Ephemera

By Tina Shaw and Dione Jones

After an international meltdown, New Zealand, along with the rest of the world, has shut down. No electricity, no broadband, and people are in survival mode – at least until somebody turns the lights on again.

 

Ruth has always led a sheltered life. Pre-Crash, she worked as an Ephemera Librarian, now she is managing a simple, self-sufficient lifestyle. But her sister is dying from tuberculosis and her love for Juliana propels Ruth to undertake a perilous journey.

 

She intrepidly sets off from Auckland to find the man known as Nelson and his rumoured stockpile of pharmaceutical drugs. Word has it he is based at the old Huka Lodge. Along with the handsome Lance Hinckley and enigmatic Adebowale Ackers, Ruth travels by steamboat up the Waikato River – the only practical way. The group journeys through settlements that have sprung up along the river as people try to re-establish their lives in this precarious time. With society itself broken, will

Ruth manage to keep her commitment to her sister without compromising her own values?

 

Inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, this post-apocalyptic, partly comedic novel reveals that things are not always what they seem.

 

"Shaw's near-future New Zealand is all too recognisable, and her story both unsettles and thrills. Ephemera is not only a page-turner; it's a book that makes us question what we value – what we discard, and what remains to us." – Catherine Chidgey, author of The Wish Child

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cloud Ink Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9780473500337

Book preview

Ephemera

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Tina Shaw

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Shaw’s near-future New Zealand is all too recognisable, and her story both unsettles and thrills. Ephemera is not only a page-turner, it’s a book that makes us question what we value – what we discard, and what remains to us.

~ Catherine Chidgey

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Ephemera is a fast-moving and compelling read; Tina Shaw never lets the tension slip.

~ James Norcliffe

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Wildly imaginative.

~ Janet Charman

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I am in awe of Tina’s skill as a writer and her ability to paint us these incredible pictures with her words. Ephemera may be timely, but it is also timeless.

~ Taupo Weekender

First published in 2020 by Cloud Ink Press

www.cloudink.co.nz

Epub ISBN 978-0-473-50033-7

Ephemera is also available in paperback and ebook formats from Cloud Ink.

Copyright © Tina Shaw 2020

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or digital, including photocopying, recording, storage in any information retrieval system, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

The novel is a work of fiction; all characters and all dialogue are the product of the author’s imagination.

Quotes throughout are from Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad.

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Cover design and map illustration

Robin Charles, www.robincharles.com

Cover image features the mayfly (order Ephemeroptera)

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Ebook design

Adrienne Charlton, www.ampublishingnz.com

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See here for other books by Tina Shaw

www.tinashaw.co.nz

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Thank you

Also by Tina Shaw

Acknowledgements

New Zealand map

The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface,

beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling.

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

1

‘You know it could be a totally wasted trip,’ said my sister.

It was a debate we’d been having for several days, ever since I mooted the idea of a journey. I was thinking that it would either be me going down south, or nothing. The options weren’t great, at any rate; yet even if the trip was wasted, at least I would have done something.

We had been hearing the whispers for what seemed like months, although in reality it probably wasn’t that long. From the get-go, it seemed more myth than reality: prescription drugs stockpiled around the time of the Crash were being traded from a base down south.

It made me shudder to think of the kind of person who would have had the cold foresight to do such a thing then profit from other people’s misfortune. What kinds of actions would have taken place to secure these drugs in the first place, and during an uncertain time, when the rest of us were still in a state of shock? And what possible profit could one extract from such trades these days? Why would you bother? It hardly seemed worth the effort.

It was all rather perplexing; yet beguiling at the same time, offering, as it did, a possible solution to my sister’s gradually worsening condition. Juliana had contracted tuberculosis, that old-world disease which, before the Crash, had been virtually eradicated in our country (apart from some poorer areas like the East Cape) – and a certain drug regime could cure her, or at least put the disease into remission. Let’s call it Golden Pash, after the sugary Asian soft drink, because if you give something a silly name, I find, its emotional power becomes somewhat diminished.

I had tried to get hold of the drugs in the city; gone into the grubbier parts of the CBD, had searched out and met with random men out west, had searched various meeting places where drugs might be traded, but found nothing – except rumours. Yet these rumours all told the same story.

There was a man I had to go and see about some drugs. It was a long shot, although, as I kept reminding myself, even having some hope was better than nothing.

2

Lying on the couch and covered with our mother’s old goose feather duvet, Juliana took a sharp breath and opened her eyes, faded blue-grey like the sea. She blinked a couple of times, and focused. ‘What’s up, sis?’ she asked in a cartoon voice.

‘Oh, um, nothing.’ I was standing in the middle of the lounge, holding a balled pair of socks. ‘How’re you feeling?’

