THE ROAD INTO BLUFF was lined with flax bushes, and the big fat flax seeds were like evil black birds on black stalks leaning in towards the road. Beyond the flax bushes were clumps of dirty blonde tussock, and on one side lay the turquoise sea.
People in Bluff were famous for making their livings by scraping the seabed for oysters and stripping them from their shells. They were people with nicks on their hands and bits of shell in their thumbs.
Vera was a distinctive resident of Bluff. She often wore an electric-pink fake fur coat. She lived in a green and pink house, and she liked the colours, even though all of the houses in Bluff had been beaten-up and faded by the weather until they were more like large baches. Her hair was constantly being messed up by the wind, and she thought the colours of her house had lasted quite well, considering.
She liked to collect things: shells, black nigger dolls, plastic flowers, velvet wall hangings, china dogs. ‘Kitsch,’ said her brother Stuart dismissively. ‘Clutter,’ said his wife Janet. But Vera liked to have her shelves full. She constantly roamed the second-hand shops looking for treasures. She was a born collector.
When she was younger, Vera had collected starfish in a big jar of seawater. She’d listened to see if she could hear them speaking starfish language. She had seen one brought out of the nets that had what looked like cream-and coffee-coloured letters of the alphabet patterning its skinny legs. G, C, N. She wanted to learn their starfish language and talk it back to them. But in the end, after weeks of hearing nothing, she decided that starfish just listen to each other’s thoughts.
Every Sunday, Stuart took Vera to the Foveaux Hotel. It was down by the sea front, and ever since they’d been little, and their mother had been alive, all bosom and starched white apron, they’d had lamingtons and jam rolls on a Sunday. Vera still had to try hard not to giggle at the sailors. Stuart didn’t like it any better than their mother had, although he didn’t rap her over the knuckles with the heavy silver fork.
From Monday to Thursday, Vera worked at the hotel, washing dishes. It was an elderly wooden building, mustard in colour, and flavoured with cod, salt spray and oysters. At her own house she liked to leave her sink stacked and overflowing with dirty dishes because it annoyed Stuart when he called in, and she took a certain pleasure in that.
Vera had been born special. At primary school she did crafts with nails and sparkly strings in a special class. At college, she had only done home economics and work experience, which was how she came to have a job at the hotel now.
Stuart was born the same as other people. He was named for the island, but their parents had spelt it differently, to avoid confusion. He and Janet lived in Invercargill, but both of them had names that were streets in Bluff, so Stuart had names in two places. The streets that ran downhill to the sea, and the streets that criss-crossed them all had names which Vera’s mother used to call ‘old English’. There was Alice Street and Albert Street, Elizabeth Street and Victoria Street, William Street, Edward Street, Mary Street and James Street, and of course, Janet Street and Stuart Street. There was no Vera Street.
Stuart loved the weather, and always paid attention to the forecasts. He had been like that right back since Vera’s memories of him started. Down at Land’s End, at the very bottom of Bluff, ten year old Stuart had tried to persuade his older sister that the noise they could hear was the wind whistling in off Foveaux Strait, and not the cries of mermaids being wrecked against the rocks, which was what the sailors had told her.
Ships often came in past Land’s End. Big, fat, grey tankers with dark-pink stripes around the tops. They came through the bluey-turquoise water and over the swell so close to Vera that she felt as if she could reach out and touch them.
Janet had given Stuart a weather calendar for Christmas, and he had put it up on the toilet wall. Vera’s favourite page was the photo of a pale rainbow against a pink sky. Underneath was an explanation of what a rainbow was, and why people could sometimes see double rainbows. Vera liked the bit about some people thinking that the upper one was the devil’s copy, because the colours were in backwards order, and it was a pale imitation on God’s radiant lower one.
And in Bulgaria, which Stuart said was as far away as England, people thought that if you walked underneath a rainbow, your sex would change. Vera didn’t know anyone who’d been underneath a rainbow.
Vera had a boyfriend. Ming was Chinese. He was seventy years old to Vera’s thirty-two, and he got that old by eating a diet rich in seaweed. He wore a grey boiler suit most of the time, and his face was smooth, like a polished walnut. His hair was still black, despite his age, but Vera knew that he had wrinkles on his bottom.
Ming had pictures of his granddaughters on the wall above the fireplace. They all had perfectly straight black fringes, straight black eyes and apple cheeks. ‘A family that only multiplies outwardly with women,’ said Ming.
He had five daughters and twelve granddaughters. His three nieces, who’d come out from China to jobs that Ming had found them in the oyster factories, also had only daughters. ‘Only girls for my family in this country,’ said Ming sadly. ‘It is my secret sorrow that there have been no boys.’ And he wiped a tear from his eyes.
One of his nieces used to run the Cheerful Flower Chinese Takeaways, but now the Hema family ran it, and there was no more chop suey, because they concentrated on fresh fish, pāua fritters and battered oysters. Stuart preferred it. Vera still went there because they had a counter where the brightly coloured lollies under the glass reminded her of the carefully catalogued boxes of shells down at the museum, graded for size and colour.
