Tag Archives: The Castle

The Castle Episode 11– An Awakening.

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Sandshoe

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Fairground

Fairground

 

Follow the story back from episode to episode and find its beginning if you want.

Story and illustration by Sandshoe.

Dog sighed, stood and padded across the floor. She was an elegant and thin ballerina on the uneven tiles of slate and each crevass she stepped over. Isobella opened her eyes to watch the quiet leave taking. The ritual at shared first light defined the barrier between them. Dog was bespoke.

Isobella sat up. She heard laughter scattering over rustling leaves and looked down through the window glass to where the hillside torn by the spear of the gully fell into its ravine. On a shelf of the base of the ridge fold opposite, neighbours were gathered on a verandah. Isobella could see their verandah top railing and glimpse the people as the wind moved the oak branches.

In homes built along the ridge by colonial developers, bankers and other invading landholders of Tāmaki, a modern gentry was in residence. The ridge road has remained witness to the domestic grace of the built environment of original bungalows and housing projects that followed. The road engineers followed a rise until past the historic site of St Stephen’s Cathedral their carriageway meets with another ridge and around that corner the modern coffee shops, places and haute couture of well-to-do shoppers, so on down into the tumult of the city of Auckland. We are time travellers. In its other direction back past the Castle’s entrance easement and neighbours the road swooped in a grand gesture like a living entity in an historic flight curve down to a tidal flat and its indigenous trees and ocean and land birds that made it their home.

The Castle built on a landward promontory of the ridge might as well on darkest nights have overlooked the darkest of seas. Its landscape was a south-east valley that had never been a built environment. A bush reserve seemed to stretch to the horizon in daylight. The illusion it and its castle had no other society was shattered only by a spectacle of lightning in those evenings when every star was obscured by cloud cover. Stormy weather made the only change to lifestyle. The windows shook in their wood frames with a ferocity that matched the volume of the loudspeakers of The Busker’s sound system.

Like a true nature’s child

We were born. Born to be wild

Sunrise on a clear morning was a mesmeric light show across the valley treetops.  Isobella threw off the bed cover to twist and turn to watch the sun’s gold rays spread across them. She could expect someone would appear on the verandah to watch it most mornings when the weather was fine. She would join them or not standing on the verandah.

The oposite side of the ridge from the Castle falls to Hobsons Bay and the original estuarine mouth of Newmarket Stream. Scholars recount every fishing ground of the Maori had a place name. English names dominate yet the Orakei Basin, place of an adorning, neighbours Hobson’s Bay. The ridge and on its leeside where The Castle’s residents were stirring is base slope of the volcanic cone, Pukekawa, hill of bitter memories.

The Castle Episode 8 – The Crying

20 Sunday Jul 2014

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Marble Earth

Marble Earth

Story and illustration by ‘Shoe

For readers the story so far, link to The Castle: Episode 7 – Terence

https://pigsarms.com.au/2014/04/04/the-castle-episode-7-terence/

The phone rang. Isobella supposed it was Matthias so close on the alarm.  She found the telephone in the kitchen.  Matthias was at work.  Terence and The Busker had accepted an offer of a ride back into the city.  Quiet Jack was nowhere to be seen when Matthias left. Did Isobella have everything she needed?  On the couch again, Isobella slept.

He was standing there with a cardboard box.  In the box when she looked in was an apple wrapped in tissue paper.. Who was he?

Isobella woke and stood up off the couch in a startle. In the kitchen she peered out to see between the frame of a vertical canvas awning on the exterior of the kitchen window and the window’s frame. She glimpsed empty undeveloped land through the wire of a cyclone fence across a driveway. The kitchen was an alleyway from the living room. “Is anybody there ?” she called into a hallway of closed doors offset from where the kitchen met with an entrance hall.   She listened.  There was not a sound.  In the kitchen again she filled an electric kettle with water for coffee.

Sun she saw through a gap between window curtains in the living room was low in afternoon cloud to her left hand. Both ways she looked when she pulled open the drapes their full extent, a green lawn lay flat in front of her. Angled fence tops in view over a plain aluminium back yard fence made a maze of green and silver fence lines and washing lines. Roofing scattered with aerials scudded grey and silver as clouds rolled out their shadows across a new urban landscape.

Matthias said there was no coffee she remembered. When he loped in the back door, she was tense for coffee. He said he saw Hugh and Quiet Jack at the University at a lunch time rally. Hugh and Quiet Jack were lovers.

