Peoples Choice 2010: Lucky

By Tracy Farr

She gets a park right by the cafe, and as she turns the key to shut off the ignition the wind takes over from the engine noise. She stares out at the grey-blue surf hurling itself in from Cook Strait, foaming the beach. The sand, littered with pebbles and seaweed and fragments of wood and plastic that the ocean throws up, is a grey that always looks dirty. This beach never sparkles in the sunshine, not unless you look past the grey sand and out at the breakers and through the mist and distance that draw your eyes south, unable to see it but knowing that, just there, just round the corner, is the South Island. If a rip carried you out, directly south from this dirty sand, it’d take you all the way to Antarctica before you hit land. There are safer beaches in Wellington; prettier, benign. But this is the beach she comes to, this winter, to walk the dirty grey sand and endure the wind and be just a hidden current away from the bottom of the world
The cafe was gutted by fire the week she had her accident, so it feels as if they’ve healed together, Iris and the cafe, since it’s been rebuilt and reopened for business. It’s glossy and fresh again now, fire-engine red on fatty cream paint startling against the grey-blue of the ocean and the sky. When she was well enough, after it reopened, she’d skirted warily around the cafe on her first few visits to the beach, before finally climbing the skinny stairs towards the noise of mothers and babies, and thin people she recognised from the television, and coffee and suits and music and surfers. What hooked her when she got there – hooked all of them, everyone in the room – was the view through the big window. If you sat far enough back in the room, the window frame obscured the dirty grey beach and showed only the rollers, the breakers, the sky, the mist; that restoring, fluid blue.