The Last Guests

by JP Pomare

  ‘What are the numbers?’

  ‘They’re dates. That way we will know how old you are each time so we can see how much you’ve grown.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘See, you used to be this tall when you were four, then you were this tall at four and a half, then this tall when you turned five.’

  ‘Then I grew a lot. Look how big the gap is.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t see you for a couple of years here. Then again up here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you were with your mum then.’

  Cain’s voice breaks my memory. ‘Lina, I asked you.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. But still the sadness grips me. It’s not just the marks. It’s also those messages. I fear the worst. My emotions are short-circuiting. ‘It’s nothing, don’t worry.’ Cain didn’t know the significance.

  ‘That’s why I asked if I could sand,’ he says, frustrated.

  •

  The road out towards town undulates through the lakes area. Cain is silent as we pass by the Green Lake, Lake Rotokakahi. It’s tapu, forbidden to swim in and remains mostly undisturbed, flat and much smaller than Tarawera. Once, Cain had pulled over when tourists were paddling in the emerald waters. He’d whistled and waved for them to come in. I had listened from the car as he calmly explained this was the only lake in the area where swimming was forbidden. Without complaint, the tourists took their towels and their van and moved on. Perhaps if it had come from a less imposing figure, they might not have listened but that’s the effect of the tattoos, the scars.

  Next we come around beside the Blue Lake, Lake Tikitapu. Small and round as a coin. Picnickers fill the crescent of sand at its side. I glance at Cain, see the lines of tension in his brow, his focus on the road.

  We stop at the lake store with its unreliable opening hours and equally unreliable manager, Henry, who sells fishing flies and tackle beside pick ’n’ mix candy. He has a teddy-bear face and an accent a long way from home; my guess is Bulgaria, Cain’s is Denmark. Hard to say now; two decades in New Zealand will begin to flatten even the hardest of vowels.

  When the bell over the door chimes, he looks up from the freezer.

  ‘Look who is in town,’ he says, closing the glass lid and handing an ice-cream over the counter to a waiting child. A squawk of delight.

  ‘Lina. Haven’t seen you guys in a while?’ he says, rolling the sleeves of his plaid shirt back down. ‘And…’ he pauses, searching his memory. My phone vibrates. A sharp prick at the back of my neck.

  ‘Cain,’ Cain says beside me. ‘My name’s Cain.’

  I glance down at the message on my phone.

  Why don’t you guess?

  I feel sick. It can’t be Daniel, how would he have my number?

  ‘That’s right, Cain. Welcome, welcome. Down for the weekend?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘We’re just setting our place up for WeStay actually.’

  Henry jabs at something stuck between his molars with his thumb before speaking again. ‘Mm, a few people doing that with their places these days.’

  There’s a snort of derision from someone at one of the tables in the half of the store that functions as a cafe. I turn back, see an old man sitting alone. Fishing hat on, paper opened in front of him. His shirt hasn’t seen the inside of a washing machine in some time. When I meet his eyes, he doesn’t look away. His lips are curled down in a snarl beneath his long, hooked nose. I glance away to a couple at another table, who are looking down at a map on their table. She’s white blonde and he has that backpacker fuzz over his cheeks and jaw. Do they leave their warm European countries with scraggy beards or grow them when they arrive here?

  ‘We might grab a bite,’ Cain says. I turn back.

  ‘Yeah, go for it. Take a seat.’ Henry flicks a hand towards the tables. ‘I’ll bring over menus.’

  The eyes of the old man in the bucket hat keep falling on us. Cain has his back to him but if he could see the looks being sent our way he would say something, I’m sure. I turn my attention back to my phone, rereading the messages before deleting them.

  A little while later, Henry places our food before us. ‘Bon appetit,’ he says, giving a tiny bow.

  I can barely eat. Cain finishes my salad. The old man gets up from his table. As he is paying at the counter, I overhear him speaking to Henry, his voice deliberately raised. ‘More pricks from the city buying up houses and renting them out, eh?’

