Michael White spent six months in the South of France. Flights and accommodation all paid for and his living costs heavily subsidised, he should have been happy. But he wasn’t. “Fucking stifling” was how he put it when his old mate Dean emailed him. Michael White has been the face of New Zealand fiction for the last few years. A Montana prize, so much critical acclaim you could paper the lounge with it and middle-aged women in book festival audiences going crazy to hear him read, to be in his presence. And he hated it. So when someone suggested he should apply for the Katherine Mansfield fellowship, he thought, “yeah, why not?” Not because it was prestigious or the chance to travel, he’d travelled plenty, but it was “six months off the hamster wheel”.

Katherine Mansfield’s greatest legacy to New Zealand writing, as Michael saw it, was not her work but the house she left in Menton. An overly posh bolt-hole for a certain kind of genteel English soul on the French Mediterranean coast. Mansfield fled the colonies when she got ill and never came back. “Some fucking Kiwi icon”, he had said when Dean egged him on to apply, “worst kind of colonial fucking pakeha”. He didn’t even like her books. That was until he read her diaries from a camping trip to Te Urewara, that rugged and remote area of mountains and bush and lakes inland from where he grew up on the East Coast of New Zealand. It was the place his family came from. For the briefest of moments their two lives crossed over. Michael found his Katherine Mansfield.

So he applied and he got it. Of course he did, he was the writer de jour, they all loved him. Even if he thought they were a bunch of pretentious fawning wankers. That was part of his ‘earthy’ charm. It was, he said afterwards, soul destroying. It was twee, fiction packaged for the fucking tourists. And how was he supposed to write in that house when people kept calling by. By the end of it he felt like a prized beast, a zoo animal made ready for public display. He wrote little and what he did write he knew he’d never use. But he walked a lot and he thought about things, about where to go next. Eventually even he began to admit this was the space he needed.

Fast-forward three years and Michael is sitting under the grape vines of the old house in Sellia. A tiny, white-painted village, it clings to the side of the hill overlooking a sea as blue as the eyes of the woman he met the first time he came to Greece. Michael came to Crete because he had heard stories about their fierce independence, their resistance to invaders, about the fire in the people. It reminded him of home. It reminded him of the East Coast. It reminded him of Te Urewera. And after six months of sanitised middle-fucking-class literary bullshit he’d had enough. He didn’t want to go home, not yet, he wasn’t ready, he wasn’t done. He had a sense that something was taking shape in his head. If he was ever going to write again, Michael White knew, he had to get as far away from canapés and polite evening readings as he could.

He came to escape, he stayed for her and for the place. He has become inspired by the history of the island that Evangelia has taught him. The Minoan’s and their empire and sophistication that is all but gone, save for a few excavated ruins. He is intrigued that all we can know of them is supposition pieced together from a few fragments of their broken dreams. Who is left to tell their story? And it was this that led him to his last book, the biggest yet. ‘Children of the mist’ was about the people who had lived in Te Urewera before his people came, long before the Europeans came. But this was a book set in the present, where the locals knew of them and kept their secret, of how the few that remained avoided the newcomers. They had inter-mingled, some inter-married, but the stories were a closely guarded secret. It won him huge acclaim, there was movie to come, there were awards and the New York Review of Books called him the ‘greatest living writer’. He laughed when he saw that. There was the inevitable backlash, some of the Maori activists back home, some he had even called friends, thought he was putting them down, he wasn’t. Some thought that he was selling out on his own heritage as ‘tangata whenua’, as the people of the land, as Tuhoe, but he wasn’t. It was just a story, wasn’t it?

Today, Michael White was distracted. Evangelia left in the darkness, she had to catch a flight to Athens and he was missing her already. She would be back in three days. It was still early and he sipped his coffee, savouring the sweet, gritty flavours. He listened to the repetitive cluck, cluck, cluck of a rooster somewhere down the hill, he looked out across the sea in front of him, calculating in his mind the time he needed to leave. His brother and sister-in-law were coming to visit. The first visitors since he’d decided this was the place he was going to call home, for now at least. The first visitors since he had let slip of Evangelia’s entry into his orbit to the family back home and told them that she was a reason, not the reason, to stay. He was feeling more productive than ever, had finished one book and was working on another. In the spaces in-between he was writing short stories, writing poetry. The frustrations and the writer’s block that had crippled him at Menton and before were gone, set adrift in the Libyan Sea and set alight by Evangelia. Seeing family could always be a challenge but for once he felt on top of things. No longer the disappointment, giving up a good job teaching to study creative writing at Victoria. No longer the jobbing writer, he was a successful author and one of the few who could make a living from it, so long as he wasn’t too extravagant.

