He is smiling broadly now.
"I dunno, Kerewin, I dunno… we couldn't have cared less if it had been anyone else, but we love you. So I think we better kiss and make up at all opportunities," and because he can feel her drawing away from him, even though she's made no overt move, as soon as he mentioned love, he adds quickly, "metaphorically speaking of course, otherwise we'd be doing bloody nothing else down here."
She laughs and sets the guitar down. "Yeah, well, it must be the sea air or something."
"As for the fish, he'll love the photos. He wanted to know when we'd be going fishing again so he could catch another one… he suggested this afternoon."
"Ah youth and resilience… if he really wants to go fishing again today, I'll get him out even if I have to swim and tow him."
Joe says drily that maybe today was enough of an introduction to the sea again, without getting that close to it, and as it happens, the boy sleeps till dark.
He wakes seemingly relaxed and at ease with himself and the world. His thumb isn't hurting him much, and he is made happy when Kerewin explains apologetically why she stayed at the other end of the beach and didn't offer to help. He gloats over his fish, making three trips out to see it, lying stiff and glistening in the freezer. He eats tea, and stays up quite a while, playing cards with Kerewin and Joe, and winning. By cheerfully concealed cardsharping,
they deal him hand after hand of straights and flushes and aces four high, just in case his luck isn't it. He swallows his trichloral with a smile, kisses them both goodnight, and goes happily to bed.
And wakes them both at three in the morning, starting up in the dark and screaming uncontrollably. On and on and on.
Joe strives, cajoling and pleading in English and Maori and begging interrogatives that are beyond language, to reach the child wherever he is.
She shivers. It is totally unlike the boy not to respond.
So that's what lies behind those throw away phrases Joe uses. He has nightmares, you know? And, Spooked would you believe? This is the shadow to Simon's light.
The self-control, the unchild-like wit and rationality he often shows, the strange abilities he has, are paid for in this coin.
The noise is full of abject fear, of someone driven to the point where only terror and anguish exist. Nothing else, not even a memory of anything else, sounds as if it remains.
Worse than the screaming under the shower, o my heart… and you were going to poke happily round and pry something interesting out of that deep? Interesting… aue.
It's too cold to stay sitting up in nakedness. She finds her shirt and jersey, and dresses in them, sits tailor-fashion in the middle of her blankets and eiderdowns.
Something Joe has said or done has worked.
Or maybe the spasm of terror doesn't last the way it sounds, forever.
Now she can hear the sea again, a breaker line coming down the beach, the dull boom of the blowhole in the northern reef. The hiss of retreating waves.
"Kerewin?
"Kerewin?" says Joe again. "Are you awake?"
There is, strange and wonderful, a glimmer of laughter in his voice.
"Yes," and her voice sounds deadpan, even to her ears.
He chuckles, then sighs.
"Well…" if he was going to add anything, he has decided against it. There's a rustling of blankets. "You like a bed companion for a few minutes?"
"Looks like I get one, will I or nill I," says Kerewin drily. "Switch on a torch, e Joe. I put my smokes down somewhere here, but not even my owl-eyes can spy them. O, plonk whosit down first."
She says, "Greetings, and welcome to the ineffable couch of Holmes, my pipkin. Shall we entertain you with silence and wondrous feats
of feet, or shall our fealty be wine and song and nightingales' hearts in jars?"
She can spout high-flown nonsense for hours on end if need be, her voice resonant and controlled. She makes no mention of the child's shuddering, or that he's wet himself, nor does she enquire why he started shrieking. It might be midnight at the oasis and ten thousand miles away. She holds him comfortingly and pours Holmes-type paraphrases of the Arabian Nights into his ear, until he listens helplessly to that instead of to the drub of his heart.
Joe listens too, and grins often to himself at the frequent punning and double entendre. Kerewin has a strange vast knowledge of pornography, and a hitherto unrevealed sense of ribaldry. He hopes it's all going over the child's head.
By the time he has got the coals wakened into a fire, and milk heating, she has talked Simon into a state of relaxed, albeit bemused, calm.
"You want some milk too?" He takes Simon from her, wrapping a blanket round the boy as he does.
"Yeah, might as well."
"It'll be a minute… we'll duck along to the other bach. I left the dope there, but we'll be back in two ticks." "Okay…"
Hope we can bank on the good old NZ tradition of Don't Interfere. I know there's other people here now, and he must have been heard by everyone in every crib along the beach. If anyone thought we were beating him up, and decided to check-
For the first time, it comes home to her that she is aiding and abetting the concealment of a criminal offence.
Whee, outlawry and small wars made to order, mysteries and pandemonium… what the hell did I do before the Gillayleys arrived on the scene?
And she wonders how it would be if they left.
Tide in
Joe is an uncannily good darts player.
A gentle heft, and chk! the dart is as firm in the number, the double, the bull, as though it had grown from there. He rarely misses.
He brought the dartboard back from Hamdon, with more groceries and a renewal of their grog supply.
"Ah darts!" Kerewin said gleefully, rubbing her hands and anticipating victory. Joe had smiled.
He won every game.
"No bloody wonder I've never seen you play at the pub," she grumbles. "You've probably been banned… how do you do it? Hypnotise the feathers or magnetise the points?", "Years of practice. Years and years of practice."
He told her more that night.
They've established a routine now. Tea and a drink or two, get the child settled in bed, and then play chess and swap yarns and confidences until the fire goes out.
Simon's asleep in the top bunk.
(He's been listless all day, though good-humoured enough. "It always knocks some of the stuffing out of him, eh," Joe says in an aside to Kerewin. "It takes a couple of good nights for him to get over it. And me."
She says, Yeah, she could see about the stuffing part. Must be taken mainly from the head, she thought, straight faced "You notice those luverly purple hollows under his eyes? Whoever does the unstuffing has a nice aesthetic sense. Purple shadows and sea green eyes… rather decadent, but an arresting combination.")
The kettle's singing a thin metallic song on the range; the sea is heard clearly now, washing laplap husssh by the fence; Kerewin is smoking her pipe, having won the chess as usual; the lamp is dying as the pressure falls off, and the kerosene burns out; and Joe says into the easy night, "About my one skill, darts… I had a funny childhood." "Oh?"
"Funny horrible."