What will be remembered

Every day and night I’m in Auckland, I walk past a woman who lies and sometimes sits on a Hello Kitty™ duvet on the street. She is usually in the same doorway: quiet, innocuous, staring. Occasionally she asks for change. I walk past without looking too hard, and offer her nothing. She looks reasonably healthy and sane from the corner of my vision. Apparently this is something I can tell by looking. I think she must be incredibly tough. I think she must have other options. I wonder where she pees and what she eats. I wonder where the rest of her stuff is.

We stay at a very fancy hotel. I am surprised that, while a novelty, the opulence of the place does not disturb me as much as I might have predicted. Perhaps poor people aren’t inherently better than rich. Perhaps it is okay to play at richness since this is not part of our real life. I make jokes about the sumptuous furniture in the lobbies, which is rarely touched—ornate couches and finely crafted sets of drawers that will never hold anything. We could set up our living room there, I suggest, no one’s using it.

Both my partner and I enjoy the storied space of graveyards— how a city tells its history through its dead. One of the things we do before we leave the city is cross the street to walk through the cemetery. A man overhears us discussing where to go and launches into a strangely friendly rant about how the gravestones have been vandalised by druggies and taggers. We realise the extent of this when we see empty alcohol containers littering a grave. This cemetery has been sliced through to make room for a motorway, like Bolton Street in Wellington. We walk down and read of the bodies disinterred and placed in a mass grave. Back up by the street, we’re both curious about page 8 some very old brick cemetery buildings, but curtail any investigation when we see that people have left their belongings there, where they sleep. As we leave the graveyard and wash our hands in a public drinking fountain, I wonder what kind of story this tells: the way a city treats its living and its dead.

Ornate and empty hotel furniture can’t compare to the riches of well-worn family drawers and cabinets, and cemeteries. Sometimes people still espouse that old prejudice: the history of New Zealand is so recent, so limited. Have they looked, I always wonder, really looked? Whenever I peek over the brim of the last century to the one before I am staggered by the stories there, the cluster of voices all clamouring for attention. Most of them have never been heard, and they seem much more quirky and lively and bawdy than the accepted histories suggest.

On our last day in Auckland my partner offers the woman on the Hello Kitty™ duvet a couple of spare apples. She’ll take just one, she replies, reluctantly. Later, when I write about her, I wonder how to convey the strength and dignity in her voice, my own inability to comprehend her place in the world. I wonder what her story is, but at the time I didn’t ask.