‘Working hard, Mr Peters?’
Jesus, it’s Jeremiah. After Bill’s initial consternation at having allowed two corporate lawyers to slip in under his radar, he feels some relief. Jeremiah in Mother Teresa mode is a far preferable option to Le Stratton ‘off duty’. Furthermore, Bill feels he owes the kid for keeping quiet about his meltdown at the Beach. In any case, the thing to avoid at all costs, he feels with passionate intensity, is a threesome. Christ, he thinks, a corporate lawyer sandwich. The thought of witnessing the young guns jostle for superiority in his eyes through displays of humility is horrifying.
‘For Christ’s sakes, Jeremiah. Call me Bill.’
‘Sorry, Bill. I keep doing that.’
‘That’s okay, but don’t let it happen again.’
‘Right, Bill.’
‘Listen, I’d like to talk to you alone. Without Le Stratton, if you don’t mind.’
‘Sure, Bill.’
There could be material here for Trix, he thinks, a ‘Bill’ tacked on to the end of every single statement Jeremiah utters during lunch. Jeremiah is, in fact, reliably and inadvertently entertaining. The way he now listlessly points out vegetarian options, continuing with his hopeless pretence of vegetarianism but clearly mortified by what is slopped on his plate, for example, is exactly the kind of thing that makes him preferable to Le Stratton.
‘Nelson,’ Bill tells Le Stratton as he stands over him with his pie-laden tray, ‘sorry to leave you all alone, but I want a word with young Jeremiah here.’
‘No worries at all, Bill. Have a nice lunch, guys.’
As they sit down, Bill senses excitement stirring in Jeremiah that is obviously not food-related, as if he’s sniffing a work-related opportunity out of Bill’s impending retirement. One week to go! Bill judiciously salts his meal, adds lemon juice and then, with scrupulous care, tucks a napkin into his shirt—something he never does. He’s enjoying this, prolonging the tension, but before he can begin torturing Jeremiah with questions about the surface features of Venus as seen from Earth through a mid-range telescope, the younger man speaks.
‘You seem distracted, Bill. You’re probably already tending a little vineyard on the east coast.’
Bill’s taken aback. One thing Jeremiah can talk about is wine, albeit in a night class kind of way, but his basic technical knowledge is very sound. It could be a pleasant lunch after all. ‘Did I mention a few vines the other day?’
‘No, I guessed. I imagined a wine-lover like you making a little vintage for friends.’
‘Four acres of open-air vines about 50 kilometres from Napier. Inland, so it’ll be tough—hot, but I’m hopeful. You’ll have to bring the family up and have a bottle.’
‘Thanks, we’d love to, Bill.’
Bill thinks, I’m being worked here. Then he pictures Karen in his pool, which is yet to be built, and is happy he extended the invitation. It’s the architecture of her, the unexpectedly pleasing dimensions and angles, the unexpected grace notes she plays when doing the simplest things. Even just her throat and jawline, the length of her neck, the way she moves her head. When she spoke passionately about fashion with Trix at the Beach, elegantly wasted as she was, drawing shapes in the air and laughing with delight, she was bewitching.
‘I imagine you’ll have lots of visitors,’ Jeremiah adds.
‘I’m afraid Trix may become a visitor too.’ To his relief, Jeremiah takes this blurted confession without blinking an eye. In fact, he doesn’t even reply. Bill can’t believe he’s chosen Jeremiah, of all men, to confide in. ‘She runs her business down here in Wellington,’ he adds, returning the subject to work. After half a minute more of silence, he says, ‘Of course, she could run her business out of Napier, but I’m afraid the house is a little rustic for her.’
Jeremiah nods and says nothing, offers no comment, as he finishes shovelling in his tepid-looking vegetable lasagne.
Buddha-like, Bill thinks, and places an embargo on the subject of his ongoing financial support of his sons and grandchildren.
Jeremiah wipes his lips. ‘Bill, strictly between you and me…’ He actually awaits confirmation.
‘Of course.’ Bill means it. He owes Jeremiah that much for his silence after the bombing.
‘This is something you didn’t hear from me.’ Again, he awaits formal confirmation.
‘Right.’
