by Laura Elliot
Light footsteps sound behind her. Lauren’s arms slide around her waist.
‘Don’t be cross, Julie.’ Her sister’s voice is subdued. ‘If I talk about him, I’ll fall apart. Try to understand.’
‘I’ll never understand you, Lauren.’ Julie’s anger evaporates as suddenly as it ignited. She knows, if she turns to face her sister, that Lauren’s eyes will be bleak and tearless. ‘But that doesn’t matter. I’m here to listen if you need me.’
The sun flashes between the pines as Julie walks along the narrow forest trail. Rebecca has been missing for an hour and it is time to leave the holiday park. The ferns are dense and shoulder-high, the trees entwined with creepers that brush against her face as she ventures deeper into the forest. She enters a loamy clearing and discovers Rebecca sitting on the trunk of a felled tree. Unaware of Julie’s presence, she is sobbing unrestrainedly. Julie hovers, undecided. Rebecca would hate to be discovered in such distress. Perhaps last night…all that talk about the past…it must have stirred so many memories. A scaly creature darts through the ferns and disappears. Julie, unable to prevent a shriek, jumps to one side. Rebecca turns around. Too late for pretence, she buries her face in her hands.
‘Poor Becks.’ Julie kneels beside her. ‘We’re driving you mad again.’
‘No…it’s not…’ She swallows, unable to continue.
‘It was only a silly argument, not worth upsetting yourself over.’
Rebecca wipes her eyes, blows her nose and stuffs the hankie back into her shorts. ‘It’s nothing to do with the row.’
‘Then what?’
‘It’s just…why is everyone calling me Becks?’
‘We’re not.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘It’s Cathy, isn’t it? She’s the reason you’re so uptight.’
‘Absolutely not.’ Her voice wobbles.
‘Rebecca, we all have our opinions about what Cathy did. But this is our opportunity to put the past behind us.’
‘Is that what you really believe?’
‘Dust around corners, Rebecca.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what you used to tell us. Don’t look behind. There’s nothing but dust around corners.’ Julie stretches out her hand and helps Rebecca to her feet. ‘I spoke to Cathy last night. She’s as nervous as you are about this reunion.’
‘I told you, I’m not nervous.’
‘Conor seems nice.’
Rebecca breaks off a frond from one of the ferns and waves it over her cheeks. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘He asks about you every time we talk on the phone. Why won’t you speak to him?’
‘I’ll meet him soon enough.’
The breeze stirs the forest and the ferns sway like ballerinas. Another scaly creature crouches against a stone. Almost indistinguishable, apart from a pair of beady eyes, it watches them unblinkingly.
Julie clutches Rebecca’s arm as they walk past it. There are probably hundreds of them, invisible eyes observing the strange antics of humans. Rebecca is staunch. Unlike Julie, she does not find relief in tears. Or maybe she only cries when she is alone and unobserved. In a sudden rush of sympathy, Julie tightens her grip on Rebecca’s arm. ‘Let’s go find Cinderella.’
Lauren is sitting on the steps of the camper. ‘I thought you’d abandoned me.’ She holds up a CD of Kiri Te Kanawa. ‘No more arguments about music. This is the perfect choice for today.’
For once there is unanimous agreement. With the New Zealand diva singing La Traviata, they head for the home of the black stilt.
Chapter Thirty
Cromwell
Days begin to blur. They take turns driving through the heat, stopping to picnic or visit wineries, to seek shade and relax under the parasols of pavement cafés. The scenery becomes more rugged, the ghosts of a gold-mining past visible in the shaly brown hills and decaying mining sites. Julie keeps up a running commentary. Since the trip began, she has appointed herself as their official guide and Traversing New Zealand has acquired the authority of a Bible.
On their fifth day they arrive in Cromwell. Rebecca books the motor home into a holiday park. Somehow, without realising it was happening, they have formed into a well-organised team that moves into action as soon as they arrive at a new destination, connecting electricity, checking out internet cafés, bathroom and kitchen facilities, and anything else necessary for survival. While Julie busies herself in the kitchen and Lauren applies sunscreen lotion, Rebecca enters the internet café.
