THE MOUNTAIN LOOKED like an upside–down cone, drizzled with sparkling white ice cream. Pristine, that was the word. Pristine, and rising up through green grass and cows. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that an ice cream cone should emerge from such lush dairy flats and such fat cows. And all those white daisies.
Mount Egmont. It sounded like a fancy dessert, made with eggs and vanilla and whipped cream. And now it was Taranaki, like the land. But it was Naki or The Nak to those who lived there. Big ships came and went on the swell of the port. And before you went up the hill, you passed the dark trains on their dirty lines, hurrying in the shade of their deadend station to unload butter and logs going across the sea to other places.
Jethro Tull played at the Magog pad. And even though Delight knew that the surf was smashing dull blue and grey on the rocks outside in the dark, as she listened to them playing their song, ‘Aqualung’, under blue and green lights, where the blue was only just a hint, like the late–afternoon shadows of faraway mountains, she felt as if she was underwater, and was convinced that drowning was full of light.
The sweet haybarn smell of smoke drifted up amongst the black leather jackets and long dark hair to meet the surreal glow. She touched her lips to see if bubbles were coming from the corners of her mouth, so convinced was she that she was submerged. The band caressed their guitars, drank black rum and swam in their own sweat.
A girl in silver hot pants and a silver bikini top danced on the seat of a motorbike, swaying with her arms above her head. A man jumped up on the bike behind her, unzipped his dirty jeans to the crowd, and shouted, ‘Who wants to make babies?’
Later on, when they played another song, he rocked backwards on his heels and squirted those near to him with sprays of sperm, some of which landed in Delight’s brown hair like a sticky strand of creamy pearls.
A lot of people from Naki were dark and underbelly, like the oil sleeping under the crust of the earth there. Delight liked black jellybeans, which stained her teeth a very dark grey, as if she’d breathed in too much diesel. It looked good with dark red lipstick.
Delight. Her name was a present from her mother, who had gone and left her by dying when Delight was only six. Delight had wanted to go too, but they had told her that she couldn’t, although they had never said why not.
The mountain was like her carousel. She whirled around it on her bike, passing the old lead–cast toy museum, the left-hand corner where her sister died, the fields where you could pick magic mushrooms, the man with the collection of Elvis Presley album covers and costumes. Also the damp house with the white camellias where they took her daughters away because there were bongs and burnt knives on the bench, and the whole house smelled of hash oil, from the inside of her leather jacket to the paper hanging from the walls.
They all rode bikes, because Naki was a long way from anywhere, like a little island on its own that the sea had forgotten on some sides. When she left it, she rode past grassy cliffs that towered like fortresses, where a sentinel on a peak would have been as insignificant as a grain of sand blown back across the miles from the wild West Coast beaches that they overlooked.
As the beaches got closer to the road, the tough scrubby bushes grew caressed into shapes by the wind. She only truly left Naki when she crossed the bridge over the river to Mokau, with its old concrete buildings and the bright blue museum with the ancient whalebones and the organ–grinder piano.
They all thought that when she hooked up, it would be with another rider, and she thought so too. But that wasn’t how it happened.
She met him in the White Hart over a beer. He drew maps of the stars and wrote poetry, some of it about her. He lived by the sea, and when the surf pounded the beaches during a storm outside, the waves came in layer upon foamy layer. They made the same booming noise as the grandstand at a rugby match when the crowd were all drumming their feet on the metal plates beneath them. He walked amongst the salt spray and driftwood, bleached clean like bones, and picked up all the little blue penguins that had been battered to death by the waves. He took them back to his cottage to bury. He also collected sacks of seaweed, for his garden.
His cottage was bright and blue, like the Mokau museum, and red roses grew by the concrete steps. Prickly pear cactuses with yellow flowers grew underneath the windows. Delight knew that you were supposed to say cactii, but she liked to say cactuses better.
