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Reunited

March 26th, 2010 by the_lifer
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It’s Winona’s turn to be in a cafe, tapping an iPhone. She has taken a morning off from flat hunting to catch up with an old friend. It wasn’t entirely successful, chiefly due to the old friend’s two-year-old. She is waiting to hear from Will about a second interview he’s been on when someone behind her says, “Winona? Is that you?” She looks up to a gasp of relief. “Oh! I wasn’t sure, with your hair so different. I was going to message you on Facebook – ”

“Willow! You’re back from your conference!” The two women stand and hug.

Winona feels guilty that she hadn’t felt particular urgency about contacting Willow, a friend from girls’ college. But Willow’s life is so respectable that it’s all tidily on her Facebook page. She has no qualms about including her triple-stacked education history, culminating in a rarefied biology Ph.D, nor about listing her government agency employer. There are 179 friends, lots of ecological Fan Of memberships, and a Relationship status of “Single.” In her six online photo albums, Willow’s most striking features, long natural blonde hair and bright blue eyes, are usually obscured by hiking hats and glasses.

Willow listens patiently while Winona spills about her unemployment, her return, and her flat hunt. When Willow can get a word in edgewise, she says, “I’m moving into a new flat in two weeks myself.”

“Landlord problems?” Winona can imagine that only too well after her flat hunt.

Willow suddenly becomes pretty as she smiles. “I’m buying.” As Winona shrieks in surprise, Willow adds, “I didn’t want to post about it in case I jinxed it, but it all went unconditional this morning. Have you found a place yet?”

Winona carefully shakes her head.

Within three minutes, Willow is in a position to break her lease, Winona has a flat, and they are making plans to get together repeatedly.

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Moore Wilson’s

March 24th, 2010 by the_lifer
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After letting Will sleep in while she looked at an exceptionally disappointing downtown flat, Winona decides to take a peek into Moore Wilson’s. She has heard that this wholesale distributor – cum- gourmet retailer has renovated their central store.

Fifteen minutes later, she is in mild shock.  The former dark, cramped grocery, with its snaking lines, now gleams with the airy brightness of expensive retail. She went past the serried ranks of ruffled vegetables and rare fruits and is now ordering an espresso at the cafe next to the refrigerated cheese room. It does not escape her that she is being served by the city’s best-looking grocery staff. Most of all, she is dazzled by the way that some of the customers are, clearly, doing their “weekly shop” here.

Anyone from the UK hoping for an in-depth food hall would find it familiar, but they would look in vain for the counters of prepared food. Most of the shoppers in Moore Wilsons’ are tall and thin. They are also, it is a given, able to cook, for Moore Wilson’s sells chiefly ingredients. After the horrid rental kitchens Winona has been looking at, she recognizes space to cook well as a luxury itself.

After firing off a few texts, Winona picks up some salad greens and bread, and takes her place in a queue. As she watches the well-groomed older woman ahead of her unload a full trolley of the best groceries in New Zealand, Winona stiffens her shoulders. She had  had enough of this wistful gazing when she’d been unemployed in London for six months. Will was happy enough to support her, she thought, but she was ground down by the empty winter days and endless rejections.  And then there were her student loans, from back when a graduate degree in journalism had been a good idea.

She thought that she’d be freer of this jealousy back in the land of the corner dairy, but locavorism and designer clothes have followed her home. There’s enough room for her modest shopping at the end of the counter. As she unloads her basket, Winona privately vows that, some day, she too will do her “weekly shop” there.

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Wellington Hair

March 22nd, 2010 by the_lifer
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Winona sits in the chair at her mother’s salon.

This is not half as cozy as it sounds.

Wilhelmina may be 67, but she is a fashionable Wellington woman, and her salon is one of the city’s many ateliers of avant-garde hair. Winona wonders how much its pressed raw concrete walls and deliberately industrial sinks cost, and is privately relieved that her mother, having her hair washed, is picking up the tab “as a treat for us girls”.

A stylist comes over, somber and chic. Winona takes in her black dress, striped stockings, and cobalt-blue shoes. After a little breath, she says, “I’m looking for something more…”

She circles a hand around her head, the deep brown hair coming down to her shoulders. She ironed it flat this morning, but the wind tore at it cruelly, and it’s not looking half as good as it did in London.

The stylist says, “Something with more movement?”

Winona yelps in agreement.

