Kaitangata Twitch

by Margaret Mahy

  By now they were quite close to the home beach, paddling in darkness, for the moon had at last disappeared and now only the stars were shining out. Scorpio was setting but Meredith knew that Orion, belted and armed, would be striding up out of the east, bringing summer with him. She sat thinking about what Lee had just told her.

  ‘I love Kaitangata,’ she said. ‘Well, I used to love it.’ She tested her feeling like someone gingerly feeling a bruise. ‘I think I still do.’

  Lee stared up at the stars, leaning back on his oars.

  ‘I don’t know if I love it or not,’ he said. ‘I do know that it is like – like part of me by now. Part of my world ever since I can remember. That’s why I play to it at night on my saxophone. I feel it listening to me.’ He broke off and shrugged. ‘And who knows? Sebastian may show up tomorrow, sharp and nasty as ever.’

  ‘Do you really think he will?’ asked Meredith, and listened to the silence behind her.

  ‘No,’ said Lee at last. ‘Between you and me, I think he’s met his match. I reckon Kaitangata – I think it . . . it protects itself by feeding on dreams. I reckon it’s been feeding on yours. But hey! I could be wrong.’

  ‘Is it a wicked island?’ asked Meredith, as they pulled the canoe up to the Gallagher boathouse.

  ‘No way!’ said Lee, stepping through the shallows. He took out his little torch, and turned it on, so that it pointed up the path with a thin finger of light. ‘Wicked? Good? That’s people-talk. Kaitangata is something older than people. Beyond them. Now just you think of all the things people do to land – clear it, cut it, bruise it, burn it. They smash it around, smooth it down, and all to suit themselves. I reckon that, every now and then, there are a few pieces that want to stay the way they are – maybe get their own back, even. And Kaitangata’s one of those pieces. It makes itself powerful by feeding on – well, whatever offers itself. And maybe Sebastian offered himself.’

  ‘It’s so spooky,’ said Meredith, and began to cry. Lee helped her out onto the sand and then patted her shoulder.

  ‘It’s the way things are,’ he said. ‘You already know that. Everything gives up one shape, sooner or later, and takes on another. Once you get used to the idea, it seems halfway beautiful. Well, it does to me. The game of changes I call it, and at my time of life I’m edging towards a big change myself. And now I’d better get you home. Will your parents be offering a reward, do you reckon?’

  ‘A million dollars,’ said Meredith, smiling through tears. ‘But they’ll have to pay in little lots over a thousand years.’

  ‘Oh well, that should keep me in beer,’ said Lee Kaa. They climbed the Zigzag, and crossed the lawn, turning their backs on the End of the World. Lee knocked on the door, and after a moment there was the sound of anxious feet, thudding down the stairs. A few minutes after that, Meredith was being exclaimed over, hugged, kissed, warmed and given midnight treats, an island no longer, but part of her family, as she always had been, and always would be, for in the game of changes there were a few happy things that would never really change.

  23

  ‘I’m going to have to swallow my pride,’ Mr Gallagher told Kate at breakfast the next day. ‘Do you realise that? I am going to have to apologise. To Sebastian,’ he added. It was the first time Meredith had heard her father refer to his enemy without playing with his name in a thumping way. Sebastian Cars-well . . . three blows and a grunt! Simply calling him ‘Sebastian’ made him seem too much like an old friend. ‘The dreadful thing is – he deserves an apology from both of us.’

  ‘Don’t you dare apologise!’ yelled Kate. Her stubble seemed to bristle all over her round head. ‘He set you up. He wanted you to hit him. He tempted you. And you fell for it.’

  ‘He fell for it,’ said Rufus but everyone ignored Rufus.

  ‘You may be right,’ sighed Mr Gallagher. ‘It doesn’t let me off the hook, though, does it?’

  He rang first Sebastian Cardwell’s home and then his office, only to be told that Mr Cardwell was not currently available. He was given a mobile number, which he rang, but the call did not go through. And when he rang again, late in the afternoon, he was told that Mr Cardwell had left town. He had been unexpectedly called to Sydney, and no one was sure when he would be back. The voices on the other end of the phone gave nothing away but almost at once a curious, creeping gossip began inching around the bay. There was some business problem that nobody seemed sure about. Mr Cardwell was not answering any calls – even his mobile had fallen silent.

