Wake (3 page)

Curtis picked up Adele and staggered to the door. Then the woman was beside him. He shrank from her, but she only wanted to open the door for him. Its brass bell chimed. Curtis plunged out into the street. He looked back in time to see the woman collapse. She gave a sigh, then folded and diminished, as if someone had let the air out of her.

Curtis peered up the road at the blue and red lights of the police car. He clutched Adele to him, and headed towards it.

At first he hurried, as if there was something that could be done. Then—because he was a year shy of sixty, and had problems with his right hip—he had to stop and rest for a while. He cradled his wife and stroked her hair. The sun had warmed it, but the skin on her forehead was cool. ‘Darling,' he said softly.

In the road ahead the air was oily with the heat of fires, and full of flakes of soot.

Holly and her mother had spent the weekend at a family reunion. On the Sunday Holly's brothers had taken her aside to remark that Kate looked low, and to ask: was that rest home Holly had found really the best arrangement?

Of course it had been Holly who'd had to do everything: find Kate a place, persuade her to move, help her sort her possessions, sell her house.

The rest home Holly found was Mary Whitaker in Kahukura. There were better equipped homes, and better ventilated ones. There were places with fully carpeted floors and larger rooms. These were all more expensive, and closer to Nelson. But Mary Whitaker had grounds with mature rhododendron bushes and magnolia trees. It had daffodils, jonquils, and narcissi sprouting on its damp lawns. It had a veranda around three sides, and a 180° view of Kahukura Bay. Holly had totally zoned out when she first saw the view. The rest home manager had been telling her things about Kahukura—a quiet, tight-knit community—but Holly only stared out to sea, where two separate rainfalls were coming down from livid patches in a wholly grey sky. Thick pillars of shadow—rain, faraway, but still dynamic. She'd thought, ‘
I'd
come here to die.'

Holly wasn't keen to tackle her mother about her living situation—which she could do very little to ameliorate, anyway. She doubted that her mother's subdued mood was depression, but she'd promised her brothers she'd ask. Holly thought it would turn out that it was only a displeased silence, that Kate had a grievance, which Holly would hear about in due course.

It was an hour yet till lunch was served at Mary Whitaker. There was time to take a small detour along the winding gravel road that climbed around the boundary of Cotley's Orchard and led to a new subdivision, with roads and streetlights, and a billboard with a map of the sections for sale.

Holly drove up to the subdivision. She parked, and they got out to study the billboard and see which sections had sold and which were still to go.

It was a sunny spring day. The trees of the arboretum behind Kahukura Spa were coming into leaf, brilliant green below the sombre bush of Stanislaw's Reserve.

‘Not a power pole in sight,' said Holly, admiring the view.

‘Over this side the power cables are all underground,' Kate said. ‘There used to be pylons crossing what is now the reserve. They moved them, and buried the workings when they had all the machinery up here to dig the trench for the predator-proof fence.'

‘You're getting to be quite the local.'

‘Well, Holly, it seems people go on chattering about property values and improvements even when they've one foot in the grave.'

They watched a helicopter take off from the spa, a sizeable red and white machine.

‘I hate that noisy thing.' Kate frowned at the helicopter, which, without warning—without any sign of engine trouble—suddenly swooped at the hillside before it, and flew straight into the ground. Its props splintered. The helicopter momentarily disappeared inside a bloom of bright, black-edged fire.

Kate grabbed Holly's arm. She sagged, and Holly caught her. For the next minute Holly was busy, manhandling her mother to the car, leaning her up against it while she opened the door.

Once she was seated Kate groped for her daughter's handbag. She produced Holly's phone and passed it to her. ‘Never mind me,' she said. ‘I'll be fine presently.'

Holly punched triple 1. The phone didn't ring. She looked at its display.
No signal
.

Holly got in the car and started it. ‘We should go and make sure help is on its way.' She turned to watch where she was backing. There was only the groomed hillside behind her. Then, without any warning, that view—new lawn and fluorescent pink boundary pegs—snapped closed, like the virtual camera shutter on her smartphone. There was a dark pause, then Holly became aware of her mother's hoarse shouting, and that she was being shaken.

