Small Bodies of Water

by Nina Mingya Powles

  A few weeks before the break-in I’d just got home from class, my backpack still on and my keys still in my fist, when the charcoal carpet tilted up towards my face. I made an involuntary sound, an animal yelp. I didn’t know what was happening. I lost my balance but landed on my knees on the faux sheepskin rug while the room moved sideways around me. I crawled under the dining table, which was being jostled but hadn’t yet tipped over, and gripped the table legs. I remember being more shocked than afraid – did the floor really just rise up or did I fall down, or both? – until the shaking went on longer than I’d ever felt before and the thought came: this must be it. I reached around into my bag’s front pocket for my phone; sent texts to my flatmate, who I knew was especially scared of earthquakes; to my mum, who was at work; and to my dad, who was having lunch somewhere on Cuba Street. People always said that was where you really wouldn’t want to be in an earthquake. I knew I should try to reach them before the phone networks went down, if it got worse. Dad replied the quickest: ‘Under the table. All fine.’

  When the shaking subsided I wiped my nose on my sleeve. I didn’t realise I’d been crying, but then, I always cry when I’m scared. I went to my room, where my bookcase had toppled over, leaving a sea of unharmed poetry books. Dad managed to get through the traffic to pick me up from Newtown and we drove slowly around the harbour. It was a Friday afternoon, and as it started to emerge that no one had been seriously injured in the magnitude-6.5 quake, Wellington enthusiastically kicked into low-key civil defence emergency mode, which really meant that office workers went home early for the weekend and people popped to the supermarket to stock up on bottled water and tinned spaghetti. There had been slips around the north-east of the South Island, where the quake was centred, but thankfully our route home was clear for now. The car’s shock-absorbers took most of the aftershocks, but I saw street lamps wavering out the window as the asphalt rippled softly beneath them.

  Most of the time, I’m in the safe zone. But my thoughts often feel like a web of connected fault lines, each small rupture causing another, bigger rupture. I can’t control their spread. I feel an intense pressure in the centre of my chest and my breathing turns into gasping.

  Like many, I have trouble describing my anxiety. In Mandarin, to worry or to be anxious is: dānxīn . The first word in the two-character phrase, dān, means to shoulder or to carry, and originally had the more specific meaning to carry on a shoulder pole. I picture myself trying and failing to carry buckets of water, one at each end of the pole, water sloshing over the brim. The second character is a heart: xīn. It helps me to think of my anxiety in such visual terms. I picture a heart carrying too much inside, fit to burst, overflowing at the slightest touch.

  My mother is the type of person who is good at channelling worry into practical action and preparedness. In her house, an unused bathtub is filled with supersized bottles of purified water, for emergencies. The bedrooms have packets of crackers and canned food under the bed. A set of pre-packed ‘go-bags’ filled with water bottles, batteries and first-aid kits wait untouched next to the coat stand by the front door.

  This has always stirred a combination of amusement, comfort and panic in me. While she places extra batteries and tinned peaches around the house at regular intervals, my brain flips into overdrive. The scene from my dream replays itself over and over at varying speeds. I see the black wave. I see the trees buckle and break, the glass shatter, the roof tiles bend.

  In 2016, a deep earthquake beneath the Kermadec Islands caused ‘ghost quakes’ to pop up on the GeoNet online map of Aotearoa. Ghost quakes appear when sensors pick up readings from seismic energy that has travelled many hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre of a deep, strong earthquake. ‘The strength of the quake registers as locally generated earthquakes’, according to the automatic sensors, as GeoNet seismologist John Ristau explains in an article with the excellent headline, ‘Ghost quakes: The ghost chips of earthquakes’. It’s like a translation error, but in the language of tectonics. A large quake occurs and generates vast seismic energy, tricking sensors hundreds of kilometres away, which in turn (mis) translate the shock waves into small, imagined earthquakes.

