by Albert Wendt
Nine or so months later, Daniel’s father rang to tell him that their new house was now complete. ‘It’s very impressive, Tanielu, and comfortable; got all the things you’d find in a kiwi home.’ As he described in detail the building of it, and how he’d used the project to strengthen the unity in their aiga, his voice vibrated with a boundless confidence. ‘Yes, Tanielu, I think you’ll like it. I’ve even turned one of the bedrooms – the one looking out over the beach – into a study for you. Go out and buy a desk and desk chair for it, son. I’ve also built some bookshelves into one wall for all your books, Dan. And I’ve added a store to the front of the house facing the road. The next time you come home, you’ll find your dad behind the counter selling goods and making a living for himself. Is that good, Tanielu?’
‘Wonderful, Dad.’
‘This way I won’t have to rely on you for financial help, eh?’ His father laughed.
Lemu went on to give Daniel the latest news about what was happening in Malie. Then, as if it was afterthought, he said, in English, ‘Dan, I’ve decided to get married again. Her name is Fa‘alua. She’s a widow with two grown-up daughters about your age. You’ll like her, son.’
‘Where is she from, Dad?’ Daniel asked.
‘From here originally. She married years ago and shifted to live in her husband’s village. Her husband died two years ago, and she shifted back to Malie …’ Daniel didn’t want his thoughts to go back to his mother’s claim in her letter about his dad’s love for a woman his parents hadn’t wanted him to marry, but they did, and it was as if his father had anticipated it. ‘No, she’s not the woman your mother claimed I fell in love with,’ he said. ‘There was no such woman.’
‘That’s fine, Dad,’ Daniel heard himself saying, but there were lingering unwelcomed doubts. ‘I’m sure I’ll like her.’ He paused. ‘Would you like me to come over for the wedding?’
‘No need, son. We’re going to marry in the registry office, then have a small family lotu and party.’
After Daniel put the phone down, he sat for a long while trying to dispel the undeniable feeling of aloneness that had enveloped him.
24
‘So we’re not whānau or aiga, are we, Dan?’ Mere confronted him, and he squirmed and couldn’t look at her. She, Aaron and Keith had demanded that they meet after lectures at her flat two days after he’d married Laura at the post office. Mere had ordered him not to bring Laura.
‘Of course, you’re …!’ He tried to protest.
‘Aiga do not exclude their brothers and sister from important occasions, Dan.’
‘I’m – I’m sorry …’ he started apologizing, but he knew she wasn’t going to release him.
‘Dan,’ she began; and he was immediately wary, because whenever she wanted to beat him up, she prepared him for it by caressing his name repeatedly. ‘Dan, Dan, Dan’ – she was shaking her head sternly, her heavy black hair framing her invulnerable prosecuting face – ‘Dan, are you ashamed of us?’ Right then Aaron, Keith and Paul entered, and saved him momentarily. ‘You forget that if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t have met Laura. And if I hadn’t persuaded her to go out with you, she wouldn’t have. She wasn’t interested whatsoever in you, mate.’
‘Anyone like a beer?’ Paul, who’d been Daniel’s best man, attempted to rescue Daniel.
‘Paul, you and your bro, uso, mate, are not going to get out of it that easily,’ Mere warned.
‘Out of what, sis?’ Paul’s look of innocence was opaque and flimsy.
Mere was gazing directly at Keith and Aaron, who were now sitting opposite her. ‘Keith, who doesn’t know how to lie, how long have we all been whānau?’ Daniel tried to protest again, but Mere’s imperious right hand, with the long, slender, multi-ringed fingers, reared up once, then down again, and he was shut out. ‘How long, Keith?’
Keith, who, over the years, they have come to associate with a habitual obsession with and memory for details, was nodding his head. ‘Yeah, suga, if we go back to our first day in Mrs Baystall’s class, in 1963, it’s – it’s – my fucking ulu is bloody mushy today – it’s about nineteen years …’
‘So, Dan and Paul, there you have it. We have been family for almost twenty fucking years, and what do you do, eh?’
Daniel couldn’t look into her blazing eyes. ‘Sis, I’m very sorry, but …’
‘But what, Dan?’ She was now fully sitting up, massive shoulders and back straight. Daniel glanced at Paul.
