4

THEY WERE A COLOURFUL CARAVAN through the deserted streets to Brian’s place. Kevin led the procession. He was pulling a golf trundler carrying the gas bottle. He would have blended in a crowd but he stood out now, with jeans, sneakers, a blue hooded sweatshirt with STEINLAGER on the front and NGAHERE TAVERN on the back. He had a wire-haired terrier, teenage boy look, all disproportionate features waiting to grow into an adult shape, and a prickly vulnerability that made some people feel protective and others send a fax to the Listener. Or ‘used to’, Sean thought to himself. New rules applied now.

Hemi wasn’t saying anything and Sean could see he still looked away to a distant horizon. He was helping Marie with her pushchair-load of blankets, cans of food and other things like candles, soap, batteries and a big pot Brian thought they might need. He was dressed all in black — baggy jeans, a nylon jacket with PENRITH PANTHERS on the back, an unadorned peaked cap on backwards, and on his feet a pair of expensive sneakers.

Sean could tell Marie was excited, frightened but perky, like a person on holiday, going somewhere new. She also wore jeans and sneakers, and over a shirt and jumper, a woollen coat she’d found behind the door of the house they’d just vacated. Her purposeful stride and eager air were quite at odds with the noxious atmosphere that grew thicker as the sun got higher and the day warmed.

‘You look like a bag lady,’ Brian told her and she laughed, the sound loud and shocking in the empty street.

‘Maybe I should have brought a shopping trolley home,’ she said.

Brian’s jeans and check shirt were still torn and bloodied from the dog attack. His left arm was in a sling. He had some packets of rice and pasta in a shoulder bag and he carried his shotgun in his right hand. He had a crab-like walk and crazy stare. One arm or not, Sean wouldn’t have bet much on the chances of anything that attacked.

Hamu was frisky and alert. He seemed eager for new adventures, but nervous about the prospect of more surprises. His ear looked okay, probably in better repair than Sean’s gear. Sean looked like he’d been sleeping in the pig-fern for a week. A quick glance in a mirror that morning had shown him a crop of whiskers about two stages beyond designer stubble. Like the others, he was wearing, beneath an air of bravado, a dark and haunted look around the eyes. He carried his shotgun, a knife on his belt, the ammunition in a shoulder bag. He thought of Kosovo and East Timor where death and disaster had become commonplace. He wondered briefly how things were in the rest of the world.

But thoughts of other countries were soon displaced by the smell of death around them and the nightmare they just couldn’t get away from. It didn’t matter how he breathed either, deep and even, or shallow and panting. He resolved to take up smoking again — anything to combat the stink. ‘No health in it,’ as his Irish grandmother would have said.

Everyone looked around as they walked along, wondering what other shocks were in store. Then a cry from one of the houses they were passing stopped them in mid-stride. Sean tensed. Watch it, he thought. You’ll get wasted by something you don’t expect.

He looked to his left. Out of a drive came a little girl in a frilly dress, accompanied by one of those big lollopy English gun dogs, all dribble and bounce.

‘Are you real?’ she said. ‘Or did we dream you?’

‘We’re real, okay,’ said Brian, the first to recover. ‘You’re not dreaming.’

She looked at him in distaste.

‘You’ve got blood on you. Your shirt’s torn.... Everyone’s dead. Rex and I haven’t got any food left. Where are you going? Can I come with you?’

‘Certainly you can, dear,’ said Marie. But before anyone could move, Hemi detached himself from the pushchair handle and moved to the little girl. He didn’t say anything and she took his hand.

‘My name’s Cally,’ she said. ‘You’re Hemi, aren’t you?’ Silence. ‘I’ll call you Charlie.’

Then Hemi spoke, his voice scratchy with disuse. ‘Yeah, I’m Hemi. Pleased to meet you, Cally.’

They all looked at each other. None of them, not even Marie, had heard Hemi speak. And how did the little girl know his name? Cally smiled at him.

‘And I’m pleased to meet you too,’ she said. ‘I’m nine years old and I’d like to be your friend.’

‘We’re friends,’ said Hemi. ‘I dreamed about you.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I dreamed about you too. You’re supposed to be taller.’

