Sole Survivor

by Derek Hansen

  Red motored home as fast as he could and copped a soaking in the process. He grabbed a spray jacket from the storage locker and huddled in close to the console and splash guard. Archie had crawled up under the bow deck, safe from the flying spray and wind. The wind was the problem, working on his wet skin and chilling him to the bone. He knew he had no need to run so fast, knew he was also wasting diesel, but he had things on his mind. Unwelcome things. When he wasn’t worrying about Bernie, either the woman or the Lieutenant Commander would sneak into his thoughts, and he couldn’t find sufficient distraction. There was no place for either of them at Wreck Bay. He turned the corner around Needles Rock and felt the wind and sea swing behind him. The temperature jumped ten degrees immediately, and his entourage of seagulls, blown from their station astern, wheeled indignantly as they tried to regain formation. They knew about the fish. Red had kept one box of snapper, which Jack had generously iced for him, and left nearly fifteen hundred pounds of fish behind to be sent to the co-op. Enough to pay his bills for months.

  The calmer water gave Red the chance to work. He began gutting and filleting his fish, splitting the big ones up the back and saving them for smoking. The gulls feasted raucously on the guts but he kept the heads and frames to make stock and fish soup. Nothing was wasted, ever. He killed the motor as he reached Wreck Bay and let the boat’s momentum carry him up to his mooring. He knew that he should make Bernie his first priority, but there was still work to be done and a logical order for doing it. His boat needed cleaning and there was no way he could leave it while one speck of fish blood or guts remained to harden in the sun and stain the paintwork. He scrubbed the decks and gunwales till they were spotless, dried them with cloths, then fastened the storm cover into place. The sun had dropped behind the ridge by the time he began the steep climb up through the bush to Bernie’s. When he reached the pohutukawas he automatically took the left fork which would take him by the Scotsman’s cabin. Angus was waiting for him, a grim, brooding presence framed in the doorway.

  ‘I saw you come in. What is it you want?’

  Red glanced up at the veranda, the demarcation line beyond which he’d never set foot, not in the Scotsman’s time anyway. ‘I’ve brought you some fish.’

  ‘Aye, I thought as much. It’s why I never went fishing myself.’ Angus took the fish and watched as his faithless Bonnie smooched up to Red. ‘Is there something I can give you in return, some gherkin, perhaps?’

  ‘No. I have to get on up the hill to see Bernie.’

  ‘How is he, the old man?’

  ‘Why didn’t you go up and see?’

  ‘Don’t you lecture me! He’s as entitled to his privacy as I am to mine.’

  ‘He needs help,’ Red shouted back in a flash of anger. ‘And he’s entitled to that!’ He’d wasted his breath. Angus had gone indoors and slammed the screen door shut behind him. Red turned and made his way back down to the pohutukawas. The muscles in his back had stiffened in the cold of the return journey, and ached under the load of fish and the steepness of the climb. He felt bad about leaving the old bloke on his own and worse for not leaving Archie. But he couldn’t go without Archie’s company two days in a row. Red put the fish box down where the track forked to Bernie’s and left Archie to mind it. He took a couple of medium-sized snapper fillets with him up the trail to the shack. He called out as he approached but there was no answer. He pushed open the screen door.

  ‘Bernie?’

  Red felt his way in the darkness, found the matches on the table and lit the hurricane lamp. One of the flagons of sherry was missing from the table so the old man had obviously got up at some time. He wandered into the bedroom and found Bernie lying on his bed, dead to the world, the half-empty flagon alongside amid gobs of toilet paper. Red knew he’d get no sense out of him that night, and that there was no point in cooking him a meal. He reached down to pull a sheet and blanket over the old man so that he wouldn’t get a chill in the night. His hand brushed Bernie’s cheek. It felt cold, unnaturally cold. He held the lamp closer to the old man’s face. His eyes were half open but they’d long given up seeing. Bernie had died alone and there was nothing Red could do about it.

