Tram, ferry, bus—all the shaky way home they are worrying because Pat says she felt very little, no dilation (‘At your cervix Madame, you’ll be dilated,’ had been Melior’s joke), no knitting needle, no puncture, only something in there, an instrument, a certain amount of pressure but no pain, and then an injection of some fluid and a smell of chlorine. Has anything happened, or have they been tricked out of fifty pounds? But as they get ready for bed Pat reports that the bleeding has started. She settles down beside him padded with towels.
‘And all are false that taste not just like mine.’ So much the poet Donne claims for his tears of true love, and so much we claim for the scene which follows. Accept no imitations (there are some). This is the real story. As you will see we have gone to the only available source for the truth. So here is Takapuna beach empty at perhaps 2 a.m. and here is Curl Skidmore carrying a soaked towel and a bowl of blood. Could we just check on that Curl.
It was a bowl of blood?
It was an old po lent me for the occasion by Nathan Stockman. He used it for friars balsam. For inhalations. He suffered from catarrh. It was horribly brown stained with balsam ….
So we see Curl Skidmore in his pyjamas and dressing gown carrying a large ornate brown-stained chipped china bowl full …. Was it full?
I don’t remember. Half full perhaps. There was a lot of blood.
Down to the sea. Why would that be when across the yard in the outhouse there was a lavatory?
There was no light in the lavatory and we shared it with Nathan and Felice. I was afraid of splashing it about.
So Curl Skidmore carries the bowl across the lawn, down the steps under the tamarisk feathers, over the sand and down to the shallows. It is one of those nights with high-flying spaced-out clouds and a big moon and when he looks up the moon appears to be racing through static fleeces which it lights up as it goes. He is full of some unresolved and swelling emotion, part fear, part horror, part guilt.
Look here, aren’t you laying it on?
Is that not what you felt?
I was prone to melodrama.
So you didn’t, as reported, feel a sense of sin?
How do we know what we feel? We find words for what we think we feel and that puts a limit on it. Perhaps falsifies ….
Thank you for that reminder. But you will see we haven’t yet got the blood into the water. We have you in pyjamas and dressing gown and we have the blood in the stained china jerry and we have the moon travelling light up there and we have you feeling—something. What was it?
All you’ve said and more. Love, Guilt, Ecstasy, Fear—anything you like. It was a big moment in my life. I was a father-to-be for the first time and now I was a father-not-to-be, and in the bowl was the child-not-to-be of Curl and Pat. I tipped the blood into the sea and I thought of the German momma and the Anglo-Saxon Kiwi father and the Tuhoe forebears and the de Thierry forebears and even the godamn dark Celts—it was a powerful mix I was throwing away. And up there was the moon and out there was Rangitoto. I was afraid.
Afraid of what?
That the gods might punish I suppose.
And did Pat feel ….
Pat was a practical girl. She said, ‘My Tuhoe forebears practised infanticide. So did yours probably.’
So now you have rolled your pyjamas up to the knees and you are barefoot in the shallows. You are tipping the bowl of blood into the sea. You think of Macbeth and the multitudinous seas incarnadine. In one of those flash floods of moonlight when the clouds are travelling fast you see the dark stain in the water, you see it spreading, you watch it fade. There is no other witness ….
There was one.
Someone else was there?
Hiroshima, mon ami.
Ah, the little dog. Rosh.
He sometimes slipped his chain at night and went roaming. He wanted me to throw a stick. I wasn’t in the mood for it. He jumped up and pulled at the tassel on my dressing gown. I whacked him on the nose and he ran off whimpering. It was the only time I ever hit him. I called him but he wouldn’t come back ….
So the bowl is empty. There’s still the towel. It’s soaked through with blood. You try to rinse it and wring it out in the shallows but it’s hopelessly sodden and in the end you simply swing it and throw it as far as you can. The tide is on its way out and will take it out to sea. Back in the bedroom Pat reports she thinks the flow is easing. She pads herself some more and you settle down on towels to sleep.
But the flow wasn’t easing. In the morning the towels were soaked through, the mattress was sodden, Pat was pale, whether with fright or loss of blood. Curl was paler without loss of any blood at all but in the matter of pallor he had a head start. He was quick on his feet however, and he panted up the steep drive and through the early morning streets to the phone box and had an ambulance there in—well, however long it took. Pat was driven to Devonport in time to cross on an early vehicular crossing and she was already anaesthetised and being spooned out on a table in a theatre of National Women’s Hospital before the tide which had carried away the dream that was to be called Siegfried or Sieglinde had returned uncarnadined.
She was none the worse for it. She was fit as a flea—a box of birds. The doctor’s reassurances made Curl feel he could breathe freely and he silently put up with what followed about not getting girls pregnant if you didn’t intend to marry them and not taking advantage of a girl’s racial origins and what a beautiful girl she was anyway, there weren’t many pakeha girls could hold a candle to her ….
