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Sport 40: 2012

Cowboy

page 401

Cowboy

Matt’s dad moved back to New Zealand with his girlfriend the year Matt turned twenty-one. They moved to the outskirts of Christchurch, a place with a bit of land around it. Matt’s older sister Kerri visited their dad two weeks after he arrived back. She told Matt the girlfriend had fake boobs and that leathery Australian look. Matt tried to picture them together as Kerri spoke—his dad and the girlfriend, standing together, outside their new house, squinting into the winter sun. For some reason the picture was static, like a photograph. And it was heavily pixelated, making it hard to distinguish their faces.

‘Dad looks the same.’ Kerri was calling from her hostel at Otago University and Matt could hear long-winded conversations trudging in the background—‘feta’, one voice said, another voice, female, said ‘genocide’. ‘He’s bought a new motorbike. Not like the gang ones though. Thank god. Not like that.’

Matt looked out the window and drummed his fingers on the glass. Rows of white-capped waves cut diagonal pathways across Lake Wanaka. Earlier in the day it had been glassy and smooth, a rare green opaque quality, like coloured glass. It could change quickly.

‘He seems happy,’ said Kerri, sighing loudly. ‘But then, you know Dad. He’s only happy when he’s living on the edge of this world and the next.’

The background conversations on the other end of the line had dimmed to the smoky sound of ideas being born and dying. Kerri’s voice, against them, sounded flat, wrung out. ‘You know Dad,’ she said again.

‘Yes,’ said Matt, as though he did.

Outside the window a tortoiseshell cat angled its way across the shallow arc of lawn, the mountains sharp and white in the background. Matt watched as it stopped in the very centre of the lawn and began to clean itself, lifting its hind leg like a mast.

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Matt went down to the lake that afternoon. As he walked he tried to picture what his dad might look like now, attempting to fix on a feature he remembered—greyish hair, an arched nose, the small scar near his hairline. Each detail seemed to change the more he concentrated on it. He walked along the limestone track and down the grass verge to the water’s edge and skimmed a few stones. Far out in the middle of the lake two red shapes bobbed side by side—kayakers. They were heading further out. Matt watched until they disappeared around the curve of the bay.

Kerri called Matt on his cellphone a week later. It was lunchtime. Matt had been working on the chairlift all morning, standing at the bottom and helping the skiers and snowboarders—the indistinguishable, goggle-eyed bodies in grey and black and red and blue—onto the chairs that sped up and bounced over the snow, up and away, away and up.

‘So are you going?’ Kerri’s voice was edgy, verging on excited. Matt imagined her sitting on her small, regulation hostel bed, or standing outside a lecture hall. Her body cupped around the phone, bossy and small.

‘Going where?’ said Matt. He was sitting on the balcony of the café at the base of the chairlift eating hot chips from a styrofoam cup that had tiny red stars in a ring around the outside. From a mound of snow nearby, a kea was watching him.

‘To Dad’s fiftieth,’ said Kerri. ‘I thought you knew. It’s this weekend. At their place. The girlfriend is organising it.’ Matt could almost see the pattern of fine lines around Kerri’s mouth becoming contorted as she spoke then relax back into the hollows of her cheeks.

‘He didn’t ask me.’

‘He isn’t the one organising it. It’s her. She probably just forgot.’ There was a small pause. ‘I could pick you up. I was thinking of driving up. I could pick you up on the way. What do you think?’

Just then the café door opened and two small children dressed in ski gear ran over to one of the ice-covered picnic tables on the balcony near where Matt was sitting. One of the children, a girl, climbed up and started to make animal noises—it was hard to tell what kind of animal. ‘Why are we wait-ing,’ she chanted.

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We are suf-fo-ca-ting,’ chanted the second child. A boy. A glisten- ing chain of snot hung from his chin.

Why are we wa-i-ting!’ chanted the girl again.

‘Careful,’ said Matt, holding the cellphone against his shoulder.

‘You might fall off.’

‘Matt?’ Kerri’s voice was thin, straining. ‘Are you still there? What do you think?’