  He took the lamp back out into the main room and sat down at the table, knowing he’d failed a dying man. Red put his head in his hands and let his tiredness and dismay wash over him. Archie had to see Bernie, too, so that he’d understand. He went to the door and whistled. The dog sensed what was afoot the second he stepped into the shack. Instead of trotting in to see Bernie, he stole in, nose quivering. He sniffed along the length of Bernie’s arm to confirm his suspicions and retreated to the door, pausing to look reproachfully at Red.

  Red forced himself to his feet. He hadn’t wanted the responsibility of caring for Bernie but the responsibility had found him anyway. He opened Bernie’s cupboards and grabbed as many preserving jars as he could find, relics from the time Bernie bottled the fruit from his plum, peach and nectarine trees. He opened the freezer compartment in the top of his fridge. It was filled with trays of ice kept for icing his catch. Bernie had never entirely discounted the possibility of taking his boat to the rise one final time. He took the trays out and shook the cubes onto the bench. He filled as many jars as he could with ice and sealed them. He carrried the jars into the bedroom and distributed them evenly around Bernie’s body. He pulled the blankets up over him to trap in the cold air, found two more in the wardrobe and tossed them over the bed as well. He tidied up the floor around the bed, put the top on the half-empty flagon and put it away in a kitchen cupboard. He pulled the curtains closed. Bernie had liked to sleep late and had curtains to block out the morning sun. The curtains would help keep the bach cool. Red began to feel better. He’d done his duty. The bach was tidy and Bernie was taken care of. He half filled a tin with chicken pellets and went out to round up the chooks. There was nothing else he needed to do. Once the chooks were safely in the hen house he could go home and slip back into his routine. At least until morning. He picked up the two pieces of snapper and turned down the hurricane lamp.

  Another day was drawing to a close, a day in which he’d had to confront Japanese poachers and the Navy, a day in which Bernie had died and cleared the way for the woman to claim her inheritance. His world was changing, but at least he still survived.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Rosie Trethewey was not happy. When she’d left for work that morning summer had been in full cry. The sun had beaten down from a cloudless blue sky and for once, though only briefly, she was glad the judge had taken away her driving licence. But the walk up Shelley Beach Road to the bus stop had soon tested her anti-perspirant and found it lacking. Her cotton dress had darkened beneath her arms and clung to her back. Then she’d cursed the judge and the smug policemen who’d picked on her and booked her for speeding. Even the judge had expressed surprise that her Volkswagen could go as fast as the police had claimed it had. But that was Rosie. She only had two speeds, flat out and stop.

  The afternoon had brought clouds, low and threatening, and sent temperatures plummeting. She’d shivered in offices while the airconditioning thermostats struggled to figure out what was happening, and failed. She’d spent the day talking to groups of women, trying to divine their innermost thoughts and attitudes towards toilet cleaners and bathroom disinfectants. Up until then Rosie had thought that skid marks were something immature men in fast cars left on roads. She’d learned differently and wished she hadn’t. But the job of a market researcher was to research markets, and there was a market for toilet cleaners, just as there was for most other things. She had no control over what products she was given to investigate. Nevertheless, it had been an unedifying day and it was no way to spend a life.

  ‘You’ll have to find something else to do,’ Norma insisted whenever Rosie moaned about her job. Norma was her friend and meant well but, Christ on a motorbike, what was there left for her to do?

  The rain had held off until the bus deposited her at the
top of Shelley Beach Road, then the heavens had opened. Typical. The only certain thing about the weather in Auckland was that it would change. Rosie began to run but quickly realised the futility of it. She was going to get soaked no matter what she did. She walked head on into the wind and driving rain as it howled in off the harbour. The thin cotton stuck fast to her body like a second layer of skin, defining her figure in intimate detail. Rosie didn’t care a damn. There was no one dumb enough to be out in the rain to see her and, even if there had been, she was in no mood to care. She was more concerned with the cold and her hates. Walking briskly helped fend off the chill from the wet and wind, but there was nothing she could do about her hates. She hated the judge who wouldn’t let her drive her car, and she hated the police. It was their fault she was cold and wet. She hated buses. She hated her job. She hated her flat. She hated her father, her ex-husband, stupid women who had nothing better to do than waffle on endlessly about toilet cleaners and skid marks as if they were making some worthwhile contribution to the sum total of human knowledge, and she hated dresses that rode up and bunched at the crotch.

