A Many Coated Man by Owen Marshall Read Free Book Online

as the light goes. Bright, self-advertisements of distinctiveness are replaced by washes of shadow, blue and grey. Hedgehogs begin snuffling amongst the pea-straw that Kellie has laid beneath the shrubs, moths swerve clumsily towards the windows behind the patio where Kellie and Slaven have come out again. Kellie has a cardigan over her shoulders and as she sits surrounded by all the commonplace reassurance of her home, she stifles any fears of where Slaven’s new life will take them and how it will end. ‘What does it feel like?’ she says.
    ‘Feel like?’
    ‘To have yourself turned upside down, yet still look just the same. We’re heading off god knows where, with scarcely a remark about it. I imagined more emotion, long discussion, declarations of commitment and intent. Instead it’s just happening isn’t it.’
    Slaven makes a quick grimace in the dusk. He opens his mouth to make the impossible explanations to his wife. Even as he talks he is confounded by the realisation that the more urgently he is driven to influence other people, the more aware he becomes of an unspeakable and final isolation. There is no necessary sense to it, but consequences will be no less for that. Something has been burnt out of him, perhaps, or something exposed. All our troubles fall away, when we’re together at Half Moon Bay.
     
    It is cold and still when Slaven and Miles drive from Blenheim to Tuamarina on the Picton road. The grass is bowed down with the melt water of the night’s frost andwhere any stock have disturbed it their tracks are clear within the milky paddocks. At the Tuamarina turn-off there is little visible to encourage cars to stop: a lay-by, the cheese factory and primary school beyond the railway line, the small cemetery on the summit of the first, abrupt hill which overlooks the plain. The new prosperity of boutique vineyards and lifestyle organic horticulture has passed by this part of the Wairau. The trees are motionless and from a weatherboard farmhouse a trail of chimney smoke gradually topples to one side. Two border collies bark them past, the heads jerking at each release of the sound. The sky of the grey winter morning presses over everything like a shark’s belly.
    Slaven carefully negotiates the few, steep bends of the cemetery hill, the granite and concrete of the graves repeating the colour of the sky. At the summit, behind the patch of graves there, a park has been bulldozed out on the ridge which runs back to the gathering hills. No one else has arrived, but some preparations stand from the day before. A line of yellow portaloos has been set behind a green canvas screen and flexible pipes from them snake down the hill to a large tanker parked on the flat. There are stacks of chairs to be set out for invited guests and the infirm. The dew covers the tubular backs with droplets and has pooled in the top seat of each pile. Angel Hire, is stamped on each backrest. There is one strung banner to identify the day’s event, its vinyl background lighter than the morning sky and the blue lettering saying Praise The Lord. A cheerful, defiant banner, even if one end is held up by a manuka pole and the other attached to the eucalypt tree which grows over the grave of those Europeans killed in the skirmish with the Maori in 1843.
    It is all so ordinary, so do-it-yourself, so low-key New Zealand. ‘Perfect,’ whispers Miles from the car. For him it is the best moment of the whole occasion. He doesn’t want anyone else to come, doesn’t care if no one speaks, if no issues are raised, or resolved. He doesn’t want people gradually obscuring his view with their earnest, solid bodies and the equally solid belief in their own importance. The secret pride of New Zealanders is to be alone in their landscape. Miles wants to see the sooty fantail on the looscreen, the stacks of Angel Hire chairs amongst the grass drenched with the winter dew, the side-road bearing west to Waikakaho, the Wairau River in the middle