by Adam Nevill
Peering between his knees, Jack kept his face lowered until the creases disappeared from the sides of his mouth and from around his eyes. He couldn’t let Lozzy see him cry.
Before his brother left the laundry room, and then the house too, Jack had longed to hold him for a while but couldn’t do it, and Hector wouldn’t have wanted that anyway, because it would have made his leaving even harder. Instead, Jack just stared at his own flat toes spread out on the lino.
‘Where’s Hegder going?’ Lozzy asked, as a bubble popped on her shiny lips.
‘To get the Pitchfords.’
‘They have a cat,’ she said.
Jack nodded. ‘That’s right.’ But Jack knew where Hector would have to go first before he even got close to the Pitchfords’ place; Hector was going into the forest with the clacking branches and ocean sounds, and along the earthen paths and over slippery tree roots, exposed like bones; these places that they had run and mapped together. And Hector would leap across the thin creek with the rowing-boat smells, race across the field of long grass that was darker than English grass and always felt wet and where they had found two whole sheep skeletons and brought them home in a wheelbarrow to reassemble on the front lawn. Hector was going to run a long way through the lightless night until he reached the Pitchfords’ house with the high fence and the horseshoes fixed around the gate. ‘To keep things out,’ Mrs Pitchford had once told them in a quiet voice when Hector asked why they were nailed to the dark planks.
‘No. Don’t. No,’ Jack had whispered, unable to hold back, when Hector turned the door handle. Everything had slowed thick and cold inside Jack’s chest. Welling up to the back of his throat, this feeling spilled inside his mouth, tasting of rain. Inside Jack’s head sang urgent, desperate sounds that were prayers trying to find words, and he squeezed his eyes shut to try and push the thoughts down, to squash them down like he was forcing the lid back onto a tin of paint. He did everything that he could to stop the hysterics from storming out of his entire body.
‘Got to,’ Hector said, his eyes wild inside a stiff face.
Lozzy stood up and tried to follow Hector. Jack snatched her hand but gripped it too hard. She winced, tearing up, and stamped a foot.
‘Jack, don’t open the door after I’m gone.’ They were Hector’s final words, and the laundry door clicked shut behind him.
Jack heard his brother’s feet patter across the floorboards of the hall, and the catch being turned on the front door. When that door closed too, the wind chimes in the porch clinked and made an inappropriate spacey sound. There was a brief creak from the bottom step of the porch stairs, and then Lozzy’s sobs made an unwelcome return into the laundry room.
After comforting her with a second ice-cream cone, Jack unplugged the freezer. Quickly but carefully, so as to make less noise, he removed the rustling bags of frozen peas, the steaks, stewed apple and fish fingers. He put the food in the big laundry sink that smelled like the back of Gran’s house in England. Then he stacked the white baskets from inside the freezer against the side of the sink. Around the rim of the freezer cabinet, he placed plastic clothes pegs at intervals, so that there would be a gap between the grey rubber seal of the freezer lid and the cabinet, otherwise they would run out of air when he shut them both inside the freezer.
‘Come on, Lozzy,’ he said, hearing some of his mom inside his voice, and he felt a bit better for doing something that wasn’t just waiting. He picked Lozzy up and lowered her into the freezer, and together they spread Schnapps’s old blanket over the wet floor of the cabinet so they wouldn’t get cold bottoms and feet.
‘This smells. His fur is on it. Look.’ Lozzy held up a tuft of the brown fur that the dog used to get stuck between his claws after riffing his neck. Their mom and dad had been unable to throw the dog’s blanket away, in case Schnapps ever came home, so the blanket had stayed in the laundry where Schnapps had ended up sleeping at night. Their dad’s idea of dogs sleeping outside had become a bad one after Schnapps had begun barking, whimpering and finally scratching at the front door every night. ‘He’s soft,’ their dad had said. But tonight, their memories of Schnapps’s distress had made more sense.
After handing the tub of ice-cream and the box of cones to Lozzy, Jack climbed inside the freezer and sat beside his sister. She reached for his hand with her sticky fingers.
