No Man's Land

by A. J. Fitzwater

“Umm?” Tea could look at Izzy’s chin now. And her lips. “Two. But they don’t really count. They weren’t nice at all. I guess that’s what being with boys is. They’re rough and awful.”

  “Did Robbie and Grant together look rough and awful to you?”

  “N-no?”

  “Tea, you’re trembling.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “Here, let me warm you up.”

  Tea managed to meet Izzy’s eyes just as she came in to press her lips against hers. She lost her vision for a moment. It was everything and far more than she had imagined, her dreams like monsters, but ones that could stop the war, the world, with their power. If they, she, tried hard enough.

  “You taste like beer.” Izzy’s lips smiled against Tea’s.

  “Izz … oh. What was that?”

  “What it’s … meant to be? Was it alright that I did it? I can stop if you want.” Izzy touched her cheek. There it was again. That fizz Tea felt when they exchanged breath, breathed together, in the water.

  “No, it’s …” Tea murmured, biting her lip, looking up through her lashes. “I don’t know.”

  “Auē. It’s not wrong, Tea.” Izzy cupped her cheek, skin raw and soft and warm all at the same time, full of all the things she could do. “We’re not wrong. Like Robbie and Grant aren’t wrong. Like our whaiwhaiā isn’t wrong. Listen, what does your water song tell you?”

  Tea mirrored Izzy’s gesture, touching her cheek. “That … I need to try again. And listen harder. I don’t know if I got it right the first time.”

  The eels danced against each other.

  Epilogue

  Tea sat at the farm office desk, cold cup of tea at her elbow, willing the phone to ring. She could taste the intent, the buzz along the line, as well as she could taste the electricity in the sky before a storm.

  The sizzle came from two directions, both north. It was almost four, so Robin would be calling from wherever she and Grant were in their Auckland celebratory escapades. The second sizzle of intention came from around Wellington: it had to be Benny.

  Noise filled the farmhouse – barking and the friendly shouts of the kids and work gang from the yard, the wireless in the living room, and a cat whining impatiently for attention at the bay window – but Tea’s focus landed on the office noticeboard. The usual planting and work gang schedules and reminders of doctors’ appointments were covered by newspaper clippings from around the country. The one pinned on top had just arrived in the mail from a friend in Christchurch. Front page of The Press, July 10, 1986. ‘Five votes pass homosexual law reform’. Was it only just over a week ago? A victory still fresh and keen as VE and VJ day, though the battles were forty years apart.

  Tea poked the old memories like a broken tooth: the girls in their uniforms, whistled and jeered at by the crowds. But for the land girls, there had been no medals, no commendation from Parliament. Just silence. Tea and Izzy had kept their uniforms out of spite, and the home office had stopped asking after a while.

  Their uniforms now were the same as they had been for decades – gumboots, dungarees, and mud – but it felt lighter somehow. She’d walked out into each freezing dawn for the last week with her shoulders straighter, her head held higher. It didn’t matter anymore if some nosy neighbour riding past saw her and Izzy leave the old farmhouse together, or saw Robbie and Grant exit the other house on the property.

  Maybe.

  A battalion of women had ended up making the land theirs despite the discomfort of a changing world. The other farmers in the area either tolerated or welcomed the two ‘married’ couples who had bought out the MacGregor farm after the old couple became too infirm to manage the large property. A couple of local families even embraced them. Unmarried aunties and uncles who ‘lived together’ were good referees for them at The Office, their nickname for the Ministry of Social Welfare.

  The Gray-Stevenson farm had become a home for kids just as lost as the four of them had been. The gay kids, kids with whaiwhaiā, kids who wanted to change like Uncle Robbie into Aunty Robin, but for forever.

  The law reform battle had been won, but another was brewing. Searching for the warmth she knew was hibernating in the winter ground, she pushed her thoughts down into the earth, her whaiwhaiā threading around the soil clumps like her winding eels dancing through the water. Something tasted off, tasted ill. The something Benny had gone looking for, her whaiwhaiā pulling her away from her foster home on the farm into a nursing career.

  The whistle of the kettle on the Shacklock and the rattle of cups startled Tea back into the breathing world. She flicked away the scales darkening her fingertips with the old irritation, and her hands became her hands again, bent by a little arthritis and scarred and dried by a lot of time.

  Izzy swung into the office with a tray of cups and biscuits.

  “She’s late calling,” Izzy grumbled, then muttered something in te reo. Tea let her buzz-cut voice settle into her, the constant harmony to her water song. “I told you Grant shouldn’t have gone to Auckland so soon after that bad bout of bronchitis.”

  “The girls are probably still having a whale of a party.” Tea gratefully took a fresh cup and dunked a gingernut. Though both houses had been renovated to electricity early, there was something about tea brewed on the old wood stove, or from the billy. “And Grant knows how to look after himself.”

  “Pft. You always make excuses for them.” Izzy grimaced at the wall as if she could still see the ugly roses of the MacGregors’ old master bedroom they’d painted over years ago.

  “I do not! They worked so hard for, God, years to help change the law.” If Izzy saw ugly roses in the office, Tea saw Grant patiently typing submission after submission, making phone calls and newsletters. “They deserve to celebrate. Robin needs to be in her skin for a while.”