Kate had one hand on the handbrake. ‘You fainted, Holly. And, honestly, I thought I would too. The car stalled and rolled forward. We were nearly over the edge.'

Holly checked her phone again. ‘We have to go somewhere where we can get a signal.'

Kate gestured at the spa, the town. ‘Plenty of people will have seen the crash. You shouldn't move till you're quite sure you've recovered.'

They heard another loud impact down in the settlement. A truck blasted through the intersection by the supermarket with the twisted remnant of a motorbike beneath its front wheels. The sparks from the crushed bike were as bright as those from a welding torch. Then the bike's petrol tank exploded. The truck continued on regardless, surfing on flame, and leaving long flaming tyre tracks. The tangle of vehicles finally came to a halt at the next intersection, where they burned.

Holly and her mother stared at the fire. They waited to see people rushing to help—shopkeepers with fire extinguishers. To see what you would normally expect to see.

There was a thin thread of siren. It came closer, then was shut off. They glimpsed flashing red and blue lights in the smoke at the intersection.

Holly and her mother waited to see more help arrive. Long minutes went by. Tens of minutes. During that time they heard gunfire. But no more police cars, or fire appliances, or ambulances appeared.

Then Holly saw a quad bike moving slowly around the wrecked helicopter, bumbling through thick grass.

She looked back at the intersection in time to see a woman with a stroller walk, apparently calm and deliberate, towards the flames. The woman stopped at the edge of a puddle of burning petrol, and stood for a time in a considering way. Suddenly she began pushing the stroller in and out of it, back and forth, as mothers do to soothe a crying child. The stroller caught fire.

Holly screamed. Her mother was screaming. They clutched one another, and Holly buried her face against her mother's bony shoulder.

Belle stopped well back from the wreck. She sat astride her bike, shielding her eyes with her hands and squinting into the flames. She couldn't tell what was blistered metal and what charred flesh. She could smell both every time gusts pushed the smoke her way.

She drove slowly around it, checking to see whether anyone had been thrown clear. But the bodies were all in the helicopter, and there was nothing to be done.

The fire had scorched and shrivelled a patch of meadow; but the grass was damp so it wouldn't spread. Belle peered through the fumes at the spa, at its rear walls with their pebbled-glass bathroom windows and steel fire escapes. Where was everyone? Her feeling that there should be something happening that wasn't was almost as disturbing as her feeling that something was happening that shouldn't be.

Belle told herself that she was mistaken about how long she'd been waiting. Time was dilating, the way it did during a car accident. Any minute now there'd be people all over.

Belle so clearly imagined the arrival of ambulances and fire trucks that she began anticipating TV vans as well. News reports started up in her head.
First on the scene was Department of Conservation ranger Belle Greenbrook. . . .
A helicopter crash was bound to make the national news. If she was interviewed, rather than say what she'd been doing when Theresa called, Belle decided to mention Boomer, whom she'd been following around for most of the morning. Yes, she'd take a little moment to talk about her favourite endangered flightless parrot, and the dustbowl he was preparing to give the right round tones to his courtship song.

Belle unclipped her radio, and pressed the call button. ‘Tre?' And then, ‘Over.' She let the button up; and listened to static. She'd been able to hear the siren as she was coming through the reserve, but she couldn't now.

Belle moved away from the screen of smoke. She looked down at the bay and at once saw more smoke rising from the town. There were vehicles on fire at the intersection of Haven Road and Grove Street. She heard glass breaking, and dogs barking—maybe every animal in town. And they weren't just barking; some were howling in pain and terror. The roaring flames of the wreck had masked the clamour of canine hysteria and grief.

Then Belle heard women screaming. The screams were coming from a car parked at the new subdivision. Belle waved, but no one showed themselves. She looked around for the cause of the screaming, and saw what the women had seen.

