‘That was the plan, but things haven’t been so good between us lately. I’m pretty sure he’s seeing some other girl, which is why I … you know,’ Erin explains. She pauses and drags deeply on her cigarette, sucking the last remnants of life out of it. ‘I’m not even sure I want to get married to Jimmy, to be honest.’

  ‘You have to tell him about the baby though.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I’ll do it tonight. After the dance.’

  ‘You’ve been smoking,’ Mum says when we get back from our ‘walk’. ‘I can smell it on you.’

  ‘See you later,’ Erin says, exiting swiftly out the back door.

  She’ll be back with Jimmy later in his dad’s car to pick me up for the dance.

  Mum slides a corned-beef sandwich in front of me as I sit down at the kitchen table. ‘You should eat before you get dressed,’ she says.

  My little sister Lorna comes into the kitchen and sits down beside me. ‘I wish I could go to the dance,’ she says. Lorna is fifteen and already boy-mad. She’s allowed to go to dances at the Community Centre in Freemans Bay with Mum and Dad, but the Orange in Newton is forbidden territory.

  ‘You’re too young,’ says Mum, who has the final word on all things, as she tumbles store-bought potatoes into the sink to be washed and peeled for dinner. ‘Especially for a Valentine’s Day dance.’

  Sitting there, eating and half-listening to Mum and Lorna bicker, I wonder why I’ve never told Erin about Mereana, even though I’ve told her about lots of the other patients. The memory of helping scrub that ancient body of a year’s worth of filth a few weeks ago haunts me.

  How we peeled the layers of rotten fabric from her body. How she twisted and turned in our hands, slippery and fleshy, until the warmth of the water calmed her and she fell into a half sleep, exhausted by her wakening. The trickle of water running into the drain on the floor and the sound of our breathing. Once she calmed down I could see the scar tissue on scar tissue, thick cords of it slashing her entire body. Bone ends protruded, threatening to push through the thickened skin that contained them. It was as if every bone had been broken and then healed in a fractured state, forming ridges and spines beneath the landscape of her tortured body.

  ‘What happened to her?’ I whispered.

  ‘No one knows,’ answered the nurse who was helping me.

  Once the layers of filth had softened a bit we began to wash Mereana with soapy rags. She started to croon happily, almost purring as we gently soaped her clean. With the worst of the grime dislodged and the water gone tepid and brown, the nurse helping me turned around and started running one of the other baths in the room so we could rinse Mereana off in clean water.

  That’s when it happened. That first flicker of a vision behind my eyes. Seeing the sharpened bone of an eel gaff coming at me and hearing that thick, gristly crunch as the sharpened bone bit into flesh only to tear through it and vanish upwards towards the watery light. Gone as quickly as it had arrived.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the other nurse asked, looking over her shoulder as she turned off the taps.

  ‘Yes,’ I said with absolute certainty. ‘Yes. Come on, let’s get her rinsed off and dressed.’

  After that, Mereana becomes something of a fixture in my life. ‘She likes you,’ the other staff say in amazement. ‘It’s given her a whole new lease on life.’

  I have to take their word for it, but throughout the summer, in the rickety old wheelchair someone’s found her, Mereana is everywhere. No matter how much I try to hide, she always finds me. ‘Girlie,’ she says, and beckons me closer. And I can’t say no.

  So Erin and I, who tell each other everything, especially those things like Mr Hartley and the things he did when we were in primary school. Things we can’t tell anyone else. Erin who held in her news about the baby, so I would be the first to know. Erin and I who swore to be friends forever when we were only eight years old. Erin and I finally have a secret between us. But it won’t be just her. I don’t even talk about Mereana to my mum. I never speak about the visions that keep coming: the fury of creation, of fire and shaking earth and strange creatures emerging from the fissured ground; the crack of muskets and the sudden terrible bloom of flesh struck by lead; the screams of children and the wailing mothers left behind. I never speak to anyone about how the sights and sounds don’t frighten me, not really. It’s this place, I think, though really I know it’s Mereana and she’s telling me a story I don’t understand.

