Pink oyster

How something hot can also be SOOO unhot, at the same time

Rita Angus was quite put out by this morning’s 5.7

This morning has been insane. First of all, nobody likes being shuddered awake by a 5.7 magnitude earthquake, which rattled in the dark for ages and tilted all the pictures.

This old house bends even in the wind, so the juddering felt dramatic. I bolted out of bed at 5.10am like thousands of other people, even though it’s safer, apparently, to stay under the blankets. When the rocking stopped, the valley returned to normal, but I unhooked my bobbly dressing-gown and went downstairs. Our alarms were set for 5.30am anyway, as Maddie was heading to her first ever rowing camp at half past six. I brewed a large pot of coffee and knocked it back in what seemed like two gulps.

In these velvety, early morning moments, are the birds usually so noisy and insistent? Our garden sounded like a Hitchcock film. Or maybe those little souls and their tiny brains, wired so well for spatial memory, packed with proteins and neurons, strangely knowing and mathematical, are better than we are at sensing the yaw and crunch of the active plates below this city. Had it bothered them more than it had us? Or less?

In the end, aside from one cheap Kmart lamp falling off a table and the toothpaste getting donked into the sink, there was no evidence at all that we’d been thrown around by the notoriously restless Hikurangi fault. Unless you count our rip-off Rita Angus, which had kinked to the side.

Who doesn’t love Cass? It marked Angus’ ascension from the mere atmosphere, as an artist, into the stratosphere. What a brimming cup of talent (“gem-like colours, girls,” my art history teacher used to say. “See the hard edges, the bright light?”).

Did I read somewhere Angus was staunchly feminist, Pacifist and celibate, utterly frugal (one kūmara in the cupboard type thing, far more concerned about her art supplies) and remained almost willfully broke throughout her adult life? No wonder she looks gimlet-eyed and formidable in her famous self-portraits. She didn’t have time for anybody’s crap.

Today’s bohemians are doing it easier than Rita, especially as so many are middle-class and entirely comfortable with conveniences like dating apps and Temu. Imagine if she’d had My Food Bag delivered and taken to Tinder with enthusiasm. New Zealand’s art history may have taken quite a different path, though none so gleaming, or austere.

Rita Angus would mostly have swiped left

Maddie made it to the camp bus in good time, along with our baked contributions (gluten-free apple crumble; Betty Crocker chocolate brownies). Her required list of gear ran to a couple of pages, and it took more than a week to tick it all off (what the dang is a ‘rowing sock’? What’s the 10mm spanner for? And how about those sterilized needles and strapping tape, because for rowers, blisters are for life and not just for Christmas?).

I got off lightly compared to some parents by selecting tinned fruit from the cooking list, instead of making and freezing monstrous quantities of lasagne. I went to Moore Wilson’s bulk & dry section, where restaurants buy pickles by the vat and flour by the sack, and then staggered onto College Street under two industry-sized tins of peaches. I nearly slipped a disc.

Maddie was long gone but it was still early when another camp mum, Hayley, messaged me. She was as punch-drunk as I was by the early start. She’d barely slept because her chili con carne hadn’t properly frozen by the time she went to bed. This is because it was big enough to feed forty people.

FORTY.

We were in the kind of stupor all parents must feel when their 12-year-old girls go off to war.

Is it wrong to have a second pot of coffee? I texted.

I’ve just finished my third plunger, said Hayley.

We probably drank it without tasting it, our heads whirling with everything. Maddie had been gone barely an hour. And I so missed her.

Rowing people are made of stern stuff. There are so many downsides. Blisters, early mornings, freezing water, being insistently shouted at by someone who doesn’t know your name and speeding somewhere fast with your back to the destination. The language rowers use is softer and more poetic than rowing really is (catching, finishing, feathering, recovering - how gorgeous) but imagine the freedom you must feel, skimming low and fast across the harbour, perfectly synchronized with your crew, breathing and sliding and pulling in unison, when the coxswain calls “let her run” and you all lift your oars and remember again who you are, and where. How difficult to define the joy you must feel as the hard work ends, and yet your boat continues to cut the water in two.

The whole thing’s enough to make me break out in scales, if I’m honest.

Oh, wait.

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Remember last week, and my suspicion fungi are out to get us? Turns out, it could be true.

Strange, pink patches have started appearing on my temple and as I was going to the GP this week anyway, I decided to pull my hair aside and point them out, bracing for bad news.

I never turn down the chance to talk about myself in pathological terms (some common openers are “Sniff this. Weird, right?” and “Look what happens when I squeeze this”). If ever I’m offered something from a dispensary, I’ll gladly take it. The medical fraternity refer to people like me as the Worried Well, although not to our faces; a bit like flight attendants who privately name the hottest passenger on the plane the B.O.B (Best on Board). We’re a recognized type, we hypochondriacs. We are a type, way less sexy than the BOBs. But as a result, I feel close to my doctor; I see her all the time and have done for years. She knows me better than anyone; after all, she has gazed deeply into my fundament several times.

Anyway, she took a look at my forehead and seemed unimpressed. But just to be on the safe side, do you know what she suggested I have?

A FUNGAL SCRAPE.

Neither of these words are attractive on their own, let alone combined in a sentence. It’s the worst pairing I’ve heard in a while, actually. There are others that make me blanch - anal glands, jellied eel, mucus plug - but this one was about to involve my face and a blunt instrument. It killed my Wednesday.

