by Ted Dawe
‘Try it now, Macko.’
The old guy took a step back, eyes darting around the room and then, with a turbo-boost of adrenalin, scrambled onto the bed, over Gigi, and into the safety of the bathroom. There was the clatter of a door being rapidly locked.
Sonny giggled. ‘Never thought he could move so fast.’ He had Macko’s leather jacket and was going through the pockets. From outside, they heard another round of sirens, but they were further off this time. Somewhere across town.
Gigi was wriggling into her tight dress.
‘Score!’ It was Sonny, holding up Macko’s wallet. ‘Let’s hit it.’
‘Give a girl time to get her shit together,’ said Gigi, as she scrambled about stuffing her bits and pieces into her handbag and picking up her spike heels.
Jazz opened the door and peeped outside. It was all clear. No-one seemed to have heard a thing. Then again, he couldn’t hear any noise from the other rooms either. Gigi came up behind him and put her chin on his shoulder. Jazz could smell her sour breath.
‘Seems we aren’t wanted here any more. Was it something I said, darling? Maybe it’s because I’m from … the wrong part of town.’
‘Let’s go.’ It was Sonny, sounding urgent. They poured out into the hallway and began to walk towards the fire exit. Up ahead of them a door opened and a man in a white bathrobe put a tray out. He saw them coming and rapidly closed the door.
‘I guess that’s our cue,’ said Gigi. ‘Run like the wind, my brothers. There’s evil about.’
They were still running when they reached the fire doors, but Sonny – who started at the back – burst past them and went through first. None of them talked as they wound their way down successive flights of stairs: each focused on keeping their footing. Sonny came to a halt outside the ground floor door and waited for the others to catch up.
‘Which way from here, Jazz?’
It looked the same in both directions, but they had to go somewhere, and fast. ‘That way I think.’
They barged down the long corridor towards the double swing doors at the end. Jazz heard someone yell, ‘Hey!’ behind him but didn’t stop to look. They burst through the doors without a care about what lay through them. They made the laundry at last: just one more set of doors to freedom. Sonny pushed but nothing moved. It was locked. They turned just as the security guard flung the laundry doors open. He was a Fijian, tall and athletic. There was no way they could get away from him.
He smiled, like it was just a game. ‘You guys are coming with me now,’ he said, moving towards them. Then he froze. Something changed; there was an uncertainty.
‘Ya want me? Here I am.’ It was Sonny, his voice low and threatening. He held the butterfly knife in his hand.
The guard reached for his walkie talkie. He wasn’t paid enough to take on some whacked-out street kid with a knife.
Jazz saw a small red button on the wall. He pushed it. The door was freed. ‘We’re out,’ he said.
Gigi hauled on Sonny, who had other ideas now. She managed to get him to slowly reverse out the door.
‘Run!’ said Jazz.
‘Neh!’ said Sonny. He spat it out. ‘He won’t come out that door. He knows I’m here.’
And he was right. No one followed them as they made their leisurely way out of the car park.
There was a little convenience shop run by a Korean on the corner. Sonny and Gigi claimed they had a bad case of the munchies and went in to score some chocolate and Coke. Sonny showed the other two the wallet. It had pictures of a middle-aged woman and two boys in school uniform blazers.
‘The bitch!’ said Gigi, ‘He’s been two-timing me.’
‘Just over a hunred here,’ said Sonny, picking through the notes. ‘That’s fair. It would be good to use the credit card, it’ll be dead by tomorrow, but I don’t reckon this Jap would take Visa for a couple of chocolates and a Coke…’
He said something else but it was drowned out by a fire engine tearing past. When they stepped out into K. Road once more it was bathed in the thick red glow of some false dawn. As Jazz and the other two moved towards the light with growing urgency, in his heart, Jazz knew that everything had changed.
Was it weeks? Was it months? Jazz never knew.
After Roxy went he became the thing he hated. He peeped at the world through a mean little crack. It was a crack that let him see just enough to get what he wanted. A crack that shielded him from all that had happened.
There were many things to get you off, and it wasn’t long before he’d tried them all. When the money for P ran out there was glue. Ados and Joytoy were best, but anything would do. There was lighter fluid. Shorty’s ready mix. The box of White Out correction pens stolen by Wings from an office. Petrol sucked out of parked cars parked in the blank-faced buildings behind K. Road. Anything.
One day these school kids shared a big cylinder of nitrous from the hospital over the bridge. It was almost fun: so wrong for these days. He wanted something to get deep into his brain and kill it. To kill the memories. The thoughts. To block the pictures. To shut out Roxy. Her pale face glowing in the dark tower. The savage heat. The silent screams.
