Richard and Helen had lived in the town nearly three months before they discovered the park by the river. Only a few blocks walk from their rental, grass grew wetly in the shade of exotic trees. Adjacent to the children’s playground with the giant octopus and the concrete mountain, the paths and glades seemed like a fantastical garden. They had intended to drive further to find a picnic spot, maybe south to the wild beaches cut up by quad bikes and the wind. But a bent palm tree beckoned them like a long ridiculous finger, and they parked up, spread their tartan blanket, and unloaded their rustling shopping bag of cheese, fruit, bread and carbonated drinks.
‘This is beautiful,’ said Helen, looking around her, plastic knife in hand. ‘I wonder if anyone ever comes here?’ An hour or more passed and they didn’t see a soul. Occasionally, sounds came through the trees — the high-pitched calls of small pirates capturing invisible ships. But there were no footfalls, no barking dogs; no one disturbed their idyll by the water. ‘It’s about time we got to know the river,’ Helen said.
The river swamped the heart of the town, chewing its soft banks, picking logs from its teeth. Around the bridges the river moved almost silently, that massive body of water with its inhuman might. When Richard looked down on it, his skin tightened. In those days the river still received raw sewage from the town, and from the hills it wound through, it brought farm effluent, dead trees, and tonnes of eroded soil. ‘I’m so glad we moved to a town with a river,’ Helen added.
She was in one of her positive spins. Like a moving candle, Helen cast an ever-changing light over the facets of her life. She would wake early in the morning to prepare for her nursing shift, and say to Richard, ‘You know, the good thing about my alarm waking you up, is that you can hear the dawn chorus.’ The blackbirds sounded their clearest, sweetest notes, and Richard felt harassed. The same Helen came home in the late afternoon, slumped at the table in her uniform, looked at Richard reading the paper, and said to him ‘Didn’t you find a job today?’
Richard was not lazy, he was orderly. In the mornings he liked to arise at a regular time: not before eight. He liked to drink two cups of tea, the second stronger than the first, while he read the front page of the paper and the classifieds. The situations vacant were few and unpromising. In those days, the days of raw sewage, the main street was flecked with empty shops, dust crusting their windows. At the end of the river the downgraded, dying port sat like a scab, silting up, sealing the town’s former exit. In the local factories, machines came to a final halt. Business shuffled elsewhere. Richard would close the paper with a sigh most days, and set out for his morning walk; to look at the water, to see what the town had coughed up. In his walks around town, he discovered a range of things. In the local museum he looked at photographs of colonial dreams: white frock photographs, steamer photographs, photographs of new tram tracks and shops with names like ‘Drapery.’ He found out that they used to call the river the ‘Rhine of the South.’ Perhaps, he reasoned, in hope of recreating a Europe that even in Europe no longer existed. He found it interesting that the restaurants, shops and warehouses sat with their backs to the river. It was as though it was something filthy, that no one wanted to acknowledge was there.
At around noon he would have his usual lunch of either baked beans or eggs on cheap, thin toast. He would eat this in the company of the National programme, staring out the ranch slider at the flat green square of backyard and lack of garden. He imagined himself growing borders of marigolds and curly parsley, picking parsley sprigs to decorate his eggs. He imagined himself making great sculptures, centrepieces for sprawling estates and public parks. More than anything he wanted to work in marble, carve classical folds of cloth, curlicues, smooth white hands. He knew it was old-fashioned. After lunch he carried out whichever household chores seemed urgent, and then returned to the paper to read the middle. That was where Helen usually found him.
‘This is beautiful,’ said Helen, looking around her, plastic knife in hand. ‘I wonder if anyone ever comes here?’ An hour or more passed and they didn’t see a soul. Occasionally, sounds came through the trees — the high-pitched calls of small pirates capturing invisible ships. But there were no footfalls, no barking dogs; no one disturbed their idyll by the water. ‘It’s about time we got to know the river,’ Helen said.
The river swamped the heart of the town, chewing its soft banks, picking logs from its teeth. Around the bridges the river moved almost silently, that massive body of water with its inhuman might. When Richard looked down on it, his skin tightened. In those days the river still received raw sewage from the town, and from the hills it wound through, it brought farm effluent, dead trees, and tonnes of eroded soil. ‘I’m so glad we moved to a town with a river,’ Helen added.