In the end it took barely ten seconds and involved the flicking of a sorry few flakes of my skin onto a neat square of black card, which would be slid under a microscope and inspected for fungal elements.

“I didn’t expect to be a mushroom farm,” I said to the kids afterwards, in the car. They ignored this, because it’s the school holidays and we’ve spent so much quantity time together (none of it, quality) that they see my outline but no longer recognize my solid mass. Except at mealtimes. Then I reassume human form.

I’ll keep you posted, but it could take up to a month to grow enough culture off those cells to make a judgment. Will I be diagnosed flat brown, white button, or the more glamorous pink oyster? It’s all completely disgusting for you as a reader and I should apologize for even bringing it up, but it’s like anything mildly gross that’s happening to somebody else - deep down, I know you want to know.

Fungal Scrape would be a great name for a band, wouldn’t it?

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Okay, that was Wednesday, and it turned out to be nothing compared to the doozy that was Friday. I had to take the dog to be seen because he kept scratching his droopy spaniel ears. I might have let this go except whenever I scratched them - the hairless underside of them, the white parts - he groaned with so much satisfaction, it startled me.

I haven’t had this effect on a male since the nineties. So we went to the vet.

It turns out, not only does he have infected ears, in which I need to squeeze drops twice a day and hide antibiotics in his food, but he is too tubby. Worse, according to his file, he’s gained nearly two kilos in six months. Six months!

Our wonderful nurse was quick to tell me that it could be corrected, he was young enough for there to be no consequences, and I wasn’t exactly unusual. There are a lot of fat dogs in Wellington, including one Labrador who apparently blocks out the sun.

Even so. We itemized all the things he eats and established a plan to reduce his calories by ten percent. He needs to weigh in again in a fortnight, like Jenny Craig for mutts. The idea isn’t that he loses weight by then, but that he plateaus. We step his weight down slowly, over six months. It’s all very achievable, sensible, and well-advised.

I must say I felt awful. It made me examine my personality, as the person most responsible for feeding him. My own portion sizes are reasonable, as are the meals I serve my family. So why am I lavishing my dog with too much food? Leaving biscuits in his dish all day? Slipping him the odd knob of sausage, a corn chip here and there? Am I compensating for my stark diet by sneaking him treats? Is this what all owners of overweight dogs are doing - soothing themselves through the proxy of their pets? I can’t seem to accept he isn’t human. I’m indulging him too much, following his moods and not the plan. Did you know you’re supposed to walk through a doorway first, before your dog? It shows him his place and reinforces yours. I’m missing opportunities to express my dominance. In fact, I’ve been missing these opportunities since coming to Wellington, twenty years ago; long before we got a dog.

Come on, Leah. Find your hard edges, your bright light.

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Let me tell you how Friday finished. So, we had four builders at our place for the final time - two on the scaffold outside the laundry and two young hands clearing all the waste from the garden and tossing it into a skip.

It was a rare sunny day, and it was dusty work. At the end of the afternoon, George and I were driving home from the park as the tradies were packing up their vans outside our house. There was a space for me to reverse into, between the skip and one of their cars. As we approached, George said disbelievingly, “Does that guy have his SHIRT off?”

Well, naturally I looked and let me tell you, he did. Not only that, he was the most confident, lofty and talkative of the group - let’s just say, the twinkly one. And as I slowed down to pass, he gave me eye-contact and a bit of a wave. I glanced in the rearview mirror and he was flexing his biceps and all of his many, many abdominals.

Well, how flustered can you get? I reversed at a demented angle, laughed shrilly at the wheel like a chimp, and parked so far from the kerb I needed a passport to reach the footpath. I felt hot and cold at the same time. George said, suspiciously, “That guy needs to put on a SHIRT.” By the time I got out of the car, that shirt was back on, thank the baby Jesus, and George got out of the car and stumped to the house without a backward glance, unaware that his mother was having a public crisis of personality. Naturally I over-compensated, getting out of the car, announcing to all the blokes that I was going to get back in (“I think I’ll park it again, tee-hee!”) and turning the engine on. I drove out, reversed in again, avoided all eye contact, trotted into the house, and tried to think about something neutral, like the fact my dog is a fatty.

I know middle-aged housewife/handyman scenarios are the basis of the cheesier erotic novels (“Is that a pipe wrench in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”) and for all I know, porn films, but this is Karori, where sexuality essentially comes to die. Even if something is empirically hot, if it happens anywhere between the Karori Tunnel and the Mākara turn-off, it is emphatically not hot at the same time. There are just too many leaf blowers in this area. Too many Mazda Demios. To get into the zone, you really have to commit yourself, is what I’m trying to say. It’s not Rio de Janeiro.

The suburbs signify the heat death, really, of your sexual career. You don’t have time for one, not until your kids are out of high school. Your Buxus needs trimming, and you got up at five for rowing camp.

We in this suburb must surely be of interest to science, in this regard. They’re welcome to sign me up for clinical trials.

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Thanks to Marie, a completely delightful subscriber, I’m helping support the warm-hearted Kiwi Christmas Books campaign, where book-buyers who can afford it donate new books as gifts for children in need. You can buy and donate books at participating NZ bookshops between 1 November and mid-December (my chosen store is Marsden Books in Karori). Volunteers will then make sure they reach little hands, and little hearts. There are other ways to contribute, too. It’s a lovely charity.