by Stacy Gregg
CHAPTER 11
The Riddle of the Sphinx
We have wood pigeon stew for breakfast and I offer to do the dishes, but Helen says no and just stacks them on top of the bench where they were before. I don’t think those dishes have ever seen a hot tap and soap, and I think about what Willard Fox said to me that first day we met, about how OCD doesn’t always mean you like to be clean.
She’s not so scary this morning. I watch the way she shambles about the house, fetching me the stew. I see her quiet rituals. The way she always has to walk in a certain direction round the table, making a certain number of clacks with her cane against the furniture. When I’m walking down the hall and my backpack accidentally nudges over a pile of newspapers she comes almost running to fix the stack and mutters rhyming words to herself, nodding her head as she rearranges them so that they’re back in position exactly as they were before. I realise it was a big thing for her last night to let me sit in her chair, and probably an even huger thing for her to move those newspapers so that I had somewhere to sleep, and I’m grateful.
In the hallway, with Helen walking behind me, I pause next to the stacks of newspapers, and look at the dusty pile of Horse & Pony magazines. I reach out to pick one up and then I see the look on Helen’s face and I stop myself. I glance down at the magazine, its cover faded by age, and I read the date on the top corner. It’s from 1972.
“Did you have a horse?” I ask Helen.
“Of course,” she laughs as if I should know this. “More than one.”
“Did you compete?”
Helen looks serious. “I remember, I would get so nervous the night before a competition, I couldn’t sleep.”
“I get nervous in the start box,” I say, “but once I’m out on that cross-country course with my horse, it’s like my mind is clear and I’m totally focused. It’s the best feeling in the world.”
Helen steps up beside me and looks down at the magazine stack, at the picture on the front cover of the magazine sitting on the top. It’s a girl on a black horse jumping a massive show jump. Her eyes are looking to the left, so it’s clear that she’s already focused on the next fence, and the horse is tucking his feet up neatly, and she’s wearing a velvet hard hat and a hairnet and white gloves. They look very professional.
“I loved to ride,” Helen says wistfully. “Horses are good for making the bees go quiet.”
The bees? Did she really just say that?
A pained expression passes over her face and Helen briskly shakes her head as if she’s rearranging the jumble of thoughts inside. I know the conversation is over. “I have hay in the shed,” she says, heading for the back door. “Pegasus will be needing his breakfast.”
That’s what she calls Gus. The weird thing is, I don’t recall ever telling Helen his real name.
“Pegasus, the winged horse from Parnassus,” she coos as she watches Gus devour the hay. When he’s down to the last scraps of the hay biscuit, she gathers the scattered remains up off the ground for him and feeds him by hand. I can see her relishing the feeling of his velvety lips against her palm with the joy of a small child. Then once it’s all gone, Helen strokes his muzzle and lowers her own head to meet his and whispers, “Where are your thunderbolts now, Pegasus? Have you used them all up or are there more to come? Will you rock the earth again or is your work done?”
This is how she speaks. Like everything is a riddle. She reminds me of the Sphinx in the Greek myths. The Sphinx would stop travellers on the road and ask them a riddle, and if they got the answer right they would be allowed to live, but if they got it wrong the sphinx would eat them. It was always the same question and no one ever got it right until this guy Oedipus, so everyone got eaten, I guess. And the riddle was this:
What creature has four legs in the morning, two legs at midday and three legs in the evening?
The answer is: man. We crawl on all fours as a baby, walk upright on two legs when we grow up, and then when we’re old, like Helen, we use a walking stick as our extra leg to make three.
I don’t know how old Helen is. I asked her how long she’d been living here in this house and who built it.
“It’s my house,” she said. “I’ve been here since the start, I was here when the trees were saplings.” Which sounds impressive but what does it actually mean? And anyway, this is forestry land so surely some of these trees here are young, younger than me even, let alone ancient old Helen?
“I’m twelve,” I tell her, even though she hasn’t asked. She never asks me anything normal. “I’m going to Kaikoura. There’s a boat coming and I’m going to evacuate with the others.”
