by Alan Duff
Why am I saying this? Who’s to listen, who cares in here? No one does. I’m a definition of another type, in here I am. If you don’t count the middle-aged dudes who go for ritual and symbolism, we’re the crim types, who’ve seen the light of God. Only with me, I’ve seen my light, not God’s.
It’s one day waking up from a dream of seeing me. You! Screaming without the hot coal of truth on my skin. Screaming with the truth of Self bellowing it had never belonged to me, had Self, it had always been claimed by someone and something else.
I woke up that day in burning pain of being told what I was. I got unlocked from my cell and stepped out and saw for the first time what and who I was surrounded by and that it had been me, we were one and the same, separated not by degrees, but here for the same reason and therefore existed as the same mindless creature. The creature that does not and cannot change. The creature who feeds on the bodies of innocents. Even as we eat up ourselves.
From that moment on I cottoned on to everyone’s scam and agenda and act and cunning thought and bad intent. I asked myself questions that came as experiences in themselves, so novel and profound to me did they seem. And so alone was I.
I looked back on myself, my past, for the first time. And saw only a dismal empty field, with corpses of people I’d hurt and good ideas I’d failed to do anything about, relationships with women, with ordinary people. Dead. All dead. No, make that destroyed. Everything of meaning we destroy as if another truth we don’t want to confront.
I looked into a future that had the thick wall of a lengthy prison sentence ahead of it, blocking out the light. I went over all that I supposedly knew, and found I knew nothing. Like Jurassic Park Joe, I tried to find it by looking at others’ faces. But I found only masks, on masks, layer and layers thick of life’s scar tissue. Of hurt never got to cry, not even to announce itself.
I asked the old lags what prisons used to be like or were they the same. Not the same, was the unanimous answer. We had a thieves’ code, even a murderer’s code. You killed a man over a debt or pride, but never for the sake of killing. We didn’t regard raping a woman with pride, let alone a badge of honour like these Maori gangies do. We did rape, but it had more a purity, if you will, of simple sexual need out of control than the brutal acts of today. As thieves you never gave up your mate. You never stole from another inmate’s cell, since you were all in the same boat. To rape and murder a child was beyond our comprehension. Those who did had to go on protection.
That’s why I, Nameless, exist now. If only but to give out a message, my urgent ticker-tape message from Hell. Not the Hell of here, locked up, chained of souls and hearts. But the Hell of out there, where all this starts and yet needn’t, not most of it. (It needn’t be, folks. But then how will you ever hear me, a voice like mine from the furnace?) I’m telling any who will listen: It-need-not-be.
That’s why I’ve worked my transfer application to the same new Hellhole as Apeman Black. To stop him succeeding in his mission, to wipe out another innocent. To hold off what nature, not some human plot, should decide: when to put another Heke kid in the graveyard.
Because I’m a Heke, you see.
I’m my brother Jake, and the late Nig, and poor lovely Grace, and tired of spirit Huata, and the morally true Abe. I’m not Polly, can’t hope to get to that level, never could have. Fate deals us different hands in different times. And my smile for her, Beth, who used to be a Heke. The truest Heke of them all, being Beth, mother of Jake’s kids. They let me stay once, long ago — Jake and Beth did — and I’ve followed their progress since. From a distance.
I’m each and every one of them, I’m blood, I’m of their race and with blood equal of the other race. I’m serving a long prison sentence, maybe forever. Killed a man in a pub (over a look he gave me — a look — and it got the man killed), and within a year of getting here got into a fight and killed the guy. Twenty-seven years I’ve done, same as Nelson Mandela, except he came out a hero and he shouldn’t have been jailed in the first place. Still, making comparison to a figure like Mandela keeps these present thoughts absolutely on track, that I’m going to make something of this life, this double life sentence.
It’s the — true — face I’ve shown the authorities. Time and again I’ve been challenged, provoked by my fellow residents, and not retaliated as I’ve been known for. Not even a verbal clash; I’ve just walked away. I’ve put in for a transfer and the authorities are so relieved I’m a new man they’re right behind me.