  A few hours later at the Orange’s Valentine’s Day dance, Erin and I are dancing up a storm to Ray Paparoa and his band. Ray is known as ‘The Māori Elvis from Pukekohe’, and Erin and I think he’s all that and a bit more. Usually, he plays at the Māori Community Centre in Freemans Bay. It’s not often we go to the Orange which has a much more Pākehā — and younger — crowd. Jimmy and the boys prefer it. At the Community Centre the wardens have their eye on them. They know exactly what their game is. Things have got far too ‘free and easy’ according to some of the older people who have been going to the Centre since it opened after the war. It’s still about family, though, but they do let us do the twist. It’s been getting quieter at the Centre lately, as families move out to the new suburbs.

  Jimmy is hovering around the door, sliding out onto the street every so often to smoke and drink with his friends. He’s no dancer. Never has been. ‘That’s reason enough,’ Erin has said on a number of occasions, ‘not to marry him.’

  Ray Paparoa finishes his set and the dance floor clears as people head downstairs to the basement where the Orange has its refreshment room. Erin and I go outside, hoping to catch a kiss of breeze that will cool us down. Outside is almost as hot as in. We sit on the concrete stairs that are mercifully cool now the sun has gone down. Jimmy breaks away from his mates and comes over.

  Erin sighs. ‘I need to tell you something,’ she says to him.

  ‘All right,’ he replies, taking a last drag from the cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Not here,’ Erin says, standing up. ‘Let’s go for a walk. You’ll be all right won’t you Jen?’

  ‘Sure,’ I reply.

  ‘Can I take the smokes?’ asks Erin.

  ‘Yeah,’ I reply. ‘You need them more than me.’

  I stay sitting on the stairs as they cross the road and head down St Benedicts Street. The sweat on my skin has cooled and it’s nice, so nice, just to be sitting out here by myself.

  ‘Have you been abandoned?’ a Pākehā guy says, coming up behind me and sitting down. I don’t know him from a bar of soap, but I like his cheek.

  ‘I really think I have,’ I reply, ‘but for a good cause.’

  ‘Will Murdoch,’ he says, extending his hand.

  ‘Jennifer Devich,’ I say, taking his hand and shaking it.

  ‘A pleasure,’ he says, with a big goofy grin. His teeth are crooked but beautifully white. ‘I was watching you and your friend, you know, dancing. You two are pretty good. And now she’s disappeared and The Playdates are going to start their set soon. We wouldn’t want you to miss that.’

  ‘Are you asking me to dance?’

  ‘Oh good,’ Will says, ‘thank heavens you understood all that.’

  ‘I’m gasping for a cup of tea. Do you think we have time?’

  ‘Plenty of time,’ Will says, standing up and extending his hand once again and helping me to my feet. ‘We have all the time in the world.’

  Erin and Jimmy return as The Playdates, the last act of the night, are finishing. Erin’s make-up has mostly been cried off, but they’re both smiling, so obviously things are going to work out for the best. Which I had figured anyway.

  ‘We’re getting married,’ Erin says excitedly. I hug her and am happy — because what other choice did Erin really have?

  ‘Congratulations,’ Will says.

  ‘Who are you?’ asks Erin.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, and laugh. ‘Erin, Jimmy, this is my new friend, Will.’

  ‘We’re going to a party in Ponsonby,’ says Jimmy. ‘You two up for it?’

  ‘Not me,’ I reply. ‘I need to go home. I have to be back at work by midday, so have to catch an early bus.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Erin, without malice, ‘you’re no fun.’

  ‘You can go if you want to,’ I say to Will.

  ‘A gentleman always walks his dance partner home,’ he says. ‘So where was it you lived again?’

  ‘Helensville,’ I say for fun.

  ‘It’s going to be a long night then,’ he fires back with that goofy smile thing happening again.

  Jimmy laughs, ‘We’ll drop you off up the top of K Road.’

  ‘It’s a start I guess,’ says Will. ‘You don’t really live in Helensville, do you?’

  ‘She lives on Matekai Street in Grey Lynn,’ says Jimmy. ‘That’s our Jen. Always the joker.’

