Dogside Story

by Patricia Grace

  ‘After a year at the High School where I didn’t do much good,’ he said, ‘I was packed off to boarding school with money sent from Aussie by my father. Homesick the whole time and always in trouble for standing up for myself. I missed home, missed my cousins, especially Taku and Shania because we’d always been together.’

  He’d started too far back but it was because he wanted her to know about Taku and Shania before he came to the leg bit. Or was it because he wanted to have conversation, an excuse for her to stay a while?

  ‘My cousin Dion was at the school too, the one that was best man the other day. He was two years ahead, two years older, and that helped a bit but I never really got over my homesickness. I stuck it out for two years then they let me come home, but I had to promise to complete everything at the local High so I could go to university. It’s what my father and the rest of the whanau had in mind for me.

  ‘So I did the first bit, got through the exams, but there was no way I wanted to go to university—nothing there to interest me. Not academic like Dion, wanted to be a builder.

  ‘Anyway it wasn’t a good time for builders and the nearest type of training I could get was to go on a Home Maintenance course which I thought would be a way in, maybe with an apprenticeship to follow or a job doing building labour. What we learned was to replace door handles. But there was only one door handle and one screwdriver, so we had to take turns taking the handle off and putting it on again. We had to take turns with the shovel digging a drain, take turns with the trowel putting down little squares of concrete. Most of the time you sat around waiting for things to do—some catch to attach or shelf to paint. For book work we had to draw different types of hammers and saws and hinges. It all made you feel stupid. One week’s worth of stuff stretched out to twenty. And there were no jobs. All we could do at the end of it was go on other courses, graduating from one to another.

  ‘Horticulture was a flash name for weeding gardens for old people and putting a few seeds in pots. Nothing to it really, except we flogged all the potting mix and plastic stuff and took it home for the tarutaru we had back here in the manuka—Shania, Taku and me. It was like it was all nothing, like messing about waiting for something to start.

  ‘Arts Programme? We made prints using this method and that method, but always waiting for equipment or materials and having no use for the things we made. Not happening.’

  All this and she’d only asked about the missing leg. She was standing now, making her way to the fire, stepping smoothly like a dancer so that she wouldn’t make a sound, not wanting a stick to crack, dry grass to shift, not wanting to wake him up to the fact that he was telling. He watched her scoop water from the pot and return to the bank, rescuing her old teabag from where she’d left it in the grass and making herself another cup with it. She let the milk dribble in, concentrating on it, keeping her eyes off him so he’d go on talking—sipped, looking into her cup. He’d like her to know he wasn’t fooled.

  ‘The courses all had Job Search attached where you learned to phone up bosses, prepare CVs, go for interviews, fill out forms, all that. And Life Skills—visit libraries and supermarkets, one hour a week on computers and a pretending bit of bone carving with a tutor who turned up sometimes, sometimes didn’t, useless hua.’

  Talking too much, letting off steam about those courses, just talking. Boring stuff. Only asked about the leg, which could’ve been answered in a sentence.

  It was something to do with fires he thought. Fires made talk, especially early fires and night fires, and it was when he had his fire going that he most wanted company. From the time he lit it to the time it burned out, whether it was his outside fire or the wood stove, were the times he wouldn’t’ve minded having someone there.

  Apart from those times he preferred living on his own. It’s what he’d wanted to do ever since Nanny Blind had given him the place when he was a kid. ‘You have it now,’ she’d said. ‘If my girl stayed, it for her. But gone, so you have it, for you.’

  His aunties and uncles had never let him live there before, didn’t like it even now, yet it gave him his physical life, that’s how he thought of it. It was his physical life. Because what would there be to do now if he hadn’t put himself in charge of getting people their fish, and who else to get fish now that Taku and Shania were gone? It had to be him.

  And it was his physical life having to do things for himself—get his wood, nail up boards here and there, keep his water hole clear and his tank clean, grow his bit of dope and his pumpkins, shoot a few hares, catch his eels and his fish and keep the creek running. Once a fortnight he went out for supplies and once in a while Jase and Bones picked him up for a night out.

