The crossing in front of Midland Park was the last place Huia expected to see her cousin. She might have missed her in the throng of city-goers if Cassidy’s eyes hadn’t bulged out of her head as they passed each other, and if she hadn’t grabbed her with enough force to send the designer tote bag on her other arm flying into another pedestrian.
“Cousin! Holy shit!” Cassidy squawked as people weaved around them and stared.
The two women embraced in the center of the pedestrian crossing, gripping the backs of one another's coats with clenched fists to keep themselves from being buffeted by the wind that funneled through Lambton Quay. The pedestrian light clicked off and the crossing began to clear as they shuffled to the bus shelter outside the park. They gazed at each other, both bold and shy, momentarily transported back to their childhood selves. It took time to readjust to each other after so long and to figure out exactly how long it had been. Six years? More?
Huia asked her cousin what she was doing in Wellington, but Cassidy waved her questions aside with a brisk hand as if living a four-hour flight away was an irrelevant detail. As it turned out, she’d arrived in the city a few hours earlier.
“I’m in town for three days, let’s get dinner,” she said.
“Where?”
“Wherever you want babe, it’s your town!”
Huia had to get back to work. Her cousin wasn’t clear about where she was going or what she was doing but she mentioned some appointments to keep, and after another string of breathless exclamations and clumsy cheek kisses they parted ways, stunned and somewhat dreading the thought of a longer meeting.
As she walked back to her office Huia pondered the pleasure she felt at seeing her cousin’s face, and the odd sense of embarrassment at running into her by coincidence. What could she be doing in Wellington? Cassidy had been living in Sydney for close to four years, the rest of their whanau who hadn’t jumped across the pond already were still up in Auckland and Northland. There was no reason for her to be in the capital, or not any that she could think of, aside from work.
Huia had grown absent from her family. It was two Christmases passed since she’d flown home, and she rarely replied to messages or paid attention to what they shared online. She never knew what anyone was doing. Still, it was unnerving—and worse, shameful—to think that her cousin, once almost as close as a sister, could fly to her city without her knowing about it.
Only when she got home and scrolled through Cassidy’s Instagram feed on the couch, trying to catch up and dazzled by the saturated slideshow of shimmering beaches, bikini shots, and lush meals out, that it clicked in her mind that her cousin had always known she lived in Wellington and had not reached out either.
Despite it being a Thursday, the restaurant she suggested was rather empty. Only two other pairs of diners were tucked away into corners when she arrived. It was a nondescript spot at the top of Cuba Street that a former coworker had once recommended. Huia never had a reason to visit before, and she wondered how it would compare to the glitzy rooftop restaurants she’d seen on Cassidy’s Instagram. She found her cousin already seated by the window and not looking at all disdainful of their surroundings. She stood up to meet her. Taller by three inches naturally and three more in spiked heels, she enveloped her in a warm, familial embrace. Huia breathed in the delicate scent of lilies laced with jasmine and sandalwood that emanated from her chest. Her cousin smelled expensive. They pulled back and took one another in again, less shy this time.
“Look at you! You look so different, just as gorgeous,” Cassidy said as they took a seat across from one another.
She was being nice, Huia thought, because she hadn’t been taking care of herself at all and the difference between them now was as stark as daylight. Cassidy’s dark skin was smooth and luminescent, giving off the impression of some nascent inner glow, her makeup minimal but beautifully applied. Her dress was a shimmery lavender silk that draped her body in an ornamental and imposing way. She was utterly changed from the rough, angry teenage girl in Nike track pants and $2 shop hoop earrings that Huia always pictured. Even her expression was soft now, more like a 10-year-old version of herself than teenage.
Huia was wretched by comparison, a ball of split ends and dry skin. Her thin woolen jumper had a noticeable hole at the left shoulder seam and her opaque tights were starting to ladder in the inner thighs. The spaces beneath her eyes were perpetually blackened. She was so used to looking like shit that it hadn’t occurred to her to dress up. Cass didn’t say a thing, which was another noticeable change—a younger version would have ripped into her. Do you always look this hori? was something she would have asked.
Cass ordered for both of them—two cocktails each, a platter of king prawns, oysters, orange and pistachio salad, garlic ciabatta, sirloin steak, and a rack of lamb—and ignored Huia’s yelps of complaint that it was too much for two people.
It was a silly amount of food and it felt like showing off to Huia. As kids, they never went to “real” restaurants as kids unless you counted the Homestead their Nan took them to for special pokie nights in town, with its dry chops and limp greasy french fries and upholstery that stank of burnt canola oil.
Cass, as if reading her mind, glanced back at the menu and whistled through the tiny gap between her front teeth. “Eight oysters for 50 bucks,” she said. “Nan would kill me for that.”
