Sole Survivor

He knew the moment would pass and begged God to let it pass quickly. But it would never pass completely. The shadow would remain, never entirely out of his mind, never far away, always poised to haunt and claim him whenever it chose. His burden, his guilt, his nemesis. A thunderous roar filled his ears, and the air around him pulsed and beat down on him in waves. He squeezed his eyes tightly closed. Archie was barking. Barking. Barking. Cautiously he opened his eyes, momentarily disoriented. He cowered down as the monster passed directly overhead. It took him a few moments to comprehend, to clear his mind and realize the enormity of the thing he had done.

“Nooooo … !”

He watched the lumbering seaplane swoop low overhead, knowing how the aircrew would be cursing him. He smashed his fist into the helm console. The Japanese had won again and it was all his fault. He watched the big Sunderland turn in a slow arc and pass once more over the Japanese longliner. It banked toward him no more than two or three hundred feet above the water so that he could clearly see the cameras mounted in the forward dome where the nose guns would normally be. It was also close enough for him to see the gloved fist shaking at him from the copilot’s window.

He collapsed backward onto his seat in despair. They’d set a trap for the Japs, and he’d sprung it prematurely. Dear God! His hands still shook from the attack he’d had, and he still felt light-headed. Dear God! Would there ever come a time when he was not at war with Japan? He spotted a buoy floating off to starboard, seized upon it as his salvation. There was work to be done and he needed it. Work was his sanctuary. So long as he could work he could keep control. There’d be time for recriminations later.

Red began the task of hauling in the miles of abandoned longlines. Without a winch to help him, the work was slow and back-breaking. He knew the lines would be heavy with snapper because he’d planned to fish there himself. He threw the dead and near-drowned fish into his fish boxes and set free all those he found that were still in reasonable condition. He could afford to release the live fish because he knew the proportion of dead ones would increase the farther he worked out from shore. The snappers’ air sacs would rupture in the haul up from the deeper water. The dead fish from the first line half filled his boat despite the fact that he’d thrown forty to fifty percent back. The efficiency of the Japanese fed his bitterness.

It took him all morning to retrieve the remaining lines, setting free the few survivors and throwing the remainder overboard for the sharks and stingrays, the octopi, crabs and the crayfish. The second line had filled his boat, but Red wanted the remaining lines out of the water where they could do no more harm. The slaughter and waste appalled him.

He regretted the fact that he hadn’t brought ice with him, because now he had no option but to motor straight around to the fish processing plant at Okupu. He couldn’t allow the fish he’d kept to add to the waste, but he was also concerned about Bernie. It would be evening by the time he got back, and the old man would have been on his own all day. Red wondered briefly if the Scotsman had thought to take Bernie something, then dismissed the thought. There was a better chance of the sun rising in the west and the Japanese fishermen becoming conservationists. He fired up his diesel and set off to Okupu, fish piled high in his boxes, keeping cool under soaking-wet sugar sacks. The longlines were piled high in the bow. Nothing was wasted. He wished he’d left Archie behind again to keep Bernie company.

“That you off Aiguilles this morning?”

Red looked up into the smiling face of Jack Lampton and discovered the bad news had preceded him.

“Whole island’s talking about you.”

Red threw him his bow line. The low tide meant that Red would have to manhandle the fish boxes high over his head to lay them on the jetty. Given the weight of them and the fact that his back hadn’t yet forgiven him for his earlier exertions, he knew it would be no easy task.

“Navy wants a word with you, too.”

“Give us a hand with these boxes.”

“Hang on. I’ll get you a cray tank. Off-load them into the tank and we’ll haul them up with the winch.” The fish factory wasn’t really set up for fish but for crayfish—the delicious red crays they sent to the mainland whole, and the giant packhorse crays, which they tailed first. But Jack had the means to help the snapper fishermen and make a few pounds for himself in the process, so he did. He was a young man in his early thirties, married with two small kids, and determined to make a go of the factory, even though everyone said it would fold soon enough, which is what usually happened to business ventures on the Barrier. He looked at the load of fish as Red transferred them into the steel cray tank. “You’ve been busy.”

