Dogside Story

by Patricia Grace

  ‘They’re porangi.’

  ‘We’ll take those two first. They’re alleging firstly that Rua here is a user and an addict, that secondly he and his cousins have a marijuana plantation up the back somewhere and are part of a drug ring. They don’t seem to have any evidence apart from the fact that they say they’ve seen nieces and nephews, not Rua, coming down from the hills where Rua’s house is, with implements. I mean, all I need to know is they’re not going to come up with a list of convictions or a bunch of evidence …’

  ‘It’s a load of rubbish,’ Wai said.

  ‘Not true then, no convictions?’

  ‘None,’ he said. ‘But I got a plant or two.’

  ‘A bit for yourself?’

  ‘Cousins and me … ’

  ‘If it was going on big we’d know,’ Wai said. ‘We got nephews into dealing but they keep it away from home. Nothing to do with him.’

  ‘So they can’t come at us with anything in court. People coming out of bushes with implements. What would you say …?’

  ‘Out busting cray poachers on New Year morning is what they’re talking about. They know. Everyone knows …’

  ‘Good, OK … Anything else … other drugs?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘You drink?’

  ‘Yep. Same as them.’

  ‘OK, it’s just we don’t want any surprises. Ah let’s see … well, this land business. They wouldn’t expand on it at all, and if they’re not going to talk about it I don’t see how they can expect it to have relevance, and anyway it doesn’t have bearing on a person’s ability or suitability to be a parent. Depends what comes out I suppose …’

  ‘So, what … what they saying?’

  ‘Saying your only interest in having Kiri is so you can steal land. That’s as far as they’d go. No evidence, nothing to support … They’d have to show somehow that you didn’t really want the girl and are only interested in what she’s got. They wouldn’t even say whether Kiri was a landowner or not, or an asset holder.’

  ‘Mad in the head, them.’

  ‘Rua here’s got his own land,’ Wai said. ‘Clear title to some, shares in other places. He don’t need land.’

  ‘And the girl got nothing yet,’ Tini said. ‘Except what she got coming later, like anyone else.’

  ‘Have you had any land dealings?’ Heke Norman asked.

  ‘None. Like they say, I got my own.’

  ‘Buy, or swap, or talk to anyone? Not that that would affect your ability to be a father as far as I can see.’

  ‘None of that.’

  ‘All right look, I reckon we can deal with all that. They certainly don’t seem to have much support for any of those things they’re saying. But … E Kui, Whaea, e Rua, there’s more …’

  ‘What is it then, Heke Norman?’

  ‘To do with … well to do with what they’re calling the abduction, and they’re giving their own version for the reasons for this so called abduction.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well let’s come to that. E Kui, Whaea, what they’re alleging is to do with Rua’s relationships, first with the mother of Kiri, then with Kiri herself. Putting it clearly they’re alleging Rua here had an incestuous relationship with the girl’s mother, the mother of Kiri being his sister …’

  ‘They got no right …’

  ‘And ah, if I just finish off here, tell it all. They’re saying, and intend to take to court, that there was this relationship with the mother, and now this same relationship with the daughter. An incestuous relationship with the mother and now he’s sleeping with the daughter. Only telling you what they’re saying.’

  ‘Porangi, them.’

  ‘Evil.’

  Dead meat was what he felt like. He knew it wasn’t up to him to speak for himself now and waited for Wai and Tini to get themselves together. Wai was up pacing.

  ‘It’s all in their heads then?’ Heke Norman asked. ‘They made it all up?’

  ‘Rua here, and the mother of Kiri have the same mother,’ Wai said. ‘So, that’s true, they’re brother and sister … but there’s no way … no way those two are going to put that round any court. It’s family business. No right telling that lawyer of theirs our family business, or telling you, Heke Norman. It don’t go past here, Heke Norman. No business having all that written down on your papers.’

