Wake (18 page)

‘What happened to you?' William asked, amazed again by the way she looked.

Sam was stricken. ‘I told you. I hurt my old people at Mary Whitaker and then hurt myself. You saw what I was doing with—' She hesitated. ‘With the paella pan.'

‘Sam, I don't mean what happened at the rest home. I mean—did something happen to you when you were younger? Some kind of head injury?'

‘It wasn't my head.'

‘All right.' William tried to think how to rephrase his question. The buzzing had receded. Sam's face was in sharp focus, her skin glowing like honey in radiance from the lamp with its parchment shade. She sighed, then said, ‘This is what happened, if you want to know. One day, when I was by myself, climbing up a bank, I pulled on a bush and a stone about the size of a basketball came out and knocked me down the bank. They said it tore a vein in my liver. I bled so much my heart stopped. But not till I was at the hospital. Sam went to the hospital and left me there.'

William frowned. ‘You said “Sam”. What do you mean “Sam”?'

‘The other Sam. She went to the hospital and told them she thought something terrible had happened. And then she left me, and the nurses and doctors saw what was wrong and rushed me into surgery. But my heart stopped. I had to learn to talk again.'

‘How old were you?'

‘Twelve.'

Brain damage from the oxygen starvation of severe blood loss, William thought. And whoever she was before the accident had already shaped her face, already conferred a momentous and eloquent beauty on her now dispossessed flesh. He asked, ‘What did this friend of yours—this other Sam—call
you
?'

‘Sam,' said Sam.

‘Wasn't that confusing?'

‘No. I don't usually call her Sam. When I'm talking to her I call her “You”. One of my old ladies once said to me that everyone has a “You”. Sam is my “You”.'

William reflected that he hadn't ever had a ‘You'. Furthermore he couldn't even imagine what his ‘You' would be like. ‘You must miss her,' he said.

‘She should be here.' Sam gnawed her lips then met William's gaze and, for the first time, kissed him. She acted with initiative, and staked a claim.

That night William was able to sleep for a few hours, till a dream played him the recording his imagination had made that day in the preschool. In his dream he heard a thin, terrified crying, then a series of thuds, then squealing cut short by cracks and crunches and the innocuous not-quite-timber noise that custom board makes when you thump it with your fist. He woke up. It was as if he'd been dropped from the height of the ceiling. The room seem to quake. The bedside lamp was still on. All the shadows in the room were motionless, empty and clean. He was safe.

William slid his hand along the covers, but Sam wasn't beside him. He closed his eyes. After a moment, he felt the pressure of her attention. He raised his head from the pillow. She was sitting at the end of the bed wrapped in a throw rug. She flipped her hair behind her bare shoulders, an uncharacteristically nervy and self-conscious gesture.

He patted the bed next to him. ‘You're very pretty,' he said.

She didn't move. ‘Is that why you like me?'

‘And very sweet,' he added. He closed his eyes and waited for her to nestle up. ‘So,' he thought. ‘This is what they mean when they say “bone-tired”.'

The bed shook as Sam climbed off it. When next William looked, she was at his desk, her back to him, still robed in the rug. Her hair lay in shining waves—it looked washed, combed, carefully dried. When they went to bed it was clumped with sweat at her nape. He said, ‘You washed me off.'

‘I washed off the day.' She lifted a book. She showed him its cover. ‘Are you reading this?'

‘Jeeves and Wooster,' he said.

‘Is that the sort of book you like?'

‘I was enjoying it, when my mind was still able to settle. And speaking of settling—why are you roaming?'

Papers rustled, then, ‘Is this your work?'

‘Those are documents I was taking to a man in Granity, on the West Coast. Most of my work is on my laptop.'

And backed up, sent into the cloud, thank goodness. William hadn't thought about the case—even at first, when he'd still hoped to escape and continue his journey, as if the first hour massacre was just a hitch in his schedule, and as if continuing would have been allowed. He hadn't thought about the things he had to do, or the loss to his firm, the difficulties for the plaintiffs. But it was a relief now to remember that his work was accessible to his colleagues, and that the machinery of the suit would go on at its own slow pace, representing someone else's billable hours.

