Before George E-Book

Deborah Robertson

• Herausgeber: Huia Publishers
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 400

Beschreibung

When Marnya immigrates to New Zealand from South Africa in 1953 with her mother and sister, her mother cuts off Marnya's hair and changes her name to George to hide her identity as a girl. Hours later, their Christmas Eve train plummets into the Whangaehu River and George loses not only her family and name, but also the answers as to why her mother deceived her father and fled their homeland. Now a ward of the state, George finds herself enrolled in a rural school where survival depends on fitting in with a group of boys who think she's strange. Disconnected from everything that once defined who she was, George must reconstruct her identity and come to understand her mother's decisions.

Leseprobe

First published in 2023 by Huia Publishers

39 Pipitea Street, PO Box 12280

Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

www.huia.co.nz

ISBN 978-1-77550-729-1 (print)

ISBN 978-1-77550-792-5 (ebook)

Copyright © Deborah Robertson 2023

Cover image copyright © Tayla Hartemink 2023

This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the prior permission of the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

Published with the assistance of

Ebook conversion 2023 by meBooks

To Juan, who thought this was a good idea even when I didn’t.

And to my Cub Scouts, who preferred playing battleswith sticks in the Whangaehu River to reading the memorial.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

On 24 December 1953, a little after 10pm, the damaged Whangaehu River rail bridge collapsed under the weight of the express train from Wellington to Auckland. Five carriages fell into the raging river, and 151 of the 285 passengers perished at the scene.

Twenty of the bodies were never found, and several more were unidentifiable. Some were stripped of their clothing by the river. Many were recent immigrants to New Zealand.

While the events surrounding this disaster are described as accurately as I can understand them, the school Ohakune College is fictional. The real school in Ohakune is Ruapehu College. Ngunguru Road and Kiripaka Road are also real, but Coates Road is fictional.

PART ONE

Chapter One

My new name was George.

I traced the name across the cool surface of the window and said it aloud.

‘J-orge.’ The first consonant, a foreign sound to my Afrikaans tongue, cut the air. I looked across at my sister, Karen, but I hadn’t woken her. She was curled up like a kitten on the dull leather of the train seat, her red Christmas dress rumpled around her. Next to her sat my mother, hands folded across her lap, eyes closed. It angered me that she was able to sleep while I was left awake to wonder.

I wondered how easy it was going to be, having a new name. Did a new name make me a new person? For the past twelve, almost thirteen years – all my life – I was Marnya.

I was angry with Mama for bringing us here. I’d taken off my shoes, now that she wasn’t looking, and my long thin legs dangled over the seat. I had always thought of them as girls’ legs and girls’ feet. It was hard to think that they might also be boys’ legs and boys’ feet. What was it that made them one or the other?

I slid my finger down the windowpane. So cold. Everything was cold here – the houses of Wellington huddled into the sides of the hills as if hiding from the wind, the rough sea, the black rocks. It wasn’t fair. My mother couldn’t take my name away and make me someone else. She said it was only for a short while, but I didn’t believe her. She’d told me that us coming here was only for a short while, and now it was forever. I wished we had never got on that ship in Cape Town.

◆

‘You can’t be called Marnya in New Zealand.’ My mother stood before me, biting her bottom lip. She always did this when she was worried.

We were standing on the dock by the ship.

‘They don’t have names like that in New Zealand,’ she was saying, and her eyes flitted about, as if scared she might be overheard. ‘We’ll call you George instead.’

‘George is a boy’s name.’ We weren’t English but even I knew that. There was a boy called George at my school who spoke in a broken Afrikaans.

‘I know that. You’ll be a boy in New Zealand, just for a couple of weeks.’

A wave of confusion washed over me. In the world before this day, it had never occurred to me that anyone could be anything except the sex they already were.

At once my mother was a hundred times bigger and me a hundred times smaller. I heard my own voice, small and far away, exclaim, ‘What do you mean?’

My mother crouched down in front of me. ‘I don’t want anyone to recognise us,’ she said. ‘If you’re dressed as a boy then it makes it harder for anyone to track us down. Especially with our names changed.’

‘But I’m not a boy!’

‘Shh. Listen. It will only be for a little while. Just until we get to Uncle Ryl. Then we’ll sort it all out.’

‘But I thought we were only going for a month?’ This made no sense. Who didn’t she want to find us?

My mother said nothing. It was perhaps this more than anything that impressed on me the seriousness of this conversation. My bottom lip quivered and I gulped down the lump in my throat. ‘Mama?’

‘We’re never going back,’ my mother whispered. ‘Not ever.’

At once my world dissolved. The noise of the Cape Town port faded into a strange glugging. Voices, once near and imposing, now a thousand miles away. I understood that I had been told something important. Something I knew, deep in the dark pits of my heart, that even my father didn’t know.

