The Scent of Apples (16 page)

‘But how do I know I will?'

‘You don't. You just have to believe that you will.'

My eyelids start to droop with the immensity of all the day's events. It feels like a long time since I opened them this morning.

‘You look tired, Libby. We better get some sleep.' Charlie drags her blanket back to her own bed. ‘Sweet dreams.'

Jack – from the Jack and the beanstalk story – marches into my dreams. He promises to sell me a magical potion that will make me stop pulling my hair out. To get it, I have to lead his cow through a maze, where he'll be waiting by the exit with the potion. I go around and around the maze all day, failing to find the exit. Finally I give up, and slink into a corner. The cow wanders off, and around the next bend I hear Jack welcoming him home.

*

The twins come running into our room as the morning sunshine sneaks in. They both jump on Charlie's bed. She whacks them with her pillow. ‘Don't you two have anyone else to annoy?'

‘Nah, we don't.' Tainui giggles. He grabs the pillow and hits an unsuspecting Kawharu.

‘You'll pay for that, you dick!' Kawharu says as he leaps off the bed and chases his brother, who is already running up the hallway. Kawharu almost crashes into Hautai as she comes into the room carrying two cups of tea.

‘Morning girls.' She places a cup beside Charlie and hands one to me, then sits down on my bed. ‘This time yesterday you two would have been treading water.'

‘Very funny, Mum.'

‘Libby, you look like you've got a bit of a rash. Do you feel OK?' Hautai asks.

‘I think so.'

She passes me a hand mirror. I'm used to seeing puffy eyes, but not my face covered in a rash. I pull my top up and we both see red blotches and a few small welts.

‘They look like jellyfish stings. Did you feel anything sting you yesterday?'

‘No. But I remember seeing some jellyfish in the water when I went back for the boat.'

‘We get them a bit at this time of year,' Charlie says. ‘They don't really hurt so you don't notice the sting.'

‘The rash will be gone in a few days, but we can't send you back to school like this. I'll ring your mum, and you can either stay with us or she might want to come and pick you up.'

‘I'll ring her,' I say, too fast.

Both of them look at me.

‘I told her I'd ring on Sunday, so she'll be expecting my call. She's real busy so it might be best if I stay here a few more days. If that's not too much trouble?'

Hautai looks at me. I know that she knows something is out of place, but she just taps the blankets beside me. ‘You're no trouble, Libby. It's the others I need to send away.' She pushes herself up. ‘You better ring your mum this morning and let her know what's going on. We need to check that she's OK with you staying.'

‘I will,' I say, without looking her in the eye.

Charlie grins at the turn of events.

‘I might need to stay off school and help you out, Mum.'

‘Nice try, but I think I'll cope.'

*

After breakfast I follow Charlie into her mum's room. Koro looks like some ageing rock star as he sits in bed, his hair lose from his pony tail. His usual dark olive complexion is a funny shade of grey.

‘How you feeling?' Charlie asks as she climbs onto the bed.

‘Not bad,' he smiles, but it's easy to see that he's still in a lot of pain. ‘The whisky has worn off. Don't suppose you know where another bottle is?'

‘No, and I wouldn't tell you if I did. Guess what?'

He raises his eyebrows in mock excitement.

‘Libby got stung by some jellyfish and probably has to stay longer.'

‘I don't know if you're meant to be so excited about your friend getting stung.' He turns to look at me. I hope the rash on my face covers the blush that comes to my cheeks. I remember that he's seen my bald spots.

‘Sorry you got stung, but it'll be nice to have you round a little longer. Hautai will have you fetching and carrying like the others in no time. She would have made a great drill sergeant.'

‘I heard that, you ungrateful old goat,' Hautai says, coming into the room. She passes him a cup of something that smells like nettles. ‘Drink this up, it's for the pain.' She keeps one hand under the cup to help him tip it to his lips. ‘I need you girls to run down the hill and get some stuff for Koro.'

‘Grab a pen and paper, Charlie, and I'll make a list,' Koro says. ‘You'll find most of the stuff labelled and in the spare room. I want you to pick some fresh kawakawa leaves and bring some of the vine growing over that old tractor near the bush. Libby will need that for her rash.'

We leave with a list that looks like someone's planning to make a new garden. The toothbrush and bathrobe are an afterthought at the bottom of the page.

