Wake

by Elizabeth Knox

  He settled his hands on her upper arms, and held her gently. ‘Theresa—can I call you Theresa?’

  ‘You just did,’ said Theresa, and her apparently pert answer caused a rush of happy laughter all around her.

  He smiled, then collected himself and gazed at her with solemn tenderness. ‘I want you to know that we are all very proud of you.’

  Her tears were unexpected. She hadn’t expected them—even if they had. Someone offered her a clean handkerchief. They wanted to console her, but their kindness felt paltry. They meant well, but she felt petted, rather than loved. She tried to say that it was Sam. Sam had saved them. Had maybe even saved worlds. She tried to say that she—Theresa—had only understood what was necessary. Like William poisoning the poor cats.

  Then she broke away from her colleagues and was running, painfully, but with desperate determination.

  There were too many people in the tent. Theresa barged through them. She refused to recognise faces. She rushed right past her sister. Her sister could wait. Theresa didn’t know at what point she started to do it—but she found herself shouting his name. People got out of her way. They turned their bodies to make a channel she could flood through unopposed. Some of them even pointed the way for her.

  Theresa finally saw the green and yellow reflective stripes of the ambulance. William was sitting on a gurney, his shirt was open and wires were strapped to his chest. Several doctors were gazing into the monitor he was attached to. Everyone around William was busy and, at the moment Theresa saw him, none of them was actually looking at him, or touching him. He was a silent island. The doctors did look when he got up from the gurney—but by that time she had reached him and he had opened his arms and gathered her to him.

  The juvenile gannets that came, midsummer, to roost on Matarau Point, were back again, and utterly unperturbed. They could be seen by day in search of game, making their long sweeps and sudden plunges. The flock of gulls that huddled near the boat ramp, fruitlessly waiting for scraps and cat food, only flew so far, before circling back to the beach. But at night, when it was quiet, the kakapo had been heard booming, getting on with the business of wooing.

  Highway 60 was open to through-traffic, though there were interlocking plastic barriers erected all the way along Bypass Road, and an armed checkpoint at either end of the settlement, something like the one William had gone through near Jolon when Big Sur was burning.

  Almost everyone in Kahukura was in uniform, though some of the uniforms were unprepossessing, like the green shirts and shorts of the Department of Conservation. The rangers were busy up at the reserve, digging a trench for the new stretch of fence, digging by hand, because the noise levels in Kahukura were—as one of them told a reporter— ‘simply unacceptable’.

  The mass graves had been opened in the white light of chilly, antiseptic tents. Army ambulances came and went. Somewhere the oily parcels were unwrapped. Photos were taken, and matched to those in the definitive databases of Belle Greenbrook and Warren Kreutzer.

  Up at the spa one of the ambulances parked on the driveway backed into the long grass to let a police car go by, on its way out again. The two constables waved their thanks. They were looking satisfied, and one was nursing a cat cage, dandling his fingers through its wire to caress the tired, puzzled, beige Burmese, and soothe her crying.

  No one had noticed the water-dimpled writing pad lying in the mauve haze of a smoke bush that grew by the spa’s front steps. On the pad’s exposed page were two lines, written in fading pencil.

  But you wouldn’t have shot him.

  The Wake is here. Look at Sam.

  Acknowledgements

  A heartfelt thanks to all those who read and commented on this novel as it grew and mutated: Natasha Fairweather, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, Ellen Kushner, Jonathan King and David Larsen.

  Thanks also to Ursula Poole for kakapo insights, and to Tracey Sullivan of the Pharmacy Guild of New Zealand for advice on what might be in a small-town pharmacy.

  Thank you to my mother, Heather Knox, whose motor neurone disease, with its enforced silence and isolation, and its long slide, motivated this novel, and whose valour and stoicism inspired it. And thank you to my sister Sara and my husband Fergus—You and You.