Keri chose Friday for her departure to the Mahia Peninsula and began packing as soon as Andy had left for work. The doorbell rang as she was placing a carton by the front door. She feared for a moment that her husband had returned.
A woman with short iron-grey hair stood on the other side of the frosted glass panels. Sal, from a house nearby as the crow flies, wasn’t at all out of breath, despite descending one set of steep steps before climbing another. Keri had sometimes wondered if they would have become bosom pals had they been neighbours of a similar age in one of Wellington’s more level suburbs.
“I saw your car was still here and came to ask if you’d sell some raffle tickets at work… but you’re going away?” Her voice conveyed surprise at seeing the suitcase and filled cartons near the door.
“Andy won’t know till he sees the letter.” Keri pointed to two folded pages resting on the hall table. “It doesn’t say where I’m going.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“Got time for a coffee?”
“Love one.” Sal slipped the charity raffle tickets into a blue plastic bag.
Keri shared how Andy had assumed his career and interests were more important than hers. She might have tolerated this conceit, but was fed up that they no longer talked. He had come to prefer television, video games and pub drinking with mates to conversation at home. The couple hadn’t discussed their summer holiday, even though Christmas was only a month away. Sal listened as if such things had never happened before. The older woman’s hands, rough from years of creating terraces to expand the sloping garden behind her house, patted Keri’s restless fingers.
“When I’ve suggested seeing a counsellor together, he stalls or picks a row about something else. A work colleague has lent me her bach in Mahia for three weeks and promised not to let anyone else know where I’m going. Maybe my absence will help him decide what he wants.”
“I hope Andy comes to his senses. But any conclusions you come to matter at least as much as what he decides.”
On hearing this, Keri had a sense of déjà vu that she couldn’t explain.
Sal walked up and down the steps to help fill the boot of Keri’s Nissan with a suitcase, a rucksack containing boots and wet weather gear, two cartons of groceries, one carton of novels and CDs, and a compact stereo system. They hugged, and then waved until the car followed a bend that left a bush-covered hillside between them. Keri had joined the motorway before realising she hadn’t bought any raffle tickets.
The Nissan skirted the harbour before turning into the Ngauranga Gorge. She had a jumble of early memories from summer holidays that involved sitting in the back of a Morris Minor between Gavin and Lachlan, her strapping older brothers. They had listened to the wind whistling through the gorge on its way to the harbour. A tarpaulin covering the bulging roof rack slapped, as if to giddy up the engine struggling against the incline and gusts.
As a child, Keri had found it hard to believe that commuters travelled daily through the steep and winding brown rock. And despite the walls being scraped back and back to prevent debris falling onto vehicles, she had asked her parents if a bluff could crumble as someone drove by, due to torrential rain, freak wind – the kind that acts like a giant vacuum cleaner on roof cladding – or an earthquake.
“Those things are so unlikely that they’re not worth worrying about,” said Mum.
“Yeah,” said Gavin, “Why worry about heavy rain, strong wind and earthquakes in Wellington?”
And Dad had growled at him, “Cut it out.”
Keri’s childhood home had been in Lyall Bay, on one of the flattest streets in Wellington. Her tricycle had only moved when she pedalled or a southerly pushed her along. The latter had been fun until she tried to ride against the wind. After heavy surf was all that remained of a gale’s noisy performance, bedroom windows had admitted the sound of rollers pounding the bay. Crashing waves seemed ominous after Lachlan had drowned while swimming less than a kilometre from home. Keri was 11 at the time, and she and Mum had shed many tears. Dad and Gavin’s grief following the funeral was dry-eyed and alternated between tetchiness and stoicism, which in the case of Gavin included claiming not to care about anything or anyone.
The other noises Keri recalled hearing in her first bedroom had come from the nearby airport. Because she had known the whining and roar of engines and screeching of landing tyres from infancy, they hadn’t fully registered until Lachlan’s death. Then at night, she had felt obliged to listen to what he was no longer able to experience. Keri as a teenager and adult witnessing something beautiful or noteworthy still asked how Lachlan would have responded. And as she drove up the gorge, she wondered what he would make of Mahia and her escape to it.
On two occasions before the drowning, the family had set out for a holiday only to go back home after Mum said she had forgotten something. The first time they had been driving for less than five minutes, and Dad had laughed and said, “At least you remembered before Ngauranga Gorge.”
The second time, they had been passing the wharves that fringe the centre of Wellington, and he had said, “Bloody hell” and sulked for an hour.
Worse still, he had refused to put the box of crockery they had returned to collect on the roof rack, and the kids had to take turns with the weight on their knees because Mum had the dog on her lap. Gavin had ignored Keri’s discomfort while Lachlan had taken extra-long turns with the box. He had always been kinder and gentler than his brother.
As a child, leaving the Ngauranga Gorge and entering the uplands had seemed like the point of no return to Keri. Her parents had never said this, but she had sensed they would buy or borrow, or do without anything left behind, rather than force the burdened Morris to groan up the gradient a second time.
