“There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water. — Janet Frame, Faces in the Water 1961

I wake early. Shannon was out last night so I creep around the house, feed the dog, dress and set out with Rubes for an early morning walk. I head up past my family home where the light tells me mum has stirred and is starting her day. I walk a road edged by bush on one side and the nursery that grows plants for the council garden beds the other. The Berhampore golf course extends across the hill in the distance. When I was a child a house stood on the boundary of cultivation and golf. A large rotund nursery caretaker lived there and he used to chase us when we hopped over the back fence to play in the nursery grounds.

Above me the clouds surge up the valley from the south coast. The legendary winds of my homeland make for constantly evolving skies. The sky above right now is deep dark blue , yet to be diluted and faded by the day’s sun. When I visit flat still places I always feel slightly uncomfortable, out of my element. This wind swept valley that runs from Cook Strait in the south to Port Nicolson in the north has shaped how I expect the world to be. When I visited England a few years ago the south of the country was lovely, it’s rolling hills and flat plains were a novelty , but when I reached Yorkshire with it’s dales and steep valleys I felt at home.

The bush to my right once provided a scene which hosted a thousand different childhood fantasies and games. It was a jungle through which we trekked and battled clad in army surplus gear and clutching toy guns of the sort that were banned at school. It was the 1980’s and the country had just found another vertebrae of self-identity in it’s nuclear free moment. War toys were out of favour for everyone except us kids wading through the bush. Our teachers had marched against Vietnam, my uncle had fought there.
Later war toys gave way to stolen bottles of bourbon and gin, drunk to excess sat on the forest floor. I was dragged from that bush once and transported to hospital. My body narrowly avoiding the indignity of stomach pumping. I remember the Smurfs on the A&E cubical wall, strangely incongruous surroundings for a teen with alcohol poisoning. A marker of the boundary between childhood and what lies beyond.

I continue up the road. Originally an Edwardian Orphanage, in later years this road led to an old peoples home and a half way house. A friend’s grandmother ended her journey in the old peoples home. The half way house filled my childhood with colourful but wounded characters , out of the 19th century style institutions and into the streets of south Wellington , victims of ‘shell shock’ or the 60’s or an imbalance or just life.

Recently the orphanage has come into the spotlight as it was host to a culture of abuse, the media coined the term The Beast of Berhampore for the late former director Wallace Lake. The revelations make sense in my head, there has always been a darkness up here.

Both these presbyterian institutions are gone. A gate bars people from entering but I slip through a hole in the fence. Rubes revels in the morning breeze coming up the valley from Antarctica. The road is potholed and unkempt. Mysteriously there is a pile of horse shit in the middle of it. Kingston the suburb above has begun to give in to the inevitability of gravity. A decade ago it started sliding down upon Berhampore a little too hastily for comfort. The elderly were evicted , the wounded moved on. Now all that remains are marks where the roads went, sewer accesses , and tussock and gorse. A house still balances on the precipice , raining bits of its flesh down on the bank below. We walk back to Shannon’s. It’s time to leave my k9 baby in her care and fly.

At the airport the domestic terminal is a hive of action. It’s the school holidays so travel is in fashion. The AirNZ host directing the bag drop has a nose as sharp as his shoes. He holds a ‘makeup counter’ smile that almost succeeds in being authentic.

We proceed through the security vetting , and on into the flying pencil that is to transport us south . Towards the end of the flight the pilot comes on the intercom , he tells us the temperature and weather conditions and apologises that we will be alittle late landing at New Plymouth , we are meant to be flying to Dunedin. I seem to be the only one concerned.

We emerge into a glorious Dunedin day , snow on the hills and air that is a tonic for everything. After an hour on a park bench a coach arrives to take me to Oamaru. I have paid extra for a first class seat at the front. The first class seats are full of elderly citizens from Invercargill , the driver has his stuff all over the one spare seat. I head past to cattle class, its where I am more comfortable anyway.

As we navigate the streets of Dunedin there is a moment where the driver meets an impasse with a car which won’t pull over to allow the large coach to swing round the intersection. The driver jumps from the coach filling the air with venom tipped expletives aimed squarely at the car in question. He jumps back on board and seamlessly shifts to smooth host again. We are off.