“Japs have been busier. There were four dories, Jack, four lines apiece, and they were using those double-barbed hooks. They hardly ever missed. Snapper won’t stand a chance if they keep this up.”

“Bastards.”

“I freed the live ones and took all the dead fish I could, but I had to throw ten times as many away. Kingfish, kahawai, gurnard, trumpeter, trevally and blue cod as well as snapper. Would’ve given you a yell, but by the time you got there the sea lice and crabs would’ve ruined them. It’s just not right!”

“Bloody waste,” said Jack. “But you did what you could, that’s the main thing.” He could hear the tension rising in Red’s voice and knew it was time to hose him down. “You did good, Red, letting the live ones go. I’ll get you another tank and chuck this lot in the freezer till I get some ice.”

The two men worked diligently for half an hour, until the boat was unloaded. Then Jack reminded Red of his obligation.

“Are you going to call the navy?”

“Suppose.”

“Just get Kate on the exchange. She knows the number and name of the bloke you have to talk to.”

Red walked into the half-partitioned corner of the corrugated iron factory shed that constituted the office. He lifted off the handset and cranked the handle. He waited anxiously. Only four lines connected Great Barrier Island with the mainland, and there was usually a queue. For once Kate answered almost straight away.

“Yes, Jack.”

“It’s Red.”

“Hello, Red, have you got any pants on?”

“No.”

“Oooohhhh …”

“I have to call the navy, Kate.”

“All right … keep your hair on.” He heard Kate giggling. “Stay there, Red. I’ll call you back.”

Red hung up and stood by the phone. The mess on Jack’s desk distracted him, and he couldn’t help himself. He gathered the scraps of paper into a pile and weighted them down by putting Jack’s pad over them. The dregs in Jack’s coffee cup had evaporated, leaving a caked crust. He reached over to the washbasin in the corner, rinsed the cup, filled it and left it to stand in the bottom of the basin. He straightened the calendar, and crossed off the last two days of February, which Jack had omitted to do. The phone rang.

“Red here.” Red could feel a tingling grow in the pit of his stomach and his neck muscles tighten.

“Lieutenant Commander Michael Finn.”

Lieutenant commander. Red could feel his throat begin to tighten. “You want to speak to me, sir?”

“No, I bloody well want to kick your arse! What the hell did you think you were doing? Do you know how many strings we had to pull to set up that ambush? Do you know what it costs to get a bloody Sunderland airborne?”

“Please don’t shout.” Red lined up Jack’s ruler parallel to his pad.

“Jesus H. Christ!”

The fist in Red’s stomach tightened. His hand trembled. There were too many memories beating on the door inside his brain. Screaming officers, screaming guards, and a body that couldn’t obey. His voice shrank to a whisper. “Don’t shout. You don’t have to shout.” Perhaps some of his desperation reached down the line to the naval officer, because his attitude changed.

“Sorry. My turn to apologize. I guess we’re on the same side, Red, but we’ve got to find some means of keeping out of each other’s way.”

Red waited for the officer to continue. He laid Jack’s ballpoint pen and his pencil neatly alongside the ruler.

“What I mean is, we’ve got to work together, pool information. You with me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any chance you could come over to Devonport?”

“No.” Red gathered up Jack’s wayward paper clips and returned them to their home in a little plastic bowl.

“What if I sent a boat for you?”

“No. I have a boat.”

“Don’t like cities?”

“No.” Red closed his eyes. “I don’t like cities.”

To say Red didn’t like cities was colossal understatement. He couldn’t stand the cars, the noise, the crowds, the milling and disorderliness. He’d had to leave Auckland when he’d become too frightened to go outside his own front door.

“Do you want me to come to you?” The officer worked hard to keep the exasperation out of his voice and only partially succeeded.

“You coming alone?”

“Alone, but with a crew. If you want, they can stay aboard the patrol boat while I come ashore.”

“Okay.” Red was beginning to feel more confident. “I took their lines.”

“I guess that’s something. I’m sorry for shouting. Don’t feel too bad about this morning. You weren’t to know. But look, if we can get something worked out together, we could really nail the bastards next time. You’re in the ideal position to help us. Have you got a number I can ring you on?”

“No. Call Col at Port Fitzroy and leave a message. He’ll know what to do. Good-bye, Lieutenant Commander.”