  ‘Easy, Russ. No one’s breaking any laws.’

  We didn’t buy the house.

  ‘Did you say something?’ Cain calls, turning back. A moment of eye contact. The old man raises his hands as if to say, nothing to see here, then folds the paper under his arm and leaves. ‘Rude bastard,’ Cain says, his eyes fixed on the man’s back as he departs. The tourists are watching on, quietly passing comments between each other in another language. Henry collects our plates and we head into the groceries section. My mind is still reeling from the messages, my heart thumping from the confrontation. Cain asks me which red to buy.

  ‘Pinot,’ I say. ‘A nice red to have by the fire.’

  ‘’Bout fifty percent higher prices here than in town,’ Cain says out the side of his mouth. I can’t smile or react. I just grab a few bottles while Cain picks out some handmade soap and scented candles.

  ‘Why are you so uninterested?’ he says abruptly. ‘This was your idea.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, puffing out my cheeks. ‘A little under the weather today.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Seems it.’

  When we climb into the car, Cain places the paper bag of wine and soap on the back seat. I reach for my phone again, no new messages. But there is something else chewing through me like a parasite. I think about it now as Cain reaches over and squeezes my hand, those brown eyes fall on mine before he starts the car. I’d been careful, I used a fake name, gave all fake details and only ever contacted him through the app. I never gave him anything that could connect him to me. So if it is Daniel, how does he have my number? And what else does he know?

  DEADLY SAS RAID IN AFGHANISTAN UNDER SCRUTINY

  Pressure is mounting on the New Zealand government to call an inquiry into a botched special forces raid in Afghanistan that left a family of three civilians dead, including a six-year-old child. The raid was planned by NZSAS and carried out with US helicopter support.

  A report published this week alleges the NZSAS staged the raid to retaliate for the death of a New Zealand soldier earlier that week. No insurgents were killed in the raid. The NZ military maintains the killings were justified and in self-defence.

  Elders from the village, along with insiders within the military community, have expressed dismay at the needless killings. Many have suggested it heightened tensions and undermined trust for foreign agents operating in the war-torn country.

  Amnesty International has also called for a probe and five New Zealand human rights lawyers announced this Friday that they were representing affected Afghan villagers. They supported the idea of an independent investigation and have publicly called for anyone within the special forces community to speak up about what they may have witnessed.

  Another prominent lawyer called the killings ‘a textbook war crime with no ambiguity whatsoever’.

  FIVE

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN a house and a home can be something as insignificant as the smell. New, sterile places don’t have their own smell. The lake house does. It’s something I barely noticed growing up; it was a scent that belonged to me. Old pine, musty carpets. A scent I’ll always associate with the happy moments of my childhood. But now the paint fumes have chased the smell away. I know it will come back, but what if it’s like those marks showing my increasing height, gone forever?

  The large house echoes as Cain closes a cupboard in the kitchen downstairs. It’s still light out, and he continues working to get the place ready. It’s becoming a house, not a home. All traces of life sanded down, polished away. He’d already cut down
the snapped rope from my old tyre swing, the rotting tyre was already in the trash. He’d found new rope in the basement, hitched it to the branch and used an old piece of timber from the basement to fashion a seat. ‘It’s not a tyre, but it’ll do,’ he’d said.

  My mind is still reeling from the messages. Keeping busy, distracting myself by cleaning doesn’t seem to help; new linen sheets go on the beds, pillows stacked against the headboards in each room. I tie the curtains back so far that sheets of light pass through the windows and drape the bed in the master bedroom. I flatten the duvet with my palms, snap a loose thread with my fingernails. While I reach up to sweep the spider webs in the corners, I can hear Cain drilling into wood, attaching a lock to the basement door. Grandpa’s old dinghy sits dusty and unused out in the padlocked shed. That’s where it will stay – it needs a bit of work to get it running again so we won’t be letting the guests use it and it saves us searching for the key to the shed.

  The guests. Those invisible, idealised travellers.

