Box Read online

  Disco and I found him in the garden shed where he was arranging tins like soldiers on the shelves. ‘How did the calibration go, Pops?’

  ‘Derik? There you are.’ He glanced at Disco without curiosity. ‘I’m really very pleased with the outcome and I want your grandmother to get fixed up as soon as possible.’ He ran his hand along the row of tins, making sure they were dead in place, then he came out into the garden.

  ‘I know I was doubtful initially but since I had it done a great calm has fallen on me. For the first time in my life I am truly calm.’ He smiled over his glasses at me, then took them off and folded them in his hands.

  That kind of talk might be normal in someone else’s grandfather but I felt like I was crossing a railway track and the bells were all twangling. Then I figured he must be kidding. I squeezed him in the side, just above his trousers, the way he did to me, often.

  ‘Derik — are you trying to rib me? I’m no longer ticklish, apparently.’ The cool tone hollowed me out. Pops went on. ‘I know your parents have been opposed to Endorsement since its inception and I was prepared to back them all the way. You know I got endorsed in order to support you all.

  ‘But truly, the balm of the last twenty-four hours has been very, very welcome. I think you could say the scales have fallen from my eyes.’ Pops dropped his glasses.

  I laughed. Nervously. He stooped and picked them up without his usual ‘bugger’, dusted them on his handkerchief and told us to come inside.

  Gran had got herself busy. I could see that was her way of coping with her new reformed husband. She gave me the usual smacking kiss and put her arm round Disco, pulling him into the kitchen after me.

  ‘As soon as I saw you out in the garden I took soup from the freezer; it’ll be hot soon. You’ll stay for that, won’t you?’

  Pops sat at the table, and began to arrange with military precision the soup spoons, knives and plates Gran had thrown there. Disco and I sat down.

  ‘The girls have been angels, needless to say. The things they can do on that computer!’ Gran was slicing a loaf, still hot from the bread-maker. ‘Have you seen the city they’re making, Brian?’

  Pops flicked a crumb from the table-cloth. ‘Still making a city? Couldn’t they be helping you here in the kitchen, Susie? They don’t get enough of that at home.’

  Gran clamped her lips and shook her head at me. That was the kind of thing Pops would say, to tease us. He was so proud of my mother even though she refused to learn any domestic skill not essential to survival. But there was no joking in his voice now. He sounded genuinely puzzled about the girls’ preoccupation.

  ‘I’ve seen things with new clarity today.’ As he spoke, he re-stacked the heap of bread Gran had put on the table. ‘I wonder, seeing how I’ve felt this last twenty-four hours if your generation mightn’t now see a great settling down, a settling in, once they’ve retrieved from the past the appropriate values for social harmony.’

  Marti cleared her throat. Her face glowed. ‘Appropriate values includes women going back to the kitchen? Is that where he was leading? Where this whole experiment is leading?’

  I shrugged. It was too painful to say out loud all my grandfather had spouted. ‘Maybe — if calibration can make him go back and want the past. I mean, that’s how he would’ve grown up — expecting women to run round after the men.’

  ‘So calibration makes people look back, instead of forwards? What do you call that? Anti-gress? Is that a word?’ Marti’s voice was climbing. She put her hand to her throat as if she was choking. ‘Is that what they mean it to do, Derik?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think the main thing they want is for people not to get sick so they won’t cost the government so much. And Pharmix gets to make lots of money, selling their machines and chemicals. Anything else is a side effect, I guess.’

  ‘Pretty damn serious side effect,’ said Marti.

  ‘It might just be Pops’s particular medicine,’ I said feebly.

  Disco whacked a stick onto the fire, making a dazzle of sparks. ‘Don’t you ever think though, that we have had enough so-called progress? I mean, our grandparents grew up without TV, jets, computers, blenders, instant noodles, whatever. Now we’ve got all that. We’ve got enough. Everything’s so fast and the earth’s in such a mess, wouldn’t slowing way down help?’

  Marti frowned and looked into her cupped hands. ‘You have to try and understand change, keep up with it, maybe even get ahead of it. Not go back to the dark ages.’

