by Grant Stone
I broach the dinosaur in the room to Sue and Martin. Why is Bree building a dinosaur? Is it for school?
They look at each other, Martin in the armchair and Sue on the couch, a cup of tea in his hand and a phone in hers, conversation flickering between their eyes. Simultaneously, they return their gaze to me.
‘It’s just something she enjoys doing, that’s all,’ says Sue. ‘A hobby.’
‘So it’s art?’ I run through my mental dictionary for the correct word. ‘Sculpture?’
‘Have you seen the dinosaur?’ Martin asks me. He’s wearing a polo shirt with the logo of his sailing club on the pocket, and it’s quite apparent where he’d rather be.
I shake my head. ‘She doesn’t let me in her room.’
More eye conversation. ‘We were hoping ...’ Sue says. ‘Bree’s always been a very shy girl. She doesn’t have any friends, really. We were hoping that having you in the house would encourage her to talk to people a bit more.’
Bree does have friends, though. I’ve seen her with them from the bus with their tartan skirts hitched up, passing headphones between each other, laughing, taking up the whole width of the footpath, drinking Coke. I saw her in McDonald's once, with a group of boys and one other girl, flicking fries at each other’s faces. She’s not shy, but a veil descends around her in this house. She is not, to use another phrase, at home when she’s at home.
‘I’ll try and talk with her,’ I say, smiling, but there’s a hint of anger creeping up inside me. I want to help, but I pay them two hundred and forty dollars a week, and I’m here to study to further my career and I have my own family who need me. Bree – Bree cannot be my responsibility. I swallow the anger. Sue and Martin have not picked up on it, and I think that is for the best. It is important to me that I’m a good guest in their home.
‘What’s a good recipe?’ I ask Sue, moving on. ‘I’d like to bake something new.’
‘Edmonds,’ replies Sue, pulling a spiral-bound book from the shelves and handing it to me. ‘Real Kiwi icon.’
I’ve noticed how people emphasise things as cultural pointers but don’t explain them, only serving to mystify them further. Still, I’m sure it’s meant to be helpful; I take the book and thank her and she smiles in return and says it’s no problem at all, that she’s pleased I’m interested. Martin turns on the news and I stretch back on the sofa to flick through the recipes.
I make chocolate-coconut brownies. The recipe is easy, almost soothing – one saucepan and then into a tray, the oven. I take some time to myself while it’s cooking; headphones in, idle internet browsing.
On my way back, alerted by the oven timer, I almost trip over something large and white, about the size of a soccer ball, sitting halfway down the stairs. Bree runs out, grabs it and cradles it to her chest, mouths an apology and runs back to her bedroom. I only catch a glimpse of it, so I tell myself it was most probably a rugby ball. Except one end was considerably thinner than the other. Like a giant egg.
A few minutes later she follows me down. When I cut the brownies she takes one from the rack before it’s cooled, bites a chunk out of it hungrily. I think I see the hint of a smile on her face. I ask what’s your dinosaur, Bree? and panic clutches at my chest. I want to hear her say a sculpture, and at the same time, I’m not sure I do.
To my surprise, her face breaks into a clear smile. She perches on a stool, talks semi-incoherently as she forces the rest of the brownie into her mouth.
‘It’s a Titanosaur,’ she says, ‘A sauropod, like the Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus, only they came a bit later.’
I struggle to process the words, cycling between the known and unknown, a repeating translation running through my head as I scrub the saucepan and wipe the silicon baking pan.
‘Long neck.’ It’s the over-enunciation people tend to do when they underestimate my English, but it don’t sound like she’s being unkind – more that she’s lost in her own world with the dinosaur and is unsure how to communicate with people from outside it. ‘Eats plants.’
She grabs an envelope from the table behind her and starts to draw on the back of it. The outline of a dinosaur quickly emerges, a blue, long-necked creature. She finishes by drawing grass around its feet and labelling it in large, rounded capitals: TITANOSAUR.
