The Salted Air

by Thom Conroy

  The next day we drive. We pass a faded and inconspicuously small sign that informs us we’re entering tribal lands, and then we climb long, thick-bushed slopes and cross strands of white water falling out of the mountains to the pale glimmer of the sea. The road skirts red-roofed villages of broken-up houses and dirt lanes sprawling backwards from the white beach of a hidden bay. We drive beside rock pools and long shoals that children follow to a great distance beyond the surf, so that, at a glance, they appear to be running on the water.

  Fingers of land jut away from the road; the spray of the tide breaks on clinging pohutukawas. A thin orange fence stands between us and a slip that ends on a foreshore below. Somewhere along the way, we pull over in the dust beside the road and sit on an empty and coarse-sanded beach for lunch. What happens next is hard for me to say. There is a kind of trouble with time. The trouble is that both of us neglect it. No, we do not neglect it. We revoke it.

  Barefoot, without water or sunscreen, we wander. We climb into tidal pools, being careful not to step on the orange starfishes. We feel the gel-like packets of seaweed under our toes. At a headland, we wade through the surf until it’s over our heads and, side by side, like two seals, we swim. The water is cold, and I can see Ella is scared, but we don’t mention it, and in a minute or two we’re around the headland, still maybe ten metres out from the beach in a pocket of very cold and very deep water. Ella whimpers, says my name with a gurgle of panic in her voice, and I tell her she’s all right. I tell her she’s going to be fine, though, in fact, my own legs and arms are getting tired and I’m becoming aware of the fact that I have made a grave misjudgement.

  About halfway into the beach, as panic is starting to tighten in my forearms and throat, my feet brush sand and I take Ella into my arms. She says, ‘Are we going to drown?’

  I hold her close to my body. ‘We’re fine, just fine,’ I say, but even I can hear how my voice trembles.

  People are sitting in the shade and watching us as we walk out of the surf. They watch us walk up the beach, and when we are close enough to make out their faces — weathered and a little older than I’d first thought, but open and unstrained — they call us over.

  The group is mixed colours — pale, mahogany, latte — and mixed gender, but it includes three older men — Maori, I think, not without a cringing recollection of the septic gabber — and the fact is that I’m a bit uncomfortable with only Ella by my side. One of the girls in this group, she is maybe sixteen, notices my hesitation, and breaks a peeled orange in half. I see the wisdom in her gesture right away. Now I have no choice but to come to them.

  ‘You just climb out of the sea?’ one of the older men says. He’s wearing a threadbare blue wool cap with dreads peeking out of it, no shirt, and long ragged-looking jeans. His arms are knotty with muscle. He may be anywhere from thirty to fifty.

  ‘We swam around the headland,’ I say, pointing. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Ella has accepted the orange half.

  A younger man, maybe twenty, shakes his head and spits on the sand. ‘Been some weird shit coming out of the sea, you know.’

  For a moment what he says strikes me as aggressive, but then I understand two things. First, he has spit an orange seed, that’s all. I know this when Ella does the same thing. Next, it occurs to me that he’s talking about the shipwreck, the Rena. I remember reading that shipping containers have been washing up on the beaches. Which means, I only now process, that this man was making a joke. But the conversation has already passed me by, and now Ella is talking. She is telling them about how we swam, how her legs are tired.

  ‘Better not go back that way,’ the first man says. When I don’t answer, he raises his eyebrows and leans towards me, as if I’m a little slow. ‘Rip,’ he says, hitting the ‘p’ with a hard smack of the lips.

  We’re informed that over the next finger of land we can find tidal pools warm as. A shag colony roosts along the cliff on the far side of that bay, too. We should have a look. The girl who gave Ella the orange stares at my chest and waist, looking for something.

  ‘Haven’t youse got a camera?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  The girl shakes her head, apparently disappointed in my performance as a tourist.

