| |
MY HOST SISTER TAKES a break from the dinosaur to watch me baking, sits on a stool with her knees pulled up, bare feet displaying chipped nail polish. Her name is Bree and she’s not quite sixteen, but her parents still have a plan for us to become best friends. I don’t tell them – and they don’t ask – that I already have a best friend back home, that she’s getting married in five months and I’m not sure I’ll be able to be there even though we promised we’d be at each other’s weddings. You can make promises like that, when you’re younger, because you can still manipulate the future, compress it down to converge on whichever moment seems most important.
I’ve lined up the ingredients on the small strip of bench not taken up by the breadmaker, the food processor, what I think is an ice-cream maker, and two other completely unidentifiable appliances. Bree picks up one of the plantains, holds it by one end delicately as if it’s hot to the touch: what is this, some kind of deformed banana?
I tell her that I’m making cake, and that I hope she’ll enjoy it. My orientation pack says that sharing something from your culture is a good way to connect with your host family, but I think my mother would be horrified at the idea of me presenting this haphazard recipe as emblematic of my culture, and I certainly don’t think it will be enough to connect with Bree.
The foreignness hits me in waves, like a recurrence of the car sickness I felt on the first night as we drove in darkness up the hills and round the tight corners of Wellington’s suburbs. I measure out flour and become suddenly aware that these are not the ceramic measuring cups from the box of kitchen equipment, some of it more useful than others, which my grandmother gave me when I left home. It hits me that I’m more than three hours from Sydney, another thirteen from Hanoi where I have lived these past eight years, and then two by road to the small town where the remnants of my family still live.
The cat – Chloe – crashes backwards through the cat door, tail puffing up as she returns herself to an upright position. Bree slides down from the stool to pick her up, soothe her, as I mix ingredients together. Bree wears her blonde hair in a long plait, which I don’t think is fashionable. It makes her look young, which is the opposite of what I wanted at her age – but then, I’m not sure what Bree wants. Despite Sue’s determination for a friendship to form between us, I’ve barely spoken to her in the time I’ve been here.
Our bedrooms are upstairs, part of each located over the garage, with a bathroom beside them and a microwave and electric jug on a shelf across an alcove. Bree’s room – where she is building the dinosaur – has been closed to me, Bree slipping out through the narrowest possible opening in the door, locking it behind her. Mine could be a model for the standard homestay room. Every item on the list has been ticked off: one bed, one set of drawers, one desk, one lamp. I bought a navy-blue duvet cover to replace the salmon-coloured one which was there when I arrived, covered the pinboard with photos of family and friends, just like I did when I was eighteen, but it still feels generic, as if I’m a homestay student before I’m Cam.
Sue said that she hoped I will be a good influence, and that the arrangement will help Bree take some steps towards independence. Besides, she said, smiling, Bree can help you with your English. I don’t tell her that my conversational English is very good, thank you, and that the course I’m doing is English for Business Purposes which I doubt Bree can help me with very much, and wonder if a homestay was a bad choice. Sue means well, so most of the time I say nothing.
Bree wanders off with Chloe hanging over her shoulder, back to her dinosaur. I blu-tac a vocabulary list to the cupboard and read over it as I mix, my lips forming around both familiar and unfamiliar words, the vibrations of the beater numbing my fingers.
Sue works at an intermediate school, and by the time she gets home the house smells of plantains and batter. I’ve worked out how to set the timer on the oven, and full of all the good guest resolutions in the world, rinsed the bowl and utensils and stacked them in the dishwasher. I can hear the sound of thumping and a whir like an electric drill coming from upstairs.
‘This smells delicious,’ Sue comments, negotiating the doorway with her arms around a box of papers. ‘What are you making?’
‘It’s like ... a bit like a type of banana cake. It will be ready soon if you’d like some.’
‘Oh, that would be lovely,’ she says. ‘You’re such an angel, Cam.’
We eat fish with peas and boiled potatoes which Bree immediately smothers in butter, salt, and pepper. I’m well accustomed to the weeknight ritual by now: Martin will ask each of us in turn how our day was, and Sue will bring it to a conclusion by asking and how was your day, Martin?
He asks me first, and I say that my day was good, thank you, that I only have morning class on Tuesdays and after that I came home and did some study and baked a cake. Sue says that it’s good cake and he should have some after dinner, and that I’m very talented. Martin asks her how her day was, and she says that this government has a lot to answer for, but the kids were well enough behaved. And then it’s Bree’s turn. I think she’s going to say that after school she watched me bake and Sue will be all approving, but instead she says: I’ve been building my dinosaur.
I chew on a mouthful of lukewarm potato and look out through the ranch slider. Bree reaches over and pours herself a glass of water, the ice cubes clinking as they hit the pinched spout. Sue turns and looks at Martin, a forced smile creasing her face.
‘And how was your day, Martin?’
*
OVERNIGHT, A STORM hits. The wind rattles my windows and I’m awake, sweating uncomfortably even though it’s cold. Branches thump against the walls. Over my years in Hanoi, I have become used to the sounds of an inner city, the repetition of pedestrian crossings and stalled traffic. Out here in the suburbs, the Karori wind, and then the rain, take me by surprise as they emerge amongst the silence, enveloping the house, the wooden cladding stretching and relaxing, creaking each time the weather pauses for breath. The rain drums heavy on the metal roof and I feel as if I could be alone up here, as if the rest of the world has fallen away and it’s just me and the weather.
It is only wind, of course, that is roaring like some untamed beast. It sounds like it’s coming from Bree’s bedroom, but that must be no more than a trick of how sound carries in this old wooden house. Aching, I clench the duvet round my neck and fall into an unsatisfying sleep.
