by Thom Conroy
‘Wish he hadn’t,’ Tama says. ‘Glad he did, too.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, though I don’t know what for. Or I only know some of what for.
‘You’re sorry?’ Tama’s face is hard now. Looks like he might punch something. Instead, he speaks. At this moment, the light changes. The sun has set, but something in the sky darkens further, and it occurs to me that the man before me is a stranger. But then I see that he also is not.
‘The night — the night it happened, the night I did that — everything was over. For the night, I mean. I was thinking about going to bed, you know …’ Tama trails off, turns out to the sea. I turn, too, not knowing if he intends me to speak.
One fat star is growing bright in the last damson light of the heavens.
‘I was dropping off Kevin at the end of the night,’ Tama says, his voice sputtering a bit. His eyes are still fixed on the sea. ‘It was all cool, you know? But I just don’t think you can get it. Who you are, your history … And this was about me, who I am. Who I was going to be since before I was born. About this place, that’s all I’m trying to say.’
He smiles at me, his missing and his yellow teeth showing clearly for the first time. ‘Least I think it is.’
I want to ask more, but it seems he doesn’t have anything to add, and I find myself relieved.
‘You’re right,’ I say. I tear the page out of the notebook. ‘I was writing something violent. About my father. He’s such a fool.’
‘It’s just love, eh?’
‘Love?’
‘Takes you down a road. You just gotta follow along and see where it goes, I reckon.’
Tama takes my hand and holds it, his skin smooth and cool against mine. I have the feeling that he’s going to do something stupid like try to kiss me. And I can’t say how I will react. But he only touches my shoulder, and when this happens I realise that in Tama I’ve found a friend — something both prosaic and wholly unanticipated.
‘Your dad and my sis? They’re the kind that are always looking for something. So no wonder they’re always finding it.’ Tama glances at the notebook in my hand. ‘Go on and toss that page into the sea.’
And so I do. We stand there and watch the white page churning around in the surf. Finally, a heavy wave moves sideways and this time when the page plunges into the water it doesn’t emerge. We wait a little more, but when it’s clear there’s no sign of it, we start walking up the estuary together, picking our way through the mud and flat slippery stones. We come to an underpass, and here I turn and look back. Maybe I’m hoping for some sighting of the lost page, but what I notice is the sky. There’s still a feather of colour streaked across it. I think about what Tama said. About the kind who are always looking, and I understand he was talking about me, too.
WE MAKE OUR WAY UNDER THE BRIDGE, SCALE THE MUDDY sides of the stream and climb a stile. We are not speaking or looking at each other, and as we walk shapes emerge out of the stunted trees. Not emerge, exactly. They seem to bleed from shadow. White and beige and black and white shapes that cry to us in human voices. My breath catches in my throat before I see one of the shapes leap, and I understand. Goats. Tama turns to me, laughing quietly. There are maybe half a dozen baby goats leaping and running alongside us. One butts into my leg, its small horns scraping me.
‘Kids,’ Tama says, getting further ahead of me.
When I run to catch up, the goats follow, crowding and mewing and running into my legs. And Tama starts running, too. We’re on a hill, running with goats crying at our heels, and when we emerge through an arch in a hedge I see the paddock where my father’s caravan is parked, sparkling now with strands of fairy lights stretched from the treeline to the caravan. Ella sees us and shrieks, and, shrieking, begins to run with the bucking goats. My father is on a ladder, a strand of lights in his hand. He waves to us. At the base of the ladder is Reina, balancing it, her bare legs catching the glow of everything.
So here I am in this moment of living: that’s what I think.
I think this not at Harvey, like I might have before, but facing in his direction. Here are all the rest of us, Harvey. Here we are, for a little while longer — a man who committed some unspeakable violence half a lifetime ago and then sauntered down to the beach to help me control myself; this mad, happy child with some misery hanging over her, but not now, not tonight; my numbskull father and this woman whom he seems to have revoked everything for.
