Cousins

by Patricia Grace

  When the car reached the road you stopped running, watched until it rounded the corner leaving only the surging dust. ‘I’ll be blamed, I’ll be blamed,’ our mother was saying.

  Then, in the distance, there was another disturbance of the dust. ‘Buses, buses, Mama,’ Manny said. The visitors were arriving and you had all been left with the shame. There was nothing left to do but go and tell Keita, and everyone, what had happened.

  ‘What is it, Daughter?’ Wi asked Mama when you arrived at the house. ‘I see she’s not with you.’

  ‘Gone,’ our mother said, weeping and moaning as she told Wi what had happened. Men at the cooking fires were looking across, wondering what had gone wrong.

  You crept into the house with Mama and Wi, a house suddenly quiet, eyes going from Mama to Wi and back again. You listened to our grandfather greeting the dead who belonged to the house and to those who belonged anywhere, then greeting the living before telling what he had to tell. You listened to the silence that followed and to the breaking of that silence as the women began to wail and cry. Our grandmother moaning, beating herself, let the korowai that lay across her knee slide to the floor. You saw Uncle Nonny, who had come from the cooking fires, standing at the door looking shocked at what he saw. ‘Kua tae mai nga pahi,’ he said.

  Buses. The visitors would be getting out of them and waiting to be called in. Mama, beside you, waited, trembling.

  ‘You did this.’ It was Keita standing to accuse Mama. ‘You before, now you again. It was you. You sent our granddaughter away, you and her mother between you. Planned this between you, thinking nothing of our shame. You could have been the honoured one yourself once but you didn’t want that. You wanted that useless husband of yours instead. Now you’ve sent our child away out of spite, and left us with the shame.’

  Keita wailed, clutching her chest as Wi and Aunty Henrietta took her by the elbows to sit her down.

  Who would help Mama?

  Koro Paora rose to his feet and talked about what had happened, about the visitors, who they were, why they’d come, telling everything, to give people time. ‘We don’t want to keep them waiting too long,’ he said. ‘But before we call them we have to decide what we will do, must find our own peace first.’ He sang his peace song.

  After that the house was quiet again, waiting. Mama, beside you, was still trembling. Who would help her? Keita, opposite, held the cloak against her, her nostrils wide and her face drawn and pale.

  Everyone waited and only the eyes moved.

  You stood. The eyes shifted to you, and words, that at the moment of standing had been only a thought, were coming from you, shocking and loud. ‘I want it to be me,’ you said.

  You waited, but there was no movement, no sound, so you said, ‘I want to be the one,’ and remained standing with no more words to say, knowing you must not sit down even though our mother’s hand had reached to sit you.

  Stood in the centre of the circle of eyes, not knowing if the people would sit you down or sing for you. Quite still, no matter how loud the heart. And not heeding the feeble voice of me reminding you of your dreams. The singer, my sister, what about the singer?

  Waiting, for them to see, understand.

  Waiting to know if they would sing for you in your yellow dress, standing where the light slanted in through the window. Behind you were the pale face, the flickering eyes of the ancestress, around you the silence of the house.

  Watching.

  Grandmother Keita, a movement of the head.

  Then Keita stood, unfolding the cloak and came toward you. You stooped so that she could put the cloak round your shoulders and press her nose to yours. You remained there holding the eyes, while Keita returned to sit down. The people sang for you and you were the one.

  You were taken out onto the verandah with the old ones, where the women started to call and the visitors stepped on to the marae where the straw had been spread.

  Bringing someone for you.

  At first you saw only his feet, which was all your lowered eyes could see, feet in polished black shoes walking forward with all the others through the sticking straw. The callers brought the visitors closer, and when all the feet stopped moving, you listened to the wailing of women that occurs when family meet family. The feet turned and the group went to the seating that had been arranged for them.

  It was during the speeches of welcome that you heard his name for the first time and still you had seen only his feet. Even so, you knew you could love.

