by Thom Conroy
At the door to the East Cape Book Depository, my father asks me if I want him to stay with me tonight. I say I don’t, though I do. It’s what I want more than anything, but the mere fact that he suggests it counts for everything. Is enough.
‘Just get some sleep,’ he says, kissing my forehead. ‘Everything will be better in the morning.’
IN WHICH DJUNA COMES TO AN ENCHANTED PLACE
In the morning I find my father is correct. I am warm, alone, and a square of sunlight lies on the floor beside me. So, yes, I am resolutely and indisputably all right. Although they refused to do so last night, the facts sort themselves out simply enough: when Tama and I arrived yesterday afternoon we found Joanne already here, sitting beside the fire ring outside my father’s caravan and looking nothing like the way her neighbour Sue had described her on the phone. Bruce and Ella, she said, were tucked away in Reina’s caravan for the night because the solicitor Joanne rang before she left Palmerston North advised her that Bruce should turn himself in as soon as possible. And so everyone had decided to give him one last night with his daughter. He’s headed not to Suriname but to jail. And he’ll be leaving today.
He may, in fact, be already gone.
With this business of things stacked up properly in my mind, I roll over to my backpack, slip out this battered notebook and a trusty pen and, at the very moment when I’m putting ink to paper, my gaze wanders across the room to one of the cardboard boxes stacked up against the wall beside me. I crawl over to it, flick through a few titles — textbooks, novels, an atlas from 1963, a children’s picture book that snaps in half in my hands. But what’s this down the side? The House at Pooh Corner.
Back in my sleeping bag, I regress into genuine wholesomeness. Christopher Robin is leaving the 100-Acre Wood, and I remember the pang of sadness I felt when I first read those words. No, I do not remember so much as dredge up that pang from the tissue around my heart, allow it to possess me as it once did. Eeyore and his sad, very long poem, and Pooh saying, in answer to Christopher Robin’s question, ‘What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying, “What about a little something?” and Me saying, “Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,” and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.’ I read the last bit of the story, set in the enchanted place called Galleon’s Lap, close the book and, as if I knew it was going to go off all along, reach for my phone the second before it starts to ring.
‘Djuna,’ my mother says, though the number is Lois’s. ‘I’m here, I’m back.’
‘In New Zealand?’
I’m astonished, of course. At the same time, I’ve learned not to put anything past this woman. My mother tells me a little more then, but not so much as I should like because she is tired and a bit unwell, which is part — but not all — of the reason she’s back here. We trade a few details, promise to call each other the next day after she’s rested properly, and I put away this notebook, though I’ve still got the tip of the pen in my mouth and a pleasing gush of balminess dropping down my torso.
WHEN MY MOTHER WAS A GIRL
When my mother was very young — four or five — her mother, my grandmother, went into surgery for a deviated septum. While my grandmother was recovering, my mother was taken care of by a Mennonite family a few streets away, and it was my grandfather’s task to walk her there each morning. My mother still remembers picking wildflowers along the way and giving the bunch not to the Mennonite family but to her father, who stood at the gate of the house, grasping a bunch of purple and red and yellow blossoms in his hands.
THE BREAKING OF THE FELLOWSHIP
It must be nearly noon when I emerge from the East Cape Book Depository. The sky is clouded, but pocked with acre-wide holes of open sky. Down on earth, crowds are milling. The sinks in the toilet block are occupied by women with overflowing bags of ointments and lipsticks. There is, for the first time since I’ve been here, a queue for the toilet. As I take my place in it, I feel — or think I feel — the eyes of the other women on me. One my age gives a smile, a fleeting, half-hearted movement of her lips. A pair of teenage girls with dark hair look me up and down and then look at one another. Like the smile, it’s a fleeting gesture, casual and easy enough to forget, but at the same time unforgettable. You are white, this look says. And not white as in skin colour, white as in soul colour.
When I arrive at my father’s caravan, I’m surprised to see the paddock chock-full of cars, utes, trailers, blue and orange and beige tents, fire rings, cloth folding chairs and clotheslines. There are no people around expect for a single baby, fat and radiant-looking, clad in a nappy and stumbling through the maze of blue and orange and beige tents.
