Wild Halo

Zia knows what people see: bad girl, bad influence, bad news. She's twenty-six, and draws when nobody's watching. But Michelle, gorgeous car whisperer and old family friend, looks up from a hot pool in rural New Zealand and calls her "lovely".

It's Halloween. The black cat is sweet and the zombie is emotional. And when Michelle explains why a mountain village with sulphur in the air is a horror movie waiting to happen, Zia bursts out laughing. She'd forgotten she could.

They laugh heaps, but there's also grief, a past addiction, and a creep who the cops ought to talk to. This is the first of three slow-burning books, so they don't kiss, or jump each other's bones yet. Zia does have a very good shower, though, and the book ends happy too. Expect Kiwi words, with French and Māori when it counts, but you'll be fine without a dictionary.

Chapter 1: Alexia

"Alexia!"

Dad always greets me like that: he makes it sound like I've turned up at his door with a huge pie, and I pretend I haven't noticed he's using my full name.

"Hey, Dad."

"You're not coming today, then."

"Nah, sorry. I'm in Hanmer. With Auntie Becca and the rest of the Taylors."

"Hanmer?" I can hear him deciding how he feels about that. "Bit of a trip for that electric thing of yours."

"Yeah, but driving it through the passes is magic."

"And coming out of Weka Pass you freewheel into Culverden on a flat battery?"

"That was last year, Dad. This year I hitched a ride with Auntie Becca."

He's quiet for a moment. I can picture him exactly: standing in his kitchen in Hornby, phone to his ear, the other hand holding a tea towel.

"That Honda of Rebecca's," he says, finally. "Not much car left under all the rust."

Becca's Jazz has been around forever, but is almost rust-free. It's just Dad giving me shit in his obscure blokey way. Or maybe he's getting in a snide remark about his little sister, who Dad thinks has gone and married the wrong kind of man.

But I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole, so I go with, "Coming from the man with the dented Toyota."

He laughs at the absurdity of that. Dad's Hilux is in mint condition. I don't think it ever had a dent.

"The southerly came through." He's changing the topic. "It's bloody freezing this morning."

"It's grey up here too... and drizzling. So the pools are full, because there's nothing else to do."

I'm standing in the locker area between the men's and women's changing rooms, the only place in the whole complex where the noise drops low enough to have a conversation over a phone. The air is cold on my wet shoulders.

I stopped noticing the smell of sulphur soon after we arrived in Hanmer. Now that I'm standing still, I notice it again, mineral and eggy. Steam stands above each pool, making columns in the cold air, so that the whole place looks like it's slowly boiling under the grey.

Somewhere in there are my auntie and uncle, and their teenage kids.

"You eating properly, Alexia?"

"Yeah. I'm fine, Dad. I'm not starving, I'm not freezing, I've got a job. So... yeah. Perfectly fine."

I've learned to answer the question he means, rather than the one he asks.

"All righty then." A pause. "Is your boss still a taskmaster at work?"

"Yep."

He doesn't push, and there's a moment where neither of us says anything, which doesn't feel weird or awkward at all.

"It's this Halloween business tonight," he complains, the way other people moan about traffic cones. "Kids knocking on the door wanting lollies, and that whole carry-on. It wasn't a thing when I was a boy."

"You don't have to open the door, Dad."

"No," he agrees.

He'll already have a bag of lollies, though. A big mixed one from the Warehouse, and he'll have been through it and taken out the ones he reckons are too cheap to give a kid.

He tells me he's been redoing the seals on the sliding door because the easterly gets in. He's got a lamb shoulder in a slow oven that's going to go to waste now. I tell him to freeze half of it, not to worry about it. He agrees. Yeah, he'll do that. Nah, he won't worry.

"Right then, Alexia. Best get on with it. You be careful driving back."

"I'm not driving, Dad."

"Well, be careful being a passenger then."

I laugh, which surprises me, and he hangs up before I've quite finished, because that's how he ends calls.

I stand there a bit longer, phone in hand, cold, and it occurs to me that I almost like talking to him.

The fortnightly Saturdays were my idea. Earlier this year, I finally admitted to myself that I need more people around me than only my flatmates, who are almost never home on weekends anyway.

Nathalie has a social life that would exhaust a Labrador, and Liam only rents a room so his girlfriend's parents in Rolleston can keep believing he doesn't live with her.

So I rang Dad, and said, "How about catching up every second Saturday?"

He agreed, like I'd suggested rotating the tyres. I thought I was doing it for me. It didn't occur to me that he'd be standing in his kitchen when I skip a Saturday, wanting me to be there.

It's a nice thought but also a slightly uncomfortable one, so I put the phone in the locker and go back out into the steam.

-oOo-

A middle-aged woman stands outside the door doing a loud video call. She must be a tourist, because she's telling her Mam that it's a bonnie day in Hanmer Springs today. We just call this place Hanmer.

I walk past my auntie and uncle in one of the hexagon-shaped pools, up to their chins in the corner they've claimed for the day. They don't move or talk, like two people who've been married a very long time, content in hot water with the rain falling on their heads.

Rawiri has one arm around Becca's shoulders, the other on the pool's edge. He lifts two fingers and does an almost-wave. Becca looks super peaceful, she doesn't even open her eyes.

Their kids are all somewhere within earshot. Rua is being noisy on a slide he's too old for, acting his shoe size instead of his age. Everyone in the complex can hear him being completely himself.

Ana is the nerdy middle child. She's sitting on the steps, explaining something to her big brother Mika.

He's nodding along in his serious way, but given the faraway look in his eyes, I reckon she's on about something scientific, and science is not his thing at all.

That's my family. Or rather, the parts of my family that function as one: Dad's little sister, her husband, their three big kids, in a basin full of hot water in North Canterbury on a miserable Saturday because Becca decided we're going, so we went.

I don't get into the pool with them though. There's room for me, but I keep walking, and think of the other side of my family:

Mum, who's deputy principaling a school in Timaru. She calls me sometimes, and remains disappointed that I'm still at the supermarket. And Dad. He still believes a woman's place is in the kitchen instead of the boardroom, but cooks me dinner every second Saturday anyway.

The overflow pools are not exactly hidden away, but nobody wants the overflow pools when it's drizzling. That's why I want them.

I pick the one in the middle. The water here is silkier than it should be, heavier, like it's been somewhere for a very long time, which I suppose it has. I wade my way through to take my favourite seat, a submerged ledge close to the gentle waterfall where the upstream pool overflows into this one.