She tried swallowing, I heard the dry, rasping sound and went to fetch her a glass of water. When I came back she was pushing herself upright. I put a pillow behind her back for support and handed her the glass, watching as she cautiously sipped. ‘How’s the packing going?’ she asked in a husky voice. Apart from the paleness of her lips, she didn’t look too bad.

‘All right, I suppose,’ I admitted.

‘Ruth, you haven’t packed anything yet,’ she said, cutting her eyes to the yawning suitcase, which actually was still empty, while a slew of items lay scattered on the floor around it.

‘It’s proving difficult.’ I puffed at my thick hair.

Juliana shook her head as if I was the most hopeless case on earth, and when it came to this kind of thing – trying to plan for a serious, physical journey – she was probably right. She sipped more water, briefly closed her eyes. Really, our roles should have been reversed. ‘You can’t go,’ she said simply.

I considered the phrasing – not don’t go, or I don’t want you to go, or we could find somebody else to go, and wondered how significant it was. Was she really saying she wanted me to go but didn’t want to appear to be saying that? Was she in fact secretly giving me her blessing? Or was I reading too much into it, overthinking, as usual?

‘Listen to me, Ruth,’ – as sick as she was, Juliana held my eye with a strength of conviction you wouldn’t think possible in a woman in such a weakened state – ‘it’s really not a good idea.’

It was one of her bad days, and I had thought to work on packing my things in the living room to keep her company. Yet, even though my sister had been quiet while I worked on packing my suitcase for the journey, the expression in her shadowy eyes was one of scepticism and, every now and then, as I scurried back from my bedroom with a certain item, she would roll her eyes.

When I say worked on, I mean the packing was harder than I had expected it to be, so it had become work. I would put something into the case only to take it out again a few seconds or minutes later, undecided on its merit or usefulness or value on such a journey. Then I would leave the room to fetch a pile of folded clothes, but not put any of them in the case, which was simply not filling up the way I wanted it to. The problem, I realised, standing in front of its gaping maw and scratching my head, was that at the age of 37, I had never really travelled before. I mean, in the old life. I was a novice at this kind of thing. And I had only the vaguest of notions of what travel would involve these days; news from the rest of the country was random, desultory, and it seemed few people were travelling. Outside of the main centres things seemed to be getting a bit out of control. For all we knew, the South Island could have detached itself, like a retina, from the rest of the country and drifted away. Hard to believe it was only a few years ago that we took travel for granted. But since the Crash we had lost so many seemingly vital things, such as fuel to power vehicles, and electricity to power most other things. And don’t even get me going on coffee and tampons.

It all started, if you can call it a start, with a ridiculous slanging match between two mad world leaders. Destabilising ripples had already been reaching out from America to the rest of the world when the North Koreans launched Taepodong-4 and blew up the US base at Guam. People blamed the ensuing war that erupted in the South China Sea, but the domino effect was already taking place. Little did we know at the time, but the whole world – not just America – was going to hell in a handbasket.

The Crash was really a series of events that happened quite quickly, culminating in a worldwide economic meltdown that made the Great Depression look like a church picnic. The final blow was the global computer system failure caused by a massive viral attack. Initially, it was possibly similar to the shutdown experienced by British Airways in 2017 – which saw flights from Heathrow and Gatwick cancelled – but on a much larger scale. The astounding thing, in hindsight, was the way our connected world changed irreversibly, almost overnight. Even little old New Zealand was affected. We were probably doomed from the moment the virus hit the airports, I thought, staring at Juliana’s old suitcase.

It was a huge, black thing made of lightweight materials such as webbing and vinyl, and had belonged to my more adventurous sister, who had taken it over to London on her OE before coming back home to New Zealand to join the police force. She had lived out of that suitcase, as they used to say. She had filled it with rash purchases: flimsy tops bought on trips to Greece, Spain and Italy – unthinkable, visiting those places now; bottles of duty-free alcohol; and beach paraphernalia. My sister – who had flitted, butterfly-like, from summer to summer.

While Juliana had travelled, posting images on Instagram and Facebook of herself laughing in various bars around the summer hotspots of Europe, tanned arms slung around people she had just met, I had remained in New Zealand, although there was a conference I was keen to attend in Prague on ephemera collections and databases, and I had even obtained my new microchipped passport – but the Crash came first. So I hadn’t been anywhere, not even in my own country. Sure, there had been the occasional family trips in the car when we were growing up, usually to a DOC camping ground where we would get rained out after two nights and have to return home, everything soaked. But it wasn’t like real travel, and besides, Mum had always done the packing.

