Authors: Neil Cross
Weatherell was not the man of Holloway’s memory. He remembered Kate’s lover, the man for the love of whom she had left him, as a gloomy, Byronic figure, with a dark, heavy fringe and intense, unblinking eyes. This man was shorter, stouter. He shambled as he walked and wore clothes that needed pressing: a pastel-pink shirt with short sleeves and biros in the breast pocket. Grubby khaki chinos. He had sweaty feet and a belly. His socks were worn transparent at the heel. His greasy hair was combed carelessly back from his brow. He wore a goatee beard in need of a trim.
‘I got no work done,’ she said. ‘Not a jot.’
Weatherell opened a low cupboard.
‘Take a day out, for God’s sake. Any luck with the real estate agents?’
‘Not even a call.’
‘You leave messages?’
‘About a hundred.’
‘Jeez. Those guys.’
He took some sweet potatoes from the cupboard and dumped them on a double spread of newspaper. He sat alongside her at the table and began to peel.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Never mind.’ He dumped a potato in an empty pan and pulled a curl of peel from the blade. He picked up another and said: ‘I had another phone call today.’
‘What sort of phone call?’
‘The English guy, asking to come and see me at home.’
‘About what, this time?’
‘He wouldn’t say. Not over the phone. That’s why he wants me to see him.’
‘Are you going to?’
He took a sip from her glass.
‘What? See him?
Fuck
no. I’m worried that he’s—you know. A pickle short of the full burger.’
She smiled, set the poussins with some crushed garlic on a baking tray. Drizzled over some olive oil. She went to the fruit bowl and put three lemons in her lap, returned to the table and cut them in half. One by one, she squeezed the halves over the tiny, hollow chickens. Then she arranged the squeezed halves in the baking tray.
They talked some more about selling the house, independent access to which was becoming more difficult for her. But the house-hunting was not going well.
The discussion disheartened them and for a while they sat in silence at the table, sharing and refilling the same glass of wine. A couple of flies buzzed the crushed poussins, and Weatherell brushed them away with a flick of his wrist.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to the beach this weekend.’
A brief silence.
‘I don’t know, Dan.’
‘Christ, Liz. You’re talking a couple hundred bucks, max. I’m not talking Fiji here. I’m just saying, let’s go up the coast. I’m talking maybe the Road to Ruin.’
At first Holloway was not sure he’d understood Weatherell correctly. But he repeated it three or four times in the next few minutes.
Let’s just go relax at the Road to Ruin.
‘Honey,’ said Liz. ‘Are you OK? You seem a little freaked out.’
Weatherell was slicing some mushrooms. He shrugged.
‘It’s this house thing,’ he said. ‘It’s getting me down, I guess.’
‘Don’t worry about the house. We’ll be right. There’s plenty of time.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know. I know that.’
She said: ‘There’s something else.’
‘No, there’s not. I’m fine. I’m tired.’
‘It’s that phone call, isn’t it?’
He lay the vegetable knife down and ran a hand through his hair. He left little shreds of mushroom there.
‘Dan, what did he actually
say
?’
‘Nothing. It’s just—stupid.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He started chopping again. He gathered himself and said: ‘Are we going away or what?’
A lock of hair fell across his brow and he brushed it away.
Liz agreed that they would set out on Friday for the Road to Ruin. Weatherell took the tray of poussins to the oven and slammed it in. A brief burst of heat.
Holloway hid out behind the sofa for perhaps half an hour while they stayed in the kitchen. Then, still in his socks, Weatherell carried two folding tables to the patio. He returned for the bottle and a basket of bread. Liz followed him to the garden.
Holloway peeked over the back of the sofa. He watched and listened for any sign that they might be headed back to the kitchen. But they were talking in a low, summer murmur. Liz reached out and tickled the back of Weatherell’s head. He nuzzled closer to her. Holloway wondered how long the small birds would take to roast.
He lurched through to the kitchen and out of the door. His legs were cramped and numb for the crouching. He wondered if he could make it up the two flights of concrete steps. Leaves tickled his face. Burrs caught in his hair.
Later, he picked them out, one by one, in the hotel bathroom mirror.