We meet people and they are strangers. People stay strangers and sometimes we are married to them. We uphold sacred text. We keep secrets.

She offered to help Matthias with chores. He would not be long he said. She watched him from the opened back door. The wind was fierce from the ocean. He pointed to show her direction Together they made a meal of rice and vegetables and sat cross legged on the floor to eat it and drink chamomile tea. She noted there was no television and no books or bookshelves. The house was new.

She told him her dream.

“Your dreams are the only things you have that are the truth,” Matthias said. He laid claim to an intense loneliness of being. He sat forward with his head bowed and his body curved into his hands. He began to sob.

“My father is in prison.”

“How long has he been there.” She imagined the grimy walls of Mt Eden prison and the heart of Auckland.

“He left our house one day. He never came home. He went with friends. They went to free our country. They were arrested when they stepped off the plane. What did he expect.”

Her heart thudded as she saw his face raised was contorted with grief. They half looked at each other then. He looked away.

“I have felt so much shame. I am so ashamed.”

“What are you ashamed of?”

“All those years at school and my father. In prison. I have to keep my mother and my sister safe. He taught me. He left us. I could never be the same as my friends. What could I tell them. I felt so ashamed.”

He fell backwards on the carpet in front of the fire. His two hands side by side made a cover over his face.

“Where is this?”

He told her and she knew she would never say.

“Why did your father think he would save the country?”

He sat up in an awkward movement that was a casting off from shame. He wrapped his two arms around one of his knees he propped up and bent his other lanky leg away from her under it. His shoulder length hair had curled in boyish locks as they dried from the evening’s early dewfall and, later, light rain outside.

“He was a soldier. He was an important man in his uniform. His friends thought the same way. They were all soldiers for their people. For us? I don’t think his heart was here. It stayed there surely. My father was brave. He was brave in a special way. In the War, when my father got separated from his battalion, he walked the mountains thinking he was walking to his battalion. He walked into Italy. Where he was hidden from the Fascists was a farm house. The people were hiding their daughter. She fell very ill. He was hidden with her. Mussolini’s soldiers came. They left. He fed the girl soup. She was dying.”

Isobella barely wiser about detail cried out as he cried again in half light gashing his face.

“What happened to the girl?” she cried out

“It is my mother. He went back for her after the war. My parents have a great love. We have between us in our family.”

She felt a great grief for him as he wept. She knew grief of all the emotions of harm and defence.

The telephone rang. Matthias started. His tears went. He wiped his face with the back of a hand as he unfolded himself and rose to his feet. His tone of voice was sardonic.

“This will be the owners. They said they would ring me late one night.”

She listened to Matthias walk across the carpet, the length of the kitchen aisleway and the telephone stop ringing in the kitchen. She heard a singing noise like a cry.

Isobella stood up from the floor quickly and walked to the kitchen entrance from the living room to see if Matthias was harmed. He leaned in stark profile against the door frame at the other end of the kitchen’s alley where the phone was on its bench and caressed the mouthpiece in his two hands. His voice in contrast to the first sound he had made in answer to this intrusion was level and reasoned. At his feet a jostle of fowl shocked her imagination as she saw a young and strikingly handsome man in a Mediterranean farm house where she had never been far from this new house and housing estate so new and so new to her. Two more fowl stepped through the kitchen entrance onto the large white outlay of contemporary kitchen tiles towards the brood at the young man’s ankles.

‘Alright, I will see you there.” Matthias concluded his conservation. He put the phone down. His body looked a burden as he turned and walked towards Isobella.

“My father is home,” he said staring at her as he walked. They stood close in the frame of the door where she had stood motionless.

“What do you mean?” she asked, “He has been released? He will come home?”

“He is here. He walked in the house a half an hour ago. My mother rang to not shock me. She put him on.” Matthias looked around as if searching for the identity of an object he didn’t know was missed. Isobella kept her eyes on his face and his returned fixed on hers.

“You have to go then, “ she said.

“Have to. I have to go straight there.”

“Go,” she said, “I can find my way home by early public transport in the morning if you will leave me here. I feel a great deal better. Refreshed.”

“I don’t know where that is.”

“What? The bus? I will find a bus. There will be one.”

He looked at her closely and a cloud of resentment rolled abruptly across his mood. “Typical. That is so typical of him,” he said and turned away. “He turns up. Without telling us. He could have rung.”

In her office the first person the next day was Dinia, her closest colleague. He stopped her with a turn of his small and elegant frame. He shimmered with light reflections from sunshine off the internal glass walls that made their office partitions.

