All Those For

By Angela Trolove

My father drives us south. We take the Inland Scenic Route, like every time. After Staverley my son drops off to sleep, a school journal pressed open under his rubbery hands.

We flank the Southern Alps, glide past waterlogged paddocks, and bridge churning rivers. Only a little cloud drifts in the gullies of the mountains. Cows wade in fields of kale, cordoned, break-fed. Willows are damned with old man’s beard. Matted sods and waste branches are beached on gravel in the run of the Orari. Silver birches supplicate. Among a flock of sheep, a horse noses blond grass.                                                                                            

At my side, my son coughs, pulling on a corner of his book. He drops his head to the other side of his car seat, sleeps on.            

We pass through Geraldine. Domain, squash club, chapel, tyre and auto services: driving through this town, you wouldn’t know about its remnant of ancient tōtara forest. Then again, for most of us, the whole of this country is only its beaten tracks. We know about the tōtara because we camped here once.           

At Temuka, my father parks.                                                                                                      

“Should we wake him up?” He looks in the back at Torch, his grandson. “No. We’ll get takeaways and leave him asleep. What would you like?”                                            

After he has closed the door firmly, and crossed the road, Torch comes to life. A yawn interrupts his discontent. He stretches against the seat in front. He grizzles, rubs his eyes, plays with his seatbelt buckle, and calls for me.                                                                                                                 

I unclip the lid of his lunchbox and pass it across.                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Entering Timaru, the traffic congests. Dad wonders whether there’s an accident ahead. We are slowed to a standstill, even here on the outskirts of the place.                                                                                 

“Look.” Torch points out his window.                                                                                               

“A plough,” I say.                                                                                                   

“There’s a hay rake,” Dad says, not unkindly.

We inch forwards.                                                                                    

Torch moans, so I point out a trailer.

“A trailer,” Dad confirms.

I take one of Torch’s carrot sticks for myself.  

“A lot of cars are turning right here. There must be a parallel road.”                                                            

Pause.

“We’re not moving far each time, are we.” Dad cuts the engine.                        

Our mandarin peels and apple cores are building up in a compartment of the car. A seagull flies north, free in the sky. It flies as the crow flies.

A man in overalls strides out to the end of his drive, sizes up the traffic jam, mouths a drawn out fuck. Turns and walks back to his shed.                                                                                                                   

“Twelve minutes, it’ll be one hour,” Dad says.                                                                                                                 

The car shudders to life. We pull forward, every other vehicle is indicating. 

My son yawns my name. He voices a siren for his toy loader.        

Dad turns up the radio. A reporter announces, “Traffic has built up in Canterbury.” I hush Torch. “Tractors coming into the city of Timaru have backed up traffic for six miles... Farmers are protesting increased regulation...”          

Dad groans as we realise our situation. “I mean, it’s okay to protest, but they should let the traffic through.”                                                                                                                                                   

And then we are out on the open road, and the road twins to a rail track. The turquoise Pacific Ocean hosts a strange amber haze, heavily lidded with a whole super-region: that laconic underbelly of cold, grey cloud. These coastal paddocks are unkempt, the walnut trees wretched. They alienate willows, with their early orange shoots.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

We hear tractors have arrived in Auckland too, and that farmers have brought along their dogs so as to stage a collective howl against ‘...increasing interference from the Government, unworkable regulations and unjustified costs.’      

All deciduous trees are, in winter, (in summer,) both the least and the most voluminous they can possibly be. They are collar bones and ribs. They sketch harshly on winter’s smudge and burr skies, its waterlogged heavens.

Clouds doze alongside the Hunter hills. Paddocks roll. Grass thickens, and forestry occurs neatly, infrequently.      

At two in the afternoon, cars begin to flick their headlights on.

Against flickering toitoi my son cradles my phone. He’s watching Krtek, his Czech cartoon, devotedly. The characters giggle and chirrup, a xylophone bandies a pretty tune, waves crash.                                                                                                                   

He looks up at me and sure enough, we’re up to the Konec credits.

In my aid, Dad jumps in to point out a big double shed, holding his hand aloft like a prophet, other hand on the wheel, and thankfully Torch is willing to buy into the distraction.

When, soon after, he’s shifting in his seat, I thrust out my hand, “There’s a blue digger up ahead of us. We’re in digger country now.”

Torch whines and claws at his face.                                                                                                                        

Dad breaks into a sleazy lullaby.       

Torch is silent, his fingers hooking his jaw down.

He arches his back and we harp on about the (truly) beautiful Waitaki.

The more reasonable Torch’s grizzling, the wilder our charade for tourism.                                                                                        

He plunges into a grievous pout, his forehead chiselled. I pick up his loader and wheel it up my jersey, make it flip onto Dad’s headrest, guide it across to the seat in front of Torch. He smiles, sweat beading his cheek just below his eye, his lashes dark, clumped. Wee heart.

With one bonus Krtek episode, we roll into Te Oha-a-Maru.

Leaving the Maheno petrol station.

“You sure you don’t want one, Ange?” My father pops another licorice allsort into his mouth. 

Torch eats one beautifully. It fits largely in his fingers, like a sandwich. He wets his allsort and licks his fingers as he goes.                                                                                               

Finishes.                                                                                              

“More please.”                                                                                       

“Nope,” I cut in “That’s enough, Sweetheart.”                                                                                                    

Pause.

“Poppa,” he tries.                                                                                                  

One last one, we agree.