Rain dimples the surface. Steam snakes up off the water in lazy, slow ropes that lean a little sideways in whatever breath of wind is moving, then straighten again. I sink until my chin's on the water, looking at the light.

The sky is a flat grey lid. It turns everything the same colour, doesn't cast any shadows, the mountains are basically not there at all, and the whole thing is grim and uninteresting.

But the pool complex is full of native plants, flax bushes, hebe bushes, things that I don't know the names of, right up to the edge of the pool, and as the steam drifts through the leaves, it captures just enough light for the plants to glow, almost from inside.

This place could be some kind of set they'd have built for a film about the end of the world, if the end of the world was quiet and warm and smelled like Dad's 12-minute boiled eggs.

I like it here. I lie in the water and watch the way the steam moves and think, without any real intention of doing it, about how I'd draw the gaps between the leaves, and the foggy steam.

And that's where I see her.

A shoulder first, through the gaps between the flax leaves, and a dark swim top with sleeves, black where it's wet from the pool. She moves with the unhurried gait of a woman who has never once in her life been in a rush and would like to know why you are.

The wind puffs, shifting steam to one side, and I get more of her: a round cheek, copper hair in a French crop with tapered sides, darker brown where it's wet. Then her calf, and it is a... good calf. Beautifully curved, defined muscle, a canvas for Harley Quinn tattooed on it, in glorious colour.

I know that calf.

Then I catch one last glimpse of a towel draped over an arm, all ink from wrist to elbow, before Michelle Harris disappears towards the café.

I remember standing in a cinema queue on a wet night three years ago, watching how a Harley Quinn tattoo moved on the calf of the woman in front of me as we shuffled forward. It was the original Harley with a wild grin on her face, in a jester suit with a red-and-black cowl, the proper one from the animated series before DC even wrote her into the comic books. I loved that whoever did the tattoo got the white pom-poms right.

Then the woman turned around, and it was Michelle, smiling at me like no time had passed at all. She asked about Mum and Dad, and Becca's side of the family.

The teenager, with her hair flowing over her shoulders, was Gabbie. The only word she said was "Hi."

The lanky kid turned out to be Jade. She had a very vague memory of someone who wasn't her mum or Gabbie reading her bedtime stories, and what hue of green was my hair, exactly? So I told her: kererū green, like the colour of a kererū's neck and back when it's flying away into the sun after raiding your cherry tree. She laughed, told me I was weird, that my Docs were awesome, and that she wanted to dye her hair kererū green too.

And now, three years on, Michelle's tattoo is not quite Harley Quinn any more. She's had it turned into a playing card: a Joker card, but with Harley instead of a joker, which I think is bloody brilliant, and much cooler. While Harley in the jester suit was intimate and playful, the card is wry. It knows something about people. It can end up anywhere.

I'm overanalysing. Which is what I do.

So, to get my mind out of trouble, I try to imagine a tattoo with no erotic charge whatsoever, like... a nun? It doesn't help. Even a tattooed nun would look hot on that calf.

The unhelpful realisation pops into my head: it's not about the ink on her skin. She's turning things on that I'd rather keep shut off. My face gets hot in a way that has nothing to do with the water, heat spreads down my neck, and I am blushing, in a public pool, at a woman who hasn't even seen me.

Michelle Harris is in Hanmer too, and my whole body just...

I don't finish the thought. I look at the flax, think about the sketchbook in my bag, and how to draw steam.

-oOo-

There's a queue at the toilets, because there always is a queue here. Today is worse than usual, running along a damp concrete semi-corridor that's neither inside nor out.

I'm four from the front with a towel around my shoulders. I've got myself together again on the surface, more or less. Underneath, everything's slightly skewed, like a shirt buttoned up one hole off.

Then Gabbie comes around the corner and joins the queue two behind me.

"Oh," she says.

"Hey, Gabbie."

"Hi."

She's twenty now, and I think I can see both mothers in her. The steady walk is Michelle's, and also the confident look. Those are Amélie's gorgeous Gallic cheekbones though, and the same honey hair, but cut short now. She's wearing glasses too. But the temperature set to cold in the first two words, and staying there? My memories of Amélie are of bright colour and noisy fun, and how it rubbed off on everyone around her. Michelle gave cars a stern look, but not people.

I try again: "You're at Otago now, right? How were the exams?"

"The exams are next week."

"Oh, shit. And you're here?" It's out before I have time to think, and I'm worried that she'll take it the wrong way.

"Mum booked it before the timetable came out."

That's all she's got to say to me, basically a full stop you can hear from across the room. The queue shuffles, and the kid in goggles behind me keeps hopping from foot to foot. I dislike the silence more than she does, obviously, since she's standing in it like it's her nature.

"Was it a good drive up? We got the drizzle from about Waikari."

"It was fine."

She doesn't ask how I got here, or who with, or anything at all, and the missing questions hang there between us. So I do what I do and start guessing what's wrong: she's not having a good day, or she doesn't like me, or I'm being weird... which I am, because I've just spent ten minutes in a pool blushing at her mother, and I'm probably not at my most likeable.

Gabbie and I used to be fine. I used to read to her, and she and her little sister used to make me do a voice. Once I got coerced into it, I couldn't stop laughing, but I also couldn't stop doing a silly voice, and the whole reading session collapsed into helpless laughter. I loved babysitting them, I realise.

I don't know what happened between then and now, or why Gabbie dislikes me so much, and there's nowhere in a toilet queue to find out. As if I would know how to ask.

A cubicle opens up, and it's mine. "See you round, Gabbie."

"Yeah."

I go through the door, shut it, and lean against it, with my eyes closed.

Well, that went well.

-oOo-

I'm on my way back to the overflow pools, giving the café a wide berth, when someone yells my name across the water.

"Zia!"

I stop, because I don't have a choice. Half of Hanmer turns to stare at me: the tall, awkward girl in boring black togs with her hair in a mess. There's Jade, in a traffic-cone orange one-piece that the shop assistant probably called coral, standing up in the water with her arms out like I'm a ship coming in.

"Oh my god!" she calls out. "Zia! You're here too! Mum! Mum! It's Zia!"

I'm still feeling off from the queue thing. Jade doesn't care that my shoulders are still up around my ears. She wades to the edge of the pool, grabs my wrist with a wet hand, and hauls me, laughing, and something in me goes soft before I've decided to let it.

