Tree of Strangers Page 8

  ‘Do you not see the irony?’ I asked as she fed in a bank statement.

  She frowned and looked away. ‘This would be very good in your compost,’ she said.

  I left with a bag of shredded names, drove away and parked around the corner and laughed till I cried.

  My history, my family, my mother and my name were erased. Mavis replaced my mother’s name with hers on my birth certificate.

  First names are more personal, a friend said. She felt I should soften the blow by changing my name gradually. Start with Sumner, she said. They won’t be quite so antagonistic. So I went ahead and changed my surname by deed poll.

  While I waited for my new identity, the police raided the bar at the musicians’ club. The patrons scattered. A cop went to put me in handcuffs but thought better of it and held the door of the car. ‘I’ll drive you home,’ he said. We stopped outside my flat and he took his time writing down my details. I gave him my new name. He asked if I knew we lacked a licence. I explained we’d recently moved from the West Coast. I was a single parent, working weekends to support my kids.

  ‘It’s a good defence,’ he said.

  When my court date arrived, I dressed the girls in their best clothes and we waited in a pew until they called my name. Barbara Sumner. I stood in the dock, and the judge looked at my girls and then at me. He read his notes and asked the same question. Did I know I was selling alcohol illegally? I shook my head and wiped a tear, and Rachel broke from the others and ran towards me.

  The judge smiled. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I apologise for putting you through this, Miss Sumner.’ He discharged me without conviction.

  As we left the courthouse, we passed the arresting officer. ‘Nice performance,’ he said, and slow-clapped me out the door.

  14

  A cosmological view of time

  The musicians’ club shut down and I was out of a job. Bruce came to pick up the girls. Our agreement no longer suited him.

  ‘I need more time to myself,’ he said. We were standing at the bottom of the concrete stairs to my flat. ‘I can do the day and overnight on Saturday only.’

  I was not in a placating mood. ‘It’s interesting,’ I said, ‘how resources and opportunity concentrate around the father.’ Both of us were smiling to fool the girls we were still friends.

  ‘You took away my children, so you took away my responsibility. Your choice.’ We watched the girls in the car, fussing over their seat belts. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I have a girlfriend. Can you return that bag of raw wool you took? She’s learning to spin and weave.’

  I’d left behind almost everything. The loom on which I’d made rugs to cover the cold floors, the spinning wheel and a half-knitted jersey.

  ‘I hope she likes waterbeds,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll never be a nice person,’ he replied.

  He brought the children back the next day. They reported his girlfriend had already moved in and was wearing a skirt I’d made. She had my sewing machine, too. I wondered what it would be like to step into another woman’s shadow.

  I went back to Piko Wholefoods where the same large man was waiting in line. He saw me and smiled. ‘No foehn winds today?’

  ‘We’re in the Zone of Calms,’ I replied, repeating the unusual weather report from the day of the motel. The day Jeannie called.

  I was wary of men, but David exuded kindness. ‘How about lunch?’ he asked, and paid for my groceries. The older girls were at kindergarten. He squatted in front of Ruth in her stroller and laughed when she patted his bulging stomach. We went for toasties at the bakery nearby. David was an actor’s agent. He was warm and funny and generous. It felt like I knew him already.

  And then I realised I’d seen him before. The vision I’d had in the bath in Runanga, the plane crash clear as day. He’d dropped his tickets and my mother picked them up. He’d shuffled on board and held her hand as his camel-hair coat dissolved in the heat. When I explained it to David, he smiled in the same syrupy way and did not question the madness of it.

  The next time I saw him, he brought a photocopy of a New York Times article.

  90 ARE KILLED AS JETLINERS COLLIDE ON MADRID RUNWAY IN HEAVY FOG

  I learned how the smaller plane landed in the murk and missed a runway sign. It turned too soon and ploughed into the middle of the Iberia aeroplane, tearing it in half. A few survivors walked away with minor injuries. Much of the luggage remained intact. The fog was so thick a survivor running from the burning wreckage had to show rescuers where to go. Charred clothing and debris were everywhere. They covered the burned and mutilated bodies with blankets. Captain Carlos Lopez Barranco crawled from his damaged cockpit, shouting: ‘The runway was mine!’

