by Thom Conroy
I consider calling my mum, but it’s like three in the morning in Swallsborough. I pick Lois’s number from my list and almost call her, but then, at the last minute, my fingers select ‘Create Message’ all on their own. I type, U awake? and send this off to Lyle’s number.
Only 11.30 — why wld I be asleep?
Before I can think of what to say to this, the next message comes from him: On the beach.
With who?
Whole crew: me, myself, I.
This makes me smile. I lean my head back then, and, without intending to, I notice that the storm that has been threatening all day is gone and in its place are the stars. Only I don’t think of what I see as stars — the word that comes to me is firmament. What I see is heavenly and astounding, nothing like what I expected … And what did I expect? A streetlight, maybe? The lit wall of a building? Instead, my gift is space. One marvellous and twinkling corner of the universe.
I type, Look up.
Wooow.
Why r you at the beach?
Why r u whervr u r?
I’m north of Taupo with an 8 yr old girl.
Why?
I shrug into my phone and shiver. It is only now, at this moment, that I’ve noticed how cold it is. I’m trying to type in a summary, trying to say in as few words as possible that I’m with Harvey’s niece and heading to the Cape to find my wayward father, that I’m seeking solace, or perhaps the past, that I may also be running from something, but I can’t say what, when up there — up in the firmament — streaking out of the firmament and into the little sphere where we find ourselves, is a meteor. A blaze of white, sharp and clean as a drawn line.
Falling star, I type.
Before I get a reply, I write, Did u c it too?
Yes. Amazing. Made a wish.
I don’t think Lyle could have seen the same meteor from Wellington, but I don’t contradict him. I type, Dont tell me wot u wished. Goodnt, and then I turn off my phone immediately because I don’t want to see the reply. I don’t want any more reality. What I want is reverie and the crystalline firmament shedding its spare brilliance.
By which I mean I want to believe.
But in what?
That’s easy: in whatever I find waiting.
HYDROTHERMAL WONDERS
Ella and I are sitting in front of a wide pit of boiling green and sharing a smuggled-in meat pie at a thermal park just south of Rotorua. An hour ago hail clattered on the windscreen and Ella opened her window to fill her palms with the melting balls of it. Now the sky is searing blue and the last cloud is scuttling off behind the sulphated and ravaged brown of the surrounding hills. I rang Joanne surreptitiously from the bathroom this morning to report that Ella woke refreshed and stable, with not the least sign of the previous night’s distress. When, over our breakfast of muesli bars, I asked Ella how she was feeling, she squinted at me, puzzled.
On our tour of the hydrothermal wonders, amid the conversations of others conducted in German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and what sounded to me like something Eastern European, Ella and I have been chatting about our plan, about what lies ahead. I’ve told her about my father, and the lovely beach awaiting us. I’ve told her my father is living in what used to be a campground and is more than likely stretching out every last moment of what I suspect is a kind of holiday.
‘Is your dad not supposed to be on holiday?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Then why do you want him to come home?’
I’ve just taken a steaming bite of pie, and this buys me a pause. Why do I want my father to come home? It occurs to me that I haven’t claimed I do, not to Ella. Do I plan on living with my father again? If so, where? Our house is taken and, if Hamish Lippleton has his way, it will be turned into consecrated ground. So it seems I don’t know how to answer Ella and, as it happens, I don’t have to. While I’m chewing, her patience expires.
‘What’s his name?’
‘My dad? Eugene. You can call him that if you want. He won’t mind.’
Ella swallows what’s in her mouth and I hand her the pie. She takes a bite about the size of her fist and, mouth chock-full, says, ‘Is he nice?’
‘He’s a terribly cruel giant who eats three children a day.’
Unfazed, Ella moves on to her next question. ‘Why is your mum in America?’
‘She’s got a job there. She’s working with the mentally disabled. She’s actually living in my dad’s hometown. Isn’t that strange?’
‘Why doesn’t she live with your dad?’
