The Swimmers E-Book

Chloe Lane

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 312

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2021 The outcast in a family of former competitive swimmers must prepare for the end of her mother's life in this sharp, sparkling debut from a bold New Zealand talent. When an affair ends badly and takes her career down with it, 26-year-old Erin leaves Auckland to spend the holiday weekend with her aunt, uncle, and terminally ill mother at their suburban family home. On arrival she learns that her mother has decided to take matters into her own hands and end her life - the following Tuesday. Tasked with fulfilling her mother's final wishes, Erin can only do her imperfect best to navigate difficult feelings, an eccentric neighbourhood, and her complicated family of former competitive swimmers. She must summon the strength she would normally find in the water as she prepares for the loss of the fiery, independent woman who raised her alone, and one last swim together in the cold New Zealand Sea.

Leseprobe

Chloe Lane is a writer and the founding editor of Hue+Cry Press. The Swimmers is her first novel and was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2021. She lives in Christchurch, New Zealand with her husband and young son.

The Swimmers

Chloe Lane

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

First published by Te Herenga Waka University Press

New Zealand in 2020

© Chloe Lane 2020

Chloe Lane has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Gallic Books, 12 Eccleston Street, London, SW1W 9LT

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781805334507

Typeset in Minion Pro by Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

For my family

Contents

The Saturday Before

The Sunday Before

The Monday Before

Tuesday

Wednesday

The Saturday Before

1

‘It’s a painting show,’ I said. ‘Geometric abstraction.’

‘Geometric abstraction,’ Aunty Wynn said.

‘Shapes,’ I said. ‘Squares and triangles, etcetera.’

I had no desire to discuss art with Aunty Wynn. This was the first time she had shown any interest in my interests. I had my mother to blame for these questions about my recent curatorial debut, and while trapped inside a car.

‘I can remember the difference between an isosceles triangle and the other one.’ It was typical of Aunty Wynn to veer the conversation into a zone where she could be in control, in the know. ‘The isosceles and the triangle with three sides the same.’

‘You mean the equilateral,’ I said. ‘And there’s the scalene— you’ve forgotten that one.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t ring a bell.’

Then, before I could respond, as if it were the only play she could think of to again shift the subject of attention in her favour, Aunty Wynn tugged hard on the steering wheel, and I was thrown sideways in my seat.

‘Shivers,’ she said. She brought the car to an uneasy but deliberate stop on the grassy verge on the wrong side of the road. She hadn’t lost control of the vehicle—she had seen something. ‘Look at that.’

I was holding a brown paper package of raw meat that Aunty Wynn had collected from the butcher shop after collecting me from the bus stop. It was our red meat for the long weekend. She had insisted I nurse the parcel, which was the size of my head,all the way to the Moore family house. I was no vegetarian, but the car was filled with the stench of uncooked beef and lamb. I’d already spent two hours on the bus. Now I just wanted to reach our destination and see my mother, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly a month. I wasn’t interested in any kind of delay.

I squinted through the dirty windscreen. ‘Look at what?’

Aunty Wynn flung open her door and skidded down the small gravelly ditch, and was climbing over the wire fence that separated the verge from the paddock before I saw, strung up by its horns and swinging from a low branch of a bare pōhutukawa about twenty metres away, the stricken goat. The animal’s back hooves were a foot off the ground. I could hear it bleating. It was a wretched sound. The desperation in its cries, now waning, now increasing.

I had no intention of getting involved. I hadn’t even planned on coming north for Queen’s Birthday weekend. Only a lastminute change of circumstance had dragged me out of my previous obligation at Mean Space, the gallery where I’d been interning the last six months or so, and where I’d just curated my first show. Knowing how much it meant to me to have my foot in the door with Auckland’s art scene, my mother would have been the first to be baffled by my affair with Karl, the gallery’s director. The affair had ended abruptly on Friday, after Karl’s wife found us in the storage room, backed hard against a rack of paintings covered in bubble wrap and corrugated cardboard, our hands down each other’s pants. I hadn’t told my mother that was why I’d changed my mind about attending the annual Moore family lunch. I hoped she thought it was because I missed her.

