There was dirt under his fingernails. I knew he hated that. I also knew he wouldn’t comment on it, so I covered his hands with my own so for a moment, at least, he wouldn’t have to see. I missed what we were to each other. I knew that he missed it too, but neither of us were the type to dwell on past decisions. That way lay misery and madness. George knew it as well as I did, and he was the first to withdraw his hands.
“Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
He wasn’t the only one. “You want to tell me what that was about?” I said, climbing through the glistening surface and trying not to shudder.
“It’s a reminder that we’re rats,” he said. “All of us.” He drank from his water bottle and sighed, but reluctance had never been a reason for prevarication with him. “Look, you know New Zealand was the last major land mass to be colonized, right? And I don’t mean by you lot. When my ancestors turned up here, they brought kiore with them. Rats. And hunting and hungry mouths, and so many of the birds here were flightless. They didn’t have a hope. So many species went extinct. We did for the moa. Then the Europeans came and they brought more rats, different rats, and other animals too, all the introduced species together. And that was the second big wave of extinctions.”
“Don’t tell me. That took out the huia,” I said.
“Yep. Watch it die and let it die. That’s the phrase, right?” He shook his head. “I guess we all got better and better at killing. What a shock it must be, to find how efficiency in slaughter always takes the upward trajectory.” He kicked dirt into the hole, watched it send the surface to shimmering. “Nasty bloody mirror,” he said, under his breath, and stomped away. I let him go, let him have the time to collect himself.
Part of me wanted to toss the book in after the dirt, disturb that sinister surface, even if only briefly. Part of me wanted to chuck the wren in as well, leave bird and thermos together with the ruined book and take George, go back home, and forget this morbid tour of the resurrected dead that we’d found ourselves on, forget the bastardized creativity of pathological yearning that Grief had wrought in the world. If I threw them all in, the ripples on that holographic surface would smooth over quickly enough. If I threw them all in, eventually other ripples would smooth over too, and I’d come to forget, or at least I’d come not to dwell. I’d forget the Sea Witch, forget birds and beasts and lighted over places. Forget, too, that George had told me once, a long time ago and in passing, of people who were trying to bring back the moa as they had tried to bring back the lost tiger wolves of Tasmania. He had been trying to tell me, I think, that the world could be a home for other things than jellyfish, that we could bring children into it and there would be more for them to marvel at than tentacles. I think he thought I’d forgotten that.
I could forget it all now. I could. I’d make sure of it.
“Ruby.” George beckoned me over, disturbance now smoothed so well I’d not have known it was there if I hadn’t experienced it with him. “Take a look at this.” He led me around the kettle, demonstrating, using an artist’s eye to uncover artificiality. “This is really an amazing set-up. I’d admire it if I wasn’t so damn revolted.”
“Is it bad I’m wondering what someone could bury in a place like this? Something other than bones, I mean.”
“I wondered it first,” he said. There was a long silence, in which he carefully did not look at me. “I know you don’t want to talk about her.” He held up his hands. “I’m not saying this to be difficult. But that book, and this place, and this weird-arse trip that’s centered on you and this twisted version of restoration of animal and place, don’t you think … I mean, have you wondered whether or not your witch friend is actually fucking dead?”
Of course I’d wondered. I’d wondered since the moment I understood, head under that apparently watery surface and staring at dry earth, that what I’d seen, that what I thought existed, had been pure construction.
“I saw her die.”
Can you watch something die and let it die?
“I let her die,” I told him. I’d never told anyone before. “I pulled myself out of that pool and I looked back at her and the real jellyfish were pouring in, mixing with those horrid plastic simulacra she’d made, and the water was rising and rising, and all the blood from where her tongue had been, and I could have run to her, round the edge. I could have reached out to her, encouraged her to swim to the side. If she had I might have been able to pull her out. Even if she’d been stung, even if she’d been stung a lot, first aid and a hospital might have saved her.
“I didn’t even try,” I told him. The Grief had had her so long, and it had been so hard to watch, and then it had been over. I told myself that I’d saved her future pain, for she would have tried again — they all did. While this was the truth, it was not all of it. “I saw her die,” I
