Song of the Sound

by Jeff Gulvin

  He walked to the bowsprit as First Arm opened on the port side with Bradshaw and Thompson Sound to starboard. The dolphins had been in Bradshaw the last couple of times he had seen them. He didn’t always see them; there were occasions when the guests that chartered the boat were disappointed, but never when Mahina was on board.

  Quasimodo breached right under the bowsprit before settling on the bow wave to surf. There were ten or twelve dolphins now, all grouped together riding the wave with whistles and clicks, and John-Cody wondered if somehow they knew. Was this their parting shot, the funeral cortege on the bows? He went back into the wheelhouse and flicked the boat into neutral. No bow wave now, nothing to keep them there. He wandered for’ard again and lit a cigarette. The wind was getting up and clouds massed over the Tasman. The wind cut the Gut north of Bauza and whistled through the spreaders. The dolphins were still gathered under the bow, rolling over one another, playing, caressing, diving and calling out. All at once Quasimodo lifted his head out of the water spy-hopping like a bowhead whale, and John-Cody felt the hairs lift on the back of his neck.

  ‘Can you feel her, Quasi? Do you know where she’s at?’

  Quasimodo dived again, showing the lump in his back between the dorsal fin and his tail; he came up again and blew gold in the morning sunlight.

  John-Cody engaged the gears and eased the revs higher, Seymour Island on the starboard quarter now and beyond it Espinosa Point and Yuvali Beach where he had first spoken to Mahina. The pain in his chest almost suffocated him. She had been his love from the day they met to the day she died. Sudden instant love, like two souls meeting right there by the deer trap on Yuvali Beach.

  He was twenty-four and had been living in Manapouri for two years, working with Tom on a crayfish boat in the sound and trapping deer for the farms. John-Cody’s sense of adventure had almost made him join one of the helicopter crews where the really big money was, but after they went to three funerals in a week he decided terra firma or the deck of a boat under his feet were far better options.

  He and Tom ran ten deer traps, worked out carefully in terms of design and location, and they took it in turn to check them. Tom kept the crayfish boat moored at Deep Cove and when all the pots were down they would go and see what they had caught. Live deer were beginning to fetch good money then, though the government was still paying per hide and they shot as many as they could.

  That particular day he had run the dinghy up onto Yuvali Beach and heard the deer trying to escape his trap. Tom was moored further out by Seymour, taking care of last night’s crayfish catch. John-Cody had a rifle slung over his shoulder and he crunched his way up the beach to the trap. Inside was a beautiful hind, two or perhaps three years old. He stood and crooned softly, calming her till she remained still and he could think about netting her and getting her back to the boat. He would need Tom for that, but he had to get her nice and steady first.

  ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ The woman’s voice came from nowhere and John-Cody whirled and saw nothing; the disembodied words hung in the atmosphere like mist. ‘She’s young. She’ll breed well. I’m glad you didn’t kill her.’

  He looked round, seeing nothing until he noticed the little aluminium dinghy tied high up on the burn. When he turned again he saw her standing to the left of the trap, half hidden among the red-flowering rata. She wore shorts, though it was cold, and just a T-shirt so the swell of her breasts and the tightness of nipples showed through. Her face was dark and her eyes flashed as she crossed the sand barefoot, mud from the banks of the burn climbing above her ankles. Her hair was thick and long and pushed behind one ear, its blackness tinted with the natural henna of the Polynesian, iridescent with the sun behind her.

  ‘You’re John-Cody Gibbs the fisherman.’

  She walked in a circle around him, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Her legs were smooth and brown and taut with muscle, her waist slim; she moved with the grace of a cat. She wandered right up to the trap and leaned on the fence, then made a cooing owl-like sound in the back of her throat. The hind dropped her head and her ears flattened and she took her first tentative steps towards the wire.

  ‘They’re so beautiful,’ the girl said. ‘It’s a shame they are so destructive.’

  ‘Who are you?’ John-Cody recognized the dinghy tied up on the beach and he had seen the girl at Deep Cove once or twice.

  ‘Mahina.’

  ‘That’s a beautiful name.’

  ‘You think so? I’m not so sure.’ She wandered down the beach where she paused before the water and gazed across Pendulo Reach at their boat. John-Cody could see Tom on deck sorting the crayfish into size and weight.

  ‘Why d’you catch crayfish?’ She looked over her shoulder at him.

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘My father hunted crayfish before my mother died and my mother’s father before him. With each generation of people the crayfish have got smaller.’

  John-Cody stood up and thought of what Tom Blanch had told him when he first came here, how Tom as a boy had followed the trails of the kakapo, the flightless ground parrot. Now the only trails left were from deer. ‘People have to eat,’ he said quietly, walking down the beach to join her. ‘Everybody needs food.’

  She nodded. ‘But we take more than we need. We take what can’t be replaced.’ She stood for a long moment, then glanced at him again and pointed to the mountains. ‘Did you know that what goes on above the water is echoed exactly below it? Life, death and rebirth, John-Cody. When the forest dies, trees slip into the fiord to feed it. The slip above the water is reciprocated beneath it. Both the forest above and the coral below begin to regenerate at the same time. If not, there is no balance and without balance the world cannot function.

