33. Touching Distance
When they were younger, they used to stay at his family’s bach in Kaupokonui. His father said it was painted like a Speight’s label – a warm orange on the inside, a faded yellow exterior, and a dark blue balustrade along the deck. They would play imaginary games, watch crackly video tapes, and sleep back to back on foam mattresses pushed together on the lounge room floor. They wouldn’t talk about this at school.
Reihana was more boyish than the other girls. It was bare feet, scraped knees, salt spray, and cicadas. And back then it was always summer. They’d cut their feet on mussel shells, master driftwood architecture, and circle like a tennis ball at the end of a rope, spinning giddy into backyard daydreams. On those long nights they’d stay up watching the rugby with his father, eating cheese toasties and warming their hands on mugs of Milo. During the day, they would venture into the sand dunes that rose above the river, out of the grasp of grown-ups and into their own world. They would run across the bridge, scamper up the dunes, and spend the day exploring the sand-swept landscape that seemed to stretch forever. His father used to call them the bad lands. Something from another world. Just sand and sun and their shared imagination.
One day, while exploring, they stumbled across an old run-down cemetery. It was small, with only ten or so gravestones, encircled by a fence of chipped white wood and wire mesh; bottles and cans banging against the netting. It sat on a patch of sandy grass at the edge of a cliff looking westward over the ocean. It was bizarre, they thought, and kind of creepy – a lone cemetery up there in the middle of nothing, in a dune they had explored many times before. They washed their hands in a plastic bucket that had been left at the foot of the fence, the water green with algae. The wire gate creaked on its rusted hinges. They looked at each other and went in.
It was an old imperial cemetery. The graves all belonged to British soldiers that had died during the Land Wars; epitaphs that read: here lies sergeant so and so. Killed by Māori savages. It was clear the cemetery had been forgotten because the graves were falling apart. Most of the inscriptions were illegible, and the headstones were overgrown with vines and kikuyu. Reihana said that they best not touch anything. They walked around the small fenced-off cemetery, watching where they stepped and reading what they could. It didn’t feel like a game anymore. The emblems of death were real. Reihana nudged him on the arm. I think we should go.
As they went to leave they heard a noise. It was coming from a hedge of boxthorn on the far side of the cemetery. They stood there behind the arc of a headstone and listened. It wasn’t the cans or the bottles or the sound of the gate. It was something different. Almost human. They looked at each other, and Reihana started moving slowly towards where the sound was coming from. She climbed carefully over the fence and began walking towards the sound. He called for her to stop.
She turned, looked at him, turned back to the hedge, and carried on walking. She walked slowly with a hand out in front of her.
Stop. Just come back, he said. We should be getting home.
That sound. A low-pitched whine. A gurgling. A territorial bellow. Yes, it clearly came from behind the boxthorn, but it also sounded like it was coming from all around. From the cemetery itself and from within his own head. From the sand dunes and the sky and their shared imagination. But it wasn’t imaginary. It was real and it was happening and he wanted to go home.
She reached the hedge of boxthorn and moved towards a clearing in the bushes. Her arm outstretched. Palm open to the sky. She came to the clearing and stopped. Her hand dropped to her side.
What is it? he said.
The sound got louder. It built up all around. It smothered them like brown grass on sand.
She stood there, with her hands at her side, looking into the clearing. She gasped without a sound. And then she turned and looked back at him still standing at the edge of the cemetery. He would never in his life forget the look on her face.
* * *
When they were older, he would wait for her at the bus stop and walk her home. He would sit at the shelter, still in school uniform, and wait for her to get off with the other girls. When her bus arrived, they would walk past the library, past the fish and chip shop, maybe stop at the Four Square, and then walk down the dirt track that led to the houses where she lived on the riverbank. They would spend most afternoons there. Her mum liked having him around, but Reihana had two younger siblings who would annoy them, bursting into her bedroom and wanting to play games with him in the backyard. So she would change, and they would go for a walk down to the river mouth.
There was a small patch of grass and a lookout near the edge of the river. They would go there and watch the surging waves roll into the shoreline. She didn’t want to do anything at the lookout on the off chance someone might walk by, and he didn’t want to do anything in her bedroom because of her brother and sister, so they were constrained to making out on the grass. He would kiss her neck and her stomach and the top part of her chest, and she would lay on the grass listening to the thumping waves and the stony river rolling itself out to sea.
In between makeout sessions, they would talk about their families and their friends, or lack thereof, at school. And they would talk about their future. How they wanted to study and travel and live in a different city, and how, most importantly, they wanted to do all of this together. They would talk about the days they spent at his family’s beach – about eeling, and the horrible black and white TV, and laugh about how, as kids, they used to sleep with their mattresses pushed together. Sometimes, though not often, they would talk about the cemetery they found and the noise they heard. That sound, one of them would say. I haven’t heard anything like it since.
He would calm their nerves by saying that it was clearly just a cow. A bull probably, he would say. We’d seen them up there before, many times. They used to come down in the evening to drink from the river.
