The Long Blink
They beat into the wind for eleven hours to get to Great Barrier Island. Lyle was at the tiller almost the entire time. Sue had taken over for a couple of earlier stints but now it was dark she was resting up in the bow, feeling a bit green around the gills. Penny was in the main cabin. She hunched in the vee made by the cushioned berth and the panel running up beside it. She squeezed her eyes shut against the pitching diagonals of surfaces which should have been uncompromisingly perpendicular. She endured the seasickness. Was it really only five days ago she had been kissing her boyfriend in Piccadilly Circus? That Eros had gazed down upon parting lovers? That winter-wrapped Londoners had blurred passed with their Christmas shopping in the crepuscular light of four pm?
Penny's innards writhed like seasnakes in a barrel. Sleep was the only release from their twisting lurches but it was punctured by the swoop and bang of Persephone's bow into the next wave.
They nosed into Port Fitzroy just after midnight, staying well clear of the channel's submerged rocks. Lyle found an anchor just inside the harbour mouth which would do till morning. The yacht's steel stays tinged against the mast in the tidal swell. Lyle and Sue slept. Penny lay queasily awake in the rocking dark for an indefinate amount of time.
She woke in the morning to the wump of the gas burner taking light. Sue was at the galley sink, filling the kettle. She wore a cuddly purple fleece and her short grey hair was pillow-flattened on one side. From her berth, Penny could also see her father's lower half through the companionway. Lyle was standing in the cockpit in his stubbies, scratching his arse.
`Do that somewhere else will you, Dad?'
Lyle farted in response and uttered a shout of recognition. He stepped out of the cockpit and Penny's view. Outside, an outboard was cut and replaced by a cheery, cultured voice.
`Morning Lyle! Just getting up?'
`Good to see you, Roy. Yeah, slow start this morning. Got a daughter on board again.' He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. `London's made her soft.'
`Ah, well! Isn't that nice. Boys and I have been up for hours. Went fishing off the Old Lady. Quite a catch.'
Lyle stepped back down into the cabin a few minutes later holding two gutted fish. `Snapper for breakfast!' he announced. He pulled a plastic plate from its rack behind the chart table. Penny stretched under her blankets. The prospect of fresh fish for breakfast was, actually, marvellous. It made up for missing what her other self would be doing right now - the self that felt more real; the self that met friends in Islington gastropubs for hangover-blitzing Bloody Maries; that had a boyfriend; that went to gay-straight bhangra parties in Tufnell Park.
It almost made up. `This is the life,' she said.
In the late afternoon they motored across the port's deep, cold water to a sheltered bay that harboured a dense community of anchored yachts. It was two days before New Year's Eve and the Barrier's many anchorages would absorb more boats yet. A hover-carpet of dense manuka covered the surrounding hills. The wind had polished the canopy in a single direction and the land's contours projected upwards into the shaggy topography. It looked as though someone had thrown a giant blanket over long grass.
`Not there, Sue. We'll swing into Easy Rider.' Lyle was at the bow, the anchor locker open at his feet.
`Why don't you just man the anchor and I'll do the driving.' Sue twitched the tiller and their boat glided further away from a moored catamaran into a clear patch of water closer to the shore. Sue liked being close in. She liked the overhanging pohutukawas and the deep, contemplative green of the water in their shade. Lyle wasn't fussy. He just wanted to be safe. He'd been sailing forty years and he never took risks. The depth-sounder blipped greenly above the chart table, counting off the metres below the keel.
Penny stepped up the gangway, buoyant with the novelty of being afloat. There were no boats in London. At least, there were narrow boats on the canals, and barges and water-taxis on the Thames, but no one you knew actually owned a boat or had access to one. If you told anyone you'd been sailing all your life, they looked at you differently. It gave you an invisible stamp. `Posh,' it said.
Yet, Penny was not posh. And Persephone was far from posh. She'd been built in the seventies by her grandad. She was powered by a Ford Escort's motor which, year in and year out, Lyle persuaded to continue its attenuated life. In London, there was no `mucking about in boats.' People there imagined shining chrome and spacious saloons. They imagined master cabins with double beds. They didn't understand that pretty much anyone could have a boat if they wanted. That outdoor recreation had degrees of luxury according to means. You didn't have to be rich to enjoy nature.
It was this splendid nonchalance, the way New Zealand simply accepted its naturalness as normal, the way its pristine wilderness just was, and you could be part of it, that made it such a paradisaical, south pacific nostalgiafest for Penny and her London crew. So much time spent recalling the land, the beaches, the food, the trees, the wine oh the wine. So much time bagging London commuters, the crap banking services (no EFTPOS!), the weather.
What she wouldn't do to be back there right now.
Penny rearranged the vinyl cockpit cushions while Sue mixed gin and tonics in the tiny galley and gathered together sesame crackers, plates, and a pot of smoked mussels. Lyle pottered around the aft locker. He extracted a fishing rod and the scarred white bucket he used for seawater sluicing and the containment of fishy death-throes. The bucket reminded Penny of every childhood summer sailing trip, a line out into the grey chop and a kahawai already nose down in thick, swashing blood. She pushed down a tiny wash of nausea.