She concealed her packets of lollies from Stuart by hiding them under the seats of the couch. She liked to slosh each one around in her mouth before crushing out all the sugar. Stuart couldn’t stand to hear it. He thought lollies were a waste of money anyway. Vera had black lines on the top edge of each tooth where they were rotting away. She rarely remembered to clean them.
Once, Stuart had left her house with a half-sucked liquorice allsort sticking to his pants. Vera didn’t mention it in case he got angry with her. Her teeth were very sweet, and even though Stuart disapproved, her favourite food was white bread and butter, cut into triangles, and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. Sometimes Vera had this fairy bread for breakfast and dinner, as well as birthdays.
In town, if Ming saw Vera, he would cross the street and walk on the other side; head turned away, or down, examining his steel-capped boots. ‘Out of respect for the memory of my delicate wife, whose death still surrounds me, he told Vera. ‘You will be understanding. Because she bore my children, her grace must not be broken.’
Vera tried to understand why she mustn’t tell anybody about what she and Ming did, but it was very hard. She liked to talk. She couldn’t stop herself from telling her friend Janine, and Janine said that if Ming didn’t take her out on a Saturday night, then he wasn’t a proper boyfriend. Vera was very worried that Janine might be right. She really wanted a proper boyfriend. Janine had one.
Vera and Janine had an on-off friendship. Once, Vera had gone to Janine’s house and seen some of her miniature china dogs on Janine’s dressing table. She accused Janine of stealing them. Janine said that Vera had given them to her. Vera said that it had only been a loan, and rang the police, who came from Invercargill. They were very friendly, and looked through all her collections before having a word with Stuart about wasting police time. Janine gave the dogs back. She didn’t want them anyway, she said.
When Vera was at Ming’s house, they mainly sat around and watched the soaps on TV. Sometimes, when Vera talked a lot, Ming went out into the garden and looked after his copper chrysanthemums. They were like big pompoms with spider’s legs sticking out, and Ming’s number-one enemy was earwigs. He put rolled-up newspapers underneath the bushes, and the earwigs crawled down inside them to hide from him. Then he put the newspapers into a big drum, and burnt all the earwigs alive.
If a Chinese ship was docked up, Ming rode down there on his old black bike. He came back with shrimp sauce and pickled lemons for making sweet and sour fish. Vera loved his kitchen, and what she really liked was the jar of MSG: sparkly white crystals that she ran through her fingers when she knew that Ming was in the toilet and wouldn’t be out for a while.
One April, she tried to bake him some Anzac biscuits. She enjoyed twisting the golden syrup up out of the tin and onto the spoon, winding it round and round until it didn’t drip anymore. But she forgot to take the biscuits out of the oven, and they burnt. The whole kitchen was flooded with sour vanilla-scented smoke that couldn’t get out. Ming always kept his bamboo blinds closed when Vera was there, in case one of the neighbours saw her.
When Ming lay on top of Vera, and put his thing into her little lady, he wore special covers to keep himself dry while they did it. They glowed in the dark: white, blue, deep sea green and violet. Eventually Vera couldn’t resist, and unwrapped them all and put them on her fingers. Then she crawled under the bed where they radiated ghostly colour, just as they did when Ming put them on and turned off the light. She waved at herself and pretended that they were schools of deep-water jellyfish swimming towards her.
Vera wished that she could have lived in the dark. One of her favourite possessions at her own house was a fibre-optic light where the long, graceful strands glowed at the ends, changing from red to purple to blue and green and pink like a fantastic starfish flexing its arms in the black depths of the sea. She waved to herself again.
Ming was annoyed that she had nearly wasted all the covers, and he carefully smoothed them out and saved them in a little jar by his bed. He said that they were still good, even though the packets were gone.
Sometimes, in bed at night, Vera thought that she could feel starfish crawling around in her stomach, feeling their way gently across the bottom with their long arms and short tentacles. ‘It’s just the meat and potatoes going down your pipes,’ said Stuart impatiently when she told him.
Stuart was often impatient with Vera. ‘Jeez, you’re getting fat like Mum,’ he said, as she tucked into the lamingtons and jam rolls down at the Foveaux Hotel. ‘It must be all those lollies you eat.’ Vera had a guilty flash of some stored in her cabinet at home, inside the china teapot.
Later that night, she was scared that Stuart was right. She’d eaten too many of them. She had a stomach ache that got worse and worse as the hours got later. She turned up the ABBA cassette that she was listening to, but she couldn’t distract herself from how much it hurt. Not even with her fibre-optic light. At three in the morning, she crawled to the phone and rang Stuart and Janet. ‘The forecast says high winds and rain,’ said Stuart grumpily. ‘Can’t you wait till morning?’ But when Vera started to cry, he agreed to come.
When he and Janet arrived, they took one look at Vera, and drove her to Invercargill Hospital. When the baby was born, no one could believe it. ‘It’s a boy,’ said Stuart.
‘It’s a baby,’ said Janet wonderingly. She and Stuart had spent years trying to get pregnant before they’d found that Janet couldn’t have children.
Vera liked the way that her son lay on his back, waving his arms and legs. With his head, they made five points, like an upside-down starfish. ‘Absolutely not. You can’t call him that!’ said Janet and Stuart in horrified unison. But it was her baby, and she did. She named him Little Starfish. And Janine was jealous, because Vera had a proper baby.