Somebody Loves Us All (29 page)

‘Anyway, the third morning we got going very early and made great progress. We biked seriously, hardly talking the whole time. There was no bitterness or bad feeling at all. We knew we had to rely on each other. It was as if we’d used up all our emotions the previous day, and we pushed on automatically and very efficiently. And maybe for that reason, I have no memory of where we stayed the next night or what we did there. General tiredness might be the cover-all phrase, and a sense of satisfaction, we were really doing it!

‘One of the days, however, we didn’t go anywhere. Because I’d stupidly taken off my tennis shoes and put on sandals to ride in the heat. Guess what? I woke up with the tops of my feet badly sunburnt. I remember the tent then, lying in agony by myself. I think your mother had gone off in a huff. She came back later on and she rubbed cooling cream onto my feet, which was lovely.

‘I’m sorry, Paddy, if this is all going too slowly. It probably seems to you as if you’ve been asked to experience our epic journey in real time. I’ll try to speed it up. I’ve never told this story out loud though I’ve said it to myself many many times over the years and things can go faster in one’s head.

‘You’ve heard about Bulls. Let’s move on.

‘We arrived at Waiouru hopelessly under-dressed. I don’t think either of us knew what the Desert Road was. Perhaps we
knew about the mountains but even there I’m not sure. In winter, snow sometimes shut the road, we knew that in an abstract way but we would never have asked ourselves why this road and not others? It was just something odd that people mentioned happening somewhere else. Could we have been so lacking in curiosity? I fear yes.

‘Actually I was terrified and trying not to show it. At the tearooms there was a strange feeling suddenly. There was a table of young soldiers who kept looking at us, and there were truck drivers. We had no idea what the army was doing here. The presence of the soldiers certainly didn’t help our nerves. They were eating raspberry buns that left cream all over their faces and they were drinking milkshakes. Not much older than boys, about our age, but dressed in uniforms. It was all strange. We sensed that we’d come to a kind of portal. That’s the only way I can describe it. A place where you
go through
. That was the talk. We overheard things at the other tables, talk of slips, and corners, accidents. I mean, it wasn’t intimidating talk, it was just how people thought of that stretch. Is it still the case? Not sure. But we knew we’d come to somewhere important. We felt very girlish in those tearooms, in the middle of a male world so different from our fathers’ world—my father was an accountant—and the mountains loomed, it’s the only word I can think of.

‘There was a chill in the air that took us by surprise. It went straight through our thin summer shirts. Even inside the tearooms we couldn’t escape it. It was as if we’d biked into another month altogether when of course all we’d done was ascend to the volcanic plateau. That phrase itself—“volcanic plateau”—would have been meaningless to us before this moment. We put on jerseys but they were lightweight summer ones. I remember Teresa slipping her jersey over her bare knees and hugging herself under the table. I told her she’d stretch her jersey and she said she didn’t care, better than freeze. But she stopped doing it and smiled at me. “Let’s go then,” she said, and she stood up and clapped her hands. I was so grateful to
her, so impressed and buoyed up by that clap! It was all an act but it was a good act. People turned to look at us. The soldiers stared, a couple of them were grinning. One gave a clap just like Teresa’s but we pretended not to notice or care. We wheeled our bikes out of sight of the tearoom. Didn’t want them to see us getting on our bikes. We walked a bit down the road, wheeling them, then took off as if nothing mattered.

‘I was biking at first with my breath held, if that’s possible. Teresa was out in front and I had no idea how she was feeling but immediately I was getting very tired. I had so little energy, despite having just eaten at the tearooms. It was because I wasn’t getting enough oxygen and even though intellectually I knew this, I didn’t seem able to adjust. My heart was racing and my breaths were like hiccups.

‘I remember a terrific wind had come up and it was buffeting us from the side. I knew that if I tried to shout out to Teresa she wouldn’t be able to hear me. She was further ahead of me now, perhaps fifty yards or so. I saw a sign by the side of the road warning about army testing. We had to stick to the road, to leave it would be a “grave risk to civilian safety”. I thought of the soldiers back at the tearooms, eating their raspberry cream buns. We didn’t even know how long the Desert Road was and how long it would take us to get to the first town on the other side and now we wouldn’t be able to get off our bikes and rest because of the army testing.

