by Alan Duff
After whatever, Ma. Gave a look, then went unhurriedly, languidly, for the phone down the end of the kitchen, screwed to the wall by Mr fix-anything, Beth’s man of ten good solid years. Charlie. Whom she loved. (I adore.)
Down there out of reach of the sunlight, Polly was a silhouette, a strong pencil drawing in thick lead. A prime young woman in the telephone world, making the spontaneous changes of pose that conversation creates. Her non-stop flowing movement was like she’d got oil for blood, she was some kid. (An adult, Beth. Let her grow up.)
She wouldn’t have a bar of throwing a big twenty-first bash. That was for the peasants, she told Beth and Charlie. To drink humungous quantities of booze, end up in a mass brawl. Real good Kiwi fun — not. The event passed without celebration, much to a mother’s disappointment. (I gave hard birth to you, girl. Your father never came once to the maternity to see us. His drinking was more important. He never got close to any of his children; I think now because no one had got close to him when he was a child. The cycle repeating itself, as Charlie keeps seeing in his social work, behavioural cycles, violence breeding violence, ignorance cloning itself — well, this positive young woman had broken one cycle.)
Polly was advising a friend to drop her boyfriend, describing him as a loser, a worse than possessive Greek. Get rid of this emotional retard, Soraya.
Beth left Polly to it, went to the living area of this open-planned house, the first she’d ever seen, never knowing they existed before. (Never knew so much of my present world existed. I was in prison, along with the rest of them, and didn’t know it. Yet kind of intuitively I did.) She sorted through some CDs, remembering when they used to be dinner-plate, long-play vinyl recordings that took the household’s fingerprints better than a police file, a scratched record of the rough drunken hands in charge of the music. Different music, utterly different times. God, but those were not the days.
These were now her surroundings: one wall floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; two leather sofas; Charlie’s chosen oil paintings; fabulous curtains; a bit of the old in an antique sideboard, two lovely, well-worn (well-loved therefore) Persian rugs. She was middle-class without realising it, and feeling quite comfortable with the part at that.
Sitting there on the sofa was a woman supposed to be more than content and deliciously so. Yet something was missing. A nagging, a yearning. But what was it? I have a lifestyle I never could even imagine; a good marriage; no violence; no drunks; no incidents; not a whiff of tragedy. They had more than enough money to live well and save quite a reasonable sum between them, his salary nearing seventy thousand, hers as a legal secretary just under half that. It was a job she loved, especially the language they used, the precision, the complexity of concepts the law threw up, of human affairs and their disorder and dispute, seeking some kind of resolution, which only language could give clarity to. I have interesting, stimulating friends, my children have mostly done pretty well for themselves and even if a son or two doesn’t quite cut it, I’m mature enough not to blame myself. I’m happy. Yet at the same time with this wanting for something.
In winter we go to the beach once or twice a month, we’re going to buy a bach. To think, in my entire years with Jake, we never once went to the beach, not as a family or any of us individually, except my kids on school visits or with their friends. I meet my friends for coffee on weekends, or during my lunch breaks; fancy, me, Beth of Pine Block, who only knew instant coffee from a chipped enamel cup, making it a social event. Dinner parties on our circuit of friends’ homes are so normal I’d feel deprived if they ever stopped. Same as restaurant dining and all my other very pleasant lifestyle options. (So why this void?)
A picture formed in Beth’s mind, a family portrait of her and her four children: Polly, Boogie (Mark), Huata and Abe. Grace and Nig were missing, and absolutely so was Jake’s face. But so, too, was Charlie. My husband? Yes, your husband.
Good, wonderful Charlie Bennett, head of Two Lakes District Child, Youth and Family Services, whose recommendation put my son Mark into custody of a child welfare home. That was his turning point and now look at him: a lawyer practising in Wellington; even if he doesn’t make much contact. Made your own life, haven’t you, Boog. Lawyers are busy people.
