All I See Is You Read online

  Also by Lily Hammond

  Alice & Jean

  Violet

  The Way Home

  All I See Is You

  Lily Hammond

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Glossary of Maori Words

  About the Author

  Thank you for reading

  Also by Lily Hammond

  Copyright © 2020 by Lily Hammond.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the publisher at the address below.

  Dunedin, NZ

  www.sapphicabooks.com

  [email protected]

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, dead or alive, is purely coincidental.

  All I See Is You/ Lily Hammond. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-0-473-51859-2 (softcover) 978-0-473-51860-8 (hardcover) 978-0-473-051861-5 (ePub) 978-0-473-51862-2 (Kindle)

  For Valerie, as always.

  Where there is love, there is life.

  - Mahatma Gandhi

  Chapter One

  Someone had left a newspaper behind. Eliza inched closer to it and touched it with the tip of a finger. It was folded, columns of print tightly packed on the page. She leaned over the yellowed tablecloth to peer at it. The ink was smudged, and a corner of the page had been scrunched by an angry hand. Eliza knew it had been an angry hand that had done the damage – how else would such a procession of cramped words make anyone feel?

  She swallowed, her throat dry. Then tried breathing slow in through her nose, pursing her lips to blow out the breath, just the way her grandmother had taught her when she was a child grown frustrated with the world.

  If only her grandmother was here now. But she had died years ago. Eliza wasn’t sure how many years – not because she couldn’t count, which she could; she knew her numbers. But because often inside her head time, blurred together, the days bumping up against each other without order or reason.

  She touched the newsprint with her finger and left a sweaty print behind. Snatching back her hand she rubbed palm and fingers on her skirt.

  But the paper sat there on the table, the reason why she’d chosen this seat, or at least, one of the reasons, and Eliza huffed out a breath again, knowing it held the information she needed. She tried again. Tugged the paper towards herself sitting tucked against the wall where she felt safest, barely noticeable.

  Her mouth was parched. Staring down at the paper, she groped out a hand for the teacup. There was a puddle of cold tea left and she gulped at it. The cup clattered against the saucer when she put it back down and she hunched tighter at the noise.

  If only her mother was here. But like her grandmother, her mother was no longer of this world but had moved on to the next. The ship’s captain had been very solemn about that, standing on the deck of the ship, a book with pages that rustled like onion skins in the breeze clasped in his hands. Her mother had lain on the planked decking at their feet, bound in a sheet, and once the Captain had stopped his talking, he’d made some sort of gesture, and some of the sailors had stepped forward, hefted her mother between them, and tipped her overboard.

  Eliza had shoved a hand over her mouth then, although whether to claw out a scream or hold one in, she still didn’t know. But she’d leaned over the railing, fingers of one hand hooked around it and she’d watched as her mother drifted from view, the saltwater washing over her, pulling her down into green depths the colour of moss.

  ‘You having anything else?’

  The voice jarred her back from the side of the boat, and she jumped in her chair, twisting around to see a grubby apron over a dark cotton skirt, the weave heavy and uneven. The shoes beneath were of cracked brown leather.

  ‘Only you can’t sit here if you’re not having anything more. We don’t allow loitering.’

  Eliza didn’t know what loitering was, but she knew the tone, and she understood the rest of the words. She wasn’t stupid.

  The brown shoe tapped on the floor.

  Eliza thought of the coins in her little purse. She’d felt rich when she’d got off the boat, the city blooming around her in an exotic cacophony of noise and smells and blessedly steady land. She had her suitcase and her mother’s, and the gold wedding ring, taken from her mother’s hand by one of the other ladies on board and pressed into Eliza’s with a piercing gaze. You keep this, the lady had said, and Eliza had nodded dumbly and closed her fingers over it.

  It was on a thread of cotton around her neck. She wanted to reach up and press her fingers to the circle of thin, dull gold under her blouse, but she resisted.

  Instead, risking a glance at the waitress’s face, Eliza nodded, and pointed to the teacup.

  The woman in the apron and cracked leather shoes had thick eyebrows, and they folded down at Eliza in a frown.

  ‘Another pot of tea, then?’

  Eliza creased her mouth into a smile and nodded. Shoving her hand into her deepest pocket, she snatched out her purse and snapped it open, digging for one of the unfamiliar coins. She put one of them on the table and slid it towards the woman. There was a smudge of ink on her finger and she tucked it back into her lap before the woman could see.

