The Waves Burn Bright

by Iain Maloney

  Sunday. He wrote. They went for a walk. Another bottle. Just the one. Monday she went to work, came round after with a bottle. He’d made a noodle salad. She brought a bottle.

  He filled pages. Went back, started again, said it better, clearer. They worked through the recipe book. Walked further as his hip strengthened. Each day another bottle. Just the one.

  She read what he wrote. He wanted her to. Needed her to.

  ‘I won’t be over tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I have to go to Edinburgh.’

  ‘But I was going to try the peanut sauce.’

  ‘The day after. It’s only for one night.’

  ‘Business?’

  ‘Of course. You’ll be okay?’

  ‘It’s just one night.’

  I was in the cinema, he wrote, when the first explosion came.

  He stirred the sauce, unseeing. It was all down on paper, the galley, the heat of it. The water, the chill of it. He was going to die, there on the rig. He’d never see Carrie again. He’d survived but had lost Carrie anyway.

  Isobel found him the next morning on the kitchen floor. Three empty bottles of wine. A bottle of whisky. All of his painkillers. The stink in the flat. He’d be fine, the paramedics said on the way to the hospital, must have thrown it all up. She took a taxi back to his flat, cleaned. Opened his notebook and read.

  University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, December 2000

  You could pretend a letter hadn’t arrived. Growing up in the UK, ‘lost in the post’ was rarely metaphorical. Email had no direct equivalent. Lost in the ether? Took a wrong turn on the information superhighway? All technology did was make it more difficult to avoid people. Avoiding people was what I did best.

  In the past, when people fell out of favour with the royal court, with the Tudors or the Plantagenets or whoever, they took themselves off to their country estates and it was considered exile. I took myself to the other side of the planet. Literally, or near as dammit. The other side of the world from Dunedin would be off the north coast of Spain if you drilled right through. I escaped, exiled myself to the South Seas and then this happened. In amongst unread emails from Hannah and requests for papers, to attend conferences, I found this:

  To: Dr Caroline Fraser

  From: Graeme Anderson

  Subject: New Zealand

  Hi Carrie, (this is you, isn’t it?)

  Long time, no see. I heard you were in New Zealand and I got your email address from the website. I hope you don’t mind. I’m going to be in New Zealand for a bit and I thought it would be nice to catch up.

  Cheers,

  Graeme.

  Closing down the computer, I packed my desk into my khaki canvas bag, all my marking, papers I had to read, that book to review, all homework for the holidays. My nail caught on a loop of stitching, ripping the edge of the nail and drawing out more of the thread. Shit on both counts. I rummaged in my desk for the nail clippers but couldn’t find them. In the stationery drawer I found a huge pair of paper scissors and snipped the offending snag. The nail now curled in like a bite had been taken from it. That was going to hurt like hell when I went climbing later. Pulling on my jacket, I slung the backpack over my shoulder.

  In the corridor, Jeannie Parker, palaeontologist and fellow immigrant, though only from Perth, the far side of Australia, was saying goodbye to Paul Harding, a senior lecturer in geology. Paul and I got on professionally but didn’t socialise much outside the building. He liked bars and loud music, had little time for outdoors and exercise.

  ‘Paul’s off to India,’ said Jeannie.

  ‘The Deccan Traps?’ Paul and I did have one thing in common – a love of those half-million square kilometre basalt steps in Western India, the result of a series of eruptions that many think played a part in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

  ‘Yes, I’m taking the kids for the first time.’

  ‘Enjoy it,’ I said, locking my door. ‘An Indian Christmas.’

  ‘Turkey curry,’ said Jeannie. ‘Have a good trip.’

  ‘You too.’ He disappeared down the stairwell, heavy steps echoing.

  ‘Finally done? I thought you’d still be here on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Not done, Jeannie, just leaving.’

  ‘It never gets done, does it?’

  ‘When’s your flight?’ I asked on the stairs.

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon. A few of us are going out for a drink later. Can I tempt you?’

  ‘Looking for a designated driver?’

