When I see fragile
Do you remember the typewriting rain, between the window and the moon? Curtains so thin that, as it fell, shadows scattered and grew.
And remember, the hammock tied between brick and hedge, the squeak as we all clambered in, you underneath us, trying to get free –
‘‘What are we gonna do with it all?’’ Remember, how the taste of honey on porridge is sunlight through the still-drawn drapes? How the stairs of the deck creak on the way to the beach,
one, two, three –
‘‘Seriously, El. It’s not like we can sell it.’’ Remember, the harakeke on our bare legs? Twisting it around our hands as we walk the boardwalk, pulling, pulling, letting go. Toitoi tickling our necks from behind.
‘‘Like this junk.’’ Des pulls the old chess board out from the TV cabinet in the lounge. He’s on his knees, trash bags at his heels. Shakes a box to get my attention. It’s got the pieces in it, seagulls as pawns, captains as kings. Still looks the same. But the lighthouse is crumbling, and a sailor has no head – what piece was he? Knight? Bishop? The corner of the box is eaten through.
‘‘Oh yeah,’’ I say. I see it, and I can hear Brooke Fraser playing in the background as parents read newspapers, us arguing over the rules. It’s an L
shape. Two up, two across, not three. ‘‘Thought we
threw that out.’’
Moody days for chess, hot days for the ocean. Remember? Summer is the sound of tin cans on rock, wet laughter, crickets sending morse code to the powerline doves. Eating sandwiches full of chips, boogie boarding till our knees are raw.
And it isn’t just me and Des, back then. Mum and Dad are there. You and Des share a room, I have my own. Little model sailing ships on the wall, painted a blue that’s neither ocean nor sky.
‘‘The dump?’’ Des asks, holding the chessboard over the rubbish bag. The donation box is already spilling. ‘‘Half the pieces are missing.’’
I nod. Hear the thump of the board as it meets the ground.
The three of us – you, me and Des – we clamber barefoot over rockpools and upturn stones, looking for crabs. They strew in all directions. We laugh, squish pipi between our toes, listen to the pop. Laugh some more.
It’s all laughter, and hot feet on pavement, icecreams from the dairy – two scoops? Three? Always the same flavour – hokey pokey for you and me, orange chocolate for Des.
The bach is only an hour from home, and we beg Mum and Dad to take us back even when the days are short, the waves hungry. Weekends pass and weeks drag in grey, nothing offered but concrete skies.
The beach offers more than grayscale, and when summer hits no time has passed at all. We’re back again with the lace curtains and gritty deck. Floral bed covers pulled tight over beds, sheets like
And when the night is thick with stars, we find you at the water’s edge, alone. You, wearing nothing but swim shorts and the ocean on your feet, stirring the moonlight with a toe – slowly.
plastic. Hanging shells that click in the breeze, gentle and warm.
We hop the chain between the beach and the house, bruises at shin height. Pick grapefruit from the trees that block our view, branches weighed down, down. Remember?
Us: letting blue ladybirds walk over our arms. You: feeling sorry for the aphids.
You were born in the midst of a typhoon, the ocean seething, the sky molten – too soon, too far from home. The walls of the bach ached with the storm and with you, but you came, and you cried, as loud as the wind.
And this place, now, then, it’s the eye of the storm – sky clear, winds light. You reach for the ocean even when we’re home, searching, searching.
‘‘Can we swim there?’’ You ask, when you’re old enough to come out alone with me, and I’m old enough to take you. We wade in, slowly, letting the water build to my hips.
‘‘Where?’’ I ask, because you’re pointing at nothing but sky, and the sun is bright in my eyes. ‘‘There,’’ you say, annoyed I can’t see it. There’s no buoy or diving platform, nothing different to yesterday, so I shake my head. ‘‘Don’t go further than your waist.’’
You didn’t mean it like that, I get that now. You meant the edge of the world, and I couldn’t see.
There’s a pilot whale, beached on the sand. So long and smooth, Des thinks it’s a rock. People in togs and fluorescent jackets run back and forth between the ocean, like a game. We want in – cast aside our pyjamas and slip back into half-wet swimwear, hop the fence, and run. Hands meet harakeke, feet meet gorse as we move down the track.
Water – that’s all it needs, and there’s miles and miles of it. But there’s five more by the day’s end, the water we run is no use against the sun and the salt. Burnt and hungry, impatient and wild, we return to our shade.
‘‘There’s nothing more we can do,’’ Dad says, hands on shoulders. ‘‘Come on, it’s getting dark.’’ So, we go, and we – Des and I – we forget.
But at night, I hear the pad of small feet on the landing, the creak of the stairs. I can picture you now, running that plastic bucket back and forth, under the stars.
‘‘Mont Blanc is melting,’’ you tell me, when we’re old enough to stay at the bach by ourselves. I bring out a thermos and a rug, and we plant ourselves among raging toitoi, in front of the patch the grapefruit trees once lined.
There are no mountains here, only horizons and oceans and, yet you stare and think of this and I, I–
‘‘How?’’ I say, digging my heels into the sand. It’s warm, my toes curl. The toitoi whip at my hair. ‘‘Mountains are rocks, they can’t melt.’’
