TURBINE | KAPOHAU

Since you died my heart transformed into a locket or a spy device with a secret compartment. Open it up to find an ancient granite plateau, speckled with mountain daisies, atop a towering cliff. Crumbs of rock spit off the edges and transform into violent boulders which bash against ice-capped waves. There you are: gliding the currents of air off the edge.  I watch you swooping, weightless, and unobserved. You are wearing your denim jacket. The one that was stolen at that gig a few years ago. Turns out it was you who took it and you needed it to fly.  

* 

When you died you came to live in Nanna first. She didn’t believe it though and so, one night, she was standing at the big window overlooking the sea and she said, OK Neil, if you really are there give me a sign. And then one of the street lights flickered.  Soon after that Nanna said you left her.  Then you began to move into me. I know because I had a dream, which was definitely more like a visitation.  

In the dream it is the mid-80s – I am not born yet. You are standing on a central suburban street in Auckland with no one else around. On your right is a brown square car. Its boot is open and filled with moving boxes.  The air is crisp and bright, and it is mid-afternoon because the shadows of leafy mature poplars offer some dappled protection. You are wearing a Hawaiian shirt and have a moustache. I arrive like Ebenezer Scrooge on his tour through time: zapped into a scene to watch it unfold. Except you see me – because you were waiting for me – and standing across the street you give me a smile and try to tell me with your eyes the things that the language of your life didn’t allow. Then you pull out a chair from somewhere and offer me a seat. Instead of taking it I wake up crying and can feel your arms wrapped around me. 

At the time of the dream I was in my second year of university, living in my first flat up Holloway Road in Wellington’s windy and damp Aro Valley. Crumbling nineteenth-century cottages, painted in bright colours and filled with the ghosts of their former residents. Just below its winding tarmac road the underground Waimapihi river holding its stories: of a time when there were only Rangi and Papa, and birds with no  wings, of a time where people who call themselves Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Ruanui,  Muaūpoko, and Ngāti Mamoe relied on it for food, of a time when a man with a monocle stood in an office somewhere in London and used a ruler to cut the land up with lines and  then ferried in people carrying bibles in their baggage to establish Wellington’s first residential suburb.  Those who were there before were evicted without warning, or knowledge that such a thing was even possible.  

Our flat was a nineteen forties bungalow with no insulation and little sun. In winter you could see your breath escaping. I lived there with two old high school friends. We had a tiny TV and no fridge, heating or internet. I slept in socks, pyjamas, a woollen jumper, woollen socks and a food-crusted pink dressing robe, under two duvets. An accidental weighted blanket made up of the overwhelming potential of being an adult now.   

Maddy was in her second year of nursing and wore a practical black backpack to school. We called her Tiny or Aunty Mads and would play a game where we lifted up little objects – a cup, a book, the edge of a rug – and ask if she was there.   

Sylvan, my high school drama friend, was now studying creative writing and managing the intensity of a first love with a cool slightly older person.   

As flatmates, we spent our weekend going to parties dressed up like a three-person rat king and hanging out with each other on the deck – the only part of the house that got any sun during the day. One weekend Sylvan and I made an unsuccessful marble maze from bits of cardboard and Tupperware, another time Maddy put a stainless steel bowl over Sylvan’s head and gave him a haircut. Later in the year we went to a party at the identical house next door where I saw my theatre crush pashing my theatre rival.  I went back home and cried under the weight of my duvets until the hangover came.   

I had been the first person to move into the flat, a couple of weeks before uni started. I  didn’t yet have any furniture and so I slept on a military trundler bed I borrowed from someone somewhere and watched season one to six of Six Feet Under in the dark on my Lenovo laptop, hired box sets from Aro Video just up the road and floated back and forth in a sea of 19-year-old angst.  

* 

You get to know someone very well when you share space with them. Flatmates you meet on Trade Me become accidental siblings. You live with them for two years, have a couple of Mexi-fest dinners and parties, and it’s not until you move out that you realise you know everything there is to know – even those flatmates that never leave their room except to make a week’s worth of pumpkin soup. The years or months when you shared intimate inside space are always transformed into sacred tableaux in the history of your life.  

In my mid-twenties I lived for a year and a half in an urban commune in Auckland’s leafy and right-voting suburb of Epsom. There were 20 or so of us living in a 12-room retirement village. The landlord was land-banking, waiting for permission from the council to build big apartments. Until then, he said, you can live here and do whatever you want to with it. Nail things, paint things, build lofts, paint a mural on the wall, have two caravans for extra flatmates on the back lawn, rip out walls – I don’t care.  And so we did. My friends, who had taken on the lease a few years before I moved in, were filmmakers and so they turned the front rooms into a production house – music videos, ads, short films, play rehearsals, live gigs, actors doing self-tape auditions for untitled pilots and student short films.  Soups with egg-shells in them, commercial-sized bags of corn chips, a steriliser but not a dishwasher, weed from a sticky glass bong filling the lounge, two people sharing a room, radical honesty, mid-week eleven pm jams on the piano and drum kit in the dining room, a person coming home from their day job as a children’s entertainer dressed in a too-tight Superman costume, a flatmate coming into my room and using my hairbrush without asking, a flatmate living in between the walls, and another above the second toilet, crying when a flatmate won the Billy T Awards, doing nos in the bedroom, cuddle puddles and big feelings.   

One of my favourite people there was Patrick. Sweet and sour Patrick who liked ice-cream as much as me and would tease me for my messy car. Patrick who had a shaved head and wore black jeans. Patrick who had come back from Australia after his marriage had broken down, who loved plants and op-shopping and cars, and who had also lost his dad a few years before.   

Patrick who moved into the caravan at the back of the house. Patrick who had a collection of obscure audio equipment and could only cook one meal: eggs on toast. Patrick who was tidy and house proud and kept his caravan very neat – a brightly coloured crochet blanket always at the foot of his bed. Patrick who pressed the doorbell the morning he arrived at the house to be greeted by me, in undies and t-shirt, with a hug.   

Patrick who, I have sometimes wondered, is you. You in another life. You if you weren’t my dad and we were the same age.  I have wondered if you might have been like Patrick as a flatmate, and now a friend.  

* 

Generally I feel like we live together pretty well. Even if it isn’t a conventional arrangement. You seem to have all the space you need. You also don’t seem to need to eat or shower because you are no longer a body who sweats and so there’s no need for a roster which makes things easier.  It would be good to know how you are feeling about things though. I was thinking we should have a flat meeting except that, the thing is, I’ve never heard you talk or seen you write. I also can’t quite pin you down because you are always flying. When and where do you sleep?  I could leave you a passive aggressive note I guess except that I have no idea where I would leave it. You don’t have any furniture and your room is the space between a cliff edge and the water below.  As a result I feel like I’ve had to make a lot of assumptions about what you like and don’t like and what you think and feel about things. It would be good to get some of those cleared up. I just would hate for this all to turn sour because of something left unsaid.  

The thing is I’ve been thinking I might like to live on my own for a while. Nothing against you or anything. I just feel like I might be at that stage, you know.  Where I am ready to try it out. This is obviously a bit awkward because it’s my mind and so I hold the power but just know you should take as long as you need to find somewhere else. I’m sure you’ve been thinking about it anyway, just like any flatmate I would never expect you to stay in the same sport for ever and ever.  

I am also ready to know how our relationship has changed through you living in me. I’m ready to get some distance so I can see what we have become.