The other day I watched a clip on TV of the announcement of the 1996 All Blacks team for the first test in South Africa. As each player was announced, a glamour shot with their signature was displayed. At the end, the announcer said, ‘On behalf of the board and all the rugby people of New Zealand we wish you all the best.’ I sent this video to my small group chat that is categorised in my mind as a place where you can be a bit more in-depth and demanding than in the wider chat and do things like get everyone to watch a two minute video recording of your TV. My friend really liked the concept of ‘the rugby people of New Zealand’ and tried to talk about this to other people in person but they weren’t interested. I think that the world is better if your heart is more open to hear about things like the rugby people of New Zealand. I think words are so interesting. When I did NCEA, the English exams would often have a question ‘discuss a detail or moment in the text that shocked or surprised you’ and I would always pick that question even though everyone always told me I was stupid because you could get an Excellence much more easily by picking a question like, ‘discuss how literary techniques were used in the text’. I think that it was already the situation for me, even as a child, that I never wanted to do what was easiest or would yield the best results, but rather what was the most interesting. The pro is the lifelong exploration of the world of ideas, people and language and the con is that I can’t afford to buy my own house. There are so many things that I could have done in an easier way. For example, I could have written three 250-page books by now and had one come out a sensible every-three-years but that isn’t what I’ve done at all.

Ever since RNZ published their terrible and insidious list of the best 100 New Zealand songs, I have been listening to a lot of mid-2000s local music. Something happened in this country, I think some of the readers of my blog would know and some wouldn’t, but we used to have major labels here and now we don’t. It all ended around the time Lorde debuted and the last major label music video I remember seeing on TV was Broken Machine by Zowie, which would have been in around 2012. Now when I see the NZ Top 40, I’ve basically never heard of any of the songs or even the artists, but there was a time before that when all the songs in the shops and on TV, in ads whatever, were by people who were just around. And were oftentimes cousins of people I knew. One of my friend’s cousins was in Fast Crew. The reason why I’m saying this is because I never knew what the lyrics to a lot of these songs were before and have now discovered that Hard to Find Her by Zed says ‘I’d crawl on my knees just to be beside her even if it meant that I could never walk again’. What is that? What does that mean? But it didn’t matter, in the golden era of New Zealand music. We’d just put that on a KFC ad or whatever. Once, a long time ago, I was in the supermarket, the one near the airport, my friends used to drive around the roundabouts near the airport late at night when they were depressed because everyone had undiagnosed autism and had to do sensory regulation in unexpected ways, and someone who worked there said, hey, I know you—you work at KFC. I said that I didn’t and they said, yeah, you do. I’ve never worked at KFC. My high school chemistry teacher had and she said that’s why she could pick up test tubes from over the Bunsen burner without gloves.

I’m also still entranced by K by The Tutts. The narrative of this song is that a guy arrives at a party—which we can assume to be on Auckland’s North Shore—and everyone is talking about how his girlfriend is in an outdoor bathtub with ‘two, or was it three, other naked guys.’ Then, he goes home and has sex with her anyway and they smell each other and then he does her laundry ‘and her friends’ and family’s as well’. This song won the Smokefree Rockquest when I was sixteen. At the time I thought this was terrible but now? Now I am deeply nostalgic for a time when young people wrote catchy but insane psychosexual pop-rock songs and they’d play them in the supermarket for all of us. I feel that was a more creatively fertile time for the country. Now I feel like every time I try and write anything, do anything, it’s like trying to get toothpaste out of an empty tube with a hammer. I met a lot of my friends when I was a teenager because we all produced our own music and now I can’t even imagine downloading a pirated version of Logic Pro or going to someone’s house from TradeMe to pick up a synth.

It’s from an earlier era than I was talking about, but I don’t think you can go past the lyric in Whaling, ‘I’m the first to get trigger happy, I’m the first to think of my own health.’ I just, I just don’t even know how you could come up with the meta-narrative for a song about being on a whaling ship and being the most self-involved and worst of all the whalers. I don’t think it’s helpful to say or to think that nothing like this will ever happen again but we need to do something to create circumstances where people write things that are weird as fuck and it’s amplified through state broadcast. I was also overwhelmed recently listening to Moron Says What, who have the lyric ‘your texts are so funny, glad you’re not on Telecom, because I’d spend all my money all my credit would be gone’. I just think it’s so important to have a record of how we lived and how things were, even if it seems redundant at the time.

This weekend I was at the night market in Pakuranga and it was much worse than it used to be, I think probably because someone got stabbed there and people stopped going, but also because it was raining, there was a man in a singlet pushing the dirty rainwater into the drain with a broom, but the worst thing for me was the AI. Probably two-thirds of the stalls had AI posters which are so ugly and unappetising and most of all don’t give an accurate representation of what the food will look like. It’s much better to just have a blurry photo from someone’s phone than some computer generated corn showing one corncob with thousands of kernels. I won’t buy food from anywhere with AI posters. My mum was embarrassed of me, rolling her eyes and laughing nervously, a difference between us is that I have no qualms about pointing out things I think are bad and should change and she wants to be friendly and convenient at all costs. I got a Brazilian meal that was thirty dollars, which is too much for the night market. I didn’t know what to think about myself that I minded more about the AI than the risk of getting stabbed. I grew up the kind of old-timey poor where we just didn’t have any money for things and ate microwaved potatoes and frozen beans every day. We never went on holiday but there wasn’t a risk of falling into homelessness or crime, although we lived in an area where a lot of people had. So that’s why I don’t feel scared if people are getting stabbed. These things happen.

People assume I grew up rich these days. I think it’s hard to get a read on which class autistic people belong to. You can see this watching Love on the Spectrum, the participants all seem quite similar to each other but sometimes they live in mansions in LA and sometimes they share a room with their immigrant mother. It’s because ‘not picking up on social cues’ isn’t only not saying the right thing in a conversation, it’s not picking up the accent of the community you’re in, not thinking to dress yourself like people in your local demographic, not having the same interests as other people might. This is why a lot of autistic people are loligoths or rockabillies or dress in 60s clothes or always wear shorts or that whole CEO thing with the black turtlenecks. This all makes it hard to sort people by class signifiers. No one’s going to think you’re poor if you have intellectual seeming interests and recreate outfits from Swedish fashion blogs with fill-a-bag clothes from school fairs and no one’s going to think you’re the super-wealthy if you wear skinny jean shorts and a skate belt and only eat Pizza Hut $5 value pizzas. This year I haven’t been paid at all, which is quite bad for me but I persevere. People hate to hear about how authors get paid. It’s sort of like a t-shirt canon that you have to wait to go off at random and you hope that it’s going to be ten thousand dollars but sometimes it’s three hundred. And you know that there are other people whose canon is shooting them three hundred thousand dollars but you need a much, much broader appeal for that and it doesn’t usually last for very long.

