The Colour

She described Pao Yi’s vegetable garden and the way the colours of it changed and yet always seemed bright, even when heavy rain was falling, and the demeanour of Pao Yi himself ‘which strikes me as very unusual, or even exceptional, because he is so still and contained’.

Then she talked about the soups she was making from his vegetables, ‘stringing my pot on a poorly contrived little tilting cradle above my fires’, and how she felt that this was the finest food she’d ever eaten, better than the beautiful steak-and-kidney puddings they served at the Assembly Rooms in Norwich, better than the succulent oyster pies that could be bought at Wells and Brancaster.

She saw that what she’d written here amounted to ridiculous hyperbole, but she didn’t want to cross it out; there was something about the soup which struck her as uniquely good. She would have liked some bread – even Lilian’s bread – to eat with it, but she felt strong enough on the soup alone.

She went on to describe the diggings at Kokatahi, the crude and leaky huts, the persistent impression that she had formed of some ‘aftermath’ there, as if, without being noticed, an earthquake had struck and the miners were now trying to rebuild what they’d already lost. ‘I know’, she put, ‘that this is not logical and yet this intimation of a disaster, about which nobody will speak, endures in my mind and I conclude that, because I am so much alone with my thoughts, I may have begun to see the world in a topsy-turvy way . . .’

Nobody heard this conversation. Neither Harriet, nor Pao Yi, nor Joseph, nor the other miners at Kokatahi heard anything at all, yet with every passing hour it became noisier and more clamorous, until at last it had to escape its underground confinement. And so it rose up and broke on the surface of the rock and then the sound of it burst out into the air. For a brief moment, the wash of water bubbled and trembled on the rock’s ferny edge. Then it began to fall as a roaring cataract into the river.

The dog, Lady, was the first to hear it. She was standing at the river’s edge, pursuing her favourite occupation of trying to gobble up small fish as they swam within reach of her mouth. She raised her head and listened. She was attuned now to the sounds of the bush, even to the sudden crash of a tree or a cascade of falling rock, but this presented itself to her as something frightening, something new and unknown, and she started to whine.

Harriet was a little way off, wearing a shawl and her old knitted hat to try to keep off the rain. She was examining what looked like a piece of greenstone, feeling its surprising smoothness, as though it had been polished by its constant slip and roll among the smaller stones. Harriet was so preoccupied by the greenstone that she paid little attention to Lady’s whining, but then she, too, heard the roar coming from the direction of the gorge, and then she looked up and saw arriving, at the bend in the river, a wall of white water like a vast, breaking wave, and before she could cry out, the wave swept down upon Lady and snatched her away.

The water crashed by inches from Harriet’s feet, almost obliterating the shingle strand on which the tent stood. Behind the first wave came a second and then a third, and then the river calmed, but rose higher still, drowning the banks, frothing and whirling in a swelling tide.

Harriet unlaced her boots and kicked them off, snatched her hat from her head and her shawl from her shoulders and waded into the freezing water. She began calling to Lady, but the sound of her voice was gone instantly as the swiftness of the flood caught her in its cold arms and she fell under.

Water streamed into her mouth and she felt her heavy, drenched skirts drag her down into the weeds. She kicked out, thrashed against the pull of the skirts, tried to claw her way up towards the turmoil of light far above her, as her lungs burned and the icy coldness of the river pressed on her skin and sent shock-waves into her bones.

She felt her head come to the surface and she coughed and choked and gulped for a mouthful of air and saw the sky for a brief, white moment, but her clothes weighed her down and the sky vanished once more and Harriet Blackstone knew that she was drowning.

She was falling into a green darkness. Yet she still fought and kicked against the winding sheet of her skirts, thrashed upwards with her arms, and now at last a bright bubble of sky burst once again above her face and she struggled to hold it there, to hold the sky above her, to emulate the rose at the base of the waterfall, rising through its own drowning, ‘obstinate in resurrection’.

She heard herself shrieking, as though this sharp sound piercing the air might play a role in holding up her head, but she knew that she was helpless against the icy current. And what cold was entering her veins! No cold in any snow-filled winter had been as terrible as the cold which had its grip upon her now. Harriet knew that even if she could vanquish the tug of the saturated skirts, she had no weapon with which to fight the cold . . .

Unless . . .

Unless it was her voice, her cries of ice going up into the air, so she tried to stretch these out, each one like a high note on a flute, taking all the breath that remained.

And then, as she choked again on the water and her cries were cut off, she felt her body being slammed into something yielding, like a thicket of weed and this thicket held her still as she saw the flood keep driving past her and she reached out and tried to clutch at this yielding thing and she got hold of it and found that it had some cunning pattern or design that she knew to be shaped by people and not by nature and she searched for the word to describe it, searched and searched as she let her body be wrapped round by it and felt her skirts slowly billow to the surface, as though both she and they had suddenly become weightless.

Then she remembered the word.

A net.

She could hear nothing.

She closed her eyes. She supposed that this was what death was: darkness and soundlessness. But after a little while, she was aware of something else: heat. She was still in her body and her body seemed to be burning.

