Jake's Long Shadow

by Alan Duff

  Had become, as in the past tense, because with Kayla he had done a bit of self-weaning. On top of that, this baby had changed all their three lives. The mother’s obviously — and shamefully — Kayla’s since she was always walking the baby around at night once they heard its wailing unattended, which almost invariably said Sharneeta had gone walkabout or drive-around, and so Kayla would go and get the baby and make it some milk mix and walk and rock it for ages, it evolving that she was becoming more little Rachel’s mother than Sharns. Poor, dark-mooded Sharns. Lovely, uncomplicated Kayla.

  It had changed his life because the baby’s presence, and the mother it got cursed with, imposed a certain responsibility on the couple and certainly more sobriety. Kayla initiated that because she feared being drunk and/or stoned might mean she’d miss hearing the baby if its lost mother had abandoned it again.

  He stood at the door for several moments, afraid to be caught in there again. But the baby’s crying was a din, got right inside a man, he had no choice but to go and pick it up.

  Sodden. Soaked to the skin, its wet had crept all the way up its clothes. She was cold and so distressed, Alistair feared her sobbing would break bones in her tiny little body.

  He ran the bath and undressed Raych on the floor on a towel. She stunk. She was a sore red all over. Poor thing. Found himself talking to the child, It’s all right, Uncle Ali’s here. Uncle’ll look after you. Going to give you a bath, get you nice and warm and cleaned up. Then Unc’s gonna feed you. There there, honey child, come on, get you into a nice warm bath. Just like his mother had talked to him (maybe my father too?).

  Gently cradling the child in one hand she was so tiny, he washed water over her and though she continued to cry it was not nearly as bad. Three months old, her father must be a Maori by her features and skin colouring, or a Pacific Islander. You’re a beautiful baby, he told the little creature. And he took a cake of soap and smoothed it over skin and bumps of rolled fat; amazed at how the soap seemed a quarter the size of her body.

  Well be damned if that didn’t stop her crying; she was looking up into (Uncle) Ali’s face, and my God she actually smiled. Freaked him for a moment, as if she had supernatural powers and was showing appreciation, when a kid this age can’t appreciate, can it?

  Maybe it can. Or this one could. He leaned right over and pulled her puny weight up with both (strong, loving) hands and kissed her. Then gave a gubblegubble against her chest with his air-blowing lips and side to side head.

  She broke out giggling. He did it again and she giggled harder. Again. That was sheer laughter coming out of her tiny vessel of air, lungs, voice box and coursing blood and a mind for an engine.

  Then she was anticipating his gubblegubble, yet not with tensed body but with a serene expression, straight (trustingly) into his eyes. Hey, this was pretty cool. Gubblegubble, gubblegubble. You like that don’t you?

  Her skin colour returned from the deathly pallor of earlier, the redness no longer looked sore but alive and healthy, and she felt a little fatter. As he lifted her out of the water he noticed — and with instant concern — that the wall lining was black at the edging, indicating water had got behind the panels. Might the baby get an infection from all the bugs, the germs taken up residence there? Let’s get out of here.

  He wrapped her in the towel and carried her into the living room. Damn TV, had he turned it up that loud, and just to shut out this beautiful little at-peace creature? Grabbed the remote and turned it off. So, it was just the two of them, these uneven and yet same existences.

  The feeling as he went into the kitchen area, of holding Raych up with her head rested on his shoulder, whilst he fiddled with the milk-powder tin and filled the jug to boil the water, was pleasant indeed. Not that he had desires to be a father, not for a long while yet. (Only when I become a man enough to be a good dad.) When he got his shit together.

  He wasn’t supposed to put cold water from the tap in with the boiling water used to mix the milk powder; something to do with bacteria. You were s’posed to put the filled bottle in cold water and let it cool naturally, but Rachel wasn’t waiting for that.

  She was screaming her head off again, the ungrateful little blighter from minutes ago when Alistair was the best thing since sliced bread and powdered baby’s milk for those with frequently absent mothers. And a man who was forced to play mother and father. Shush now, honey. (Uncle) Al’s here. I’m not going to leave you. (My class don’t do that. It’s so shameful to our lot it wouldn’t occur to us. And yet being a poor parent behind the scene is okay.)

