Walkways

When I turned sixty I made some changes in my life. For a start, I stopped looking in the mirror, except when I had tweezers in my hand, and then I made sure I only looked at a square inch on my chin or between my brows. And I joined a Saturday afternoon walking club with women of my own age—women of a certain age—and explored some of the places I had been hearing about all my life but never seen. Red Rocks, for instance. And the Ataturk Memorial on the ridge above Tarakena Bay at the start of the Eastern Walkway. In fact, we have been covering the whole Walkway system. Before it is too late for us to manage the topography of Wellington. We want to climb all the hills and see all the views we can before we dwindle into old ladies. We are full of post-menopausal zest. It’s a girls only thing. Husbands are not allowed. Most of us do have husbands. I have a husband. We were the clever girls at school—no homecrafts or shorthand and typing for us—no, it was Latin and physics and John Donne, and it seems that the intellectual grind fitted us out for the capture and maintenance of a satisfactory husband. But every Saturday, when the weather is at all reasonable—because this is Wellington and the weather can be most unreasonable—we leave our husbands to their lawnmowers or squash racquets or whatever lights their fire, and become The Girls. We call ourselves The Girls. For one afternoon a week we are girls again, tousled by the wind, shouting cheerful nonsense to each other, and singing the songs we used to dance to before it all began.  

And I became a volunteer with an organisation called A Breath Of Fresh Air. We take shut-ins out for—yes—a breath of fresh air—on Sunday afternoons. In Wellington, what with the weather, the Waterfront or the flatter reaches of the Botanic Garden are just unthinkable quite often, so my stand-by is Te Papa. That’s very wheelchair-friendly and climate-controlled and endlessly interesting, what with the changing exhibitions and the gift shop and two places to stop off for a coffee and a chat. I prefer the cafe upstairs with the armchairs, but some of the shut-ins want to buy me afternoon tea and the place downstairs looks as if it might be cheaper. I don’t think it is though. Anyway, it is a nice outing when the southerly is blowing in and the rain is like sleet. I enjoy it most of the time. Though some of the shut-ins are on the morose side—I won’t say they are ungrateful—but some of them are definitely not bright sparks. I have to remind myself it must be very hard not to be able to get around easily, to depend on other people for such a simple thing—just an afternoon out—to feel the walls closing in on you. Sometimes I rush off after my “good deed” and walk and walk and go in and out of shops and climb Plimmer Steps and I feel so free. So, as you see, I really do get a lot out of it. Even when they are a gloomy guts.

Like Faye. She was new. A woman of about my own age, she was stuck in a wheelchair most of the time because of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I read up about it on Wikipedia before our first jaunt. It sounded just awful. It’s one of the mystery things that strikes out of nowhere, nobody seems to know why. I checked out the symptoms. What a list. Exhaustion, muscle twitching, joint pain, cognitive difficulties, sensitivity to light and sound and smells, nausea, depression and extreme weight gain or loss. Quite a cocktail. And that’s just a few of them. What a horror to have inflicted upon you.

Doug introduced me to Faye as she was being inched down out of the van on the lift. She looked impassively miserable, but then I wasn’t exactly on the top of the world myself, as we braced ourselves in the car park against the worst Wellington could throw at us. She stared at me with eyes like stones and pinched her thin lips together, coming slowly down to my eye level and then down below my gaze. She was gaunt and wizened, painfully emaciated. Extreme weight loss, I thought. And she flinched as the lift jolted into place on the asphalt. Ah, I thought. The poor thing.

“Faye is from London,” said Doug. “But she’s been out here in the colonies for quite a while. She came out by ship, so that tells you how long she has been in Kiwiland.”

Faye said nothing and looked off into the distance as the wind flailed her lank, ashen hair against her hollow cheeks.

“See you at four,” I shouted back at Doug, as I wheeled Faye quick-smart into the sanctuary of Te Papa’s foyer as smoothly as I could.

I parked her facing one of the benches and sat down with her, knee to knee. I did what I could to break the ice, ran her through all the options, asked her a few questions about what she might like to do—nothing too personal—and told her a bit about myself. She was listening to me, I could see the movement of thoughts behind her eyes. But she didn’t speak. I began to wonder if perhaps she couldn’t speak.

So I pushed her into the convenient lift—the ararewa—and pressed the button for the next floor up. I do like the way we have bilingual signage now. It was odd to begin with, going into a Wāhine instead of just a Ladies—it felt quite adventurous—but it is not as if one language is privileged. If you don’t know the Māori word, there it is in English as well. When I’ve retired from my job at the Ministry of Education—Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga—I am going to make a serious effort to learn Te Reo. People just say Te Reo. That means the language. Te Reo Māori. It’s quite the thing to do these days, and I just love the sound of it.