And she would say, No, no, it can’t have been. We knew what cattle sounded like, and it wasn’t anything like that. And remember, we both agreed it definitely wasn’t cattle.
It was somebody trying to scare us, he would say.
All the way up there, in the middle of the sand dunes? She would become annoyed by this point. We used to spend all day up there and we never came across a single person. We knew the bad lands. They were our territory. We never saw anyone up there and we’d never come across that cemetery. That sound, Christ.
Sometimes, if he was feeling bold enough, he would even bring himself to ask if she’d seen anything.
She would say that it was a long time ago and that she couldn’t remember.
He would ask what she saw.
And she would kiss him on the forehead and hold him close, in a way that would make him forget about the world, about school and family and the cemetery in the sand dunes, and he would wish that she would never let him go.
* * *
He went to university in Wellington to study law, and Reihana stayed home to help look after her brother and sister. He came home a few times, but the bus ride was long and the papers were difficult, and eventually they stopped seeing each other altogether.
His first year at university was lonely. He found it difficult to make friends and spent a lot of time alone in his room. He would drunk call Reihana often. She usually wouldn’t pick up, and when she did, she would speak very coldly, without emotion, as if waiting for him to finish talking and for the call to end. When he woke up in the morning, he would remember pieces of what he’d said and would become embarrassed and anxious and vow not to call her again. But he couldn’t bring himself to delete her number. He never deleted her number, so each time he drank he would think of her and the phone calls continued. He never brought up the cemetery.
As the year went on, his loneliness worsened to the point where his father became concerned and organised a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist put him on a medication, which numbed the loneliness, but also made it more consuming. He felt as if the medication was diminishing every emotion, which in a way was worse. To complicate matters, it didn’t mix well with alcohol, and it would take him far fewer drinks to become intoxicated. Often, he would get so drunk that he would have to be helped back to his room by the students on his floor.
He wasn’t sure if it was the medication or the stress of his papers or his dingy single bed, but he started having trouble sleeping. No matter how hard he tried, it took him hours to fall asleep, and when he finally did, he would have horrible, vivid nightmares. The nightmares were about various things, but often they were about Reihana and the cemetery in the dunes. He would be standing there behind the arc of the headstone, watching as she climbed the fence and made her way towards the boxthorn. There was the sound of bottles rattling against the wire, the rusted gate swinging on its hinges, and that god-awful sound coming from behind the bush. She would walk slowly towards the hedge with her arm stretched out in front of her. He would try to call out, but when he went to speak, nothing would come.
And in his dream, she would be creeping towards the noise, footsteps gentle on the sand. Just as he remembered, she’d round the hedge, fingertips grazing nothing. The noise would grow louder. Her arm would drop to her side. And she would stand there in the sand dune, peering at this thing behind the hedge.
* * *
He found a flat with some friends and lived in Brooklyn, not far from the wind turbine. He was off the medication and had dropped out of law school to study English literature. On the days he only had afternoon lectures, he would wake up early and go surfing out at Lyall Bay. On weekends, he and his flatmates would go for hikes along Hawkins Hill or Red Rocks, before heading into town to one of the bars on Lambton Quay. He met a girl in one of his classes, and they made plans to live together the following year.
His father had gotten sick, so he went back home a lot on weekends. Sometimes with his girlfriend and other times alone. He bought a car, which made the trip more bearable – plus the food at his dad’s was nicer than at the flat. Despite often thinking about her, he never saw Reihana on any of his visits home.
He would stay at his father’s, helping out around the house and sitting with him watching the rugby. He would cruise around his old town, past the library and the fish and chip shop, sometimes calling in at the Four Square, and then drive down and park at the river mouth. The river had changed its shape, cutting new tracks through the stones. The stream had eroded the banks by the houses up where Reihana used to live.. It looked as though the homes had been abandoned. The track to the lookout had been boarded up.
On one visit, towards the end, he drove up with his girlfriend after their Friday lectures. There was no rugby on, so they lit a fire and sat drinking on the deck. While they were talking about their studies and their flatmates and their plans to live together, his father mentioned he had seen Reihana, working at the Repco in town. He said that she’d been friendly and had come up to him and said hello. His girlfriend, sitting beside the fire with a Smirnoff Ice, asked who Reihana was.
The two of them were best friends growing up, said his father. Utterly inseparable. You remember? He looked at his son. She used to stay at the bach with us, and the two of you would spend all day up in the sand dunes.
The bad lands.
That’s right, his father smiled. That’s what we used to call them. The two of you would spend all day up there. It was impossible to get you back down for dinner. He put another log on the fire. Until one day, you just didn’t want to go up there. Probably got spooked by one of the cattle.
It was when we saw the cemetery, he said.
His father laughed. What cemetery?
The cemetery in the dunes.
He laughed again. There was no cemetery up there.
He looked at his father. Yes there was, we found it. It was this small cemetery with a white fence, right at the edge of one of the cliffs. He prodded the fire with a stick. Embers spat up. It was really far in. You probably never went that far.
