Hira walks quietly. That is her trait. A quiet walker.
Queen of the coastline, she walks in the sea breeze along the clifftop path where the trees all lean, salt licked, into the land. The sun shines through skittish clouds. Her sea-bleached hair tugs in front of her face like snakes vying for attention. She looks out through the gaps in her snake-hair and sees the wind; in the white sea spray, the grass bent over, the trees shivering landwards. Hands in her pockets, Hira keeps herself contained.
If I began as a seed, she thinks, what am I now? How am I different from that child uncurling out of the black dirt?
Hira reaches the place where the slope slackens and only windblown grass remains. There is a lone kahikatea in the middle of the field. She lays her hand on its trunk. Far above her, its straight trunk becomes branches bending away from the sea. Leaves tremor towards the sheltered land. Every detail of the tree stands out, distinct against the blue-and-white sky.
Trees share nutrients between their root systems. When all the trees were chopped down except for this one, she thinks, how did it feel?
She feels the sea spray spittling at her skin. Sun showers slide by. She already knows the answer to her own question.
She walks quietly though the wind, and the wind roars loudly in her ears.
When she gets back to her house in the dunes, Hira’s skin feels flushed and alive. Every breath feels especially deep. Hira laughs, for no reason other than it feels good. She takes off her boots and her coat, and combs back her wind-knotted hair with her fingers. She puts the kettle over the fire for a cup of tea and stands beside it, hands hovering above the shimmering waves of heat.
After a while, the silence of the house seeps back into her bones. The air hardly seems to move in here. Wherever she sits, the sun does not reach, and she cannot see the sea from the window. She waits for something to happen, for someone to call. No one does.
The next day it is raining; a light chilly drizzle. She puts on her boots and coat and sets off along the clifftop path. The rain prickles fresh against her cheeks, saturating. She cannot see very much in the direction of the sea. It is all engulfed in white mist, wavering with sheets of rain.
In this blankness, Hira can pretend that the things that should be there are there. She can imagine the call of gulls coming up from the cliff faces. She can imagine the agitated forms of sheep, bleating as they jostle away from her, their coats covered in little droplets of rain. She can imagine the fluke of a whale hitting the ocean on the horizon, its splash hidden in the mist.
She comes to the kahikatea tree. Sadness has seeped into her soul just as the rain has seeped through her body.
Why do we have to be alone, she asks. Is there nothing we can do?
She rests her hip against the tree’s trunk and slings her arm around it. She feels comfortable there. Together they drip in the mist and drizzle until she gets too cold and she walks quietly home.
Late that afternoon, the rain clears and for a short period the sun shines. Steam phantoms up from the ground outside the house. She decides to go walking again. Instead of the clifftop path, she walks northwards, towards where the town used to be.
She thinks about the woman who sold her tomatoes. Hira was just a child at the time, standing on tiptoes to lean on the table of produce. The woman cupped each red and black orb in her hand like it was a baby bird as she transferred them into Hira’s basket. I grew these in my garden, she said. She was doing a horticulture course. She told Hira about how she had worked seaweed into the soil; how she had planted the seeds in a sheltered space where the sun warmed the ground and the wall of the house; how she had carefully fed them the right amount of water every day, and drew the clear plastic blanket over them at night. She told Hira that she liked to sit beside them in the drowsy sunlight and sing. That’s not advised by my horticulture course, she said, laughing. That’s just something I like to do.
The house where the woman grew the tomatoes is the first house at the edge of the town. Hira looks at the dark gap where the door used to be. The paint is peeling around the doorframe. There is a hole in the roof of the veranda. Water pools on the wooden planks of the porch. Hira stands outside the house and remembers why she doesn’t usually walk towards the town.
Does the sun still warm the ground in the sheltered spot round the back of the house? Does the tomato plant still stretch its green limbs towards the sky, now that the singing is gone?
She remembers the sweet earthy tang of tomato, cut into slices, eaten delicately, one by one. The juice running down her chin.
Hira is a quiet walker but it is not in her nature to creep through the remains of another person’s space. She wishes she had an offering to slip into the letterbox. Perhaps a packet of seeds. Instead, she walks along the road, turning her back on the empty house that speaks now only with the groan of the wind.
The sky is all grey now and darkness seeps in from the east. Hira walks down the main street. Some of the houses are perfectly in order except that seaweed hangs dried from the doorknobs and sand is scattered in patterns across their fronts. In other places, only a broken mess of wood and rubble remains. The broken timber beams are like bones—tree-bones. Cracked and weathered ribcages, pointing up towards the sky.
There are no people in the town. The houses have been stripped of belongings. They are the shells, the empty carapaces, the shed scales of a lifeform that no longer needs them.