"What are you doing here? Are you with Becca's crowd, like, the whole whānau? Did you go on the slides? Don't go on the slides, they're full of kids!" I can't get a word in. "Oh my god, you should totally come in this pool. It's perfect, it's the exact right temperature... and your hair, Zia, oh my god, is that orange? The ends are dark orange! That's so wild!"

The ends are burnt amber, actually, but I don't correct Jade. Dyeing it takes two goes and a whole Sunday, and tests even Nathalie's patience. I push the frizz back off my face with my free hand. It falls straight back again, the way it does in damp air, and I leave it.

"Hi, Jade."

"Hi!"

And behind her, up to her shoulders in the water with her arms along the rock edge, is Michelle.

She's already looking at me when I look at her. Her face does something I'd like to have a drawing of. Happiness, first, plain and immediate. And then, a split-second later, a small adjustment, like she's turned a dial down a notch. Still warm and friendly, but perhaps a bit... careful.

"Zia Calder," she says. "Well, look at you."

Her voice scrambles my insides, but I manage to get a full sentence out:

"Hey, Michelle."

Okay, so that wasn't quite a full sentence, but at least my voice was level.

"Get into the pool, lovely. You're letting the cold in."

I get in, though not all the way. I sit on the rock ledge at the edge, legs in the water and my back against the flax, where I can see the whole pool. It's the same temperature as the overflow pool and completely different, because Jade and Michelle are in it.

Jade talks the way water goes downhill: they're here for the weekend; Mum booked a house, an actual house, with a loft, which is hers; they're doing the pools today and tomorrow because why would you come to Hanmer and not do the pools twice?

It's Halloween, but it'll still be light when the kids go out tonight, and it's so stink that people in Europe get snow for Christmas and we're in the wrong hemisphere for that. Gabbie's studying, Gabbie's always studying, and Jade is doing a school art thing that she's behind on, and did I know there's a fudge place?

"Yeah, I know the fudge place."

"And what are you doing? Like, for work? Are you still at the... no, wait, were you at a supermarket? Or are you doing something different now?"

"Yeah... nah, I'm still there. It's the one on Colombo Street."

"Oh, that one. The one with the good bakery."

"The bakery's average."

"Yeah, but they have croissants."

"The croissants come frozen from Auckland."

"No." She's betrayed. "Mum. Mum, the croissants are pre-frozen."

"Most supermarket croissants are pre-frozen, love."

"And you?" I ask Michelle, because talking to people is easier than watching Jade grieve. "Still at Waltham?"

"Yup."

She would have left it at that, but Jade is having none of it.

"Mum's the boss."

"In a way I am," she admits. "Neville retired nearly four years ago. So I'm running it, but he's still very much the owner."

"Mum's got a swanky office, with a huge window..."

"It's got a window onto the workshop floor so I can see who's slacking."

"... but she never sits in it."

"I sit in it."

"Mum sits in it to do invoices, and then she goes and lies under a car for three hours because she doesn't trust anyone else with the diff."

"That's not..." Michelle stops. "Okay, that happened once."

"That happened Tuesday."

I laugh out loud before I can stop myself. Michelle glances at me. The corners of her eyes are laughing along with me, and she's looking a bit pleased with herself, or maybe pleased with Jade. She doesn't argue any further.

Then I notice Jade's eyes jump in small steps: my ear, ear, nose, lip, back to my ear. She's counting my piercings.

Lobes, daith, industrial, nostril, medusa. She gets to five, glances at the side of my neck like she suspects there's more, then sees that I've seen her. Her face goes pink, brighter even than her coral one-piece. She suddenly needs to look very hard at a flax bush.

It's the first time I have ever seen Jade Harris embarrassed.

I know what people see when they look at me: dyed hair, a face full of metal, black hoodie. Bad girl, bad influence, bad news.

I've been getting the look for ten years, the little pause while somebody decides what I am, and whether they should warn their kids. Or the cops.

But there's nothing like that coming off Jade at all, just embarrassment at being caught counting. She's so uncomplicated in everything she says and does.

Michelle hasn't missed her daughter being herself. She's looking at Jade's pink face with an expression I can only call fond, but underneath the mum-fondness, she's doing a subpar job of not laughing. She looks my way, and I could swear that she's about to wink.

I don't know what to make of that, so I look at the same flax that Jade's looking at.

When Jade clambers out to find water, Michelle's still watching me, though. I know she's watching me because I can feel it warming the side of my face. She's got a way of looking at people, like she's reading a gauge and doesn't need it to hurry up. She reads people for a living, or reads engines, which I suspect is the same thing to her.

She'll have noticed that I'm borderline nervous and stupidly self-conscious, how I'm trying to smooth my wild hair and how I've put my hands under my legs to keep them quiet.

And maybe she's picked up that I've just sneaked a peek at her boobs, not quite submerged, not quite contained by her sleeved top, moving a bit in the warm water, and... breathtaking.

"Long week?"

That's all she says.

"Yeah." I start breathing again. "Long week."

"I can relate." She lets it go.

Jade climbs back into the pool. Michelle asks if she's put on sunblock.

"It's raining, Mum."

"UV doesn't care."

I sit on my ledge with my hands still under my legs and notice my shoulders are down. I hadn't put them down; they've just gone. Michelle is arguing about sunblock, Jade is trying to tell me about last night's dinner instead, and nobody in this pool needs me to be anything other than my normal dorky self.

Michelle's arms are along the rock, the one closest to me covered in Māori-style tattoos, beautifully crafted on bronze-olive skin. Where the ink starts there's a fern frond, still curled tight, about to open: a koru, done with real care. More koru unroll from it, all of it within bands of parallel lines, some with little notches, some without, until the whole lot disappears under her top. It's a language of curves.

She looked at my left wrist while I was fussing with my hair: the flowing lines and the koru and the notched lines, a whole small story written in a language I suspect she'd know how to read. But she just asked me about my week.

Jade splashes me.

"Come in, you're being weird on the edge like that."

"I'm fine here."

"You're so weird. I love it. Mum, Zia's still weird."

"I can see that."

Michelle smiles. She closes her eyes with a happy sigh. I look at our flax.

Chapter 2: Choice

The sound comes before the sense of it. A crunch, then a second crunch, longer, a sort of groan with metal in it, then a hiss.

I'm at the edge of the car park with a towel bag over my shoulder, my hair doing what it does after thermal water, which is frizzing in every direction at once. I look up to see Becca's Jazz, faded blue-grey, with a blacked-out Range Rover Sport reversed into its nose.

The Range Rover has a tow bar that found the radiator, and now there's a spreading puddle under the front of the Jazz that is the wrong colour to be rainwater.

