The Paua Tower (6 page)

‘We’re on strike,’ Vic said, and shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘No work until something’s done about the food.’

‘The food’s fine,’ said Forster. ‘A damn sight better than most of you’d be getting at home.’

‘Have you seen the meat?’ said Gilchrist. ‘What they served last night was putrid — must have been sitting about for days.’

‘Don’t eat it if you don’t like it,’ said Forster, going back towards the shed that acted as the camp office. ‘And if there’s any more of these tricks, stirred up by troublemakers like you, Cowan, and you, Gilchrist, I’ll see you’re all off down the road.’

Two days later the strike fizzled out, most of the men too anxious about the loss of pay and the threat of discharge. The food improved slightly, with meat and bread somewhat fresher than before. But the strike had started the men talking. The idea of a camp committee caught on, and before long there was a meeting and Vic and Gilchrist found themselves elected chairman and secretary.

There was trouble in the dining room. The camp was heavy with tension and discontent, and a real or imagined insult readily drew fights and divisions: Catholics against Protestants, townies against country, workers against men who saw themselves as a cut above.

‘Makes you sick,’ Gilchrist would say.

‘Why can’t they see we’re all in the shit together?’ Vic agreed.

It was late afternoon on Saturday, the weather bad and the large communal room congested. Groups of men played euchre, the Holy Joes had set up a Bible study group and were reading the New Testament aloud. Henderson, who had been a cobbler, was
mending a boot on a last. Vic and Gilchrist were sharing a
week-old
copy of the
Herald
between them. Shorty Barnes, who’d been a seaman, was telling a story about a whorehouse in Trinidad.

‘I fixed her good and proper, you can put a ring around that. This black floozy running about squawking as if …’

‘Cheating bastard,’ a card player shouted. The whole room fell silent. Two men were on their feet.

‘Bollocks,’ said the other man.

‘I saw what you were up to, O’Shea.’

‘Liar!’

‘Bloody Mickey Doolan!’

O’Shea, a black-haired Irishman, swung a punch that caught his opponent on the side of the eye. The other man hit back.

‘Give the fish-eater one from me!’ someone shouted.

‘Fuckin’ Proddies.’

‘Green niggers.’

Then everyone was on their feet, punching and jostling.

O’Shea went down and Vic saw him kicked.

‘Stop that!’ shouted Gilchrist. No one heard.

Vic leapt onto one of the long trestles, picked up Henderson’s hammer and hit the table an almighty wallop. The noise was so unexpected that for a moment all movement ceased.

‘Cut it out!’ Vic roared. ‘Can’t you see it’s just what they want — us fighting among ourselves? What we need is fighting the bosses, not playing silly buggers belting each other. We’re all working men here, Micks and Prods or whatever.’

‘The man’s right,’ a voice said.

‘Give O’Shea some air and get him back to his tent,’ said Vic.

‘They’re bored shitless,’ said Gilchrist later, as he and Legatt sat squashed together on the table in Vic’s tent.

‘Can’t blame them when there’s nothing to do except slug your guts out working, or play cards,’ said Miller, who was standing by the tent flap.

‘They could walk into town,’ suggested Legatt.

‘Two hours each way and diddly squat to spend,’ said Vic who was lying on the bed.

‘True,’ said Legatt.

‘What we need is a wireless,’ said Vic.

‘You’re porangi, Cowan,’ Gilchrist laughed.

‘We could build a crystal set,’ said Miller. ‘Had one when I was a boy.’

‘Hopeless,’ said Gilchrist.

‘No, I mean a decent one the whole camp can listen to,’ said Vic.

‘And how do we pay for this posh wireless set?’ said Gilchrist.

‘No idea,’ said Vic, running his hands through his hair, ‘but I’ll think.’

‘Be my guest,’ said Gilchrist, grinning.

‘What do you reckon?’ Vic and Gilchrist were lying on the grass by the river one fine afternoon, about a week later. ‘See that tree there in the bush, the big fellow, kahikatea by the looks.’

Gilchrist rolled over. ‘What of it?’

‘Remember my idea about the wireless?’ said Vic.

‘Yeah,’ said Gilchrist, picking a piece of grass and putting it in his teeth.

‘I’ve been thinking about money, making money. Why don’t us blokes do a bit of moonlight tree felling?’

‘Tree felling?’

