Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley

purpose.

Part I

1

Holloway Road

The house was not how Danyl had imagined it. It was a derelict two-storey wooden structure perched on the lower slope of the hill, facing back down the valley. All the windows were broken and boarded up; most of the paint was gone. Grass sprouted from the rooftop gutters.

Steve pointed to it. ‘This must be the place.’

‘I really don’t think so.’ But Danyl checked the street number—91—and it was correct and there was his box right there on the porch, just where Verity said it would be.

They crossed the road and walked through the gate. The house looked even worse up close: the peeled weatherboards were covered in graffiti and mould; dead trees lined the garden path; rubbish lay strewn amid the tall weeds.

Horrible, Danyl thought. Just horrible. Yet this was Verity’s new home. Her life with him was so unbearable she chose to be alone in this ruined shack instead. He hesitated at the bottom of the steps. He didn’t want to be there.

It was late morning, midsummer. The rest of Te Aro was filled with sunlight, but here in the deepest reaches of the valley it was damp and cool. Danyl thought fondly of his bedroom back in his own home. At this time of day the sun streamed through the window. He should be in bed, drowsing in that warm glow, or outside somewhere—sleeping under a tree in the park, perhaps, his head nestled in Verity’s lap. Anywhere but here, at the foot of these broken steps.

‘Coming?’ Steve walked past him and started up the zigzag pathway leading to the house. Danyl followed.

The box sat in the centre of the porch, in front of the front door. It was a waist-high cube sealed with electrical tape with the logo of the AAAAAA Storage Company printed on each face. It was larger than Danyl remembered. It looked real heavy.

‘It looks real heavy,’ Steve said.

‘It’s mostly empty.’ Danyl stepped onto the porch. A gust of wind rattled the branches of the dead trees, and the front door creaked open. He paused mid-step.

Beyond the door lay an interior of absolute blackness.

‘Verity must be home.’ Steve called out, ‘Hey! Verity!’

The wind died. Silence. ‘Verity?’

‘She’ll be at work.’ Danyl walked to the door and put his hand on the handle. From inside the house came the smell of damp earth; beneath it the scent of antiseptic, and another smell beneath that: something sour; something old. He heard a faint sound—metal tapping against metal. Was she home? Or was there someone else in there? She said she was living alone. But why would she choose such a huge place?

Then he reminded himself: Verity is not your problem any more. He pulled the door shut and said, ‘She probably forgot to lock up.’ He gestured at the box. ‘Let’s get this out of here.’

They bent down and picked it up, growling and baring their teeth, and carried it off the porch. They both faced forward: Danyl was in front, his hands behind his back and fingers bent backwards. He was a handsome, distinguished-looking man in his late twenties, with a scraggly beard, modest pot-belly and a halo of brown curly hair.

Steve was in back: he was a few years older than Danyl, taller and thinner, with what some might call a winning smile, but he was prematurely bald. The box was between them. It was heavier than Danyl remembered.

Looking down from the top of the path he saw that the overgrown bank in front of the house used to be a series of terraces descending to the street: the walls were crumbling, collapsed in places; the entire area was choked with weeds pushing up between the broken paving stones. A tangle of blackberry bushes concealed a ruined fountain. The dirt path criss-crossed the terraces. The ruin was so complete it was impossible to discern the old landscaping except from above.

Steve saw it too. He halted and said, ‘What is this place?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Very interesting. Very strange. Notice that Verity’s house is more recent than the others?’

Steve was right. The rest of the homes along the road were all built in the late nineteenth century: elegant villas perched on the hillsides, or worker’s cottages on the valley floor. Verity’s house was post-war.

‘And this whole section of the hill is levelled,’ Steve continued, ‘as if there was once a much larger building here. There used to be a hospital at this end of Te Aro. I bet these are the old grounds.’

A hospital? Danyl looked about. They were at the dead end of Holloway Road: a long leafy street beginning at the end of the Aro Valley and winding into the emptiness of the hills south of the city. Most of the road was sealed, but for the last hundred metres it degraded to gravel and dust. The hills were high; the valley was narrow and sunless.

