“What I said was we might get a kitten one day. One big dog is enough for any family. What would Rata do? She’d hate having a cat in the house.”
“No, she wouldn’t. Golden retrievers like cats,” Sam replied. “I read it in my pet book.”
There was no point recalling the number of times we’d seen Rata disappear into undergrowth in pursuit of an unfortunate member of the feline species. Since Sam had given up trying to become a superhero and thrown his Batman mask to the back of his wardrobe, he’d morphed into an obsessive reader brimming with facts to destroy any argument I could dredge up.
I didn’t want a cat. I probably wasn’t even a cat person. My husband, Steve, certainly wasn’t. If only Lena hadn’t smiled so brightly that day at our neighborhood playgroup when she’d asked: “Would you like a kitten?” If only she hadn’t said it so loudly—and in front of the kids.
“Wow! We’re getting a kitten!” Sam had yelled before I had a chance to answer.
“Wow! Wow!” Rob had echoed, jumping up and down in his sneakers with the holes I’d been trying to ignore.
Even before we’d met Lena I’d been in awe of her. A willowy beauty with an eclectic fashion style, she’d migrated from Holland in her late teens to become a highly regarded painter. Her portraits invariably contained political comment about race, sex or religion. An artist in the deepest sense, she also chose to live independently from men with her three children. Personally, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Lena had summoned her offspring from some parallel universe only she and Pablo Picasso had access codes to. I wasn’t about to make a fuss about a kitten in front of her.
Raising a pair of boys was proving to be more demanding than I’d imagined back when I was a schoolgirl watching baby-shampoo ads on television. If there’d been an Olympic medal for teenage-mother naivety, I’d have won gold. Married and pregnant at nineteen, I’d smiled at the notion of babies waking up at night. Those were other people’s babies. Reality struck with Sam’s birth. I’d tried to grow up fast. Midnight phone calls to Mum three hundred kilometers away hadn’t always been helpful (“He must be teething, dear”). Fortunately, older, more experienced mothers had taken pity on me. With kindness and great patience they’d guided me through Motherhood 101. I’d eventually learned to accept that sleep is a luxury and a mother is only ever as happy as her saddest child. So in those closing days of 1982 I was doing okay. They were gorgeous boys, and put it this way: I hadn’t been to the supermarket wearing a nightgown under my coat for several months.
We were living in Wellington, a city famous for two things—bad weather and earthquakes. We’d just managed to purchase a house with the potential to expose us to both: a bungalow halfway down a zigzag on a cliff directly above a major fault line.
Minor earthquakes were so common we hardly noticed when walls trembled and plates rattled. But people said Wellington was overdue for a massive quake like the one of 1855, when great tracts of land disappeared into the sea and were flung up in other places.
It certainly seemed like our bungalow clung to the hill as if it was prepared for something terrible to happen. There was a faded fairytale appeal to its pitched roof, dark-beamed cladding and shutters. Mock Tudor meets Arts and Crafts, it wasn’t shabby chic; it was just plain shabby. My efforts to create a cottage garden had resulted in an apology of forget-me-nots along the front path.
Quaint as it was, clearly the house had been built with a family of alpine goats in mind. There was no garage, not even a street frontage. The only way to reach it was to park the car up at road level, high above our roofline, and bundle groceries and children’s gear into our arms. Gravity would take care of the rest, sucking us down several zigs and zags to our gate.
We were young, so it was no problem on sunny days when the harbor was blue and as flat as a dinner plate. Whenever a southerly gale roared up from Antarctica, however, tearing at our coat buttons and flinging rain in our faces, we wished we’d bought a more sensible house.
But we loved living a twenty-minute walk from town. Equipped with ropes and rock-climbing shoes we could have made it in five. When we headed into the city, an invisible force would send us plummeting down the lower end of the zigzag. Hurtling through scrub and flax bushes, we’d pause for a glimpse. A circle of amethyst hills, stark and steep, rose above us. I was amazed we could be part of such beauty.
The path then pulled us across an old wooden footbridge spanning the main road. From there we could either take steps down to the bus stop or continue our perpendicular journey to the Houses of Parliament and central railway station. The slog home from the city was another matter. It took twice as long and demanded the lungs of a mountaineer.
The zigzag had a sharply divided social structure. There was a Right Side, on which substantial two-story houses nestled in gardens with aspirations to Tuscany. And the Wrong Side, where bungalows sprinkled themselves like afterthoughts along the edge of the cliff. Wrong Side people tended to have weed collections rather than gardens.
The prestige of jobs declined in direct correlation to the zigzag’s slope. On the top right-hand side Mr. Butler’s house sat like a castle. Grey and two-story, it oozed superiority not only over the neighborhood but the city in general.
Below Mr. Butler’s, a two-story house opened out over the harbor, looking as if it would hardly be bothered by mere social comparisons. With eaves graceful as seagull’s wings, it seemed ready to take off in the next decent gale to a far more glamorous world. Rick Desilva ran a record company. People said that before they were married, his wife, Ginny, had been a fashion model, New Zealand’s answer to Jean Shrimpton. Shielded behind a thicket of vegetation that no doubt could be dried and smoked, they had a reputation for parties.
There was a ridiculous rumor that Elton John had been seen staggering out of their house drunk as a dog, though in reality it was just someone who looked like him. Their son, Jason, was at the same school as our boys. They were perched on the lip of a gully about half a mile farther up the hill, but we kept our distance. The Desilvas had a sports car. Steve said they were too racy. I had no energy to argue.
Our side of the zigzag specialized in recluses and people who were renting for a while before moving somewhere less exposed, with better access and not so close to the fault line. Mrs. Sommerville, a retired high school teacher, was one of the few longtime residents of the Wrong Side. She inhabited a tidy weatherboard house one down from us. A lifetime with adolescents had done nothing for her looks. She wore a permanent expression of someone who’d just received an insult.
Mrs. Sommerville had already appeared on our doorstep with complaints about our dog terrorizing her cat, Tomkin, a large tabby cat with a matching sour face. Even though I tried to avoid her, I bumped into her most days, giving her the opportunity to point out skid marks where boys had been zooming down the zigzag illegally on skateboards, or the latest graffiti on her letterbox. Mrs. Sommerville’s pathological dislike of boys included our sons, who were suspects of every crime. Steve said I was imagining things. While she loathed boys, Mrs. Sommerville knew how to turn the charm on for men.
I worked at home, writing a weekly column for Wellington’s morning newspaper, The Dominion. Steve worked one week home, one week away, as radio officer on one of the ferries that plowed between the North and South Islands. We’d met at a ship’s party when I was fifteen. A grand old man of twenty, he was the most exotic creature I’d ever encountered. Compared to the farmers who steered us around country dance halls near New Plymouth where I grew up, he was from another world.
His face was peachy white and he had baby-soft hands. I’d been mesmerized by his blue eyes, which glowed under their long lashes. Unlike the farmers, he hadn’t been frightened of conversation. I’d assumed that being English, he was probably related to one of the Beatles, if not the Rolling Stones.
I’d loved the way his tawny hair draped across his collar, just like Paul McCartney’s. He’d smelled of diesel oil and salt, the perfume of the wider world that was impatient for me to join it.
We’d