We are outside, in the sun, and as I unlock the boot of the car to put back the hammer and tyre lever, I see a glint of steel. Perrin’s metal box. I’d forgotten about that. I shall have to find some way of opening it. But not when Apirana is around.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
We make an illusion for ourselves. We seem to be in control of the world but it means nothing. So we hurry through the emptiness like animals that have to keep moving to live. For more than a week we keep ourselves working hard.
To make sure there is nobody else, we drive round bleating the car horn through the suburbs and the Hutt Valley. They are graveyards without bodies. The wind blows over the hills and shakes the grass and trees. Bright plastic flags snap in the air above used car lots. The world is a heap of dead machinery and closed rooms.
We rob shops when we get hungry, eating cold canned food; then speed back to the city, the silence unzipped by the motor then fastening up close behind us all the way.
Apirana fixes a radio transmitter and receiver. We transmit words and morse; we receive nothing. I work at the university, wandering around the various laboratories of the science buildings, visiting the observatory on the hill, checking books in the library, always with Api hovering around to make machines work, to link diesel generators to transformers and power circuits. He insists on installing a generator in the basement car park of the hotel, and we have lights, refrigeration and hot water again. The generators replace the silence with a constant humming and vibrating beneath us, a machine noise like the engines of an ocean liner. We switch off when we want to sleep.
So there is the illusion of meaning and power, centred on us, made by us for ourselves.
With the help of books I delve into areas of physics I can remember little about. I dutifully make checks on radiation levels, the various wavebands of radiation, the positions of fixed stars and constellations, even the cellular structure of plants. All appear to be normal, except for a slightly above-average level of radioactivity around me, no doubt a result of the time I spent in the research centre. I conceal this from Apirana. It would only make him unnecessarily nervous.
In the evenings after work we read from a heap of books and magazines looted fairly randomly from shops and the library. We talk about small things from the past, avoiding what might be dangerous, or deep, by some unspoken consent, except that one evening he drinks several cans of beer and tells me, or the room in which I happen to be sitting, about his woman and how she had promised to wait for him when he was sent overseas; then, after he got back, neither of them were really the same any more, she had changed, couldn’t understand him, had rejected him. As far as I can tell, most of the bitterness of this came from the admitted fact that the woman had been faithful and waited for him; and I think he is aware that he must have been the one who had changed, though of course he will not say this. I only half-listen; but I wonder what had happened to him that she could not understand or live with.
He wakes with a headache and says he won’t drink beer anymore. It isn’t good for him. He will drink other things he doesn’t like too much.
These trivialities are embedded in our existence, changing focus and dimensions according to our moods or our sense of our own importance. At one level we still seem to want to behave like stranded travellers waiting for normal services to resume, exchanging small talk, thinking: This can’t continue much longer; or even: If we behave in any other way, it implies a longer wait. On what would be the Friday of the second week, it occurs to me that Crusoe was alone on his island for more than twenty years. And I think: Dear God, no; but without any feeling of being heard or watched. The sense of absence is too powerful for that.
On a second trip to the Hutt Valley, Apirana breaks into the television centre at Avalon and removes a videotape playback unit and a large box of canisters. He sets up this unit in the dining room at the hotel and plugs it into his power supply. The programmes in the canisters seem to be capsules of the most mind-corroding Californian serials. Large cars pursue each other and explode in colour. Guns are fired, biro-red blood squirts from white shirts. Comedies erupt with pre-recorded howls of laughter every eight seconds. Api watches for a while, then switches off. It seems to have made a mockery of all his technological expertise; worse, for both of us, it’s too disturbing a reminder of the old world, it stirs up an unnerving mixture of contradictory feelings. In between looting, we are caretakers. We have enough power to feel we may be the guardians of everything, and if we could remake the world I suppose we would want it to be better. What had he said?—‘There are some bastards I wouldn’t want back,’ or words to that effect. We don’t say anything more about it. But in fact there is a hell of a lot we would not want back. We’re in limbo, stuck between a gone world which presses threats and memories in on us, vividly, one moment, then falls away into a sullen gulf of ages ago; and a future which is nothing. Which we must not think about. Or speak about. We make each day out of nothing. It is like leaning into space, blindfold. We are powerless to do anything else.
The weather becomes dull, then clears to a hot sun again. One late afternoon on a bright day, Api says he is going for a swim in Oriental Bay; he wants to collect shellfish and catch fresh fish. The water is flat calm, iridescent blue. Wearing blue swimming trunks and equipped with goggles, snorkel, flippers and a spear gun obtained from a sports goods shop, he wades out from the beach and sinks beneath the surface. I sit on some rocks, the Sten gun nearby, watching him wallowing around. I doubt if there are any sharks. And he says he’s a good swimmer. But I feel uneasy. He dives several times, the black flippers up-ending, sliding under the surface tension. The glass-like top of the water becomes liquid in ripples, then calms. I’ve forgotten my sunglasses; I can’t see beneath the brightness of the water, it’s all polished and sky. He seems to be under for a long time. I stand up. There are bubbles, a faint swirl. The nightmare closes in quickly. It’s no use shouting. I clamber across the rocks. Nothing. The light hurts, I can hardly see. The water here must be about a metre deep. I step in, onto sand, and wade forward. He is there, by the next rock, breaking through the surface, blowing water from the snorkel, his hair matted. He wrenches off the mouthpiece, exhales and laughs, eyes crinkling behind the glass visor. The water seems to slide off his skin, over its smoothness, as it would from the skin of a child; he lies back, drifting towards me, the bright line of water making its way up his chest and throat, the ripples shaking his image until it dissolves, childlike, a convulsive movement beneath the pressure of my hand on his head forcing him below the surface with hardly any pressure at first but then a firm hold of my spread hand pressing down to meet the sudden resistance from below, the eyes wide under the water and collecting all the light; child, I know, the struggle, the movements are only instinctive and I can help you hold firm against them because I know from what you let me see in your eyes that you have no control over those movements and this is what you want, this is why you looked to me, still, now, in unbelievable bright liquid staring, the eyes will stay open even after the limbs have all gone slack and the hand has slipped back from the side of the bath. Why don’t the eyes close?
A sudden wrench on my arm pulls me forward and I almost lose my balance. The head jerks away. A kick thuds onto my kneecap. In the same instant the water explodes upward, splattering my face in a shock.
The Maori is standing, the spear gun held straight at my chest, less than a metre away. He gasps for breath. The saltwater runs down my face. I blink it aside. We stare, fixed; his eyes wide behind the beads of sea on the glass panel. He spits, savagely.