More karate-chop type gestures take place around Winona’s head, to show her a part direction, where the new length will end. Then, the scissors come out.

Half an hour later, Winona has a whole new head.

Her hair is sliced into feathery layers, cupping her head like plumage.

She gazes into the mirror. “I love it, but…”

The stylist understands. “You can have it sleek, or like this.” She reaches out and ruffles Winona’s hair. Disarrayed, it becomes kittenish, witty. Hair that can move. Hair that will, after fifteen minutes battling a gale, still look presentable.

Winona hits the street, smiling, no longer afraid of the wind.

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Not An Interview

March 19th, 2010 by the_lifer
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Will is at the strange ritual of Having Coffee With A Potential Employer, a Wellington phenomenon as measured as a Japanese tea ceremony.

First, there is the hosts’ disclaimer that this meeting of minds isn’t an interview. They just wanted to meet him. It is unspoken that, if he is found worthy, an actual job interview might ensue. If an actual job interview had already taken place, the coffee meeting would be the more delicate, because then his nuances of personality and teamwork are being carefully weighed.

Once Will expresses his understanding of this, with an appropriate level of relaxed breeziness, drinks are ordered.

Doing this step wrong is ordering a cold drink, or anything with whipped cream; ordering anything more than a biscotti to eat is also a faux pas.

Doing it right begins with a hot drink, whatever the weather. Coffee, of course, is best, followed by tea. Hot chocolate is risky – some places serve it as the respectable cousin to a mocchachino, in a cup with two modest marshmallows; others treat it as a liquid Knickerbocker Glory in a tall glass mug adorned with syrup and confectionery. Will plays it safe and orders a flat white.

Fresh back from London, Will knows that he has to lay it on a bit thick about Wellington being vastly superior to everywhere else on the planet. Saying the wrong thing, he knows, includes complaining about the weather, or talking too much about changing things at a theoretical place of employment

Making the entire thing much more taxing for Will is that it’s early evening and someone at the bar next door is having a costume party. He has to stay calm and focused on his hosts while hordes of whooping merrymakers in fabulous fancy dress pass by their window table. For all he knows, laughing at that group all dressed like multiple Tiger Woods may mean he’ll never work in this town again.

At the end of this relaxing, casual meeting of minds, Will is completely drained. To recover,  he goes a couple of blocks, and up a set of stairs.

There, away from prying eyes, is another café, where he orders another hot drink.

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Flat Hunting In Wellington

March 17th, 2010 by the_lifer
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Flat hunting in Wellington. The sheer hell of it.

Several days after their arrival, Will cases the To Rent ads on TradeMe while Winona rustles the paper (thrust upon her by her mother.) Pretty soon Will’s cellphone rings. It is a former colleague of his. What’s he been up to? Has he got a CV? Can he come around for coffee?

Within twenty minutes of this, Will is gone, and it is now Winona’s job to try and find them a tolerable two-bedroom apartment. Luckily, she is no tyro, and she uses all the tools at her disposal over the next week.

As soon as she gets a flat’s address, she checks it out on Google Maps, using the Terrain view. This saves her from arriving at a flat and finding out that it is down, or up, half a kilometer of slippery hillside stairs. She has lived in those flats.  At thirty-four, she considers that she has paid her dues and is completely over it.

Even after winnowing prospects down like this, when she does show up at rentals, she is invariably dismayed. Downtown apartments have peculiar angles, harsh spars bisecting the ceilings, and bathrooms better not spoken of. Flats in the first ring of convenient neighborhoods circling downtown are, inevitably, basement flats, with clog-dancing landlords living overhead. They would be the Income part of the owners’ Home and Income.

Further out in the suburbs, the flats are spacious and quiet, but they haven’t been renovated since, on average, 1973. Some are dark and damp enough to evoke Cthulu; others, full of views and light, rattle in ceaseless wind.

Many of them have the current residents still in situ. A group of overseas students, smoking cigarettes and sitting down to a late luncheon of whole grilled fish. The place that smells like sour milk, with a cradle jammed into the spare room. Or, worse, somewhere tidy, half-empty of furniture, with divorce paperwork laid out neatly on a desk.

Finally, she finds a decent place. Unfortunately others have found it too. The landlords, knowing a good thing when they have it, have held an open home, and hordes of potential residents have shown up. Winona has a quiet word with one of the landlords, offering $20 more a week than they are asking. She gets a call on her cellphone later saying that the flat has gone to someone else who offered $50 a week more.