‘We’ll get you a haircut,’ she said. ‘And some new clothes. Brand new ones.’

‘But what about my old ones?’

‘You’ve almost outgrown most of your dresses anyway. We’ll get you new ones when we move in with Uncle Ryl.’

‘I don’t understand!’ I exclaimed. Uncle Ryl had emigrated to New Zealand when I was seven, and I hadn’t seen him since. The only clear memories I had of him were of him teaching me to ride his pony.

‘You don’t have to understand.’ My mother’s arms clamped around my shoulders. Firm. ‘You just have to trust me.’

Her eyes were hard as baubles. I wanted to tell her, No. I wanted her to explain.

But the moment passed. My mother stood up and talked to a man on the docks about our baggage.

Two hours later, she cut off all my long hair.

◆

It was seven hours since we’d left Wellington. Restless, I stared at the window, but it was impossible to see the name I’d drawn on the glass. Was George real or just a ghost, easily erased by time?

I wasn’t sure. I knew only that I didn’t want him. Didn’t want his legs, his short hair, his khaki shorts. I wanted me.

Outside, the darkness was coal-black.

Then light erupted in the night and for a moment I saw trees, rocks, depth. Then it was gone.

I glanced back, unsure if this ghost light was real or not. The light flickered on again. A tunnel through the darkness. In it a man running, his torch the beam of light. He was waving his arms, his ghoulish face panicked.

The train tore past the man, and the world again fell into blackness. Then the train brakes screeched, long and slow. In the cabin, a couple of people lifted their heads.

And then a roar. Building so quickly it consumed every other sound.

‘Mama?’ I said, my voice shattering at the edges.

The train leaped, twisting like a snake in mid-air. I was flung from my seat. The floor was a wall, the window the ceiling. I smacked into the man across the row from me. Heard him grunt when we collided. And then my feet were on the wall, my head on the floor. The seat slapped my elbow.

I yelled, but I had no voice. I could do nothing but move with the sound, my body tumbling over and over.

Water.

Cold water everywhere.

My hands wet. My hair wet.

It swirled under me, splashed over me. My body jerked. I lifted my head above the wave to find it almost filled the carriage. Then I was under again.

Darkness. My mother, her body long and bent, speaking to my father. Telling him we’d only be going to Cape Town for a week.

My father, sandals on the dusty sunburned earth. The lines of his face angry, taut. ‘You don’t need to see your sister!’

I was up again, head above water. My mouth gulped in gasps of air. There was no light. My eyes stung. I flailed my arms, the world revolving around me as I disappeared.

My mother in the garden singing a song that doesn’t quite make it to her eyes. She hangs out the clothes, checking for snakes in the long grass around the washing line.

I smacked into something hard. A tide was pulling at my body, sucking me into its liquid jaws. I pulled free. It dragged me down.

The tide changed, drawing me out from the carriage. A current pulled me away. I rose, pushing, scrabbling, a desperate burning for breath in my throat. I was suspended in the water with nothing but its lick on my skin to guide me.

The current pulled me to the surface, and I felt the bite of air. I opened my mouth to gasp a breath, but silt, silt on my face, choked me. A sharp stick jabbed one hand. I wanted to scream for help, but I couldn’t. I was moving rapidly, irreversibly, with the flow of water.

For a moment I was pulled under again. Something solid scraped beneath my feet. I pushed my toes in, but this pushed me forward, so I was like a swimmer in the current. My body slapped against a rock, air driven from my lungs. I clamped my arms around it, hugging it, holding it.

I wanted to see, but I did not want to see the water that swirled around me. For a brief second in my mind’s eye, I saw again the train as it stood on the platform in Wellington. The dark crust of its undercarriage. The lingering dampness of the steam. The image of it dissolved into now. To this world of darkness and water, and I wondered if I were dead.

It was some minutes before the water subsided. I was mostly on the rock, the current at my knees. I tried to move, but the surface was too slick. As soon as I lifted my arm, I slipped. The next thing I knew I was standing in the water, up to my thighs, the flow still pushing me against the cold stone.

I felt the bottom. My right foot was higher than my left, so I pushed myself that way. My feet crunched over branches, pushing them into the silt.

I reached the bank, slick with mud, and crawled up on my knees pricked by gravel. I skidded, blind and hunting for higher ground. I didn’t even try to stand, shaking too much. Instead, I crawled through sludge half-a-foot deep until my hands found firmer ground.

A wet clump of grass, slick and sharp, met my flailing hand and I grasped it, pulling myself higher. There was more grass and bracken, crispy beneath my knees. I sprawled into it, sobs escaping my mud-clogged mouth.

