By the Tracks We Leave
Chapter One: Rogan
Rogan Fielding paused for a few moments, panting, braced against the slope. He looked up. The track was indistinct here, little more than a faint scratch across the land, but he could see the rough line of rocks that marked the divide. After that, the route would be easier: a longer, gentler descent into the next valley and the first hut, his home for the night.
He would sleep well. Only half a day out, and his legs were aching. But it was doing him good, body and mind.
He hitched his rucksack onto his shoulders, and restarted his climb. He kept his eyes on the horizon, on a stunted tree that he had already marked as his next point of rest, willing it closer, watching its slow rise with each hauled step.
Then the tree changed shape, became the figure of a man. It moved right to left along the ridgeline, back hunched against the wind.
He measured their progress, trying to calculate whether they would meet – hoping they would do so, for the sight of someone else made the hills suddenly seem vast and his own existence small. Yet in another dozen steps it was obvious that they would not. The man was striding out, seeming to eat up the path; they would miss each other by a hundred metres or more. He thought of calling; wondered if the other walker would look down, see him and pause. But the man strode on.
A few minutes later, Rogan crested the slope himself. The force of the wind brought tears to his eyes, and he turned away. Further along the ridge, the man was still walking fast. As Rogan watched, the figure dissolved to a black shape again, dwindled, was itself eaten up by the land.
He turned around, facing the wind once more. With gritted teeth he strode into it, head down. Another five minutes and he reached a low cluster of rocks where the track split. He ducked between them into a narrow cleft, threw himself down and lay back. Above him, the wind whistled and howled.
Walking had been Kate’s idea. She had suggested it for his sake – yet perhaps for hers as well. He went to flab too easily, she said – and she didn’t like fat men. It would help to keep him in trim; it was that or join her in the gym. To his surprise he had liked it, and they had walked often. After she left, though, he had failed to keep it up; had slipped back into a more sluggish life. He’d put the kilos back on and hadn’t fretted over it, for there was no-one who might care. And as he buried himself deeper in his work, there hadn’t been the time. So the sudden decision to go tramping again, not just a stroll but a three-day hike, had been something of a surprise even to him. He’d questioned his motives as he searched the house for missing gear, tried to brush the mud off his walking boots, wipe the mildew from his waterproofs, did so again soon after he’d set out, when he encountered his first real climb.
Yet lying there now, he knew that he was enjoying it and could see its sense. Another tentative step on the journey back. For in the last few months, something had stirred. At first just the sharp recognition of loneliness. Then the gradual – sometimes clumsy – attempt to do something about it. An evening with Mac and the others in the bar. Driving to Christchurch to spend a night with old university friends, reliving memories, before parting in embarrassed hugs and promises. With an oblique look, browsing the on-line dating websites, before hurrying onto some other page in the endeavour to make it feel like an accident. Once, when he could not settle, couldn’t face the night alone, cruising the Dunedin streets, assessing every woman he passed, finding himself lured and repulsed in equal measure; until he realised that he was looking at girls of fifteen, women of fifty, and could hardly tell them apart, and swerved away, down a side-road, made his way home.
He checked his watch. Nearly two o’clock now. Time to move on. He picked up his rucksack. Feeling refreshed, buoyant, he set off, through the tussock grass, down to the stream, followed it more slowly, stretching the day out.
The hut, when he reached it, was empty, but in the shelter of the valley it felt warm and welcoming. He cooked a simple meal, and sat in the doorway eating it greedily. Opposite, the sun spread its colour into the evening sky, lit up the snow-patches, and sent shadows sprawling over the land. He stayed, watching, until the air had cooled and the whole valley lapsed to dark. Then he unrolled his sleeping mat and bag on one of the bunk-shelves, slid inside gratefully, and slept until well after dawn.
He set out the next day, feeling strong and refreshed. The day seemed to welcome him. Bright sun, a pale sky swept clean by the wind. Beneath the trees, the sun dappled the ground, and he walked mindlessly, as if in a bubble. When he emerged from the forest, the bubble dissolved, and he saw himself as a tiny point on an empty landscape, making microbial progress across the stretched surface of the world. By lunch-time, however, it had all changed. The sky had become faceless and opaque. Clouds piled against the peaks, the horizon shrank. The air started to bite. Just below the ridge he stopped and ate a hurried meal, crouching in a hollow.
As he stepped onto the crest, the rain came.
