by Thom Conroy
But as the last sound of the car receded and the night closed back in around me, the sea rushing to my ears again, the lowing of the unseen cows starting again, I found myself wishing the car would return. I felt for the pocketknife in my jeans. I was not defenceless. And who can say why someone might be driving along this coast at — I checked my phone then, its blue rectangle of light like the doorway to some alternative world of beds, my father’s snoring, Ella’s warm frame beside me — 3.30 in the morning? The dead middle of the dead middle. And yet who knew why anyone would be out here? It might be that the passing car was driven by a woman like me, by a grandmother or a mother or an aunt who’d had enough and was making a break for it, the same as I was before my car ran out of petrol maybe five kilometres back.
But, then, is this what I was doing in the salted air? Making a break for it? A break for what? It had seemed so clear when I left maybe two hours ago, but now I can’t get a handle on my own reasoning. The argument I used with my father in the dead of night outside his caravan is lost to me. I recall him asking me to stay, asking me to wait until morning. Assuring me he’d talk with Bruce, if he ever found his way there. I remember my father telling me everything would be all right. But I also knew what he didn’t understand. What he didn’t suspect about his own daughter.
MY COMFORTING LITTLE CREEK
What sort of thing makes me feel safe? I’m at a loss. I fumble for an image, anything at all, and arrive at my mother sitting at the kitchen table in our house on the Palmerston North river terrace. She looks up from a piece of stationery, a pen in hand, an envelope and a handwritten letter beside her. A cup of tea, one greying strand of her hair on her temple, contemplative, startled to see me. I watch her there long enough to see the corners of her mouth turning up so that I know she’ll call me to her and hold me and I won’t be out here by the rushing pounding darkness of the sea any more, out here beneath the infinite and sterile plain of the heavens.
What else brings me safety? It takes a moment to come to me, but there it is: my father, also in a kitchen. Only he’s standing. He’s talking, of course. Even in my imagining of him, he’s talking. A chopping block in front of him, the smell of cooking in the air. And behind him, beyond him in the next frame, is the Puma herself, Lois. Lois with her chocolate cake. I hadn’t expected her, but there she is. Now my thoughts drift, turn. I stumble on a bit of truck tyre tread and then re-submerge into my comforting little creek of near-dawn musing. I see a stone wall. My grandmother’s face. She’s drinking a tall glass of water.
Now I imagine a stone walkway leading to no place I recognise.
Dusk closer to a pink gas than to any form of light in high gum trees, almost floating.
I see the high windows of a city building blue at noon.
I see schoolgirls, eight- or nine-year-olds. They’re wearing orange hats and pulling ropes with wooden blocks tied to them. They’re laughing with each other and eyeing me askance. They have secrets. They begin to run.
All is right with the world.
Still I can’t help but wonder, To whom was my mother writing?
I AM NOT HERE
I am conscious. I sit, I write. I hear the shower on the other side of the wall. I smell dust and myself, and, more vaguely, leather. I am aware of who I am and how I came to sit here. Of what has preceded this moment and what I know will follow. And yet my consciousness is incomplete. Hollowed out. It strikes me as the veneer meant to obscure a surface. What this surface is actually made of, I cannot tell. Or, I can tell. This surface is skin. Skin in two shades: my own and Bruce’s.
At the same time, I am as light as a scrap of tissue paper. Almost entirely absent.
Now the shower stops and my stomach tingles.
Am I excited or simply afraid?
I remember the sound of Bruce’s car in the darkness. I remember my fear of the unknown, and I cling to it again, hold it almost sentimentally in my mind.
There is a human sound in the little bathroom. A grunt that comes with towelling off. Nothing more than a little expulsion of air, but I feel it in my gut and, against all intention, my groin.
