by Thom Conroy
‘I’ll get Ella,’ I said.
‘Can I talk to you first?’
I glanced outside, scanning the wooden steps and the little path that led to the toilet block. ‘Bruce, we have nothing to talk about. You know that.’
‘I want to come up there. I want to see you.’
Ella and my father were walking up the path then, and I told Bruce I had to go. He asked me to wait, but I rushed to the door, called Ella’s name and handed the phone over right away. I saw my father looking at me. He said nothing, but he seemed to understand that something was off. There’s a lot of this going on, and it feels surprisingly healthy. Some sun-drenched denial but, still, it is denial. And I feel it swelling under my collar sometimes. Feel it roiling or rising up hot between my breasts.
Something, I think, is happening. Or, it could be something is ceasing to happen. I don’t know more than this.
GETTING THE TONGUE
At the edge of the wet sand one day, my father stops, looks at Ella. This is a meaningful look. A challenge. Ella understands at once, and so do I. I drop the bag of beach things and come up beside them, saying, ‘Ready, set—’ As I’m saying ‘set’, Ella sprints, pre-empting my father’s cheat by a half-second. And then they’re off, both of them at their top speeds down towards the little white lip of a wave that counts as surf.
I feel myself smiling at the sight of the two of them, but as they hit the water it occurs to me how strangely tight my smile is, and I wonder, Is this really a smile?
Later Ella and I are walking back to the campground with Tihema — this, it turns out, is the name of the little boy I saw that first morning in the toilets — when I understand the tightness of my smile from hours ago. It’s a bit shameful to admit this, but I have yet to break my vow of truth. That feeling on the beach as my father and Ella hit the water? Jealousy. Pure and simple. But, then, maybe not simple. It was a two-way jealousy. I wanted what they both had in that moment. I wanted my father and Ella all to myself. Her loyalty and his. To be daughter and parent.
Up in the campground we find my father and Reina both in the communal kitchen, same as usual. Tama is over at a table, cutting onions, a book open in front of him. I have not said a word to Tama about what I know of his past. Oddly, this knowledge has not changed much between us. I am not hardened against him, at any rate. I feel a twinge of pity now and again, but the moment I interrogate this, the feeling grows twisted. Pity? Why pity? And for him? What about the best mate he attacked?
There is often someone else in the kitchen in the evenings, and sometimes I’m introduced, sometimes not. Except for Ella, my father and me, no one here is Pakeha. But then I’m discovering that I may not know who is Pakeha and who isn’t: I suppose I should say that no one else seems to be Pakeha. Last night I met a light-skinned woman about my age, a baby in her arms. She was wearing track pants ripped into shorts and a tee-shirt with splotches of what might have been decking stain on it. Her hair was heavy with grease. Her nails, of which I just caught a glimpse as she stormed out with the baby and an enormous frying pan, were about five or six centimetres long and stencilled with tiny skyscrapers.
‘Sam,’ Reina said before the woman was even out of earshot. ‘Tihema’s mum.’
I smiled, wanting to ask so much and on the brink of asking nothing at all. I settled for something in between: ‘What was that on her nails?’
Reina turned to me, a dreamy look on her face. ‘When she makes a fist, you can see the Auckland skyline.’
Aside from Tama, there is an older man in the far corner of the kitchen tonight. He is no particular colour, but, like almost everyone here, he’s not Pakeha. Or not exactly Pakeha. His skin is a sort of dark grey and he has a residue of white hair on his head. He is, it occurs to me, very old. Late seventies, maybe. Eighties? It’s so hard for me to gauge that end of life. He seems to be opening packages, one after another, but the top of an up-ended rusted-out freezer blocks my view of his hands so I can’t be sure. He is making a terrible racket of crinkling, at any rate. Ella takes a few steps in his direction, staring, and I’m waiting for an introduction. What I get is Reina turning to me and asking if I like tongue.
