After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘I was entertaining myself—so what?’

  ‘So you’re obviously a compulsive—something. Having Basil on about the house being haunted, for Christ’s sake!’

  He shrugged.

  Ellen looked back at me and squeezed my hands. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m all right. About the dream, what I was trying to say is that I don’t have nightmares. And this nightmare wasn’t even about anything personal to me. Also, in the dream I wasn’t actually frightened or distressed, it only started to seem frightening after I woke up.’

  ‘But you’re better now?’

  ‘Yes, but when you asked me what it was about I felt I was beginning to dream again—not the same dream, but its sequel.’

  Kelfie was smiling crookedly and grinding his teeth under the smile. He looked sceptical.

  ‘Well?’ I demanded.

  ‘Nothing.’

  His expression was maddening, that peculiarly male expression of prejudiced doubt.

  ‘Are you getting enough sleep?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Doctor Lamb paused, his pen’s silver rod lifting from the paper. He was the Morgan family doctor; he’d delivered Dan, and thought highly of the family—he said so at our wedding.

  ‘Dan’s drinking too much.’

  ‘How much, do you know?’

  ‘No, I really don’t have any idea. But he’s getting drunk, and he’s secretive about it.’

  ‘Do you drink with him?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘I saw Dan last Thursday. He seemed fine—is he missing work, appointments?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does he get violent when he drinks?’

  ‘No, he just abuses me.’

  ‘You argue?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘You need to get more sleep, Jill.’ He put the card down and began to write a prescription. ‘I’m going to prescribe some tablets. Take one in the evenings—these aren’t something you can’t drink with, so you needn’t worry about alcohol. I’ll have a word to Dan next time he’s in.’ He ripped the prescription off the pad and extended it to me. I took it, tried to decipher the scrawl. When I looked up the doctor was staring at me, slightly irritated. I folded the paper and stood up. He stood too, as if we were attached to the same mechanism and my standing necessitated his. ‘You’ll have to expect quite a long period of adjustment. Both of you.’

  In my head something was surfacing, something huge emerging from tremendous depths, the water boiling and raising itself in a smooth hump, as it did in the pool at Pupu over the source of the cold spring.

  ‘I know that,’ I said, ‘I’m trying.’

  ‘Be patient with Dan.’ And there it was, implicitly: ‘She was not your daughter.’ Not the daughter of the young, griping, ‘artistic’ second wife.

  ‘Do you think I’m being hysterical? Pity one of the other blokes isn’t awake so you can roll your eyes at each other.’

  ‘What?’

  I caught Ellen’s eye. ‘Offended innocence.’ Pointing at Kelfie.

  ‘I believe Jill anyway,’ she said.

  ‘What a forceful ally you have, Jill. Exactly what do you believe, Ellen?’

  ‘I believe she’s right in what she thinks.’

  ‘Oh, a carte blanche Jill, you’re lucky.’

  Hannah, who was lying facing the back of the ottoman, rolled over. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘An argument.’

  She sat up, rubbing her hands through her hair. ‘Did you bring the coffee up, Ellen?’

  ‘Yes, you could ask Basil for a billy and put it outside to collect rainwater. Under that stream running off the veranda roof.’

  Hannah leaned over Basil. ‘Should I wake him?’

  ‘Go on. He might be having a horrible nightmare,’ Ellen said and glowered at Kelfie

  Kelfie turned his eyes away from us. He said, ‘You don’t know what I’m thinking.’

  Hannah shook Basil. He came awake abruptly, confused and disoriented.

  ‘I just want to borrow a billy, to collect some water for coffee.’ He made to get up, and Hannah patted his shoulder. ‘Stay put. I’ll get it. Just thought I should say before I went in your pack. ‘ She began searching it. Basil sat yawning, then shook himself vigorously, like a wet dog. ‘No wonder I’m cold, you’re all being a fire screen,’ he complained.

  Kelfie moved further away from us. Basil shuffled over into the space.

  ‘Voilà!’ Hannah left the room swinging a billy.

  ‘Did you have any nightmares, Basil?’ Kelfie asked, ingenuous.