It swept towards him from the valley beyond, unimpeded. It spread its gauze of grey around him, and pulled him into itself. It seemed to focus all its energy upon him, the only living thing in its way – battering at his anorak, lashing at his cheeks, filling his eyes. It hung in large droplets from his nose. His boots squelched and slipped in the mud. His exposed hands were stiff and numb.
He zipped his anorak to the chin, pulled the hood tight. With lengthened stride he drove forward. How far to the hut? Five kilometres? He counted his steps, subtracting them from the distance he still had to go. Fixing his mind on his destination. Imagining its eager embrace.
The thought brought a small, new seed of hope. In these conditions, he might not be the only refugee from the hills. Other people might already be there; maybe even the man he had seen the previous day. He conjured up the scene in the hut. A fire. Smoke hanging beneath the roof. Bodies huddled close, welcoming him amongst them. A hot stew on the stove, enough for him to be given a share. Maybe a beer or two, or a warming whisky. Laughter at their mutual misfortune.
He strode, slipped, stumbled on. Cursed aloud, his voice fleeing to nothing in the clamour of the wind and rain. He thought again of the hut, of the people waiting; the promise of warmth and company.
*
The door was unyielding. He pushed again, but it would not budge.
It had taken him another two hours to get here. The daylight had almost gone. He was tired, miserable with the cold.
For a third time he pushed. The obstruction, whatever it might be, seemed to be low down, half a metre or so above the ground, almost as if someone on the other side had their knee against the door.
He hammered on the wood, shouted “What the hell’s going on?” He listened, half expecting laughter in return, but there was no answer. He knelt and slid his hand around the edge of the door. He touched something soft: fabric or perhaps the fur of an animal. Instinctively, he withdrew his hand.
He reached out again. A sack, full and heavy, wedged against the door. He tugged at it, but it would not move.
Crouched, he put his shoulder against the wood, heaved with sudden desperation. It slid slowly open. He stumbled inside.
The room was dark. His outstretched hand jarred against a wooden post. But the sudden dryness of the air felt good and warm on his face. He steadied himself, while his mind and eyes cleared, then turned to look back at the door. He felt his breath catch. The thing that lay there was no longer a sack, but a human figure. A man, slumped forward, head loose.
“Are you alright?”
He stepped forward, knelt down beside the figure; reached a hand out to the face.
The wind yanked at the door, making it bang against his leg, scattering rain and grit across the room.
Even to his fingers, the touch of the skin was cold. It was a strange, dull coldness. The product not of the weather but something more visceral, more consuming, draining the last warmth from his hand.
Dead?
His sluggish mind resisted the notion. It didn’t seem possible. Death wasn’t something he knew or expected first-hand. Not in this way, not so incidentally. If it were to approach him, surely it would be with a fanfare or warning. So he remained kneeling, waiting for the man to move or respond in some way, curious rather than alarmed.
Then, tentatively, he reached out and touched him again. Still cold. Water dripped from his sleeve onto the man’s shoulder, and he went to wipe it away; stopped, took the man’s wrist instead, felt for a pulse. There was nothing. He put his ear to the man’s mouth, trying to catch some small sound or brush of breath. Again, nothing. He pushed the man’s collar down and touched the neck. It felt doughy and inert.
As the truth at last broke, questions spilled into his mind. Was this the man he had seen only yesterday? How had he died? Was there still any chance of reviving him? What should he do? Should he try and get help?
In what seemed like his first act of rationality, he fumbled for his mobile phone, yet knew as he did so that there would be no signal. He looked around, hoping for some form of illumination – a candle, a lamp – but in the gathering gloom could see nothing. He shivered, as much perhaps from the shock of his discovery as his physical state.
Then his thoughts steadied. He had a torch. And it was just another backpackers’ hut like all the others. He knew its layout, what it had to offer. Bunk beds on either side. A wood stove on the further wall, a small table, three or four wooden chairs. A single window and a sink behind him, just inside the door, fed from the rainwater tank outside. There would be matches, perhaps candles, by the stove; if he were lucky some paper, dry wood.
He found the torch and played it around the room, careful to avoid the man. Within minutes, he had two candles guttering on the windowsill, the makings of a fire in the stove, a battered billy full of water waiting for the heat to take hold. Only then did he step past the body and push the door shut.
One of the chairs was lying askew in the middle of the room. He righted it and sat by the stove. Huddling close for every grain of warmth, he looked across at the man. Not directly at first, he was not ready for that, but with a quick, sidelong glance.
