Song of the Sound

by Jeff Gulvin

  Anyway they’re still bullying me and school is awful except for Hunter. It’s the worst I’ve had, Dad, the very worst. I can’t tell Mum because there’s nothing she could do about it and she’d only worry. Mr Pole was cool though, you should have seen Jessica’s face when he told her he was going to see her father. Cool. Really cool.

  It’s been a bad day, but maybe things will get better now. Mr Pole told me he’s going to make sure those girls leave me alone and I really want him to teach me to ride. I’m going to ask Mum. She won’t be happy, but I’m going to ask her anyway. It’d be great to show Hunter how I can ride properly because he’s so good. I hope John-Cody doesn’t mind, though, he and Mr Pole don’t like each other. John-Cody’s so cool to me, Dad. I really love him. I hope he doesn’t mind. He won’t, will he?

  Anyway, I’m tired. Mum and John-Cody are away and I want to go to bed.

  Love you, I’ll write again soon.

  Bree

  Libby laid the letter down, her heart thumping. She looked at the fire and then at John-Cody; she passed him the letter. He read it in silence and the two of them looked at each other, neither of them speaking.

  ‘I had no idea,’ Libby whispered in the end. ‘My own daughter being bullied and I had no idea.’

  ‘She’s not the sort of girl to say anything, Lib.’

  ‘Ned Pole of all people.’ Libby shook her head. ‘Nehemiah Pole. Good God, no wonder she wanted him to teach her to ride.’ She lifted her hands, palm upwards. ‘John-Cody, I know nothing about my own daughter.’

  ‘Yes, you do. But you’re a parent, Libby. Bree’s nearly a teenager. Did you tell your parents everything when you were a teenager?’

  Libby didn’t answer him. She stared at the fire. John-Cody slipped into silence and looked at the letter again. Bree had worried that he might be jealous. He had been jealous, taking her over to Pole’s house, leaving her there and seeing the delight in her eyes when she came back. He and Pole were both childless, him never having had the opportunity and Pole having lost his only son on the Korimako.

  Libby was watching him. ‘Ned Pole knew my daughter was being bullied when neither you nor I did.’

  ‘Well, much as I hate to say it, thank God somebody did.’

  They sat and smoked and drank whisky in silence and then Libby picked up the other envelopes and thumbed through them.

  ‘Whatever it says in there, she’s happier now.’ John-Cody indicated the letters with his glass. ‘That probably means the bullying is over. Ironically Pole is to thank for it.’ His mouth twisted at the corners. ‘Bree seems happy enough to me, Libby. She loves this house, the lake, Sierra. Hunter Caldwell’s got a lot to do with it.’

  ‘So have you. She confides in you, John-Cody.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I’ve seen it. I’ve seen her around you. You’re so gentle with her. She looks up to you, her quiet man of the sea. She’s never had a male role model before. Pole might be teaching her to ride, but she looks up to you.’ A thought struck her then and Libby sifted the pile of letters once more, inspecting the postmark on the outside of the envelopes. Apart from the Easter letter the last one had been posted at the end of January.

  ‘What happened in January?’ John-Cody said when she showed him.

  Libby sipped whisky. ‘I don’t know. But it’s about the time she started hanging out with you.’

  Again silence, both of them considering the implications of what she was saying. John-Cody thought of his own letter from immigration and the little time remaining. He felt his breathing grow shallow and his face must have betrayed something because Libby suddenly frowned at him.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. Frog in my throat, that’s all.’ He coughed and reached for his glass.

  ‘Thank you,’ Libby said when he set it down again. ‘I mean, really thank you. You’ve had so much loss and yet you’ve been wonderful to us.’ She looked round the room. ‘You even gave up your home.’ She paused. ‘What’s it like having us here?’

  ‘It’s good.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘And Mahina, would she have been pleased?’

  ‘She’d be delighted. No doubt she is delighted.’

  Libby watched him for a while. ‘You’re lucky, you know,’ she said.

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  ‘To have had somebody you loved so much for so long.’