By day the air is calmer, the rain coming and going in patches. I pull on a raincoat and my most waterproof shoes, run for the bus. It’s close to full and I cling to a pole as we wind our way down the hills and through the tunnel, water dripping everywhere, passengers squeezing on. In class we role-play Informal Workplace Interactions, discuss different workplace styles and how meanings can be misconstrued, a vague feeling of anxiety clutching at me as pitfall after potential pitfall comes to light.
After school finishes, I eat lemon syrup cake with yoghurt in a Cuba Street café with two of my classmates. Violet is an accountant from China; unlike me, she wants to stay in New Zealand permanently, just a matter of finding a job, she says. Katja is German and only taking the first part of the course. After that, she says, her girlfriend will meet her in Wellington and they will buy a second-hand van and travel for three months. We’re all around the same age, and we talk about how strange it is to be studying again, to have classmates again, and yet be so far from home.
I don’t talk about Bree and her dinosaur, or about how Sue wants to sort everyone’s life out, or about my brother, who has been increasingly on my mind. I talk, instead, about my work as a business analyst in the energy industry, and how with increasing interest in hydroelectricity in many areas of the world I hope to find work in an international company. I’ll go back to Hanoi initially, I say, but perhaps I can be transferred somewhere in a few years. I realise, as I sip my coffee, that I feel the same way I did when I first started university, the same as when I first graduated: that the whole world is open to me.
I order another coffee, dark, strong, as Katja tells Violet a story accompanied by demonstrative gestures, wide arm movements. Through the window, as I wait in line at the counter, I watch passers-by, an abundance of tattoos and striped socks. A rite of passage I circumvented, though some people seem to stretch it forever, unrestrained by plans.
And yet I know from my life, and from my parents’, that plans don’t always work out anyway.
I look at posters over Violet’s shoulder as we laugh about one of our tutors who is able, at will, to transform himself into an exaggerated American, dragging us up to the front for role-plays as we attempt, nervously, to respond to his loudness in kind.
Outside, the rain comes heavier, pedestrians manoeuvring themselves against the windows to stay under the awnings, drops of falling water reflecting in headlamps as the darkness comes early. We look outside at the weather uncomfortably, reluctant to make a move.
As it happens, we stay there another hour, ordering coffees on a rotation so there is always something on the table, an excuse to stay inside. Eventually, though, Violet swings her red leather bag over her shoulder.
‘My turn to cook,’ she explains, wrapping a long scarf around her shoulders as she makes it through the glass door and out onto the street. After Katja finishes the last of the bottle of pear cider she bought when she tired of the repeated coffees, she too moves to leave, on her way to meet up with a group of German travellers she’s connected with online. She tugs at her straggling dark-blonde hair, retying it in a loose pony tail, and promises to see me in class tomorrow.
So that just leaves me here at this painted, chipped table. I drink up the last of my coffee and then make a move, toes numbing up with the cold even as I’m barely out of the door, hands dug deep into my pockets. It’s still apparent how few people I know here – and that the few I do know have therefore become such a big part of my life, irrespective of how little we may have in common, whether we would have made our connections in another place.
I make my way through the rain, hood pulled up tight, manage to find a seat on the crowded bus as it makes its way through the city, past the botanic gardens and up the hills to home.
Home for now, at least. The wind is loud against the wooden walls. I change into dry clothes, switch on the fan heater, and drag a blanket around my shoulders, enter a new batch of vocabulary into my flashcard app. I try not to listen to whatever is happening on the other side of the thin plasterboard wall that separates my bedroom from Bree’s.
*
THERE’S A PHRASE IN English: the elephant in the room. As far as I can tell, the only reason for it being an elephant is that it’s big enough that no one can avoid seeing it. Perhaps what’s happening here is something even bigger than an elephant. A dinosaur in the room.
I broach the dinosaur in the room to Sue and Martin. Why is Bree building a dinosaur? Is it for school?
They look at each other, Martin in the armchair and Sue on the couch, a cup of tea in his hand and a phone in hers, conversation flickering between their eyes. Simultaneously, they return their gaze to me.
‘It’s just something she enjoys doing, that’s all,’ says Sue. ‘A hobby.’
‘So it’s art?’ I run through my mental dictionary for the correct word. ‘Sculpture?’
‘Have you seen the dinosaur?’ Martin asks me. He’s wearing a polo shirt with the logo of his sailing club on the pocket, and it’s quite apparent where he’d rather be.
I shake my head. ‘She doesn’t let me in her room.’
More eye conversation. ‘We were hoping ...’ Sue says. ‘Bree’s always been a very shy girl. She doesn’t have any friends, really. We were hoping that having you in the house would encourage her to talk to people a bit more.’
Bree does have friends, though. I’ve seen her with them from the bus with their tartan skirts hitched up, passing headphones between each other, laughing, taking up the whole width of the footpath, drinking Coke. I saw her in McDonald's once, with a group of boys and one other girl, flicking fries at each other’s faces. She’s not shy, but a veil descends around her in this house. She is not, to use another phrase, at home when she’s at home.
‘I’ll try and talk with her,’ I say, smiling, but there’s a hint of anger creeping up inside me. I want to help, but I pay them two hundred and forty dollars a week, and I’m here to study to further my career and I have my own family who need me. Bree – Bree cannot be my responsibility. I swallow the anger. Sue and Martin have not picked up on it, and I think that is for the best. It is important to me that I’m a good guest in their home.
‘What’s a good recipe?’ I ask Sue, moving on. ‘I’d like to bake something new.’
‘Edmonds,’ replies Sue, pulling a spiral-bound book from the shelves and handing it to me. ‘Real Kiwi icon.’
