Curtis could no longer feel the handle of the shovel. He was walking away through the air. He was going to go away, and find his family, and renew that old, warm pact.
Jacob took the shovel from him. Sam put a hand under his elbow and helped him sit down on the damp ground.
And then the dogs began to howl. Warren covered his ears. Bub and Jacob kept filling in the grave. Belle said, ‘I’ll go and see to those animals,’ and went off towards the pool, the spa’s only fenced area, where Bub had put the dogs he’d taken into protective custody.
Sam stepped away from Curtis, raised her hands from her sides, and, face upturned, began to spin slowly like a child enraptured by an early snowfall.
‘Sam?’ William said, in his hard, incisive way. ‘Why are you doing that?’
‘It’s the wind,’ Sam said.
There was scarcely a breeze, and still Sam went on turning in her private whirlwind, seduced by something none of the rest of them could see, or hear, or feel.
Four days after the catastrophe, no one had come to their aid, or communicated in any way. The No-Go appeared to have thickened. The survivors could still see the rough flanks of Pepin Island across the mouth of Tasman Bay, but its base was blurry, as if some giant had dipped a finger in clear oil and carefully wiped along the join of land and sea. The whole horizon was smudged and streaky and, at night, no lights showed across the bay at Glenduan.
No one was coming, so they got on with what they had to do.
Theresa, Bub, and William broke into a succession of garages, looking for cans of spray-paint, collecting only pale colours. They painted a message on the school field, the town’s largest open area.
‘We can always revise it,’ Theresa said. ‘If we do find more survivors.’
‘Only if we mow the grass,’ said Bub, rattling his can. He stooped and began the long line of the first numeral. Bub wrote 14 survivors and then a list of their names, plus one unidentified man.
Bub, Theresa, Dan, and William moved all the bodies from the section of Haven Road between the pharmacy and supermarket, and both buildings. They moved the bodies slumped in wrecked cars, and lying broken on the lawn around the old bank building, and sprawled on scorched footpaths. They took them to the school hall and laid them out under sheets.
While that was happening, Warren, Holly, Jacob, and Belle shifted the supermarket’s meat from the fresh section to the big chest freezers. They filled the Captiva’s boot with cans of beans and bags of rice. They stockpiled as if they meant to winter over—although the others were only moving bodies out of sight for later, for their rescuers to deal with in due course.
All those who foraged, or moved bodies, had moments of insight. They kept seeing what they had to do. Yet no one said, ‘Let’s sit down together and talk it over,’ even on the day when the wobbly wheel on a trolley caused Jacob to spill his load of lotions and antiseptics onto the oil-soaked surface of the road. He and Belle were picking it all up when she said, ‘You know there’s a digger up by the reserve. There was going to be a ground-breaking ceremony for the Visitors’ Centre. We could use that digger to move the wrecks off the road and use cars instead of these blasted trolleys.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ Jacob said—and thought, ‘A digger. Yes. We’ll need one of those.’
It turned out that Dan could operate a digger, and that Belle had a pretty good idea where the man who drove it would have been shortly before noon on the deadly day. She and Theresa went to the Smokehouse Café and searched the pockets of the men from the construction crew. They fumbled one-handed, faces pressed into the crooks of their arms, to shield them from the stink. And even then the subject wasn’t broached.
But the next day, when they were all having breakfast, Oscar shifted to a seat beside Theresa and said in a low voice, ‘I’d like to bury Evan, that guy from my school. Can you help me?’
Warren overheard. He said he wanted to lay Aunt Winnie to rest too. ‘I’m sure she’d like to be under her flowering cherry tree.’
Before Theresa was able to respond, Kate said, ‘And I’d feel much happier if I could think that my fellow residents at Mary Whitaker weren’t just lying about like so much lumber.’
Sam looked up. ‘I went and put some blankets over the poor people on the road. But that isn’t good enough. It isn’t right.’
Theresa held up her hands. ‘I promise we’ll make a start today. Certainly we must with your aunt, Warren, and Oscar’s schoolmate. But I think perhaps me, William, Bub, and Jacob should sit down and talk about how to tackle the old people’s home.’
‘Why William?’ said Warren. ‘I get that Jacob is kind of health and safety, and Bub’s got more muscle than the rest of us, but it’s Dan who knows how to drive the digger.’
Dan said, ‘I’m happy to be told what to do.’
‘Well, yeah, so am I,’ said Warren. ‘I only want to know why William.’
William said, ‘Bub, Theresa, and I have already moved bodies to the school hall. We’ve even checked to see where the buried cables are on the playing field.’
‘Whoa,’ said Theresa to William. Then to Warren, ‘Don’t worry about him. He keeps getting ahead of himself.’
Bub was looking grim. His eyes settled on Belle. He said, as if it was only her he had to convince, ‘Just let us work out all the details. Okay?’
‘That’s right,’ Theresa said. ‘We’re not going to rush into anything. I’m asking these guys to help me nut out the details. If that’s okay.’
‘Sure,’ Belle said. ‘That’s fine.’
‘For now,’ Warren added.
At the end of their meeting Theresa said, ‘We are going to have to get everyone together at some point and present this as a plan.’
