by Albert Wendt
When Laura had joined the Tribe in their university days, she had recognised in Aaron a magnificent but frightening intelligence, and an ability to analyse and use people. She couldn’t trust him. His unlimited generosity to and aroha for the Tribe she didn’t doubt. To him, loyalty to the Tribe was the supreme virtue. But she was afraid of it because Aaron was so fanatical about it. She also recognised that Aaron, in his arrogance and self-belief, didn’t observe the conventions, laws and moral expectations of society. However, despite not trusting him she, like the rest of the Tribe, loved him. She had never doubted that.
‘Was the trip to make another connection; secure another source of supply?’ she joked.
When he gazed directly at her for the first time that evening, his eyes were rich with mirth. ‘Good one, sis, good one!’ She knew he liked Merlot, so she got him a glass, and one for herself. ‘You see me far more clearly than all the Tribe,’ he said, raising his glass to her. They drank.
‘What’s wrong, Aaron?’ She decided to be direct.
He took another long sip, sighed and, looking away, said, ‘I – I need a safe place to stay in. For a while.’ For a moment she didn’t believe what she’d just heard. ‘That’s right, sis. Just a quiet, safe place.’
She leaned forward and, clasping her hands round his, said, ‘Aaron, of course you can stay here. You know that. And thank you.’ He looked puzzled. ‘For trusting me.’
He cringed away in embarrassment, and continued sipping his wine. She’d wait him out. ‘You and I have never quite trusted each other, eh?’ he said, still avoiding her scrutiny.
‘Yes, you’re right there.’
‘I’ve always wanted to, but have never been able to persuade myself to do so.’
‘Same here,’ she said. ‘Ultimately, Aaron, you are a very dangerous person.’ She saw the fake disbelief in his eyes ‘Why? Because you behave according to your own laws.’ He shrugged his shoulders, eyes again glazed with disbelief. ‘Aaron, we all love you – but sometimes when I’m with you, the whole world feels dangerous …’
‘It’s a bloody dangerous world we live in, Laura,’ he interrupted. ‘You know that. You survived a tough, tough childhood.’
She took him into the guest quarters at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, and showed him where everything was. Knowing how particular he was about cleanliness, and having everything in simple but elegant order, she was relieved she’d cleaned the spacious bedroom, attached bathroom and small study thoroughly two days before.
He thanked her and then said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Dan.’ He put his haversack on the bed.
‘Why should I? And I don’t want to!’ was her automatic, offended reaction.
‘If it’s of some consolation, I’ve always envied the love you and Dan had for each other.’
‘That’s right – had.’
‘I’ve not been able to love like that. A few times I thought I’d found it, but it never lasted. Here’ – and he placed his right hand over his heart – ‘between my heart and my lungs, where love should be, is a clenched fist of emptiness.’ He paused, and she sensed his sadness, regret. ‘I’ve never been able to rid myself of it.’
‘You just haven’t met the right person to love,’ she said, but immediately recognised how trite the remark was.
‘Please don’t tell anyone I’m staying here. I’ve asked Phil to do the same.’
‘Are you in trouble again?’
‘Have I ever been out of trouble?’
‘No!’ she laughed.
‘I just want to drop out of my self and my life for a while,’ he said. He reached across and caressed the side of her face, gently. ‘I’m tired. I’m very tired, Laura: sick and tired of who I am,’ he sighed, and his sickly pallor seemed to deepen, especially round his eyes. For the first time, she felt he was without guise.
‘Aaron, you’re safe here – and you can stay with us as long as you want.’
Wearing a floral ‘ie lavalava and black singlet, his body gleaming red from his hot shower, Phillip came into the sitting room while she was straightening it out before going to bed. ‘I’m glad Uncle came to us for help,’ he said.
She was still amazed at how much he’d grown over the past year: he was now taller than his father, and long-limbed with a thickly muscled body that, with all the heavy sports training and exercise, was still developing, enlarging. Since her marriage had started failing, she had been relieved that Phillip resembled his father only in height; in most features, including his colour, Phillip looked like her – or so people told her.
She asked, ‘You don’t think he’s putting us in danger by being here?’
He hesitated. ‘No, I feel safe having him here.’ He paused. ‘You don’t need to worry; I’ll look after him while you’re at work.’ At times, particularly during moments when she felt alone, severed from other people, she imagined her son looked like the father her mother had taken as a secret to her grave. Perhaps she loved that father now, through her son.
‘I know you will, son,’ she said, ‘but be careful. As you know, your uncle doesn’t know fear.’ Since his father had left, Phillip had avoided discussing him with her; avoided it like the hugest pain and anger in his life. It was consoling that Phillip was on her side, but she blamed herself for his pain. ‘I’m off to bed,’ she said. She hugged him, kissed him on the cheek and left.
Usually she was ready to go to work by eight o’clock; she had breakfast by herself and then left before Phillip got up. This morning she got up early so she could make breakfast for Aaron, but when she got downstairs, Phillip and Aaron were already at the dining table. They had set out a healthy breakfast: a variety of fresh fruit, blackberry juice, low-fat yoghurt, muesli, skimmed milk, wholemeal toast, coffee and tea. At the centre of the table stood a vase of assorted flowers, still coated with dewdrops and obviously picked from her garden. ‘This breakfast is no good for a promising league star,’ she said. ‘Ya need lotsa good ol’ kiwi steak, bacon and heaps of eggs!’
They laughed and Aaron said, ‘But it’s ideal for an unfit, unhealthy middle-aged joker like me.’
She sat down between them at the table. ‘Thank you for waiting for me,’ she said, meaning it. ‘It’s great having breakfast with people I love instead of by my lonely self. For a change our table feels full.’ Since Daniel had left, there had been a large hole, an absence, at the table – and she couldn’t get rid of it. ‘And thank you for the flowers, Aaron.’