I’ve noticed how people emphasise things as cultural pointers but don’t explain them, only serving to mystify them further. Still, I’m sure it’s meant to be helpful; I take the book and thank her and she smiles in return and says it’s no problem at all, that she’s pleased I’m interested. Martin turns on the news and I stretch back on the sofa to flick through the recipes.
I make chocolate-coconut brownies. The recipe is easy, almost soothing – one saucepan and then into a tray, the oven. I take some time to myself while it’s cooking; headphones in, idle internet browsing.
On my way back, alerted by the oven timer, I almost trip over something large and white, about the size of a soccer ball, sitting halfway down the stairs. Bree runs out, grabs it and cradles it to her chest, mouths an apology and runs back to her bedroom. I only catch a glimpse of it, so I tell myself it was most probably a rugby ball. Except one end was considerably thinner than the other. Like a giant egg.
A few minutes later she follows me down. When I cut the brownies she takes one from the rack before it’s cooled, bites a chunk out of it hungrily. I think I see the hint of a smile on her face. I ask what’s your dinosaur, Bree? and panic clutches at my chest. I want to hear her say a sculpture, and at the same time, I’m not sure I do.
To my surprise, her face breaks into a clear smile. She perches on a stool, talks semi-incoherently as she forces the rest of the brownie into her mouth.
‘It’s a Titanosaur,’ she says, ‘A sauropod, like the Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus, only they came a bit later.’
I struggle to process the words, cycling between the known and unknown, a repeating translation running through my head as I scrub the saucepan and wipe the silicon baking pan.
‘Long neck.’ It’s the over-enunciation people tend to do when they underestimate my English, but it don’t sound like she’s being unkind – more that she’s lost in her own world with the dinosaur and is unsure how to communicate with people from outside it. ‘Eats plants.’
She grabs an envelope from the table behind her and starts to draw on the back of it. The outline of a dinosaur quickly emerges, a blue, long-necked creature. She finishes by drawing grass around its feet and labelling it in large, rounded capitals: TITANOSAUR.
She leaves after that, muttering about going to see some friends, people who understand her (though I think that’s a dig at her parents rather than at me). I don’t think initiating another conversation about the dinosaur will be easy – in any case, Bree’s been taking up more of my headspace than she should. With study occupying the majority of my thoughts during the day, and much of my evenings spent wondering what is going on in the next room, I’ve had little time to relax, barely set foot in a bar since I’ve been here, haven’t been to a concert or shopped for anything beyond necessities.
I resolve to move out of this rut and text Violet and we eat kebabs sitting on one of the triangular benches in Te Aro park, amongst the pigeons: thick fried falafel smothered in sweet chilli sauce. A vaguely drunk-sounding man tries to sell a pair of jeans to passers-by. Brand new, he says, and not stolen. Definitely not stolen. We giggle, watching the water bubbling up from the shallow fountain, the pigeons stalking over the blue and grey tiles around our feet. Someone a little way across from us is dropping pieces of bread, and the pigeons, along with the occasional sparrow and seagull, make for that direction.
Violet tells me that she’s thinking of moving in with her boyfriend. They’re serious, she says, a wedding might be on the horizon; but she looks nervously down at her fingers spread out across her dark jeans as she says it.
‘But one day. Not now. He has a big room, we can share that, and get a place to ourselves later.’
I nod, drink the dregs of my apple juice. ‘I think you’ll want to find a job first. And things aren’t so good with the economy still, you might need to search a bit.’
She pauses. ‘Yes. I’ll have to ... what is it ... crunch numbers.’ We laugh.
‘You need to take stock of your situation. You don’t want to end up in ... in a tight spot.’
We sit and watch the buses drive past. The commuters turn to office workers heading hurriedly home from Friday night drinks, then the party-goers beginning to emerge. I’m growing to like this city, despite its cold and wind and endless hills. I will perhaps miss it, when I leave, even though I expect I will never return. Some experiences, once over, are consigned to the past forever.
*
I LOOK UP THE TITANOSAUR that night, curled up in bed with my laptop, idly eating my way through a packet of M&Ms. It includes some of the heaviest creatures ever to walk the earth, Wikipedia says, such as Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus – which are estimated to have weighted up to 90 tonnes. 90 tonnes. I’m not quite sure how much that is, but I’m pretty confident nothing of that weight would fit in anyone’s bedroom. I find some small consolation in learning that they were, at least, herbivores.
I read further, bring up a news article:
One of the largest known dinosaurs, a titanosaurid, once roamed New Zealand about 80 million years ago.
The article details the identification of a bone from the spine of a dinosaur which was found in a stream in Hawke’s Bay. I flick to Google Maps. Hawkes Bay isn’t so far away. Especially not in the context of a time when continents were shifting, when the land that is now New Zealand was sandwiched between Australia on one side and Antarctica on the other.
This bone, the article says, is the first evidence that titanosaurids once lived in New Zealand. It’s not clear if it was from a child or an adult, but adds a lot to what is known about dinosaurs in New Zealand ...
But this isn’t Jurassic Park. Either Bree’s got some slightly eccentric art project going on, or she’s mentally unstable and imagining things. Either way, looking up types of dinosaurs isn’t going to help and, I reiterate to myself, it’s not my responsibility.
(Even if I still feel slightly relieved about it being a herbivore.)
My mother says the same thing (about responsibility, not herbivores) when I finally get hold of her on Skype. By now it’s dark outside, and I talk softly to avoid waking Bree who is – for once – quiet. ‘It’s your own life, Cam,’ she says. ‘I’m sure these people are very nice. You must be polite to them and help out when asked – you do help them out?’
I nod, and see the small image of myself in the corner of my screen nod back at me. My mother’s face looks dull, but I tell myself it’s just the poor quality camera, and the sunlight behind her beginning to fade. There’s something about time zones that always makes me vaguely uneasy, as if no matter how clearly I understand it, I still can’t quite process the difference between here and there.
