A Many Coated Man (29 page)

Like a water beetle on the smoother surface of Queen Charlotte Sound the hydrofoil skims towards Picton. The drumming caused by the waves of Cook Strait dies away and Slaven can again hear Les Croad rebuilding life to his scale. They are passing Waikawa, the old batches clustered by the beach and the high rise hotels behind, built by Hong Kong investors at the turn of the century. Les examines Slaven’s face with care. ‘It’s healed up pretty well you know. Any effects still?’

‘My teeth aren’t so good.’

‘You’re probably just too fussy there, being a dentist and all. Jeez, was I pissed off afterwards. They used remote electrical interference you know and I should have twigged to something when those two wanted you to ride with them.’

‘You weren’t to know.’

‘All the same, a nod is as good as.’ Les watches the small slipways and docks at the left of Picton harbour. He’s making the most frank apology he finds possible. ‘The police haven’t found either of those bastards,’ he says.

There’s an old inter-island ferry laid up for the tourists to view and the hydrofoil slips behind it into a private berth.
Les and Slaven climb from the hatch and apart from a group of primary kids heading back from the ferry, there’s no one about. Les leads the way to a utility with its tray full of boxes of fir seedlings and with a Parks Board motif on the door. ‘We’ll have to have a bite as we go, I’m afraid,’ says Les. ‘The sooner we’re out of here the better.’

‘From what I know of the Beckley-Waite they won’t even miss me.’

‘They have their masters though.’

‘How far is it to Mahakipawa?’

‘Right over towards Havelock,’ says Les as he drives up the hill out of Picton. The vehicle has been chosen well. Les Croad is a natural in a ute with a load of seedlings. ‘Mahakipawa. Whatever made you think of that. There’s nothing at Mahakipawa.’

‘For me there is. I’ll go there some day.’ Slaven thought of a broad hill with native bush on its crown, rough pasture with yellow-flowered gorse and bracken, then the carefully-tied rows of vines. The Caretaker’s hapu would be working amongst them and the free-range leghorns would come from fluffing in the dustbowls beneath the windbreak pines to take grapes in their beaks so that the bloom on the dark skin was marked as if with pencil lines.

There’s a tin of sandwiches and a carton of fruit juice in the cab. Slaven can tell that Kellie has made the sandwiches — egg and parsley, and tongue — for the crusts are cut from them as is her way. Who else but Kellie would think of it amongst the mechanics of escape. Slaven is eating as they pass Tuamarina and he looks up to the hill where he knows the cemetery to be. Almost he expects to see his meeting still in progress there, but all the people, all the rhetoric, the pies and publicity, have had no lasting impact and now he’s a fugitive from the Beckley-Waite, sliding by in a utility driven by Les Croad. Will anything alter if he stops and adds himself to the quiet landscape? Will the hedges be less impenetrable, the Friesians less shitted at the tail, will the Scotch thistle mitigate the wonder of its purple, or the angles of the cheese factory be less definite against the sky? The backdrop has both the message and the last laugh.

Slaven has the taste of a beast’s tongue in his mouth. The afternoon shadows give definition to the land. The old eucalyptus tree will be making its pipe-bowl nuts above the Wairau memorial and through it the mottled light will make the record of 1843 even less distinct. From the green school-ground below it are cries of joy from country children playing.

On then, across the Wairau Plain, with time for just a final backward glance over the firecely-waving seedlings to the hills of Tuamarina and the white memorial there.

Les Croad’s phone buzzes and he answers with a voice of conscious conspiracy. ‘Things are on the move,’ he says to Slaven, ‘but we’d better not have you talking to anyone. The snoopers will have their gear out. We mightn’t be able to get right down to Christchurch tonight, but we’ll be told of the best place to make a stop. There aren’t any checks at Blenheim as yet, so we’ll get through there all right. I used to work here you know. I had a seed drier and used to handle a good deal of small stuff, clover and so on.’

‘So what happened.’ Slaven knows that he is to be told in any case.

‘My wife caught me shagging the babysitter and I had to sell up the business when the family broke up. I reckon I would have been mayor of Blenheim now if it hadn’t been for that girl.’

‘Who came out of it the best,’ says Slaven. ‘The babysitter, the town, your wife, or you.’

