by Thom Conroy
So what grim news is in store for me today? My father and Ella are absent, as they often are when I wake, and outside I hear seabirds and wind, same as always. I feel the waves of sunlight building in the open paddock and starting to percolate through the tall grass. Now I hear something else: the sound of a woman’s laughter. Reina. Yes, she may be the cause of what’s in store. I contemplate this possibility long enough to feel a prickly coldness make its way down my back, and then laugh it all off.
Just after breakfast, Ella and I are walking past the official East Cape Book Depository when an old car, something small and red in the patches between the rust, stops directly in front of us.
‘Tama!’ Ella says, recognising the driver before I do. As soon as Tama’s out of the seat, I know something is the matter. Or not the matter, I suppose. But different. Tama’s wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, same as usual, but they are neither paint-splattered nor torn nor beige with dirt nor stretched out or defiled in any obvious way. He pops into the official East Cape Book Depository and re-emerges, a backpack over his shoulder.
‘What are you doing?’ Ella asks in the moment before I’m about to.
Although I have said nothing, Tama answers us both. ‘Going to Opotiki,’ he says. ‘Got some people to see there. A birthday.’ He drops his pack in the boot, slams it shut. ‘And we’re out of everything round here.’
Ella and I say our goodbyes, but as Tama is driving out of the campground I return to that morning’s feeling and, just like this, I understand: The terrible thing is that I’ll never see Tama again.
I begin to run after Tama’s car. Ella, unquestioning, begins to sprint beside me. We round the bend and turn on to the main road of the campground, passing by the man with the earplugs sitting in front of a partially collapsed tent, eating noodles from a paper cup. He must notice something urgent in our movement because he calls after us.
‘Hey!’ he says. ‘What is it?’
We don’t answer. We just keep running because Tama’s car is nearing the last turn that will take him along the cliff and out on to the main road. I’m waving my arms as I run, and I know Tama will see me, stop the car, open the door and ask me what all the fuss is about. I’ll tell him my premonition and he’ll shake his head. Tell me I’m a numbskull, and get back in his car and continue to Opotiki — and if all this happens, everything will be fine. This knowledge is electricity. It zaps my veins and shoots across my chest. Yes, I’m sure of it. If I can just make him see me. If he can just stop.
As I’m thinking this, the car slows down, bobs into a dip and rounds the bend, leaving a wisp of dust in its wake.
Ella smiles and turns back the way we’ve come. The man with the earplugs is walking shirtless down the metal track, eating his paper cup of noodles. ‘Race you back!’ she says.
‘Race me back?’
But she doesn’t hear. She’s already gone.
MR BOB OR NOTHING
I’m sitting at the small coffee-stained desk in the official East Cape Book Depository amid the dense smell of dust and paper, and feeling a bit forlorn. After Tama left today, I told myself that the terrible thing, whatever it was, had passed. My guard came down, I suppose. Although, looking back, I think I still intuited that whatever I’d been dreading was still lying in wait for me. This wasn’t conscious information I possessed, but a sort of shadow that I felt just beneath the sunlight.
After lunch, my father went somewhere with Nicholas Ray, the kaumatua. We’ve only exchanged a few words, Nicholas and me, and while he’s gracious, I don’t like this man’s eye, the movement of his hands. But this is not exactly true. The matter is not what I like but what I perceive this man likes, and my sense is that he doesn’t trust me. Doesn’t trust my father, either, when it comes to it. My evidence, aside from his eyes and shuffling hands? One comment only, which I know isn’t much.
During the party the other night I overheard him and my father talking — just a phrase. My father was speaking of the campground, of some improvement that could be made, a newly paved road, I think, and Nicholas’s face went tight. He downed what was in his plastic wine glass and said, ‘You’ve got lots of ideas.’ Nicholas saw that I’d overheard him then, and he smiled at me, a cursory viewing of his teeth. All three of us knew who you were.
But my father is not a man to be easily daunted when he gets hold of a notion, no matter how misguided or foolish it is. My mother always said that he’s never willing to give up an opinion, unless it’s the right one. So when I saw Eugene climb into the car with Nicholas today, I had a back-up plan for my premonition: if I wasn’t feeling terrible because Tama left, then I was feeling terrible because my dad was having another go at his hopeless ambition.