"Oh, no!" Ana uses her experiment-gone-south voice.

Some guy gets out. He's tall, with a red face under his sunglasses. He walks around to check it out, looks up, and notices a whole family walking towards him, with intention.

He turns around, with a weird little twist of his left foot, and is back in the driver's seat before anyone can do anything.

"Hey! You!"

Becca's shouts are loud, she picks up speed, but he drives off. The Range Rover's windows are so dark you can't tell whether he looks back.

"Oh for fuck...!" She cuts herself off. She must be absolutely pissed off, she never swears in front of her kids.

"Bloody arsehole," adds Rawiri, to the back of the ridiculous city toy that's disappearing up the road. He puts his big arm around his love. She shrugs him off, but calms down enough to get her final verdict out:

"Bloody entitled idiot!"

"Yup," Rawiri agrees.

They stand in front of the Jazz. Rawiri knows his way around any kitchen. He knows his way around the shed in their backyard, stuffed to the brim with wood and tools and paint and whatever else he's bought and inherited and bartered, all the things he's needed to add living space to the once-tiny house as their family expanded.

But Rawiri doesn't know his way around cars. At all.

Michelle comes out of the pools' entrance with her girls and a bag of wet towels, and she stops.

Then she walks over, not fast, puts the bag down on the kerb, and crouches at the front of the Jazz. She looks under it, and then she stands up, wipes her fingers on her jeans, and gives bad news:

"The radiator's gone. She's not going anywhere like this."

"You're a mechanic?" Becca asks.

"Yeah."

"Michelle runs Waltham Automotive," I add from the side, because Michelle won't. "This is Michelle, from Lyttelton, she lived up the hill from Mum and me."

I have to introduce two whole families. They say good afternoon and ahiahi mārie to each other.

Becca looks at Michelle, then at me, then back, and I watch my aunt size her up, the way she does. She heals people, body and spirit, in the rongoā way Rawiri's mum taught her, and right now she's deciding if this woman's up to something.

Rawiri doesn't say anything. He's standing a bit back with his arms folded, his face doing nothing at all, which is Rawiri's way of taking notes.

Michelle must know she's being measured. I can see it in the way she stands: straight back, useful, and to the point. And gorgeous, my mind whispers, but I swat that thought back to where it belongs.

She tells Becca what's wrong with the car, roughly what it'll cost to fix, and that, sorry, no, it isn't the kind of thing you can limp home on.

"Bugger."

"Yeah," Michelle agrees, "it's absolute ratshit." She considers Becca, with her head tilting to one side. Her hair ends up over her eyes.

"Hang on." She pulls out her phone and pushes her hair back. She taps, scrolls, finds something, and walks a few steps away with it against her ear. I try not to check out her bum.

I hear, "Gav! Hello! It's Michelle Harris, from Waltham. Yeah. Yeah, I know, ages. Listen, mate, I've got a Jazz in the pools' car park with a stoved radiator, tow bar job, and the owner's got to get back to Christchurch tonight..."

She laughs at something he's said, nods, tells him he's a legend, and that she owes him one now. Then Michelle comes back to Becca. She holds out her phone.

"Gav from the garage on the main road can come and tow it this afternoon, and look at it on Monday. He knows what he's doing. If you want to, that is."

"You know him?"

"Everyone knows Gav. But yeah, I do know him. He's been around, and doesn't cheat."

Becca looks at her a moment longer. Then she nods, once, the nod she gives people who've turned out to be all right.

She takes the phone, gives Gav her details, and tells him they'll drop the keys off on their way out of town.

"You got us to do that guy's retirement catering, didn't you? At that workshop in Waltham, about four years ago?" Rawiri says to Michelle. It's the first real thing he's said to her.

Michelle turns. "That was you guys?"

"Yup, that was us... a hāngī delivered to the car park." Rawiri's looking pleased with himself.

"That was the best catering that workshop's ever had. The crew still talks about it. Alistair asks me every Christmas if I can get the hāngī people back."

Becca relaxes, just a little bit. I think she's picked up that Michelle is someone who eats with people, and appreciates the cook. That counts, in Becca's world.

"Thank you for saying so, Michelle. Give us a call anytime."

"I might. It was good food."

Rawiri looks at her, then at me, and says nothing. I don't like the way he doesn't say anything. But I love how Michelle just knew who to ring, sorted Becca's worries in forty seconds, and didn't make anything of it. It goes on the pile with everything else I'm trying not to feel about her today, which is getting to be a big pile.

But there's the maths.

The Taylors came up in two cars. The Jazz, and the catering van because Rawiri and Mika had a job in Kaikōura on Friday and came the long way round. There are now five Taylors plus a Calder, and one working vehicle that's already half full of crates and huge pots.

We're doing the arithmetic at the same time, out loud, in the car park, while Jade and Ana stand a bit apart talking about something that makes them both laugh. Two girls from two very different worlds, already friends, as if it's simply obvious that they would be.

Rua is not talking about the number of seats either. He's fastening a cape over his hoodie, a shiny black polyester thing with red lining and a collar that won't stand up.

Then he swoops down and lifts the lid of the big chilly bin at the back of the van, and liberates a container. It is full of Becca's little blueberry pies out of her Naomi Toilalo cookbook. They look like Christmas fruit mince pies, dark and glossy under the pastry stars she pressed on top of each.

I watch him look at them. I watch him look at the back of his mother's head, where she's standing with her phone out, trying to work out what their insurance will make of the Jazz's repairs. I watch him look at the pies again, and do Rua-maths, which comes out in his favour, and take one.

Then he shuts the lid, sits on it with the container on his knees, eats the pie in two bites, grabs a second one, and starts a faux rugby commentary, to nobody in particular. But this is where he gets stupidly weird, because he's doing a voice:

"Und ze Jazz iz munted. Bled dry vith a low tackle, but zere iz no card from ze ref! Ze Range Rover iz fleeing up ze road, and..."

Mika is inside the van, bent double, trying to shove a stack of crates and two enormous pots into the back corner so there's room for a human being to sit down. He can't get to the chilly bin, because his brother is sitting on it.

"Rua. Bro."

"... ze crowd... ze mob stampeding into ze hills, zey haf pitchforks and..."

Rawiri, standing by the van with his arms folded and a mostly straight face, makes a small sound through his nose that's almost not a giggle.

Rua takes another pie.

"Ruaumoko. Get off the chilly bin. And stop stuffing yourself with Mum's pies."

