Mistress of Night and Dawn (31 page)

They had met, age seven, at Holy Communion. Having opened her mouth and swallowed the dry husk that had been placed there by the robed priest, Moana had spied Iris through the curtain of her white veil, trailing her fingers through the Holy Water before an attendant had pulled her away. Moana had broken from the orderly queue of girls from the boarding school waiting to be escorted back to its cloistered walls and run after the little girl who had dared to touch the untouchable and managed to grab her hand before she too was whisked off by another adult. As they touched, the water had passed between them. Moana had carefully held her hand out from herself so as to keep it damp and not wipe the precious droplets away, but she could not prevent even Holy Water from drying.

The next week, they had introduced themselves, and from that day onward Moana began to look forward to Sundays, leading her tutors to hope that the strange girl who had never before demonstrated a pious bone in her body had finally found comfort in God.

Moana had not found comfort in God, but she had found a friend in Iris. The moments they shared were snatched between hymns or in the cover of darkened alcoves when they were supposed to be engaged in confession.

When she was seventeen years old, Moana was unofficially adopted by Iris’s parents when her own mother passed away suddenly of a heart attack and left behind neither income nor provision for school fees. She became part of their family.

At the weekends, under the pretext of taking music lessons and keeping an old woman company, Moana and Iris were driven to visit Iris’s grandmother, Joan, in Piha. Iris’s father would drive them in his new Plymouth Valiant with its elaborate chrome-trimmed fender, with Ray Columbus and the Invaders crackling on the radio for as long as they could pick up reception.

The cream leather upholstery always felt cool against the skin of Moana’s thighs as she gripped Iris’s hand and tried to concentrate on not being sick. They’d be swung from side to side as the car accelerated around the sharp bends of the tree-lined road that led to the beach with its sand blacker than the night sky and so hot in the sun it was near impossible to walk across without scalding the bare skin of her feet.

Iris’s father would spend the afternoons drinking lager with the boys at the surf club as Moana and Iris pried Joan for information about her previous life.

Iris’s grandmother had once been a circus performer in London’s music halls and it was rumoured that she could swallow fire and perform various unimaginable feats of sexual athleticism.

The girls would listen in fascination as she recounted tales of lewd events that had occurred in the back of hansom cabs when the twenty-two-year-old Joan had allowed herself to be wooed by the rich men who watched her.

She was still able to lift her leg over her head, she told them one day, before nimbly clambering onto the piano stool and demonstrating this remarkable feat by wrapping one slim wrinkled arm around her left calf and wrapping it around her right shoulder as if her hips were hinged and swung open as easily as any front door.

The stories they loved to hear most were those that concerned the Ball, a bizarre celebration that occurred just once a year in a different location across the globe. Joan told them that she had been recruited as a performer for the event by a tall and handsome woman who had waited for her in the shadows outside the Trocadero Music Hall in Piccadilly Circus. She had hair so long it reached all the way to her ankles, Joan said, and was so flame red that at first glance it appeared she was on fire. The woman had given her an enormous amount of money in advance to secure both her discretion and a lifetime of performances, just one night per year, and from that evening onwards Joan had travelled with the Ball.

Iris was disbelieving, but Moana listened with rapt attention as the old woman described her very first party on a burning riverboat in New Orleans where the walls had been set alight with flames that did not burn and half of the guests were disguised as human torches. She described another held in a mansion on Long Island in New York that from dusk to dawn appeared to be underwater and all of the guests swam from room to room in the guise of mermaids and tropical fish. And another in a vast underground cave beneath a frozen waterfall in Norway where a group of dancers had been dressed from head to toe in diamonds that stuck to their skin and gave them the appearance of glittering snowflakes drifting gracefully from a shimmering ceiling of stalactites.

Joan had never married, but left the employ of the Ball after conceiving a child under a rosebush with a man who she had met at a garden party. The life of a travelling performer was not well suited to child rearing, and so, with Iris’s mother growing in her belly, Joan chose a new life with the pioneers who were emigrating to the Antipodes and she relocated to New Zealand. And there she gave birth to a child who would inexplicably grow up to be conventional in every way, aside from the genetics that had produced her mother and would eventually produce her daughter, Iris.