All of which is to say that my guard was well and truly down.
I made Ella pasta for the second day in a row. As we were sitting at the picnic table, eating, I found myself thinking how long it had been since I’d seen a loaf of bread or a jug of fresh milk, and, with a rush of shame, the words of the septic gabber returned to me. When we were finished eating, Ella ran off with Tihema and I returned to the communal kitchen to wash the dishes.
In the kitchen I found the old man I’d seen smoking shirtless in the paddock a few days ago. I asked him his name, and he just looked at me, his hands wrist-deep in a sinkful of grey water. It occurred to me that maybe he couldn’t speak, but at last he said, ‘If you’re staying on here a while, I’m Mr Bob.’
I shifted the dirty dishes in my hands. ‘And if I’m not?’
Mr Bob clicked his tongue, gave up a quiet laugh. ‘Then call me nothing!’ He nodded at the dishes in my hand. ‘Sink’s blocked up. Take them to the outside tap. Behind the kitchen block.’
I thanked Mr Bob or Nothing, snatched up a bottle of dishwashing liquid with only a green film left in the bottom and started for the outside tap. I saw a glimpse of Ella playing in the lane, heard her laughter, noticed the sky. It was clouding over, but the temperature was warm and scraps of blue were still left up there. As I came around the back wall, I observed the light of a caravan I hadn’t noticed before. It was parked off in a grove of pines by itself. I set down the dishes, ready to get to it, when, mid-squat, I stopped.
My father’s voice.
I turned to the caravan. I took two or three steps in the direction of the pine grove. What were my intentions? I had no intentions. I had heard my father’s voice, that was all. I was surprised he had returned to the campground without me knowing. I was surprised to notice a new caravan, too.
As I came to the edge of the trees, I recalled the prickling sensation I’d had down my back and under my arms that morning. This is it, I understood. Here was the moment. And, thinking this, I considered turning back and getting on with the dishes. After all, it wasn’t my fate to follow my premonition, to always obey the commands of my inconvenient sixth sense.
Reina was laughing inside the window of the caravan. I stepped forward into the pines, heard sounds and movement through the caravan’s open window. I came close, invading their privacy and making myself abject. But as yet I had heard nothing that altered my view of either of them. Just a voice and a laugh. I knew I could turn back. But I did not turn back. What I did was listen. They were whispering. The whisper of lovers, which should not have been a surprise. The caravan shifted. I heard Reina say the word no, quietly. Softly. She was cooing the word. There was more movement inside the caravan, walking, and I was sure the door was going to open and I was going to be caught stalking them.
So I took a step back and ducked behind a wild blackberry. In the dim light of the pine grove, I saw its tight little berries. The tiny barbs of its thorns. The shining darkness of its leaves.
And then the door opened. My father stepped into the space of the caravan doorway and Reina leaned into the same rectangle and kissed him. I’d known they kissed, of course, but that was the first time I’d witnessed it, and it felt worse than it should have.
To be fair, it was a tentative kiss, a gentle ki
ss. Nothing fiery and ardent. Of course, sitting here now, it occurs to me that this makes it so much worse.
THE END
So this was it: the terrible thing, at last. Now that I’ve written it down, it doesn’t seem as terrible as it felt then. And the truth is, I went on with my evening after I witnessed it: cleaned the dishes, tried to put Ella to bed, then rang Joanne and listened to Ella whimper into the phone a little while. My father knew something was the matter but we didn’t mention it. I asked him how his talk with Nicholas went, and he shrugged. Said the man drives a hard bargain. I said something banal in response to that, waited for my father to go into his room for the night, grabbed my notebook and headed here, to the Book Depository.
I must have been feeling desperate. Desperate enough to text Lyle and tell him I hated this place and that I hated my father and that I wanted to come home but I didn’t know where home was. I’d lost my way. He texted right back. Said all the right things. Said I would be all right. I did not hate my father. Home was anywhere someone you loved was. I thanked him, told him he was a nice guy, told him I missed him, and then shut off my phone before I said something totally stupid.
