The Worm King (33 page)

Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!

Then there was this beautiful sucking noise,
as he wrenched out his dripping boot. The sound resembled a live, skinned cat
going down a drain. He did that to a cat once, when he was twelve.

What a pity Bob wasn’t still here! Justin’s eye
would’ve scared the fudgepack out of him.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Twins

N
atasha groped blindly, both arms outstretched. ‘I’m sure it’s our
old room,’ she whispered to her sister. They’d pulled off their blindfolds but
it was impossible to tell. The odor: it definitely
smelt
like their old
room; a mix between disgustingly rotten salami and dog poopy.

‘Yes, here, give me your hand. It’s alright,
I think he’s gone now. Feel the wall, up here. It’s where we tore the wallpaper
off. Wait on, what’s this?’

‘It’s the chair,’ whispered Krystal.

Natasha grasped the top edge of the back of
the chair and dragged it across the carpet until it seemed in about the right
place, got onto it, and felt around until she found the hole drilled in the wall.
Then she knew for certain it was their old room. They leant against the wall
for support, breathing heavily. Krystal shivered. ‘Let’s sit down,’ said
Natasha and they slid to the floor. A thought occurred: is someone else in the
room? How would they even know! She felt exposed. ‘No, let’s get on the bed,’
she whispered in Krystal’s ear. They worked their way to the bed and climbed on.
Still no sound from the rest of the room, and Natasha realized she was just being
silly: if anyone else were here, they’d say hello or make a noise. The mattress
felt all crusty and there weren’t any blankets but they didn’t care and crawled
up until reaching the headboard, then sat facing blindly back into the room.

Without warning, a crack of light appeared at
the bottom of the door. Only the faintest of glimmers, but by the way Krystal’s
hand tightened on Natasha’s arm, you’d think a whole heap of New Years Eve
fireworks had gone off right beside the bed. Then a noise out in the hall: a heavy
thud, followed by something weighty being dragged in short bursts with a grunt
of effort each time.

‘What is it?’ whispered Krystal. Neither had
been scared of the dark before all this happened. Krystal, especially, was upset
because she’d liked Mr Snow most, and now they both thought he’d been telling a
pack of lies about their parents. To top it off, their backpacks were gone too.

“Take the backpacks, just in case.” These
were the last words Natasha remembered her mother saying, the day they’d left
Sydney. Their next-door neighbor Mr Richards worked in the Blue Mountains and
he’d offered to take the girls, and was honking his horn in the driveway.
Just
in case
. Their last afternoon in Sydney. Well, the last afternoon, that is,
apart from the nightmarish trip to the dwarf’s house, which had been out on the
edge of the city anyway as far as she recalled. Just in case? Natasha was
pretty sure her mother would’ve also said, “Goodbye darling,” or something to
that effect before they finally left, but she couldn’t recall it because she’d
been busy thinking: in case of what?
At the time, the backpacks
contained only raincoats and drink bottles, both of which the girls subsequently
lost. Their mother was right though, the backpacks had been awfully handy. When
the man with the funny lisp took them they’d been crammed with spare clothes
but also held a pack of cards and two little designer toilet bags with the
hotel emblem on the sides, which looked very posh. The weather diary had been
in Krystal’s backpack. It wasn’t so much what was
in
them: it was the
bags themselves; they were the last link to their mother.

Natasha missed her so much.

The man with the lisp had just walked in
behind Mrs Sheng like he owned the place. ‘Thowee about thith. Thickuwitty
pwecauthin.’ Then he’d snuck around behind Krystal and tried to tie a blindfold
on. What a nerve! She’d bolted.

He immediately gave chase and there weren’t
a lot of places to run. The girls screamed in unison, cowering behind Mrs Sheng
who held up her hand. ‘Is ok! Is ok! No ploblem.’ Her face was red and blotchy under
a dense layer of makeup, as though she’d been crying. ‘Is like spy film. You
know? I make sure you alrighty.’ She paused, tapping her nose and giving a
secretive nod. ‘It so if anyone ask which room you in, you can’t say. It for
your plotection.’

