Peter began to utter screams. There would be no word in the dictionary adequate to describe the actual noises which came from him; ‘screams’ would fall far short. He didn’t seem in any physical pain. His expression hardly altered, there were no warnings beforehand or traces of any trauma afterwards; it was as if the screams were being irregularly transmitted through the child’s throat and mouth from a distant source. They suggested dreadful terror and agony. The doctors and psychiatrists did tests, summoned us, and spread out encephalograms on their desks showing the jagged electrical pulses inside the child’s brain like edges of broken ice. Then they said: Well, we really don’t know. They spoke of electro-convulsive therapy. At any rate they proposed that we consider placing the subject in a special clinic. Whilst we talked, the subject sat in another room waiting, ignoring the nurse who was there; it was a soundproofed room, and we could see him through a one-way mirror. At one point he turned and seemed to stare towards us and his mouth opened in what may have been a scream; only later did I remember that he was not looking at us but towards his own reflection.
We took him home, and argued as usual. I felt my opposition weakening. The screams, sporadic, shocking, were unbearable. I had seen history-book pictures by medieval painters, where faces were spread out in terror and split open soundlessly, the noise left to your mind. Peter’s cries were like that, as if a door had opened and slammed shut on hell.
What followed, a few weeks later, was still not easy for me to remember because my mind had insisted on being evasive, and this was part of the nightmare, the thing I wanted to elude. Now it presented itself in the form of disconnected images as a waking memory, held in me like a shout without sound.
I am sitting on the edge of the bath. Peter’s eyes are devious, they glance in all directions and then again with a wrench of his head they fix on my face. I know what will happen. Holding the sides of the bath, he sinks back, slowly. His face goes from the air by inches, mouth closed, the edge of the water sliding up his face in a silver glint of surface tension, the trapped bubbles of air bright like chromium beads, his eyes open beneath the water. His hair floats and drifts, rising from his forehead, combed in slow motion by the lift of the silver line. Now I have to decide. Ten seconds. Wet skin glitters. The eyes widen. I stand, trembling, the reflections slipping over the brilliance. Goodbye Peter. He will only see my lips move. Then the lights.
I go down the hallway and into the kitchen. I go back into the hall. My child is dying. I go into the front room. Joanne is out. He knows that. I go to the kitchen. How long? I shall tell the inquest I went for a towel to the airing cupboard. Some things fell out when I opened the door. Then the phone rang. Wrong number. Then it was too late. I go into the front room. Dear God. I wrap my arms around myself. I am shivering. The sky dark blue. There is no noise.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The grey haze lightened and paled from clouds of rain mixing steam and mist. Buildings, dark macrocarpa trees, wet streets emerged and receded. The day uncovered the landscape cautiously, but the clouds still waited round the lake and hills, and I waited and looked out from the drawn curtains of the sixth floor of the hotel. The volcanic areas heaved with steam. Some craters seemed dead, scabs of white-yellow sulphur amongst pools of acid, as though the moon had pressed an infection onto the surface of the earth. The rest boiled and spat, expelling the smell of decaying innards into the thickness of the atmosphere. When the clouds moved there were glimpses of wounds gone septic, erupting from beneath pieces of loose cotton wool.
I did not believe that I could go on much longer without having a complete breakdown. There was no option but to keep going until I lost control, but the end was inevitable. It shrank closer all the time. What day was it today? Friday? No; Thursday. I might not even last a week.
The city cleared itself into a more intense daylight. The structures of motel signs, motels, car parks, filling stations, shops, take-away food bars and used-car lots solidified from the dawn and set their colours against each other to catch nonexistent eyes. How familiar. It would all go. The corrosion would eat into it. The fraying edge would make its way across like gangrene. It would all go. The makers and users had ceased to exist. Now the bits of city appeared to be nothing but lost luggage which nobody would ever claim, a dump of non-returnable objects.
When I used to look down from high buildings I always wondered about the hidden lives of the people who were hurrying around, coming and going, all fixed on errands and purposes I could never begin to guess at. How did they live? Were they content with their lives? The Maoris in the next street in Auckland, twenty years ago: why did they seem happy? Did they really have good lives? Inside all the faces you saw in the streets and on buses or behind blinds, all the minds in those miles and miles of houses, under every corrugated iron roof, in the dark, awake at night: what were they thinking? Were there bound to be so many mysteries? And secrets? I wondered how much was concealed from the world or how much was concealed from me; my life had been a very narrow channel, and I’d edged along it knowing almost nothing. The life everybody else was leading had seemed vital and purposeful, as if meanings had been found; it went on apart from me, and I picked up faint images from it, echoes, muted sounds, filtering down my narrow channel. I watched people from a distance, I read books, I glimpsed hints from films and television advertisements. But my detachment, my amazement at the way life went on without me, stayed the same. I would feel bitter, and bury that feeling, and direct rage outwards to easy targets. I was doing it even now, when everybody had vanished into an even greater mystery, a communal secret hidden completely from any ignorant speculations I might make; me of all people. It had been left to me to break into their locked houses, look at the evidence, and make sense of it.
The light gathered in the room like a damp powder. Everywhere it would be filling millions of closed places uselessly. I got ready to leave. Holding the shotgun and torch I unlocked the door, went out into the corridor and down the stairs. Near the lift there was a trolley laden with early morning breakfasts intercepted at 6.12 last Saturday; amongst white cups and plates stood a jug of rancid milk and wads of green fur which had been bread. The silence was stronger than ever. The carpet absorbed the sounds of my movements. In the lobby of the hotel the large window walls were slanting great rectangular plots of light across the floor. The sun had come out. Enormous pleasure and sadness mixed together and welled up within a rush of new sensations. My shadow moved over the carpet, across the furniture. It was as if the world had been re-created. The dreadful night and the image of the abomination of the dark road seemed to fall back into the distance with the other bad memories. My arm brushed against the branch of an indoor plant fading to brown for lack of water, and a few dry leaves detached from the stem and rustled to the floor. Soon it would all be dead.
I unfastened the main doors and walked outside into the damp warmth. The car was covered with condensation. I wiped the windows. Cancerous waves of stench from the pools. I drove round and back onto the main street, turning left out of town. The air soon freshened on the way south. My mind began to clear. But I was achingly tired and increasingly hungry. The road went through desolate and strange-looking country with ragged hills here and there, and then carved its way through vast forests. It was a wide new highway with a cleared space on each side reaching to the blocks of trees. Even though the sun was bright there was a thick darkness in the packed forest and nothing else was growing except a few feeble ferns at the edge of the gloom. The columns of pines went back on all sides into the distance.