  The finger of land in question turns out to be several paddocks wide. There is a dirt track that crosses it, and marching along it beneath the sun, the sea seems to continuously recede. We are on the far side, panting with thirst, dizzy, before I understand how stupid it was to come so far without water. This knowledge comes and goes, flits by both of us like an insect. Ella and I talk about going back then, but all the while we’re walking along the expanse of a very wide lagoon. We traverse the beach, our throats and lips burning, but we’re determined to find the tidal pools. At least I am. What we find is mud, some so thick it takes all my strength to pull Ella’s foot loose. So we settle for finding the shag colony, but there is not the least sign of it, nor of the cliffs. There is only a blindingly silver expanse of beach and a current of glimmering air that gets me turned around, bewildered.

  When we come off the beach we are on the wrong side of the finger of land. I don’t understand this, until the sun begins to descend out of the top of the sky and Ella, weak and quiet, sits down on the sandy bank and says she can’t walk any more. In another situation I might despair, but the turn things are taking is becoming too serious for me to allow such an indulgence. What I do is take a good long stare from one horizon to the other until I think I know where we are and where we need to be, and then I take Ella’s hand and I force us to walk.

  By the time we arrive back at the car, I am straw. Ella, whom I have carried off and on for the two- or three-kilometre trek down the road, is listless. She sits on the boiling tarmac beside the car, and I don’t comment on it.

  I pull at the door handle. It’s unlocked. Inside, I find all of our groceries, a wilted lettuce sticking out of a plastic bag, a folded bar of chocolate. Then the water. Boiling hot and baked in a plastic bottle, but I drink half of it before I so much as take a breath. During the breath, I think of Ella, take another long gulp, and then force her to finish the bottle.

  Once we’ve come to our senses, we forage among the groceries, opening packets, taking stray bites, passing on to the next thing. The shadow of the hill behind us is trawling across the beach where we had lunch, a purple hood lowering over the land and the sea. Sitting in the driver’s seat chewing a fig, I see the sun as it catches a plume of smoke on the horizon. My first thought is that it’s a whale, but as I look the size of the plume comes into focus. My sense of scale adjusts. It’s the smoking plume of a volcano. My meagre knowledge of geography recalibrates.

  ‘See that?’ I say to Ella. ‘That’s White Island.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That plume of smoke. It’s an active volcano.’

  ‘Are we in trouble?’

  I reach behind me and find Ella’s sticky palm. ‘We’re not in any trouble.’

  WE DRIVE FOR A LONG WAY IN THE DUSK. A HALF HOUR OR so from where we stopped, the shoulders of the road are filled with parked cars and trucks, and around a bend an enormous crowd of sharply dressed people are standing in front of a marae. I catch a glimpse of portable booths. Popcorn and candy floss, and one booth with a clown’s face that is lit by a single ray of sun. We turn into the valley of the Motu River, passing along the steep walls with a ravine full of sunlit fog below. We meet no one on the impossibly narrow road, and descend to the river, then onto a long metal bridge. Far out towards the way we’ve come, towards the sea and the obscured plume of smoke, the sky is streaked, a luminescent tie-dye of scarlet and orange.

  At last I reckon we’re close enough to wherever my father might be to turn to the directions I’ve hastily scribbled down. There’s not much to work with. The barest of outlines, and there’s a key word I can’t read. Slow at school and turn—. It’s this last word that’s illegible. Worse than illegible. Something has spilled on it, like a single tear plopping rig
ht down and erasing that very word.

  We come to a glowing shape in the darkness, a white building under the furling arm of the Milky Way. Just past it is a crossroads. To the right, an unpaved road heads around behind what my directions tell me must be the school. There are lights over there, the outline of the gable of a roof in the dusk. Left is the sea, a purple glimmer. There’s a road in this direction, too: two ruts, gated. I can see trees, the side of a drop-off.

  Ella, who has been sitting up front with me ever since the twilight began to peter out, is tired and nervous. She has told me she wants to go home two or three times in the last quarter of an hour, but I’ve been distracting her. Pointing out the fading views. When I pull over at the side of the road, she says, ‘We’re really lost now, aren’t we? We’re lost, and we’re almost out of petrol.’

  ‘We’re not lost,’ I say. This much is likely true. Her comment about the petrol I don’t respond to, as the needle has been in the slender red segment of the circle for the past twenty minutes, just lingering there like a bird on the surface of the sea, not sinking, not rising, and I have no wish to disturb it.

  Without any thought, I get out and unfasten the gate beside us.

