Paddy thought of his volcano dream.
‘With a great conscious effort I slowed down, concentrating not on keeping up with your mother but just getting my breathing right. I couldn’t see her now since she’d gone around a bend.
‘I don’t remember much traffic on the road. This only contributed to my idea of the strangeness of the place. No one much came here, as if they knew its dangers, its graveness. I know this sounds melodramatic, Paddy. It was after all the main highway of the entire country! Still I must be accurate to how it felt then, to a young girl out on her own for the first time. It was like biking on the moon. Perhaps that family in Bulls hadn’t been so silly after all.
‘Gradually I calmed down and it became easier to maintain my speed, though the wind was getting worse. I still rode anxiously. Had your mother not been out in front, I might have turned back to Waiouru. It was already late in the afternoon. We’d never reach the lake by dinnertime. It was another thing my father had told us, “Stay at the lake. Don’t stop at Turangi. Push on to Taupo and stay at the lake.” All of his easy-sounding instructions now seemed to me very hateful and cruel. I regarded him as highly irresponsible for letting us go on the trip.
‘From nowhere, an army truck went roaring past me. It blew its horn. My bike wobbled in the wake of the truck. I caught the voices of the soldiers shouting something at me. They were sitting in the back of the truck, which had canvas sides, looking at me, shrieking and pointing. Then they were gone. I was close to tears.
‘I came around a bend and I saw Teresa waiting for me at the bottom of a slight dip in the road. Her clothes were being plastered against her body and her hair was wild in the wind. She was having trouble standing up, holding the bike. Good, I thought, she’s had the same idea as me, we’re going to turn back. We could spend the night at Waiouru in a motel. Reconsider our options in the morning. It was an achievement to have reached the mountains. We already had plenty of stories to tell everyone. The bare-chested man who stopped to fix a puncture on Teresa’s tyre, when she could do it better than him, with a tattoo of an eagle across his shoulders. Once he’d finished, he ran back to his car lifting his arms up and down in bird-like swoops and making crowing noises. We’d laughed every night about him. We made the same noise whenever we overtook each other on the bikes.
‘I pulled alongside her. “My God, Pip,” she shouted, “isn’t this great!”
‘I couldn’t understand what she’d said at first. “Are you loving it?” she yelled.
‘And she wasn’t being ironic, she was dead serious. I could see it in her face. She was alive, on a high. I shook my head. No, no I wasn’t loving it. I wasn’t. “I want to go back,” I shouted.
‘“Can’t hear, what?”
‘I screamed it again and this time she heard.
‘“Philippa Macklin,” she said, “don’t be such a little fool. Pull yourself together.” This was something one of our teachers used to say. We were all little fools.
‘“We could be in grave danger,” I said.
‘Teresa stared at me.
‘“We could!” I said. “We’re civilians.”
‘She waited again, not speaking but looking right at me. And the pause, the waiting, had an effect. I felt my words crumble. I felt my fear crouch down low and hide. I won’t say it was banished but there was no longer any courage left in my fear. It was like a pain I could cope with, say to myself I could cope with. I’ve always had basically a timid disposition. I think that’s why I’ve ended up in some dangerous places in my life. I went to Africa to spite people, because it was the last thing expected of me, that I would have the gumption to do such a thing. Timidity and pigheadedness in combination, that’s probably more common than we think. But I’m wandering now. Sorry.
‘On the Desert Road, Teresa motioned with her head for me to start riding, to take the lead, and I did. I pushed off into the sideways wind and began the slow climb up again.
‘Did I mention how dark the sky was? Black clouds. Further in, cars had their lights on. It was as though normal time had been suspended and we were travelling through a special zone, somewhere not made for civilians. It seemed very unlikely anyone would stop for us here. A few cars slowed down to get a look at us but that was all. Plus we didn’t have lights on our bikes. We had reflectors. It was unsafe.
