Soon, the birds will have flown
Sarah Daniell
They are leaving. Our whole lives seem to have been in preparation for this moment and, yet I am not remotely there. They are at the door and I am still somewhere down the hallway.
Two at once. Just add water, I would joke when explaining to people why my belly was so huge. When you’re pregnant, all bets are off when it comes to diplomacy. There are probing and brutal observations from complete strangers.
The odds for a successful full-term twin pregnancy in your 30s are even more confronting. The experts lay them out crisply, methodically, like surgical instruments on a tray. Grave tones, forensic warnings. When it came to the amniocentesis, the worst-case scenario: a too-big-per cent chance one might miscarry. But they want to test the amniotic fluid to check for potential abnormalities. Their father leaves the small windowless room. Outside, where he’s turned a whiter shade of pale, he bumps into someone he knows and they say, “S*** man, I haven’t seen you looked this f***ed since you were on the dance floor at Studio 9.” Inside, the needle goes in.
Stay. Please stay, I would silently pray to the trees and the sky and the ocean, or wherever the gods reside. But mostly I was talking to them.
I didn’t know their sex and it wasn’t until the surgeon pulled them out at 38 weeks, that I could meet him, Isaac and her, Daisy. Before they were born, I found the te reo Maori translations: Ihaka and Parani. Haere mai, my babies. We buried their placentae under a te kouka tree in our garden, in Pukerua Bay.
Haera ra, my babies. They are leaving and, instead of “things” for your 18th birthday, I say let’s have a holiday together, our last before you are officially adults.
They are more mature in many ways than I was at their age. They have jobs, they can drive, they will soon be voting. They are funny. They are the generation of the smart, critical thinkers; the anxious and the screen-obsessed. They are testing the waters, which they know are getting too warm because — climate change. They are dreaming of the future. Laying down plans.
I will be, apparently, an “empty nester”. I loathe this slogan. It indicates that somehow my life, my very existence, will be an empty pile of old twigs. My life, I know, is more than that. But it’s true that soon the birds will have flown.
Her children are set to leave the nest. To ease the transition — for her and them — suggests an island getaway.
We are leaving. Driving from La Tontouta International Airport, in New Caledonia. I’m excited to drag out my dusty, poorly constructed French with misplaced verbs and tenses; to see and feel the convergence of Melanesian and French culture and food; to swim, to dive, to feel the sun.
I am excited to drive on the right-hand side of the road, I say as we pile in. In truth, I’m nervous AF but I want to inspire confidence. “Mum, you’re too close to the edge,” he shrieks from the passenger seat as we hit the highway. It is the only moment of tension on our 10-day road trip of New Caledonia’s Grand Terre.
Put on some music. Jazz, blues, reggae, rap. We drive. The wild thing, for someone accustomed to driving in Auckland, is that people here are so polite. There’s no horn-blasting, bird-flipping, angry arms flailing out windows. I start to relax.
We take the winding unfamiliar highway to Noumea, where we will stay one night, before heading to Poé.
The next day, we buy supplies — baguettes, charcuterie and camembert, salad and mixers — from Auchan Supermarche. We leave behind the smart high-rise hotels and ritzy boutiques, and soon it’s just mountains, jungle and the coast — a strip of iridescent turquoise, in the distance. We pull over at a roadside shop with a peeling painted sign. Workers in fluoro vests are having smoko — French pastries and Gatorade — outside at a picnic table. We buy coffee and snacks and get talking to a local who tells us he lived in New Zealand. He lists all the places he once lived and it’s like the song I’ve Been Everywhere, Man: “I’ve lived in Takapuna, Howick, Te Atatu, Taihape.” He also loves the All Blacks but when I say, “Oui, mais avez-vous vu le Black Ferns?” he looks blank. But it could be my French. Then he gets in his small red car and drives off, waving furiously out the window until we can no longer see him.
“After the Nera bridge,” writes Nathalie in an email, “before entering Bourail, take the Poé road.”
She is in Paris with her family but Sophie will be there.
“As you face the lagoon, turn right, drive along the fence of the Poé municipal campsite on your left ... then take the first sandy track on the left and drive for about 1.2km. On your right, you’ll see the gate.” We aren’t there yet, but I love this place already.
The road to Poé is a sandy track fringed with banana palms and hibiscus. There are lychees and bromeliads, shrubs of silver and purple and red. Strange birds cry a constant discordant soundtrack. The coconut palms clap gently at the splendour.
We park outside the gate and head to the beach and lie there like stranded creatures, relieved we made it without any drama. And we stare, speechless. We are here.
They have left. All the weekend tourists from Noumea have gone home and we seem to have the place to ourselves. The tide is high at 8am and the sunlight on the lagoon throws shades of pale gold and turquoise, turning deeper, darker blue farther out near the ghost waves gnawing at the reef. After coffee, and cheap, warm baguettes from the store just down the road, we haul the kayaks and SUP boards across the lawn and down to the sand.
At night we discuss everything from childhood memories to the stars and the universe, which is right there, above us, clear and close. “We are stardust,” says Isaac. Just matter. Literally. We are also golden from the sun.