  The treetops shushed overhead. What kind of ‘ages’ were we in, where, to feel safe, people had to run off into the forest? ‘You make it sound like change happens all by itself,’ I said. ‘People make it happen — and we’re people too. We should have a say when the change is for bad, not good.’

  Disco carried on poking, piling the embers up against Marti’s log. ‘My parents don’t seem to think they lived in the dark ages. The best of times, they reckon they had, growing up. What if we stopped here, made things simpler now, instead of more complicated?’

  The fire was throwing out a good heat but I was shivering cold at the core. It was one thing to bat these ideas around in class discussions. It was another to feel that the course of your life depended on how well you could figure them out. ‘Whatever we do, it’s got to be because individual people decide to do it. Not because a whole population is made to think the same way.’

  ‘Calibration would probably stop people killing and hurting each other though, eh?’ said Disco. ‘If everyone was as unfazed as your grand-dad.’

  ‘Might stop them getting excited too, about … anything.’ Marti glanced at us. Her face was gold in the firelight; her eyebrows arched and knitted, her mouth twitched with emotion. ‘They’d rather stay in their comfy lounge rooms than go out and light fires under the stars.’

  ‘People are like that already,’ said Disco. ‘Maybe Endorsement gives them what they really want — an easy life, not too exciting, no worries.’ He smoothed the ember pile into a glowing bank. ‘Anyway, we worked out with Dek’s grand mother how to stop Pops getting his next dose.’

  ‘Yeah, like disabling the car next Friday. Or her throwing a sicky so he can’t leave the house. And hopefully he’ll realise what he’s been missing, when the chemicals wear off.’

  Marti put her hands to her flushed cheeks. ‘Man, what a lucky escape. We could be half way to being zombies, you guys.’

  ‘Healthy zombies though.’ Disco wiped his dirty mitts together.

  ‘We wouldn’t be here, looking like we’d eaten coal for dinner. Disco you’ve got charcoal up to your ears,’ I told him.

  He wiped with his sleeve. ‘Hey, we didn’t get to the filthy part of our story. The truck driver agreed to bring us back but he dropped us off in Kaikorai Valley so we decided to walk up through this paddock.’

  ‘Full of gorse,’ I added.

  ‘Well, it was hard to tell in the dark.’

  ‘So when we found a creek we followed it.’

  ‘Followed it? That’s a bit tame. We wormed our way up it, beneath the gorse. It was a mud trench with a trickle of water. See?’ Disco tapped at the mud crusted on his trousers from the knees down. ‘Then we had to come through about three backyards to get to a road. That’s where Dek lost a piece of his trousers.’

  ‘A shred,’ I said. ‘I jumped up a fence so fast the dog’s teeth got stuck in the hem. He took a bit with him when I shook him off.’

  Marti wagged her head. ‘Well, there was plenty going on here too. I couldn’t light the fire till just before you came because there were kids roaming through the trees. At least two gangs, about our age. I didn’t want them to find me but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve seen our fire already.’

  ‘I wonder who,’ I said. ‘Other kids hiding out?’

  ‘Maybe. We should find some others tomorrow, if we can, start talking about long-term survival.’ Marti peeled off her hoody. ‘Who wants a baked apple?’ She raked at the fire and rolled out
three black balls.

  ‘Choice,’ said Disco. ‘Pudding matches dinner.’

  ‘Watch.’ Marti had a big rangiora leaf in each hand. She twisted her apple open and held her nose to the steaming white flesh.

  ‘How come it didn’t burst?’ I said, picking the black crust off mine.

  ‘Type of apple. Plus I pricked them first.’

  For a few minutes everything was perfect: three friends, one of us a babe, three apples, a fire, the wind shushing through the trees overhead. Nibbling the flavour of summer out of a charcoal shell.

  ‘Oi, don’t spit on me.’ Disco touched his neck, smearing it with black.

  ‘I didn’t. It’s rain.’

  Suddenly big clumsy drops were pelting the fire, sending up jets of steam, and we were scrambling to collect our things: bags, jackets, jerseys. Typical Dunedin.

  ‘Better put this out,’ I said.

