by Moir, Tanya
Quietly, Robbie raises a whitening windowpane and, in stockinged feet, slips out into the star-chilled night. He forces his numbing toes into icy boots, and does not think about the cold. The Milky Way dusts the sky above him; Venus is risen, clear and bright. He vaults softly over the creaking gate, and follows the sound of the waves down to the sea.
Outside the darkened whare, he loses courage. He thinks he will just sit for a while, here in the sand at the base of the dunes, opposite her door, where the embers of her fire are feathering down to a whisper beneath the black weight of the sky. He draws his knees up to his chest and shivers. But it feels better to be here, close. Ready, waiting.
Back in the trees behind the beach, a morepork calls, and between the tussocks a grey rat halts and stiffens on its track out to the sea. For an instant, Robbie thinks he feels the dunes around him tremble, a quick shrug of their silver skin against the cold breath of the night.
‘You will freeze there.’
Hine stands in the doorway, and Robbie feels another shudder run like fingers up his spine. She holds back the blanket-door for him. Wordless, he crosses the sand, and crawls inside.
She laughs in the darkness. ‘You are cold.’
He finds her skin, summons the shape of her from the night, warm and soft, curving beneath his hands.
Outside, a silky wave climbs the beach, licks the tussock, and recedes; once more, the jet-black sea lies smooth as glass.
Fifteen
‘I need you to come down to the store with me tomorrow,’ says Mary one evening, over the washing up. ‘Help carry the things back up.’
Hester looks round, surprised. ‘What about Mrs Delacroix’s wagon?’
‘Her old man’s doing their run this month. Sarah’s too near her time.’
Hester sees that she should understand this. ‘Oh, I see,’ she says. ‘Won’t Mr Delacroix take you?’
‘I’m walking,’ snaps Mary. ‘Are you coming, or not?’
Hester bites her tongue, and goes back to scrubbing out the stewpot.
The morning is cold, with a gentle wind blowing in off the sea, and a grey dawn tinting slowly to rose and blue. Up on Karupoti Bay Road, they find ice in the lee of the rocks, the mud white and crackling beneath their boots. Away to the west, across the harbour, the tops of the hills are washed with a deep blood-red.
Mary sets a brisk pace, and they reach the top of Pigeon Bay Road by the middle of the morning. They hear the settlement before they see it. Axes echo out of the valley; below that is the rumble and pant of the sawmills’ steam. Away to their left, a dog works a mob of cattle, and someone, somewhere, shouts abuse at his bullock team. A man rides past on a chestnut horse. He tips his hat, and in a heavy German accent wishes them good morning. Hester stares at him for a moment, quite nonplussed, before remembering to reply.
They walk down, between green fields where sheep and cattle graze around charred tree stumps, and the last leaves of English trees blaze against the bush. They pass another party riding up out of the bay, two gentlemen and three ladies on bored-looking hacks, the younger gentleman waving a hand towards homesteads and peaks, while the ladies admire all generously, as if it has been got up for their amusement.
‘Straight off the steamer,’ says Mary, with a sniff, and gives them a hard stare.
On the foreshore, the racket of the timber mills and boatbuilders’ yards shreds Hester’s nerves. A terrier leaping up behind a picket fence as she passes makes her cry out, her hand at her throat, and Mary laughs.
‘You’ve been up in the hills too long, girl.’
There is someone already in the tiny Corner House Store, so Mary goes in alone, leaving Hester to wait outside. She sits down on a bench and presses her fingers between her eyes. A sawmill emits a skull-piercing whistle and rattles to a halt. The bay falls silent, but for the terrier across the road, still yapping.
‘Rex!’ calls a woman’s voice, a genteel Scots burr. ‘For heaven’s sake, be quiet!’
Hester looks up. Under a leafless tree behind the picket fence, a middle-aged woman looks back at her, and smiles.
‘Did he frighten you? He likes to do that.’ The woman shakes her head apologetically. She is wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the autumn sun, and has a basket over her arm, and lace at her cuffs and collar. ‘He’s such a bad wee dog. I’m afraid I can’t do a thing with him.’
