Absences
The door is shut. Has been shut now for several days. Georgia has walked past it (shut) for several days now, and it has not been open and isn't there something wrong with this image? The door. Shut.
So Georgia opens the door. Hesitates before going inside, finds excuses: what if she left something? We could mail it to her. Thinks: Why am I trying to justify it? She has no reason to. No reason not to. After all, it's not Holly's room. It's a spare room.
And the shelves are empty.
They had left the house in the morning. Last minute kerfuffles - "I haven't packed my pyjamas!" "Will I need recipe books?" "Where's the toothpaste -" "Where're my textbooks -" devolving into bright nervous chatter in the back of the car. Four of them; Dad's long legs in the front, Mum driving, Georgia and Holly in the back. The radio on low.
Around lunch they stopped the car, walked a short distance to a cave in the base of Godley Head; red soil, scraggly shrubs and iceplant, a cascading succulent with pale yellow flowers. It was a still, sheltered spot, cradled in the arms of the hill. Flowers and history and beauty and dirt.
The second day it was drizzling, and they set out to explore on foot. The city was flat. Georgia couldn't see the horizon and the buildings looming up over her had felt like the walls of a trap. The plants were unfamiliar: rhododendrons and red-hot pokers and pink and white camellias rotting on the tree. The streets were very wide.
Back in the car, they climbed two hundred metres from the olive trees and sun of the mediterranean streets (slowly, slowly, through the gathering cloud) to steeply sloping moors, got lost in the clouds, groped their way to a rocky car park and a sign that said 'Gun Emplacements, Second World War.' They left the car, put on raincoats, walked - it was a muddy farm track, it was a short walk, it was an endless journey (fifty years, sixty -)
There were skylarks. Several buildings stood by the side of the track. The walls were twelve inches thick, the windows rusted open. Only one building had a door (also rusted open), and that was the one Georgia entered. There were iron rimmed channels on the floor, filled with water, a gantry rusting on the ceiling, bars and gears. There was green moss around the cracks and the roof leaked, water falling (falling, falling) -
Plop. And it echoed.
Georgia had heard her family talking in another building, turned away from the rust and the water and joined them. Pointed out the door and said to Holly, "Look, a swallow." They had laughed together at how comical it looked, with its fat little body and skinny streamers of tail.
"Perhaps," Holly said, "It wants to nest here." Georgia considered this, and found nothing wrong with the idea. Why not? No-one else was using the buildings.
In the distance, the hills looked like sandcastles left to the tide; sharply defined turrets, concave sides polished clean by the waves... but the waves would have been colossal. The hills are hundreds of metres tall. She thought, on a fine day, up here, you would be able to see for miles. It was not a fine day.
The third and fourth days had been spent travelling through the Canterbury plains. They were flat: "Dairy farms, mostly," Dad said. They needed to be irrigated nine months of the year. "A waste," he had added. "But these people don't care about waste, only profit." In one distance there were mountains, in the other, ocean. It was hot. Regimented hedges march across the fields, thin, offering no shade.
Timaru was a nice city. It had hills. Magnolias, palm trees and gums. They walked along the beach, by a construction site. Georgia couldn't remember what was being built, only that there were no builders working. There was a sign up advertising a circus in the park, but the dates were for the previous week. There was no water in the fountain and none of the roses were in bloom.
The fifth day, a penguin colony, a sea lion, grey rocks on orange sand. A hotel in Oamaru.
The next morning, it was overcast. They reached the university at eleven o'clock. Left at six o'clock, the back seat half empty. It didn't rain.
The seventh day, the Mackenzie Country. It was snowing up in the hills, she remembers, and the ground was rocky. Short, wispy, brown-gold-green grass, straggly grey bushes with occasional flashes of green foliage, the trees mostly conifers. Bracken with shades of rust. Tussock. There were larches by the river: the flowers looked like little pompoms but there were no leaves, not at that time of year. Recently shorn sheep, beef cattle in paddocks. "Herefords," Dad had said. They were white (cloud), and russet too (like the bracken).
Snow made the foothills transparent against the clouds, like ghosts. The mountains were invisible.
The strangest thing was the water. "Rocks pounded in the water create 'rock flour'," Mum had said. "It makes that limpid blue colour." Georgia had never believed water could be limpid blue, had always considered it a failure of imagination on the part of those who described it that way. And yet the lake, the river and even the little stream they crossed were that colour.
She had felt deeply uneasy, up in the hills. There was something wrong, something she couldn't see, couldn't identify. In retrospect, she's amazed she didn't see it earlier; but it wasn't until her father mentioned it that she noticed that the lake was several metres shallower than the shoreline.
She had been able to see it in the other streams and rivers as well: once, the water covered those rocks.
Once.