The Colour (43 page)

In his own language, he apologised to Harriet for doing this, but was aware that she didn't hear him.

He saw that her hands and arms had been browned by the weather, but that her body was translucent white like an onion and her nipples dark as beets. Her feet were slender and finely arched and Pao Yi stared at the straightness of her toes. To warm them, he held her feet in his hands and then laid them against his thighs.

He dressed her in some of his own cotton clothes – jacket and wide trousers – and laid her on his mat, and covered her with rags and blankets.

He made a little fire, opening a vent he'd contrived in his roof with a flower-pot that would take most of the smoke up and away into the air, and crouched by the fire to warm himself, but with his eye always on Harriet. Her body seemed to fill all the space around him. Nobody else had ever come into his hut in all the time he had lived there. He began unplaiting his hair.

When he was dry and warm, he set water to boil on the fire and made a tea from mint leaves and juniper berries and tried to lift Harriet's head so that she would drink and he saw her looking at him, unafraid, but curious. The feel of her neck under his hand was intimate and troubling. He tried to smile when he looked at her, to reassure her that she was safe. She asked about the dog, Lady, and he attempted to tell her that the fresh had surely taken the life of the dog, but he didn't have sufficient words. And very soon, he laid her head down again and watched her tenderly as she drifted back to sleep.

Pao Yi felt very tired now. He fetched the last thin blanket that he had and wrapped himself in this and lay down on the hard floor. Outside he could hear the river rush onwards, leaving him and his garden far behind. His last thought before he slept concerned the piece of gold lying buried under the seventeenth onion.

VI

Harriet woke in the dark.

There was an ember of light on the earth to the left of her, where the fire had burnt low, and Harriet remembered staring at flames and forming some peculiar question about them which she'd been unable to answer.

And she felt now that she didn't know the answers to any single thing which concerned her. She knew only that the fresh had come, that she'd found herself in the river. But why had she been in the water? She was cold now, yet seemingly safe, lying in darkness by the scarlet ashes of a fire. But this was not her tent, she knew that. And how had she escaped drowning?

She pulled the blanket that covered her more closely round her and stared at the darkness, trying to see the outline of things, but her eyes couldn't make sense of anything. She thought how excellent it would be to discover within her reach a piece of wood and throw it on to the fire, so that both heat and light would increase, but she felt unable to move. Her head ached and her throat was parched. But what could she do about any of these things?

She lay as still as she could and listened. The night seemed to be calm, but Harriet could hear the river sliding by, lapping at stones, and now she began to wonder whether her tent and everything that she'd owned, including the gold she'd found, had been taken by the river, and she saw that such a thing could easily happen because she could remember suddenly, with extraordinary clarity, the way the drought and the rain and the wind had taken the Cob House and how the calico walls had lain flapping on the tussock and the door had rammed itself into the earth . . .

The sudden brief flaring of the fire, as a small twig burned and went out, brought Harriet back to the present and to her task of listening. She began to try to count the things she could hear:

No wind in the high bush.

The river travelling on and on.

The sighing of her own heart.

No other sound.

Then, the daylight came: a grey shadow of day.

She was warmer because the fire was burning again.

She turned her head and saw Pao Yi kneeling by the fire, plaiting his hair. She recognised him and knew that he had saved her from the river and that she must be lying in his hut above the vegetable garden.

She watched him without moving, feigning sleep: his face that was comically sad, the thick braid of his hair, his hands that looked nimble, like the hands of a flautist. She remembered his name. She remembered that in his other life he owned a boat and fished a far-away lake.

Pao Yi stood up and crept silently about the hut, intent on small tasks, folding a blanket, filling a tin can with water, taking dry food of some kind from a sack, breaking more kindling for the fire. And Harriet thought how she'd never seen anybody who moved like this, barefoot, making no sound. She felt that she would like to go on watching him, unobserved, all through his day: see him drink his tea or eat whatever food he was going to make; hear him whistle or sing or talk to himself; hear him go out of the hut to piss; see him wash and shave himself; observe his naked arms, which had saved her from the water, and his narrow hips and his strong thighs and his sex.

Pao Yi crossed to her and knelt down by her and Harriet lowered her eyes, wondering if he'd seen her staring at him, intruding into his life with her fever-distorted thoughts. Then she felt his hand on her brow and the touch of this was as beautiful a thing as Harriet had ever experienced and she wanted it to remain there and never move. She tried to speak, to ask him, perhaps, to stay still, exactly as he was, but she found that she couldn't say a word because she was crying. She was scarcely making any sound, yet her tears kept flowing, running down her face and neck and arriving as a pool in the cleft of her collar bone. She felt Pao Yi's hand move gently away from her forehead down to her cheek and rest there, trying to collect the tears, as though the palm of his hand could absorb her grief into itself.

‘Cry for Lady?' Pao Yi asked softly. ‘Black. White. Cry for dying?'

Bellbird Singing

I

When the fresh arrived at Kokatahi, Joseph was working at the bottom of his eighth shaft.

He'd already glimpsed the shine of the blue clay in Shaft 8 and had begun to feel the familiar yet futile resurgence of hope that always came when the clay bottom was reached. Then, he heard the roar of the water. He lifted his head. He'd just put a foot on to his rickety ladder when the flood arrived at the lip of the shaft. He fell back into the hole and the water came drenching down on him.

He grabbed the ladder and gripped it and climbed up and got his head out into the air, and he heard screaming all around him. Then the white waves broke against Joseph's head, as against a stone, and he was hurled backwards into the shaft.

Again, he struggled to find the ladder and held it as the freezing water rose around him. He felt his feet leave the ground, but now, he forced his body down, taking gulps of air as and when he could, knowing that being below ground in the mine-shaft had saved him from being taken by the flood. For the pace of the river was like nothing that he'd ever seen. Joseph understood that any man standing out in the open would have been knocked down and whirled away in the freezing eddies of the fresh.