  ‘That’s what Alex told me.’

  ‘She’s right. It’s rare.’ Libby put out her cigarette. ‘Mahina was lucky. Very few women get loved like that in their lives.’

  ‘Not you?’

  She laughed a little bitterly. ‘No chance. When have I had time to stop and think about love? I’ve hardly even thought about my daughter.’

  She leafed through the letters on her lap. ‘I don’t know what I can do about these, except listen to Bree properly in future. I mean listen to the noises her heart makes. Hear her better. Take the time. Not get so caught up in myself.’

  ‘That ought to work.’ He stood up.

  ‘You’re not going, are you?’

  He hesitated for a moment, awkward all at once in her presence. Then he sat down and she reached for more logs. The lights were dim and the flames cast shadows that danced on the panelled wood of the walls.

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’ John-Cody pointed to the letters she had laid on the floor.

  ‘I’ll keep them and read them one by one, on the boat maybe as we head south.’ Libby picked up the ones she had opened. ‘I need to. I need to learn how she’s really feeling.’

  ‘Could you get in touch with her father?’

  Libby arched her brows. ‘After twelve years? I don’t even know his name.’

  ‘What about other people at the party?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was only the friend of a friend. I haven’t seen the friend I went with since that night.’ She shook her head at herself. ‘Listen to me, what a great advert for motherhood. I was so drunk or stoned or both I dropped my knickers and didn’t even ask his name.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’ John-Cody said it with authority, not sympathy. ‘Everyone can make a mistake. Do something they regret later.’ He stared at her now. ‘We do what we do. That’s it. That’s all there is. What we think at the time. You had a child and you got your qualifications and now look at you, possibly the greatest expert on whale communication in the world. Don’t punish yourself. Guilt achieves nothing. It’s a perfectly useless emotion.’

  ‘You sound like you know what you’re talking about.’

  He looked at her then, darkness in his eyes. ‘Believe me, I do.’

  SIXTEEN

  JOHN-CODY DROVE TO Naseby in central Otago. He was in no hurry, Kobi wasn’t going anywhere: he spent most of his life in the room he had built in the general store and Jonah would be sleeping on a mat on the concrete floor. John-Cody would get as far as Alexandra or Omakau that evening and head out again in the morning. He drove to Mossburn and took the road for Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu. Libby was on his mind; he saw again the pain in her eyes, the guilt over Bree. She had sat there the other night thinking what a failure she was at motherhood whereas he could see only the success she had achieved in bringing up her daughter single-handed. There had been no compromises and perhaps in some ways Bree might have suffered from that: but in other ways she had benefited like few children before her. At twelve she had seen so much of the world, learned so much and was fluent in three languages. Many adults he knew would have killed for a childhood like that.

  He drove with the letters from immigration in his pocket but quite why he needed to keep them that close to him he didn’t know. He skirted Queenstown and crossed the river at Cromwell. The water at the Clyde dam was low and he was reminded just how close it had been to bursting back in November.

  Now he was closing in on old haunts: he and Mahina had spent quite a bit of time up here in the
early days of their relationship. Mahina was always looking out for her father and they would drive up from Manapouri half a dozen times a year. Central Otago was baking in the summer and freezing in the winter. It was high and the climate reminded him of Idaho where the snow could easily reach ten feet in February and the temperature into the hundreds in July.

  He stayed that night in Omakau, had a couple of beers with an elderly English deer hunter he met in the bar and discussed old times in Fiordland. In the morning he left early and took a detour to St Bathans, where the cavalcade passed in summer. He pulled over by the blue lake and lit a cigarette. The morning was crisp and clear, a chill to the air but dry like the heat of summer. John-Cody leaned against the door of his truck and licked the paper on the cigarette he had made. The lake was still, glacial blue with twin wooden jetties on the northern shore. It beached at one end and in summer people flocked here from the neighbouring towns to swim and fish and picnic. He stared at the lake now: white-faced cliffs of sandstone sloped in varying degrees of gradient to lip the water, jagged in places and smooth in others, crowding the lake like a group of thirsty old men. He half-closed his eyes and recalled Mahina’s smile, the laughter in her eyes as the two of them swam in the icy water, duck-diving and holding their breath for as long as they could before breaking the surface again. When nobody else was around they would swim naked, running to dive from the jetties then lying back on the volcanic sand to dry in the heat of the sun. English willow trees dominated the shoreline and when it got too hot they would take shelter under the many-fronded branches.

