Kaitangata Twitch

by Margaret Mahy

  ‘Well, I’m going to tell everyone what I think, even if I’m not a ratepayer,’ Kate was saying. Her family was only half-listening. They had heard it all before. Only Meredith, who was actually looking at her, noticed Kate’s curious expression – defiant yet a little smug too, the expression of someone enjoying a wicked secret.

  Rufus laughed.

  ‘A ratpayer!’ he cried. ‘The true people of the bay – that’s us – are full-blown ratepayers, but anyone who agrees with Sebastian Cardwell is a fly-blown ratpayer.’

  Mrs Gallagher sighed, and began to carry dirty dishes into the kitchen, followed by Mr Gallagher and Kate, still nagging from either side. Rufus jiggled uncertainly for a minute or two, then followed them into the kitchen, while Meredith, glad to be on her own for a few minutes, climbed onto the window seat and looked out through the window.

  ‘There you are,’ she muttered, ‘Just behave yourself.’

  ‘. . . and after all, if I really wanted the bay to stay totally untouched, I wouldn’t be living here myself, would I?’ said her mother’s voice out in the kitchen. ‘I’d live in the city, and just enjoy the idea of the bay, pure and untouched between bare hills. But we built this house, didn’t we? We dug into the slope and levelled the space and poured the concrete foundations. And then we had our kids, and brought in our dogs, and our donkeys and car and our diesel truck. And now we’re saying “After us, nobody!” Anyhow, let’s get this show on the road. Meredith!’ she called, ‘Wash-up time!’

  The signal came again. Flick! ‘Feed! Feed!’

  When Meredith went to bed that night she did what she had done ever since her last sleepwalking dream, which was to push her blue chair against the door, and tie one end of her dressing-gown cord to her wrist and the other around one of the bars on the headboard of her narrow bed.

  But as it happened, she slept deeply without dreams of any kind.

  18

  Almost no one put out onto the harbour during the winter. The Trident Cove jet-skis and outboard motors were packed away, and the whole bay fell under a spell of silence. Early-morning light grew somehow reluctant, slinking unwillingly up from behind the hills. Meredith was often the only person out on the water on these late grey afternoons, her hands feeling as if they had been welded by cold to the rhythmically dipping paddle. Out there, in the pearly world of winter, she could imagine herself to be the first and only traveller on a new planet. Gliding around Kaitangata, she pulled on her paddle so slowly that the water barely rippled above the flat surface of the rest of the bay. Kaitangata’s warrior fist of rock gestured above her, and if she looked down she saw it again, reflected in the sea, punching downwards now, towards the heart of the world. Sometimes she landed on the island and walked around it in a state of eerie expectation, studying the wavering ribbons of seaweed debris, that tied the island in on itself. Every shred of plastic, every strand of seaweed, every crushed tin and grain of sand seemed to have as much meaning as the big things of the world – the hills, the daylight moon and the oldest trees. But meaning, whatever it might be, slid away if she tried to give it a name, turning once more into mere flotsam thrown up by the sea.

  Of course, there were times when she raced down the Zigzag with Rufus, times when she tore around Kaitangata, scrambling from one beach to another, leaping, without fear across the rocks. Her short brown hair bobbed about her ears, yet in her mind she was transformed into a cloudy, slender creature whose long tresses flowed behind her in streaks of fire. Sometimes she would come to a halt, balancing gingerly on some pitted ridge of volcanic stone, confused at being two different people in one and the same moment. She knew the picture she had of herself inside her head was nothing like the person who looked back at her from the mirror each morning. But who cared! She would shrug, then run and shout again. Both moods, the still one and the running one, were kinds of happiness.

  The usual winter storms beat down, but once they were over the watchful stillness returned. Lee Kaa did not come down to the beach these cold evenings, so there was no chance to practise the saxophone. Up in her bedroom she played the flute, with the door open. Then she would close the door, get the shell from the back of her wardrobe and blow into it softly, filling the room with its strange, mossy note, a sound swelling towards her from some unearthly place. After school Meredith sometimes paddled out beyond Kaitangata, then, laying her paddle across the blue canoe, she would sit looking through her birthday binoculars at the hillside above their house. The bulldozers had retreated, but not before cutting a great, slow, winding reddish word – a word in a language Meredith could not understand – across the hillside.

