The Paua Tower (24 page)

Vic leapt up the steps and hit the doors with the hardwood
truncheon as heavily as he could. Once, twice, three times. Nothing happened. He hoped there were no police or Specials about, but guessed most of them were fully occupied in the main street. He thumped again and again. His head hurt and every time he swung the stick he felt dizzy. On he went, bashing at the door, until suddenly he hit a weak spot and a slice of wood splintered and broke. Vic attacked the broken part like fury and soon had done sufficient damage to force the lock. The doors opened inwards in front of him.

The interior was in utter darkness. There was a slight rumbling noise — sometimes loud, sometimes low — coming from the building’s heart. The place seemed alive and possessed by its own weird conversation. Fear fluttered through Vic.

Find the switch, must find the switch, he told himself as he stepped tentatively into the mumbling blackness. If only he’d worked on municipal supply, or wired up the place himself, he’d know immediately where the light switch was. Probably behind the door, he guessed as he scrabbled about, but he found nothing. Maybe the other side. Vic pawed the wall for a moment, then his fingers touched something that felt right. He pushed down and the light went on.

The place was bare and functional. In front of him was a huge slab of marble covered in brass contacts with fuses plugged into them. Take it easy now, this looks like live metal, Vic thought, gazing around and seeing the big switches on the other side. He needed the switch for the main part of town, but how in heaven would he know which one it was? There was no time for reading labels and fiddling about. Better to go for the main incomer — cut everything off at one fell swoop.

Vic looked about and saw the huge metal cabinet of the transformer, then, glancing back, he saw the levers sticking out of the switches like a row of spade handles. Careful, he said to himself, this is high-voltage stuff. He peered at the switch cabinet, searching for the button. It had to be somewhere but he couldn’t
see it. Hurry, hurry, people may be dying as you’re messing about! Just try the lever and hope like crazy it’s the right thing.

Vic grasped the handle and pulled. At first it was stiff,
reluctant
to move, and then he felt it yield under his pressure. Vic jumped in fright as there was an almighty bang and everything went dark. There was a pause, a shudder from the machinery and silence. Vic groped his way to the door and looked out into the street. The street and shop lights were off: everywhere was black. He had done it.

Almost by instinct he pulled the doors of the substation closed again and fumbled to secure the lock. Then he felt his way down the dark steps to the pavement.

I
t was dark as Stella came down Sebastopol Street. Blinds were drawn over windows and dogs, locked away for the night in yards and kennels, barked as she passed. There was no moon and few streetlights. Stella tried to alternate running and walking between the lampposts as she had as a child, but she found running difficult with her belly bouncing under her jacket, so she walked as quickly as she could and hoped it was fast enough. The closer she got to the main street the more noise she could hear — an angry, jumbled sound of men shouting and scurrying feet. The unemployed march should be long over by now and the meeting in the cinema must be almost halfway through. What were all these people doing running and shouting in the darkness?

A few hours before, after Roland had left for his rehearsal, Stella and Lal had been sewing in the vicarage back sitting room. Stella was working at Lal’s treadle machine making a baby gown,
and Lal was by the fire embroidering blue and pink flowers on a little pillowcase. Roland didn’t approve of the way Lal treated Stella as more of a friend than a servant, but whenever he’d raised it Lal had rounded on him. Accused him of being a snob and a hypocrite — and wasn’t Jesus’ own earthly father a working man?

‘How are the pains now?’ asked Stella, pausing in her work.

‘They’re getting worse,’ said Lal. ‘Not all the time, but when they come they really hurt.’

‘Maybe you should go to bed,’ said Stella.

‘Perhaps I will,’ said Lal, laying the pillowcase on the top of her open workbasket.

When Lal went out of the room Stella sat with her feet idling on the treadle of the machine and thought about Vic. She knew about the big meeting in town that night and she hoped he would be safe. She wished she hadn’t felt the need to send him away when they’d met in the library, but once her baby was born things would be different. It was odd, Stella thought, but as the months passed, the recollection of what had happened with Mr Maguire was slowly changing, like a persistent stain that fades after many washes. The baby was hers and hers alone, though one day she hoped it would also belong to Vic. Stella imagined being together with Vic and the child; holding hands as they pushed a wicker pram along the street, or sitting together on the grass, the baby in a white smocked top propped between them.

‘Stella!’ Lal called from the bedroom. ‘Stella, quick!’

Stella ran down the corridor. Lal was sitting on the side of the bed looking at a damp mark on the floor.

‘My waters have broken; I think baby’s coming.’ Lal was half crying and half laughing as she hugged her stomach.

‘You get into bed and I’ll go and fetch Dr Cunningham,’ said Stella, getting Lal’s nightdress from under the pillow. ‘And I’m sure Mr Crawford will be back before too long.’