19
On Friday, he drove the Subaru hatchback through 600 km of landscape that proved to be wholly inconstant.
He took the Gold Coast north from Wellington. The ocean was to his left. The sky was broad and flat and endless. He drove through familiar-looking suburbs, listening to the Best of Fleetwood Mac with the window open. The suburbs began to thin out, giving way to semi-rural towns. These small communities became widely separated, then thinned like vapour and he passed into open countryside.
He took the Foxton Straight through the Wairarapa, crossing into the North Island’s agrarian heartland. He thought of Scotland, but the Wairarapa hillsides were young and jagged, as if their brittle rock was newly shattered.
He passed through one-street towns—a general goods store, a petrol station, hardware stores, real estate agents, tearooms—that might have been dumped by a Midwestern twister. He stopped at one such town to lunch in a tearoom. Inside, it glimmered with the dusty ghost of the provincial 1950s.
Back on the road, it was the Subaru’s engine that first alerted him to a long, insistent gradient. Gradually, he left sheep-farming country behind him. At its apex, the Desert Road opened on to a vast volcanic plateau. To the west, mountains faded slowly into view. He knew that one of them, Ruapehu, long believed dormant, had erupted two years before. The ferocity of its awakening had darkened the sky and coated the North Island with a thin fur of ash.
He arrived at the shores of lake Taupo, an inland sea whose beaches were pumice. Its depths boiled with geothermal currents. Mountains reflected on its surface like gloomy sentinels.
He pulled up to the scree at the side of the deserted road. He left the car and spread the map on the roof to check his position. He wanted to understand the spectacle. He couldn’t. He turned a full circle. A sound like gravel beneath his feet. The landscape rushed away from his mind. Its scale and its emptiness eluded comprehension.
It was like travelling into primal, geological antiquity. A country of ancient ghosts.
He sat down on the harsh soil and watched the lake. Tendrils of haze shifted and evaporated on its surface. Two or three cars passed him. He looked at his watch and decided to drive on.
He descended from the volcanic plain as the sun began to set in the west. At lower altitudes, scrubby native bush gave way to patches of high pine trees. The patches grew: threw out connections to one another. Became clumps of woodland. As it grew dark, he found himself alone in a forest without limit.
Deep in the dark, luxuriant woods, the land was fiercely steaming. The ground bloomed suddenly with great, white clouds that carried on the breeze and obscured the road and sky before him. The air was thick with sulphur.
After many miles, the trees began to thin. He saw the lights of a city.
He had arrived at the Road to Ruin. It lay before him, surrounded on all sides by the vaporizing earth.
He’d asked a familiar young waiter in one of the cafés off Wellington’s Civic Square if there could really be a place in New Zealand called the Road to Ruin. There was a Bay of Plenty and a Poverty Bay. A Road to Ruin would complete the trio, but Holloway couldn’t find it on his map or any reference to it in his guidebook.
The waiter swept his blond ponytail off one shoulder and said: ‘Mate—you mean
Rotorua
.’
Rotorua was a tourist destination set on the volcanic, new earth. It catered to those who wished to bathe in its hot mineral springs and witness some geothermal violence.
The town had been built to a grid. Its streets were lined with tearooms, hotels, fast food outlets and shops that catered to the wants of its visiting consumers. But there remained something of the frontier about it, as if Rotorua stood on the hinterland between worlds.
After a cursory drive round, Holloway checked in at the Sheraton.
He woke at 5 a.m. When he had showered and dressed, he went to the hotel car park and searched in the early morning light until he found a familiar Pajero. He re-parked the grey Subaru in an empty slot nearby. By now it was approaching six. He went to Reception.
He had dressed in cargo shorts and a blue, Hawaiian shirt, pulled a Gap baseball cap low over his eyes. He took a seat opposite the desk, crossed his legs and pretended to read a newspaper. His own daughter would not have recognized him.
Weatherell and his wife didn’t show up until eight. Holloway supposed they’d enjoyed a lie-in. Liz was walking with the aid of a stick. Weatherell followed her, pushing the empty wheelchair. Outside the lift, she stopped and lay a hand on his elbow. He kept pace, funereal step for funereal step. They left the wheelchair with an obliging member of staff at the restaurant door.