  Rachel went at that teat like a starving animal. But within only a few minutes she got herself in a tizz and kept twisting her head away, which only made her scream louder. And louder. (Please stop. It’s getting to my very soul, I swear, child.)

  Suddenly, this wasn’t at all pleasant. Hold on, baby, Uncle Ali’s just gonna put some music on, thinking that might soothe her. Found a CD in the slot, it’d be Sharneeta’s black shit, which he didn’t really prefer. He pushed play, gave it some volume in case the baby’s screaming reached that unbearable pitch again. (The hell are you, Sharneeta?) And he walked the baby to the slow rhythm of the song. Humming sort of to the song, though he didn’t know the lyrics or the tune. Still. And maybe babies like music?

  Walking and humming to the baby, not realising he was going into a pure emotional place.

  Blow me, if the baby didn’t stop screaming and started looking up into Uncle Alistair’s face like she had in the bath. So he rocked her over to the sofa, sat down, and gently teased her tiny mouth with the teat, which she took and must have got the fit right this time, for she settled down to some serious sucking. He spoke the chorus line: You don’t have to worry. And watched her take succour from the bottle and his physical closeness (and love) and be damned if a man wasn’t a bit, well, teary-eyed. A bit emotional (pure?), but if Sharns walked in right now a guy would feel a right twit. He hoped she wouldn’t, hoped Kayla wouldn’t walk in, either. He wanted this moment for himself and Rachel, and them (us) alone.

  I can’t believe this, my parents were right all along: responsibility does find even you who walks in the dark. Though how can anything penetrate the mother, Sharneeta’s dark? Unless, impossibly, it was him. (Me?) Me. Me? (But how? What’s happening?) What’s happened?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BACK TO THE BEGINNING

  SEEMED LIKE HE hadn’t stopped crying, on the inside now, since Beth of two weeks and three more visits ago. And now he was back where all this had started.

  The bad marriage he gave Beth, failings as a father to his kids, failure as a man, even as a simple provider. Here he was looking back at his life, before the adult years of heavy drinking had started, seeing it now for what it was: pubs and parties. Drink, always drink. The process of drink, how it made him feel wonderful, humorous, wittily dangerous, even interesting (as if a barely literate boozer could be interesting) and how each downed beer changed him.

  He’d feel as if a chemical trickled into his muscles, his warped mind, which gave him a simple instruction: fight. Hit someone. It put him in a state — the same most every time — of seeing his wife as someone who, for reasons unasked, enraged him, whose very existence seemed reason enough to assault her. (Why?) Seeing a woman of defiance, with her own pride, as somehow this terrible threat. And in thinking of the man he was then, he nearly had to pull the jeep over to throw up.

  Every hiding he gave his wife, every blow he struck against her innocent person, every fight with scores and scores of men, all those times of roaring like some encrazed beast, furious at the world, without ever asking why it was so, here’s where it began.

  Maybe he had been incapable of asking any question of himself. (But what if that’s just a cop-out?) Right up till now, might be even to this very day, he had never asked himself what of the man, where is he going, why does he exist, and why does he do what he does?

  (But I didn’t ask. I did not ask questions of myself, not once in
all those years and not, as I recall, once whilst living here. Or did I?) Perhaps that was why he had come here, to find out if there had been a time when Jake did ask, when the young innocent Jake was with questions of self and the world. He was back at home —

  No! It wasn’t home! It was a pigsty! We were the Hekes, descendants of slaves, who lived how they, the effin’ community, told us. Bloody cultured Maoris they were meant to be, and yet they condemned us without trial, without the right to speak up on our own behalf. Cast in the roles they defined for us — slaves. That’s your line of descendancy, you Heke shits, from captured warriors lost of all their mana. Treated us like mongrel dogs, any wonder we grew up to be just that.

