After Z-Hour Page 9

  My gas mask was damaged; I couldn’t breathe. I tore it off—smelling cordite, blood and mustard gas. There was a wound in my throat, at the junction of my collar bones. When I began to choke it welled blood. I covered it with my hand …

  When I came to I felt nauseous, my eyes were streaming and my face itched. It had begun to snow. Droplets of vapour had frozen on the wire. It was glazed with ice, silvered and beautiful. I couldn’t lift my head to look around, and there was not a sound from Alf, Bill and Calvin.

  Not a sound. At home it seldom snowed. I couldn’t get used to this dumb show of drifting flakes. Rain says, ‘this, this, this, this …’ Snow says nothing.

  The rough blanket against my chin felt just as it did when my father wrapped me up warm from the night air, propped sleepily upright between him and Uncle Euan, coming back up the Hill. I would drop off, then be jolted awake again, trying to listen to their conversation, but lulled by their big, comfortable voices. Now again I was slipping, with small lurching falls, down into sleep, while the sounds around me surged and retreated like the wash and backwash of waves.

  I smelt the tang of tea, which I craved to taste. Opened my eyes and discovered it, Given’s hand gripping the dimpled tin mug—it was him, his square fingers and heavy gold wedding ring. Over the sound of voices, conversation and orders, was the familiar thumping of the dawn barrage—and earth sifting slowly down over us.

  Given saw I was awake and leaned over me, so that the dust from the dugout roof fell on his back, not in my open eyes.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It’s better you don’t talk, Thornton. We didn’t get back smartly enough to send you straight off, but you’ll be off when the shelling stops.’

  There was blood in my mouth. I made a face. He smiled at me, sadly and tenderly. Then he turned his head and looked at the candle on the table beside us. ‘Your friends McCauley and Palmer volunteered to look for you. They came to me and told me they were volunteering, less to account for their absence than because they wanted a third man.’ He met my eyes. ‘I’m telling you this because you asked why we came out to find you. Your first words weren’t “Hello” or “Thank God” or “How about a drink?” but, “Why did you come out?”’ He looked down at his palms, as if reading a message written there. ‘You can’t have been so surprised to see McCauley or Palmer, so I expect you meant me.’ He laughed. ‘God, they looked comic! “Volunteering”—then eyeing me as though I was some horse they were expecting to run well in a race.’

  The dugout was cold and misty. The candle had a halo. Given was turned towards its light, a muscle rippling in his cheek. ‘I used to notice how frustrated you got when they passed around the letter cards. Of course it’s awful for all the men: Circle the appropriate message: I’m well—I’m wounded—I took off my boot this morning and left my toes inside it.’ He laughed bitterly—closing his eyes tightly for a moment, as people do to ward off tears. And I remembered he had been weeping as he cut the wire around my legs. ‘I always hated to take the crayon to your letters, Thornton. Green’s a better butcher than I am.’ He cleared his throat. ‘He sent you out I suppose?’

  ‘Ssss.’

  He took this for a ‘yes’ and nodded, then, remembering his tea, picked up the cup and drained it. Seeing my rapacious expression he explained, ‘You shouldn’t drink anything, I’m told. I expect you think you should?’

  The ground shuddered and he leant over me again. His face was very close to mine, dark, a two-day growth of whiskers on his jaw and long top lip, his eyes red-rimmed, glistening, but their whites clear. His breath smelt of sweet tea and tobacco. Even through my fug of exhaustion I could feel him, his strength warming the air between us. It wasn’t the same as feeling his brief steadying touch on my shoulder just before we went over the parapet. In this proximity, not contact, there was an onslaught of sensation—the blood in his body was faith in life itself.

  My wide-eyed stare must have worried him, because he drew back. Sitting straight in his chair, the candle behind his head. A Lieutenant keeping company with a wounded private.

  England, Oatlands …

  Reduced to the sibilance of silence inside an ear. Voiceless. (Hear me with your eyes.) Eyeless. (My voice a medicine even for the blind.)

  England, Oatlands, home.