The two of them stared at each other, still holding hands, while the rest of the party stood mute, wondering what was happening. Finally Brian spoke.

‘Do you mind if we go up to your house, Cally? We can pick up things you might want to bring.’

‘No, I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘But everyone’s dead. It isn’t very nice.’

Hamu and Rex sniffed and circled warily as they walked up the drive and in by the back door. They found Cally’s parents in their room, the door shut. The stench seemed to bother Cally a lot less than the others. She led the way to her room and Marie found a bag for some of the clothes from her dresser. The walls were covered with paintings. If they’d been framed in a gallery Sean would never have believed they’d been done by a nine-year-old girl.

There were knowing-looking animals, cats and dogs mostly, playing among trees and flowers, sometimes under a bright yellow sun and sometimes a monochrome moon with the face of a young girl. There were pictures of what at first Sean took to be Asian jungle, but a familiarity, at once disturbing and comforting, brought into focus ponga ferns and large-leaf puka. Flying around were brightly coloured kaka, and in the undergrowth strange, misshapen little creatures grinned and gesticulated.

Pinned on the back of the door was a picture of a watery-looking serpentine beast, with fins that might have been wings, big eyes and a mouthful of sharp teeth. Cally had used the cheapest of primary school poster colours, but the painting had a power and a depth that almost scared Sean. It did scare Hemi. He took one look and left the room.

‘That’s my taniwha,’ said Cally. ‘He looks after me.’

Hard-case taniwha, thought Sean, looking at the tiara and a three-strand necklace of large green and red stones that the beast was wearing.

‘He likes jewellery,’ she told Sean and Marie in a matter-of-fact way. ‘He likes pretty things.’

Sean didn’t know what to say. Cally’s paintings looked like pictures of real scenes, not the products of her imagination. He had the feeling she’d been there, dancing with the animals, at home in the jungle while the wild birds swooped through the trees.

‘Who are these guys?’ he asked, pointing to the little creatures in the undergrowth.

‘They’re the Maeroero,’ she said. ‘Kati ra, kati ra!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘It’s what they keep saying. I think it’s "that’s enough, that’s enough." They get upset about a lot of things.’

Sean smiled at Cally. ‘I don’t blame them,’ he said. He took another look at the creatures. They seemed familiar.

‘Bring your pictures,’ he said to Cally. ‘Your paints too.’ Sean was thinking more in terms of therapy than anything else, but as Cally rolled and banded her work and swept her paints into a plastic shopping bag, he had a sudden suspicion that maybe this little girl had a lot to say to people about what had happened.

On the way out they found her brother in the sleepout, buzzing and stinking. Cally stood looking at him.

‘I wish he was still alive,’ she said sadly, then almost as an afterthought, ‘He laughed at my taniwha.’ She picked up her bike and put her bag in the basket. ‘I’m ready,’ she said, and without a backward glance led the way down the drive.

Sean watched her go, like she was off to a party in her frilly white dress, Hemi on one side of her and Rex on the other. He wanted to ask her something but the question hovered just outside his awareness, intriguing and worrying.

Two streets away they found Edgar, an elderly man, sitting in a deckchair in his Victor Meldrew pyjamas, on the front lawn of his fibro bungalow.

‘I was waiting for the dogs,’ he told Sean quietly when nobody was listening. ‘What’s the point? Everyone’s dead. The power’s off. I can’t make a cup of tea. I haven’t even been able to go outside in case I get attacked.’

Sean looked at him, his head still full of Cally’s paintings, and his nostrils with the stink of rot.

‘Two of my neighbours survived,’ the old man continued. ‘They both killed themselves when they realised what had happened. And what do you think I was doing? Nothing left to eat, no hope either. I’m not young and strong. I just can’t be bothered.’

Sean looked at him. ‘You’d better come with us, Uncle,’ he said.

While they waited, Edgar dressed and put on some solid walking shoes. He was in his seventies, old and frail, and they did the last kilometre to Brian’s place with the old man in the pushchair, piled up with blankets and food. He didn’t even ask where they were going, and nobody thought to tell him. They didn’t find anyone else either. Sean began to wonder how many more people had taken a rope from the shed or mixed themselves a Dr Death special from the bathroom cabinet.