I remember the ride in Bruce’s car just a half-hour ago now. I remember the words that passed between the two of us. My surprise at seeing him behind the wheel and, deeper down, my satisfaction at knowing I couldn’t get away from him after all. As we turned into the little town of Opotiki, a white cat ran across the road in front of us. The creature was nearly invisible, with the sky also being grey-white and the tarmac of the road itself gleaming with a white lustre from the dawn. The trees and shrubs on either side of us were monochromatic and livid-coloured. The single house beside the road was also white.
‘What do you reckon a white cat means?’ Bruce said.
‘Maybe it’s the same as a black cat, but worse.’
He laughed, and I smelt the liquor on his breath. ‘And maybe it’s the opposite.’
I wanted to tell him to drop me off right there, and my heart began to beat faster at the prospect of being rid of him, as it is now beating faster again as he emerges from the shower.
‘Still writing?’ he is saying.
My back is to him, but I hear the floorboards of the motel creak as he moves closer.
I remember his car stopping when he first saw me walking between the sea and the road. I knew it was not far from dawn. I knew at that point I could hold out until proper daylight and get a ride. At the same time, this is why I refused to hide. With dawn so close, the danger of hitching a ride seemed to fade away.
He is standing behind me now.
I remember the feeling of my finger on the top of my pocketknife as his car came to a stop.
He is touching me. Kissing my neck, licking at the sweat in the most reviling way. Even so, I can feel myself responding. I want to put down this pen, even as I write this.
I remember recognising his car. Thinking I could run away from him. Glancing at the wide beach beside me, almost feeling my feet on its packed black sand.
He is touching me.
I remember he was not surprised to see me, and I remember how I knew at once what had happened. Tried to recall if I had seen his car passing me the first time on the way down the coast to the campground. I also knew what would happen next.
What I would not let happen next.
LIMBO
I am sitting in the passenger seat of a car, with Tama asleep in the driver’s seat beside me. His head is thrown back, he’s snoring, he reeks of beer, and all the lines of his face have grown stark. I can see, for the first time, the grey in his stubble, the deep pockmarks on his cheeks. Craters, really. Asleep, he does not look so kind. Without the placid expression he usually wears, he appears worn down, middle-aged. He looks, I think with an unexpected laugh, like an ex-con.
He shifts at the sound of my laugh, his snore going gurgly, as if he knows I’m staring. Once he sobers up, we’ll head back to my car with petrol, and then everything will begin again: Ella and my father, Bruce and Suriname. But the truth is, part of me would prefer to stay here, sweaty, exhausted, famished. The front seat of Tama’s car on this Opotiki side street with the cry of unseen seagulls and a rising mugginess in the air is about as near to limbo as anyone could come, but I think this is what appeals to me about it.
How many hours ago was I walking down the far side of this same street, wondering whether or not to cry? No, I don’t want to think of it, let alone commit it to paper. But I will.
TWO PEOPLE IN A MOTEL ROOM
She turned from the desk and found him standing there, naked.
‘You look like you’re about to laugh,’ he said, a smile on his face.
She stood and unbuttoned her blouse, undid her bra. Against her breast, his face was rough, unwelcome.
‘I’m not sure I like the smell of you,’ she said to him.
He began feeding on her, like a baby or a boar, and she pushed away his head. Her stomach lurched.
He told her he was leaving his wife, and she
said he couldn’t do that. She moved him to the bed and said, ‘Anyway, you’re going to jail.’
He pulled away from her. He looked abashed.
‘Who told you that?’
She unbuttoned her jeans, dropped them to the floor. ‘You’re an embezzler,’ she said. She reached down and touched him, her hand squeezing too hard. Did she intend him harm? ‘And now everyone else knows it.’
He moved away from her, pushed off her hand. He seemed speechless as she removed her underpants. He seemed about to cry.
She lay down and motioned for him to get on top of her. He didn’t move, but he looked at her.
‘C’mon.’ She parted her legs for him.
As he was climbing on to the bed, she said she was glad he hadn’t seen his daughter the night before. She said it was she who had asked her father and the two other men who met him at the gate to the campground to turn him away.
‘But I’m her father. How could you do that?’
