Short story: The Dart, by Miro Bilbrough

Newsroom

24-05-2025

A lacework of crosses and dashes notched the counter person's fingers and hands as I watched these elegant inky gloves tap in my details and issue me a window emergency exit-row seat, never mind that I am short. Her tatau, she explained, was a malu pattern signifying shelter, protection and connection to her ancestors. Cultural respect! she summed up, statuesque in her green-and-black koru print uniform, to which I silently added, Female agency! And that is how I found myself two thirds of the way down the plane reading the special safety card on how to disarm the emergency door.
Studying the multitude of arrows while making a note of my abbreviated memory for instructions and directions, I turned to the human dart who had recently lowered himself into the seat next to me, smiled out of the side of his face, and otherwise remained tacit. The doubling of his clothes was compelling. A black kerchief knotted pirate style under a cap, black tights with a sheeny damask of scales under neatly rolled-up cargo trousers, a further layering of dark cloth on top. The whole ensemble precisely curated.
Excuse me but we're in this together, this disarming the door in an event of an emergency thing, I said by way of introduction. He darted his eyes at me and away. His smile disappeared all other primary features, enveloped and garlanded them. His cheek was gaunt and crosshatched with acne, young.
Of course, he replied amiably and reached for his own disarm the door card.
A silent perusing but not absorbing ensued. Is it just me or is this hard to understand? I offered.
I could feel my neighbour's humour quicken on the other side of the arm rest. His whole body was fleet with it, fleet and elliptical.
Not just you.
These arrows seem to be going in different directions, you know, conflicting.
I thought so too.
So…if I turn the handle to the left and it collapses on me…
The Dart's eyes danced up to mine and back down to his sneakery feet.
…You will be my assistant while I am struggling with the door, I summarised.
Your assistant, he agreed, andlaughed a laugh of no confidence and as we considered the exit. I sensed we might make a good team, just not for disarming doors while our plane fell from the sky.
The door had boiled down the infographics into just two arrows and an illustration of itself falling inward: the Exit Plan for Dummies. Returning to my laminated card, I found the legend 'strong but heavy'.The Dart's pleasure in the slipperiness of language equalled my own as the adjectives merged object and handler into one formidable entity, a Hydra.
13 kilos, I mused, my dog's sixteen and I can lift him.
What sort of dog?
Whippet, brindled.
Mine's an American Pitbull.
My dog's nemesis. Nice.
Strong but Heavy, The Dart concluded.
Over the Sounds, I abandoned the elliptical vision of my neighbour for the blissful tablecloth of islands, isthmuses and water. I soaked these in while the Dart talked about his life as a deep-sea fisherman, and I recounted swimming straight off the road at Tahunanui. He didn't like ocean swimming, he said, not given what he knew about the creatures that inhabited the depths; the fish he had encountered, their bodies half munched off. The cooling islands pulled at my attention. I drank them in in gulped drafts.
Fresh water was a different story. When people came to stay, he took them to Siberian Flats on the Wangapeka. He did a brief imitation of the uninitiated emerging from the freezing waters. One detail ceded another. His family had just been given notice on their fourth rental when his father was diagnosed with cancer. The Dart resigned from life on the boats. At this I relinquished the serpentine forms out the window in favour of his own.
How long did you nurse him?
The Dart made a self-correcting face. Assistant nurse, actually. To my mother. She was awesome. Two years. He was good with it though.
I wondered how that might be possible. The air in front of me thickened with impressions, with intimations of a dead man, with cliché and archetype, before becoming just air again.
He taught me so much.
I shot a look at the Dart as he touched the pounamu at his neck. I had fallen into the rhythm of his scuttled looks and glances. It was, I found, more than enough. My own father had died two years earlier and although I had only attended him on that bed-bound journey for a matter of weeks, I knew that the Dart and I had experienced the grace and beneficence of a father who dies well.
I feel like I'm in pause—The Dart left the word unstoppered as he fumbled before the large something that lay behind it, the fish from submarine depths that would not be landed.
I've never stuck at any job since school. I'm afraid maybe I don't know how to commit.
Maybe you get bored?
I do.
It was time to tell him my name.
I'm Van, returned The Dart.
Good name. Gender neutral with a touch of swagger.
I like it.
A stealth-ambition crept up on me on behalf of a young man who had left school early for mystery and the sea, who knew boredom, impatience, kindness, and death and who was, amongst other things, a serial renter like me. Don't settle, I said lightly to disguise the urgency that had taken hold at the fugitive view of possibility unfolding like that recent cloth of land and sea. Whatever you do, make sure it is so challenging you might feel—whatever—just don't settle.
Yeah, said Van softly. I had entered the zone of zealotry and futility, of the old trying to pass inscrutable shit on to the young. I had no idea if he knew what the hell I was talking about or even if I did.
The air hostess appeared at the front of the plane to announce our descent, and minutes later again to announce that we had landed.
Those of you that have experienced any disturbance during the flight may disembark first, she intoned and, addressing the rest, please let those who have felt disturbed go ahead.
Van and I exchanged incredulous looks. The flight had been smooth. What hell new euphemism was this?
My ears experienced some disturbance, I said, inclining toward him.
My legs feel a bit disturbed, he fired back, flexing his knees.
The plane sat in suspense as a large woman lumbered up the aisle. Then another, a bundled form that emerged from behind us with a lot of bags and out past the airhostess. The number of bags made you feel suspicious about the self-diagnosis. On cue, the rest of us were on our feet.
I parted with Van in Arrivals where my father's best friend Des was nowhere to be seen. Two years on, he and I were going to scatter half my father's ashes in the Rangitikei where the blue-grey cliffs that forms its banks is made of a clay called papa. In a hurry to catch a bus to his cousin's wedding, Van stayed with me to scout for my meet until I reluctantly urged him on his way.
I passed Van as he doubled back in, and I exited for Pick Ups and Drops Offs where Des was waiting. I wasn't sure what Van had come back for, but we smiled at each other, full face this time. The slender thread of fate that connected us was being yanked one last time, but who knew? Seeing him in long shot in the Arrivals and Departures Hall I thought he really was as svelte as a dart, Van, but for now less directional.
Asked what was on her mind when she wrote her story, the author replied, 'I was thinking, as I routinely do, about how to capture what I once heard the writer Sebastian Barry describe as the tincture of a person. His Irish accent made the descriptor indelible, and I knew immediately what he was talking about. How to get such a thing is another matter. It is basically impossible and that is why I write. It was extra impossible in The Dart's case. We had been seated side-by-side, so our glancing encounter was conducted in profile. But then, peripheral vision is a gift.
'I was thinking that the counter woman was maybe playing her own playful diversity game, never mind the orthodoxies of the seating plan. I struggled with her arresting beauty and the way her personal authority outstripped her station: how to suggest those things on the page without heading for homily. Reading a late draft, my friend Janine recognised her instantly from her own transits through Nelson airport. Queenly, was the word she used to describe her.'