“D’you like the taste of fish, Renaldo?”
“Oi,Jugsy? You got a licence to carry those things?”
“I bet her dad’s Al Qaeda. Ask her if he did 9/11.”
“I heard the psycho new girl was crying in the toilets so long Mrs. White had to go in and make sure she wasn’t slitting her wrists.”
I collapse, the cushioned booth the only thing keeping me from the floor as things I’d long squashed away surge up and over me like the waves beating the coast a mile away. These boys, these ‘bachelors,’ are from Pukekohe and for two miserable years, so was I.
Auckland isn’t just some place I’m visiting. New Zealand isn’t just where my best friend is from. I was fifteen when my dad got a professorship at the Manukau Institute of Technology, and it was‘arrivederci’to a lifetime of friends and family in Melbourne and‘bonjourno’to being the only wog teen on the entire North Island.
I was promptly enrolled at Pukekohe High, where I was inevitably bullied for my accent, flute-playing, big boobs, general aesthetic, and what would later go on to be diagnosed as lady-Autism.
I had one shining light in the dark: A casual gig at the newsagency, where I could escape the endless cycle of bullying, babysitting, and flute practice. It’s where I met Cece. But home was hell, and school was worse. I counted the days until I could leave for university. Sometimes, when I couldn’t escape the boiling spotlight of humiliation to save myself, I counted hours. But Ididescape.
I became a musician. I made a ridiculous amount of moneybeinga musician. I had a flat in Paris, a crew of music-nerd friends, a hot British boyfriend, and a best friend back home I could call when I needed her. It should have been a happy ending.
But that’s the thing about happy endings. Unless you’re dead, they don’t exist. It’s always the start of a new story. In mine, the hot British boyfriend turns out to be a psychopath, and ruins the dip-shit flute-player’s career and life, and the flute-player calls her best friend sobbing and pleading for a way out.
The best friend says,Come live with me in New Zealand.
The flute-player says,Besides you, everyone I hate lives in New Zealand.
Best friend swears,No, everyone you hate is still rotting away in Pukekohe, or some other backwater that might as well be Mars.
But here they are. My former classmates. In Auckland. Alive and well and drinking beer fifteen feet away.
My palms sting. I glance down and realise I’m digging my lavender SNS-coated nails into my skin.
Across the bar, Cece’s shouts of surprise bring me to my feet.
I don’t want to run. Nothing about these men scares me now. No, the emotion electrifying every atom of my body, energising me so completely I’m surprised the booth hasn’t burst into flames, is rage.
2
“The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.”
Shona Proverb
“I never knew what I wanted to do, but I knew the kind of woman I wanted to be.”
Diane von Fürstenberg
Cece
“Cece Taylorrrrrr!”
My name booms around my bar like it’s being announced over the loudspeaker at a boxing match. I turn and search for the voice as one of the behemoths wearing a unicorn headband peels himself away from his group and heads towards me, finger outstretched. He’s at least six-three with the physique of someone who bench presses BMWs for fun.
“I knew it was you!” Jake Graves-Holland shouts happily. “How the hell are ya?”
Jake went to school with me and Ada. He was the captain of the first-XV and now he plays for theAll Blacks. That’s better than being prime minister in New Zealand, where rugby isn’t so much a sport as a religion.
I shoot a glance at the booth where Ada was hanging out. She’s vanished, which isn’t surprising. No one has less desire to hang out with our ex-schoolmates than she does. Especially the all-popular rugby crowd. At least I get to make money off their debauchery; the best she’ll get is ’Nam flashbacks. I give her a mental salute before returning my attention to Jake.
“Hi, Jake! I’m good. How are you?”
“Great.” He beams at me, grey eyes twinkling. JGH, as he was known at Pukekohe High, is the kind of good-looking that only seems possible via AI-generated fairie smut, but nothing about him gets my heart racing. Maybe because I sober-drove him and my brother home after a rugby court session when I was sixteen, and he helped me hold Tristan up while he vomited into Mum’s rose garden.