Hester smiles back. ‘It’s all right. I like dogs.’
‘Oh, no one likes Rex!’ The terrier rolls over at her feet, and she bends to rub his belly. ‘Mr McLean over there quite often threatens to shoot him. But as I say to Mr McLean, he is quite annoying himself, and I’m not a bad hand with a rifle.’ She glances back up at Hester. ‘I’m Una Monroe. What’s your name?’
‘Hester. Hester Peterson.’
‘Hester. Well. Nice to meet you.’ She holds out her basket. ‘Can I offer you some walnuts?’
‘That’s very kind.’ Hester glances over her shoulder. Mary does not seem about to emerge.
‘Come inside.’ Una Monroe pushes open the gate. ‘I’ll get you a bag.’
Drifts of leaves lie across the path, thick and soft, an exotic carpet. It is a wild sort of garden, a tumble of collapsing roses and wallflowers and fleshy jungle vigour, bare fruit trees and lime-green palms, an English autumn lost in the latitudes of eternal summer. In its centre is the house. A sea captain’s house, Hester thinks, with five gabled windows that must look over the trees to the bay, today a deep, placid blue. Beside the verandah, oranges grow, and she stares, entranced.
‘Take one,’ says Una Monroe, and laughs at Hester’s hesitation. ‘You just pull it off, like this.’ She holds it out on her palm, where it glows bright and perfect, like the sun. Hester is almost afraid to touch it.
‘Now,’ she says, brushing leaves from her skirt, ‘you’ll take some tea, won’t you? I’ve an apple cake in the larder.’
Hester stares at Una Monroe, who is smiling and untying her hat, and thinks she might cry. ‘That’s so terribly kind,’ she says again. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t. I’m waiting for my …’ She hesitates and frowns. ‘For Mary.’
‘Another day, then — when you have more time.’
‘Yes,’ says Hester, hopelessly. ‘Thank you so much. But I really can’t stay very long.’
‘Of course, of course! Let’s find you that bag. I’m sure I’ve one in the kitchen.’
Hester waits on the verandah. On the windowsills, pots of crimson geraniums bloom, their colour so rich and bright it is almost painful. Behind them, through the windows, she can see a sitting room papered with orchids and jungle birds, where the fire is lit, and the sun filters in around heavy curtains. There are sofas, and a Persian rug on the floor, lilac and green and rose, soft colours that seem to shine from within, like a brooch she once saw in a Bond Street jeweller’s window.
‘Here we are!’
‘Thank you.’ Hester takes the sugar sack from Una Monroe, and turns away.
‘Hang about!’ Una Monroe laughs again, and holds up her basket. ‘Let’s put some walnuts in it.’ ‘The mad old bat over the road give you those?’ Mary asks, and sniffs. ‘Done her bit for the poor today, then, has she?’
Hester ignores this. She does not mention the orange in her pocket. They walk home in silence. Mary carries the bulk of the load, but still Hester struggles to balance the sacks of sugar and salt with the box of tea.
As they cross the saddle, the day fades around them, greying slowly. They reach home before nightfall, but inside the house is dark and cold, and Mary hurries to light the stove.
‘See to the candles first,’ she orders Hester, ‘before you fetch the water.’
Hester peels potatoes in the sooty yellow light, hands numbing in cold water, and tries to imagine a world in which people take tea and apple cake among geraniums, while food grows on trees around them. She thinks of a firelit dining room, crystal glinting, silver warm and burnished, glowing, like an orange.
Sixteen
‘Get up!’ Hine tears the blanket aside. The moon is behind her; he cannot see her face, but her voice is hard and sharp. ‘Hurry!’ she urges fiercely. ‘Run!’
‘What is it?’ He fumbles, bent over double in the tiny space, trying to pull on his trousers.
Hine grabs him by the arm. ‘No time! No time! Run, now!’
The hairs rise on Robbie’s neck. He takes her hand, grabs his boots from the doorway, and runs without knowing why, as fast as they can, up through needling tussock and jagged stones, until they are standing on George’s lightless porch, Robbie’s heart banging in his chest, and Hine shouting things he does not understand, hammering hard with the heel of her hand on George’s door.
