Deadly Sky (ePub), The

by Hill, David

  Did she have bills to pay, maybe? His dad had sent them money since he took off for Australia, but sometimes it was a while before any arrived. That was one reason his mother was doing extra hours at her school.

  Darryl looked over at her again, sitting there and staring straight ahead. She’d hardly touched her dinner. Yeah, something was wrong, all right. Oh man, she and his father must be going to get divor— They’d decided, and now she was trying to work out how to tell him.

  He found he was gabbling, saying anything that lurched into his head, just to stop his mother from speaking. ‘I might get some books out of the library on nuclear weapons and stuff. We’ll be studying World War II in Form Five next year, if I take History.’ (You already said that, you stupid wally, his mind told him.) ‘That might come into it.’

  He realised his mother was watching him in surprise. After a minute, she said, ‘Did you know that you could see one of the explosions from New Zealand?’

  ‘From here? Incredible!’

  His mum nodded. ‘An American test, I think. As big as a million tons of high-explosive, the newspaper said. They let it off on an island away out in the Pacific. People up in Northland reckoned they saw a bright red glow on the horizon, with white streaks in it. And there was something about increased radioactivity measurements here for a couple of weeks afterwards.’

  Here? Darryl thought again. They shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Someone should … should protest.

  Mrs Davis poked at a potato as though she had just noticed it, then put her fork down on the table. ‘I’ll get pudding. Oh, listen to that rain! Brrrr, I’m fed up with winter!’ Even as she spoke, she was staring into space again.

  ‘I’ll light the fire as soon as I get home in the afternoons,’ Darryl heard himself saying this time. ‘Sorry I forgot today.’

  His mother looked at him. Really looked at him. She stood, walked over and put her arms around him. ‘Thanks, Da.’ She still called him by his childhood nickname sometimes; it was embarrassing in front of his friends. ‘Anyway, you’ll only have to do the fire for another three weeks. That’s all.’

  Oh, no, Darryl knew. They are getting divorced. We’re going to leave here and move somewhere else. I won’t see my friends again. I won’t see Dad again. He pulled away from his mother. ‘Why? What do you mean “only three weeks”? What’s wrong?’

  His mother straightened up, and pushed the hair back off his forehead. Darryl hated it when she did that; he was trying to grow his hair long, like The Rolling Stones on the cover of their new LP record, but she kept wanting him to get it cut.

  She smiled at him, then looked at the wall and seemed to make her mind up. ‘Nothing’s wrong. But the term finishes in three weeks, remember? And then you’re coming with me to Tahiti.’

  THREE

  Twenty days, eighteen hours and thirty-five minutes later, Darryl and his mother were 25,000 feet above the Tasman Sea, on a plane bound for Sydney.

  He had a couple of small bruises on one arm, where he’d kept pinching himself to believe it was truly, actually, genuinely happening.

  That evening at dinner when his mum had suddenly told him, he had gaped at her until she began laughing. ‘If you let your mouth hang open any more, I’ll drop some dinner into it.’ Darryl quickly shut his mouth, then opened it again to ask: ‘What? When? How? Why?’

  The Pacific Islands groups who helped organise getting girls to New Zealand high schools wanted to know more about what was available, Mrs Davis explained. Since the girls’ high where she worked took more Pacific students than anyone else, they had invited her to come and talk to schools and churches and other people. So she was visiting Tahiti, and then going to some really little place called Manga-something; so remote that they had to fly for hours to get there. They’d be away for about ten days.

  ‘Coming to New Zealand is a huge change for kids from the Islands,’ she said. ‘They get really nervous about it. Hardly any of them have ever flown before.’

  Me neither, thought Darryl, while he sat there and his dinner got colder and colder. His mouth was hanging open again; he hauled it back up. He wasn’t interested in how the Island kids felt – he was more interested in how he felt. I’m going to Tahiti, he kept telling himself as he started putting the first bruise on his arm. To Tahiti!

  ‘We get students whose parents are teachers or church ministers,’ his mother went on. ‘Ones whose father is a fisherman and whose mother helps cook for the whole village. A few of them have never been in a car before. They cry when they leave home, and they cry when they arrive at our school. Then they cry when they have to go back to their homes again.’

