Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (10 page)

Billy stood up, his world turned upside down before his eyes. Louise once saw a man arrive home to his house on fire. Billy had that same look of loss and bewilderment. Henry sat on the floor of the cave, his head down, drawing the sand up and letting it go between his fingers.

Somebody needed to say something. Schmidt chose to. He stepped away from her and he spoke in Billy's direction.

‘You could let me go. I'll walk north and pick up a ride over the pass. No one would find me. I'd be gone from your lives.'

There it was. Neat. Tidy. That other world beckoning.

Schmidt went on, ‘No one would track me back to here. I'd be gone. Out of your lives.'

Billy Pohl turned away to the mouth of the cave and looked out.

Schmidt continued, pleading his case. ‘You don't need me here, Billy. You know they aren't looking to sign me up.'

Billy Pohl picked up a stone and flung it at the sea.

Henry had dropped his chin on to his chest. Now he looked up and caught Louise's eye. He nodded for her to join him outside. That's right, it would be dark soon, and there was still firewood to collect. Any excuse would do. She needed to do something.

She moved quickly by Schmidt.

‘Louise,' she heard him say. She knew he would want to explain. But she kept moving. It was Henry's hand she felt on her shoulder propelling her on.

Tom Williams always said false words were a sin. So Henry didn't say anything at all and she was glad of that. They walked up the beach, the shingle giving under their feet. ‘Henry,' she said, and when he stopped to hear what she meant to say she said, ‘Nothing. It's nothing.' She had been on the brink of telling him about the shellfish gatherer. She just wanted to tell him something for the sake of saying something new. Perhaps she wanted to show that she could surprise the world as well. More likely it was grief at the sacrifice she'd made and the collapse of the wildly romantic hopes she'd nourished, wishing to make themselves heard. She wanted someone to know about this. She wanted compensation.

They started to collect firewood. She was glad to have this to do. Though when she bent down for the first piece the tears inside her had just been waiting for such a slope to run down. Henry must have heard her because he let go of the driftwood in his arms. She heard his loyal responsive steps in the shingle. She sniffed back the tears. She said, ‘I haven't cried like this since…Since…' She didn't know when. She was going to say since her mother's funeral. But that wasn't right; not exactly. On that occasion she had felt less sorry for herself than she did for her mother and the hollowness that she'd clasped following her father's drowning. She hadn't known how to live without her husband. That was the first realisation. The second—she realised she didn't want to. Now Henry held out a hand to her as if to say she could have that if she wished, if she had a use for it. He told her everything would be all right. Then he offered the only thing he knew that worked for him. ‘Tom'll come for us when he thinks the time is right.'

Soon they had gathered enough driftwood.They were on their way back when Billy Pohl came out to help. Henry told him they had enough for the night and although Billy nodded that he'd heard and understood, he went on picking up stray bits here and there.

At the mouth of the cave Schmidt tried to make eye contact with her. He took his hands out of his pockets to take firewood from her, but she turned her shoulders away. She didn't need help. But she didn't want his in particular.

She didn't speak to the piano tuner again. That night she lay with her back to him, and when she woke up in the morning he was gone.

In the sand next to where he slept, he had written with a stick, ‘Bye Louise, I shan't forget you.' There was a squiggle after ‘you'. She thought it might be a kiss. She looked at it from another angle. It was a kiss. She glanced over at the sleeping figures of Billy Pohl and Henry Graham. There were no messages for them so she smoothed out this one left for her.

For the next day or two no one remarked on Schmidt's departure. It was too hotly contested by other thoughts. Too hot a subject to handle in their tender state. They skirted mention of him by plunging into silence and living like phantoms. They slept, and woke to chores that they no longer had any heart for. Louise dragged herself to the stream to drink and wash. It took such an effort to walk up the beach, to pick each foot out of the shingle, that she wondered if she was ailing. She had lost weight. They all had. She hungered for something sweet to eat. Anything other than the black leathery paua flesh. An apple would be nice. A glass of cool milk. Henry Graham smacked his lips in his sleep. They all salivated in their dreams. And long after she swallowed them down, the bits of paua sat individually and rejectedly in the pit of her stomach. Even her intestinal juices had tired of the monotony. She forced herself to sit up straighter, to snap out of this food obsession. And while physical discomfort could be admitted, owned up to and wilfully dismissed, banishing the piano tuner from her thoughts was a much harder task. Schmidt had taken up residence in that part of her over which she had less control.

