by Albert Wendt
So this afternoon, as you watch the haunted Aaron surfacing from the haze over the Pacific, you re-experience to your darkest core that unravellable fusion of shock, surprise, amazement, sexual arousal, dismay, fear and horror that brimmed up from your belly and radiated swiftly into all your limits that afternoon at the end of winter, at the end of the your last primary school day, at the end of what you later identified as your innocence as a child. Sweat seeps out of your pores, and you shut your eyes and curl back in your chair …
Arthur Helters is small, fragile small, with large freckles, bad skin, dirty red hair and grime-ingrained nails, and he stinks of neglect. He can’t return anyone’s gaze, and he lisps and can barely be heard when he works up the courage to speak. And because he has just joined the class, he isn’t one of you – not yet. Many small, physically fragile and disabled people exude that certain vulnerability that makes you want to protect and help them. Arthur isn’t one of those. All that he is signals he is an obvious target for the stronger, which means everyone in your class. There is nothing about Martha Dewwer – who joined your class the same time as Arthur – that makes her as conspicuous as Arthur. She is Palagi, like nearly all the class; she is chubby and pimply and acned like most of the girls; she performs averagely, like most of the class, in everything; she never volunteers answers or behaves in ways that make her a bloody show-off, better than the rest of the class; like most of the girls, she isn’t attractive to the boys, like Aaron and Paul and you, who determine what that is; compared to Mere, the superstar beauty and brains in your class, Martha is just plain.
So why them? That is what has puzzled you all your life. Poor miserable Arthur because his absolute vulnerability invited abuse? Martha because she just happened to be there, just one of the many that Aaron could have chosen from your class?
Aaron lived with his mother, brother and sister in Napier Street, which branched off from your street; Paul and his family lived in Howes Street, just behind yours; Mere and Keith lived in Franklin Road, at the end of your street. So it was easy for your tribe to come together at any time; in truth, when you became inseparable friends, you made sure you became members of one another’s families, considered and loved by your parents and relatives as their children. So you could move from house to house as if they were all your homes.
Over the years, Freemans Bay and Ponsonby, centred on Wellington Street, became your special territory; your tūrangawaewae, Mere called it. You knew all the maps that made it up: every street, every twist of them, every corner, all the families and people who lived permanently in it. Despite being stereotyped by the media and the people outside your territory as the poorest and worst slum area in Auckland, you all loved it; considered it the ‘proud indefatigable heart’ of your lives (your Faulknerian description of it when you were finishing your MA, and Faulkner was a hero of yours.)
It is cold, and though you are wrapped up in your father’s thick woollen overcoat that smells of him and his tobacco smoke, the cold cuts up your spine and lodges in the back of your neck and in your ears and face. You can hear your shoes thudding into the wet pavement as you run towards Aaron’s house. He isn’t expecting you, but you’re used to going to one another’s homes whenever you feel like it.
The insides of your nostrils hurt from the cold. One more lamp post and you’re there. You don’t pay much attention to the black pick-up truck outside Aaron’s house. You glance up: the black sky is aswirl with wind that is driving the storm clouds across the heavens, and for a second the silvery image of the white owl you saw at the zoo the month before catches your attention and then vanishes. Why the owl?
You hesitate again at the bottom of the front steps into the house, turn and look back at the pick-up truck. Recognise it as belonging to Feau ‘Mako’ Schultz and Bonzy Scotman, who’d dropped out of high school at sixteen and were already in trouble with the police for theft, burglaries, assault and extortion, and other misdemeanors, and were feared by most of you as unrelenting bullies. Once at the dairy at the bottom of your street, when you went to buy milk, they cornered you before you went in, twisted your arms until you cried out in pain, and demanded you hand over the money your mother had given you. When you refused, Feau shoved his forefinger along your arse groove and hissed into your ear, ‘Ya don’t give us the money, kid, and we’ll shove more than this up ya!’ As they ran off with your money, you cried, realising you’d pissed yourself with fear. What are they doing in Aaron’s home in the middle of the afternoon? But you remember seeing Aaron with them a few times before. You remember Mere saying to Aaron, ‘Shit, man, you got ya head screwed on right?’