The spare room turns out to be more like a potting shed with carpet. Sunlight floods in, and a door opens out into the back garden. Wires are strung across the ceiling, and hanging from them are plants in various stages of decomposition. Newspapers scattered on the floor catch the seeds and petals when they drop.

A battered wooden bench stretches along one wall. Elephant garlic lies half-plaited among bunches of dried flowers on the bench. The other walls are lined with bookshelves crammed with books, stacked on top of each other where the shelf is full.

Rows of jars containing dried plant matter sit on shelves away from direct sunlight. My senses are assaulted by so many smells at once: ginger and fennel mingle with garlic and mint.

‘What is this place?'

‘Just Koro's garden shed. He stores his veggies in here, because it's cool and dry. He collects the seeds from plants to sow again the next season. It looks pretty crazy, but he knows exactly where everything is.'

She takes a wooden ladder from the corner of the room and leans it on one of the bookcases. Climbing to the top, she takes some gourd pots from the highest shelf.

‘He wants the one that looks like a fish.' She holds them out at arm's length and tilts her head several ways, before deciding on one and returning the others.

‘I'll get the plants from the garden. Can you find him these books?' She passes me the note, which has the titles written on them. As she disappears out the door I wonder, as I look at the hundreds of books stacked every way possible, where to start.

My fingertips brush lightly along the spines, like a torch light on a search boat, scanning across the water. The spine on one of the books is so faded I have to squint to make out the letters. I'm glad I do, as it reveals a myths and legends book he wants. Another, a history book, is further along the same shelf.

I nearly give up on finding a brown ring binder, when I spot it sticking out from under some red chillies that are drying in the sun.

I sit in an old armchair by the window. The weight of my body squashes more scents out from the chair. Spice smells hover in the air, too varied and too many for my brain to separate and name.

The ring binder, like a fat lady in clothes a size too small, bulges at the seams. I open the front cover and struggle to contain the contents. Stapled to the left-hand side of the first page, a flower is encased in a small bag. To the right of this, there is an intricate pencil drawing of what I presume to be the plant that the flower came from. It is so finely detailed. Notes below have been written with a delicate nib and a gentle
hand.

Kōwhai

Flowers of bright yellow droop from the tree in spring. The flowers grow in little clusters and then a unique seed pod forms. Both a large- and a short-leaf type is found in New Zealand.

They like to live on the edge of the forests and riverbeds. The rocks in the river may help to break the hard seed shell, which needs to happen before they can germinate. They can be found on the coast and inland.

All parts of the plant can be used for rongoa, but as the tree has toxic alkaloids, careful preparation of rongoa must be observed.

I read on, and find out the best time to harvest kōwhai, all according to the moon and observing other signs from nature. Inner bark, flowers, leaves and juice all have to be prepared in a certain way to extract the magic within.

Kareao, Karewao, Supplejack

A creeper with bright red berries that climbs and wraps itself around the forest trees...

The wind slams the door shut behind Charlie. Her arms are laden with plant material.

‘I can't remember which bit I'm meant to give you. When I tried to pull a leaf off, a whole lot of the vine wanted to come too.'

I look down at the tangled mass of vine she gives me. ‘What are we meant to do with it?'

‘Seeing as you're already poisoned, we can experiment, or you can see if you can find the leaf in there.' She points to the ring binder on my knee. ‘I'll go find Koro's clothes.'

I hold the book and the plant on my lap like someone's newborn baby. I tip each page over, holding onto the underside of it in case it tears. A lot of the flowers in their little sealed coffins have lost their colours and faded to brown, and some of the pages have yellowed with age.

I search the pages for the vine in my hand. A few seem similar, but the notes contain such miniscule details that as I read on they eliminate themselves. One fits the profile exactly, but the pencil drawing of the leaf has serrations and the one in my hand doesn't. I read on, and find that the juvenile plants don't have serrations: they develop later.

‘I found it,' I yell to an empty room.

Puawānanga, Pōānanga

The child of two stars: Rehua, the father and Puanga, the mother.

Puanga is the food-bringer. If her rays twinkle towards the north, the produce from the forests and the sea will be plentiful. If towards the south, then it will be a lean year.

The white star-shaped flowers weave their way through the forest to festoon the treetops.

