The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

awaiting your recognition

  back then, that

  trashy muzack

  14/8/81

  (1984)

  Fiona Kidman, from True Stars

  The meetings of the Weyville branch of the Labour Party were held in the Presbyterian church hall. A trestle table was set out at the front. The electorate committee sat along the table facing the members. Of late, there had been more committee than audience.

  But this evening, when Rose Kendall arrived, there were at least twenty cars outside, and inside the hall fifty or so people had gathered. She was on the point of being late and tried to walk slowly as if it didn’t matter. She had put on make-up and changed into an off-the-rack emerald green silk shirt with an Eloise label, and a grey linen skirt with boxer pleats. She smiled at everybody and nobody in particular.

  Harry Ryan, the secretary, was already seated behind the table while the chairman, Matt Decker, walked up and down alongside it, doing a head count among the rows.

  Rose pushed her way through a crowd round the kitchen door to deposit her plate of supper sandwiches. Toni was amongst the knot of women setting out cups and food, applying herself to the wrapping of bread around tinned asparagus spears. When Rose caught sight of her small pointed face bent over her task, she thought, absurdly it seemed at that moment, how pretty she was. Her eyes, turned away from Rose now, were blue-ish green and wide-spaced, her dark hair cropped short. Her throat rose out of a crisp cotton blouse; she seemed to work intensely. Rose longed for Toni to look up and speak first. The women were laughing about something.

  After a moment, she said, ‘You didn’t tell me you were coming tonight.’

  ‘I only decided at the last moment.’ Toni sounded defensive.

  ‘What’s the joke?’

  ‘How many men does it take to wallpaper a room?’ asked Toni quickly, lightening up.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Six if you slice them thinly.’ The women laughed, as if for the first time, small hooting noises.

  Matt had come up behind them. ‘That’s all right. How many women does it take to paint a ceiling?’

  Toni groaned. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Three. One to hold the ladder and two to form a support group.’

  While they pretended uneasily that they had stopped laughing, Rose moved away towards Matt, looking for a quiet word. As a rule he appreciated this. She knew it made him feel privy to the news from Wellington, even more because he was deputy editor of the local paper. She and Matt had had many serious and important discussions about nothing in these interludes while the party faithful were gathering. He was a tall bulky man, fleshy and handsome in his way, with thick curly grey hair. He had had his disappointments, which included a continual failure to become the paper’s editor. His critics suggested that this was hardly surprising given his political stance. They accused him of naïvety; this was the country, boy. While he wore his second ranking like a martyr’s badge of honour, others more unkindly promoted the notion that it was his wife’s family ties with the newspaper’s proprietor that kept him in a job at all. A play he once wrote for television had been accepted, only to have the producer change his mind at the last moment; more recently he had been passed over for selection as candidate for the Weyville seat in favour of Kit. It had soured him for a time, especially when Kit surprised everyone and got into Parliament. Now, it seemed, he was easygoing and affable and cooked couscous for dinner parties when his wife let him. Kit told Rose that she should watch him, because sooner or later he would take his feelings out on the world. Yet he exuded decency and discretion, even a slight jaunty courage. She could not believe that he would hurt her or Kit.

  ‘Looking for somebody?’ Matt asked.

  ‘You,’ she said, irritated.

  ‘Oh, well, we’re about to get started.’ He nodded towards the seats.

  Dismissed, she took a place in the front row. Something felt wrong. She looked over towards Harry, who was avoiding her eye. The last time she had seen him he had been standing outside welfare, his rumpled hair still showing the remains of a smart cut. He had blinked uncertainly, as if he couldn’t believe it was him standing there; and she hadn’t been able to either. She had started towards him in the street, and then, looking at his face with its expression of misery, thought better of it. Besides, she didn’t know what to say. She could see it wasn’t her place to say how sorry she was that he was unemployed. Now he sat turning his thick gold wedding band over and over.

  She wished that she hadn’t come. But Kit had told her to go to the meetings whenever she could make them. It was a way of pressing the flesh, a visible reminder that all of them in the Party movement had got this Government together between them, that they had united once with common purpose.

  A group of them made the decision that they would have a new Government as they sat in a roadway in 1981.

  A cold day gleaming with a distant rim of sunlight behind dense grey cumulus. Twenty-two of them, men and women, sat across the roadway north into Weyville, blocking the highway before a football game was due to start. There had been orders out not to bring children. The Springboks were due to start playing football against the local team in half an hour. Spectators headed towards the grounds; so far they had been deflected away from the group of protesters. There were two routes in. The group had decided to block only one entrance in order to make a show of strength together, there being no hope at all, with their numbers, of covering both roads. They were wearing motorcycle crash helmets. They had all heard about Molesworth Street in Wellington, when the police waded into the crowd with batons, breaking open the skulls of women in the front row of the demonstration.

  ‘At least there were a lot of them,’ someone in the group said nervously. Somebody else pointed out the disadvantage of this, the way they were pressed back into the crowd behind, so they couldn’t escape—there was nowhere to run.

