by Karina Halle
Mr. Orange has gone through a lot and I assume the Shaggin’ Wagon can take some more. We’re about three minutes up this rough, steep, drive when the bus starts to cough and shake and then comes to a stop.
Then it starts rolling backward.
“Put on the hand brake!” I manage to yell before the back wheels go over the side of the hill and the bus slumps to a stop amid a cloud of dust. Wind whistles in through the open back window.
Gemma slowly turns around and eyes me, her face pinched and panicked. I hate being the voice of reason. I want to flap my arms and panic, too.
“We’re good,” I manage to say. “Let’s take a look at her.”
I get out of the bus and come over to Gemma, opening her door. Once again she’s clad in shorts and I have a hard time concentrating on the bus instead of her smooth, fine legs, but I manage. Either Mr. Orange has run out of gas way before his time or he’s overheating.
One look at the engine tells me that it’s not the problem.
We’ve run out of gas and in the worst place possible.
Gemma looks absolutely embarrassed, and though she should be, I also can’t blame her. Considering everything that’s been going on with her, I should have been the one driving, not her. She needed to sit back and pull herself together. Or let herself unravel. I would be fine with either one.
“I’m such an idiot,” she moans, her head pressed against the steering wheel.
I place my hand on her back and rub. She flinches at first but I try not to take offense. I keep doing it, persistently, and eventually she relaxes into me. She’s saying more than she realizes; I just wish she’d let her body call all the shots.
“It’s just petrol,” I tell her, remembering to use the proper term. “I’m sure there’s someone just up the road who will give us some. People tend to understand this shit out in the country. I bet whoever lives here gets people like us once a week, dumbasses like me who think it’s a great idea to come up here and take pictures.”
Naturally, it’s up to the dumbass to journey up the rest of the steep, winding drive to find out if anyone actually lives up here. Gemma and Amber stay behind, keeping each other company, and I start the climb, hoping I don’t run into some backward sheep farmer.
Of course, that’s exactly who I run into.
I get to the top of the crest, my body covered in sweat, when I see a small, ramshackle farmhouse amid rolling fenced pastures as far as the eye can see.
There’s a man between it and me, holding a shotgun, a border collie at his side, staring up at him as if waiting for directions. Do I kill the punk or not, master?
“Uh, hi,” I say loudly, raising my arm in a wave. “We had a bit of car trouble down the road.”
The man stares at me. He’s wearing a leather coat over dirty jeans and a thick wool sweater, a cowboy hat on his head. His face is smudged with oil or something. He couldn’t look more stereotypical if he tried.
Somewhere in the distance, among the waving tussock, a sheep baahs.
I feel like I’ve wandered into an episode of Flight of the Conchords and someone is having a laugh at my expense.
I continue, slightly unnerved. “It’s nothing major, we just ran out of gas—sorry, petrol. We’re wondering if you have a jerry can and any petrol to spare, or maybe you could give us a ride into the nearest town?”
“Nearest town is Glentanner,” the man says, totally monotone. “Nearest petrol is Twizel. They’re both out of my way.”
“Okay,” I say, trying not to sound panicky. Guess I’ll be going back down to the bottom of the hill and trying to hitchhike or something. “Thanks anyway.”
I turn around and he calls out, “What will you give me?”
I stop and look at him. “Sorry, what?”
He just nods. “I said, what will you give me for the petrol. I have a jerry can in the shed if you’d like but petrol is expensive out here.”
“Oh, sure,” I say quickly and bring out my wallet from my jeans. “Um, I have some coins,” I say, rifling through it. The last cash I took out was in Wanaka, which reminds me that I owe Gemma a lot of money. “I have eighty cents,” I say pathetically. “But the girls probably have a load of cash.”
All right, now I’m just saying all the wrong stuff.
He raises his brow. “The girls?”
“My friends, they’re back at Mr. Orange, waiting for me.”
I can tell he wants to ask what Mr. Orange is but he only nods stiffly before turning and walking away. I wait there for at least five minutes as he disappears behind his house, debating whether to just give up and head back to the bus or stand there like an idiot and hope he comes back out.
My patience and/or stupidity pays off and he eventually emerges carrying a small red can of petrol. I do an inner whoop of joy in my head and then start walking back along the road just before he reaches me so I don’t have to do the awkward walk with a burly, silent sheep farmer.
The views are amazing on the way down, though, just as I thought, with the powder blue of Lake Pukaki stretching out to the bare suede hills of the east and up to the jagged white peaks of Mount Cook to the north. I want to stop and take a picture to paint later but I don’t dare with this man at my heels.
When we get back to Mr. Orange, Gemma and Amber are waiting, leaning against the side of the bus, facing the views and the sun. Once they see Mr. Friendly coming, they straighten to attention.
“Girls,” I say, “this kind gentleman has agreed to help us out with some petrol. Do either of you have some cash we can give him?”
The two of them start frantically digging. Amber pulls out a five-dollar bill and a bunch of lint and candy wrappers from her purse. Gemma frowns, flipping through her wallet.
“I just have my credit cards and my bank card,” Gemma says, her voice shaking slightly. “I spent my last bills this morning.”
