Wake

by Elizabeth Knox

  Jacob hurried to the bed and flung back the duvet. He moved too hastily. There was a sticky ripping noise, and Curtis cried out.

  Curtis’s blood-soaked pyjama bottoms had adhered to his legs, and the bedclothes.

  For a moment all Jacob was able to do was stare. It was like watching the sea retreat. There was only blankness before him, and anticipation, of the thing gathering itself at the horizon, the thing that would soon surge back in and drown him.

  He found his voice—and a firm kindness, which failing all else had always stood him in stead. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to this. You just lie still.’ Jacob let the covers settle again. He left the room to get busy, to find swabs, disinfectant, and dressings—and to hide his face.

  Sam had gone to see Belle’s kakapo because the birds were an Elect—they were going to be saved.

  She fetched the kakapo’s feed and filled the hopper, then sat at the edge of the clearing to watch the birds gather and eat.

  When she heard the quad bike she went down to the gate and saw Theresa let Belle off and go on herself, the bike rocking away along the overgrown grass of the firebreak.

  Belle saw her and called out, and, for a moment, Sam stood her ground. There was nothing threatening or frightening in Belle’s open face, but Sam didn’t really know Belle, and she didn’t know what to say to her, or to any of them.

  She hadn’t planned to run; she just did, swivelling on her heel and taking off. She plunged into the forest and jumped up onto a fallen log, her foot hitting the slimy spot where the bark was coming away from the wood. She slipped, and tumbled into a patch of bush-lawyer. She lay still in its clinging tangles, listening as Belle went by calling her name.

  Her name—Sam—the name she had first learned to answer to. But not just her, for when Uncle would say ‘Sam’, they had both raised their faces from whatever had their attention, for instance their bath toys—the duck, the frog, the spouting fish—floating between their chubby legs. Uncle would say ‘Sam’ and they’d both look up at him—Samantha and Samara. Uncle would call them Samantha and Samara too, and they had distinguished each other with what they could manage with their soft infant palates, of ‘Samantha’ and ‘Samara’. So—‘Fa’ and ‘Wa’. They distinguished each other whenever they looked up and saw that the other one was doing something different. For instance, there were nights when Wa would wake up to see Fa across the room, standing in her crib, crying. Wa would get to her feet and cry too. Uncle would come in and he’d be annoyed because, of course, it was difficult for him to pick them both up at the same time.

  Then, one day, there was another adult in the house—a woman with skin so dark that light scarcely bounced off it, so that her facial expressions were impossible to interpret. This mysterious stranger and Uncle had a conversation in the twins’ bedroom. While they talked, the woman plucked Wa up out of her cot, and Uncle picked up Fa. The girls gazed at each other and shared a laugh, because this being held at the same time was delightfully different. And they’d never had visitors! Here, suddenly, was a visitor, and, for a little while, two adults to comfort two crying children.

  And then—

  —then Sam couldn’t remember what. All she remembered was waking up knowing that something had happened. Something terrible. She was in her crib in their bedroom, and the air was white. There were new net curtains on the windows—white nets filtering the yellow blaze of the blossoming kowhai. Uncle was by himself once more. He was sitting on the floor. He had a screwdriver in his hand and was winding the screws out of Fa’s crib. He was taking it apart. Its mattress and bedding were on the floor. Uncle drew out the last screw, and got up to press on the sides of the crib. Its floor swung down and it collapsed with a loud clack! The crib’s bars came together to make a grill with such narrow gaps that a child would be unable to put its hand out, were there still space in which a child could lie, as Fa would lie, blinking sleepily at her sister.

  Sam watched as Belle went past her hiding place a second time, on her way back down the hill. Belle was still calling now and then, but she sounded spooked and uncertain.

  Sam heard Belle greet Theresa. She listened to their consultation—their words indistinguishable except when they called out to her.

  Theresa, urgent: ‘Sam!’

  Belle, tearful: ‘Please, Sam!’

