CONFESSION
By Samantha Oakley
At 10.47 am on 3 February 1931, a devastating earthquake struck the Hawke’s Bay region of New Zealand, killing 256 people and injuring thousands more. Many of those killed had emigrated from the United Kingdom.
My dearest Mary, I must tell you something. I think you might know it already, or at least a part of it. You’ve asked so many questions and I know, even after all this time, I am still something of a mystery to you.
Do you recall that day when a lady came in from Napier? She’d travelled all the way down to the South Island, following Queen Elizabeth’s tour, so it must have been 1954, I believe. Three summers ago now. The lady required stockings, and you were so very excited. You rushed up to me and said, “Constance, this lady’s come from Napier. She might know something of your family!”
I told you I had to attend to the inventory, or some such thing, but you insisted I meet her. I didn’t give anything away. Not where I’d lived, not a thing about my husband. I was frightened. Indeed, I recall I persuaded you to serve her after that.
I knew that made you suspicious.
I do wish I hadn’t ever lied. I dare say I wouldn’t have survived without you, but in the beginning it was merely one little white lie to avoid being discovered, and then another tiny lie, and then another and another, until one day I realised the lies were my shadow.
I’m so very fond of this place.
The vast emptiness of the fiords.
I can walk for hours on Sundays after church and not see another soul.
I adore how the snow arrives each year as a cloak of crystal icing that stays in place, glistening, pristine, for months and months until the farmers get busy with lambing, heralding the melting of our world and the appearance of first green, then yellow, then a rainbow of flora, which always takes my breath away in its suddenness.
I adore the turquoise blue of the lake. It’s a particular blue that takes me back to Napier—takes me back to all that I have lost. One might think I wouldn’t be able to stand it but, when I look into those waters, with the sun shimmering on its surface, and I see that blue, it is the closest to happy that I can be.
You often say that I should take a trip back to Napier. You say they’ve built up the town so that people can walk through the middle of it and never know what happened. But it doesn’t matter what it looks like now. I shan’t ever forget.
It stays in my heart.
I know you’ve wanted to hear about that day.
Honestly, it’s terribly difficult to remember. So very long ago, more than twenty years. I do recall, vividly, that Gilbert hadn’t come home the night before. Goodness knows where he’d been. Drinking our money away, I imagine. It was a tremendously difficult time, you recall—people had nothing in those days. I’d left my own family behind in England just three years before, and I’d endured a terrible sailing to marry a man whose family was known to our parish in Sussex but whose station was not as grand as we’d been led to believe. Reverand Williams had spoken highly of Gilbert’s lineage, and my own parents were encouraged by everything they’d heard, but in truth Gilbert and his family were most unkind. They constantly berated me. They said I was spoiled and ill-equipped for life on their farm. They’d expected a labourer of a girl, I dare say, not the proper little Madam that my mother-in-law insisted on calling me.
Gilbert and I were living in one of the farmhouses miles from the town, and his staying away at night only added insult to injury.
I was filled with anger when I woke that morning, and the bitterness hadn’t gone away even by the time the earthquake hit.
I was fetching water from the stream at the back of the house. It happened suddenly. At first the noise was deafening, unforgettable, but after the ground stopped shaking there was silence. I ran towards the house, anxious to tend to Blue. I ran up the grassy hill, but then the second one hit, even stronger. I fell to the ground and then, quickly, there was rumbling. I looked back to see the land behind me, where I’d stood on firm ground just moments earlier, sliding down into the valley. Earth everywhere. An enormous mountain of brown earth where the valley and the stream had been.
It was overwhelming but something frantic inside me propelled me to find Blue. That’s what I called him, you see, on account of his eyes. Their colour was astonishing and I couldn’t bear to call him Gilbert. I’d left him sleeping. Oh Mary, I can’t tell you how much I adored my little one. He was the source of my joy. A fully grown man, he’d be now—almost the same age as Gilbert when I last saw him.
I ran to the house—I was trembling—and I could see that the front of it had collapsed. Pieces of timber and glass were everywhere.
I found Blue on the floor, wedged in between broken bed boards. I dug him out with my bare hands, desperate, his little body limp in my hands, tangled in a blanket, and even though I knew—I knew instantly—that he wasn’t sleeping, I still hoped he was. I called out for help but I knew not a soul would hear. I shook him, I didn’t know what else to do. I shook him and shook him, panicked, until at last I realised it was no use. I picked him up and snuggled my face against his chest, my tears wetting his clothes. I stayed like that for a long time, a very long time, just holding him, rocking him back and forth in my arms.
It seemed like hours before I could pull myself together. I knew I needed to act. I began walking down the path and up the hill towards town, clutching Blue. I didn’t think to take anything, not even my hat. I hadn’t imagined that I wouldn’t be back.
I walked and I walked, and I kept walking.
