No Man's Land

by A. J. Fitzwater

  Izzy took her arm and searched for eelskin, but it had gone. She tested Tea’s muscles with her strong fingers, and the pressure felt good. Tea had never been touched by boys – a dance here, an elbow on the way home there – but this …

  “You went to the war,” Izzy said softly before letting Tea’s arm go. Cool night rushed in to fill the void left by her touch.

  Tea’s hands shook as she took up a mug of tea. “I think I was near Robbie. I was feeling his pain. Something is wrong with his arm. I don’t know if he’s injured. Just … his arm doesn’t feel the right part of him. Oh, that doesn’t make sense at all.”

  “The whaiwhaiā is strong between the two of you.”

  The word magic burned sour as Tea took another sip of the bitter brew. “Grant says a storm is coming, and I think I felt part of that now. But I don’t know what any of it means, or what I’m supposed to do with it. I’m here, Robbie’s there. There are oceans between us.”

  Izzy rubbed the ears of a sleeping dog acting as a pillow. “Perhaps that’s it. Water is everywhere. Your lingering power from that tapped into something that was happening to Robbie, and he was near a strong body of water …” she stopped, shook her head. “I can only guess. We need to talk to Grant. But I think he’ll agree with me. We all have a lot of work to do. You have to practise your water thing—”

  “My eelskin.”

  “Yes, if that’s what you want to call it.”

  Izzy didn’t laugh. Izzy wasn’t afraid of her. Izzy didn’t treat her like the girls at school, the girls on the street. Izzy heard her words and gave them the weight they deserved.

  “I … I’m scared, Izzy.”

  An arm slid back around Tea’s shoulders. How could something so wrong be so right? But it was only them here. Izzy with her scent of starlight, her breath sharing her water from deep within.

  “It’s alright, Tea. We’ll figure it out. Whatever happens, we’ll do it together. Promise me you won’t go doing something foolish if the call comes through … through the—”

  “The water.”

  “Yes, through the water, and you hear it first. Promise you’ll wait for us.”

  “I promise.”

  Together. Us. Whaiwhaiā. The words smelled like a home Tea had never known.

  6.

  Christmas, 1942.

  The best present Tea could receive was relief from the strange pain. It didn’t entirely dissipate – lingering in her skin as a scratchy memory, exacerbated by the oncoming heat like a rash – but further medicine came in a letter from the front. Robbie could not write about what he’d been through, due to censorship rules, but it was enough to know he was safe, alive, and grumbling about sunburn.

  Spring lambing had bled into a brittle summer, the grass turning brown almost overnight. The heat radiated from the hard North Otago soil and crunching grass, brush fires hiding in wait. The hot Nor’wester blasted the senses and pushed dust into everything. The dogs barked at nothing, putting Izzy on edge. Sometimes she’d crawl into her dogskin at night to share a blanket in the dog runs to keep them quiet. A dangerous thing to do, but Izzy told Tea she’d had plenty of experience slipping in and out of form near other people, and the MacGregors were creatures of habit.

  The sheer weight of the work never let up. The girls went to bed exhausted every night. Though Tea groaned to Izzy about her aches and pains, excessive expectations from the boss, and the sharp tongue and eye of Mrs MacGregor, a growing sense of achievement pervaded her discomfort. She was doing something!

  Underneath it all, water seethed. Even when she was dead tired from a day of fencing, dagging, hoeing, chopping, riding, docking and dipping, mucking, wool sales, counting feed, manipulating heavy ploughs head-down in the wind, fertilising, fixing, and generally making do, even when the Nor’wester blasted around the edges of the cottage and she tried to read her books and letters by lamplight, she strained to touch the hiss of the creek.

  A low-level itch took up in her hands that had nothing to do with trimming gorse or pulling Old Man’s Beard. She too used the cover of dark to pull at her new skin, taking sips of lukewarm water from a chipped cup and practising flipping scales up and down her forearms. It didn’t always happen. She could never tell when her whaiwhaiā would respond, whether the water would take or give. The weather and her weariness had nothing to do with it. Frustration was a constant friend.

