After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

‘When Nicky died I felt destroyed. I’d failed her; she’d called out and I wasn’t there. Dan felt the same. But he started to drink—that was how he dealt with it, while I had to behave. Suddenly, as far as your family was concerned, she wasn’t my daughter, she was Julie’s daughter and I was some latecomer childminder. Everyone seemed to start mourning Julie all over again.

  ‘But Nicky was a huge part of every day for me—more for me than for Dan. After she died I’d do things like sometimes set her place at the table by mistake—Dan saw this once and was furious with me, as though I’d done it to hurt him. Taking care of her had become so natural to me that I couldn’t reprogramme myself—I missed doing her washing and making her bed—’

  I opened my eyes. There were the two plates, the cutlery, the crumpled serviettes, the carnation and bristol fairy in a cut-glass vase on the red cloth. Dora had gone.

  She was sitting in her car. Of course I didn’t join her or speak to her, but went back to the Toyota and sat staring out the windscreen, reading over and over, without taking in its message, the bumper-sticker of the car parked in front of me.

  Then Dora tapped on the driver’s window and, when I wound it down, asked stiffly, ‘How much was the bill?’ She opened her purse.

  ‘How decent of you,’ I said, coldly.

  ‘Let’s not mention it,’ she answered, impervious.

  Swearing, I wound the window up, started the engine, reversed out of the park and sped away. I left her, standing at the kerb, holding out her money.

  A week after the power failure, on the first day of July, I drove over the Hill to Motueka; along the road beside the river to Motupiko and on to Highway Six; through the Buller Gorge to the Inangahua Junction; down Highway Sixty-Nine to Reefton; through the Lewis Pass to Hanmer.

  But first.

  I stopped my car at the edge of the new road cut above the stand of macrocarpa, and pulled on my gumboots to walk through the thick hair-like hanks of long grass, hidden from the early sun striking the hillside slantwise, frost still at its roots. I walked up the hill, informally, avoiding the whalebone gateway, but unable to avoid the wet open throat of the brick tunnel. I emerged on the overgrown lawn—a lawn only in that it was apparent this grass had never been pasture—and walked around the deadfall of apple branches, to confront the house in full daylight, with its barred lower and black upper windows, listing side veranda and scaly roof-paint, looking exactly as I had remembered it last; glancing back over my shoulder through the dark, from the tunnel’s mouth, blinkered by tiredness and fear, all my resilience gone and my mind completely pliable—seeing the house, huge, solid, as full of integrity as a great personage, Wrathall was standing on the porch like an unfriendly owner seeing trespassers off his property.

  It had neither changed nor relented. On a sunny winter morning it still said: ‘I am here, alone and unlooked on in all weather. A house cast away from all communities.’

  And I felt, standing there, that I might suddenly be witness to some fantastic vision—as though the house, trees, hill before me might rip like a rotten rag, opening on a scene of catastrophe, like Bruegel’s Triumph of Death: wheels, instruments of torture and execution, fire, an army of skeletons, a poisonous sky, and a man hiding in the trunk of a hollow tree, naked, a spear in his back.

  I clenched my fists and looked up at the still trees, the sun daubing their blackness with deep green. There were birds in the trees—magpies—and eyes in the birds. I was afraid. Yet I had been afraid before, often for no good reason—walking down a strange street or entering an unfamiliar building, anxious about appointments, not knowing how long it would take me to get where I was going, having never been there before.

  I climbed the first three steps to the veranda, then I saw the motorbike helmet sitting in the corner of the top step, new and in perfect condition. Kelfie’s helmet.

  He was in a bad way when Hannah and Basil guided him across the slip. He lay shivering on the back seat of the bus that took us downhill. Stayed quiet and withdrawn as we waited, eating mince on toast and drinking tea at the Motueka Community Hall. I assumed he went home, and, like me, retrieved his vehicle when the new road was cut. But he hadn’t returned to the house to collect his helmet.