  As the speeches went on through the afternoon you were glad of the cloak about your shoulders as a cold dusk settled. Our mother, beside you, whispered, ‘I’ll help you, Missy, if you can’t love.’ But you knew you could love. ‘Keita’s been there,’ she said. ‘It can’t be just anybody. They have to honour you.’

  ‘Where’s Dadda?’ you asked.

  ‘Drunk. Asleep. Manny and Nonny tossed him in Aperehama’s car.’

  The speeches ended and the old ones drew together to cry with each other and with you. Then his nose was pressing against yours. You saw that he was dark and solemn with a broad face and a wide body. His eyes were black-brown and he had lashes like brushes, eyebrows like brooms. His hair was thick and wavy, black and Brylcreemed.

  Later, seated together at the table, you wondered what you should say to him. That morning you’d been someone different, a girl, full of the excitement of preparing for a party. Now you had chosen yourself to be a woman, to be the one. You wondered if Hamuera knew that it should have been someone else sitting there beside him. So much had happened that it was difficult to believe that only a few hours had passed. ‘Did you have long hair before?’ he asked leaning towards you. So he knew. All the eyes were on the two of you. ‘Aunty Billy, the one with white hair, was telling me about someone …’

  ‘My cousin, Makareta,’ you said. ‘She ran away this morning.’

  And he laughed. You wanted to look at him but there were too many eyes. People were passing food, putting food on your plate that you couldn’t eat. There were songs, gifts going from family to family. ‘It could have been Zac,’ he said. ‘The one down the end there, older than me, but I’m the one keen on farming.’

  ‘So they made you be the one.’

  ‘They asked me,’ he said. ‘I agreed.’

  As the meal ended you saw Mama talking hard to Dadda, who had just come in. She took him to greet the old people, then brought him to you and Hamuera. ‘What do you think, Son,’ he said to Hamuera after they had greeted each other. ‘About having a boozer like me for a father-in-law?’

  ‘Shut up, Bobby,’ our mother whispered at him.

  ‘Well you know, you know, he might like it. How do you know he don’t like a few beers.’

  ‘Keep quiet.’

  ‘Yes, my darling, my Glory, don’t growl … You see, Son, yackitty yack in your earholes night and day and so on. See, Glory, what you missed? You could had one of them instead of a drunk, shot-up bastard like me.’

  ‘Should’ve too.’

  ‘What you think? What you think, Son? What you think of my beautiful daughter here?’

  ‘I think I’m lucky,’ he said. There was a smile on the solemn face. You were glad to be your new self then, knew you could love.

  When the clearing up had been done all the guitars were brought out and there was singing and dancing all night long — all the aunties getting Hamuera to dance with them, giggling, teasing, prying, gossiping, while his family danced with you. Late in the evening our cousin Tuahine danced up to you. ‘How about you?’ she said. ‘Supposed to come to Wellington, you. Who’s going to room with me now? Jeez, have to find me a man.’ You knew you were saying goodbye to dreams, but still there was love.

  MAKARETA

  Forty-one

  My cousin Mata has walked into my life. We have lived in the same city for more than thirty years and yet our paths have never crossed during that time, I being incarcerated in my tower in one part of town, she being state-owned in an
other. Tonight by street-light our eyes met and knew each other.

  It’s many years since I travelled in the city buses. I had sold my car the day before, and after a late night at a farewell given in my honour I was waiting for a taxi when the bus came along. I liked the idea of a night bus ride during this, my last few weeks of living in the city. I was the only passenger.

  Had I been in my car or in a taxi, perhaps there would have been no encounter. I stepped off the bus and hurried up to the house, knowing that from here I could observe the whole long sweep of road and know which direction she was taking.

  She had walked since early morning, crossing suburbs, walking the streets, following many tracks and pathways as though searching for something — but she sought nothing, literally. She had only what was in her pockets and wanted nothing more.