‘Sis, Dan and Laura didn’t want you and their aiga to spend a lot of money,’ Paul replied for Daniel. ‘You know what Samoan aiga are like when it comes to weddings.’
‘Yeah, have a hundred bridesmaids and best men, a hundred-storey wedding cake …’ Aaron interjected.
‘So you agree with what they did?’ Mere turned on him.
‘Nope, absolutely not,’ Aaron replied. ‘Dan and Paul, you should have consulted us; we’re your family.’
‘You guys know I don’t believe in that PI bullshit about having extravagant weddings and in church!’ Daniel protested. ‘If my relatives had known about it, they would have insisted on a wedding like that. It’s a bloody waste of money, sis.’
‘Dan, Dan: we are not your show-offish Hamo relatives,’ she pronounced. ‘We are your family; we want to be consulted, we want to help, you know that!’ She paused and reached over and held Daniel’s hand. ‘We have always done it that way, Dan.’
‘Sole, how do you think we felt – and still feel – when we found out you and Laura got married in the bloody post office?’ Keith said. ‘People are saying, “Poor Tanielu, e leai soga aiga,” man.’
‘We are your family, mate,’ Aaron declared. ‘We wanted to be there …’
‘We love you, Dan, and we love Laura, and I wanted to be there to see you commit yourself to one woman for once.’ Mere’s face relaxed, and she started laughing.
‘Sa‘o, sole, I thought poor Laura was going to end up like all your other women!’ Keith laughed with her.
‘Now you’re hitched to her for good!’ Aaron laughed.
‘Didn’t you even have drinks and kai afterwards?’ Mere asked.
‘No – we couldn’t afford it,’ Paul replied.
‘We’re still poor students, sis,’ Daniel said. He was finishing his doctorate in New Zealand and Pacific literature, and Paul was completing his MBA. ‘And if you must know, the ceremony and the surroundings were bleak; fucking bleak and impersonal. I kept thinking of you guys and how lucky you were not being there.’
‘Even the Justice of the Peace was bald and thin and …’ Paul added.
‘Pull my middle leg, kama!’ Keith laughed.
Mere glanced at Aaron, who said, ‘Sis and I are taking you out tonight to celebrate your marriage to the latest and only new member of our whānau, Laura Shelley Matson.’
‘Shit, I hope it’s not to that cheap Chinese takeaway place you frequent all the time, Aaron,’ Paul said.
‘Only the best for our whānau,’ Aaron promised.
They went in Aaron’s new car, an expensive vintage BMW, and collected Laura from her apartment in Mount Eden. When they got to the Golden Dragon, one of the most expensive restaurants in the city, at the bottom of Queen Street, Mere asked, ‘So this is where you meet and bring your so-called “business associates”, Aaron?’
He grinned and, putting his arms around Laura and Daniel, escorted them across the packed restaurant to a large round table with an intricate and impressive arrangement of bird of paradise flowers, orchids and an ice sculpture of a dragon at its centre. On the back of the dragon, in ice, were the figures of a wedding couple, holding hands.
Two immaculate waiters and the manager welcomed and seated them. ‘Sir,’ the manager said to Aaron, ‘we have arranged everything the way you wanted it.’ Aaron thanked him. ‘Shall we serve the champagne now, sir?’ The manager aske
d. Aaron nodded.
‘Eh, kama, ese le magaia o le dinner for Dan’s and Laura’s fa‘aipoipoga!’ Keith declared, then, winding his arm round Aaron, he kissed him on the head.
‘Yes, thank you, Aaron,’ Daniel said.
Laura rushed over and, embracing Aaron tightly, started crying. ‘Thank you, thank you, Aaron!’
‘We are whānau,’ Aaron said, his voice breaking with emotion.
‘Not “business associates”,’ Mere joked. ‘This is not business; this is aroha for whānau.’
As Daniel reconstructs that beautiful evening now, he remembers that none of them ever asked Aaron where he got the money to pay for it all. When, as kids, Aaron started providing them with all the lollies, ice cream, bubble gum and anything else they craved, no one ever asked, not even Mere, Miss Honesty, and Aaron’s mother, who was struggling to feed him and his brother and sister. Their hard-working parents couldn’t give them money to spend on the things they liked, so Aaron helped himself and the whānau. Daniel also remembers that Aaron never once offered to take him with him when he went out to steal stuff, or teach him how. Not once.