I didn’t know where I was. It didn’t seem important. All that mattered was the ground beneath me. The firmness of it. My breath was thick, heavy. I couldn’t get enough of it. A small dark tunnel closed in on my mind.

I awoke as part of the earth, my body frozen in a dry crust, the passages of my nose turbulent as I breathed in and out.

It took a moment for the stinging to set in. I’d been scraped and cut in a thousand places I couldn’t see.

I reached up with a hand, surprised I still had one, and pawed at my face. The muck around my eyes was thick, and when I finally blinked, fragments of dirt stung my eyes. I snapped them shut again and sat up on my haunches. Silt burned the inside of my nose. I pawed at my eyes again, blinking until the stabbing had dulled to a throb.

I was sitting in a patch of forest in the watery light of a moon. Beyond me lay a tide of mud that fell away to the banks of a river, gurgling far below. Much lower now.

A blanket of mud, yards long, stretched as far as I could see.

I felt strange. Fleeting images of my previous life – playing with Karen, rolling koeksisters with my mother – danced for a minute before me and then dissolved. This was not my life. I looked down at my legs, but they were unrecognisable, caked with silt. Sitting on this bank was not Marnya Scheppers, but a little boy with short hair, so filthy you couldn’t tell the colour of his clothes.

I got up, barefoot in this strange new wilderness. The night was cold compared with the warmth of one in South Africa. I walked along the edge of the river, letting my legs lead me. What was my name again? George, that was it. George … I couldn’t remember what now. Something starting with S. I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to be going.

The riverbed was carnage. Tree limbs, twisted and deformed out of shape, littered the banks. They looked like props from a strange play.

Apart from the river, all I could hear was the noise of my feet, squelching. I was hungry. How long had I been here?

A small metal wheel lay on the ground in front of me, wedged into a tree branch.

I made my way towards it, curious. What was a wheel doing on the bank of the river?

And that was when I saw it.

The body was stripped of its clothing. It had no discernible face. But it lay, face up, arms outstretched in the mud, just feet from where I was standing. My eyes fixed on its hand, fingers curled into a clawed fist, palm up.

And I screamed, a horrible, silence-shredding scream.

In that moment, I knew where I was. On the riverbank beside the wreckage of my mangled train, ankle deep in mud that had long ago swallowed the shoes I had so carelessly removed in my seat. My seat in which I had sat with my little sister and my mother on our way from Wellington to Auckland. My mother and sister whom I hadn’t seen since the moment I had looked over my shoulder.

It was Christmas Day 1953.

Chapter Two

Someone heard my scream.

The man who found me was a farmer. He had rough hands and a beard. He whisked me off my feet and shouted to someone else further away.

I was transported to a hospital at the local army base. It was three o’clock in the morning, and I was shivering violently. The first thing the nurse tried to do was take off my clothes, but I screamed until she stopped. I could still see in my mind’s eye, the person, their body naked on the riverbank, and I did not want to become that. She must have figured I couldn’t be too injured because she gave up trying. Another nurse led me into a small room with a tub and told me she would get me some clean clothes.

I stared at the tub, my eyes lingering on the still water. In that moment I loathed it. Its cleanness, its stillness. It was a lie. The water that washed was also the water that drowned. But I was cold. And I was muddy. I stripped off my clothes and climbed into the tub.

Now everything was stinging again. I had cuts everywhere. The water was a brown sludge within seconds, but I could run my hands along my legs and feel them. I had a huge gash on the back of my hand. I didn’t remember when I’d got it.

The nurse was gone a long time. From the amount of noise in the background, I guessed this was because she was busy elsewhere. I hadn’t really taken in the hospital when I had been brought in, but what I had absorbed was the scale of the disaster. Bodies on beds. People rushing. Voices.

I wanted to know where my mother and sister were. I’d tried to ask the men who brought me here, but I was so petrified I couldn’t think of the words in English. My babbling stream of Afrikaans had confused them.

‘Shock,’ I’d heard one of them say.

I sat in the tub for at least twenty minutes before the nurse returned, bearing a shirt and trousers two sizes too large for me. I shrank down into the muddy water so that only my head and shoulders were exposed. She laid the clothes over the edge of the tub, scooping my dirty ones off the ground. Her eyes were a vibrant blue, her hair golden. So out of place.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked me in a gentle voice.

My mouth quavered for a moment, trying to find the right words. I didn’t know who I was. Not here. ‘George,’ I said, my voice strange to my own ears.

She was waiting for me to get out and get changed. Panic flared. It was not safe to be a girl here. Not without my mother. I sunk even lower into the tub. ‘I is cold,’ I said, stumbling over the words in English. ‘I don’t want to get out.’

‘Cold already?’ The nurse was surprised. ‘I’ll go see if there’s some more hot water then.’

The moment she left the room I leaped out of the tub and snatched up the new clothes. They were boys’ clothes. For the moment at least, I was safe.