  ‘No, but hell am I tired. I need coffee.’

  ‘Why not sleep?’

  ‘It’s anti-social, Snouf. Wrathall looks like he’s out for the duration.’

  Kelfie frowned and asked what a Snouf was.

  ‘Don’t know. Sounds like Tove Jansson. Suits you anyhow.’

  Basil seemed to have chosen to refer to Simon by his surname and call Kelfie pet names—maybe it was something to do with their relative ages. Simon was in his early thirties, Basil was in his mid twenties and Kelfie in his late teens. ‘Was I growling, or whimpering, or something?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Kelfie’s just being a dick. Jill was trying to explain this weird dream she had, and he thinks she’s exagerating, or something.’

  ‘They’re waiting to see whose side you come down on,’ Kelfie said coolly.

  Basil looked anxious and uncomfortable, like a child between two quarrelling parents. ‘Well I don’t know anything. Except I suppose you were being difficult,’ he said to Kelfie, then flushed meeting Kelfie’s remote, superior stare.

  Kelfie

  I was my father’s child, or so I was told. This pleased me greatly, since I admired him so much.

  The three of us kids used to compete for his attention. Meredith had it easy; she was boisterous, vivid, quick and overflowing with unshakeable self-esteem. She looked like him too: long-boned, but not clumsy, black-haired, blue-eyed, pale. Meredith wasn’t interested in the things that interested Dad, and made no attempts to pretend to be. She pursued obsessions, cultivated her talents and became an expert on any subject that captured her interest. Successively: Ancient Egypt, sharks, Plains Indian religions and the history of Marvel comics. When she was twelve and in her final year at the Montessori school, she started her own comic strip, which the local suburban paper ran.

  Owen was the clod of the family—as Meredith would incessantly remind him. He too was quick and clever and self-controlled, not brilliant like Mere, but a born leader with hordes of friends who hung on his every word.

  My parents, Jenny and Gareth Kelsey, had married at twenty-one, just after they had got their degrees from Auckland, his in Maths and Physics, hers in Music. They fell into good jobs and good money and started a family, deciding to raise their children ‘the right way’.

  I was born in Auckland, but removed to Los Angeles when Gareth was snapped up by IBM. It would have been 1973. For three years he was one of their super-programmers, then he burned out.

  I look back and picture Dad—Gareth—lying like a cat on the lawn in the sun. This was his idea of playing with the kids when he didn’t feel like exerting himself. We’d dance around him and he’d occasionally make a grab at our legs—the game kept us in a state of terrified suspense; we’d creep towards him and rush away again shrieking when the smile twitched on his face, or we caught sight of the gleam of a partly opened eye.

  And I remember the day he decided to trim the ‘hedge’—a line of thick conifers on the edge of our property. He didn’t have a chainsaw and seemed not to want to use one. Our Los Angeles neighbours thought we were crazy. Gareth was up in the trees stamping on a half-sawn branch; we were all on the ground helping by hauling on a rope he had tied around the limb, me at the front, valiantly contributing my few ergs.

  Gareth was so strong. His body smelt clean and charged, an ozone scent, like the drenched air after a thu
nderstorm.

  Some of our dinner table ‘discussions’ would get out of hand. He didn’t want Meredith to be enthusiastic about anything without ‘regarding the alternatives’. He was always prodding her back from what interested her, afraid I think of the intensity of her involvement with her obsessions. ‘I’m an iconoclast,’ he said to her one day when she was in tears, as if he thought this was an adequate explanation for his never just letting her be fired up.

  My father the idol-breaker.

  I never knew exactly why I was consigned to him—Jenny did that; whenever I was stubborn, tactless, or selfish, I was ‘your son, Gareth’. And he petted me, over-compensating I expect, because she neglected me. That is to say, she fed me, clothed me, watched my health—but that was duty, ordinary kindness and decency—not love.