Hira makes no sound as she walks through the street of houses. When there is glass or sand or tree-bones that could crunch underfoot, she easily sidesteps out of the way. She is going to the beach, where the pīkao trembles golden in the wind and the white sand blows over her feet. The waves will stand up, blue-green inside, before they crash down in white foam that gallops into shore. It used to be that penguins would break out of the waves and stumble awkwardly on two feet up into the dunes. That won’t happen now, she knows. But Hira knows the grey clouds on the horizon will be piling up in patterns and the hush of the dusk will turn the clouds deep blue, and then she will watch the shadows rise up and walk around her, whispering to one another, and the smell of the seaweed will be cut open by the salt lick of cold water on her skin.
It has been a long time since she walked this path to the beach. The scrub has grown and at first, she cannot find the trail.There is nothing to keep the grass from growing or to stop the branches reaching across the space where people and animals used to walk. She finds the gap at last and scratches through, very carefully letting each branch spring back into its place so that they don’t rustle or snap.
It is dark in the pines and there are branches lying dead under pine needles, daring her to step on them so they can crackle noisily into the gloom. She used to get lost in the pines as a child. Now she is back in the dizzying disorientation of the close-pressed trunks, but she can see the gold of the pīkao ahead. She knows where to go, although she misses the maze of ways left by sea lions who once called these pines home.
She steps out of the pines and the salty wind snaps at her skin. She takes great leaps through the pīkao to the sand, which blows around her feet in skittish scatterings. The wind is blowing sideways along the beach and carries white sea spray in sheets off the breaking waves. The waves stand up, blue-green inside, and on the horizon the dusk has turned the clouds blue. In between, the sea is silver. She runs along wet sand at the waves’ edge, arms spread wide; the wind behind her lifts her; her hair whips forward in angry snakes. The waves catch at her toes for all she tries to dodge them and she leaves a trail of loud, splashing footsteps.
As she runs with the joy of the ocean, shadows rise up among the dunes and driftwood debris. Ahead of her, a fallen trunk stretches from the waterline diagonally to the dunes. One root or branch of it sticks up like the sternpost of a waka. Small worms seem to have drilled patterns in it, so it looks carved.
Hira’s footsteps slow as she gets closer. The closer she gets, the less it looks like a trunk that looks like a waka, and the more it looks like a waka. She catches her snakes of hair and pulls them back—they’re interfering with her eyes. She ties her hair in a knot behind her head. The shadows lean around her, muttering.
She has to wade in the waves to get around the base of the trunk. It is a waka. Hira has only seen one once before, at night, being paddled across a lake to a distant light. She knew she had been imagining things then and perhaps she is imagining things now, but both times her senses tell her that what she sees is true. Here is a waka wrecked on the beach, on its side and broken but still carved with such perfection that she wants to touch the spirals with her fingers; to follow the lines and curves to their inevitable end. The waves are cold and curl the sand out from under her toes; she sinks deeper into the sea the longer she stands with her hands on the carvings. The tree this waka came from must have been as tall and straight as the kahikatea tree on the clifftop. Like that tree, it has bent to the strength of the sea and the wind; it has reached out yearningly towards the shelter of land.
Hira hears a groaning sound, and it is not the groaning of the wind in a doorless house; it is the groaning of breath in a soft body. Her heart pulses blood into her fingertips, her ears, the skin of her cheeks. Alive, alive, alive. Her heart is a strong worker, it grew her from a tiny seed.
The man is curled in amongst the piles of kelp and bladderwrack and driftwood and plastic scraps. His hair is the colour of pīkao and his skin is the same colour as the sand—white and grey in streaks and blotches. His face is pressed into the sand and the seaweed so she cannot see his eyes.
When Hira touches his back, he flinches. The raised round lumps of his spine are like barnacles. She can feel the cold of him. She can feel that he should be warm. She takes his head in her hands, and he gapes at the air. He stares up at her, eyes blue-green like the standing-up wave.
He is alive, he is alive, he is alive.
She unbends herself from where she is kneeling on the sand. He reaches out towards her with long arms, elbow knobbles like driftwood. He makes noises with his mouth. He speaks. Help me, please.
She helps him stand up. His body judders as he leans on her. He is a head taller than she is and she worries that he might topple. His arms sling around her shoulders and he clings there. Perhaps this is the way he clung to the hull of the waka, when it smashed upon the rocks. She puts her arm around his hips. It feels comfortable there. She takes a step and he staggers forwards with her. They take another step, and another. The shadows are all leaning against the waka, watching them. Won’t get far like that, they seem to mutter. The man’s skin is warm, she can feel blood moving through his veins. His breath is hot, wet, loud against her ear. Alive, she thinks. Alive.
It is slow moving through the pine forest. To get past the outer needle branches, she has to make him crawl on his hands and knees, to slide on his belly like a sea lion. He groans like a lost pup. She keeps very close to him. She doesn’t want to stop feeling the energy vibrating from the surface of his skin.