Sophie, our host, sailed to Poé with her husband 30 years ago and never left. She misses sailing, and her face turns sad when she says this, and I think it’s because she mostly misses her husband.
Sophie has invited us for dinner. “I only invite people if I like them.”
She’s straight up, funny. We speak a hybrid of broken-English-broken-French. She’s made poached fish and potatoes. We eat salad last. We drink wine and she tells jokes. I ask her what’s the name of the purple and silver shrubs clustered around the perfect swimming pool and she says, waving her hand, “Ah ... they are ... I don’t know ... plants.”
On our second morning we have coffee together and she shows me a plastic container full of centipedes, about 12cm long. They were already dead when she swept up from the pool and now they are now preserved in alcohol. Canned sardines on acid.
The French came and they stayed. But why do you not have an official Kanak language, I ask Sophie. Everyone in New Caledonia speaks French, including the indigenous Kanak people. Of the 293,000 people in New Caledonia, roughly 40 per cent are Kanaks. There are 28 different Kanak languages in NC, and 11 dialects. In the debate about bilingual representation is an ongoing conversation. Mostly in French.
“Are French people in New Caledonia nicer than they are in France?” Daisy asks Christophe, at Le Jardin de Poé. We order passionfruit cocktails, duck, crab and a Vietnamese-style pulled pork and fried rice.
“Of course, oui, oui” he replies, emphatically. “But here we have time. We are on an island. No one is in a rush. It’s easier to be nice.
“Everything in life has a cost,” he says. “No one place is better than another. Me? I prefer to live here.”
People want to talk here. Not surface. Philosophical, funny and big-life riffs and they go there fast. Christophe dangles the herbs in front of my nose and asks, “Mint or thyme?” He’s not testing my knowledge of herbs; he’s making tea, he says, because it aids digestion. So which do I want? Mint or thyme?
We need to go beneath the surface because I know the diving will be extraordinary. New Caledonia is a World Heritage Unesco-protected site, there are many varied and brilliant marine species. Some are familiar, like trevally, but much, much bigger.
Philippe wears reflective mirror wraparound sunglasses. He is taking us diving. He’s a sixthgeneration New Caledonian. His family are beef farmers and he runs a dive business, when the tide is right, from a small hut on the beach. He tells us that we must not just take off. We must stay near him. There are “things” out there, he says. I hope so, I think, as we pull on our wetsuits and climb into the boat. The water is calm and so clear you can see right to the sandy floor. We motor for about half an hour, closer to the reef. He lists what we might see: eels, massive green turtles, sharks, sea snakes, parrot fish, clown fish, yellow snapper, stingrays. He’s right on all counts. I dive down to the sandy floor and there a basking shark rests, its tail gracefully flicking from side to side, utterly bored by our presence. On the trip back, Philippe sings a song in French about sailors, love and loss. We are all encouraged to join in and sing our own. Of course, I do.
The next morning, I wake up and put the coffee on in our outside kitchen in the garden. And there on the table is a basket of warm pastries, from Sophie.
We lounge by the pool when the tide is out. We shell peanuts, read books. In the pool, a robot moves around beneath the surface like an exotic alien, cleaning diligently. I am reading Lessons, by Ian McEwan. On page 314 a father, Roland, is waiting for his teenage son to arrive home from summer holidays in Greece. He is late to arrive, “casual”.
“Lawrence should have phoned. But no complaining. This is the beginning of the transition, of letting go,” though he had never heard anyone speak of it, “this form of parental dismay.” I finish my book, talk it up and hand it to Isaac. He says he’s keen. “How’s it going — are you enjoying it?” I ask a few hours later, and he replies, “Yeah I’ve just got to the part where he jerks off for the first time.”
“You could read The Handmaid’s Tale when Daisy’s finished,” I say.
We plan walks. We actually walk. We do absolutely nothing. We eat at strange times and make cocktails with vodka at 4pm.
They know a little more — and also less — than I, my children. I try to listen more than I talk. We talk about determinism versus free will. Daisy is doing homework, which I try to discourage but she ignores me, saying, “I think it’s how you are brought up that determines how we are as adults.”
That night, a delivery guy from Pizza Nera arrives at the gate in a four-wheel drive. “Merci beaucoup,” I say as I pass the cash through the gate. “Normale!” he replies. “I think you will enjoy.”
The next day, his French wife, who’s beautiful and who smokes cigarettes after her lunch with Sophie, tells me she has just taken her two teenage boys backpacking in Thailand. It’s good for them, she says, because they are privileged.
We are. For them, to be able to broaden their horizons. To be challenged. For me, to have had the time and space to enjoy them as the adults they have become.
We have to leave soon, even though we’d like to live here for 20 years. It is an art, knowing when to leave. Before the party turns and you have to walk through the broken glass, over unconscious bodies, past the arguments, ashtrays and discarded pizza crusts. Leave while you’re enjoying it.
We’ve had conversations about broken hearts, theirs and mine. We talk about everything and sometimes they will say nothing at all. We are comfortable, too, in the not-saying. We discuss films, friendships, substances and things of substance. Their friends still fill the house. I like it that way. But they are not staying, they are going. It’s time. Their time. Two at once.