Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (11 page)

An icy wind swept up the road, scattering rain across the pavement. There was no traffic, just the dark shapes of the city boxing the wind and the rain. As Rosa turned around from locking up she was surprised to see me still there. She'd offered to drop me off at the hostel before and I had always refused for no specific reason other than a vague sense of pride. That or an inability to accept a favour or kindness. The answer is somewhere in that pot stewing with gruff country-styled living and a certain lack of grace that has to do with youth rather than place.

A gust of wind tore at her coat. She shoved a hand out and turned her face away. Rosa had a way of making the weather seem like some unspeakable insult. I was forever apologising for it.

‘Come on, Lionel. Tonight I will drive you. The weather is barbaric.'

The confidence Rosa displayed in the restaurant I saw vanish outside La Chacra. She perched behind the wheel, pushed her face forward and peered shortsightedly. Her foot on the accelerator was surprisingly timid. She was suspicious of everything.

‘Where did you say, Lionel? Up this road? My god, it is so steep. They should grow goats here. It is not a place fit for cars. What, here?' She pulled a face at the dark entrance of a track through the bush that was the common shortcut from the road. I knew she would never walk along it by herself.

Two weeks later she would need me on our trip south. She would need me to set against her uncertainty. ‘Will it be safe on the ferry in this weather?' (It was raining.) ‘Do you think this café is okay?' (Lace curtains hung in the window.) The world threatened in so many ways. The swell in the Strait. The bacterial menace of places we stopped for a coffee and a sandwich.

She pulled on the handbrake and switched off the engine. Discreetly I slid my hand away from the door handle.

‘So, Angelo tells me you are going home this Labour Weekend. It is not so convenient to hear this secondhand.'

‘It's study leave as well,' I said. I had told Angelo thinking that he would tell Rosa.This is how I thought the chain of command worked. A split second later I realised he had.

‘Of course, it is absolutely fine,' she said. ‘In fact, I thought we could drive together. I could show you the cave, and also drop you off at your farm. It is on the same road, I think.'

She must have looked up a map and plotted this.

At my hesitation she said, ‘That is up to you, of course.'

‘Can I think about it?'

‘Yes. Of course you may think about it. But you need to know that I have booked the car on to the ferry anyway. Otherwise it is up to you.'

The Rosa that showed up at the Terminal looked a different person from the one I was used to. ‘Vamp' is not a word I knew in those days. She'd applied a cherry lipstick with a heavy hand. She'd darkened her eyes. She brooded inside a black leather jacket. Under that she wore a fire-engine-red cashmere top.

I saw her before she saw me, and so I stayed put for the moment enjoying this distance and its advantage. She looked smaller, nervier.

When she saw me she stood up, she was so relieved. ‘Lionel, I got here early just in case.' In case of what? I didn't ask. There was a moment when she went to kiss my cheek. I pulled away. It was involuntary on my part; but only by a split-second. I was sure everyone's eyes must be on us. A thirty-eight-year-old woman and a wispy-chinned youth. None of this anxiety and calculation escaped her.

‘Look. My Pasta has turned red.'

‘No, I haven't.'

‘I have embarrassed you!'

‘No. No,' I said. ‘Not at all.'

And just to prove it I presented my cheek for her to kiss. Only for her to leave my face absurdly hanging there.

‘Once is enough,' she said. ‘More than that is vulgar.'

She was tired from a late night at the restaurant. For most of the crossing she dozed, knees and arms folded in a big leather chair. I went out on deck. It was October, springtime, and the snowcaps along the Kaikouras were sunlit. Other parts of the landscape still wintered in shadow. In the still glassy waters of the Sounds the tourists came out to the sunny decks and fed chips and battered fish to the seagulls. I leant against the railing and smiled indulgently. It felt good to be out in the world again, away from the sweat and sogginess of the kitchen and the closed atmosphere of the room I shared at the hostel with Brice Johns.

When we rolled off the ferry at the other end Rosa insisted on driving. She hunched over the wheel; gripped it too tightly, and drove too slowly for the straight roads that were magnificently empty.

‘Rosa, would you like me to drive?'

‘Why? Why do you ask?'

‘No reason. I just thought you might like a break.'

