The path had brought them right to the edge of a sheer drop. When she looked over Larry’s shoulder she saw the sickening wall of rock and the river thirty metres below. She imagined Larry, an upside-down figure plunging, spinning and screaming, down the grey cliff. The nerves jangled in her hands and feet and she had a feeling of betrayal, as if the trees and ferns and flowers were united in secret malice, the insects in the bright air vibrating with tiny, poisonous laughter.
‘I nearly just kept walking.’ Larry’s voice was sick.
She said, ‘We’ll have to go back.’
Beth and Per lay near each other on the sand. All along the beach the heat haze wavered and danced. The only sound was the roar of the surf.
Marie was digging a hole. Her sunhat kept falling over her eyes. It was a nuisance. She tugged it off and screwed it into a ball. They were always making her wear it, even though it scratched and made her itchy and covered her eyes. And it was hideous. Marie liked to look nice.
Per had his chin on his hands and was staring down at the sand, concentrating. Beth lay face down, her head on her arm. Their calves were lightly touching. Slowly, Per reached across and rested his hand on the small of Beth’s back.
Marie rolled the hat into a sausage and poked it down into the hole. She took her spade and filled it in, patting the sand over it. Then she flopped quickly down onto her stomach and lay very still, holding her breath.
Slowly she turned her head. No one had noticed.
A girl sprinted up the beach and leapt onto her towel, reaching down, exclaiming, to hold her sore feet. Marie listened to her shrill complaining — the black sand got so hot that you had to wear shoes. Once they’d met a tourist who’d set off in bare feet and got caught in the heat on a long stretch of beach. He was in a real state, his feet badly blistered and burned.
Three figures were coming across the dunes. Marie watched the mirage splitting the figures apart into silvery bubbles. At first they seemed to be floating above the liquidy blur made by the light, but as they got closer they solidified and shrank and turned into a man and a woman and a girl wearing straw hats and carrying coloured beach towels. The woman leading, the man and the girl trailing along behind.
The Brights, Robyn and John, trailed by their daughter Amy, greeted Beth and Per. They dumped their gear and sat down in the sand.
Beth rolled over and said lazily, ‘Nice, eh.’
Robyn took Amy by the arm and smeared suntan lotion over her in swift efficient dabs. Amy smiled at Marie.
Marie hated and feared Amy. She was a big girl — Emily’s friend — who never lost a chance to deliver a vicious poke or kick when Emily and her parents weren’t looking. Once she forced a big piece of mud into Marie’s mouth and then said in a shocked voice, ‘Look, Emily, she’s eating dirt,’ and had rubbed Marie’s face extra hard, pretending to clean it. Marie spat into the sand at the memory, and crept closer to Beth.
John Bright solemnly coated his nose with white zinc. He stretched out his skinny legs, dug his long white toes into the sand and started singing in a bass voice:
Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play
‘There,’ Robyn said, pushing Amy away. To Marie she said, sugary, ‘Would Marie like Amy to take her to the lovely lagoon?’
Marie shook her head. No, thank you very much.
Amy, who had been gazing dopily into space, looked suddenly interested. She eyed Marie’s soft little arms, so satisfying to twist and pinch. What fun to poke sticks into a small foot, to see the mouth open in howls of infant distress. Amy got a hot feeling just thinking about it.
She said casually, ‘I’ll take her if she’s not too shy.’
‘Would Marie like to go and make lovely sand castles?’ Robyn asked Marie.
The little blonde head shook emphatically. No, Marie would not.
‘Would Marie like a nice little paddle?’
Marie pushed her face into Beth’s shoulder. ‘No.’
Robyn said, ‘I made sure Amy would never be shy. I exposed her, socially, from a young age.’
But Beth said, ‘You go ahead, Amy. I’ll bring her along later.’
John’s singing rose above the murmur and roar of the sea.
Where seldom is heard
A discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
And Amy, thwarted, gave Marie a meaning look and slouched off across the hot sand.
‘Where are your other lot?’ Robyn asked, arranging herself comfortably on her towel.
Beth said, ‘They’ve gone on a bush walk. We’re meeting them down here.’