Everyone slept — or at least some of them did — on the floor in Brian’s lounge, and in the morning they made a trip to the mall for more food. Kevin took Brian’s shotgun and the point position. Marie muttered something about ‘boys’ as Kevin high-stepped from driveway to driveway and peered around street corners. Marie insisted Sean walk beside her while she wheeled the pushchair.

At the mall they met Jim. He was standing outside as they emerged from the stink and the gloom with their cargo of rice, pasta, tinned food, toilet paper and other goodies. He was a nuggety little guy in his forties, tight jeans, a fringed and tasselled buckskin jacket, a flat-brimmed black hat, a bristling moustache and well-worn cowboy boots. He spoke first.

‘I thought I heard people,’ he said. ‘Hope I didn’t scare you.’ Sean tried to breathe slow and deep. He needed to calm his thumping heart after the fright of seeing Jim’s figure in the doorway, silhouetted against the sunlight like a western gunfighter.

‘Awesome,’ whispered Kevin.

Sean got his breath back. ‘You scared the shit out of us,’ he said. ‘But we’re still pleased to see you. Just surprised. Blown away, in fact.’

‘Yeah, well,’ the man replied, ‘nobody around to introduce us.’ His eyes had the familiar dark rings they were all sporting, and the state of his clothes showed he’d had his moments with the dogs. He carried an axe, and stepped forward with his hand out.

‘The name’s Jim Marinkovich,’ he said. ‘Believe it or not I came here to be by myself.’

Sean introduced himself, then Marie and Kevin.

‘I know you,’ Marie said. ‘You used to work for the council.’

‘Citicorp,’ Jim said. ‘Wankers. Pardon me.’ He touched his hat. ‘I’d shout you folk a coffee but the tearooms seem to be closed.’ He barked a short laugh that could well have passed for a snort of disgust.

‘Where are you staying, mate?’ Sean asked.

‘The high-school marae,’ Jim said. ‘They just built it. It’s set up for about fifty people. There’re water tanks, a fireplace and a hangi pit for cooking, bedding, even kero lamps and candles in case of power cuts. A wetback for hot water. We’re the first ones in it.’

‘Who’s "we", if you don’t mind me asking?’ Sean watched Jim start to bristle at the directness of the question, then soften.

‘Fifteen of us. All ages.’

Marie and Sean looked at each other. It sounded like a huge improvement on Brian’s barbecue and living room floor. For a start there was the safety of a large group of people. And they both liked Jim. He reminded Sean of the men he’d dealt with while doing bush work, fencing, and cutting firewood, men who led hard lives, to whom the greatest sin was a show of weakness, and looking after the family the greatest source of pride.

‘What are we waiting for?’ said Marie. ‘Let’s pick up the others and get over there while it’s still light.’ Jim nodded. Beneath his hard-man exterior Sean saw an eagerness, almost a desperation, and he was reminded just how vulnerable he felt himself.

That night they were all installed on the high-school marae, bags at the feet of their mattresses, and their supply of food on the pantry shelves next to the main kitchen. Sean felt he could breathe out. They weren’t just seven frightened people any more. They were twenty-three and it was starting to feel like they might make it — though where to he had no idea.

After dinner, when they sat in the wharenui and people told their stories, Sean listened to one tragic tale after another. Over and over he was given reminders of how other people were coping.

‘I’m not the only person deep in the brown stuff,’ he kept thinking. ‘And other people are handling things.’

Weeping, as the shadows swooped and loomed in the soft and flickering light, teenaged Naomi talked about her parents and little brothers dying around her. Puru, tats and gang colours, talked about organising a dogwatch. Bill, who turned out to be an old mate of Edgar’s, spoke of finding others while there was still a chance. Brian speculated on what might be happening elsewhere. Sean pulled himself together enough to talk about the importance of ritual and spirituality.

‘Say it like you mean it,’ he growled at himself. ‘No room for half-arses any more.’