‘Sure,’ said Matt. ‘Fine. Whatever.’ He turned off his cellphone. The little girl was watching him closely, as if gauging something. Then, suddenly, she launched herself into the air, arms and legs splayed, like a bat. Landing in a crouched position in a pile of snow, she stood up, dusted herself off, and walked back to the café door, vanishing amongst the crowd of skiers and snowboarders inside. The boy looked up at Matt. ‘She never falls off,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know that?’ Then he followed the girl back into the café.

*

Matt’s dad moved to Australia when Matt was seven. Every year or so he’d come back to New Zealand to visit them. Each time he came Matt found him harder to recognise. The edges became blurred, the outline undefined—this strange man, standing there at the front door, grinning like there was no tomorrow. One year he had dark sideburns cut across his jaw like daggers. Another time he had a full beard through which his mouth, or the place where his mouth should be, was barely visible—it could have just been a slit in his head. One year he had dreadlocks with red beads threaded into the tapered ends. Every time he came he would take Matt out for an afternoon—just the two of them. ‘I’ve got an afternoon with your name on it,’ he’d say, every time.

These rare visits from his dad were never alike. Once they went to the beach and his dad taught him how to find oysters in the rock pools, then eat them, by slitting the shells. They had a sticky, salty taste. Another time he took him, on the back of a motorbike (borrowed from a mate), to the top of the hill where the war memorial stood tall in its coat of rust-coloured lichens. While Matt played on the cannon that pointed out to sea, his dad sat on the grass smoking sweet-smelling cigarettes and smiling, languidly, at the sky. One year, page 404 when Matt was ten, they went rock-climbing at the new sports centre recently built on the outskirts of town. Matt climbed nimbly up the first five walls, the ones with brightly coloured hand-grips, while his dad belayed from below. The sixth wall was much harder; it had only the smallest finger-grips, minute holes in the smooth, vertical surface. Halfway to the top, Matt decided he didn’t want to go any further.

‘Go on,’ his dad shouted from below. He had a shaven head that year. Matt could see the crown of his dad’s head, below him, a pale sphere with the shape of his nose pointing outwards, like a compass.

‘You’ll regret it if you don’t.’

But Matt was already climbing down, carefully—hand over foot over foot over hand. Downwards towards the ground and the island of soft, blue mats.

His dad dropped him off at the end of the driveway. As he got out of the car, Matt could see his mother and Kerri, encased in the brightly-lit lounge, like toy people in a toy house. They were talking, looking at each other and moving their arms. But Matt couldn’t guess at what they were saying. Years later, this is the part Matt would remember about that day, standing by the car with his dad, looking in, watching this soundless female conversation.

‘We had a good day, didn’t we?’ said his dad as he turned to leave.

‘Wasn’t that a good day?’

*

Kerri parked her blue Honda by the curb outside Matt’s flat on Saturday. Matt watched from the front door as she got out and stretched. He was regretting agreeing to go, but it was too late now. Walking down to meet her, he threw his backpack in the boot. ‘I can drive.’

She smiled at him and took off her sunglasses. Her nose was flecked with pink. She was one of those girls who might have been beautiful, if she’d decided to be.

The temperature rose markedly the further they got from the mountain range. Kerri fell asleep, her head gently swaying with the rhythm of the road. Matt opened his window a fraction and the outside air beat nosily through the car like a terrified bird. Moaning softly, Kerri moved her head, but didn’t wake up.

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Matt slowed the car to fifty when they reached Geraldine. It felt painfully slow after the open road. A scattering of shops and cafés had signs out on the pavement. Outside a red and green hardware shop, a row of ride-on mowers was parked, diagonally. A mannequin stood naked and headless in the window of a ‘pre-loved’ clothes shop.

Kerri woke as they reached the edge of town. ‘I had this strange dream.’ She looked at him curiously as she spoke, her face small, striking. ‘In it I had children. There were two, I think. But then it changed and I was talking with a woman in a supermarket. And, just now when I woke, I felt so sad.’

The fifty-kilometre zone ended and Matt sped up to a hundred again.

‘I’m beginning to think it’s selfish to have children. I mean with the way the world is at the moment. It seems almost irresponsible’—she paused to look at him—‘what do you think?’