As Jack pulled the lid down over their huddled bodies, he secretly hoped that the cold, wet freezer would stop the pig thing from smelling them. He also wondered, if it stood upright on those hairy back legs, as it had done out on the sundeck, if those trotter things on the ends of its front legs would be able to push the lid up. But he also took another small comfort into the dark with him: the pig thing had never come inside their house. Not yet, anyway.
Mrs Pitchford entered the bungalow through the empty aluminium frame of the sliding door; the glass had been smashed inwards and had collected within the mess of the curtains that had been torn down during the forced entry. Mrs Pitchford favoured net curtains behind the windows of her own home; she didn’t like the sense of exposure that the large windows gave to the new homes that the government had started delivering on truck-beds for the migrants who were settling all over the area. She’d found it hard to even look at the red earth exposed beneath the felled trees. The appearance of these long rectangular bungalows, with tin cladding on their walls, never failed to choke her with fury and grief that was no good for her heart. And who could now say what kind of eyes would be drawn to these great glassy doors if you didn’t use nets? You couldn’t then go blaming them who was already here.
All of the lights were still on inside the bungalow. She looked at the brown carpets and the orange fabric on the furniture, and was startled again by what the English did with their homes: all Formica and white plastic and patterned carpets and big garish swirls in wallpaper the colour of coffee. Shiny, new, fragile, and she didn’t care for any of it. There was a television too and a new radio, coloured silver and black, and both made in Japan. They mesmerised her, the things that these pale-skinned Poms brought from faraway places and surrounded themselves with. But anyone could see that the Poms and their things didn’t sit right with the old bush. The bush had ways that not even the Maoris liked, because there were things here before them too.
Glass crunched under her boots as Mrs Pitchford made her way further inside the house.
The kitchen and dining room were open-plan, divided from the living room by the rear of the sofa. Unable to resist the lure of the kitchen, she went inside and touched the extractor fan above the stove. It was like a big hopper on a petrol lawnmower, and she marvelled again at what young mothers considered necessary for the running of a household. And here was the food mixer Jan had once showed her. Orange and white plastic with Kenwood Chevette printed along one side. A silver coffee pot with a wooden handle, what Jan had called a percolator, beside the casserole dishes with their orange flower patterns.
Mrs Pitchford ran her hard fingertips across the smooth sides of the Tupperware boxes that Jan had lined up on the counter; they were filled with cereal, rice, something called spaghetti, bran and sugar. You could see the contents as murky shadows through the sides. Everything in her own home was wood, pottery, steel or iron. And she remembered seeing the very same implements in use when she was a little girl and had helped her mother prepare food. Hardwoods and metals lasted. Plastic and carpet and ‘stereos’ hadn’t been much use to this family tonight, had they?
The sound of the car engine idling outside returned her sense of purpose; Harold had told her not to get distracted. She turned and waddled out of the kitchen, but her eyes were drawn to the sideboard beside the dining table; at all of the silver and ceramic trinkets behind the sliding glass doors: little sherry glasses; small mugs with ruddy faces on the front; China thimbles; teaspoons with patterns on the handles.
There was a washing machine in the little laundry room beside the ‘dining area’, and a freezer too. Jan had been horrified to lea
rn that Mrs Pitchford still washed clothes in a tin bath, used a larder for food and still preserved fruit in jars. The bloody cheek.
The laundry room smelled of wine, soap powder and urine. All of the food from the freezer was melting and softening inside the sink. The lid of the freezer was raised and there was an old blanket inside the white metal cabinet that hummed softly. It was still cold inside the freezer when she leaned over to look inside, puzzled why the food was stacked in the sink. They had no mutton, no venison, no sweet potatoes that she could see. She looked under her foot and saw that she was standing on a yellow clothes peg.
Inside the unlit hallway that led down to the four bedrooms, she paused for a few moments to get herself accustomed to the darkness. It was a relief to be out of the bright living area, but she would need more light to conduct a proper search in the bedrooms. Ordinarily, she could have found a sewing pin on the floor by the thinnest moonlight, because around here there were plenty who could see better at night than others. But tonight there was no moon or starlight at all, and the curtains in the bedrooms were drawn, and it would be terrible if she missed something important. She found the light switch for the hallway.
