The marina ended in an industrial port, containers stacked like Lego bricks, their sides painted in wacky Russian fonts. Behind them, a cone-shaped island rose out of the bay, and Hamish told me it was a volcano with a Maori name, Rangitoto.
“I hope you’re kidding,” I said.
“Don’t worry, it’s extinct,” he said. “Dormant for thousands of years.”
We drove through undulating streets, past houses that were prettier and more colonial than the ones I’d seen on the way in from the airport. The car climbed a steep road toward the summit of a hill, and Hamish said it was another extinct volcano. At the top, we got out of the car and peered into a crater cup filled with grass and sheep. A strong wind blew me into Hamish, and he put his arm around me. I asked if we could go.
We drove in silence to the hostel, and when we arrived Hamish wanted to come in.
“No,” I said.
“I just want to keep talking,” he said.
When I opened the door, he followed me in. The shoe box, with two people in it, was crowded, the single bed the only place to sit. We had nothing to say, and I suddenly felt like I had been shot with a tranquilizer gun.
“You should leave,” I said. “I need to sleep.”
I got into bed with my clothes on, and Hamish sat on the floor with his knees pulled up in a triangle. “I’m quite comfortable here,” he said.
My head sank into the soft pillow and the rest of my body followed. Lying down was wonderful, the bed a sort of heaven.
“You’re very beautiful,” said Hamish, from a distant place, perhaps another room.
Only the pillow heard me say, “Bullshit.”
All had gone quiet, except for the air-conditioning unit, droning on. I was sinking, slowly, heavily, downward, with no will to climb back up. At the bottom, there was a volcano, upside down, sheep swimming in a coffee cup. Train noises, but no train, and my name whispered down the tracks.
“Suki. Oh, Suki. So posh.” The last word grunted.
I paddled upward, felt my eyes pinch as I surfaced. I’d fallen asleep with my contacts in again. Heavy breathing—not mine—and at the edge of my vision, blue jeans concertinaed around a pair of hairy white knees. Higher up: hairy buttocks, tensed flanks, and an elbow, still in its shirtsleeve, pumping.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said.
Hamish said absolutely nothing, just pulled up his pants and left.
I took a cold shower and tried to wash away what I’d seen. And came smack up against what I wanted. Not sex with Hamish, but sex all the same.
Since ending my nonrelationship with Leon soon after it began, I had gone back to pining for boys I didn’t know or who weren’t interested in me. Between that and my mother’s continued disapproval, I had somehow forgotten to lose my virginity. I was pretty sure I was the only one in my peer group who hadn’t, so I fell into the habit of pretending, cagily, that I had, whenever the subject came up. This had gone on for so long I worried that if I did finally try to have sex, everyone would find out I’d been lying and the humiliation would be double. But now that I was in New Zealand, what did any of that matter?
In a downtown bar, I met a surfer with salt-bleached hair. With a bottle of tequila on the backseat, he drove us out to a west coast surf beach in his yellow Holden Kingswood station wagon. I would not normally have noticed what type of car it was, but he was so proud of it and repeated the details so many times on the way out there that long after I had forgotten the sex, I remembered the make and model of the car. I would never again see one without thinking of that night, without remembering how I had sat on the sand dunes afterward while a vial of lemon-and-barley syrup trickled down my thigh. I wished I’d thought to bring a towel, and perhaps a paperback, something to read while I waited for him to sober up enough to drive us home.
The next morning, I felt ready to meet my father, and found his address in the library, just like Hamish had said I would. The very same afternoon, I went to the bus station to buy a ticket for Hamilton, where the directory said he lived.
The cashier said, “Are you sure that’s where you want to go?”
I checked the address. “Yes, why?”
“It isn’t a tourist destination, that’s all.”
“I’m not a tourist,” I said.
Past the city limits, the countryside was so green it could have been AstroTurf. I hadn’t telephoned ahead, I’d been too nervous, too unsure of what to say. The coach followed a swollen river for many miles before approaching a town that was far uglier even than Auckland. Wide streets with barnlike stores sold fertilizer and tractors. The coach pulled into a bus terminal, an open-air glue-sniffing bar, and I hesitated before climbing off.