Wake (44 page)

Bub looked at Belle's sleeping face and felt cool towards her, and contaminated himself.

The kitchen. Morning. Jacob was waiting for the lemonade he'd boiled to cool. He'd put some into ice trays for later and would take the rest up to Belle, for her breakfast. In a few days her tongue might be able to handle soup, or some of that cardboard-and-vanilla flavoured instant yoghurt they were eating now.

William was at the central bench. He emptied eight big cans of chunky beef-and-gravy cat food into a container, and produced a plastic bag from his pocket.

Jacob looked away. He rattled the spoon in the pot, pushing air into the cooling liquid.

William was mixing and mashing. Jacob heard the container sealed, then the rustle and zip of William's backpack. William washed the bowl and fork, and put them on the draining board. Then he left. Jacob heard the solid sound of the Mercedes door closing, then the whisper of its engine.

Jacob decanted the lemonade into a large mug, and then took it and a wrapped straw upstairs.

Belle was out of bed and had showered. She produced a writing pad and pen from the pocket of her robe, and wrote:
I can't manage to wash my hair yet. Should I be babying my shoulder?

‘To be on the safe side,' Jacob said. He gave her the lemonade and sat down with her on the edge of the bed. ‘Where's Bub?'

Belle gestured at the bedclothes, both sides were rumpled. Then she shrugged her good shoulder.

Jacob said, ‘He's looking for Warren. He spelled me for a little while when I took Warren's car and criss-crossed town calling. Warren's ignoring us. He's still angry. After Dan's funeral we had an argument. I didn't listen to him.' For a moment he brooded. ‘I was
tired
of listening to him.'

Belle opened her mouth to speak, and dribbled the lemonade back into her cup. Blood feathered in the liquid and turned it pink.

‘Sorry, I'll leave you to concentrate on that. I'll bring the rest up in a jug and you can just keep topping up. You must be pretty hungry.'

Belle nodded.

‘Try to stay in bed. Conserve your energy. That'll help.' Jacob got up. ‘I'll go see what Kate wants for breakfast. She's been a bit off-colour.'

Kate was dead. Her body was undisturbed. Her skin was cool, her cheeks sunken, her nose sharp. Her wristwatch was on the nightstand, ticking. Next to it was a book, face down, a fat novel, with perhaps seventy pages to go. Beside the book were her reading glasses.

Jacob took all this in, and got down on his knees at the bedside. He touched Kate's forehead again, this time in blessing. She had gone quietly. She was reading a book, and had taken off her glasses, turned off the bedside lamp, and gone to sleep. Nothing had touched her, or taken her.

Jacob put his head down on the bed and cried, in grief, and gratitude.

The cats came, and coalesced into a furry flood on the wave-scoured concrete of the boat ramp. They gathered at William's feet, looking up at him, and their triangular faces were like open flowers. Some were so eager they trembled. Or perhaps it was simply emotion. They'd had homes, and their own people, and meal times—for people and for cats. Now
this
was all they had, and when it arrived it was being-not-forgotten that made them tremble.

William went down past the high tide mark, shuffling, because the cats kept diving at his legs. He opened the container and tipped out a third of the mix. The cats hunched, and showed him their sharp shoulder blades and quivering tails. They jostled and settled. William moved on and poured out another pile of the saffron-tinted meat, and then another. He rinsed the container in the sea—then let it go and watched it drift away. He left the clustered animals and walked back along the shore. He sat down, and cleaned his hands with warm, dry sand.

Oscar fixed himself something to eat. It was 7pm and there wasn't any dinner. He ate in his room. Lucy purred and kneaded, and gave his plate a cursory lick, then jumped down and continued to roam. She sat on the back of the armchair and gazed out the window, then got down and sniffed the gap under the door, then went on nosing the skirting, and the wardrobe. She cried at the corners of the bathroom, and knocked things off shelves.

Finally Oscar had had enough—he left her and went to prowl about the spa himself.

Kate's room was closed and unlit—no one was keeping a vigil with her body. Jacob had dug only half her grave. He'd had to stop because his hands were blistered.

