Wings of fire, p.2
Wings of Fire, page 2
“Gang,” Graham burbled on happily, “this is my varsity mate Mark, he’s a Kiwi but he isn’t too bad as far as Kiwis go.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Mark, but his eyes were on Sabrina.
“You don’t look like a Mark,” she blurted, cringing as she heard her too-bright voice and wishing desperately that she had had the sense to simply stay quiet. But it was too late.
“Oh?” he said, cupping his chin in his hand and this time making no pretence that he was paying any attention to anyone but her. “What do I look like, then?”
She hadn’t even thought about it before the words had come tumbling from her mouth, but she knew. “You’re more Marco,” she said, through a half-smile that wouldn’t go away despite her best efforts to keep a straight face.
He grinned. “So, then. You can call me Marco if you like.”
She could never remember, afterwards, what she had had for dinner that night, or if she had in fact eaten anything at all. Her world had shrunk to his eyes, and his smile, and the voice with the soft accent which could have been reciting multiplication tables and still have been huskily sexy.
“So,” Marco said as they all left the restaurant after settling the bill, turning his back on everyone else and taking Sabrina’s hand, “you fancy going out for a bite tomorrow night?”
“Can’t,” said Sabrina, her heart sinking into her heels. “I have to work. I work weekends…”
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll pick you up after.”
“Okay,” she said.
It took them less than two weeks to become what Cordelia called “disgustingly inseparable”, and within a month Sabrina had left her flat and moved in with Marco in his somewhat more up-market digs in a more well-heeled part of town. Already she could no more imagine her world without him than she could imagine not breathing. Her name for him, Marco, stuck, and soon a lot of people had started calling him that. His pet name for her nobody knew; it was a thing whispered in the shadows of their bed when the lights were off and his arms would go around her in the darkness.
“Hey, Sabriny,” he’d say softly. “My ‘Briny.”
When she came home from work one evening and found a suitcase on the floor of the living room, she thought her heart would stop for a moment. Like this? Could it really end like this?
Marco came out of the bedroom with a couple of shirts in his arms, and his face broke into a smile.
“You’re early, I wasn’t expecting you yet. I thought we could…”
“What…?” she managed, sweeping her hand out towards the suitcase, a mute completion to a sentence she could not say out loud.
“I have to go home, sweetheart. I have to go back. There are things back in Auckland that I need to take care of.”
“For… how long?” she managed.
“For good, love, I’m afraid,” he said gently.
Sabrina groped blindly for support and clutched at the back of a nearby chair, feeling the colour drain from her face.
“When…?”
“I have tickets for Friday…” he paused, took in her expression, and drew in his breath sharply before crossing the room to her in two long strides and gathering her into his arms. “For both of us, love,” he said. “I got tickets for both of us. I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting you home so soon. I wanted to take you out to a nice restaurant and tell you… ask you… Briny, will you come with me? Will you come home with me?”
She burst into tears.
But there had been nothing to discuss—he was right, he had known there would be no need to ask. Sabrina handed in her notice at work, and then steeled herself to phone her ailing father to tell him she was leaving the UK for New Zealand. They had had an uneasy relationship, Sabrina and her father, ever since her mother had died and her father had remarried a woman closer to Sabrina’s age than his own. Sabrina had recoiled from it, and had spent very little time in her father’s house since his marriage. She had been living on her own and making her own decisions for years—but the New Zealand thing was still a bolt from the blue, nearly causing her father to drop dead of a second heart attack right there and then.
But Sabrina was of age, and even if he wanted to there was nothing he could have done about her choice.
“Is he going to marry you?” was all he asked.
Sabrina, who hadn’t even thought about the ramifications of her decision to leave everything and move halfway across the world with Marco, had hesitated only a fraction of a second. “We’re together,” she had replied. “We don’t need to have it stamped and sealed.”
But there had been that hesitation, and it burned her when she thought about it. And she hated her father for being the one who had planted it in her mind. There was a part of her that did want the traditional stamp and seal. But Marco was quite simply the other half of her, and after a moment of furious self-doubt she locked the matter away at the back of her mind. It would have been nice—but it didn’t matter. Not really. After all, he had got tickets for both of them to go to New Zealand; he too had assumed that she would go, that they would stay together. That was just the way it was.
Her belongings were few, fewer than she had thought possible—they fitted into a single suitcase. And that was that—the duties squared away, the obligations fulfilled, the paperwork in order, Marco and Sabrina had left England, and Sabrina’s old life, behind.
They had rented a small house in Auckland and set up home together, slowly acquiring all the trappings—a new sofa, a stereo, piles of books, an exceedingly ugly cat which turned up as a stray, attached itself to Marco, and made itself at home. Sabrina had settled in, become comfortable, found a job she enjoyed. She never was clear on what it was precisely that Marco did for a living, but it involved him working long hours at a computer in his study and the occasional trips to other parts of New Zealand or abroad. He had obediently started explaining when she had asked him about his work, but he gave up after her eyes had glazed over for the third time in thirty minutes as she completely failed to understand the minutiae of his job, although she grasped it had something to do with engineering or maybe applied physics. He often shuffled around complicated electrical wiring diagrams and plans for strange buildings, and every now and then she’d inadvertently pick up the phone extension not being aware that Marco was talking to someone and she would be confronted by a conversation only nominally in English. He tried to explain—but she had soon learned to let him get on with it without asking for further detail.