She had kept in touch with various other members of the Ball’s staff who continued to travel and perform and so it was, shortly before Moana’s eighteenth birthday, that Joan learned that the Ball would soon arrive in New Zealand.

‘Are the stories true, do you think?’ Iris asked Moana that evening.

‘Every single word,’ Moana replied, her eyes shining with the joy of it all.

When the invitation came, it was on thick, white card embossed with gold lettering and sealed with a large glob of candle wax. Joan had asked Moana to peel it open, complaining that her now arthritic fingers were no match for the heavy envelope although just that morning her digits had flown across the ivories with the dexterity of someone half her age.

Moana slid her fingernail along the surface of the paper, peeled off the seal and examined it between her fingertips. It was soft and pliable and smelled of marshmallows.

‘Cape Reinga,’ she breathed softly as she pulled out the card and read the invitation aloud. Moana rolled the words in her mouth as if they were a benediction. She had long wanted to visit the point that was often thought to be the Northern-most tip of the North Island, the place that in Maori was called
Te Rerenga Wairua
, the leaping-off place of the spirits. It was said that from the lighthouse that stood watch on the Island’s tip, the line of separation could be seen between the Tasman to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east as the two seas clashed in a battle of the tides. Along the way was Ninety Mile Beach, a stretch of coastline so vast it seemed never ending to the naked eye.

‘And what is the theme to be?’ asked Joan, her bright eyes glowing with anticipation.

‘The Day of the Dead,’ Moana replied, reading further. ‘A little morbid, don’t you think?’

‘Not at all,’ replied the old woman, ‘and I ought to know, because I have one foot in the grave already.’ She lifted a wrinkled hand sternly to wave away the girls’ polite protestations. ‘Death is just another step on the way of life.’

That night, Moana and Iris lay side by side in the single bed in Iris’s bedroom in her parents’ ramshackle house on the North Shore. In another life they might have been sisters, but in this one they had grown to be something more.

It was only in the last few months that Moana had realised that she was in love with Iris. More than in love, she was consumed by her and consumed by the thought of losing her. Now that they had both finished school and Iris had begun working in the office of a local motor dealership, there were inevitable suitors. Older men, mostly, rich men, those who could afford to drive and very occasionally Moana suspected that their wives too admired Iris. With her thick, untamed, dark-brown ringlets that framed her face, eyes the colour of melted chocolate, who wouldn’t?

Iris had a round doll-like face and a look of perpetual innocence that attracted people to her like bees to a honey pot. Moana felt herself to be the opposite. She wasn’t fat, but she was stocky, her brown hair dull and straight, her eyebrows a little too thick and her features square and unremarkable. She avoided mirrors, because she found her appearance ordinary, and she often wished that she had been born a boy so that she did not need to worry about whether or not her hair was combed or her waist was becoming too thick.

As soon as she heard about the Ball, she had wanted to be a part of it, and take Iris with her. There was something magical about the way Joan described it. Moana felt it in her bones as surely as she felt that perpetual longing to be near the ocean, and when she discovered that the Ball was to be held in Cape Reinga, the place where one sea laps over another, she knew that they must go.

She had no way to secure an invitation, or so she believed before another thick, white envelope appeared through Joan’s letterbox, this time addressed to Moana Irving and Iris Lark. Moana tore it open with shaking hands to find that the old woman had written to the Ball’s organisers and recommended that both girls be offered positions in the kitchens. Neither of them could cook particularly well, but that, Joan said when they next saw her, was of little consequence.

