At the Edge

by Lee Murray

  You still got newspapers delivered, right up until the printers stopped and the family who owned the nearest dairy left the country. You liked the texture of them, spreading them out across the table in the morning. In those pages you saw the first pictures of the farms, and though you had limited interest at that stage, you had to admit they were spectacular and, more than that, they were tangible, evidence that something was finally being done.

  On television there were adverts, competing power companies desperate to prove their concern for the environment. In the evenings, over an imported beer, you saw the film recorded by underwater cameras navigating a path between the towering stalks and then the image softly fading into that of a child switching on the light and grinning at the new future open to them. This new biofuel, the voiceover said, had limited CO2 emissions and would not take up valuable land or fresh water. All Natural, All Safe, All Ours.

  And then Glenn’s cancer came back. The future seemed not just irrelevant, but a brutal, mocking presence. What happened next, you caught up on only after he was gone.

  There were five large developments off the coast of New Zealand, along with other research centres, and it’s generally agreed the problems started in the largest, east of the Coromandel peninsula. Was there a defined point in time when it began? Perhaps not, because if the seaweed was growing faster than expected, or pushing the boundaries of the designated area, no one was too worried.

  Over the course of a year or so, it came closer to land, close enough that they closed the beaches for swimming in case people became entangled in it, dragged down beneath the waves. The area became jokingly referred to as Sargasso, and while there were calls for government intervention, and the energy companies lost some of their environmentally friendly credentials, it took a while before people were truly concerned.

  The generally accepted theory is that a genetic modification experiment, designed to increase the hardiness of the kelp and expand the range of conditions in which it could grow, had been more successful than intended. Before long, it was poking above the surface, and then higher, as if the sea were populated by bushes and then trees, growing closer to the land until you could walk amongst it at low tide. A marvel of nature, they called it, beckoning tourists to these shores.

  But warning signs grew and the excitement deteriorated. People started to talk about management, and then about herbicides. Shipping lanes were disrupted and the fishing industry was all but destroyed in some regions. The kelp continued unabated, spreading around the country’s coastlines, growing higher, closing in.

  *

  Lauren and Wiremu take the quad bike out to the supplies drop. There are fewer people there each time they go. They say the RAAF offered to take them out on that very flight, and that they won’t be able to keep bringing in supplies indefinitely.

  Wiremu seems disconcerted by this prospect, but Lauren isn’t worried. ‘I told them the chicken we had yesterday was pretty good, and that we have leftovers. And there’s a good vegetable garden going by the marae,’ she adds. ‘There are maybe thirty people living up there now, heaps of kids running round. I asked someone there, she said if we help them out we can take some food. It’s community, eh, helping each other. That’s a good thing.’

  You want to have faith in community, but the parcels, whether you need them or not, are more tangible. Sausages, cheese. Large sacks of rice. Panadol and antiseptic cream. You eat the rest of the chicken for lunch and Nari makes a casserole for dinner. You hang around as she cooks, half-heartedly cleaning up then trying to work out how to use the satellite phone. You wouldn’t touch it in front of Wiremu; show a moment’s hesitation and he’d snatch it off you, but here you have the time you need to work it out.

  ‘How are your daughters?’ you ask after some silence.

  ‘Very good.’ She drains the cans of beans into the sink. ‘Sophia is starting her Master’s degree. Moving to California. And Melanie – she says nothing but I think there might be an announcement soon. Very hopeful.’

  ‘A baby?’

  ‘A marriage. Then babies. She’s old fashioned.’

  You’re tempted to ask the obvious question: Why don’t you leave, Nari, be with your daughters? Wiremu has his guilt, and Lauren has barely been as far as Wellington, can’t conceive of another land. There are some for whom this whenua, this land, cannot be separated from themselves, or who believe they are duty bound to stand guard over it, and others whose nerves are so shredded by fear they simply cannot leave. For you, it’s stubbornness, an acknowledgement that your days are already numbered, and that you’ve little appetite for starting again and no ties anywhere else. The Berlin of your childhood is unrecognisable; the few visits you made to your mother revealed a different city, and she is long gone. Your only known relation is a much younger sister who you barely know.

  But though you’re curious about Nari’s motivations, you hate being asked the question yourself, and so you refrain from inflicting it on her. You’re immigrants both, and despite all your combined decades on these islands, you’re used to thinking of yourself as transitory, rootless. And yet you’re holding firm here, when so many have gone.

  And for the moment your lives are good enough. You eat decently, sleep well. That won’t last forever, but it lasts for now.

  *

  You don’t miss the cities, exactly, but there was a comfort in knowing they were there, anchoring you to the rest of the world. Now they’re crumbling buildings and shattered glass, fallen into a forest of kelp. They say that up north you can catch glimpses of the Sky Tower among the leathery strands of seaweed, grown and woven together, but that’s all.

  Auckland fell first, then Wellington, the harbours turning to forest, the shoots growing inland, breaking up Wellington’s reclaimed shore and then up the hills faster than they could be beaten back. You mentally check off cities: Christchurch, Tauranga, Dunedin. Hamilton was the last major centre to fall, but the kelp came up the river ahead of its progress across the land, and they evacuated, jets taking off in quick succession to Sydney, then returning for a new load of refugees. Soon after, the seaweed broke through the runway, cracking the tarmac.

