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
