They’re in the blasting night on the rolling, pitching deck in their thin green uniforms, the three of them. His newly shaved head is cold. He feels naked. Ahead is the heavy little sea-door, the entrance to the bar for off-duty soldiers. Its window is a little square of light. It’s really happening. Marty’s heart thuds in his chest, yet he feels disembodied, as if the little door is coming to him. It falls to him, the number seven, to try the door handle. He reaches out. He is the whistle, the booted ball, the first roar of the crowd. The door opens easily at his touch. He enters the cabin, his teammates behind him. A dozen Russians, smiling, smoking and drinking. He’s on the carpet, floored by a blow between his shoulders. I’m shot. Am I shot? Rapid gunfire; an invisible dragon lashes the room, curses, flailing, falling. It’s over and he’s unharmed. Tunny and Plate are okay. The cabin is full of corpses, men with the life wrenched out of them. Brian fusses about the rolling cabin, pushing bodies, looking for something. He takes a dead man’s pistol and crosses smartly to the other side of the cabin and fires into the back of a Russian head. There had been a gurgling sound that Marty wasn’t aware of until it stopped. Brian stands over another body and shoots.
‘Okay, Brian,’ says Jimmy, and he waves in the front row from outside. There is much handshaking and shoulder slapping.
Brian fires again. His voice is high-pitched. ‘We don’t want any nasty surprises.’
‘Take a gun, boys,’ Jimmy tells the loosies. ‘You’ll feel a lot better armed.’
Marty is aware that the heavy machine pistol in his hand didn’t do its previous owner any good. The cabin is suddenly full of jubilant players. Brian fires again.
‘Jesus, Brian.’
‘He was alive, Jimmy!’
‘Here, mate.’ Jimmy takes the pistol from Marty and swiftly checks the magazine. Marty likes Jimmy, who was clearly a lock in his day. His sense of calm and strength remind him of Chris. ‘Just point and shoot,’ Jimmy says. ‘I’ve taken the safety off. Don’t worry about reloading. You blokes have got sixty shots between you now. More than enough for the next phase.’
‘Da, comrades,’ says Marty in a Russian accent. ‘Da, da, da.’
Tunny giggles. ‘Marty, for fuck’s sake, hit the deck next time.’
‘Eh?’
‘I had to bring you down, bro.’
Marty puts a hand on Tunny’s shoulder. ‘You’re shitting me.’ Tunny’s eyes are gleaming. ‘Was that you that tackled me?’
Everyone laughs, except the dead men.
‘You did good, man,’ says Tunny, ‘but you stood there like you wanted someone to buy you a drink.’
More laughter.
Plate slaps Marty’s back. ‘Nah, full credit to you, bro. That took nuts.’
‘You guys have an understanding,’ says Jimmy. ‘That’s why we chose you. Having said that, no one was going to buy you a drink, Number Seven. You can hit the deck straight away next time.’
Brian, separated from the general jubilation, is crouched over a dead young man, blond and Kiwi-like, with his finger at the man’s throat as if hoping for a pulse. His hand jerks back, revealing a red knife. Blood pools on the green lino.
‘Brian, for fuck’s sake—’
Almost furtively, Brian cuts another throat. Then he wipes his blade clean on the dead man’s uniform and springs for the door.
‘Let’s go,’ he cries in a high-pitched voice. ‘Same again on the bridge, lads, and we’re on our way to Australia.’
‘Hang on,’ says Jimmy, ‘that’s not the plan.’
‘Come on! We’re still heading south. We need to be going northwest.’
‘Wait!’ Jimmy runs out of the cabin after Brian. The Typhoons loosies follow, under the impression they are rushing to haul Brian in, but as soon as they hit the black night air, their backs are slapped and they slow as players part for them like a guard of honour. Marty has the sensation of riding a wave as they make their way in darkness over the rolling deck, of being swept by an irresistible force. They are the spearhead flying to the heart of the enemy. The guards are not at their usual posts. The way has been cleared for them. In a moment they are in the Tourist Section, where he has never dared set foot before, surging up the plushly carpeted corridor with its polished wood.
