Weeping Waters

by Nicholson, Anne Maria

  Her stomach tightens as she glances ahead. She nears the middle, only 100 metres or so from where the doomed train, with her family on board, had reached the bridge. Beneath her the water flows more swiftly than further downstream. She tries to imagine the terror of that night when the huge wave swept right over the place where she is standing. Further along the track she can see the bend the train had rounded just before the bridge gave way. As the engine and the first carriages went onto the bridge, the massive concrete pylon in the middle collapsed into the floodwaters.

  Dizzying images of the crash start to resound in her head: the enormous hulking steam locomotive smashing into the bank, the carriages washing away, the terrified passengers, her parents panicking and searching…And again, those nightmare images of Valerie’s face trapped beneath the water.

  Feeling nauseous, Frances turns back, needing to get away. She balances on the silver rails, trying to cover the distance faster, to escape the sight of the water below, but her legs are failing her and she keeps slipping off onto the sleepers. Forcing herself to slow down, she walks on towards the end of the bridge. Just as she reaches the end, she slips onto the sharp gravel and cries out in pain as her knee buckles under her. Pulling herself up again, she fights a dizziness that is enveloping her. She thinks she can hear a train coming and uses all her strength to throw herself against the fence. Panting for breath, she lies there listening. The dizziness subsides and she strains to hear. But there is no train, only a soft whistling as a breeze blows though the pines. She climbs back over the fence, now dragging feet that feel like lead weights, and walks slowly back to the memorial.

  The bikers have gone. But an elderly man wearing a tweed jacket and felt hat is standing staring at the memorial. He glances up at the flushed and sweating young woman before him.

  ‘Been for a bit of a walk?’ He looks at her knowingly. ‘You shouldn’t go up there. Could get into all sorts of trouble.’ Frances sees he’s looking at a fresh tear around the knee of her jeans.

  She touches the hole, pushes back escaped damp tendrils of hair and tries to smile reassuringly. ‘Got a bit carried away,’ she says apologetically.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Seattle…well, sort of. I was born in England.’

  ‘This was a bad business. I saw you went for a closer look at the bridge. You’re brave.’ He grins at her, revealing two gold-capped middle teeth. ‘But there are hardly any trains these days so it’s not too much of a risk. Not like the old days. Used to be about thirty a day. They called it economic rationalism when they sold the railways off. Bloody robbery if you ask me.’

  He snorts in contempt then pauses to look more closely at Frances, who is shifting uncomfortably in her thick leather walking shoes and rubbing her knee.

  ‘You wouldn’t pick it now but this little river can be a torrent. It was that night…’

  ‘Did you see it? Did you see the train accident?’ she quickly interrupts him.

  ‘Sure did, well, certainly the aftermath. I nearly got swept away myself. My farm’s just back up around the bridge a bit and all of us heard this roaring sound and saw the river was right up. It was damn peculiar as it hadn’t even been raining. But it’s that volcano up there. You know we call this river Sulphur Creek? It often pongs from the chemicals.’

  Frances sniffs the breeze, detecting the odour.

  ‘Can you remember much about that night?’ She encourages him with her eyes, eager to hear more.

  ‘I’ll never forget it, love. Nothing like that ever happened here before…or since. The train was in the river and there were lots of people hurt and…and bodies…bodies everywhere. My wife was here and all the farmers around, helping pull people out. Bringing blankets and cups of tea and the like. A very bad business.’

  ‘There were so many people on the train. How did you rescue them?’

  ‘We worked in small groups, got out all the ropes and horses from the farms. We went for miles up the river. We found half a carriage six miles downstream. There are steep cliffs along the river further on, very hard to search. Some of us kept going for days…you just had to do it. Had to keep going.’ He pauses. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’ Frances hesitates. ‘Actually my parents were on that train and my baby sister…she drowned.’ She blurts it out, not knowing if she can trust this stranger with information she usually keeps locked away inside herself.

  For a moment the man says nothing, just looks at her. ‘I’m really sorry about that. Nearly everyone around here was affected,’ he says at last. ‘It’s like that in a small place—everyone knows someone who was involved somehow. It changed everything.’

  ‘Do you know others who saw the accident, were there on the night?’

  ‘Quite a few. I even know a woman who was on the train, someone we found on the riverbank. We’ve kept in touch with her but she won’t come anywhere near here for love or money.

  ‘Then there’s Trevor Atley. He was only a lad at the time. Well, I suppose we all were! He was here helping for days. Had a big impact on him. For years after, no one really wanted to talk about it. It was too terrible. But everyone gets together for the odd anniversary now. We make more of everything in the past now, don’t we? Except for Beverley, she’ll never come here.’

  The old man bends down to pull a few weeds that are pushing up through the gaps in the cement surrounding the memorial.

  ‘I like to keep my eye on things, make sure this doesn’t get vandalised. It’s happened before. A lot of bloody idiots around. So what brings you here?’ he asks, brushing away the loose soil.

  ‘I suppose I’d like to know more about what happened. But also I’m a scientist, so I’m interested in what’s going on in the volcano.’