  June was over. Then July. In August the year began to stir and stretch again. The days began to get just a little longer. The puddles by the bus stop stopped icing overnight. Meredith and Rufus and the other minibus children would occasionally see, as they came home from school, groups of people up on the slopes behind the bus stop inspecting sections they might buy and build on.

  All through that winter Meredith had continued to set traps for herself – obstacles that would wake her up if she began sleepwalking again. Night after night she would push the blue chair in front of the door, jamming its straight back under the door handle. Night after night she would carefully tie herself to the head of her bed.

  ‘Merry’s getting shy,’ Rufus said one morning at breakfast. ‘It’s because she’s getting – you know!’ He sketched two curves in front of his own thin chest. Meredith felt her face grow suddenly hot.

  ‘You shut up!’ she cried. ‘You don’t know anything about anything.’

  ‘Hope not!’ cried Rufus in a deeply sarcastic voice. ‘Hope not!’ But Kate, walking behind his chair, took hold of his ears, crying ‘What are these great jug handles?’ and shook his head from side to side, winking at Meredith over his head as she did so.

  Their mother looked over at Meredith with a funny mixed expression, amused and loving. And was it also, Meredith wondered, a little bit sad? For some reason, her mother’s kind glance made her blush all over again.

  Yet as Meredith tied her wrist to the head of her bed with the dressing-gown cord (which was long enough to let her turn over in the night, but would bring her up short if she made for the door), she knew that anyone capable of sleepwalking their way down the Zigzag would also be capable of untying the dressing-gown cord and shifting the chair without once waking up.

  Sometimes she thought that strange, urgent island voice might echo in her head for the rest of her life, stinging and throbbing every now and then, like a slightly anxious tooth. She might get used to it and just shrug it away. At other times she was sure it was waiting for some weak moment, and then, whether she wanted to or not, she would answer its call.

  Little by little, spring began to edge into the bay. Early plum blossom began to show on dark branches. Lambs hurried after their mothers in the paddocks past which the minibus drove on its way to school. Soon it would be Meredith’s birthday again. ‘You were born when the thrift came into flower,’ her mother said, smiling and remembering. Soon the thrift would flower again and she would be thirteen. A teenager . . . something officially different from a child. Thirteen! thought Meredith with mixed feelings. Staring at herself in her mirror, she was surprised again at her reflection. There she was, middling tall, middling thin, middling coloured; could that really be her, so definitely not an enchantress – not a wild, free creature with a bright mane of flowing hair? She knew all that middling girl’s secrets, knew that the middling girl secretly believed herself to be remarkable. But what did anyone else think, seeing that particular face . . . hearing that particular voice? What could anyone think but ‘middling’?

  She was sure her dreams were not middling dreams. Sometimes she remembered them, and sometimes she simply remembered dreaming. One night she dreamed she was on Kaitangata, climbing up under the gorse exactly as she had climbed almost a year ago. There, right before her, the ground had caved in. She crept towards the edge on hands and
knees and looked down into the new underrunner. At first she thought it was full of water and that she was seeing her own reflection, but then she saw that this hole really fell away to the very centre of the world and that, rising up out of it, was a white-headed child offering flowers. Meredith put out her hand to take the bouquet, but then the girl dropped the flowers and twisted her fingers in between Meredith’s, so that their hands were linked like hands engraved on a ring, and began tugging her down into the hole. As they struggled, the girl smiled and blinked at Meredith. Then her eyes dissolved into dry sand which ran in bright, trembling threads down her cheeks. Mud and clay gushed out of her mouth, and dribbled down her chin. The grip on Meredith’s wrist was so thin and strong that it hurt, like a tightening noose of wire. Waking, Meredith found herself in the passage outside her bedroom door, tugging hard against the dressing-gown cord, which had pulled around her wrist so tightly that the skin of her hand had darkened and her fingers throbbed once they were set free. She was frightened for a single moment, but almost at once she relaxed, feeling pleased with herself. That dressing-gown cord had worked. It had saved her, perhaps, from that unknown beach – the third beach that lay beyond the beaches of Hand and Eye. As nightmares go, this last one was nasty, but only in an ordinary way.

