by Thom Conroy
In the moment before the rubber lips of the doors make contact, I extend my foot. The doors tap my ankle, bounce apart, and in we go. Lyle is looking at my reflection in the large mirrored panel in front of us. It is to this reflection of me that he apologises.
‘About Harvey,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
I laugh at his reflection, mawkish and bashful in its heavily framed glasses.
‘I know I shouldn’t have said anything,’ the reflected lips are saying. ‘I know that Harvey—’
But that’s as far as those lips get, because my mouth closes over them while they’re still parted, tasting the salty y of Harvey.
Out in the carpark, never mind how much later, I stand outside my car and let my mind wander. I should be heading back to my own hotel for the night, true, but on the other hand, it’s not that late. And even if it were, I still have the whole night before me.
Thinking this, I remove my keys from my pocket, and there is the profusely bearded cleric from Sydney staring up at me with his austerely serene gaze. Only this time, he’s not withholding anything. At last he has an answer. The one answer I have long required.
STEVE CYNZK’S FAULT, AGAIN
My propitious feeling is fulfilled at 11 a.m. on the day of the impossible dinner in the form of a text from Steve Cynzk: he’s ill, he’s sorry, he can’t host the dinner. I’m walking on the river terrace with Lyle, taking one last look at 45 Tindell Terrace and my old elm, when the text comes. I reply immediately, telling Steve how sorry I am to hear that, wishing him well, and when I put away my phone Lyle is staring.
‘What’s with you?’
I explain the situation, and Lyle informs me it’s a fortunate turn. Now we’ll meet in a restaurant and the public nature of the reunion will rub the edge right off. It’s the best luck of all. For the ten minutes it takes me to get hold of my father, I adopt Lyle’s view and remain ebullient, but when I pass on the news to Eugene, he manages to stamp out my mood in just under ten words.
‘No problem. We’ll have the dinner at my office.’
‘Your office?’
‘Maybe you and Mum can come over a bit early. Help me move things around.’
‘And Lyle,’ I say.
‘And Lyle, yes.’
I tell my father I love him, intending to sound forlorn, but the line goes dead, my dejection unnoted, wasted. I tuck my phone in my pocket and notice now where we are. The hedge of my childhood is directly before us, the great already-yellowing canopy of the elm rising up behind the squat stucco house and the matching faces of two little girls peering out from behind the curtain of the room where I once slept.
‘What’s the matter?’ is what Lyle wants to know.
THE IMPOSSIBLE DINNER
I know these things are about the current of the breeze, the accidents of timing and reflex, the falling of light, the colour of a shirt, and so on the way to my father’s office I’ve got my eye open for all the right signs. There’s a fender-bender and a closed side street, which are not exactly open-ended omens, but, as I’m driving over the bridge, down there on the hard black surface of the river a water-fowl is landing, which is hard to spin as inauspicious, but just before I turn away it flaps haphazardly, veering out of control, on the brink of a crash.
I park in the shade in front of a vacant suite of offices where once, when I came here as a girl, I remember there was a family of Indian immigrants running a dye business. Sometimes you’d see a rack of teal sarongs outside in the sun or a shirtless little boy sitting on the grass.
As Lyle and my mother are unloading the loaves of bread and bottles of wine my father asked us to pick up on the way, I realise I’ve forgotten my notebook. My instinct is to call out that I need to go back to the hotel, but now I see Tama. ‘I thought you said you’d never be back in the Manawatu,’ I say.
‘Just for the one night. First light — I’m gone!’ Tama says, opening his arms.
As I step out of his embrace, I see my father, an unlikely ultramarine apron tied around his waist, coming down the footpath in our direction. I rush in front of Lyle and my mother to meet them, make introductions, and then wait, my forearms tense, poised for the most difficult moment of all. Eugene spends a handful of seconds looking stumped, then nods and smiles at me.
‘Reina couldn’t make it,’ he says.
I catch Lyle’s eye, my look some mash-up of exasperated and relieved, but Lyle strikes me as composed, vindicated. Somehow this is another item of evidence in support of his unspoken trust in the vagaries of fate. I turn away, unconvinced.
