This post is inspired by an index for the colour of water by Christina Riley, a gorgeous handmade book that collects descriptions of the colour of water alongside Christina’s daily photographs of the sea. I’m honoured that she chose to include a few watery references from my book Small Bodies of Water. I answered a few interview questions for The Nature Library’s Substack, which will be out soon — in the meantime her words made me consider the colours of water I’m currently preoccupied with in the latest double-heatwave month of June.
Brackish, mud brown
I looked out the window on the morning of June 23rd and saw that my tomato plants had died overnight. The day before I’d seen them alive and now they were dead, all six. I’m not a diligent or particularly skilled gardener so I felt an inescapable sinking feeling that I wouldn’t be able to work out why they had died, and wouldn’t be able to stop it.
I learned about growing tomatoes mostly from my mother-in-law. Her greenhouse is crowded with climbing Tuscan plants with wild tendrils, the spidery yellow flowers just now beginning to fruit. Last year she had a crop of heavy, sun-kissed fruit that weighed down the stems. The scent of the greenhouse is astringent and bittersweet. Two of mine were seedlings given to me by her.
On the morning of the dead tomatoes, I was woken with a start at 7:13am by someone buzzing the door urgently. Three long buzzes. My dog, who had also been fast asleep, barked in alarm. My partner opened the door and it turned out to be a friend having a difficult time. She’d lost her keys and knew we had a spare. We spoke in the hallway. I helplessly offered her a cup of tea and a banana. She handed me a bundle of purple thistle and lavender that she’d picked during the night. I thanked her and put them down, intending to put them in water. I found them later that afternoon, wilted. I felt strange and disoriented for the rest of the day.
Pale yellow peach juice
I crave stone fruit in a heatwave. Cold cherries in a paper bag. Nectarines with warm skin, almost as warm as mine. Fresh jackfruit and papaya, both a faraway dream. I keep checking the weather app, tracking the projected hour when the temperature will start to drop and it will be safe to take the dog out. It gets later and later. 5pm - 32 degrees. 6pm - 31 degrees. I tie my hair higher and higher to keep it off my neck.
It hasn’t rained properly in weeks. The old buckets scattered around the garden I use to collect rainwater are empty.
It’s still too hot for my dog so I walk to the shops alone in the evening. I stop at the dairy and get the last caramel Magnum in the ice cream bin, which feels like a prize. In the air-conditioned fruit and veggie shop on the corner, an orange butterfly gets trapped inside and settles in the corner of a box of persimmons. I buy three peaches with yellow flesh, mozzarella and a giant tomato shaped like an organ.
Back home I cut the peach, the tomato and the mozzarella ball into thin slices and drizzled olive oil on top and lots of cracked black pepper, and pretend I am on holiday.
In the last few years, as the heatwaves have slowly intensified, London as a city hasn’t gotten any better at coping with the heat—but Londoners have. The train is full of people holding mini electric fans. In the past few weeks I have seen two girls with their portable fan propped up in their cleavage, perfectly angled at their face. Walking home, I pass a pair of teen goths wearing thigh-high black stockings and black faux fur Uggs.
Reflected sky pooling on the surface
Swimming close to the edge of the lake, a seagull rises up out of the water near me. Another swimmer near me yells “look!” and I see that the gull carries a squirming grey crayfish in its beak. The bird drops it on the deck where swimmers gather unaware, lowering themselves down the ladder. I think someone told me once they’d seen a gull catch a crayfish, but I’d never seen one before in the 7 years since I’ve been swimming here, so they seemed mythical to me. The water is murky. We can’t see everything we share the lake with. I prefer that—not being able to see the bottom.
Reading about freshwater crayfish, a memory surfaces. I wonder if it’s triggered by the heatwave. Why do heatwaves bring me the urge to write? They take us out of ourselves and everything is hazy, unreal, shockingly uncomfortable.