  After tidying, I sit downstairs at the kitchen bench, my phone nearby, never out of reach now. I’m thinking about the text message, I’m thinking about Daniel and what I did. I’m thinking about my ring. There’s a tension in my chest. Guilt? Yes. Fear? Possibly. It feels like I’m bracing for a blow. The moment that will destroy my marriage.

  The growl of the lawnmower fills the yard and enters the house as a low hum. Cain bought a new spark plug down for it.

  My phone vibrates on the kitchen bench, it might as well be a fire alarm given the way my heart leaps. I rush to it. Another message from that number.

  Sorry to text like this out of the blue, I was trying to flirt but it’s not working. I’m away this weekend, down in Rotorua actually. But I will be in Auckland next week. I’ve got something for you.

  Rotorua. A short drive from here. Is that a coincidence? There is something mildly threatening about it. I’m so focused on the words on my screen I fail to notice the absence of sound coming from the backyard. Not until the door opens and Cain steps inside. I jam my phone in the pocket of my jeans. He goes to the sink for a glass of water, gulps it down before turning back to me.

  ‘What?’ he says, with a funny smile.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re staring at me with that odd look again.’

  I shake my head. ‘I was daydreaming.’ I glance through the doors, across the mowed grass and over the flat lake. Mirror-still, blue sky reflected; the distant mountains and the valley running between, it almost opens up enough for the sky to touch the water and form an hourglass.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I can see that. You’re not yourself today, Quin.’ I used to love it when he used my maiden name, like I was in the military too. It’s lost its charm these days.

  What would he do if he saw the message? What would he do if he knew where I was last Thursday night? It was selfish, of course it was, despite how much I tell myself otherwise. I think about Trent Skelton, who served with Cain. I recall the media images of the siege when he’d barricaded himself in his house with his family. How he turned his rifle on himself before the police could reach him. War does strange things to people. Cain has changed in the time I’ve known him. Death, seeing death and killing would change anyone. He once told me about the Australians he served with, how those without a kill were forced to execute captive insurgents to ‘blood’ them. My instincts tell me Cain has killed before. He saw enough combat and came back a different man to the one I met at the student bar in Auckland city all those years ago.

  He didn’t fit in there with his military clipped hair and his tight, unsmiling mouth. He was also older, much older. In his late twenties. A man. I was ready for someone different after those clumsy, privately educated boys in medicine. Grandpa had recently died, it was around the time I dropped out of medicine and started studying for the ambulance service instead. My ID was stuffed down my bra and at some stage during the night it slipped out, through my dress to the floor. Cain had spotted it. He’d walked the bar until he found a face that matched the one on the card. The cover band had just started a version of ‘When You Were Young’ by The Killers, the snare sizzling, the rasp of a distorted guitar. Punters flooded to the dance floor. ‘I found you,’ he said, holding up my ID.

  I patted my chest as if the ID might impossibly still be there. The lines about waiting for a beautiful boy and being saved from your old ways were playing.

  ‘Apt, this song,’ I yelled, taking the ID from his hand.

  ‘What?’

  I leant close to his ear, could smell him, not his cologne, but him. This alone set him aside from the crowds of boys soaked in body spray and perfume. ‘I’m going to buy you a drink to say thanks.’

  Then the singer sang about closing your eyes and seeing the place where you used to live and I felt suddenly effervescent. I can see now why they call it falling in love. It was as though I’d stumbled and found myself wanting to spend every waking moment with this man. That’s how sudden it was. Maybe I was already in love that night. If that’s possible. Just the idea of him. A soldier in the army. Training for the SAS. Elite, fit, someone who could protect me. So utterly different to my mother’s men. He grew up outside of the city, down near where I’d spent so much of my childhood.

  We stayed together through his first deployment, committing to long distance – late nights and early mornings with a pixelated version of my boyfriend in a dusty war-torn country on the other side of the world. Then Cain proposed. It was on a call. He stepped back from his laptop, and dropped to one knee. There was no engagement ring, we were supposed to pick it together but by the time he got back it seemed like a needless expense and he already had the wedding ring, his mother’s wedding ring. When I said yes, when I burst into tears, his unit busted in cheering and hugging him. It was a special moment. I called Claire first. Then everyone else. A few months later came that other phone call. Over five years ago now. I can still hear the clipped no-nonsense voice. I knew from the moment I answered that it was about Cain.