  The man lifts his eyes in surprise and rises awkwardly to his feet, complaining about a sore hip. ‘Well, we need people like you here. Pleased to meet you. I’m Cedric Morton,’ he says, holding out his hand.

  ‘Frances Nelson. Pleased to meet you, Cedric.’ She grips his thick weathered hand and feels fingers distorted by arthritis.

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you around.’ They stroll away from the memorial towards the river where they can see the mountain clearly. ‘There’s a lot of us around here who are worried sick it will happen again. Some of the scientists say this time it will be even bigger but no one seems to be doing anything to stop it. I understand they could do things in the Crater Lake to prevent it. Trouble is the Maori around here are against it and so are a few others—the greenies, some of the government people.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve already heard the arguments. I’m working on a new early warning system so at least people like you will know when to expect an eruption or lahar.’

  Cedric laughs. ‘Well, give us a call and we’ll run like hell! That’s if I can remember how to run with this blessed hip of mine.’

  ‘Hey, give me some credit.’ She laughs with him. ‘It does help to know when to run. It worked in the Philippines. I went there a few years ago with a group of scientists from many countries when we were still experimenting. We knew Mount Pinatubo was threatening to erupt and, unlike here, there were thousands of people living on the surrounding slopes. We installed an early warning system there and believe me, it worked.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re on our case,’ says Cedric. ‘We all worry like mad that we’ll have another Tangiwai disaster.’

  Frances takes a small notebook from her bag. ‘Can I have your number? I’ll let you know how it goes.’ She also writes her own on another page and tears it out to give to him. As she turns to leave she calls back to him, almost as an afterthought, ‘If you find any numbers of others who were there that night or afterwards, could you let me know? I’d really like to talk to them.’

  The Policeman

  It was just after one in the morning on Christmas Day when I got the call. I was on duty at the Wanganui Police Station, the biggest one in the area. I had to drive the three or so hours to Tangiwai, to t
ake charge of the operation. Other police were called out from some of the smaller stations and along with the army were doing their best to put some order into a shocking situation. It was nearly light when I arrived.

  I saw the railway bridge had collapsed. The wreckage of the train was strewn everywhere in the river and on the banks. There was a massive concrete pier from the bridge lying in the middle of the river. The water level had dropped but it was still muddy and there were large quantities of silt and sand all along the river. There were many bodies and bits of bodies, including heads. My job was to prepare a temporary mortuary at the Waiouru Military Camp just a few miles away.

  Over the next three days, 114 bodies were brought in. Of all the bodies, sixty were found more than 10 miles downstream from the accident. Some bodies were swept along the river by the silt and we believe out to sea, a distance of more than 80 miles. Some were never recovered. By far the greatest casualties were in second class where only twenty-eight passengers survived.

  We had to do our best to put the bodies back together with the help of the army, local volunteers and lots of nurses who came from local hospitals to help.

  The Prime Minister arrived early in the afternoon with some of his government ministers. They had come from Auckland where they had gone to welcome the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh. So we were also taken up with helping them inspect the site. By this time, there were also a few journalists and photographers arriving and the Prime Minister was giving interviews and sending messages of condolence.

  Then some of the families started arriving from many parts of New Zealand. My constables, the medical staff and many others had to show them the bodies of their loved ones for identification. In all my years as a policeman, I’ve never experienced anything like this. Many of the bodies were in bad shape and we had to clean them up as best we could before the families could see them. There was one poor fellow who had to identify his brother, his sister-in-law and their three kids—all girls aged three, six and nine. None of us knew what to say really. We felt that bad about it. Most of us had kids ourselves.

  There was a special area where we laid out the children’s bodies. It was a room full of Christmas decorations where the army kids had their Christmas party on the day of the crash. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. At the end of three days there were still forty bodies that were unidentified.

  Quite a number of the victims were from other countries. There was a young Dutch couple from Amsterdam, both of them in their twenties, who had only been in New Zealand for two years. He had been working as an optician in Wellington. There were many young single people from Britain, Australia, Canada and Ireland. Contacting relations overseas was difficult, especially as it was Christmas time and many people could not be located.

  We had to put them into coffins so they could be returned to Wellington for postmortems and identification. We loaded the coffins onto a train, including many where families had already identified their loved ones. They went back down the track the way they came but this time in wagons with white crosses chalked on their sides. We all gathered along the railway platform and bowed our heads as the train left on its journey all the way back to the mortuary in Wellington.

  Senior Sergeant Robert Andrews, 42, policeman at Tangiwai

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It’s the first Sunday of the month so Beverley Corbett is preparing to go to church where she will play the organ. She checks she has her sheet music, her hat, her glasses and a handkerchief in her small white handbag. A neat woman in her seventies, she stopped going every week years ago. Not like when she was growing up, when she would never have missed a single Sunday. But this is another life, another time. And she is another person. In spite of her struggle with her faith, the new Beverley goes to church, just in case.

  For the last dozen or so years, since retiring from her job as a bank clerk, her life has been completely ordered. Not that it wasn’t so during her work years—it’s just that now there’s even less chance of anything unexpected happening. That’s the way Beverley prefers things to be: safe and predictable, with nothing left to chance.

