"Grisly." She begins to see why the child might have nightmares.
"O Himi wasn't with him," Joe somehow catches the tenor of her thought. "Anyway, this bloke. His face was nice, pleasant, open. Relaxed somehow, as though he didn't care about dying. He was tall and beautifully muscled, a body like an athlete's. He was naked, his clothes probably torn off during his passage in, but none of them were ever found. I never saw his eyes open. Trover radioed the copshop to say we'd found one, and the station 'phoned for an ambulance to come from 'Wera, and we kept on looking. You know my cousin, Piri Tainui?"
"I've met Piri for five minutes, when he picked up Simon on the weekend."
"Yeah. Well, he found the woman. She had drowned apparently. The other constable, some foreign name like Kosinski or something, but he was a nice bloke, tried artificial respiration. It didn't work. Because the lady had a broken neck aside from anything else, the pathologist said. She was partly clothed in a loose blouse thing, with a thonged sandal somehow still on her right foot. Her toenails were
painted black. She was well-shaped, but flabby. I remember thinking, God help me, that she looked a right tart, lying there spread among the weed. Her hair was hennaed. It might have been blond at some stage. The bloke had black hair, by the way, but crewcut. The woman had blue eyes and they were wide open, staring as though she couldn't believe she was dead. She had a watch on her right wrist, which is a bit unusual. The glass was smashed, and it proved useless for identification purposes. Her clothes weren't any help in that line either."
He sits up, and lights a cigarette.
"About half after seven, I was sent back along the beaches, while the others went to scour the far east of the headland. It was dark, very dark, and the wind hadn't dropped any. I had to fight to keep on going, to stop myself from being blown backwards. I hadn't gone that far when I saw something at the water's edge. I thought, ahh Ngakau, it's a weed tangle again, get going. The shore was littered with them, and it wasn't the first time I'd mistaken one for a body, eh. You started seeing bodies everywhere, you know?"
He looks down at the stream of smoke flowing out of his cigarette, shaking his head. "Then I saw his hair… long then, even longer than it is now. He was thrown mainly clear of the water, but a high wave from the receding tide would drag at him. He was front down, his face twisted towards me as I ran skidding over the sand and weed. There was sand half over him, in his mouth, in his ears, in his nose. I thought, I was quite sure he was dead. But I cleaned out his mouth and nose, and pressed water from his lungs, and breathed for him."
He is silent for a minute.
"He has got that of me, I suppose. My breath… I was surprised when he started coughing. I hadn't any hope in my heart at all. He was so small, and limp. We didn't think he was much more than two or three, thin and fair with arms and legs like sticks. Sweet Lord, was he skinny! You think he's bad now," grinning at her, "you ought to have seen him then-"
Silence again.
"His eyes were black, all pupil, and he didn't see me at all. I thought he was a girl at first, you know because of the hair, but when I picked him up I saw his penis. He had on the top half of a pair of pyjamas — still around here somewhere as a matter of fact. Common kind, you can buy them at any Woolworth's. And a life jacket. One of those orange things that are two pockets of kapok and a collar for joining them. They go over your head?"
She nods. "I know them."
"He was almost literally black and blue all over from cold and bruising. I didn't know it till after, but his left hand was smashed, his left arm broken in two places, three ribs on that side were fractured, and both his collarbones were cracked. Like he had hit
something very hard, arm first. I just picked him up, and wrapped him in my coat, and ran back, was blown back, snouting like a lunatic with the wind cutting into my kidneys like a knife. And after that, everything is a bit blurred. The ambulance ride into Taiwhenuawera with two corpses for company. Long waiting, or it seemed like it, in hospital rooms with huge bright lights. Examinations, and him screaming his head off. He seemed to come back to life very quickly. Scared as hell, but even when he was half-conscious, he was clinging like a leech to my hand all the time he could and they'd let him. Shock, exposure, pneumonia, he should be dead, said the hospital, and enumerated the breaks. I stayed the night with him, because he was upset whenever I stopped holding his hand, and Hana came up and stayed with me." He adds, "Did you know Hana was a nurse?"
He leans forward and stubs out his smoke, avoiding her eyes.
"No."
"Two other things," he says, after a while. "He had obviously been in hospital before, and it was clear early on, from the way he reacted, that the other time had been bad. X-rays showed he had had widespread injuries to his pelvis and hips, and they would have kept him in hospital for quite a while, the medics reckoned. The other thing is, he never talked. Screamed, my God could he scream! He was, and is, a fluent screamer. But he never said anything, or acted like he was used to talking. The ENT bloke who examined him said there was no physical reason to prevent him from speaking. He's got all the gear needed, eh. But if he vocalises, he throws up, and violently."
"Words?"
"No, just sounds."
"Hmm."
"Well, there was a coroner's court, to get back to the story. I testified. Piri testified. Tass Dansy testified. Half of Whangaroa testified, one way or the other, and enjoyed it very much. The pathologist said the woman was in her late thirties, the man in his early thirties, and both had been in good health. No distinguishing marks or scars — most unusual, said the pathologist, and left it at that.
"The police never got a report of any people of their description missing, and they made enquiries as far afield as Britain. The bodies and the survivor were, and are, unidentifiable. The one object that might have helped is in two hundred fathoms of current ridden water, and nobody wants to have a go at getting to it. You know, I often wonder about the others on board, because I think there were others. Aside from Tass seeing maybe a couple extra, Himi used to be scared of meeting people, like he expected to see someone from the wreck he didn't want to see."
"How much does he remember?"
"Nothing that he's telling, if he remembers anything at all. Sweet Jesus, he was too young to know how old he was. He didn't even know his name, or if he did, he couldn't ever tell us. Hana called him Simon Peter because he initially reacted to that name most of all. We tried lists of them, hundreds… actually, he reacted to quite a few, some of them odd as hell. We thought they might have been people he had known or places he'd been to or something like that. I'm pretty sure that O'Connor was the name of the people he was with, for instance."
"People he was with? Not his parents?"
"Not according to blood groups, definitely not his parents."
"A real live mystery… what other names?"
"Well, one morning he heard something on the radio and got really agitated. Tried to drag Hana to listen to it. What he wanted to hear was over by the time she got there, so she rang the station and they kindly sent her the news broadcast, because that's what it was. And the item Himi went almost berserk over was about a shark attack on a Dunedin beach."
"O, I remember that."
"Well, where did it get us? Nowhere, because he shut up tight and wouldn't say any more. Another thing used to be Citroen cars. He had a bee in his bonnet about them for some reason. And fires… he doesn't mind them now, but at one time he was even afraid of matches."