Box Read online

  ‘Oh, shit. Are we on today? Sorry. Come back in ten minutes, eh? Just you, is it?’

  ‘Three of us.’

  ‘Righto.’ He shuffled out the back and the clattering started up again.

  I shot through the door so fast it made only one ack! I found Marti and Disco down the road with their foreheads pressed against the Kandy Korner window, picking out their favourites. ‘Sour snakes,’ said Marti.

  ‘Blech. Milk bottles.’ Disco.

  ‘Salty liquorice.’

  I leaned my head in between theirs. ‘I think we look kind of obviously hungry here. But, I’ll have Eskimos.’

  Disco stepped back and glanced around. ‘So what do they serve in the Styx?’

  ‘I don’t think you can eat there at all,’ Marti said. ‘You know it’s the river that leads to death, eh?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The River Styx. In the myth the ferryman rows people over into the underworld.’

  ‘I met him!’ I crowed, smacking the window. ‘First he guns you down, then he stabs you with a high C. Now he’s going to finish us off with poison scraps.’

  ‘Was it that bad?’ Disco looked worried.

  ‘He told me we could pick the crumbs from the bread bin, then for dessert, lick the patterns off the plates.’

  Disco groaned and thudded the glass with his head. ‘Giant jubes, Buzz bars …’

  I pulled him away and we walked round the block. So close to food, we were on edge now every time a car slowed. We crossed the road twice to avoid students although it was hard to believe they were any kind of threat. They certainly didn’t seem to notice us. I told the others about the strange café.

  ‘Bags I go back for the food,’ said Disco.

  We all did in the end. Disco had to play with the door — opening and closing it to make bursts of gunfire. When he saw the place was still empty, he ‘shot’ himself and slid down the wall to the blood-red floor.

  Marti set off the opera singer and the ferryman came scuttling out, still bent, carrying a shoebox. ‘Hey, cut the racket, eh? Some of us round here have got headaches.’

  ‘They’re your bells,’ Marti told him.

  ‘My brother’s. He’s cracked.’

  Disco put his hands on the box. ‘Thanks a lot anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ Marti and I said. We lingered, curious but not knowing what we could ask, or what was safe to say.

  Ferryman spoke. ‘Did you all decide right from the start not to get done?’

  We looked at each other. I pointed to his sleeve, covering his wrist.

  He pulled it back to show a blood-soaked slab of sticking plaster. ‘Took it out myself, last night, but it won’t stop bleeding.’

  ‘You should apply pressure and keep it up,’ said Marti. ‘Make a sling. I’ll make one if you find a cloth big enough.’

  ‘How do you know so much about all this?’ I asked as the ferryman went off to raid his brother’s bathroom.

  ‘First Aid? I’ve kept my certificate current since I was ten. And I go to Civil Defence meetings. I want to be in there when the big one comes.’

  ‘The big one?’ Disco laughed. ‘Maybe this is it.’

  ‘Could be.’

  We watched Marti re-cover the wound with a gooey piece of gauze from an antique tin, and bandage it with a torn-up nappy.

  ‘That was a bit hacked-up.’ Marti managed not to pull the face until she’d safety-pinned the strips in place.

  Ferryman flexed his arm and smiled for the first time. ‘I thought abstaining was crap till I got in the town hall, eh? I didn’t care if I got done or not, then these kids your age started going off round me. I was there a long time ’cause they couldn’t get the vein.

  ‘I hear they’re getting soundproof booths put in for you adolescent screamers. Anyway, I got the wand thingy put in and came back here.’

  Disco had his legs spread wide, which lowered his nose to the level of the box lid. He was sniffing.

  The man scratched his bristly chin. ‘Then last night I dreamt I was in this endless queue leading up to a black oily slick. Up ahead people were dropping into it like lemmings.’

  Marti nudged me and wrote on the bench with her finger. Styx River. I shivered.

  ‘I knew when I got up to the oil I’d get pulled under, no choice. I tried to run but you know what it’s like in dreams. Woke up drenched but I knew I had to get this out. I threw back about five double whiskies and found a razor blade. Got the bloody thing too. Look.’ He slid a tumbler along the bench.

  We peered in at the blood clot on the end of a dark filament.