  ‘E Kui, Whaea, Rua … I think we can deal with it,’ Heke said. ‘What we’ll do, what we’ll do … I can talk it over with Cath, probably cancel that part of it out of the equation as not being relevant to Rua’s suitability to be a father. We’re talking about suitability now, in the absence of the mother, whoever she might be. What’s more important may be …’

  ‘Those Two, Those Two …’

  ‘What they doing …?’

  ‘Look ah, maybe …’ Heke Norman said.

  ‘They want trouble, we give them trouble …’

  ‘More important may be the rest of it …’ he said.

  ‘What rest of it?’

  ‘They say they saw …’

  ‘Lies.’

  ‘Rubbish, they saw nothing.’

  ‘New Year’s morning, they’re saying, and saying others saw.’

  He had to think back to the night and day of so many happenings. Fireworks, bonfires, cray pots, gunshot, Brad and Horomona, Jase in a coma, carrying him out and the chopper arriving.

  Before that he and Kid asleep. ‘Nutters,’ he said. ‘What they’re talking about is me asleep on my bed up at the old place. Kid asleep on the same bed too. Nuts.’

  ‘Poison.’

  ‘And Wellington. You took her, they’re saying …’

  ‘Went there, stayed with his cousin while he got his limb fitted … They know …’

  ‘It’s what we’re up against if this all goes …’

  ‘Not going anywhere …’

  ‘It’s the damage allegation can do,’ Heke said. ‘The doubt that can be put into people’s minds.’

  ‘Not going anywhere, not after we get our hands on them. They want trouble, we give them trouble.’

  But Heke wouldn’t let go. ‘Help me,’ he said. ‘Kui Tini, Whaea Wai, e hoa e Rua, it’s the doubt that can be put in people’s minds. You have certainty, other people haven’t—that is if the worst happens and Amiria and Babs can’t be persuaded.’

  ‘They gotta be told.’

  ‘Awhina mai,’ Heke said, and they waited while he considered his words. ‘Would you agree, for example, to your mokopuna being talked to ah … by a professional?’

  ‘No way,’ he said.

  ‘E Kui, Whaea, Rua would you consider a doctor’s report?’

  ‘Examination?’ Tini asked.

  ‘None a that, no bloody way,’ he said.

  ‘If you think how …’

  ‘Look here Heke Norman …’

  ‘How it could seem if you refuse … I’m only trying to explain the position.’

  ‘There’s no position,’ Wai said. ‘Look, it’s not your fault Heke Norman. We understand, and you’re right. If we were fighting this in court we’d need back-up. But it won’t happen. The sooner we get home, take a piece out of those two the better. Knowing their big mouths they could be spouting this all round the place already. It could’ve all crossed the inlet by now.’

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Wai was right to be concerned. Tongues were going for it over the bridge at the Post Shop. In this now slowed-down time, Babs found space between dealing with customers and paperwork to write cards and letters to new friends, as well as to keep up a flow of information to old friends and other-side relatives.

  When customers or casual callers first noticed the absence of Kiri and asked after her, they received abrupt replies from Babs who said she had gone to hospital with a burn on her arm and that her uncle had taken her to Wellington without their permission while he was off getting himself a new leg.

  ‘Ah that one, Tamarua’s son who was in the accident,’ they said.

  It was on
e of these customers who first suggested Babs should’ve called the police—him going off with somebody’s kid like that, not even saying. And he was only a kid himself wasn’t he, Tamarua’s son? They knew him.

  Inside the shop doorway, to catch the eye of holidaymakers, overnighters and other casuals, were shelves of magazines, newspapers, sweets and drinks. There were fishing lines, hooks and sinkers for those who might wish to drop their lines alongside others who fished regularly from the bridge. Packets of cards and a shelf of printed shirts gave greetings from Aotearoa, New Zealand.

  The shop had been built during an era of windowlessness. Going into it was like entering a cave, though there was an attempt at lighting via a fluorescent tube which served to brighten the front counters and cast candlepower over the front ends of the shelves which became darker and darker towards laundry goods, coils of rope, light bulbs, work socks, pop-out clotheslines and jandals.

