Sky Dancer, page 1
Sky Dancer
Witi Ihimaera
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2003
Copyright © Witi Ihimaera 2003
The right of Witi Ihimaera to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.
Digital conversion by Pindar NZ
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
www.penguin.co.nz
ISBN 9781742288123
for Jessica Kiri
Part One
Chapter One
– 1 –
The sea stretched brilliant and glistening to the horizon. High in the sky, a seashag hovered. It saw a fleet of tiny boats, nets straining with fish, bobbing over the rich kahawai grounds. Further out, a pod of whales was making its way northwards.
The seashag was preparing to relinquish its patrol and seek its lunch from a shoal of minnows broiling below. Suddenly, there was a flash from the coast, the border between sea and land, at the seashag’s extreme right perimeter. Alert, the seashag circled towards the land, descending slowly to make a reconnaissance.
A beat-up Jeep shuddered around a bend and up to the top of the mountain road.
With a shiver of apprehension the seashag stalled, spilled air from its outstretched pinions, and dived. Like a stone it hurtled down to take a closer look. At the last moment it swerved, gliding parallel to the Jeep.
The hood was down. The seashag had a clear view. Two women. One older: the hen. The other younger: the chick. The young chick spotted the seashag. Its eyes grew wide and golden, and the seashag knew:
Yes. Yes.
The seashag opened its beak and uttered a gutteral hunting cry.
Kaa. Kaa.
Veering away, it sideslipped down the flanks of the mountain back to the sea.
– 2 –
The seashag had a greater effect on Cora than it did on Skylark.
“Oh my God,” she screamed. She put both hands up to her eyes and covered them. The trouble was she was also driving.
“Watch out,” Skylark yelled. She grabbed at the steering wheel and righted the Jeep. But Cora had also taken her high-heeled foot off the accelerator.
“Oh no you don’t,” Skylark said as the vehicle began to jerk to a stop, threatening to stall. “We haven’t nursed you all this way up the road for nothing.”
Quickly, she pushed her right leg over Cora’s body and stamped down onto the accelerator. With her left hand, she changed gear. Surprised into action, the Jeep leapt ahead with a roar, crested the hill and, in a last gasp of petrol fumes and smoke, died.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Cora said. “Did you see that crazy bird? It gave me such a fright, darting at us like that.”
“At least we made it to the top,” Skylark answered. “Otherwise, we would have rolled all the way back. From here we’ve got a chance.”
Behind, the road twisted and turned back through thick green forest. In front, the road snaked like a roller-coaster down and around the contours of the coast. Tuapa, the small town Skylark and her mother were heading for, was just visible in the distance. The rest was sea, unrolling like a bolt of blue cloth to the horizon.
Skylark opened the bonnet and found the problem almost at once. “I’m going to kill that Zac,” she said. A faulty petrol pump — or, rather, Zac’s faulty replacement.
“Can I help you, honey?”
Skylark looked up, shaded her eyes against the sun, and saw that her mother was picking wild daisies further down the road. This was the way Cora always dealt with her problems: if you went wandering in the flowers long enough, by the time you returned somebody, usually a man, had made it all better.
“No, I’ve found what’s wrong,” Skylark answered — and her mother began sauntering back.
“Can we make it to Tuapa?” she called.
“Yes,” Skylark said, slamming down the bonnet. “I’ll just put the Jeep into neutral and we’ll freewheel into town and —”
Too late, Skylark saw that Cora, trying to make amends, was already behind the wheel. Which was how, halfway down the mountain road, Cora had to overtake a big grader and, swinging widely, almost ran down two old Maori women who had chosen that moment to cross the road.
“Oh no,” Skylark yelled as Cora, yet again, took her hands off the wheel, screamed and covered her eyes.
Skylark grabbed the wheel and pulled hard on it. Rigid with fright, she watched as the two women slid from the left side of the windscreen to the right. She saw two shocked faces, hair covered with scarves, dresses of a formless black. The larger of the two women pushed the smaller woman with a yell so that she would fall out of the Jeep’s path.
Two bends down Cora asked, “Did we hit them?”
“No,” Skylark said. “One of the women looked really angry, though. She was shaking a fist at us.”
“We should go back.”
“How can we? We’ve got no power and, anyway, it’s too late.”
“Well they should have been using a pedestrian crossing,” Cora said. She reached in the glovebox for a cigarette and lit it.
“Mum,” Skylark asked after a while, “do you think you could take the steering wheel again?” With Cora, you had to keep on joining the dots.
“The wheel? Oh! Yes, of course.”
Puffing nervously, but still shaken, Cora guided the Jeep into Tuapa.
– 3 –
“Honey, please don’t tell me that this is where we’re staying,” Cora said.