  ‘Looking for your company.’ Was there a hint of something there? ‘It’s just a quiet thing. That new Thai place on George Street. The Albar after. It won’t be a late one. At least, it doesn’t have to be.’

  ‘Thanks, Jeannie, but I’ve got plans.’

  ‘Actual plans or staying in with a book and a bath plans?’

  ‘An old friend is in town.’ Not strictly a lie.

  ‘Bring her. Him? Or are these plan plans?’

  ‘Nothing like that, just—’

  ‘You’re blushing.’ Jeannie held the door open and as I passed I could smell the soap from the gym.

  We sheltered under the roof of the bike garage and prepared for the weather. Two years and I still couldn’t get my head around the climate. It was December so it should have been cold. But we were in the southern hemisphere so it should have been hot. But we were on the south island, next stop Antarctica, so it should have been proper snowy December cold. But actually it was just pissing with rain. You’d never have guessed the place was founded by Scots.

  ‘Well, if you change your mind, you know where we’ll be. If not, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, all that crap.’

  ‘You too. Enjoy the sun.’ We connected an awkward hug, all arms and bags and jackets. I gave her a last wave, mounted the bike and rolled out into the rain. I dropped a couple of gears, stood on the peddles and rode as hard as I could down Leith Street, onto Union Street East and then Clyde Street, following the roads through the city, taking a winding route to avoid the traffic then along Portsmouth Drive, skirting the harbour, onto Portobello Road and into Waverley, where I lived.

  The house was dark and quiet. I shared with Mike, who was doing his PhD in physiotherapy. He was from Christchurch and had gone home for the festive period. The house was a wooden villa with a tin roof, a deck and garden out the back where we could enjoy the sun. Mike’s father was a property developer and owned it, so the rent was reasonable. Everything creaked and groaned in the wind that blustered from the harbour. Peeling off my soaking clothes and throwing them straight into the machine, I flicked the kettle on then had a shower. As easy to live with as Mike was – he was either studying, running or playing rugby – having the place to myself was bliss. The curtains all drawn, I could walk around in whatever state of undress I felt like. I’d never had my own place, so those moments I treasured, being truly alone, the rainy world shut out, the peace of nothing but my own breath and the clink of the lid on the teapot. It was like being high in the mountains but with five-star facilities. Well, maybe three-star.

  I pulled on a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms and settled into the couch with my camomile. So, Graeme was in New Zealand.

  I hadn’t seen him since that day in Café Continental but I’d followed his career. On his way to the Olympic bronze two years ago were a few golds in Aspen and a cupboard full of trophies. For ten years he’d been a mainstay at the top of his sport. But watching an old friend succeed from a distance and having him turn up unannounced on my doorstep? I put my misgivings aside. It would be nice to see him again.

  I emailed him and agreed to meet for coffee the following day. My room was a mess of clothes as I tried to find the right balance of casual but not too casual, suitable for Dunedin’s weather. What was wrong with me? I was a twenty-eight-year-old volcanologist, not a sixteen-year-old girl. I left my bike at home, took the number nineteen bus into town. How would he look? In my mind he was still somewhere between that hurt but determined boy in Café Continental and the
gracious bronze medallist on the TV two years ago in his colourful gear, hat off, goggles up on his forehead spiking his hair like a pineapple.

  It was summer in the Southern Hemisphere. What the hell was he doing in Dunedin?

  He was in a dwam and didn’t see me straight away. He hadn’t changed, still the sharp cheekbones, the neck tendons standing out taut like they’d been carved from oak. His hair was thinning on the crown, receding from his forehead so he wore it shaved close, the tousled fresh-out-of-bed look gone. His clothes were expensive, factory-aged jeans, a tight checked shirt and a soft leather jacket. I dropped my bag and scarf on the chair opposite, startling him awake. ‘Off in your own world?’

  He stood and we shared a half-hug, half-peck on the cheek. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I was buffering. Still a bit jet lagged.’

  ‘More coffee? Is that a long black?’

  ‘I’ll get it. What are you for?’

  ‘Camomile. I can get it.’

  ‘No, no, sit down.’

