Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

He swivelled away. ‘Oh…no.’ After a pause he said, ‘I’m sure you do. Both of you.’

This needled me. Joanne was not there at that interview; she had begun to attend some absurd classes in transcendental meditation or whatever the latest cure-all craze was at that time. I had cared about her, too; once. Looking back on my life I thought how enormously strange it was that I should have found myself giving so much affection to two such unresponsive people, like somebody squandering a small hoard of valuables on indifferent recipients.

Small? I admitted that to myself, yes. I had never been one for self-deception. After my parents had failed to return, my father’s older brother had gloomily taken me in. He and his wife had no children of their own. He was a bureaucrat in an insurance company. The house was a chilling, neat, carefully painted and polished place in Herne Bay. Time went by. I withdrew into books. I had few friends; I did well at school, especially in science. I read science fiction a lot and made my own worlds in my mind. My surrogate parents seemed pleased at my school reports. They only ever surprised me once; and that was over their reaction to a Maori family which had moved into an old house in the next street. One day I was mowing our front lawn, the strip bordering the footpath, when the mower began to fall apart. A Maori boy of about my own age appeared out of nowhere and offered to help. He asked if I had some kind of spanner; we went into the garage to look. I saw my aunt in the front room cracking apart the venetian blinds to try to see who I was talking to. In the garage the Maori saw a few drawings I had been doing on white card; they were mathematical circles and spirals formed by moving a biro round several discs of transparent plastic. This was about as artistically creative as I had ever been, and even this had been consigned to the garage workbench. I showed the Maori how it worked; he tried a drawing himself but with odd results; he was left-handed and moved the discs anti-clockwise, producing odd patterns and reverse spirals. In the middle of this my aunt put her head out of the back door and shouted for me to come in for a minute if I had finished the mowing. The Maori boy moved away. I said something like ‘Come in,’ but he looked away, shook his head and mumbled, ‘Nah, better go, eh,’ and walked off.

I was surprised, not merely at the warnings my aunt and uncle gave me about the undesirability of associating with Polynesian children, since I already had a vague idea that they disliked Maoris, and remarks about contagious scabies and head lice were familiar in the form of general warnings against people one should not mix with; no, what amazed me was the extent of my own naïveté, revealed by the fact that the Maori boy knew more about my surrogate parents than I did. In the shake of his head he had expressed a whole world of intuitive knowledge of which I was quite ignorant, knowledge gleaned in ways which I couldn’t even begin to guess at. The hand forcing apart the slats of the blind, the tone of my aunt’s voice, had been noted and evaluated and acted upon. There was no bitterness in his gesture. In any case I was concerned with my feelings, not his. I thought I had sensed a form of casual pity towards me and this enraged me. After all, I was, I thought, better off than him in every way. He lived in a squalid house, crammed with drunken relatives who were always in trouble with the police and welfare people; my aunt, in the succeeding months, filled out the details whilst my uncle nodded and worried about Islanders moving in nearby and the decline of property values. I walked past these houses and saw heaps of children playing in the overgrown gardens and heard laughing and music from the wide-open doors and windows, and when my uncle had said solemnly one evening that they were ‘lowering the tone of the district’ I suddenly found myself saying, ‘Well, altering it, anyhow,’ which astonished him as much as me, since it surfaced from this rage inside me and the need to strike out randomly at somebody in retaliation for what I still couldn’t understand. A whole space of experience had been locked away from me. I felt I would never make up the lost time, that it was already too late.

‘You like those people, do you?’ my uncle asked, after a pause.

I considered. ‘No,’ I said. It was true. I realised I hated them. Hurt pride, I suppose, demanded it. Yet I felt later that this was the moment when I took control over the values which had up till then been imposed on me by others; I made them my own, and this denial, made for my reasons, not to please anybody else, was my assertion of control.

The sky had darkened even more by the time I reached the junction of the roads at Tirau. I stopped at a filling station to refuel and eat some canned pineapple and a few biscuits. A metal sign overhead was squeaking and banging in the uneasy gusts of air; the sky behind me, to the west, had curdled into grey banks of cumulus occasionally shot through with insipid yellow. It looked as though there would be rain soon; the mass of hills and dark forest towards Tokoroa was an unnerving prospect. I consulted a map. The sign above me swung and screeched. I decided to turn onto State Highway 5 and make Rotorua before the light failed. Map folded, windows shut tight, I set off.

The saturated green of the trees and grass seemed to intensify against the thundery sky. I had still not seen one living animal. There were empty cars and lorries on the roads and I had had to drive carefully. Now I switched on the headlights full beam. Soon there were gloomy stacks of forest on each side. The headlights made a space in the dark for a hundred metres ahead and the car hurried onto this light and pushed it forward, the white centre-markings on the road flashing up out of the night like tracer bullets.

Joanne had insisted we spend our honeymoon in Rotorua. She said she had been told that the place didn’t really stink all that badly and you soon got used to it. Of course this was not true, and even I was taken aback by the unbelievable putrescence of the hydrogen sulphide from the thermal decay fuming underneath everywhere. The ground wobbled. It could have been an omen, as it turned out. At the time it seemed funny. The hotel was shaken by a small earthquake one night; not, unfortunately, at an appropriate climactic moment. Joanne was already pregnant, anyhow.

We had met at university. I had left the house in Herne Bay and taken a flat just off Parnell Road. The university work was easy and I felt free. That was the best time of my life. I imitated the way of life of the other students and did a lot of pretending but generally I was really happy. Perhaps the confusion began during those years; maybe I came to deceive myself into thinking my sociable, amenable behaviour represented a complete deep change; and I fell for that, at least for a while. I met Joanne at a third-year party. She was intense and intelligent, but with a nice sense of humour; and she was attractive. Her parents disapproved of me. She defied them, and occasionally stayed weekends and overnight at my flat. I think it was her first fling at independence. After I began doing postgraduate work I took a flat in Northcote to be nearer the research unit at Albany because the university had leased research facilities there. Joanne moved into my new flat with me, in spite of her family’s de facto objections. We decided we both valued our independence too much to make firm commitments. I did well at the unit and gained a full-time job there after two years.

We had already begun to test the effects of radioactivity on chromosomes and although it was early days I knew it was going to be important work. When Joanne became pregnant we married for the sake of the child, and it looked for a while as if the breach with her parents would heal, and we would get a house and settle down and have kids and that would be life. Yet looking back I wouldn’t say either of us really wanted that, we just seemed to…