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My boyfriend (now husband) and I drove away from home at 18 years old in the silver Lancer his mum gave us. I had spent my last few years at high school disengaged, barely turning up. I did attend my final English exam though – a symbolic gesture to my dream since I was six years old: to be a writer.

Tim and I drove away, and the unease in my belly increased and by the time we arrived at his cousin’s house where we would stop for the night the acidic feeling was rising to my chest. We went to a pharmacy and bought a bottle of Mylanta. Late that night we went eeling. Tim and his cousins packed the tilly lanterns and gaffs. We dressed in heavy jerseys, beanies and shorts. It wasn’t the first time Tim had brought me to Kaikōura. The first time he took me to a black-sand beach and we ate fresh crayfish sandwiches looking out at the sea. He took me by his marae, Takahanga, and out to the urupā where his dead family members were buried, and he would be too one day, he said. Below was the village of Oaro, and the Kaikoura coastline. The small trees around the cemetery grew whimsically, like oversized bonsais.

Being back in Kaikōura on our way to live up north, in Ahuriri, where I would take a job at Hawkes Bay Seafoods and Tim would play rugby for the Hawkes Bay Magpies, was both magic and frightening.

That night we walked up the Conway River with the gaffs and the tilly lanterns and Tim was telling me how his Uncle Tono used to bring him and his cousins out eeling in this river. I watched Tim gaff an eel, and pull it, writhing violently, onto the rocks, a boyish smile on his face.

Eight years later we were walking up the same river, with our six-year-old son, my father on the banks holding our twoyear- old daughter. Tim told our son how his uncle Tono had brought him here. Then he taught our boy to eel.

Several years later, having worked a number of jobs I knew could never sustain my spirit, I sat down and started to write. There were many people I wanted to write for (mother, father, cousins, brother, sisters, aunties, uncles and ancestors), but one person whose attention I wanted to hold the most: my husband’s. To do that I needed to go for magic. For longing; and for fear.