  That evening Mrs Hansen from the pub at the head of the harbour rang about someone who might want to buy a donkey. She said almost as an afterthought, ‘Doesn’t look too good for Sebastian Cardwell, does it?’ Mrs Gallagher asked, cautiously, what she meant.

  ‘It was on the news tonight. Seems he’s had some sort of financial crash,’ Mrs Hansen explained. ‘Right out of the blue! Bang! Sounds like a big one. Some other big international company – Idiot Industries or something – has sort of come down on him and swallowed him up. And it looks as if he owes a lot of money. It even sounded as if he might be declared bankrupt. Watch this space, eh?’

  ‘Idiot Industries!’ cried Rufus indignantly. ‘I said that first.’

  ‘Good name for them,’ exclaimed Mr Gallagher. ‘But it’ll probably be that lot we’ve heard of . . . Eyot Holdings. Aren’t they the ones who . . .’ His voice faded as he followed Mrs Gallagher into another room.

  ‘Eyot Industries,’ Meredith repeated in a soft voice filled with a sudden, secret puzzle. ‘Eyot! A small island!’ she remembered. And she looked out of the window at Kaitangata, stretching itself calmly as the tide came in. Maybe an island like Kaitangata could reach out and connect with other islands. Maybe there was more than one way of being swallowed.

  The following morning even some of the minibus kids were talking about it. Sebastian Cardwell’s whole great business suddenly seemed to have come crashing down on him.

  Ideas and guesses filled the air. Meredith listened – listened, but said nothing. Sometimes it seemed to her that the right sort of dream might link into the world and shift things around, though mostly she began thinking it was all a strange sort of accident . . . nothing to do with her father or even with her. Yet Lee Kaa was right. Kaitangata had been threatened. It had wakened; it had stolen her dreams. And perhaps, in some mysterious way, it had used the power of her dreams to save itself.

  At home the topic of Sebastian Cardwell kept on coming up. ‘He’s run away,’ said Mr Gallagher. ‘Chickened out.’

  ‘He didn’t sound as if he was chickening when he last spoke to us,’ said Mrs Gallagher doubtfully. ‘But there’s no doubt about it. He’s been swallowed up by someone even bigger than he was. Otherwise he’d be back here, being rich and powerful all over the place.’

  ‘I’ll bet he was setting out to do a drug deal somewhere and the FBI or someone caught onto him,’ said Kate, speaking of Sebastian as if he were history already. ‘He was that sort of man.’

  ‘So! Is the bay saved yet?’ Rufus asked his parents, but neither of them replied.

  Of course, as it turned out, Sebastian’s plans were not his alone. They had become an official District Scheme, and strangers – part of a New Zealand company associated with the mysterious Eyot Holdings, people who had never visited the bay before – suddenly appeared and began carrying on with Sebastian’s work. People who had already bought sections began to build the very houses Mr Gallagher had foretold – big, expensive houses with huge foundations dug deep into the hillside. One family camped on their section in the weekends. Unexpectedly Meredith made friends with Martin, the boy of this family, a reader who knew The Lord of the Rings almost by heart and carried books of ghost stories around with him. Many of the new families needed help when it came to working out their garden, and suddenly Mr Gallagher had a lot of local work, which he enjoyed. As for the fight with the Pontys – there seemed to be no more reason for it. Allan and Rufus began hanging out together once more. Sharon i
nvited Meredith to her birthday party, and Martin, Meredith and Sharon wandered along the beach together, searching for bits of green and blue glass which had been turned into smooth jewels by the tumbling of the sea on the stones.

  The thrift began to bloom.

  ‘You came with the thrift,’ Mrs Gallagher said to Meredith as they strolled along the beach one evening. ‘What do you want for your birthday this year?’