The main street led down to the small port. On one side was a pub, a fish and chip shop, a takeaway bar, a video rental shop and, interestingly, a massage parlour advertising in Korean and Japanese. On the other side of the street was another pub, a hall which looked like it offered Housie during the week and showed action and sci-fi movies during the weekends, a corner supermarket which also sold Lotto tickets and, next to it, an all-night diner. The diner had a couple of cars and a motorbike parked outside.
“Look on the bright side,” Skylark said. “It’s off season, so it’s not costing us too much to stay here and —” she pointed to the all-night diner — “at least there are some signs of a pulse.”
“You told me it would be a seaside resort,” Cora wailed.
“There really wasn’t that much time to organise this holiday,” Skylark said. “I left it up to the travel agent.”
“You mean we’ll be stuck here for a week? In a place which doesn’t look like it even has a mall?”
“Mum, you’re such a fashionista.” Skylark sighed as she stepped down from the Jeep. Just her luck — the garage, like a mirage, was down the other end of the street.
“Do you want to wait here?” she asked. “I’ll get us a tow truck.”
“Definitely not,” Cora answered. “Who knows what might happen to a single woman in a place like this? One moment.” She took out a lipstick to freshen her lips and flicked her fingers through her hair to give it sass and sex appeal. “How do I look, honey?”
An icecream on high heels wouldn’t have looked any better. “Like the best thing to ever hit this town,” Skylark said, knowing it was just the kind of soap-opera comment her mother liked. Which was why, when mother and daughter walked into the Tuapa Garage, Lucas, the owner, was immediately smitten.
“You’ve broken down, Miss?” he asked, all solicitous, as if Cora had stubbed a tiny red-painted toe. “I’ll get Arnie to tow your Jeep in … Hey, Schwartzenegger!” he shouted, turning to the far end of the garage.
Arnie, the apprentice mechanic, did, in fact, look like a Maori version of Big Arnie himself. The hair was American crewcut. The face was handsome in a pretty-boy kind of way. The body was unbelievable. Even in his overalls, Arnie was a sight to see.
“The little lady’s Jeep is just up the street,” Lucas told him. “Bring it back here and fix it, okay? As for me and her —” He was suddenly painfully aware of the Playboy centrefolds plastered on the walls — “we’ll be at the diner. Come and get us when you’re finished.”
“Hel-lo?” Skylark said. “Would you mind if I joined you?”
But Lucas wasn’t listening. He motioned to the centrefolds.
“Arnie’s,” he told Cora.
Trailing after her mother and Lucas, Skylark took her irritation out on the disconsolate mechanic.
“If you think I don’t know what’s wrong with the Jeep, I do,” she hissed. “It’s the petrol pump.”
Arnie gave her a dirty look but that didn’t faze her one bit.
“Don’t try to overcharge us either,” she added.
The diner turned out to be a surprise. Clean, bright, with sparkling formica tables, plastic tablecloths and pretty little plastic roses in Marmite jars. Along one wall was a bar. On the other side of the bar a waitress — the peroxided Flora Cornish, who was fifty-nine but had been forty for the past twenty years — went about the business of dispensing very bad coffee to patrons who wouldn’t have known the difference.
“Oh, how pretty,” Cora cried as she picked up a handful of roses and sniffed them.
Flora Cornish looked at Cora, wondering what kind of dingbat she was, and her look changed into recognition.
“Here it comes,” Skylark sighed.
“I know you,” Flora screamed. “You’re Cora Edwards. You used to be the weather girl on television, didn’t you, love!”
The diner’s other patrons stared at Cora, struggling to make the connection between a girl who had once been a nightly fixture on the six o’clock news and the older woman who stood before them. After all, her heyday had been five years ago.
“See?” Flora Cornish said, rummaging behind the bar and waving a dogeared Woman’s Weekly. There, in all her radiant youthfulness, was a colour photograph of Cora accepting the award for Television Weather Girl of the Year.
“It’s true!” Skylark heard Lucas gasp. She saw the look on his face as he realised, hey, this was the best thing to have happened to him in years. He’d never been seen with, let alone talked to, a celebrity. His mind was already turning to romantic possibilities.
Meantime, of course, Flora Cornish just had to ring everybody else in the street to come and say hello to Cora Edwards.
“Time to bail out,” Skylark said to herself.
Skylark stepped outside the diner and headed down main street to look at the port. Part way along, she came to a war memorial with a marble soldier pointing down a road that ran off to the left.
What was there to lose?
“Thanks,” Skylark told the soldier. She followed his direction and it was like ripping through an old hoarding and finding another town behind the billboard.