Matt wound up his window. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never thought much about it.’

Kerri examined the backs of her hands, as if trying to read some- thing written there long ago—a shopping list? A missed appointment?

They drove on for a while; the only sound a maple leaf caught in the vent by the windscreen that flapped violently in the wind.

‘There was another suicide bomber in the news last night,’ said Kerri. ‘In Pakistan.’

A sheep truck thundered past, tufts of wool poking through the tiny, round slits. Matt rested his elbow on the window, feeling the vibrations from the motion of the car. Kerri examined her face in the side mirror. ‘Did you get Dad a present?’ She looked at him, hopefully.

‘No.’

‘Me neither. I feel bad. Fifty is a big deal. It’s not just some random age—like twenty-four, or thirty-seven. It’s a big deal.’

Matt glanced at her; he could see the fine hairs on the back of her neck.

‘Do you remember my birthday party the year I turned nine? We had a swimming pool cake with blue jelly for the water and chocolate fingers around the outside for the fence. No one wanted to eat the jelly, only the chocolate fingers. And Dad was there, he came over from Australia for it—remember?’

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Matt nodded slowly but didn’t take his eyes off the road. This was a story Kerri told often. But he wasn’t sure if it was a true story or not. Kerri collected stories the way some people collected old coins, storing them up to show later, fingering the shiny surfaces and noticing the tiny imperfections, the bits that made them real. Sometimes they were pieces of stories other people had told her. Sometimes they were just conversations she had overheard. She would retell them, over time, gradually making them about her.

‘What about the time Dad took us camping?’ she said.

The traffic was getting heavier. Another sheep truck came towards them, speeding by in a throb of stagnant air.

‘Yes,’ said Matt. ‘I remember that.’

‘Remember how we cooked sausages on the fire so they were all crispy and charred and we had to peel off the outside layer? Wasn’t it fantastic?’

Two cop cars sped by. Matt watched them disappear in the rear- view mirror.

*

One Friday evening when Matt was twelve, his dad appeared, unexpectedly, at the front door. He was wearing ripped jeans and a red jacket with ‘cowboy’ emblazoned across the chest. He wanted, as he explained to their mother while Matt and Kerri listened from the lounge, to take Matt away for a camping weekend—just the two of them, a father and son thing. Matt and Kerri listened as their mother reluctantly agreed.

‘I wouldn’t have wanted to come anyway,’ said Kerri from her perch on the couch. ‘Even if he’d asked me, I wouldn’t have wanted to come.’

Matt’s dad arrived at the house the next day in a brown Holden with a trail of bullet-hole stickers across the bonnet. He’d bought a tarpaulin especially for the trip. This was rolled up in a bundle on the backseat along with a supermarket bag containing sausages and white bread. He turned on the stereo when Matt got in the car. A loud, angry song came on—something by Creed.

At the first intersection two hitchhikers, both female, straddled the curb. Matt’s dad braked violently and then reversed, his hand pressing page 407 firmly on the back of Matt’s seat.

‘Ladies.’ He wound down the window. ‘What can I do you for?’ One of the girls leant her elbows on the edge of the driver’s window. She had a thick accent Matt could barely understand. On her exposed shoulder was a tattoo of a rose. Several minutes later Matt was relegated to the backseat where he sat beside the other girl. She was wearing a crochet top with holes the size of ten cent coins. Matt could see her bra; it was white with pink and green butterflies.

‘There’s this party tonight,’ said the girl in the front seat in her thick accent.

‘No shit,’ said Matt’s dad.

The party was in a barn at the end of a long gravel driveway. Matt stayed sitting in the car when they arrived. He watched his dad get out and sit on the bonnet, talking with the two girls. Another girl came over to them; she was carrying four bottles of beer, two in each hand, her fingers twisted around the tapered bottle necks.

Later on Matt lay down on the backseat and slept. When he woke it was dark and his dad was peering in the car window, tapping on the glass. Matt opened the door and his dad handed him a sausage wrapped in a piece of white bread. Tomato sauce had leaked up his forearm. It looked like coagulated blood.

