the end

The bach there is a converted garage, in the middle of a one-street village on the ridgeline above the bay. When you stand out on the back lawn you see the sea stretching out far below, and melding in haze to the sky. Little islands are dotted around the place in there and it's hard to tell if they are part of the sea or the sky. And close to the shore there's the hill, a small, grassy volcanic cone that juts out into the sea between the two beaches.

The inside of the old garage is lined and my parents have painted it in a graded blue, from indigo up to azure, with a vivid 'sky' blue for the ceiling. The art is all of fishes, and the bathroom is shelly pink, with real shells lined up along the sills and around the bath. The paint choices are an absolute expression of their love for this setting - awkwardly, ineptly faithful to an image of blue seas and blue skies that they carry with them when they are not there, or when they're deep in the fog that clings to the top of the ridge two days out of three. I have wondered whether they mind, on fine days, that they look out the ranchsliders and see myriad silvery shades that are nothing like those of their painted room. But I don't think they do. They just wake up in their living room bed, look out over the back lawn and hoot with happiness at the kind of day it is, that you can see the islands, that they can go out on the boat.

The boat is stored in the new garage, built on at the front of the bach. The new garage also comes from their dreaming minds. It's twice as tall as the boat they have, in case they ever buy a bigger boat. Swinging round the corner to drive down into the village you used to see scattered little houses and baches hanging back from the road, variously modest and all concerned just with looking away to the sea. Now you see the new garage, looming over the road, blocking off sight of the rest of the village like a tan wall against the future. The first time I saw it my face went hot and I had to pull over to cover my eyes with my hands. I rang them to ask whether they'd had any feedback and they admitted that yeah, they'd heard a few grumbles from the neighbours. They took some fish around as apologies, and put up some trellises, and now there are roses straggling up the sides. It seems to look not so bad now to me. Maybe everyone's got used to it.

The other dream they made up there is the spa pool. It's a short way down the bank off the end of the lawn, on a wooden platform they built one step down the ridge-line. When you sit in there the wind catches on your face and it feels like you've been lifted up to float in the sky. This last time I got in there after dark, the night before Stuart and I left for Auckland. Stuart hates spas so I went alone with a plastic wine glass, and I sat listening to the trees swishing round me in the night.

My brother Manuel came down after a while with more wine. I thought it was Stuart at first because they have similar silhouettes. It was the first time we'd sat together in ages, and the first time we'd been in a pool together in decades. When we were kids we spent endless hours in spa pools and swimming pools, whiling away school-less days in the tropics, getting blistery sunburns on our shoulders and noses. We turned spa pools into whirlpools, we practiced bombs and duck-dives and belly-flops and sitting on the bottom for as long as we could. But this time we just sat quietly and talked about money. Whether I needed to pay back my university debt to the family or not. I thought I was supposed to, out of whatever was left at 'the end' (a euphemism for our parents' death) - but I was confused by something that was said before dinner. No, he said, the debt is gone, it's forgotten.

But yours was a government loan. You didn't get anything. You paid it back.

But he told me he was okay, that his in-laws had sorted them out several times over and their mortgage was fine. "Bank of Leslie," he said about his mother-in-law. "And she's happy. Really. If you knew... everything is okay."

It seemed like something that needed crying for. How happy my parents were, after everything. How comfortable and unquestioning Manuel's marriage was, steady since first-year, how sweet their kids were, that they grew strawberries together, that their mortgage was fine. That we could sit in a spa pool teetering on a ridgeline in space and be incredibly, comfortably safe.