After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  In the script the couple are walking in the winter forest. The woman says, in a tone which suggests she has said it several times before and that, with each vocalisation; the enormity of meaning in the sentence has increased Gs exponentially in the heavy world of her heart, ‘I wasn’t there. I couldn’t save her.’

  To which the man replies, fielding his own pain, ‘Don’t be like that. I understand it’s difficult for you.’

  Whereupon she stops, like a clockwork toy whose walking mechanism has suddenly seized up. And, after going several paces, immersed in himself, the man stops too, and turns, looks at her, waiting.

  Suddenly she runs from him, stumbling through the wood, but slips on a patch of fortuitous frost and falls—so he can catch her, saying, ‘I love you.’ Just in the nick of time.

  The mourning-manual says: ‘These are the stages of grief.’ Take note, mark down the intervals of grief’s remission, for it is a curable disease. You will pay off your loss, purchasing peace on time. Paying off days, months, against the debt of your mourning—rather like a mortgage, only it doesn’t take so long.

  She says (her buried voice), ‘Fairy ball gowns,’ pulling the gold and cream petals from their clasp of green sepals and touching the tip of the flower’s funnel to her tongue to taste the nectar.

  Begin again. But begin where?

  And yet I am changing; infected with rage, as if by a werewolf’s bite.

  Kelfie

  Certificate of Vaccination. Driver’s Licence. Motor Vehicle Registration. Accident Report. Passport. Visa. Work Permit. Lease. Title Deed. Deed of Sale. Receipt. Cheque. Bill. File. Letter. Postcard. Dispatch. Diary. Journal. A Report on the Storm Damage to the Hill Section of Highway Sixty. Certificate of Attainment. Degree. I.D. Casebook. War Record. Prescription. Police File. Autopsy. Lawyer’s Brief.

  Documents, monuments, manuscripts.

  News after Z-Hour.

  Dreams, diseases, memories, ghosts.

  ‘Hello, Mr Harper? It’s Keith Kelsey—the history student—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’d like to say how sorry I was to hear about your mother’s death.’

  ‘Yes—it was quite sudden, she was very old, but her health was good and we’d been told she could expect another few years. Did you see her? Was she any help?’

  ‘I saw her briefly. I was short of time, unfortunately.’

  ‘Did she say much about my uncle?’

  ‘She said he used to gather pukeko eggs and make his family strongly flavoured, greenish omelettes. She said he always had chilblains from walking around barefoot on the frost.’

  ‘It’s funny what they remember.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did she have the journal?’

  ‘Yes. Do you have it now?’

  ‘Did you see it? Because it wasn’t among her things at Rest-haven.’

  ‘Really? I saw it, but she was reluctant to let me study it. She only got it out to show me a snapshot—’

  ‘She was always a bit close-lipped about her life before she married. I think she didn’t like to remind anyone that she had such a stretch of life before then. She was twenty-eight and my father only twenty-one when they married, not that such age differences were unusual in the years following the war.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s strange about the journal though—are you sure that’s what you saw?’

  ‘It was Mark Thornton’s journal.’

  ‘My sisters and I did the sorting out together, maybe one of them has it. I’ll ask.’

  ‘What’ll happen to the house now?’

  ‘I gather she told you she was hanging on to it? Stubborn old soul. Now the whole farm can go for the pine plantation. The house will be demolished—it’ll probably have to be dynamited, since it’s so out of the way—after my daughters and nephews have taken all the salvageable turned-wood and stained-glass.

  ‘It’s an interesting house.’

  ‘Yes, a great old landmark. It used to be a sort of wayside inn when the route over the Hill was really a journey. The present road—or rather where it was before the big slips in April—was cut in the thirties. Yes, the house was a landmark in its day. Patriarch, the Summit Station. An uncle of mine ran the other big hill station, Rotherburn—half of it went to the quarry, and the other half to the Crown.’

  ‘So much for history.’

  ‘That’s the way things go.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything more about the journal. I have a contact number.’

  ‘That would be good. Thanks for all your help.’

  ‘Good luck with the project.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. Goodbye.’

  Soon there will be no one left to say that it was what it was. No more resurrected casualties veering away from memories of despair. The old people with soft, blotched, folded bodies, sitting bonelessly, bored, in chairs in then children’s living rooms and hospital day rooms are, too, the broken shells and lost greywacke tools in middens hidden by marram and bracken—they, too, are the stumps of our razed forests.

  It was a snapshot, not a portrait. Portraits were often touched up so that the subject’s skin would have the same matt patina as today’s Vogue black-and-whites—the flesh of a firm, faintly downy summer fruit. Portraits really made those soldiers look fresh-faced. (Unless, of course, they were. One of my friends contends that our skin problems are a result of preservatives in our food. He believes we ingest all our indispositions, and, ultimately, our failures. I think he even believes that chemical devils produce ideas like the distinction between ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, and institutions like the concentration camps in Honduras.)

  A snapshot. Showing Mark Thornton leaning on the river wall beside one of the old cannon on the banks of the Thames. His hat perched on the top of a pyramid of cannonballs. One thumb hooked in his belt and his ankles crossed. His hair, coarse and blond, brushed back from a sharp widow’s peak. He is laughing affectionately at the photographer, his squinting, half-moon eyes pale and clear.

  ‘I want to get you all in.’

  ‘I am all in. I’m footsore and parched, I need a beer.’

  ‘This isn’t the same as my camera, it takes getting used to. All right, I have you. Why don’t you lean on the gun!’

  ‘I want the picture to be of me and the gun, not of me in front of the gun.’

  ‘If you insist. But if you ask me it spoils the composition—the gun looks wonderful, you look superfluous.’

  ‘Take the picture.’

  ‘Stop glowering.’

  ‘For God’s sake Alan, take the picture—before I turn to dust and blow away!’

  ‘Go on—I’d be famous if I caught that in a photograph. Ah! Now that’s better! That’s what I call a smile.’