‘I told you we’d have sausages.’ He grinned. There was a smudge of something black on the side of his face. ‘We’re having a good time, aren’t we?’

They left in the afternoon the next day. Matt’s dad sat far back in the seat as he drove, his right elbow on the windowsill, only the tips of his fingers touching the wheel. Matt studied him for a while, pretending he was looking out the far window. The space between them felt thick. His dad turned on the stereo and tapped his fingers in time to the music. In front of them the road continued on in a straight line, piercing the hills into half moons. His dad stopped the car at the end of the driveway. They just sat there for a while, listening to the music. Then Matt got out and went inside.

*

Matt and Kerri arrived as it was getting dark. The house appeared to be on the brink of collapse. It stood unsteadily on its exposed piles, page 408 one of which had crumbled into a mound of bricks. The mint-green paint along the weatherboards was blistering and cracking in a cobweb pattern. Around the house a sea of mud, fringed with grass and weeds. They walked up a concrete driveway riddled with fractures. On the paler stretches of concrete, islands of dark-coloured moss converged to create moss continents. Lines of dandelions invaded from the edges.

Silhouetted in the front door of the house was a short blonde woman. She called out, waved, then walked towards them. Up close she had a round, lined face and crinkly skin around the top of her neck. She wore a white top with fake fur around the collar. The fur looked dangerously flammable.

‘Rhonda,’ she said in a voice that sounded of smoke. Her accent was distinctly Australian. ‘Kerri! Good to see you again. You must be Matt, right?’

Matt took her outstretched hand; her fingers were dry and stringy. She held his hand a fraction too long, as if compensating for something. He wished again that he hadn’t come.

‘I’ve got some bad news for you. Your dad’s in the sin bin. They got him this afternoon doing one-eighty on his motorbike. One-eighty.’ Rhonda’s voice surged towards the end of the sentence. It was hard to tell if she sounded proud or shocked. It could have been either.

‘Anyway he put up a bit of a fight. Nothing really—just a bit of argy-bargy, you know what he’s like. They’ve locked him up for a night or two. Serves him right.’

Matt looked at Kerri. She was standing behind him, upright and still.

‘He’s had it coming.’ Rhonda clapped her hands together in a quick, chopping motion. ‘The cops have had their eye on him.’

‘We came all this way,’ said Kerri in a small voice, her face showing all the complexities of dismay. She pushed her sunglasses further onto the top of her head.

Matt leant back on the balls of his feet and put his hands in his pockets. ‘Shit happens,’ he said to no one in particular.

‘Come inside,’ said Rhonda. ‘You look cold.’ She zipped up her coat and a tuft of fake fur caught in the zip. It stuck out, a bobble of white, like a rabbit’s tail. ‘I’ve called the other people I invited. I called you too, but I got your answerphone.’

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‘I had my phone on silent,’ said Kerri.

The house was surprisingly clean and tidy. Matt and Kerri followed Rhonda through a narrow hallway into a lounge furnished in orange and brown and burnt red—a colour scheme that reminded Matt of movies set in the seventies. A leather couch faced a television mounted on the far wall. Streamers hung from the ceiling in loops—blue, gold, orange, red. In the corner a pretend log fire threw pretend flames of gas up a grey chimney. Cooking smells drifted from the next room. Rhonda leant, arms and legs crossed, against the doorframe that led, presumably, into the kitchen. She looked at them for several seconds, then, abruptly, she smiled. The expression made her look almost pretty in a raw and sloppy way. ‘Fuck him,’ she said, laughing, ‘we’ll do it anyway. We’ll have the party—just us.’

Kerri looked at Matt and smiled a protective smile. Matt shrugged; he felt drained and listless, like the feeling of setting out on a road-trip somewhere he didn’t particularly want to go but someone else had decided the route a long time before.

*

A week before Matt’s fifteenth birthday, a cheque arrived in the post. With it a note:

Come to Queensland mate, I’ve forgotten what you look like.

It was dark when Matt got off the plane at the Gold Coast airport. It was the first time he’d been overseas (not that Australia really counted though). His dad was standing inside the sliding doors, hands in his pockets. Matt watched him from a distance, checking his features, trying to find evidence of something that wasn’t quite palpable.