They put me in a hospital bed. A man lay in the bed next to me. He was so covered in mud that he was unrecognisable. I slipped glances at him, wondering why nobody had bothered to wash him. Later I found out it was because they didn’t expect him to survive the night.

A nurse came into our corner every half hour or so to check how we were. She gave me a glass of water and a biscuit, but when I asked her where my mother and sister were, she just shook her head. I wasn’t sure whether this was because she didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me. It wasn’t until it was light outside the windows that someone noticed the gash on my hand and bandaged it. After that, a doctor came in and had a look at me.

‘Nothing but cuts and bruises,’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘Where is my family?’

His face was impassive. ‘Were they travelling with you?’

I nodded.

‘They might be in the hospital then.’

‘I hasn’t seen them!’ Tears crept to my eyes. I could still see the drowned person.

The doctor gestured to a nurse who came over. ‘What were their names?’ he asked.

‘Joanne and Katie Shepherd.’ Not their real names, but the names my mother had drilled into us.

The doctor raised an eyebrow at the nurse, but she just shook her head. She hadn’t heard of them. I scrambled, wondering whether I should give their real names. Was it safe to tell a doctor?

‘Do you have any family who we can contact?’ the nurse asked.

‘There is Uncle Ryl,’ I said.

‘Can you give me his full name?’

His full name? But he was Uncle Ryl. I didn’t know if Ryl was short for anything. And his last name? It wasn’t the same as mine. It must have been my mother’s maiden name. But I couldn’t even remember that.

My eyes sought the faces of the two people watching me, searching for answers. But there were none. I shook my head, ‘I can’t remember.’

‘You need some sleep,’ the nurse told me. ‘You’ll remember once you’ve slept.’

I didn’t want to sleep. Did they think I could just shut my eyes and the flood would be gone? The rolling train, the bruises, disappearing into the night? As if tomorrow could be the same as yesterday.

They left me alone. I was still hungry, but the biscuit had stuck so thickly to my throat I couldn’t imagine eating another. The sheets were stiff and scratchy. My back hurt, so I tried to lie on my side, but this brought me face to face with the filthy man, his breath rattling in and out like a fork in a tin can. I rolled over to my other side, but this hurt as well.

I don’t remember falling asleep, but the next thing I knew, it was afternoon. The man in the bed next to me was gone. His sheets lay unmade, smeared with river filth.

I sat up, but the action caused so much pain I cried out. My back was on fire. I slumped back down again, huddling in my oversized clothes. What if I was so broken I would die?

The nurse came in later and declared that there was nothing wrong with me. I was lifted out of my bed and carried to the back of a car that transported me to a small ginger-brick house beside a school. A woman named Mrs Taylor gave me a meal of meat and potatoes and put me to bed in a room that smelled of damp.

I remember very little of what occurred after that. Several people came to see me over the following day, each one laden with a series of questions heavier than the last.

What was my name? My family’s name? Where were we from? Did I remember who my uncle was? Could I tell them what my mother and sister were wearing? Who was left who could be telegrammed in South Africa?

I didn’t answer most of their questions. My uncle’s last name, Tierson, landed on blank faces, and I didn’t dare tell them about my father. I had my own questions. Had they found my mother? Where was I? Where was she? Could I go and look for her?

They couldn’t answer my questions either. I considered trying to tell them the truth. That my mother had run away from my father. That I didn’t know why. What would they do then? Send me home? I imagined my father on the doorstep regarding me with my short hair and boys’ clothes. Imagined trying to tell him what had happened. My skin prickled. I could already feel the leather strap. How many lashings would I get? A dozen? Two dozen? I’d cut my hair once before, when I was seven, with a pair of the gardener’s shears. Once father was done with me, I couldn’t sit for a week.

Terror pumped through my veins. This was all wrong. I needed to find my mother. I couldn’t go back home without her. If I did, then who would be left to find her? What if she never came home?

The room’s cloistering damp was suffocating. Its wallpaper with its cream lattice pattern had faded to white in all but the darkest corners. Strips of it hung limp from the walls. There was little furniture – a dresser and a bedside table, bare except for a vase of wilting white flowers.

By the end of the second day, I thought that maybe I could walk again. I rolled myself off the edge of my bed and staggered into the kitchen, where Mrs Taylor was boiling carrots on the stove.

‘Please, I want to going back,’ I told her.

She turned. In the shock of the last couple of days, I had not really examined her, and only now did I note the blue eyes, the worn hands, the faded pattern of flowers on her yellow dress. She was old, at least sixty.

‘George,’ she said softly. ‘It’s good to see you on your feet.’

‘I want to find my mother!’ My father would have slapped me for such impoliteness, but I didn’t care.

