by Lloyd Jones
She was shocked when she saw the others. Only three days had passed but in the uneven light of the cave Billy Pohl and Henry Graham looked like they had been marooned for weeks. They hadn’t shaved. Their faces looked strained. They were relieved to see her, though when they saw Schmidt they leapt up. Billy Pohl was first to speak. ‘Louise, just who the hell is this?’
She told them what had happened. Their going out for lemonade. And how the day had suddenly turned on them. Their escape on the jigger pleased Billy especially.
But she also felt their resentment. Where had she been all this time? Why hadn’t she brought them food? Henry wanted to know if she had spoken with his parents. What about Tom Williams? Had he given her any news to pass on? Had she remembered to bring tea?
She said, ‘I wasn’t thinking of tea when we left the house, Henry.’
She walked to the mouth of the cave and stared at the moonlight on the water. Now that they had stopped running she started to notice the night chill. It condensed along her spine. The embers from the fire behind the log in the entrance had died down. She folded her arms and began to think aloud. It was too dark to go back home tonight. She didn’t want to climb up the cliff or walk all that way without light.
‘Go back?’ said Billy Pohl. He sounded amazed. ‘You can’t go back, Louise. What’s the matter with you. They saw you. They saw you with our friend here.You can’t go back.’
‘Go back,’ said Schmidt. ‘Of course we must go back. I have appointments. There are pianos to see. People are…Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘Oh Christ.’ He plonked himself down dejectedly in the sand.
Billy ignored the stranger to concentrate on Louise. ‘You go back, Louise, and we might as well walk back with you to our graves. You do know that, don’t you?’
9
She did not know Billy Pohl or Henry Graham that well. Isolation added to the mystery of the Grahams who lived outside the town boundary in almost derelict circumstances. A wooden shack folding into the bush, a solitary square of pasture, the white-freckled trunks of kahikatea. They were bee-keepers. Also, they didn’t eat meat or so it was rumoured.That was more or less Henry, then. Billy Pohl she knew as a man of casual habits. Sometimes he would appear on the brink of growing a beard, then, the next time she saw him he was shaven, clean as a whistle, the line of his jawbone sporting and gleaming. With Billy you just never knew what lay around the corner. It was usually Billy’s chair you heard scrape the floor at the Meetings. Some are able to occupy silence and rug themselves up in it. Billy was not one of them.
She joined the circle by the fire. Against the cave wall played the flickering shadow of their bowed heads as they sought the comforts of silence. Habits are what you fall back on in a moment of crisis.
She made room for Schmidt but he stuck his hands in his pockets and took himself off to the mouth of the cave to sulk.
That first night, they lay their heads on their folded arms. Sleep came and went. She heard Schmidt get up in the night and move around. She closed her eyes and drifted off again. The next time she woke she raised her head—the mouth of the cave was evenly divided between sky and sea—and she saw him telescoped, sitting on a rock, the moonlit tide washing around him.
Later that morning she was gathering firewood when she heard footsteps in the shingle behind her. She turned, and there he was, holding his hands to her, advancing with an expression of distress. ‘I’m sorry, Louise. This is all my fault. I am so sorry.’
Every morning they wake up with the sound of the ocean roaring in their ears. It is the sound of the world in these parts—huge, unpopulated, lonely. They lie there, for the moment too stiff to move, too cold to make the effort even though they know that once they get up and start moving their aches will disappear. They wake with sand in their ears, up nostrils, a grit on their fingers, hands and arms. Skin like sandpaper; their hair stiff. An irritating graininess in their scalp. The itching never stops. Billy Pohl and Henry Graham complain of their filthy trousers; the awful drag of material on their skin is even changing the way they walk. They complain of sores on their legs and soon the discomfort is working its way into their faces, stretching the skin, focussing the eyes, souring mouths.
They raise their heads a few inches and look past their bent knees to the ocean. Another December day lies exhaustingly ahead. By midday Louise is ready to lie down again. She’s done everything there is to do. She is ready to lie down and sleep. By midday she finds herself wishing for nightfall. The afternoon is no use to her. There is nothing to do but to wait.
