A rural lockdown drama by Palmerston North writer Thom Conroy
Before lockdown hit, Fae and I agreed we needed to get away from this place, and most of this came down to our neighbour and landlord, Bergan. Weeks on end, the man did not change his Swanndri. A bald circle adorned the crown of his head, and heavy, self-dreading locks hung past his shoulders so that our son, Liam, said he looked like a punk rock monk. But worst of all was the man’s talk.
There was no lease, no signed paper of any kind, but Bergan had let us rent the unoccupied sharemilker’s cottage on his farm while a series of house renovations were allegedly underway at our place in town. Only the farm wasn’t his. Bergan was staying with his mum, Wendi, who was subletting from a man called Hammy, who in turn, was managing the place on behalf of a convalescing farmer in the South Island whose herd had once been slaughtered on account of mad cow disease. Plague and death and woe, what Bergan knew.
What we thought was wind on the ranges, Bergan said one night when we’d had him and Wendi round for dinner, was the screaming of wounded souls fleeing down from the ranges. They came out of the high places to die.
Oh, please! Wendi scolded, but you could tell she was loving every word.
Then Bergan looked right at Lacey, our youngest, to see if she was buying it. Lacey had been studying argument in school, so she looked right back at Bergan and asked did he have any evidence for his claim? This set Bergan back, and it was a treasure to behold. He spluttered something about there being headstones in the hills, then turned to his mum.
Wendi forked a bite of roast tofu into her mouth. Oh, hell, she said, speaking to the room. What you lot don’t know would fill a lake.
My wife Fae was halfway through her seventeenth year of teaching primary students, and they’d just started the measurement unit, so it happened that we engaged in a fair bit of late night conversation about filling lakes or Olympic swimming pools or irregularly shaped balloons while we lay in the recessed dining area that we had converted into our bedroom.
I had been against using the space as a bedroom. The wind bore down on the many windows of the kitchen all night long and, in the heavy gales, scuttled food scraps across the sunburnt lino like tumbleweed while the two kids each inhabited one of the actual bedrooms of the cottage with real latching doors and other amenities, such as carpet and an unhaunted atmosphere better suited to take one’s daily rest, but Fae said they were growing, they needed their sleep.
My position was that Fae and I needed our sleep, too. As for me, I was recovering from a transient ischemic attack—a little stroke—but I had quietly come to comprehend I was also not recovering. Fae wasn’t keen to admit it, but the gap between her and her pupils had become a crater over the years, and at night when we were meant to be drifting into restorative slumber, she mostly lay on her back questioning every professional choice she had ever made. Sometimes this line of self-afflicted injury was interrupted by the crash of something outside—a flowerpot, perhaps, or some object that had shattered like a flowerpot would shatter, but which, upon a thorough search in the morning, could not be discovered.
On the nights when Fae did manage to drift off, my insomnia usually kicked in. Back at our place in town, I never had any trouble sleeping, but out here I couldn’t stay unconscious for more than two, three hours at a time. Sometimes I’d wake to the whimpering of an open farm gate in the breeze, but other times I wasn’t sure. Once I heard footsteps on the long veranda at the back of the house. It might have been wrong, but my first thought was Bergan, and I stormed outside in my underwear with his name on my tongue.
A fat moon sat over the ranges, and it was bright enough to see for miles. I observed the eyes of cows glinting in the middle distance, but otherwise the wash of bony light revealed only empty paddocks. On the way back to the front door, I heard a splash in the drainage ditch between our place and Bergan’s. Just a plop, the sound of a dropped pebble. I froze, waited. There was nothing more. When I turned to face the cottage, Fae stood in the doorway, her hair uplifted but folded over like the kinked wing of magpie.
First day of lockdown, Bergman held out his arms for balance and hotfooted it across the plank that spanned the drainage ditch. I was knee deep in a soak pit of my own making, and he’d come to regale me about wild cows. Just squatted there and watched me going hard at the labour I’d been warned against.
I was thinking of Fae as I shovelled. Lockdown had interrupted the measurement unit, and she was having a hell of a time keeping the attention of her students online. A few nights before she told me that in a fit of exasperation she’d asked the kids what it was they wanted to learn about. Climate change was their answer.
Miss, no disrespect, but we’re calculating the volume of swimming pools when the global mean temperature for last year was, what, the second highest on record?
