Good Vibrations
Wild thoughts and feelings as winter descends
There’s an odd circle of scruffy grass in the back garden, now the trampoline has gone.
“Did you decide on dessert?” the waitress is asking you and your oldest friends.
You could easily nosebag a brown sugar pavlova, chocolate mousse, or any number of panna cottas. You’d pay for this in chins, though, possibly as early as tomorrow, so hand back the menu, shrugging. “We’re in our fifties,” you say.
In bed, the wind howling outside, and the cat has slung herself in a silky rope around your neck. She’s vibrating with pleasure and her purring roars in your ears.
Burmese love the heat, and you’re a useful source on a winter’s evening. She’s offered her tummy to stroke. You massage the tips of her ears, scratch her throat, and rub her chin. You press a finger into the fat of her cheeks and make tiny circles, exposing exquisite, deadly teeth. You trace her nose, which is a perfect black heart.
Eventually she begins to dream, twitching and making angry ack-ack noises.
With her nose against your ear, you realise how thin and whistling a cat’s breathing is. She’s a fragile collection of fine bones, organs, lean muscle and fur. She gleams with danger and beauty when awake but like this, is as needy a pet as the dog.
You lie still, listening to the inside workings of her body and following the crazy path of her sleep.
It’s howling, newsworthy weather. Flights grounded, ferries lashed to the docks, deep-water buoys returning news of mighty, 10-metre swells. Your house trembled all night, and your mate Cynthia’s office shook so much that everyone was sent home early.
Wellingtonians are told to stay at home and avoid unnecessary travel — a wearily familiar directive. Winter, to coin a phrase of Cynthia’s, “has got us by the pubes”.
You’re at your Mum’s, an hour from Wellington, where the sea is lumpy and the cabbage tree leaves are flattening in the wind. You meant to drive home today but the most exposed stretch of highway, Transmission Gully, might not be safe.
You’re a climate refugee in her neat brick house, scrolling the live weather blogs and wondering if a dip in the windspeed, scheduled for late afternoon, might be an opportunity to make your break. Sensibly, you decide against. Sea spray is reported to be sheeting over the motorway barriers, and they’ve closed two lanes to the city.
In the end you’ll drive through the Gully the next day, your knuckles tight on the steering wheel. A digital road sign is flashing STRONG WINDS, TAKE CARE, as furious gusts nudge the car this way and that. It takes focus to stay inside the lane. Trucks loom from the mist as you pass them. You remind yourself what to do if the car aquaplanes but eventually you reach the safety of the city, whose high-rise offices close around your plucky Toyota.
There are shredded branches heaped in the gutters along Upland Road, but Karori looks as it always does — resigned to bad weather, and holding up.
So, the trampoline has gone; sold. The boing-boing soundtrack of childhood, and of lockdown, is over. Your kids have outgrown it.
“Come and hug your mother!” you insist, pretending to be upset by the milestone. Your son, nearly as tall as you are, smiles as you pull him in. Your daughter tolerates you too, but your hugging is imposed.
It’s okay that your family aren’t huggers. According to Meghan Markle neither is Catherine, Princess of Wales.
The greatest hugs are the perfect balance of needing and wanting. There has to be equal feeling or it’s just an empty and unwilling payment, made for the sake of appearances.
The best hug you’ve ever had was with a friend who had months to live. This hug was full of strength, telling the other person everything neither of you had the language to say.
It’s your belief that a hug that good won’t come around again.
You, Hamish and Jane are slap in the centre stalls, along with several hundred expectant concertgoers, waiting for the soloist and orchestra. It’s been brought to your attention (too late! too late!) that the opening act is a Mongolian-adjacent throat singer, after which there will be a half-hour interval so everyone can come to terms with the encounter. The vocalist is apparently a New Zealander, and an Olympian of the pharynx.
It’s hard to explain what happens next, except it involves a microphone, a drum the size of a pizza, a drum the size of a tractor wheel, a squeezebox, a clarinet and cattle bells. During this extraordinary performance you’re invited into the human diaphragm, shown around a larynx and bounced about the soft palate.
The hall feels like a hot pan, getting hotter, steaming with a rolling boil of guttural noise. The experience is muscular. It’s startling. It’s beyond words, and very close to madness. It continues for a solid 30 minutes, during which a woman pushes along your row, muttering she needs the bar.
Jane slides down in her seat, and so to avoid looking at Hamish, who you just know will set you off, you focus on the audience. This is an edgy Gen X crowd, open to out of body experiences. It appears they may have had many of these in the 1980s and are possibly still recovering. There are leather coats, chunky boots, every type of hairstyle. But most seem captivated; serious. Someone in front of you is weaving from side to side in appreciation, apparently ecstatic. The three of you manage to stay on the acceptable side of naked hysteria, but teeter at the edge.
When the lights come up for interval, applause thunders around the hall. You grope for the exit and queue for drinks.
Nobody else seems as plastered with sweat as you. It’s probable they go to shit like this all the time; you hear someone near the bar say, “I’m still a Communist”.
Second half and you’re on safer ground. The soloist is an alt-rock legend, leaving the audience weak with gratitude for a lushly arranged, heavenly set. There are strings, woodwinds, gales of percussion, and the defiance of an electric guitar. His singing reminds everyone how it felt to be young, back when some of these songs were written, but also has a searching quality. This is music being thrown towards the future, in the direction of all the living yet to do. Many will get to their feet at the last note, utterly affirmed, and cheer for more.
Everyone tumbles outside and scatters along Cuba St, taking their street style with them to all the points of the city. You feel a bit high, honestly. On a night like this, Wellington is completely off its face. It’s absurd. It’s loveable. It will one day all make sense.
You cut kindling, slicing through the dry, dusty pine stacked in the carport. The blocks crack easily exposing clean, yellow fibres. You toss these pieces into a basket. They smell sharp, and somehow medicinal. They’ll burn easily in the grate and soon attract the cat and the dog, who’ll nose around the hearth and coat his face in soot.
A fire, thick soup, and candles. Already, three good things about this winter.
Sundry Matters
I’ve started Land by Maggie O’Farrell. Good grief, it’s grim! A famine, eviction, the workhouse and an exorcism, all in the first few chapters!
This is why I can’t handle too much literary fiction. (I mean, we’ve already established that I’m a philistine.) For emotional relief from it, I watched a three-part TV documentary about a crazed killer. Naturally all his victims were women, because this was on Netflix.
The July edition of Karori’s The Local newspaper is hitting mailboxes — a monster at 24 pages. It’s a wonderfully feel-good issue, with heartwarming stories featuring local identities, community heroes, and a three-legged dog.
My piece wonders if we’re in danger of becoming cool, bearing in mind we have a trendy Shelly Bay Bakery:
Who knew we had a constituency of locals prepared to brush their hair before 9am and line up for sourdough? By the look of them, these people may even have sex lives. It’s not the Karori I know.
You’ll find it on stands in Marsden Books, Karori Mall and the Karori Community Centre from July 1.
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Loving your work,
Leah 💋
Yes! - spontaneous mutual hugs, like unscheduled phone calls, so worth the patience. Love your work! xx
Leah, I smile at your love of language; send my warm wishes to Wellingtonians sheltering in place as wild winds and weather dominate; celebrate the sweet relationship you enjoy with your loyal feline friend (which reminds me of my ‘son’ - a tabby named Rocky whom I lost custody of). His purring lives on in my ears.