At the Edge Read online

  Sunday, February 28

  A very hot day. Thirty degrees Celsius. Very unusual for Wellington. Quant’s family spend the whole day in and out of the pool. By mid-afternoon, the heat is such that the kids decide to have ‘nudey-swims’. They strip off and flesh about in the warm water. Cicadas fall into the tepid liquid with them. The younger girls smile-scream as the cicadas whir across the water surface. Jonno calls them kamikaze cicadas. He scoops them up, tossing the half-drowned carcasses into a Shinto shrine he imagines in the flower bed.

  Reclining on a chair in the partial shade next to Quant, Maena lifts her thin cotton dress to her pubis. She wears practical knickers. She parts her legs slightly to cool inside her thighs. An aging Freedom store shade dapples the ripples of her skin. Quant imagines his tongue brushing out the dimples, sticking momentarily to the goose bumps. He shifts in his chair, which sets it creaking and scratching. Maena turns and smiles. ‘We’ll have to fix that.’

  Later she brings out an afternoon snack. The kids stand pooling water on the deck, waiting for Maena to lay out the meal. They jiggle in unison, in freshened anticipation of food. Their browning naked bodies are already drying in the sun. Rivulets of crinkled water run into the triangle of the girls’ groins. Freshly filtered water traces a line down Jonno’s chilled arched penis and spills from the pursed tip.

  A cicada flies into the jam. The kids screech with laughter as it coats itself with tacky boysenberry. Quant fishes it out with a knife and flicks it away.

  Maena looks up to the sun, eyes closed, and emits a little cry, somewhere between joy and heat exasperation. She shrugs the dress off her shoulders, slipping it to her feet, and steps out.

  The kids eat hungrily, watching.

  Maena flicks off the straps of her bra and unhooks it.

  The kids down glasses of ice-cubed juice.

  Maena eases the thick sweat-dampened cotton knickers to her ankles.

  Quant, sandwich in mouth, sees his wife. Velvet curtains of adipose tissue drape her thighs. Breasts pendulant, satisfied stomach cernuous. Broad wanton smile. She takes little leaps towards the pool. Her bottom dances. Cheeks slap. She plunges with a joyous screech into the pool.

  The kids cheer and Quant joins them in mushing wet fruit slices into his mouth.

  Wednesday, March 2

  Again no answer to Quant’s calls to the travelling team. They should be finishing this week. Their text messages are terse and belligerent. Flynn texts that Damon is flirting with Julie and it’s distracting their work. Damon texts that Flynn is deliberately finding things to criticise. There’s no word from Julie. Quant wishes he was there, to know she is okay.

  Thursday, March 3

  A relief – finally other people notice the pervasive smell. Quant is called at the office by journalists asking if the Institute knows what it is. He tells them he could not smell it, and is not measuring anything unusual. That irritates them, but there’s nothing they can do about it.

  The month’s results are now in, but Quant doesn’t finish making sense of them. Krypton levels are still climbing. He sends a note to Jim, recommending they write a briefing paper on krypton for the Minister. The upward trend is now worrying, but the narcotic effects are still a long way off.

  Friday, March 4

  Jim is not at work. Quant estimates that 22 per cent of the staff are away. Those at work are indolent.

  At the bus stop, a used condom lies ripening in the sunshine. The bus is late. Quant has to stand thinking whether he should clean it up. It’s unseemly. He wonders at the hurried tryst that must have occurred right where he stood, only hours before. He shifts uncomfortably and adjusts himself in his trousers. The bus arrives. He gets on.

  He can’t hear the drawled greeting of the bus driver over the din of the cicadas.

  Sunday, March 7

  Quant lies in bed listening to the cicadas. The males are desperate to rise above the din of nearby competitors. He hears them rearranging themselves to go again, in turn, louder and rougher. The coarse hum is magnificent. The females fling themselves in the direction of the male noise they like best. Their skittery clasping sounds like dry hail scraping the roof.

  Maena bumps her body heavily against Quant. She dances tiny dry thrusts against his side. She runs raspy hands down his chest and over his allantoid stomach. She locates what she needs. It is ready. She casts the sheets back, and shucks off her pyjamas. The wooden joints and bolts of the bed crack under them. Their pubic hairs scritter like Velcro.

