Where Cuckoos Call (9 page)

A weather bomb is like a tropical cyclone except it develops faster and outside the tropics. This one formed just north of New Zealand and aimed itself at Mansfield Bay. We had some warning: just enough to tie down the dog cage and anything else that might fly around.

We’re used to storms on the Coromandel Peninsula. We get them every winter, and in summer we often get the remnants of tropical cyclones. But weather bombs are something else. This one was horrible. The rainfall was the most frightening. It was like somebody was pouring a huge bucket of water over the house. From my bedroom I couldn’t see the trees that were ten metres away.

It continued into the night, with rain pounding so loudly on the roof that it was impossible to sleep. Sometime in the early morning the rain stopped and the wind dropped. When I looked out my window in the morning, I found a stream running past my window. There should be no streams near our house, yet the rain had been so heavy that the water had found new ways to flow downhill, and one of those was through our garden. The hills were scarred with slips and mud slides. It would take years for nature to repair what the storm had done in only eight hours.

Down at the beach the damage could have been worse. The winds had been mainly offshore, which kept the waves away. While there was a big swell coming in now, the sand spit looked like it would be OK. The worst damage was at the other end of the beach. Two huge kauri logs had washed down from the hills. These were leftovers from the earlier logging days. I knew of at least five up in the bush. Each had been trimmed ready for shipping out, yet somehow had been forgotten. A
hundred years later they were all rotten, and two were blocking our stream, forming a lake.

Dad came down while I was wondering what to do.

‘This is just what I thought might happen,’ he said grimly. ‘The others will come down sometime too.’

‘What are we going to do with them?’

‘Get them out of the stream to begin with.’

I went to get the tractor while Dad searched for chains. The tractor shed had taken a battering. The centre pole had shifted some more and the roof was just clear of the roll bar. If it slipped much more, the whole roof would come down.

It took the rest of the morning to shift those logs. We dragged each of them up the track and rolled them onto the grass edge. Dad took a hammer out of the tractor toolbox and started attacking the rot. He found some good timber, but most of it was a black mess. They were rubbish, and sometime we had to find a way of getting rid of them.

We returned to the stream. The new ‘lake’ had almost drained away, and we could see the damage that had been done by the raging water. The clay bank had been eaten away, exposing more of the roots of the kahikatea. Looking closer, I saw that the brown stain had gone, leaving freshly exposed clay. The Taupo ash layer was even more obvious. Below it a brown piece of rock was poking out. I moved forward to remove it.

‘Hold on,’ said Dad urgently. ‘Have a look at this.’ He was pointing to a similar piece lying in the stream. He bent down and picked it up. After looking at it for a moment he handed it to me. ‘It looks like a piece off a clay plant pot.’

I studied it with growing excitement. I had seen a piece like this in Vanuatu. The pattern was not the same, yet there was no mistaking what it was.

‘Do you know what this is?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

Dad shook his head.

‘It’s Lapita pottery. The Lapita people lived in the Pacific a couple of thousand years back.’

‘Is it? Then what’s it doing here?’

‘Maybe the Lapita people were here?’

He looked at me. ‘That’s a big step to take, Ben.’

We then studied the bank more closely. The other piece was not exposed enough to see any pattern, though it looked to be the same. Nearby was a hole that matched the piece we had. That was where it had fallen from.

‘Right,’ said Dad. ‘I’m going to give Bill a call. If this is for real, then there could be a problem with our deal.’

Bill Wiltshire arrived by helicopter mid-afternoon. With him was a Professor Waghorn. We walked them down to the stream and the professor went to work. Dad, Bill, Peg and I watched as the bank was photographed from every possible angle. Waghorn gave us a running commentary of what he was doing. He sounded so much like the TV image of a professor that I had trouble not laughing.

Basically he repeated what Sarah-Lee had said about the Taupo ash layer. His excitement was not only about discovering the Lapita, but about its location below the ash layer. I had the feeling he was already anticipating the fame this discovery might bring.

After everything had been measured and probed, the part of the bank with the artefacts was removed and placed in a box. The loose piece of pottery had already been sealed in a jar.

When that was finished, Professor Waghorn turned to us and beamed. ‘Now if I can just have a photo of the boy who discovered the find, I’ll be on my way.’ So, I was photographed many times from different angles and with different backgrounds.

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve got everything I’ll need. We’ll soon get to the bottom of this.’

After the helicopter had left, Dad and I made our way slowly up to the house. ‘You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you, Ben?’ asked Dad.

The question took me by surprise. ‘What? No! I never did anything.’

‘Mmm. I hope you’re telling the truth. Because if you’re not… well, it could be big trouble.’

I didn’t speak, but I sure was thinking. I certainly hadn’t done anything, yet I knew somebody who might have. Sarah- Lee’d had the opportunity, the means and the desire. Was this the ecoterrorism she had suggested? Oh, how I hoped it wasn’t, for both our sakes. I hoped it was what I wanted it to be: an exciting find about the discovery of New Zealand. With all my being I wanted it to be the miracle that would save Mansfield Bay and its birds.

