by Ella West
‘The detective’s son, the one here for the murder investigation.’ She drags out the word murder as she ducks under the covered walkway. I follow her and the drips from the spouting splatter down my back.
‘Who is he?’ I play dumb.
‘We don’t know his name. Yet.’
‘Yet?’
‘Rachel and I are planning to go out to the Cape Pub tonight. Her sister’s taking us. Apparently he and his dad have been eating there. They’re staying at Barney’s Lodge.’
‘So, what, are you just going to go up to him and start talking?’
‘Why not?’
‘Isn’t that a bit obvious? And maybe he doesn’t want to be bothered. Maybe he’s already got a girlfriend.’
‘Who said I wanted to be his girlfriend? Anyway, maybe he’s lonely and wants to meet some locals. He’s our age, maybe a little bit older. And he’s cute.’
‘Cute?’ Some younger kids jostle us going the other way, trying to keep dry under the walkway too. Sam glares at them.
‘In a cowboy sort of way,’ she says. ‘Rachel said when she saw him he was wearing a cowboy hat.’
‘Where?’
‘It was a black cowboy hat. At the Cape Pub. He took it off to eat. Put it on the chair next to him. I mean, who does that?’
‘So Rachel has already seen him there?’
‘But she was too nervous to go up and talk to him. That’s why we’re both going tonight. Together, you know. Safety in numbers.’ She pulls open the door to the classroom and the conversation is finished with.
All the way through English I think about texting Jack about it, but what would I say? Don’t go to the Cape Pub tonight? And what would he say back? I’m also thinking about Pete. Jack had said yesterday that he was still missing. It’s been five days now since he blew up his house and no one has seen him, except me, I suppose (although technically I didn’t see him). So where is he? Where is he sleeping, how is he getting food to eat? His car is still sitting outside his house, destroyed by the explosion and the fire, but he could have hitchhiked to Canterbury or gone Nelson way, got a ride with friends. Somehow I doubt it, though. This is his home. He was born here; second, third generation, maybe more. He doesn’t know anywhere else, he’s never gone anywhere else. He won’t leave. Not when they’re looking for him. He’ll be hiding.
So if he’s still here, where would he go? If he had somehow planned the explosion, did he manage to grab a sleeping bag, a tent, a gun, beforehand? Maybe. If he shot up the police station around midnight and then went home, would he have had enough time to set the explosives, pack a bag, plan where to go? (English, we’re doing persuasive writing, is dead boring.) But none of it makes sense. Pete wouldn’t hurt anyone or anything, I remember Harry Brown saying that on Sunday morning. He couldn’t even shoot his own dog when it needed to be put down, so why would he attempt to shoot a cop at the police station?
There’s a lot of bush on the other side of the road from the beach. Up into those hills, Mount Rochfort. Dense bush. Bush where no one would find you.
I glance across the classroom at Sam, at her long dark hair, her perfect face, her lips with their unmissable trace of lip gloss, and wonder what she would say to Jack and what he would say back to her. Maybe I should just get up and walk over to her desk right now and tell her that his name is Jack Robertson and that he wears a cowboy hat because he is a cowboy. A real cowboy. But then again, why bother? Why bother at all?
When I get into the car with Mum after school, Jack is texting me: Beach, four? I brush my phone against my skirt, trying to dry the rain off it.
‘Is that Dad?’ Mum asks.
‘No. Why would it be?’
‘He wants you to go with him this afternoon. Through the gorge. He’s going to hold the train at Stafford Street for you. I’m taking you home to get changed out of your uniform.’
‘Do I have to go?’
‘When was the last time you did this together? When you were ten? Come on, this is special. You know it is.’
I text back to Jack that I can’t make it. Mum and I don’t talk the whole way home.
Dad is out of the engine talking to someone in one of the white trucks that service the line when we get there. He’s got the train up by the railway crossing, still rumbling. Dairy cows are walking along a muddy track on the other side of the road, nose to tail over the railway line, on their way to milking. A few of them glance our way.
