The Colour (32 page)

Edwin Orchard liked to believe that, between them, his mother and father knew everything there was to know. But he understood that there were certain things which Pare knew that were outside what they were capable of knowing. And this was what Edwin missed. Not only the smell of Pare and the feel of her forehead against his when she made her
hongi
greeting, but those stories of hers which came from another place and which made him shiver sometimes with a feeling that was not fear and was not delight, but something between the two.

He began to believe that Pare's present existence on the ledge was connected to that other world she talked about, but he also knew that she was still in the ordinary world, too, because she called to him in her ordinary voice. She spoke English. She pronounced his name: ‘E'win'. She told him about the waterfall.

Sometimes, Edwin wanted Pare to be quiet. He felt so ill and tired. He wanted everything to be silent and safe and normal, as it used to be. But the days and nights went on and the worm feasted on all the imaginatively crafted blancmanges and the calling of Pare didn't stop.

At Harriet's request, Edwin took her to see the new ice house, built of brick and dug deep into the ground.

Edwin said: ‘Some men are going to cut ice out of a glacier and bring it here on drays. Papa says it will be the coldest place in New Zealand, but he's wrong. I know where the coldest place in New Zealand is.'

‘Where is the coldest place in New Zealand, Edwin?'

Edwin didn't reply to this. The ice house smelled of fern root and damp mortar. A little sunshine penetrated it now, but Edwin said: ‘There will be a door there, where the sun's coming in, and then it will be all sealed up and dark and stay cold all the time.'

‘It's ingenious,' said Harriet.

‘What does “ingenious” mean?'

‘Clever. The ice house is a very clever idea.'

Edwin walked around the ice house, running his hand along the walls. Harriet had noticed a growing restlessness in him, as though he was afraid to stand still or sit quietly anywhere.

Harriet felt herself shiver. She wanted to go back into the light above, but nevertheless she remained there, quietly watching Edwin. After a while, she said: ‘I'm sorry I couldn't find Pare, Edwin. She may have been down in the valley . . . where I was too frightened to go.'

He didn't answer. Then he said: ‘The ice will be put here. All the way round. Ice from the glacier.'

Harriet nodded, then said again: ‘Do you think she's still in danger?'

Edwin stopped walking. He held on to the wall. ‘I'm going to be sick again,' he said. ‘You'd better not look. My sick is sometimes purple.'

Harriet crossed to him and held his shoulders while he vomited on to the floor of the ice house. Then, she took out her handkerchief and gently wiped his face with it. His face, in the subterranean ice house, looked as pale as a lily.

She led him out and felt him trembling and knew that he was glad of the little warmth there was in the sun. They sat for a moment on a pile of slabs near where the ice house door would go.

‘Did Mama tell you about my worm?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘It's never going to come out with that medicine.'

‘Never?'

‘Mama thinks it's going to come out of my bottom, but it won't, because it doesn't move downwards. It stays in the same place.'

‘Where? Where's the place?'

Edwin pressed his gut, just above the hip bone. ‘Here.'

‘But,' said Harriet, ‘the medicine will make it move and then it will come out.'

‘No,' said Edwin. ‘It won't.'

In the distance, Harriet could hear noise from the house: the barking of the dogs and Janet tunelessly whistling as she hung some laundry out to dry. These sounds seemed to draw Edwin to them and he began to walk towards them without glancing back at Harriet.

Before he had gone too far, she called out: ‘I'm going to the goldfields, Edwin. By the sea route. North to Nelson, then down the West Coast to Hokitika. I could ask people . . . If Pare is still in the mountains, I could go into the gorges from that side. I could try to find her . . .'

She saw Edwin stop. He looked round at her and said: ‘She might be invisible. Like she was in the toi-toi grass. Then you would have wasted your time.'

II

Charlie Wilde was doing a good trade.