  ‘Trouble is, I was so drunk I fell over the chair and conked out on the floor. You guys don’t need the grisly details, but I’ve decided I’ll stay and help my bro out here at the café ’cause he’s said all along he won’t get endorsed.’

  ‘High tide’s at three o’clock,’ said Disco. ‘But it’s hard to give the signal when the glass is blacked out.’

  ‘True.’ Ferryman went over to the window and scraped it with his fingernail. ‘I’ll use my blade to make a porthole, eh? I’ll keep an eye out.’

  ‘Did you write where we go next?’ I asked, tapping the shoebox.

  ‘Oh shit. Not very good at this, am I? Ian did tell me … Tui Café. That ring a bell?’

  ‘I know where it is,’ said Disco.

  ‘They obviously haven’t had anyone else in yet,’ I said when we were outside again. ‘I wonder if the message about feeding is getting to the kids who need it, because, really, it’s been organised round adults — all the contacts are adults. Organisers assumed kids would abstain because their parents did. They didn’t know they’d be deciding for themselves.’

  ‘We’re here ’cause we met you’, said Marti. ‘How else could we have found out?’

  ‘Maybe we should hunt out some of the other abstainers and find out what they know,’ I said. ‘After we’ve eaten.’

  ‘We’re going to find another place to live too, remember?’

  Again we took a set of steps, that ran up off George Street. Disco sat and drummed on the box lid.

  ‘Some hae meat and canna eat,

  And some would eat that want it,

  But we hae meat and we can eat,

  Sae let the Lord be thankit.’

  Marti and I stared at him, then grinned at each other.

  ‘I hope we just look like ordinary, endorsed kids having a picnic breakfast,’ said Disco.

  Marti laughed. ‘Not likely! Nice endorsed kids eat Weetbix at the kitchen table, not strange … let’s see … green and yellow things, sitting on cold concrete steps.’

  ‘What are these?’ I picked up a pastry shell, its gold filling streaked with green fibres. ‘Must have been green and yellow day yesterday. Look at the sandwiches. Lettuce and egg. Asparagus and … smoked cheese.’

  ‘Corn and green pepper.’ Disco folded one in half and put it in his mouth whole.

  ‘Savoury custard,’ I said, brushing the flakes of pastry off my jacket. ‘Nice.’

  ‘Lolly cake for afters,’ said Marti, looking into a shiny purple party bag. Guess what colours.’

  ‘Might have to take them with us.’ Disco nudged me and pointed with his chin.

  We stood up like one person, seeing the two young men in white shirts and navy vests stopped at the bottom of our steps, looking up.

  ‘Mormons, aren’t they?’ I said, but I was stuffing paper back in the box Marti held open, shoving a last sandwich in my mouth.

  ‘Students paid to dress up like parking officers and chase abstainers, I reckon. Definitely checking us out.’ Disco lurched off up the remaining steps.

  At the top we crossed a road and ducked up another alley between garden fences.

  ‘Are they following?’ Disco called back.

  ‘Slowly,’ I replied. They were just starting up the steps.

  ‘Come and hang out in our garden shed while I see if Dad’s there.’ Disco led us round a couple of corners then, glancing
about suspiciously (Marti muttered, ‘Could you try and look really guilty, Disco?’), he beckoned us over an empty section. We climbed a tumbledown wall and Disco kicked open the door of an ancient wooden shed. ‘Won’t be long.’

  Marti and I shut the door after us and looked around in the gloomy light of a green-stained window. There was flattened straw under our feet, with white feathers here and there.

  ‘Youch.’ I rubbed my head and turned to see what I’d hit.

  ‘Hen perch,’ said Marti. ‘And here are the nesting boxes. Hey, even an egg.’ She brought it to the window where it glowed bluey-green.

  ‘It’s a fake, isn’t it? You know, they use them to get the hens to lay there and not on the floor.’

  ‘Decoy?’

  ‘I guess.’

  Marti put the egg back. ‘What would you do if Disco turned out to be a decoy?’

  ‘What?’ My stomach flipped and I whanged my head on the perch again. ‘How could he be?’

  ‘Or if I was?’ She scratched a fingernail across the window scum.

  ‘What do you mean? That one of you’s kidding me?’