  And then the entire North Island was forest. You understand, from the patchy satellite internet, that they can land teams for research, but certainly no one can live there. Let’s face it, they’re not hoping to reclaim the land, just trying to prevent the same fate befalling another nation.

  Now the South has gone the same way, all except a patch of land maybe ten, fifteen kilometres square, around the edges of which the growth of the kelp has slowed, but does not stop. A patch of land you have called home for half a century.

  *

  You haven’t used a gun since your Wehrdienst, a young man amongst other young men, amongst forests – forests of trees, yes, but also of tents and barracks, of uniforms. Forests of repetition which is what forests are at their essence; repetition you can become lost among. Your mother cried when you left, as if you were really going to war, as if you could not possibly be back in six months. In a way, she was almost right; by the time you returned to Berlin you’d already begun planning your passage to New Zealand.

  But today you have a gun in your hand once again and Lauren is leading, gently schooling you. You tell yourself it’s to hunt wild pigs and kill the cows humanely when their milk runs dry. You tell yourself that, but the supply drops are stopping in two weeks, and what you produce here can’t sustain everyone forever.

  Wiremu is uncomfortable around guns and not afraid to show it, but Nari seems excited by this sudden power that has been placed in her hands, whooping each time she hits the makeshift targets that Lauren and Wiremu rigged up.

  Your shoulder hurts from the recoil more than you thought it would, and after a while you take a walk, while the sound of gunfire penetrates the air behind you. Your body finds new ways to ache, new ways to fail you, and though you are nomina
lly healthy for your years, it feels like everything is pointing in one inevitable direction.

  But there’s a cold, clear, Southland sun above you and a pasta bake waiting to be put in the oven. You’re alive for now.

  *

  The last flight out takes 29 passengers. Amongst them are the Lemalu family (and you’re relieved because that boy of theirs is barely two years old), Jana Reid, Sione and Jenifer Robertson, Crystal Makea and her girls, and elderly Mrs Morgan. You remember being a small child, and your mother carrying you outside to watch the planes make their descent into Templehof, remember being young enough to have faith in uniforms and in flying machines. The population of New Zealand now numbers a couple of hundred, and the outside world will not be helping you any longer.

  When you return home from the drop, your backpacks full of supplies, Wiremu has his laptop out, the table covered with paper. He’s in his element, calculating your resources, projecting needs and worst-case scenarios, what you might trade. Lauren and Nari survey the house for vulnerabilities, places where mice might get in and eat the rice and the flour you have stored. There are guns in every room now.

  Lauren guards the house while the rest of you walk the couple of miles to the community meeting. The meeting’s in a school next to the marae, long deserted by children. Their artwork still covers the walls. Most made it out alive, you tell yourself. Most are safely in Australia or further afield; most, but not all. For some, the kelp will have weakened the foundations of their houses until one night the whole structure collapsed, the roof crashing in on them, crushing them to death as they slept perfectly forever, parents running through the forest in despair, in search of help that never came.

  Some will have been lost forever in the forest. They’ll have wandered out while playing, or perhaps they woke one morning and found the kelp growing around their house and ran in the dark looking for their parents until the dark closed in. Perhaps they sat leaning against a damp trunk and cried, or perhaps they tried eating the seaweed but found it salty, and there was no water to be found.

  They say that if you go into the forest you can hear them, laughing and gurgling, as if swimming under water.

  Time for you to break from this line of thought. Tragedies happen, children die; it’s just the way of the world. You can only focus on what you have: three people who were not long ago strangers, determined to cling to this rocky patch of land. No, more than that: in this hall you have two hundred and eleven people – you know this once the record-sheets go round on worn clipboards with biros attached to them by string – who refuse to leave.

  After the karakia, Lorena Sánchez is the first to speak. She says she wants to thank – and here her voice quivers a little – all those who have helped them, taken care of their children. She appreciates their concern about her husband’s illness but, she says, she’s left one country behind and found a refuge here, and she cannot bear to leave another. The crowd applauds her, with genuine support but perhaps unease at her decision.

  This fate is not so terrible, says Bethika Auld, a woman of forty or so who has emerged as a community leader in the past few months. Many catastrophes have threatened all your lives, over and over again. Is the land being reclaimed by nature so terrible in that context? Perhaps we’ve found the community we never had, and now we know that each one of us can do what we once thought impossible, we can build a new community here.

  Jim Henderson pins a map to the wall behind him, a number of concentric though irregular shapes which show the progression of the kelp. You’re trapped from all directions. He tries to stay optimistic, though, pointing out areas where the lines are close together, an indication that their efforts are having an effect.

  In your mind, the close lines on the maps indicate a steep slope. It feels as if you could fall forever.

  *

  You’re woken by noises downstairs. You pull on your dressing gown, grab the crowbar from beside the bed – the gun doesn’t even occur to you – and go to investigate. There’s someone in the kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards by torchlight. You’re thinking what to do: whether to confront him, or to get Wiremu for backup, when he hears you, leaps forward, pins you to the ground with his hands around your neck. The torch falls to the floor and smashes.