On the bus, having rejected yet another strange basement flat, she sinks back in her seat and sighs. A friend’s words ring in her mind. “In Wellington, either you live in squalor, or you live in the suburbs.”

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Perfect Anywhere But Here

March 15th, 2010 by the_lifer
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“Well, tell Win and Will they must come around sometime soon. We’ll get the spa pool going and have a barbecue, if this gorgeous weather holds. Ronan! Ronan, down! Can’t you hear him barking? I must go take care of this beast of ours.”

Helena is the middle Wellington sister. She takes after their fair, rounded father, with a heart-shaped chin and a petulant expression.

In any other region of New Zealand, her cross look would be impossible to explain. To a visitor from Napier, or even Auckland,  Helena has it all. A devoted tower of a husband, unusually well off by Wellington standards. Two healthy boy children who fall over each other to give her hugs, shouting their love. A vast yet warm house with a three-car garage and dramatic views of Wellington Harbour. A passport with plenty of stamps in it from her twice-yearly trips overseas. A part-time job teaching art. A tall, silky Irish setter – but it’s the dog that gives the game away. Every time her family visits and pets the well-behaved animal, they say, “You could never have this dog if you lived in Wellington.”

Helena, you see, lives in Lower Hutt.

To live in the Hutt Valley is to have a slightly damaged Wellington region experience at bargain prices. Houses are affordable, schools range from decent to excellent, life’s luxuries (spas, dining, gyms) are cheaper, hiking trails abound. The damage comes when anyone from outside the Hutt hears where Helena lives.

It was almost a relief when she had the children and stopped going to her Wellington friends’ parties. There was always someone who would go on at length about how he’d never, ever, in a million years, live in the Hutt, even though he was still flatting at 45. She knows it’s ridiculous to let things like this bother her. She might do better at brushing it off if she didn’t get a dose of it from her elder sister Karin (“It’s ever so cold there, and the Dowse has just taken so long to find itself”) and her mother (“I’d see the boys more if you were closer, dear,” when Maungaraki is only 15 minutes from downtown Wellington).  It’s nice that little Win is back – she can’t wait to show her how much the boys have grown – but she does hope that she and Will get a car, this time.

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Up The Coast

March 12th, 2010 by the_lifer
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“You didn’t have to call to tell me Win’s back, Mummy. I’ve been reading her Twitter posts all week. At least now that she’s back she and Will can reduce their carbon footprint properly.”

Even Mina has to admit that her eldest daughter, Karin Kapiti, takes herself rather seriously.

Karin has her mother’s height, topped with long hair (currently streaked with aggressive white-blonde bars) that gets wind-tangled and split when she visits Wellington. Her tall angular figure is perfect when draped in gloomy cutting-edge New Zealand fashion, with a large bone or jade carving clanking around her neck. She creates ferocious metal sculptures that do well in Holland.

After art school and going thoroughly off the rails in her early 20s, she became the third wife of Kev Kapiti, the renowned half-Maori ceramicist. Kev is much older than Karin – when she married him and went up the coast, there were cracks about her retiring early. They live in a spacious, drafty 1970s house, which is now in fashion again.

This is typical of how Karin always manages to be ahead of the curve. She talked Kev into a web site in 1997, was painting rooms in their house black in 2001, and got her home-grown vegetable garden started in 2005.  Right now, she is upbraiding everyone about being carbon-neutral locavores, hand-weaving raincoats out of plastic grocery bags and showing them in galleries, and campaigning against the evil that is wind farms.

Annoying as Karin is, it is difficult to say anything nasty about her, because it was her idea that she and Kev should host a foster child. The boy adores the avuncular Kev, and listens patiently when Karin goes on about his whanau and expressing his culture.  Karin’s friends, many of them childfree women like herself, are bracing themselves in case this is the next must-do lifestyle trend.

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Who Is Will?

March 10th, 2010 by the_lifer
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That night, Winona lies next to Will, under the red and burgundy quilt. He’s asleep as if jet lag didn’t exist. Winona is not so lucky. She lies there, staring at his shoulders while he sleeps on his side.

Everything that’s wrong and right about Kiwi men is wrapped up in Will’s history. He’s a tidy specimen: quiet, soft-spoken, dark haired,  clean shaven. His narrow, sloping shoulders are improved by a business shirt, but he has the legs to pull off the shorts he’d like to wear year round. He likes fixing things. He doesn’t talk about his family much.

