Tipu looked down at his broad, pale toe poking out of the end of his sock.
He learned how to darn socks in the Air Force, back when things were mended. He’d learned how to do other things too, like make beds you could bounce coins off, iron razor-sharp creases into clothes and polish shoes until you could see your face in them.
Being a flyboy hadn’t really been a choice. He’d been conscripted into the forces, and got into the Air Force as flight crew because he had a few more brains than some of the other fullas.
He’d wanted to see the world anyway, and that was the only way this Māori boy from Pōrangahau was going to manage that. He’d seen the world too, and it was a lot bigger and scarier than he ever imagined it would be.
He had stories, lots of them, about things like Mount Fuji, Buckingham Palace, the Eiffel Tower, the mountains of Nepal, paddy fields in Thailand, the Great Pyramids, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the streets of San Francisco. However, he had an unfortunate, slow meandering way of telling them that only his wife would listen to, without rolling her eyes or leaving the room, the way his kids and moko did.
His Clara was an angel; she listened, really listened, the three-hundredth time he told her, as if it was the first time. She’d lean into him, her eyes wide whenever he got stuck on a detail, and make soft encouraging purrs, as if she needed to hear the rest or she would die. And she would laugh, loud and long, like a drunken sailor on shore leave.
Thinking about her made him smile, and then his eyes misted, and his heart thudded in his ears, tightening up his breath. He sat down and tried to control his tense, gasping breathing. He slowed it, evened it out and calmed it down. Sweat beaded on his upper lip, and twin aches tightened in his temples. He missed her so much.
‘Koro,’ Lou yelled down the hallway before he careened into the room. ‘Koro, Mum says hurry up.’
‘Your mum doesn’t tell me what to do!’ Tipu grumped, tucking his naked toe under his other foot. ‘I’m the boss here.’ He swished his hand at his moko. ‘Tell her I’ll be as long as it takes.’
The little boy stared at him, lifting his eyebrows in an expression that was very familiar. Clara stared out of his plump little face. ‘You tell her she’s not the boss.’ Lou grimaced. ‘I’m not crazy.’
Tipu sighed as he looked down. He was wearing his blue suit, so he needed blue socks. Why did he only have one pair of blue socks? Why did one blue sock have a hole in it? Clara wouldn’t let this happen to him, ever. She’d laid out his clothes every morning for fifty-three years. He never had to worry about socks. He never had to worry about anything.
His Clara. His beloved. His everything. He missed her; he missed her so much.
While he’d grown older, greyer and frailer, magically she stayed exactly the same as the moment he first saw her, standing in the Wellington Railway Station, trying to sell raffle tickets to support the student union at Victoria University. A university student, studying English Literature. He couldn’t believe she’d smiled and said yes when he asked her out. He couldn’t believe she’d agreed to marry him later. And he’d been lucky her little sister Mary had liked him enough to stand with them, against her shocked English parents when they told her.
Tipu emptied Clara’s sewing box all over the bed and found her darning needle, wooden darning mushroom and blue thread. He sat on the corner of the bed, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. A grimace of concentration gathered his forehead into a knot as he tried to thread the needle; again and again and again. His temper rose in a wave and began to punch holes in his patience. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he barked.
‘Dad.’ Mere, his boxy, lead-footed daughter came through the door, eyes blazing, her eyebrows knotted above her pretty nose. His knot, Clara’s nose. ‘What the hell—’
He held up the needle as if it answered any questions she may have.
‘We’ve been waiting in the car for nearly twenty minutes.’
‘Blue socks,’ he answered.
‘What?’ Her voice was halfway between a whisper and a shriek. ‘Dad. Geez. You have a million socks, I know you do. Mum bought them for you all the time.’
‘Not blue.’
‘What?’ She threw up her hands. ‘So?’
Tipu peered over his glasses at her. Was she always this slow? ‘Blue suit – blue socks.’
‘We are going to be late.’ She stormed to his chest of drawers and jerked out the top drawer. ‘I’ll get you other socks.’
‘No, no, no, blue suit – blue socks.’
She’s ignoring me. Tipu wondered if he’d said it out loud, as she didn’t seem to hear him. ‘Blue suit,’ he said again. ‘Blue socks.’
‘I can’t find blue.’ She scooped up socks and threw them out of the way.
‘I know, that’s why I’m darning—’
‘No one darns socks, Dad, no one,’ she shouted.
Tipu held up the needle. ‘I do.’
She glared at him and then, as if something cracked inside her, her face dissolved in amusement and she laughed, her mother’s dirty, drunken-sailor laugh. ‘Dad, you are batcrap crazy,’ she said breathlessly in between guffaws.
Lou reappeared in the doorway. ‘Hurry up, yous two. We’re gonna be late.’
‘Dad.’ His daughter sighed. ‘Why don’t you change into another suit?’
‘But your mum likes me in blue.’ Tipu frowned.
‘Dad, she won’t care,’ she said in her gentle talking-someone-off-a-ledge voice.
‘But …’ He stopped. Of course she wouldn’t care what he wore.
‘Please, Dad,’ Mere sighed. ‘The plane is due in half an hour, and I have to get to the airport, find a park, get into the terminal and—’
‘I know, I know …’ Tipu grumbled as he pulled on grey socks.
Clara was coming home today, after he and their kids surprised her with a trip around the world with her little sister. So, she could have some long rambling stories to tell that he would listen to.
But he’d missed her, he’d missed her so, so, much.