  Opening her mouth, Eliza worked her throat. No words came out. They never did, and she subsided into another smile instead and stared back at the tablecloth.

  The waitress stared down at her for a moment, then plucked the coin from the table and, with a clatter, the teapot too. She turned and made for the kitchen. Something wasn’t right with the girl at the table, she thought, but it wasn’t any business of hers. Her feet ached and she had her own worries.

  Eliza breathed out then in again, her chest expanding in sudden pride.

  She’d made the right decision. There was the newspaper.

  This one didn’t have any pictures, or not on the page to which it was folded. Eliza reached out with both hands and pressed them against the news
print, made brave by the order of more tea, and she smoothed out the scrunched page, squinting at the columns of words.

  She liked the papers with pictures. They had had those at home sometimes and she would sit at the table and leaf through after her mother was done with them. It would be after work, with her hands red and raw from the laundry, her back and feet aching from standing all day over the copper vats, but the sun would be slanting its last through the window and there would be a hot cup of tea and a slice of bread, and the pictures were always interesting. Some of them were even funny and she would bark out a wheeze that was a laugh and her mother would pinch her shoulder as she walked past and laugh with her for a moment. If her mother was in a particularly good mood, she would tell Eliza the story that went with the pictures and Eliza would laugh some more.

  But that was then. The words swam before Eliza’s eyes, black squiggles that marched across the page, refusing to stay still, never coalescing into any order that she could discern and translate. She gritted her teeth and narrowed her eyes further, looking desperately for something she could recognise.

  There were no words she could read. She didn’t know why the words made no sense to her as soon as they were written down. Or why they refused to make it past her throat. It had always been like that, or so her mother had told her. There’d been a doctor once, when she was little, who had peered down her throat, then looked at her eyes and ears, which made her confused – there was nothing wrong with those. He had hemmed and hawed, leaning so close to her to examine the inside of her head that she could feel the scratch of his chin hairs against her.

  She could see, she could hear. She just couldn’t speak.

  Eliza looked at the newspaper. Perhaps, he had not been so stupid to look at her eyes after all, for she could not make head nor tail of the words on the paper.

  The waitress came back with the fresh pot of tea and set it down on the table.

  Eliza wanted to say thank you. She bowed her head instead in gratitude.

  The waitress paused in her turn away from the table. The café was quiet, the strange girl the only customer. Maybe she could spare a minute after all. She jabbed a hand at the newspaper.

  ‘You looking for work?’

  Light-headed, Eliza nodded vigorously, then glanced up at the woman, who was young, despite the thick eyebrows, her eyes a muddy brown under them.

  ‘You won’t find any.’

  Eliza blinked at her.

  The skin around the eyes was sallow, as though the waitress didn’t get quite enough sleep, or good food. Eliza moved her hand and touched her own face unconsciously. It had stared back at her, pale and drawn, from the cracked mirror over the sink in the bathroom this morning. When she touched it, the skin felt hot and papery. She thought again of the dwindling account of coins in her purse.

  Communicating took concentration. The sounds – the words – in her head never made it as far as her tongue. Sometimes she got lost in the swirl of them inside her head. Swallowing, she put a finger to the paper again, crumpling her eyebrows at the waitress with the cracked leather shoes and the tired face.

  The waitress, Jessie, stared at her a moment. ‘Something wrong with you?’ she asked. She was sure there was.

  Eliza dropped her eyes, feeling her face relax into slack humiliation. She wanted to shake her head, say no, but of course, the woman was right. There was something wrong with her.

  She couldn’t read, or write, or even talk. The only real conversations she ever had were inside her head, which was a place that couldn’t always be relied on. Things got crowded in there sometimes, and then she would go for a time not knowing where she was.

  If only she could talk. If she could open her mouth and have strings of words flow out the way they were supposed to, like a sparrow, like the bird that was the other part of her name. Eliza Sparrow. Then, if they could do that, things wouldn’t get stoppered up inside, and she could breathe properly. She was sure if she could talk then things wouldn’t always hurt so much.

  ‘You an imbecile, or something?’ Jessie’s eyebrows tented over her muddy eyes, her whole face dubious, ready to grow twisted in disgust and turn away. She had never been able to stand any sort of disability. Her nephew had been born with something wrong with his brain. He drooled all the time, and although Jessie tried to think kindly about him, sometimes just the thought of his vacant eyes and dribbling mouth made her shudder.

