by Jeff Gulvin
‘That guy’s a long way from home,’ John-Cody said quietly. ‘White cap: they breed on the Auckland Islands. That’s nearly five hundred kilometres south of here. Mahina…’ His voice was trapped in his throat. ‘Mahina loved it down there. She used to crew for me, cook for the Department of Conservation teams that were measuring the giant herbs, the daisies and lilies that grow on Adams Island.’ He looked round at her. ‘The Aucklands are an amazing place, Libby. The plants have a very short growing season so they grow faster and flatter than their cousins do up here. The rata forest is incredible. The seeds look like little threads and they ride on the back of the wind from here to the Sub-Antarctic.’
He rested against the rail with his back to the water, and in his mind’s eye he saw the flat calm of Carnley Harbour to the north of Adams Island. Beyond the shores lay the tangled forests of rata: umbellata, the ironwood that had grown and massed and interwoven without interruption for nine thousand years. He recalled the first time that he and Mahina had been ashore: the bellbird’s wonderful song rising to crescendo then dying in their ears. The moss underfoot so soft, they had taken off their boots and buried their toes deep in the carpet-like texture; above their heads the canopy of tangled branches formed a natural cavern, which was strangely hushed and quiet. Not much further on, their way was blocked. As the forest climbed higher it shrank to knee height, the incessant drag of the wind beating any perpendicular growth into flattened sideways submission.
He looked at Libby once more. ‘That mollymawk is really a small albatross. It breeds on the cliffs of Adams Island facing into the wind with no land between it and the Antarctic’ He broke off and the expression in his eyes darkened; when he spoke again his voice was much softer. ‘I’ve sailed that southern coastline only once and I don’t want to do it again. It’s the most desolate, most lonely place I think I’ve ever been. It’s lonely right in the soul. I’ve sailed with people on board, but there’s a silence that seems to get right inside everyone.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t explain what I mean exactly. I guess it’s something to do with the history. In 1864 the Grafton was wrecked in Carnley Harbour. Five crew got ashore and their captain, a man called Musgrave, kept a diary for the twenty months they had to survive before they were finally rescued.’ He pushed himself away from the rail. ‘I have been round both capes and I have crossed the western ocean many times, but never have I experienced — or read — or heard of anything in the shape of storms to equal this place.’
John-Cody took tobacco from his pocket. ‘Mahina made me read those words before I sailed the first time.’ He smiled fondly then at the memory. ‘It is one hell of a place, Libby. Believe me.’
Libby moistened her lips with her tongue. ‘Southern right whales breed there, don’t they?’
‘In winter they do. I’ve seen them from May till November. I was part of a crew that tried to film a cow giving birth once, but we couldn’t get the footage.’ He sighed. ‘That would have been a first. The trouble was it was night, and the underwater lights attracted great shoals of krill. We couldn’t see a thing.’
Bree came on deck then, rubbing her eyes. ‘Is breakfast ready yet?’ she said.
They moved the Korimako to Kisbee Bay and dropped anchor again. Libby could see an old white boathouse on the shore. John-Cody took them across in the dinghy and moored on the beach. Bree wandered up to the boathouse, which had a cabin attached to it, an old bed with no mattress in the middle of the floor and a stove with fresh wood lying beside it. Rats scampered into the corners, making her shudder, and as she came out she saw her mother looking at the headstones in the tiny graveyard.
Libby stared at the six names and then turned again, the wind on her face from the sea. ‘I wonder what it must have been like to live down here,’ she murmured.
John-Cody lifted his shoulders. ‘They were miners. A guy called Johnston discovered gold in 1868. At one point there was a settlement of two thousand people. They built a lighthouse on Puysegur Point.’ He pointed to the gravestones. ‘They’re all that’s left of the colony.’
Libby looked back at the headstones, four men and two women. For a moment she wondered who they had been, what their lives were like. She looked across the bay where the sun bounced all the colours of light off the surface of the water and the Korimako lay at anchor, a perfect white against the bottle green of the islands. Nothing much had changed here. She stood where they would have stood and saw the same landscape they would have seen all those years ago.
