The Paua Tower by Coral Atkinson Page B

years he threatened with prosecution anyone who ventured over the fences. As years passed, both those fencesand Carey’s own possessive energy sagged. The tower became public property by default, a destination for afternoon walks, a place for lovers. Visitors took to writing initials, drawing hearts, engraving words between the shells. Like some Latin declension, the language of love, lust and copulation sprouted from between the glowing blue shards. On the ground floor of the tower the words materialised as physical objects: semen-sticky handkerchiefs , used condoms, lace and rayon knickers, cigarette butts were all frequently strewn about.
    Now, when Carey heard lovers at the tower, rather than taking his rifle out of the kitchen cupboard and shouting invective, he merely smiled at the predictability of it all. Lonely in his advancing age, he had come to appreciate his uninvited guests, drawing a vicarious pleasure from the rituals of their courtships. The preliminary giggles, the little pretend cries of female modesty followed by the noises of pleasure, primitive and feral. When he went down there, wished the couple the time of day, they would grasp their clothes about them — Adam and Eve caught in the garden. The women would look sheepish, peering into handbags, dabbing their noses with powder puffs. As if he didn’t know.
    Carey’s farmhouse was on a ridge overlooking the tower and the river. Built by his father on confiscated Maori land in the late 1860s, the house was rough and poky. A veranda had originally run along the front but the boards on one end, under a broken drainpipe, had rotted through, leaving only a small sound area to one side of the front door. This was where Carey kept an old fireside chair. The chair, like the veranda, had seen better days. A spring pushed through the seat at the back and the hessian lining had come adrift between the legs and hung down in torn flitters. Carey sat on the chair thinking of love. The way it gripped and hung on, like ticks in sheep. He remembered the urgency, too. Once known, now long gone. He thought of being with his wife Ellie in the double bed with the broken slat and the missing castor, making the boy the tower would commemorate. Time,which had taken both Ellie and the boy, was now after him and the tower as well, and would get them both in the end. Carey had no regrets about his own demise, but the decay and eventual destruction of the tower bothered him. Thirty years after it was built, the structure was beginning to subside, the elaborate wooden staircase rotting, the shells falling out, leaving patches on the concrete like mange on a once handsome animal. Too old now to reverse the process, he watched the changes and felt overcome with sadness.
    Carey heard Stella laugh as he sat on the broken armchair, looking at his hands and thinking of death. He liked to hear a woman laugh. He could see her down there, hanging over the gate. A girl wearing a grey felt hat, her back covered in long pale hair, plaited like a skein of the yarn that Ellie used in her fancywork, and a young man standing beside her. They were staring at the tower.
    ‘Gee whiz,’ said Vic. ‘It’s beautiful.’
    ‘Marvellous,’ said Stella, pleased Vic liked it.
    Neither spoke for a moment, both gazing at the tower, though they were each thinking of the other.
    ‘Look at me,’ said Vic, moving closer to Stella, his arm on the top of the gate, his long fingers, with their prominent joints, resting on the wood.
    Stella turned her head.
    ‘Your eyes,’ he said, gazing tenderly into her face. ‘Their colour. So blue, like those shells.’
    Vic put his arm around Stella’s shoulders. She didn’t draw back as he gathered her towards him. Her head felt comfortable against his chest.
    ‘Can I kiss you?’ Vic whispered.
    Stella smiled and nodded.
    Vic kissed her once very lightly, and then again. Stella felt the rough intimacy of his skin, and caught the newness of his smell as their