  Later that same morning, she and Rufus scrambled up the road away from the sea to the school bus stop. Above them on the hillside rose scarred slopes crossed with bands of tumbled raw clay, and spiked with the stumps of kanaka and wilding pines snapped like sticks. The new roads curled over the rounded slopes like purposeful worms, writhing across the land and eating it into a different shape.

  All the other local children were at the bus stop before them, and everyone was looking at Sebastian Cardwell’s huge notice as if it were completely new. No one turned as they came up, both panting a little.

  Meredith could easily see that something had happened to change the notice, but she could not immediately work out what it might be.

  Hee? Haw! called the donkeys.

  WITTWOOD VILLAGE. Exclusive Residential Development said the sign. Except it no longer said ‘Wittwood’ at the top or ‘Cardwell’ at the bottom. Someone with a spray-can had taken the notice by surprise, and had altered both words.

  ‘SHITWOOD VILLAGE! Arse-well Developments,’ read Rufus, clearly feeling he could say such things aloud if they had been written down, where everyone could read them anyway. And then at the bottom, crammed into a speech balloon, there were other words crowded and uneven, misty at the edges as if they were fading into the air.

  ‘That’s an “I”,’ said Rufus, joining the other children, bending and squinting at smudgy, cramped words. ‘I am – something. I am an Arse-well and a great big . . .’

  ‘You probably know what it says,’ said Sharon Ponty, turning towards them with unexpected fury. ‘Your dad did it, didn’t he? Sneaked up here with a spraycan after dark.’

  Rufus straightened.

  ‘He’s not a vandal,’ he said, sounding genuinely upset. ‘He’s an activist.’

  ‘Anyhow, there’s another notice back by the pub that’s been sprayed,’ said Cathy Sullivan, who came from the head of the bay. ‘It must be someone with a car, getting around after dark.’

  ‘They’ve got a car,’ said Sharon. ‘The Gallaghers have. Not much of a one, but it goes. Police should examine it for traces of blood – I mean paint.’

  Allan Ponty gave Meredith a weak smile, and Meredith understood that Allan was sick of the fighting. In the beginning it had been exciting, but Allan wanted to forget arguments and hang out with Rufus again.

  ‘Don’t smile at them,’ said Sharon, punching Allan’s shoulder. Kate was not the only warrior in their part of the bay.

  It was low tide in the harbour. Out beyond the treetops the mud seemed somehow iced with light. Two grey herons scavenged busily, and beyond them lay Kaitangata, looking perfectly at ease with the changing world. From this angle, Meredith was tempted to think that the island, as bored with all the arguments as Allan Ponty, had yawned and turned its back on them, and then, effortlessly, dropped off to sleep.

  19

  The damaged notices were replaced. Once again Sebastian Cardwell’s face gazed across the road and into the Gallagher garden, undefiled and smiling with false innocence. But a day or two later, the notices were sprayed again, and with dirtier suggestions.

  ‘Doom strikes!’ yelled Rufus, enjoying it all. ‘The phantom sprayer is at work! Mum, do you know what it said? It said . . .’

  ‘I know what it said,’ snapped Mrs Gallagher. ‘I can read. And if I look out of my bedroom window and up the hill, I can read it all over again. Just don’t let me hear you repeating the words on that notice.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Mr Gallagher, just as sternly. But Meredith heard him saying to her mother out in the kitchen when he thought the children could not hear him. ‘I must say Sebastian’s been asking for it. No wonder he’s a bit reluctant to show his face around here.’

  ‘He’s over in Sydney,’ said Mrs Gallagher. ‘Or he was. He might be back now. Some business complication according to Mr Gair. Some takeover bid or other.’

  ‘I wish someone would take him over,’ grumbled her husband. ‘Take him over and get him out of our lives, so that things could go back to being the way they were.’

  ‘That Eyot Holdings lot apparently,’ Mrs Gallagher said. ‘Funny! It sounds quite small, doesn’t it, but whatever it is, it’s been powerful enough to get Sebastian’s attention.’

