I watch her, but for the next month, she stays on her guard.
Then in geography, Mr. Gibbs starts talking about the weather in Britain,
and asks her if it is colder than Auckland, and her shoulders immediately
go stiff in fright. But then she loosens up, and I become fascinated by
the way she calls jumpers woollies, and without really meaning to she starts
talking about all the places she's been - Curaçao and the Panama
Canal - and I'm hopelessly sucked in.
I'm only beginning to come to terms with the stunning discovery that
the books I've been reading for years are not all set in New Zealand. A
few are set in America, a distant, irrelevant place, but most are set in
England. Here's Zelda, a real live piece of England right in my own back
yard - or nearly. She lives up on top of the hill in a big house rumoured
to have been owned by John Court (or was it George Court?).
I throw myself down next to her in the lunch bay outside the classroom,
and offer her a cheese and Marmite sandwich. Her eyes slide from side to
side, as she tries to figure out what to do. Finally she takes the sandwich
and holds her packet of sandwiches out to me to choose one. The crusts
are cut off, and I bite into one, amazed to find that it's got cucumber
in it and not much else. What sort of a sandwich is that?
"Hanging around the Pongo, Challinor?" asks Phillip Sullivan.
I look past Zelda and tell him to bloody piss off, catching the shock
on her face as she hears my language. Then suddenly she giggles. "I say,
well done," she says in her pluty accent. When we go inside I ask if I
can move my seat to sit next to her. Old Gibsy says no, of course, but
from then on, Zelda and I are inseparable.
If she's silent most of the time in class, at home she's a banshee,
racing through the house and yard, waving her mother's underwear around
her head and screaming "Brassiére!" Jeeze, don't the neighbours
complain? There's something about her wildness, her imagination, and the
fact that she's clearly beyond her parents control that both repels and
excites me. If dinner is ready, but Zelda isn't, her father blusters and
her mother pleads, but Zelda just says, "No Mummy, I shan't come now, stop
being such a bother." I'm unnerved by all this, but after one or two visits,
I get used to it. A couple of neighbour kids who venture over can 't handle
it, though, and pretty soon they stop showing up, so it's just Zelda and
me.
I'm something of a loner too, different from the other kids because
I live alone with my mother and one, much older brother no father, which
was unusual in those days. I have my games and fantasies, just as Zelda
does, but hers are so much more exotic than mine because she comes from
Britain, a small country but one with great power and a widespread empire.
She has also travelled the world, whereas I know only New Zealand, a country
so tiny and unimportant that it barely shows up at the bottom of the globe
in the school library.
A few times, Zelda comes to my house to play. She's quiet and polite
to my mother, but doesn't seem to know where to put herself. She stands
stiffly with her hands clasped in front of her stomach, and says nothing.
To her, the neat wooden box we live in allows no privacy, no escape from
convention, no room for fantasy and adventure. Our yard, a neatly mowed
square of lawn with four symmetrically placed fruit trees, has no bowers,
no vines, none of the lushness of hers. It has long since driven me out
into the creeks and blackberries, the estuary and the gravel pit, of the
surrounding countryside.
But I can't show Zelda my special places in the neighbourhood because
the first time she comes home with me, Zelda's mother calls mine, and begs
her to see that we stay in the yard. Zelda herself is so nervous about
the other children that she won't even walk home alone. To them, New Zealand
is the wilds, the Antipodes, a collection of hard-drinking grownups and
barefoot children and natives running wild through the gorse and toi-toi.
After the first few weeks, we play exclusively at Zelda's house, which
comes straight out of all those English storybooks I had been raised on,
tall and spooky looking. It is painted moss green, has leaded windows,
many bedrooms, a real dining room, a pantry, and what Zelda's mother calls
a scullery. It is as unlike our square state bungalow as is possible to
imagine and still be a house. The rooms smell of lavender. In winter, the
family lights log fires in what they call the "drawing" room and actually
bakes potatoes and apples in the coals. (I wonder why they never draw in
there.) Instead they play games together, like Scrabble and Mah Jong. No
adult has ever played Scrabble or Mah Jong with me in my entire life.