Back to the memory. I’m walking down an empty street in the middle of the day, having exited the air-conditioned air of the bus and stepped out into the crushing heat. Earlier that morning we visited Meizhou, the river port where more than a century ago my Hakka ancestors probably boarded wooden boats bound for Malaya and Borneo. The daughter of one of my mother’s friends falls into step next to me. I like her; she’s recently spent a month doing a baking course in Taiwan. She starts telling me about her pet yabbies back home in Australia. A pet yabby? I repeat cluelessly. Yabby—crayfish, she says. One of her yabbies, her favourite one, he’s bright electric blue. I’ve never heard of crayfish being kept as pets. It seems odd to eat crayfish and also get attached to them but it’s not something I’m going to moralise about, as a non-vegetarian. I can almost see him, luminous blue in his glowing tank.
Vibrating kingfisher blue
I’m treading water when I spot the kingfisher. An unreal blur of metallic turquoise and I gasp out loud. When it lands on a branch sticking out from the lake, I realise I’ve only seen a kingfisher in flight—never still. Now it’s still and I can see the different patches of electric aqua blue, the brightest strip down the middle of its back. I keep treading water with one hand, the other shielding my eyes from the sun. The little blue bird’s wings seem to vibrate and then it takes off into the trees. A swimmer next to me starts laughing, the kind of laugh fuelled by adrenaline and wonder. I laugh back, out of breath.
It’s swimming season and since late May I’ve been making a note of what the girls are reading after their swim, lounging on towels in the slightly muddy pond meadow:
Evenings & Weekends, Oisín McKenna (x2)
All Fours, Miranda July (fav)
Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar (urgent on my tbr pile)
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood (in my tbr pile)
The Coin, Yasmin Zaher (personal fave)
Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk (yes girl)
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (a mood)
Butter, Asako Yuzuki
Open, Heaven, Seán Hewitt
Dream of a winter sea
I’m working on a blue quilt for an old friend’s new baby. Lots of baby accessories are either pink or blue (or other pastel shades) and I feel weird about picking such a gendered colour for the quilt. The fact is I’ve never made a blue quilt before and have bags full of blue scraps. It’s the fourth quilt I have made, all for friends who have recently become mothers.
I have found a way of making quilts that’s forgiving of tiredness, impatience and mess. I don’t use a quilt pattern. I don’t measure the shapes I cut out. The making process can be imperfect, improvisational and wonky. Some quilts are geometrically perfect, complex and symmetrical. (My grandfather’s were). Some, like mine, are simple and lopsided.
The blue will be balanced by squares of lilac and pale green. On a cooler day, I will lay the pieces on the floor of my flat and sandwich the layers together—linen, wool, cotton. I will mark out lines of stitching across the squares, trace them by hand and by machine. I will fold the quilt and carefully pack it in my suitcase. In four weeks’ time, high summer flipped to deep winter on the other side of the world, I will give it to her.
My new book In the Hollow of the Wave is out very soon (31 July!) and available to preorder: NZ or UK. I wrote about one of my favourite poems from the collection here. Also, doing a bunch of events:
Aotearoa events—
Launch at Unity Books Wellington w/ Helen Rickerby, Thu 31 July. All welcome!
Poetry workshop at Katherine Mansfield House, Sun 3 Aug. Limited spaces.
Writers On Mondays at Te Papa w/ Grek Kan, Jiaqiao Liu, Cadence Chung and Chris Tse (all faves!!), Mon 28 July. Free!
UK events—
w/ Stephanie Sy-Quia and Sana Goyal at Edinburgh Book Fest, Sun 17 Aug
this too is a glistening at Edinburgh Book Fest, Sat 23 Aug (w/ Jessica J. Lee, Pratyusha & Alycia Pirmohamed - yay!)
Online launch with Chris McCabe & Gregory Leadbetter, Mon 8 September with Nine Arches Press (details tbc)
Red Bean Poetry w/ Erica Hesketh and Troy Cabida, at the National Poetry Library, Wed 3 Dec (details tbc)
this piece of writing gave me the sensation of a cool breeze breaking stagnant heat. thank you for sharing it <3
I really enjoyed reading this 🩵