‘Funny place to build a hospital. What happened to it?’

‘I think it burned down during the war. The First World War. There were rumours of arson. How very interesting that Verity would live here. Let’s take a look around.’

‘Let’s just go. Please?’

Steve assented. They set off down the path and passed through the gate. Danyl glanced back at the house. Maybe Steve was right—he knew many strange and obscure things, picking up odd bits of knowledge from old news archives and local historians, but often his wisdom was mixed with folklore and urban myth and the ramblings of the mentally ill, along with his own private delusions, and so diluted down into nonsense. Perhaps Verity would know the house’s real story. She lived there now.

They walked through the gate and onto the road.

The old man came at them out of nowhere. One instant the street was empty; the next he charged at them, screaming and waving a shovel.

Danyl and Steve dropped the box onto the gravel and stumbled backwards in divergent directions. The old man paused, considered them both and ran towards Danyl, his shovel held high.

‘Stop,’ Danyl commanded.

‘Arghhhhh,’ said the old man. He was tall and thin with tufts of white hair sprouting from indiscriminate regions of his face and head. He wore a shabby black suit with a white shirt and no tie; ropes of spit hung from his mouth. He swung the shovel, missing Danyl by about a metre.

‘Steve! Help!’ Danyl tried to grab the shovel but the old man backed away and jabbed it at his face.

‘I can’t get involved.’

‘Why not? Get behind him!’

‘I’m a scholar.’

‘What?’

‘I can only observe. I can’t interfere.’

‘Arghhhhh.’

The old man charged Danyl, who stepped into the swing and attempted to grab his assailant’s arm but somehow missed and landed a solid blow on his throat. The shovel fell to the ground with a clatter; the old man staggered backwards and collapsed onto the road, throwing up a cloud of dust.

‘My God.’ Danyl rushed over to him as he lay gasping by the verge. ‘Are you OK?’

The man coughed and spluttered; his face turned red.

‘I didn’t mean to hit you. Although clearly, it was justified—’

Steve pushed Danyl aside. ‘I think you really hurt him.’ He knelt down. ‘Can you hear me, buddy? Can you breathe?’

The old man’s lips moved. A faint whisper, all but inaudible. Steve leaned closer. ‘What’s that?’

The old man’s fingers tugged at Steve’s sleeve, drawing him closer still. ‘I—’ he rasped, then coughed and swallowed. ‘I—’

‘You can tell me anything,’ Steve assured the old man. ‘I’m a psychologist.’

The man shuddered, jerked his head back and spat directly in Steve’s face. Steve recoiled, yelled, ‘You animal,’ leaped to his feet and drew his leg back to kick the old man in the gut, but Danyl restrained him. ‘Let’s just go.’

‘Let’s take his wallet.’

‘Let’s leave him be.’

Steve wiped the spit off his face and fixed the incapacitated old man with a vengeful gaze. ‘This isn’t over,’ he warned.

They walked back to the box and lifted it and set off. When they reached the bend in the road Danyl looked back at the old man, who lay on the curb hissing and whispering, and at the derelict house on the hillside and he saw—for a second—a figure watching him from a high window, its face obscured by reflected sunlight.

‘This is awkward.’

Steve shovelled another fistful of berries into his mouth and looked at Danyl. They had stopped to rest in an allotment halfway down Holloway Road. It was a vacant lot above the street, positioned to capture the sunlight. Someone had planted it with vegetables and fruit trees, and borders of companion flowers. They lay on a patch of sun-warmed grass, leaning against the box at right angles to each other. A small pile of stolen fruit sat on the ground between them. The air teemed with butterflies. Bees and other beneficial insects went about their industry.

Steve said, ‘Awkward in what way?’

‘Verity didn’t say why she left me, exactly,’ Danyl replied. ‘But before she went she said something that’s been preying on me. A comment about my . . . mental health. I wanted your semi-professional opinion.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes.’ Steve devoured more berries. ‘Unburden yourself by all means.’

Danyl hesitated. ‘This is hard for me to say. Verity said . . . The reason she left . . . She thinks I’m depressed.’