I now held a red Swiss army knife in my hand that used to belong to Dad, and I tried to imagine how such an item might be useful on my forthcoming trip. If I rated items on a scale of usefulness, ten being the highest score, I might succeed with the packing; for instance, where a sushi-rolling mat would be a one, the pocketknife would surely be considered a ten, even though I had no exact idea what kinds of situations would call for its use. Gutting a fish? Shaving bark off a branch to start a fire? I vaguely recalled seeing something like that on a television programme many years ago, one of those wilderness survival reality shows. And didn’t the Famous Five do things like that? Conjure tools and things out of bits of number 8 fencing wire? No, I was getting confused. It would have been a bloke like Barry Crump who had once used number 8 wire.

I turned to Juliana to see if she could help – she was, after all, the practical one in the family – but she had drifted off into another sweaty doze. I went over and sat on the couch beside her, pushed back a piece of damp hair from her forehead. She barely stirred. I could see her eyes moving beneath the mauve lids. What would she be dreaming about? Perhaps frolicking in a field with some cute animal. She had a thing about zoos and had never failed to visit the local zoo in the European towns she visited, especially petting zoos that were designed for children to interact with domestic animals. I smiled to remember the photograph of a giraffe eating something out of her outstretched hand and the rapt expression on her face. The picture of her visit to the donkey refuge near Marrakech.

We still have the Auckland Zoo, a team of volunteers keep it going, probably assisted by the ex-keepers, even though the animals have been dying off one by one. Anybody can go there now without paying, although they do appreciate it if you can take food for the animals – old cabbages, cut grass, that kind of thing. I offered to take Juliana over there recently. How? she had asked. On the back of your bike? I have a trailer, it was actually possible, and it wasn’t that far in the scheme of things. But she couldn’t raise the energy. And in hindsight, it would probably have been too much for her. It’s been a while since I’ve even seen her walk down the end of our long driveway and back. In fact, thinking about it, I can’t even remember when I last saw her leaning over the fence to talk to Arnie the German shepherd.

She murmured now in her sleep, barely audible, her lips pale as the inside of a shell.

It was an insidious disease. It had crept up a few months before the Crash. She had been getting tired, complained of mysterious aches and pains, swollen ankles, an annoying cough. She was working at that time in the lower CBD, patrolling, with a colleague, the bars and clubs around Fort Street that would disgorge drunken customers in the wee hours; along to Princes Wharf, no rolling sailors but slick young people with plenty of disposable income. She’d tell me the stories when she came in the following morning while I was eating my toast. The breaking up of altercations, I think they called it, talking to people who looked suspicious or drunk, helping young drunk women out of trouble. It wasn’t a scene I was ever familiar with – downtown Auckland at night. My sister seemed to like it, the edginess of it, I suppose, no shift ever the same. She had applied to join the detective division and had been given an interview date before she collapsed outside a strip club. I liked to imagine passers-by rushing to her aid, dialling one-one-one on their mobiles, an ambulance tearing through the city streets to resuscitate or rescue her from possible death. Certainly the ambulance arrived, I know that from her partner, a considerate young man whose name I don’t recall, who sounded as distraught as I was on hearing the news.

All that is in the past now: dialling 111 on a phone, having an ambulance appear as if by magic. These days you might as well wish for a flying carpet.

Her colleagues were thoughtful. Once she was out of isolation, they visited with flowers, fruit and teddy bears; and as she recovered – which she did, thanks to the battery of antibiotics they gave her – she was able to go back to limited duties, which was a kindness in itself, because Juliana loved being a police person.

Personally, I didn’t understand my sister’s attraction to the force. I much preferred my own workplace, the library. Back in the day, it was calm, quiet and controlled. People spoke in muted voices, pages rustled as they were turned, muted mouse clicks came from the bank of computers. There were hardly any drunks, and certainly nobody shouted or vomited over your shoes. People are actually living in the library now, which I don’t particularly approve of, especially when I caught one rather fragrant individual using the 2001 Vanuatu Telephone Directory as toilet paper.

I worried about what would happen to the Ephemera Collection without air conditioning, proper conditions. Would the tickets and stubs and postcards grow mouldy and start to disintegrate? If things carried on indefinitely, would we lose the entire collection? The idea filled me with horror. The Ephemera Collection would truly become ephemeral. Even though it had been seven long years, I had to believe that sooner or later somebody would sort things out and we could go back to normal – or at least to what life used to be like before the world was brought low.

I was an expert in my field, the Ephemera Librarian, someone other people came to when they wanted to find out some arcane piece of knowledge; I had written papers for journals, was planning a book. In fact, the project was still a reality. I worked on it in my spare time when I didn’t cycle into the Central Library to tend to the collection.

