Kind

!

Rainbow Valley is on the way up Mount Everest, about five hundred metres from the top and patched with bright colours rarely seen in nature. She had seen it herself in the days of travel. Neon oranges, livid greens and purples, hallucinogenic pinks and acid yellows are distributed unevenly, which may be due to wind direction, or weight and heft, or the exact position of the climber on the ridge before the fall or disposal of the body. 

This guy, though, right here and now, high on the Southern Alps of New Zealand, is more of a black exclamation mark on a white page, Kiwi-noir face down in the snow. She climbs down from her snowmobile and with surprising ease turns him over to see if he's still alive. 

 2021

Flawless

Wiri Women’s Prison,

August 7th, 2021

Dear K.A,

I miss you, my old friend, so much that I have to write to you. Is that alright? I’m going to write to you from in here. Some days all through the slow hours all I can think of is you and it’s driving me crazy. I reckon that if I write to you it’ll help. It’ll make time pass faster, it’ll be like talking, it’ll soothe the pain — even though I haven’t heard from you. Not once.

And I don’t expect to. Sad, eh, after all this time? Worked it out. We’ve been friends for 34 years. If we were sat here together I’d ask the question that never leaves me, and while I waited for your reply I’d watch you carefully for signs that you were lying. You might like to ask me the same question. And that is . . .

Do you still love me?

Neither of us would have a simple answer, would we?

But at least now that it’s all over I can start to work out when it all went wrong. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? Reflecting on my sins? Plenty of time, nothing else to think about. 

Nothing of any importance in here, anyway, other than eating, sleeping, missing you and keeping my head down.

When it all went wrong.

Yeah, right.

Like there’s an actual point on the clock. When people say ‘when it all went wrong’, what exactly do they mean? There’s no precise ‘when’. Usually it’s been going wrong for months, years — certain essentials being put in place one after another so that going wrong can’t go wrong. One morning we wake up and think, It’s all gone wrong. As in gone really wrong.

For me, you could say it started one winter midnight in 1983 when I was born at Dargaville Hospital, and that every day after that there have only been intermittent flashes of gold among the shit. Did you know that gold is in shit, as in actually, for real? The faeces of one million of us contains nearly $17 million worth of gold. Like, they could mine it and get rich.

Now I’ve got the time I’ve been doing a bit of mining myself, looking for the gold, and there’s plenty of it. Because, girlfriend, I’ve had some fun. When it went wrong for me, I was flying high. Until that moment, in those few seconds when I realised it would be very hard ever to make things right again, I was doing better than anybody could have thought, even you.

Not to say you didn’t keep the faith. For years. You always knew I’d succeed. You knew I was a winner. What must you be thinking now!