‘You’re right!’ she said. ‘Of course you’re right, Paddy. She was French, so what. Yes. Too far-fetched, yes.’ She sat down again opposite him, deflated.
He waited for her to say more, to advance her theory, to convince him of the connections, yet she’d lapsed into silence, her face a blank. No longer animated by her narration, she looked immediately older.
‘Did you talk about this possibility with my mother, this connection with the woman in the forest?’
She shook her head. ‘It occurred to me much later, after she’d gone. She’d already told me about hearing the item on the radio. But to me that sounded so minor and inconsequential. Of course what do I know? Maybe that would be enough. And how anyway does this help?’
They were silent for several more moments.
Of course he also wanted desperately to know how it would all end. Because he didn’t yet know. And maybe this Genevieve had a bigger part to play. ‘But you can’t leave it there,’ he said.
She seemed surprised by this and looked at him with curiosity. Leave what where? Now that her feeling about the French connection had been revealed and made to look weak, did this mean the tale really lacked a point? Of course Pip knew the ending. To her there was no mystery. She was the story’s ending embodied. She sat before him, so obviously they made it out of the forest. What did he want to know?
‘How did you get away?’ he said.
‘How did we get away?’ She was foggy and tired. ‘Oh, that. You’d really like to hear?’
‘Pip,’ he said, ‘I have no idea whether or not this all relates to what my mother has got now. I’m not ruling it out. The brain is an astonishing thing. Yes, she’d also heard the story on the radio about the French truck drivers. It might all be in the mix. But anyway, the French woman, Genevieve, has come to life and she’s asking what your plan is. Me too. What’s your plan?’
‘Okay.’ Pip rubbed her ankle thoughtfully. ‘Our plan. Didn’t have one. Not immediately. Because we were too dumbfounded. We were in shock from this person. The cast on her foot. Her accent! Paddy, all right, I won’t make a thing of it. But her French accent!’
‘Where had she come from?’
‘But we didn’t ask her! She was standing with us, talking, being held up by us! It was as much as we could take in, that she wasn’t with the man, she was against him! That was all we could digest. I remember looking at Teresa and she just had this happiness in her face, utter surrender to euphoria I suppose. I’m sure I was the same.
‘We were all panting, Teresa and I from our outpouring, Genevieve because she found it difficult to get around. Somehow she’d hopped soundlessly from the car. “We must go!” said Genevieve. “Before he comes back, yes?”
‘“Yes!” we said.
‘She was looking along the road in both directions, listening. The night was completely silent except for rustling from the trees, birds, insects. Teresa slapped her own leg. “I’m being bitten,” she said. Genevieve glanced at Teresa, briefly annoyed. Problems on that scale, we understood, were not worth mentioning.
‘“We push the car into the trees,” said Genevieve. “Hide it. He comes back, he won’t know where. The road all looks the same.”
‘“And we hide in the car?” I said.
‘She shook her head. “Too dangerous, he finds us. We hide further away over there.” She pointed up the road on the opposite side. “I can’t walk far.”
Teresa picked up my bike. “On this,” she said.
‘“Yes, you must ride away, both.” She pointed to me. “You ride with her across.”
‘“Giving her a dub?”
‘“She sits on the front, the back wherever. But first can you help me? Look in the car for blankets or something warm. Get anything. Then push the car away. Last, take me across the road. Just a little way. He won’t find me.”
‘Sitting in the car, she’d been thinking it all through.
‘We eased her down so she was sitting on a patch of grass and then we went to the car. We found a Swanndri jacket in the back seat, which we took. In the boot there was a large bottle of water that looked too old to drink safely. He probably kept it there to fill the radiator. Teresa tipped this out on the grass and put the bottle back in the car. There was also a short piece of rope. She lifted up an old mat underneath which was the spare tyre. “Come on,” she said to me. Together we pulled the tyre out. Teresa then rolled it away, taking it thirty or forty yards off from the car before pushing it into the forest. I heard the tyre moving across leaves and fallen branches and then nothing. Teresa ran back to the car. “Get the handbrake,” she said.