The man was dressed normally enough. An old Barbour jacket, its fabric scuffed and cracked, dark green trousers, muddied walking boots. Despite the misshapen sprawl of the body, he was obviously tall, rather angular, a man who had carried little waste. He might have been in his seventies or early eighties. White hair, untrimmed, hung in loose strands across his scalp. Long fingers splayed from bony hands.
Was it the man he had seen the previous day? He could not tell.
Slowly, fighting his emotions, he looked back at the face, studied it, seeking clues. It was thin-featured, the hollow of the cheeks emphasised by the dancing light. There was a rough stubble on his chin. The mouth hung slightly open. The eyes were vacant, expressionless, yielding no hint of knowledge or a past.
Just a body, a corpse, that existed only as it was now, slumped by the door. Fancifully, he imagined that it might have been there for years; might stay there for years more, anonymous, hardly noticed, save when someone tripped against a stray foot, or needed somewhere to drape a wet pair of jeans.
With an effort he pulled his wandering mind back, stood up, said aloud: “Christ, I’m tired.”
He needed to focus on practicalities. To get changed, dry out his clothes, eat, sleep. He opened his rucksack. Immediately, the inadequacies of his preparations for the trip became evident. His rucksack was old, the seams had leaked; he’d not packed anything in polythene bags. His sleeping bag and mat, spare clothes were all wet. He stripped off, chose the driest alternatives he could find, and put them on; arranged all his wet things around the stove.
The knowledge of the body, there by the door, dragged at his attention, as if he were being watched. He glanced towards it.
Who was he?
Suddenly curious, he went across to the man to seek some means of identification – a wallet, a diary, any piece of hard fact. As he did so, a new thought occurred. He gave the arm of the jacket an experimental tug. It resisted. He heaved the body into a sitting position, its back to his legs, and pulled again. The jacket slid off. With an effort, he hauled the body around, propped it against the wall. It sat there, looking drunken, defeated, disarranged.
The light from the candles played across the face, carving shadows in the skin. It etched out a coarse scar that ran across his forehead, diagonally from his left eye. Rogan reached out and touched it. The blood was dry, congealed.
Had he fallen, been attacked?
He fetched a candle and searched for marks on the floor, where the man’s head would have lain. Amid the other stains on the wood it was hard to tell, but there seemed to be a small dark area, the size of a dinner plate. It was smooth, yet faintly tacky to the touch.
Then another question: where was the man’s pack? Surely, there had to be one. He looked around. There was none in sight. Lost before he arrived? Abandoned?
But as he stood up, something else caught his eye. A crumpled piece of paper in the space where the body had lain. A photograph. He placed it on the table, then retrieved the man’s jacket, put it on. The lining was cold against his skin. It seemed unwilling to warm him. He felt in the pockets, found them empty.
He picked up the photograph. The paper was soft, creased. Had he been holding it? Had it simply been loose on the floor? He peered at it. A woman. In the dim light it was difficult to make out any details, and the colours had faded – but in her forties, perhaps. Slim, dark-haired. Laughing. She stood, holding a bicycle, in front of what looked like a shop doorway. On the wall above her, in large letters, was a word: ANGER.
He turned it over. There was nothing on the reverse. He placed it back on the table, stood looking down at it. Had it been the man’s?
Would she be waiting?
Across the room, the body faced him, its thoughts a secret. It seemed twisted, molested and he went over to it and righted it as best he could. The sense of pillage remained.
He turned his mind to his own comfort again and scouted around the hut, searching for anything else he might wear or use as bedding until his own sleeping bag dried. There were no mattresses, but on one of the bunks he found a thin blanket, and in a corner was a small pile of odd and holey socks. He pulled two onto each foot, used two others for his hands.
The heat from the stove was already waning, and he threw the remainder of the logs into the fire, knowing that he’d regret it later in the night when the fire died.
The action made him realise that if he were to have hot food, he needed to cook it soon. He went to his rucksack, took out the remainder of his rice, a bag of sauce. Clumsy in his mittened hands, he cooked them together on the stove; ate straight from the pan.
Finally, dog-tired, he poked at the fire, pulled the two chairs together in front of it, huddled into the blanket and tried to sleep. Failed. Found himself instead fixed by the shape of the body across the room. A formless shadow against the wall, made real only by his memory of the cold skin, the empty look of the eyes. And by the sudden darting light from the stove that every now and then would make quick sketches of his features, bringing them alive.
He found himself, also, prey to his circling thoughts. Reliving the events of the day. Trying to make sense of the scene he had stumbled into. Exploring different explanations, imagining different scenes, each of which dissolved into fantasy. He pushed them away.