She was in one of her positive spins. Like a moving candle, Helen cast an ever-changing light over the facets of her life. She would wake early in the morning to prepare for her nursing shift, and say to Richard, ‘You know, the good thing about my alarm waking you up, is that you can hear the dawn chorus.’ The blackbirds sounded their clearest, sweetest notes, and Richard felt harassed. The same Helen came home in the late afternoon, slumped at the table in her uniform, looked at Richard reading the paper, and said to him ‘Didn’t you find a job today?’
Richard was not lazy, he was orderly. In the mornings he liked to arise at a regular time: not before eight. He liked to drink two cups of tea, the second stronger than the first, while he read the front page of the paper and the classifieds. The situations vacant were few and unpromising. In those days, the days of raw sewage, the main street was flecked with empty shops, dust crusting their windows. At the end of the river the downgraded, dying port sat like a scab, silting up, sealing the town’s former exit. In the local factories, machines came to a final halt. Business shuffled elsewhere. Richard would close the paper with a sigh most days, and set out for his morning walk; to look at the water, to see what the town had coughed up. In his walks around town, he discovered a range of things. In the local museum he looked at photographs of colonial dreams: white frock photographs, steamer photographs, photographs of new tram tracks and shops with names like ‘Drapery.’ He found out that they used to call the river the ‘Rhine of the South.’ Perhaps, he reasoned, in hope of recreating a Europe that even in Europe no longer existed. He found it interesting that the restaurants, shops and warehouses sat with their backs to the river. It was as though it was something filthy, that no one wanted to acknowledge was there.
At around noon he would have his usual lunch of either baked beans or eggs on cheap, thin toast. He would eat this in the company of the National programme, staring out the ranch slider at the flat green square of backyard and lack of garden. He imagined himself growing borders of marigolds and curly parsley, picking parsley sprigs to decorate his eggs. He imagined himself making great sculptures, centrepieces for sprawling estates and public parks. More than anything he wanted to work in marble, carve classical folds of cloth, curlicues, smooth white hands. He knew it was old-fashioned. After lunch he carried out whichever household chores seemed urgent, and then returned to the paper to read the middle. That was where Helen usually found him.
+ + +
Their picnic came to its natural end. They crumpled the bread bags and slurped the last of their drinks. They tried to be mildly intimate on the picnic rug, but the pressure of their bodies made mud ooze from the ground. The rug was not large enough to stretch out fully, and they soon became uncomfortable searching for ways to extend their legs without wetting their feet. Helen suggested they take a walk, so they wrapped the rug around their rubbish and clicked it back into the car boot. Arm in arm they wandered under the shade to the riverbank, Helen pressing her head into Richard’s shoulder. At that time, those twelve weeks into their new life, they still held hands in public. Helen still felt a rush of contentment and desire at the smell of Richard’s woollen coat. His fingers felt smooth between hers. She tried not to think of them as the fingers of a man who did not work.
The driftwood lining the riverbank was bone-like, holding bottle-tops and dead pens in its grip. That year, the river spilled itself into the lawns and low-lying lounges of their suburb, leaving an icing of soft brown mud. Helen made a cake to commemorate it, adding instant coffee until the right colour was replicated. Baking was one of the things she made up her mind to. Every few days she made up her mind to do something. What I really, really would like to do is sew a dress — a dress for parties! I can see myself holding a glass, in this fabric. What I want to do is go for more long walks, explore up-river, buy some proper boots. What I am determined to do is be kinder to Richard. I will look for his good qualities and praise him for them — then he is bound to pick up. I would like to join an amateur theatre. Sometimes I wish I had studied drama instead of nursing. Somehow the made-up mind always left a loose thread, which eventually unravelled the whole thing. As they were walking, Helen made up her mind to come back here, to this park, to this riverbank, perhaps after work some days, perhaps with Richard, perhaps alone.