Through the tears they sang songs and said prayers. People even told jokes, and watching everyone trying made Sean feel a little stronger. But everyone still looked shell-shocked, jumpy and unsure of themselves. They shared a bemusement, a puzzlement. like nobody quite believed what had happened. They sat close to each other, touching, even clinging, relieved they’d found more people.

‘I think we’re doing okay,’ said Brian, from the mattress beside Sean.

‘Hope so, bro,’ Sean said. He was thinking they’d just come through a time that could have blown them apart. Any number of fates could have finished them — dogs, the rope, Dr Death.

Cally was on the mattress to Sean’s right. He’d helped her pin her taniwha on the wall. Hemi was beyond her, then Marie. Sean leaned back, closed his eyes, breathed deep, and it suddenly came to him what he’d wanted to ask her.

‘Are you okay, girl?’

‘Yes, I am,’ she said. ‘I like it here. I feel safe with so many people.’

‘How come you were all clean when we found you?’

She looked at him for a long time, trying to work out what he meant. ‘I told you,’ she said, ‘the taniwha looked after me. I didn’t get sick.’ She threw him a sideways glance, like he was a bit simple. ‘Excuse me, I’m going to sleep now, I’m tired,’ she said, and, burrowing under her blankets, she was soon giving off the rhythmic snuffling and snorting of a small creature in repose, oblivious to all about her.

Sean didn’t find sleep so easily, though, and when he finally drifted off he had the first of many strange dreams.

He was back at Pukepoto, Te Rina’s ancestral home. He was walking across McKinleys’ farm towards the Waitangi Stream to find a place where he could take the kids swimming. It was midsummer. Everything was hot and dry. The stream looked idyllic from a distance, an attractive line of cool, green willows, but up close it was a series of dark impenetrable pools ringed with willow roots and choked with fallen trees and floodborne debris. He took his time, climbing the drystone walls and skirting the giant pig-pear tree, wasps buzzing drunkenly around its fermenting windfalls.

As he drew closer something shifted. The willows vanished. The stream was wide and clear. Waving grasses grew on the banks. A few metres back, feathery manuka danced delicately in a gentle breeze. Sunlight glinted on the water tinkling down rapids at the head of a long pool. He’d never seen anything so inviting. He peeled off his clothes and sat in the sun, the grasses tickling his side. He gazed at the water as it fanned out from the base of the rapids and magnified the coloured stones scattered along the stream bed.

Then something happened in his head. There was a noise like boulders cracking and rumbling in a snowmelt mountain torrent. Or maybe it was like the thunder of surf, and the hiss of a wave sweeping up a beach. Or maybe it wasn’t a noise at all. Maybe it was like an eel insinuating itself through a field of marine grass, with the effortless ease of a Bach fugue or a Miles Davis solo. Whatever, it was irresistible.

‘Haere mai!’ it said, but not in words. ‘Haere mai kei roto i te manga.’

Sean didn’t hesitate. He stood up and dived, as far out as he could, and as he hit the water he experienced not the shock of coldness, but immersion in a cloud of emotion: triumph, sadness, pride, compassion and a feeling of great antiquity. He entered another world. He could breathe. His vision was sharper. Images rang in his head.

‘I’m Tinirau. I’ve been swimming the waters of Kiwa’s ocean since your people lived in trees and ate raw flesh. I’m older than Kiwa. I’m older than anyone. I’ve watched the children of the land come and go, the people of the sea too. I endure. I watch, and guard. I’ll be here long after this place is nothing but damp ground.’

Sean started drifting with the current. Above him the water swirled and the sunlight splintered. Chalcedony and carnelian were splashes of blood glinting on the stream bed. Soft grasses grew in the sand by the banks and wafted in the eddies. On the surface, stained glass melted and flowed. Rainbows formed and vanished like little daubs of light from a spinning crystal.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ sounded in Sean’s head like bells pealing.

‘Where are you?’ he asked — or thought.

‘You can’t see me. The sight of me might kill you. But you can believe I’m all around you. I’m the water sparkling in the rapids. I’m the gentle grasses waving in the current. I’m the tuna watching from his hole in the bank. I’m the koura under a rock in the shallow water. I’m the kokopu dreaming in the dappled shadows. See them, you see me. Love them, you love me.’