In the pines it is now too dark to see. She feels all the shadows packed so tightly around them. Let me through, she says, let us through here. The shadows draw up tall and harsh into the creaking branches. She hopes no branches fall, none of those limbs known as widow-makers, while they stumble loudly through the forest, stubbing their toes on the rough, clammy bark.
Her directional instinct leads her true, into the wall of scrub, which they crash through, snapping branches; tearing leaves. They break into the relative light of the open twilight on the edge of the town. The man stumbles and then folds to the ground like an empty pair of trousers. She sits next to him and takes his head on her lap. He breathes and groans and twitches. She runs her hand over his pīkao-coloured hair, which is thick and stiff with salt.
When he sits himself upright again, the stars have come out, and it is dark. She is watching the stars, her heart beating and bubbling. There is Mahurangi, the Southern Cross, whose pointers point towards her home. She wants to sing but she doesn’t know any songs, so she hums and sings notes and words, making a pattern. It is the pattern of his breath, his twitching, his body that moves of its own accord because he is alive. She can feel a buzz as she runs her fingertips across his skin, like electricity. She feels charged.
Water, he asks her, do you have any water? He sounds apologetic.
Do not apologise for needing the things you need to stay alive, she sings.
He smiles, lips cracked and sore from the salt.
Can you walk some more? she asks.
He nods. With help.
She takes his weight across her shoulders again and puts her arms around his hips again, and they shuffle through the silent streets of the town.
He shudders and shivers as they pass the empty husk houses; the broken ribcage tree-bone houses. She feels wet salt drops of his tears on her face. She tastes the salt.
They are all gone here, too, he says.
No, she says. Not all. I am still here. She squeezes her arm around his hips. He rests his head on hers.
As they make their way through the town, the weight of him presses down on her. They keep tripping on the debris that scatters the road. She knows that her house in the dunes is too far away, too hard to walk to in the dark. And they are so loud, walking like this. The shadows are gathering.
When they get to the last house at the edge of the town, she turns through the gate. She gets him to pull on the banister to get up the three steps onto the veranda. She takes him through the dark gap where the door should be, into the tomato grower’s house.
It is not as dilapidated inside as she thought. There is still some furniture; in the kitchen there is a scrubbed wooden table and two chairs, and crockery stacked on the shelf. The taps do not run, of course. She leaves him sitting at the scrubbed table and takes a jug out the back door to the sheltered garden where, back before the storms came, the sun warmed the ground and the wall of the house. There is a rainwater tank there. Hira thinks the woman might have used it to water her tomatoes, carefully ferrying just the right amount of water to each plant in her cupped hands. Hira fills the jug and tries a mouthful. The water is fresh and sweet, like Mahurangi shining above. She can hear the sound of the sea. Her eyes trace the mess of vines in front of her. It is a delicate plant, green in the shadows, with darker spheres tucked among the leaves.
The man sits leaning against the wall of the kitchen, sliding in and out of dream. He is sitting in a waka with his brothers as they paddle endlessly, tiresomely, towards somewhere new, somewhere liveable. He is clinging to the waka in the up and down grip of waves that rise like hills to take away the sky. He is caught in the circling hand of water; it is pulling at his limbs and his hair. He is holding the carved side of the waka as it carries him up for gulps of air. He is lying mashed against the land, gritty sand in his mouth, seaweed and salt deep up his nose.
He feels a warm hand against his arm. She is the woman of the coastline with the soft hair and electric touch. The woman who saved him. She holds a cup of starlight water against his lips. He drinks, splutters, drinks some more. She is talking, excited, a thrumming energy like the warmth of the sun. Something about a woman who grew tomatoes. Something about a tomato vine, growing through the storms. He doesn’t understand but he nods. She holds something round and dark against his nose. It smells so alive, sweet and tangy. He breathes it in deeply. He takes hold of her hand to keep it there so he can keep breathing that scent.
Hira slices the tomato into segments. It is fleshy, juicy. It is miraculous. She gives a slice to the man who has come from the sea. The man who is alive. She eats a slice herself. It is earthy, tangy, sweet. Its juice runs down her chin. She laughs and he laughs too.
We can live here, she tells him. We can live in this house of the tomato grower, and I will look after the tomatoes. He nods and reaches out to catch her hand.
There on the edge of things, she hears another sound. It stirs through the gap where the door should be, seemingly out of her memories. It is a sound that was such a constant when she was growing out of a seed.
The sound of tītī, flying in from the sea.
She rushes outside again and sees them. Thousands of them, chaos across the sky. They are so loud and smelly. They are chaotic and clumsy. They have come from the place beyond the horizon, to bring life to this coastline that she calls home.