  One day, when I was nearly five, Gareth came looking for me, wearing an intent look. I was lying on my stomach in front of the TV, watching the Indianapolis 500. He knelt down next to me and watched the cars whiz around the track, then asked, ‘Can I turn it down for a moment, Keith?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He put some paper down in front of me and said, ‘I’ve got a puzzle for you. Say you have to tell a machine to change one number, whenever it occurs in thousands of numbers, to another.’ He wrote a seven and a three. ‘Wherever there is a three it has to become a seven, and wherever there’s a seven it has to become a three. The trick is that you have to tell the machine to do it in the shortest way possible, using as few words as possible. And because we don’t know whether the numbers we want changed are sevens or threes we call them x. The machine is pretty stupid, so you have to tell it to do everything.’

  ‘Even to find the sevens and threes first?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He tapped the paper. ‘How would you do it?’

  It seemed obvious to me—he was tricking me, writing out the seven and three when the important number was ten. ‘First you tell the machine that x is seven or three.’ I wrote, x is 7. x is 3. ‘Then you tell the machine to find x.’ I wrote, Find x. ‘Then you tell it to change x to ten minus x.’ Change x to 10-x. ‘Because ten minus three is seven and ten minus seven is three.’

  ‘Aren’t you even going to ask if that’s right?’

  ‘It is right, unless I don’t get what you want me to do.’

  ‘You do understand, you are absolutely right. There’s another way to do it, but it’s slower. That is the best way, that’s “arithmetic logic”, Keith.’ He stretched out beside me and leaned his head on his fist. I imitated him, adopting exactly the same pose.

  Jenny came in. ‘Mime session?’

  ‘I’m going to build Keith a computer,’ my father announced.

  I pulled a face. ‘You said you were going to build me a kite.’

  He pulled me to him and hugged me. ‘I’ll build you a kite too.’

  Everything started to fall to pieces when I was six. Gareth couldn’t sleep. He’d roam around the house at night, or come home very late, or go out very late. He started sitting in the dark wearing dark glasses. ‘Stoned all the time,’ was Meredith’s verdict.

  ‘You know what I hate most about him now?’ she asked Owen one day when we were all hiding in Owen’s bedroom, and an was argument raging downstairs.

  ‘The fights?’ Owen was shaking and pale, flinching each time the voices soared.

  ‘No, the way he keeps cornering me to talk about things like what a good father he’d like to be, and how brilliant he was, and how good his nerves were once—’ Her face contorted, fighting tears.

  Owen had the hiccups; he’d been so tense at dinner that he’d swallowed air.

  ‘The other night he hit Jenny! I know he hit her because I heard it—’ Meredith began rocking back and forth; her face relaxed, and the tears came.

  ‘Maybe they’ll give him his job back,’ Owen said.

  ‘Are you kidding! He gets shaky every time he has to add up the chequebook.’

  ‘He might get over it.’

  ‘Even if he did, they wouldn’t take him back when he stuffed up and made them lose all that money. And the insurance people said no.’

  Owen started to cry too. ‘Mummy can look after us.’

  ‘He’s making her sick!’ Meredith was enraged. ‘I just want her to leave. To take us and go.’

  I felt my body jerk as though someone had pounded me hard in the back. My hands and feet started to go numb; the numbness travelled up my body. ‘Mere—’

  She was sobbing too much now to answer me.

  ‘I can’t feel my hands and feet.’

  She rolled across the bed and put her arms around me. I felt I was made of sand, disintegrating gradually in the wind. ‘I’m disappearing,’ I whispered.

  Mere sniffed loudly and said, ‘No you’re not, silly.’ She lifted me and propped me up against the pillows at the end of the bed. ‘See, here are your hands, with all the fingers.’ She lifted them.

  Downstairs a door slammed. Owen and Meredith exchanged glances. A moment later the bedroom door opened and Jenny came in. The skin around her eyes was red and tight; she too was shaking. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said.

  Owen began to wail, his mouth wide open. Jenny sat beside him on the bed and drew him onto her lap. ‘Barbara’s offered to let us come and stay up at Olympia with her.’ She turned to me. ‘You can stay with your father if you want to, Keith.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave Gareth.’

  She looked away, squeezed Mere and Owen tighter. ‘OK. That’s settled then.’