  Monday, March 8

  Damon is dead. The police found him in Julie’s room in Hamilton. Flynn entered the room while Julie and Damon were mating. He bashed in Damon’s head with one of the aluminium housings from the air-sampling units.

  What are they doing still in Hamilton? They should have been in Kaitaia. Fuck them.

  Quant finds Jim at a café near the Institute, overlooking the bay. The sea is flat, but a long-spaced swell paces itself, spilling foam over the pebbled beaches. Quant asks Jim for news on the Ministers’ response to the report. Jim says he hadn’t got around to sending it. With hand on shoulder, he invites Quant to go for a drink. Quant declines. He goes home.

  The strange esthesis caused by the odour now even overpowers the diesel exhaust of the bus.

  Tuesday, March 9

  Maena is languid. There is no dinner. The family gathers in the kitchen and eats things from the fridge. The kids aren’t even asleep before she slumps onto the bed, rolls onto her back and peels open to Quant like the dry husk of a mandarin. He sucks hungrily at the juice, wiping away pith.

  Wednesday, March 10

  The kids don’t get up to go to school. Maena is not up to make them. Quant drives to work because the buses have stopped. He pulls in for petrol. Looking for someone to pay, he interrupts the service guy in the machine shop with a female customer on the bonnet of her car.

  Thursday, March 11

  After dark, Maena reclines on the wooden deck, naked. Quant watches her from a nearby lounger. A cicada lands on her thigh. She makes no move to wipe it away. He can see it picking at her skin with its sticky feet. Tiny red welts swell like inflamed goosebumps. More cicadas land, congregate. They clack ceaselessly. They latch onto each other, dry humping. Maena squirms. She’s sort of smiling. More follow. They tangle in her pubic hair. She slumps, undone.

  Friday, March 12

  There is no one at work. He can’t reach anyone at the Hamilton police station. He doesn’t know what’s happened to Julie. Gorgeous Julie. He looks at the office pin board for the photo of her from a conference last year. It’s at the post-session drinks. She’s in a t-shirt and short skirt. The hard angles of her torso are visible. The protuberance of bone at the hips. The muscles rich with adenosine triphosphate. He picks the photo from the wall and goes to the bathroom.

  Monday, March 15

  Quant drives past two dogs copulating on the road. They are oblivious as the car swerves around them.

  Driving home, Quant sees one of those fucking dogs. It is dead. He stops to look. Cicadas crawl around its eyes, sucking at the death weep. Cicadas use liquid sap to build their soil burrows.

  Wednesday, March 17

  The family is eating canned food. Maena is not eating. She is shedding weight. Her skin is dry. She has no energy to go to the supermarket. Quant went there yesterday; it was open, shelves in disarray, but empty of people.

  Somewhere along the line, Quant realises, he has stopped going to work.

  Thursday, March 18

  They all stay in bed until noon. Then lie about the lounge. They can’t be bothered eating. The kids are emaciated. There’s no human sounds from the neighbours or road. Just the cicadas snappeling.

  Quant fucks Maena carelessly in the lounge while the kids watch videos. TV stations aren’t running. She feels dry and brittle beneath him. He can’t remember if they fi
nish.

  Much later, she says she is pregnant. They look at each other blankly, unable to think of anything but the cacophony of cicadas.

  He says she looks terrible. Like she’s drying out. She asks for salve. Quant anoints Maena with pawpaw cream, then crawls onto her and interlocks. She is parched inside. It hurts and leaves him bloody.

  Thursday, March 25

  Quant awakes to complete silence.

  A week has passed.

  He feels guilty. He doesn’t know why.

  There are dead cicadas on the windowsill.

  Maena lies beside him in the bed, breathing shallowly. Skin parched and peeling.

  The kids are up and about. They stomp about the neighbourhood, languorously digging their heels into cicadas that flap on the ground. The cicadas coat the ground in brown and green. They rasp about the pavement. They lie crunched on the road and everywhere underfoot. Jonno collects them in rubbish bags and piles the shells onto a mound on the beach.

