Dogside Story

by Patricia Grace

  It was as they moved through the city by taxi from the bus depot, stopping, starting and swapping lanes that he’d felt relieved he hadn’t driven down, as had been his intention when he bought the car.

  ‘Nowhere to park, Cuz,’ Dion had told him over the phone. ‘Nowhere unless you want to pay top dollar in an overnight place.’ So he’d booked seats on Intercity instead. ‘Tell the driver Te Aro Park. Get out and look up, Cuz, you’ll see our flag.’

  After getting out of the taxi they’d looked up, turning themselves until they spotted the flag on a pole hanging from a second storey window above a deli. Also at the window was a little face that he’d thought at first belonged to a child, then as they crossed the road the woman whose face it was came out of a doorway onto the pavement.

  ‘I’m Miraana,’ she’d said. ‘One of the flatmates. Dion’s working late up at Student Union and asked me to watch out.’ Her hair was like pop-weed tied up in a high bunch and she was wearing tight black clothes and high shoes. She’d led them up a steep stairway.

  ‘But not for too much longer,’ Dion was saying from up there. ‘Graduate then get me a full-time job. Well … I hope … Near home maybe. I want to find somewhere to live that’s level with the ground.’

  At the top of the stairs Miraana had taken them into the lounge and kitchen where the concrete walls were painted pink and purple and where there was a square pillar in the centre of the room covered in yellow, green and blue patterns. She’d sat them down on an old sofa and stood with her back to the flag window asking questions about the bus trip. He didn’t know how much Dion had told her about why he had come, didn’t care.

  On the wall opposite were old band posters—Dread Beat and Blood, Lee Scratch Perry and Roots Foundation. Music from a tape deck mingled with the sounds of booming waves of traffic below. Low down on the same wall was a map marking out he didn’t know what, and on an adjacent wall were photos of street marches, demonstrations, protests and occupations all featuring the flag.

  Miraana had told him about the different events, the different key figures, but he wasn’t able to keep up with what she was saying, thinking of food instead, wondering if he should be getting Kid something to eat or if they should wait for Dion.

  In the kitchen was an unused stove with pot plants growing down over it and a stainless steel bench that had a split in it as though it had been chopped with an axe. But on a little table, beside a set of silver painted cupboards, were a two-plate camp cooker, a toaster and a jug. There were people coming in, being introduced, going off to rooms then going out again banging their big shoes on the stairs.

  ‘At least I got a few mates here and it’s only one flight of stairs, one storey. Seatoun? Way up there, six floors and living on my own. People forget where they belong when they live high up, and the ground keeps on trying to remind them, pulls at their feet, takes colour from out of their bodies making them greyer and greyer and pulling all their corners down. They have to keep looking out to see where the ground is. It’s down there but its all concreted over with no rain or sun touching it, so they keep frowning down trying to look through those layers and their eyes get tired and their faces get lonely. The higher you go in buildings the grumpier and more faded you become.’

  From the flag window they looked down to Lunar Park and The Faultline Bar, Loading Zone, Wicked Charcoal, Hair Afrik, Kwanzaa, IKON, Karaoke, Great India, Kebabaholic. There was one big pohutukawa tree and a wind-beaten ti kouka; paste-ups and papers, and alleys and car parks where workers were allowed to go and smoke. People, stretched out on seats and on grass, ate from boxes and paper bags. They wore big shoes, big jackets, black clothes. Trolley buses trundled by.

  When he asked Miraana if there were any takeaway places still open she’d directed him to an all-night cart, and on asking if she wanted anything she’d answered no, so he’d guessed she didn’t have any money. He and Kid had gone out for chicken and chips bringing enough for Miraana and Dion as well. It was ten thirty by then and Dion had arrived not long afterwards, grateful for food.

  ‘It’s unfood day,’ he’d said. ‘Tomorrow we get money, put in for ten dollar meat packs and two dollar bags of veggies, put something into the flat account for tea and bread. By this time of the week there’s only tea and bread, sometimes.’