  Life out front meant being trapped in front of infomercials, Days of Our Lives and Ricki Lake along with aunties, grandfathers and truants. It meant everyone running around after him not allowing him to do anything for himself. But back here he’d given himself a life.

  ‘Then I got something, something I wanted. A mate of my father’s had building work round the city, said he’d teach me but couldn’t pay much. I stayed with him two years and learned heaps. Taku and Shania got hacked off with courses too and they managed to get enough seasonal work to keep them going—a bit of fencing, picking pumpkins, packing corn, picking grapes, shearing. The two of them were saving to go to Aussie to stay with my father and get themselves jobs over there. But me? This was always the place for me.’

  Her eyes shifted from left—catching him halfway—to right, still dulled, wiped, Marmite. Must be hanging out for a smoke by now, hanging out for news on his missing leg too maybe, but he hadn’t got to the leg bit yet. She asked for it. Made him feel like laughing—which he thought was probably also something to do with the fire.

  ‘My two cousins came to meet me one Friday with their pockets stuffed full of their shearing money. We went off to the pub and got to drinking, playing some pool, drinking some more, then Taku pulls out a fistful of his dollars and says, “We never drink all this. We go and get us a car.”

  ‘So we went off to this place where people had vehicles parked up for sale, found one, bought it, put petrol in and off we went heading for home. Taku was checking out our car, what it could do. We come to a corner too fast and went flying, is all I remember. In hospital I found out Taku and Shania were dead, my same-age cousins. No shark got my leg. They chopped it off at the hospital. One broken leg I had, and one missing leg that left its ghost behind, giving me hell.’

  She was watching him now, careful not to move. Marmite had picked up a glimmer from somewhere—from fading fire, from sun criss-crossing through leaves, from light coming off creek water or a tin roof, or … or, from a hot spot in her skull.

  ‘It’s buried over there with them. Never wanted it back.’ True, not that anyone would believe it, so what made him say it when he’d never said it to anyone before?

  It shifted her. She stood, sensing that he had gone as far as he would go, that ‘physical life’ may have been beyond what he’d wanted to say. Or was it that the fire was gone now and there was only a dribble of smoke coming from it?

  Or that she’d got all she wanted?

  He’d got away from them—the prying aunties and uncles who pulled all sorts of stuff out of you like they were big hot poultices. On you like hot packs, them, so you felt only comfort while they drew you out. Now he’d brought her here with his ‘I know a place’ and was letting all this stuff out, but he didn’t care really, knew what was happening and he could let it happen—but ahh, only to a certain point.

  ‘I did have a prosthesis …’ He felt pleased with the word, which he’d never said out loud before. She took her plate and scraped the bones into the fireplace. Flies scattered, and the bones woke a spark. ‘Supposed to get refitted after a year but I was living here by then, escaped my aunties. It was a nuisance taking it off all the time to get in the water, and even out of the water I can move round quicker without it. Didn’t bother about the refit.’

 
; She returned to her place on the creek bank and sat with her arms as struts on either side of her. He put a handful of dry stuff on to the spark and blew, poked in a few sticks and scraped his own plate out.

  ‘So … so … I should get on my way,’ she said. He noticed ‘should’.

  ‘The tide’ll be down in another hour,’ he said. ‘I could go out through the hole and phone up Jase to come after work and give you a lift home.’

  ‘I don’t like to trouble anyone, even though I know I’m doing that already.’

  ‘No trouble. Anyway I want to. I need a few things, batteries for my tape deck. Go crazy if I got no sounds.’

  ‘Sing. Dance. They had you up dancing. It don’t stop you dancing.’ Her eyes narrowed as her mouth widened into her big teeth grin.

  And it was the fire.

  It was the fire. It was the flames, the way they flared orange and blue and waded through the wood chips. Or it was words, like ‘physical life’ and ‘prosthesis’, or cicadas racketing hard-out in the trees with the sound of waterfalls. Or it was the waterfall itself spilling down the hill behind them, or it was smoke up his nose.

