by Grant Stone
The child has stopped crying. There’s mud spattered up her legs. The sirens begin to shut off. Bree places her on the path and she seems unsteady for a moment, then regains her balance, toddles up the path and disappears.
WE DON’T SLEEP THAT night. We sit in the living room with blankets and cellphones, a candle on the dining table, waiting for the power to come back on. Wind whistles through the upstairs of the house.
‘Well I guess it’s happy birthday, Bree,’ Sue says, rising from the sofa. ‘Good thing I made your cake yesterday.’
Bree stretches, raising her arms in the air in an exaggerated fashion. ‘I forgot.’
Texts start to come in on our phones – mostly Bree’s, but I exchange messages with my few friends in the city. There’s damage throughout, is the picture I’m getting, though we were at the heart of it. Windows shattered from office blocks down onto the streets. School closed until further notice.
Sue and Martin are (fortunately) under the impression that there was a smaller explosion before the main one, and their house had the misfortune of being right next to it.
‘Thank god you two got out okay.’
‘Bree was terrified.’ I know that she’ll be torn between relief at me covering her and fury at being portrayed as scared, and I’m okay with that. ‘She just ran. I went after her to check she was okay.’
We eat cold meat and three kinds of cheese with bread for lunch. One wall of Bree’s room is missing. A builder-friend has confirmed the structural integrity isn’t at risk, and they pull a tarpaulin over to protect the remainder of the room from the elements. I’ve volunteered to move out, so Bree can take my room while it’s being fixed. They’re terribly grateful and say I don’t have to, that Bree could sleep in the study, but I think it’s more than time for me to move on. There’s a room free in the same student hostel as Katja, just down the corridor in fact, and Martin’s going to drive me there later today.
Neither of them appears to know anything about the child. Now I have worked things out, I realise they would surely know if they saw her, and I think it’s best they don’t know. But I think things are going to start getting easier for them – once they get the house repaired, of course.
The cake has a thin coating of icing, and below that layers of pink, chocolate, ginger. I press my fork down, pushing up layers as I go. Bree hesitates, eyes her slice for a moment, then eats hungrily.
‘You’re okay now?’ I ask. She nods, swallowing the mouthful of cake, eyes welling with restrained tears. She picks up her plate and walks out to the deck, balancing it on the rail, staring out at the garden. After a moment I follow her.
‘She was you, wasn’t she?’ I ask, though I already know the answer.
‘I don’t remember much, but I put things together. And I think I remember the meteor as both me and her. I mean, me now and me as a kid. So when they said that it was coming I understood more.’ She laughs a little. ‘I don’t really like kids, but I guess I had to take care of her and make sure she came back. If Mum and Dad had found her, or if she’d been too far from the house, things could have gone really wrong. So it was ... self-preservation.’
I look round the corner, where the blue tarpaulin billows out above the garage. They’ve picked up most of the pieces of house, the big ones at least, but the concrete is still flecked with chips of white paint and the occasional sliver of glass glints in the afternoon sun.
‘You’re good at self-preservation,’ I reply. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’
Martin and Sue don’t follow us, and we stand on the deck for a while, a gangly teenager who has just met her past self, and a young woman whose past is far away, eating sugary cake with our fingers as the sun trickles through the kowhai tree that spreads between us and the road.
Sometimes, I know, things come back from the past, and sometimes they take pieces of our selves away with them. Sometimes abstractions like emotions and memories aren’t enough to hold them; like everything important to us, they have to become monsters at some stage or another. Monsters not with dripping blood or giant fangs, monsters just so big they can’t stay under your bed or trapped in a lake. A turtle that once took a sword from an emperor returned to take a boy from his family. A girl desperate to reconstruct a past that makes no sense has looked even deeper into the past and found a dinosaur which may once have lived on this land.
The sky is clouding over. Bree smudges up the last few crumbs of cake onto her finger and then into her mouth, picks up the fork and plate and moves to head inside.