I may not be convinced, but as the afternoon wears on my stance feels harder and harder to defend. Like I said, it’s current and motion, accident and beat that determine the outcome of such occasions, and it seems the bunch of us begin to synchronise. There is discussion, weather and sport and menu, but it gives way to a productive new language of grunts and nods, hand-gestures and taps, and before I know it we’re all pushing tables together, shifting bookcases to make room, handing up folding chairs from the tomb-like crawlspace under the floor of my father’s office. Given his profession, I should not be surprised at the unlikely abundance of materialising objects — and yet I am. Chairs, cutlery and candelabras, crystal and rickety old buffet tables — a teal tablecloth I recognise from the Indians of yesteryear. In no time there are also vases of fresh flowers and the smell of garlic and prawn wafting in from the storage bay where my father has plugged in one of three black glass-topped ovens that have been stored there for the past decade.
Why had I never imagined they might actually work?
Tama opens a bottle. Pinot Gris from his cousin’s vineyard, three years old. My mother, whom I’ve told Lyle and Tama will refuse anything alcoholic, holds forth her glass, and the room breaks into laughter. Before the last note of it trails off, there’s a young girl’s voice in the doorway, and here is Ella in a white dress, her hair in cream ribbons, her shoes in her hand. A woman I do not know, yellow-brown skin and two cheeks of freckles, follows a full two minutes or so behind Ella. This woman is bedraggled and flushed — she’s obviously walked — but she’s eager enough to take me into her arms and tell me she’s Sue, the neighbour, the one I spoke to on the phone.
My arms still around her, I say, ‘I’m Djuna.’
Sue winks. ‘Course you are.’
‘Joanne couldn’t make it?’ my mother says.
Sue shakes her head, looks over at Ella who is being fed a taste of something from my father. ‘Nah,’ is all she says.
To me, she says, ‘Sends her love.’ She gives it, and I’ll take it. And someday I’ll tell Joanne everything and somehow I will make everything right between us, I swear it. But not now, not tonight.
THE TREES OF THE INDUSTRIAL PARK, OF WHICH MY FATHER says he is the sole remaining occupant, are stuffed with blackbirds. So many birds that the ruckus is sufficient to incite Tama to stand and close the windows, but I follow him to the high wall of glass overlooking a narrow paddock and, beyond that, the gleaming curve of the Manawatu River, and I ask him to please leave them open.
‘No one can hear themselves think,’ he says.
I turn him away from the windows and back to the table, where my father is setting down a tray of tiny breads smeared with tapenade, a favourite from our Tindell Terrace days, and I say, ‘No one needs to think.’
I’ve only intended to say this to Tama, a little intimacy passed between us, but my father holds up his glass. ‘To not thinking,’ he says.
The fact is we haven’t really invented an excuse for this dinner, but it’s beginning to seem strangely akin to a celebration, and in this spirit Lyle — like I say, he has a sixth sense of his own — asks if he, too, can propose a toast. Tama and my father, ringmasters, stroke their chins, mock deliberate, and decide they can let it pass this one time. Thinking, presumably, of himself and his new job, Lyle toasts to new beginnings, but the heartiness of my father’s Hear, hear suggests Lyle is not alone in his sentiment, a
nd so I ask him for the latest.
‘A new business venture,’ Tama says, grinning. We’ve just heard how the salvaging of the Rena thing went belly-up, so the sigh that goes across the table is not unexpected.
‘No, no,’ my father says, ‘this is something else.’
‘A newer new,’ Lyle says. ‘Something completely different!’
My father puts his hand on his heart. Candles are sputtering down the table and the windows are violet with the last of the sun. I notice now that the birds are almost finished singing. A few twitters, the trilling dip of a whistle.
‘Well, not completely different,’ Eugene admits. ‘We’re salvaging things still. Boats, fixing them up and then auctioning them.’
Tama grins. ‘Only we’re making money.’
My mother rolls her eyes at Sue, who’s sitting beside her. Lucy’s had a lifetime of Eugene. She knows the drill.
‘No,’ my father says, ‘really, we are. This is different. This is good. Really good.’
‘How good?’ I say.
Everyone laughs, and my father waves his finger at me. ‘That sounds like a question from someone who wants something.’
I wasn’t going to mention it tonight, but since he’s asked. ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘I do.’
My father makes a bow and even Ella groans. ‘Name it.’
