As they drive along the coast, Lulu looks at the calm sea and thinks about geology. Isla is sound asleep, slumped in the booster seat in the back. Lulu can hear her rhythmic breathing.
To her left is the sea and to her right, the mountains. The Southern Alps rise silently and majestically, sculpted by glaciers for millions of years. The road is deserted. Lulu hasn’t seen another car for a long time. They have passed through only one tiny village, with a café and a shop, both closed. Christmas. It is Christmas Lulu’s escaping from, hitting the road instead. They have no other family to gather with and no local friends close enough to ask how to celebrate. What would she have cooked for Christmas dinner? Lulu has seen on TV that people eat turkey for Christmas, but probably that was in America. What do Kiwis eat? Even if she knew, could she learn to cook it and pretend to like it? Isla would have loved to celebrate Christmas. Perhaps they should have done it for the kid. But the thought of buying a plastic tree and cheap ornaments from The Warehouse and then putting them up at home with Isla somehow made her sad.
Lulu’s interest in geology started two months ago, when Dan told her that his two-week annual leave had been approved and he would come visit them at Christmas. After a stressful year, the three of them could finally reunite, relax a little, and travel. She did some research and decided on this South Island itinerary—because two weeks were just right for it, and because she had the feeling that Dan was here to have a serious talk with her. What if they couldn’t stay in this country for long? Why wouldn’t they go straight for the cherry on the cake: Queenstown, the Sounds, the glaciers, and the Southern Alps?
As she planned the trip, Lulu researched her new country, discovering why Auckland has so many volcanic cones, why Rotorua is steamy with mud pools, and how the Southern Alps erode yet grow taller too, pushed up by the compressions from the boundaries of the Australian plate and the Pacific plate underneath. She streamed ‘How the Earth was Made’, a series of thirteen episodes. Golden lava erupted from volcanoes like a celebration, fiery and unstoppable, obliterating everything it encountered. Tsunamis, earthquakes, plate tectonics, geological deep time. She watched with wide eyes. Afterwards, she put ‘strata’, ‘igneous rocks’, ‘groundwater’, ‘meteorites’, and ‘palaeontology’ into a Google search.
At least the three of them are together for the holiday season. But then Lulu dreads the end of the holidays, just like she dreads Christmas, for by then Dan will have to go back to China, and Isla will cry again. Last year at Auckland Airport when Dan grabbed his suitcase from the boot and said goodbye to them, Isla cried. She cried as Dan stood at the kerb waving until their car turned at the bend, and she cried all the way home. They had just arrived in New Zealand for the first time. Dan was with them for ten days to help them settle, before going back to China for work.
Lulu is grateful that they’re able to do this—she studying in New Zealand, Dan working—although separation is a high price to pay too. Which is what Dan is going to talk to her about—she dreads that too—maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night. About her plans, about how to sustain the marriage and the family, about whether they all have to go back to China.
“Are you tired?” She glances at Dan. “Do you want me to drive?” They are climbing uphill, trees and slopes have blocked the scenery.
“I’m okay, you can take a nap if you want.” Dan keeps his eyes on the road ahead, making a smooth turn following the hilly curve.
When they first arrived in Auckland, the language school had arranged for Lulu and Isla to board at someone’s house. It was a small, cold room with a double bed. The host was a woman in her fifties who lived with her husband and a teenage son. She had a thin long face, wore glasses, and said she liked to be quiet. Lulu and Isla lived there like mice, always listening to what was happening outside before deciding whether it was a good time to come out, and Lulu always had to shush Isla. Dinners were scant, sometimes cold. One night the host had said to them, “This is green-lipped mussel, New Zealand’s most famous dish, you must try it!” On her cheek was a skin-coloured mole that stuck out as a tiny ball, on which stood a few hairs. When she spoke, these hairs shook in the air. In China, Lulu had eaten plenty of mussels in restaurants. They were brownish or blackish, and slightly smaller. That night the host gave her one mussel on vermicelli. Isla, as a child who hadn’t developed the more sophisticated taste buds of an adult, received none.
She wakes up. Dan’s saying something. For a moment, Lulu has completely forgotten where they are. Her neck is sore. She has drooled a little. “What did you say?” she asks.
