Derek Hansen - Sole Survivor

Col was waiting for him on the wharf and tied off his painter. Red handed back the borrowed jacket, trousers, tie and shoes and accepted two four-gallon tins of diesel in exchange, which Col had filled and ready.

“How’d it go?” asked Col.

“As Bernie wanted.”

“Think I’d rather be planted myself.”

“What difference does it make?”

“My way, the worms get a feed. Oh hell. I forgot. There’s a letter for you up at the shop. Help yourself. I’ll go fetch it.”

A letter. Red couldn’t remember when anybody had last sent him a letter. His spirits sank. There’d been a time when letters promised hope, life and an afterward. It hadn’t even mattered if the letter had been written to someone else. News from home had been proof that the rest of the world still existed, still cared. But letters had since come to mean something else, and he didn’t relish receiving them. Red had no reason to expect this letter to be any more welcome. Maybe some government department wanted to move him off his land. After all, there’d been talk of turning the north end of the island into a reserve. He sought diversion in work, but the fuel poured too slowly into his tank, and all that was required was patience. Why couldn’t the world leave him alone? Archie sensed his distress and nuzzled up close.

Col returned and handed him the letter. Red examined it cautiously and distastefully, as if it might explode. The envelope was white and his name and address typewritten. The name of a market research company was printed in orange on the back. He didn’t even know what a market research company was. It made no sense to him.

But it would soon enough.

Six

A ngus McLeod was as happy as he’d ever been. He stirred and thought briefly about pulling his bedcovers up over his head to try to block out Bonnie’s insistent meowing. It was time for breakfast and both of them knew it. The first rays of the morning sun had pierced his window and lit upon his bed, warming and seductively indolent. He had no reason to rise other than his ingrained sense of discipline, but that was reason enough. Angus was one of those dour Scots to whom happiness always carried with it a suspicion of sin and was never acknowledged without due caution.

He followed Bonnie to the door of his refrigerator. The shiny new Kelvinator was one of two additions to a rather primitive kitchen. The other was a new Stanley woodstove imported from Ireland. Only the Kelvinator looked out of place, a proud and incongruous acknowledgment of progress alongside a chipped enamel sink with two brass taps, a kauri countertop, table and chairs.

“Here you go, you spoiled thing,” he said as he gave Bonnie a saucer of fish pieces. “Look at you now, fatter than butter, like a sheep with the bloat.” He slipped a couple of pieces of hakea into the Stanley’s firebox and opened the flue to boost the flame. With nothing to do but wait until the hob had heated sufficiently to boil water for his tea and fry his fish, he strolled out onto his veranda to greet the day. Like so many of his countrymen, Angus had left home with the solemn hope of re-creating it in some other part of the world. It wasn’t until he retired from the New Zealand police force five years earlier at the age of sixty that he finally realized his objective. He gazed over a landscape that was as wild, rugged and inhospitable as his birthplace on the slopes of Mount Conneville on Scotland’s far northwest coast. Of course his bach was a castle compared to the crofter’s hut that had been his home, with its thatched roof, cold stone walls and pounded-dirt floor. And the vegetation bore no resemblance other than that it clung to the poor soil in equal desperation. But he’d found heather upon the slopes, not the true heather of Scotland but a species he’d grown up calling ling. Still, it was heather enough for him to collect and dry and hang in bundles from the kitchen’s exposed beams. It helped make him feel at home.

Angus took advantage of the morning sun to eat his breakfast out on his veranda, where he could look down over the treetops to his boat moored in the bay below. Now that he was up, he was anxious to get to work. Angus had two secrets. The first was that he wrote children’s books. He did his best to conceal the fact because he didn’t think it was a fitting occupation for a retired police officer. It concerned him that others might interpret it as weakness or a softening on his part, and he couldn’t allow that. Nevertheless, his writing gave him great pleasure and satisfaction. If he’d had a chat with Rosie’s father, the psychiatrist would probably have concluded that Angus was compensating for the childhood he’d never had.

He noticed Red’s boat back was on its mooring when a wind shift brought it into view. So the madman had returned. A few years earlier he would have arrested him for indecent exposure or for causing a public nuisance and had him locked away in the Carrington Road mental institution. He didn’t doubt that Red meant well, but equally it was clear all was not as it should be inside his head. Insanity troubled Angus, it was something beyond his ken. He was just about to sit down at his typewriter and return to the story of the boy who tamed the fierce griffin and saved his village, when movement caught his eye. It was the madman and his dog, coming up the trail toward his house. He looked for Bonnie, thinking he could throw her inside before they arrived, but she had also spotted the visitors and run along the veranda rail to greet them. He felt a surge of anger build up as he waited for Red to appear through the tea-tree arch that marked the head of the trail.

“What is it you want this time?” he snapped. “Can you not leave me alone for five minutes?” His eyebrows bristled and his face flushed with indignation.

“We need to talk,” said Red.

“We need do no such thing! Away with you, now. Stop pestering me!”

“Angus, we need to talk.” Red had learned to be patient with the belligerent old Scot, but controlling his temper had not come easy. There’d been a time when his temper had cost him his freedom, when he’d exploded for no reason and could do nothing to control it.

“If it’s about the old man, I’ve nothing more to add.”

“How can you add to nothing?” Red’s hands began to shake.

“Don’t you play smart with me! I contributed to his funeral.”

“You should have contributed to his life.” Red felt his patience slip and his anger flare. He didn’t want to talk about Bernie, but now that Angus had raised the subject there were things that had to be said. Responsibilities that had to be faced. “You had a duty to attend his funeral.”

“I don’t attend funerals.”

“He was your comrade.”

“He was no comrade of mine. He was my neighbor; an acquaintance and distant at that!”

“No!” Red began to shout back, his voice growing shrill. “He was your neighbor and your comrade. He would have stood by you if you’d needed help. Bernie would never have turned his back on you like you did on him. You had an obligation.”

“I have obligations to no man. I did not want him as my friend. I did not want him as my neighbor. I don’t want you as my neighbor and I certainly don’t want you as my friend.” Years as police spokesman had taught Angus how to use words to maximum effect, and his precise Highland accent turned them into bullets. He watched them strike home with satisfaction.

“Like it or not, we’re neighbors, and neighbors carry obligations.” Red stuck doggedly to the beliefs that had been shaped in Burma and had enabled men to survive.

“I don’t want neighbors. Can’t you get that through your thick skull? I don’t need you. Now, would you kindly get off my land and take that mangy animal with you.”