I’m doing it because there’s a young man’s life at stake. Why see another good Heke go down? And good person, full stop. How many more lives to go to waste?
In the prison library, if only Abe Heke knew, are a nineteenth century English poet’s words: I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day … Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me. Penned by Gerard Manly Hopkins, in his time of utmost despair, and yet his dying words expressed to his mother were: I’m so happy, so very happy. So many written gems available, if you broken boys only knew.
Words which, defining you, could set you truly free.
A single individual’s good cause is what I am living for and none but me will know it. Watch (this space) me.
CHAPTER THIRTY
‘DESPAIR, NOT FEAST ON THEE’ — GERARD MANLY HOPKINS
HE’D NEVER CRIED like this before, or not that he could remember. He’d cried for brother Nig’s death and Grace’s. Now he was crying for himself, for the man he had almost become, was so close to growing into, only for it to end like this. (Violence claimed me. This is Jake’s legacy.)
And now the bitter irony, of knowing his stand against ever reverting to violence again could not last here, in this place. (I’ve walked back into a past, of kill or be killed. Here where none questions the very behaviour that befalls most of them.) For violent challenge, malevolent stares, threat glaring cold-eyed, on fire, were at every turn in this concrete and steel hellhole. Someone was going to find how to light his fuse, nothing was surer. (They’ll want my reputation, like McClutchy’s bar patrons wanted my old man’s.) Violence defined these people. It was their only means of measuring and expressing, of being.
(They’ll find me. And then I’ll cut loose and in here it’ll have to be as desperate, but more so, as what put me here. So things’ll compound, my sentence will lengthen, I’ll use up my parole days, the same way they’ll eat up my soul, squeeze out every drop of goodness and desire to be something better. The collective, it always claims you. And when it has high concrete walls topped with razor wire and steel bars over windows, over light, steel grilles and solid steel (bedroom) cell doors, the claim is complete.
A man had but one glimmer of light: his appeal to the Court of Appeal. (For mercy, Your Highest Honours. For your combined eyes to look upon me and see a good young man. That’s all I ask. For if you don’t, then I have to become far worse than my father whose genes have never stopped stirring in me. If I don’t, I’ll die.)
I have just to not wake up every day with the desire to punch someone, I have to go and do it, every day it’s required and a few more on top to let my fellows know, Don’t be messing with me. I’ll shape my whole existence here around my fighting prowess, since nothing else — nothing — matters. Oh, what a life this is, what a mess I’m in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
TO BE ANY OTHER THAN THIS — MAORI
EVEN THEY STOOD for a while to gaze wordlessly at the sight, these tough hombres, pig and deer hunters yesterday, innocuous gatherers of watercress today. One a bar brawler not so many years ago he’d forgotten, Jake Heke taking in the sight of broad, six-metre sheet of waterfall, and so peaceful with the wrap-around of trees and trill of birds. His two closest mates, Gary and Kohi Douglas, a silent two-brother chorus at the beauty. Simple men. Birds. Insects. Water. Sunlight. Food.
The shifted perspective, of Maoris appreciating the bursts of emerald-green watercress, removing sneakers, wading into the knee-high flow and to begin expertly picking the plant at th
e waterline, stuffing the bunches into sugar sacks. Gary noting its young sweet growth, his brother grunting his same gladness, and Jake saying it was perfect timing to find this favourite green vegetable in its prime.
Ever the hunters, they glanced around for signs at the bank edge, of pig rootings, deer hoof marks, antler rubbings against tree bark; sniffed the air for the scent of wild game, distinct and pungent and answering some inner call of nature — when you got to know it.