Mrs Taylor stared at me, and her eyes seemed to deepen. ‘I don’t know where your mother is,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure how to help you find her.’

‘She was in the train.’

‘I understand.’ Her eyes were glistening, and I hated her for it. I wanted to know. Was my mother dead? My sister? Were they lost somewhere? Freezing in the cold summer of New Zealand?

‘I want to going back,’ I said again. ‘To the train.’ I didn’t know where that was. I didn’t even know where I was, only that I didn’t remember having been driven very far.

‘I’m not sure you’ll like it,’ Mrs Taylor murmured. ‘There’s not much left of the train.’

Whether or not I liked it was irrelevant. I had to see it to get my bearings again. To figure out where in the world I was. I felt like a train myself. Derailed.

I was trying to find a way to voice these thoughts, but Mrs Taylor must have understood what I meant because she took the carrots off the stove, took my hand, and walked me outside to the car.

The drive wasn’t far, maybe ten minutes. I craned my neck, trying to see over the top of the dashboard. There was a bridge not far in front of us. Or what remained of one. Here was the end of the road – a gaping chasm, as though a monster had come along and taken a huge bite.

I got out of the car. Mud, silty grey, streaked down either side of the chasm, down into a river clogged with branches and a million other indistinct things.

There was a carriage in the chasm. Almost unrecognisable. It had been torn in half. My chest constricted and my bottom lip began to quiver. The silt was everywhere. It had dried, crusted, over each bank. The carriage was the same clay brown as everything else.

‘They’re saying it’s the worst rail disaster that’s ever happened in New Zealand,’ said Mrs Taylor, coming up behind me. ‘Six carriages in the river.’

I saw the wheels, bent out of shape, windows, gaping mouths, not a fragment of glass left.

A volcano had done this. Its crater lake erupted, sending a torrent down the mountainside. I could see the mountain now, its peak capped with blue-white snow. They’d told me it was all just unlucky. An accident that no one could have seen coming.

We walked further up the bank. There were more carriages, some still intact, some nothing more than crushed tin cans, melded into the silt. At the lowest point, you could walk to the river, mild and bubbling, unaware of its own carnage.

Even the sight of the water chilled me. I remembered how icy it had been. How thick.

The rail bridge was gone like the road one. A concrete pier lay on its side in the current.

The image of the naked person came back to me, and for a moment I was scared that I might see them again. I looked to the space in front of my feet. I was right on the edge of the dried silt. A strange mound lay encrusted in the clay.

I recoiled. The lump was too small to be a person, but it looked like one, curled up in a foetal position.

Sick with dread, I reached down and pulled it from the silt, and the mud gave way to a softness. A smudge of dark brown velvet. A long dripping strand of blood red.

It was a teddy bear, a shredded red ribbon dangling from its neck.

Chapter Three

The boat journey to New Zealand had been long.

Our cabin made me feel as though all the air was being squished out of my lungs. I had lain on the top bunk and scratched words into the boards above me with my fingernails. One night, though, things changed.

‘Marnya?’

‘Ja?’ I didn’t move. I knew just from her tone that Karen was sitting on the bed below me, her face upturned to the bottom of my bunk.

‘Mama’s been gone forever,’ she said, speaking in Afrikaans.

‘Forever is a long time, meisie. She hasn’t been gone that long.’

I heard my sister’s feet drop onto the floor. ‘I’m going to go find her.’

‘No.’ I sat upright and my head hit the ceiling. I yelped. ‘You’re not allowed to go out at night. Not without Mama.’

‘But she’s not here!’ Karen’s voice rose.

I shimmied down the ladder, trying not to catch the hem of my nightdress on the rung ends.

The room was tiny. Mama’s bedcovers were pulled back to expose the fleshy pink of the sheets beneath. I tried to remember when I had heard the click of the door opening – my mother leaving on her midnight pilgrimage to the bathroom.

‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘You stay here.’

‘But you’re not allowed out in your dress!’

I glared at her. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’ I did not want to pull on my boys’ clothes. More than that, I did not want to be told what to do by my eight-year-old sister. I grabbed my coat off the back of the door and put it on. ‘She’s probably just in the bathroom. Where else could she be?’

Karen said nothing, but her eyes told me she could think of a thousand places, all of them full of monsters. She’d been like this ever since we left the port, days ago.

I didn’t wait for her to say anything but yanked the door open (it required yanking to even budge) and pushed myself through it into the hall.

The corridor was narrow and lemon yellow with mould growing on the ceiling and grease smudges on the walls. There was a perfect handprint on the wall at my head height, near our door, made by a giant of a man with fingers like sausages. I hoped I never saw him.