The family had no rugs; they had laid carpet all the way down the passage and even inside the bedrooms. How did Jan get the dust out of them, or air them in the spring like she did with her rugs? Shaking her head in disapproval, she went into the first room: Jan and Bill’s room. Two suitcases were open on the bed and had been filled with clothes. The headboard was softened with padded white plastic. Mrs Pitchford reached out and pressed it.
The next room was for the little girl with all of the lovely thick hair. Dear little Charlotte. The light from the hall revealed the dim outlines of her dolls and toys, the books on all of the shelves, the bears in the wallpaper pattern. ‘Darlin’,’ she said, quietly, into the darkness.
No one answered.
Some of the teddy bears and stuffed rabbits were on the floor; they had been pulled off the shelves. Mrs Pitchford had a hunch a few would be missing too.
She carried on, down the passageway to the two end bedrooms: Jack and Hector’s rooms. Hector was safe at their home. How he had managed to scuttle all the way to their farm, in the dark, had surprised her and her husband. But little Hector had come and banged on their door, then fallen inside, panting and as pale as a sheet. She and Harold hadn’t wasted a moment and had swept him into their arms, before spiriting him across the yard to Harold’s workshop.
‘That kid was as slippery as an eel and quick as a fox,’ Harold had said, his eyes smiling, after he returned to the kitchen from his workshop, and had removed his sheep-shearing gloves and leather apron. He’d then yanked their coats off the pegs. ‘Come on, mother, we better get our skates on.’
And when he’d arrived at their farm, Hector had been so concerned for his younger brother and his sister, that she and Harold had sped to the bungalow in the old black Rover that someone else had once brought over with them from England. Harold had taught himself to drive the car too, not long after acquiring it from an elderly couple with those Pommy accents that miss the H in every word.
Harold would dress Hector when they returned with the other two children, if they were still around, though that seemed unlikely to Mrs Pitchford.
The family’s bungalow was looking like it was completely deserted, like all of the bungalows on the Rangatera Road that were waiting for new Pommy families, or Pacific Islanders, or even more of those bloody Dutch Dike-Duckies. Poles were supposed to be coming too. What next?
The two end bedrooms were empty, but she smelled what all life leaves behind, and then found the spoor on the floor of one of the boys’ rooms that overlooked the wattle tree. It was ruddy in colour and smelled strong; the fresh stool of excitement, the stool of too much fresh blood gulped down by a very greedy girl.
Kneeling down, Mrs Pitchford tried to scoop it into her handkerchief, but there was too much of it. She stripped a pillow case off the bed. ‘You’ve been at it here, my little joker,’ Mrs Pitchford said with a rueful smile. Her errant daughter must have hunted right through the house until she’d found the other two kiddiewinks hiding; under the beds maybe, or in that hardboard wardrobe with the sliding doors on the little plastic runners. ‘What a rumble you’ve had, my girl.’ This kind of house couldn’t possibly make a family feel safe either; it was like cardboard covered in tin. But her daughter must have, at the very least, had the sense to take Jack and little Charlotte outside the house first, like Harold had shown her how to do with the other Poms. Otherwise, they’d have to burn out another of these bungalows to incinerate the leavings, and that always made a flaming mess. ‘One more and it’ll smell funny,’ Harold had warned after the last bungalow that they’d lit up.
Mrs Pitchford went back to the laundry room and found a scrubbing brush, detergent and a bucket. She filled the bucket with hot water from the tap in the laundry, then went back to the boy’s room and scrubbed the rest of the muck out of the carpet. While she was doing this, Harold had become impatient and had sounded the car horn. ‘Hold your bloody horses,’ she’d called out, but Harold couldn’t have heard her.
When Mrs Pitchford was finally back inside the car and seated beside her husband with a pillow case in her lap, the contents wet and heavy, and with three Tupperware containers inside a brown paper bag clutched in her other hand, she asked Harold, ‘You want to check the creek?’
