A warm summer afternoon in Whanganui the year I turned twelve. I climbed out of my bedroom window and walked around the new subdivision that had sprung up nearby. The pine forest they’d toppled in a week had been my solace. Now I scrambled through half-built houses. I climbed on the wheel of a resting bulldozer to look at the picture of a naked woman taped to the ceiling. I returned home an hour later, walking through the back door as if I belonged there. Mavis did not look up. The set of her shoulder was enough to tell me a cold front was passing through our kitchen. I had to wait in my bedroom with the lemon striped wallpaper. Max arrived already angry, the leather strap in his hand. But I was thirteen and beginning to feel my boundaries. I must have argued with him, and he picked me up and shoved me against the wall. The exact moment my back gave out, the genetic weakness activated by blunt-force trauma.
For all those years I’d hidden that memory. My defect the perfect example of essential wrongness. Years later, even my four-year-old knew it. I had angered Daddy. It was all my fault.
We drove past the general shop and the petrol station. ‘When will Daddy fix your plate?’ Bonnie asked.
I kept my voice soft as I explained that some things were unfixable.
I’d taken to using a placating singsong voice with them when they asked the difficult questions. I caught myself doing it again. From then on I determined always to speak clearly. To be a different kind of parent. The kind who did not paper over everything uncomfortable.
‘My mother is coming,’ I said in my new serious tone. ‘We’re going to meet your grandmother. We are on our way.’ And I knew then I was going home. A metaphorical home. And I imagined us leaving with my mother, flying to Spain to start again. The idea felt as unreal as footprints after the tide.
We drove over Arthur’s Pass. Bonnie and Rachel argued over the colour of a horse. Or whether it had been a cat or a dog sitting in front of a house. We stopped for lunch at a roadside table. I unpacked the sandwiches while the girls explored the edges of the clearing. Ruth staggered after them on her baby legs. They looked under bushes and chased each other. I watched them from the picnic table as they huddled over a dead bird. Bonnie pushed it with her toe. Rachel jumped and squealed while Ruth sat down to touch it. Bonnie waved, pointing to the dead bird. Would she remember this moment? Or would it become part of the blur of childhood? As normalised as the everyday violence of the leather strap and the cold shoulder.
The girls fell asleep as soon as we left, their heads lolling over the sides of their seats. I rolled the car wide around the corners so as not to disturb them. Anything to prolong the quiet. We drove through a tunnel and I thought about ghosts. The spectral image of my mother leaning over her lost baby. And the ghost I had become. I’d been living between two worlds. In a couple of days, I would take my mother’s hand and we would step out of the fog and into the sunlight.
7
And the dolphins walked on water
The sun came out as the countryside gave up its green. When the girls woke I put in a tape and we sang along to Joni Mitchell’s song about paving paradise. Christchurch still made me nervous. Another life before marriage and children and rural bliss. A world of damp squats and the Jesus movement.
We stopped at the lights near the motel, and I realised this was the very corner they caught me, a few weeks before I turned seventeen. A group of people had gathered around a short man who, dressed in homespun clothes and with shaggy hair, looked as though he’d escaped a hippy commune. An older woman smiled, and that was enough to pull me in. His name was Marcus Arden. He waved his arms as he told a story about driving across the Desert Road on his way to an important meeting. A snowstorm came out of nowhere and the road became impassable. Marcus prayed, and God parted the snow as easily as water and he drove on.
Now I understand it as an acid trip, repackaged for a new audience of broken people. But then it sounded like a miracle. He was part of a group of men, including Jim, who proclaimed themselves saviours of the true faith. And especially the saviours of women like me. Except I was a child pretending to be an adult. Living on the streets some of the time, or staying with a cousin. Those were dangerous days. Filled with street drugs and the kind of iniquity the Jesus movement flourished on.
Marcus led us through the Square in the middle of old Christchurch. The beautiful city before the earthquakes swallowed it all. He stopped in front of the Cathedral and preached about the evils of organised religion. Nearby his friend Ray Comfort perched on a small ladder and yelled at the pigeons and the passersby. Ray was natty and sharp-edged, convinced of his rightness. He was the opposite of Marcus, who tended to bumble and mix his words. Except when preaching. The men acknowledged each other, and Ray winked. We followed Marcus along the street and down the stairs to the Love Shop.
I’d heard about the drop-in centre on the streets. Free tea and a change of clothes. There were piles of tracts written by Ray, with stick figures illustrating the effects of sin. Marcus took me aside. He’d seen the same evil spirits that would so excite Jim a few years later. The month before, three
