She had red hair. She put red dye over her own dark red to cover the grey hairs that had come since she’d met him. Thirty-two was too young to have grey hair. ‘Pull them out,’ he said, but there were too many, and she had been taught that if you pulled out a grey hair, six more would come. Her skin was white, and she fed it with milky creams to keep it soft. It glowed with that indefinable luminosity that makes a woman beautiful. She never exposed it to the sun. It was like the pale, white jellyfish underneath the ocean who have no eyes, never needing to see because the water is black and thick.
During the day, Joel had a job in a factory printing egg cartons. In the supermarket, he would point out other egg cartons to her, printed by other companies. Sometimes there were patches where the print hadn’t come out properly. He wouldn’t let that happen on the cartons he printed, he said. Semitoxic bluey-green dye stained his arms up to his elbows, his hands and underneath his fingernails. After work, he scrubbed, had a quick nap, ate the dinner that she’d cooked, and then he went out.
He grew his own smoke now. He liked to drive, and have a joint. His plants waited for him in the dark like fragile ghosts; the timer light off. They were white clones, without chlorophyll—the white widow strain. When the buds were picked, tiny, sticky crystals clung to them like dew. It was more potent than anything else he’d ever smoked. When he shone his torch at them, he was reminded of the white wood of eucalyptus trees, lit up by his headlights back in the time when he’d travelled the lonely roads of the Australian Outback at night, looking for something. He hadn’t found it there, and he’d come back home.
He preferred to drive around at night. Things were different then. He liked to go past the Farmer’s Building before Christmas. It had a towering red-and-white Santa Claus anchored to the corner, hand up and waving. The building itself glowed like pale green ice, an iceberg adrift in the city light. He floated by, looking down side-streets, always searching.
Joel never took his girlfriend with him when he went out. ‘I need my freedom,’ he said. ‘No, you can’t come. And that’s final. Spend time with your mates.’ But she was past the stage of wanting to go out. She was at the stage of wanting to stay home. With him. She wanted to hold his warm body while they slept.
She worried and imagined, lying in bed alone in the young hours of the morning. The alarm clock by her bed was luminous, and the numbers glowed like little ghosts, writhing and dancing in a circle around the slow-moving hands. Their dance was joyful, but she was not. Her heart pumped too fast, and her breathing was funny. She felt restless and knew that her body was constantly flooding with adrenaline, but she was unable to put it to use while she was lying in bed. It stopped her from sleeping. Sometimes, when the morning came, she was not sure if she’d been to sleep for a while or not. When she did remember sleeping, her dreams were full of looking for him, finding him, and then losing him again. Loneliness was the worst pain of all, worse than even a jellyfish sting.
Joel had tiny blue neons rigged up on the dashboard of his car. In the dark they gave the inside of his car an unearthly glow, as if he was sitting in an alien tomb. Some of the neons lit up the dials that measured his speed and his revs. One of the little blue lights illuminated the silver racing pedals on the floor. Clutch, brake, accelerator. When his foot was poised above them, he imagined a horse’s hoof, pawing at the ground, waiting for the command to release its muscles.
Once, on his way home, he came across one Tampax, and then several, lying on the road. He slammed on his brakes, thinking that a swarm of white mice was running across the road, under his wheels. Mice frighten horses, he thought. Their string tails curved behind them, like the painted white lines that marked the bends in the road. But instead of scattering, they remained frozen, and he realised what they were.
Not everything is what we think it is at first, he told himself. Sometimes we make mistakes. He’d made hundreds in his search. Sometimes he thought he saw things out of the corner of his eye when he didn’t. Maybe I smoke too much, he thought.
His girlfriend lay in bed at home thinking that every car she heard was his. Her heart beat in her ears as cars approached, and then stopped when they went past. The sound of their engines would disappear altogether, sucked into the vacuum of elsewhere. If she got up to go to the toilet, she found her hands were shaking. If Joel had been home to put his ear to her heart, he would have heard the sound of horses stampeding through the middle of it.
It took her a long time to see Jealousy as a little voice in her head, separate from her. Something evil, there to hurt her. Jealousy was a tiny blue angel, with long golden hair and see-through golden wings that beat really, really fast. At first she had thought that Jealousy was part of her, something helpful, a friend, and she had called her Intuition. If she popped into her head, she was a shadow of what had really happened. Once, she was sitting on top of Joel, and out of nowhere, Jealousy had made her think, I hope I’m better than the girl you fucked the other night.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he would say. ‘I never cheat on you. I wouldn’t do that.’ And while he was home, she believed him. She had known a lot of women who agreed that there’s a special feeling of knowing that you get when your partner is seeing someone else. But she knew that she needed to let go of that and see Jealousy as a destructive little voice, flitting through her mind, planting lies.