‘I took the handbrake off and we started to rock the car back and forth, trying to get it moving. I had one hand on the steering wheel.
‘“Wait!” said Teresa. She walked around to the passenger side and opened the glove box. She came out with a screwdriver and she told me to open the hood. I couldn’t find the release handle at first—it was getting quite dark. Finally I found it and Teresa opened the hood.
‘“What are you doing?” I said.
‘Her head was lost in the engine and she was grunting with effort. I could hear the screwdriver scraping against metal. Something gave way and Teresa stood up, holding a piece in her hand. “Distributor rotor!” she said. She put this in her pocket.
‘Where had she learned about such things? I didn’t ask her then. I’ve never asked her.’
‘It’s true,’ Paddy said to Pip, ‘she knows about cars. Her brother Graham taught her, I think. He built a car in their garage and she watched.’
‘Ah, poor Graham,’ said Pip. ‘Yes, that rings a bell now. Anyway, we went back to our positions and this time we got the car rolling. I aimed for a gap in the trees and the car went through easily. It must have struck a small ridge though because it stopped and we couldn’t get it moving again. This wasn’t far enough. Anyone could see the vehicle from the road, even in this light.
‘We lifted Genevieve up and walked her to the car. She leaned her weight against the back of the car and with Teresa and I also pushing—no one steering—we managed to get the car over the ridge. Genevieve fell down with a cry at the same time the car left our hands. There must have been a slope because we heard the car carry on for several moments, bashing down through the undergrowth until it came to a thudding stop. The noise gave me a shock, it was so final. We couldn’t go back now. We stood looking after the car, with half an idea it might come back up the slope and offer us a second chance, a chance to reconsider what we’d done.
‘Genevieve was already getting to her feet. She was in pain, you could see it, but she didn’t say anything. She pointed to the other side of the road.
‘“No,” said Teresa. “We’re not throwing you into the bushes. We’ll put you on the bike and we can wheel it along the road until we’ve gone far enough, then we’ll get off the road and wait with you.”
‘“Yes,” I said.
‘Genevieve refused this at once. She told us we’d do much better by ourselves and that she’d be fine if we left her. She’d wait until morning and then cars and trucks would start using the road again and she’d get a lift. But we held firm. We weren’t going anywhere without her. She threw up her hands in the air. I remember the gesture so clearly! She said something in French, a long string of—exasperation. So strange to hear that, Paddy, in the forest, but nothing could happen which wasn’t an inversion of normal life, our normal lives up to this point.
‘We worked to conceal the car’s location, spreading pine needles over the tracks with our feet and dragging branches to obscure the gap we’d pushed it through. It was difficult in the night to know how successful we’d been. Perhaps we were making things worse, making it look too obviously like the site of a cover-up. The man would notice everything. Yet his car was down the bank, undriveable.
‘Finally we got Genevieve on the bike, her bad foot sticking out awkwardly, and we started off slowly down the road, heading in the same direction as the
man had gone on Teresa’s bike.
‘I wheeled the bike while Teresa carried the panniers which the man had stripped off.
‘We thought we could travel like this for about half an hour at the most before the risk of meeting him on his way back became too great. The plastic hosing, Teresa explained, was for siphoning the petrol. Most likely the petrol station would be closed. The man would simply take petrol from the first parked vehicle he came across in a suitable location, that is one that allowed him to steal without detection. If he was lucky, and we were not, he might come across a car, perhaps a forestry vehicle, nearby on a side-road or on a farm. Forget the petrol, he could simply break a window, touch a couple of ignition wires and steal the car. He wouldn’t have to go the five miles at all. He might be returning our way now and so we needed to keep as far to the left as possible.