  That summer in Christchurch, the days were sticky, the nights cool. I carried the article everywhere, feeling its presence in my pocket or bag. One Sunday we went to a concert in the park. We lay on the grass, the sky filled with mares’ tails, those high, trailing cirrus clouds. The girls danced in front of the stage as the Topp Twins sang ‘Untouchable Girls’. Ruth curled up beside me with a blanket over her face. She disliked loud noises and crowds. My vision wavered and I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  It was not a hallucination exactly. More like an occulism with reality twisting away until the park became an airport. Two girls, young teens, stood on a viewing platform overlooking the runway. I knew without knowing they were my sisters. A man I assumed to be their father stood with them. The image was so clear I could see the younger one had smeared lipstick over the edges of her lips.

  The air was soupy. Madrid expected dry cold in winter, not this damp seep. The father leaned over the railing towards the shape of an aeroplane in the fog. ‘There.’ He pointed to a disembodied hand pressed against the tiny round window near the front of the plane.

  ‘That’s not her,’ the older girl said with disdain. The father put his arm around her. His voice rang clear in my ear. ‘It’ll be over soon, sweetie. Before you know it you’ll be grown up. You won’t even remember this day, let alone how awful it feels to be fourteen.’

  She shrugged away and turned to the glass wall overlooking the terminal. The younger girl breathed a circle of condensation on the glass. She practised her signature, the last letter curling back through the others. The shadow of their mother’s plane loomed in the reflection. It rose out of the fog, then disappeared as the engines roared and they taxied away.

  ‘Can we go now?’ the older girl asked.

  The scream of an engine in reverse filled them. An explosion saturated the air. The sound permeated every cell in their bodies. The father dragged his girls under the flimsy protection of his coat. And then an infinite silence — before the glass wall shattered and fell onto the screaming people beneath.

  For a moment, the fog parted like cut cloth to reveal a patch of blue above the dismembered plane. Father and daughters ran towards the stairs that led back into the terminal. Behind them, black smoke billowed across the tarmac and over the viewing platform.

  Years later, I learned my sisters were at school that day. Their father was away. She was on her way to you, he wrote in a letter. He told me Pamela died on impact. The cataclysm was so great her necklace fused with her breastbone.

  My sisters and their father were not there that day. And yet in my vision I’d seen it through their eyes. A doctor once told me I had false memory syndrome. For a while, I believed him. To qualify you need to think your real life is happening in another timeline of existence. And somehow you’ve slipped from it, into this other, less real world.

  Many adopted people share the sense of living the wrong life. The possibility of another life exists in your marrow. But we cannot be in two places at once. There is no permeable wall between the past and the present. If there were, fact and truth would cease to exist. So was the dream of the crash a false memory, an aberration, or something else?

  A few weeks after the hallucination at the park, we were at Sumner Beach. The sea had turned cold
and the girls hunted for crabs along a stretch of rocks. I spread the blanket and put up an umbrella. The trance rolled in again so that I was standing on the tarmac, emergency vehicles all around. There was no sound except for the sea and the girls’ laughter. But I was running with a group of medics towards the remains of the burning plane. Foam lay thick on the ground. An ambulance officer stumbled past, carrying an unconscious child. I put out my arms, and he passed him to me. I lay him on a sheet on the slick tarmac and brushed back his black curls to see his eyes wide open and empty.

  The girls returned, piling onto the blanket, their sandy bodies warm from the sun. David arrived with buckets and spades and a bottle of wine. I told him everything. He listened and absorbed my stories of ghost worlds, of the taste of fog, gritty and acrid with smoke.

  A while later, we were eating sandwiches in David’s office. ‘A friend will be joining us,’ he said as a man in yellow leather boots walked in.

  He shook my hand and looked at me with his head on one side as if deciding.

  ‘Can I buy you new shoes?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re clearly from the provinces,’ he replied. ‘Call me Hampster.’ We made plans to meet on the weekend. ‘We’ll go shopping,’ he said.

