My mother’s eldest sister was my favourite aunt.
“Who’s your favourite aunt?”
“You are, Kaite.”
“No, Feather, remember.”
“You are, Feather.”
“Aunt Feather.”
“You are, Aunt Feather.”
“Say it all together.”
I roll my eyes, “You’re my favourite aunt, Aunt Feather.”
“Good girl,” she laughs, only half-joking, “Now eat your toast.”
I’m 10. The already warm Western Australian sun slants through the roller blinds. Sitting at the kitchen table opposite me is a large woman, the morning light a golden frame for her bird’s nest of baby-fine brown hair. She leans over the table, passing me a thick piece of toast dripping with honey and a slab of butter cut thick as cheese.
“Thanks,” I say, taking the toast.
She sits back to observe me. “I should have got your hair,” she says, not for the first time, eyeing my thick red curls. She reaches forward, “You don’t mind if I just cut a little snip off for a wee wig, do you?” I shriek and bat her warm hands away, squealing and giggling, half-terrified she’ll get the scissors out right then and there.
This is Kathleen Margaret. She’s been known as Katy, Katrina, Kate, Katriana, Kat… before finally settling on Kaite, pronounced Kate but with an added ‘i’. (Finding her name was a complicated process involving much consultation of the stars and various charts; eventually it was numerology that did it for her – she liked the sound of ‘Kate’ but needed the added numbers of the ‘i’.) It’s when she’s feeling mischievous that she demands to be called Feather.
Aunt Kaite is impossible to describe. When I try, I’m left with a heap of adjectives, none of which capture her – I might say she’s beautiful, and you’d imagine something she’s not; or she’s larger than life (she is, literally, at over 120 kilos), she’s wonderful, she’s beloved by her community, she’s a lesbian, she’s a mother, she’s a storyteller, she’s part Māori, she’s a celebrant. She’s skilled at prising extraordinary stories out of ordinary people.
“Do you know my friend Kerei,” she might say, casually.
“The carpenter?” I’d reply, bored already by the plain, quiet man she was referring to.
She’d fix her canny eye on me, “He invented a method of clearing land mines for the United Nations, you know.”
Aunt Kaite loves opportunity shops. When she dropped everything and came to Wellington in the bitter winter to be at my mother’s bedside after her sudden and shocking cancer diagnosis, Kaite, who’d been living in the dry, hot desert of Western Australia, was frozen to the very marrow of her bones. She went immediately to the op shop and bought a hat. A complicated, moth-eaten concoction of real fur and flaps. It was very warm. She wore it everywhere. With every outfit.
I found her one morning making tea in the pre-dawn kitchen, wearing a black-and-yellow stripped thermal onesie. And the hat.
I was 18, not unused to op-shop looks myself, but safe ones. I looked her up and down, “You look like a Russian Mafia bumble bee.”
“Excellent.” She beamed, dazzling me with a smile showing no trace of her exhaustion from being up all night comforting my mother, or her fear.
“I’m dropping you at class today, like this.” She flashed jazz hands at me.
“You’re not.”
She did.
Leaning out the open car window, as I made my way into the thrum of students, head down, in a voice well trained from a childhood of elocution lessons, she called brightly, “Have a great day hoochy slut puppy!”
The morning after her arrival, Mum was still in hospital. Disorientated, jetlagged, heart on high alert, Kaite, from the bedroom window, saw two men in dark suits threading their way down the path towards the house. Knowing they were there to deliver bad news she leapt out of bed and flung herself at the door.
I was also dragged from my sleepy state by the doorbell. Climbing down the stairs, I just had time to see Aunt Kaite throw open the door and hear –
“There’s still enough time to come –”
Kaite clutched her chest.
“– to God.”
“Fuck off!” she screamed, pent-up relief and adrenaline coursing through her. The Mormans backed away, never, ever, to return.
“Kaite,” I said, starting to giggle as the skinny one vaulted up the path. “You’re naked.”
It was a long winter, that winter of Mum’s cancer. Kaite got bored of the endless dreary rounds of hospital visits and rain. The hours of chemotherapy, the slow drip in Mum’s arm. She found creative ways to entertain herself. Once (this was the days before cell phones) the phone rang while I was vacuuming. Kaite swerved in to answer it, “Hello!” she boomed in a faux accent, “You have reached the Chinese Laundry!”
There was a small silence at the other end before, in her normal voice, Kaite said, “Yes, hello?”