My last thought of the week is that I really liked the quote people were sharing the other day about how the editor is not the doctor, the editor is the patient who tells the author where they think the pain is, but ultimately the problems can only be remedied by the author. I can’t find the quote now. I Googled it and the Google AI told me I was thinking of the album Jagged Little Pill, which I am sometimes, but not right now.

*Or otherwise, on this website, writing long pieces ‘breaking down the truth’ about their publishing ‘journey’. I understand that this is because publishing feels, to a lot of people, impenetrable, and that there must be some kind of secret formula to publishing a best-selling book. I find this sort of gauche and sort of misleading. I don’t think there’s a code that you can crack that will make you a best-selling author. I don’t think that the whole industry is rigged, either. It’s fickle and often based on feelings and whims and timing, right place right time sort of stuff, which makes it a sort of strange beast, in my opinion, to try and game. It’s so unlikely to work out, following a system or series of instructions from a blog to try and shoot yourself to fame as an author. The other thing is that a lot of this type of content ignores the concept of being good at writing, having something interesting to say, all together. It views writing novels as a hyper-accessible trade that everyone can pivot to, and the only thing standing in anyone’s way are the pesky agents and editors who don’t know what they’re passing over.

I find it worrisome, reading all this stuff about hooky concepts, trending tropes, how to catch attention, whether to privately hire a publicist and so on. It reminds me a lot of gamebots on Survivor—contestants, usually young and with little life experience, who have seen every episode, listened to podcasts about it, spent a lot of time on forums and believe they can win a game that requires intensely high levels of social prowess against a group of people they’ve never met before with a rote-learned strategy. Of course you can’t. It’s like all those books about how to get rich quickly, threads about how to land a ‘high value partner’, anything to do with exercises that will give you thin arms in thirty days—I hate all that stuff. You can’t optimise yourself into being hot, skinny, rich and in love, as much as you can’t will yourself into being the Sole Survivor or a New York Times Bestseller. My point of view on life is that you should be trying to sustainably enjoy it as much as you can with your one chance to. But a lot of people aren’t. They’re on their phones commenting on strangers’ posts that they need to commit to a calorie deficit and that they’re wearing the wrong bra size**, when they could be in a national park or learning a language or trying a new food, singing, talking to their loved ones and so on. A person is a type of animal, not a type of computer.

I think what you need to succeed in publishing as a novelist are the following things: adaptability; your own style and point of view; confidence in yourself and your writing; knowing your worth but also a realistic view of where you’re placed in the market, within your publisher’s list and so on; to be able to see through flattery, overpromising, that sort of thing; ambition in your writing and with your career but modest expectations for things beyond your control; to be able to know when to compromise; to be a good communicator; to generally be able to get things done to schedule; to be able to write a whole book with little outside incentive several times over; to be very good at writing.

** I don’t know what it is about people telling strangers that they’re wearing the wrong bra size on the Internet. They seem to have taken the factoid that most people wear the wrong size and run with it. And the ‘correct’ size they always recommend is 28 or 30G, which is a 6 or 8G in New Zealand/Australian sizes. Which is not a body type you see every day! There seems to be a sort of club, in-group, type of thing for people of this size. They say ‘small band large cup girlies’ with a cherry emoji, and post whiny comments on people’s outfit posts and brands’ advertisements pointing out that their tops won’t suit them. I don’t know what this is all about, I see it all the time. It’s positioned as a type of oppressed group but the group is people who are very small and thin but still have big boobs. Not like . . . one of the typically most oppressed groups. You don’t see people with big feet commenting, ‘my feet are actually way bigger than that’ on shoe ads. ‘Can you show it in a 12 narrow.’ ‘I’ve got long toes.’

Things I like at the moment:

• The NPC rugby competition. I like it a lot. Super Rugby doesn’t have enough of a connection to place, but NPC does. It’s free on TVNZ, there are seven games a week and you can see all the people all around the country in their different regional stadiums. I like their slogans: FINZ UP (Tasman Mako), ANTLERS UP (Southland Stags). The stadium in New Plymouth has a sign that says something like, AAAAAOOOGGGHHAA Zone. The Taranaki players have a beer logo on the back of their shorts that look like ass targets. Last week, the Waikato players’ sponsor names were just taped onto their shirts. Te Rapa Cars, and so on. I thought it would be fun to be an NPC sponsor but I don’t have a business to promote. One time I got paid quite a lot of money and I donated $500 to a charity that I cared about. Then I asked the platform, you know, the NZ one for the arts, for a receipt and they said no, so I couldn’t write it off. Then the charity immediately folded. I am going back to donating money to gender surgery fundraisers. If I were to go on a Celebrity gameshow, I’d have to say, I’m here on behalf of Please Help Luna Get Her Vagina.

• The CRL being so close to opening. We have been waiting for so long. Pinning our hopes for the revitalisation of the city on it. Of course I wished that I’d been a TikToker or a city councillor or whatever so I could have seen it early, but I can wait. I didn’t say this before but you also need to get used to working on a scale of years as a novelist. Obviously when I worked in customer service, everything was now now now or the customer will simply perish. In publishing it’s more like, can I survive not getting paid until 2028.

• Working at the library. I like to be amongst the people. People are doing things I never would have thought of doing at the library every day. Coming in to read the Waikato Times, sitting there knitting for six hours, opening their laptop and then just sleeping on their backpack for an hour. In the Central Library there are a lot of homeless people. They have much better routines than the students who panic write five sentences of an essay and then take a long nap. The bad thing about the library is that the desks are too low for me and the plastic chairs hurt my back. I have to do a full thirty minutes of stretching a day in order to keep going.