Rongoa: make a cut along the raised bit of the stem. When you peel back the two sides you will find a slimy tissue nestled inside. This substance can be put straight onto the skin. This will help alleviate pain from stings and skin rashes.

I jump when Charlie places her hand on my shoulder.

‘God, Charlie. You scared me.'

‘Sorry, I didn't mean to, but I thought I heard you yell.'

‘I found the plant.'

‘Cool. The puawānanga vine.'

‘Oh. You knew.'

‘Yeah, but it always pays to check. So many plants look the same. If you get it wrong some plants could kill you.'

‘What's rongoa?'

‘Rongoa Māori is traditional Māori medicine. A treatment.'

‘I've never seen anything like this ring binder. It's amazing. Who wrote it?'

She sits down on the edge of the armchair.

‘I wrote this page,' she says, pointing to the one we're on. ‘My mum wrote this one and my nan this one,' she says, flicking over to other pages.

‘But how come the writing all looks the same?'

Charlie doesn't answer, but climbs up a ladder and takes a box from one of the shelves.

‘This is a waka huia, or treasure box.' She lifts the lid off an ornately carved wooden box. ‘My ancestors used to store valuable things, like huia feathers, in them.' She takes an object out and unwraps the tissue paper surrounding it.

‘This,' she says, holding up a fountain pen, ‘is your answer.'

I take the pen and see the slant and fine nib on the end.

‘Koro prefers the old way of passing on knowledge, through kōrero or language. Nan used to help him collect a lot of the plants, and she liked to press some of the flowers. Mum liked to draw, so the book grew from there, really. When I was small, I used to sit in this chair and memorise each plant in the order it came in the book.'

I can picture her as a child, her head resting on one armrest and her limbs dangling over the other.

‘I still remember the day I discovered a plant that I knew wasn't in the book. It was summer, and I'd gone up Karioi Mountain with Kawharu to look for some wild strawberries. At the base of a rātā tree I found a small plant with dark green oval leaves and hairy white flowers.'

‘When I showed it to Koro, tears welled up in his eyes. He said it was very rare and that he'd only heard of it growing at the top of the South Island.'

‘What was it?'

She flips a couple of pages over in the ring binder. ‘It's this one.'

Scutellaria novae-zelandiae, Shovel mint

A low-growing herb with erect branches. Belongs to the mint family: one of only two that is native to New Zealand. Found mainly in lowland areas in Nelson and Marlborough.

The description of the plant is small in comparison to its likes and dislikes. Every plant in the book seems to have human qualities.

In some cases, giving the mint too much attention when it is young will be the ruin of it in adolescence. Another plant will cause trouble if it is confined, and prefers to roam free. And yet another will flourish if given centre stage.

‘What does the mint cure?'

‘Flatulence.'

‘No way!'

‘Yep, good old farting. That was such a let-down. Koro was sad but also excited when I found it. I thought it must cure cancer or something. I realised later that Koro's feelings weren't about what the plant could do, but what it had shown him. He'd read it as a sign that I would be the one to help him with his work, and that it was time for him and Nan to take a trip to the South Island.'

Charlie gets up and returns the treasure box to its shelf. Sitting on the top of the ladder, she finishes her story.

‘Koro and Nan took several weeks tiki-touring around the South Island. A week after they returned, my nan died in her sleep.'

‘Wow, that's spooky.'

‘Not really. Koro says the universe is whispering to us all the time, but people are just too busy to listen. Nan got to say goodbye to a whole lot of her relatives because Koro read the sign.'

Charlie climbs down a few rungs of the ladder and then jumps, landing with a thud. She picks up the other two books Koro wants and puts them in her canvas bag.

‘Plants have so much to teach us. We even need the same things to grow: shelter, water, warmth and someone looking out for us.'

I think about Poppa and remember him comparing me to a new bud on the tree. Every day he would show me some natural wonder. A caterpillar snuggled up on a leaf or a heart-shaped rock.
Another gift from nature
, he would say.

Every other time Poppa's face has flashed up in my mind, I've quickly shut the image down, frightened of the pain that might follow. This time, I think about Charlie telling me to swim. I let his smiling blue eyes linger for a moment.

‘Come on, Libby. We better get this stuff back up the hill.'

I take a huge sniff of the spice-scented air and reluctantly push myself up from the chair. I want to stay in this room forever, where magic, secrets and stories hide among seed pods and books.