She leaves after that, muttering about going to see some friends, people who understand her (though I think that’s a dig at her parents rather than at me). I don’t think initiating another conversation about the dinosaur will be easy – in any case, Bree’s been taking up more of my headspace than she should. With study occupying the majority of my thoughts during the day, and much of my evenings spent wondering what is going on in the next room, I’ve had little time to relax, barely set foot in a bar since I’ve been here, haven’t been to a concert or shopped for anything beyond necessities.
I resolve to move out of this rut and text Violet and we eat kebabs sitting on one of the triangular benches in Te Aro park, amongst the pigeons: thick fried falafel smothered in sweet chilli sauce. A vaguely drunk-sounding man tries to sell a pair of jeans to passers-by. Brand new, he says, and not stolen. Definitely not stolen. We giggle, watching the water bubbling up from the shallow fountain, the pigeons stalking over the blue and grey tiles around our feet. Someone a little way across from us is dropping pieces of bread, and the pigeons, along with the occasional sparrow and seagull, make for that direction.
Violet tells me that she’s thinking of moving in with her boyfriend. They’re serious, she says, a wedding might be on the horizon; but she looks nervously down at her fingers spread out across her dark jeans as she says it.
‘But one day. Not now. He has a big room, we can share that, and get a place to ourselves later.’
I nod, drink the dregs of my apple juice. ‘I think you’ll want to find a job first. And things aren’t so good with the economy still, you might need to search a bit.’
She pauses. ‘Yes. I’ll have to ... what is it ... crunch numbers.’ We laugh.
‘You need to take stock of your situation. You don’t want to end up in ... in a tight spot.’
We sit and watch the buses drive past. The commuters turn to office workers heading hurriedly home from Friday night drinks, then the party-goers beginning to emerge. I’m growing to like this city, despite its cold and wind and endless hills. I will perhaps miss it, when I leave, even though I expect I will never return. Some experiences, once over, are consigned to the past forever.
I LOOK UP THE TITANOSAUR that night, curled up in bed with my laptop, idly eating my way through a packet of M&Ms. It includes some of the heaviest creatures ever to walk the earth, Wikipedia says, such as Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus – which are estimated to have weighted up to 90 tonnes. 90 tonnes. I’m not quite sure how much that is, but I’m pretty confident nothing of that weight would fit in anyone’s bedroom. I find some small consolation in learning that they were, at least, herbivores.
I read further, bring up a news article:
One of the largest known dinosaurs, a titanosaurid, once roamed New Zealand about 80 million years ago.
The article details the identification of a bone from the spine of a dinosaur which was found in a stream in Hawke’s Bay. I flick to Google Maps. Hawkes Bay isn’t so far away. Especially not in the context of a time when continents were shifting, when the land that is now New Zealand was sandwiched between Australia on one side and Antarctica on the other.
This bone, the article says, is the first evidence that titanosaurids once lived in New Zealand. It’s not clear if it was from a child or an adult, but adds a lot to what is known about dinosaurs in New Zealand ...
But this isn’t Jurassic Park. Either Bree’s got some slightly eccentric art project going on, or she’s mentally unstable and imagining things. Either way, looking up types of dinosaurs isn’t going to help and, I reiterate to myself, it’s not my responsibility.
(Even if I still feel slightly relieved about it being a herbivore.)
&nb
sp; My mother says the same thing (about responsibility, not herbivores) when I finally get hold of her on Skype. By now it’s dark outside, and I talk softly to avoid waking Bree who is – for once – quiet. ‘It’s your own life, Cam,’ she says. ‘I’m sure these people are very nice. You must be polite to them and help out when asked – you do help them out?’
I nod, and see the small image of myself in the corner of my screen nod back at me. My mother’s face looks dull, but I tell myself it’s just the poor quality camera, and the sunlight behind her beginning to fade. There’s something about time zones that always makes me vaguely uneasy, as if no matter how clearly I understand it, I still can’t quite process the difference between here and there.
‘But your responsibility is to yourself and your family,’ she continues. ‘You can’t worry about everyone else – so worry about those who will worry about you in return. How is your course?’
