by Pip Adam
We go for a drive. We rent a car, pack up our vegetarian luncheon sausage and some white, bouncy bread and we go for a drive. There are dogs everywhere. I send an email home, saying, ‘We’re having a great time; there are dogs everywhere in Samoa.’ A lot of the dogs have bits missing: ears, eyes, legs. On Savai’i, while we’re waiting for the ferry, a group of them surround us like a 1980s horror movie. The baby teases them from her car seat. She shows them her vegetarian luncheon sausage and they growl. We say, ‘Don’t worry the dogs.’ They look like they have rabies. Neither of us have seen a dog with rabies, but we agree these dogs look like they have rabies. We wind up the windows and drive somewhere else to wait for the ferry.
For dinner we eat palusami and taro chips. We stay in a fale on Savai’i and eat curry and rice. We eat more palusami. Palusami quickly becomes our favourite food. I have my photo taken outside the Marlon Brando fale. We meet Aggie Grey’s granddaughter – she dances for us. There is fire every night: fire-dancing, fire-twirling, and jumping from the top of a palm tree into the swimming pool holding fire. We eat more palusami and lots of star fruit. We see pawpaw growing on trees. Anywhere else I’ve been I hate pawpaw, but I can eat it in Samoa with pleasure. Everywhere we go it rains – big, fat, warm rain. I had a different holiday in mind. I thought it would be sunny all the time and I would be lounging by the pool, getting brown, but it rains and often isn’t swimming weather. We try to go snorkelling. We take the baby out a wee way, and I see a fish and panic and don’t go snorkelling any more. I think of Jaws and Piranha and Piranha 2, where they could fly. I don’t like fish. I don’t like animals where I can’t see them – where they can creep up on me. On the way to the snorkelling beach we see a dead dog – stiff, with its legs up. We agree someone will come for it. On the way home it’s still there, only fatter. It’ll burst if the sun stays out. It’s in a ditch.
They have a huge banquet that night, Aggie Grey’s granddaughter dances again. There’s fish everywhere, raw fish marinated in coconut milk and fresh limes. I think about the fish that were there while we were snorkelling – how sneaking up on someone and frightening them isn’t a nice thing to do. There are shellfish. Shellfish are like vegetables to me. ‘No central nervous system,’ I say to the baby. I order palusami and a vegetarian pizza with no cheese and can they check there is no butter or milk in the pizza base. The waiter smiles. I feel elite in the worst way. We all eat palusami and taro chips, the baby gets some of it in her hair and tries to feed the rest of it to a cat that lives in the hotel. The pizza has parmesan on it, so I order some more palusami. The parmesan is a test, an accident or a misunderstanding. I leave the pizza untouched hoping that someone will eat it in the kitchen. Waste, food miles, hypocrisy, reliance on capitalism, elitism – someone mentions one of these things to me most days. In New Zealand the doctor says ‘restricted diet’ a couple of times and I figure sooner or later someone is going to take the baby off us. The Plunket Nurse says, ‘Just a glass of milk a day would do it.’ I think about a million cows in pain and all the rivers drowned in shit and say, ‘Yeah, that would do it.’ I start lying to the Plunket Nurse. I say, ‘Yeah,’ when she says, ‘Is she having any meat?’ The baby has never seen meat. I stop going to see the Plunket Nurse. Someone asks me if I’ve ever given the baby a choice to eat meat. While we’re in Samoa the baby eats pigeon shit and some weird fluffy plant. I say, ‘Yeah, nah, I haven’t done that.’ I say I see their point, but I don’t, not really. I pretend to cooperate. I say, ‘You might be right.’ It’s my secret way of not getting into a fight when I don’t agree with someone. The nutritionist at the hospital tells me I have to go back to Plunket. I say, ‘Okay,’ but I might as well have said, ‘You might be right.’ The baby and I walk back through the hospital carpark, there’s a cold and dry wind. ‘It’s warm enough in Samoa to grow beans and wet enough to grow rice,’ I tell her. ‘That’s a perfect protein – pulses and grain.’ If I could catch a wild pig with my bare hands and kill it with my bare hands and eat it raw I probably would.