And me waiting for what happens next. And then, as if the moment weren’t full enough, weren’t crammed to the gills with living, my phone starts beeping — I’ve just walked into range, apparently — and there is Lyle’s name.
WHO WEARS TURTLENECKS?
The moment rises and crests, and it holds, like a note of song. In a single beat, attuned to some celestial resonance I can’t hear, people — a dozen, twenty? — step into the paddock. Some are holding bottles of wine and plastic bags. A wheelie suitcase. The goats are still here, still running and leaping. People are laughing. Deep voices. The sound of te reo Maori and English together. Music begins — a loud bass note, amplified. A large man with long grey hair and a guitar around his neck. A picnic table is set down amid dancers, one of whom I see is Tihema’s mum, Sam. Plastic wine glasses are lining up on a picnic table, but the face of the person filling them is entirely lost in shadow. A dog comes running, a white blur. Now a black blur. Darting between legs.
I’m standing here texting Lyle. We’re not saying much; in fact, I’ve lost the thread of the conversation. Something about a job interview gone awry. But I have the tingling feeling in my shoulders all the same. Something amazing is about to happen.
Was some ahole in a turtleneck, too — who wears trtlncks?
My father does, I type.
Now the dogs are barking. A wine glass is dropped and bounces on the grass. Laughter. The beauty of plastic! Drums begin.
I’m reading beckett, djuna.
Well?
Yr very odd, thats all.
‘Hey, Djuna!’ My father’s voice. He’s standing on the other side of the paddock. An older man in a sports jacket, grey hair, cane — obviously the kaumatua — is standing next to him. I’m being waved over. A child is crying. Out of the corner of my eye, I see someone pushing a wheelbarrow. A strand of fairy lights is swaying. The light shifts and people turn in that direction.
Wot r u doing up there?
Hmm. Not xactly sure. Was just running w goats.
Running w goats?
‘Djuna.’ My father again.
‘Djuna.’ Tama now, standing closer, red plastic cup in his hand. The air is suddenly heavy with the smell of pot. I notice the moon — flat and papery-looking above Tama’s head.
The band are all playing. Something light, something with a good beat.
‘Djuna!’
I shld go — it’s a party. Apparently!
Ok. Wish u could stay. I miss u.
‘Djuna, come over here. Someone I want you to meet!’
I type, I wish u were here.
TALKING TO THE MOON
I’m in the toilets with Ella, trying to keep her awake long enough to do what she came here to do, and I can hear, as a single ruckus of sound, someone vomiting outside, bassy reggae, laughter, breaking glass, rising voices, a toilet flushing from the men’s block next door, more laughter, murmur in a microphone, a slamming door.
When she’s finished in the toilets, Ella asks me to carry her to bed. Bed is our usual sofa in the caravan, only tonight it’s the shared kids’ room — my father’s request — and it should not be possible for me to carry this girl more than half my own weight all the way down the lane between the hedges and the smoke of campfires burning damp wood. But I do carry her. I heft her in place and she holds on, her damp nose in my neck like a puppy, her sticky hands on my shirt.
As we walk, I survey ruin: sprawled-out snoring men, discarded bottles and chippy bags, half-burnt lumber sitting amid abandoned fire rings. But Ella knows nothing about any o
f it. She’s been running and eating and yelling and bickering with the other children for hours, and I can’t understand how she’s still conscious. Yet she is: I know this because as we come to the quietest part of the walk, making our way through a little thicket of pine trees where the moon is resting way up at the apex of the sky, full and confident and silver-white, she puts her mouth near my ear and asks me if I love her daddy as much as I love her.
The question washes down my back and into my arms, a current of ice water. I try not to stumble.
‘Your daddy?’
She doesn’t answer for a moment, and then, just as we’re turning the corner on to the paddock where the band is saying goodbye and goodnight, she says, ‘Do you love him, too?’