I tell her about the topics we’ve been learning, that the tutors are mostly good and that I’ve been getting on well with my classmates. She’s sipping at tea and picking at a slice of cake that is indistinguishable at this low resolution while she talks to me. She says that this is all very good, that she misses me but it sounds like I’ve made the right decision, and that I must remember to send a postcard to my grandmother, who paid for this after all. She catches me up on the local gossip; the son of a neighbour on his way to university, two others trapped in a dispute over the theft of a fridge.
‘How do you steal a fridge?’ I ask. ‘Casually slip it in your pocket when you’re invited round for tea?’
I tug my blankets over me even though I’m still dressed. Eventually I swallow and ask after my father, and she says he’s all right, as well as can be expected, she doesn’t want to wake him now but she’ll make sure I can talk to him soon, and that it’s good to get my emails – he reads those, or she reads them to him.
I say that I understand, because I do understand, now that I’m an adult, and we chat some more before I shut down the computer and go to sleep. Though the wind taps branches against my window, the night is relatively quiet – and Bree’s room in particular does not disturb me. I sleep soundly.
MY RESPONSIBILITY ISN’T to Bree, but I’m still looking up dinosaurs on my phone as the bus heads into town. Tuatara are living dinosaurs, say some sources, but the more reliable clarify that they are the last surviving members of the order Sphenodontia, a group of animals common 200 million years ago. There are Coelacanths, thought to have become extinct in the Late Cretaceous, until their rediscovery in 1938. That story is a little closer than I feel comfortable with, so I move on, but find only a controversial idea that dinosaurs lived past the asteroid impact into the Palaeocene epoch, and from then on it’s all conspiracy theories.
But however ridiculous this whole thing is, I keep looking. Because I, more than most people, know that when people say the last of a kind has died, they are not always correct. There are many stories – and I look through some of them now – of creatures that have survived their seeming extinction, or are caught between myth and reality, who stalk through jungles and deserts, soar over mountains. Of giant eagles and worms thicker than a man’s arm, large cats loose on moors and prehistoric relics hiding in deep lakes.
I get off the bus at Lambton Quay without stopping to think about it, walk down to the waterfront. This is the first time I’ve missed class but right now I can’t stand the thought of other voices and the squeak of chairs and the clear enunciation of every role-played word.
For now, among the stories, there is a memory.
The overlapping of hills by the harbour’s entrance makes it look closed in, as if it could be a lake. Hồ Hoàn Kiếm is much smaller – as an adult I walked its perimeter many times. But as a child, it seemed similarly endless.
The waterfront is busy with joggers and office workers, roller skaters, the occasional family out on this clear winter morning. I sit on a bench by the edge of the water and watch the ferry leave, pulling my coat around me.
1997. I was ten years old; my brother, Thanh, two years younger. We were living in the city then, though the town where my grandparents lived was still where we called home. In the city we had an apartment with no land and only a slip of a balcony, so we went to the lake often. We were afforded less freedom in the city, but going to the lake by ourselves was okay, as long as I looked after Thanh.
I liked the banks of the lake then, even though they were messy with only patches of yellow flowers in the soil. The river was murky green and it seemed as if it could be a portal to another world, the vague reflections of buildings another city entirely. Looking out we could see the red Bridge of the Rising Sun, the Turtle Tower on a small island. Sometimes there were turtles there, moving like slow lumbering rocks, but not today.
There were larger turtles there too, once. The last one died in 1967, beaten by a fisherman with a crow bar. It was stuffed and put in a glass case which we were taken to see, one Saturday, awed by its size, longer than the height of anyone we knew. But long before that, a turtle in the lake took a sword from the emperor Lê Lợi and returned it to Kim Qui, the Golden Turtle God, from whom it originally came. But the turtles were all gone now, our father said, and the gods too.
We’d never been taught to swim, and so when Thanh leaned over the shallow waters, looking at something I couldn’t see, I warned him to be careful. Then he leaned forward just a little too much, and toppled in head first. I screamed.
