The Colour (29 page)

But for herself, something else was clear to Harriet now: she might get down with Lady, but Billy would not get down. And this was all the justification she needed for her decision to turn back. For a few more moments, she stood where she was, trying to glimpse the tiny figure of the man who had already gone down, but unable to locate him. Then she turned Billy round and pulled Lady to her, out of the wind.

‘A man's precious name'

I

Joseph lay alone in his tent and listened to the rain. He thought that the sound of it on the tent roof was like faint applause, heard from far off, acknowledging the achievements of others.

He was living desperate days. On his seventy-two-foot square plot, he had already sunk and slabbed seven shafts. Three of these had flooded and kept on filling with water, despite the painstakingly dug drainage bore-holes. In each one of the remaining four, Joseph had arrived at the blue-clay bottom and Will Sefton, nimble as a chimney-sweep, had gone down there to ‘scrape up the gold, Mister Blackstone', gone down all eager and ready for each find, and then there had been no find at all, no trace of the colour, only bucketful after bucketful of the oily clay with its blue sheen, heavy and difficult to wash in the cradle.

Joseph thought of himself as a patient man. Hadn't he built the Cob House out of handfuls of this same wretched dirt? Hadn't he buried Beauty the cow in ground so hard it had broken his shovel? But now, he knew that patience wasn't enough; he needed
luck
. He would find the gold if it was there; but supposing it wasn't there?

The possibility that no gold existed anywhere on his claim created in Joseph Blackstone a dread so absolute it made his skin crawl. Each and every vision of his future assumed an alteration that could only be brought about by money. To return to a life no different from the one he had left when he boarded the
Wallabi
would be so painful, so terrifyingly unhappy, that Joseph now believed he would rather die here, on his thirty-shilling plot, and lie and rot in a blue-clay grave than suffer it.

For he saw very clearly, in the cold, wet light of the days he was living at Kokatahi, that without money, his farm on the Okuku flats would never amount to anything. Lilian would grow old, mending her china by the sooty range, and he would never manage to do the one thing that would please her at last. She would die despising him. And after that, he and Harriet might struggle on, but they would be for ever separate and secretive and cold, and hate would creep in and mark them with its eye and then they would be done for.

It was as though maggots were creeping up Joseph's neck and into his hair. He sat up and let a cry escape from him as he reached up with a hand, to try to wrench away whatever was crawling there. But there was nothing: only the dread in his mind that he couldn't overcome. He wanted to scream, as he had once screamed at birds or toys, at the three tigers in the circus ring. His longing to find gold was so intense, so unrelenting, that he considered getting up now, in the middle of the night, with the rain falling, and beginning work on a new shaft, just sinking it wherever he happened to find himself, with no regard to the lie of the terrain, and he imagined – even now, after the disappointments of seven barren shafts – that moment when, as the dawn arrived perhaps, there would be the first sighting of the colour and how his altered future would start spinning towards him.

But he lay down again and didn't move. Disappointment was tiring him out. He thought with sympathetic tenderness of his father who, on the days when he didn't have to visit any farm or be at the livestock market, with his ledger and his gavel, would often lay his head back in his favourite armchair and pull the white anti-macassar from the chair-back and crumple it in his hand until it half covered his face and fall into a fretful sleep from which he seemed not to want to wake.

Lilian complained about the crumpled anti-macassars. She clearly despised the use Roderick made of them. She said there was no earthly point in continuing to put anti-macassars on the chair-backs if he was going to do that to them.

‘Let be,' Roderick had said. Just those two words:
Let be
.

And perhaps Lilian heard the pain in them, for the anti-macassars remained on the chairs, washed and ironed as frequently as was necessary, and Roderick Blackstone, before he met his death in a field of ostriches, continued to scrumple them up and pull them across his face whenever he felt in need of sleep to refresh his disappointed heart.

Joseph tried to settle himself into sleep now, but beyond the pattering of the rain he was listening for footsteps, hoping that Will might choose this night to return. Yet he knew that the hope was vain. Will Sefton had left him for the Scots' camp. An arrangement which Joseph had begun to think of as permanent – permanent for as long as it took to find enough gold to alter his life – had dissolved suddenly in violence and humiliation.