  ‘You’re from America,’ she said. ‘You might understand what I’m saying.’

  He frowned. ‘You mean people round here don’t?’

  ‘Not really. A few perhaps, but there are livings to be made and eyes go blind when that is the case. Ears have a habit of turning deaf.’

  John-Cody raised one eyebrow. ‘What exactly are you telling me?’

  She stepped up close then, her feet sinking in the chill of the sand. She laid a warm palm against the flat of his chest and looked into his eyes. ‘I’m telling you there is more to life than just catching crayfish.’

  She had come to his house that night, the little crib he rented between Manapouri and Te Anau. Tom told him it used to be the Manapouri schoolhouse and had been moved onto a farmer’s land where it had stood empty for ten years. He had lit a fire in the stove and cooked some feral deer steaks when he heard a truck pull up outside. Glancing out of the window he spied Mahina climbing from the driver’s seat. She carried a bottle wrapped in crepe paper, was barefoot and wore the same shorts and top she’d been wearing when they spoke at Yuvali Beach.

  John-Cody figured she was about eighteen. He had seen her brother around, a great hulking Maori called Jonah. He was still only a kid though he liked to hang out with Ned Pole and the other chopper crews. They knew each other to nod to and John-Cody wondered what Jonah would think if he knew his big sister had invited herself for dinner.

  He recalled that night vividly and with a fondness now as he steered the Korimako towards the Shelter Islands. He looked at his watch: late morning. He had dawdled out here knowing that he didn’t want to let her go. He had thought that maybe this would be the end of it for him, that he could release her; let her go and get on with his life without her. For a year he had been a prisoner of this moment and now the moment was upon him he knew he would rather remain a prisoner than face the future without her. The emotion welled up in him and threatened to boil over, as if the real mourning would start now, as if the last twelve months had been nothing but preparation.

  The Shelter Islands were ahead and the dolphins lagged behind the boat, their escort duties over now. They would stay close to Bradshaw; rarely had he seen them beyond that point. West of the Shelter Islands the sky had da
rkened and cloud squeezed the horizon white to grey and black.

  As the boat steamed beyond the islands he could see the Hare’s Ears, twin rocks out to sea that kept boats away from Febrero Point. His whole body tingled, every sinew, every muscle, every sense as alive as he had ever felt it. He stood on the brink of something: he did not know what, but he was more alive in her death, more aware of the life around him than he had ever been. The last time he had felt anything vaguely close to this was when he had stood on the Camas prairie, not yet twenty-one, looking down on the wreckage of the FBI agents’ car.

  He put the boat back on autopilot and looked at the pack, which still lay where he had left it on the seat by the saloon table. The Shelter Islands were beam on to port now and it was time. This is where she wanted her ashes scattered, between the Nee and the Shelters, where the Tasman Sea met the sound. Taking the earthenware pot he went out on deck and stood for a moment. The sun was showing her face again through a sucker hole in the cloud, though it was raining in Corset Cove only a hundred metres to port. He walked to the bowsprit and the memory of that first night together, just talking in front of his fire, was burnt into his mind. No touching, no kissing, nothing but the mingling of voices and thoughts. He recalled thinking how immense her knowledge of her country was, the land and the ocean and the way all things fitted together. He forgot she was barely eighteen, for she spoke with the wisdom of her ancestors. Her eyes were on fire and her skin shone in the glow from the stove. Their words mixed with a richness he had never felt before and she delved into the recesses of his soul without him even knowing she was doing it.

  He stood now on the bowsprit and as he began to unscrew the lid of the urn the wind rattled the spreaders above his head. It caught the length of his hair, uncut in twenty-five years, and he saw her again in his mind’s eye, sitting by the fire in the house they had built in Manapouri. She took the brush to his hair, stroke after stroke, night after night, year after year as gradually it faded to silver.

  Back in the wheelhouse he rummaged among the tray of tools he kept behind the global positioning system till he found what he was looking for. On deck he stuffed the scissors in the back pocket of his jeans, then placing Mahina’s urn under his shirt he climbed the jib mast to the spreaders thirty feet above the deck. He stood with one foot on each spreader, the hoop of the crow’s nest at his back, and faced the Tasman Sea. Taking the scissors from his pocket, he grabbed his hair in one hand and cut it off at the shoulder. He heard the grating of the blades, felt the tugging against his scalp, and imagined the pull of the brush as she worked to make it shine. The clump of hair came away in his hand and he swivelled round so his back was to the mast. Again he worked the lid of the urn loose. The wind lifted and pressed him against the metal hoop. He felt the first spots of rain and the sheets rattled left and right. He took the open urn and lifted the mass of silver strands, holding them both above his head. In a cloud of greyed white the wind took the ashes and the wind took his hair: together they flew one last time before Mahina was lost to the sound.

  THREE

  LIBBY AND BREE FLEW into Christchurch at the beginning of November, the plane landing at midnight roughly twenty-four hours after they left Heathrow. Bree was exhausted, walking through the arrivals lounge like a ghost, rings of darkness dragging at the skin of her eyes. Her face was white, her backpack, magazines and Walkman dangling in hands that trailed at her sides.

