I LIKE TO GO UP TO SEAVIEW. It’s where my mother spent much of my childhood. Gazing out over a hazy blue sea that went on forever into the distance. Resting. Getting better.
Nowadays, it’s not a mental hospital anymore. Some of the buildings are still used. One of them is painted bright turquoise, and they use it as a home for the elderly; people with dementia and lost minds, which is quite ironic really.
When the sun shines, cheerful, round nurses in white uniforms push patients in wheelchairs down the ramps and around the parking area out the front. The patients absorb the warmth, and the nurses ignore them, talking instead about the Weight Watchers meetings that they attend on Tuesday evenings.
The rest of the buildings are well spread out. There’s an old sanatorium, a building like a small lighthouse, where sick people who had something catching had to sit by themselves. Food was put through a slit every morning. The lonely house, I call it.
There is a third building, in use for occupational therapy. Elderly and disabled people make string pictures and cane baskets there. Every other building has broken windows, spray-paint on the doors and rubbish inside on the floors.
There are roads where the tarseal is crumbling away at the sides, leaving edges like those of a jigsaw puzzle. Jigsaw edges are strangely reoccurring. The 50 km/hr speed restriction signs remain, like pieces randomly distributed from a child’s traffic set.
The trick is to walk around purposefully, because none of the people in any building know for sure whether you are attached to any of the other buildings. I ignore the warning signs about trespassers and private property. I know that the little man who spends his days scraping off lichen with a penknife from the scrubby little half-dead trees which pop up in the middle of the scruffy grass, nowhere near any of the buildings, is only pretending that he has a purpose. It’s hard to believe that someone has been delegated to do what he does.
The sky up at Seaview is like all the sky in the South Island: shot with sour milk. Blue yes, but a paler, more washed out, yet more intense blue. As if someone had tipped milk that has gone off into it. If your tongue touched it you’d have more of a reaction to it than you would if you did the same to an ordinary sky.
I have tiny blue flowers, forget-me-nots, around my ankle. They’re painted there, on my plaster leg. The flowers match my eyes, which the mirror at the camping ground tells me are washed out, like the sky. My hair has faded too, from red to orange, like a pressed flower that only retains some of its original colour. Everything fades.
There’s a bandstand at the entrance to Seaview, just over the brow of the hill, at the point when you realise that you’re there. It’s like a beret, middle blue in colour, with a tweak in the centre. Sometimes there’s an elderly woman in there, doing a jigsaw puzzle on the dusty floor, having swept the bits of broken glass aside.
When my shadow falls on to the pieces as I stand in the gap between the white railings, blocking the sunlight, she looks up and says something like, ‘There’s some of the sky missing.’ Every now and then, when I feel like it, I push the straight-edged outer pieces towards her with my toe.
A bandstand should have a band, and that’s what appeared one day, marching up through the entrance way with the midday sun glinting on the chrome of their instruments. I had to blink to check that they were really there. They stood blowing cheerful notes in the shade of the rotunda for a while, and then a man with a baton blew on his tin whistle, and they marched around Seaview, clipping their feet.
They moved in rows, not stopping until the whistle blew again, and then they’d all abruptly about face to the left or right, heading off single-mindedly in what was no direction at all, really. It was as if they were following invisible lines, already mapped out for them. And as suddenly as they had come, they marched back over the curve of the hill and disappeared. I might have thought that I’d imagined them if their music hadn’t lingered faintly in the distance, on down past the dairy where they sold ice creams.
My mother had told me how the straightjackets at Seaview were like pillows, puffing up over all the noise and disturbance in her head. Wearing one was the same as being drowned in a vat of sticky, fluffy marshmallow. Struggling and struggling and being unable to get out no matter how much she tried to move her arms to save herself. Like being trapped in a dream. And then she sunk right under and couldn’t breathe. Marshmallow was up her nose and in her ears, filling up her head. When she woke up, she’d be lying on the floor, and she could smell the bitter smell of cold poo, because no one had bothered to change her.
Sometimes she used to ring and say, ‘The men are here. They’re giving me electric shocks right now. I can smell the burning.’ And I’d say, ‘Mum, you’re getting sick again. Take your pills.’ And she’d say, ‘Just keep talking to me. I’ll be all right. Maybe they’ll go away again.’
That was why I didn’t top up my cellphone, so that my mother can’t ring me anymore to tell me that there are silver Zeppelins in the air above her house, about to drop bombs. Asking where she should hide so that they couldn’t see her. No matter what I would say, she insisted that their binoculars could find her everywhere and that she had nowhere to conceal herself. Another time, she rang to tell me that the sun had lost its heat, and that a nuclear winter had started. There was no escape that I could suggest.
I like to sit in the sun at Seaview and eat mushroom lollies from the dairy. They’re fat, puffy white things, dyed green, orange or yellow on top, and rolled in shredded coconut. The stalks are white as well, like cigarette filters. They taste of sweet chalk and baby birthdays.