Left alone and at night clutching herself in her sand bed she thought about the kiss from Schmidt. What if Henry Graham and Billy Pohl hadn't been there? What if the kiss had been taken at a more private moment? Had the incident been premeditated or had the piano tuner simply taken his opportunity as he had the kiss? He had been so quick to speak up. A bit too quick to make his case to Billy. She wondered where he was now. She placed him on a dark road walking by the moonlight. She heard him singing to himself and hated him all the more.

Yet it was Louise who made the effort to get them dancing again. It would be good for their morale, she thought. One night she walked over to the dance floor. Henry rolled away from her invitation. He lay back dreaming up at the cave ceiling. So she called over to Billy, ‘Will you dance with me, Billy?' She saw him give it a thought. He wanted to. He took his hands out of his pockets, managed a step towards her, then changed his mind. Without a word said he turned and walked out of the cave. She had an idea that he wanted to her to follow him. Instead, she went and lay down to wait for morning.

It was this waiting that got to them in the end, and the following day when Henry Graham proposed that he might walk south and look for a sign of Tom Williams, there was no objection from her or Billy Pohl. They were so tired of waiting to be found.

12

Billy Pohl now slept where Schmidt had been, occupying the same hollow in the sand, and Louise slept with her back to Billy to prevent him mapping her thoughts as they came and went on her face. Everything was easier in the dark. You could think one thing and say another.

In the dark Henry was able to opine, ‘If they catch him it will be curtains for us.'

‘
If
they catch him, Henry.' She allowed herself that because to stay quiet was almost as bad as saying too much.

‘So, Louise.' It was Billy now, prefacing his next thought with a calculated pause. ‘Where would you say he's headed?'

‘England. South America. I really don't know, Billy.' She meant to sound vague.

It was the first time they'd mentioned Schmidt since he left them.

One night Billy Pohl got up from the fire and wandered circumspectly over to the dance floor. She watched him, hands in pockets, kick away the sand and rake the small stones clear with his bare foot. Then he looked across his shoulder for her and held out a hand.

There wasn't much in the way of music. The singular handclaps of Henry which sounded like half-hearted attempts to slap a bothersome sandfly. Billy held her firmly. He hardly moved at all. She felt his rough face against hers. His urgent whisper, ‘Show me how, Louise. Show me how to do it.' So she tried to show him. She talked him through the steps. ‘Back. Across. Now, forward. That's it, Billy.' But he couldn't do it. His legs got tied up, and in his frustration he pushed her away and shook his head. She told him they could try again in the morning. And Billy nodded, ‘In the morning then.'

They did not dance again.

It was January, they realised, by the number of longliners out at sea. They tried calculating back to pinpoint Christmas. In the course of their routine nothing they ever did cut very deeply into any one day to make it memorable. The weeks fell away to a blur. The more vivid moments that came back to Louise involved the piano tuner—his brazen stare at her sunbathing naked on the rock, the playful march of his fingers around her neck, the gauge of feeling a quick glance allowed when the backs of the others were turned, the way he said her name, and above all, their dancing. There was also the shellfish gatherer's uneven breath, his torn shorts, the pressure he lightly applied. That came and went along with the moment she and Schmidt kissed, and that other moment when she had felt life itself spill out of her on waking up to find the piano tuner gone. These of course were deeply personal memories. Time as a public record was less spectacular, a sameness that failed to cut up the days into neat and memorable portions.

By now the limestone bluffs had completely dried up. It was hard to believe that water had ever poured out of them. Even the sea had stopped shifting about, as if it too were conscious of sparing itself extra effort. The heat turned sticky. They became listless. Just to trudge across the piping hot sand and up the hill to the creek required supreme effort. And when they got there they found the creek water was low and brackish. It was easier to stay in the cool of the cave and gaze out at the world and wonder why it had left them to rot.

