Wake by Elizabeth Knox

Author:Elizabeth Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2013-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

Oscar waited a very long time for the hallway to be quiet and empty. He hadn’t wanted to know what the sounds of hushed alarm were about. He just wished everyone would go to bed and get out of his way.

After another hour the noises had subsided. Oscar’s clock said that it was two-fifteen. He’d had no trouble staying awake. He was of an age when he’d naturally rather get up at noon and go to bed in the small hours.

At two-thirty Oscar opened his door, checked the hall, and went out. He crept to the fire exit—pressed the latch, then jammed the door open with the ironing board he was carrying for that purpose. It was the fifth time he’d done it, and it was beginning to feel like an established procedure.

He stood on the fire escape and listened to the night. A ruru had come down from the reserve and was up in the arboretum. Oscar heard the owl calling, then saw it, a small silent shadow that floated across a glade between a stand of birches and a black beech. He lost it in the dark and, a moment later, heard a scream—a rat or rabbit. Then, as if a sluice had opened in the sky, a wind came across the ridges landward and the tall brittle European trees began to roar like surf.

Oscar clambered quickly down the fire escape. The steel shivered and rang, but he couldn’t hear it over the wind.

He made his way around the back of the kitchen and started across the lawn, navigating through a dark crease near to the shrubbery by the lights on the driveway. The grass was damp and squeaked under his trainers. From where he was, the driveway lights made a yellow gauze in the air, before which everything showed black. There was nothing to see, till suddenly he was under the jacaranda. Its top was visible: purple blossom blanched pink in the light. Oscar only just managed to stop before he blundered onto the pale patch of ground by the tree—Adele Haines’s grave, now covered with flowering petunias.

Oscar caught his breath and listened. The wind had dropped again. It was coming around, one wind pushing against another somewhere up there, passing back and forth through the No-Go as if it wasn’t there, except that it was and would be sieving the wind of birds and beetles.

Something brushed Oscar’s cheek and he jumped, but it was only falling jacaranda blossom.

He went on, keeping away from the driveway, in case the man in black was standing somewhere down in the town looking up at that channel of light. He pushed through the feijoa hedge and came out on Bypass Road.

All along that road were sodium street lamps, high on their concrete stems. Oscar hurried across and plunged into another hedge. He paused, held his breath, listened, and continued on his way. He skirted one house. In the fingers of orange radiance coming through the hedge, Oscar saw its windowsills were black with dead flies.

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