Settlers' Creek Read online

  Settlers’ Creek

  Carl Nixon

  To Fenton & Alice

  & everyone else whose heart belongs

  in these long islands

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  PART II

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  PART III

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  PART IV

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  PART V

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Rocking Horse Road

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Some pranksters have strung up a naked mannequin from one of the big pine trees. That was the old man’s first thought. They’d probably done it to frighten the joggers coming up the track. It’d be teenagers or students — young people anyway, out after a few drinks. They must’ve driven up into the hills last night, just having bit of a laugh.

  The man was out collecting those pine cones that the night wind had shaken from the bare branches. He used them to start his fire. He carefully placed the nylon sack he was carrying on the grass. The words ‘Gardener Grain’ were stamped on the side in faded forest-green. The half-dozen cones he’d already picked up were lumping the bottom of the sack, and he watched it for a moment to make sure that their weight didn’t send the whole thing sliding off down the steep grassy slope.

  He began to walk slowly, cutting across the slope up towards the jagged pines, which were about fifty metres from where he had been standing. The morning air was perfectly still and the figure hanging from the branch didn’t swing or twist.

  The man moved gingerly over the grass. He was afraid of falling. He hadn’t taken his anti-inflammatory that morning because it upset his stomach if he took the pills twice every day as the doctor said he should. He didn’t trust pills. Or doctors much, if it came to that. He worried that the small white triangles he’d been prescribed had given him a stomach ulcer. Now the joints in his fingers began to ache again, maybe just because he’d begun to think about them. He looked down at his hands and saw that his knuckles were bruised knobs, swollen and tender. His feet throbbed.

  The 6 a.m. weather report on the radio had told him that a storm was due to blow up from the south around mid-afternoon, but for now the sky was unblemished and blue. It was the third Sunday in April and very early morning, less than half an hour after the autumn dawn. The wind had blown hard during the night but died away before first light. Stretching out to the north in the clear morning air were the southern suburbs of the city. The houses jostled up to the edge of the hills: red and orange and white rooftops and green postage-stamp lawns and the sharp, straight lines of the streets, all deserted at this hour on a Sunday morning. From the hillside he could see the expanse of playing fields at the local primary school and beyond that across to where the course of the river was marked out by a hazy-edged path of old willows and poplars. Over there was the cluster of tall office buildings at the city’s centre, and jostling up behind them, to the west, low on the horizon, were the mountains, looking close but really two hours’ drive away.

  The old man was walking below the track, almost up to his knees in the never-mown grass, although occasionally a few sheep would be let loose along here. He heard two eager, early-bird mountain bikers talking between breaths as they ground their way up the hill but couldn’t see them because of the trees. The sun was shining on the top of the spur above him but this, the western side of the hill, was in shadow all the way down to the bottom of the valley. As he looked over and up at the pine trees he could see the ghost of his breath in the morning air. There were a dozen pines growing too close together below the track. They were mostly self-seeded and over the years had become tall and tangle-branched and the layer of needles under them was deep and slick and allowed no undergrowth. It would be easy to slip.

  He’d been watching the ground as he walked but now that he was close to the trees he looked up.

  ‘Jesus!’ Loud in the still morning air. Not a mannequin. Of course not. Why had he even thought that? ‘Jesus-damnchrist! Oh Jesus.’ Naked as a jay bird. ‘Jesus.’ Softly this time.

  The head was slightly back, dragged up by the heavy knot, chin pointing towards the first bare branches. The eyes were closed and the old man was thankful for that. He was drawn to look at the tangle of pubic hair. The dark, sea-slug penis.

  The dead man — no, not so old as that, probably still in his teens, poor bugger — the almost-man, the boy then, had put his clothes in a neat pile in a hollow between roots at the base of the pine tree.

  Jesuschrist, he thought.

  This boy was about to hang himself and he took the time to fold up his clothes. The old man marvelled at that. There were his jeans on top of the pile. The black liquorice-strap belt was coiled and placed on the pine needles.

  ‘Jesuschrist.’

  He could feel his heart beating as if he’d run hard all the way up from the valley floor. He moved closer. He saw immediately how the boy had managed it. A three-strand wire fence ran up the hill, marking the division between private land and the council-owned reserve, with its new plantings of flax and pittosporum and messy damn cabbage trees. The boy must have stood on the top of that closest fencepost, there, then got the rope over the branch and tied it off. Put the noose around his neck. Jumped. Easy as that.

  The old man looked away from the hanging body and out over the city. He took in a deep breath through his nose. The autumn sky was blue and wide with no clouds. He could feel sudden sweat on his forehead and more coming out of his palms. He rubbed his hands on the sides of his trousers and wondered how long the boy’s body had hung here. The pines would have hidden it from the sight of the dawn joggers and the first mountain bikers, but not all day yesterday, not that long. Someone would’ve seen it.

  His own house was the third to last on the sealed section of the road. He slept poorly because of his arthritis and usually heard cars if they came up to the farm gate in the night. There’d been nothing last night.