Things I don’t like at the moment:

• Everyone in Auckland seeming to go to the same two restaurants and posting it on Instagram every weekend. There are thousands of restaurants, go somewhere else.

• When you read about someone being rejected for funding and then see that the proposal didn’t sound very good. It seems more kind-hearted to be one of those people who despairs for everything, but probably emotionally impractical. It reminds me of a group holiday I went on once where everyone took a personality test and got a green fairy called The Idealist, except for me and my boyfriend at the time who both got The Logician. A grey-haired guy with a ruler.

• The bloody food influencers! I usually agree with very, very little of what local Twitter users have to say, especially because I live in Mt Albert and currently they believe that the electorate should be gifted to The Opportunities Party, but I saw a Tweet two days ago about how terrible the American-influenced Auckland food influencers are, especially because they keep talking about how pies should have a good cheese pull. No, they should not. Take that attitude and hop on the Air New Zealand direct flight to Dallas-Fort Worth and pick yourself up a mozzarella dipper.

That’s all, have a good weekend, like and subscribe and so on <3

I remember the following year, and this is very ‘of a different time’ now, when I had transferred to the University of Auckland, my friend went around at lunch asking people we knew, because people we knew were everywhere, lying on the grass in Albert Park or sitting in the quad or outside the café if they’d ever heard of ‘Gangnam Style’ and then we went to the computer lab to watch it together. Now I don’t know how long I’d have to walk around in town before I ran into anyone I knew. No one I can even think of being there that day even lives in Auckland anymore. Sometimes people tell me to move to be better socially connected but where would I even move to when I know 1 to 3 people in every city?

I saw two videos—in the self-serious, self-help, motivational speaker style that remains popular—about tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand. Both videos featured people posing in the middle of the street and an older person yelling out, ‘Why are you filming yourself!’ This is tall poppy syndrome and this is why I’m leaving New Zealand, the influencers lamented. One of them had set his tripod up in the path of a run club. To film himself hitting deep-in-thought poses for a video about investing in cryptocurrencies. And no one in the run club had even complained until they were on their third lap. Oh my god, I thought, this isn’t tall poppy syndrome. This is a generational difference about recording in public and being in the way. We don’t need to expand the definition of tall poppy. We all hate each ourselves enough as it is. And we hate people being in the way. When I was a student we had to protest a lot because the government kept hacking away at our funding and I remember being dismayed at how many people I went to school with would post on Facebook to say that they understood that defunding education was bad, but in a way, wasn’t it worse to stand on the crossing? People needed to drive around and stuff. Surely there had to be a way to get the point across that didn’t inconvenience anyone. I guess now there is because there aren’t public protests all the time anymore. It’s hard to make people take notice of something if they’re all working remotely from inside their houses aside from posting protest images on Instagram. Every time I see a post from a tourist about New Zealand, all the comments are locals saying that everything here actually sucks and is terrible and not as good as in Australia.

When I was in Australia two weeks ago, I watched a documentary called Wog Ball where Anthony La Paglia and John Safran—neither of whom I had thought about since 2006 when they were the lead in Without a Trace and placing a fatwa on Rove respectively—talked about how they didn’t used to let Southern European people play football for Australia. I don’t think I could live there. It’s nice, sure, but I don’t want to be part of their society. To me, it’s not the same as here but with more money and opportunities, it’s fundamentally different in ways that I can’t overlook, I think. Also, I don’t think there would be more opportunities for me personally because I’m kind of a flop in Australia. Not as much of a flop as I am in Ireland, which is very inconvenient because I’ve never been there but they have very little incentive to invite me on those numbers. Even though I made all the CMAT karaoke videos on YouTube. When I was on the Spring Hill Loop bus—which is free!—I was imagining myself writing a book about Australia to better my reputation there so I could have the option to retire to an apartment overlooking the Brisbane river, if I became unscrupulous and got over the things I saw in Alice Springs. I think this could work better than writing a book set in the UK or the US, they have enough books set there already. I had an ex a long time ago now in Brisbane who told me Sufjan Stevens had been seen swimming in the river after his concert once. When we were driving around they told me they were still in love with their ex who had the same first name as them and had broken up with them while they were in hospital once. They emailed me to congratulate me on my career. I think there’s a lot of pressure on young women and even girls in this country to get over the things people have done to them so everyone can carry on as usual, and a lot of the time you don’t even realise until a long time later. I thought this would be a good theme for my theoretically forthcoming novel but I didn’t write any New Zealand men characters so it won’t fit in. The river is called the Brown Snake. It’s not good for swimming. There’s an episode of Who Dares Wins where they exploded a young mother into it with dynamite. It’s on YouTube. This is the kind of thing you can watch to think, oh, none of this could happen now. These people are just in the mall on their lunch break and former cricketer Mike Whitney comes up to them and asks do you want to get run over for a hundred dollars. And they say: yes.

I watch the fans in the audience at the World Cup and I think this kind of excitement will never happen for us as New Zealanders. We would never scream and sob and chant and bring a trombone to the stadium. If the All Whites made it to the quarter finals of the World Cup, we would sit in our seats and say, Woah. This is pretty unexpected. But it won’t last. Will Jordan became the All Blacks’ top point-scorer of all time and he said, Yeah. And that he used to play in the back yard, so. He hoped the kids would get out there, too. I like the way the men’s rugby players and commentators speak, in a weird bricolage of set phrases about momentum and discipline and relentless set-piece dominance. They show something called ‘Keys to Victory’ in the corner of the screen in the TV coverage, and the keys will be, like, ‘Give everything’ and ‘Leave it all on the field.’ They get paid a lot of money for this. In the women’s game they just speak normally. My friend who moved back to England messaged me they couldn’t sleep because there was a man singing in celebration outside the window. I asked my mum if she remembered England winning the World Cup when she was at primary school there and she said no and acted like it would be crazy to. She said she wouldn’t want to go to the World Cup because it was, ‘too noisy.’