‘But your responsibility is to yourself and your family,’ she continues. ‘You can’t worry about everyone else – so worry about those who will worry about you in return. How is your course?’
I tell her about the topics we’ve been learning, that the tutors are mostly good and that I’ve been getting on well with my classmates. She’s sipping at tea and picking at a slice of cake that is indistinguishable at this low resolution while she talks to me. She says that this is all very good, that she misses me but it sounds like I’ve made the right decision, and that I must remember to send a postcard to my grandmother, who paid for this after all. She catches me up on the local gossip; the son of a neighbour on his way to university, two others trapped in a dispute over the theft of a fridge.
‘How do you steal a fridge?’ I ask. ‘Casually slip it in your pocket when you’re invited round for tea?’
I tug my blankets over me even though I’m still dressed. Eventually I swallow and ask after my father, and she says he’s all right, as well as can be expected, she doesn’t want to wake him now but she’ll make sure I can talk to him soon, and that it’s good to get my emails – he reads those, or she reads them to him.
I say that I understand, because I do understand, now that I’m an adult, and we chat some more before I shut down the computer and go to sleep. Though the wind taps branches against my window, the night is relatively quiet – and Bree’s room in particular does not disturb me. I sleep soundly.
*
MY RESPONSIBILITY ISN’T to Bree, but I’m still looking up dinosaurs on my phone as the bus heads into town. Tuatara are living dinosaurs, say some sources, but the more reliable clarify that they are the last surviving members of the order Sphenodontia, a group of animals common 200 million years ago. There are Coelacanths, thought to have become extinct in the Late Cretaceous, until their rediscovery in 1938. That story is a little closer than I feel comfortable with, so I move on, but find only a controversial idea that dinosaurs lived past the asteroid impact into the Palaeocene epoch, and from then on it’s all conspiracy theories.
But however ridiculous this whole thing is, I keep looking. Because I, more than most people, know that when people say the last of a kind has died, they are not always correct. There are many stories – and I look through some of them now – of creatures that have survived their seeming extinction, or are caught between myth and reality, who stalk through jungles and deserts, soar over mountains. Of giant eagles and worms thicker than a man’s arm, large cats loose on moors and prehistoric relics hiding in deep lakes.
I get off the bus at Lambton Quay without stopping to think about it, walk down to the waterfront. This is the first time I’ve missed class but right now I can’t stand the thought of other voices and the squeak of chairs and the clear enunciation of every role-played word.
For now, among the stories, there is a memory.
The overlapping of hills by the harbour’s entrance makes it look closed in, as if it could be a lake. Hồ Hoàn Kiếm is much smaller – as an adult I walked its perimeter many times. But as a child, it seemed similarly endless.
The waterfront is busy with joggers and office workers, roller skaters, the occasional family out on this clear winter morning. I sit on a bench by the edge of the water and watch the ferry leave, pulling my coat around me.
1997. I was ten years old; my brother, Thanh, two years younger. We were living in the city then, though the town where my grandparents lived was still where we called home. In the city we had an apartment with no land and only a slip of a balcony, so we went to the lake often. We were afforded less freedom in the city, but going to the lake by ourselves was okay, as long as I looked after Thanh.
I liked the banks of the lake then, even though they were messy with only patches of yellow flowers in the soil. The river was murky green and it seemed as if it could be a portal to another world, the vague reflections of buildings another city entirely. Looking out we could see the red Bridge of the Rising Sun, the Turtle Tower on a small island. Sometimes there were turtles there, moving like slow lumbering rocks, but not today.
There were larger turtles there too, once. The last one died in 1967, beaten by a fisherman with a crow bar. It was stuffed and put in a glass case which we were taken to see, one Saturday, awed by its size, longer than the height of anyone we knew. But long before that, a turtle in the lake took a sword from the emperor Lê Lợi and returned it to Kim Qui, the Golden Turtle God, from whom it originally came. But the turtles were all gone now, our father said, and the gods too.
We’d never been taught to swim, and so when Thanh leaned over the shallow waters, looking at something I couldn’t see, I warned him to be careful. Then he leaned forward just a little too much, and toppled in head first. I screamed.
The lake was not deep; men could stand up in it, or near enough, and two slid in after him, half swimming, half wading, as I sat on the bank wailing, more with shock than the grief which would hit later. They shook their heads as they couldn’t find him, and then police and other official-looking people and eventually our father arrived, but he didn’t swim determinedly like the others; instead he splashed and flailed until others dragged him, exhausted, back to shore.
He wasn’t the same after that. They said it was because water had got in his lungs and stopped him breathing for a bit, and that had hurt his brain and made him sick.
It wasn’t entirely a lie.
I didn’t tell them everything, either. I didn’t tell them how I saw the large flippers, the turtle’s twisting neck, the giant shell emerging like an island, and how Thanh went with it, deep into the lake. I wasn’t sure, and I’m still not sure, whether it dragged him in or if he followed it down. The turtle was long-extinct, and mostly just a legend anyway, was what people would say, so I said nothing.
Early the next year, an amateur film-maker produced footage of the giant turtle in Hoàn Kiếm lake. No longer just a legend or a creature from the past. I didn’t feel vindicated, only sad. I lived with my grandmother for two years and didn’t see the lake at all. Only as an adult did I become comfortable walking the path – newly landscaped – around its green waters, sit beside it eating street food, noodles or fried cake of flour and peanut powder, sweetened with honey.
I look up. The waterfront is quieter, the work day begun. A small group of teenagers are huddled around a bench, two kayakers taking on the cold harbour.
Three years ago the turtle was put in an enclosure in the middle of the lake for observation and treatment, before being released. Crowds turned up, lined the concreted banks hoping desperately for a glimpse. Depending on who you believe, it’s either the last of its species or one of only four left.
