I hold the plump globe we have just bought at Experilab. We sit on our couch, four of us shoved together, peering at the scrap of land we are about to move to. Everyone is very quiet. Even my toddler, Adam, has stopped squirming for a moment, and seems to be frowning at the globe like the rest of us.
"It's very...far, isn't it?" K says. My heart sinks. The slither of New Zealand is exactly on the opposite end of the world, surrounded by almost half of the world's ocean - a piece of flotsam on the rim of the huge Pacific.
"No wonder people say it's isolated," I mutter. "It's literally on the brink of nowhere."
We turn the globe all the way back to SA, point to Cape Town, and tell our children that this is their home. South Africa, the familiar triangle at the foot of a continent.
That triangle of land has been my home for the past 35 years. All the people I've ever known, family, friends, teachers, colleagues, all memories bundled into one geometric shape. And now we are about to leave it behind for a country 20 000 miles away, 20 hours away as an airoplane flies.
Adam and Isobella are somehow aware that this is not a ball for playing with. We gingerly set it up on our side table, and to our surprise, they don't touch it.
It takes us a few days to get used to the location of New Zealand. The maps we previously looked at were in books - flat and feasible. Seeing the two oceans - normally sliced in half at both edges of the page - together shows the true picture - a whole lot of water, and a snatch of land.
I keep telling myself that we are young, that this is a good move, and that there's no turning back. Our application to emigrate went in eight months ago; we're just waiting for the outcome.
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