Winona is one of the few people who knows about the bullying that made Will’s life hell when he was a boy in Eketahuna. He’s not very articulate about how he got through it. Winona always thinks of him as applying some invisible, durable #8 wire to his spirit. Somehow braced, he disregarded it, stayed in school, got uni scholarships, met her. She didn’t know, at that party at the student flat, that he was almost a genius, just that he seemed smitten.

Today, a lot of people know he’s pretty smart. His IT work is so abstruse that, even though it allows them to live anywhere on the planet they want, Winona can scarcely stay conscious while he discusses it. Just when she has a vague idea of what he’s doing , the field takes a quantum leap and she’s back at “blah de blah blah” again.

Over the past few years, he had spent a lot of his spare time eerily stupefied by his Playstation. But in London they lived in a one and a half bedroom apartment – what was the man supposed to do?

Now, they’re back in New Zealand, the world’s greatest bloke playground. Winona pictures him losing his shallow layer of London flab while hiking, kayaking, helping his best mate fix things. Getting a bit of a tan. Smiling more.

Very, very gently, she spoons her body around him while he sleeps on his side.

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Meet Walter Wellington

March 8th, 2010 by the_lifer
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Winona’s father, Walter, blocks Will when he tries to go into the kitchen to help with dinner. “Come and have a drink, you look bloody exhausted!”

Walter is shorter, rounder, younger, and jollier than his wife Wilhelmina, and still working for his own government department. Less outdoorsy than most New Zealand men, he’s a Corgi rather than a border collie. He’s content to putter around their Edwardian villa, indulge in golf at the Karori course, and follow “Mina” on her round of brunches, experimental theater, and benefit dinners. His sins are small: chatting rather too long to pretty young assistant analysts, cake with his coffee, domestic laziness. And maybe, in his secret heart, amidst his Amazonian clan, wishing he had a son.

He encourages Will to take his pick from the beer fridge. He fills in Will’s silences with unexpectedly amusing jet lag anectdotes. He says to Will, “Heard you talking about your own place. I respect that. Still, it’s not so easy as Mina…” Walter nods towards the kitchen. “So, stay as long as you like.”

Will grips his beer and clouds up, nodding. Any unmanly awkwardness is circumvented by screams from the kitchen. “Walter! If you’re getting drinks…”

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A Kelburn Matriarch

March 5th, 2010 by the_lifer
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Winona’s mother, Wilhelmina Wellington, is one of the Junoesque figures that make Wellington tick. She doesn’t know everyone, but it can seem like she does. Her puissant confidence usually browbeats anyone into awed compliance. Retired two years ago from the Ministry of Justice, she now volunteers at City Gallery, fundraises for Women’s Refuge, and focuses on her abstract quilting.

She is solidly glad that her youngest daughter is home from her OE at last. “I’ve got something for you,” she says, and gestures towards the kauri coffee table.

Wilhelmina has always done her best to be “fair” with her three daughters. Now that Winona is back, it is her turn to benefit from her mother’s new hobby.

Karin, her eldest daughter, got a quilt two years ago. She took the hand-dyed indigo reverse trapunto quilt her mother titled “Storm Mist” and hung it on the wall in her living room.

Chuffed by this success, Wilhelmina then gifted her middle child, Helena, with a similarly sized work, this time in black with orange and yellow rings. Wilhelmina is still prickly that this is banished to Helena’s spare room. “Helena always liked things pretty,” Wilhelmina grumbles, dismissively. (She forgets, when it suits her, that her ravishing Kelburn villa, packed with antiques and art, would win approval from William Morris.)

Winona unwraps a vast calico package and holds up her quilt. A blurred assemblage of red and burgundy, it is lovable for its warm colours alone. “Oh, Mummy, it’s gorgeous, we’ll never be cold now,” Winona squeals, but then she wails, “I wish we had a bedroom to put it in. But we still have to find a place.”

“We’re looking tomorrow. We don’t want to be a bother,” Will mumbles.

Wilhelmina says, briskly, “I don’t know what you’re so worried about. You just got here. Besides, you’ll find flats and jobs. Just get up in the morning and get the paper.”

Winona and Will exchange a look, but say nothing. It takes more resources than they can muster at the moment to remind Wilhelmina about the 21st century.

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