Chapter 12:
Ice and fire
Miss Kurosawa’s absence from the 5 pm class on Friday settles the issue of their meeting that night once and for all. There’s no way it will happen. He just needs to apologise next week, say something came up, and it’s over. Spectacular while it lasted, but … He works late, planning lessons in the staffroom. The missing ferry is commented on. He wonders if he should get drunk. A teacher says fifty Japanese crew and soldiers were on board, along with the eight hundred passengers, numbers that the media have been cagey about. The teachers talk about how it was mainly rugby players travelling south for the big match, how family groups avoid those late sailings when Wellington plays in Christchurch, given the reputation for barbaric behaviour. After the teachers have voiced their disapproval the conversation ends. But they know something else, he can tell. The story’s too big and they’re working a little too scrupulously for a Friday night. The real conversation will begin when he leaves.
He decides to test his hypothesis by asking the deputy principal if he can leave early. Before he can even open his mouth he is waved away. Something’s definitely up. He packs his briefcase, bows to the room and excuses himself. In return he’s thanked for his work in a distracted way by the younger staff members. After sitting in a cubicle in the men’s bathroom for ten minutes he returns to the staffroom on the pretext of forgetting a textbook and hears the buzz of animated conversation.
He was right. From his vantage point near the door at the front of the staffroom, close to where the speakers are gathered at the principal’s desk, it quickly becomes clear to him that they don’t know much for certain. What they do know is that the radio transmitter at Mount Kaukau was sabotaged rather than storm-damaged on the night the ferry disappeared. So no distress call could be sent in a mutiny, he thinks. It was planned. They’ll be heading for Australia. He turns away, holding his breath, and walks quickly and quietly down the corridor. For a couple of seconds his back feels acutely exposed and a shout from a teacher imminent. He makes the door and bursts outside into the freezing gale. As he plunges down the steps a general clatter of iron and metal announces the arrival of hail. A cry of joy or anger comes with it as he runs across the road to the sanctuary of Paddy’s.
The fire near the entrance is piled high and radiates warmth. They might be safe, he thinks. Safe on board, heading for Australia. This is the more measured end of the bar, where couples and older people come to have a quiet drink. In a mood for happy reflection he takes an empty table near the window, not too far from the fire, and lays his coat over the chair.
‘Bad night to be at sea,’ the barman says as he pours Chris a pint of Asahi Gold.
‘I just heard,’ Chris replies, leaning forward and lowering his voice, ‘that the radio transmitter was sabotaged.’
The barman raises his eyebrows.
‘Maybe that’s why the crew was unable to send a distress call.’
‘Source?’
‘Just overheard it.’
‘On me, mate.’
‘Cheers.’
Taking his free beer and the barman’s approval to his table by the window, he sits and watches hail pop in the street. He’s very happy, yet it’s a bittersweet happiness at the same time, because he knows he won’t see Marty or his teammates ever again. If not drowned, they’re still gone; for him it’s nearly the same loss in practical terms. It occurs to him that even if they have taken control of the vessel, it’s still a long way to Australia, and the air force will have the option of sinking the ferry when the weather clears. Or they may even be able to intercept it with a destroyer. That would be the preferred option for the IJA: to avoid an international incident by bringing everyone home and locking them up forever. I
t’s another bad outcome, and he reminds himself that his theory of an organised mutiny is just speculation at this stage. Marty’s behaviour at their last meeting is further evidence, though. Maybe compelling evidence. Something was up with the haircut and the locks for his mum. I wasn’t trusted, he thinks. It hurts.
