Charlie and Pearl (23 page)

CHARLIE

I’ve handed in my resignation. I woke up at 2.30am in the morning when the text came through and I knew what I had to do. So first thing
in the
morning I typed it up, emailed it through to the new owners and 2 minutes the phone rang and it was Pete’s sister, wanting to know why.

It’s too simple to explain, and yet too difficult for anyone else to understand.

“Is there anything we can do to get you to stay?” she asked, “More money?”

“Oh no, the money’s great, the jobs great”

“Then why are you leaving?”

“Love” is the answer I give her.

Ever since I’d left Pearl that day I’d been searching for a reason for why she had come into my life, why the universe would be so cruel as to send me my perfect someone, and then decide we were too happy and take her away again. And I’d decided that the reason was to give me a kick up the ass. Here I was, existing but not living, getting through day by day with the bare minimum of fuss and effort. 

It was time for a sea change. Time to shake things up a little, because for the first time in a long time I knew exactly what it was I wanted.

PEARL

Oh sweet, sweet joy!
  I
am renewed; I have
been granted a second wind.

Just when I thought I couldn’t take it for a second longer in my mother’s house, my knight in blue jeans came and saved me. I was
napping
in the bedroom, tired, as I’m often tired these days, when I heard a loud engine rev and then a series of deep beeps, like seal barks, out front. I didn’t think it was anything to do with us; none of my mum’s friends would have a vehicle that made those kinds of noises, so I ignored it at first, but whoever it was just kept on beeping. So I got up and went to the window and the first thing I saw was the motor home, canary yellow, and the second thing I saw was a beaming Charlie
behind the wheel
. My heart skidded across my chest to see him and the memory of his eyes in mine while we made love in our cave flashed into my mind. I felt
something
down there
.
This was an excellent, timely reminder that I wasn’t dead just yet.

I heard my mum open the front door. “Charlie” she said, “what a wonderful surprise!”

“Good morning Claire” he said, in his lovely familiar voice.

“You’ve come to visit Pearl, she’ll be so happy to see you”

“I’m not here to visit her”

“You’re not?”
she was openly flustered.

He’s not? By this time I’d reached the front door. He smiled that smile at me.

“No, I’m here to kidnap her”

“What took you so long” I grinned back at him.

And so it is that I find myself, a mere two hours later, cruising down the highway in a canary yellow motor home, the window open and my pink tipped toes sticking out, and the radio blasting out Pearl Jam’s ‘alive’ which, really, is just too much of a coincidence.

My mother was not happy. “You can’t go” she wailed, “You’re sick!”

“I’m aware of that mum” I said, “which is exactly why I need to go. I’m sorry to leave you, and you know I love you, but if I have to stay here another second I’m going to hang myself before the cancer even gets me”

Which
,
ok
,
may have been a bit on the cruel side but I wan
ted to get out of there so much.

‘Do we have a plan?” I asked Charlie.

“Nope, no plan. Just an open road and all the money I’ve ever saved” he replied. Which when he told me how much I was impressed, it was quite substantial. I guess living at home with his mum meant he hadn’t needed to spend all that much over the years.

I grinned at him.

He grinned back at me.

“I love you crazy girl” he said.

“I love you too, idiot”

“Such sweet words”

“Shut up and drive”

CHARLIE

It was a gamble on my part, but one that paid off. The motor home I bought cheap from a friend of a friend of Rangi’s who bought it off Trademe with dreams of family summer vacations but whose children declared it “lame” and “wouldn’t be caught dead in it”. It had been sitting in his backyard slowly rusting and when Rangi explained why I wanted it the guy gave me a bargain price.

It was far from luxurious but it was comfortable. I
knew
Pearl would think it was cute. I’d been mulling over
her
bucket list in my mind when it hit me. No one else was going to help her do those things, it was up to me. So I jacked in the job, borrowed the motor home and set about making it homely and welcoming, with a little help from some friends. It wasn’t
quite
the luxurious one she had on her list but I knew she’d understand.

Rangi helped me paint the outside a bright cheery yellow, even though he thought the
colour
was hideous and that I would probably cause car crashes up and down the country.

“There is a method to my madness, my friend” I told him.
And there was.

I wanted something that reminded Pearl there was a reason to smile every day, and yellow
made me think of a giant Happy face, so I chose the brightest yellow I could find.