‘As you know, it’s the landscape which gives the road its name. It’s not a desert as such but it chimes with something in our imaginations connected to the word. Inhospitable would be part of it. A duney place, isn’t it, but without any hint of the beach. Pumice, scorched rock, scrubby plants, and running alongside us, telegraph poles. I’ve travelled a bit and I’ve never found a counterpart for that geography, have you? If the rest of the country is all done and made, more or less finished, completed, beautiful in many instances, this is the place left over, exhausted from all that making, ground zero if you like. Or the geologists might just say, typically volcanic.’

Paddy thought of his volcano dream.

‘With a great conscious effort I slowed down, concentrating not on keeping up with your mother but just getting my breathing right. I couldn’t see her now since she’d gone around a bend.

‘I don’t remember much traffic on the road. This only contributed to my idea of the strangeness of the place. No one much came here, as if they knew its dangers, its graveness. I know this sounds melodramatic, Paddy. It was after all the main highway of the entire country! Still I must be accurate to how it felt then, to a young girl out on her own for the first time. It was like biking on the moon. Perhaps that family in Bulls hadn’t been so silly after all.

‘Gradually I calmed down and it became easier to maintain my speed, though the wind was getting worse. I still rode anxiously. Had your mother not been out in front, I might have turned back to Waiouru. It was already late in the afternoon. We’d never reach the lake by dinnertime. It was another thing my father had told us, “Stay at the lake. Don’t stop at Turangi. Push on to Taupo and stay at the lake.” All of his easy-sounding instructions now seemed to me very hateful and cruel. I regarded him as highly irresponsible for letting us go on the trip.

‘From nowhere, an army truck went roaring past me. It blew its horn. My bike wobbled in the wake of the truck. I caught the voices of the soldiers shouting something at me. They were sitting in the back of the truck, which had canvas sides, looking at me, shrieking and pointing. Then they were gone. I was close to tears.

‘I came around a bend and I saw Teresa waiting for me at the bottom of a slight dip in the road. Her clothes were being plastered against her body and her hair was wild in the wind. She was having trouble standing up, holding the bike. Good, I thought, she’s had the same idea as me, we’re going to turn back. We could spend the night at Waiouru in a motel. Reconsider our options in the morning. It was an achievement to have reached the mountains. We already had plenty of stories to tell everyone. The bare-chested man who stopped to fix a puncture on Teresa’s
tyre, when she could do it better than him, with a tattoo of an eagle across his shoulders. Once he’d finished, he ran back to his car lifting his arms up and down in bird-like swoops and making crowing noises. We’d laughed every night about him. We made the same noise whenever we overtook each other on the bikes.

‘I pulled alongside her. “My God, Pip,” she shouted, “isn’t this great!”

‘I couldn’t understand what she’d said at first. “Are you loving it?” she yelled.

‘And she wasn’t being ironic, she was dead serious. I could see it in her face. She was alive, on a high. I shook my head. No, no I wasn’t loving it. I wasn’t. “I want to go back,” I shouted.

‘“Can’t hear, what?”

‘I screamed it again and this time she heard.

‘“Philippa Macklin,” she said, “don’t be such a little fool. Pull yourself together.” This was something one of our teachers used to say. We were all little fools.

‘“We could be in grave danger,” I said.

‘Teresa stared at me.

‘“We could!” I said. “We’re civilians.”

‘She waited again, not speaking but looking right at me. And the pause, the waiting, had an effect. I felt my words crumble. I felt my fear crouch down low and hide. I won’t say it was banished but there was no longer any courage left in my fear. It was like a pain I could cope with, say to myself I could cope with. I’ve always had basically a timid disposition. I think that’s why I’ve ended up in some dangerous places in my life. I went to Africa to spite people, because it was the last thing expected of me, that I would have the gumption to do such a thing. Timidity and pigheadedness in combination, that’s probably more common than we think. But I’m wandering now. Sorry.

‘On the Desert Road, Teresa motioned with her head for me to start riding, to take the lead, and I did. I pushed off into the sideways wind and began the slow climb up again.