‘Six of one, I reckon, but I never look back. It’s all water under, after all.’ He drives through the town which seems to have prospered under the leadership of Mayors who haven’t been sabotaged by babysitters of either sex. Above the central shops is the huge, plastic bunch of grapes which can be lit up at night and which is decorated at Christmas time instead of a communal tree.

Perhaps indeed that’s the secret — don’t look back. Don’t look back across the waving seedlings to Tuamarina, don’t look back to the spinning eyes of the Beckley-Waite, don’t look back to Waiouru and a father chinning effortlessly on the back-lawn bars that held the swing, a mother of special smiles, don’t look back to Kellie on her wedding day with a face as serene as her expectations, don’t look back to the
blue paint of the barge board, the wire in his grasp and Half Moon Bay.

The present also may become with examination as unhelpful as Les Croad confirms his past to be. The dry hills before Seddon will be the same dry hills when Les and Slaven have passed, the frogs will bulge their eyes from the stock dams when the wind alone is before their stare, the genetic pattern of the harrier hawk will have it lift awkwardly from guts upon the road on the day Les surrenders his bitterness, and long after. What happens to the spools of incessant occurrence; insistent yet trivial patterns of sight, sound and fragrances which net the heart and hint at some explanation for consciousness.

There’s a place, not far, sweet country if only it had summer rain. The sheep seek shade and in these camps the loess clay of the ground is smooth and hard, or pooled to dust and the droppings of the sheep are thickly spread, but dry and inoffensive, baked in the heat. In the odd sink hole the briar seeks moisture and gorse blooms brighter than the clay. The ridges are worn almost bald, like the heads of the lean, brown farmers who ride farm bikes too small for them across the paddocks of their land. The creek beds are marked more by rushes and willows than running water and the mallards come only in twos or threes. An easterly is always up after midday and burnishes the arc of pale, blue sky. The shelter belts close to the road and the macrocarpa before the farmhouse are dusted with a false pollen drifting in off the road. The rural delivery boxes are large so that stores can be left there as well as mail and each has a name painted by hand. In the evenings the sheep come to the stock dams and troughs to drink, the magpies gather to imitate the noise of poets and the barley grass and brown-top ripple at the sides of the shingle roads.

Is that so far away?

Les Croad is on the phone again. He fully accepts the urgency of the present. He lowers his voice at moments of greatest decision. ‘I’d rather not leave the visitor alone,’ he says. And, ‘Yes I see that, but I’d rather not leave him alone.’

‘What’s this,’ asks Slaven.

‘They’re making checks before Kaikoura. Miles Kitson’s people want you to spend the night at Lake Grassmere to be on the safe side.’

‘Then we do it.’

They turn left from the main road towards Lake Grassmere. A deadend road with the old salt works almost at the finish of it. Les has a key to the works’ gate. ‘Plan B,’ he says with his flat grin and they drive to the old buildings with the wide sea-pans beyond them, then the ocean. Solitude and dereliction have worn the buildings down in relation to their surroundings and drawn one building further from another so that there are conspicuous spaces between one gaunt barn and another. Only the remains of a viaduct conveyor system sticks up thirty or forty metres, its raw, solid parts expensive to dismantle. There are still slumps of unprocessed salt like old snow and the long grass is untrammelled at the loading bays alongside the rusted railway lines. Les takes a backpack and the food from the truck and pushes past the door of what may have been the administration block. Slaven can make out, in large letters on the outside — ‘Cerebos’.

Inside there are stairs without a railing to the upper floor. ‘Tomorrow morning I’ll come back in a green van. Don’t come out for anything else,’ says Les. He’s attaching a thin, metallic sheet, almost a foil, as a shelter. He strings it from warped partitions there, despite a roof that seems serviceable enough. ‘If a chopper comes over you’ll be all right under this,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to get the ute out of here pronto, but I’ll be back quite early tomorrow and we’ll have you in Christchurch lickedy.’