At high school, Aaron continued supplying all of them with anything they needed but couldn’t afford: sports gear, books and stationery, uniforms and other clothes. He never once asked for payment. Not in money, anyway. ‘We are all one in our aroha,’ he once mimicked Mere.
At university, while Aaron was completing his chemistry degree, he ensured they had enough money to pay their fees and other expenses, such as the dinner for Daniel’s wedding. When the Tribe first heard him talking about his ‘business associates’ and the ‘deals and projects’ they were putting together, none of them dared ask him about them. Then, after Aaron completed his MSc in chemistry and declared he’d had enough of being a student, none of them investigated the rumours – and Aaron himself joked– about him teaching his ‘associates’ to make illegal drugs. Feau and Bonzy being two of those associates.
Once, in the middle of the night, Aaron rang Daniel and told him he’d been hurt in an ‘accident’, and Daniel rushed to his flat and found it all smashed up. Aaron was lying on his blood-soaked bed, with broken ribs and wounds and cuts over his face. Then, too, Daniel observed the Tribe’s lifelong convention of not asking Aaron about it. Daniel cleaned him up, cleaned the flat, called an ambulance and told the ambulance people that his friend had fallen down the stairs.
Aaron’s second ‘accident’, a few years after university, Daniel learned about when Mere rang him and, in a frantic, uncool, un-Mere-like way, ordered him to her flat. ‘Something terrible has happened,’ she told him, ‘please hurry!’
When he arrived he found Keith and Paul around Aaron, cleaning and dressing his wounds. ‘I’m not going to believe your fucking bullshit any more!’ Mere told Aaron then.
‘Yeah, Aaron; tell me who did this to you and I’ll – ou ke fasiokia,’ Keith vowed.
‘Keith is right, mate, we’ll get the bastards and gut them,’ Paul echoed.
Aaron smiled through his pain and said, ‘I’ve never told you before, and I’m not telling you now.’
Now a feared court prosecutor, Mere huffed with protest and dismay and love. ‘Fuck you, Aaron. They’ll kill you next time – I know.’
‘If I tell you, I’ll be betraying them,’ Aaron reasoned.
‘Auē, what the fuck kind of reasoning is that, bro?’ she demanded, flinging her hands up in exasperation. ‘We love you, Aaron; we want to help you.’
‘Have I ever betrayed any of you?’ He cornered them. ‘Have I ever allowed you, invited you, asked you to become part of my other life?’
With tears trickling down her cheeks, Mere shook her head, and said, ‘No, Aaron, because we’re scared shitless of that other life …’
‘… And we don’t have the guts to do it, bro,’ Paul interrupted.
‘But he has?’ Mere pointed at Aaron. ‘Fuck, what stupid kind of logic is that, Paul? Are you saying Aaron’s suicidal – that he has a death wish, and that’s why he’s into this bullshit, and we should let him destroy himself?’
‘We’ve got to take him to the hospital,’ Daniel interjected. ‘While we argue about Aaron’s psychological reasons for living the way he does, he’s bleeding to death.’
‘How are we going to explain his condition to the doctors, a?’ Keith asked.
Mere sprang up and said, ‘I’ll ring my friend at the hospital – she’s a doctor, and she’ll meet you when you get to the emergency ward.’
Aaron reached up and, caressing her arm, said, ‘Sis, you’re the best prosecutor this fucking city’s ever had.’
‘Did ya “associates” tell you that, mate?’ she said, wiping her tears away.
‘Too right – some of them are living proof,’ Aaron said.
A week or so later, while Daniel and Paul were helping Mere clean out her garage, she mentioned, inadvertently, that when she’d visited Aaron at the hospital the afternoon he’d been admitted with his injuries, she’d found Feau and Bonzy there. She’d not seen them for a long time but, from Aaron’s behavior, they were obviously still close friends of his.
‘“Associates”?’ Paul joked.
‘Yeah, probably!’ Daniel tried to divert the conversation.
‘Stop bullshitting me,’ Mere stopped that. ‘I know they’re big criminals. They’re into some pretty serious stuff. I got my secretary to look them up.’
‘So what are you saying?’ Daniel pursued her.
‘Why is Aaron still with them?’ she asked. ‘They could be his…’
‘… End?’ Paul said. She looked away.
