by Baker Chris
‘Good job,’ said Jim. ‘There are still people round I wouldn’t trust with a sharp stick.’
Jim had his own rifle and would occasionally vanish for a day or so, reappearing with a dressed sheep over his shoulder. Once somebody asked him where he was going, pikau on his back, rifle slung over his shoulder and axe in hand.
‘Woolly pigs,’ he said cryptically, a phrase that soon entered the common parlance, whenever somebody wanted some time out.
Jim was a Tarara, of mixed Maori-Dalmatian ancestry. Late in the 1800s a lot of Dalmatian men left Europe, looking for a new life away from chronic unpleasantness in the Balkans. When they arrived in Aotearoa, they worked in the gumfields of the north. Isolated and marginalised by the British settlers of the day and beguiled by the locals, some of them married Maori women. Eventually Dalmatian brides-to-be arrived and many of the local women were abandoned. But some of the marriages survived and Sean had met Maori people with names ending in -ich and -oj. Jim’s marae was near an old gumfield on the west coast but he preferred to stay close to his wife’s marae, a few kilometres outside Whangarei. He told Sean his story late one night in the kitchen.
‘I got sick, same as everyone around me. But I woke up. They didn’t. I nearly lost it then. I sat by the stream over the back for hours, and every time I went back, thinking maybe it had been an awful dream, they were still dead ... I lay in the stream for hours,’ he told Sean. ‘I got clean but I didn’t wake up.’
‘So what’d you do?’
‘I cleaned them up and set fire to everything. Then bugger me if I didn’t get hungry.’ Sean remembered the roast chicken. ‘So I ate the neighbour’s pet goat. Then I took his car. Mine was burned up.’
‘Thirty houses around Mira’s marae,’ said Jim. ‘Nobody alive, only dogs.’ He spat into the fire. ‘They didn’t look too hungry either, so I shot the fucking lot.’ Sean finished rolling his cigarette and lit it.
‘I checked all the houses then,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to hear somebody say "hey, bro!" But I didn’t hear a thing. So I set fire to every house.’ Sean poured glasses of brandy and pictured him at his terrible task, grim-faced and dry-eyed, all alone and unable to weep.
He wept in the Ngahere High School kitchen though, a candle on the table and some classroom framing in the fireplace throwing a soft and gentle light while Jim gave it all up. Sean wept with him. He couldn’t help it. A karanga or someone else’s tears would bring on the waterworks every time. The tears and snot could flow free. That night they slept on the concrete floor, passed out in front of the fire. Doug tossed a blanket over the two men and put pillows under their heads. Next day they had the worst hangovers either could remember.
‘Serves us right I suppose,’ Jim said, bleary and bilious in the sunlight. ‘But I don’t care, I needed that.’
A few days later Kevin hot-wired a car. Puru, Mike, Kevin and Sean drove to the centre of Whangarei. They wanted to see how things were. Through the open window came a mind-numbing stench. The town centre was deserted. Broken glass and wind-blown paper were strewn across the landscape.
Puru wrinkled his nose. ‘Man, this sucks,’ he said, just before Kevin stalled the car at a stop sign. ‘You don’t have to stop, cuz,’ he continued. ‘Who’s going to give you a ticket now?’ Kevin didn’t reply. He was trying to start the car. When it wouldn’t he turned to Puru.
‘It’s knackered,’ he said. ‘Got your cellphone? We better call AA.’
They were attacked by three different packs of dogs on the five-kilometre walk home. Ralph appeared during the second attack. Sean shook his head in disbelief at the middle-aged man with his quiet refined voice. Ralph wore a blood-spattered powder-blue tracksuit and carried a machete. He saved them a lot of ammunition. He leapt, crouched and struck with a savage abandon, severing spines and cleaving skulls. He hadn’t yet learned to wear leather on his forearms and both his sleeves were in tatters with the flesh beneath torn and bloody. That night in the wharenui Sean asked him why he was alone and walking north when they met.
‘A woman was raped where I was staying,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t right and I said so. The three men who did it told me if I didn’t shut up they’d kill me.’