  Friday, March 26

  It’s Good Friday for those who are entertained by those things.

  The silence is strange. Quant can still hear cicadas clapping. But they’re all dead. A breeze has started. The air is clear. The first time in weeks. The air swirls dried husks of cicadas into large mounds.

  The kids are clearly more alert and stronger, thank God. They trek to the Four Square and return laden with packaged food. Quant feels his strength returning.

  Saturday, March 27

  Maena is not recovering. She may be dying. Quant tries to help her; compresses; any medicine with sanguine instructions. He sits by her the whole day, pacing the dry scrape of her breath. He calculates that it is slowing 1% every five hours.

  Sunday, March 28

  The kids say people are appearing on the streets. Buses trundle slowly past the house. Radio and TV is back on, with repeats, and news bulletins by tired people. Government ministers look bewildered and say they are conducting inquiries.

  Monday, March 29

  The date of our deliverance is a prime number. There are Australians in blue uniforms on the streets. They dole out fresh food and water. Quant sends the kids out to join the short passive queues. The blue uniforms come to the door. They wave machines about in their hands.

  From the bed, Maena cracks at Quant to dispel them.

  At the door, the uniforms tell Quant everything is okay. He agrees, they are okay. They go away.

  Maena’s skin is hardening – becoming rigid. Her breasts are chitin plates. Her bottom like two cockle shells.

  She has burrowed under the sheets. Her pixel eyes stare at Quant from the bed dark. From there, she whispers to Quant hoarsely: what happened was glorious, wasn’t it? Bacchanalian. Insouciance. She wants it again.

  You can, Quant says. You can come again.

  He wraps the hardened body in the bedsheets and carries it into the garden to bake in the soil.

  Boxing Day

  Martin Livings

  It was early morning, but already the ground was starting to shimmer with summer heat, the reds and browns of our sun-scorched property running together like melted paints. Dad sat on the verandah in his favourite chair, the wicker one that was coming apart, and watched the procession of cars approaching up our driveway, the road so far away that it wasn’t even visible from the house. I stood on one side of the chair, Pete on the other, though Dad couldn’t see him, nobody could, not anymore. Nobody but me.

  Dad smiled, that tight, expectant smile we all knew too well; not a smile of amusement, but of pleasure, the pleasure of violence on the horizon. He smiled that smile before he punished his children, or his wife for that matter. And he smiled it every year on this day.

  ‘They’re coming,’ he said, his voice husky, and took a deep swallow from his can of beer, already his third for the new-born day. He reeked of it. I breathed it in, tasted it. Tasted things in it that I’d never tasted before. Promise. Hope. ‘We can start soon.’

  Yes, we can, Pete said in his cold, silent voice. I had to stop myself looking at him standing there, smiling at my dead twin brother, nodding to him. Not when Dad was there. Only when we were alone. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, though. He looked like he always did, like me, only a boy; a strong, tall, entirely satisfactory boy. Unlike me. He looked good, fifteen years old and in his prime. Not like he’d looked at the end, thank heaven. I couldn’t have taken that, not for a whole year.

  Had it really been a year? It seemed like yesterday. It seemed like a thousand years ago. Anything but a year, twelve months, three hundred and sixty-five days.

  I watched the cars draw closer, my heart racing. Dad was right. We’d start soon.

  Less than two hundred people lived in Blair, and most were related to me one way or another. Uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, once removed, twice, three times. The town census and my family tree were basically the same thing. But our family was the trunk of that tree, and that made us top of the food chain in Blair. Poppa Michael was Dad’s father, but he was old and couldn’t remember much of anything anymore, so Dad was in charge. Sure, the Mayor went through the motions, but nothing happened without Eddie Blair’s say-so. And Eddie Blair had three daughters including me, who were irrelevant to his wishes, and one shining son. Pete.

  Had.

  The first car pulled up, and Uncle Albert and Auntie Doreen climbed out. They opened the back door, and four of my cousins spilled out into the dirt. Two girls and two boys. The boys looked excited, and a bit scared. The girls just looked bored. I didn’t blame them; every year I’d felt much the same. Not this year, though. Albert nodded at Dad, who nodded back. Then he headed around to the side paddock to start setting up. More would join him soon, with sledgehammers and star pickets and ropes. Many hands made light work.