In the struggle between fear of the ‘stairway of hell' and desire for riches, desire was winning. Most nights, there were men camped round Charlie's fire, eating his wild-bird stew, coming and going from the manuka grove. His sixpence-a-night charge for bed and food and fire was slowly building to a satisfactory small accumulation and it now occurred to Charlie Wilde to put the price up by a humorous little halfpenny that no one would begrudge him. He began to enjoy saying the words ‘sixpence ha'penny'. They were words, he thought, which had a little dance to them.
Sixpence ha'penny la la la!

Charlie kept the ha'pennies in a separate place from the sixpences and made separate plans for them. This was free money. Money no one noticed. So, one day, when all the gold fever was past, he would spend it on something extraordinary. The ‘extraordinary' thing altered all the time. Sometimes, it was a Spanish girl with camellias in her hair. Sometimes, it was a boat with a scarlet sail. Sometimes, it was a strange and wonderful kiosk, tall as a minaret, from which he would sell . . . what? Jars of amber-coloured wine, lowered to his customers on a rope? Phials of opium? Homing pigeons? Hats?

Very often, Charlie Wilde drifted to sleep in the middle of formulating some new and astonishing idea for his ha'penny store. He was in no hurry to realise any of them. He understood, perhaps, that imagining them brought him as much satisfaction as ever they would bring when they had form and substance. But the ha'pennies were mounting up. Charlie enjoyed gazing at the pile. Now, for every twelve gold-seekers paying the extra ha'penny, he knew there was a thirteenth invisible gold-seeker (whom he did not have to feed) miraculously paying the former price of sixpence, too.

‘I should have been in business,' Charlie Wilde told himself. ‘Success in business consists of getting what is there to pay for what is not there, or, alternatively, getting what is not there to pay for something which is. I've missed my bloody vocation.'

III

While Harriet remained at the Orchard Run, two men from the Lyttelton wharves, John Shannon and Francis Fairford, arrived at the Hurunui Gorge.

Fairford was an immigrant from Dover, England, a man of fifty-four. The Dover docks had been his life until he decided, one February day, he'd had enough of the hail and the salt wind and the smell of herring and he bought a cheap passage on a ship bound for New Zealand. He'd never married nor had a child. He was ‘hard', he told his mates, ‘belligerent as a bloody seagull', and so he'd become known as ‘Flinty'. But his legendary hardness now disguised a growing terror that he would die poor, with his pitiable wages spent long ago on grog and women and the feeling of a life lived in vain.

Shannon, usually called ‘John-boy', had been born fatherless in Christchurch. He wasn't much more than twenty-three and ready to face down whatever had to be faced down to escape from the repetitive life poverty had imposed on him. As soon as he heard that men were walking across the mountains to the West Coast Rush, John-boy decided to try his luck with them. He smacked his beloved mother's arse in its cotton dress and told her he would bring her ‘a pair of golden shoes'. Marie Shannon put her arms round the big hulk that her son was becoming and said: ‘Take Flinty Fairford with you. He knows what's what. You need a hard head with you in the mountains.'

With a few others, Flinty and John-boy had paid their sixpence ha'pennies and stayed a night in Charlie Wilde's hut and eaten pigeon by his scalding fire. Both had guts of iron and slept like lambs, never needing to stumble out to the foul-smelling manuka grove and, when they climbed the Saddle and looked down, from the lip of scrub where Harriet had turned back, neither of them swore or even said a word. Because they had known how the gorge would appear. The gorge was the darkness of their heads made visible. The gorge was what Flinty saw every day at the moment of waking. The gorge was what John-boy knew when he imagined his father lying on his mother on an iron bed and leaving her before the day got light and never returning. But now, they were going to conquer it. Flinty and John-boy. They were going to crush the gorge under their boots, piss in its confounded river. At long last, they were going to master something.

They felt the cold and the dark creep towards them. They felt the stony ground break apart and slip under their weight. They heard birds shrieking somewhere in the freezing air.

They roped themselves together. Why not? Sometimes life throws you in with another and you accept it like you accept a free meal or a girl who happens to be by you when you're in need.