They'd begun a week ago – Will's complaints that he wasn't being paid for his ‘services'. Joseph hadn't considered the complaints important at first. He reminded Will that he fed him, sheltered him in the tent, had bought him the fishing rod, with which he amused himself catching fish and cooking them on little fires at the river's edge. He'd believed that this was enough, that Will Sefton was ‘his' now, for as long as this life at Kokatahi lasted, that they would wait it out together and labour together on the shafts and do what they did in the night whenever the urge took him (for Joseph admitted, now that he was in a world of men, that desire in men was like a hunger of the belly and had to be satisfied, and to moralise about this or that way of satisfying it could be left to pastors and to women) and then the colour would arrive and Joseph would be generous to the boy, as generous as his own plans allowed . . .

But then word came up the river that the Scots had struck gold. On still nights, Joseph and Will could hear the jubilant Glasgow miners singing and shouting. And Will would go out of the tent and stand under the sky, as though moonstruck, and listen.

‘I can
see
it,' said Will one morning, after a long night when he hadn't slept, but only day-dreamed about the Scottish gold.

‘I can see it in their dirty palms. Not shavings or dust, but lumps of it, with that lovely weight it has . . .'

Joseph and Will were standing side by side, resting from their work among the piles of mullock and the stacks of planking. Their crooked windlass creaked mockingly in the wind, like a clock beginning to tick for no reason.

‘Their find raises our chances,' insisted Joseph bravely. ‘Their terrain is almost identical to this. Our time will come.'

Will let his pick fall and blew his nose into his hand. ‘Or it may never,' he said, wiping his hand on his trousers. ‘And then my arse will have bled for nothing . . .'

Joseph cuffed Will across his neck. ‘Don't use that language!' he said.

Will tottered for a moment, then righted himself and faced Joseph defiantly. ‘What language do you want me to use, then, Mister Blackstone?' he said. ‘Girls' language? Did you ever find a girl to let you do what I let you? Tear my flesh, you do, and never pay me –'

‘Shut up! Or I shall never pay you! When we find gold, I shall give you nothing!'

‘You wouldn't be the first,' said Will calmly. ‘The things men promise when they're in rut aren't worth sixpence. I've sucked miners from Queenstown to Ten Mile, but am I rich?'

‘I don't want to hear about it!'

‘Jealous, are you? Think I'm your darling, or something, Mister Blackstone? Told you when I first played my whistle, I was nobody's darling and nobody is mine. Nobody on the stinking earth. I do this for the money, for the
survival.
But you, you have me digging in the ground night and day and slabbing and getting my feet frozen. But I don't like this work, Mister Blackstone. This mining work makes me choke worse than your slime in my mouth. See my skin? Wasn't it white and lovely when you first saw me and now I'm getting bruised and toughened and my hands are red and –'

Joseph hit Will again, this time across his ear, and the boy staggered and fell to his knees. With his heavy boots, Joseph wanted to kick him, kick him till he really hurt, but Will saw his intention and began to scrabble away from him through the mud. And seeing him cower like this, Joseph understood that he'd been wrong about Will staying with him and sharing his fate, wrong and naïve and pathetic. Will Sefton's heart was as hard as flint. He'd known this all along, but now it was making him suffer much more than he'd expected.

Will got to his feet and said: ‘I always wanted to go to Scotland, Mister Blackstone. So now I shall. Something about the air, they say. Perhaps it's cleaner. Is it?'

So then Joseph, filled with dismay at the imminent loss of Will, approached him and tried to touch him and dissuade him from leaving. Will backed away from him, but Joseph followed, the two of them stumbling over the pitted earth. Joseph told Will he knew they would find gold soon on this claim ‘and then', he said, ‘you can name your own price. Your own price.'

