Tim says “Come on, let’s go and see the stingrays”. So they go, father and daughter. They walk on the water side of the road, because there’s no footpath on the house side. Even if there was, you’d still walk on the water side. The water draws you to it, like a big dark magnet.
Ngaire says “Past here, eh?” when they get to the marae.
“Yeah, a bit further,” Tim tells her. “Come on.”
They walk on the crunch of gravel and shells. There are voices from the marae, kids and grownups all outside and inside and the noise of them carrying on the still-warm night air. To the left of them is the sea, flat, like a lying down window. Dark like a window at bedtime, with only the night and the moon through it.
Tim puts his hand on her shoulder, stopping her. “Here,” he says. “Here’s the spot.” They face the sea, standing still on the grass above the rocks, looking out at the bay. Ngaire puts her hand up to shade her eyes, even though it’s night, because that’s what you do when you look out to sea.
“Crack!” says Ngaire, as the surface of the water splits with a triangle of dark, and Tim says “There’s one!” at almost the same time, pointing out to the bay. “I saw it,” Ngaire tells him. They both scan the water. As they watch, they realise how many there are, at least ten or a dozen, maybe more, and how big – except it’s hard to tell how big, because they’re out there in the bay and there’s nothing to measure them against, just the water spreading forever around them. Their wingtips break the surface, sometimes one tip, as if it’s banking like a fixed-wing jet, sometimes both at once. The tips of the wings are mostly all they see, although once in a while there’s a bigger splash, more of the creature leaping out above the surface of the water.
“Are they always there?” she asks him.
“They must be,” Tim tells her, “it’s just we don’t see them all the time.”
“But what about when we go swimming? Are they there then?”
Tim looks at her, and after a while he says, “I think they live out in the deep in the daytime. They just come in close sometimes to feed. And only when it’s flat like this. And only at night.”
“So they’re not there when we swim?” she asks him.
“That’s right. They’re not there when we swim.”
“Oh,” says Ngaire. “Good.” She reaches her hand down to scratch her ankle, then straightens up again. “What’s stingray backwards?” she asks him.
“Um,” Tim says, and then, “yargnits.”
Ngaire giggles. “Yargnits, yarg-nits,” she says. Then, “Well, what’s yargnits backwards?”
“Um,” says Tim, but the um’s a joke this time, “stingray.” They both smile then, and watch the sea, the stingrays breaking the surface, the dark and the quiet.
“Can stingrays swim backwards?” Ngaire asks him.
“Mmm, probably not,” Tim says. “Maybe sideways-y, but not backwards I don’t think.”
There’s a big splash then, as one of the stingrays does an almost-leap, all but clearing its body above the surface of the water before it falls backwards into the oily dark.
“Yargnits,” says Ngaire. She puts her hand in Tim’s big hand then, and squeezes it. “Mum’d like to see ‘em, don’t you reckon?” She looks up at him, but just quickly, as quick as the tip of the wing beating the sea’s surface, just enough to see his mouth say Yes.