‘No, I’m not,’ I said.
But then my eyes slammed shut and my head sandwiched against the train window, and I slept, twitching with dreams in bright colours and whispering shapes. It was not until the doors hissed open at Paraparaumu that I woke. Stony-faced, the ghost indicated the doors and followed me out. In silence now, we fetched my bike and walked. For a long time she didn’t speak, and this time as we went past them she glanced warily at the shops—the Warehouse Stationery, the organic shop—and seemed rather smaller against their backdrop, vulnerable in the noisy bulk of evening traffic.
For my part, I was still groggy from my enforced sleep on the train, and I felt the small silent shape beside me as a rebuke. I’d met Maud Pember Reeves at last, and I’d wasted the chance. I’d offended her, brought out the worst side of her ghost.
‘I won’t blog about this,’ I said, at last. ‘About meeting you.’
She nodded and walked on, keeping her eyes on her feet. She seemed self-conscious, for the first time, about her old-fashioned look. As we went through the mall carpark, some teenagers had gone past in a car and leaned out of a car and honked, the passengers jeering out the windows, apparently at her odd appearance. But at the station I’d automatically put on my bike helmet and a hi-viz vest over my suit, so perhaps I was the target.
‘But I’ll still blog about you, and your family,’ I said. ‘You can’t reasonably expect me to stop Fabian Life. It’s practically a job for me now—a second job, if you like.’
Some more time passed; we crested the footpath out the back of Coastlands and began walking down past the drycleaners and op-shops.
‘But you don’t get paid for it,’ said Maud, at last.
‘I might,’ I said. ‘I’ve reviewed some books, and they paid well—some of them. And I’ll get some adverts on the website, if the popularity keeps up. I’ve had some interest.’
She smiled, but with less of the smugness of before.
‘Have you read the whole blog?’ I said. ‘There’s heaps on there. Some of my published reviews, and other work.’
She sighed and looked down the street. ‘Yes. You’ve already harangued me about that.’
‘Well,’ I said, and fell silent.
We turned into Matai Road, and Maud secured her hair against the light breeze, clipping some stray hairs flat. My stomach growled, and I had a sudden pang for home. It was homemade pizza night. It was a family night, normally, when there was music and loud disagreement, all three of us slapping on our preferred ingredients, but tonight I’d have to microwave what they’d already cooked. I was already too late to see my stepson before he went to bed.
Glancing at me, Maud said, ‘Why are you so obsessed, Mr Hunt? Why the Fabians, and why our family, especially? Why can’t you pick on somebody else?’
I shrugged and walked on, but she forced my gaze to meet hers.
‘Well?’
‘I’d hardly call it picking on you,’ I said.
She waved this off. ‘You owe me an explanation, at least. I’m your guest.’
‘Ha!’
She smiled. ‘A somewhat troublesome guest, perhaps. All the same.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s just what takes my interest. I can never predict what I’ll blog about next. Did you know I blogged about the Gallaghers before this—the electric fence family? And I’ve got a blog about sport.’
‘Good God,’ she said. ‘What excellent company you make us keep.’
What a snob, I thought.
‘I heard that,’ she said.
We were amongst the Raumati houses now. A trio of schoolgirls straggled along the path, music coming from somewhere amongst them, and they sniggered openly at Maud’s outfit. She bent her head until they were well past.
‘Are you still in contact with your husband?’ I said, gently. ‘Will you tell him about this?’
She paused, her lips pressed tight, then said, ‘We are in contact.’
It was meant as a politeness, an inquiry after the health of her family, but it brought another question with it, and I couldn’t resist asking it. ‘And H.G. Wells? Do you see him, now—do you talk?’
Her head snapped towards me, and I looked away, bracing for a telling-off. Of course, I knew her daughter had eloped with Wells and fallen pregnant to him in Europe. For a time it was the scandal of Maud’s later life, and it had sapped much of her husband’s strength. On the website I’d made it the subject of a quiz. A tasteful quiz, I’d thought.
