Angela came home with the idea that something significant had happened to her at Uluru. On those silent afternoons, as she was pushing the yard broom up and down the concrete porch, she’d lost her grip. She finished school by some miracle and embarked on a vague attempt at university, but she had an affair with a married man that went badly wrong, and one day after an argument she hitchhiked down the Southern motorway and finished up in Wellington, which ended her university career.
Back in Auckland she moved into a flat with a group of people who were busy, she soon discovered, setting the record for the most armed robberies performed in a year. The papers ran a series for a while, Today’s armed robbery, which was a way of needling the police about their failure to make any arrests. Angela’s flatmate, an outwardly respectable blonde called Amanda, was the getaway driver. This Angela learned later, when the police kicked down the door. Her flatmates were arrested, and the landlord threw her out. Maria had gone to try her luck in Australia again. Angela’s grandparents were dead. Her father’s family was in Europe. She had no one.
She moved in with Hemi, who lived in a tinny house. She didn’t work. She applied for the dole. She cut tattoos in her arms. Hemi was feckless, sweet-natured, and extremely kind. He was the leader of a local street gang that had a ferocious reputation. It used to amuse Angela, travelling about with this lot who affected the mannerisms of American gangsters and frightened everyone they met. She soaked up Hemi’s kindness. But she was disgusted with herself. They were idle, directionless; they stayed up all night and slept all day. They never saw the sun.
Hemi and Angela and some of his gang drove up north for a tangi. In the car she listened, tranced with boredom, to their inane chatter. They stopped at a café in Kamo that backed onto a Christian camp. The camp advertised hot pools, and Hemi decided to try them. He and Angela went in, and he wanted to have sex beside the bubbling spa pool. It was a wet, ugly little room, with mouldy concrete pipes roaring in the walls. After a while she left him in there and came out into the car park. It was hot and bright, the cars flashing past on the open road. She had a crushing sense of inertia, disgust and squalor. She saw a man standing in the doorway of the Christian camp, carrying a backpack. She asked him, ‘Where’s the nearest bus station? I want to get away from here.’
His name was Pastor Kyle Sendells. She got into his car without a word to anyone. Pastor Kyle drove her up to the Far North, where she met Nathan, and where she’d been ever since, at the dump. She never saw Hemi again.
Angela’s great-grandfather’s house in Indonesia was large and grand. He was rich, well educated, by all accounts handsome and suave. His wife was ‘delicate’ and had only one child, Angela’s grandmother. She never recovered from the change of country, and died relatively young. Angela thought about how they’d made their way out here after their home was taken from them, how they’d tried to make a new life, and where the lines of their family had ended — in her case, in a sea of rubbish bags at the far end of the world.
And yet she believed she’d reached the lowest point of her life that day at the Christian camp at Kamo. The shame and weariness were overpowering. She had faith that she would never feel that low again, and that faith started when she was sitting in the car with Pastor Kyle Sendells, leaving Hemi mile after mile behind.
Pastor Kyle started his religious patter as soon as they were on the road. Angela had been brought up an atheist and didn’t pay any attention to it, but some of the things he said were useful, she had to admit. She was so low and depressed that she told him everything. It came out in a stream of despair. He was an intense, thin, wiry man, aged in his fifties, with deep lines down his face, blond hair and pale, sly eyes with fair eyelashes. He had on a faded, checked shirt, nylon trousers and cheap shoes with zips. She told him about her mother, her father’s death, about Travis who’d pushed her mother around and turned her back to booze and drugs, about trying and failing to live a decent life. She even told him about pushing the yard broom up and down the porch at Uluru, and how she believed that was the point when she’d lost her mind.
He listened, and whenever she paused he chipped in. ‘If we invite Jesus into our life,’ he said, ‘if we accept that he died for our sins …’ He must have thought she was the ideal person for him to practise on — people do turn to God when they’re low — but Angela was absolutely immune to the Lord.
When they stopped at a café he sat down and stared at her, calculating, with his sly eyes.
He said, ‘Number one. You feel your mother’s addiction has tainted you.’
‘I don’t,’ she said.
He spread out his freckly hands and looked at them.
‘Was your father an addict?’
‘No.’
‘Addiction can be inherited. But if you had inherited that gene, you’d be an addict by now. So the taint hasn’t attached to you.’
Angela stared.
‘You’re free of it.’
‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she said.
He took dainty bites out of his hot pie. ‘Point two. Those tattoos on your arms. They can easily be erased. Simply go to a doctor, who will refer you to a surgeon. With new techniques there will be no scars.’
She put her arms under the table.
‘Point three. On the question of your mother,’ he went on.
‘Oh yes?’ She gave him a dark look, and took her arms out from under the table.
‘You tell me she was a woman who allowed herself to be overborne. When this Travis pushed her, she gave in. Isn’t that true?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you like your mother?’
‘No. She says I’m like my father. Tough-minded.’
‘You need to stop copying her then, and become yourself.’
‘Christ,’ she exploded.
He smiled. ‘Yes. And then there is Christ. The fourth point is that you must take Christ into your life. When you accept that he …’
He ran on. She tuned out. She was annoyed, but very much struck by what he’d said.