  The next day I return to Kingseat. It’s another four weeks until I get another weekend leave. Will and I have already arranged to go to a dance next time I’m home, but it’s far too much in the future for both of us, so he telephones to find out when my next day’s leave in Pukekohe is due. We meet on King Street and talk about going to the pictures, but end up in a tearoom talking avidly. I find out that he’s from Palmerston North, about to start his final year at law school and works part-time at The White Lady on Shortland Street to make ends meet. He is the first person in his family to go to university, so feels a weight of responsibility.

  ‘I like you, Jen Devich,’ he says as we part.

  ‘And I like you too, Will Murdoch,’ I reply.

  I’m one of Erin’s bridesmaids when she and Jimmy marry six weeks later. Her mum does a good job on the dress and she barely shows, not that anyone cares now they’ve made it down the aisle and back. Will joins the wedding party as my partner. Erin opts for pale blue as her colour and, in years to come, Will and I will derive a great deal of pleasure from the wedding photos. Our first as a couple. ‘Baby blue,’ I always say. ‘What was she thinking?’

  Will makes the journey out to Pukekohe at least twice a month for the remainder of my placement and I spend so much of my time with him when I’m home that Mum’s already talking white dresses and bridesmaids, even though it’s only been a few months.

  ‘Leave them alone, Annie,’ chides Dad, who likes Will. ‘They’re just kids.’

  Fortunately for me, Lorna sneaking out to the airport at Whenuapai to see The Beatles takes the heat off me. She would have got away with it too, if her picture hadn’t been on the front page of the Herald. There’s a fair bit of shouting about her ‘making a spectacle of herself’ with Dad threatening to send her North to stay with our grandmother, Nan. Though, predictably, because it’s Lorna, nothing comes of it.

  I’ve come off Saturday night duty with less than a week left of my time at Kingseat to go, and it’s been a hard night’s work with the police bringing three new patients into the drunk-tank villas. I smell like vomit but even that can’t get me down as I walk across the grounds to the nurses’ home, anticipating a bath. By next Sunday morning I’ll be at home in my own bed with nothing much to do for six whole weeks before I start my new job. Mereana is waiting by the front door of the nurses’ home in her wheelchair. I’m really surprised to see her as now that the cold weather has set in, she’s retreated back into herself. But there she is, remarkably bright and obviously has a bone to pick with me.

  ‘Kia ora, Mereana,’ I say, coming to a halt in front of her.

  ‘Oh, kia ora now is it?’ she says slyly. ‘Maybe you’re not so useless after all, Girlie.’

  ‘What are you doing here, Mereana? You know it’s out of bounds.’

  She gives me a long watery look and then suddenly grins. ‘I’ve come to see you, Girlie.’

  ‘Why?’ I say, sitting down on the stairs.

  ‘You’re going away.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I reply.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I can’t stay here. Because I want to see the world,’ I reply.

  ‘I’ll find you,’ she says.

  ‘Maybe,’ I reply, thinking she’d have to have an escape plan a bit more dynamic than an old wheelchair. In two months’ time, I’ll be boarding a boat for England as an elderly woman’s nurse and companion. Will is going to follow me at the end of the year, after his last exam — though that bit Mum and Dad don’t know about.

  ‘I know you, Girlie,’ Mereana says, pausing to cough wetly and hoik up a thick wad of phlegm, spitting it on the concrete. Her chest sounds muddy and heavy like she’s swimming underwater and I don’t like her chances of surviving another winter. ‘And I have something to tell you,’ she continues.

  ‘What’s that, Mereana?’

  ‘Ko Rūruhi-Kerepō ahau,’ Mereana says, growing in stature, her voice suddenly strong.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mereana, I don’t speak Māori.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ she says, ‘bloody useless. I am Rūruhi-Kerepō.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, because to me it’s just a name. ‘How lovely.’

  ‘Ko Rūruhi-Kerepō ahau,’ she says again. When she says it in Māori it has so much more power. In English the statement is somehow diminished.

  ‘Ko Rūruhi-Kerepō ahau,’ I say, standing up. ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘You go now, Girlie,’ she says, dismissing me.

  Erin has her baby a few days before I sail across the ocean — as far away from Auckland as I can get. I wonder, in those days leading up to my departure, if I’ll ever come back.