‘His face looks really yucky,’ muttered
Krystal, pointing at the man. ‘I don’t want to get close to it.’

Mrs Sheng giggled, then stopped abruptly, covering
her mouth. She lowered her hand and the smile had gone. ‘He can hear you, you
know? He name Bob. I put on, if it bother you. It only for couple of minute, to
go back to room down hall.’ She reached out and Bob reluctantly passed the
blindfolds.

It’d occurred to Natasha that maybe he
wanted the blindfolds on so they’d look more like him. The grubby rag he’d tied
across one eye and up around his own head was totally gross. But the thing
that’d creeped Natasha out most, was the way he’d been staring at Krystal, when
he first tried to tie the blindfold on. Despite saying “thowee” he obviously wasn’t
the least bit sorry about doing it. He’d looked eager; almost hungry; starving
even, and it was frightening in a way vaguely familiar, although she couldn’t
put her finger on it. Bob’s unbandaged eye seemed much . . . larger,
or different than people’s eyes normally are. Like an owl? No, owls are nice. A
lizard? Closer.

Mrs Sheng told them to pack up their
backpacks, which they did, then she put the blindfolds on herself, leaving them
so loose Natasha could easily see through a gap at the bottom if she furtively tilted
her head back. Bob picked up their bags just as the blindfold slid down a fraction
obscuring her view, and that was the last she saw of Bob or bags.

Their clothes came from the hotel’s
lost-and-found. “Those Girl Glide uniform, they nearly fally off,” Mrs Sheng had
told them shortly after they’d arrived at the hotel. An hour later she returned
with a bundle of assorted garments and they’d happily discarded their tatty uniforms,
swapping into the upmarket Hyatt castoffs. It was much better having Mrs Sheng
delivering meals than the hotel waiters, who weren’t very friendly at all. Natasha
thought Mrs Sheng must be borrowing clothes for herself too, because lately
she’d turned up in fancy, expensive dresses. Krystal said she looked like a
Chinky Cinderella, but they didn’t tell her that.

How much time had passed? Natasha had no
idea. Occasionally, there’d been sounds out in the hall as if furniture were
being dragged around, followed by rushed footsteps. Then a door might slam nearby,
and more running feet; hushed voices; a frantic thumping on the wall and a muffled
scream in the distance, or perhaps from another room.
Knock! Knock!

‘Hello!’ called Krystal. ‘We’re—’

Knock!

‘Wait!’ Natasha whispered urgently. Soft
footsteps faded away. There’d been an unusually long pause between each knock,
and Natasha realized it was only someone rapping on the door as they walked
slowly past in the dark.

She remembered where she’d seen Bob’s eye
before. On an American Funniest Home Movies clip on TV that the family watched
a few months back, in the middle of winter. The story was about this night
camera they set up on some guy who kept sleepwalking. He got up, and walked to
a window and waved, despite it being pitch dark outside, then went back to bed.
Apparently did it every night. The room was bathed in this creepy, greenish
light which Natasha thought must’ve come from the camera. When she asked her
Dad about it, he said no, it was just the tiny spec of light that’s always there,
and the camera simply magnifies it.

So that green light’s there all the time. The
man sleepwalking had strangely enlarged eyes, like huge black saucers, with evil
little white circles in the middle. Later that night Natasha lay in bed
thinking:
I have those eyes now,
and it really scared her. If it’s
always dark, like it is now, everyone must look like that all the time.

Even back then, she hadn’t thought the video
clip very funny.

The door opened without warning. A dazzling
beam whipped around the room, settling on the bed. Natasha must’ve been dozing
because she hadn’t heard footsteps.

