Lit
Page 4
“Up the lot of you,” he said. Then he walked away. Silent. Padding out of the pub.
For a long time nobody spoke at the table. Then David and Warren began to relax. It was all over now.
“Well,” George sighed. He grinned at Peter.
“The black bastard,” Peter swore.
“Hey . . .” George began.
“The black bastard,” Peter swore again. “He’ll never win.”
The words punched into George’s mind. It wasn’t a question of winning or losing. It wasn’t a matter of white against black. It wasn’t a question of taking sides. Or was it? And if it was, which side was the winner and which side was the loser?
“Shut up, Peter,” George growled. “Shut up. And buy us another round, brother. Forget what’s happened. For God’s sake.”
Outside, the night grew dark. Don at Parliament, a tent had been pitched on the home ground. A banner flapped on a wooden fence: You Stole My Land Now Leave My Soul. From within the tent came the sound of a guitar, singing and laughter. The sounds did not seem aggressive at all. We’re protesting for human rights.
George stood watching from the shadows. He had been there over twenty minutes. Then he walked to the tent, past a placard bearing an upraised hand, and opened the flap. The light from a tilley lamp blazed upon him. He’ll never win, the black bastard, Peter had sworn. The guitar stopped. The people in the tent looked at him. Curious. Wary. In the corner was Api. George tried to smile.
“Api, aren’t I good enough for your mates,” he said.
‘Tent on the Home Ground’ was first published in Witi Ihimaera’s collection The New Net Goes Fishing (Heinemann, 1977).
Witi Ihimaera is of Māori descent and is regarded as one of New Zealand’s leading writers. He was the first Māori writer to have a book of short stories and a novel published in the 1970s, and ‘Tent on the Home Ground’ is one of his earliest published stories. Since then he has written a number of important and award winning books including The Whale Rider, Bulibasha King of the Gypsies and Māori Boy. His latest book is Navigating the Stars. He lives in Auckland.
The Queen’s chain
Anahera Gildea
My mother was born in the summer of ’53, as the Queen took her first steps on our soil. Nan cursed and swore cos she never got to see nothin’ – not even from the hospital where the patients crowded at the windows to watch the landaulette pass by. But she named her daughter Elizabeth anyway; they all did.
That’s how the women do it in our line – I got my name, Te Ao Haere, cos I was born straight into the ’75 land march, well, close as intention can get you. My mother liked to think she supported her people with each push and each bear-down that forced me out.
As soon as she was allowed, she squashed the whole world down into a single vinyl suitcase and slid us both into the car like she was trying to get us back in the womb.
‘Back to the land!’ she shouted. ‘Back to our roots!’ And she left, swearing at the city behind us.
Our house was built in the ‘50s by my grandfather before the rest of the street got built up round it. The land came through from Nan, from the Raukawa whānau. It started where my feet hit the kerb and finished up at the creek down the back. On the day my mother and I arrived to move in, the lawn was newly mowed and there were rough broom marks on the path from the wire gate to the doorsteps. Blades of grass blew onto and off the concrete as we walked towards Nan at the door. Overgrown shrubs and foreign grasses ate away at the foot of every wall and crawled up the back fence.
When I was old enough to keep my gumboots on, it got to be my job to help her drag the weeds to the pile down the back. She would talk to me about each of the flowers as we passed like they were her other children. There was red roses and hot-pink dahlias, jonquils and tulips, lilies and irises, and falling-over ranunculuses. She reckoned the smell of a flower in the last minutes of its life was the best, most amazing thing.
‘When you were born, you were sick.’ When my mother gardened, all the pretty stuff would let her thinking out.
‘We stayed in the hospital, just you and me, and you had to get fed from a tube.’
She never looked at me when she was telling, she just went back into herself and remembered out loud.
‘I would line up beside the other women in a little room on a chair facing the wall. We had these new electric pumps with long rubber tentacles on them that you pulled out and attached to your breasts.’ She would show this bit by waving her arms around and I would laugh, kind of faking it.
‘Everyone would just stare at the wall, and no one would talk directly with each other cos women were more modest then.’
Whenever she paused to clear the space around a plant, I would just wait and then she’d go on again like she’d never stopped.
‘The sound of the milk hitting the plastic catch bottle and the chug of the machine was like strange music in that quiet room. Suck chug spray. Suck chug spray. I would collect as many bottles as I could fill, and we would all keep looking at that wall while we put the lids on, taking off the tentacles and mopping up our spills.’
Then the bad moment would come, and she would get sad and confess, ‘I didn’t breastfeed you.’
‘I know, it’s all good, Mum. No one cares,’ I would whisper but she never heard me. You can’t hear the dead, I reckon.
‘But I did my best,’ she would finish.
Eventually the view from the road became of lilies curving up around the path and shooting heavenward, like it was them that held up the walls, the stamens yearning forward, inviting the touch that got coloured fingermarks pasted across clothes.
‘Never a dull moment round here, Te Ao,’ my mother would say, with the air of someone who could cultivate an intricate work of art out of seeds and dirt. ‘Women born under the auspices of great happenings can handle anything. We can rise and walk about in our lot, wear it like every dress we ever bought that looked great but that we had no occasion for.’