They’d given her some pills. She tried not to take them. Why should he make me into a crazy person because he doesn’t bother coming home? she thought. He could save me from this. When she did take them they took her to somewhere cold and distant, like the outer atmosphere. The air tasted really clean and fresh when she breathed, the whole way down her throat. Her heart felt still, not all choked up at the place where her bottom ribs met, in the middle of her chest.
Sometimes she thought it would be a relief if he cheated on her and she found out. Cheating was her bottom line, where the relationship would definitely be over. At least she’d know what to do, then. Better than always wondering if his behaviour was bad enough for her to give up on the two of them. Whether to let go of the good things, like the way he stroked her cheek with his forefinger. Like the way he whispered his love in her ear.
What if this going out all the time was just a phase for him, and he settled down like her? What if she got so wound up that she wasted everything? Being truly loved was something special, and she thought that, despite everything, he truly loved her.
Sometimes she would turn the lava lamp on and watch big globules of wax the colour of egg yolks rise and fall in the deep greeny-blue water. But it was all repetitious—there was no sense of progress; no beginning, no middle, no end. The wax went up, the wax went down. Occasionally, she tried to get her breathing in rhythm with it, just to make it go slower. But mainly, she lay in the dark and hoped for sleep.
If I’d had my baby, she thought, I wouldn’t be alone.
One night, tiredness took over, and she slept briefly, dreaming. She was in a car with Joel, and they were going to the hospital to get her baby. ‘If you don’t like what I do, get out of the car,’ he said, and she did. She started walking and didn’t look back or look for him at all in that dream. He was gone, and she didn’t care. When she woke up, she felt as if she could see both of them clearly, as though she was floating outside her body, unclouded by her love for him.
She could see how he did his sorry, liquid-eyes thing, and how he made up excuses for not coming home that he knew she wanted to hear. And she saw all the times that he had done it laid out and strung together like a sparkling necklace of his dark adventures, none of them forgotten by her. All the excuses that he had used fell away, like grime polished off by her dream.
A friend had told her once that she’d know when she came to the point when she’d had enough. She wasn’t quite there yet, but she could see it up ahead. She listened to a Kris Kristofferson record that her mum had played when she was little, and she remembered that she had had a life before she met him. She had survived be
fore. Surely she could survive if he was gone?
One night, her phone vibrated. There was a message on the pale blue screen, glowing in the dark. ‘Look outside on the wall,’ it read. He hardly ever sent her messages, not even to say where he was, or to tell her whether he’d be home or not. He never replied to her own texts, and she’d stopped sending them.
Outside, the moon was full. Cold and white and lonely, and the air on the way up to the sky was very clean and blue, almost as if it was day, sprayed out of a can. The moon, she thought, is like one of my pills, floating up there all alone in outer space.
A cold flim of silver light lay on the factory wall across the road. A trail of luminous paint lit by the moonlight was beginning to glow. How could something so cold warm something else so that it glowed? The letters got clearer and bolder until she could see where the paint had run in little dribbles. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ it said.
Driving back towards the city in the last hours of darkness, Joel could see the big neon cross up on the Hawkins construction crane; doing their bit for Easter. It was a pinky-orange colour, like salmon in a tin. He imagined walking out along the boom with his arms outstretched, not holding on, and then clinging to the cross. It was fitting really, a symbol of death and resurrection on a crane that was used to rip down the old Auckland, and hoist up the new.
In the distance, as the light thinned with the dawn, he thought he saw a dapple of grey, and a flash of silver. He accelerated and drove towards it. He spent nearly every night driving towards it. But he didn’t see it through his own eyes now. He saw it as if he was a stranger, standing outside on the concrete footpath in the early morning. Mist swirled around, and they hadn’t even turned the apricot-pink streetlights off yet.
The horse stood on the road, with its beautiful head arched downwards, pawing at the ground with its front hoof. Myriad small patches on the grey hide on its neck and back glistened silver, like an arrangement of thumb prints, deep at the base, shallow at the near end.
And he saw the bedroom curtain twitch, and his little boy face look sadly out through the glass. His jaw was twisted into a big lump on one side where his father had hit him, and the rosy swelling was already beginning to be tinged a dirty grey. He saw himself looking at the horse which was waiting out there for him on the road, and he knew how much he longed for the day when he would cling to its mane, and it would carry him away.