I could see the smoke in the air from a long way below the ridge. All of Napier was on fire. It was a ghastly sight and I had to stop there at the top of the hill—I shan’t ever forget it—just to take it in. I saw a warship and thought momentarily that we might be under attack, that perhaps it hadn’t been an earthquake after all but bombs—but then I saw how much the coastline was changed, how the Ahuriri Lagoon had vanished, replaced by new land. I knew for certain then.
Crowds of people were visible in the distance on the beach. I went towards them, avoiding the middle of town because of all the burning. I saw firemen trying desperately to attend to the fires, and groups of people like me, some on horseback, wandering around at a loss.
It haunts me to this day.
It was summer, you remember, and it was so very warm.
It was cooler by the time I got to the beach.
There were tents already out, and men from our navy helping. It was the HMS Veronica that I’d seen from the hill. I remember a nurse asking me about Blue, but I couldn’t answer, I couldn’t speak. She prised his cold little body out of my arms and she didn’t complain when I kicked and sobbed and yelped like a wounded animal. I must have looked a fright too, covered in dust and mud from the landslide. Afterwards she came to sit with me, the dear little creature. She gave me a lock of Blue’s hair, wrapped in a neat little square of newspaper. She gave me a blanket and said she’d be back.
I didn’t see her again.
Later on, I heard about the burial at Greenmeadows. I like to think Blue rests there now, but I was too distraught at the time, too mad with grief, to think of it.
It was on perhaps the second day, I can’t be certain, that things became organised. They moved us to shelter at Nelson Park. There was talk of evacuation, and government officers started to compile a register. One of them came to me. He might have asked my name, I’m not certain, but a lady next to me intervened. She’d seen with me Blue on that first day. She spoke to him quietly, and he moved on to someone else. I remember how he looked at me; he was so young, and his face was full of sympathy and something like embarrassment under his shiny government hat.
People shared what news they’d heard. The whole town was destroyed. Many buildings withstood the earthquake only to burn down afterwards. The fire engines had been stopped in their tracks by the debris of fallen buildings, the water pipes smashed to pieces. Train and tram tracks broken. Hundreds of people presumed dead, the lucky ones killed instantly. Yet we had survived.
An act of God had determined that we would live but you know, don’t you, because you have watched me closely over the years.
I am barely alive.
I am a ghost.
And you are my only friend.
I was astonished by your kindness even when we first met. Do you remember you were buying cigarettes at the station when I arrived? I asked where I could find a bed for the night.
I told you I’d lost my family, everyone, in the earthquake. That was the first lie. And then I said my name was Constance. That was the second. If I’d known you were to become my friend, my salvation, I mightn’t have lied.
I bet you never imagined I would stay this long.
Hundreds of people presumed dead, that’s how it was.
Strange thoughts came to me while I was in the shelter. Some of them were dream-like, where I got to hold Blue again, and laugh with him, and look deep into those striking eyes of his. They were a heavenly blue, bright like sunlight through a fisherman’s glass buoy, blue like the great lake of this town at the bottom of the Earth.
I thought about Gilbert too. I know now that he survived—I pored over the names of the deceased as they were published—but at that time I wasn’t certain. He hadn’t come home, not even in the early hours. He could have been passed out on the street when the earthquake struck, or in the back of the tavern if they’d locked in and let him stay after closing, or in some other place. Another woman, perhaps. It made no difference. I didn’t understand my own feelings at the time, but I knew without doubt that I didn’t grieve for him. I ought to have done, but I didn’t. Not for a minute.
I lay on my makeshift bed and thought about my husband. I knew that, if he’d survived, he would have searched frantically for our son; he would have done everything he could. I pictured him kneeling, his shoulders shuddering with each heavy sob. My mind was wild. I imagined him returning, distraught, to his lover, and her welcoming arms around him, kissing him, being affectionate in a way in which I could not. In my mind, she was bonnier than me. Perhaps I was delirious but thoughts of them together started to intrude as I lay there surrounded by the sounds of human anguish, the muffled cries of the inconsolable all around me. It was easier to think these beastly thoughts, even in shameful detail, than mourn my son. When I remembered where I was, my wounded heart wept for my lost child, as it does still now, the memories of him alive in my very pulse.
I slept badly—we all did—but one morning I woke with a new resolve. It had come to me in the night. A revelation. I could make a new life, far away, away from my husband and his ghastly family. I couldn’t return to England for the shame of it, not to mention the expense, but I could go somewhere else. A place like this. I could start anew.
I was so very desperate, but this gave me hope. I’d already lost my Blue, the one thing I loved. I couldn’t go back to Gilbert.
I left before daylight. I took one of the coats hanging up in the tent and I crept out. I was perfectly free to leave but still my heart was racing. It was terrifying but exhilarating all at once. I went out into the summer air and I started to walk.
I had no direction in mind. I only knew that was my one chance. Nobody knew me at the shelter, and nobody I knew had seen anything of me since the earthquake.
Hundreds of people presumed dead, that’s how it was.
I walked and I walked, and I kept on walking.
Samantha Oakley is a Japanese-British writer currently living in New Zealand. She has a Master's in Creative Writing from Massey University, and is currently working on a novel.