  Later Meredith woke. And since she was awake now – awake and thirsty – she decided to go downstairs and get a drink of water. The sound of detectives arguing on television crept in under her closed door, so she knew, even before she untied the old dressing-gown cord, even before she shifted the chair under the doorhandle and then padded along the upstairs gallery, that her parents were still up. She looked in on them on her way to the kitchen.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ said her mother. ‘Are you asleep or awake?’

  ‘Mostly awake,’ said Meredith. ‘Awake and thirsty.’ She went through into the kitchen, both dogs following her, just in case. She was looking down at the dogs at the exact moment they suddenly lifted their heads and cocked their ears forward. Pie began to bark and ran for the hall. A heavy knock fell on the front door. Pudding took off, barking too.

  ‘More trouble,’ Meredith heard Mr Gallagher saying gloomily, as he got to his feet. ‘Must be trouble at this time of night.’ His voice changed, as he became truly alarmed. ‘Kate! If that damned boy has crashed that bomb of his . . .’

  ‘Might be good news,’ Mrs Gallagher called after him. ‘The law of averages says it has to be good luck sometimes.’

  ‘I read somewhere that you can toss a coin and it will come down heads fifty times running,’ Meredith called, turning towards the partly open door.

  Mrs Gallagher did not answer.

  ‘Hello, Tom,’ Mr Gallagher was saying. ‘What can I do you for?’ And then he spoke in such a different voice it sounded as if the stranger at the door might have stabbed him.

  ‘Kate!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Gallagher, springing to her feet, and running to the hall door. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Of course I’m all right!’ yelled Kate from somewhere in the hall, sounding particularly grumpy.

  Then Meredith heard the voice of a second man, and knew exactly who that second voice belonged to. Pushing the door open a little further, she looked into the sitting room.

  The room had filled up. There was Kate, there was Tom Maxwell, the local policeman, and there was Sebastian Cardwell himself. He stood there as if he owned the room, yet looked around it curiously. His expression seemed grave, but Meredith was not fooled. Sebastian Cardwell was a happy man. No matter how he might tuck in the corners of his mouth, his eyes were sparkling with wicked joy. There had been some sort of Gallagher disaster and Sebastian Cardwell was delighted.

  ‘Kate!’ said Mrs Gallagher.
‘Darling! What’s happened?’

  ‘Perhaps we could have a word,’ Tom said, looking at Mrs Gallagher doubtfully. ‘I mean, it’s nothing too serious in one way. Nothing that can’t be mended. But—’

  ‘It’s just that I’ve been spraying his horrible signs,’ said Kate impatiently, jerking her elbow in the direction of Sebastian Cardwell, rather as if she longed to be hitting him in the ribs with it. ‘And he caught me.’

  ‘She wasn’t the only one,’ said Sebastian Cardwell. ‘There were two of them. I was planning to work late in the boatshed – the way I do – and I caught them at it. Well, I drove on by as if I hadn’t picked up anything unusual, but I parked by the Harpers’ drive, and got on the phone to Tom. And I followed the kids when they went on to the next sign. If I’d known it was one of your girls, Carey, I swear I’d have just had a quiet word with you first . . .’

  He sounded apologetic, but anyone (thought Meredith) could tell he was only acting, playing out the part of a good-hearted but abused neighbour in front of a policeman.

  ‘You got on the phone?’ said Mrs Gallagher a little stupidly. ‘I didn’t know there was a phone box left between the bay and the city.’

  ‘Mum!’ cried Kate scornfully. ‘He’s the sort of man who has a mobile in every pocket.’

  ‘Spraying signs!’ said Mr Gallagher in a curiously heavy voice. He stared at Kate. ‘You’re the one who . . .’

  ‘Come on, Canary,’ said Sebastian Cardwell. Meredith knew that ‘Canary’ had been her father’s nickname at school. ‘Don’t blame the kid. She’s only been doing what you’d like to do. Maybe you even told her to do it.’

  Mr Gallagher fired up at once. ‘What are you suggesting?’ he asked angrily.

  ‘Now hang on,’ cried Tom Maxwell. ‘Stay calm!’