He had become a sad sight on the street, with his scraggy beard and wild hair. The burnt smell of the clothes he still wore from that night. But he had no time for anyone. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t hang out. Refused to be anything but what he was. One of the zombies, the walking dead, the ones that slip through the crowds like ghosts, talking softly to themselves. Asking and re-asking and asking again the same questions. The same questions. The questions that have no answers. What is the meaning of fire? Where was the wrong turning made? Where have they all gone? What can I do?
This much he knew. She had gone. She had burned in that tower. Weak and alone. She had carried his child. She carried his future. The best part of him had died there. If only the rest of him had too.
Sonny and Gigi were still around. Sonny tracked him down. Gave him stuff. Stopped the others from getting at him. But Gigi was different. She wouldn’t look at him now. Couldn’t. Stayed with her own.
The day after the fire, Sonny came to him, his face an angry mask. ‘He’ll die for this. He’ll die looking me in the eye. Nothing will stop me.’ It was a point of honour. But Jazz had no interest. It was all over. All gone.
Finally, the only thing he had left was his guitar. Diablo. That, and his gift. The thing that happened when he held it in his hands. The case was long gone and when they lay in parks, under bridges, behind stacks of boxes, they talked like lovers. He spoke to Diablo with his fingers, and Diablo sang to him, drawing out the new day’s pain.
As time passed, he found he could go longer without the daily need for numbness. The hungry, black hole he climbed into. Now he needed to feed on the pain of recollection. He needed to expose himself to the full force of what had happened. To live with the guilt and loss tearing his body like some roaming piece of shrapnel looking for an organ to nestle into.
His gift sustained him. It was like the immortal part of him. The part that couldn’t die. He played because he could. Because it fed him. Because it demanded to be known.
His favourite place was the stairwell of the car park building where he used to sniff petrol. Few people went there and the sound echoed back at him from the concrete walls. Made him feel slightly less alone.
It was into this place that two faces appeared. Two faces he couldn’t place, but faces he knew he could trust.
‘Hey! Brother! What’s happened? What’s happened to you?’
The question was too big. He couldn’t answer it. He just looked at them and played. Too far away to talk back.
They beckoned to him. ‘Come with us.’
He stood up stiffly, and followed them across the car park.
The car seemed familiar. It was full of supermarket bags and on the top were two surfboards. Then he remembered. It was before he came to the Road. When he and Roxy were first together. And it was a happy place. The one without pain. F
or the first time since the fire he had found the place without pain.
‘It’s Flash, right? And you’re Rabbit. You’re the surfers.’
‘Hey, man. Where’s your lady? You two were tight.’ Rabbit frowned at him.
It was the first time someone had asked this question. He took the full measure of it. Let it roll through him like an alien chemical.
‘She…’ he began unsurely. ‘She died. In a fire. She carried my baby.’
It was as if he had placed something on a table, for everyone to examine. Something as strange and shocking as a beating human heart.
After a while, Flash spoke. ‘You look like you’ve been through some tough times. This street, it’s like a black hole for all the bad trips. They get stuck here. Come with us, man. I reckon you need to get away. You need to be in touch with the ocean. We’re going to the top tip of the island. We’re going where the seas meet. Then we’re going to work our way back. All the East Coast beaches …’
It was late afternoon when the Holden finally made the car park above the lighthouse. The engine had that smell that came when oil leaked onto the manifold. But there it was. The small bay. The ancient pohutukawa anchoring the headland. The scribble of foam where the Tasman meets the limitless Pacific. The soft line that divides the green from the blue-green. That points the way to weary spirits journeying back to Hawai-iki.
They climbed out stiffly and stood looking to the north. Before them stretched the rest of the planet.
Rabbit began to tog up; he was in a hurry to catch the last of the light. But Flash and Jazz stood still, lost in their thoughts, unable to take their eyes off the line of white foam. Jazz got his guitar from the back of the car and headed down the grassy slope. About 50 metres above the water were terraces: the grass-covered folds of a pa site, long gone. They both sat and watched Rabbit threading his way down to the water, drawn by a call that needed no voice. He vanished for a time, where the short grass turned into a forest of toetoe, then re-appeared on the soft dry sand. Once at the sea’s edge he crouched for a moment, scooping up water to rub over his face and hair … a sort of blessing … and then he slowly walked out into the waves.
The perimeter of the car park was picked out with boulders that had been painted white to mark its edge. A simple sightline, to save the cars from a lemming-like plunge. The two of them sat on the grass and looked out over the bay below. Jazz picked at his guitar as they watched Rabbit work his way through the broken waves, each bigger than the last.
‘This hill looks like green ski slopes,’ said Flash.
