Settlers' Creek (15 page)

Box woke up confused and dry mouthed with voices in his head. He’d been dreaming about his mother. It was the same dream that he used to have all the time as a kid, but it had been a long time since it had last crept up on him.

In the dream they were at an airport, in a big terminal, near the departure gates. People bustled past carrying suitcases, bags strung over their shoulders. Everyone seemed to be moving. It was noisy and crowded in the terminal but Box was perfectly still.

His mother was hugging him goodbye. He couldn’t see her face. She was just a warm body, a pair of arms wrapped tightly around him, and a mixture of smells like crushed pot-pourri held close to his nose.

Box knew that behind him his father and Paul were waiting for him to finish saying goodbye. His mother had to go away for a while. That had been explained to him several times and now his father was angry with Box’s
protests. Box didn’t know where his mother was going. She just had to go, somewhere, on a plane. Normally they all went together. Box was as familiar with planes as most kids were with buses. But his mother had explained to him that this time she had to go alone. She would see them in a few days.

He could feel that she was getting ready to let him go. He hung onto her harder and made himself heavy. Over her shoulder Box watched one of those old-fashioned departure boards with its large white letters that could be rolled into place. The letters fluttered and blurred and changed. And then his mother stood, peeling him off her. She touched the top of his head with her hand before walking quickly away. In the dream he still hadn’t seen her face. He watched her back until she was soaked up by the crowd.

Box opened his eyes.

His head was full of that disorientating fuzz that he was always left with after sleeping during the day. The low autumn sun had worked its way under the overhang of the veranda and was shining in through the window so that most of his body was lying in a pool of pale white light. He’d been sweating in his sleep as though he had a fever. His shirt stuck to the arch of his lower back. There was a wet patch on the pillow where drool had leaked from the corner of his mouth.

Mark, he thought.

And then the dream was gone as his son’s death came charging back at him, black faced and red eyed. Box’s mind grasped and scrabbled, trying to get away, to at least gain a handhold on something that would carry him through this. Failed. Tried again. No. An accident would
have been bad enough — a car crash, a drowning, even something like that poor kid who got so pissed that he fell asleep on the train tracks. All of those deaths were stupid and pointless and a waste. But what had happened to Mark — what Mark had
done
— that was worse. Staring up at the blank canvas of the ceiling, Box saw an image of the hillside with the row of old pines, the waiting rope.

Stupid and pointless deaths happened all the time. He saw them on the news and read articles in the paper while he was eating his breakfast. But they weren’t like this.

Box heard himself suck in a tattered breath. He pushed himself up off the bed in an angry reflex and swung his legs onto the floor, cupped his face in his hands.

The voices he’d heard in his dream weren’t going away. It was singing, coming from another room, drifting through the lath and plaster walls. The words were in Maori. He recognised the tune but couldn’t name the song.

The door opened quietly. For a moment the sound of the singing swelled and then Liz had slipped into the room and closed the door gently behind her. He straightened up and looked at her, saw her expression.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The funeral director called. The coroner’s released Mark. They’ve moved him to the funeral home. We can see him.’

He got to his feet. ‘What time is it?’

‘Almost four o’clock. You slept for a couple of hours.’

‘Where’s the off button on that lot?’

‘I like the singing. Better singing than silence.’

Box used his fingers to massage his temple. ‘I shouldn’t sleep during the day. I feel like crap.’ And those beers didn’t help. ‘When are they going to leave?’

‘I can’t just kick them out.’

‘They’re not sleeping here!’

‘No, Tipene and some of the others are staying down at a motel. He said most of them have got relations to stay with.’

Box stood up. ‘Okay, fine. Sorry, I feel like shit.’

‘We should go.’

‘Give me a couple of minutes.’

Box and Liz were led into a room with a tiled floor. In the middle of the room was a metal table on wheels. A gurney. That was the word, thought Box. Mark — Mark’s body — is lying on a gurney.

The same plump-faced funeral director who’d come to the house had been waiting for them at the front door. Box had rummaged in his fogged brain for the man’s name but hadn’t found it. The building looked new: a cross between a church and a software firm. The funeral director was polite, respectful, but for some reason Box wanted to punch him in the face; just to end all this civilised façade.

In the tense and mostly silent ride over from the house, Box had imagined a dramatic unveiling of his son’s face. He guessed that he’d been watching too many American cop shows. In reality Mark’s face was visible from the moment they came through the door. The starkly white sheet that covered him was folded back with five-star precision to just below his throat. His bruised neck and the tops of his bare shoulders were on display.

Box sensed that Liz, who’d been walking behind him, had stopped. He turned and saw her stranded halfway between the door and their son’s body. Her face was leached
of colour. She was so still and pale that she seemed to be on the verge of turning into a pillar of salt, of becoming frozen and permanent.

Box went back to her and put his arms around her stiff shoulders.

‘I’m okay.’

‘Just take it slowly.’

The funeral director made that coughing noise that had irritated Box at the house. ‘Everything you need should be here. If you want me for anything I’ll just be in the office. The door’s on the left just outside.’

‘Okay,’ said Box. That’s right, piss off.

‘I’ll leave you alone now.’

‘Thanks.’

Box heard the man’s footsteps on the tiled floor and then the door closed. They were alone, just the three of them. He cupped Liz’s face in his hands.

‘Are you sure you’re up for this? We don’t have to. The people here can take care of everything.’

‘No, I’m okay. I need to be here, Box.’

He took her hand and they crossed the room together.