The couple I saw speaking the Eastern European language are now walking along the thermal pool toward us. They’re studying their phones as they approach. Looking at them again, I notice that they are maybe five or six years younger than me. Very thin, very well manicured. I don’t think they’re a couple, either. I would say they are acquaintances who have joined each other on this particular, perhaps forgettable, leg of a trip around the world. They have scheduled a local flight together, sat beside each other in a café, not much more. They will not fall in love, they will hardly recollect one another in nine months’ time.
Just to see these two walking beside one another in their coy, metro bubbles of serenity makes me feel pity — not for them, but for myself. At twenty-eight I am already old. My father would laugh to hear me say such a thing, but I feel I have slumped towards the edge of the next phase, and I am, by rights, a person entering that period of worry and mothering, that time many of my friends have already begun, which ends with a mortgage, a chain of inevitable compromises and, if you’re very lucky, a ribcage of laugh lines around your eyes.
‘Napkin?’ Ella says. I hand it over, and she shakes her head at me. ‘You’re funny, you know that?’
Oddly, this girl reminds me of Lucy, my mother.
‘You don’t know the way to your father’s place, do you?’
‘We can buy a map.’
LINE IN A NOTEBOOK
One day, maybe fifteen years ago, I picked up my notebook and found there, in my father’s handwriting:
Words are like light in a jar.
HONEYSUCKLE, BEES AND FLOWERS
The smell of honeysuckle, which wafts into the car as we pass Lake Rotoma, opens like a tunnel in high grass, the space a child finds beside a creek smelling of fish and pungent rot. This scent is fleeting, a one-time encounter. Ah, but such is the way with honeysuckle! It emerges, your nose ingests a taste and goes sniffing for the rest, for the whole bush.
But, driving now in a long queue of summer holiday traffic, the scent doesn’t quite fade away. I glimpse Ella in the rear-view, and see she is almost suspiciously quiet, merely staring at passing trees. And, moving my gaze back to the road, the honeysuckle returns. For some reason I don’t quite understand, this scent calls to mind an inexplicably vivid image: the cells of a honeycomb, a network of slightly irregular spaces, each framed by the most slender of branches, and on the branches, or flitting through them, gliding easily from one cell to the next, are bees, dragonflies, and here and there a fantail hovers. Now I’m not sure what it is I’m doing — I’m driving, yes, but, then, I’m not. And somehow or another this is a conscious decision, too. It’s a creeping return to that sweet recklessness that took hold of me on the way north from the Wells’ house. I have this new attraction to terror. It’s liberating, seductive. It’s calling out for me, and I’m prepared to answer.
But then, at the same time, I’m not.
Some habit eases my foot onto the brake and turns the steering wheel. Midway onto the shoulder, my conscious mind is re-engaged, and now comes my first moment of genuine panic. I am, I observe, driving onto a narrow shoulder beside a two-metre gulley at, say, sixty or seventy kilometres an hour, and I’m not exactly sure how I got here. The car veers a bit further to the right, out of my control now, it seems, heading straight into the gulley, and there is an instant — no, less than an instant — when I think I feel the metal against my flesh. Ella’s face enters my mind, my foot is lower
ing, and then we hit something that rocks us, bumps the whole car, but not dramatically, and sends us back into the road, swerving far out into the oncoming lane.
I am aware of gripping the wheel.
I am aware of steering, of Ella saying something with urgency.
Now we are back where we should be, going about half the speed we were a moment ago. In front of us, a queue of cars is disappearing round a bend. Just beside the bend, the tops of the trees in a small orchard are burning light green amid a lawn of deep green.
‘Are we okay?’ Ella says.
I glance in the rear-view. Impossibly, no one is following. No one has seen a thing.
‘Yes, we’re all good.’
Strange as it seems, I think I mean it.