Gary started singing an old number, from the era of a man turned fifty; a Stylistics song, sung in falsetto. His brother joined in and so did Jake, not a bit self-conscious, just expressing. There may even be a sense of spiritual connection with the Maori past, but none would ever have said so. They weren’t into the culture stuff, yet had awareness of being distinctly, and separately, Maori. Not confounded, struggling Maoris, but hunter-gatherers, and happy men, glad to be doing this in each other’s company. Men to whom singing came naturally, like laughter, a teasing banter, self-deprecating wit.
The sugar sacks filled in no time, bursting at the seams with the green growing wild, introduced long ago by English settlers and adopted by Maori to boil with the cheap meat cuts, given they were in the less well-paid jobs: beef brisket bones, pork bones, bacon hocks, mutton chops, added potatoes, pumpkin, kamokamo marrow, kumara, dough balls, all in one pot.
That afternoon, to the low tide, the sea gave a different sense of self and belonging. Out on the tidal flats in channels thick with cockles, backs bent, hands working swiftly in the sand, they grabbed the shellfish, hearing them clatter in the bucket, the smell of sea, of salt and seaweed and organic decay not offensive to the nose. The wash and crash of surf out beyond the sand bar joined the gulls screeching and oyster-catchers after their share of the sea’s bounty, and the sound of children enjoying, discovering, delighting in fear of tiny crabs, or some object of fascination in the water, or in their imaginative young minds. Sight of others, Maoris, like you three, and the two brothers’ combined seven boisterous children, playing more than gathering food. Kaimoana, food of the sea. Kaimoana, state of being Maori. (That’s what we’re doing. We’re being Maori.)
Further up and closer to shore they moved then to the pipi beds, the shell tongues sticking out from the sand, a different feel to pulling cockles up, these slid, a cockle pulled. And of course they tasted different, made a different sound against each other in more filling buckets, a higher pitch. But still the music of food out here gifted free by nature was the music of being Maori.
Jason and Hata, two more of the family brothers, were out snorkelling for mussels and kina at a rocky spot, filling a sugar sack attached to an inflated rubber-tyre inner-tube, you could hear them laughing from some distance, just boys being boys even if past forty. Maori boys, happy to be gathering food from the watery wild. Eight, ten metres, a little more if necessary, they could dive, and over a minute hold breath to swiftly pluck the spiny kinas from their sucking grasp of rock, tear mussels away from their rope-like hold, flick a knife beneath the suction underside of paua. Maori boys gathering kaimoana. At one with nature.
From sea to fresh lake, an hour before dusk, out in a preposterously small aluminium dinghy to hold such a trio of large men; rods flicking lines out with carefully chosen lures to attract a trout. No life jackets, as they’d swim if the boat sprung a leak. And laugh about it over a few beers, the thought of drowning was inconceivable.
A line tightened. There was instant excitement at whoever’s line had gone taut. Playing the fish, they had to be careful, skilful, experienced: a trout was an admirable prey, not a guaranteed catch until it was on the boat bottom, gasping in its shock encounter with air. They had seven fish between them before the sun dropped, catchers teasing the empty-handed all the way home, wishing they had brought some cold beers.
Yesterday, they’d been up in the hills yonder, far end of the lake, the farmer had let his mates hunt a block of native bush on his land, as long as he got a leg of pork or same of venison. A decent bloke, Tom the sheep farmer. The dogs got onto a pig within minutes of arriving, bailed it up in a tight ravine, it ripped one of the dogs, took twenty minutes before the hunters could get in close enough to grab its back legs and flip it on its back and for Jake to stick it as it was his turn, and, like with a wife, you never took another man’s turn at sticking, they did laugh amongst themselves even as they meant it. Took the rest of the day before they found the deer whose hoof marks had taunted them eight long hours.
Gary downed it with a perfect shoulder shot, a hind about three years old, so it was a good weight; they gutted it on the spot and Gary lugged his own kill back to Jake’s jeep, whose turn it was to use his vehicle. Hacked a hind leg of venison, a back leg of good-sized pork — a sow who must have topped a hundred kilograms, which the guys called killograms and marvelled in their unspoken way how the addition of a single letter could change the entire meaning of a word. From a weight to a mortal event.