  Sitting one morning after the war with Andy McCauley. He was on his way back to Ashburton and the shoe shop. His sister Janet had been in Wellington to meet him when the Zealandic docked. It was late February 1919.

  The door closed behind Janet and Emma. We could hear them cross the hallway, talking cheerfully. Andy turned back to me, lifted the teacup and saucer off the tray and balanced them on his broad knee. He was regarding me with a shy sober look, not about to say, ‘Well you look better.’

  I looked worse. The room was warm, windows closed on the sickroom, and a late summer fire, burning sadly and sootily in the grate.

  Andy said, ‘Colonel Evans had his say before we disembarked. He told us to remember that we weren’t the heroes—“the heroes lie in France”.’

  Emma’s laugh sounded faintly from the first landing. She and Janet would be standing in the stained sunlight by the long window’s pink, yellow and pale blue glass.

  ‘What do you think of that, Mark?’

  ‘I suppose we are lucky. I remember how much I just wanted to get back here.’

  Andy was becoming accustomed to my whisper. He didn’t shuffle or flinch; the teacup stayed steady on his knee.

  ‘You haven’t changed your tune. You know, I was always waiting for you to get angry. Fed up with the weather, or the food, or that old woman, Miller—especially as he’d have us parading all the time we were out of the line. Or with Green—the bastard.’

  I smiled.

  He shook his head. ‘As uncomplaining as ever.’

  ‘You complain Andy, you’re stronger than me.’

  A footfall above on the sprung board in the first floor parlour. The lamp trembled on its iron chain.

  ‘I suppose we are lucky,’ he said, sipping his tea.

  ‘At least we’re here to wonder about it.’

  ‘There’s that. Did you get all your belongings?’

  ‘Yes, they all turned up at Oatlands.’

  ‘So you still have your journal. You know you should publish it, Mark.’

  I shook my head.

  He looked away. ‘Do you still have the book by that German bloke?’

  The book had been a talking point. I’d picked it up in a dingy, cluttered bookshop in London before we went over to reinforce the Canterbury Infantry, just after we’d finished training at Sling. My odd reading matter went everywhere with me—Alan used to call it my bible.

  ‘I’ve still got it.’

  Another door closed overhead. Soon Emma would take Janet out to her garden at the back, first letting her guest catch sight of the flowerbeds through the round window in the hall.

  ‘Everything is so different here.’ Andy’s voice was bleak. I looked back at him. He seemed shrunken, staring out at the trees. We sat, he lost and confused, faced with the prospect of the shoe shop, civilian life, quiet nights. Something frightening him, something he missed, something he’d lost. After death, home must be a strange place. I was full of feelings too big to say in a whisper. Not a fretful invalid, but a weak man settling back into a cloud of strong anger.

  How did I endure it? How did I recover from such wounds? The cicadas applauding in the grass. The women coming downstairs, talking quietly about how the world would now be better—or perhaps how war took away what was theirs and, if they were lucky, gave them back strangers. How did my soul arise from these graves? Successive sleepless nights, a single bird by my window piping hopefully into the greyness of dusk.

  Andy was looking at me—a breathless invalid—enviously. The expression vanished quickly, but he knew I’d seen it, and looked down at his boots.

  ‘You’ll settle in Andy,’ I said, dismissing him.

  ‘What about you
?’

  ‘I’ll improve.’ Yes, something invulnerable, unburiable, is within me, something that rends rocks.

  Jill

  Ellen and I draped Kelfie’s arms over our shoulders and half-carried him downstairs. Basil and Hannah walked ahead of us, hand in hand, like children. Nobody spoke.

  The parlour door was closed, the hall dark. Hannah turned the handle, pushed, put her shoulder to it, shoved—

  —then stepped away as the handle twisted out of her grip.

  ‘What are you doing out there?’ Simon’s muffled voice from the far side of the door.

  ‘Never mind. Let us in.’

  ‘It’s jammed.’

  ‘Why did you shut it?

  ‘I didn’t, I just woke up and discovered you were gone. What are you doing?’