‘Every butcher has a chopping block, right? And they like kahikatea ’cause it doesn’t smell. Fell a few biggies, cut them up, and get them to the station. Tiny Mulcock on the Limited, works in the guards’ van, he’d take them for nothing, and my cousin down in Wellington could treat them and flog them off. Hey presto: a wireless!’

‘We’d need saws, axes, a lorry, petrol,’ said Gilchrist, sitting up.

‘And what’s up there in the camp sheds with locks just asking to be picked?’ said Vic.

‘Jesus, Cowan, do you want us in clink?’

‘We are already, just about.’

‘It’d be pilfering government property, and as for the trees …’ Gilchrist’s voice trailed away.

‘They’re fine trees, I agree, but we’d only bowl one or two.’ Vic put his hand to his eyes and looked towards the bush.

‘No, I mean it’s Crown land,’ said Gilchrist.

‘Shit, Gilchrist, and you fancy yourself a commie!’ said Vic, laughing.

No one had an alarm clock but Gilchrist drew the short piece of cutty grass, so it was he who stayed awake and woke the others at 2 am.

‘Wakey, wakey,’ said Gilchrist from the flap of Vic’s tent.

‘What the hell?’ Vic pulled the blankets back. It was so cold at night that he always slept fully clothed with the covers over his head.

‘Time to get up,’ said Gilchrist.

Vic moaned and rolled over.

‘Come on, Cowan, shake your shirt.’ Gilchrist grabbed a blanket and gave it a tug.

Vic put his feet out of bed, felt around the ground for his boots, drew them to him with his toes and pulled them on.

‘Got the keys?’ asked Vic.

‘Too right,’ said Gilchrist, twirling the filched keyring on one finger of his hand.

Legatt and Miller, with the brothers Ben and John Nicholson, were waiting outside the tent when Vic and Gilchrist emerged. The moon was throwing slabs of brightness on the sleeping camp and the thick matted darkness of the bush. Thank God we’ve at least got some light, thought Vic, suddenly feeling nervous. This whole idea had been his and he hoped like billy-oh it was going to work. So far everything had gone well.

Felling the tree hadn’t been difficult. The Nicholson brothers,
who had once worked as bushmen in Northland, had
surreptitiously
done the job with saws illicitly borrowed from the camp. Tonight they were going to move the sawn-up blocks. This was more of a problem, involving as it did the borrowing of the lorry from the shed by the overseer’s house and a trip into Matauranga.

Vic followed the others through the confusing tangle of tent guy-ropes, careful where he placed his feet. It reminded him of his boyhood, creeping about in other people’s places, fearful of waking or disturbing somebody. Vic wrote to his mother Joy every Sunday, putting a few shillings from his pay in the envelope. In between times he tried not to let himself dwell on her; the feelings were too raw and painful. But at times like this the thoughts rose unbidden.

He imagined Joy in the sleepout where she lived. It was in a backyard behind a tall tooth-like house in Tinakori Road. Vic thought of his mother counting money out of her worn black purse, looking in the ashtrays on the windowsill, or down the side of the couch, trying to cobble together enough for a loaf of bread, a bit of mince. There was no work as a housekeeper for Joy now. Instead she minded children, weeded, mended silk stockings, but what she earned was never enough, and even with his few shillings he wondered how she managed. She had made a little garden, scraps of geraniums and bits of pink daisies she’d taken as slips and grown in old cups, shaving mugs and chamber pots around the doorway.

They were heading for the supervisor’s house, which was an old cottage over the road from the camp. The two lorries were parked in a corrugated-iron lean-to that sloped from the house to the fence. Getting a lorry out without waking the supervisor and his family was going to be a hell of a job. They’d talked about it over and over.

‘Nothing for it,’ Vic said. ‘Just take the brake off and push.’

‘What if Forster or his wife wake up?’ said Miller. ‘That shed’s under their bloody noses.’

‘In that case we scarper,’ said Gilchrist. ‘Even if they do come out, Forster would be hard pressed to recognise us in the dark.’

When they got to the shed, the doors were already unlocked as arranged. Gilchrist had used his skill as a glazier and removed the window of the supervisor’s office. It was then a simple matter to climb in and help himself to the metal ring that held the keys to the shed and the lorries.

‘What’s that?’ whispered Vic to Gilchrist, pointing at a window in the house, where a wan, flickering light glowed from behind a curtain. ‘Someone’s up.’

‘Reckon it’s just a lamp or candle left burning,’ said Miller, moving close to the other two men.

‘One of Forster’s kids,’ said Vic. ‘Could be spooked by the dark.’