  He thought about turning and going straight back to the house and calling the police. But, no, it didn’t seem to be the right thing to do. For some reason that he wouldn’t be able to put into words until a lot later, he thought of his father. He’d been dead forty years last Christmas, but the man still wondered what the grumpy old bugger would have done if he’d been here now.

  He sighed and went closer, keeping his eyes on the slippery carpet of dry pine needles. Mindful of his stiff fingers and the very sensitive spot on the ball of his left foot, he started to climb up onto the fencepost. He moved awkwardly, one limb at a time, because he was no longer capable of anything fluid or quick. He felt like something made of wood, a deckchair perhaps, which had to be unfolded one rusted part at a time. The fencepost he had his foot on had been replaced recently. Several of them along the line had. The wood he was struggling to climb up onto was pale and unstained by water or lichen. The old man had watched two men from the council one day last summer as they worked replacing the rotted posts. Now, with one foot up on the post, he
was just able to steady himself with a hand on the jigsaw-puzzle bark of the old pine tree as he pushed up off the sloping ground with his back leg. He swayed, then steadied himself with his hand on the rough bark.

  The body was hanging with its broad back towards him. When he had found his balance the old man fished in his back pocket with his left hand, pulled out his pocketknife and unfolded the longest blade with his teeth. The metal touched his tongue and he could immediately taste it, brackish and sharp, throughout his whole mouth and the taste made the fillings in his teeth ache. He balanced on the post and swayed as though there was a breeze but the morning air was still and cold.

  No, the body hadn’t been here yesterday, he was sure. If this boy had come up here last evening when it was still light enough to do the things he thought he had to do, then his body had hung here all night. The man had heard the wind start to blow hard shortly before midnight. He’d lain in his bed and listened to the wind shift to the southwest and the big pines and two big eucalyptus trees near his house had begun to creak and rub in the darkness. In the room next to his, Irene, his wife, had stirred beneath her heavy duvet. But she took two sleeping pills most evenings and wouldn’t have woken up even if a train full of rapists had pulled in at the foot of her bed.

  He imagined the boy’s body hanging there in the darkness. He thought about it twisting around and around in the strong wind. The sou’wester always funnelled down this valley. It lashed these trees. He imagined the body moving, swinging and twisting in the wind, all less than a hundred metres from where he’d been lying in his bed. The bones across the balls of the man’s feet were beginning to ache from the pressure of balancing on the narrow space. He tried to ignore the pain, to focus on the task at hand. He had to reach out further than he thought to touch the blade of the knife against the rope. It was a good-quality knife. Should be, he’d paid enough for it. He kept the blade sharp and it took only two precarious, lunging movements before the rope suddenly frayed and stretched and then snapped.

  The boy’s body fell to the ground with a sound that made the old man cringe. It didn’t crumple as he’d expected but fell rigid and then began sliding away down the slope. For a sickening moment he thought that it was going to carry on, sliding down out of his sight beyond the curve of the hill, maybe as far as the new plantings, but then the body caught on some raised roots and stopped. The head with its dark, straight hair was pointed downhill.

  He climbed gingerly off the fencepost, taking even longer to get down than he had to get up. When he was at last on the ground again he straightened his back as best he could and stretched his toes inside his boots, clenching and unclenching them in the cold autumn air.

  A phone started ringing somewhere very close by. The man let out a small spooked noise. His head turned quickly left and right before his fear turned to anger. It wasn’t a normal ring tone, but a tune, tinny and jaunty. The bloody noise was coming from the base of the tree. The shitting phone must be with the clothes. Jesus, but it had scared him. When the burst of adrenaline had passed he realised that it was a tune he recognised. Something out of an old television programme. Not M*A*S*H or Get Smart, but something like that, a comedy anyway. The music was ridiculously upbeat and he wished to hell it would quit.

  He stood and waited.

  Later, during the police interview in his kitchen, the young policeman would ask him why he hadn’t answered the cellphone. He told him, truthfully, that it hadn’t even occurred to him. What would he have said? The police were annoyed with him because he’d cut the boy down. Apparently, he’d interfered with evidence. The old man didn’t care. He still thought he’d done the right thing.

  At last the music stopped.

  He stomped his feet a couple of times and then edged his way over the sleek, needle-covered ground to the spot where the naked body lay. It rested on its back and there was some mud from the fall on the boy’s flank and down his left leg. Now that he was up close and not so spooked he saw that the boy’s skin was dark. He had what the old man’s mother would have called ‘a touch of the tar brush’. There was even darker bruising around the neck and at the ankles where he guessed the boy’s blood had pooled, though God knows he was no doctor. Not that even a doctor could do any good now.