  Girls, thought Darryl. Weird. But he still wasn’t really listening. In his head he was already miles away.

  Mrs Davis looked at the two plates on the table with their half-eaten cold chops and vegetables. She picked them up, and scraped them into the under-bench rubbish tin. ‘I think this is a night for fish and chips, don’t you?’

  The school was helping with some money, his mother told him as the next three weeks began to stream past. ‘Plus your dad’s sent us a fair bit.’ She was standing at the sink as she said this; she didn’t look at Darryl. ‘I’ve written to his last address – that mine in Queensland – and told him where we’re going.’

  In his room that night, Darryl took out the most recent postcard again. A huge truck for carrying iron ore up from a great pit in the ground. The guy in a hard-hat standing beside it was only half the height of its tyres. His dad had drawn an arrow pointing to the guy, and written I’M BETTER LOOKING THAN HIM!

  Sometimes he felt wild at his father, leaving and upsetting things the way he had, but mostly he just wished his dad was here. He put the card back in its drawer.

  For a while, he stood staring at the photograph on his bookcase. Him and his father and Grandad Davis; his mum had taken it when Grandad came to dinner one Sunday. His dad had an arm around Darryl and an arm around his own father, and they were all laughing. Now one of them was dead and another had gone away.

  The time until they left was busy, then more busy, then frantically busy. First, they had to get passports. When these were delivered, one Tuesday after school, in a bright yellow envelope that Darryl had to sign for, he looked at his photo and went ‘Aarghh!’ But I’m still going to keep this forever, he promised himself.

  Another postcard from his dad arrived, addressed to them both. One of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Have a great time! I’ll be thinking of you. A bit about the weather and his work, then, Tell me as soon as you’re back, Jacqui. Time for a talk. Darryl wondered about that last sentence all evening.

  Darryl told his friends about Tahiti and Mangawhosit. They exclaimed: ‘You’re kidding!’ Then they went: ‘Hey, bring us back a souvenir, eh? A canoe. Or a bunch of coconuts. Or one of the girls!’

  He had piles of schoolwork to finish: all the assignments he’d planned to do in the holidays. When they came back, he would still have a bit of time since the Term Two holidays were three weeks long. His mother had suggested he bring along some work to do while they were travelling, though.

  When she said this, it was Darryl’s turn to go, ‘You’re kidding!’ His first trip overseas and she wanted him to spend it doing assignments? School exams didn’t start until November. Time enough to worry next year when he’d be 15 – jeez! – and sitting School Certificate. He had to pass that or he wouldn’t be allowed into Form Six. But now? Nah, he was going to Tahiti, and maybe to a few James Bond-type adventures!

  They flew out from Mangere Airport. Darryl could just remember his dad taking him there for its big opening in 1966. They had seen all sorts of aircraft displays and fly-pasts and stuff. He’d have been about six then, and things had been OK between his parents. The rows hadn’t started. Or if they had, he’d been too young to notice.

  About an hour after they took off, the air hostesses served them a meal. A meal on a plane! Well, it was four hours to Sydney. Darryl looked at the plastic tray,
with everything divided up into little compartments. He wished he had a camera to take a photo, but they only had his mum’s, and she’d said they were going to take just four or five pictures a day. ‘That’ll be nearly four rolls of film. And developing photos is expensive, remember.’

  He still felt excited. He thought about starting another bruise on his arm; instead, he glanced sideways at his mother. She had finished her meal and was sitting, flicking through a magazine. She seemed calm, but he remembered how on Tuesday night, before the last day of term, she had grabbed him suddenly as he turned off the TV after watching part of an Elvis Presley concert, and danced round the room, dragging him with her. ‘Aw, Mum!’ Darryl had grumbled. ‘Cut it out!’

  Now she caught her son’s eye and smiled. She looks pretty, Darryl suddenly thought. When they had boarded the plane, working their way down the crowded aisle until they found their seats, a guy in a suit stood up as they arrived beside him, gave Darryl’s mother a cheesy grin, and asked, ‘May I help you with that bag?’ The man was asleep now, his mouth open. Mrs Davis glanced at him, then at her son, and rolled her eyes.