I think of the mystical stare of the cleric in my pocket and I answer. ‘Forty-five Tindell Terrace.’
Now no one is laughing. My mother takes in a breath and the room goes a little tighter. Suddenly we can hear the traffic out on the highway.
‘Djuna,’ she says. ‘We talked about this.’
Lyle sets down his glass. ‘You want to give it to the Burmese.’
‘The mosque!’ my father says. He turns to Tama, as if maybe he can say something enlightening, but Tama only shrugs. ‘Fine, then,’ my father says. ‘You can have it.’
My mother shakes her head, and my father puts his finger to his lips, playfully, like he used to do. To Lucy, he says, ‘I’ll buy your half from you. Market value.’
My mother crosses her arms, but Tama leans across the table to my mother. ‘Don’t worry, he really will. He’s good for it, swear.’
Now Sue has her glass in the air. ‘Well, then,’ she says, ‘to the Burmese!’
ON THE BANKS OF THE MOST POLLUTED RIVER IN THE WORLD
An hour or so later, I ask Lyle if he’d like to sneak out and take a walk down to the banks of the most polluted river in the world where I used to play when Eugene brought me along to work when I was a girl. My father is in the tiny kitchen off the back of the office, and my mother — old habit, I guess — has gone out to help him clean up. Sue and Tama are still at the table, voices lowered, heads close, a landscape of wine glasses sparkling around them. Ella is sitting on a thick yellow chair, her head slumped to one side. She’s fast asleep. I would be worried about her, but I’ve heard my father and Tama talking with Sue about bringing the girl up to the Cape for the school holidays. She’s got the Wells, too. Her aunt on Saturdays. And I don’t have any plans to let her slip out of my life either.
‘The most polluted river in the world,’ Lyle says, rising, catching his balance and holding out his arm for me to take hold of. ‘How could I refuse?’
We’re outside now, walking in front of the empty office where the Indians used to dye sarongs and scarves and placemats, and overhead the last dusting of twilight is not quite erased from the sky. Once we cross the carpark and climb into the paddock, the air goes thick with bugs, springy unseen little flutters on our legs and arms. We slap and curse, but otherwise walk on without a word. By now we must be in view of little kitchen where Eugene and Lucy will be standing at the sink side by side, as they’ve done so many times before. Is there enough light for them to see us, or are we invisible to my parents, the glass before them sealed over with the new dark?
‘You’re doing it for Harvey, eh?’ Lyle says.
I did not accept the offer of his arm back in my father’s office, but I take hold of it now.
‘I want them to put something there on the grounds of the mosque. A plaque or something at the base of the elm tree. That’s another condition — they cannot cut down the elm! I don’t care what happens to the house, but they can’t touch the elm. I’ll put that in the contract.’
‘You really don’t care what happens to the house itself?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Fine,’ Lyle says, ‘I know a guy who moves houses. I’ll take it off your hands.’
‘But you don’t need a house.’
Lyle swats a gnat away from his face. In the dusk I can only see his eyes, grey but somehow bright. ‘Maybe not yet.’
He doesn’t speak again until we’re across the paddock and standing in front of the stile where we can hear the rushing sound of the river. ‘I think Harvey would like it,’ he says. ‘He’d appreciate the randomness of your gesture.’
‘I think so, too.’ I turn to look back at the office complex and I see the light of the kitchen, see what might be — what likely are — the two figures of my parents, standing so close they might be a single person.
‘I didn’t bring my notebook,’ I say, ‘but if I had, I know how I’d finish it up, what I’d write.’
‘How’s that?’
‘I’d say something about us, about us from the point of view of my parents, maybe, the two of them watching us heading off to the bank of the most polluted river in the world while they stood in there with the smell of dishwater in the air and the presence of one another very close in the small space where the two of them have not stood in a very long time. And I’d write that my father would turn to my mother and ask her something he shouldn’t, not yet at least. Something like, does she want to stay over tonight, and my mother would just laugh and tell him that the story doesn’t end the way he thinks it does.’
Lyle is shaking his head at me by the time I’m done. I’m a little hurt, and I tell him so, but he just turns to the stile and takes a step up. ‘What is it?’ I say. ‘What don’t you like about that?’