“Some things human brains were not meant to understand,” she’d told him once, frustrated.
“I agree,” he had said, and he’d sounded serious.
And then he had laughed. Sabrina thought of him as a generic ‘engineer’, and left it at that.
In their spare time, the two of them went on long hikes together in the Waitakeres; during longer vacations he took her down to the South Island, and the fiords. He loved his country, and knew a lot about it, and through him she fell in love with it, too.
And then, after seven years together, with almost no warning at all, it had all ended.
“It isn’t working,” Marco had said in his usual laconic way. They had gone for a walk on Takapuna Beach, on a grey winter’s day full of dragging, pendulous clouds and a biting breeze. Marco stood with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, looking at once pained and determined. The wind ruffled his dark hair. He suddenly looked like a dream to her, unreal, something her mind had conjured up to salve her loneliness. It was the third time he’d said those words; it was as if he was waiting for her to argue, to defend, to plead, to cajole—he had made up his mind, but not yet beyond apparently waiting for her to try and change it for him.
Sabrina stood close to him, looking up to his face. She was slight, small-boned; she stood no taller than his shoulder, and ached to bury her face into it, to feel his arms coming around her, that was the way things had always worked before—she would be hurting, and he would heal. Only this time, he was doing the hurting.
But her own reaction surprised her, almost stunned her speechless. In the face of this, the ending, she would have thought she would cry, would demand to know his reasons, would rail at him, would even hit him. But there it was—that dream-like quantity. It was not that she did not feel the pain at this parting; if anything, she felt too much. But something dark and deep had shifted inside her like the swell of a quiet ocean, a sharp sense of foreboding—premonition, almost—that hanging on to him would have destroyed them both.
Her eyes filled with tears—she could not help that much—but it was she who flung up the wall that needed to be raised between them. He had said he had to go, and she let him, very gently.
“It’s not working,” he’d repeated once again. “I have to leave.”
“Okay,” Sabrina said.
He hesitated, looked like he wanted to say more—and then he turned and walked away. She did not watch him go. But she knew, with that weird sixth sense that she had always had where he was concerned, that he had paused, briefly, and had turned to look at her. She did not turn to see that, could not bear it—could not bear the awful sense that, despite him having initiated the break-up, he was the one walking away with the broken heart.
As for Sabrina… it had been… it felt oddly… like a sacrifice. Like she had killed something she loved at the altar of something greater that needed to be placated or appeased. It had been no less than a severing of a part of herself, her heart and her soul, and she was far from sure she could survive the haemorrhage of spirit it had begun. Left alone, in the house they had shared, she found she could not bear to look at the debris of the relationship which still haunted every room. After five or six tortured months of trying, Sabrina gave away Marco’s ugly but still very affectionate cat, which had been left behind when he disappeared, to a friend willing to care for it, bought a ticket on the first plane to Australia, locked up the house, and left. She had raided the money she’d been squirrelling away in her ‘bug-out’ account—the mad money she was saving up against potential futures she had never been entirely clear about the details of, and she had been travelling for almost half a year now, travelling across Australia, visiting the islands of the Pacific. She had finally, wandering aimlessly by this stage, found herself retracing some of the paths she and Marco had once trod together. That was how she’d fetched up, a piece of flotsam, at the feet of odd old Uncle Bob in Arrowtown…
<<>>
To her surprise, she’d found that she had been less wrapped in her silent and solitary memories than she had thought, and that she had said a lot of all this out loud to Uncle Bob.
“You must go to the Fiords,” he said at the conclusion of her recital.
“I’ve been,” she said. “We’ve been. We went to Milford last Christmas.”
But she was talking to his back. Uncle Bob had left her to go rummage in a number of drawers in what must once have been a handsome piece of furniture. From the glimpses Sabrina caught, the drawers were now full of eye-of-newt-leg-of-frog witches’-cauldron type material, which is to say that they did not seem to have anything in particular in common, but were rather a jumbled mess of odds and ends and remnants. She could have sworn she’d glimpsed something alive rear from one of the drawers, but it could just have been an imagination fired by the esoterica of this room. Her host finally seemed to have found what he was looking for, though, because he made a satisfied little click with his tongue against the roof of his mouth, nudged the drawer he’d been searching shut with his elbow, and came back to her with a little box in his hands. It was faded red velour, the colour of a memory of opulence.
“You must go to the Fiords,” he said again. “Milford is nothing—it’s a tourist trap. Go and seek the sounds.”
“We did,” Sabrina said again. “We went…”
But Uncle Bob shook his head. “Go to the Fiords,” he said again. “Look for the sound of silence. But you must cross the lake of rainbows first, the lake which the Maori called the Lake of the Sorrowing Heart.”