I’ve turned back to the first page of my notebook and read what I wrote about the beginning of everything, of my parents, of me. When I think of my beginning, I wrote, I don’t picture the afternoon of my conception. Tonight, right here in this campground, I know this is the end of whatever began in that photograph of my young parents, my father in his red shirt smeared with soil, my mum with her guilty hips and that strand of her hair on her cheek. This is where all that ends and I find what’s waiting.
Or I don’t. But I’m tired, and above me I hear the first raindrops hitting the tin roof, and I know I should sleep.
TO KEEP A FATHER FROM HIS CHILD
I’m opening the door to my father’s caravan. It’s several hours since I’ve seen him and Reina kiss. I’m dry-eyed now and resigned to whatever it is that happens next, but then my phone starts ringing. The flash of its screen in the dark, slightly rank-smelling space of the caravan is so alarming I don’t look at it. Ella begins to stir, my heart flutters. On the screen is Joanne’s number, but I have this feeling that it isn’t Joanne. That maybe it’s Bruce trying to fool me into answering. Calling to entice me to run away with him to Suriname. And it’s true that I glance at Ella sleeping there in the dark and call to mind the quickest flash of an image of her playing on a tropical beach, with Bruce and me on two deck chairs, watching. But by the time I tap the phone and put it to my ear, I’m ready for anything, even Joanne’s voice.
Only it isn’t Joanne. And it isn’t Bruce either. It’s a voice I don’t know. A voice with a broad Kiwi accent who says she’s Sue and who says Joanne is finally asleep. This is all she says, but I can tell something — no, everything — is wrong.
I ask Sue to hold on, to back up, because already I’ve lost track. She’s a bit frantic now, speaking too fast, and our connection is downright shoddy. Whole phrases are swallowed up. I hear Ella’s name and Bruce’s, I hear about someone else. Dan Harris, I think is the name.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Can you slow down? What’s happening?’
‘They’d both been drinking all night. Christ, I’d call the police for him on the roads if he wasn’t in enough hot water already.’
‘Who wasn’t?’
I step out of the caravan and Sue starts over, and I begin to piece it back together. Sue is Bruce and Joanne’s next-door neighbour. Or maybe two doors down, I miss this detail. But she’s a neighbour at any rate. For some reason I miss, Joanne is sleeping on Sue’s sofa. Bruce, on the other hand, is headed up here to the Cape. To pick up his daughter. I think of this with the smallest thrill, but now Sue says he’s drunk, or at least he was when he left.
Only this isn’t why she’s calling.
‘He’s been sending Jo these strange texts and won’t answer his phone,’ Sue says. She sounds tired. I hear her light a cigarette now and she begins to talk more coherently. I walk to a stand of trees higher up the paddock to escape the fine falling of the rain, and our connection gets more agreeable.
‘He’s been texting Jo these creepy-as messages,’ Sue says. She stops and gives a good, long exhale. ‘He says things like Jo doesn’t have to worry about him. He’s going to be all right. Ella’s going to be all right. He’s got it all figured out now.’
Although I have the sneaking suspicion that ‘having it all figured out’ involves a covert withdrawal of funds and a very long flight, I say, ‘Got what all figured out?’
Another pause of exhalation, then a sigh. A great release of forbidding energy. Even over the phone I can sense this much. ‘Honey, I don’t know how much I can tell you,’ Sue says. For the first time I hear her age. She’s older than Joanne. Closer to my mother’s age. Now she speaks again. ‘Let’s say this: Bruce has got himself into some trouble. It’s at work. But it’s a criminal kind of trouble, dear.’
‘Embezzling,’ I say, unaffected. It feels suddenly powerful to let my intimate knowledge rip like this.
‘Christ! How did you hear?’
‘Just tell me what happened, please.’
‘He was caught is what happened. His boss in town couldn’t get a hold of Dan Harris tonight, but Dan Harris’ll ring up the cops, sure thing.’