“Kaikoura,” Helen shakes her head. “Glittering city on the sea.” I don’t know what she’s talking about because Kaikoura isn’t a city, it’s got like maybe a couple of thousand people and even fewer when the tourist season isn’t happening.
“Do you ever go into Kaikoura? For food, and stuff?” I ask. The shops there must be the nearest to the Hundalees.
“Oh no!” Helen shakes her head vigorously. “I don’t need the shops. I kill what I eat.” And she raises her hands and extends her left arm and draws the right one back, miming a hunter drawing taut the string on a bow and letting loose the arrow.
“What do you kill?” I ask, thinking of the wood pigeon in her pot and wondering what other endangered species might be getting culled and cooked up by this frail little old woman.
Helen’s eyes go wide at this question as if she is remembering something very exciting. “Yesterday,” she says, “I shot a leopard.”
OK, now she’s officially crossed the border to crazy town. This is New Zealand – there are no wild cats here. Certainly there are no leopards roaming the hills of the Hundalees.
“What did it look like?”
“It was this big …” Helen spreads her arms out wide then slowly brings her hands closer together, so that she’s holding them the length of a bread loaf apart. It’s as if she’s describing a fish she’s caught, and it has just shrunk from a marlin to a trout.
“A leopard with a serpent’s tail.”
And I don’t know why, but I know straight away, without a doubt, who she’s talking about.
“Moxy!” I say. “Was it a cat? A dark brown cat?”
“Noooo,” Helen is adamant. “Not a cat! Funny-looking creature. A leopard, but small, with no fur.”
“That’s her!” I say. “That’s my cat!”
And then I think of the pot of stew on the stove. Did I just eat my own cat for dinner last night? Was that Moxy, or was that wood pigeon? I’m almost scared to ask the next question.
“Did you kill her?”
Helen looks at me, clearly insulted. “I am a very good huntress. I don’t miss.”
I feel sick with despair until she says, “I saw the arrow fly clean from my bow, but the little leopard was swift and when I hunted in the bushes my arrow was there, held firm in the wood of a tree.”
So maybe she did miss! Moxy might still be alive.
***
I saddle up Gus as fast as I can after that. I’m trying to think like Moxy. Where would she be now? She’s a smart cat and she won’t have hung around after the near miss with the bow and arrow. Helen says she was running in the direction of the Stag and Spey – so that’s the way we will go from here.
I’m tying the sleeping bag and the tent behind the saddle when the aftershock hits. Jock senses its surge before I do and suddenly starts up barking, and then I hear the boom and a moment later the train-rumble beneath my feet. I look down and see the pine needles dancing, bouncing around like Mexican jumping beans. It’s as if the earth below is trying to shrug the rug off its back. Then the trembling becomes more intense, a proper shaking, and I lose my balance and fall against Gus and cling to him.
I stay there with my arms round his neck, holding on. The rumble is strong this time, it shakes us back and forth and up and down at the same time. It reminds me of that time we went to Auckland and Dad and I went on
the rollercoaster, the way the force of the turns pressed us hard back into our seats and then loosed us again so that we were compressed upwards into the straps of our harnesses. Only there’s no harness to hold me here and I’m struggling against the ground to stay upright.
And then it’s over. I stand there and cling to Gus for a long time, breathing hard, waiting for the huge adrenalin surge that’s filling my system to normalise a little. When truly deep primal fear strikes you, it’s as if all your senses become more awake, and at that moment as I hold on to Gus I can smell the sweetness of him, that horsey smell that all my life has felt like home to me. It soothes me more than any ritual could do. It keeps the bees quiet. I realise at this moment that all this time I thought I was saving Gus by bringing him with me, but I didn’t admit to myself that I needed him too. Long before the earthquake, my world was already falling apart. And through it all, my father’s death and my OCD, I have had my arms round Gus every day, and he has held me upright, my own two legs combining with his four legs to become pillars of strength together. At my worst moments, Gus and I have been as one. We stand together on six legs. The sphinx has a new answer to her riddle.
