The Line

Charlie woke, and for a moment could not remember exactly where he was. Then he did. God yes. Mokau. The middle of nowhere.

Three young boys lay curled up like cats in the bed opposite, their legs and breaths tangled with the blankets. Charlie reached his hands up behind his head and made a higher pillow. He lay there and looked at the ceiling. It was buckled and paint peeled back as easily as orange skin. He thought his mother in London would have a fit if she could see him now. She'd more than likely take him to one side and say in her calm and infuriating way, 'Charlie, you're making a mistake.'

He could hear his heartbeat in the stillness of the morning telling him the same thing: Mis-take, mis-take, mis-take.

Careful not to disturb the children, Charlie sat up and pulled back the ragged curtains and let an inch of daylight in. The sun was not properly up, but even in this light he could see the sea below. He'd never seen sea like this before in his life. He wasn't used to beaches, except those where caravans of small waves pulled in, parked up briefly, and pulled out again. But here, the waves thundered with such ferocity the foam fled in terror of being sucked back to sea. Here the foam was not white but a slimy sickly brown. It piled up on jet-black sand. The kids yesterday had run for miles in it, looking like workers from an unkempt laundry. When it dried, it left slick yellow marks on your clothes and probably ruined your shoes.

Lisa had laughed. 'This is the West Coast, Charlie.'
But to Charlie, it might have been a different planet.

And Lisa a different girl.

Lisa, from the city, who worked in a city bank, had somehow turned into Leese of Mokau overnight. Leese, catch the ball! Leese, come and see! Leese, look at this! Her name had turned into a nasally whine which seeped under his skin.

In the short time they had been at the bach, he had watched her slit the throats of a dozen of flounder and dump them into hot fat. Fat, he thought. In Auckland she wouldn't eat butter. Here she mixed a dozen eggs with whitebait so fresh-caught they flipped out of the pan while they were cooking, white on one side, clear on the other. Here she wore borrowed trackpants and rubber boots that came up to her knees.

Here she laughed at him, and said, 'Oh Charlie,' often. They slept in single beds, in different rooms full of foreign bodies. She wouldn't sit on his knee but she'd sit on her father's, and hold hands with her mother like a six-year- old. Here she treated Charlie in the same kind but careless manner she did her nephews and nieces. You hungry? You warm enough?

Charlie sat up and put his feet to the lino. Perhaps, he thought, if I go out now I might catch her by herself. Turn her back into Lisa.

But as Charlie arrived in the kitchen with the first real rays of sun, Joe and Maia, Lisa's parents, were already at the table sharing tea from a single stained mug.

'Sleep well?'

'Sure,' said Charlie, though a little begrudgingly. 'Thanks.'

'Them boys didn't keep you awake too long I hope? What did you do in the end to shut them up - hit them on the head with a stick of wood?'

'No, ' said Charlie.

Instead, he had chosen to ignore them. In the middle of an endless chorus - charlie barley wheat and oats - he'd rolled over and feigned sleep. Possibly he had fallen asleep well before them, he'd felt tired out since he arrived.

'The beach can bugger a bloke,' said Joe, though the way he said it made it a compliment to the beach. Charlie nodded. Yes, he thought.

It had been Lisa's idea.

'Time to meet the whanau,' she'd told him. Lying beside her in her flat futon bed with one hand on her breast, it had been easy to agree.

'Whanau?'

'Oh, you immigrant,' she'd said moving closer. 'Family. My family.'

Lisa boasted that she was a sixty-fourth Maori, just enough to drop a racist joke dead in its tracks at a party. She had creamy white skin and black hair and she said she didn't give a damn what the rest of her was. Kiwi - a patriotic mix.

She told Charlie he was three-quarters English and a quarter Pom. She kissed him long and hard and said, 'I've never had blue blood in me before,' while Charlie held his breath and fell to bits.

But now he seemed to be losing sight of the things he knew about her, her lines were getting blurred. And his were coming off with the salt-spray. Perhaps, he thought, if she came through the door in her red silk kimono he would know exactly who she was. Who he was. Who they were. But Lisa padded into the kitchen wearing bare feet and someone's yellow T-shirt with a picture of a cow on the front. 'Hi, Miss Mokau,' Joe said.

'Hi, Dad.'

Lisa ruffled Charlie's hair as she wandered past, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

'Seen the sea this morning?'

Charlie obligingly looked out the window. The sand had blown in around the rotting timber and made a pile on the sill. But now that the sun was fully out, he could see beyond the breakers, way beyond the waves to the flat water at the back. It had amazed him yesterday and the day before, and now it amazed him again.

