Eighty Days Blue

by Vina Jackson

  She buttoned up the coat, the rough material scraping against her uncovered nipples and brushing the forest of her pubic hair, and rushed down the floor’s long corridor to where the lift was waiting. Outside, she went left and reached the bottom end of the main street.

  It was a street that went on for ever, in turns busy, well lit and affluent, and further up, shady, clandestine and even seedy, as the high-class restaurants and shops made way for bars, dubious dives and bargain stores, most of which were closed at this time of night. After wandering north for half an hour, Summer stopped. She stood in a pool of darkness.

  She held her breath.

  She unbuckled and then unbuttoned the beige trench coat, exposing herself to the night.

  Just a few yards away, as she leaned back against the steel shutters of a closed store, exposed in full view under a flickering streetlight, cars raced by on the main road. None slowed down, as if she were not even present or worth a moment’s attention.

  Her mind was blank. Her cunt was on fire, or was it her face, her heart?

  Slowly the silhouette of a passer-by walking south in her direction came into focus. It was a guy. He was visibly swaying, drunk, clutching in his hand a brown paper bag from which the neck of a bottle emerged. As he arrived at her level, he slowed down. Gazed at her. Stopped.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Summer said to the drunk stranger. Begging him, forgetful of her dignity, desperate.

  The man just looked at her, dazed.

  ‘Please.’

  What else must she do? Get on all fours, uplift her arse, hold herself open?

  The man hiccupped, his eyes still hypnotised by the provocative nature of her display, a thin smile across his lips, leering at her nipples, her exposed pussy. Then he took a step forward, and another, and moved on down the street.

  Ignoring her.

  Ten minutes later, still fixed to the same spot in front of the store’s metal shutters, Summer realised how she had somehow become a parody of a dirty old man lifting his mac open to expose his genitals, and shuddered.

  She pulled the flaps of the trench coat together, buttoned herself and tightened the belt. There was a crumpled bunch of banknotes in one of the pockets. She stepped to the kerb, hailed a cab and was dropped off at her hotel.

  She took another shower, washing away not just the dirt but the memory of her despair, and determined never to wear the corset again.

  She fell into a deep sleep.

  She was woken in the morning by a call from her agent. Was she willing to extend the tour, which was scheduled to end a few weeks hence, with a further fortnight’s travelling in Australia and New Zealand?

  9

  A Homecoming

  Few other experiences made me feel as happy as walking through the large wooden arch at Auckland Airport that signalled the end of the landing corridor and the arrival into New Zealand.

  It’s the sound that always got to me first, the recorded Tui birdsong that played around the arch just before passport control, a ceremonial gateway carved with traditional Maori figures that separated my home from the rest of the world.

  When I reached that point, I had to restrain myself from breaking into a run to get through the front doors and kiss the earth like the Pope does, an action that in practice would probably have me chased through the airport by customs officials and a pack of well-trained hounds on the hunt for any sign of forbidden fruit and vegetables in my luggage.

  I always felt a little daft about my attachment to New Zealand, considering that I had left of my own accord, visited rarely and wasn’t sure if I would ever return for good. It was the land that I missed, more than anything. There was nothing else in the world that made my heart sing as much as the sight of Aotearoa appearing through the aeroplane window.

  Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, a strange name for a country not characterised by clouds but by hills, which bubble up from flat plains like the bellies of pregnant women, oceans as clear and bright as a fish’s eye and rivers that wind lazily from one end of the country to the other, smooth golden water filled with eel and trout, a permanent reminder of hot afternoons and weekends spent floating on my back in the Waihou.

  I had managed to negotiate a few days before this leg of the tour to visit my family in Te Aroha, the little town in the North Island where I was born, a couple of hours’ drive south of Auckland.