‘It is shaping up as a plan, isn’t it,’ Bub said. He sounded gloomy.
William said. ‘We should wait and see how we go with the rest home, before committing ourselves to anything further.’
‘The rest home is a huge job,’ Bub said.
‘Sam and Kate actually knew those people. We have to do it.’ Theresa tapped her pen on her teeth. ‘If we discover we can’t cope, and have to stop, then we’ll be dealing with flies and rats and disease instead. We’re between the devil and the deep blue sea.’
‘Only if no one comes,’ said Jacob.
Bub said, ‘We have to make a start. We’re living here. And if Mary Whitaker proves too hard—well, we just have to toughen up. People do. I know this.’
Theresa said, ‘You were in Afghanistan, right?’
‘I dug drains and helped build a school, but there was tough stuff, and we got shot at.’ He went on, ‘My only rule when it comes to burials is that whoever handles bodies doesn’t prepare food. Kate and Holly are already doing the cooking so it makes sense to say that’s their job. And Oscar can give them a hand.’
‘Okay. That’s good,’ said Jacob.
‘So you agree that we have to start?’
‘I keep hoping we’ll be rescued.’
Theresa closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Being rescued—that’s Plan A. Plan B is we take care of ourselves as best we can.’
Warren and Jacob were seeing to Mrs Kreutzer’s burial, and Bub had insisted on handling his friend George by himself—probably because he wanted to spare anyone else a sight that had so horrified him. So Theresa dispatched William and Dan to find the digger, and set off herself with Oscar to his friend Evan’s house. She told the boy just to point her to the right place. He did, and she wrapped the teenager’s body in his own duvet, before calling Oscar in to help her carry the wrapped body out into the back garden.
Theresa hadn’t done any spadework since she was about fifteen, when she would help her father dig over the garden before putting in potatoes. Oscar told her he’d once helped dig a hangi. Later, after he’d managed to scratch another foot down into her two-f
oot-deep hole, he admitted that, with the hangi, his whole class had taken turns digging. Then he looked at the shrouded shape, and his legs folded, and he sat down hard on the pile of earth by the hole. ‘I’m sorry, Evan,’ he said. ‘I forgot you were there too. I’m sorry I’m so shit at this.’
‘Look,’ said Theresa, ‘how about I send you back to the spa and you get Jacob to help me finish?’
It was then that William turned up. He was pale with excitement. ‘You know that loud bang I told you about? The one we all heard when you and Bub and Belle were off in the Reserve? I know what made it now. You’ve got to see this.’
Oscar got to his feet.
William said, ‘Not you buddy. This is pretty horrible.’
Theresa had another of her contained, icy thoughts. She thought it was interesting the way they were onto grades of horrible now.
It took Theresa a few moments to see that the black spray was blood, dried and oxidised, spread widely, in a fine coating on the driveway, the blades of grass, the stove-in steel roof, and the buckled door of a garage on Bypass Road.
The body was dressed in a neoprene coverall, and was wearing boots with hard-ridged soles. The metal on the parachute harness was still bright. The blood had erupted laterally, sprayed out in blades—there were distinct stripes of it on the roof behind the body. The tough fabric of the suit had split rather than torn, and the shattered flesh inside the suit was split too, as deeply fissured as a pumpkin dropped on a concrete path. A pumpkin in a bag—because the suit still contained the sectioned flesh.
The body’s helmeted head had made a round dent in the roof, but the back of the helmet was flattened. The man’s cheeks and jaw looked as if they had been carefully cut away from his skull and spread out, like a circle of raw dough. The mask of the helmet was still in place across the eyes and nose, but the eyes were pushed out of their sockets and pressed against the goggles like pickled eggs in a jar.
Because the corpse was that of a military man, Dan had fetched Bub while William was fetching Theresa.
Bub said that it looked as if the man had made a high-altitude parachute jump. ‘His parachute would have one of those devices that allow a chute to deploy only when it reaches the right altitude—like the parachutes on a fighter pilot’s ejection seat.’
‘But it didn’t deploy,’ William said. ‘The man wasn’t conscious. And the mechanism didn’t work.’
‘Because it’s a mechanism, I guess,’ Bub said. ‘And the No-Go is hostile to them.’
‘How do those things work? The parachute devices?’
‘I think they’re triggered by changes in air pressure.’
‘Does that mean the No-Go is tens of thousands of feet high?’ William asked. Then, ‘You know, we thought we heard two or three distinct sounds. This guy won’t have been alone.’
‘The others might have landed inside the No-Go,’ Bub said.
Theresa said, ‘Or we might yet find them.’
‘Shouldn’t we look through his clothes for information?’ Dan asked. ‘There might be a message saying what they’re up to—the people out there. What they know about what happened, and how they plan to help us.’ He sounded desperately eager.
‘I’ll search him,’ Bub volunteered. He tried to prise the military man’s shoulder out of the folded roofing steel. The man had a gun under him, but it was bent out of shape.
The man had identity tags. He had a name. A name, a knife, a gun, a first-aid kit, two flashlights, one normal and one with a light so bright it was hot and impossible to look at.
‘What’s that for? Starting fires?’ William said.