“Did you hear the noise? What is it?”
She listens and is instantly alarmed: a constant crushing and flapping sound under the car.
“I’m going to pull off and have a look,” Dan says.
Parked on the side of the road, they find a piece of battered cardboard sticking to the left front wheel. After Dan tears it off, a nail is revealed, stabbing deep and tight into the middle of the tyre.
Lulu rings the car rental company, receiving a recorded message that it’s closed for the holidays. They drive slowly to the nearest small town; its only garage is also closed.
“I can try to change the tyre—I’m sure there is a spare one in the car,” Dan says. They are standing in the empty parking lot of the garage. Isla stays in the car, rubbing her eyes, her cheeks red with sleep.
“But you’ve never changed a tyre before, right?” Lulu asks.
A driver doesn’t need to change a tyre in China. Mechanics do that. Garages are everywhere, opening long hours, providing great service. Dan was the one who took the car to the garage, but Lulu has been to the car-washers. After their car went through the cleaning system, four young men appeared—two at the front doors, two at the back—and started wiping and vacuuming. In five minutes, the car was sparkling inside and out, smelling freshly scented. All for eight dollars.
“Let’s drive to a petrol station,” Lulu says, “maybe we can find help there.” According to the GPS, they need to drive for at least three hours to reach Hokitika where she’s booked accommodation for the night.
The shop at the petrol station bustles. Lulu is hopeful for a second, but quickly discouraged the next. The tall man at the cashier is attending to the four or five customers standing in a queue. They all look busy. A man who has been browsing an aisle ambles a few steps toward the fridges near her. He is wearing black shorts and a grey singlet with a red dragon print, his muscular arms are blue-grey with tattoos as if he has on a long-sleeve shirt underneath the singlet. Lulu hesitates for a moment before stepping towards him.
“Excuse me, we have a problem with our car. Are you good with cars? Are you able to help us please?” The man looks surprised at first. As she speaks, he squints at her, which almost makes her run away. He isn’t tall, but fit. His face is tanned and a little weathered, though he can’t be over thirty-five. She notices more tattoos on his neck and legs. Actually, his whole body is covered in tattoos, except for the backs of his hands, as if he were wearing a pair of tan gloves. He reminds her of someone who would ride a loud motorcycle in a big group. But she can’t falter, she tells herself, now that she has made the first step.
“Mummy…” Isla runs into the shop. “Can I have an ice cream?” She clutches Lulu’s hand, trying to drag her to the freezer. When she sees the man, she stares at him and hushes up, pulling at Lulu harder.
“Could you take a look for us? We’ve found a nail in a tyre,” Lulu says to the man.
“Fuck,” the man says.
His voice isn’t loud but Lulu is appalled. She tries not to show it, and she finds herself trembling a little. She isn’t a person who hears swear words every day. Possibly she has never uttered one all her life. Of course, at university she has heard other students swear, but with their fresh faces and easy demeanour they sounded pretty harmless.
She tells the man about the sound they heard when driving, and the cardboard and the nail they discovered in the tyre. She leads the way, turning towards him now and then, making sure that he is following her to the car. She still isn’t sure whether this is a good idea, but the people in the shop and the cars at the pumps give her a feeling of security. Dan has turned the wheel so that the nail on the tyre can be easily spotted. When he sees the man, he comes over with a smile and says hi.
The man doesn’t respond. Slowly he rubs a finger across the nail. “Shit… you got a bottle or something?”
Lulu is a little slow to react. She hasn’t fully grasped what he just said.
The man glances at the three of them, then turns around and walks away.
Dan and Lulu look at each other. “What’s he doing? Where did he go?” Dan says. Isla moans again for an ice cream, brushing her face against Lulu’s belly. Dan takes her into the shop.
Lulu stands beside the car not knowing where to put her hands. She opens the car door, finds her bag, slings it over her shoulder, just for something to do. She locks the car door with the remote.
