‘A-ma-zing,’ he said.
Inside Atul’s flat, the walls were a seaweed green. The place was small, the furniture all pressed together. The strobe lights in the living room were the only sign of extravagance. Atul spent most of the day upstairs, but in the evening he cooked for her: lamb biryani and microwaved poppadum. There was something about having a meal with another person—the intimacy of it—that Lauren loved. Her mother rarely cooked. Most of the time Lauren ate microwaved dinners alone. Her mother, who came home after eleven, would eat the leftovers while reading case briefs.
Atul was different. He was animated, attentive to everything Lauren said. When he laughed his whole body curved in on itself, his head dipping so low that it almost touched the plate.
‘Why’d you shave off your hair?’ asked Lauren.
He smiled at her. ‘Hair is annoying.’
***
The next morning, Atul made her two burritos for breakfast.
‘Eat quickly,’ he said. ‘I want to show you the art room.’
As Lauren ate, he swallowed two coloured pills from a bottle.
‘What sort of stuff do you paint?’ asked Lauren.
‘I used to be really into surrealist stuff,’ he said. ‘At art school they called me the brown Magritte.’
Lauren had no idea who Magritte was.
‘Quickly, quickly!’ sang Atul, pointing to the food.
Lauren stuffed the remaining burrito into her mouth, startled by the urgency in his voice.
He led her up a short, cramped flight of stairs. By the time they reached the top he was panting again. This time the sound startled Lauren, unsettled her.
He said: ‘Close your eyes.’
She did. Shutting her eyes reminded her of Christmases at her grandparents’ home in Bucklands Beach. She remembered the somnolent purring of the cat, the early morning light filtering into the living room, the syrupy Christmas films that they’d watch together afterwards.
Her mother was never present in these memories. Her mother took on clients right through the holiday period, and if she wasn’t working on Christmas day, she was usually asleep.
‘Open your eyes,’ said Atul softly.
Lauren did, and saw that they were standing in a room full of canvases. There were some paintings of the sea, of the winding road that they had travelled across to reach Atul’s flat. Mostly there were just paintings of people. In one corner there was an oil painting of a girl. With a start, Lauren recognized her own blunt features.
‘Is that me?’ she asked in wonder.
Atul smiled. ‘It’s not finished yet,’ he said.
***
That night, he asked if she’d ever done weed. She looked at him to see whether he was joking. His face was completely serious.
He went over to the kitchen cabinet, pulled upon a cupboard, and produced a plastic box of brownies.
‘My stash,’ he said, grinning. ‘Care to join me?’
Nervousness pooled in Lauren’s stomach and then, hot on the heels of that, a feeling of rebelliousness. She imagined her mother’s shocked face. In the end, it was the deliciousness of that vision which impelled her to agree.
Atul led the way back to the art room. Dusk was falling, but he didn’t turn on the lights. The two of them sat side by side on the floor. Lauren took a brownie and bit into it.
‘I wonder what your mother would say about this,’ said Atul, after a while. Lauren could hear the smile in his voice.
‘She’d ask rhetorical questions,’ said Lauren. ‘Lauren Young, are you aware that you are breaching the Misuse of Drugs Act?’
Atul burst out laughing. ‘Oh, Lorraine. Oh God, she was delightful. I think she was the smartest woman I ever slept with.’
The absurdity of the comment set Lauren off. Soon they were both in paroxysms, falling against one another in the darkness.
‘But no, seriously,’ said Atul, gasping for breath. ‘A Shortland Street lawyer. Your mother has done well for herself, hasn’t she?’
‘Sure,’ said Lauren. ‘So well that I never see her bloody face.’
The bitterness in her own voice surprised her. Wasn’t it because of her mother that she was able to live the life that she did? There were plenty of fatherless kids at Lauren’s high school, and she’d seen enough of them to picture the route her own life might have taken. Still, she resented her mother; resented the many nights, growing up, that she’d spent at her grandparents’ home.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Atul. ‘I’ve said something I shouldn’t have.’
Lauren didn’t know if it was the cannabis, but she felt, suddenly, a strange kinship with Atul. She felt a giddy delight. It did not matter that she did not know who Magritte was. It did not matter that she did not have Atul’s lovely dark skin, his black hair.
‘Can I live here with you?’ she asked abruptly. She had not planned to ask him so soon, but the words seemed to burst from her, almost against her will.
There was a long pause. Then Atul turned to look at her, his face inscrutable.
‘Lauren,’ he said, ‘there’s something you should know.’
He told her that he had lung cancer. He told her that he’d refused treatment. He told her all of this in a soft, matter-of-fact voice, as if he was announcing the next day’s lunch menu.
Lauren stared at the wall. She felt numbness and then, overwhelmingly, anger. He had invited her into his life only to announce its end. The neatness of the operation—the finality of it—incensed her.
‘How long?’ she asked, finally.
Atul shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It could be three months, a year.’
She got to her feet.
‘Wait,’ he said. He went over to the far wall and picked up the painting of Lauren. ‘I finished it last night. I want you to have it.’