  Eliza shook her head vigorously.

  ‘So, what’s wrong with you then?’

  Eliza spread her hands and shrugged, touched cold fingers to her throat, shook her head, and found the smile she tried to use in these conversations. Then she turned and pointed to the newspaper, tapping the squiggles of print with a hopeful glance at the waitress.

  Jessie looked at her for a long moment, then glanced back at the counter, her thick eyelids blinking.

  ‘Don’t know how you haven’t heard,’ she said, deciding to talk. Frank, back in the kitchen, never passed the time of day with her, and she was bored.

  Eliza nodded along with the words, trying to encourage her.

  ‘But there isn’t anyone who has jobs going at the moment. People are being laid off all over town, for that matter. It’s The Depression.’

  Eliza frowned over the word. She recognised it as the name of something according to the brooding way the waitress had pronounced it, but she didn’t understand what. She worked her mouth. Nothing came out.

  ‘The Depression,’ Jessie repeated with a damp shake of her head. ‘I’m lucky to have a job, even though it doesn’t pay much. Hardly anything, really, but more than lots of men and women have now.’ She gazed over Eliza’s head out of the window and her eyebrows rippled across her forehead like twin caterpillars. ‘There’s no money around. I don’t know all the whys and wherefores, just that you’re not going to find a job – especially not if you can’t talk.’ She frowned back at Eliza. ‘You’re best to go back where you came from, get your family to look after you.’ She nodded at the newspaper. ‘There’s nothing in there for anyone these days. People are going hungry now, all over the country.’

  With that, she turned away, walking back across the café, her shoes thudding on the bare floorboards.

  Eliza sat back to stare at the table, at the empty cup, the full pot with steam twisting up from the spout, and the newspaper sitting hatefully there in front of her. She put out a hand and pushed it away, closing her eyes as she did so. It clattered against the cup and she jumped.

  Her hands shook as she poured the tea. She didn’t really want it, wanted to get up and leave the grimy little café but she’d paid for it and right now, the way things were, it would be bordering on a crime not to drink it down once she’d handed over good money for it.

  So she sat and sipped the tea, staring out the window. It was bright out there, summer at the wrong time of year. When she’d left England with her mother, boarding the boat that would take them to find her father at the end of the journey, it had been winter and bitterly cold. Her small suitcase was full of winter clothes, such as she had, but she’d not worn her coat once since setting foot on this upside-down land.

  The seat was hard under her and she squirmed in it. Her bones had grown closer to the skin on the trip over. She had a feeling she’d known already what the waitress had just told her. It was why they’d left home after all, her and her mother. They’d lost their jobs at the laundry, and her mother had come home from trying to find them other work only to sit at the table staring out at nothing. She’d told Eliza there were no jobs for them.

  She’d told Eliza they needed to use the little they’d saved to go find her father. He’d always said New Zealand would look after them – and hadn’t he sent money back? Not much recently, and nothing in the last few months, hadn’t even sent a letter, but they had his address, and they had to do everything they could to stay out of the workhouse, hadn’t they?

  Eliza had listened and nodded along, knowing all the while that wha
tever her mother decided was what they would do. What was for Eliza otherwise? She couldn’t very well get along on her own.

  The tea was gone, and Eliza put the cup down on the saucer, being very careful with it, feeling brittle, and somehow still parched even though she’d drunk two of the small pots of tea.

  Pushing the chair back from the table, Eliza stood up, smoothed her clothes, then let her hand do what it wanted to, sneaking to her pocket to feel her purse there, then up to her neck to touch the round outline of the wedding ring. She took a deep breath, carefully made her mind blank and visited the bathroom, relieved herself, and rearranged her clothes. She wore a woollen skirt and it was heavy and old, the fabric sagging at the hem.

  She left the café and stepped out into the hot, bright sun.

  Chapter Two

  The sun made her tired. Standing outside the café, Eliza pressed her palms against her skirt, the unconscious gesture soothing her as though she were smoothing ruffled feathers. It was impossible to get used to the harshness of the sun, and she blinked up at it, perplexed. Her mother had said nothing about the seasons being all wrong here. Had she even realised? Eliza didn’t know.