The wind in the Tararuas can only be ignored for so long. As soon as we came out onto the top of Bull Mound it was obvious this wasn’t a place used to calm. There were no trees up there. The small patches of scrub grew short and prickly, clinging hard to the rocky ground. It was a grey landscape of stone, broken only by vivid green patches of moss. In the background clouds rushed over the tops of the overlooking mountains and then were blown apart, looking like a half-formed waterfall.
We were Wellington kids. We were meant to be used to wind. Down in the city gales funnelled through narrow streets and children grabbed at parking meters to stop themselves blowing away. This wind was different. This wind was frightening. The noise of it filled my ears as it swept around me, attacking me from three different directions. It inflated my nostrils and twisted my eyelids. It threatened my hold on the ground, 1300 metres up with no place to shelter. Stone cairns pointed the way forward, south along the flat top. At least we would be away from any steep dropoffs.
Instinctively we linked arms. Jonathon paired up with Rebecca while Ms Jenkins and me stood either side of Lisa. We stumbled forward, leaning heavily on one another and crouching to the ground during the strongest gusts. Jonathon was the first to go. They were up ahead of us and I saw him stumble on a rock and lose hold of Rebecca’s arm. It was terrifying how quickly the wind took him, lifting his full weight, pack and all, as if he had deliberately leapt into the air. He landed a couple of metres to the left of his take-off point, flat on his pack, arms and legs flailing about like a turtle tipped in the surf.
We got to him as quickly as we could. The wind meant any sound he made was snatched away before it reached us and it wasn’t until I was standing over him that I realised he was laughing. Big whooping laughter, so he had to keep stopping to catch his breath. He grabbed at the arms offered him and pulled himself up.
‘Come on Marko!’ he shouted in my ear. ‘Let’s run. That was the coolest thing.’
So we did. The first time the wind took me I freaked, sure I’d land badly, twist a knee or crash head first into a rock. Jonathon was right though, there was fun to be had once I got the hang of it, a bit like moon-walking must feel, only more erratic, taking off in huge wind-assisted bounds, following a crazy path like some Friday night drunk, twisting every time I fell, relying on my pack to cushion me. Then straight back up and racing to catch the others, our shrieks of laughter ripped away from us, to snag on rocks and branches somewhere down in the valleys. It was a wonderful feeling: to be so totally at the mercy of such an awesome force and yet somehow invincible.
At the southern end of Bull Mound a boggy track took us right, down into the shelter of trees. We stopped, the memory of wind still filling our heads, and turned the game into stories. Fifteen minutes on the top had given us enough energy to keep going all the way to Alpha. I remember thinking how once again Jonathon had been the one to pull us together.
The last part of the tramp took us up through the Goblin Forest, where the air is damp all year round and the sky is the only thing not covered by the thick moss. It’s a landscape of dripping green, like walking through the set of a movie made for children. We walked in silence, enjoying the tramp now, but ready for the hut too.
It was a huge improvement on Cone, relatively new and built with trampers in mind. A bunkroom overlooked a large open-plan kitchen, windows all around let in the light, there was a mattress for every bed and as far as I could tell no holes to let the rats in. Lisa walked over to the map on the wall.
‘Look. We did all this today.’ She traced the track with her fingers. ‘Almost all the climbing done too.’
We crowded round and saw she was right. Alpha Hut was at 1300 metres, not far short of the highest peak of the crossing. We dumped our gear and crashed on the mattresses. There was a sense of relief that we’d beaten the day’s challenges. The sort of relief fate lies waiting for.
Dinner was good. It was Rebecca’s turn to cook and she produced a huge billy full of curried rice with fresh vegetables and cashews all mixed in. She looked pleased with herself when Jonathon and me raced each other for seconds. Then we had the predictable washing up argument which I lost, the way I always lose arguments—I run out of volume. After that we did the radio. There was still no contact from the others who had made it across to Kime before the wind got up. I expected we’d just settle in for a much needed sleep but Ms Jenkins had other ideas.
‘Who’s for a walk up to the tops?’ she asked us. ‘Just fifteen minutes.’
‘Walking? Yeah, I knew there was something my day had been missing,’ Jonathon replied.
‘We’ll be seeing it tomorrow anyway won’t we?’ Lisa asked.
‘Not at night we won’t. The wind’s died right down. It’s gorgeous out there.’ She rubbed a patch in the steamed up window and the stars shone through. ‘You’ll be able to see right down into the city.’
‘I’m in,’ Rebecca announced, sitting up on her bed. She meant it as a challenge and we rose to it. Even Lisa went through the hell of putting warm feet back into wet socks for the sake of group unity.
The track followed a path waterways had cut through the clay. Soon we were above the trees again and walking through dew-wet clumps of mountain grass. The air was cold and clean-tasting. Except for Lisa we all carried torches but Ms Jenkins made us turn them off, so our eyes could adjust to the light of the low hanging half-moon. She’d been right to drag us out. It was like walking through another world, one where day and night hardly mattered, where none of the things we’d left behind—homework, TV, dodging skateboarders on the pavements—seemed real.