As if he could guess her thoughts, John-Cody laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘It has changed,’ he said. ‘It’s no longer the virgin land that it was, the mining saw to that. The slaughter of seals, the introduction of deer and stoat and possum.’ He cracked a wide smile. ‘But it is still beautiful.’
They walked in the gradually rising heat though the trail was soggy underfoot. John-Cody wore no shoes or socks and Libby decided to do likewise, wearing just cut-off jean shorts and a T-shirt. She loved walking barefoot, the feel of the land between her toes a delight.
John-Cody had watched her as she climbed down to the dive platform and for half a second he was reminded of Mahina. That’s how she would have been, in shorts and no shoes so she could feel the forest against her skin. The realization had been startling and he was quiet as he steered the little boat to the beach.
Now he moved ahead with Carlos and his mother, the other two guests who had joined them on the walk. Libby trailed behind them with her arm round Bree’s shoulders and they climbed the old gold-miners’ trail with the land falling away on their right and the sea green and blue and spittle among the rocks. John-Cody led them up the hill and into the bush where the trees grew closer, the trail still discernible. They walked for maybe an hour, passing the marker for Sealers Beach, then the trail opened onto a cliff top and Libby spied the white walls of the lighthouse on Puysegur Point. The wind blew hard here and a few clouds had lifted to spoil the sky.
When they got to the point they looked down on a staircase of jagged black rocks falling hundreds of feet to where the sea thrashed the land. Libby stood in the weight of the wind and listened to the sound of water breaking hard, then sucking back with a hiss before rising to beat the rocks once again. John-Cody came alongside her.
‘Now you see why they needed to build a lighthouse. Get caught on those and it’s all over.’ He turned to Bree. ‘Can you hear that sound? That sucking and hissing and silence before the crash of the waves again?’ He squatted next to her and pointed out the white-caps close to the shore. ‘Water on rock: that’s the worst sound a seaman can ever hear. It sends a shiver right through your heart.’ He glanced at Libby. ‘This is New Zealand’s Cape Horn. The wind blows ten knots harder here than anywhere along the coast.’
He led the way back. Carlos told them his mother was tired and they would go back to the dinghy and wait. Sealers Beach was another half-hour walk and she was not up to it. Bree said she would go back with them because she was not up to it either. That left Libby, who wanted to see the beach where tea-coloured fresh water ran out to the sea.
She followed John-Cody, the trail steeper and lined with tangled secondary growth, twigs and sticks poking at her bare feet. The vegetation dripped water that mingled with her sweat and by the time they reached the top of the slope she was soaking. The banks of the slope were damp and muddy and brown water ran over their feet in rivulets. Libby stopped a little way behind John-Cody and looked down through the canopy of trees to a square of deserted beach where a twin-armed river of tannin-stained water spread across the sand. On three sides the bush crept like a hairline and Libby could hear the breaking of waves on rock. John-Cody paused in front of her.
‘Something, isn’t it?’ He looked back at her then as she stood above him: shorts cut to the top of naked thighs, legs brown and slender, the lines defined with muscle. Her skin ran with mud and water and again, for a moment, he saw Mahina. Yuvali Beach when she was just eighteen and dressed as Libby was now.
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p; He suddenly realized he was staring; realized Libby was looking back at him and the breath caught in his chest. Colour scarred his cheeks and he looked away and down and turned to the trail once more. Libby looked after him: she had felt the intensity of his gaze, the way his eyes for a moment had feasted on her and as she watched him move off she was aware of a fluttering sensation in her belly.
The sand was firm underfoot, cool against her soles. She wandered to the twin rivers where shallow water ran between massive turret-like boulders some thirty feet in height that broke up the path to the sea. The water was icy and she gasped at the sudden contrast, goose pimples breaking the flesh of her legs. John-Cody perched on a rock and rolled a cigarette, his own feet in the water.
‘Could be the Bahamas, eh?’
She smiled and waded through the water to him. ‘This is fresh, right?’ She pointed between her toes.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘So I can drink it?’
