‘Yeah, then someone could get a crowbar—’ Hannah grinned at me encouragingly and drew me into their circle. ‘You OK now, Jill?’
‘Better.’
‘Climbing out onto the roof in this weather probably isn’t a very good idea—it could be slippery or rotten,’ Kelfie said.
‘Don’t bother to say what it’s like!’ Basil said, angrily.
‘I was just pointing out the drawbacks in the plan,’ Kelfie answered, defensive.
‘No you’re not. You want to make it like that! The roof is “slippery or rotten” is it? Like your other remark about this house being “haunted”?’
Ellen and Hannah regarded Basil with confusion. Kelfie was still and thoughtful. Basil glared at him and added, ‘He knows what I mean.’
‘No I don’t. Stop getting upset; it’s all going to be all right. Tomorrow morning there’ll be guys from the MOW clearing the road with earthmoving machines and putting down amber flashing lights and orange witches hats.’
‘Is that what’s going to happen?’
Kelfie gave Basil a long look, then frowned and shrugged.
‘Well I want to spend the rest of the night by our fire,’ Hannah said. ‘Let’s stop arguing and solve this problem.’
Basil muttered, ‘He’s one of those people who can make things happen by suggesting they might.’ He didn’t sound hysterical, but tired, resigned and sure of himself. Only I heard his remark; the others had returned to the closed door.
Hannah raised her voice. ‘Wrathall?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you want to go down the hill and get the crowbar?’
‘You mean “will I?”’
‘Will you then?’ Hannah said, then added, ‘The keys to the camper are in my jacket, the toolbox is under the water cylinder.’
‘What am I to do with the crowbar?’
‘Open the door. Or prise some boards off another downstairs window.’ We stood, listening to the thoughtful silence. Then Wrathall asked, ‘What time is it?’
‘Twelve-fifty.’
‘What time is dawn?’
‘Why? You a vampire or something?’ Kelfie asked.
Ignoring this, Wrathall said, ‘I was wondering when the landslide would be discovered.’
‘Soon, I guess. Maybe they’ve already found your car and are looking for you.’
‘Perhaps I should go and have a look.’
‘You shouldn’t wander around in the wet, Simon,’ I told him.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll just go down to see if there are any lights. I’ll fetch the crowbar. Can I wear your parka, Hanley?’
‘If you like.’ Basil sounded morose; he even shrugged and turned away from the door as if Wrathall could see him.
‘Perhaps we ought to explore downstairs first, in case there’s another way out,’ Kelfie told us, then raised his voice. ‘Hang on a minute, Wrathall. Before you go anywhere some of us should take a quick shufty around the lower floor—I mean a look—for another way out.’
Ellen said to Kelfie, ‘What’s with the quaint words?’
He ignored her.
Wrathall said, ‘Go ahead.’
Hannah gave me her flashlight and asked Basil to sit with me. He squatted down beside me, his underlit face at once eerie, sullen and closed off.
First they went into the room off the far side of the entrance hall; by the light of Ellen’s torch we saw them standing in a large space, empty but for an iron lamp with a cluster of tulip-shaped, frosted-glass lampshades suspended from the ceiling by a thick iron chain. And, under the fuzzy dust carpeting the floor, here and there, the gleam of broken glass. The torchlight stopped on the ceiling, as they stood trying to read the indecipherable words scrawled there in a soot of candle smoke.
‘Vandals?’ Ellen speculated.
‘It doesn’t say anything.’ Kelfie sounded surprised.
Hannah left the room and Kelfie and Ellen followed her. They all set off down a hallway on the far side of the stairs. We listened to their voices and muffled footsteps moving away. The dusty air breathing out the double doors of the dark room seemed warm; it carried a faint scent that brought vividly to my mind a picture of sunlight on the fresh, folded clothes in my sewing-room at home. I got up to close the doors. When I grasped the handles to pull them shut it was like submerging my arms up to the elbows in lukewarm water.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked Basil as I went back to sit by him.
He shook his head, face turned away.
‘What happened?’
