What You Wish For Read online

  A funny and poignant Gabriel’s Bay story

  Dr Ashwin Ghadavi, the newly imported GP, is trying hard to fit into Gabriel’s Bay. His challenges include the immoveable force of his office manager, Mac, the ambiguities of the Kiwi idiom, and his unrequited attraction to Mac’s daughter, Emma.

  Having returned home, Emma is determined to help her old friend, Devon, whether he wants it or not. She’s also on a mission to right eco wrongs, and her targets include local farmer Vic Halsworth, who’s already neck deep in the proverbial and, to make matters worse, seems to be having visions of moose.

  Add in a former jailbird, a Norwegian recluse, and a woman struggling to foster a child, and you have the usual endearing and down-to-earth mix that can only occur in Gabriel’s Bay.

  FROM THE BESTSELLING

  CATHERINE ROBERTSON

  ‘Catherine Robertson is a wonderful tour guide. It’s as if we’re somehow peeking, unobserved, into the lives that populate Gabriel’s Bay. There’s a lovely affection in her knowing. And as we watch and listen, her lightness of touch invites us ever further in. Technically assured and utterly warm hearted, this book makes us not so much readers as neighbours.’

  — John Campbell

  Contents

  Prologue: The Moose

  Chapter 1: Ash

  Chapter 2: Vic

  Chapter 3: Patricia

  Chapter 4: Sidney

  Chapter 5: Devon

  Chapter 6: Ash

  Chapter 7: Emma

  Chapter 8: Patricia

  Chapter 9: Vic

  Chapter 10: Devon

  Chapter 11: Sidney

  Chapter 12: Emma

  Chapter 13: Patricia

  Chapter 14: Ash

  Chapter 15: Vic

  Chapter 16: Devon

  Chapter 17: Emma

  Chapter 18: Patricia

  Chapter 19: Ash

  Chapter 20: Sidney

  Chapter 21: Vic

  Chapter 22: Devon

  Chapter 23: Emma

  Chapter 24: Patricia

  Chapter 25: Sidney

  Chapter 26: Ash

  Chapter 27: Devon

  Chapter 28: Emma

  Chapter 29: Vic

  Chapter 30: Sidney

  Chapter 31: Patricia

  Chapter 32: Devon

  Chapter 33: Emma

  Chapter 34: Ash

  Chapter 35: Sidney

  Chapter 36: Vic

  Chapter 37: Ash

  Chapter 38: Devon

  Chapter 39: Patricia

  Chapter 40: Sidney

  Epilogue: The Moose

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin Random House

  To Lesley, Nigel and Noah, with all my love.

  A few readers have asked for a cast of characters, so here they are:

  Dr Ashwin Ghadavi: newly arrived, rather anxious town GP

  Devon Pohio-Ladbrook: barman, horse wrangler, currently not in a good mood

  Emma Reid: eco-warrior daughter of Jacko and Mac

  Patricia Weston: wife of Bernard, carer for children in need

  Sidney Gillespie: mother of Aidan and Rory, jam-maker, assistant beekeeper

  Vic Halsworth: farmer whose life is up the proverbial

  Barrett Tahana aka Brownie: handsome, well spoken, recently out of jail

  Bernard Weston: will do anything to ensure Patricia doesn’t leave him again

  Bronagh Macfarlane: chatty mother of Kerry, holidaying from the UK

  Casey Marshall: town police officer, Corinna’s sister

  Charles Love: adored retired town GP

  Corinna Marshall: lawyer, activist, married to Tai Te Wera

  Douglas Macfarlane: not at all chatty husband of Bronagh

  Gene Collins: Jacko Reid’s best friend and professional mischief-maker

  Jacko Reid: large, forthright owner of the Boat Shed restaurant

  Jan Dundy: Gabriel’s Bay Primary School principal

  Kerry Macfarlane aka the Ginger Joker: chatty partner of Sidney Gillespie

  Loko: eco-warrior, mansplainer

  Mac Reid: short, forthright wife of Jacko, office manager for Dr G

  Magnus Torvaldsen: recluse, Scrabble enthusiast

  Moana: Devon’s colleague at the Lightning Tree stables

  Oksana: vigorous house cleaner, partner of Magnus

  Otto Visser: farmer, mate of Vic’s

  Reuben Coates: small boy temporarily in Patricia Weston’s care

  Ron Hanrahan: property developer, Gene Collins’s nemesis

  Tai Te Wera: lawyer, husband of Corinna Marshall

  Titus Phipps: beekeeper

  Darius, Rua: Wood Sprites

  Ianthe, Bea: plant collective volunteers

  Immy, Jason, Mrs Dickens: Lightning Tree stables crew

  Meredith Barton: Kerry’s former employer

  The moose: a moose

  PROLOGUE

  The Moose

  The moose could not explain why only a few humans could see it. For one thing, it was two metres tall and weighed four hundred kilos. And for half the year it had antlers so wide that it could not avoid crashing into branches or leaving trails of tree fungus and epiphytes dislodged from a height that should have raised the eyebrows of those familiar with the second-largest bush dweller, the red stag. Or, as the moose liked to call him, Tihkoosue, which, roughly translated, meant Short-Arse. The red stag did not like his nickname but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

  Perhaps the human mind was to blame, not their eyes? In the moose’s deliberately limited experience, humans spoke with a loud conviction that increased in parallel with their consumption of alcohol. If your status among your peers depended on you being right, then your brain had to reject all evidence to the contrary. ‘There are no bloody moose left here, you berk — they died out decades ago’ was a phrase the moose had more than once overheard. If moose could not exist, then, ipso facto, neither could the evidence. Human self-worth depended on it.

  The moose felt it could not judge humans for this. It had questioned its own existence many times, prompted by an instinct lodged deep in its DNA that kept insisting it lived in entirely the wrong place. Its ancestors had not eaten these permanently green trees! They’d grazed on trembling aspen and sweet deciduous maple! All right, they had consumed the same dandelions and pondweed, though the pondweed here seemed also out of place, too vigorous in its growth, overwhelming the other water plants. The moose sensed it might be doing its foreign home a favour by consuming pondweed, roots and all. Besides, it was delicious.

  Delicious, too, was the food offered to the moose by one of the humans who did choose to see it. The man who did not wear clothing. Who lived in the glass house on the edge of the bush with the woman who wore clothing only when she went out. Pink clothing, mostly. With sparkles.

  The moose always waited until the woman left the house. She was strong and fierce, and occasionally swore in a language that seemed vaguely familiar to the moose. The man, by contrast, was mellow, welcoming. The first time the man had seen the moose peering over his balcony, he’d shown no surprise. He’d smiled and held out his hand. In it was a roundish brown object that smelled sweet, like the memory of maple bark that lingered in the moose’s DNA.

  ‘Vatrushka?’ said the man. ‘A traditional Russian bun, filled with sweet cheese and jam from our own raspberries. Very good.’

  The moose extended its lips and took the bun. It wasn’t pondweed, but it was, indeed, very good.

  ‘I’m Magnus,’ said the man. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  The moose did not know that its own name evolved from the Proto-Algonquian word, mo-swa, meaning ‘it strips’. If it had, it would have spotted that it and the man had something in common. The man was always naked, even on colder days, because, unlike the woman, he never went out. Which meant he was happy to provide a snack no matter the hour. The moose was grateful. It had developed quite a taste for Russian buns.

  The man seemed happy also to accept the existence of the moose. Of course, the animal was right there in front of his eyes, taking a cheese and jam-filled bun from his hand, but even given that weight of evidence, there’d been no guarantee the man would believe it. The moose had once appeared before two hunters in a glade. By accident; it was mating season and it had been distracted. The two men blinked at the moose, but all their other body parts remained fixed, as if constrained by invisible straitjackets. The moose decided it would be politic to quietly amble back into the bush, walk for a bit and then run. The hunters did not follow it. Later, the moose wondered how they’d reacted to its mating call, as it knew how far away the deep grunting could be heard. Probably attributed it to the red stag, whose own mating call was laughingly called a roar. The moose’s memory contained the sound made by an irate grizzly bear. Now that was a roar.

  Bears, wolves, cougars; the moose’s instinct still urged it to be wary. But in this place, the one that never felt quite right, it was bothered only by the red stag (soft as well as short), wild pigs and the odd pig dog that it could scare off with only the threat of a kick. The dogs were not used to ungulates that could kick in all directions, but they learned fast. They were only smaller wolves, after all, and in the moose’s memory, wolves were sent howling with a swift, sharp hoof to the guts.

