by Albert Wendt
‘Tell me, Laura, I’m too scared to say it.’
Laura told her it wasn’t fair on Kepa because he wasn’t going to measure up to Mere’s expectations.
‘What are those?’ Mere asked.
For any male to compete for her aroha, Laura reasoned, he had to measure up to Aaron, Daniel, Keith and Paul. ‘And has to be someone who doesn’t feel inadequate in your presence.’
‘You mean like my father, who felt small beside my mother and then tried to beat her down to his size?’ Mere said.
‘I didn’t know him.’ Laura tried extricating herself.
‘If Kepa is half as capable and kind and strong as Daniel, then he may have a chance,’ Mere said.‘You’re lucky, Laura; Daniel is falling for you.’ Laura reached over and held onto Mere’s arm. ‘But be careful: you can’t trust poets who’re too attractive to women for their own good.’
Laura shivered as the fingers of the darkness caressed her arms.
18
‘Hey, Uncle,’ Aleki whispered into Daniel’s ear, ‘it’s time to cook breakfast.’
Daniel sat up and saw that except for Tahu, who was outside the tent rubbing his eyes and stretching his body, everyone was still asleep.
Aleki ambled off to join Tahu. Daniel staggered up, suppressed his yawning, and went to join them. He gazed out to sea: dawn was stretching slowly across the sky. So it must have been when Tagaloaalagi created the first dawn and invented the alphabet of omens. The lines eased out of the tongue of his head. He needed to write them down.
‘Laura’s beaten us,’ Tahu said, as they followed the smell of frying sausages through the sitting room to the kitchen. Daniel swept back his hair with his hands, straightened his ‘ie lavalava and t-shirt, and wished he’d taken a shower and brushed his teeth.
She had her back to them, and was shoving two trays of sausages into the hot oven. On the stove were two large frying pans, in which heaps of bacon were sizzling. ‘Kia ora, Auntie,’ Tahu greeted her. She smiled and moved to hug him, but he edged back, and she respected his wanting to be staunch.
‘Thought you guys wouldn’t want to get up this early,’ she said. ‘Okay, we’re having sausages, bacon, tomatoes, toast, tea and coffee, fruit juice …’
‘What about porridge, Auntie? I always have porridge,’ Tahu declared.
‘Do ya know how to cook that?’ Daniel asked.
Tahu looked offended and said, scoffingly, ‘Yeah, Uncle. I cook it at home every morning.’
‘So, Dan, you help chef Tahu cook the porridge, and when we’re ready to make the toast and eggs, I’ll help chef Aleki with those. Okay?’ Laura instructed.
‘While I wait for you, Auntie, I’ll go and set the tables in the tent,’ Aleki offered.
Tahu was soon immersed in preparing and cooking the porridge. Daniel, though he was helping Tahu, felt he and Laura were working together in that confined space. There was no need for them to talk. Occasionally their hands brushed against each other, their arms touched, their hips lingered against each other, their eyes met and lingered. It was a slow silent dance, Daniel would later describe it to himself; a dance that set alight every part of them.
‘Right, Auntie, the porridge is ready.’ Tahu cut into the dance. ‘Look!’ He brandished his large wooden ladle, triumphantly.
Laura hurried over to the stove and peered into the large steaming pot. She closed her eyes as she breathed in the aroma of the porridge and exclaimed, ‘Great stuff, chef!’ This time a coy Tahu welcomed her hugging him.
And Daniel pressed against her from the back, his body trembling as she pushed back against him, and lingered, until Tahu unhugged and said, ‘Hey, Uncle, you better taste it and see.’ He scooped up some porridge in his wooden ladle and handed the ladle to Daniel, who blew on it and then tasted it.
He screwed his face up as if he didn’t like the taste of it, and then said, ‘Hey, Chef, ya certainly know how ta make porridge.’
Tahu beamed with pride.
‘We’re the greatest cooking team this side of heaven,’ Laura declared.
Shortly after, under Laura’s directions, they put the food on the table, and Tahu rushed off upstairs and woke everyone by loudly knocking on their doors and yelling, ‘Hey, guys, it’s kai time!’
