That night, Albert slept under the stars. He’d never slept under the stars before. In fact, he’d never really thought about them. But they’d been there all the time.
It was Mikaere’s idea. He preferred sleeping out-of-doors to the cozy confines of the camper trailer he shared with Ngaio. “She is a lot of woman,” he’d said. “Even bigger in a small space.” She was now sharing the camper with Suzie.
For Albert, the revelations of sleeping outside had just begun. Most notable, apart from the stars, was the music. All around him creatures of the night were exchanging harmonies, melodies, rhythms, point and counterpoint, salted, now and then, with surprising rifts and scats in accordance with the patterns allotted them at the beginning of time.
At first it seemed that the music was laid down in layers, the crickets singing for other crickets, as with the tree frogs, bats, and whatever other creatures haunted the night, each contributing its peculiar note to the chorus of its kind. But careful listening proved that not to be the case. While each thread began on its own layer, it was soon embraced by a wider tapestry, woven into the fabric of a grand symphony that, Albert knew, sang far beyond the capacity of his senses—even his imagination—to contain.
“You know constellations?” said the old Maori from his sleeping bag on the adjacent picnic table.
“I know the Big Dipper,” said Albert. “Somebody showed it to me once.” That somebody had been Uncle Albert, but his name wouldn’t mean anything to Mikaere. “But I don’t see it.”
“Not here you won’t!” said Mikaere with a snort. “You can only see that from the Northern Hemisphere. Look, you see those five stars there?”
Albert saw about a hundred billion stars. He’d have seen more if he’d been able to conceive of a higher number. “Five?”
“Shaped like a cross. There to the southeast.”
“South?”
“Southeast.”
That was no help.
“Shaped like a cross,” Mikaere said again. “Just left of that mamuku frond.”
“Mamma Coo?”
“Look,” said Mikaere. He slipped from the table, sack and all, and hopped to Albert’s side where, putting his face within whisker’s reach looked up. “Oh, well, not from this angle.” He held up his hand and pointed at the Southern Cross. “Look up along my arm, like a rifle sight.”
Albert pressed his head against Mikaere’s shoulder, looked up his arm and, wonder of wonders, there they were, five stars that, with a little imagination, could be connected to form a cross.
“I see.”
“The two brightest stars,” said the old man, “are Acrux and Gacrux.” He pointed at them in sequence, and Albert, still with his head on Mikaere’s shoulder, followed. “If you imagine a line from one to the other, they point the way to the South Pole.”
“That’s in Antarctica,” said Albert, straightening up. If he’d thought about it, which he hadn’t, he’d have imagined the sky in the Southern Hemisphere was just the same as in the Northern Hemisphere, only upside down. That’s not how it was. “It’s completely different.”
Mikaere cleared a question mark from the back of this throat.
“The sky here is different than the one in the Northern Hemisphere.”
“Ah, yes. I’ve never seen that, but I am told that’s so. I’ve seen pictures of it in books, on the telly. The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and Orion’s belt. All that. But this is the sky that points the Maori home.”
Albert sat up in his sleeping bag and let his feet swing down. “But it’s different from there to here, too,” he said, drawing a line in the air between Mikaere’s picnic table and his own. “You saw something there, but I didn’t see it here. At least, from here,” he tapped his picnic table, “it was not where you said it was.”
“Different point of view,” said Mikaere.
“Different point of view,” Albert echoed. “Same sky. Same stars. Same hemisphere . . .”
“But different points of view,” they observed in unison.
“It’s that way with the girl,” Albert said, nodding at the camper. “There are five ways to see. First, you see what you see because you’re who you are and what picnic table you’re on. Second, you see what someone else wants you to see—that could mean they’re not telling the truth, or just that they think what they’re telling you is true—like you pointing at the star . . .”
“Honest mistake,” said Mikaere.
“Yes. Third, you see what really is: something that doesn’t change, no matter how, when, or who looks at it. Fourth, you don’t see at all.”
He seemed to have concluded his list.
“And fifth?” Mikaere prodded.
Albert turned his head toward the speaker. “You ignore what’s in front of your eyes.”
There was something in that. Something important. Something to do with the girl, and Woolie-Woolie, and Chatham Island, and the Venice Regent. What wasn’t he seeing because he was blinded by who he was and where his picnic table was relative to the facts? And, inasmuch as he’d been looking in any particular direction, was it the right one, or just the one that seemed right based upon what he knew at the time, which was, at best, fragmentary, at worst—and more likely—just wrong?
How could he know which was the right direction any more than, looking at the night sky, he could tell which way was south? It was there, but without some point of reference, there was no way to tell where it was.
A full two minutes passed during which neither said anything. It was Mikaere who broke the silence. “It’s what we do, isn’t it?”
“Hm?”
“Ignore what’s in front of our eyes,” said Mikaere. “There are too many things to see. If we didn’t ignore most of them, our brains would blow up.”
Another minute and some seconds passed as they contemplated the implications of this.
Mikaere hung a sparkling pendant on the necklace of silence. “The trouble is, we get so good at ignoring unimportant things, that important things get caught up in there, too. That’s when our brain tosses the baby out with the bathwater.”
