The new book

This is the first chapter of the book I am writing as the University of Otago College of Education Creative New Zealand Children’s Writer in Residence:

ABSORBED

By Ella West

© Ella West 2010

Chapter One

            It is chaos, absolute chaos. 

            The bellowing of cattle, some still caught in the wreckage of the stock truck, is interrupted only by the steady bang bang of the rifle as each of the animals lucky enough to be lying injured on the road is put out of its misery.  Those still in the truck and out of reach will have to wait.  A cop or a medic or someone rushes past me, waving his arms as if that is his only job and I take several steps closer to the photographer who is with me.  This might be my first fatal accident but it isn’t his.  The rescue helicopter swiftly lifts off the tarseal, the rotor wash throwing debris in my face even though I bend away.  Loaded onboard is the truck driver on his way to hospital.  The guy in the blue car was not so fortunate.  Apparently he and the truck driver chatted, the destroyed vehicles they were trapped in ending up close enough together so they could do so, while they waited to see which would happen first – him bleed out or help arrive.  Now, a tarpaulin is pulled over the car, hiding what I don’t want to see.  The smell of blood and animals and spilt fuel is making me feel sick enough.

            And in the middle of this, this madness, James walks past.

            “Hi, Brooklyn.”

            We’re in the middle of nowhere, at least ten, twenty kilometres out of Dunedin on the way to the airport, and here is James Turner walking down the side of the road dressed in a black suit and tie.  The place is cordoned off, there are cops, fire crews everywhere and he’s stepping around a dead cattle beast.

            “Brooklyn, it’s me, James.”

            “Yeah, hi,” I somehow say, trying madly to figure out what he’s doing here.

            “It’s good to see you.”  And he means it, his dark eyes watching my face intently.  He’s always looked a bit weird.  Blond, almost white hair, but dark, dark eyes and a body that never seemed to fill out like the rest of the guys.  But wasn’t he meant to be working in Sydney?  He’d finished school like the rest of us and come down here to study law at the University of Otago but then, before we all knew it, he’d withdrawn from the course and was off to the Lucky Country saying something about a job offer too good to pass up. Gone without a backward glance. 

            “Look, can I catch up with you later?” he asks.

            “Yeah, sure.  If you want.”

            “Good.”  He starts walking again, picking through the debris of the accident, no one but me seeming to notice him.

            “James, you okay?” I call out to him.  He stops and turns around. 

            “Yeah, I’m fine now.”  He smiles, confidently.  A couple of minutes later he’s gone, around a bend of the road, out of sight.  Suddenly I want to run around the corner to make sure he’s still there, walking, but it’s a crazy thought and I’m here to do a job.  I’d better get it started.

            Not that there’s a lot to do, it ends up.  I put my brave face on and talk to the cops but they don’t want to be bothered with me.  By chance I start talking to the motorist who was following the blue car when the accident happened but he doesn’t want his name used.  “Yeah, you can write what I said but if you use my name it’ll get me in trouble with the boss.  I’m picking up my girlfriend from the airport with the company car.  I can’t afford to use my own.”  If I knew what I was doing I’d argue with him but I don’t.

              A sticker on the bumper bar of the mangled car, not quite covered by the tarpaulin, is of a Christchurch radio station so maybe the dead guy isn’t local.  The stock truck belongs to a company based in a small town about an hour towards Central Otago.  I jump as the rifle goes off again, the sound bouncing off the hills.

            Brian, the paper’s chief photographer, is packing his camera gear in the car.  If he is the caring, fatherly type guy he looks to be, he’ll be about to ask me if I’m okay.  He doesn’t.  You know, first fatal, first dead body, even though it’s under a tarpaulin, lots of dead animals, if they count, should be enough to eke some sympathy out of him.  All the younger reporters at the newspaper say he’s an arsehole.  It’s the first time I’ve gone out on a job with him and now I think I see what they mean.  He grunts as he gets behind the wheel and turns the key.  Doesn’t even ask if I’m ready to go.

            It doesn’t improve on the way back to the paper.  I got the unsettling interrogation on the way out from him – family, education, what the hell I was doing finding a job in Dunners straight from school when my family were all in Auckland?  Must be a boyfriend?  No?  Surely?  I think he would then have asked if I was a lessie if he’d had the guts to but he’s too old fashioned to utter the word, or maybe even think it’s a possibility.  Anyway, I’m not.  And there’s no boyfriend and I’m here because the living is cheap.  My friends from school are here studying at the varsity and offered me a room in their flat, which was a relief as I’m not sure if I would have gone in with people I didn’t know.  But really, I’m here because my dad is mates with the owner of the paper so I got the job straight out of school, no journalism experience necessary.  If he was mates with the guys who own the New Zealand Herald in Auckland I would no doubt be there.  Not that I tell Brian that, or anyone else I work with.