He ordered extra coffees, sausage rolls and two pieces of cake. He told the girl he would pay when they were finished.
‘Will you be finishing that pie?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘Then perhaps I may …?’ He ate it in a few efficient mouthfuls. He looked around. The girl who had served them was taking off her apron. A boy came into the shop and they left together.
‘Have you got any money?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got twenty dollars.’
‘We need petrol. And I need to ask you where you’re going. I’m going to a settlement in the Far North. I have an errand there, a mission. I serve God, and I have my own private cross to bear. There’s been sorrow in my family life, my church family — it strengthens me to love and serve Jesus.’ He looked sly suddenly. ‘Mine is a secret sorrow.’
‘You might as well tell me,’ she said with a bleak smile. ‘I’ve told you everything.’
‘And I’ve told you that you’re free.’ He held up his hand. ‘Say no more. Think. There is nothing to hold you back. Four points. You’re free.’
She followed him to the counter.
‘Twenty dollars you said?’ He nudged her. She gave it to him. He asked the girl, ‘Have you got change for a twenty? Two tens?’
She gave him the change. ‘God bless,’ he said. They walked out, and he gave her ten dollars.
‘Take it all,’ she said.
‘But you’ve got nothing else.’
‘I’ve got a bank account.’
The girl called, ‘What about paying for the extras?’
‘Oh, we paid your colleague for those,’ he sang out.
‘Awesome,’ she called, dopey.
He looked around edgily. ‘Perhaps we should get on?’
‘You didn’t pay for the extras,’ Angela whispered.
‘They were your share to pay. And the Lord tells me you need a bit of kindness. He has mercy on peopl
e who have suffered, and sometimes he likes to give them a little freebie.’
They sped on.
At Mangonui, Angela was car sick. Pastor Kyle went into the shop. He came hurrying out, jumped in and drove off fast, unloading his pockets.
‘Take these.’ He handed her a tube of antacids. ‘I assume you’re not employed. You mentioned a bank account?’
She said, ashamed, ‘I’ve been getting the dole.’
‘You have to cancel it. You have to work. The Lord says if we are to serve him, we must honestly toil to help ourselves.’
She was silent.
‘Besides, how much do they give you these days?’
She told him.
‘Chicken feed!’
He took her to a tiny bach way out at the end of the White Beach. It was a wild, empty, beautiful place on a hill above the dunes. No one could approach without being visible a long way off. The front windows looked out over the rolling surf. He told her he often saw sharks cruising just beyond the breakers. There were islands on the horizon, and the land rolled away up the coast as far as you could see. From the garden there was a view of the swamp land behind the beach, reaching as far as the burnt hill. The garden was sheltered by the house and by a windbreak, and he had a healthy, well-tended vegetable patch. He lived there in the summer, when he wasn’t giving sermons in evangelical churches, and when he was away a friend borrowed the place and looked after the garden.
He slept in the bedroom, and she had a couch in the sitting room. There’d been a woman in the place at some stage. Angela found some dowdy dresses and shoes. One day when he was out she found a pile of child’s drawings in a drawer, and a letter written in felt pen in a child’s big, uneven handwriting.
I like my new toys. I miss my mum. I have fun and go on
walks. I play with toys and ride a bike. I have nice things
to eat. I do some lessons and do maths and learn to read.
What I wish for please is to live with my mum again.
She closed the drawer. She supposed he must have had a grandchild to stay, but the letter was strange. She couldn’t quite see how it fitted. It was a sort of report, and an appeal, but to whom? She wondered whether Pastor Kyle was up to something, and imagined some scam involving his church and a charity — fake begging letters that purported to be from African orphans, but were actually penned by a diligent Pastor Kyle.
At night she listened to the surf booming down on the shore. She swam in the sea and took long walks, all the way to the burnt hill. She got fit. They fished off the rocks every day, and their diet consisted of fish, tinned food and vegetables from the garden. He didn’t drink or smoke. One day he drove her into town and got her to cancel her dole. She took the money out of the account and gave it to him; he thanked her and said, ‘Now you are truly free.’ They celebrated with a big meal. For such a thin man, he ate an enormous amount.
Angela met Nathan in town, and started to go out with him. He’d been a senior rugby league player; he was fit and good-looking, with a sweet smile. His family — the respectable side that is — were handsome people who owned a lot of land in the area. Nathan was the lazy youngest brother of eight children, the bad boy of the family. He’d avoided school and never learned a trade like the others, and ended up working in the dump. His family loved him and indulged him; he was a real favourite.
When Pastor Kyle decided he had to go down to Auckland, Angela didn’t want to live in such an isolated place by herself, so she moved into Nathan’s little house on the main road. They shared with Nathan’s friend Brad Richards for a while, before he left to find work down south. (Angela liked Brad. She was sorry to see him go. She didn’t know she would meet him again, much later, in Auckland, and discover that he had a different name. That she would end up living with him for most of the rest of her life.)
She started working in the dump with Nathan.