‘Old pa site, I reckon. Usually means there’s food around here somewhere.’ Jazz picked away at the high notes at the base of the fret board.
Flash went off then came grunting back with a glowing white boulder. Jazz picked up his heavy breathing well before he reappeared over the lip of the hill. He stared at him, wondered for a moment what he was planning to do.
‘Watch this,’ Flash said as he released the boulder down the slope. It began slowly at first, as if unwilling to release itself and then it gathered pace so that it launched into the air at the first terrace. At the second terrace it was ten metres clear on the bank and only touched once before bounding off the third, and disappearing into oblivion. So ferocious was it, in its power and speed.
He was gone for a while and then returned with another. This one was smaller, and not as round. Its progress was even more reluctant at first before it too found its pace and became something more than a parking place marker. It became a missile, a small meteor, a fleet engine of gravity, before it too found the bottom with a few dull clunks. There must have been six more rocks bounding and leaping down the slope before Flash finally tired of it and settled once more next to Jazz.
The sun dipped lower and the light, now subdued, changed the bay into a painting of a bay. The lighter and darker greens had a sombre depth, as if they were keyed into some deeper emotion which they all shared. Rabbit, making his way to the back of the sets, was part of this. Jazz sent out his notes on the evening breeze: part melody, part incantation.
‘You know what, Flash? Those rocks is us, eh?’
‘What? You and me?’
‘And Rabbit. And Roxy. Everybody, man. We’re all racing down that grassy slope. Some of us take longer. Some bounce higher, maybe get a bit off course … but in the end we all finish up at the same place.’
‘Nah, we’ve got choices, man … the rocks have just got gravity and the things they bump into.’
Jazz turned to him with a grin. It was an old, old grin. ‘Ya reckon?’
He stood up again and picked his way down the slope, holding the flamenco guitar out every now and then to regain his balance. Flash saw him vanish from view as he made for the rocky headland overlooking the point. Out in the other direction he could see the shadow Rabbit cast on the water, as the low sun lit up his whole body at the crest of a wave. As he watched he became aware of the sounds. At first, it was so soft: as though the wind itself was stroking the steel strings. Then it swelled and grew stronger, rolling out over the bay. It mixed with the breeze that ruffled the grass and the soft rumble of the waves, holding it all together. Making a oneness, indivisible.
Flash felt more than happy, he felt complete.
After a while Flash was aware that the music had stopped and Rabbit was now surfing in shadow because the sun had dropped below the line of the horizon. He got up stiffly and stretched the cramped muscles in the backs of his legs. Then he wandered down the slope to where he guessed Jazz was headed. He reached a point where he could see both sides of New Zealand at once, just by turning his head. The Pacific, and the Tasman too. The line of foam stretching north seemed to glow in the water as the gloom deepened. The pathway to Hawai-iki, he thought. A highway for the pulsing spirits. He slowly rotated, straining to see Jazz in every direction, but there was nothing. He was gone. Before him lay the broad ocean and behind was just the breeze-tugged toetoe, framed by the first stars in an empty blue sky.
About the Author
Ted Dawe grew up in a series of small towns around New Zealand: Mangakino, Ruatoria, Tokoroa, Otaki, Darfield, New Plymouth and Invercargill.
On leaving school he worked on building sites and engineering works. Eventually, after a stint on the Kapuni Gas Pipeline, he opted for a softer life with an insurance company. After a few years of stapling and filing he rediscovered his love of learning and became a student of English literature at the University of Auckland.
As a consequence of accepting a Studentship (a teacher’s scholarship) Dawe’s progress to Christchurch Teachers’ College and the world of the classroom became inevitable. Now, after more than 20 years teaching in Auckland, London and Sydney he teaches at a Foundation College on Karangahape Road, Auckland. He lives in Mt Eden with his wife Jane, and son Oliver. Ted’s favourite activity, when he’s not tapping away at the word processor, is overseas travel.
K. Road is his second novel. His first, Thunder Road, won two awards in the 2004 New Zealand Post Book Awards: Best Senior Fiction and Best First Book.
Also by Ted Dawe
Thunder Road 2003
Copyright
K. Road is a work of fiction.
All the characters and incidents are figments of the author’s imagination.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the written permission of Longacre Press and the author.
Ted Dawe asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
© Ted Dawe
ISBN 978 1 775530 82 4
An URBAN book
first published by Longacre Press, 2005
30 Moray Place, Dunedin, New Zealand
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the National Library of New Zealand.
Cover and book design: Christine Buess with Airplane Stu
dios Ltd,
Wellington, New Zealand
Cover photograph: Katharina Nobbs
Printed by Astra Print, Wellington, New Zealand