Kāinga
Bonsai Best Small Stories from Aotearoa NZ, Canterbury University Press, 2018
I share Penny’s job as night porter at the Cherry Court Lodge. I never learn to work the visa machine or the floor polisher or the telephone intercom thing so I put the no vacancy sign outside and sit under the desk reading the duty manager’s Freemason handbook, and pray the owners don’t come by. I have to remember to make the coffee for the breakfast – three heaped tablespoons of Greggs Instant boiled away in the percolators for at least half an hour.
I live with my boyfriend in a damp flat in Queen Street. He is part Māori and a tiny part Italian. Everyone is interested in the exotic Italian part, his fine nose. Once he was given a huge frozen block of Orange Roughy from a Russian sailor he’d given a lift to and we had to go round to the in-laws basement in the middle of the night to put it in their chest freezer, but no-one had heard of Orange Roughy so no-one ate it.
I share a studio behind the DIC with Rachel who has taken up Morris dancing, and Pippa who has taken up drinking at the downstairs Cook. We are on some small business scheme . We make things and try to sell them. My sister has got mixed up with Dunedin’s first punk. He has green hair. There’s a woman at a party with one arm. She cut the other one off to spite her boyfriend. On Friday afternoons I volunteer at the Daybreak Feminist Bookshop. There’s a pack of overalled dykes and sessions on finding one’s own cervix. I don’t join in.