‘You can.’
She squatted in front of him and as she bent to cup her hands for a drink he glimpsed the tops of her breasts. Her chest was smooth and flat, the clavicle pronounced and her breasts swollen and milky, white compared to the rest of her. Libby cupped the water to her mouth again and again and John-Cody held his cigarette and stared. The last time he had been here was with Mahina and for a moment he felt as though he had betrayed her. Memory was all he had now: she was gone, lost, and with every day that passed she would fade and fade. Which was what she wanted, what she had told him would happen when they sat together that last night on her thinking stone with the gum tree silent beside them.
He stood up, drawing smoke into his lungs and exhaling in one breath. She was fading now, right there on Sealers Beach. But he didn’t want her to fade: he didn’t want to forget her or her to forget him. He imagined her now in the silence of the bush with the Tuheru, delighting in the other world where the garden of Tane was undiminished and colour and form and variety cast the trees he saw here into shapeless grey and brown.
‘John-Cody?’
He looked round sharply and saw Libby standing close to him, hands behind her back, looking up into the closed silence of his features.
‘You were miles away.’
He clipped his cigarette and put the butt in his pocket, then he led her to the boulders and showed her the caves and the slippery ridges of flat rock that looked like the work of glaciers. Far in the south the weather was changing. He turned his face to the wind, gazed back at the sea and his hair blew round his head.
‘It’s blowing nor’west,’ he said. ‘It’ll turn sou’west later, ten knots slower. Look for lightning on the horizon around teatime. It happens that way down here when a nor’wester turns from the south.’
SEVEN
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY Libby woke Bree early for school. She sat up, rubbed her eyes and looked at the crisp new uniform they had bought in Invercargill.
‘D’you want cereal or porridge?’ Libby asked her.
‘Porridge, please.’ Bree yawned and stretched and then wondered at her choice, suddenly aware of the stones gathered in the pit of her stomach. Today reality dawned after the magic of life on the Korimako: she had yet another new school to get used to.
Libby left her to get dressed and went into the kitchenette, switched on a ring on the stove and fetched milk from the fridge. Bree had had porridge on the Korimako every morning for a week, cooked by John-Cody who always took over in the galley at breakfast time. She came out of her bedroom still wearing her pyjamas with a towel draped over one shoulder, hair tousled, her eyes still puffy with sleep. She went through the little laundry space to the bathroom beyond the kitchenette. Libby poured porridge oats into the pan of boiling milk, aware of the knots in her own stomach: she would take Bree in this morning, give her some moral support on her first day.
John-Cody had told Libby she could use the truck. Once Bree was settled she needed to go and see Ned Pole about the motor launch he had offered to rent her. John-Cody didn’t seem to like the idea of her renting from Pole, and had spent a lot of time on the phone when they got back from Preservation Inlet. But he couldn’t find any other boats available and in the end he had muttered something about Pole’s boats being as good as any. Libby wondered at him, sharing his concern about what might happen in Dusky Sound, but at the same time she understood that people had to make a living. It was the age-old question of balance, economics versus ecology. Somewhere there had to be a happy medium. John-Cody didn’t like Ned Pole and Pole didn’t like him: that was evident from the conversations she’d had with both of them. She considered their history and what was between them now and it occurred to her that the Te Anau basin was a very small place indeed.
She also thought that, given the situation with her research, there was every possibility that she too would find herself opposing the big man; but he had offered her a boat in the full knowledge of why she needed one, and he was the only supplier at present.
John-Cody had brought them back from Preservation Inlet via the Acheron Passage because another squall had blown up in the west. But she had seen no dolphins in Dusky Sound. John-Cody seemed a little perturbed himself, telling her that in windy weather they were often located at the entrance to Wet Jacket Arm, but there was no sign of them there even. They had steamed north to Breaksea and back out to the ocean for the four-hour sail to Doubtful Sound without catching so much as a glimpse of them. Libby was itching to get back, set something up at the Supper Cove hut and trawl the arms of the sound on her own. Perhaps in a smaller, less intrusive vessel she would have more chance of sighting the pod.
