After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  This wasn’t the right thing to say either. Russell sighed wearily, got up dusting his hands on his trousers, and walked away.

  He had a deck of tarot cards he kept wrapped in black silk in a cane box. The card for Strength was a woman in a floral gown, an infinity symbol over her head. Showing me the tarot he discarded her quickly; threw away the joyous, serene, the perpetually renewed.

  We looked for ourselves in the pictures.

  Lightning striking: two figures plunging from a burning tower. ‘That means a broken home, Basil.’

  Ten goblets strung on a rainbow, a man, woman and child dancing beneath them. ‘That looks good,’ I ventured.

  ‘Reversed,’ he said in satisfaction.

  Sitting bolt upright in bed, her face hidden in her hands, the woman had just woken from a nightmare. Nine swords like prison bars were suspended above her head, the after-image of her evil dream.

  ‘This is more like me—’ I said, with a sudden and sad recognition: a white-haired man with a lamp. The Hermit.

  ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is me.’ A black-cloaked man with a sword, walking away. ‘Or perhaps?’ A man standing grief-stricken before three overturned cups.

  Everything had to be larger than life. Relaxation, comfortable physical tiredness, laziness, frightened him. When we were sprawled in front of the TV he’d pretend to watch, watching us, perched on his seat. If he had started gasping like a beached fish I wouldn’t have been surprised. He was out of his element in the everyday.

  It was a weird, heady relationship, one that none of us was able to handle, between the stage where boys run around in packs, or have one or two friends they go everywhere with—sharing what they do, rather than what they think—and the more sedate friendships of later adolescence, when each individual has enough confidence to begin offering opinions, advice, support. At a time when we really needed to be able to relax back into safe and acceptable ways of behaving, we all ended up surrendering to Russell’s compulsion to set himself and his circle apart from what he’d call ‘ordinary life’.

  If he had been just unusually intelligent and serious he might have been defused by shyness, or fear of ridicule, as many original people are. But because he seemed so confident, because he showed no sign of timidity, everything he said, and almost everything he did, went unchallenged by his peers.

  And he could make the world seem the way he saw it. Not only was everything he said about himself wholly believable, but he was able to persuade you to see yourself the way he saw you (and other people, and the world), steering all conversations and determining all moods.

  He was my best friend; but, except for a few hours, I think I existed to him only as an audience.

  The few hours were on a train travelling back to the school from his parents’ home—a slow 200-kilometre journey through grain fields, orchards and small towns. It was two days after the start of term. Russell had postponed the journey by taking me out for a walk the evening before we were to return, and we stayed out all night and most of the next day, wandering out of town and into the fields, along endless fence lines and drainage ditches. On the train there were only a few people going our way—a couple of young women asleep in their seats at the other end of the carriage, and one seasoned traveller who looked interesting, but ignored us, staying stretched out in his seat with his feet, in leather-soled German walking boots, sticking out into the aisle.

  Though it was late autumn the sun went down slowly, blotting out the views of houses and trees in golden light. Light crept around the edges of all the solid objects, wasting broad trees into spindly black shadows. When the sun vanished the air cooled, became slowly less tortured, until, after half an hour, the atmosphere was like clear blue glass, in which every detail of the landscape was set, undistorted, in deepening shades of blue to the horizon.

  We had been talking about Russell’s parents, who I liked, who were friendly and affectionate but vague and a little withdrawn. And I was privately thinking that their distance was less likely to be responsible for the way Russell was, than a product of the way he was; that they had learned how to reserve something of themselves from their own son. Or perhaps what I saw was all that was left of them after Russell’s brother had died. Whichever it was, they seemed immune to him.

  Russell went on to talk about his last home in central BC, heaping one skilfully drawn picture on top of another in the way he always did, like he was rummaging through a portfolio in search of one particular painting, the one he thought would prove to everyone he was an artist, not a dabbler.

  ‘There’s a long, potholed tarseal road between the towns at either end of Kamloops Lake. All along it in the fields are these pillars of soft rock, left on the cleared land where topsoil and clay have washed away. The locals call them “hoodoos”, and they do look spooky, especially driving at night, through rain; like tall men looming up on either side of the road.

