by Baker Chris
The old people in the north had gone out of their way to be good to Te Rina and her family, and to Sean. They’d encouraged him to learn about fires and cooking, shelter, and most especially about the welcome and care of visitors and what he had come to see as the overwhelmingly precious nature of life. He’d been constantly reminded that some of them saw him as a rather leaky vessel in which to entrust the teachings that had sustained them all their lives. But that didn’t stop their kindness to him, and once he’d seen what was happening he was overwhelmed by the patient way they unwrapped his middle-class Pakeha upbringing and grafted on a view of the world where every action had consequences and aroha really was the only response to utu.
Sean had started off working as a journalist but before long he was doing bush and farm work, fencing, building, and attending hui all over the north. He’d loved it. Whenever he could he’d helped out in the kitchen, stoking fires, butchering sheep, preparing vegetables, scrubbing pots, cleaning camp ovens, and listening to the old folk chat about their lives, unchanged for generations, not greatly affected by the trappings of modern society. He’d suspected the twentieth century was just a bad dream for most of them, and somehow the things that were real and important to them had got through to him.
Those old aunties and uncles had offered gentle advice, nodding approvingly or looking away politely. He’d taken on as many of their customs and ways as he was able to grasp and he often heard Uncle Rangi or Uncle Joe laughing.
‘At least the roof doesn’t leak, boy. At least there’s something to eat tonight.’
Things were the way they were and you just handled them. And if there was any hurt involved they’d encouraged him to take as much of it as he could on himself.
‘Eat it, boy, till you’ve got a real gutsache. Then have a good shit. You’ll feel better after a while,’ they’d say.
Thinking of the old ones calmed Sean and stopped his tears. The rooster was crowing away like he couldn’t care less, not silenced by a soaking rain or even by Uncle Wire’s dog broken free from his chain and trying to find out what was wrong, where was everyone? Sean could feel the smoothness of the boards in the porch floor and see the kaka beak growing so that the black and rattly seedpods from last spring’s red flowers hung through the railings. The dog looked at him with deep suspicion, like all this disorder was his fault. It cocked a leg on the nearby gatepost and sidled over beside him.
Sean sat up, his head clear but very delicate, like the colours were too bright and the noises too sharp. The dog licked his face, its tongue smooth and warm and the gesture bursting with all the love and trust in the world. And Sean remembered there were people inside, they were here, now, and they needed looking after. He lit the fire in the copper and while the water was heating fed the dog some stinking mince from the fridge. When the water was hot, Sean took a bucketful in to Te Rina and the kids. He found a cake of soap and some clean towels.
It took him all day and all the hot water to wash them. He cried. He sang to them: nursery rhymes, old Rolling Stones songs, bits of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley anthems, hymns like ‘Whakaaria Mai’ and ‘Tama Ngakau Marie’. He changed their bedding. He brushed their hair and when he’d finished they all looked so peaceful. Not happy or sad, just not really there. He told them he loved them all and kissed them goodbye. Had he done enough? What else was there?
He fetched a can of petrol from the boot of the car, poured it all through the house and tossed a match from the door. The dog watched with him from the stone wall at the back of the house while everything burned up with an awful roar of finality. As the window glass exploded most of Sean was saying goodbye to his family — to Te Rina’s dreams, to Rewa’s poetry, to the laughter of the others and to the life he’d known. The world grew emptier as the flames died. But deep inside, a part of him was saying ‘What the fuck do I do now?’
He was stung by a sharp pang of hunger, a reverberating wrench that had him over the back fence and through the orchard to Uncle Wire’s place. The front door was shut and when Sean opened it, knowing the old man would probably be dead, the smell hit him full on. His empty gut heaved.
He left the door open and he and the dog sat outside on the steps. Slowly Sean collected himself. If he wanted food he’d have to go in the house. Anyway, it was only Uncle Wire. The old bugger always did have a lot of character.
The dog followed Sean into the kitchen, gingerly, like he knew he was breaking the rules but there was a fair chance he’d get away with it. Behind the door was a bag that Sean filled with a few basic supplies: tea, sugar, salt, flour, spuds, cooking oil.
