Strandings

Katie Henderson

 

It was the last time she went to the roof garden. Nami was ten years old and the Nagoya sky swarmed with stars. Her mother pointed secateurs at the quarter moon and the new crocuses and told Nami about her day’s drawing. How she and another artist had been chosen to sketch planets and pods of whales for a new comic.

‘The whales live in space, swimming through galaxies. Space travellers harness them to transport their ships.’

‘Are there really whales in space?’

‘Anything is possible. Human eyes can’t see everything, Nami-chan.’

‘How do they breathe?’

‘They are space whales.’

Nami remembers becoming suddenly aware of the vastness above her and feeling very small and huge at the same time, as if the whole of space was already assumed in her own head.

‘I can see them,’ she whispered. Everything was perfect and in its place. Except for one woven arm of jasmine that had wound itself down and along the neighbour’s balcony. Her mother leaned over the railing to untether it. When Nami turned to ask, ‘What do the space whales eat?’ all she saw was the jasmine vine ripping from the garden wall and its final tautness across the rail before it gave up its strength and the shredded stalks fell back, pointing to the gap where her mother had been. Then Nami remembers only chaos.

Years later and across an ocean, she told her Advanced English teacher of her mother’s death-fall from a balcony. Alec nodded and said, ‘The Universe may act in a random, unstable manner when it shuns its own intelligence.’ She had no idea what he meant but she liked his certainty. By winter she was pregnant with his son.

 

Alec decided Nami must retain her heritage so he bought a property on the outskirts of Auckland boasting a karesansui garden.

‘The process is all about subtraction,’ said Alec, trying to sound Zen.

Nami wanted to say, ‘Dry gardens are pointless.’ She wanted to tell him about her mother’s profuse, scented jungle high above the traffic. But he was thrilled with his cleverness.

‘The karesansui garden is a testimony to its designer’s restraint of imagination.’ He adjusted the two lion statues guarding the entrance.

The garden reminds Nami of a dull ink painting – two moss-covered islands in a sea of white sand. She recalls lying in the sun amongst pots of burgeoning peonies, her mother singing as she trowelled earth from a bag. She wonders if Alec, when he sits cross-legged with his Buddha incense-holder on the sand, has ever found this centre of complete happiness. Nami bows her small black head and rakes perfect figures of eight around the breast-shaped mounds. Each evening, little Zane’s shoeprints are dispersed in ripples of dry sea. There is one plant, a round-headed azalea against the far bamboo fence, a gift from the receptionist at Alec’s language school. When the buds appear, Nami pulls them off and throws them into the empty section next door.

 

After Zane’s first birthday, Alec moved his forgetful mother into their spare room. Alec told Nami that being a caregiver to two needy human beings was her part to play in enhancing the Universe. Nami felt something germinate under her breastbone, a shoot of anxiety.

Alec’s mother said, ‘That Jappo is stealing my bloody clothes.’

‘Take her into the garden every day, Nami,’ Alec instructed. ‘The tranquillity will settle her.’

So on fine mornings, obedient Nami walks Elizabeth along the gravel path and between the stone lions. She composes the old woman in the ink painting and they watch Zane totter about, levelling the sand ridges. When he bends to grasp a handful of grit, Elizabeth cries, ‘Alec! No! Don’t eat sand! Spit it out!’

‘Not Alec. Zane,’ Nami corrects but Elizabeth staggers after the wrong baby, arm raised.

Nami bears the marks of interceptions. She has a scar on her left eyebrow made by Elizabeth’s eternity ring and once had been stunned by a chopping board. Alec said if Nami had seen the x-rays of his mother’s atrophied brain, she would understand the old woman couldn’t help it. He showed her an article in a Time magazine.

 

The skull is the perimeter of a great sky cradling a monstrous chemical and electrical universe, all-thinking and remembering, all-conscious and unconscious, lit with trillions of bright neurons emailing each other across the synaptic galaxy…

 

Nothing can save Elizabeth from distracted messages. When Elizabeth calls her ‘the yellow peril’ Nami thinks of her own distracted mother reaching towards a wayward vine. The spectral shoot inside Nami ripens and snakes.