Red hung up too quickly, before the officer had a chance to respond. He stood silently in the gloom of the shed while he gradually calmed down. He’d fulfilled his obligation. His duty was done. If the lieutenant commander needed to find him he knew where to look. More than anything Red just wanted the whole thing to blow over. Like the hermit he was, he just wanted to crawl back into his shell.

Red motored home as fast as he could and copped a soaking in the process. He grabbed a spray jacket from the storage locker and huddled in close to the console and splash guard. Archie had crawled up under the bow deck, safe from the flying spray and wind. The wind was the problem, working on his wet skin and chilling him to the bone. He knew he had no need to run so fast, knew he was also wasting diesel, but he had things on his mind. Unwelcome things. When he wasn’t worrying about Bernie, either the woman or the lieutenant commander would sneak into his thoughts, and he couldn’t find sufficient distraction. There was no place for either of them at Wreck Bay. He turned the corner around Needles Point and felt the wind and sea swing behind him. The temperature jumped ten degrees immediately, and his entourage of seagulls, blown from their station astern, wheeled indignantly as they tried to regain formation. They knew about the fish. Red had kept one box of snapper, which Jack had generously iced for him, and left nearly fifteen hundred pounds of fish behind to be sent to the co-op. Enough to pay his bills for months.

The calmer water gave Red the chance to work. He began gutting and filleting his fish, splitting the big fish up the back and saving them for smoking. The gulls feasted raucously on the guts but he kept the heads and frames to make stock and fish soup. Nothing was wasted, ever. He killed the motor as he reached Wreck Bay, and let the boat’s momentum carry him up to his mooring. He knew that he should make Bernie his first priority, but there was still work to be done and a logical order for doing it. His boat needed cleaning and there was no way he could leave it while one speck of fish blood or guts remained to harden in the sun and stain the paint. He scrubbed the decks and gunwales till they were spotless, dried them with cloths, then fastened the storm cover into place. The sun had dropped behind the ridge by the time he began the steep climb up through the bush to Bernie’s. When he reached the pohutukawas he automatically took the left fork, which would take him by the Scotsman’s cabin. Angus was waiting for him, a grim, brooding presence framed in the doorway.

“I saw you come in. What is it you want?”

Red glanced up at the veranda, the demarcation line beyond which he’d never set foot, not in the Scotsman’s time anyway. “I’ve brought you some fish.”

“Aye, I thought as much. It’s why I never went fishing myself.” Angus took the fish and watched as his faithless Bonnie smooched up to Red. “Is there something I can give you in return, some gherkins, perhaps?”

“No. I have to get on up the hill to see Bernie.”

“How is he, the old man?”

“Why didn’t you go up and see?”

“Don’t you lecture me! He’s entitled to his privacy as I am to mine.”

“He needs help,” Red shouted back in a flash of anger. “And he’s entitled to that!” He wasted his breath. Angus had gone indoors and slammed the screen door shut behind him. Red turned and made his way back down to the pohutukawas. The muscles in his back had stiffened in the cold of the return journey and ached under the load of fish and the steepness of the climb. He felt bad about leaving the old bloke on his own and worse for not leaving Archie. But he couldn’t go without Archie’s company two days in a row. Red put the fish box down where the track forked to Bernie’s and left Archie to mind it. He took a couple of medium-sized snapper fillets with him up the trail to the shack. He called out as he approached, but there was no answer. He pushed open the screen door.

“Bernie?”

Red felt his way in the darkness, found the matches on the table and lit the hurricane lamp. One of the jugs of sherry was missing off the table, so the old man had obviously got up at some time. Red wandered into the bedroom and found Bernie lying on his bed, dead to the world, the half-empty jug alongside amid gobs of toilet paper. Red knew he’d get no sense out of the old man that night, and that there was no point in cooking him a meal. He reached down to pull a sheet and blanket over him so that he wouldn’t get a chill in the night. His hand brushed Bernie’s cheek. It felt cold, unnaturally cold. He held the lamp closer to the old man’s face. His eyes were half open but they’d long given up seeing. Bernie had died alone, and there was nothing Red could do about it.

