Settlers' Creek Page 2

  The temperature was dropping by the minute. Screw that, by the second. Box’s tanned forearms goosebumped into life, the tangle of pale hairs that grew there separating and rising.

  The new classroom was supposed to be finished in ten days, all set for the first day of the second term. That’s why they were working on a Sunday. The timber framing was up but the roofing iron had only started to go on late yesterday afternoon. Mitch wasn’t going to be happy about them losing the best part of another day, not when they were already way behind. Even in the short time that Box had looked away the clouds had advanced towards him, spilling over the hills in a muddy tsunami. He slipped his hammer into his tool-belt and walked easily across the slope of the roof to the ladder and climbed down to get his bush shirt from the ute.

  Taylor, and of course Grant, were beginning to pack up. Predictable. He should have guessed that, as far as Taylor was concerned, even a whiff of bad weather was a good enough excuse to down tools. Those two would be halfway to the pub before the rain even looked like starting. And more than likely they’d still tell Mitch that they’d worked until five. They’d been grumbling and bitching about having to be here on a Sunday anyway.

  The truth was Box didn’t have much time for either of them. The recession, the global downturn, the international credit crisis — whatever it was — had hit the building industry like a steamroller. Box knew that better than most. He watched Taylor and Grant packing up. When a lot of chippies were out of work these two were grumbling about having to work on a Sunday; actually moaning about having a steady job, about being paid overtime. They didn’t even know when they had a good thing going on. Thanks to Mitch and his government contacts, these two clowns had a steady stream of work laid out like a red carpet right up to the end of the year.

  If this had been his crew Box would have made them put in a last burst before the storm hit. They should be trying to get the roof on, or most of it anyway. But Taylor was the site foreman. These days Box was just a hammer for hire. He was no more in charge here than the newest apprentice. He shook his head and carried on towards his ute.

  When Box came back, pulling on his bush shirt, Taylor was up on the concrete foundation stacking the sawhorses. His red ear protectors were around his neck.

  ‘Mate, we’re off. You coming?’

  ‘There’s probably an hour before it rains,’ said Box.

  Taylor shrugged. ‘We’re heading over to a pub in town.’

  ‘If we all got stuck in to the roof we could maybe get most of it nailed down.’

  Taylor looked across at the clouds and shook his head. He had brown curly hair speckled with sawdust and short muscular legs. He was still in his twenties but already had a beer gut the size of a party balloon smuggled up under his paint-splattered sweatshirt.

  ‘Nah. There’s not enough time.’

  ‘With the roof on we could start packing the insulation into the walls. The gib boys could be in tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s going to piss down pretty soon.’

  ‘We’re already going to be pushing it to be finished before the twenty-ninth.’

  ‘We’ll be right.’

  Box’s experience didn’t mean anything here. In fact he knew that it actually worked against him. Taylor didn’t like him being around. Defensive prick. He was one of those men who was always looking for the criticism or the putdown, always looking for a chance to show how much he knew. Or to ram it home to Box exactly who was in charge.

  ‘How do you figure that?’ said Box.

  ‘Look, we’re off. You coming or what?’

  Box didn’t bother hiding his disgust. He shook his head. ‘I’ll finish up what I can here. That’s what I’m being paid for.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ And Taylor gave a smirk that made Box want to rub the useless prick’s face into the scattered wood shavings.

  Instead, he turned stiffly away and walked over to the ladder. He climbed back on to the roof where the new wind, cold as a thrown bucketful of ice-water, washed over his face. There was no point in arguing with Taylor. Box couldn’t be bothered with that shit anyway — the building-site politics and storm-in-a-teacup power struggles. He was done with that. He did his work and kept to himself. That was the plan — earn enough money to keep the wolf from breaking down the door back home and then get back to Liz and the kids.

  Box got to work nailing down the roof but he couldn’t help keeping half an eye on the other two. He saw Grant load his tools into the back of Taylor’s big red Nissan. The SUV was almost brand-new, bought on the tick, Box was sure. Grant was loping around behind Taylor like a dopey Labrador pup, grinning and excited at the prospect of the pub. When they were packed up, Box half expected Taylor to whistle the kid up into the passenger seat. Before pulling away, Taylor spun the back wheel on a hard smear of gravel left over from the concreting. Box watched the SUV drive down the winding road to the water, then turn right onto the only road up to the top of the harbour.

  ‘Useless prick,’ said Box and drove another nail home with two hard whacks of the hammer. Taylor was lazy. He was forever slacking off, unless Mitch was looking over his shoulder the whole time. And, even worse, he was sloppy; always trying to cut corners. He didn’t have the mindset or the experience to be a good builder. Mitch had only been in the game seven or eight years, and most of that time had been spent throwing together kitset homes that could be put up by a retarded monkey with a nail gun. And yet to hear Taylor tell it you’d think he had done it all. According to him he was a master bloody builder.

  Box told himself to let it go. He sucked cold air down through his nose into his lungs and released it slowly through his mouth. He tried to empty his mind, to relax the big muscles across the top of his shoulders. Liz used to teach yoga, had been right into it for years, and she was always trying to get him to breathe. She reckoned he carried too much tension in his body, whatever that meant.