 

Zane is sitting on a moss island and dripping lemonade iceblock over his legs. Nami flicks through a book called ‘Enlightenment’ from Alec’s bookshelf.

 

A fish goes to his queen fish and says, ‘Others have told me about the sea but what is the sea? Where is it?’ The queen fish says, ‘The sea is within you and without you. You breathe in it and move in it and have your being in it. You are composed of sea and will have your end in sea. The sea surrounds you as your own being.’

 

Zane laughs and pokes his stick into the moss. Alec has told Nami, ‘You are the Universe and the Universe is You.’ Right now, she would like to be in Alec’s Universe. Zane’s sandals scuff small arcs in the glassy sand. His grandmother has been standing at the end of the garden for several minutes, pulling the leaves off the azalea. Eventually, Nami realises Elizabeth has forgotten how to propel herself. The old woman plucks away, searching for an exit.

Nami had watched her mother pruning spaces in the middle of camellias.

‘What are those holes for?’

‘For the birds to fly through, Nami-chan. Always make a way out.’

Nami knows about being trapped. She tears pages of enlightenment into stepping stones and lays them on the sand sea so Elizabeth can remember her way back to land.

 

Alec is away for the weekend at a conference for ESOL teachers in Rotorua. She heard him on his phone with the azalea woman, arranging accommodation. When Zane is in his cot, Nami opens Alec’s bedside drawer and sees the new packet of Fetherlite has lost its cellophane.

Zane was conceived two winters ago in Rotorua. Alec had taken Nami on the Skyride gondola. Nami refused to sit in a cart and luge down the spiral hill track through the twilight. Alec said it was pointless to live in fear as a random particle of energy disengaged from the whole unified sphere.

‘I’m just cold,’ she said.

She assuaged Alec’s disappointment later in their motel room. Fearless. She hopes his receptionist will fall into a boiling mud pool.

 

After lunch, Zane watches his grandmother pack her belongings into supermarket bags. Nami’s departure fantasy is similar.

‘You can’t keep me here. I’ve got a bus ticket. My son will verify that. I want you to take me to the bus stop. What’s the time? I’ve got to get home.’

‘Sit here for a while and we will wait for the bus.’

Nami lowers Elizabeth into the La-Z-Boy and closes her veined hands around a plastic mug. Halcion Milo. She crushes the tiny tablets between two spoons. Medicated afternoons are safe and calm. Nami wonders if Milo could camouflage the taste of something more toxic. She saw a programme once about a woman who admitted ending her mother’s life with an injection of insulin under a toenail. It was an ideal death, sudden and untraceable.

When Elizabeth dozes off, Nami picks up Zane and they rescue a late load of washing from the machine. Zane chews on a cord of his grandmother’s nightdress and Nami feeds Elizabeth’s sheets to the drier. Alec had explained that a clothesline would be incongruous in the context of dry landscape architecture. Nami’s days are as prosaic as the washing itself, colourless and wrung out. She thinks of her mother and feels the new vine slip ghostlike along her rib space. The mundane has been her comfort. In structure there is safety. Nami takes a bamboo rake from the laundry cupboard and carries Zane into the still-warm air. Lying in the karesansui garden is a whale.

 

Grey and colossal, the whale rests in the abstract sea, its blunt head raised on an island. Nami drops the rake and tilts her face to the sky, searching for its pod. From inside the whale’s skull comes a frantic clicking. Nami hugs Zane to her hip and softly walks the length of the whale. Zane’s hand traces the vast parchment of gashes and scrawls, patches of skin peeling back like incinerated paper. Nami just manages to avoid the tail sweeping towards them. One enormous fluke scythes and flattens Alec’s azalea. As she tiptoes past the whale’s small eye, the drawbridge of its mouth lowers and a whole squid flops onto a stone lion. Zane begins to cry and Nami hurries him back to the house. The vine twines around her heart. Last night she dreamt of a cartoon ocean, her mother’s dark drawing charging to the surface.