  The early morning Christmas Eve train back to Dunedin was packed with girls in wool uniforms too thick for the enclosed space, gritty wind rocking the carriages. Tea’s full uniform had arrived in November, and unwrapping the brown paper package had felt as much like early Christmas as Robbie’s letter. The jauntiness of her pinned hat brim made her hold her head up. Some other girls had to look twice at the Land Service epaulet, and Tea bit her lip to manage her grin. The name had only changed recently, as if Land ‘Army’ was too strident for girls. Though the chocolate brown uniform didn’t sport as many gleaming buttons and badges as the other corps, its refined lines brought her close to feeling a kinship with other girls that she hadn’t before. She could hide her broken and dirty fingernails inside her gloves.

  The only Māori girl in her carriage was wearing Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps khaki – They were allowed to serve there? Tea wondered – gave Tea a single, knowing look, then ignored her for the rest of the trip.

  Dunedin. Home. An abstract idea she had to stitch back together from a patchwork of memories that even after only a few months away didn’t come together seamlessly.

  The place where Mum was. Where Robbie wasn’t. Where Grandad wasn’t anymore. Where her father had never been.

  With a little time and space in her head between here and there, she chewed over thoughts of her father as the train clicked past glimmering Seacliff, headed across the lagoon from Warrington, and then puffed uphill from Waitati.

  It was hard to miss someone you never knew. His shadow had sprung into her thoughts more often in the last few months than any other time in her life. A shadow as large as the fire in her blood.

  Peter Gray. His name meant little. Tea had never known that side of her family, other than they lived ‘way back country’; Mum said this with the same inflection as ‘them mowrees’. Maybe that wasn’t his real name at all. Mum would never tell her how they met. There was no photo of him in his Great War uniform. Tea didn’t even have a whisper of a memory of him. He’d gone to war not long after she and Robbie had been born.

  The very few Māori girls Tea had known before Izzy – at school, down at the shops, or the groups that stuck together as they left the factories – kept to themselves. The girls at school had whispered about them, the size of their noses, the black thickness of their hair, their drab clothes. Did they take their cottons off and put on their grass skirts as soon as they got home? Did they really run around taunting men with their bare chests, wild eyes, and long, sticking-out tongues?

  Tea had often assessed the angle of her jaw, the wideness of her nostrils. Was her nose as big as theirs? Izzy could pass easily as white. Tan, but not too tan, stout, but still slim, like a good, healthy Kiwi girl.

  Mum met Tea at the train station. Moments after she greeted her, she was annoyed by the venting steam engine, the excited voices bouncing off stone, and the temperature being so high for early morning. Not much had changed for Tea’s mother in the months she’d been away.

  The walk up the hill didn’t steal Tea’s breath like it used to, and she was glad for the firm, sensible grip of her uniform shoes. Mum said nothing about her sharp ensemble, instead chattering about letters from Robbie. Had Tea received any she would like to share?

  Christmas Day came and went in blessed quiet, with the small piece of lamb Mrs MacGregor had given her roasting in the range. Without Robbie there to supervise, the tree sat forgotten in the bay window, paper chains haphazardly looped. The quiet of prayer in between the thunder of
the church organ, fewer people in between the concrete walls to soak up the sound. Mum smiling at her gift of handmade doilies, while Tea didn’t quite know what to make of the package of lacy handkerchiefs she gave her.

  Tea had saved up all her rations for chocolate, but the doilies had been a last-minute decision. They were a little clumsy after months of not touching hook and cotton. Frilly wasn’t Grant or Izzy’s style. She gave them the chocolate instead.

  After the bottle of cooking sherry made an appearance, Mum’s words came out as clipped as the holes in Robbie’s letters. They read and shared, but beyond a cheeky mention about Robbie ‘purchasing a pair of lady’s silk stockings’ which Mum claimed not to understand with an uncharacteristic blush, there was nothing they could discover of his whereabouts. And that suited Mum fine. To her, Robbie was safe, well behind the lines, building bridges or laying train tracks. Working hard like a good boy should.