  We scooped up handfuls of leaves and dumped them on. We stomped and scattered the embers and stomped again until we’d cut loose the last tendrils of smoke.

  WE COULDN’T sleep out in the box. Apart from the fact that it wouldn’t hold three, it would have got pulped in the rain that fell all night. Disco offered his garden shed but it was way along the hill and besides, we had the bike shed. One corner backed into the rain and wasn’t as wet as the other end. We crowded in there, with the folded box bent half up the wall, so our bottoms and backs were against it. Nobody lay down; we leaned and slouched, Marti in the middle, Disco in the corner, me on the weather side. I wrapped the ground sheet round my sleeping bag.

  ‘We need to find a better place,’ said Marti. ‘This is too open.’

  I chose not to remind Marti that this has been her choice. ‘Tomorrow, eh? Somewhere the trees are really dense.’

  Disco pulled the drawstring on his sleeping bag so just his eyes and nose were visible. ‘Anyone got a bedtime story?’

  ‘I’ve still got Mr Binge’s one about the box.’ I rapped on the cardboard behind our heads.

  ‘Better than nothing. Away you go.’

  I used the torch and read quickly to save batteries.

  ‘Uh?’ said Marti when I finished, then ‘Uh!’ which sounded like puzzlement, then startled satisfaction.

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ said Disco. ‘Is the box supposed to be like, his life? But that wouldn’t make sense because everyone gets one of those.’

  ‘Maybe lots of people do have boxes,’ I said. ‘The story doesn’t tell you. What do you reckon, Marti?’

  ‘It can’t be life, exactly. Because he could have lost the box and carried on living, couldn’t he?’

  ‘It’s something that makes his life interesting,’ said Disco.

  ‘But challenging,’ Marti added. ‘Something he could never forget about.’

  ‘His body. No … maybe … partly,’ I said.

  Disco’s sleepy voice came from his corner. ‘That story should be called, “The Box of Remembering You are Alive.”’

  For a moment Disco’s title made perfect, blinding sense, then none at all.

  Soon his breath came chugging evenly out the top of his bag. That meant it was just Marti and me awake in the half dark, but before I could figure how to make the most of it, I felt my tongue grow heavy and I was drifting … Air rushed under me. I was nailed to the cold floor of the pie truck. My grandfather watched me over his glasses, eyes weepy with regret, while my grandmother flew between the table and the sink, getting thinner and thinner. My hands hurt. They were full of gorse prickles and the mud was clasping at my feet …

  ‘Hey, listen to this.’

  I opened my eyes. I was lying flat and alone half off the cardboard. Marti had a newspaper open over the bar of the old bike. The asphalt outside was puddled but the sky above the bush was pale blue.

  ‘It says here, Adult compliance in Dunedin has been eighty-seven percent so far.’

  There was crunching above me and the iron roof bent. The tip of Disco’s shoe appeared, then his head as he peered over. It seemed like a bad idea, him being up there, visible to the world, but my tongue was still stuck with sleep.

  Marti went on, ‘But they say there’s mass truancy in the thirteen to sixteen age group and they’re urging parents to get their kids done as soon as possible. They’re keeping the Endorsement stations open the next twenty-four hours hoping to get everyone through.’

  ‘And then?’ There was a creak and a shower of rust as Disco pushed off and landed, splat, flat-footed on the asphalt. ‘Ouch!’

  ‘It says, blah, blah … here it is … after Thursday, today, it will be mandatory for all government employees, from the armed forces through to hospital workers, to report on anyone known to be abstaining. Failure to report or harbouring of abstainers will result, in the first instance, in the docking of pay. That is so horrible.’

  ‘Why aren’t teenagers getting done?’ Disco dusted his hands together.

  ‘Well, they’ve got a psychologist onto it in this other article. She says … it’s a sensitive age … issues of identity and authority … but, here we are, once a threshold number of Endorsed teenagers is attained, then peer pressure will do its work. Teens need to encourage their friends to take the healthy option… blah, blah … crap! Of course they can’t say why teens aren’t getting done, because they don’t know us. They think we all want to be clones like them.’ Marti was bundling the newspaper back together. ‘But that reporting thing means my dad, for example, could get his pay stopped unless he snitches on me. His bus fleet’s on a government contract.’

