Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

‘The land. You can have it back. All yours.’

He sat up and gave me a look of withering contempt. For a moment I almost felt alarmed.

‘Oh,’ he said, slowly, with heavy sarcasm, ‘thank you .’

‘I can’t see it makes any difference,’ I said, wanting to dismiss the subject, ‘if it’s what you’ve always wanted.’

He knitted his large hands together, fingers clasped, and held them up in front of him in a manner which seemed, fleetingly, to be too dramatic and theatrical.

‘ Tangata whenua .’ He pulled his hands apart. ‘The people…and the land. Go together.’ One hand dropped and the other withered its fingers like a dead plant. ‘Without the people, it’s nothing .’

I sat through the silence that followed, looking away, mad at myself for getting involved in a useless argument on his territory, on his terms, all uphill against his natural assumption of the moral heights; and mad at him for, in spite of all that, making me seem to be talking down to him, to be trivial and boneheaded. Then I realised that in a curious way I was merely an audience for him, that he was creating a performance of some kind, slightly overstated in its gestures and verbal mannerisms, and not completely within his control. He waved his hands towards the statue.

‘All that, duty , and loyalty . To what? He gives everything away, for what?’

‘The British Empire, I suppose.’

‘Yes. And where’s that now, eh?’

He tensed and leaned forward. I could tell that his agitation, the great tension working in the muscles of his face and body, had very little to do with any provocation I might have given him. It stemmed from some much more powerful disturbance inside his own experience. It was packed behind his eyes.

‘I joined the army,’ he said, ‘because…’ and here he paused, lost concentration, then regained it; ‘anyhow, I joined. They talk a lot about your duty and what it means, and they have…an oath of loyalty and you sign all these papers, of course, you never think, I mean, what the whole…What they want is to, to just scrub you out, and put someone else there with a gun and they want to be sure that person they’ve made will do what they say and press the trigger when they give the word. That’s it. That’s what it means. They have to count on that. And it works. But it’s not you . And you don’t want all these bastards coming out with this bullshit about loyalty when it’s all over, and shoving these bullshit memorials up in every fucken’ town because it’s all just—’

He stopped. His face was glistening with sweat. After a pause he sat back and wiped his face with the back of his left hand. I gave him what I hoped was an expression suggesting sympathy. The tension lessened.

Deliberately coarsening his voice, thickening a Maori accent, he turned and shouted across the dead roses at the statue: ‘Hey, chief! You an’ me, the big suckers, eh boy?’

The journey to Wellington would take two or three hours; we cleared up and prepared to leave. I threw the empty wine bottle into the rose garden. Apirana stared.

‘I do everything like they’re going to come back tomorrow,’ he said; ‘I thought, if I don’t it might muck things up. It’d mean I didn’t really believe that.’

I repressed the impulse to laugh. He was being faithful to a system that had cheated him, in the hope that his fidelity would somehow charm it back.

‘I told a lie back there,’ I said. ‘I only paid out cheques on the first day. I’ve stolen everything else.’ He gaped at me. ‘I thought, when they come back, they’ll understand, they’ll make allowances.’

‘For you, maybe,’ he replied flatly. I saw his meaning. I’d misjudged him. He laughed. ‘You look honest. Could’ve fooled me.’

‘Nobody did a very good job on me, either,’ I said. ‘I’ve no sense of duty at all.’

He grinned and picked up the bottle to carry it back to the land rover.

‘Hey. I might be your conscience,’ he said. Although jocular, this sounded just a little odd. I felt the need to dispel the sensation.

‘No, you’re too big.’

‘I’m not so big.’

‘You’re still too big.’

He hooted with laughter, which was not at all strange, because we were, after all, supposedly operating a series of jokes.

‘How about dark?’ he asked; ‘too dark, maybe?’

I could laugh at that, since the joke was really on him.

On the long drive south past vacant fields, through towns sucked dry of life, I had time to think about what his spasm of anger might mean. It had made him elusive, as though a solid core had spilled out like mercury, glittering, cold, poisonous, running into unreachable corners. It was now urgent that the city ahead should provide survivors, more people, or at least some answers to help.

We drove by the rim of the ocean past a Kapiti Island hovering in shades of transparent blue on the edge of the world. Everywhere seemed sealed in hot glass, held behind the window of an empty oven, and I could only watch it from a distance with the coldness of this new fear running inside me. I had to confront the possibility that Apirana, weapons instructor, with his submachine guns and assorted bayonets and skinning knives; that Apirana might not be completely sane.

I looked in the rear-view mirror at my reflection to gauge the extent to which this would affect my expression. And I thought: was he only joking when he said that I could have fooled him?

The white motorway ramps curved along the seafront like stone rivers lifted into the centre of the city. Thousands of houses lay against the hills locked and shuttered with the sun fixed on them. The harbour water was flat under the mass of heat and quiet. A death scent from decaying animal carcases hung over the docks. The inner streets were cemented in shade by tower blocks, banks, offices, every rack of windows reflecting empty sky or a waste of more blind windows. The stopped moment of 6.12 was undisturbed. We were at the end of our journey. We stopped. The silence absorbed our engines.

‘What’s this stuff?’ He prods at the dish with a fork.

‘Abalone.’

‘It’s not bad. I don’t go for that caviar.’

We dine in style in the candlelit dining room high up in one of the big new hotels towering above the Terrace.

The windows show a dead city in twilight, like an architect’s model sunk in deep water. Our candles are reflected in the windows. Only the small slits of glass at the top will open. When a slight movement of air stirs through them, the candle flames shudder and the dark patches on the walls of the dining room flutter like huge moths. But of course there are no insects any more.

The silence has been suffocating, and Apirana has set a battery tape recorder playing. Soft bossa-nova music is defeating the death-feeling, pounding it away discreetly. He talks about rigging up a generator in the basement of the hotel: he says he could get one from the hire pool or an army depot. I can tell he’s been thinking about his little rituals of honesty and the way I have flouted the conventions. But he doesn’t want to chase all the implications too far so he has given up making payments for what we need and begun to take whatever we want, leaving me to do the rest of the thinking and arrive at reassurances. He expects me to produce some answers; he assumes I will ‘work something out’. I wonder if this is how they have regarded us for the last two hundred years. And if I will know how to act my part.

His enthusiasms are all technological; he discusses the water supply, warning against drinking water without first boiling it, describing the purifying tablets they use in the army when on active service. He seems to want to keep talking.