  The ache in Tea’s fingers told her otherwise.

  The ache was covered up the next day as she plunged her hands into buckets of hot water and clenched her fingers around rag and scrubbing brush. The next part of her Christmas present, Mum explained, was a tea party with all her church friends and their girls before they headed back to base. Tea couldn’t think of anything worse to do on her last day of furlough.

  “You need to get those elbows into some proper, decent work,” Mum said as Tea set to on the living room floor. “I can’t imagine what you’ll do out there with all that time on your hands once you’ve finished the gardening, pickling, and bottling.”

  Tea had to bite her lips shut over a retort about where Christmas dinner had come from.

  The next day, the teacups rattled with talk of likely service lads and the mock cream shivered with whispers of station bicycles. Izzy had explained the term to a shocked Tea. “But the farmer tends to go to the girls’ cottage, not the other way round as townies seem to think,” Izzy said, her eyes narrow and dark. Tea didn’t want to ask what she meant. When Izzy sounded angry, you didn’t want to get in the way.

  The girls in snappy Women’s Royal Naval Service or Auxiliary Air Force blue smiled at Tea, pleasant enough in the sight of their mothers, but Tea found herself more often than not with a plate of scones or the teapot in her hands, doing the rounds. The implication was easy to infer: the girls in blue had attained some higher status than someone in simple land brown. Meat and wool, vegetables and fruit were important to keep the country going, but Land Girls were not invited to march or wave a flag. It was in their name: service.

  Tea smiled, murmured Grant’s name in appropriate places, served scones, and kept her stocking seams straight. And when her edges were raw, when the heat became too much, she reached out to the slither of the nearby stream and drew on its gentle strength.

  By the end of furlough, she was proud not to have slipped into her eelskin once, not even in her dreams.

  Her joy at wearing her uniform in public dissipated the moment she arrived back at the farm and Mrs MacGregor had her back in work clothes. There was fruit rotting on the trees while she had lolly-gagged in the city.

  So much for her life being more than jam jars and big pots of stewed fruit.

  From sickly sweet to sweetness – Izzy and Grant, delighted at their Christmas gifts, had saved the chocolate to share.

  The winds of December became the long dry heat of January, cicadas shrieking from dawn to dusk. Sunburn gave way to a smattering of freckles. A change to her skin that was normal and real. Mum had said a work-day face would be a hard sell to a potential husband after the war, but the word ‘husband’ didn’t send a frisson through Tea like it had a year ago. She didn’t know why. She didn’t want to.

  The few days back in the city had shown Tea how little she had come to mind the grit and muck. Her biceps and thighs had taken on a solidity she took secret pleasure in, measuring them with her fingers in the dark. They kept her upright and going with purpose. Sometimes she thought she caught Izzy staring at her muscles, like the way Izzy had looked at her that strange night up at the mustering hut, but when she looked again those dark eyes were elsewhere.

  Her thoughts about her father, the ones she thought she had put away after Christmas, jumbled together when caught off guard by a casual reminder from the MacGregors. Mr MacGregor groused about “some mowree caught stealing” on another farm, and Mrs MacGregor complained about “that lazy wah-hee-knee at the shop”. They pronounced place names with a hard smack or swallow: “Tie-ree”, “Why-koo-white”, “Carry-tane”, “Om-ah-roo” – quite unlike Izzy’s rolling roundness spoken in private.

  Tea had been lulled by the gentle push of water from the creek and her strengthening flesh, so these reminders of what her skin, her whaiwhaiā, could take away from her were like punches. She practised only in the dark or in the shade of the creek. The eels mouthed against her fingers – come in, the water’ssss fine – and her scales flickered oily and sleek, the boil in her blood like low-banked coals.

  *

  Summer ebbed and flowed into autumn with the crackle of brush fires and the clipped, cheerful-serious tones of the BBC. Mr MacGregor let the girls listen to the wireless when he was out at Home Guard or farmer’s association meetings, or after dinner if they remained absolutely quiet with their sewing. Izzy found it hard to remain so still, but at least managed to stay for a full bulletin or play, for Tea’s sake. Tea couldn’t parse much of what the news reader said, and often excused herself due to weariness. Place names like Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, she had to look up in her atlas, but she could draw no shape or meaning that she couldn’t get out of the shivers and spasms from her arm and the growing restlessness of the water.

