‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’
The selkies, she told me, were creatures of the sea—they were seal-like in the water but took on a human form on land. She leaned forward on the swing, looking at me. ‘They are beautiful dancers, the selkies. At low tide they dance on the beach.’
The last of the sun was shining onto the porch on an angle. Somewhere out on the lawn a cicada sang a raspy tune.
‘One day a young fisherman happened to see them there. He saw a beautiful selkie maid and hid her skin so she couldn’t go back to the sea and had to marry him. He kept her skin in a locked drawer and the key in his pocket.’
I looked out at the still evening. Beside the fence was a single hydrangea. It had pink flowers—my father had told me this meant the soil around it was acidic.
‘But one day when he was out fishing he discovered he had forgotten the key. When he got home he found her gone. She’d escaped back to the sea.’
Something changed between my parents following my great-grandmother’s arrival: a new low-pitched tone that, because it was constant, to our ears became noiseless. Throughout January my mother retreated to her bedroom more often, a set expression on her face. If anyone asked why, she said she had a headache. She made the same dinner night after night, over-boiling the potatoes so they split down the centre and were mushy on the inside. ‘I still don’t see what’s wrong with a home,’ I heard her say to my father one afternoon. They were in the kitchen together, the door ajar.
My father cleared his throat—a sound he often made before he was about to tell me off. ‘She’s family,’ he said quietly.
‘Yes, but she’s not mine.’
My father’s reply was too soft to hear.
I heard a noise and turned around quickly. There was my great-grandmother standing behind me, one hand on the doorframe. Her fingers were thin and white, like bone.
‘Come out to the porch,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’
My great-grandmother’s stories seemed to have no real beginning or end. Most of them involved creatures and animals I hadn’t heard of: along with the selkies, there was a story of the Sidhe, a black cat with a white spot on its chest that was really a witch but could change into a cat nine times; the Enbarr, a horse that could travel on the land as well as sea; and changelings, the children of fairies and elves left in the place of human children. Another evening she talked of ancient animals I knew, spreading her arms wide to indicate their massive size: the moa and giant eagle. She told me she’d seen a model of them once in a museum—the giant eagle latched on to the moa in a deadly embrace. Sometimes she mixed them all up together in one big Noah’s ark—a blend of two zoos, one mythological and one extinct. Then the moa would come to life, running along the black sand with the changelings, its neck arched, curved beak searching for molluscs in the rock pools. Or the giant eagle would chase the Enbarr over a high mountain pass, its talons outstretched.
Interspersed with all this were the stories of her childhood—playing on the beach, how glaring the light was when they first arrived in New Zealand, the smell of shellfish being cooked.
‘Remember these stories,’ she would say when it was time for me to go to bed.
I wanted to say I would but it felt impossible, like holding back a mountain of water with my arms.
‘I’ll try,’ I told her.
At school my teacher, Mrs Waaka, had a strong voice which could switch seamlessly from English to Māori and back again. She told us about Hawke’s Bay and the stories that had happened here.
‘Today in school we learnt about Pania,’ I told my great-grandmother one evening.
I watched her small outline in the dimming light. Our legs dangled off the porch swing. I kicked my feet. My great-grandmother held hers tightly together.
‘She was a beautiful maiden who lived by the reef. One day a man saw her and fell in love.’ I glanced again at my great-grandmother. She was looking straight ahead.
‘They got married but she had to return to the sea every day or she wouldn’t survive. One day the man tried to feed her cooked food which would mean she wouldn’t be able to go back to the sea. But a bird warned her of his plan and she ran away and never came back.’
The sprinkler was going on the lawn. I could hear the trickle of water.
‘It’s like the story of the selkies—isn’t it?’
My great-grandmother didn’t answer. When I turned to look at her she was watching me, quietly.
‘What story?’ she said.
Easter came and my brother and I each got five Easter eggs—not from the Easter bunny, whom we knew along with Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real, but from my father whom we watched from my bedroom window as he tried unsuccessfully to hide the eggs on the flat lawn. Our mother gave us hot cross buns for breakfast and we ate them while watching the tops of the apple trees. Every now and then a tree branch moved out of sync with the wind—it was my father bending it down to count parasite load.
All Easter weekend it rained heavily, solid drops that fell from the sky like shingle. We played in the lounge, my brother with his matchbox cars and me with my doll who didn’t have a name. My great-grandmother, sitting on the high-backed chair, had her eyes open. But she didn’t seem to be watching us.
‘Do you think she’s dead?’ whispered my brother, his hand poised over the roof of a car.
‘No,’ I whispered back quickly.
He leaned forward on his knees. ‘When Rowan’s grandfather died, his other family who were Māori came and stole the body. It got dug up twice.’
‘She’s not dead,’ I whispered again.
Just then the rain stopped and the world was painfully quiet. My great-grandmother made a shuffling noise from her chair.
Our mother sent us outside to play in the afternoon. The rain had made the grass soggy; on the other side of the fence the branches of the apple trees touched the ground with the weight.
Our father must have known she didn’t have much time left. He planned a trip to the West Coast. My brother and I just thought it sounded fun—although we’d been almost everywhere in the North Island, we’d never been down south.
