Song of the Sound

by Jeff Gulvin

  Bree was asleep and they were smoking cigarettes under the eaves of the house. He had told her about the night Mahina died, how she told him the owl called her name and she knew then it was time to go. His voice had cracked a little but his eyes were clear and Libby had been filled with an overwhelming sense of his love for her. At that moment her concerns about Bree, her research and the implications of Ned Pole’s plans for Dusky Sound were banished and she wondered what it would feel like to be loved in the way that John-Cody had loved Mahina. She had watched him sitting in the stillness, his own special quietness enveloping him like a cloud.

  Libby stoked the flames now as the night grew behind the hut and she thought about Mahina, the impact she had had on John-Cody’s life and the lives of her brother and her father Kobi, whom Libby had still to meet. She imagined Mahina trawling the sounds in her dinghy, knowing every inch of water and forest as if it were part of her being. Libby knew very little about the spiritual traditions of the Maori but she saw Mahina as a gentle Waitaha guardian, a link with the past and the myth of the forest god, the earth and the sky. Libby had never met Mahina, never seen her save in the picture Jonah had shown them, yet she felt she knew her.

  John-Cody had actually spoken little about her, his privacy intense, but on the few occasions he had elaborated, sometimes when Jonah brought up her name with the fond recollection of a sibling, Libby had gleaned some insight into who she must have been. Jonah described her as being in this world yet not of it.

  The wind moved in the trees and Libby shivered: again the morepork called and she wondered what she would do if he called a third time and she recognized her name. She shook her head and prodded the fire, took a cigarette from her pack and lit it from the embers: the flames lit up the beach and she thought she saw something move at the edge of the trees. She started, aware all at once of her heartbeat. This was not the first time she had felt like this, as if in some way she was being watched. The sounds were silent, almost spooky places when you were alone, especially at night. On more than one occasion when she had been in the boat, intent on the dolphins, she would glance up and swear a figure was watching her from just beyond the tree line. She would look harder, see the outline of a shadow, but when she turned the boat and went closer she saw nothing.

  The darkness between herself and the hut looked all at once forbidding. Water slapped rock somewhere along the shore and the wind called like whispered voices among the trees. She took the coffee pot and made her way back to the lighted windows, trying not to see Jonah’s face or hear the seriousness of his words when he talked of Tuheru and Maeroero.

  TEN

  JANE POLE WAS ON THE telephone in her husband’s study. She wore a green suit and rested a long-nailed hand against the polished wood of the desk. Pole watched her through the open doors to the balcony, his back to the rail and January sun. Barrio whinnied and stamped in the paddock below, but Pole was intent on his wife’s conversation with their backers in the United States.

  ‘We know he came to New Zealand in 1974,’ Jane was saying. ‘He landed at Bluff Cove, Invercargill, and seems to have jumped ship. He was working on a trawler from Hawaii called the Beachcomber and then he hooked up with a Kiwi skipper called Blanch. They worked together fishing and trapping deer for a while then Gibbs met a Maori girl called Mahina Pavaro and they lived together for twenty-some years.’

  ‘Two,’ Pole said very deliberately.

  ‘What was that?’ His wife placed her hand over the mouthpiece.

  ‘Twenty-two years.’

  She turned her attention back to the phone. ‘The point is they were never legally married.’

  Pole watched her, the cool and calculating expression pasted on thin, almost hawkish features. His eyes narrowed to slits as he looked through her and the years rolled back and he saw Mahina again in the bush. That was just after she got together with Gibbs and he hated him for it. Pole was thirty years old then, with two years’ Vietnam service under his belt. He had fought in denser jungle than any man he knew and had survived not only the enemy but snakes and spiders and punji-stake mantraps. He could shoot a running stag from the skis of any chopper at any speed and was making more money than anyone in the Te Anau basin. He was in demand from all the big outfits and could virtually name his price. He spent most of his life in the bush and was as soundless as a hunting cat.