Clearly, Tuapa was more substantial than at first sight. Not so long ago the main industry had been forestry, and workers and their families had flocked to the town. Now all that was left of their time here was the derelict railway station and yards. On the other side of the road the prospect was more encouraging. Immediately ahead was a medical centre and a primary school — two prefabricated boxes sitting in the middle of a paddock. Next to the primary school was a large college and technical training institute whose students, Skylark supposed, were bussed in from the surrounding district. Outside the college was a big poster:
BYE BYE BIRDIE
The All New American Musical
College auditorium
This Saturday 1 Performance Only
A shadow flicked over Skylark’s head. She looked up. A skua, casting the serrated edges of its wings across the sun. Then another. And another.
There she is. The chick. There.
Skylark followed a circular road and happened on the port. It too was bigger than she had expected: coldstores, dry docking area, marine supply outlets and what looked like a fish packing plant; all evidence that fishing had supplanted forestry and stopped the town from becoming completely comatose.
The breakwater jutted out like a wishbone into the sea. Skylark decided to walk the length. One or two boats were still at anchor. The rest of the fishing fleet were out on the ocean and would not return until nightfall.
“Kia ora, kotiro!” A Maori fisherman, in Swanndri and woollen balaclava, called out from his boat. Too cross to reply, Skylark walked past him, right to the end of the breakwater. The waves had made the footing slippery. It would be easy to fall.
Now, the skuas cried. Now.
One among them closed its wings. Skylark heard a warning yell: “Watch out!” Surprised, she took a step backward.
The skua dropped like a stone.
– 4 –
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The voice seemed to come out of darkness. Skylark cleared her head. Worried faces were looking down at her.
“When that skua hit her, she almost went over the side. Blood was coming out of her hair. I reached her just in time. Another second and she might have fallen into the sea.”
Skylark sat up. “Where am I?” she asked.
She was back at the diner. Somebody had put a blanket around her. She looked from one face to the other. The man from the garage. The waitress. The Maori fisherman.
“Oh my baby,” Cora screamed. “My baby, she’s alive.”
Skylark’s head cleared. She saw her mother wringing her hands, reprising her role as a distraught parent on Shortland Street. “I’m definitely back on the planet,” Skylark said to nobody in particular.
“You were attacked by a bird,” Cora explained. “This lovely gentleman —” she pointed out the Maori fisherman — “he saved you.”
“Call me Mitch,” the man said, smiling. “Mitch Mahana.”
“You could have died!” Cora wailed, as usual focusing all the attention on herself. Lucas took the opportunity to offer his arms and Cora’s tears dripped down his hairy chest. He was leaning into her as if he owned her already.
“There, there, baby,” he said. Skylark winced. Mum was at least ten years older than he was. What was this power she had over younger men?
Cora looked up at Lucas and then at the audience in the diner, as if she didn’t know where she was. “It’s been such a long day,” she said. “And now this. You’ve all been so kind. But I think it’s time Skylark and I booked into our lodge. Once we get there we’ll be all right, won’t we, honey?”
“Lodge?” Flora Cornish asked. “There’s no lodge around here. Only the motel at the crossroads that the locals call the Passion Pit, and the hotel across the road which rents rooms by the hour.”
“But Skylark’s travel agent,” Cora said, “made the reservation. Here —”
Flora pursed her lips. “Ah,” she said. “You’re talking about the old bach that Bella and Hoki rent out up the Manu Valley.”
“Manu Valley?” Skylark repeated. She had a terrible feeling about this.
“I’ll show you,” Mitch Mahana said. He led Cora, Skylark, and the various hangers-on outside. “That’s it. Up there.”
Towering over Tuapa were two snow-capped peaks. Where they intersected was a dark, lush valley, the colour of greenstone. It was breathtaking, like the body of a great lustrous bird with wings spreading over the peaks. At that moment, sunlight flashed on two eyes of the bird.
“That’s the reflection off the windows of Bella and Hoki’s place,” Flora Cornish explained. “The bach is just below theirs.”
“But it’s supposed to have views across the beach to the sea,” Cora said.
“It surely has!” Mitch laughed. “Up there you can see to the end of forever. It’s a front porch view on the rest of the world.”
“How come it’s so green?” Skylark asked. Not that she really wanted to know.
“It’s Maori land,” Lucas answered. “When the forestry came here everybody sold up and made a profit. Only the Maoris held out. People say that Manu Valley is one of the few places in New Zealand where you can see virgin forest as it once was. It’s owned by Bella and Hoki now.” He paused, and then turned to Cora. “Listen,” Lucas said. “I can see you’re distressed. There’s no reason for you to wait around for Arnie to finish the repairs on your Jeep. By that time it will be too dark. He can deliver it to you tomorrow.”
“But what can I do to repay you?” Cora asked.
Skylark gave her mother a sarcastic glance. “Lucas will think of something,” she said.