‘Hello, pet,’ Dad says to me, after ending the conversation with the man. ‘Supervisor’s not around so I thought we’d take the chance. Climb on up.’ As Mum drives off I do what I’m told. The door is already open above me.
Being in a train is nothing like being in a car. For starters you’re really high up and the seats are big and there are no seatbelts. If there’s going to be a crash, drivers are supposed to lie flat on the floor, whatever that would do to save them. Dad has never had the chance to try it out, which I’m quite glad about. Not that he hasn’t had accidents. Besides the Brown’s cow, he’s hit a car or a motorbike or something on a railway crossing most years, more accidents than truck drivers have. He always says that trains don’t swerve to purposely hit cars. My advice: when you’re driving, take a good long look both ways before crossing a railway line.
I’m in the left-hand seat. Dad has climbed up into the right-hand seat. The controls are in front of him but there are a few dials and stuff my side as well. No steering wheel, not like in a car. There’s only one way to go, and that’s along the tracks. Dad is looking out the window, watching the last of the cows cross the railway line. Behind them is a woman in a raincoat and waterproof leggings, wearing a helmet, riding a four-wheel motorbike. She gives us a wave as she crosses the tracks and then stops the motorbike, gets off and shuts the farm gate behind her. Dad waves back.
‘I always watch out for those cows,’ Dad says. ‘They’re pretty good though, haven’t hit one yet.’
He pushes some buttons, pulls a lever and the train noise increases and we’re slowly moving forward. The tracks are well above the paddocks, built up in case of flooding, and we’re sitting pretty high as well, so we’re looking down on everything. It’s a great view. There are dairy farms and houses and patches of bush as the train starts to gather momentum and we head towards the gap in the mountains which is the start of the Buller River Gorge.
‘This is Te Kuha,’ Dad says. ‘Used to be a hotel here, and houses and a ferry that took cars across the river, before they built the bridge at Westport. Now nothing is here. Nothing left to even show what was here once. So much history.’
Dad pulls the radio down and tells Wellington Control where we are. It’s a safety thing. Every ten minutes he has to check in, just when we’re in the gorge. If we miss the ten-minute call they come looking for us. It’s one of only a few rail lines in New Zealand where the drivers have to do it, but then, being on this line, it’s easy to understand why.
Going upriver the tracks are on the left-hand side of the gorge and the road is on the right. There’s not enough room for both on one side. Even the road narrows to a single lane in places and in one area, at Hawks Crag, they had to blast the rock away to put the road in. On the rail side it’s worse. The line seems to cling to the sheer cliffs and on a day like today the volume of water coming off them is massive. It’s like we’re driving through one long waterfall. However, the danger comes from the trees. Somehow trees grow up there on the sheer rock above the river, above where the train runs. If the water dislodges them, a slip, there is only one place they will go – onto the line. And with the track snaking around so many corners Dad wouldn’t see a tree fallen onto the rails or the track completely gone until it was too late to stop. Or the trees, rock and everything else could all come down on top of him.
He’s always said the beauty of the area, even when it’s raining, makes up for the stress of driving through it. I’m not so sure. I’d rather have my dad around.
I look back out of the side window and see the train c
urving behind us as we chug over a bridge with a bend in it. Full coal wagon after full coal wagon follows us obediently in the rain.
‘River’s up,’ Dad says. ‘We could have a flood.’
The Buller is brown and swollen, eddies and currents churning the surface.
‘So, have you thought about what you want to do, when you’ve finished school and everything?’
‘Why?’
‘Just wondering. Making conversation. You never seem to talk about it.’
‘Maybe because I don’t know. I’ll probably stay around, find a job that I can do here. I was thinking of maybe working in the labs for the mines.’
‘I don’t think the mines will still be here, pet. Not by the time you finish school.’
‘Something with the bush, then. Possum control, looking after the tracks.’