(2007)
Karlo Mila, ‘On Joining Pasifica’
for Jo
When I first met you
we were learning to siva
wearing lavalava tied in awkward knots
our work clothes carefully folded away
both of us
learning a new dance
both of us
finding a different way to move
through life
We have hustled and bustled
and power-walked well
somehow
sacrificing the grace
and ease of movement
our grandmothers held in their hands
When we met
both of us
were trying to remember
that earlier beat
Both of us trying to reclaim
a new dance from old memories
both of us standing shyly
in the back-row
trying to siva in our sports socks
both of us searching for a rhythm
we’d never quite
been able to find
within ourselves
All of us trying to find time
to ta’olunga
to meke
to tamule
to siva
into our truest selves
(2005)
Geoff Cochrane, ‘That Winter with Celeste’
I don’t remember buying this espresso.
I don’t remember last night’s television.
I don’t remember Troy
nor the first dynamo
nor the first use of ether in dentistry.
I don’t remember coal
nor the skittish Tiger Moth
nor Romeo’s cute little hard-on.
As well as all of which
I’m struggling to recall
that winter with Celeste
in her bed above the harbour,
the ships like chandeliers
parked beneath her window.
(2008)
Geoff Cochrane, ‘Loop’
Foals were born beneath
the great chart of the stars;
I woke to the sepia smell
of wallpaper parched and friable;
gilled, waxen, large,
Kurt’s mauve erection
swung like a derrick.
For many years,
I steeped myself in booze.
I steeped myself in booze
till even my marrow drank,
but it’s all behind me now,
sad fuck that I am.
(2003)
Last Words
James Brown, ‘The Language of the Future’
for Catherine
In the language of the future
today will always be today
and the moments will sparkle like bearings.
There will always be enough time
to get things done
because there will always be
enough hours in the day.
Countries will be divided up
into hexagons, and every hexagon
will be occupied by
a new idea. Everywhere
will be connected directly
with everywhere else
by the infallible laws
of perspective.
Straight lines will flow
into straight lines
across the golden fields,
across the golden fields melting
into the golden cities.
Gold will grow on vines.
In the future, language will also
grow on a vine, and everything we say
will be understood. People
will be able to speak their minds,
so that the world will seem
at first astonishing
and then strangely quiet. Some will begin
to choose their words carefully, but most
will come to regard communication
with a lengthening suspicion, so that eventually
the sounds themselves
will be granted independence
—and then held accountable.
As such, in the language of the future
the revelations of the new freedoms
will be the property of everyone
and nobody.
Breasts will become a
universal validating standard
and fat people
will be made illegal. Cars
will finally be included in
the Bill of Rights
and granted protection from
pedestrians
and other forms of
visual pollution.
The emancipation of signs
will be the speed of change.
For in the future, brain retention will decrease
but thought-count will expand,
so that poking out one’s tongue
will be just the tip
of the iceberg.
And although the space separating words
from everything else
will have ceased to be, research will continue
and a distant descendant of Henry James
will discover a way of measuring exactly
the spaces between words.
Mapping will begin, and the first settlers
will arrive and gaze straight through
all that lies before them
into
whatever will be.
With the new discoveries
the insides of language
trillions of interconnecting spheres.
Thus, the insides of many things
will come to be similarly
constructed, so that when a man
inserts his opinion
into a woman, her insides too
will glisten with spheres, which will whirr
and retract and increase slightly
in temperature. Teenagers courting in parents’ cars
will no longer do donuts, but will do spheres,
and, as the verbs decline, their rear-vision mirrors
will display the past
like kinetic sculpture.
Babies will start to be born with wheels,
making it easier
to get around.
Within the language of the future
everything will be different
and instantly recognisable.
We will touch our golden bodies together
and they will touch their golden bodies
together, and so on and so on.
But there will still be the stories
for we will always have the need
to be guided by voices. ‘Listen,’ they already whisper,
‘under the bushes, under the stars,
a cool hand talks silently, love …’
(1999)
Michele Leggott, ‘Mirabile Dictu’
imagine the world goes dark
a bowl of granite or a stone bird
incised by tools the nature of which
is unknown just that they are metal
and therefore from otherwhere
just that the weight of the bowl
precludes light and lightness
of thought my feet take a path
I can no longer see my eyes
won’t bring me the bird
only now
has my hand found the stones
I could add to the smooth interior
of my despair the world goes dark
I look into the eyes of my stone bird
hammers before memory
silence and the world that is not
that is no country
for the unassigned smell of sunlight
on skin in a darkened room
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 143