‘I’m not supposed to know.’
‘I see.’ Jeremiah has actually begun to sweat.
He leans closer and and drops his voice further. ‘We’ve just bought the news and property rights to a story. In fact, we’ve essentially bought the location as well: a large town and most of its major assets. In New Zealand. It’s been a big investment in news, by any standard.’
Bill’s curiosity is awakened. What local news, he wonders, could justify that outlay, could possibly be so compelling? Disaster and revolution overseas is hard to compete with. Venture Group’s New Zealand news has been in a slump because Kiwis find the huge-scale carnage going on overseas so compelling. ‘Right,’ Bill says. ‘It’s a very big story.’
Jeremiah leans forward. ‘The biggest.’ Flashing his eyes over Bill’s shoulder to the not-so-distant Le Stratton, he says, ‘Actually, I’ll wait until Nelson goes. He’s just finishing up.’
‘Sure.’ I’ve admitted my fear of loneliness in my twilight years, Bill thinks, so he’ll let me in on a work-related issue in return. One that I would have found out about tomorrow anyway.
He eats in silence and Jeremiah looks at his screen.
Bought a town? Bill thinks. What?
Le Stratton calls heartily across the room, ‘Have a good afternoon, guys,’ and spins on his heel, salutes the server, and strides away.
Jeremiah’s brown eyes are very serious. ‘You can’t even tell Trix this.’
‘Alright.’
Jeremiah’s face flushes. ‘Another alien has come down in New Hokitika.’
‘What?’
Jeremiah nods and drops his voice to a whisper. ‘Like Sam Starsailor. The DNA proves it. He’s not from Earth. Could not be. And he’s just like Sam, with the funny mouth and a broken left leg. But he’s unconscious. He’s taken a nasty blow to the head.’
Blood pounds in Bill’s ears. ‘Head injuries?’
‘Yes. Possibly severe.’
It can’t be possible, Bill thinks. More than that, it isn’t right. ‘But…’
‘I know you’ll be tapped on the shoulder for this, Bill. I mean, they think it might even be the same alien…’
‘What? When?’ I was right, he thinks. Of course I was right.
‘Like a few days ago.’
‘But…’
‘So if your project team needs an extra lawyer—I need this, Bill. I’m… I’m… I made a slip-up recently and I need this to get back on track. I need to be on your team.’
‘Uh,’ Bill says, ‘right!’
‘This must be a huge surprise. And you’re about to retire and everything. Do you want to be involved?’
Carefully packed and labelled regrets spill open. The things he should have done 60 years ago; questions he should have asked, records he didn’t preserve. He knows the Earth has suffered, humanity has suffered, from his clumsiness and lack of insight as a young man through his failure to advocate for Sam after his disappearance, to spread his message and convince the world. And now a second chance? It can’t be true. He fears it is true—and that he’s still not up to the job. I should leave it to someone younger and stronger and better than me, he thinks. It’s too big, too important.
‘Bill? Are you okay?’
An image of diseased trees blowing in hot wind and then not blowing comes to him. In the long hours of his lonely retirement there will be nowhere to hide. He won’t have any kind of peace until he sees this traveller, damaged or not. Yes, he says, but nothing comes out.
‘Think about it, Bill.’
This time, he thinks, I have a lifetime behind me. He nods. The word comes out: ‘Yes.’
>
‘You’ll do it?’
‘Yes. And you’re on my team.’
Jeremiah stands, bangs the table and knocks the condiments over. Bill feels and hears the commotion. His eyes are full of tears. My dear friend has come back, he thinks. My dear friend has returned.
PART III
13
The screen black. A pale yellow column brightens on the right, flares and illuminates an empty expanse of whitecapped ocean seen from high above. Dawn. Urgent percussive music. It’s been a week now of news teasing a forthcoming major announcement. A big story promised, and here it is. Trix holds her breath, wondering what the hell is happening and what Bill has to do with it.
He was bound by an extremely strict nondisclosure agreement before he left, the type verified by lie detectors. No kind of hint was permissible, not even the raise of an eyebrow in reply to a question. She knew not to ask. But his spontaneous smiles at nothing, his distractedness and loving attention and peacefulness suggested to her it must be Sam-related, something like the discovery of new or buried evidence that confirmed Bill’s account of what happened all those years ago.