‘Mate,’ said his dad as Matt walked over to him. For a moment he thought his dad was going to hug him. But he didn’t. Instead he turned the forwards gesture into a handshake. They walked outside the terminal to a Holden parked astride a double yellow line. His dad drove quickly, tooting at a dawdling taxi, overtaking a van.

‘I’ve made me a bit of money since I’ve been over here,’ he said, doing the fingers at a motorbike pulling out from the curb.

‘Yeah?’ Matt watched lines of multi-storey motels and hotels on either side of the road blur into an endless stream of flashing neon.

‘Yeah,’ said his dad.

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Circles of coloured lights outlined the entranceways to restaurants. The lights seemed to wink at Matt as they passed by. Eventually they turned off the motorway and drove down a street leading towards the beach.

‘I thought we could go for a drink,’ said his dad. ‘Just me and you; before I take you back to mine.’

They pulled up outside a white concrete building that said ‘Trev’s Tavern’ above the door. As he stepped out of the car Matt felt the heat melt around him. His body felt unbelievably light, weightless almost, as though he was swimming. He raised his arm to shoulder-height, letting it float, slowly, back to his side. It was cooler inside the pub. The smell of cigarettes, grease and beer embraced Matt as he walked in behind his dad. At the bar his dad pulled two stools from their resting place. Matt watched him closely as he moved, the way his muscles strained as he lifted the stools, the tensing of his shoulders. His hair was thinner around the temples and he had a balding spot on the back of his head, like a target. The skin on his face seemed redder in the brown, padded pub light. Yet, for all this, he didn’t seem necessarily older. He could have been twenty-eight or thirty-one or forty-three. Somehow he appeared timeless, suspended forever in the moment. As Matt watched, his dad signalled to the barman and ordered two beers. Then he turned to face Matt. They sat in silence, trying not to make eye contact. The barman set down the beers in front of them—with the action the atmosphere changed, as if a switch had been turned on, a fuse released with a slow hiss of steam.

‘So how’s things, mate? Do you have a job?’

Matt took a sip of the beer. Tiny droplets of condensation had formed around the glass. When he lifted it up there was a ring of condensation on the bar mat. ‘I’m fifteen. I’m still at school.’

‘Fifteen huh? Jesus.’ He smiled. ‘You shouldn’t really be drinking then huh?’

‘No,’ said Matt.

They both turned back to their beer. The air was starting to feel sticky. Matt watched a woman come into the bar. She wore a low cut top that finished above her midriff. In her belly button was a silver ring. It looked like the kind of ring put through bulls’ noses to stop them tearing up their paddocks.

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‘Hey gorgeous!’ called Matt’s dad. ‘Watch this, mate,’ he whispered to Matt. ‘This is how you gets yourself a woman.’ He waved his hand above his head. ‘Over here, gorgeous. I’ve got a drink with your name on it.’

The woman looked over, angling her body to face them. She put her hands on her hips and stared. Then she shook her head, just once. As she moved her head, Matt noticed a silver skull suspended on a slender chain around her neck level with the tops of her breasts.

Matt’s dad looked back at the bar. His whole body seemed, in an instant, to deflate. Matt began to feel something, a strange light- headedness. Perhaps it was the beer? Or the heat? He looked over at his father and wanted to say, ‘It’s okay, Dad’, but the words wouldn’t form.

When his dad looked up again he was grinning and there were patches of red on his cheeks as though he’d been scratching them. Looking at him made Matt feel intensely lonely and yet buoyant at the same time, as if he could float up off the stool. It seemed, then, as if he was watching his dad from a great distance, like he was up there, suspended below the ceiling, looking down at his dad’s head, all that way below him, balding and unprotected.

*

They ate the birthday dinner sitting on the leather couch—Rhonda in the middle, Matt and Kerri on either side.

‘That’s the problem with your dad.’ Rhonda was eating a chicken leg with her fingers. ‘He has no concept of consequences. It’s like part of his brain is missing.’ She licked a greasy thumb. ‘His life is one big joyride.’