Per looked up. ‘Actually, you’d think they’d be here by now.’
They all scanned the beach.
‘They should be coming around the south rocks,’ Beth said.
‘Where have they been?’ Robyn asked.
‘It’s a track. The Pararaha Gorge. They’re meant to come around the shore.’
Robyn said, ‘The Pararaha Gorge? That’s a tall order. Who’s taking them down there?’
‘They’re by themselves,’ Per said.
‘By themselves?’ Robyn said.
Beth rolled over. Per stared.
John elbowed himself up. He said carefully, ‘The Pararaha’s a big tramp. It’s a long way. It’s rough terrain too.’
There was a silence.
Robyn’s eyes were bright. ‘Didn’t you know?’ she said.
Beth looked fearfully at Per. ‘It was a project of Larry’s. He thought it up. He’s got a map. And they wanted something to do with Sam.’
‘Sam?’
‘The Richardson’s Sam.’
‘But he’s only five,’ Robyn said. ‘Do you mean to say that three children aged ten, seven and five are …?’
Per rounded on her. He said in an iron voice, ‘You’re saying we’ve made a mistake. You’re saying they’re too young.’
‘It’s a marathon. A hugely long way. And there are cliff s and rapids and and … John?’
John nodded. ‘It’s a tough one,’ he said.
Beth picked up Marie. She said, ‘Oh God. What should we do?’
Per said, ‘I’ll go round there.’
‘Round where?’ Beth said.
‘Round the rocks. To see if I can meet them. And if I can’t find them you’ll have to call the ranger.’
Beth rocked Marie back and forth.
Robyn shaded her eyes. ‘Here we go,’ she said, waving out.
A smiling couple lugging a chilly bin between them came staggering across the sand.
‘Over here,’ Robyn called. And to Beth and Per she said brightly, ‘Well. Here come the Richardsons.’
They were crushed. Sam immediately caught their fear and began to wail. There was nothing for it but to turn around. They walked all the way down the bluff, until they were back at the riverbank.
Emily had started to hate the river. It laughed at them, dashing along over its rocks, it menaced and mocked. She slipped and grazed her foot, and the river babbled and sighed and chuckled to itself.
She and Larry looked for another track. They were wary of entering the really dense bush; they knew how easy it would be to become confused, especially here where the gorge had widened out and there were gullies and dips in the terrain.
The sky was still bright but the colours were changing, the sunlight growing yellower as the afternoon wore on. Emily thought with fear of the gorge at night.
Larry frowned over his map. Sam bleakly ate the last sandwich and Emily stared down into the shallows, where the water rippled over ochre stones and the weed waved, and the eels curled and slipped between the rocks. She saw a crayfish poke its claws out from under a rock as if to check the underwater weather — the swirls and flurries of sparkling mud, the tiny leaves whirling lazily past its door. It shot back under the rock again, quick as a flash. The feathery river weed was combed and parted by the current, and tiny bubbles of air were caught in its strands and lift e
d off, and whisked away.
Larry said, ‘I’ve got it. We’re so stupid.’
He got up, snapping his fingers. ‘We don’t have to find a track. All we have to do is follow the river. We want to find the sea, that’s where the river will take us.’
He was so convinced that Emily and Sam felt a bit of hope. Emily prayed to the Unknown Somebody that Larry was right.
They went on. When the riverbank gave out, they waded and swam. The water was cool and fresh; they sank in brown mud, slipped and slid over stones. They swam in their clothes and shoes. Where the river was flowing too fast they clambered along the bank, hanging onto the ferns.
Now that they had given up searching for a track they felt they were making progress. Sometimes they could lie in the water and let the river carry them along, sometimes they swam and waded through long slow lagoons, where the nikau palms grew thickly overhead and the water lay brown and sun-striped and sluggish.
There were fewer rapids and waterfalls now. The land had begun to flatten out and they were no longer walled in on both sides of the river by steep hills. The afternoon sun blazed down, the bush was still in the heat, light glinted off every leaf and the cicadas were so loud that the air seemed to shimmer and vibrate with the sound. There was still no sign of a track but they kept faith with Larry’s idea: a river must lead to the sea. As long as they stuck with it, they wouldn’t get lost.