‘Do you like to read books?' Sam asked.

He wondered whether she hoped he'd say no, he wasn't much of a reader. Perhaps she hoped to find he was more like her. But she didn't wait for an answer. ‘Is your job important?' she said. ‘Do you make a lot of money?'

‘Other people could do my job,' he said. ‘So I don't know that it is important. But, yes, I make very good money.'

‘Do you have a house?'

‘Yes.'

The bed jostled again. She had resumed her seat, this time a little nearer to him. He reached out, and she took his hand. Hers was smooth, soft, lightly muscled. He caressed it, his calluses scratching her. He rolled her relaxed muscles against her little finger bones. ‘Are you trying to get to know me better?' He continued to fondle her fingers. This was familiarity. And in a moment her hand would feel familiar again. It felt odd. Wrong.

‘I told you about my accident, didn't I?' Sam said.

‘I see. Your accident and my house are equivalent?'

Silence.

William tightened his grip to retain her fingers—but she didn't pull away. ‘Sorry,' he said.

‘Do you mean that my accident is
personal
, and your house isn't?' she said.

This was uncharacteristically astute. William said, ‘If your aim is to get to know me better you can't have wanted to talk about books. Books aren't sufficiently personal.'

‘That's why I asked you about your house.'

William yawned. He dropped her hand. ‘Okay. Let's see. My house. Well—it has an amazing kitchen, but I never cook. When I want dinner I walk as far from my place as it takes to end up somewhere where men's cologne won't have too much olfactory impact on my enjoyment of my meal. What does that tell you?'

Sam didn't ask about ‘olfactory impact' and William imagined she took in sentences with the phrase ‘skipped words' in place of those she didn't understand, like a bad transcription of a wiretap. He went on. ‘My books are still in boxes. I had an idea about putting them all in one room in built-in bookcases. But I have yet to find a cabinetmaker I like. And it all seems too permanent.'

‘You mean you don't really want a house?'

‘That's right. Because I blamed the house I lived in as a kid for things that went wrong with my family.'

‘Why?'

William laughed. ‘That's the time-honoured default question.' His eyes were closed again. He heard Sam take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Was she annoyed with him? He made an attempt to explain. ‘I blamed the things that went wrong with our house—instead of taking issue with the reasons my mother found for those things having gone wrong. Her explanations of what must have happened when the roof leaked or she found a rat in the oven.'

More silence from Sam. It was a kind of busy silence. William shifted his head on the pillow so he could look at her. She was poised, radiant. He took hold of her wrist and pulled her into his arms. She went stiff, her elbows braced between their bodies. She said, ‘I need to go to the bathroom.'

William released her.

She was gone for a while and he dozed off again—only roused when he felt her slip a hand between the covers, not to touch him but to smooth the sheets on her side of the bed. The hand withdrew. He watched her circle the bed, trailing her palm along the top of it. She stopped where she'd been sitting and stroked the covers. She looked like someone discovering a damp patch where a cat has done something illicit. She bristled with annoyance.

William opened his arms. Sam grinned, and clambered up the bed into his embrace. They kissed. Then she said, ‘We were talking, right?'

‘I don't mean to start again,' he said. ‘Talking is done, for now.'

‘So—you
don't
like me better when I talk?' She sounded hopeful.

‘You don't have to talk to make me like you, Sam—if that's what you're worried about.'

She considered that for a moment, then looked mollified.

‘Was I being tested with conversation?' William was amused. He kissed her some more.

When he drifted awake again some hours later William discovered that Sam had taken herself off to her own bed. Sam—who would let him do to her pretty much whatever he wanted, and would sweat and tremble and gasp and sigh like she wanted it all too but, it seemed, would never ever let herself fall asleep beside him.

