Surrender

by Malane, Donna

  Kazu became my watering hole in the months after Niki died — the place where I’d drink methodically until either Sean picked me up at the end of his shift, or I staggered down to a cab in Courtenay Place. Robbie said he’d spent a fair bit of time in Kazu as well, and we expressed surprise at not having seen each other there. Maybe he had seen me during that time and was just being polite, or maybe the time for seeing each other just wasn’t right.

  I could still remember the first time I set eyes on Sean. Straight away I knew … well, I knew something. I knew we were going to slam into each other in every way it’s possible for two people to slam. I knew he would turn my world inside out and upside down. I knew I was going to fall in love, and I knew that eventually it was going to hurt like hell, and I knew too that it would be worth it. There hadn’t been anything like that when I’d met Robbie, no big premonitions, but the man was undoubtedly having an effect on me, and I was liking it.

  Too wired to stay inside, I walked out to the curb to wait for my taxi. All that agonising over which undies to wear had made me late. The night was clear and still, the moon shone brightly, and all the street lamps were lit, so there was no excuse for me not to pay more attention to the man walking towards me, his collar turned up against the non-existent rain, his head bent on non-existent thoughts.

  Lost in the future, I didn’t even notice him until he was up in my face saying something about a light. Before I could register a response, his punch landed in my gut with such force that I fell into him, winded, retching and in agony. Pain roared in my senses and blocked out any thoughts trying desperately to register. As I was half dragged, half carried across the pavement, in some stuttering part of my brain I could hear Wolf barking and bashing his paws against the window, but it was distant, removed somehow, as if the world had become an old super-eight movie running at the wrong speed — frames dropping out entirely, or flickering, blurred. My yell became nothing more than drool and a retching groan. It had all happened so damn fast.

  I registered the car I was being dragged to as a big, black four-door Holden Commodore sedan, probably about six or seven years old. I even noted the tyres were Turanza ER 300s — the ones with the asymmetrical tread — before I was slammed head first into the gap between the front and back seats. With no time to raise my hands to soften the crash, I went straight down, cracking my forehead on something on the way. My legs were shoved in after me, the force of it ramming my head further under the front passenger seat. A nasty carpet burn stung my cheek, and I tasted the saltiness of blood. I heard the car door slam shut, and before I’d even thought of trying to pull my head out from under the seat, the driver had started the car and slid it quietly out from the curb.

  I spent the first thirty seconds trying not to pass out. When the next big black wave rolled towards me I rubbed my grazed cheek into the flooring, hoping the pain would keep me conscious. The carpet smelt of bubblegum. Okay, I figured, if I could smell, it probably meant my nose wasn’t broken. That was something. My knee, I wasn’t so optimistic about.

  A high-pitched screaming noise was going on and on — for one truly weird minute I thought it might be me making the sound. The taste of my own blood was strangely comforting. A voice suddenly cut through the screaming, and as I tried desperately to make sense of his words, the high-pitched wailing sound receded to background noise. So it wasn’t me screaming, then. Good.

  That stutter-frame film thing was still happening, and at first I could only register every second or third word he said. I heard ‘bitch’ and ‘cops’, and then the word ‘blackmail’ crashed through. I gritted my teeth, blocked out the pain my body was screaming at me to do something about, and tried to focus on each word, but still I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. It wasn’t until I heard ‘Bonnie’ that I truly focused. Bonnie — Niki’s working name.

  ‘… bitch sister of yours destroyed my life and I’m not going to let you start that all over again.’

  Even though I’d never heard him speak, even though my ‘bitch sister’ had probably destroyed a lot of men’s lives, I knew immediately which one this was. Chris Ross. The man who’d hired Snow to kill Niki, and then killed Snow to shut him up. Spying on Ross from the alleyway had been a stupid mistake and I’d known it at the time. Being busted by Ross in the act of doing it was even stupider. Fuck! If I hadn’t already figured it, I knew now, without any doubt, that I was in very deep shit.