Sean was glad to get out of the house. The lean-to, where he found a billy and a small camp oven, smelled a lot better. In the chook run the poor starving birds had killed and partly eaten two of their weaker brethren. He grabbed two more as they rushed the door, wrung their necks, plucked and gutted them and left them to hang while he lit a fire in Uncle Wire’s fireplace.
When the fire had burned down to a good bed of coals, Sean put the birds in the oven with some spuds, sprinkled everything with oil and salt, shovelled embers onto the lid and sat back to wait. The dog was full of biscuits but still highly interested. Hamuera was his name, Sean remembered, Hamu for short. He rolled the name around in his head and tried it out loud. The dog pricked up his ears. That’ll do, Sean thought, and patted his new friend’s head. Hamu panted.
Sean had been comfortable in the north when he and Te Rina moved next door to Uncle Wire and Auntie Megan. She’d died a year later. She was a Pakeha woman with fair hair and blue eyes. Uncle Wire used to call her his ‘pihikete’, his ‘biscuit’. He’d told Sean that when the Pakeha first sailed into the north, Maori women would go with the seamen, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes for a bag of biscuits, and if the resulting offspring had blue eyes or fair hair they’d been known as ‘biscuits’.
Uncle Wire had fought in World War Two, in North Africa and Italy. He hadn’t ever talked to Sean about the bad stuff, watching friends get blown up and machine-gunned, but he’d told marvellous tales of the Mediterranean people, the Cretans, Tunisians and Italians whose lives he’d shared and whose bravery he greatly admired. Uncle Wire’s heart hadn’t really been in his present home but rather in the countries where he’d been liked and respected, made welcome — where people had delighted in his love of women, good food and drink, a song and a joke.
‘Bugger these people,’ he used to growl after yet another unsatisfactory Land Court encounter. ‘They should get some service in.’
The food was cooked and Hamu was dribbling unashamedly. Sean tried hard not to think of times past, when Te Rina and the kids and Uncle Wire would be enjoying the legs, wings and breasts, washed down with Chateau Cardboard. They’d all be there, comfortable on the warm ground, laughing, singing and arguing, all a part of each other and bursting with life. He was sure Hamu felt it too, but that didn’t stop them devouring everything. When there was nothing left, not even the smallest bone, Sean lay down on an old sheepskin in the afternoon sun and slept.
The midnight cool woke him. Hamu twitched and dreamed beside him and a half-moon glowed high in the sky. He stoked the fire and took stock. Jeans, a swanny, bare feet. No home any more, only him and Hamu. No blanket either. But he found an old horse cover in the lean-to and sat by the fire sipping tea. His mind filled with questions.
Who was left? How would he find them? What if he was the only one? Perhaps he should stay where he was. No way. In the morning he’d be burning Uncle Wire and anyway he had to know what was happening. And he could hear Uncle Wire laughing.
‘What are you staying here for, boy? You don’t know what kehua want.’
3
IN THE MORNING, Sean made some fried bread in the camp oven and ate it with jam. It was as appetising as sun-baked roadkill. Everything felt ugly and unpleasant. It brought back the old days for Sean, like a really bad acid trip, the world twisted, awry, a sense of foreboding hanging in the air. Even Hamu was jittery, eyes
darting around, like the menace was something that could be seen and might attack them at any moment. Sean sat by the fire, a tin mug of tea in one hand, a piece of fried bread in the other. Hamu rolled his eyes and Sean felt death all around.
With the dog close by he walked to Uncle Wire’s shed. Fighting hard to concentrate, he unearthed a pair of sandals and an old jumper that smelled of smoke and eels. Sean held it over his nose while he poured petrol through Uncle Wire’s house. He threw a match from the door and was lost in the roar of the flames and the exploding windows. Uncle Wire’s ammunition woke him up, shotgun shells and .308 cartridges cracking and banging in the inferno. Hamu and Sean watched from under the old totara tree at the head of the drive. When the fire started to die down, Sean said goodbye to Uncle Wire, to his family, to the place that had been his home, and started out across the paddock.
