A Trick of Light Read online

  A Trick of Light

  by Deborah A Rogers

  Published by Deborah A Rogers

  Copyright 2013 Deborah A Rogers

  ISBN 978-0-473-26341-6

  For Kate

  Contents

  Before

  Part One - Departures

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two - Exile

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Part Three - Homecoming

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author

  Before

  MY FATHER is a restless man. When I am very young he sometimes rouses us from our sleep and bundles us into our old silver Chrysler for an out of town trip. We drive for hours in the dark. My two older sisters and I doze in our sleeping bags in the backseat, while in front my mother holds my baby brother in her lap.

  Outside our window the sun slowly rises over steaming paddocks and sheep tear grass from the earth. Then my father slips Rod Stewart into our little cassette player and sings along to “Tonight's the Night” or “Maggie May” and my mother taps her foot, and there is the smell of peppermint gum as my sister tries to chew away her car sickness.

  We go to see the snow at Mount Holdsworth. There's a photograph of him. He sits at a picnic table in a tan leather jacket, smoked cheese sandwich in one hand, Rothman's in the other. His face is spilt with an enormous smile, as if the forest around him is somehow his.

  Then one day he has an accident. He is coming home late from work on a dark country road and runs right into them. Two young nurses. But it's not his fault. They hadn't been looking.

  “I want a blood test.”

  “Breath test ought to do the trick, sir.”

  “It wasn’t a request.”

  He is a solicitor and knows best. They take his blood and it's fine. But one of the nurses goes blind, and the way my mother tells it, he is never the same again.

  My parents meet at the United Service pub in Christchurch in 1970. He's not long out of the seminary, she's a divorcee hairdresser with two little girls. I imagine their first meeting when they do the twist to Ray Columbus: my mother with her outrageous auburn beehive and my father in his corduroy flares.

  There is a great fuss when they decide to marry. My devout catholic grandmother won't have it on account of my mother's divorcee status. My father marries her anyway. Years later when we visit my grandmother in her tiny red-bricked flat, she calls me pet and feeds me chocolate biscuits while my two sisters sit on the couch and watch.

  We move to Hillcrest Street in Masterton when I am four. We have a little Maltese dog called Buttons. At first we put pink bows in her fur and take turns brushing her, but soon no one can be bothered and her coat becomes knotted and tangled with twigs. Sometimes when she defecates it sticks to her bum.

  One winter's morning I go into the lounge and there she is, stiff in a yellow puddle right on the spot where I open my Christmas presents. I run to the kitchen.

  “Something's wrong,” I tell my sister.

  She goes to have a look and comes back sniffing.

  “Go get Dad,” she says.

  My father digs a hole in the back garden. On the grass beside him, Buttons is wrapped tight like a newborn in a faded blue towel. The heat of our breaths frosts the glass as my sisters and I watch from the lounge. My father places Buttons inside the hole. He takes great care, using just one half-shovel of dirt at a time. When he finishes he comes inside.

  “There,” he says.

  His left cheek is still wet where his sleeve missed the tears.

  Afterwards, I linger near the spot and long to dig her up. But then my father has the accident with the nurses and his restless spirit erupts like a geyser.

  “I've got an announcement,” he says one day. “We're moving to Hong Kong.”

  And that was that.

  *

  We arrive at night in 1978. I am six. Someone from the New Zealand Society of Expats has arranged for a driver to take us to a hotel and we are ushered into a waiting van. We race through the streets, weaving in and out of lanes filled with traffic. There are double-decker buses and glossy red taxis.

  “Is it always like this?” says my father to the Chinese driver.

  The man looks straight ahead and says nothing.

  I have never seen so many people before. They are walking shoulder-to-shoulder along the footpaths. I stick my head out the window and wonder where they are all going. Above their heads, neon lights fizz and cling to the sides of buildings like parasites. There is no night because of them.

  We pull to a stop and get out. I wait on the footpath like I'm told. I am so small and the buildings are so big. I seek out the comfort of my father's hand: but he is elsewhere, pulling suitcases from the van.

  Heat sticks to my skin. And my father is sweating like I’ve never seen before. It drips like rain from his forehead and his white shirt is glued to the pink of his back. He delivers the last of the luggage to the curb and turns to the driver to thank him, but the van is already gone, halfway up Nathan Road.

  That first night I am awake for hours waiting for the city to go to sleep. But it never does. It just keeps moving and moving and moving.

  I dream of home. I am looking for empty coke bottles in the patch of bush near the netball courts. Then it is Easter and we are hunting for marshmallow eggs. I am chasing after my big sisters as they race around the house. There's one egg on top of the picture frame and another on the window sill. The bunny is clever, I think, to have done all this under our noses.

  *

  The next day the family walks up Salisbury Road. The juice of the city gurgles beneath iron grills in the gutters. The smell is like a thump on the back you aren't expecting. And there is always the diesel, belching from the oversized buses and delivery trucks that stop and start along the road.