Mark didn’t look as though he was sleeping. That was the cliché, wasn’t it, the — what was the word — euphemism? Asleep, Mark had always moved. He’d splayed twitchy and hot across every bed he’d ever lain in. As a kid he was constantly murmuring and mumbling to himself in his sleep, sometimes crying out, eyelids flickering.

Right from that tepid Nelson summer when Box had first got together with Liz, it had been Mark’s habit to slip like a warm rabbit into their bed, almost every night. Hadn’t stopped till he was ten. Bad dreams, he always said, standing by the bed in the darkness. At first Box had been
all for taking the kid back to his own room but Liz had insisted that they let him stay. Mark sleeping in her bed was a pattern the two of them had set up in the twelve months since Steve — Tipene now — had walked out on them. Even with Liz’s body between them, Box was aware of the kid shifting and muttering on the other side of the bed. Sometimes a foot or a fist, flung blind in the darkness, would snake across and hit him. It had been like sleeping with a minor earthquake. Not that Box had minded much. Not that much. Not after a while, anyway. He missed the deep unbroken sleep of a single man, but the truth was that the three of them together in the bed like that had made him feel as if he was part of a family. That had been worth the odd bruise earned in the night.

But here, now, in this tiled room, in the fucked-up, inexplicable, gut-churning nightmare he found himself in, Box knew that Mark was definitely not sleeping. There was only ghastly stillness.

Beneath the sheet Mark was naked. Seen from above his body was all contours; peaks, rolling hills and dry valleys.

Someone who didn’t know him had combed his hair. It had always been thick and long and unkempt, a mane that he seldom wore shorter than shoulder length. Now the fringe was brushed to one side and there was a heavy-handed parting where a pale line of scalp showed. Liz reached out slowly with her hand and ruffled his hair, tousling away the parting until she was satisfied. She let the back of her hand drop down and brush his cheek. She pulled it away quickly. She made a strangled sound and stepped back and looked away to the high windows where the day’s last sunlight was coming into the room and hitting the far wall.

Box looked at the heavy bruising around the boy’s neck.
It wasn’t pretty. But actually he was relieved. During the last two days he’d imagined that it would be worse. Box had found himself going over and over in his mind what could have happened up on the hills on Saturday night. In those torturous movie scenes, Mark’s eyes were the bulging bloodshot eyes of road-kill possums. The boy’s neck was always a dripping nail-torn mess. Box could deal with reality better: just blue-black bruises.

With the tips of two fingers he touched the skin on his son’s shoulder just above the ridgeline of the shoulder bone. The skin was hard, cold and desert dry. Of course, with Liz not wanting the boy to be embalmed, they’d been keeping the body in some type of cooler. Box blinked several times and breathed deeply.

The funeral director had laid out a neat pile of flannels and several thick soft white towels. They were the type of towels that Liz had loved in the days when they’d been able to afford to travel and stay at good hotels. There was also a basin of water. Box carried the basin over to the table, balancing it on top of the towels and the flannels, careful not to slop any water on the floor. There was room on the gurney to place the bowl next to Mark’s hip.

‘You okay? We can still change our minds.’

‘No. I want to do this.’

Liz used the tips of her fingers to lift the edge of the sheet up and away from Mark’s chest. She folded it down carefully across his hips. The funeral director had told them what to expect, but the autopsy scar was enough to start Liz sobbing. It was Y shaped and ran almost down to his navel. The funeral director had chosen his words carefully as he’d explained what would be done and the extent of the scarring they’d be faced with. He had strongly advised that
Box and Elizabeth not dress the body themselves.

Now, looking at the damage, Box couldn’t help imagining latex hands cracking open his son’s chest. He felt a surge of anger. What the hell were they looking for anyway? Wasn’t it obvious that it was hanging from his neck that had killed the kid? Box imagined them reaching into the excavated chest and lifting out the boy’s heart. They would have held it up, turned it towards the light and slowly rolled it over for closer inspection. How much had it weighed? he wondered.

Liz took a flannel, dipped it in the bowl of water and wrung it out. Box watched as she began wiping Mark’s forehead with long gentle strokes. She moved to the sides of his nose and then down across his cheeks.

‘There’s a little bit of stubble,’ said Box.

Mark had shaved daily. Even before he needed to. Box went to the door and opened it. ‘Excuse me.’

The funeral director immediately appeared through the first door on the left. ‘Yes? Is everything all right?’

‘Do you have a razor? And some shaving foam.’

‘Of course.’

The man followed Box back into the room. From a cupboard over the bench he took out a packet of disposable razors and a blue and white can of shaving foam.

‘Thank you.’

‘Is there anything else you need?’

‘No.’

The man left. Box popped off the lid and pushed down the nozzle but only a thin trickle of watery foam came out into his hand. He shook the can and tried again, with better results. It gushed like whipped cream, smelling strongly of mint.

Box carefully wiped some of the foam onto Mark’s cheeks and down the line of his jaw to his chin, then went over to the sink and washed the rest of the foam off his hands.

Each razor came in its own clear wrapper. He undid one, pulled the hard plastic guard off the blade and held it out to Liz.

‘You can do it if you want,’ he said.

Liz shook her head. ‘No. You do this part.’

Box began to carefully shave his son’s face. On the first stroke, the razor moved over the skin with an audible rasp that made them both flinch.

‘I’ll make the water hotter,’ said Liz.

She carried the bowl back to the sink and emptied it and ran the tap until the water came out steaming. She filled the bowl and carried it back to Box. He sloshed the head of the razor in the hot water. Foam and a few flecks of black hair washed free from the blade floated in the bowl.

When he was finished with the cheeks Box shaved downwards from the jawline onto the neck, making long furrows through the foam. What would happen if he nicked the skin? Would there be any blood?