‘You could go overseas, university, anything.’
‘I like it here.’
‘What if we’re not here?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This isn’t where we belong. We’re just here because of my job.’
‘But we’ve always lived here.’
‘No, we haven’t. We came here just before you were born. You know that.’
‘That’s still kind of forever, Dad.’
‘Might be for you, but it’s not for your mum and me. And it’s definitely not in West Coast terms. Remember, you have to have been born here to be a Coaster. Your mum and I are still imports. Always will be.’ Dad’s always said this in the past as if it’s a joke. This time he’s serious.
‘So?’
‘What I’m trying to tell you is that we have no ties here.’
‘You have lots of friends here, lots of people you know,’ I try to argue.
‘We have friends everywhere, and anyway, you make new ones.’
I look out of the window at the bush, dripping with water. Deep green against deeper green, ferns and the hanging needles of rimu trees and the tiny leaves of the beech, the large, paler leaves of the broadleaves, of rata. And I think about Christchurch. The city over the hill, where all my cousins live and my aunts and uncles and my grandmother and friends of my parents. We go there a couple of times a year to visit, to go shopping, for weddings and funerals. There are streets full of houses and cars and tall buildings and traffic lights and noise. Brown grass, no rain, no green. Just heat in the summer, freezing cold in the winter. Snow and ice. The city where Jack Robertson lives, and his girlfriend, Stella.
‘Would we go back to Christchurch if the mines closed? If you lose your job?’
‘Maybe, probably. Depends on where I find a job, or where your mum finds a job. But yes, that’s what we’re thinking.’
Dad stops the train at Inangahua Junction, at the end of the gorge, his shift for the day ended. Another driver takes over. We’re to take the car the other driver has brought up from Westport. I wait inside the car out of the rain while they talk briefly, then Dad climbs in, pushing the seat back. He’s taller than the other driver. He flicks on the windscreen wipers and headlights and we drive back through the gorge, on the road side this time.
Mum has spaghetti and meatballs ready when we get home. And garlic bread, which is pretty good. She asks how the trip went. I say something enthusiastic about how much I loved it, about how great it was, because that’s what she wants me to say, what Dad wants to hear. I know now that it’s probably the last time I will ever ride in the engine of a train through the Buller River Gorge. It’s probably the last time I will ride in the engine of a train with my dad. I figured it out in the silence on the way home in the car. I should have figured it out earlier. That’s why Dad had wanted to take me, why Mum had wanted me to go.
After tea I see Blue, throw him a slab of hay. He neighs and snorts at me, complaining that he didn’t get a ride today, that he didn’t get to see Tassie, but he eats the hay anyway. There’s only one thing he really cares about and that’s his stomach. I go inside and help Mum strip more wallpaper off the hall walls.
‘Don’t you have homework to do or something?’ she asks.
‘This has got to be done,’ I answer. And that’s the end of the conversation. She has got one side finished, and we’ve moved on to the other. We work away quietly, listening to the TV in the living room and Dad snoring (not quietly) in front of it.
Jack texts me halfway through the evening and I have to stop, knife poised, ready to rip a huge section of wallpaper off in one hit.
Do you know a Samantha?
Why? I text back.
How dangerous is she?
Very.
Thanks. Missed you today.
Don’t tell her that you know me.
Why?
Promise.
Okay.
I put the phone back in my pocket, not sure whether I can trust him or not. I’m trying to imagine what’s happening at the Cape Pub. It would be funny watching Jack texting me while he’s talking to Sam. She wouldn’t have a clue. If only I could be sitting in a corner, behind the pool table, watching it all. Listening. It would be hard not to laugh out loud. But then again, maybe Jack will like her.
I get the full story the next morning at school, but I have to ask for it.
‘So what happened?’
‘What do you mean, what happened?’ Sam replies.
‘Last night, you and Rachel were going to go to the Cape Pub to meet that guy in the cowboy hat. Was he there?’
