Page 28 of Kiwi Gold
She laughed, and her face changed completely. Gray, who’d been looking a little tense and a lot protective, like the more testosterone-fortified kind of dad at a newborn photo session, smiled, and Poppy said, “Awesome, Laila.”
“No worries,” Daisy said. “I changed my name, yeh, and so did Oriana and my other sisters. Mine was Chastity, so you know, and hers was Obedience. Awful, eh. But I have no opinion to share about your situation. I understand doing it, and I understand deciding you don’t give a toss what people think, too. I don’t believe half of what I hear, myself, but people love to pile on. They love to think they know.”
Poppy said, “I told you, Laila. You don’t have to hide. ”
A well-upholstered woman in her fifties came over now and said, “Steaks are done. Let’s find a table to put those plates on first, though. What lovely things have you brought us?”
I said, “Not that lovely, I’m afraid. Coconut-raspberry slice that I bought at the supermarket and took out of the plastic, that’s all.” Exactly what I hadn’t meant to share, but there was a sort of reckless thing happening in my body and brain. Something entirely new.
The words came out a little combative, in fact, but the woman just smiled. “Well, that’s what they’re for, supermarkets, to help us working women get through the week. You’ll be Oriana’s new boss, then. The photographer. Laila Drake, isn’t it? Oriana admires you so much. Talks about you constantly. It makes me quite jealous sometimes.” She laughed. “Reckon we all want to be extra-special, eh. I’m Honor Tamatoa, Gray’s mum.”
“Oriana’s a wonderful assistant,” I told her, and meant it. Then I said it for the second time. “It’s Laila Ashford, actually. Kegan Ashford’s widow.”
Silence for a long moment, and then Honor said, “Well, then. That’s news. I reckon that if we’re going to have revelations and drama and all, though, we’d better get something to eat and keep up our strength.”
12
HERO TO ZERO
Lachlan
“So,” I finally said, when Laila and I were sitting at a long table in the sunshine, eating steak and salmon and crisp-roasted potatoes and salad made of pea shoots and all the rest of the enormous amount of food that was practically collapsing the serving table, “I’m trying to sort out what would be best to say here about your reveal, since I think that’s what that just was.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” she said.
“Maybe not. But I’m going to take the plunge anyway and tell you I’m sorry about your husband.”
Inadequate, to say the least, but the English language only has so many words.
I’d have to have been shot into space notto know who Kegan Ashford was, or at least into Australia. Kiwi celebrity is funny that way. Comes from having five million people in the whole place, probably, and being out-of-reason proud when we punch above our weight.
And Ashfordwasa celebrity. About my age, he’d been climbing since he was a kid, and competitive for all that time, winning medal after medal, capped by nabbing gold in the men’s division of the Lead Climbing event at the World Championships some years back. Which had to do with getting the highest on a route nobody should have been able to climb a meter of, apparently. New Zealand had very nearly stopped for that one, and during his event in the last Olympics as well, when he’d also won gold. Sponsored to hell, but pushing his sponsors’ wares only by association with his powerful character, since he was the epitome of stoicism, a man of few words whose lean, serious face was nearly as recognizable as an All Black’s. A national hero even before he and his mate had been caught in a rockfall four or five years ago, when he’d dug the mate out and carried him to safety on his back with apparently superhuman reserves of strength and endurance and mana.
After that? A national icon.
Australia had the surfers. New Zealand had Kegan Ashford. Tough, driven, and intense, the kind of manly man that girls swooned over and men envied.
His real love, though, was mountaineering. And, towards the end, ski mountaineering, which means about what you’d think. You climb a mountain that shouldn’t be climbable, braving cold at levels humans weren’t built for, a lack of oxygen that would have astronauts gasping for air in their spacesuits, and hurricane-force winds that threaten to rip away your tent and your survival, not to mention the avalanches that might thunder down to bury you and other insane delights, and then you hurtle yourself 4,000 meters down it on skis. Suicidal, you’d say, but apparently it’s a thing.
After those Olympics, he’d announced his new goal to ski all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks, finishing each down-ski in a single day, and all of it without oxygen. Nobody had done it before, and instead of reflecting on why that might be, he’d decided that he’d be the first.
He’d started, predictably, with the most spectacular. Mount Everest, what else. For a bloke who acted like he didn’t care about the celebrity, he always seemed to find it. By the time he reached Annapurna, he was at three down, eleven to go. The Himalayan mountain was only the tenth highest peak in the world, but it had a thirty-three-percent death rate among those who’d tried to reach the top and get down again. Apparently that only added to the appeal.
How did I know that? Because you couldn’t help but know. There’d been a TV special. An advertising campaign. Collectible cards with your grocery order from New World. Livestreamed footage that had kids making models of the Himalayas in their classrooms and sticking pins in them every day to show the team’s progress.
Though, to be honest, nobody cared much about the team. They cared about Kegan Ashford.
Annapurna had lived up to its reputation as a frustrater of dreams. Two weeks to hike in, the group of them crossing rushing streams with huge packs on their backs, shuffling along one rope whilst holding onto another, all of it expertly filmed and thrillingly set to music, and then the assault on the mountain itself. Going up and down and up again, fixing rope and then carrying gear to the next camp in grueling all-day efforts, then coming down to carry another load up. Enduring storms that kept them in tiny tents for days on end and roaring avalanches that shook the ground under them, all of it recorded and commented on and shared. Successes and setbacks and the anticipation building all the while, as if they’d planned it that way.
By the time the assault on the summit began, the team had been pared down by exhaustion, illness, and injury, until it was just Ashford and his best mate, Colin Hampton. They’d struggled up from Camp IV to their highest stopping point at Camp V, their huge packs made even heavier by the skis on their backs, one cramponed boot at a time kicking into the deep snow and every centimeter of their bodies covered against the blowing wind and the freezing cold that could cause frostbite in minutes. The Himalayan climbing season was well advanced, and another climber, this one from Japan, had skied four of those 8,000-meter peaks himself and was on his fifth. Chasing the same record, and gaining, but he’d done the easy ones first.
It was the Olympics, but reduced to a single event. It was the Rugby World Cup, but with only one person who mattered, the one who would ski down those treacherous slopes. Everybody else was support.
It had seemed like pure show pony to me, but what did I know?
The final ascent to the summit, then. Starting in the darkness, at two o’clock in the morning, because you needed to start that ski as early as possible to make it down in one day. One person’s ice axe biting into the snow. One person breathing hard in the impossibly thin air, his lungs so fit that he could do it without oxygen. One person leaping a deep crevasse while little kids hid their eyes. And, finally, one person standing on the summit, turning to take in the majestic vista of the Himalaya, the ice-clad peaks soaring far above the clouds that hid the bases from view, because another storm was coming.
Kegan Ashford, obviously, didn’t care about that. He knew he’d make it all the way down the mountain before the storm, because there was no better skier and no better mountaineer in the world, save only Sir Edmund Hillary himself, and he was dead. There was no doubt on his bearded face, only determination and, finally, triumph, as he came off the height of the peak, flying on his skis at a rate hard to comprehend.