Did the man ask her to wait a moment? Is he coming back? This isn’t the first time Lulu has been confused by people in New Zealand—and it won’t be the last. At university, she often doesn’t quite understand what makes her classmates laugh—she is studying early childhood education and her classmates are mostly young white girls. Not that she gets to interact with them often. They don’t speak to her unless they have to. It is her Chinese classmates she is stuck with—laughing together, exchanging information: where to find cheaper petrol, which Chinese grocery offers more variety. Has she come here, all the way over the oceans, only to be with her own people again? Lulu thinks of the averted eyes of a white girl walking past a group of them chattering loudly in Chinese. In the girl’s blue-eyed glance, Lulu had read only annoyance, fear, resentment.
An SUV drives across the petrol station and parks a few metres behind their car. A man comes out from the driver’s side, slamming the door shut. The man with the tattoos! Lulu goes up to him with a big grin. She isn’t going to leave him alone now.
He drops water onto the nail in the tyre from the drink bottle he has brought with him. He looks at it closely. “Shit. You need to fix it,” he says.
But how? Where? Who has the tools? They will have to drive for at least three more hours to their accommodation—it has to be fixed professionally. The rental car company would also want it repaired expertly. What about changing to the spare tyre, Lulu asks the man.
He nods and is about to turn away.
“Please,’ Lulu says, “do you know how to change it?”
The man stares at her. “You guys don’t know how to change a fucking tyre?” He has a full head of wild brown hair. Dark stubble dots his cheeks and chin. His pale grey eyes are too fiery to face.
Lulu bows her head and lets out an awkward laugh. “No, we don’t know how… please, could you help us?” This said in a near-whisper.
There is a short moment of silence, during which Lulu stares at her sneakers.
“Alright. Get that shit out.” When Lulu looks up at him with a confused expression, the man nods toward the boot.
The “shit” is their suitcases, day bags, and three pairs of walking boots, all of which she asks Dan, who has bought Isla ice cream, to unload and pack aside, out of the way.
Lulu and the man look at the empty boot. He raises the floor panel, unlatches the handle and hooks it up, revealing the spare tyre and some compartments. He locates the wrench and the jack as if he has known this car all his life, then pulls out the spare tyre. There’s a kind of grace in the way he handles the tools, and Lulu can’t help asking, “You seem to be so good at this—are you a mechanic by any chance?”
He doesn’t look at her while busying himself, heaving the tyre and bringing it to the side of the car. “Nah,” he says finally with a quiet, almost shy laugh.
He kneels by the tyre and feels the undercarriage with his hand. When he isn’t satisfied with this, he lies down on his back and peers underneath the car.
Lulu looks at the man on the ground. He isn’t reclining limply, but in a way that’s agile and athletic. Nevertheless he is at her feet, and suddenly she has an urge to stomp on him, hurl herself at him, and rain her fists down on him, hard. Because she can. Because she has been scared of him; because she can’t comprehend those fiery pale-grey eyes, just like she can’t comprehend all the blue and grey and green eyes in the world averted from her and her friends—the loud-spoken Chinese. Because she doesn’t know how things work here and she’s fearful. Because this man is on the ground and vulnerable.
She starts, as if awakened from a nightmare. Her face is hot, she’s deeply ashamed of herself. Is she the snake that turns on the farmer?
It was her idea to come to this country. She married Dan at twenty-five; Isla was born a year later. Lulu had had a stable job. A sixty-hour working week was the norm for her and Dan. Her parents lived with them and helped look after Isla. They were paying for an apartment in a good location with good schools. The rest of their life lay in front of them, plain as day. She had been a good girl, doing everything her parents expected of her. And yet it was she—Lulu —who pointed to the horizon and said to Dan, “Let’s go there.”
During the last Ice Age, the sea level lowered, exposing a land bridge called Beringia that connected Siberia with North America. Early humans who hunted the woolly mammoths crossed this land bridge and became the first ever human beings on the soil of America.
Why did the early humans migrate to North America? Weren’t there boundless resources in the vast land of Asia, mammoths, bison, and all? Lulu thinks that she knows. To borrow a well-used saying: Why do you climb the mountain? Because it’s there. She is proud of herself for making it to beautiful New Zealand. But is it a mistake that they came here? If Dan says to her one of these nights: “Lulu, this is getting too hard. Come home with me,” what is she going to do?