  Then the gate clanged, and the chain rattled, and they went away.

  When the sound of the quad bike’s engine had receded, Sam went back down the hill and through the gate, locking it after her. She walked away from Stanislaw’s Reserve and skirted around the edge of the town until she came to Cotley’s Orchard.

  There were leaves on the apple trees, and vestigial fruit bubbling from the hard red-brown casings left over from the buds of blossoms. Sam walked through the orchard to the cutting and followed the long white stain of the tanker’s spilled milk. She left the road and clambered through the scrub till she hit the shore track. She walked back along it till she reached the beach, where she took off her shoes and went to stand at the water’s edge.

  The tide was coming in and the sand was wet. The sky was reflected in it. Sam’s feet pressed the water out of the sand, and each foot had a dry halo, flaws in the refection, so that it seemed Sam stood on stepping stones in the air above the clouds. The wind was pushing the waves. They broke diagonally along the shore, their percussion not a beat but a long drawing sound.

  Sam had discovered why the man in black had kept away from them all. She was thinking of doing the same, and for the same reason.

  She didn’t want to share what she knew.

  Sam could stay away. It wasn’t as if she’d be lonely. She was accustomed to loneliness, had been lonely most of her life, ever since that first wound had left her so bereft that she didn’t know who she was, or even that she was.

  Uncle collapsed Fa’s crib and carried it out of the bedroom. Where was Fa? The day came to an end and another day arrived. Where was Fa? Wa was hungry and thirsty, so she ate and drank. But where was Fa? The days succeeded one another and Wa forgot that she was a big girl and knew how to put the special seat on to the toilet then use the step to get up there herself and do what she needed to. She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do anything Uncle asked her to till he gave Fa back. Wa’s stomach became very sore and Uncle put her on the toilet and begged her to be good. Then he shouted at her. But she wouldn’t. Where was Fa? Wa went out in the garden and ran around with the pain pushing her. Then the poo was coming out and it had knives.

  Wa stopped that particular protest and would go, but in her pants, or in the bath. Uncle was angry and told her she was dirty, but he still wouldn’t answer where was Fa? He wouldn’t say, so she stopped answering him. She kept her mouth shut and stared at him to see whether he’d understand that she was being bad so that he’d want a good girl. Fa was always a good girl—and so was she when Fa was there.

  Uncle packed up the house into their van, the VW with chalky paint. They left Kahukura, and drove to the ferry at Picton. They went to live on the other island, in a different house. Uncle unpacked the boxes from Sam’s bedroom and slit the plastic wrapping of the mattress on Sam’s new big girl’s bed. He glued yellow-spotted red fimo caterpillars to the outside of the bedroom door. The caterpillars were twisted to make letters that Uncle said read Sam’s Room. All the toys were hers now. Though she and her sister had never bothered to keep track of which was whose.

  But then, after a while, funny things began to happen with the toys. Sam would dress the dolls in the morning and find them undressed in the afternoon. Or she’d wake up and there would be a doll’s tea party. She was very angry at Uncle for playing with her toys. She hid her favourites, but he kept finding her hiding places. She’d come in from the sandpit and the toys would be out again.

  Then Sam noticed that the weather was funny. It got cold too quickly. The grass grew too fast. This was so remarkable that she had to
ask Uncle about it. It was the first thing she’d said to him for a long time. ‘How fast does grass grow?’ she asked. Uncle explained seasons. He showed her a calendar: Waimate at strawberry time; Nelson Cathedral with Christmas decorations; cherries on the trees at Roxburgh; Arrowtown with its leaves turning. Sam hadn’t any other experience to measure things by, but would still stand in the garden, or the kindergarten playground, and think, ‘This can’t be right.’ It couldn’t be right that flowers flashed into life like fireworks—but never when she was looking. It couldn’t be right that the ducklings in the culvert under the road—tiny compact masses of gilded brown fluff —would, overnight, become sleek, sturdy, and bold. And there were fewer of them. ‘The cats get them,’ Uncle explained. ‘Sam,’ he said. ‘It’s that cat from number 10.’ ‘Sam,’ he said—and she answered to ‘Sam’.