You don’t go into the house, but veer left and down the narrow footpath between the house and next door, a slippery surface that stinks of rotten leaves and mud, and which you have to navigate carefully.
Behind the house you are sheltered from the wind. You go to fetch the stepladder from the toolshed, and recall Mere ordering all of you, whenever Aaron talked admiringly of Feau and Bonzy, to ‘stay away from those gangster bastids.’
You expand the step ladder, push it up against the wall of the house, stamp it firmly into the wet mushy ground, steady yourself and then mount the steps – one, two, three – up to the windows that look down into the kitchen and dining room.
Your heart is thumping, thumping, thumping, your ears echoing with your excited breathing, your throat sandpaper dry, your eyes burning with expectation, though you are trying to persuade yourself that your desire, your undeniable need to see, to know, is ‘sinful’ (your father’s description). What if Aaron’s in trouble with those bullies? You have to save him – yeah, that’s why you have to do this. You shut your eyes tightly as you raise your face up over the window ledge. Stop. Open them, now.
And once again it is there, in all its forbidden, repulsive beauty, as it has been since that afternoon although, over the years, you have denied it to yourself by not ever confronting Aaron with it and resolving it. Now as you again view it, like a film that you’ve edited repeatedly according to what you’ve learned about yourself and others over the years, you weep silently for Aaron and Arthur and Martha, who you could have saved but, in your compulsive fascination, voyeuristic enjoyment and cowardice, didn’t. And by not saving them you allowed Aaron to pursue the hypnotic self-destructive darkness in himself that you witnessed in its full splendour and terror for the first time that afternoon. You also allowed those unremitting gangsters, Feau and Bonzy, to get away with their terrible crime, leaving you craving for Arthur’s and Martha’s forgiveness.
Because you’ve been in and out of it since you’ve known Aaron, you know that dining room in intimate detail but, when you look down into it this time, it feels new, different; bristling with danger, threat, fear. It is without sound, because you are shut outside it.
The light on the far wall behind the red sofa is on, and caught under its stark interrogating light are three figures.
Martha is sitting with her face buried in Aaron’s middle as he stands, with his back to you, his buttocks clenching and unclenching, his trousers down at his ankles.
A tearful Arthur is cowering at the other end of the sofa, bent forward, shaking arms wrapped around his thin knees, trying to hide from what is happening.
Directly beneath you, enthroned in the rickety dining room chairs, their feet extending out towards the others, are Feau and Bonzy. Feau’s right hand is moving in his lap, his taut back and head pressed back against the wall, while Bonzy, who is leaning forward, is stroking Aaron’s buttocks.
Aaron periodically glances back over his shoulder at Bonzy, his face aglow with desire and pleasure. You want to look away, but, as you watch, your sight and total being won’t allow you.
When Bonzy rises up and, unzipping his fly, walks up and against Aaron, you want to warn your friend, but you don’t, you don’t. Why? Suddenly Feau is a hungry darkness that separates itself from the wall and extends towards Ar
thur. No, no, no! But your voice chokes in your throat.
Arthur, sick with fear and sobbing, jumps up and tries to escape, but the darkness that is Feau envelopes him and forces him back onto the sofa …
Now Aaron is dead, and you don’t know what became of Arthur and Martha, who, to your immense relief, didn’t enroll at your high school, and disappeared, physically, from your life. Feau and Bonzy went to borstal a few months later for other crimes and didn’t return to live permanently in your neighbourhood. Throughout your life, you’ve read and heard stories and rumours about their careers as criminals. Just before you left for Hawai‘i, Aaron boasted that one of his ‘business associates’, Feau ‘Mako’ Schultz, was now the ‘King of Dope’ in Auckland. You pretended you didn’t know who Feau was, and Aaron left it at that, But you knew Feau and Bonzy were intertwined permanently in Aaron’s life, rooted there in their abuse of Arthur and Martha.
