Noise filled the farmhouse – barking and the friendly shouts of the kids and work gang from the yard, the wireless in the living room, and a cat whining impatiently for attention at the bay window – but Tea’s focus landed on the office noticeboard. The usual planting and work gang schedules and reminders of doctors’ appointments were covered by newspaper clippings from around the country. The one pinned on top had just arrived in the mail from a friend in Christchurch. Front page of The Press, July 10, 1986. ‘Five votes pass homosexual law reform’. Was it only just over a week ago? A victory still fresh and keen as VE and VJ day, though the battles were forty years apart.
Tea poked the old memories like a broken tooth: the girls in their uniforms, whistled and jeered at by the crowds. But for the land girls, there had been no medals, no commendation from Parliament. Just silence. Tea and Izzy had kept their uniforms out of spite, and the home office had stopped asking after a while.
Their uniforms now were the same as they had been for decades – gumboots, dungarees, and mud – but it felt lighter somehow. She’d walked out into each freezing dawn for the last week with her shoulders straighter, her head held higher. It didn’t matter anymore if some nosy neighbour riding past saw her and Izzy leave the old farmhouse together, or saw Robbie and Grant exit the other house on the property.
Maybe.
A battalion of women had ended up making the land theirs despite the discomfort of a changing world. The other farmers in the area either tolerated or welcomed the two ‘married’ couples who had bought out the MacGregor farm after the old couple became too infirm to manage the large property. A couple of local families even embraced them. Unmarried aunties and uncles who ‘lived together’ were good referees for them at The Office, their nickname for the Ministry of Social Welfare.
The Gray-Stevenson farm had become a home for kids just as lost as the four of them had been. The gay kids, kids with whaiwhaiā, kids who wanted to change like Uncle Robbie into Aunty Robin, but for forever.
The law reform battle had been won, but another was brewing. Searching for the warmth she knew was hibernating in the winter ground, she pushed her thoughts down into the earth, her whaiwhaiā threading around the soil clumps like her winding eels dancing through the water. Something tasted off, tasted ill. The something Benny had gone looking for, her whaiwhaiā pulling her away from her foster home on the farm into a nursing career.
The whistle of the kettle on the Shacklock and the rattle of cups startled Tea back into the breathing world. She flicked away the scales darkening her fingertips with the old irritation, and her hands became her hands again, bent by a little arthritis and scarred and dried by a lot of time.
Izzy swung into the office with a tray of cups and biscuits.
“She’s late calling,” Izzy grumbled, then muttered something in te reo. Tea let her buzz-cut voice settle into her, the constant harmony to her water song. “I told you Grant shouldn’t have gone to Auckland so soon after that bad bout of bronchitis.”
“The girls are probably still having a whale of a party.” Tea gratefully took a fresh cup and dunked a gingernut. Though both houses had been renovated to electricity early, there was something about tea brewed on the old wood stove, or from the billy. “And Grant knows how to look after himself.”
“Pft. You always make excuses for them.” Izzy grimaced at the wall as if she could still see the ugly roses of the MacGregors’ old master bedroom they’d painted over years ago.
“I do not! They worked so hard for, God, years to help change the law.” If Izzy saw ugly roses in the office, Tea saw Grant patiently typing submission after submission, making phone calls and newsletters. “They deserve to celebrate. Robin needs to be in her skin for a while.”
“We worked hard, too,” Izzy grunted, easing into the old green velvet chair in the corner. “People forget that so quick.”
“Robin and Grant don’t.”
It had taken some convincing from Izzy, but they’d joined the Lesbian Coalition to help with the campaign. Not because Tea didn’t want to help, but she was endlessly cautious. One misstep and they could lose everything they’d built with the farm. They were both excited by the watershed moment, but they couldn’t help but feel the sting of how the official language centred men. Their friends in the Auckland and Sydney clubs – the girls, their old foster kids – were miffed. “Even with all the organising work we did, they just want us dykes and trannies to stop existing,” Tina had drawled in her cigarette-and-whiskey voice down the phone as disco thumped in the background.
Tea hated when Tina spoke that way, but deep down she knew she was right. Robin was still getting into fights even in her sixties. Benny had gotten into scuffles at nursing school, too.
Izzy stared at the ceiling, muttered in te reo again, then blew out a breath. “Sorry. I’m just so—”
“Tired. I know.”
“The air is tight.” Izzy squeezed a fist, the wrinkles on her face making a map Tea couldn’t read for a moment. But then after a moment gazing at her love – hair grey as a storm, but her shoulders still muscular and lean – there it was. The old warmth building up – simmering coals, summer winds, sweat from hard work, the belly heat from beer – that had held them together for so long.
“You feel it, too,” Tea said. “The water song doesn’t taste right. As if it’s stagnant from sitting too long.”
Izzy locked gazes with Tea. “Is it like … before?”
“No. But it’s something big, getting bigger, a new battle. Like when Robbie and Grant went to New York in ’69. Like when you marched on Parliament in ’77. I think Benny is about to call.”
Izzy’s gaze strayed towards the news clipping. “It’s that virus.”
The phone shrilled. They flinched.
“Aunty,” Benny sobbed down the line. “I need your help. People are trying, they are, that little girl’s story made a difference. But there are so many. I can’t make it stop. I don’t know where to take them or what to do.” Blood and piss and death were in her voice, fear like black scabs, tighter than the loose yellow of cancer that had taken Tea’s mother back in ’58.
Tea fell into practised soothing of Benny’s stone armour; stone that had gotten her into so much trouble, stone Tea had learned to carve with the gentle trickle of water. Izzy grabbed the long-wired extension and murmured in the warm tones she used when Benny had awoken from her nightmares as a teen.
When Benny was coherent enough, she told them about the people left alone to die in America, even by the hospitals. The water song grew loud and tight in Tea’s head. Her skin itched, scales creaking and flickering up to her wrists. An old call to arms.
A solution tumbled from Tea’s lips as easy-hard as changing into her eelskin had come all those decades ago. “Let’s bring some of them here, eh? There’s plenty of room in both houses. You’re not alone. We’ll fight this together.”