There was probably a metaphor in that, thought Albert, or several all twisted up together. But somehow the old Maori made sense. Albert felt like he could relate to the way he thought, and that was a new sensation. For his own part, the countryside was probably littered with the babies he’d been tossing out with the bathwater all his life. Like Abraham, Albert was the father of nations—only they were all still with Moses, wandering in the wilderness.
To the accompaniment of a chorus of old-man body sounds, Mikaere hopped back to his table. Albert lay down and turned his attention once more to the foreign sky and its strange constellations. Were there stars there that pointed the way to the answers he was looking for? If so, which, among billions, were they?
“We have to ignore the past,” said Mikaere from his makeshift bed, as if five minutes hadn’t lapsed since they last spoke. “We only have a little suitcase.” He tapped his temple in the dark. “No room for all that baggage. People. Tribes. Nations. We all do it. If we didn’t, . . . boom!”
“Boom,” said Albert softly. That’s the way he felt about all the dead people his little suitcase had collected in the last four years. And there was no way to dump them out. If he were required to stuff one more corpse in there, the hinges would break. It was very important that nobody else die.
“For example, Jimmy says you come here from Chatham Island,” Mikaere continued. “That’s where we chased the Moriori. Chased them, butchered them, tortured some, ate some. Babies and men. The women we made slaves. But we forget about all that,” said Mikaere. “At least, we forget the truth. Say it never happened. Say evil came to the Land of the Long Cloud with the white man. That is a lie we tell ourselves. Our suitcase has a hidden compartment like one of those kid toys, where the music stops and the clown pops out. We don’t crank that handle. Our shoulders are not big enough to carry that clown. That leaves two choices: ignore it, or lie
about it. Lie to ourselves.
“We do both.”
Albert stared at the stars. He wished James Simon was there. He’d have something helpful to say. As it was, all he could think to say was, “We need to get rid of that baggage somehow.”
“Too right,” said Mikaere. “Or else . . .”
“Boom,” said Albert to the stars.
It was quiet when he woke, several hours later. His face, the stubble on his face, his hair, and his sleeping bag were moist with dew. And his back hurt. He looked up at the sky. Everything had moved. Even the Southern Cross wasn’t where it had been. He remembered that one of his tutors had once said a philosopher named Tycho Brae had worked out how stars move, and drawn it all out in a book that was stolen by his friend. Albert, sensing the broad, celestial lacuna in his personal education, resolved to look up the man one day—the one who stole the book—and ask him to explain. For the moment, all his cranium could work out was that everything had moved.
Where did one begin to find a philosopher, anyway? They probably had agents, like Huffy, sloughing them around the world in limousines and making them philsophize for the paying public.
He allowed his sight to troll the heavens and, at last, he found it. It was a very satisfying feeling. He had, in a minute or so, swept trillions of miles of space, and ten thousand millennia of time and, in that incomprehensibly vast ocean, found a single, relatively insignificant constellation.
Finding the truth behind Suzie, and Woolie-Woolie, and the dead women of Parliament row shouldn’t be much of a problem. If he could work out the pattern, he might even be able to find that book and give it back to Tycho Brae.
Patterns.
Music, mathematics, murder. They all had patterns. All you had to do to make them make sense is see them.
You never know.
What remained of the night was not peaceful. Albert had a dream about being in large hallway surrounded by doors. In his hand was a ring of keys. In the unspoken knowledge that is only conveyed in dreams, he knew he was supposed to put the right key in the right door and open it, and that he only had one chance to get it right.
The hallway had no ceiling; its roof was sprinkled with the strange skies of the Southern Hemisphere, pricked with points of light pointing the way to an entirely different eternity.
Chapter Twenty
“Help me.”
The words had become a refrain that kept Albert awake, one that—almost seamlessly—all the creatures of the night incorporated into their primeval songs, as if they’d been singing nothing else since time began. “Help me!” In all their voices, all their overlaying, intertwining layers, soon every chirping of a cricket’s hind leg, every deflating sac of the tree frog’s throat, even the whir of the wings of passing bats, was raised in baleful chorus. “Help me!”
He shuddered to think how lost must someone be to turn to him for help. Jeremy Ash, or Mrs. Bridges, or even Angela—they were the kind of people who could help. They Knew Things.
The only thing Albert knew—the one unassailable fact that he embraced heart-and-soul with unshakable confidence—was that he knew blessed little. That fact became a subtle but dominant leitmotif in his thinking as he tried to think of something helpful.
“You’re about as useful as a box of rocks to a drowning man,” his mother had once observed of her prodigal son. He had committed the unpardonable sin—undoubtedly the one to which Jesus Himself referred in Matthew 12:31—of leaving a sock on the stairs. This thoughtless act would, he was made to understand—had the Fates not intervened—have precipitated terrible falls and the breaking of necks of everyone in the household.
“Then where would you be?” she had demanded at the conclusion of her lecture. “No more mother to do everything for you. No more sister to tend out on you hand and foot.”
Albert sighed.
