‘Lots of Maoris in Auckland,’ he said softly.
‘Didn’t you think we’d met somewhere?’
The face was expressionless.
‘They say we all look the same to the pakeha.’
‘I don’t think so.’
A pause. He drank his beer. It looked gold; it slid into his mouth. Then, placing the glass on the concrete floor, ‘How many Maoris did you know?’
‘One used to live near us, twenty years ago.’
‘What was his name?’
It was my turn to pause.
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Did you ever know?’
‘No.’
He didn’t move. His face was set like an Easter Island monolith against the sun on a hillside.
‘Anybody else?’ he asked quietly. My irritation began to increase.
‘A bloke at the supermarket. A mechanic at the garage. There weren’t many at university.’
‘No, I reckon not.’
It was obviously useless trying to get behind the mask he’d assumed. A sullen reticence had come over him, an apathetic weariness rather than defensive hostility. The shadows stretched across the grass towards us as the light faded. When I looked at his face again the dusk had gained such depth in the porch that only the whites of his eyes reflected glitterings of light.
‘So we can’t have met before,’ he said, finally.
‘But you did think you recognised me.’
A long sigh came from the gloom.
‘Yes.’
The eyes closed and cut out the last points of light, and the place where his face was seemed darker for a moment than the shadows behind and all around.
‘I was wondering what it might mean,’ he whispered.
I felt very calm; the admission reassured me, it justified my persistence, and even its obscurity blended easily into the mass of darkness. He had delayed, waited for the day to evaporate.
‘What do you think?’ I said. There was this calmness between us, as if we had settled into an awareness of our fixed situation on a planet that was moving, slowly but perceptibly turning its axis against the sun and taking us through space with some immense purpose.
He stood up, suddenly.
‘Don’t ask me,’ he said; ‘you’re the scientist.’ Pause.
‘It’s too dark. I’m going inside.’
Lying awake in the night I wondered why we should think that we could understand what was happening. We would have to pretend, perhaps, so that we would have something to do, to impose at least a surface of purpose on our actions. But after all, nobody had understood existence as it used to be; and here we were, hoping to unravel an even stranger set of trickery in a few days.
At school there had been an experiment in which a clear, highly saturated solution of a chemical could be made to transform itself suddenly into a dense white solid, a crystalline mass, merely by knocking the side of the jar in which it stood. The sudden disappearance of solid objects such as people and animals might be analogous, in reverse; perhaps the universe reached a point of saturation and then an instantaneous transformation took place to another dimension. It would be what we called, in jargon, a ‘major event anomaly’ or a ‘singularity occurrence’. Many experts no longer believed in the Darwinian theory of evolution; they said that the appearance of Homo sapiens was inexplicable, a sudden phenomenon for which science as we knew it could never find a cause. The ‘quantum leap’ wasn’t merely a ‘missing link’ but a random event, a quirk in the universe. We had discarded religious fables of creation. Sooner or later we would have to discard the evolutionary fables. If these experts were right, then a ‘major event (positive)’ could very well be annulled by a ‘major event (negative)’. A few apes had survived the first; we had survived the second. The lack of completeness was characteristic. No theory could account for a hundred per cent of any phenomenon.
Obviously the world had undergone a psychic jolt; the Maori had confirmed that a change had occurred. The world we were in was almost exactly, but not quite, the same as the old world. A subtle dislocation somehow involving the processes of perception had shaken the normal boundaries out of place. It was hard to detect, like a familiar room in which something is very slightly changed. And it induced the same unease.
I had no concepts or words to apply to this. I had to struggle with the realisation, also, that I wasn’t unique, I wasn’t the focal point, I hadn’t been especially chosen for some revelation or saved for a purpose. The universe was simply careless. Its disorder seemed to me to be a betrayal. The calm I had felt earlier was eaten up within me by a cancerous rage. The universe was simply careless. After the silent bang, there remained a few pathetic whimpers. I was one. Asleep in the next room was another, making occasional sounds very like pathetic whimpers.
Perhaps that was how I slept, too.
In some dreams I see photographs of my family which were never taken. They show Joanne and myself, and Peter as a normal child, with such clarity that even as the dream is going on I wonder if this is a future which does exist somewhere in the universe. We are on a boat, a ferry, in what seems to be the Bay of Islands, leaning on a white-painted rail, laughing. Another shows Peter reading a magazine on a beach. He is slightly older than he ever was; about twelve or thirteen.
Then, sometimes, there are events from that alternative world, in which these people move and talk. I am taking a piece of meat from a barbecue grill and putting it on a plate held by Peter; he makes a face and complains that the steak is burnt, and Joanne laughs and asks why I insist on cooking outdoors but hardly ever in the kitchen. Peter groans and says, Mum, for heaven’s sake, don’t encourage him. Then there are other segments of clearly defined events, frighteningly vivid. It worries me that they should have such clarity. None of them are significant, they lack any specific meaning, their ordinariness is equally disturbing. We move through rooms which must exist in the real world somewhere, and from which we could not be subtracted without violating the rules of the universe, without creating an absence and a vacuum as impossible as that which I had felt in the succession of empty houses I had entered all through the afternoon at Thames. And yet now we are not there; the impossible has happened twice. I move through an empty room towards a mirror. When I stand in front of it, and look into it, I cannot see myself. There is nothing.
The road wound down and around awkwardly and then came up, turned, and pointed straight across the desert plateau. The day was cloudless, the sky acid-blue behind the snow on the tops and slopes of the mountain volcanoes to the right. They looked ruined, as if the white was quicklime corroding their solidity. A smear of vapour from the height of Ruapehu stretched east on the top of the sky; there was fire inside the snow.
Apirana drove ahead in his land rover. I followed about fifty metres behind in my car. We had agreed on my plan to go to Wellington. The first stop would be Taihape. He said there was no point in stopping at Waiouru; he had double-checked everything.
The air thickened as we drove down from the plateau through great clefts in the hills. The scrub browns gave way to greens, faded on the sheep-eaten hills, dusty by the road. The road slanted down. More vegetation appeared, some undefeated trees and patches of bush. Mostly it was chainsaw land. Every now and then, week-old dead possums lay on the road where trucks had hit them, bits of fur and leather innards, no flies or hawks to worry what was left. The land rover made swerves.
At each small town we halted and Apirana detonated a training grenade, a thunder flash. He showed me how they worked, compared with real hand grenades made out of metal, of which he also had a boxful in the land rover. The thunder flashes blasted violent waves of noise into empty streets and back at us from buildings and hillsides. Then silence. We would wait, then go on.