William regarded Sam’s painfully familiar body, her long toes, her narrow hips, the little lozenge of silky pubic hair that tapered up to her navel, becoming finer and fairer as it climbed but still there, almost masculine. He watched that compact boyish body cut through the water. Sam rolled her shoulders up on every fourth stroke to breathe, and when she did, William noticed something. He crouched to get a better look. A better look at the whole of her—sleek, symmetrical, unmarred—for Sam’s nipples were intact.
She swam fifty laps. William had time to go to the laundry and fetch one of the robes. He was waiting for her when she finally came to a stop. She slapped the end of the pool and her wake surged up to break over her shoulders. She wiped her eyes, then kicked off and came to him, climbed out, and turned her back so that he could drape the robe around her. She worked her arms into its sleeves and tied its belt.
‘He healed you,’ William said. His voice was shaking. If the man in black had healed Sam’s mutilated breast, then he must be benevolent. But somehow William couldn’t imagine him that way. His mind refused it. The man’s avoiding them seemed to weigh more than his having healed Sam. His staying away—and his being there before, preceding all of them by centuries, someone who wasn’t subject to the rules of time. A demigod, like Superman, or the Doctor; one of those judicious, sequestered aliens of fiction.
‘I need to clean up,’ Sam said.
‘Where have you been hiding?’
A small crease formed between her brows. ‘I want to shower,’ she said, and brushed by him.
William was in despair. ‘What did the man say? You’re the only one who knows anything.’
Sam stopped with her hands on the gate. She kept her back to him.
William said, ‘When you were with him, you were representing us—you do get that?’
Sam went on through the gate and up the path to the terrace.
‘I’m not the only one with questions,’ he called after her. Then he headed to the kitchen to make coffee.
A minute later Lily arrived. She went straight to the sink to fill her hydration pack.
William asked her if she’d seen Sam.
She nodded.
There would only have been time for a few words in passing. But William wondered what Sam had said that justified Lily’s lack of interest in the fact of her reappearance. He said, ‘She wasn’t very forthcoming.’
‘No,’ Lily agreed.
William waited for Lily to repeat what Sam had said to her, or to ask some cogent questions.
Lily put her hydration pack on and adjusted its straps.
‘I presume you’re as relieved as I am,’ William said.
Lily met his gaze. ‘Oh—yes—of course. She looked well. I guess she’s collecting herself. I don’t expect her to talk to me. I never understand her when she does.’
‘Did you tell her about Curtis?’
‘No. It’s not my place.’
Lily wasn’t really engaging with him. William wondered whether Sam had said something to Lily about him—something detrimental.
‘I have to get going,’ Lily said. ‘I warmed up in my room. Don’t want my tendons tightening up.’ She pushed off the bench, gave a little wave and set off. William watched her bounce down the driveway. Her knee had settled and her gait was good.
*
Sam didn’t put in an appearance until breakfast was being cleared away. She filled a bowl with cereal and fruit juice, then went out onto the terrace and sat in a cane chair, her face hidden behind her damp hair, her feet tucked up under her robe.
The others clustered in the atrium, out of her earshot. They murmured and hissed at one another for several minutes, trying to figure out how they might tackle her. Not everyone wanted in on the discussion. Holly was in the vegetable patch making bamboo tepees for runner beans; Lily was still doing her circuits. Kate was loading the dishwasher and said she just couldn’t take another bickering discussion, and that, for her, it was enough that Sam was safe.
The discussion was contentious, but brief. Everyone stayed in character. Oscar put up his hand when he wanted to say something; Belle did her best to keep the peace when Theresa once again brought up the issue of Sam’s bruises; William fumed; Dan called the rest of them ‘You people’; and Jacob kept saying ‘Go easy’ whenever anyone seemed particularly upset.
It was Belle who was eventually delegated to speak to Sam. Everyone else ostentatiously melted away, and Belle went and sat opposite Sam.
Sam looked good, her skin dewy, her eyes clear. ‘I’d like to go for a walk,’ she told Belle, without looking at her.
‘You’ve only just returned.’
‘I’m restless.’
‘William says that the man in black healed you. I guess that means we have nothing to fear from him.’
‘The man in black isn’t a problem. And we really don’t have to worry anymore about safety in numbers.’ Then, as if that subject was done with, Sam said, ‘I’m going to scavenge for foil. We need something bright to reflect our lights when we send messages.’
‘Yes, we should get back to that. Our plans got a little sidelined when you went missing.’ Belle hesitated then said, ‘How were you able to communicate with the man?’
‘He speaks English.’ Sam finally looked at Belle. ‘Would you ask William if he’ll go scavenging with me? I’m going to get dressed.’ She headed off upstairs. When she was out of sight, Theresa sidled up to Belle. ‘Well?’
‘She wants William to go for a walk with her.’
‘Do you think he should have reason for concern? I mean, it’s not as if they’ve been getting on. You don’t think she means to lead him into some kind of trap?’
‘No! This is Sam. Well—kind of.’ Belle took Theresa’s arm and walked her back into the dining room. She found William and explained to him that Sam wanted him to help her scavenge for aluminium foil.