Sam was standing at William's door. When Oscar went by she turned to look at him—her expression cold. She was concentrating on something, and he was irrelevant.

Belle was dozing. When Oscar looked in on her she started and raised her head from the pillow. Then she looked disappointed. She waved, ‘Hi,' and her eyes slid away from his.

‘Bub's not here?' Oscar said.

Belle shook her head.

Oscar went downstairs. He found Bub sitting by himself in the dark atrium, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped, head bowed.

Oscar said, ‘I think Belle is expecting you.'

Bub raised his face. The twilight made his skin grey. He nodded, and got up slowly and stiffly, and trudged to the stairs.

Oscar looked out the door and saw the rectangle of the latest grave, now deep enough to fill up with shadow. The spade had been left thrust upright in the piled earth.

Oscar found Jacob and Theresa on the terrace, Theresa sitting rigid, wrapped in a rug and bolstered by cushions.

Jacob was holding a mug. It was steaming. Oscar looked at the steam and his eyes teared up. The steam seemed like a last flag, still flying. That Jacob had made himself a hot drink, and had made Theresa comfortable, that was good.
Something was still good
.

Oscar sat down with them. Theresa turned her bruised face and gave him a little smile. Then they just sat, the three of them, no one saying anything.

After a time Oscar said, ‘It isn't overcast.'

‘No. It isn't,' said Jacob.

‘So they don't have the option of bouncing light off clouds.'

‘That's right.'

‘Then what are you watching for?'

‘For balloons,' said Theresa. ‘For lights in the town.'

‘For Warren,' said Jacob.

Theresa said she should go back to bed. She was stiffening up, hurting more today than she had the day before.

Jacob said he'd give her something for nerve pain; it would make her sleep. He helped her up and they went away together.

The cup was still steaming.

Jacob had given Theresa two amitriptyline tablets, and she couldn't open her eyes. She felt flattened, a paper-thin woman floating just under the surface of a still pool. She wasn't alone. Now and then, she could hear pages turning. Her lips were stuck to her teeth. She wanted to ask for a drink but couldn't stir even to do that.

The slight, intermittent sound kept repeating—the faint fingertip rasp and flap of pages. Then Theresa heard a voice. Sam. ‘Don't you ever read thrillers, or magazines?'

‘Sure, for the solution. But wasn't it you who was asking for a book like a boat?'

It was William who was sitting with her. Sam had just come into the room. There was the sound of furniture being dragged, and William said, ‘You don't have to sit all the way over there.'

Sam: ‘That book you recommended wasn't really a boat for an atheist.' A pause. ‘Why did you pray with Jacob? Bub thinks you're only hedging your bets.'

‘Bub has principles and sticks to them. Praying with Jacob is something I can do for him. I'd do anything for that guy. He's a good person.' Pause. ‘So is your sister.'

‘I know.'

‘Your sister once said to me—about you—“Sam is my You”. One of her old ladies had told her that everyone has a You.'

‘I think that “You” is the same as the “Thou” in the twenty-third Psalm, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me”.'

‘I think the Thou in the twenty-third Psalm is supposed to be God.'

‘Yes, but,' Sam said, and then, after a long pause, ‘Bub is Belle's Thou.'

Silence. Theresa's ears were straining so hard that her mouth filled with saliva and her cheeks came unstuck. She issued an involuntarily spluttering wheeze.

‘Theresa?' William said.

Theresa hushed. The sine waves behind her eyelids became bolder and greener.

Sam said, ‘My sister can be your You as well as mine.'

‘Why do I feel like you're telling me I'm not your business?'

‘You are my business, William. But you want me to say—'

‘How could you possibly imagine what I want you to say?'

‘You want me to say,
Take this cup from me
.'
Sam's voice lifted to override his. ‘That's what you want. You think that, because I have appetite, I must want to live. You think I'm like my sister, only more sophisticated. But we were never alike. My sister could tolerate the secrecy, and the discontinuity, and the fact that her life made no sense. I couldn't. But look—can't you see?—it turns out that it wasn't a life, it was a destiny.'

