Peninsula, page 21
Trish hands the map to Tim.
‘Do you think he knows what he’s doing?’ I ask Amy quietly.
‘Do you want it?’
I don’t. One thing I noticed on our family walks, the map was more of a complaint licence than a path-finding tool. Everyone not in possession of it got to direct all their grievances at the map-carrier. ‘Nah,’ I say to Amy. ‘Who cares?’ I don’t know why I say this. I do care, I just don’t want the responsibility wearing away at me like sand when it gets in your socks.
On one side of the camp is the estuary, with its unruly flock of burly mangroves, and on the other is a herd of flash baches. Mum said this might be the last time the school comes here because the landowner has sold to developers. Sandspit is out of bounds so no chance of spotting any tara iti. I really hope they don’t get kicked out and sent to Hauturu where I’ll have no chance of seeing them. Bush near the camp is mostly a network of trails through toe toe, harakeke and mānuka, with a few ponga and other scrubby things, but further in I recognise rimu, pūriri and horopito with its red leaves.
Amy takes a few pictures on her phone. She’s the only one of us brazen enough to ignore the phone ban. We share a fist bump then pose for a group selfie by a big tree with lots of little plants growing on it.
‘Epiphytes.’ Trish surprises us. ‘Nature’s social climbers.’
Before I can ask her more, freckly Tim interrupts. ‘I like your T-shirt.’
Trish blushes. What is this, the Bachelorette New Zealand? I’m thinking about how there are three guys and three girls as we pass yet another intersection where we could take any number of tracks. We’re following Tim. As far as I can tell we’re selecting trails at random. I don’t see Tim consulting the map but I assume he does. We’re supposed to find spots and record clues. Every group has been sent in a different direction, which kind of sucks. We won’t be able to compare answers. Trish and I stop to wait for Amy while she waters a tree. The guys carry on.
‘How’s it going?’ I ask Trish.
She looks pensive. ‘Do you think Tim’s recording the clues?’
I shrug. Tim is kind of easygoing. At squash he doesn’t call a block to get a point replayed if you obstruct him, he waits for the ref. I like that about him. I just want to enjoy the bush and I want Trish to relax. Actually I want to get the tramp over and done with. Trish reminds me of Pipi wanting to go outside then tapping on the door to be let back in. I get distracted watching out for her and burn my toast. I’m working on a design for a cat door, in the shape of a cat. I’m not sure what colour it should be, something between the shade of horopito leaves and the colour of Trish’s face when she blushes, cerise maybe.
Trish is looking at the long skinny trunk and finger-shaped leaves of horoeka.
‘Dad reckons they look like something out of Dr Seuss,’ I say.
‘These ones are juveniles. Adult ones have short fat leaves and round crowns.’
‘Wowser. Reckon you’ll keep doing botany?’
‘I think so. You know – ’ She fiddles with the hem of her T-shirt.
‘Know what?’
‘Sometimes I can’t stop thinking. About how the planet is warming up, the waterways getting dirtier, birds like the tara iti. And you know all the plastic, like those sheets Dion got, it doesn’t break down.’
I nod. I think about the David Attenborough doco all the time too, when I’m not thinking about the plastic ocean one. We watched the David Attenborough one in science.
‘I stopped eating meat. Mum doesn’t want me to be vegan. That coleslaw last night made me feel sick,’ she says.
‘Oh my god. It was disgusting, that coleslaw!’ Amy’s back. She strokes the leaves of the horoeka with her perfect nails. ‘Doubt anyone ate it. Bet the prefects ditched it. These trees look dead!’
The leaves feel smooth but the edges are knotty. They point earthwards rather than skywards, like they’ve given up on the sun. ‘You’re right Trish, it’s hard to know what to do, and we’re running out of time.’
‘Oh my god, Ellen.’ Amy is pointing at my chewed-down nails. ‘Gross!’ Then she says to Trish, ‘I’m only kidding. Her hands are gross though.’
I want to mention her bailing twine hair. ‘What about climate change, Amy?’
She wrinkles her nose. ‘I dunno.’
‘Not eating meat is a thing, I guess. I like meat but cows are bad, methane eh, pollute the water if you don’t fence. Dad fences and plants trees. Pipi catches birds sometimes, sparrows.’ I can see from the look on Trish’s face that I’m not making sense.