Sabrina smiled sadly. “Sounds appropriate.”
“Go to Manapouri. And when you do—that’s for you. Take it.”
“What?” Sabrina took the box automatically as it was thrust into her hands but then looked from it back up into Uncle Bob’s face. “But... I can’t...”
“Trust me,” he said, closing her fingers over the box. “It’s yours. Don’t you want to look inside?”
He was hypnotic, and her hands opened the box almost without any orders to do so from her brain. Inside, nestling on a cushion of blood-coloured velvet, was a pendant on an inhumanly delicate chain. It looked like opal, perhaps—all colours and none at all—but Sabrina somehow knew that it was more than that, and less. It wasn’t a precious thing, at least not in the sense that a fire-opal would be precious, in price alone. This stone wasn’t valued according to the usual rules. But it was precious, indeed—possibly priceless on quite a different scale. She didn’t know how she knew this, but the knowledge came from something that was almost recognition.
“I can’t...” she began again, looking up.
But he was gone. The room was empty except for Sabrina and the sleepy cats and the books and the tea things on the silver platter. A slight breeze rustled the papers on the floor where they had been dumped to make space for the tea tray – a breeze that hadn’t been there before. The air smelled of damp freshness, of late spring emerging into the chrysalis of summer, as though someone had suddenly opened a window. And someone had opened something—the front door was wide open. The rain had stopped, and the eaves dripped quietly into a day which had acquired a smudged, impressionistic quality. The green leaves of the trees outside in the street trembled and shimmered in the shifting air.
Sabrina hadn’t quite realised that she had stepped outside, but she found herself out on the street, with her bag in one hand and the red box in the other. When she turned around in baffled surprise, all the cottages’ doors were shut, anonymous. She shook her head, poised as though she wanted to go back to knock, but then thought the better of it, her features dissolving into a ghost of a smile.
“Weird,” she muttered, under her breath. There seemed a lot more that she could say about the magic of that afternoon, about the unreality of it all, but that was the word that summed it all up. It was… weird.
Her ankle had improved during the tea break and she wandered up and down Arrowtown’s main street for a while peering into shop windows and finding herself increasingly bored with the endless variations on knitwear, sheepskins and greenstone. Back in Queenstown, where she was saying, she got off the tourist coach and walked out into the late and golden afternoon sunlight with an intention of finding something to eat before going to ground in her tiny little B&B room. Instead, she found herself riveted by a window display of a white ship on cobalt-blue waters. Doubtful Sound, it said, the Sound of Silence.
The sound of silence. The Fiords. That bloody weird old man. The way to Doubtful Sound, apparently, lay across a lake...
“Well, damn,” Sabrina said softly.
She was the first in the booking office when it opened the next morning.
Yes, they told her, she could get a ticket for the Doubtful Sound cruise the very next day. She was considerably startled at the uncanny flow of events and how easily everything slotted together, like magnetic pieces of some strange puzzle reaching for each other and joining edges with an emphatic snick into something whole, new, seamless, oddly dangerous; at the same time she was hardly surprised at all. Of course things would fall into place easily. That was why she came. All she had to do was turn up, and… and…
The voice of the old man from Arrowtown echoed in her mind. All you had to do was come…
And now she was here. On the lake. The lake of rainbows, Uncle Bob had called it—and there were certainly rainbows in abundance, clinging like veils to the wooded slopes of the upper lake.
Her hand crept up to her neck where, nestled in the hollow of her throat, she wore the pendant she had been given to take to this place. The stone was warm to the touch.
*2*
First immersing herself in the memories which had led her to this place and then allowing herself to become captivated by its beauty and its mysterious symbolism, Sabrina had found it easy enough to ignore her lone companion on the deck as something of no consequence, irrelevant, dismissed. Now, suddenly, an unexpected voice spoke right beside her, almost into her ear.
“All those colours in the rainbow… put them together, and all you get is white.”
She looked up, startled. The man from the aft railings had moved up next to her, and she had been so deep in thought that she hadn’t even noticed. He squinted at her face, shielding his eyes against the cutting wind and the sharp reflections of sunlight off the lake of black glass.
“I don’t much like white,” he continued, in a manner that managed to be at once pregnant with meaning and easily conversational. “It doesn’t seem to like any colour at all, just throws them all away. What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
It was a purely defensive response; Sabrina had been considerably taken aback by the man’s abrupt approach. He must have spent the entire trip on deck, she didn’t remember seeing him in the cabin or even getting on the boat. Maybe he was one of the crew…? But he was not wearing their distinctive jacket; he wore nondescript black jeans and a plain dark sweater. No clues there. He looked Maori, with honey-coloured skin, flat Polynesian cheekbones, and shoulder-length black hair, so curly that it almost looked like dreadlocks. He was watching her as he spoke, a curious look on his face, and for a fleeting moment—although he looked nothing like her lost love—Sabrina thought she recognized Marco’s eyes.
It was that, more than anything, that made her pick up the thread of the conversation instead of turning her back and walking away.