Emily saw a plane high in the sky, a tiny silver dart. And she saw that shadows were starting to cross the bush. Now they were walking through a kind of grassland; the river was broad and slow and there were little tributaries, marshy pools, banks of toetoe sticking out of the middle of muddy bogs. Larry shouted from up ahead; the track had resumed, winding and overgrown and pitted here and there with the hoof prints of cows.
‘Listen,’ Larry said. They could hear a distant sighing roar — the sea.
They were in a wide, shallow valley. There were tussocky paddocks, fields of low scrub, and, in the distance, cows grouped under a tree. Water lay everywhere, in brackish pools along the edge of the path, fringed by great banks of native reeds. They passed pools filled with bright green weed, and frogs sitting on lily pads in the shade of the waving stalks. The heat was intense. The sun was lower and burned into their faces. They were so tired they couldn’t talk.
They came to a sign. Larry consulted his map and Emily couldn’t raise the energy to kick him or to ask him how far they had to go; she only looked at the sign with dull resentment; she thought there was something shameless about the track, the way it had just turned up again, all cheerful and business-like, as if it hadn’t abandoned them in the middle of the bush.
And now, finally, the sea was really roaring, and when they crossed a wooden bridge over a marsh and followed a narrow path under a row of cabbage trees, they came to the foot of a vast black sand dune. Emily looked up the glittering iron slope to the intense blue sky. She had never seen such a dune, its spine curving like the back of a giant lizard, its rippling flank so black that it had a sheen of blue.
They began to climb, their feet sinking into the hot sand. Sam started to cry as the sand got into his sandals, burning his feet. They reached the top and there before them was the huge curve of the coast, stretching many kilometres south, all the way to Whatipu, and to the north towards Karekare, a desert of black sand and dunes and scrub rippling with heat waves, and, far across it, fringed with surf, the wild sea. Emily turned and turned; it seemed to her that the whole landscape was full of bright, violent motion. The fluffy toetoe waved in the wind like spears borne by a marching army, the surf ceaselessly tumbled and roared, the light played on the sand, casting a powerful, shimmering glare. Where the black desert met the land there were enormous, grey cliffs that sent the sound booming off them. Behind them lay the green valley they had come through, with its marshland and cabbage trees and the river that had spread into many waterways, spilling out towards the sea.
They walked along the backbone of the great dune, and across a boiling expanse of beach. Then they came down into a trench of scrub under the cliffs, where cabbage trees grew along the edge of a stream, and pohutukawas hung off the cliffs. Here they were screened from the roar of the sea by the dunes, and there was a path of hard, matted grass that was easy to walk on.
But Sam sat down on the grass. He couldn’t go on.
Larry climbed up onto a dune.
‘I can see people,’ he shouted.
Far away, near the sea, there were figures walking in a line. Little shapes against the dancing, glittering water. Fishermen or trampers, heading for Whatipu. She saw that the light was changing. Soon the sky would turn orange and the sun would go down; there would be no twilight, only the sudden, absolute dark.
‘Look what I got,’ Larry said. His hand was full of blackberries. There were clumps of bushes, laden with fruit. They picked more and carried them back to Sam. The little boy dragged himself up with a persecuted look and consented to trudge on, his mouth stained with red juice.
Emily saw a circle of light against the headland. It was a tunnel, cut out of the rock, made a hundred years ago, Larry said, when there was a small railway line around the coast. He stopped and looked hurt. Emily had thrown a stone at him.
They walked through the tunnel, running their hands over the cold stone. ‘Now we’re nearly there,’ Larry said.
But Sam sat down again, and this time he wouldn’t move.
‘Christ, Svensson,’ Hugh Richardson kept saying. ‘Christ.’
He was lucky, Per thought, that Hugh was too civilised, too repressed, to give him the tongue-lashing he deserved. All he could do was explode every now and then with a little wounded exclamation. ‘Christ.’
They had crossed around the rocks and now faced the immense wasteland of sand, stretching away in the polished light towards Whatipu.