  Meredith looked sideways at the island. It looked so small, so ordinary now. It was sleeping soundly, as she herself slept these days, with no chair under the door and no dressing-gown cord tying her to her bed. For some reason, she no longer had any fear of walking in her sleep, and though she was never totally sure if she was asleep or dreaming, she had stopped worrying about it. It was a question beyond all worry.

  Her birthday came. Her family brought her a birthday breakfast in bed – pancakes and a rose in a silver vase. She was given books, and a coupon for a special sailing weekend put on by the new Trident Cove yacht club. And there was a letter from her grandparents, marked ‘Not to be opened until your birthday’. Everyone else watched her curiously as she opened and read the card.

  ‘Gran says Happy Birthday,’ she read. ‘They’ve both been going to cooking classes and Grandpa can make really good muffins. And . . . oh man! Hooray! Dad! Dad! They’ve bought one of the Wittwood sections.’

  Everyone in the family cried out in a chorus of astonishment.

  ‘Give me that!’ said Mr Gallagher, snatching the card and reading rapidly. ‘It’s true. They’re going to build a cottage and move back here. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Ace!’ cried Rufus. He looked gleeful and then, suddenly, puzzled. ‘As if they were siding with you-know-who!’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Mr Gallagher. ‘It’ll be wonderful to have them back again. Wonderful!’

  ‘Sure! Sure!’ said Rufus. ‘But they wouldn’t have been able to get back here again if there hadn’t been that extra building space, would they? And we hate that.’

  Mr Gallagher stood frowning. He looked right and left with a curious desperation, almost as if he was longing for some magical voice to speak out of the air and chant a spell that would allow everything to fall into place. There would be room for grandparents up on the hillside, but for no one else. And the grandparents would move in without changing anything. But at last he sighed. He shrugged. He flung out his arms helplessly and then let them flop down to his side.

  ‘I don’t know!’ he cried. ‘I just don’t know. There’s no sense in anything any more.’

  Mrs Gallagher laughed and put her arm around his shoulders.

  ‘Darling!’ she said. ‘Life’s always been madder than we want it to be. We just have to do the best we can, moment to moment.’

  Mr Gallagher shrugged again. Then at last he smiled.

  ‘OK! Yes! Things are what they are,’ he said. ‘Let’s just relax and enjoy them.’

  ‘Right on!’ Mrs Gallagher and Rufus said, almost together.

  That afternoon, before Kate was home from school and while Rufus was busy playing computer games over at the Pontys’, Meredith did something she had not done for weeks. She tucked a certain box under her arm, and set off down the Zigzag onto the beach. The dogs followed eagerly after her. A few yachts were already tacking across the bay, but she suddenly felt as solitary, as simple, as pure as she felt in winter when the harbour was empty and still. As she pulled out the blue canoe, she shivered, but it was a calm shiver, a shiver for the past not the present, for she knew she was not going to be in any danger.

  Meredith landed at Shelly Beach. Everything she looked at seemed, in this mood, transformed. Each foxglove bell was outlined with a thread of – of something that seemed to Meredith like nothingness – a thin line of some different kind of space from the space that she herself belonged to. Every shell and blade of grass declared itself.

  From the box in the bottom of the canoe she took out the great shell Lee Kaa had given her and began to walk along the beach, blowing softly into it. Its melancholy, mossy song somehow echoed back into itself as it sang out into the world. She flapped her hand over the wide mouth of the shell, and the sound rose and fell, rose and fell in musical waves matching the small sea waves that curled up softly before flopping on the sand. Holding the shell and blowing into it, Meredith walked along beaches and over rocks to the pointed top of the tear-shaped eyot that was Kaitangata. Then she wandered along Hand Beach, over more rocks, along Eye Beach and carefully across Mouth Beach, without looking left or right. There were no notices to name the beaches. Well, there never had been. At the broad western end of the island, she leaped from rock to rock, hooting softly all the time, worked her way around the point of the island, and came back onto the sand once more. On and on until the blue canoe came into sight. She had marched almost all the way around Kaitangata, playing on her shell.

  All the time, whether she was walking on sand or rock, she felt someone or perhaps something watching her, but she did not turn. In a way, she had been expecting to be watched. Both dogs began to whine softly, and press against her.