  Then, one day, Sam found a picture clumsily taped to the wall above her bed. A picture drawn with crayons. It showed Fa and Wa, holding hands. And on either side of the girls were their toys—two teddies, in different hats, though there had only ever been one teddy; there was the black-haired doll and the fair-haired doll as well, but two of each, beside either girl. Everything was doubled. It was as if there were a mirror standing on edge halfway across the sheet of paper. Of every single toy there were two. And the girls; there were two of them. But that was real, and though years had passed, Sam hadn’t forgotten that she’d had a sister, and that her sister was taken away. Sam knew that the picture had been drawn by her sister—and that Fa meant her to look at it and understand what had happened to them. The picture didn’t say, ‘I’m still here and where are you?’ It said, ‘I’m still here and you are too.’

  Sam—Samara Waite—stood on the beach till the waves came up over her feet and her feet went numb with cold. She tried to think what she could do—how she could get through this next bit. If she didn’t rejoin the other survivors then she wouldn’t have to keep another secret. She was good at keeping secrets, but this one wasn’t hers alone—or, rather, it wasn’t hers and her sister’s. It was a secret that concerned them all. And she couldn’t join the man in black, who had only released her because he thought she was damaged. For, as soon as she had understood what he was telling her, the monster had come—and it had shown Sam her loneliness, all of it, a loneliness as vast and unquenchable as its own greed. It had drilled down into her, its revolutions ripping every feeling from the experiences to which they were anchored—the damp flats, and dull jobs, and night buses; the moments where she had stood stupidly before a cash machine with the wrong card for her PIN number; the coming home to an empty house and to someone else’s unwashed clothes and dirty dishes; the terror of surfacing straight into arguments, or into some cop at the driver’s window shining a light into her eyes, and the hailstone smear of safety glass on the road. That was her life—fragments scattered along the broken path, the crazy paving, of someone else’s life.

  The monster had whirled inside Sam, sucking the heat out of each memory till Sam forgot why—why she cared that she’d been left alone, left to explain things she didn’t see happen, and things she hadn’t done. She forgot why she cared. And then she was in her childhood bedroom again, and the air was white. Sam went away. The man in black must then have thought that the monster had broken her—because when she went away he’d been left with the other Sam, the frightened and incapable woman who couldn’t remember a thing of all he’d just told her.

  Sam walked out of the sea, sat on the dry sand and let the sun warm her reddened feet. She looked around Kahukura. By daylight she could see the brilliant greens on the trees of the arboretum. There had been no heat yet to dampen down the colours. It was late November. The last time she’d been out—and outdoors—the air was perfumed by blossom and it was early November.

  Sam was always coming back to note the changes. This was the only scale she had to measure time—the time of other people, those with continuous daily lives. She was always looking hard at nature, and admiring it, the surprises it played on her. The loneliness in that was wistful. The monster couldn’t have made use of it. It used the other sort, the loneliness of being left—over and over—without a plausible story to stand on. ‘What happened here?’ and ‘What happened to you?’ were questions that filled Sam with rage.

  There had been a time when it was easier to explain. From early on she and Fa had had a system and could cover for each other. When they first learned to read and write—as soon as they went to the first of their four different primary schools—they devised their system. They were clever and able, and by then were used to the practical material loneliness of their lives. For in another way they were never lonely. They were each other’s treasured secret. They would swap in and out, day by day, to lovingly examine each other’s little notes about Uncle, the cat, about schoolmates and teachers. About who got the most medals on School Sports Day, and how Annette had pinched Colleen under the desk. Notes detailing what happened last week in Doctor Who—and Sam always liked her sister’s explanations more than the programme itself on the occasions when it was her who was out and got to watch it. Fa was always there, in Wa’s thoughts, the first person she had to tell everything to. And she loved to think that, when she was gone, Fa would be reading her letters, laughing at her jokes, wondering at her stories, and solving the puzzles she’d left. They’d bring double the energy and interest and character to any project. They’d make things twice as good. Their poncho-wearing teacher always told their art class, ‘Leave no white space on the paper’, and that’s what they did—together they coloured right to the lines, they filled up their time, and filled each other’s shoes. Sam’s sister warmed her bed for her; she warmed her clothes.

