She talks about the little bits of herself fluttering on fences, the rags and shreds of her life. I don’t see them. Maybe we’re talking in metaphors. Even then, I don’t see them. I stand outside the house of Katherine Mansfield. I see jasmine and a tree I try to imagine grows pears. I see a mountain bike in the back shed. I push open the wooden gate and walk up a gravel path. “Perfect timing” a woman says, letting me inside. Not true. I got here twenty minutes before opening. Been watching the motorway for the last fifteen, counting cars coming and going. More going. Katherine Mansfield’s house is ten minutes out of Wellington’s city centre, just beyond the motorway overpass she walked to get to the city each day, but hang on that’s not quite right. And neither is the gas heater in the corner of her room. And, come to think of it, I don’t know if it’s enough that the wall paper resembles the stuff in a book she once wrote. On the walls of her room are pages of her diaries. The parts of herself she chose not to share.

I do my best to hate this town but then there’s Friday evening. We move in a mass of people to reach the pub. Everyone around me looks fairly purposeful. They could just about all be going to the same place, except that every now and then somebody drops off the moving mass and into a restaurant or a house or even just a different pub than the one we’re headed for. One named after a fictional construct of a different Irish writer, where they season their garlic bread a bit differently. Molly Malone’s maybe, down the road. I can tell the locals from the tourists in that they step out a moment before the little green man who tells us it’s safe to cross.

I find myself in Kitty O’Shea’s, trying to remember who she was. It has a kind of cramped set up. By the time one walks in the door they’re in line for a drink, but that’s not so bad. It smells cleaner than any pub should. Though asthmatic, I recall the smoky smell with a fond sort of nostalgia. On the wall there are posters of writers. Yeats, Joyce, Synge. I read a book about this once – the Irish Literary Renaissance. The Irish reverted to the old myths and legends to create or recreate a Celtic past which would bring about change in Ireland. Tried to invent some version of themselves that was akin to their idealised remembering.

“Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn out like last weekend.”

“Where did you get to anyway? I didn’t see you after Molly Malone’s”

“All I know is I woke up on a crate and it was raining.” His story hits a nice cadence. No doubt perfected over a week of retelling, so that by now he almost believes that’s how it was. He wears a leather jacket and it’s no accident that I can hear him, though we’re standing two tables away. The man he’s with is older. Old enough, perhaps, to know that we wake up where we go to sleep. He glances from his beer to the door and back again. He is waiting for somebody, or wants to give that impression.

A man plays Dylan on an electric guitar.

She was Parnell’s lover, I remember now. His consequent downfall lead to the downfall of Ireland and they turned to memory. Paved a path to the past like that insurmountable overpass to where a woman sits writing. We take our drinks and move upstairs. We sit on the deck. If you don’t sit on the deck you run the risk of things changing too much. If you sit on the deck you feel cheated but not surprised when the fading light doesn’t come to anything. We watch the street. A girl juggles fire. There’s something classy in busking here. Back home it’s for the young and the homeless, mostly the homeless. Here it’s an art, or at least a sport. A crowd is drawn to the heat or the light. As fire flies from one hand to the other she tells them, “I am so scared… that you guys are going to leave without paying.” She gestures to a hat on the path beside a bottle of kerosene. The cutting cold of late winter keeps anyone from lingering too long in the street. At some point the crowd dies down. People leave pubs in ones and twos. Eventually they stop coming and going at all and that’s my cue to leave.

Briefly, I sleep.

I do my best to hate this town but then there’s morning, when I have to be up by six to pay the parking meter by the harbour. In my sleep hazed stumble from the backpackers I notice a cigarette smouldering in the street. It marks the brief interim between night and morning, in itself a kind of forgetting. I pay the meter and then I take a walk to the wharf and sit at the end of it. There are holes in the knees of my jeans. In the early morning the sea reflects the city more sincerely, or a more sincere city. One without the cars and the people. I know it’s no way to render the scene but what if it’s enough to say the sun rose the same way it did yesterday and the day before that? The same way it rose a hundred years ago when a woman sat writing in a room and before that on Ireland’s imagined past. Earlier still on a pre-Copernican earth where men hovered on the world’s edge before they learned they could, in fact, sail beyond the sunset.

This piece first appeared in Hue and Cry.