I remember the 2002 World Cup because it was in Korea and Japan and in West Auckland at that time there was a massive influx of Koreans at school and they all had scented pens, grape jelly lollies and Be the Reds t-shirts. This wasn’t something I understood the significance of until my friend and I went to Seoul for the first time when he was at the International Headache Conference and I was returning from Thailand. In the National Museum of Contemporary Korean History, we read a wall display about the economic Miracle on the Han River that ended in 2002 with the World Cup, 94% of Koreans buying a TV and mass migration to Sydney and Auckland. Oh, right, we said. Old people kept getting excited about how tall we were and saying welcome Korea to us in elevators. The second time I went to Seoul things were different because I went with a friend who wasn’t a tall white guy. A Hongdae guy tried to chat us up until he Googled me and I had a Wikipedia page. When we said we were from New Zealand, he said, Ah, like Jennie, meaning Jennie from Blackpink who was sent to Auckland in the 2000s. But we both thought he meant the first female Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1997 to 1999, Jenny Shipley. This has never worked as an anecdote when I’ve told it to anyone else because everyone has also, incredibly, assumed he meant Jenny Shipley. Why the fuck would he have meant Jenny Shipley and why is she front of mind for everyone.

Sometimes people say I should have a column, which is very nice of them, but the sort of truth of that is I was offered three columns in 2021 during the second lockdown which was a very crying-in-the-shower and getting cyberbullied by old people online about my book and every joke tweet I made time of my life and then nothing since then. I took one of the opportunities and it ended up bad. They hadn’t told me the funding they had wasn’t just to write a general column, it was for Māori research journalism. I had to try and do it anyway because I didn’t have any money, I had been paid four thousand NZD for my first book and then I won two thousand for the Hubert Church Prize and that was literally all the money I had for two years. But the job was extremely untenable. I was asking for help because I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing or writing about or even how many words or when and the editor wrote me a list of suggested topics, one of which was ‘why should or shouldn’t Māori vaccinate their young?’ Like we were possums or something. Sometimes in life you accidentally become a victim of racism.

I don’t know how you become the sort of writer who’s always being asked to do things even when you don’t have a book out. It’s probably to do with networking, being friends with the right people, seeming approachable, being a man or being something else as well, you know, like being a TV host or whatever. I made a post about how I hate noticing how men authors are treated compared to everyone else and 32 women and two men liked it. Uh oh, I thought. Once I was invited to the Auckland Writers Festival gala because the other young Māori woman they had pulled out and someone told me afterwards that she’d never heard of me and asked what I did. When I said I was a writer, she said and what else? Nothing else, I said. Well, she said, most people here are something else. Maybe you should try stand-up. I’m not going to do that but I’m going to try and keep up with this blog because I think it would be good for me to write something less painful than my novel that doesn’t have deadlines and millions of other administrative things attached and obviously I hope people agree.

How other people feel is something I often wonder about, worry about sometimes, when I see the way the other first stream boys act during exams, unable to tear their eyes away from scraps of refill with formulae and examples of symbols seen in the School of Athens; when people complain about not being invited to the cool parties; when I try not to notice someone crying in class and hear a whisper that their boyfriend broke up with them. I wonder why I don’t feel any of these ways, and how I manage to co-exist with everyone without being caught out as an impostor. Maybe other people’s parents pressure them to be a certain way, academic high-achievers with even better social skills. My dad only cares about me being a good person, which is in some ways worse.

‘Hey,’ says Plan, appearing in the corridor in a grey t-shirt and black jeans, no jacket even though it’s autumn here.

‘Good morning,’ I say, too formally, fumbling with the key.

‘I don’t know if any time before midday can really be called good,’ he says, taking his glasses off, rubbing his eyes. He tries to smooth his hair down, but it stays the same. ‘You’re the last one to leave? I’m surprised, some of those guys were drinking rakija from the bottle.’

‘No, they’re all asleep.’

‘Why are you locking the door, then?’

I bite my lip and put the key in my pocket of my dad’s Kathmandu jacket. He insisted that everyone would be wearing practical clothing here and I’d feel stupid freezing in a plaza in a holey cardigan, surrounded by prepared Europeans. He was right. Sometimes he’s right.

‘Did you sleep okay?’ I ask Plan as we walk down the corridor. I don’t ask if he had a good night. It’s different at home, at work my job is pretty much to tell people to have a good night and enjoy the show. My uncle brought my sister to Disney on Ice once and I couldn’t stop myself from saying it to them. He messaged me later to say he enjoyed my work persona. In Europe, people tend to answer questions honestly, and I would feel bad if Plan said he didn’t have a good night.

‘Not great,’ he says, yawning. ‘Dumas was snoring, everyone was shouting to shut up man, which didn’t help. The guy under me I can see his phone light all night, he sends his girlfriend selfies and heart emojis every few minutes, in case she forgets him while we’re away. It’s only two weeks. Do you have a girlfriend?’

‘No,’ I say. He nods. I don’t think I have a girlfriend. Sometimes I try too hard to be nice and then things become unclear. That’s not an aspect of my life that I really enjoy thinking or talking about.

On the ground floor, the hostel dining hall has trestle tables and floor to ceiling windows covered with peeling tinted film. People are walking past on the street and I wonder where they’re going, what it would be like to be someone on their way to work in Budapest in the autumn. The teachers are chatting, the other students are swirling cereal around in bowls and clutching mugs of black coffee. The food on offer is mainly bread rolls and thin slices of meat. I ladle an enormous glob of purple yoghurt into a white bowl and, for some reason, scoop cornflakes on top. This is the madness of the breakfast buffet. Plan pours two cups of coffee and balances two bread rolls with jam between his wrists. He heads for an empty table, but another group gets there first. He knows them—they start speaking their own language and I sit down removed from the conversation. I focus on my yoghurt and replay some of my favourite moments from last night in my head.

‘Tang, my man, how’d you get up so early?’ Case asks, in shorts with his hoodie up, when the others from my school finally appear, sliding onto the benches around us. They all have piles of toast. The toast here is a lot smaller than our normal toast.

‘I dunno,’ I say, wondering if I should go all in and mix the yoghurt and cornflakes together.

‘Those Spanish guys thrashed us at pool, it was brutal,’ says Moses eating two pieces of toast together like a sandwich. He picks at a piece of prosciutto. ‘I could destroy a hashbrown right now.’

Plan’s group stop talking and look over. I can’t tell who’s Serbian, who’s Croatian and who’s from Montenegro, which is probably problematic of me. A tall blonde guy in a Nike tracksuit jacket looks over at the teaches and then says in a low voice, ‘Do you have hash?’