Before I open the tiny caravan door, I can smell that my father is cooking. Basil and bacon and caramelising onion. When I enter, I see that gathered in the cramped, dim space of the caravan are Reina, who gives me an embrace, her chest warm up against mine; Tama, off in the corner with a book on his lap; Tihema with a device in his hand and buds in his ears; and, looking impossible and incongruent standing in the kitchen with one of my father’s aprons around her waist, Joanne.
I give my greetings and make my way to my father. His coffee-enhanced peck on my cheek tempts me to spill the beans and tell him right here and now about Lucy’s return, but, with my skin still warm from Reina’s, I can’t quite bring myself to do it. What do I imagine would happen if I did? That he’d fling down his fish-slice and race for Lois’s million-dollar view? And if he did, what then? My mother would likely be roused from a petulant sleep to ask what the hell he thought he was doing there. And if she posed such a question, I know exactly how Eugene would reply. He would mutter and back away and explain that, well, he didn’t think he was doing anything at all, that, as it happened, he was just passing by.
I peer into the saucepans and catch a glimpse of the sizzling rounds of onion, bronze and sweet-tasting, but almost immediately I’m shooed away. Joanne tells me it’ll be done in a few minutes. Apparently, I’ve got good timing. I let the comment pass and ask why they’re making enough for an army. I know Tama barely eats a thing until after lunch and I can’t bring myself to imagine Joanne’s appetite as ravenous — but, then, it occurs to me, I may have some general deficiency when it comes to imagining attributes associated with Joanne.
‘We’ve got two more guests for brunch,’ Reina says. She’s walking about, casting a hostess’s eye at the tiny folding table and its pile of disposable plates.
Joanne leans over the bench and, in a voice meant only for me, says, ‘Bruce and Ella are going to join us.’
‘Bruce?’ I say, trying to keep my voice flat, unruffled, emptied of fear, revulsion, desire, affection, love, or whatever it is I feel toward the embezzler.
Joanne glances at my dad. ‘He’ll eat here,’ Eugene says, ‘then he’s going back to straighten out a few things—’
‘—and turn himself in,’ Joanne adds, her eyes avoiding mine. I see her glance at Tihema, then she lowers her voice so that I need to take two steps up to her side, close enough to smell her breath, to hear her: ‘Ella doesn’t know, of course.’ She wipes her hands on her apron as my father shuffles by with a pot in his hand. ‘We’ll tell her. In time.’
After this, a silence overtakes the tight and food-charged space of the caravan. We hear the scrape and clatter of my father and Joanne cooking, the sudden burst of a sizzle as some new ingredient is dumped onto a hot surface, muted tinkles and beeps from Tihema’s game, the turning of the pages of a Hone Tuwhare book in Tama’s hand. Now and again a seagull calls or a voice shouts or an engine starts somewhere far away. I smile at Reina, who is sitting on a chair across from me, folding and refolding a serviette. She appears to me much older than usual. Her eyes are dark and she strikes me as incurably sad, ruined even. I have this idea that her sadness is caused by me, by my desire to take my father away from her without remorse. Even as I’m thinking this, my gaze shifts to Joanne, who is s
tanding at the benchtop, grating cheese, not noticing me observing her.
‘Where are they?’ Reina says, turning, speaking over her shoulder to my father.
It’s Tama, sitting across the room, eyes still in his book, who answers.
‘Texted ten minutes ago.’ He looks up, shrugs. ‘I’ll try again.’
Tama texts again and more time passes. My father says he’s going to turn down the heat on the eggs. He asks Tama to try texting Bruce a third time.
‘They’ll come,’ Joanne says. ‘Ella probably needed to go toilet.’ But she’s staring out the window and her voice is weak. She doesn’t believe a word of this excuse, and neither do I. Don’t they see? Bruce has run off with his daughter! Without me or Joanne, the two of them are on a plane for Suriname as we speak. He’s not about to turn himself in. I recall what the neighbour, Sue, told me the other night, how she said Bruce had it all figured out. The blood is pulsing in my wrists, and again I have the sensation that this, too, is my fault. I’ve engineered much too much of what’s happening here: I kept Bruce away from Ella, spent the night with him, agreed to bring Ella up here with me without even knowing why I was coming in the first place.