‘‘No. But the glaciers. They’re retreating.’’ Retreating?
‘‘Oh,’’ I say. It’s all I say.
‘‘I read an article about it,’’ your nose crinkles. ‘‘Strange, right?’’
I try to catch the threads of them, your thoughts, scattered like our typewriting rain. ‘‘What is? Articles?’’
‘‘No,’’ you frown and twist and avoid my eyes. You can’t gather them, either, your thoughts. Remember? The hunch of your shoulders, a weight that grows there, hangs around your neck like a dead albatross.
You want to say: ‘‘Impermanence, I guess.’’ You want to say: ‘‘Strange, that something so large and incomprehensible exists.’’
You want to say: ‘‘Strange, that it is equally large and incomprehensible that it would not.’’
But you do not say those things. There’s swishes and silence and a charging sea.
‘‘It’s the Highlanders against the Crusaders tonight,’’ I say, placing one foot over the other to itch where the midges bite. ‘‘We should watch it with Des.’’
‘‘Right,’’ you smile, but it’s not a smile. ‘‘We should.’’
When we go our separate ways – suits and student debt – I ask you to come back, to visit. You do, Des too. We cut our feet on rockpools and upturn stones to look for crabs, but it doesn’t last long. Feels cruel now, to see them run from us. Feels odd, to waste time in bare feet.
And when it rains and the sky paints itself a storm, we hear drips in the ceiling. Mould spreads along peeling windowsills.
‘‘It feels like limbo, sometimes. Coming back here,’’ you say, quietly, the whisper of the rolling sea. ‘‘Don’t you think?’’
‘‘Yeah, does need some reno,’’ Des says, cracking open a beer. He offers you one, kicking his feet up on the couch as the rain starts to type.
You nod and smile, though you don’t mean it like that. I didn’t know it back then, but maybe I do now. I’ve googled the definition a thousand times. Limbo: an uncertain period of awaiting. Limbo: an intermediate state.
Limbo: to remember what we had, but to know it’ll never be the same. A fracture on the inside.
And when the night is thick with stars, we find you at the water’s edge, alone. You, wearing nothing but swim shorts and the ocean on your feet, stirring the moonlight with a toe – slowly. Quickly. Hands deep in pockets, eyes deep in thought. Thoughts? Looking to that sleeping horizon with something – something that isn’t longing, something –
‘‘You’re gonna get eaten out here, fulla!’’ Des calls, but it blows right through you, skips across the ocean like a stone. One. Two. Three.
‘‘Oi!’’ Des can’t handle getting no response, so he skips across the sand too. One. Two. Wraps an arm around your shoulder, pulls you down. You push at each other. Laughter.
‘‘Gedoff me –’’
‘‘Why? Not up for a midnight swim?’’
It’s okay, for a night.
But early in the morning, when the sky is bruised like an underworld, you’re back there again, with the staring. Staring at the fuming clouds, or the red tinged sky, or nothing at all. Who’s to know.
They say Mont Blanc is melting.
Remember when moss was soft underfoot in the garden, washing our feet with the hose, picking up as much dirt as we had sand?
They say the seas are rising.
Remember the stones at the very foot of the furthest cliff, round as marbles, worn smooth from hundreds and thousands of years of waves?
They say you didn’t leave a note. Or they couldn’t find one, at least.
Remember the three of us, knee-deep in water, counting out loud to seven, waiting for the biggest wave?
‘‘We may as well sell it while we can, right El? There’s no point holding on to it. It’d cost too much to do it up.’’
Des’s hands shake as we load the car. There’s a glance in the back of the truck, to the bags we’ve filled.
‘‘Bit strange, isn’t it?’’ He says, as we drive. There’s a new retirement village being built, right on the beach front. A new playground too, among the pohutukawa trees that line the water. ‘‘What?’’ I say. Think. Listen. ‘‘Impermanence?’’ ‘‘Yeah,’’ Des frowns. ‘‘I guess.’’
We go and get ice cream from the dairy: hokey pokey and orange chocolate chip. It melts in the sun as we walk, drips on our hands. I stop, to kick my jandals off, carry them in my other hand. People with their dogs greet us. I see kids, in the distance, in the ocean. Hear laughter.
We’re halfway down the street when a man stops us – wears a jersey in the full light of the sun, wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. He politely asks us to point him in the direction of the market. We tell him we don’t know, hasn’t been one for years. Ask him where he heard about it. He’s been clearing out his dead father’s house. Read about the market in a five-year-old newspaper, and thought, maybe, maybe.
‘‘There used to be one on a Saturday,’’ I say. Remember? Necklaces of sea glass and driftwood, the little glass bottles of shells that you love. ‘‘But not any more.’’
Susanna Elliffe’s short story entry When I see fragile things was the first runnerup in the Sunday Star-Times short story competition. Judges said her story strongly evoked youthful Kiwi summers – ‘‘chip sandwiches, rockpools and whale strandings – and the limbo as youth recedes. It is riddled with anxiety about personal loss, climate change, ‘suits and student debt’, while also brimming with affection’’.