I’m not sure why, but it grew colder as I trod down the hall, each step smaller and slower than the last. I had walked this hall many times, but it took on a life of its own at night. Each door was an eye, its lid pulled shut, waiting to snap open as I walked past. There was something sick about that yellow. Why was it so quiet here? Where were the people? Were they all sleeping? Or, when the night fell, did they turn into monsters and slink around the ship?

Karen’s fear was contagious.

The bathroom was at the end of the hall, down a set of metal steps. My feet clanked as I descended. The bulb had blown and hung on its long wire like a hangman’s noose. A tall man like my father would have bumped his head on it.

The bathroom door was open. I walked in, the pale greenish glow of a bulb above the sink the only light.

‘Marnya! Go back to bed.’

I jumped with fright. My eyes flicked around, searching.

I didn’t see my mother until she moved. She was stuffed into a corner between the sink and one of the cubicles. Her legs bare.

‘Mama, what are you doing there?’

‘Go to bed!’ My mother tried to get to her feet. I dropped down beside her, and she grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me. ‘What are you doing in your nightdress? What did I tell you?’

The breath left my lungs. My mother had never shaken me before, not ever.

‘Do you want them to find you? To hurt you?’

My bottom lip quivered, my throat suddenly thick. Her eyes! More terrified than Karen’s.

She must have realised that I was about to cry because she stopped and moved her leg, trying to get up. It brushed me – slick, wet. There was blood on my arm where she’d touched it – she wasn’t trying to get up. She was trying to cover herself. Her bottom half, bare under her dress.

I whimpered. I wanted to ask what had happened, but I couldn’t.

My mother’s hand slid down my arm. This time it was gentle. Her other hand brushed my cheek, nudging my face towards her own. ‘Marnya,’ she said, ‘listen to me.’

I was listening. I could do nothing but listen. The dripping tap, the creaking of the hull.

‘You must never let them find you,’ she said. ‘Not ever.’

I tried to find my tongue. I wanted to ask her who. My father? The people from the village? From the church?

‘Remember this.’ My mother held my face close to hers. ‘There is nothing more dangerous in the world than being a girl. Nothing at all. I want you to promise me, right now, that you’ll never walk out of that room in your nightdress again.’

I opened my mouth, but a strangled sound came out. I had no voice.

‘Promise me.’

I nodded.

My mother reached out. She grasped the side of the sink and pulled herself onto unsteady legs. I grabbed her other arm and placed it over my shoulders. We struggled our way back up the stairs and along the corridor. I reached a shaky hand for the door handle but she caught it.

‘Marnya,’ she said again. She crouched in front of me. ‘I know you don’t want to be George. But if you’re George, then no one will hurt you. Do you understand that? You’ll be safe.’

I just stared at her. I understood it was important, but not why. I just wanted us to be safe.

My mother stood up. ‘Dry your eyes,’ she said. ‘And climb straight up into your bed. We shouldn’t frighten Karen.’

We went inside. Karen was sitting on her bunk, cross-legged, rocking backwards and forwards. ‘Mama!’ she said, before she saw me. ‘Where were you?’

‘Just in the bathroom, go back to sleep, Karen. It’s the middle of the night.’

‘Marnya, why are you crying?’

I didn’t meet her gaze but climbed straight up into my bunk. I lay sobbing, trying not to make too much noise, and I don’t remember falling asleep.

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They hadn’t found my mother or my sister. A makeshift mortuary was set up at the military camp, and people filed through to search for their loved ones. But they never took me there.

On 31 December, a mass funeral was held in Karori for the unidentified bodies, many of them visitors or immigrants like myself. Prince Phillip was there, Mrs Taylor told me, pointing him out, but my mother was not. She, my sister and a number of others were presumed to have washed out to sea.

They were lying, of course. My mother was still out there somewhere. She would come back for me.

Mrs Taylor had taken me for the long drive to the funeral against my will, and I stood in the line of spectators, my hands mangling the stalks of the yellow flowers I had picked off the side of the road on the way.

‘You don’t want to go picking that,’ Mrs Taylor exclaimed to me when I asked her to pull over. ‘That there’s broom.’

I kept pleading until she did pull over and let me out. I picked as much of the plant as I could.

My hands wouldn’t stay still while the prince droned on in his English accent and the Kiwis replied in their strange toneless drawl. I looked at the coffins and I wanted to scream.

At the end of the service, Mrs Taylor told me to lay my flowers on one of the coffins. ‘For your sister.’

‘She’s not there,’ I told her, scanning the faces in the crowd for my mother’s. As soon as Mrs Taylor was distracted for a moment, I slipped into the throng. Everyone was wearing black. I searched for my mother’s familiar dress amongst the sea of coats. People frowned at me, and my hackles rose. Was it even safe here?

A group of men passed me. On their other side I glimpsed a little girl, her brown hair pulled into a ponytail, her back turned to me.