Plan shakes his head. ‘Hashbrowns, Miloš. Like latkes. Potatoes.’

The guy called Miloš and his friends look around at each other and laugh. ‘Ah, sorry, we are not drug addicts.’

The guys from my school laugh as well, and Plan rolls his eyes so far back into his head that they go completely white. I wonder if he feels different from other people as well, or if I’m just projecting.

The first stop of the day’s tour is the Hungarian National Gallery, where Plan is told off for being too loud. I don’t know how he always seems to be slightly out of step with everyone else. After breakfast, he realised he had left his jacket and bag upstairs and left me waiting in the hostel reception, his third jam roll in my hand.

I’m reading about a painting by László Paál when he comes up next to me and asks, ‘Can you explain this?’

‘Um, I don’t know, it’s an Impressionist painting of a forest, I don’t know if there’s anything else I can really—’

‘No, I mean the whole thing,’ he says, waving his hand around in the air. ‘Where I’m from we don’t have this “art”.’

I stop looking at the plaque and look over at him. I looked up where he was from on my phone late last night and there was definitely an art museum, along with several other museums, mausoleums, and an observation deck which reviewers on TripAdvisor said was well worth the 461-step climb to get there.

He sighs. ‘The only art I know is thousands of Yugoslav workers working harmoniously towards a brighter future.’ He doesn’t say this in a quiet museum voice, he says it in a normal outside voice and his teacher, a woman with spiky red hair and a purple jumper, comes over and puts her hands on his shoulders.

‘Plamen, pazi šta radiš, stop showing off in front of your new friend,’ she says.

‘Our thoughts were free in the Tito times,’ he mutters, his face turning an interesting shade of pink.

‘I’ve seen your passport, that was all well before your time,’ she says, winking at me. I don’t know why she does that, if that’s something that everyone’s doing where they’re from, when they aren’t visiting the Lovćen National Park, which is apparently well worth driving around the twenty-five terrifying hairpin bends to get to.

We walk around the less busy parts of the gallery by ourselves. Plan keeps quiet, with obvious difficulty. At every Cubo-futurist symbolisation of struggle, every marble sculpture of a wonky no-eyed angel, every Modernist painting of a depressed uncle, he screws up his face and breathes between his teeth, like we’re losing a game of charades and he’s run out of ideas to make me understand.

In front of a Realist painting of someone in the middle of either a yawn or a bored scream, Plan lets out a small exasperated groan and I laugh. I never laugh in art galleries, not even at the most preposterous nudes—my dad is an art lecturer and has been dragging me around these places as long as I can remember. But now, suddenly, I can’t stop. A woman looks over and shakes her head.

Plan shakes his head as well, ‘I can’t believe you would act like this in such a place of respect and great honour.’ He has a new smile on his face, and I think he’s pleased that he made me laugh. ‘Let’s get a bratwurst after this,’ he says.

The tiredness of the late afternoon seeps through the bus back to the hostel, after a messy bratwurst outside the parliament buildings and a quick stop at a supermarket under a shopping mall for Plan to get a donut, nearly making us miss the bus. We wouldn’t have got to see Memento Park, where all the Communist statues had been rounded up and displayed for an entry fee of 1200 forint. Propaganda anthems blasted over a tinny loudspeaker while a bored attendant read a book, and you could buy a postcard of people doing skateboard tricks in front of the sculptures, if you got her attention. I loved it. I think Plan liked it too, he knew a lot about the history of Hungary, which I didn’t. My class at home is studying the Tudors.

Most people are asleep now on the bus, tracksuit jackets bundled up as pillows or over their faces, the teachers talking quietly at the front. Plan turns to me suddenly and asks, ‘What’s your favourite colour?’

‘Ah, green, I guess.’

He nods. ‘What’s your favourite animal?’

‘I don’t know, maybe lemur.’

He frowns. ‘What is this? An animal from Peru?’

‘No, from Madagascar, with big eyes and a long tail with stripes.’

‘Ah, lemur,’ he says, just in a very different way from the way I said it. ‘I like, ah, I don’t know the name for it, it has a big flat face. It’s like a cow, it’s called mudar. It weighs 600 kilograms. Do you know what I’m talking about?’

I shake my head and try not to laugh again. ‘No.’

‘Hm. Well, you are missing out. It’s a great animal. When’s your birthday?’

‘November 14^th. Why are you asking me all these questions?’

He shrugs. ‘Because you are a little bit hard to know.’

‘Oh,’ I say. This makes me feel bad. I wish I wasn’t perceptibly detached from everything. At school I always feel as if I’m an observer of the scene, I laugh with everyone else at someone’s Lord of the Flies presentation when it’s obvious they didn’t read the book, but my mind feels like it’s drifting higher and higher out of my body until I’m not in class at all—I’m over the E block, above the people hanging around the tuckshop to try and get a pie before they run out, above the Year 9s playing lacrosse badly on the tennis courts, above the boy hiding in the D Quad, waiting for the bell to ring so he doesn’t have to go to the dean for having incorrect shoes. But I don’t feel like this now, I haven’t felt like that all day. ‘My dad really likes penguins.’

He laughs, ‘Really?’

‘Yeah, he made us, um, me, my mum and my sister, go on this really long drive to this beach where you can see them and then he just sat there for like, three hours, waiting, and my sister’s five and she kept crying because she was so bored.’

‘Your sister is only five years old?’

I nod. ‘Yeah, we don’t have the same mum. I call her my mum but she’s, um, my dad’s wife.’

‘Do you live with them all the time?’

‘Yeah, I don’t know my biological mother.’ I feel weird that I’ve said that out loud, that’s not something I usually tell people. I feel my neck flushing and have a low buzzing noise in my ears, like a disaster warning for imparting too much personal information.

Plan nods. ‘I just live with my mum, but she’s very busy. She’s an engineer. My dad lives in Belgrade, I think. Maybe Novi Sad.’

‘What’s your mum’s favourite animal?’

‘Ah,’ he smiles. ‘Now I have to think again. It’s… foka. He’s a grey guy, swimming around, big eyes, flat hands. I think you have it.’