‘What’s that smell?’ Richard asked. His nose was a source of personal pride. This river, in spite of its baggage, tended to carry an earthy scent. But this scent was very much flesh — a dead bird maybe, a fish disemboweled by the tide. They kept walking, shoes scuffing the wood, vaguely curious, mostly unconcerned. ‘Remember the seal we saw at Paekakariki?’ Helen said, thinking of their latest discovery of death, a furred tragic pungency, and then —
‘OH!’ Helen inhaled the sharpness of shock. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh!’ She started to dance from foot to foot, trembling with panic and disgust. In spite of all the gruesome things she had seen at work, this, this was —
‘Hands,’ said Richard in bewilderment, a sense of wonder creeping over his immediate feeling of fear. They were whitened by water and he thought of his daydreams of marble. Their skin was bluish, like the de-fuzzed skin of a possum he had seen in the creek of his childhood. Their severed ends were wiggly — lobes of fat, dangling tendons. From one of them a bone protruded, round and yellow. A carpal, Richard told himself, and somehow this word was reassuring. They were hanging out of a plastic bag — it was silly, really; it had acted as a flotation device and brought them here, rather than the riverbed where they must have been intended to rest. This was the act of a dumb criminal, Richard decided. But who, while disposing of dismembered body parts, would be thinking straight?
Helen was still hopping about. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ she whispered. ‘What do we do?’ For once, it appeared to Richard she was relying on him; to take the lead, to guide the situation, to solve the problem at hand. A new thread of pride wound into his confused mind. His stomach churned like a bucket of punch at this emotional mix-up. ‘We’ve got to tell the police,’ Helen said.
Richard stood there calmly, looking across the water, which was turning grey as the sun clouded up. ‘I’ll wait with the hands,’ he said. ‘Just in case they wash away. You go and phone the cops.’
‘I didn’t see a phone booth anywhere around here,’ Helen wailed.
‘You’ll have to find the nearest house and knock on the door,’ Richard said. ‘Go to one of those houses over the road from where we parked.’ Helen started to walk away, and then paused. ‘Richard,’ she hissed, as if the hands were listening. ‘Richard.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t touch them, will you? Whatever you do, don’t touch them or move them.’
‘Of course not.’ And Richard stood and watched the hands, stuck in their nest of sticks, grisly yet peaceful, the rigor of death in the looseness of life. He thought all the logical thoughts: whose hands were they? Where was the rest of their owner? Who would do such a thing? Why would they do it? And then in turn he thought of logical answers. It was gang related. It was drug related. It was a family dispute. There’d be a body in a gully somewhere, a shallow grave in the bush. A sharp knife had been used, but not that sharp. They’d probably been chopped quite recently. Skin breaks down remarkably fast in water, and these hands still had a good coating of skin.
It seemed like hours that Helen was gone. When she returned, a stocky man in blue was at her side, with the set unsmiling mouth of a dark career. A few paces behind them walked a woman, brisk and neat, armed with clipboard and camera. Helen had waited by the car for the police to arrive, and was guiding them to the site in an important manner, highly agitated and talking excitedly. The officers looked at Richard a little strangely, then introduced themselves, shaking his hand. The man’s palm was warm and very firm.
‘Okay,’ said Richard. ‘What happens now?’ He heard the crackle of a walkie talkie.
‘We’ll need to ask you a few questions,’ the woman said. More police arrived and unrolled tape. Richard and Helen answered all kinds of enquiries, from name and address to the contents of their picnic. Their statements gave the time of discovery of the hands, their exact location, the method of their discovery. ‘How long have you been waiting with the hands?’ the woman asked Richard. ‘I didn’t mind too much,’ he said. ‘I thought if a kid came along, or something, I could warn them.’
‘Thank you,’ the stocky officer told them at length. The shadows of the trees were lengthening. ‘We’ll handle it from here.’ Was it a pun, wondered Richard, had he said that on purpose?
‘Will you let us know what happens?’ he asked, and the cop gave him that strange look again. ‘That won’t be necessary, sir.’ He imagined himself reading about it in Monday’s paper. It would probably be front page — it would have to be the anchor. He would be eating his breakfast while he read about it. The journalist would mention him, and Helen. Then he would turn to the classifieds and see if any decent jobs had come up this week. While he read the ads, he would still be thinking of the hands.