THE SEPTIC GABBER
At the check-in desk of the Ohope Campground, where I have decided we’ll spend our second night on the road, the woman at the counter is a babbler. We tell her we’re headed up the Cape, and she gets sour on us. Sour but loquacious, which, it strikes me, is a peculiar combination. The warnings mount. Do we know you can’t get so much as a loaf of fresh bread up there? Not a jug of milk to be found for fifty miles, that’s a fact. And don’t put anything valuable down.
A lovely pause erupts here, but it comes too suddenly for me to take advantage of it. The babbler is back to it.
Mawree, she says, like she’s giving me a code word, a secret passed on in the schoolyard like a cigarette.
‘And what does that mean?’ I say, my voice finally righteous, a beat too late.
The gabber must see that I’ve got hold of something I won’t let go, and may even understand that I’m not one of her kind after all, because she changes tack to the shipwreck up the coast, the Rena, which has been stuck on a reef for a little over three months now. I’m not responding, but from the Rena she’s on to her son-in-law (I miss the link), the recent but precarious final triumph in the Rugby World Cup, her winter holiday plans, the nasty riptide on the beach, and, finally, peanut allergies, which brings her back to how important it is for me to grab up all the milk and bread I can get my hands on before I leave her shop.
On the way to find our campsite, I pull over and take out my notebook, and write, There are two kinds of talkers in the world: the innocuous nervous talker who is a prisoner of her own speech and is relieved to be pacified and set free from talking, and the bona fide septic talker, whose hopeless gabbing is only the most obvious symptom of an infected core.
Almost immediately, I feel a little tug of remorse at such a nasty generalisation, and I reopen the page to write: Why must I always cast stones?
ICE
Ella and I set up a camp under a behemoth of a pohutukawa, wolf down ham sandwiches, and duck into the tent to slip on togs. With the exception of a few young campers and a stiff-armed older woman pegging up her wash hopefully under the grey heavens, the campground is empty. Ella and I follow a sandy track to dunes and on to a shelf of cold beach. My head is still filled up with the strange images of the car ride, mixed now with a hint of bitterness from the gabber, but there must still be some wonder and dreamy stuff left in there. I know this because when, a metre from the surf, the sun suddenly breaks, and falls on our shoulders and lights up the whole of the sea and the distant dark mouth of the Ohope harbour, my response is a kind of smug delight — But of course the sun should show himself for us!
The Pacific is frigid and a malevolent breeze draws across our skin, but the sun won’t permit us to stay dry. I plunge in ahead of Ella, ignore her screaming for me to wait, and dive when I come to a sudden drop-off. A moment later, I realise that Ella is running towards the same drop-off and I turn to rescue her, but she has already retreated.
The two of us paddle, leap waves, hold hands, and we holler. The sun continues, the beach remains deserted. We raise our voices as loud as we can. I do not holler in that restrained, half-hearted way that I know a woman ought to, but with a carnal joy that I can see is exciting Ella no end. When I’ve had enough of leaping and screaming, I make my way to the edge of the surf, wrap myself in a towel and watch her. I am exhausted, frozen. I can see that Ella’s lips are blue and she is shivering, but it seems so harmless in this sun. And she is ecstatic, almost drowsy with joy.
What I feel watching her, I think, is a parent’s pleasure. I feel pride and vicarious, momentarily boundless, happiness. It is the strangeness of this happiness, the rising prick of it in my blood, that moves me to stand and call for Ella to come out of the water.
‘Do I have to? Please?’
I summon her, a new mercilessness in my gesture. She obeys, and I force a towel across her shoulders, pull it tight, hold my arms around the towel. She struggles a bit, but at the same time it seems she is embracing me as well. I know this feeling. I can sense it all over my body at once, something between us beginning to thaw.
TAMPO, ALONE ON THE ISLAND
That night in the tent, Ella begins to get nervous again. I try to head it off, and stroke her head and tell her all the nursery rhymes I know. Finally, she is so sleepy she is mumbling under her breath and rolling on to her side and taking one last epic yawn, and I know that I’ve done it. But I don’t celebrate my victory too soon. Oh no, I’m too savvy for that. I lie there, purging my mind of thought so I don’t generate any nasty anxiety vibes to stimulate her dwindling brainwaves. I lie so still and easeful that I am close to sleep myself before I remove my arm, shifting it so slowly I would not spook a predator, and then, in excruciatingly small increments, I roll my body away from Ella’s sleeping bag until I am no longer touching her.
