Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  I’m not sure how Mum made the jump from glaring at cops to burning down the church but I knew, in my heart, the fate that awaited me. I was going to be sent back to Samoa. (I knew this because that was the standing parental threat that hung over all of us kids as we grew up. Sometimes, in the middle of an Auckland winter, this threat seemed like a very good thing.) But instead of packing my suitcase and booking the next flight, my mum just said, ‘Your Aunty Fiona is coming to pick you up.’ Then she went to work. I was stunned: no hiding, no nothing. Not even my dad could be bothered giving me a hiding, because he had to go to work too.

  I had heard of my Aunty Fiona, but never met her. All I knew was that she was my mum’s youngest sister and she was married to an arms dealer. Seriously, the dude she was married to was a straight-up, legit arms dealer, with most of his clients being in Eastern Europe and Saudi Arabia. Well, he was legit until a few years later when suddenly he wasn’t, and then he disappeared and we don’t talk about him now.

  Anyway, the arms business must have been doing really well back then because instead of coming to Te Atatu like she’d vowed she never would, a few weeks later, at the start of the school term, Aunty Fiona sent a driver in a limo to pick me up. I can still remember to this very day both my parents and my little sister waving me goodbye after I put my meagre belongings in the limo and it drove off. The last thing I would see of Te Atatu for years (except for at some weekends and during the school holidays) was Purity farewelling me by flashing her one-finger-raised gang sign.

  The limo drove for ages, but I still had no idea where we were going. Then it drove into Auckland’s old-school rich suburbs and then down a long driveway, past the swimming pool and the tennis court, then right up to the front door of this huge mansion. I stepped out of the car and stared up at the stately house and gasped at the sheer wonder of it all. The theme tune to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air started running through my head and I even began doing the running man. As the driver started to walk to the door, carrying what looked like an envelope full of money, I said to him, ‘Yo Holmes, smell ya later!’ He looked at me like I was a dick and told me to get back in the car — we were only here so he could drop something off. Then he went inside the mansion.

  As I climbed back in the car something made me look up and that was when I had my first vision of Joanna. A beautiful palagi girl, my age, was looking down at me from inside the house that I later found out belonged to her father, the principal of the school I was being sent to. Our eyes met. Time slowed. And in that slow time, I knew that one day, somehow, she would be mine. Then she turned away from the window and was gone.

  The driver came back and we left the house and Joanna behind. This time we drove south, along the motorway, then into the working-class suburbs. I started to panic. Was I being sent to live with my rough cousins in Papatoetoe where they would pick on me mercilessly? But then we drove through these suburbs and found our way to a new place, a haven full of flash buildings. This, it turned out, was to be my home for the next few years: Bling’s College.

  So I was dropped off at the front of Bling’s College and at that time I was as miserable as a sad sack whose sack parents had just died. I just stood there feeling like the worst person in the world because my parents didn’t want me any more, and neither apparently did my Aunty Fiona who had just dumped me at a boarding school.

  The first chance I got, once they had shown me to my dormitory, where the rich white kids all looked suspiciously at me, I rang my mum at her cleaning job. And begged her to give me another chance. But she couldn’t really talk because she was busy cleaning the cardiac ward but she promised it was only for a short time, until I bucked my ideas up. She said she had wanted to send me back to Samoa but her sister convinced her to give me another chance and that she’d pay for it. And so there I was at Bling’s College.

  Comforted by my mother’s promise that it wouldn’t be for long, I thought I may as well make the best of it. I mean, Mum had said it would only be until I bucked my ideas up, right? Little did I know that she was lying in that way that parents lie when they know the truth is too hard. This was my future, whether I wanted it or not.

  At first the answer was ‘not’ as I would struggle with the school’s strict rules and regime. But once I stopped fighting the system and learned to turn it to my advantage, compared to life at home it was like a walk in the park. No longer did I have to worry about my little sister sleepwalking and trying to stab me with a screwdriver. Instead I had to negotiate a whole new world, with whole new people I’d never really experienced before. Previously and for a very short time, Ghost had been my only palagi mate, so it took me a while to realise that palagi were people too — except weirder and more uptight.

  Luckily, this was where rugby came to my aid. When you’re a Samoan kid from Te Atatu, nothing gets you accepted into the world of a rich-kid private school better than the ability to toss a rugby ball round. Also, all the other brown people at the school were there to play rugby so that was where we could get together to talk about how weird the palagi were.

  But I still had to get used to dealing with whole roomfuls of palagi at a time, so I figured the best way to do this was by making friends. Luckily, making friends is something I do really easily, so it was only a matter of time before I realised some of the palagi kids I boarded with were some of the best people you could meet. Sure, some of the behaviour they displayed in the dorm was a bit odd — the spankings and the constant masturbation after the lights went out — but I put that down to them also having parents who didn’t want to live with them.