  He was kneeling in deep cover by the carcass of a young hind when a rustle in the bush disturbed him. He saw movement between the dripping trees ahead and his gaze deepened as he realized he was looking at a young Maori woman picking her way through the undergrowth. His throat tightened as he saw she was naked.

  ‘Ned!’

  He started and looked at his wife. She had put the phone down and he hadn’t noticed, so lost had he been in reverie.

  ‘Sorry. What did they say?’

  ‘They’re worried about the hearing. They’re pushing, Ned. We need to do something about Gibbs before then. If we don’t they think we’ll lose.’

  Pole bit his lip, still not fully concentrating. ‘No date’s been set for the hearing.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ She looked at him, head slanted slightly. ‘Are you sure your heart’s still in this? If you go soft on me now, you can kiss it all goodbye. Not just this deal but the lot.’ She stepped away from the desk, arms folded across her chest. ‘If we lose this property I’ll be back in the US faster than you can spit.’

  Pole stared at her. ‘Of course my heart’s still in it. As you’re so keen to remind me — it’s all I’ve got.’ He drew himself up and stood square, shoulders back, looking down at her. ‘And as for going soft, you might think you’re tough, Jane, but you’d last five minutes out there.’ He pointed to the mountains against the horizon.

  Jane tipped back her head and laughed. ‘Oh Ned, give me a break, please. I wouldn’t be stupid enough to be out there in the first place.’ She walked over to him and laid a hand on his chest. ‘Darling, I know you’re good in the bush. Why do you think I married you?’ She tapped him on the temple. ‘Not for your brains surely. It’s a good job you can hunt and that you look so good, because businessman of the year you are not.’

  Pole flinched. He saw his father’s face in his mind’s eye. Be someone I can be proud of.

  ‘You should thank your lucky stars you’ve got me,’ Jane went on. ‘If I weren’t around you’d be living in a tent by now. Stick to your rifles, Nehemiah. It’s what you were bred for.’

  Pole stood where he was, the tips of his cheekbones white. Jane ran her hand up and down the hard muscles of his stomach, lingering at his belt.

  ‘What’re they going to do?’ he asked her.

  ‘Arrange for a private investigator to look into Gibbs’s background, Hawaii, the States, etc., see if he can’t drag up something we can use. We can do our bit from this end too, or rather you can.’ She looked at him then. ‘Can’t we use the accident in some way?’

  The tone of her voice was brusque and matter-of-fact. Pole winced beneath it.

  ‘Gibbs was the skipper,’ Jane went on. ‘It was his fault, his responsibility.’

  Pole stared at her. ‘It was five years ago.’

  ‘So what? Your son still died.’

  Pole stepped around her. ‘There was an inquiry, Jane. He was exonerated.’

  ‘And you just accepted that?’ She stared at him now, brow furrowed. ‘You of all people, the big man of Te Anau.’

  Pole looked beyond her, through the open window to the paddock where Barrio stamped and snorted, running up and down the fence as if he scented a mare in season.

  Jane looked at him from under shadowed eyelids. ‘It may have been five years ago, but inquiries get reopened. Especially when somebody died. There must be something we can use.’

  Pole had no answer for her. He went outside and crossed the yard to the paddock, the shadow of his father haunting him, the shadow of Eli’s ghost stalking the recesses of his mind: grandfather and grandson, the knowledge between th
em of how he had failed them both. He paused at the fence, rested a booted foot on the bottom rail and sought a cigar from his top pocket. On days like today he hated Jane with a vengeance, but for all the ice water in her veins he knew she was right: they had to use everything to win this, particularly now the Bass woman was ensconced in Dusky Sound with her camera and her hydra-phones. He knew Gib and Mahina had never married and he suspected something else but couldn’t prove it. Every time he had broached the subject Gib had carefully avoided it. Then Eli went to work for them, which put him in an intolerable position.