“Have you ever learnt Te Reo?” I ask Faye.

But she throws me a wild glance with a rolling eye over her shoulder, as if she doesn’t understand me.

Te Papa is a bit of a nuisance, the way the lift only goes from the foyer up to the first floor, and then you have to head to the right to get to the main bank of lifts.

“As we’re here,” I say, loudly so she can hear me and brightly, because it’s not going well and I tend to tense up and be “bright” if things get sticky. “As we’re here, we might as well have a look around the Māori collection and the Marae. Okay?”

But not a peep out of Faye. She stares in front of her, unmoving and unmoved, like a rock, or like patience on a monument. I am looking down at her head and can see the jagged parting zigzagging across her greasy scalp. So difficult to wash her hair. I can imagine.

But the lighting is very dim in this part of Te Papa as we approach the old Meeting House—I have no idea why it has to be so gloomy here—that I begin to think it is not a good idea. There is quite enough gloom to be going on with emanating from Faye. And there is that tricky baseboard thing at the front that you have to step over. Some of my shut-ins can walk a little, and I can hoist them out of their wheelchair and support them by their elbow around inside to look at the carved panels and rafters and feel the history, which is quite palpable. At least I find it is. The sense of life as it was lived. The mana. That’s a kind of spiritual power, amongst other things. Prestige, authority, charisma. But no. Not today. I don’t think Faye is in the mood to dwell on the past. So I wheel her briskly past the sign exhorting us to take our shoes off in the Wharenui please—Unuhia ō hū—and into the light of the modern meeting house with its fascinating reworking of the traditional style of carvings. We don’t have to take our shoes off. I don’t know why shoes are okay in here. Maybe some special dispensation for modern ways. And it’s just as well, because I am wearing my simple slip-on Kumfs but I can see Faye is laced into a kind of support boot. They look a bit like Doc Martens peeping out from under her rusty black skirt. How does she get them on? I wheel her around and make a few random comments about why I just love these contemporary embellishments. But again, no. Not a flicker from Faye. I face her towards the long windows at the far end that let all the available light in, and we both stare out at the storm which is raging to and fro across the harbour. Heavens, Wellington can turn it on when she wants to. The sea is a churning gun-metal grey and the sky is almost silver. Quite lovely. Then a roaring gust hammers at the windows and they make a sort of twanging noise as they shudder.

Faye looks away as if she is not impressed. She seems to be quite hard to impress. I decide to take her upstairs to the art. There is a new exhibition of modern works—We Are Unsuitable For Framing—which I want to see, and if that doesn’t tickle her fancy there is another set of rooms with paintings that are old friends of mine, from way back when I was a child and used to be taken to visit the Art Gallery up on the hill before Te Papa was built. Old friends like the Goldies. Everyone likes the Goldies, unless they are very very picky. I like them. It is quite amazing how realistic they are, every wrinkle on the back of a hand, and the moko—that’s the chin tattoo Māori dignitaries used to sport—just so … realistic.

My husband says—“Flat and wearisome technical brilliance. And what was he thinking? ‘A Noble Relic Of A Noble Race!’” And then he makes a noise very much like—pshaw!

But when you get past all that, Goldie could do it, and so many can’t.

Then as we ascend in the lift, I am struck with a sudden thought. Well, several thoughts, actually. First off, I must make a start at learning Te Reo. Everything is pointing that way. I have such a fascination with all things Māori, and one of the lessons sixty brings is—do it now. And second off, maybe because Faye isn’t a native born New Zealander, she is a bit underwhelmed by our heritage. Maybe it is something you have to be bred up to, you have to be born to it. You have to have the sound of it in your ears to feel the connection.

She was born in London, and here she is now on the other side of the world, lonely and alone, for whatever reason. She is far from everything she knew, the place she called home. And I know how you do return to the past as you age, the memories of your early days flood back. And she has so much time to sit and think.

I know there is a really lovely little painting of a view of a London street through a window. Perhaps she will like that.

But first, the modern art, just to give us a jolt of new thought.

I do love the rooms that contain art. Such an airy yet focused ambience, such smooth inviting floors. Such space. And light. I do a circuit of the rooms just to see if anything catches Faye’s attention. We positively whizz around as if we are doing laps because there are no other people here, not even a security guard. We are on our own. We have all the art to ourselves. I am dodging around the big installation—which I can’t work out yet, it will repay closer study—catching glimpses of bright, distraught, expressive works, and tiny, lopsided ceramic pieces and a big black and white photograph that seems to be soft porn. And Faye makes a noise. It’s like a grunt, as if someone has knocked the wind out of her.

