The Woman with all the Time

When to stand and when to sit

Dear friends,

Firstly, thank you for your warm comments about ‘The Worst Funeral’ - I worried it was too dark for the end of the year, but it turns out it wasn’t. In writing and in life if I remember to keep the lights on, the darkness is bearable. Thanks also to those who’ve pledged support by subscribing. You now have access to ‘The Velvet Room’ (my VIP area for special creative happenings) - rest assured you are keeping me in writing pens and helping me keep buoyed. For those of you who haven’t yet upgraded, once you have, in a few days’ time you’ll gain access to my exclusively curated photo-montage pilgrimage to the home of Katherine Mansfield, the short story writer who grew up in Wellington, NZ. You can show your continuing support with just a few pounds (or bucks) a month here:

So today I am writing to you from the bedroom of my good friends Elaine and Charlotte in Wellington. It’s Tuesday morning. Someone is drilling outside in the bright sunshine and there’s a strong wind drying my swimsuit on the washing line. In London it is Monday evening. I imagine myself, post dinner, curled on the sofa in my jim jams. I am enjoying this notion of stretched time between the me here and you there, this ‘us of time’ created. I’m thirteen hours ahead and as your day follows mine, they merge creating a thrity-seven hour long day.

It feels like an age since I left home. And like all travels, the experience has been so much more than merely a series of picture postcard views, like this one of our walk through the Abel Tasman National Park:

Weeks ago, when we arrived off the plane from Sydney, Australia into New Zealand, we immediately came down with Covid. We had just settled in at the Te Horo beach house belonging to Elaine and her wife Charlotte. I woke with a razor sharp sore throat and quickly developed a cough. Min tested positive with a strong line and me with just a hint of red.

In the middle of the following night my breathing became laboured. My lungs began to rattle and rasp. The left lung became rather like an old block accordian. During those long dark hours awake, I got to thinking about how serious Covid is. My imagination annoyingly reproduced a miserable image of Boris Johnson in hospital, sweaty, that blonde nest of hair all over the place, rolled onto his stomach trying to breathe. While the virus was actively attacking my lungs, enough to create piercing pains, I wondered if he truly had had the capacity to think about those who couldn’t catch their breath, only to finally lose it. It is frightening to think how we are governed by the heartless. How this ungovernable man had all the power in his hands.

In the morning. I found out that Elaine had lain awake worrying about me. This touched me so much. She has three children to care for and still she found room for me. Born two days before me in the same year, there’s always been a psychic shorthand between us. In this land of open skies, flightless birds and endless beaches, she has blossomed. Charlotte is a big part of this, her fierce love for Elaine something to learn from. This is something I will bring home, a lack of fear to show love explicitly. Not hide behind a joke, which springs from the fear of sounding insincere. My upbringing was full of reserve, I was often “too much”. One day can I say ‘I LOVE YOU’ without balking inside?

When I admitted to my friends I was feeling pretty ropey, and just a little bit scared, Charlotte arranged for me to speak with a doctor over the phone. In the night I had imagined posting an Instagram update of me in a hospital bed, dressed in a backless gown and attached to lifesaving tubes, and how I would get lots of comments. Then I thought how sad, how obvious my desire was, for this odd kind of heart-emoji attention, as if I needed more than I have already. I thought of the writer Hanif Kureishi and the tragic fall which paraysed him. The bravery of his truth. My imagination was failing to be, well, imaginative. Frida Kahlo would have got out her paintbrush, Julia Darling her notebook and pen. She would have written a poem like this one called ‘Two Lighthouses’:

I would like us to live like two lighthouses
at the mouth of a river, each with her own lamp.

We could see each other across the water,
which would be dangerous, and uncrossable.

I could watch your shape, your warm shadow,
moving in the upper rooms. We would have jokes.

Jokes that were only ours, signs and secrets,
flares on birthdays, a rocket at Christmas.

Clouds would be cities, we would look for omens,
and learn the impossible language of birds.

We would meet, of course, in cinemas, cafés,
but then, we would return to our towers,

knowing the other was the light on the water,
a beam of alignment. It would never be broken.

---

The doctor’s accent was Northern Irish and she nudged me into asking for what medicine I needed. It was clear that I was not going to be hospitalised, it wasn't even close to being an emergency. She knew I didn’t want to go to the medical centre, and she didn’t want me infecting anyone, so I was prescribed steroids and antibiotics. Much to my surprise, the prescription was free - I got a hundred ibuprofen and paracentamol chucked in too - with a small fee for the consultation.

We quarantined for a few days while Elaine and Char fed us grilled vegetables, bought us fresh juices and fetched medecines. We sat at a distance in the open air, feverishly one night I told odd funny snippets of stories, speaking ten to the dozen, willing myself better.

