Wake

by Elizabeth Knox

  But then Bub looked at Warren and seemed to see something further to offend him. He hauled off and kicked Warren once, hard, then flicked Sam off his arm. She fell back onto the mussed ground. She was looking up at the sky, past leaves interleaved with leaf shadows, a pattern in many shades of green. She heard the rubbery impact of Bub’s boot on a fleshy portion of Warren’s body. She thought how upset Jacob would be. She had to stop this. She needed to be stronger.

  Bub heard Sam behind him. Her voice was a croak. ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘That was supposed to make a difference.’

  Warren was scrambling to safety, moving around the trunk of the tree. Bub followed him and swept his legs out from under him. Warren sprawled, and this time sensibly stayed down.

  Bub checked behind him. Sam was curled up, gripping her guts. She was white, and her lips were grey. Bub was positive he’d only knocked her off-balance. He wouldn’t have hurt her.

  Then he saw what was happening. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said and, paying no further attention to the felled Warren, he scooped Sam up and sprinted off through the forest.

  When Bub came running with Sam, shouting that she’d switched over and needed help, Jacob didn’t pause to ask questions. Once they had Sam settled in her room, Jacob dismissed Bub and went straight to work, treating Sam with the atropine eye drops and alupent. He kept his finger on her pulse for a whole three hours, and felt it gradually pick up its pace. Then he just sat with her.

  Oscar appeared with coffee and pot noodles. Jacob asked him whether there was any sign of Warren.

  Oscar shook his head. ‘And Bub has gone to sleep, so I can’t ask. But Bub would have said if he’d found Warren, right?’

  Jacob looked at Sam. ‘Maybe Sam saw him.’

  ‘How long till she wakes up?’

  ‘I don’t want to disturb her,’ Jacob said. ‘It can wait.’

  Bub woke with a start. He dropped Belle’s hand. They’d been holding hands, and he was in a chair by her bed. The curtains weren’t drawn, and the window glass was black.

  Belle was fast asleep, on her back. She’d been sleeping fitfully—every time she turned over a jolt of pain from her shoulder would wake her. Jacob had given her some more painkillers an hour ago, and she was finally far down, motionless, breathing deeply and peacefully.

  Bub left Belle, quietly closing the bedroom door. He wanted to see whether Warren had dared to come back. He wouldn’t, Bub thought. He’d be holed up in some abandoned house, working his way through its liquor cabinet and feeling aggrieved.

  Bub was a little worried about Warren—and guilty that he hadn’t done as Jacob had charged and brought the man back into the fold. ‘It’s us against it,’ Jacob had reminded Bub. ‘We can’t let it divide us.’

  Fine, thought Bub. Warren could be drunk all the time, dice with his health, OD, refuse to listen to any of his friends’ advice and finally stuff up big time, but he, Bub, was supposed to behave with unwavering altruism.

  Bub went to find Jacob, but he found William instead, sitting by Sam’s bed. ‘Jacob is with Theresa,’ William said, ‘seeing if she’s got movement in all the right places. She woke up.’

  Bub went and watched Jacob and Theresa. She was swivelling her feet and pressing back on Jacob’s hands as he put pressure on her toes. She was saying, ‘I don’t think anything’s broken. I have the bones of a horse.’ She tried to smile at Bub, then aborted the smile when the scabs on her cheek rumpled. ‘How’s Belle?’

  ‘She’s fast asleep,’ Bub said.

  ‘I’ve got her rinsing her mouth every few hours with warm salt water. I don’t know what else to do.’ Jacob looked drawn with worry. He asked Bub whether Warren had turned up.

  Bub shook his head.

  ‘Was there no sign of him?’

  Bub tried to keep a straight face. ‘I saw him. Then Sam got into difficulties, and I had to see to her instead.’

  Jacob made a list of who was fully fit. ‘Just you, me, and Oscar. And I have to stay with my patients. I blinked with Curtis. I’m not going to with Belle and Theresa. I need you to go looking for Warren again tomorrow, Bub. You and Oscar have to do it. You can split up. You have to persuade him to come back and be looked after. He’s not safe out there alone.’