"Bro. I'm emotionally supporting the Jazz."

Mika glances at Becca, her back to them and her phone out, then at his little brother, who is about to start on his third pie, and does his own arithmetic, faster than any of us.

"Come here and hold this pot," he tells Rua, "before Mum turns round."

Rua looks at his mother. She's putting away her phone. He gets up.

He puts the pie in his mouth, whole, and stands there holding a pot the size of a small bath with his cheeks bulging and sugar on his nose, his cape lifting in the wind. Mika, very patiently, starts handing him things.

But in the end, there's room for five. Just about.

"I can get the bus," Mika offers.

I don't really register it, because I'm standing at the edge of the group with my bag, and I've just realised that the person who is actually one too many here, is me. I'm about to tell Mika, nah, I'll take the bus, but Michelle's faster:

"There's room with us. We're here for the night, though, so you won't be home until tomorrow."

She says it to the air between Becca and me.

"Ohhh, yes!" That's Jade. She and Ana are both looking at me. "Zia, come hang with us! There's a whole house, you can have the couch, or, actually, Mum..."

"Jade."

"I'm just saying."

So there it is. I can go now, jammed into the middle seat of the van with Rua's elbow in my ribs, like a sensible person. Or I can stay behind and spend another whole day with the woman who levelled me from the other side of a flax bush, and get a lift home tomorrow.

I notice Gabbie to the side, fiddling with her phone, not remotely interested.

I stand there, for what feels like a long time.

"Okay. I'll catch a ride with Michelle tomorrow."

Jade whoops. Rawiri giggles. And Rua, ever the shit-shirt, says, "Choice, Zia."

I ignore Rua and glare at Rawiri instead.

"Don't," I tell him, but he smiles back, gentle and knowing. Then his eyes land on Becca next to me, and he wipes the smile off his face.

Right, so Rawiri has worked me out in one glance. Becca has worked out Rawiri. They both know something I'm apparently broadcasting in the middle of a car park, and I wish I were somewhere else.

Mika steps into the awkwardness and presses his puffer jacket into my hands.

"Take this, cuz," he tells me. "Tonight is going to get cold as."

"Oh. Thank you, cuz."

"No worries." He lopes off to the van, already taller than I am, and apparently ready for blokehood.

Becca takes my elbow and walks me three steps away, which is her way of having a private conversation in public.

"You're all right with this?"

"Yeah."

"Only if you want to. You can squeeze in with us. Nobody minds." Becca looks at me. I think she's making sure I'm as okay as I claim I am.

"I'm fine, Auntie."

"Okay then." She squeezes my arm. "Text me when you're home."

"Sure."

Ana gives Jade a quick hug and beelines for the van. I watch my cousins get in, bickering about who has to squeeze into the middle seat. I wave, and the van pulls out onto Amuri Avenue.

And then they are gone.

And I'm still here, in a car park that's grey and wet, with the Jazz looking a bit forlorn.

Behind me are Michelle, her girls, and a wet towel bag. I've chosen the door that scares me, and now I'm through it, for the next twenty-four hours.

I turn around.

"All good?" Michelle asks.

"Yeah. Oh... and thanks for this."

"No worries. Come on. It's raining, and Gabbie's got a textbook to be unhappy with."

"Sure," says Gabbie, and shoulders her bag.

Chapter 3: Nerds Know Stuff

The house is up Conical Hill Road, on the lower slope where the village starts to run out, and the pines take over.

It's timber, dark-stained, one of those holiday places built in the seventies by someone who liked wood, with a deck out the front and the forest straight up behind. Inside it smells like a wood burner that's been lit a lot. The honey-coloured panelling has gone deeper with age, and the view out the small windows is full of trees.

Michelle drops the towel bag on the bench. "So, Jade's got the loft..."

"Totally!"

"... and Gabbie's on her own in the back room because she needs to be able to study when she wants to. Which leaves the one with the two singles." She looks at me. "If that's okay? I don't snore."

"Much," Gabbie adds from the hallway, not looking up from her phone.

"Much," Michelle agrees. "It's that, or the couch, and the couch isn't great."

"The couch is a crime," Jade adds helpfully.

"I'll sleep on one of the singles. I don't mind at all." Which is not true.

"Sweet. Will you be all right though? I guess you didn't plan on sleeping over, so if you need anything...?"

"Yeah... nah, I always pack extra clothes and things when we come to the pools. I learned that the hard way. I'll just get a toothbrush from the shop before they close."

That's it. Michelle smiles at me and starts hanging wet towels over the backs of chairs. I watch her from the doorway to the lounge, with Mika's puffer over my arm and my bag at my feet, one shoulder against the frame the way I like to. I can see both the lounge and the hall from here.

Jade goes up the ladder like a tame possum. She comes back down with a Faber-Castell sketchbook and a grocery bag that rattles.

She spreads paints and brushes on the dining table under the one window that gets good light, then sneaks a mug of water from the kitchen.

I'm still in the doorway when she takes a seat, with an appropriately dramatic movement, and disappears into her own world.

Except that she doesn't shut us out.

"It's a zombie," Jade explains. "Because it is Halloween. It's for the sustained observational study: a natural form, in wet and dry media."

"A zombie is not a natural form," Gabbie says, going past with an open textbook.

"It was a natural form. Once. And it's corroded, which is very natural. Well, for a zombie."

Gabbie's door shuts.

I've moved as far as the arm of the couch. I'm not watching Jade, exactly, but I sense the rhythm, the way you do when someone is working near you: bursts and stalls. Brush into water, sometimes deliberate, and sometimes faster than I would have. Paint and water on the page, a grey wash going down, a green over it, a huff.

Jade talks while she works, a running commentary: "okay so the jaw's kind of, no, more like, hmm, oh that's actually good, no, wait." A purple goes on that's way too cheerful. She knows it, so she rubs at it with her thumb, which makes it worse, which, judging by her huff, she also knows.

Michelle's in the kitchen.

"It looks wrong," Jade decides, twenty minutes in. "It looks... I don't know, ugh. It's got all the bits, and it's wrong. Why is it wrong?"

She's fighting a hand. I can see it from over here, a zombie hand reaching out, but it looks more like a dirty glove, all fingers and no bones.

I guess Jade knows what skin looks like, but not what's under it. Ana would know, actually. I remember Ana telling us, over dinner, how the boys in her biology class had to stand outside while she was dissecting something that was alive before the school got hold of it. Rawiri eyed her, and Mika told her not to spoil his kai.