Something weird happened in Hokitika in the 80s. There’s no doubt about that in Trix’s mind. Bill has plenty of cuttings and documents giving contradictory information, but precisely who—or what—Sam Starsailor was, is something she’s kept an open mind about. It seems unlikely that he was a disabled deckhand swept overboard and quietly returned home to China, as was claimed at the time by the government, but it’s at least equally unlikely that he was an alien lost in transit, as Bill believes. Or wants to believe.
Bill’s alien. It’s his main piece of baggage. His weight, Trix thinks. How wonderful it would be to have it lifted clean away.
All Venture Group’s news advertisements, claiming a major announcement, have led to this live 6 pm broadcast, which will be aired simultaneously around the world. It’s huge, so huge she suspects she may not be able to cope, so she’s alone in her home cinema on the Mount rather than at the studio with everyone else. She’s been ignoring calls, but when her little sister, Camille, rings from Auckland’s walled Grammar Zone, she answers.
‘What’s all this about, Trix? Does your live-in journalist have any idea?’
‘I think he’s involved.’
‘Is it Ebola X?’ A new, vaccine-resistant strain of Ebola has broken out in parts of the North Island.
‘No, I think it’s bigger than that. He’s away working on it.’
‘He didn’t say?’
‘Not a word.’
‘Of course not.’
New Zealand is illuminated as it rolls into view. The camera zooms in. The islands grow bigger, focus into the map-like clarity of a photo taken from space. Freefall. A choice is made: tonight the falling eye veers to the south. The West Coast rapidly expands.
Yes, Trix thinks. It is Sam. Thank God.
Terminal velocity. Contours of mountainous land sharpen and white surf wrinkles. The roofs of a town near the coast. The falling eye slows, slows, stops. Kettle drums roll. Silence. ‘BREAKING NEWS’ is rapped out letter by letter in archaic font as if by typewriter.
Audrey Filter’s imperious face fills the screen. ‘An alien has landed. Scientists have confirmed that a male humanoid who appeared four days ago on a remote beach in New Zealand’s South Island does not have terrestrial DNA. While human in appearance, he is not from Earth. In a Venture Group world exclusive, you are about to see the first confirmed images of intelligent alien life ever broadcast. Don’t go away.’
An advertisement for home defence systems.
‘Honestly,’ Camille says, ‘I’ll watch it later if they’re going to break it up like this, no matter how many wise bulbous heads he—’
Trix lets the phone drop from her ear.
A panel of experts have completed their analysis and are finally in agreement on two things—how historical the news is and what an exciting time it is to be alive right now—when Trix is ready to speak again, but the system is overloaded and she can’t reach Bill or Camille, so she settles in front of the breaking news special.
Surf pounds an historic, gently sloping stony beach rendered fuzzy by some old film or video format. The year 1-9-8-6 raps up number by number. Waves topple and rush up the gravel as strings soar. ‘Sixty-two years ago, in 1986, Bill Peters was a young newspaper reporter working on New Zealand’s West Coast.’
A stream of messages arrive, 15 or 20 of them, and her screen rings. She answers without checking the caller. It’s Camille.
‘Trix, I had no idea! Did you? Did you know?’
‘No. Only about the first brief appearance in the 80s. Bill always said it was hushed up.’
A black-and-white photo of Bill fades in over the surf. He is dark-haired and thin, with a roguish roll-your-own cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His rectangular tie is loosely knotted, the top button of his shirt undone. As the camera tracks back, he is seen to be leaning against one of the heavy old petrol-powered cars of the era. His soft shoes have zips.
Camille laughs. ‘Lock up your daughters.’
‘You’re not worried about alien invasion and enslavement, Camille?’
‘Oh, no, it’s all very nebulous at this stage. I’m sure they’ve found something extraordinary, but who knows what. Someone alone and lost. I just hope he’s not a communist, socialist type of alien when he wakes up. That’s all we need right now.’
‘I think he’s an environmentalist.’
‘We all are, darling.’