The man is jacking up the car. “Is that hydraulic?” Lulu asks the man, who murmurs something she doesn’t catch. The way he concentrates while loosening the bolts and removing the wheel is beautiful. He’s kind of attractive, she thinks. Isla comes over to watch him work too, licking her ice cream.
They gave their daughter the English name ‘Isla’ about three months after they were here. One of her classmates was named Isla. Lulu thought it was very pretty. Cut the last two letters from the word ‘Island’ and you get ‘Isla’. They have come to an island to live.
The sun is hot on her face. She raises her eyes and sees the mountains, green and blue in the distance, against the sky. Maybe tomorrow they will take a walk in them. They might even find an outcrop or a bare rocky cliff during the hike. There might be layers of red, black, brown, and yellow on the cliff—the earth’s history frozen within. Plate tectonics shifted the continents and built the mountains; ice ages produced glaciers; the sea level rose and fell. It takes tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years. The Earth is more than four billion years old. In this long, deep time, human history is a blink of an eye, a throb of a pulse.
Maybe she can be a geologist. The thought sends a shiver of excitement across Lulu’s body. She studies early childhood education because it’s easier to find a job here. But does she really want to change nappies all her working life? Maybe she can finally do something she loves. She has seen two women geologists in ‘How the Earth was Made’. They had carefully explained the science of the subduction zone and the stromatolites. One of them had driven a motorboat on a lake to examine a heat source in the water. The boat skimmed and jumped across the lake, at times almost flying—in Lulu’s eyes, she had looked free.
According to the caption, the geologists in the series were all PhDs. A doctor’s title requires at least seven to eight years of training. How can she ask Dan to support her for all that time?
Perhaps geology is only a passing interest, like her many other past interests—calligraphy, philosophy, painting, to name a few—that reached nowhere. Not to mention the career in advertising she has left behind. Lulu is thirty-two and still hasn’t found her calling.
Or perhaps being a weekend geologist is good enough. She will keep on studying and after two years when she gets a degree, she will find a job and support Dan until he finds a job here. Would that be too hard? Would he like it in New Zealand enough to give up his job in China?
The man has lowered the car onto the ground and is tightening up the bolts on the spare wheel. He starts on a lower bolt, moves up to the upper bolt, down to the second lower one, then to the left and lastly to the right. He leans back, scans the tyre like an artist assessing the progress of his painting. Then he secures the bolts once more, one after another. His hand holding the wrench is strong, but curiously small.
“Thank you so much,” Lulu says to him as he stands up. “That’s very kind of you. We wouldn’t have known what to do without your help…”
“You’ve got to learn how to change a fucking tyre. It’s not even that damn hard. Anything could happen on the road,” the man says. He turns towards the SUV from which a woman has just emerged, now standing by the side of the passenger seat. She wears a white t-shirt and jeans, and looks older than the man but is perhaps too young to be his mother.
Lulu says to the woman, “Isn’t he amazing? He’s the best! Thank you all!” She raises her arm with her thumb held up in an exaggerated way.
At her words, the woman laughs out loud before scrambling back into the car.
Lulu sees that the man has reddened. He has put on a pair of sunglasses. She wonders where they had been hidden.
The family stands in a row waving to the SUV driving out of the petrol station. Lulu notices that there are two others in the car, all four of them now laughing and chattering. What are they talking about? Some stupid Chinese tourists who can’t even change a tyre? Who thinks that someone is a mechanic simply because he can change a tyre? Or perhaps the man does have the talent to be a mechanic, they now realise? Before they pull onto the road, the man lifts his hand from the steering wheel and gives the three of them a single wave.
Isla is the first to climb into the car. Dan looks at a small yellow sign on the new wheel: “We can’t drive any faster than 80 kilometres per hour with this tyre,” he says.
It will take longer than three hours to reach Hokitika, Lulu estimates. Before Hokitika she still wants to check out Fox Glacier, maybe even do a short hike in the area, as she had planned at home. The spare tyre looks a little smaller than the rest, but if they drive slowly and carefully, they’ll be all right, Lulu tells herself. They’ll be fucking all right.