Online, Daniel books his air fares to New Zealand and Aaron’s funeral, far too late to admit his cowardice to Aaron and ask for his forgiveness.
8
It seems uncomplicated: all you need to do is go to Auckland, meet Aaron’s lawyer, find out what Aaron wants done and implement those wishes – the funeral and burial probably being the most important events you have to arrange – and then return to Honolulu. Simple. Yet to achieve that involves again seeing and being with all the people who have been central to Aaron’s and your life and your whole history, back to your first meeting at school in Miss Baystall’s class, complicated further by what happened to your marriage and how that changed those relationships and the reading of your history with those people, especially the ones you love. It also involves a return to the locations in your life where you spent time with Laura and your children, and the memories that make up that life, that past through which you now have to read even Aaron’s death. Your return will be a headlong meeting with those memories, that past and the pain and regret they will generate; the most painful will be those memories of the happy and fulfilling times. Your re-entry to bury Aaron will be an exhumation of what you wanted to leave behind in Aotearoa. Now you will be seeing that time through a self that has been changed by almost two years of living in Hawai‘i. It will be a complicated, complex, to-be-feared minefield. But your undeniable desire is to go, because you need Aaron’s forgiveness, and you want to continue your atonement in the hope that the people you love will forgive you. You also have to admit to yourself that you miss Mere, Keith, Paul, Aaron, Laura and your two children: yes, especially your children. That is now a cutting physical pain just under your diaphragm, a pain that has worsened since the phone call about Aaron’s death.
When Daniel finishes explaining all this to Megan, he looks across at her sitting in the armchair and the mellow evening light that is being reflected off the tops of the Ko‘olau that surround the Mānoa Valley and her house. Usually he spends at least one week evening at her home, and during the weekends, when he is free of Michelle, he spends days there.
‘Dan, why do you always make things so complicated for yourself? Can’t you just tell your brain to stop complicating things?’ He moves to touch her hand, but she moves it out of reach. ‘Dan, your friend is dead; he wants you to come and bury him, period. And going on what you’ve told me about your “tribe”, they will help you do that …’
‘I go to bury Aaron, but everything from my past is alive …’
‘So?’
‘So I’ll have to face all that.’
‘Did you ever believe you’ll be able to avoid that for the rest of your complicated life? What about the children you tell me you love? What about Laura? Don’t you owe it to her and the love you must have once enjoyed with her to go back and come to terms with her?’ One of the strengths of their relationship is their frankness with each other about their past lives, without jealousy or rancour.
‘I’m not making up the complexity and complications, Megan. Life isn’t that simple.’ Dramatically he jumps to his feet and hurries out to the lānai. He stands there and assumes the dramatic pose of the wounded hero, hand on hip, head bowed, eyes focused on the darkening Ko‘olau, with the sun dropping quickly behind them. He expects her to follow him out. She doesn’t. And he feels deeply wounded when he hears her laughing softly.
‘Stop being so melodramatic!’ she calls. ‘So if your life is so complicated, uncomplicate it.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘End your affair with the woman you’ve tried your devious best to hide from me.’ Instantly, in disbelief, her revelation clutches at his breath. He turns to deny her accusation, but catches her knowing, unrelenting smile. He says nothing. ‘Yes, Dan, be fair to Michelle: you’ve lost any interest in her apart from sex, haven’t you?’ He refuses to reply. She turns and heads for the kitchen in the inner darkness of the house, and he needs to stop her from doing that.
‘Megan?’ he hears himself calling. ‘Megan?’
Out of the darkness comes her voice: ‘Dinner will be served soon, Master!’