‘I remember listening to all this coming from Teresa and knowing absolutely that it was extraordinary, that her composure and expertise were startling, but also understanding that it was necessary simply to listen and act on what she was saying. There was no time for marvelling. Danger made everything clear, like ice. Speaking of which, the temperature had dropped a good deal. We were cold and this seemed better than drugged by heat. The air itself was pure in our lungs, I felt. The handlebars were cold, almost sticky with cold.
‘We pushed the French woman on the bicycle down that dark road without any effort it seemed and with no thought now as to our own strangeness. Certainly I wasn’t thinking about her story. How did she get here? Who was she to the man? What was the danger he represented? No. All the normal questions were utterly suppressed. It was your mother, Paddy, who showed how it was to be done. And I understand completely now what it is to obey an order. To hear a voice. We were a tiny female army, more army than the boys we’d seen with cream on their faces in the tea rooms.
‘No one talked on that journey.
‘All our senses were trained on the distance, trying to hear or see him first in the incomplete darkness, to find some reflected glow off the road’s surface that would give us that moment’s warning which would let us fall into the shadows by the trees before we were spotted. I was conscious of a terrific headache from staring and staring ahead but I couldn’t break away.’
His mother’s cousin opened her eyes wide and blinked slowly several times as if she’d been back on that road just then. She rubbed her face, covering a yawn with both hands. Paddy asked if she wanted a rest. They could resume later, after lunch. She looked at her watch, apologising again for how long this had taken, but she thought she should finish it now. There wasn’t much left.
In the midst of many other thoughts, he was considering what was surely a tangential if not meaningless connection between the story Pip was telling and the films Dora and Medbh made about female hitchhikers in trouble. Of course Teresa had never seen these films; the connection was in his head only. Still he wondered what the two cousins would have made of them.
‘After thirty minutes of that, we left the road and pushed the bike carrying Genevieve between the trees, entering the forest for several minutes until we came to a small grassy clearing. We helped her off and she sat down, the Swanndri covering her shoulders. She rested her head against Teresa’s panniers and while we spoke about what we’d do, she fell asleep. One moment she was wide-awake and listening closely, next she was sleeping. It gave us both an idea about what she must have been through. It was enough, you know, to tell us something. Of course it was also what we both wanted to do as well and now we couldn’t. Suddenly I looked at her with wild resentment. But it never crossed my mind to leave her. She was vital. One good thing, I didn’t like listening to her voice, and now she was, thank goodness, quiet. I was still blaming her for everything, I suppose.
‘Your mother and I took turns to watch over the road. We were on a slight rise and we could see sections of the road down in a valley beneath us. We lay on our stomachs, really again like soldiers. Sentinels. And we waited for him. We did thirty-minute shifts, any longer and we would have all been asleep. Of course we couldn’t be sure we didn’t nod off occasionally. Lying on my stomach, I did feel the strong temptation to turn my head and sleep. To avoid this, we agreed to lie with sticks near our faces. If we felt droopy, the sharpness of the sticks would wake us. The cold helped too. Even with this precaution of the sticks, did we miss something? Did he bike past at just that moment? It’s possible. But we never saw him and I don’t think he came back at all.
‘You know, Paddy, when I was in the chicken coop, with my hands tied and the blindfold on, those people didn’t come back either. But they want you to think they will. That’s the trick of their terror.
‘I remember when I was on watch I kept myself alert by going over my police description of the man until that too took on a mantra-like feeling, height, weight, eyes, height, weight, eyes, and I had to stop in case its rhythm sent me off to sleep.
‘In the forest we were all awake at dawn and we went out carefully to the road. It was deserted, though not for long. A logging truck went past after a few minutes, too sudden and too huge for us to react. We watched it disappear into the valley. No one felt like moving so we simply sat down and waited. I’d imagined a kind of triumph but there wasn’t any of that feeling, none at all. There was no conversation, no planning. If the man called Duncan had appeared, he would have had us. I suppose sleep-deprived we lost our purpose.