‘You think I have flat hands?’ I didn’t mean to bring up my hands. Our hands have been touching between the bus seats the whole time and I didn’t want to draw attention to it. It might be by accident. It didn’t say on TripAdvisor whether men in his town often touch hands on the bus as a symbol of platonic friendship—the reviewers were too busy discussing whether the five-euro entry fee to Njegoš Mausoleum is well worth it or a total rip off.

‘No,’ he says, and pokes the back of my hand. ‘I think the grey water creature is living in your area. He has a funny attitude. Fun. Sorry, ah, I thought that I was good at English until I met you. Now I’m worry I. . .’ He stops and frowns. ‘I have to get a good English grade so I can be accepted to a German university.’

‘Oh, you’ll get it, you’re so good. Is it my accent, I can—’ I have no idea what I can do, this is just what I sound like. ‘I could, um, try and do an English or American accent if you want, if that’s easier.’

‘It’s not that, you have a nice accent. I’m just nervous around you.’

‘Because I’m a native speaker?’

‘No.’ He looks around the bus. Everyone’s still asleep or very busy with a game of Monopoly Deal down the back. Then he holds my hand properly. I feel like when you take a photo of yourself on a webcam and it automatically flips over and you’re surprised by your own face. He looks up at me and I start thinking that he has a very beautiful mouth, like a peach cut in half, but not a mottled red and orange three-dollar–a–kilo end of summer peach at Countdown, a really nice one, like in a campaign for the state of Georgia or the special kind you can buy in Japan for upwards of twenty New Zealand dollars. Could I kiss Plan right now on the bus, would that be allowed? There wasn’t anything specifically outlawing kissing during group excursions in the programme rules. I might still be wrong though, about his intentions. I think men in Sicily hold hands as a sign of respect, this could be like that.

‘Why do you want to move to Germany?’ I ask.

‘I just have to,’ he says and tilts his head at me like he expects me to understand something, but I don’t. ‘Hm. Morski lav, sea lion, does that make sense to you? Like that but smaller.’

‘Oh, right, yeah, a seal,’ I say.

When we walked around after lunch, Plan kept gesturing at things and saying, ah, magnifico. Not at examples of historic architecture or things of cultural significance, but at a heavily armed guard outside the US embassy, a broken vending machine juddering loudly in the subway station, graffiti that said ‘nazis fuck of’, a busker singing Wonderwall who didn’t know the words. I laughed so much I thought I was going to burst into a thousand pieces and float away down the Danube, all the way through Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania until I was emptied out into the Black Sea, maybe washing up on the other side one day, like seaweed or a bag of missing cocaine.

We’re closer to the hostel and everyone starts waking up and looking for their bags. Plan puts his hand in his pocket and smiles out the window.

Everyone’s friends now, the people from my school and the drug people from this morning; they all shout ‘catch youse then’, and ‘have a mean time’ in the stairwell as we go up to change for dinner. I wave feebly and feel bad that Plan doesn’t know any New Zealand slang because I just held his hand and told him I don’t know my real mum. For fuck’s sake.

In the dorm everyone’s talking about something funny that happened at the statue park which I didn’t notice, charging their phones and looking for socks. I lock myself in the bathroom and turn the shower on, cold. I just stand there in front of it, feeling the water splashing my bare feet. I take my shirt off and look at myself in the mirror. Is my face a good face, is my body a good body? Is there such a thing? I think my nose is too big and my eyes are too prominent like a. . . tarsier. My legs are too long for my school shorts, I have to go around looking like I’m auditioning to be in a Wham! video when I’m just going to stats. I said that I felt like this to my friends late one night in a conversation about our deepest insecurities, but they called me a dumb bitch and threw their home-brand Pringles at me. I wish my friends were here, but you had to be taking history and a foreign language to be eligible for the programme. I don’t think I know the guys here well enough to throw open the bathroom door and ask, ‘Fellas, is it gay to hold hands with a man and stare at his beautiful fruit mouth?’

I stand under the cold water imagining what would happen if I died of hypothermia until someone starts banging on the door for the toilet.

It’s still warm when we walk back to the hostel after dinner and everyone’s in a good mood, laughing as the streetlights’ reflections make their teeth look extra white and their eyes shiny. I’m behind and Plan turns around to look at me without stopping, one eyebrow raised like there’s a private joke between us. He kept looking at me all through dinner; I couldn’t hear what he was saying because we were sitting at opposite sides of a table that seemed too wide, but I could feel when he was looking at me. He was talking to one of the Serbian girls, he was making her laugh so much that she was doubled over the table with her thin arms holding up her head, her long blonde hair nearly falling into her wine glass.  It was too much. I felt like I was in the French film I went to alone one night and didn’t tell anyone about. I said to my dad that it was the kapa haka finals at work and they’d run three hours over time. He wasn’t surprised, he just asked if his mate Tāwhiri was there. Thank god my dad’s mate Tāwhiri was not there, at the French film. Just people of all genders in berets who looked like they worked in performing arts. I don’t know why my life has become so furtive and undercover, it’s like The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole except, instead of the Falklands War, there’s a man with sparkly eyes and too many buttons undone to really be appropriate at a school event.

I still feel weird, in this big city thousands and thousands of kilometres away from home but still tethered to the itinerary of the exchange programme, and the rules set by the school before we left. I’ll be eighteen soon and could technically do whatever I want. I’m overwhelmed by that amount of freedom.

When my dad was my age, I was about to be born. He didn’t know that, though. He didn’t even know my mother’s name. In one of his many impromptu TED talks about relationships and consent, he talked a lot about how if you go home with someone you have to get their full name. For health and safety, he said. I knew why, really. I had read the court documents. Piles and piles of official papers, in a box in his wardrobe, trying to find me, trying to prove that it would be better for me to be with him. I remember almost everything that’s ever happened to me, in a level of detail that other people find frightening or unbelievable. It’s not in perfect HD but it’s all there, like thousands of videotapes organised in a system only I can understand. But there’s nothing before I went to live with my dad. I was five, I should be able to remember something, but it’s blank. I know I was being looked after by someone, but I don’t remember their face or what the house was like. I play those tapes back but it’s just two scratchy grey lines across the screen and faint images of things I’ve made up. There are no photos of me. Why didn’t he just ask her what her name was? You should obviously ask people what their names are before you do anything else with them. Plan, Plan. Plamen Gajević. He turns around and looks at me again and I raise my eyebrow back at him.