Sighting them was one thing: photographing and identifying them was another completely. Then there was the question of sex, whether a dominant female governed the pod. There was a hell of a lot of work to be done before she could begin to think about the levels of communication between them and the possible effect of the territorial changes that more tourism would bring.
Bree came out of the shower and went back to her bedroom, taking a bowl of porridge with her. She was very quiet and Libby really felt for her: first-day nerves for the umpteenth time in her life. She had left the tap dripping and Libby turned it off. As she did so she heard John-Cody’s electric shaver through the wall. She paused long enough to listen for a few seconds, and found herself imagining him standing in front of the mirror. The two bathrooms backed on to each other and that was the weakest point in the walls. She wondered if he could hear the fall of their shower.
In the kitchen she poured herself some tea and stood at the back window, looking over the garden to drink it. She heard the clatter of possum claws on the corrugated iron roof and wondered if she would ever catch sight of one. According to John-Cody, there were millions of the creatures eating their way through the forests every night, but the only ones she had seen were flattened on the road between Manapouri and Te Anau. She looked at the pink bark of the fuchsia and the hanging bird table where a fantail was cleaning its feathers. Bree talked about bellbirds, and Jonah had told them that when Mahina was dying she had lain between the fuchsia and the red beech so she could listen to them. But Libby had not heard a single note, let alone seen one, since they had been here.
Bree came out of the bedroom with the half-eaten porridge sticking to the side of the bowl. She looked neat in the summer uniform of open-necked blouse and sensible black shoes.
‘Are you OK, darling?’
Bree shrugged and looked at her watch. ‘Let’s just go, shall we?’
‘You’ll be early.’
‘I’d rather be early than late.’
Libby climbed behind the wheel of the old Toyota and started the engine. Bree got in next to her, new school bag on her knees, socks rolled down to her ankles. The sun was over the lake, though Leaning Peak was swathed in cloud as they turned onto Cathedral Drive. They passed Alex walking to the office from her house and she waved and mouthed good luck to Bree. Sierra was in the back of the truck and she barked at Alex as she b
arked at everyone they passed, and Alex rolled her eyes to the sky.
It took twenty minutes to drive to the school and Bree said virtually nothing all the way there. She gazed to the left, watching the lake roll out of sight, taking in the signs to Supply Bay and Rainbow Reach and the Kepler Track. Farmlands spread away beyond the airport on the right, and various vehicles were rumbling towards Manapouri. Halfway to Te Anau, Libby slowed as a pale-feathered Australian harrier swooped low over the cab and, talons extended, settled on the corpse of a road-killed possum lying on the grass verge.
‘He’s old,’ Bree muttered, looking through the window.
Libby squinted at her. ‘How do you know?’
‘The feathers: they get paler as the bird gets older. That one’s very old.’
‘Where did you learn that?’
Bree shrugged. ‘John-Cody told me.’
Libby turned into Howden Street where other parents were dropping off their children. She pulled over outside the school and reached for her daughter’s hand. Bree squeezed and Libby touched her cheek with the backs of her fingers.
‘Do you want me to come in with you, darling?’
Bree pursed her lips then slowly shook her head. ‘I’ll go by myself.’ She looked sideways at her mother. ‘I may have to play rugby in the winter, Mum. I’d better be able to walk in by myself.’
‘OK.’ Libby leaned over to kiss her but Bree shied away, self-conscious already under the gaze of the children gathered in the concourse.
‘You know where to go?’ Libby asked her.
Bree was half out of the truck now. She nodded and closed the door. Libby watched her walk into school, dragging her feet ever so slightly, then she noticed that various other mothers were there, some of them watching. They were not watching Bree, however, but looking at her sitting in John-Cody’s truck.
Bree walked past a group of girls a year or two older than she was and none of them said anything. They just stared at her and she looked straight ahead, pushed open the swing door and walked the length of the corridor to the secretary’s office. The principal had told them that the school comprised forms one to seven and she would be in form two.