All of the food and drink created at the Ball was unlike anything else that they might ever have tasted or would ever taste and consequently the recipes were exotic and heavily guarded. All they would need to do was supply the labour; peeling, cutting, chopping and stirring. It was believed that each dish would be imbued with the particular flavour of the person who prepared it and so the Ball selected only a few trained chefs to supervise the catering. All the other kitchen staff were chosen based on the vibe that they would be likely to pass onto the diners. A combination of personality, enthusiasm for the event and sexual libido. All things which Joan had advised the organisers Moana and Iris both possessed in abundance, each in their own way.

With the invitations secured, there was nothing else to do besides find their way there. Joan had declined to attend, stating that she preferred the memories of her youth to whatever inferior adventures her worn-out body might now be capable of.

Iris had convinced her father to loan her the car. She had little experience of the open road, but had learned to drive as part and parcel of her employment at the motor dealership and the necessity of opening up and closing down the shop and bringing the vehicles in from display outside to the secure workshop indoors.

They had little idea of what might be required in the way of costumes, but from everything she had heard about the ball, Moana guessed that any of the daringly short, brightly coloured shift dresses that she and Iris usually wore to parties wouldn’t do. A brief note that had accompanied the formal invitation advised them that they would be provided with clothing suitable for their work in the kitchen and would then be expected to change into something more suitable once their duties had been completed and were free to enjoy the rest of the evening’s entertainment. They would also be expected to attend a ceremony that would commence at dawn.

The drive was long and slow. Iris was cautious behind the wheel, all too aware of the eruption at home if she caused any damage to her father’s prized Valiant. The vehicle was so roomy and she so petite that she could barely see over the steering wheel and anyone coming the other way might have suspected that the car was somehow driving itself.

At Moana’s insistence, they stopped just west of Kaitaia to swim in the sea. Moana had never been able to understand the concept of a bathing suit. She always wanted to feel the lapping of salt water all over her body and particularly on the parts of her that a bathing suit usually covered. So, as soon as they had traversed the desert-like dunes that led to the ocean, she tugged her blouse straight over her head without even bothering to undo the buttons and slipped her skirt and undergarments down and over her ankles, tossed them aside and ran straight for the waves, not the slightest bit concerned whether her naked form was or was not visible to any bystander. Iris followed soon after her, though she stopped to carefully fold her dress and place it neatly over a bit of driftwood so that it would not crease or be covered in too much sand.

Moana’s heart drummed in her chest as she watched her friend walk nude into the water. She had small breasts, her hips jutted out only slightly from her waist, and she had the long, slim legs of a wading bird. She was different from the majority of New Zealand pioneering stock who were mostly a hardy and rugged lot, accustomed to physical labour and rude good health. Her friend’s slightness evoked a protective urge in Moana as well as a lustful one and when she entered the water and was close enough to touch Moana, she took her hand and pulled her into an embrace and their naked bodies tangled together in the waves. They laughed and splashed and kissed beneath the salty waves until the cold forced them to swim back to the shore.

By the time they reached the Cape it was just beginning to grow dark. There were no buildings besides the lighthouse, and they had expected no formal venue as such. Joan had told them that they would find the Ball once they arrived. The venues were always designed or located in such a way that the uninvited might walk right by them, but to anyone who was destined to be a part of it, the Ball would prove unmissable.

Moana heard the Ball before she saw it. They left the car parked on a grass verge near the point and as soon as she stepped out of it and her bare feet touched the grass, she knew where they were headed. The sound was a strange, keening-like whale song. She took the lead, and together they picked their way carefully down the steep embankment to the sea that stretched out on all sides of them.

Moana’s heart leaped – it was exactly as she had imagined. Like standing on the end of the world. And there, by the headland where it was said that the dead begin their journey to the afterlife, a hundred or more large white birds flew, their wings beating in unison, diving off the edge of the cliff and then reappearing moments later, twisting, turning, joining with one another in mid-air, frolicking on the strong wind that blew across the Cape. But they were not birds, Moana realised, and she brought her hand to her mouth in shock. They were people dressed in elaborate feathered costumes. Both men and women and all of them naked besides the luminous paint that covered their bodies and reflected the light of the setting sun in a million coloured shards so that they were almost too bright to look at.