‘And how did she strike you?’
‘Different,’ Belle said.
‘So, she’s clever Sam.’ William made air quotes.
‘I think so. And she isn’t pretending. I think she really does have two personalities.’
‘And you know this because of your extensive experience with endangered parrots.’
‘Fine, be like that.’
Theresa said, ‘Will you go with her, William?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good. But be careful.’ Theresa turned back to Belle. ‘Did you tell her about Curtis?’
‘No, sorry. Should I have? Can’t it wait?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘William can tell her.’ Belle looked at him. ‘He can tell her off, say that people are perishing while she plays her silly game.’
William looked at Belle coldly, then went off to find Sam.
*
They went through some of the houses that had been cleared, and several they knew were empty. They took rolls of foil from kitchen drawers, and from dispensers, and stuffed them into their backpacks. In one house Sam paused and studied the photographs on the fridge door. ‘I bet that woman has something in my size,’ she said, and went off to the master bedroom.
After a moment William followed her, and found her trying on clothes—a silk chiffon shirt, with buttoned cuffs and a flourishing bow. She glanced at William in the mirror and said, ‘When I was a teenager I used to have this dream where I could walk into any house and take whatever I wanted.’
‘Were the houses empty?’
‘Empty and unthreatening; it never felt like theft.’ She frowned. ‘Come to think of it, in those dreams I knew that everyone was dead.’ She had found a pair of jeans; soft, aged denim. ‘Do you mind, William?’ She made a stirring gesture, meaning ‘turn around’.
‘Seriously?’
‘Humour me.’
William faced the door. He heard h
er stomping on the backs of her running shoes and kicking them off. ‘I’m tired of wearing sweatpants,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll just work my way through this woman’s things.’
‘You’re not worried about her family? About afterwards?’
Sam laughed. ‘I’m not going to be called to account.’
‘So—tell me—which is the real Sam? This? Or the one who wouldn’t use a phrase like “called to account”?’
There was a sly smile in her voice when she answered. ‘You think that the man in black healed my breast. Couldn’t he have healed my brain as well?’
‘Did he?’ William turned around.
Sam was admiring herself in the mirror. She rummaged in a basket on the dresser and chose a lipstick, put it on, pouted at her reflection, then pulled the shirt from her shoulder to practise a kiss, and study the print of it. She said, ‘I bet her shoes won’t fit me. That would be asking too much.’ She got down on her knees and pulled the shoe tree out of the wardrobe. She selected some ballet flats and slipped them on. She got up to check the effect with her jeans. ‘Wow. They’re only about half a size too big.’
‘Sam, if the man in black had fixed your brain you’d be like the protagonist in Flowers for Algernon. You ever read that story?’
‘No.’
‘It’s science fiction. An intellectually handicapped guy takes part in an experiment, and his IQ goes up 150 points. Then the mouse dies.’
‘I take it the mouse is Algernon?’
‘Yes.’
‘The difference isn’t as much as 150 points,’ Sam said. ‘Though, if it were shoe sizes, I’d have to say that I do have much bigger feet than the other Sam.’
William stayed very still, and held his breath.
Sam posed in her new outfit. ‘Do you like the way I look?’
‘You know I like the way you look.’
She turned back to the mirror to preen. She used a finger to blot the lipstick at the corner of her mouth, and pulled a stray lock of hair out from under her collar.
‘Is this a test?’ William asked.
‘No.’
‘I hit you,’ he said. ‘Do you remember that?’
‘Yes. Are you sorry about it?’
‘It was wrong. But—’
‘With mea culpa there’s not usually a “but”.’
‘Having your brain healed wouldn’t produce the habit of thinking that comes up with metaphors—that makes IQ analogous with shoe size. Or, for that matter, suddenly have a grasp of everyday Latin.’
‘There’s an everyday Latin?’
‘Per diem. Pro forma. In flagrante delicto.’
Sam retrieved her backpack and said she’d come back later and go through everything properly. ‘I can go about refurbished. Body, clothes—’ she glanced at William through her thick eyelashes ‘—and brain.’
‘So you’re sticking to that story?’
‘It isn’t a sworn statement, or affidavit—since we’re doing Latin.’ Sam breezed out past William, and he followed her to the next house. They cut across the school field, skirting the turned earth of its mass grave. They began their scavenging again in a row of houses they knew were empty—houses that had been locked when the clean-up crews first came along. In the second they paused again so that Sam could inspect bookshelves. She said, ‘William, are there books that make you feel better?’
‘Me?’
‘People. Books that make people feel better. And I don’t mean diverting books, or the Bible.’
William sighed. ‘Sam. I’ve been delegated to question you, and I’m supposed not to alarm or alienate you.’
‘You’re doing fine so far.’
‘I’m biting my lip.’
Sam went along a shelf, her finger tripping from spine to spine. It was a good library, housed in floor to ceiling built-in shelves. There was one whole wall of books, apart from two bays displaying big cast-glass bowls. Sam said, ‘What would you read if you thought you needed a book like a boat to put out in?’
‘A boat?’
