Part Five - Robin

At the height of Mt Victoria, the creature reached towards the sky. Robin walked under its arching limbs, already overgrown with vines; she had people to meet. At the bright pyramid of the Byrd Memorial she found them, and smiled shyly. “You made it,” she said.

Out of the ... branches? overhead, two small faces peered at her. At her side, Robot waved cheerfully and started to climb up to them. Still at ground level, Robin patted the bundle tied to her chest and nodded at their keeper. “How are they doing?”

“Oh, you know, still having nightmares. Not so many this past couple of weeks.” He rubbed a hand over his spiky hair. “Can’t blame, ‘em. I haven’t had a drink in three months, eh?”

“Yeah,” Robin said. “I know what you mean.”

Life had changed a lot in the last three months. The rebuilding was still going on – from the top of this hill she could see the grey concrete remains of poor dead Wellington, the bit in the centre that had collapsed in on itself. The bulldozers had moved in, but she wasn’t sure if anyone was going to move back in there. The hills were safer. The hills were home.

And the other rebuilding was going on, too, as people found their families again, or made new ones. Robot had turned up, of course, and Aroha even, hypothermic and shivering, had been found in the old Manners Mall two days after It happened, and been cracked out of hospital a month later. She had thought that Christie and Alex were gone for good, but no, even they had been alright, come back from their castle in the clouds and in the care, inexplicably, of a guy she’d used to go out with. They’d been pleased to see her, but hadn’t wanted to come home with her.

Seth was, at any rate, a decent guy at heart, for all his leather jackets and nose rings. Robin had been giving him maintenance money and tried not to feel like a divorced parent. She looked through the creature’s high arms at her kids, and waved at them. “Christie and Alex talking yet?” she asked.

Seth shook his head, “Nup.” He ran his hand over his hair again. “But I think they talk to each other. With their brains or something. They always seem to know what the other one is up to. I dunno.”

She nodded. “You sure you’re OK with Robot for the afternoon?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Cool, I’ll meet you two up here around 6 then.” She gave him a wad of money and kissed him, awkwardly, on the cheek. “Thanks.” And she walked away from her kids, and the Creature – Tane Mahuta some people were calling it – and picked her way down the tracks of Mt Vic. She and Aroha had someone else to see.

***

The Other Creature, the one of the sea, had remained in the harbour, although it had sagged greatly, to her sorrow. There was a part of her that missed that night, when she could hear the great music. When she got to Oriental Beach she took her shoes off and wiggled her toes in the coarse sand, and unhitched Aroha from her sling. Behind her, she heard someone walking and turned quickly. They’d shot one of the crazies last week, but there were still some around she’d heard.

It was just a man, though, without that wild look the crazies had. He was wearing a gaudy Hawaiian shirt and shirts, and seemed awfully familiar.

“Do we know each other?” he asked.

“I don’t –” Robin hefted Aroha onto her lap, “yes, maybe we do...?”

He grinned at her suddenly. “It was you. You pulled me out of the water that day.”

She shook her head at him. “Wait. Noel? You look so different. Relaxed. Happy.”

He nodded at her and sat down next to her. “Making that coding deadline just doesn’t seem that important anymore.”

Robin nodded and lay back into the sand to look at the sky. They sat there for a while, the three of them, under the blue sky, at the boundary of earth and water, sea and air. Then she got up and finished taking her clothes off, and Aroha’s, and said good bye to Noel. “Take care of yourself, hey?”

“Yeah, see you around” he said, as she walked into the sea.

It was funny, Robin thought, that there were people who had left Wellington. She’d heard about them in the newspapers, or local gossip, someone’s friend or rellie who’d gone away with the evac and never come back. She’d thought they were nuts, crazier than the crazies. It wasn’t even that they’d given up, it’s that they’d left a place that was real. Nowhere had been realer than Wellington even before the Event, and now, now it was the Marriage of Sea and Sky. How could anyone leave that behind them? She was waist deep and put Aroha into the water to paddle next to her.

Then, of course, there were the people who had never gone away, or rushed back from the evac camps as soon as they could manage it. Mostly people were living up in the hills, but they could still come down to visit the sea, and the Other One, and the graves of the people they’d lost. Realer than real. She dived down into the water, feeling the coolness slide down her hair, the sweet water fill her lungs. She rolled over to look at the boundary of water and air above her, and little Aroha paddling along. She reached up a hand to tickle her round belly, and the little girl giggled and dived down to join her, flipper feet whirring away like a duck’s legs.

They went deeper and swam away to pay their respects to the Other One, the One which had not survived the night. But in all that chaos and destruction it had tried to be born, and that was a noble thing, as alien as it was.

Aroha looked at her with round, wise eyes, her little water baby. It was enough.