  Seven of us kids, crammed into a tiny hut-like house, near eating each other’s shit it was so crushed. Where are they now, my six brothers and sisters? We didn’t grow up close to each other, despite the tight physical proximity, not with no good mother nor father to hold us together, no binds of love, nor sense of family. Slaves. Haven’t seen one of them, except one brother — Matty — in a brief visit to Two Lakes so long ago I wouldn’t know what he looked like.

  And why would we be close, growing up like piglets in a sty fighting for every scrap of food. How did they pay the rent? Or did his parents own our little hovel? Why was beer the number one priority in the household budget? (And you went on to repeat the cycle, didn’t you, Jake?)

  Where’s my family now, still here, all gone, how many dead? My parents must be long dead.

  Jake’s stomach was in a knot since he hit this shithole. Driving slowly through a forest village in his jeep, not believing what he was seeing, asking who was the guilty party. (Me or them?) He couldn’t believe that those who’d looked down on him and his family and who he’d looked up to still lived like this — this!

  This place was worse than the baddest part of Pine Block. This was hardcore welfare country out in the sticks. This was where they got the name Hicksville. A forestry town, a step back into an era gone way past its use-by date, from the fifties, when people settled for less because they knew less or didn’t know at all. Houses of peeled paint, rotting timbers, sagging everywhere, like the air punched out of someone. Downed by new economic realities, left behind with their fixed outlooks. Modern machines and ever-increasing efficiencies of forestry practice had caught these folk on the hop. If it wasn’t for the welfare system they wouldn’t be here, and nor would the houses (more like huts).

  Look at these people sitting on front steps, in the shade of verandas close to collapsing, leaning on car wrecks, on fences, ain’t none going nowhere, not today, next year, next decade, none of them. This is loser territory, Jake, so what’re you doing here? Get the hell out. Able to see the irony, too.

  Yet finding himself in the pub — there was only one — but not because of a beer thirst. Not quite four o’clock of a nice Thursday summer afternoon, though rained off the job back in Two Lakes. From out of this beer-stinking, smoky murk a thought comes in stark contrast: Beth. (Who would have believed it? Us back in the sack? Friends again, or maybe for the first time, how could this be?)

  Her image, her voice in his head, the tingling sensation of her body, he had to shut it down. Now I’m back in another unexpected past place. My old man used to drink here. With the alcoholics, the scum amongst scum.

  Up to the bar, aware of the eyes on him, most too tired of spirit to be astonished, but curious suspicion like a silent, collective scream.

  He asked for a bottle of DB and the barman said, Don’t I know your face, brother?

  Jake said, I don’t think so.

  The barman said, I do think so. You’re Jake Heke aren’t you?

  And then Jake remembered. Are you Bobby? Used to be at school with me?

  I sure am, Jake. School with you all the way to the —

  Third form, Jake said. I left that year and so did you. You been here all this time?

  Yeah, why not? Though Jake did notice Bobby’s shift to defensiveness. Well, I’ll be. Jake Heke, eh. Pumped Jake’s hand, beaming. We used to hear about your reputation in Two Lakes. Felt proud one of our boys was showing those Two Laker snobs what a real fighter was.

  Jake remembered, from time to time, different men from here introducing, or re-introducing themselves, when he ruled McClutchy’s like his own kingdom, and how he used to dismiss them as from a past he didn’t want to know.

  This one’s on the house, Jake. For old times.

  Bobby filled a beer glass and lifted a toast to Jake, then offered him a cigarette, which he declined.

  Don’t smoke.

  You don’t? Bobby genuinely surprised, as if he felt Jake should not only smoke but smoking would say something of him, that he was the same person, as Bobby was, as they all were here.

  He called to another barman that he was going to take an hour out, catch up with this old friend. Faces were looking at Jake, saying they knew him, even if he’d left here as a teenager, faces stick in a place like this; nodding, giving signals they might be more receptive once they got a handle on the man.