  ‘You waste too much energy on negative thoughts,’ Norma kept telling her, but Norma was younger, better looking and had a boyfriend who was loaded. It was easy for Norma to give advice. Nature had given her everything except depth.

  Her flatmate hadn’t closed their letterbox properly the day before and all the mail was saturated. She cursed the wally in her office who told her to keep the windows of her VW open a half inch to let air circulate. Now rain circulated. Too bad. She stepped off the driveway onto the path that wound through the overgrown garden to the once grand two-storey home that had been converted to flats. Leaves tipped water over her as she brushed past unpruned bushes. The down pipes were blocked causing a sheet of water to cascade off the roof right in front of the steps leading to the front door. She groaned aloud. There was the whole front of the house but of course the guttering had chosen to overflow by the front door. She’d complained to the landlord.

  ‘Plumber’s coming to fix it next week,’ she was told, but next week never arrived and neither did the plumber. She hated the landlord, cheap old bastard, and she hated the real estate agent who’d conned her into signing a lease. She opened the door to her flat and paused, wondering how to circumnavigate her beloved kilim rugs that lay scattered across the dark stained timber floors. Then she thought of her flatmate who’d simply barge in regardless and gave up. She’d long given up protecting her things against flatmates, and considered herself lucky if nothing was stolen when they moved out.

  She closed the door behind her, switched on the light because the flat was gloomy even on a bright day, and began to strip off her wet clothes. She considered leaving them in puddles on the floor as her flatmate would but thought better of it. It was smarter to leave one big puddle to wipe up than half a dozen smaller ones. She slipped out of her clothes. Wet, cold and naked, she didn’t feel a bit beautiful, but she had the sort of figure that turned men on, particularly the one watching from the window of the house next door. She groaned at the indignity, gathered up her bundle of wet clothes and strode into the bathroom. She didn’t even bother giving her voyeuristic neighbour the finger, as she normally did. It bothered her that the man never seemed to blink.

  One good thing about the flat was that they never ran out of hot water, not even when her flatmate took his usual half-hour shower. She’d always flatted with men and still harboured the hope that one day she’d find one who was clever with his hands – in a practical way. But she was always the one who had to change washers on leaky taps, hang curtains and fix door knobs. Yet the men were better than the women she’d shared flats with in her younger days, who spent forever putting on make-up and no time at all doing housework. She’d begun to relax and let the steaming bath water do its soothing work when she noticed her towel missing. How many times had she warned her flatmate not to use her towel? But he had. Again. And once again he’d left her towel in his bedroom. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. Perhaps the bastard was working in partnership with the voyeur next door because she’d have to run the gauntlet once more. Had she left the light on? Of course she had. She hated her flatmate. He had to go. Enough was enough. She lay back in the bath and tried to relax. Perhaps the bloke next door had finally gone blind through self-abuse. That was a thought that comforted her and brought a glimmer of a smile, but only briefly. There was no escaping the reality. She was thirty-four years old, trapped in a grubby bathroom in a grubby flat by a grubby little man next door. What, she wondered, was she doing with her life? The sound of a key turning the lock on the front door dragged her away from her reveries. Her flatmate had come home.

  ‘Hi!’

  She heard him call out and drop his valise. She’d grown tired of telling him to put the bloody thing away, so now it lived just inside the front door. She heard a clump, a step, another clump. He was taking off his shoes. He’d be halfway across the kilims, probably dumping them on her indigo blue Kazak which he thought didn’t show the dirt.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the bath, you bastard, waiting for you to come home and replace the towel you nicked this morning.’