There had been a scene on the beach. The Richardsons’ mounting alarm, Beth’s anxiety and remorse. Per had felt utterly sorry for Beth and furious with himself. He couldn’t even remember the discussion that morning about what the children were doing; he had assumed that Beth was handling all that, and of course she had been distracted, and hadn’t understood what they were meaning to do, and now they were somewhere in this huge landscape or worse, lost in the bush or drowned.
‘Bloody hell, Svensson.’ Hugh loped along next to him. ‘It’s going to get dark.’
Per looked along the line of coast and felt a part of himself crumbling with misery and panic. Should they go back now, summon more help? Now they’d come this far it would take a long time to get back, and meanwhile the dark would come on. He couldn’t go back; he couldn’t turn away and leave them, even if it was the rational thing to do.
Images floated in his mind. The smiles fading from the Richardsons’ faces. Marilyn Richardson bursting into tears. The children in sunlight, waving as they walked away.
They joined the track. Four fishermen appeared near the cliff s and Hugh scrambled towards them, holding up his hand. ‘Have you seen three kids?’ he called. ‘Three lost kids.’ The fishermen conferred rapidly in their language, shook their heads and marched past. Per stared after them uneasily, wondering why they were so taciturn. Was there something shifty about them? The fronds of the cabbage trees rustled over their heads, as sharp as knives.
Per looked up at the wall of rock, at the deep black spaces. He felt as if the cliffs were ringing with a terrible sound. The iron echo rang in his head. The whole landscape was reverberating, crying out to him. The crash of the waves on the shore, the cliff-echo. The black rock, the black sand, the seagull shifting on its red feet, its shiny black eye with no light no depth in it.
There was an orange tinge to the sky now. They passed through a manuka glade and came out on a long stretch of scrub and marram grass. Ahead of them they saw three small figures, sprawled in the grass at the edge of the track. They rushed forward.
But the children’s faces were covered with blood.
Hugh’s shou
t, the surge of his own blood, the horror and fear. Per ran and ran. He reached them first and they held up their little smeared hands. Blackberry juice.
‘Christ,’ Hugh exploded for the hundredth time, swinging his boy up into his arms.
Per would never forget it. It would stay with him. He would make sure of this, by writing it down. The ringing of the cliff, the wild sound, the iron song the land had sung.
He took his children by their red hands and thanked the God he didn’t believe in, thanked Him anyway.
THE OTHER
Ford was in his study at home, writing a lecture. There was scrabbling on the iron roof; it broke into his thoughts. He looked across the garden to the hill in the distance, saw its green shoulder, the clouds black behind it, felt a prickling in his neck and back, looked at the words on his computer screen. He pressed his feet against the legs of the desk, stretched, and heard the back of the chair give a series of protesting cracks, like small bones bending and snapping. Thoughts of violence filled him. What was happening?
There was rain, now the garden was drying, the leaves dripping, the grass lifting itself vertical again. Many tiny sounds. Rustling. Water in the pipes. Making a cup of coffee he looked out at the drenched green square of land: lawn, fruit trees, a white fence, the street. The suburbs on a Sunday. Birds on the roof, far away, the cries of children on the playing field. A girl, straight-backed, erect, face forward, sailed the length of his fence, the handles of her scooter just visible above the palings. She did not turn to see his face behind the glass. The kettle steamed up the window. He allowed himself a piece of cake. He was getting heavy. These days, when he looked down, he saw more and less of himself.
He finished the cake, the coffee, another piece of cake. He shaped his lecture: it needed little work. He was known as an entertaining, as well as a rigorous, teacher. In the faculty he was approachable, friendly, reliable, utterly scrupulous in all matters — professional, social, intellectual. He was prolific: the author of three books, over a decade’s worth of articles. His work was known internationally. Professor Ford Lampton. He had worked hard and made a good life for himself. The girl on the scooter, had she turned her head, would have seen an ordinary sandy-haired guy with a benign, slightly dopey expression on his broad face, plucking at the collar of his rumpled shirt. (She would not have seen the Other: a shambling, cake-devouring ogre.)
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