The Pale North

WINNER, BEST FIRST BOOK, 2012 NEW ZEALAND POST BOOK AWARDS

‘I was blown away by Wulf’s imaginative derring-do. It is by far and away the most impressive debut I’ve read in a long time.’

—Lloyd Jones, author of Mister Pip

‘A powerfully imagined novel—assured, crisply poetic and spellbinding in its unfurling narrative…. Clayton [is] a gifted writer for a new generation.’

—Murray Bramwell, NZ Books

‘Haunting and highly original.’

—New Zealand Listener

‘Enchanting … [Wulf] draws readers into the world of intrigue, brutality and a touch of mythology.’

—Linda Hall, Daily Post

‘Few attempts to capture the sparsely habited early colonial landscape, the feeling of newness and mystery with which Europeans encountered it, have been as successful as this.’

—North & South

‘This startling first novel is already en route to becoming a New Zealand literary legend.’

—David Hill, Weekend Herald

THE CITY OF LOST THINGS

I came back to Wellington in 1998, the year of the earthquake. It was the earthquake that brought me back. I had been living on the other side of the world, in London, when I heard that the capital city of New Zealand had been shaken apart at the seams, devastated by a series of earthquakes over the space of three hours. I felt a deep groan from the far side of the planet, a swarm of shaking earth, and a flutter inside me like a ghost.

The first and severest of the earthquakes struck at three o’clock in the afternoon on a calm, sunny day. Although it was July and Wellington lay in the grip of a cold winter, it had been unseasonably warm. Half a world away, I’d woken in the middle of the English night and known that something somewhere had fallen apart. I lay awake in the chilling grip of a sensation I’d never known before. An otherworldliness descended upon me, a blanket of ashes in the darkness, and I was weighed down in the bed by gravity’s heavy wing. And yet I remember too the impossible sensation that I had somehow floated to the ceiling during those seconds. I lay in the current of an irrational fear that my soul had become airborne and I was drifting helplessly free of the anchor of my body, never to return. And in the back of my mind crept another dread: that someone close to me, somewhere far away, had at that moment died in violence. In those seconds I felt everything solid dissolve into a sea of ghosts.

Eventually the feeling passed and I must have drifted back to sleep. When I woke again, the early morning light was filtering into the room. I turned on the radio and in a few minutes I heard the news. I lay in bed frozen by the shock of reality.

The days passed in a hyper-real dream. The streets in London were hot and calm, every building and footpath burnished, sharp with white sun. The city was beautiful, so whole and perfect. I walked there in a guilty heaven.

One morning, a few days after the earthquakes, I woke to a message left on the answer-phone overnight. It was a woman speaking.

‘Come back,’ she said.

I didn’t recognise the voice. It was muffled and cracked beneath layers of violent static. I played the message over and over, listening for clues in the background. I couldn’t make out anything else but I thought I could hear her beginning to speak again just as her voice had been cut off. ‘Come back,’ she’d said, then paused, and then said nothing.

Nearly four months later I returned.

On my first morning in the ruined city, when I walked the collapsed streets, I felt as though I were walking through roads in the Third World, or the last book of the Bible. A war had somehow been declared there; a curse or a judgement, made in heaven, had fallen and landed in those streets. All about me the disaster lay. Wide pools of dirty water had collected between broken buildings; piles of rubble had inundated and erased the streets. The roads had been parted as easily as sheets and beneath them the raw dark earth had opened into deep clefts. The cracked footpaths were now meadows of smashed headstones. But as I walked it was as though I moved untouched through the ruin all around me: like an angel I passed, present yet removed from its scenes of despair. Wellington had passed through a fire, a crucible, but I had not passed through this flame. I’d escaped that baptism and so I remained a creature of the old world, a child of the old city. As I walked I held within me the Wellington I’d known before the earthquake, its idea as delicate as a birdcage. I walked there with memory a staff in my hand.

It was the eighth of November, late spring in New Zealand. Usually by then the days in Wellington had begun to be warm again, but that day the air was freezing. Everywhere was held in the grip of a penetrating cold, the bitter edges of a steel sheet of wind brought there from the frozen face of Antarctica. In the north-east, beyond the flat shining sea of Wellington Harbour, the peaks of the ranges were covered in snow. Overhead the late morning sun shone high in the radiant blue sky. Like the utter devastation which lay all around, the season disorientated me, for though the light spoke of summer and the sun was high, the air, cold and clear, was purest winter. It was as though the city could no longer turn through the normal wheel of the seasons. Wellington had been broken and removed from the rhythm of the world. It was a dying animal, limping and out of step with the planet around it.

As I walked I saw others like me wandering the rubble where once there had been buildings and roads and traffic. If you’d seen them, perhaps you would have thought they were aimless wanderers, tourists of the macabre drawn by the perverse appeal of disaster. And perhaps some were. But perhaps some of them had come to that place of death and destruction through a sense of private ritual. Perhaps they had been drawn there, as I had been drawn there, through an obligation to bear witness to the fractured wholeness of their lives. Perhaps the tangled desire to return, silently, to a place which had passed over was the desire to return to a place they’d cherished for how it had once cherished them. Though I wasn’t born in Wellington, I was of that city, I was made in its image, and I went back so I might glimpse the finality of its streets before they were cleared and remade anew and lost from me forever. I went back there in search of what part of me had become.