He glanced at me. ‘I had a bad dream.’
‘You too?’
He didn’t answer. After a moment I said, ‘They’ll be back soon,’ inviting him to speak, to have his say before the others returned. To talk only to me—or to me and Wrathall, if Wrathall was listening. Basil gave a resigned sigh, as if confiding in me was pointless or against his better judgement. He said, ‘It was like I was both walking around upstairs and asleep by the fire at the same time. I imagined I was going to die.’
‘Were you sleepwalking when you ran out of the room?’
‘I think so, because in my dream I walked slowly upstairs. But the passageway in my dream looked exactly the same when I woke up—except, in my dream, the mirror at the end of the passage looked like an open door with rain falling outside.’
‘That’s spooky, but it still doesn’t explain why you’re behaving as if your dream, and the jammed door, are part of some subterfuge of Kelfie’s.’
Basil scowled at me. ‘Kelfie knows.’
‘Knows what?’
‘He knows the house is haunted.’
I thought about Kelfie’s attitude to my nightmare—not, I now believed, scepticism, but an eagerness to hear about the dream if he could do so without having me think about it too seriously. He wanted to know about my dream, but didn’t want me to know about it. I said, ‘OK, he’s behaving oddly—but a haunted house? Really, Basil? I don’t believe in ghosts.’
He dropped his gaze and glowered at the floor. ‘Why not?’
‘Why do you want ghosts to exist?’
‘I never wanted them to exist! I don’t want them to exist now! Do you think I thought to myself, at some stage, “Gee! Wouldn’t it be great if ghosts existed and started picking on me.”’ He was angry at me for coaxing the cause of his distress from him, then not believing what he had to say.
I was angry at him for his persistent mithering superstition. Why the hell should I accept the possible existence of the spirits of dead strangers?
I remembered the only ‘ghost story’ I was ever told by someone whose good sense I had confidence in. A friend had told me that her grandmother often nagged her mother about not pegging the washing firmly enough on the line—they lived in a windy suburb and the sheets would occasionally end up in a snarled heap against the garden fence. When her grandmother died, several days after the tangi, when her mother was hanging out the washing, my friend looked out the window to see her mother, a shadow behind bed sheets, pegging them; and following her along the line a pair of old brown hands touching the top of every peg. I said to Basil, ‘Sometimes, perhaps, when someone close dies, we can conjure up a vision of them doing something familiar and reassuring—but it’s memory, not evidence of anything surviving death.’
‘Stop talking down to me. I think this house is haunted and is having a weird effect on all of us, but I can’t discuss it with you because you refuse to even consider the possibility of a haunting—even for argument’s sake!’
‘For argument’s sake I should believe in life after death? Like Heaven and its happy angels?’ I yelled at him. ‘So—there are ghosts? Where are my ghosts then?’ I punched the floor and a sudden pain shot up my arm.
Basil looked confused and frightened. ‘I didn’t mean—’
I growled at him, hunched over, nursing my aching arm. He sat, very still, beside me. After a moment I said, ‘Have you ever lost someone you loved?’
He remained still, with a tense immo
bility compounded of emotion and repression. For a moment, watching his blank face, I saw myself in him. Finally he said, ‘Yes—but that was his business,’ then reached up to touch his own ears, as though disturbed by a very low or high-pitched sound. All I could hear was the rain. I wondered how many people walked around concealing the injuries of grief. And how long it would be before it wasn’t the most important thing in my life. I realised I was crying.
Basil timidly touched my shoulder. It didn’t help. Although we place great faith in our warmth, touching someone who is suffering is not ‘big magic’, is really no better than saying ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘It’s all right’, or any of the other ineffectual reassurances we are moved to say mainly to comfort ourselves.
The wavering light of Hannah’s torch preceded them back back along the hallway on the near side of the stairs. Ellen saw I was crying and descended on me—hugging me and looking enquiringly, but not accusingly, at Basil.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, rocking me.
‘No—it’s—not.’
‘OK, it isn’t then,’ she conceded cheerfully.