So Fae had dropped the lesson plan she’d relied on for two solid decades and decided to start only measuring things associated with climate change. We reckoned the flooding in our front yard was climate related, so she had the kids calculate the volume of my soak pit to start with. She also had them taking temperatures in light and shady spots and posting these on the school website. One kid whose grandparents lived at the beach started reporting the height of the tides. Fae didn’t know how these activities would translate to the end of year test, but, when it came to it, she also didn’t care. Kids were sitting still in their squares on the computer screen without giving any indications of being in acute pain, and this seemed like a good enough place to start.
Now here was Bergan, fiddling with a book of matches and going on about the wild cattle in the region. Every once in a while his gaze would pass to the denuded hills that rose up behind the farm and refocus. Once I leant on my spade and peered over the edge of the soak pit in the direction where he was staring, my eyes settling at last on the dark flanks of the ranges. I wouldn’t have said it to Bergan, but the depth and the rawness of those flanks weakened something inside my chest. Made me feel the way I had felt when my vision had gone blurry and my mouth tasted like a handful of pennies. I wasn’t sure how to put it, but something about the shade of black green in those valleys struck me as moderately indecent. A colour, if I was going to be honest about it, that I tried not to think of at night when all the flimsy panes of glass were trembling around our bed.
They’re out there, Bergan said. People think wild cattle are funny, but they’re no joke.
I don’t know if you noticed, I said, but I’m working. If you’re not doing anything—
Contrary to appearances, Bergan assured me had plenty on his plate. That very moment, for instance, he was waiting on a call. He had a contact who could drive him into the hills to hunt the wild cattle, but Bergan had to be ready at a moment’s notice.
Bergan, I said. Forget the wild cattle! Leave the poor bastards be!
Bergan said I may as well know that he was hunting the cattle for our protection. He and Wendi might be ok, but Fae and I had a young child. This was a different matter.
I thought of the open farm gates, the unidentified midnight noises. I said, Our protection? Is that a threat?
Bergan looked at me like he might start weeping there and then. He said I was a true townie, no doubt about it. I had no idea, not any idea, of how a single thing worked out this way.
Hearing the conversation, Fae came outside. Lacey, who was wagging her own online classes, jogged behind, overtaking Fae at a distance of fifteen metres. I suspected Fae was checking on my progress, as the soak pit was mostly for her benefit. Our second night out here, the section had flooded right up to the front steps and the gardens were savaged, washing all the hopeful seeds Fae had scattered right out to sea. The soak pit was something we could do. What we could reclaim.
Feral cows up in the hills! Bergan called to Fae and Lacey from his side of the pit. The bulls weigh a thousand kilos and will charge you right through a fence!
To Lacey, he said, You ever hear about the Lundy girl?
Another story then. A feckless local fiction about a wild bull and a little girl. The girl lives, but the bull gores the wall, horns penetrating right through the jib and piercing the Lundy girl’s back. The family leave the bull stuck in the wall to care for the girl, but when they return, the beast is gone. A search party is formed. The bull is never found. Someday it will return. Some night when you least expect—
Fae, whom it must be said was not concerned by the precariousness of our situation as Bergan’s quasi-legal tenants, walked right up the edge of the soak pit and told Began to give it a rest.
Don’t you have something better to do?
Something better? Bergan said. Let me ask you, why not live in the moment? Be here and now for a change.
I was surprised to see the scowl Fae was wearing at this comment given that she had been offering the same advice the night before. She offered Bergan a good long look at this scowl, and then tapped at my shoulder with her slippered foot. Didn’t I think it was time it call it a day? She had to get back for her two o’clock session and there was dinner to be made, and—. But she stopped right there, coming up to the edge of the reason I shouldn’t have been standing in the pit with a spade in my hand and muck caked six inches thick on the soles of my boots. When I was younger, I never would have guessed how much compassion could be packed into a single beat of silence, but now I got it.
Ungracefully, I hauled myself out of the pit and began levering off my boots while Bergan came around to the cottage side of the soak pit and sat on a railway sleeper I’d unearthed. As I cleaned up, I watched Lacey reacting to whatever it was Bergan was saying. She stood in place for as long as she could take, and then began jogging between the soak pit and the drainage ditch. When the world wasn’t locked down, she played football, swam, ran cross country. At twelve years of age, she had given herself over to the rigours of the body.