‘I felt spits of rain against my face. To the east, near the horizon, we could see a patch of horizontal lines connecting the sky with the earth. We knew it was a storm. There was no downward direction implied in these smudged lines however. It wasn’t obvious that rain was falling. It may just as easily have been something being sucked up into the clouds from the land, as in a tornado though there was no funnel shape.
‘Having had the whole trip so far in sunshine, we’d just assumed things would carry on in this way. The rain was an outrage and I know that I took it personally, yet another slap in the face, literally! My face hurt. The rain dripped from my nose. It was coming down more heavily now. Rain from the road was getting sprayed up against my legs then running into my shoes and I could feel my lower back also getting wet from the rear tyre. I could see when I glanced around that one of my panniers was flapping open and the rain was soaking everything inside.
‘These details, Paddy! It’s hard to imagine I’m a person who has had a gun pointed at her head, isn’t it?’
She stopped abruptly, as if she’d felt something touch her. Metal?
‘I’m someone who has been blindfolded, tied up and put in a chicken coop with my own birds. But those are other stories, with their own context. I didn’t like the blindfold one bit but once I was in there, I knew—I guessed and I was right—that was all the harm that was coming to me from those people. Probably they also thought it was clever and humiliating and horrible to be in the coop but being with my chooks was calming. We knew each other. Those people misjudged that.
‘What I’m trying to speak about, not very well at all I know, is this particular feeling, in this particular time. Historically, it ranks very low. On a scale of suffering, it doesn’t make the scale. You see a child dying of cholera, well. A man beaten to death. Yet I can still feel the rain on the backs of my bare legs and the way it drained into my shoes. Horrible! It makes me shudder now. And of course my failure to rid myself of what was only minor physical unpleasantness, this must be connected with what happened later. Everything’s connected.’
She looked down at her brown shoes and moved their toes together and then apart again. ‘May I have some water?’
‘Of course,’ said Paddy. ‘Anything else? A snack?’ Pip shook her head. She looked pale and tired suddenly, a bit shaky. He went to the kitchen and brought back a tray with the jug from the fridge together with two glasses. They drank some water and Pip sat for a moment in silence. His mind was racing with questions—about their ride but also about Africa, the gun, the blindfold, the chicken coop. Not the time.
‘As you know,’ she said, ‘the road twists and turns and has lots of hollows, but it also has flat straights, sections which grant you the larger view, across the plain, where you think it wouldn’t take much to go over to one of the mountains and tap it with your foot. You feel close suddenly. We were on one of these. To the east, the storm seemed to have moved off somewhere else and there was a bright margin of sky lighting less dense clouds as if it was clearing. It was still raining but lightly now, a steady drizzle. Teresa rode up beside me. She was soaking like me and grinning just as she’d been when I’d thought we should turn back. More than an hour had passed since that bad moment.
‘“Good afternoon, Miss Macklin,” she called to me.
‘“Good afternoon, Miss Fulton,” I said.
‘“Nice day for a ride.”
‘“Perfect, Miss Fulton.”
‘“You look a tad damp, Miss Macklin.”
‘“Do I? I wasn’t aware of it. Though looking closely at you, Miss Fulton, the phrase ‘drowned rat’ comes to mind.”
‘“Why, Miss Ma
cklin, I do believe you’re right. Kind of you to point it out.”
‘“What friends are for, Miss Fulton.”
‘“Is that what friends are for, I’d always wondered what they were for.”
‘She overtook me, a faint crowing sound coming from her, and we biked on through the rain, past signs which warned of firing ranges and military vehicles crossing the road, though we never saw any of this activity and never saw another soldier. Maybe their canvas truck had been sucked into the air.
‘I’m not sure how long it took us to get through. We moved ahead in numbness. I think all our vigilance was exhausted long before we left that road. By evening, there were simply no vehicles going either way. It was less gloomy. A clear night, the air warmer now. We began to dry out. We went on like this for quite a time, owning the entire place, biking automatically.