It was almost over by that time, so it took her a moment to work out that the flame-wrapped upright shape was a human being, still alive, and that there was something in front of it in the fire—

—Belle staggered to her bike and hit her horn. Then her legs gave way and she dropped with a thump into the damp grass, and lay there, incapable, only trying with her mind, not her hands, to tear the sight away from her eyes, the sight of the burning child. It was blinding her.

The screams had stopped, but the car didn't respond to Belle's signal. Instead, from out on the water, came a dense, deep blast from a foghorn.

Bub Lanagan was headed in to Kahukura. He had a few snapper for his friend George, who ran the Smokehouse Café. George always kept an eye out for the
Champion
, and would send someone down to collect Bub's catch. After that Bub was going to head over to Ruby Bay and see if he could sell whatever George couldn't use to folks in campervans parked along the beach. The school holidays had just finished, so most of those people would be tourists. He'd have to clean the fish for them. Then he'd use one of the rest-area barbecues to cook his own snapper. He'd crack a beer, then catch the tide into his mooring at Mapua, and call it a day. Bub knew he could just get by like this for as long as it took. Eventually he'd figure out what he should do. Or rather—eventually he'd be able to bring himself to hire someone to help him with the nets; or give up the
Champion
, and his father's fishing quota. In the meantime he had this: he had the catch of the day.

It had been five months since Bub's father had died. He still often caught himself checking behind him so that he wouldn't step on his dad's foot or accidentally nudge him into the scuppers or even overboard. Bub's dad had been a little fellow, five foot eight. Bub was six foot three. The
Champion
wasn't a very big boat, and Bub had always had to watch his step around his dad.

Bub cut the
engines and coasted in towards the pier. With less noise the gulls suddenly seemed very loud. Bub looked up at them and said, ‘We come crying hither.' He wondered what poet that was. Shakespeare, probably—Bub's mum had been a high school teacher, and very big on Shakespeare.

Then the gulls fell silent. Abruptly. Utterly. They left the boat, setting their wings at an angle and sliding away forward, skimming the water. The sea before the
Champion
's bow filled with shadows and silver as a thick school of fish sped ahead of her into the shallow water. Bub looked astern, his eyes scanning the sea for whatever had scared the fish. Dolphins perhaps. But the sea behind the boat was empty, and as innocent as milk.

Bub grabbed his gaff, and made his way lightly along the gunwale to the bow. He picked up the mooring line and waited for the trawler to drift closer to the pier.

It was then that he noticed thick smoke billowing up near Stanislaw's Reserve. The short stretch of commercial properties in the centre of Kahukura obscured his view of the fire itself. It must be quite big. He'd have noticed it earlier if he hadn't been so busy watching the strange behaviour of the fish.

Actually, now that he was thinking about it, nothing in Kahukura looked quite right. Or—the only thing that looked normal was a guy with a sailboard who had come skimming around Matarau Point about the same time that Bub had brought the
Champion
into the bay. The sailboarder was now on the beach near the boat ramp. He was zipping his board into its bag.

Bub cast his line around a hawser and used the gaff to pull his boat into the pier. He made it fast. Then he took a more careful look around. His eyes were drawn to the roof of the old bank, and a huddle of people. They looked like a rugby scrum. Their arms were draped over one another's shoulders, their heads bowed together. As Bub watched, the people suddenly bounced up out of their huddle, high-fived, then all ran directly off the edge of the roof—every one of them, without pause.

Bub flinched. His eyes immediately sought the only normal thing they could find—that sailboarder, who Bub saw was now tussling with two men in blood-soaked clothing.

Bub bellowed. It was a sound of shock, and a challenge.

The sailboarder heard him and broke away. He clapped his hand to his neck and fled, flat out, towards the pier.

Bub jumped onto the pier to loosen the mooring line. He cast off, and ran to the wheelhouse to start his engine. It caught and roared into life. Bub yelled, ‘Hurry!' at the sailboarder, who staggered, then collected himself and sped up.

He pelted onto the pier, pursued by the bloodied men. Bub let out the throttle a little and nudged the boat close. The sailboarder jumped onto the
Champion
's bow and sprawled, catching himself on the guard rail. He used both hands, and his neck began to let loose small rhythmic spurts of blood.