For I hadn’t given in, like so many others; I hadn’t walked away from my duties. It was my life’s work and had perhaps kept me in the city longer than it should have once we heard about the drugs. But who else would take care of things while I was gone? Eventually Selwyn took me to one side and said I must go, that he would look after the collection while I was gone, that I could trust him. Really? I asked him, my eyes wide, half in hope, half in denial. Because a large part of me didn’t want to make this journey, even though it was for my sister. He had squeezed my elbow – the most intimate he and I had been since the disappointing Christmas party of 2016 – and said, Really, I mean it.

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I started working at Central when I was eighteen years old, straight out of Year 13. My parents had wanted me to go to university, perhaps eventually to go teaching like my mother had, but I saw the job advertised on the Internet (also long gone) and impulsively applied for it. Part of the deal was that I would get to study extramurally for my library quals. Wonderful, I thought, I can earn money while I gain a degree. It was my first job, and I’ve been there ever since. Over the years, I moved up and sideways and then up again, until I reached the refined heights of the Research Centre. I was in seventh heaven. The Research Centre to me was the epitome of library work, the zenith; the people who worked there seemed a special breed as I watched them come and go through the glass doors into the inner sanctum of the air-controlled environment of rare books, manuscripts and old newspapers.

Selwyn was already there, a relatively young chap back then with ginger sideburns – an ironic statement, of course. He was the one who taught me how to use the microfiche –outdated technology, even then – and we had been part of the team involved in digitising the Grey letters. His field was family history. I knew I had achieved a certain special plateau when the Turnbull sent me a flattering letter in carefully couched language: they were headhunting me! Top of my field, I had whispered under my breath all the way home on the train and the bus (both now gone), pride swelling my rather ample breast. Ah, how pride comes before a fall.

Just think, Selwyn was fond of saying, one day we both might be catalogued and digitised in here. Hardly likely, now.

3

My sister and I have lived together for most of our adult lives, growing up together, naturally, and also continuing to live together after our parents died. There was a period when it was just Mum, Dad and me banging around in the big house, but then Juliana came back home from London and the excitements of Europe. I thought she might’ve gone flatting, perhaps moved to a more fashionable suburb like Grey Lynn, or got an apartment in the CBD, but she moved wordlessly into her old bedroom in the big house in Avondale our parents had bought many years ago, before we were born. It was hidden away, our family home, down a long, tree-lined driveway – with hindsight, off the radar of burglars and meth addicts – like stepping back into the past or through an historical portal. It had once been the home of a wealthy businessman and his family, one of the founding fathers. There had been many acres of land attached to the house, land that had been sold off piecemeal over the years and built on, so that the property was an oasis in the midst of small bungalows and council housing. When my parents bought the property for a song – it being so neglected and the suburb itself also being so run-down, unattractive to investors – there were fruit trees, a veritable orchard, a neglected rose garden, a desiccated fountain and a sunken garden. The house itself was single level, but rambling, with dormer windows to let light into the large attic that covered a whole floor, where we used to play for hours when we were children. It was a privileged childhood; looking back, idyllic.

There was the musky scent of lilac on the night air during summer; tūī in the kōwhai; the prettily pink-and-white flowering apple trees buzzing with bees. I would pretend there were fairies at the bottom of the garden and drew pictures of unicorns that might, on a twilit evening, walk out of the grove of almond trees that bordered one side of the property.

It was a house big enough that my sister and I could now lead quite separate lives, while also having some company when wanted or necessary. Occasionally, we’d meet up in the kitchen and share a hot chocolate or a plate of Marmite toast and catch up on each other’s lives. Once, when I went down the corridor to her rooms, hoping to talk – there had been a particularly unhappy incident at the library that I needed to share with somebody – I caught the sound of voices. I stood in the hallway, bare boards underfoot, and listened to the male and female voices, a syncopated duet, and had felt a disturbing feeling, possibly a lonesomeness, a singularity – for I was often by myself unable, it seemed, to connect with people the way my sister could so naturally. She was the extrovert in the family, what job adverts used to describe as bubbly, and people just seemed to like her, without any special effort on her part, and gravitate towards her. What was it about Juliana that people liked? Even though she was the younger, I tried my best to imitate her, to try and achieve a similar result – her bouncy walk, the way she tossed her ponytail over her shoulder, her infectious laugh – even hanging out with her friends when they came over, trying to ingratiate myself with them with freshly baked biscuits or cake – but my efforts were only ever pathetic, a mere echo of my sister. It left me feeling not only alone, but also humiliated. Small. A shadow in my sister’s wake.

4

‘You can’t go.’

We continued this argument, or discussion, or whatever