  In my head this phone call had come countless times but now it was really happening. I couldn’t move.

  ‘At approximately zero four hundred this morning a patrol including Lance Corporal Phillips was targeted by a troop of insurgents. A rocket-propelled grenade was directed at the vehicles, one of which was occupied by Lance Corporal Phill –’

  ‘He’s dead,’ I said. Gravity intensifying, my stomach contracting. The one person who could conceivably replace my family, the love of my life and he was gone already.

  ‘Your fiancé was in the range of the blast and has sustained serious injuries. He is currently at the NATO Multinational Medical Unit in Kandahar Airfield undergoing treatment.’

  He’s alive, I thought. Thank God. The man was still speaking but I interrupted. ‘Is he… will he survive?’

  ‘His condition is serious but stable. He has sustained injuries to his left side with some glass fragments and shrapnel cutting through his protective gear, he also suffered a fracture to his left thumb and has sustained a ligament and bone injury to his right knee. Medical staff are working on him. We are hopeful that he will regain consciousness in the next twenty-four hours and be back home in the coming months, if not weeks.’

  ‘I…’ No words came, my head was swimming.

  ‘He’s lucky to be alive, but he is alive and that’s the most important thing. In the ensuing firefight he was pulled away to safety.’

  I knew two things then: one, Cain’s military career was over; and two, he would never be the same man again. I would later learn it was Axel who had dragged him to safety. An act that earned him the New Zealand Gallantry Star. How different things might have been if it was Axel riding in the front vehicle and Cain had saved his life.

  •

  ‘When you were young,’ Cain croons.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You were humming it, the song.’

  ‘I was,’ I say. Was I?

  He’s frowning a
gain. ‘I might go see Wiremu and Melissa. Give them a heads-up that we will have people staying.’ He scratches a blade of grass from his stubble.

  I’d guess only about one in four houses around the lake are occupied year-round, the rest are holiday homes.

  ‘I’ll come,’ I say. The thought of being alone at the moment makes my stomach tighten. I have this feeling something is about to snap.

  We set off together up the driveway towards the road.

  Daniel is in Rotorua. He has my number and my wedding ring. I could always change my number, block him. I’ll have to explain the missing ring to Cain somehow though.

  Wiremu and Melissa’s place is a big wooden house, angled out from the hill towards the lake. It’s not changed since I was a kid. When Cain knocks, I can hear someone coming towards the door.

  ‘Hello,’ Melissa says, leaning her brown sun-creased face out. ‘Cain, Lina, how are you both?’

  Melissa has wild grey hair and a slightly lazy eye. ‘Hi, Melissa,’ Cain says. ‘We’re good, thanks. We just wanted to let you know that Lina and I are going to be renting our place out on WeStay, so you might see a few more strangers on the road.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, frowning a little. ‘WeStay, right. Well, that’s fine. We’ll keep an eye out.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure there won’t be any issues but if you hear loud music or notice anything amiss, feel free to text or call us.’

  ‘No worries, Cain. I better make sure I have the right number for you both. Did you let anyone else in the community know?’

  Cain scratches his stubble. ‘To be honest, I think they’re all far enough away that they won’t notice.’

  She bites her lips. ‘Sure, well if anyone asks, we will let them know. It’s not like you’re the first around here to rent your place out to holidaymakers. Sue and Ian Cosgrove across the lake have their place listed while they’re in Greece.’

  ‘It’s good for the area. Brings tourists in,’ Cain says.

  ‘And we all know how much everyone loves tourists.’ A smile now to let us know there’s no meanness in it. ‘A bit more money pumping into the cafe and Buried Village doesn’t hurt I suppose. We don’t mind either way so long as they’re tidy and respectful.’