Amy says, ‘It’s us burning fossil fuels, not the cows and cats Ellen. That doco was like, work together to fix up your mess peeps, and by the way, there are too many of you fuckers. All right for Attenborough though, he’s ancient, won’t be around.’
‘Yeah, but like, over his, our grandparents’ lifetime, all the changes, it’s real gradual but past a certain point it’s going to speed up, then we might not be able to back-pedal, that’s the scary bit eh Trish?’ But I’m thinking Amy is onto something too. Easy to see the signs, to tell people what to do, harder to get them to do it. Like us with the tent, now this rogaine. We gave Tim the map.
‘You have to break it down to get your head around it,’ Trish says.
I shut my eyes for a moment and think up Trish’s future. I can see her being awarded a science scholarship and using it to research horoeka. She’s good at fieldwork, she loves it and gets invited all round the world to do it. Like a female version of Attenborough, except she doesn’t make docos, she’s hands on, might give some talks in schools and stuff, yes that would be cool. She’ll come home to see her parents when they’re getting older and work at a conservation park near Kerikeri. Plenty of rich dudes up there to fund it, and people like Dad and Aunty Rachel will pay subscriptions like they do for Netflix and Neon. By then, the replanting of natives and getting rid of weeds and pests will be happening everywhere. I reckon she teams up with local greenie Clive Stringer and eventually replaces him as CEO. Not sure what the park will be called, Te Tai Tokerau maybe. I wonder if she’ll ever think about our Year 10 camp then.
‘Chocolate?’ I pull off my pack and retrieve my bag of mini-Snickers. I’m tempted to tell Trish the story I just made up about her but I can’t rip open the bag with my nails. I’m about to use my teeth when Amy snatches it off me and tears it open. She helps herself and offers it to Trish.
‘Comfort food. Sugar and fat, bloody good,’ Amy says with her mouth full. ‘Vegan probably Trish, maybe a bit of gelatine, but no worries. You collecting the wrappers, Ellen? Better not leave rubbish.’
I look at Trish as I help myself. ‘Reckon Amy’s even carrying anything in that pack of hers?’
Trish smiles as I hold out my hand for her wrapper. ‘Nail polish?’
Amy laughs. ‘True!’ She slides her pack off her shoulder and pretends to look inside. ‘Yeah nah. But like, seriously Ellen, you gotta try that stuff that tastes disgusting you can paint on your nails. Take it as a first step towards sorting out the planet eh.’
We nearly walk right past the guys but they yell out to us. Tim is in the bush taking a leak and happens to spot Trish’s orange top. We push our way through the trees and vines for ages, aiming for his voice.
Dad always goes on about, when you’re tramping in groups, you need to stick together. It seems a bit late to mention the sticking together thing. Dad had asked Mum a thousand questions about the camp. Would the prefects know what they were doing? Who would keep an eye on them? Where was it exactly? Dad is usually so chill. Mum had to tell him to pull his head in.
Eventually we emerge on the shoreline. Mint spot. The guys are reclining on the sand beside a big log. A curved sandy beach piled high with driftwood and shells, nīkau with their tattooed trunks and vermilion berry necklaces woven together in loops. Behind them are clumps of harakeke, hebe bushes and dusty piles of crunchy nīkau fronds.
‘Anyone seen anything interesting?’ Dion has his mouth full of sandwich. Mark is onto his orange. I like the pūriri flowers but don’t want to say so. We marvel at the quantity of driftwood. The guys have started collecting it into piles. Amy and I pull out our lunch. Trish says she’ll eat hers later.
‘Why not eat it now?’ Mark says.
‘Not hungry. Do you want it?’
‘I could eat it for sure, but it’s yours, you hold on to it.’ He turns to the rest of us. ‘Is all the coast and forest round here like this?’
‘Duh, yeah,’ Amy says. ‘Have you not been in the bush?’
‘Not here. You’re lucky having the beach so close. Back home we hardly ever went, big trip, too crowded.’
‘We were talking about that,’ Trish says. ‘How we take it for granted.’
‘Meaning?’
‘We aren’t doing anything to reduce our carbon emissions. Sea level will rise from the warming. This beach will go underwater, the bush too. Plants and animals will die.’