She pauses and turns. ‘About the dinosaur. You know ... when you’re a kid, people notice if you’re gone even a few minutes, they freak out. But when you’re a bit older you tell them you were at a friend’s place, and you might get grounded but it’s hardly a big mystery.’
‘You travelled more than once, didn’t you?’ But Bree is already on her way upstairs. My possessions have been packed into my suitcases, and Bree has already moved most of hers into her new room. She leaves the door open and I walk in behind her. The room is neat, with everything put in place as it was brought in. She has posters on the walls and a pinboard of photos of her and her friends pulling faces for the camera. A toy pig sits on her turquoise pillow. I stand behind her at the window. A dark shape moves over the hill and is gone.
‘I can make us some cake,’ Bree says. ‘And bring it to your hostel after school. No deformed banana cake, though.’
The Last
Grant Stone
THE TOYOTA BLEW A TYRE somewhere not far north of Huntly.
Rachel twisted the steering wheel and swore, squeezing the brake and aiming for the side of the road. The car stumbled to a stop in foot-high grass, barely missing a fencepost many degrees from straight.
She was not surprised to learn the rental company had not included a spare tyre. Simon had told her to expect that sort of thing. ‘It's like travelling back to the seventies, especially when you get out of Auckland. Maybe that's why she picked it.’
She leaned against the cooling car and listened to the cicadas buzzing their arses off.
Her phone still had a signal, which at this point Rachel was prepared to consider a bona fide miracle. She had already dialled Simon's number before she remembered it was still three in the morning back in London. She killed the call. Simon couldn't find his reading glasses on his desk half the time. There was no chance of him finding a mechanic on the other side of the world.
Rachel reached through the window for the map Simon had printed for her. She'd just gone over a short bridge with a long name and it didn't look too far from there to where Simon had marked an X in blue ballpoint and written KSJ next to it. She grabbed her suitcase from the back and started walking.
The Toyota's tyres might have been shot but its air conditioning had been top notch. The humidity was jungle-strength. Five minutes walking and she was covered in sweat. Biggest interview of her career and she'd go into it soaked. Figured.
RACHEL HAD BEEN AT her desk in Sounding's tiny Earl's Court office when the call had come in. Maria, the receptionist, had looked over the top of her magazine at the ringing phone as if it were an alien. First time it had rung in a month.
‘Who was it?’ Rachel asked once Maria had passed the call through to Simon's office.
Maria shrugged and mumbled something. She only enunciated on the phone.
Rachel frowned. That couldn't be right. ‘Sorry? Did you say Katherine St. John?’
Simon burst out of his office so fast he nearly took the door off. ‘You. Pub. Now.’
‘WAIT, I DON'T – WHAT?’
Simon sipped his pint. He was loving this, being the one with a scoop for the first time in a decade or more, having Rachel hang on his every word.
‘That was Katherine St. John on the phone. She's about to release a new album and she's going to give exactly one interview. To us. Or more specifically, to you.’
‘To me?’
‘And only you.’
‘
Shit.’
‘I know.’
Eleven-year-old Katherine St. John had come to the attention of the public in 1965. She had been camping with her parents on the edge of Bedgebury Forest in Kent when she went missing. The story held the front page for over a week. Black-and-white pictures of St. John's parents, arms around each other, stricken looks on their faces. Long lines of volunteers marching between the trees, trying to cover every square foot of a forest whose heart had been untroubled since the days of Hadrian. Then, as the days went on, rumours that the police were taking a particular interest in St. John's father. One telephoto shot of him being led up the stairs to the Maidstone police station for further questioning was published on Monday morning, a thin civil servant with a comb-over and a permanently crooked tie. The Sunday Mirror published a picture of a child's blue canvas shoe lying beneath a holly bush. In the opinion of the majority of the paper's readers, the man was clearly guilty, a trial just a formality on his way to the gallows.
