Cousins

by Patricia Grace

  After lying awake for several hours I got up and walked about the empty rooms, reminding myself that this was a stopping-off place, a rest on my journey to nowhere. I wasn’t unhappy, liked the thought of nowhere, of emptiness, of not wanting. It meant pushing away hope that sometimes comes, and trying to think of nothing, finding ways of not having thoughts. I decided to make myself a hot drink and sit and look through the windows, through the trees, for the last time.

  When I passed Makareta’s room someone was in there, someone I remembered from a long time ago, and even though it was dark I recognised the old lady who had looked after Makareta when she was little. So I went into the room. The woman didn’t look up or speak, but stood with her hands in front of her, palms upwards, looking down at Makareta. Makareta’s eyes were open and she was looking at the woman.

  Then I noticed the other people. The room was full of them. They were shadowy. They were old. But even though they were shadowy I could see that some of them looked like her, Makareta, or like me. They were rustling and shuffling and seating themselves.

  I moved over closer to the bed, but I could see by her stillness that Makareta was dead.

  That was all right because people go away, or they die. I went to the kitchen and made a cup of Milo. I sat by the windows drinking it, looking out, then I went back to my room. After a while I went to sleep.

  I woke next morning to the doorbell ringing. It was the carrier who had come for the Cat House and Parrot House boxes.

  When he’d gone I showered and dressed in my own old dress. I put my own two shoes on my feet and sat down and ate an orange and had a cup of tea. I tidied the room that I’d slept in and took the photo from the windowsill, then walked out of the house and down the long drive and stood at the gateway deciding which way I should go, waiting for my feet to walk me. But my feet stood still, then they turned me back.

  There were things to do when someone died. The dead don’t just disappear to heaven, I had to remind myself of that. There were things to do, but I didn’t know about them. I remembered Makareta saying, ‘Tell me yes. When I go home I want you to come with me. Gloria’s expecting you. Your cousins are expecting you. All the ones who knew your mother are expecting you. They want you to stay and not go away again. Tell me you will.’

  I’d found it hard to answer her. But when she’d said, ‘I need you. If you come I won’t have to send for Michael, or anyone, to help me,’ I’d said I’d go with her. She’d hugged my stiff body and thanked me. Then she’d said, ‘We’ll see about the rest when we get there.’

  Now she was dead so there was no need, but there was still something that I should do. There were things to do when someone died, but I didn’t know what they were.

  I went into the room. The old woman was still there by the bed, but the others had gone. Nothing about that night or morning seemed strange to me at the time, but I felt that my life was changing even though I didn’t want it to. I had stopped waiting and hoping. I had tried to walk away but my own two feet had turned me.

  ‘What will I do?’ I said to the woman. She sat plainly visible in the chair by the bed but didn’t look at me, looked only at Makareta and didn’t speak.

  So I sat in the chair on the opposite side of the bed and tried to think. I thought of going out to the footpath and finding someone to help me. I thought of knocking on someone’s door. Then I thought of the one person I knew who would help me, who would know what to do. I rang the wharf and asked for Sonny. I didn’t know if he still worked there. I hadn’t seen him for ten or more years. The man who answered the phone said they would give him a message to ring me. I waited there by Makareta because I thought that might be the right thing to do.

  It was an hour before Sonny rang back. It was difficult trying to tell him all that had happened. I heard my flat voice asking if he could just tell me what to do. He said, ‘I’ll come up after one o’clock. I can knock off at one. What’s the address?’ The address was there on the slip of paper that the carrier had left. I read it out over the phone.

  It was about three o’clock when he arrived, along with two elderly women. I stood in the doorway as they came up the drive. It seemed the right thing to do. They pressed their noses on mine, and cried, clutching my stiff shoulders. Inside the house Sonny introduced me to the two women. ‘This is my wife Mata,’ he said to them and I was surprised. I’d forgotten we were still married. We’d had nothing to do with each other for many years.

  We went into the room where Makareta was, and as we went in, the two women began to call in their own language. It was strange to me. Makareta’s granny had gone. When they finished Sonny stood by the bed and spoke in the language that I didn’t know he had.

  The women sat down then, one on either side of Makareta. Sonny took my elbow and led me out. ‘We have to have a wash,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll find out what we have to do.’

  I remembered something about washing from a long time ago —when I’d found out that my mother wasn’t an angel flying. As we’d left the cemetery Aunty Gloria and I had washed our hands. She’d washed her face and dabbed her eyes as well.

  ‘We have to ring the family,’ Sonny said. ‘The ones close around, so they can come here quick and take over.’

  ‘I don’t know any,’ I said. But then I remembered the carrier’s dockets with the Cat House and Parrot House addresses and the two phone numbers on them.

  Sonny rang one of the phone numbers and a little girl answered. She gave him her father’s work number and Sonny was able to get hold of Benny, Makareta’s cousin, and tell him what had happened. Some time later six people arrived. The two old women went to the door and did their strange calling. The group of cousins and their father and an old man came in, crying for Makareta. It was all strange to me.