  ‘Dad, Paul and I used to have this yearly tradition of going up into the hills to look at the Walsingham apple trees in bloom. Walsingham was a small English settlement founded around the turn of the century. They cleared land up in the hills in the middle of the forest and built a long wooden aqueduct to carry water from far up the Thomson River. As soon as World War One broke out all the men went back to Europe to fight. Most of them were killed and Walsingham disintegrated. Now there’s nothing left but a mile-long line of crumbling wood—the aqueduct—a few chimneys, and the apple trees.

  ‘They look beautiful in spring, and odd, surrounded by pines. Lots of people used to go up to look at them in bloom, but as far as I know no one ever bothered to harvest the apples.’

  ‘It sounds as if you miss it.’

  ‘Not really,’ he said with quiet gravity. ‘I don’t miss anything.’ He paused a moment, considering his own statement. ‘Everything I’ve seen, everywhere I’ve been—even me talking to you now—is just part of a parade of impressions. I don’t have to do anything about any of it, I don’t even have to miss it.’

  I waited for him to clarify.

  ‘I try not to want things back, and to not want things to happen.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It wouldn’t do me any good. My mother has a friend who does a lot of work for various causes. She fights for the preservation of this and that, and she fights to change things. But at the same time she’s so depressed it’s like she’s always saying goodbye. Just like in the movies; one of those women standing crying on the station platform as the troop train pulls away. I’d hate to be like that—so I don’t hang on, and I don’t hope. You know—sometimes I feel I’m dead already—’

  This admission distressed and confused me. I said, ‘Look Russell, when I start getting depressed about what might happen to me—whether I’ll get blown off the face of the earth along with everyone else, or I’ll develop a brain tumour, or get axed by a marauding lunatic—I always cheer myself up by imagining this house I’d like to build one day. It’s a lot like my Auntie Pat’s house on Vancouver Island, an A-frame, with a loft above the living room that looks out over the garden. I imagine myself standing in the loft of my house. It’s warm under the roof. I can see the garden. Along the windowsill is a row of withered apples. Everything smells of old yellow apples. I’m not sick, or lonely, or bored. And you know what? I really believe it will come true for me someday.’

  He stared at me, for the first time perhaps really listening. For once my suggestion about myself won out over his. ‘Maybe that is what will happen to you,’ he conceded, ‘but I still know what will happen to me.’

  Outside it was dark, and by the carriage lights I saw our reflections on the windows. We could have been anywhere, in a gliding corridor of light, outside of time, with no destination.

  ‘I’m going to tell you something I had decided never to tell anyone,’ I said, ‘just to show you that we can’t know anything. Because I think that if there is even one fact that doesn’t fit into the accepted pattern, then we ought not be so sure of ourselves.
I also think it’s good not to be sure.’

  I told him about the Vanishing House, speaking at first with difficulty, trying to be exact, then as my revelation turned into a confession, talking excitedly. When I’d finished he said, ‘Hey really? That’s neat!’ Turning away from me, grinning, avoiding my eyes: polite, deferential—and hostile. He didn’t believe me; he wasn’t pretending to believe my story just to humour me, but rather because believing me fitted in with the way he saw himself. He, Russell the extremist, the original spirit, couldn’t scoff.

  That was the first of my friendships which ended with the telling of my story. I resented him resenting me. I was too immature and self-righteous to forgive his falling below my estimation of him.

  I remember him coming into the dorm that hot dark afternoon four days later. Sensing his presence, and staring fixedly at the pages of my book.

  He spent five minutes tidying his locker, banging things about angrily, in an effort, I thought, to disturb my concen-tration and provoke a reaction. I ignored him and he left. (I wonder what he looked like when he walked out the door.)

  After several minutes, when I’d returned to reading, Ian came in and asked, ‘What’s Russ up to?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘He was climbing the pool gates.’

  I looked up at him. Then out the tall windows came a flash of lightning and a thunderclap directly overhead. There was a moment of stark light in which everything slowed down. I could feel my heart quietly pulsing, feel myself falling back into the room, part of a world flattened out into two dimensions for a moment beneath that light.