A base of operations was established at the campsite, now deserted except for the St. John family's tent and their grey Hillman Minx, already starting to sink into the mud. On the Monday of the second week of the search, Detective Harlan Smith was eating lunch at his temporary desk in the prefab office when Katherine St. John walked in, looking as unruffled as if she had just been out for a brief stroll. No injuries, no malnutrition. Still wearing both her black leather shoes which, even scuffed and covered with mud, looked nothing like the one on the front page of the Mirror.
The papers printed full-page photos of the newly reunited family under headlines such as MIRACLE CHILD, but could find no more explanation for what had happened than the girl herself. In the few minutes after she reappeared she mentioned that she had been to see the ‘dancing man’. But she was unable to clarify who she had meant and, as the days went on, seemed to recant even that, claiming she had no memory of her time in the forest.
Nobody remembered the lost girl who had been to see the dancing man in 1978, when Katherine St. John's first album was released. It was a revelation. Her voice rose above her own sparse piano playing, then swooped low. People compared her to Joni Mitchell, to Laura Nyro, but that wasn't quite it. She more ethereal than her contemporaries, more otherworldly. Nothing about her songs should have worked: the surreal lyrics, the unorthodox keys and time signatures – none of it suggested commercial success. And yet there she was, barely sixteen, topping album charts all over the world. Her time as a lost girl was mentioned, of course, in the initial coverage, but faded away. The music obliterated her history as it propelled her on the way to inevitable superstardom.
St. John's follow-up album two years later met middling reviews. Punk was on the rise and it seemed that St. John's unique sound was going to be consigned to the same dustbin of history as Prog Rock. She had never toured, and with the poor reception of her sophomore effort she became even more reclusive.
Rachel couldn't remember the third album at all. Her own attempt at an English degree was already in flames at that point. She had spiked her hair to look like Siouxsie Sioux and spent every weekend going to see The Damned and The Clash.
‘It's a wind-up, surely. Every music magazine from here to New York would have got that call.’
Simon's hands were trembling slightly. Did they always do that? Why hadn't she noticed before? ‘I don't think you're hearing me. That wasn't St. John's agent on the phone. That was her.’
‘Shit.’
‘I know.’
THERE WAS NO GATE, just a break in the fence. No mailbox. The number 257 had been scratched into a piece of tin and nailed to the fencepost. Rachel checked the map again and shrugged. This was the place.
The bare dirt driveway ran along a stand of trees before turning right around the side of a shed. One of the suitcase’s tiny wheels had already crumbled from being dragged along the side of the road instead of a smooth airport floor, so she had to carry it. She heard a buzzing as she approached the shed. Then a smell that made her step back.
The corpse of a rabbit was balanced on the top of a fencepost, attended by a cloud of flies. It lay on its back, head lolling towards the ground, one dead eye looking at Rachel. The rabbit's belly was bloated, the blue mottled skin under its grey fur writhing with maggots.
Rachel backed away, holding a hand over her mouth and nose until she was around the corner of the shed. She leaned over, hands on knees, for a few moments, sucking in lungfuls of fresh air. The grass on the side of the driveway was long and ragged. She could see small patches of green in the middle of the bare dirt. Rachel wondered how long it would take for the grass to claim back the whole driveway.
When she picked up the suitcase again her arms were trembling.
THE FARMHOUSE WAS SMALL but tidy. It was surrounded by a garden that was a strange mix, English roses sitting next to native ferns and flaxes. There was no sense of untidiness; the garden had clearly been tended with great care.
The front door was pine, inset with stained glass. Rachel knocked and waited. A shadow appeared on the other side of the glass, stretched and rainbowed, so tall and wide that for a moment Rachel wondered if she'd got the wrong place after all. Then she heard footsteps in the hall and the shadow shrunk. The door opened.
Katherine St. John smiled and held out her hand. ‘You must be Rachel Mackenzie. Welcome. Come in.’