Mark considers this. ‘Everyone drives everywhere, I’ve noticed that. Less emissions here than in Cape Town, doesn’t seem polluted.’
‘The emissions warm the atmosphere everywhere, it’s a joined-up thing. Everyone, everywhere needs to do their bit.’ I look at Trish as I say this. I want to know if I’m making sense this time.
Mark says, ‘People should work together more, we’re supposed to be tribal.’
I hope he didn’t see how saggy our tent was before we got the teachers to fix it.
‘Teams man, like with sports.’ Tim shoots Trish a look so hopeful I have to chew my thumb. Above us diluted sunlight pours through a plate-sized gap in the cloud. I’m not sure if it’s a reward or a warning. Tim’s freckles are like glitter where the light catches them. Trish reaches into her bag, pulls out her sunscreen and offers it to him.
It’s Mark who suggests we make a tepee. ‘Back home we used to build them and sleep in them.’
Amy is busy applying sunscreen to her tanned arms. ‘I didn’t know South Africa was a third-world country.’
Mark misses the joke, gives her a hard look. ‘We live in houses.’
Trish takes the sunscreen tube back. ‘We’re supposedly first-world, but we don’t have enough houses. People live in cars, garages, under bridges and stuff.’
‘Those baches at the camp are empty most of the time,’ Tim says.
‘Ghost houses.’ Amy looks at me. She wants me to remember the ruru from last night, but it’s the kōtare that’s haunting me. It means something, but exactly what is just out of my reach.
We leave Mark and Dion assembling the tepee and continue gathering wood. Mark knows what he’s doing. Lines up the dead branches so they’re flush, manages to work the alignment so the structure’s stable, breaks some sticks to fit. He uses his pocket knife to hack through dead flax leaves then weaves them between key pieces.
‘How did you learn to make these?’ He really does seem to know what he’s doing.
He doesn’t look up. ‘My dad’s an engineer, always building stuff from natural materials.’
I decide I like his accent. ‘Are you going to be an engineer?’
He glances at me then. ‘Probably. What about you?’
The gentle drop-shot he plays when I’d been expecting a backhand smash. ‘Dunno.’ It’s the best I can come up with.
‘You must have some idea?’
I take my finger out of my mouth. ‘I like drawing and design but no, I haven’t thought that far ahead.’ There is no way I’m sharing my dream with anyone yet. I don’t want to be laughed at. It’s still blurry and it kind of changes all the time and I haven’t worked out how I’ll do it but I hope to design eco-friendly houses. My idea is they’ll change colour depending on the light like the sky does. And they’ll be small because we don’t need big ones, in the future we won’t be buying lots of stuff. Also, they’ll be cheap and easy to build so everyone can have one and be able to put them up themselves if they want to, like a tent. Maybe a tent is a bad example. I’m going to call my thing Kōtare Designs, or Halcyon. That’s the part I’m most sure about. Kōtare are so quick, colourful and magical.
‘Let’s put some shells around it so it looks better,’ Amy says. There’s a pause before she adds, ‘So it looks even better than it already looks.’ She has a handful of white shells. She and Trish start arranging them around the base, while I pretend to look for periwinkles. Dion comes back with seaweed.
Amy wrinkles her nose. ‘It stinks!’
‘It’ll look good up the top, like dreadlocks.’ He arranges a pile of dark seaweed up the top. It does look cool.
Mark says, ‘We used to burn seaweed.’
‘Really? I thought people eat it.’ I sort of want to keep him talking.
‘Seaweed? I’m just about hungry enough to, but nuts and berries would be better.’
‘Scroggin.’
His eyebrows shoot up.
‘That’s what we call it,’ I say.
‘Good black-and-white pattern.’ He nods at the shells then looks at me. ‘Not a bad example of a joined-up thing. But if we want to do any more construction we’ll need to stand on them, then we’ll ruin the effect.’
‘I’m thinking about interior design.’
He squints. The cloud gap has closed on the sun but its shine persists.
‘What about architecture?’
I can feel heat in my face but nobody seems to notice. Amy decides it’s time to take a photo. We crowd around while she works out the angles. The guys have to crouch, especially Mark who is the tallest. Eventually Amy surrenders the phone to him on account of his reach. ‘I’m a selfie stick,’ he says and sort of smiles. It’s his way of saying he forgives Amy.
