‘It’s not them!’ I’m drowning in the slick stench of new shoes.

  ‘Leupega is in intensive care at Middlemore Hospital …’

  ‘It can’t be them!’

  ‘I rang Makiva, Robo,’ she whispers. ‘He told me.’

  I watch them, their cool boxers flashing in all their silky brilliance, diving into the forgiving embracing waves of Long Bay.

  Now I’ll never know if they’d wanted me to rejoin Their Way or whether they’d again abandoned me to God’s narrow and demanding schizophrenic rails.

  Interrogation

  I

  Andrea, my wife, possesses this uncanny, wonderful, sometimes frightening gift of experiencing these uncanny, wonderful, sometimes frightening dreams and then recalling them for only me and Regina, our daughter, in multi-coloured detail and in what she calls ‘the dream’s language’.

  So on that unusually cold December Saturday morning when she woke as usual at 6 am, and deliberately woke me by rolling against my side, and, out of the dim dark, said, with urgent excitement and awe, ‘Although it sounded all the year round; although it rang out sometimes as early as half past six in the morning, sometimes as late as half past ten at night, it was in the spring, when Bengel’s violet patch inside the gate was blue with flowers, that that piano … made the passers-by not only stop talking, but slow down, pause, look suddenly – if they were men – grave, even stern, and if they were women – dreamy, even sorrowful,’ I knew we were again into another enthralling interrogation session. It was as if she was quoting from a story written by an experienced writer such as Katherine Mansfield, whose work I’d loved at high school. ‘That’s exactly how I saw that dream and how it wrote itself into my sight,’ she insisted.

  Our life together has been influenced intensely by the way we interrogate and read her dreams. Even the name of our daughter, Regina, came in a dream the night before Andrea gave birth to her. The dream had also said that the love between Regina and Andrea would be special and would never be broken.

  ‘So shall we interrogate the text you’ve just described?’ I asked, for that was our usual procedure after each dream she considered important. Gently she slid her leg over my stomach, and put her right arm around my chest, her warm nudity and the odour of dry sweat and Figiel perfume wrapping round me like a comforting second skin. The centre window curtains were parted down the middle and the summer light was pushing itself through that gap and lying protectively across our shoulders.

  ‘I didn’t recognise the street, the garden, the house,’ she whispered, her warm slightly stale breath pulsing against the right side of my face. ‘But I knew the street is here in Ponsonby.’

  We married a few months after we completed our master’s degrees – she in civil engineering and I in architecture – and then, with my parents’ financial help, bought this villa, which was built in the 1910s, and which I’ve restored and enlarged, even having it lifted and a double garage constructed under it. Impressed with my restoration, many of our architectural clients, over the years, have hired us to retore their villas.

  ‘What about the Bengel?’

  ‘A very striking name. Whatever its origins, I’ve never come across that name in my life.’ I asked her if she’d seen any of the Bengels, and she replied, ‘Almost. I think the father – yes, the father was prematurely old and had salt and pepper hair, and he wore a black double-breasted suit, like the ones men wore in the 1920s, and his son was the pianist but I wasn’t that interested in his age and appearance.’

  ‘What about the music he was playing?’

  ‘It was that classical stuff that I’ve always found – difficult. But this time I found myself loving it and I wanted to tell you that. It just entered my welcoming eyes and shimmered, like the pianist’s fingers, down my throat into my ravenous belly and other vital regions!’ Her body trembled invitingly against me.

  ‘Chopin or Mozart or Bach?’ I tried the few classical composers I was familiar with.

  ‘Yeah, the first one – Chopin, the music our nephew Rodney plays every time we go to your arrogant sister’s house.’ I ignored her denigration of my sister because her live twinkling fingers were now playing Chopin, as it were, across my belly just above my ‘vital regions.’

  ‘So what about the passers-by?’

  ‘Yes, I saw two very thin middle-aged men wearing heavy woollen overcoats – dark blue their coats were – stopping in front of the front gate, and, putting their right hands to their right ears, listening intently to the playing, with smiles radiating across their pale faces, radiating and radiating until they were part of the exhilarating tide that was the music.’