            A month in, and I’m still on this silly high every time I walk into the newsroom.  The day starts with the choice – the lift or the stairs.  The lift is tiny, with thick, grey carpet on the walls.  It’s as old as the Edwardian building, if not older, and creaks and groans its way up to the third floor as if making sound effects for a horror movie.  The first time I used it, the light bulb had blown and I rode the whole way in pitch blackness.  That was a freak-out, especially on the first day at work.  If you’re only going to the second floor, where the community papers and IT are, it’s quicker to take the stairs but getting to the third is that bit more of a workout.  So that is the choice that starts the day – scary lift or puffing up the stairs.

            Out of the lift/stairwell is this weird shaped triangular entrance foyer complete with receptionist behind a glass window.  She is supposed to double as a security guard but June wouldn’t hurt anyone.  The best she could do is bash someone over the head with the roses she brings in from her garden every couple of days.  She has a button on her desk which controls the door to the newsroom and if there is someone to see one of us, she phones and we come out to the foyer to meet them.  A small interview room is there, too, if we want to use it. 

            As well as the vase of flowers there are several framed old front pages hung on the walls to remind us all, I suppose, of the paper’s glory days.  Of course, if you want to delay your day’s start there is always the option two door – to the staff cafeteria.    

            Entry to the news room is negotiated past the editor’s office, and the assistant editor’s, and then there are benches where all the dailies from around the country are stacked.  The photographers huddle on the right and the subeditors past them.  The reporters’ desks are on the left.  My desk, with my own phone and my own computer and my own drawers filled up with my own stuff, is against the window.  Only problem is I have to sidle past the chief reporter, my immediate boss, to get to it.

            Anyway, on the way back to the office Brian doesn’t speak.  Either I’ve done something wrong and I’m being punished or he now, interrogation over, finds me boring.  I give up trying to figure it out and instead watch the countryside slide into rural suburbs and then city proper.  It’s March and the hills are brown.  Yesterday had been spent writing about water restrictions and homeowners on tank water trying to conserve every drop.  It would have been fire danger or beaches packed today no doubt if the blue car and the cattle truck hadn’t got it on together.

            Brian somehow manages to get all green lights after the motorway ends and soon is parking the car at the back of the building.  The roads are pretty quiet these days.  No one much can afford to drive with petrol prices more than $7 a litre and the promised bio-cars and ones with batteries and electric motors have failed to eventuate.  They’re still having problems with making them work properly, apparently.  Brian and I take the freight lift up which is, thankfully, a lot bigger than the one at the front of the building but just as slow and Brian is still not talking. Maybe he does think I’m a lessie and doesn’t want to squeeze in with me in the front lift.  Upstairs, the office is in afternoon-cruise mode.  Brian and his digital camera get waved into the daily editorial meeting going on around the table in the editor’s office and I overhear the magical words “front page” as the editor  looks at the photos displayed on the camera’s small screen.   

            “Brooklyn, Lisa’s already got the stuff from the police on it,” the chief reporter, Tom, sitting next to the editor, calls out to me.  “Can you write up what was happening out there and send it to her and she’ll put it altogether.  And keep to the facts.  Remember this isn’t a creative writing course.”  

            I hear the laughter from the editor’s office as I sit down at my desk and feel my self-esteem sink to a new low.  A few of the other reporters looked up as I walk past but most, especially the older ones, stay staring at the computer screens, their fingers moving silently over the keyboards.  I accept I am too junior a reporter to be worthy of acknowledgment but surely?  I find my shorthand pad in my bag and start going through my notes then come to the words “Ring Susie” with a rectangle drawn around them.  I’d forgotten.  I’d written it just after I’d seen James at the accident.  Her number is in my cell phone but I use the office phone to dial it.  I’ll have a free personal phone call as revenge for the unwarranted comment from the chief, thank you.

            “Hi, Susie,” I say when she answers the phone.

            “Brooklyn!  Stranger.  Haven’t heard from you for ages.  What’s up?”

            “Nothing really.  I was just wondering if you had James’ cell phone number.”

             “James?  No, I haven’t.  Haven’t even got an email address.  Why?”

              “It’s just that I saw him before.  He said he wanted to catch up but he must have forgotten I don’t have his phone number.  Did you know he was in town?”

            “No.  I thought he was in Sydney.  Last time we talked he said he wouldn’t be over for months.  Some new job and no holidays yet.  Where did you see him?”

