The Luminaries

nothing to help!’ Anna cried. ‘No one to help! For the last time: there was no suicide, Joseph, and no—bloody—
poison
!’
    ‘Then explain to me why you ended up half-dead in the middle of the Christchurch-road!’
    ‘
I can’t explain it
!’
    For the first time that day Pritchard saw real emotion on her face: fear, fury.
    ‘You took a pipe that night—same as usual?’
    ‘And every day since I made bail.’
    ‘Today?’
    ‘No. I ate the last of it last night. I told you.’
    ‘What time last night?’
    ‘Late. Midnight, maybe.’
    Pritchard wanted to spit. ‘Don’t call me a fool. I’ve seen you when you’re under, and I’ve seen you coming up. Right now you’re sober as a nun.’
    Her face crumpled. ‘If you don’t believe me, go away.’
    ‘I won’t. I won’t go.’
    ‘D—n you, Jo Pritchard!’
    ‘D—n
you.
’
    She burst into tears again. Pritchard turned away. Where would she keep it? He strode to the armoire, opened it, and began rifling through the contents. Her empty dresses, hanging from the rail. Her petticoats. Her bloomers, most of them tattered and stained. Handkerchiefs, shawls, stays, stockings; her button boots. There was nothing. He moved to the dresser, where a spirit lamp sat upon a cracked china plate—this would be her opium lamp—and beside it, a wadded pair of gloves, a comb, a pincushion, an opened package of soap, sundry jars of cream and powder. These items he picked up and then replaced, roughly; he meant to turn the whole room over.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Anna said.
    ‘You’re hiding it—only you won’t tell me why!’
    ‘Those are my things.’
    He laughed. ‘Keepsakes, are they? Precious mementos? Antiques?’
    He wrenched the drawer from her dresser, and upended it overthe floor. A cascade of trinkets rattled out. Coins, wooden spools of thread, ribbons, covered buttons, a pair of dressmaker’s shears. Three rolling champagne corks. A man’s shaving brush—she must have stolen that from somewhere. Matches, stays. The ticket from her passage to New Zealand. Wads of cloth. A silver-backed looking glass. Pritchard raked the pile. There was Anna’s pipe—and there ought to be a little box to match it, or perhaps a little pouch, inside of which her resin would be folded in a square of waxed paper, like toffee purchased from a store. He cursed.
    ‘You’re a beast,’ Anna said. ‘You’re detestable.’
    He ignored her, and picked up the pipe.
    It was of Chinese making, fashioned from bamboo, and about as long as Pritchard’s forearm. The bowl of the pipe sat some three inches away from its end; it protruded like a doorknob, and was fixed to the wood by means of a metal saddle. Pritchard weighed the thing in his hands, holding it as a flautist holds a flute. He sniffed it. There was a dark residue around the rim of the bowl—so someone had partaken of the pipe, and recently.
    ‘Happy?’ she said.
    ‘Watch your lip. Where’s the needle?’
    ‘There.’ She pointed at a square of cloth among the sorry detritus on the floor, through which was pushed a long hatpin, stained black at the tip. Pritchard sniffed this also. He then inserted the hatpin into the aperture of the bowl and rolled the tip about.
    ‘You’re going to break it.’
    ‘Be doing you a favour, then.’
    (Pritchard deplored Anna’s craving for the drug—but why? He himself had taken opium many times. He had taken it in Kaniere, in fact, with Ah Sook, in the tiny hut that Sook had hung with Oriental fabrics, to still the air so that his precious lamps would not flicker in a draught.)
    At last Pritchard tossed the pipe aside—but carelessly, so that the bowl struck the floorboards, and rang out.
    ‘Beast,’ Anna said again.
    ‘I’m a beast, am I?’
    He lunged for her, not really intending to hurt her, but merely tograb her by the shoulders and shake her, until she told him the truth. But he was clumsy, and she wrenched away, and for the third time that afternoon, Pritchard’s nostrils were filled with the rich, briny smell of the ocean—and, impossibly, the metallic taste of
cold
—as if a wind had slapped him in the face, as if a sail had snapped above him, as if a storm was in the air. He faltered.
    ‘Get back,’ she said. She was holding her hands before her face, her fingers half-curled into fists. ‘I mean it, Joseph. I won’t be called a liar. Get back and get out.’
    ‘I’ll call you a liar if you d—ned well lie.’
    ‘Get back.’
    ‘Tell