  Was it all of those things making him pull himself up onto his foot and begin singing and doing his stick dance, his hip thing, as he went towards the house, ‘Whati whati to hope …’ Hand slap, ‘Ringa pakia e.’

  Was it all of those things making her flop and laugh?

  ‘Waewae takahia, e hura o kanohi e,’ one-leg stamp and silly eyes.

  ‘Titiro whakarunga, titiro whakararo,’ look up, look down and haere whakamua, hoki whakamuri, making his way past clothes steaming on bushes to the house and taking the song up a note. She was laughing up on the bank out between her rocks of teeth, then singing along.

  He took the half packet of flour from the shelf and put it in a bowl with baking powder and a tin of syrup and a fork, and when he went back out she was dancing back and forth along the creek bank in her fat and her towel with her face all beamed, her arms swimming, diving, circling, gleaming like seals or dark fishes. She came stepping down, picking her clothes from the bushes and went singing and dancing inside. Had a voice on her which came from down low, like it pulled up from her knees, up through her groin and stomach, coming smoky and ragged up through a crusty chest and out between the big teeth. It was out-of-breath, gutsy, kapa haka, god and all that. It needed, he thought, a different song.

  ‘Now what?’ she said, coming out in her dress that was snagged and crumpled and still steaming. ‘Ah, fry bread, I’ll do it.’

  She picked up the flour and emptied it into the bowl, shook in the baking powder and took it to the tank for water. While she mixed he tipped hot water in the pan, sitting on the ground while he scrubbed it with a brush then wiped it out with newspaper which he dropped into the fire. For a moment as it burned the paper took the shape of a bird which, with the heat under it, rose, colourful and decorated with advertising words which said Imported Fragrance. Where everyone gets. $3.99. Luxury of. Nationwide. The bird settled, disappeared in flames.

  ‘I suppose he came, asked around, found I’d gone. Probably thought I’d rung my father to come and get me. He’ll ring my father and when he finds I’m not there, he won’t have a clue where I am, and won’t care really.

  ‘The other woman lives down there, Wellington. Glamorous as. More his style, so I don’t know why he doesn’t just stay down there with her. More convenient as it is, I suppose, with me here, her there. I mean I wouldn’t care. Or would I? He treats me fine when he’s around—or does he? He’s like a tricky baby. No he isn’t. He’s a liar, and a user and that’s what makes me want to get my own back on him … But … not worth it, not really, because how much would he care if I wasn’t there on Friday when he comes back. He’d care about an empty house and nothing cooking, care about no one out earning while he flies here and there spending other people’s money. Bugger knows I always come back in the end.’

  She whipped the sticky dough with the fork, beating the remainder of dry flour from round the sides of the bowl down into it.

  ‘Before I met him—which was only five years ago, but it seems like we’ve been involved in ten years worth of business together—I had a good job in an agency where I got to arrange travel for kapa haka groups. I was just getting into a management area, you know, of kapa haka groups and their travel, which would’ve meant travel for me too. It’s what I’ve always wanted—overseas travel, seeing the world, all that. Instead, off I went with him, escaping from this and that failed scam all over the country, and haven’t had a decent job since.’

  He spread the wood to lower the flames as she began pulling pieces off the dough, shaping them and letting them down into the fat that had become smoking hot.

  ‘Telling you all this, things I never heard myself say before,’ she said, shifting the bread around the pan. ‘Landing it all on you, and here I am got a son about your age. Sorry about that.’

  ‘It’s the fire,’ he said.

  ‘Aaay? True?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘What’s it got? Germs?’

  ‘Something. For talk, sing, dance, laugh, whatever.’

  ‘Aaay? Is that right?’

  She lifted the first panful of fry bread out on to the plate. ‘Well, whatever it is I could do with more … more letting off steam. It’s a hundred times better than walking the floors at DEKA all day to keep him in fancy underwear and me in smokes. Got to work so I can smoke, ha ha, couldn’t last another day. But hmm, at the moment, just right now, it’d only take cigarettes to keep me here ’til after Friday—long enough for him to come back from Wellington with his unfaithful washing and find me not home.’