‘Lakey, lakey,’ said Mrs Sheng. The intense light
made it hard to make out anything apart from silhouettes. She raised a hand, shielding
her eyes and squinting. The waft of hot noodles swirled across, then the beam
shifted towards Krystal, so Natasha plainly saw Bob with his bandaged eye, gripping
the torch beside Mrs Sheng. ‘Roodles again. I solly.’ Her Chinese accent sounded
more pronounced, with a thick nasal undercurrent like she was getting a cold,
but when she put the two bowls down on the little table attached to the head of
the bed, Natasha could see her nose was all swollen and puffy and bruised.

‘Where’re our parents?’ demanded Krystal,
holding up her palm to block the beam. It reminded Natasha of being in hospital
getting ready for an operation, with the bright lights and masked faces staring.
She’d had her tonsils out when she was eight so knew what it was like.

‘I don’t know. I solly.’ Mrs Sheng seemed
upset about something and shook her head, pointing at the bowls. ‘Careful not
to spill.’ Bob threw their backpacks on the bed then both turned without
another word and left.

The girls gobbled the noodles in the dark. They
drank the liquid first by tilting the bowls, which was tricky to do without
spilling, then ate the rest by hand. After this, they felt through their
backpacks.

‘I think it’s all here,’ said Natasha,
relieved. Her toilet bag had been opened because she distinctly remembered
zipping it up, although she didn’t mention this to her sister.

‘My underwear’s missing!’ cried Krystal. The
weather diary had gone too.

Hours passed.

Or maybe only minutes? There was just the dark,
and the cold. They attempted to cheer themselves up with a game of
I Spy.

‘I spy, with my little eye, something
beginning with . . .  “S”,’ said Krystal quietly.

‘Stinky!’ exclaimed Natasha. They’d already
had this one, in an earlier round, because the room sure was stinky.

‘No,’ Krystal whispered.

Natasha concentrated. For some reason,
Sandman
popped into her head. ‘Sandman!’

‘No,’ repeated Krystal, voice barely audible.
‘Can’t you hear it? That sound?’

Yes, Natasha
could
hear it now. To
begin with, they thought it came from outside, so crawled to the window to
listen. Still couldn’t see a thing out there. Eventually they worked out it
must be coming from the room next door, and crept back to the bed.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Natasha. Suddenly an
image flashed into her head of herself, sitting up against the headboard,
craning her neck to work out the sound. It was as though she were floating
around the room up by the ceiling and looking back down at herself. She had those
enormous black eyes, with the little white middles. A thick, greenish mist
surrounded both her and Krystal. Her sister lay next to her, holding her arm
tightly and staring up into her face, like a lizard. Exactly where she lay now.
A man stood in the corner of the room. They must’ve crawled really near him,
when they tried to see out the window before. His hand was down near his waist,
stropping back and forth but she couldn’t quite see what he held.

Zzzzzzzzzssssssshhht!

Zzzzzzzzzssssssshhht!

He just stood there, staring at them.

Zzzzzzzzzssssssshhht!

Zzzzzzzzzssssssshhht!

Zzzzzzzzzssssssshhht!

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Tūhoe

W
iremu Ruarangi was Tūhoe.

He walked over to the fire where Alistair
and Nigel were talking about a cricket game Alistair once played at Adelaide
oval. Alistair was a left-arm spin bowler, taking 5 for 22 on an ultra-hard
wicket one stinking hot day in February. The other side even had a couple of
ring-ins who’d played for Surry.

‘Crickets a damn tough game!’ said Nigel. Alistair
agreed. It wouldn’t surprise Wiremu if both of them were poofs.

The bus had broken down in Peak Hill, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it
country town a hundred-odd clicks southwest of Dubbo. Halfway as the crow flew
between Tamworth and Griffith. They’d been expelled from Tamworth exactly thirty-seven
hours ago, so it’d been a long, slow haul. Geoff, Hemi and Rangi also sat at
the fire, along with Zelda, Lord Brown, David, Ken, John the Hat and . . . perhaps
seventeen others from the Tamworth gym, plus three more they’d picked up along
the way. He thought there might be a couple of extras too, who’d snuck in from
the darkness of Peak Hill in the three hours they’d been stuck here. About a
third of those present wore strips of damp material tied around their mouths,
but most discarded the protection because it wasn’t comfortable and you
couldn’t talk with it on. Tamati had gone out wandering the neighborhood with Sgt
Kevin and two of his mates, looking for food and fuel.