  I never knew whether she told him she really was going to leave. He wasn’t around the house very often, and when he was he wasn’t talking to any of us. Meredith and Owen made no protest about my being left behind. They understood that their silence on the subject was a condition of their being rescued from a painful situation by the mother who loved them.

  Jenny had the removal van come around one Saturday morning when Gareth had disappeared somewhere. She had the men take quite a lot of the furniture, crockery, cutlery and bedding. Meredith and Owen climbed up and down the stairs carrying their books, toys and clothes in boxes. Mere had secretly arranged for a friend of hers to come over to say goodbye. The friend had turned up, ‘just dropping in’, and Jenny made her a milkshake and let her stay. The friend trailed Mere up and down the stairs, her face tragic.

  We had chocolate-chip ice cream for lunch, then Jenny sent me upstairs for a bath. Half an hour later she came up, towelled me dry, dressed me and combed my hair. Then carried me downstairs, sat me on the footstool in front of the TV and put the remote control into my hand.

  Meredith and Owen were standing at the front door. Jenny picked up her coat and keys and, pushing them out before her, closed the door. I heard the car doors slam, the engine start, covered by the deeper throb of the truck engine, and both vehicles pull out of the driveway and fade down the street.

  I had recently started at the Montessori school. Once the others had gone, Gareth drove me there in the mornings and a housekeeper picked me up in the afternoons. The school was supposed to give me the resources to pursue my own interests, and help when I needed it—but all I was interested in was the swing in the playground.

  I sat, swung and listened. Listened to the other children, shrieking and diving about, to bits of paper dragged over the pavement by the wind, the sea sound of three eucalypts at the end of the field, the murmur of traffic and always, from the sky, the echoing roar of jets. Swinging, listening, I would feel myself diffuse over the landscape, first into the nearest objects, the plastic seat and steel chains of the swing, then the frame of the swing, the pink pavement of the playground, the fence, the road, the buildings in my sight, the buildings I knew lay beyond my sight, the city, ringed with hills, the hills, the desert beyond, the continent, sea, continents, islands, changing elements, unseen places, people, plants and animals—the whole breathing, blue globe of earth and air rolling in icy space.

  Sometimes it was difficult to concentrate myself bac
k into my own body. I felt drugged and sleepy.

  I became unable to make decisions, about what I wanted to eat—so asked always to be served the same meal to save myself the trouble. I began to have favourite clothes, wanting them to be ready to wear at the times I felt I should be wearing them. Nor could I go to sleep unless everything in my room was arranged in a particular pattern. I knew if something was out of place. The comb had to be in the upturned hairbrush, the middle window open on the middle notch, the wardrobe door closed, my eiderdown in three folds draped evenly over the end of my bed, and the keyboard console completely aligned with the screen. My whole life had to be regular and dependable—at least, it had to look as though it was.

  I must have seemed sluggish and sleepy most of the time, unresponsive, uninterested in what people were saying to me. I felt like a field over which the sun travelled and clouds passed, rain fell and winds blew, bringing forth grass and flowers, inhabited by small animals, crossed by larger animals. Everything happened to me, I did nothing.

  Half a year after my mother left, Gareth took me home to my grandparents. We landed at Auckland and stayed the night in a city hotel. The following morning we flew into Nelson, my grandparents’ home town.

  They were waiting at the airport. My grandmother, a neat little woman with smooth greying black hair wound in a bun at the back of her head; my grandfather very tall and thin, with sallow skin, sparse grey hair and large, slightly pointed ears. My grandmother picked me up. Her flesh was soft under her angora suit, the scent she was wearing sweet, the cheek she laid against mine soft and flaccid. I stared at my grandfather over her shoulder and he winked at me.

  After lunch they took me up to the cathedral. My grandmother finally relinquished my hand, and they let me run ahead of them up the red-carpeted aisle. Gareth called me back when I slipped under the ropes and began to climb the altar steps, mesmerised by the large plain cross that seemed to fall towards me when I came close beneath it. I rambled off into one of the side galleries and stood under some large, dirty flags: a worn New Zealand flag and three regimental flags; blue, red and white, bearing insignia and trimmed with tarnishing gold braid.