Roped, then, and each of them clinging to the rope – as though one end of it were tied to something unmoving – Flinty and John-boy came down towards the shadows. They tried to follow a track, where other gold-seekers had passed, but they found that in several places trees had fallen across the track, uprooted by the wind, and so thick was the bush that it was difficult to go round the fallen trunks and so they hauled themselves over them, snagging and tangling their rope, cursing as thorns picked at their arms and the weight of their swags made them stumble.

From the lip of the gorge, they'd been able to see the Hurunui River far below, but now they couldn't see anything, only the ghostly semblance of the track – or what their eyes wanted to believe was a track – weaving through the trees, leading them over termite mounds, around boulders, and to sudden unexpected precipices, where they just managed to stop before they fell, each pulling hard on the rope, and staring down and then looking about them for some other way. All the time, they felt stealing on them the certainty that they were lost.

‘Keep on the descent and we'll be right,' said Flinty, who was leading, ‘this path goes nowhere except to the river. Then we follow that.'

The deeper they went into the gorge the quieter it became. It was like a dusk falling – a noonday dusk – and every bird or creature vanishing with the onset of night. Yet, in the murky light, shapes of animals, of crouching figures, appeared to seep out of the trees, and John-boy's knuckles were yellow as ivory, so fiercely did he cling to the rope. He tried to choke back his fear, but he felt his legs go soft, as if gravity had lost its pull and, to Flinty, he whispered: ‘Feels like . . . like the deep, eh Flinty? Like the bottom of the sea?'

‘Stay on track. Stay on track,' said Flinty. ‘Don't let yourself get confused.'

Alone, he would have been lost. John-boy knew this. He'd boasted that he – the younger man – would be the one to ‘take care' of Flinty over the Hurunui, but he hadn't imagined the strangeness of it, this terrifying feeling he had now that he was walking into an underwater world and was going to drown. He'd lived through hunger and misery and he thought he could endure whatever life hurled at him and come through and see – somewhere in front of him – the light of something better. But now, as he and Flinty Fairford crawled on down into the depths of the gorge, John-boy Shannon felt himself drawn in to a world where there was no ‘light of something better', where there was only confusion and a feeling of everything vanishing away.

‘See the track, Flinty?' he kept on asking. ‘See it, do you?'

And Flinty, hearing the terror in John-boy's voice, kept replying: ‘I see it all right, John-boy. Hold to the rope. We'll be down soon.'

But both knew that these were empty words, not only because there was no track, but because
all
words were empty here, because the weight of the air pressed down so hard upon everything which breathed that sound could barely linger long enough to acquire meaning and it was becoming difficult to distinguish between what was spoken and what were hallucinatory musings of the mind. Flinty Fairford and John-boy Shannon were walking into a trance.

The Forest under the Earth

I

Joseph Blackstone was living in an altered world.

The Kaniere miners had pegged claims all along the river. They made fires on what had been Will Sefton's ‘fishing chair'. The bush-line retreated as they felled trees for slabs and firewood. The river-bank piled up with wash-dirt and stones.

Bush rats arrived in countless numbers. For every man digging at Kokatahi, there now seemed to be four or five or six rats, living off flour and bacon and spilt rice and the oil from old pilchard tins. The rats were sometimes shot as food themselves and roasted, and their skins and tails thrown into the water. Only one of the Kaniere men would eat a rat's tail. He'd char it black and taunt the diggers by holding it up in the air like a delicacy before sucking the meagre flesh from the gristle. He said: ‘If I never find gold, I'll make a living from rats. Change the name, that's all. Men will eat any breathing thing and I can get a million rats for nothing. All I need is a fancy epithet. “Water venison”, I'll call it!'

There was a camaraderie among the Kaniere men which excluded Joseph. From the moment they'd arrived, they'd behaved almost as though Joseph wasn't there. They'd suffered together in the Kaniere swamps and now they'd moved on and this was their chosen camp, a paradise compared to Kaniere, despite the rats and the slow accumulation of rubbish, and they roped it to within inches of the water and straightaway began digging their shafts, setting up windlasses, rinsing and mending cradles, contriving latrines, lighting fires, shooting birds and talking, drinking, cursing and laughing far into the hours of darkness.