I watched Aunty Wynn from the safety of the passenger seat. Her figure was that of a woman who had once been an athlete but who hadn’t managed to keep a full grip on her fitness through middle age. She was in her late fifties, older than my mother by a couple of years, and, as of two weeks prior, mymother’s primary caregiver. She was standing with her hands on her hips with her back to me. Her three-quarter-length turquoise pants were made from a synthetic material that clung to her legs and was bunched up around her backside and waist from the time she had been sitting in the car. On her feet were brand new Nikes, road-cone orange. She was a confusion of wealth and small-town fashion sense. The goat was bleating and softly swinging beside her. I guessed she was figuring out how to extract it from the branch without getting kicked or head-butted. As I was reassuring myself that she wouldn’t trust me to be of use anyway, she turned and flapped her arm in a way that suggested she expected me to join her. I pretended I couldn’t see.

Like I said, I had no intention of getting involved. I was a born and raised city girl—starting in Wellington and recently settling in Auckland. I looked out my side window: roughly sealed road, ditch, wonky wire and wood fence, empty hump of paddock, three dusty nīkau palms. It was a mirror image of the scene out the other window. Except for those exoticlooking nīkau palms, which appeared alien against that gorse- ravaged backdrop.

‘Hello, Erin,’ Aunty Wynn called.

I turned to witness her putting her fingers in her mouth and whistle at me like she was summoning a sheepdog.

‘Erin! This fellow and I are going to need some assistance.’

In what was admittedly a pretty petulant move, I heaved the package in my lap onto the driver’s seat, but with too much force so it bounced and rolled out the open door. I could clearly see Aunty Wynn’s face as she watched her bundle of sausages and chops reach the centre of the ditch. Next she looked at me with the kind of expression my mother had used all those times when as a teenager I’d come home at three in the morning stinking of rum and Cokes, with mince-and-cheese pie spillage down the front of my outfit.

I collected the meat package on my way to join Aunty Wynn in the paddock.

The goat was bigger up close. Its coat was off-white with a clean brown splotch on its back, and it had a beard that looked as though it had recently been trimmed and conditioned. Its horns were both hooked around and wedged into a fork of the lowest branch of the pōhutukawa. It wasn’t clear how it had got stuck that way. Its yellow eyes were round with panic, but beyond that they were just cold animal eyes. I didn’t feel comfortable being that close to it.

‘We’re going to have to lift him up off the branch and this way a bit,’ Aunty Wynn said, as if none of this was new to her. ‘He’ll kick and it might not be pretty, but it’s the only way.’

For decades Aunty Wynn had worn large unflattering glasses, similar to those of the Queen, but in the last year she had updated to more modern frames coated in a cheap turquoise that brilliantly matched her pants. They were exactly the kind of glasses you would expect a small-town nurse to wear. From beneath a helmet of curly auburn hair, she blinked at me through her thick lenses, waiting for me to respond.

‘How’d it get like this in the first place?’ I asked.

The goat was wearing a collar, and attached to the collar was a long metal chain, which trailed back down the paddock towards a triangular hut constructed out of pinewood and rusted-up corrugated iron. I’d seen several of those goat huts already on our drive from the bus stop.

‘Goats like to jump about.’ Aunty Wynn said this in her most condescending tone. ‘Though I’ve always thought they must have bad depth perception—you wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve found various goats.’

‘Like where?’ I asked.

Aunty Wynn shook her head and smiled. I could see her mind turning, remembering those various goats. She had no intention of sharing them with me.