‘Oh,’ Joanne says, speaking in the same subdued fashion, as if she’s simply telling herself another lie, ‘here they are now.’
I hear Ella’s voice through the open window. She’s telling her father a story. I hear her mention a jelly-tip ice cream.
For her, I see, the world has not shattered. Not yet.
The door opens. All of us look away, disinterested, unconcerned. Only my father steps forward, untying his apron, welcoming, asking Ella if she would like some bacon, asking Bruce if he would like a coffee. Ella says, yes. Bruce says, yes, thanks, he would like a coffee. He is standing beside me and so decidedly not looking at me that my face flushes.
‘What’s the matter?’ Ella says, speaking now to the room. I glance at each one of us, and no one seems to know the answer, and I can feel the space straining, the air itself crackling as if with static electricity. This excruciating moment stretches out, holds, attenuates, wavering in the air until I think I’ll stand up and make a full confession.
This doesn’t happen. What happens is that Tihema takes off his earbuds and burps, and the whole room begins to laugh.
IF THIS IS BRUCE’S LAST SUPPER, THEN NO ONE COULD ASK for a better one. The group of us are sitting on folding chairs, perched on sofas, standing at the benchtop or sitting cross-legged on the floor while my father passes coffee and Reina passes grapefruit juice, a heady, sweetened brew as thick as soup and made from the fruits of the ancient but fertile tree just outside her caravan. There is bacon, beautiful hand-smoked strips of it made from a pig Tama’s cousin — Mr Earplugs, I think — has shot up in the hills. There is frittata, enough for second and third helpings, garnished with parsley and the crisp purple onion someone has grown just down the coast.
The talk is charged with jubilation. More people are due to arrive between now and Waitangi Day, a tremendous crowd of first and second and third cousins, aunties twice-removed, stepfathers, forgotten widows and desperate old acquaintances, all of them here to talk about reopening the old campground — what’s more, some have come with bank accounts and family investors. Suddenly, it seems, everyone has plans. Tama and Reina are talking about paved roads and irrigation. Tihema says he and his mum and his sister are heading back to Auckland for a while. Joanne has rung Ella’s school and worked it all out — she will stay until Waitangi Day, since Reina has invited her. My own departure, which I’ve felt has been impending for days now, is pondered aloud. The end of the summer gets a mention. Only Bruce’s exit receives no attention, not even when the meal is over and the coffee is gone and Bruce stands.
Ella and Joanne follow him to the door, and the rest of us try hard to remember all the things we had to talk about as Bruce nods goodbye to the room, his eyes resting on mine for just one innocent moment, and during this moment, I think, Him, too — I must add his name to the list of people I have harmed in the extravagance of my grief.
Tama says he’s off for a while, things to do, and when he leans in to kiss Reina she pushes him away and says she’ll join him. Without explanation, Tihema runs after them, and I’m left amid a demoralising stack of dirty dishes with my uncharacteristically quiet father. And standing here beside him, I get what it was he meant last night on the beach.
‘Your deal here,’ I say. ‘It isn’t going to go through.’
Standing beside me, looking at Tama and Reina crossing the paddock, my father pulls me to his side. ‘Not a chance. Not with the family investors. No need for me. For my money.’
Although I do not exactly mean it, I say, ‘I’m sorry.’
My father’s chest shakes with a laugh. ‘To hell you are. You and Reina both are happy as clams — and for the goddamn opposite reasons!’
‘Dad,’ I say. ‘Lucy’s back.’
My father’s features loosen and his grip goes slack on my arm. ‘Your mother?’
‘No, some other Lucy who’s a complete and total fucking stranger.’
HAPPY WAITANGI DAY
Gathering with a large group of people from the campground outside a marae situated on a hill overlooking a sweeping bay, I hear Joanne wish someone a happy Waitangi Day. Waitangi Day is the day after tomorrow, so at first I think the strange electricity passing through the crowd just has to do with Joanne getting ahead of herself, but then the voices sink into a restless, panicky quiet, and I have not the least doubt in the world that I’ve missed the point entirely.