I look at Mr. Friendly hopefully. “Will five bucks do?”
He gives me a level gaze. So does his dog. “It’s worth more than that. What else ya got?”
Oh boy. “Well, you see,” I say, scratching the back of my neck, “we were broken into the other day and they stole everything valuable.”
The farmer walks over to the bus and peers inside the window. “Sure is a nice specimen, though you should know better than to try and take her up roads like this.” Then he pauses. “What’s that?”
I join him by his side. He smells like strong cigarettes. I follow his gaze to the stack of seventies porn on the backseat. I had been rifling through it earlier, comparing the bushes of 1977 to 1979.
“Uh, really old Penthouse and such?”
He grunts. “All right. I’ll take it.”
“Say what?” I glance at Gemma and Amber huddling by the end of the bus.
“Petrol for the nudie mags. Fair trade. Keep your five dollars.”
“Really?” I ask, feeling momentarily torn up about it. “You sure you want those?”
“Oh, just give him my uncle’s porn stash, Josh,” Gemma hisses.
I do as she says, bringing them out of the bus and placing it in Mr. Friendly’s arms. “Do you want some Pink Floyd tapes to go with it?”
He scrunches up his face, the first emotion I’ve seen from him, and passes me the jerry can, before walking back up the hill, the dog trotting after him.
“Thank you!” I call after him. I look at Gemma who is shaking her head, her brows pinched in worry as she pushes past me to the driver’s side.
“Hey,” I say, touching her arm for her to stop. “I’ll drive. You just relax.”
“I’m fine,” she says, lying once again.
So I let her be, knowing if I insist, she’ll snap. She seems very close to losing it. I go and pour the can of petrol into the bus and Amber gets in the backseat, making sure I’m up in the front beside Gemma.
She starts the car and slides The Wall into the cassette player, as if to punish me for trying to sell the tapes to Mr. Friendly.
“Hey You” starts to play and my mind is focusing on the lyrics, applying them to Gemma. Is she feeling so desolate, alone, wanting to give in without a fight? It’s a tumultuous, heady song and it takes us down the steep dirt road, to the paved one that runs along Lake Pukaki. To my surprise she takes a right, heading back the way we came from Twizel.
“Aren’t we going to Mount Cook?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Lake Tekapo.”
I shrug, but I’m actually relieved that we’re heading back toward civilization. The whole running out of petrol and trading porn with a sheep farmer has put me in a weird mood, and tensions in the bus are running high, crisscrossing like threads in danger of snapping.
“What’s in Lake Tekapo?” I ask, trying to get her to talk, to open up. She’s slipped her sunnies on her eyes so I can’t try and read them.
“A very blue, very cold lake,” is her simple answer.
I eye Amber in the rearview mirror and she gives me a worried look in exchange. We’re just along for the ride.
We motor away from the mountains and toward the cloud-filtered sunshine and rolling brown hills of the east. Lake Tekapo seems to be a popular stop, and as we get closer I can see why. The lake is even bluer than Pukaki was and the town along the banks is a pleasing slice of civilization.
But we don’t stop there like I thought we would. Gemma keeps driving until we come to a turnoff and then she’s gunning it toward the lake. On one side of us the road curves along pine trees and holiday homes; on the other there is a stream and a picturesque stone church surrounded by snap-happy tour bus groups.
At a gravel lot at the very end, not far from the shore, she angrily slams Mr. Orange into park and jumps out of the bus. Instinctively I do the same, jumping out after her.
As I stand there watching, I know the memory is being ingrained into my head. The van is still running and “Comfortably Numb” is blaring from the speakers as Gemma strips down to her underwear and runs to the edge of the lake. She’s barefoot and she doesn’t even slip on the rocks as she goes. She’s running from something, she’s running to something. The water will be ice cold.
It’s just what she wants. She wants to be numb.
I’ve listened to this album enough damn times now to know that “Run Like Hell” will play soon. So I do. I run like hell toward her. I leave Amber in the back of Mr. Orange, puttering on Lake Tekapo’s shore, and I’m sprinting toward the water, unwilling to let her out of my sight.
She’s already splashing into the water, like a mermaid returning to a kingdom of blue milk. If the cold is shocking her, she doesn’t show it, it doesn’t slow her down. The lake splashes around her in Technicolor brilliance, her darkly tanned skin shimmering from the reflection.
In seconds she is diving under and I hold my breath as my legs and blood pump me forward. I’m bizarrely, acutely aware that she might not come up again. I think about what she told me, huddled in my rain jacket. I think I ache for things I may never get. I long for purpose, for life and yet sometimes I think I’m too afraid to live.
My fear is in not living.
We need to meet in the middle.
So I go into the lake after her. I’m stripped down to my boxers and T-shirt, my dusty jeans and flip-flops discarded somewhere between me and the bus, in a patch of purple and pink foxgloves.
It’s so cold I think I’m going to die. My lips open to yell, “Fuck me!” but my mouth is more intent on chattering my teeth together. Each step stabs stones into the soles of my feet and jagged knives of ice water into my legs until the feeling—all feeling—subsides.