‘Did I mention how dark the sky was? Black clouds. Further
in, cars had their lights on. It was as though normal time had been suspended and we were travelling through a special zone, somewhere not made for civilians. It seemed very unlikely anyone would stop for us here. A few cars slowed down to get a look at us but that was all. Plus we didn’t have lights on our bikes. We had reflectors. It was unsafe.

‘I felt spits of rain against my face. To the east, near the horizon, we could see a patch of horizontal lines connecting the sky with the earth. We knew it was a storm. There was no downward direction implied in these smudged lines however. It wasn’t obvious that rain was falling. It may just as easily have been something being sucked up into the clouds from the land, as in a tornado though there was no funnel shape.

‘Having had the whole trip so far in sunshine, we’d just assumed things would carry on in this way. The rain was an outrage and I know that I took it personally, yet another slap in the face, literally! My face hurt. The rain dripped from my nose. It was coming down more heavily now. Rain from the road was getting sprayed up against my legs then running into my shoes and I could feel my lower back also getting wet from the rear tyre. I could see when I glanced around that one of my panniers was flapping open and the rain was soaking everything inside.

‘These details, Paddy! It’s hard to imagine I’m a person who has had a gun pointed at her head, isn’t it?’

She stopped abruptly, as if she’d felt something touch her. Metal?

‘I’m someone who has been blindfolded, tied up and put in a chicken coop with my own birds. But those are other stories, with their own context. I didn’t like the blindfold one bit but once I was in there, I knew—I guessed and I was right—that was all the harm that was coming to me from those people. Probably they also thought it was clever and humiliating and horrible to be in the coop but being with my chooks was calming. We knew each other. Those people misjudged that.

‘What I’m trying to speak about, not very well at all I know, is this particular feeling, in this particular time. Historically,
it ranks very low. On a scale of suffering, it doesn’t make the scale. You see a child dying of cholera, well. A man beaten to death. Yet I can still feel the rain on the backs of my bare legs and the way it drained into my shoes. Horrible! It makes me shudder now. And of course my failure to rid myself of what was only minor physical unpleasantness, this must be connected with what happened later. Everything’s connected.’

She looked down at her brown shoes and moved their toes together and then apart again. ‘May I have some water?’

‘Of course,’ said Paddy. ‘Anything else? A snack?’ Pip shook her head. She looked pale and tired suddenly, a bit shaky. He went to the kitchen and brought back a tray with the jug from the fridge together with two glasses. They drank some water and Pip sat for a moment in silence. His mind was racing with questions—about their ride but also about Africa, the gun, the blindfold, the chicken coop. Not the time.

‘As you know,’ she said, ‘the road twists and turns and has lots of hollows, but it also has flat straights, sections which grant you the larger view, across the plain, where you think it wouldn’t take much to go over to one of the mountains and tap it with your foot. You feel close suddenly. We were on one of these. To the east, the storm seemed to have moved off somewhere else and there was a bright margin of sky lighting less dense clouds as if it was clearing. It was still raining but lightly now, a steady drizzle. Teresa rode up beside me. She was soaking like me and grinning just as she’d been when I’d thought we should turn back. More than an hour had passed since that bad moment.

‘“Good afternoon, Miss Macklin,” she called to me.

‘“Good afternoon, Miss Fulton,” I said.

‘“Nice day for a ride.”

‘“Perfect, Miss Fulton.”

‘“You look a tad damp, Miss Macklin.”

‘“Do I? I wasn’t aware of it. Though looking closely at you, Miss Fulton, the phrase ‘drowned rat’ comes to mind.”

‘“Why, Miss Macklin, I do believe you’re right. Kind of you to point it out.”

‘“What friends are for, Miss Fulton.”

‘“Is that what friends are for, I’d always wondered what they were for.”

‘She overtook me, a faint crowing sound coming from her, and we biked on through the rain, past signs which warned of firing ranges and military vehicles crossing the road, though we never saw any of this activity and never saw another soldier. Maybe their canvas truck had been sucked into the air.

‘I’m not sure how long it took us to get through. We moved ahead in numbness. I think all our vigilance was exhausted long before we left that road. By evening, there were simply no vehicles going either way. It was less gloomy. A clear night, the air warmer now. We began to dry out. We went on like this for quite a time, owning the entire place, biking automatically.