  ‘No one gets left behind,’ Theresa growled, like someone in the movies. Then, ‘Can you mend the fence?’

  Bub said, ‘I’ll have to try patching it somehow. But Belle wants me to deal with the cats.’

  Theresa was horrified. ‘You mean kill them? No!’

  ‘Belle and I used to count them when we fed them, and their numbers were never stable. We wondered if they were picking and choosing which feeding spot to come to. But then we figured some were just too freaked out by things and had gone feral. And you know we hear them fighting at night—territorial disputes from all quarters.’

  ‘But—no,’ Theresa said. ‘She can’t ask anyone to do that.’

  ‘She’s right, Theresa,’ Bub said. ‘I’d rather poke out my own eyes than kill the cats—but Belle’s right. It’s the sort of decision the Department of Conservation makes all the time when it clears offshore islands of pests, or culls Kaimanawa horses. You do know that absolutely everything that isn’t indigenous is here on sufferance? It’s just that now—here—there’s no one else to do the dirty work we expect done. It’s not all that different from having to bury people.’

  William arrived in the doorway. ‘Raised voices,’ he said. ‘I think we’re supposed to guard against that.’

  ‘Get William to do it, Bub,’ Jacob said. Then to William, ‘Belle thinks it’s necessary to kill the cats. And you’re not soft-hearted.’

  There was a silence, then, ‘Okay. That’s something I can do,’ William said.

  ‘You can fix yourself later,’ Jacob said, and touched his own heart.

  Bub was thinking about the cats, in their daily clusters, their eager trotting, and pert tails, and tiptoe smooching.

  ‘But what about the rats?’ Theresa said. ‘Don’t the cats keep the rats down? Aren’t the rats just as dangerous to the kakapo?’

  ‘To eggs and chicks, not adult birds,’ Bub said. ‘That’s my understanding. And there are no eggs or chicks at the moment.’

  Theresa asked whether anyone had been watching for messages.

  ‘Oscar’s on night duty. So—actually—he’ll be sleeping tomorrow. He won’t be any use looking for Warren.’

  ‘There aren’t enough of us now to run our lives,’ William said. ‘To mend fences, watch the skies, defend the nests, and bring black sheep back into the fold—to make an archetypal list.’

  Bub promised Jacob he’d spend a couple of hours looking for Warren, starting as soon as it was light. And later in the afternoon, when Oscar was up, they could try to mend the fence.

  William listened as Bub organised himself and made promises to Jacob. Theresa was insisting that she could help. Surely she could do something. No one spoke to him again and he understood that he’d been handed the job of getting rid of the cats, and they didn’t want to hear about it. Now they wouldn’t even look at him. It wasn’t that he was a pariah—more like a condemned man, or a sacrifice. He was in some kind of sacred space. But the task was a technical as well as a moral one, and William didn’t have the first idea about how to kill cats. He was thinking poison, because they were numerous, and wary, and individualistic, and agile. He’d seen them being fed, and knew they didn’t all crowd in at once. There was a hierarchy, and some animals waited till the others had finished. Anything fast-acting would warn them. Anything slower acting and he’d never be sure it had worked.

  He went downstairs and peered into the filing cabinet in the manager’s office at Jacob’s collection of medications, many of which had doses dangerous to humans. But which drug, and how much would he need, and how could he disguise its taste?

  William closed the drawer, turned o
ut the light, and went to the kitchen.

  The range had browned ripples of burned egg on its elements, and the counter top was clouded. As William stood there he realised he’d come as if to consult Holly’s ghost. Holly had chosen oleander because for some reason she happened to know that, now and then, people accidentally poisoned themselves with that ordinary garden plant. William wondered was there anything that regularly, accidentally, poisoned cats? Since he lived in California, he knew oleanders were poisonous, but here he was, surrounded by unfamiliar plants.

