THE NIGHT THE BABY DIED, there were fireworks. A full moon hung outside, and the cabbage trees exploded with clusters of starry white flowers.
Inside, Hana had put the Baby to bed, and the walls of the room were lit by the soft, warm glow of flickering candle light. She felt as though she was in a cave. Three candles floated in a bowl of water on the table, and others stood upright in strategically placed cups of sand. Hana was wrapped up in a blanket on her bed, watching the shadows. She was glad that there was no electricity.
No electricity and no tap water. There was a lot those city people missed out on, she thought. Never seeing the glow of the sunrise tinting the sky lemon and pale blue. Never seeing the way the moths flew in and out amongst the dark leaves of the cabbage trees at dusk, when the light was nearly gone.
Hana heard someone talking outside, so she dragged her blanket over to the window and leaned out. ‘Come down onto the beach!’ said her cousin, who lived in one of the caravans. ‘Pete was just down there, and he said to hurry up and come and look at the stars!’
‘What for?’
‘Dunno, but he’s run back down. Me and Mahina are going. Must be something, why he’s so excited!’
Hana stuck her head back inside and went to check on the Baby. Sound asleep. She brushed a stray curl from the Baby’s face. The light of the candles gave the Baby’s skin an angelic glow. Breath danced across the Baby’s lips. Hana could feel her soul reach right out across to the Baby’s and touch it. She placed her finger lightly against the Baby’s cheek, and then snuck out the door.
She had to run to catch up to Mahina and her cousin, who were already at the top of the sandhills. The glare of the moon gave the wide stretch of sand a silvery white sheen. The frill of froth at the edge of the water was whiter than snow, and the waves stroked the beach with soft, rhythmic thuds.
‘Look at the sky,’ said Hana’s cousin, and when Hana looked, the heavens were going mad. It was as if someone was hurling stars. They were falling out of the sky in long, burning streaks, silver scars across the deep, velvety blue that healed within seconds, leaving an afterglow of pale light, and then nothing.
‘Massive,’ said Mahina.
A large wave crashed and broke, and as it did, it lit up with greeny-gold phosphorescence, making it glow from within.
‘Maybe one of those stars just fell into the sea,’ said Pete.
Someone had the idea of pushing the boat out, and they lay flopped back against its sides, looking up at the sky. The ankles of Hana’s pyjamas were wet and sandy from the tide. ‘What spins me out,’ she said, ‘is that no matter how many of them are falling, the sky is still full of stars. It’s not getting emptier at all.’
‘My neck’s sore,’ said Mahina, at last. ‘Let’s go in.’
‘I can smell smoke from all those stars burning up,’ said Hana’s cousin.
‘Me too,’ said Pete, picking up the oars.
It was only as they skimmed in across the waves that Hana noticed the glow that hung above the sandhills, and then there was the pain of just knowing.
She flung herself from the boat and into the water and stumbled as the boat swung sideways and hit her. She felt hands trying to pull her up, but she brushed them aside.
By the time she could see what was happening, the flames were thick and orange, and sparks were dancing high into the silk of the night.
‘Hana!’ said another cousin. ‘We thought that you were in there!’ They had to hold her back as she tried to rush into the flames, tried to think how to save the Baby. People were bringing buckets of water from the stream, but the fire was too hot, and it just hissed back.
There was nothing to be done but stand around waiting while someone ran up the road to the nearest farmhouse to use the phone. When the fire truck arrived, all that was left were the warm glowing embers, twinkling with their selfish heat; and black, smoking wood. The fireworks were over, and the Baby had died forever.
*
So Hana went to Auckland. Auckland smelt of coconut cream and Chinese cabbage and newly baked bread and the salty air of the sea.
The first job she found was injecting Turkish delight into chocolates. She pulled a lever that brought down a big needle into the centre of each one. And if the chocolates piled up and spilled off the belt in their eagerness to be filled, or if she left the lever down too long, and the chocolates burst apart, swollen with an excess of sticky purple syrup, then that was her fault. Which is why she lost that job.
For some time, she could find no work, and that was how she came to be working as a dancer on K Road. The warm golden light that spilled out doorways and the soft red light within reminded her of the candlelit room where she had watched the Baby sleep.
She made more money selling her body. There were men and men and men. And one night, one of them swung his belt buckle above his head. The mirror on the ceiling above them shattered into thousands of tiny pieces which fell to the ground all around them like a thousand flashing, sharp-edged stars falling out of the sky. Reminders were everywhere.
She did a lot of work with the sailors on the ships. There were English sailors whose blankets were stitched with army surplus Union Jacks. And a Russian sailor who asked her to marry him over a bottle of vodka because New Zealand was such a ‘place of beautifulness’, and he wanted to stay. Then he collapsed on Hana’s shoulder and shed tears of homesickness for his own country.
Many of the Chinese sailors didn’t speak English. Lots of them tried to pay her in Chinese money. The ships from China were rusty above the water line, with dull, flaky red or black paint. Below decks was a dark rabbit warren of passages and cabins, dimly lit. It was down here, in one of these cabins, that a Chinese soldier marked his strange calendar with a piece of red chalk, and told Hana about the festival of miracles that was beginning in his birthplace.
‘In the first instance,’ he said, ‘wine is poured over the rice. Before long, the rice is swollen, and the wine is gone. This is an ordinary miracle, one that a child can perform. But then the practitioners of more complicated miracles come forth. The woman who can heal scars by touching them with her fingers. The old man who sings with the voice of an angel and sews poignancy in the heart. The boy who puts greeny-gold grasshoppers onto his tongue and blows bubbles from his mouth. The grasshoppers rise into the air, dancing inside a cloud of shining spheres.’
‘That is not true,’ said Hana.
It was, the sailor insisted. And to prove it, he would do a small miracle of his own. They squatted at the edge of the cracked porcelain toilet, and he took some little paper coils from his pocket and dropped them into the water. Slowly the coils unfolded. Colourful paper fronds sprang out, and grew, and twisted, until five beautiful miniature flowers floated in the urine-stained bowl. A miracle.
*
On a night that Hana didn’t feel like working, she took a taxi up the road that wound its way to the summit of Mt Eden. ‘Make sure you ask for me when you want to come down again,’ said the driver as he dropped her off.
Hana sat on the rim of the crater and saw the city lights scattered out in all directions around her, like the hot orange coals that had consumed her living, breathing Baby. And she felt the pain of being burned alive like an electric shock searing through her until the sunrise came, and the taxi driver had long since gone off duty.
She remembered her Baby’s name. Rangitakaiho. And she started thinking of home. Her mother would be in the mustard-coloured house with the cactus growing underneath the window. And the kitchen would smell of fried bread, because it was morning. And her mum would go outside and walk barefoot in the dirt of the garden, and poke the young green kūmara shoots with her toes. ‘They’ve grown a lot since yesterday,’ she’d say.
A miracle.