When I finally feel like the earth has definitely stopped moving and it’s safe, I let Gus go. I tie his reins to the rope attached to the tree and I go back inside the house.
“Helen?” I can’t see her at first but I can hear her in the gloom at the kitchen end of the hallway, muttering dark incantations. She’s behind a stack of magazines on her hands and knees, repiling the copies of Horse & Pony that have been knocked into a state of shambles by the aftershock.
I come to join her and bend down to help, but she turns and snarls at me like a wild animal.
“Don’t touch!” she growls.
I leap back. I can feel the anxiety radiating off her. She’s changed completely and the gentleness is gone from her. Is this how I am when my anxiety grips me?
I wait until she has the stack back together. She’s fussing with it, turning the magazines over and restacking them, not satisfied, until the complex matrix of her OCD is restored and they are precisely the way they need to be. I can almost hear the bees in her brain from here, they’re so loud.
I stand there in the dark of the hall, and I feel sick. I can’t just leave her in this house alone like this.
“Helen?” I say. “Why don’t you come with me to Kaikoura? You can come on the boat and evacuate with us, come to Christchurch …”
Helen doesn’t look up from the floor. I see her body stiffen. “Have to stay here.” She carries on stacking the magazines. “Too loud out there. Too shiny, too many bees …”
She looks distressed and I know I’m upsetting her with all this talk of leaving so I let it go.
Helen fusses with the magazines some more and then she looks up at me. “You stay. Stay with me, Evie? I’ll teach you to be a huntress …” She looks up at me with haunted eyes. “Teach you how to be safe.”
In this moment I can see my fate. I can see myself as Helen, allowing my fears to trap me as hers did in a house like this, to grow and multiply gradually, day by day, until one morning you wake up and you simply think, I cannot leave this place. And then you are there for good, like a Greek hero in a myth where he’s forever pushing a boulder up a hill, or drinking water but cannot slake his thirst.
And I think of Willard Fox and what he did for me.
If Helen of the Hundalees had been to see Willard Fox when she was twelve, I don’t think she’d be stuck here in this madhouse with the newspapers stacked almost to the ceiling and the smell of mildew and coal smoke. No one ever gave her the weapons to fight back. But Willard gave them to me, and I’m using them. I’m not going to be trapped forever.
When my bedroom got destroyed by the earthquake, most of the symbols of my OCD were demolished too. I’ve been letting go more and more each day, but Willard Fox was right. It’s like rust. And I still have a little bit of the rust with me. I strap it on to my back each day. Unzip and zip, unzip and zip. Pen, takeaway container, glasses and notebook. I feel the pull of my rituals as if they’re magnets and I am iron. They don’t want me to let them go.
I don’t want to let go either. That’s the thing – I truly wasn’t strong enough at first, even when I left Willard Fox’s rooms that day. But this journey has made me strong, and Willard Fox is right. My powers are real now. Not the way they were before when I thought I could bring earthquakes and ruin the world. I am not a god. But I am me. I am Evie Violet Van Zwanenberg and I can do this. I’m in charge, OCD. I’m taking the reins.
I wait until Helen has sorted the pile and gone back to the kitchen before I pick up my backpack. I don’t want her to see what I’m about to do because the last thing I want is to upset Helen by unbalancing her universe. This is about me and she doesn’t need to know.
In the spare room where she’s stacked the old newspapers back up on the sofa again, I look around for the perfect hiding place. I have to lift down two boxes of glass jars until I find a box with enough space to squeeze the backpack inside right at the very bottom of a stack. I bundle it up tight and stuff it in and then I restack the boxes where they were before, arranging them so precisely – I have experience in these matters – that I am certain Helen will never suspect it is there.
As I walk out of the room I cast one last glance behind me. Then I take a deep breath and I let it go.
It’s buried there forever now, my backpack and its contents, like a hidden treasure in a dusty tomb. I won’t be going back for it. I don’t need it any more.