Maybe Jade should ask Ana about bones and tendons and muscles, I think, but she looks at her own hand holding the pencil, curls it, watches the knuckles come up and the tendons on the back, and she's off again.

That is impressive. She looks instinctively, which most people never do.

But this zombie is not her friend today. She grumbles, and then she mutters under her breath. Jade goes quiet, which is disturbing, and I start to wonder what...

"It's hopeless! Hopeless!"

All of her gives up at the same time. Jade folds forwards onto the table. She misses the mug of paint water by three millimetres, but the sketchbook flies across the table and lands on the frayed carpet, with a soft slap.

Nobody says anything. Gabbie's door stays shut. In the kitchen, the jug boils and clicks off.

There is now a pile of red hoodie and brown hair on the table, with two elbows sticking out, and a scattering of pencils and brushes and tubes of paint.

I get up and reach down, the same way I'd straighten a crooked frame in someone else's house, and... wow.

The colour is alive, actually alive, the greys have green in them, the greens have grey, the skin looks translucent where it should, clotted where it should, and there's a purple in the shadows of the eye sockets that shouldn't work but does.

Every part is beautifully done, but the finished thing looks assembled. I feel a bit sad for the zombie. It's coming for someone, but it doesn't have the required body parts to pull it off.

"This is so good," I tell her.

"It's not."

"No, really, Jade, your colour is amazing. How do you even do it? And the hand, it's alive enough to... well, to do bad things." I turn it toward the window. "It's sad, though. Your zombie's sad."

"Sad?"

"He wants to come at me and he can't. He doesn't know where he's going."

She lifts her head. "What?" Her eyes are a bit red.

"May I?"

She nods. I pick a soft pencil from her tin and study the page a moment longer.

I draw a light line, a single curve that starts down at the hip, sweeps up through the spine and the shoulders, and out along the reaching arm to the beautifully scary hand.

The parts fit each other now, and the zombie has somewhere to go. His shoulders slump down from the line, the hip turns sideways off it, his arm is an arm now, and the glove on a stick is a proper hand that's trying to grab me.

Jade sees it. I watch her see it. Her whole face opens.

"Oh, my god."

"I haven't drawn anything, not really... You already had all the right pieces, and I've just put a line through the movement. So, I guess, if you find that line early, while you're still planning your work, then everything knows where it goes, and you can see anything that doesn't."

She's watching me intently.

"Well, that's what I think happens? Um. It works for me, sometimes."

"Oh, my god, Zia. That's it. How did you... Where did you...?"

"Nerds know stuff."

She laughs, a proper loud laugh, and grabs the book from me, already reaching for a pencil, already looking at the hand that's now hanging off a line and seeing what it needs.

Michelle is in the kitchen doorway with two mugs of tea, one in each hand. She's been standing there for I don't know how long. Her face is doing the thing from the pool: quite obviously thrilled, and then a little careful.

Except this time there's something else in it, a small bit of wonder, like she's turned a corner in a house she knows and found a new room.

She doesn't comment on it, though. She just comes over, puts the one mug down next to me and the other next to Jade, and goes back to the kitchen.

I drink the tea. It's exactly how I like it.

I take the mug through to the kitchen when it's empty, because I need something to do with my hands. Michelle's at the bench slicing bread, and there's not really room for two people in there, so I stand with my shoulder against the door frame.

"Where'd you learn that?"

"What?"

"The line thing."

"Oh, that. In year ten at Cashmere High. There was a teacher there, Josh Cavanagh. He was really young, and he'd just come out from the UK. He used to stand around and not speak much at all. And then he'd borrow a pencil or show with his finger where the movement should be. But mostly he didn't draw it for you, just pointed."

I turn the empty mug round in my hands. "He got in trouble for me once. With the department head, because of my hoodie."

"Your hoodie? Did you wear it when you shouldn't have?"

"Nah, I made it. It was a Wednesday Addams hoodie, or rather, a Wednesday Addams hashtag that started with a swear word. The department head was scorching the earth about it, and when Josh heard, he went to the office. He came back looking smug, but in a kind of pale way. He had my detention squashed, though."

Printing #fuckyeahwednesdayaddams across my chest seemed like a good idea then.

Michelle looks puzzled for a moment, and then she works it out.

"You mean, hash..." She mouths ffff, "... yeah, Wednesday Addams? And the school couldn't cope with a sweet bit of culture like that?"

"Yeah... nah, it's a posh school."

I still have that hoodie.

Michelle laughs.

"After that day, that guy hated Josh. Everyone could see it. Josh couldn't care less."

"Huh." She slides the bread into a bag. "Cavanagh's still at Cashmere, isn't he?"

"I don't know. I haven't been back."

"Jade's at Cashmere."

"I know."

"She's got a Cavanagh for art."

I look at her. She's opening a jar of peanut butter.

"Small city."

"Yeah. It is."

"You'd have been good at it. I mean, at teaching."

"I'm not a teacher. I stack shelves."

"Yeah," she says, and nothing else, and puts sandwiches on a plate.

-oOo-

"I'm hungry."

Gabbie is standing in the hallway with her arms folded.

"You didn't want the sandwich I made earlier, Gabbie."

"Mum. I was focusing."

Michelle relents.

"Fish and chips?"

"That'll work."

"Coming, Jade?"

"Yeah," she says, but something about the zombie's ear draws her in again. "Actually, I just want to..."

"You, Jade Harris, are about to become a liability." Gabbie's voice has a hungry edge to it.

"Okay! Okay, I'm coming, see? This is me, rinsing my paintbrush, okay? Sheez!"

And that's that, because nobody argues with Gabbie once she's decided it's time to eat. Everyone is finding shoes and puffer jackets.

We walk down into the village. It's stopped raining, more or less, and the clouds are beginning to break in the west, a long crack of pale light under the grey, so that the wet streets reflect it, black tar with a line of bright sky in it.

The pines are heavy with rain.

Jade and Gabbie are ahead, Jade talking, Gabbie occasionally producing a contrary word.

Michelle and I end up at the back. We've moved through a whole day of managed distance: pools, car parks, lounges, kitchens, and now we're just walking side by side, completely naturally, two women off to buy dinner. I don't mind at all.

We talk about practical things. The drive tomorrow, and when we should leave. The price of petrol. Whether Gav will actually ring Becca on Monday, which Michelle says he will, because he owed her one and now she owes him: a game she calls Canterbury ping pong. Gabbie's flight back to Dunedin, so we'll have to hit the airport on the way through. And then we talk about Jade.

