Aorewa McLeod - Who Was That Woman Anyway?

At first I was placed at the end of a conveyor belt, packing iceblocks with lurid paper wrappers on sticks into cartons. The older women beside me packed swiftly, their hands blurring with the speed, but I was slow and inept and the iceblocks piled up, finally spilling onto the floor.

I think dear, said the forewoman, as she shuffled through the spilt iceblocks, that Ill move you to icing our ice cream cakes. Thats the elite end of the factory. And you can be as slow as you are. Now, you pick up the iceblocks from the floor and take them to the bin out the back. Rosie here will take your place.

How kind they were. Id expected to be fired for incompetency and here I was, proud of my pre-Christmas holly decorations, my calligraphic swirls as I laboriously wrote Happy Birthday Johnny in pale blue, or Happy Birthday Mary in pastel pink.

It was a summer of rosescream, pink, yellow, scarletpouring over fences, cascading down trellises, climbing up drainpipes. School was finished with forever. We walked to the factory from our flat in Sandringham through the scent and petals. Every Thursday we got our money in a brown paper envelope with a pay slip inside. Real money: folded notes and jingling coins that you could see through the holes punched in the envelope. Every Friday, as a bonus, we could take home a quart of ice cream, any flavour, wrapped in newspaper. I liked hokey pokey best, with its tiny crunchy honeycomb candy balls dotted through the vanilla. Id eat my way through the quart every Friday night. My four friends would make their more sedate choices, like chocolate or Neapolitan, last for the whole week. It was many years before I could eat ice cream again.

One of the group, Jane, didnt flat with us. She lived with her mother near the ice cream factory. Shed been good at Maths as well as English and was school dux and head prefect. We all liked her anyway. Often all five of us went to lunch at her mothers flat where we devoured a huge bowl of steamed green beans fresh from the garden. It was the best food I had ever tasted. We didnt often have green vegetables at home, and if we did they were usually canned. That summer I alternated between hokey-pokey queasiness and the relish of those beans, soaked in butter, both against a background of the scent of roses. An odd mixture, not altogether comfortable.

Janes mother was divorced, which was romantic. None of us knew anyone else who had divorced parents. But Janes mother was a stubby grey-haired ex-farm woman, which was not at all romantic. Whereas Janes father was most romantic. He was a Welsh remittance man who seemed dashingly bohemian to us flatmates. His name was Herman and he rented a red brick two-storey terrace house in Wynyard Street just down from the university. We gave up our suburban flat, where the four of us had shared one bedroom, and moved in.

Herman belonged to an esoteric philosophic group based on Ouspensky and Gurdjieff and we used to go together to their meetings. Ouspensky was the disciple of Gurdjieff; a mystic philosopher from Armenia with impressive curled mustachios in the frontispiece to his book. Their philosophy was a mixture of Zen Buddhism, psychotherapy and Christian mysticism. I read his Fourth Way in bed at night with the same diligence I applied to my zoology texts. I hoped I would develop a higher level of consciousness, some sort of spiritual awakening.

Self-remembering Gurdjieff called it. Katherine Mansfield had been a disciple of Gurdjieff, had in fact died at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. I couldnt decide if this was in Gurdjieffs favour or not. The guru of the Auckland group was a fat red-faced retired engineer from India, a kind of modern Buddha who chuckled as he read from Gurdjieff and made enigmatic wise-sounding statements about how to lead a transcendental life: Man lives his life in sleep and in sleep he dies, which led on to When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half awake.

I felt humble and inferior as I sat on a hard wooden chair, in the circle of acolytes in the dimly lit room whose windows and walls were swathed with scarlet curtains. I was sure I was asleep, and that he was chuckling because what he was saying would be obvious if only I were higher on the evolutionary self-development scale. The other flatmates seemed more impressed by Ouspensky and Gurdjieff than I was. I supposed they were more spiritual than me. They seemed to have an inner certainty, an awareness of the purpose of it all, which I couldnt find.

My boyfriends came and went. None lasted very long. Panicking about being pregnant and waiting for the bloodstains to appear was a monthly phenomenon. No way did I want to end up like my mother. Jane and the flatmates said it would be good for me to go out with a fellow Gurdjieff disciple: plump thirtyish Brylcreemed mathematician, Leonard, who sniggered rather than chuckled when the guru pronounced. Leonard talked to me about inner growth and self-development and after a few outings to movies and on bush walks, we slept together on the sofa in his flat. He had difficulty putting the condom on as his penis was only half-erect and I had to help him press it into me. I disliked the feel of his fingers, slimy with contraceptive cream, squeezing himself in. I felt claustrophobic, imprinted into the lumpy sofa, under his continual wet kisses. He was heavy and sweaty on top of me. I was worried the condom might slide off, and despite his moans I didnt think he had come. I didnt feel I knew him well enough to ask him.