I don’t know what I expected to happen when we got back to the hostel but we’re all playing pool in the basement. I’m playing very badly because I feel like my heart has migrated to the outside of my chest. I don’t feel like my face is the colour it usually is either, but I don’t think anyone can tell underneath the multicoloured strip lighting. Moses and the others from my school know how to do trick shots, they say a Spanish girl taught them last night. I didn’t play pool last night; I was playing a listing game with other people in the dining hall. The kind of game where you go around naming things in a category and if you can’t think of something you have to drink. Sometimes I was pretending I didn’t know another American president or Asian capital city because I wanted everyone to like me and I didn’t want to come across as intense.

Everyone was tired of the game by the time we got to European currencies and went off to get more drinks, but Plan stayed. That was the first time we spoke. He wanted to know how I knew so much about the Transnistrian rouble and its coloured plastic coins. I wanted to know what it was like living in a country with the Euro as a de facto currency. He had a lot of opinions. He wished they could mint their own coins; he’d like one with a big sandwich and one with a guy squatting in a tracksuit, waiting for the car ferry.

There’s a money museum where he lives, it’s the 16^th top rated attraction according to TripAdvisor. Even though they only had their own currency from 1906 to 1918. It was called the perper. Plan told me. I told him one of our coins has the boat of the guy who came and colonised us on it, like we should be happy about that, but a few years ago we had a referendum about getting a new flag and anyone could upload whatever design they wanted to the website. He liked that a lot. I didn’t know what happened to the other people from the game, I don’t think I ever saw them again.

Someone brings over another tray of beers to the pool table and while they’re distracted, Plan picks up two of the pool balls and puts them in the pocket. Everyone’s laughing and joking a lot, but he’s the quietest I’ve seen him so far. Quieter than he was in the art gallery when everyone was supposed to be quiet. He clears his throat, ‘I have to go after this round. It’s Fridtjof’s birthday and I said I would come upstairs for cake.’

Miloš is taking aim at the red apparently unaware there are now two fewer balls on the table. ‘Who’s Fridtjof, does he have alcohol?’

‘Fridtjof Nansen, he’s one of the Norwegians.’

Everyone looks at each other. The Norwegians probably don’t have any alcohol. Their delegation is from an international school and they mostly like playing cards and talking about emissions trading. Miloš gets the red in, but the black rolls in after it and the game’s over. I try not to be disappointed that this means Plan’s going to leave.

‘Tang, are you coming?’ he asks me, as if this is something I know about.

I stand up and give my cue to a girl called Alice. ‘Yeah, yeah, I guess.’ I follow him towards and the door and Miloš calls after us, ‘Come back when you get bored talking about NATO!’

‘Who’s Fridtjof’s Nansen?’ I ask as the door closes behind us, blinking in the bright light of the corridor.

‘He was the first person to cross Greenland on skis in 1888,’ Plan says, and kisses me right on the mouth. My mind feels very quiet for the first time, a dark vacant void and a tiny echo of a memory, she wasn’t prepared for that, but she is prepared for dinner, is that an. . . old ad? The mum. . . lasers her own arm off. . .  my hands are on Plan’s face and his hands are in my hair, and I can feel my own tongue through his cheek which is maybe disgusting and maybe. . . maybe it’s chill. He takes my hand and pulls me along the corridor. He opens a door to a food store with massive cans of sauerkraut and bags of flour, how did he know about this, did he conduct a location scouting mission? What if someone needs late–night sauerkraut? He bolts the door shut. It’s dark but there’s some streetlight coming through a high narrow window. I look at him, looking around the room and breathing heavily, and wonder how long he’s been thinking about this, if he woke up feeling confused like I did.

He doesn’t say anything, it’s all going on again, it’s going on a lot more than it has before, usually I just. . . kiss for a bit and then feel weird and say I think I can hear your mum’s car or I think that Māori Warden’s looking at us, but I like his hands on my chest, my nose pressed against his neck, I’m sitting on a bench and I don’t have time to wonder if it’s still tapū if the bench is Hungarian and has no idea what tapū is, he’s standing between my legs, what’s going to happen now? How much further can this go? I didn’t bring a condom when I came to the. . . cupboard. I don’t even know how. . . I should have taken a notebook when I went to that French film, god.

‘Tang,’ Plan whispers. ‘This topic is not in my English textbook. Ah. . . mogu li te. . ?’

His hand is on my belt, so I think I know what he means, yeah, yeah, I say, unless he wants me to swap pants. I don’t think so, we’re not. . . the same size, oh, it’s all going on. I don’t know how long I can. . . Time. Time, ages and ages of time right back to the. . . big bang. No. The, um, The Hours. I haven’t seen it, does someone have a prosthetic nose? Or was that. . . Yentl? That can’t be right, I just want to. . . kiss Plan forever and never go on to the next stop on our trip which is Vienna, even though I really like Billy Joel and Falco and also Conchita and I—

‘Plan, I, um—’

‘Oh,’ he says, and looks around as if there might be a stack of paper towels but there’s just. . . so much sauerkraut. ‘I. . . ah,’ he points to his mouth and bends down, fuck, I can’t look, I can’t believe this is happening to me and not someone I don’t really believe behind a bike shed or at the after party for the school production of The Tempest. I look up at the moon through the window and I think I’m going to accidentally kick him, but he holds my thigh down, hard. Oh. God. Things have taken a turn.

Fuck.

After a short period of rest and reflection, we hear people talking in the corridor and we both rush to put our clothes back on properly.

‘I know somewhere else we can go,’ he says, and picks up the smallest can of sauerkraut in the room.

‘What’s that for?’ I ask, as he unbolts the door.

‘A souvenir,’ he says. He runs his thumb over the label, ‘If we run into anyone, I will say Fridtjof needed a snack, he has low blood sugar.’

The hostel has a second, more underground basement where there’s a small gym, which is under renovation, and a washing machine, which doesn’t work.

‘I don’t think anyone would come down here, but if we sit here, we can hear people coming and they can’t see us,’ Plan says, when we’re sitting on a single duvet inner on the old turquoise carpet tiles under the stairs, drinking Pepsi Max.

