The Love Apple (25 page)

‘Files — about gallop!’ Powell bellowed, doubling back with a group of troopers at his side. Bullets flew, two men fell, wagons halted, horses shied. There was uncertainty and confusion.

‘Back!’ shouted PJ to Oliver, who had halted Jimmy. ‘Back!’ PJ turned his horse. Powell was right, PJ thought: they had to get back to the higher ground. They’d be shot to blazes down in the drift.

PJ and Oliver had reached the lip of the escarpment when there was the hot, wheezing breath of a nearby bullet, and a dull thud. Jimmy, hit lightly on the flank, reared in panic, throwing Oliver out of the saddle. The boy fell sideways off the horse, his leg tangled in the stirrup, his head hanging over the rough grass.

‘Oliver!’ PJ shouted, trying to reach him. In the mêlée of horses it was impossible. A sniper on the opposite side of the kopje peered over a heap of boulders and aimed at Oliver. PJ sighted his rifle and fired. The man fell sideways, clutching his mouth. A volley of shots replied.

PJ jostled through the firing troopers, following the direction that Jimmy was taking. The big horse, mad with terror, was galloping fast, Oliver swinging from its side. Once or twice the boy tried to heave himself back in the saddle but each time he fell back.

‘Joseph!’ the lieutenant shouted at PJ. ‘Where the hell are you going?’

‘Hastings,’ PJ yelled and pointed. ‘Got to bring him in.’

‘Not now. Leave the blighter.’

It was a command PJ had no intention of obeying, but as he touched his horse’s flanks with his spurs PJ could almost hear the words of the charge sheet being read against him: ‘
Dereliction
of duty, cowardice in the face of enemy fire, disobeying orders.’ Let them court-martial him — shoot him if they chose. He might as well die by a firing-squad bullet as an enemy one and with the way things were going it’d be that or the fever. He had to get Oliver. He had to stop Jimmy before the boy was slammed into a rock or finished by a Boer shot.

Jimmy, with Oliver hanging off him, galloped in a directionless fashion, doubling back and looping on his track. He headed back to the left of the route the convoy was following, disappearing from view behind a small kopje. PJ followed, shouting at the horse to stop, the sound of gunfire
growing fainter the further he went. At first it was easy to follow the hoof marks but once in the grassier areas these became fainter and disappeared.

PJ rode for a mile or two, repeatedly calling Oliver’s name. There was no reply. Maybe the boy had been captured: obviously the Boers were close. Around and back and up and down PJ rode, panic spreading through him. He was still hunting when it started to get dark, the light departing as if rapidly sucked from the sky. Already the air was cold. I’ll have to bivvy for the night, PJ thought, peering through the gathering night for some available shelter. There was a lump on the ground ahead of him. It looked like a man.

S
omewhere above was a source of light. Oliver grasped to reach it, but each time as he came close he lost his bearings and slithered back into the submerging gloom. Finally he opened his eyes. He was lying on the ground. His body, like a felled tree, seemed unable to move.

He tried to remember what had happened. There was the convoy in the drift, the ambush, the retreat to higher ground, and Jimmy was hit. After that the images were random: a rock patterned with lines, a tuft of pale grass, blood in his eyes, pain, darkness. Oliver had no idea how long he’d been dragged about or when he fell. And Jimmy — where was Jimmy? With difficulty, Oliver pulled himself up on his elbow. The horse was grazing not far off. Oliver began to cry.

‘I want to go home,’ he sobbed as the blood-tinged tears oozed over his face and onto his chest. Home. He thought of the glasshouses of Wharenui, the foliage of the plants bursting against the walls, the tomatoes cheerful as Christmas. He thought of sitting in the sand dunes at the beach at Hokitika, watching the waves rolling in from Australia and pondering on life, and he thought of Rosaleen turning to kiss him, her mouth both flower and fruit. Oliver tried to hold the pictures but they kept slipping from him, losing their outline, dissolving into
nothing. Darkness, like a sour breath, was coming closer; he could feel it at his shoulder, hooding consciousness, dragging him back, back and down. He was in a box, a hole. Oliver struggled as dimness rushed in. The lid was closing. Closing …

‘Thanks be to God, it’s yourself,’ said PJ, hunkering down and striking a match. Oliver said nothing. Was he dead? PJ put his cheek close. The boy’s breath was ragged, his face hot. The match went out. Oliver murmured something.

‘Can’t do much for you now,’ PJ said, cursing the night, ‘but I’ll take you in come morning.’ He put the mouth of the canteen to Oliver’s swollen lips. The boy went to swallow and immediately his body contorted in pain and he pushed the flask away. This was the way with enteric fever — hadn’t PJ heard the sounds of men in the hospital tents screaming and struggling as liquid was forced down agonised throats? ‘Got to,’ said PJ, pushing the opening of the canteen back between Oliver’s lips. The boy grimaced and turned his head. Water trickled from his mouth. This happened over and over. PJ could see no way of getting the liquid down.