‘No. I absolutely like to drive.'

She switched her attention back to the road and I slithered down in my seat a bit more. Silence never lasted with Rosa and soon we were talking—about my parent's farm, where it was exactly, what it looked like. I told her and she looked up at the stark bare hills. ‘It would kill me,' she said. Her attention drifted back to the road and we entered a new period of silence. Once she glanced at the car clock. She calculated that they would be setting up the tables about now. That cheered her up.

‘Kay. What do you think of her?' she asked.

What did I think of her? Kay was emotionally thin. While the rest of us might daydream, Kay gave the impression of total devotion to the task at hand. She was the one Rosa turned to in an emergency. It was Kay who whipped off an old tablecloth, pressed on a new one with gleaming cutlery. The whole exercise was done with chilling efficiency. I couldn't picture Kay outside of La Chacra. I'd heard a husband mentioned; and that he had gone. But that was the sum of my take on Kay. I just couldn't imagine her with a life of her own.

‘Kay is totally reliable,' I said.

‘She is on the ball, yes?'

‘Totally.'

I liked these conversations. They put me above the rank and file and suggested a trust in me that I knew Rosa didn't extend to the rest of the staff. Funny to think that dancing lessons had brought the kitchen and the front of the restaurant together.

‘And what about my dishwasher?' she asked.

‘Ditto,' I said.

‘What is this ditto?'

‘It means the same.'

‘Ah,' she said, and then something in Spanish that clearly amused her.

‘What was that? What was that you just said?'

‘Nothing.'

A bend approached and Rosa turned her concentration back to the road. We were about to enter the gorge.

I'd never travelled in my own country with a foreigner before. I found myself feeling anxious. I desperately wanted Rosa to like what she saw. I assumed she would be filled with admiration and that I would feel understatedly proud. Instead, I began to see it through Rosa's eyes. It was big, and shadowed, and above all, it was empty.

Once when we stopped for petrol a tour bus on its way south to the glaciers slowed down.You could see the sleepy faces in the window, dulled by landscape. Already they were sick to death of mountains, lakes, rivers and sea. If only someone would run naked across the street! Their eyes picked me up and put me down again.

I wasn't what they had hoped for.

At the end of the gorge we came out to ocean and sky. Rooftops sparkled in the late-afternoon sunlight. As we entered Louise's old neighbourhood of Little River, Rosa pointed to the glovebox for her sunglasses. Private driveways tunnelled through thick, bushy hedgerow. At the top of one drive a rust-coloured metal sculpture showed four spindly figures clinging to one another in a storm of cold green light.We passed a few scratchy streets, a war memorial, and a number of grey weathered houses with murky windows. Little River was one of many towns along the Coast that had earned its living from coal and railways. But no longer. The coal seams were exhausted, and the railway that had carried the coal over the Main Divide to the cities was no longer viable. Weeds grew where the road crossed the tracks. Buildings with Greco-Roman columns and pre-war solidity, once tenanted with banks and solicitors, now advertised bingo evenings. Two women in tracksuit pants guarding a cake stall watched us crawl by.

Out the other side of town the bridge took us across an estuary all golden in the fading light. Up ahead were the jagged black tops of the cemetery. We passed it for farmland. As we slowed down again a cow raised its monstrous head to stare at us. ‘Beast,' Rosa said back at it. We drove on.

This is how the Little River Cemetery declares itself, with a small wooden arrow pointing to dense roadside scrub. Rosa had to brake suddenly. She parked the car and we walked along a short path, parting pig fern and bracken until we reached a section of long grass with raised graves, two with iron bedheads at each end. Rosa fossicked around, parting grass until she found what she was after, which is what she meant to show me, in case I thought she had made everything up. ‘Here,' she said, crouching down by a river boulder. ‘Read, please.' I read out the names of James and Kathleen Cunningham.

It wasn't so interesting, not as interesting as I had hoped it would be. A boulder with a plaque in long grass. But that might have been because I was feeling hungry.

We got back into the car and drove into town. This time there were no false turns. No hesitation at intersections. She drove like a local.