His daughter was helping fix the bus.

Just before they lit the fire, a general
consensus was arrived at that a glow might be visible in the sky, and the sun may
finally be breaking through. Then the wind sprang up and it disappeared. It is
the opinion of Lord Brown that minute particles high in the stratosphere will
gradually settle and as they do, they’ll create side-draughts which “murky” it
all up again, so the clearing process can be very staggered. It is his view
that it could get worse before becoming completely “clarified”. Personally, Wiremu
couldn’t envisage a “worse,” so he pretty much ignored the warning. He was more
worried about Āmiria. The weather would take care of itself, and those
strangers who may have snuck in, well, he could just walk over and ask them if
he had a mind. Which he didn’t. They looked harmless enough. But his daughter,
that was a more troubling issue.

Jerry and Āmiria were attempting to
jigger up some attachment to the steering rod, which had become bent out of
shape. She was filing down a thin piece of metal so it could be slotted into
another piece which would in turn help support the twisted rod. The bus had
only two functional torches: Jerry was using one to peer into the guts of the
engine, while Kevin took the other. Kevin and Tamati initially tried using
burning stakes from the fire, in an effort to conserve the torch, but in
practice keeping them alight proved more work than they were worth and they
thought it better to use the torch, and hold the unlit stakes as backup should
the torch fail. The stakes had a knot of material around the top which had been
rubbed over with candle wax.

On leaving Tamworth, Lord Brown convinced
them all the drive to Griffith would be easy as pie. There seemed no question
of going near the coast until it became lighter. The other generally held view,
was they should, at all costs, avoid Dubbo. Lord Brown persuaded the group the
best recovery efforts to date were happening in Griffith, although Wiremu
suspected he just wanted to hook up with that dwarf fūlla Āmiria told
him about.

From Tamworth they’d travelled west on the
Oxley highway, through Gunnedah, then Rocky Glen and the badlands of the
Coonabarabran before turning south, scouting the fringe of the Warrumbungles
and through Gilandra. After this they left the Oxley highway, continuing south
on the Newell highway which went through Dubbo. However before Dubbo, they cut
west on a side road which took them through Narromine and brought them back
onto the Newell, bypassing Dubbo. A short drive south of this was Peak Hill. This
morning, on the outskirts of Peak Hill, Jerry said they definitely ort to stop
and try to fix the steering. Wiremu wasn’t about to argue.

From here they’d simply have to stay on the
Newell highway, continue south through Parkes, Forbes, and all the way to West
Wyalong. That’s a big stretch with bugger all in the middle, so more diesel will
need to be found before that. Stay on the Newell, head south until Ardlethan
(which Lord Brown said was just past Mirrool) then leave the Newell and go west
through Barellan, Binya, Yanda, and hey presto, they’d be in Griffith! Yeah, piece
a cake.

Wiremu shook his head, disillusioned. He
should never have left Whakatāne. Beside him, Peanuts looked away from
Alistair for a moment and wagged his tail in agreement. Alistair held a branch
vaguely shaped like a cricket bat. He swung it majestically, showing everyone a
well-played stroke, but apart from Nigel and Peanuts, no one paid much
attention. And Peanuts only wanted him to chuck the branch so he could bring it
back.

Wiremu decided to check progress on the bus.
They’d positioned the fire so the engine was within the circle of light from
the flames, but hopefully far enough to avoid any stray ember being blown into some
exposed fuel pipe. The dog followed, cutting Alistair’s audience in half. Āmiria
filed away steadily at the metal strut. Jerry’s torch was off, and his job
appeared to be issuing instructions on the correct filing angle. He’d said
earlier his eyesight couldn’t match Āmiria’s, and Wiremu wasn’t surprised
to see her take over the filing. Right from the time the girl could crawl,
she’d had this gift for figuring out mechanical gadgets. He knew he’d only get
in the way and tried to tell himself a good leader knows when to delegate
anyhow, so let her take on the critical job.

