… there, in the long grass, beneath the golden sweep of the walnut tree. Tom sits on the side verandah next to the post with the little figures carved one on top of the other, with their three-fingered hands splayed over their bellies. He likes that post. It’s warm here, out of the wind. Sheltered by the big glossy leaves of the vine that has taken over one end of the verandah. Behind him the house is shuttered with plywood over all the doors and windows. Some scaffolding pipes are stacked in the garden, but other than that there is no sign of the builders. They were supposed to be here last month to start repairs but there was some problem, something that made his father slam the table, making them all jump. He never slammed. And his mother shrugged, said, ‘Well, what did you expect?’
Someone has been in. They’ve tagged the plywood. Not well. VJ would have scoffed. ‘Toy shit,’ he’d have said. ‘No style.’ But VJ isn’t here. He’s gone. His house in the Loop was red-zoned. It was going to be torn down. The pretzel shop had relocated, but the rent was astronomical and no one wanted to drive all the way to Woolston to buy pretzels and really, his dad said, he couldn’t be bothered with all the hassle. He was going back to Switzerland, where there were lots of rules and regulations but no worse than here. New Zealand had turned into something different from the free and easy place he’d expected when he emigrated.
‘Fuck Switzerland!’ said VJ. ‘Soon as I can, I’m back here.’
That wouldn’t be for years.
Sometimes Tom looks at their video. It’s not much good. Others have done it better, with music and proper editing and those clips have gone viral. But there is one bit, just a few seconds when he’d had the camera and filmed VJ ollying a crack that had opened across the road by the river, leaving a sharp ledge. There are some orange cones strung with plastic KEEP CLEAR tape and he skates in from the left, approaches the ledge and Tom keeps him in tight focus and the screen flares as VJ jumps up and the sun explodes around him, then he lands and skates off down the street and out of shot. That bit’s good.
The sun sifts through golden leaf. It’s a long detour on the way home from school to their new place, but he wants to come back here. It feels sad and full of absence and that’s how he wants to feel right now. Sad and full of absence.
Houses have come down all along Savage Street. They have left gaps of rough gravel between hedges or a driveway going nowhere, or a hollow concrete square where a house once stood, or a single tree, some tied with strips of yellow plastic that his mum said was to tell the demo people to leave that tree standing because it was special: a dog was buried there, or someone’s ashes. Dead things among the absence. On their side of Savage Street some houses still had cars in the driveway, but others are like theirs, boarded up and empty.
The sun flares in the walnut tree among leaves of brilliant gold. Then, the movement …
‘Hey!’ he says. ‘What are you doing?’
There’s a girl by the walnut tree. Hair in a plait under an orange bobble hat, blue puffer jacket over baggy pants. Beside her on the ground there’s a shopping bag and it is full, he notices, of walnuts. More crunch under his feet as he walks towards her, a crackling carpet fallen in the gales under the golden-leaved tree. The girl straightens and turns to look at him.
‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘I’m not a rapist or anything.’
But she doesn’t seem startled or worried. He recognises her. She’s one of the older kids at school: Dana? Mila?
‘Hey, Tom,’ she says. She has a freckled face and small mucky hands in those fingerless gloves. They look like the paws of some forest creature with dirty nails. ‘Do you live here? Is this your house?’
‘Not right now,’ says Tom. ‘It’s being repaired.’
‘So it’s not being pulled down?’ says Molly. Yes. Molly. That was her name. Molly. ‘That’s good. I like that tower thing. It’s cool. If I lived here, I’d sleep up there when it’s fixed. You’d be able to see for miles.’
Tom turns to look. The tower thing is wrecked, all the little arched windows covered in ply, twisted iron peeling from the roof with its curly metal finial. But yes. It is cool. And when it’s fixed, that’s exactly what he’ll do. Sleep up there, above the trees.
‘Hope you don’t mind about the walnuts,’ says Molly. ‘I thought this place was empty, like all the others. It’s crazy: people buying fruit when there’s all these apples and stuff just lying around rotting.’
‘Help yourself,’ says Tom. ‘Take as much as you like.’ Now he looks around he sees that there are other bags under the tree: apples. Pears. Grapefruit.
‘See?” says Molly. ‘That’s all from your garden.’
‘What do you do with it?’ he says.
‘Eat it,’ she says. ‘Or give it away. People always like free fruit. And it’s not sprayed with toxic chemicals.’
And because she has already turned away and is picking up walnuts, he picks some up, too. Their small hard wrinkled shells sit comfortably within his hand. He presses two together and one splits open, revealing the nutmeat inside.
‘It looks like a brain,’ he says, and instantly regrets it. It’s the kind of comment that makes some people look doubtful, think he’s weird. But Molly says, ‘Yeah, that’s because they’re good for your brain. That’s nature telling you to eat walnuts if you want to think clearly.’ Plants had all sorts of shapes that told people what they were good for: like some plants had leaves that looked like lungs with spots and they really did help people who had TB, and tomatoes were shaped like hearts and they were good for heart disease, like plants are really amazing, there’s all this old lore about them that people have forgotten because they’ve come to depend on supermarkets and packaging and food has been industrialised, but look: everything we need to be healthy is just growing here, all around and free for the taking …
She pauses. Looks up at him. ‘Do you think that’s weird?’ she says. ‘No,’ he says. She smiles. ‘Good,’ she says. She picks up one of the bags.
He helps her carry the bags to her bike, which is parked by the fence with a wooden trailer on old pram wheels attached to the back. They load it up, along with some apples from a tree in what used to be the Novaks’ back garden. And some cactuses that were growing in the rough grass next door. Molly says she’ll take them into the city and plant them. They’re planting stuff on the rubble because no one cares about it, but plants are amazing and heaps of people are coming into the city and making little gardens where the buildings had been, just cactuses and things that are tough and can survive and all these butterflies and insects are coming back now the buildings are gone, things that haven’t been in the city for years …
And then they set off down Savage Street, Molly riding slowly on her bike with its laden trailer, he on his skateboard and looking round, not at absence but at apple trees and pear trees and grapefruit trees, laden with ripe fruit and free for the …