Torch receives his new prize. “It’s a blue one!” He’s delighted.

It is pink.                                                                        

Robust arguments from the radio panellists. 

Jake—a scientist I once connected with—had been working for clean rivers for years. My belly turns for no one, I think on each swing of the hammock when we stop at the playground in Oamaru.

My country is in upheaval.                                                                                   

Come the Karitane turn-off we pass beneath hillsides of kanuka.                                                            

~

At a bar, that night.

My friend sips from her pint. She looks at her fingernails. We’re sat at a table in the room off from the bar, blocking the people on the couches behind us but not those on the stools in the window.

Between songs I think to say something to my friend, but between songs is not long, so she catches my eye and we smile. Good students.                                                                   

It was in this bar, the last time I ran into Jake.                                                                                                  

My fiancé was at the bar. I was perched on a stool against the window, in this room, and Jake comes in with his girlfriend.                                                                                                    

“Anny?” He smiles to see me.                     

 We compliment the act, a local soul singer.

I say, “This singer, she’s really good, hey? Her voice, wow. Powerful,”

“She’s incredible,” he replies.

You could say, we enthuse.

It’s all we’ve got: radiance.

I lived for days in that blissful, bodily self-consciousness of inhabiting someone’s peripheral vision.                                                                                                     

But tonight, at our table this friend and I sit up straight. My IPA is loosening me up. I sway. Softening into the band’s rhythm I am camouflaged. I stretch my neck, rock and dip.

A wiry dog flickers through the audience, a blue heeler.

“I need a whiskey for this last one,” the vocalist jokes.

“I’ll get you one.” An old man standing by the doorway goes unheard. But the band has already started again, and he doesn’t make for the bar.

                                                      ~

Clean rivers. One spokesperson for the protest argued that the regulations are a pain for the majority of farmers who are already doing the right thing, and will go unheeded by those who aren’t.      

It’s a disorienting thing, when the Right protests.            

To reiterate, we enthused over the singer, as—with my son—over the landscape. 

Enthusiasm is a way to be together in hard times, it’s a side route away from catastrophe.

What starts as distraction eventually relocates us. The diggers are wondrous, powerful, complex. The Orari is pummelling, alive, and also runnelling. Critically, it is yet swimmable. Following heavy rain, the Taieri—a river closer to my home—is not.           

I read about a colony of gulls, shitting E.coli. Four years ago, there was a one in ten chance of getting sick swimming at the bay where I lived and swam with my family last year. It doesn’t seem like much, but the argument is the trend. Upward, since farming intensified anywhere. One in ten is the canary in the mine.                                                                                                                                                                       

~                                          

In the lounge after dinner one evening. 

Torch draws intricate hoops: eyes, or tractor wheels.

My husband is lying on the floor, drowsy. I’m lying on my husband. An evening squash, we call it a squash.                                                                                                             

“My dear,” he says, “you have such a lovely body weight.”

The next morning, leaving the bank.                                                                                                                           

In 12th speed, I stand on my pedal for as long as I can balance before my body weight brings it down. I am just heavy enough to set out from scratch in a high gear on the flat. 

                                                     ~                                                                                                                                          

When we first met, Jake had recently stayed a week with a type who used to bike the 50km from Banks Peninsula to Ōtautahi. God, we feasted on that. Conservationist, didn’t own a car. Reforested howsoevermany acres.          

That night, Jake said he wasn’t looking forward to sleeping in his car. His knees would be cold, he claimed. 

After that summer I got a job in tourism on the Otago Peninsula. I used to cycle there. 17km. I’d leave my flat two hours before my shifts. Horses bristled in the mist, beads of dew, fog over the sea. Narrow margins. A glug of cold water, and ghosts to burn.     

I didn’t lose my appetite over my husband, when we met. I thought: here’s a relationship that could be sustainable. He however went for days on nothing.                                                    

I forced an icecream on us.

“Melon,” he whispered, “my favourite.” He was floating, tripping on love; he only swiped with his tongue like an animal, to show me his strength.                                                  

~

You know, the thrill of steering; foremost literally. And of morphing, shoulders locked, into the very frame of your bike. In winter, your knuckles gradually chill to the zero of metal. You’re prehensile. And there’s that insider courtesy:

“Coming through on your right.”                                                                                                                                   

On the cycle lane north, I scoot my head around, “Yip.”                                                                                                                    

“Thanks. Cheers.” A stranger and his companion stream ahead.                                                                                                                                      

That daylight volume of a cyclist’s voice, like room temperature, audible only in the brief tract as he passes me: it is no siren, no horn, has no horsepower. Yet we ride into the city abreast of those forces. Equals.                                 

Visiting my parents.

I go to fill a barrow with pine cones. Park it under the row of giant, gnarled pines, pitch down for this open whorl, that one. Stuck on a stick. Partly closed. I discriminate. Stepping around in the pine needles, back and forth to the barrow—resins gloss this, mould furs that—I turn and hear my jacket rip on the barbed wire. I’ve a fair barrow-full. It’s a picturesque work, this.                                                                                                                                                                                                  

In the garage.

“Helmet on.” I help Torch with the buckle.

“Sitting on your seat.” I buckle him in his trailer. Fit a blanket over his lap, seal the velcro cover.

“Mummy’s helmet,” he says.

I squeeze the front and rear lights on, and wheel us free of the firewood.

Swing my leg up and over, send us out into the mist.