It was an eight-kilometre walk into Ngahere, about two hours. He could have driven, but the keys to both his car and Uncle Wire’s truck had been in the burning houses, and hot-wiring vehicles was not among his life skills. Instinct kept him moving slowly, giving him time to get his head around the things he suspected he’d find. Sean’s dread grew with every step, Uncle Wire’s sandals going flip-flop as the sole of the right one came loose.
Sean used to work in Ngahere sometimes. He’d laid concrete drives and floors, and built fences for the cheap houses sold to starry-eyed young couples with lounge suites and whiteware on hock, freshly sown lawns and roadside plantings that looked like twigs stuck in clay by kids. The suburb was up on a hill, but nonetheless Te Rina had renamed it ‘The Sunken Village’.
‘You wouldn’t laugh if you had to live there,’ Sean had said to her.
It always felt to him like every other fibro-and-chipboard suburb where the kids tagged the fences — ‘Hip-hop rules, OK?’ — and the council collected the rates and commissioned sociological surveys with stirring recommendations that nobody could afford to implement.
Sean walked into the place, trying to focus his apprehension, thinking mainly of friends he’d had, and wondering whether or not they’d survived. Had any of them been forced to watch family members die around them? Had they burned and buried spouses and children? His imagination worked overtime but the stench brought him back with a nasty jolt. He should have expected it, but it quite took him by surprise.
Hamu’s growl made him turn. Out of a drive charged three dogs, barking and snarling. Hamu didn’t hesitate. He crouched as the lead dog, a heavy-jawed, spiked-collar mastiff cross, leapt at Sean. Hamu sprang and took the attacker by the throat. Sean seized the second dog around the neck and swung him, breaking his back on the kerb. The third dog fled. Hamu had his opponent, about twice his size, by the throat and on his back.
As he moved to one side for a better purchase Sean knee-dropped the mastiff and heard his ribs break. Hamu ripped his throat open. It must have taken all of five seconds.
Sean sat down on the kerb by the dog he’d killed. Hamu was growling, his hackles and his tail up, ready for any other attackers.
‘Good dog,’ Sean said. ‘You did really well.’
Hamu knew he had and wagged his tail, before giving his enemy’s corpse another bite in the neck and a shake. Sean remembered Uncle Wire telling him what a good pig dog he’d been in his younger years, baling and holding some very large boars. He thought of all the mean dogs — rotties, staffy crosses, pit bulls, ridgebacks and mastiff crosses — that he’d seen held in check only by owners meaner than themselves. He looked at Hamu.
‘Well, mate, we’d better get used to shite like that,’ he said. Hamu wagged and panted.
They didn’t go into the house where the dogs had been. There was no traffic, no noise anywhere; there were no people, no motor mowers, no chainsaws or hedge trimmers. Sean was aware of little more than the stench, like the smell in Uncle Wire’s house, not as concentrated but more pervasive, multiplied a thousand times and filtered through closed doors. He thought again of what it meant. Hundreds and hundreds of dead people. Bodies in every house, and he was only on the edge of the suburb. He couldn’t help himself. He threw up, sitting there on the kerb, Hamu sniffing round apparently unfazed. He thought of disease, rats. He was dirty. The stink made even shallow breaths feel disgusting.
And where was he going, anyway? What was he going to do? If there were other survivors where would he find them? Suddenly he was fighting the feeling of being in very deep trouble, way out of his depth. Words like confused and lonely didn’t even come close. Frightened didn’t cut it either. He felt a whisker away from giggling, babbling madness, like he was right on the edge of some mental precipice, all his footholds crumbled away and nothing to hold onto.
Hamu stuck his nose right in Sean’s ear. It was cold and wet and utterly shocking and it brought him back to earth like a handful of ice down the neck. Now he knew where to go. The place where everyone went to get what they needed — the mall. With its supermarket and specialty stores, it was probably the closest thing in Ngahere to a marae or a community centre — always somebody there using the public seating, the play area for the kids and the coffee bar where people gathered and gossiped.