  William filled the electric kettle and switched it on. He listened to the clatter as water turned to steam right by the element. Then it settled to boil. He spooned camomile tea leaves into a small glass teapot. He thought about his own kitchen—the one he never cooked in. He saw himself cutting up melon for breakfast. He’d arrange it on a plate, rinse the knife and the chopping board, and that was all the use he’d make of his kitchen. He saw his espresso machine. He saw a bottle of red wine standing on his glass counter top. His house was empty, the city was humming around him. Then he was in the street hurrying to the intersection to catch the F train. He was going out to eat home cooking. He got off midtown and walked towards the bay. He pressed the buzzer to his friend’s apartment. She released the lock and sent the elevator down to him. She opened her door. He kissed her and gave her the flowers he’d bought on Stockton Street. He watched her use her kitchen scissors to snip the stamen and sepals from the lilies. Saffron pollen spread softly and transparently on the film of water at the bottom of her sink. She would put the lilies up high to keep them from her cats, but even then the stamens would eventually fall and then the pollen would be everywhere. ‘So it’s better just to cut them off,’ she said.

  ‘What does lily pollen do to cats?’ he asked.

  ‘Liver failure, I think.’

  Liver failure was gradual and insidious. The cats would sicken and stay put. They’d crawl under houses, hide, die.

  William had never plotted to kill anything. He’d only been fatally forgetful, leaving his cousins out in the freezing weather. How many times, in his head, had he gone back into the house to pull a rug off the couch, a quilt off the bed, to cover them? He’d do it over and over whenever he was tired or unhappy—he’d take a minute, go back, and find something to keep them warm.

  The accident had happened three weeks before his ninth birthday. When that birthday came he was in a foster home. He didn’t tell anyone. Several years later the attentive foster parents took note of the birthday and there was a party and presents and a cake, and William—who loved to be the centre of attention—felt ashamed to be noticed. It was wrong to measure his progress away from that day. And yet here he was, still alive. Alive, and doing it again, pulling the quilt from his cousin’s bed. Or—he’d go back in the middle of the night and see that his drunken uncle had carried the barbecue indoors to keep the room cosy while they all went on drinking. He’d see it, and do something, and it would make a difference that he was outdoors when everyone else was indoors.

  He was standing outside his uncle’s house. His breath was fuming in the frozen air. Someone was calling him back in, as if they needed his heat. The mountains were on fire. The state trooper and the national guardsmen were waiting at the plastic-draped gate. ‘Step in here, sir,’ said the national guardsman. ‘It’s nice and cold in here.’

  *

  A slightly clammy hand dropped onto William’s. He opened his eyes—they had been screwed shut—to see Sam’s bony, blunt-tipped fingers. She was pressing down hard because she was using the kitchen counter to hold herself up. ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  The tea in the pot in front of William was deep yellow, stewed, and no longer steaming. William stayed still, his blood blowing in his ears. He knew that there was something else there in the kitchen with him and Sam. He couldn’t feel it, but he knew she could, and that she’d got out of bed to investigate.

  She was wearing only a man’s T-shirt. Her feet were bare, and she was shivering. William pulled off his sweater and put it over her head, then left her to do the rest herself. He poured the tea into a cup and put it in the microwave to reheat. He said, ‘Is it gone yet? The Wake?’

  ‘It’s back upstairs,’ she said. ‘It’s leaning on someone, I’m not sure who. And I’m too tired to chase it from place to place.’ Sam sat on one of the tall stools and put her feet up on another, between herself and William.

  William took the cup from the microwave, warmed his hands for a moment, passed it to her, then gathered her toes between his warmed palms.

  She said, ‘Whatever you were feeling, you have to not feel it any more. The Wake had a real taste for it.’

  The next morning Bub and Sam went out in different directions to look for Warren. It was Bub who found him.

  Warren was lying where Bub had left him. He had crawled to the far side of the sullied tree and was slumped face down, his shoulder against the trunk, his knees tucked under him, and one ear pressed to the pine needles, as if he was listening for footfalls. His face was piebald with patches of dark blood. His eyes were open, and dull, their surfaces dry.