‘Oh.’

‘What do you think? How much do you know about this?’

‘Depression?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Um.’ Steve thought. ‘Nothing, basically.’

‘Nothing? Aren’t you nine years into a doctorate in psychology? Don’t you lecture to undergraduates?’

‘Sure, but it’s a broad, uh, field. My work is more cognitive. Depression is a disease of the mind. But I ask: what is the mind? Does it even exist? And if not, what does that mean for my research? Do you see what I’m saying? Does that make you feel better?’

‘You must know something,’ Danyl pleaded. ‘I sleep all the time. It’s the only thing I enjoy any more. Isn’t that a symptom?’

‘Sure. I guess.’

‘Do you think I should see someone? A clinical psychologist?’

‘Oh God no.’ Steve shook his head. ‘Don’t tell anyone else about this. Ever. Once you’re in the system—’ He made a throat slitting gesture, and then picked at the pile of stolen fruit. ‘These lemons are delicious. They’re so sweet.’

‘So what should I do?’

‘I’ve no idea. I think they’re some kind of lemon-mandarin hybrid.’

‘But you must know something.’

Steve leaned his head to one side. ‘I’ve heard that exercise is good for depression.’

‘Exercise?’

‘Exercise and Vitamin B. I read about it in a magazine somewhere. It works for me. I run every morning, irregardless of weather. It keeps me sharp. On the edge.’ Steve clicked his fingers in the air. ‘Where I gotta be. You’re welcome to join me. Sunrise, buddy.’

‘I think my problems go beyond lack of exercise,’ Danyl said dismissively. ‘They’re deeper. More complex. Maybe I need medication?’ He brightened at the thought. Then a car came around the corner, heading towards the top of Holloway Road, and his eyes widened in alarm. ‘Hide,’ he said.

They flattened themselves on the ground. Danyl looked up as the car went by, his mouth open and filled with half-eaten berries. It was a police car. It roared out of sight around the bend.

Steve said, ‘Do you think they were looking for us?’

‘Yes. Do you think the old man called them?’

‘He had communication problems. I think someone else, probably a neighbour, saw you assault an elderly old man and leave him lying in the gutter gasping for air, and they called the police.’

‘He came at me with a shovel.’

‘I make no judgements.’

‘You tried to kick him when he was down.’

‘I have no memory of that. Do you think they saw us?’

‘No,’ Danyl replied. ‘We were obscured by the broad beans. But we should leave.’

Steve agreed. They shovelled the last of the fruit into their mouths and wiped their hands on the grass, then stood and picked up the box and carried it down to the road.

‘I don’t want Verity to hear about this,’ Danyl said. ‘It wouldn’t improve things between us.’ He thought about the derelict house again. Why would she move to such a terrible place? Perhaps it was just temporary. Perhaps she hadn’t really left him: she was just sending him a sign—a signal of her displeasure. That made sense. That had to be it. And this thing with his box, accidentally shifting it to her new house and then asking him to move it back—this was a test. Would he perform this small kindness for her? And he had! There had been a tiny setback—the fight with her elderly neighbour and the involvement of the authorities—but she never had to hear about that. He’d done pretty well, all things considered.

‘I think they’re coming back.’

Danyl heard the sound of the car engine. ‘Run!’

They scuttled to the far side of the road, through the trees and down the bank to the Waimapihi stream, which at this time of year was just a ditch filled with muddy ooze. The car rushed by above them.

‘They came back pretty fast.’

‘Yes,’ said Steve. ‘Maybe they’re checking the streets for two men carrying a cardboard box.’

They stood in the bed of the stream, slowly sinking into the mud. ‘Then we’re cut off,’ Danyl said. ‘We can’t use the road.’

‘We’ll just follow the stream.’

‘It goes underground at the end of Holloway. Then what? We can’t just walk down Aro Street. We’d be in plain sight the whole way.’

‘I know another way,’ Steve replied. ‘A secret way.’