“Are you in love? So early today too. This is none of my business. What has happened?”

In the chaos of this bloody market place they had grown respectful of each other. Such respect was not everyone’s in this place. The lives of people they had themselves known would be lost and some measure of their own. They shared the thought in an agreeable moment. They both knew war.

“No,” she said, affectionate for him. “I’m not in love. I have been a witness, Dinia, to great love. Experience I could never imagine. I witnessed the unexpected return to his family of a prisoner out of imprisonment.”

“Who?” he said.

“I can’t say. I will never say. Not here. From outside the country.”

Dinia smiled at her. She saw his beautiful charm was intact and kindness that was its strength. “Pity,” he said, “What a story you have. I have no doubt you experienced the world itself. I can see. So nice to see you back. I missed you.”

“I truly haven’t given anyone a further thought beyond calling to say I was not well. I am very happy to see you now I’m back. No-one seemed to be here to let me in to the office the other night as I expected by the way. ”

“I wonder how long in these circumstances will we last here. How long can it hold.” Dinia smiled. “There’s another boat going in, anyway. Business as usual today,”

The Castle – Episode 7 – Terence

04 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by in Sandshoe

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youth

The Youth

Story and Illustration by Sandshoe

The Castle Episode 6

Two men side by side and another close behind them stepped into the light Isobella and Hugh stepped side by side out of into the dark. Hugh leaped with a cry of alarm. He had not recognised his friends. The latecomers made their apologies. “At least you turned up,” Hugh said to them. They stood as a group. “Didn’t matter. I had a book. I met my friend, Isobella,”

Terence , the straggler, his hair roughly cut, his fair skin weathered and feet bare, guitar secured around his back so the neck of the guitar reared upward behind his own. He was dressed in shorts and a light cotton shirt as if it was the middle of summer.

He walked directly up to Isobella.

“Who are you?” When she told him her name and he told her his, he prefaced his identity, “He’s my brother.”.He pointed to the taller of the two men talking with Hugh. “ That’s Matthias. I’m going to marry his sister, but she is not allowed.” They expressly shared surnames.

“Aren’t you cold,” Hugh insisted of Terence. Hugh wore a brown corduroy coat with jeans of sturdy quality, a scarf and a cloth cap.

Everybody it seemed was going to walk with Isobella up the hill to her office. She was invited to go on with them after she was finished. They would wait.

“You can’t do that. I’ll be too long. I can’t let you into the office anyway.”

No-one was waiting to allow her entry as she supposed at the base of her work place building on Symonds Street. Matthias was amiable they would wait. She found the public phone in working order. The telephone rang out. She doubted anybody was there in the office above her. She sensed duplicity.

Quiet Jack was their other companion. He asked if she always worked there late at night. “No,” she said simply.

“Homeless people live under the bridge.” Quiet Jack was softly spoken. She could barely hear him. *Yes,” she said.

The men asked if she had a key. They were designing solutions. If she did not have a key, they would stand on each other’s shoulders and make a human ladder to the window of the third floor address.

“You wave through the window.”

One Saturday morning she told them as rejoinder she locked herself in the stairwell at the newspaper. She exited the hatch door to the rooftop and when she waved to alert the construction crew on a neighbouring building that she needed help, they gathered, waved, and wolf whistled.

They urged her to go with them. She referenced her policy was zero alcohol on the road. Matthias, tall and thin and beautiful in the black of this night would drive. “He never drinks,” Terence told Isobella, close, respectful. Matthias was shivering. They had better walk, Isobella said. Hugh was deciding to not go. He walked back along the street with them a short distance only to where he turned down an adjoining laneway. The rest stood quietly watching him. Hugh turned. He waved silently. His companions waved and he stepped out of sight into a building. He was going to visit a student’s share unit and play Dungeons and Dragons. Isobella spoke up that she would like to accept the invitation.

Matthias was sorry they had to walk to the very end of the University where he left his car. In this moment, time held a magic proportion and might describe each to the other for they would never know themselves, the poignancy of experience of youth we only see as ‘others’. They chorused they were happy to be with him. We adore.

The Busker was walking towards them. He accepted his invitation to join their party. They were all friends. Matthias was looking after another friend’s address who was away he explained. Matthias lived at home with his mother and his sister usually, Terence said to Isobella. Terence, Quiet Jack, Matthias and the Busker asked after each other as they walked.