‘At a certain point I became aware of a different kind of shadow and a scent too. I lifted my head and saw that the road had entered a forest. Pine trees lined both sides. There was an apron of ground maybe ten yards wide leading up to the trees and this was covered in brown pine needles. Clumps of these needles had been blown onto the road and swirled into largish neat piles. It looked a bit like someone had raked them into these piles. So we rode over them, through them. We kicked at them with our feet. The setting was suddenly private, as if we were biking along a friend’s driveway, ruining someone’s hard work. We shouted with all our strength, whooping in the deserted alley of those trees. It was a huge and inspiring freedom after the tense watchfulness and doubt of the Desert Road. We were alongside each other and we took turns to ride out across the other side of the road, shouting at the nonexistent oncoming traffic, daring it to appear and crash into us. There was even a gentle downward slope to the road and we went fast, eating up the distance. The mountains were no longer visible behind us. We knew we’d made it! We’d got through to the other side and now all we had to do was carry on to the lake, or perhaps even risk stopping in nearby Turangi since it was so late. We could ride to the lake in the morning and swim before lunch.
‘Then far ahead of us we saw something shiny by the side of the road, on the apron. As we got nearer, we could make out the shape of a car.
‘Do you believe in presentiment, Paddy? I mean in some notion of foretelling?’
Automatically he touched his ear.
‘I do not,’ said Pip, ‘unless it’s tied to human agency. To the ordinary powers we all have of paying attention, of noticing, of surmise, of guesswork. Do I believe objects tremble with their own futures, signalling their import to us? No.
‘The African day the people came to our property with the gun and the blindfold and the rope for tying me up, I thought it a day like any other. Later, I thought of certain things. Afterwards, I considered the signs. A broken bottle by the mailbox that morning. A dog I didn’t know walking in the middle of the road. A commotion nearby, raised voices, angry shouting, that was quickly over, too quickly perhaps, as if someone had had second thoughts and then he was silenced, everyone on edge? Were these signs, or even part of the thing itself? At the time I thought I was hearing an argument between the labourers working on the little relay power station at the end of our street. They were patching its crumbling concrete walls. I’d gone past them a few times that week and they were a rowdy, good-humoured bunch. Signs? Dogs walked everywhere. I didn’t know them all. Bottles broke. No, these weren’t harbingers. But you think on things after the event. It’s a helpless act, to want to have seen it coming. Ah, yes, obvious.
‘Where we were living, at that moment in history, in Zimbabwe, you could argue we saw it coming, some might say even that we had it coming, and if we didn’t know we were just too—blind, stupid, for our epoch. Look I’ve gone off track again.’ Pip reached for her glass of water and as she drank she was looking at Paddy through the bottom of the glass. It gave him the sense that she doubted he’d been listening or thought he would stop listening to her now. She had to keep him engaged, even while she was drinking water. ‘Where was I?’
‘The car,’ said Paddy.
‘Your mother and I both saw the car at the same time and we wondered. We looked at each other quickly, just a glance but enough to see the smallest disturbance in each other’s eyes, nothing like fear or fright but the upset of our joy, a sobering, and of course we’d left off shouting and kicking the needles. Certainly the car put a stop to that. It was as though we’d come across the owner, the owner of the road, of the forest. The Master. Hushed, we heard our tyres against the surface of the road and the tiny crunching of the needles we passed over.
‘We biked close to one another on our side of the road, heading towards the car.
‘Concentrating so tightly on the car, trying to make out its purpose, whether there were any occupants, created an odd alternating feeling in me. At one moment it seemed we were reeling in the vehicle, drawing it to us along the avenue of trees, and then the opposite. The car was like some magnet, it sucked us towards it or sucked our ideas about the day out of ourselves. I may be dangerously close to what I’ve just denied about foretelling, presentiment. Yet I thought of the rain clouds we’d seen far off on the hills by the Desert Road, the dark band connecting sky and earth but without a sense of direction. It was similar. I didn’t know what was happening.