I’m breathless, surrounded by ice blue, a color I’ve created myself when I’ve touched too much eggshell into too little cerulean. The shores are granite, a soft warm gray, peppered by the unimaginable greens and pinks of foxglove and whatever plants happen to spring up in this country. I’m swimming in a painting, numb, and I’m going for her, the bronze mermaid who wants to swim forever.
But she’s not mythical. She’s very real. It seems to take forever and eventually she breaks the surface, shrieking out in surprise and agony from the cold. It doesn’t numb her after all.
Perhaps in this case, the number you are, the closer you are to death.
Though she swam for a while under, it doesn’t take me long to catch up with her. I was an avid swimmer for years.
“What the hell?” I say to her between chattering teeth, spitting out lake water.
She stares at me, wide-eyed, her head above the surface as she treads water. Her wet, dark hair is slicked back from her forehead, an inky wave between her shoulders, her cheekbones highlighted by sun and water.
“I told you I wanted to come here,” she says, as if suddenly abandoning your van and stripping to your underwear in public is the norm.
I can’t help but smile at how blasé she tries to be about it. “A little warning would be nice.”
“Don’t worry about me, Josh,” she says.
I pause because something in my heart has swelled. “But I do.”
Oh god, how I fucking ever.
She holds my gaze and my fingers itch to reach through the water and touch her. A few days ago I wouldn’t have, not in public like this. But I want to see just how numb she is.
My hand glides forward, sluicing through the water in slow motion until it rests on her light and silky waist.
She stares at me, her eyes glowing white against her brown irises, and her brows thread together in contemplation, as if she’s trying to unravel me, uncover some truth. I know something is bothering her and I know it’s about me more than anything else. It should be a good thing that it bothers her because it means she cares.
I want to tell her that she’s all I’ve ever wanted. I want to show her.
She relaxes into my touch for one sweet moment of victory before she slowly ducks her head under the water. I’m not sure what she’s doing so I take in a breath and submerge my head.
The cold shocks my face and when I open my eyes under water they seem to immediately freeze. Gemma is a hazy vision of pale blue, her hair swirling around her. She is so beautiful it makes my chest ache more than the cold does.
Her eyes hold mine and I see that yearning in them again. She reaches forward, grabbing my face, and pulls my head toward her. She kisses me, full on the lips. It’s so warm against the cold and I’m afraid I’m about to drown from happiness. I want this and I want more than this.
I don’t know how long the kiss lasts—we seem to float through time and space—but our bodies foolishly decide oxygen is equally as important. She breaks away and I am left sucking in ice water before I break through the surface.
I gasp in the dry air, fingers touching my lips as if I can’t believe it, but she’s back to the way she was before. Impassive. Immovable. Numb.
“We should go back before Amber freaks out,” she says in a brisk tone, and in that moment I wish to be as numb as she is.
We swim back to shore and Amber comes running out of the van with towels for us. I know they’re the same towels that we put down to cover the parrot poo, but I’m too cold to care.
We run out into them and huddle together briefly, Amber yelling at us for being crazy, then head back into Mr. Orange. We get changed in the back, no one caring about nudity at this point, even though I can feel the girls’ eyes on my body as I strip, then we head into town to get a bowl of hot soup and coffee.
Gemma seems to brighten up a bit after that “swim” but I’m watching her closely and I don’t think it will last.
She’s too comfortable being numb.
Chapter Fourteen
JOSH
“Looks like you have to answer that age-old question, my friend,” Tibald s
ays as he raises his beer. “Can I sleep with a woman that I deem to be fucking crazy?”
I give him a steady look. “Gemma isn’t crazy.”
“Maybe not fucking crazy, but she’s not normal. Then again, neither are most girls and we sleep with them anyway. Some even marry them.” He finishes his thought with a shrug and a long drink of beer.
Pink Floyd’s “Breathe” comes on the speakers and I hunch over, groaning into my Speights ale. No matter where I go, I can’t escape this fucking band.
He pats me on the back. “But at least this fellow, Nick the Dick, is out of the picture.”
“Yeah but it doesn’t change anything,” I mumble.
Tibald and I are sitting in the Dux Live bar in Christchurch, the one place we’ve been able to meet up. Schnell and Michael are off at some fancy nightclub and Gemma and Amber are off doing their own girly thing. I needed a break from all the tension and was more than happy when they agreed to split for the night.
“Change is relative,” Tibald says. “Use your balls and act on it.”
I roll my eyes. “Tell me, Tibald, are you always spewing advice to people or do you ever get a taste of your own medicine?”
When his features go stony and grave, I feel like I’ve said the wrong thing.
“I did love someone,” he said, his voice flinty. “I was engaged to her. But she left me for my brother.”
I grimace. “Oh, dude, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
He exhales sharply out of his nose, then shakes his head and smiles. “It’s all right. It was a few years ago. It got me in the best shape of my life, so I can’t regret everything. Everything that happens, I believe, leads us where we need to be.” He finishes his beer and starts toying with the Speights coaster. “I know that sounds cheesy but whatever. It’s my belief and so it’s true.” He fixes his eye on me. “What do you believe, Joshua?”