You can’t believe you’re actually home. You go around the house touching things. You set the dinner table with candles and a cloth, even though it’s only chicken pasta. You let the dog lick your whole face, even your eyeballs, because he twisted himself into a pretzel when he saw you, yelping in disbelief. It’s six days since you left for Auckland on a trip meant only to last for three. It wound up being an epic, on par with The Odyssey, which is why you keep touching the cups, the bedding, the coffee pot.
The Friday evening flight home to Wellington had been pleasant, the drinks trolley rattling along the aisle thanks to the Koru Hour. You chose the sauvignon blanc — you even said it to the flight attendant with a French inflection. She murmured back, ‘Oh, the savvy?” making you feel a bit of a twat.
She slid a cardboard tray of cheese and crackers onto your tray table, and you remember settling back with your book thinking: this is the life. You’d just spent three nights in glammy Auckland at a smart hotel (with a pod coffeemaker and a terry-towelling bathrobe), enjoying the strangeness of the city’s tall palms, mangroves, and milky inlets. You’d eaten out a consecutive FOUR times — a personal record — browsed bookshops, motored across the harbour bridge, and shopped at the mighty IKEA, filling half your case with Scandi tea-towels.
You felt the molecules rearrange themselves inside the cabin in what felt like descent. And then, in well-rounded vowels, the senior flight attendant spoke into her eighties-style wall-phone, announcing that sea fog was blanketing the Wellington runway at that precise moment, making it almost invisible. The pilot would give it a crack, but there were no guarantees.
This was the inflection point, when your week bent into a new shape.
A ripple went around the cabin. The couple beside you leaned over to tell you they’d left Colombo on Wednesday and in a dreadful run of luck, still hadn’t made it home, thanks to delays in Sydney and Auckland. On the opposing aisle seat, a passenger took up the brace position with her eyes closed, anxiously tapping her temples. There was the squeal of landing gear descending, a series of thumps, and then a sharp bank upwards.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the pilot, “Regrettably we’re unable to land in Wellington this evening and have commenced our return to Auckland.”
The only thing they could offer was another run of the drinks trolley. Pinot and lager flowed freely as the plane drilled north through all weathers. You decided against a second drink but gladly took more cheese, as you knew it would be your dinner that evening.
You can excuse sea fog. It’s vapour after all, and nothing personal. Indeed you graciously told the pilot, who stood apologetically at the exit ramp, “You did the RIGHT THING,” but it had really been the savvy talking. Back in Auckland you were briefly homeless but managed to get your hotel room back, spending the rest of the evening on hold with the airline. You gave up at 11pm and lay scissoring your legs in bed, to loosen the tightly-tucked sheets.
At seven-thirty the next morning you’re told there are no flights available until late evening, so decide to fly home the next day, on Sunday. A whole spare day in Auckland! You meet Usha late that afternoon and zigzag the city, browsing the mall at Commercial Bay (you do well at Flo & Frankie. Who knew you’d suit that pink shirt with preposterous balloon sleeves? And thank goodness you do, because you’ve run out of clean tops).
Usha takes you to an exclusive rooftop bar where you’re considered for entry by three door staff, including a lift attendant, before being waved up. It has sweeping views of the waterfront but is full of lawyers, so you leave. The lift attendant suggests Pici on K-Road for dinner, so you take a bus and careen there; K Road is thronging with people, many dressed as toadstools for a street festival. A group of girls walk past, each holding the cap of a thin-stemmed, stuffed-toy mushroom like it’s the most ordinary thing to do on a Saturday night, and trust me — on K Road, there appears to be no normal.
Pici is packed, with a two-hour wait for tables. Usha calls an Uber while three police cars, a paddy wagon and an ambulance screech to a stop nearby. You tell your driver (smeared windows; a scrunched tissue in the backseat) that a major incident is unfolding around the corner and he waves his hand dismissively, saying, “Every Saturday.”
Auckland, giving and taking away! On this very street the evening before, you’d ordered sangria from a waitress with a flower spiked in her hair. It had arrived, chunky with ice and plummy slices of dehydrated fruit. How charming! How freezing all the bars were, how close your tables to all the toilets! Glamour always seemed close to grime in this thriving, indifferent, remarkable city.
You’d earlier stood for ages at the underground aquarium, gazing at egg-yolk jellyfish. They pulsed with some kind of wisdom, their tiny filaments waving, expecting nothing more than their due. Later, you slid on a conveyor belt inside a Perspex underwater tunnel and the stippled, brown-and-white underside of a stingray glided over your head like a giant circle of roti. A shark banked past and you noticed, not its teeth, but the dimple of its anus. This made you feel kindly towards it. The deep sea was unknowable as Auckland, vague with danger and mystery.
