EVERY HOLIDAYS, Maddy’s mum sent her to Grandma and Grandpa’s in Auckland. From her room up the stairs on the top floor, she could smell the sea and the scent of Indian spices rising up from the shops below. She liked the bone china on the ledges, as thin and brittle as biscuits, and the clocks that chimed on the hour.
At night, they would have dinner at the dining table, in the room with the red carpet. Maddy was allowed to choose a chocolate out of the box in the drawer for afterwards. When it was opened, the whole drawer smelled of sweetly dark chocolate, and she made sure to breathe the scent of the cocoa right in and hold her breath for as long as possible. Sometimes she chose the special ones, wrapped in golden foil.
Later, when her light was out and she was supposed to be asleep, she would stand up on tippy toes on her little bed and look out over the sill at the lights of the ships in the port. Sometimes there were battleships, Christmas trees at night, but long and sombre in the daytime, as they lay like sleeping grey dogs on the blue–grey harbour.
Grandpa would point them out from the kitchen window while Maddy drank lemonade out of a real glass. She could hear the fizziness make baby–sized sizzles and pops. It spat tiny silver bubbles so high into the air that some of them got up her nose and made it burn.
During the day, Grandma would stay home and bake Melting Moments and Peanut Brownies for the tins in the pantry. Grandpa would take Maddy with him. They walked up winding roads to the tops of the volcanoes, and Grandpa pointed out the olive trees, just like they grew in Greece when he was in the war. Maddy’s feet hurt because her shoes were too tight, but they could see the whole of Auckland. Some people had climbed down into the crater and spelt out their names using the red volcanic rocks to make the letters, but Grandpa always said maybe they could do that another day.
Sometimes they had lunch at the War Memorial Museum, in their favourite room on the second floor, where an elephant, a bear and a giant turtle were grouped together as if posing for a family photo. The elephant towered above the other two animals. Despite its majesty, its tusks were yellowing, and stuffing leaked out of a hole in its knee. The bear stood under the elephant’s chin, with its angry eyes glittering like shiny black volcanic glass. The turtle fitted in underneath, between their legs.
Grandpa and Maddy would sit on its shell, while Grandpa unwrapped the sandwiches. After eating, they liked to visit the Planetarium. They sat in the dark, watching the heavens wheel above their heads across the ceiling, till Maddy nearly fell off her chair backwards because she was so busy soaking up the night sky.
Sometimes they would go to town, perhaps to buy Grandpa’s tobacco and pass the shop that sold false eyes, wigs and smooth wooden legs with painted toenails. Once, Grandpa put some money into a glass–fronted box, where a clown doll pedalled along a tightrope, back and forth on a one–wheeled bike. Maddy held her nose to bring him good luck, because he wobbled as though he might fall off.
On Fridays, they went to the zoo. Maddy’s favourite animals were the brown marshmallow–shaped hippos. They walked along the bottom of their pool, under the clear–as-glass surface, making fat, ploppy bubbles with their wide pink nostrils. They stomped and ploughed through the densely packed lotus leaves when they decided to heave themselves out onto the bank with their short, stumpy legs. When they wallowed in the mud, they enjoyed themselves like Grandma in the bath. And sometimes, when the mud dried, Maddy could see thin, grey birds standing on the hippo’s backs, treating them like taxis.
They would visit the elephants at the Eastern pavilion, and sometimes a hairy trunk would nose its way out between the bars, looking for peanuts. One day, some sailors were there in their uniforms, and Grandpa told her not to stare, and not to say hello, because nice girls didn’t talk to sailors. The sailors laughed at the elephants, and said something that Maddy didn’t understand. She wondered if she could see their ship from her window.
The wide footpaths at the zoo got really hot in the Auckland sun, and because Maddy’s shoes were often too tight she would carry them while Grandpa carried her on his shoulders. Sometimes she just climbed up because she’d had enough of walking. Grandpa threatened to hire one of the metal prams from the ticket office, but Maddy was too big for that.
Just before two thirty they hurried to the band rotunda at the centre of the zoo, because every Friday the chimp keeper picked one little girl to have afternoon tea with Arabella. Maddy treasured every detail of the day she was finally chosen. She had dropped her ice cream onto the path, and it had begun to melt into milk straight away. She wriggled down from her grandpa’s shoulders and pushed her way through people’s legs to the front, hand in the air, jumping up and down, nearly bursting.
The keeper laughed. ‘The little black girl,’ he said. And although she was the only dark-skinned girl there, he said, ‘the one in the red dress with the yellow flowers on it, and all the ribbons tied in her curly hair.’
‘I’m not black, I’m brown,’ said Maddy, skipping up the steps of the rotunda to the table.
‘She’s a box of birds, isn’t she?’ said the keeper to her grandpa.
Arabella was already seated. ‘And how are you today, Miss Arabella?’ enquired Maddy.
‘I’d be better if I wasn’t wearing this frumpy thing,’ said Arabella, pointing to her head. On it sat a large straw hat, whose brim was garlanded with roses and foil covered Easter eggs.
The table itself was set with all kinds of yummy treats. There were Cream Horns; pastries twisted like shells, dusted with icing sugar and crammed with cream, which Arabella squirted at the crowd when it took her fancy. There were two large plates full of Jam Lattices and Neenish Tarts, and best of all, Butterfly Cakes.
