Rain Fall

by Ella West

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Not galloping this time.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I use my legs to push Blue forward and he starts off at a walk. The black falls in beside us, shaking her wet mane. I have more time to look at her today. She’s fit, I can see that, and compact. She’s got a small head but a huge chest, all muscle. I’m trying to remember everything I know about quarter horses, which is about zero. Cowboys ride them. They come from ranches in America, where they’re used for stock work and for competing in barrel racing.

  ‘Do you do roping?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m starting to learn, but I’m useless so far. It’s not as easy as it looks.’

  ‘Bull riding?’

  ‘I’m not that crazy.’

  ‘So what do you do? You don’t barrel race. That’s what girls do.’

  He glances at me sharply and then looks away, out to sea, obviously deciding what to tell me, maybe embarrassed he’s been caught out.

  ‘I ride saddle bronc, but I busted up my shoulder so I’m out for several months. I was meant to go to the States to compete.’

  ‘And that’s where Tassie’s owner is, isn’t she, barrel racing?’ I finish for him. ‘You were meant to go on the circuit with her but she went on her own. So you’re keeping her horse fit for her, for when she comes back.’

  He nods. ‘Her name is Stella. Tassie’s her horse.’

  Girlfriend or sister, I want to ask, or just someone you know? but I keep my mouth shut. My bets are on girlfriend. A girlfriend with a horse like Tassie and I’m on a retired racing hack. Just great.

  So with me keeping my mouth shut and Jack finally keeping his shut as well, we walk along the beach. I’m still keeping my eye on the high tide line. I haven’t forgotten why I’m out here this time.

  ‘It rains a lot in Westport,’ he says after a couple of minutes.

  ‘It’s just the wet season right now.’

  ‘When is that?’

  ‘It starts about the first of August and goes through until about the end of July.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  I look over at him and he’s grinning. He’s got the joke. Truce.

  ‘My name is Annie.’

  ‘Annie,’ he repeats, smiling even more now. ‘So you go to school here?’

  ‘Buller High. It’s the only high school here.’

  ‘I’m guessing you’re fifteen, sixteen?’

  ‘Fifteen. I’ll be sixteen in a couple of months, though. I live across the road from that house that got blown up.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Watched it happen. They had the roads blocked off, so I couldn’t get to school.’

  ‘That must have been pretty awesome.’

  ‘Woke my dad up. He does shift work, driving the coal trains.’ Which is probably not as exciting as being a detective of murder investigations around the country.

  ‘So you ride along this beach often?’

  ‘Sometimes. It’s a good place to ride when it’s so wet. Doesn’t mess up the grass.’

  ‘And also you’re looking for something.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘That’s why you rode off the other day when the helicopter arrived, and that’s what you’re doing now.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘It’s kind of obvious. You know, seeing a dead body isn’t that nice.’

  ‘Have you seen one to know?’

  ‘Just my mum’s.’

  I don’t know how to answer.

  ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,’ he mumbles.

  ‘It’s okay. I shouldn’t have asked.’

  ‘She died last year, cancer. So, you really think this dead body is washed up along here somewhere? Is that what you’re doing?’

  ‘Worth a look. This is where things end up usually. This beach or North Beach or the ones further north, that’s the way the current takes them.’

  ‘Won’t be North Beach,’ he says. ‘They’re not searching there. Someone saw the body dumped into the Orowaiti River. So it’ll be this one.’

  ‘I saw a raincoat floating down the Orowaiti. It was the day it started raining.’

  Okay, I like Jack. I admit it. Blue likes Tassie. I’m not sure if Tassie likes Blue, but what does that matter? I like Jack not in that way, but in the ‘I’m curious about him and I would like to have a go barrel racing Tassie’ way. That’s all. Except Jack competes in saddle bronc events in rodeos all around the world, and he looks like he competes in saddle bronc events in rodeos all around the world. Understand? Get the picture?

  It’s easy to imagine him wearing a cowboy hat.