One night she woke with a fierce headache. She'd had them before but this headache was different. The ache seemed to float and shift in a bubble inside her skull. The only relief was when she turned from one side to the other, but it was fleeting, the pain briefly put aside, and for her trouble when it returned it was worse than before, expanding until her skull was fit to burst. Billy knelt by her, massaging her head. He pulled gently on the ends of her hair. For a brief time this led the throbbing away. Then she grew faint.

She heard Billy and Henry discussing her. She heard Henry say: ‘She's dehydrated. She needs water.' After a pause, she heard Billy answer. ‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll go.' He sounded tired. Then she heard them scratching around for the saucepan. Beyond her closed eyelids she heard Billy swear, then she must have passed out. The next thing she could taste the metallic edge of the saucepan. She could hear coaxing words from Billy. She felt the water in her mouth; some of it trickled into her throat. She coughed and spluttered. The violence of her coughing forced her upright and she blacked out again.

Later she would remember moments of absolute clarity. At different times she was aware of Billy and Henry deep in conference, one talking, the other nodding. It was good to know that the world was at last making plans for them. She didn't care what they involved. She had no opinion any more. Nor did she care what happened to her. There was a terrible stiffness in her neck and shoulders. She felt cast; she couldn't move. She was hot, then she was cold. She left it to Billy or Henry to throw clothing over her or to mop her brow with a rag that smelt of seawater.

At some point in her fever there were arms reaching under her. She felt herself scooped up and lowered on to a carrying frame of branches and flax. Someone was trying to tip water into her mouth again. She felt it run down her neck. Then she was raised above the sand. She found herself gazing up at the underneath bits of Billy's beard and the cups of his sweat-stained shirt. They left the cave and came out to twilight, and as they walked along the beach, with each footfall she could see the moon gently rise and fall on the edge of the sea.

She heard later of the struggle to haul the frame with her on it up the bluff to the nikaus. Apparently she fell off once but because Billy was smiling when he told her she was inclined not to believe him. Years later she would recall the slow fade of the light in the treetops and the warm tarry aroma of the road when they set her down to rest.

She heard of the questions that weighed on Henry as they drew closer to town.‘What will we say?' And Billy telling him, ‘We don't have to say anything. We find the doctor.That's the only thing we have to do.' At one point on the dark road Billy stumbled and fell but somehow caught the road with his elbows and managed to keep the carrying frame stable. She learned later how word got around and people came out of their houses to watch this strange little procession, and of the calm dignity that came over her porters.

13

‘Of course, she married Billy Pohl.'

‘Why do you say “of course”?'

‘Well, my grandfather had gone. So she married the next best thing.'

‘Not Henry?'

‘Not Henry. I told you. It was Billy Pohl.'

Rosa's glance was so she could check that the words had arrived safely, that I had heard correctly and what she said required no further explanation. She often did this, her eyes burning into the side of my face, until unable to endure it any longer, I would have to turn my head to look back at her, at which point she lazily lifted her eyes to the road.

‘So, this time you hear me,' she said.

This was in the car along the same stretch of coast that Schmidt had made his escape. He had walked with just the moon and the hardness of the road in the dark to guide him. Now and then the sea roused itself. This is what he had told his granddaughter years later in El Imperio across the way from the
cementerio
in La Chacarita. He'd walked in a state of elation. At last he'd escaped the right angles of the sea and the sky and the pinched horizon. At last he'd come back out in to the world. Even to the small girl listening his relief sounded consolatory; he'd won one thing but lost another. That other, whatever it was, seemed to lurk behind her grandfather's sad smile. A watery-eyed determination to see only the bright side. The story usually ended the same way. A drum roll of his fingers, a sharp look her way to remind her in case she thought otherwise that he was alert to her thoughts. ‘That was the first step I took towards Buenos Aires, towards meeting your nanna and having your beautiful mama. From that day,' he told her, ‘my life went forward.'