Sam nodded. ‘A book to sail off in, and set fire to, like a Viking funeral pyre.’
It took William a moment, but he finally understood what she meant him to understand. ‘Are we going to die?’ he said. ‘Is that what the man in black told you?’
Sam didn’t respond.
‘Just say it. Go on. Deprive me of hope.’ William looked at the set of her turned head and saw smugness. He saw everyone who had ever said to him: ‘This is for your own good.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sam said, without turning around.
‘No, you’re not.’
She looked over her shoulder. Her face was clenched and anxious. ‘I have to stay calm,’ she said. ‘Everyone has to stay calm.’ She returned her gaze to the books, eased one out, and put it on the arm of the couch.
‘I’m not sure that’s what you want,’ William said. ‘There’s transcendence and “transcendence”. Try the skinny one in the middle of the shelf below.’
She looked at the spine. Gilead. ‘I haven’t heard of it.’
William hated people who’d say they hadn’t heard of something, in that sceptical way as if the state of their knowledge was the state of knowledge itself. He said, ‘Sam? Why do you think the man told you?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps he cracks periodically.’ She pulled out another book, then put it back again.
‘You’d probably be better off with poetry,’ William said. ‘Fiction is all people and connections and, at its best, it teaches us how to live. But since you’re saying we won’t live, then try poetry. Poetry’s all arias and no recitatives.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Arias are the big, dramatic, self-actualising soliloquies in operas. Recitative does plot, pretty much, or dialogue. You know—the Barber of Seville measuring his marriage bed.’
Sam gazed at William, her expression admiring. ‘I wish I’d met someone like you a long time ago. But I kept having to come back to Kahukura.’ She took William’s suggested book and sat down holding it to her heart, as if making promises to it.
‘Didn’t you have a choice?’
‘No. I’ve spent my whole adult life here. I’ve spent my life with my foot in the door, keeping it open, waiting for something to come along.’
‘And this came.’
‘And this came.’ Sam echoed him.
‘Okay. But what is “this”? Could you please be a bit more specific?’
‘What’s the point?’ Sam said.
‘No,’ William said. ‘I guess you’d rather nurse another secret and feel special. You obviously like feeling special.’
Sam leapt to her feet and took several steps towards him. The book she was treating with such tenderness had become her weapon. William raised an arm to ward off her blow. But then it was as though she was pulled up short. As if something above her tightened the strings that held her upright, so that she stiffened and stood very erect. Her hands fell to her sides. She dropped the book. For a moment she was blank and motionless, then she grew radiant. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, and she flushed.
There was nothing in the room with them. Nothing William could hear or see. But Sam was in the grip of something. Something godlike was there with her, caressing her.
William took hold of her, but she didn’t feel his touch or turn her eyes. His rational brain began to make suggestions for things that could explain some of her behaviour. Cerebral lesions. Frontal lobe seizures. He considered all this, but he knew it was something else. It was the ‘wind’ that she had always liked to dance with. The wind that had come when the Nokia ring tui first made itself heard, and at Adele Haines’s funeral, a wind intangible to everyone but Sam. It was there—something was there—and it and she were in communion.
*
When the Wake cam
e, Sam felt, very remotely, William shaking her. His words were unintelligible, but his voice was as expressive as the Reserve’s kaka, who would come every spring to squabble over the new growth on the kowhai at her gate. The monster was making a meal of their agitation. It spun faster, drilled harder, sang louder. It licked and sucked and savoured. It oscillated out from Sam to take William too, and coax him. Its voracious song and dance was making a kind of silence and stillness. Sam stopped breathing to listen to that, to what she had never heard, the perfect silence of that place she went whenever she wasn’t here.
Shortly before noon, when Sam and William were still out, and Theresa was pacing the terrace and peering down the hill, the man in black came into view, framed by the spa’s gateposts. He was carrying someone. He walked up the drive and Theresa hurried out to meet him. It was Lily he had in his arms, her body inert but not quite floppy. Theresa instantly recognised the not-quite floppiness as rigor mortis. She knew that Lily was dead, but when she reached the man for a time everything Theresa did was a denial of what she knew. She called Lily’s name and tried to take her from him, which was impossible—Lily wasn’t entirely in the man’s force field but, because of it, Theresa couldn’t slip her hands under Lily to lift her away. Jacob arrived and tried too, but retreated wiping his hands on his thighs as if he’d touched something nasty.
The man laid Lily on the driveway. Only then were they were able to get at her. Jacob checked her and then got up shaking his head, probably for the benefit of everyone else—Holly in the vegetable bed, and the others who had come out onto the terrace.
Dan stormed down the drive, shotgun in hand.
The man got up and backed off.
Bub intercepted Dan and wrenched the gun from his grip.
Theresa said to the man, ‘Just wait.’ She put up a palm and patted the air. ‘Wait.’ She wondered whether what she imagined was a universal gesture would turn out to be merely terrestrial. ‘Where did you find her?’
‘At the farthest point of the shoreline track,’ said the man. ‘I didn’t see her collapse. She has been wearing herself out. That was her weakness.’
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