Theresa tried to open her mouth. She wanted to tell Sam that she
did
have a life, that she was distinct, that there were plenty of people walking around who might remember a person's birthday but who never showed anything more than a ceremonial interest in others, and therefore had nothing much going on inside them. Life wasn't a set of social functions—like being a cop, or a caregiver, or a big shot lawyer. It wasn't a CV. It wasn't influence—how many people listened to what you had to say. It wasn't even having been sometime the hapless witness to one of the big moments of history and therefore having a gosh-how-amazing biography. Life was the other stuff, like not being sad in front of someone you're grieving for; or kneeling to pray to a God you don't believe in to make a believer easier in their heart; or not giving your family the terrible truth they might think they're owed, but knitting the grandkids hats instead; it was knowing enough to say that you
wouldn't
say, ‘Take this cup from me'. Because that's what Sam meant. She meant, ‘This is my cup.
My cup runneth over.
' And she had said, ‘You are my business, William,' because she meant to save him. She'd figured something out and was going to try somehow to save them all.

Theresa made a noise, a sticky grunt.

William took her hand. He said, ‘Jacob was pretty confident about the dose, but you've been down for hours.'

Sam said. ‘Some people are sensitive to amitriptyline.'

William lifted Theresa and put the rim of a glass to her lips. She sipped, and croaked out her thanks. He laid her down, and she felt herself slipping—everything flattening out once more. ‘You don't have to sit with me,' she said.

‘No one likes it downstairs any more,' Sam said. ‘We are all upstairs. Just sitting.'

‘What time is it?'

‘Seven,' William said.

Theresa opened her eyes. The light bristled with rainbows.

‘Christmas Eve,' Sam added.

Theresa said, ‘The man in black removed the messages from the balloon.' She was certain she was right as soon as she heard herself say it. It seemed her brain had been busy while she was semiconscious, and had made the necessary leap of intuition.

Sam said, ‘That makes sense.' She thought for a bit. ‘Myr told me that, with other survivors, he'd tried everything. He'd stayed away from them, he'd helped them, and he even killed them himself.'

‘Christ!' said William. ‘The sound I heard in the forest the night I chased him was the sound of a balloon coming in across the treetops. And he led me away from it!'

‘He's trying to kill us by killing our hope,' Theresa said. Then she fixed her gaze sternly, if blearily, on William. ‘Because he at least understands the concept of morale.'

‘I've been cultivating a healthy cynicism.'

‘You were cynical, but that didn't help you work out what he was up to.'

‘You're the cop. You're supposed to work things out.'

Sam said, ‘It's been blowing quite hard from the northwest for ages. Most of the balloons they sent would have blown right over. If more had made it we would have got to at least one before Myr did. What he's doing—it's not much of a plan.'

‘If that's
all
he's doing,' William said.

‘No one failed us,' Theresa said. ‘That's the point. Dan shouldn't have despaired.' Then, ‘Sam, can you go and talk to Myr? Persuade him to give us our messages. And—also—maybe can you tell him we have reason to hope?'

William wondered what they were thinking—the two women, looking so knowingly at each other. It was a very deep communication, and it didn't include him.

Finally, Sam said, ‘Yes. I'll do what I can.'

*

The following morning Sam got up long before everyone else. She showered, and blow-dried her long wavy hair. She put on her designer blouse, boyfriend jeans, and pastel pink ballet flats. She left her room and pushed Oscar's door open. The tongue of its lock was still retracted, a lump under layers of scuffed gaffer tape. Sam crept into the room.

Oscar was curled up with the covers over his head. His cat was tucked neatly in the crook of his legs. Oscar didn't stir—he was in the deep, competent sleep of a teenager's morning. Lucy gave a little chirp when Sam picked her up, but she didn't struggle.

In the kitchen Sam found two chickens thawing in the refrigerator. Someone had remembered Christmas—probably Jacob. He'd cleaned the kitchen too. Sam noticed this, and it only hardened her resolve. She didn't really know Jacob, but here was everything she needed to know. Jacob was heart-struck, but deeply civilised. Sam thought about the smug misanthropists who like to claim that civilisation is a thin veneer. They didn't know people.