  You’re struggling against him in the dark, the blood pressure building in your head, your thoughts blurring, when there’s a light and for a split second you see Kieran Auld’s face before his hands loosen and he falls onto you. Later you’ll realise that the warmth you feel is his blood, pulsing onto you then spreading out over the vinyl floor.

  When you pull yourself free you see Lauren, her hand grasped around a kitchen knife. The colour has drained from her already pale skin. Her hands are trembling and her face is sinking in on itself. You recognise not just shock but horror. Wiremu takes her to the bedroom, feeds her sickly, barely-dissolved Raro to get her blood-sugar up and tells her to try and sleep.

  You and Nari wrap the body in a sheet and take it outside. While you soak your clothes with bleach – they’re too precious to get rid of – you try and work out how to tell his family.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ you tell Nari, your fingers aching and raw, a small penance. ‘The Aulds are so well prepared, and everyone likes Bethika. Couldn’t she just have asked?’

  Nari has the mop in her hands, ready for a third attempt at the floor.

  ‘People don’t always act in rational ways. It happens more the closer the forest comes. There are strange things out there, people not what they seem.’

  You look up.

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Of course not. But I think you do. You might be right, I might be. No one to decide for sure.’

  In the morning, Lauren is gone. You don’t see her again.

  The words hang in the air, but no one says them: If anyone could survive this, it would have been her.

  *

  As the weeks turn into months, you look back on the early days with envy, as if they were filled with feasts and laughter. You’re rationing yourselves now, and the food is bland, the only seasoning salt and the Italian parsley which is thriving as every other plant wilts. The hunger persists even when you eat.

  Wiremu, especially, is noticeably thinner, lethargic. He pushes on with the heavy work, but without the protein he needs to sustain his muscles. You have little flesh to lose. There are eggs one day in five, at best. It’ll be time to kill the last of the chickens before too long.

  Another ring is drawn on the map, and then another. But you don’t need those to see that the kelp is coming closer, and you’re not comfortable at the meetings anymore anyway. People might say that Lauren had no choice, that he shouldn’t have been stealing, but in her absence they blame you just the same. Bethika sits silently at the back now, and no longer addresses the group.

  So today Nari guards the house and Wiremu goes alone. You walk out early in the morning to burn back some of the kelp shoots, which are appearing with increased frequency. You burn and burn though your arms ache and you feel uncomfortably warm from the proximity, watching the singed stalks die, taking some comfort from this minor victory despite knowing they’ll be back tomorrow. You burn and burn, zigzagging back and forth between them. You reach the edge of the forest.

  Even the smaller of the kelp plants – trees, you increasingly call them – are taller than you. You stand between two of them, staring into the darkness. Something is enticing you, calling you. It’s the soft voice of a lost child, the cackle of an old woman, the scream of a wounded animal, the authoritative command of a guide who’ll take you somewhere from where you’ll never return…

  You wonder, briefly, if these kelp trees soaked with the stench of fish are Tāne’s descendants, or if this is an overgrowth of the sea, of Tangaroa’s domain. You wonder, not for the first time, why it seems filled with stories you brought with you from anot
her place and another time, if they’ve finally taken root, an infestation of sorts. You wonder if it’s all your fault.

  But such thoughts are their own kind of arrogance. As if you could control this land and this sea and this sky which, as you take cautious steps into the forest, becomes dappled and patchy, barely finding its way through the leaves.

  A few more steps and you’ll be unable to see back to the open land. Those few steps are itching at you, an urge longing to be fulfilled. But you hear Nari calling your name, she calls and you turn and walk back into the light. You blink as your eyes adjust. You’re not going that way. Not today.

  *

  That evening Nari and Wiremu start yelling at each other. It’s a stupid argument, about water conservation and frequency of household cleaning, but at this point it seems anything has the power to tip people into tension and tears. You’ve never heard Wiremu yell before; he’s always had the presence to make himself heard without needing volume. You try to block it out, grab a book from the shelves and mumble lines of poetry you half-know by heart in the hope the rhythm will comfort you.

  You’re interrupted by shouts outside and the sound of a quad bike. Wiremu’s needed. He’s not a doctor, has nothing but a first aid course behind him, but people think his Master’s in biology counts for something.

  You and Wiremu grab the bike and follow. The sun is beginning to set; it sets earlier these days, falling behind the kelp which now stretches six metres high or more, enough to keep this increasingly small patch of land edged by shadow.

  On the way, Jim shouts to you over the noise of your bikes. ‘Accident at the Sánchez’s. Their littlest is really sick.’

  When you get there, you realise he hasn’t told you half of it. You see bodies outlined under sheets; Lorena and David Sánchez and their two sons. Their youngest, Ellie, all of three years old, alive but barely, surrounded by a crowd.

  Carbon monoxide poisoning from a barbeque in the front room where they slept, someone tells you later. No one says that Lorena and David would never have made a mistake like that, or that if they’d asked for help then they’d have probably have managed to get an evacuation team in, because what’s the point?