M
um and I scrubbed
the inside
from top to bottom, and Cushla and some of her aunties sewed up smart white curtains to replace the
faded and cobwebbed
netting that was already there. They also made a cover for the mattress in the back and some pretty yellow and white striped cushions. I installed
kitset cupboards
above the
small
kitchen area and we filled them with food
;
all of Pearls
favourites
that I could think of and some of my own. I stocked the kitchen with plates, cups,
and cutlery
. There was a little stove and some eleme
nts that ran off a generator, and a s
hower, toilet, sink, taps and a little fold out table. It was a mini little home on wheels.

PEARL

I have 30 sunsets imprinted on my mind whose
colours
will linger there until I die. If you asked me
about
a particular day in the last month I could close my eyes and recall where I was and the sunset I
saw. Each one was
unique, like fingerprints. The shades of their
colours
, the patterns and streaks they make.
Vibrant sunsets;
intense reds,
purples and
oranges.
And soft ones, lemons, mauves and rose pink.

We have been on the road for a month now. Being with Charlie in our own little home on wheels
has helped my health
. Maybe it’s the fresh air, or the ever changing view. But I feel a little better, stronger. Maybe it’s just that at home with mum I was merely
watching the clock and
waiting to die.
Waiting for the visit from
Death
,
in his heavy black cloak and carrying his sharpened scythe.
L
et him try and find me now.

Each morning I wake up to Charlie’s smiling face and his arms around me. I don’t like to talk to him until I’ve at least had a coffee, I’m paranoid about my morning breath
with its decaying odour
but he doesn’t seem to mind.

We sometimes park in campgrounds, sometimes just on the side of the road. The best places are the DOC campgrounds; they still
have a
wild and natural
air
but are
also
well lit and maintained. We decided on that second day not to use maps, to instead just go wherever we felt like each day.

It’s funny, both times when I made my dream book, I glued picture after picture of beautiful locations from around the world. Everywhere from Russia to Iceland, Colombia to Bali. But I never stuck any photos of my own country in there. And apart from a few towns and cities I had seen bugger all of it really.

Till now
.

We went back to the
Beach house
for a few days first, just to relax and prepare and make up for lost time. I was a little bit worried, not sure if my
pathetically
weak body could still enjoy being with him, but it was fine. It was more than fine. In fact it was exactly what my body needed.

“Hmm, if only they could bottle this fe
eling and pump it into my veins”
I purred
after we made love
, the
proverbial
cat with the cream. “I’m sure it would cure me in no time”.

That was a sore point with Charlie, my illness. He refused to discuss me dying and would change the subject whenever it came up. I think he even hoped he could cure me
,
because every morning he squeezed fresh fruit juice for me in one of those high tech juicing machines that could get juice out of a rock, (mixtures made up from whatever we could buy at the numerous stalls on the side of the road or pick wild - oranges, kiwifruit, apples, carrots, pomegranates, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, blueberries, lemons, ginger) then we ate eggs and more fruit, (bananas and nectarines) and, you guessed it, even MORE fruit at lunch and after dinner. He also refused to have anything in the motor home that was processed or didn’t resemble its original form. I knew what he’d done; I’d done the same thing myself months ago. He’d googled ‘cancer’ and ‘cures’ and read about people changing their diets to fresh vegetables and fruits and cutting out all the bad stuff and, according to the internet, miraculously curing themselves. Hey, I wanted to believe it to. But even though eating all that good food made me feel stronger, I could still feel the slow decline deep inside.

We started on the east and made our way down the coast, along with about a million foreign backpackers, who become, over the days, like a little family. The typical New Zealand road trip is as Kiwi as kiwifruit, buzzy bees, tiki’s, All Blacks, pavlova (despite any claims to the otherwise by the aussies), L&P, Footrot flats and No 8 wire. Nothing makes you feel prouder of your own country and countryman than seeing them through someone else’s eyes. Every time we pulled up at a campground or reserve we’d see one or two people or couples that we’d stayed with somewhere
else
previously. It got so we’d pull up and within half an hour we’d all be around
a
table outside someone’s tent or motor home
sharing
food and alcohol and stories, and sometimes we’d light a bonfire on the beach and do a bit of night fishing. Those nights, rugged up in a blanket with my bare feet burrowed in the sand, a plastic fluorescent pink glass of wine in my hand, listening to the talk around me, laughter universal in any language, I would look at the stars blanketing the skies above me and feel invincible. And I would wish hard that however long I had left I could live it feeling just like this.