‘No, you’re too big.’
‘I’m not so big.’
‘You’re still too big.’
He hooted with laughter, which was not at all strange, because we were, after all, supposedly operating a series of jokes.
‘How about dark?’ he asked; ‘too dark, maybe?’
I could laugh at that, since the joke was really on him.
On the long drive south past vacant fields, through towns sucked dry of life, I had time to think about what his spasm of anger might mean. It had made him elusive, as though a solid core had spilled out like mercury, glittering, cold, poisonous, running into unreachable corners. It was now urgent that the city ahead should provide survivors, more people, or at least some answers to help.
We drove by the rim of the ocean past a Kapiti Island hovering in shades of transparent blue on the edge of the world. Everywhere seemed sealed in hot glass, held behind the window of an empty oven, and I could only watch it from a distance with the coldness of this new fear running inside me. I had to confront the possibility that Apirana, weapons instructor, with his submachine guns and assorted bayonets and skinning knives; that Apirana might not be completely sane.
I looked in the rear-view mirror at my reflection to gauge the extent to which this would affect my expression. And I thought: was he only joking when he said that I could have fooled him?
The white motorway ramps curved along the seafront like stone rivers lifted into the centre of the city. Thousands of houses lay against the hills locked and shuttered with the sun fixed on them. The harbour water was flat under the mass of heat and quiet. A death scent from decaying animal carcases hung over the docks. The inner streets were cemented in shade by tower blocks, banks, offices, every rack of windows reflecting empty sky or a waste of more blind windows. The stopped moment of 6.12 was undisturbed. We were at the end of our journey. We stopped. The silence absorbed our engines.
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘What’s this stuff?’ He prods at the dish with a fork.
‘Abalone.’
‘It’s not bad. I don’t go for that caviar.’
We dine in style in the candlelit dining room high up in one of the big new hotels towering above the Terrace.
The windows show a dead city in twilight, like an architect’s model sunk in deep water. Our candles are reflected in the windows. Only the small slits of glass at the top will open. When a slight movement of air stirs through them, the candle flames shudder and the dark patches on the walls of the dining room flutter like huge moths. But of course there are no insects any more.
The silence has been suffocating, and Apirana has set a battery tape recorder playing. Soft bossa-nova music is defeating the death-feeling, pounding it away discreetly. He talks about rigging up a generator in the basement of the hoteclass="underline" he says he could get one from the hire pool or an army depot. I can tell he’s been thinking about his little rituals of honesty and the way I have flouted the conventions. But he doesn’t want to chase all the implications too far so he has given up making payments for what we need and begun to take whatever we want, leaving me to do the rest of the thinking and arrive at reassurances. He expects me to produce some answers; he assumes I will ‘work something out’. I wonder if this is how they have regarded us for the last two hundred years. And if I will know how to act my part.
His enthusiasms are all technological; he discusses the water supply, warning against drinking water without first boiling it, describing the purifying tablets they use in the army when on active service. He seems to want to keep talking.
I lift the bottle of French champagne, and pour some more.
‘I’ll stay off water altogether,’ I say.
‘Yeah. Good idea.’ He accepts, and drinks. The crystal glasses sparkle in the candlelight. ‘Good stuff, eh?’
‘It ought to be.’
‘Like you say, they’ll make allowances.’ He laughs and belches. ‘Uh. I’m lowering the tone of the place.’
We look out at the city. A brief foraging session in one or two shops has opened up the prospect of vast resources of loot. I’m amazed at our restraint. I suppose the barriers will break down fairly quickly.
Api gets up and ambles to the window, holding his glass. He touches the fawn-coloured curtains.
‘Velvet.’ A pause. ‘How the other half live.’ He stares out. ‘I once came here with a girl, a couple of years ago. To Wellington, I mean, not to this place. Couldn’t afford this. Stayed in some dump, somewhere. Not much doing, Sunday evening. Just like now, except the street lights were on. It could be Sunday with a power cut, out there.’ He gives a quick snort of a laugh. ‘What a dump. Eh? Look at it.’
‘It’s not much,’ I agree.
‘When we got here today…I thought there’d be something, though. Didn’t you?’
He turns to me. I can see my reflection sitting at the table, my face whitened by the light collected by the starched tablecloth, the gleams of highlights from glasses, bottles and silver cutlery glittering steadily. I look confident.
‘There was nobody in Auckland,’ I reply. ‘I didn’t expect Parliament would be in session or anything like that.’
‘Well…I was just thinking…there are some bastards, I wouldn’t mind if they never come back.’ He becomes pensive, swirls the champagne in his glass, then drinks it all and puts the glass down. ‘That’s wrong, though. I know that.’
‘What sort of feeling does this place give you?’ I ask cautiously. ‘You said at Turangi, you could sense something just out of sight. Here?’
‘It’s different here. I can still feel it. But it’s as though there’s a reason for us being here; like, an event’s going to happen, and it’ll be in Wellington, and we had to come here. Don’t you feel that?’
‘No. Perhaps you can pick up vibrations I don’t get.’
‘Like a Geiger counter, and radioactivity?’
‘Maybe.’
He paces around on the soft carpet, hands in pockets. ‘Funny, eh; I never had much idea about the future. I used to try and look forward and work out what the hell I was going to be doing, where I was heading, my life, and all that, you know. I’d think: What’s going to happen to me? To become of me? You know? And…it was just a blank.’
‘This event… or whatever you can sense, here; is it, I mean, can you tell if it’s good, or bad, or what?’
He stops and glances at me, or rather, not at me, in a very Polynesian way, his eyes fixing for a moment away from mine, at a point to the left of me, and then he turns and goes back to the window. I have a feeling that the worst the world could do to these people would be met in the end by much the same expression, a pained resignation with almost no trace of surprise in it, equally appropriate for thousands of trivial annoyances, flat beer, rainy days, a missed bus, the tantrum of a child, a debt collector’s letter. At school we had once been made to learn a poem which described a remote island, and the phrase used for the people on this island had stayed in my mind when all the other memories had faded or become irrelevant; ‘mild-eyed melancholy’. I think the island was supposed to be enchanted, or the inhabitants drugged; their lives had no purpose, they did nothing except face the world with this expression.
Perhaps he feels the pause has taken on too much weight. He says, ‘One thing I do know. I’d like a really good cup of tea, with real milk. Not that powdered stuff. Don’t you miss real milk?’
I deliberately give him a silence in return. He sighs and wanders to the other end of the room, lifting the cover from the grand piano lurking in the corner.