Hokianga Cause and Effect

A PANORAMA DIVIDED  into horizontal thirds: blue sea, yellow sand, blue sky.

The dunes were other-worldly and apart from the breeze in Laura’s ears there was silence until Perry said, “Would you just take a look at them!”

His Irish accent sang to Laura even when he sounded breathless. That first look at those dunes hit her like a thunderbolt on a cloudless summer’s day.

Coming into Opononi they pulled over. She had been driving, complaining about sun-strike as they moved westward. Perry offered to take the wheel. When they stopped they found themselves overlooking Hokianga Harbour; more sand than she had ever seen in one place; and a ponderous blue sky that weighed down on everything.

Laura and Perry holidayed in New Zealand three times before applying for residency. European life had become predictable with age; this country was a revelation.

On their first holiday, before the plane landed in Auckland — descending over billiard table fields and hills like billowing felt, houses with coloured steel roofs coming up to meet them — he turned to her and said, “This is it. This is where I want to be.”

But Perry hadn’t come with her after all.

When Laura’s application for residency was rejected, she lodged an appeal against the Ministry of Immigration’s decision and won. After enduring another flight in cattle-class to the other side of the world, she vowed never again. So far she had been true to her word; she had been a New Zealand resident for ten years and had not once returned to Europe.

It always felt as though Perry was with her, to the point where she would exclaim, “Oh, look at that, Perry!” before remembering he wasn’t here to see it.

Their Hokianga experience was on their first holiday. That evening, after checking into a motel in Opononi, they walked downhill to the chip shop.

“What kind of fish is that?” Laura asked the woman behind the counter as she dipped a battered fillet into the oil.

“Bluenose,” said the woman.

Perry couldn’t stop sniggering until Laura nudged him outdoors. “I only asked!” said Laura, watching his shoulders convulse in the car park.

The following day Perry pointed bluenose out to her in a copy of Fish & Game New Zealand’s Guide To Saltwater Fish in a souvenir shop west of Opononi. She was relieved to discover it was an indigenous species and not just a reproach for priggish tourists.

Europeans warned Laura not to expect everyday life in New Zealand to be as idyllic as it was on those holidays. Now that she was a resident of the country she and Perry had dreamed of living in, it was as though those friendly Kiwis had been actors in a play that had come to the end of its season. The shopkeepers seemed as grumpy and disobliging and the people on the streets as cautious and guarded as they had been at home.

Sometimes she would try to see herself as she thought Perry would have seen her. She knew he must have seen something other than the grey-haired old woman who took her by surprise each time she looked in the mirror. It was, she supposed, her poor self-image that stopped her from appreciating her new life. Even when she had the sun on her face and the wind blowing through her hair, she didn’t feel as though she was really here. But if she was not here where was she? She couldn’t decide whether her disorientation had anything to do with being separated from Perry.

While walking to the post shop one day, she thought she heard him in a collage of sounds outside the pub car park. A power saw howled; a truck insistently warned of its reversing; a car alarm panicked; a ute whooshed by; in primeval contrast a tui brayed and bleeped; and then Perry’s voice spoke her name.

Warmth bloomed inside her for a moment and was gone.

There was a place where everything was exactly as it was meant to be. Laura had been there a few times, although it felt as though she’d never make that journey again without Perry. To a place where everything is lit by that occulting light you see on the leaves of trees in the sunshine; where colours are more vivid and you float on tranquillity.

Hokianga is the picture in her mind.

The sun warms her face as her car comes down the hill with a tangle of branches reflected in its windscreen.

The sand is on everything; even the leaves of the trees, which reach out from the roadside to greet her. Heading west towards Opononi, Laura waits for a gap in the traffic, pulls across the road, turns off the engine and gets out of the car.

It is just as it was with Perry, but now she has the sight of those dunes in her memory as well as in her eyes.

Would you look at all that sand! Perry had said. How many grains, do you suppose? His question resonates through Laura’s head as she misses the touch of his hand on her shoulder.

As Laura gazes across the water, there is no denying the actuality of the dunes whether Perry is here or not. Things are what they are. Like the shapes left on metal where the yellow enamel paint has chipped off a hospital bedstead; the pallor cast by fluorescent light on an emergency department corridor; the chill of a European cemetery in autumn; rhododendron leaves rolled together like miniature angels wrapped up in their wings; fallen leaves on asphalt pathways in the dusk; turned earth; wilted flowers; moss growing on gravestones.

The realisation surfacing through these memories is that there is no need to hang on to them. With the sun’s heat on her shoulders, Laura feels at peace as she looks into the light at a panorama divided horizontally into thirds by the Hokianga sand dunes, shifting but undeniable.

—0O0—

(Hokianga Cause and Effect is previously unpublished in print.)

Email me the title of this story and I will send it to you as a PDF file, free of charge: chrisb[at]xtra[dot]co[dot]nz