New thoughts queued up in their place. About the woman who might be waiting. About the man’s life.
Muddled thoughts about his own.
Kate. Life with her, and without. Meeting and parting.
Familiar thoughts, like old yet unwanted friends. There’d be no sleep now, for a while. He let them in.
It had been her suggestion to leave Christchurch, to come here.
She’d told him one evening, as she sat at his feet by the fire, in their small town flat. There was a vacancy in the Queenstown office of the real estate company she worked for, she had said, with responsibilities for farm and lifestyle properties. It offered not only promotion, more money, but a new life away from the city. Something, she said, that she had always wanted to do.
They’d be able to get a bigger place, she’d argued, excitement in her voice. Maybe even a house.
And it would be good for him. An opportunity to do what he wanted, to go independent, to be his own boss.
The chance to show people what he could do.
He could hear her hope, feel her eagerness, could not say no. So he’d leaned forward and kissed her, in the pale centre of her head where the hair parted; gently, slipped his arms down her side. Whispered his love to her, telling her that he’d happily go anywhere with her – even Otago. Making a joke of it, making her laugh, so that the import of it all would not show.
Two weeks later, he had submitted his resignation to the TV production company he was working for. They reacted swiftly and with what seemed like real concern, asking him to think again, hinting at inducements to stay, sketching out the career he was abandoning. As calmly as he could, he batted it all away, wrapping his decision up in the ambition she’d painted for him, in the yearning for independence. They hadn’t heard the last of him, he assured them; he’d be back, and charging a lot more for the fruits of his labour. They wished him luck.
The reality was no easier than he, or they, had expected. Not just his work, struggling to get established, but Kate equally. Trying to match her emotions, chasing the all too familiar switchback of her moods. Huge joy and hope at first, driving her to excess – at work, with friends, in their private play together. Then slowly, inevitably, its antithesis creeping in. Doubt and despair.
He watched, feeling helpless, as her world unravelled again. As she retreated back into herself, feeding off her failure and sense of blame. Hungry all the time for more. So that when she guessed that his own endeavours were failing, as she easily did – for in her eyes everything around her was fraying and at risk – she absorbed the blame for that as well.
He fought against it, as best he knew how, with false cheerfulness, manufactured hope, genuine love and sympathy. But it did no good. Like twigs in an eddy, they circled around each other, neither of use to the other. Neither of them wanting to recognise their plight, pretending.
Until, after a year, she left.
Since then?
Doubts of his own. And guilt. And confusion.
For he had thought that they could be happy, and that he gave her as much as any man could. Not just love, but understanding, support. Was that true?
And if not, where exactly had he failed?
He still did not know.
But it had left him drained. Bereft, betrayed. Not by her – he could say that honestly. Rather, by himself, by his own limits and lack of strength, his own judgement of himself, of her. So that he no longer trusted his emotions, or other women he might meet.
In response, he did what he later supposed every man did: threw himself into his work. It had its compensations. He found himself thinking, writing with a new edge – the sharpness of solitude, of anger. It brought achievement of a sort. A monthly programme for Radio Otago. A documentary for a TV franchise. Articles for newspapers and magazines. Enough to live off. A rough trajectory beginning to form.
Though no replacement for Kate, nor any real attempt to find one. The nut of distrust that had grown within him seemed to harden rather than dissolve. It guarded his independence; probably cast a shadow of surliness around him, like a warning to others. If so it had worked, for he was still alone.
He went over to the stove, felt at his sleeping bag and mat. They were almost dry now, enough at least to use. He made up a bed on one of the bunks, crawled into the bag. Lay there, gazing at the ceiling.
The fire in the stove flared again briefly, and he instinctively glanced across the room. The man’s eyes glinted back, his mouth shaping silent words. Like a dying man, trying to reveal his secret, voice his last wish.
Then darkness once more.
He turned over, towards the wall, slept.
The dawn brought confusion. He woke with sleep still cluttering his mind. The silence, the smell of wood smoke, the shape of the bunk above him, the wall at his side, were all strange. The body by the door, waiting for him when he turned, unfathomable, like the remnant of a dream made real.
After a quick breakfast, he packed hurriedly. Then he stood, looking around. It seemed inappropriate simply to leave like this, but there was nothing he could think of to do.
He saw the jacket he’d worn during the night, took it across to the body, hung it around the shoulders.
Then another thought. The photograph. He went back to the table, picked it up, looked at it again. The paradox of the laughter on the woman’s face, the word behind her – anger – intrigued him and seemed to beg attention. He slipped it into his pocket, and with one last glance at the man, stepped outside.
