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We met at university. My lover’s eyes were grey/green, and she had a wild streak that attracted and frightened me in equal measure; her fine, long red hair was her pride and an emblem of her personality. After six months of dating, we moved in together. On the anniversary of our meeting, I gave her a pounamu that had belonged to my late mother. Nephrite jade, it had been formed by the artist into a single pikorua twist so that it resembled the intertwining fronds of a pikopiko, a New Zealand native fern symbolic of my mother’s birthplace. My mother had placed it around my neck when she had first been diagnosed with cancer, holding on to me and telling me that the pounamu was a symbol of her always being with me no matter where my journey would take me, and to pass this symbol to the one who I most loved, most cherished. It must stand as a gift of permanence, love and respect. Just as the taniwha, the giant water being, had made his lover a bedrock of the river, this permanence could only be broken by a tangi, a tremendous song of grief at the death of the one to whom you’d gifted this object of your forever love, someone who was part of your essence.
***
It is a difficult birth; my daughter doesn’t want to face the world. My wife makes the last exhausted push. The cord is cut and our daughter is held in front of us. A squirm and then her urine sprays in short bursts across the green hospital sheet. She lets out a caterwaul and then newborn tears flow, sparking the shared parental laughter that holds us in a bubble of devotion. My wife looks at me, holds the pounamu pendant between two fingers, brings it to her lips, kisses it as she meets my gaze. Our daughter latches on to my wife’s breast and feasts.
***
In the garden, early afternoon, my daughter asks:
“What are we made of Daddy?”
“Flesh,” I say without a pause, trowel in hand, bent over the scented earth.
“But if its flesh, the same, why are we all so different?”
I stop the weeding, look at her, see her standing amongst the row of magnolias, sun-licked like a visiting angel, and say:
“The main difference is on the inside, my darling. The heart speaks more than fleshy bumps.”
A laugh, and then another: “Fleshy bumps, fleshy bumps.” She cartwheels across the lawn with her new mantra, the sun finding her auburn hair, the thrill of turning upside down framed by her shrills of delight.
***
The pool is in the southern corner of the block so it cools in the afternoon. But in the morning the sun falls in bands along its width and the pleasure of swimming up and down, down and up in a steady rhythm, is immense. It is my relief from my public service job, the daily commute, the new life of prosperity and a slight paunch. The surge of the water and the momentum of forgetting become a drug. Laps are a palliative, an escape, the underwater of blue and green a thickening of the air, a thinning of the light. The depths of the pool scatter the light so its colours could merge with my wife’s pounamu which she wears swimming, wears always, its strong leather strap a protector of the green jewel.
We taught our daughter to swim in that pool but supplemented our small efforts with beginners’ lessons. She is a good swimmer, although lacking in stamina, the effort defeating her over longer distances; the breathing not quite right. There were enough skills so that when she had her few friends over to play in the pool, the supervision was light touch, just enough. We would sometimes hold a late afternoon barbecue where a number of the neighbours and their children swarmed in and out of the pool, making her happy with the slide and grip of other people. You would see her intently hanging on to their words, enjoying the attention of another’s gaze, entering the water like a prize. Her mother and I could not have loved her more.
***
When I was at the university, just before I’d met my wife, I had a period where I was run down and tired, not eating properly, smoking too much. My studies were going badly, my mother had been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, the breast cancer having metastasised and I was sleeping poorly. My eyes became bloodshot and dry. I contracted a nasty variety of conjunctivitis with the works: irritation, pus and photophobia. All I wanted to do was lie in my darkened room and listen to soft music. I listened endlessly to Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl. Days when the rains came, Down in the hollow, Playin' a new game. It was April and wet and the words whilst upbeat, underlined the pain that I felt and the growing sorrow that I garnered from being alone and in the dark, developing a carapace of pity from a stubborn infection that continued for two weeks. In the misty morning fog with our hearts a thumpin' and you. Mine was a constant fog, without a real life companion. There was only my flat mate who called me Stevie Wonder and kept out of my way, anxious that I would pass on my infection. And in a moment of pain and self pity, tangled amongst unwashed sheets, naked except for my mother’s pounamu, in my darkened room, I let out a flood of tears. I cried and cried and sobbed and heaved; only pulling myself together after a near hysterical time had gone by. Tears and a shower, clean sheets and more Van Morrison. It was the best thing possible. The discharge reduced and my eyes cleared in the next two days, the doctor later explaining that tears contain lysozyme, an anti bacterial enzyme, and that the crying jag would have helped.
***
Our daughter’s first day of school delivered a wrenching pain to my wife. That evening when first day daughter was tightly asleep, she told me how she had hugged our girl too hard and waved goodbye like a madwoman. When my wife came home and shut the door, she told me that she had burst into tears, looking around the house as if all were lost, as if a part of her had been cut out. After listening to her sobbing, I held her for a long time that night, yet feeling apart, disconnected. When she burrowed under the sheets to finally greet sleep, she turned away from me, the way we slept from that night on.
***
The Murrumbidgee, the never-failing river, sourced from the Fiery Range of the Snowy Mountains flows through the suburbs. It eddies and collects in a number of hollows at Kambah Pool. We had banned our daughter swimming there because one stretch of thin river sand is a declared nude beach and is full of fat, wrinkled men who gather like toads. Kambah pool has shallow and deep pools where the riverbed is visible; sometimes the river meanders and swells, kisses the banks; at other times it is swollen and muddy dark, a swirl of menace. I had often driven there on rainy days, delaying my homecoming, walking through the showers and watching the water, seeing junior rainbows kiss the grass, feeling like my soul could dive into that river, following it until I found my own essence, my own unrecovered precious stone.
***
They had gone swimming in the river. My wife was found first, naked, face down in the shallow bend, the pounamu askew, its folded twist clinging to the back of her neck. The man was found further down the river. His body was trapped under a submerged log. At the funeral my daughter wept and wept. I squeezed her hand, raised my eyes to the sun and felt no tears. They had slipped downstream forever but there was only a silent tangi, a stifled lament that could never be sung. The pounamu was buried with my wife.
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