… crouches before the screen in his tiny room, every shelf, every surface crammed with report and analysis, like a rat in its nest of shredded newsprint. So much for the paperless office and no evidence whatever that five months ago he had taken advantage of disruption to tidy up. Shelves had been torn from the walls, his computer lay face-down on the desk, ceiling tiles drooped at odd angles and everything was coated in plaster dust. There was no option but to impose order.
Fifteen years of work sorted. On the day they were eventually let back into the building, the engineers having checked every shaken centimetre and given it their blessing, he had cleared a space and got down to it. This to the bin, this to keep, this to the carton destined for a purgatorial half-life in the spare room at home to await a switch in the political weather.
For some time, surely, there must be change? A different government, a different minister. Bloody Smith and even more bloody Hide must disappear some day, Smith exploding in a bloodshot frenzy, Hide tippy-toeing off to dance among the stars. Voted out and off to the blissful nirvana that awaits right-wing politicians in this bloody country: multiple directorships of this or that, comfortable consultancies, an embassy on some tree-lined boulevard. Surely, sooner or later, they’d go and the current regime would be dismantled? The overpaid, out-of-town commissioners appointed to rubber-stamp the region’s irrigation projects would fly north again. The government had overturned the regional council elections to enable their arrival, but another government could as easily reverse that.
They could reinstate elections, re-establish a proper regional council and he and his colleagues would be free at last to stop planning an environment fit only for vast herds of dairy cows. Those poor bloody creatures you saw everywhere now, moping on big bare paddocks, wagging the stumps of their amputated tails, exposed to the full force of summer sun and howling gale, winter snow and driving rain because shelterbelts and shade trees got in the way of the irrigator arms and must be rooted out. Poor bloody cows. Reluctant mainstay of the country’s economy. Just big pink sacs really, on their skinny legs, squeezing out milk powder for Chinese baby formula, Chinese ice cream, Chinese dietary supplements. And hadn’t he read somewhere that the Chinese were allergic to lactose?
Some day he would be able to stop thinking about all that, and the water being drawn up from the dark aquifers to turn dry plain to green pasture. He could stop thinking about plans for reservoirs and canals to hold all that water. He could stop thinking about cows and turn to planning environments fit for other creatures: fish, for example.
The marine reserve.
His project, his fifteen-year preoccupation. It gleams in the mind: pristine waters bordering the tawny bulk of the peninsula, edging into all the little bays between ancient outpourings of lava, lapping at the foot of basalt cliffs and tiny islets. Surging with forests of kelp and all the multitudes that live within their shadows. Silver moki and freckled blue cod fanning their fins, pouting trumpeters, orange roughy a hundred and fifty years in the growing, red cod feeling their way across the seafloor with that single spiky barbell, canny ancient hapuku in their crevices of rock, battalions of crayfish marching up submarine hill and down submarine dale on their long route around the coast, little blue penguins rafting up of an evening for a chat before the laborious commute on stumpy feet uphill to their burrows.
He had dedicated himself to their welfare. Those mysterious millions. He had worked to counter the ravages of the trawlers and the squid boats, the rows of humming factories moored at the 12-nautical-mile limit, dragging their kilometres of lines or hoovering the seafloor. He had stood and argued the case for a reserve with recreational fishermen who bellowed at the slightest hint of intrusion into their preserve even though he had the data, he had the figures to prove that their catch beyond the borders would improve. And then there were the bad boys who didn’t bother with argument, didn’t give a fuck, reserve or no reserve, they’d carry on regardless, filling the catchbags with undersize paua and crays to trade with crims and down at the pub.
Fifteen years of meeting and consultation and bellowing and reports in the attempt to hold it back: the empty seas, the dead forests, the whole sad depleted calamity that has haunted him since childhood.
He sits at night reading his daughter a bedtime story. She is tucked up under her duvet, sucking her thumb the way she has done ever since the quake, though now she sleeps in her own bed unless an aftershock sends her stumbling to the bulwark of their big parental bodies.
It’s a baby story really, but one she has always liked, about two polar bear cubs who run off on an adventure, tumbling through the snow. Her room is dimly lit by her bedside light. The shade has a pattern of little elephants running nose to tail. It rotates slowly, casting soft shadows on the bedroom wall. Poppy is warm against his arm, her hair still damp from her bath, her skin smelling of soap. Above her head is the frieze of animals Janey stencilled on the walls when Poppy was little: dancing zebras and smiling giraffes, a plump hippopotamus half-submerged in a blue pond. Beside her, arranged across her pillow, are her stuffed toys: a couple of teddies, Sahana’s stuffed koala, Monkey, grubby and well loved, and Choochoo, who is a panda and lacks one ear.
