Concrete Box
There was a lot of coming and going on the street that year, so I didn’t really notice the new neighbours at first.
Before they bought the house, I’d gone over to the open home. Mia came along, holding my hand. The real estate agent had led us down the hallway and pointed out an old photo of the house from a century back, when the rest of our valley was a mess of cleared hills and grey dirt. I picked Mia up to see, awkward on my belly. A board creaked under my weight as we found our way through the rooms. The place needed work – even I could see that. But I stood for ages in the massive master bedroom with its fireplace, sun pouring in the huge windows. The want must have practically steamed off me.
It was six or seven months later, when summer had been and gone, that I ended up walking behind the couple who had bought the house. I had a chubby baby rather than a belly by then. Joey was asleep in the buggy. Beside us, Bear trotted on his lead post-poo, tail raised in a flag of victory, legs and snout wet from where I’d let him off to scamper about the park, scatter birds to the sky.
I’d left Mia at home. It was cold, and she had the beginning of a cough. I’d made sure everything was turned off in the kitchen and she was curled up on the sofa in front of a cartoon.
The new neighbours walked ahead of me: the husband in jeans and a collared shirt; the wife in exercise leggings, with her hair cut middle-aged short. Earlier, I’d seen their two teenage boys shoot down the street on their mountain bikes, making jumps of the speed bumps. They looked like the full family unit, everything in place.
I dropped back, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. But just as Joey, Bear and I turned onto our street, Mia bobbed outside to look for us. She appeared as the neighbours were entering their driveway, opposite our place.
I stopped short. They saw her and turned, crossing the street. Mia stood barefoot in the cold, alone on the dark footpath, coughing in her too-small Wiggles dressing gown. I watched as she shook her head and the woman crouched next to her, taking her hand. I knew how it could look.
Bear pulled forward on the lead.
I started moving again, fast, but trying to appear unhurried. When Mia caught sight of us she pointed and waved, swinging her arm as though we really had been gone all day. Bear was whacking his tail against my leg and making the low chesty growl that came before a bout of barking. I was practically jogging then, jolting the buggy over the judder bar, jerking Joey’s head, rushing to reach Mia. Then I was saying Hello, nice to meet you – I’m Rosa, this is Mia – sorry, sorry, got to go, the dog, the baby, thank you, thank you . . . and bundling us all towards our flat door. Bear strained after them, tongue out. He pulled so hard I banged the buggy against the narrow doorframe, fully waking Joey, who promptly began to cry.
Inside, I tried to ignore the crying. I left Joey strapped in with the hope he’d fall back to sleep. I dried Bear’s legs and paws and fed him. I turned on another episode of Adventure Time for Mia, taking a moment to kiss her curls and get socks on her feet – Bear would be up there on the sofa with her soon enough as hot water bottle. Then I pushed the buggy to the doorway of the kitchen so Joey could see me while I made dinner. We would manage. The three – no, four – of us. We were all good.
Our neighbour Leon, from the flat right at the back of our block, once pointed out that you could tell the order the houses on the street were built by where the sun arrived first and left last. Our leaky concrete box of five flats was clearly the last to be built. My garden was a pot of basil on the windowsill for the few months we got sun. But sharing a quiet street made us a community of sorts. Those with lawns and lawn mowers had an arrangement taking turns to tidy the narrow strip of grass that ran up either side of the street. This now included the new neighbours.
The comment reached me second- or third-hand, passed on by one of the other dog owners, a woman with a small fenced lawn and a border collie she went out running with. I didn’t know her name. She probably didn’t know mine either. She appeared by her letterbox one morning as I set off on the school run, and she crossed the road, asking if I had a moment for a quick chat.
I stopped, telling her I couldn’t stay long.
She leaned down to extend the back of her hand to Bear, saying, “Good boy, no jumping up, that’s right, who’s a cute boy.” Then she stepped back out of Bear’s reach and turned her attention to me. She’d left her own dog inside.
“There’s a bit of a street conversation going on,” she said. Beside me, Mia stared up at her, eyes wide.
“Sorry, it’s a bit awkward.” The woman might have been blushing. We were all looking at her now, waiting, Bear sitting in the hope a display of good behaviour would bring reward. “It’s about the dog poo that sometimes gets left on the grass out here.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. Yeah?”