Meanwhile the hills, the tireless ocean, the broad sky all carry the same message. Look at where you are. You’re all alone.
At night when the wind blows down off the hills they lie in their sand beds with the thought that they are as powerless as the cows that stand in their dark paddocks. As vulnerable as the land peaking out to sea. Anything could happen. An earthquake. A giant wave might engorge the cave and suck them out to join the echo of the ocean and of nothingness.
By the fourth day it is clear to Louise that things are not going to pan out the way she thought they would. The world hasn’t missed them at all.The world isn’t even out searching. Either that, or they’ve done too good a job of hiding and now they are left with just themselves. Louise in her fraying dress. Paul Schmidt with that secret country he carries within. Self-sufficient and the least ruffled of them, always he seems locked in his thoughts, travelling between the here and there. Billy, cat smart, watchful. And Henry, glum, bored with the adventure, like a child in his persistence, asking every hour, why hasn’t Tom come for them? Why hasn’t Tom brought the good news that he’s sorted out things and they are now free to return to their other life? Why have they been left to hang here like this?
The same question preoccupies them all. Billy is given to standing in the mouth of the cave where he quizzes the sea.
Schmidt has made a particular rock his own. He can spend hours sitting on it, alone, knees, chin and elbows. The moment he senses anyone’s eyes on him he returns their interest with a smile. Louise hasn’t heard him complain once—even in the morning he never joins in the chorus of groans. She watches him sitting on his rock and thinks he is like a man waiting for a late-arriving train. Most days a trawler is seen out to sea. A single vee slicing a line for farther up the coast. It is always Billy who hisses at her to get down from the rock. Billy is always on the lookout. Every morning he climbs the cliff behind the cave to check their position in case in the night there has occurred some rearrangement. Billy is the one most suspicious of the world. She doesn’t get down from the rock, though. She doesn’t believe that the trawler has seen them. She’s convinced of their invisibility. Besides, she’s been out on her father’s boat and knows about the bulge in the sea and how the shoreline disappears from view.
One night Schmidt tells a story about South American animals with magical powers who at night turn themselves into ghosts and sneak into villages, passing through the front door of houses, searching the shelves for food.
In the ensuing silence it is Billy Pohl who speaks up. ‘We’re not about to do that,’ he says.
Of the unmentionable things, of all the things she is sure preoccupies Billy, it is this. What if Henry bolts? What if one morning they wake up and find him gone? That would be it then, wouldn’t it? That would mean the end. It would only be a matter of time before a sheepish-looking Henry led the authorities to their whereabouts.
The prospect made her smile. A sense of relief loosened within her; for the moment it was as if Henry had already gone and done that and now there was just a short period of waiting to get through before the dogs and handlers showed up. She looked over at Paul Schmidt sitting on the rock, crossed arms, locked in a dream.They would let him go, and he would say adieu.To where? Abroad? He wouldn’t stay a piano tuner. Or if he did, it wouldn’t be here. Europe? Not with all the fighting. He would go to Argentina. He would go to that place he describes at night around the fire. He would go there and lose
himself in a new language. She thinks how wonderful that would be, to simply leave and arrive, and in time become local. It makes her feel a little sad, even envious. And what about Henry and Billy? What would happen to them? Well, that’s easy, isn’t it. They would be marched off to the war to be killed out of fairness to old classmates.
The thought made her cry out loud. Immediately the others looked at her. Billy with that slow up-lidded querying expression of his.
Henry with his clear unblinking sight. ‘Louise?’
She smiled, shook her head. Said it was nothing.
She opened the palms of her hands to release the thoughts.
‘See? All gone.’
Boredom. What to do? What to do? How to fill the hours? She wishes someone would find them. She wishes it would pass. It’s Saturday and she wants to go to the cemetery. Is it even Saturday? It feels like it might be. She can’t be sure. She’s lost all track of time.