Lauren hefted the canvas. Yesterday it had looked small, deceptively slight. It was only now, when she held it, that she realized how heavy it really was.
‘Atul’ is previously unpublished.
Nithya Narayanan is pursuing a BA/LLB (Hons) at the University of Auckland, where she is also Co-Editor-in-Chief for Interesting journal. She has completed two creative writing courses with distinction at the New Zealand Writers’ College. Her poetry and essays have previously appeared in Starling, Mayhem, Minarets, NZ Poetry Shelf and Best New Zealand Poems 2019. She was one of the Epigraph Project’s featured writers in 2020.
Gutting
Ting. J. Yiu
It unsettles Kim how she’s become the face of the tragedy. The dog lady who discovered the whale stranding. The reporter smiles a mouth only smile and when she doesn’t respond he repeats himself.
“How did you find the whales, Ms Liu?”
Rutherford’s tail thumps against Kim’s legs. He pulls against his leash, nuzzling the reporter who looks out of place against the West Coast sand. Rutherford barks. Kim wishes she’d kept him home.
“Ms Liu?”
“My name is Kimberley. Kim.” She looks away from the camera, staring at the grey-green horizon, focusing on anything but the hundreds of too-still bodies scattered over the volcanic sand.
***
She had watched uneasily as strangers poured into their village after the discovery. The Project Jonah rescue people arrived first, lugging safety equipment, flotation devices and high-visibility vests. Then a helicopter, the whip of its propeller blades flattening a circle of tussock as a scientific team tumbled out onto the beach; a marine biologist: a conservation ranger and two PhD students from Otago. By Saturday, the place had spilt over with outsiders. Cars and utes settled on the grassed embankment like a mob of sandflies. Surfers in the bullet grey water trying to corral endless pods of incoming whales back to sea. Local school kids and teachers scooping streams of water over the animals, trying to keep them hydrated.
“I won’t be staying,” Kim had said when a boy asked if she wanted to help.
“Why?” he stopped petting Rutherford’s head, “they need us.”
“I’m sorry” was all she had said to the boy, as she led Rutherford away.
HUNGER
Did I already know then,
the year they flooded Beijing
on that submerged swampy summer,
that it would for nothing?
We believed,
thought saviours of ourselves,
of their hunger sharpened eyes,
of people, swarming streets like fireflies.
Allowed myself to be swept,
by fleshy solid newness.
Even when they said they’d clear
the gathering
by whatever means.
Meaty belief coloured the air,
even our elders,
stockpiling rakes and pickaxes,
gathering rocks, mixing petrol bombs.
Even Mr Hua, who butchered entire cows
with a few strokes of a cleaver,
who downed sorghum wine like water
and stole money from customers.
Even the butcher said,
they can try
but they’ll have to come after us first.
---
“If you could just run us through how you found them,” the reporter asks, impatience breaching his voice.
She imagines the 6 o’clock news, her face broadcast into millions of Kiwi homes. They will see a middle-aged Chinese woman, eyes placid, even against this tragedy. She knows how they will think, “You just witnessed a whale stranding, where is your compassion?” The word that appears in their minds would be—as if out of nowhere, agreed collectively about her kind—emotionless.
She stares into the camera, seeing her warped face projected back. The sameness spooks her—the cameras, the questions, the journalists. An urgency to record a cargo of limp bodies and carnage.
Rutherford barks and she is snapped back to the present. The West Coast. The beach. The whales. She exhales. Tells herself, I am in New Zealand, the ground here is solid. My name is Kim, and this is my home.
“Kim?” a shard of uncertainty pries itself through the reporter’s camera-ready veneer.
Rutherford becomes cagey, bouncing from paw to paw. She lays a hand on his head. It must be the dying whales, maybe he can smell something on the animals that she can’t. Or maybe, he can smell something on her.
Everything dies, she thinks, sinking her hand into his salt-crusted, still-damp pelt. Everything.
***
Rutherford found Kim eight years ago. He’d appeared in her garden one day after heavy rain, no collar, thin. She’d watched from behind the screen, eyeing the grey creature slumped under her cabbage tree. It scared her, his tired eyes, trained on the house. She’d quietly backed indoors, not even removing her shoes, and double bolted her door.
She thought she’d heard him circling the property, like a night prowler. She’d kept her lights on until dawn, but in the morning, he was still there watching. She sprayed him with water, then threw stones at him, but they all landed without him flinching, his sad grey eyes still watching.
“What do you want from me?” she had yelled, her voice losing out to the omnipresent ocean roar crashing to shore.
The people who had sold her the house had not owned a hunting dog. Neither did anyone in the village. He was there the next day, and then the next. And he was there every day after that, late into the summer of 1992, until Kim forgot that he hadn’t always been a part of her life and a part of this land.
She didn’t let him into the house at first, only leaving out a bowl of water and some bones from the cattle farmers. In her childhood—at least how she chose to remember it—animals had never been friends. But slowly, imperceptibly, she grew used to, and even needed, his company.