  My high school had got in touch and asked me to do a short speech at the morning assembly, a fact I found ironic, as my grades were never great and I had dropped out of university after studying music for only a year. I had also been asked to play a short homecoming gig in the school hall, and my mother had informed me proudly that my picture was in the local paper. Fortunately, not the picture that had appeared on the New York posters, in which I wasn’t wearing any clothes.

  I collected my luggage and burst through the sliding doors to the arrivals hall, looking eagerly for my brother, Ben, who had agreed to come and pick me up. He worked at the steel mill near Pukekohe, but had taken the week off to come down to Te Aroha and visit me while I was there.

  He was nowhere to be seen.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket.

  ‘Hey, sis! Come outside. I’m driving round and round to save on the parking.’

  Typical.

  I flagged him down after about his fifth lap of the pick-up area.

  ‘Hey, bro!’

  ‘Hey, little sis!’

  Ben leaped out of the car and flung his arms round me. He smelled of sweat and grease, and had changed very little since I had last seen him, though his shoulders were a little broader since he’d started working at the mill, and a few flecks of grey were apparent in his dark hair.

  ‘Jump in, quick, before they catch us,’ he said, nodding his head towards the sternly worded signs that just stopped short of promising certain death to anyone who lingered in the pick-up zone.

  He laid my violin case down on the back seat as gently as if it were an infant.

  My brother had owned the same car for as long as I could remember, a red Toyota station wagon that he had bought second-hand for less than the cost of a bicycle and patiently restored until it ran with the sort of smooth efficiency that would make a Formula One driver jealous.

  ‘Zero to sixty in fifteen minutes,’ he had proudly reminded me when he first managed to get it started.

  I sank into the passenger seat with the familiarity that comes with a fond return to something that hasn’t changed despite a long absence. My brother and his station wagon were both as reliable as the setting of the sun.

  A gentle rain had begun to fall and the windscreen wipers made a steady scrape, scrape against the glass.

  It was winter in New Zealand, but still fairly mild, much warmer than a New York winter. Despite the grey skies, it looked much more tropical than I remembered.

  I stared out of the windows at the palm trees lining the road that led to the airport.

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember it being like this. It looks like an island.’

  ‘It is an island,’ Ben replied sensibly.

  ‘I mean a proper island, like a Pacific island.’

  ‘Did you go to school? I guess the big city hasn’t made you any smarter, eh, sis? All that pollution wrecked your brain?’

  I leaned over and smacked him across the leg.

  Ben had only left New Zealand once, to visit Brisbane for a weekend of surfing. He didn’t see any reason to leave.

  ‘Wanna put a tape on?’

  He still had a cassette deck in the Toyota, and the front passenger footwell was littered with tapes. I rifled through them.

  ‘Sade?’ I teased.

  ‘She’s good. Better than Beethoven.’

  I stared out of the window again and marvelled at the lack of cars, and the fields spreading out on either side of the lanes of traffic. The last time that I had been in Auckland, it had felt like a rat race, a heaving jam of people and machines everywhere, and now even the busiest part
s looked downright parochial to me.

  ‘So did Mum tell you I’m getting married?’

  ‘No! I didn’t even know you had a girlfriend! When did that happen?’

  ‘About a month ago. Her name’s Rebecca. Bex. She lived in London for a while, so you’ll have something to talk about.’

  ‘Wow. Good work, bro.’

  ‘And she’s pregnant.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me anything?’

  ‘You never answer your phone!’

  ‘You could email.’

  ‘I’m not telling you I’m having a baby by email. Anyway, you’ll meet her at your concert. She’s in Tauranga at the moment visiting her family.’

  We drifted into silence. The rain was coming down harder now and the traffic was slow, the usual queues of city workers escaping to more tranquil parts for the weekend.

  When was the last time I phoned home? I thought about them a lot, my family, friends, New Zealand in general, but I hadn’t actually picked up the phone since Christmas, six months ago, and that was just to talk to my mum and dad. I hadn’t spoken to Ben for more than a year.

