Eleanor Catton - The Luminaries

But the digger had a cowardly temperament; he did not voice these opinions aloud. ‘Wouldn’t want to say,’ he said at last, but he still looked surly.

‘Well, we’ll ask her, when she comes around.’

‘Frank Carver speaks Chinese ?’ one of the others said, in a voice of incredulity.

‘He goes back and forth from Canton, does he not?’

‘Born in Hong Kong.’

‘Yes, but to speak the language—as they do!’

‘Makes you think different of the man.’

At this point the digger who had been discharged to the kitchen returned with a glass of water, and threw it across Lydia’s face. Gasping, she revived. The men crowded closer, asking in an anxious chorus after her health and safety, so that it was some moments before the widow had a chance to respond. Lydia Wells looked from face to face in some confusion; after a moment, she even managed a weak laugh. But her laughter was without its usual surety, and as she accepted a glass of Andalusian brandy from the man at her elbow her hand visibly trembled.

She drank, and in the moments that followed, all manner of questions were put to her—what had she seen? What could she remember? Whom had she channelled? Had she made any contact with Emery Staines?

Her answers were disappointing. She could remember nothing at all from the point she fell into her trance—which was unusual, she said, for usually she could recall her ‘visions’ very well indeed. The men prompted her, but without success; she simply could not remember anything at all. When it was revealed to her that she had spoken in a foreign tongue, quite fluently and for some time, she looked genuinely puzzled.

‘But I don’t know a word of Chinese,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? And the johnnies confirmed it? Real Chinese? You’re really sure?’

This was confirmed, with much perplexity and excitement.

‘And what is all this mess?’ She gestured weakly at the scorched table and the remains of the fire.

‘The lamp just fell,’ said one of the diggers. ‘It just fell, of its own accord.’

‘It did more than fall: it levitated !’

Lydia looked at the paraffin lamp a moment, and then seemed to rouse herself. ‘ Well !’ She raised herself a little higher on the sofa. ‘So I channelled the ghost of a Chinaman!’

‘Interference wasn’t what I paid for,’ the stubborn digger said.

‘No,’ said Lydia Wells, soothingly, ‘no—of course it wasn’t. Of course we must refund the cost of all your tickets … but tell me: what were the very words I spoke?’

‘Something to do with a murder,’ said Frost, who was still watching her very closely. ‘Something to do with revenge.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mrs. Wells. She seemed impressed.

‘Ah Sook said it had something to do with Francis Carver,’ said Frost.

Mrs. Wells went pale; she started forward. ‘What were the very words—the exact words?’

The diggers looked around them, but perceived only Ah Quee, who returned their gaze stonily, and did not speak.

‘He doesn’t have English.’

‘Where’s the other one?’

‘Where did he go?’

Ah Sook had extracted himself from the group some minutes before, padding from the room and into the foyer so quietly that nobody had noticed his departure. The revelation that Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika—that he had been in Hokitika for three weeks —had caused a flood of private emotion in his breast, and he desired, all of a sudden, to be alone.

He leaned against the rail of the porch and looked out, down the long arm of Revell-street, towards the quay. The long row of hanging lanterns formed a doubled seam of light that came together, in a haze of yellow, some two hundred yards to the south; their brightness was so intense that upon the camber of the street it might have been high noon, and the shadows of the alleys were made all the blacker, by contrast. A pair of drunks staggered past him, clutching one another around the waist. A whore passed in the other direction, her skirts gathered high above her knees. She looked at him curiously, and Ah Sook, after a moment of blankness, remembered that his face was still heavily painted, the corners of his eyes lengthened with kohl, his cheeks rounded with white. She called out to him, but he shook his head, and she walked on. From somewhere nearby there came a sudden roar of laughter and applause.

Ah Sook sucked his lips between his teeth. So Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika once again. He surely was not aware that his old associate was living in a hut at Kaniere, less than five miles away! Carver was not a man to bear a risk if he could remove the threat of that risk altogether. In that case, Ah Sook thought, perhaps he, Ah Sook, had the advantage. He sucked again at his teeth, and then, after a moment, shook his head: no. Lydia Wells had recognised him that morning. She would surely have relayed the news to Carver at once.

Inside, the conversation had returned to the subject of the paraffin lamp—a trick that Ah Sook had already dismissed out of hand. Lydia Wells had merely slipped a loop of thread over the knob of the lamp, at the moment she doused it. The thread was the same colour as her dress, and the other end of it was affixed to the inside of her wrist. One sharp twitch of her right hand, and the lamp would fall over the candles. The small table upon which the candles were burning had been coated with paraffin oil, which had the virtues of being both odourless and colourless, such that, to an outsider, the table might have seemed merely clean; at first contact with a naked flame, however, the surface of the table was sure to ignite. It was all a charade, a sham. Mrs. Wells had not made any kind of communion with the realm of the dead, and the words that she had spoken were not the words of a dead man. Ah Sook knew this because the words were his own.

The whore had lingered in the thoroughfare; she now called out to the men on the veranda opposite, and lifted the flounces of her skirt a little higher. The men called back in response, and one leaped up to caper. Ah Sook watched them with a distant expression. He marvelled at the strange power of feminine hysteria—that Lydia Wells might have remembered his very words, perfectly, over all these years. She did not speak Cantonese. However could she have recalled his speech, and his intonation, so exactly? That was uncanny, Ah Sook thought. For he might have taken her, by her ‘visitation’, for a true native of Canton.

In the street the men were pooling their shillings, while the streetwalker stood by. There came a whistle-blast from near the quays, and then a shout of warning from the duty sergeant, and then running footsteps, approaching. Ah Sook watched the men scatter and formed his resolution in his mind.

He would return to Kaniere that very evening, clear all his belongings from his cottage, and make for the hills. There he would apply himself wholly to the task of turning the ground. He would save every flake of dust he came upon, and live as simply as he was able, until he had amassed a total of five ounces. He would not take opium until he held five ounces in his hand; he would not drink; he would not gamble; he would eat only the cheapest and plainest of foods. But the very moment that he reached this target he would return to Hokitika. He would change the metal at the Grey and Buller Bank. He would walk across the thoroughfare to Tiegreen’s Hardware and Supply. He would lay his paper note upon the countertop. He would purchase a store of shot, a tin of black powder, and a gun. Then he would walk to the Palace Hotel, climb the stairs, open Carver’s door, and take his life. And after that? Ah Sook exhaled again. After that, nothing. After that his life would come full circle, and he could rest, at last.