She felt her hips moving all on their own, and she didn’t answer.
Before she left, she said that she would never see him again. That, in fact, she hated him. As she spoke these words, she felt, on the one hand, that they were true. At the same time, she knew for the first time that they could never be true. That, in fact, if she saw him again, something would be formed between them that she would not be able to reject.
The man sat there on the edge of the bed, naked, and just when she thought he was going to turn to her and utter something venomous, he said he was scared, that he didn’t want to go to jail, that he didn’t hate her, and that he had always believed there was something between them.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that you believed that.’
‘But you believe it, too,’ he said. ‘That’s why you wanted to get to know Ella. That’s why you care for her so much.’
She dressed without answering. There were words in her mouth but she chewed them into tiny pieces and swallowed them letter by letter. Even so, she could feel them reshaping inside her, swimming in her blood and flickering across the infinitesimal spaces of her brain, moving into view and retreating, each word a glimpse of the sprawling, ever-forming fabric which made her even as she was making it.
A minute later, half-running on the footpath outside, a dog was stalking her, its hackles up, its bark growly and dangerous, and when two men came to call to the dog — its name was Ginger — one of them turned back to the street after the dog retreated and he spoke in a voice she knew at once.
‘Djuna?’
‘Tama?’
DANGEROUS GROUND
I’m driving my own car, probably a kilometre or so behind Tama, with Björk playing. It’s supposed to be uplifting, classically happy and jubilant music, but I turn it off and take the long, smooth turns over the pink dusk of the sea in silence, like a woman driving in a funeral procession.
What I want is to turn back. But, no, I don’t want to turn back. I want to go — where exactly?
Tama asked me the same question a half-hour or so ago as we were driving along looking for my car. I had a sickening fear that it would be gone, hijacked and joyridden and already a smouldering pile at the dead end of a metal track deep in the Raukumara Ranges. In the minute or so before we saw it sitting just where I’d left it, a dark and dusty hump of metal on an especially inauspicious-looking stretch of coastal highway, Tama said the same thing.
‘Could be gone,’ he said, the beginning of a smile on his face.
‘I hope it is.’
‘Then what?’ Tama had asked, and immediately I understood that the question was real, something that extended beyond the comedy of the moment. And so I responded in kind.
‘I wish I knew.’ I caught a glimpse of the sea, steely blue, in an opening between trees, and I took in a long breath. ‘Tama? Can I ask you something?’
‘Go on then.’
‘Reina and my father. Do you think there’s any future for them?’
‘Oh!’ Tama said, startled. He began to slow down. ‘There it is.’
We came to a rather sudden stop on the verge opposite my car, and Tama was outside before I could stop him. When he was filling my petrol tank, however, he was cornered, and so I posed the same question about Reina and my father. He didn’t answer at first, and all I heard was the gulping exchange of petrol from the plastic container into the depths of my car’s tank.
‘Dangerous ground, that.’ He tapped the spout of the container, removed it, and the air around blossomed with the sweet smell of petrol.
‘Just talk,’ I said. ‘I want to hear someone else say something about it.’
Tama screwed the top on the petrol container and looked at me. ‘You want to know, and so I’ll tell you — I think they’re both dreamers.’
‘Dreamers?’
Tama nodded. ‘They dreamt each other and so here they are.’ He flung his arms up at the landscape around us and somewhere behind him I heard the lowing of a cow. ‘But it’s a summer dream, that’s all.’
I followed Tama back to his car, watched him stow the petrol container, sure that there was more to say, that he would elaborate or make a prophecy, but instead he slammed shut the boot, walked up to the driver’s door and told me he’d see me back there.
But I think I understand him. Dreams end, sleepers awake. So that leads me back to Tama’s question: what’s waiting next for me? As I pose it to myself, something shifts inside. A lightening sensation. A tingle in my chest. I don’t know the answer, but I want to. More than anything, I want to. It’s a feeling like need in my throat, and what I think is that I catch a glimpse of my future. Not just a corner of it, but a long, shimmering track of it, and the image makes me press my foot on the accelerator.