Every morning, Rutherford would have the red leash in his mouth, waiting by the side of her bed, nudging his warm nose into her face. By dawn, both of them would be trekking, slowly up the coastal path, for their bushwalk.
She named him after Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealander who had split the atom. When people remarked that it was an interesting name for a dog, she lied, saying it was a tribute to her adoptive home. She didn’t say that her father had also been a physicist, who instead of fairy tales, had told her stories of scientists who pushed for truth and certainty and knowledge. As if names could actually change anything, she thinks now. Kim? Rutherford? Ridiculous shields to hide the truth of things.
***
“Where did you first see the whales, Kim?” the reporter shifts his right foot, leaving a crescent trail in the sand.
“At the lighthouse.”
“The lighthouse?” his eyebrows raise, “isn’t that quite far away?”
Kim doesn’t like his tone. It feels all of a sudden like an interrogation with the camera trained onto her face. Kim points to the cliffs rising above the beach, the white lighthouse perched on top. The camera follows her gaze. “If you’re accusing me of not reporting this earlier—”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What are you saying then? I called as soon as I could.”
“With mass standings, time is crucial. The sooner the authorities are alerted the better their chances of survival.”
There it is again, his tone clipped and brusque as if she were a child. Of course, she knows about timing. She has medical training. Had medical training. After she moved here, she got as far away from wounds and pain and death as she could.
“They looked like driftwood from up there,” Kim said.
“Driftwood?”
“Is this your first time on the West Coast, sir?” she looks him square in the eyes.
“No.” He pauses, then adds “Ma’am.”
Kim wants to spit into his face. Show him how the seas here are brutally rough. How storms rip entire trees and shipwrecks from the bottom of the Tasman, tossing them on the black sand like skeletons of the deep. Didn’t he understand that this place didn’t play games?
She draws Rutherford closer, steadying his head, stopping him from jumping up again. “I couldn’t see from the lighthouse. I had to get down first before calling the coastguard. Ok?”
The West Coast is populated with descendants of mining families and nomadic Kai Tahu tribes. They lean against mine shafts and hand-hewn cabins, waiting for the sky to darken. Counting the rain beating into them sideways, knowing that the bush and moisture have been here longer than eight centuries of human settlement. Their faces say, I know the harvesting of river pounamu, giant slabs of black-green rock pulled barefoot with flax rope. They know the wrestling with ash grey tunnels to haul coal, unwilling, from the depths. The clawing of tea-coloured earth when walls collapse, darkness blanking the single point of exit. Roughness lingers in their slow drawl and even slower welcome of outsiders. It was the kind of isolation Kim had been looking for when she moved here. Anonymity. Remoteness. The possibility of disappearance.
She had taken on lighthouse duty because she thought that it would let her fit in. She wasn’t about to invite people over for company. A monthly check was all that was needed but she had started doing the walks every week. Then daily, as if walking could be an act of cleansing. Or exorcism.
An hour up the bush track the landscape suddenly burst open, revealing the headland. Toetoe and bent-over kanuka fanned out towards where the lighthouse rose, like a white chess piece balanced on the cliff. Kim had to walk towards it until the horizon levelled out again and the stretch of black lava sand became visible, grey surf pounding in endless bands.
Sometimes Kim would sit with her binoculars, scanning the horizon. She watched black-billed gulls catch the wind, and lingered over bleached driftwood that had been flung ashore like sec
rets oxidising in the air. Even when there were no birds and the sea was flat, she would sit there, still, for hours, studying the expanse of remote emptiness that felt clean and unmarked.
----
WALKING
We walked Beijing like a game.
Ba asked if I could see his window
at the physics department.
In now extinct hutong alleys
we found tanghulu hawkers
guarding sticks of too-red fruit,
imitated the knife sharpener
with his operatic wail and grindstone.
Ba told me not to be rude
so I begged for jianbing
liang mao a piece that burned my tongue.
Tired and petulant, Ba hoisted me on his shoulders
while I gaped at street dentists
pulling teeth on the sidewalk
making theatre of bloodied gums and tongues.
I walk in New Zealand too
counting raw blisters and shin splints.
The game is finding the edge of the globe
where I recognise nothing
but give new names for old things
masticating unfamiliar sounds
in my ah-yee mouth.
In the South Pacific, anything can disappear
off the lip of the horizon
space is how I am unaccounted for,
a stranger, blameless and unmarked.
I have edged my toes over the cliff-ledge
lifted ankles, hamstrings taut,
watched rocks tumble downwards
to smash against ocean and salt spray
imagined the intake of breath
suspended in between falling
conjuring an Olympic diver’s grace
swanning elegantly,
arms out, nose down
my body of veins and viscera slicing through air
where at the ends of the world
there is nowhere left to walk but sea.
---
It was foggy the day Kim discovered them. The shiny black bodies of the whales had been indistinct lumps against the dark sand. Identical oil-slick heads kerning into torpedo-shaped smoothness, foam spilling off their bodies. There were so many, it looked like an infestation, except they didn’t move.
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