  A two-hour stopover in Singapore had broken up the journey and Libby, leper-like, had gone into the smoking room for a cigarette. Bree had sat on a plastic seat watching the news on television, her face like thunder.

  When Libby had asked her what she felt about the move, she said the only thing she knew about New Zealand was that the Kiwis called English people Poms.

  ‘If they call me that at school, Mum, I’m never going to forgive you.’ She had said it with vitriol on her lip and the same darkness in her eyes that Libby recognized in her own from time to time. She could have told Bree the truth then, let her know just how dire their financial situation, had become, but she didn’t. Financial worry wasn’t Bree’s problem and if she did tell her there was every possibility that word would get back to her parents, which was the last thing Libby wanted.

  So she kept quiet, but she did have serious misgivings. She was sure Bree could handle school: school was school and kids were kids wherever you were in the world. But she would be away quite a lot; much of her research would have to be done a good distance from where they were staying in Manapouri. Quite how she would swing the child care without completely messing up her daughter’s head she did not know.

  She smoked a cigarette behind the glass panel and felt distinctly unclean. Bree watched her out of dark eyes and when Libby came out again she moved one seat down.

  ‘Have you any idea how ridiculous you look? Watching you is like being at the zoo.’

  Libby said nothing.

  ‘I mean, hello. It’s so embarrassing. There’s my mother chugging on a fag behind a glass wall in an airport.’

  Libby compressed her lips. Bree made a face: Libby laughed and Bree looked at her for a moment and then she laughed too. ‘I hate you,’ she said.

  ‘I hate you too.’

  ‘Good. Then we’re equal.’

  ‘Equal.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Why did we have to come?’

  ‘Because I needed the job.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You had a job in France. You had two jobs. How many jobs do you need?’

  ‘Bree…’ Libby sighed, hesitated a moment then said: ‘They were part-time jobs and even added together they didn’t pay enough to keep us.’

  Bree stared at her then and Libby exhaled heavily through her nostrils. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you, but I guess you’re owed some sort of explanation for yet another move. I didn’t want to move again, darling, not after you were settled in France, but money was so tight I didn’t have enough to pay the rent. If I hadn’t got the job in New Zealand we wouldn’t have had anywhere to live.’

  Bree frowned at her. ‘What about Vimereux?’

  ‘The landlord was about to throw us out. The rent was too high, darling. I just didn’t earn enough to cover it and get us everything else we needed. I couldn’t allow him to evict us. We’d have been homeless. I couldn’t let that happen. So you see, I had to take this job: it was the only one on offer that paid enough to keep us.’

  Bree looked unimpressed. ‘I don’t believe you. You wanted it because it’s proper research.’

  ‘Of course I wanted it. It’s in my field. Who wouldn’t want it? But that doesn’t change the fact that I couldn’t afford for us to stay in France.’ Libby sat forward and took Bree’s hand. ‘Do you think I like hauling you round the world like this? D’you think I want you to be constantly starting new schools, having to try and make new friends? Bree, it’s the last thing I want. But what I earn has to be enough to keep us together. I have to go where the work is.’

  Bree looked at her for a moment longer then got up and walked away. Libby watched her wandering among the shops, looking at trinkets and seeing nothing. She felt for her, having to deal with so much change all the time. She wished she hadn’t had to tell her how it really was, but perhaps in a way it was better. This was a new start for both of them, a new country with new possibilities: there would be many difficulties along the way and they had better be in it together.

  The morning after they arrived it was raining: they had to be up at 5 a.m. to catch the shuttle bus that would drive them across country to Manapouri in the far south-west. It rained much of the way there and the driver told them, almost gleefully, that they had just experienced the worst spring floods ever. The River Clutha had burst its banks and most of the roads had been closed. Bree sat in silence and sulked; summer was supposed to be on its way yet everything looked cold and damp and miserable.


  They arrived late in the afternoon. It was almost five o’clock when the bus driver pulled into the village and turned into a quiet residential street.

  ‘There you go,’ he said and opened his door. ‘I’ll just get your bags and you’re set.’

  Bree and Libby sat where they were for a moment, looking at the low cabin-style house on their left. The roof was green and made of corrugated iron as so many of them seemed to be. Two short drives, one at either end of the house, were split by a multitude of shrubs and trees so that half the building was hidden: it gave the impression of being set snugly back from the road, though in reality the distance was no more than twenty feet. An old Toyota pick-up truck was parked under the lean-to in the drive and Bree could see a red telephone box standing beside it. All at once she smiled and Libby breathed a sigh of relief.

  The rain had stopped halfway between Queenstown and Manapouri and the sun came peeping through clouds to cast rainbows over the hills. The driver had been something of a tour guide, pointing out mountains and rivers to them as they passed. They saw for themselves where the Clutha had burst its banks; fields and low-lying areas were swamped, the water reaching almost halfway up the tree trunks. He told them it was the worst flooding the South Island had suffered in its history. But the rain had stopped now and the grey of the sky had been replaced with patches of brilliance.

  ‘Aotearoa,’ Libby said, pointing at the sky. ‘The land of the long white cloud.’