So I wandered amid the ruin, part of the slow drift of strangers who moved alone or in groups through the city. I spoke to no one and none walked near me. Yet there was something pure and whole between us as well, an understanding that each of us shared a common currency of sadness. There was no need to speak or to walk with others, but between us we made the shape of the soul of the city as we followed our own paths through its vanquished streets. I’ve heard it said that those thrown together by fate in times of danger or unrest can forge bonds stronger than those formed in families or marriages. So it felt to me that morning, walking among that loose herd of ghosts. I had not been there when the earthquakes had struck, yet I felt that morning an intangible strength hanging in the air, a faith in the care of a shared understanding that we’d all been victims somehow, as if huddled together on one side of a war.

In the west the long tree-clad hill of Tinakori stood over the city, its sheer green wall hundreds of feet high. Its wooded sides had been brutally shorn into great shelves of open clay and fallen wood, torn as though swept by a great wave. In my mind I saw a biblical flood that rose and covered even that great height above me. When I saw it my thoughts went back to the night in London, months ago, during which I’d woken and felt my soul drift from my body. I felt again how I’d risen to the ceiling, how my soul had become airborne in that dark space. In the months since then I had carried an image of myself as I lay in the bed below me, my body lying stretched out on its back beneath the covering of a single white sheet. I was certain that it must have been then—in the seconds when I’d floated away from myself, buoyant on a shelf of air—that Wellington had been inundated by walls of sea. I did not know how high the waters had reached in the floods that had swept the city. It could not have reached the top of that hill. But when I looked up to it, I saw it engulfed.

I followed the road up to the base of the hills, walking the long uphill bend of Bowen Street. The way became easier and in another half hour I came to the intersection with Tinakori Road, climbing along the side of its fortress hill. I stopped there. I had once lived further up that road, up the hill to the south, around the bend where it became Glenmore Street. Opposite the gates to the Botanical Garden was the two-bedroomed house I’d shared with a woman I’d once loved. I stood there and looked up that familiar road and all other thoughts fell away. For a moment I forgot even the destroyed town behind me with its scenes of despair. And although the street it had once been was now forever lost to me, something of the house had remained there. Its spirit still moved gently in the air. I remembered the thick scent of rain on concrete paths. The way the trees had moved in the sky around the house on dark, wet afternoons. The sunlight slanting against its painted walls, entering through windows. How its character was contained in the calmly changing light. As I looked I imagined that somehow, just beyond the bend in the ruined road, there would still be that house with all its moods and words, its intimate histories of occupation. There would still be an unmade bed, a green vase on the windowsill. I could see the pale yellow rooms, the way they had looked and felt in the mornings, only just empty in the moments after she had left for work. The air quietly moving but settling like dust, still carrying the memory of her body hurrying within it. The mirror from which her reflection had just vanished. I could see her with her head held to one side, her hands attaching first one earring, then the other. I looked up the road and just beyond my view imagined a delicate, sweetly empty place. The quiet space of the rooms where she had just been. I couldn’t bring myself to walk up that road.

As I wandered through the town, through the hours on a long, wide lap of the city, I paused from time to time before the remains of buildings I’d known. On Willis Street I recognised a wooden villa, half fallen into collapse. Before the earthquakes it had been a bar. I remembered the long-ago summer afternoons spent drinking cheap beer, the late nights watching bands. I had been nineteen years old. I was still a stranger in the city then, a new arrival, and over the days and months I’d watched myself slowly becoming part of the town around me. I stood there outside memory and saw that although a corner of my history had been removed it hadn’t been erased. Though it lay there in a smashed heap on the concrete, damaged beyond all repair, still it lay there. Now I wish I’d had the courage to enter its ruined remains. I imagine foraging through the wreckage and finding a brass tap or a chrome fitting from the bar. A dull metal ashtray. Some quiet talisman of the ordinary to smuggle into whatever life lay ahead.

But instead I continued along the streets, following the white centrelines of the roads, their ribbons of paint broken by cracked tar-seal. At the top of Willis Street I turned downhill across a wide field of whitened devastation, away from the dark green of the Aro Valley, down towards a built-up quarter of the city where rundown warehouse apartments stood above industrial workplaces below. There were buildings in those streets whose sides had never seen the sun, but now their shadows seemed darker than they had before. They leaned unsteadily against one another, their doors vacant and made into hollow tombs. The glass had been shaken from every window so only empty sockets remained, looking down upon me with the knowledge of dead eyes. Those buildings would later be condemned and destroyed. But beyond even the danger of the unstable concrete I felt a darker unease. Something sinister watched me, unseen and silent. I picked my way over the piles of rubble, through the soundless, abandoned streets. I looked through the darkened doorways, into the places of cavernous silence. I believed in the ghosts that were there.

Sometimes in my dreams I pass into abandoned buildings and cross their dusty concrete floors. I walk beneath the leaning door-jambs of empty villas, gliding alone through the broken rooms. Sunshine slants calmly through high windows. There is neither a breath of wind nor the faint hum of the street to suggest a world outside. In my dreams they are forgotten corners, places where history has stopped, having swept through like a river and leaving only the restfulness of the quiet inside a tomb. I walk through the soft shadows of rooms, soundless as a held breath. I am someone half-remembered at the edge of a dream, a shadow watching from a doorway. A memory passing through another man’s slow