Aleki went to the tent and vigorously rang the triangular metal bell that Keith had hung up outside. ‘Yeah, you guys, get up and eat the best mea‘ai this side of Heaven!’ he called. Aaron cursed him but staggered up off his air bed, and started heading for the outside tap to wash. The others moaned and groaned and started following Aaron.
When Tahu and Aleki got back, they lined up eagerly between Laura and Daniel behind the dining table, ready to serve the breakfast they’d cooked. Daniel floated in pride and alofa and, when he looked at Laura, she smiled back. They looked at Tahu and Aleki and their pride and alofa blossomed even more. Wonderful to be with whānau, aiga, family, Daniel thought. Wonderful to be with Laura.
After breakfast, Mere and the other women helped them make lunches of sandwiches, fruit and bottles of soft drink.
Aaron, Lemu, Paul and Cherie and three of the warriors, with wetsuits and snorkels, took the punt and sacks and went diving for muscles, pāua and crayfish round the western curve of the beach, at ‘secret spots’ Aaron claimed had been given to him by ‘my local friends’. Mere and Kepa were to explore the coast by kayak; Mere – with Laura’s help – discouraged those warriors who wanted to go with them. Ropata, who was an expert surfer, agreed to teach Keith, Langi and the remaining warriors how to surf.
Daniel put up a large beach umbrella on the spacious front veranda, and sat at the table under it, trying to write, using the inspirational two lines he’d found that morning as he’d gazed out at the horizon. In her swimsuit, Laura put on sunglasses, set up her deck chair beside him, rubbed on suntan lotion and sunbathed while she read Sons for the Return Home by Albert Wendt, which Daniel had recommended as ‘the first novel by a Samoan – and full of great sex.’
Laura’s inescapable presence and what he imagined was happening to her as she read the novel, combined with the mesmerising smell of her suntan lotion and the sea and the compulsively inviting house, empty of people, kept defeating Daniel’s concentration every time he wrote a line or worded an image. Not wanting Laura to notice his mounting exasperation, he kept crossing out the lines. He avoided looking at her, but, because her presence was so demanding, he knew, without looking, what she was doing, and was, for a while, ashamed of the wild, riveting sexual imagery his uncontrollable imagination was conjuring up against his wishes. Then his shame was gone and, his whole body shivering from the pit of his genitals – and he had to be honest about that location – to his belly and out to all his extremities, he gazed across at her, hoping she wouldn’t recognise the state he was in. But his heart leapt when he caught her eyes through the dark lenses gazing at him, and her whole posture and body were, like his, alive with desire.
He hesitated, but she slid off her deck chair and, casting one long look at him over her shoulder, hurried across the veranda and back into the house. He followed swiftly, his breath roaring in his taut head.
Up the carpeted stairs she hurried, half-crawling, now and then stumbling, until his hands, his uncontrollable hands, clutched round her feet, her ankles, and she gasped and looked back at him, her face pale with desire, and he crawled up and over her, their desperate mouths panting as they closed over each other. He scooped her up and, her arms tight round his neck, carried her quickly into her bedroom.
For Laura, there was no need for preliminaries, because she was now wholly trusting of him, without reservations, and, even if any had been there, her fathomless need for him would have overridden them. She wanted all of him and didn’t care if he felt the same way about her. She reached up and gathered him in, and his heat and need and care were around her like the summer sea outside, and they moved.
He wasn’t like any other man she’d known, for she’d never loved – yes, that was the only label for how she felt – any other man before.
If this was the total completeness of love and desire and sexual pleasure and joy Daniel had yearned for ever since he had made love for the first time, then he would no longer be able to do without Laura. For him there was no shame, no aspect of love and sex and desire he didn’t want to experience, explore and continue to invent with her, and he sensed, to the depths of his trust and faith and finiteness, that that was how she felt about him.
They were frantic to arrive at that completeness. She came, shaking uncontrollably, and he held her tightly until her cries and body were stilled; then he continued and she came again, and he shortly after.
And as they lay, arms and legs wrapped round each other, the swirling sound and smell of the sea tidalled in and wrapped around them.
And a while later, when she rolled back onto her back, her arm around him rolling him over her, they were making love again, this time slowly, with searching tenderness.