  So on this cool autumn morning, she is unusually agitated, a feeling she hasn’t experienced since, well, since she finally moved away from all the do-gooders who wouldn’t let her be.

  It was the phone call from Cedric that did it. He called her on the Friday and it has been bothering her off and on ever since.

  ‘There’s an American woman who’d like to meet you,’ he told her. ‘She’s a scientist, come over to look at Ruapehu. But her parents were on the train. Wants to know more about the accident. Seems OK. Shall I give her your number?’

  If she didn’t have so much time for Cedric she’d never have agreed. But he sounded keen and was a hard man to refuse. He and Pauline were her last links with that other world of hers that ended that night. They were the first to help her after the men had carried her off the engine and deposited her on the riverbank. They found her there and took her and Betty, the girl who had rescued her, away in blankets. They filled them with hot cups of tea, a glass of rum and Christmas cake, not that she wanted to eat anything. In fact she hasn’t been able to face fruitcake since that day, although for some perverse reason she bakes one every year and donates it, fully decorated, to the church fête.

  They put the two women up in their farmhouse for a couple of nights while the rescue went on. She and Betty shared a lumpy double bed with a sunken wire base and every time one of them twisted or turned, trying to find solace in sleep, they would roll into each other.

  Beverley didn’t like to think too much about that. It made her squirm. She remembered thinking Betty really resented wasting her efforts on her. After all, she was groping around in that horrible darkness for her sister, not her.

  On the Friday morning after Cedric’s phone call, she could not concentrate at all on her weekly game of bridge. Her partner noticed straightaway because it was so out of character and she was secretly pleased when Miss Perfect made two mistakes. Beverley was a star player with a reputation for having a short fuse if a less competent player held things up. So in the tea room when they brought out the sandwiches and biscuits each had prepared that morning, they grinned at each other knowingly as they whispered to each other that she had, for once, been the one to hold things up.

  Beverley’s lack of concentration continued all through Saturday. Her sole companion, the latest in a succession of tabby cats, all called Marmalade, meowed incessantly and it wasn’t until eight that night that Beverley realised she had forgotten, for the first time, to feed her.

  Dressed in her lavender best, her hair immaculately combed, shoulders back, hymn music tucked under her arm, Beverley slowly but determinedly begins the short walk to church for the nine o’clock service.

  She could find it with her eyes closed, she’s come this way so often. As she passes worn white wooden fences holding back unruly gardens, she rubs a small shiny scar on the palm of her left hand with her thumb. The burn from the engine that never completely healed is her only tangible link with crash. She touches it automatically whenever she thinks about David. They never did find him or the girl’s sister. But Cedric kept looking for days after the others stopped. Then, when they were given up for dead, he drove her back to her hometown and they had kept in touch ever since.

  Beverley stops to admire a large white cat that is sleeping in the sun. It starts when it hears her hand scrape the fence and meows loudly. But it doesn’t budge and they stare at each other. Beverley loves cats—so self-detached, so independent. That’s how she decided to become. She remembers how neither she nor her rescuer wanted to see each other again. Too much pain. Too many ghosts from that night together.

  For years afterwards she resisted efforts by her family and friends to bring her back into the old life.

  ‘What would they know?’ she whispers at the cat. It blinks. ‘They weren’t there, at the river. They didn’t know how such a thing changes you forever. They
didn’t see the bodies. My four best friends. We were just beginning to taste our freedom.’

  The cat yawns, closes its eyes and resumes its nap.

  Beverley walks on. She can see them laughing together on the train, so excited to be travelling together for the first time, partying, on their way to a camping holiday for young Christians.

  She rubs the scar again. She can see his face so clearly. They had been going out together for more than a year and had talked about getting married.

  Beverley can still faintly recall the desire that spread through her body after they kissed more deeply than ever before on the train. How he slipped his hand beneath her bra to stroke her breast and how she yearned for more. It was a sensation she hasn’t felt with anybody else since that night.

  She searched for him for two days, meeting the rescuers near the river, looking into their eyes, glancing at the contorted shapes they were depositing behind a makeshift canvas morgue on the bank. Then she was led away, told to wait at the army camp with the others for a more formal, clinical process. She saw them sifting through pathetic piles of possessions, waterlogged suitcases and a few watches forever telling the time at 10.22 p.m., the moment when the water came.

  She was there when grieving friends and relatives started trickling into the army camp on Christmas Day to try to identify their loved ones. David was missing and after a while, missing, presumed dead. She stayed on, hoping, praying, disbelieving. For her, he would always be just missing. She would always be waiting. Secretly, at times, she wished that girl hadn’t pulled her out by her hair. She had cut it all off the next week. Always kept it short after that.

  It became so bad at home that Beverley decided one day she had to move away, just to be on her own. She was tired of blind dates set up by well-meaning friends, visits by the local minister, constant offers of outings by the family. And she had to see David’s family too: in a small town she was always bumping into his parents or sister or brother. It got so difficult that they began crossing the road to avoid each other.