After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword to the Second Edition

  Part One

  Jill

  Basil

  Jill

  Kelfie

  Basil

  Jill

  Kelfie

  Basil

  Jill

  Kelfie

  Mark

  Jill

  Part Two

  Jill

  Kelfie

  Basil

  Mark

  Jill

  Basil

  Mark

  Kelfie

  Mark

  Kelfie

  Mark

  Basil

  Mark

  Basil

  Jill

  Kelfie

  Mark

  Part Three

  Jill

  Kelfie

  Basil

  Kelfie

  Jill

  Kelfie

  Elizabeth Knox is one of New Zealand’s leading writers. She is the author of eight previous novels, including The Vintner’s Luck (1999 Deutz Medal for Fiction, 2001 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize) and its sequel The Angel’s Cut, and most recently Wake (2013), a trilogy of autobiographical essays, The High Jump, and a collection of personal essays, The Love School. The second part of her Dreamhunter Duet, Dreamquake, won an American Library Association Michael L. Printz Honor Award for Young Adult Literature in 2008. Her third novel for young adults, Mortal Fire, won the 2014 NZ Post Book Award for Young Adult Fiction.

  Elizabeth Knox was made an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2000 and an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 2002, and was awarded the 2014 Michael King Writer’s Fellowship. She lives in Wellington.

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH KNOX

  Treasure (1992)

  Glamour and the Sea (1996)

  The Vintner’s Luck (1998)

  The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood (2000)

  (Pomare (1994), Paremata (1989), Tawa (1998))

  Black Oxen (2001)

  Billie’s Kiss (2002)

  Daylight (2003)

  The Love School: Personal Essays (2008)

  The Angel’s Cut (2009)

  Wake (2013)

  for young adults

  Dreamhunter (2005)

  Dreamquake (2007)

  Mortal Fire (2013)

  elizabethknox.com

  VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Victoria University of Wellington

  Private Bag Wellington

  vup.victoria.ac.nz

  Copyright © Elizabeth Knox 1987

  First published 1987

  Second edition 2014

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers.

  National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Knox, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Fiona), 1959-

  After Z-hour / Elizabeth Knox.

  Second edition.

  ISBN 978-0-864-73923-0

  I. Title.

  NZ823.2—dc 23

  First publication of this book was supported

  by the New Zealand Literary Fund

  ISBN 978-0-864-73923-0 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-776-56002-8 (EPUB)

  ISBN 978-1-776-56003-5 (Kindle)

  Cover photo: Laurence Aberhart, Murchison, Tasman,

  13 December 2010 (reproduced courtesy of the artist)

  Cover design: Keely O’Shannessy

  Author photo: Robert Cross (1987)

  Ebook production 2014 by meBooks

  To my mother and father

  Acknowledgements

  Quotations from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra are taken from the Penguin Classics edition, 1961, translated by R.J. Hollingdale.

  Foreword to the Second Edition

  After Z-Hour is a ghost story in which one character declares, ‘We we all ghosts’, and in which time and space, period and place, are interpenetrating. It’s a book about memory and trauma set in a haunted house during a storm. And a book where everyone longs for home, and no one gets to go there.

  I have a letter from my grandmother to my great uncle Jack (John James Knox) dated 8 July 1918. She is writing to give him the news of the birth of his second child, a daughter, Kathleen. She reports how his wife Rose—Grandma’s sister

  —is getting along, and the baby, and Jack’s son, also Jack. ‘He would have you in fits of laughter, if you say where’s daddy gone, he says to the war to fight the Germans, he speaks so plainly for his age, God bless him. He says God bless daddy!’

  Grandma’s letter came back with Jack’s belongings, so his family knew he had got it and its happy news. Jack’s belongings had been packed up and sent after him when he was wounded, and in time found their way back to the household at 12 Hospital Road, Newtown. But Jack did not. John James Knox was one of a handful of New Zealanders among 123 who died when the hospital ship Warilda, carrying wounded from Le Havre, was torpedoed and sank on the 3rd of August 1918.

  I’ve been on Vimeo and looked at the schools of fish herded this way and that through the halls and companionways and across the decks of ‘one of the best diving wrecks in the channel’. The schools of fish are more expressive of the family’s thoughts about Jack than the marble of the Wellington Provincial War Memorial—the way they drift away, change shape, and return.

  My grandmother married Jack’s brother Joe after the war—so that Jack’s son and daughter were my father’s cousins twice over. That double-strength blood bond kept drowned Jack Knox very present in the family; present as a blank loss, not a ‘sacrifice’.

  I have written in my essay ‘On Being Picked Up’ (collected in The Love School) about the moment when it first occurred to me what all this might mean. I was eleven and waiting with my father in Wellington Hospital’s Casualty ward after having fallen out of a tree.

  It was a very busy day: a public holiday, ANZAC Day. Just down the hall a little girl who had swallowed some household poison was having her stomach pumped—a noise I’ve never heard on a hospital drama soundtrack. We knew what her problem was because an old man came along and leaned on the doorframe and said, ‘That poor wee girl.’ He had a bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head—my first blood in Casualty. He wore a suit that was shiny with wear. He was thin, with wrist bones like ping-pong balls. He told us that he’d been drinking and had fallen over in the street, hitting his head on the curb. Just below the bandage, by one ear, he had a scar, a long depression filled with smooth, snowy skin. It was an old shrapnel scar.

