‘Never mind,’ he snaps; ‘doesn’t matter.’
I swing the car into a wide turn and drive aimlessly along Willis Street and down the canyon of Lambton Quay. He lapses into a sullen silence. A lolling, spastic idiocy seems to have invaded the space between us. It is hard to know how strong it might be. My hands go clammy on the rim of the wheel. We are the only people left in the world. Every other living thing has gone as if nothing more than the images of a film bleached out of existence, wiped from a screen by a burst of light in complete silence; evaporated like bits of tissue in a furnace. And here we are. Not talking to each other.
What should I do? Apologise, sympathise? That would only pander to the absurdity. He started this. Does he need to be given a way out?
I stop the car in the shade; flick the key to kill the engine.
‘This is stupid,’ I say. He shrugs. There is a long silence. Suddenly he asks if I believe in anything. He says it sarcastically. I reply that I haven’t had the kind of life which would keep me believing in very much.
‘Maybe you should think about it,’ he says.
Now I can use some righteous indignation on him.
‘Don’t you think I have?’
‘You’re not the only one who’s had a bad time.’
‘I know that. But you asked me, so I’m telling you.’
He looks at me.
‘You haven’t told me anything.’
He’s right. I don’t want him to know too much. I remember the Maori boy years ago outside the house in Herne Bay and how he seemed to be able to make such dangerous and accurate deductions about people who were total strangers. But now, if I’m careful, in control, I can select what to tell. Otherwise he might wonder why I should want to conceal everything.
So we sit there in the car, and I look ahead at the empty street from behind my dark glasses, my hands resting on the steering wheel; and the Maori props his back against the far door and stares at me; and I tell him about Peter and Joanne, and how one evening whilst I was answering the telephone and getting towels from the airing cupboard the child had drowned in the bath. I tell him as much as I think necessary. He presents an impassive, sombre expression. Perhaps there is a morbidity in him which needs feeding, or needs the consolation of finding a lot of disorder inside what must appear to them to be our peculiarly tidy lives. Or it could be part of the Polynesian obsession with death. That must have been what hypnotised them with Christianity. Mysticism, sacrifice, cruelty; sporadic self-pity disguised as compassion: yes, it appealed to them. Worst of all, the insistence on guilt. A tumour in minds, a whining to be forgiven or made miserable. Obscene that this should persist when people had so much power over their own lives. It must make them always expect the worst. And get it.
When I stop, damp with sweat, he says nothing. I turn and face him blankly. He looks down. Then he speaks, quietly: ‘You say you don’t go for religion. But you believe in evil. You saw that animal on the road. Or whatever it was. You said it was evil.’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you mean, then?’
‘It was something which would…destroy life. For no reason. Something which thrives on destroying life.’
‘Having a reason makes a difference, you reckon?’
I lean on the steering wheel and sigh.
‘Oh, I can’t argue round all that. We’d be at it for weeks.’
‘Well,’ he says slowly, ‘I’m a soldier. It’s my job to go out and kill people, if I get the word. Just orders. They don’t give reasons. So am I evil?’
I feel an itching like static electricity inside my spine.
‘Have you killed people?’ I ask, as evenly as possible, as if it’s a very everyday question.
‘Have you?’ he replies.
There is a pause. The silence is so enormous that the ticking of the car clock and our watches expands into the emptiness like the rattling of frantic insects locked in hollow metal boxes. We hold our breath.
‘Who’d ever admit it?’ he says. ‘Anyway, what’s it mean? You blokes sit in your offices or laboratories or wherever, and you make the new weapon, you test it on animals, kill a few hundred rats and monkeys; and then you give the weapon to us, and you say, go on, use it. So who does the killing? Me or you?’
‘I’ve told you about my job. I didn’t do any weapons research.’
‘I bet you killed a few animals.’
‘Well, in the course of—’
‘Yeh, yeh, I know.’
‘I don’t see what you’re getting at.’
‘Where you draw the line, man, that’s what. Was it okay, when you did the experiments and killed them, you know, was your mind okay about it?’
The white bone of my knuckles shows through the skin and cable of veins standing out over the stretched tendons on the back of my hands. And yet I think he wants to be made to confess something himself, that this is all full of his own double meanings.
‘I didn’t like doing it,’ I say, ‘if that’s what you mean. But we thought some good would come of it.’ A pause. ‘I can’t see the point of all this now.’ He has withdrawn again, is staring into his thoughts. I decide to take a risk. ‘Have you got your mind right about whatever you did?’
‘What?’ As if he hasn’t heard.
‘Do you have anything special you have to pray about?’
He shakes his head, not really in denial, more like the gesture of somebody avoiding an insect that might sting.
‘The way I see it,’ he says, ‘it’s like one bloke digging a hole and another one’s filling it in. I mean, if I believe, and you don’t believe, we just cancel each other out, eh?’
‘I don’t think it works like that.’
‘You don’t know how it works.’ He smiles wearily and waves his hand. ‘Drive somewhere. It’s hot.’
I start the car and drive along until we emerge near Parliament, the spaceship of the Beehive building coiled up against the sun. The conversation, or interrogation, has slid away deviously; I feel the danger of having wrenched hidden questions into the open and let them loose without getting answers.
‘Let’s go in and have a look,’ he says, indicating Parliament. So I drive into the grounds and stop by the front steps. Api gets out, lifting his Sten gun from the back seat. I take my shotgun and hold it in the crook of my arm as I lock the car doors.
‘Be careful with that thing,’ he mutters, as I turn; ‘hold it down.’ He shakes his head. ‘Why’d you lock the doors?’
‘You never know.’
‘If there’s anyone around, you’ll get a ticket, parked there.’
I unlock the car boot and take out a hammer and a tyre lever.
‘We’ll have to break in,’ I explain. We set off up the steps.
‘I’ve always thought about doing this,’ he says, and grins and points the Sten gun at the doors.
We are suddenly archaeologists breaking into the tombs of our own civilisation. A week, a thousand years. There are no cobwebs but the dust is already gathering. The insides of halls, corridors and rooms hold a concentrated faded smell, musty, an accumulation of hot afternoons. In the old building our noises are rustled and hollowed in stone spaces; we walk on marble, then squeaking polished lino. We cross to the Beehive. Tufted carpets muffle sounds. The sunlight rests everywhere in large blocks as if ordered in bulk, laid down, and forgotten. Space curves round uneasily, hiding more empty space.
For some reason we start to talk louder. The corridors of the central service and power core of the building are in the dark ages. Thick fire-stop doors close slowly behind us, squeezing every atom of light out. We grope back. Apirana wants to go down to the Civil Defence emergency operations room, which is apparently in the basement; but we will need a torch.