After the excesses of the previous day, the weather now was apologetic. The wind scuffed its feet in the grass; tag-ends of clouds scuttled away towards the mountains like late night revellers caught out in the dawn. The air tasted of a fresh start.
He closed the door, then noticed a pack at the corner of the building, propped against the wall. It was old-style, metal-framed, well-worn. In the space beneath the main compartment was a small, lightweight tent. He unzipped the pack, looked inside. It smelt fungal and damp. Beneath a rolled-up sleeping bag, he found a polythene bag containing a few items of food, another of used clothes; kerosene stove, matches. In the outer pockets a water bottle and topographic maps, a compass. The usual paraphernalia of a well-prepared walker out on the hills. The only item of any exception was a notebook, bound in a plastic wrap. He flipped it open, browsed through the pages. It seemed to be a diary of sorts, for there were dates with short passages beneath. Not records of anything specific, but seemingly random thoughts, written in a personal language of abbreviations and half-words, and in a scrawling hand. Nothing to identify him.
He repacked the bag, put it inside the hut, set off back to his car.
It was late morning by the time he arrived. As soon as he did so, he rang for the police, was passed onto the Queenstown station, and told his story. An hour later two police cars arrived. While a pair of officers headed up to the hut, he gave a statement, sitting in one of the cars. He felt suddenly weary, weak, and the policewoman taking the statement offered him coffee. He drank it gratefully. Even so his account seemed stumbling and confused, and as he added his signature he noticed his hand tremble with fatigue.
When he had finished, he drove slowly back to town, seeing the world slip past him in a daze. At home, he fed the cat, bathed, ate. Then the urgent need to tell someone all about it engulfed him. He rang his sister, Trish, in Auckland. She listened sympathetically, as she always did, while he recounted the story in a jumbled way. She told him to get some sleep and call again when he was rested. He went to bed.
He was still asleep at nine the following morning when the phone rang. It was the police, thanking him for what he’d done, telling him that they had recovered the body though not yet identified the man. Nor could they yet confirm the cause of death; there would be a post-mortem, as there usually was in circumstances like this. Then the coroner might order an inquest. If so, it was possible that he would be called as a witness. They would keep him informed.
He replaced the phone, relieved. He’d feared that he’d find himself tied up in bureaucracy for days. He had other things to get on with: his weekly contribution to the Queenstown Gazette; an article for the Air New Zealand magazine; his next programme for Radio Otago. Though at that moment, he told himself, they could all wait another hour or so. He lay down again, closed his eyes.
Then he remembered the picture.
He went to the bathroom, where he’d hung his anorak to dry. He felt in the pockets, pulled out the still-damp photograph; took it back to the bedroom, stood studying it.
Was it important? Ought he to tell the police?
He reached for the phone. As he did so, it rang.
“Mr Fielding?”
Warily, wondering if it was the police, he answered: “Yes?”
“ODT here – Otago Daily Times. My name’s Lester Lovell. I work on the news desk. I understand you found a body of a man on the hills yesterday. I wondered if you could tell me a little about it: how you found him, what state it was in.”
He felt a wave of fatigue, and had to push down an instinct to refuse. As a journalist himself, he was used to that – being denied an interview – and it always irritated him; he, at least, should play the game. Nevertheless, he found it difficult to be forthcoming. Standing there, trying to piece the story together again, make it sound linear and rational, he realised how recent it still was, how unformed his memory of the episode. How the events themselves had yet to become settled and fixed, so that, even as he recounted them, they reshaped and reordered themselves in his mind.
By the end of the morning, however, he had had considerably more practice in the telling. For in close succession, he had three more calls: from a local paper, from a news agency, from Radio National. Later – and belatedly he acknowledged – he rang Radio Otago to give them the story. Each time, the questions were much the same. What had happened? How did he feel at the time? How did he think the man had died? Did he know who he was? Could he give a little information about himself?
It was the same in the afternoon, when he went into town. News of the event had clearly already been aired on the radio or TV. And once released, information travelled fast in a small community like this, though mutating as it ran. When he called on his neighbour, to thank her for looking after Darwin while he’d been away, she showered him with concern. It must have been a shock, a horrible ordeal. Was he alright? Did he need to talk about it at all? At the store, Pru asked: “What’s this about a body?” Outside, Greg, one of the crowd he knew from the bar, crossed the street to him, calling out: “Hey Rogan – someone said you’d found an injured climber.” By the next day, in the bar, the body had become a murdered man. Each time, he felt the story drift a little further away from him, from his own experience. It was no longer his, but a tale that anyone could tell, with a momentum of its own.