‘That’s not true.’ Kerri was sitting with her feet tucked neatly under her body, her paper plate carefully balanced on her lap. ‘He’s not like that all the time. Sometimes maybe; but not all the time. Eh Matt?’

Matt looked across at her. She was watching him, frowning, twisting the plate around and around on her lap.

In between them Rhonda paused from dissecting a potato, her knife held midair. It dropped, suddenly, landing on the orange carpet end-on, bouncing once, twice. She leant forward to pick it up. ‘You’re right.’ The words followed the movement of her body like smoke, to page 412 the floor and back up to the couch. She looked from Matt to Kerri and back to Matt. ‘He’s not like that all the time.’

No one said anything for a while. Rhonda went back to eating. Kerri went back to tracing the patterned rim on her plate. Sitting forward, Matt looked around the lounge. A series of photographs of Rhonda and his dad were spaced across the wall. He focused on one of his dad standing on a grassy hill with the sea in the background. It could have been taken anywhere—in New Zealand or Australia; there were no definitive features to pinpoint its origins. His dad stood in the foreground, upright and blank, the kind of man Matt might only ever know in black-and-white dreams.

‘Fifty! My god!’

It wasn’t the words that startled Matt but the motion. As Rhonda spoke she threw her head back against the couch, laughing. ‘Each year goes faster than the one before it. I liked twenty-seven, that was a bloody good year.’ Closing her eyes she smiled at something—a memory perhaps? Then, opening her eyes again she looked at them, each in turn, excitedly. ‘Let’s have some cake kids.’ She put her empty plate down in the hollow imprint in the couch where she’d been sitting.

‘I’ll just get the cream from the fridge in the garage.’ She disappeared into the kitchen. The sound of a screen door opening and shutting, forcefully.

‘So what do you think?’ Kerri was looking over at Matt, smiling. She put her plate on the floor. Matt noticed she’d picked fingernail- sized chunks from the rim in an even pattern. Her food was hardly touched.

‘About what?’

‘The girlfriend.’

‘The what?’

Kerri made a sucking sound through her teeth. ‘Rhonda.’ Matt shrugged. ‘I dunno. She’s okay, I guess.’

‘I didn’t like her at first, but’—she adjusted her legs—‘she’s different to how I thought she’d be. There’s something invincible about her. She looks like one of those women who could reverse a trailer up a driveway and put on lipstick at the same time. Don’t you reckon?’

‘Maybe.’ Matt shrugged again. ‘I don’t know.’

They heard the screen door open again and bang shut. The sound page 413 of Rhonda moving around in the kitchen—a drawer opening, closing, electric beaters, something being dropped and picked up. When Rhonda came back into the lounge she was holding a chocolate cake on a round plate, a bottle of Lindauer tucked under her right arm. On her head a crepe paper party hat clung to her teased up hair.

‘Your dad would love the fact we’re doing this.’ She set the cake on the coffee table. ‘He’s big on birthdays. Loves them.’

‘We know,’ said Kerri. ‘Don’t we Matt?’

Matt shook his head slightly; it was neither a nod nor a shake, more of a shiver. He felt suddenly warmer; the room must be heating up. Taking off his jacket he draped it over the back of the couch. A leather cushion was wedged in behind him. He picked it up; the leather so soft it felt damp.

‘Your dad got me two cakes for my forty-second.’ Rhonda opened the Lindauer as she spoke and lined up three paper party cups on the coffee table, a line of three.

Two cakes,’ she said again, licking her lips. ‘Two. He told me he believed in gluttony.’

‘I had this cake once,’ said Kerri. ‘It had a swimming pool made of jelly. Dad bought it for me.’ She brushed at something on her jeans.

‘He always came back for my birthdays.’

‘No,’ said Matt. ‘No he didn’t.’ Kerri frowned. ‘Yes he did.’

Matt was about to say, ‘You’re just making that up’, but Kerri was looking across at him, her face poised, fine lines forming around her eyes.

‘He came to some of them,’ said Matt.

‘And yours—he came back for some of yours.’