My mother and I had always approached the annual Moore family gathering—which for reasons that had never been revealed were always held on the most innocuous of public holidays, Queen’s Birthday Monday—as if it were something to win. Me and Mum against the rest of them. Every exchange was up for grabs. In that moment I hated Aunty Wynn for keeping me out of the loop about her various goat rescues, for the small power she wielded.

‘What do you want me to do then?’ I said, determined to win something back. I placed the meat package on the grass beside me and clapped my hands.

‘I’m going to give this fellow a hug,’ Aunty Wynn said. She was wearing a baggy grey-marle sweatshirt with two pink dolphins embroidered over her heart. She rolled up her sleeves to reveal two soft freckled forearms. ‘Then I’m going to lift him up and sideways so you can unhook his horns.’

‘Yup,’ I said, pretending I was bored.

I moved so I was standing directly opposite the goat. Despite the pitched angle of its head, and the branch between us, I could see into both its eyes. I wondered whether it knew we were trying to help. It hadn’t made any move to kick. In fact, if it weren’t for its fraught bleats, I would have said it seemed weirdly resigned to its hanging position in that tree.

Now Aunty Wynn leaned in, and with a ‘Here I go’ she grabbed the goat around its middle. That started it kicking— Aunty Wynn was only just out of reach of its hooves. Its four legs went wild. It was running for its life.

‘I’m going to lift him on the count of three,’ she said.

She counted down and then she raised the goat up with a groan, lifting it clear of the branch, after which I managed to unhook the horns so she was free to set it down and jump out of its way. Once the goat’s hooves hit the earth it bolted away from us with such force and speed that it nearly decapitated itself when the chain connecting its collar to its hut snappedtaut. It fell to the ground in a heap and let out a high bleat.

‘He’ll be fine,’ Aunty Wynn said matter-of-factly.

The whole scene happened very quickly. I was bowled over by the thrill of it. My heart was racing. I watched the goat for a moment, lying on its side, panting, silent, and then I turned to Aunty Wynn. I was beaming.

I swam three kilometres most days. In the last year and a bit, since my mother had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, I hadn’t missed more than one day a week. In my peak racing years, I’d swum more, much more. I’d won nationallevel medals. But the strength I felt in the pool had never really flowed over into other parts of my life. Aunty Wynn’s physical strength wasn’t surprising—she’d had a more successful swimming career than I. It was her self-assuredness that impressed me. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done recently with equal conviction. For the first time in twenty-six years of annual Moore family lunches and one funeral—those were the only times we ever saw each other—I caught myself, if not admiring, then envying her.

‘That was pretty cool,’ I said. It was the most positive thing I’d ever said to Aunty Wynn.

She pushed at the sleeves of her sweater again so they were up over her elbows. She wasn’t smiling—she was staring into the distance, her mouth moving ever so slightly, as if she were doing sums in her head.

‘Should we check the goat’s okay?’ I asked.

Behind her: a monotone grey sky, more gorse-riddled paddocks, a few mānuka trees huddled together in a lonely group. I thought I could smell the sea, though I couldn’t see or hear it.

‘I wanted to tell you about a man I saw on TV,’ Aunty Wynn said, ignoring my question about the goat’s state of health. ‘His wife had MND and he was talking about how his wife didn’tdie when they thought she would. She kept on. But only after she could do nothing but move her eyes.’ She said this quickly, rushing to get it out.

When my mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in February the previous year, I’d binged on all the information I could find about it. I was surprised and annoyed to learn that Aunty Wynn—the nurse!—hadn’t done the same.

‘It’s called locked-in syndrome,’ I said.

Aunty Wynn nodded as if this wasn’t actually new information. ‘The wife would watch him as he walked around the room,’ she said. ‘He said he’d be vacuuming her bedroom, and her eyes would follow him back and forth across the end of the bed.’ She sucked her top teeth against her bottom lip, then inhaled sharply and looked directly at me. ‘Are you worried this will happen to your mum?’

