‘What the hell you think you’re doing?’
The different images from this and the other day unravel themselves like straightening reflections pulled different ways from a distorting mirror.
How did he trick me? He fooled me into thinking he was drowning. For a moment he’s about to fire the spear gun, to kill me. He sees that fear in my face, my amazement at his impulse, his overreaction. He lowers the gun, eyes still fixed on me; chest heaving, mouth open. With his other hand he pulls off the goggles and flings them onto the rocks.
‘Don’t—’ The words stick in my throat.
‘What?’ he says.
‘You tricked me.’
‘Jesus!’
There is a tight, clenched silence. We are both trying to work out what has happened. We both want explanations. Excuses, at least. There aren’t any. Are there? My mind writhes around. All I can say is, ‘You shouldn’t have.’
‘Me?’ he asks, screwing his face into exaggerated bewilderment. ‘Me?’
‘I thought you were in trouble. You tricked me.’
‘I bloody well was!’ he interrupts. ‘You weren’t fooling, were you? Eh?’ He leans forward, very much a stranger, mad, holding his fist towards me, index finger pointing. ‘Don’t ever try that again. Ever. Right?’
‘You were making a joke of it,’ I manage to say.
‘What?’
‘Drowning. You know my son drowned. You shouldn’t have done that.’
The anger melts away from his expression; all his facial muscles relax, and his whole body seems to sag. He obviously hadn’t thought about it at all. The realisation deflates him. His eyes waver and move away.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he mutters. In a sudden movement he turns and hurls the spear gun out into deep water. Then, head down, hands on hips, he shakes his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, the words directed not really to him but to the other images from the past sliding away deaf beneath liquid, under cold earth, into the folds in my mind. I never said it before. It would not have been understood. But I never said it. I’m sorry.
‘So am I,’ the Maori says. He wrenches the flippers off, climbs out of the water onto a rock and extends a hand down towards me. ‘Come on.’
I look up. It makes some kind of sense to him. Not to me. I can’t comprehend it. The words cover something which will not be looked at, which is too elusive. All I know is that I have a conscious mind which has adapted itself to a very strange existence. Inside the control that holds my expressions and gestures I suddenly feel helpless, like a thing evolved in liquid under different pressure and weaker gravity, bones gone soft inside a hard shell, carried up by a wave against my will and thrown onto land under a light far too strong.
I raise my hand and he helps me up; solemn, subdued.
That evening I move my eyes from the book I am trying to read, and find he is gazing at me over a glass of wine, thinking intently. Our eyes collide and he slowly looks away. When I try to say that I was afraid of something else, that it wasn’t him I was pushing down, it was the memory, it was being reminded of what for me was a nightmare coming up from the past; he drinks carefully and then says, Well, it felt like me, to me.
It is a reply which might sound like one of his self-mocking jokes playing on the responses of an imaginary Maori, a stereotype less intelligent than himself yet part of an identity which is inside him somewhere, useful for saying awkward things. The permission to be frivolous has gone now, so the remark sounds hard. I realise that he dived beneath the water today to play a casual joke of the kind he might have tried out on one of his mates. The extent of his miscalculation went beyond what either of us had imagined; and now he has to estimate how far I am from being one of his mates, and cope with knowing it could be an immense distance. His intuition may have failed him; I may be immune to it in ways he hasn’t thought about.
He has been betrayed again. Perhaps he looks back over memories which may be clearer than mine and casts this into the balance.
The evening goes on. Separated from the machinery which used to slice it up and deal it out, time has already become psychological, and although we’ve kept our watches going to our own guess of hours and minutes, the figures ticked off by the hands no longer have very much meaning. The days appear to have distorted and stretched in places as much as the nights. Within a few hours even a slight lessening of the tension makes the day’s events seem to fall back a long way into the past. We want this to happen. So it happens.
Beneath what seems to be vulnerability he is resilient; there are concealed resources for absorbing surprises and making adjustments. My admission that I was not consciously in control of my actions has diminished me, and his manner changes in small, scarcely noticeable details; the emphasis of his gestures, an inflection in the tone of his voice, suggests that he has assumed some of the control I have lost. There is an air of reluctance about this, of someone forced to take on extra duties but he becomes more intent and watchful as well as more decisive. I wonder if I imagine most of this from my helpless feeling. I know for certain only that the expression which occupies him later and increases in the intervals between the attention given to trivialities is a more bitter sadness than before, adding years to his features. It occurs to me that he is older than he ever told me.
I do not feel able to think about the tricks of my own mind. All the cellular energies are being expended in defence, even when the future is an inconceivable blank in which the survival of the mind can serve no useful purpose. I would like to go on living to feel the sun on my face and to have the taste of good food and drink between my teeth; but not to be forced to think, and not to have any more dreams. I accept there would not be any love. As existence reduced to its essentials, this would be less than animal. The decision that it shall prepare itself as a possibility does not seem to be mine, to be made by me. It is merely there. It always has been.
We sit looking out over the city, the darkness so powerful that the dead tower blocks can only be detected by the high spaces of straight-edged black in the night where they blot out the stars.
The faces of our reflections in the window look at each other in the glass.
‘What the hell.’ He puts the torch on the table. ‘Your turn to switch the power off.’
I descend to the generator and make it silent; the lights fade, suck the darkness in; it compresses the yellow patch of the torch. When I get back to the suite on the eighth floor I find he has closed the connecting door between our rooms. I am not surprised. I suppose it is locked from his side. I gently press the catch on the door handle. It slides in with a click.
Now it is locked both ways.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The terror comes swiftly and simply. One evening towards the end of the second week as we are eating our evening meal at the hotel Apirana says, ‘What do we know, then?’
It’s the question which we have been avoiding by unspoken agreement and I know instantly that I have to face the demand that it poses. He has been patient. But he has decided to confront the truth and, in effect, call my bluff. I think he realises it will not do any good. Yet he feels he has to ask. I shake my head, spread my hands out.
‘I’ve checked almost everything…’
‘And we’re no wiser?’
‘No.’
The next question is the one which will not be asked: What do we do with our lives, then? In a way, it is already answered. He shows that he knows this, now.