‘He was there.’
‘So?’
School hasn’t started yet. We’re in a classroom, because the rain is pretty heavy outside. Sam is sitting at a desk; I’m perched on the windowsill.
‘So, what happened?’
‘He said he has a girlfriend.’
‘Bad luck,’ I say, trying to sound disappointed for her.
‘I know. He was still really nice, though. His name’s Jack. Jack Robertson. We talked lots. He wanted to know about school and people and what’s what.’
‘I bet he did.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I don’t know. He’s just someone from away. Probably thinks we all live in the bush or something.’
‘He was really nice. To Rachel too, and her sister.’
‘Was his dad there?’
‘Yep. He was nice too. He left early, as soon as they’d finished eating. Jack said something about him having lots of work to do.’
‘But Jack hung around talking with you?’
‘He bought us a few drinks, just orange juice and stuff. Although we said they would serve us alcohol, he didn’t want to buy it. We played a couple of games of pool. He was really good at it.’
‘I bet you he was.’
‘Why are you being so negative? Really, you should get out more. You know, do stuff. Meet people your own age. You should have come.’
‘I was busy.’
‘Maybe next time?’
‘I thought you said he had a girlfriend.’
‘So? We can still go and talk to him. She wasn’t there giving us the evils or anything. It was a fun night. Next time you should come.’
On the beach, after school, Jack questions me if it was a set-up or not. Unbelievable.
‘No, it wasn’t. She’d heard about you – everyone is talking about you, by the way – and she wanted to meet you. I couldn’t tell her don’t do it, could I? That you already have a girlfriend?’
‘Why not?’ he asks, adjusting a buckle on his saddle as we walk the horses on the sand just above the waves.
‘Because then she would know that I know you.’
‘And what would be wrong with that?’ He puts his foot back in the stirrup and looks at me.
‘You really have no idea about how people love to gossip in this town, do you?’
‘No, I don’t. You know, you have a lot of photos of Blue on Facebook.’
‘So?’
‘Most people have photos of their friends, their family, you know, themselves.’
‘Bl
ue is family.’
‘And you have only, like, forty-four friends. I am your forty-fourth friend. I don’t think I know anyone who has as few friends as you do on Facebook. Except my grandmother, maybe.’
‘I have a policy. They have to be real friends. Not just anybody. I have to know them and really like them and anyway—’ I’m interrupted by him taking his phone out of his inside jacket pocket and checking it. I wait.
‘It’s from Stella. She came second,’ he says excitedly. ‘Second in the barrel racing.’
‘Is second good?’
‘Really good. She’s pretty ecstatic.’
How he can tell someone on the other side of the world is ecstatic in a text is beyond me. And Tassie shows no sign of being ecstatic about the news, or even that she cares. Jack texts something back, then puts his phone in his pocket, but pulls it out again.
‘It’s Dad. Wanting to know if I’d heard Stella got second.’ He sighs, busy texting.
‘Sam said something about your dad being really busy,’ I say when he finally puts his phone away, wiping the rain off it first with the inside of his jacket.
‘He is, with this murder. It’s got them worried, and there are no leads. You seeing that raincoat has been the only real break so far. One man dead but no body; one man on the run, and no one’s seen him. For a town where supposedly everyone talks, no one is saying very much.’
‘They’re still searching for Pete, the guy who blew up the house across the road from us?’
‘Dad thinks he’s connected somehow. Maybe he helped in some way with the murder. They don’t know. But they want to talk to him, make sure he’s okay at the very least. That he’s alive.’
‘So have they checked his bank accounts, like they do on TV?’
‘Dad said he hasn’t used them. There’s nothing.’
‘So who actually got murdered?’
‘They don’t know that either. They just have this witness account of a body being dumped in the river and your neighbour freaking out about something, so freaked out he shot up the police station and then blew up his house – and there’s a whole heap of explosives missing too.’
‘Which were used to blow up the house.’