  I was in my dorm room at my university in Shanghai on 13th of November, 2016, when the words ‘magnitude 7.8’ appeared at the top of my Twitter feed, followed by a tsunami evacuation warning for all coastal areas of central Aotearoa. I sent WeChat messages to my parents and refreshed the page over and over while I imagined the tide dropping away in the dark. Mum and Dad piled the dog into the back of the car and drove a short way up Kōwhai Street, their radio switched on in the unsettled night. I kept thinking I could hear the windows rattling, or that I could feel faint tremors in my six-storey building. What was happening felt like the ghost quake caused by distant, imaginary shock waves of the real earthquake that was unfolding on my laptop screen, thousands of miles away.

  A long way south, four-metre waves came unseen in the night, pushing kelp and crabs up onto the land but harming no one. In some places along the coast of Kaikōura, the seabed lifted up by two metres. The words I heard broadcast on the Radio New Zealand live-stream chimed inside my head for days. ‘Do not go anywhere near water.’ The warning was lifted two hours later, but the islands kept shifting.

  An aerial photograph circulated online of two cows and a calf stranded on a grassy islet after their hillside paddock almost completely collapsed. The stranded cows went viral; ‘please save the cows I don’t think the nz people could take it if they die,’ a stranger tweeted.

  I left my bedside light on that whole night, my pink lamp casting everything in a peachy glow. I couldn’t sleep, haunted by the stranded cows, who mercifully were saved by their farmer the next day. He used a shovel to dig them a path to safer land.

  Shortly after Christmas, a small box arrived in the post. Inside was a deck of colourfully illustrated cards, with a handwritten note from my friend that read: ‘Thank you for your dream.’ I flicked through them, not necessarily thinking that they would be of any use to me. While I do believe in the emotional significance of my dreams, I’ve never paid much attention to anyone else’s interpretations of them. Nonetheless, I was curious. I found the ‘water’ card: ‘Water is a symbol of your emotional state, with associations of change and flow [. . .] a water dream may suggest you’ll pass into a new phase.’

  I liked that the cards were written in a direct, sympathetic tone, while retaining an irritating air of vagueness. The ‘disaster’ card, the only other card that interested me, was illustrated with a wave washing over a small city in the style of Hokusai’s Great Wave. In the background was a red sun, an erupting volcano, and a fiery aeroplane spiralling to the ground.

  Dreaming of any kind of disaster, whether natural (earthquake, flood, fire) or man-made (explosion, bomb, accident) can be extremely unsettling. However, such dreams are not typically precognitive. They are more likely to suggest fears or anxieties, or something that you feel is out of your control.

  For the first time in a long time, I double-click on a file on my laptop titled ‘Dream Diary’. I haven’t updated it since last year, when I did a poetry workshop where one requirement was to keep a dream diary for the duration of the course. It’s unsettling, scrolling through a catalogue of my own barely remembered dreams. Most were recorded while half-asleep in the moments after waking, just before the dream faded beyond my reach. They’re both familiar and strange, as if they belong to someone else (‘a giant tabby cat that looked like a person wearing a cat costume’, I wrote on the 5th of February). Forcing myself to keep a dream diary often caused entirely different dreams from long ago to rise to the surface without warning:

  12/2/19

  A small cottage by the sea. Orca dying on their sides, their huge black bodies sliding past. I bought oranges from the side of the road. Recalling this has made me remember another, different dream – just flashes of it. A huge, dark room made of glass, orca kept in blue tanks.

  It’s a damp,
overcast morning in November. I’m visiting home after having been away for a year in Shanghai. As I gaze out the window at the sea, a tiny dark shape disturbs the glare. I squint into the light but it’s gone. Then, a tall black fin cuts close to the northern tip of Mākaro Island. It disappears – my breath stops – then reappears a few metres away, along with another, smaller fin. I grab my shoes and wrench the sliding door open. I fix my eyes on the water, running hard. A third dorsal fin rises, this time attached to the shape of a curved body. Cold salt-wind bites into my chest as I run to the shore and there’s a fourth, fifth, sixth, maybe eight of them now, and I’m running to keep up with them as they glide out towards the harbour mouth like birds in formation. I see a small tail flicking up sea foam to reveal a snow-white belly. A calf swimming alongside its mother. A passing ferry cuts its engine, and then I can hear them. I can hear the soft whooshing sound of them breathing air through their blowholes, trailing miniature clouds of water vapour above the surface as they go. There are shouts of ‘whoa!’ and ‘oh!’ from further along the beach, where dog walkers have stopped to watch. I keep running and I’m laughing but my laughter is being eaten up by the wind. I run until they’re just a cluster of shadowy shapes in the distance. I keep looking long after they’ve gone, long after they’ve slipped out of the harbour into the Cook Strait, maybe heading south into the Sounds, or maybe even further out towards the Subantarctic Islands, far beyond where I can see them.

