In the neighbourhood

It’s about 1 am and the Full Moon is on the wane but the city isn’t and neither am I.

The night, or technically the very early morning, is just getting started.

The sky, which I can see a lot of now, had put on a show earlier as the sun set over the Waitakeres and now it’s black and laden with crushed stars.

The soundtrack to all this is urgent, loud and relentless. Sirens, honking car horns, music, voices both celebratory and desperate – fill the air and travel up, up.

It’s the first night in our new home in the city, just off Karangahape Rd, in Tāmaki Makaurau. Living in the fringe suburbs, I’d become accustomed to the sound of traffic churning down a main arterial road and I began to hear it differently – like the swish of waves rather than black tyres on asphalt. Here, it’s unlikely such an interpretation is plausible. Still, it’s irresistible and compelling if you just go with it.

A heaving energy pulses from the streets below and we sit that first night, listening, watching.

A bunch of dudes – about 10 – appear on scooters up Pitt Street and turn on to K Rd. Choreographed anarchy. A woman is pushing a pram up the hill and in it is a boombox playing techno. She sees a friend, they stop and talk and move on – one south, one north As we watch her swerving to the beats, between the chicane of orange cones and netting in the busted up street, my son asks ‘Where is she going? ‘What is her plan?’

I go inside to get another drink and he calls out, ‘Mum, come and listen to this.’ His expression is serious as he looks down at the street. We can’t see her but somewhere down there a woman is crying and screaming, perhaps at some injustice, a monster – real or imagined – or maybe she’s on the come-down. 

She’s somewhere under an awning across the street below, near the rail link, and it’s the sort of sound that you can’t turn away from. 

I think I’ll go down, but just as the thought comes, a man crosses the street to the awning and we can faintly hear him ask the woman that we can’t see, “Are you OK?”

She stands up then, staggering, and we can see them both but only their legs – his fixed, hers moving so erratically it looks like she’s dancing. I can make out the hem of a black dress, her bare feet.

Before his top half disappeared under the awning, when he was crossing the road, I thought: 70-ish? Definitely middle class. White hair – quite a lot of it. White shirt. Chinos?

They talk and he still doesn’t move. He stands and he stays. Talking. She’s constantly moving. She’s stopped crying though and then there’s laughter. Then murmurs. It goes like this for over half an hour and we watch, partly out of fascination but mostly concern because who knows what state she’s in or who the hell he is and what his intentions are. How this will play out. We might have to go down there too.

Then he must’ve cracked a joke because she’s really laughing now. But not mad laughter. Like, really happy and almost calm.

Then he crosses back over the street and vanishes below before re-emerging, about five or 10 minutes later, with a pair of shoes. He hands them to her. She laughs some more and puts them on. They don’t ever touch.

Then he waves goodbye and she marches up the road and stops someone for a light. A bright flame flickers, followed by a plume of cigarette smoke and then she vanishes into the night.

It is a single act of kindness in a city where you can make assumptions about people. You can make assumptions about anyone anywhere. Sometimes you might be right.

But if you look, you can see beauty and humanity and it looks like a pair of shoes given to a woman in distress in the early hours of a dark morning, when most had just walked on by, oblivious.