"You could have put more coal on the range and heated the water. Which reminds me, boyo. Get the porridge pot when you've finished your dinner, and we'll do all the dishes at once."
So much for trying, he thinks, and goes back to his reading.
And when he's finished the heap he brought across, he stares out the window.
The tide is nearly full out. The wind still blows strongly. Waves sweep up the beach, rise and crest, and are flattened to seaward flying spray. But over by that island — what did she call it? Makihea of something — where the waves are sheltered from the offshore wind, they are breaking in great showers of white spume. Gulls are making light of the wind, sailing in beautiful easy spirals away to the south. Other birds are beating in an ungainly way against it, getting nowhere fast.
"Kawau pateketeke? Kawau paka? Kawau tuawhenua? Kawau
tui?"
"You're nearly right," Kerewin is back on the floor, playing poker again. "Stewart Island shags, and I don't know the Maori for that… kawau rakiura, perhaps? At least, it's most likely to be them. They live and nest on the island."
"Stewart Island? This far north?"
"O, I've seen them further north than this. Don't ask me how or why they came here though."
"Poor fellas probably got blown here by the wind." "Unusual wind. The prevailing bree-eze is a northerly of some variety or the other."
"Bree-eze being a Holmes-type understatement?"
"Well, the one flaw with this place, aside from the trippers, the Japanese fisheries offshore, and the general pollution, is the ahh, rather regular wind we get."
"O," says Joe, forlornly.
"But don't let it worry you, man" saying it more kindly than she's said anything today, "Why, I've stayed as little as a month here, and had two whole windless days."
An opening. An invitation.
And anyway, what the hell is dignity good for? Keeping your nose high and your backbone stiff?
"Well, that doesn't sound as bad as I thought… you got a nice little pile of calcium around somewhere?"
"I could get you some if you really want it." Kerewin, watching him get up, sounds cautious.
"I thought I'd grow a streamlined sort of shell, so I could bask in comfort on the sand."
"O splendid idea… though did you notice those things whirling past the window a moment ago?"
"Yeah, the leaves?"
"No, they were limpets…."
What's funny, asks Simon, what're you laughing for?
Joe squats beside him, and ruffles his fringe.
"The demise of gloom, fella, that's what."
In the late afternoon, the wind drops. One moment, the bach is being buffeted and the iron on the roof is singing, and the next, everything is quite still. The sea sounds very loud.
Kerewin stands. "Anyone coming for a walk? I'm clogged to here," waist level apparently, "with smoke, and the last molecule of oxygen escaped, screaming for all its dead siblings, two seconds ago." "Yeah, it is that bit stuffy… where we going?" "Where'd you like? We can go that way, and see the north reef. Or we can go that way, and see the south reef. Or of course we could go inland, and see a resentful steer or two."
"North, make it north… I figure every step I take south brings me that much closer to Antarctica."
"North it is then. That way I won't be able to show you where you were last night, me sleight-fingered knave, but then at the moment I don't want to either." The boy grimaces.
"Y'know," she puts on her windbreaker, "I thought I was doing your child a kindness. I gave him 20 cents in cent pieces, and more or less the rudiments of poker. So far, he's won nearly three dollars off me, and had the gall to repay the original loan. The luck of ould Ireland indeed." Simon isn't amused. He scowls.
Inside he shivers. Here we go-
Joe says, "Really?" but doesn't sound sympathetic. "What do you mean, you don't want to go?" he asks his son. "Go get your jacket on, and back here at the double." The boy goes stamping out, slamming the door behind him. "Uh ah," says Joe, moving towards the door. "Uh uh," she says, putting her hand against it. "Leave him be, eh." She removes her hand.
One more step man, and down you'll go.
"If he really doesn't want to go for a walk, why make him? A drag for you, not to mention me, and a drag for Simon P." "Fair enough," he says after a moment, "fair enough." They wait outside the bach for the boy. And they wait. "Ah to hell, he's probably holed up under the bunks or something." "Well, we'll leave him under them… does he really do that?" "On occasion," says the man sourly. "Goes to earth rather than does what he's told."
"Leave him a note saying where we've gone, eh," after another minute has passed. "That wind won't stand still for hours."
"The fifth commandment," Joe spaces his words to match time with his writing, "with Haimona," the note seems studded with exclamation marks, "is, Honour thyself and thyself, and don't give
a damn about longevity, the land, or the Lord. There, and much sweat may it give him."
"What's on it?"
He's folded it already, and slipped it into the doorcrack.
"No threats… e Himi! Haere mai!"
He sang it out again, as they were moving down the beach.
"Silence and nothing moved… let the little termite stay happy in his hole, Joe. Forget him for a while."
"Yeah." He shook his shoulders and breathed out hard. "I just worry, that's all."
"Too much," she says blithely, "and watch your footing here." She began to run nimbly over the rocks.
Watch my footing, thinks Joe in the night. Watch my footing. He murmurs it aloud, into his sleeping son's ear.
Aue, what a day.
But it's over now.
And with luck and no more troubles, we're out of the woods, sighing.
He whispers Ouch, for himself.
Kerewin the quick, she of the very fast very hard foot, sleeps soundlessly as always.
"Christ alive," he says in soft wonder, "Christ alive, she's a strange lady. What did she say? The world's a fiery wayward place, why has it eaten me?" I
Crippled with bellyache, her knees dug deep in the sand, Kerewin had gone whiter than anyone he had ever seen.
"I burn to be out of it, and'll burn out of it," she'd groaned in a kind of snarl, and had refused their hands.
He stretches gingerly, easing his bruised body to a new angle without waking the child at his side.
But she'll be okay, little peace-and-war maker, as you'll be okay now. As I will. As we all will be together.
Sweet dreams, he tells himself, and is still smiling when he sleeps.
Kerewin has dreams of teeth.
Beginning with a replay of the time, the last time she'd been at Moerangi, when after a week of agony, she'd looked at the inside of her mouth in the mirror.
Jaw abscess
Swollen gums, with pus-extended ridges.
Ah God, make it go away.
There was a matter outlet, not yet breached, a gumboil where some of the infection had gathered.
It was the constancy of the ache that was unbearable.
The dream had dwelt on the moment when she had taken a razor-blade and attempted, using the mirror as a guide, to play surgeon and open the outlet the abscess had made for itself in her jaw.
She wasn't successful.
The next moment she was still looking in the mirror, and her two front teeth had changed to soft bloodstreaked stumps. The enamel all ground off, the spongy nerve and bone centre exposed… how to bite? She had only to touch them and she would dissolve in anguish. And then the teeth resolved themselves closer.
Her six front teeth loomed astonishingly white. But small yellowish holes of decay sat like ulcers near her gums, and there were brown stains from coffee and nicotine. In nearly every tooth, the enamel was marred by the black and silver inlay of fillings… except for those unexpectedly bright upper front teeth.