`You going to stick around for a drink, Dad?'
`No blossom, the fish are calling.' Lyle clambered into the dinghy with his gear. A bottle of beer stuck out a side pocket of his parka. `Better get onto making the salad, girls!' He started the outboard with a sharp yank on its cord.
Penny watched him putter away around the head of the bay. `He won't catch anything,' Sue called up from the galley. `Hasn't been having much luck lately.' She popped a cracker into her mouth and crunched it lustily. Her mouth remained politely closed. She pulled a packet of sausages out of the chest freezer. She looked pleased with herself.
Sue and Lyle were off to visit Roy and Pamela to repay the kindness of yesterday's fish. Penny glanced up from her book and saw a white ice-cream container in Sue's hand. `What are you taking for afternoon tea?' she asked.
`Crackers,' said Sue.
`You can't give them crackers, Mum!'
Sue looked shocked. This had not occurred to her.
`You might as well not give them anything.'
Lyle nodded in quiet agreement and Sue peeled back the lid of the container to contemplate its contents anew. Inside was a depleted Arnott's cheeseboard selection, pale crackers slotted into some of the tray's plastic depressions, others admonishingly empty.
`God, Mum. No. You can't take something store-bought and half eaten.' Penny could hardly believe her mother would even consider it. `You have to take something homemade - something in keeping with the fresh fish they caught. And gave us.' She put aside her book. She could warm to this. It wasn't often she got a chance to tell her parents off, on matters of etiquette or otherwise. `Something like your pan forte or homemade jam.'
`Oh, but there's hardly any pan forte left.' Sue's face was stricken but Penny's gaze was stern. She sighed and pulled a biscuit tin from the cupboard under the chart table. She opened it. The tin was more than half full with rich, nutty, fruity squares.
`Give them twelve pieces,' said Lyle.
`I will not! This stuff is like gold. I'll give them eight. Two pieces each.'
`Give them ten,' Penny said. `Two for each of them and one for each of you when they offer it to you with tea.'
Sue pursed her lips and transferred fruitcake onto a sheet of gladwrap. She followed Lyle out, pushing on her knees to step up onto the cockpit seats. They swung their legs over the railing and hopped down into the dinghy. Penny untied it for them. She looked at the gladwrapped package in her mother's hand. Eight pieces.
When they'd gone, she fed an electroclash compilation into the stereo and handwashed her knickers in the tiny sink of the cramped lavatory. The music took her back to Fabric a couple of weeks ago where she'd had her last hurrah. The whole club was going off in blue and red light. Happy whorls of people frugging to monster beats. It was a wonderful thing. To be dancing with a roomful of people for whom everything but the music ceased to matter. It was a cessation of hostilities. It was a wash-cycle. Friends and strangers overtaken by the sensory fact of having a body, of having hips, of having lips. Of being able to use these only for the joy. To revel. Alive. A creature. A group mind. In the centre, Penny. The music. Moving through her. Originating in her body. Filling her. Yes it was the pills, but not just the pills. It was something that had nearly been lost. It was primitive. Insistent. Tribes at the edges of the world knew. How to cleanse the self in rhythm.
The rhythms here were so different. So soporific. A different kind of trance. The maraca chirrup of cicadas. The gentle bowing of flax flowers under a tui's weight. The lulling rhythms of the ocean.
On the way out here, once they'd got past Waiheke Island, there was little to look at but the waves. They were hypnotic, like watching firelight, or a tennis match. They slowed down the mind. The minute variations between one wave and the next became fascinating. The fascination required little conscious attention, and so other bigger thoughts drifted over the top, larger cogs driven by the smaller. The beautiful harbour: wonderful to see its green islands again. Her friends here were nesting. They were chasing promotions and buying houses. They were growing old. Six babies had been born since her last time back. It scared her. She preferred the youth extension plan London offered. In an ancient central city pulsing with life and history she was young. Everyone seemed to be your own age. Fun was unfettered by family considerations, by obligations, by parental perceptions of earlier versions of you. You chose your tribe. Your tribe chose you. You were just who you wanted to be.
Over barbeque coals, friends here who'd once lived there loudly reminisced. Just a few days ago, on Boxing Day, Paul had gone on and on about his squat in Columbia Road, and the Sunday roasts at the Bricklayer's, and the football at Chelsea. Some, the ones who could, chipped in with their own stories, their best selves. The ones who'd never left cast their eyes down, looked embarrassed or contemptuous. New Zealanders were always apologising, Penny felt. They craved acceptance. They felt gauche. At the same time they mocked anyone who tried to extend themselves. Maybe that was why the place had Americanised so much in her absence. Kiwis could love coca-cola or Seinfeld and they didn't have to apologise for it. It was a new democracy of consumerism. Express a love for something English, the Guardian, say, or the Tate, and people thought you were putting on airs and graces.
Gannets wheeled overhead and tiny penguins bobbed in the waves.