The Nissan climbed the gorge in fourth while exceeding the speed limit. Keri hurried because, even as an adult, a holiday and the sense of irrevocability didn’t begin until the last of the unstable brown rock had disappeared from the car’s mirrors. At last, she eased the pressure on the accelerator and moved to the left to allow others to overtake. Why speed now? It wasn’t yet 11, and even with an hour for breaks she would reach Mahia before the light faded. Food, drinks and music for the journey were on the passenger seat. The recordings could wait until remoter hills degraded the FM signals, or she needed something more upbeat to boost her mood.
She remembered a radio on family holidays before the drowning. They had pitched tents to supplement the bedrooms of a rented bach near Peka Peka Beach. Her mum and aunt, working in a tiny kitchen to the accompaniment of pop songs and cheesy disc jockeys, had fed 11 people. Keri’s cousin Tiffany was a year older. The girls had mostly avoided the five boys, with the exception of Lachlan, who sometimes joined the two of them when he grew tired of laddish behaviour. Whenever the other boys tried to muscle in or tease, Tiffany’s harsh words had seen them off. Keri had learned from her cousin that girls don’t have to give way to bossy boys.
The girls had slept in the house the first time that the families stayed at Peka Peka. During a second summer there, Tiffany protested at the crowded dinner table that it was time she and Keri had a turn in a tent at the expense of the two youngest boys.
“Girls are safer inside,” said Tiffany’s mother.
Gavin had jeered, “Yeah, you don’t want Horomatangi to get you.”
Tiffany picked up the bread knife and waving it said, “I’d like to see him try.”
Her dad, into his second bottle of beer, laughed. “If Tiffany sleeps with a knife under her pillow, they won’t come to any harm.”
Tiffany had proved time and again that the limits others sought to place on girls were no more binding than paper ribbons. Perhaps Keri going to Mahia might not have been possible without her cousin’s dogged refusal to accept less than boys received. It was a shame that Tiffany’s family had settled in Australia when Keri was 12. The girls had spoken very occasionally and for just a few seconds, if both were around when one mother phoned the other. An exception to this briefness followed Keri’s mum calling with news of the engagement. Then the cousins had discussed ideas for the wedding, and Keri had mentioned what Andy and his family favoured.
“But what do you want?”
Keri preferred a smaller reception to keep down the costs to be met by her parents, and she also didn’t want to struggle to remember the names of dozens of strangers.
“And does he tell his family what’s important to you?”
Recalling this explained the déjà vu she had felt earlier; Sal and Tiffany shared a no-nonsense approach to equality. The difference was that Sal had a gentler nature and the benefit of maturity.
To the Nissan’s right, a rash of housing was spreading on the flatter land and gentler slopes. The only trees were saplings that barely reached the height of windowsills. She and Andy had visited new developments like this before buying the 1950s-built house because of its proximity to his job, and because he thought the view compensated for the steps, being exposed to the wind and the risk of what engineers called slope failure.
Gavin had terrified young Keri with tales of ancient cities lost to earthquakes and reports of current seismic devastation, whether she wanted to hear about them or not. She could have complained to Mum or Dad, but then Gavin would have been nastier still on the sly. Three months after Lachlan had died in the surf, Gavin insisted an earthquake that had just happened in the Pacific would send a wave big enough to sweep the houses of Lyall Bay across the harbour and up the Hutt Valley. Some of the fear engendered by him that day had never left Keri. She had made a point of living well above sea level once the choice was hers. Whereas Andy loved living on top of a hill for the view, she liked the way the house, even if it slid 50 metres, would still be above the reach of any tsunami. He had sniggered when she had shared her dread of cataclysmic waves and teased her for what he called the absurdity of preferring death by mudslide. From that point on, she had been reluctant to share fears, because his insensitivity had reminded her of Gavin’s.
On first meeting Andy, Keri had noticed his reddish hair and facial freckles part-hidden by suntan; features that had made Lachlan look different from the rest of his family. She had been aware that these similarities were part of the attraction that had led her to become engaged. Would another eight years, she had asked herself, have given Lachlan the same adult appearance as Andy? However, her husband’s alternating between mocking and indifference meant he came to remind her more of Gavin.
A gust nudged the driver’s side of the Nissan as it passed a gap in the gorse-yellowed hills. Although no threat, the wind had startled Keri. She noticed a cloud of dust blown from the grader-scraped earth of another suburb in the making, and recalled specks blown into her eyes and how her parents or Lachlan had used the corner of a handkerchief to remove the irritation. Her first boyfriend had done the same except his ministering was loaded with sexual tension as they hadn’t yet kissed, something she put right once he had cleared the grit.
Tears welled as Keri realised that by leaving Wellington she would have no one to dab her eyes or to kiss. The motorway ended. She could have pulled to the side for 10 minutes, but she kept driving. There would be time enough for weeping in private at Mahia.