Out in the dark, on the steep shingle beach of Matarau Point, Curtis was making a kayak ready. He lifted its rudder so that it stuck out straight like a flag on a rural mailbox, then hauled it down to the water. He got on his knees to check its cargo, his camera wrapped in many layers of plastic and stowed in a water-tight container. As he tucked the package into the hull and closed the seals of the hatch cover, Curtis said to his camera, ‘We'll make it.'

That's what Adele would always say to him, at any setback. ‘We'll make it.' There was the film that failed, the bad reviews, the funding that dried up. He'd been fifty then—too old to learn how to do anything new. ‘We'll make it,' Adele had said. It turned out that she was right—and he couldn't make it without her.

Curtis slid the kayak into the water. It coasted off, and he followed it. He eased it out between the rocks, walking till he was up to his waist in the sea. He began to push the kayak along the point, parallel to the shore. The water was very cold, and before long he was shivering.

Near the tip of Matarau Point he stopped and stood still, till the kayak's nose nudged back in towards land.

The tide had not yet turned.

Curtis waited. He would do this. He would let his camera go. If he didn't put it beyond his reach, he wouldn't be able to stop pointing it at people—living and dead—and pointlessly trying to say something by simply filling its data card. He didn't want to follow the old impulse that had shaped his whole life. He'd come to hate that impulse, and his hate was the kind that infects the past with the present. He'd had so much self-belief—and what use was it now? It was just noise in his head. It was his own voice harping back to old arguments he'd had with himself, when wounded by criticism. With
himself
, because who could argue with critics? You had to bite your lip and then endure the internal soundless fury of suppressed indignation and pointless reasoning. The critics were the canny ones. They had their say, then fanned their words away. And the artist was left to argue it out with himself. Barking, and barking, but only in his head, like a nuisance dog in a shock-collar.

Had he ever been equal to anything he'd tried to do? Curtis Haines and his camera; his boom like a boathook, grappling salvage to him, none of it really his.

He was tired of all that. Tired of thinking and planning and executing everything with care, and purpose, and full engagement—and that being never quite enough. He was tired of putting himself back together again, a little differently each time, hoping that this time he'd pass muster.

And now there was this. He had tried to film the things people really should know, like how the teams had never thought to use the digger to push the bodies into their graves, how, instead, Jacob and Bub would climb into a grave, and Dan and William would hand the wrapped bodies down to them. But people wouldn't want to see that, even if they should. How then could it be told? How could he refrain from horrifying an audience and still show how good, and tender, and civilised, the survivors were, despite the accepted wisdom about mobs, and riots, and the dissolution of the social contract that sets in whenever disaster strikes. Curtis had filmed things—long shots, dusk, the blue-painted swimming pool grave lit by car headlights; and close-ups, Bub's hands gripping the end of a gory shroud, or the tray of the ute before it was washed. Tasteful things, suggestive things, the
wrong
things—and all because he couldn't bear to be called immoral, or dishonest, or insufficient again.

He'd exiled himself from the others. Now he'd put this part of him—his past, his work—out of reach. He was in retirement.

It was very cold. His teeth were chattering so hard that he was worried he'd chip them. The slack tide went on and on, as if the sea had nowhere it needed to be.

When he was in his twenties, before surfers habitually wore wetsuits, Curtis had once stayed out for hours on a big break. He didn't quit when he got cold, and after a while he stopped feeling it. When he did come in—because it was getting too dark to judge the oncoming waves—he found he couldn't warm up. For hours he was sluggish and depressed and chilled through. It wasn't until the middle of the night that his body reached a normal temperature. Then he found himself unable to sleep because he was jacked up on adrenaline.

Curtis had had exposure and survived it, and he knew the worst of it. So he rode out the shivering as the chill seeped into his core. Eventually, the cold lost its bite, and his jaw stopped its spasms. He was almost comfortable.

The tide began to go out, and the kayak swivelled to lie at an angle to the shore. Curtis held it still in the current. He meant to make sure that, when he let it go, it would leave Kahukura and drift far away, and through the No-Go.