‘What about the woman?’ said Mike.
‘I asked her to come with me, but she said she’d stay with what she knew. I think she felt safer where she was, horrible as those people were, and she might even have been right. I certainly couldn’t say.’ He gave Sean a searching look and seemed to see something he could relate to. ‘I’m an investment consultant. I like to listen to Mozart and Puccini. Read Proust and Camus. Or I used to. All the people I knew, my wife and daughter, my friends, are gone. I can’t live with those fellows.’ He gave Sean another look, almost apologetic. ‘Excuse me talking about myself. I never had to before.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Sean said, thinking of what lay in store for this quiet, professional man, with his suddenly discovered penchant for mayhem and his ‘death before dishonour’ stand against the lowlives in his former community. ‘I haven’t heard any Mozart, but if you go in the kitchen you’re likely to hear Dizzy Gillespie on Doug’s boombox. Feel free to use the school library too. Bound to be something for you in there. And don’t worry if you don’t like the music. The batteries won’t last forever.’
Sean could see Mike thinking ‘takes all sorts’. Mike had met Puru in Mt Eden when he was doing eight months for ripping off his employers — a firm of investment consultants.
Sean wondered if he’d say anything to Ralph, but he chose not to. Instead he said, ‘Bet you were a gun at tennis, eh bro!’
‘How did you know?’ replied Ralph, already a world away from investment opportunities.
Mike laughed. ‘If you swung a racquet like you swung that machete, move over Pistol Pete, Rocket Ralph is here!’
Ralph laughed too. He looked at Sean again.
‘You know, dreadful as this sounds, if I don’t think about my family too much, this new life is a lot more interesting than the old.’
Over the next few days Sean kept getting flashes of the awful feeling of vulnerability that came over him when the car broke down. He was conscious too, more than ever before, of the detachment and isolation he’d felt when the car door slammed. He suspected he was alone, though, in his distrust of motor vehicles, so he kept quiet — until Edgar spoke up.
‘You were lucky,’ he said to Sean in the kitchen one night. ‘You might have been badly mauled. Even killed.’ Edgar must have been a mind-reader, Sean thought. He’d never trusted cars and he’d always regarded the top speed of a bicycle as the absolute upper limit, even if he had acknowledged convention and convenience by driving an old gold-metal-flake Vauxhall Cresta. It had lime green, imitation lambswool lining overhead and flashing lights to show the firing order. The kids had been ashamed. When Sean drove them to school they made him drop them off around a corner two blocks away.
‘Big shrink!’ they told him. ‘What if somebody sees us?’
But he was relieved to hear Edgar’s misgivings, and the old man’s next words opened up a whole new world.
‘There’s a riding school about a mile up the road,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could try riding horses. You’d probably be safe on a horse.’
And there it was. Sean knew he’d be leaving soon. He didn’t know where he’d be going either. For all he knew he’d be travelling the length of the country. A horse. Of course. He laughed to himself at the old song. Then he remembered that in the whole of his life he’d never ridden a horse and he knew absolutely nothing about them. He had read somewhere they had a lot in common with cats — a snippet of information that eroded completely the little burst of enthusiasm and confidence Edgar’s words had wrought. Edgar’s next words didn’t help either.
‘But you won’t get me on a horse. I’d rather wait for a bus.
Sean sighed. Tomorrow.
Two teenage girls and a middle-aged man drove into the school the next day. The man lay feverish and in
coherent on the back seat. They put him to bed. That night Marie spoke to Sean in the kitchen.
‘You know, if he’s got anything contagious those girls’ll have it too, and before long the rest of us as well.’
Marie was right. It was contagious. Within two days the man was dead and both girls were sick, and inside a week some of the community were experiencing symptoms that scared them all. A few of them, needing privacy for nocturnal activities, had moved their mattresses out of the wharenui and into classrooms and offices. When the first of them started hallucinating with accompanying sweats and dizzies they all moved back in together and held their breath while they examined each other for signs of blood. To their vast relief there weren’t any, but it was a mean illness, a strain of flu they decided. There was awful dehydration brought about by everything going at both ends, nonstop, terrible vomiting and diarrhoea. Luckily they didn’t all get sick at once and anyone still on their feet brought water, cleaned up and did their best to look after everyone. Hemi and Cally didn’t get sick at all. Hemi took Sean’s sawn-off and ran the dogwatch every night, some nights on his own, and Cally kept the kitchen going, feeding the fire and even managing to cook watery stews that were probably exactly what people needed.