Lulu’s email assures her that all is going smoothly in her absence. Sheila’s email is filled with details of her children’s latest achievements. She notices an email from Tim Dawson. The tranquillity photograph is attached. She opens the attachment and stares in amazement at the photograph. Tim has captured the sky and the sea in a harmonious movement and linked her in their frame. Her expression is pensive as she stares across the breadth of a city and its surrounding plains. Tendrils of black hair blown by the breeze curve back from her forehead and reveal its broad plane. Her nose is slightly on the large side but is balanced by her wide mouth, which is curved in a half-smile. The photograph covers half a page and is captioned ‘South Island Reflections. Rebecca Lambert visits the Christchurch Gondola.’
She clicks into his email.
Hi Rebecca,
Hope the trip is going smoothly. Where are you now? You mentioned that you hoped to cruise Milford Sound and you’ll be staying overnight in Te Anau. Will you be there on Friday? I’d like to meet up with you again. I’m doing a photo shoot at a conservation centre in the Fiordland National Park. As you’re interested in our endangered species, you might like to see a takahē breeding centre. The bird was believed to be extinct…never mind…I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Your photo is attached. It’s beautiful. You’ve become the Southern Eye pin-up girl. Looking forward, hopefully, to meeting you again.
Tim Dawson
Rebecca has never seen herself as beautiful yet Tim has captured something, redefined her features in a subtle way that gives her lips a crushed, kissed look that is rather arresting, even, dare she think it, sexy. Before she can change her mind, she taps out a reply.
Hi Tim,
Thank you for the photograph. We’re really enjoying the trip and will be in Te Anau by Friday. Hope to see you then.
Rebecca
Cromwell, once famous for its gold mining, is now famous for its fruit orchards. Above the high orchard walls, the leafy branches of fruit trees offer a welcome shade from the sun. Street stands and shops, piled with pyramids of fruit, are doing a lively business. Drawn by the promise of homemade ice cream, they approach a café and find an empty table on the veranda.
Intrigued by the name of the town, Julie checks Traversing New Zealand and announces that it was called Cromwell by a group of English gold-mining surveyors who wanted to annoy the immigrant Irish miners.
‘That would have done the trick all right.’ Julie stabs her ice cream and speaks in the passionate voice of one who has endured eight hundred years of oppression.
‘To hell or to Connaught,’ says Rebecca.
‘If he was alive today he’d be charged at The Hague for war crimes,’ declares Julie.
‘Not to mention ethnic cleansing,’ agrees Rebecca.
‘Every beast has some evil properties but Cromwell had the properties of all evil beasts,’ says Julie. ‘That’s a quote—’
‘Give me a break!’ sighs Lauren. ‘I want to enjoy my smoothie in peace.’
‘By some archbishop,’ says Julie. ‘I remember reading it in school.’
‘Archbishop John Williams,’ says Rebecca.
‘Now, can we change the subject?’ Lauren tilts her sunhat over her eyes and flicks the pages of a magazine. Rebecca dips her spoon into blueberry ice cream and listens as Julie explains how the first fruit trees to grow in Cromwell were planted by hungry miners, who supplemented their meagre rations with fresh fruit. Today, Cromwell is at the heart of the South I
sland’s fruit belt while most of the town’s gold-mining history is buried under the Lake Dunstun reservoir.
Dust around corners. Had she really said that to her sisters? Never look behind? Yes, Rebecca nods. She probably did. She can see the lake from where they are sitting on the veranda. The past is buried yet it still lives. Beneath the façade of this friendly town with its gold-mining roots and leafy orchards, under the calm surface of the sparkling reservoir with its swag of gold, lie the broken dreams, the back-breaking drudgery of hungry, immigrant miners, the exploitation and the greed; all dead now, the gold and the dreams. Only the seeds remain. Rooted deep in the earth, they link the past to the present in a bountiful harvest.
She rises, moves briskly towards the cash desk to pay the bill. At Lake Tekapo she had buckled. Alone in the forest, the past crept up on her and she had sunk to the ground under its weight. This loss of control must not be repeated.