Matthias of rare beauty, adviser, philosopher. In a long sleeve white shirt, luminate and open at the neck and body-thin black jeans, light in a silver line gave way to him in a strobe effect out of dark and into light, in and out of pools of light outside the entrances to buildings . Terence announced it was a mistake he was not chosen as his friend’s brother-in-law. He was not wanted. He accepted that status as error. Nothing was personal sleight between close friends.

Once they were in the car, Matthias describing the lay of this land was courteous and animated. The Busker spoke of their journey as mythical. The travellers witnessed on their approach to the Mangere Bridge a massive light cone beamed skywards that was the headlight beam only of a single car at its crest . With no stars when it passed and the low cloud cover wreathing the harbour, the view was of a black reach.

Matthias at the gate greeted two raucous dogs out of his vehicle window. He released them from their run. They waited noiselessly to be fed under an external light at the back of the house. Isobella, shivering now, was bundled in a quilt and directed to the lounge couch by Matthias. She had come down with a cold. Terence, attentive, lit a fire in a wood heating stove that warmed the lounge. “There is a lovely tree of lemons out there,” he encouraged Isobella, “Lemons cure everything.” Matthias insisted he, Matthias, make the hot lemon drink. He asked Terence to play some music.

“I’ll talk”, Terence retorted and sat down on the floor by the couch, “I’ve been playing all day. I want to talk to Isobella.” The Busker wrapped around his waist in a white towel was already out of a shower he asked Matthias for permission to take. He scurried for clothes he had forgotten to take with him out of his back pack left under a table in the living room. Quiet Jack had responded to a call from Matthias for someone to help him at the run gate that needed a repair. He made himself a place on the floor with a cushion. He made room for The Busker to dry in front of the fire box. The Busker excused himself. Returning in loose cotton clothing and the full heat of a sparking fire catching lights off red and grey strands in his beard and hair, he stood staring at the flames in introspection. Where could he sit, he asked, smiling. He found a bean bag. Matthias came in with a tray. He had made a hot lemon drink for each of them. He sat in his easy armchair.

Isobella would stay with him, Matthias announced to the room in the form of an assembly. The friends nodded assent to Matthias and he would cook her a meal in the evening. Did she want anything to eat now, he asked. No, she shook her head. He loped out of the armchair and returned to her from somewhere with track pants and their pull over with a pair of thick knitted socks. He helped her to stand up out of the quilt. Behind the door of the bathroom where she changed, he had left hangers for her clothes. She was wearing a white cotton shirt, she stared at and ladies’ black cotton trousers. She struggled out of the trousers to change them. She saw the strobe effect of a white shirt in a darkened street and the silver line. Her narrow black tie she knotted around the collar of her suit coat and the coat seemed incongruous. The coat waist length not a weighted woollen overcoat, she felt the coat hanger weight drop away from her hand and test her strength as she struggled to lift the coat to secure it on its hook behind the door.

The Busker had played a simple piping tune on a recorder. “Fiddlesticks,” he said at a private joke, “Got that wrong.” He smiled with the knowing of familiarity. “Go on,” he said to Terence giving him the floor. Terence had picked up his guitar that was never far from him. Each song was new to her. They were his songs and he played an accompaniment that was raw, impulsive. She remembered later some of the words of the songs and had lost recall of context. When Isobella awoke the next morning to the sound of a clock alarm, she was alone in the house.

The Castle – Episode 5 Owl Watch

25 Monday Feb 2013

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Owlwatch 3

Owlwatch 3

Story and Illustration by ‘Shoe

shes dogDog most nights slept in the front room with Isobella facing an open doorway onto a verandah and beside the internal doorway that had no door against the Castle’s central room even though Dog was not Isobella’s, Isobella in trust asleep on a divan, Dog slung low on the giant sandstone blocks that made the floor interesting. Between the blocks had not been filled with grouting and sometimes one of Dog’s paws dropped into a chasm in her sleep. Dog re-accommodated herself with a deft twist of her leg.

Dog sidled in like a comma into Isobella’s room in the evening. She had a way as if worried what would happen to her tail if she stopped watching it. She was a break in a sentence, but the opening announcement of a trial by jury, fearful and hopeful. She was a squat dog and showed her hard life by her habits, devoted and pessimistic, intelligent and naive.

The owl native to New Zealand, Ruru, the Morepork, Ninox novaeseelandiae, a Bobuk was out all night long almost entirely silent. Ruru has special feathers.

Etia anō āku mata me te mata-ā-ruru e tīwai ana
Me te mata kāhu e paro noa rā kai te tahora!