It killed four, including little Eric, and that left a bigger hole in Sean’s heart than almost anything. He never stopped missing the kid. Eric was three. Walking the streets in the first week, Jim heard him crying from hunger, fear and loneliness.
‘Man that kid could holler,’ he’d told them. ‘I heard him about a block away.’ Jim had stuffed him in a backpack and fought his way back to the school marae. Everyone who found their way there soon fell in love with Eric. Sean had never seen anyone throw food like Eric. He would hurl a bowl of stew against the wall, shattering the plate and covering a vast area with his meal. Puru always laughed.
‘Know how you feel, kid,’ he’d say, extending a large hand palm up.
‘Gimme five, bro,’ he’d say then, all serious. Eric would glower and snort and then break into the most radiant smile, slapping Puru’s hand and laughing.
They buried Eric in a hastily fenced cemetery, along with the middle-aged man who brought the flu, young Naomi who slipped away so quietly, her ethereal adolescence wrapped around her like the most insubstantial of shrouds, and Edgar’s mate, Bill, who had often regaled people with his merchant navy adventures from World War Two, up the Clyde for a refit and brawling with the ‘poison dwarves’ from Partic.
Sean felt Eric’s death more keenly than the loss of his own family, and Puru was inconsolable. They wept and wailed over their family for three days but all the tangi didn’t make them feel any better. All their work hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t saved Eric and the other members of their family and nothing could have helped. They were cheated and let down. They’d done their best and the hammer was still descending.
After the burial they gathered in the dining room for the traditional meal, except everyone was subdued, nobody was singing or laughing. Puru leapt to his feet in the middle of the meal, up-ending the table and scattering plates of food.
‘Fuck this!’ he roared, berserk with grief and rage. He stormed out of the hall and by dark he’d demolished two classrooms. Charlene took him a cup of tea at one stage. He was still crying, she said when she returned. She’d put the tea down and moved away from the wild swings of his sledgehammer, tearful herself but frightened by the depth of his passion.
It was mostly Edgar who saved them. Sean wasn’t really sure what he did, but somehow he inserted himself into all their lives and his gentle wisdom and humour was a most effective antidote against the depression that followed the sickness and the funerals. Sean asked him once how he felt.
‘I’m a tough old bastard,’ he said. ‘Take more than a bug to get me down.’
Edgar had been a navigator in Lancaster bombers during World War Two. He’ told Sean stories about their training at Edmonton in Canada. A British flag had flown from a flagpole by the gate. Orders were issued that everyone, coming and going, would salute it. The Kiwi contingent was unimpressed. Mindful of the historical precedent of Hone Heke, they cut the flagpole down and, chopping it up, fed it into the woodstove in their barracks during the thirty-below sub-Arctic winter. The Brits never did get the measure of the Kiwis and Aussies, Edgar said. Their officers were always making references to ‘colonials’, but they couldn’t hide their fear of these irreverent laughing men, to whom class was nothing but a joke and mana the only thing worth respecting.
‘We made our own way then and we’re doing it now,’ Edgar said. ‘Never mind the details. They’ll only get you down.’
Edgar had spent over two years in a German POW camp. He’d eat anything and he hated dogs. And he knew all about details too.
They recovered. Their humour was blacker and overnight they’d become harder, but somehow they were closer, more centred in the moment, and more aware of each other. Brian had been paying special attention to Cathy, sitting close to her in the wharenui, bringing her food and even feeding her at times when her sadness overwhelmed her and left her unable to move.
‘You’re just sweet on her,’ Marie teased him after everyone was back on their feet and it was safe to talk to each other without a flood of tears or a bite in the leg. But everybody was pleased the day Cathy brought Brian a cup of tea.
