Free The Paua Tower by Coral Atkinson

bush. Thank God we’ve at least got some light, thought Vic, suddenly feeling nervous. This whole idea had been his and he hoped like billy-oh it was going to work. So far everything had gone well.
    Felling the tree hadn’t been difficult. The Nicholson brothers,who had once worked as bushmen in Northland, had surreptitiously done the job with saws illicitly borrowed from the camp. Tonight they were going to move the sawn-up blocks. This was more of a problem, involving as it did the borrowing of the lorry from the shed by the overseer’s house and a trip into Matauranga.
    Vic followed the others through the confusing tangle of tent guy-ropes, careful where he placed his feet. It reminded him of his boyhood, creeping about in other people’s places, fearful of waking or disturbing somebody. Vic wrote to his mother Joy every Sunday, putting a few shillings from his pay in the envelope. In between times he tried not to let himself dwell on her; the feelings were too raw and painful. But at times like this the thoughts rose unbidden.
    He imagined Joy in the sleepout where she lived. It was in a backyard behind a tall tooth-like house in Tinakori Road. Vic thought of his mother counting money out of her worn black purse, looking in the ashtrays on the windowsill, or down the side of the couch, trying to cobble together enough for a loaf of bread, a bit of mince. There was no work as a housekeeper for Joy now. Instead she minded children, weeded, mended silk stockings, but what she earned was never enough, and even with his few shillings he wondered how she managed. She had made a little garden, scraps of geraniums and bits of pink daisies she’d taken as slips and grown in old cups, shaving mugs and chamber pots around the doorway.
    They were heading for the supervisor’s house, which was an old cottage over the road from the camp. The two lorries were parked in a corrugated-iron lean-to that sloped from the house to the fence. Getting a lorry out without waking the supervisor and his family was going to be a hell of a job. They’d talked about it over and over.
    ‘Nothing for it,’ Vic said. ‘Just take the brake off and push.’
    ‘What if Forster or his wife wake up?’ said Miller. ‘That shed’s under their bloody noses.’
    ‘In that case we scarper,’ said Gilchrist. ‘Even if they do come out, Forster would be hard pressed to recognise us in the dark.’
    When they got to the shed, the doors were already unlocked as arranged. Gilchrist had used his skill as a glazier and removed the window of the supervisor’s office. It was then a simple matter to climb in and help himself to the metal ring that held the keys to the shed and the lorries.
    ‘What’s that?’ whispered Vic to Gilchrist, pointing at a window in the house, where a wan, flickering light glowed from behind a curtain. ‘Someone’s up.’
    ‘Reckon it’s just a lamp or candle left burning,’ said Miller, moving close to the other two men.
    ‘One of Forster’s kids,’ said Vic. ‘Could be spooked by the dark.’
    ‘Nobody budge,’ said Gilchrist, ‘and we’ll see what happens.’
    The six men pushed back against the tangle of harakeke that served as a hedge and waited. There was no movement from inside the house.
    ‘Seems okay,’ said Vic, stepping out of the shadows into the moonlight. ‘Might as well carry on.’
    The double doors of the shed had sunk into the mud, making them difficult to open. Slowly the men pushed them upwards and heaved them back.
    Moana Forster, sitting up in the iron bed nursing baby Patricia, heard a slight scrape. She glanced around at the candle that stood inside a cut-down corned beef tin on the table beside her. She had lit the candle because her husband complained that the light from the oil lamp woke him and if there was one thing Stu Forster was most particular about, it was not having his sleep disturbed.
    Mrs Forster listened. It was nothing. Maybe just a cat or the chook-run door in the wind.