They dredged the lake, to clean it as part of their effort to save the remaining turtle, and I spent weeks on edge, waiting for a phone call, notification of a discovery. There was none.
That was the year I decided to leave Hanoi. It was not a sudden decision, not a flight of terror, rather a clarification of the increasing feeling that my future lay elsewhere. That what happened in that lake was never going to be something I could predict or control, and it didn’t need to be so central in my life any more. If anything was to change, it was not going to be achieved by me staying there.
I worked, studied, researched. Calculated expenses. I made plans.
*
THE NEWSREADER SAYS there has been a meteor detected, heading for Earth, but no reason to be alarmed, she says, as her voice lifts to a type of professional urgency. I am rarely alarmed by what I see on the news, unconcerned about pandemics and train crashes and cyclones, and I laughed off my mother’s earthquake worries when I bought my ticket to New Zealand, but there’s something about this that brings me a slight edge of unease.
Bree perches on the arm of the chair next to me, eating half-defrosted cheesecake. ‘Do you think it will hit here?’
I shrug.
‘Because with the velocity they reach even a small one can kill heaps of people,’ she continues. ‘Mostly they explode before they hit the ground, but that explosion’s like the size of hundreds of nuclear bombs.’
‘The world’s a big place,’ I say, though I’m unsure if she wants reassurance or a co-conspirator in her excitement. ‘And two thirds of it is water. It probably won’t hurt anyone.’
‘You never know, though, do you? It could wipe out the whole country.’
‘I’m sure we’ll be just fine, Bree. Sorry, but I’m behind with study.’ The words emerge more abruptly than I intended, but I’ve no intention of apologising. I’m sick of it all, sick of the noise from her bedroom, the idea I have to somehow reassure her, save her. If I couldn’t save my own brother, how could I save her?
In my bedroom I write out sentences, each using a designated word: negotiation, trade, taxation. I memorise the meanings of another list of seemingly impenetrable idioms: ambulance chaser, back to the salt mines, laugh all the way to the bank. Next, responding to an email from a former colleague, I keep my answer to the question of whether I’m coming back vague. To Hanoi, certainly, at least for a while. To my old company? Everything is up in the air right now, and I like that expression, as if I’ve just thrown all the pieces above me and am waiting for gravity to fit them in to place. No loud collision, as a meteor would make, but simply a gentle fall, blowing on a breeze, shuffling neatly together.
Bree bangs on my door and opens it without waiting for a response. ‘What are you up to?’ Her voice is confrontational, goading.
‘Study,’ I say, not making eye contact, filling in a worksheet.
‘You study a lot.’
‘That’s what I’m here for,’ I respond, aiming for monotone.
‘Well, why are you baking all the time? No wonder you’re fat!’
That gets me to my feet. Not because I’m particularly sensitive about the subject, but because I am twenty-seven and used to having my own apartment, and wearing a suit to work, and people being at least superficially courteous, and I have no time to be insulted by a child – a child! – who’s been keeping me awake at night with some crazy imaginary dinosaur.
I pause, breathe, aim for calm, make my voice low. ‘Bree,’ I say. ‘You need to go now.’
She hovers there in the doorway, momentarily, then silently turns and walks away, each footstep, though not particularly loud, unmistakeably deliberate. I shut the door after her, shaking with rage or guilt or probably both. I’m not sure if she was crying.
Later in the evening, while Bree bashes away at something upstairs, I’m in the living room messaging a friend. Martin looks up from his laptop.
‘How’s Bree seemed to you lately?’ he asks. I think quickly, wondering if he’s heard something, but he’s talking to me like another adult and doesn’t seem at all annoyed.
‘She’s been ... okay.’ I choose my words carefully, worried of saying anything that will cause offence. ‘She talks a lot about her dinosaur, and I think this meteor they’re talking about on the news is scaring her a bit.’
Martin nods, evidently thinking. ‘She’s quite private from us. I guess that’s just being a teenager, but we were wondering if you’d picked up on something we hadn’t. I know you’re not close, and we don’t expect you to be, but you’re a little nearer to her in age, and maybe you can see some things we can’t.’
He pauses, and I say nothing in the silence. I feel lost; afraid of not measuring up when they clearly want something from me, but equally afraid of intruding.
‘When Bree was two years old we lost her.’
I frown as I parse the translation. I know when people say they lost someone they usually mean they are dead, but that’s clearly not the case here. But Martin continues.
‘She was in the garden, the gate was shut. Sue was watching her, she was there and then she wasn’t. We didn’t know what had happened. All the obvious answers – abduction, running away – made no sense. She couldn’t have gone far by herself, but surely Sue would have seen if someone took her. They had helicopters out with infrared and teams of volunteers searching the bush, appeals for information ... but no sign of her.’
He closes his eyes, briefly, remembering.
‘But then you found her?’ I say. It’s half a question, half a reassurance. I’m feeling slightly nauseous – the police helicopter with its infrared in this family’s past, the police divers in mine. Only with a different ending.
‘She just turned up. The next evening. A little muddy, but unharmed. She seemed to have been fed. She couldn’t have come back on her own, but there was no sign of anyone else. The doctors told us – they told us there was no indication of abuse or anything like that.
‘So the best answer we could come up with was ... there’s a woman down the hill, has lots of cats, you know the type. Harmless, but she doesn’t like going near people, always does her own thing. We think maybe Bree wandered down there and she fed her and let her sleep, and then she realised she had to return her. But ...’
‘You don’t believe that?’
‘It’s the best answer we have. Bree used to talk about it all the time when she was younger – I’m sure she didn’t remember it, but she pieced together what she was told. Children like anything that makes them sound special. She hasn’t spoken about it for a while. I hope she’s forgotten...’