  Fully conscious now, my brain was working in ‘oh shit!’ hyper-survival mode while my body had effectively switched into sleep function. I had no feeling at all from my neck down. My brain told me it had been forced to turn off its pain awareness sector while it got me to wake the fuck up and start thinking! If my body position had allowed it, I’d have kicked myself. From the moment we’d pulled away from the curb I should have concentrated on the route, counted the turns and directions the sedan made, and registered the sounds we drove past that might give me a clue to where my kidnapper was taking me. I concentrated really hard, but all I heard was the noise of a grinding universal and Ross’s ranting.

  ‘Janine wouldn’t even let me see the kids. Said I was a sad, sick fuck and she didn’t want her children exposed to that. I’d already paid Bonnie everything I had, and then Janine went and took the rest.’ He paused in his rant and I felt his weight shift in the seat.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to have you fuck me over all over again.’

  His voice was louder as he turned to look over his shoulder. He’s changing lanes, I thought, and couldn’t resist a smile at my cleverness as I felt the car surge to the left, then straighten up again. Carefully, quietly, I inched my head back out from under the front passenger seat. I needed to get my face turned around so I could see out the car window. Even prone on the floor, I was hopeful I’d be able to glimpse high-rises or advertising hoardings, and maybe get a bead on where I was.

  It was a slow and excruciating process, and I had to block out the worst of the pain signals that flared through my brain’s temporary barrier. Ross raved on but I wasn’t listening any more. It took maybe two or three minutes but eventually I got my head out from under the seat. Still lying on my stomach, my legs thrust up beneath me, I managed to twist my shoulders and neck around to face the passenger window directly behind Ross. I could see the back of his head, the black woollen jacket collar pulled up, thinning greasy hair combed close against his scalp. Blue-black sky. Nothing else. No buildings. No advertisement banners. No neon lights.

  I let my head fall back to the floor and rested my cheek against the carpet while I took in a couple of deep breaths. Okay, I thought, we’re not in the CBD then. I shut my eyes and tried to gauge the speed we were travelling at. Too fast for Courtenay Place. I’d have caught a glimpse of high-rises. He wasn’t stopping for traffic light changes, so that counted out both Lambton and Aotea Quays. The car hadn’t slowed for some time. No one gets that many green lights, I thought, and then congratulated myself: okay, good, you’re doing good. And we hadn’t gone through enough intersections or turns for this to be the suburbs. Very slowly, I turned my head again. Suddenly a big, oblong orange light flew past the window. Moments later, a car horn directly behind my head blasted, and I saw Ross glance out the passenger window. We were on the motorway. That explained why the car interior was so well lit.

  I felt a wave of euphoria at this little success, which just goes to show that sometimes you can take happiness from even the most ghastly situations in life. Now I just had to figure out which motorway we were on. Either we were heading north on state highway one, or we were on highway two heading out towards the Hutt Valley. If we were on SH1, I reckoned by now we would be some way past the Johnsonville off-ramp. If we were on SH2, I’d know it when we hit the winding hill road over to the Wairarapa. Niki used to rather gleefully call it ‘Diane’s Vomit Hill’ for obvious reason, and lying as I was on the floor of the car, I knew I would react in technicolour to the first major bend we hit. I tuned Ross in again. He hadn’t pau
sed in his rant since he’d thrown me in the back.

  ‘… the cops after me saying I killed her … whole fuckin’ nightmare started up … and then you’re snooping around my place setting me up again … no way, man, no way am I going to have my life destroyed all over again …’ He had a glottal click, probably caused by too much spit. He needed to swallow more or talk less.

  Concentrating on sounds and analysing them was working — my panic was beginning to subside. Unfortunately, as the adrenalin settled, the pain started to filter through. It was nudging at my senses already, impatient to be registered. I knew when the pain did successfully breach my brain’s flimsy resistance, it would be brutal. I needed to know where I was, and I needed to know before the pain hit.

  Tuning Ross’s voice out again, I focused all my attention on the other sounds. The Holden’s motor had the whine of a sleep-deprived three year old — it sounded to me like the transmission was shot. That was going to be a costly fix for Ross, I thought, and was not surprised at the lack of sympathy I felt about that.