Dan Harris, it comes to me, is the owner of the insurance company where Bruce works. Dan is in Wellington — I know the name from the meetings Bruce was always attending. I don’t know this man, Dan Harris, but I know the tone in Bruce’s voice when he spoke of him, the fear and reverence in his eyes when it seemed on that morning in the mountain retreat as if he would be late getting to Dan Harris’s office. With this realisation come more — a series of them, like bulbs lit along a string. At once, my mind sharpens. I understand for real now that Bruce is on his way here. Here to Ella. Here to me.
I say, ‘How long ago did he leave?’
‘I’m not sure. Three, four hours ago.’ I hear Sue light another. ‘Jo was worried about Ella. She was talking about driving up there, too, so I gave her a couple of sleeping tablets. Just to calm her, you know. She fell right asleep, poor thing. But she was worried sick, and I’m not about to bother her.’
‘When she wakes up, tell her Ella will be fine,’ I say. ‘I’m here and my father’s here.’ I look down at the small, insignificant shape of my father’s caravan, at the shape of the toilet block beyond. You can see the bay from here as well. A dull grey plain beyond everything else. The shadows of the headlands like two open arms. The infinite sea beyond, a shade darker than everything else, but also lustrous. A lustrous and rich black like the hair of a young woman.
‘He won’t see Ella tonight,’ I say. The idea startles me, and I hear Sue make a noise in the phone as well. What am I saying? I’m uncertain, and yet I keep talking. ‘We won’t let him see her tonight if he comes. We’ll talk to him in the daylight and see how he is. Let him sober up a bit. Just tell Joanne that when she wakes up. That’ll make her feel better.’
Sue gives a little laugh, a wry laugh. ‘Won’t be easy to stop him. Keep a father from his child.’
I assure Sue that we can do it. That everything will be fine. Ella will be safe — she won’t even know her father is here. I’ll handle the details. I’m not even sure what I mean by this, but I believe it, and I can tell Sue does as well. I say to her I’ll ring her in the morning and ask her to tell Joanne to call me whenever she wants. It doesn’t matter the time. Assure her again that everything is in hand.
As I’m walking back down the paddock, the rain increases, the fine drops swelling. A wind blows over the campground, obviously from the sea, bending the trees closest to the shore and then rushing uphill in a surge until it passes over me, bracing cold and smelling of salt. There, at the bottom of the paddock, I see the door opening. Ella is peeking out. She’s looking for me. Now I hear her voice as well, faint and tentative. She’s calling for me, but she doesn’t know where to look. I’m moving fa
ster now, running the last bit, and I can almost feel her small body in my arms.
THE SALTED AIR
I’m walking alone under a full moon, only half aware of why I’m here, so far away from the campground. But that’s a lie — I’m here because Bruce won’t find me here. My father can take care of Ella just fine, and between him and the others at the campground, they’ll keep Bruce away from her for tonight. But they couldn’t keep me away from him. And seeing as I don’t want to end up on a plane to Suriname, I’ve run off.
Sounds are flowing down out of the shadow of the hills and across the open paddocks like channels of cold water. I hear lowing bellows, desperate sounds of misery, though I know they must be nothing more than cows. The surf thunders on my right, only a dark heartbeat until I round a bend and there is the sea before me, silver-white and pulsing at its high-tide mark, lapping along the road edge, rattling sea gravel and sucking the little stones. The hunched tops of the rocks — rocks large as tractors — appear and disappear on the waterline, whispering with trickles of water as the surf advances and recedes.
An hour ago a car passed by, and I hid myself in the shadows of a giant flax. But the car didn’t simply pass by — that’s not accurate. What happened is that the drone of its engine rose slowly from the blackness, mounting, joining and then overwhelming the whole of the night. Its headlights swept along the dark line of beach, unveiling the lip of the surf, and then the car overtook me, a sudden beast. My fear had nothing to do with the occupants of the car, either. If I had known for a fact that the car was empty, I would just as likely have hid as it rushed past my little stand of flax. It was only after the vehicle’s presence shrank away and the sound faded that I considered its occupants. With this thought, I felt a cavity of terror inside me. I imagined faces, men — some of them, I’ll admit, faces I’ve seen at the campground. An image of Mr Earplugs flashed through my mind.