  Be careful, David warned me. But I was heedless. Hampster was from another world. He made movies. He would talk endlessly about himself and catch it and smile. He asked questions that masqueraded as curiosity. A technique he’d perfected to avoid anything uncomfortable. He said he had recently left his wife. Only he hadn’t. He said he lived in Auckland. Only he didn’t. He ate at restaurants as though they were his natural habitat and made fun of my poor wine choices. He drove too fast and I let him, and it almost killed me.

  15

  Hear the cry for home

  On the first date Hampster held the door of his red Porsche and I knew I was in trouble. We went shopping. He bought me a sweatshirt, shoes and a jacket, dressing me to suit his style. But he made me laugh and held my hand in private and let me drive his car. Of course, I was smitten. The accessories swayed me. I’d had so few of them, and for a while I mistook them for the real thing.

  One night, in the silence of sleeping children, I took out a copy of Metro magazine. The first issue, from July 1981. I’d found it in a second-hand bookstore in Greymouth. Can a magazine change your perception of life? I read and reread an article about a suburb called Ponsonby. It was not Madrid. But they had cafés in Ponsonby. Auckland was warm, and Christchurch felt clogged with the past.

  Hampster was erratic. He made a fanfare of everything, arriving with a flourish, leaving in a squeal of tyres. A ‘big-noter’ is how Max would have described him.

  Mavis was still not speaking to me. But she would call Bruce to ask after the children. I phoned her one night. ‘Everything’s going well, Mum,’ I said, pretending she’d asked. ‘It’s a bit of a struggle, though. The benefit hardly covers the basics.’

  I could hear her smile down the phone. ‘You’ve made your bed,’ she said.

  A while later, Hampster suggested I go with him to Auckland. We’d drive up and he’d pay my airfare back after a week. We set the date, and on Sunday morning I walked over to Bruce’s house. We talked while the girls played in another room. Reluctantly he agreed to extend his childcare while I was away.

  He drove us back towards the flat and began to berate me, angry that I’d derailed his life. ‘If it were just you in the car, I’d drive us into the fucking river,’ he said.

  He never swore, and Bonnie leaned forward in her car seat. ‘It’s okay, Daddy.’ She patted his shoulder.

  We were beside the Avon and he swerved from the road onto the grass. The ducks that huddled over the banks flew up around the car. ‘I could do it,’ he hissed.

  Rachel began to cry. ‘Ducks, Daddy, ducks,’ she said.

  He stopped, and I leaned over and took the keys and got out. ‘Let’s talk over here.’ We unbuckled the children. His girlfriend, Alice, had made them sandwiches, and the girls ran down to the water to feed them to the ducks.

  ‘We made this mess together.’ I touched his hand.

  He snatched it away. ‘You’re like a bird of prey. Without Alice in my life, I don’t know what I’d do.’

  I’d caught sight of Alice’s blonde hair a couple of times. But she always disappeared when I arrived at his house and she refused to meet me.

  He’d never been violent or even raised his voice. Our arguments and displeasures communicated in silences and pot-shots. Six years of playing our roles and this was our first real argument. The ducks surrounded the girls and we paused to watch them. They were too far away to hear the bitterness and recrimination.

  ‘Don’t speak to me ever again,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s about the girls. Don’t ask for money. I’ll give you nothing. I don’t care if you starve.’

  ‘Shall we shake on that?’ I asked, trying for levity.

  ‘You’ve ruined me,’ he replied, and I knew it was true.

  The following week I was in the car with Hampster. The weather was grey and overcast. We sped along the Kaikōura coast, listening to Van Morrison. The sea grew dark, lidded with masses of cumulonimbus. On the ferry to Wellington, my stomach heaved with the waves. Standing at the railing in the freezing wind, I wanted to strip off all my clothes. I was desperate to be so in the moment that no other moment existed. I felt the rush and fear of the high diving board and the pull of the water, the yearning to plunge.

  He came over and hooked his arm through mine. ‘You’re chilled through,’ he said.

  I shivered and pointed to the circles of light that surrounded the moon. ‘That’s an ice crystal halo. Ring around the moon means rain soon.’

  We stayed in Hampster’s house, hidden in the hills above Wellington. In the bathroom, and later when I looked in the bedside drawer, it was clear his wife had not left. I should have said something, taken the next ferry and a bus home. But I felt new with him. As if being twenty-five with three children was not old.