  What to say, when one man on his own admission had only ever been out of town on rugby trips, and the other knew his own life had hardly been one of meeting a succession of challenges. Bobby talked about his rugby team, of local matters of importance to him and his tiny community; he complained about the wider world, as if it hourly conspired to do further hurt to this infinitesimal satellite settlement. He waxed bitter at how so-and-so over there — you must remember him, Jake, he was one year ahead of us at school, Simbi’s brother, Henry McCabe — had owed Bobby fifty dollars for over four years now. Thinks a man’s forgotten. (When you don’t, do you, Bobby? Not living here.) He gossiped like a bored small-town housewife about the things that had become important to him, like who’d had an affair with who’s wife, who got caught, who didn’t, the memorable brawls, the drinking feats, every little scandal and trivial incident.

  It was light conversation to Jake. (Is this how I used to talk?) He wanted meaning. (I want to know who I am, about this place that may have made me. Or may not have.) And if he didn’t find it then it must mean a man made his own meaning, the circumstances he was born into notwithstanding. And then what?

  (Then I’ll be free of one more burden, maybe the biggest, outside of my dead children.)

  Jake tried to get Bobby recalling their childhood so he might find a clue. But Bobby was next onto the local senior rugby side and its long-standing rivalry with the forestry village up the road thirty ks. His only childhood recollection being acts of theft he and Jake did, fights they got into.

  Jake asked of his own family, were they around? Bobby said, You up and left and never came back, not once, Jake Heke. He then reeled off Jake’s family’s names; the end of it had two brothers dead, both car crashes, both pissed out of their minds, poor bastards, left children both of them, so you got a lot of nephews and nieces running around here, Jake. Want me to introduce two of them in this bar right now?

  No, Jake didn’t feel like being introduced to blood, not more Hekes who’d chosen to stay in this hole.

  The three sisters married men from the rival village, so they were effectively the enemy who still lived there and were sure to have large tribes of children. What women are for, eh, Jake? To breed and give men pleasure. (Surely I didn’t think and talk like this?) The voice in Jake’s head saying: You did.

  The last brother — Bobby was surprised Jake hadn’t heard about — got sent down for murder, did the deed right there over by the toilet door, clubbed Chubb Patu to death with a billiard cue, got life. Jake trying to get a mental picture of his brother Matty, but nothing came.

  Your old man he passed on, oh, must be twenty years ago now, we weren’t surprised you didn’t turn up for his funeral, not many did, being what he was.

  (Who he was, too, and nor did I know he’d died, though I wouldn’t have come to his funeral.) Jake only nodded at being informed he’d not had a father for twenty years or so.

  Lea
ves only your old lady, Bobby said. She’s still around.

  Which shocked Jake mightily. My old lady?

  Your mother.

  (My mother? I never ever called her Mum. She was just the old lady, or had no title at all except ‘her’, said with venom mostly.)

  Jake managed to sound calm in asking if she still lived in the old place.

  Guess she does, Bobby said, but I wouldn’t know. I never went to your house, for all those years of growing up with you, Jake. Dunno why. Guess kids thought it was spooky, living in the trees and what they said about you Hekes — oh, not that I ever went along with that stupid talk, Jake. I was your mate.

  The conversation fell off into longer and longer silences. Jake knew it was the rigid rule to buy Bobby a beer, then he politely took his leave.

  On the way out the familiar faces: haggard, booze-ridden, but worse with this kind of denied truth sitting at the back of every red and tired eye, of men who know they’ve surrendered their souls in existing like this: Joe Nobodies, gone nowhere, done nothing, beer soaks. Made even Jake feel a little more accomplished, less cowardly in comparison.

  Back on the streets of Maharoa, he’d driven right back into a forty-yearsa-go past. Nothing had changed, just got older, houses more dilapidated, when in childhood they’d seemed large compared to the Heke’s lone dwelling. The inhabitants were now clearly on welfare, when back then they had jobs and at least a certain dignity; now with that profoundly uninterested look. Tired. The houses, the people, tired not from hard work but from not making the effort. Jake in slow drive, shaking his head at the sights.

  He found himself on the village outskirts, and the road was tar-sealed now when he had known it as bare dirt beneath bare feet, stones that stopped hurting after a few years (yet the inner hurting never stopped). He pulled the jeep over and walked the last of maybe a hundred metres, between tall pine trees where the road seal ceased, and he returned as a man to his childhood past.