  ‘It’s good to see you, big brother,’ I said, filling up with sadness, my mood suddenly as grey as the weather outside.

  ‘And you, little sis. We missed you.’

  We spent the rest of the journey chattering about old friends and acquaintances. Nothing had changed particularly, other than the inevitable run of marriages and babies in the younger set and divorces in the older. I was always surprised to hear of couples that I knew when I left who had actually managed to stay together.

  My parents had made it, married for more than thirty years. They had always seemed fond of each other, though I had never thought that they were really in love. My brother and sister disagreed with me on that point: they thought our parents paragons of romanticism, proof that two people could stay together through thick and thin. I thought they had made it last because staying together was easier and more pleasant than the alternative of dealing with breaking up and then simply being alone. I’d always been the cynical one.

  I anticipated the onset of Te Aroha before we passed the ‘welcome’ sign informing us we had officially arrived.

  The town had always seemed to me to be cloaked in a light that was slightly darker than the surrounding neighbourhoods. I had always felt as though we lived in the shadow of the local mountain, Mount Te Aroha, and its shadow spread far longer and wider than it ought to, over the whole town. The rest of my family thought I was mad; they thought that the light in Te Aroha was just the same as it was everywhere else. I found it oppressive, like sleeping in a bed with the blankets tucked too tight.

  The mountain loomed up in the distance, a dark blot on the horizon no matter what the season. It was both the reason for the township and the first route that I found out of it.

  I’d climbed it when I was a toddler, with my father. I’d given up somewhere near the bottom because the ground was so muddy and the ascent ahead so overwhelming. My legs couldn’t find any purchase in the earth, so Dad had picked me up and put me on his shoulders and carried me all the way to the top.

  When I looked out and saw what I imagined was the rest of the world spread out in front of us, I’d felt for a few moments that I was finally free of the shadow that the mountain cast, and from that day on, I saw everything outside the town borders as the Promised Land. I’d left after my last day at school, and never looked back besides the occasional visit.

  I was the youngest, and always the odd one out. My older sister, Fran, worked at the local Bank of New Zealand. She’d been in the same job for the past ten years and had no intention of leaving. My brother had studied by correspondence through the Open Polytech and had a diploma in engineering, but I was the only one to go to university, even if I hadn’t lasted.

  I had never been able to explain the itch I had to keep moving all the time. New York was probably the most settled I had ever been, and my comfort there, and in London, probably had a lot to do with the fact that the two cities were always changing and in both places I was surrounded by constant movement, enjoying the peace at the centre of the storm instead of forever running around trying to create my own tornado, just to ease the ever-present boredom of life in a small town.

  As a kid, my mother informed me, I had been excited beyond belief by a troupe of gypsies who passed through Te Aroha on a tour of the Coromandel Peninsula. They offered carved trinkets for sale, tarot readings, fire-dancing shows and visits of the brightly coloured customised house trucks they lived in.

  All I had ever wanted to do was run away and join them, play fiddle for the fire-dancing girls whom I thought so exotic, with their bare feet on the grass and the gracious swaying of their hips, their hands swinging pois dipped in gasoline with the ends ignited so quickly that they seemed to set the air on fire.

  It was just beginning to grow dark when we pulled up outside my family home, the place where I’d lived for seventeen years. We’d always been somewhat short of cash, and not materialistic in the slightest, so it hadn’t changed much during that time.

  There was now a new carport, the garden had been landscaped, and the fence given a lick of paint. The lemon tree in the yard remained, a fact I found oddly comforting, perhaps because its fruit had been gracing the top of my pancakes from the time that I could hold a knife and fork.

  The flap in the front door was swinging back and forth, and my mother’s two bulldogs, Rufus and Shilo, were growling deeply, their short legs only just managing to land on each of the front steps without toppling them head over feet. My mother was a short way behind them. She’d come racing to greet us the moment she heard the throaty hum of the Toyota coming up the street.