  ‘No.’ Marti’s voice was flat. ‘But it’s the kind of thing you have to keep thinking about, eh? I mean, how do we know Ferryman wasn’t a spy or something? And how do we know those two guys just now weren’t going to help us? What if Disco’s dad comes rushing out here to nab us?’ She scraped a line across the other, making an x. Her shoulders drooped. ‘When I woke up this morning I was sure I could keep living like this forever if I had to. Now suddenly I feel tired. I just want a hot shower and normal food. Clean clothes.’ She shuffled in the straw. ‘What if, after all, Endorsement, calibration are the best things to do, what if they really will keep us safe and healthier — and we’re missing out?’ She sighed. ‘I want to stop feeling paranoid.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ My family, my home — everything normal — that’s what I wanted, and just thinking of them I had to swallow hard. Then I felt Marti’s little finger linking up with mine. A tiny pulse blinked between us. And we stayed like that, not talking, not looking at each other, until we heard Disco shout, Seeya! and we stepped out into the daylight.

  ‘How’d that go?’ asked Marti as we clambered back over the wall.

  ‘Okay. He was in such a hurry to get to work he didn’t really listen. But I gave him the impression I’ll be at Jed’s again tonight. I didn’t tell him about this.’ Disco looked at his wrist. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘What’s his work?’ I asked.

  Disco blushed. ‘He’s a portrait photographer. He gets to take the Scope-card photos for Endorsement. He’s doing the uni students.’ He turned and replaced the rock I’d toppled from the wall. ‘So when they can’t trace my wand, they’ll stop paying him, I guess.’

  ‘Serve him right.’

  ‘Marti!’ I was shocked.

  But Marti spun round. ‘Yes, it serves anyone right who doesn’t think about what they’re letting other people put on them. Serves my parents right too. Doesn’t mean I don’t love them but I can’t stand knowing how ignorant they were, not to even see this coming. Why won’t they fight it? Why have they left it up to us?’ Her fists were bunched at her sides and I had a terrible urge to bear-hug her, to feel her flushed cheek up against mine.

  Instead I gritted my teeth and turned away. And in that instant saw a troupe of kids disappear into the green belt. One was left behind, bent over her shoe. Then she stood and glanced back at us; a girl with short black hair and a bulky black shoulder bag. She stared a moment then followed her mates into the shadows.

  ‘See that?’ I asked the others.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kids in the trees.’

  ‘Shall we follow them?’ said Disco.

  ‘My piano teacher lives near here. My mother said I should visit him.’

  ‘My mother said!’ Marti sneered. ‘Why should your parents influence what we do and they’re not even this side of the planet? They’re not even involved here!’ She squeezed viciously on her water bottle. ‘We need to catch up with those others. This is where the action is, not in stupid Belgium or wherever.’

  ‘Berlin,’ I said quietly, my chest suddenly icy. How dare she, when two days ago she didn’t have a clue about Endorsement? When I’d been the one, because of my parents, who knew about feeding stations and those other details? ‘We agreed to stick together and I’ve got something I have to do. You waited for Disco just now.’

  Disco’s eyes swivelled from me to Marti and back.

  ‘I know you reckon we’d be up the creek without your precious information, Derik, but we’ve got it now, okay?’ Marti smacked her bottle onto her palm. ‘We’ve got the feeding sussed, so I vote we make our own minds up. We need to talk to those other kids — who are getting further away every second. Coming Disco?’ She strode towards the trees.

  Disco blinked at me a few times and shrugged helplessly.

  ‘Just bloody go with her. You can’t help yourself.’ I added quietly, ‘See you back at the school.’

  I couldn’t help myself. I was shaking with rage and love as Disco loped away after her. How could she do that? We’d shared our heartbeats back in the chook shed. Now she was leaving me as if I was as forgettable as an egg.

  I WATCHED my friends head into the bush, sliding at first on the mud, then they pushed and pulled each other up a bank and disappeared — off to link up with other abstainers. What if I lost them? Other boys would fall for Marti and, anyway, she’d probably rather be with someone who didn’t embarrass her by stealing Panty-pads for her, someone who wasn’t so attached to his parents. Someone whose voice had broken properly. I kicked an empty drink bottle onto the road. I hated people who littered but I didn’t see why I should pick up after them.