I was amazed to see that the find was the main item on the news that night.

‘A recent discovery on the Coromandel Peninsula is likely to shed new light on the original settlement of New Zealand’ was the opening line. ‘A twelve-year-old boy has discovered the remains of an ancient settlement in Mansfield Bay on the northeastern side of the peninsula. However, a major coastal development is planned for the bay. Now, it is a race against time for the archaeologist investigating the find. Tim Bourke has more details.’

The screen switched to the reporter and then to Professor Waghorn, who outlined the basic parts of the story. Then my picture was on the screen and Tim Bourke was speaking. ‘The boy who made the discovery is Ben Mansfield, son of the
owner of the property. Ben has concerns about the effect of the development on the birds of the bay and has always opposed the development.’ Where had they got that from? The only people who knew that were Wiltshire, Mum, Dad and Cole.

Then the answer came on the screen: we got a picture of Bill Wiltshire sitting in his office with a magnificent view of Auckland harbour in the background. Tim Bourke was saying, ‘Bill Wiltshire says that the development will be designed to accommodate the birds, but the Lapita was not something they had planned for.’

‘If this find is authenticated,’ said Bill, ‘and I repeat “if”, then we would certainly need to look at what we will do with the Pacific Keys development. However, it would be premature to speculate until we have Professor Waghorn’s final report.’

Tim Bourke was back in person: ‘And Professor Waghorn is saying his report should be available within a week. We will await its release with interest.’

‘Indeed we shall, Tim,’ added the studio presenter. ‘And there will be a full discussion on this matter in
Behind the News
at seven.’

The discussion was between the professor and two other scientists. One was an expert on dating bones, especially rat bones. The other was a Lapita specialist. It was all friendly enough. Waghorn put his point that it was very likely that people may have visited much earlier than the permanent settlement dates. The rat man supported this, saying there was no other way that rats could have got here except by hitching a ride in a canoe, and there was lots of evidence that rats had been here for a long time. The Lapita woman wasn’t sure. The pattern she had seen on the artefact was different from that found on the Lapita islands closest to New Zealand. They were each very careful to point out that nothing had yet been proved.

The next morning was chaos. The telephone never stopped ringing. Everyone wanted to talk to me, but I wasn’t talking. Dad’s comment of the previous day had made me wary. In the end Mum took the telephone off the hook. Some reporters made the long trip up to our farm. I hid in Treetops and left Mum and Dad to deal with them.

It was on the front page of the paper, along with several photos of the bay, Waghorn, Wiltshire and me. The headline read:
Have we been here longer than we think?
The piece was well written and reported events fairly. Inside the front page was a whole article on the movement of people into the Pacific. It had arrows on a map and a dotted arrow coming from New Caledonia down to New Zealand. It certainly looked as if it could have happened.

After three days it was over. The news media had got bored with the story and moved on to other things. However, for those three days Mansfield Bay had been mentioned thousands of times in all sorts of ways. Now most of the country knew there was a debate over a development in a small bay on the Coromandel Peninsula.

While we waited for Professor Waghorn to hand down his words of wisdom, the first obvious signs of development arrived. I’d been told we had until December the fifteenth to make up our minds, yet Bill Wiltshire seemed to have forgotten that.

The first I knew about it was a truck arriving, loaded with eight huge boulders. It came down to the stream, where the driver hopped out of the cab and started wandering around the place. After he saw me running along the beach he leaned against the cab, waiting.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Is this where they’re meant to go?’

‘I know nothing about them. What are they for?’

‘I was told a breakwater was going in here somewhere.’

‘Not yet, it isn’t.’ I was starting to get annoyed.

He dived into the cab, returning with a piece of pink paper. ‘This is an order for four loads of large rocks. This is the first. Here, have a look.’

I looked, and he was right. It was signed by Bill Wiltshire. There was also an instruction to drive through the stream and dump them above the high-tide mark.

‘Where are they coming from?’ I was thinking of sending him back.

‘We’re widening the three-oh-nine road. These are all blasted out of the cuttings. They’ve got to go somewhere and this is the place.’

I thought of several things I could do: tell Dad and let him sort it out—yet he probably knew already; politely tell the driver to go away—that wasn’t going to happen; let him dump them, and then hope that Wiltshire would have to pay for them all to be carted away again.

‘OK, I suppose so,’ I said, choosing the easiest option. ‘Bring them along here.’

I chose a spot about fifty metres from the stream where the sand had blown in over the grass. It would actually help if that was covered for a while.

Dumping the load made a screeching, rumbling, crashing sound. It made me realise that here was another threat to the birds—the noise of construction. If it was starting now, it would continue into the breeding season. It couldn’t help but disturb the birds.