‘Now that’s a real sky,’ Ms Jenkins said, stopping without warning so we all bumped into the person in front. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The sky was so filled with stars it was more white than black. Their light shimmered, confusing my eyes. I stood there with my head back and my mouth open. It was the sort of night you could drink.
‘Fuck that’s beautiful,’ Lisa whispered to herself, but her voice carried in the clear air and we all murmured our agreement.
From the top we could see the lights of Wellington, down to the south, sparkling around the harbour as if they’d been arranged there especially for our benefit. We found a cavity just off the rim, protected from the breeze, and squeezed in close to one another, for warmth and because we could. Ms Jenkins started the talking. She was beginning to relax with us, now that we were away from the others, away from everything.
She was pointing out the patterns of the stars, explaining how to use the Southern Cross to get our bearings, when the first wave hit. I’d been in other earthquakes and at first this one wasn’t any different. There’s that initial confusion, before you work out for sure what’s going on. Maybe it’s just some trick of the night, or something wrong with your balance, so you look at the others and see them looking back at you, for just the same reason. Then your senses settle and your brain works out the rest. There’s only one thing that can be happening. The ground is pitching and rolling like a ship on an ocean swell. You start thinking about the dangers, all the things that might go wrong. Maybe someone screams or yells out ‘cool’ and you use it as an excuse to sit even closer. And you wait for it to pass, because it always passes. You ride it out until the ground becomes ground again, a thick crust stretched tight over a liquid earth. Not this time though. This time it didn’t stop.
It wound itself up. The rumbling turned to shaking and the shaking turned to waves. It was as if the earth had tired of us and was trying to shake us free. There was noise too, sounds of ground breaking apart and hillsides slipping away, new rips in the earth’s fabric. And screaming, my screaming mixed in with theirs, all of us holding tight to each other, like our bodies were the only solid things left. We knew how bad it was without having to say it. At any moment the ground we were perched upon could give way and that would be the end. We would live or we would die and it would all be down to blind fate, nothing else. My mind went numb as I waited, I felt as i
f I was watching from the outside. The whole world was breaking free from its rules—even time paused to let the moments fill us, so if you asked how long it lasted, I would have to say forever.
Then it was over, or at least the main shock was, and suddenly only our bodies were shaking. We were all making sounds, strange little noises of fear and relief you won’t find in any dictionary.
‘The city’s gone,’ someone finally said. I remember looking to the harbour and seeing only blackness, like the earth had rolled over and turned out the light. There was silence, as we all thought our own thoughts, thoughts of destruction and almost-death. Then the explosions came in two distinct flashes, each turning to a gigantic fireball rising in the sky, like a fireworks display gone wrong.
‘Should we go to the hut?’ Rebecca asked, and her uncertainty made it sound like she’d borrowed someone else’s voice.
‘Not yet,’ Ms Jenkins told her. ‘There’ll be aftershocks. Staying put is the safest thing for now.’
There were three separate waves over the next half hour. The second was the worst, like it was responding to the earlier challenge. It wasn’t until we’d had twenty minutes of stillness that Ms Jenkins gave the all clear. No one questioned her authority, or tried to make a joke about this being ‘our trip’. We were frightened and we needed her.
She led off slowly, one small step at a time. We had our torches on and walked so close I could feel Lisa’s breath on my neck. My legs were unsteady, tight with tramping and fear, and too long sitting in the cold.
‘Keep your eyes wide open,’ Ms Jenkins instructed. ‘Anywhere could be a slip, or a slip about to happen.’
It was too dark to tell how much had changed around us but my imagination filled in the gaps. At one stage the track seemed to finish and we were walking in loose dirt and stones. Then we were squeezing between boulders, surely too big to have moved, but they hadn’t been there on the way up.
‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ Lisa asked from behind me.
‘Yeah. Careful up here, it feels quite unsteady. No, come on, it’ll be all right.’ Ms Jenkins had climbed up over a waist-high boulder. Jonathon followed, then Rebecca. When she reached the top she turned to offer me her hand. Just as I took it the rock moved and she fell forward with a shriek, her weight taking me backwards onto the ground.
‘You were supposed to catch me,’ she joked, but I could feel she was shaking as much as I was. Below us I heard the huge rock rumbling down the hill before crashing into the scrub.
‘Shit.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘What happened?’
Torches flashed around in the dark. I replied with a weak smile, all I could manage.
It was a relief to see the hut still standing. As far as we could tell the land around it was as we’d left it. Ms Jenkins made us wait outside while she completed three slow circuits with her torch, peering at foundations, kicking at walls and leaning against the water tank. I believed in her, the way you believe in your parents when you’re little, because not believing is way too frightening.
When we got inside we just milled around, as if there was something that needed doing but none of us could remember what. I was standing at the bench next to Lisa. She turned and put her arms around me and buried her head in my chest. Someone lit a candle and the silence was broken by the static of the mountain radio.
