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The only store, at the wooden ferry jetty on the other side of the island from Puriri Bay, stocked little more than the basic necessities of life—except during the summer months, when the resident population of a few hundred was swollen by holiday-makers, visiting boaties who dropped anchor in the deepwater bays and daytrippers who made the hour-and-a-half ferry ride from Auckland.
In the nine months that she had lived on the island, Nina had been pleased to discover that there was nothing that she couldn’t buy, barter, mail-order or stoically go without.
Another shuddering gust of wind buffeted the house on its foundations as Nina cleaned her brushes with the speed and efficiency of long practise and covered her palette of watercolours with a damp cloth to prevent the shallow pans from drying out overnight. She carried the squat jars of stained water into the kitchen to rinse them out for the next day, flicking off the fluorescent lights in the cramped studio. Usually she preferred using the natural light from the sloping skylight and small, southerly facing window for her studio-based paintings, but the dense cloud cover had made artificial illumination necessary for most of the day.
Leaving her clean jars draining upside down on the bench, Nina hurried through the sprawling, three-bedroom cottage, making sure that all the external door and window latches were secure, and checking that there was nothing loose outside that high winds might turn into a potential missile.
In the last big storm, Ray Stewart, who lived in the sun-bleached weatherboard house next door, had almost been skewered in his rocking chair by an unsecured water-ski that had blown off someone’s deck and cartwheeled along the wide strip of interconnecting front yards to spear through his window. The grizzled old man, who also happened to be Nina’s landlord, had taken his near impalement in his stride, more angry at his neighbour’s carelessness than frightened by his brush with mortality, but to Nina it had been a graphic warning of the awesome power of nature.
Now, standing in her living room, looking out at the deserted, wind-scoured beach, she wrapped her arms around her waist in an unconsciously self-protective gesture. The sliding glass door, misted with salt and sand, framed a panoramic view of the tempest. Along the grassy public foreshore, the huge, gnarled puriri trees that gave the bay its name were writhing, their twisted limbs semaphoring the rising strength of the wind, the thick, evergreen foliage tossing in sympathy with the storm-whipped sea.
Spray was thick in the swirling air and even the hardiest of seabirds, the squalling gulls, had taken cover. The tide was nearly full in, the greedy waves chewing more than halfway up the wide curve of sloping sand towards the low bank on which the puriri trees perched, their venerable roots knitted deep into the sandy clay.
Farther out, the deep swells pushing in from the gulf boomed onto the rocks at the base of the cliffs, exploding upwards in sheets of ghostly white foam that instantly dissolved into the jagged cliff face. Within the semicircle of the bay itself, the murky sea was a frenzy of whitecaps, the few boats still anchored there pitching and rolling as they strained at their moorings. Clumps of dirty white foam broke away from the building crest at the high-water line and swirled up onto the back of the beach, rolling and tumbling over moisture-darkened soft sand still pockmarked from earlier showers.
Although sunset was officially still hours away, it was already almost dark outside, the dense black clouds continuing to sweep in from the north-east, bringing with them forked flashes of lightning and a thick band of rain that blurred the gap between turbulent sky and tumultuous sea until they were indistinguishable from each other in the intensifying gloom.
The artist in Nina revelled in the visual drama of the scene. It was beautiful, wild…dangerous….
A cool frisson shivered up her spine and Nina hugged herself more tightly, glad that she had earlier lit the fire in the big stone hearth that dominated the open-plan living area. The temperature had been dropping all day, and even in her red polar-fleece sweatshirt, black jeans and sheepskin boots, she had shivered at the penetrating chill in the damp air when she slipped out to fetch a few armfuls of dry driftwood from the stack under the broad eaves on the leeward side of the house. Now the comforting crackle and hum of the burning wood provided a cheerful contrast to the eerie wail of the wind.