What he was left with, as he sat at his desk trying to work, or lay in bed searching for sleep, was something different. Not a story, but the bones of one. Broken fragments, images that came back to him, uninvited. A dark shape slumped against the wall. A mouth, hung slightly open, showing crooked teeth. The coldness of a jacket on his own skin. A crumpled photograph. And questions – not about the event itself, the discovery, but a time before. A gap that he could not fill, a place that he had not been. The man himself. Who he was. How he had died. Why – and why there, then? His life.
Another story, suddenly cut short, untold.
He rang Trish once more.
Of the three siblings, it had always been he, the eldest, and she the youngest, who had been closest. They shared much in both personality and tastes, and in the as yet unresolved pattern of their lives. Only the middle one, Beth, had followed the path that their parents had expected and wished for them all. Getting married, settling down – though to their disappointment, not nearby – having children; wholly fulfilled. Like him, Trish was still searching. The difference between them, he felt, was that she enjoyed the hunt, and did not show the scars, whereas for him the scars seemed to be all. He envied her for that, wondered how she achieved it. Claimed to himself that it owed something to his own brotherly protection, his concern, his advice. In return, she gave him what he needed: understanding, gentle adoration, teasing inquisitiveness.
He got that now. She listened again as he told her how his discovery had turned already into something of a local legend, with him as the hero. “So you should be,” she said. She commiserated as he grumbled that it was all getting too much for him, distracting him from his work. “You poor thing.” Then she quizzed him about the man. Had he learned anything about him? Where did he think he was from? Was he a local?
Surely someone knew him, was missing him. “That would be so sad,” she said. “Not to know. Not even to have felt some twinge of anxiety, some sort of telepathy.” She didn’t believe in such things, he knew. Like him, she was a rationalist, scornful of anything that even smelled of mysticism. But she believed in the force of love. “To have lived those days as a lie.”
He thought once more about the photograph.
It was the one element of the story he hadn’t told her about, though why he was not sure. Mild embarrassment, perhaps, at the fact of his taking it; the further embarrassment of having to excuse his action to the police, if she told him he ought to hand it over. He shied away from telling her now, but could not suppress the question: who might it be; might she be waiting?
After he had put the phone down, he retrieved the picture, looked at it once more. Something about it told him that it was not recent. The feel of the paper, heavier, softer than modern materials. The colours – russet mid-tones, like pre-digital photos, taken on film. The shop window, the bike, not like anything found on the street today. So a picture from his past? Some family memento? A wife, a lover?
And the word above her head. Anger. Unintended? Or a deliberate piece of code between the two of them – photographer and photographed – saying something about that day? Or a message just to him, from her? I’m angry. I reject your anger.
Another conundrum.
The next day, however, one question at least was resolved. In mid-afternoon the officer who had interviewed him in the car rang. A courtesy call she said, just to update him on developments. “We have a name for him, now. Nielsen. John Trelawney Nielsen to be precise. It’s a bit of a surprise you didn’t know him: he’s a local – well, of sorts. He lived out at the end of the Parehike Valley. Kevin, your bobby, recognised him when we circulated the photograph. He checked with Nielsen’s neighbours; one of them, a Mrs Guthrie, gave us a formal identification.”
Rogan thanked her. “Do you have any idea yet about how he died?”
“Not yet. The post mortem will take a few days, and then the coroner will have to prepare a report. It should be here next week. We’ll know then whether there’ll need to be an inquest: you’ll probably be contacted if so.”
“What about family, relatives?”
“None that we know of; he lived alone. Though there’s possibly someone back in England: it seems he lived there for a while, years ago. We’re making enquiries.” But often, she continued, things became clearer once the funeral was arranged. Kevin would be asking around, to see who might take that task on. Locals often remembered then, or the announcement brought people forward. Then she added: “Though it looks to me as if he was just an old man, seeing out his time. There’s a lot of them like that in these remote places. They hide out there, the last of their line, living on their memories.”
Mac was sitting at his usual table, alone. One leg stretched out, easing the pain in his knee. An injury from his days at the sawmill, he’d said, and not the only one: a finger on his left hand was reduced to a knuckle-stub, a thumb twisted. Rogan went across to him, clutching a beer, pulled out a chair.
