Family History

1.

Here’s my grandparents’ house with all of us standing outside. My father is missing; he must have been taking the photo.

My great-grandfather built the house himself, with the help of his two eldest sons. Their photo was on the wall inside, nailed to the Rimu planks they’d laid with their own hands. My great-grandfather is in the middle of his six children, no wife beside him. She had died from appendicitis, the way people did back then. My grandad is on the far left, the rest are just solemn black and white figures staring into the camera. I don’t know their names. People get forgotten so quickly.

The house became my grandfather’s, he was the youngest and survived all the rest. I never asked how he felt about it, burying all his siblings. When you’re a child you don’t think about old people feeling sorrow, it seems like something for the young. Maybe we just hope they don’t, because there must be so much of it.

2.

This one is just us grandchildren, all crammed in around Nana's kitchen table.

We used to go and stay every summer there with my grandparents, in that old house by the beach. My earliest memory there is of being carried out of the house by my father in the night, tsunami sirens blaring. Driving up into the dry hills and the water lying flat below us, an earthquake trembling through it from hundreds of kilometres away.

I used to have nightmares about it afterward, the sea rising up, trying to outrun it. The waves swallowing us.

That summer I was thirteen and had bussed from Taupo with my brothers. Amy and Michelle were driven up by their dad. Paul had flown from Christchurch and Grandad had to make the trip to the airport to pick him up.

Once we were old enough, we’d go out after Christmas without our parents and spend two weeks there, all six of us at once, sharing two bedrooms between us. Boys in one, girls in the other, just like it had always been.

Each morning Nana would cook us all breakfast and then push us out the door. We’d go out and find the other kids, roam the stretch of streets and the shops and the beach, sunburnt and thirsty. It was a time I remember now as wild and endless. But that's the last time we were all there, that summer of 1997.

3.

Here we are in the garden of my grandparents house, me with my brothers, the Pohutukawa tree's blooming red behind us.

Troy was sixteen that summer, tall and tanned, his hair grown long and knotted. He spent most of his time with the other older teenagers, driving up and down the streets in banged up cars, smoking pot in the sand dunes.

Amy's beside the fence, looking toward the neighbour's house and smiling at something without opening her mouth. She’d just gotten her braces off and was still in the habit of trying to hide them, it made her look like she was keeping a secret. 

I still remember who she was smiling at, even though he's out of the frame. It was the neighbours nephew, a few years older than us, there for New Years Eve.

Every night that summer, Amy climbed out the window of the bedroom we slept in. The flax plants below it were all crushed down from her shoes landing on them. There was sand in her sheets and on the floor.

She and Troy went out to meet up with all the other teenagers, but he said goodnight to our grandparents and walked out the front door.

The mosquitos would come in through the open window, the whine of them above my head mixed with the sound of cars revving engines out by the beach, in the morning I’d see the tire marks in the sand.

I would wake when she climbed back in, banging against the window frame, whispering apologies. Smells clinging to her, smoky and sweet and boozy.

“Damn hooligans at it out there last night,” Grandad would say in the morning.

And Amy would smile her secret smile, and Troy would nod agreement and carry on eating.

4.

This was the morning of New Years Eve, Nana made us stop for a photo as we walked out of the gate. I'm holding a bundle of drift wood, grey and smooth. Beside me Troy’s hoisting what looks like a broken fence in his arms, I don’t know where he got that from. Amy's holding a stack of old newspapers Grandad gave her.

Down on the beach the older kids had dug out a large shallow hole and all that day everyone had been adding to it, sticks and boards and newspapers, broken bits of chairs and doors.

Excitement had been building up in me all day. That morning over breakfast, Grandad had told me and Amy we could go out to the bonfire that night. Then he looked at Troy and told him he expected him to look out for us.

The younger cousins pouted and me and Amy smiled at each other. Troy chewed in silence.

Amy talked about what we should wear as we walked back from the shop, eating ice creams, collecting anything which might burn in a plastic bag.

I agreed with everything she said because she was two years older than me, and knew more than I ever could.

At the beach I added my sticks to the growing pile, the knotted mess of driftwood and newspaper and broken boards, tangled with seaweed. It was like the nest of some giant bird. Unease crept over me and I glanced around, as if it might be crouched over us, waiting.

5.

Here’s Auntie Kathleen, the youngest of my grandparents four children. She’s holding a small child on her hips and looks older than twenty, but then young people always seemed to look more grown up, back then.

It’s yellow toned, the way old photos get, the memories washing out. Growing up she slept in the same room I did when I stayed, climbed out the same window Amy did.

Grandad caught her at it once. Walked outside for a late-night cigarette and saw her yellow hair shining in the night as she ran out to the waiting car.

He found out the boy’s name and where he lived and went around to his house. The boy’s father came out, and he and Grandad brawled on the street, trading punches, shouting insults about one another’s children. The local cop drove up and leaned out of his window and told them to knock it off or he'd arrest them both.

All that seems so strange to me, the life lived which is all in the past now. The sadness and the anger and the love, done and gone.

She climbed out the window one last time, Kathleen did, after she was banned from seeing the boy. They all searched for her, my grandparents and my mother and her two brothers. Drove all over town and walked the beach and went around to the houses of everyone who knew her.

The days became months, then years. Her side of the room remained the same, until one day my Nana screamed that she was dead and dragged all her clothes and books and shoes into the back yard and burned them. My mother said when she came home from school, she could see the smoke hanging over the house from the other end of the street.