“Umm, well, it’s unpleasant when it gets in people’s lawn mowers – or on someone’s running shoes or someone’s bike tyre. Buggy tyres too, I imagine?” She smiled. “Anyway, they thought it would be good for us all to be reminded. I wanted to make sure someone had told you. That’s all.”
I nodded stiffly and thanked her, excusing us and saying I needed to get Mia to school on time.
There was that recent time I got the bag wrong and ended up leaving half the shit squashed into the ground, smeared on my fingers. Even days-old shit might smell fresh again if it got cut open during a Saturday lawn-mowing session. It could make a person gag, I guess.
I took extra care to pick up Bear’s leavings after that, putting them in the wheelie bin on the porch crowded in with our shoes. By the beginning of each week, the bin was heaving with the weight of Joey’s nappies, the recycling bin full of tins and glass jars. It was early solids stage, and Joey rejected most of what I fed him, snapping his head away from the spoon or expelling the stuff with his tongue, finger painting orange mush across his face and chest. Mia laughed at the sight of him at dinner time, her gloriously gross little brother, which helped me laugh too.
*
Sometimes my walks back after school drop-off were the best part of my day – everyone fed, dressed, temporarily content, nothing urgent I had to do. Bear saved me from the temptation of going into the supermarket on the way back, to pick up something nice we couldn’t afford. Anyway, that early in the morning I wasn’t keen on meeting people I used to know.
I sometimes ended up lingering with the buggy on the street with Rick, the guy from a couple of houses down with an old wreck of a car parked on the grass verge. Like me, he had a kid at home and a dog, his dog big enough to eat Bear, but gentle. We never arranged anything, just met by chance, both of us appearing on the footpath in search of sun and a change of scene. It was company, though we wouldn’t have said so.
One morning, a week or so after the comment, Rick was already outside his place when I arrived back. We let our dogs off-lead for their nervy dance of greeting, sniffing noses and butts, then settling into a kind of licking, growling wrestling match, Bear being tumbled, his tongue hanging out in submission.
Standing next to me, Rick gestured at the new family’s house. “What do you make of them?”
Rick had heard they’d been looking for something to buy in our area for more than a year, wanted a doer-upper, and thought ours was an up-and-coming neighbourhood.
“Well, they got the doer-upper part right,” I laughed, though I remembered what it had felt like in there.
“They paid nearly a million for the place,” Rick said.
I’d looked it up too.
I sat down on the footpath to soak up what sun I could, though it was chilly even there. I pushed Joey back and forth with my foot, the buggy facing me so I could watch his little face, smiling and gazing, worshipping his mother as only a baby could. He burbled some small song, stretched his hands to the light. I closed my eyes, felt the sun on my face, the moment of rest.
Joey was different from Mia as a baby, quicker to cry, needier at night. It was harder this time, with just me. I felt the exhaustion, a kind of hum running right through me. Mia was becoming a kind of co-parent; she’d headed into school today with bags under her eyes. When had I stopped going into the classroom to kiss her goodbye? I needed to start looking for a new contract, the kind of admin work I was doing before, maybe even go back to study, but exactly how wasn’t clear to me.
I opened my eyes to watch Rick’s attempts to teach his own boy, Will, to ride his rattling red-and-yellow plastic trike. He was running with him and making whooping shouts, persuading Will to propel himself, use his own legs, teasing him about being lazy. You don’t want to be lazy, do you?
Will soon rebelled, abandoned his trike and headed over to stroke the dogs, who had settled into a pile of their own in the sunshine. Rick joined me on the footpath, leaned against the fence.
“Apparently they want to have a little get-together,” he told me after a bit. He jerked his head in the direction of their house.
“Sounds like a decent idea?” I tried to work out something uncertain in Rick’s voice, while making faces at Joey, who was beginning to grow restless. It could be good to see everyone, get beyond the weirdness of passed-on comments.
There were also new tenants in the flat behind ours who didn’t seem to speak much English, and I’d been hesitant – or too absorbed – to knock. “Where would we do it?” Usually, we met in summer, had a barbecue in someone’s driveway, wrapped sausages in bread, cooked damper filled with honey. But it was too cold for that now.
