prose

Ubud

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A hummingbird the size of a large bumble bee hovers through bougainvillea. We watch from the pool’s edge. In the same day, my legs turn brown and my new cat-shaped two-piece leaves cat-shaped tan lines on my chest.

We’re trying out all the recommended eating spots: tofu curries, too much tempeh, supplemented with bags of chips and unfamiliar biscuits from convenience stores dotted down the main road. Our villa feels far from that traffic as we spend hours in the hammock or on day beds, under the mosquito net or by the pool, reading, snoozing, swimming with a view of improbable jungle.

The river lulls us further into laziness with its white noise rapids, or ferries squealing tourists in red rafts through the valley. It’s 30 degrees until it’s not. A complete downpour in straight lines brightens already lush greenery, highlights crimson bougainvillea, red birds of paradise, frangipani in yellow and pink clustered on leafless branches.

The river rises then, villas across the valley obscured in mist. Fat drops fall until the clouds are empty, drip musically from the edges of the thatched roof. Fallen logs of bamboo gather at the river’s sharpest bend and the sun’s revealed again just in time to set pink behind palm tops and gold.

New Year

I didn’t realise the front yard’s potential until you took to it in gardening gloves, trimmed back the privet.

As last year changed from this year, and I could stop saying ‘last year’ with such portent, such regret; a phrase loaded with the weight of an on-coming sob-story, we were camping by the Wellington river. A settlement of pegged-out shelters, fairy lights and bonfires. I was miles from my Wellington home.

I say the h word again with a kind of inflection, trying it out for size, sighing out the həʊ, the m buzzes past my lips. I hold it in my mouth like a pill. This constant starting over exhausts me. Always has. Newness of a cleared front yard. I’ll dig in my toes, resolve to thicken like the trunk of a grapevine, let the porch be built around me for a change. Feathered things perch in my branches.

Disturbing the privet seems to be making my eyes stream, but on New Year’s Day I sprained my finger, slipped on rocks in flimsy jandals, a little drunk. There were bull ant bites on the tops of my feet and a blush of sunburn between my breasts. What I mean is, these things pass, they clear up. We heal and adapt. We look back and see fairy lights strung between trees, flickering with comforting regularity, we move closer to each other on an old brown couch. We look back and then we don’t look back.

Passage

Auckland, 1942

The man who will become my Grandad waits by the gangway of the Devonport ferry. Yesterday, he missed his usual trip home and took the later ride. He’s decided now to always be late, deliberately miss the more convenient passage home and wait half an hour for the one ‘the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen’ will be on. He steps into the queue just in time to walk on board with her. Later, at a dance, she throws confetti on him like a prophecy. The woman becomes my Grandma, of course.

Pokhara, 1978

The other man who becomes my Grandad quietly follows his son to the bus stop, where a significant goodbye takes place.  His son stays on board with the woman he loves for as long as he can then watches the bus leave. As it happens, they meet again, become my parents, but now he needs the comforting arm his father predicted. Both men walk home together, tears along the dusty road.

Melbourne, 2017

I’m on a train, swiping left, left, left. Attraction exists not in digital form, a few bad snaps of your weekend shenanigans and a poorly written bio. I look up to see people interacting with the space around them, the way they hold themselves as they stand, their expressions, absorbed in their own distractions – paperbacks and podcasts, a phone conversation. Someone photographs the sunrise. I hear a favourite song tinnily through someone else’s headphones. But I’m just trying to get to work these days.