  The hillside was still in shadow and he shivered and wrapped his arms around himself and flapped his hands hard against the sides of his body and looked up and down the slope. Nothing had changed. Despite the cold, he took off his jacket and tried to lay it over the body. The jacket was too small to cover everything. He adjusted the way it lay a couple of times but ended up just covering the stomach and chest and the poor bastard’s privates and the tops of his legs. Without touching the skin, he pulled up the jacket’s hood so that the deep bruises around the neck were also hidden. He tried not to look at the frayed umbilical rope lying out from the neck.

  When he was satisfied with the way everything was, the man set off uphill, leaving his sack where it lay. He went beneath the branches of the pine trees and through a gap between the thick trunks. By the time he arrived at the track he was breathing hard again and he could feel the sweat in the curve at the base of his back. Three young women in tight leggings and red and yellow windbreakers were climbing the stile next to the farm gate. They jogged towards him in a group. They probably thought he was some old guy just back from having a piss in the trees. One of them smiled and said good morning. He didn’t reply. As he walked away the same woman said something curt behind his back that he didn’t catch. The other two women laughed.

  He walked back down the track as quickly as he could on inflamed feet. At his house he ignored his wife’s daft questions and called the police.

  PART I

  One

  With the shift in the wind, Box Saxton raised himself from where he was kneeling on the half-finished roof of the school classroom and looked south down the long water of the harbour. The sky over his head was still clear, a leached autumnal blue, but to the south bruised storm clouds were roiling up behind the hills. They hadn’t been there the last time Box had looked. The green wall of bush at the back of the school had begun to stir and rustle. The branches of the five-fingers leaned away, snapping back at the end of each gust. The tall beech and rimu trees rattled their leaves. Box watched as the half-dozen yachts moored in the small bay shuddered under the unexpected slap of the southerly and swung their noses around. White-caps started to kick up on the harbour. The waves grew until they began rising and then folding into themselves in a foaming tumble, resurrected a moment later by the thrust of the wind against the tide pushing up the harbour from the open ocean.

  Box’s nostrils flared. He sniffed at the tang of salt spray, wind-driven on the newly chill air to where he stood. He shivered and pulled his battered and stained cap lower on his head. Half an hour ago he’d been sweating up here in the sun but now he was cold in just a T-shirt and shorts. He took a nail from his tool-belt, knelt and with three precise blows drove it through the steel and into the timber framing. He repeated the process until he reached the edge of the sheet. He stood.

  Bays Primary sat on a series of level steps in the land on the eastern side of the harbour. The playing fields were on the lowest level and then the admin block and the classrooms were staggered up the hill right the way to the bushline. The new classroom where Box was standing was being built hard against the back fence of the school’s land. From there, all the way up to the ridge, the hillside was too steep for anything except reserve. From where Box stood he could see the twenty or so scattered houses of the people who lived in the small bay.

  Last night, lying on top of the bed in his motel room, a can of beer in his hand, he had watched the TV weather forecast. It had come on after the late news. He’d already made his nightly call to Liz. Mostly he’d listened to her — that was the way it went these days — him sitting on the edge of the bed staring blankly at the bare concrete-block wall half a metre in front of his face, listening. Occasionally he’d chip in, t
rying to be upbeat, but he understood that during these calls it was mostly his role to support Liz. She was the one still up in the city, looking after the kids, with a full-time job of her own; trying to keep on top of it all. Last night there had been the usual litany of worries: Mark (who’d gone out again without telling her where he was going or when he’d be back); the water cylinder in the kitchen was leaking and the property management company had promised to send over a plumber but that was days ago and no one had turned up; Heather, who’d recently almost given up on her schoolwork in favour of her friends and, what was even more worrying, boys (at fifteen mostly just talking about them, thank God); and, of course, there was the perennial problem of money to discuss. They could talk about that for hours.

  When Box had put down the phone his right ear ached where the receiver had pressed in hard against the gristle. He’d finished one beer while he talked to Liz. He opened another and lay on the bed watching the screen between the frame of his outstretched feet. He didn’t care what was on. The television provided him with white noise — sound and flickering pictures with no real meaning. Last night was Saturday and the motel was on a main road. The bass thump of boy racers’ car stereos and the roar of their modified exhausts had penetrated the heavy walls, reaching him even over the sound of the television. He’d turned up the volume.

  Some reality show had finished and another one started. And then that finished as well. The late news came on and then the weather. For the first time that evening Box had shifted his mind into gear and paid attention.

  Now he stood on the roof of the classroom in the rapidly chilling air and looked at his watch. It was 11.15. The TV weatherman had predicted that a southerly storm would arrive late morning. Box had been hoping that the forecast had been wrong, at least the timing anyway, and that they’d be able to get in most of a full day’s work. Didn’t look like it, though. Here she was like an ancient steam train pulling into the station, right on time — loud and gusty and cold as iron. Box had grown up with southerly storms but they never failed to impress him. They brewed up in the Southern Ocean not far from Antarctica and then when they were good and ready they set off, raging and thundering their way northward. This was the first place they made landfall. Box liked to fancy that he could almost smell the icebergs and the penguin shit on the wind.