Now she was looking at me, and shaking her head. ‘You just can’t help yourself, can you, Mr Hunt.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I glanced up the street and felt the swirl of slow-rising panic. We were almost at the laneway, and the light was fading fast into dusk. At the same moment, I felt the ghost relax, as she seemed to have the same thought—soon she’d be leaving me behind for good.
She laughed and said, ‘You’re such a fool, Mr Hunt.’
‘Yes, but what was he like?’ I said. ‘Wells? Do you still hate him for it?’
She laughed again, and it was a gentler laugh, not as scornful as before. ‘Of course not.’
‘Why not?’
She stopped walking and faced me. We were at the top of the lane, the drain sending up its fragrance of swamp. ‘I hope you get wiser once you pass through, Mr Hunt. I wouldn’t like to meet you again in this state.’
‘Pass through?’ I said.
‘For a basically nice person,’ she said, ‘your manners could do with a lot of improvement.’
I glanced behind her. Mist was creeping up from the water to the laneway, then up the side-fence. ‘Perhaps you could come back,’ I said. ‘You could meet my girlfriend, her son. He’s a nice boy. You like kids. My partner’s nicer than I am. Not so earnest.’
‘Good night, Mr Hunt. Thank you for bringing me back to this lane.’
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for teasing you. I admire your work—that’s the first thing. That came first.’
She nodded and looked down the lane at the mist, assessing it.
‘But really, are you in touch with them—those people? Shaw? Your husband? I’d love to know about that.’
For a moment she searched my face, as if gauging how badly I wanted to know this. ‘No, Mr Hunt. I’m sorry, but I’m not in touch. These days, I’m all alone.’ She touched my wrist. ‘But it’s not sad. They’re all with me. We carry them with us, don’t we, Mr Hunt? All those people we’ve lived with—all our friends and ghosts. They all live with us. Forever, I think.’
I tried to return her smile but couldn’t, and instead looked down at my feet.
She stroked my arm and smiled, then began to walk down the lane without me. But after a few steps she turned. ‘I noticed something today,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘The mayor,’ she said. ‘He rescued you, didn’t he? That stunt with the chains, he rescued you from embarrassment.’
I nodded, peering down the lane. As the sun lowered, her face was becoming harder to make out.
‘That was nice of him, wasn’t it?’ she said.
‘I suppose. What’s your point?’
She touched her face absently, then held her hand up, as if surprised to find her fingertips wet from the sudden mist. I watched her put her fingers up to taste the mist, then shake the remnant moisture off.
‘What about the mayor?’ I said, straining. ‘What was your point?’
‘Oh,’ she said, glancing back. ‘Nothing—just that it was nice. It’s always nice when a friend helps you out.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That was it?’
She smiled enigmatically and walked further ahead. Then she turned again. ‘And be good to Toby,’ she said. ‘Your stepson—he knows what’s what.’
‘All right,’ I said.
She was barely visible now, halfway between the street-lamps that shone down light on the lane and fence and creek.
‘And don’t forget—’
‘Yes, I’ll email the
hologrammers tonight. That’s all off.’
Then without moving, she was at my neck again, whispering. I brushed my ear, shivered, felt her fingers dance down my throat to the helmet’s chin strap.
At that moment a car swooped past, its headlights cutting across, and I strained to catch what she said.
‘What was that?’ I said.
‘I said,’ she whispered, ‘I like your hat. Very fetching, Mr Hunt.’
I laughed and put a hand to my head. ‘It’s not a hat. It’s a bike helmet.’
But in that instant her shape looped under the bars and down into the grass, then the watercress. A greater darkness opened up, and she walked into it.
I waited a moment, but there was nothing to follow, just midges in a cloud, the slow creek, and the odd tendril of clearing mist. Another car cut across, wiping my face with light, and when it had passed the lane was empty and quiet, the streetlamps sending down their orbs of soft light.