  The low hum of traffic shifted in register as the car drove up what felt like a ramp or turn-off, veered right, then down again. An overbridge? We slowed, then accelerated through what I thought might be a roundabout, and then the car slowed and stopped, engine idling. Traffic lights. I heard the whirr of the driver’s window sliding down, the rustle of a wrapper being crushed in Ross’s fist. I focused on the new sounds through the open window — something soft, repetitive and familiar. The sound tickled at the edges of my memory, but before I could place it, the window whirred back up and the car lurched forward. Pain was pushing solidly at me now, demanding to be acknowledged. I had two, maybe three heartbeats before I’d have to let it take over. I wrenched my head around so that both ears were off the carpet. Stereo. Two things happened at once. I realised what the sound I’d heard was. Waves. Little shushing waves. The other thing that happened was an electric jolt of pain so fierce, so encompassing, so overwhelming, that I felt myself lurch into blackness.

  CHAPTER 22

  I surfaced to a kind of wakefulness, and then sank again. It was as if I was floating on a sea of consciousness. A wave of awareness would swell beneath me, and I’d open my eyes to a race of clouds whipping across a pastel-blue sky. Occasionally a break in the clouds would reveal a glimpse of the moon, or maybe it was the sun. I didn’t care. The howling wind and the lonely cry of seagulls surrounded me always. My thirst was a terrible thing. I could hear the sound of teeth grinding. Was it me? Was I doing that? My hand wouldn’t move, caught somehow. I let myself sink again into the deep, long, oily blackness.

  I surfaced again. I knew time had passed. Deathly cold. Maybe I’m dead, I thought. Maybe this is what death is. A surging, swelling kind of nothingness. With that thought came a little bubble of fear. I noticed my legs were shaking so hard my ankles thumped on a concrete floor. Your body can’t shake if it’s dead, I told myself. I’m alive — and with that thought I gratefully sank again into a kind of semi-death.

  That time, long, long ago, when Peaches had walloped me over the head with a cricket bat, there had been no sense of time passing. One second I was in Snow’s bedroom, and then, wham! What seemed like the very next second I was in a different room with one hell of a sore head, and the incongruous sight of Peaches in an evening dress swinging a Kookaburra.

  But this time I surfaced again and again from unconsciousness, and at each surfacing, though I didn’t know where I was — didn’t care where I was — I knew more time had passed, and that at every surfacing I was colder and thirstier. And then eventually I became aware of myself in a place — a freezing, windy, lonely place. And then I sank again into the sweet, soft, breathing darkness.

  Time surged by. An achingly slow, painful torture of minutes passed like a nightmare where you try and run but can’t move. After what must have been hours, maybe days of this, I drifted to the surface of consciousness; and this time, like the flipside of going under an anaesthetic, I made myself stay there, counting one, two, three — willing myself with each subsequent number to reach a higher level of wakefulness. It was like slowly rising out of a deep hypnotism.

  At twenty I opened my eyes. A whip lashed across my eyeballs, and I felt warm liquid dribble down my cheeks. I immediately fell back into the comforting blackness. Minutes, maybe hours passed, and then I was aware of myself again, and again I forced myself to stay conscious by counting. This time when I reached twenty I kept my eyes shut and focused on myself. It was like opening floodgates as the awareness of pain and thirst smashed into me.

  The torture of thirst was far greater than the pain. My tongue had swollen to an enormous hard dry muscle. It feels like a parrot’s tongue, I thought, and rested on the image of a parrot — took refuge in remembering the sweet beauty of garish feathers, paint-box blue and Lego yellow — and from there my mind wandered to favourite children’s stories I’d read aloud to Niki. Lines from The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch echoed in the distant, timeless void — out there? In my mind? I couldn’t tell the difference any more. I tried to remember the name of the lighthouse keeper — Grinland? Grinning?

  A part of me knew what was happening: my brain was comforting me with pleasant memories, free-wheeling from one anodyne thought to another, trying to help me out by imagining pleasant, comforting, everyday things, so I wouldn’t have to face the horror of my reality. I felt a welling of gratitude for that and observed myself weeping. But there were no tears; everything about me was parched and dry as bleached, windswept driftwood.

  I think it was hours later that I surfaced again. This time I lifted my eyelids fractionally, exposing only slits of eyeballs. Something lashed my cheek — a thick swatch of matted hair, crusted with blood and salt. So that’s what the whip was — my hair.