Red took the lamp back out into the main room and sat down at the table. He’d failed a dying man. He put his head in his hands and let his tiredness and dismay wash over him. Archie had to see Bernie, too, so that he’d understand. Red went to the door and whistled. The dog sensed what was afoot the second he stepped into the shack. Instead of trotting in to see Bernie, he stole in, nose quivering. He sniffed along the length of Bernie’s arm to confirm his suspicions and retreated to the door, pausing to look reproachfully at Red.

Red forced himself to his feet. He hadn’t wanted the responsibility of caring for Bernie but the responsibility had found him anyway. He opened Bernie’s cupboards and grabbed as many preserving jars as he could find, relics from the time Bernie bottled the fruit from his plum, peach and nectarine trees. He opened the freezer compartment in the top of Bernie’s fridge. It was filled with trays of ice kept for icing his catch. Bernie had never entirely discounted the possibility of taking his boat to the rise one final time. Red took the trays out and shook the cubes onto the bench. He filled as many jars as he could with ice and sealed them. He carried the jars into the bedroom and distributed them evenly around Bernie’s body. He pulled the blankets up over him to trap in the cold air, found two more in the wardrobe and tossed them over the bed as well. He tidied up the floor around the bed, put the top on the half-empty jug and put it away in a kitchen cupboard. He pulled the curtains closed. Bernie had liked to sleep late and had curtains to block out the morning sun. The curtains would help keep the shack cool. Red began to feel better. He’d done his duty. The bach was tidy and Bernie was taken care of. He half-filled a tin with chicken pellets and went out to round up the chooks. There was nothing else he needed to do. Once the chooks were safely in the henhouse he could go home and slip back into his routine. At least until morning. He picked up the two pieces of snapper and turned down the hurricane lamp.

Another day was drawing to a close, a day in which he’d had to confront Japanese poachers and the navy, a day in which Bernie had died and cleared the way for the woman to claim her inheritance. His world was changing, but at least he still survived.

Four

Rosie Trethewey was not happy. When she’d left for work that morning, summer had been in full cry. The sun had beaten down from a cloudless blue sky, and for once, though only briefly, she was glad the judge had taken away her driving license. But the walk up Shelley Beach Road to the bus stop had soon tested her antiperspirant and found it wanting. Her cotton dress had darkened beneath her arms and clung to her back. Then she’d cursed the judge and the smug policemen who’d picked on her and booked her for speeding. Even the judge had expressed surprise that her Volkswagen could go as fast as the police had claimed it had. But that was Rosie. She only had two speeds, flat out and stop.

The afternoon had brought clouds, low and threatening, and sent temperatures plummeting. She’d shivered in windowless offices while the air-conditioning thermostats struggled to figure out what was happening and failed. She’d spent the day talking to groups of women, trying to divine their innermost thoughts and attitudes toward toilet cleaners and bathroom disinfectants. Up until then Rosie had thought that skid marks were something immature men in fast cars left on roads. She’d learned differently and wished she hadn’t. But the job of a market researcher was to research markets, and there was a market for toilet cleaners, just as there was for most other things. She had no control over what products she was given to investigate. Nevertheless, it had been an unedifying day and was no way to spend a life.

“You’ll have to find something else to do,” Norma insisted whenever she moaned about it. Norma was her friend and meant well but, Christ on a motorbike, what was there left for her to do?

The rain had held off until the bus deposited her at the top of Shelley Beach Road, then the heavens had opened. Typical. The only certain thing about the weather in Auckland was that it would change. Rosie began to run but quickly realized the futility of it. She was going to get soaked no matter what she did. She walked head-on into the wind and driving rain as it howled in off the harbor. The thin cotton stuck fast to her body like a second layer of skin, defining her figure in intimate detail. Rosie didn’t care a damn. There was no one dumb enough to be out in the rain to see her, and even if there had been, she was in no mood to care. She was more concerned with the cold and her hates. Walking briskly helped fend off the chill from the wet and wind, but there was nothing she could do about her hates. She hated the judge who wouldn’t let her drive her car, and she hated the police. It was their fault she was cold and wet. She hated buses. She hated her job. She hated her flat. She hated her father, her ex-husband, stupid women who had nothing better to do than waffle on endlessly about toilet cleaners and skid marks as if they were making some worthwhile contribution to the sum total of human knowledge, and she hated dresses that rode up and bunched at the crotch.