She spent her life looking for deviations from the normal so that she could photograph them with her camera. Things that might have come from the subconscious world that she couldn’t touch during the day. Looking for them stirred the feelings she felt in her dreams. The anticipation that she might touch some of that aching beauty. Knowing that she had the freedom to search for it. She always meant to sell her pictures and make some money, but she either liked them too much to part with, or they weren’t good enough.
Sometimes, when he sat on the step and played the harp, she could feel the pain in her heart. Her arms and the palms of her hands and her fingertips hurt too, as though her whole body was crying and longing. She didn’t know what for. He sucked sweetness and sadness from the air, and breathed it into his harmonica. A mixture of Sundays, loneliness, campfire smoke on the evening air, empty churches and leaving, as well as something that couldn’t quite be remembered, drifted through the notes. Something just out of reach, giving her the feeling that even happiness had to be a sad thing. Music always affected her.
When her periods stopped coming, she didn’t worry. She thought it might be early menopause, and she didn’t miss aching stomachs and wiping away blood. But then she started feeling sick, even when she hadn’t been drinking the night before.
He listened patiently, half empty can of beer at his elbow, while she explained to him that she couldn’t have a baby in her late thirties. ‘I’ve grown away from that baby thing,’ she told him. ‘Past it now. And it’s no good loving something that they can take away from you. I don’t even bother seeing my big girls. It’s too hard for them and for me.’
He told her how happy he was, to be having his first Baby, that he was going to be a Father. His sister couldn’t have kids, and he hadn’t been sure that he’d be able to. He hugged her and swung her off her feet across a pile of dirty white sheets waiting to be washed. She couldn’t bring herself to take it away from him.
They walked through Pukekura Park, past its grassed, terraced cricket ground with the white railings, through the dimness of the bush, the dark undergrowth threaded with rhododendrons and their plump clumps of dark pink bells, then out onto the grass and around elms and chestnut trees to where the concrete stage was.
Delight had never seen an open–air stage with water in front of it before. As Shakespeare’s Juliet died on the stage, and Romeo flung himself across her apparently lifeless body, people watched from wooden boats whose chipped and faded paint was powder pink, baby blue and white.
The water cradled the boats, and they cradled the couples in them in the way the petals of the creamy white water lilies that they bobbed amongst cradled stamens full of rich, dusty golden pollen. The dusk unfolded across the scene like a moth unfurling its wings. But before it had finally settled, he had asked her to marry him, reading her one of his poems on the now deserted stage.
He had a little bit of money saved, and he sent her to be fitted for a wedding dress. He wanted her to be married in a dress as white as the ice creamy summer snow on the mountain. ‘Breathe in,’ said the shop assistant as she threaded a tape measure around Delight’s waist. ‘I always take a few centimetres off. All brides lose weight worrying about their wedding day.’ Delight held her breath and didn’t mention Baby.
As it grew inside her, her stomach swelled like the still-closed petals of a bud, cradling something precious. She could feel it moving and bobbing about in its own thick water. He liked to put his hands on her and feel it dance underneath the warmth of his palms.
He didn’t want her riding her bike any more. Got angry when he saw the black helmet under her arm. ‘It’s too dangerous for our Baby,’ he said. He thought Grace might be a nice name if it was a girl. She put her camera away.
She stayed home, and they had fish and chips every Friday night. She liked hers with a bowl of dark vinegar, he liked his wrapped in white buttered bread. He moaned when his socks came out of the laundry in odd pairs, she tried to explain that she had no idea why it happened. He stood on the edge of the couch in the darkness and played the air guitar, with just the greenish glow from the stereo display to guide his fingers to Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’.
But it was his harp that sent her out riding again. It tied her heart in knots. He didn’t know she was going until he heard the roar of the engine, and then it was too late, because the sound was fading into the distance, like the dying notes of his harmonica.
They found her in the water in front of the stage, where she had sat and dangled her feet in the moonlight’s reflection for a while. She lay amongst the white water lilies, their centres still golden even though they were wet with morning dew. Her arms and legs hung down through the clear water, so that her body was like a flower unfolding, face downwards, towards the bottom.