Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

He closes his eyes, stops; then, heaving his chest full of air, goes on in a rush. ‘And the other thing was, I mean, all the time I was in there, it wasn’t more than seventy miles from home, and they let you have visitors, once a month, and letters. My old man had a car. My brother had a motorbike, and he was working ten miles away. Okay, I knew they weren’t much at writing. But…all the time I was there…they never came to see me. Not once. Nobody. That, I mean, that…’

Swallowing hard, and pausing, for the first time he looks directly at me. ‘You know what? I thought, if I was dead , it’d be okay. They’d take a week off work, they’d go a hundred miles to a tangi , to your funeral. They’d make a real thing of it. But I was just alive. Too bad. What the hell. Who am I, anyhow? And I wanted to be dead, to force them to be there. My family.’ The tone of his voice changes, thickens to the recognisable parody of Maori speech. ‘Great bloody people, with the aroha , eh? Everyone says that. Must be true. Eh boy , you know that, eh?’

His eyes fill up and glisten. In the fury of the last sentence he leans towards me, contorted with the expression of the parody, his voice going hoarse. He straightens up, flicking his head sideways as if the stinging in his eyes is a nuisance he can shake off. His control reasserts itself. I sit hypnotised.

‘I thought maybe they never came to see me because I’d let them down. Disgraced them. I hadn’t done anything very bad. And they didn’t ever care much about the law, the cops, the court, that was all pakeha shit. But I thought, maybe that’s it. I could have understood that. Then. Then I got out. I went home. And life was going on. Oh, they said, you’re back. You know, like that. Oh, you’re back. Get the spare mattress out. We’re off down to the pub. Get some chips, eh, here’s five bucks, see to the kids, will you? And that was it. They said, hey, and next time, don’t get caught, boy. Happy people. I hadn’t got them down, at all. They’d really taken it in their stride. Hardly noticed. Was that good? You think I should’ve understood? Don’t you reckon, after everything I’d been through, I should have known better? I was still very stupid.’

He comes back, sits down, rubs his hand over his face briefly.

‘My mind was full of strange ideas, considering.’

The impulse, which seems to be outside my own power, to move my hand across the table in some gesture of understanding weakens halfway. I prevent complete surrender to it, but it’s there, and he notices.

‘And back at Turangi,’ he mutters, ‘when you said you didn’t have any family, there I was, acting the Maori, “What, nobody?”, like that was the weirdest thing. Jesus.’

‘But you went home. Last week. You went back.’

He nods, slumped in the chair.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Because…I didn’t know what else to do.

Or maybe I’m still a bit stupid. There must be something in me that’s not, I mean, that wasn’t completely’—and he appears to hover on the brink of the word ‘dead’, which I know is what he intended to say; instead he says, after a moment—‘rubbed out.’ And looks up. ‘You know? Still there.’

I nod. He seems a much weaker person now, more vulnerable. His voice carries on, his own line of thought imposed on mine. ‘Maybe it’s in everyone,’ he says; ‘somewhere. No matter what happens.’

He says this vaguely, its implications not fully considered. I don’t show what I think of it. If he had looked through a microscope at even the smallest bits of life he would know that the basic impulse is self-preservation. Everything else is decorative, spare-time indulgence. Or, as he should know, treachery, delusion. Yet I feel sympathy for him. It produces itself from this not wholly controllable source within my own experience, something I’ve set my face against. The movement of my hand across the table was almost as involuntary as the muscular reaction of the limb of a dead animal in dissection, causing the same moment of surprise. But it did have its reason. I can’t help it. Is that dangerous and treacherous for me? The feelings he described were the same as those which once nearly beat me down a long time ago; I see the process repeated and extended around another person with the force of a breaking wave, a great mass of social equipment, splintered emotions, broken words, panic, pain, all pounded together indiscriminately. And against what the rational part of my mind tells me, that people losing their balance will convulsively grab at each other, even clutch at strangers by instinct, there is the realisation that something mysterious has to be taken into account since our admission of those vague feelings of recognition between us. The idea that we are not in fact strangers to each other returns unnervingly. It is still inexplicable, beyond this.

With a great effort I stand and pick up the torch.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘come on, we have a lot to do.’

He makes a visible effort himself to concentrate on the immediate moment and push back the confusion the past has begun to loosen and unravel within him. We re-enter the compressed dark of the inner core of the building to find the stairwell, me leading the way with the small beam of light. My hand trembles and the light is unsteady. I am afraid of being trapped again. We go down, along curving corridors, through doors, round and down.

In the lower service areas the light reveals bunches of cables, pipes, wires, ducts, the dead tendrils of the building’s nervous system. Without power the place is worse than useless. Control panels show that even the curtains over the windows upstairs are electrically operated. The spaceship is as dead and inert as the pyramids.

And there, in the basement, we find the Civil Defence emergency room, a hollow at the centre of the web of dead circuits, its emptiness holding back the pressure of all the layered tons of concrete. There are telephones, maps, charts; no answers, no signs of surprise. The torch beam seems to dim, as if the darkness is heavy enough to eat away its energy.

‘There should be an emergency generator,’ he mutters, searching along the walls with the flat of his hands, like a half-blind archaeologist looking for carvings. I hold the light, silent, as he stumbles around. Then I say, ‘There’s nothing here.’ And again, ‘Api, there’s nothing here. The torch won’t last much longer. If we lose this, we’ll never find our way out.’

He stops. I hear him sigh.

‘Yeah. Okay.’

We trace our way out of the maze, coming up from the catacombs. In the stairwell we climb up flight after flight, making for the top floor. The air pressure lessens. Finally, breathless, we emerge into a hot corridor patched with sun from skylights. A lettered panel says Cabinet Room. The door is unlocked. We go in. A circular table is set beneath a central light well, a roundel of blue sky above. The polished wood gleams. There are soft-upholstered swivel chairs arranged neatly around the table, facing clean blotters and ashtrays. The same vacancy. Traces of dust. A wall clock, gold hands stopped at 6.12; brand name, Omega.

The climb up here has made me light-headed. Absurdities present themselves with no resistance. I look at the round table and think of the court of King Arthur. An enchanted castle. Well; they’re all as far gone as that, now. I draw out a chair and sit down, resting the torch and gun on a blotter. Api saunters to the other side of the table and does likewise. The sky is Camelot. Specks of dust float through the column of sun. We say nothing. We seem to be still on the spaceship, machinery silent, in planetary orbit, moving very slightly, the sun mark edging perceptibly across the circle of the table. I remember stories about space journeys which might last ten, twenty, or even hundreds of years. And here, a jumble of history below; the marble floors and Ionic columns, the fleur-de-lys carpets, Victorian ironwork, ageing photographs, bits of Maori carving, concrete air-raid shelters; it’s an ark of museum pieces. The end of history; futile junk. So much human effort gone for nothing, all the odysseys, armadas, crusades, cathedrals, epics, symphonies, all heading for 6.12 am last Saturday, a huge perspective with every line focused on a hole in space. Omega. Full stop. The enormity is meaningless. I can feel nothing about it.