  ‘I got … other stuff.’

  ‘Nah, it’s got to be nicotine thanks all the same.’

  Chapter Twelve

  During the summer when he was fourteen, Archie had taken Taku, Shania and him to the far crayfish rocks, sending them down just to look the first few times, ‘’Til you can see, ’til you can see,’ Arch had said.

  And gradually their eyes had become familiar with the contours of the rocks, the movement of the weed, the positions of the holes and finally the shapes and sizes of the crays at the entrances. ‘And a game plan,’ Arch had said. ‘You got to have one, got to know what it takes. Do it when you think so,’ and he’d left them and gone fishing.

  What it took was the deepest breath and getting down as quickly as possible, diving and pulling themselves along via the jutting pieces of rock and into the holes to grab, two-handed, the crays already backing away from their approach. It meant holding hard over the spiky backs of the crays and pulling them up against the rough cloth of the bush singlets that Arch had given them to wear. Then there was the hard push off rock, kicking for the surface, sometimes having to drop the catch if they were running out of breath and needed their arms to get them up quickly. But Arch was pleased with their five crays when he returned with the boat. ‘Because it’s up to you,’ he’d told them. ‘You young ones got the lungs for it, and who else is there now Jackson and his brother gone?’

  It was that same day, as the boat nosed its way through the rip, that he’d looked out towards Cave Rock and decided to ask Arch the question he’d often asked before but never received an answer to. ‘What’s down there?’ he’d wanted to know, but the only answer he’d ever received was, ‘You don’t go there.’

  Not allowed.

  Not allowed to go there and not considered old enough to know the reason, but perhaps now that they were old enough to be cray catchers Arch would consider him and his cousins ready to be answered. ‘What’s down there?’ he’d asked again.

  ‘Ghost of Parai Maaka,’ Archie had said. ‘A relation of ours. Went the wrong way in.’

  Arch had turned the boat then slowed the motor, picking a way back through the skewing waves. ‘You line up the top of the rock wit’ the waterfall, and then you see the path. Watch for it.’

  It was as Arch turned the boat, heading it along
the track of the rip that the tip of the rock had become aligned with the waterfall, and there, looking across to Cave Rock he’d seen the narrow strip of quiet water that would’ve let them there. If he and Ani Wainoa had started out from the opposite side they would have come to it. ‘Down there? The ghost of Parai Maaka, kina as big as plates and big fish feeding,’ Arch had said. ‘Never mind, leave it. Leave it to the fish and old Parai.’

  It was four years since he and Ani Wainoa had gone seeking a way and a treasure, and though he knew that they would never attempt that again he’d gone to find her to tell her what he’d found out about this place of boiling deep and treacherous crossing.

  These words of hers, from books she stole, that she’d eased him into four years earlier, were now unsayable. Also Ani Wainoa was different, there being nothing he could say now that would interest her in the deep, the high and the far, the hills and cove. She had other words to use, other things to do and other lies to tell.

  ‘Turning into the rip, lining up the tip of the rock with the waterfall you can see the way,’ he’d said.

  ‘It won’t be long,’ Ani Wainoa had said, ‘and I’ll be gone from here forever. We’ll be together he and I. We’ll be as one, forever.’

  That day she was wearing the top half of a singlet with white rugby shorts, and her arms and legs, shining, had reminded him of eels. It was Stefan she was talking about, who she’d met on Show Day at the bumper car rides.

  ‘You wouldn’t think … but if someone shows you, you can see,’ he’d told her. ‘Arch slowed the motor down, went slow through the high waves, and only from there you can see.’

  ‘Every night he signals me with the headlights of his car, from far away on the hill road, and I go under cover of darkness …’

  Hiding from Nanny Blind and a half blind dog? She always was bullshit, that Ani Wainoa.

  ‘Until I come to the edge of the moonlit forest.’