Rick released some vague sound – between well, and ah – making me turn to him. He was using a piece of loose gravel to scribble on the pavement, studying the crude sketch he was making.
“That’s the thing,” he said, still scribbling. “They were thinking just owners.” He rounded his vowels at the word, seemingly in imitation. Posh.
I jerked Joey’s buggy with my foot, startling him, feeling the heat of embarrassment on my face. “What the fuck?”
Rick scratched harder, the stone making a grating sound, cutting a grey line. It was true he and his wife owned their place, but it was tiny, a rundown, dark railway cottage. I knew the mortgage stretched them, that they were counting down the days until twenty hours of subsidised childcare kicked in.
Renters. That was code for all sorts of shit. My father’s whole family had lived around here for forever, before the hills were even cleared and that ‘first’ house built. Before they got priced out. They – we, I – came from here.
“Fucking snobs,” I said.
“Yeah. Damn straight.”
I waited, wanting him to say he wouldn’t go, not if they were going to be like that.
“I’m not sure they’ll actually do it,” he murmured. He called Will back from the curb as a car turned into the street. Joey struggled to get out of his straps, arched his back, began to grizzle.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, and stood, my legs stiff from the cold pavement.
“You could leave Bear with me,” Rick offered. “I can bring him back when we head inside.”
But I was still stung. “Don’t worry. I can take my own SPCA mutt away with me.”
I clipped his lead on, kept it tight as I took the brake off the buggy wheel, pushed it ahead of me.
“Don’t be like that,” Rick called after me, as I walked off. “I didn’t think it should be a secret. That’s all. It’s stupid. I thought you’d laugh.”
But I was soon jerking at my own front door, opening it to the shadows. The new neighbours weren’t even home during the day, but they’d cut the trees back to give their washing line and new vege beds more sun.
I got Joey out of the buggy and walked through to the sofa without turning on the light, sat down and organised myself to give him my breast. Bear leapt up too, and pressed his body in beside us, stretched warm and comforting along my thigh.
There was a southerly turn the next week and Mia’s cough deepened. Her inhaler didn’t seem to help. I had been looking for a winter coat for her at the op shop near her school, but I hadn’t found anything yet. Lots of people in the area had things they could afford to give away, but also lots of people came over from other parts of town to kit out their flats, fit out their kids if they had them. My old friends included. Sometimes those friends suggested meeting up while they were nearby, but not as often since Joey came and Mia and Joey’s dad left, I realised. I probably wasn’t much fun.
By Mia’s third day home sick, we were all exhausted. It was freezing and wet and at some point in the night I ended up with both Mia and Joey in bed with me – and Bear too. Even once it was light, and I’d changed Joey’s heavy overnight nappy, I kept the curtains drawn for warmth. The dehumidifier Dad had bought on one of his rare visits chugged away, but it wasn’t doing much good. The windows were soaked inside as well as out. I tried to read Mia picture books while twiddling Joey’s toes. When Joey grew restless, I propped up the book about the magic bed and kept reading while I fed him again, the tranquilising warmth of milk pulsing between us. Mia nuzzled into my back, her chin on my shoulder to see the pictures, Bear on her feet. For a few luxurious minutes we were enveloped, released. I let myself slip away into a doze, thoughts softening, floating off into fragments of dream, still with Mia attached to me, Joey in a pouch like a baby wallaby, his head furry, all of us flown somewhere else, to a warm sea or bath, a young tiger kneeling to Mia, great wet tongue licking her face.
I woke to Mia nudging my nose with hers, her eyes big and close. I felt her breath.
“Mum?” she said, in what was now a throaty whisper. Joey was sleeping again, still locked to me. I groggily picked up mid-sentence and continued reading.
But that wasn’t what she wanted. “I’m hungry.”
I could do this. I just needed to draw the parts together, gather myself again into the kind of whole, capable adult person who could do things.
I put my finger in the corner of Joey’s mouth, popped him unlatched from my nipple, and slipped out of bed without waking him. Down in the kitchen, I made myself a cup of tea and poured milk over two bowls of Weetbix. I hesitated, but then took the two bowls upstairs, and Mia and I propped ourselves up on the pillows to eat. Bear watched us, head on one side, whiskers and nose twitching.