(1984)
Albert Wendt, ‘Exam Failure Praying’
Make the prayer, my father tell me last night at our aiga lotu, so I make the prayer and say to God our Father, you look after us tonight and so on. I am good at the prayers because, since I was a tiny boy, my father he get me and my brothers and my sisters and my cousins for to learn how to make the prayers. He also get us for to read from the Holy Book until now I am sixteen years old and am the expert in the reading of the Book. My father he always tell us that the prayer is always a help to us for to pass our exams in school. He instructs us for to pray before every exam, so from primer one at our Sapepe school I pray and up through the standards and up to form four at the Catholic high school, St Joseph’s. My father he don’t like the Roman Church but he arrange for me to go schooling there because I don’t get good enough marks at form two for to go into a government high school. He really want me for to go to Samoa College where all the clever students go, but I fail and it is the first time I disgrace my father and my aiga. This time I commit the second disgrace. Last month I sit the form four exam and even with all my prayers I still fail it and now I am too afraid for to tell my father and my aiga. Last night I was going for to tell him but I do not get enough courage from God for to do it. The form four exam is very important, because if you do not pass it you are not allowed into form five and so on. All day today I spend in our plantation and pretend for to work. I am so afraid and lost for what to do. I am a disgrace. My father he spend all his money and life trying for to get me through school and here I am a failure. My father he tell us that in Samoa if you do not have a good education you go nowhere and get no job or even go to New Zealand to earn much money. My father he want me for to be government scholarship student and go to New Zealand and become a lawyer. It is the desire of every father in Samoa for their sons to do this. In my aiga only my cousin Uili he is able to go to New Zealand on the scholarship but he only return as a plumber with the palagi wife who soon get sick of the village life and go back home with their two children. I am the oldest so my father expect me for to pass everything and be the good example to the young ones. But here I am the failure. Perhaps I shall go and hang myself like that other boy in Salamumu I read about in the Samoa Times. Perhaps I shall go and drink poison weed-killer like that other boy in Vaivase who I read about too. But there is still hope in the prayers. I shall keep praying to God for to enter into my father’s heart and make him forgive me when I tell him about my failure.
If our loving God He does that for me, I will try for to pass the entering exam into Malua Theological College and study for to be a pastor like my Uncle Samani, who is very loved and respected by his village, Savaia. Samani he never been to high school but he still pass Malua College so with the help of God and my humble prayers to Him I too can pass and become a man of God. If I become that I am sure my father and aiga they will all love me because being a man of God is more worthy that becoming a lawyer. Tonight at our aiga lotu I hope for to receive enough courage from our Loving Father for to tell my father and aiga about my failure and the bad disgrace I have again brought to them. If I do not get the courage I do not know what I am going to do.
(1986)
Memory and Desire
Ian Wedde, ‘Beautiful Golden Girl of the Sixties’
Beautiful
golden girl of the Sixties
I remember your mouth
under the Pacific stars
I remember your delicate pale breast
in some dark old car backseat
the salt beachparty flavour of you in sandy tussock
I remember you stumble-drunk in an alley
& made clumsy by desire
in your very best dress
& the sound of summer after-work traffic on the hill
where you shared my narrow bed
when the night-scented datura lilies
began to breathe into the room
your thighs pale as lilies
their evening nectar
& how could you forget when
we managed it in the toilet
of the old clang-bang all-night Limited from Wellington
to Auckland, must’ve been dead of night
near frosty Taumarunui
oh ho beautiful golden girl of the Sixties
or the time at dawn in a narrow bunk
on the all-night ferryboat from Christchurch
to Wellington, & the tealady
never spilt a drop
Once on the top platform
of a slide in the childrens’ playground
at birdsong dusk in Coromandel
in summer & someone nearby yelled out
‘There’s a time & place for everything!’
—quite right! And
I remember the elevator
of the hotel St George in Beirut
both of us crazy from separation at gunpoint
& that night parked in fresh pinegroves
above the city, a patrol with torches & machineguns
& us stark naked & covered with blood
from your nose that I’d knocked in fright
& I couldn’t find my glasses
obvious we weren’t spies
we were just investigating each other
hey beautiful golden girl of the Sixties
something we did also in hotpools & in cool rivers
& in baths & in showers & in the sea
in grass (often)
up in a tree (pohutukawa)
in sand
on floors, carpets, chairs, tables
in kitchens, dining rooms, living-rooms, lounges, bathrooms
and in very many bedrooms
filled with woodsmoke & mosquitoes & the sound
of the sea or the sound
of city traffic or of wind, or opening wide windows
to the stars, the clouds
and in tents & combies &
hotel & motel rooms & in cheap spermy motorcamps
with the smells of last summer’s crayfish dinner
round the cookhouse, piddle under the pines
oh oh beautiful golden girl of the Sixties
poor blanket student cot, green nikau palm arbour
car backseat, cool heaven of wide whitesheeted bed
Sri-Lankan resthouse, sexy Swiss featherbed
Tunisian bandit pinewood, dim cheap Damascus hotel
sad dark South London, sodden sheets in Denpasar
Otago winter quilts
maybe mostly the wide cool beds
where we lay heads together
talking when it was quiet
straight, drunk, stoned, stopped, speeding, tripped
sad, happy, tired, daytime, night, morning, hot, cold
fucking & tasting, your huge flavours & groan
our hands & mouths, your bubble saliva, my come
weary & gay, your smell, the bitter fuck of rage
in silence, with laughter, to music, meanwhile-conversation
‘that was great’—‘that was terrible’—‘again’—‘later’—
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 104