last rites

Here I am sitting in Room 522 in the Arts Building on the City Campus of the University of Auckland. I've packed everything up, taken the bits and pieces off the wall, recycled the waste paper, dusted down most of the surfaces, deleted all the emails, copied my documents to CDW ... an impulse to erase all casual traces of my fellowship here, which ends with the month. Yesterday I gave a copy of the manuscript of Luca Antara to Special Collections at the University Library, along with the Report I had to write for the Departmental Files. The Librarian suggested we embargo the ms until it's published. Then the question: what if it doesn't get published? I didn't want to go there.

All endings are melancholy, I guess, though perhaps for different reasons. I know I will miss the fortnightly paychecks but then I always knew they would cease when the year ended. I don't think I'll miss the physical space much, though I did like the separation of workplace and living place which I've enjoyed only intermittently over the years. The friends I have here, and the friends I've made, will, I trust, stay friends. The City of Auckland ... I don't know. It's a town of ghosts to me, I heard myself saying to someone last night. That's, I don't know, sometimes true.

Over the weekend I went up to stay at a friend's holiday place in Mangawhai, a couple of hours north of here. We went fishing out by the Hen and Chickens one day, with a conspicuous lack of success; to the beach another day; I had my first swim since dipping in the Flores Sea back in November. I was worried about my ears, which have still not unblocked, but, if anything, the swim seems to have helped. The milky aqua sea, the jagged profile of the Hen offshore, the faded red of the last flowering of the pohutukawas on the white-grey sand ... such a familiar landscape.

On the way up we had a look at Puhoi, a little village off the main road which was settled by some Bohemians in the 19th century: Catholic farmers from central Europe, not artie wastrels from big cities. I lived near there for the best part of the year 1973, in a house in Pukapuka Road. We went and looked at that too. It's still standing, renovated, the residence of people with a boutique farm growing, among other things, olive trees. When I knew it, it was a small tumbledown wooden cottage in amongst swampy paddocks where farm animals grazed and arum lilies grew in a profusion I've not seen since.

My Report on the Fellowship suggests that I might write an account of my year here as a way back into those early 1970s years I spent as a student, an artie wastrel, an inept rural labourer, which culminated in that fairly disastrous sojourn in Pukapuka Road. But now I don't know. Do I want to revive those ghosts? For what reason? To lay them once and for all? Perhaps it's better just to shut the door on all that and go looking for something more prospective? These are questions I can't answer now, I'll just have to put them aside until they either lose their force or demand answers.

Now to expunge the last traces of my presence here ...