  Where the Kōwhai Blooms

  WIND SHAKES THE flower clusters of the kōwhai in my parents’ garden by the sea. Fallen petals scatter in the grass next to the lemon tree, where lemons tremble and drop, creating a carpet in varying shades of yellow and gold. The smell and the colour of this corner of the garden is overwhelming.

  Kōwhai – yellow. The blooms of the kōwhai tree are, unofficially, New Zealand’s national flower. Pronounced koh-fai, but the oh is much softer than f. Your teeth just gently touch your bottom lip in order to make the sound. As you say the name of the tree it dissolves into air.

  I imagine the tree often. I see many different versions of it: at night, shaking in the wind, or bursting with new, gigantic flowers, or trembling from the movement of tūī brushing past in flight. The torpedo-like tūī are black and sleek, a white pom-pom tuft at their necks, and iridescent blue-green feathers on their bellies.

  I moved to London in 2018 to be with the person I loved, whom I’d met the previous year in Shanghai. After months of looking, my first job in London was at a Chinese community centre in the northern outskirts of the city. I spent my days helping organise Chinese cooking workshops at English schools. On my lunch breaks, I’d wander the wide, suburban streets of Bounds Green, where tall hollyhocks and foxgloves swayed in neat gardens. It was the 13th of April, 2018, and it was ‘the hottest April day in sixty years’. That’s what people kept saying, emphasising each word as they said so. The phrase spun around in my head like a line from a song.

  This is where I begin: with a kōwhai tree in a garden in suburban London during an April heatwave. I don’t know how to continue; the sight was too much for me, too unreal. So, I begin again with the unseasonable April heat. Sweat on my neck, white sun in my eyes. The pavement was too hot to touch and covered in magnolia petals, crumpled and browning at the edges but still pink like slices of meat.

  The New Zealand Department of Conservation lists the kōwhai’s status as no longer endangered but ‘at risk’ and protected, like all native trees and plants. Kōwhai grow all over the hills and coasts of Wellington, heralding the end of winter and the beginning of spring. They shed their gold on the street corners and in the front gardens where I grew up. The exact colour of the bell-shaped petals, dark yellow like melted butter, is for me so deeply entwined with memories of my parents’ house by the sea and the sunlit garden behind it that I did not imagine a kōwhai could grow elsewhere, let alone here, on the diagonally opposite corner of the planet, where the seasons are upside down.

  In the gift shop of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, I find an enormous book with glossy illustrations: Joseph Banks’ Florilegium: Botanical Treasures from Cook’s Voyage. I flip to the index, scanning for K: kōwhai. It’s not there, but I flip through the pages looking for yellow. It has been indexed under its other name, Sophora tetraptera: four-winged fruit. Kōwhai seeds were first brought to England from Aotearoa by the botanist Sir Joseph Banks on James Cook’s first voyage, in 1769. The historian W.R.B. Oliver notes that Banks collected more than sixty plant specimens, including kōwhai, at the very place where Cook and his crew first set foot in Aotearoa, at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa / Poverty Bay, on the east coast. Their landing was not a peaceful one. Nine Māori people were shot dead by the crew of the Endeavour, including Te Maro, a leader of the Ngāti Oneone people.

  Drawing from the crew’s diaries, Joseph Angus Macky records that after examining the bodies of the dead the botanists collected flowers:

  The boats returned to the ship at 6 p.m. Parkinson mentions that some members of the party shot some ducks of a very large size, and that Banks and Solander gathered a variety of curious plants in flower.

