‘Apirana Maketu,’ he said.
What was even stranger was the fleeting idea which seemed to link us at the same moment, immediately after the reassurance of physical contact had confirmed for us both that we were real, living, flesh and blood human beings and not illusions or apparitions; and that was the faintest hint of recognition as our eyes stared closer. ‘Recognition’ would have been too decisive a word. It was rather more like a vague questioning look which people exchange when they mistakenly think they know each other and then realise they don’t, or can’t possibly, and yet in the act of dismissing the idea they’re really putting it to one side for further exploration. There was reassurance, and caution; for this and for all sorts of reasons, we weren’t sure about each other.
‘You’ve not seen anybody?’ I asked. He shook his head.
‘Went down to Napier, Hastings. Nothing. And up to Wairoa, Gisborne, all up the coast. That’s where I’m from. Tolaga Bay. Nobody there, back home, it’s just…’ The words had come out in a rush and he stopped and swallowed. Then, ‘D’you reckon…you reckon they’re all…?’
He was obviously thinking of his family. ‘I don’t think they’re dead,’ I replied, sensing that I ought to sound decisive and assert something, however little I might know. He very much wanted an assurance to hang onto. ‘Dead things didn’t disappear.’
He gazed at me, thoughtful, far off, his eyes still fixed on my face.
‘No.’ He nodded. ‘’S true.’
I’d avoided saying ‘corpses’. He knew that much, then; he must have found corpses. He nodded again, and came out of his thoughts with a tighter smile, lifting his right hand and clasping my left arm in a friendly gesture.
‘Gee, it’s good to talk to somebody,’ he said; ‘I was…I begun to think I was…you know? Porangi. Crazy. I mean, I couldn’t figure out why it was me, just me—’
It was my turn to nod agreement, but I couldn’t bring myself to return his gesture. I wasn’t in the habit of grasping people in matey embraces and it would have looked awkward and phoney if I’d even tried. Yet without knowing what to do, how to respond, I did feel the same thankfulness and rush of emotion.
‘And I thought it was just me,’ I said, and we grinned at each other. The puzzle seemed to have changed shape elusively, to have shrunk and expanded in different areas. Yet I felt it could be cornered now, and defeated.
‘Why us, then?’ he asked; ‘we must be special, eh?’
‘We must have something in common,’ I said, absurdly. He stood back and looked at me, in mock confusion. His face was lightened by very white teeth and the going of the frown, but he was quite dark-skinned and his eyes were very black and quick, scanning me up and down.
‘You don’t look like Ngati Porou to me,’ he said.
As if on cue we both burst out laughing like madmen, reeling around the ridiculous landscape, eyes watering, lungs heaving. The release was more than just the collapse of fear, tension, isolation, and everything else, it was a burst of noise for its own sake, for being alive, for getting our own back, for defiance and mockery at whatever had messed the universe into such clueless stupidity. Five minutes earlier, alone, it would have been a sure mark of mental disintegration.
We leaned on my car, weak. When I got my breath back I looked at him.
‘I think we’ll get by,’ I said.
‘I think we will,’ he replied.
Euphoria. Brains short of oxygen.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He had blocked the road with the sheep truck and driven along the track from the south in an army jeep to the point where the steam drifted over the way. He’d pitched a tent behind the small hill on the left. It was a carefully calculated ambush. The previous day he’d come up from Waiouru to Turangi to check the power station at Tokaanu. He didn’t know much about all that, but he thought there might have been a power surge at 6.12 last Saturday morning, since some equipment at the army camp at Waiouru had gone into overload and all the circuit breakers had been tripped. As far as he could tell this had happened at the power station too. He was a lance corporal in the army, by the way, and I should call him Api. He’d had four years’ service. Weapons instructor. Wanted to be a mechanic, really. Anyhow; yesterday he’d been at Tokaanu, about midday, and he thought he’d heard a noise coming across the lake from the north, from Taupo. What kind of noise? Well, hard to say really. Maybe an echo, like a foghorn gone wrong, but a long way off, and sort of distorted.
I said I’d heard a sound in the evening a bit like that, only I was in Taupo and it seemed to come from the southern end of the lake. No, he’d not heard any sounds in the evening. But he thought it might be a car, so he’d set up the road block south of Turangi to catch anything coming along either the east or west sides of the lake.
He was very well prepared and equipped; I was a little surprised to realise that he seemed to have been coping very competently, perhaps even more adequately in some ways than I had, though this might be, I thought, in fact it probably was, only a superficial impression. We always overrate skills in other people we don’t have ourselves, and it couldn’t take much genius to pitch a tent and cook up a meal or two. Boy Scout stuff.
I sat on a folding chair whilst he uncorked a bottle of wine and produced some cold chicken and potato salad from a polystyrene container off the back of his, or the army’s, jeep. We drank several glasses of wine in celebration. It was a good New Zealand riesling, not the flagon of sugary sauterne I expected when he offered me white wine. He talked as he unpacked and readied the meal. I drank enough to become pleasantly relaxed, and sat there watching him with the thought drifting into my mind that maybe I had acquired Man Friday.
He didn’t have very much to tell which could decipher the mystery. When he woke up last Saturday he’d found the camp deserted and imagined that some exercise was under way and he’d not been told or forgotten. Like me, he panicked slightly, and like me, he checked all the radio wavebands. There was no power problem because they had auxiliary power supplies; all he had to do was to set the generators going. The clock phenomenon and the total absence of radio signals or transmissions had had the same unnerving effect on him. When he found Waiouru town empty as well, he had to decide what to do on the basis of his training. His instincts were, as he said graphically, to ‘run away and shit myself’. It was obvious, when he looked through all the barracks and living quarters, that people had not got up and gone, they had just—and here he spread his hands out and looked at me for a word, helplessly—well, they had just gone. Those that had clothes on had disappeared with their clothes. That was weird. He had remembered a lecture they’d had a couple of years before on the neutron bomb. It was supposed to kill people but not damage buildings; the radiation did it. Maybe some new weapon like that had been used? He concluded that it was his duty to stay in the army camp, so he’d surrounded himself with weaponry and waited.
‘If you run away, it’s desertion,’ he said; ‘on active service you’d get court-martialled.’ He paused. ‘It looked like the real thing to me.’
‘What if everyone runs away?’ I asked.
‘That’s a strategic withdrawal,’ he said, seriously.