The temperature is high. She feels it dragging at her footsteps as they return to the motor home, their arms laden with punnets of fruit, chilli oils and sauces, marmalades and jams. A herd of deer run through a nearby field, swaying as they turn in a fluid sweep of flank and hoof.
Chapter Thirty-one
Rebecca’s Journal – 1994
I keep waking in the small hours. No matter how tired I am, or how late I go to bed, it makes no difference. Everything seems so much bleaker then. And the questions start. Insidious questions. Cathy has robbed me of serenity. She has destroyed my dreams. Yet I miss her so much I ache all over.
I keep thinking about how it used to be before they died. How she used to watch out for me when I was due home from school, her plump little legs pumping as she ran down the driveway to greet me, her plump little lips full of kisses. She hung on to my every word, rode my back like a koala bear. We were the eldest and the youngest, bonded in love. How could things change so much?
The gouging scrap of a black metal cross on the wing of Jeremy’s car. It’s a more accusing sound than the one-time echo of my mother’s dead voice. Even when the Saab was repaired I imagined the scratches, deep as an open wound. Why? Cathy was rebellious and argumentative, but never vindictive. I loved the car. I loved its comfort and style. But, mostly, I loved it because it was our escape hatch before we married. I was always conscious of my sisters in the other rooms, hushing Jeremy, afraid they’d hear. We parked in dark places along the estuary. The radio played late night music and we were greedy for each other. Jeremy talks about selling it. I wish he would. I don’t like driving it any more. My heart palpitates in the small hours and I must rise, go downstairs, heat some milk, which is supposed to help one to sleep, but nothing works. I can’t read a book or listen to music.
We have the house to ourselves now. Lauren’s back in London, back writing her novel. She claims it’s coming together in a most satisfactory manner. She has the look of a poet, rather than a novelist. Novelists can be anyone. Poets are more rarefied, slender and nervy, possibly with suicidal urges, constantly struggling to express their lives in the deeper veins of language. OK, so it’s a caricature but then…what’s life?
Jeremy had the grace not to say, ‘I told you so,’ when I returned from London without Cathy. He’d warned me I was on an impossible quest. I wouldn’t listen but I’d no idea London was so vast. A city with so many faces, colours, creeds, cultures. She could have been anywhere. On the other side of the street. She has broken my heart.
‘Hearts mend,’ says Jeremy. He holds me tightly when he awakens and finds me sleepless. ‘Your parents would want you to be happy. Cathy has done nothing but make your life a misery. Let her go, Rebecca. She doesn’t want to be found.’
How does he know? How can he be so sure?
Lydia Mulvaney doesn’t speak to me any more. I passed her in the city last week. Her paintings were hanging on the railings in Merrion Square. If she saw me, she gave no indication. I can’t believe someone who was such a radical in the seventies would blindly support her son against all the evidence. Where is the bra-burning feminist who worked with single mothers and rape victims, and lobbied for equal rights for women? What does she think Cathy and her son were doing all those times in his room? Studying the Bible? Playing Monopoly? Doing crossword puzzles?
Work helps a little. I miss college but I blew Gramps’ legacy on a hopeless search and I was lucky John Carmody took me on. He’s a good vet, compassionate, and, even though I’m only the receptionist, he’s noticed that I’m good around animals. Funny that, being so good with animals and hopeless with people.
I want a baby.
Jeremy says we’re not ready yet. We are…we are…we are…
Chapter Thirty-two
Havenswalk
Conor’s paddle whips the lake in short, sharp thrusts, but Lyle is already ahead. For a man in his sixties, Lyle is fit and strong, and never patronises Conor by letting him win. To be constantly beaten by an old man is disheartening but the training schedule is building up Conor’s strength. Next year he will run, kayak and cycle across the South Island in the Coast to Coast Triathlon. He accelerates through the water. The wind frisks his face. His head sings with the energy of being young and fit.