I wiped my eyes, smearing tears into the hair at my temples, explaining, ‘It’s just—everything.’
Hannah nodded, her thoughts on ‘everything’ obviously in accord with mine.
Kelfie stood watching us with no sign of curiosity or concern, then stepping around us he tapped on the door. ‘Wrathall?’
There was no answer. Kelfie called several times then turned to us.
‘It’s been quiet in there for some time,’ I said, prompted by his look, which seemed to accuse us of having emotional crises while Wrathall was spirited away. But Kelfie wasn’t accusing us, he was looking through us. Disturbed, I said to Basil, ‘Simon probably heard what you were saying and took off.’
‘What were you saying, Basil?’ Hannah asked.
‘He didn’t upset me really. I’m just worn out.’
‘I did upset her. I was talking about ghosts.’
‘This is all very well and good—’ Kelfie interrupted impatiently ‘—but it doesn’t explain why Wrathall didn’t wait. He knew we expected him to, and I hardly think he would’ve been scared off by your profound metaphysical discourse—’
Basil got up, looming over Kelfie. ‘Why don’t you shut up?’
Kelfie’s already white face became whiter, as though flushed with light. As though not blood but luminescent ichor was pumped into his skin. ‘I don’t understand you at all,’ he said to Basil, softly and tonelessly, ‘but I’m not going to stay around to be—bullied,’ the final word coming out doubtful and confused. He put his palm against Basil’s chest and pushed. Basil braced himself to stay put—yet was, nevertheless, shoved backwards. Kelfie walked away, back down the hallway they had only just emerged from. In his wake the air held the slight but distinct scent of the first drops of rain on hot stone.
Kelfie
I went on till the voices faded. There was no light. The rooms I passed through were cold and airless. As a gust of wind hit the nearside of the house, sluicing rain off the veranda, the whole building creaked like a ship at sea.
As I came back through the halls, the rooms, without the women and without the torch, the darkness made me expect something different. The flashlight had seemed, as it pointed them out, to create the dust, the boarded-up windows, and, on the ceiling, the paint cracked into an inverted, bleached forest floor of curling leaf-litter. We expected what the torch showed us, what our eyes strained to see.
Returning, I stopped at each door, hoping to find the rooms within lit, furnished, inhabited; to find some ordinary, comfortable pursuit of my own to resume, as if I were at home (there is always plenty to do at home; tea on the table, the book recently put down to be taken up again). But the doors gave on to darkness, chill and empty.
In the kitchen at the back of the house I heard again the busy sound of the rain. Here Hannah’s exploring torch had shown us a large room, occupied at one end by two cement tubs, a copper and range. On the floor in one corner were the mummified corpses of four opossums. At the other end of the room, near the door, the walls were black with mildew. Below this was a section of smashed, rotted flooring.
The torch’s light, pointing into the hole, had revealed a rippling film of water running under that corner of the house. Now, without a light, as I stood at the edge of the hole, I could still see the water, its ripples side-lit by the radiance of the rain outside. The skirting board at the bottom of the porch was broken. There was a way out of the house through the kitchen floor—a quiet, secret way I would never have found had I not left the others and wandered back here without a light to mislead me.
Past the walls of the house the rain was noisily crowding out space and silence. The house itself was listening, stiffly still, its back turned.
‘All right,’ I whispered to the house, ‘if you insist.’
I lowered myself to crawl beneath the floor a few feet—smelling water, fungus and, behind me, the warmer, drier spaces of the rest of the basement. I emerged in a patch of mint in the open air.
—you yourself will always be the worst enemy you can encounter; you yourself lie in wait for yourself in caves and forests—
My anger at Basil had been brief, but murderous; out of all proportion to anything he said, anything I felt about him or about myself. It was the anger of a patience long since at an end—vicious, tyrannous, and foreign. Maybe Meredith, with her Psych degree, scholarships and trimmed interests would be able to explain it. She did pretty well—after the two months we spent together the year before, during the summer in Wellington—at trying to defeat my troubles by detailing them.