They live as prisoners experience life. Without a sustaining present. Without even a future to grasp hold of. So they talk about the past. Billy tells stories. Henry tries to. He never seems sure whether or not he is embarked on a story. He will begin talking, then look at each of their faces unsure in which direction to direct the flow of information. He speaks of events, incidents from the farm. Or of things with a scientific bent. How bees carry honey under their wings and the miraculous creation of the honeycomb. Henry can look at a piece of honeycomb and tell exactly where, and from which flower, the bees have been gathering. But more often it’s the piano tuner they turn to. He speaks of a place that sets their dreaming selves loose. Of crazy bars where the white people copy the black people, and dance with all their innermost selves and feelings, where one dancer follows another, and one dance follows another, hour after hour, until the night peels back to dawn.
One night the piano tuner unfolds himself from his place by the fire. He shakes the sand off his trousers and snaps his fingers for Louise to get up and join him. So that they can see for themselves what he’s been talking about, he will show them a few steps of the tango.
Before the fire-lit faces of Billy Pohl and Henry Graham she feels the piano tuner’s hand arrive at the small of her back. The hand gives a little shove and resettles. It presses and guides; Schmidt hums; it is the same music she heard him play in her front room. She laughs—but that is more for Billy Pohl and Henry Graham’s sakes, to make them relax. The piano tuner’s eyes are still, concentrated— now they move off. They prospect in one direction, then shift their weight there. They do not hurry. She likes that. The way he moves her with exaggerated slowness. And because it is dark she is able to close her eyes and float in his arms, and smile at the flow of instruction to Billy Pohl and Henry Graham. ‘You see? Yes? Yes?’ For a second they hold the position—hold it, hold it. ‘You see, yes?’ until the shiny faces by the fire nod back.
Billy Pohl has a turn. Then Henry Graham. Billy holds her too tightly. He doesn’t want to so much guide her as possess her, clamp her on to himself and run off with her. With Henry it is like she might crumble into a thousand pieces.
‘Henry,’ she whispers. ‘I can’t feel your hand.’
She can hear his tremulous breath though.
‘Go on, Henry, don’t be shy.’
But her back is a hot coal and Henry can’t keep his hand there for long.
The piano tuner sings. He sang in Spanish. Words that none of them can understand. It is the only tango song Paul Schmidt knows in its entirety so he sings it repeatedly until they get to know the words and at a certain bend in the song are able to join in.
When she dances with Henry the piano tuner fits the song around Henry’s uncertainty. He slows it down. He even stops it to instruct Henry on some point.With Billy the song tends to speed up; it is a race to the finish and that is Billy’s fault. He tries to fit in more turns than necessary. Sometimes Louise thinks she catches a glimpse of the finish tape in Billy’s eyes.
The sand on the floor of the cave is quick to cut up. After each dance they move to another area of the cave until that too cuts up, and then they begin over, Paul Schmidt singing, one or the other of the boys clapping to keep the rhythm.
Morning finds the floor of the cave churned up. It looks like a herd of cattle has passed through.
It was Billy Pohl who ‘discovered’ the dance floor. An area of flat rock on one side of the cave. It sloped away but other than that it behaved fine. After Billy brushed away the sand they watched Schmidt measure it out in steps. Four to the side, ten to the end where he stopped to scratch his chin and ponder. ‘Louise?’ He looked around for her and held out a beckoning hand. She moved inside his arms. He whispered the instructions and they demonstrated the gancha—a thigh glance inviting an upward flick of her heel inside his leg that brought a ‘Holy Jesus’ from Billy looking on. ‘You see,’ said the piano tuner calmly. ‘There doesn’t have to be a lot of movement to make it interesting.’
They were learning in their different ways. Billy Pohl had a turn; then Henry. But it was Schmidt whom Louise waited for. Billy and Henry were just something to get through. They liked the womanly feel of her. They liked to feel her close, Billy especially, he became like a vine, clamping on to her; Henry, on the other hand, wanting to but not quite able to and going slack with shame. She danced longer with Schmidt. For one thing, the piano tuner could carry the song and add as many verses as he wished. He could hum in her ear. Not only was he the master of technique he was in charge of music, which gave him a distinct advantage over Billy Pohl and Henry Graham. In their hands the dance was a clumsy, awkward thing. Whereas it flowed out of Schmidt. Well, it was in him to start with. Bit by bit Louise found herself stowing bits of the dance inside of herself, the sandwich, for example, and when the piano tuner dragged her foot back with her own she felt a glass chandelier must be hanging over them, a band playing onstage, floorboards gleaming in the lights.