I have been fascinated by the house's history since long before Zelda
and her parents moved in. It is one of two large, three-storeyed, gabled
houses on Court Crescent, one to the left of Hobson Drive, and one to the
right (Zelda lived to in the one to the right). "Bloody haunted, they are,"
the kids would say, "by George Court and John Court. Buggers wander around
inside without their heads, trying to find them. Lotsa blood." The two
houses are marooned in an ocean of state bungalows, surrounded by large
trees, through which their upstairs lights beam out at night like lighthouse
lanterns.
Zelda is disappointed that I can't tell her whether she's living in
John's or George's house. Even my mother, who seems to know everything
about everything in the world, doesn't know. Zelda and I spend hours listening
for noises (there are plenty), and discussing what we'll do if we encounter
a headless businessman searching about in the basement or attic for his
missing body part.
In one of the bedrooms, a sliding panel in the wardrobe opens into a
secret room, beyond which a passage leads to a wardrobe in another bedroom.
Zelda and I push through the camphor-smelling furs left over from English
winters, and huddle together in the secret room, which has a dim yellow
bulb hanging from a cracked brown electrical wire, and a bench to sit on.
With the rafters creaking above us, shoulders pressed together, we read
to each other from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and Biggles in the
Baltic, and plan to sail together to the West Indies in a schooner. We
decide to become detectives and catch murderers not that there are
any murderers that we know of. We don't know about Pauline Parker and Juliet
Hulme, those Heavenly Creatures whose murderous relationship just a couple
of years before Zelda and I met so closely parallels our own - minus the
murder, of course.
In the weekends, we lie on the freshly mowed grass in her back yard,
dreaming, looking up at the sky. "When we finish school, let's go on a
trip down the Nile. We can wear white suits, and pith helmets, and Nubians
will wave palm trees at us from the banks," I say.
"No, let's go to India we can ride around Madras in rickshaws,
drink pink gins at the British Club, and go to Kashmir for the summers."
Zelda teaches me to speak her secret language, which she calls "Aygay."
You speak Aygay by inserting into every syllable of an English word the
sound "ayg." Aygit aygis aygeasaygy it is easy. Zelda almost has
me believing it's the language of the Pitcairn islanders.
Within an afternoon I am fluent. We speak in Aygay for hours, once speaking
nothing else for an entire school week, baffling and enraging the other
kids. We recite whole poems in it. If another kid looks like catching on,
we translate one of the few foreign phrases we know or rather one
of the foreign phrases Zelda knows, because I don't know any saygacrayge
blaygeur! (sacre bleur!) and throw it into our conversation to create
confusion.
Zelda's father, a tubby blonde man with the only mustache I have ever
seen, takes us driving on Sundays, racing up the Bombay Hills and turning
off the motor to let the Rover coast in neutral down the other side. "Freewheeling
at ninety," Zelda says, "jolly good, Pater." Zelda's control over her parents
is almost total, and she bestows her approval patronizingly. But Pater
smiles, and I don't understand why I feel so squirmy and uncomfortable
about it.
When the Rover isn't in the garage, we colonize it, poking through the
dusty tools left by prior owners, using the rubbish bin lids as cymbals,
and
chasing wetas and centipedes around with an axe. In spite of the fact that
I am too soft-hearted to kill so much as a spider or flea, and have to
catch them and free them outside, I boast in front of Pater about killing
and skinning rabbits, and he pales. Zelda giggles, and eggs me on.
For two years we are inseparable, and Mum doesn't seem to notice that
I'm gone most of the time at Zelda's, and when I'm home I'm dreaming my
way through the atlas. Since my earliest memories I've lost myself in English
books and popular poetry, first Enid Blyton, then the Biggles books, then
Arthur Ransome. Now I'm living in a world of Singapore Slings, Aygay, high
tea, Easter Island, the British Raj, stately Spanish galleons coming from
the isthmus, dipping through the waters by the palm green shores. I ignore
the teasing from the other kids.