2

The Secret Way

This turned out to be an abandoned council track. It started near the bottom of Holloway Road, climbed into the foothills on the southern end of the valley and then wound through the regenerating native forest covering the slopes. The first stage of the track was a vicious climb up a flight of steps cut into the sandstone of the hill.

‘This is really very heavy.’ They rested the box on the top step and stood, panting in time with each other. Steve took off his T-shirt and wiped the sweat off his face.

Danyl asked him, ‘Why do you think the old man attacked us?’

‘The mad have their own logic,’ Steve replied. ‘It’s not for the sane to divine it.’

‘You think he was crazy?’

‘He spat on me. Of course he was crazy.’ He tapped the lid of the box. ‘Let’s keep moving.’

They picked it up and walked in silence for a few minutes until they reached the ridgeline and the Aro Valley came into view.

The overall character of the valley was leafy and shabby but cute. The houses were mostly old, mostly white weatherboard villas, mostly in a state of genteel decay. Aro Street was a crooked line running along the base of the valley. The village centre lay midway along it: it was made up of shops, a community hall, cafes, art galleries and the food market. Beyond that stretched Aro Park, a pale green field dotted with trees. They could see dozens of tiny figures moving around the valley. The people in the village centre moved back and forth between the shops; the people in the park all seemed to be sleeping.

They continued up the path until they reached a fork. Steve led them south and further uphill. ‘This will take us up to Mortimer Terrace,’ he said. ‘From there we can take another track to Ohiro where we can walk down behind the treeline to Aro Street. From there it’s only a couple of dozen metres along the main road then across it, up Devon Street and home.’

Danyl was impressed. This was a side of Steve he’d never seen before, a Steve who knew something that had actual practical value in the real world and he said as much. ‘In so far as the Aro Valley can be considered part of the real world,’ he added. ‘How do you know about all these trails?’

‘The valley is filled with hidden pathways,’ Steve explained. ‘Only the wise know them all.’

They stopped to rest again when they reached the corner of Ohiro Road and Aro Street. This was the busiest region of the valley: cars drove by, pedestrians bustled about. Single-storey houses lined the road; behind them loomed a row of apartment buildings and tenement towers built in an assortment of styles, from irritably cheerful art deco to soothing, featureless expanses of steel and concrete. The tallest and ugliest of these structures was eight storeys high, a synthesis of opaque black windows and unpainted cement: it cast a deep shadow over the adjacent streets and buildings.

Danyl regarded it with fear. There were eyes watching from the top floor of that tower, he knew. Eyes monitoring the valley, scrutinising its inhabitants. Eyes that were especially hostile to Danyl, and very, very interested in the contents of his box.

He had been foolish to come this way. Danyl rebuked himself: he’d been distracted by thoughts of Verity and shaken by the events of the morning—his victorious brawl with the elderly man, the police pursuit—and his inattention had caused him to stray into enemy territory. He stood and tugged Steve’s sleeve. ‘Let’s move on.’

‘Wait.’ Steve held up his hand. ‘I’m just thinking about something.’

‘Thinking? About what?’

‘Something important.’

‘Your thesis?’

‘Of course not.’

‘We need to leave. Now.’

‘Hssst.’

Danyl gritted his teeth and waited while Steve stared off into space. He glanced back at the tower. It was set back from the street, surrounded by a high wall and reached via a driveway running between two apartment buildings. A gate topped with razor-wire barred admittance. The gate was closed.

Danyl turned to Steve and pleaded, ‘Can you hurry this up?’

Steve flicked his hand dismissively. His eyes widened, and then narrowed. His lips moved but made no sound. Danyl shifted nervously. He switched his gaze from Steve to the tower and back again. Steve’s head drifted downwards in a diagonal motion, then snapped back up and his eyes focused. He announced, ‘I’m done.’

‘Take that end.’ Danyl lifted his corner of the box. He looked over at the gate. They would have to walk right past the entrance.

Which was opening.

He watched in horror as the gate shuddered and slid aside, moving with slow, robotic grace. Panic clawed at him. He dropped his end of the box, grabbed Steve’s arm and pulled him down behind it, hissing, ‘Hide.’