  Rose and Kit sat side by side. For a moment Rose wanted to giggle, they looked so silly dressed up like this, as if this were a game in itself. The group caught one another’s eyes, grinned; she was not the only person thinking that. But her stomach rumbled and she remembered what Kit had said, don’t have too much breakfast, just in case you end up hurt, needing an anaesthetic or something. Someone passed a flask of hot coffee. Maybe nothing would happen. She reached for Kit’s hand, his fingers closed around hers. His scarf was wrapped around his beard. At the same time that he held her hand with his free one he rubbed Nick Newbone’s back as if he were a kid; she felt sorry for Nick, he looked so scared. They were all scared in different ways, but Nick was terrified, and although she didn’t like him much it seemed to her that he was much braver because he had come anyway, anticipating the fear before it happened. Hortense, his thin energetic wife, sat beside him but she didn’t seem to notice how scared he was.

  Alongside them, Toni pulled her coat around her and shivered. ‘Will Lyle be very angry?’ Rose asked her. It would be a long time before Lyle seemed to accept Toni’s political activity. Today he had asked her not to come. He was going to the game.

  Toni shrugged and gazed up the road, as if seeking him out. Matt turned and smiled at her, brushed her face. Rose sometimes wondered about them. Matt, and Harry and his new girlfriend Belinda, and Morris Applebloom, had been carrying a banner between them at the front. It read GO HOME BOKS. At the moment it drooped as they waited for action.

  Henare Muru and his mother Wiki handed out sweets. The boiled lollies dissolved down the backs of their throats as they sucked. Rose didn’t know Wiki before the tour began, now she saw her as a friend. She had been to several of their meetings. Her presence formed a bridge with four gang members who had turned up.

  ‘What about a song?’ someone called. ‘Give us a chant.’

  ‘Amandla-a-a,’ cried Toni, as if driven.

  ‘Amandl-a-a, Ngawhetu, Amandla Amandla,’ they responded, full throat.

  In the distance a car approached travelling fast. It was a big dark car and it did not lo
ok as if it was going to stop.

  ‘Hold fast,’ screamed Toni. Her face was contorted, her eyes shining, her mouth pulled back against her teeth.

  Still no police.

  The car ground to a halt just in front of them, brakes squealing. A man sat at the wheel, dressed up in a suit. A large woman wearing an enormous pink and grey hat leapt out on the passenger’s side.

  ‘We’re going to a wedding, not the bloody game. What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘One, two, three, four. We don’t want your racist tour.’

  ‘We’re not going to the bloody game, didn’t you hear us?’

  ‘You would if you bloody could. If you didn’t have a bloody wedding to go to.’ Toni was beside herself.

  ‘Toni, you don’t know that,’ Matt said. He was the only person who could say it to her. Mind you, they all knew she was right.

  The man in the car got out.

  ‘Keep back, this mob’ll do you, Kev,’ screamed the woman. ‘Just see if they dare lay hands on a woman.’

  Rose called out, ‘Mrs Hawker, we’re not going to hurt you.’

  The woman’s eyes singled her out. ‘You. A teacher. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Who’s wedding is it?’ Rose asked.

  ‘Mind your own bloody business.’ Mrs Hawker was close to tears, her heavy powdered cheeks quivering.

  ‘Is it Yvonne? Is it your brother’s girl?’

  The hat trembled as she heaved herself across the road towards them, hands up like a boxer’s.

  ‘It’s okay, Mrs Hawker, you can go through,’ Kit called.

  The group parted and Mrs Hawker hesitated, then stumped back to the car. It started up and the car drove through, Mrs Hawker restored to the side of her husband, both of them looking straight ahead, thanking no one.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ Matt asked. ‘You didn’t ask us.’

  ‘Are you here to stop a wedding or a tour?’ Kit responded.

  And the next moment the rugby supporters had broken ranks up ahead of them near the ground and were streaming back towards them, seeing the interference with the Hawkers as a blow against them, uncertain of what had happened. ‘We want the tour, we want the tour.’ Their chants lifted skywards.

  There were more than a hundred in the approaching group; as they closed in bottles began to fly. One of the supporters held a softball bat like a weapon, menacing them.

  ‘Kill, kill, kill the motherfuckers.’ He lifted the bat above his head. A full can of beer sailed past Rose’s head and landed with a dull thunk beside her.

  ‘Where the fuck’s the police?’ muttered Morris. A banker, he had not lived here for long. He was not the kind of person they had expected to turn out with them; they held him in special awe and respect, the courage of it, laying his job on the line like this. He was married to Sarah who had stayed home today because of the children (not just hers and Morris’s—several of the group had left their children with her today); she made the banners for them too. Morris’s face shone with one of his usual close shaves, but there was a film of sweat and fear on his skin now.

  Then the police emerged from behind the garden fence where they had been hidden all the time, almost too late to stop the onslaught, but not quite.

  The supporters were turned back, marched away up the road under police escort. ‘Are they going to arrest the bloke with the bat?’ someone asked.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Kit said and he was right, there were no arrests, only talk between the police and a knot of supporters.

  Still nothing happened. Nearly time for the game to begin. ‘I think we’re a fizzer,’ Harry said. ‘What’s the point, we should have tried to get on to the field.’