  I sat up and rubbed my face awake. Things were getting serious after all.

  Disco had the paper now. ‘Listen. Endorsement Officers Recruited. Dozens of students are taking the opportunity to slash their debt this month. They are being employed by the Ministry of Health to find abstainers and encourage them to come and talk to counsellors about their issues …’

  Marti had tidied up her plaits. She wore a fresh yellow bandanna round her neck. Her cheeks were red. ‘I can’t believe it. This is war. We need to find those other abstainers, I reckon. Safety in numbers.’

  ‘First things first though.’ Disco was blowing on his hands and jumping on the spot. ‘I need food.’

  ‘Yeah, eight fifty-one, that’s in thirty-five minutes,’ said Marti. ‘We should get a move on. Wakey-wake, Derik. I can’t believe how long you slept. We’ve been up for ages.’

  ‘I’m up. I’m dressed.’ I stood and walked out of my sleeping bag.

  ‘Yeah, but your hair, mate. Is mine sticking up that bad?’ Disco asked.

  ‘Worse,’ I said, stuffing the bag into its sack.

  Marti dug in her backpack. ‘Have some gel. At least make it look like you mean it to stick up. Not like you’ve been sleeping in a bike shed.’

  Disco was onto it. He covered his fingers in blue gel and plunged them into my hair. ‘I’ll do yours, you do mine.’

  ‘Youch, go easy. That’s enough. I don’t want to smell like a flower shop.’

  Disco’s hair went rich and shiny. He looked like a flaming torch in the morning sun. We stashed our gear in the trees, washed our faces, filled our bottles at the drinking fountain and headed for town.

  ‘We’re going to have to keep an eye out the whole time now, I reckon.’ I cast a look back at the empty playground.

  ‘We have to live, too, though,’ said Disco. ‘Just gotta be ready to run.’

  On the road below the school, Marti crossed over and shoved the newspaper into its slot. The little dog started up its manic barking as she ran back to us. ‘What else do we have to do today? Apart from check our e-mail when the library’s open.’

  ‘I should visit my old music teacher,’ I said.

  And I’ll go and tell my dad I’m okay,’ said Disco. ‘From a distance. I’ll shout from the bottom of the garden. But I can do that on my own.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ asked Marti.

  ‘King’s Rise.’

  ‘And my piano teacher�
�s just above there.’

  ‘I vote we stick together,’ said Marti. ‘Now that we know people are starting to look out for us.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said and Disco shrugged. As if we didn’t care one way or another. As if we weren’t jostling Marti like a couple of bodyguards.

  Breakfast was strange. First, it was hard to get. The Styx had a narrow front window with the name spray-painted in silver, like graffiti. But we’d all walked by, giving the signal, before we realised the window wasn’t made of dark glass; it was painted black.

  So I went back alone and pushed open the door. Overhead, a blast rapped out like machine-gun fire. I jumped back and let the door slam. Then I had to open it again and let off more ack-ack-ack! There was no-one in the café full of black stools and round black-and-chrome tables and the stench of last night’s smoke. The door shut behind me and silence fell.

  I walked up to the counter, hearing only my own footsteps. I picked up the brass hand-bell — and dropped it when it set off a shriek of crystal-shattering opera. You could almost feel the woman’s tonsils quivering.

  At least someone was coming. It sounded as if they were clambering out of a dishwasher; a door creaked open, crockery rattled, something fell and spun on its rim. Feet thumped and a man groaned. Then he came out, bent and holding his hip like The Little Crooked Man.

  Except he was only about twenty, very pale and thin, all in grey, and I noticed at once the trickle of dried blood on his wrist below his cuff.

  ‘Yeh?’ He tried to stand straight and winced.

  I rubbed my nose and waited.

  He frowned and pulled his head back.

  I touched my nose with my fingertip.

  ‘If you don’t like the smell, get out, punk.’

  I turned to go. There was nothing I could say if he hadn’t got it by now.