19
The others started returning in the mid-afternoon. The surfers came
first, burnt almost black by the hot sun. Ropata ordered the warriors to take cold showers to wash off the salt, and then they were to put on calamine lotion and rest in the tent – no more sun for any of them. A few complained, but they did his bidding. Keith fished for sympathy by claiming he’d never be able to surf because he was ‘too bloody large for the board’. So lose weight, Langi suggested unsympathetically.
Daniel and Laura, who believed their looks were showing the others they were now at a new intimate level, tried hiding it as they distributed cold drinks. Ropata and the warriors soothed Keith’s ego by telling him that he’d ‘done good’ on the board: ‘real good, man.’
The breeze grew stronger, and wove like healing hands round their bodies. Most of the warriors were soon asleep.
Shortly after, they watched the punt and the divers rowing round the curve, ploughing a white furrow through the low waves just behind the groups of swimmers now spread along the beach. In front of their house, the punt turned in.
Daniel and Laura rushed out over the beach as the divers got off the punt and started pushing it into the shallows. ‘Hey, Dad, ese lou meauli!’ Daniel called. Unlike the others, who were either in diving suits or t-shirts, Lemu was wearing only goggles round his head and his ‘ie lavalava, his sinewy lean body glistening silver-black.
‘I used to it,’ he laughed. ‘Arona and they – too soft for the sun.’
‘Your dad’s the best diver I’ve ever been with,’ Aaron said.
The three warriors echoed the sentiment, and one of them said, ‘Koro also taught us how to do it, Uncle.’
‘He outdived all of us,’ Paul said. ‘Aaron showed him once how to dive and catch the crayfish, and he was away.’
‘He also located the kūtai and pāua as if he had some internal radar, man,’ Aaron said. Lemu splashed him with water.
‘Me and Cherie, the best, eh, Cherie.’ Lemu smiled.
‘Too right, Koro!’
They dragged the punt over the beach through Pākehā picnickers who greeted them and wanted to know what they’d caught. Keith told them if they wanted some seafood, they could come up and get some. Only a few did.
The males lifted the heavy punt onto their shoulders. They carried it swiftly over the low dunes – no one stumbled – and put it down in front of the tent. Keith and Aaron opened some of the sacks, revealing wriggling blue-black, reddish crayfish, green-lipped muscles and green-black pāua. The warriors, who’d not seen anything like that before today and who were proud of their catch, crowded round it.
‘Gosh, you got quite a lot!’ exclaimed one of the Pākehā picknickers, a tall sandy-haired man. Keith invited them to choose the seafood they wanted.
Paul instructed the warriors to pick up the bulging sacks and follow him to the large washtubs in the laundry. Daniel followed them.
With a flowing clatter the kūtai were emptied into one of the tubs, and Paul filled the tub with water and explained to the curious warriors that the mussels, when the tide came in, would flush their sand out into the water. The pāua and crayfish they left in the sacks in the second washtub.
By the time they returned to the tent, Lemu had already had a cold shower and dried himself, and was now rubbing a thick layer of Samoan coconut oil into his skin. He insisted that the warriors do the same thing, and he watched until they’d all done it. ‘Best way to heal the burning. Now you drink lot of cold water and you go sleep.’ None of them objected, and Daniel surmised it was because their admiration of Lemu had reached godly proportions.
Lemu followed his new disciples into the tent, lay down on the the folding bed in the middle of the warriors, and was soon fast asleep.
‘Man,’ Aaron said, examining his skin, over which he’d spread Lemu’s oil. ‘It works. No smarting, no pain. Cool.’ Paul and Cherie agreed with him. ‘But I think instead of cold water, an ice-cold beer will heal it faster.’
Daniel fetched bottles of beer, which were rich with layers of condensation. But he’d forgotten the bottle opener.
‘Never mind,’ Keith said, and then, with his teeth, opened each one, to their loud acclamation and Langi’s cautions about ‘fucking your teeth up, Pākehā!’
‘Ia manuia!’ Daniel offered. The others returned his salute, and they drank in unison.
‘Great, great!’ gasped Aaron, after he’d drained half his bottle. They watched and marvelled as Keith drained all of his, the cutting cold of the beer bursting through his chest and up behind his eyes, forcing tears out of them.