  He would never forget that day when the telephone rang on his desk upstairs and the police told him that his son had been involved in an accident. The chill had started in his hair and worked its way to his toes. He knew the accident was bad and he knew it was on Gib’s boat. He didn’t know how bad until he crossed the lake to West Arm and saw the body bag on the dock. Mahina was there but she didn’t come forward when Gibbs approached him. Pole had looked beyond Gibbs and his gaze met fully with hers for the first time in eighteen years. No words were spoken and both of them knew that with this between them now, none would ever need to be.

  He clamped the cigar between his teeth and looked up to see Jane standing on the balcony with her jacket undone. He realized she was wearing nothing underneath and her hair was loose and long and she leaned so the jacket hung open and she looked at him with that slow darkness in her eyes. For a long moment they just stared at each other and then she turned and walked back into the house. Pole dropped his cigar in the dirt and ground it out. He strode indoors, unbuttoning his shirt as he went. The bedroom door was open and Jane lay back on the bed, completely naked. He dropped his shirt on the floor and unsnapped his belt buckle.

  ‘When you talk to your man in the States,’ he said, ‘ask him to find out what outfit Gibbs was with in Vietnam.’

  Bree got off the bus and looked through the window at Hunter. He waved, just one flap of his hand, but a thrill ran through her and she stood for a moment watching while the bus turned left for the Tuatapere road. They sat next to each other most days now both to and from school. Hunter probably had no idea what that meant to her, or if he did he certainly didn’t show it. The bullying from Jessica and her cronies was getting steadily worse and Bree had no-one to confide in. She sat with Biscuit in most lessons but she was not what Bree would call a friend. She had always managed to find at least one special friend at school wherever her mother had sent her, even during the six months in the Baja California. In France she had been part of a trio that, when her grasp of the language grew strong enough, became a firm little friendship. So why was it so hard here? Maybe it was the fact that Jessica picked on her right from the start. She certainly had an influence over the form; all the girls were scared of her and she did just enough work to keep the tutors off her back.

  All of which made Hunter’s interest that much more important. None of his friends came in from Blackmount and the seat next to him was always vacant. He talked to Bree in his gentle Kiwi accent, his voice already starting to break; his eyes were deep brown, his skin tanned from the sun and he had ingrained dirt from his father’s farm under his fingernails. Bree always sat with him in the mornings and he took the space next to her when they got back on the bus in the afternoon, all of which made life just about bearable. She hadn’t told anyone about Hunter, in case in doing so she somehow broke the spell. He was the only reason she could face going to school.

  School was different here from anywhere she had been before: it seemed to her that the one thing all New Zealand children had in common was sport and their love of it. They all seemed to be good at it, enthusiastic to the point of obsession, and she wondered why that was. She had talked to her mother about it, trying not to let her know that games was the one lesson where she felt weak and really vulnerable. It had soon become apparent that she was far and away the brightest in her class, even at Japanese, which she had started late. The tutors liked her, but her abilities set her apart and when games came round it gave the others an opportunity to get even.

  Her mother said the country was like Australia and South Africa, young still and seeking its place in the world. Whereas England and the rest of Europe had found theirs through war and conquest over a thousand and more years, places like New Zealand were shaping their identity through sport. In a way it was a modern if benign form of war, country set against country, culture against culture on the field of play. None of that helped Bree, though, who was as bad at hockey and cricket as she knew she would be at rugby when the winter term came round.

  She stood on the corner and watched the bus go, thinking about Hunter’s eyes and how kind and gentle they were. He was big for his age, almost a head taller than his mates, none of whom seemed to poke fun when he got off the bus with Bree every morning. He was brilliant at sport: secretly Bree watched him on the cricket pitch when she was trying to play hockey. They had stuck her in goal, either to keep her out of the way or to take pot shots at her, she had not quite worked out which yet. Hunter could hit a cricket ball very hard and he looked really athletic when he ran up to bowl. Most people made fun of her name, which was ridiculous when she considered some of theirs, but Hunter called her by her initials, BB.