  In its memory, humans were the real danger. There was a dreadful story that the heads of dead moose were mounted on wooden shields and hung on walls of human houses, though most moose believed it had been made up by their g
randparents, whose cautionary tales, as is universal to all species, were always heartily seasoned with ghoulishness.

  Here, in this aspen-free land, those who observed the moose were gentle. Naked Magnus, the old man with the bees, and his wife, who’d loved hiking alone, and who’d fallen one day and not got up again. The moose had nudged her into the stream, hoping the water would revive her. It did not. When her body had been removed, the moose visited the old man to pass on its condolences. Death was natural, but that did not mean it was always welcome.

  Those with guns — perhaps the moose had just been lucky with them? The two hunters weren’t the only ones who’d ignored the evidence of their eyes. The farmer whose land led down to the river — he’d seen one of the cows and her calf crossing the water. But instead of reaching for his rifle, he’d sat heavily down on a rock and buried his head in his hands, as if the sight was too much to bear. If the cow had not had her calf with her, she told the moose, she would have asked the sad man, ‘Sa kir winkan?’ Are you OK? But the calf’s safety was paramount. By the time the man lifted his head, he would have seen only stones in the river.

  ‘How many more of you are there?’ Magnus had asked once, though his smile said he did not expect an answer.

  Four. The moose, two cows, one pregnant, and the last surviving calf, a young female, seven months old, not yet ready to leave its mother. Before them, many had died because this place, it was not right. The moose was the only male, and he was nineteen years old. He would live six more years at most. If the cow was not pregnant with a bull calf, or it, like others before, did not survive, he had six more years to produce another male. Or else …

  But that was tomorrow. Today, there was pondweed and bark. There was the freedom of moving through the trees unfettered by mating-season-sized antlers. There was the red stag to bring down a peg or two. And if the moose timed its visit to naked Magnus to coincide with his afternoon break, there would be a fresh-baked Russian bun.

  Today was a good day to be a moose.

  CHAPTER 1

  Ash

  ‘There are no bloody moose left here, you berk — they died out decades ago.’

  After four-and-a-bit months in Gabriel’s Bay, Ashwin Ghadavi knew that, when uttered by Jacko Reid, the term ‘berk’ was tantamount to an endearment. Jacko often called his friends ‘berks’, also ‘dickheads’, ‘retards’ and ‘nongs’. When he was mildly irked, he called them ‘bastards’. No one knew what he said when he was seriously irked because an angry Jacko had the same effect as a Brazilian wandering spider emerging from a bunch of bananas in the fruit bowl — cleared the room in seconds.

  Jacko owned the restaurant they were currently drinking in, and it was clear that people came to the Boat Shed not only for the excellent food, but also for the opportunity to be glared at by Jacko. Ash guessed it induced the same flirting-with-death frisson that a person might feel at the top of a bungy jump or with chopsticks poised over slivers of Japanese blowfish. Even in relaxed mode, Jacko was formidable — six foot seven, white blonde buzz-cut hair, hands that could crush a watermelon. Not that Jacko would ever crush a watermelon; he did not believe in wasting food. But Ash had no doubt that if he wanted to crush one, he could.

  ‘But there is photographic evidence.’ In the last month, Ash had become bold enough to venture the odd rebuttal. ‘A cow and her calf, from which we can conclude that they were successfully breeding.’

  ‘That was in the 1950s,’ said Gene Collins, Jacko’s best friend despite being the all-time most-awarded recipient of the ‘bastard’ epithet. ‘Moose live for — what, fifteen years?’

  ‘Up to twenty-five,’ said Devon, cleaning glasses behind the bar.

  Devon Pohio-Ladbrook worked five evenings at the Boat Shed, and weekday mornings at a horse rescue centre and training stables. In between, he was studying for a Bachelor’s in Biological Science via distance learning. Devon was twenty-three, and made Ash feel like he’d taken the easy road by spending the last decade training to be a mere doctor. He should have taken helicopter-flying lessons as well, or, at the very least, scaled the world’s major peaks.

  ‘There you go,’ said Gene. ‘So any moose born in the 1950s would have been dead by the end of the ’70s. You’re forty years too late, mate.’

  ‘People are convinced they still exist today,’ said Ash.