Lyle holds out his hand. ‘I like it. I just don’t think the story’s over, that’s all.’
ALSO BY THOM CONROY
THE NATURALIST
A FASCINATING, MOVING NOVEL BASED ON THE REAL LIFE OF DR ERNST DIEFFENBACH: SCIENTIST, EXPLORER, REVOLUTIONARY, OUTCAST.
Dieffenbach arrived in New Zealand in 1839 as a naturalist. What he discovered was fascinating, but what his prescient records didn’t reveal was his own intriguing story. This compelling novel turns the focus on Dieffenbach. As a young idealist, he had plotted a revolution in the name of equality. Imprisoned and then exiled, first from Giessen, then Strasbourg, then Zurich, he fled to London. He hoped to redeem his reputation by joining an expedition to New Zealand. But as he was to discover, the complexities of freedom, exile and equality could not be left behind.
Featuring Darwin, Charles Heaphy and the notorious Maori chief Te Rauparaha, The Naturalist connects New Zealand’s past with world history and brings alive the story of this remarkable man.
This richly-detailed novel makes a great way to learn more of New Zealand’s history.
— GOOD MAGAZINE
The German doctor’s character, complicated life, ideas, loves and hates are fleshed out beautifully, and are wrapped in a ripping yarn of arduous travel, all set at the time when New Zealand was at the very edge of colonisation. I’m ashamed to admit I hadn’t heard of Dieffenbach before picking up this book; now I feel as though I’ve met him.
— KIAORA MAGAZINE
Regardless of historical accuracy — and a little research suggests that the book is fairly true to life — the vividness of character and landscape that Conroy captures in the novel is rather spectacular … Weaving world history and local folklore together with a deft hand for prose, Thom Conroy has written a novel about a New Zealand that is at once familiar and alien. It’s always startling to be reminded how much the landscape of ou
r country has changed in a relatively short time; Dieffenbach’s first voyage from Europe to the South Pacific on the Tory was in 1839. It has been a very good couple of years for New Zealand historical fiction, and The Naturalist continues that trend. It’s wonderfully written with a beautiful cover design (when there are takahe involved, I’m sold) and leads you on a winding journey through history, nature and Aotearoa.
— BOOKSELLERS NZ
The Naturalist is an unflinching exploration of New Zealand’s origins and a fascinating chronicle of ownership, observation and identity: a study of cultures in interaction and collision … It is very difficult for an author to write a novel about someone as special as Ernst Dieffenbach without writing a biography or a record. Perhaps creative non-fiction more aptly describes this narrative, because there is much to admire in this book.
— MANAWATU STANDARD
But it is the sympathetic drawing of the picture of Dieffenbach which makes the book such a riveting read … The Naturalist is highly recommended.
— OTAGO DAILY TIMES
While this tale is slow to start, the historical masterpiece quickly changes into a page turner as the plot jumps between England, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand and places in between.
— NZ DOCTOR
The outstanding strength of The Naturalist is the sense it contains of an early Aotearoa on the cusp of full-blown colonisation. We can feel the change in the air, the trepidation of a people who feel uneasy about the newcomers but have no real power to stop them.
— NZ BOOKS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I AM GRATEFUL TO THE BURMESE REFUGEES WITH WHOM I volunteered in 2007 — I’m still learning from this intense and formative experience. In many ways, The Salted Air is a montage, and I would like to acknowledge the use of quotations from the following texts: ‘Sleep and Poetry’ by John Keats; The Monadology by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett; The Wizard of Oz directed by Victor Fleming and written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf; ‘At the Bay’ by Katherine Mansfield; and The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne. The kuia’s monologue in the chapter ‘Happy Waitangi Day’ is adapted from the comments of an unnamed Rotorua local in ‘Waitangi Day: Coming together to celebrate’ (New Zealand Herald, 7 February 2015). Special thanks are due to Massey University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences who provided the support that enabled me to complete final revisions. My warmest appreciation goes to the Penguin Random House publishing team, especially Stuart Lipshaw, Rebecca Lal, and Kate Stone. I have particular regard for my sharp-eyed and insightful editor Jane Parkin. No acknowledgement would be complete without recognising the vision and ongoing support of Harriet Allan, publisher extraordinaire.