  I could see the faces of my sister and father through the kitchen window, both grinning from ear to ear. Fran lived a few blocks from my parents in a small cottage that she had bought together with a friend.

  Fran had been determinedly single for years, and there had been no sign of romance on the horizon the last I had heard, though with Benji’s announcement, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d turned up at the door with a man in tow and a pair of toddlers trailing behind her. My mother would have been thrilled to hear Ben’s news. With my sister and I both claiming to be sworn off romance, she had feared she’d never see any grandchildren.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she said, her arms tight around me. She was wearing a cream apron well used and covered with splotches of food stains, overtop a pair of jeans and a pale-pink sweater. She’d put make-up on for my arrival, just the lightest touch of mascara and blush. My mother had let her hair go grey, though it was still thick and long. She had never been one for vanity. She was a bit plumper than she had been when I last saw her, but it suited her, as did her grey hair. I always imagined her like a tree, just continuing to grow peacefully in whatever way nature intended. I’d never heard her say a negative word about herself, nor to my knowledge had she ever been on a diet, which was probably why my sister and I both had fairly unshakeable self-esteem.

  Fran was the only one of us with short hair. She’d cropped it when she was a teenager and dyed it bottle blonde in the biggest rebellion that had occurred in our family before I dropped out of university and moved to Australia, and she’d kept it cropped ever since. We looked nothing alike, I thought, but other people said that our mannerisms were the same. Even having spent several years apart, we could still finish each other’s sentences and pick out each other’s clothes.

  Fran was like a pixie, tiny and lithe with a sharp nose and a wide smile. She rode a bicycle and wore heavy plastic frames, even though she had perfect vision. She looked like the sort of girl you would see cycling around London’s Shoreditch, and the fact that she’d opted to stay in Te Aroha was always a mystery to me. Initially, I had thought she stuck out like a sore thumb, but she’d been here so long that the town had sort of enveloped her until she seemed like part of it, like a barnacle on a ship.

&nb
sp; Fran’s hug was stiff and quick. She’d never been comfortable with affection. With all the talk of the Brits being standoffish, I had been surprised to find that they were much more tactile than the Pakeha in New Zealand, for whom it wasn’t common to greet friends with anything more than a smile or a gentle teasing.

  My father stood behind them both, waiting patiently. He was still in his overalls, a uniform that I had so rarely seen him out of, it was like a second skin, as familiar to me as seeing my mother in an apron. He picked me up off the ground with his hug and held me for so long I thought I might fall asleep in his arms like a child.

  The door opened again and another shape loomed behind them the doorway.

  Mr van der Vliet. He wasn’t as tall as I remembered, though he was just as thin and still hanging on to the last wisps of hair either side of his head. He must be in his eighties now, but his eyes were as hard and bright as ever, his expression as piercing as a magpie that’s just alighted on a silver spoon.

  ‘Well done, my girl,’ he said, as I gave his hollow cheek a soft kiss. He patted me gently on the back.

  He didn’t live near my parents, or socialise with them on a regular basis, so he must have come over just to see me. I suddenly felt as if I would burst into tears.

  Fran saved me from that eventuality.

  She cleared her throat. ‘We should probably go inside, guys. No point standing out here, is there? Even the dogs are getting hungry, the greedy bastards.’

  My mother must have been cooking for weeks, as the table looked close to collapse under the weight of all my favourite foods.

  ‘For the last month I’ve been cooking in batches and freezing it,’ she said proudly.

  The vegetables were from the garden, which my father kept a close eye on, and the meat from a local farmer. Dad had apparently swapped some truck tyres for an entire cow, the corpse of which was cut into pieces and stored in our big chest freezer in the shed.

  We had L&P and Speight’s beer to go with it, and hokey-pokey ice cream on homemade apple fritters for dessert, followed by Pineapple Lumps. I noticed when I went to fetch the salt and pepper that the pantry was filled with three different sorts of Vogel’s bread.