Later, over a light dinner of cold ham and salad and beer, he asks her, ‘How did you find out about …’
‘Michelle?’ He nods. She reaches across the table and wraps her right hand fearlessly around his left wrist, holding it still. ‘Honolulu is a small place, Dan. You’re so naïve about people knowing everyone else’s business, in villages like UH and Honolulu!’ She laughs again. ‘Hell, wake up. Did you believe no one in this gossip-ridden town knew nothing about Michelle? And Michelle likes talking about her trophies.’ I’m not naïve, Michelle isn’t treating me like a trophy, and I’m expert at keeping my affairs totally secret, Daniel wants to protest, but he hesitates. ‘I’ve got nothing to gain by telling you that,’ she continues. Then gazing straight into his eyes, she says, ‘I want our affair to end, Dan.’ Wounded, insulted more by that, he starts to say so, but she adds, ‘I mean it, Professor. I’ve had enough of men like you who treat women badly.’
‘But I don’t!’ he protests. She lets go of his wrist, and the release feels like she is abandoning him.
She gets up and, looking down at him, says, ‘Your Laura was dead right about you: your egotism won’t allow you to see yourself for what you are.’
‘And what is that?’ he demands.
She starts walking away, pauses and looks back at him. ‘Just another selfish male, except you’re more intransigent because you’re convinced you’re an expert at analysing people and life and yourself.’ He gets up, ready to challenge her claims, but she turns her back to him and, gazing up into the darkening range, says with unquestioned finality, ‘I want you to go now.’ When he doesn’t move, she swirls round, her eyes blazing with determination, and orders him: ‘Dan, I want you to go, now!’ She watches him intently as he glances at her, shakes his head and then hurries to the front door.
In his car on his way home, when he has steadied himself and decided perhaps there was some truth in her analysis of him, he recalls, in heightened detail, the way she looked as he was leaving. In the deep black shine of her eyes was her utter refusal to allow him to disobey her instruction for him to leave. He shivers once, twice: you disobey her at your peril. No regret, none whatsoever, in her voice, presence and manner, he realises unexpectedly, as she ended their relationship. That for an instant blinds him like the lights of the oncoming traffic. To her, he is in the past already: of no value, someone who’d never come into her life. His pride won’t accept that –
well, not at this time.
9
Did the Tribe of Aaron, Paul, Keith, Mere and Daniel ever formally agree to a pact, a contract – call it what you like – that guaranteed they would, as Daniel expressed it in their last year at Freemans Bay Primary School, always be mates and never rat on each other? Or, was it just, as Keith said in his deliberate, clearly thought-out way in their third year at high school, that ‘us jokers have gotta stick together in this messed-up, ag
ainst-us society’? Or was it as Aaron, during their first year at Auckland University, reiterated: ‘we will never betray one another and will help one another forever, whatever and whoever we each become?’ Or was it as Laura, who entered their compact during their third year at university, joked: ‘you guys – including Keith, who is an adopted Coconut – are joined in your permanent suntans and your unbreakable brown blood and history in the Freemans Bay hood’. Or did they just grow into it? And can’t grow out of it, even if, at times, they have wanted to? Or was their alofa for and unquestioning loyalty to one another sealed that first week at primary school in Miss Baystall’s class?
The almost insurmountable problem Daniel now faces is: how does he, over forty years later, re-enter the world of that five-year-old boy and see and describe that world?
People who tell you they can recall in detail what happened to them when they were, say, five years old either have photographic memories – and there aren’t many of those around – or are egotistical liars. Or they are, like novelists, allowing their vivid imaginations to make it up, conjure it up, call it what you will. As far as Daniel is concerned there ain’t no difference between autobiography and fiction.
He can’t remember what kind of morning it was, but it must have been summer, late January, because that is the time you start primary school.
Lemu, Daniel’s father, a short, slight figure with softly shuffling jandals, who didn’t really want to be noticed by anyone, clutched Daniel’s reluctant hand as they walked out of their front gate, away from Daniel’s angry regret that his mother, Tautasi, was again at work and unable to take him to school. On the important days and occasions of his life, she was rarely there: after all, she had to earn the money to feed their family. She kept apologising for this to their relatives more than to Daniel or his dad. As her absences grew, she became larger and more real in Daniel’s life, while his unemployed father, who stayed home to care for him, became less and less tangible, until he was just almost inaudible background noise to the loud, unavoidable, demanding absence of his mother.