‘No,’ I say. I’m looking to the moon, talking to the moon. ‘I love you but not him.’
I don’t know if Ella has heard this, because what I feel now is her breath change on my neck. A little wheeze escapes from her nostrils.
Way up beside the moon a shooting star goes streaking past.
I have lied.
Or have I?
UNCLE NIGHT
My dad had this tradition with me when I was younger. During the last minute or two of the day, we would stand in the back garden, him holding me, and we would look over the back fence to the ranges — when you could see them — and to the grey, half-lit distance when you couldn’t. We would stand out there and say goodbye to the day, waving, or sometimes whispering it.
But what I think is that all this farewelling the day had an impact. I came to see the sun as a visitor, a guest whom, day to day, we might not meet again. More than that, daytime itself seemed like the aberration, the possibility, the conditional portion of life, while night was resolute. The baseline state, a solid whole. Night, I knew, was always there. Not that I was scared of the dark or especially disapproving of the dark. But I understood early on that the night was different. It stirred me and everyone else in its own way. Softened the edges of day, but made promises, too. Was dimly avuncular. Had a tendency to come too close, say just what was on its mind, and then trail off, its eyes still looking into yours.
Night remained. Night was the bedrock on which the marvels and visions of day were built. Though I did not dread it, it was disconcerting that the root of everything was dark and gave off a whiff of some unspoken hazard, the reserve of dreams. That feeling of it refusing to break eye contact. And somehow it struck me as more personal. An afternoon takes nothing to heart, couldn’t care less if you lived or died or sat on a hill and licked sherbet. Night-time can speak your name and take an interest. It’s always at your side.
SOMEWHERE IN CHRISTCHURCH
During that time I mostly try to forget right after Harvey died, I did everything you might have thought. I sobbed until I ran out of tears and then I felt nothing. I talked to people, of course: some were paid to listen and some were obliged to listen by virtue of being a friend or relative. Like everyone else, my parents didn’t help me much, but they didn’t offer me meaningless advice, either. Mostly, they listened and offered me food. Once or twice my mother cried with me, sobbed as hard as I did, and I think that helped. To look at her face streaked with tears like mine was, and to feel her chest heaving with grief as she held me — even though I understood it was grief for me and not for Harvey and, therefore, nothing like what I was feeling, or, perhaps, only partially like what I was feeling — it helped me anyway. It was probably the only thing. When I think of that time, I feel myself weeping. I feel it in my body again, taking hold of me, the heat and shaking of it, the ravages of such endless and pointless crying. I also feel her chest against mine as we sat together on her hotel bed somewhere in Christchurch.
Somewhere in the room with us — off in the bathroom or concealed up in the drop panels of the ceiling — was Bruce. Not a presence exactly, but not an absence either. A kind of motor, purring away when things got silent.
WHEN IN ROME
Last night I found a tent that looked like my father’s set up in the high grass behind his caravan, and fell asleep thinking he might find his way in there at some point. He never did.
I wake up in the cool of early morning and outside the tent the paddock is a scene of carnage. Men and women are sleeping on the ground, a few on blankets. There’s a high-tide mark of bottles through the middle of the place. A red electric guitar rests against a tree. A man is awake on the far side of the paddock and he spots me straight away. Gives me a wave. I nod and turn down the driveway towards the toilets.
Sunrise is maybe ten minutes away. There are no stars. Or there seem to be only one or two, way back behind me, fading even as I notice them.
I’m making my way to the toilets when I decide not to bother. When in Rome … but where? There are hedges on either side of the driveway, but anyone could come walking down here. I look for an opening in the hedge to my right, find it and press through. Just like that, I’m in a paddock I’ve never set foot in before this morning. There’s an upside-down hull of a boat beside me and the high grass looks somehow velvety. Beyond the boat I have a glimpse of the flat, metallic surface of sea water.