  In 1774, the seeds collected by Banks were planted at Chelsea Physic Garden in London, then known as the Apothecaries Garden. A writer in a 1791 issue of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine describes the tree:

  A finer sight can scarcely be imagined than a tree of this sort [. . .] which at this moment (April 28, 1791) is thickly covered with large pendulous branches of yellow, I had almost said golden flowers; for they contain a particular richness, which is impossible to represent in colouring.

  Right there in the shop where the book lay open on the table, I could see the emerald green of a tūī in flight. I could feel the air vibrate with its beating wings.

  The garden by the sea is overgrown now. The jasmine has gone wild, its vines arching over the gate, up into the air, searching for something to cling to. The fuchsia is bright and unruly by the fence, next to creamy yellow roses the size of plates. Giant green apples and lemons roll in the grass. A hedge of lavender, once lovingly tended to by my mother, threatens to overtake it all. The kōwhai remains in the back corner, a little spindly and battered by the wind but unchanged, as in my dreams.

  I read that when the poet and scholar Anna Jackson was looking at the diaries of the writer Katherine Mansfield at Turnbull Library in Wellington, she found a single perfectly preserved kōwhai flower pressed between the pages of one of the notebooks from 1908. ‘After all this time, there it still was, still yellow, still between the same two pages Mansfield had placed it between all those years ago. A piece of the world she wrote about was right there as a piece of the world still.’

  Three young kōwhai have been planted on a low hilltop in Katherine Mansfield Park in Wellington, in the suburb where she was born and where I went to school for seven years. I used to lie under them after school, watching tūī and blackbirds swooping in and out of the trees, yellow tongue-shaped petals spinning in the northerly wind, the grass dampening the backs of my knees and the thick wool skirt of my uniform.

  In the mid-twentieth century, kōwhai became relatively common English garden shrubs. Semi-evergreen and hardy enough to withstand the cold sea winds of Aotearoa’s coastlines, kōwhai thrive in England. They join the many other plants introduced to Britain from its colonies – including tī kōuka (cabbage trees), toe toe, flax and tree ferns, which bend gracefully over brick walls of shaded gardens in the affluent London suburbs of Highgate and Hampstead.

  When I first saw the yellow tree in London I thought I was hallucinating. It might have been hot enough for that. In the distance, the air shimmered and bent into waves above the asphalt. I walked closer. The tree seemed to be glowing. I felt that if I stood close enough I would be able to see the gold reflected on my skin, like a buttercup held up to the chin. Its slender bell-shaped flowers were full and open, ready to drop at the slightest touch. More than half had already dropped in a pool of yellow petals. I touched them with my foot. I
picked up one of the fallen blooms and held it in my hand. I took a picture with my phone and sent it to my mum on WeChat.

  Heatwaves often occur in fiction as plot devices, forcing characters to contend with the uncomfortable and the unbearable. New York City is often depicted in a heatwave, as in two of my favourite novels when I was a teenager, The Great Gatsby and The Bell Jar. The latter famously begins with the particular taste and smell of an inner-city heatwave: ‘the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat’. The strange heat of London that day made everything feel luminous, dreamlike, a little unsettling. Would all Aprils from now on be like this one?

  The tree vibrated in my memory afterwards. I went back the following day, and the next, unsure whether I’d be able to find it again. But it was there, still standing in eerie silence, with no Wellington wind and no noisy tūī to dart around its branches, to sing and suck nectar. Who planted this tree? Did they know where it came from? Had anyone else seen it, stopped in their tracks in front of it, unsure whether they were dreaming? The flowers fell without a sound.

  My own map of London consists of three lines connecting the places where I’ve spotted kōwhai trees blooming in and around the city: north, near Bounds Green station; south-east, while driving back to the city from the New Forest (a bright gold blur spotted from the car window); and north-west, on a street just around the corner from my flat. I walked past it one day in mid-autumn. Its frilled evergreen leaves caught my eye. Dried golden petals coated the gravel path. At that time, the news was full of pictures of burning: eucalyptus forest fires in Australia, early scrub fires in Aotearoa. Each year the burning goes on longer and the images grow more surreal. A clip circulating on Twitter showed a charred ridge of flame being whipped into spirals by the wind: a bright funnel of light in mid-air.