  ‘There’s not enough of us.’

  ‘Some people should have come up from the city.’

  In a way that was what they were all thinking, though they understood the need for orchestrated chaos in the cities. And the barbed wire was so thick around the game nobody in their right mind would have believed they could get through today unless there were hundreds of them. Later in the tour there would be crowds of protesters from throughout the country at all the games, but it was still too early for the danger to have sunk in. It was like a dream unfolding.

  A great cheer erupted in the grounds.

  ‘They’ve begun,’ somebody said glumly. ‘Nobody even noticed we were here.’

  ‘We’re a bunch of wets,’ Toni announced. She was strung right out, tension and frustration bringing her close to despair. ‘They’ll say we didn’t care.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Morris sharply. ‘We do, and we’re here, that’s the point.’

  At that moment a squad of police dressed in riot gear moved down the road towards them, shields up, batons at the ready, cantering along in a half-run with rhythmical, even tread. There was an almost light-hearted note in that steady beat. That was something they would remember.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ said Kit. On either side of her, Rose felt him and Morris leaning towards her, protecting her, but at the same time afraid, holding their hands up to protect themselves too. Kit stood up and was knocked down by the first policeman. She jumped to her feet, throwing herself forward to protect him, taking the full force of the baton on her side.

  *

  Afterwards, lying dazed by the roadside, holding each other, trying to stem the flow of blood from wounds that sprouted above their eyes and over their ears, several of the men holding themselves in the groin where they had been kicked, somebody, it might have been her, or Toni, or Wiki Muru coming round from being knocked out, or maybe just all of them, said it wouldn’t happen again, that they were going to do something, change the Government for a start, if it took them the rest of their lives. They weren’t going to sit down and wait for any more to happen to them, not just like that.

  But you got hit either way.

  (1990)

  David Eggleton, ‘Painting Mount Taranaki’

  Mainly I was led to them, the casinos of aluminium,

  by the gift of eyebright, whose hollow core contained

  a vision of the coast and on it the cone shape,

  like a pile of drenched wheat, of Mount Taranaki.

  In a world covered in silica and

  chucked-up alkathene, fibrolite, aluminium

  it is just a peak surrounded on three sides by water.

  For the Soviets, holding down a floor

  of the Los Angeles Hilton is a forbidden

  progression of the open society.

  So, to the French, whose own symbol is an ageing Brigitte Bardot,

  the mountain, just the same,

  could be a logo for the butter they’ve no-noed,

  dismissing a country’s living tannery with a sniff:

  the hides of rain-slicked cows only acceptable

  in the corner of a page by Frank Sargeson.

  Corrupt innocence, a young brain, prodded Techtones,

  featureless Features, a shot Texan burgerbar,

  the list is endless but not one story seems complete

  on its own, even tying up the numbered dots proves

  less efficient than you might at first think

  and, anyway, this absurd reductionist format is one

  which can only begin to hint at the complex

  underlying reality.

  Gossamer threads in air, truck belting down the drive,

  irresistible wind urging on the silver mist threads

  over the split, cheap graves and into green Norfolk pines.

  During the Vietnam War Against Imperialist Aggression

  I was schooled in classrooms near Mangere International Airport

  as venerable millennium temples blew into

  millions of fragments in lovely orange and black

  negatives—in a variation on a theme

  a close study of the status of stainless, chrome, plastic

  superheroes revealed wild discrepancies.

  Over the various ey
e-witness accounts

  whirred the blades of gunships trailing and corpses

  surfed by on an extravaganza of black Coke.

  Later, as I put down another batch of jungle juice,

  I began to learn that Man cannot live

  on home-baked bread and granola alone.

  So much up, I moved closer under the mountain

  until I stood inside a convention of car dealers

  in an Inglewood hotel.

  Young and hopelessly flippant, I felt

  I should be in an environment where it was easier

  to make a buck and people were more understanding

  about ‘in’ references to tribal totems.

  I swan-dived through the sex shops of Wellington,

  reaching towards vibrators in a glass case, only

  to catch onto a picnic papercup then an electrified fence

  as it threw the other way

  on an elliptical approach towards the majestic

  funereal mountain that figures at the violet centre

  of the windscreen first dotted before being laced

  by the rain caught in the drum-machine motion of Jupiter,

  spearing the side of a punga with a flaming asteroid,

  the cosmos being full of Hau-hau vistas.

  In the snowstorm black-visored Samurai rode on

  hornet-yellow Yamahas past a chipped, white,

  enamel basin on a window ledge,

  a plant trained to crawl up that same window,

  the richly decayed caskets of autowreckers’ yards,

  the tea kiosks of tourist stops

  and up the winter volcano to the extinct lip.

  From ash to dove to puce to brandy

  the undersea turbines smashed the tints

  of the glassy waves into sloppy froth and stiff whites.

  A litany of rejects from dye vats,

  the unwanted energy of their beauty decorated the feet

  of the giant for whom the many Victorian explorers

  also left souvenirs.

  A string tie, cedarwood fan, lace-edged cambric,

  saddlestrap, sherry glass, wristwatch, nightgown, velvet ribbon.

  In the centre of ferns they were given back