I’m caught off-guard, and my dad looks at Reina, smiling. ‘Give her the chicken.’
Reina says nothing, but turns back to the benchtop. My father, sensing something I’ve missed, says, ‘Not much chicken, sorry.’ He nods at Ella. ‘We should give it to the wee one.’
Ella turns now, charmingly confused at everything.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Just give it to her. I’ll take the tongue.’
TAONGA
It’s after two in the morning. I checked. I’m coming back from the toilets, but instead of turning left to head back to my father’s caravan, I turn right and then left on to a grassy lane I’ve never seen before. Or at least never noticed. I should go to bed, I know. And my thought turns to the idea of bed, to the salty musk smell of the little space Ella and I share, and the sound of my father snoring — which I imagine I can hear now on the breeze — and all I feel is entirely awake.
I notice the road which runs parallel to this one and see the twinkle of a car windscreen. My car, I see. So there it is. My dad told me he’d moved it, and there it’s sat, untouched, since my first night here. And how long ago was this? A week, I think. Maybe closer to ten days by now. Two weeks? But as I’m trying to sort it out, I notice the sugary black depth of the sky, the aurulent puddles of nebula, the centre of the galaxy turned on its side. With my eyes full of the cosmos, the numbers in my head crumble away, fall out of my consciousness like stones dropped from a cliff.
I notice a small house. A barn, really, its roof lost in the branches. There are no windows, just a solid brown door and, at the bottom of the door, a line of light.
I step onto the narrow veranda in front of the door and stop short at the sound of footsteps. Somebody is walking inside the house. Somebody, it occurs to me, is coming to see who is standing outside their house in the middle of the night. I will do something, I determine. I will take some appropriate action, such as stepping down off the veranda, but before I do, the door opens. And there, startled, is Tama. For the first time, the sight of him truly frightens me. The fear tingles out of my stomach into my legs. Threatens my voice. And so, on instinct, I speak, my voice uneven, cracking like ice.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know you lived here.’
‘Practically do,’ Tama says. He steps away from the door, and inside I see books on shelves from the bare boards of the floor up to the rafters. Cardboard boxes are piled in front of some of the books. More books are stacked on their own beneath and on top of the small folding table where the lamp is sitting. I notice the chair at the table, the rings of coffee mugs staining its surface. A cup with cutlery in it.
Looking for the first time since I’ve met him, embarrassed, Tama says, ‘You’re looking at an official East Cape Book Depository.’
I speak quietly. I do not want my voice to tremble. My voice must not tremble. I say, ‘Right here?’
‘Most of it they were going to toss out, but I argued for keeping it.’ He laughs, glances to the rafters. ‘Got the funds to fix the roof too. Get a little stipend for looking after the taonga.’ He shrugs, flicks off the light and joins me on to the veranda. He closes the door behind him. I notice there’s no lock. ‘Books were all I had when I got back from Manawatu’.
‘You lived in the Manawatu?’
Tama raises an eyebrow at me, as if he thinks I’m making a joke. ‘Manawatu Correctional Facility.’
‘Oh.’ I want to make conversation. At the same time, I don’t. I’m thankful I know what I do about this man, but, then, I wish I didn’t. ‘So,’ I say, ‘we were neighbours.’
Tama laughs, husky and a little private. An inward-looking laugh.
‘Guess so,’ he says at last. ‘But I had an excuse to be there for so long. Soon as they unlocked the door, I ran straight back up here. Be damned if you see me going back!’
The cloudbank of my ignorance descends over me.
Now Tama steps off the veranda and into the lane. I want to call after him, but I just watch him walking under the Milky Way and the hard white stars.
All that I don’t know makes me shiver.