  The creek did not ache down to a summer trickle.

  March marched right on into the farm. Leaves turned a scintillating red and yellow. Winter feed stacked. Fields turned over to sit fallow. More wood chopped to keep the homestead and cottages running. Alison often complained about Tea’s jerky sawing motion. Tea brushed it off as weariness and Alison bought the excuse easily, disgusted. Though she tried her best with Alison and Carmel, the girls held to their wariness. Like they felt something about her, her fire, but couldn’t put their finger on it.

  Tea’s exhaustion sprung from the deep ache that woke her in the night.

  As March grew late, the sensation didn’t abate, settling into a dull throb that came and went like a tide. Though she thought the burden of her pain connection to her brother was hers to bear, she often saw flickers between the other two, like lightning between the clouds. Swift, hard, sharp, but gone in an instant. Grant in the yards or fields rubbing his joints like an arthritic. Izzy, usually staunch, complained of pain in her elbows.

  Tea hid her pain. It took the last of her energy not to rush down to the creek and plunge her hands into the cool water, or keep her eelskin from turning at inappropriate moments. Her dreams became fretful and dark. She often woke with her fingers webbed and black. It took her longer for her human flesh to return from its slippery state, pulling hard on the hiss-feel. The hiss pulled right back.

  *

  “Come on, girl. Cows to milk. Upsy-daisy.”

  Tea groaned. Her fingers were a normal tan-brown as she flipped over the calendar to Saturday, March the twenty-seventh.

  Her arm settled into its daily ache.

  “Oh, Bess. Stop being such a pest!” Tea slapped the rump of the fractious cow. “Give it up, there’s a good girl.”

  “That’s the third time Clover has stood on my toes!” Izzy yelped. Her bucket clattered, and she gave an unladylike curse.

  “When you girls have finished mucking around in there, that butter won’t churn itself,” Mr MacGregor bellowed. “And don’t forget rabbit cull starts this afternoon. We need all hands on deck.”

  “Yessir!” they chorused.

  In her mood, Tea decided, handling a gun would be just the thing. Mr MacGregor
had grumbled about girls learning to shoot and handle the ferrets, but, as in everything, they were short-handed, and they couldn’t skip rabbit cull. The skins brought in good extra money. Three of the horses had almost been lamed by holes in the fields, more than enough sheep had been lost to broken legs, and there was damage to feed stock.

  As they stalked through the thistles that forever needed grubbing and the gorse that scoured her skin, Izzy’s dark glances clawed at the surface of Tea’s patience.

  “Stop it,” she hissed out the corner of her mouth. Spotting movement, she loaded, shouldered, and popped off. The rabbit dropped, but with the kickback of the rifle, the pain in Tea’s shoulder increased. Good God, if Mum knew I was using a rifle …

  “Stop what?” Izzy demanded once the boom-ring of the shot died down.

  “You’re staring at me. Like I’m about to … turn into something.”

  “What bee you got in your bonnet? You on the rag?”

  Tea blushed. “What if I am?”

  “Your blood is up. Thought so.” Those canine senses of hers!

  They picked up some dropped rabbits, and Tea stomped back to the dray to empty her sack into the bloody morass. The stink helped maintain the potency of her mood, ignore the pinch and flutter of her bicep. She should apologise. Izzy was a good friend but for some reason today the thought of how easily she could slide in and out of her fur annoyed Tea no end.

  A scratch against her skin. Dry. With the stench of iron and salt. Not the fullness of her menses or the softness of the creek. More … something that wasn’t of here.

  “Hey.” Izzy’s soft interjection made Tea jump. She tilted her head like an inquisitive dog, and the words settled across her mind. Something’s happening, isn’t it? “Making sure you’re alright.”

  “I’m fine,” Tea snapped, unable to stop the words. “I’m not a baby. You’re not my mother. I take care of myself.”