10
At low tide the world reconfigured. The sea drew back and the tide turned lazy with sloppy brown kelp beds. Rocks emerged, and seabirds found new quarters to rest on and watch the day.
Louise was sitting on a rock watching Billy Pohl show the piano tuner how to reach down and feel for paua. Both men were in their long johns, Schmidt with the side of his face flat to the water; his eyes squeezed tight with concentrated effort. She thought of him tuning the piano, feeling for the notes.
It was the same when they danced together. She watched his eyes. They coaxed her, assisted by his shoves and tips; and his quiet words of encouragement. ‘Good, Louise. That’s it. You’ve got it.’ When his mouth closed a line ran from the corner to halfway up his cheek. Once they were safely through the step or series of steps the lines of his jaw would soften again. She was picking it up. Her progress seemed to please Schmidt as much as it did her. He told her, ‘You can dance, Louise. You can do it.’
Once, while gathering firewood, she felt sufficiently light and confident enough to ask him, ‘Are you married, Mister Schmidt?’ Falling back on formality in a jokey way.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Are you?’
‘No,’ she said.
They left it at that.
These days it was too hot to linger. The sun hogged the sky and scorched the grey beach, making it too hot to walk barefoot on. During the hottest part of the day they holed up in the cave, huddling in the highest corners to protect their red bitten shins from the sandhoppers and sandflies.
There were duties to perform. Small tasks that in themselves were diverting. In the next bay there was water to collect from a hill stream where they would drop to their knees and dip their faces and drink as the cattle did. Separately they took themselves off to the creek to strip off their rags and soak them.
They went swimming, Billy Pohl and Henry Graham several times a day, Schmidt not so often. He was just as happy with his rock where he could sit alone and think.
To get a moment by herself, or to bathe, Louise would walk all the way to the end of the beach
where a finger of rock pushed out to sea like a breakwater. Inside it were a number of rocks and rock pools to choose from. Billy Pohl and Henry Graham entered the sea in their long johns. But she could not bear the way her dress stiffened with the saltwater once it dried, so she went in naked.
There were days when the wind blew up and flung spit across the beach. Summer squalls that sent them running for the cave. Then the wind would stop dead and the head of a dandelion would come to a complete rest on the beach. It was as though the weather had stopped to pause and think, ‘What now?’ before deciding it might as well rain. And rain it did. Inside the cave they looked out at the tiny waterfalls cascading over the entrance. Out to sea heavy grey lines like guy ropes held the sky in place. And when the rain stopped and the sun came out they left the cave to find jets of fresh water spurting out of the limestone bluffs above the beach. Some of these fell thirty feet and they ran to stand under them, squealing with pleasure and gasping at the cold.
After three days the waterfalls slowed to a trickle. They made wet streaks against the rock face. Then just a line of mist as the last of the waterfall evaporated. Finally, nothing. Or at least it returned to bare rock face. And at dusk they could lean against the limestone and feel the warmth of the day where, just a few days earlier, it had spurted with water.
For a spell it was stifling hot and none of them had the energy to climb up to the hill creek for water or to wash. The fatigue Louise felt had nothing to do with the dancing at night. It was dehydration. The light headacheyness. The sandbagged weariness. The effort it took just to drag herself up the beach. They weren’t drinking enough water. She knew that. But immersion in the sea momentarily revived her; then she felt her body solidify and gather its old self. Now she slid up on to a rock, found a place to sit.With her fingers she brushed her wet hair back from her face. The salt cleared from her eyes and when she looked to the beach there was the piano tuner. Something inside her gave a start. On the surface though she was perfectly calm. He nodded to her. She did the same. Then he turned and walked back down the beach.