  The old man started to talk to Dad about Passchendaele and life on the Salient in 1917. And I listened. Then Dad said a few things about his father, who had been there too. A nurse came by and tried to move the old guy and Dad said, ‘He’s all right, don’t bother him’, and she went away again.

  And I was picked up. Because I had been in pain and wasn’t any more. Because I was hearing a story about horror and loss, the storyteller’s horror and loss, with a backing of these awful stomach-pump noises, and the sight of blood, a recent injury standing in for an old one—and because my father was talking about his father, whom he never talked about—I was picked up. Inspired. A subject had got hold of me until I had it out with it, in my first published book, After Z-Hour.

  When my son, Jack, was in Year 11 at Wellington College he came in from a very long Anzac Day assembly, crawled up the last flight of stairs, and flopped at my feet. He didn’t complain of being bored, or even outraged. Inste
ad he was filled with gloom and disgust. He said he just felt the whole thing was meant to prepare him and others to go and be killed in some war, if there was ever another big one. The speeches were all about how the soldiers were heroes who made a sacrifice. He complained to a friend afterwards about how the speakers didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between the reasons soldiers died in World War I, and why they died in World War II. And his friend said Jack was dishonouring the dead. ‘I say their deaths were pointless and I’m dishonouring them? But aren’t I honouring them if it’s the truth? That war didn’t do anyone any good, and now its just being used as an exercise in building school spirit.’

  Jack was right. Even more so now, when Anzac Day is, year by year, becoming less a focus for national mourning than national pride—and, too often, a nation-building exercise. But Lest We Forget: for all the good and meaningful stories we’ve inherited, and the friendships formed and horizons expanded for that generation of combatants, it would have been a better, wiser, kinder fate for all those young men to have stayed at home.

  Rereading After Z-Hour for the first time in over 25 years, I noticed how it is now set in two historical periods: 1916 to 1920, and the mid-1980s. So, along with the World War 1 story, there are also apparitions from that second bygone age. There’s the National Weather Bureau, tobacco-drying kilns in Riwaka, the Ministry of Works, street preachers railing against the evils of cash machines, and people as likely to drink sherry at home as wine. Plus student flatmates called Andrea, Sue and Mike, rather than Jacob, Dylan and Lily, and the idea of young people able to study things not vocationally, but for the sake of of learning.

  This is a young writer’s novel, filled with intensity and evidence. And I’m particularly proud of the prescience of its youngest character, the Machiavellian Kelfie, who imagined pretty clearly the world we find ourselves in now.

  For this new edition, I took the opportunity to make a few changes, mostly the vaunting dyslexic madness of the opening page and a half. Those paragraphs are now neatly combed and set in order. (Bill Manhire and Fergus Barrowman, faithful people, thought I was stretching out into my experimental style!) Also, throughout the novel, many semicolons have gone the way of all semicolons, and become a full stop and a new sentence. What I retained that still make me nervous are the pronoun-less opening passages of the first Mark chapter. My plan at the time was to have a ghost coming back to life by coalescing in the cloud of his life’s great and small moments, and his memories of the material. So—straw mattresses in a tent at the Trentham camp, the wet decks of a troopship, fallen snow feathering barbed wire. For a few paragraphs there is no distinct point of view at the centre of the memories. And then a ‘we’ appears. Mark is ‘we’ even as he comes back without his friends.

  Elizabeth Knox

  August 2014

  Part One

  Jill

  When the storm broke I had just passed the summit of the Hill. The road dipped down, narrowed, and cut into the side of the Hill. I’d been driving with my windows open and the sound of my tyres hissing on tarseal dampened by earlier showers seemed a thin shell between my car and a great expectant silence. Dusk was thickening and the pasture had gone a dull khaki, as though it lay under the red-tinged shadow of smoke, rather than cloud. The air was dense and still.

  For months I had felt I was in flight, but in that moment before the storm’s first salvo I had the sensation of being overtaken, and overwhelmed, by pursuers as swift, lethal and nebulous as a swarm of bees. One minute my wheels were rolling and the white strokes of the median strip falling behind me like marked-off seconds, the next I was engulfed in a pause; the air went as solid as a caught breath, and a smell like a hot-plate—a clean, metallic tang—filled my head.

  In that pause I understood that, though I’d been running, I hadn’t got away—from my husband’s house, the farm, the tidy, collected time following disaster; from the sounds longing would conjure, of a chair creaking in a empty room, as if someone was stirring and was getting up to come through to ask a question, or fix a snack, or switch on the TV; from the sensation longing would conjure, of a person stepping out of my way as I entered a room, as if my presence displaced possibilities in passing from room to room—because every room was empty. I’d performed all the ceremonies of getting away. I’d packed my bags, and left a few final instructions for the neighbour who was to mind the farm. I’d taken leave of my cat, Shackleton, held him as I stood by the window of my tidy kitchen, my nose buried in his fur and its scent of dry earth and decaying leaves. My sister had said, ‘Come and stay and take stock.’ So here I was, in flight, partway between the farm, where there was nothing left for me to do, and my sister’s house, where I’d be expected to show some sign that I was ‘putting it all behind me’, not in my good own time, but at the convenience of those who had undertaken to look after me.