            “Doesn’t matter.  Just thought you’d know how long he’s in town for,” I say, suddenly not wanting to talk anymore.  I hope I haven’t dropped myself in it.

            “Weird.  Oh, well, that’s James lately.  But you and me, we should hit the town one night with the others, you know?”

            “I’m on late shifts this week.”  At least I have an excuse.  I’m not really into going out.  Not in what is still a strange city and, okay I admit it, without parents to make sure you get home okay.

            “Next week then.  Anyway, I’ve got to go.  See you.”

            So maybe I haven’t escaped.  I’ve never been close to Susie and her wanting to catch up with me is completely unexpected.  I only have her phone number because we had all dutifully loaded each other’s at some party last year.  (The number I had then loaded under James doesn’t work.  I had tried it in the car on the way back to the paper and it had said no such number.)  I suppose it would be nice to get to know Susie better.  You need all the friends you can get living down here away from home.

            I remember that party in Auckland.  It had been at George’s house, the George who is now my flatmate.  James and Susie had been there together.  They were the perfect two-some for the last year of high school then they seemed to somehow drift apart.  After that we all ended up down here and I suppose that changed us all too.  I’d never really got to know James but we always seemed to be in the same group of friends.  Strange though, that Susie didn’t know he was here.  It was her place he should have ended up at.

            Anyway, I’ve got to get this story written up.  I flick through my notes again.  It’s whacky how we call them stories.  We’re meant to be writing fact, not fiction.  No adjectives, adverbs, tell it straight, keep it simple, direct.  I’m figuring it out.  That creative writing wisecrack hurt because a subeditor told me off for it the other night.  Said I should go work for television if I wanted to write like that.  I start typing, naming the story and the date for it on the top of the computer screen.  Instantly the word count comes up in its box reminding me to keep it down.  Less is more.  Tell it straight.  Comma, close quote, he said.

            I ring the hospital and try to get the condition of the truck driver, because Lisa, whose desk is next to mine, hasn’t done it because she working on some big scoop or something.  But, without a name, I get the run-around.  I always think someone’s “condition” is the most useless piece of information anyway.  If they’re critical they’re at death’s door and stable just means the patient is not at any immediate risk of dying.  He could have both legs and arms gone and still be in a stable condition.  I check with Lisa again.  She hasn’t got the name from the cops. I ring the cops but am passed around too many people via telephone transfers to count.  Finally, I’m put through to the right person and get the truck driver’s name – Rod Stephens, 49, of Dunedin.  Yes, we can print his name.  I also ask about the dead guy but they’re not giving out his details until his next of kin has been contacted.  They do give me his age and where he’s from.  I had been wrong about the radio sticker on his bumper bar – he is a local.  Only twenty-eight.  I ring the hospital again and after talking to no less than four different people finally get hold of someone in Patient Inquiries who tells me that the condition of Rod Stephens, forty-nine, truck driver, of Dunedin, is, wait for it, stable.   

            I finish the story, put it in Lisa’s desk in the computer programme, and start writing up some press releases that have been piled by my keyboard and sent to my email.  I also manage to incur the wrath of my fellow co-workers.  Cleaning up my desk, I happen to bin some old reports.

            “Hey, recycle, remember,” Kim says from across the desk.  Kim is a couple years older than me and a bit of a star of the office.  Somehow she landed the transport round last year just when petrol prices were going through the roof.  Reporters are given what are called rounds, such as health or education or local government or agriculture, and they are responsible for the stories in those sectors.  I haven’t been given one as I’m still supposed to be learning it all so I just get to do what everyone else doesn’t want to be bothered with.  But Kim got transport, which is usually the most boring one out, until the world realised it was really running out of oil fast.

            “Sorry, forgot,” I mumble to her as I hurriedly pull out the papers from my rubbish bin.  Embarrassed, I carry them to the large, yellow recycling bin, lift the lid and drop them in.

            “Think of the trees,” Kim says as I sit down again.

             By the end of my shift I’m still feeling down.  I wonder if anything I wrote about the accident will be recognisable in the paper tomorrow.  By the time Lisa’s fitted it into her story and the subeditors have had a go at it, all I’ll probably be able to identify is my name at the top of the first column.

            Subs are enemy number one.  They’re the rewrite people who have the absolute power to call muck the finely crafted sentences you have sweated over.  Oh sure, they have to make the story fit the space in the newspaper column, have to check the grammar, spelling, the general facts but rewrite my whole story like they did the day before?  And then they left my byline on it!  They might as well have put on their own.