“Get your arse out on those rocks, girl,” Huia said in a rough imitation of their dead grandmother, while her cousin laughed with pleasure. “You should be selling them, not buying them.”
Cassidy was over for work, but just as on Lambton Quay, she was evasive with details. She talked at length about life in Australia though. She’d been living on the Gold Coast like a lot of Māori but she’d branched out more socially than she ever did back home. She had strong opinions about Australians, who were apparently better-looking and better-dressed but somehow acted more sheltered than Kiwis, despite having more people, bigger cities, and crazy diversity.
“Don’t get me started on the racism,” she snapped over the foamy rim of a pina colada. “They’re alright to us, actually, but the way they talk about Aboriginals…” she shuddered. “I feel like I know how it feels to be white now, with all the shit I’ve had to listen to.”
“Why don’t you move back? It’s not as bad as all that here.”
Cassidy rolled her eyes, and for a moment her teenage self flickered back into her tone and expression. Scornful. “For you maybe. It’s worse for me. Whenever I left South Auckland, old white ladies flinched at me on the train, and I’d get security guards searching my bags in the shittest shops. In Supré, for fucks sake. Who steals from Supré? Do you know how many crackheads offered me P to blow them when I lived out in Taka’s?”
“No,” Huia said, feeling herself shrink pathetically in her seat.
“More than one,” Cass said while she polished off an oyster.
“Well, I don’t know. It never happened to me.”
“No shit. It’s different for me. I’m not like them and I can’t pretend to be.”
Huia took her fork and stabbed at a pink, glistening prawn on her plate. Its shell was shiny and hard so she used her hand to peel it instead. She didn’t want to hear about us and them.
“Anyway,” Cass said, “Aussie’s boring, what about you? You work in the city, right? Doing what?”
“Just admin,” Huia said, foregoing the impulse to be as evasive as her cousin. Her life wasn’t interesting enough to act mysterious about.
“Like what? Office work?”
“Basically. I help keep the office running.”
“Cuz,” Cassidy’s smile broke into a grin. “That’s so funny. It really sounds Pākehā, you know? ‘Doing admin.’ I knew you’d end up in something like that.”
Had everyone known she was destined for a life of sterile office work, eyes glazing over from seven plus hours of screen time, replacing the ink cartridges on the printers ad infinitum, listening to her 60-year-old boss dribble compliments and come-ons over her desk? She wished someone would have told her because maybe she would have done something else. Or maybe she wouldn’t have. She told Cassidy about her boss to lighten her own mood, which made her cousin cackle and spit bits of lamb onto the tablecloth.
Otherwise, they didn’t touch on the topic of men in any detail. Huia tried to ask but Cassidy said blithely, “Oh, you know me, there’s always someone,” and didn’t elaborate further. She didn’t ask Huia either, though for Huia’s part there was nothing to share—her last relationship had ended three years before.
Cass’ mum was the same, apparently, living like an old maid, working and going back to her empty old house in Kaeo every night. Cassidy’s brothers were much older and had moved out long before. After splitting with her long-term boyfriend, who had technically been a stepdad but had never been seen as one, her mum had given up on dating altogether.
“She’ll be just like Nan,” Cass said. “Spent too long with one nasty son of a bitch and now she’s off men for life.”
Nan again. It wasn’t a surprise she kept coming up in conversation. Cass had lived with her for a few years as a kid, and when her grandmother passed away, it hit Cassidy harder than anyone. Huia still recalled the sight of her cousin clinging to the coffin when it was time to carry it up to the urupā. She could almost hear the wails echoing through the marae again. At 13, Cassidy’s grief had seemed ancient and unknowable to Huia, who had accepted the death as a sad but natural end for a 75-year-old woman suffering from years of lung cancer.
Cass’ pain continued long after their Nan was interred in the earth. When she realised she had to move back in with her mum and her mum's boyfriend, that grief turned into rage. At the time Huia couldn’t understand her cousin's misery, which seemed to go beyond the loss of an elderly grandparent. Even when she wasn’t screaming at her mum or picking fights with girls at school, she had had the energy of a caged animal—sometimes sullen and silent, curled up in a corner, but always ready to rip throats out if she felt threatened. Always unhappy and always on alert. Cass began to drift from her remaining family, including her cousin. At a relative’s wedding, they had stood together around the back of the wharekai while a 15-year-old Cassidy chain-smoked Holidays and told her about the 23-year-old boyfriend who’d bought them for her, the first one in a long line of older partners. Huia, who could barely imagine having her first kiss, let alone a 23-year-old boyfriend, felt a wedge driven further between them. The start of a continental drift.
Eventually, the teenager had proven to be too much, so she was sent to Auckland. The fights continued, but now they were between Huia and Cassidy’s mothers, who could not see eye-to-eye about her being sent away. It was four years before the sisters could speak civilly when the whanau were together.