“Do you see something you like?” I ask. I pause the chariot, slam on the brakes if you like.

And she begins to make this slow moaning noise. Well, it is more like a kind of keening. And then she gasps and says—“Oh oh oh oh oh.”

I think she is in pain. I panic. There is no one around, I fumble for my mobile in the bottom of my bag but keep coming up with packets of tissues and my key purse. I move around in front of her and kneel and look her in the face. Her whole expression is wild and lit up, but it doesn’t look like pain.

“Me,” she says. “That’s me.” Her voice is rusty like her black skirt, and dark and hoarse from lack of use, and her accent is not exactly Cockney but it is something like that. If I knew I would be able to say Clapham or Elephant and Castle, but I don’t know so I can’t say.

“You?” I ask. I am very confused.

She flaps her bony hands towards the big photograph of the young girl posing in her knickers.

“That’s you?”

I turn the wheelchair to face the work of art—the young, fresh girl with the smooth curve of her spine and shoulder and thigh, sitting with her back to us on a kind of divan with her legs drawn to the side. It is a really old picture, I can tell that now I look at it. Maybe because of the make-up on her hopeful, naive face, peek-a-boo over her shoulder. It’s that heavy make-up, eyebrows and lips, that places it in the fifties. And that Cleopatra bob of thick, dark hair framing her face.

“But it’s called Fifi,” I say, reading the label on the wall next to it.

“I was fifteen. So when he asked for my glamour name …”

Ah. Of course. Glamour shots. She was another one of those young girls who think “modelling” is the way up and out of wherever they were born. But how on earth did her picture come to be here? I read on. “Fiona Pardington rescued this image from a proof sheet she found in a rubbish skip in London in the 1990’s.”

“London,” gasps Faye. There is no d in the word. It sounds like Lunnon.

“Me!” she says. “Look at me.”

And I don’t know whether she means look at me now or look at me then. Perhaps she means both.

She is quite entranced, she stares and stares. And I stare at the picture too. There she is frozen in that time and place, in all her beauty, clasping her unfastened bra to her chest. Her cheap nylon knickers are lace-trimmed, and—such a resonant, such a pathetic detail—the label on the back seam is visible through the flimsy fabric. Then I see that the soles of her feet are dirty. And I am flooded with such a palpable apprehension of how she walked across the studio floor in her bare feet, and obediently climbed up onto the shabby, rumpled divan to pose. Hoping for so much, willing to risk so much. I can see in my mind’s eye just how sleazy that studio was. I can see the cluttered sink bench in the corner with its dirty cups and curdled bottle of milk and the electric jug with a frayed cord. I can see the harried, slippery eyes of the heavy-set, unshaven man behind the camera. I can imagine the kind of things he said to her, exhorting her to feign sexual heat.

“The image is reprinted unedited in large scale, featuring the stains, tears, and scratches on the original.” I am trying to control the bounding emotional energy that is surging through both of us. And a young female security guard has appeared and is eyeing us from middle distance. Maybe we have been noisy. I don’t remember. Maybe we have been spotted on a camera, being much too interested in a work of art. Too intent, too close.

“Yes, it’s pretty beat up. Like me.” And Faye starts laughing in whooping bursts.

There is something that looks like a cigarette burn on the area of those long-ago knickers—what colour were they? I am guessing pink—close to the incongruous label. But she is—she was—she still is—glorious.

The security guard is pursing her lips at us, so I throw her the kind of look that means—sorry, but you know the disabled can behave in inappropriate ways. I should have stood up to her in the middle of this most intimate and, yes, triumphant of epiphanies, but I am very easily cowed into backing off, taking the easy way out. Faye couldn’t have seen my betrayal, but still I feel … mean.

“Faye,” I say quietly, leaning forward and speaking close to her ear so no one else can hear, “let’s go and have a coffee and you can tell me the story. The whole story of your life.”

“The whole sad story.” She smiles back at me, across her shoulder, and I see in that smile the girl she used to be. I had believed her, but now I believe her.

“That’s me!” she shouts at the guard, who is standing with stern, folded arms, close to the exit as if she is suggesting we use the exit and use it now. “Once I was young. And pretty. And stupid.”

Jennifer Compton was born in New Zealand and lives in Melbourne. Her poetry and stories appear frequently in Quadrant.