When Mia coughed, she passed me her bowl and covered her mouth with the back of her hand, a kind of choking, wheezy animal in her chest. I felt sore just hearing her. We needed to get her to a doctor, but it had started raining. I didn’t want to walk into town with them in the wet. I didn’t have cash on hand for the bus, and our bus cards were out. I left my bowl on the windowsill for only a moment while I grabbed more tissues, but Bear moved fast, toppling the soggy brown mix, making Mia scream and push him away, four paws padding milk and soaked Weetbix mush all over the bed. Joey woke, rolling onto his tummy and wriggling over to rub his hands about in the mess, then shoving his knuckles in his mouth, while Mia coughed and cried and said, “Sorry, sorry, it was Bear. I didn’t mean to. Stop it, Joey! Make him stop, Mum!” I tried to grab Bear, but all our noise only made him bark too, bouncing about on the bed till I was shouting, “Shut up shut up shut up everyone!” which made Mia cry even harder, and Joey join in, and Bear dart further out of my reach, his barking becoming high-pitched and panicky.
I finally managed to catch the dog, flinging myself forward in a kind of rugby tackle. I told Mia to stay where she was. Downstairs, I shoved Bear into the laundry closet and shut the door. It wasn’t like we had a yard. He could bark all he wanted in there for all I cared, though by the time I went upstairs again Mia had switched from blaming Bear to excusing him, saying, “He didn’t mean to, Mummy, it wasn’t his fault. He’s just a dog.” She had Joey on her knee sucking her thumb, and there was a pile of tissues beside her wet with milk she’d tried to clean up and a fresh batch of snot.
I took a breath. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” I said. “I know. It just happened.”
But I was shaking with holding it all in. I would have happily taken that discussion further with any of them on the sunny side of the street.
I moved everyone downstairs and began the clean-up. I put Joey’s dirty nappy in the bin outside. I stripped the bed and left the bundled sheets by the laundry closet. Bear was still barking and scratching at the door. He hadn’t even had his morning pee. At that thought, I got myself together enough to let him out, putting on his collar and lead more roughly than necessary, not ready to look at him, to see the wild stare his eyes took on when he was shut in like that. I put my raincoat on over my pyjamas, which had a distinct milky smell, shoved my feet into my shoes, damp from the day before, and yanked the dog to the door.
There was a man out on the street. I stepped back into the shelter of the doorway, pulling Bear with me and making him sit, as he trembled with anticipation. The man had come from one of the renovated houses and was fitted out in his fluoro wet-weather gear. He seemed to take forever fiddling with his bike before he finally got on it and peddled up the hill and away.
Only then did I take Bear out, and only as far as the verge.
Back inside, I stood at the door watching as Mia petted and comforted the dog, scratching him behind his ears, burying her hot, pink-nosed, tear-puffed face in his fur, while he rubbed his damp doggy smell all over her.
At which point, my mother also entered the scene. Her text arrived with a ping.
Howz it going? You ok in this weather?
Did U hear about Katie?
I didn’t care about Katie. I hardly even knew her at school. With my mother, it was always someone’s new job or wedding or baby. I replied,
Mia sick.
Oh no. Bad?
Not too bad.
I could cm this afternoon?
Nah, we’re fine. Your busy.
U sure?
I wasn’t sure I could cope with having to look after my mother as well. Still, I hesitated before answering.
Yep no worries.
OK. Kiss kids for me. Tickle J. C u soon. Xxx
I felt horribly lonely, though, when her words stopped pinging in, and I was left with just the sound of the rain, already a waterfall outside the living-room window from the broken guttering upstairs, and Mia started up her hollow coughing again. I picked up my phone.
Maybe tomorrow. If your not working?
Sure. I can come before work.
Sat so starting late. C U in the morning. Xxx
The day seemed to last forever. So much rain. At least Mia was easy – she just lay on the sofa, dropping in and out of sleep. Bear’s afternoon walk was a dash outside for long enough to do his business, which I dutifully bagged and put in the bin. By the time I got Mia fed – with canned peaches for dessert to ensure she would eat – and fed Joey to sleep and lowered him into his cot, then made my own bed with the spare sheets, I was spent. But still lonely. I thought of calling the kids’ dad, but I didn’t want to talk to him and I didn’t want to ask for his help. If he wanted to fuck off elsewhere, he could stay there. I thought of calling a friend. I scrolled instead. The usual smiling families and partying pics. I’d stopped posting months ago.