            I am thoroughly over the day by the time I leave.  Late shift sucks.  I catch the last bus home as the dusk gathers.  Daylight Saving really makes the twilights draw out here.  You don’t realise just how far south Dunedin is until you start comparing things like sunrises and sunsets.  In the Antarctic, it is daylight all the time in summer and we’re not that far away from it.  I’m not looking forward to next month when it will be completely dark when I catch the bus home.  The buses are only half full at this time and most of the people on them look pretty creepy.  Tonight, it seems, is no exception.  I take one of the last empty seats and lean into the corner, face up by the window watching the lights and the empty streets.  The bus lurches to the next stop.  There is a blond-headed man dressed in a dark suit waiting by the shelter.  I can’t believe it, it’s James.  I’ve bumped into him twice in one day?

            He smiles at me down the aisle between the seats then pays for his ticket.  The driver doesn’t wait for him to sit down and jerks through the gears.  James grabs the seat backs steadying himself as he comes towards me and half falls into the seat opposite.  The suit jacket flops around off his shoulders as if it’s on a coat hanger.

           “Brooklyn.  Hi.  Finished work for the day?”  Our knees are almost touching in the cramped space.  I try to shuffle in the seat to give him more room.

            “We should really stop meeting like this, James.”  I try humour. 

             “No, I wanted to see you, remember?”  He doesn’t get the joke, or doesn’t want to.  “We talked on the side of the road earlier?  I asked if I could catch up with you and you said I could.”  His voice is quiet.  I can hardly hear him over the grumbling diesel.

            “I didn’t think it would be by chance on a bus.”

            “No, it’s all right.  I wanted to talk to you.”

            I keep quiet.  He seems to have something he wants to tell me but doesn’t know how to start.

            “It’s good you’re on a bus,” he says at last.

            “What?”

            “On a bus, instead of driving a car.”

            “I’m on a bus because I can’t afford a car and if I did have one I couldn’t afford to put petrol in it.”

            “No.  People should ride buses.  It’s better for the environment.”

            “I’m on a bus, in the middle of the night.  It’s cold and I have to walk from the stop to my house, in the dark, so it’s dangerous.”

            “It’s still better for the environment.”

            “I thought you were in Sydney?”  I change the subject.

            “I am, I mean, I’m here now but I’m in Sydney.  Look, this is all going to sound really weird.  But it’s all good.  Believe me.”  He’s sitting forward in the seat, almost as close as he can get without touching me.  I look up and meet his eyes, staring straight into mine.  It’s obvious he’s excited about something but he’s beginning to make me nervous.

            “James, what’s going on?”

            “How do I explain this?  I mean, I haven’t told anyone.  I haven’t even told my parents yet.  I will, but I just want to wait a bit longer so I can tell them it’s awesome, which it is, and how I’ve been living this way for ages and it works and it’s fantastic and I’m alive and I’m going to stay alive this way.”

            Some of the speech sounds rehearsed, like he has gone over and over in his head how to tell me. 

            “What are you talking about?”  I blurt out confused.

            He’s still staring at me, his pale hair almost luminous in the semi-darkness.  Then slowly he reaches out his fingers towards me.  For some reason my gaze follows his hand’s progress until it rests on mine.  Both my hands are grasping my bag on my knees.  He touches them, but I can’t feel it.  It’s like his hand is not even there.  The bus unexpectedly lurches and his arm drops lower, his hand vanishes through my skin.

            I gasp.

            “Shh, it’s okay,” he says, quickly sitting back, clasping his hands together on his lap.  He’s shocked by my reaction, suddenly unsure.  Someone is walking down the aisle of the bus towards us.  I turn around to see.  The man looks drunk.

            “Is this kid causing you problems?”  His breath stinks.  I can smell it even though I’m still hard against the window, as far from the aisle as I can get.

            “No, no I’m fine.  He’s a friend.”  I can see the bus driver watching us in the mirror above him.

            “If he’s causing you problems you just yell out and I’ll deal with him,” the man says, staring at James, then he stays there, hanging onto the back of my seat, swaying with the movement of the bus.

            “I said I’m fine.”

            “Just trying to be helpful, girlie.” 

            He finally leaves us alone and returns to the back of the bus.  James is still looking at me.

            “Was that a trick?  Some sort of magic stuff?”  I whisper hurriedly.  I’m angry he’s pulled a stunt like that.

            “No.  It’s not magic.  Pretty freaky, huh?”  He wants me to share his excitement. 

            “But how can you do that?” 

            “Because I can.  Believe me, I really did that.” 

            The horror starts to sink in.

            “What’s happened to you?” I ask aghast.

            He shrugs, looks out the window into the darkness, his pale face reflected in the glass.

            “I’ve been absorbed.”