One overcast day in Samoa we go to Robert Louis Stevenson’s estate. There are fireplaces in most of the rooms. We walk up the hill in Roman sandals to the memorial. Black lizards move as we walk close to them. At first I think I’m seeing things, from the lack of protein and iron, and the humidity, and the long walk uphill, but then we see them and they join us and the baby laughs and tries to catch the lizards with her bare, hungry hands.
The Other Side of the World
Her mother was coming from the other side of the world. As she sat in her bed in the bedroom of her London flat, Beth imagined her mother – coming from the other side of the world. Driving to the airport with her father, parking the car, checking in. She would have bought something to put her tickets in, something that hung around her neck or tied up around her waist. Someone would have said they were good. Beth’s father would have made her check over and over again that she had her tickets and her passport and her credit card. She would take the thing out from under her clothing and check it and then return it and then she would go through the gates. Beth’s sister, Clare, would meet her at Heathrow. Clare would fly from Melbourne and their mother would fly from Auckland and they would meet at Heathrow and take a taxi or the underground. It was easy on the train but they would probably take a taxi. Both of them would be tired by the time they got to Beth’s flat. She had nothing to eat and if she did it would be no use. Her sister would need to go shopping, perhaps her mother would cook. Beth couldn’t face it. Hopefully, no one would say she needed to keep her strength up. Micah and the children had left three weeks ago. It was as fast as they could pull it all together. Her mother was travelling almost completely on Clare and Rowena’s air-points. Rowena had organised time off work to look after their father. It was a massive undertaking. Everyone was enjoying the organising. Beth hadn’t been involved. There had been a telephone call and it had taken off from there, like snow falling. No one had asked her. Clare had said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ and that was that.
Beth hadn’t tidied. Since Micah had left she hadn’t tidied. The flat was dirty. She thought about getting up to clean it and then she thought again. He wasn’t going to sit around and watch her die and he didn’t think it was good for the children to do so either.
‘You’ve brought this on yourself,’ he said. If only she’d be more positive about things. It was anger that was eating her up, anger and fear, and if she was doing nothing to resolve it he couldn’t let it infect the rest of them. It seems cruel, he’d written, but it’s for the best, for all of us. She had fought and he had remained reasonable and then she hit Tess and he saw it and Tess made it worse than it was, like ten-year-olds will, and when Beth came home the next day there was a note and some money and the flat was empty. It was like a bad book. It didn’t even feel like a dream, it was so mundane. It felt like daytime TV. No one should have to put up with that from anyone, he wrote. Violence is never an answer for anyone, no matter what they’ve brought on themselves. She had the note. It had a phone number on it. He called sometimes to let the children talk to her but she never picked up. She was tired, and now her mother and sister were coming.
She didn’t want them there. She didn’t really care, though. She was tired and bored and it all just floated in and out now, day after day. Like a parade of one brass band after another. They could come. They were in the air now. There would be noise and she would nod and there would be fights and she would sigh and clench her teeth and then there would be eating and perhaps they would want to take her out. It wasn’t much to ask, Beth thought, three months at the most, it didn’t seem like much to ask out of someone’s life. But he was gone now. He’d taken Tess and Stevie and he’d gone and who could blame him? Violence is never an answer and the children needed their father.
‘You’re not still reading these horrible books?’ Clare was visiting from Melbourne. She was going to a conference delivering a paper on causation; no one really understood what Clare did. Beth was pr
egnant with Stevie, Tess was in childcare. Clare and Beth had spent the afternoon eating, Clare drinking wine.
‘I think I’ve eaten myself into a stupor,’ Beth had said and they both laughed. They couldn’t stop laughing. Beth went to the toilet and when she came back Clare was at the bookshelf reading the back of a book and asked again, ‘You’re not still into all this, are you?’ And they both laughed again.
They’d gone to the Serpentine. Micah could pick up Tess. Clare walked slowly so Beth could keep up. She felt huge, like Queen Victoria. The gallery was showing paintings by John Currin.