  Bree turned back to the beach, gazing across the lake in the late afternoon sunshine. A pair of spur-winged plovers rose from among the black-trunked manuka in the wetlands. She thought about what John-Cody had told her: manuka was the tea tree and Captain Cook had made spruce beer from the rimu. There was manuka in the copse by the garden; often she would wander in there and sit on one of the stumps and smell the twigs with the rain on them. She loved that garden. Every day it seemed she learned something new, saw something she hadn’t seen before, a new frog or a bird’s nest. She had even glimpsed a possum high in the marbleleaf tree first thing one morning.

  Lately she had taken to lying between the fuchsia and the red beech in the late afternoon with half an apple in her outstretched hand. She lay very still, so still that the male bellbird that sang from the lower branches overcame his fear and licked the apple as it sat in her hand. She watched out of half-closed eyes, hardly daring to breathe, as his snake-like tongue dug a tiny furrow in the flesh and she imagined him with nectar on his beak, moving from flower to flower, carrying the life of the forest.

  John-Cody came walking up the road from Pearl Harbour. The guests were long gone and he had been sorting out a few things with Southland Tours. The sun was lower in the sky now and he could smell the change in the atmosphere: tomorrow would bring rain and a lot of it. He was thinking about Libby trawling up and down Dusky’s various arms and the water turning white round the boat. He thought of yesterday’s call, telling him that Quasimodo was in the sound. Was he just visiting or could he be part of a coalition between the two pods as she had suggested? He was looking forward to seeing her tomorrow night so he could discuss it with her.

  Bree was approaching from the other direction, both of them converging on the office. She would be going to raise her mum on the radio before heading home with Alex. That had surprised him: he would not have put Alex down as a woman overflowing with maternal instinct, but she was brilliant with Bree and happily looked after her whenever Libby was working. At the weekends she had gone home for the odd night and John-Cody had kept an eye on Bree himself.

  Bree saw him and waved. He waved back, then Sierra bounded out of the office, caught both their scents, looked left and right and raced up to Bree. She knelt down and flung her arms round the dog’s neck. John-Cody shook his head: must be the quality of the welcome, he thought.

  ‘Hey, Breezy. Take it easy,’ he called.

  She smiled at him, raised her hand and slapped his palm. ‘Five high, Captain Bligh.’

  It was their greeting grown up over the short time they had known each other, something else that kept her sane when her mother was down at Dusky.

  ‘Good day?’

  She shrugged. ‘It was all right.’


  ‘I spoke to your mum yesterday.’

  ‘Did you?’

  They walked up the steps and into the office. ‘She saw Quasimodo in the Acheron Passage.’

  Bree stared at him. ‘You mean Quasimodo from Doubtful Sound?’

  He nodded.

  Bree had only ever seen the dolphin on video, but she knew all about him from her conversations with John-Cody. He had become something of a celebrity since he was first identified and named.

  ‘What’s he doing in Dusky?’

  ‘We don’t know. But your mum’s got some theories.’ John-Cody swept his hair from his eyes and smiled. ‘Call her up on the radio.’

  He left Bree to it, made a waggle-handed gesture at Alex and climbed into the cab of his truck.

  Ned Pole’s twin cab was parked out the back of the Motor Inn and John-Cody almost drove on, but he had been having a beer in that pub for most of his life and Pole wasn’t going to stop him.

  Pole’s wife was with him and they were sitting at a table by the window overlooking the lake, a stack of papers between them. Pole saw him come in and his eyes sharpened considerably. John-Cody ignored them and ordered a glass of beer. He sat on one of the high stools and watched the six o’clock news, quietly rolling himself a smoke. Ned Pole moved alongside him, a shadow blocking the light from the window. He placed a half-empty pint on the counter and took the stool opposite. John-Cody saw that his wife was still at their table, though her attention was fixed on the papers. He looked back at Pole.

  ‘Jane going to be around for a while, is she?’

  Pole nodded. John-Cody could smell the beer on his breath.

  ‘All the other submitters have come over to my side, Gib,’ he said quietly. ‘Why don’t you do yourself a favour and just let it go? It’s going to happen sooner or later, whether you object or not.’

  John-Cody sighed heavily. ‘Ned, give me a break, will you? We’ve had this conversation.’