‘You think it’s related? To the dinosaur?’
He pauses. ‘Well I sometimes wonder if it had an effect. I probably shouldn’t say this to you, but they say that anything that happens before you’re three has a particularly big effect. At some fundamental level. I wonder if it’s ... unbalanced her a little. She’s a good kid.’ He adds the last sentence hastily.
I shuffle uncomfortably, wanting to be anywhere but here. I think I probably need to go bake something else. Bree’s words still sting a little, antagonism hanging in the air, shadows and wisps of the petty arguments and wind-ups Thanh and I would engage in. But for now I just have to say something to try and calm the anxiety lurching in us all, even if I don’t really believe it.
‘I think she’ll be okay. I know why you’re worried ... the dinosaur thing is unusual, but lots of people lose their way a bit when they’re her age. I think she’ll find it again.’
*
AS DAYS GO BY, I’M becoming increasingly uncomfortable and distracted. Nightmares I thought long gone are flaring up inside my brain, memories surfacing at inconvenient times.
I attribute it to lack of sleep, resolving to find somewhere new to stay – even if I will forfeit a board payment – if things don’t improve. I can’t believe how little the constant noise bothers Sue and Martin. I may be closest to Bree’s room, but the house is not particularly big; there’s no wall insulation (no insulation at all, I’m increasingly suspecting) and sound carries easily. Near every night I’m woken, sometimes multiple times, by the sound of heavy footfall, growls, roars, thumping, and something that sounds like a wild animal eating. I consider, briefly, that this could all be an attempt to drive me away, that Bree’s behaving like a spoiled child who can scare off any nanny, but I suspect in reality I’m just not that high on her list of concerns.
I think that when class starts again on Monday, I’ll be fine, that I’ll perk up and put my best foot forward, but I catch the bus in a sleep-deprived haze. By ten o’clock my head is throbbing. Katja walks me round the corner and pushes me into a taxi. Words seem to have deserted me; I barely manage to recite my address to the driver in stilted syllables.
No one is home. I let myself in, kick off my shoes, close my bedroom curtains and collapse onto the bed, lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling in the semi-darkness. I feel more vulnerable in every respect right now, much more than I did at home. I drift into sleep over and over, but noises come from the next room, chomping, and soft growls which startle me awake. Eventually I force myself up, my vision fuzzy, knock on the door, Bree, are you there, but there is only silence.
I drag myself downstairs, trailing a fleece blanket with me, hoping this is not some breach of etiquette, because I can never quite work out where I fit between guest and visitor and family member and resident, let alone apply New Zealand norms to my role.
Then again, presumably building a dinosaur next to someone’s room is a breach of etiquette in most countries.
I prop myself up on the sofa with my laptop, pulling the blanket over me, nibbling at a slice of ginger loaf. Everyone seems to be talking about the meteor, but I’ve had enough of hearing about it. I open up a season of CSI I downloaded a while ago but haven’t yet had time to watch, telling myself it’s English practice. Just in case I ever need to talk to someone about a crime scene.
A child is bawling outside. The crime scene thing is looking increasingly likely.
I’m not sure which department investigates murdered dinosaurs.
Eventually, even watching TV becomes too much. I keep closing my eyes and thinking that I’m drowning, waking from a daze as if fighting for breath. Finally, and with relief, I fall into sleep. I sleep most of the afternoon, then make some instant noodles and apologetically excuse myself from the evening meal before I clamber into bed, cold and clammy, exhausted. Sue asks if I have a fever, if I need her to take me to the doctor, but I brush away her concerns. The streetlamp is orange, a slightly eerie glow through my curtains. The cat rustles and leaps as if chasing something, but I don’t get up to check, and fall into sleep.
I’m woken, later, by a loud whisper, tapping on my door. Cam, Cam. I need your help. I lean over to switch on my regulation desk lamp, pleased to find that my headache has cleared and I have only the usual level of just-woken-up grogginess. One minute. I pull on clothes, whichever I get to first. The family may walk round in their pyjamas, but I don’t feel comfortable with that, not here.
Bree slides in, her blonde hair tangled and unusually frizzy, a child in her arms. She stands awkwardly by the door. Bree is fully dressed, as if she’s just got home, or as if she expected something to be happening tonight. I look at my phone: almost 3am. Bree leans against the wall in tight jeans, a low-cut top, her eyes anxious beneath the mascara’d lashes. She clutches the child to her chest awkwardly. Though the girl makes no obvious signs of unhappiness, she must be uncomfortable; her arms and legs hang loose rather than clutching, as children almost instinctively do at that age.
‘Sit down,’ I say, because I can’t bear to look at that awkward pose any longer. Bree hesitates before perching at the end of the bed, the child still in her arms. The child is dressed in pink dungarees over a white top, her hair loose but with a bow clipped in one side, a smear of mud on her right cheek.
‘Where ... who is she?’ I ask. I reach out and put my hands under the girl’s shoulders and pull her away. I have heard no sounds from her and Bree obviously has no clue (only child, I guess) how to take care of her, so I need to make sure she’s okay. She turns her head, looks at me for a moment before scrunching up her face as if to cry, but mercifully thinks better of it, letting loose only a few tearless sobs. I rock her, feel her forehead, place my hand on her chest to check her breathing and scan her for injuries. She seems fine.
‘I need you to help me with her,’ Bree replies. ‘She needs to go back home.’
‘Of course she does. Who is she?’ I’m aware that exasperation is showing in my voice, and that it may well be counterproductive, but at this point I’ve no interest in containing it.
‘It’s complicated.’
Teenage stubbornness at the worst possible time. I want to shake her. Who knows what she’s done, what she could possibly be implicated in – or implicating me in?