There was a line that ran parallel to the shore about a mile out, from one end of the beach to the other, as far as the eye could see. Or more accurately, Charlie thought, no line. The water on the far side was a perfect marine blue, while the water towards the shore was a thick, milky brown. When it rained, water swept the dirt down from the hills into the Mokau river, over the sand bar, and dragged it out to sea, so Lisa had told him.

A few miles North the Awakino River competed and managed a tie. Now the stretch between them ran filthy until it hit the open sea. Yet where the colours met was so smooth, so certain, so straight, it looked possible to row out there in a small boat and cleave them apart with a knife.

'Dad calls it Billy-tea and ink,' said Lisa. 'But I call it Bailey's and Aqua Vitae.'

Charlie watched her put her lips to Joe's stubbled cheek and he didn't like it. But she looked at Charlie sadly afterwards and said:

'Come on then. Let's walk the beach before breakfast.' It seemed a good idea, to be alone. Charlie found his shoes, and Lisa threw on old pants, dropped an oilskin over the top. But by then the bach was alive with kids - the boys from Charlie's room and the two girls who had slept with Marta and Lisa somewhere else in the house. He couldn't remember their names. Lisa's sister had had five children so close together, it was impossible for Charlie to view them as anything less than a team.

'The mokopunas,' Maia called them. It sounded fair enough.

But it was this raft of feet and noise that followed a disappointed Charlie down through the kikuyu grass at the edge of the dunes. Charlie looked around him with peevish eyes.

How lazy it was to make a hundred different paths through these dunes, he thought, cutting up the grass when a bit of foresight would have saved the growth. He guessed it went with the territory though. He looked around at cottages, whipped at and wasted by the weather. They could do with a paint. Some could do with pulling down. There was a water tank lying on its side, untidily rusting away, forgotten. Didn't anybody care?

'Come on,' yelled Lisa as she raced Charlie down and her hair flew out like gannet's wings behind her. The kids ran along the beach, kicking foam into castles while the wind blew it up into bridges and banks.

These kids and the sea held all the energy the older residents seemed to lack, thought Charlie. Still, he squeezed Lisa's hand when he caught her up. He felt better for his closeness to her, but still not happy. He stomped on each shell he saw and relished the crack as it broke.

'Don't,' Lisa said.

'Why not?'

Lisa bent and retrieved one he hadn't reached yet and held out what was left of it after being ground down by other elements. She slipped it over her finger.

'Look. It's a ring.'

She smiled so sweetly at him, that Charlie remembered how easily he'd fallen in love.

'Besides, ' she said. 'It's destructive. Wrecking things for the sake of it.'

Charlie said, more sharply than he'd meant to, 'They're only shells. They'll go out with the next tide anyway. They're not even whole.'

But Lisa dashed off with a handkerchief to catch a child and wipe the inevitable running nose. He watched her round up a renegade, and hold it while it wriggled, roll up a pants leg to keep it from dragging in the water.

They all had running noses, those kids, Charlie said to himself, in spite. And they're always soaking wet.

Wrecking things for the sake of it. How dare she tell him that.

He thought of the tracks that ruined the dunes. He thought of the cave the mokopunas had gouged into the bank yesterday. Of the fire they'd made from a mound of wood. Of the fish they had speared in the shallows - stabbing them deftly with a pointed stick, slinging them together with a rope through bare eye sockets.

Charlie threw the ring as far as it would go.

And it wasn't a ring, it was a broken shell.

Michael Hill had sold him the one Lisa was meant to have. It was inside the box in the soap bag with the shaving gear, still waiting for Charlie to find the right time to give it to her. He hadn't found it yet.

Leese called, 'I want breakfast.'

Lisa never ate breakfast.

As they came back up the way they'd come, Charlie watched her picking pink flowers with thick juicy stems. She took up four or five, disregarded them until she found one she liked.

Now she came to Charlie. 'I've got something for you.'

Charlie stood quietly as she bestowed her gift upon him. 'This is called an ice-plant,' she said, 'because it likes a lot of heat.'

She smiled at the mystery of it.

Charlie did not smile. Sap ran down his arm and bled inside his sleeve. He held the flower like a bloodied knife and looked for somewhere to put it while he wiped his hands, but there was nowhere except the sand.

Lisa's face lost its joy, and she stared at him so strangely, Charlie thought she had forgotten why she'd picked it. Then she wrenched the flower from him and planted it deep into her hair where the stickiness ran in a trickle towards her ear. She shoved Charlie's hands up inside her jacket and wiped them on her yellow shirt. She ran so fast from him, sand flew up and stuck to the wetness anyway.