  Before the arrival of these visitors Sonny had been out to buy food, and he’d helped me to unpack dishes, cutlery and pots and to organise the kitchen and dining room so that people could be fed. While the visitors were in the room with Makareta, I did the best I could, setting up the table with the best cutlery and dishes. I sliced meat and made salads and sandwiches, cooked a tray of sausage rolls and a tray of scones. It’s one thing I know how to do.

  The man called Ben, father of Makareta’s cousins, came out into the lounge with Sonny, who did the ringing up for him. Soon there were other people, including a doctor, a policeman and the men from the undertakers, coming in.

  It was late afternoon before everyone was ready for the lunch that I’d prepared. The undertakers had taken Makareta away.

  After everyone had eaten, most of the people went away to get a change of clothes. Sonny and I put mattresses into the lounge room, unpacked the bedding and made up beds for the cousins when they returned, and for the people coming from ‘back home’, who would arrive at midnight. We prepared food for their arrival.

  ‘So you found a cousin,’ Sonny said. I had never told him about my mother’s family and had always said that I didn’t have any relatives.

  ‘I met my mother’s family once,’ I said, ‘but I never heard from them again, so I pretended they didn’t exist.’

  ‘How come you found this one?’

  ‘One day she rode past me in a bus. We saw and recognised each other.’ That’s all I told him.

  He asked me if I wanted him to come with me the next day so I would know what to do.

  ‘Where? Come where?’ I asked.

  ‘To take Makareta back.’ He paused, I suppose at the puzzled look that I gave him. ‘You have to go,’ he said. ‘She’s your cousin … like your sister. You were the one here when she died, now you’ve got to stay with her right through.’ I couldn’t say anything and after a while he said, ‘I’d better come. I’ll ring the job in the morning and go and get my stuff.’ Then he said, ‘What about you, your job?’

  ‘I left it.’

  ‘The house, some clothes?’

  ‘I left there. I’ve got no clothes.’

  ‘Money?’

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p; ‘I left it for the Postbank to have.’

  He looked at me and said nothing, and I sat there thinking how odd it must have sounded. So I told him all that had happened between Makareta and me in the weeks that I’d been there. After a while he started to laugh as though something was funny. ‘Well, I better come with you,’ he said.

  The cousins came back. Other people came as well — many people, arriving in one group after another. Something was happening to me. I was being part of something and I wasn’t used to it. I didn’t know what all the people were doing, but I knew how to get the food ready and how to make the table look nice with all Makareta’s beautiful things.

  At midnight Aperehama, Girlie, Nonny and Win came. They cried for Makareta in a way that made me afraid. They all remembered me and cried over me too. I wasn’t used to it and wanted to pull away from them but knew I shouldn’t. I stood stiff and still while they held on to me, until at last I could go to the kitchen and make tea for them.

  It was after two o’clock when they all settled down on the mattresses that Sonny and I had put down for them. I went to bed in the room that I had been sleeping in up until then, and lay awake thinking about all that had happened.

  When I went out into the kitchen the next morning Sonny was already up and had been to the dairy for milk and bread. We started getting the breakfast and he told me that we would leave at eleven for the undertakers because they wouldn’t release her before then, and that all the cars would go from there. I didn’t understand everything he was saying.

  It was just after eleven when we all left the house with our bags and bundles. I went in Sonny’s car along with Pahe and Josie, the two old women that had come on that first day with him. Aperehama and Girlie took Makareta’s car and her dog because it was the only car they could persuade Hipi to get into. Then all the cars drove together to the undertakers, where there was another line of vehicles ready to accompany us. I didn’t understand at first that all these other cars were coming with us. I didn’t know how all these people had found out about Makareta.

  The hearse came out onto the road. Aperehama’s car pulled out to lead it and we all followed. I was only beginning to understand what was happening, starting to realise that I was now on my way back to the place that I had spent a three-week holiday in when I was ten, a place that had been in my mind for many years afterwards, but that I had eventually put out of my mind, pretending to myself that I had never been there.

  It was a six-hour drive. The railway station where I’d got off the train all those years ago looked so small, but it was the same station. The white, dusty road that I’d walked along with Aunty Gloria had been widened and tarsealed. Our group of cars travelled slowly along it, but even so, what had seemed a long way then took a few minutes only. There was the place where the creek ran close to the road where we’d climbed through the fence with the suitcase. We rounded a corner and the old house was still there.

  There were several new houses as well. We climbed slowly for a short distance, rounded a bend and then looked down to where the meeting house stood. I had not been to the meeting house, or even close to it, when I had visited there as a child, but I remembered seeing it one day when we were going over the hill to the creek. To me then it was just an old deserted building, standing alone on a rough square of ground. This was a renewed house with lawns and gardens round it. There was another large building beside it and there were people about.

  Our cars drove slowly down the long drive and stopped outside the gateway. When we were out of the car Sonny said to me, ‘You have to go to the front with Pahe and Josie. You have to lead the way, or that’s how I’ve seen it done.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

  ‘I might be needed to carry her,’ he said, ‘And anyway, you have to go with them.’