They crouched below the rim. An elderly woman walking a little white dog walked past and glanced at them without curiosity.

‘What’s happening? Is it the law?’ Steve poked his head up and peered about. ‘I don’t see them.’

‘It’s worse than the law.’ Danyl cursed. They were so close. Less than ten minutes from his front door and now this. ‘There’s a gate up ahead on the other side of the road.’ He spoke in a whisper. ‘It’s opening. Take a look and tell me what you see.’

Steve peeked over the top of the box. ‘I see the gate. There’s a white van driving out of it. It’s turning onto the road. It’s coming towards us.’

‘Move!’

They shuffled around to the side of the box facing away from the street. The van drew level with them: Danyl saw it reflected in the window-panes of the adjacent house: it was white with tinted black windows. It rumbled by, moving slowly, then sped up and rounded the corner heading deeper into the valley.

Danyl peered around the side of the box. The gate slid shut, moving on automated rollers triggered by some remote mechanism.

He stood. His hands shook. He wiped them on his T-shirt and said, ‘We shouldn’t have come this way. Let’s get out of here. We’ll go through the park.’

They picked up the box and carried it through the entrance to Te Aro Park. The air smelled of pot, as usual: several suspect groups sat beneath the trees, some of them chanting softly in languages not readily identifiable. They followed the path, past yogis and tai-chi masters and a middle-aged man whispering to his dog and crying. When they were alone Steve said, ‘What happened back there?’

They set the box down and Danyl pointed to the tower: it loomed over the trees. He said, ‘That’s where the white van came from. It’s where the driveway behind the gate leads. Do you know who lives in that building?’

‘Everybody knows.‘ Steve blinked at Danyl. ‘But no one ever sees him. He never leaves that tower. How do you know him? And why are you hiding from him?’ His gaze flicked to the box and he nodded in comprehension. ‘I see. Sort of. What’s in there?’

Steve was always that much smarter than you wanted him to be. Danyl gave an insincere little laugh. ‘Isn’t it funny that you walked all the way to the end of the valley, helped me carry this box back from Holloway, fled from the police and only now wonder what’s inside it.’

Steve laughed too. ‘It is funny,’ he agreed. He stopped laughing. ‘What’s inside it?’

Danyl hesitated. He looked around the park again. The trees cast long shadows across the lawn. A man in a dressing-gown and slippers walked by with a newspaper tucked under his arm, sipping from a can of beer. There were no obvious threats.

How much could he tell Steve? He said, ‘This box—’ He thought he saw movement, high in the windows of the tower. They needed to get out of the open. ‘Help me carry it home,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll show you what’s inside. We’ll take the old road.’

The old road ran along the valley floor, parallel to lower Devon Street. It was abandoned some decades ago due to a tendency to flood in winter. In summer it was covered in knee-high grass and lined with flowering trees: pohutukawa and azaleas and kowhai. The houses of Devon Street were barely visible through the canopy, just glimpses of white walls and tiled roofs. They walked along it in silence, passing through a clearing and climbing over a fallen tree and through a gap in the fence leading to Danyl’s backyard.

They were sweating heavily now: the air was heavy and warm, and they grunted like angry beasts as they manhandled the box across the chaotic terrain of Danyl’s overgrown garden and through his back door into the kitchen. They set it down on the wooden floor and pushed it down the hall, stopping midway outside a door.

Danyl opened it, revealing a tiny closet. ‘In there,’ he said.

The closet was empty. There was a door handle set in the back wall. Danyl reached in and turned it and the wall swung backwards revealing a narrow windowless room extending to the end of the house.

‘Wow.’ Steve stepped through the closet and examined the space. ‘It’s like a secret passage.’

‘It’s not a passage. Passages lead somewhere.’

‘Then what is it?’

Danyl said, ‘I don’t know. Verity called it the room-between-rooms. She kept her old clothes in here.’

‘How intriguing.’ Steve investigated the space. The walls were made from bare wooden boards. The ceiling was low. There was no light socket: the only illumination spilled through from the hall. It was empty except for an old pair of Danyl’s shoes and a few items of discarded female clothing. There was a faint smell of petrol.