Last night as the wind was battering down the valley, Fae and I stood at the kitchen sink brushing our teeth, worrying together. The true topic was time, the moment slipping our grip and such, but we didn’t say anything of this nature aloud. Our son Liam, who had entered a new state of gaming-induced hibernation after he’d graduated high school last year, was playing a sickening military style game in his bedroom, and as Fae and I chatted and spat, the sound of gunfire or death throes could be heard. We waited out a long series of explosions, and then Fae asked me had I noticed Lacey changing at all lately? Did her hair look thicker or darker?
Had I, in other words, observed any of the signs of my daughter’s approach towards womanhood? I said, no I hadn’t noticed anything at all. I was lying. Or, rather, I’d noticed, but also decided not to notice.
Soon, I would notice, but not now. Not yet.
Fae said I should keep my eyes open. Be in the moment. What she didn’t say was, while you can. While you’re here. Before a second stroke strikes and you don’t get off with a stern warning and a medical suspension from work. She didn’t utter any of this, and I didn’t acknowledge that I knew what she was really saying, but it didn’t feel anything like a failure of communication.
Once I had my muddy gear off, I joined Bergan and Lacey. The two of them were standing by the drainage ditch now, mats of black algae cooking along the steep banks below them. Over in Bergan’s place the chimney was smoking and the sound of bass from Wendi’s music echoed out the back of their place, booming across the desert of rye grass and clover.
You’ll see, Bergan was saying. First you don’t believe and then you can’t stop.
I asked Lacey if she was okay, and she just pulled a face. To Bergan I said, More about the rogue cows?
Bergan and my daughter exchanged looks, like they had a secret and they weren’t sure I could handle it. Finally, Lacey said, He claims methane gas builds up in the valley and flows down the watercourses. It can make you sick.
Before I could chastise him, Bergan began swearing that every word was true. Blurred vision, headaches, nausea, he said. He pushed his finger through his mane and tapped.
Hallucinations, he said. Messes with you.
Bergan, I said, let’s call it a day. Anyway, it’s a freaking lockdown. You shouldn’t even be here. You’re not in our bubble.
Bergan took a long step backwards, an expression of anguish on his face. That’s funny, he said. I thought I was.
That night after dinner the rain started. Fae and I cajoled Lacey into her rendition of cleaning the dishes, and I went out to the veranda for firewood. There was nothing chopped, and this was Liam’s chore. One of the last ones we could still get him to do. Thinking this, I felt a little tremor up my arm and then stopped right where I was and took a few long, cleansing breaths, just as I’d been instructed. After lockdown was over, we would see to the kid. We wouldn’t kick him out—Fae wouldn’t hear of this—but we would do something. Surely, there was an action that could be taken, a final drop of authority that could be rung out of seventeen years of love, time, and sacrifice.
I opened the door to Liam’s room just as a hail of bullets showered down upon his avatar. He cursed, leant his body to the left, and his avatar leapt from a pink swing bridge into a deep chasm. Without looking away from the screen, he told me I’d picked a bad time. The worst time. Nine months of identical battles, a thousand leaps off the same pink bridge into the same deep chasm, but somehow I’d managed to pick a bad time.
I watched my son’s avatar, a Jamaican woman who I knew was a medic, scale a rocky bank, and emerge behind her rivals. One was a hulking robot with a lobster arm, the other a barrel-chested warrior who lugged a firearm twice the width of my torso. The Jamaican medic found cover behind a palm tree, opened fire. The lobster-armed robot went straight down, yellow smoke issuing out of the vents on the side of his neck, but the warrior spun round, landed a round, and then dashed into an abandoned shopping centre.
Liam, I said, I know you can’t hear it over the game, but it’s raining—hard! Can you please chop some firewood?
Liam’s avatar rushed over to the wounded robot, aimed a fearsome machine gun at its face and finished it off. Then she began hopping up the balconies of the shopping mall. Jumping was her eXtreme power—her X, in the game parlance I’d involuntarily picked up over the course of the past several months. Each character had a different X. I didn’t know the lobster-clawed robot’s X, but the warrior’s was his mega weapon. In this game, characters could drop and pick up every weapon, but the warrior alone could manage the back-breaking phallus.
Liam, c’mon! We need you to chop some wood. Can you just pause it?
I knew for a fact that he couldn’t pause the game, and Liam was perfectly aware that I knew, but he reminded me anyway. We were speaking loud and clear, stating perfectly what the other one already knew, but somehow we weren’t saying anything at all.