‘Bloody hell, woman!’ The old man’s voice comes from the back of the house, slow and rough with sleep. ‘You gone mad down there?’
‘What’s wrong?’ Tommy throws open the door. ‘Where’d you say the sea was?’
Hine stares at him. ‘Gone,’ she says. ‘But it is coming.’
It sweeps up the Karupoti Stream, a wall of foam and debris three times the height of a man, running before black water. The valley fills with its boom and rush. It sounds like the end of the world. Robbie turns to look. Above the dunes, the tall trees founder, and are lost.
‘Jesus,’ says Tommy. ‘God Almighty.’
It is an appeal as much as a curse. Robbie thinks of Pharaoh’s horsemen, and wonders about their last words. There are high, sad notes wound about with the surge and crash of the wave, like a spell or a prayer, and he knows it is Hine, above him, singing.
Then the wave is upon them, a wild thing heaving against the hillside twenty yards below their feet.
Beside Robbie, George looks down in silence. The hull of his whaleboat tumbles past, a flash of solid white amid the foam. At the bend in the stream below the house, the wave slows, caught in a tangle of trees, the rubble it has swept before it briefly damming its own flow. The water widens and spreads.
George gives a low sort of grunt when it hits the house, as if it is he who has taken the impact. Tommy puts his hand on the old man’s shoulder, and the dogs press close to their legs. The moon glints on the roof below, an island in dark, swift water.
Robbie shivers. ‘Let’s get up a bit higher.’
‘Hell,’ says George. ‘I forgot about poor old Daisy.’
‘She might be alright,’ says Tommy, looking down at what was, a few moments ago, the cow paddock. No trace of shed or fence line can now be seen above the flood. The others are silent. ‘You never know.’
Through the remains of the night, the sea falls away then rises again, the gentle cycle of moon and tide compressed to a ragged hour. Every few minutes, a wave foams high into the dunes, and they wait. But for now, the sea comes no further. Robbie holds onto Hine. Tommy looks at them, but he and George say nothing.
After a time, Hine sleeps. Beside her, Robbie watches the sky, and wonders if, in this new world order, there will be a dawn. But slowly, the sky begins to lighten, and the waves subside, until the bay is almost quiet.
As the sun rises, he hears it. It is a sound like nothing he knows, unless in dreams, a soft wet shudder like breath through teeth, something waiting, slow and hungry, around the corner of a nightmare. He watches the sea retreat. Karupoti Bay is sucked dry, right down to its weedy, fissured hide, naked in the grey morning.
‘Jesus,’ says Tommy, again.
They stare at the missing sea in silence. A great quiet rolls around them, as if time, or the earth, has stopped. For a long time, nothing moves.
‘I think that’s the wreck of the Sarah-Jane,’ says George.
‘Shh,’ says Hine. ‘It is coming.’
There is a boom as the wave hits the cliffs, and then they see it. Robbie holds his breath as it sweeps up the stream, but its force is less this time, and it falls back before it nears the farmhouse. Slowly, it ebbs below low water. Again, the tide resumes its frenzied rise and fall.
Robbie looks down on the flattened valley. The shape of it seems changed, its topography inverted. The dunes are full of the tops of trees, the stripped trunks hung with seaweed. Rivers of water are running out of the lower fields, but the bed of the stream is almost dry. Two of George’s apple trees lie on the beach. The orchard is covered in sand.
A third wave mounts around the middle of the morning. Again, the sea retreats with a hissing suck, but not so far, and the height of the wave is much diminished. In its wake, the cycle of the tides begins to slow and settle. By midday, the ocean is blue and demure, a swirl of mud here and there, a raft of purple weed, the only signs of its adventures.
Hours pass. The sea does not stir from its bed. In the bush behind, the bellbirds sing. Hungry and tired and cold, Robbie and the others go down at last, cautious as stealing rats, as if the waves might hear them.