I turned with my bike and went back into the street. I spent some time getting my bike and gear organised, to collect myself. My helmet was loose. My bike-lamp didn’t have much battery left. I’d have to pedal fast to make it home before it ran out.
MY BROTHER’S BLOOD
We carried no guns. Whereas we went over those Fiordland heights with no weapons under our coats, my brother would have been draped about with knives and flintlock weapons, and it was this clear difference that proved I was right to oppose him. His task was bloody; I came to prevent bloodshed. It was 1802. Just two years were left to run before we put an end to their reign of slaughter, and our conflict was at its height. I put my boots in the tracks of the man in front of me and knew it was the correct path.
That certainty propelled me forward for about ten steps of each hour’s walking. The rest was doubt. Try marching toward conflict with your brother—the one who brought you up. Try knowing exactly what malignant twist his face will take. Try going towards that, armed only with the religious armour put about you by the Order, a faith I’d adopted for the sake of comfort, not for burning love of the Mother inviolate.
Nevertheless I was on the march. From Bluff up the southwest hinterland we’d come to within a day’s tramp of Dusky Sound. We were travelling light and fast, aiming to complete our intervention and return south, because we all had vegetables at home to lift, and some had families. As we walked, we knew ourselves to be observed by the scouts of local people, in the area for the gathering of their sacred pounamu, but bent on their own Holy task they did not approach us, recognising perhaps in our single-minded speed and lack of weapons a similar crew of pilgrims, bisecting that sacred space to protect it.
A greater danger lay ahead. From intelligence John had gained at Bluff we knew my brother’s crew to be the sweepings of van Diemen’s Land and the world’s merchant marine. Besides the clubs and lances of their trade and their own private knives, they possessed muskets and a powder keg. None of us were naīve to the danger such men would present. Once interrupted—irritated—yet again by the Order, they would lash out. Several Ordermen had died on such campaigns, and in most of those stories my brother’s ferocity was the central point. To the Order, he was Lucifer, heretic plunderer of the beasts they held sacred.
I alone knew this unholy spectre as an intimate. We’d been apart fifteen years now, but what I owed him I would not forget. His hard boy’s face. His hands in my hair, wrenching me up. Our shared early misfortune, the stinging Shetland water, the salt.
We camped that night in bush upstream from the fiord. We were, John calculated, within a few hours’ march of their camp, yet sufficiently obscured by the near ridge to risk a fire. The sandflies were a curse. Prohibited by our faith from killing them, we flinched and flicked away insects as their bites sucked under collars, into wrists.
All twitching ceased, though, once the fire was lit and Nightsong called. At a silent signal from John we knelt, ten men and women on wet forested ground, all hats removed, waiting for John’s words.
Aid us, O Mother, to preserve Your Order
Your Holy rank of creatures and trees
Lift us up, O Mother, and redeem us
By this work, from our human basity.
For Yours is the Order
The Forest, the Water
In Your name we carry forth
This Holy War.
Then there was an easing of knees, a collective shifting to sit on logs or our rude travelling bags, for each campaigner’s Offering-words. The Blacksmith was first and the brothers second, and true to form their Offerings yawned with piety.
‘We travel here,’ began the Blacksmith, ‘in the instruction of the prophets and under the guidance of John; we observe your Natural Order in this Holiest place, we take forth your work in the company of these trees.’ The brothers DeMarinis merely echoed him minus the gravitas, and the rhythmic virtue went on, lulling everyone away to their own thoughts and back in time for each Amen, and thus I had little fear of inquisition from the group as I came to give my own Offering.
Nevertheless I could sense through the fire John’s attention on me; somehow as we’d walked that day he’d traced the whiff of ambivalence along the line of campaigners to me. He was our chief prophet’s son and lieutenant and shared his father’s acute perceptiveness, yet his face was harder, his resolve more pure; any of his nature that might have been given over to lenience or compassion had been absorbed in the demands of active leadership. Thus he had led our campaigns for fifteen years or more; this was my first campaign, and I knew to expect no indulgence from him.