He does a great job on the composition, even manages some black-and-white ones of us all grinning like Jacinda, the tepee an arty blur behind.
‘Should we go back?’ Trish asks.
Amy checks her phone. ‘It’s nearly two. Maybe we should.’
‘We could walk the beach?’ Tim says. We’re packing up, but he’s checking his shorts pockets and now he looks like he’s unpacking.
‘Do you think we can get all the way back to camp that way?’ I like the thought of walking on the sand rather than crashing through the prickly forest. But I don’t know the area, none of us do.
‘Aren’t we supposed to be doing a loop?’ Amy says.
‘Clues. We’re supposed to use the map to find the clues.’ Trish is watching Tim unpack.
‘What are you talking about?’ Mark says.
‘When you were up at the car park you missed the briefing thing,’ Dion says. ‘We’re supposed to be doing a rogaine.’
‘Rogaine?’
‘Don’t you know orienteering? Same thing, you look for points on the map.’
‘I thought we were doing a hike.’ Mark runs a hand through his hair.
‘Where’s the map?’ Trish asks.
Everyone looks at Tim. He’s still searching his bag. ‘Yeah, about the map, I think I dropped it before lunch.’
‘Jesus, Tim!’ Amy says.
‘Bugger,’ Dion says. Then he shrugs. ‘We’ve come this far without it.’
‘We should retrace our steps,’ Trish says.
Retrace our steps. Yeah right. We didn’t see much the first-time round on account of our stupid sunglasses. If I could retrace my steps, I’d be back at the camp paying attention to the Magpie. I’d have the map out. I’d be studying it and working out a route. We would not be anywhere near the beach. If ever you want a lesson in the difference between theory and practice, just wander round in the bush for half an hour blindfolded. Take the blindfold off and see how you go finding your way back. That’s what we’re trying to do. Amy, Dion and me at any rate.
With six of us it should be easier, but really we have no idea and nobody wants to admit it.
‘We could look for the broken branches,’ Dion suggests.
‘Oh, you mean those sticks that kept poking me in the eye?’ Amy has taken her sunglasses off and put on sarcasm. I want to tell her this is a poor strategy but I have trouble of my own – I’ve accidentally grabbed hold of a bush that stings. I let out a yelp. ‘Something bit me!’
I stop and inspect my hand. There’s a line of white welts like giant pin pricks. The pain feels like a wasp sting.
Trish looks at my hand. ‘What was it?’
‘That bush.’ I point to the offending pale green shrub with prickly leaves.
‘Ongaonga, type of stinging nettle,’ she says.
Mark says, ‘Let’s go back to the beach.’
We’ve been bashing around in a circle. The shoreline’s nearby, although before we make it Amy gets tangled in a vine and has to be rescued by Dion. Following Mark, I find if I stay close there are less sticks. My hand throbs. I dip it in the water to cool it down.
‘Now what?’ Amy is brushing leaves out of her hair.
Tim and Dion wear expressions like when I beat them at squash. Kind of sheepish, kind of staunch. I turn to Mark and am disappointed when he shrugs.
It’s Trish who takes charge. ‘Let’s follow the beach back to camp before they send a search party.’
Amy looks like she’s about to say something grumpy but I shake my head at her.
‘Do you have coverage?’ Mark asks her.
She stares at him blankly for a moment then drops her pack to retrieve her phone. ‘No.’ She does have her bottle full of cordial. Trish and I get ours out too and share them around. Raro has never tasted so good. I think about my bag of mini-Snickers but don’t mention it. Something Dad said about always keeping some food for emergencies keeps me quiet, even as my stomach growls and my hand aches.
‘Let’s stick together eh.’
We walk down the shoreline. There’s no way to avoid wet feet. The salt stings our scratches. The shells that were glittering promises an hour ago have lost their lustre, we barely register them. Amy shows me a broken fingernail, then another one. Tim’s T-shirt is ripped at the side where he’s caught a branch and kept going. We’re hungry and generally over it. Resigned to a bit of a hike and having to explain to the teachers why we’re so late. A good pecking from the Magpie to look forward to. Tim probably thinks we’ll throw him under the bus, what with losing the map and the stupid bush bash. He’s likely right, although Trish will stick up for him.