MORE TAONGA
Syrupy peach is the colour of the hour, and the hour is about 6 a.m. But syrupy peach does not capture my mood, merely the shade of the bottom third of the sky and the slick of colour across the sea. We’re not on our usual beach, but in some new place further down the coast, some place my father has driven Ella and me to in his sputtering white ute in the dark. The whole of the way here I’ve had a feeling of peril. I hadn’t intended to talk to my dad about Reina at the crack of dawn, but as we pulled onto the beach and aimed the car at the syrupy tableau of this bay, it occurred to me that now might be the time whether I like it or not.
Tama and some men I don’t know are far out in the water. It’s up to their chests, or at least I think it is. The rising sun casts a solid shadow across the pockets of the sea that aren’t gleaming gold. We’re here for kai moana, that’s what I’ve been told. Kina, crayfish, paua, mussels. The men went off with nets in their hands, and there are nets and long pink rods leaning against the scooters parked on the sand. Nice scooters, sleek and new-looking and tossed aside in the rush for the treasures of the sea.
Ella and Tihema and an older girl, maybe ten, are walking along in the breaking surf. Or they were. I’ve lost track of them. If Joanne was here, she would be down there with them, running in the water and laughing, inconspicuously hovering. She wouldn’t be sitting in the front seat of my father’s ute, staring at the tiny dots out in the bay and wondering when she should speak.
‘Djuna,’ my father says, turning to me before I so much as open my mouth.
Now, isn’t it like him to do that?
‘Sorry.’ He notices I was about to speak. He smiles. ‘Go ahead.’
‘No, you.’
My father looks out at the bay again. The syrupy shade is already fading into something less neon, a subtle tinge of yellow that seems to whisk away the heaviness of the shadows. And I can now see the children in this light, a group of them nearly at the headland. Twice as far away as I had thought.
‘Some people are coming tomorrow, the next day,’ my father says, not yet facing me. The tone of his voice is troubling enough to send a tingle up my arms. So here it is, the peril. What I was dreading — I’m not the source, but he is. I should have known.
‘A kaumatua from Tama’s family. We’re going to have a little meeting.’ He laughs at himself, at the word ‘meeting’ in his mouth. ‘Talk, I guess.’
‘What sort of talk?’
My father turns to me, a terrible benevolence on his face.
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
My father sweeps his hand across the scene in front of us as if it were a mural accomplished by his own hand. Pricking and tingling have moved up to my shoulders and softened a bit, thousands of little slippers on their way to someplace.
‘It’s perfect, Djuna.’
‘What’s perfect?’
‘This place. I’d like to put some money into it, into the campground. Maybe stay a while. Feel like I’ve been looking for a place for a long time, Djuna, and here it is. All this time, it was waiting right here.’ Now Eugene opens his door. ‘Course, Reina’s not pleased. Tells me I shouldn’t have ever mentioned it to Tama.’
‘Why not?’
‘Pakeha and Maori land,’ Eugene says, smiling. ‘She says they don’t mix.’ Now my father shrugs, a hopeless immigrant again after years of apparent integration. He knows she’s right. He knows better.
‘Don’t play dumb to try to get what you want. You know what’s right, what’s not.’
My father considers this for a minute, his face brightening with the sunrise. He leaps down from his seat. ‘We should go after the kids.’
DAUGHTERS
In the communal kitchen there seems to be a permanent unspoken truce in place — at least that’s my impression. In the communal kitchen you can cook or sing to yourself or read books, but you can’t argue or raise your voice. Except maybe at children. Knowing all of this, I walk into the communal kitchen that evening and call my dad outside. I do raise my voice. I do make a scene. Tama, puzzled, looks up from a book he’s holding in front of him. Oddly, I notice the title. For the first time ever, I notice the title of one of his books, and it’s while I’m standing here, shaking with rage, with my father’s name on my tongue. The Mill on the Floss: this is what Tama is reading in the communal kitchen of the crumbling campground my father wants to invest his money in. Only he has no money. And if he did, it would not be welcome here.