‘It makes me like people again,’ Beth said, then corrected herself. ‘Paintings of people. I always think I like landscapes’ – they were looking at a painting of two women laughing – ‘but I really do like paintings of people.’
It had started when Beth left school. She went to work for a couple who went to a Spiritualist Church and told her things like ‘There’s more’ and ‘You can have anything you want’. It was true. Beth had asked and it had been provided, including Micah. She’d written down everything she wanted on a piece of paper that she burned in a bonfire in her backyard. ‘If nothing else, you’ll know it when you see it,’ someone had said, and they were right. Micah had been cynical and then he started to see it working so he asked and it was all provided, including the understanding of it. They glowed as a couple. They shone and they smiled. Clare had asked, the night of the Serpentine Gallery, while they sat around Micah and Beth’s table eating salad and rice. ‘It’s like,’ Micah said, ‘the other day I was in a taxi going to the airport and we got one green light after another and the taxi driver commented on it and I thought, this is like my life.’
‘All green lights,’ Beth said and held his hand.
It didn’t seem right to Clare. ‘What about the people waiting at the red lights?’ she asked.
‘Everyone needs to look after themselves,’ Beth said. ‘You can’t look after anyone else, not really. It just doesn’t work like that. We all choose.’
They’d bought a postcard at the gallery of the two women laughing and it had been tucked into a book for ages and then it wasn’t.
Clare had said it was a bad match from the beginning. She said ‘I told you so’ to their mother more than once after Micah left. Her mother said that wasn’t the issue now. She should come home, how could they get Beth home? ‘You talk to her,’ their mother said, and Clare did. There was no way she was coming home. There was no way she was going anywhere, she said, and they laughed, Beth for real and Clare to be polite. ‘Are you sure it wouldn’t be better?’ Clare asked. Beth was sure it wouldn’t be better. She needed to be there, close to things. She couldn’t face the flight. ‘Everyone should just stay where they are,’ Beth said. Clare said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ and it was decided. Her mother asked if Beth had tried to get hold of Micah, and Beth said no, in a tired way that made her mother defensive. ‘Surely you want to see the kids?’ she said. ‘Why?’ asked Beth and her mother said, ‘Well,’ and then neither of them said anything for a moment.
Clare tried to contact Micah. Her mother advised against it but she tried. She waited up late one Thursday night until she thought it might be about eleven o’clock in the morning in London. She called his work and he wouldn’t take her call. She called his cell phone and he said, ‘Clare, I really don’t think we have anything to discuss here.’ It seemed cruel to Clare, worse than cruel. He said it would. Beth has become violent, he wrote in an email that Clare suspected was designed to explain things, but which made no sense. He didn’t expect it to, Micah wrote, but he’d spoken with a lawyer and he was well within his rights. The children were fine and if she wanted, while she and her mother were in town they could see them, but not with Beth, and then something about energy and the weight of psychic contamination. He was sorry, but he couldn’t help Beth if she wouldn’t help herself.
Beth had a sore back. She would move around while they were eating dinner, trying to get comfortable. She’d switch from haunch to haunch but it wouldn’t go away. She meditated at first, meditated on everything being right in her world. She said affirmations to try and shift the energy that was blocked in her body. When people noticed her wincing she said, ‘I’m letting go of something.’ After a while she took paracetamol, then ibuprofen, then codeine. Then she went to the doctor. On the way to the doctor she tried to find change for the bus, she was sure there was some in the bottom of her handbag. She pulled out four packets of different painkillers and, wedged in the corner of her handbag, a quartz crystal and a small piece of paper saying, ‘All is well with me and my world.’