  Darryl grinned and turned to look out the window. There wasn’t much to see: a haze of thin white clouds, and a pale blue far below that, which could be sea or sky or both.

  I mustn’t keep staring, he told himself. People will guess I’ve never travelled overseas before.

  He hooked his bag towards him from under the seat in front and pulled a book from it. Deadly Cloud: The History of Nuclear Weapons. He was reading about them after all. He’d mentioned the TV programme to his social studies teacher, and Mr Reidy had said, ‘Yes, could be useful material for next year. After all, you’re going to study History for School Cert, aren’t you, Davis?’ Then his teacher had smiled. ‘We’ll look forward to hearing about your trip. A speech to the class, perhaps?’

  Me? Speak to the class? Darryl thought. No way!

  He had read the sections on Hiroshima, and on Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb had been dropped. There were photographs of burn victims that he hadn’t let his mother see, and there were descriptions of radiation sickness that made him swallow as he read: dark-coloured spots appearing all over victims’ bodies; bleeding from ears, nose, mouth; the way they were given pain-killing injections, but their flesh started rotting away from the hole made by the needle.

  It all stinks, Darryl told himself. But what would happen if the United States and Great Britain and others didn’t have nuclear weapons? The USSR – the Russians – could just invade anytime they wanted.

  So could others. ‘Just think of China during the Korean War in the 1950s!’ Grandad Davis had said. ‘The thing that stopped them and the other commies was that they knew the Yanks had atomic bombs to use against them.’

  Darryl looked at the bookmark he’d stuck between the pages. His father’s postcard, with the huge iron-ore truck. He’d grabbed the card just before they left home; he didn’t know why. Actually, he did know; he just didn’t want to think about it.

  Now he was onto the part about nuclear tests by the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1950s. The British had exploded one bomb on an old frigate, just off the northwest coast of Australia. (Australia! He hadn’t known that.) It was a ‘small’ bomb, just a quarter of the power of the Hiroshima bomb. The frigate was vapourised and dead fish were found floating on the surface eighty kilometres away.

  Then the Americans had detonated a really big bomb on a coral atoll in the Pacific. The whole atoll vanished, leaving a gaping hole in the seabed. After another American test at Bikini – a place called Bikini: how weird! – radioactive fallout was reported as far away as—

  His mother was saying something, pointing out the window. Darryl looked, then looked harder. The blue was clearer now. It was sea, all right, and reaching out into it, so definite that he blinked, was a curve of brown and green. Land. Australia.

  The plane curved in over the harbour. Tall buildings rose up towards them. Trees. Dry earth. The glittering sea, with boats moored or crawling across it. A curved white shape slid past below, its roof like shells or sails. ‘The Sydney Opera House,’ said Darryl’s mother, leaning over his shoulder. ‘Just opened late last year.’

  They both exclaimed. A bridge was in view. A huge, arched bridge, with tall towers at each end, and a spider’s web of cables and girders between them. The one on his dad’s other postcard! Might— Might his father be down there, waiting for them? No, that was kid’s stuff. His dad had gone. It was just the two of them now.

  They were in Sydney Airport for three hours, until their flight to Tahiti left. They stayed in the terminal. ‘Don’t want the plane taking off while we’re trying to find the door back in,’ his mother told him.

  A poster on a newspaper stand read: RUSSIANS, AMERICANS MAY SIGN AGREEMENT. ‘NUCLEAR MISSILES KEEP FREE WORLD SAFE,’ SAYS US PRESIDENT.

  As they sat on hard chairs at a hard table and listened to Australian accents (‘thees weel be a beet better’), Darryl stared through tall windows at a narrow strip of trees and grass outside. Any kangaroos? No. Emus? No. Crocodiles or snakes? No. Thank goodness.

  Then something Australian did appear. A small, terrier-type dog trotting along. It stopped and looked through the window at Darryl. Darryl looked back. The dog waved its tail. Darryl waved his hand. He’d met his trip’s first foreigner.