Mia coughed all night – once so much I thought she would vomit – and by midnight I had them all back in my bed again. At 2am all three of us cried for a bit, Bear curling into Mia even tighter, as though he knew. Lying in the dark, I got out my phone and looked up whooping cough, watched videos with the volume down of kids wheezing, their coughs sharp and high and, well, whooping. Mia’s cough wasn’t like that. When the Plunket nurse had visited after Joey was born, she glanced around the flat as she weighed him and filled in the neat columns in his Well Child book. She had told me it wasn’t healthy for a child’s lungs to live in a damp environment – I needed to open the windows morning and night, let the fresh air in. She repeated the four-hourly mantra – Eat, Play, Sleep – as though parenting was as simple as that. I might want to consider moving, she said.
It was still raining. The waterfall from the roof sluiced endlessly past our windows, like a jug being emptied outside in the darkness. Bear raised his head and looked at me in the grey-blue light of my phone. He’d hardly had a walk these past two days. “Okay, pup,” I whispered, putting my hand on his soft head. “Sleep time. I’ll try too.”
It seemed barely a minute later that Joey’s fingers on my face woke me to the half-light of morning. Often that was the hardest part – that there was hardly a moment when it stopped. No reset button. My whole body felt heavy. But I couldn’t resist the pull of Joey’s beam, his astonished delight at once again opening his eyes and finding me right there. Feeding him gave us all an excuse to lie in bed a little longer. Soon though, it was necessary to drag myself up, move onto getting us all dressed and vaguely decent.
Mum walked straight in without bothering to knock. “Good morning, you three,” she said with deliberate brightness, bringing with her the smell of warm bread from the bakery by Mia’s school, coming over to hug me, deftly kneeing Bear out of the way.
She looked around the living room, where there was one sheet draped over the rack, another over the door to the stairs. I saw the effort it cost her not to say anything. Instead, she went over to the sofa, took Joey on her knee, kissed his feet like apples, and talked quietly to Mia, running her fingers through her granddaughter’s tangled hair, putting her hand to her forehead.
“She’s hot.”
I nodded. We would really have to get to the doctor today – go to After Hours now it was Saturday. I leaned on the doorway watching them all, feeling none of the irritation I sometimes felt at my mother, just wishing I could be her little girl again too, even just for an hour.
“You sit down,” she said, as if hearing me. Could it really be possible she loved me with the intensity I loved Mia and Joey? “I’ll make us both a cup of tea.”
As she stood, moving Joey from her lap, I could see she was tired too, dark smudges under her eyes – we were all prone to those. Her hair was up in a messy ponytail, grey at the roots and due for a dye job. But I sat down with gratitude.
By the time she brought over the two cups of tea, she had a plan.
“You need to get out of here for a bit.”
She would go with us to After Hours, then we could head over to her place and spend the day there, where it was warm and dry. I could borrow her bus card.
“What about Bear?”
“The damn dog? He can stay here.” Unsaid for once: Your father should never have given him to you.
It was one of the nicest things he had ever done.
“But really, hon,” she said, “can’t he stay behind? You need the break.”
She even offered to walk him before we set off, giving me instructions to get us all ready while she was out, taking on her head-lunch-lady persona. As a kid, I’d seen her in action at the uni hostel often enough to know when she meant business.
The rain had eased to a drizzle. I forgot to remind her to take a poo bag, and only half noticed when she came back empty-handed.
Leaving Bear with his box of toys – ropes and half-chewed pieces of plastic – we locked the door and drove away.
When Joey and I returned hours later it was almost dark. Mum had sent us home, insisting Mia stay a night with her. The doctor thought Mia had bronchitis. I’d tried to read the woman’s face – she seemed only slightly concerned. She had prescribed rest and plenty of fluids. Mia should be able to get better on her own, she said. If not, bring her back.
As soon as we turned onto our street I could hear Bear barking, an alarmed, high-pitched sound that he surely couldn’t have kept up the whole time we were gone. At some point during the day, I had thought of contacting Rick, but I had never hidden that spare key outside as I’d always meant to. Since the ‘owners’ conversation, he’d tried to explain about them having a particular stake in the street long-term. But by then I was too worried about Mia to worry about it. He seemed more fixated on putting it right than I was.