  Much of what had once been front window was now taken up by the rows of red post boxes. Of the remaining window space the bottom third had been painted over with white paint. Maybe there was a reason. The top portion had posters and notices advertising past events Sellotaped to it.

  It must be said that Babs was selective regarding who she gave hard core information to. There were people and people. Old ones, new ones. The true informees were people she’d known all her life because they were related to her and she went to school with them or with their families, even if they were other-siders. It was mainly through Babs, and to a less extent her sister, that news travelled from Dogside to Godside and vice versa. Sometimes Dogside talk spread more quickly through Godside than it did through its own home territory. Likewise God goss through Dog.

  It wasn’t that Babs was above yarning with strangers or newer residents but she was able to give information a different slant when talking with them. Kiri had had an accident, spilt hot water. They’d sent her off on holiday with her uncle while she recovered. From the Post Shop, the informees could go along the street and call in on a less-giving Amiria at Bay Fish.

  After the holiday period was over there was plenty to keep tongues busy until well into February, by which time the school term was well underway and there was still no sign of Kiri. It was a dead time with summer visitors gone, no one with money, a few old ones out getting their milk and bread, collecting bills and junk mail and going along for their Lotto tickets.

  ‘So what …? What’s with this girl?’ Godsiders wondered.

  ‘So, now he’s saying he’s the father, Rua,’ Babs said. ‘Thinks he’s keeping her.’

  ‘Ah, ah, well ah …’ and it would be likely to be some days later that the caller would return to check on her own recollections. ‘Ah, the girl’s mother, Ani Wainoa, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Daughter of Ramari. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Him, that Rua, saying he’s the father of the girl, is son of the same Ramari. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Ah.’

  In her position as Post Shop attendant, Babs was first to see the postcards and letters coming to her and her sister from all over the country, all over the world. Or would’ve been first to see them had they come.

  Once in a while there would be something to make her heart leap, some lonely card with a disappointing message scrawled across it. It would enliven her enough to ring Amiria along at Bay Fish and the two would make what they could out of it. Also it was something to show to friends, relatives, acquaintances and even talkative strangers who came in. It sustained them for a time.

  Even expectation can be sustenance for a time.

  But generally, opening the bag with hope in her heart each day, flicking the bits and pieces of mail into boxes and then looking into their own empty box at the end of it was a souring experience. You were like that with these people, then they took off and you never heard from them again. That included Dawn Anne and her folder bunged with notes. Thin air and not even a kiss-my-foot.

  ‘He wants her land.’

  ‘Her land, ah. She got land?’

  A visit to Babs was usually followed by a call into Bay Fish to see Amiria who might be in the process of cleaning down stainless steel, mixing batter, heating fat in the vats, flipping onion slices and beef on the hot plate. Amiria already damp.

  Amiria, though nowhere near as free regarding solid information as her sister, was useful in that a person could go to her with a sentence beginning, ‘I hear,’ and receive a statement of what they could take to be confirmation, such as, ‘And he’ll get what’s coming, the little rat.’ Or, ‘Out for what he can get, little rat. Bugger-all by the time we finished with him.’

  And if over the counter at the Post Shop there was a snippet of conversation such as: ‘Who knows what he’s up to?’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘And her.’

  ‘Him, and her?’

  ‘Sleeping. Broad daylight. The whole world …’ Along at Bay Fish they could get from Amiria: ‘Get what’s coming to him, little brat, when the shit hits the fan.’

  What it did hit was rafters, Godside rafters, from where it eased down in drifts and spread itself. This was weeks before it ever touched base in its equivalent place on Dogside.

  The rafters on Godside, taking first the main beam—the tahuhu, backbone of the ancestor from which the ribs descend—is a beam densely carved in ancestral figures whose heads sit squarely on only slightly rounded shoulders. These ones are open-mouthed in a rather innocent looking way, a round-mouthed rather than a gaping, fiery-mouthed way. They’re round-eyed too. Surprised looking. Their tongues are not greatly elongated, protruding only as far as their chins. The stance that each takes is not particularly wide-legged and they’re all somewhat uniform, differing mainly in what is held in the hand, or the patterns used in decoration of face and bodies.