  While he queued I sorted myself out. The coffee shop was quiet with most of the students gone for the holidays. His bag was hanging on his chair, the corner of the New Zealand Lonely Planet sticking out. When I moved over I bought a copy myself but since then a new edition had come out. I pointed to it as he sat back down. ‘You’re over on holiday then?’

  He zipped up his bag before answering. ‘Kind of. I’ve got a bit of time off.’

  ‘You’ve been to New Zealand before, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, some competitions, a bit of climbing.’

  ‘It’s your kind of place. You still climb?’

  ‘When I can. You’re looking good.’

  ‘Congratulations on the medal, by the way, that was amazing.’

  ‘It’s just a bronze.’

  ‘It’s an Olympic bronze.’

  ‘I suppose. Gold would’ve been better.’

  ‘Should we ask the guy who came fourth?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You can try again in two years. America, isn’t it?’

  ‘Salt Lake.’ He fell silent while I sipped my tea. His coffee untouched. He looked tired, now I could see him closely, double bags under his eyes.

  ‘Where did you fly in from?’

  ‘New York,’ he said, ‘via… somewhere. San Francisco. Auckland.’

  ‘That’s a long way.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what day it is. Is it Christmas yet?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d be here. I thought maybe you’d go home for Christmas.’

  ‘That’s a long way, too.’

  ‘Too long.’

  I caught his eye, the smoky blue, the pupil dilated and behind it, around it, an exhaustion that went beyond time zones.

  ‘This place is surreal.’ We were standing in the middle of the Octagon, a pedestrianised plaza in the centre of town, looking at a statue of Robert Burns, taking advantage of a break in the rain to have a walk around. Two years I’d been in Dunedin and I’d never quite got used to the Edinburgh street names, the overwhelming Scottishness of it all. When I applied for the job at Otago University I knew nothing about Dunedin. Once I started researching I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘The Edinburgh of the South, the Lonely Planet calls it,’ he said.

  ‘And Edinburgh is the Athens of the North.’

  ‘What does that make Athens? Did you know the Lonely Planet calls Aberdeen a “symphony in grey”?’

  ‘Can’t say I’ve ever looked. Dunedin comes from the gaelic Dùn Èideann.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Edinburgh. It was founded and designed by Scots.’

  ‘Only Scots would choose the cold, rainy South Island over the hot, sunny North.’

  ‘Most of them probably didn’t want to leave Scotland in the first place. Only natural to make it more familiar.’

  ‘Exiles rather than expats.’

  ‘Which are we?’

  ‘Can you be an exile through choice?’

  ‘If you have a good enough reason for not going back. Anyway I don’t like that expression.’

  ‘Expat? Why?’

  ‘It’s racist. Only white people who have moved to another country get called expats. Non-white people are called migrants.’

  The rain had returned and, feeling peckish, I took him to Plato’s down near the harbour. From outside it wasn’t much, housed in an old seaman’s mission by a flyover, but the food was outstanding.

  ‘So what are your plans?’

  The waiter placed my blue cod, and Graeme’s squid in garlic and chilli, and took away our unused and unwanted wine glasses.

  ‘This evening?’ he asked.

  ‘This trip. I mean, you didn’t come from New York just to eat seafood with me.’

  ‘Maybe I did.’ He sipped his water. ‘No plans really. I just felt like a change of scenery.’

  ‘New York got too boring?’

  ‘Just… you know.’

  ‘Insightful. Well you’ve missed the ski season, but I guess I don’t have to tell you that. Don’t you need to be training? No Winter X Games this year?’

  ‘I felt like a break. If I miss one the world won’t end.’

  ‘Fair enough. So are you going to travel around the country? There are some great bike trails, and the national parks are just beautiful.’

  ‘I haven’t decided. How about you? You must be on vacation.’

  ‘No classes but lots of work. Students get in the way of my research, so now they’ve all sodded off I can concentrate on the important stuff.’

  ‘What are you researching?’

  ‘You want to know? I’m studying something called magma evolution and storage, basically what is going on day-to-day inside a volcano, trying to understand the processes that govern stability versus volatility in volcanoes.’