 

Whale dreams have a strong spiritual significance. They represent an emerging life force. The whale is a symbol for freedom and dreaming of whales can indicate that a new you – spiritual or sexual – is about to spring forth, however, if the ocean waters in your dream were turbulent, consider your emotional environment. These large creatures may represent overwhelming emotional or psychological issues.

 

Nami puts Zane in his playpen with a biscuit and finds the phone book. She reads through government departments. Elizabeth shudders in her sleep.

Don from DOC says, ‘Squid-eater? Sounds like a sperm. Keep the hose on it, love. I’m on my way.’

They do not own a hose, so Nami re-wets the washing and unlocks the laundry door. The whale taps out its coda of distress as she casts sheets and towels like nets over its head.

‘Why are you here?’ she whispers at the eye. ‘Why have you left your family? I can’t help you. You have destroyed my husband’s garden.’

 

The stranded whale is often a victim of neglect or serial monogamy and therefore displays depressive characteristics: disrupted sleep, low mood, appetite changes, lack of concentration, disinterest in everyday activities, feelings of hopelessness, thoughts of death. Stranding may be a device used to gain attention but any suicide attempt must be treated seriously.

 

Nami washes her hands. Zane stabs a bitten rice cracker at his grandmother’s leg and she opens her eyes.

‘Elizabeth. There is a whale in the garden.’

‘Pop Swanson’s got a golf bag made from a whale’s whatsit. Moby’s Dick, that’s what he calls it but he can’t play golf for nuts. Give this baby some proper food.’

 

Pan-fried Whale

Wipe the mammal and cut into neat pieces. Dust with seasoned flour. Dip in batter or milk and fry in smoking-hot fat. (Use minke, sperm or pilot.)

 

Nami opens the microwave. She feeds Zane chicken katsu and rice. Elizabeth says she’s ‘not eating that bloody foreign rubbish’ but she does. By the time Zane is settled in bed, Elizabeth has disappeared.

Nami finds her in the garden at the end of a tape measure. She is having a lucid moment.

‘Yes, it’s a bloody mystery all right, boys!’ Elizabeth giggles.

The whale is quiet and the evening air smells slightly decomposed. Two men, one with dreadlocked hair, are walking backwards to the fence and Nami follows them, dipping her head.

‘Excuse me, I am Nami Swanson.’

‘Don. We spoke on the phone.’ He speaks loudly and offers his hand. ‘Your mother-in-law, is it? Said your husband was out.’

‘Yes.’

‘This is Nick. He’s a mammal medic.’

‘Cheers. Nine point two metres, Don. Female. I reckon about twelve years. See those? Mammary slits. Might’ve calved this year. That’s a shame.’ Nami likes his sad face. Don winds up the tape measure with Elizabeth on the end.

‘She is not well,’ Nami murmurs.

‘No, you’re probably right,’ Don agrees. ‘It’s beyond me how she ended up this far inshore but she’s dehydrated and the sheer weight of her is crushing all her organs. We’ll do the kindest thing.’

‘The kindest thing?’ Nami imagines a giant syringe of insulin inserted under a flipper.

‘One shot, won’t know a thing.’

‘And the… body?’ She watches Elizabeth pick up the abandoned rake and poke at the dead squid.

‘Well, I’ve got to inform the iwi first. They’ll want to get here early tomorrow to take any bone and teeth they want. She’ll go off pretty fast in this weather.’

‘They are going to cut her?’

‘Yep, the tribe gets their quota of bone for carving and what-have-you. It’ll be easier once she’s in bits. We usually bury whale carcasses but I don’t s’pose you want your backyard bulldozed up!’

 

Whales are a large, deep-rooting species and gardeners must exercise caution when planting them in a suburban setting. An incision made with a spade in the underbelly of a young specimen before planting will prevent accumulation of gases in the body cavity that may cause the whale to resurface at an inappropriate moment e.g. a family barbecue.

Shoots should appear in early Spring; a dressing of seaweed applied in the growing season is advantageous but, on the whole, whales are self-fertilising.

 

Nami imagines blade-wielding men dancing around the whale’s great crushed heart.

