OF ORANGES AND MEN

He offered only fruit during the first month, but after that I got mutton every Sunday. I never liked mutton, but it was the only meat to be had, so I ate it for me and I guess for him. Because when the miracle of him finding me happened I was dying, but now, because of his care, I’m well again.

The first time I ever climbed anything vertical was on a fibreglass wall in a shopping centre. I got the bug, turning up every day until I could climb every aspect of it. I spent money I didn’t have going to the States to climb spectacular rock faces. I honed my skills, hardened my muscles and read everything I could about climbing.

Mt Patriarch in New Zealand is climbable all year round. Summer’s easy if you’re fit, but in winter you need to grab it by the throat. If you’re gonna pussyfoot, don’t go near it. Fatigue can make you pussyfoot. That’s what happened to me; fatigue at six thousand feet on slushy snow. Wind chill boring into the bones of my skull and me pussyfooting instead of grabbing it.

It happened in an instant, a sudden gut ripping free fall. Weightless and terrified, I grabbed air before the mountain pummelled me. My leg shattered, my gloves tore off, then a head impact put me out. I tumbled down a four thousand foot natural slide. Without the gods it would’ve killed me. It seems I had gods in spades that day.

I awoke to the pungency of magnolia blossom. He was looking down at me, his huge bulk draped in a mud coloured coat. I was curled up like an animal and just stared back at him. He looked shaken.

‘Can’t move,’ I whispered.

He poured some whisky into my mouth. A rivulet of fire trickled down my throat.

‘I got to get the tractor.’ His voice sounded crushed. He dropped a bucket of magnolia blossoms beside me, then crashed off into the bush again.

I felt drowsy from the whisky.

Much later I heard the tractor grinding along the side of the lake. When it pulled up near me I found the smell and the heat from it comforting. He’d brought along another man called Jackson. I fainted when they lifted me onto the trailer and woke much later in a gloomy room that smelt of men and tobacco.

‘You’re a bloody mess,’ said Jackson.

A sudden mind blowing pain shot through me. He was splinting my left leg. The pain was so intense my skull and the walls seemed to distort. I was in hell. I tried screaming but passed out again. When I woke Jackson was still there. I asked him how on earth they found me. Patriarch is very remote.

‘It was a miracle,’ he said. ‘No one’s been down the end of the lake in four years. Not since the big man’s boy drowned.’

I heard the big man coming down the hall and asked Jackson how the boy had drowned.

Jackson hissed at me, ‘He filled up with water you nosey bastard.’

The big man came in. ‘Only eat fruit now,’ he said, and placed a white plate next to me on which was a peeled orange. Clear juice dribbled from its bulging segments. Tears welled up in my eyes. The orange and its smell transformed the room, gave it light.

When the big man had left and gone outside, Jackson pulled his chair closer and told me the story of my rescue. It seemed that since the big man’s boy had drowned, no one had been on the lake. The big man wouldn’t allow it. Then suddenly, a day ago, the day of my rescue, the big man sent everyone out down the valley except Jackson. He told Jackson to launch the dinghy. When the big man climbed into the dinghy he was carrying a bucket of magnolia blossoms. He made Jackson sit at the back, then he pushed off and started rowing.

They hadn’t gone far when the big man slowed the pace, looked straight at Jackson and said, “I’m gonna say some things to you Jackson and I don’t want no interruptions”

A skein of red and yellow ducks came out of the mist and skidded onto the lake.

“I never grieved for the boy properly,” he said. “It’s why the wife left, thought I was too hard.”

Jackson nodded his head in a non committal sort of way and that made the big man snarl, “Don’t even nod your fucking head, ok.”

It scared the hell out Jackson, but the big man just carried on. He told Jackson he’d had a vivid dream that night that the boy hadn’t actually drowned but was badly injured and lying down by the old fallen tree at the end of the lake and that he was gonna go down there and put the magnolia blossoms by the tree and try and get some sort of closure. He told Jackson he wanted him there just to sort of be there and told him to keep his mouth shut and not tell anyone about it all.

The oars left swirls in the clean water, eddies of silver and blue.

When the dinghy ground onto the gravel beach at the far end of the lake he told Jackson to stay there while he took the blossoms and disappeared into the bush. Minutes later he’d come stumbling back, white faced and sort of crumpled looking.

‘We got to get the tractor, now!’ he shouted

Jackson didn’t know what was going on until they arrived back with the tractor to pick me up; the old man couldn’t talk, he just pointed at me.

So, that was the story of my rescue. My life, it seems, had spun out on the thread of a dream. I sucked at the orange, drinking in the light, tasting the juice, feeling goodness flood into my veins.

Three months later, on a grey, damp Sunday, I had my first mutton sandwich, wrapped against the never ending mist and damp sitting on the rotting veranda with the big man, drizzle pitting the lake, low clouds obscuring the mountain. Suddenly a hole briefly appeared in the murk, giving a fleeting glimpse of Patriarch’s rugged peak, but closed over again.

‘I hope you can stay on for a bit longer boy,’ he said.

‘Yes, that’d be good,’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

He pulled an orange from his coat pocket, peeled it with his big
hands and offered me half.

‘Wouldn’t have asked if I’d minded.’

I turned, there was moisture in his eyes.