  ‘Any others?’

  ‘Yes, an elderly rotund woman, with a court jester’s multicoloured felt hat – I didn’t find that strange – and a long blood-red scarf wrapped round and round her throat, its ends fluttering in the breeze that was funnelling down against her.’ Andrea paused, pondering, and then, chortling almost inaudibly, she said, ‘She stopped and gripped the front gate’s handle, but, unable to unlock it, she shook it violently once, twice, three times, and said, “Fuck that!” – and that really shocked me because women shouldn’t swear in public.’ She paused and then said, ‘You know, I don’t care if women swear wherever and whenever, but in that dream that’s how I felt about that woman swearing.’ She paused. ‘By the way, I think the dream is also sexist in pandering to the stereotypes that men assumed “grave, even stern” demeanours and women “dreamy, even sorrowful” ones when they heard that music.’

  ‘Perhaps it was part of the time the dream is set in?’

  ‘I suppose, so it’s dated in that way, the wording of it coming out of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, maybe.’

  ‘And why do you think spring and blue violets in that garden?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because I love blue and randy spring – you know that, darling.’ Her fingers were now searching pleasurably through my garden, as it were.

  ‘Do you want to continue this dream interrogation or not?’ I insisted.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, taking her hand away. She turned onto her back, and, gazing into the blue ceiling across which the morning light was now pushing back the darkness, pondered and then said, ‘The piano was a black lacquered grand.’

  And so we continued that interrogation into the eternal question that whole civilisations have tried to answer: where do those strangers in your sleep life come from, and why do they come? A question that Andrea, well before we met, had started living with because of her gift and the circumstances of her life; a question which her grandmother had tried to answer years before; and a question that, over the years, has become a binding strand in our marriage.

  Andrea was born in Samoa as Autasi Lagilua in the village of Gagaifo, Lefaga. (She changed her Christian name to Andrea, with my encouragement, not long after we met.) I was born in Malie and my parents brought me to New Zealand when I was only five, so I was raised here, while Andrea migrated here after she graduated from high school. When we first courted at Auckland University in the late 1970s, she told me that her parents had drowned at sea when she was a toddler and she had been raised by Faivai, her maternal grandmother, who’d believed profoundly in the truth of dreams being at the heart of all reality, and that because of that you had to learn not only how to live with them and facilitate their entry into your sleep, but how to read them and what they meant for your waking life. For instance, the first of her grandmother’s readings that Andrea could remember and describe to me, in her grandmother’s compellingly poetic story-telling manner, with which I was to become familiar as Andrea narrated her readings to me over the years, was this:

  ‘In the centre of the silver dark, in the protecting feel of it, is a luminous ocean-green dragonfly, a variety I’ve not seen before – delicate, with darkly veined transparent wings beating quickly, keeping it hovering, defeating gravity. Then at the rim of the dark I sense a crowd of spectators, their hushed curiosity focused on the wondrous creature. When their faces are lit up by the dragonfly’s luminosity I don’t recognise any of them, and wonder why I don’t, and am afraid because they aren’t Samoan or Papālagi or Chinese or any other race I know. Before I can identify them, the dragonfly rises up suddenly to the height of our breath and sight. We all sigh, loudly in applause. It turns its head towards me and my heart sings with joy as the creature bows, yes, bows once, acknowledging my worth, my value, my existence. And I wake up, weeping, sobbing …’

  Andrea first told me this on a Saturday night, on our second date after we had been to the movies – a forgettable thriller – and were eating at the Ponsonby KFC. (And I can still smell the acidic odour of the cooking oil.) I couldn’t understand why she was telling me this and why it was important to her. I’d been raised by my deacon lay preacher father and scientifically trained mother to consider such things as irrational, even superstitious. But because I was extremely attracted to Andrea – and had been so since I’d first seen her at our MA anthropology class on Polynesia – I needed to indulge her. She went on relating her grandmother’s narration:

  ‘For the next few days I tried to decipher that dream. What puzzled me most was this question: how do people and creatures you’ve never known become part of your dreams? Have we existed before, not only as peoples but as other creatures and things? My beloved, Autasi, that is one of the questions that will be at the centre of your life forever.’