On the flat, the air is full of the sound of running water, and the smell of silt and drying weed. The dogs stick close to their heels as they make their way back to the farmhouse. George stops to look up at a barnacled dugout canoe resting on top of a stand of matagouri. ‘Lost that back in ’65,’ he says. ‘Been wondering where it got to.’
A pair of oystercatchers is poking through a pile of kelp in the front garden. George stares at his dripping house in silence. Delicate pink weed hangs from the overflowing gutters, trailing down like party streamers. On the verandah, there is a gentle, slapping thud.
‘E!’ says Hine, and darts forward to retrieve a flapping kahawai from the step.
‘Stand back.’ George puts his shoulder to the door. Dirty water rushes out, knee high, bearing a tide of household goods into the garden. A floating chair jams in the doorway, sliding slowly to the floor as the last of the water drains. George sticks his head around the door, and peers down the hall. He takes a deep breath.
‘Could be worse,’ he says.
Seventeen
Hester wakes suddenly, without knowing why. She lies still in the darkness, listening. She hears roaring, like a high wind through the scrub, but the house is unstirred, the air around her serene and silent. She gets up, and pulls back the curtains. The moon is up. The tops of the trees shift gently. There is barely a breeze outside.
Light flares up through the attic floorboards. She hears Mary’s sleepy protest, and her father’s voice, low and firm. The front door opens. From behind the curtain, Hester watches Daniel walk around the house, light spilling around the hand that shields his wavering candle. He is gone for a while.
She hears the sound of the kitchen door, and the thump on the bedroom floor as he takes off his boots. ‘Just the sea,’ he says, and Mary groans, and the candle is extinguished.
Hester goes back to bed. The night is quiet now, except for the roughened surf. She snatches at sleep, but cannot fully grasp it; she watches grey light grow slowly around the edges of the curtains.
She is getting dressed when it happens again. A boom, like a vast cannon under the cliffs. And then the roaring rush, up out of the valleys all around her. She feels it reverberate in her chest, and her heart pounds on as the dawn settles back into stillness. Downstairs, the kettle is boiling on the stove, but the kitchen is empty. She opens the back door slowly, reluctant to face whatever may be outside. The noise of the sea lurches up at her. But the land is still there, grass and weeds and stunted hedge, and beyond, at its edge, two figures, shadows against the sky.
Hester walks out to the cliffs. She keeps back, behind Daniel and Mary. But still she can see the wreck of Sutherland’s Bay.
‘You go,’ her father is saying to Mary. ‘I’ll go to Sutherland’s.’
Mary takes a deep breath and
shakes her head, but Daniel holds up his hand.
‘Take Hester.’ He straightens his back. ‘I have a duty.’
Mary turns. She walks past Hester, back to the house, and Hester sees her roll her eyes. ‘Come on, get your coat,’ she snaps. ‘We’re off down to see to your brother.’
Mary packs swiftly. They take flour and blankets, matches, a billy and tea. They start down the cliff track, but turn back when Mary decides they should not risk crossing the Karupoti Stream. Hester follows her without question, her own wits moving slowly, as if against white water. She does not trust her footing here in the middle of this gleaming winter’s day.
They have reached the top of Karupoti Bay Road when the third wave strikes.
Far below them, in the valley, the farmhouse stands alone, a tiny square of red and cream against the vast stretch of the ocean. Hester watches the sea come for it, a cry stuck in her throat, the breath trapped in her chest.
The wave falls back. The farmhouse is still standing. Hester breathes out. She feels a prickle of hope. ‘Come on,’ she says to Mary. ‘We have to get down.’
They are halted halfway down the valley by the stream. The Karupoti no longer runs beside the road, but across and down it, a busy, muddy torrent edged by a wall of foam. Just below them, fallen trees block the stream’s old course. As they stand there, a foot-high wave drives up against the flow and raises the water to their toes.
‘I don’t like the look of this,’ says Mary.
‘Perhaps it’s not deep,’ says Hester, though she likes the look of the stream no more than Mary. ‘Or we could go around it.’
Mary eyes the impromptu dam. ‘No telling what’s on the other side of all that. Or how long those trees’ll hold.’
‘We have to do something.’