  “We worked hard, too,” Izzy grunted, easing into the old green velvet chair in the corner. “People forget that so quick.”

  “Robin and Grant don’t.”

  It had taken some convincing from Izzy, but they’d joined the Lesbian Coalition to help with the campaign. Not because Tea didn’t want to help, but she was endlessly cautious. One misstep and they could lose everything they’d built with the farm. They were both excited by the watershed moment, but they couldn’t help but feel the sting of how the official language centred men. Their friends in the Auckland and Sydney clubs – the girls, their old foster kids – were miffed. “Even with all the organising work we did, they just want us dykes and trannies to stop existing,” Tina had drawled in her cigarette-and-whiskey voice down the phone as disco thumped in the background.

  Tea hated when Tina spoke that way, but deep down she knew she was right. Robin was still getting into fights even in her sixties. Benny had gotten into scuffles at nursing school, too.

  Izzy stared at the ceiling, muttered in te reo again, then blew out a breath. “Sorry. I’m just so—”

  “Tired. I know.”

  “The air is tight.” Izzy squeezed a fist, the wrinkles on her face making a map Tea couldn’t read for a moment. But then after a moment gazing at her love – hair grey as a storm, but her shoulders still muscular and lean – there it was. The old warmth building up – simmering coals, summer winds, sweat from hard work, the belly heat from beer – that had held them together for so long.

  “You feel it, too,” Tea said. “The water song doesn’t taste right. As if it’s stagnant from sitting too long.”

  Izzy locked gazes with Tea. “Is it like … before?”

  “No. But it’s something big, getting bigger, a new battle. Like when Robbie and Grant went to New York in ’69. Like when you marched on Parliament in ’77. I think Benny is about to call.”

  Izzy’s gaze strayed towards the news clipping. “It’s that virus.”

  The phone shrilled. They flinched.

  “Aunty,” Benny sobbed down t
he line. “I need your help. People are trying, they are, that little girl’s story made a difference. But there are so many. I can’t make it stop. I don’t know where to take them or what to do.” Blood and piss and death were in her voice, fear like black scabs, tighter than the loose yellow of cancer that had taken Tea’s mother back in ’58.

  Tea fell into practised soothing of Benny’s stone armour; stone that had gotten her into so much trouble, stone Tea had learned to carve with the gentle trickle of water. Izzy grabbed the long-wired extension and murmured in the warm tones she used when Benny had awoken from her nightmares as a teen.

  When Benny was coherent enough, she told them about the people left alone to die in America, even by the hospitals. The water song grew loud and tight in Tea’s head. Her skin itched, scales creaking and flickering up to her wrists. An old call to arms.

  A solution tumbled from Tea’s lips as easy-hard as changing into her eelskin had come all those decades ago. “Let’s bring some of them here, eh? There’s plenty of room in both houses. You’re not alone. We’ll fight this together.”

  Tea rubbed the fingers of her right hand together; that old pain was mostly a whisper now. Without having to hear their voice, Tea knew her sibling agreed. Grant too; whatever the kids needed, he was there with pride.

  Pride. A word she heard more often these days.

  Izzy’s back straightened and she nodded firmly.

  “Ae, together,” she said.

  Acknowledgements

  This book has its origin story in a second-hand bookshop. The cover of Dianne Bardsley’s The Land Girls: In a Man’s World, 1939–1946 (University of Otago Press, 2000) – a muscular, tanned woman shearing a sheep – leapt out at me and planted the double-meaning story title in my head. Bardsley’s patient research on this part of forgotten New Zealand women’s history was an indispensable resource, and helped me formulate the characters.

  Thanks to Fiona in the Tūranga archives for helping me research homosexual law reform. To books on the women’s military auxiliaries and war work force by Bee Dawson (Spreading Their Wings: New Zealand WAAF in Wartime, Penguin, 2004), Bathia MacKenzie (The WAAF Book, Whitcoulls Publishers, 1982), and Deborah Montgomerie (The Women’s War: New Zealand Women 1939–1945, Auckland University Press, 2001). And to the National Library online photograph collections which helped with images of the uniform and land girls at work.

  Thanks to my family who supplied memories of the Dunedin to Palmerston train services and North Otago during wartime, to my great uncle’s wartime letters, and my grandfather’s war service in the Middle East.

  This book wouldn’t have happened without the enthusiasm of editor and publisher Marie Hodgkinson. Thanks to Laya Rose for the beautiful cover art. Kia ora Cassie Hart for the sensitivity read.

  Thanks to my critique group CLAM who helped with my original drafts, to beta reader Andi C. Buchanan, and the rest of the Crustaceans for your support.

  I wouldn’t be the author I am today without my Clarion classmates and tutors. It’s an honour to have you as colleagues and friends. Special thanks to Ann VanderMeer for her advice and unwavering support.

  And love and thanks to C for always being there.

  About the Author

  A.J. Fitzwater lives between the cracks of Christchurch, New Zealand. The Clarion Writer’s Workshop of 2014 presented them to the world somewhat formed, and two Sir Julius Vogel Awards are used interchangeably on any given day as unicorn horns. Their short fiction can be found in a variety of anthologies and such venues of repute as Fireside Fiction, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer Magazine, GigaNotoSaurus, and GlitterShip.

  Dedication

  To the Girls,

  The Queens,

  And the ones who went unseen.

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