Rob reads the story of the polar bear cubs and Poppy sucks her thumb dreamily, believing it all. This fantasy of carefree cubs frolicking in the snow while Rob can think only of the cubs’ mother, her big white legs pawing at the water in that endless blue looking ahead for the ice shelf that has receded since last year, is shrinking still, faster, faster.
He sits reading to his daughter as the elephants (down to 600,000 because of the fucking poachers, the fucking ivory carvers) slowly circle the walls. She cuddles her panda (1864 at last count, and there is something so infinitely depressing about that ‘4’, the exactness of it). Monkey sprawls beside her head, the goofy long-limbed orangutan without whom she cannot go to sleep (400,000, declining by around 1000 a year to make way for fucking oil palms). And she has tucked the koala (100,000, dying by the dozen from disease and dog bite and suburban encroachment) under her duvet.
His daughter sleeps each night surrounded by dying species and he can hardly bear it, this terrible fairytale he must keep telling her of cute polar bears and happy elephants and cuddly monkeys when the reality is cubs starving to withered corpses, their bodies empty leather on windswept rock, their teeth like pearls, the sea levels rising and warming, the dead birds, dead fish, the silent empty world.
He’s done his best, day after day, biking into the office, a quick sprint on the rowing machine in the basement gym, a shower and at his desk by 7.30, ready to do his best for the moki and the cod, red and blue. And then overnight it was all shelved, cast aside in the rush to approve plans to turn plains of skimpy grassland over river shingle into lush green dairy pasture.
There had been rumours in 2008 as soon as the Nats got in. Veiled hints at meetings or in public statements. Comments passed on by a mate of Rob’s who had moved to the ministry in Wellington and knew how things were moving. Central government was ‘not happy’ with the Canterbury council’s performance, it was ‘dysfunctional’, it was obstructing progress, in its niggling nanny-state fashion, getting in the way of the canal and dams that would ensure prosperity for the region and, by extension, the economy of the entire country. Straws in the wind, followed as inevitably as night follows day by the ministerial directive, the performance review, the official report — written, of course, by another Nat, former cabinet minister and deputy PM, one of those reports where, Rob’s mate said, the conclusion had been written first and was going to be attached to whatever the review uncovered.
And after that came the sacking of the elected council, and the arrival of the government’s own appointed commissioners, like some SWAT team dropping from the sky to deliver dazzling efficiency. No report to be more than a single side of an A4 sheet. No meeting to last longer than one hour. All non-essential work to be cast aside for that monocular focus on irrigation, on dairy cows. All hands to the pump. All eyes on the irrigator.
Rob crouches before the screen, preparing for the afternoon while things are relatively quiet. Colin from next door, who has never quite adjusted to office existence, still operates like man alone, voice booming from a bare mountainside, is off at the Carlton for his lunchtime pint. Sarah will be back at one, and then they’ll head out to Prebbleton, rattling along companionably in one of the council utes to check water quality in a well that has been repeatedly condemned, unfit for human consumption, especially dangerous for babies, laden with nitrates and phosphorus, seething with faecal coliforms.
Brian, the farmer, doesn’t give a stuff. His feedlot is a shitty mess, the drain-off inadequate. His fences are broken and crudely mended, unable to restrain his stock who break through to stand, as they yearn to stand, in the river’s cooling waters, soothing udders strained to bursting to produce more milk than any cow was ever designed to produce to feed its calf in her unmodified lifetime. Brian will stand by, arms folded in barely repressed resentment, while he and Sarah dip and test the toxic residue of a once-pristine aquifer. Ahead lie argument, rage, injured innocence, delays, mitigation, summons, lawyers, a fine for an amount that may or may not act as a deterrent, depending on this month’s milk solids payout. A mere slap on the wrist.
But first there’ll be the trip, window down, out of the office with Sarah, who is good company, her long brown legs in summer shorts, her long hair flying, making the drive tolerable: along the road by the dead lake with its flaccid eels, its toxic algal bloom, over the dry streams where bikes scream about among the broken bottles and plumes of dust rise, a rim of willow the only evidence that once there was water, glittery with dragonflies and iridescent millions and herons motionless at the rim and bitterns among the reeds and all the beautiful shadows of species long dead, long gone.
He reaches for his coffee. And in that split second, a new fault ruptures and the building leaps into …