When I unlocked the door there was the inevitable smell of shit and pee, and Bear running at us, barking but not letting me grab him to get his lead on, telling me again, again, again, that we had left him, locked him up, his eyes pulled back, his eyeballs huge, the whites round.
I turned the lights on, put down my bag, and made myself ignore him and the barking till he calmed down. Sitting Joey on his bottom and giving him a pumpkin sucky to keep him still, I went in search of the pee and shit, getting down on my hands and knees and putting my nose to the ground. I already knew it would be hidden somewhere behind the sofa.
It was after that – after pouring water and baking soda on the dark patch of pee while Bear continued to bark furiously right in my face, after scraping the shit from the carpet, after leaving Mia with my mother because she wasn’t sure I could cope, after having to call their father and feel his irritation flooding down the phone, after listening to Mia’s narrow chest, the aching pain of what I had been told was little more than a common chest cold – that I found the note.
It must have been slipped under the door. That event in itself would have driven Bear wild for at least an hour. It was a miracle he hadn’t eaten the thing.
Dear Neighbour, it began. They didn’t want to intrude, but my dog sounded distressed. It had been barking all day. One of their boys would be happy to walk it sometimes if that helped. They wondered if everything was okay at home.
I stood in my living room, the letter in my hand, Bear barking, barking, barking, so that I couldn’t think. We weren’t meant to have pets. Mum had taken Bear the one time the landlord had organised a flat inspection since we got him.
I passed the note to Joey, who screwed it up, tearing it, putting it in his pink mouth.
When I said ‘walk’ to Bear, he was suddenly calm and all attention. He came quietly to have his lead clipped on. “It’s okay, boy,” I said. I buried my face in his soft, smelly, doggy fur in the way Mia always did.
Then I fetched the front carrier from the laundry closet and strapped Joey on. He was getting heavier and I didn’t use the carrier so much anymore, but I felt the need to be free, to have the use of both arms. I positioned him facing outwards, like the prow of a ship. On the front porch, I paused beside the bin. Monday was rubbish day. I imagined groping about, my fingers moving through clumps of pasta and rotting vegetables, cans, sour plastic milk bottles I’d neglected to separate out for recycling. There would be plenty of full shit bags in there, squishy as cookie dough. There were also nappies heavy with piss made from the milk of my body. I could fill a shopping bag with the stuff. Or better still, a box – scratch a couple of windows and a door on it and deliver it direct to their mailbox. But I didn’t.
The rain had stopped at last. When I stepped outside, it was so still I could hear the TV in the flat behind ours, the voice of a woman making some demand in a language I didn’t understand. I crossed the road to the neighbours’ lawn and loitered there, half hoping Bear would do his worst, though really he’d already done that on our carpet. He did, after a bit of nosing about, raise his leg against the front tyre of their car.
We headed on into the night then, the three of us setting off up and out of the valley. Up further, the pines formed dark, creaturely shapes against the sky, fragments of clouds whistling above. I didn’t know what would happen – what I was capable of – but I didn’t care. I was thankful for the explosion of stars. I thought of Mia, felt as though it were me lying in bed, my mother looking over me, my sleeping chest rising and falling, oxygen finding its way into my lungs.
When we reached the park, I attached the torch to Bear’s collar and set him free, Joey clapping as our dog galloped about on the black, dewy grass, becoming a light hurtling recklessly through the darkness – flying in space.
It was me that howled at the moon.
Taken with kind permission from the short story collection All Her Lives by Ingrid Horrocks (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35), available in bookstores nationwide. It won the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn fiction prize at the 2026 Ockham NZ book awards on May 13. Fiction convenor of judges Craig Cliff commented, “Across nine elegant, probing stories that range from the late eighteenth century to the unsettled present, from rural Wairarapa to icy Norwegian ports and rave culture Berlin, All Her Lives explores the shifting expectations and constraints of womanhood. Sparks from one story and one generation ignite elsewhere in the book, illustrating how material conditions, freedoms and ideologies can be shaped, for better or worse, by our forebears. Emotionally intelligent and historically alert, All Her Lives is an outrageously good addition to the top shelf of New Zealand fiction.”