There wasn’t anything they could do. ‘Medically,’ Micah had said when the doctor told them, ‘you can’t do anything, medically.’ Micah made an appointment at an aura specialist. It was anger, the woman said, anger and fear. She asked Beth to lie down: she needed to be still. Beth’s back hurt as the woman shook things and waved things over her. Everything that had made sense didn’t. Micah stuck the affirmations all over the house and they weren’t allowed to mention it to anyone. ‘The word sick will not be used in this house,’ he said. ‘It’s very important.’ The only thought she had was, I am going to die. When he held her and said, ‘We’re beating this’ she thought: I won’t see my children’s next birthdays. All felt lost. She tried to claw it back but there was something new living in her head and she begged him to let her tell the children. ‘What good will come of that?’ he said, and he was right. She wanted it to not be happening and Micah said he was doing everything he could to stop it happening and she needed to do that too. One afternoon Micah came home and she was in bed with someone else and drunk. She said, ‘So what?’ like it was his fault. Micah went back to the aura specialist alone. The woman said what he didn’t understand, what he had no conception of, was that his fear, his negativity, had the power to actually kill Beth. That night he sat at the dining table they had eaten over and passed plates over, the table they had weaned both their children at and repeated to himself over and over that all was well.
In the morning, after everyone left, Beth started drinking again. She pulled down all the pieces of paper from the walls, leaving small clumps of Blu-Tack with paper corners stuck to them. When he came home she’d hit him, told him to fuck off and then she hit Tess. She knocked the ten-year-old over with a blow to the side of her head and they left. It was better for everyone this way. She was the child now. Her father couldn’t afford to come so she would say goodbye to him over the phone, and Rowena, both of them, in the small house he and their mother had moved into after all the girls had left. He’d bought a new television and that would keep him company while his wife was away, and he’d have the garden and he’d call soon and he loved her. She was tired. If she might ask something for the others, if it might work like that in this one thing – make her well.
Christchurch
We drive into town and I say ‘I hate this city’ – over and over and with increasing venom. Everything I see, I remember another reason to hate it. When we get to the car park we see some people I don’t like the look of and that’s it; their tiny heads, their red necks. I say, ‘It’s so cold here, no one leaves their family home to breed.’ You sigh and I get the message and finish by saying, ‘I lived here for five years and that was four and a half years too long.’ We find a park on the third floor. There are 150 parks left in the building and it costs $1.10 for every hour of parking and you say, ‘Does that change your mind?’ and I say, ‘Nah.’ We get the pushchair out of the boot. I have cold feet. It’s been years since I’ve had cold feet. You say your legs are cold. I put the baby’s jacket on over the top of the pushchair straps. She can’t move so I have to take it off and put it on all over again. As we walk to the lift I look at the hills stretched out to breaking and I say, ‘Hard to beat those hills though.’ You look out over them and say, ‘Yeah – the sky goes on forever.’ You’ve hit the nail on the head – the birds don’t disappear here. You can watch them all the way
to the Alps. Washing takes all day to dry if it doesn’t freeze solid on the line. People stay here and the river runs beside them staying.
We see women getting out of European cars wearing fur and Italian boots. It’s like someone’s set it up just for me to hate and I say, ‘Told you so.’ You laugh at me. I say, ‘What?’ You say, ‘Just you.’ It feels like that here. I try to point it out – the rich and white. ‘Where are the brown people?’ I say, and you point to someone and I say, ‘What about the Chinese people? Huh? Huh?’ You laugh again and it’s still just me. The baby’s kicking off her boots – over and over. I end up putting them on the handles of the push-chair. Nothing’s changed. People are dead and they’ve been replaced by more and more people just like them. It’s like a video game based on a zombie film.
We have lunch at a café and they serve us a huge pile of mashed potatoes and mushrooms. You look at it, and say, ‘It’s not a meal you’d cook yourself.’ They put whipped cream in cups of filtered coffee and call it a Vienna. The baby eats last night’s dinner. She sneaks up on a businessman in a suit and tries to steal his ID card which is on a retractable cord. It retracts. I say sorry, and he says, ‘Do you want to work at Telecom?’ He’s talking to the baby. I say, ‘I’m sure she’d work hard,’ and he looks at me like I’m trying to find a job for my child. I remind him he brought it up. He smiles. The baby walks away and finds an expensive fur coat on the back of a chair. She thinks it’s alive, which it was once. ‘Like everything else in this city,’ I say to her but she pretends not to understand.