Outside, I walk my father around the corner of the breeze-block building. There’s a picnic table a few metres away from us with four men gathered round it, nodding their heads in time to music. Bob Marley wailing out of a phone that one of the men holds. I recognise one guy from the fishing trip this morning — a tall, skinny fellow with close-cropped black hair and large pink plugs in his pierced lobes. His skin is white, I note myself noting. The other three men are darker, complete strangers. And this seems to be another rule around here: people appear.
‘Is something wrong?’ my father wants to know. This is his question, but it’s clear from the look in his eyes that he knows exactly what’s wrong. And seeing that he knows this, I almost want to let him off the hook. Draw him near and tell him to forget it. This is what I almost want.
‘You’ve got to give up this idea of putting some money into this campground. You’ve got to listen to Reina.’
My father reaches for me, and I take a step backward.
‘Look, now doesn’t seem like the time—’
I fold my arms over my chest, and this breaks my father’s resolve. Such as it was.
‘I can sell my half of the house, Djuna. It’s paid off. That half might be enough — or near enough — to turn things around here.’
‘Our house, you mean? The family house? It’s not even for sale. And what? You’re going to just live here, is that it? You don’t even know these people!’
My father nods in the direction of the picnic table, where it seems the four men have taken an interest in us. One has a pen and paper, and for a strange moment I imagine he’s writing down everything I say. I imagine him writing down the phrase these people. I know what I sound like, but at the moment I don’t care.
My voice lowered, I say, ‘Does Mum know about this?’
‘Your mother?’ As usual, the mention of my father’s wife seems to stump him.
Now Ella comes running round the corner of the building, hands out in front of her Superman-style, a length of filthy sheet tied around her neck like a cape. She rams her hands into my father’s waist.
‘Reina wants you,’ she says to him.
‘Reina doesn’t approve of this,’ I say.
My father smiles. ‘Ah, so now you care what Reina thinks?’
I glance at Ella, then back to him. ‘And Lucy would not, either.’
‘You might be surprised what she approves of.’
Ella flies over to me, circles me and continues on around the building, still flying.
My father looks at me, helpless in the face of Reina’s call, it seems. From the picnic table, one of the men calls out to me. I turn, confused, unwilling to let my father walk away. A little furious at this interruption. A little frightened as well, since it may be that I’ll be called out for my these people comment.
But the man who spoke to me just nods at the direction where Ella has
run off. He smiles. ‘Good kid, that one. Looks like you, too.’
LIVING
Tama finds me down at the beach at dusk, hunched over a rock, spewing cruel things about my father onto a page. He says he can tell by the way I’m holding my pen that whatever it is I’m writing is violent, and therefore worthless. I look up, startled at the sight of him, trying to stay light-hearted, but I see that he’s lost that little shine in his eyes. Or at least I think he’s lost that shine, and right there among the purple, murky shadows of the beach I watch him shift and shrink, his face hardening, the sockets of his eyes receding. It would not surprise me if he grew fangs.
But he does not grow fangs. He squats in front of me and tells me not to be scared. Immediately, I’m more scared than I have been before. My torso hollows out. With him beside me, I remember my comment about these people, and, in a mad rush, I hear the whole of an imagined conversation: Do you know what this girl said? This white girl? Really? She said that?
‘You do a lot of writing,’ Tama says. He’s leading up to something, I can tell. So I let him carry on. ‘All good, but just watch yourself.’
‘Watch myself?’
‘People round here might think you’re writing about them.’
Once again I feel the shadow of that cloud of ignorance moving in place above me, and I say, ‘I’m writing about me.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Tama says. I hear the soft crash and roll of the surf. ‘I know that. But not everybody here does, that’s all.’ Tama stands, so I stand, too. When I do, he takes a step towards me, a slow step that closes in the last measure of space between us.
‘I can see your father told you about me. About my past. Am I right?’
I tell him he’s right, my voice uneven. My fear is between us now, unconcealed, obvious, a given. My fear in its rawest form, with grief and race and sex all tied up together. A pulsing blood-red sort of ghost of a thing, that’s how I imagine it.