I’m in Raglan now instead of the same couple suburbs of Hamilton and the street I live on in Cambridge which have been my only routine sights out of a sense of complacency for the past whatever.
Alsatia splashes water over herself on the front porch of her cousin’s bach and I’m leaning against the yay-high chainlink fence strangling one last drag out of this cigarette. There are possums everywhere, every street I turn down there’s a possum on a curb or I walk to get dinner and a curb is wearing a possum or I take the long way home to watch seagulls etch themselves into the horizon then crash down out of my vision and I turn my head and there’s a ziploc bag of baby possums that have been lit on fire and the street smells like nascent piss and death and I wander back up the road and lean against this fence and smoke a whole cigarette to get the smell out of my mouth.
“What’s that smell?” Alsatia asks. She’s at AU on exchange from France studying something to do with textiles. She is covered from head to toe, always, in a bit of plaid. The lattices in the pattern of her shorts catch the sunlight and add it to themselves.
“It’s geothermal, I think.”
“Really?”
“Like Rotorua? Have you been to Rotorua yet?”
“Mmm, to the redwoods, but–”
“Well, you know, Rotorua, it can smell a lot worse than this,” I don’t know if that’s true. It’s been two years since I was in Rotorua, “mm, way worse.”
–
A little later that afternoon we were at the wharf, watching boats jet by.
“Do you wanna stick around for dinner with my cousin and all of them, Dylan?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I fiddled with my thumbs, “are they also French?”
“No, my cousin and his family are from Germany.”
“East or West?”
She gawked, then chuckled, “what?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I’ll come.”
–
Dinner was seafood. Lobster Mac & Cheese. Shrimp cocktails. Kina. Little cubicles of sushi made in ice trays. Mussels. Salmon. All of it served on a big and ornately carved tablepiece that looked like a two-hulled boat and which balanced on an arrangement of driftwood.
“Do you know much about this?” Alsatia’s cousin, Blue, asked.
“Pardon?” I asked, putting my hand to my mouth as I put back a heap of lobster. They all stared at me for a little bit until I realised he had gestured to the boat-table-piece-plate thing.
“Oh!” I shook my head, “um, it’s a waka, right?”
“Well,” he inhaled, “it’s a model replica of Hōkūleʻa.”
I stabbed a couple chunks of lobster with my fork and brought it up to my mouth.
“The, um, the Polynesian people traveled great distances with boats like these. You know?” Blue continued, “Hōkūleʻas would have gotten them from places like Tonga and, er, Fiji, down to Aotearoa. Into places like here, Raglan,” He gestured around himself, “people like, errrrr… The narrty matonga.”
I looked around the table, there was a painful kind of static buzz between everyone there.
“Oh,” I said, “Oh! Oh, well, you know… I don’t really know much about that side of myself, I mean, it’s like, I don’t even know, fifteen percent? I can’t even speak Te Reo to be honest,” I shrugged and put back another couple forkfulls of lobster mac. The rest of dinner was the awkward shuffle of cutlery and chairs and hair and jewellery and hipster tunics and throats clearing.
–
I never talked to Alsatia again. Well, in the morning I said bye, and then half a month later she was on a flight to the French Riviera. She unfollowed me and I got tired of seeing her living by beaches with no dead possums.