  I looked up from the helmet at the barred door, the black gap in the boarded window. A gust of wind swept some fallen leaves along the veranda—hard, dry leaves, skipping, making a sound identical to that of the padded, nailed feet of a dog sprinting along a cement pavement. A magpie set up its whetting, metallic call.

  I turned and went away down the hill, knowing I was being spoken to—words of leaves, wind, birdcalls—in some common, inadequate tongue, by something mysterious, while all the time it, and I, went on thinking in our own mismatched languages, unable to make ourselves understood.

  Kelfie

  I was lying on the couch propped up by cushions, a lamp looking over my shoulder at the books and papers, taking notes, struggling to make my laziness and lack of interest yield: writing nonsense. It was midyear, three days beyond the deadline for a final essay, with exams looming in the following week—and an eviction notice pinned to the cork tiles above the kitchen sink.

  It was blowing hard outside. That day the wind had broken a branch off the willow beside the steps. It had rattled the windows, sucked the doors shut, and seemed to twitch the ground sideways under every step I took. Beneath the wind I could still hear the low background roar of night traffic.

  As I read, tiring, the light on the pages began to yellow and dim. I put my head back and closed my eyes, no ideas in my mind, just images from what I had read: Dorothy Wordsworth planting her gardens at Dove Cottage with daisies, primroses and celandines (and, in undertone, backwash of the wash of waves, images of another garden: a rail fence, white paint flaking and filmed with mildew smothered in violet convolvulus—and the wet brick path to the back door). I recollected fragmented details of my reading: Wordsworth’s sister’s frequent indispositions, her two-week toothaches. And the pageant of the poor she met wandering the roads, turned out by Europe’s wars, shortages of food, work, and care. And the parades of funerals, topping up the high ground inside the churchyard walls. (Then—backwash of the wash of another wave—a churchyard choked with yellow grass under steep stony hills.)

  I had translated the past from books into a past where I might find myself at any moment, wandering onto a wet road, into a cold March wind in old England, to watch Wordsworth’s sister in her cap and shawl and buttoned-up boots stopping to give a small copper coin to a one-armed sailor miles from the sea. Dreaming, drained and very nearly asleep, it seemed to me that the history recorded on the printed page was curling back to reveal all the past—in tattered layers like the posters plastered on billboards around town, advertising plays, gigs, public meetings and protest marches going back to last spring.

  The door handle creaked as Andrea came in quietly from work, the five to midnight shift at Databank. She didn’t remove her coat, but sat down in front of our one-bar heater with her purple fingertips held out to its heat. ‘How’s it going?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not going.’

  ‘What happens if you don’t finish it?’

  ‘I’ll fail the course, and set back by six months the agenda of my life.’

  She laughed. ‘You’ll finish it, you’ll follow through—you always do, since you think that if you stop asserting yourself you’ll disappear in a puff of smoke.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  She began pushing my papers aside with her feet, examining the titles of the books surrounding me. Mostly they were what she could expect to find: an anthology of Romantic poetry, a critical collection, Blake to Byron, Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal—

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked, ‘Robin Hyde’s Passport to Hell, John A. Lee’s Civilian into Soldier,’ bending over to pick it up,’ Thus Spake Zarathustra. And Robert Westall’s Watch House—that’s predictable at least. Are all these relevant?’

  ‘I keep getting sid
e-tracked.’

  She laughed again. ‘So it’s the essay that’s distracting you.’

  ‘I’m going to have to ask for another extension.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it then—achiever—intentions and distractions.’ She gave me a sympathetic hug and retired to her room.

  I returned to my attempt to produce another essay; another leap through a flaming hoop.

  In the morning, before my pleading appointment with my lecturer, I went to visit my grandfather at the Museum. For the past two weeks he had been staying at my aunt’s house in Eastbourne and commuting to the Museum to help out with preparations for the upcoming shift.