His daughter’s lips were pursed in
concentration and despite the chill in the air, sweat beaded her forehead. ‘Down!’
called Jerry. She shifted the file angle a minute fraction. Tim watched on uselessly.
Rather than interrupt, Wiremu thought he’d take a look inside. The dog followed.

The bus stank. From the top of the stairs,
every footstep scattered a carpet of rubbish across the deck. Clattering cans,
chip and biscuit packets, bottles, even broken glass. Why didn’t they just toss
it out the window? That’ll be all that save-the-earth, greenie crap still
hanging on. You’d think that’d be down the toilet for a while, the way things
have turned out. He made a snap decision to clean the bus. A good leader’s
supposed to take on the toughest jobs aren’t they? This had the same hollow ring
as the leader delegating to his daughter when he doesn’t-know-shit theory. Nevertheless,
he fumbled around until finding a large empty sackcloth bag. Up in the light,
it read:
20kg Wholemeal High-Grade Flour,
stenciled right across the middle.
Just the ticket for collecting garbage, so he got down to it.

The only cleanish area of floor was the
driver’s area, and around his and Āmiria’s seat second back from the
driver where they’d securely chained their pack to the armrest. His cleaning
enthusiasm lasted until row seven. By then, the flour bag was nearly chocker,
he’d cut his hand on glass, and taken numerous dings to the head from the
underside of the seats. By row ten, reality had well and truly set in. He was
cleaning a bloody bus! For what? Nuthin! And where are they goin? Nowhere! This
is what Wiremu Ruarangi had descended to.

He was Wiremu Ruarangi, the Cleaner of Buses,
son of Tane Ruarangi who could trace his lineage all the way back to
Tūhoe-pōtiki, the youngest son of Tamatea ki-te-huatahi, who in turn
was a grandson of Toroa, captain of the Mataatua canoe which arrived at Whakatāne
from Hawaiki in 1352 (Sir Peter Buck, the noted Māori historian, estimated
the arrival of the Mataatua canoe at Whakatāne to be in 1350AD, counting
generations back at 25yrs per generation, but Wiremu always said his rellies
had never managed to turn up early for anything in their lives so he put it
nearer 1352). The same Wiremu Ruarangi whose Tūhoe ancestors rallied
alongside the great chief Rewi Maniapoto at the Battle of Ōrākau in
1864, when 300 warriors held back an overwhelming English force for three bloody
days before being cut to ribbons by cavalry when they tried to retreat. And now
here he was, cleaning a bloody bus in the dark.

‘I have come a very long way,’ said Wiremu to
the dog.

At row eleven, he found a gigantic bone Peanuts
had been gnawing on, left over from roadkill they’d picked up somewhere near
Gilandra. The thigh bone of a steer. He put this to one side, intending to
smash it open later with a rock so the dog could get at the marrow and finish it
off. Another handful of rubbish was jammed in, leaving barely enough room to
tie a knot at the top. He stacked it up by the front door. It took only a few
moments ferreting around to find an empty plastic shopping bag to replace the
flour sack. At row twelve, under a mush of soggy newspaper lay an unopened can
of food. Wiremu held it up to the light:
Tom Yum Soup, authentic Thai, just
add meat
. The label was damp, but readable, and it had a ring-pull top so
they wouldn’t even need the can opener.

He really should’ve stayed in
Whakatāne. This is what happens to those who deviate from the path: they
end up with cold Tom Yum in the dark. The People of the Mist gradually mutate
into the little-known, mysterious, Tom-Yum tribe, who inhabit broken-down buses
and play much cricket. Through the window he could see Alistair tossing a pebble
a few feet into the air, then attempting to belt it with his branch-bat. That’s
another swing; another miss.