  ‘People long for the earth. Even if it’s concreted over they still know it’s there somewhere because they see it sneaking out of cracks. The higher you go the less of a person you become. You become a kehua, but sometimes you don’t know you’re a kehua, you feel you’re wearing a mask instead. Try to take it off but you can’t. So after a while you realise it’s you. Earthquakes rattle you and your bones start coming to the outside. Well it’s bad enough here, up a storey and sleeping on a shelf.’

  It was a room of white concrete with an ungibbed wooden wall that had been erected as a divider to make two rooms from one. A platform had been put up and that’s where Dion had his mattress. A bed lamp provided the only light for the room. ‘The ceiling light is in the other half, on the other side of the partition,’ Dion told him.

  Underneath the platform was a sofa and a small formica table with Dion’s books on it, and across one corner, balanced on jutting screws, was a broom handle where he hung his clothes.

  It was when they’d gone to bed on that first night that he wondered if he should’ve left Kid with Nan Tini instead of bringing her with him. The noise of traffic hadn’t stopped and every now and again a siren or alarm would sound, or when a bus or truck went by the whole building would shake making the windows rattle. But Kid had quickly gone to sleep on Dion’s sofa, pleased with the new sleeping bag he’d bought her. He’d unrolled his own bag on the floor in front of the sofa, which was the only remaining space on the piece of old carpet which smelled of damp and rot while his sleeping bag smelled of fish. Dion had climbed the wall and got into bed.

  The next day he and Kid had taken a bus to the hospital so that she could have her dressings done then they’d walked over to the Artificial Limbs Centre for him to begin his physio treatment. Most of that day had been spent in waiting rooms, or in one of them having treatment, and it had been much the same every day. Again on that first day he’d wondered if he should’ve brought her, yet knew he couldn’t have left her for six weeks—or however long this was all going to take.

  Before the shops closed that day he’d gone down town for a foam strip to put under his sleeping bag to get himself up off the rotten carpet. After a few days he became used to the noise of traffic, the shaking and rattling, and would go to sleep listening to Dion’s voice, thinking of water, thinking of her, managing to sleep at least until the street sweeper trucks came grinding through at four in the morning.

  After a week he became used to that as well. He’d wake, think of home, of her, and go back to sleep again while Kid slept on.

  ‘We’re all trapped in some way. Me here, you there. Me so I can graduate and “work for the people”, which’ll mean I can never live at home again until I’m old. You, you’re stuck there in among all the home politics where you can’t even fart without everyone knowing and having an opinion. You, getting people their fish but not knowing what else is going on in Te Ao Maori.’

  On the days after Kid’s last dressings had come off and when he had early appointments at the Limbs Centre they would spend the afternoons down at the waterfront, by the sea with all its edges trimmed against jetties, walkways, wharf sheds, cafés and markets, walls and breakwaters. They’d watched the fishing boats, the day trip boats, the people coming and going, the row of men sitting with their fishing lines over the side waiting for bites that never seemed to come. He’d thought of stripping down and getting in for a look around, but the water looked oily and lifeless, and he thought he’d better take notice of the warning signs.

  There was life down there though.

  One afternoon the fish were biting and the fishermen, who on most days had looked like nothing but sad, bent statues, had pulled up smal
l kahawai one after another. At last they had become people, men pulling up food to take home, the fish flashing white out of the thick water.

  Sometimes they’d gone to the big museum on the waterfront though he didn’t really like it there. On going in the first time it had seemed like a big expanse of shiny floor, a dark shop and stairs. Up the stairs there were lit-up information stands, lights flashing, lights everywhere, yet it had seemed dark. Other people all seemed to be going places—he didn’t quite know where—in their walk shoes and fishing hats, their sweatshirts tied to them, backpacks on their backs.

  In a darkened area with lights set into the floor, there were glassed-off birds, and forest sounds mixed with wind and sea and tapes of kids’ voices, yet everything had seemed dead and still. There were glassed-off fish, a good-sized cray with its tail tucked under, rows of shells, skeletons, skulls and numbered bones of dolphins and whales, seabirds strung up above.