CAT COUNTDOWN
My father once told me a story about a man who adored cats. The man was a friend of my father’s in America. When both of them were twenty-three years old, this man decided that he would always own at least one cat until the day he died. What’s more, he decided that he would estimate how many cats that came to, and name his cats in a sort of life-long countdown. Accordingly, he decided to name his current cat Ten. When Ten died, the next would be named Nine and so forth. If all went to plan, the man’s final cat would be named One.
‘So where is he down to now?’ I remember asking my father.
‘He passed away. Only got to Six.’
I remember feeling deflated by the story and intentionally not thinking of it for years after. But I’ve grown to like it since. And I get the moral as well: what seems at first to be the promise of a thing to come is the thing itself.
THE UNDEAD TRANCE
When my father says ‘It’s all over’, my senses are so full, so choked with the input of life and the sting of salt, that I’m taken aback. I nearly trip on the wet, hard and entirely flat surface of the beach. Except for a catnap a few hours ago, I haven’t slept since the day before I left the campground, and I’m so deep into that undead trance of sleeplessness that I could be convinced he’s talking about more or less anything: his and Reina’s relationship, Ella’s childhood, the apocalypse. The world is, I notice, tilting to one side so that it seems as if the clouds will spill into the sea, and I stop walking to recalibrate.
‘Djuna?’ My father is touching my shoulder, his voice brimming with paternal solicitude. This much seems straightforward, but what else is there to recall? I see Joanne’s face in the firelight and recall that she’s here now, too. Or have I dreamt this? My little lie-down earlier was shallow, fitful and dominated by the dream touches of a man who — impossibly and grotesquely — was both Harvey and Bruce at the same time. I woke then to my father beside me. Is that right? No, I woke alone, but not in my bed in his caravan. I’m enjoying this, piecing together my recent past like a punch-drunk detective. Let’s see … I awoke in a sleeping bag on a mattress in the East Cape Book Depository.
‘Let’s not talk about it tonight,’ my father says. I’m leaning against him now, the sea air in my nostrils
. Fresh but sprinkled with a hint of brine. For some reason, it comes to me that kingfish have washed up on the beaches while I’ve been away, thousands of them, and when I arrived at the campground — was that tonight? yesterday? — it was blazing with campfires to grill the sudden bounty of the oceans.
‘I’m sorry.’ I let go of my father and see his face in the hollow-looking illumination of the high moon. Haggard is the word that comes to me. I can’t ever recall thinking this about my father, and this, in and of itself, is enough to convince me that I am not myself.
‘You’re tired,’ my father says. He takes my hand.
We begin walking again, but where are we going? What time is it, anyway? I have the feeling that it’s very late.
Bruce is here. In the campground. This knowledge returns to me like a hand on my chest, and, with it, a whole flood of unlikely information that’s been drifting around in my mind. But this fact stands out above the others, and I end up saying it aloud.
‘Bruce is here.’
My father misses the urgency of my proclamation and says nothing in response. I stop walking again, tug on his hand like a little girl. Like a little girl.
‘Everything’s okay,’ Eugene says. Why do I think of him as Eugene when the moment before he was merely ‘dad’? My thinking comes against a dark wall as we’re climbing the dunes back to the campground. Before we’re up in the paddock where I saw Mr Bob or Nothing smoking, I hear the sound of music, of talking, of singing. I smell the frying of so many fish. When we come over the rise, I’m astonished to see tents, caravans, campfires.
Waitangi Day is coming — this much I remember Tama told me. There’s a big gathering planned. Some rellies from Gisborne are visiting, apparently, though the details escape me as we make our way through groups of people eating fish and talking. I hear someone playing a guitar, a baby crying. I hear a man call my father’s name. It’s too much for me, but when I close my eyes Bruce is there waiting for me, and so I do not close my eyes.