She often thought about Pastor Kyle’s advice. First, she wasn’t an addict. Second, she could, if she chose, have her tattoos removed. Third, she didn’t have her mother’s soft, scatter-brained nature, and therefore she should stop behaving like her and become herself. Fourth, the Lord — well, she chose to forget about Him.
When she’d first started going out with Nathan she hadn’t shaken off her shame and self-disgust. During those aimless, sensuous, idle months with Hemi, a kind of sweet decay had seeped into her soul. Now things were changing. As time went by she felt the old layers falling away and a new self hardening up — her own true personality. She began to be sharp with Nathan, to be bored by him. Sensing the change, he hit out. He was losing something. She knew what was going to happen: he loved her and she was going to hurt him. Those holiday women who stared at her from their cars, at her black eye, and at the glowering tough guy who’d beaten her up, would have had a firm idea who was the victim. But Nathan had a look of bewilderment and dread after they’d been fighting. When she was sitting on the deck after work he would lie down beside her and rest his head on her knee. He clung to her. And she stroked his hair and stared out over the bay, silent, cold, unyielding.
Huru could see she was changing. He was stirring up trouble, whispering in Nathan’s ear. Perhaps he wanted Nathan to kill her, just for his own evil entertainment.
After a stint in Auckland, Pastor Kyle came back to his bach at the end of the White Beach. Angela took to driving to the estuary around the coast from his place, and walking the tracks through the bush. He worked in his garden in the mornings, and when she turned up he stopped and put the kettle on, and served up fresh fish and corn cobs for lunch. They ate out in the garden, looking over the beach. Afterwards they went fishing.
It was another hot day, the bright light striking off the flax. Angela climbed Pastor Kyle’s hill, intending to tell him about her latest row with Nathan. He wasn’t in his garden. She went into the house and put the kettle on, then heard him dropping his boots at the back door.
He came in and looked at her steadily from under his pale lashes.
‘You have a black eye.’ His tone was flat. He looked hot and irritated.
‘It’s your fault,’ she said, smiling.
‘What?’
‘You told me to become myself. Nathan doesn’t like it.’
‘Yourself? Oh, I see.’ He took out a packet of cigarettes, lit one and eyed her impatiently. He’d never looked at her like that before, as if she were a nuisance.
‘I’ll come back another day,’ she said, and then burst out, ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
He didn’t take his eyes off her. ‘Want one?’ he said.
She took one. He lit it. There was a silence. The wind whistled over the iron roof, a fly buzzed against the window, and the sky in the square of the glass glowed an intense, unclouded blue. She saw that Pastor Kyle had not shaved.
‘Is something wrong?’
‘No,’ he said mechanically. ‘I’m going fishing. Want to come?’ There was no encouragement in his voice.
‘I’ll see you later. Nathan’s waiting.’
He watched her go. He waved, and she didn’t wave back, wanting him to know she was a bit hurt.
She turned off the track and lay down under a tree. It was Saturday, and since she didn’t have anything to do she thought she might turn back and have a swim at the White Beach. She lay in the shade, looking up at the sky through the leaves, too lazy to move. After half an hour she heard someone on the track. She saw Pastor Kyle walking quickly, carrying a pack on his back and a large box in his arms. The box was criss-crossed all over with blue and black packing tape.
She lay in the scrub, waiting until he was a distance off, still visible through the trees. She followed. He left the track that led to the coastal settlement and turned down a steep slope, then disappeared from view. She hurried to an outcrop of rock and looked down. He was making his way through the trees to a sandy path that followed the coast just above the rocks.
Angela sat on the rock. The sun blazed down, and the sea glittered.
The sandy path he’d taken must lead round the coast to the jetty where she’d left Nathan’s ute. She decided to follow him, and if he caught her, to say that she’d seen him come down that way and thought it might be a good shortcut. The only thing that made her hesitate was his expression as he’d passed. There was something so fixed, so coldly intent in it, that she didn’t like the thought of getting in his way.
She skidded down the slope and onto the path, which wound between rocks, under clay banks and over tangled pohutukawa roots. Below, the dark blue sea, deep here, washed in among the rocks, and further out gannets circled and swooped and dive-bombed, surfacing with fish in their beaks. The hot wind flipped the shiny leaves and the pohutukawa flowers blazed red against the sky. There was the iridescent sheen in the air that you get on very hot days. She passed under trees laden with straw bundles of shags’ nests, the birds clacking their beaks and shitting down onto the white-streaked rocks, the air pungent with the smell of fish. She was heading out onto a small peninsula. The path went around an outcrop and then there was no more path just white sand and a long, lonely, beautiful stretch of coast fringed with bush, out of sight of the jetty, which lay behind the curve of the land inside the estuary.
Pastor Kyle had walked in the hard sand near the water. His footprints were visible. Where the beach met the trees the sand was smooth and cool, and behind the small dunes the bush made a thick, sheltering canopy. The sand was bone white and the estuary water was very clear, with a fast current in it. The tide was going out, the water running between the shore and an island. She stuck close to the edge of the bush, following the footprints until they crossed the beach and entered the forest. Near the shore she came to a sunny clearing in the trees.
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