Sean drifted on, entranced, light and colour incandescent about him. He thought of Cally’s paintings.

‘What about the little girl?’ he asked.

‘Calliope can see me whenever she wants. She understands. She respects and believes. She doesn’t fear me. She even loves me.’

Ahead a darkness grew. The banks closed in, lined with knotted tree roots. The bottom became muddied. Suddenly Sean was afraid.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ came a far-from-reassuring feeling. ‘Nothing here will hurt you. It’s just ugly.’

Sean was plunged into a pit, one of the willow-lined pools. Down he sank, aware of his naked vulnerability as he came close to the sides, tangled roots hiding dark cavities. The water was chilly and tasted bitter. A greenish-grey light was just enough to see by but not bright enough to cheer. His heart froze, and as the bottom came in view he cringed. It was muddy, carpeted with bones, bits of wire, a set of rusted bed-springs, a car chassis, discarded machinery.

‘Welcome to my spare room,’ said the voice, not a trace of amusement. ‘You can stay here as long as you like.’

Sean looked around at the sheep skeletons, the corroding metal. He tasted chemicals in the water. What could he say? He couldn’t think of a worse crime than turning the sparkling stream into this disgusting pit.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He’d been fighting the ugliness for years, but he’d always felt he was still a part of it.

‘So you should be. Did you imagine you were exempt from the workings of the law of cause and effect? Did you think your greed was without price? But most of you are gone now and, even if it’s too late for this place, there are still streams where the kokopu does his nightly dance. You should go there. There’s nothing for you here.’

Sean sank to the bottom, overcome with a dreadful despair. He lay on the mud, his eyes stinging in the now-acrid water, and sobbed.

‘Piki mai, kake mai!’ boomed in his head like the opening bars of a symphony. ‘Stop lying there feeling sorry for yourself. Get up. Calliope asked me to help you so I did, and I’ve given you all the help I feel like giving. You know what to do!’

Sean didn’t know. He just wanted to get out of that dreadful cheerless place and back to the sunlight. He started swimming upwards, choked on the water, and had to hold his breath. When his head broke the surface, he swam to the side of the pool and clambered out, his flesh creeping at the touch of the willow roots. He found his clothes a little way upstream after climbing around pools and over fallen trees. They were hanging in the branches of the dead willow that lay across the dark water. Caught up next to them was the rotting carcass of a sheep, drowned in a recent flood and half eaten by water rats. He dressed quickly and scrambled up the bank, back into the sunlight.

He was on his mattress in the wharenui. It was early morning, just light enough to see. Cally was lying on her side, watching him carefully. Her head was propped on her left hand.

‘I didn’t know your name was Calliope,’ Sean said.

‘Course,’ she replied. ‘It’s Greek. She looks after people who write long poems. I haven’t written one yet, but I’m going to. Did you like where the taniwha took you?’

Sean looked at her. He couldn’t think what to say. What was real? What was a dream? He thought he’d woken up, but as people stirred around them, disturbed by the conversation, he felt disjointed, detached, like the fragile state after a mushroom vision that had blurred all the boundaries and trampled the physical rules.

He pulled himself up against the wall and sat there with his head spinning. Goya-esque images of impaled sheep, accompanied by Verdi arias, strobed and echoed in his mind. Cally called him back.

‘You’ll have to leave here, won’t you?’ she said.

He took a few seconds to collect himself, the realisation slowly dawning on him. Of course he’d have to leave. He’d just been given the hard word, clear and succinct for all its outlandish delivery. He had no idea of the consequences of staying but, looking across at Cally, he knew that, even if he didn’t understand what was happening, he’d best go along with events. Go with the flow, as the old hippies might have said. He felt like an old hippie. He felt like Alice in Wonderland.

‘I’m late, I’m late,’ he muttered.

‘What?’ said Cally.

‘Nothing. It’s just a book about some strange things that happened to a little girl.’ She gave him a hard and searching look. On the wall behind her the jewels on the taniwha sparkled and glowed.