  Eventually, I started to make friends in my house. People like Spozzo, Crunch, Coxy, Mouse, Bong and Grunter were good people. They got to go home for the weekends and invited me along when their parents picked them up in their Range Rovers. One time I accepted Bong’s invitation to hang with his family one weekend. It was his mother’s birthday and it was an absolute eye-opener. I took my cleanest lavalava along, thinking we would have lots of chores to do, in helping with the preparations, but instead all the work was outsourced, to caterers and staff who did everything. Bong and I just stood around and watched his parents and their friends running around the garden being all excited and talkative, and disappearing off to the toilets a lot. Bong explained to me later that his parents were on something called ecstasy and something called Charlie.

  I’m not saying my time at Bling’s was easier. I know for a fact it wasn’t because I went out of my way to make it hard. I felt alienated a lot of the time — alienated from my culture; alienated from Te Atatu; and really alienated from my parents who had dumped me there, except on the weekends when I went home.

  I dealt with my alienation in three ways: through rugby; by alienating myself even more by being surly and uncommunicative; and by deliberately poking with a stick the ones I thought were alienating me. I formed the Bling’s College Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in order to fight the system. This actually turned out to be mainly people from the rugby team complaining about training and the food in the dining hall and suchlike. Then the Fijians tried to stage a coup and I had to kick them out. In order to boost membership, I then opened the door to another oppressed minority at Bling’s: the gingers. But all they wanted to do was fight everyone all the time so I disbanded the group. No, the BCAACP was not a resounding success.

  Part of my inner rage was that although I was at Bling’s College the ‘scholarship’ my Aunty Fiona paid the school, every term, in unmarked bills for ‘tax purposes’, did not run to me being able to join in on the exciting range of cultural activities the school offered — like trekking through the Himalayan foothills or photographing the pyramids in Egypt or exploring the Amazon rainforest. So, while the rest of my dorm would be away skiing the Swiss Alps, I festered alone at the school and had to pass the time by persuading the gardening staff that they were oppressed and that they should go on strike. None of this endeared me to M
r Trimble, the school principal.

  Also not endearing me to Mr Trimble was the fact that I was endearing myself to Joanna, his daughter — the girl in the window. I started seeing her on the sidelines during my rugby matches so, just for her, I would throw in a special dance move whenever I celebrated a try (and I scored heaps of tries at school, so there was a lot of dancing). Then, one time, after I’d just gone straight from a moonwalk into a pop-and-lock, I saw her smile at me. Then, another time, when I was in Year 12, after I’d scored the winning try against our cross-town rivals Auckland Glamour and celebrated with a Destiny’s Child tribute, at the aftermatch function, when it got dark, she took me by the hand and led me out to the middle of the field where she had her way with me on the halfway line. Then, another time, a few weeks later, she told me she was pregnant and was keeping the baby. (Love you, son! See you at Christmas, I promise!) None of any of this was endearing me to Mr Trimble which is probably why he told me if I came back for Year 13 he would kill me with his bare hands.

  But before I left Bling’s College under a cloud — especially when the essentially illegal nature of Aunty Fiona’s ‘scholarship donations’ came to light — I had one piece of unfinished business to attend to: the end-of-season trip to Hastings Boys’ High School, where we would challenge them for the Moascar Cup, which is made out of part of a WW1 German airplane and is the symbol of high-school rugby supremacy in New Zealand.

  And, as it would turn out, it was also my road back into Ghost’s life.

  The Bay

  by Ghost

  Life turns on moments. That’s something I’ve managed to learn over the years. Meeting Machete, that was a moment. When we fell out for the first time, that was also a moment. Later, years on, when we really fell out, that was definitely a moment. And when, after the raft incident, we got back to the freaky commune in Glenfield to find that in the wake of the police raid Barry had declared himself God and had decided that the whole world was out to get him, that was also a moment. Faced with the possibility that we were now members of an apocalyptic cult, even my parents realised it was time to reconsider the Glenfield option. So, naturally, they decided to leave that commune, buy a house truck and drive to another commune in The Bay. It seemed only logical to them at the time.

  New Zealand has hundreds, probably thousands, of bays. From Tom Bowling Bay in the north to Flour Cask Bay in the south, there are heaps and heaps of bays, many of them without names. But when you live in Hawke’s Bay there is only one bay and it is called The Bay and it is where you live — The Bay.

  To say it was weird, moving from a commune in Glenfield to a commune in The Bay, is probably entirely unnecessary, but the fact remains that it was weird, deeply weird. Whereas the Glenfield commune was more like a gated community with people walking round in the nude, the one in The Bay was more like a farm in the middle of nowhere with feral people walking round in the nude. The one thing they had in common, for me, was that no child should ever see their parents walking round in the nude.

  When I arrived at the commune in The Bay, out near Waimarama Beach, there was a dispute over my future education. My parents and all the freaky nude people on the commune felt that I should stay on the commune and be educated in the ways of Gaia; while the government, via the Ministry of Education, felt I should go to an actual high school to learn actual things.

  As it turned out, the matter was decided when another government department, the police, raided the farm and busted the largest hydroponic dope-growing facility on the East Coast. My parents, because they were new to the commune and had therefore not been under surveillance for three years, were the only ones not arrested and/or put into state care. For a while there it was just the three of us — and the chickens and the goats — on the commune, but then everything was seized under the Proceeds of Crime Act 1991 and we were forced to pack up our meagre possessions into the house truck and to hit the road.