‘Oh yes,' mocked Will. ‘Another fine promise! I've no use for promises any more. But the Scotsmen have the colour! They
have it,
Mister Blackstone, and now it will be mine: I have only to kiss their pricks –'

Joseph grabbed Will Sefton by the neck. Though the boy was strong, Joseph was stronger because all his arduous work in New Zealand had made him tough and lean. He twisted Will's arm behind his back and the boy cried out, but Joseph paid no attention. He pulled Will to him, so close that he could feel his sternum against his chest and the hard pelvic bone and the gristle of his cock pressing against his, and tried to kiss his mouth, the mouth that was pink and pretty and reminded him of Rebecca Millward. But Will clamped his jaw shut and they stood there, locked together in pain and fury, neither of them yielding, and Joseph felt all his anger and sadness at Will's parting turn to furious desire.

Keeping Will's arm locked behind him, Joseph undid the boy's belt and fumbled with his buttons and began to tug his trousers down. He now forced Will away from him, to kneel on the mud. They were in full daylight and only a few yards from them, sunlight glinted on the river as it rushed blithely on. Will attempted to stand, but stumbled over his trousers and now Joseph was kneeling behind him, unbuttoning his moleskins and bringing his own sex into his hand.

‘Pay me!' yelled Will. ‘You pay me this time, you dirty bugger, or I swear I'll kill you! You'll never sleep for fear of what I can do.'

‘I'll pay you. I'll pay you, Will . . .'

Will kicked backwards at him, fighting him off. ‘You pay me
now
!'

‘I will. Just let me –'

‘No! No, I will not let you!'

Will pushed himself up with his arms and spun round to face Joseph. He punched him hard in the belly, and Joseph doubled up and fell sideways, and all his breath seemed to leave his lungs and bile filled his mouth and everything around him – the rush of the river, the creaking of the windlass, the breathing of Will Sefton – was snatched suddenly away.

When he looked up he could see Will standing over him, as though preparing to punch him again. He blinked and spat. And now he saw that just beyond Will was another man. This man was as still and silent as a heron and Joseph knew at once that he had seen everything that had just happened. And he thought coldly: Whoever this man is, I am going to have to kill him.

Joseph tried to stand up. The man wasn't looking at him, he was looking away, but with something like a smile on his face – a smile which was not quite a smile – and Joseph remembered that he'd seen this kind of look before, this Chinese look, on the deck of the
Wallabi.
And he felt that to be regarded like this, in this state of humiliation and pain, by some self-satisfied Celestial was worse – if anything could be worse – than what had just occurred.

‘
What?
' shouted Joseph, furiously buttoning up his moleskins. ‘What are you looking at?'

The man said nothing, only lowered his head. At his feet sat two baskets of vegetables and Joseph realised now who he was: he was Scurvy Jenny, whom they had glimpsed once before from high up in the bush, the market gardener, Chen, who made a living selling garden produce to the diggers at Kaniere.

‘Wakey!' shouted Joseph, when Chen didn't answer. ‘What d'you want? Think you can blackmail me for what you've seen? Is that it? Think you can take my gold? Well, I've got no gold, Jenny. I've got nothing and you've seen nothing. Savvy?'

‘He's selling vegetables,' said Will calmly.

The man bent down and his long pigtail fell over his shoulder. He took a cabbage from his basket and held it out to Joseph.

‘What?' said Joseph again. ‘
What?
'

‘You like this?' asked Chen Pao Yi. ‘From my garden.'

Joseph wanted to take the cabbage and hurl it at the man's head. He wanted to drag his baskets to the river and send all the produce tumbling into the water. He tugged a shovel out of the heavy earth and brandished it like a weapon, all the while aware how foolish he was appearing.

‘You leave,' he said. ‘You vamoose, Jenny. This is my claim and I paid thirty shillings for it and you're on my land and I want you gone!'

He was ready to hit the Chinaman with the shovel, but to his surprise, the man obediently replaced the cabbage in one of the baskets and prepared to lift the baskets up on his bamboo pole and walk away.

But then Joseph heard Will pipe up: ‘I'd like a cabbage, Mister Blackstone. Cure my diseases with fresh greens, couldn't I?'