Waiwera

John Amos Comenius. Orbis Sensualium Pictus: A Facsimile (1659 / 1968): 232.

A wet day on the coast, at the hot pools. It feels strange to be floating in steaming water as cold sheets of rain fall from the sky.

All of the adults are sheltering under the garish awnings, munching hot dogs and chips, but groups of children keep on running out into the open to splash each other, screaming like banshees.

Lifeguards stand around in drenched blue raingear. “No t-shirts in the pool,” they shout. One kid (12 or so?) is ordered to strip off her top, only to reveal she has nothing else on above the waist. She runs off crying, arms cradling her chest.

What difference does it make, in the rain?

Rules are rules and must be obeyed.

The water is blessedly warm.

There are covered pools too, of course: hot spas. The most crowded one is the big screen pool, where you can wallow in comfort, watching movies or satellite TV.

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The beach is grey and rain-swept too, but clean: sands stretching out to the island, bush-clad hills in frame.

– D’you want to play a game?

– What kind of game?

– Imagine you’ve woken up in a blue room, a room where the walls and floor and ceiling are all coloured sky-blue. There’s no door, no windows, no way in or out. You have absolutely no idea how you got there. How do you feel? Think of three words to describe it.

– Ummm … cold, frightened … lost, maybe.

That’s Car’ for you. Straightforward and uncomplicated. I guess that’s why I like her. I felt comfortable … off the hook … relaxed, the first time I played it.

– Okay, now think of your favourite animal. Three words that explain why you like it so much.

– Aren’t you going to explain the blue room?

– Only when we’ve got to the end.

– Okay, then, let’s see – my favourite animal. That would be a … koala bear. Warm, furry, and … trusting.

(I chose a wolf: beautiful, fearsome, unpredictable …)

– Okay, the last one. Think of a body of water: a lake, or river, or sea, or stream. Any body of water: a waterfall even. Describe how it makes you feel.

– Three words?

– Yep.

– Okay. That one’s not so simple. Umm … I think a mountain tarn: clear, deep, dark and clean. Oops, that’s four, isn’t it?

– It doesn’t matter.

(I chose the sea, the sea where it meets the shore: vast, turbulent and strong.)

– So what does it mean?

– Well, it’s just a trick really. It doesn’t mean anything much, I’m sure. But the idea is supposed to be that the blue room is your attitude to death.

– Oh! I felt all cold and scared. Is that good?

– Well, yeah, I guess so. It’s normal, anyway.

– What about the others?

– Well, the animal stands for …

•

Car’ says some people think we’re surrounded by ghosts all the time.

That every second person you see is a ghost.

It was the matter-of-fact way she said it that got to me. Maybe it comes of being religious, but I thought I was supposed to be the extremist. The idea of seeing a ghost totally freaks me out, but she just took it in her stride.

She told me she’d spent a night in a haunted house once.

It was when she was staying with some relatives of hers in Scotland: an uncle and aunt, or some cousins, or something like that.

They were driving along the road towards the old stone cottage they lived in, late at night, with some creepy ghost story playing on the radio, when suddenly, on an impulse, she asked if their house was haunted. They looked at each other and said, Oh, we’d better not talk about that now, which was really reassuring.

Then she had to go and sleep in the attic because there wasn’t enough space downstairs, and the house was so ancient that it didn’t even have an inside staircase – you had to go outside to climb up these old stone steps in the dark, up through a little door into this big room full of every piece of junk anybody had wanted to preserve for the past couple of hundred years – old books, and boxes, and chairs, even a set of deer’s antlers – and there was an oil stove burning in the middle of the floor, because it was so cold and snowy outside, and a little gas lamp for light, and she had to make her way across the floor to a camp-bed in the middle of the room, and then blow out the lamp and lie there with the oil heater huffing and puffing away, and throwing reflections and shadows on the walls, listening for creaks and expecting something to come and join her every minute.

But nothing did.

Next morning, at breakfast, she asked them again about the haunting and they said that there was a ruined monastery next door, and sometimes the monks had been seen holding services in the downstairs room (it used to be a boathouse, and coffins were put there before they were shipped over to the other side of the firth for burial.)

They also said that one of their children when he was really young had seen someone with a hood looking in on him in his cot, and they thought that might have been one of the monks. He wasn’t at all frightened, because apparently whatever it was looked friendly, but it made you think twice about being there alone.

•

There was a documentary on last night about psychic television.

All you need is a video camera and a TV monitor, apparently. First you tune the TV to a dead channel – just static. Then you set up the camera to film the monitor. If you play back the videotape frame by frame, sooner or later faces appear.

They don’t look like ghosts; more like still photographs. Not spirit photographs, but portraits: stiff and formal, lifeless. The German researcher who started it all wanted to contact his dead daughter. He got a picture he said was her, hovering like a balloon in a parade, her puny arms dangling beside her, face framed by bangs of hair.