Holloway watched them enter, then he folded his newspaper and followed. He took a seat close to the window, a few metres from Weatherell’s back.
He watched them eat an unhurried breakfast, interrupted with brief snippets of muttered conversation and a snorted laugh or two. Holloway caught the eye of a mismatched pair of men in the corner and looked away. He wondered if he looked suspicious, if perhaps something in his manner or his gaze hinted at his intent. He forced himself not to stare at the Weatherells, in case the two men were watching him. Instead, he concentrated on a page of the newspaper that already seemed so familiar he might have recited it from memory.
He waited until they had nearly finished breakfast. Then he walked to the car park and sat low in the driver’s seat of the Subaru. It was another half-hour before the Weatherells appeared in his rear-view mirror. He wondered where they’d been for so long. Dan Weatherell had put on a floppy sun hat with his washed-out University of Wellington T-shirt, baggy shorts and flip-flops. His legs looked hairless and nude, like an old man’s.
Holloway followed them at a prudent distance. With some judicious light-jumping, he was able to keep three or four vehicles between them. It was to his benefit that the Pajero was the size of a house.
He followed them to Whakawerawera, which his guidebook told him was a thermal park and Maori cultural centre. It was sited on the edge of town. From the car park, outside the wooden boundary fence, he saw the muscular spurt of a hot water geyser and heard the yells of people caught in its spray. Drifting clouds of steam half obscured the park entrance.
Judging by the empty lots in the car park, the thermal park was not yet half full. He waited until the Weatherells had paid and entered before joining the short queue. At the turnstile, he bought a pamphlet that folded out into a simple map of the park.
Through the gates he found a souvenir shop and a cafeteria. He checked to ensure the
Weatherells were not inside.
The park was not yet busy. Small groups of visitors maintained a muted, respectful distance from each other. White clouds flowed and eddied like battlefield smoke across the ruined, cratered landscape. Only the most resolute plant life had taken hold here; unearthly species with needle-like leaves.
The path through the fissures and splits in the earth was marked by wooden duckboard walkways. Arrows painted on the walkways corresponded with those marked on his map. Thus he was able to navigate the blighted earth. Keeping close enough to the edge of a German coach party for a casual observer to assume he was part of it, he followed the Weatherells from minor crater to minor crater: cleaves and gashes in the earth, within which smoke billowed and rolled and hot grey mud seethed.
He left the Germans and, separated from the Weatherells only by a ragged haze of vapour, he followed them across a bubbling mud flat. The geyser stood at the mud flat’s centre. Its eruption was accompanied by a sudden hot spray of water that dropped vertically from the clear blue sky and soaked his clothing. The brief shower was followed by a dense, warm cloud of vapour that caught on the wind and engulfed him. He became disorientated. He caught shifting glimpses in the fog, forms that might have been the Weatherells, or trees, or his own refracted shadow.
He waited until the smoke had cleared before proceeding.
He caught up with them five minutes later. Liz was standing. She had joined Dan in leaning on a metal railing. They overlooked a crack in the crust of the planet. Coloured mineral deposits encrusted its walls, like a witch’s grotto. Its depths ebbed and rushed with super-heated water and boiling mud that exploded forth in a great roar of steam and heat.
Holloway waited under a needle-leafed bush while a crowd of Japanese joined them: took photographs, passed on. The Weatherells showed no inclination to move. He wondered if this was a special place for them.
They kept their silence, contemplating the seismic violence beneath them. His hand was clasped over hers. Holloway walked to the handrail and grabbed it in both fists. He stood a metre from Weatherell.
He said: ‘I’ve come to get you, Dan.’
There was a moment without sound or motion. Then Weatherell turned his head.
The earth hissed and roared beneath them.
‘Will?’
Holloway removed the baseball cap and threw it to the wet ground. Inexplicably, since he had felt no emotion until this second, his eyes welled with tears of self-pity and rage. He removed the sunglasses.
‘I told you I’d come for you.’
Liz took a shaky half-step forward. She lay a protective hand on Dan’s shoulder. Dan took it in his and squeezed.
