Page 3 of Kiwi Gold
For the moment, I was alive. So I ran.
2
FALLING WITH STYLE
Laila
The baby was crying, and I had the kind of tension headache that wraps around your head like an ever-tightening band as somebody turns the screw.
All right, it’s not coal mining or armed combat, but still.
Babies do cry at pretty frequent intervals in the life of a newborn photographer, though, especially when the parents don’t do what the photographer asks. Namely: feed said baby before you set out for the studio, wait for me to take it out of the car seat inside the studio, and stay out of my way.
That last part wasn’t how I phrased it, of course. It was more like, “This is your time to relax and enjoy watching the process unfold, because we’ll be going at baby’s speed. You can catch up on your phone scrolling, if you like, or make yourself a cup of tea. Newborns don’t leave you much time for that, and no worries, Oriana and I’ve got this.” Spoken in the soothing-yet-chirpy tone I’d mastered by now. You know. Mum-speak.
So what had they done? Dad had taken the bub, a wee girl named Ava with skin as pale as milk and a hint of ginger in her hair, straight out of her car seat when she’d stirred into wakefulness on entering the studio, before I could remind him not to. And when I finally got the chance to undress her, moving slowly and gently, the mum, a first-timer all but quivering with anxiety, came too close and started asking questions, and four-day-old Ava heard her, or smelled her, more likely, and woke up all the way. And spent the next half hour screaming.
Which was fine. Turn on the white noise, get the baby swaddled and rocked to sleep again, and we’d be golden. And once she was asleep, I’d duck into the kitchen and find a couple of Panadol for my head.
For now, though, I needed to stay in the moment. There’d be time later to think about those wee items of interest that had woken me at four this morning. Or, better yet, time to ignore them, because what could I do about them? Nothing.
Yes, I’d spent much too much on new props for the summer season, with a week to go until Christmas and the unavoidable weeks-long break after it, and I wasn’t in the black yet for the month, let alone next month. Also yes, the gifts were going to be decidedly modest this year, because buying this flat, which I’d fallen in love with the second I’d laid eyes on it, had taken nearly every bit of cash I’d saved, and too much of my income. And especially yes, my husband had died fifteen months earlier—famouslydied, and without any life insurance at all, because big-mountain climbers, especially ones who live and risk out there on the edge, are nearly impossible to insure—and I’d done exactly what you weren’t meant to do. I’d made very big changes, very fast.
Not that I’d had much choice. I hadn’t seen any way to afford the rent on the tiny, seriously shonky house in South Auckland, so I’d quit my stable-but-inflexible, pays-the-bills-when-Kegan-doesn’t gig in advertising and my weekend job as a newborn photographer’s assistant, moved the girls and me back to the less-expensive mainland and in with my dad in Dunedin, and doubled down, not on the advertising like any sensible person would do, but on this wildly entrepreneurial path instead.
I compounded my folly a year later by buying the central flat in a former church, exactly as shonky as our last place but with such wonderful light, exactlyforsaid wildly entrepreneurial career, because, yes, I’d somehow gone out on my own in every way possible. I was going to have to go to my dad and beg for help if I didn’t start turning a better profit soon, and I was fairly sure he was waiting for exactly that to happen.
One problem with having an analytical mind, though, is that you tend to analyze when you should be experiencing, and I was tired of it. The only way to influence my future was to be here in the present, and to stay here. Another reason for the new career, because there was nothing more “present” than newborn photography, and if you need to feel alive, with all its highs and lows, being an entrepreneur is the way to do it, right?
Right.
Also, I loved babies beyond reason. The milky-sweet, brand-new smell of them. The curling-up thing they did, their starfish hands and unfocused eyes, their pursed mouths and perfect little feet. Holding them, posing them, and photographing them in all their sweetness was my idea of joy. I’d only been able to give birth to my own once, I clearly wasn’t going to get to do it again, and my baby lust had to be satisfied somehow.
Bottom line? The paint on my windowsills was peeling and we didn’t have much of a kitchen, but I’d found a new path that was going to be better for all of us. Real life had bumps, and second-guessing got you nowhere.
There you were. Pep talk.
I kept taking slow, deep breaths, wrapped baby Ava up tight in a soft-as-down bit of white mohair that knotted in front, so she became the world’s sweetest bundle, noted from the sweat on my forehead and between my shoulder blades that it was indeed warm enough in here for naked newborns, and shot a look at Oriana, my seventeen-year-old assistant. She knew what it meant, because she gently guided the baby’s mum, Celeste, back to the comfy chairs in the corner of my vaulted church nave/photography studio, also known as the sectioned-off front lounge of my flat, where she sat down with her and began asking sympathetic questions about her pregnancy and childbirth while I walked the baby back and forth between the unobtrusive speakers that were currently emitting the soothing sound of a vacuum cleaner.
You think it’s the patter of gentle rain on fallen leaves that best soothes an infant? Or waves on the beach, sounding like Mum’s heartbeat? No. For so many of them, it’s the vacuum cleaner instead.
It was working this time, too. The baby was soothing, the wails diminishing in volume and frequency, and Oriana was still doing the business.
You wouldn’t think a seventeen-year-old would be much chop as a photographer’s assistant, especially working with brand-new babies and their brand-new mums in a job that required every bit of patience a person could possess, but I’d been desperate after my last assistant, Ginger, had left on maternity leave, and her replacement hadn’t worked out. I’d needed to bridge the gap until February fourteenth, Oriana had been on school holidays until the end of January, so—not perfect, but heaps better than it could have been, and I’d taken the chance.
Besides, Oriana was no ordinary seventeen-year-old. Made of caretaking stuff, she had a gentleness about her that soothed everyone in the vicinity. As a bonus, she was brilliant with the props, always bringing in mosses and flowers and other interesting things, and inventive about what to do with them.
“I was thinking—what about a scatter of fallen oak leaves and acorns, or maple leaves, maybe, in that red—but real ones, because you can tell which are real—around a big wooden bucket, holding an autumn baby?” she’d asked this morning, and I’d seen it just as she had and couldn’t wait to try it. At the moment, though, we were in midsummer, and Ava was a flower baby all the way.
Finally, she was asleep, and I set her down as slowly as I possibly could on the padded platform, which I’d draped in pale gray for this shot, in the filtered light let in by the translucent screens in front of the big windows. She looked beautiful there, with that skin and that bit of red in her wispy hair. Her clenched fist was against her chin, and she was so sweet, you just wanted to cuddle her. I took off her swaddling, and then, moving so slowly, took off her nappy. And she stayed asleep.
Newborns were wonderful, when you thought about it. IfIstill felt uprooted and off-balance sometimes, what did a newborn feel, out of that safe, dark nest with nothing but the soothing swish of fluid around her and thelub-dupof her mother’s heartbeat, and into a world full of too much stimulation of too many kinds? And yet—look how they adapted. Look how theygrew.
I was just breathing a sigh of relief and moving Ava carefully into the first pose, the bare-body bum-up position that’s a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, when I heard the heavy sound of the back door banging shut without any attempt to dampen the noise, and Ava startled and screwed up her face to cry. And took a dainty little wee while she was at it, because there was a wet patch spreading beneath her.
Not today,I thought. I said one o’clock, and it’s barely ten! You’re not even close!
Voices outside the studio, because somebody—probably me—had failed to shut the dividing door. My daughter Amira, in her best six-going-on-sixteen voice, saying, “You can lie down and be quiet and safe.” Not sounding like an emergency, but—what? Had something happened to Yasmin? She wasn’tsafe?