###

Evangelia settled into the seat, she only just made the flight despite leaving early. Ahead of her lay three days of meetings and workshops in Athens. The end of a project she’d been working on for the last two years. This was the big meeting, a chance to meet up with the others and to excite the funders. To get more money. Which they would need if the next part of the project was going to happen and she was going to have a job. Back when the whole trouble started Evangelia was settling into what she thought would be a career in the university in Athens. After her own degrees and two post-docs, one in Switzerland and a second in France, she had secured the position she wanted. What she hadn’t planned on was on the total collapse of the country’s economic system, and with it her job. She blamed the EU. They all blamed the EU. Yes, it was their own fault too, but the European banks and their governments kept pushing the money at them, so they took it. Until one day someone wanted it back and it wasn’t there. They had to borrow it all over again, at rates they couldn’t afford, just to pay it back. Evangelia knew that they were paying the price for someone else’s screw up. But what could you do?

A year before it all went wrong she bought a little property in Crete, it was in her father’s village, her grandfather’s village. She had a connection. She remembered going there as a child and how she loved it. That house was lost to her now, still there but owned by cousins. She could visit but she realised she wanted a piece of that land for herself. She had not understood why this mattered at the time, but it did. After everything collapsed around her and she watched her friends getting angry, she retreated. There was no strategy, no grand plan, she didn’t intend to ‘sit it out’ on the mountain side watching the sea. She just did. She picked up contracts, research funding, she was good at what she did and living was cheap. She figured that, between work, she would write. Poetry, a novel, perhaps, but as it turned out mostly academic papers to keep up her reputation and track record, not quite ready to cut the strings that tied her to the system she had grown up in.

She met Michael in Athens, at an event organised by the British Council. He was there as part of a panel of writers and, from the first time Evangelia saw him, she knew he was different. He had a presence and an energy unlike the others. Where they were confident, brash even, Michael seemed to be standing back and watching, listening to the room. He had a calmness that made her want to know more, made her want to hold her breath and dive down deep below his surface. This man was gentle, humble even. She liked that and, as they spoke afterwards, she knew she liked him. They met again, this time for coffee. He told her about where he was from and why he was in Greece. He wanted to explore, he’d read a lot about Crete and wanted to spend time there, for him not just the ancient history but the more recent past mattered too. The resistance, the war, the invaders. He told her he felt an affinity, his people were resisting still, had been invaded, had their identities stripped from them by waves of colonisation. She told him about the house on the hill above the sea and watched the words bounce back from his eyes.

That was three years ago. She is still in Crete, so is he. They are together and she is happy. As she flies north, Evangelia starts the clock, starts the countdown to when she will be back in that house on that hillside with the man she loves more than anyone else in the world. But inside she knows too that, though he loves her and the place, it is not his home and he is always drawn away. Drawn back in his stories, in his mind. In his writing he is constantly called home. She doesn’t know how it will end, but this is Greece, she thinks, here things follow their own course.

###

Michael stands expectantly, jostled by waiting taxi drivers, across from the holiday reps and their signs. He looks over the heads in front at the crowded arrivals area at Heraklion airport. A slightly shabby, slightly dusty place, the man that designed it (he was sure it was a man) had imagined people flowing out into the heat of a Cretan afternoon. In the architects romantic vision he’d failed to imagine the flocks of meeters and greeters crowded around the decidedly small door leading from the baggage reclaim, from the world beyond the island.

He can see their flight has landed and he gauges who’s who by glancing at baggage tags and listening for accents. So far they are Germans, being herded by an red-uniformed and efficient looking woman towards the outside and a bus to their all-inclusive holiday world. Some may never leave save for the return trip to the airport, he imagines. And for a moment Michael White wants to shout out, to tell them what they’re missing glued by sweat to the sun lounger by the pool with the bar. He laughs to himself. Dutch, just a few people trickling out, independent travellers this time, met by taxis and signs for hotel pickups, and then he hears English. This must be the flight from London, his sense prick, his eyes sharpen, he looks further through the crowd.

When Tony and Marie come through they are lost in the sea of people. As they touch they connect through their breath. They are from the same breath. It is emotional for Michael. He kisses Marie, they hug for a long time. Haere mai, bro, welcome to Crete, he says and they laugh. He picks up Marie’s suitcase and motions them off through the crowd to his old four-wheel drive, incongruous alongside the smart Mercedes and Toyota taxis. They all laugh, the mood is light and Michael feels happy. On the two hour drive home they talk about Tony and Marie’s trip so far, the holiday of a lifetime to London and around the UK and now Crete. It is a strange land to them, to Michael, cast suddenly in the role of interpreter, it re-enforces his feeling of love for this new home. He laughs, his guests are nervous in the car, their first time driving on ‘the wrong side’, they are confused not even by the language they have yet to hear but the written language they can’t even read. It is all new and this newness gives shape, creates a sharpness, to his own sense of familiarity. He wishes Evangelia was here to share that moment.

###

Mixed up two parts starlight, one part loneliness.

[2017]