  My favourites are the narrow alleyways that sprout from streets with names like Shanghai and Canton and Waterloo. They are crammed with all sorts of treasure. Soft toys, large and small, swing from hooks. Little battery powered dogs bark and somersault in the air. There are carved sandalwood fans and picture playing cards and t-shirts and coasters and lighters and key rings and luggage. My sister stops to admire some earrings glinting under a light bulb. The stall-holder selects a pair and holds them next to my sister’s ear.

  “How you like?” he says.

  My sister looks in the spotted mirror and beams.

  “Mum, can I?”

  “Go on, then.”

  Along the promenade that looks out over the harbour, toothless men read flapping newspapers and smoke. Victoria harbour is busy with boat traffic and the sea is all peaks and valleys.

  “See those two?” my father points to the green and white boats crossing paths in the water.

  “They're called the Star Ferry. We'll go on one later.”

  On the other side of the harbour, the buildings are like block
s on a graph. One stands out more than the rest. It has portholes for windows.

  “That’s where I’m going to work,” says my father.

  Then he nods toward the lush green hill rising up behind the buildings.

  “And that’s The Peak. We'll go there too.”

  He laughs and I turn to him. He has a faraway look that I haven't seen before. I turn back to the view and try to see what he sees. I search and search but cannot find it. Then my father laughs again but this time the sound is lost in the wind.

  Part I

  DEPARTURES

  ΅

  One

  1987. NIGHT. On my bed, fully clothed. Waiting. Outside, wind rises and shakes plums from the neighbour’s tree. One hits my window then dully thuds away. Fleur will be waiting at St Peter’s church. Under the eaves, in the shadows. The orange eye of her cigarette will burn bright then fade into an ashen cloud.

  I get to my feet and listen. The dog walks up the hallway and into the kitchen. She stops to lap water from her bowl. In the room next to mine, my mother rolls over in bed and my stepfather snores through his teeth.

  I thread the strap of my bag through my arm and move to the window. It is a sliding window on rusting metal casters that sometimes squeal so I push one careful inch at a time. Soon the opening is wide. I pause there, looking out, the dark air fresh on my lips.

  Then I throw a leg over and ease myself to the ground and I am off up the drive, down the street, along the river, toward Fisher Ave.

  I sit on the steps of the church. A street light slips through the rubies and emeralds of the stained-glass window. There is Mary and baby Jesus. Joseph and a lamb. I light a smoke and wait. Down the road a figure walks quickly, hugging the curb. Fleur.

  “Alright?” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  She opens her bag and shows me the bottle of Double Brown.

  “Cool,” I say.

  And we carry on up the road and onto the school.

  We walk heel-to-toe on top of the wooden benches outside the classrooms, and cup our hands to look through the windows. There is a poster of Canada and an empty goldfish bowl with pebbles and a tiny pink castle. A poi with a red and black plait hangs from a hook.

  I take a drink from the steel trough under the window and kick at the chalk marks on the concrete. Someone has thrown a skipping rope into the flax bush.

  The school cat, Mr Bojangles, sits on the fence outside the office. His eyes track us as we walk across the playground. The caretaker has forgotten to lower the flag and the cord bats the steel pole like a sail. We pull at the rope to get at the flag but it does not budge. So we walk off and try the door of the school hall where there are packets of Chocolate Thins and Cameo Creams in the cupboard under the sink out the back.

  We did folk dancing in the hall when we were twelve. I danced with our teacher, Mr Barrington. He hooked his arm through mine and we skipped around in a wheel. When it was over, he bowed and shook my hand.

  We give the door handle a good tug, but it’s locked. Fleur points to a half-opened window. I shake my head: it’s too high up. So we sit on a bench with the bottle of beer. Fleur passes a fingertip over the corrugated ridge of the lid.

  “Didn’t think about a bottle opener.”

  “Let me see.”

  I hit the top of the bottle against the bench and the neck breaks off. I chug back a mouthful and pass it over. She stares at my mouth.

  “There’s blood on your lips.”

  She angles the bottle under the light.

  “It's got glass in it.”

  She tips the beer out over a shrub and throws the bottle against the wall.

  I light a match and watch the flame until it dies on my fingernails, then stare at the classrooms.

  “Imagine them burning.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Imagine the heat.”

  Fleur looks at her Casio digital watch.

  “Almost five,” she says.

  “Alright.”

  So we head for home.

  *

  I have a big bag of makeup and Fleur and I like to put on the works. Her mother says youth is beauty and that we don’t need the makeup. She calls us painted dolls. Her mother also tells me I will get kidney damage if I don’t cover up the gap between my jeans and tank top.

  We meet some boys by the river who say we look like clowns. I tell them they don’t know what they are talking about.

  My mother takes away my big bag of makeup when I misbehave and makes me go to school without my face on. She also tells me to buck up or else I’ll go live with my father.