They spent the night wrapped in their military overcoats. Oliver thrashed and moaned; one minute he was running with sweat, the next shivering with cold. Often he coughed, choking struggling coughs that brought blood streaming from his nostrils. PJ tried to keep him covered, talking and coaxing. ‘There’s a lad,’ he said. ‘Good fellow’, ‘Just a drop, do you good.’ Oliver would drink nothing and much of the precious water was spilled in the trying.

Towards morning Oliver struggled and seemed to want to sit up. He raised himself unsteadily. ‘Zebra,’ he said.

‘Zebras?’ said PJ. ‘None of those boyos here.’

‘No, no, not Zebra — Jimmy,’ said Oliver, speaking with difficulty. ‘Remember, you swore.’

PJ did remember. They had been at Bloemfontein. A
trooper was on a veldt pony. The animal was only half broken and a group of soldiers were entertaining themselves with their own private rodeo, betting on who could stay on longest. The pony, roped, whipped and spurred, was already in a paroxysm of terror when a trooper holding a coffeepot threw the boiling contents over the animal’s rump.

‘Bastard,’ said Oliver to PJ, as the mounted man was thrown. The other soldiers laughed.

‘Deserves to be reported,’ said PJ, turning away.

It was later that evening that Oliver and PJ were attending to their own horses. ‘Say something happens,’ said Oliver, dropping Jimmy’s foot and coming over to PJ. ‘I want you to do it.’

‘In the name of Jaysis, what are you talking about?’

‘Jimmy,’ said Oliver. ‘I’m not having any of those buggers on him, messing him about. If I’m knocked out you’ve got to end it for him too.’

‘Nothing will happen; we’ll be safe as houses.’

‘Swear,’ said Oliver. ‘Say you’ll do it.’

PJ slept a little. When he woke, the earth and grasses were colouring in the sunrise. ‘It’s morning,’ said PJ. ‘Thank God for that.’

There was silence beside him.

‘Oliver? Oliver!’ PJ pulled the boy into a sitting position. Blood was caked on his face and his eyes stared wild and wide. ‘Wake up, wake up! Two shakes of a lamb’s tail and I’ll get you out of here and to the hospital. You’ll be fine, fine.’ Oliver fell heavily forward. ‘You’re not dead, sure you can’t be, you can’t be!’ He grasped Oliver’s shoulders and began to shout.

PJ knew about working with drystone. Hadn’t he seen men toiling over walls since he was a child? Dirty, careful hands,
identifying shape, size, compatibility; pressing the stones together in just the right place with those that went before, beside and after. Now PJ did it as if his whole life had been spent persuading stone into walls and shelter. He worked
mechanically
, all feeling suspended: an inhabitant of that blank space of nothingness that anticipates grief. Once convinced that Oliver was indeed dead, he’d covered the youth with his overcoat and gathered the stones. He’d built the cairn, stopping neither to rest nor drink. He began in the gentleness of the morning and fixed the final stones in the dull heat of afternoon.

PJ took his rifle and unhitched Jimmy from the bush he’d tied him to the previous night. The horse was suspicious and didn’t want to move. PJ had to drag him up. He took him behind a little hillock, out of sight of his own horse, and tied him again. ‘Aren’t I heart-scalded?’ PJ said aloud. ‘We’re both banjaxed.’

The rifle nestled familiarly against PJ’s shoulder, his fingers instinctive on the cold trigger. ‘Aim,’ he said to himself, focusing on the fawn star on Jimmy’s forehead. ‘Now pull. Just pull.’ Jimmy looked at him, eyes rolling, huge with dread.

PJ remembered how, coming over on the
Knight
Templar
, Oliver had a joke. Said he’d trained Jimmy to obey new orders. ‘Eyes front!’ he would command, and as the ship crested the swell Jimmy’s head would appear over the door of the loose box, facing front. ‘Stand at ease,’ Oliver would shout, laughing as the ship dipped and Jimmy’s head would disappear back into his stall.

PJ’s fingers slipped. He put the gun down. ‘God forgive me, Oliver, but I can’t do it.’ He untied Jimmy and took off his bridle. The horse looked about, uncertain. ‘Go on, go on, get out of here,’ said PJ, slapping Jimmy’s rump. ‘At least you can be free; ’tis little enough, God knows, but what else can be done with you?’ Jimmy took a few steps as if expecting to be reined in, then, feeling no restriction, he began to trot and then to canter away.

PJ sat on a stone shaded by a small bluff with Jimmy’s
bridle in his hands. He was sorry he had finished building the cairn: he wanted to go on being taxed and occupied. He watched a snake wriggle in the dust. Maybe it was dangerous but he didn’t care. PJ was no longer a man: he was a stone, a rock or lump of clay, something devoid of feeling or response. He knew he should think, make a plan, decide what he must do. He knew that even if he could find his way back to the convoy he wouldn’t be going. He would stop here, here with Oliver.

The world fell away as if increasingly viewed from a great height or distance. Time lost all shape, light and dark spilled together, day and night passed. At one point PJ opened the field service emergency ration that a Tommy soldier had given him and shoved the ill-tasting beef powder into his mouth with his hand. It made the thirst worse. He put the canteen to his lips but it was empty.