  Then time stopped, and I wasn’t in flight, I was falling. Falling under the utmost power of gravity, but with freefall’s illusion of weightless suspension in space. In that pause I hung suspended, it seemed, between negative and positive time, the seconds around the silence counting, minus one, zero, one—

  And then the storm broke. An immense, vital entity touched a finger to the Hill’s summit, and the road ahead was obliterated by light. Thunder tumbled over my car like a rockfall. There was a sudden downpour of heavy rain, and, as my car rounded a left-hand curve, I saw the way ahead blocked by a mass of yellow earth. I braked, my car slithering, rear end fish-tailing. Its right flank gently kissed the crash barrier, then it slewed around and struck the slip at an angle. The front wheels reared up over the heaped earth, its undercarriage ground across rubble, the steering wheel jerked out of my hands—then the drive wheels hit the tacky clay, sank in and stuck. My car came to an abrupt stop, and its engine stalled.

  For a moment the only sounds were my own gasping breath, the engine’s metal ticking cool, and the whispered commentary of the rain. Then I began pounding on the horn, as though the slip was a herd of sheep blocking the road. After several seconds the noise began to scare me, so I stopped—just sat and cried; bawled as I hadn’t done for years, hitting the dashboard, competing with a storm, stalled on an empty road.

  When my tears had subsided to a few hiccupping sobs, I decided to try the engine. It started. I put the car into reverse and lurched backwards. The wheels slipped and spun in the mud. It wouldn’t budge. I switched off the engine, got out, and was within a few moments nearly wet through.

  Since there was nothing else to do—and I had to be doing something—I started back up the slope. Perhaps I might spot the lights of another car. A membrane of silt, flowing from a flooded ditch made the surface of the tarseal slippery. My hair hung in dripping strands against the cold flesh of my cheeks, and water trickled down my neck under my jersey. A wind was coming up, mixing with the rain, striking my body at one angle, then another, in brief, freezing gusts.

  I stopped at the corner and peered along the road. The thick stand of beech trees I’d just passed through was only a smudge on the grey-on-grey silhouette of the ridge. Back down the slope my car, a bright yellow Toyota, which I had always considered highly visible, was, through the rain, only a slightly sunny blur. Any vehicle coming down the road would run into it. I should have left its lights on.

  I began to hurry back. Water pouring down the slope washed around my ankles, and I stumbled as I walked. My skin was so cold it felt burned. As I hurried I noticed that the slip had scooped a cavern out of the bank, and above the gouge a crumbling overhang of mud and boulders threatened my car. I was so busy looking at this that I wasn’t watching my feet. I slipped and fell, jarring my knees and grazing my palms on the road’s gritty surface. I got up, and watched blood spring up in stinging stitches, and then form webs on my wet hands. I picked my way gingerly back to the car, got in and wound up the windows to inhibit the sound of the rain and sight of the threatening slip. I turned on the lights and the heat. My clothes became clammy as I warmed
. The windows fogged over, sealing me off behind misted glass from the sight of the rain clawing my skewed car.

  My stepdaughter Nicky’s funeral had been held in a crematorium chapel, a room panelled in pine and hung with mustard-coloured curtains. A Presbyterian minister in a purple suit read the service, saying that we must all think fondly of her: ‘I didn’t know Nichola well, but I’m told she was a good girl and well loved—’

  I had come out onto the porch of the farmhouse to find her trying to crease the crown of my old straw sunhat. ‘I’m playing rodeos,’ she told me. And I knew she was copying a TV movie we’d seen, about women rodeo riders. She set the hat on her head and straddled the rail of the porch, incongruous in her peacock-blue bikini with her little pot-belly. I laughed and went inside. Shortly after that she found a rope, and walked out over the field to her pet bobby calf. She slipped the noose over his head and tried to make him come to her. Then, to look the part I guess, she tied the rope around her waist. The calf, for some reason, bolted—dragging Nicky out of the paddock and along the driveway.

  Well loved. Lying in an undersized coffin, in a room full of stinking daffodils, skinned, with a little dent in her temple and beige make-up covering the brown and yellow bruises that had formed around her eyes after death, from all that blood in her broken skull.

  The intimate funeral was Nicky’s Grandma’s idea. She wanted none of those ‘old speeches’. None of those glorious speeches that, by the beauty and conviction of their language, ask not to be questioned: ‘He will change our vile bodies, to be like unto His glorious body, through that power by which He subdues all things to Himself—’ Instead, there was the coffin, lying on a trolley of laminated wood, like a tea-trolley. There was organ music, undistinguished. It was a sketch of a funeral, not a funeral. The service was a medley of sermon and prayer, and promises impossible to believe: ‘She has gone to heaven, and lives on in our memories. Remembered by those qualities she possessed which we loved, perhaps gentleness, perhaps that she was a good daughter—’