‘Nobody budge,’ said Gilchrist, ‘and we’ll see what happens.’

The six men pushed back against the tangle of harakeke that served as a hedge and waited. There was no movement from inside the house.

‘Seems okay,’ said Vic, stepping out of the shadows into the moonlight. ‘Might as well carry on.’

The double doors of the shed had sunk into the mud, making them difficult to open. Slowly the men pushed them upwards and heaved them back.

Moana Forster, sitting up in the iron bed nursing baby Patricia, heard a slight scrape. She glanced around at the candle that stood inside a cut-down corned beef tin on the table beside her. She had lit the candle because her husband complained that the light from the oil lamp woke him and if there was one thing Stu Forster was most particular about, it was not having his sleep disturbed.

Mrs Forster listened. It was nothing. Maybe just a cat or the chook-run door in the wind. She lay back on the pillow, feeling drowsy and content. She put her hand on Patricia’s hair, the little head warm as a bird under her fingers. Mrs Forster loved feeding
in the night; it was the only time she had to herself, the only time when there was nothing for her to do except rest and watch the baby busy at her breast.

The noise outside came again, followed by what she’d swear was the sound of feet, and something large being pushed. The men at the camp were up to something, she was sure of it.

But Mrs Forster was tired. The thought of heaving herself up — the place between her legs still wounded from the birth hurt dreadfully when she climbed out of bed. Putting her feet down on the cold linoleum, walking across, pulling back the curtain, seemed too much, too big a thing to do. She could, of course, wake Stu, but he was bound to be angry and there’d be trouble. She’d nothing against the men in the camp — decent enough blokes on the whole; she felt sorry for them, really. Better not to know what they were doing. Easier, and so much more comfortable, to cuddle down with the baby and only hear the sucking slurp of Patricia’s mouth on her breast. Tonight she’d keep the baby in bed, not bother to put her back in the drawer that served as a cot. Stu didn’t like a baby between them, couldn’t stand the pissing and puking, wanted the bed to himself, but what would he know? Wasn’t she always up with Patricia back in her cot, long before Stu woke in the morning? Moana Forster turned her head and blew out the candle.

‘The light in the window,’ said Legatt to Gilchrist, who was beside him. ‘It’s gone.’

The five men at the back of the lorry stopped pushing and looked towards the house. Vic, who was steering, wondered why the vehicle halted.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Gilchrist, ‘Forster can’t have heard anything.’

Safely out of earshot, they cranked the lorry and got in, though Vic didn’t put the lights on until they turned into the bush. The track led through the trees for half a mile or so before coming to the felled kahikatea, which the Nicholson brothers had cut into blocks.

‘We’ll all be crook with bloody hernias moving these buggers,’
said Miller, staggering under the weight of one of the giant lumps of wood.

‘Told you,’ said Ben Nicholson. ‘Use the winch we made, like I said. You’ll do yourself in trying to move them otherwise.’

They directed the lorry headlights so they could see, and with a great deal of swearing, grunting and help from the improvised rope winch knotted over a tree, the blocks were finally hoisted on board.

‘Thank God that’s over,’ said Miller, leaning against the cab and lighting the remains of a cigarette.

‘All aboard,’ said Vic, with the crank in his hand. He was the only one among them who could drive.

‘Where did you learn?’ asked Gilchrist, taking off his glasses and wiping his face with his hand as the lorry jolted through the night to Matauranga.

‘Firm I worked for had a van,’ said Vic. ‘Perks of the job.’

‘You might get work as a chauffeur,’ said Legatt, who longed to drive and rather fancied such employment himself.

‘Chauffeur?’ said Vic. ‘You must be joking.’

‘Could just see you, Cowan, running some of those Wellington government bastards around.’ Gilchrist grinned.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Vic. ‘Just get in, Mr Coates, and you too, Mr Forbes, and I’ll take you on a quick trip off the end of the wharf.’

‘Or into a bloody brick wall,’ said Miller.

‘Cowan’s one-way taxi company. Guaranteed to take all Tory politicians from this world to the next,’ said Gilchrist.

Tiny Mulcock saw them laughing as the lorry turned into the freight entrance of the Matauranga railway station.

Stella was looking for the vinegar. Did they have any left? She pushed the bottles along the pantry shelf, trying not to make them clink. From the bedroom she could hear her father’s snores. It was very early Friday morning, just getting light, and her parents were still asleep.