I knew there was a small chance my mother’s decline might plateau right before death. It had been some time since she had been able to speak. She could no longer eat or drink— all nutrients arriving through a plastic tube on a direct route through her stomach wall. And she could only move about on her own with the aid of a four-wheeled walker. With her doctor’s shaky prognosis, and a law of averages guiding us, we were prepared for her to continue this downhill slide for another two or three months. Yet the idea that her decline, however painful and hideous, might slow, that she might remain in this current state, or worse, for an unknowable amount of time— that seemed like the sort of next-level tragedy that would befall someone else. But I didn’t know how to admit that. Or if I even should.

‘No, you don’t need to answer that question,’ Aunty Wynn said, as if reading my mind.

The goat was standing up now, a few metres away. It looked calmly in our direction and then slowly lowered its headand enjoyed a large mouthful of thistle. It appeared to have gotten over its recent trauma. I, too, had already forgotten the excitement.

‘She’s been feeling funny lately,’ Aunty Wynn said, though this comment felt like the tail end of a much longer statement. She had been having an internal dialogue with herself, and now she needed to share part of it with me. ‘She’s been good, really good, but also.’

‘Good?’ I said. I was picking at the bark of the low-hanging branch of the pōhutukawa—it was soft after recent rain. I’d already picked away a scab the size of my fist. ‘But she can’t do any of the things she loves to do. She can’t go anywhere on her own. She can’t eat, she can’t drink her gin and tonics. She barely has enough energy to read. Her life has gotten shittier and shittier.’

‘Yes,’ Aunty Wynn said. ‘She’s good though. You’ll see.’

‘Good?’ I said, my voice a register higher this time. I didn’t believe it. I threw another chunk of bark back at the tree.

Now Aunty Wynn was rolling her shoulders so her arms danced loose at her side. I recognised the action—she was a swimmer loosening up before a race. It was something I used to do. Then she briefly closed her eyes, and for a second her face appeared almost regal. ‘She’s good,’ she said again, taking a deep breath and exhaling audibly through her nose. ‘Though you should know, your mum has asked me to help her exit.’

‘Exit?’ I said.

‘Die,’ Aunty Wynn said.

She was incredible to watch, my mother had once said about Aunty Wynn. She was talking about when they were both young and still swimming competitively. Despite how she holds herself on land these days, back then she moved through the water as effortlessly as a goddamn dolphin. It was, to my knowledge, the only nice thing my mother had ever said about her sister. I remembered this as proof that my mother wouldn’t enlistAunty Wynn in this way. The idea of my mother checking out made no sense. And even if it could be true, she would have asked me first.

‘The law doesn’t agree with us, Erin.’ Aunty Wynn reached for the package of meat, which was still lying on the grass near my feet. She scooped it up with one hand and lodged it in her armpit. ‘We both thought you had a right to know.’ Her cheeks and neck had flushed a blotchy crimson. She looked deeply unhappy.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.

Just then the goat let out a horrific cry. It startled us both. In the time we’d been talking, the goat had planted itself on the top of its corrugated-iron hut. I hadn’t even noticed it walking back down the paddock, let alone scaling the side of its house. Its cry was victorious. I had a vision of firing a bullet clean through the side of its skull.

‘Mum hasn’t said anything about this to me,’ I said. I’d never fired a gun, but in that moment I felt certain I could. In the same way I felt certain that Aunty Wynn had no idea what she was talking about.

Aunty Wynn moved towards me, and I realised she was coming in for a hug. I stepped away. I could think of nothing more repulsive.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said again. I was beginning to feel the cold, and shivered. It was June, and the air felt chilled with the recent rain.

I could tell Aunty Wynn wanted to say something else. She looked at me with fear and embarrassment, and whatever small admiration I’d had for her earlier vanished. She had never appeared so large and imposing, but those pants, that sweater, the way she squinted at me through her terrible turquoise frames—I knew there was no way my mother would give herself up to that woman. It was like a strange Mexican standoff, the two of us unmoving beside the single pōhutukawa, the goatrefereeing from the roof of its hut, but no other witnesses coming or going along the winding road. I’d never felt so alone.