  Sought nothing, but our eyes found each other, which is an irony. I can give her some of what she has longed and waited for, but is now seeking not to have.

  I need her. She has never been needed before.

  She still has the same square body that we both had when we were girls. She has the same short, curly hair, turning grey now, the same sad and innocent look, the nervous hands that hold or pick at the sides of her clothes, the eyes that are unsure where to look. They are family eyes, and our eyes knew each other.

  I love this city, the hills, the harbour, the wind that blasts through it. I love the life and pulse and activity, and the warm decrepitude. And I enjoy the work that I do which takes me into many forums. There’s always an edge here that one must walk which is sharp and precarious, requiring vigilance. But I have decided it is indulgent to live here alone. Missy has been calling me home. Home has been calling me home.

  I was twenty when I arrived red-eyed at Polly’s. It was my birthday. She was in bed asleep and I tapped a shilling on her bedroom window to wake her. The taxi that I had taken from the railway station was curling away on the road behind me and the night was quiet and cold. Polly had been crying too. I got into bed beside her and told her all that had happened that week and that day.

  I have never stopped loving my first home, but even though I missed it I have never been afraid of the city. I could often feel excited by the shops, the noise, the lights, the strange, waiting people and the hurrying — but it was a long time before I felt part of it. There was an angled hardness of buildings and a brightness that made me ache sometimes, an underfoot beat that burned the strength out of me. My cousins of the cat house smoothed their way through town like cream, wove in and out of traffic, stood loose against posts, pillars and walls and could disappear and reappear between one footfall and the next.

  At first I thought of going to university, but there was a doubt, a feeling I had that I couldn’t understand at first.

  ‘Leave it for now,’ Polly said. ‘Leave it for a month or two. It’s too late to enrol anyway. Let’s just enjoy ourselves, Daughter. Give yourself time.’

  It was good advice, because after I’d had time to think about the circumstances in which I’d left home, I realised that university was something I’d thought of because it would be acceptable to Keita and the family — something that could perhaps lessen the hurt for them of what I’d done. It could be seen as a reason, apart from the true reason, for me leaving. But it wasn’t something I really wanted for myself. It was too clean, too easy. I wanted to try myself out.

  When I asked Polly what she thought Keita and the family’s reaction would be if I went nursing, she said they wouldn’t like it. ‘They won’t like their puhi washing strangers,’ she said, ‘touching the heads of strangers, carrying pans, touching the dead. They’ll think I’ve put the idea into your head because it’s something I would’ve liked myself, something I could’ve done if I’d had a chance. I don’t want you to do it because of me.’

  But the more I thought about nursing, the more I wanted to do it. One of the reasons I’d left home was because I was never allowed to do anything there. In a place where everyone else worked hard I had never been allowed to work, never been allowed to dirty my hands. I’d been loved and given everything, and now my mother had used the word ‘puhi’ — the cherished, virgin daughter. I realised the aptness of the word as I looked back over my childhood and realised that I had been brought up as a special daughter, for an arrangement with a special son. I would’ve done it for them if I could, and felt an enormous sorrow when I left them all with the burden of shame. When I received a letter from Aunty Gloria telling me what had happened after I left, I was full of love for Missy, love and gratitude.

  Once I had decided on nursing as a career, my mother wrote to her sisters in Auckland, both of whom had been nurses. They came down to see me, to get me ready they said. Aunty Nui gave me her nurse’s watch, which had been to war and all, and Aunty Lex went out, bought material and made a linen bag for me. They had badges and photos to show me and all the advice in the world.

  ‘Trying oneself out’ wasn’t an acceptable reason for becoming a nurse, I soon realised, but by the time my interview came round I had some sense of nursing as a vocation and was able to answer, adequately, matron’s question as to why I wanted nursing as a career. I wanted to care for the sick, I told her, I wanted to serve humanity. Once I had made the utterance about caring and serving, I had no difficulty in making the ideology my own.