The dinner was swallowed in memories on both sides of the table. Once they finished as much as they could stomach, Cassidy leaned back and scanned her cousin's face. “You’re lucky. I knew you’d get out of all that bullshit.”
By ‘that bullshit’ Huia supposed she meant Northland. “Didn’t you get out too?” she asked.
Cassidy smiled, but only a little, and when the waitress came to clear their table, they both got up without a word, piling purses and coats into their arms. Cass paid the hefty bill, ignoring Huia's weak albeit grateful protests.The two women turned down the street and walked aimlessly together, watching a Thursday night in central Wellington unfold. A homeless man sitting outside the Night ‘n Day called them his “sisses” and complimented them as they passed, and while Huia kept her eyes trained forward like always, Cassidy stopped. He was Māori, so she asked where he was from and how long he’d been in Wellington. They chatted a bit, then Huia followed her cousin into the convenience store where she got $20 cash out and a chicken pie with the steam still coming off the crust like she’d baked the thing herself. “God bless you, beautiful,” the man called after her. Then they walked and walked until they passed Midland Park again.
They walked until they hit the harbor, with its cranes and sheds and jutting concrete boulevards. On the left side of the water were the many glittering lights of Khandallah and Johnsonville and way away on the other side, beyond the peninsula, the black hills of Pencarrow Head and the Remutakas. Although they were from up north, Huia’s mum had told her they had tūpuna from the Wairarapa and Wellington, and sometimes she liked to walk down to the harbour after work and look across the water, imagining her ancestors walking the blank cliffs and stony shoreline. It made her feel less lonely in the city, imagining that part of her did belong here, even if it was a long time ago.
Cassidy liked that too. “It’s one of the things I really miss,” she said. “Feeling like I belong somewhere.”
Weeks later, Huia would think of the colour on her cousin's cheeks under the lamplight, the way her eyes shone wetly as they looked out over Wellington harbour.
“I actually wanted to stay up north. I thought maybe I could have stayed with you guys.”
Huia had suspected, but hearing it out loud put a hard lump like a stone in her throat. “Why didn’t you just ask?”
“It was a bad idea. You were stuck in your own world. I thought all my pain would rub off on you.”
“I would have been ok,” Huia said uncertainly.
“Nan was the one who always had my back. If she had stayed longer I would have tried harder to live, you know? Do something she would’ve been proud of.”
Something in the tone of the conversation had shifted. Huia felt it, like a song where the wrong chord had been played and the players just went along with it. She put her arm around Cassidy’s shoulders and squeezed her, trying to reel back whatever the feeling was. “Are you kidding? Look at you—of course she’d be proud.”
Cassidy just shrugged her away gently and began walking back to the street. Then her phone started pinging and she didn’t say much of anything after that.
Eventually they stopped outside a grey apartment block. Huia realised Cassidy must have manoeuvred them to her hotel. Except it didn’t look like a hotel at all, more like one of those cheap Auckland builds with 100 flimsy tiny-windowed shoebox apartments stacked up on top of one another, like a child's hasty sketch of a building. It wasn’t what she’d expected, given Cassidy’s expensive clothing and appetite, but she felt embarrassed to even notice something like that. Her cousin’s expression didn’t give any acknowledgment of the discrepancy. “I’d invite you up,” she said. “But I need to get an early one.”
She was fumbling with her phone, texting someone. A moment later there was a buzzing sound and the glass doors to the complex clicked open. Beyond them, the foyer was flooded with harsh white light that drew attention to the grime on the tiled floor. A rubbish bin near the door overflowed with rumpled McDonald's packaging and empty beer bottles. Huia wanted to ask if she was staying with someone but thought better of it. They hugged for the third and last time, a little tighter now. “Take care of yourself, ok?” Cass murmured, her eyes looking distant as she pulled away and pushed the door open.
“You too,” Huia croaked. They glanced at one another through the glass and Huia felt something pressing against her throat again. She was seized by a violent feeling and cried in the Uber up to Mt Cook.
Growing up, her mum always told her that Māori women have exceptional intuition. “We have to rely on it,” she said, “because we don’t have the same protections from the world as other people do.”
Huia rarely ever felt that intuition. Maybe it was better to say she had never trusted herself enough to know when she felt it. But as she had watched her cousin walking down that grimy corridor, she had known it. She had wanted to call her back, to convince her into the Uber so they could talk late into the night like they did when they were little, and make excuses to whoever they had to in the morning.
Instead, she went home and lay under her bed covers and scrolled through her cousin's Instagram again. Photos of Cassidy in a pool, on the beach, eating, laughing, posing, and not a single other person in sight.