‘Another Niuean showing off!’ Langi pronounced, smacking him playfully on the arm.
‘So what have you two been up to?’ Aaron asked Daniel.
‘Yeah, Daniel-in-the lion’s-den?’ Paul imitated Daniel’s mother.
‘Reading and writing a new poem,’ Daniel said, but he couldn’t look at them. Aaron started hooting, softly. Keith and Paul chortled, and Cherie and Langi tried to keep straight faces.
‘So, let’s have some lines from your new poem, Dan,’ Aaron said.
Daniel hesitated, and then recited, ‘So it must have been when Tagaloaalagi created the first dawn and invented the alphabet of omens …’
‘Shit, that’s – that’s beautiful, Dan,’ Aaron whispered.
‘Dan, did you get that since we’ve been here?’ Langi, who Daniel knew loved poetry, asked.
He nodded, relieved that the conversation had veered away from Laura and himself. ‘Yes, this morning when I looked out at the horizon’, he replied.
‘Any more lines to that?’ Keith asked. Daniel had always respected Keith’s knowledge of literature, particularly of Shakespeare and W. B. Yeats.
‘We brought good omens to Waioha where the atua once fished for souls
and netted only the bones of dead dolphins
the escaping footprints of crabs and the fear of white ships breaking
through the sky …
‘That’s all so far,’ he ended.
Carrying a large tray with snacks on it, Laura emerged from the house and started towards them. Daniel avoided looking at her.
‘Laura’s a lucky woman,’ Paul said. ‘She’s found a real poet, eh?’
Aaron said, ‘She’s your inspiration, eh, Daniel-raging-in-Laura’s-den?’ Laura looked so vulnerable, so in need of protection, Daniel thought as the others watched her approaching, her hair luminous in the dazzling late afternoon light.
‘She is, she is,’ he admitted.
‘So, Laura-in-Daniel’s-den, what do you have for us?’ Langi greeted Laura as she placed her tray on the table.
‘She has Daniel and we have both of them,’ Cherie said.
‘So we’re bloody lucky, eh?’ Keith said.
Aaron told them he was taking a short nap, and curled up on his air bed on the ground. Langi and Cherie disappeared into the house to sleep. Keith and Paul leant forward over the table and started to sleep too.
Laura and Daniel strolled out to the dunes with a beach umbrella. Lying down under it, they talked, but wouldn’t remember their conversation.
They didn’t see Mere and Kepa until they were right in front of them, carrying the kayaks on their shoulders. The translucent light of the golden sun that was now hovering over the western horizon made them appear as if they were turning into yellow glass. Daniel scrambled up and took the kayak from Mere. ‘Where are the others?’ Mere asked.
‘All asleep, exhausted’ Laura replied. Kepa avoided looking at her and Daniel, but Mere’s stance revealed little about what may have eventuated between them.
‘I need a cold shower,’ Mere said, and rushed off, leaving Kepa.
‘You guys had a good expedition?’ Daniel deliberately worded his question.
Kepa nodded once, in a perfunctory way, and, shoving his kayak under his left arm, started up the dunes. Daniel glanced at Laura and shrugged his shoulders, and they followed Kepa, their shadows trailing behind them.
When they got to the tent, Kepa was in the shower, the water thumping down and splashing off his body in thousands of diamond-like droplets, and Mere was nowhere in sight.
20
When Aaron woke he insisted he was in charge of the cooking that evening, because he knew best about cooking kaimoana. Lemu reminded him that mussels and pāua were best eaten raw. Laura caught the look of distaste on most of the warriors’ faces at that, and said that was how she felt about raw seafood too. But Paul said, ‘Aaron, Koro’s dead right. I want mine raw too.’ Daniel and Keith agreed.
‘Okay, Koro and I will prepare the raw seafood,’ Aaron agreed.
When Cherie, Langi and Mere declared their preference for cooked seafood, the warriors cheered up, and Tahu the brave ventured his opinion: ‘Hey, Uncle Aaron, do we have to eat the kaimoana? Aren’t you cooking sausages or something like that?’ Aleki and half the others held the same hope.