‘Our problem is with anger, Keith.’
‘I thought my problem was with provocation.’
‘No. Seriously.’ She looked serious, concerned, intent—her legs folded, wrists rested on her bent knees. She looked like Jenny used to years ago, doing yoga. ‘Much as I hate to say it, it’s family temperament. Dad was more than just ratty—he was quite paranoid sometimes, thinking people were keeping things from him, and secretly making fun of him.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Oh come on,’ she said impatiently, ‘of course you remember.’ Her voice cracked when she lowered it. If she spoke up it came out clear and even—but with confidences or persuasion it always broke and roughened. ‘Me, I have a short fuse, but only about certain things. For instance, I can’t stand people being weak—it’s like I start smelling their blood under their skin and want to bite them. I find weakness disturbing.’
‘You’ll be a terrific psychologist then.’
‘I didn’t study it to practise—I only wanted to find out how people think.’
‘To crack the code of human behaviour, eh?’
‘Sounds as though you find it impossible to imagine that someone else might have thought of some idea, or system of ideas, that could help you understand yourself.’
‘That’s not what I mean. I’d just hate you to form some view of me that you’d think was accurate because it’s based on established ideas.’
‘They’re helpful ideas.’ She leant forward. ‘I’ve been studying you and I’ve come to a few conclusions.’
‘How comfortable for you.’
‘I think you’re scornful of psychoanalysis, because you’re worried it might force you to see some of your difficulties in unheroic terms.’
‘Where the fuck do you get heroic from? It’s not a value of mine. And I don’t have difficulties—just because I’m not composed or insipid.’
‘You should see yourself, Keith. And you think you don’t have a problem with anger?’
‘Just because I show it, doesn’t mean it’s a problem. Am I obliged to hide what I think and feel?’
‘No one will listen to you if you’re so aggressive. I’ve had to learn that myself.’ She touched her chest and nodded sagely.
‘You mean you learned to pretend to be uncertain and weak.’
‘No,
just more reasonable and less hostile.’
‘People don’t listen anyway, Mere. They hear one word in every five and from that reconstruct not what you said, but what they think you meant to say.’
‘What a terrific assumption to bring into every encounter with others.’
‘It’s true.’
‘No, it just sounded good—you’re addicted to strong statements.’
‘I feel strongly.’
‘Do you really? Or is that just a value—feeling strongly, not being insipid? It seems to me that you miss out on a lot of what others offer you because you’re so busy insisting on yourself.’
‘If that’s true, then I’m just like that.’
‘No one’s like that innately, you’re only like that because of your problem with anger.’
I stared at her blankly, already deep in confidences with her, regretting it and feeling threatened. ‘Of course I’m angry. I was abandoned, Mere.’
‘You feel abandoned—so hard done by that you don’t think you owe anyone anything. You don’t even try to get over it.’
‘Get over what, exactly? It’s not like I even know the extent of the damage, I’ve forgotten so much.’ (But bits and pieces of remembered misery would keep turning up, like the remains of a body partly digested by a glacier; trapped, vanished, broken-up, moved down miles and years, to be discovered later, horrifying and incomplete.)
‘When we were talking about how you argued with Gareth in Mazatlan and, before that, with Mum, you said—and I remember it exactly—“I want to punish everyone whose existence accuses me of failing to be loved.” And I thought, Wow! How strange, momentous and complicated he is—’
‘Don’t tell me what I said—’
‘You didn’t fail to be loved! That’s crazy!’ She was shouting because I’d got up to leave the room.
I stopped. ‘Do you think I’m overstating what I feel?’
‘It all happened a long time ago, Keith. And all that happened was that your parents, who were just people after all, not super-beings, were unable to supply the love you needed.’
(All that happened was that everything retreated, till nothing was touching me anymore. So that now, lonely or afraid, I would conjure: I am everything that touches me—drawing close the light, the air—I am everything that touches what touches me. Still far away, exiled; a small, cold, wordless body with no colossal ideas.)
After Z-Hour Page 10