Yesterday, Julie sent him a photo from her mobile phone. It was taken in a café in Cromwell and, for the first time, he saw Rebecca as an older woman. She was still recognisable as the younger Rebecca in the family photograph–and the resemblance between her and his mother has grown rather than diminished since their separation. His aunts are holding glasses of ice cream towards the camera and smiling, like they are all saying cheese together.
He has plans for Rebecca. Horse trekking and a visit to Abel Tasman Park to see the llamas. He wonders if she rescues horses from apartment blocks. Having seen The Commitments, he knows that horses live in apartment complexes and tiny urban gardens, but he is unable to imagine any green space that does not stretch beyond his horizon.
London, where he was born, is a vague memory. He remembers cars at night, a dark staircase leading from Alma’s shop to her flat upstairs, and the smell of aromatic oils. He still lives with the smell of oils. They ooze from the corridors of Havenswalk and are as much a part of his life as the sight of people doing shoulder stands or releasing the yoga breath of life.
His childhood memories are mainly of the South Island and Havenswalk–not the Havenswalk of today, with its restaurant and veranda and swimming pool and meditation rooms, but a rackety old house with holes in the roof and a stone floor where rats scurried and the cobwebs seemed thick enough to use as hammocks. He lived with his mother and Alma in the nearby farmhouse while the old building was repaired and the chalets built. Workmen carried him on their shoulders, sent him to the foreman with an order to bring back a glass hammer, and sang ballads about gold mines and sugar cane fields, and driving seven hours to reach the nearest pub. When they went home at night, he walked by the lake with his mother and listened to her talking about a centre where people could come and be serene. He asked her what ‘serene’ meant. Not to have thoughts clambering around in your head and regrets bowing you down to the ground, she explained. She called the lake ‘Heron Cove’. The workmen had another name for it, a proper name that once belonged to a Maori princess, yet his mother’s nickname stuck.
When Havenswalk opened, Ruthie and Hannah arrived to work in the kitchens. Others came and went, yoga instructors who stood like arrows before the lake, and tai-chi practitioners moving their arms in slow motion replays. Then, four years ago, Lyle knocked on the door and asked his mother if there were any spare jobs she could give him.
Conor paddles faster and catches up on Lyle, who has stopped paddling and is relaxing back in his cockpit, drinking water. Conor draws alongside and rests his blades, watches a fish glide under the kayak. Through a gap in the trees, Lyle’s house, looking as dilapidated as usual, is visible. It is little more than a shack with a corrugated iron roof hanging low over mottled walls. Uninvited callers are not welcome but Conor calls any time he likes. L
yle is the nearest thing to a father he knew until his real father came on the scene. It amazes Conor how seemingly unrelated events can create momentous happenings. If his mother had refused to look beyond Lyle’s shabby clothes and bony face, his shoulders so stooped he seemed to be clasping secrets inside a shell, they would not have a garden filled with vegetables, fruit and herbs, no rose arbour or glow-worm grotto, no lawn sloping to the lake where the marquee for her wedding will soon be erected. And Conor would never have met his father.
Chapter Thirty-three
Queenstown
Lauren’s nightmare is familiar. The landscape, even the characters, can change but the face remains the same. It appears at the window. Eyes stare in at her, illuminate the interior of the camper but Lauren remains frozen, unable to move or call out a warning, as the camper begins to move. She screams but the sound is a whimper, barely audible and her sisters sleep on, unable to hear her, unaware that the camper is gaining speed, and they are plummeting downwards through a forest where branches bend and buckle, and claw against the walls. Her mother, dressed in her old gardening clothes, reaches out her arms to stop it. Her grip is weak, a ghost flitting by. As they hurtle past, Lauren sees a young girl standing by her mother’s side. She recognises the prostitute from the restaurant in Bangkok, her slinky black trousers and red satin blouse, her figure moulded by a glittering silver belt. When the camper crashes into a tree, the older woman shields her from the sight. Lauren, trapped in her own nightmare, is unable to escape the grinding screech of steel turning on its side. The sound is too terrible to endure and Lauren, knowing she is the only person in the world who can handle this chaotic terror, screams once again and jerks herself awake.