  So we ride for about an hour along the beach in the drizzle and we don’t see any dead bodies, which I am kind of glad about because then I would have to explain to my parents what we were doing together when we found a body when really all we were doing was riding along the beach in the drizzle for about an hour talking about nothing, just talking, and at the end of it, when I turn to splash across Deadmans again and he goes off to where he’s parked his four-wheel-drive and horse float (which means he must be old enough to have his driver’s licence), we kiss, which on horseback isn’t that easy, especially with Tassie refusing to stay still, so then we laugh. And we swap cell phone numbers. So maybe I do like him in that way. I’m not saying. He’s got a girlfriend, remember.

  I give Blue an extra ration of hay.

  Mum has given up stripping wallpaper for the day. There’s now a sizable chunk missing of the tiny pink flowers on the white background, and I think she might have even broken through the final layer to the wallboard. Although I’m not sure if it is wallboard. It looks dusty anyway, like bugs have been eating away at it. Gross. Actually I’m not sure where Mum is. I call out to her, but there’s no reply. She could have gone for a run. She does that: gets cabin fever, as she puts it, because of the rain, and needs to blow off some steam. The rain affects people. Another week of it and the teachers will start to get grumpy at school. It always happens. Humans need sunshine. Popping vitamin D pills doesn’t quite do it.

  I find some dry clothes and put my wet ones in the ever-growing washing pile in the laundry. (Mum is obviously waiting for fine weather before she does any washing so she can hang clothes outside on the line rather than use the dryer – good luck with that one, Mum.) As I munch into a sandwich as a late lunch I open my laptop and go on Facebook, searching for Jack Robertson. He’s easy to find – he’s the Jack Robertson with spurs and a cowboy hat as his profile pic – but his page is obviously private. There’s hardly anything on it. My finger hovers over the keyboard as I wonder if I should send a friend request, and I decide maybe not. Not yet, anyway. Instead I go on Google and type his name again. He’s easy to find there too. Page after page about him competing at rodeos, winning at rodeos, breaking his collarbone at a big rodeo in Christchurch two months ago. There’s even video footage of him going down, the horse catching him with its hind hooves. It’s not easy to watch.

  So at least he wasn’t lying.

  Just out of curiosity, I type my own name into Google. Nothing, nothing at all about me. Good. I like it like that.

  I wonder if Jack is doing the same right now, but he’s still probably rubbing Tassie down, feeding her. He said he and his father are staying out at the Cape, on the other side of Westport. He would have had to put her in the float, drive there, take her out, get her sorted. Maybe in another half hour he’ll be opening his laptop, or turning on his tablet, or looking on his phone. So will he send me a friend request? But then, I didn’t tell him my surname.

  I watch the video again. Jack has on a black cowboy hat, black fringed chaps and a safety vest. He loses the hat with the horse’s first buck, but he makes it to the buzzer at eight seconds. He’s looking for the other rider, but he isn’t close enough for him to grab and the horse bucks him again at a weird angle and he goes down, the horse’s hooves making contact. Brutal.

  But he doesn’t stay down. It’s obvious he’s hurt, and hurt bad, but he
gets to his feet somehow. The other rider temporarily blocks the camera’s view as his horse and the horse Jack was on gallop past, and when they’re gone, Jack is on his feet, walking towards where his hat is lying on the dirt. He’s holding his injured arm with the other hand but he lets it go to reach down and pick up the hat, dust it off, put it back on his head. The announcer is asking everyone to cheer for him. And then the video ends.

  Okay, he’s the first boy who has kissed me. Not that it was a big deal. It was just fun. It was more bumping noses than anything because Tassie shifted her weight when Jack leaned out of the saddle and we didn’t really connect. That’s why we laughed. We both laughed. So it wasn’t even a proper kiss. Even though the intention was there, at least from him it was. So first kiss, age fifteen (some girls around here are already pregnant at that age), and it was on horseback, with a guy who might have a girlfriend, who is currently on the other side of the world. What does all that say about me?

  Mum comes home, supermarket bags in her hands (the other cure for cabin fever, according to her, is chocolate).

  ‘Look who I found,’ she calls out, and Samantha pops her head round my bedroom door.

  ‘Okay if I come in?’ Sam asks, and comes in anyway. She’s been to my place before – usually courtesy of Mum, who thinks I need more friends – so she knows what’s what. She flops herself down on my bed and stares at the ceiling. ‘It’s just dead boring at home.’

  ‘It’s dead boring here too,’ I tell her.