‘Nah. She’ll be right. Long gone. She’ll be up in them caves by now, mother.’
‘She got carried away again, my love.’
Smiling with a father’s pride, Harold said, ‘She’s a big girl, mother. You’ve got to let them suss their own way in this world. Be there for them from time to time, but still, we’ve done what we can for her. She has her own family now. She’s just providing for them the best way she knows how.’
‘We’ve been very lucky with her, Harold. To think of all them sheep that Len and Audrey lost last year with their girl.’
‘You’re not wrong, mother. But when you let a child run that wild . . .’ Harold rolled his eyes behind the thick lenses in the tortoiseshell frames of his glasses, which he’d taken off the old Maori boy whom they’d found fishing too far downstream last summer. ‘It’s all about pace, mother. We showed our girl how to pace herself. A chook or two. A dog. A cat. And if dags like these Poms are still around after that, well, it comes down to who was here first. And who was here first, mother?’
‘We was, dear. We was.’
What God Hath Wrought?
1848. Utah.
And in the darkness the soldier came upon the old man. Five miles out the dragoon had seen the red spark of the campfire, down in the desert, like it was the last ember in hell yet to wink out and leave only the abyss behind; the black void that was there before all of this, and before hell too.
And the soldier came upon that old man as silently as a Comanche upon his pony comes with ease into an enemy’s camp to leave more widows in this world than it ever wanted. Came out of nothing with not so much as a jingle of spurs or a jangle of sabre against his saddle, just like he’d been showed by the Apache scouts down on the Rio Grande, when he rode for ‘Old Rough and Ready’ General Zachary Taylor against the Mexican Army of the North.
When the old man saw the dragoon come out of the night air, he might have been some kind of avenging angel with an hourglass and scythe in each celestial hand, and it was too late to reach for the musket that he had laid out on his bedroll.
Around the fire the soldier spied a mule, a pick, a shovel, some pans. Smelled coffee, a mess of beans in a skillet. A prospector, heading for the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. Another fool.
Since the news broke in New York about the gold out west, the soldier had been coming across these men and their desperate dreams all along the trails through Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming. Men would suffer for their greed more than they would suffer for anything else. Give them snow and road agents and Indians and starvation and
every disease that rolled your eyes up inside your head, and all the privations of hell on top of that, and they would still suffer and make others suffer for a mere rumour of gold.
‘Easy,’ he said to the old man, who was just sat on his ass, all wide of eye and open of mouth before his skillet, and whose skittery, honking mule now seemed to be transmitting a crazy terror into its owner; a man who might yet reach for the musket, or snatch at the Bowie knife stuck in the sand, and end up getting himself shot dead.
From up high in his dragoon saddle, in plain sight, the soldier holstered the pistol. Then flashed all 44 inches and six pounds of his sabre through the reaching red light of the campfire, before sinking Old Wristbreaker back into its scabbard, real smooth. ‘You ain’t the one,’ he said.
The soldier dismounted.
‘Well, I sho’ is pleased to hear it, sir,’ the old man said. ‘Had all the fear a man can git for one day.’
‘Mind sharin’ that fire a time?’
Out of an instinct for self-preservation, and a relief that he’d live a little longer, maybe even long enough to see some of that gold up near San Francisco, the old man said, ‘Sure. Got a mess of beans and some biscuit I’m willing to part with.’ The old man would refuse him nothing; the soldier knew that. There was a time when he’d have felt bad for scaring an old boy in the night, but that time was hard to even remember now.
‘Coffee be appreciated. Few words. Then I be pulling out.’
The old man nodded back at him. His beard was filthy with tobacco juice; his face creased like dried fruit in a store jar, the skin brown as molasses. He smelled of mule, years of sweat, bear grease, pipe tobacco and shit.
The soldier fed his horse; talked to her in a soft voice, touched her ears. She nuzzled him like an obedient daughter. Then he pulled his cape of navy-blue wool round his neck and squatted opposite the prospector.
The fire snapped between them, blinded them to the greater darkness of the desert, a whole universe with no edges out there.