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talk,” Marion says to me. “Let’s go to my office.”
    When we reach her office, she closes the door, picks up myworking visa application from her desk, and places it on the table. She tilts her elegant, silvered head toward the papers.
    â€œYou didn’t tell me you were actually born in New Zealand.”
    â€œI didn’t think it was relevant.” I pause. “And I’m illegitimate.”
    Marion snorts. “Haven’t heard anyone call themselves illegitimate for a long time. No one here cares whether your parents were married or not. You could probably get citizenship since you were born in New Zealand,” she adds. “But it would have been even easier if you still had family here.”
    â€œOh?”
    â€œThat would make it a dead cert.”
    â€œActually, I do have some family in New Zealand.”
    â€œFantastic! Give me their details, and we’ll include the information in the application.”
    I mutter something noncommittal.
    I can’t tell her I don’t know where they live. I can’t tell her that they have never wanted to know me, that every time my father tried to make contact, they sent back a reply that always had the same theme.
    Fuck you and the horse you rode in on
.

Chapter 7
    When the weekend arrives, I sleep in and it is late morning by the time I get up, shower, pull on jeans, a shirt, and my most comfortable shoes. I make coffee and toast with Marmite. The first time I tried the stuff, I slathered it on thick like Nutella and it made me gag. Ben laughed until he fell off his chair. Now I dab it delicately in dainty dots like a Pissarro.
    Outside in the bright sun Michael and Polly are chasing each other around the house. They stop to wag their tails at me and then take off again, giggling happily.
    I love to walk. I don’t care whether I walk the busy streets of a city or the alleyways of old stone villages, shady forest paths, or wild and lonely beaches. It’s the act of placing your steps one after another, letting your eyes see whatever the world has to offer, your ears hear the sound of the birds or the buzz of foreign-sounding voices, and your nostrils smell the earth or the food cooking in some back street café.
    I head down the road and turn onto a path through a forest. I could be in another world. The trees are tall and their foliage is dense and green and lush, full of hidden birds who twitter, honk, ring, screech, cry, and sing. A jogger jogs past, panting, sweat glowing on his pink skin, feet slapping the leafy carpet as he thrusts himself onward. A man walking his terrier greets me with a polite nod. The dog sniffs my leg and passes on.
    When I emerge from the trees, ahead lies the city, glinting in myriad shades of black, white, gray, and green. The jagged shapes of buildings rise up from streets that are neither boulevards nor alleys but somewhere in between. Every building is adifferent height and shape, and every street emerges on an angle.
    I walk down a steep hill and arrive at the top of Cuba Street. I pass art galleries and boutiques of handcrafted clothing, a New-Age gift shop, a fish shop selling dozens of varieties of fish and shellfish, a coffee roaster. To my left and right are cafés of all types; rich ones, poor ones, Italian, Malaysian, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Turkish, French.
    Young girls strut past in laddered tights and short-skirted dresses alongside boys with pants falling off their behinds. A middle-aged woman sits at a table on the pavement drinking coffee and reading a book. A couple walks by carrying bags of shopping and arguing over where to stop for lunch. I count three street performers—an Asian boy playing violin, a hippy with a guitar, and a Maori couple singing to a boom box. “How bizarre” he sings in a beautiful tenor while she warbles the chorus and taps her tambourine.
    I collect a baguette from a French deli and a fillet of local fish,
hapuka
, I am