Waiata

Someone’s bright idea to build the hotel right beside the intermediate school, then. Come eight or nine a.m. here were the sounds of the kids running and screaming and playing playground games that sounded like war games. 

Bea slatted the blinds and watched the children and then felt guilty and moved back. What if some kid saw her watching? Old lady in the window of the old convent slash boutique hotel. Old lady (mid thirties) who’d gained weight lately (maybe ten kilos) and who hadn’t had the courage to visit her mother yet.

She was the only one here. The tall man at the desk hadn’t even been wearing shoes when he’d checked her in and given her the piece of paper to put on the dashboard of her car, the paper that said her sensible hybrid was allowed to park out back near the rubbish skip. Later that night Bea had walked the hotel hallways with their gorgeous resurfaced plaster walls and their recycled decor and burnished metal room numbers and seen nobody, heard nobody. 

Her own room was luxurious. A free upgrade, said the tall clerk. From the kitchen window on the front of the building she could see Great North Road and an Indian restaurant and the volcanic hilltops of distant suburbs. Her mother was out there in Herne Bay. For now anyway. For a little bit longer, the doctor had said, but Ms. Spencer something really needs to be done soon, doesn’t it? Can’t you see that something needs to be done?

A truck rattled down the side of the hotel and Bea once again released the window blinds. More morning deliveries arriving. The ground floor here was a fine dining restaurant, the proud recipient of one of Auckland’s first Michelin stars, and the work in the kitchen started early. Even earlier than the yelling kids. The owner or the chefs or whoever had shouted back and forth since dawn. Bea hadn’t eaten there yet but when she returned to the hotel every night she had to walk past the windows and the diners inside, carrying her big pizza box or her bag of Mexican food to her room, on display. Some cheap greedy animal. 

Quiet and peaceful the booking website had said. Recently renovated. Almost spiritual seclusion. Like those nuns who walked back and forth here in their stifling habits and spoke to no men, no husbands, no doctors. Sang hymns maybe. If nuns sang hymns. 

But something has to be done very soon, Ms. Spencer. The last time Bea had visited her mother, her mother had left the jug boiling without a lid on, boiling and boiling until it ran dry and scorched the metal. Her mother had used the toilet without flushing it. She’d told the same story about a Tasmanian cruise three times. 

Now when Bea thought of it, heat crept down the back of her neck and her vision seemed to get darker. Somehow soon she needed to get in her car and remove the little paper parking slip from the dashboard and drive the ten minutes to Herne Bay. There the little single-level white weatherboard was waiting, worth nearly a million in the current market, nice big back garden and zoned for subdivision. A developer would jump on this in minutes, said the flyers in the mailbox, said the hand-signed letters from real estate agents begging for authenticity. How do they know my name? Bea’s mother would ask her again. What do they want to do with this garden? This garden that grew wild over old vegetable beds, that had a red-flowered pōhutukawa tree planted fify years ago. 

In that house right now in the lounge beside the bay windows, her mother would be watching TV and doing those New York Times puzzles at the same time. Did she keep the same commentary going as she did when Bea was there with her? TV comments and puzzle comments that Bea lacked context to understand. Always Bea told herself she would do better and then always she felt anger anyway. I can’t see the screen, Mum. I don’t know who wrote that. 

Bea breathed out. She sat on the edge of the hotel bed as if she were going to put her shoes on. She looked up. The ceiling was vaulted and painted white. Late last night in the dark alone she had walked the hallways and tried other doors and many had been open. The other rooms were all exactly like hers. Slatted blinds and views of the intermediate school and tidily made beds with pyramidal white towels stacked on the ends. She had lain on one for a few minutes with her head in front of the pillows and the empty hotel had seemed so distant and vanishing around her. What was the world anyway? What was Auckland? Lying there on a stranger’s bed (on no one’s bed, on a bed that belonged to nobody) she couldn’t put an image with the name. 

But then she had felt guilty and left. Back to her own room. To the hour or two of sleep interrupted by the arrival of the chefs at the restaurant and the kids at the intermediate.  

Now she closed her eyes. Heard water boiling in spits and spots. No. Listened to the yelling. She flopped fully back and the bed rocked with it and the ceiling vault spun. 

But outside the school kids weren’t yelling anymore. 

Down there in the chainlink fenced playground the kids were singing. They were singing a waiata. Ten or twelve of them were making harmonies in their black blazers. When one of them fell out of time, the others stopped and waited and then all at once they started singing again. 

And the sound had walls and places inside it, had places waiting for her. Haere mai, welcome, haere mai! Bea closed her eyes and pressed her hand to her eyelids and felt them shaking. The children's voices rose like air. Choral. High and fine. And around her she knew buses were driving down Great North Road and cars were stuck in morning traffic on the Northwestern Motorway and chefs were prepping vegetables, and she knew that Auckland was an isthmus city, a city between the blue water and the green water, and she was here inside it, and her mother was with her, and her mother’s name was Mary. 

When the children finished their waiata, Bea would stand.