  The moment passed. Ian was at my shoulder, whispering, ‘Amazing … amazing …’

  Outside the air thickened with rain.

  I stood—racked by that feeling of disquiet I used to get when my bus or train had arrived and I wanted to check the bag I’d already checked several times to make sure I had everything I might need. Then, without thinking about what I was doing, I left the dormitory and ran over the fields through the rain.

  I couldn’t remember climbing the fence. But eight years later I could still hear the rain on the water—crouching in my ears, whispering. In the wet and airless dusk I saw the cracked grey pavement around the pool, chipped tiles of the changing house, small piles of sodden dead leaves pressed up against the fence, the pool’s green water assaulted by the rain, surface punched, penetrated by forceful, forcefully swallowed drops. And a figure in the water, white shirt transparent, slowly turning like a ship’s wheel.

  I lost my bearings. My moral compass spinning.

  How could there be two such people? Was I looking for Russell? Threading my way through the world like an unfolding crowd; people moving away right and left, to be noticed, but not focused on, like the smiling chorus line before the camera, finally revealing the Star.

  Though we all walk through the streets anticipating reunions with old friends, meetings with would-be lovers, or acquaintances whose phone numbers we’ve forgotten when we are planning a party—what makes any of us search crowds for the faces of those people who we injured, who injured us, who are not lost, but dead? Is it that we know we will meet them again?

  Mark

  Between the Advanced Aid Station and the Casualty Clearing Station our ambulance was run off the road by an explosion, the freight-train long-range shell we listened to, and our minds rushed out to meet, coming down. We got out and sat on the grass among some young birches. My arm was hot, swollen by three hard boils caused by scratching at lice and not extracting them carefully, so that I’d left their heads buried in my skin.

  I lay on my back, patches of leaf-shadow stirring on my face, and remembered the dappled canvas of our tent at Featherston. My thoughts, like caged pigeons released before a race, fluttered forth and wheeled together towards home.

  With reveille at 3:30 we went to sleep in the last of the evening light, looking up at the shadows on the canvas. The tent was pitched among hundreds of others on commandeered farmland, beside the farmer’s stand of young birches. We were roughing it on our last night in New Zealand, our old straw beds burned and striped palliasses returned.

  Reveille, exercises, kitbags packed, breakfast; and then we were on the train at 5:30, pulling out of Featherston, the camp we had marched into seven weeks before. (Thirty miles over the Rimutaka road, on a fine day in February, hot in the sun, cool in the hill’s shade, the road glimmering and water running between the moss and ferns on the bank beside us. The clean pungency of the bush—growth, decay, cold water—surrounding us.)

  We settled down as the train slipped out of sight of the hut and canvas camp. My four tent mates and I were carrying our group photograph—the first of those we sent back to our families—Doug Triste, Alan Thomas, Les Norman, Bill Ford and Mark Thornton, together beside their tent at Trentham. (The second was a shot of the eight of us mates in front of our hut at Sling: Doug, Alan, Les, Bill, Andy McCauley, John Price, John Palmer and me.)

  Les, who could sleep under any circumstances, dozed; his head rested on the rattling window. I was too excited to sleep. We scrambled for sandwiches and tea at Kaitoke, then were back on the train, passing the camp at Trentham and fresh recruits at an earlier stage of training—parading, and lying belly-down out on the shooting range.

  From Wellington Station we marched to the wharf and our transport, the Pakeha. Stowed our kits in the spaces allotted each company below decks—close quarters—and I thought of Pip in Moby-Dick listening to the sharks’ fins brush by the hull.

  Our NCO, MacLean, checked the rolls while we stood to attention beside our bunks (‘pretend you have sixpences clamped tight between the cheeks of your arses. Right?!’). Standing behind Mac was one of our new officers, a young veteran returned wounded from Gallipoli, a square-shouldered, wiry, dark-haired man.

  We bolted dinner, and assembled on the wharf for our march through town.