  Bending, Meredith gave Pudding a loving pat.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said soothingly, putting the big shell on the sand. ‘Everything’s OK.’ Pudding, still whining, stretched herself up in a half-leap, putting her paws on her shoulders, so Meredith took her paws and made her dance in a circle with her. As she danced she sang, inventing a few of her own words to an old song:

  Hi-tiddly-hi-ti Island,

  Everybody wears a smile.

  Hi-tiddly-hi-ti Island,

  Ev’rybody lives in style . . .

  The life’s so bright and swift and gay

  You live two weeks then fade away,

  For once you’re called you have to stay

  On Hi-tiddly-hi-ti Isle.

  Looking over Pudding’s woolly shoulder as they revolved, barking and singing in duet, she half-expected to glimpse Sebastian Cardwell even though she knew he had lost interest in this part of the world. Mouth Beach (in more than one place and more than one form) had swallowed its enemy. Meredith stopped dancing, released Pudding, and laid her hand on the nearest rock. It was rough with lichen and warm with sunlight, and she imagined it rising and falling under her hand as if the island were breathing. But, of course, dancing in a circle always made you dizzy.

  ‘I don’t want to change you,’ she shouted aloud to whatever it was that was watching her. ‘I want you to stay exactly as you are.’ Then she picked up the shell again and took a breath to blow on it once more as she walked the last few yards to the canoe. Then, at last, she turned to look behind her, and found she was looking into a face. She had never seen it before, but all the same she recognised it.

  That face was neither old nor young . . . neither male nor female. One eye was like a hollow, the other was like a rockpool alive at the edges with fine, waving weed. The nose reminded Meredith of a dried, twisted gorse stem. Or was it stone with lichen on it? Or even sand? Meredith made herself smile, and saw her own reflection, dark in its deep rockpool eye. Perhaps the curious face copied her smile. Afterwards, she was sure that she had seen teeth of broken shell, and a crab, creeping from the corner of the mouth and scrambling hastily across its cheek. The smile, if it was a smile, widened. Then the face closed its eyes, and Meredith closed hers too. She blew a last cloudy note, moving her left hand over the mouth of the shell. When she looked again the face had disappeared, though all the parts that had made it were still there . . . the bark, the stone, the hollow, the lichen, the dried gorse stem, the sand, the crab. Whatever had trusted her and shown itself in order to smile at her had fallen back into its separate pieces.

  Meredith whistled to the dogs, and walked back to the blue canoe. Around her she felt the island changing – but changing in its own way and in its own time. She felt the thin soil shifting over the rocks, the thrift growing up through the gorse, becoming brighter as spring advanced. She put the great shell carefully back into
its box and began to paddle home. Ahead of her she made out the donkeys in their donkey paddock, the jennies in a cluster with last year’s foals among them. Glancing sideways, she couldn’t help seeing the definite scarlet of the Cardwell boathouse, now locked and unused, and further along the beach she saw the light reflected from Lee Kaa’s glasshouses. Further up the hillsides, above the boathouse and the donkey paddock, wound the new road, with the foundations of soon-to-be houses on either side of it. In a few years, twenty or thirty, say (nothing much when you thought of the age of the hills), the people who lived there would have mostly become friends and neighbours. Her grandparents would be living there. They would wander down for cups of tea, she would wander up for Anzac biscuits and home-made icecream. For some reason, accepting that new road, even though it was signalling great alterations in the world of her childhood, made her feel somehow older and wiser. Maybe this is my first day of being grown-up she thought, paddling onwards.

  Mixed world! Mixed world! Lee Kaa was walking by on the beach, and they waved to each other but he did not wait. Like Meredith, Lee Kaa liked to be on his own sometimes. Dreamers do, thought Meredith. Dreams branch out when you’re alone, and dreamers are all islands, really. She reached their shabby boathouse, pulled the blue canoe into it, then, carefully carrying her shell and with the dogs on either side of her, Meredith ran for the Zigzag, and scrambled back over the Edge of the World to her family and her birthday dinner, while behind her Kaitangata, wrapped in its own silence, lay like a tear on the smooth cheek of the bay.