  An Australian harrier called, breaking into his thoughts, and he shielded his eyes and saw it high above him, no more than a black dot in the sky. It glided on ruffled wings then turned and banked and turned again to settle among the willow branches. John-Cody clipped his cigarette and took out the three crumpled letters, which he read again, just to remind himself it was real. It was: the words were still there, still the same black letters typed on the white pages. His time here was over. Everything was finished and all he had now were the memories.

  Back in the truck he drove the short distance to Naseby and found Kobi in the back yard of the store cutting wood. John-Cody pulled up and the old man laid down the hand axe and looked at him through the windscreen. The house was the general store, basically no more than a warehouse. The only way in was through the sliding door at the back, which led to a concrete floor where Kobi’s unused car was kept; a separate door led to the single room he had built, roof and all, inside the warehouse itself. There was a bath but no hot water and Kobi washed in cold as he had done since his days at the mine beyond Danseys Pass. John-Cody got out of the truck and smiled at him. Kobi looked back and nodded slowly, a little moisture in the rheumy blue of his eyes.

  ‘G’day, Kobi.’

  ‘G’day, son.’

  ‘How you going?’

  ‘Good, thanks.’ They shook hands and then John-Cody pulled the old fellow close and embraced him. He felt thin and small and frail and John-Cody was careful not to squeeze him too hard for fear of crushing the life in him. He held him at arm’s length and looked in his eyes and saw the same familiar expression: Kobi often told him he had lived long enough to bury a wife and a daughter, too long in any man’s language.

  ‘Where’s Jonah?’

  ‘Gone to the dairy for lollies.’

  John-Cody smiled. ‘You want to brew me some coffee, old man?’ He slipped his arm round Kobi’s shoulders and led him towards the store. John-Cody carried in the wood and stoked up the pot-bellied stove whose cast-iron chimney reached to the homemade ceiling and up through the roof of the warehouse.

  Kobi folded his arms and looked at him as they sat at the table. He was eighty-five and his neck hung in folds from his jaw; thread veins criss-crossed his cheeks and the end of his nose. His knuckles were stiff and enlarged with arthritis, fingernails long and yellow like the claws of an animal. His eyes were permanently moist, the pupil mixing with the white to form a filmy layer.

  ‘So you’re going to the Subs again,’ he said quietly.

  John-Cody nodded. He told him about Libby’s passion for whales and the possibility of dolphins in Port Ross.

  Kobi looked at him. ‘There’s no dolphins that far south.’

  ‘Not resident, no. But that’s not the point, Kobi. Libby wants to see the southern rights.’

  Kobi nodded. ‘She’s not proved anything in Dusky then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will she?’

  ‘Probably not in time.’

  Kobi was still. ‘So you’re going to the Subs. Jonah’s going to crew for you?’

  ‘Him and Tom Blanch.’

  ‘Old Tom, eh? Sounds like a busy trip.’

  ‘I need Tom, Kobi. If anything happened to me I’d need another ocean-going skipper.’

  Kobi squinted at him then. ‘And what’s going to happen to you?’

  ‘Nothing I can’t handle.’

  Kobi nodded slowly and scraped a roughened palm over his jaw. ‘Are you over her yet?’

  The question stung and John-Cody sat for a moment not answering. Kobi looked keenly at him. ‘Well, are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think about her all the time.’

  ‘So do I, but are you over her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were.’ Kobi let go a stiff breath. ‘You need to get over her, Gib. She’d be pissed off if she thought you weren’t.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She had her mother’s temper.’ Kobi smiled with the fondness of memory. ‘Waitaha. A people of peace, that’s what they always told me, but boy what a temper.’ He looked round then. ‘You hear much from the joker Pole?’