  Austere, they are. The workmanship is impressive and Godsiders would claim their main beam to be superior to any they’d seen. In the first place there was the very size and weight of the slab that enabled the fullness of the figures and the depth of the chisel work to be brought out. Also the work had taken time. It was serious and proper.

  Dogsiders, however, might describe the work as lifeless, the figures as half asleep or half dead, gutless maybe, or boring—just like the praying hypocrites that gathered underneath it, that lot—the canoe-breaking fatheads.

  The figures on the main beam in the Dogside house had been brought out from much lighter slabs and their heads were on sideways, alternately to left and right. Tongues flopped down to bellybuttons or slid out over shoulders, chests, arms. They squinted, ogled, peered, challenged and cheeked. Decoration was minimal.

  Dogsiders were proud of the liveliness of the figures and their stuff-you attitudes, while Godsiders thought the work to be rough, careless, hurried and undisciplined, and believed the figures wayward, typical of fly-by-night, canoe-snatching runaways.

  Now the heke—these painted ancestral ribs in each house—also invite comparison. In the Godside house, the central unbroken line which is where the heartbeat is, zig-zagged down the centre of each plank. The scrollwork following this heartline tucked itself into each angle, curling in on itself while at the same time maintaining an unbroken flow from the top edge to the bottom. The designs in black and red on a white background, that they’d replicated from the old house, were part of tradition that Godsiders were proud to follow.

  It made Dogsiders yawn.

  The heartlines on the Dogside heke were more sinuous and the coiled shapes in the indentations were unattached, open in shape as though they could be flying or swimming, or they were like dancers facing each other and seemed likely to break out as if they could evolve to some other form. A bit of yellow, a bit of blue had crept in there.

  Godsiders said the reason that everything was so skimped and gaudy in the Dogside house was because their other-side relations had run out of the right paint and probably owned only two paint brushes, in other wor
ds they’d been short of materials at the time. This happened to be true but Dogsiders believed the results were all the better for it.

  What does all this amount to when it comes to information retention, rafter ears, rafter story? Nothing much. Capacity is limitless no matter what the workmanship or adornments. Maybe there were fewer prayers hoisted up in the Dogside house but there were equally as many words, stories—equally as much gossip, slander, secret and history. The rafters handled it all, not a problem.

  That’s enough about beams.

  Enough about Godside.

  So, what was revealed to Wai, Tini and Rua when they went to their meeting with Heke Norman many weeks into the New Year was already hot on Godside. It had all crossed water via the bridge, via the footpaths and stores, via Post Shop and Bay Fish.

  The three left the lawyer’s office chopping out of the room and along the insecty boards in single file like a row of axes. Heke Norman, holding the door for them as they went out, caught up to Tini who was leading the three and hurried along beside her. ‘What I’m saying, what I’m saying is, if it does, does get to court, don’t leave me with nothing, no back-up.’

  Chopping along.

  After calling into Tini’s place for an overnight bag the three drove mostly in silence through to the main street—where the countdown clock was well into ticking off its next three hundred and sixty-five days—over the new traffic humps and flagstones, round the roundabout, past the town clock in its new millennium paint, past the flags and decorations and the fatigued kerbside palms.

  ‘What got into them?’ Tini said, ‘What they on about?’

  Looking towards the beach, the temporary seating where the big celebrations had taken place was gone. There was a man jabbing papers onto a stick, putting them in a rubbish bag, and past the roadside veggie trucks and the whale graveyard the big beach was empty.

  ‘Well, they can’t. Not going to …’

  The tide was a long way out, the spread of flat rocks making dark animal shapes all over the vast shore.

  ‘You know, deep down …’

  ‘Deep down rotten,’ Rua said.