Charlie, who took my kids as his own. He asked them for nothing except to love him as he loved them. The terrible times Huata gave him, carrying the baggage of Jake, all that violence he witnessed. Yet Charlie’s love never faltered.
Polly entered the room. You look far away, Mum. You okay?
More than okay, thanks, honey. I won’t bother asking if you are. Polly kissed her mother goodbye, things to do. Beth sat there, staring into her thoughts and that space of Charlie’s missing face. The sound like faint hammering, of someone wanting to be let — or put — in. How very odd. It might be menopause.
CHAPTER THREE
IN A MOUNTAIN’S PAST (AND A MAN’S) SHADOW
HE FELT A sense of ownership up here on Mount Tarawera. As a member of the tribe that owned it and the surrounding couple of thousand hectares, he always felt his ancestors’ presence in bringing his puffing, increasingly overweight body up here. A mountain that had erupted in June 1886 and, along with 153 lives, it buried forever a creation of nature many had considered the eighth wonder of the world: the Pink and White Terraces.
He brought his stressed states here, but also his spiritual side. Up here he could put things back in perspective, think less in anguish about the plight of his Maori people for whom he despaired, seeing as he did at first-hand the wretched and worsening state so many were in.
His job was dealing with young offenders, children and the inevitably hopeless families his office was meant to do something about, when they all (except a few never-say-die faithfuls like me) knew it was a waste of time and government money. Not unless they attacked the problem at source, which was what he relentlessly suggested in his reports to head office in Wellington, that they were no more than ambulances at the bottom of a cliff picking up broken (Maori) bodies.
He dared to state a written view that the Maori societal model was inadequately equipped to give young people the means to cope in a modern world of knowledge and technology. His reports suggested parenting and life skills should be taught at school, rather than this blind, unquestioning adherence to Maori culture, as if somehow it would cure their every woe. He had been raised on traditional cultural practice and values, but did not for a moment think they armed him for the modern world. And why was it, he asked, that the same liberal Europeans who advocated Maori return to their traditions did not themselves return to their own? Why did they not live how their ancestors did in, say, Medieval times? What was so inherently superior in past history?
He wondered how he had stuck at the job for over two decades, since he wasn’t overly ambitious career-wise, unlike some of his senior colleagues who cared not one jot for the young social malcontents and their family backgrounds; his colleagues saw it only as a series of career steps, a salary increase. To them it was getting on the conference circuit and networking. Charlie got to be district general manager by dint of long service, not by back-scratching colleagues on the promotion path. Charlie Bennett took his job seriously.
In the Wellington head office, however, they had Charlie Bennett as too strongly opinionated on the most sensitive issues: Maori social ills, education, crime, employment, justice, health. Though he kept sending his frank reports, even if he now knew they’d never act on anything he wrote. Which hurt a man who so loved his people.
Up here he could put that behind him; though in its place was a feeling close to possessiveness; of hope that this land stay forever in tribal ownership that he could hold on to the tangible. This was where the past did mean something, and not so many words were lost in the wind. He felt the unofficial guardian of these hectares, currently leased to a tourist operator who charged trampers a fee and split the revenue with the tribal trust. Charlie often asked tourists he encountered for proof of having paid.
/> Somewhere down there had sat the stunning sight of thermal creation, the Pink Terrace more poetically named Otukapua a rangi, meaning fountain of the clouded sky. The White Terrace’s original name was Te Tarata, a comparison to the male tattoo that signified warriorhood.
Scribes had once written in breathless frustration at being unable to fully describe the Terraces. Painters knew they had not captured the real beauty, the spectacular colours and plays of light, the amazing series of natural bathing pools as the terraces spilled down the hillsides into the lake; scores of cobalt blue, where one could soak in the medicinal, soft waters and look over a pristine lake and bush-clad hills.