It was mid-April and our father was working into the night. Our mother was tired all the time. Her headaches had become more frequent, and the recovery longer. She let us play outside when it was dark and didn’t say anything when one of us used a bad word, or when we fought.
Our father made the announcement at dinner one night. We were having mashed potato. I was constructing a mountain range out of mine.
‘Why’re we going there?’ said my brother.
‘Because it’s where great-grandma comes from,’ said our father. ‘She’s connected to the area.’
We all looked at my great-grandmother, who was eating her dinner quietly. She continued what she was doing and didn’t look at any of us.
‘The same way you’re connected to Hawke’s Bay,’ our father said, ‘and before that to Kerikeri, and before that—’
‘Hawke’s Bay is shit,’ said my brother.
Our father put his knife and fork down on his plate. ‘In this household we don’t use that sort of language,’ he said.
Our mother stood up, her chair scraping the floor. ‘We? Who’s this we?’
I looked from my brother, to my father, to my mother. Everyone was silent.
‘It’s such a pity,’ said my great-grandmother suddenly, ‘that your garden doesn’t have any flowers.’
My brother and I were sent to my room after dinner. We sat on our beds and didn’t look at each other across the strip of floor that separated us. Later, when he fell asleep, I opened the window and climbed down to the lawn. It was cold outside. The hydrangea a dark shadow by the fence.
‘What are you doing up?’ said my great-grandmother when I got to the porch.
‘I brought you a present,’ I said, handing her a bunch of pink hydrangea flowers, the last remaining on the bush. The stems were twisted and t
orn; they’d been hard to break.
She took them from me. I could see the outline of her glasses in the dark. Light from the kitchen window reflected off the lenses.
‘Thank you, little one.’
‘Why do you call me that?’ I asked. ‘In my class I’m the second to tallest.’
‘Because you remind me of the little people.’
‘Who are they?’
She paused for a while, rearranging her shawl. ‘At night they live in the stars. But in the day they climb in the mānuka trees, or play in the snow high up on the Southern Alps. Sometimes they collect pāua shells on the beach to make into necklaces.’
‘Are they fairies?’
‘No, they’re tiny people.’
I looked out at the grey lawn—all the daytime colours sucked from it. ‘If they’re so small, why don’t we step on them?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘they’re not that small.’
When I glanced at her again she was holding the hydrangea flowers up to her face, examining the tiny flowerheads. She pulled one off and looked at it, her hand shaking slightly. ‘I’ve always liked the pink ones,’ she said. ‘But at home they always seemed to turn out blue.’
‘Which home do you mean?’ I said, ‘Ireland or New Zealand?’
‘Pardon?’
I repeated the question. She nodded, but didn’t say anything.
Our father was back late the Friday we were to leave. Our mother was waiting on the porch, the skin on her cheeks flushed, her blond hair in a tight bun on top of her head. She’d been packing all afternoon and boxes and bags lined the hallway, the lounge—more stuff that was necessary for a four-day trip. We all got in the car, parents in the front, and the rest of us in the back. My great-grandmother sat in the middle, her hands firmly clasped.
‘Do you know where we’re going?’ I asked her.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, giving her version of a smile—a thin crack in her face, like mud drying.
We drove out of town, passing orchards and more orchards—apples, stone fruit, apples. Further on hills of brown grass, a scattering of sheep. The grass turned greener the further we drove and the buttery light changed into a golden haze then to streaks of pink.
‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight,’ chanted my brother.
Our father took his hand off the wheel and slipped the car into a higher gear. ‘That’s only true in the Northern hemisphere,’ he said, ‘places like the UK where the weather tends to come from the west. In New Zealand it doesn’t make sense.’
Our mother tapped her hand on the glove box. ‘It’s a rhyme. It doesn’t have to make sense.’
I must have fallen asleep sometime before the Manawatū Gorge. When I woke up I was being carried from the car by my father. I kept my eyes closed and felt the rhythm of his footsteps across the ground, up some steps. The next morning we were all in a room together—a backpackers with four bunks. My great-grandmother and I were sharing the bottom one closest to the door.
We got the early morning ferry across Cook Strait and the sea was glistening and blue. As we left the North Island the swell rose and my brother and I were not allowed to go out onto the deck, but we could see the waves through the salt-crusted windows, each one a mountain of water with a bubbling cap of foam.
In Nelson we stopped for lunch then drove on to Greymouth. By the time we arrived it was late afternoon and the sun had gone behind a bank of cloud so we couldn’t see Mount Cook. A fine misty drizzle was falling. Our parents found a café and bought coffee to drink in the car while they debated where we would stay that night. In the end it was a motel with peeling paint, wallpaper covered in roses that might have been pink once but were now the colour of milky tea, and a sliding door that opened to a view of the sea. The sliding door was made of yellow glass. My great-grandmother sat on a frayed couch, straight-backed, her hands on her lap.
‘How does it feel to be home?’ said my father.
She looked at him, her face to one side as if she was listening intently for something—a train made of wind.