Another event was made in presenting the two selections of wild game to Tom the farmer, who gave them laughing warning there better be no sheep carcass added to their kill in the back of their jeep on the way out. He didn’t mean it for a second and the boys would never have dreamed of doing it. Not to a good bloke.
Back home at the Douglas family enclave, after the second day of gathering food, the brothers teasingly mocked Jake in preparing their trout for smoking, with turned backs and whispers about not letting Jake know the secret recipe.
The other brothers, Jason and Hata, prepared the hangi, just the same as it had been done for a thousand years. A big fire burned to heat special river stones, which were lifted out by a shovel and put into a hole. Except it wasn’t human meat placed in the wire-mesh but wild pork, venison and bagged watercress, potatoes, kumara, pumpkin, all piled on to the stones. The bottom of the basket had been layered with cabbage leaves to stop direct burning, wet sheets then sugar sacks were finally added over the top to create steam, then an earth covering to let it cook for three, even four hours. And now the drinking could start.
Beer. By the keg as it was a special occasion: Hata’s forty-second birthday. Lion Brown was the only brand for this family, except Jake who preferred DB. You got relaxed, then easy, the laughter flowed more freely, and you went into a state of feeling kind of alone, if you chose to. But you were always in the company — and, yes, comfort — of others, in this case family, close family, and Jake was considered without question a member.
They sang whilst the hangi cooked beneath the steaming earth, played cards and made every deal a drama, a melodrama of slapping down a trump card, of euchring someone, of taking the money, or just the delight of winning. And the food cooked, and brain and emotions got nicely mellow (if you had no devils to exorcise). And in this little village family no one did. Especially not Jake.
The mussels had been shucked and put raw into bowls with a marinade. The pipis and cockles were ready to be steamed. The kinas that looked like hedgehogs had been cracked apart and the sweet yellow roe slivers taken out from the black liquid goo, and put into bowls.
Children played by themselves, or at the feet of these big and powerful adults, who exploded frequently in loudest laughter at the non-stop stream of funny comments. They were in raucous uproar remembering their childhood, sitting watching a glass-fronted stove door, pretending it was a television screen, and each family member taking turn to act a part behind the stove door. Now pass the beer! Hahahaha!
Drank more, felt better by the bottle. The food cooked. The women pressed themselves on the men’s company and the men minded not at all, not in this camp, not around this fire. They brought their own humour, and threw the sexual comments back at the men and laughed and had them laughing at their own sexuality and funny incidents, especially the, um, male failed times. Children came in closer, some cuddled up to Mum, or Dad. Room by this fire for everyone.
The women’s voices and sweeter harmonising added to the singing. The conversation? Well, none tried nor expec
ted and maybe didn’t even notice it get higher than a certain basic level. This wasn’t a time to be talking serious, not issues, not of the decadent morality of the younger generation (and who are we to talk?), not of the intellect. Not even of those Maoris they knew were struggling, fighting furiously against the tide of this modern life.
The hangi was lifted, which was a performance in itself, of voluminous steam escaping from the earth and cloth covering, men’s faces sweating as they raised the baskets onto a long wooden bench revealing a feast, steamed to perfection, meat falling off the bone, vegetables just right. The children were fed, and the women put them to bed. The adults’ food under foil-wrap was kept warm in the oven, for they had more singing left, room for more beer.
Then, quite late, even seasoned drinkers had to eat but there was no pigging out like animals as Jake had known more of than not in his past life, bar a couple of members for there are always exceptions in even the finest families. Sure, they ate droopy-eyed and the words came out that if on paper would be smudged, the letters not straight, nor the sense meaning much, or in a logical context. Didn’t matter.
Each ate her and his fill and then some, women and men tidied up. The real hard-doer drinkers tried to carry on, but got defeated by livers crying enough. Time to go to bed, whanau. (Includes you, Jake. You know that.)