  Like I say, life turns on the simplest of moments but still, to this very day, I cannot help but be blown away by the thought that if the house truck hadn’t blown that head gasket and shat oil all over Heretaunga Street in Hastings, I would never have had a rugby career. But the fact remains that on pretty much the flattest, straightest street in New Zealand, the house truck died a horrible, smelly, oily-smoky death and we were trapped in Hastings with no money.

  The ‘no money’ thing meant that my parents had to find jobs. Which they did. And then, after the house truck spontaneously combusted one night, we had to find a house to live in. Which we did. And seeing we were now in a house, in Hastings, for the foreseeable future, I had to find a school. Which is how I ended up at Hastings Boys’ High School (HBHS).

  While HBHS was a far from perfect school — in that it was all hormonally enraged boys, without a girl in sight during educational hours — it did have several things going for it, as far as I was concerned. For starters, they taught you actual things like art and maths and not just how to milk a goat or grow hydroponic weed. It also brought a sense of something approaching normality into my life, being in an environment where everyone wore clothes most of the time. But, best of all, HBHS was a rugby school with a proud rugby tradition.

  I’d tried to keep my rugby skills developing, as much as I could, during my time on the commune near Waimarama. You would often find me out on the field behind the hydroponic dope shed, with a chicken under my arm, trying to dodge the goats as I ran the length of the field, before diving over in the corner by the composting toilets. To this day I think my ability to fend off tacklers much larger than I am stems from keeping Odin, the alpha-male goat, from ramming me in the nuts.

  In terms of the rugby, my progress at HBHS was pretty straightforward. By my second year there I was good enough and big enough to make the First XV and there I stayed for the duration of my secondary education. Yeah, the rugby side of things looked after themselves for the next few years.

  Of much more interest to me, growing up in Hastings, was that with my parents finally untethered from a freaky cult, the sense of something close to normality that followed allowed me to indulge in a brand-new passion: girls. Girls, I learnt, were just the best thing on the planet. For starters, they were generally way more interesting than boys and then, on top of that, they smelled much nicer. So I threw myself willingly into this whole new world. At one stage I had four girlfriends on the go at the same time — two at Hastings Girls’ High; one at Karamu High; and the rich, troubled girl who taught me things I will never unlearn, out at Iona, in Havelock North. I spent a lot of time cycling from one to the other so it was just lucky that most of Hawke’s Bay is flat. And of course they all eventually found out about each other but, to me, that just added to the game.

  Did I ever think about Machete during this time? Of course not. I was far too busy with the whole ‘girls’ thing. Did I ever have some magical feeling that our paths would cross again? Going back to the ‘girls’ thing, then ‘no’. Sure, it would probably be better for the book if I did, but the truth is I was far too obsessed with girls to think about just about anything else — even rugby — on some days. And certainly the last place and time I ever expected to see Machete again was when we were defending the Moascar Cup against a bunch of flash rich boys from the big city.

  Reunited

  (and it feels so good)

  [The following verbatim recollection session was recorded at a café in the picturesque French village of Beynac-et-Cazenac, Aquitaine.]

  MACHETE: More red wine?

  GHOST: Machete, it’s 10 in the morning.

  M: Not in New Zealand.

  G: We have training later on.

  M: Why didn’t you mention that when we had the first glass of wine?

  G: You didn’t give me a chance. I was having my croissant and you put the glass in front of me. I think you’re developing an alcohol problem.

  M: Relax, uce. You know what they say — when in Fra
nce . . .

  G: I’m very glad you seem to love life in France.

  M: What I love about the French is that everything is so beautiful. And their fries. I really love their fries and the rest of their food. And their red wine.

  G: And their language, and their culture, and the people.

  M: What’s not to love? And it’s all so well expressed through the fries. It’s no wonder, seeing that they invented them.

  G: I think the Belgians claim that they did.

  M: And then named them after the French? Why would they do that? Surely if something as awesome as the French fry was invented in Belgium then they’d be called Belgian fries. Which, I have to say, doesn’t sound anywhere near as delicious as the French fry. What are we talking about today?

  G: Apparently a lot of people have been wondering how we came back into contact with each other after having been estranged as teenagers.

  M: By a lot of people, you mean the writer dudes and Warren the editor, right?

  G: I guess. So how shall we explain what happened?

  M: What’s the most serious thing you can think of right now, at this moment?

  G: Right now? Dying a lonely and unfulfilled life, I guess.

  M: Okay, less serious than that, but still like really serious.

  G: Global warming?

  M: Okay, less serious than that.

  G: Okay, you’re clearly driving towards something here, so what point, exactly, are you trying to get me to make for you?

  M: Just think of something serious but not too serious.

  G: Just say what you’re trying to say before I choke you with this half-eaten croissant.

  M: I’m trying to think of something that’s a big deal; that can make or break lives and can seem like the most important thing in the world at the time.