One day, I saw them coming up out of the ground, the crust of which cracked and burst apart, as though a pimple was forming underneath. They billowed up through the grass and made the place look like some kind of mad, life-sized mini-golf range where little white balls thread their way through concrete toadstools. Like a giant fairy tale. And when I blinked again, they were only trees, small and round and stunted by the wind. I must have been dozing off to sleep in the laziness of the warm sunshine.
Little things like that take life out of the ordinary. Like when I washed my white laundry down at the camping ground, and someone left a new blue shirt in the machine and I didn’t see it. The dye ran, and everything came out pale blue. As I hung out my things that morning, they flapped in the breeze above my head. ‘Look,’ I said to the Dutch backpacker using the next line. ‘I’ve lost my washing in the sky.’ And she laughed, because it was hard to see it against the thin blueness of the air.
The woman in the bandstand is there more and more often. ‘See those white smudges of cloud in the sky?’ she said last week.
‘Clouds,’ I answered.
‘Rocket trails,’ she said, mysteriously. ‘It’s rockets. That’s how you know that they’ve been there.’
‘What do they do up there?’ I asked. She just shook her head.
‘I want to show you something,’ she said. ‘I want to show you what’s happened in my life. It will give you some insight into me.’ And she pulled out a scrapbook from the pack on her back. She licked her thumb for better traction, and laid it open. Nearly every page was full, pasted with the Pisces section from hundreds of different horoscopes from newspapers and magazines, some of them recent, some of them dating back years.
‘Twin fishes. You can see what sort of character I have,’ she said. ‘Dreamy, creative, intuitive. I’m a water sign.’
‘This isn’t about you,’ I said.
‘Yes it is,’ she said. ‘I’m a Pisces. This is everything I’ve done. And this,’ she said proudly, stabbing her finger at a small clipping on the second to last page, ‘is what’s going to happen to me tomorrow, and next week.’ I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe it would. Life is hard to predict.
Sometimes, I stop my progress across the bare spaces amongst the buildings and stand, waist deep in the summer grass, looking up into the blueness of the sky. Aeroplanes glint high above me, drifting in from the sea like tiny silver insects caught in the breeze, too distant to make any noise except silence as they float towards Christchurch.
The man who scrapes lichen off the trees is usually busy in the distance. He’s a funny man. His arms and legs are too short for his body, and he has to hold them close. I think he has narcolepsy, because he’s in the habit of falling off to sleep at the drop of a hat. Sometimes he manages to curl up under a bush, like a garden gnome that’s rolled under there and been forgotten.
Other times, I trip over him in the middle of nowhere. Cheeks flushed, full lips glossy and shining. His rusty brown beanie falls over his eyes, and he looks like a sleeping dum-dum doll, mouth open and snoring. The plaster on my toes is chipped because I fell across him at the edge of a road and was unable to steady myself. My leg came flying off. He didn’t even wake up.
One day, we both came to exactly the same point in the Seaview Mental Hospital and Sanatorium grounds. A random point, but we arrived there as our chosen destination at exactly the same time. It was coincidence, because our chosen dot was unlinked to anything, purposefully so, and the only difference about how we’d gotten there was that he had used a compass.
We stayed standing, because we wanted to remain face to face, above the grass. He pulled some Shrewsbury biscuits out of his pocket. ‘See?’ he said. ‘This is how much knowledge they let you have access to in New Zealand. The amount that you can see of the jam in this biscuit, in the window made by this pretty little heart shape. But if you pull off the front biscuit, you’ll find there’s a whole layer of jam behind it that no one ever sees. People just eat the entire thing without thinking.’ And he bit off the frill from around the edge of the biscuit to better make his point.
I was reminded of my mother in the kitchen when I was young. When she was home from resting by the sea. There was a smell of burning sugar on the element while she compulsively made jam, stocking our pantry in case of another war. When it was poured into the jars and held up to the light, it had a translucent rosy glow, like unpowdered Turkish delight.
The old woman in the bandstand has a watch pinned to her breast, one of those round silver ones that nurses use. Whenever she remembers to check it, she makes an exclamatory noise, and sweeps all her jigsaw pieces into a plastic bag, along with the dust. Busting her puzzle means that she can start all over again next time. ‘I’m late,’ she says, rushing off.
I am beginning to map my lately life from one small metal implement to the other: penknife, tin whistle, compass, watch. They are standing out above the surface of life like raised dots in the Braille alphabet. If I run my fingers over them, I will be able to decode them, and I’ll know whatever it is that is hidden from me. The big secret at the back of everything.
Yesterday, as the woman was leaving, she stopped, and pulled a packet of Shrewsbury biscuits from the backpack where she kept her puzzles and her scrapbook. ‘It’s your birthday today,’ she said. ‘You’re an air sign. Head in the clouds. We must celebrate.’ I looked at her, because she was right. It was my birthday. And I was annoyed, because I wasn’t sure whether this woman was my mother or not.