  Ellen and I lowered the limp, bloodstained Kelfie to the floor. Hannah’s torch shone back at us out of the dark wood of the door. Basil kicked it.

  ‘If you are going to do that, let me get out of the way first,’ Simon said acidly from within.

  ‘I don’t trust you,’ Basil announced irrationally, then glanced at Kelfie. ‘I don’t trust anybody.’

  ‘Why would I lock the door?’

  ‘Exactly, why would you?’ Basil’s voice was strained.

  ‘Why did you all sneak out while I was asleep?’

  ‘We didn’t sneak—we rushed,’ Hannah said, and handed me her torch. ‘Get out of the way, Wrathall, I’m going to break down the door.’

  Silence, then from further away, ‘Go ahead.’

  Basil and Hannah rammed the door several times in tandem, then Hannah stopped, rubbing her shoulder. ‘It’s not as easy as it looks on TV.’ Basil stopped a moment later, laying his hands flat against the panels and smiling weirdly.

  From the floor a voice said, ‘He locked it so he could iggry off and bury the body.’

  I shone the torch into Kelfie’s face. He appeared to be unconscious; his mouth, nose and chin were caked with dried blood; showing between parted lips, his teeth were blood-streaked also. The skin of his cheeks and forehead was wet, tight and pale, and his slightly opened eyes looked the colour of gas flames, an intense, transparent blue.

  I remembered something I had heard when walking through Wellington with my friend Louise, four weeks before Nicky’s death, when I was up there organising my first exhibition. We were crossing Manners Mall, through the dawdling crowd, the break-dancers spinning on a body-polished square of linoleum, the Hari Krishnas bobbing and chanting, their cymbals clashing, the whole night falling into a rhythm against which the voice of two street preachers swung and struck drunkenly. One of the preachers was talking about how the advent of cash machines heralded Armageddon—pointing to a painted ark on his sad little diagram, carrying not a staff, but a ruler, and mimicking the old time weather-men: Here a deep depression, there a cold front. While the other man, who looked like a figure from an age-darkened oil painting, bearing a grand and frenzied witness, thundered: ‘—even failing this, even if by doing this we discover the terrible, ancient and intelligent strength of the shadowy cloud—even destroyed, we will have once thrown off, along with our ignorance of evil, also the illusion we are alone. Once we put ourselves aside we will discover we are not only ourselves, or images of each other—’

  ‘What is he going on about?’ Simon demanded, directly behind the door again.

  ‘God knows—but he’s not conscious,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Who? God?’ Basil cackled hysterically. ‘I should have known it. The kid has one of those faces—a road leading innocently away between trees, to the end of the world.’

  I touched his arm. ‘Please don’t blather, Basil.’

  ‘Why the fuck did I come here?’ he moaned. ‘And what the hell does iggry mean?’

  Kelfie started to sing, ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.’

  ‘Terrific,’ Ellen muttered.

  ‘What should I do?’ Simon asked us.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Hannah was nearly weeping with anger and frustration.

  Kelfie groaned, then began: ‘I do not like this one so well, all he does is yell, yell, yell. I will not have this one about, when he comes in, I put him out.’

  Ellen and I exchanged glances. Basil closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to the door.

  ‘Some are sad. And some are glad. And some are very, very bad. Why are they sad and glad and bad?—’ Kelfie recited clearly.

  ‘He’s quoting, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,’ I told them, ‘I used to read it to my daughter.’

  Calmly, serenely, Kelfie intoned: ‘Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one—’

  Basil swooped on him and shook him violently. Kelfie’s head jerked back and forth, then he stiffened, opened his eyes and caught Basil’s arms in a hard grip, scowling. ‘Don’t shake me.’

  ‘Don’t … say … Doctor … Seuss!’ Basil thumped Kelfie firmly into the wall at each word, then released his hold.

  I realised I had said ‘my daughter’.