  Every year, the day after Christmas, the family would gather here. The women brought food and grog, and immediately joined Mum and us girls in the kitchen. Our job was to keep the menfolk fed and watered for the day. And the men … the men did what men did best. Ate. Drank.

  Fought.

  I glanced at Dad’s hands. He’d already bound them with thin strips of cloth, blood stains visible from previous years’ bouts. He was a deeply superstitious man, used the same strapping every year, wore the same clothes; his dark blue shorts and his white singlet, which was also spotted with rusty brown stains, some faded by years of washing, others fresh. The cloth on his knuckles was as close to protection as he was willing to offer. Fucken faggots and their fucken pillow gloves, he’d spat when watching a boxing match on the telly. What’s the fucken point?

  Dad was a man of few words, and a lot of those words were fucken. If Pete or I or Evie or Mary ever said it, though, we’d get a clip around the ear, if we were lucky. Sometimes it was a fist to the side of the head. Sometimes more.

  Sometimes much more.

  Dad finally got out of his chair. I saw the hesitation, the slight flinch of pain that rippled across his forehead. I tried not to smile.

  He’s old, Pete said, standing right next to me now, the summer morning air chilled by his presence. Old and slow and weak.

  I didn’t react, couldn’t. Death had made Pete a bit cocky. Which was ironic, considering how he’d died.

  We walked around the side of the house, Dad and I, and watched the rings being constructed. Blairs all, by blood if not by name, bashing steel pickets into the dust, deep enough to hold the ropes that would be slung around them like spider webs, ready to catch unwary souls. All the same as last year, and the years before that.

  This year, though, this year was going to be different. This year was going to be the last.

  Dad put a wrapped hand on my shoulder, calloused and bruised and rough, fingernails cut brutally short, and looked into my eyes. There was a sadness in his, a loss that mirrored my own.

  ‘Are you sure a
bout this, Katie?’ he asked.

  I nodded. I was dressed differently from the rest of the Blair womenfolk, shorts and an old t-shirt, no shoes. They weren’t my clothes. They were Pete’s. There was still blood on the shirt, blood that wouldn’t wash out. I didn’t try that hard. I liked it there.

  Dad frowned, a thunderhead rolling across his face. ‘It’s just not right,’ he growled. ‘It’s not done.’

  ‘Just this year, Dad,’ I assured him, as sweetly as I could. ‘I need to do this. Just this once.’ I looked into his eyes, and tried to hide my hatred. ‘For Pete.’

  He sighed. ‘For Pete. Just do your best, Katie.’

  ‘I will, Dad,’ I replied with complete honesty. ‘I will.’

  Fucken right you will, Pete growled. He glared at Dad from beside me.

  Dad didn’t hear him. Dad never heard Pete. Not since he’d killed him.

  The Blair men had nearly finished setting up the rings, four of them, the star posts driven into the ground in the same place as every year. They weren’t exactly even, but they were good enough. Four rings, and sixteen competitors. It didn’t change much from year to year, just the young ones getting old enough to strap their hands and climb into the ring, and the old ones stepping down. This year, we were a man short. It stuffed everything up.

  That’s where I came in.

  I looked around at the fifteen boys and men preparing for battle. Not all of them would be leaving the rings on their feet. Five or six of the fighters would need medical treatment for broken bones, dislocated retinas, bloody noses; the usual stuff. The town hospital kept some beds free after Christmas, just for us. Blairs would go in, and a few days later Blairs would come out.

  Pete Blair, though, he never came out. Never woke up.

  The first eight fighters strode out onto the paddock, my father amongst them. They kicked up dust as they marched, chests pumped, smiling for the small crowd of onlookers, mainly the other Blairs waiting their turn, or the boys and old men, some looking at their futures, others at their pasts. I allowed myself a small smile, safe, unseen. Nobody paid me any attention. Katie, they’d think, she’s nothing, a girl, a weakling. Forget her.