Slaven watches the Parks Board vehicle go back towards the main road, skirting the downs. It has left no obvious tyre marks within the gates, and as Slaven turns back he has the inconsequential hope that the seedlings will not suffer for their adventure. He’s never been to Grassmere before, yet his first careful scrutiny after Les Croad has gone brings to him a landscape of utter familiarity; as if he has been assembling it in his sub-conscious during the long, air conditioned nights of the Beckley-Waite and now is able to
visit his creation at last. The wooden and corrugated iron buildings are dry and whitened by wind and sand and salt. The sea has long broken into some of the pans closest to the coast, but from the others the setting sun still catches crystals and pond surfaces between the low rubble causeways and the wind casts grit and sand against the old buildings. In the concrete loading ramps and retaining walls the iron reinforcement has burst out in furled half-blooms of rust in response to the salt sea air. The skeleton of an industry remains — those things too large, or uneconomic to cart away. The sun shows through the ribs of the high walls and much of the heavy, simple machinery is still in place.

The people have drawn off to find a life elsewhere. A tribe of Croads; sunburnt, stubborn, bitterly humorous, clinging to a host of work-related perks of doubtful legality as they drove loaders and skimmers, alternately let in and held back the sea. Then in other jobs and places they would mention briefly that they’d worked at Grassmere by the sea, but not take the time when passing to come back to see the shallow, discoloured water, or feel the salt rind their sweat in the way it always used to do.

Slaven sits on the warm boards of the blank second story of the administration building. By the glassless window is carved — ‘here Tigger did the deed with Alice’. The night hills are one dimensional serrations against the red and yellow of the western sky and the closest pans have glints of flamingo pink. Slaven wishes the Caretaker could be with him so that they could talk some more and he could share the tobacco in a more substantial way.

When the sun is down, Slaven lies on the sleeping bag and beneath the foil which will keep his living heat from detection — all being well. He has no artificial light and lies listening to the building creaking as it cools, feeling the wind move easily through it. He is completely safe, free of the hum of the Beckley-Waite air conditioning and able to breathe the wind flowing in from Lake Grassmere. There is a rat, or a cat, maybe, scratching a reply on the tin, but no tight walls, no acoustic ceilings, no padding futility in the narrow corridors, or surreptitious unwrapping of chocolate, no soft weeping, or levitations of despair.

At three he wakes because of the chill and a need to piss. He urinates in the corner furthest from his camp, not trusting the stairs in the dark and he makes sure that he climbs within the sleeping bag when he comes back. Despite the hard boards, he’s quickly asleep again; just enough time beforehand to hear the wind in the gaps of the old timbers, the ocean at a distance and the flexing of the foil strip above him. Also the drip of his own piss to the ground floor beneath.

Gulls wake him and the sun through windows rimmed with shattered glass. He is nailed to the floor with stiffness, but manages to dress clumsily and go down the stairs to stand in the doorway and flex himself. It’s a wonderfully empty world and Slaven finds it hard to imagine that his presence is of concern to anyone. There have been no helicopters, loudspeakers, or dogs, not even a local policeman come to have a nose around. It will be a piece of cake from now on. Slaven thinks.

A green van comes while he’s having a cursory wash in shallow and discoloured water of the nearest pan and stops by the old building and Les Croad picks up the kit which is already packed. Slaven hears the tyres in the grit and salt as the van comes towards him. ‘No problems?’ asks Les.

‘Fine.’

‘We haven’t been all that far away. Better sure than,’ says Les. He has brought coffee and a bag of apples and Slaven is able to balance the cup better once they reach the main road.

‘Things get just a bit dicey from here on in,’ says Les. ‘There’s a good deal of surveillance as we go towards Christchurch. They know they need to get you quickly, or the publicity will be too much for them. You’re going to become a veteran cyclist to be on the safe side. I hope that’s okay?’

‘How veteran?’ Slaven has never liked cycling.

‘You won’t be on the road that much. There’s a group riding in turns to publicise Australasian Union.’

The Australasian Unionists have set up a pit stop at Ward and Les drops him there. ‘Don’t you worry. We won’t be that far away,’ he says. A grey-haired, whippet of a man
takes Slaven into his care, arranging for a shower, a completely vegetarian meal and a shave which includes the legs.

‘So that we can give you an instant tan,’ says the whippet man, ‘and you won’t stand out from the rest.’ From the outside maybe he doesn’t, but he feels foolish in the large back-up van travelling on: lycra shorts and top, helmet ready and yellow elbow and knee pads in place. Rather than the threat of recapture he’s worried about his own clothes and his possible inability to ride fast enough when his turn comes.