‘Bree, the child. Is she a relative’s? Did you just find her? Do you know who her parents are?’
‘She’s a relative’s. She got out of her garden and got lost so I’m looking after her.’
I breathe a sigh of relief. ‘That’s great. So they live nearby? Let’s go and take her home – I’m sure they’ll be relieved to have her back.’ I touch Bree’s hand lightly, as if to guide her up and to the door.
But Bree shakes her head. ‘She can’t go back to her parents yet. I kept her in the shed yesterday but I can’t keep doing that – the wood’s full of splinters and she cries heaps.’
I take a deep breath. Bree means well, but ... I just hope it’s a long time before she considers having her own children. I take a deep breath.
‘Okay, Bree, listen to me. If there’s something wrong, if her family have been mistreating her, you need to talk to your parents about this. I know it’s hard when you’re related to them, but you’re fifteen years old, Bree, you can’t just sort this out by yourself.’
‘I can!’ Her voice is still quiet, but desperately insistent. ‘I’m exactly the person who needs to do this, but ... I need you to help me.’
Suddenly crashing begins next to us, the sound of glass smashing and wood splintering. The house seems to shake to its foundations, the walls visibly vibrating. I duck down, my body bent over the child’s as she starts to cry. The initial shock is followed by a series of loud thuds which send smaller, but still terrifying, vibrations through the house. I hear a yell, footsteps from the other end of the house. Bree grabs the child and runs, her footsteps echoing against the wind as she takes the stairs two at a time, made louder with the weight of the child still between her arms.
*
THE NIGHT WIND IS SHARP. I’m in mismatched clothes; sneakers, knee-length cotton skirt, long-sleeved T-shirt, my hair loose. I round the corner at the end of the street, run up then downhill, making for the bush, steep land not yet surrendered to housing, muddy under foot. I push through someone’s gate, climb the fence at the back of the yard. Bree can’t have gone far, not with a child in her arms. I use my hands to steady myself, pull my way through the thick bush. I scan the darkness; a rustling in one direction and then another as I haul myself another metre up the slope, find enough ground to stand upright on.
‘Bree!’ When my voice comes it is laughably faint; even with the urgency of the situation I’m afraid to shout in this darkness. A bit louder: ‘Bree!’ I pull out my phone, which I managed to stuff in my bra as I left, but its light is of minimal help.
I catch a movement, drag myself over. Scratches all over my bare legs. The cold air aching at my throat. Bree clinging desperately to the child.
‘Bree, come on, let’s go home.’ I hold up my cell phone, illuminate her tear-stained face with bluish light.
‘The dinosaur left,’ she says, looking upwards at the hill. ‘My dinosaur. I tried to look after it well. I fed it three times a day. I created it – it never would have existed without me. No one cares about it like I do.’
I take a risk. ‘There was no dinosaur in your bedroom, Bree. I know this means something to you, something important, and I can help you with that, but ... dinosaurs are extinct.’
Bree chokes a little, softly.
‘I looked up your dinosaur. The Titanosaur? They grew to forty metres long? How long’s your bedroom? A tenth of that?’
‘There are other dinosaurs. Maybe it wasn’t a Titanosaur after all. Besides, they’re smaller when they’re young. I hadn’t had it very long.’ Her tone is defensive, but her voice is quiet.
‘What are you scared of?’ I ask, gently, betraying none of my frustration.
Bree looks upwards, up at the sky, and I can tell she is desperately trying to make it clear that she fears nothing. ‘Don’t assume I’m scared just because you are.’ She pauses. ‘That meteor’s going to arrive soon. It’s a near-Earth asteroid not big enough to hit the ground – I’ve been reading about it. That’s good because if they’re bigger they can cause all kinds of problems. Extinctions.’
‘Dinosaurs are extinct, Bree. Not us. We’re going to be fine.’
‘It’s going to explode here. Right above us. Soon. It’s ...’
‘You can’t know that. I watched the news too – the scientists say it’s not possible to predict where it will be, but most likely over ocean. We probably won’t even see it at all.’
‘Won’t you listen to me? Just because I’m young doesn’t mean I don’t know things. It will be here, I can sense it ...’
I bite my tongue. I’m not going to argue about the plausibility of sensing a meteor, not out here in the cold and dark. My priorities are to get the baby back to its parents (who must be frantic by now) without getting into any trouble myself, to get Bree home and ideally get her some help, because this kid is really not okay, and to get more than two hours’ sleep before my test tomorrow.
Not necessarily in that order of importance.
I’m suddenly almost uncontrollably homesick. Not for Hanoi, for my small but modern apartment, or the friends I would meet up with after work. Not for speaking my own language again, rather than having to think before every word; or even for my parents and my grandmother, and the house she was born in and never left. My homesickness is for something longer ago, before the turtle and the lake, for a life I’ve never really mourned. Children are resilient, they said, they are used to going along with their parents’ decisions, they adjust. I’d adjusted well, they said.
I’m homesick, right now, for a time when I didn’t have to make decisions, because I’m tired, so tired. For the drive back to my grandparents’ house, Thanh getting increasingly carsick next to me, his excited voice as he opened the door before we’d quite stopped (even though he was told not to) and charged round the vegetable plot to the front door.
But now I’m thousands of miles away, and I’ve embraced change – a career, a new language, any number of new countries beckoning me – because that was how I could absolve myself. By being adaptable, and not crying when we gave away Thanh’s clothes, or every time my father struggled to talk.
My eyes are adjusting to the darkness. There’s just the three of us out here in the middle of the night, our breathing audible over the wind, running far too many thoughts through our heads until it seems like everything else just falls away, as if we could be standing forever, out here, in inadequate clothes against the winter air.