Matt looked away. ‘Yeah.’ Then, quietly, ‘Whatever.’

Rhonda sank down by the coffee table, her legs straight out in front of her. She had removed her shoes. Her socks had holes in the heels.

‘He’s great, your dad. Bloody impulsive—but great. I’ve never met anyone before quite like him. He’s got such a sense of, of’—she reached her arm above her head and waved it around, her fingers opening and closing, as if she was trying to grab at something—‘what’s the word I’m after here? I don’t know what it is, but there’s a word.’

‘Happiness?’ said Kerri tentatively. She smiled, her face younger page 414 all of a sudden, happier. She liked to be asked questions about words. Matt used to watch her doing the Listener crossword with their mother every week, backs bowed over the kitchen table, sounding out syllables.

‘Joy?’

‘No,’ said Rhonda, ‘that’s not it. It starts with R.’

‘Rapt?’ said Kerri. ‘Rapture!’

‘That’s it! I knew there was a word. I couldn’t put my finger on it.’ Standing up, Matt walked across the room to the kitchen and out the door. Light from the kitchen window collapsed across the lawn, illuminating the closest part and fading toward the corrugated iron fence where it framed blades of grass and dandelion leaves. A line of pot plants in various stages of life and death edged a concrete path leading to a rotating washing line. Matt walked out to it, cupping his hands around the metal pole. The metal was ice cold. It felt like his hands might stick to it if he held on for too long. Behind him he heard the screen door open and bang closed.

Rhonda walked across the lawn towards him in gumboots, each footstep making a heavy, tired sound. ‘You right?’

‘Yeah. Fine.’

She stopped midway down the path and kicked at a pot plant; part of the terracotta pot came away, crumbling like dirt. ‘You want a smoke?’

‘I don’t smoke.’

He watched her bend down and pick up a piece of the pot, holding it towards the light. Then she threw it to the far end of the lawn. The soft thud of it landing somewhere unseen.

‘Your dad said you were a liftie at Cardrona?’

‘Yeah.’ Matt let go of the washing line, taking a step onto the lawn. ‘For the season.’

‘Good for you.’

He could see the cloud of breath around her, billowing out, silhouetted in the kitchen light. But he couldn’t see her mouth, just the outline of her head. This was the way he’d remember her, he decided—a smoky shadow, her distinctive voice the only thing defining the hard edges where she began and ended.

‘I’m sorry I forgot to invite you,’ she said.

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‘It doesn’t matter.’ Matt took a step towards her, his feet sinking into the lawn. ‘Anyway he’s not even here.’

She took a step forward and stood there in her gumboots—solid, sturdy. ‘I tried to get your number from your dad, but you know how he is with numbers.’

A shape moved across the light coming from the kitchen window— Kerri’s shadow projected across the lawn.

‘You know your dad.’ Rhonda’s voice had a slight shakiness to it, uncertain, all of a sudden.

Matt watched her for a while. Then he put his hands in his pockets.

‘You look cold,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back inside.’

Matt slept in the lounge. Kerri was given the spare room at the end of the hallway. When the others had left to go to bed, Matt walked in a loop around the room, touching each wallpapered wall, his fingers tracing at hip level. Then he spread out the pile of quilts Rhonda had given him on the couch and lay down, listening to the foreign night noises. A cold draft blew from somewhere unseen, circling the room, finding the cracks below the doorframes, the edges that didn’t quite meet. Matt shivered and rolled over. He began to think about a time when he was five or six, before his dad left for Australia. They were going on a train ride, all of them—him, his mother and Kerri, through the Manawatu Gorge. They’d got on at the station just before the gorge and were in the last carriage, the one with tall glass windows on every side. Matt was sitting on his mother’s lap and Kerri was beside them, her legs dangling down. They were all looking out the window, intently, watching something. And then Matt saw what they were looking at: it was his dad, up ahead; on the other side of the gorge. He was standing on the road in one of the stopping bays, his motorbike parked to one side, and he was waving at them with both his arms, making propeller motions. Matt could see his whole body, even from all that distance across the river, was an expression of pure joy, as though nothing else in the world, at that moment, could matter more.