  Kid liked it.

  On the way out he’d bought her a blow-up dinosaur, and some packets of bugs and insects to take home for her cousins.

  ‘There’s more, there’s more,’ Dion and Miraana had told him that night. ‘There’s Bush City, Maori Exhibition, Discovery Place, Marae. You have to go up and go out.’ So they’d kept going back and he began to enjoy it after a while. Well, he began to enjoy being a father taking his daughter places.

  One night after they’d been there a month there’d been a phone call from Archie. It was a Wednesday, two-dollar night, when all the pubs around were selling cheap drinks. People were out on the pavements yelling and laughing and some of them were trying to sing. There was someone screaming up the outside stairway and someone swearing down, so much noise that when the phone rang it had sounded distant. ‘I wouldn’t mind being out there two-dollar-nighting. Wish it was me out there pissed as a pukeko,’ Dion was saying as he left the window to pick up the phone.

  ‘It’s for you,’ he’d said. ‘It’s Uncle Archie shouting so loud he doesn’t need a phone. Just get up the top of Puketoi and call out, him.’

  ‘They filed for custody,’ Archie had told him. ‘Couldn’t talk them out of it, and reckon they charging you wit’ abduction you don’t bring her home soon. But keep talking and I reckon they give up in the end. Don’t worry Son, we all help you wit’ your daughter, help you keep your daughter, you’re the one she wants. Don’t know why they want her back actually, don’t understand that. My sister been giving them a hard time, but ah …’

  Archie’d had a lot to tell, shouting over the phone about the millennium project—the bookings, the ground preparation, where they’d be getting the water in from. ‘Water trucks in every three days to keep the tanks topped up and Bussy’s bringing a refrigerated truck in from the removal firm, for food supplies and cold drinks. Bookings, deposits coming in from all over,’ he’d said. ‘Mostly from Kiwis, some from overseas as well. Got you and Dion down for Waste Management, ha ha—taking stuff to the tip. Jackson and Joeboy too. We got trailers lined up. All go.’

  He listened to all that but what he’d really wanted to know about was the weather, the tides, the fishing, how Pop Henry was doing. The millennium business would be two weeks out of his life, then it’d be over and there’d be plenty of good tides after that. Building the wharekai would be a good buzz, something he’d be able to help with once he had his limb.

  ‘Your cousin brought Remelda and her baby home to live in the pink house,’ Arch had told him. ‘That ex of hers done his time and she reckons he be after her, out to get Bones, so keeping out of his way. Well our mate Jase is a bit low and he’s back home too, travelling to work from here. Never worked out with him and Tina. Gone. Anyway good to see the houses filling up again.’

  Wanted to ask about her.

  ‘Maina been here with Cass, going over receipts and things, tidying up after her old man. Holding on to $7000 of people’s deposits she reckons. Ha, tell you later. Anyway they sorting out who all paid and Maina reckons she’s selling the car to pay it back. Ha, you know, when she left him she took the car and hid it at her mate’s place. Well, ah, she paid for the car in the first place and put it in her own name, haa. We told her don’t sell the car. Wasn’t her who pinched the money, and we got a fund. Anyway my sister having a go at getting it off him.’

  Later that night when he told Dion that The Aunties had filed for custody of Kid, Dion had become concerned. ‘You have to file too,’ he’d said, ‘otherwise you’ll have no power in court. You have to file straight away and it doesn’t matter where. I’ll take you tomorrow. And you have to get hold of Ani Wainoa, get her to name you as the father. No one needs to know the relationship, but it’s dirty business. You have to try and settle it out of court, otherwise the court makes all the decisions, often based on who’s not fit to be a parent rather than who is.’