“Is Heidi there?” my friend Annabel recovered enough to ask, politely.
“She’s BUSY cleaning right now,” Kaite yelled in mock-outrage down the phone. “She can’t talk to you. What do you think this is?”
Just as Annabel was fumbling to hang up, Kaite said quite pleasantly, “I’ll just pop her on now. Cheerio.” Annabel did not ring back for quite some time. But perhaps it was a prophecy, as she ended up marrying a Chinese man.
One time we were visiting Kaite and her only son Luke in Perth. Luke, four years my senior, was 15 at the time. My mother, sister and I came home from shopping to see Kaite swaying on her veranda, clutching the railing for support. An overly full brandy glass in her other hand. She didn’t actually drink alcohol, but she liked the drama of it; she had a penchant for using the fumes like smelling salts.
“What is it?” My mother dropped her supermarket bags to go to her; they fell with a faint snap in the brittle grass.
Kaite swayed, perilously close to fainting, “It’s Luke.”
Mum guided Kaite into a wicker chair, “Sweetie, what happened?” Mum steeled her face for the worst as we clustered around.
“I told him we’re selling. He’s gone crazy with grief.” Kaite took a great inhale of the alcoholic vapour, and her eyes rolled back, “He’s tearing the boards off the house. He’s destroying it.” She stage whispered.
“Stay here.” Mum, ever practical, commanded me and my sister. “Watch her.” She gestured to Kaite who was now hyperventilating, eyes closed, lying back in her chair, her free hand thrown across her forehead.
Mum marched in to confront her nephew.
What she found was our placid cousin fixing a broken board on the outside of the house. “Mum said we were selling,” he explained, “I took this off because it needed fixing. I did try and tell her…”
Aunt Kaite was a Gemini, the only one in our family. Horoscopes mean a lot to her. My daughter was born the day before Aunt Kaite’s 65th birthday. Mum was in Christchurch, Kaite’s home for the last 15 years.
She called me to say that Kaite, although she professed often enough that she didn’t much care for babies, was chuffed to have a Gemini grand-niece.
Mum was there to say goodbye. Kaite had bowel cancer. By the time they found it, it was too late. But despite the heavy load of drugs to keep the pain at bay, Kaite managed to do my daughter’s numerological chart.
“It’s a good name.” Kaite emailed me, approvingly. “She’ll do well. You tell her that from Feather. Besides, the family needs another Gemini.”
Kaite never met her grand-niece. Eight weeks after my daughter was born, Kaite died. I’d wanted terribly to see her again, once I was knew she was dying, but she lived at the other end of the country, a journey complicated by the late stages of pregnancy and then a sick newborn in the storm-strewn winter.
But she never was one for goodbyes. “Don’t worry”, she used to say breezily to me and my sister when we were younger, terrified as we were of the ghosts Kaite claimed regularly to see, “I won’t ever be properly gone.” She’d flash her hazel eyes, lunging towards us in our shrieking terror, “I’ll come back specifically to haunt you two.”
The last time I saw Kaite was a year before she died, when I visited her home in Little River, a peninsula outside of Christchurch. Her and her partner’s log cottage was high up, at the top of a rutted road, the building nestled in the flat, the imposing sweep of the hills behind it, standing guard. I’d never really known why Kaite had come home to New Zealand after 30 years away and why to Christchurch, where she’d never lived before. But standing on the grass outside her house, under the electric blue sky, with the shock of the hills veering dizzily off to meet the sea below us, I understood.
She squeezed me tightly as I left, holding me in the warmth of her all-encompassing hug. She didn’t want to come into town, leaving her partner to do the more prosaic, practical work of the goodbye – the car, the luggage, being on time for the plane. She preferred the dramatic. I left her waving her silk handkerchief in the breeze at me, her devoted dog lapping crazily around her feet, standing against the green slash of the hills, a woman on the edge of the sky.
She gave me a china fortune-telling teacup on that last visit. Stars and moons and delicate gold symbols danced on the bone-white china. It might have belonged to her wayward maternal grandmother, Lillian, famed for her long line of children to different men, her refusal to marry, and the many complicated secrets of her history she took to her grave. Or it might have come from an opportunity shop. It doesn’t matter. With Kaite, it’s always and only ever been about the story.
And that’s why she’ll never be properly gone, because when my daughter’s old enough, I’ll tell her all about her great-aunt. “Aunt Feather,” I’ll start by saying to her, “She was my favourite aunt.”