My heart stopped. Karen?

‘There you are!’ Mrs Taylor appeared and grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t just run off like that!’ She jerked me along after her.

‘No!’ I pulled back towards the girl. Only now did I see she was talking to a little boy. They had turned so I could see their faces. I exhaled sharply. It was not Karen.

‘We’re leaving.’ Mrs Taylor pulled me back into the crowd. The girl and boy disappeared behind a sea of legs. I don’t think they even saw me. Maybe nobody saw me any more. Maybe Marnya had disappeared in the flood and the water and the cold, along with Mama and Karen. I didn’t know what was left. How was I to become a whole other person, not just a thing with eyes and some memories?

Chapter Four

‘You’re sure your name wasn’t changed when you moved here?’

Mrs Taylor asked me, when we finally turned back into Ohakune after the funeral. ‘Didn’t you have an Afrikaans name?’

I shook my head, my throat so thick that any word I spoke stuck.

‘The reason I ask is that George isn’t usually a girl’s name.’

‘I is not a girl,’ I said.

‘Am, not is.’ She glanced at me, sharp and brief, and pulled into the narrow driveway by the cottage. As soon as the car had stopped, I opened the door, but she caught my other arm. Her grip was hard, each finger biting into my skin. Her face was pulled towards me, her eyes stern.

‘It won’t do to lie here,’ she said. ‘I don’t tolerate lying.’

I jerked my arm from her grasp and sprinted from the car to the trees at the edge of the stream that ran beside the school buildings. Only once I was there did I sit down on the bank, bury my head in my knees and cry.

I didn’t understand why I was here. What I did understand, however, was that no one was telling me anything. I wanted my father, but I didn’t want him either. I imagined his face, red and angry, should I return in my boys’ clothes. A little traitor who had left him. My mother gone, my sister gone. Just me and him in that big house.

The thought terrified me. How could the world exist without Mama and Karen? Father would take me to church, and they’d be angry too. They’d know I had lied. It was a sin to lie.

The school grounds lay quiet. It was summer so the children were gone, the old boarding house empty. Mrs Taylor was the hostel matron, which was why she lived here in the house by the school.

At first the only sound was that of the funny blue birds Mrs Taylor called pūkeko, which gathered around the stream, yacking to each other in complaining voices and strutting on red-wire legs. Then I heard something hitting the gravel and a muted curse.

I looked up. There was a man a few yards away, outside the nearest classroom. He was carrying a stack of books and kept dropping them. He looked like a pūkeko, his legs too long, too thin. He lifted a leg in the same way they did, using it to balance the stack in his hands.

He was trying to unlock the classroom door with the key between his teeth. I stood up and edged towards him. He was the first human I had seen, other than Mrs Taylor, on the school grounds.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘Eh?’ The man’s head jerked around. His face was much younger than I expected. He still had the key between his teeth.

I bent over and picked up his fallen books.

The man spat the key onto the pile of books in his arms. ‘Take the key! The key!’

I unlocked the door and scooted out of the way before he barrelled through and dumped the pile on the nearest desk, still muttering under his breath. He wheeled around and took the other books from my hand.

‘Argh, scuffed the covers already!’ His face contorted. ‘Idiot, idiot! Not you. Me. Idiot. Hold on – who are you?’

‘George,’ I said. ‘I lives here for the moment.’

‘You don’t live in my English classroom, lad. I’m not that unobservant.’

I pointed in the direction of the college. ‘I lives there with the matron, Mrs Taylor.’

‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘No, that can’t be right. I live with Mrs Taylor.’

‘How come I hasn’t seen you there?’ I asked.

‘Haven’t, not hasn’t, and I ought to be the one asking that. Are you an orphan, George?’

I thought about this for a moment and shrugged. ‘I’m waiting for my mother to come back.’

‘I see.’ He started sorting through his books. ‘You’re not the first.’

‘Is – I mean are – you an orphan, sir?’ He looked too old to be an orphan.

‘I’m a teacher,’ he said, ‘and the boarding-house master. My name is Mr Cletis, with a C. Remember that. You’ll need to. Now, help me put away these books.’

At dinner that night, Mr Cletis and I sat across from one another. In the term time he would live in the hostel, but for most of the holidays he would be in the house. Neither of us spoke. Mrs Taylor was telling him about her son, whose wife was going to have a baby, but if he was at all interested, he didn’t show it. He gave the occasional nod, chasing peas around his plate with his fork, whilst I watched him over my own. I liked the way his hair stuck up, the way his green eyes were always moving, as though the little gears behind them were turning when he talked or thought or ate his dinner.

He couldn’t have been Mrs Taylor’s son because they didn’t have the same last name. But she treated him like her child all the same.