‘How did you know about this?’

‘I looked this morning. Then I brought this blanket down here and told the reception the cleaners took it away by mistake and they gave me another one. When I was walking back upstairs I saw you in the corridor, when you couldn’t lock the door.’ He says this all very matter-of-factly and I feel pleasantly bamboozled.

‘Is that why you didn’t have a jacket or a bag?’

‘Yes. I had to pretend I’m not organised; I couldn’t say I was out looking for places to be alone. That I couldn’t sleep because I was imagining what that would be like.’

‘But you don’t mind saying that now.’

He looks at me. ‘We don’t have to have secrets now you came in the cupboard.’

I cringe, I don’t know if he realises the appalling nature of that double entendre. I feel like I should have bought him a bottle of Listerine, but the vending machine only had Pepsi Max, or something called Hell Energy Drink. He said he didn’t mind.

‘How did you know I would want to go anywhere with you?’ I ask.

‘You said you were going downstairs to play pool and then three hours later you were still talking to me about your favourite coins and flag proposals. Like it’s hard to get a frog in water.’

I should be embarrassed that I’m so transparent, but I’m pleased. This hasn’t happened to me before. People usually ask me if I’m actually listening to them and don’t invite me places because I seemed like I didn’t want to go. I always want to go; I just don’t know how to make my face look like I do.

‘I wish I had somewhere else I could take you to,’ I say.

‘Some sort of pied–à–tierre. What would that be like?’ he asks, closing his eyes and lying his head on my shoulder.

‘Like how many square metres? Ninety would be good.’

‘No, I want you to evoke the fantasy for me.’

I look down and stroke the back of his hand as it rests on his thigh.

‘I don’t know, you said you wanted to work for the European Parliament didn’t you, or was that because you had nothing else to say to the Norwegians?’

‘I do actually want to do that. I don’t care about tax rebates for carbon neutral companies though. I’m really bad in maths, I don’t understand tax.’

‘Your mum is an engineer and you’re bad at maths?’

He groans. ‘I know, okay.’

‘Okay, well if you want to be there then the apartment would be in Strasbourg. Um, it’s Sunday and we sleep in late because we’ve been at our friends’ party the night before. And maybe you’ve been in Brussels or something, and brought back something nice for me, maybe a book I like that’s hard to find. Not Manneken Pis merchandise, I think he’s creepy.’

‘What’s wrong with a bronze baby pissing? This is our continental culture.’

‘This morning you were trying to convince me you had never heard of the concept of art, make up your mind. Okay, and also it’s spring in Strasbourg, that’s my favourite season. I open the window and notice that there are more leaves on the trees outside than there were yesterday. There’s a shop across the street that sells expensive shoes and we never see anyone buying any, the person who runs the shop is talking to someone about where they’re going to go for the summer. They’re going to Sagres.’

‘Where are we going?’ he asks.

‘We’re going to Utah to look at bison since they’re your favourite.’

‘Is that their English name? When did you look that up?’

‘At dinner, I just googled 600 kilogram cow relative. In the apartment I eat a croissant off a plate, we have really nice duck egg blue plates, and wait for you to wake up. You’re tired because you’re busy all the time.’ I think I would probably eat it over the sink because I hate doing dishes, but this is a fantasy so I can use as many plates as I want.

‘What about you, what’s your job?’

‘I work at KFC and everyone hates me because I can’t speak French, I just have to empty the bin all the time because I can’t serve the customers.’

‘Tang, you’re very intelligent and to be honest I think some people might hire you based on looks. I don’t think you’re going to be the worst employee at KFC.’

I can almost feel the tape in my brain recording the compliment for later, as if I could put it on my CV or a website that’s just about me as a person. ‘Okay, I’m a translator. I write a lot of captions for plaques in museums. It’s good because I can work from home and I can come with you sometimes when you travel.’

‘What happens when I wake up?’

‘Well, I guess I would have to give you the rest of the croissant because you’re probably still addicted to pastries.’

‘Do we love each other?’

I don’t know if he means in the fantasy or in our real lives, where we’re under some stairs in a Hungarian youth hostel and don’t even have a door anywhere we can close. I look down at him, his eyes still closed, my hand still on his. ‘Yeah, I think we do.’

Everything that happens over the next few days feels like an exercise in trying to cling onto time, to make it go slower by being extremely aware of it. That’s not how time works. I stop looking at my phone, which is filling up with messages about things and people that are too far away to make sense anymore; trips to Parnell Baths, a birthday dinner at Kiss Kiss, my dad updating me about the weather every day, asking me to message back when I can. The excuses after dinner are fast and make less and less sense. The Norwegians have sparkling grape juice. The Norwegians want to show us a webinar about fracking. We sit under the stairs facing each other with our heads pressed together, blankets around our shoulders ignoring everything around us, like Olympic divers afraid to look up at their scores. He tells me things that are hard to hear, things he hasn’t told anyone before. The boy who got scared and stopped showing up one day, the threats that cancel the events every year, what his uncle said at Christmas. I feel helpless and stupid. I tell him I don’t know myself, which isn’t a real problem, but he says that it is, if that’s the way I feel. The last night we don’t get much talking done at all.

 The morning comes and we have to say goodbye, our eyes red and our faces scratched, and I feel like Rangi being torn apart from Papa except not by our children, but by a teacher shouting if everyone doesn’t get on the right bus this minute, and our separation doesn’t form anything as beautiful as the mountains and rivers, but just leaves me, alone. Surrounded by people at Schönbrunn and the Belvedere Schlossgarten, but alone, my body performing the actions I know are required of me but never feeling like I’m really there.

Then I’m at home again, my dad hugging me at the airport like he’ll never let me go again, at school, laughing along with everyone when a reliever can’t make the projector work, the smell of wet school jerseys on the radiator. I play every moment of what happened again and again in my head, trying to feel like I’m there, trying to remember the taste of the croissant on that future morning that never happened but for a second really felt like it could. Every now and then I look down at my phone and wonder why Plan never tried to track me down, if someone else is buying him Pepsi now, and if he looks at them the way he looked at me. I scan the memories harder and harder, looking for something that hinted that I didn’t really mean anything to him, something I said or did maybe, that put him off wanting to find me again, and then one day I realise that I never even told him my last name.