She opened her eyes again and she saw, or thought she saw, very close to her open eyes, a face which she didn’t recognise. She stared at it and she thought that it smiled at her but that in this smile was contained such measureless sadness that she concluded it belonged to the face of someone come to mourn her as she lay in her coffin. She wanted to ask: Who are you? Then she remembered that she was almost certainly dead and the dead had no voice. And she returned to sleep.

The way the flames moved without ceasing fascinated her, for what moved them? Could it be said that a flame was ‘alive’?

She saw shadows, shapes. There was some movement in these, or else they didn’t move at all, but the firelight only flickered over them or behind them, giving the illusion of movement. She waited to see which of these possibilities would prove to be true, and while she waited felt herself spirited away into a dream of the Cob House, where Lilian was riddling the smoky range and cursing and crying, both at once, and she, Harriet, was decorating cakes that Lilian had made and on one of the cakes she laid some berries of belladonna. Lilian turned round and saw the belladonna berries, but instead of protesting, she dried her eyes on her apron and began to smile a secretive smile and to nod her head with its rope of hair like a noose. ‘The belladonna is for him,’ Lilian announced. ‘A very fine idea. Wulla.’

Then Harriet woke and felt her head being lifted up and a cup was put to her lips and she took a sip. She wanted to ask: ‘Is it belladonna?’ But she still had no voice and couldn’t declare beyond all question that she was no longer dead or dreaming. Yet the drink was warm and had a strong scent of flowers or herbs and she felt it go down into her body and begin to fill the empty spaces inside her, and it was at this moment that memory returned to her and she asked: ‘Lady. Where’s Lady?’

There was silence. Then a voice said: ‘Lady? Black white dog?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fresh came,’ said the quiet voice of Pao Yi. ‘Lady gone.’

Since the death of his parents on the weir, he always listened attentively to the changing moods of any river or lake near which he found himself, and so he heard the roar of the fresh begin far away in the Styx Valley and stood waiting to see what it was going to do here. He’d wanted to bring in his fishing net, but judged that he didn’t have time to do this.

When he saw the advancing wall of water, he felt his heart quicken. Though his garden was on a plateau well above the river’s edge, Pao Yi retreated towards his hut. He knew that in New Zealand a dry creek could become a brimming river in seconds and the great rivers themselves carve out new valleys in a single season.

The succession of high waves broke and pooled and the river-banks disappeared and other waves appeared, rising up and coming to their curve and falling, and all the time the level rose and rose and Pao Yi understood that the old, sluggish Kokatahi was gone – gone for this season, gone for ever, perhaps? – and the new river would be wide and angry and fast. And he saw in his mind’s eye how it would rush down upon the mine workings at Kokatahi and Kaniere, flattening the heaps of mullock, snatching away the tents and hovels and streaming into the mine-shafts and bores, carrying everything onwards, tumbling and broken and drowned, and hurling it all into the sea.

And so Pao Yi knew that his livelihood here was at an end.

Some of the miners would be drowned and the rest would take whatever they had left and make their way back to Hokitika. There would be no customers left for his vegetables and they would rot in the earth.

He looked down at them, at the neat rows, at his leeks like fountains, at the blood-red beets. He felt, not fear for his future, but a sentimental sorrow for the plants themselves or for the orderly beauty of the plot which nobody except himself and the Englishwoman had ever seen. He was just imagining, too, how the routine of his days, with which he had been so strangely content, would change, when he heard screams coming from the water.

Harriet Blackstone was still holding on to his fishing net, but her head had fallen sideways and her face had the pallor of the drowned.

Pao Yi lifted her up and fed the rope round her waist and brought it back and tied it, so that he and she were roped together and now, as he turned to swim back, he felt the heaviness of her and didn’t know whether he was too late to save her. He swam on his back, with his frog legs kicking out as strongly as he could make them, and she lay on him and to keep her head from dropping into the water, he rested her face on his.

When he felt his back arrive against dry land, he was aware of how steep the slope of the land suddenly was. He tried to stand up and to turn, so that he wouldn’t topple over as he attempted to scramble out. He fumbled to release Harriet from the rope and when she was free of it he laid her on the grass and he saw the rain which was still falling begin to pattern the mud which coated her skirts.

Shivering, still looped about with the rope, Pao Yi knelt by Harriet, then turned her over gently and tried to do what he’d often done in his dreams to the bodies of Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming – to undrown them.

He’d always been able to see it so clearly, this miracle of an undrowning: the soaked heads and thin torsos lying at the side of Heron Lake and his own strong hands pressing on them, on the back of their rib cages, to force the lake-water out of their lungs, pressing down again and again, and then at last seeing the streams coming out of their mouths and feeling them come alive again – his beloved parents, irascible Lin and self-centred Fen Ming – and begin to curse and spit.

And then he lifted them up in his arms and they were as light as cloth, and he carried them to their dark little house and laid them down and lit a fire to bring warmth back into their veins and heard them begin to chatter and giggle, saying:

‘Oh but did you see how near we got to the weir, Lin? We were inches from it, we truly were. We were a fish’s length from the very lip of the weir!’ ‘Oh yes, my word, what luck we had, Fen Ming! We would be dead now, Pao Yi, and you would be an orphan. How sad! An orphan’s life is full of worry and confusion, ha, ha! But you saved us and you saved yourself. What a miracle!’

