‘What they used to call a retreat?’
‘Uh.’ He shrugged, not detecting any irony. ‘If you’re the odd one out, you usually cop it.’
‘That’s what they tell you?’
‘That’s how it is.’ He ate some chicken. ‘How it was, then. Hell, I don’t know. If we were being attacked, I couldn’t see anyone. Except…’ He stared pensively, looking away and then back at me in an almost furtive manner, as if dubious about what he might say.
‘Except what?’ I felt my stomach constrict.
‘I got this feeling…there’s something around, like something you think you just might see out of the corner of your eye, or like hearing a noise and then you listen and there’s nothing, and you can’t be sure…And it’s not everywhere, only in some places. And worse at night. Don’t you feel it?’
I had hardly spoken. For some reason I was wondering how much I ought to tell him about what had happened to me since Saturday.
‘Yes,’ I said; ‘I know what you mean.’
He sighed with relief.
‘Jesus. I thought it might be all in my head.’
‘Well it’s in mine as well, then.’
There was a pause. He drank some more wine. His eyes fixed on me above the glass.
‘Did you see anything?’
‘I was driving to Rotorua. It got dark, there was a storm coming on. I saw a thing like a…dog or a calf, come running at the car. No sound, and it seemed to vanish. It scared hell out of me.’
‘A dog?’
‘Like nothing on earth. Bits of dog, bits of other animals. Teeth, like a wolf. No hair on it. White all over.’ I drained my glass. He uncorked the wine bottle and refilled it, his lips compressed, the frown dark on his face again. ‘You haven’t seen anything?’ I asked. He shook his head.
‘You reckon it was really there?’
‘I saw it.’ I held the glass in both hands. The pale straw-coloured wine reflected the sky and the glass held my distorted, curved image. ‘It’s evil, whatever it is,’ I said; ‘it gave off evil like a smell. I could feel it.’
‘Yeah. I know that.’
I gave him a questioning look, and he held his hands up, pink palms outward, as though pressing on a sheet of invisible glass in midair.
‘At times I can feel it,’ he said, ‘very close. But I don’t know what it is.’ He lowered his hands. ‘When I was a kid, about nine or ten, I woke up one night and there was my cousin Hemi standing outside the window looking in. It was moonlight, I could see him as clear as day. I said, “Hey Hemi, what you doing out there? Come on in.” And he walked off round the side of the house and I waited but everyone was asleep and there was no knocking on the door. I woke my brother up and told him and he said, “You must’ve had a dream, go back to sleep, Hemi’s in Whakatane.” So I went back to sleep. But I knew I’d seen him. And next day we got the news, Hemi died suddenly in the night, at Whakatane. Appendix or something. Well…’ and here he rubbed his forehead with his knuckles, nervously; ‘the next night, I saw him again, outside the window. And I thought, if Hemi’s dead then that thing out there shouldn’t be walking around looking like Hemi. It must be bad, and why is it after me? Wants me to join it, maybe? I mean, dead is dead, all the way. You might have liked somebody a hell of a lot, I liked Hemi, we were good friends, but you don’t want anything like that, not all dead, not staying dead, so I yelled, “Hemi, you’re dead! Go back, go away, you’re dead!” ’Course it woke everyone up and they reckoned I was having a bad dream. But when I shouted, that thing outside the window seemed to know. Like it was him, eh? And he really didn’t know he was dead. It just faded away.’
The Maori clenched his fists. I moved the wine glass to my mouth and tipped some of the cold liquid between my lips and teeth. He closed his eyes tight. ‘I think that was one of the worst things I ever did: I still dream about it. They thought I was a spooky kind of kid. I had dreams. But that was real. It wasn’t a dream. I know who he was and what I said. For people who’re alive you can go back another day and say, “Look I’m sorry I hurt you.” And explain, and get it right in your mind. But this was forever. It was worse than if I’d killed him. The look on his face.’
I wished he would stop. It was not the kind of thing I wanted to hear. I hadn’t found the only other person perhaps in the world in order to listen to this kind of thing. He stood up and put the empty wine bottle back in the jeep and then faced me again, holding his hands up.
‘That’s like the feeling I’ve had this week,’ he said; ‘something bad, weird, just trying to get through to me, not far off. And I don’t want to know.’
‘Neither do I,’ I said. He seemed to sense the tone of my dismissal, and lay down on a groundsheet, his head propped up on a rucksack. After a silence he said quietly, ‘You missed the point.’
‘What do you mean?’
There was another pause, and he toyed with a piece of fern with a sad intentness before replying. ‘I mean, what side of the window are we on? What if we’re the ones who don’t know, and we have to be told?’
I looked away. My stomach was churning.
‘For Christ’s sake—’ I said.
‘You must have thought of it.’ His words were soft and slow-spoken, with an odd insinuating quality. I resented the way he had somehow placed me on the defensive and pushed these words and ideas so easily through my defences.
‘We eat and sleep and breathe,’ I said, with as much force as I could, ‘and when we get cut, we bleed’—I held up my fingers, sealed with pink sticking plaster—‘and the wound heals. And you think we may be dead?’
He avoided looking at me.
‘How often you been dead, then?’ he said.
‘Alright. What do we do? Dig a couple of holes, crawl in, and lie there till we go cold?’
He didn’t answer; he threw the fern aside and stared gloomily at the ground. I felt I had to assert myself, as much for my own sake as for his.
‘Apirana,’ I said. He looked up. ‘I don’t know what being dead is like, but I do know about being alive, and this is it.’
The statement, packed with ironies as it was, swelling into a massive lie, still had a power to it as though the words could harden in the air and make their own reality in the same way that an exorcism might have strength to push against a manifest threat.
‘We are both alive,’ I said deliberately; ‘don’t fool yourself.’
A trace of smiling went into the expression of his lips and he nodded.
‘Okay. Sorry.’
‘You don’t believe New Zealand really is heaven do you?’ I asked, anxious to break the mood. His teeth showed. We laughed.
‘I reckon not,’ he said, then pretended to sniff the air in the direction of the sulphur pools; ‘could be the other place, though.’
I was slightly drunk, which made it easier for me to play the part of somebody with a fairly developed sense of humour. I held up the glass.
‘No, it couldn’t be hell. They wouldn’t do a good riesling.’ And we laughed some more. He relaxed.
‘It’s three dollars a bottle,’ he declared.
‘Did you pay cash?’ I asked. His face clouded for a moment and he nodded.
‘Habit,’ he said, curtly. I hadn’t meant to suggest anything. This was treacherous. My experience of talking to Maoris was almost zero. All the time there were sharp points and bad patches, like walking barefoot over a lawn with bits of broken glass hidden ready to draw blood.
‘I left cheques,’ I said lamely.
‘You put your address on the back?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’ A pause. ‘I’m a good keen bloke.’
He leaned back and folded his arms, pushing his head against the rucksack so that his black woollen hat tipped down his forehead and shaded his eyes. The teeth appeared again.