Two young blond women are blown in by the storm. He watches the barman tell them something, probably the information about the transmitter, as he mixes rum and colas. You could send them over here, mate, for the full story, Chris thinks, growing courageous after one beer on an empty stomach. Drinks in hand, the women head down past the barbecue booths to the raucous end of the pub where the pool tables are. The space is marked off by three-quarters of a wall. They disappear into a cloud of cigarette smoke from which comes the crack of pool balls, laughter, the new Irish band U2 on the jukebox. He considers following the women, but not seriously, having learned his lesson from the New Zealand Culture evening about the perils of socialising in a suit. On the way back from the toilet he peers inside the smoky section anyway. There are half a dozen slight and pale young Irishmen playing pool, drinking and generally holding court, dressed in green and with Gaelic script on their T-shirts. They’re popular with Kiwi women. One time Marty put on a green T-shirt and an Irish accent in the hope of scoring but his size and robust colour didn’t indicate generational malnutrition and gave him away immediately. His cries of protest—‘Oim big because oi grew up on a faarm!’—didn’t wash. Once, an Irishman told Chris: ‘The English are fookin’ tiny, man!’ Irish pubs are popular in Wellington because of Ireland’s neutrality in World War II and their ongoing friendly relations, which includes the Irish on-selling New Zealand beef and lamb to Great Britain as ‘Irish Produce’. Chris likes the Irish. They’re a good source of information about Great Britain and the US. They don’t know much about Soviet Europe though, so it will be useless asking them about the Paris riots. He thanks the barman and heads for home. The hail is sporadic now. The odd bang is either the arrival of the last high-frozen stones, or terrestrial objects picked up by the gale and brought to a sudden stop. It’s been only a week since, in the house on Mount Victoria, he heard about Sarah’s murder. He wonders if the players’ meeting he was excluded from was about the mutiny.
His apartment is cold. He lights the kerosene heater by the sliding door and cracks it open for ventilation. The gale sucks and whistles. The animated clatter of a tin can comes loudly from the ground below. He closes the door, puts out the heater and changes into his wool jersey and heavy leather jacket. On impulse he takes a blanket with him.
He has a very good car for a young New Zealander: a 1980 Toyota Corolla sedan with a 2.8-litre engine. He’s particularly fond of the stereo, an AM/FM radio and cassette player with 30-watt amp and speakers back and front. It’s been a while since he’s driven, and despite the filthy weather he enjoys it. The heater soon warms him up. He feels cocooned. A violent squall of rain comes in and he turns the wipers to maximum. No problem. There are few cars about. Those he sees on the way to Island Bay crawl through ponds on the road; lights puddle, slip and fracture across his windscreen.
He stops outside Bill and Marty’s dark house in Derwent Street. There is a chance that Bill might be in, he thinks, lying low. The old Datsun van the guys share is in the drive. Given that houses where rugby players reside are occasionally raided by the army, he would normally park down the street to prevent his car’s possible seizure, but it’s 10 pm and the night is rotten. He has to push the car door open, fight the wind to get out. The sea roars and its pungency floods over him. A freezing battering ram. The weather is exhilaratingly bad. The gale slams the car door shut. Grabbed and buffeted, he runs up the side of the house. Suddenly in shelter, he tries the back door. It opens. He finds the light switch in the kitchen and a mouse bolts under the fridge, scritching its claws on the lino. ‘Bill? Bill? It’s Chris.’ He half expects to see a possum in the lounge. Instead he finds surprising neatness. The coffee table, a slab of macrocarpa with eighty-seven or eighty-eight rings, is clear of bottles and cans. Even the ashtray is empty. It’s cold. ‘Bill?’ He knocks on Bill’s door. ‘It’s Chris. I have a spliff.’ He has a strong sense he shouldn’t be there.
He drives around the south coast, in the teeth of the storm, in awe of the sea’s fury as it detonates and rushes over the rocky shore. His headlights seem to freeze white foam in midair after the thump of heavy impact. As he enters Breaker Bay a man in a red-and-black bush shirt steps out onto the road waving his arms. Unshaven, haggard, there is desperation in him. Chris goes around him and accelerates away. The colony survives solely on the food they grow in their gardens and catch in the sea. The object is to have nothing to do with the occupying forces, which includes their electricity, and it’s a bitter place in winter.
A two-storeyed wooden house is on fire across the cove, reflecting redly on the white blanket of surf over black seawater. The top right corner is engulfed. Chris stops and winds down his window. A tongue of flame leaps into the sky and sends a shower of sparks in a low, flat trajectory into the dark hillside behind. A long crackling gust makes the flames appear to falter. Darkness creeps back as the gust continues. Figures out front on the grass hold up their hands. The wind stalls, and flames and sparks erupt skyward, brighter than before, in a muscular release.