Charlie walked back to the bach and washed under a tap. Then he sat on a step at the back door. He could feel the pump of his heart going, mis-take, mis-take, mis-take.

Someone called him in for a breakfast that was late enough to be lunch. Lisa was quiet but charitable. More bread Charlie?

In the afternoon, Marta enlisted his help in a game of cricket, which gave him something to do. He divided the family into batsmen and out-fielders and kept a note of the runs. But Marta insisted he adjust the tally, adding some for the smallest players, to make up for their lack of age and ability. It was hard to keep up with who deserved what, and in the end he gave the game away.

Charlie sat in the shade of a twisted Pohutukawa and wished Lisa would come. But it was Joe who brought him the beer. He slapped Charlie on the back.

'Well, done Old Chap. An Englishman knows his cricket, wot?'

Charlie contemplated the bottle label. Waikato Ale, and not even in a glass.

'I've never played cricket before in my life,' said Charlie though it wasn't true. It was a bald-faced lie. He couldn't understand why he'd said it.

'Well, neither have the rest of this lot,' said Joe. 'Which makes you about even.'

Joe said, as he stood up and flexed his back. 'We're putting down a hangi, we've already done the fire. Easiest way to feed a pile of people. Besides, you look like you could do with some real tucker. Doesn't that girl of mine feed you?'

The words snaked in Charlie's head.

Doesn't that girl of mine feed you?

As soon as he was gone, Charlie stalked off to where Lisa and her mother scrubbed potatoes into a bucket and rinsed them off in seawater. He dragged hard on his beer and watched from a distance as Joe raked flames and embers.

He wondered what Lisa's old man would think if he told him that it was usually he, Charlie, who did the cooking. Italian. He was very good with Italian, but he liked French as well. Lots of wine and lots of herbs. And the only rule he followed was quality, not quantity.

He saw the slabs of pumpkin laid out next to the kumera, Maia top-dressing everything with a fistful of salt. Lisa lifted a strand of hair out of her mother's eyes as if she were a fellow peasant in a field full of cotton. He didn't imagine anyone here would know parsley if it bit them on the arse.

Charlie watched the women wrap the food in preparation for being buried in a ditch of dirt. The kids ran around the hangi pit like wild Indians, whooping and yelling 'War!' He stood by as baskets of mutton and fish were lowered in together like coffins in a communal grave.

'This is how the Maori used to cook in the old days. Kai moana. You've got to hand it to them,' Marta told him.

Whatever that means, thought Charlie.

Lisa joined him now, cold despite the glowing coals. First she rubbed her hands together in an attempt to warm them up. Then in a gesture of friendliness, or comfort-seeking, Charlie wasn't sure which, she tucked one hand deep into the pocket of his jacket.

She said, 'We used to cook the whiteman up like this.'

The feeling he'd had on the beach descended upon Charlie. He felt wrapped up tight inside himself, like raw meat in a tin-foil skin. He shut his eyes and prayed that when he opened them, his Lisa and not Joe's Leese would be standing there beside him. That she'd be saying something he might recognise.

Lisa, who conquered racist statements at the cost of a good night out, who said such intelligent things as 'A seventh of your life is used up on Mondays', who counted a million dollars in Auckland every day. Lisa with a rose behind her ear and not a stalk from some stupid viscous plant.

Lisa, for whom a ring waited and not a torn up shell.

For a second, he almost had her, as she leaned her head into his shoulder and he felt the fall of her body against him. But when he brought her hand out of his pocket to hold it properly, he saw where a fish scale had stuck to a knuckle in a parody of a diamond. He picked it off and it dropped to the ground, and inside, he held himself tighter still.

The sun fell so fast Charlie felt a chill come down hard behind it. There was a sting in the wind and salt from the sea felt caked upon his lips.

The mokopunas ran around in bare feet.

Deliberately, Lisa put her hand back into his pocket and said:

'What kind of a baby do you think we'll make? I'm pregnant, Charlie.'

Charlie stared through the steam that hissed and rose from the hangi pit as wet sacks were laid across the rocks. He felt the oily heat. He raised his stinging eyes to the horizon and there it was - the line you couldn't see. But in the darkness it was still easy to see where brown met blue. You could row out there in a small boat and pull them apart with your bare hands.

Charlie watched the silhouette of Joe shovel dirt into the grave and close the hole. He gave no indication that he had heard what Lisa had said. He took her hand from his pocket and let it fall.

'I'm going tomorrow,' Charlie said.

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