  ‘Not this way,’ Ella says once I’m back in the car. ‘Let’s try the other way.’

  The road to the left is banked on both sides, so that for the first couple of metres I can’t say where we’re going. Then we break the crest of a hill, and I stop. Before us is an escarpment, the sudden surface of a bay, silver ripples enclosing a rock knob out in the middle. The road, I notice as an afterthought, veers sharply to the right, turning into the bush.

  Ella wants to head back to the main road, and so do I, but turning around is not possible here, and so we continue. We pass into the cool shade of surprisingly tall trees. Slender, leafy trees that have clearly been planted in rows. The way is level, the gravel suddenly more ample. My headlights sweep across an open paddock, pass a thread of smoke rising up from it. What I notice next is music. Classical music filling the space of the paddock like a marching band.

  Ella says, ‘What’s that?’

  The driveway splutters out into grass, and there, casting a shadow on the edge of the grass, are the embers of a little fire. In the glare of my headlights are three sets of eyes, quickly shielded. The man nearest to us sits on a low lawn chair. Even with his arm shielding his face, I can see the mane of his hair.

  Next I notice unpainted wooden steps and a small unpainted wooden deck built onto the side of a caravan. On the steps are two people sitting thigh to thigh. One is a woman I do not know. The other is my father.

  THE PAST

  I awake to what must be the past. This isn’t a vision, a daydream or even one of those dream-within-a-dream things — it’s the past. I’m conscious, though I admit my head is throbby and my body laced with unfamiliar aches. How do I know I’ve been transported before I so much as open my eyes? I smell coffee and fresh herbs; the grassy fragments of oregano and chives are fluttering in the air, tickling my memory. I hear the soft thwumping of a knife on a wooden chopping block, and I know the rhythm right off: thwump, thwump, thwump, and then the glorious, heavy-handed encore of a thwump. And I hear my father’s voice. It speaks as it has all the years of my life, a monologue stretching back into the first twilight of my hearing. An echo, it comes to me on the brink of proper waking — an echo out of the attic of the New Jerusalem Lutheran Church in Swallsborough, Pennsylvania.

  One more bit of evidence synchs the whole thing, and that’s the smell of dust and old wallpaper and polished wood lurking a little like an intruder on the edges of sense. No, not like an intruder, since, unquestionably, it belongs, but like an older child, one who’s meant to have left home but just can’t stay away. And who could blame her?

  But it’s when I open my eyes, sit, and come into my authentic knowing of the living world that I am most certain this must be the past because right there, perched on a stool on the far side of a dim space surrounded by the bone-yellow sun of early morning, is me. I, Djuna, am sitting just where you would think I would be sitting. My head is inclined towards my father, who, wooden spoon in hand, holds forth. And some of the meaning of his talk makes its way to me now. He’s talking about Christmas, how he sat on the beach with a cup of joe in his hand and saw Santa heading home. He’s talking of resolutions and love. Of fish and nets and kai moana. He’s dropping names I don’t know, neither the me over here on a fold-out bed nor the me — a little too blonde, I see now — on the stool across the caravan from us.

  ‘Djuna,’ my father says, his gaze shifting in my direction.

  Outside, a cluster of magpies takes flight. Folded newsprint rising up the well of sunlight.

  Now the younger me turns, smiles a smile I have rarely seen, and says, ‘I like your dad.’

  ‘Please,’ I call across the room, a pillow in my hand poised for throwing, ‘don’t encourage him.’

  The younger me pouts, a thick trembling of the lip, and, that quick, she’s back to being Ella, back to sitting there so many miles from home with her own father likely on her mind. His face and dark eyes. Does she like him, too?

  Do I?

  I drop the pillow, fall down on my back on the bed.

  IN THE TOILETS

  Ella, encouraged by my father’s example, has decided that a quick piss in the shrubs outside my father’s caravan will be fine this morning, thank you. My needs exceed both of theirs, however, and so I walk the two hundred metres or so of metal road that winds through paddocks separated from one another by head-height hedges. In the open gaps of the hedges are decomposing caravans and the long hulls of rusting boats. It’s before eight in the morning and already inching towards hot.