  We visited a friend who’d arrived from Canada. We walked into the house and she was on a ladder, wallpapering the hall. They hugged and laughed and talked about the film business in Vancouver. Her pale curly hair fanned around her head. She breathed in the energy of the room and reflected it back and I felt like I was bathing in her light.

  The next day we drove north towards Napier. Towering macrocarpas lined Highway 50. I still remember the exact spot, a sharp bend near Ongaonga. Hampster took it too fast and the car spun out. He laughed and put his foot down.

  We rolled into Napier and I thought about visiting Mavis and Max. They’d recently moved there from Upper Hutt. Later I would think of their move as returning to the scene of the crime. We drove past their house. Max was in the driveway, washing his car. He turned at the sound of the Porsche, spraying water over the lawn. I raised my hand, but his face was devoid of recognition and we drove on. Perhaps he did not see me.

  I tried to explain to Hampster how it felt not to belong anywhere.

  ‘We’ll find a motel.’ He smiled. ‘And I can be your Daddy.’ I thought again that it was time to go home to my kids.

  We visited Mavis and Max the next morning. Max did not mention he’d seen the car the previous day. We sat at the table and drank tea and talked about the weather and how their cat loved her new home. As we drove away, the sun came out for the first time in days and I closed my eyes. Hampster put Van Morrison on again.

  We drove to Tauranga and stayed with his friends. I was anxious to be away. I’d never been to Auckland. I wanted to walk along Ponsonby Road and see if any of it matched the image I’d conjured in my mind.

  We took the twisting, steep road over the Kaimai Ranges. As he was passing a truck, Hampster leaned forward to change the CD and swerved into the path of an oncoming car. I saw it bearing down on us and thought: My turn, my poor girls. It hit my side, the Porsche collapsing around my legs, spinning in silence.

  When I came to, Hampster was sitting on the grass
nearby, his head in his hands. I noticed the jagged edges of my teeth. Somewhere nearby a baby was crying. The car lurched forward, sliding by degrees down the bank towards the gorge. I could hear my girls laughing as they chased the chickens.

  As they cut me from the wreckage I woke to the shock of blood over the new clothes and the agony of movement. A fireman leaned over me, ‘You’re so lucky,’ he said as they pulled the stretcher up the bank over the wet bracken. I’m told a truck driver tied a rope around the bumper to halt the car’s further descent into the gorge. The mother and her two small children in the other vehicle survived with broken bones. It was her baby I’d heard crying.

  Later they said I was delirious, repeating a nonsensical sentence: The runway was mine, the runway was mine. I remember waking in the car, amazed at the beauty of the bush dense with green. And the water below sparkling in the sunlight, calling me in.

  16

  Oh so lucky

  In the dream, I am sprawled across a sun-warmed boulder in the middle of a hidden river. The water is languid and deep. Birds swoop low as if checking on me. I slip into the water and drift in the lazy current as my body grows heavy. For a moment there is panic, a breathless struggle, and then a buoyant peace.

  I woke to the weight of plaster on one foot, a thick bandage on the other. There were transverse spinal fractures, broken teeth and facial wounds. I felt a rush of exhilaration. I was alive. I wanted to be alive.

  Mavis and Max stood beside the bed like two small sentries. They mirrored each other’s body language, except she was pulling at her fingers.

  ‘We couldn’t find you,’ Mavis said.

  ‘You changed your name,’ Max added.

  I want to remember them well. I want to bright-side myself with an image of Max standing in the water at Waipātiki Beach. He wears loose blue togs and wire-framed sunglasses. His shirtless skin is pale and freckled and he cups his palms and holds them out. I swim over, and he dips his hands and grasps my foot. ‘Keep your leg straight,’ he instructs as he hoists me up and catapults me, weightless, into the air. Or of Mavis under a canvas shade rigged from the door of the Vauxhall Victor. She wears white cat-eye sunglasses and a white swimsuit. She is pouring tea from a Thermos and arranging sandwiches. She brushes the sand from the blanket and looks up and smiles. A real smile.