“There was sand. And it was night. And the stars. No, they must have been bullets and shells. And the shouting. And the water there. Tastes so different. My arm hurt so much. But it doesn’t now. Oh, that all sounds a mess. I’m not making any sense at all.”
Izzy took her arm and searched for eelskin, but it had gone. She tested Tea’s muscles with her strong fingers, and the pressure felt good. Tea had never been touched by boys – a dance here, an elbow on the way home there – but this …
“You went to the war,” Izzy said softly before letting Tea’s arm go. Cool night rushed in to fill the void left by her touch.
Tea’s hands shook as she took up a mug of tea. “I think I was near Robbie. I was feeling his pain. Something is wrong with his arm. I don’t know if he’s injured. Just … his arm doesn’t feel the right part of him. Oh, that doesn’t make sense at all.”
“The whaiwhaiā is strong between the two of you.”
The word magic burned sour as Tea took another sip of the bitter brew. “Grant says a storm is coming, and I think I felt part of that now. But I don’t know what any of it means, or what I’m supposed to do with it. I’m here, Robbie’s there. There are oceans between us.”
Izzy rubbed the ears of a sleeping dog acting as a pillow. “Perhaps that’s it. Water is everywhere. Your lingering power from that tapped into something that was happening to Robbie, and he was near a strong body of water …” she stopped, shook her head. “I can only guess. We need to talk to Grant. But I think he’ll agree with me. We all have a lot of work to do. You have to practise your water thing—”
“My eelskin.”
“Yes, if that’s what you want to call it.”
Izzy didn’t laugh. Izzy wasn’t afraid of her. Izzy didn’t treat her like the girls at school, the girls on the street. Izzy heard her words and gave them the weight they deserved.
“I … I’m scared, Izzy.”
An arm slid back around Tea’s shoulders. How could something so wrong be so right? But it was only them here. Izzy with her scent of starlight, her breath sharing her water from deep within.
“It’s alright, Tea. We’ll figure it out. Whatever happens, we’ll do it together. Promise me you won’t go doing something foolish if the call comes through … through the—”
“The water.”
“Yes, through the water, and you hear it first. Promise you’ll wait for us.”
“I promise.”
Together. Us. Whaiwhaiā. The words smelled like a home Tea had never known.
6.
Christmas, 1942.
The best present Tea could receive was relief from the strange pain. It didn’t entirely dissipate – lingering in her skin as a scratchy memory, exacerbated by the oncoming heat like a rash – but further medicine came in a letter from the front. Robbie could not write about what he’d been through, due to censorship rules, but it was enough to know he was safe, alive, and grumbling about sunburn.
Spring lambing had bled into a brittle summer, the grass turning brown almost overnight. The heat radiated from the hard North Otago soil and crunching grass, brush fires hiding in wait. The hot Nor’wester blasted the senses and pushed dust into everything. The dogs barked at nothing, putting Izzy on edge. Sometimes she’d crawl into her dogskin at night to share a blanket in the dog runs to keep them quiet. A dangerous thing to do, but Izzy told Tea she’d had plenty of experience slipping in and out of form near other people, and the MacGregors were creatures of habit.
The sheer weight of the work never let up. The girls went to bed exhausted every night. Though Tea groaned to Izzy about her aches and pains, excessive expectations from the boss, and the sharp tongue and eye of Mrs MacGregor, a growing sense of achievement pervaded her discomfort. She was doing something!
Underneath it all, water seethed. Even when she was dead tired from a day of fencing, dagging, hoeing, chopping, riding, docking and dipping, mucking, wool sales, counting feed, manipulating heavy ploughs head-down in the wind, fertilising, fixing, and generally making do, even when the Nor’wester blasted around the edges of the cottage and she tried to read her books and letters by lamplight, she strained to touch the hiss of the creek.
A low-level itch took up in her hands that had nothing to do with trimming gorse or pulling Old Man’s Beard. She too used the cover of dark to pull at her new skin, taking sips of lukewarm water from a chipped cup and practising flipping scales up and down her forearms. It didn’t always happen. She could never tell when her whaiwhaiā would respond, whether the water would take or give. The weather and her weariness had nothing to do with it. Frustration was a constant friend.
The early morning Christmas Eve train back to Dunedin was packed with girls in wool uniforms too thick for the enclosed space, gritty wind rocking the carriages. Tea’s full uniform had arrived in November, and unwrapping the brown paper package had felt as much like early Christmas as Robbie’s letter. The jauntiness of her pinned hat brim made her hold her head up. Some other girls had to look twice at the Land Service epaulet, and Tea bit her lip to manage her grin. The name had only changed recently, as if Land ‘Army’ was too strident for girls. Though the chocolate brown uniform didn’t sport as many gleaming buttons and badges as the other corps, its refined lines brought her close to feeling a kinship with other girls that she hadn’t before. She could hide her broken and dirty fingernails inside her gloves.
The only Māori girl in her carriage was wearing Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps khaki – They were allowed to serve there? Tea wondered – gave Tea a single, knowing look, then ignored her for the rest of the trip.
Dunedin. Home. An abstract idea she had to stitch back together from a patchwork of memories that even after only a few months away didn’t come together seamlessly.
The place where Mum was. Where Robbie wasn’t. Where Grandad wasn’t anymore. Where her father had never been.
With a little time and space in her head between here and there, she chewed over thoughts of her father as the train clicked past glimmering Seacliff, headed across the lagoon from Warrington, and then puffed uphill from Waitati.
It was hard to miss someone you never knew. His shadow had sprung into her thoughts more often in the last few months than any other time in her life. A shadow as large as the fire in her blood.
Peter Gray. His name meant little. Tea had never known that side of her family, other than they lived ‘way back country’; Mum said this with the same inflection as ‘them mowrees’. Maybe that wasn’t his real name at all. Mum would never tell her how they met. There was no photo of him in his Great War uniform. Tea didn’t even have a whisper of a memory of him. He’d gone to war not long after she and Robbie had been born.