Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

‘Have you killed people?’ I ask, as evenly as possible, as if it’s a very everyday question.

‘Have you?’ he replies.

There is a pause. The silence is so enormous that the ticking of the car clock and our watches expands into the emptiness like the rattling of frantic insects locked in hollow metal boxes. We hold our breath.

‘Who’d ever admit it?’ he says. ‘Anyway, what’s it mean? You blokes sit in your offices or laboratories or wherever, and you make the new weapon, you test it on animals, kill a few hundred rats and monkeys; and then you give the weapon to us, and you say, go on, use it. So who does the killing? Me or you?’

‘I’ve told you about my job. I didn’t do any weapons research.’

‘I bet you killed a few animals.’

‘Well, in the course of—’

‘Yeh, yeh, I know.’

‘I don’t see what you’re getting at.’

‘Where you draw the line, man, that’s what. Was it okay, when you did the experiments and killed them, you know, was your mind okay about it?’

The white bone of my knuckles shows through the skin and cable of veins standing out over the stretched tendons on the back of my hands. And yet I think he wants to be made to confess something himself, that this is all full of his own double meanings.

‘I didn’t like doing it,’ I say, ‘if that’s what you mean. But we thought some good would come of it.’ A pause. ‘I can’t see the point of all this now.’ He has withdrawn again, is staring into his thoughts. I decide to take a risk. ‘Have you got your mind right about whatever you did?’

‘What?’ As if he hasn’t heard.

‘Do you have anything special you have to pray about?’

He shakes his head, not really in denial, more like the gesture of somebody avoiding an insect that might sting.

‘The way I see it,’ he says, ‘it’s like one bloke digging a hole and another one’s filling it in. I mean, if I believe, and you don’t believe, we just cancel each other out, eh?’

‘I don’t think it works like that.’

‘You don’t know how it works.’ He smiles wearily and waves his hand. ‘Drive somewhere. It’s hot.’

I start the car and drive along until we emerge near Parliament, the spaceship of the Beehive building coiled up against the sun. The conversation, or interrogation, has slid away deviously; I feel the danger of having wrenched hidden questions into the open and let them loose without getting answers.

‘Let’s go in and have a look,’ he says, indicating Parliament. So I drive into the grounds and stop by the front steps. Api gets out, lifting his Sten gun from the back seat. I take my shotgun and hold it in the crook of my arm as I lock the car doors.

‘Be careful with that thing,’ he mutters, as I turn; ‘hold it down.’ He shakes his head. ‘Why’d you lock the doors?’

‘You never know.’

‘If there’s anyone around, you’ll get a ticket, parked there.’

I unlock the car boot and take out a hammer and a tyre lever.

‘We’ll have to break in,’ I explain. We set off up the steps.

‘I’ve always thought about doing this,’ he says, and grins and points the Sten gun at the doors.

We are suddenly archaeologists breaking into the tombs of our own civilisation. A week, a thousand years. There are no cobwebs but the dust is already gathering. The insides of halls, corridors and rooms hold a concentrated faded smell, musty, an accumulation of hot afternoons. In the old building our noises are rustled and hollowed in stone spaces; we walk on marble, then squeaking polished lino. We cross to the Beehive. Tufted carpets muffle sounds. The sunlight rests everywhere in large blocks as if ordered in bulk, laid down, and forgotten. Space curves round uneasily, hiding more empty space.

For some reason we start to talk louder. The corridors of the central service and power core of the building are in the dark ages. Thick fire-stop doors close slowly behind us, squeezing every atom of light out. We grope back. Apirana wants to go down to the Civil Defence emergency operations room, which is apparently in the basement; but we will need a torch.

‘I’ll go back to the car,’ I say. ‘Stay here, so I know where you are.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going any -where.’ He puts his gun on a table and sits down. I walk away. Looking back through the glass panel of a door I see him place his elbows on the table and clasp his hands tightly together in front of his face. He leans his forehead down on his hands. I hurry through to the old building and out to the car, get the torch, and walk quickly back. He has taken a bottle of whisky from a bar and is pouring some into a glass.

‘On the house. Have one.’

‘I think I will.’

I get a glass and join him, leaning my shotgun against a chair.

‘Cheers.’

He drinks quickly and refills. We are both nervous. We sit with our backs to the window so we can keep the corners of our eyes on each side of the cineramic warp of the room. Although we know there is nothing there, round the curve.

Apirana rubs his hand over the tattoo on his left arm, a greenish-blue mark on smooth brown. It seems to represent a cross or a sword. The words LOVE and HATE intersect, blurred.

‘Neat, eh?’ he says, in a mockery of a thick Maori voice, the tone suggesting an odd ambivalence, a self-parody; ‘You know what a boob tat is?’

‘No. I’ve no idea.’

‘A tattoo done in jail. Or borstal. Or DC.’ He glances up. ‘Detention centre. Or remand home.’

I drink some more whisky. It burns inside my throat.

‘It was when I was a kid,’ he says; ‘nothing really. I got in with these kids a bit older than me. We stole a few cars, you know, messed around. Just bored, I mean, nothing bad. The cops fell on us like a ton of bricks.’ He pauses, rubbing his arm slowly, staring into the memory of what happened. ‘And we got done. In court, the whole thing. Sent me to a…lock-up for kids. A place of detention for juvenile offenders.’ His voice becomes formal, sarcastic. Then he looks at me. ‘You know what goes on in those places? Nobody does. You’d never know.’ He gives a sudden snort, like a laugh, cut off, covering his left arm with his right hand. ‘The warders were ex-cops, ex-drill sergeants, South Africans, Rhodesians. Full-time bastards. You face the wall. Stand to attention. They keep you there for hours. They put a pencil between the wall and your forehead. You got to hold it there. If it drops they punch you in the kidneys. You go down, they kick you. They know how to do it so it doesn’t show. That’s the welcome room. They make you strip. Shave all your hair off. Spray you with delousing powder. Shove you under an ice cold shower. Back to attention with the pencil till you dry off. Or fifty press-ups.’ He nods, staring into space. ‘They break kids pretty easy. I’ve seen them make kids go face down and lick their boots. I mean, really do it. Lick the mud off. Or dog shit. I’ve seen them do it.’

There is a long pause. Neither of us moves. Then he says, ‘But even after the welcome room…I knew they couldn’t break me.’ He stands up and walks away a few paces, his back to me. ‘Anyhow, I was broken.’ Then he walks off slowly, trailing his fingers on tabletops, wandering around the big curved room, in and out of the pieces of sunlight.

‘What happened?’ I say, finally. I feel sick. But I keep my hands anchored round my glass. He stands about five paces away, still rubbing his arm slowly.

‘I’m a bit of a fake, really,’ he says; ‘a phoney, you know; all that stuff about tangata whenua , I can say that, but…you know what broke me? When I got through the welcome room at that place, got locked up with the other kids…well…most of them were Maori. And they had a few who kind of ran the place. At their level. They had their own welcome. The screws—I mean, the warders—they knew what went on. It went on all night.’ He paces up and down, looking at the carpet. ‘I knew nothing. Well, I thought I knew a bit. But nothing, really. I didn’t know people could… You wouldn’t believe it. My own people. What they did, and made me do. And they were Maori . That broke me. The screws, cops, South Africans, you expect them to be bastards. You could deal with that. But when your own people fuck you. And make you, make you—’