Then, during my last few weeks in intermediate school, I get interested
in boys, which infuriates Zelda. One day Norman, a boy I think of as my
boyfriend because he pushed me into the Parnell Baths on a school trip,
tells me I "talk funny."
"That's coz she plays with that drongo Zelda all the time," says Lynnette
McKechnie. "She's picked up her bloody stuck-up Pommie accent." I know
this is true, because my mother and brother have remarked about it. But
it's one thing to have your family mention it, and something else to have
a boy you like comment on it. I've spent two years trying to sound as British
as I can, but now I try to remember at school to broaden my vowels and
say "Bonzer, mate" instead of "Ripping, old girl," or "Jolly good!"
Slowly at first, we start to drift apart. Instead of going up Hobson
Drive to Zelda's every day over the summer, I play more tennis. Zelda is
going to private high school with the other rich kids, and I'm going to
Tamaki College. For a while she calls me to go up to her house to play
after school. "Do come," she begs. "We can be the marauding Mongol hordes,
or stout Cortez, staring at the Pacific with eagle eye."
I go a few times, but after a while it's easy to find excuses. "I've
got too much homework," or "I'm going to a pash party at Elizabeth Dyer's."
What if the other kids saw me with her, Pommie Zelda that nobody likes?
What if some boy sees me, racing around her yard wearing her mother's underwear
on my head?
But in the weekend, when all the other kids are out with their families,
I sit reading in the back yard under the Golden Queen peach tree, and I
feel the pull of her. What's she doing without me, up there in our secret
room?
I stand up and look across the school yard, toward the foot of Hobson
Drive, remembering the joy and abandon we felt as we threw ourselves into
our fantasies. I feel as if a tide is sucking me toward her. All I have
to do is climb the hill, make a right turn, and there she'll be, waiting
for me with a yell of delight. Once or twice I go inside, and stand looking
at the phone. But then I get a crawling feeling down my spine, and disturbing
questions creep into my mind. Why do I like her so much? Am I really, deep
down inside, as strange as she is? I think about it a lot, but I never
call.
Eventually, I leave high school, go nursing, and my life moves on. Sometimes,
in my dreams, I see her sailing around the Horn in a four-master, or digging
for human fossils in Africa, or flying her own Gypsy Moth. Once I decide
to phone her, but there's no longer any listing for her family. Her father
has gone back to his business in England, I decide. I picture her on an
Arabian horse, velvet riding helmet and red jacket, jumping fences on the
heels of a pack of baying hounds.
Six years later, I am living in Gore in the South Island. I am playing
tennis and get talking to a young couple from Auckland, who lived at one
time in Court Crescent. They tell me that after high school, Zelda rarely
left her house. "Away with the fairies, that one," says the young man.
"They built this big fence around their yard, so nobody could see in. But
we could hear her from the street, singing sometimes, or screaming and
crying. I think her parents eventually put her in the loony bin at Avondale."
My tennis partner leaves, and I pack up my racquet, thinking about Zelda.
When I was twelve years old, Zelda and her house represented the antithesis
of my life - a life spent in the footpaths and back yards of a state-housing
district, with its Friday night fish and chips, worries about money, and
petty respectabilities. How could someone from such a house end up in a
mental hospital?
There was something special between us, two girls from opposite sides
of the world, sitting together in the dark of the secret room, perfectly
attuned. Without my friendship, Zelda became an exile, an oddity, isolated
in her story-book house. Her pieces of eight, her Visigoths, and her felucca
on the Nile had seduced her away from her loneliness once too often, and
she'd lost her way back.
As I lie on the freshly mowed grass next to the tennis courts, listening
to the pap of the balls and the sound of rushing feet, I wonder what would
have happened to Zelda if I had remained her friend. Would she have been
able to hold onto a core of reality or would I have lost my grasp,
and gone with her on longer and longer trips into her enticing world? I
try to remember the way it felt, sailing the Kon Tiki through the Pacific
of her garden. But no matter how hard I try, I can't conjure up even a
hint of the elation that overtook us like a fever as we rampaged through
her yard.
Thayge aygend.