‘I could see Teresa had a similar intentness on her face. She was peering, trying to work it out at the earliest possible moment. And all the time a million innocent explanations went through my head. The car was abandoned. The car’s owner was going for a walk in the bush, or he was a hunter. Someone had stopped for a rest, for a drink from a thermos. The call of nature. A man would appear soon from the trees pulling up his trousers, a bit sheepish, and he would wave at us. The obviousness of its position—parked just off State Highway One—worked in its favour.
‘Getting nearer it looked as though the car was empty. There were no signs of movement. I felt the tension ease up through my legs and shoulders. I’d been unaware of this nervous grip. I gave Teresa a smile when she looked at me. She returned it.
‘We were almost alongside the car when its driver’s door swung open and a man who’d been slumped down in his seat stretched a leg, then got out of the car quickly. He took a few steps towards us, holding up his hand. We braked and stopped. Perhaps that was the moment when we should have accelerated past him, swerved out onto the other side of the road and biked off. I’m sure we both thought of it.
‘“Girls,” he said. “Girls! Are we pleased to see you!”
‘We looked towards the car and saw a young woman, a few years older than us perhaps, who’d also been slumped down in the passenger seat, gradually work her way up. She didn’t get out of the car, however, but she was looking at us carefully. I wasn’t sure whether she’d been asleep and we’d woken her. It wasn’t a friendly look. The man was stretching his arms over his head as if he’d been sleeping. “Our saviours,” he said.’
At this point Paddy became aware of the phone ringing and although he told Pip that they could ignore it, she was insistent that he pick it up. She would use the break to go to the bathroom. ‘Comfort stop,’ she said, moving from the sofa as he answered the phone.
It was Murray Blanchford from the hospital. He’d just spoken to Teresa. They’d set the MRI appointment for the following day. Obviously this would give them a clearer idea of what, if anything, was going on. From his conversation with Teresa, he understood that she was in the same position as when he’d examined her—was this Paddy’s feeling too? It was. Excellent. The line seemed to go dead for a moment and then Blanchford came on again, apologising. A moment later, they were saying goodbye.
At once Paddy thought of the things he hadn’t asked. He’d wanted to get Blanchford’s opinion on her tiredness, the pattern of sleeping and waking. Also he thought he should have said how they’d been expecting him to call earlier and his failure to do so had caused anxiety. Doctors should know this stuff, even very important brain doctors. T
he conversation had gone so fast. Blanchford had given the impression that Paddy was in a queue, which perhaps he was, and their time was extremely limited.
Pip came back into the room and sat down again. ‘Is it all right to go on, Paddy?’
He told her what Blanchford had said.
‘I can be there at the hospital, if you want me there, that is.’
‘That’s very kind.’
‘But I’m very worried now. I’m using up all your time.’
He waved this away, continue.
‘Okay, if you’re sure. I’m not entirely without hope that maybe this long-winded anecdote has some bearing on what’s happened to Teresa.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not sure. Sorry. I’m ahead of myself. Anyway, it’s information I’m … relieved to share finally with someone. You can do with it whatever you like. Where were we?’
‘“Our saviours”,’ he said. ‘The man in the car. He called you his saviours. With the woman.’
‘Yes! The man. Funny, I have trouble picturing him. He was maybe in his early thirties or a little older. Clean-shaven. Average height, thin. Light complexion. No scars. It was how I went over in my mind the description I’d give to the police when they asked for a description. In truth, I can’t remember really what his face looked like to see into. Or I’ve preferred not to remember for so long that now I can’t.’
‘The police?’ said Paddy.
Pip held up a hand, begging him to hold off. ‘Perhaps it was because we’d been in, I don’t know—the rhythm of strangers’ kindness for the previous days, throughout the trip, and here was an opportunity to repay some of that but Teresa said at once, very brightly, “How can we help?”
‘It was painful to hear these words. I felt we were immediately in further than we should have been. This is stupid of course. What were our options? We were on bikes, in the middle of nowhere and it was night though still easy enough to see twenty or thirty yards ahead of us.
Somebody Loves Us All Page 29