These were cupcakes with the centres cut out and sliced into two half circles. The empty hollows were refilled with cream, and the two pieces were replaced, delicately balanced to look like wings. Dobs of pale golden marmalade disguised the join. Maddy held her little finger up high so as not to get it sticky with sweet stuff.
Arabella reached into the pocket of her red dress with the big white polka dots. ‘Something special today!’ said the keeper, and Arabella took out a box of matches and some fireworks the size of her thumb. She lit them in the palm of her hand and clutched them tightly. Tiny silver stars exploded across the table and showered onto the food. This amused the watching children, and Arabella bared her teeth and grinned too, before picking a bit of pastry out of one of her flattened back molars.
‘Tea?’ she said to Maddy, raising the pot and delicately pouring, not waiting for an answer. The cup overflowed as Arabella was distracted by a flea. Maddy was doubtful. She was already sitting with her legs crossed, busting to go to the loo, but too scared to ask, in case the special, precious opportunity evaporated. ‘Cheers, big ears,’ said Arabella, draining hers. Maddy sipped.
When it was finally over, and the table was littered with empty cupcake cases and half finished Fairy Bread with hundreds and thousands stuck to the butter, the keeper beckoned her down. ‘Thank you very much,’ said Maddy to Arabella.
‘Blah!’ said Arabella rudely.
Maddy stood up and the crowd laughed. At the back of her red dress with the yellow flowers was a big, dark wet patch, and her shiny black shoes with the buckles were standing in a little golden puddle. Grandpa took off her undies and carried them home. Her dress dried in the sun as they walked.
Every time Maddy went back to school again, the new teachers made her write about what she did in the holidays. Maddy recorded it all faithfully, pencil gripped firmly in her left hand, tongue poking out the side of her mouth while she concentrated. Her mum cut the stories from her books at the end of each year, and sent them all off to Grandpa.
Grandpa died when Maddy was eleven, and there were no more visits after that. But Maddy always remembered. Years later, her auntie sent her a box of Grandpa’s things. There were her old stories, and some photos. ‘Look,’ she showed her son. ‘That dress was yellow with red flowers. I remembered it the other way around.’
‘We went to tha musum,’ read her essay. ‘I sat on tha crocadle undre tha bare and tha alafant.’
‘It was a turtle,’ she told her son. ‘I must have written it wrong.’
Maddy took her son to Auckland. They went up early in the morning while the dew was still wet on the ground for the people at home, so that they could make the most of the day. ‘That’s One Tree Hill over there,’ said Maddy, ‘but it doesn’t have its tree anymore.’
They stopped at the markets and wandered past the Korean noodle stalls over to where they were selling pineapples and coconuts. A man knocked a nail through the eye of one of the husk-covered shells, and her son was able to dribble the fresh coconut milk into his mouth. ‘It tastes a bit like wood,’ he said. A chalk artist was drawing tapa cloth patterns in cream and brown on the footpath.
Maddy bought a T-shirt with ‘brown sugar’ written across the front, and they watched the hula dancers swivelling their bare hips into figure eights, like golden butter melting as it glides around the bottom of a heated pan.
Maddy’s son stubbed his toe, and cried until Maddy got him a snow globe, where a blue-robed Madonna stood, arms upstretched, on a black plastic base. When he shook it, flakes of gold glitter swirled through the water and landed on her shoulders like mana from heaven.
They went to where Maddy thought the shop that sold glass eyes and wigs and wooden limbs used to be. A hand-painted sign announced ‘genuine, Chinese all year round fireworks’. ‘Can we have some?’ begged Maddy’s son, looking longingly at the Tom Thumbs and Squibs, and the Rockets with wonderful names like ‘Wild Geese’, and ‘Cluster of Bees’.
When they came out with their brown paper bag, Maddy took a photo of the shop with her grandpa’s old camera, which had been in the box her auntie sent her. A woman wearing a black ponytail and a blue shirt came out, suspicion written all over her pale face. ‘What you take photo for?’ she said. Maddy hoped that one day, her son would look back and remember doing special things with her, but she didn’t say so. It seemed enough to reassure the woman that she wasn’t from the council.
‘Let’s go to the zoo,’ she said to her son. They got onto one of the cream and yellow Auckland buses, and went out to Western Springs. ‘Zoological Gardens’, said a small yellow sign with black lettering, pinned to a power pole. It pointed past the corner where the crimson tram still trundled past, bound by wires to the lines above it. Maddy didn’t remember the sign, although it looked like an old one.
‘Are we going in?’ asked her son.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Let’s go to the fruit shop further down that way instead.’ To ease his disappointment, she offered to buy him a bag of plums, but he wanted a watermelon.
While she was paying for it, he dropped it onto the footpath, accidentally or not, she couldn’t tell. The dark green skin smashed open as it hit the black asphalt, leaving pulp exposed like brains. Sitting on the kerb under the sun’s blinding shine, he stuffed the chunks of pink flesh into his mouth. The sugary juice dribbled down his brown chin, and he spat the nutty pips out into the gutter through the gap in his front teeth.
Maddy smiled on her inside. She knew she’d always remember this.