Charlie had committed to memory a description written by a most unlikely poet, a former New Zealand Prime Minister, one Alfred Domett, in 1872. For Charlie loved language, the worlds it opened up. (If only my Maori people would know that.) Domett wrote:
A cataract carved in Parisian stone
Or any pure substance known —
Agate or milk-chalcedony!
Its showery snow-cascades appear
Long ranges low of stalactite,
And sparry frets and fringes white,
Thick-falling, plenteous, tier o’er tier;
Piled up that silvery-glimmering height,
Are layers, they know — accretions slow
Of hard siliceous sediment.
For as they gain a rugged road,
And cautious climb the rugged rime,
Each step becomes a terrace broad,
Each terrace a wide basin brimmed
With water — brilliant, yet in hue
The tenderest delicate harebell blue,
Deepening to violet!
Charlie loved reciting this poem to Beth. He thought it ironic that English words should give him a physical sight that his tribal ancestors had seen in reality. Indeed he felt the written description left a weightier legacy, for the mind saw much more than the eye of the less articulate Maori of old.
Slowly climb
The twain, and turn from time to time
To mark the hundred baths in view —
Crystalline azure, snowy-rimmed —
The marge of every beauteous pond
Curve after curve — each lower beyond
The higher — outsweeping white and wide,
Like snowy lines of form that glide
O’er level sea sands, lightly skimmed
By thin sheets of the glistening tide.
Whenever Beth accompanied him here, Charlie was self-conscious about his weight, the climb exposing his shortness of breath. Even if Beth said she never gave his body shape a thought, unless in lust, she’d tease. He knew he was no Adonis. Nor did he appreciate Beth speaking so overtly of sex, inhibited as he was in that area. Which was another reason he preferred being alone here. Though God knows he adored her and would rather have her company than not.
They climb those milk-white flats, encrusted
And netted o’er with wavy ropes
Of wrinkled silica. At last —
Each basin’s heat increasing fast —
The topmost step the pair surmount,
And, lo, the cause of all! Around
Half-circling cliffs a crater bound;
Cliffs damp with dark green moss — their slopes
All crimson-stained with blots and streak —
When he first started taking an interest in Beth, it was her violation that drew him. Brought up by his maternal grandparents, he had been taught utmost respect for women. So it was his gradual falling in love, coming to admire Beth’s indomitable spirit, her ultimate refusal to accept her miserable, Jake Heke-dominated lot in life, before it was a physical attraction. (I hadn’t dared allow myself that.)
He and Beth would muse on how they met, through his recommending to the court that Mark be put into welfare custody. Outside of his job description, Charlie had taken it upon himself to mentor young Mark Heke, for he saw potential in the lad. (I refused to call him by his nickname, Boogie. I wanted him to think like a Mark, someone with a proper name, disassociate from the background that gave him the other name; I taught him to lift his head high in saying who he was: Mark Heke.
I taught him ancient Maori chants and hakas that I’d learnt from my grandparents. This is what being a Maori is, except it is not enough, I told him. Since we live in our own age we must acquire the means to flourish in our own times.
Of the hakas, I told him these war dances were to bring out a different male in him, one with pride and discipline, not to induce battle fury. That purpose is gone, consigned to the past. Now it is to learn the discipline of practice, of mastering the complicated movements. A haka has to mean war without being war; that if he felt need to do physical battle he must turn it into a battle against failure, a fight against mediocrity, a war against getting nowhere in life. You must strive to gain a learned mind.
I found a boy who responded, a highly intelligent, tough-spirited kid who wanted out from the Pine Block identity he inherited. Who wanted, more than anything, to remove himself a million miles from the world of his father. Now look at him: Mark Heke, LLB, the nameplate reads on his office door in Wellington. From one side of the courtroom to the other.)