Professor Waghorn must have been concerned that he was out of the news for a few days, because he published his report much sooner than expected.

I was sitting reading in Treetops when I heard Dad’s voice calling out to me. It was most unexpected; he hadn’t been down there for months. ‘I wonder what he wants,’ I mumbled.

When I climbed down I found he was not alone. There was a TV news crew with him.

‘These people want to interview you.’ He was not angry. He was more sad than anything else.

‘What about?’

Tim Bourke, the interviewer, took over. ‘If you’ll just stand over here, we can do it with the estuary in the background. Yes, that’s good.’

The camera started to roll. ‘Ben, are you aware that Professor Waghorn has released his report?’

‘No.’

‘It says that the two pieces of pottery could not have been in the ground for two thousand years and that there is evidence that they were placed there only recently. Have you anything to say about this?’

I lowered my eyes to the ground. This was just what I had feared. ‘No,’ I said softly.

‘No!’ he sounded incredulous. ‘Do you not know how they could have got there?’

I kept looking at the ground.

‘Ben?’

‘He put them there,’ Dad interrupted.

The camera spun around to him and the interviewer said, ‘Can you repeat that?’

‘He put them there. My son did it.’

The camera came back to me. ‘Do you have anything to say about that?’

There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t get others into trouble, so I kept my mouth shut.

‘Do you know where they came from?’

‘That’s enough!’ yelled Dad, losing his temper. ‘You can get out of here now. You’ve caused enough problems for this family.’

They went. So did Dad, leaving me standing by myself and shaking with shame.

We got more information in the news that night. Again Professor Waghorn was the main item, which I’m sure is what he intended all along.

His evidence was damning. One, the clay surrounding the artefacts had been recently loosened as if dug out and filled back in. Two, the artefacts had another, much harder, clay on the surface and this matched a clay from Papua New Guinea. Three, the design matched those of other pots found in that same place in Papua New Guinea. There was no doubt that the thing was a hoax.

Next came the interview which showed one very guilty boy hanging his head and not speaking. Then the boy’s father said
what everyone knew was true: it was the boy who had buried the bits of pottery.

They then went live to the Wiltshire Property Development building where Tim Bourke said that Bill Wiltshire was relieved that the matter had been sorted out and that he would be able to get on with Pacific Keys. There was then an interchange between the studio presenter and Tim Bourke about why the boy would have done such a thing. The conclusion was that he did it for selfish reasons—he wanted the bay to stay the way it was. And where did he get the bits of pottery? ‘Well,’ said Tim. ‘I’ve asked around and it seems that these things are quite common and can be bought online, so that’s probably where he got them.’ And what would happen to the boy? ‘I have spoken to the police,’ replied Tim, ‘and they say that it is unlikely they will lay any charges.’

We sat at the table in silence until the news was finished. Then the TV was turned off and we sat in silence for a while longer. Finally, Dad said, ‘Ben, you have brought terrible shame on this family.’ His voice was controlled, almost as if he was reading the words. ‘And you have caused embarrassment for other people. Perhaps I should have said yes to the sale earlier and stopped all the wondering. Well, now I’m going to say yes. Tomorrow I will ring Bill Wiltshire and tell him we are selling.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And, then, that must be the end of it. There must be no more interference. You are not to get involved in anything to do with stopping or changing the development. Nothing. Do you understand me?’

I nodded.

‘No, that’s not enough. I want to hear you say it.’

I took a deep breath and said it. ‘I will not get involved in anything to do with the development.’

‘And you make sure you keep that promise. Now go to your room.’

I don’t want to talk about the days that followed. The media interest seemed even more intense than the first time—everyone wanted a chunk of the boy who had perpetrated the hoax. But, just when it seemed that it would never end, it did and I was left in peace. I sat in Treetops and read—the world of fantasy was proving a much better place than the real world.

Slowly I recovered and began to take an interest in life again. When finally I checked my emails, I found I had lots from Sarah-Lee telling me about school. When I had not responded, she became increasingly concerned about me, pleading for a reply.

I was unsure what to do about Sarah-Lee. There was no doubting that she had planted the bits of pottery. I thought she was extremely lucky that the media had not discovered the connection to her parents. It only needed a comment from someone and links would have been made back to the Petersens. That would have been disastrous for them.

Eventually I did write to her. It was a long email, reporting everything. I did not accuse her, but it was impossible to keep the anger and sadness out of my words.

Her reply came almost immediately.

Dear Ben,

I am so terribly sorry. I regretted it as soon as I left. At first I was angry with you, but that was stupid. I was angry that we keep destroying beautiful places like Mansfield Bay. I wanted to stop it from happening and so I buried the pottery pieces.

I did not expect you to find them. I don’t really know what I expected. I did it without thinking it through.

I’m crying as I write this. I am so ashamed of myself and of what I have done to you.

I will understand if you never write to me again, but that is not what I want. I want us to stay being friends. It means so very much to me.

Sarah-Lee