  2004

  Erin’s already waiting at a table when I walk into Alleluya. ‘Erin. Hiya. Sorry I’m late,’ I say, pleased that she’s chosen a table that looks over Myers Park. Beneath the concrete and steel of St Kevins Arcade, I can feel the trickle of the Waihorotiu Stream, the Queen Street river that still percolates deep beneath the ground here.

  ‘No worries,’ she replies. ‘I’ve only just arrived. And it’s Erina, these days.’

  ‘When did that happen?’ I ask, sitting down.

  ‘Back in the 70s.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ I reply. ‘I missed all that. We were in London.’

  ‘K Road is so flash these days isn’t it?’ says Erina, changing the subject. ‘I hardly ever get into the city so I really notice the changes.’

  ‘The Las Vegas, a few sex shops and Rendells are hanging in there. George Courts is long gone of course. It’s very nice apartments now. Do you remember our mums getting us dressed up and taking us there for special shopping?’

  ‘Ha,’ laughs Erina. ‘Mum always got people’s wedding presents from there, so she could shame the down-country rellies who inevitably turned up with “Māori food” as she called it. Funny really, these days I’d kill for a feed of kina or pāua. Thank goodness for Rendells though,’ she continues. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any parking around here anymore except in their car park. Where did you park?’

  ‘I walked,’ I say.

  ‘Why?’ asks Erina. ‘I’m so lazy Stan says I’d drive to the shops if they were next door.’

  ‘I like it,’ I say. ‘It clears my head. And it’s really not that far from my place. I hardly ever use my car, to be honest. Me, traffic and parking are not such a good mix.’

  ‘I can’t believe you still live in your mum and dad’s house on Matekai Street. I’m sorry Jen, that’s a bit weird you rattling around that old house by yourself. And these days it must be worth a fortune. You should cash up.’

  ‘I like it,’ I reply. ‘And remember I spent almost thirty years in the UK, so it doesn’t feel like I’ve been stuck there since time began. Shall we order?’ I continue, ‘I’m dying for a coffee, and they do a great eggs benedict here.’

  ‘How long has it been?’ asks Erina after we’ve ordered our food and coffees at the counter.

  ‘I was thinking about it last night, and when I left your baby had just been born. I can’t even remember her name!’

  Erina laughs. ‘That baby has just had her fourtieth. I called her Nicolette. At the moment we’re calling her Nicorette, as she’s just given up the smokes and she’s as grumpy as a taniwha.’

  ‘Forty years,’ I say. ‘That’s almost forever.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Erina says. ‘No wonder we look so old. I have grandchildren who are teenagers!’

  ‘Are you and Jimmy still together?’

  ‘Oh, God no, we broke up when the kids were little. He could never keep it in his pants so I thought I was better off if he was someone else’s problem. After Jimmy there was Gary, what a nohoper he was. Still, took me another two kids in three years to work that one out. He went out for a packet of smokes one day and that was the last anyone heard of him. Could be in Oz or could be dead for all I know. We’d been arguing for a while so he probably legged it. So, not a cent of child support. At least Jimmy always provided for his kids. And now I’m with Stan who’s Tongan, we met up when we were both protesting the Tour and that was twenty years ago. Stan’s been a life saver. He took on all my kids like they were his own.’

  ‘How many kids did you end up having?’ I ask as our coffees arrive.

  ‘Six, would you believe. The youngest, who’s Stan’s, just graduated from university.’

  ‘I thought you worked out what caused them with the first,’ I say. ‘I clearly remember you saying, never, ever again.’

  Erina laughs, ‘I kept forgetting — that’s the problem.’

  ‘Still, lots of them to look after you in your old age,’ I offer in consolation.

  ‘Little buggers ruined my body though. Nobody remembers that I was once skinny. Having babies and giving up the smokes was my downfall. I stacked it on.’ There’s a long awkward silence as the undeniable fact that Erina has indeed ‘stacked it on’ hangs between us.

  ‘So anyway,’ I say, ‘what have you been doing for the last forty years besides having kids?’

  ‘To be honest,’ she says, as our food arrives (a virtuous salad for her and eggs benedict gleaming with rich yellow hollandaise for me and my hangover), ‘turns out having kids is a full-time job.’

  ‘How are your brother and sister?’