  Several of the Museum’s natural history departments were transferring their laboratories and collections from the old building on Mount Cook to ‘temporary’ accommodation in a made-over commercial building on Taranaki Street. (The word ‘temporary’, used to describe any measures to relieve the pressure on space in the old building, was euphemistic, since, according to the sceptics, any plans for a new museum and art gallery would probably take twenty years from proposal to realisation.) Grandfather was overseeing the repacking and labelling of some of the specimens, and indexing the volumes of information he had gathered during his twenty years in the institution.

  I met one of the taxidermists in the galleries. He knew me, so let me in the back to walk around the long way—through corridors stinking of formalin, floor polish, carbolic and dried bird, past the shadowy shapes of the waka, stacked in steel frames behind a billowing sheet of clear plastic, across the courtyard lined with metal crates containing large fish and dolphins preserved in gallons of formalin, where a blue whale’s jawbone had been hung from the ceiling for a year-long process of draining off its oil—stinking saltily in the open air. I went through hallways lined with cabinets full of bird’s eggs nestled in cotton wool, shells, stacks of paper pressing dried leaves and flowers; past shelves with soap-stone carvings, painted fans, dark, tapering fire-hardened spears, spiny sea eggs, and boxes of brittle stars that tinkled when touched, like porcelain ornaments. From the display department drifted the smells of polyurethane, paint and hot glue. Through their door I caught a glimpse of a fibreglass shark, lying on a bench—it was familiar, usually seen frozen, wheeling in the dark space beneath the ramp in the marine life gallery.

  Grandfather wasn’t to be found in his usual haunt, a room crowded with floor-to-ceiling cabinets containing mollusc specimens. Nor was his successor, ‘young’ Howard (forty-three at his last birthday), tucked into his usual place against the only clear corner by the outside wall of the room.

  Two contract workers were sitting at one of the workbenches, with a radio turned on and up, playing the current number one for probably the fourth time that morning. The young women were busy transferring tiny sea-snail shells from the boxes they had been stored in some fifty years before into thin glass bottles, which they then laid in shallow trays lined with waste cotton. They didn’t have any idea where Grandfather had got to, so I went back to Howard’s corner to wait.

  Howard’s desk was covered in stacks of detailed Indian ink diagrams of bisected snail shells and snails’ digestive tracts—beautiful and faithful representations of a hidden world. It was a fraction of Howard’s fifteen-year project, a monograph on New Zealand land snails; worthwhile work, which would perhaps be printed in ten years’ time, in sharp black print on glossy paper, and would stand on the shelves of natural science libraries all around the world. Studying the drawings I could almost hear the slow spring—the drop-by-drop equations of human knowledge wearing down the stone sum of human time. Taxonomy, that rare thing, work that when it is done well, need never be done again; also, arguably, work that need never be done. The public didn’t need it, not the public at that moment wandering around the galleries above; they would never bring their kids to it, on wet Sundays, to gape. And yet the drawings were lovely—careful maps of hidden facts one person in ten thousand might want to know.

  Howard came in, dressed as usual in shorts and sandals, a Swanndri and a white labcoat, his long hair tied back in a ponytail. He sat down behind the microscope and smiled at me. He seemed to not quite fit the desk, his elbows stuck out at odd angles and, sitting, he stooped, as he never did standing.

  ‘Hugh is on his way over, he’s talking to Marion at the moment.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘The shift? Neither Hugh nor I like the donkey work, the housekeeping, relabelling and so on.’

  ‘I meant your monograph.’

  ‘It’s getting there. I’ll have to find time for another field trip up north soon. Perhaps put out a paper on the clearing of predators from the new reserves. Marion is working at some papers on her scavenging sea-snails. Fascinating stuff.’

  ‘Yeah? Like?’

  He peered at me, trying to assess whether or not I was genuinely interested in Marion’s papers, concluded I might be and began, ‘As you may know, deep-sea animals often live longer than related species in shallow water—because the intense cold of the deep oceans slows their metabolisms.’

  ‘I remember talking about this, before, something about the build-up of mercury and other toxins in Orange Roughy?’

  ‘How typical of you to remember something suggesting a commercial conspiracy of silence.’