Beth took a time to reciprocate Charlie’s subtle overtures. For true to her low self-esteem, she refused to believe she was worthy of what she described as a high-up Maori society man. But in reality he was low on the social scale compared to the wider, non-Maori world; he took no money risks, owned no business, his only risk was pushing his radical ideas to a head office that ignored him. I’m just a low-salaried welfare officer with a degree in political history and a diploma in social work. My background is totally working-class. I’d like to think I’ve progressed, if not spectacularly. And Beth came to see herself in better terms.
That first time for Beth, dining in a restaurant, he started out teasing but then had to reassure her that the other diners were not looking at her. For she had stressed out. She experienced wine for the first time and it seemed odd that a fellow human living in the same town should never have done these things before. When they went to bed, however, it was his turn to be the floundering novice, for he’d not had too many relationships, and certainly not any like with Beth. Such passion, such uninhibited hunger. (My turn to be frightened — well, threatened if truth be known. For I had never struck a woman who knew so clearly what she wanted from the act. I thought it was rebound behaviour at first. Till the next time, and the next. Then I realised she was a highly sexed woman, quite at home with this aspect of herself. That it was up to me to learn from her.)
To his regret, even with ten wonderful years, he was still uncomfortable with sex, of unrestrained sexuality. He was well aware that this side of him frustrated Beth, but he was unable to disassociate his sexual lust from disrespect to his ideal of Woman. (I hardly even think about sex, which I know is unusual for a male, but that’s how I was made.) Still, their love for each other had flourished, and he did not think for a moment that Beth would find her sexual satisfaction elsewhere, and nor would he think of asking her such a question.
His sexual diffidence was probably his absolute belief that a woman held everything together: the marriage, children’s well-being, the home. She held the fragile pieces that were men and male together, when otherwise men were at war with each other, with themselves, and the age-old confoundment with the female condition. The act of sex was much too raw for a man with an idealised notion of women.
Life without Beth was unimaginable, and he wondered how she might have turned out if they hadn’t met. The thought she might have even got back with Jake made him laugh in waking hours. If she chose that then they deserved each other.
In Charlie’s dreams, however, and disturbingly too often for comfort, it was the opposite. He dreamed them together, making sex and love in front of his eyes and Jake taunting his sexual lack of interest. Even up here, on his beloved tribal mountain, a memory of one of those dreams would have Char
lie ask uncomfortable questions of himself. Not that a Beth-with-Jake dream came to mind this Saturday afternoon. Just the cold registering and reminding a man how quickly impenetrable fog could form, making the descent potentially dangerous. He was anyway peckish, he had cream buns, three (three, Charlie?), back in the land cruiser.
As he came down the slope, he saw another vehicle, heard it stop suddenly and doors slam. Then the sound of barking dogs — hunters. Illegal without a doubt. (On my tribal land.) Bodies crashed through scrub and trees. Charlie felt an instant protective anger and hurried down to the scrubby flats, his overweight body protesting at the extra requirement of energy. (I must do something about my weight. I must. That same old promise again, not acted on.)
It was a jeep, with a dead pig roped to the bonnet. These hunters better have a permit. He waited, hearing the fury of dogs at a wild pig. Some of his friends were hunters and he’d tried it a few times but found no liking for killing an animal, even a worthy prey that a wild pig was. As for eating wild pork, now that was another matter.
Grinning at the thought of roasted wild pork, he stepped up to the dead pig and touched its coarse bristles, ran a finger over a smooth ivory tusk. It would take a strong man to lug this out of the thick scrub and uneven ground. He’d wait around and see if these hunters had a permit.
After some time, three dogs emerged and trotted up to smell him out. Then three men broke from the manukas, accompanied by swarming flies drawn to the dead pig on the last man’s back, so big it bent his head down. If he hadn’t been so obviously strong he could have been doing damage to his back.
Three big Maoris, middle-aged. Sure of themselves they were, but in an unthreatening way. One greeted him with a standard, Kia ora. Charlie replied in kind and praised their hunting prowess. Two good-size porkers, boys. I didn’t hear a shot.