  He was whispering to me in an urgent way. ‘You have to know it’s your place. Not anyone else here, only you. Like you told me your mother is the oldest of her family and you’re her only child. That means it’s you. You’re the one closest. You’re the tuakana —in one way, even if she’s older than you. You got to be there right through. It’ll be big, this tangi, hundreds of people will come tomorrow and the days after, for someone so well known all over the country.’ I didn’t know what Sonny was talking about.

  The undertaker was opening the back of the car. He stood there and waited. Aperehama came up to Sonny, and Sonny nodded but neither of them said a word. Other people have ways of knowing things that I don’t know, but I could feel something happening to me. Sonny took my arm and led me to where the two old women stood. He spoke to them in their language.

  ‘It’s quite right, dear,’ Pahe said. ‘You got to come right along with your sister. It’s your own sister there. Us two old kuia, we come along to help your family. This dear daughter here, she’s not ours. We only come to help bring her home because we feel sorry for your family. Your family’s got no old people in the big town there to help you.’ They were patting me, stroking my arm. I didn’t understand what they were saying. ‘We’re going to clear the way, and we’re taking you along. Now, dear, it won’t be just you on your own. It’ll be us and all your tipuna with you, all your ancestors.’

  The men had taken the casket from the car. There was Aperehama and Ben, Ben’s son, his son-in-law, Sonny and the undertaker. The others, including Makareta’s Hipi, were forming up around and behind them. But the two old women held me, one by each arm, and we stood at the head of the casket. We seemed to be waiting.

  Then I heard the strange calling. I stood shocked and still, but only for a moment because something was happening to me. The old women were urging me forward, so I walked.

  We made our way slowly through the gateway. All the people were waiting there in front of the house and they were calling out and crying. The older ones were dressed mainly in black. The women wore green leaves in their hair and held greenery in their hands. There were younger people in an array of clothing —skirts and blouses, T-shirts and jeans, bush shirts and boots, caps bearing messages, track tops, track pants, sports shoes, jandals. There were mats laid out on the ground.

  I could see Aunty Gloria, Manny, Missy, Chum and other faces that I remembered. They were holding each other and crying. Something was happening. Beside me Pahe started to call, and then Josie, as we kept on our slow walk forward.

  Something was happening, because suddenly the place became more and more crowded. Suddenly there were people sitting by where the mats had been lain, where at first there had been nobody. There were men and women with marked chins and faces who belonged to an older time. They had my own face some of them, Makareta’s and mine.

  The verandah of the house filled with more people too — these people from an older time. Some of them were soldiers in uniform. One of them was Keita, who seemed to be both herself and Aunty Gloria at once, yet there were two of them.

  And then I saw a woman standing forward of the others, looking only at me. It was Anihera.

  I had waited. For years I had waited. For years I had wanted. Now that I had decided that I would not want or wait, and would have only what I had already, my mother had come to me.

  Around us, walking with us, there were more people. Walking right by the casket was Makareta’s own Kui Hinemate with fantails in her hair. Her hand rested on the wood.

  In the middle of the big lawn we all stopped. Pahe and Josie started to weep with high sounds and tears were running down their faces. The people waiting began to cry more loudly. Something was happening to me. Something.

  My eyes were filling. Water was running from my eyes. Streams of water. Water was running from my nose and dropping onto the ground, streams of water. I had never cried before in all my life and now I felt that I would never stop. We all wept for a long time there. All my tears were falling and I was just letting them run. I had never cried before. Years of tears. And I heard the sounds come out of me, the crying sounds, just like the sounds of the women around me.


  Gradually our crying lessened and we began moving forward again. The men put the casket down onto the mats and women came and sat around it, touching and stroking the wood. I was led to some seating then, and everyone in our group sat down. One after the other, men stood to speak, and there were sad droning songs that went on and on. When all the talking was over we moved forward again. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but there was nothing that made me afraid.

  The people, Aunty Gloria and the others, were forming a line. The other people, Anihera and the ones who had come crowding in, had moved back, become shadowy, except for Makareta’s Kui Hinemate, whom I could see plainly, seated by the casket. Our group went forward and the people were putting their noses together and beginning to weep again. I didn’t know how to do it but I wasn’t afraid. I followed on after Pahe and Josie, trying to do what they did. When I came to the women they held on to me for a long time and wept and wailed over me and I felt my tears rushing out again. Something was happening to me.

  Then I saw Makareta’s Kui Hinemate walking into the house. I didn’t know if I was the only one who could see her, didn’t know if I was the only one who could see the other shadow people, but I know that it didn’t seem strange to me, just as it hadn’t seemed strange when I’d gone into the room full of people the night Makareta died.

  The men picked Makareta up and we all went into the house, and the casket was put down in a place that had been made ready. The undertaker began undoing the screws, but I didn’t realise at first that he was removing the lid, didn’t know that I was going to look at the dead Makareta again. The crying and wailing began again, and when I looked down at Makareta I felt my tears pour out once more. I wasn’t sure that my tears, or any of the crying that I had done that day, were for Makareta. They seemed to come from an unfound place, from years.

  I was taken by Missy to sit with her on the mattresses, she on one side of Makareta, I on the other.