‘We’ll have to helicopter this one out. Righto mate, better get this over with.’

‘Best if you go inside,’ says Nick.

‘Yes, you take your ma-in-law in, dear. We’re lucky the media hasn’t got wind of this, actually. We’ll see you in the morning.’

‘That Jappo won’t let me go home. She wants to shoot me.’ They turn to see Elizabeth lifting her skirt too high and twirling in the sand by the whale’s eye. The vine tightens around Nami’s small heart.

 

She tries not to hear the gunshot. When it’s dark, she zips a jacket over her pyjamas and slips out of the house. There is a three-quarter moon and the sky is a bowl spattered with bright crumbs. In the karesansui garden Nami looks up, away from the dull eye, the stained sand and begins to bring down the washing. The stench of rotten flesh is in her nostrils and she doesn’t understand what makes her stop and stretch her arms out over the place where she thinks the whale’s heart might be. She puts her cheek against its flesh. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Hello.’

Nami jumps. A man with wild-rope hair is sitting on one of her towels, his back against the whale. Smoke wafts out of his T-shirt.

‘I’m really sorry but I just wanted to wait here a while.’

Nami comes up for air. ‘You’re wasting that.’

Nick rescues the joint from behind his back and laughs. ‘It’s wasting me. Sit down. Here.’

‘I am Nami.’ She kneels inside the hot stink of dead whale and burnt grass. ‘You like whales?’

‘I drowned one when I was ten. We were on holiday and my brother and I found a stranded orca on the beach and we’re like, ‘whales need water, right,’ so we just kept filling up its blowhole. My whole career path’s based on guilt.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, more a sense of duty, I s’pose.’ He grins. ‘And I like whales.’

‘Why did she come here, Nick?’

‘Lost her bearings. Or she’s sick. The ocean’s a toilet. ’Course, whales are the spirits of ancestors. That’s what Maori reckon, anyway.’ Nami is not strong enough for ghosts. ‘Or they reckon whales can prophesise death.’ Red sparks spin above Nick’s fingers. ‘Hell, I shouldn’t say that. Sorry.’

‘No. That’s interesting.’ She inhales. She would like to touch his hair.

‘Whatever, Nami, your garden was a nice place to strand.’

Nami smiles. In the silence she thinks about strandings. About her mother lying broken on a street. About Elizabeth slipping away from shore. About herself, beached.

‘Look, how lucky are we, Nami? Being so close to this beautiful creature. I mean it’s sad and tragic, I know, but it’s like… you’re a part of something incredible and everything’s linked somehow, and everyone’s responsible and you can only get more humble really. It’s like… everyone’s in the picture together, right, so you’ve gotta find your place. Your purpose, y’know.’

Nami thinks it must be very good dope but philosophy makes her eyes water. What if your purpose makes you unhappy? She lies on the sand beneath the curve of the whale’s belly. The stars blur and shoot out through her tears.

 

The space whale is radiant. It swims weightless and unconstrained, breaching constellations and feeding on milky star fish. Fraunhofer whales appear as dark shapes interrupting the spectra and space observers have often mistaken galactic whale blow for dust clouds.

The celestial behemoth is in no danger of stranding although a pod will often accompany a sick family member to a moon’s surface. Dead whales can be seen from earth as grey shadows floating just above the Sea of Serenity.

 

They lie quietly, watching clouds skim the moon. One night, Alec said, the stars will burn out and explode taking everything with them. She sits up and brushes tiny shell flecks from her palms.

Nick touches her wrist. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay ’til morning. The kaumatua does a karakia, you know, a prayer, which is sort of like closure for me. I’ve got another joint if you wanna share it?’

‘Thank you. But I must check my family.’ Nami bundles up the sheets.

She goes into the house and bows twice to listen for sleeping breaths then climbs into Alec’s side of the bed. The vine is unfurling slowly from her heart. Perhaps anything is possible. She thinks about autumn when she will rake away the white sand and let Elizabeth and Zane toss handfuls of grass seed like new rain over the waiting earth.