‘You should take your coat off at the table, Sam. One would think you were about to run off to the ice-cream parlour.’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘Did you find all the books you needed at the fair?’

‘Mostly.’

‘I’ve given George here Andrea’s old room. I figured it’s probably better for a girl to have her own space.’

Mr Cletis lifted his eyes from his fork and a stream of peas dribbled off. He looked across at me, then back at Mrs Taylor.

‘I’ll explain,’ she said, and changed the subject.

After dinner, I made a pretence of going to my room, counted to twenty, and crept back. The kitchen door was ajar. I watched Mrs Taylor and Mr Cletis doing the dishes.

‘I don’t understand it,’ she was telling him. ‘We thought she was lying, but when the police spoke to immigration, that was all they got. George Shepherd and an address that doesn’t even exist. What do you make of that?’

Mr Cletis put a plate in the cupboard. ‘Have they called the embassy?’

‘I presume so. But you know what it’s like over there. Half of them don’t even speak good English. She’s insisting she’s a boy. I don’t know if it’s just her English, or if she actually thinks she is one.’

‘Fooled me.’ Mr Cletis turned, and I ducked out of view.

‘It’s unhealthy!’

‘Depends what you make of it,’ I heard him say. ‘Could’ve been any sort of background. Maybe they were hiding from something?’

‘Better send her back there, in that case. Let them sort it out.’

My heart started thumping. I pulled away from the door just as Mr Cletis moved towards it and ran back to the shelter of my small room.

No. No. I couldn’t. They couldn’t. I would not go back there. Not without Mama. Not without Karen. It was impossible. I had to wait for them. They would come back. They couldn’t be dead. Not if I was still alive.

That night, I thought about running away. But where would I go? How would my mother find me? I sat on the front porch of the house all the next day, straining my eyes for her and Karen till I cried and couldn’t stop.

‘Why don’t you go out and play?’ Mrs Taylor snapped at me.

‘I don’t know how to play,’ I said through my tears. ‘I want my sister.’

‘Well, don’t come inside until you stop blubbering.’ She marched back in, locking the door behind her.

At first, I didn’t care that she had locked the door. I kicked at the dirt below the little porch, grabbing the ryegrass stalks between my toes and yanking them out. I hated the stalks, the porch with its rotting wood rail, Mrs Taylor. I wished all the grass would die. All the trees too.

I got up and tried the door, but Mrs Taylor didn’t come, even when I called out for her. I climbed down from the porch.

I hitched up my oversized shorts. The town had provided me with a new wardrobe. Shorts and shirtsand scratchy woollen socks – hand-me-downs from the children of Ohakune. At home I was never allowed towear shorts. Someone had tied a strand of twine to the school fence. I wandered over and pulled it off, using itto tie my shorts up tighter.

I didn’t know where I should go, only that I had to find my mother. To my left lay the open school gate. Down the road I could just see the tin roofs of town houses, reflecting the sun. Ohakune was no more than a few narrow clumps of houses. On the school side of the road, they backed onto what Mrs Taylor called ‘the bush’, even though there was definitely more than one bush and even more trees. Beyond these houses lay open fields of vegetables in perfect rows, their fuzzy tops poking out of red soil. They seemed cold, sitting in the ground like that. In the other direction, the road was flat, but it wasn’t anything like the flat plains of South Africa. The wind was too strong, the air too icy, the sky so deep you felt like it went on forever. Mrs Taylor talked about the ‘Desert Road,’ but this was no desert. Grass grew everywhere. Streams of water poured out of the mountains. There was so much water here; it rained all the time, even though it was supposed to be summer.

The New Zealand people didn’t even put up fences to keep out the lions. They were not very conscious of their own safety. When I’d asked why I had been given sandals for walking outside, Mrs Taylor had just looked surprised. All the children wore sandals, she said. Why wear boots when sandals were so much cooler?

I wandered along the main road, past men working in the carrot fields, backs bent. Beyond them lay the wilderness. I stuck to the road where I could see where I was walking. My bare toes, like small red sausages, poked invitingly out of my sandals, one step away from being a snake’s dinner. Every rock was a snake’s hiding place, every pothole a threat. I picked up a long stick that I poked at offending patches of foliage before I walked through them.

‘Well, if it isn’t the little Saffer!’

I leaped at the sound of the voice. I had been so focused on the ground that I had walked right past the front door of the post office. The postmaster, Mr James, stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips. ‘What brings you here?’

I had been to the post office once before, to post a letter with Mrs Taylor. She’d sent a formal inquiry to the South African government asking if any details could be provided about the family of a George Shepherd, a child from Cape Town whose mother and sister were missing. I never told anyone that my mother had changed my name. Mama had a friend in immigration. I didn’t realise he had helped us until I saw my name printed on a rough certificate. George Shepherd.