  ‘Now and again.’

  ‘Hotels in Dusky Sound?’ Kobi frowned heavily. ‘Mahina would turn in her grave if she thought it would come to that.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything anyone can do?’

  John-Cody sighed. ‘We can only wait for the hearing.’ He got up. ‘I’m going to take a walk, Kobi, see if I can find Jonah.’

  ‘Try the pub.’ Kobi looked keenly at him.

  John-Cody nodded, turned for the door and turned back again. ‘Kobi, did Mahina ever say anything to you about Pole?’

  Kobi looked at him out of the corner of his eye. ‘Say anything? No, she didn’t. Why?’

  ‘No reason.’ John Cody shook his head.

  The problem of who would look after Bree while Libby was in the Sub-Antarctic was solved by Bree herself: two days before John-Cody and Jonah sailed for Bluff Cove on the first leg of the journey, Bree came home and announced that Hunter’s parents had offered to have her for the three weeks or so they were likely to be gone. Libby phoned to confirm it with the Caldwells and they told her they would be delighted to have both Bree and Sierra. Libby put the phone down and looked at her daughter, who sat on a kitchen stool with the biggest smile on her face.

  ‘See,’ she said, ‘I told you. They’re cool about it. Hunter’s parents are cool about most things.’

  Libby nodded. ‘So he’s the one, is he? He’s definitely your boyfriend.’

  Bree cocked her head to one side. ‘We’re still just friends at the moment. I mean I haven’t kissed him or anything. We hold hands all the time, though.’

  ‘I know. I’ve seen you,’ Libby sat down on the stool alongside her. ‘You’re sure you don’t mind me going? I could stay. I mean I don’t have to go. It was John-Cody’s idea actually.’

  ‘I know. He told me.’ Bree took her mother’s hand and squeezed it. ‘Everything’s cool, Mum. Everything’s just fine. You go and find some whales or dolphins or whatever. I’ll stay here and Hunter can coach me for the rugby season.’

  Libby looked at her. ‘You are joking.’

  ‘No. I need coaching. I don’t want loud-mouth Lowden on my case again.’ She broke off. ‘You don’t know her, but take it from me I don’t want her on my case.’

  ‘Agai
n? She was on your case before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she’s off it now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Completely?’

  ‘Totally. Ever since I got off the bus with Hunter.’

  ‘Hunter?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Bree’s eyes shone. ‘It was so cool, Mum. Jessica had been giving me a hard time, then one day Hunter just took my hand and held it all the way into class. She’s left me alone ever since. Cool, isn’t it?’

  Libby hugged her. ‘You bet it’s cool. Tell me though next time, huh, if someone gets on your case. I’m your mum, remember.’

  ‘OK.’ Bree shrugged.

  ‘I’m going to miss you,’ Libby said.

  Bree took an apple from the basket. ‘Don’t worry. It won’t be any different to when you’re in Dusky Sound. I can still talk to you on the radio.’

  ‘The single-side-band, not the VHF.’

  ‘Alex’ll show me.’

  Libby nodded. ‘What’re you going to do — get off the bus at the office and then get a lift to Hunter’s?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. They don’t have a radio at the sheep station. I’ll have to talk to Alex. Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out, Mum.’

  Libby laughed. ‘I’ll just wait for you to call then, shall I?’

  John-Cody came in and dropped his bag on the floor. Jonah was already at Pearl Harbour, where a boat was waiting to take them across the lake. Bree told John-Cody about the offer from the Caldwells.

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘You should be just fine then.’ He smiled, but there was a broken look in his eyes and Bree frowned: she went over to him, slipped her arms about his waist and hugged him.

  ‘Look after my mum.’

  ‘I will. Don’t worry, we’ve got Jonah along and Tom. She’s in very good hands.’

  ‘No.’ Bree held him at arm’s length and looked into his eyes. ‘I mean you look after her. I trust you, John-Cody.’