He was reminded of his feet. Each had a sock on; he wondered if it was significant that they were of different colors, but concluded that the world, for the time being, was safe from slipping and falling and breaking its neck, at least as far as his socks were concerned.
He struggled to concentrate on Something Helpful, but now was lumbered with the nonsense of his mother’s concern. While either she or his sister might slip and fall on a sock on the stairs, surely the other would see what had happened, and avoid the sock. For that matter, wouldn’t the sock have gone down stairs with the first fallee?
Gravity.
“Think about that later, Albert,” he told himself.
“You’re not asleep,” said Mikaere, yanking Albert back to the moment.
“No.”
“You’re thinking.”
“Yes.”
“About the girl?”
Albert thought about that. Yes, he was thinking about the girl, but not just about her. There were so many other things connected to the girl in some way: Woolie-Woolie; the women on Parliament Row; socks. No. Not socks. Put socks out of your mind.
However, he did have mismatched socks on. Where were the others? Probably he’d left them on stairs somewhere. Even now, hosts of innocent people could be slipping on them and falling to their deaths.
No. Not that many. Certainly no more than two people would fall and break their necks on two socks.
Stop thinking about socks. Think about Suzie—which was not her real name. “Yes,” he said, at last, deciding not to mention that she was just one of the many things he’d been thinking about.
“Well, talk it out,” Mikaere suggested. “I’m all ears.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“At the beginning.”
What was the beginning? The beginning of what? Then he had a thought. “It started when Mr. Sweetman and Wendell told us about the ladies on the street who all died.”
There followed a brief Q&A during which Albert exposited on the identities of the residents and ancillary players of Parliament Row and their various tragedies.
“Four women?” said Mikaere, at the story’s conclusion.
“Mrs. Sweetman,” said Albert, holding up a finger, “her name was Susan. The Colonel’s wife,” whose name he didn’t remember. Another finger. “The poison plant lady...”
“Poison plant?”
“Angela said her name sounded like a poison plant.”
“I see,” said Mikaera. “And Angela is?”
Albert found himself developing a sudden respect for storytellers. How did they keep track of everything, and remember what to leave in and what to leave out, and who was who and when they were where and why. With renewed trepidation, armed only with his memory, he assaulted the facts which, he strongly suspected, were not necessarily facts but only appearances and possibilities parading as facts, but you had to start somewhere. How far back did he have to go, though, to assemble so ragtag a battalion of weary foot-soldiers to the truth into some semblance of order?
He decided to eliminate anything that didn’t have to do with New Zealand from his recitation. That would leave out about forty years of his life, making the story shorter. Even at that, though, there were people—like Jeremy Ash and Angela—who bridged the chasm between tragedies past and present, one world and the next. How much of their story should he tell?
His tongue, though awaiting developments with interest, was becoming dry in anticipation of the part it would soon be called upon to play in this Herculean task. At long last, it was summoned to the breach.
Since he’d already told Mikaere about the dead ladies of Parliament Row, about the Trade and harvesting, he chose events subsequent to that as his starting point.
Albert had never spoken so long, with such clarity of memory, cogency of thought, and lucidity of expression as he did that night. By the time he had traced the little trickle of his recollection to its headwaters, dawn was slowly making three-dimensional objects of the silhouetted cut-outs of the trees around him.
The silence that followed the telling was thick enough to walk across. For a moment he thought
how deeply impacted Mikaere must have been by the account as it unfolded; then he heard the snoring, and became aware that, for some time, it had been perforating the night.
That wasn’t the point, though. While his story may have had a soporific effect on the aged Maori, it had—on Albert’s mental ledger—sketched out a sequence of ghost notes connecting those composed boldly in ink; and they pointed to that elusive pattern. There were still some critical components missing from the score—the time and key signatures, for example.
Time. That was the thing. A rhythm. “Twenty-five months ago, six months ago, four months ago, and two months ago,” he recalled himself saying about the dead of Parliament Row. Their deaths—barring that of Susan Sweetman—had been two months apart. Why? Was there some natural event that happened every two months? Nothing came to mind but he knew that, in his case, that by no means precluded the possibility.
If not natural, though, then man-made. Something that some people somewhere made happen every two months. Something that—like the stars—ran on a schedule.
Stars.
The Sea Queen had run on a schedule; every six days it would sail from Napier to Chatham Island. But that wasn’t the point, which was that ships run on schedules.
That would explain why they didn’t run into each other.
Immediately, two other ships of his recent acquaintance came to mind; Verity, which, as far as he knew, existed only in a painting on Colonel Riven’s piano, and the Venice Regent, now lying in the mud at the dock where it had caught fire and sunk.
Hadit had a schedule?
“I need a telephone,” Albert said to the night, loudly enough to rouse Mikaere from his rowdy slumber.
“Huh?”
Albert repeated his request a couple of times over the next minute or so, until Mikaere was clear-headed enough to distill it to its essence. “You want a phone?”
“Yes.”
Mikaere studied this proposal much as if he’d been asked to produce a pumpkin from a promise. “No phones out here, mate.”
“In there?” said Albert, poking a finger in the direction of the camper trailer.
Improvisato Page 25