And at the end of every day, as if to signal to the world she was off, she would pick a few stems in payment, using scissors to clip the flowers at just the right length. She would snip off the stamens and let their mustard dust fall down around her feet.
Inside the house, in a long glass cylinder half-filled with murky water, she would display the fresh ones, folding the old bunch in her hands of steel and taking them back down to the pile.
Crises weren’t really her forté, my mother. It was the cycle of life she understood – growing things and then letting the dying ones go on the pile, draped in sunlight, with every edge, every lip, every leaf, curling in on itself.
Photo Credit: Sadie Coe
‘The Queen’s chain’ was most recently published in A Vase and a Vast Sea (Escalator Press, 2020).
Anahera Gildea (Ngāti Tukorehe) is an essayist, poet, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, and her first poetry book was published by Seraph Press in 2016. She is currently undertaking doctoral research focusing on Māori literature at Victoria University.
The Lake and the River
Elsie Locke
Garth held the boat steady for Tina to get in. She hesitated before stepping through the shallow water.
“Aren’t you taking the transistor?” she said.
“No. I never do, on the lake,” he replied.
Tina Maxwell pouted. She hardly ever went anywhere without pop music drumming in her ears, and she’d seen the transistor lying idle on the window ledge of the farmhouse where she’d come with her parents to spend the day. Garth was her cousin and they were both the same age, seventeen, but she didn’t know him very well. His family had moved down from the north only recently to take up this farm. Garth was a strange one, Mrs Maxwell said; he didn’t have much to say, but he was good with boats and he’d take her sailing.
“How dismal. There’ll be nothing to listen to,” said Tina.
“You can listen to the lake,” said Garth.
“Wait and see. Or rather, wait and listen,” was all he said.
The yacht was small and open, with room for only two, and the striped red-and-white sail looked too big for its body but performed well. The breeze blowing offshore took them quickly out onto the wide water in the bright sunshine. Garth wasn’t talking. When Tina spoke to him he answered her questions only briefly. She had nothing to do but watch the shore receding, the shape of the trees round the house, and backdrop of the hills and gullies dark with bush. It was really quite beautiful. Tina loved to sketch: she must memorise the scene so that she could draw it tomorrow…
. . . and then she realised she was not only looking, she was listening; listening to the wind in the sails, the lake water chuckling past, two seagulls crying plaintively overhead.
A delighted smile puckered her face, and Garth noticed.
“Were you listening?” he asked.
“Yes, and looking too. Where are you heading?”
“The other side of the lake.”
“All that far! Won’t we be away too long?”
“I’ve got something over there to look at and it won’t keep. If we get into trouble for being late back, don’t worry, I’ll take the flak.”
Before long, the farthest shore became nearer. It was not very inviting; there were no tall trees standing out from the reeds and the flax. When they came ashore the ground was wet and their feet were squelching over marshy grasses. Clumps of rushes were scattered around like islands. Garth looked carefully into each one.
“What are you after?” said Tina.
“I can’t remember which one it was,” he answered.
Suddenly two birds rose noisily into the air and flew ahead, quite low, flashing their blue wings and trailing their long legs.
“Pūkeko!” cried Tina.
“Silly birds,” said Garth. “They should know better than to give the show away.”
He parted the next clump of rushes to reveal a nest shaped like a shallow bowl, and inside it a huddle of chicks clothed in black fuzz that stuck out stiffly, like fine wire, with outsize beaks poking upwards.
“So that’s what they’re like!” exclaimed Garth, all excited. “I hoped they’d be hatched by now.”
He picked up one of the chicks and held it securely in his hand, laughing at its agitated piping.
“Is it all right to do that?” said Tina. “Won’t you scare it to death, or chase its parents away or something?”
“I don’t think so. Did you follow the films about how they saved the black robins on the Chatham Islands? They shifted them all over the place by hand.”
“Yes, but the robins are an endangered species. They had to take risks to save them. Pūkeko aren’t endangered, are they?”
“No more than other birds – or us for that matter. We’re all endangered species, in a way. Go on, hold one.”
Tina’s chick wriggled and piped so shrilly that she nearly dropped it. “Oh, it tickles!” she said happily. “I’ve never held a baby bird like this before!”
“Worth coming to see, wasn’t it?” said Garth.
Carefully they returned the chicks to their nest, squelched back to the shore and pointed the yacht for home.
“Weren’t they cute, those chicks?” said Tina.
“Cute? They’re incredible. When you think of the adult birds, how they stalk about like lords and ladies in their royal blue and crimson, and flicking their tails in that superior way – and this is how they begin, just balls of black fuzz.”
Tina was astonished. The boys she knew never talked like this. They got steamed up about rugby and cricket, pop bands, cars and motorbikes, themselves and each other. Garth was a strange one all right.
She was going to ask what he meant when he said they were all endangered species in a way; but the gleam of the setting sun on the lake took the question out of her mind. It took longer to sail home because they had to tack against the wind, and navigate through the darkness by the lights of the farmhouse. The evening was warm and there was no possible danger, but when they pushed open the kitchen door, a storm of words broke over their heads: Tina’s mother had just convinced herself that they must have been drowned in the lake.