  I laughed. ‘Go on, tell me about the sea-snails then.’

  ‘Not really snails, mollusc limpets actually. In the case of these limpets it is possible that, despite living in the cold deep ocean, they have comparatively short lives, because of competition for the same food sources.’ He was becoming enthusiastic now, and his round eyes under his greying eyebrows had brightened—he looked a little like a Friday night evangelist. ‘It’s possible that these limpets grow and reach sexual maturity quite quickly—that a whole population can actually decide to achieve sexual maturity earlier, depending on the amount of competition for their food resources.’

  ‘What are they competing with?’

  ‘I’m not sure that “competing” is the right word, really. Other limpets and some bivalves, like shipworms, eat the same material—but the bivalves, by tunnelling into the wood, increase the surface area on which the limpets can feed. When biologists start talking about “competition” or “natural selection by competition” they aren’t being strictly accurate.’

  I thought about this for a moment, then asked, rhetorically, ‘Is that because “competition” is a human idea—the animals live in the same place, eat the same things, and it seems to us that they’re competing, when really they co-exist?’

  ‘In an interdependent ecological system. Right.’

  I’d caught his enthusiasm, but not about the ‘deciding’ sea-snail populations. ‘So the language you and I are trying to describe things in has got values that make us see things, and say things, inaccurately.’

  ‘That’s right. Despite what we think, there are no distinct, independent, dominant, or competing species, including ourselves. Interesting isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s only do or die for people because we think it is, really it’s do and die.’

  Howard was grinning at me. ‘Have I made your day?’

  ‘Sure, I love discovering the ways we deceive ourselves. It makes some problems seem less intractable, as if they could be solved by just discovering that we think about things in the wrong way. If you think about it—competition is capitalism, and notions of “more” or “less” instead of “enough”. I can’t come to grips with the true significance of limpets and shipworms eating the same food sources because my culture has tied a knot in my thoughts. It’s good to realise that.’

  ‘But aren’t you getting into iffy territory, Keith, using nature to make social criticism?’

  Grandfather came into the room. ‘There he is,’ he said to himself, much in the same way as he might announce, on finding his mislaid glasses, ‘There they are.’

  I lowered my voice and said to Howard, ‘I wasn’t using nature, I was using the way we think a
bout it. I wasn’t saying we were like the limpets and shipworms, I meant we are them, sort of—we’re all here together, and the world isn’t what we try to think it is: a collection of oppositions.’

  Howard shook his head and said to Grandfather, ‘He’s being oracular again, Hugh. I’d watch him if I were you. You might lose him to the Young Socialists, or the Charismatic Christians.’

  Grandfather, looming and frowning, said to me, ‘What do you want, Keith?’ Then, ‘Have you had lunch?’

  ‘That’s a great idea—feed me.’ I slid off the desk and took his arm. ‘I came to see you,’ I cajoled, then, in one sentence, listed all my problems: ‘We’re being evicted, I’m trying to write an essay and I can’t, and I have an appointment with this lecturer who hates me, to ask for an extension.’

  Grandfather bought me lunch. We sat in the cafeteria. I had the impression he was trying to keep me clear of his colleagues.

  ‘All right, what’s this about being evicted?’

  ‘We got the letter on Tuesday, six weeks’ notice. The property has been sold and we didn’t even know it was on the market.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Get another flat, together if possible.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to find one within six weeks?’

  ‘Maybe not. Anyway, I’m letting the others look—I’m thinking of making a trip down south.’

  ‘But don’t you have exams next week?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you afford a break? Won’t you need the money for bond, and rent?’

  ‘I can go into overdraft, it’s no problem. Anyway, you and Grandma can be my safety net, as usual.’

  He regarded me dubiously. I turned his wrist over and looked at his watch. ‘I have an appointment at four o’clock with Professor Armitage. I always seem to antagonise him, I don’t know why. I need another extension on my essay.’

  ‘Keith,’ he scolded.

  ‘What?’