"She's been stuck on that art homework for a week, you know."

"She wasn't stuck. She was nearly there."

"Yeah, well. Nearly there and stuck look the same from the kitchen."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to..."

"Zia." She looks at me, and then at the pines still raining on their own, and then back at me. "Don't apologise for that. That was the nicest thing anyone's done for her this year."

I don't know what to answer, so I don't, and watch the reflection of the sky in the road instead.

The chippy is on Amuri Avenue, opposite the pools. The smell of deep-fried food drifts down the street, and suddenly I'm just as hungry as Gabbie.

Michelle orders before anyone's asked: four fish, two scoops of chips. She does it without fuss, like it's her job to feed people, and counts me in without even needing to think about it. Then she notices what she's done, and looks over her shoulder with her card floating in the air.

"Is it okay? I can still change the order."

"Nah, it'll be perfect," I tell her.

She gives me a small smile and turns back to the chippy's daughter behind the counter, while I wander over to the fridge in the corner. The fizzy drinks are enthusiastically priced.

"Would you mind getting the drinks?" Michelle asks. "The supermarket is marginally less of a rip-off, though."

So I ask who wants what, and walk up the road to the Four Square for the drinks: raspberry for Jade and lemonade for Gabbie, L&P for Michelle and ginger beer for me. I'm glad they have Phoenix ginger beer, because the Aussie one is sweeter than I like. Actually, most things made in Aussie are too sweet for me.

They have Halloween lollies on a stand, orange and black, already marked down. I ignore them, but add a bag of muesli for breakfast, one with nuts that might be almonds, and a cheap toothbrush for me.

While I walk back, with drinks that are rapidly turning my hands into ice blocks, I realise what Michelle has done. I'm not a guest if I bought the fizzy. I don't know if she meant it that way. I suspect she did.

The wet streets shine gold in the late afternoon light, now coming in low under the cloud.

We eat outside, at one of the wooden tables by the road, where we fold the paper open between us.

Jade is delighted with the Fanta raspberry, which was the last one they had at Four Square.

The fish is juicy, and the chips are properly double-fried, chunky enough to stay warm for a decent while.

Gabbie and I run out of paper napkins, so I get up and fetch a pile from the counter, and put it on the table between us. Gabbie nods, takes one, wipes her fingers, and goes back to dipping her chips in the lake of tomato sauce Jade has squirted onto the paper.

"Is London Fish and Chips still there?" I ask. "On London Street?"

I ask it to no one in particular, and I don't know why. Jade answers with her hands because she's recovering from finishing her fizzy.

"Yeah, they're still there," says Gabbie. She doesn't bother to say anything else.

"And Bomba does pizza by the slice on Saturdays," Jade adds. "On the same street. Like actual wood-fired pizza. You get one slice for six bucks, and it's the size of your face. Mum, we should get pizza when we're back..."

"I just bought you fish."

"I mean next Saturday. It'll be so fun if you come and hang with us! Zia, did you know..."

She's off, telling me about the market, the murals, how many there are on London Street now and which one's her favourite. Gabbie has shut the conversation down; Jade has just gone and opened it up again, and I'm sitting at a wooden table in Hanmer, inside their world.

Michelle watches us while she eats her chips, in a dainty way that is both charming and distracting. Her eyes are on the girls and, every so often, on me, and I think she's picked up on the London Street question-and-answers.

Jade explains that you can see the best mural of them all through a window when you're in the back room of the gift shop on London Street.

I notice her selecting the longest, most evenly cut chip. She places it neatly to the side, like she's saving it for last.

"So, Jade," I hazard, "do you remember how you planted a chip in the garden? So it would grow a chip tree?"

"Noooo! I never did that!"

She's halfway between outrage and laughter.

"You did, actually." Gabbie chucks her under the bus without looking up. "And watered it, every day. For a week."

Jade looks at her sister like she's been stabbed, but the laughing gets the upper hand. Gabbie, very nearly, smiles. Michelle, though, looks at me. She doesn't look away. Her eyes shine. The corners crinkle, and then the rest of her face lights up into the most beautiful smile.

My heart skips two beats.

So I finish eating my chips.

Chapter 4: Hello, Cat

Back at the house, Gabbie goes into her room with her book and a mug, and closes the door with a click. Jade goes back to the table, puts her headphones on and vanishes into the zombie: she mixes paint with determined intent, and as she sets to work, we cease to exist.

Michelle stands in the middle of the lounge for a moment, looking at one closed door, and one pair of headphones.

I watch her from where I'm leaning with my shoulder against the window frame. Then she looks at the wood burner and loads it: kindling, two smallish logs, and a large one. Michelle places kindling the way she eats hot chips, with care and finesse.

She puts a match to the firestarters and closes the door on the smoke. Yellow light glows and flickers behind the smoke-stained glass. When she's apparently satisfied that it's drawing well enough, Michelle stands, stretches, and walks to the bookshelf tucked under the loft's ladder.

She considers the books. "Wilbur Smith and Nevil Shute, which is standard, I suppose. Georgette Heyer, that's nice, actually. Someone's mum must have forgotten it here... oh, look, Ice Station Zebra." She laughs about that one. "But here is an improvement, a New Zealand birds field guide! Nice. And here we have..."

Michelle's running commentary stops abruptly. She has a National Geographic magazine in her hands, old and battered. She runs her finger down the spine and opens it.

A lioness and her cub are on the cover, photographed in the warm amber of African light. Someone must have brought it, read it over summer, and left it behind as a gift to future generations of holiday-makers.

Michelle pages slowly, as if entranced. She has her back to the glare of the lamp that lights up the table where Jade works with tiny, precise movements. She stands there in the light from the wood burner, and I watch her eyes move, take in the photos, skim over words, read phrases. Her face has gone... not soft, but gentle, and full of wonder.

And before I can look away, she looks up and meets my gaze. I count the heartbeats. Then her eyes flick to the side of my head, and she's looking out the window at Hanmer.

"I feel like a walk." She closes the magazine and puts it back, carefully. "It'll be cold but beautiful outside... coming?"

"Sure."

I put Mika's puffer on. It's enormous on me and smells like a teenage boy's deodorant, but it's the warmest thing I've got right now.

Jade waves in our general direction at Michelle's instructions to keep the wood burner going.

Outside, the cloud is gone, and the sky over the basin is that deep blue just before dark, with the ridges going black beneath it. Two stars are already in. The air's dropped ten degrees since the chippy. My breath shows.