Suddenly, a set of unlikely French doors burst open on one of the balconies and there stood the soldier. Liam’s reflexes were sharp, and he dropped from the ledge in the same second the doors opened. I studied his elegant fall, dodging his way through a barrage of missiles on the way down, but when he at last made contact with the marble floor of the shopping centre, one of the warrior’s projectiles pinged him right between the shoulder blades, and it was game over. Before the words appeared, the view shifted to the mighty gunner on the balcony’s edge. He was looking right at us, his bazooka held at hip level, a patch over one eye, and a look of cartoonish cruelty on his rumpled face.
Jesus Christ, dad! Liam said. He tossed the controller beside him on the bed. You fucking killed me!
Liam, language!—this was Fae, who had appeared in the doorway to our son’s actual bedroom. Your father asked you to chop a little firewood so we don’t all freeze to death. Is that so damn hard?
Liam looked at us in the half light of the TV screen. He seemed perplexed, gravely disappointed, as if he’d just woken from a beautiful dream to find himself still in the prison of reality where he’d fallen asleep. I knew our son had a serious problem, knew he was frittering away his youth, and falling behind every other kid his age, but I couldn’t help it—I felt a little tug of sadness on his behalf. It seemed so obvious that this was no place he wanted to be.
That night I woke at some obscene hour, same as always. The rain was lashing, the windows rattling off their frames. I turned to Fae, only she wasn’t beside me. Knowing something that I didn’t yet understand, I pulled on a pair of jeans and met Fae running back through the front door. She looked absolutely stricken. I took her hand, and we rushed outside.
The sky was dark, the garden ankle deep in cold water, and Fae led me to the edge of the soak pit. At first, I didn’t understand. It looked like someone had thrown a mattress into the hole, and for no good reason, I thought of Liam. Why would he toss his mattress in the soak pit?
Fae said, It’s a sheep.
I knelt in the mud to get a better look. Rain poured off my face, but I could see that it was a sheep. More accurately, a sheep’s carcass. It floated face down in a metre and half of water, its head pushed into the corner. As I knelt there wondering how the hell we would haul the sheep out the hole, something moved. I couldn’t help it, I screamed.
What is it? What?
Instead of answering, I tugged Fae down beside me and pointed to the creature’s grey back, where I’d seen the movement. My first thought had been that the animal was grossly deformed and a second head grew out of its spine, but it was a lamb, of course. It had climbed on its mother’s back to live, and the creature’s head was turned toward us now. We saw the floppy ears, the dark, bewildered eyes.
I dropped into pit without much thought, though as soon as I felt myself standing there past my waist in the icy water, I understood my mistake. A shot of pain travelled the length of my arm and my whole body began to tremble. My vision smeared, but not before I took the lamb in my arms.
Dad, what are you doing?
My scream must have roused the children, for now I saw their shapes on the edge of the pit. Lacey’s unruly tresses flattened against her cheeks and Liam, his arms wrapped around his bare chest. Fae’s hands appeared beside me, both of them. Two open palms that looked so much larger than I recalled. She was speaking, too, but I couldn’t make out the words. I couldn’t be sure of everything, but it occurred to me that the lamb would probably live. Wendi said she’d reared a million. She’d said the little buggers were tougher than people thought.
Give us the lamb and climb out!
This voice I knew, no matter what. It was Bergan. Bergan had arrived, and somehow this mattered. Or did it? For reasons I couldn’t get hold of, I thought of Bergan as the lamb. It was true that he had once been an infant, a babe at Wendi’s breast. Then what? Then the moment passed, and now here he was, a man for wild bulls and wailing souls.
This soak pit wouldn’t do the job it was intended to, this much was evident. I thought, too, of what one of the kids had asked Fae during her two o’clock session the day before. How would all this measuring matter? What could it do to change the sky or the river or the soured sea where Fae’s seeds were sinking? Fae, more power to her, had told the truth. Not just a part of it. She didn’t know why they were measuring anything, she really had not the least idea. Nor why she was there, nor what they would measure tomorrow. She didn’t know if she was really cut out for teaching and, yes, they could all log off early.
I held the lamb right against my face. The wool was coarse, but also dry. In my nostrils, I should have smelt lanolin and mud, but there was nothing. No smell at all. No smell and my mouth felt thick, like I was chewing on a sock. Still, I held the lamb close, and I thought of Bergan on the trail of the feral bull, the one who’d gored an innocent and got away, who’d headed for the hills, running against the tide of all the gammy souls on their way into this sodden valley so far below.
Next week's short story is by Fergus Porteous