The water was so cold, it was as though Joseph were being packed in ice. But he knew he had to remain in the hole until the water began to pool and calm. He knew he was lucky that this particular shaft was near the back of his claim, furthest from the river, and when he came up for air again he could see that he was only a few feet from ground that was still dry under the manuka scrub.

When he surfaced once more, he could see tents and huts being crumpled and broken apart and sailing out on to the water, and one of these was his tent, with everything that he possessed, including his gun and his cradle and his cup of gold given to him by Harriet and the precious dust he'd found long ago at the old creek.

As he watched his tent disappear, Joseph thought how, in moments, the fresh would arrive at the Scots' claim and come down upon Hamish McConnell and all his fancy machinery and upon Will Sefton. And the thought that Will might drown was, despite all that had happened, as wistful a thing as Joseph could contemplate and he imagined Will's penny whistle floating out on the tide like a miniature raft, staying afloat for a long time, bobbing on the waves until at last it was swamped and gone.

All this while, as he hung on in the freezing shaft, Joseph gave no thought to Harriet. Perhaps, some part of him knew that the fresh must have come down from the mountains high up in the Styx Valley, where she was working her shingle beach, but it was as though he imagined that its true force had been unleashed only here, at Kokatahi, and that all the deaths would occur here and at Kaniere, and they would be miners' deaths, the deaths of
men,
of old returners and new chums; and all the rest of the indifferent world would be spared, as it had been spared the days that he'd suffered here.

It was only some time later, when he could feel his blood begin to go cold in his veins and understood that he could die in the water and would have to try soon to reach the lip of dry ground, it was only then, when he had to act to save himself, that Joseph realised the full and fearful consequence to him of what had happened: Harriet and all the gold might also be drowned and gone. Her miraculous find – the only thing which had kept him from going mad with rage and disappointment – might now have been taken from him.

It was almost certainly his fury at this, pumping energy to his heart, bringing a sudden, murderous strength to his arms, that enabled Joseph to pull himself out of the shaft and claw his way on his hands and knees through the surging water to the manuka strand. He clasped a limb of the prickly scrub, knew it was tough and wouldn't snap, threw himself forward into the bushes, immune to cuts and scratches, and lay where he fell, among the thorny leaves.

After a while, he stood up. He was trembling with shock and cold and with the horror of everything around him and the dread of everything that was to come. He saw that it was no longer raining and that a cold sun glimmered on the river, moving in its new and lethal course. He saw that nothing remained of the mounds of wash-dirt that had lined the water's edge and that not one tent or hut had been left standing.

If he'd been able to make a fire to warm himself, Joseph might have tried to trek up-river, to where Harriet had pitched her tent. But he had nothing. And he knew that he could die of his drenching in the fresh if he let the cold night come on.

He took off his heavy, soaking shirt and tried to dry his neck and arms with grass. Then he began to walk in the direction of the McConnell claim and the distant shelter of Hokitika.

The path had gone. Joseph had to make his way over and around boulders, through scrub, cling precariously to trees to stop himself from slipping down into the surging water. Ahead of him, other survivors of the fresh were making this same long, difficult, melancholy journey. He saw some of the miners clinging to each other, almost as lovers cling, and it occurred to him now that men he'd thought crude and vexing at Kokatahi had perhaps been stoical and good-humoured and that he could have made friends here – but for Will Sefton – he could have become part of some camaraderie and got drunk with these people and felt less alone. But none of this signified now. They were all headed back to Hokitika. The Canterbury Government would have to authorise some assistance . . .

Joseph saw from a distance that McConnell's horse-whim was still standing as well as two or three tents behind. But the river now ran only a few feet from them and most of the Brenner–McConnell claim was under water and there was no sign of any miner choosing to remain.

Nevertheless, when Joseph arrived there, he stood for a moment on the mud – on the very soil that had brought Hamish McConnell and his partner so much good fortune – and wondered if McConnell was still alive and would yet live to inhabit his castle in Scotland.

And he asked himself what the epitaphs of the Gold Rush would be and what would come after and how the country would be changed and who would eventually turn out to be the winners and losers. But he had no answers. All he could see and feel was the suffering that gold had brought upon the miners of Kokatahi. And although the idea of McConnell's grand establishment had once made him half mad with envy, now he hoped that the man would get it after all and live in it like an aristocrat and spit in the eye of anyone who looked down on him, but yet remember to his dying day that he'd got his whole fortune by fossicking in the earth. For if McConnell was beaten, what hope was there for him or for any of the others?

He trudged on. He saw the sun getting low in the sky and dreaded to be overtaken by the dark. As he neared Kaniere, he saw a body washed up on the wide bank. A little way from it, stood a cluster of gulls and Joseph stopped and stared at them. He shouted out, trying to frighten the birds away, but they wouldn't be moved. They were waiting for the moment when they would begin their feast. So now, like a madman, flapping his soaking shirt and screaming in just the way he'd screamed so often as a boy, Joseph ran at the gulls, and they hopped away from him over the mud and lazily took off, but only to fly in circles above him. Soon enough, he knew, they would land again.

He went to the body and turned it, half afraid it would be McConnell's body, but it was a man he didn't know, and the man had a strange smile on his face, as though he had just caught his first beautiful glimpse of the colour on his claim. And Joseph felt that this smile was one of the most terrible things he'd seen in all this long, terrible time. Barely aware of what he was doing, he began to wrap the man's head in his wet shirt. He bound it tight.

Let be
, he muttered.
Let be
.

II

Now, Joseph was sitting by a fire, trying to eat a plate of k
Å«
mara that seemed too hot and too sickly and he kept laying it aside.