“You waste too much energy on negative thoughts,” Norma kept telling her, but Norma was younger, better looking and had a boyfriend who was loaded. It was easy for Norma to give advice. Nature had given her everything except depth.

Her flatmate hadn’t closed their letterbox properly the day before, and all the mail was saturated. She cursed the office wally who told her to keep the windows of her VW open a half inch to let air circulate. Now rain circulated. Too bad. She stepped off the driveway onto the path that wound through the overgrown garden to the once-grand two-story home that had been converted to flats. Leaves tipped water over her as she brushed past unpruned bushes. The downspouts were blocked, causing the gutters to overflow and a sheet of water to cascade off the roof right in front of the steps leading to the front door. She groaned aloud. There was the whole front of the house, but of course the gutters had chosen to overflow by the front door. She’d complained to the landlord.

“Plumber’s coming to fix it next week,” she’d been told, but next week never arrived and neither did the plumber. She hated the landlord, cheap old bastard, and she hated the real estate agent who’d signed her up to a two-year lease. She opened the door to her flat and paused, wondering how to circumnavigate her beloved kelim rugs that lay scattered across the dark-stained timber floors. Then she thought of her flatmate, who’d simply barge in regardless, and gave up. She’d long given up protecting her things against flatmates and considered herself lucky if nothing was stolen when they moved out.

She closed the door behind her, switched on the light because the flat was gloomy even on a bright day, and began to strip off her wet clothes. She thought of leaving them in puddles on the floor as her flatmate would, but thought better of it. It was smarter to leave one big puddle to wipe up than half a dozen smaller ones. She slipped out of her clothes. Wet, cold and naked, she didn’t feel a bit beautiful, but she had the sort of figure that turned men on, particularly the one watching from the window of the house next door. She groaned at the indignity, gathered up her bundle of wet clothes and strode into the bathroom. She didn’t even bother giving her voyeuristic neighbor the finger as she normally did. It bothered her that the man never seemed to blink.

One good thing about the flat was that they never ran out of hot water, not even when her flatmate took his usual half-hour shower. She always flatted with men and still harbored the hope that one day she’d find one who was clever with his hands. In a practical way. But she was always the one who had to change washers on leaky taps, hang curtains and fix doorknobs. Yet the men were better than the women she’d shared flats with in her younger days, who spent forever putting on makeup and no time at all doing housework. She’d begun to relax and let the steaming bathwater do its soothing work when she noticed her towel missing. How many times had she warned her flatmate not to use her towel? But he had. Again. And once again he’d left her towel in his bedroom. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. Perhaps the bastard was working in partnership with the voyeur next door, because she’d have to run the gauntlet once more. Had she left the light on? Of course she had. She hated her flatmate. He had to go. Enough was enough. She lay back in the bath and tried to relax. Perhaps the bloke next door had finally gone blind through self-abuse. That was a thought that comforted her and brought a glimmer of a smile, but only briefly. There was no escaping the reality. She was thirty-four years old, trapped in a grubby bathroom in a grubby flat by a grubby little man next door. What, she wondered, was she doing with her life? The sound of a key turning in the lock on the front door dragged her away from her reveries. Her flatmate had come home.

“Hi!”

She heard him call out and drop his valise. She’d grown tired of telling him to put the bloody thing away, so now it lived just inside the front door. She heard a clump, a step, another clump. He was taking off his shoes. He’d be halfway across the kelims, probably dumping his shoes on her indigo blue Kazak, which he thought didn’t show the dirt.

“Where are you?”

“In the bath, you bastard, waiting for you to come home and replace the towel you nicked this morning.”

“Sorry. Just get out of these things.” She heard his belt buckle scrape on the polished floor. Trousers down. His bedroom-door handle rattled. Coat hung. “Shit!” Slipped taking off socks. It was all so familiar and predictable they might as well have been married instead of just flatmates. Rosie never slept with flatmates, because that created too many complications; she preferred to think of them as no more than rent-sharers. She heard him open her bedroom door, open a cupboard and close it.