In the Time of the Manaroans by Miro Bilbrough

Author:Miro Bilbrough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Last days of Wellington Street

Julie shifts into Lisa’s flat, a fifteen-minute walk away on the other side of Nelson Cathedral and in the neighbourhood of my school friend Ruth. Robert melts away. The owners of Wellington Street, Jean and her husband, are moving back in and have invited me to stay on for the remainder of the school term. There’ll be no more hippy travellers—no more random men with girlish hair, professing brotherhood but actually seeking a hand job—hiking up the drive.

Literally overnight I become a guest in a high-functioning household where, formerly, I was among slovenly equals. I have become accustomed to being chief shopper, cook and bottle washer, my flatmates’ talents stopping wilfully short of the domestic, my school-goer playing responsible to their extended post-adolescence. I don’t begrudge this. Robert and Julie brought home the Information. Now I am redundant. Jean does everything: cooks, cleans and shops while maintaining a take-no-prisoners intelligence and the baby.

My father takes immediately to Jean when he visits. She is just the kind of woman he admires: abrasive, intelligent, burdensomely capable. English. They talk at the kitchen table for what seems like hours: books and, this being my father, relationships. In the glow of the other’s attention, each is an accomplished flirt. It is vaguely disturbing, and I leave them to it. There’s not a skerrick of self-mythologising at work with Jean or her husband, and no Information to be gleaned either.

Jean has, from a previous marriage, two teenage daughters and a son, who live out of town with their father, Peter. Hazel, Lucy and their brother are famous beauties with improbably rosy cheekbone apples. Sailing home from drama camp I overhear a Cook Strait ferry steward gasp, Fucking hell, there goes the Madonna, as Hazel passes. Hazel is in the same year as me at Nelson Girls’. The steward makes a satirical sign of the cross, but not before I see his astonished eyes. The siblings resemble those pretty-coloured cards of Christian saints the worshipful distribute among themselves. I have been known to own a few myself.

When I first arrive in Nelson, their father Peter invites me to stay over on their land, perhaps even to remain. Overlapping circles of acquaintance are generous when it comes to extending hospitality in the hippy community. Jean’s ex and their children keep bees, poultry, horses and a huge vegetable garden, and practise a low-key Christianity. Unsure of how to insert myself into their pastoral bliss, I proceed through serial crushes on each of the four. Initially, I settle on father and son. I follow one or other of these over the soft green bumps of their land, my head emptying before Theory. Once I recover from the beauty blinding, I realise these men are too drily abstract for my liking.

Hazel is an earthier pedagogue, laboriously captive to notions of how to be good. Her talk circles how things should be versus how they are. It is the rhythm I can’t seem to fit: the words that stop and start and plonk on in search of music.

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