They dragged the box through the closet and into the empty room. Danyl brushed the top of the box with his fingertips, noticing again how much larger it was than he remembered.

‘Open it up then,’ said Steve. ‘Let’s see what the big secret is.’

Danyl tugged at the tape on the lid, peeling it back: exposing the flaps, which were emblazoned with the logo of the AAAAAA storage company. Which was strange, now that he thought about it, because his box didn’t come from a storage company. And, he was pretty sure, his box was smaller. All the evidence pointed to one horrible, horrible conclusion.

He flipped back the lid and looked inside. It was filled with books and folders, on top of which sat a large red brick, blackened at one end. None of these things belonged to Danyl, who announced, ‘This is not my box.’

‘Interesting,’ said Steve.

‘Oh, this is unbelievable.’ Danyl dug down through the contents. More books. A photo album. Scrapbooks filled with clippings. ‘Simply. Unbelievable. Verity put the wrong box out. And you know what happens next? This’ll be my fault, somehow, and she’ll expect me carry this all the way back to that decrepit hovel, then carry my real box all the way back here. Well, we’ll see about that.’ Danyl took his mobile phone from his back pocket and dialled Verity’s number.

Steve peered into the box. He grunted to get Danyl’s attention and said, ‘This is interesting.’

He picked up the photo album and flipped through it, fanning the pages. They were black-and-white pictures, dating—Danyl guessed—back to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Some of the photos were old street scenes of Te Aro, but most of them were group portraits showing men and women dressed in odd ceremonial outfits reminiscent of ancient Egypt. They were arranged into formal poses, holding aloft golden cups and wooden staves. One picture showed a young woman standing against a stone wall: she was dressed in a white robe, and carved into the wall above her head was an image of a baboon greeting the sun.

‘Spirituality,’ Steve said. ‘Hermetic occultism. People were crazy about this stuff in the late Victorian era.’

‘Huh.’

‘Why does Verity have this? Is your ex-girlfriend a hermetic occultist? And these books are all in German. Does she understand German?’

‘Oh, who knows what she gets up to. I imagine it’s something to do with her work at the gallery,’ Danyl said, working an angry sneer into his words. ‘Some installation or exhibit or performance project. And she’s not even answering her phone.’ His call went through to her voicemail: would he like to leave a message? He hung up.

‘Interesting,’ Steve said yet again. He put the photo album back in the box and taped the lid shut, and they filed out of the room-between-rooms. Danyl closed the first door behind them, and then shut the closet, leaving the box alone in the darkness.

~

It was night when he woke. Danyl turned on the bedside light and checked the time on his phone: 10 pm. He’d slept away the dead hours of the late afternoon and evening and he felt refreshed and content. Now for dinner, maybe some TV, and he’d be ready for a decent night’s sleep. He got up and rummaged around in a pile of laundry, put on a pair of socks and, otherwise unclothed, went downstairs to the kitchen to forage.

The kitchen was his favourite room in the house. Wooden benches, white plaster walls and an old stone sink: it looked just as it must have when they built it a hundred years ago. Except for the oven and the power outlets. And the kettle and the toaster. And the fridge. Anyway, it had character. Danyl wondered who had lived in his house back then. A family? A couple with children, teenage daughters perhaps, who chased each other around this very room in flimsy white cotton nightgowns that were transparent in the flickering candlelight? Yes, he was sure they did.

His toast popped. He buttered it, filled a mug with hot water and miso soup powder, stuck a piece of toast in his mouth and held the other between his fingers and made his way back down the hall, stopping halfway down.

The door to the hallway closet was open.

He splashed hot soup on his bare belly in shock. That door was closed when he passed it a minute ago. He peered around the doorway. The rear wall was also open, revealing the room-between-rooms. The box was a vague black shape squatting malignantly in the darkness.

He was sure he had shut both doors, locked the damn thing away so he didn’t have to look at it, and think about Verity, the contents of his real box—the one he was supposed to bring home—and the mess he’d made of his life. He stepped into the room-between-rooms and peered about. Nothing. Perhaps the door blew open in the breeze? He pulled it shut but it stuck: there was something trapped between the door and the frame. It was an old running shoe, its laces tangled up with its twin.