  ‘Come on, you have houses that blow up across the road and get you out of school for the day.’

  ‘Besides that.’

  ‘You still pissed off about the basketball game?’ Sam has dark wavy hair and she does the bedraggled look perfectly. She’s wearing the latest sports clothes, no doubt bought in Christchurch, because no shops here stock them.

  ‘I should have been there.’

  ‘Wasn’t your fault. We were probably going to lose anyway, whether you were there or not.’

  Thomas dispels the awkwardness perfectly by sauntering in at this point. He arches his back, demanding a rub, which I dutifully give him; then he sidles over to Sam to check out if she knows the Thomas-cat-etiquette protocol. Sam does, and adds a few extras, such as scratches behind the ears and tickles just above the nose. Not only can Sam suck up to my mother, she does the same with our cat.

  ‘So, can we go look at it?’ she asks.

  ‘Look at what?’

  ‘The blown-up house, of course.’

  ‘That. Suppose so.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t already been over there?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘We drive past it all the time. You can see it from the road.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘It’s my neighbour’s house.’

  ‘It’s not trespassing.’

  I give up. At least now I know why she came round to see me. It wasn’t just to harass me about basketball.

  We grab our coats and go out the front door, avoiding Mum unpacking supermarket shopping in the kitchen. The road is empty when we cross it, the rain steady. Pete’s driveway still has police tape strung over it. We straddle it and walk up the gravel.

  ‘Not much left,’ Sam says, stating the obvious. She’s sucking a strand of wet hair.

  I wander around to where the front door once was. It’s kind of still there, just in large splintered, blackened pieces, most of it lying on the concrete steps. The steps seem to be the only part of the house that has survived undamaged. Sam has already climbed inside. She’s standing there, looking around. There’s no floor – it’s gone, charred and blown up – so her feet are on the ground, between the concrete piles.

  ‘It’s hard to work out what was where,’ she says.

  ‘I think you’re in what was the living room,’ I tell her.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because at night you used to be able to see the TV through the window.’

  She seems to accept my answer, because she doesn’t reply. Minutes later she’s holding up a large blackened piece of plastic. ‘Part of the TV, do you reckon?’

  ‘Could be. We probably shouldn’t be touching stuff, just in case.’

  ‘The police have finished, otherwise there would be a guard here or something. It’s fine.’

  I think about Jack’s dad. Would he have stood where I’m standing? Searched through the remains? Or did he just read the reports? There were swarms of police here afterwards, on the Thursday afternoon and when I was at school yesterday, so I don’t know what happened then. So maybe. Then again, maybe not.

  ‘The guy who lived here, have they found him?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Sam’s rummaging through the wreckage at the back of the house, what looks like was once the kitchen. She holds up pots, a frying pan, broken plates. A fridge is lying on its side.

  ‘Everything is just destroyed. There’s nothing of any value at all,’ she says.

  ‘Is that why we’re here? You hoping to pinch stuff?’

  ‘No, although if there was, could sell them on Trade Me, I suppose.’

  ‘Probably not a good idea.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say where I got them from. No, I was just curious. You know how they talk about a blast pattern, how you can tell where the explosion was? But you can’t tell anything here. It’s just one big mess.’

  I look around again, trying to work out if what she is saying is true. There’s burnt wood, furniture, destroyed belongings everywhere. I can’t figure out anything from it. It’s just a charred, soaking-wet disaster zone. Coming over here, I’d half hoped I could have saved something for Pete, maybe a framed photo of his mum, some item of clothing, anything. But there is nothing to salvage. Sam’s right. Everything is one big mess.

  It’s not what you expect to see when you’re invited around by family friends for morning tea on a Sunday, on your dad’s day off, even if you are told to bring gumboots. The Brown’s farm is at the bottom of Mount Rochfort. My dad first met the Browns when his train bowled one of their cows. It was their fault – the cow shouldn’t have been on the railway line but it had broken through one of the fences, and Dad couldn’t have stopped, however much he tried. It takes a lot to stop a fully loaded coal train. The cow hadn’t done any damage to the train, but the train had done a lot of damage to the cow. Dad didn’t need to go and apologise to them afterwards, but he did, when his shift ended, and they have been friends ever since. Harry has taken Dad and me deer shooting up above the farm, and Mrs Brown, Di, is a great cook.