We stopped at a pub to eat, and as I feared would happen, when we entered conversation stopped and faces looked up. Rosa took no notice. It was a younger crowd, some my own age and a little older. Girls in blue track pants. One with a ring through her nose. Another with a nose stud. Some with Chinese symbols tattooed over their arms, or the names of boyfriends branded with ‘forever' over their flesh. They were the living, breathing flesh of the land, these large, bloated meat-eating figures with heavy breasts swinging under their T-shirts and sweat tops. Their overfed cheeks sagged on heavy jawbones. In this company Rosa looked like a small porcelain doll.

I bought two beers back to our table. As I sat down she hissed, ‘Look at the way these people dress. I shudder to think if I did not provide my waitresses with uniforms. Otherwise, probably they would turn up in rags to wait on tables.'

It was the same taut voice we heard at La Chacra whenever a large party of diners squeezed through the doors. When she left her booth it was like the Captain taking over at the bridge. For her to show her face in the kitchen was a sure sign of trouble out front. Friendships were savagely disregarded. A kind word said a moment earlier was forgotten. In the space of a few minutes we had gone from plain sailing to heavy seas, and everyone was required to pitch in. If I was shining wine glasses then I had to be seen to shine more vigorously. Waitresses, as a matter of unspoken accord, were required to show more breathlessness and distress. Angelo's voice rose until he was shouting at the char-grilled meat, hissing at it to cook more quickly. Eventually tables were joined, three clean tablecloths found, the cutlery set and the twenty-six unexpected diners seated, and the earlier calm re-established. The waitresses stole out to the loading bay for a cigarette. Angelo stopped shouting at the meat to stare moodily at the grill, and I was left to shine glasses in my own good time. Best of all, Rosa withdrew to her booth of cigarette smoke, and we crossed into the sunset hours of the evening shift.

Here at the pub she pointedly left her cottage pie. She pushed it showily to one side.

I pointed out to her, ‘It's a pub, not a restaurant.'

‘They still have a responsibility to the food. I would not feed this to pigs.'

She looked critically around at the other tables.

‘Look at these people…' I couldn't wait to get out of there, away from the frosty stares of the bar help and the locals.

We got back into the car and went off to find the hotel.

At the desk Rosa turned to announce a slight hitch. ‘Well it is not necessarily a problem. They have put us in a double room.' She announced this in such a public way that I could only agree.

‘No problem.'

The hotel was a big old wooden one with outside fire escapes, wooden banisters, and a steep flight of carpeted stairs that made you feel you were climbing back in time to mustiness and communal bathrooms. On the landing outside our room she apologised. She said, ‘If you are uncomfortable we can change our accommodations.'

‘No, this will be fine.'

She smiled. ‘Thank you, Pasta. I just don't want you to be uncomfortable.'

‘I'm comfortable.'

‘I hope it is not too disgusting,' she said, turning the key in the door.

She was pleasantly surprised. There were French prints on one wall. A pouch of pot pourri on the dresser. A stylish bedside lamp. Two beds, I was relieved to see. A double bed and a single which I quickly claimed with my backpack. Rosa looked about for her bag and realised she had left it downstairs. ‘Pasta, would you mind?'

At bedtime, she demonstrated the same flair for direction. ‘Now Pasta, why don't you use the bathroom to brush your teeth and shower, and I'll follow after.' I did as she instructed. On my return Rosa was in black satin pyjamas. It was her turn for the shower. This revolving door saw me in bed by the time she returned, and the awkwardness I was anticipating neatly averted.

In the morning, we once again had the road to ourselves and once more it was slow going. We seemed to occupy the same stretch of road and the same view without any sense of progress.

I said to Rosa, ‘Would you like me to drive?'

‘There is nothing wrong with my driving.'

‘I wasn't suggesting that there is…' ‘Then why do you ask?'

Silence.

‘Now you're pouting.'

‘I'm not.'

‘Yes. Your arms are folded. I know that look,' she said.

I laughed, which was a mistake.

‘I am also your employer,' she said quietly. And just like that the hierarchy of La Chacra imposed itself on two people in a car driving along the loneliest coast in the world. Rosa was a proud little nation conscious of its borders and entitlements. Soon though she tired of the silence. She sighed a number of times. Then I felt the car slow down. She was pulling over.