‘You were the one who said, Aaron isn’t on a self-destructive kick,’ Daniel reminded Mere.
‘Well, do you think he is?’ Paul asked Daniel.
‘He isn’t!’ Mere insisted. But the others didn’t believe that.
25
Laura slipped out of bed, quietly, believing Dan was still asleep. She tied her hair in a ponytail and slipped on an ‘ie lavalava and blue t-shirt. She glanced at him, and then opened the bedroom door and disappeared down the corridor, her burnt skin still stinging from having spent the previous afternoon in the hot sun. No one else in their family was awake.
Outside, she pulled a bush knife out of the thatching of the kitchen fale, in which a few chickens were foraging, and then headed for the mangroves.
There wasn’t yet any trace of sunlight in the transparent greyness of the dawn light that encompassed everything, and into which she moved quickly. She headed towards the shore, her light auburn hair shimmering in the tangy breeze blowing in from the dark sea and the waves breaking on the reef; her bare feet, toughened by a week of living in Malie, stepping fearlessly on the sharp rocks, bitsy sand and roots. Soon she was following the narrow leaf-covered track through the stand of palms and into the powerful smell of sea mud and the thick tangled area of mangrove trees, whose long crablike roots were now covered by the high tide. Her lungs and pores and head and nerves were more alive than she had experienced for many years. Everything was so strange, so new, yet so invigorating, so challenging; like a perpetual injection of self-renewing adrenalin. So contrary to the ways Daniel and she had expected. ‘Life is so basic and difficult and different in Malie, and there’s little privacy,’ he’d warned her. ‘As for the mossies and flies and cockroaches, they are humongous!’ All that was certainly true, she’d concluded after their first two days, but instead of alienating her from Dan’s aiga and village, those aspects had drawn her compulsively deeper and deeper into them. She hadn’t expected herself to react this way, and she was euphorically surprised by it, and in congratulating herself on her reaction, desired more of it.
For instance, yesterday, against Dan’s, Lemu’s and Fa’alua’s caution that she’d get sunburn and hurt herself – besides, Palagi shouldn’t do such work – she’d spent most of the afternoon in th
e mangroves, with Teva and Ma‘amusa, two of Dan’s young female cousins, who were finishing high school at Samoa College, gathering and stacking firewood. It was hot, hard, dirty, smelly work. In her ineptitude, she’d been relentlessly determined to learn from her new-found cousins how to identify the right wood, use a bush knife to hack it from the trees, slash the small twigs and leaves off the branches and then cut it into short lengths and stack it. And she hadn’t minded her cousins laughing and giggling and wondering why Dan’s very pale and delicate Palagi wife wanted to do such menial work. She could’ve stayed in their house, which had all the comforts of a Palagi home. Why voluntarily choose to do this? And to enjoy it – they’d never enjoyed it – was even more puzzling and strange. What was wrong with her?
After they’d made the first stack, they told her that was enough wood but, without replying, she’d continued a second stack. They then had to continue working themselves, and their puzzlement had turned automatically to resentment. The Palagi woman didn’t even mind being covered with sweat-soaked dirt, mud and mosquito bites, and getting her hands blistered and cut and her soft skin burnt to the reddest red they’d ever seen! Served her right for making them work and work and work and then, when she’d mastered the bush knife and the technigues of cutting and stacking, outworking them in speed and skill and neatness. They didn’t like that, no; no weak Palagi was going to do that to them!
All that changed when, unexpectedly, Laura had plunged fully clothed into the water and, like a dolphin, had swum into and around the mangrove roots, obviously loving it. In her hilariously inept Samoan, she had invited them to join her, and when they hadn’t she’d scooped up handfuls of mud, rounded them into balls, and belted them, shrieking and laughing and laughing like a Samoan. They’d leapt in then and, within seconds, a furious mud fight ensued; they were soon all covered with the stinking, healing mud. They’d looked at one another and, seeing only their eyes twinkling out of cloaks of mud, had stopped and laughed and laughed some more, Laura out-laughing them in a way adults (and Palagi) shouldn’t. In their growing, loving admiration of her, they promised themselves never to tell the elders of their aiga that Laura, their Laura, had behaved like a Samoan and a child while they’d been gathering firewood. They’d joked and laughed some more on their way back to the house.