He thinks of his boyhood home, the boarding house in Newtown his mother ran, how he came home from school, noticing first the flowing gutters at the bottom of Constable Street on a sunny day, then the smell before he turned into Owen Street, a strange patch of smoky mist over the rooftops, then the crowd of strangers, the daytime pulse of fire sirens, the criss-cross of flat hoses. It’s my house, he told a fireman. The man took his hand and looked around. Uncertain, he took Chris down the driveway. The back half of the house was smoky, steamy, stinky; a wreckage. The roof had collapsed and twisted. The oven was a black stub, the only thing still standing. Firemen in heavy gear were crunching in their boots, looking for something in the charred and soaking remains. It was still warm; things trickled and popped. His mother appeared from nowhere and grabbed him and nearly crushed the breath out of him. She smelled of smoke. Her body heaved with sobs.
He puts the car into gear. No one in front of the burning house tries to stop him as he passes. There is a phonebox at the Seatoun shops. It works, and he calls 111. The operator tells him that the fire service is already on its way. She’s a Kiwi, so it might be true. He continues around the peninsula. Scorching Bay is still windy, but nothing like the south coast. He remembers the boarding house. It was a gift from Patrick, a place to live and earn money at a time when money was hard to come by for solo mothers. But because his mother owned it freehold, she ran it more like a charity than a business, according to Patrick. He would tell Chris about it on the phone from Japan. Eventually Chris would pass the phone to his mother. During his brother’s calls, she would sometimes put the phone down and light a cigarette and Patrick would keep scolding her from Japan and never notice.
Money was not the real source of tension in the house though; that revolved around an ethnic Chinese woman, Katrina, whom his mother was hiding. Ethnic Chinese were thought to harbour anti-Japanese sentiment and were routinely executed in the first years of the occupation. The entire Auckland population was rounded up and shot in 1943. It had been inexplicable to most New Zealanders, who thought Chinese and Japanese were basically the same people. Chris’s mother had met Katrina through a mutual friend who had hidden her for a decade in her attic. Katrina would come down at night and babysit and cook for the family. A fine arrangement, until the couple separated and sold the house.
Katrina was about forty-five, the same age as Chris’s mother, when she moved into the boarding house. She stayed in her room and sewed and knitted. She made Chris elaborate jerseys. Her room smelled funny and so did the garments she made until they were washed. She ate all her meals in her room and used a chamber pot as well. Sometimes, when the other boarders were out, she would cook
a big Chinese meal using Japanese ingredients like ginger, soy sauce, noodles, fish and rice. She spoke English with an accent like a Japanese as well. Two of the other boarders weren’t sympathetic. They used Katrina as an excuse not to pay rent. ‘If she doesn’t pay,’ said old Mr Parsons from the first war, ‘why should I?’ He used to refer to her as a Jap and a Yellow Devil. He talked about her a lot. Chris’s mother explained to Chris that she couldn’t kick Mr Parsons out because he would go to the police. The other boarder who took exception to Katrina was a woman of about thirty-five, a typist named Nadine, who also refused to pay rent. She wanted Katrina’s room as well. She said that the windows in Katrina’s room were wasted because the curtains were always drawn. Why couldn’t Katrina have her smaller, windowless room? Chris’s mother would tell her that Katrina needed a larger room because she lived in it all day every day. Nadine kept complaining to old Mr Parsons about it. It was all they ever talked about as far as Chris could tell. And then Patrick would ring from Japan about the finances and his mother would put the phone down and light a cigarette. When Chris came home from school one day, Katrina was gone. His mum told him she’d gone to a safer place. One of his most vivid memories of that time is Nadine beginning to move her stuff into Katrina’s room and his mother throwing it out onto the street. He’d been surprised by her strength and fury. There was a lot of yelling, and bad language even. Nadine left in tears, taking her few possessions. But his mother’s fury had not abated. When she began throwing Mr Parsons’ stuff onto the street as well, he’d joined in and helped. A few days later the fire happened.
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