  I focused on my body. There was something wrong with my left hand. I couldn’t move it. Okay, leave that for now. I forced myself to stay conscious as I took in the immediate surroundings. I was curled up in an enforced foetal position, my body wrapped around an iron ring cemented into a concrete floor, my left wrist secured to it by a hard plastic pull-through handcuff. I was inside what appeared to be a three-sided bunker, my body curled towards a concrete wall built into the clay bank.

  Okay, I congratulated myself. Well done. Now for the big one. I needed to know where the bunker was, and that meant turning my body to face the freezing whip of wind at my back. I took a long, deep breath and rolled my body over. The wind slammed into me like a car crash. The open side of the bunker faced a heaving black mass of water stippled with moonlight. I counted ten deep, slow breaths, willing myself not to black out again. I knew where I was: Fitzroy Bay on the hill above the Pencarrow lighthouse. I was in an old WW2 lookout bunker, dug into a hill above the deep, unsettled waters of Cook Strait.

  Grinling. That was the name of the lighthouse keeper whose wife had fought so valiantly to stop the seagulls eating her husband’s lunch. It was Grinling.

  A couple of years ago, Sean and I had hired mountain bikes and cycled around the winding clay and shingle coastal track as far as Fitzroy Bay where the Pencarrow lighthouse winked at the ferries, and container ships hacked their course between the North and South Islands. I remembered it as a pleasant, easy jaunt of maybe six or seven kilometres from Eastbourne to the Bay. The memory of that was reassuring. Beyond this bay, the track became rougher, stonier, and much more difficult to ride on, and then increasingly tricky for some twenty kilometres before it finally reached Palliser Bay.

  We’d decided the lighthouse was far enough for us that day. We weren’t doing the ride for fitness, and were happy to lie around on a little grassy knoll above the lighthouse and lick salt spray off each other’s skin. I suddenly remembered with a lurch of excitement that there was a lake, somewhere inland and not far from this bunker. Rather than return by the same coastal track, we’d ridden our bikes inland from the bay looking for a short cut back to town, and we’d come across a small reedy lake where we stopped to watch
the resident ducks skidding in to land on the water, their webbed feet stuck out in front like toppling water-skiers.

  The memory of the lake was excruciating. I knew I didn’t have a hope of finding it again. Reluctantly, I forced myself to abandon the possibility, and turned my thoughts back to the coastal road. Presumably Ross had driven his Commodore in from the Eastbourne end, but I had no idea how he’d got me from the dirt track up the hill to the bunker. Maybe I’d climbed with him; maybe he’d dragged or carried me. I couldn’t remember anything after realising his car was heading along the foreshore of Petone.

  I imagined myself dying up here on this wild, windswept outcrop of land, and merged that image with one of Niki dead on the manicured lawn of the Island Bay golf course. There was a strange sort of rightness to it. Niki had always been the tidy one, had never lost her compulsion to put things in order, tidy them away. She’d stopped counting lamp posts once I’d convinced her that the Good Luk! knickers would work their charm, but she’d continued to snip, trim and pluck at herself obsessively. She tried to keep it hidden from me and I let her think she succeeded, but there was little she could keep secret from me. That’s what I thought anyway, until recently.

  I slitted my eyes open again, and this time made out a sprinkling of the city’s lights in the distance. So it was coming on to evening. I let this thought ping-pong around in my brain for a while until I could work up the courage to accept what it meant. This wasn’t the same night I’d been kidnapped. One whole day at least had passed while I’d risen and fallen in and out of consciousness. I had to work very hard to hold down the panic that threatened.

  Broken glass, graffiti, and the remnants of a fire meant people had been here in the bunker at some time. The thought brought some comfort. I wouldn’t let myself dwell on the possibility the debris was years old. I wouldn’t let myself think about what a god-forsaken place this was. Bikers and even walkers did the coastal track, but that was way below where I was. No matter how loud I screamed, only the seagulls would hear me, and they didn’t care. I couldn’t make any noise anyway. My swollen tongue made even breathing difficult. Some hardy, intrepid off-road bikers might take it into their heads to come up here, but it was unlikely.