  ‘People are convinced that fluoride in the water allows the government to control our minds.’

  ‘Government,’ muttered Jacko, as if envisaging it as a watermelon.

  ‘Easy tiger,’ said Gene. ‘Speaking personally, our beloved leaders have been bumped down my own shit list ever since our new enemy arrived, grasping hands outstretched, wreathed in the toxic stench of capitalism.’

  ‘You’re a business owner,’ said Devon. ‘You make money off the sweat of others. How are you suddenly a socialist?’

  Gene Collins ran a concrete pouring company, which kept him, his wife and three daughters in relative affluence, even though, as far as Ash could tell, his head office was the Kozy Kettle café over the hill in Hampton. Ash supposed it saved on overheads.

  ‘I provide a valuable service and pay a fair wage,’ said Gene. ‘And I’m not proposing to blight our waterfront with a shitty industrial park.’

  ‘You tendered for the concrete, you hypocrite,’ said Jacko. ‘And got it, too.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Gene. ‘Keep your enemies close, that’s my motto.’

  ‘So close you can reach into their wallets?’

  ‘Well, since I hit a wall preventing the bloody project getting this far, I figured if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em …’

  Gene was short and round, with a neat salt and pepper beard and a penchant for Pasifika-patterned shirts. When Ash had first met him, he’d thought him a cheery kind of bloke. He now knew that Gene’s smile was the equivalent of the click heard when your foot came down on a landmine — a signal that you were in mortal peril and there wasn’t a single thing you could do about it.

  Gene smiled. ‘And once you’re on the inside, then you can wreak some proper havoc.’

  ‘I thought Liz threatened to shiv you if you got in any trouble?’ said Jacko.

  ‘Incorrect. My darling wife said she’d come at me with a machete.’

  Gene sipped his beer. It was the only kind the Boat Shed served, and came in a plain brown bottle with the word ‘Beer’ handwritten on it.

  ‘That’s what happens when white chicks marry us half-Samoans,’ he added. ‘They assimilate too thoroughly.’

  Devon was shaking his head.

  ‘Just because you’re half brown doesn’t mean you can make crappy racist jokes,’ he said to Gene. ‘If you tried that in my family, you’d get your arse kicked.’

  ‘Come on,’ Gene protested. ‘You can’t tell me that no one in your whole entire whanau has ever made a Maori joke?’

  ‘Our priority is respect, man. In deeds and words.’

  ‘And if you don’t watch your mouth, you’ll get a smack round the chops from your aunties?’ said Gene, with a grin.

  Devon cast a look at Ash, who wished he wouldn’t. Ash had not yet got over his embarrassing first encounter with the young man, even though others had assured him that he was not the first to make that mistake. (The others were laughing quite heartily as they said this, which Ash felt lent a somewhat equivocal edge to their support.) The mistake had arisen because, despite being born to unambiguously Maori parents, Devon had milk-coffee skin, brown eyes, long blonde hair, a slender physique and the face of a model. A female model. Folk conjectured that he was a throwback to non-Maori ancestors, who included Scottish whalers, Dutch cheesemakers and Polish refugees. Whatever the reason, Devon was a striking genetic anomaly in a family that treated him no differently to any other member. It was only strangers who went, in Devon’s words, ‘all weird on him’. Ash had indeed gone ‘all weird’, and the memory still made him cringe with shame.

  ‘See?’ said Devon to Ash. ‘Attitudes like this is why our society can’t progress.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that is the entirety of factors as to why—’

  ‘You make Indian jokes in your family, Dr G?’ said Gene.

  Ash’s first thought was to say that humorous banter arose in his family home about as often as ice-cream vans drove around Mars piping ‘Greensleeves’. His father had founded a merchant banking firm in the Ghadavis’ home city of Ahmedabad and, having successfully employed his two oldest sons, could not understand why his youngest had no head for finance, and why, if he insisted on becoming a doctor, he did not aspire to be a Harley Street consultant or celebrity cosmetic surgeon. His mother ran their household and was involved in good works. Ash did not know what these were, and any enquiry would only invite derision to be poured upon him. His mother was very certain of everything and had no patience with those who were not — a significant subset of humanity that had always included Ash. His brothers did laugh on occasion, but Ash rarely joined in owing to being most often in a corner, crying — which was the reason his brothers were laughing in the first place.