At first Stella mistook the dark shape for a bag of coal. Coming
nearer she saw it was a bare-headed middle-aged man, sitting in the gutter holding his head in his hands. He looked up.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Stella, seeing a smear of what looked like blood on the man’s face.

‘Think so,’ said the man, his speech slightly slurred. ‘The Specials whacked me.’

‘It looks nasty, needs seeing to,’ said Stella.

‘Reckon I’ll live,’ said the man, taking a scarf off from around his neck and winding it turban style about his head, ‘though I wouldn’t go down to the main street just now if I were you.’

‘Got to,’ Stella said, feeling fearful.

‘Well, keep down this end of the town then,’ the man said. ‘There’s merry hell going on around the Adelphi.’

When Stella reached the main street she saw for herself. Mr Halsall, the newsagent, was standing in the open door of his shop holding a rifle, and a man was outside Bonds Hardware nailing wooden slats across the window. Three boys were climbing on the roof of the public toilets. Stella saw one stand up with a slingshot in his hand and aim at the windows of the Chinese greengrocer across the road. There was a plopping noise as the stones punctured the glass. When Mr Halsall shouted and brandished his rifle the boys disappeared into the shadows of the roof.

Beyond the war memorial, down towards the cinema, the road was crowded with men, a sea of hats surging about. It was
impossible
for Stella to make out what was happening. There was a great deal of shouting and what looked like fighting. There were uplifted arms and hands flailing with pieces of wood. Under the streetlights Stella could see the dark blue of police uniforms and the square shape of their vans. There was the distant sound of breaking glass. She heard someone shout, ‘The Specials!’ and saw a group of men run towards Marlborough Street, pursued by others with helmets and raised batons. Please let them escape, she thought.

Stella was trembling with fear. Vic must be down there in the
midst of the uproar. She imagined a hickory stick fall from a clenched fist, walloping skin with a sickening thump and Vic’s poor forehead splintering under the blow.

Hurrying away from the scene of the riot towards the doctor’s house she passed injured men being dragged away by mates, and curious sightseers coming to see what was happening. She was crossing Khartoum Street when the lights flickered and suddenly went out. There was a yell from the streets behind her as the whole town was covered by darkness.

Stella arrived back at the vicarage with Dr Cunningham and his nurse, to find Lal holding on to the brass bedposts and screaming. When Stella had fetched and lit the old oil lamps they kept for emergencies she could see Lal’s face shiny with crying and her eyes big with fear.

‘Stop that nonsense immediately,’ said Nurse Huddie to Lal. Very angrily, Stella thought. Nurse Huddie had rimless glasses and white shoes with flapping tongues. She bustled about the room as if she lived there, moving the Crawfords’ possessions, opening drawers and hanging clothes in the cupboard. Stella wanted to help Lal, hold her hand and assure her everything would be all right, but she could tell the nurse and the doctor thought a maid had no place in the bedroom.

‘We’re going to give you something to deaden the pain, Mrs Crawford,’ the doctor said to Lal, taking a hypodermic needle out of his bag. Then he turned and added, ‘That will be all, thank you, Stella.’

Stella wandered down the corridor to the kitchen and
desultorily
put away some cups that were draining on the rack. Lal was still crying out but her sounds were different now, low and feral like an animal in extreme distress. Stella hated to think of her friend in such misery and wished she could have stayed with her. The picture of her own mother came back, knees to her chin, her face clenched like a fist, mouth open in a bellow. What would
it be like when her own time came to give birth? Lal had said they’d see she was given the Twilight Sleep too. Stella had heard that women given the new drug sometimes screamed and thrashed and had to be tied down but afterwards they remembered nothing. The thought frightened her.

There was a crash. At first Jack thought he was dreaming but then he heard, as if by way of an afterthought, the tinkle of falling glass. There was shouting and yelling coming from the street. Jack put his hand out, expecting to find Amélie beside him, but she wasn’t in the bed and it hadn’t been slept in. He was breathing badly, as he often did when woken suddenly, air coming to him in little inadequate sips that lacked any real substance and his chest tight and uncomfortable. Jack went to the window. The street was a confusion of men — some running, some chasing, men with steel helmets and batons, men with fenceposts and swinging bolts on wires. The front window of Gillmans across the road was broken and a man inside the shop was throwing shoes out into the street.

God almighty, thought Jack, steadying himself against the window frame and starting to cough. Those poor blighters — it looked as if the Specials were knocking hell out of them. And Amélie, why wasn’t she here? It was no place for her out there driving about. Then Jack thought of the bank. He couldn’t be sure if the window he’d heard breaking was in his building or next door. Had the stone been thrown as some idle gesture or was it a prelude to entry? Were there looters in the bank at this very minute breaking into the strongroom?