‘It’s for signalling, I think,’ said Bub. He switched the torch on and aimed it out at the bay.
‘At night,’ said William.
‘Yes,’ Bub said, then switched the torch off again. He sighed. ‘When I went into the army they’d stopped teaching signallers Morse.’
‘Were you in the Signal Corps?’ Theresa asked.
‘No. Armoured Corps. A LAV unit,’ Bub said. Then, ‘I’ll do some meaningless flashing tonight. Just to remind them we’re here.’
*
Curtis had plugged his digital video camera into a computer in the manager’s office, and was reviewing footage. He’d been filming some of what went on day-to-day: Bub and Belle standing on a street banging spoons against tins of pet food till the cats came running; Jacob changing Sam’s dressing; Warren ploughing up and down the pool, after dark, when little wisps of steam came off the heated water; and the shimmering stillness of the town at morning, every morning.
Curtis was a documentary filmmaker. When he’d picked up his camera he was reverting to the habit of a lifetime in order to find his way forward. But he was having trouble imagining himself, even a year later, looking this over and finding anything that made sense, or was worth seeing.
William came in and stood watching over Curtis’s shoulder. They’d got to Curtis’s long shots of bodies lying in the street. Of Theresa and Jacob searching them for identification, then draping them with sheets. Curtis said, ‘All this is problematic. I have to consider the feelings of relatives, then weigh them against the idea of having some direct evidence.’
William said, ‘And I’ve been mentally composing opening arguments for someone prosecuting the case in which those relatives are the plaintiffs. My arguments are all about the carelessness and callousness of corporations. With references to Bhopal and Union Carbide.’
Curtis’s years of documentary-making had inclined him to just listen to people and let them run on. He swivelled his chair and looked at William—his bruised eye sockets, his very clear eyes.
‘But making a case is just a habit for me.’ William nodded at the images on screen. ‘And so is your thinking about what you should and shouldn’t film.’
‘So you’re not going with the nerve gas theory?’
‘How could something like that be so selective? How could it drive people mad but not animals?’
‘Theresa keeps telling us to put all that aside for now,’ Curtis said. ‘She’s right.’
‘She’s right to get us to focus on the things we can do. But I’m not sure that’s all we should be considering. You’re a thinker, Curtis. I need you to think.’
Curtis had begun to feel that his habit of facing life with a camera in front of his eyes was a curse. He’d lost his wife of thirty-eight years, and here he was still filming things, and being wooed by the group’s leader for his moral qualities, and by its maverick for his imagination. But Curtis didn’t want to be reminded of his worth. He wanted to go on being the man he was in Adele’s eyes. He wanted to be left in peace to think only about Adele. He said, ‘If you’re trying to enlist me into pushing Theresa to discuss things, don’t bother. I don’t want to be a part of any of this. Part of the group or the group’s decisions.’ Then, ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and left the manager’s office.
He went and sat on the leather sofa in the atrium, where Oscar was sitting, grimly hanging on to his controller and glaring at the big plasma TV. ‘Hi, Mr Haines,’ said Oscar, then, explanatory, ‘The red line is my health. I’m taking too many hits.’
The following day, Theresa, Bub, and Curtis went to the supermarket. Theresa asked them to stock up on things they needed in order to tackle Mary Whitaker. She grabbed a shopping trolley and went to the start of the toiletries aisle. ‘I’ll fill this with hand sanitiser.’
Bub said, ‘I’ll collect rubbish sacks and packing tape.’
‘And rubber gloves. And twine, if there is any.’
Bub wrestled the trolley out of the cue, and went off pushing it with his belly.
Theresa looked at Curtis. His eyes were red-rimmed. His skin seemed thin and bluish in the light of the fluorescents. ‘I know I can trust you to judge what we will and won’t need right now,’ she said.
He grabbed a trolley and set of
f down the aisle.
Ten minutes later Theresa ran into him again between the canned fruit and breakfast cereals and, glancing into his basket, saw that it was full of single-serve food products. She nosed her trolley up to his. He was peering over the top of his glasses, reading the fine print on a small tin of tuna. He tossed it in, and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.
‘What are you doing, Curtis?’
He regarded her, his expression strained. ‘I think it would be better for me to be on my own.’
Theresa opened her mouth, but stopped when he held up his hand. ‘Hear me out. I can’t be with strangers right now, Theresa. It’s harder than being alone.’
‘Has someone been disrespectful?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘We want to look after you,’ Theresa said. ‘And if you go off alone I can’t guarantee your safety.’
‘Bub might be obediently filling his trolley with rubbish sacks and rubber gloves, but don’t you see that you can’t keep asking people to handle corpses?’
‘We only have to make a start,’ Theresa said. ‘Of course police and coroners are going to come along after us. And I know that even making a start will be a hard, horrible task. But we have to, for sanitary reasons, never mind anything else. Obviously I’m going to exempt Oscar and Kate. Oscar’s too young and Kate’s over eighty and kind of off-duty.’
Curtis said, ‘If you start, where will you stop?’
‘There are satellites watching us right now. The people monitoring them have to see hostages, not hostage-takers. They have to see survivors, not perpetrators.’
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