After dinner, Lyle and Penny talked about the role of the church in modern life. Penny was an atheist. She'd never believed in God, not even in Sunday school. She couldn't understand why adults, who normally placed such importance on truth, tried to make her believe something so clearly fantastical as the holy trinity. She complained of boredom.
Later, she'd raged with the blunt riposte of a new teenage rebel: `Religion is a crutch for weak people!' She'd mellowed now, a little. She knew people needed something bigger than themselves to believe in. If it wasn't religion it was chakras, or Travel, or the Diet, or the Jedi. She envied her parents their quiet Anglican faith.
`It's values that are the important thing,' she said. `And Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on those.' The Rachmaninov was suddenly too loud.
`You're right,' said Lyle. He turned down the volume and gestured at her with his glass of Riesling. `The church is in trouble because the doctrine itself has - puffed out - beyond all sense or control.'
Over on the other side of the foldaway table, Sue reclined against a stack of cushions with her feet up. She had been flossing her teeth with a device that looked like a wishbone, a piece of dental floss stretched taut between its plastic prongs. Now the floss was stuck between a molar and her left eye-tooth. An experimental tug had not freed it and she didn't want to pull too hard in case a tooth came with it. She gave up and sat with her lip snarled over the thing's plastic handle. She looked back and forth between her husband and daughter until they noticed her.
`Mum!' Penny laughed. `We're having a serious philosophical discussion! Get some scissors.'
On New Year's Eve, Penny and Lyle went drift fishing in the dinghy at sunset. `Drop the sinker over the side then switch the catch and use your thumb to control the line,' said Lyle, handing her a rod before baiting his own hook with stinking squid. `Otherwise it'll whiz out too fast and snarl when the sinker hits the bottom.'
Despite spending two weeks of each and every summer holiday on the yacht, Penny had never fished before. She'd never had the desire. But it was something she couldn't have done in London, and there had to be some replacements, so she was giving it a go.
When her sinker hit the bottom, the thump it transmitted up the line flicked a switch somewhere. The sea was said to have a bottom, but this was hearsay. She'd never seen or touched it. For all she knew, the water went down forever into the dark. Now, in her mind's eye, she could see everything down there. She could sense it with the antennae of the nylon line: rocks and weed, silt, tin cans, fish drifting on the currents. Hungry fish. She twitched the rod, a wolf in squid's clothing, and was gratified a few moments later when a couple of answering nibbles telegraphed back up the line to the rod's tip.
`They're down there alright,' said Lyle. They passed half an hour in silence. Hook after hook came back to the surface, its bait adroitly eaten off. They moved to a different spot. Three minutes more and Penny felt a great yank. She had a living creature on the end of her shivering rod. In panic, she reeled it in. A silver and copper muscle danced for its life in the golden light. A thrill of joy and dread pulsed through her. She would have to kill it.
`Come here, ya bugger.' Lyle grabbed the fish with a cloth, measured it and twisted the hook from its mouth. `Legal,' he said.
Penny had heard there was a place behind the eye that killed a fish instantly. She grasped the knife and held her breath. She pushed the knife in. The crunch of the snapper's scales and the resistance of its living flesh sickened her. The fish spasmed. It didn't die. She made Lyle kill it again but he didn't do it properly either and still the maimed fish struggled, smearing its own blood around the bucket's sides. She stabbed the snapper again. One side of its eye popped out as she drove the knife into its head for the umpteenth time.
`Oh, God,' she said. `Let's go back.'
`In a minute,' said Lyle. `I've got to wee.'
`Oh, great.'
Lyle grabbed the plastic bailer and stood carefully with his back to Penny. `Problem with this wretched prostate thing,' he said as he balanced. `Have to go to the bloody loo every half an hour.'
Penny looked away to the last sliver of sun melting into the far hills while she waited for the thin trickle of urine to cease. The sky was like tissue. The air was absolutely still. A tui nearby loosed its hopeful carillon.
Moving back was like coming home for a lovely death. There seemed so few possibilities except for the drain of her parents' colour. The slow bleaching of age made noticeable by the long blinks between looking. Could it be that all the time real life had been here? Lives had continued in her absence: full of boats and music-making, gardening and food that tasted like it should, meat that didn't need labels announcing `free range' because it was all free range. Active lives of civic pride and duties discharged and feeling good about the government and its anti-nuclear, non-conservative egalitarianism. She had missed out on so many things, become less a New Zealander every year she was gone, but somehow more herself.
What if her hand had not been forced?
Lyle pulled the cord on the outboard and it sputtered into life. Penny tried not to think about the fish that had been beautiful and that even now might still be alive, its mouth kissing the white plastic. She concentrated on the glassy stillness and the deepening pink sky. The engine began missing, then died.
`Dad?'
`Mmm?'
`You know when I asked if you'd checked the petrol?'
`Yep,' said Lyle, leaning into the oars. `I did check it.'
`I meant did you put more in.'
Lyle grunted. The oars sent braids of ripples across the water.
`I'll be more specific next time.'
Lyle filleted the snapper when they got back. Sue floured and fried it. The family had it as a starter. Six mouthfuls each. They waited for the fireworks.
(c) Melissa Firth. All rights reserved.
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