But as I’m about to pull down my shorts, I observe that I’m not alone. Well, in a way I am. There is an old man without a shirt standing out in the middle of the paddock, smoking. He doesn’t see me and his back is to the sea. It’s the old man who was in the kitchen, crinkling plastic, I’m sure it is. The sky above him — above us — is turning a sort of periwinkle and the sun will break any moment, but he doesn’t see it. He’s looking at a wall of pine, his body so thin that he nearly blends into the high grass.
So here we are, the two of us in this paddock, waiting for the sun.
GIRLHOOD
I step back onto the drive and there — freshly shaven in a white bathrobe I’ve never seen before, his thin hair on end, his mouth set small and bright red in the middle of his white cheeks — is my father.
I don’t think then. Maybe I should think but I don’t. I walk to him, and he holds me, and with my head on the terrycloth of his chest, that’s the exact second the sun rises. I’m looking at the green of the hedges and the grey of the gravel when it breaks, and the shade of everything softens. Goes golden pale as if my eyes have been polished. And under my cheek, my father’s breath. Like the timber give of a wooden floor.
It’s the New Jerusalem Lutheran Church in Swallsborough, Pennsylvania, all over again. I can almost feel the space of the nave opening above me, the secrets of its attics and crawlspaces aligning in the empty sky atop the hedges. It is not just safety I feel, but good old-fashioned regression. A reckless plunge into the cavalier simplicity of delicious girlhood. It persists only for a handful of seconds, but it’s there, and I’m protected and somehow anew. An enclosing and tangible incarnation of paternal care that draws me into it like a waterless baptism. The firming of the bedrock way down under our feet. The weight of each and every cell shrinking with a force that I can almost hear, a kind of hiss as burdens convert to vapour.
Who among you would like a life like this?
THE FLIGHT OF A BUTTERFLY
Ella and Tihema are running. They are running down the lane past the official East Cape Book Depository. In the holes of light and shade, a monarch, which is their object. The monarch swerves up and over a hedge, lost to sight. Only I see that it’s not lost to sight, for now Ella and Tihema turn into the hedge, fling themselves through a gap and into the paddock beyond, the same spot where Tama and I were ambushed by goats.
I sprint down the slope towards a fence. The children bound a stile, leaping thoughtlessly from its top step into shoulder-high grass. They disappear into a grove of stunted trees. Old fruit trees, I can smell them as I pass beneath them, though I see no fruit. Ella and Tihema make their way down the muddy banks of the stream and under the bridge where I walked with Tama, bounding over rocks and through the trickle of water to the beach. There is a dot of orange high over the sea now. It rises out of sight, sinks back to the sur
f where the children are standing.
I arrive at the sand, panting hard, almost asthmatic. The children and a small crowd are all gathered to watch the butterfly. Reina is there, and Tama, and the one with plugs in his ears, and the man with the cane, Nicholas Ray, the kaumatua, who I now know is in charge of the campground. Or at least was when it used to be a campground. There are cars parked on the beach and people climbing through the tidal pools on the far side of the bay, and all of us are watching the very same monarch that the children followed down here to the sea. In a second, it’ll be over and everyone will be back to whatever it is they do next, but for now, for this second, here we are.
United by the flight of a butterfly.
THE 28 JANUARY PREMONITION
I wake up on 28 January — for some reason I cannot plumb, I check the date on the pocket-size calendar my father has cellotaped to the wall above the microwave in his caravan — with the surest knowledge that something terrible will occur. At least I think I wake with this knowledge. I’ve said I have premonitions, and this is a fact, but what I didn’t mention was that my intensity gauge is off. Way off. Especially in the mornings. I wake up with a sluice of dreams awash inside me, bits of memory and fantasy intermingling, my bladder about to burst, and I intuit only the faintest gist of this or that. I think, Today is a miracle, and, hours later, I watch a bee alight on my knee. Ah, I think. That’s it, then. Not quite a miracle.
But then, who is to say?