“Others not here yet?” Usually there was a crowd of them, six or seven at least. A mixed bunch. Maddy, Mac’s daughter-in-law; Rob who ran a landscaping business, Vince one of his workers; Aiden; the brothers Greg and Brad.
Mac sipped at his glass. A tonic water; he reserved beer-drinking for when he had company. “Something on at the school,” he said, “So Maddy won’t be here until later. Don’t know about the others: broke, I expect; they often are. Or just sitting in front of their telly.”
It was true. Rogan was only an occasional member of their group – welcomed on a form of guest status, which as Mac had once told him meant that it was his duty to buy the beer. He did so willingly enough, for it was good to have their company when he needed it: nights when he tired of his bachelor existence, the silent room, or as now when he needed to talk. But he had become aware over recent months how their presence had thinned.
“What brings you out? Nothing better to do?”
“Just the opposite really. Far too much. So I’m playing truant.”
They were silent for a while, then Mac said: “So it was JT you found.”
It took a moment for the meaning to crystallise. “Nielsen? Yes. Did you know him?”
“A little. Not close. I don’t think any of us did. He kept himself to himself. But he can’t be blamed for that.” Mac rubbed at his knee, grumbled that it was troubling him tonight, blaming the weather. “Lived out in the Parehike somewhere. End of the road. So we didn’t see him often. Used to come in for supplies, spend a bit of time with Bill.” He finished his tonic and put it down on the table. “You staying long enough for another?”
Rogan nodded, quickly downing the rest of his own beer. “Here, I’ll get them.” Mac resisted briefly, then yielded to the offer with a nod and rueful smile.
“You know his story, do you?” he asked, when Rogan came back.
“No.”
“Quite something. Before he came here of course. Years back. Captured by some rebel group in South America somewhere. Guatemala, I think. Held him for a few years before he got away. Probably made him what he was. Independent. Bit of a loner.”
Rogan thought of the body, tried to fit the events to the man he had seen.
With a little prompting, Mac went on. Nielsen, it seemed, had been captured along with some other tourists, back-packers, by an armed group. He was held in the jungle, eventually escaped when the chance arose, made his way back to civilisation. Later, he’d led the army back to the camp. Too late: the other hostages had been killed.
“Maddy will know more,” Mac said. “I can’t remember it all now. She learned about it at school, or maybe that boy of hers did. You should ask her.”
Later, Rogan did so. She arrived just after Rob; while he got the drinks, she leaned over and kissed Mac on the cheek, asked him how his knee was this evening, brushed his cheek with a hand when he admitted that it wasn’t good. Greeted Rogan with a warm smile.
“Our friend here wants to know about JT. I said you’d oblige.”
She told him the story again. “He came and gave a talk on it once, at school. Ben came home full of it. So what I know I got from him.” Perhaps for that reason some of the details differed from Mac’s account. How long he’d been held for, how he had escaped. And it was in Nicaragua, she said, not Guatemala. Mac was never any good at geography.
“Or history. Or English and maths,” he muttered.
“So when was this?” Rogan asked.
“Nineteen-sixties. About nineteen sixty-four, I think.”
“So then what?”
“Afterwards? I don’t really know.” She looked at Mac, eyebrows raised in enquiry.
“No. He never said much about any of it. Not unless you really pushed him. Like I say, kept himself to himself. He was British, I think, originally; came here first as a child. Then worked overseas. Africa was it? Came back fifteen years ago, when he retired, and has been here ever since.”
“There were reports about it at the time, in the local papers,” Maddy added. “When he came back, I mean. They treated him as a bit of a local hero, and interviewed him. I looked them up, after Ben told me all about him. They’re in the library.”
They talked on, adding in a few more memories about Nielsen, things he’d told them, things they’d heard; opinions about his character. Not much of a legacy from a life, Rogan mused.
As they talked, Vince joined them. He was an edgy, brittle young man, with the ragged hair, fleshy lips, careless clothes of a seventies rock-star. Of them all, Rogan knew him and warmed to him the least. He seemed moody and self-absorbed. He could swing from bright bonhomie to dark despair in the space of an evening. He seemed to be in the latter shade tonight, for he sat slightly apart, staring into his glass, saying little.
For a while, they speculated about how Nielsen had died, circulating through the possibilities. Coming back over and again to the wound on his head. Favouring, as a result, an attack of some sort.
“Nowhere’s safe, these days,” Mac said. “It’ll have been some druggy after a few dollars. It always is.”
“I’m not sure you get many druggies out there on the hills, dad”
“It just takes one.”