  ‘Sorry. Just get out of these things.’ She heard his belt buckle scrape on the polished floor. Trousers down. His bedroom door handle rattled. Coat hung. ‘Shit!’ Slipped taking off socks. It was all so familiar and predictable they might as well have been married instead of just flatmates. Rosie never slept with flatmates because that created too many complications, preferred to think of them as no more than rent-sharers. She heard him open her bedroom door, open a cupboard and close it.

  ‘Here he comes,’ she said softly, slipping as deeply into the bath as she could, wishing she’d been more liberal with water and soap. But it was the old story. Too little, too late, too bad.

  ‘Here’s your towel. Got a dry one.’

  ‘How very clever of you.’ He hadn’t knocked. He hadn’t discreetly opened the door a whisker and thrown the towel through the gap. No, he’d just marched straight in and stood ogling her.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘John, I am a woman. You are a man. I am naked and you are staring.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He made no move to go.

  ‘John, leave me the towel. Put it on the rail. And then please go next door and punch Merv the Perv’s lights out. And when you’ve done that, ask him to do the same to you for the same reason.’

  ‘Jesus, Rosie. Here’s your bloody towel. Don’t bother to say thanks.’ He left and closed the door behind him. Rosie didn’t move. She knew better. The door pushed open again. ‘Want a cup of tea?’ John looked vaguely disappointed.

  ‘Yes, please. Now do be a good boy and piss off.’

  ‘Did you get any milk?’

  ‘Why would I get milk? There was plenty when I left this morning.’

  ‘I used it on my cornflakes.’

  ‘John, when you’re drinking your black tea, get the paper and look through the flats-to-let section.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly what it sounds like. Piss off. Out of my bathroom. Out of my flat. Out of my life. Take as long as you like, but if you’re not gone in one hour you’ll find all your stuff out on the street.’

  ‘You can’t do that. It’s raining. Where will I go?’

  ‘John, you’re still staring. Don’t stare at me. One, I can throw you and all the rubbish you flatteringly call your things out onto the street. You know I can. We know each other well and you know I’ve done that before. Two, I don’t care if it’s raining. Three, I don’t care a damn where you go. Just go.’ She fixed him with the look he’d come to fear and sat up. He saw her breasts clearly which is what he’d wanted to see all along, but more than that he saw she meant business. He went.

  Rosie sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. John had gone by taxi, but not without argument, not without some of her things as yet undiscovered, and not with
out asking if he could borrow her car. She was alone again, and wondering if she should cry. The flat was cold and damp and there was no milk. Tomorrow she’d have to begin writing up the report based on the findings of the group discussions she’d conducted. What, she wondered, was the benchmark for removing skid marks, and did anyone really care? There was nothing to eat except limp vegetables, a can of baked beans which John had left behind because he’d put it in the wrong cupboard, and a butterscotch-flavoured Gregg’s instant pudding which needed milk. Crying seemed the preferred option when she heard knuckles do a drum roll on her door.

  ‘Come in, Norma, it’s not locked.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Norma brightly. ‘Guess what? You and me are going out to dinner. Lover boy’s had to fly down to Wellington on business. I stopped off at the bistro and reserved a table.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Rosie. ‘John rang you to see if he could sleep the night at your place.’

  ‘How’d you know?’ Norma seemed genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s good to see you, I need a friend and I’d love to go out to dinner with you because there’s nothing to eat here.’

  Norma hung her raincoat on the back of the door and flopped down on a chair opposite Rosie. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing, everything, the usual, what the hell does it matter? In a funny way I’ll miss him. Sometimes I think I’m the most useless creature on earth, then I come home and John’s here and suddenly I feel reassured.’

  ‘Negative thoughts,’ said Norma.

  ‘I’ve earned them,’ said Rosie.

  ‘There’s never any excuse for negative thoughts. You’re brainy, your whole illustrious family is brainy, and they’re all wonderfully successful.’

  ‘Except me.’

  ‘Except you. You don’t even try.’ Norma stuck a du Maurier in her mouth and lit it. She had the knack of talking while her cigarette sat glued to her bottom lip.