  There is no glimpse of the sea through the hedges, but even without the wrecks of the boats I would know it was nearby. There’s a salt smell in the air, yes, but there’s also a hollowed-out freshness to everything, a fierce quality to the wavering light. And, of course, there are the seagulls to give it all away. Flocks of circling white wailers gliding over the paddocks and the dense, airless hedges towards the source of the light, a vast unseen acreage to the immediate east.

  The facilities, when at last I arrive, are cement and mortar, built in the style of a Roman bath meets an abattoir. Which, when you think about it, are not all that different. The seats and bowls and sinks inside are cast in brown and green. The scent is shit and mould and grey water so dense that it is a new odour altogether — a musk of waste that is, in the manner of rotting meat, almost sweet. As I squat over one of the toilets doing what, come what may, must be done, the white wooden door of the latchless stall swings slowly open.

  Before me I see a line of windows, arrow slits almost, in the concrete wall. There is no glass and the slits give on to an overgrown lawn and the cone of a tepee protruding from behind a nearby hedge. Beyond the tepee is a hill with a blue tractor gleaming. Nearer at hand is the broken concrete footpath that leads past the window to the men’s block, which I admit I find a little unnerving.

  To think that the toilets were made to this design, that the men must pass the open holes in the walls through which you can see the latchless stalls inside, makes me doubt the intentions of the whole place. In fact, it makes me wish I were home. But as I’m squatting here thinking this and wondering what exactly I now mean by this word, I hear footfalls.

  I kick at the door, trying to catch it and close it. I do, but it only swings back open, the groan of its hinges drawing even more attention. But it doesn’t matter, not really, since now I see who is outside. A boy. Maybe five, six. His skin is dark beside his brilliantly white tee-shirt. As for his bottom half, I can’t see it. The windows don’t extend that low.

  He is not far from me, and his eyes are wide open, but I don’t think he notices me. I can’t be sure. He is walking slow, halfway turning as he goes, swaying, as if dancing with himself. His gaze is indistinct.

  When I emerge from the toilets, I walk around the block and peek
in the men’s building. I call Hello. Nothing. I wander out into the middle of the paddock, turning around in all directions.

  There is no sign of the boy. Not a trace. Part of me thinks it’s a staggering mystery. Part of me thinks it’s nothing at all, merely something ordinary.

  But, then, why should I choose one or the other?

  ODE TO THE IBEX

  Tonight I am drained but a little bit new. Delicately strong, like a healthy ibex calf who, in a couple of minutes, will be on her feet, ready to outrun whatever comes panting across the Serengeti with its incisors gleaming. But not just yet. Just now I’m sitting on a half-rotted picnic table outside my dad’s lopsided, deteriorating caravan which sheds flakes of fibreglass into the untended bed of a herb garden. Ella is sound asleep — an event exclusively my father’s handiwork — and a little slice of the moon sits just above the hedge at the back of the paddock, osseous and coral-hued.

  A ham bone of moon.

  Across from me, reading by the light of a flickering, soon-to-die lantern, is Tama, the man with the mane, whom I saw on my first night here. In the lantern light his face looks hard, carved as if from deep brown stone, but I already know he’s the kindest person within a hundred metres. I’m not sure how I know. But I’m not wrong. And my father? He’s out in the middle of the paddock, lollygagging around, amazed at stars and, I’d bet anything, feeling rather proud of himself.

  On the other side of the caravan is a ring of russet embers. If I went around there just now, I might still be able to salvage a to or a stray the from the letter I scribbled to Harvey in my notebook this morning. For that very reason, I won’t have a look, not under any circumstances.

  It was my dad who suggested I burn this letter, but it wasn’t his advice I listened to in the end. He found the letter in my notebook after lunch when we all came back from the communal kitchen with our bellies full of the fresh bread and butter and apples I’d brought along. It could be I had left the notebook out for him to see, sitting on the Formica benchtop in the caravan where I had written it, but I don’t think I laid that kind of trap for him. I think I was just distracted by Ella, who suddenly went hungry and sour on us about mid-morning, whining that she was bored and demanding to ring her parents — never mind that me, my father and, later, Tama, when he wandered by with a cardboard box of books, all demonstrated the striking lack of bars on our phones.