R L Goddard

Wairua

Bee has an overactive brain. She drags me outside, neck flexed back to awe-gaze at the millions of stars in the milky way. She gushes about galaxies behind galaxies that we have not yet seen and certainly could never perceive the enormity of. She says the human race is a mere cell on the back of a dog. An experiment by a mass of energy, larger than us and faster than light (she will not call it god), or bacteria in a petri dish, just multiplying and using up all the resources, until we hit our peak, or bump into the side of the dish (or some celestial body). All this, because she fell from a fire escape on a three-storey building and landed on her head. Some say she should not have been playing on the fire escape with her sister and friends, others may well say she was pushed.

We have developed a routine; black sand, big waves, evening strolls and culminations. Tide in and out like breathing, coalesced with Tangaroa’s beat of “I know, I know”. Yet I am not sure if we do.

And then there is Helen, rummaging in the paketai, numerologist, meditator, traveller, soloist, an ascetic. Ninety years of life on and off the planet. Where have you been Helen? In UFO’s, to Tibet, Mexico, India, many Ashrams, China, Australia, South America, Europe, and on Mountains. All of them. More countries than I am old. Always alone, always climbing. I meditate to get to the top. Maybe I walk, crawl, or maybe I float.

Here people avoid me. I am the mad woman. My face is as wrinkled as the sand blown in creases up the beach, as lined as an architect’s drawing, as ingrained and creviced as a Mesozoic cliff. My health is failing but my speech bounds, unfurls, I am articulate and erudite. I heat my cardigan in the oven because I cannot afford a heater. I speak German, English, te reo Maori, Italian and French. I needed those words in each place I stayed, to live, to communicate, to fit. Here the words mean little. Some of them I have forgotten.

We want to capture her story, Bee and me, before she goes, but she is hard to contain, she slides like silt, and her eyes flit left and right whilst she talks, one on the blue swooning glider, the other rolling up and down Ngaranui Beach, tisking at the children playing in the pingao, whilst her words flow uninterrupted.

We talk about mysticism, spirituality and cosmology. She has read Gurdjieff, but not Salman Rushdie. We move onto British occupation in India, Maori land wars, and those Germans (who she covertly plotted against as a Swiss) in that terrible war. Of the Brits, she says they are contained, reserved, yet contrastingly passionate. Of the Maori, well they are spiritual and like to give, but a complicated culture, throws her arms up for emphasis. Papatuanuku, like Gaia, is palpable, I feel her pulsing between my toes as I walk the length of Ngarunui Beach. Imagine if we collectively had that connection and understood our roots, had a te ao Maori worldview? Raises her shoulders and brows simultaneously for extra weight.

Helen talks expressively, visually, hands and eyebrows dancing a foxtrot. She has few teeth, black half stumps like rotten legs of a wharf, a brown saggy brow that hangs over the bridge of her nose, and when it rises reveals startling white skin underneath. Eyes small, cloudy blue, half cataracted, rimmed with red. Hair grey, wispy, thinning, pulled back with a plastic clip.

Helen is beyond bodies. It’s wairua that matters, she explains in her lisping Swiss accent, who cares about bodies when it’s the essence that’s true and always there, constant like the planet rolling round, or a bruise turning from purple to yellow.

Alarmingly she is still driving. We see her almost weekly clutching the wheel, nose almost to the windscreen whilst a line of cars jostle and weave behind her.

Bee wants to tell her about her childhood fall from 40 feet, head cracked, brow burst and bleeding, but still walking. Managed to get back to the pub where Dad swept her up in his arms. A modern day Humpty. Was she pushed, did she jump? She never had a fear of heights, loved the feeling of falling. Bee goes down, Helen goes up. A see saw.

Helen has always lived alone, scoffing at men and ‘their needs’, mimicking crudely with gestures, then dismissing the thought with a snort and wiping of the hands.

She shows me a sepia photograph of her in Switzerland, circa 1945, a handsome young woman, square jawed, bobbed hair, arrogant, strong, impatient. Now she is unrecognisable, hunched and shuffling like the black oyster catchers on the beach, barely sustained on watery soup when she remembers to eat. She says this shell is immaterial, a burden, something to cast off. It is nearly time, she says nonchalantly.

Each week on the beach she introduces herself again and talks until the sand builds around our legs. She will talk to anyone who is too polite to walk away. Yesterday the kaumatua was sat on a long bleached tree that had been rolled in from the tide. In the distance Helen was engrossed, entangled in his space. She waved, hunched, spread her arms, bent forward, nodded and disagreed. He sat, never moved or seemed to speak, his eyes on the maunga and the sun birthing yellow-red, splitting like an egg across the sea.

I ask to preserve her story, her life. She dismisses the words, vanquishing them with a sideways sweep of her hand. Who will be interested in my life. It is almost over. Her words spur me to lunge forward to capture it all the more.

I have not seen Helen for two weeks. I reintroduce myself as she shuffles doubled over through the iron rich sand. I tell her we have met before, remember Salman Rushdie e hoa? Her hand floats airily around her temple, Ah my mind, she says. So many people. Come to my house, I will tell you stories.

In the weed infested drive, her beat up old Mitsubishi sits on bald tyres and sports no registration. Inside the declining house there is no carpet, few belongings, no fire, and a few old second hand clothes hung up on twisted wire hangers.

We live in Aotearoa, and a very old woman has fallen through the veneer and into a jagged crack called penury. I feel ashamed of my privilege and comfort.

We begin to drop in with offerings, food and soup, worried she is not eating, concerned she cannot afford proper food. I smell burning and remove her pink cardigan from the oven where she is heating it to put on. “I think they will turn the power off again”, she croaks, and pulls the oversized garment around her for emphasis.

Every few days I go, hoping to capture her stories, preserve her life in Arial font on a page, rein in her spirit which is already reaching with smoke like tendrils to some other place.

Her voice is a river of eddies, twisting backwards, forwards, sloshing about, spinning around like dervishes. I cannot make sense or capture her eel like words as they slide. I leave her food.

Bee and I give her one last gift. A flight over Whaingaroa in a thin, motorless white glider. She is at her happiest, strapped into the claustrophobic perspex cockpit, her spirit close to the stratosphere, her body straining towards the mesosphere, and beyond.

Days later I knock on her door, a pot of soup in hand. The house echoes emptily, sadly, utterly, finally.

She is gone.

Bee says there is a brighter star now in that immeasurable cosmic mass of stars, gas, dust and gravity. For me the sky is dark.

Aue, kia poutū te marama, kia hinapōuri mai.