My eyes are like morepork eyes turning from side to side,
Like the eyes of a hawk who soars over the plain! 1

Margaret Orbell, Birds of Aotearoa. Auckland: Reed, 2003, p101.

REF:

1 http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/birds-of-prey/page-2


PAST EPISODES, READERS

Episode 1 – November 2010 – is here  https://pigsarms.com.au/2010/11/22/the-castle-episode-one-the-florist/

Episode 2 – April 2011 – is here  https://pigsarms.com.au/2011/04/02/the-castle-episode-2-wooden-%E2%80%93-it-%E2%80%93-be-%E2%80%93-nice-%E2%80%93-to-%E2%80%93-get-%E2%80%93-on-%E2%80%93-with-%E2%80%93-your-%E2%80%93-neighbours/

Episode 3 – February 2012 – is here  https://pigsarms.com.au/2012/02/16/the-castle-episode-3-fruhlingsrauschen/

Episode 4 – October 201 2 is here  https://pigsarms.com.au/2012/10/29/the-castle-episode-4-lessons/

The Castle: Episode 4 – Lessons

29 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in Sandshoe

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Blowin’ in the Wind

Story and Illustration by Sandshoe

Black walked in swaggering. He was cooked. A day at the beach represented ‘what people do’.

“Went to the beach.” He was as self conscious as a flag and pulled away from around his neck the striped towel he wore as he would an ill fitting evening scarf.

Where she had stopped half way towards the interior room and glanced behind her when she heard Black about to come in, she was motionless.

“You got badly burnt,” she said.

Black recoiled and sneered. He made a noise of disapproval.

“You are badly burnt.”

Black sat down on an upended crate installed inside the door of the front living room to furnish it with a one-seater. He sprawled against the exposed framework of the wooden wall. He lolled his head. He raised his head, screwed his eyes almost shut, eyeballing her. He declared her wrong.

“Alright,” she said, “you’ll know about it tomorrow.”

She felt confused, but didn’t show it.

“I don’t burn. I can’t.” Black’s head fell forward. He feigned sleep.

She recovered her aplomb.

“All right,” she said and returned her attention to the walk across the bare boards of the room. Everywhere in The Castle’s interior was bare. She called back easily as she disappeared through the door into a baffle of sunlight accommodating a mezzanine floor above her.

“Must be the Red Indian in you.”

A tense expulsion of vented breath split the air. She heard Black scrape the upturned crate so it fell over when he stood.

She wasn’t frightened by Black’s impetuous movements. They were full of grace. The exclamation made her turn around and walk back into the front room to hear what Black was suggesting. He was leaning forward in front of the small mirror hung on a wall post. His legs creased forward, his knees bent the better to see his face full on and side to side, he swung his face wide to the view of the mirror’s reflection. “I am,” he mused. He turned to her, defenceless. “I never knew I could burn. I thought I couldn’t.”

Black sauntered immediately behind her as they both turned and headed towards the doorway into the interior room, the heart of the renovation furnished with bench seats either side of a wooden table. She skirted the table to access her room on the other side of the table, before she lay down to sleep through the rest of this afternoon’s heat threw the cushions onto the floor off her single divan bed, ready for evening loungers. Black ran up the ladder to the enclosed mezzanine that made a loft over the fireplace. He sang in the private consideration of space he shared with Suse.

Mismatched and partnered individuals meet and find a way to live together in squats. There is only one antidote for homelessness, housing and The Castle was an adventure, their roof overhead, a haven, sleeping place and – like a found object of the greatest value – companionship. None of the residents were keen to leave regardless while the meaning here was – so – different from the rhythms of the city streets and their neighbours. The resonance of the property was theirs and eccentric. The place was home everything aside. There was a lifestyle challenge. Parties were irresistible. The music was good. One length of power cord trailed through the entrance door past the end of the cement driveway and the levelled ground of the build site next door ran a stereo and boiled an electric kettle. The owner fallen from rank and who knows what directories through financial calamity had fled some time previous to the squatters’ occupancies and the power account lapsed.

This is where writing you depend on instinct to communicate an authentic claim to know something, perhaps a character very well, but story certainly. You need to know the story. An expansive sleight of hand to indicate direction or occasion – generate opinion – garners belief in it. You’ve got to give a little.