The NZ rules are, after testing positive for five days, you can go back to work and re-socialise. So, on day five, we allowed ourselves a walk to the The Bus Stop Café across the road. The owner keeps alpacas. Elaine had already told me about Miriam, who is pictured above. She recently gave birth to Archie. When the male alpaca, Achilles, was brought into the pen to mate with the females, Miriam had been the only one to sit down. The females voted with their legs. The male ‘cushed’ Miriam. She knew it was her time. Looking at her long eyelashes, her prominent teeth, the frill of hair on her head, her ‘normal’ face reminded me of the strange face of sex. Although the most unfriendly of the lot, she struck me as the most beautiful because of her strapping posture. I think of all the holiday pictures of me with my double chin and wide, winter bottom. I think how much of what I deem as unnatractive I will not show, but one day I will look back on and see as well built, maybe sexy too.

It is a rainy day in Napier when we finally find a chemist selling some remaining Covid tests. If we are negative we can restart our holiday with our friends. I’ll be able to breathe normally and hug them.

We are sheltering beneath a covered picnic area, tests at the ready when behind us is a glimpse of pink. A woman is sitting alone and she takes off her shoes. The rain becomes London heavy. Trapping us, the humidity plays with my lungs so I have to use my inhaler. The sail boats at sea have let down their sails. The woman then rustles for some time in her bag, and I hope she is packing up. The hairs on my neck are aware of her; I sense she sees the Covid test box. Min puts it back in her rucksack.

‘Not now…’ Min says. ‘It is wrong here, in front of her.’

We wait. We write postcards; one to Mum, simple, thin stories about how a crab pincered my toe in the sea at Te Horo. I think of the old postcard adage ‘wish you were here’ - how it means more now she lives with dementia.

The woman in pink is putting on her shoes. I nudge Min, think this is our chance for an all clear future. But she sits back down, as if she knows we are waiting to be alone. The light changes, it opens up. Elaine said it wouldn’t last, this rain. ‘Not here,’ she said. And even these two words are enough for me to feel sad, how soon, they will still be here in New Zealand and I won’t.

A child slaps up an down in her ‘togs’ - her round belly pushing at her swimsuit. The woman stands - brings out a shoulder wrap. I watch all I can of her without being obvious. She knows I want her out of ‘our’ rain shelter, I’m sure of it. People pretend there’s no atmosphere, but somehow she has joined us. She clearly has no place she needs to be. Wrapping herself up, the rain has now completely stopped, yet she sits back down. We are defeated. She has all the time in the world.

Chest wheezing, we move to a local café hiding the box from the regulars outside drinking wine. Min goes to the toilet with the box in her bag.

‘Looking good,’ she says when she returns. She flips open her glasses case revealing the test which shows one line against the C. ‘If you go into the accessible bathroom, there’s shelving options.’

In the wide loo, I unpack the gear. Foraging like a drug addict, feeling watched though alone. All the liquid drops into the correct spot. A line of pink travels up the stick. Slowly it darkens the C. No second line.

The rain starts again. We decide to go to the Globe Theatrette, a sweet little cinema overlooking the sea in Ahuriri, to watch ‘One Life’ with Anthony Hopkins. I’ll have to suck a series of sweets throughout, so I don’t cough.

While Min goes and books the tickets, a man sits down at the next table. He orders a glass of pink fizz. Once this would have been the nod for me to order a glass of wine too.

He asks me where I’m from. London, I say. He tells me his father was from Liverpool. Then he says how his wife died in his arms just eight weeks ago. So every afternoon he comes and has a drink while “I repair myself”.

When Min and I sit in the dark of the cinema, surrounded by the retired community of Napier, I don’t tell her the whole conversation with the man. I just tell her the part about how he said he was proud of being English. How he said us English have strong blood and are resilient. I am not used to people being proud of Englishness without a far-right undertone. I must correct this, I think.

Somehow there’s room for more pride in my own history and land. I must stand up for this. I must create it from what I celebrate. When I told Charlotte and Elaine about the old man who had lost his wife, and my desire to claim a sense of pride from my own homeland and my found tribe, they told me of the Māori word ‘whakapapa’. In English, it translates to ‘place in layers’ or ‘create a foundation’. In Māori it is an individual’s history which places Māori in amongst their genealogy, linking them to their ancestors, their gods and their tribes. I can’t help but sense I am smack bang in the process of seeing where I land.

So good to touch base again.

Write soon,

Karen xxx

P.S. If you enjoy my writing please do consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I am quite a slow writer, and these letters do take a fair bit of composition. Who knows, one day they might form a collection. You’ll have access to ‘The Velvet Room’ which features readings and stories for bedtime, always presented in an artistic and entertaining way. Thank you for reading…

xxx