‘Let’s get this meat home and into the fridge,’ Aunty Wynn said finally. And that was all she said before she sadly marched her way back down the paddock.

I had no choice but to follow.

2

I once made an infographic for high school art history that included all of the major advancements in twentieth-century abstraction, beginning with Gauguin and ending with the Abstract Expressionists. Picture a metre-wide cardboard construction, complete with pale, stripy ink-jet examples of works from each period. Recently, I was having days when I thought about the time since my mother had been diagnosed, and I could hold it in my mind as one unbroken line—the decline of her health becoming its own kind of infographic. And sometimes I visualised each step in her decline as parallel to a significant art historical plot point: my mother tripping on the carpet for the second time in a week (Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire), beginning to slur her words (Sonia Delaunay’s ‘Prismes électriques’), losing control of her hands (a Mondrian composition), losing control of her bowels (Rothko).

I doubted it was healthy for me to do this. I hadn’t read any books on grief, or sought counselling, and I rarely spoke to my friends about my mother’s illness. They knew—I just didn’t talk about it. I couldn’t imagine my life without my mother in it—of course I couldn’t—and I felt like shit all of the time, but weird was often the word that rolled through my mind. When people asked how my mother was doing, more than once I’d responded with a cool overview, followed by, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty weird.’

Standing in the Moore family kitchen for only the second time in my life, I had that same inane thought: this is just weird. I also felt calm. The dead calm of a deep, dark lake,where things brush against your legs while you’re swimming.

My mother and I had always hosted the annual family lunch, so the only other time I’d visited the Moore family house, even though I now lived only two hours south, was sixteen years earlier, when my grandfather died. Aunty Wynn had lived in this house her whole life with the oldest Moore sibling, my Uncle Cliff, and though the farm hadn’t functioned as a farm in years, the house—a wide bungalow in desperate need of a paint job, with its waist-high wire fence rimming the yard— was exactly as I remembered it. Except now it stood on the edge of a subdivision of sprawling brick-and-tile kitset homes, all with stunted flax bushes and bare hydrangea shrubs lining the driveways.

I’d come prepared to stay two nights. It was the most I could swing away from my thesis, and paid and unpaid work. My mother knew that. From the beginning, she had insisted life should go on as normal. ‘I don’t want you moping around the place any more than usual,’ she had said, many times. Since then I’d flown home to Wellington about once every month, give or take, which was about twice as often as before.

My satchel on one shoulder, my overnight bag on the other, and still clutching the large parcel of uncooked meat, I stared out the window and into the backyard of one of those new kitset houses, where two small children were jumping on a trampoline. Gleeful is the word I would use to describe them. My great-grandmother had once looked through this same window when the farm had stretched all the way to the blacksand mudflats of the Kaipara Harbour and the hills beyond.

Some might consider that landscape beautiful. Rita Angus, the primary artist I was writing about for my master’s, sure did. Though she hadn’t studied these exact hills, she had painted others like them, and relentlessly—paintings that had already been written about relentlessly too. For that reason alone, shewasn’t an original topic choice—something which pained me to admit.

The trampoline had a high soft fence around it. The children, who wore gumboots and ankle-length yellow anoraks, stopped jumping and the girl knotted the sleeves of the boy’s anorak at his back like handcuffs. When the girl resumed jumping, the boy lost his balance and instantly fell to his knees, bouncing head first against the trampoline’s protective fence before falling face first against his sister’s boot. The girl froze and looked in the direction of the house as the boy began to howl. No one rushed outside.

Hearing that boy’s cries made me painfully aware of the deep silence in the house behind me and how nervous I was about seeing my mother. She had stopped being able to talk before my last visit, before she left our Wellington home and moved here and into Aunty Wynn’s care.