I turn, and an older woman I have not seen before is slowly shaking her head. When she begins to speak, she takes a step forward, and she is talking not only to Joanne but to me and my father, and to the rest of the crowd, most of whom are listening, even if they seem to be continuing their own conversations on the side.
‘You can wish me a happy Waitangi Day,’ the woman begins, ‘but what if I don’t have much to celebrate? What if it is not so happy for me? How can I celebrate, have a big party and talk about the future when the past is still all muddled up? Until the disparities we face every day are resolved and the injustices of seven generations are addressed once and for all, I’m sorry, there is nothing for me to celebrate. This is no holiday of mine.’
In the moment of silence following her declaration we get the word: we have been invited to enter the marae. All eyes turn towards the opened gate, the carved posts and the surging, white-capped sea beyond.
A NEGATIVE TRANSCENDENCE
Ella, Joanne and I are returning to an empty campground, driving along the cliff, our headlights a pale tunnel flickering with the wings of insects. Everyone else is still at the marae. At the last minute Ella refused to stay the night, whimpered so long and so loud amid the other mattresses that there was only relief when we spirited her away, though no one said as much. So here we are driving with Ella’s whistling snore in the back seat and our heads full of hongi and tea, the memories of so many faces so close to our own, the inhalation of so much other breath, the sound of a language I don’t yet understand a rumbling kind of silence in my head.
Another ceremony, a larger ceremony with a spread of kai moana, is on the day after tomorrow, and Joanne and Ella are heading back to the marae for that, but as the car pulls to a stop in the paddock of ghostly tents set up around my father’s caravan, I know that I won’t be there. Joanne tucks Ella in, kisses her and unbuttons her and shushes her, while I get mugs of water from the tap, and this feeling of departure begins to takes root. I’m leaving. I turn off the tap, and I know it’s true. I am leaving.
No one else knows this. In fact, not more than an hour ago I promised Tama I wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. But then, he didn’t believe me. Just hugged me and told me I had to take a book. Said he knew the whole inventory of the East Cape Book Depository off by heart and if he didn’t find a book gone he would hunt me down and make me take a whole box of them.
Outside �
�� Joanne, it seems, is now smoking cigarettes — the stars are pinned to a high vault. There is no wind, no sound of voices or music. Everyone else must be at the marae. Everyone must be sleeping, even my father who seems to have accepted his fate, though I heard him arguing in hushed tones with Reina earlier today. So it’s just the three of us here. The three of us and the towering macrocarpas so black they are an absence. A kind of negative transcendence. But now I’m laughing aloud because I have no idea what I’m on about.
‘Thanks for coming back with me,’ Joanne says. She blows white smoke up and I watch it dissipate. ‘I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to have to think.’
‘Joanne,’ I say, my voice cracking. I wonder just what it is I’m going to tell her. Not about Bruce, I find myself begging. Please, not now. If not now, then when?
Soon. I promise myself this much. No matter what happens, soon.
‘I’m taking off in the morning.’
Joanne looks at me like I’ve said the part I didn’t say. She is wounded, of this there can be no doubt.
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t really know why I came up here in the first place, remember, and I don’t really know why I’m leaving, either.’
‘I thought you came to get your dad. And you haven’t done that.’
I smile at Joanne. It thaws her a bit. But not all the way. ‘No, I haven’t done that.’
Joanne sleeps on the pull-out sofa with Ella and I take my sleeping bag and lay it on the kitchen floor, the smell of mouse poo and cooking grease a little too rich for my liking. Lying here in the dark, I take out my journal, my trusty pen. My head is still steeped in the day, in the shared breath of so many others, the sunlight and sea, the lilt and cadence of te reo, the creases and dimples of so many singing faces. I turn on my phone for light, and it immediately illuminates a bookshelf at eye level — cookbooks, Birds of New Zealand, a coffee-table book of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, the same blue paperback edition of To the Lighthouse that was always on the shelves in our house. I remove this book, crack it open and feel the shifting of loose pages between the covers. Smell the rising dust.