It was just a few dunes, son. They went over to the next river, and from there it was all farmland. He took a sip of Steinlager. I went for walks up there plenty of times. Never came across no cemetery.
* * *
When his father died, he took the week off work and travelled home for the funeral. He didn’t go to the river mouth, but he did go to the Repco once. He walked up and down the aisles, pretending to look at spark plugs and car batteries. After ten minutes or so, when he hadn’t seen Reihana, he bought a cheap air freshener and left.
That night, he had another nightmare. He was back at the cemetery with Reihana, behind the arc of the headstone. He could hear the waves and the gate and the bottles banging against the wire. Reihana was standing next to him. She turned and whispered, I saw your father at Repco by the way. The waves rolled in and crashed against the rocks on the cliffside. He looked up. She was already making her way around the boxthorn. In his dream, he waited for the sound, but this time he couldn’t hear it – just the waves and the gate and the cans. He called out to her, I know, he told me. She turned back and smiled. Then it happened. A great noise rose all around them like deep cattle-herd stomping. The dune trembled. Reihana’s hand dropped to her side and she looked back at him with that look on her face. He is in the sand dune now.
The dune shook, rattling the fence all around the cemetery. The gate shuddered on its hinges. The stomping grew louder. From around the bend, from the clearing in the boxthorn, came a stampede of cattle. They burst through the hedge, hundreds of them, hooves spitting up sand, tearing past Reihana and around either side of the cemetery. The gravestones began to crumble, breaking into little pieces, falling into dust. The cows stampeded past, towards the cliff and the waves below. One by one and all at once, the cattle ran over the edge. Their heavy bodies thudding into water and rocks.
Afterwards, he was left there in a great cloud of sand and dust. The headstones broken to pieces and Reihana nowhere to be found. When he woke up, he could still hear it, like he was still in the dream – the sound of bovine drowning.
He got up, showered, then got in his car and headed for the coast. It was a dry, sunny day, and there weren’t a lot of cars on the road. He drove past rows of pines trees and the Kaitaki golf course, wayward rubbish bins and small-town honesty boxes, and made his way into the country. Paddocks upon paddocks, stretching into nothing, folding out a memory he prayed hadn’t changed.
* * *
He noticed right away that the bach had been repainted. An off-white cream colour. It was like all the life had been scrubbed out of it. Despite the bach, the campground still looked the same as it had when he was younger. Memories of swing ball, pōhutukawa arborism, handstands, grass stains, and black-and-white TVs. It came flooding back like a long-forgotten dream, spiralling into a life he barely remembered.
He parked his car by the bridge and got out. There were a few white-baiters littered around and some kids down by the river mouth, up fresh and early for a swim. He looked over at the sand dunes, standing high on the blue horizon. The wind had changed their shape – the sand had eroded and been blown back up again, held in place by flax and the cliff’s edge. But although they had changed, he still saw remnants of what he remembered. There was the track up from the bridge, the ridgeline along the ocean, and the same dip between the first and second dunes, where he and Reihana would light bonfires with his father. He got out of his car and made his way towards them.
His father was right, the sand dunes were smaller than he remembered. They didn’t go on forever, and it didn’t take him long to reach the next stream, where the dunes stopped and turned to farmland. He didn’t see any signs of cattle.
The tracks through the dunes were overgrown, so when he turned back, he walked along the cliffside overlooking the ocean – the water was calm and the tide was out; the waves didn’t make it to the cliffs.
He walked back down, crossed the bridge, and got in his car to head home. He hadn’t seen the cemetery. Maybe it was still up there somewhere, overgrown with boxthorn and gorse, sunken in the dunes. Or maybe his father was right and it wasn’t there at all.
* * *
When he got back to town, he stopped at the Four Square. He was standing in line at the counter when he saw her, pulling a steak and cheese pie from the cabinet with a pair of tongs. She looked at him and smiled, and he waited for her outside with a sausage roll and an energy drink.
They sat and talked for a while, about life and death and everything they’d missed over the years. She talked about her family, how her brother and sister were doing well, and how her mother had moved into town and no longer lived down by the river. She said she was sorry to hear about his father. She showed him pictures of her kid and said she’d never known true meaning until she’d had him. They talked about the days they spent at the bach, their afternoons at the lookout, how they were sorry they’d lost touch. And after they’d been talking for a while, when he felt particularly bold, he asked her about the cemetery. How his father had said there had been no cemetery, and how he had been there himself, searching, and hadn’t found it either. How every memory he had, every dream and fear, seemed to somehow spiral back to this one. And that, despite how much it scared him, how much it ate him up, the cemetery was proof of something, something he only shared with her.
She sat there listening, waiting for him to finish. And when he did, she smiled at him, then reached out and placed her hand on his.
Liam McBreen was born in Taranaki and graduated from the University of Waikato with a Masters in Professional Writing. His work has appeared in Poetry Aotearoa, Mayhem Literary Journal, and online in At The Bay | I Te Kokoru.