  Trevor drove us to the doctor in Puhoi. I had Nicky wrapped up in the tartan rug that used to cover our old couch. I first saw her lying under that rug, when she was four, with the mumps. She was slightly delirious, pointing at the red squares in the pattern, saying, ‘Fire engines are this colour.’ She was dead before I moved her. As she passed into something deeper than unconsciousness, I watched her face soften and change.

  Tiredness lay like a cobweb over my face. I stared passively at Kelfie as he got to his feet, unaware of the blood, his face composed.

  ‘I know what’s going on,’ Basil said in an odd, bragging way.

  ‘I wouldn’t admit it if I were you,’ Kelfie laughed. ‘Don’t admit you understand. Don’t take that step. It’s a step into a swamp. Any grounds other than the grounds of indifference are a swamp.’

  I was overcome. I felt myself spiral up out of my body. Down a shaft through the storm I saw six little figures standing in confusion on either side of a jammed door. I covered my face with my hands. Someone, possibly Ellen, placed an arm around my shoulders.

  Outdoors the birds began twittering warning calls, as if there were a cat in the garden.

  Part Two

  Jill

  Six days after the funeral, at three-thirty in the afternoon, I found myself waiting at the lounge window looking out to where the road swung towards our drive and away again. Nicky’s classmate Jason was biking past. He looked my way and his bike faltered, front wheel wobbling—then he waved. I waved back and he went on, his nylon jacket puffed out by wind, his thin legs pedalling.

  The bus came, an old cream-and-red bus with a fluorescent yellow, black-lettered ‘SCHOOL’ sign on its front. It stopped at the intersection by the crowd of letterboxes. After a moment it pulled away, and I saw the children in a haze of dust, turning two different directions towards their homes—the younger Smalls, Sharon and Barry, walking my way, Liz Rewi and Karl Schwartz turning down the other road, walking apart, heads down, like strangers (two years before they’d have climbed over the fence and would be playing their way slowly over the fields, chasing and cuffing each other—now, at eleven, they felt awkward even talking).

  Between the two pairs of children, where the bus had been, where the dust was settling, was a space. A child-shaped space. Like the afterimage of a light, the portion of a scene a shocked optic nerve fails to render—not a shadow, but a flaw in sight.

  I backed away from the window, hitting my legs on the edge of the coffee table. A minute later I stood at the back of the house, shaking, my hands covering my ears so I couldn’t hope to hear her come in. So I wouldn’t be listening.

  For months I would leave the house every afternoon before three. Maybe I’d stop five miles away on the road by the Tata inlet and sit on the smooth, sun-warmed concrete of the drainage pipe, watching the wind ruffle the shallow water and the sun set in the four poplars behind the boat-builder’s yard.

>   In later autumn I’d sit in the garden outside the aviary in town, among the beds of bare, pruned rose bushes, looking down at the colourful crazy-paved walkway, and listening to the finches twittering; the sound of the birds and the sound of the cage, thin bars plucked by their claws as they fluttered from perch to perch.

  In winter I’d walk along the steep beach at Tata, plodding over the large-grained, yielding sand. After sunset, when everything went blue-grey and black, and the wind set the air like ice, and struck down the smoke rising from the chimneys of the houses in the lea of the hill at the beach’s near end. I’d walk beside waves curling to collapse abruptly over trapped air that burst out in loud concussions and foam. And the wind would drive me into myself, then the noise would drive me out of myself.

  At five I’d go home to finish making dinner and find Dan there, the TV on and a flagon of sherry open on the kitchen counter. And, because in the summer drosophila would fly into the open bottle and drown, at first I’d re-cap it out of habit, then later as a suggestion, and still later as a gesture of defiance. Of course he would open it again when he fetched his next drink.

  The sound of a screw cap grating on the lip of a glass bottle is still the nearest way into nightmare for me.

  Huddled around the flashlight, faces underlit, they were arguing about what to do. Hannah and Ellen looked irritated, Basil hangdog. Kelfie pulled the end of his white teeshirt out of his trousers, spat on it and wiped the blood from his face, leaving only a dark streak at one corner of his mouth.

  ‘—maybe we could get out a second storey window onto the veranda roof,’ Ellen was saying.