  He shouldn’t let Taylor get to him. Box reminded himself that the bloke’s biggest problem was that he was young. At twenty-four Taylor was exactly half his age.

  Box got back to work nailing down the roof, one eye on the approaching clouds.

  He’d been wrong. It was only forty minutes later when the sun was blotted out and day turned to a hazy twilight. The clouds that had rolled in were dark and swollen and low. The wind had picked up to the point where it would have been stupid for Box to keep working on the roof. He was almost at the end of the sheet he was nailing down when the first fat drop of rain pinged into the metal next to his hand. Another drop hit the back of his sock. And then his shoulder. And then one scored a bull’s-eye on his bare neck, just above the collar of his bush shirt — exploding cold as a pinprick — and almost instantly it was raining full-on. For a moment, Box could smell the rain on the sun-warmed earth but then the deluge washed all scent from the air. The sound of the individual drops on the steel turned into a single rattling rolling kettledrum bash. It was, he thought, as if someone had spun open a valve in the clouds.

  Bent over against the rain, Box made it across the slippery roof. Water was already flowing along the bottom of the corrugations and waterfalling away into the air to land four metres below on the churned-up and baked earth of the building site. He forced himself to go slowly down the ladder. The very last thing he needed was to fall and to break his leg. Liz would love that. Although the regular ACC cheque would be welcome.

  When he got safely to the ground he ducked under the shelter of the only-one-third-there roof. Box shook his arms and brushed the drops of water off his bush shirt where they clung swollen and round and silvered by the dim light. The legs of his paint-and plaster-splattered work shorts were soaked through. The rain was close to deafening. The noise was not only coming from the roof, he could hear it hitting the exposed part of the concrete foundation and drumming off the tarsealed playing area in front of the classrooms. Box watched as a pile of dirty yellow sawdust turned lumpen as porridge. The earth of the site, which minutes before had been h
ard and brittle after a run of dry autumn days, quickly gave up trying to drain away the water and began to suck it down. Soon it had turned to a grey squelch that stretched right around the new foundations.

  There was no point in Box waiting for a break in the rain. This wasn’t a spring shower. The storm would last for the rest of the day. That’s what they’d predicted on the telly, anyway, and now, looking at the sky, Box believed it. He systematically packed his tools from his belt into his heavy toolbox. When he was finished he fastened the lid. He paused for a moment, then made a hunched dash for it, boots sinking into the mud. The building site was ringed by security fencing. Box dragged the gate shut behind him and used the heavy chain and the padlock to secure it. By the time he’d locked the gate, run to his ute and put the tools into the large metal box built onto the wooden deck behind the cab, fumbled the key into the door and climbed in, he wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing that was dry.

  Box slammed the ute’s door shut and sat in the cab, listening to his breathing competing with the heavy sound of the rain on the metal above his head. There was a time when he might have found sitting here saturated with his clothes moulding themselves to his body actually funny. But right now all he felt was irritated, pissed off. He gave the steering wheel a thump with the palm of his hand.

  Jesus, but he was unfit. Turning forty-nine at the end of July was no excuse. He needed to get back into the jogging, maybe do a little sparring. Liz hated him boxing but he’d always enjoyed it and it was a hell of a workout. Box was tall and broad shouldered and had always been fit. He had only a hint of a gut but was self-conscious about that, even around Liz. Not vain. Box just didn’t like the idea of losing it physically. He’d known too many guys who were overweight wrecks before they were fifty.

  He pulled off his cap and shook the water onto the floor of the passenger side. The cap was once navy-blue with the All Black silver fern logo stitched into the front, but the white stitching had come away and the blue had sun-faded down into a watercolourist’s summer sky. He ran his hand over his scalp and felt the rasp of a week’s worth of stubble against his palm.

  As a kid he’d had long red hair but in his mid-twenties he’d realised that keeping a full head of hair was a lost cause. Liz did all his haircuts outside with a pair of clippers set permanently to one. Sometimes he simply stood in the shower and shaved his head right along with his face. He joked that over the years he’d saved a fortune in shampoo. In summer he wore a cap for most of the daylight hours, even indoors. In winter he pulled on a beanie — like hair, but warmer and a better fit. That was another line he trotted out. There had been blokes he’d worked with for months who were surprised when they saw him for the first time with nothing on his head. People assumed that you had hair unless they saw evidence to the contrary.

  The ute was parked on the asphalt next to the school library and the painted lines of a four-square court next to it blurred under the thin sheen of water that had built up. If anything the rain was coming down harder now. Box reached over to the passenger seat and lifted up a plastic lunchbox. He opened it and took out a ham and cheese sandwich and a boiled egg. He’d prepared the lunch that morning in the motel room where there was a portable gas stove set up next to the sink. The egg still held a faint residual heat that he could feel against the skin of his hand. It wouldn’t do him any good to turn on the engine. The heater in the ute was buggered. It had died at the end of last winter and, at the time, Box didn’t have the cash to get it fixed. He still didn’t. Besides, a three-hundred dollar repair job would mean that the heater was worth more than all the other parts of the ute put together.

