In a public library in Wellington, I said to the librarian, “I’m losing my mind.” He was a kindly young man, unfazed as he showed me what to do. He was so helpful my spirits began to rise.
The morning had begun at an office, where we were making an administrative application. We had arrived for the appointment with our documentation ready. As we entered, a flustered couple were being ushered out and directed to the library two blocks away, where they could print material. Clearly, they’d come unprepared.
Soon, though, we were receiving the same instruction. Parts of our application needed to be printed; we could use the library. Directions were given. In the library, we couldn’t locate a login, the printer wouldn’t work and the screen timed out. The saintly librarian made soothing noises as he worked the computers, around which people were gathered, agitated or slumped like players at the pokies.
Back at the office, another person was receiving directions to the library, a family were being told to head to the library, and a different couple were just returning from the library. In the waiting room, the mood was subdued. Those who entered with confidence didn’t know that soon they would be quivering with anxiety, at the library.
We pressed on with the application, and after the ordeal and the testing tasks, things improved. After bureaucracy there was charm, and we went from being wrong-footed to being won over. The interview concluded and we emerged, late for our next date but happy. A few hoops – well, what did we expect?
Wellington had turned on a beautiful morning; now the wind had picked up. We decided to walk to Karori, where the writer Katherine Mansfield spent much of her childhood. This was fitting because (I’m happy and grateful to record) the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi has awarded me the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, enabling me to live and write in Menton, France. Mansfield moved there in 1919, seeking a cure for tuberculosis.
In Karori, I visited my brother. We talked about Menton, where we lived as children when our father held the Katherine Mansfield fellowship. After school, my brother and I would walk down to the marina, where he would direct our search for the exotic sports cars that passed through town on their way to Monte Carlo.
In a short story, The Olive Grove, I wrote a child’s eye account of living there. I described a brother and sister roaming through the olive grove and the streets of the Old Town, playing on the breakwater.
As we talked, I thought about the pair we were long ago, our wild enthusiasms, our capacity for happiness. We didn’t know we needed to learn how to live. We couldn’t have imagined ourselves in this room in Karori, counting our gains and losses, remembering.
The wind howled across the courtyard and blew open the door. Papers flew up in the air and I said, “Oh, leave it open.”
In Mansfield’s famous short story The Wind Blows, a brother and sister walk together on the esplanade in a Wellington gale. It’s a portrayal of intense childhood memories. At the end, they’re looking back at themselves on the shore as they sail out of the stormy harbour: “They can’t see those two any more. Goodbye, goodbye. Don’t forget …”
The wind roared in the trees. I said goodbye to my brother. This is what Mansfield called the life of life. There are hoops and then you emerge. Don’t lose your mind, don’t forget. Hold onto the memory, two children on the sunlit breakwater, their faces turned to the horizon.