‘This is JG67.’ Ms Jenkins was at the table, hunched over the transceiver, talking quietly, no hint of panic in her voice. She was much tougher than I would have guessed. ‘This is JG67. Do you read me? Over.’
We crowded around her and waited for the static to give way to a reply. Nothing. She tried again, and again. Thirty measured minutes of the same message, like each time she was sure the next one would bring a reply. It never came.
Then we crawled off to our beds, all five of us close together on the bottom level. As soon as my eyes closed my head filled with movement. I fell asleep feeling like a baby again, rocking into unconsciousness.
11
APRIL 21 I have set myself a target. Three days. In three days the Doctor will be dead. Any longer and I am sure I will be discovered. It seems so simple, when I write it down. The Doctor will be dead. There must be a thousand different ways of killing, in a place like this, and I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. But the more I think the less simple it seems. Perhaps that is fear.
If nothing else works I will attack him openly, but that must be my last resort. There is a chair in the television room with legs that screw out. One of those in my hand feels good, the right weight to swing. It would just be a matter of coming up behind him, letting go a frenzy of blows to his head, until it is a head no more. I could do that. I could plead insanity easily enough, the Doctor has already made the diagnosis. There would be a price to pay though, a lifetime maybe in a place like this. But I could talk again, and there would be visitors too. It would be worth it. The biggest problems are the possibility of someone intervening, pulling me off before the job was finished, or my strength failing me. I know I couldn’t bear that. I couldn’t live with another failure.
I have thought of poisoning him. I have even collected all the pills I pretend to take, hidden them here with my book. Only I don’t know what they are, or how they might affect him, and I have no idea how I would get him to take them. It is not as though he is in the habit of sitting with me as he eats his dinner. And it would happen offstage, his final pain. I don’t want that. I want to be there, I want to see it. I want to be part of it.
We are on the third floor here and there is concrete down below. It has become my favourite fantasy, watching him fall through the space in between, calling out for help, grabbing desperately for something solid, while his life rushes past and the world looks away. Not that they’re stupid enough to leave windows unlocked in a place like this. It wouldn’t be long before a flying competition was organised. If only there was a way of luring him out onto one of those balconies. I am thinking I could confront him during his rounds, show him I can talk, lead him there. I have wondered about charging him too, propelling him through the glass. There is a fire escape but I can’t see how to get to it. Maybe if I set off the fire alarms there would be a chance. It is still only half of an idea, tied to the picture of the Doctor falling.
I could get someone else to do the job for me. There must be people here who would only need the smallest nudge to get them going, a prod in the psychotic direction. A riot could start, with him in the middle. That would be wild, watching the shit get kicked out of him by a bunch of crazies. Unpredictable though. Risky. Sometimes I wish he was a cat, so he might die nine times over. I would find a way of being there at every death, directing the proceedings.
Or there is the real world. Me here, alone in this little room. It feels colder today. Cold in the air and cold in my bones. The cold of knowing that he must have plans of his own, plotting them right now as I write this down. Three days left and so much work still to be done. I will follow him, next time he comes on the ward. I need more information.
Now I must find words for something else which can no longer be put off. It is the thing that can make sense of all of this, the hardest thing to write.
12
The next morning I woke slowly. I recognised the pieces of my world but couldn’t place them. It was like having a jigsaw shaken loose in front of my eyes. Same hut, same sleeping bag, same faces, but outside a world turned upside-down, and inside my head the memory of the night before. It was hard to know where to start.
At first I concentrated on just being busy, doing all the normal stuff, hoping that would be enough to restore order. We all did. Rebecca got the billy on, Ms Jenkins tried the mountain radio again, Lisa had her morning battle with her gear, swearing loudly at a lone sock and a missing toothbrush. Jonathon sat back and watched, his grin still there but not so certain now, and I opened the stash of gingernuts I had kept for emergencies. I figured this counted. None of us said much.
‘Okay then. About today. I went back up on the tops before the sun came up. The lights are still out, right up through the valley too. When it got light, I saw the damage up here is pretty severe too. There are slips right round the Dress Circle and it looks like a huge crevasse has opened up two thirds around. Below where we were sitting last night a whole spur has basically collapsed.’
‘Fuck we were lucky,’ Rebecca said.
‘It was hard to tell because some cloud has come in now but it looked like there’d been movement off the top of Marchant too. The thing is, I’m no expert but I figure there must be a chance that either of the valleys has been dammed by the slips. What else? The mountain radio is still out which seems strange to me. It means we don’t have a forecast so it would be crazy to go over the tops in these conditions I think, especially with so little visibility. I’m thinking that leaves two choices.’
She paused and looked around, like she wanted to make sure we all understood.
‘Look, I don’t want to get overdramatic here. Rebecca’s right, we were very lucky and we’re all perfectly safe where we are. The thing is, this is for real now. We have to be careful. Very, very careful. You realise that don’t you?’
We nodded. She would be careful, we would do what she told us. It wasn’t too difficult.
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