  I was the oldest, at twenty, of the intake of probationers.

  On our first day we gathered in the sitting room to be given our room numbers, linen numbers and allowance chits for shoes, stockings and studs. We were all watching each other, but I think I must have been the most watched one. I was the oldest by a few years, but I felt much older. And I was the most different, being Maori, and having plaits that wound round my head three times. We were all strangers watching each other, but mostly what I saw when I looked about was that everyone seemed to be watching me. The next day we went to our first class.

  I liked the work and the learning, the strict routines, the uniforms and insignia and the way of life. Boarding school had prepared me for some of it. I liked the people that I worked with, including those who had authority over us, but had no particular friends. Boarding school hadn’t prepared me for that. I seemed to be always set apart, people stood off from me. It was rumoured that I was a princess. ‘It’s because you look stately,’ Polly said. ‘And because you’re Maori and you’re top of the class. It’s hard for them to understand that, a Maori being top of the class, that’s why they have to make you a princess.’

  So nursing was my vocation. I loved, most of all, to work in the wards, attending to the needs of the patients, although it was difficult for me sometimes. I was lucky that I had Kui Hinemate beside me, or inside me, or wherever it is that she speaks to me from.

  First of all there was her disapproval to deal with, but I’m a daughter who has always had her own way. I had to make her know that this was something I really wanted to do. After that she helped me.

  When there were things that felt wrong for me — touching the dead who were not my own dead to touch, shifting the bed of the dead into a ward for the living, handling the linen of the dead and depositing it with all the other linen without any clearing, preparing the room where someone had died for someone else to come into — she helped me to have the right karakia to say and to do my own cleansing. They were the customs I had observed so well as I journeyed about with old ones when I was a child, everything that Kui Hinemate and the grandmothers had taught me that would keep me safe during my life. But I did them surreptitiously. Being thought a princess was enough, I didn’t want any more rumours circulating about me.

  So it was a double life, as my life always has been in the city, but it became less difficult as I understood it more. It’s an absorbing and interesting life as long as you are certain, and as long as you keep hold of who you know you are.

  There were other areas of difficulty for me. Maori patients would see me, perhaps just as I passed by, and would call to me or send for me and wan
t me to attend to them. They would want only me to touch their heads or attend to personal matters. I longed to do what they wanted, and sometimes did, but the hospital was a place of territories that were strictly and jealously guarded.

  I was twenty-nine when I married Mick. He was thirty-six and had been married before. He came into my ward after an operation followed by complications that nearly cost him his life. It’s easy for patients to fall in love with those who care for them. Sometimes it is fleeting, over once the patient has gained his strength. I wasn’t one, myself, to fall in love, even though I often searched in my heart to decide on what was compassion and what might be love.

  About two weeks after Mick left the hospital he rang and we arranged to meet. I was looking into my heart. We went to a cabaret and I felt relaxed and happy with him as we danced or sat and talked together, and at one stage he reached out and touched my hair and I allowed his hand to rest there and his fingers to drift through a loosening strand. That’s when I knew that I would marry him. It is my hair that has linked me to all those who have ever loved me, and only those who loved me, and whom I loved, could touch my hair.

  We married at the end of that year. It meant an end to my nursing days, there being no true place for a married woman in the profession in those times. We bought this beautiful house, here in this inner-city suburb of beautiful houses — a house on three levels, with many rooms. It is large and spacious and I have a view of the wonderful harbour. Also it is private and enclosed and I have surrounded it with the trees and ferns of home, but it is an indulgence now that I am alone.

  Our twins, Michael and Kate, were born the following year, and while they were little Polly came every day to help me look after them. She was an important part of our lives. The children were her life.

  I enjoyed those times at home together when the twins were little, but also there were events taking place that were exciting. ‘It’s all our people, on the move,’ Polly called to me one morning as she stepped out of her little car waving the morning paper. Michael and Kate were five by then and had just started school.