CHAPTER 12
Creatures of Poseidon
We ride all day. That indentation at the top of Gus’s rump where Moxy once rode remains empty. Sometimes I turn round and expect to see her sitting there, my most inquisitive companion, her eyes focused on the trees, looking for birds. Each of us go through our lives like that – looking for the things that matter to us, failing to see things that are really there.
I see more now than I did before. The journey has made my senses keen. At nightfall we’ve made it to the Stag and Spey and as I set up camp I hear nature settling into its nocturnal cadences, the haunting call of the morepork, the rattle of the cicadas, the soft rustling of the hedgehogs on their evening hunt.
My senses still do not extend as far as Jock’s however. My dog is the fail-safe – he knows when the aftershocks are coming. My canine alarm system. When he growls out that tremulous bark, I know it will only be a few moments before the “boom” comes and the ground begins to shake. Gus senses the rumbles too. I’ve seen how his nostrils go wide seconds before they strike. He’ll inhale the air with a ragged snort, his ears pricked and tail raised, and for that moment he’ll look like a magnificent Arabian stallion and not at all like a 14.2 pony from Parnassus.
I am anxious to leave as soon as it’s dawn. The ship arrives in Kaikoura tomorrow and we still have miles to cover, our band of three. I snuggle down in my sleeping bag with Jock pressed up against my side. He’s a big dog, but I’ve realised now that it was Moxy who somehow took up the most room, always squashed up beside my chin, burrowing in for warmth, purring her heart out. We found no sign of her as we left the forests of the Hundalees. Every time I heard a rustling in the trees I hoped it was her. Now, I’ve realised that our chances of finding her before Kaikoura are like a needle in a haystack. Still, I haven’t given up hope that she’s alive. She could survive as a wild cat, I guess. She’s resourceful and a good hunter. She doesn’t need me to put biscuits in her bowl and although I try not to think about the fact that I’ll never see her again, in the back of my mind it makes me feel better to know that of all my animals, she’s the one who can most take care of herself out there alone.
When I open the tent flap at daybreak the sky is dark blue tinged with soft pink. Red morning, sailors’ warning. The rain that struck us in the Hundalees still hangs over the mountains behind us, but when I look in the direction we’re going, towards the sea, the sky is clear.
As soon as the grassy verges at the side of the road are wide enough and even enough underfoot, I urge Gus into a canter. It’s like sitting astride a rocking horse the way he moves, lilting and gentle. Gus never seems to tire. His Arab blood was made for such long journeys, refined over the centuries across the barren desert terrain. He’s a descendant of the nomadic mares of Al Khamseh. Distance is his birthright.
We’re cantering along the verge when I see a fallen poplar tree up ahead. In a rush of blood, I don’t slow Gus down to go round it, I put my legs on and I ride him onwards. Gus sees the tree too, and when he realises my intentions his ears prick. We come in on a strong forward stride and he picks his feet up neatly. We clear it and canter on. And despite his tiredness Gus shakes his head, trying to loosen the reins and take the bit and run. I look for something else, another fallen tree, a ditch, anything we can jump. There’s a cattle ramp to the side of the road ahead and we canter up that and then jump down the other side. Jock follows and jumps too. For an old dog, he keeps pace pretty well, tongue lolling happily out, paws moving swiftly at twice the speed of Gus’s strides to stick with us. I worry that the speed I’m setting now will exhaust him, but then at one point my dog spies a rabbit in a nearby field and bolts after it until he’s just a black and white speck in the distance. If he has the energy to work up enough bloodlust for a hunt, then he’s fit enough to make it to the coast at my pony’s heels.
When we cross the last ridge we look down to the coast and finally I glimpse the sparkling blue of the sea in the far distance. I feel my heart surge – Kaikoura! I think of Helen and her “glittering city” and at that moment it is shining in front of me. Today the ship will come into port in South Bay to pick up the evacuees. This is what we’ve made the journey for. So I keep cantering on the downhill roads, but all the time I’m aware of the tiny feline shadow over my shoulder, the vacant space where Moxy once sat up here behind me.