  The draft halted at Waterloo Quay, and our wives, sweethearts, parents, brothers, sisters and children all broke over us—everyone was looking around for familiar faces. I felt taller, proud and changed, as I searched the crowd for Emma and my aunt Olive with whom she was staying while in Wellington. I was craning, peering through the crowd, but she seemed to come up under my arm, smaller than I remembered—my ‘big’ sister, the real head of the house since my mother’s death, suddenly small, delicate, and feminine. We set off again with the band playing. Emma clasped my arm, her little hands in lilac gloves strange on the rough khaki of my tunic. She was clinging to me because she was afraid of the crowd. She kept turning her head this way and that, smiling nervously at my friends as we exchanged introductions.

  The aunt I’d never met couldn’t get at me. Emma pointed her out, a short, feverish woman waving a handkerchief.

  We wheeled into Lambton Quay, the marching soldiers conferring form on the mass of well-wishers, who were dragged along in the band’s, the soldiers’, magnetic wake.

  Emma was shouting at me, urgently, something about taking care and how I was all she had. But I wasn’t able to pay attention, couldn’t regret leaving her, or fear for her, or understand she might be lonely or afraid. I had got ahead of myself, having already taken leave of the old life the day I told her I was going into Nelson to get measured for a new suit, then marched straight into the recruiting office and lied about my age.

  The cabbage trees in the grounds of the Government Buildings were in bloom early, an auspice of a long, hot summer. Flags were flying below the square tower of Government House, and the sun shone brightly on the tramlines intersecting the wide elbow of Brandon’s Corner. At that time I wasn’t aware of the city’s newness—but it was what I dreamed of later, longing to come home whole to that quickly sketched and set down port, with its few stone and many wooden buildings, against the backdrop of the Tinakori hill, on whose grassy crest cattle grazed among the stumps of the forest burnt off sixty years before.

  I let go of my sister on the wharf. My hands became busy acceptin
g the gifts showered on us from every side. As we climbed the gangplank the crowd cheered, whistled, shouted, wept behind the gates. The ship listed slightly with all the men crowded at the starboard rail. I saw Emma among the waving hands, handkerchiefs, hats. She was standing still, gripping the bars of the gate in her lilac-gloved fingers. She didn’t weep, moved only when she was jostled by the swaying throng.

  I began to be embarrassed by her and looked around to see whether anyone else had noticed my sister’s strange behaviour. The dark-haired lieutenant was extracting himself from his group of relatives by the gate. He reached up to unclasp his wife’s hands from his neck, just as Mother used to unclasp the black basalt necklace she wore to church. He saw Emma, a small woman wearing a tragic expression, buffeted by the crowd, and followed her gaze up to me. I flushed and turned away, waving vaguely at the crowd in general.

  When the gangplank was up and we were casting off, the gates were opened and the crowd rushed to the ship’s side. Everyone renewed shouts, hand kissing, stunned by blasts of the ship’s horn. The deck shuddered. Green water appeared between the ship and wharf, widening. Emma was shouting—inaudibly—‘Come home!’ as though she expected me to leap from the ship and swim back to the wharf. A few enthusiastically thrown hats fell upturned among flowers drifting on the water between us.

  Slowly the cheering crowd receded. Something in ourselves adjusted, as we became no longer the point of focus of pitched emotion, the centre of a domestic universe—but a group of friends and strangers on an iron island, moving away.

  The hills to the east of the harbour showed in clear outlines, like cut-out shapes on a plain of blue; there was no distinction between the consistency of colour in water and air. A turn in the harbour hid the city.

  We paraded through town at Hobart, but weren’t let loose. By Sydney Andy and the two Johns had undertaken to get Alan and me drunk. Alan’s wasn’t a drinking family, and I didn’t have the heart to tell Andy I’d been drunk before—besides, if they were paying I didn’t mind repeating the experience. Consequently I don’t have a very clear recollection of my night on Sydney town. Most of it was spent in a pub alternately egging on and mediating between two arguing men. One, a fat fellow in a chequered suit, insisted that we should conduct ourselves with more decorum as representatives of the fighting forces of King and Country. The other, who wore a battered, stained boater, said we should have the free run of every port we passed through.