But it was worth it, Tina told herself when at last she was home in bed, thinking of the lake and remembering the sound of the wind and the water and the seagulls crying overhead, and finding the nest in the rushes.
Next day at school, in her art lesson, she sketched the shoreline of the lake, and then the pūkeko chick in its wiry black fuzz and its outsize beak, nestling in her hand.
It was nearly the end of term and she thought it would be the end of school too; but it wasn’t. All through the summer holidays, in between the beach and the tennis court, she looked for a job. She wanted to be a dress designer, or something else with an artistic side to it. There was nothing. Like so many others, she went back to school to fill in time.
The only lessons Tina took seriously now were in art, where her teacher said she was good, and her painting scenery for the drama presentations. She saw Garth occasionally when her parents had time to drive out to the farm by the lake; but he went to a distant high school, and he wasn’t one of the bunch she spent her spare time with. And the yacht was taken out of the water for the winter, so they didn’t go sailing again.
Because there were no examination goals for students like Tina who would leave school as soon as they had a job to go to, extra subjects were introduced. These included Peace Studies, which didn’t excite Tina at all; it was too much like politics, which was usually rubbished in the Maxwell household. So when Miss Walters was going on and on in class about the effects of H-bombs, Tina switched off her attention. Her father always said it was never going to happen, the big chiefs were too scared of their own skins to let those things go bang. Her mother said they only made them because there was money in armaments and it kept the economies going.
Tina took out her sketch book and turned over the pages, Miss Walters’ voice went rolling over her while she went through the reminders of autumn, winter, spring.
“What’s that thing?” whispered the girl beside her.
“A pūkeko chick,” she answered. And it all came back, the nest, Garth telling her it was all right to pick up the chick and hold it –
And Miss Walters’ voice broke through, saying birds!
“Remember this,” she said. “It isn’t only people we need to think of, it’s the world web of life and the balance of nature. The insects would have the best chance of survival and the birds would have the least, so they’re exposed –”
The horror of it broke over Tina’s consciousness like surf breaking. She put her hand over the sketch, instinctively wanting to protect the helpless chick; then drew it away aware that this was futile. Those little birds, all burned up, stifled or slowly poisoned; and the seagulls overhead, the most exposed of all; the trees and the animals and the people – oh, it was monstrous, that anyone should leave even the slightest chink open, for such a disaster to happen!
Tears pricked at her eyes. Embarrassed, she clutched her sketchbook, muttered, “Excuse me,” and rushed into the grounds and the shelter of a rhododendron bush where she could weep uncontrollably. Now she saw not only the chick but the adult birds flying with their long legs trailing, and heard Garth saying, “We’re all endangered species, in a way.”
What was the use of crying? It was all so hopeless. New Zealand wanted to keep out of the whole thing, being nuclear-free, but if the Northern Hemisphere blew up no place on earth could be isolated. Tina had taken in more of Miss Walters’ information than she thought she had.
The buzzers sounded for morning break. At once the grounds were noisy with students talking, laughing, hassling one another, throwing balls about, taking practice shots at the netball goals. Tina bent her head and stayed where she was, hoping not to be noticed, but a girl slid onto the sea
t beside her.
“Why did you rush out like that?” she said. “What upset you?”
It was Olivia, not a special friend of Tina’s, but a calm sort of girl who never picked on other people or got nasty. Silently, Tina showed her the sketchbook.
“Hey, you sure can draw!” Olivia said admiringly. “What a funny fellow. What is it?”
“A pūkeko chick.”
“Is that right! But I can’t believe you were crying over a pūkeko chick.”
“Yes I was! Him and all the other birds and the animals and the people . . . what Miss Walters said, they could all be lost forever . . . I’ve never really thought about it before.”
“You pushed it all away. Most people do.”
“Dad says not to worry, it will never happen. So does Mum. They say nobody’s so mad as to drop those bombs in earnest.”
“Huh!” said Olivia. “They were mad enough to drop them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bikini and Maralinga –”
“Maralinga, where’s that?”
“Australian desert. They didn’t clear out the Aborigines first.”
“Didn’t they? How horrific!”
“They hushed it up. They don’t tell us what’s really going on, ever.”
“That’s it then,” said Tina. “It’s all hopeless, we can’t do a thing about it. This nuclear-free thing, old Lange thinks it’s great, it’s all right I suppose, but who takes notice of a little country like New Zealand?”
“Is that what your dad says?”
“Yes, why?”
“You quoted him before. I don’t listen to my father. He’s had half his life. We’ve got more to lose than they have.”
“What is in it for us anyway? I can’t see much ahead of me, not even a job. I wouldn’t have come back to this stupid school if I could have found something.”
“You haven’t got that on your own. Me too – but I wasn’t thinking about that. This nuclear thing: if it worries people here enough to get ourselves declared nuclear-free, mustn’t it worry those people still more when they’re near the action, like Europe and Russia and America?”