“Hel-lo?” Skylark said. “Would you mind if I joined you?”
But Lucas wasn’t listening. He motioned to the centrefolds.
“Arnie’s,” he told Cora.
Trailing after her mother and Lucas, Skylark took her irritation out on the disconsolate mechanic.
“If you think I don’t know what’s wrong with the Jeep, I do,” she hissed. “It’s the petrol pump.”
Arnie gave her a dirty look but that didn’t faze her one bit.
“Don’t try to overcharge us either,” she added.
The diner turned out to be a surprise. Clean, bright, with sparkling formica tables, plastic tablecloths and pretty little plastic roses in Marmite jars. Along one wall was a bar. On the other side of the bar a waitress — the peroxided Flora Cornish, who was fifty-nine but had been forty for the past twenty years — went about the business of dispensing very bad coffee to patrons who wouldn’t have known the difference.
“Oh, how pretty,” Cora cried as she picked up a handful of roses and sniffed them.
Flora Cornish looked at Cora, wondering what kind of dingbat she was, and her look changed into recognition.
“Here it comes,” Skylark sighed.
“I know you,” Flora screamed. “You’re Cora Edwards. You used to be the weather girl on television, didn’t you, love!”
The diner’s other patrons stared at Cora, struggling to make the connection between a girl who had once been a nightly fixture on the six o’clock news and the older woman who stood before them. After all, her heyday had been five years ago.
“See?” Flora Cornish said, rummaging behind the bar and waving a dogeared Woman’s Weekly. There, in all her radiant youthfulness, was a colour photograph of Cora accepting the award for Television Weather Girl of the Year.
“It’s true!” Skylark heard Lucas gasp. She saw the look on his face as he realised, hey, this was the best thing to have happened to him in years. He’d never been seen with, let alone talked to, a celebrity. His mind was already turning to romantic possibilities.
Meantime, of course, Flora Cornish just had to ring everybody else in the street to come and say hello to Cora Edwards.
“Time to bail out,” Skylark said to herself.
Skylark stepped outside the diner and headed down main street to look at the port. Part way along, she came to a war memorial with a marble soldier pointing down a road that ran off to the left.
What was there to lose?
“Thanks,” Skylark told the soldier. She followed his direction and it was like ripping through an old hoarding and finding another town behind the billboard.
Clearly, Tuapa was more substantial than at first sight. Not so long ago the main industry had been forestry, and workers and their families had flocked to the town. Now all that was left of their time here was the derelict railway station and yards. On the other side of the road the prospect was more encouraging. Immediately ahead was a medical centre and a primary school — two prefabricated boxes sitting in the middle of a paddock. Next to the primary school was a large college and technical training institute whose students, Skylark supposed, were bussed in from the surrounding district. Outside the college was a big poster:
BYE BYE BIRDIE
The All New American Musical
College auditorium
This Saturday 1 Performance Only
A shadow flicked over Skylark’s head. She looked up. A skua, casting the serrated edges of its wings across the sun. Then another. And another.
There she is. The chick. There.
Skylark followed a circular road and happened on the port. It too was bigger than she had expected: coldstores, dry docking area, marine supply outlets and what looked like a fish packing plant; all evidence that fishing had supplanted forestry and stopped the town from becoming completely comatose.
The breakwater jutted out like a wishbone into the sea. Skylark decided to walk the length. One or two boats were still at anchor. The rest of the fishing fleet were out on the ocean and would not return until nightfall.
“Kia ora, kotiro!” A Maori fisherman, in Swanndri and woollen balaclava, called out from his boat. Too cross to reply, Skylark walked past him, right to the end of the breakwater. The waves had made the footing slippery. It would be easy to fall.
Now, the skuas cried. Now.
One among them closed its wings. Skylark heard a warning yelclass="underline" “Watch out!” Surprised, she took a step backward.
The skua dropped like a stone.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The voice seemed to come out of darkness. Skylark cleared her head. Worried faces were looking down at her.
“When that skua hit her, she almost went over the side. Blood was coming out of her hair. I reached her just in time. Another second and she might have fallen into the sea.”
Skylark sat up. “Where am I?” she asked.
She was back at the diner. Somebody had put a blanket around her. She looked from one face to the other. The man from the garage. The waitress. The Maori fisherman.
“Oh my baby,” Cora screamed. “My baby, she’s alive.”
Skylark’s head cleared. She saw her mother wringing her hands, reprising her role as a distraught parent on Shortland Street. “I’m definitely back on the planet,” Skylark said to nobody in particular.
“You were attacked by a bird,” Cora explained. “This lovely gentleman —” she pointed out the Maori fisherman — “he saved you.”
“Call me Mitch,” the man said, smiling. “Mitch Mahana.”
“You could have died!” Cora wailed, as usual focusing all the attention on herself. Lucas took the opportunity to offer his arms and Cora’s tears dripped down his hairy chest. He was leaning into her as if he owned her already.
“There, there, baby,” he said. Skylark winced. Mum was at least ten years older than he was. What was this power she had over younger men?
Cora looked up at Lucas and then at the audience in the diner, as if she didn’t know where she was. “It’s been such a long day,” she said. “And now this. You’ve all been so kind. But I think it’s time Skylark and I booked into our lodge. Once we get there we’ll be all right, won’t we, honey?”
“Lodge?” Flora Cornish asked. “There’s no lodge around here. Only the motel at the crossroads that the locals call the Passion Pit, and the hotel across the road which rents rooms by the hour.”
“But Skylark’s travel agent,” Cora said, “made the reservation. Here —”
Flora pursed her lips. “Ah,” she said. “You’re talking about the old bach that Bella and Hoki rent out up the Manu Valley.”
“Manu Valley?” Skylark repeated. She had a terrible feeling about this.
“I’ll show you,” Mitch Mahana said. He led Cora, Skylark, and the various hangers-on outside. “That’s it. Up there.”
Towering over Tuapa were two snow-capped peaks. Where they intersected was a dark, lush valley, the colour of greenstone. It was breathtaking, like the body of a great lustrous bird with wings spreading over the peaks. At that moment, sunlight flashed on two eyes of the bird.
“That’s the reflection off the windows of Bella and Hoki’s place,” Flora Cornish explained. “The bach is just below theirs.”
“But it’s supposed to have views across the beach to the sea,” Cora said.
“It surely has!” Mitch laughed. “Up there you can see to the end of forever. It’s a front porch view on the rest of the world.”