‘Ten minutes later we heard another vehicle in the distance and Teresa and I stood up and started waving. It was a farm worker, a Maori guy, a bit older than us. He put the bike on the back with his dogs and said one of us had drawn the short straw because he could only fit two more in the cab. Teresa was the first to move, climbing into the back, and we drove into town. Actually I would have preferred the back too. The idea of talking to the Maori guy, explaining any of it, was hard to take. But he didn’t seem to care that my answers were so vague. Once he knew Genevieve was a foreigner, it seemed any explanation carried equal plausibility. We were soon bumping along in silence. I looked back through the cab’s little rear window. The dogs were ignoring Teresa and barking from time to time, their heads stuck far out in the wind. They were alive in the morning air, telling everyone about it. They were alive. And I thought, we were those dogs too.
‘When we got into the town, it was still early morning and there was hardly anyone about. The wide streets were misty and damp. Genevieve looked out the window and suddenly asked the guy to stop the truck. She pointed across the road to a walkway between houses. She said she lived down there and thanked him for the ride. I hadn’t been prepared for this and she had the door open before I could think what to do. I looked quickly at Teresa through the window. She didn’t know what was happening of course. I told Genevieve I’d help her across the road but she was now standing on the street, leaning against the door. No, she said, she’d be okay. “Thanks,” she said. She closed the door and we drove off.
‘I was stunned. Teresa knocked on the window and gave me a frantic questioning look. Behind us I saw the French woman hopping across the road and disappearing down the walkway. The Maori guy was asking where we wanted to be dropped off. “Here!” I said, pointing to a dairy we were passing which was closed. “Right here?” he said. He pulled over sharply and we heard the dogs sliding on the tray, their claws against the metal. The bike also knocked against the side, catching one of the dogs who yelped. The guy leaned his head out the window and told the dog to be quiet.
‘He got out and helped us with the bike. One of the dogs jumped down, did one mad circuit around the truck, and jumped back up again.
‘“You girls aren’t in trouble, are you?” he said.
‘“No,” said Teresa. “My aunt lives here.”
‘“What’s her name?”
‘“Polly.”
‘The lie was so swift I almost believed it myself. Maybe she did have an aunt here. Was I also related to her?
‘“Polly?” he said.
‘“Do you know her? Polly Purvis?”
‘“Purvis? There’s Purvises from Bucknell’s Bay but not any Polly.”
‘“Different ones must be,” said Teresa.
‘“Polly Purvis,” repeated the Maori guy, moving back to the cab of his truck.
‘Once the truck had gone, I biked back as fast as I could to the walkway but there was no sign of the French woman. A few of the houses now had lights on, most had their curtains closed. The lane went on for some time and I biked the length of it but Genevieve wasn’t there. I went back to Teresa.
‘What had we been imagining would happen once we reached civilisation? We’d imagined telling our story to the police. And for that, we needed Genevieve. Without her, what did we have? A man runs out of petrol and borrows a bike to get some. For that, we vandalise his car and take off with his girlfriend, or whatever she was to him. We required her terror, her evidence, her foot in the cast. Without her, we were the ones in trouble with the police.
‘Then we imagined Duncan out on the dark road, having biked ten miles, lugging the petrol, looking for us and for his car, trying to piece it together. If he had gone out there, what would he then do? Bike back most likely, another five miles. The man was somewhere in this town, furious, having lost everything.
‘It was hard to believe that the nightmare was continuing, that the nightmare had a place in broad daylight. But of course, yes, it does.
‘We had to get out of the place as fast as possible. We decided to risk going to the bus station though we figured there was a chance he’d be waiting there for us. He wasn’t. And there was an intercity bus for Rotorua that left within the hour. We didn’t know where that was. “Hot pools!” said the man behind the counter and we nodded. We bought tickets and waited in a playground near the station. I remember there was a concrete tunnel for kids to crawl through and we lay down in this, at either end, our heads almost touching, our legs dangling out the ends as the town slowly woke up.
Somebody Loves Us All Page 31
