Wake by Elizabeth Knox Page B

snake toys. It was broken in many places. Lily released him and backed off. She stood wringing her hands.
    Lily had always considered herself tough. She wasn’t a crier; tears were a waste of moisture. At the end of a race, whether she lost or won the first thing she’d do once she was away from the crowds was fill a bath with water and ice and sit in it for thirty minutes, to suppress the inflammation. She’d grit her teeth and take pain on top of pain.
    Was hardihood not the same as toughness?
    Lily tore her eyes away from the old people and looked at Kahukura.
    There was something on fire down there.
    The American, William Minute, was a lawyer who had come to New Zealand to depose twenty plaintiffs in a class-action against a multinational chemical company. Most of the people William had to meet had been flown to Auckland by the Kiwi legal team. But two were unable to travel. One was in Murchison, nursing his sick wife; another was sick himself, and in a community hospital near Granity. William would have to go to them. And the Kiwis thought, since he’d come all this way, it would be nice to treat him—and themselves—to a weekend at Kahukura Spa.
    Monday morning William said goodbye to his colleagues, who were waiting for a helicopter to take them to Nelson Airport. William had rented a big Mercedes and was looking forward to his drive. However, once the sprawling, many-gabled spa was receding in his rear-view mirror, William thought that, actually, it was less that he was looking forward to the journey than glad to be going, to be parting company with his company. Treats and fringe benefits were, these days, in shorter supply. And William liked mud baths, massages and manicures as much as the next guy. Or maybe a little more than the next guy. He’d enjoyed the spa’s appetising whole food, and the clean smell of the narrow belt of old exotic trees behind his room. He’d liked the crystalline blue, heated outdoor swimming pool. However, he hadn’t liked the concentrated period of having to be nice to people. The spa was a nice place. New Zealand was a nice place. He was having a nice time.
    Now he was looking forward to being alone, to washing off the company of others, as he’d washed off the spa’s soothing body balms.
    The spa was behind him now, its sweeping drive and grand gateway. It looked romantic. It looked like that place in Calistoga where Robert Louis Stevenson had gone to nurse his lungs. (William had stayed there once, and had spent his stay daydreaming about the nineteenth century. He liked to think he’d have flourished back then—in a time with fewer rules, and without people always looking over your shoulder.)
    He turned onto Bypass Road and drove southeast to go west. He’d been told that the road west was a dead end, that after a distance it came up against some national park. It was weird to be in a country that lacked roads in the obvious places.
    Six minutes later William was out of the settlement, through the cutting that crossed the base of Matarau Point. He was well on his way.
    Then he got a kind of itch. A moment later he could see what he’d forgotten. He knew that his phone charger was still plugged in by his room’s writing desk. Before he’d jumped in the shower he’d unplugged his phone, checked his messages, and put his phone in his jacket pocket. But he couldn’t remember bundling up the charger and stowing it in his bag.
    William pulled over, popped the hatch, and got out to check his bag. No charger.
    He slammed the hatch and stood for a time staring at the road ahead, which grew straight and ran on, cutting across a tidal inlet. There were cars moving away from him along that road, and the sun shining on their windows seemed to form lines of code.
    William scowled and shook his head. ‘Idiot,’ he said to himself—about his fanciful thoughts and his forgetfulness. He got back in his car and