Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

I lift the bottle of French champagne, and pour some more.

‘I’ll stay off water altogether,’ I say.

‘Yeah. Good idea.’ He accepts, and drinks. The crystal glasses sparkle in the candlelight. ‘Good stuff, eh?’

‘It ought to be.’

‘Like you say, they’ll make allowances.’ He laughs and belches. ‘Uh. I’m lowering the tone of the place.’

We look out at the city. A brief foraging session in one or two shops has opened up the prospect of vast resources of loot. I’m amazed at our restraint. I suppose the barriers will break down fairly quickly.

Api gets up and ambles to the window, holding his glass. He touches the fawn-coloured curtains.

‘Velvet.’ A pause. ‘How the other half live.’ He stares out. ‘I once came here with a girl, a couple of years ago. To Wellington, I mean, not to this place. Couldn’t afford this. Stayed in some dump, somewhere. Not much doing, Sunday evening. Just like now, except the street lights were on. It could be Sunday with a power cut, out there.’ He gives a quick snort of a laugh. ‘What a dump. Eh? Look at it.’

‘It’s not much,’ I agree.

‘When we got here today…I thought there’d be something , though. Didn’t you?’

He turns to me. I can see my reflection sitting at the table, my face whitened by the light collected by the starched tablecloth, the gleams of highlights from glasses, bottles and silver cutlery glittering steadily. I look confident.

‘There was nobody in Auckland,’ I reply. ‘I didn’t expect Parliament would be in session or anything like that.’

‘Well…I was just thinking…there are some bastards, I wouldn’t mind if they never come back.’ He becomes pensive, swirls the champagne in his glass, then drinks it all and puts the glass down. ‘That’s wrong, though. I know that.’

‘What sort of feeling does this place give you?’ I ask cautiously. ‘You said at Turangi, you could sense something just out of sight. Here?’

‘It’s different here. I can still feel it. But it’s as though there’s a reason for us being here; like, an event’s going to happen, and it’ll be in Wellington, and we had to come here. Don’t you feel that?’

‘No. Perhaps you can pick up vibrations I don’t get.’

‘Like a Geiger counter, and radioactivity?’

‘Maybe.’

He paces around on the soft carpet, hands in pockets. ‘Funny, eh; I never had much idea about the future. I used to try and look forward and work out what the hell I was going to be doing, where I was heading, my life, and all that, you know. I’d think: What’s going to happen to me? To become of me? You know? And…it was just a blank.’

‘This event… or whatever you can sense, here; is it, I mean, can you tell if it’s good, or bad, or what?’

He stops and glances at me, or rather, not at me, in a very Polynesian way, his eyes fixing for a moment away from mine, at a point to the left of me, and then he turns and goes back to the window. I have a feeling that the worst the world could do to these people would be met in the end by much the same expression, a pained resignation with almost no trace of surprise in it, equally appropriate for thousands of trivial annoyances, flat beer, rainy days, a missed bus, the tantrum of a child, a debt collector’s letter. At school we had once been made to learn a poem which described a remote island, and the phrase used for the people on this island had stayed in my mind when all the other memories had faded or become irrelevant; ‘mild-eyed melancholy’. I think the island was supposed to be enchanted, or the inhabitants drugged; their lives had no purpose, they did nothing except face the world with this expression.

Perhaps he feels the pause has taken on too much weight. He says, ‘One thing I do know. I’d like a really good cup of tea, with real milk. Not that powdered stuff. Don’t you miss real milk?’

I deliberately give him a silence in return. He sighs and wanders to the other end of the room, lifting the cover from the grand piano lurking in the corner.

‘Twenty million cows are missing,’ he shouts across the distance; ‘they haven’t milked for a week. What are you going to do about it?’

I begin to formulate a sarcastic answer, but he sits at the piano and starts to play, and to sing purposely off-key.

The moon has, in fact, edged into the sky over the harbour, embalming the powerless buildings and streets in a formaldehyde white. The shadows are utterly black. Stars are flickering morse dots a long way off.

He stops playing. Then shouts: ‘You ever go overseas?’

‘To Sydney, once. To a conference.’

‘We were in Singapore. Last year. Great place.’

He comes back and sits by the table again.

‘Know anything about ships? Sailing?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Well we’re stuck here, aren’t we? I’m bloody useless with boats. We can’t even get to the South Island.’

‘You expect to find more people?’

‘Bound to be.’

‘There might be one other person in New Zealand. The survival rate must be about one in a million.’

‘Survival?’

‘Non-disappearance, then.’

‘We could have missed people. You’d have driven past Waiouru, I might have missed you by ten minutes. There could be people out there in the bush, could be months before they even know anything’s wrong. Deerstalkers. Anybody.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘One in a million, that’d still be a hell of a lot in Singapore.’

‘What would you do if we got to Singapore and there were a dozen Chinese or Malays or whoever they are? What’s the point?’

‘The point is—’

‘What would you do? Sing “Moon River”?’

He bangs the table, his eyes glittering, lips tight.

‘Well what’re you going to do? Eh? What if there’s an accident? If one of us gets sick? Then what? You get appendicitis, or something. You want me to cut you open, eh?’

A coldness goes through me, as though my stomach and intestines are actually being exposed to the air at that moment. The tension has squeezed this psychotic idea from inside his mind. He spreads his big hands down on the white tablecloth and looks down at them. Then he says, more quietly, ‘We stand a better chance if there’s more people. We don’t know how long it’ll go on, do we? What about women? I mean, there might be…there’s no reason why…’ His head sags and shakes. ‘Oh, hell, I don’t know.’ Then, silence, perhaps memories of barrack-room Malaysian prostitutes.

‘If we start panicking, we’ve had it,’ I say, as evenly as possible. ‘We’ve got to think logically. Right?’ He nods. I take a deep breath. ‘Look. Today we’ve driven for about two hundred and fifty kilometres. What did you notice about your windscreen?’

‘Notice? Why?’ He looks up.

‘Not a single insect. No flies. Mosquitoes. Moths.’ I waved my hand at the open windows. ‘After a week, not one.’

‘So what?’

‘We used fruit flies in our research. In genetics you need something which breeds fast. There used to be billions of insects. There should have been thousands of survivors. Flies have a two-day breeding cycle; they’d lay millions of eggs. They’d breed like mad, and there are no natural predators to keep them down. But we haven’t seen a single one of any species.’

‘They all disappeared, then.’

‘There are two other possibilities. Think about it.’

He stares at me with a frown, a long, slow minute.