  The plane to Tahiti was bigger. The voices speaking to them over the intercom were different. They sounded French, Darryl realised.

  ‘Our aircraft is powered by four turbo-prop engines. It can climb on three, fly on two, and make a controlled descent on just one.’

  ‘What happens with no engines?’ Darryl asked his mum. She jabbed him with her elbow.

  They powered along the runway, lifted up over busy roads and railway lines. No harbour bridge or opera house this time: after a few seconds they were over the sea, Australia already behind them.

  A guy five or six years older than Darryl sat across the aisle. He wore blue jeans and a blue shirt, and looked foreign. He also looked bored, like he flew to another country every day. Darryl decided he didn’t like him.

  He gazed down at his own khaki-grey trousers and cream shirt. He wished he had some jeans like the guy across the aisle. How hot was it going to be in Tahiti? And that other island, Mangarora. No, Mangareva. He’d looked it up in the atlas and it was way south of Tahiti, in among a whole lot of other islands. He hadn’t realised there were so many of them.

  What was he going to do in Tahiti, anyway? His mum would be visiting schools and talking to her groups, and she’d told him he was welcome to come along. Come along to a lot of girls’ schools? Darryl had thought: I wouldn’t mind. Out loud, he said ‘Hell, no’, and his mother laughed.

  The meal on this flight was different from the first one. There was fish, and a crisp bread roll, and cheese. It looked French, somehow. ‘Would you like a glass of wine, monsieur?’ the air hostess asked him, and he didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Go ahead,’ his mother grinned. ‘Try it.’ It tasted like cough medicine, he decided after three sips; he wished he’d got a Coke instead.

  Then he realised his mother was signalling to the air hostess. ‘I think my son would like a Coke.’ He said nothing, but felt grateful.

  There was a man sitting between them and the window, so Darryl couldn’t see out. It was just ocean all the way to Tahiti now, anyway, and it was starting to get dark outside. This guy was asleep with his mouth open, too. Planes seemed full of men sleeping and showing their fillings.

  He read a bit more. After the United Kingdom and the United States (and the USSR, up in Siberia), France had also begun testing nuclear weapons. First in the Sahara Desert, then on some of the Pacific Islands.

  There was a map in Deadly Cloud showing Mururoa, away south of Tahiti, too. How far was it from the place they were going to? Mangareva? He couldn’t tell from the map. He …

  Darryl grabbed the book as it almost dropped. He’d fallen asleep,
he realised. Settling himself back in his seat, he glanced at the hands of his watch. They had been flying for nearly three hours. Another six-and-a-bit to Tahiti. The cabin lights had been dimmed. A different air hostess was coming along the aisle, asking people to pull down the window shades. Darryl reached past the Sleeping Non-Beauty and lowered theirs.

  He hoped those four engines all kept working. And he hoped his own mouth didn’t fall open. His mother was asleep, too.

  The engines droned on. The cabin grew cooler. He half-woke, feeling excited but still sleepy, and closed his eyes once more. Then he heard someone speaking, the voice getting louder as he surfaced from his dream. Someone with a French accent. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ it was saying. Darryl jerked and forced his eyes open. The lights were on; people were stirring and stretching. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ the voice said. ‘We will shortly be landing at Papeete Airport.’

  FOUR

  As they came down the steps from the plane, smiling, dark-haired women placed circles of flowers – leis, they called them – around their necks. ‘Bonjour,’ they went. ‘’Allo. Welcome to Tahiti.’ A couple of teenage girls were there, also: Darryl saw one of them giving flowers to the young blue-shirted guy from the plane, who looked as though this happened to him every day as well. Yeah, Darryl decided. I definitely don’t like him.

  Dawn was breaking as they walked towards the terminal, but it was warm already. Inside, the Customs and Immigration Officers sounded just like the crew on the plane. ‘Any-theeng to day-clar?’ one asked, and laughed when Darryl and his mother looked blank.

  A taxi took them through streets with signs in French and English, brightly painted buses, trees with big green leaves. The houses had all their windows and doors wide open, and the sun cast hard black shadows across the ground.