Four years later, my Nana was hanging sheets outside and as they flapped in the wind, she saw a glimpse of a figure between them.

She pulled the sheet aside and there she was, walking in through the gate, a child beside her. Her lost girl.

6.

My grandparents hosted a lunch on New Years Eve. The boys carried the kitchen table outside and joined it end to end to the picnic table. Not all of us are looking at the camera, but then we couldn’t just keep snapping again and again, deleting the ones which hadn’t worked. Taking a photo felt more like something we did on a special occasion.

Troy looks pissed off because he had to brush his hair and put a shirt on. Amy’s sitting beside the neighbour's nephew and he’s watching her, hands braced on his thighs.

I don’t know everyone in the photo, or I’ve forgotten them. The neighbour's from beside my grandparents, I don’t remember their names.

I feel like I should remember everything about that day, but I don’t. Sometimes I don’t even remember what we all looked like until I see the photo; how young we looked, the way I smiled when someone took a photo, desperately, as if I couldn’t be seen not to smile in one.

7.

This was taken from the house. There's the gate Kathleen came walking back through in front of the frame, and beyond the beach. Maybe Nana took it for the sunset, or because she knew her grandchildren were out there.

You can see the yellow and orange flames of the bonfire too, the smoke rising toward the sky. It makes me think of my Nana burning all of her daughter’s clothes, her funeral pyre, before she came back home.

Everyone is indistinct, we’re just a mass of black shapes. You can’t see me stiff and self-conscious in Amy’s tank top with the night air against my bare stomach. I was scared of all the loud boys and girls around me and stared at the ground in the hope they wouldn’t notice me.

But then I felt one close at my side, grabbing to get my attention. The neighbour's nephew. His hand was rough against me, man not boy. “Where’s your sister?”

Sometimes me and Amy pretended to other people we were sisters. I was always happy when they believed we really were. I thought he knew we were cousins, but maybe he’d forgotten, or maybe we’d never told him either way and he assumed.

“There,” I said, pointing. Amy was drinking and she turned toward him, smiling, open mouthed.

“I want to show you something,” he said. His face in shadow, light from the fire moving across it. Hollowed out and hungry looking. I didn’t tell her to stay with me, even though she probably would have, if I’d asked.

“Hold this for me,” she said, passing me her beer.

I moved through the crowds, alone, watching the fire at the centre. I could hear the cars up on the road and I thought of my grandparents at home with my younger brother and cousins, watching TV, and wished to be back there with them.

I’d lost my brother and I found him again after the countdown, drunk, annoyed. “Where’s Amy?” he asked me. “I promised to get you both home at midnight.”

I told him she’d gone with the neighbour's nephew and his lip curled up. “That fucking creep?” he asked.

“I’ll find her,” I said, a frantic feeling surging inside me at his words, the way they wrapped around the thought which had needled at me when he beckoned her. Creep.

I pushed through the crowds again, purposeful. Going up to them, the groups of boys and girls standing around with their shorts and unbrushed hair and beer bottles, asked if they knew Amy, if they’d seen her.

She wasn’t with anyone there, and when there was no one else to ask I turned away from them all and toward the sand dunes, hidden in flax and darkness.

When the noise from the bonfire faded behind me, I could hear the noises coming from somewhere in the dunes, a man’s voice, a laugh, a girl, a cry.

The fear made me run, but I forced myself to go forward instead of back. The sting of sand against my calves, shoes sliding. It was like the nightmare I used to have when I was younger, my feet weighed down, sinking into sand, tangling in seaweed. The water at my back, rising up, coming to wash everything away.

8.

This was when we all went to the airport to see Troy off. He’s eager looking, a bag slung over one shoulder. Mum's beside him red eyed, tearful. Dad stoic. Maybe regretting all the fights he and Troy had the last three years, all the shouting and slammed doors. My youngest brother biting hard down on his lip. Me with my stupid, stupid smile.

He sent us a postcard when he first arrived, an address scrawled on the back. Told us he’d seen Kangaroo’s and snakes and he worked ten days in a row at the mine and then had four days off. I imagined him out there in the flat dry desert, all of us behind him.

It wasn’t his fault, but he didn’t believe that. Things can fall apart slowly, so for a long time it seems like they will be alright.

9.

This is the last photo of me and Amy together. It’s Christmas 2002, the tree strung with light and tinsel behind us. I’m looking toward her but she’s turned away.

Maybe her mind was already on London, where she was heading in the new year. Sometimes I thought she didn’t like being around me anymore. I had been there that night, saw him lying over her, like some heavy slippery seal was covering her, her hands sliding helplessly against him.

The nightmare slowness as I raised my hand, the beer bottle clenched in it. When I bought it down, I thought it would bounce off again, his animal hide. But he fell away from her, clutching his head. We ran from him, fast over the black sand, shells crushed underfoot. The waves crashing, breaking.

Sometimes now, when I'm out walking or driving the streets, I find myself looking into the faces of blond women of about forty, even though I know it can’t be her. She cancelled her return ticket, never did come back.

Still when I’m outside hanging the laundry, in those moments away from my husband and my own children, I can’t help myself imagining it. The sheets parting and Amy walking back in to my life, after all that time.

10.

Sometimes I turn back and look again at the photo of us all at New Year's Eve lunch. The neighbour's nephew and the way he is sitting back in his chair, so he’s behind Amy as he looks at her, his eyes squinted against the sun, waiting to pounce.