Does it bring people comfort? Who knows, who can say? All you can say is, it works. You can get pictures of faces that way. What it means is anyone’s guess, the point is that it works.

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I should tell you more about Car’. I must have mentioned her a few times now. She’s my best friend. We’ve been friends since primary school, in fact. We’re totally unlike. I don’t know what she sees in me, to be honest. I like her because she’s good – good inside, I mean.

Her real name’s Caroline, but I call her Car’ because of this old book we found together which had a character in it, a beautiful, cruel, Eurasian girl, called Cara Jolly (Car’ for short). It was an autobiography by an English army officer, about the women he’d slept with and the things he’d done with them and all that sort of stuff.

We found it in the attic at her parents’ place. She said it couldn’t have been her father’s (he’s a minister) but that it might have belonged to her uncle. It was really smutty. We read parts of it out loud, putting on funny voices for the different characters.

That’s the thing about her, you see. She’s a laugh, she’s fun, even if she does go to church on Sundays, and prayer-meetings all through the week.

She came to see me a couple of times in hospital, and since then we’ve been spending even more time together than we did before. I suppose she thinks it’s her Christian duty, but you’d never guess. It seems natural to her, as if it’s normal for her to be nice.

That’s what kind of fascinates me about her. She makes me want to be good as well.

•

Have you ever had a waking dream?

That was the thing I wanted to ask Car’, but somehow couldn’t. I guess I was afraid how she’d react. She’d probably have been cool with it, but you never know …

I don’t mean a daydream, when you’re just playing with a lot of ideas in your mind and drifting off somewhere; I mean a real waking dream.

Since the overdose, I’ve been finding it difficult to sleep. I used to get it only when I’d had caffeine before going to bed, but now it seems to happen for no reason at all. I don’t know how to stop it.

I was lying in bed, not stressed, like you usually get when you can’t sleep, but just nicely relaxed, with my eyes open, when I saw a hand reaching for me from the table at the side of the bed. It was dark, but I could still see the fingers coming at me. I wasn’t scared, just a little disconcerted. I knew my eyes were open, and that I wasn’t asleep, but I could still see this hand.

I picked up a cushion as a kind of shield and held it in front of me. Nothing came past it. Then I reached up and turned on the light. There was nothing there. But my eyes were open, they were still open! It was as if it had been real.

It made me wonder if I was losing my mind.

Last night it happened again. The exact same thing. My eyes would just not get heavy. Even when I held them closed they seemed alert behind the lids.

Looking down at the side of the bed, I saw a cat there, or rather a kitten – grey, I think, but you can’t really tell in the dark. It was standing on its hind legs and reaching up towards the bedclothes.

Again, it didn’t scare me, exactly, but it was odd. I was so sure I was awake.

I thought, Oh, that’s the explanation for the hand. There’s a cat living in here, and it started climbing towards me, so I thought it was a hand. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that was what I thought.

When I looked again there was no cat. There’s no evidence of a cat anywhere this morning. There never was. It can’t have been real, and yet I saw it – with my eyes open.

•

Dear Mum,

I didn’t think I’d ever write to you again. Everybody seems to agree that it would be a really bad idea. That’s the one thing they all do agree on. It’s your birthday though, today, and I couldn’t resist wishing you many happy returns.

Dad finally agreed to tell me a few things when he saw how much you’d been on my mind. He told me how you’d drowned yourself. Or maybe you just fell from the cliffpath. Nobody can actually say if it was deliberate or not.

I could see him thinking “Like mother, like daughter,” the whole time we were talking. He always looks a bit frightened these days. Like he doesn’t know what to do or say anymore, but hopes if he just pussyfoots around for long enough then everything’ll turn out okay.

What do you think? Will it?

What I really wanted to say was: Could you please stop bugging me?

I know I started it. I was the one who got in touch with you, not the other way round. But I’ve had enough of it now. Since that first time I’ve been seeing you everywhere. Not doing anything much, just waiting on a street corner, or disappearing through a door, but long enough each time for me to see it’s you.

If you keep it up I’ll tell on you. There’s plenty of people I can tell, too. There’s my new shrink, or Car’, or even Dad.

I’m ordinary, you see. That’s what I want to be. Car’ and I are like sisters. The more time I spend with her the more I learn to be just like her.

I can be like everyone else if I put my mind to it.

That’d make them all happy, wouldn’t it?

I love you. I do love you, but you need to leave me alone now.

your loving daughter, L.

---

Jack Ross: Monkey Miss Her Now (2004)


[4/8/2003]

[2052 words]

[Published in Monkey Miss Her Now (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004): 127-33.]

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