Rogan put down his glass, rose, ready to leave, then stood there looking around. “What about family, a wife? Did he have anyone do you know?”
“None that I heard of,” said Mac. “But you ought to talk to Bill in the store. He knew him as well as anyone. Used to spend a bit of time together.”
There were nods, a raised hand, as he turned towards the door. Except from Vince, who got to his feet, followed him. “I need a fag,” he said. Outside, he stopped, took a cigarette from his packet, offered the pack to Rogan, who shook his head. “You seem very interested in our friend Nielsen.” Vince cradled the cigarette to light it.
“Not especially.”
Vince drew on his cigarette. “People have two opinions of him around here. They either like him or loathe him.”
“Why’s that?”
Vince shrugged. “Some folk didn’t know him well, I guess.”
“Did you?”
“Well enough. As much as I wanted to.” The tone of his voice was clear, but he added: “Me, I couldn’t stand the guy. Wouldn’t trust him an inch.” He flicked a tag of ash from his cigarette, and watched it fall.
The funeral was clearly going to be a low-key affair. There were barely twenty people there. Mainly men he knew from town or the outlying farms. A few he could recognise but not name. Two rows in front of him, three strangers sat together, forming a phalanx of erect backs.
He’d taken a seat near the door, feeling a need to be there, to close his belated involvement in Nielsen’s life, yet an intruder nonetheless.
While the congregation assembled, music played softly. Not the usual church music or plangent tunes, but African songs – a male choir, backed by gentle drums. From a CD that Nielsen had lent him, Bill explained as he stood up and faced them, introduced himself: the sort of music JT liked. Then, with a cough, he welcomed everyone, apologised that he was no public speaker, outlined the style and order of the service. Nothing religious, he said – JT had no truck with that, and they wouldn’t want him walking out on them. There was subdued laughter. They’d start with a minute of silence, for reflection, then he would read a brief eulogy; after that, others would be invited to stand up and say their piece.
As he spoke, Rogan felt something brush against his neck. There was a whispered apology. He glanced around. A woman was leading her child along the back aisle, her hand on his shoulder. She took the seats at the far end of the row, ushering the child in first. He sat down hurriedly, then hunched forward, rocking back and forth with a strange, nervous intent. The woman restrained him with a hand.
Bill was true to his word. The eulogy was brief, and he was no orator. He spoke head down, reading from his notes. His voice was small in the cavernous room. From where he sat, Rogan could hear only fragments of it, most of them words and phrases he was already primed to listen for and recognise. Kidnapped by the Sandinistas. Held hostage. Escape. Came to Otago. Parehike. Walking in the hills. A bit of fishing.
A whole life, he reflected, shrunk to its minimum.
Then a few more phrases – said with more emphasis, more personal. “A good friend, when you made the effort to know him. We spent quite a bit of time together, playing chess. He was good at it. Better than me. And he never gave any quarter. So most of the time I lost. But he’d be even happier than I was if I managed to win. As though it really pleased him.”
Afterwards, as Bill had promised, a few of the others there stood and said a few words. Pru, Bill’s wife. Mac. Rob, talking fluently, and in a generous encompassing way, as if for the town as a whole. Mick Stead, who ran the large farm that surrounded Nielsen’s property, so was a neighbour of sorts. Bunny Crockett, who seemed to know everyone; turned up at every funeral, it was said, as she did every christening, the self-appointed censor who counted you in and counted you out.
Simple words for the most part. Things that might have been said about anyone, hardly singled Nielsen out. But a mark of respect, of recognition, from those around him; confirming that his presence in the community had been noted, and his departure mourned.
At the end, Bill asked if anyone else had anything to say. There was a brief silence, a shuffling of feet. Then one of the three strangers sitting a few rows in front of Rogan rose to his feet. “If I may.” He cleared his voice, a coarse ‘hrrumph’ that carried to the back of the room. “Just a few words. From myself and my friends here.” He stood facing forward, so Rogan could only see his back. But his voice was strong and firm and carried around the room, though his sentences were short and he wheezed as he took breath between them. He told how Nielsen had been a tramper, used to walk with them in the hills. How he loved the hills. Knew them intimately. Often walked there alone. Loved not just the landscape but the rocks from which they were made. “Fitting, therefore, that his life should end there,” he said, then sat down.
Bill thanked him, asked again for any further contributions. Finally, said simply: “That was JT.”
Another African song, filling the air as they walked one by one up to the coffin, paused, touched it, perhaps said a prayer, went out again into the crisp sunlight of the afternoon.