The explosion above throws us to the ground. Bree, with an instinct I’d never have guessed she had, falls on top of me, sandwiching the child between our bodies, sheltering her from the blast, then immediately sits up. Sounds shake through my eardrums. The light above, just for an instant, illuminates the whole suburb, the green of trees and white of houses, searing on to my eyes, red and yellow shapes lingering on my retinas against the darkness.
I hear glass smash, broken glass blown out of windows, smashing into bedrooms and onto the road, raining down and the tinkling goes on and on. Then the sirens start, one after another to form a chorus, every burglar and vehicle alarm in the suburb. Footsteps out on the street, yells rising above the sirens.
The child begins to cry, bawling at the noise surrounding her. Bree comforts her gently. Then she looks up at me.
‘We’re losing her.’
What do you mean losing her, I’m about to say. She’s fine, just shaken, a bit bruised at worst. But Bree is already running, limping slightly. Lights are coming on but the sirens are still going. I make after her along the road. She’s weighed down by the child, but her legs are longer than mine, and we’re almost at the gate by the time I catch up with her.
The child has stopped crying. There’s mud spattered up her legs. The sirens begin to shut off. Bree places her on the path and she seems unsteady for a moment, then regains her balance, toddles up the path and disappears.
*
WE DON’T SLEEP THAT night. We sit in the living room with blankets and cellphones, a candle on the dining table, waiting for the power to come back on. Wind whistles through the upstairs of the house.
‘Well I guess it’s happy birthday, Bree,’ Sue says, rising from the sofa. ‘Good thing I made your cake yesterday.’
Bree stretches, raising her arms in the air in an exaggerated fashion. ‘I forgot.’
Texts start to come in on our phones – mostly Bree’s, but I exchange messages with my few friends in the city. There’s damage throughout, is the picture I’m getting, though we were at the heart of it. Windows shattered from office blocks down onto the streets. School closed until further notice.
Sue and Martin are (fortunately) under the impression that there was a smaller explosion before the main one, and their house had the misfortune of being right next to it.
‘Thank god you two got out okay.’
‘Bree was terrified.’ I know that she’ll be torn between relief at me covering her and fury at being portrayed as scared, and I’m okay with that. ‘She just ran. I went after her to check she was okay.’
We eat cold meat and three kinds of cheese with bread for lunch. One wall of Bree’s room is missing. A builder-friend has confirmed the structural integrity isn’t at risk, and they pull a tarpaulin over to protect the remainder of the room from the elements. I’ve volunteered to move out, so Bree can take my room while it’s being fixed. They’re terribly grateful and say I don’t have to, that Bree could sleep in the study, but I think it’s more than time for me to move on. There’s a room free in the same student hostel as Katja, just down the corridor in fact, and Martin’s going to drive me there later today.
Neither of them appears to know anything about the child. Now I have worked things out, I realise they would surely know if they saw her, and I think it’s best they don’t know. But I think things are going to start getting easier for them – once they get the house repaired, of course.
The cake has a thin coating of icing, and below that layers of pink, chocolate, ginger. I press my fork down, pushing up layers as I go. Bree hesitates, eyes her slice for a moment, then eats hungrily.
‘You’re okay now?’ I ask. She nods, swallowing the mouthful of cake, eyes welling with restrained tears. She picks up her plate and walks out to the deck, balancing it on the rail, staring out at the garden. After a moment I follow her.
‘She was you, wasn’t she?’ I ask, though I already know the answer.
‘I don’t remember much, but I put things together. And I think I remember the meteor as both me and her. I mean, me now and me as a kid. So when they said that it was coming I understood more.’ She laughs a little. ‘I don’t really like kids, but I guess I had to take care of her and make sure she came back. If Mum and Dad had found her, or if she’d been too far from the house, things could have gone really wrong. So it was ... self-preservation.’
I look round the corner, where the blue tarpaulin billows out above the garage. They’ve picked up most of the pieces of house, the big ones at least, but the concrete is still flecked with chips of white paint and the occasional sliver of glass glints in the afternoon sun.
‘You’re good at self-preservation,’ I reply. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’
Martin and Sue don’t follow us, and we stand on the deck for a while, a gangly teenager who has just met her past self, and a young woman whose past is far away, eating sugary cake with our fingers as the sun trickles through the kowhai tree that spreads between us and the road.
Sometimes, I know, things come back from the past, and sometimes they take pieces of our selves away with them. Sometimes abstractions like emotions and memories aren’t enough to hold them; like everything important to us, they have to become monsters at some stage or another. Monsters not with dripping blood or giant fangs, monsters just so big they can’t stay under your bed or trapped in a lake. A turtle that once took a sword from an emperor returned to take a boy from his family. A girl desperate to reconstruct a past that makes no sense has looked even deeper into the past and found a dinosaur which may once have lived on this land.
The sky is clouding over. Bree smudges up the last few crumbs of cake onto her finger and then into her mouth, picks up the fork and plate and moves to head inside.
She pauses and turns. ‘About the dinosaur. You know ... when you’re a kid, people notice if you’re gone even a few minutes, they freak out. But when you’re a bit older you tell them you were at a friend’s place, and you might get grounded but it’s hardly a big mystery.’
‘You travelled more than once, didn’t you?’ But Bree is already on her way upstairs. My possessions have been packed into my suitcases, and Bree has already moved most of hers into her new room. She leaves the door open and I walk in behind her. The room is neat, with everything put in place as it was brought in. She has posters on the walls and a pinboard of photos of her and her friends pulling faces for the camera. A toy pig sits on her turquoise pillow. I stand behind her at the window. A dark shape moves over the hill and is gone.
‘I can make us some cake,’ Bree says. ‘And bring it to your hostel after school. No deformed banana cake, though.’