‘Is your tummy better?’ Aunty Wynn said in her best nurse’s voice. She had appeared in the kitchen hugging a sack of potatoes: our vegetable for the long weekend.

‘It’s perfect,’ I said, though it wasn’t completely true. After five silent minutes back on the road, I’d thrown up—on the dashboard, car seat and floor, though not on my shoes. I wasn’t used to country roads. Aunty Wynn wasn’t upset—she handled the mess cheerfully, which only made me feel more humiliated. Now I placed the parcel of meat on the kitchen counter while I observed Aunty Wynn staring at my waist, my legs, my waist again.

‘I meant to say earlier, you’re all skin and bones,’ she said. The sack of potatoes was slipping and she adjusted her grip.

I looked down at my T-shirt and cardigan, my old blue jeans. They were all loose. It was true I’d lost a lot of weight in the last twelve months. The second-to-last time I’d seen Karl the gallery director, one of only three times we’d got ourselves a bed insteadof a dusty storage room, he had snatched at my bare thighs, my ankles hooked over his shoulders, and whispered, not to me but to himself, like a scientist making a field recording: ‘Lovely lean drumsticks.’ If I hadn’t fallen so hard and fast for him, I might have been able to admit how much it had repulsed, even alarmed, me.

While a couple of my oldest friends had expressed concern about my health, most were quick to say how good I looked, which meant they were impressed with how thin I’d become. The compliments made me feel like I was handling it, like I was on top of it all. Though whenever I see photos of myself from this time, I think of the expression ‘bright-eyed and bushy- tailed’ and how much I looked the opposite. Not tired or sick, exactly, not really even too thin. More like I’d been through the wash too many times. Faded out. Less there.

Aunty Wynn took a couple of wide steps towards me and dropped the sack of potatoes on the floor. She lingered, and for a moment it seemed like she didn’t quite know what to do with her face. ‘She’ll be awake,’ she said. Then she stretched up tall, planted her hands on her hips and confidently beamed at me: the woman of the house.

Looking at her standing like that made me newly grateful to my mother for being the one Moore sibling who had managed to get away. And then, in a heartbeat, I remembered that now, nearly forty years later, she’d had to move back.

Carrying my bags, I trailed Aunty Wynn out of the kitchen and into the hallway, following the bottom stroke of the hallway’s backwards L shape. When I entered the small room to the left I was struck by the shelves crammed with hundreds of dolphins of varying sizes and colours and made out of wood, ceramic, glass, crystal, plastic, shells, and were those pine cones? The curtains had been drawn so the only decent light was a low- watt ceiling bulb and the faint glow of my mother’s iPad, as she sat diminished and propped up in a loaned hospital bed. Toher right there was a metal frame, which her feeding bag come mealtime could be suspended from. The dolphins didn’t cheer things up.

‘Here she is,’ Aunty Wynn said commandingly from the end of the bed.

As I emerged from behind Aunty Wynn, my mother let out a shrivelled-up cry. I could tell she was laughing but the sound she made wasn’t my mother’s laugh. It frightened me.

‘Doesn’t she look good?’ Aunty Wynn said.

I’d expected her to look worse somehow. I think I’d expected Aunty Wynn to have her dressed in some kind of old lady’s nightgown, maybe an off-white flannel with tiny pale pink flowers on it. Instead, my mother was wearing a loud seventies- style yellow and green frock with capped sleeves. I’d never seen that frock before. I couldn’t remember the last time my mother had worn a frock for any occasion. A string of large yellow beads hung around her neck.

My mother was pointing at her hair and nodding at me. I’d dyed my hair a few days before and, while the box had described the dye as ‘darkest intense auburn’, the result was more of a pink grapefruit. When I emailed my mother a photo she had responded: OH NO MY DAUGHTER HAS JOINED A CULT WHERE THEY WEAR WATERMELON HATS. Her comment didn’t really make sense, but it had deflated me. She could still be blunt—her illness hadn’t changed her that much.

