You Must Believe in Spring

From the veranda of a villa nestled in the hills of Thorndon, looking down the sloping stretch of lawn around the edge of which your father and grandmother are digging, working the damp soil in the shadow of bare, pale trees, your view of the city is another tier of wooden villas, staggering towards the shore, a ladder to a water tower, and the white blur of a ferry on the still lagoon before the sinuous green hills behind Petone and Eastbourne on the far side of the harbour give way to the higher peaks, Rimutakas, Tararuas, snow covered and crisp and melting into the long plumes of cloud. You cradle your mug of tea and watch the steam rise, drifting up over the turquoise glints of water and the deep green of the distant shivering of the bush.

The city hides itself in folds, European gridlines tucked into the undulating banks of green that rise around the basin of the harbour. It is Saturday. A radio crackle backs the warbling of a tui in the neighbours’ kowhai tree. It feels like the world is waiting, unready to rise just yet, and when you were younger, you would try to cling onto this moment for as long as possible; it felt like the city was a private place, for a few hours. It was yours. You had books that you wanted to read, friends you had to see, but still, you wanted to partition off this time and make it stretch. Coming back to stay for the weekend, you feel all of it again. The marmalade smeared across your toast is bitter, the bergamot an echo, mellow, on your tongue. You sip the tea again.

You know better than when you were younger. But you still want to clutch that feeling against your chest, feel the day, the city, set aside. Your father leans against his spade, plunged down into the earth, and his breath is smoke.

You decide you have to move. It’s a feeling that comes over you more and more these days. You could just walk down past the figures in the garden, underneath the arch of the next villa down, and find your way towards the sea. But if you wrap up and follow the path that winds behind the house, up the slope towards the ridgeline rising always over the city centre, wherever you go, you will find the paths between the radiata pines, damp and mushroomy, are almost completely still. No one will disturb the thrumming wind as it comes up from Makara and the strait, through the power pylons, where you can look out and see the city spread apart, the hills like membranes on a fan.

You wonder about the people who are making their way through the streets below you. Women wrapped in woollen coats, men with heavy scarves, the smell of roses and dried flowers drifting from their necks and wrists like dust from the wings of moths. Are they headed out to a department store? Are they going over to a friend’s, to meet somewhere for coffee, somewhere they can talk? Tracking the view on, towards the right, the heights of Kelburn drop away in an s-bend parade, and you catch the top of the gothic brickwork of the University. Classes are over for the winter break. Somewhere in the library, a few students will still be bent over books. And in the gully on the farther side of campus, you can sense but not quite see the little bungalows that in the last few years have been slowly taken over by students. You shudder a little, thinking of the damp, the line of mould around the bathroom wall, the green moss on the weatherboards, the constant smell of ferns. You know that the valley is quiet now, awaiting the migration back for Spring.

Following the cable car as it rolls down from Kelburn, disappearing from view, you come back to the dense and golden cluster of the city centre, wooden office blocks just three or four stories high, the first glass fronted buildings coming up on Lambton Quay, but still the plaster arches and squared deco lines of a few decades past, and all the while, the orange and cream of trams shuttling from one end of the little capital back to the other. You forget the burghers, their musty perfumes. Any of the city’s fifty coffee bars are waiting. There’s the three-handled, stainless steel gaggia espresso machine upstairs above Wardell’s on Willis, with its Scandinavian wood panels and three-legged chairs around little triangle tables. There’s the smoky lounge of Tete-a Tete, where in the afternoon a three-piece set will start and carry on until late in the night. The double bulbs of kona coffee makers bubble on behind one shop in almost every block. Further around the harbour, heading out towards Oriental Parade, you could stop at one of the milk bars run by Greeks from Island Bay before you wander back to browse the shelves at Parson’s, down the other end of Lambton Quay.

You alight from the press of bodies on the tram as it comes to the end of Courtenay Place. Shaking off the fug of condensation, you walk the two blocks until you reach the waterfront. The reclaimed land here is shored up by steep banks of rough-hewn boulders, and you find a place amongst them, hunker down, and watch the workmen on the wharf reaching out towards the olive smudges of Somes Island, listen as they talk about their overtime building the new Overseas Passenger Terminal, set to welcome in more boats from Sydney and Singapore and somewheres further still, imagining that you are stepping through the wide new archway, with a ticket in your hand, leaning up against the railing, braced against the offshore wind, and the whole wide crescent of this city, overhung by rising tiers of Brooklyn, Kelburn, Tinakori, bungalows between the flax and fern, and over them, the thick trees of the ridgeline that you viewed the water from that morning, recedes and blurs.

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