‘Honey,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go back to the car?’
‘She’s not going anywhere,’ said Holloway.
She fixed him with frigid contempt. There was no fear there.
‘What do you want?’
‘He doesn’t want anything, love. Just go on back to the car. I’ll be there in a minute.’
‘Stay where you are.’
‘Will,’ said Weatherell. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. But, whatever it is, it’s got nothing to do with my wife.’
‘Not with
your
wife. No.’
‘For Christ’s
sake
, Will. Let’s just you and I can go somewhere and talk. Jesus. You should see yourself.’
Holloway put a hand to his mouth.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You’re unbelievable.’
Weatherell made a pacifying gesture with his hand. He looked left and right.
‘Will,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here.’
‘
You
are what’s going on.’
‘Listen to me. I don’t
understand
that. I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
With urgent, furtive movements of his left hand, Weatherell edged Liz behind him.
From the hip pocket of his shorts, Holloway took out the hunting knife.
Liz said: ‘Run, Dan.’
He squeezed her hand.
‘Will,’ he said. ‘Please don’t do this. You don’t know what you’re doing.’
‘I can’t believe what you did to me,’ said Holloway.
‘I didn’t do
anything
,’
said Weatherell. ‘Come on, this can’t be about Kate, can it? This can’t be about
Kate
, for Christ’s sake? That’s a million years ago.’
Holloway blinked rapidly. A passing drift of steam obscured Weatherell, made him a grey shadow on white fog.
He looked at Liz, leaning now on the railings for support. He couldn’t meet her eyes.
‘Will,’ said Weatherell. His tone of voice had changed. He looked left and right. ‘I don’t want to fight you. But you’re scaring me, mate. Now, if you take one step forward with that knife in your hand, you won’t leave me with any choice. Do you understand that? I’m warning you, Will. Stand back. Stay away from us.’
Holloway tried to speak. But now he needed them, no words would come.
‘I’m not kidding round,’ Weatherell said. He looked hurriedly to his left and right, as if preparing to yell for help. ‘Take another step and I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you, Will. I’m not joking now. Put the knife down.’
Holloway glanced into the pit below him.
He wondered what it would do to a human body.
‘Please,’ said Weatherell.
Holloway shook his head.
‘No,’ he said.
Weatherell licked his lips.
‘Whatever it is you think I did,’ he said. ‘I didn’t. OK? Whatever it is—it wasn’t me.’
Holloway saw himself mirrored on beads of moisture that had condensed on the blade. He saw himself reflected there a dozen times, inverted in miniature.
He took a step.
Two figures emerged from the steam.
The first was a big, shaven-headed man who wore wire-rimmed spectacles and an unruly, tangled beard. He was accompanied by a skinny, scruffy younger man with a grown-out blond crew cut. He wore gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses that had slipped down his nose. Both were breathing heavily.
‘Jesus fucking Holy Christ,’ said Weatherell. His voice had climbed an octave. ‘Where were
you
guys?’
The younger man joined the Weatherells and held up his hands, as if in surrender.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We lost you. All the smoke. The big geyser.’
‘The fucking
smoke
? You’ve got to be joking me, right?’ Weatherell pointed at Holloway. ‘That bastard’s fucking crazy.’
The younger man muttered something. It sounded to Holloway like agreement.
‘You fucking
promised
,’
said Weatherell. ‘You fucking
swore
to me.’
‘What can I say? Sorry.’
‘He’s fucking
sorry
. I guess it’s OK, then. Jeez. You fucking
arsehole
.’
The younger man splayed a gently restraining hand on Dan’s sternum.
The bearded man took his place between Holloway and Weatherell. Holloway relaxed his grip on the handle of the knife. Measured against the bearded man’s girth, it seemed an ineffectual weapon. His hand dropped to his side.
The bearded man and Holloway faced each other.
Something passed between them.
Will said: ‘Do I know you?’
He felt empty.
The big man took another step forward.
Holloway could smell him: a sweaty mustiness, like an old book.
‘No,’ he said. The voice was gentle, without threat or frailty. He spoke with an English accent.
He held out his hand.