Mere minutes before he dumped me, Karl had said—his voice dry with lust, his lips brushing my neck—that I looked like the girl from The Fifth Element. Remembering this now, a confused shiver of pleasure and anxiety zipped along my spine. I combed at my hair with my fingers. ‘It looks dumb, doesn’t it?’

My mother leaned back into her pillow and shook her head weakly. She did look frailer than she had the last time I’d seen her.

‘Your hair?’ Aunty Wynn said to me. Then turning back to my mother: ‘It’s very bold, isn’t it, Helen?’

My mother didn’t respond, which was exactly how I expected her to treat her sister. She had given her that cold shoulder my whole life. I felt secure knowing that much hadn’t changed, that my mother and I were still allies. I placed my bags on the floor and sat on the edge of her bed. The high metal frame creaked. With one weak hand she turned her iPad towards me. This was how she communicated all the time now—the screen full of giant uppercase text.

SOS I CAN’T SPEND ANOTHER MOMENT WITH THESE FUCKING DOLPHINS

I knew how long it would have taken my mother to type that message. She used Word because she didn’t like the text programmes that were ‘too pushy with their corrections’. I pictured her hands gliding slowly and awkwardly over the screen, woodpecking out each letter, deleting the unintentional typos, the slipping of her fingers, typing it again. I loved that this was the most urgent thing she wanted to share with me in that moment, and it meant even more because of the effort involved.

I glanced at Aunty Wynn, who was still hovering at the end of the bed, the shelves behind her crammed with ugly dolphins. She pushed the bridge of her glasses up her nose with one soft index finger and smiled, as if she were in on the joke. ‘I’ll leave you ladies to catch up,’ she said. Then she left the room.

‘Do you want me to smash them?’ I asked jokingly, holding fast to the knowledge that my mother and I were a team.

She attempted a smile. When I sat this close to her, the difficulty with which she moved her limbs, the fact she could no longer talk, and the slackness of her face all faded into the periphery, and I saw that my whole hilarious and sharp- tongued mother was still there. There was no glazing overof her eyes. She held my gaze the same way she had for the previous twenty-six years of my life: confidently, questioning, and ready to laugh. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed her.

But something had changed since I’d seen her last.

When she was eighteen my mother had gone to university in Wellington, then lived in London for a stint before returning to Wellington where she had worked at the National Library since the early nineties, after I was born. Her life didn’t seem that remarkable to me, but she had told me more than once that the reason she had never been close to her brother and sister was because they had never forgiven her for moving so far away—for having a life that was different from theirs. When I’d asked what had stopped Aunty Wynn and Uncle Cliff from leaving the family farm, my mother simply said, ‘Your grandfather couldn’t hack looking after the farm on his own. I only got to leave because he liked me least.’

In my opinion, my mother had got the better deal, but that bitterness had followed her around her entire life. I’d rarelyheard her mention her family or speak to them without sharpness in her voice (her admiration for Aunty Wynn’s athleticism was one of those rare moments). Even if it was difficult to gauge the tone of her written words, her quip about Aunty Wynn’s dolphins was different, and Aunty Wynn’s response confirmed the whole thing as playful. It was impossible to deny that my mother was enjoying herself. I’d never seen her and Aunty Wynn interact like that.

There was something else. I’d dyed my mother’s hair during my last visit home. Expecting to see the grey roots showing at her part, I’d bought a box of dye from the pharmacy on my way to the bus stop that afternoon. She wouldn’t need me to fix her up, though—her hair had recently been dyed and cut. It was a rich red brown. It was glistening. And she had highlights! I began wondering what kind of drug cocktail Aunty Wynnmight have her on, which led me to my next thought: my mother’s decision about wanting to end her life couldn’t possibly have been a sober one.