"It's funny. Jade's so chilled about everything. Well, right up until she's got a paintbrush in her hand. But still."

Michelle snorts. "Chilled? Jade?"

"Isn't she?"

"She's chilled until she decides to be angry about something. Then, look out."

"No way! About what?"

"Climate change, mostly. Last year she found out what's happening to the Hector's dolphins, and for a month she didn't talk about anything else. She made posters. She wrote to the Minister."

"Did they write back?"

"Yeah, but it was just some noncommittal gargle. She read it out at dinner, in a voice."

I laugh. I can just see it.

"Most people never get to see that side of her," Michelle says. "She saves it up."

"And Gabbie?"

"Gabbie's the other way round. She looks like she'd bite you, but underneath she's as soft as butter."

"Butter that's been kept in the fridge though."

It slipped out, and I worry she'll mind, but Michelle just glances at me and smiles a bit.

"Yeah. Fair point. But hey, she makes me continental-style hot chocolate. And she sings in the shower, when she thinks nobody's home. Opera, Lorde, the lot. If you ever tell her I told you, I'll deny everything."

"All right, then."

"Actually... Jade was her idea."

"Wait, what? Gabbie's?"

"She was four, and she wanted a baby sister, and she would not let it go. Amélie loved the idea straight away, of course." She smiles up at the wet pines. "It took me about thirty minutes longer. Then I loved it too."

It's the first time she's mentioned Amélie all day. She says it casually, like it's not a big thing.

"Gabbie was so cute while I was pregnant with Jade. We'd be busy around the house, and at random intervals she would drop her toys and come running to kiss my belly. She was absolutely stoked when Jade eventually kicked her in the face. Amélie thought it was a cracker."

"Gabbie used to run everywhere," I say. "I don't think I ever saw her walking."

"She still runs. She's out every morning in Dunedin, up and down those hills like a lunatic." Michelle looks sideways at me. "Do you remember when she came down on Jacksons?"

"She did that a lot."

"I mean the bad one," she says, laughing. "She couldn't bend her knee for three days after that."

I remember the bad one. She was seven or eight, we were at the upper end of Jacksons Road, she was playing silly buggers, and the usual thing happened. By the time I got to her, there was blood all down her shin, so I picked her up and carried her home, the whole way. She cried for about ten seconds, mostly because her ice block looked worse than her leg, and then wanted to know why blood goes brown when it dries.

"I told her it was the iron in it, going rusty," I say. "I didn't know if that was true. She was happy with it, though."

"Then she spent the whole of dinner explaining haemoglobin to me."

"Then Mum saw my school shirt."

"Oh. Ouch?"

"She was not impressed. It was a brand new shirt." I can still see Mum at the laundry tub, telling me off, and at the same time instructing me on the fine art of soaking a shirt in cold salty water. "She's very... organised, Mum. In an intense way."

"She was good to me and the girls, your mum," Michelle says quietly.

It's true, Mum does look after people. In her way. But I don't really know how to say that, so I take the easy way out and tell Michelle about the lamb Dad roasted that I didn't turn up for.

"Poor Roger."

"Poor lamb."

She laughs. "Does he still call you Alexia?"

"Every time. It is annoying, but... well, I guess we're talking to each other now? Like, I had to go and live with him after Mum went to Timaru, and we hardly said a word to each other for three years. Well, not quite that bad. Actually, he had lots to say, usually about people he didn't like, and types of people he didn't like." Michelle nods along, like she understands what I'm on about. "To be fair though... he's never said a bad word about Mum, you know. No complaints, ever. And half the kids at school talked about their separated parents who'd bitch about each other, all the time, but Dad? He just didn't go there. I don't think it even occurred to him to bitch about Mum."

"That's rare."

"I know, right? Dad's a bit weird, I think. Okay, that's unfair. Unusual? Yeah, that's a good word for him. But... I guess... he didn't chuck me out when I had fucked up badly, so..."

I'm rambling. I didn't want to start telling her about that time, and for a moment I'm worried she'll ask, but she just looks at me. Michelle has kind eyes.

"I see him regularly now," I say. "Dunno what we're doing. Painting fences, mostly."

That gets a quiet laugh out of her. We don't say much for a bit and then she asks about the supermarket.

"It's a job."

"It's a decent job. You lot kept the country fed in lockdown."

"Dunno about that," I counter, but I appreciate the warmth.

Somehow we start talking about cars, and she figures out that I'm driving a Nissan Leaf.

"So how do you find it?"

"I'm loving her." Even I can hear the smile in my voice. "She's fun in town, and absolutely brilliant on the motorway. Just not for very long."

"How far does she go then?"

"Hundred and something? Depends how flat the road is, and if I'm behaving... or not."

"So not Hanmer?"

"Not without a lunch stop, a charger, and a bit of range anxiety. Dad thinks it's hilarious."

"I'm guessing you're not having buyer's remorse, then."

I think about it, because she's asked decently, not the way people ask about an electric car when they want to have an argument about it. "She's quiet. She goes, no messing around. She suits me, I think? Buying her wasn't a statement or anything, I'm not saving the planet. Well, I am, but I wanted a car with a bit of character, and the prices were okay then, and she's green in the shade."

"Green in the shade?"

"Yup. And blue in the sun. Nearly black in the rain."

She's smiling at the road. "You've thought about the colour."

"It's a brilliant colour. I appreciate clever colours, and people who can pull them off. Somebody has to."

"Fair enough," she says, and then we fall into a silence that isn't exactly awkward but isn't comfortable either. I try not to overthink it, and do anyway. Every time she asks me something, I give her a whole TED talk.

She's walking on the kerb side, the old-fashioned way, like my grandad used to. I wonder if she holds doors open for girls.

The residential streets up here have gone in for Halloween in a small, embarrassed way. A skeleton hangs off a letterbox. Someone's put a strip of orange fairy lights along a porch, and a cherry tree in the same garden has dropped all of its pink blossom on a plastic gravestone.

Two little kids go past in the opposite direction with a parent: one a ghost in a pillowcase, the other something with wings that I think is a bat, but might be a fairy. Both look very tired and very happy, with their loot stuffed into a New World shopping bag and a pink sandcastle bucket.

I look back. The smaller one, the bat-fairy, turns round to walk backwards for a bit. Her eyes go wide as she takes me in from the bottom up: worn Docs, loose jeans that were black a long time ago, a giant puffer over a hoodie that can't contain my amber-tipped hair, dark lips and black eyeliner, a face full of black piercings. She literally keeps staring at my face.