Despite the reality of his parents’ death, Pao Yi always enjoyed this dream. One of the things he liked most about it was his own unchanging efficiency.

In his own language, he apologised to Harriet for doing this, but was aware that she didn’t hear him.

He saw that her hands and arms had been browned by the weather, but that her body was translucent white like an onion and her nipples dark as beets. Her feet were slender and finely arched and Pao Yi stared at the straightness of her toes. To warm them, he held her feet in his hands and then laid them against his thighs.

He dressed her in some of his own cotton clothes – jacket and wide trousers – and laid her on his mat, and covered her with rags and blankets.

He made a little fire, opening a vent he’d contrived in his roof with a flower-pot that would take most of the smoke up and away into the air, and crouched by the fire to warm himself, but with his eye always on Harriet. Her body seemed to fill all the space around him. Nobody else had ever come into his hut in all the time he had lived there. He began unplaiting his hair.

When he was dry and warm, he set water to boil on the fire and made a tea from mint leaves and juniper berries and tried to lift Harriet’s head so that she would drink and he saw her looking at him, unafraid, but curious. The feel of her neck under his hand was intimate and troubling. He tried to smile when he looked at her, to reassure her that she was safe. She asked about the dog, Lady, and he attempted to tell her that the fresh had surely taken the life of the dog, but he didn’t have sufficient words. And very soon, he laid her head down again and watched her tenderly as she drifted back to sleep.

Pao Yi felt very tired now. He fetched the last thin blanket that he had and wrapped himself in this and lay down on the hard floor. Outside he could hear the river rush onwards, leaving him and his garden far behind. His last thought before he slept concerned the piece of gold lying buried under the seventeenth onion.

There was an ember of light on the earth to the left of her, where the fire had burnt low, and Harriet remembered staring at flames and forming some peculiar question about them which she’d been unable to answer.

And she felt now that she didn’t know the answers to any single thing which concerned her. She knew only that the fresh had come, that she’d found herself in the river. But why had she been in the water? She was cold now, yet seemingly safe, lying in darkness by the scarlet ashes of a fire. But this was not her tent, she knew that. And how had she escaped drowning?

She pulled the blanket that covered her more closely round her and stared at the darkness, trying to see the outline of things, but her eyes couldn’t make sense of anything. She thought how excellent it would be to discover within her reach a piece of wood and throw it on to the fire, so that both heat and light would increase, but she felt unable to move. Her head ached and her throat was parched. But what could she do about any of these things?

She lay as still as she could and listened. The night seemed to be calm, but Harriet could hear the river sliding by, lapping at stones, and now she began to wonder whether her tent and everything that she’d owned, including the gold she’d found, had been taken by the river, and she saw that such a thing could easily happen because she could remember suddenly, with extraordinary clarity, the way the drought and the rain and the wind had taken the Cob House and how the calico walls had lain flapping on the tussock and the door had rammed itself into the earth . . .

The sudden brief flaring of the fire, as a small twig burned and went out, brought Harriet back to the present and to her task of listening. She began to try to count the things she could hear:

No wind in the high bush.

The river travelling on and on.

The sighing of her own heart.

No other sound.

She was warmer because the fire was burning again.

She turned her head and saw Pao Yi kneeling by the fire, plaiting his hair. She recognised him and knew that he had saved her from the river and that she must be lying in his hut above the vegetable garden.

She watched him without moving, feigning sleep: his face that was comically sad, the thick braid of his hair, his hands that looked nimble, like the hands of a flautist. She remembered his name. She remembered that in his other life he owned a boat and fished a far-away lake.

Pao Yi stood up and crept silently about the hut, intent on small tasks, folding a blanket, filling a tin can with water, taking dry food of some kind from a sack, breaking more kindling for the fire. And Harriet thought how she’d never seen anybody who moved like this, barefoot, making no sound. She felt that she would like to go on watching him, unobserved, all through his day: see him drink his tea or eat whatever food he was going to make; hear him whistle or sing or talk to himself; hear him go out of the hut to piss; see him wash and shave himself; observe his naked arms, which had saved her from the water, and his narrow hips and his strong thighs and his sex.

Pao Yi crossed to her and knelt down by her and Harriet lowered her eyes, wondering if he’d seen her staring at him, intruding into his life with her fever-distorted thoughts. Then she felt his hand on her brow and the touch of this was as beautiful a thing as Harriet had ever experienced and she wanted it to remain there and never move. She tried to speak, to ask him, perhaps, to stay still, exactly as he was, but she found that she couldn’t say a word because she was crying. She was scarcely making any sound, yet her tears kept flowing, running down her face and neck and arriving as a pool in the cleft of her collar bone. She felt Pao Yi’s hand move gently away from her forehead down to her cheek and rest there, trying to collect the tears, as though the palm of his hand could absorb her grief into itself.

‘Cry for Lady?’ Pao Yi asked softly. ‘Black. White. Cry for dying?’