Now she opened another saved note on her iPad. She had obviously prepared a number of things she wanted to say without the pain of typing each letter in front of me.

PLEASE SEND PHOTOS

‘I will,’ I said.

She meant the photos of the show I’d curated at Mean Space. The internship with Karl was mostly writing emails, visiting the post office, buying coffees and helping to pour drinks at exhibition openings, but a couple of years earlier Karl had started giving his interns the chance to curate their own small group show. It was an exciting opportunity, for sure, but it was also good for him—he could scope out potential new talent without having to lift a finger. My show had opened a couple of weeks ago, and I felt that the reception had been overwhelmingly mediocre. I didn’t want my mother to know about the medium-sized turnout at the opening, where people only stayed long enough to drink the free booze, and then the radio silence that followed—no response being much worse than even a scathing review.

‘I’ll send them to you later,’ I said.

My mother was already looking for another pre-prepared note. I scanned the room while I waited. At the foot of the bed was her old TV, sitting on the same wood veneer and glass unit that it had sat on for a decade in our home. She had moved a few other large possessions with her from Wellington—I’d helped her pack them up during my last visit—though the TV was all I recognised. On the bedside table were chunky paperbacks. There were several by Agatha Christie, P. D. James, Ngaio Marsh, as well as a Stephen King and a Dan Brown. Thrillers and whodunits were my mother’s reading materialof choice since the disease had slowed her down. ‘Dan knows how to keep a reader hooked,’ she’d said when I asked why she was reading one of the Da Vinci Code books. ‘Everyone in my MND group’s reading this stuff. We love it. I can fall asleep after ten pages, then when I wake up, I’m straight back into heart-pumping action.’ At the bottom of the book pile was a much slimmer volume. It looked out of place beneath those heavy page-turners, but my mother had found what she was looking for.

This new note had the same large text as the previous two, but it disappeared well below the bottom of the screen. It pained me to think about how long it would have taken my mother to type it all. I braced myself: this joking around about Aunty Wynn’s dolphins hadn’t distracted me from what we most needed to discuss. She nudged the iPad with her hand, and then closed her eyes.

I WAS THINKING ABOUT LAST QUEEN’S BIRTHDAY

It wasn’t surprising that even in her current state, and given the difficulty with which she typed, she had abbreviated nothing. She despised text-message speech. This was another reason she liked to write these things in advance—so she had time to get it right.

I GET BORED LYING HERE CORNERED BY MY THOUGHTS. THOUGH WYNN HAS BEEN A HOOT

‘Really, a hoot?’

She opened her eyes. Though she could manage few convincing facial movements there was an undeniable secretiveness to her expression. She had never once referred to her sister as a hoot. She usually preferred ‘my sister’, ‘your aunty’, ‘that woman’, ‘the Boiled Chicken Queen’. She rarely even referred to her by her first name.

REMEMBER THE FENNEL SALAD YOU MADE. I DIDN’T SAY HOW BAD IT WAS BECAUSE YOU WERE TRYING HARD TOBRANCH OUT IN THE KITCHEN. IF YOU’RE STILL MAKING IT, CHECK YOU’RE USING RIGHT AMOUNT OF FENNEL FROM BEST PART OF BULB. IT’S AN INTENSE VEGE

When I looked up, my mother was watching me with a small smile.

‘Mum?’ I said. I’d been expecting to read something completely different. Was she kidding? Had she really spent however long—ten minutes, twenty minutes, maybe longer— typing a warning about my fennel salad?

Her joyful expression faltered. She looked tired. I had the horrible realisation that I was the source of her present tiredness—my response had disappointed her. She wanted to keep things light and I’d failed to play along. Before I could say anything else she opened another of her notes.

WYNN TOLD YOU I WANT TO GET THIS THING OVER WITH. I’M SORRY I COULDN’T TELL YOU. THIS TYPING BULLSHIT DIDN’T SEEM LIKE THE RIGHT WAY