Having now more or less won the battle, I begin to unzip the tent.
‘Where are you going?’
I turn, deflated, furious. ‘Shush,’ I say, but it comes out sounding very unkind. ‘Go to sleep.’
‘I don’t want to sleep.’ Ella’s voice is not subdued. It is at full daytime volume: she might be asking to stay at the swings or demanding something in a crowded supermarket. Like that, the facade of my victory crumbles. A minute later, Ella is close to tears, and I’m standing on the car bonnet trying to get a signal.
‘If you can’t get them, I want to go home,’ Ella says. I don’t answer, so she says it again. ‘Do you hear me? I want to get right in the car and go home! I mean it!’
Now Joanne picks up, and I wave Ella onto the bonnet with me. Ella and her mum talk for a while, and I hear the fatigue inching into Ella’s voice. I take the phone. The connection is lousy, Joanne’s voice is grainy and broken. It’s hard to make out what she says. She mentions Bruce — I hear this.
‘What was that?’
‘I’ll get Bruce to come after you two,’ she says.
My chest tightens. There must be more to it. What have I missed?
‘Bruce to come after us?’
‘If Ella keeps having trouble with sleeping. Did you hear me?’
The line is suddenly very clear. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘But she’ll be okay. She’s just getting used to it. We’re actually having a great time.’
‘I shouldn’t have asked you to bring her—’
‘It’s good. It’s been great, actually.’
Joanne says something that cuts out. ‘—if I can,’ I hear her say. ‘But it’s easy for Bruce to come up. So just let me know if you want him.’
‘Right, will do.’
Back in the tent, Ella is restless, sobby, and so I start to tell her a story. The story, which comes to me as I open my mouth, is about a little girl, and the little girl is named Tampo, and Tampo, it seems, is lost in the bush. Ella wants to know why. Why is she lost in the bush? Let’s see, she’s lost in the bush because she was in her grandmother’s house and she walked through the wrong door. When it opened, she was in the bush.
Ella seems satisfied with this, and so I keep talking. I tell her about Tampo trekking up a mountain and crossing a swamp and then having to run from a band of shadows.
When I see that Ella is still not asleep, I slow the story down and beg
in to describe the girl’s surroundings. I talk about tall, dark flowers and a beach of red sand where Tampo meets a talking sea lion, and the sea lion, who is barely tame, leads her into the rough surf and on to an island, and there on the island is a bed, and Tampo lies down in the bed and sleeps, and while she sleeps all the animals grow old and the trees grow tall and the sea lowers and rises and lowers again, until, by the time she wakes, the world has changed, and the sea lion is gone, and the girls finds herself alone on the island, cut off from the shore by the thundering surf she cannot cross.
When I finish talking, Ella is truly asleep, and I exit the tent without looking back. Standing on the bonnet of my car, I try texting Lyle, but I’m now down to one bar on the phone and the message doesn’t go through. So I put away my phone then and sit in the passenger seat, fingering the key ring that Harvey bought for me in Sydney.
The face of the bearded, white-haired man looks up at me with an expression somewhere between stern and beatific, but all I find myself wondering is where Harvey has gone. Thinking of it this way, as if he’s only missing, as if he’s been lost like a comb or a car key, sends a thrill through me. For a moment it feels like I may have it wrong, and in my mind I go searching for where he might be, my thoughts flicking through the series of ordinary things that made up our lives. It could be he has gone out for milk. Ducked out to visit a friend. Stepped out for a midnight stroll.
In my hand, the cleric’s eyes meet mine. It seems he knows something, a whisper out of his study of the faith. He has knowledge, but I’m betting he isn’t going to share.
SOME WEIRD SHIT COMING OUT OF THE SEA