Danyl looked at the shoe and sneered at it. Running! Exercise! That was Steve’s cure for clinical depression. The man was a total fraud. He kicked the shoes into the hallway, closed both sets of doors and stamped back to the kitchen, where he poured the remains of his soup in the sink, tossed the toast in the bin, then trudged back up the stairs, his formerly temperate mood now black. He sat on the edge of his bed, the spilled soup congealing on the downy fur of his belly.

What now? His appetite was gone. He was too upset to watch TV or read. What else was there but sleep?

Sleep. He looked longingly at the rumpled sheets. But Verity had ruined even that for him, ruined it with her reckless talk about clinical depression. A philosopher—Danyl was pretty sure it was Schopenhauer—once said: ‘If life were happy and pleasant then people would dread sleep and welcome the new morning, but instead the reverse is true.’ How perceptive! How right! But, he brooded, how typical a thing for a depressed person to think.

He lay on his side. He thought about Verity. He thought about the derelict house. He thought about the box. He thought about the room-between-rooms, and the running shoes on the hallway floor and sneered again. Psychology: it wasn’t even a real science.

And yet. Last year, back when he met Verity, when life was good, Danyl went running every morning. Up at sunrise, through the city; along the waterfront then home again and ready to work all day. He even ran in the depths of winter. Then he remembered a moment of wild joy running along the waterfront with the waves crashing over the sea-wall, drenching him, the last man out in the storm. A great moment to be alive.

Maybe living like that was better than lying alone in the darkness covered in soup. Maybe Steve had something there after all. Danyl got out of bed, found his phone and sent a text offering to run with him at dawn.

It was the right move. Danyl felt it. Verity was more likely to come back to him if he spent his day running and writing instead of sleeping and crying. He walked downstairs and found his shoes and lined them up by the doorway along with his running clothes. Then he yawned and stretched and returned to his bed, optimistic—for the first time in months—about the day to come.

3

The first day of the rest of Danyl’s life

Danyl screamed, ‘I think it’s shattered. I can see the bone beneath the skin.’

‘That’s your ankle joint,’ said Steve. ‘It’s supposed to look like that. Your leg looks OK—’

Danyl screamed again. ‘The pain! I feel sick.’ Steve helped him stagger to a bench near the bottom of Epuni St where he half-sat, half-lay on the seat, breathing raggedly.

‘We made pretty good time for a while there.’ Steve contemplated Danyl’s house, visible in the medium distance. ‘You want me to call an ambulance?’

‘Everything’s going dark.’ Danyl sucked in his breath. ‘That means yes.’

Steve nodded and jogged back towards Devon Street, where he lived a few doors up and over the road from Danyl, but turned around in the middle of the street and lumbered back.

‘It just occurred to me,’ he said. ‘It’s a really bad time to go to the emergency ward.’

‘What?’

‘It’s Sunday morning. End of the graveyard shift, a skeleton staff still dealing with all the drunks and assaults from Saturday night—’

‘Today is Wednesday, imbecile.’

‘I like to think I know what day it is.’

Danyl closed his eyes and pressed his face against the cool, dew-dabbled wood of the bench. This had been a horrible mistake.

‘I know where to go.’ Danyl’s eyelids flickered. Steve continued, ‘There’s a doctor’s surgery, like, two minutes down the road.’

‘Doctor’s surgery? You don’t mean that crackpot at the free clinic?’

‘That’s the guy. Here, lean on me.’

Danyl snatched his arm from Steve’s grasp. ‘I need proper medical treatment, not that pothead. Besides, he won’t be open this early no matter what day it is.’

‘He’ll be there. He lives in the apartment behind the clinic,’ Steve said. ‘There’s a bell you can ring in an emergency.’

‘Well, this is an emergency,’ Danyl conceded. He considered his options.