Helen was hysterical all the way home. The hands had opened up all kinds of closed lids in her. ‘I still feel sick,’ she wept. What I want more than anything, Richard was thinking, dreaming of stone and a chisel.
‘OH!’ Helen inhaled the sharpness of shock. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh!’ She started to dance from foot to foot, trembling with panic and disgust. In spite of all the gruesome things she had seen at work, this, this was —
‘Hands,’ said Richard in bewilderment, a sense of wonder creeping over his immediate feeling of fear. They were whitened by water and he thought of his daydreams of marble. Their skin was bluish, like the de-fuzzed skin of a possum he had seen in the creek of his childhood. Their severed ends were wiggly — lobes of fat, dangling tendons. From one of them a bone protruded, round and yellow. A carpal, Richard told himself, and somehow this word was reassuring. They were hanging out of a plastic bag — it was silly, really; it had acted as a flotation device and brought them here, rather than the riverbed where they must have been intended to rest. This was the act of a dumb criminal, Richard decided. But who, while disposing of dismembered body parts, would be thinking straight?
Helen was still hopping about. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ she whispered. ‘What do we do?’ For once, it appeared to Richard she was relying on him; to take the lead, to guide the situation, to solve the problem at hand. A new thread of pride wound into his confused mind. His stomach churned like a bucket of punch at this emotional mix-up. ‘We’ve got to tell the police,’ Helen said.
Richard stood there calmly, looking across the water, which was turning grey as the sun clouded up. ‘I’ll wait with the hands,’ he said. ‘Just in case they wash away. You go and phone the cops.’
‘I didn’t see a phone booth anywhere around here,’ Helen wailed.
‘You’ll have to find the nearest house and knock on the door,’ Richard said. ‘Go to one of those houses over the road from where we parked.’ Helen started to walk away, and then paused. ‘Richard,’ she hissed, as if the hands were listening. ‘Richard.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t touch them, will you? Whatever you do, don’t touch them or move them.’
‘Of course not.’ And Richard stood and watched the hands, stuck in their nest of sticks, grisly yet peaceful, the rigor of death in the looseness of life. He thought all the logical thoughts: whose hands were they? Where was the rest of their owner? Who would do such a thing? Why would they do it? And then in turn he thought of logical answers. It was gang related. It was drug related. It was a family dispute. There’d be a body in a gully somewhere, a shallow grave in the bush. A sharp knife had been used, but not that sharp. They’d probably been chopped quite recently. Skin breaks down remarkably fast in water, and these hands still had a good coating of skin.
It seemed like hours that Helen was gone. When she returned, a stocky man in blue was at her side, with the set unsmiling mouth of a dark career. A few paces behind them walked a woman, brisk and neat, armed with clipboard and camera. Helen had waited by the car for the police to arrive, and was guiding them to the site in an important manner, highly agitated and talking excitedly. The officers looked at Richard a little strangely, then introduced themselves, shaking his hand. The man’s palm was warm and very firm.
‘Okay,’ said Richard. ‘What happens now?’ He heard the crackle of a walkie talkie.
‘We’ll need to ask you a few questions,’ the woman said. More police arrived and unrolled tape. Richard and Helen answered all kinds of enquiries, from name and address to the contents of their picnic. Their statements gave the time of discovery of the hands, their exact location, the method of their discovery. ‘How long have you been waiting with the hands?’ the woman asked Richard. ‘I didn’t mind too much,’ he said. ‘I thought if a kid came along, or something, I could warn them.’
‘Thank you,’ the stocky officer told them at length. The shadows of the trees were lengthening. ‘We’ll handle it from here.’ Was it a pun, wondered Richard, had he said that on purpose?
‘Will you let us know what happens?’ he asked, and the cop gave him that strange look again. ‘That won’t be necessary, sir.’ He imagined himself reading about it in Monday’s paper. It would probably be front page — it would have to be the anchor. He would be eating his breakfast while he read about it. The journalist would mention him, and Helen. Then he would turn to the classifieds and see if any decent jobs had come up this week. While he read the ads, he would still be thinking of the hands.
Helen was hysterical all the way home. The hands had opened up all kinds of closed lids in her. ‘I still feel sick,’ she wept. What I want more than anything, Richard was thinking, dreaming of stone and a chisel.