‘I forget, one sugar or two?’
Actually, it was no sugar. Doug had achieved instant and universal abstinence when, with an evil grin, he’d waved a pair of pliers and offered to perform dental surgery on anyone who needed it. Between them, Doug and Marie had been handling all the medical matters like sprains, cuts, infections and even broken bones. They used the well-equipped school infirmary, and Marie’s detailed knowledge of natural cures, but it took them both a while to regain their confidence after the flu.
But the outburst of libidinous behaviour that happened after the flu took them all by surprise. Sean eventually figured it was the biological imperative to reproduce in the face of a threat to the species. He’d read once about a horrified group of US Peace Corps workers who arrived in the aftermath of an earthquake in South America. The locals weren’t interested in their clean-cut saviours. They were busy bonking.
Everywhere the young middle-class Americans looked, they were aghast to find bonking couples, and not just under bushes or behind buildings, but in the middle of the road and the village square, in full view, amid the rubble and devastation, with the finer things like decorum and discretion tossed to the wind.
Sean laughed, until he found out how they felt. One night he was in the kitchen describing to Doug how he’d tripped over a couple copulating in a doorway.
‘They didn’t care where they were,’ he was saying to Doug when Robyn came in, wearing a predatory look that had an amazingly sexy effect when combined with her usual long skirt and high-buttoned blouse. She gave a little wiggle and lifted an eyebrow at Sean. As he got to his feet, the conversation with Doug forgotten, a flood of testosterone burst the dam he wasn’t even aware of.
‘Your place or mine, girl?’ he managed to joke before they were rushing for the nearest classroom, tearing their clothes off as they went.
Robyn left him limp and exhausted. He lay on the floor for an hour, his head under a desk, but when he regained enough strength to get to his feet all he could think was that he wanted to go again. He was hopping through the door, no particular person in mind, when he was knocked over by Robyn returning. She was towing young Mark by the hand. She didn’t even see him.
The only person not affected by the lust that gripped everyone was Edgar. But he was certainly amused. He told Sean it was like Auckland after he was finally demobbed. He could have rooted himself silly, he said, except after two years in a POW camp he didn’t have the strength and now he simply couldn’t be bothered. He told Sean a joke.
‘They offered me super sex,’ he said. ‘I told them if it was all the same to them, I’d rather have the soup.’
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But for two or three weeks nobody was thinking about soup. All they could think about was how desirable was the person next to them. They didn’t even wonder if the attraction was mutual. It was, for a while at least, and they went at it like there was no tomorrow — indeed, there might not have been, although that sort of philosophical gem was far from Sean’s mind as he grunted and bonked along with everyone else.
Eventually everyone calmed down, and Sean was able to relate to people on a less carnal level. He especially liked spending time around Patrick. The man was discreet and near-invisible, but with an earthy presence, like the smell of a horse blanket or manuka in the rain. Patrick had grown up on a South Island high-country sheep station and had gone adventuring when he was sixteen. He looked like a mountain goat with his shaggy hair and satyr eyes and he was deceptively tough and strong. In his twenties, he and a friend had run overland treks in Africa, driving an old quad, a four-wheel-drive ex-Rhodesian Army truck, the length of the continent, braving the most amazing hazards from land mines to tsetse flies. Patrick laughed when he heard of Sean’s equine intentions.
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Just in case you pick yourself a failed pacer that trots like a water-filled balloon.’
Kevin, Patrick and Sean walked to the riding school together. They found half a dozen horses in an eaten-down paddock near a shed containing all the gear Patrick said they’d need — saddles, bridles, halters, reins, stirrups, surcingles, shoes, rasps, nails — and a big bin of apples they tipped out for the starving animals.
Patrick cast a practised eye over the six horses and chose three he thought would be suitable, shoeing them with an expert ease. Sean watched carefully while he worked and slowly became aware of a huge horse standing beside him, watching too, like he was sharing Sean’s interest. His mane was shaggy and dreadlocked. He had ‘TZ Nirm’ branded on his neck. The apples were making him fart, great gassy Braeburn billows that filled the shed where they were working and made Patrick laugh.