The hospital? He took Verity there once when she cut her finger cooking dinner. They waited in the foyer for twelve hours: Verity read celebrity gossip magazines and Danyl seethed and paced and ranted at the receptionist while a seemingly endless procession of car-crash victims and elderly heart patients jumped the queue ahead of them. Steve was right. The hospital was no good.

But the local doctor? He told his patients to call him ‘Doctor K’. Danyl went to him a while back worried about a discoloured mole on his hip. Doctor K smelled conspicuously of marijuana and giggled when Danyl undressed for his examination.

He leaned forward on the bench, doubled over in agony. His ankle was swelling: the skin felt stretched and tight. He clenched his teeth as a terrible warmth radiated up his leg. Thrombosis? Fragments of bone entering his bloodstream? He had an odd premonition that much weighed on his decision. One choice was right, the other wrong. But which was which?

‘Take me to the pothead,’ he decided.

They linked arms and Danyl leaned on Steve, who carried the weight of his crippled, mutilated leg, and they staggered down Aro Street together in the pre-dawn gloom.

‘I went to a party at this doctor’s place once,’ Danyl said, as they neared the clinic. ‘Verity took me, back when we were first dating. Doctor K passed out after inhaling a huge volume of marijuana smoke from a bong carved in the shape of Ganesha.’

‘So the guy likes to party,’ said Steve. ‘So what?’

‘This was a barbecue. It was two in the afternoon. There were children there.’ It seemed to Danyl there was something important about that party—something he was supposed to remember, but the waves of pain racking his body carried the thought away. His entire foot felt as if it was dipped in molten lava. There was one consolation in all this, he told himself, gritting his teeth: if he was crippled indefinitely he wouldn’t have to carry that box all the way back to Verity’s house.

‘We’re here,’ said Steve.

The clinic was set back from the main road at the end of a driveway between two townhouses. As they neared the entrance Danyl noticed that the mounted plaque advertising the doctor’s name and opening hours was gone, replaced by a blue plastic billboard with ‘EZWHUC’ written on it in futuristic white letters.

‘EZWHUC? What the hell is EZWHUC?’

‘I don’t know.’ Steve looked puzzled. He guided them down the driveway. They reached a car park behind the apartment buildings and approached the wooden wheelchair ramp leading to the entrance.

‘That’s funny,’ said Steve. ‘The front door is open. And the light’s on. You lucked out, buddy. He’s open for business.’

‘Don’t tell me I lucked out. And why would he be open at this hour of . . .’ He looked up and his voice trailed away. The clinic was a single-storey brick building, previously unremarkable but now decorated with an elaborate mural covering the front wall: a procession of children and woodland animals danced amid mystical symbols including an ankh, om symbol, taijitu, swastika, wyrm oroborous and Star of David. The word ‘Namaste’ was rainbowed over the entrance. Beneath this, ‘Wellcome to The EZ Wellness Heal U Centre’ was stencilled into the glass window above the doorway.

‘Oh no,’ said Danyl. ‘No no no.‘ He remembered now. The party he went to was a farewell party. Doctor K had sold his clinic and moved to Bhutan. Now it was an alternative healing centre. He declared, ‘I’m not going in there.’

‘Why not? The clinic’s open. You’ll see the doctor in no time.’

‘There’s no doctor in there. That’s not a clinic. It’s an abomination.’

‘Don’t be so reactionary. Look at the sign—it’s a Wellness Centre. They’ll take a spiritual approach. This is better than a doctor. That depression we talked about yesterday—’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Gone! Let’s see one of your western medical doctors do that. They’re just shills for the Enlightenment.’

‘I like the Enlightenment. I like living after it. Let me go!’

Steve said, ‘You’re going in.’

A brief tussle broke out: Danyl tried to back away from the Wellness Centre while Steve, still holding him up, dragged him towards the ramp. Steve triumphed.

‘Let’s just see what happens.’ he spoke soothingly, while Danyl trembled in his arms like a furious rabbit. ‘Go in, try it and if you want to leave we’ll call you an ambulance.’

That sounded reasonable. It was hard to think through the pain, so Danyl stopped struggling and let himself be led up the ramp, through the