I opened the sliding door and walked a way down the beach. In amongst the black sand were white stones. I picked one up—smooth and round. It fitted perfectly into my palm.
The next day we went searching for my great-grandmother’s house, or where it would have stood. It was clear from the outset that my father had not thought this part through. We drove into the centre of town, peering at the shop fronts—a chemist, a petrol station, a Chinese takeaway—as if by looking hard enough they would tell us something: directions scrawled across a concrete wall, or written across a shop window, or chalked across the pavement. From there we radiated outwards, moving through suburbs then circling back towards the waterfront—my father had a vague idea it was somewhere near the sea. My great-grandmother just sat in the middle of the back seat, hands crossed. Every time we asked her if she remembered this street, this building, this park, she said, ‘Oh, yes,’ but gave no further indication. Eventually we ended up in an industrial area. My father got out of the car and stood on the roadside, his hands on the back of his head, looking at the sky.
‘I knew this was a bad idea,’ said my mother.
I got out of the car too. We were in a land of asphalt and concrete, a crisscross of roads, parallel to the sea or leading to or away from it. Everything was grey. It was as if the entire town had risen out of a shallow prehistoric ocean, unfolding like a sea anemone or the fingers of a rubber glove when you blow into it—sprouting jerkily like a grey, grainy film of a flower opening in an old movie my father showed us once.
‘Shit,’ he said, quietly.
‘You said shit,’ said my brother who’d got out of the car behind me. ‘Mum—Dad said shit.’
My father went back to the car, leaning on the open door. ‘Do you have any idea where we are?’
My great-grandmother looked out the window, to my father, back out the window. ‘I’ve had enough,’ she said. ‘I’d like to go home now.’
‘Do any animals go back to the sea?’ I asked my father one Sunday evening.
‘Are we talking in an evolutionary sense?’
We were sitting together on the second to top porch step. It was late afternoon and the sun had gone behind the hills.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I was thinking of a sequence of pictures of a fish I’d seen in a book at school. In the sequence the fish grew four legs—tiny stumps at first, then longer. Feet with tiny toenails appeared. The fish walked from the bottom of the sea, shaded in dark blue, up the stony bank and into the air that had no colour.
My father took out his box of cigars and selected one. ‘Whales and dolphins had ancestors that walked on land,’ he said. ‘They still need to breathe air to survive.’
He lit his cigar, cupping his hands together to keep the flame alight, and stood up to blow the smoke away from me. I smelt the woody, sweet smell. Behind us someone, most likely my mother, pulled the kitchen window closed with a bang.
‘They were originally thought to have evolved from a creature with hooves.’ He paused to cough. ‘But more recent evidence suggests they had a similar ancestor to the hippopotamus.’
I picked at a piece of paint on the step. The porch had been painted the same colour as the house but was wearing away in the places people trod. ‘What’s an ancestor?’
‘A distant relation who lived a long time ago.’
‘Before you were born?’
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling at me.
The world, after our trip to the South Island, was disappointing. We returned to an early winter. A low mist hung over the orchards and hills, hiding Te Mata Peak. My brother and I didn’t want to go back to school. We fought in our room, throwing toys from bed to bed and shouting at each other. The boxes my mother had packed before our trip still lined the hallway and I tripped over one on my way to the toilet at night, scraping the skin off my right knee.
After school I sat outside on the porch swing with my jacket on and listened to my p
arents talking in lowered voices in the kitchen. One afternoon I realised, with a shock, they were discussing my great-grandmother’s funeral.
‘She wants to be buried in the South Island,’ said my father.
‘Says who?’ said my mother.
‘I just know. She wants to be near the sea.’
‘She could be near the sea in the North Island. What difference does it make?’ Then, in a softer tone, ‘She doesn’t even know her own name.’
I couldn’t hear any more.
My great-grandmother, sitting beside me, gave a quiet cough. She was wearing a heavy shawl wound around her shoulders twice. The ends were coming unravelled.
She died in the middle of winter, the day after a heavy frost. The funeral service, held at the funeral home, was small—us and a handful of my father’s relatives we hadn’t met before. I sat by my father whose right knee jiggled throughout the service, like a dog running in a dream. Afterwards we drove to the local cemetery. My great-grandmother was buried at the end of a row. Beside the small gravestone that misspelt her name was a cylindrical bowl.
‘What’s that for?’ I asked my father.
But my mother answered the question by settling in the bowl a huge bunch of flowers. They were exotics—lilies, orchids and hibiscus—imported from Australia. An expensive wedding had been cancelled and the florist my mother worked for was trying to get rid of the order. The flowers stood stiffly in the bowl, upright and unnaturally shiny. When I looked closely I could see grains of glitter on the petals.
‘It makes them look prettier,’ said my mother. ‘Don’t you think?’
After a while I wandered back to the car. My brother was sitting in the backseat crying—he’d been told off for running over the graves. I got in beside him and we looked out our separate windows. My brother sniffed loudly a few times and stopped crying. When I glanced across at him his face was thoughtful and he was making a faint sucking sound, the click of something hitting against his teeth.
‘What have you got in your mouth?’
The Red Queen Page 11