  Mr Nemeyeva was the last person I felt like visiting. He was so nice and I felt so angry. But there had to be a reason for Mum’s hint. The Nemeyevas lived in part of a huge old brick house covered in ivy, with a garden almost as wild as the green belt. They were looking after it for the owner who lived overseas. Mr Nemeyeva’s wife, Mirri, let me in. She had a shiny face that seemed to be always smiling even if she wasn’t really. It was tricky, because sometimes she was actually about to take you apart for coming in with muddy feet, or if you hadn’t done enough practice, she was the one to nobble you later as you tried to sneak out the door. ‘You think he have to put up with that kind of not-music? You show respect, you do your work!’

  Mr Nemeyeva was from some eastern European country, I could never remember which. In Dunedin he spent his time teaching musical klutzes like me to play the piano. I’m not all that bad but I don’t have a single gene of the musical x-factor that came off my teacher’s hands like smoke the moment he sat down to play. My sister Caro was a child prodigy, so I guess he hoped that would rub off on me, even though she’s younger. But I hadn’t touched the piano since Mum and Dad left.

  After I’d heeled off my shoes, Mirri let me into the kitchen where she had her English study notes spread out on the table with a pot of tea and plates of toast scraps and cut-out apple cores. The kitchen always smelt of ripe apples.

  ‘How are your parents getting on?’ Her words were slow and careful and perfect.

  I always found myself talking back the same way. ‘I had an e-mail from them. They say things are going well but that I should listen to The Flight of the Bumblebee.’

  She gave me a real, shiny smile. ‘Yes, I like that one too. I’m sure Jan will play it for you. What is it about the bomblebee?’

  ‘Bumble … It’s fast … oh, you don’t mean the music … the bee. Um, I don’t know a lot. The sting hurts more than a honey bee’s.’ I knew that much; I once rolled onto one with a bare arm, on the lawn. Agony, then it itched for weeks.

  The door behind Mirri opened and Mr Nemeyeva came through, wearing his woollen coat and scarf. His indoor coat. He had an even bigger one he put over it when he went out. He stood stretching his fingers and smiling.

  ‘Hello
Derik, you’ve been pointed in my direction, I see. Or did you want an early lesson with me this week?’

  ‘Maybe a lesson about the bees.’ Mirri was tidying the table. Gold clips glinted in her hair.

  ‘Ah, the birds and the bees? Or just the bees?’

  ‘Bumblebees?’ I said. ‘Is that code for something?’

  ‘I wonder. I’ve got something here.’ Mr Nemeyeva went and found a heavy book on the hall shelf then came and sat down. It was an old encyclopaedia. He thumbed through and lay it open between us. ‘Here we are. Genus Bombus.’

  We pored over the photo of a nest unearthed from under a garage. It was a mixture of messy grass and leaves and tidy eggs — home for several hundred bees — but nothing like as precise as a beehive. … used for just one season, the caption told us.

  ‘Perhaps your parents wanted to be sure you knew that ours is an open house if it’s needed. Underground.’ He looked at me carefully, as if inspecting for signs of neglect. ‘I’m not going to ask what you’re up to although I see …’ He flipped his own wrist over and we looked at mine too — unblemished.

  ‘You were hoping I’d play that piece? But I haven’t warmed up sufficiently. My hands wouldn’t manage it yet today — not to my satisfaction. Perhaps next time you visit.’ Mr Nemeyeva patted my shoulder.

  ‘Will you have some lunch before you go?’ Mirri asked.

  I was tempted but I could only think of Disco and Marti, getting further from me with every passing minute. I said yes to a slice of her strange, malty pumpernickel bread and even though we’d just eaten, an apple to eat on the way.

  Back on the road I looked up into the trees. There was no-one anywhere. I could head straight back to the school by road, or go through the bush the way the others had — although they could be miles off by now. I felt spooked on my own. If I got caught I had no way of getting a message to them.

  I chose the bush. The ground was slippery from last night’s rain, and I got wet as I ducked and dodged through the foliage, looking for a track. There are proper walking paths from one street to another, but there are others, used by school kids and dogs and — if you believe the stories — perverts and druggies. These tracks grow from mud chutes spilling off parks and from hidden entrances at the edges of schools. They skid away to nothing, then reappear if you just keep on the way you’re going.