  But when we get there it’s not scones or biscuits. Not yet, anyway. Instead it’s gumboots on, raincoats on, let’s go for a walk. Mum and I share confused glances, but do as we’re told. Dad likes getting out in the bush (it’s a dairy farm, but there’s a lot of bush too) so he strides ahead alongside Harry, with Di and Mum and me following. Di and Mum are chatting about the cows, the weather (when will it stop raining, if it will stop raining) and Di’s grandchildren (she has seven, so she has a lot to talk about) as we walk along the muddy track. Harry has the gate open for us, waiting, and he does it back up after we walk through. In the paddock are the cows. They’re golden Jerseys with big brown eyes and they stop eating the long grass as we walk by. Di reaches out and gives one a pat. The cows don’t seem to mind the rain, but you can see where their hooves have sunk into the soft ground. Harry plants his gumboot on the single-wire fence on the edge of the paddock and we all step over it carefully. I know not to touch any of the fences here with my hands – they’re electric and getting a shock from them is not much fun. They have to be electric, because that way the cows stay in their paddock with just one wire. The cows know not to touch it – they get a bigger shock with their four feet compared with our two. And it’s just one wire because in a flood (it does flood here, I’ve seen it) it’s easier to cut one wire to let the cows out so they don’t drown than pull a whole fence to pieces.

&nb
sp; Over the wire is a patch of bush. We crash through it, single file, wet ferns in our faces, branches of rimu and rata and kahikatea. The rain sounds different falling on the bush. Noisy. And then, through the branches, we all catch a glimpse of it, what we are here to see. I’m pretty sure Mum gasps. Dad says something, but I’m just silent, staring. As I said, it’s not what you expect to see in a paddock on a dairy farm in the rain when you’ve been invited around for morning tea.

  ‘They didn’t want to leave it at the airport over the weekend,’ Harry says.

  ‘They couldn’t leave it at the airport, you mean,’ Di says.

  ‘Worried something would happen to it?’ Dad asks.

  ‘They’ve been having a lot of problems lately.’ Harry sighs.

  It’s big, I mean really big. It’s white and has eight rotors and they’re tied down to big stakes which have been stuck into the grass.

  ‘It’s impressive up close, isn’t it?’ Dad says.

  ‘Certainly is.’

  I walk around it, looking up at it, as I listen to them talk.

  ‘I can’t get over how huge it is,’ Mum says.

  ‘The lifting power it has is incredible. It can pick up several tonne at a time.’

  ‘So they’ve hidden it on your farm? For the weekend?’ Dad says.

  ‘They did ask first,’ Di says. ‘Of course we said yes.’

  ‘How many other people know it’s here?’

  ‘Just you, us, the helicopter pilots obviously. We gave them a lift into town afterwards.’

  ‘You’re not worried someone will find out, do some damage to the place? You are in the middle of nowhere out here,’ Dad says.

  ‘No point locking gates, is there,’ Harry says.

  ‘Annie, no Snapchat or Facebook or anything,’ Mum calls out to me.

  ‘There’s no cell phone reception out here anyway,’ Di says. ‘And she’s a sensible girl.’

  ‘No, Mum,’ I yell from the other side of the helicopter. It’s so big I have to yell. I’ve heard about these helicopters, seen them the odd time flying high in the distance, read about how vandals have been targeting them. Although they’re not vandals – they’re not some kids with a spray can looking for something to tag. These are greenies, ecowarriors, whatever they call themselves. They think because they’re saving the trees, and therefore somehow the world, they have the right to vandalise a helicopter. Loosen bolts that hold the rotors together, contaminate the fuel, endanger the crew. Peoples’ lives are less important than a rimu tree that has been growing for hundreds of years and is now about to die anyway. The logging crews take the tree, lifting it out with the helicopter so no other tree is damaged in the process, and then they replant the area with more rimu trees. The light let in by the removal of the old tree revitalises the bush. It’s completely sustainable. But the greenies want it stopped. Just like they want the coalmines closed. I don’t understand it. Coalmining and logging means jobs, lots of jobs, and if there’s anything the West Coast needs right now it’s jobs. Sometimes it feels as if we’re in the middle of a war.