  His cellphone began to ring. Box started and had to juggle to keep hold of the egg. He swore. He’d forgotten that the phone was sitting down between the seats. He never carried it on him when he was on a site. He didn’t like to be interrupted while he was working. A cellphone in his back pocket, ready to go off any second, always put him in two places. He picked up the phone and pushed a button.

  ‘Yeah, hello?’

  ‘Box. You okay? You sound pissed off.’

  It was Mitch calling from up north, but it was hard to hear him over the rain on the roof of the cab.

  ‘Nah, I’m fine, Mitch.’

  ‘How’s it going down there?’

  ‘It’s all over. Rained out.’

  ‘What?’

  Louder this time. ‘We’re rained out. That southerly came in.’

  ‘Did you get the roof finished?’

  ‘No. It’s only about half done.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Box heard that loud enough. ‘This weather’s all I need. I thought April was supposed to be settled.’

  ‘TV forecast said that it should blow through tonight. Tomorrow afternoon is supposed to be fine.’

  ‘I can’t afford any more delays.’

  ‘Hope those kids don’t mind working in a classroom with no walls.’

  ‘Don’t even joke about it.’ Mitch sighed loudly enough to be heard over the rain’s din. ‘I’m going to need you boys over on the George Street site. There’s plenty to do there.’

  ‘Sure. I can drive over soon as I drop by the motel and get some dry clothes. But Taylor and Grant have already left.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Useless prick. I’ve already tried Taylor’s cell. It’s switched off.’

  ‘You hired him.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks for reminding me. Okay, look, you swing by the motel. If Taylor’s there, tell him and Grant to get over to George Street. And tell Taylor to turn his fucking phone back on.’

  ‘Can I quote you on that?’

  ‘You can say what you like, Box, as long as he bloody does it.’

  Mitch hung up.

  Box finished what was left of his lunch and then turned on the ute’s engine and pulled out of the school grounds.

  At the bottom of the hill, he switched on his headlights although it was only just past noon. The road that ran around this side of the harbour wove in and out of a series of small bays and headlands. As he passed, he saw the huddles of houses set among the trees. Other, more expensive, places were built right up on the steep ridges. Box imagined the owners sitting up there at night and looking out over the black water to the lights of the city. But not today: the harbour was blotted out by low cloud and rain.

  The ute’s wipers were struggling to keep up with the amount of water hitting the windscreen. The worn blades had only two speeds — on and off. On was a kind of spastic twitch that made it three-quarters of the way through its arc before bolting convulsively back to the right. Then there was an unnaturally long pause as it readied itself for the next effort. Most of the time Box saw the world ahead as soft-edged and intangible. He drove leaning forward, nosing into the downpour. The ute had just scraped through its last warrant of fitness test by the skin of its teeth.

  The road ahead was black and slick. In several places the gutters were blocked by dams of sodden autumn leaves and streams flowed across the road in front of him, water spraying up as he drove through. On his right the waves pounded and sprayed up over low concrete walls that had been built to stop the harbour from gnawing at the edges of the road.

  The phone went again. Keeping his eyes on the road, Box reached into the passenger seat and fumbled the cell up to his ear. ‘Yeah, it’s still raining down here, Mitch.’

  ‘Box.’

  It wasn’t Mitch ringing back. It was Liz. Something was wrong. He could hear it in her voice even above the noise of the rain and the engine. She said his name so that the word was an empty hole.

  ‘Liz?’

  Nothing now.

  ‘Liz? It’s me. Can you hear me?’

  She almost moaned his name.

  ‘I’m here. What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s Mark.’

  ‘What’s he done this time?’

  ‘There’s been an accident.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Box.’ Her
voice was shaking.

  ‘Just tell me. Christ.’

  The rain is streaming down. The wipers are going across, revealing for a moment the narrow road and the snaking white line. The spray from a broken wave blows across the dark road, hitting the side of the ute.

  ‘He’s dead. Mark’s dead. Box.’

  Box lowers the phone. It drops from his hand into his lap, still making noises. He can hear Liz saying his name.

  He’s driving around a pointed headland where the road has been cut into the rock and the gouged and broken face of the cliff rises up sheer from the road without so much as a footpath. There’s nowhere to pull over. He drives on until he finds a place at the top of a shingle beach where there’s angle parking for the cars belonging to the summer people who came here to picnic and swim. Box swings the ute in and turns off the engine. In front of him the waves are biting down into the beach, one after another after another, endlessly. The harbour beyond the waves is lost in cloud and sheets of rain. The waves are dark brown, choked with seaweed and driftwood and silt from the floor of the harbour. With the engine off, he can hear them, the waves, their rumble mixing with the drumming rain on the roof of the cab and the wind’s howl; all of it melting into a roar in his ears.

  He fumbles up the phone again. ‘Liz. Liz. I’m here.’

  She’s sobbing. It has obviously taken everything Liz has to get out the few words he’s already heard. He waits and listens to the sounds of the storm and to the sound of his wife’s tears.