So I relied on the scaffolding of Orderist scripture to start me off.
Mother God, aid me to preserve Your Order
The beasts, the fowls and the trees.
Then, as our faith requires, I gave honest exposure to my own soul, that it might be offered up to the forest.
Mother in this place
Give faith to a blind man
Sympathy to his brothers and sisters
And in faith and good fortune
I obey Thee.
Thus I gave under the trees honest utterance. It would have piqued a sceptic’s interest, had one been there, would have provoked a long discussion in some prophet’s hut or vegetable rows the next day—but the prophets were not there, I was on campaign, and my words seemed merely to reinforce the novitiates around me. The Amen was resounding, and the Offerings went on, man to woman to man. Only John’s eyes touched on mine, as he stared plainly through the smoke until I looked down. Then the Offerings were done and the hard bread was passed, leavened with pumpkin paste and a handful of berries, sandflies nipping our fingers and cheeks as we ate.
A final briefing from John sent us into the tents, rain threatening above.
I was adjacent to the brothers DeMarinis and, as always, they slept immediately and did not wake. And as on every night of the trek thus far, I lay awake a long while, my eyes probing the tent roof while the night-birds boomed through the dark. Then it rained.
When I woke the dawn chorus was already upon us, the birds open-throated in the trees above and the rain all gone, and the brothers DeMarinis already by the dead fire with John, their hats removed and heads bent in observance, the others quickly arriving. To rise before dawn for this observance was a core practice of most Orderists, but I was not a man who enjoyed the hours before morning tea, and at the community I’d done my best to avoid it.
Rubbing the damp from my joints I came to the circle and knelt and truly it was a rich sound, the birdsong that avalanched from the trees. Bellbirds, robins, and others I couldn’t distinguish, all pouring forth, and I was quite swept away by it. Of course it was right to revere this miracle, this Mother-provided organsound and hymn.
Yet for this we’d been banished from every port and city, save for those of our stronghold in Scotland, even denied access to the meeting places of this new colony, forced inland from Bluff. And the more I listened to this mad Fiordland chorus the more I felt some of what must have driven t
he others—that tribal outrage, absolute and united.
But then light lifted through the trees and the chorus lost its intensity, desiccating into a broader melee of forest noise, and John cleared his throat to say Morningsong. Then we all stood and shook hands, clasping at the elbows and shoulders, and broke camp.
The day’s purpose was reconnaissance, and from the valley we climbed to the ridgeline to scan the fiord fingering out grandly to the Tasman and, on its nearmost shore, the rude camp of tents my brother’s crew had established. Before the main tent the bush had been cleared and a small boat moored. John and the older DeMarinis manned the spy glasses for a half-hour and concluded that my brother’s men had forayed far from their camp. Zigzagging down the slope we moved as quickly as the terrain would allow, all silent, both in trepidation of what lay ahead and from respect to the habitat we were passing through, the bugs and leaves and smaller beings we crushed underfoot with each step.
The sun was high and my feet were blistered, my toes bloodied inside my boots and grating with each step down. Wincing, I pictured both DeMarinis brothers loving such a discomfort, relishing the pain as a trial of faith when it came. In truth I found it hard to like those brothers. Both walked ahead of me now, one with a wife, and even her chuffing labour I disliked. ‘Phew!’ she said, over and over. ‘Holy Mother!’ So much of campaigning was not to my taste.
We came close to the sealers’ tents and John held up a hand. ‘A quick thanks.’
We circled as well we could in the bush with our eyes cast down, but it was a hasty meditation, summoning back my nerves rather than calming them. And immediately afterwards everyone was active, the youngest brother and the Blacksmith going to unmoor the boat, the others surrounding the tents. Left alone with John I crouched under cover of the bush, waiting for instructions. In what I took to be some kind of novitiate test, I’d been chosen to raid the tents with him.
For a full ten minutes we crouched side by side, surveying the tents.
I Got His Blood on Me: Frontier Tales Page 10