  Andrea stopped and, gazing skeptically at me, asked, ‘You’re not really interested in this stuff, are you?’ She smiled when she caught my half nod. And immediately explained that her grandmother had believed that every one and every thing was connected through gafa/genealogy right back to the atua, and that gafa was intelligent, and when you maliu-ed – moved on – you became part of that intelligence and the inheritance of your descendants.

  The rest of that fried chicken conversation amid that invasive cooking-oil smell I can’t recall in detail, except that she had reached across the table and, grasping my hand firmly, had smiled – it was like a beautiful gardenia opening to fill all my sight – and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not crazy, I’m just strange, but you’ll get used to that. And I hope you want to get used to it, right?’

  I nodded, unreservedly, unconditionally, and meant it as a promise.

  ‘Good,’ she whispered, ‘I want to know you too.’

  When I drove her home that night, the dragonfly continued hovering with all its marvelous luminosity and gravity-defeating flight in my eyes. Holding onto my arm, she slid into my side as I drove.

  II

  Andrea jumped out of bed, arms wrapped round her chest. ‘Fuck, for summer, its bloody cold!’ she cried, and scrambled into the bathroom and the shower, as she did every morning. She was right; it was crisply cold out of bed, so I put on my favourite dressing gown – the blue-striped woollen one she had bought me for my fortieth birthday – and, scurrying down the cold passageway, turned on a few of the heaters. By the time she came out, according to the quick breakfast routine we’d established over our life together, I had the electric jug on, the coffee ground, the milk in the microwave for eighty seconds, a glass of orange juice for her, a glass of grapefruit for me, two whole-wheat slices in the toaster, and the table set – even with napkins.

  ‘So how are you reading your dream?’ I continued, as soon as she had sat down opposite me, smelling sweetly of McMullin soap and Daniell shampoo, and in her bright red dressing gown, which was open down the front. I took the first sip of my coffee, eagerly anticipating its hot, addictive taste sliding down my throat and warming up my chest, waking up all my nerves.

  With both hands and a thick fluffy white towel, she continued kneading the wetness out of her hair, her face and exposed breasts glowing red from the heat of the shower. How she glowed!

  ‘First thing is: I’ve never seen violets in any Ponsonby garden. So what does that mean?’

  ‘Perhaps they represent how you felt while in that dream, as you observed the Bengels. So repeat the wording of the dream and we’ll see.’ After she repeated it, I asked, ‘Don’t you think there is some sadness in that?’

  ‘Yes, maybe in the way it’s worded, but I didn’t feel any sadness in the scene while I was there.’

  ‘The piano playing, you know. Doesn’t that suggest strange compulsive behavior?’

  ‘It may to someone who reads the wording, but wasn’t in the dream. I accepted it as normal behaviour.’

  ‘What did you think of the relationship between the father and the son, if you thought anything at all about it?’

  ‘Normal. Now I’m awake, I could read something else into it, but I don’t want to.’

  ‘So, say you didn’t wake up at the time you did, and the dream had continued for some length, what do you think would have unfolded, darling?’

  ‘You know I never speculate outside the dream itself!’ Her knife crunched across her piece of toast. ‘I never unfold a dream outside the boundaries of sleep.’

  I knew that, but for some inexplicable reason, for the past few weeks, ever since our daughter Regina had rung and told us she and Ralph were separating, I now wanted her to. ‘Just indulge me, darling, just …’

  ‘Because you’re a lit freak who feeds on stories, you want me to do that, even though it’s against the rules I’ve determined?’ She took an impatient gulp of her coffee; thrust the piece of toast into her mouth. Her immaculately white teeth crunched down decisively on it and she started chewing rapidly. ‘Okay, let me develop the story outside the dream.’ She gulped down more coffee, took another massive bite of her toast, thumped down her mug and, gazing through me, back into her dream, said, ‘The plot line would go something like this: Harold Mansfield Bengel, the father, is a retired bank manager who, five years before, had lost his lifelong, devoted wife, Katherine, to a pulmonary haemorrhage, leaving him to care for their only child, Dyer Beauchamp, who is autistic and a savant.’ She paused, deliberately challenging me: so, see what you can do with that!