Sean rose and started walking. His sandal sole got looser and doubled under his foot, tripped him and landed him face down on the grass verge, his nose in the mud and Hamu’s nose once again in his ear.
He should have known. The mall had always been full of light and life, purpose and activity, good smells and bright colours. It was dark now, and it stank. The reek of rotting food in the supermarket freezers seeped through the smashed doors and filled the empty concourse. The gloom was barely relieved by the merest smudge of light filtering through two or three tiny skylights. Sean picked his way carefully through the broken glass and into the supermarket, trying to ignore the smell. He grabbed two cans of baked beans and a packet of rice, not really out of need, more out of habit, and to Hamu’s obvious regret turned and crunched his way back out the door.
The man probably didn’t mean to give Sean a fright, but he certainly did, blood-streaked in the half-light and making noises like a landed fish drowning in the air. His eyes were ringed with black, like a kid who’d been at the mascara, and, from the look of him, Sean could see they’d each given the other a terrible turn. They sized each other up. They were both thinking the same thing — A live person. What do I do now?
The fellow collected his wits before Sean, and held out his hand.
‘My name’s Brian,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s dead.’ They stood there in silence, too shocked for relief, able to do nothing more than stare. Eventually Sean found his voice.
‘These sandals are stuffed. I need some new ones.’
Hamu bounced, pleased to see another human.
Neither of them said a word as they walked around the mall to the shoe shop. Still without speaking, Brian smashed the window with a Property Press box. Inside Sean found a pair of high boots with steel toecaps and in the shop next door a pair of thick wool socks. Back outside in the open air the smell was dreadful, but at least they could see. They sat on a bench and Sean struggled into his new footwear. His companion seemed unreal in his faded jeans and Hallensteins check shirt, one side hanging out and the buttons in the wrong holes.
Brian hugged himself and rocked. Maybe, like Sean, he was trying to cope with alternating waves of grief, shock and numbness. Sean turned and saw him looking.
‘I know you,’ Brian said. ‘My Sarah was in your Kiri’s class at school.’ His voice faded off.
‘Where’s your family now?’ Sean remembered open days at the Ngahere Primary School.
‘I buried them. I had them inside for a week but I couldn’t take the smell any more.’
‘I burned my family,’ Sean told him, and with nothing else to say they just sat side by side, staring into space. Eventually they moved, both at the same time. Sean shifted along the seat so their hips were touching and Brian put an arm around Sean’s shoulders. They were both weeping silently.
‘What are we going to do?’ Brian asked.
‘Stick together,’ was all Sean could think to say. They sat in silence for a few more minutes, then Sean spoke again.
‘Had any trouble with dogs?’ Brian nodded, then gestured towards the mall.
‘We’d better arm ourselves.’
In the gloom of a mall sports shop they could see rifles and shotguns in racks, chained by their trigger guards. It seemed to Sean that Brian moved like he was sleepwalking. They used bolt cutters from the next-door hardware shop to liberate a shotgun each, but as they picked up Rambo knives Brian came right back into the moment.
‘What about these other rifles?’ he said. ‘What if some video game freak decides to blow away anyone left?’
Sean was still thinking about what he’d said, wondering who’d smashed the supermarket doors, when Brian ducked back into the hardware store and came out with a sledgehammer, walking stooped with a low-browed glare like a Cro-Magnon warrior. Carefully he took each rifle, laid it on the floor and pounded the breech.
‘That should slow them up,’ he said, tossing the sledge into a corner. ‘And now for us. Do you want to come home to my place?’
Sean looked at him. He had dark rings round his eyes, a week of stubble, hair unkempt and clothes like he’d just butchered a sheep. Sean kept wanting to just drift away, to wake up, to be somewhere else. But Brian was sounding more self-assured, more centred, certainly more together than he had at first. Sean was starting to feel like he was losing his grip. He kept having to tell himself to focus, to concentrate, to stay with it.
‘Everything’s changed,’ Brian said. ‘We have to think differently. There’s nothing left now.’
Nothing. The word really hurt. Then Sean’s stomach rumbled, loud enough for Brian to hear.
‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘We can fire up my barbecue.’