  Time to go. The final adjustments had been made to the limb, and he’d packed everything ready to head for the station the next morning. Dion, from up above, was saying on this last night, ‘So who’s going to look after us now on unfood days? All back to our normal starve-o. Anyhow not long and I’ll be home eating fish. Home to the Y2K Christian celebration, big fat Christian sun coming out of the sea bringing us dollars, ha. You could’ve stayed on a bit Cuz, waited for me. Miraana would’ve liked that—as you must’ve noticed. But you … Well, if that was me … if that was me … but she’s not interested in me. I used to dream of her and me climbing up my wall together. Suppose I talk too much, suppose she prefers the strong silent type.’

  Home.

  Back to new millennium.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  There were some who reckoned Piiki Chiefy wouldn’t have the neck to turn up to a meeting arranged especially for the purpose of stripping him down. They thought it a waste of time setting aside a whole afternoon when there was so much work still to be done.

  These disbelievers were the ones who didn’t know the man, either because they came from elsewhere and had married into the whanau, or because they were too young to remember the time when PC had made a run for it thirty years before with funds from local rugby.

  Others, who knew him better, knew he had plenty of neck, and thought he would probably come to the meeting just to see what he could make out of it. These ones had grown up with him. He was a relative of theirs, and even though he was brought up on the other side they’d all gone to school together, been in the same teams and leapt off banks and bridges into the same water holes. Every now and again when they were kids, a Dogsider had dealt him a biff, probably because he always brought shop bread to school for lunch instead of home-made rewena, and because he always wore shoes. He was never too unhappy about the hits.

  There were other kids, always Godsiders, who had shoes too, but they had the sense to remove them and hide them in the bushes as soon as they were out of sight of parents and grandparents. These ones would spend the days barefoot and get the shoes back on their feet before they arrived home at their back doors. In this way they didn’t get picked on. It also meant the shoes were seldom worn and could last as long as one wearer and the next could squeeze feet into them. There were some, both Godside and Dogside, who now and again took shop bread to school, but this didn’t happen as regularly as with little PC.

  Another thing that earned him a slap-down or part drowning every now and again was the way words came out from between his teeth. He had a smart mouth, grew up swanky and gum-chewing, and had long pants by the time he was fourteen that had been handed on to him by a short uncle. He left school at fifteen and got an oily job, which he didn’t like, in his uncle’s garage.

  At about this time he had a girlfriend who used to get up in front of him on his horse on the way to the pictures. He’d let her down in the horse paddock behind the picture theatre, they’d kiss behind the backside of the horse, then she’d join the cousins she was meant to be with and go into the theatre. In there, as well as other kids, would be uncles in cowboy outfits with butcher knives in their belts, aun
ties in old dresses and broken shoes with babies wrapped in blankets.

  After six months at the garage he moved on to work in the dairy factory. He didn’t like that either, but he liked having money, which he spent on tight trousers, big jackets, crepe-soled shoes, string ties and oil to stick down and slick back his particularly jumpy hair.

  In other words he dressed himself up like a city boy. The dairy factory wasn’t for him, but it took him a few years to realise money could be available some other way. He was married with two children by the time he got himself into a position of responsibility in the Rugby Club.

  Easy.

  Away he went in a new car, with a new woman, leaving Neta and his children to be looked after by his relatives. The ones that set out looking for him to teach him a lesson did so not because of the money he’d stolen but because of Neta and the kids. They never found him.

  After some years his name kept coming up in connection with one scam after another, but none of this seemed to make any difference at all to him being given responsible positions in government departments and on advisory boards. It was a laugh, really. Those who’d grown up with him and knew him well couldn’t help but have some sneaking admiration for him and thought those who employed him were so stupid that they deserved what they got.

  Among those who knew him better and thought it likely he would turn up to the meeting, were some who thought such a meeting a waste of time anyway. He’d never part with the seven thou, which had probably been spent already, and they didn’t need anything in the way of information from him because they’d been given everything they needed by Maina, who, once she’d decided to put her husband’s weights up, had done it in a big way.

  In his absence she’d downloaded everything she needed from the computer, picked up a bundle of envelopes containing deposits, emptied the letter box and had all their mail redirected to her father’s address. What more did they need?