Time past or time future, mine or theirs, I got used to seeing Selene and her family. I often had to put two and two together, trying to understand what had been going on. That happens with anyone you haven’t run across for a while, but with this lot it was trickier. I did try speaking to them, but the only response I got was from Selene herself, who might pause, look as if she were thinking about something, and go on with whatever she was doing.
She was keen to make a start on their Great House, as I heard them call it, but Jenek and Tobik insisted they first get all the materials ready. I admired their organising sense, but understood Selene’s reason for wanting it finished.
Halfway up the steps to my car one morning, I glanced down the channel to see what the traffic was like on the bridge — I was going over to the supermarket — reeled, and grabbed a branch, one of the pohutukawas I’d planted to hold the cliff.
“Take it easy, you old coot,” I told myself, and took another look.
Not only was the channel twice as wide, but both the road and rail bridges had disappeared, the long mounds of the approaches, abutments, piers, and all. Gone.
It took me a dizzying moment to work out that I was in that other time, or their time was in mine. The much bigger channel must be the reason why the inlet hadn’t just kept filling in. I wondered about the current that set down the coast from the north, if it had altered so the bay outside had been dredged and deepened by its vast, continuous force. That might account for the wider channel, but the bridges? I thought of the word my friend Gordon had used: plunge.
There was such a tidal movement up and down the inlet that many of the sandbanks of my time had vanished. However the changes had occurred, tsunami, earthquake, epidemic, whatever the furious disasters had been, they must have stopped development — that propagandist usage so beloved of mayors and land agents: the spread of housing, suburban roads, the silting up of the harbour, all the consequences of our insane overpopulating.
Not only that, but the shops and buildings across on the other side had gone, and the spit of sand they’d been built on was now covered with pohutukawas. All our flimsy traces had been wiped out but for two boats sweeping in on the tide, something towing behind them. For a moment I thought Selene’s family had found one of those Maori canoes with a towering stern-piece fretted, scrolled, and pierced by light shattering off the sea.
After storms in the bush, I’d often seen trees, matais especially, that had come down across a rock or another log and snapped right through. This was a big totara, and it had smashed off below the first branches; at the other end its sprawl of roots lifted high above the water.
The next time I saw them, that amazing pair Jenek and Tobik had raised the tree till it stood upside down on a whale vertebra they’d buried down a hole. The tree became the centre post for their building, its knuckled roots splaying beams like spokes to the circular wall, as if they’d grown that way. They reminded me of a picture of Paul Bunyan squeezing fistfuls of iron ore and coal so railway lines sprouted between his knuckles.
Above that, Jenek and Tobik had rigged a high post with rafters angling down all around. It was a powerful, shapely structure, the intricacy of roots at its centre baroque.
I could hardly believe what they’d managed. They were just kids, really. Jenek would give anything a go; Tobik was more thoughtful, methodical. They were a good pair. Of course, they had the help of that priceless assistant necessity; there was nobody else to do any of it for them. Even so, I looked at the effort they put into towing the totara home and raising it, and wondered at its significance to the family.
They did a good job of the thatching, topped off with a double bundle of reeds in the shape of a fluking whale diving through the roof. When I was a young joker in the Waikato, I once saw a cocky finish thatching a haystack with a straw device like an animal of some sort, and somebody said, “That’s a bit superstitious, isn’t it?”
“We always did it at home. The old man said it kept away lightning and witches.”
“I thought we came out to this country to get away from that superstitious rubbish.”
I asked the two men what they meant, but neither bothered to reply to a boy.
Now I heard Peck telling Ruka and Lorne that the roots, the beams, and the spaces between them and the rafters were the map of the whales’ journey.
“Selene told me so,” Peck finished. I grinned to myself and thought about the sense of purpose and confidence the youngsters had, its maturing effect on the lot of them. But there was something more than that. Something to do with manners.
Peck and Ruka were as rough and tumble a pair of young boys as any, but careful around Selene, with a fair bit of respect and affection, it seemed. Tobik and Jenek took the trouble to explain things to them, to include them, but didn’t take any nonsense. I thought about it and decided they’d learned how to behave as part of surviving, unlike the children and many of the adults of my own time, who weren’t living hard up against unforgiving nature. Selene’s family gave up much of their childhood for survival, again a sacrifice to Anangke.
The only one who didn’t fit the general pattern of behaviour in the family was Larish. The boys as well as young Lorne were wary around her because she was inclined to lash out.
When I saw them again the Great House was finished, and Selene had given birth to a baby girl named Enna after her father, Ennish. It sounded as if he died in a boat, about the time they left Hornish.