Wiremu left Whakatāne when he was seventeen,
after getting a Tainui girl from Ngaruawahia pregnant. The option had certainly
been there (had he pushed it) to bring her back to Tūhoe kāinga, but
in reality let himself be drawn away because he wanted to travel, and moving to
the big smoke of Ngaruawahia, which was a lot closer to Auckland, seemed a step
in the right direction. As it turned out their grim council house in
Ngaruawahia was mouldy and cramped and they never could afford to go to
Auckland anyway. Two days after moving in, there’d been a pack-rape incident
directly over the road and they were interviewed by police for an hour even
though they’d seen or heard nothing. Shortly after this, a pensioner at the end
of the street was bashed to death for the nine dollars in her purse. There were
only two good things about this phase of Wiremu’s life: he picked up a job as a
builders apprentice, and the birth of his daughter.

When Āmiria was ten months old, his
wife went to the supermarket one afternoon and died in a head-on crash with a
drunk driver. By a solitary stroke of luck, Wiremu was looking after the baby
at the time and she’d been alone in the car. The drunk was a Rangatira from
Tūrangawaewae marae and his misdemeanor got quietly swept under the carpet
because he’d sadly been killed in the smash too. Wiremu thought this unjust,
and a week after the funeral, got drunk himself, then went up to the cemetery on
Taupiri hill and pissed on the dead Rangatira’s grave.

A month after this Wiremu had his REVELATION.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that
any
man who goes through trauma of
this nature will tend to reassess his general role, and direction in life, but
at the time it’d been earth-shattering. Wiremu spoke with the wise men: the
Tohunga at the marae. He even tried incantations and other various karakia to
find out what his ancestors might, or might not, advise. Then the REVELATION
hit him, and it said: You have a child to take care of. Your ancestors, before
the Pākehā arrived, were tribes of warring cannibals, and the
Pākehā turned out to be not much better. In fact, the only truly
impressive thing your hapū ever did was manage to sail all the way to
Aotearoa in the first place. They were explorers! New Zealand, Wiremu had been
told, was the last place on the entire planet to be settled by humans. His ancestors
weren’t just explorers: they were the
greatest
explorers; reaching the
islands at the very ends of the earth! And tucked away deep in the forests of
the most inaccessible parts of New Zealand, at the very,
very
end, lived
the Tūhoe.

With all this in hand it was just a matter
of putting the pieces together. To look after his daughter properly he had to
play the Pākehā game and make some scratch. This would entail
exploring: there was no doubt. Ngaruawahia and scratch are not words that ride
together easily. So he took Āmiria to the mines, on the north-west coast
of Australia, where they had excellent childcare facilities and the scratch was
massive. Obviously, his wife’s whānau, as well as his own, were
not
keen on that decision, but the REVELATION had told him exactly what to say:

‘Y’all can get fucked. I’ve got a job to
do.’ And that is exactly what he did.

From Perth he quickly worked his way up the
coast, finding employment as a builder in Port Hedland and squeezing in a part-time
job at a mine in the Pilbara. The mine was a big commute but they were more
than happy to help out with costs and hours because, if truth be told, one of
the HR women interviewing Wiremu had been immensely sympathetic of his solo-Dad
status which certainly hadn’t done his case any harm.

After seven years in Hedland, he thought the
girl should go to a better school and opted for Sydney. By then, he’d built up
a decent stash of cash, thank you very much; enough to put a sizable deposit on
a house in Manly. More importantly, he’d completed his Master Builders
certification and a construction boom was kicking-off in New South Wales. So
bags were packed and over they went. When he looked back, it seemed the days in
the wild north-west were probably the best of his life. Well, best bar one. After
they shifted to Sydney his wife’s whānau started coming over more
regularly, to help look after the girl. He also began taking Āmiria back
to Whakatāne and Ngaruawahia on more frequent trips, now that he had the
dough for travel.