Eventually you leave again for the airport, trundling on the express bus, the storage units of Mt Roskill giving way to retail parks and airport services. The Mainfreight hangar flashes past, plastered with corporate quotes: The Only Thing Worse Than Losing Is Giving Up. You’d experienced both and honestly, neither were that bad; given the chance, you’d probably Give Up again.
Before pulling in at Domestic Departures, the bus swings past an airport office with a rotary shelf of ringbinders in its window. Ringbinders! This is oddly touching and might explain why Air NZ seems stumped by the challenge of getting you home to Wellington.
You blag your way into the Koru Lounge, thanks to your husband’s membership, and sit in a window watching a 737 refuel. Ten minutes before boarding, an announcement. Flights to Wellington might be delayed or disrupted, thanks to high winds down south. A ripple goes around the lounge. The couple beside you mock-grimaces and you grimace back, saying, “High winds and Wellington are the SAME THING.” You imagine going back to the hotel, lying on the soft, white bed and scissoring your legs for eternity. For now, you close your eyes and listen to the cow cockies behind you, talking with vigour over free cappuccino.
“Luxon has lost the people,” one says, and then, “Those other clowns”. Later, the sentence “Beef is doing well,” drifts over to you. “But it’s been a long time between drinks.”
It’s been a long time between newsletters! For this I blame my chaotic travel experience, but also the 48-Hour Film competition the weekend before last.
I have to tell you it was completely wholesome watching seven boys throw themselves at filmmaking while we threw cheese sticks, fruit juice and packet-mix cake at them (I was on Catering, as were two other Mums, one of whom baked the most fantastic cheesy pasta in a giant foil container; her secret was ham off the bone).
I didn’t realise until late Friday, when the competition was in swing (Teams must make a sub-five-minute film and submit it by Sunday evening; films must fit an assigned genre and feature a rumour; an interruption; a drawing or portrait), that filming would be happening in my house. This froze the blood in my veins but at the mid-point on Saturday, joined by three other Mums, four Dads and two grandmothers, with boys darting in and out of every room, swinging the boom, smacking shut the clapperboard, changing around the pictures on our walls, raiding my wardrobe and even filming the dog — I realised how happy it all made me. Our foley artist was ten years old. TEN!
Judging is next month but for now, here’s the poster for their epic, The Last Hotdog: one of hundreds of films, and dozens by school-age kids.
Behold, the top three things Australia has stolen from us:
Pavlova
Crowded House
Meg Mason
In a blown kiss to her fellow New Zealanders, though, Meg Mason’s latest novel has landed here before releasing elsewhere. Sorrow and Bliss was the most perfect contemporary novel I’ve read in forever, full of wit and feeling. Naturally, I swallowed Sophie, Standing There whole.
It didn’t win my heart, honestly, because it wasn’t quite the satire on the literary festival circuit that I’d hoped, and didn’t wholly satisfy emotionally. But what has won me over, lately? I’m a complete vinegar-tits these days.
I didn’t like Elizabeth Strout’s latest (Booker-listed!) and can’t face Ann Patchett. Barbara Kingsolver’s upcoming new one is apparently Fabergé-egg level dazzling, so maybe I’ll give that a crack in the manner of an Air NZ pilot, before returning to my first and greater love, non-fiction.
I still believe Mason is the most sparkling literary wit New Zealand has seen in yonks and I’ll read Sorrow and Bliss every year until I wheeze my last. I’ve bought Usha a copy of Sophie and am lending it to Ness this week.
In this week’s Listener, I spend a column imagining what triggered a passerby at my local shops to burst out, “What the hell, Karori?” I was so fortunate to have witnessed it.
Perhaps it was simply that the best part of her day had been and gone? That was shaving the bobbles off her jersey, if she were honest. It felt so satisfying, the shaver’s tiny motor vibrating as she guided it under her armpits. It had tugged at the wool as if with tiny hands, in the way of an elf or a storybook mouse doing housework, sending her into a lovely trance.
The new issue is out today! Hard to believe I’ve still got the job!
Thank you to the lovely new readers who’ve signed up in the past couple of weeks, including skulking new followers (I appreciate your commitment-phobia; you are my people). If you’d do me a good turn and click the heart, it will help other readers to find us. (Gary McCormick, you do not need to click the heart.)
💛 You did so well to make it this far, you doll!
Love, Leah
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