  Bub stood with both hands clamped over his mouth, stifling sounds that wanted to escape him and be heard—noises of anguish. For a few minutes all he felt was a scalding shock. This was followed by a feeling that Bub knew he’d have from now on, would have all his life, in the foreground of every other feeling. It was shame. He had done this. He’d lost control of himself, and his malice had made his hands and feet so insensitive that he couldn’t feel and see what he was doing, the violence he was doing. He wanted to say to Warren, ‘But I didn’t hit you that hard.’ But he must have—because there was the blood, crusted thick on the back of Warren’s head. The last time Bub knocked him down Warren must have cracked his skull. The bunched tree-roots near Warren’s head were blood-smeared.

  Bub was frozen with horror. He had killed Warren. Had killed his friend’s friend. He had made a corpse. He had made another corpse. For a long period he paced, and pulled at his hair, and made futile wishes. He wanted to absent himself, but he kept being where he was, circling that poor body.

  Bub was guilty, so he was wary too, and when he heard someone coming it took all his strength not to flee. He knew he couldn’t do that. He wanted what he had, so he was going back, to the others, to Belle, to confess and be judged. There wasn’t any way around it.

  Myr came into the clearing. He stopped at a respectful distance.

  Bub found himself pointing inarticulately at the hunched body. He pointed, and looked at Myr with swimming eyes. He scrubbed his face with his palms.

  Myr’s silence must be sympathy. It was a captivating and resilient silence, and it seemed to work on Bub, to slow his agitated stamping, to make him stop and listen.

  Myr said, ‘Will you want to bury him in your small graveyard?’

  This remark struck Bub to his knees. He wrapped his arms around his head and wept. He sobbed and wheezed.

  ‘I’ve seen this before,’ Myr said, gentle. ‘You begin by needing your own dead near you—then feel outnumbered by graves.’

  Bub ground his knuckles into his hot eye sockets and tried to stop weeping.

  ‘You don’t want to be the one to break the bad news,’ Myr said.

  It was then that Bub realised that Myr had no idea he was crying because he was culpable. Myr thought Bub was simply grief-stricken, and unready to tell the others that they’d lost yet another of their number.

  ‘Did you quarrel with him?’ Myr asked. ‘He was off on his own.’

  Bub nodded, then lied, ‘We quarrelled with him.’

  There was a period of stillness disturbed only by Bub’s shuddering breathing. Then Myr said, ‘Perhaps it would be kinder if your friends could think that this man has only shunned them and hidden himself.’

  Bub stopped sniffing and blearily regarded Myr.

 
‘It will only work if you can dissemble,’ Myr said.

  Bub opened his hands to gesture at Warren’s body.

  ‘Yes. We’ll have to bury him,’ Myr said. Then, ‘Would that help, do you think? Would that make their lives more tolerable?’

  Bub bit his lip. He tried to keep his face still. Myr really seemed not to suspect him. He was offering to help Bub quietly dispose of the body, so that the others could go on imagining that Warren was still alive.

  Would that be better? If Bub postponed his confession he could go on, for a time, being what the remaining survivors needed him to be—steady, reliable, strong.

  ‘What do you say?’

  Bub managed to nod.

  Myr told Bub that he’d fetch what they needed. He told him to wait, and strode away through the trees.

  Bub sat down and tried to collect himself. This was his first test, and it was an easy one, he told himself. He would simply do what he was told. It didn’t seem to have crossed Myr’s mind that he’d killed Warren. But, of course, Myr would expect Bub to be upset. Later, Bub knew, he’d have to pass harder tests. He’d be under closer scrutiny. He’d have to keep up a pretence that Warren was alive. He’d have to continue searching for Warren, and act anxious, but not too anxious, since everyone knew he was angry at Warren. And he’d have to continue to bad-mouth Warren, because to stop altogether would be suspicious.

  Bub’s thoughts went around in little self-consuming circles. Several times he was roused, startled by a sound—two branches knocking together, the thud of a falling pine cone. He found himself talking, telling Warren off. ‘Why did you have to say you expected me to hit you?’ he whispered. ‘Why did you have to do that? And why didn’t you have any sympathy for Belle?’ His accusations got away on him, till he felt like a mountain climber trying to sprint down a slope of shale ahead of a landslide. The words would merge soon into some hoarse, senseless noise. He found himself glaring resentfully at Warren and asking why he’d had to die? Why did he have to go and do a thing like that?