Always More
When I am older, I will think of the skin on her hands as being paper, but only because that’s how I hear the skin of the old described time and time again; my adult mind forgets how to create its own metaphors.
“That is the image I remember the most,” I will tell Jasmine as nana’s hands are clutched around a book, the blue veins jutting out of the papery skin. Jasmine will smile but look at me with weariness. She will be an artist, full of creativity and originality. I will be a waitress, and a disappointment.
The skin on nana’s hands is ghost-like. See-through, like Casper the Friendly Ghost, like the jellyfish I found washed up on the beach when I went there with my Dad in the summer. Like a bubble when you manage to catch one in your hand and it rests there for a while, glimmering, before it bursts and leaves a tiny soap residue on your palm.
I am fascinated and repulsed by the blue veins that show themselves as if they’ve spent all their lives hiding and now they’re getting their turn to shine. They’re trying far too hard. They’ll remind me of the first time I put on make-up, hard lines and too many bold colours. I’ll still go out, and the boys will laugh at me and call me a wannabe whore.
Nana’s paper-like hands are wrapped around a children’s book of mythology. The cover is varying shades of green: deep like seaweed, bright like fern leaves and rich like pounamu. Pictures of saplings that koru across the page.
She reads me a story from it. The story is of Hinemoa and Tutanekai. They fall in love but cannot be together. He plays his flute and she swims towards the music and they find each other.
“And then what?” I ask. “Then what happens?”
“Well, they live happily ever after, I suppose.”
Happily ever after is not a story. I sulk, but Nana is yawning and putting the book down, pulling the sheets and duvet up around me. I want to know what's next. She sighs and tells me that I always want to know what next, but that sometimes I need to learn when the end is the end.
We’re talking in metaphors, I suppose. All I know is that I’ve been living at Nana’s since the summer and the weather is getting colder. That Mum and Dad once loved each other, but they don’t anymore. They told me they still love me but I haven’t seen Dad for a long time and Mum is always crying, so they can’t love me that much. Happily ever after doesn’t feel very happy. There’s always more to the story.
Jasmine won’t play the flute for me, but she will leave me a trail of paintings and drawings and they’ll all be of me. Or, they’ll be of parts of me: the pieces that she notices. At first, there will be a small watercolour of my painted fingernails against a glass and a drawing of my hair curling down the nape of my neck. An eyelash resting on my cheek. There will be my mouth, smiling, and then biting my lower lip – she will draw it so well that it will look both thoughtful and seductive and I won’t be sure if I look like that or if she’s teasing, playful, hopeful.
Nana’s house is old and the next morning the cold air slips in like water. We sit at the big table in the kitchen and Nana heats up milk in the microwave. She’s suspicious of the microwave, but is coming round; it’s hard to argue against convenience. Sometimes she heats the milk too long, and it has a skin on top so that I have to dip my spoon in. It clings to the metal like moss on a rock. I don’t like the milk when it’s like this, but I can’t throw it away; Nana won’t allow the waste.
I pour the milk over the two Weetbix Nana placed in my bowl and sprinkle brown sugar on top and two more heaped teaspoons when Nana turns away and I can get away with it. I manage this amount of sugar most mornings, so I’m starting to think Nana turns away on purpose, that she doesn’t mind what I do so long as she doesn’t see it.
Perhaps I’m just being suspicious – maybe Nana has better things to do than supervise the rationing of my sugar. I prefer to think that she’s pretending not to see because that’s what happens when you’re seven - you start to become more suspicious of the adults around you, to see through their tricks. Or perhaps that’s just me.
Jasmine will tell me that she’s never met somebody as cynical as I am. She’ll say it with a laugh and kiss me afterwards, but her words will wrap around my heart and rest there, reminding me, as my blood beats through my body, of just one more thing that is wrong with me.
Nana walks me to school. I hate that she does this, though one day when I am much older I will be walking down the street that my school was on and an autumn leaf will blow past and stick to my shoe and a feeling will wrap itself around my throat, pulling me back into the moments when I was seven and Nana was alive and even though everything in my life was falling apart Nana was piecing the parts back together.
Nana loves colours. They are changing for autumn and Nana points them out. I think they are red and brown and orange, but she corrects me. Tawny, she says. Amber, ochre and rust. Some trees are green, and I want to know why but, more than that, I want to make it clear that I don’t like her walking me to school. I trudge behind her, scuffing my shoes and trying to curl my face in the way I’ve seen on the faces of the teenagers who hang around the dairy. She tells me anyway. Evergreen, she says. Deciduous.