  *

  I am sitting at the back of the class in the furthest corner. My hand is a visor hiding my half-sleeping face. Kerry prods my shoulder and palms me the Twink thinner. The cuff of her jersey is cupped over her nose and mouth.

  I stretch my sleeve across the bridge of my hand and shake out drops from the little bottle and breathe in. It goes up my nose and into my mouth and down the back of my throat and into my brain. My brain hums like a plucked guitar.

  The four of us leave school at lunch time. We go to the two bedroom flat in King Street where Belinda lives with her mother. There is a book called The Happy Hooker under her mother’s bed. Belinda opens the fridge and takes out a KFC box. We share the two drumsticks and cold, half-eaten tub of potato and gravy.

  Belinda’s mother is at work so it’s just Fleur, Kerry, Belinda and I. We have glue and a tin of lighter fluid. We bought different types of glue like PVA and UHU because we don’t know which ones work. We have a go, squeezing the stuff into a Supervalue bag, but it burns our lips so we give it away and go back to the lighter fluid.

  We huff on an old pair of Belinda’s mum’s undies, as well as strips torn from a flannelette sheet. We press the cloth to our faces and jolt around the flat. A man with a beard plays pan flute on the television.

  “It’s beautiful! It’s beautiful!” cries Kerry.

  We are off our heads, inside the stop and start of a strobe light. Then a car pulls up the drive.

  “Shit. It’s Aunty,” says Belinda.

  The tin of lighter fluid slips through our fingers as we chase it around the lounge room floor. Fleur gets a hold of the tin and throws it out the bedroom window and onto the roof.

  Aunty does not notice when she steps into the flat.

  *

  Belinda has a friend-of-a-friend who lives in Hutchinson Street in Sydenham. He lives in a garage at the back of a house. One day during school time we go round there. The garage is set up like a bedroom with two single mattresses, a turntable and chest of drawers.

  The friend-of-a-friend is reclining on one of the beds, smoking. He peers over his shades at me.

  “What’s your name when it’s home?”

  “Who wants to know?” I say.

  Trent is sixteen, unemployed and lives here with Alastair, who is a little backward and eager to please. Myra, the owner of the house and Alastair’s mother, comes in.

  “You kids want a cup of tea or something?"

  Over the back fence, traffic tears up Brougham Street.

  *

  We hang around the garage in Hutchinson Street because we can sniff away to our hearts’ content. There is a noose, a heavy-roped noose, strung up through the rafters. Trent likes to give it a whack as he goes past, and it swings back and forth like a giant pendulum. We poke our heads though and laugh, but are quick to get out of it.

  The girls have a competition to see who can lose their virginity first. Trent has already felt up Belinda and Fleur, but they have not gone all the way.

  *

  One day our English teacher is sick so we have Mr Fox instead. He is around forty and has an earring and wears glasses. The boys call him faggot. Once he was pushed off his bike. Another time, someone let down his tyres.

  Mr Fox reads us a short story about a boy who is waiting for his parents to return to the farm, but they take so long, the boy burns down his house. Mr Fox has a good re
ading voice and for once everyone is quiet. I decide I like Mr Fox very much. He is gentle and a loner and likes a good read.

  I tear the story out of the book and put it in my bag.

  *

  On Friday night, Fleur and I sit on a park bench by the Bridge of Remembrance. We drink a bottle of vodka from a paper bag and watch the Avon river pass. The vodka has come from the bottle store in Cathedral Square. I get it by showing the man my sister’s school report as ID.

  When we are drunk, we leave our seat and walk through Cashel Mall. We trip over our own feet and cannot look anyone in the eye.

  “I’m starving,” says Fleur.

  We count up our change. There is enough for some hot chips. We go to The Dog House in the Square and get a scoop. A street kid asks for 20 cents for Spacies but we don’t have any money left.

  “No worries,” he says.

  We eat our chips outside, under a tree, near one of the warm floodlights. Seagulls drop shit from the sky and watch us from the side of their heads. Over there, near the Church, a group of skinheads play The Sex Pistols on a ghetto blaster. A girl skinhead pushes a little kid back and forth in an old fashioned pram. There is a tall bloke with tattoos on his shaven skull and a swastika between his eyes. I have seen him before, on his own, marching across the Square, thrusting a Seig Heil arm in the air.

  Fleur looks at her watch.

  “Shit,” she says.

  It’s time for her to go. Her parents have a rule that she must be home on the 9.15pm bus.

  Two

  MY MATHS TEACHER, The Wolfman, drones on about fractions. His lips are lost in his ratty brown beard. He points a hairy knuckle at the overhead projector and mutters something about subtracting A from E. I look down at my workbook. Little green squares are blank when they should be full.

  “Five minutes?” he says to the class.

  And he is out the door for a quick cigarette.

  I stare at the playing fields and wish I was there, walking across the grass and out the school gates and off to Belinda’s or Trent’s. The Wolfman returns and a smoke ghost wafts in behind him.