"Just crickets and treefrogs," he says dully. "Just beetles and mothwings thrumming."
Here?
He's been here at night and in the day and there have been flies. Some flies. A few flies.
A morepork calls close by, and its mate answers from further up the gorge.
The early evening air is alive with noise.
His breath held until it's painful, he searches round the buried pool.
It's a hump in the dusk, a round, a disk, a thing the size he could hold in his two spread palms. Settled on a broken-backed rock, balanced on the crack as though it had grown there. It looks very black or very green, and from the piercing, the hole in the centre, light like a glow-worm, aboriginal light.
"You're cheerful, mate." "Yep. Nice day and all eh?"
"Too right… pack go in the back?"
"You mind if I keep it in the cab? It can stay on my lap?"
The driver shrugs.
"Suit yourself, mate. There's room down by your feet. Shove her
there." "Right." Whistling merrily, propping his feet on the pack.
He had been afraid to touch it, but the drawing power of it
was immense.
He had walked to it, sat by it, hands over it, hands on it.
It felt like stone, it was stone, fine-grained cold stone… no
tingling or warmth, nothing out of the ordinary, Ngakau.
The light is just phosphorescence, eh? but when he lifts the
thing, he nearly falls.
He's tensed his muscles and pulled, and it's light light light,
no weight at all.
And there's an ecstasy as he carries it, a live buoying stream
of joy that makes him want to shout and sing and dance.
He can see streamers and fields of brightness round everything
he looks at: the very weeds and stones at his feet coruscate
with brilliant fire.
That's what Haimona meant by light? Aie!
Past the cave where the old woman's bones are entombed forever
— he ran to look there, and the stone in his hands grew too
heavy to carry. He took the hint and turned back onto the
track.
Past the kaumatua's ruined garden, the miro tree uprooted,
the careful lines of corn and other vegetables fallen in disarray.
Not to worry, man, this is someone else's place now.
Not mine.
For sure as the light that lives steadily in the stone, he's going
home.
"Where you going, mate?"
"Anywhere south," says Joe, his grin wide, "I'm taking the south road home."
11. The Boy By His Own
The night gives up its hold reluctantly, but slowly, very slowly, the world comes back.
Because he kept attempting to remove the useful tubes they inserted, they restrained his hands.
He was still after that, for over a week.
Lying in the dark, lying without moving, listening helplessly to the voices.
It doesn't seem that the night is giving ground.
No familiar touch, no handholding, no-one he knows.
There is never anybody he knows.
So he lies withdrawn again, his tied hands clenched to the deep of nails in despair.
But little by little, the night is lifting.
Instead of the shifting shattered brightness, he begins to see outlines. The light is shot through with forms. They crack and vanish and unexpectedly reappear; they splinter like a broken mirror when he blinks, but now, for seconds at a time, he can see the chair. The cabinet at the side. His feet. They look, somehow, cut off from his legs. He can see people again, briefly, as people, instead of dark, cores in the centre of lightning oscillations.
He watches, his hope never quite dead, for them to enter.
In time, says his heart.
Wait, says his heart.
They'll come, says his heart.
They don't.
He weeps in the dead silence and he can't hear himself cry. It is only by the wet of tears that he knows it is real crying.
Yet the night is ebbing away.
The hated voice grows weaker, cannot sing as freely. The old fears seem impotent in the face of what has happened.
He shrinks from the impersonally gentle hands that feed and clean him, but he glimpses the faces now, and they smile.
He doesn't smile back.
One morning, he discovers his hands are free again. For minutes, he doesn't dare move them. But nothing happens. No-one conies in.
The hands feel strange; they've been restrained for so long they're apart from him, as though they belong to someone else.
He brings them in front of his face. He stares at them as long as he can without blinking.
There is a network of pink scars over them he hasn't seen before. Cuts? Glass? Windows? Binny… wait. With a new keen instinct for self-preservation, he stops-thinking about the windows right then. He just stares at the scars, fresh and shiny and jagged.
There is a plastic bangle round his left arm.
He brings it close to his eyes, squinting to keep it in focus. There are letters of some kind or another. He doesn't know what they
are.
I never had a bangle?
He spends the morning watching his hands, opening and closing his fingers, touching them together. Absorbed in rediscovery.
But he keeps them by his sides when someone finally comes in with food. He accepts the food passively, but instead of closing his eyes after seeing who the person is, he watches her as dedicatedly as he has been watching his hands. He discovers the longer he watches the steadier his vision becomes. The nurse smiles at him all the time, and speaks often. He can't hear what she says, and he can't tell what she is talking about from the way her lips move. They don't shape themselves in the shape of words. He is frowning with concentration at the end of lunch, and he still hasn't understood a word.
It's all silence.
During that afternoon, he sends his hands on forays round his body. By drawing up his legs, he learns that the two cut-off lines at his ankles are bandages, covering what feel like holes. Once he has felt his legs and feet with his hands, he can feel them again.
Which is very odd.
He realises he hasn't been conscious of his body for a long time. The half-moon marks in the palms of his hands where his nails had bitten in haven't hurt him at all until now.
The fingers explore on.
The label on the chain round his neck is gone.
His face feels strange, with lumps in the bone of his jaw.
His scalp is half-covered by padded bandaging. He can feel stiff bristles of very short hair. His fingers stay on the remains of his hair for minutes.
I dreamed of that….
They move on, following the contours of the pads at the side of his head.
He can feel three things now; the itching of his scalp; the long scar lines under the pads; the band that holds them in place. It runs round his head. It covers his ears.
That's why I can't hear?
He snaps his fingers very close to his right ear. Nothing. Not a click, not the ghost of a click. Nor by his left ear… hold on, something
like a very distant thud? It doesn't sound like the sharp click! he normally hears, but he can hear something. Or is it feel something?
By evening, he has wakened — it is as if he just climbed back into it again — all his body. Some of it is uncomfortable: his ankles ache, and there is a pain like a headache bothering him, and he's learned that if he breathes in deeply, both sides of his chest get something like cramp.