Jack fumbled with his dressing-gown cord as he crossed the landing. His coughing had ceased but he still couldn’t breathe properly and felt dizzy. Patches of colour detached themselves from the painting on the wall; random brown and tawny smudges floated off the coaching scene with its straining horses and
horn-blowing
postilion and sailed across his vision. Jack held the
banister rail tightly as he went down the stairs. He had reached the hall when he remembered he’d left the keys on the table by his bed and he had to go back upstairs to get them. By the time he came down again he was gasping, each breath a desperate fluting cry. The ornate moulded ceilings and cream-washed walls of the corridor had become high and distant as if seen through a periscope. Jack took a deep breath but nothing happened. It was as if he had forgotten how to breathe.

The draught hit him as soon as he opened the door into the bank. He shivered with cold. A tunnel of air was blowing through the main office, bringing the shouts from the street closer. He took a few steps forward, staggered and fell. Everything went black.

Jack lay looking at the darkness and listening to the shouting. He could see a hole of ice surrounded by jagged talons. He knew the creatures with the long snouts and the eyes like pickle-jar bottoms were out there beyond the frozen opening. They were coming; he could hear them screaming as they tore open men’s throats. He must, he had to stop them. Get to the ice hole, block it up, suture it with his own body if needs be. Jack crawled forward. There was something on the ground — stones with
knife-like
edges, blades hidden in the mud. The incisions sliced his palms open. His hands were on fire with blood.

He could see something pale moving in front of him. It danced and whirled. He stretched forward but it evaded his reach. ‘Charlie!’ said Jack, recognising the triangular tuft of the little dog’s tail. Of course it was Charlie — he always ducked like that when you reached out to pat him, but where were the men, Addison, Owen and Mayhew?

Everything had grown quiet. The screaming creatures had vanished. No need to block the aperture now; they had to crawl through it, he and Charlie. Once out in the darkness they’d be safe. Jack screwed up his eyes to see through the hole. What were those freckles of light? Could they be stars? Or were they his men holding candles as they crept through the forest?

‘Don’t fret, lad,’ said Jack to Charlie as he looked at the cruel opening. ‘I’ll carry you across.’

Tad was proud of his torch, which he’d got for his last birthday. It was black and said Raider on the side. The name was particularly appealing to Tad, who had read the story of the use of an electric flashlight in the discovery of King Tut’s tomb.

When he had woken suddenly on hearing his father on the stairs, Tad had immediately put his hand on the torch. With the light dancing over the bedroom, the boy got up. If he was going to follow his father downstairs, he supposed he’d better put on his dressing gown and slippers or there’d be a fuss. He hunkered down and swept his hand around the broken train set, lead soldiers, pieces of wood, old comics and some chicken wire — he’d once planned a cage for a baby hare he’d found but the creature had died before the cage eventuated — before finally touching his slippers.

The lights were on in the house and at the top of the stairs Tad could see into the hall on the floor below. The door into the main office of the bank was open: his father must have gone in there; maybe the place was being robbed. Suddenly the lights went off. Tad, hesitant and fearful, made his way down into the bank. Standing among the broken glass, he shone the torch on his father.

‘Dad, Dad, what’s wrong?’ he wept.

Jack lay on the floor of the bank, blood seeping into the striped sleeves of his pyjamas. In his hand was a triangular scrap of white paper, which Tad thought was a torn bank deposit form.

Roland knew he should take Amélie straight back to the bank house, drop in at the vicarage to check on Lal and then go down to the Adelphi cinema. He should show that he cared about these people and was prepared to prove it. He should really have gone to the meeting rather than his rehearsal in the first place but couldn’t bear having to give up the evening with Amélie. Damn
the unemployed — haven’t I rights too? he’d said to himself as he was fixing the stud in the back of his clerical collar prior to going out. He’d found himself both shocked and elated for having dared think such a thing. It was certainly not a thought he would ever have voiced before, even to himself.

Shadows slipped over Amélie’s face and hair as they drove along. The smell of her perfume filled the car. Roland found it hard to keep his eyes on the road, with the Frenchwoman’s coat brushing his arm and her scent in his nostrils.

‘Look,’ said Amélie, pointing. ‘Over there.’

He turned his head. Far away he could see what looked like an indigo and turquoise fountain glittering in the darkness.

‘The Paua Tower,’ said Roland. ‘I heard they’d put on the spotlights for the opening next week.’

‘Do you know, I have been in Matauranga all these years but have never been to the famous tower,’ said Amélie, continuing to gaze out the car window.

‘We could visit it now, if you’d like,’ said Roland, feeling reckless.

‘An excursion!’ Amélie clapped her gloved hands together like a child.

As Roland opened the passenger door of the car to help Amélie out he felt the flutter of her fingers in his. Taking her elbow, he guided her into the darkness, which pressed around them like navy blue fur. There was no moon. They walked on; a small animal ran across their path and Amélie gasped in fright.

‘It’s okay,’ said Roland, ‘just an opossum.’

Roland put his arm around Amélie’s shoulders and drew her closer. She made no move to pull away but rested lightly against him. In front of them the lighted tower sliced the night like a sharp tongue.