The Busker walks noisily in through the front door and espouses to himself he made some money. As he proceeds, he takes a packet of chocolate biscuits out of an army bivouac bag he slings through the doorway into his room. It is his ritual he stand in the doorway and rustle the cellophane paper of the packet of chocolate biscuits he buys any day coins are thrown by passers-by into his guitar case. Other residents straggle in. The Busker in his room tells of his fortune like a town crier. Evening would close in soon. The squatters will view the darkening gully tree tops through the window of the Busker’s bedroom. They drape as their mood and comfort takes them across the Busker’s double bed, sit  cross legged on his floor, cram alongside massive stereo speakers on a table. They guffaw, shout to nobody, enjoin, tell stories, recount memorable incidents without concern over the volume of the music. Some will keep a clear head. They will leave to turn in earlier than die-hard others. The heat of this night will intensify.

PAST EPISODES, READERS

Episode 1 – November 2010 – is here  https://pigsarms.com.au/2010/11/22/the-castle-episode-one-the-florist/

Episode 2 – April 2011 – is here  https://pigsarms.com.au/2011/04/02/the-castle-episode-2-wooden-%E2%80%93-it-%E2%80%93-be-%E2%80%93-nice-%E2%80%93-to-%E2%80%93-get-%E2%80%93-on-%E2%80%93-with-%E2%80%93-your-%E2%80%93-neighbours/

Episode 3 – February last – is here  https://pigsarms.com.au/2012/02/16/the-castle-episode-3-fruhlingsrauschen/

The Castle: Episode 3 – Frühlingsrauschen

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by in Sandshoe

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Uptown: drawing in the dark behind the Diner.

Story and Illustration by Sandshoe

Readers who might have missed Episode 1 – November 2010 – may wish to catch it here https://pigsarms.com.au/2010/11/22/the-castle-episode-one-the-florist/

Similarly, Readers, Episode 2 – April last year – is here https://pigsarms.com.au/2011/04/02/the-castle-episode-2-wooden-%E2%80%93-it-%E2%80%93-be-%E2%80%93-nice-%E2%80%93-to-%E2%80%93-get-%E2%80%93-on-%E2%80%93-with-%E2%80%93-your-%E2%80%93-neighbours/

 

Suse opens her eyes.  She begins to speak again and there is no apparent lapse of reason or fault of logic between the sentence on which Suse succumbed to slumber and this next. Who is there to know other than her audience of one she had been mid-sentence and nodded off recounting to her interviewer the rules of the workplace Suse knows in its every corner and nook.  Her eyes beneath lank  eyelashes are a tranquil hazel flecked with the colours of the spectrum and all their shades including there is violet. Her lightly freckled face is pale representing more than any other aspect of her existence a life spent indoors. Nothing is prettier than Suse’s hair however dulled from an imaginable bounty of flecks of gold, bronze and titanium naturally curling and tousled about a casually inserted pair of hairpins. Suse is the princess in the tower who has come down for coffee, petite, pale, polite.

It is as her eyelids lift she speaks.

“No-one much who has not been there would understand we have rules,” she advises, “they are not allowed to kiss.”

Something in her demeanour advises as equally, informs, educates. Her mind is resolute with kind intention. It lacks no clarity in respect of kindness.

Her listener dares not shift her cramped position where she has sat almost breathless while her interviewee napped. She encourages description.

“The client cannot kiss you? How do you manage that? Surely..how…do you have problems enforcing that?”

The steaming coffee is a warmer Suse has embraced as if her small hands need to be thawed.

“No.” She declares her preparedness to communicate, steadfast, resolute, a reliable source of information in this instance of a real and barely imagined world between the two women seated at the table. She explains her clients are regulars because she has been working so long. She has been given privileges. They can be trusted. By and large, customers do heed the rules in the first instance.

“I feel sorry for them, why they are there, who they are, what they tell me, how they live. They say thank you.”

She waves one hand free of the coffee mug before replacing it.

“We don’t have much here at home but, you know, we are lucky we have this.”

Behind Suse, past where sunlight is playing at the tips of her hair the oak tree on the gullyside opposite the stark verandah off the empty coconut wood kitchen and a sun room has caught a gust of wind and translated it into song, through the rustling of its leaves. The brief trill followed by the o, so characteristic klok-klok-klok of the song of a tui has never ceased. A parlour piano can be heard starting up as if in the hidden distance behind the oak tree tinkling without the intervention of human hands. Sight unseen. It is of water beginning to flow and racing, of the tumble of cracking ice and snow melting, of branches breaking and being swept into the melee that the piano is singing.

 

Sandshoe

15/2/2012