  ‘Predicting eruptions?’

  ‘That’s what everyone’s working towards.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Important, but I wouldn’t call it cool.’

  ‘Hey, I slide down mountains for a living but I have no idea what’s going on inside them. If you can tell a village that the volcano it’s built on is about to blow, I’d say that qualifies as cool. What are you doing for Christmas?’

  I lay in bed unable to sleep. Neither the biography of Arthur Eddington nor the book on volcano development I’d been asked to blurb could keep my attention for more than a few lines. In the darkness I stared at the ceiling.

  When I lived in Aberdeen, my ceiling had been covered in glow-in-the-dark stars set out in various constellations. With the light shade in centre, moving clockwise, you could travel a year in the Scottish sky, Gemini, Capella and Pleiades for spring; the summer triangle of Deneb, Vega and Altair; Pegasus as you moved into autumn and Orion bridging winter and spring. Astrophysics came a distant second to geology, but a passion nonetheless. I could still see them although the Kiwi sky was so alien. One thing Dunedin’s founders couldn’t make like home.

  I’d made such deliberate efforts to leave Aberdeen behind. Four years in Durham, two in Dunedin, memories tightly packed away gathering dust and then Graeme lands, blasting cobwebs and picking locks.

  Christmas was a day like any other. A Monday, in fact, and Monday was a day of work. I was sure Graeme would have been happy with me cooking him a turkey but I was having none of that. If I was taking the day off I wasn’t going to spend it in the house. Climbing seemed the obvious thing to do.

  There were plenty of places to climb in Dunedin, but lacking a car limited our options. Mike had left his bike behind so once we’d fixed Graeme up with boots we cycled away from Dunedin out to the Peninsula along Highcliff Road and down Sandymount to Lover’s Leap, a crag facing out into the ocean. It was a beautiful day as we rode through the undulating green landscape, the sea iris blue between hills, the fields of sheep basking in the sun.

  ‘It looks like Scotland,’ said Graeme.

  It was an outing in itself rather than a
journey, and the roads that early were empty. We cycled side-by-side taking climbs in our stride, free-wheeled winding downhills, content with the chatter of lambs and the burr of wheels.

  We carried the bikes down the gully and round to the crag. It stood perpendicular to the sea facing west, still in shade at that time of the day. I stretched and got everything ready, boots on and rope set. I usually went climbing at Long Beach. There was a cave with loads of bouldering lines, so I could go myself and didn’t need to cart all the gear, but the climbing at Lover’s Leap was great, basalt organ pipes meaning loads of long single-pitch routes. Getting started was tricky because of all the unclimbable choss but there were enough bolts and chains so that once you were over it, you were off. Occasionally it was better to be with someone.

  Crimps and fingerlocks, highsteps and kneebars, there was nothing else in your mind but the rock, your position on it, where you were going next, next, next. Fingers rusty, I slipped and Graeme lowered me, we changed places, tried different lines, the sun at noon, warming the crags. We stopped for Christmas lunch on the grass, salad and leftovers, fruit juice and bottled water.

  ‘I like this,’ said Graeme. A chain of sea kayaks, violent orange against the bruise-dark sea, rounded the headland in caravan. ‘I could stay here forever.’

  ‘Three thousand years ago people set out across these waters, starting from Indonesia and spreading through the Polynesian islands, Fiji, Samoa, the Cooks and down here, up to Hawaii, right across to Easter Island. Almost all the way across the Pacific in canoes. They didn’t even know if there was anything out there. They just got in their boats with some supplies and kicked off, knowing they’d never be back.’ The hard curve of the horizon. ‘Some stayed, made a home. Others kept going.’

  ‘We’re always searching for something. Some people never find it.’

  ‘Like Bono.’

  He laughed, threw a grape at me.

  ‘How long are you staying? You didn’t say,’ I asked.

  He finished his mango smoothie, waiting with the bottle upturned over his mouth for the pulp to drop out. He deliberately screwed the lid back on and put the empty into his bag. Got a tissue and dabbed at his mouth. ‘No idea.’ He wouldn’t look at me.