From a city window
When the sun comes up, it hits all the buildings at different times. There is so much colour in concrete: mauve; taupe; a deep, hurt orange. For ten minutes before seven, shadow and exposure coexist without contradiction and the old, old story of the sun coming up — day taking the baton from night; light pipping darkness; hope edging out despair — is so powerful that it still seems worth writing about.
A tiny black poodle walks his owner, feet twittering.
Overnight, someone has dropped a kebab in the middle of the pavement. The explosion of wet beetroot and carrots is somehow obscene — but a painterly swoop of hummus also gives it the appearance of an avant-garde chef’s special, served on a particularly rustic plate. The birds come to pick at it as soon as it’s light; a homeless man follows mid-morning — until all the evidence a kebab was ever dropped here is a slick of tzatziki soon ground to nothing under thousands of passing feet.
I sit on the balcony over the honk and steam of the traffic. A car stops directly below for the light, playing Ultralight Beam much too loud, one hand resting out the window. The light lasts long enough for the song to get to the bit where the child shouts hallelujah! a sublime unifier of the car fumes and beep-boop-boop-boop of the pedestrian crossing signal and the blue sky — none of which seem out of place in a song so collaborative to begin with.
For a whole hour, nobody within view emerges onto their balcony. Then a woman in a blue bathrobe appears like something out of the 1950s, to water a glowing white begonia and, I’m not kidding, smoke a cigarette. The tableau is so beautiful, the woman so unself-conscious, that it would seem sacrilegious to wave or smile or otherwise draw the elements of the moment out of their private cinema. I sit very still, full of seeing.
Beyond the carparks and streetlights is the wide, shimmering plate of the harbour. During the day, it sits blue and mild. But after dark, it seems to disappear. No matter how hard I strain my eyes, nothing is where the water was all day except blackness — as if the city opens directly onto an abyss, resolved into serenity each morning.
A group of people with signs straggles along Fanshawe Street. At first it’s difficult to see what they’re protesting about, but as they come past the BP, I know suddenly. Of the many hundreds who will see them, a few will be disturbed, moved to notice the unseasonal warmth of the day, the heat frizzing visibly from passing cars, the public notices everywhere proclaiming Auckland is facing a water shortage. Still, after dark, the city will cool. Those who drove in will drive home.
From a boardwalk by the sea
After we have finished our morning buns, we blow sugar into the sea. The world smells of cinnamon and cardamom and salt. We are lucky.
In half an hour I count forty-seven bicycles. Sometimes an adult comes ahead of a shoal of children; more often it’s two middle-aged, lycra-clad men with sock tans. Whoever it is, they pass in a cool rush, their Saturday conversation evaporating behind them, graceful and hollow as the wind.
When you look. Closely you can see a slight twitching. In the black sand which is blue in certain lights. Even from here. It’s the sandflies, who leave big pink buttons on all your. Toes.
A shining black labrador walks his owner, feet lolloping.
Almost everyone who passes says hello: old couples, ice cream-handed families, chur-bros with skateboards and low shorts. Only the tangle of Spanish tourists, who like all tourists long for the kindness of strangers, don’t know to greet the occupiers of boardwalk benches.
The Wind Wand nods overhead: an arching red pole, shaped like a fishing line mid-cast. I imagine it falling down, as happened once: the cyclists swerving, the cracked boardwalk, the leap of the waves, like sopranos reaching for high notes. The way people become their kindest selves in the wake of a catastrophe happening to someone nearby.
Someone has left a yellow jandal on a rock in the middle of the sea below. High tide is not for another half hour, but eventually the sea will take the rock and the jandal in its embrace. The latter will be sucked out for aching miles, to be dandled and trilled and dashed by the waves, until it is broken apart. The constituent parts may be eaten or fished up or washed onto beaches in Indonesia — or, more likely, ushered to some sea patch far from land, where they will remain yellow longer than all the kōwhai on earth.