She looked like someone's grandmother, which was, Rachel thought, entirely possible. Her hair wasn't completely grey yet, but there were wide streaks around her temples. The wrinkles around the corners of her mouth were beginning to deepen, like streams in sand at low tide. Rachel was only a few years younger than St. John, but looking at her now it could have been a couple of decades. Her eyes, though, were still that deep, endless green, same as they had been thirty years ago when they stared from posters on tens of thousands of suburban teenage bedroom walls.
‘It's so nice to meet you, Miss St. John,’ Rachel said.
St. John waved her hand. ‘Just Katherine, please. I'm so glad you could come.’
The house was blessedly cool. Rachel nearly fell across the threshold.
Katherine led her into a kitchen that looked out to a small conservatory and took an old whistling kettle from the gas cooker. On the wall were paintings of English landscapes with fussy, gilt-edged frames. Bunches of dried flowers hung from the roof. There were no gold records on the wall, none of the awards St. John had won, just Devonshire granny chic. Not at all what Rachel had expected.
‘Where's your car?’
‘Down the road a little. Flat tire. No spare.’
Katherine pouted. ‘Oh dear. To fly halfway around the world and then have that happen. I'm so sorry.’
Rachel shrugged. ‘I've had worse.’
‘Still. There's a garage back by the river. I'll give them a call.’
‘You don't have to—’
‘Please. You're my guest.’
Rachel smiled. ‘I've interviewed the biggest names in rock for over thirty years and I don't think anyone's said that before.’
‘Well,’ Katherine said, passing over a mug of tea, ‘there's always the chance of something new, on any given day.’
‘WE CAN GO BACK TO THE house if you want. No need to start straight away. It's a terrible flight.’
Rachel shook her hear. ‘No. It's fine.’
The headache had started up while she was sipping St. John's tea, a buzzing like a badly earthed mic. Katherine had suggested they walk around the farm while they talked and Rachel had agreed, hoping the fresh country air would help clear her head.
The gumboots Katherine had given her looked ridiculous over her business slacks. Or perhaps it was the slacks that looked ridiculous out here in the country.
‘We'll start over here,’ Katherine said, leading the way to the milking shed.
Light through the looming black clouds rendered the land in high contrast. There was a heavy feeling in the air, as if a thunderstorm were imminent, but there was no smell of
rain, just the sticky, oppressive heat.
‘It's a working farm,’ Katherine said, ‘although I don't get up early to do the milking. That's a young person's game.’
Rachel pulled out her tape recorder. ‘Do you mind if I use this?’
Katherine shook her head. ‘Not at all. That's what you're here for.’
Rachel had seen many different responses to her tape recorder. Back in the day, she'd had more than one rock star refuse to speak as soon as she'd placed it on the table. Never mind that these people had a tendency to make all manner of libellous and offensive statements in the media. There had been a power in the sight of the recording device once, she supposed. Why else would a shirtless, tattooed rock god who had been arrested in Texas six months previous for exposing himself on stage clam up at the sight of the turning wheels of the tape? More than once recently she had placed the recorder before some bright young pop star and had the impression it was the first time they had seen such ancient technology. Justin Bieber had snorted and asked why she didn't just use her phone like everyone else. She'd bought the JVC KD-2 in a store on Tottenham Court Road in ’82. It had cost her a fortune then, and several more since. Perhaps Bieber was right. But she liked the weight of it, the solid click of the buttons, the slow turn of the tape.
Rachel hefted the recorder. The strap dug into her shoulder. She suspected St. John might be the kind of interviewee who would just start talking without a lot of prompting.
‘Milking here. I had it all upgraded last year. We've got just over a hundred Holstein-Friesians. Which isn't much by New Zealand standards, but I don't think the land would take any more.’
The milking shed was impeccably clean. The concrete floor had been hosed down recently and the shining water reflected the corrugated iron roof.
Katherine led Rachel out a smaller door on the far side of the shed. A newer building stood on the other side of a paddock, near a stand of old, gnarled trees. They trudged through knee-high grass, Katherine doing a better job of avoiding the cow shit than Rachel did. ‘Some macrocarpas there,’ Katherine said. ‘Oldest trees in the area.’