  We’d often discussed autism and savants, ever since Andrea had claimed, after excelling in three papers in psychology at university, that perhaps her grandmother had had a mild form of autism and was something of a savant in her incredible gift for remembering and re-singing any music you played or sang to her, and in her mesmerising ability to talk in the accents of the strangers in her dreams. ‘Wasn’t she feared, considered evil, by your village because of that?’ I’d asked. Not feared, not evil, she’d replied. ‘Hadn’t the church condemned such – such behavior as being part of Samoa’s evil and pagan past?’ I pursued her. ‘Yes, but when people learned that through her they could connect with their loved ones who’d passed on, and that through her the future could speak to them, they came to love her – but behind the church’s back, of course! They especially loved her songs – the songs she fished out of her dreams, which, when I was old enough, she taught me and I taught our village choir. Some of those songs became national favourites and are still sung today.’ She listed a whole swag of them, but because I was raised in New Zealand, I recognised only two.

  III

  ‘So to continue my Hollywood script: With the help of the best psychologists, Dyer Beauchamp is identified as a savant with an insatiable talent for playing the piano. He is given the best teacher’ — Andrea refused to slow down as she steered our shopping cart through the crowded entrance into Foodtown in Williamson Avenue, where we shopped every Saturday morning — ‘As yet I can’t think of a suitable name for that teacher. The teacher has to be a middle-aged woman – men are bloody useless at handling autistic kids. She could be a failed concert pianist with the relentless determination to become triumphant through her gifted pupil …’ In hurrying to keep up with her, in a busy aisle, I bumped into a tall, solid man dressed in a dirty singlet and black shorts and mud-caked sports shoes, who exuded the foulest BO my nostrils had ever encountered.

  ‘Watch where ya going, chief!’ the BO objected as I stepped left and out of his way, catching red-veined eyes, a stubbled face and gaps in his front teeth. I refused to apologise as I hurried after Andrea, who hadn’t noticed the incident and was still talking as if I was beside her.

  ‘At the age of ten, Dyer gives his first public concert. It’s a smash hit. People especially love his being autistic. Being a very experienced bank manager, Harold Mansfield becomes his son’s fulltime manager …’ We hit one of the coldest sections of the supermarket – the vegetable and fruit section. Dressed only in blue cotton longs and a black t-shirt with three red roses stitched boldly across the front, Andrea shivered and started rubbing her hands crisply up and down her goose-pimpled arms. Her long black hair was tied back in a ponytail and her skin glistened with health – she trained at the gym four days a week.

  ‘Darling, how do you like the script so far?’

  ‘It’s like the one for Shine,’ I tried to joke.

  ‘And all the other Hollywood ones about autistic geniuses and other “challenged people”.’ She wasn’t joking. ‘But, darling, it’s meant to be that. You’re the one who wanted me to go outside the reality of the dream.’

  ‘But not into corny plots!’ I tried disguising my annoyance.

  Thrusting a package of lettuce into the cart, then a large pumpkin, all the time avoiding my gaze, she said, ‘Are there any other types of plots, darling? You should know; since high school when you fell in love with Mansfield, the only New Zealand author they taught then, you’ve continued reading all those serious novels and stories.’ I didn’t know how to take that accusation – yes, it was an accusation. ‘Isn’t there just one major plot line: the hero and heroine are born; they meet, fall in love and if they don’t fall out of that, they live happily or otherwise, and then die?’ Before I could react to that, she said, ‘Another variation is: the fearless stranger rides into town, which evil villains have taken over; the citizens are too scared of the villains to help him, so, alone and with the fastest guns in the West he outguns the villains, and then rides off into the sunset.’ She pointed at the potatoes and bananas and automatically, as I did every Saturday, I grabbed a small bag of potatoes and a hand of the ripest bananas and dumped them into the cart.