  All that came to an end when Sam was twelve. They had just moved to Hataitai, in Wellington. On an afternoon when Uncle was out, Sam went down to the bottom of their section and was exploring the wilderness where the garden ended. She was on a hillside looking out over the little isthmus of Wellington airport and she thought, at her absent sister, ‘Take a look at this.’ There was the familiar trusting lassitude of letting go. Then she came out again suddenly to find herself lying head down on a slope at the foot of a steep bank. A little avalanche of stones was pouring around her, and a boulder was still bouncing away into the bushes. She went back to the house to look for Uncle, and then wandered around the neighbourhood looking fruitlessly for someone, anyone, who seemed trustworthy. There was no urgency to her search, and she could well have sat down and simply waited for Uncle to turn up and make decisions. But her need to know what had happened pressed upon her, urging her on. She checked in the phone book, and walked though the noisy Mount Victoria tunnel, and all the way to Newtown, and the hospital. She walked into Accident and Emergency and told the woman behind the sliding glass door in the reception area that there had been an accident. Then she willed herself away again.

  When she finally returned she found herself back in Kahukura. Uncle told her she must be gone again by this coming Tuesday. He tapped the calendar on the kitchen wall, and Sam saw that it was months later. He said, ‘You have to be gone by Tuesday because I have to drive your sister to Nelson for her physical therapy.’ Sam agreed. They ate dinner in silence. Then Uncle said, ‘Stay indoors until I tell you you can go out again. We are going to have to work out how to handle this.’

  Sam went to her room and looked for a letter from Fa. There were no letters. Uncle didn’t know about the letters so Sam couldn’t ask why the other Sam hadn’t written to say what had happened, how she was, what hospital was like. She got their pyjamas out of the pyjama dog and put them on. She stood before the mirror and thought of questions, then wrote her own letter. She hid her letter in the place they always hid them. She went to sleep in their bed, enveloped in her sister’s smell, and was obediently gone by Tuesday morning.

  When she next came back she looked for a letter, and found her own, unopened.

  Uncle never bothered to explain. When
Sam asked, he only said, ‘She’s alive. Everything else is immaterial.’ Sam didn’t know how her sister was, but she deduced from the way that Uncle seemed—of all things—more relaxed, that the changes in her sister somehow made it easier to cover for the fact that they were both younger than they should be. They had been sharing a life and were not walking in step with children their own age. That’s why Uncle would always say to people, ‘Sam is small for her age.’ It was why they were always moving schools and houses. Now Uncle told Sam she was done with school. And if anyone asked she was to say she was seventeen—a runty seventeen.

  Months later Fa finally did write. She wrote that she didn’t understand Sam’s letters. She wrote that she couldn’t write much—she was still learning how to again. The letter wasn’t in Fa’s handwriting. Fa’s subsequent letters showed some improvement, but they remained different. And life was different too—the life they’d shared. People now spoke to Sam slowly and gently, and looked at her with smiling patience, or frowning practicality. They stopped including her in conversations—instead their talk would part around her as if she was a stone in a stream. She had lost her life. Her sister, and her life. Ever since then she’d been lonely—lonely and responsible, lonely and thwarted.

  At noon Sam spotted Bub and William across the bay, on Matarau Point. It was only when they stopped to speak to Curtis that she realised he had been there the whole time, facing her way.

  Sam lay down on the sand. She made herself small. She watched Bub and William head back towards Haven Road. Once they were out of sight she retreated along the shoreline track till she could no longer see the town and point, only the large empty expanse of Tasman Bay and the far off Richmond Range.