It was afternoon again, the sun high and piercing. PJ sat on the rock looking at the cairn. The stones were floating and moving in the air. Oliver was better. The stones moved because Oliver was getting up, stretching. The boy needed a hand. PJ went to stand and immediately fell. He tried to get to his feet but seemed unable. He felt the harsh ground beneath his fingertips.

‘Will ye look at that!’ a voice called from the sky. There was the sound of hooves and shouting and PJ was dragged upwards by a group of men. A hand at his belt removed his revolver. ‘For the love of Mike, who’ve we got here?’ said one of the men. PJ opened his mouth but no words came out.

‘He’s not one of ours. An Aussie, do you think? Or them others from that place where the birds can’t fly?’

‘New Zealand.’

‘That’s it.’

‘You’re under arrest, New Zealander. Prisoner of war.’

‘Looks harmless.’

‘Better tie his hands just in case.’

‘Thought them New Zealanders couldn’t fly.’ The men laughed.

PJ staggered as they pulled his arms behind his back and tied them together. ‘Give the man a drink, he could use it.’ A water bottle was thrust into PJ’s face and the liquid fell cool and welcome into his mouth. PJ felt about in his mind for words, as one might search for a coin in a coat pocket, but found nothing.

They hoisted him onto a horse, one of the men mounted behind him. PJ’s own horse, on his knees from thirst and hunger, was dragged to his feet and tied to a bridle. They rode to a camp of tents hidden in low hills where about twenty men were sitting and standing around a pot cooking on a trivet. The men spoke in a way that PJ remembered from some other time or place — he didn’t know when or where. Someone untied his hands and gave him a mess tin of mealy porridge and a cup of water. A man pushed his way into the middle of the group and began singing:

It was Mick Sullivan. ‘Mick, be the powers it’s yourself!’ PJ called out. The singer took no notice.

‘Eat your grub and get some sleep, New Zealander. We’ll hear from you in the morning,’ a man shouted to PJ, tossing him a horse blanket. ‘And don’t take a notion to escape. Our sentries will blow your brains out.’

‘There’s a telegram,’ said Daisy, the maid, as she opened the door.

Geoffrey put down the new book he was holding. He grabbed the brown envelope, his fingers shaking as he tore the fold. Letters and words jangled up and down in front of his eyes. Then out of the gyrating hieroglyphics one word appeared: MISSING. ‘Missing,’ Geoffrey said aloud, as if the word were a charm, a rune revealing truth. ‘Missing,’ he said again. There were other words on the telegram — not many, but a few. Geoffrey stared at them as if he could no longer read, and gradually the letters clumped together: ‘Missing in action, presumed …’ Geoffrey read no more. He knew without looking. Oliver was dead.

Geoffrey walked up and down the room. He wasn’t sure whether or not he was breathing. Of course the message was a mistake; it had to be. There was no way this could have happened, not to Oliver, and with PJ there with him as well. The army — well, didn’t everyone know they were fools, bloody fools? Probably got the name wrong, another Hastings, maybe even someone from the town in the North Island, some lad with a completely different name, easy enough mistake to make.

He looked at his fingers holding the paper. The hand seemed to belong to someone else. Geoffrey wondered what this strange hand was doing in front of him and why the paper was shaking. There was something written on the paper, something terrible. He needed to know what it was. He smoothed out the
telegram and looked at the words again and again.

For days Geoffrey stayed in his bedroom. He pulled the curtains and lay on his bed bundled in an eiderdown, his head beneath the covers. Daylight seemed an intrusion and an affront: he wanted darkness and oblivion. He shook uncontrollably. He wished there was someone to hold him, to calm his shaking, to provide the warmth and comfort of another human being. There was no one. Every few hours Daisy would knock on the door, asking if he wanted anything, leaving soup, bringing sandwiches. Geoffrey ate nothing. When his throat and mouth ached from thirst he swallowed a little water from the decanter on the washstand.

On the third morning he got up. He knew Sybil was in Christchurch and he was going to see her. He spoke to himself as if to another person. ‘You must wash now’, ‘You must shave’, and his hands obediently followed the instructions, while inside grief howled unabated.

He stood on the deck of the steamer bound for Lyttelton and looked at the sea. It was a calm day and the water was thin and limp and endlessly blue. Geoffrey thought of Vanessa, Huia and Oliver: all sucked away into some similarly
incomprehensible
vastness. He felt like a man marooned on a drifting island as the shore of Hokitika receded and the ragged jaw of the mountains grew small against the sky.

‘The moment when the telegram arrived was an
abomination
,’ Geoffrey told Sybil later, as he sat in her Christchurch drawing room. ‘Doors closed: it was like seeing an Advent calendar in reverse.’

Sybil had been on the downstairs verandah sticking pictures on a decoupage screen when Geoffrey walked in the gate and past the bamboo clumps of the Powells’ townhouse. He had never visited the Cashel Street house before and his arrival was totally unexpected.

‘Geoffrey!’ Sybil said, quickly getting up, a flock of brightly coloured scraps falling from her skirt. ‘Geoffrey, is something wrong?’

‘Got the news on Monday,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Had to come as soon as I heard.’

‘Heard?’

‘My boy, dead — presumed dead they say, but he’s dead all right.’