The lake was not deep; men could stand up in it, or near enough, and two slid in after him, half swimming, half wading, as I sat on the bank wailing, more with shock than the grief which would hit later. They shook their heads as they couldn’t find him, and then police and other official-looking people and eventually our father arrived, but he didn’t swim determinedly like the others; instead he splashed and flailed until others dragged him, exhausted, back to shore.
He wasn’t the same after that. They said it was because water had got in his lungs and stopped him breathing for a bit, and that had hurt his brain and made him sick.
It wasn’t entirely a lie.
I didn’t tell them everything, either. I didn’t tell them how I saw the large flippers, the turtle’s twisting neck, the giant shell emerging like an island, and how Thanh went with it, deep into the lake. I wasn’t sure, and I’m still not sure, whether it dragged him in or if he followed it down. The turtle was long-extinct, and mostly just a legend anyway, was what people would say, so I said nothing.
Early the next year, an amateur film-maker produced footage of the giant turtle in Hoàn Kiếm lake. No longer just a legend or a creature from the past. I didn’t feel vindicated, only sad. I lived with my grandmother for two years and didn’t see the lake at all. Only as an adult did I become comfortable walking the path – newly landscaped – around its green waters, sit beside it eating street food, noodles or fried cake of flour and peanut powder, sweetened with honey.
I look up. The waterfront is quieter, the work day begun. A small group of teenagers are huddled around a bench, two kayakers taking on the cold harbour.
Three years ago the turtle was put in an enclosure in the middle of the lake for observation and treatment, before being released. Crowds turned up, lined the concreted banks hoping desperately for a glimpse. Depending on who you believe, it’s either the last of its species or one of only four left.
They dredged the lake, to clean it as part of their effort to save the remaining turtle, and I spent weeks on edge, waiting for a phone call, notification of a discovery. There was none.
That was the year I decided to leave Hanoi. It was not a sudden decision, not a flight of terror, rather a clarification of the increasing feeling that my future lay elsewhere. That what happened in that lake was never going to be something I could predict or control, and it didn’t need to be so central in my life any more. If anything was to change, it was not going to be achieved by me staying there.
I worked, studied, resea
rched. Calculated expenses. I made plans.
THE NEWSREADER SAYS there has been a meteor detected, heading for Earth, but no reason to be alarmed, she says, as her voice lifts to a type of professional urgency. I am rarely alarmed by what I see on the news, unconcerned about pandemics and train crashes and cyclones, and I laughed off my mother’s earthquake worries when I bought my ticket to New Zealand, but there’s something about this that brings me a slight edge of unease.
Bree perches on the arm of the chair next to me, eating half-defrosted cheesecake. ‘Do you think it will hit here?’
I shrug.
‘Because with the velocity they reach even a small one can kill heaps of people,’ she continues. ‘Mostly they explode before they hit the ground, but that explosion’s like the size of hundreds of nuclear bombs.’
‘The world’s a big place,’ I say, though I’m unsure if she wants reassurance or a co-conspirator in her excitement. ‘And two thirds of it is water. It probably won’t hurt anyone.’
‘You never know, though, do you? It could wipe out the whole country.’
‘I’m sure we’ll be just fine, Bree. Sorry, but I’m behind with study.’ The words emerge more abruptly than I intended, but I’ve no intention of apologising. I’m sick of it all, sick of the noise from her bedroom, the idea I have to somehow reassure her, save her. If I couldn’t save my own brother, how could I save her?
In my bedroom I write out sentences, each using a designated word: negotiation, trade, taxation. I memorise the meanings of another list of seemingly impenetrable idioms: ambulance chaser, back to the salt mines, laugh all the way to the bank. Next, responding to an email from a former colleague, I keep my answer to the question of whether I’m coming back vague. To Hanoi, certainly, at least for a while. To my old company? Everything is up in the air right now, and I like that expression, as if I’ve just thrown all the pieces above me and am waiting for gravity to fit them in to place. No loud collision, as a meteor would make, but simply a gentle fall, blowing on a breeze, shuffling neatly together.