While Bill may not be sweating next to Trix in the cinema as he normally does, he feels present in a big way, in the sharp black-and-white stills and washed-out colour footage from the late 1980s and early 90s made life-size on the big screen. She’d like to hold him. She scrolls through her missed calls as Camille jokes that she now approves of Bill after seeing him in such a capital-producing role. They laugh ironically because the Stanaways are old money and Trix has enough of it to easily support a harem of journalists if she wanted to.
There are various shots of the historic gold mining town of Hokitika and then shots from the 80s of skinny, poorly dressed locals and their hordes of children. An old photo of Sam arrests the flow of images. He’s poised, propped up on hospital pillows, looking down the barrel of the camera with his knowing eyes.
New, never-before-seen photos are promised after the break.
Camille’s new gardener isn’t working out. Trix interrupts her sister’s recitation of his incompetencies (which might be deliberate provocations) with an exclamation of surprise as the special resumes with a sharp colour image of Sam with two nurses. It could have been taken 10 years ago, not 60. Sam, with his letterbox mouth, sits up: dark-eyed, bald, dignified, unsmiling yet amiable in pale blue pyjamas, between two delighted young nurses who lean over him from either side to be sure they’re in the picture. The camera zooms in on Sam’s face, on his brown eyes.
‘Where did he go?’ asks the narrator. ‘What really happened to Sam Starsailor?’
In a second high-definition colour photo, the young Bill sits beside the bed, smiling at the camera. Ridiculously young—basically a teenager—spotty-faced, with his greasy dark hair spiked thickly. His Adam’s apple juts above his poorly knotted tie.
Trix laughs. ‘Bill looks illiterate.’
The camera tracks back and Sam comes into frame, looking away, above Bill’s head towards the light source, a window.
‘Oh, they’re holding hands!’ Camille cries, ‘How sweet.’
Trix wipes her eyes. ‘Oh, here I go.’
The camera zooms in on Sam’s hand, laid over Bill’s on the blanket. The image dissolves into old spiralling headlines: ‘Mystery Man’, ‘Illegal Alien’, and old photos familiar to Trix that Camille won’t have seen. Colour washes into the black-and-white and sharpens into the present, into Bill today, in ultra-high digital definition, walking under a dry rain awning, towards the camera, with the ease of a man of 50. The light is red-gold. In med
ium close-up illuminated by the setting sun, Bill looks noble, as if the spotty teenager in the previous photo received a transfusion of the alien’s dignity and poise.
‘My name is Bill Peters,’ he says gravely, ‘and this is my story.’
‘The ladies are still in danger,’ Trix says.
During the umpteenth ad break their conversation drifts from the danger of secateurs left with wilful carelessness in the garden (almost unforgivable, even if the children have all grown up and left home), to the cases of an Ebola-type haemorrhagic virus popping up in the central and eastern North Island. Camille jokes about that too, of course, saying she occasionally commutes through those areas and would not like to be obliged to fly every time she comes to Wellington. She then airs a theory about the virus being introduced to New Zealand by terrorists who lost control of it, which Trix initially mistakes for another joke. But no, it isn’t meant to be funny. Camille has become serious, in the way she does when in danger of losing money on an investment or when one of her sons has disappeared to the Coromandel with their boat. Trix can tell that the Ebola outbreak has affected her much more deeply than the arrival or return of a solo light-boned unconscious alien humanoid. ‘But you must see this doco about the Ebola X,’ she tells Trix. ‘It’s a new kind of awful and really, we’re seriously thinking of Waiheke.’ The link arrives. ‘I’ll bother you until you watch this, you know.’
Bill’s phone is constantly engaged and Trix is happy for him. But as the hours pass and she fields excited calls from friends and relatives, and still no call or text arrives from him, she feels increasingly left out. Nearly everyone says that Bill must be so excited or pleased to be vindicated after all these years, or something similar. Yes, yes, she says, agreeing to whatever needs to be agreed with, until she feels officially abandoned and stops taking calls.
In bed she brings up the documentary Camille recommended so devoutly. The preamble states that sufferers of Ebola X allowed the filmmakers remarkable access in order to raise awareness of the disease and the importance of medical insurance, such as Virend.
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