Later, I will impress my teacher with a new four-syllable word. She’ll give me a sticker for it which I’ll wear on my jumper until one of the boys calls me a teacher’s pet, and I pull it off in disgust.
I will meet Jasmine at a party on New Year’s Eve. Our cousins will be friends, and both of us will have been dragged along, me more willingly than her. I will be the kind of drunk that I always am at nineteen – loud, rambunctious and wild. I’ll be dancing on the table with my shirt falling down on one side so that you can see the top of my red (crimson) lace bra. I will be flirting with everyone, but then I will see her, with her short black (ebony, jet, onyx) hair and her smirk of a smile.
She’ll be standing in the doorway, leaning against it, and our eyes will meet. It will be both exhilarating and sobering and for the rest of the night, I’ll find that I don’t want to flirt with anyone but her.
We will go to different universities and live in different parts of town. Still, we’ll find ourselves out at the same lousy student plays and the same gigs and the same grimy bars. Both of us will go in the hope that we’ll run into each other; both of us will be too proud to admit to it. I will be drunk, always, and I’ll talk loudly to my friends and dance in a way that I hope looks careless, but that is actually full of hope that she is watching me. She’ll see me first, with artist-in-training eyes, learning to spot the details. Eventually, our eyes will meet, and we’ll watch each other from across the room.
We’ll rarely talk; when we do, it’ll be in groups of friends, with drinks and complaints and pot being passed. It will be at the end of these nights that she’ll slip one of her paintings or drawings into my hands. Then, later, when the night is over and we’ve both gone back to our homes, she’ll message me: You looked so pretty tonight, or I wish we could have talked more, or I love seeing you smile. It’ll be an elaborate game; neither of us will know the rules, but we’ll both love playing.
Then one night I will be on the wrong side of a nineteen-year-old drunk, and we’ll both be out at a bar, but this time I will see her first. She’ll be with a pretty girl, laughing, and the girl will go to the bar and order drinks and I’ll ask her whom she is buying them for. She’ll say, “Jasmine” with a smug little smile, and I won’t plan to do it, but there it will be: my hand, swatting at the glasses, and the contents of two rum and Cokes crashing to the floor. When Jasmine comes over to investigate she’ll see me and smile with amusement or disappointment or victory or disdain, depending on which way I later choose to remember the moment, and she’ll ask me which drink I’m buying her to apologise and where I am taking her for dinner. It’s a story that we’ll tell over and over again in the coming weeks; our friends will love it. Jasmine will wrap her arms around me, kissing me on the cheek, laughing, and I’ll bask in the attention, flattered and love-struck.
When Nana dies, my Mum will call me while Jasmine and I are at a gig on K’ Road. I will be drunk on Jim Beam and Diet Coke, throwing my body into the mosh pit and letting myself be thrown around, people’s arms and legs thrashing at me like waves during a storm. Jasmine will pull me out, annoyed at my recklessness, and it’ll only be then that I will see the missed calls. We’ll go outside and I’ll listen to my mother crying on the voice message and find myself sitting on the cold concrete of the footpath, arms wrapped around my knees, rocking back and forth back and forth back and forth until Jasmine will help me to the bus stop, her arms wrapped around me – a rock in that moment – and a car will drive past and somebody will yell “fucking dykes” from the window and it won’t be the first time or the last time I am called that but this will be the only time that I lose it, I mean really really lose it – yelling and kicking and throwing god knows what – and I will fall to the ground again with my open palms pounding against the concrete and Jasmine will end up calling a taxi even though we can’t afford one and I’ll always feel like she resents me a little bit for this, for my inability to grieve properly, for never knowing how to behave.
And then one morning I will wake up with Jasmine lying quietly beside me in her flannelette pyjamas because that is how we mostly sleep now, in pyjamas, in silence, in side-by-side solitude and her hands (beautiful hands, artist hands, hands that look delicate and fragile but can paint with a morbid ferocity) will be holding the covers and I will wonder what they will look like when they are old, if they will develop ghost-like paper-like translucent skin and if their veins will pop out, if they will tremble like Nana’s did in the end or if they will remain still and strong. And then I will wonder if I will ever find out. And then I will wonder if I want to.
“And then what?” I ask Nana, time and time again. “And then what happens next?”