During the day she rang the home phone twice, but no one answered, so she tried Phillip’s cell phone. Aaron answered and told her they were at Phillip’s league gym, training. ‘Hell, your son’s a tough trainer: I can barely keep up with the exercises he’s instructing me to do.’
‘I thought you were supposed to be hiding from the public?’ she asked, concerned. He just laughed and told her not to worry about it.
When she got home that evening, they were in the kitchen and the house was dancing with the exuberant smell of sautéing garlic and other condiments, and curry and coconut cream, and she remembered that Aaron was a fastidious, innovative cook who expected you to pay appreciative attention to the dishes he prepared.
‘Smells delicious,’ she congratulated them as she entered the kitchen.
‘Sapasui, oka ūla, Thai green curry, sticky rice wrapped in lily leaves …’ Phillip recited. ‘Uncle’s the greatest chef, Mum.’ Aaron handed her a glass of Merlot. Phillip filled himself a glass of water.
‘Ia manuia, Chef!’ she toasted. They clinked glasses and drank. She observed that much of the heavy sadness that had cloaked him the day before was gone.
‘How hot do you want your curry?’ Aaron asked.
‘Medium,’ she replied. They clinked glasses again and drank. ‘For me, life must always be mellow, medium, balanced. Lived out in moderation.’
‘Is that so,
Mum?’ Phillip said, with obvious irony.
‘Yeah, Ms Liver-to-the Full?’ Aaron copied Phillip. He reminded Laura of a party she’d hosted in which she’d declared she’d just discovered pina colada and how delicious it tasted. She’d mixed and served jugfuls of it for everyone until she and many of the guests were unable to stand and merely crawled along the floor, drunkenly singing the praises of the drink. ‘Pina, Pina, Pina colada, how we love ya!’ Aaron sang now.
‘Now that was a great party!’ she laughed. ‘And you crawled away and we found you next morning snoring under the veranda, Aaron.’
‘I’ve never been able to drink pina coladas since then, sis.’
On her way up to change for dinner, she noticed that they’d vacuumed and cleaned the house, something that she and Phillip usually did once a week. For the first time since Daniel’s departure, the house was starting to exude a healing sense of freedom from pain; the congratulatory feeling she was coping with that pain, able to examine it with some objectivity.
Through the years, Laura had noticed that Aaron’s conversational map ranged from what Daniel once described as ‘Byronic silences’ while he listened to others – discerning silences that often made conversers feel intimidated, exposed, believing Aaron was dissecting what they were saying with a critical arrogance – to periods in which he talked as if the language could only survive if he kept using it non-stop; as if only what he was saying could maintain the reality within and around them. Usually those performances would go for the duration of a function or meeting, and were accompanied by a consistent sequence of gin and tonics with a thin slice of lime. The longest one of these bouts had taken was three days, at a surprise birthday party she and Daniel had held for Aaron. Everyone had taken turns drinking and staying up with him for the exhausting three days, while he talked. Over the years the three drinks he’d usually restricted himself to had dissolved away.
Now as she cleaned her face in front of her dresser mirror, she remembered some of his monologue. Incredible though it was, Aaron was rarely drunk to unintelligibility; the more he drank, the more his mind and language seemed to become more lucid. He became more difficult to fault or argue against, especially when he was elucidating the reasons why he supported some of his lifelong causes or beliefs. For instance, during that birthday party, she had heard him saying: ‘Now, how can I convince myself that the basic contradictions on and around which our miserable lives revolve can’t be argued away? That they just are, and that they are unalterable?’ He had paused profoundly, his outstretched fingers displayed to emphasise his rhetorical question. ‘We all know; we can imagine ourselves immortal – able to live into a hopeless sci-fi forever – yet we all die eventually. We live and perform and invent as if we have a future, hoping to leave a legacy to show we achieved something in the inevitability of death, even if it’s only our turds calcified in the dust of time. The other basic contradiction, as you well know, is that the atua gifted us intelligence, soul, spirit, doubt, courage, making us capable of magnificent creativity and invention and healing, but also capable of being the most monstrous and destructive and violent creatures on this benighted planet.’ Another dramatic pause, his hands holding their attention. ‘How do you explain a creature like me? I am a contradiction on two feet. With my gifts as a chemist I can help lots and lots of people, yet I need to live at the edge of death and challenge; in that realm am I branded as criminal?’ When he talked like that, they knew it wasn’t to them; it was a public analysis of himself and his fears, and all they needed to do was to show they were listening. As she remembered it now, his existentialism – compiled from an intensely wide reading of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and other European philosophers – now sounded so undergraduate, so self-indulgent.
She brushed and combed her hair and put on a light lipstick. As she started putting on a blue yukata, she remembered Daniel had bought it for her on a trip to Tokyo, and quickly rehung it in her cupboard. She dressed in white cotton trousers, a light green sweater and slippers. As she examined her appearance in the mirror before going down, she saw and heard Aaron again at that birthday party.
His eyes had been almost closed, his frame bent forward, propped up by his arms set firmly on his knees, as he continued: ‘Do you know the one memory I’d like to retain to the day I kick the bucket? It’s that of my one and only pet, Noa, who I found as a kitten, when I was about ten. Until then, I didn’t like animals; in fact I was scared of them. I didn’t even want this one, but it chose me. A starving kitten, struggling out of the winter creek behind our house. Drenched to the bone, a shivering tiny handful that was barely alive, barely able to meow pitifully. I turned to escape back into our house but its cry lassoed my legs, then my guts, then my heart, and I couldn’t get away. Next minute I was back there, pulling it out of the creek, using my shirt to dry it, carefully, and then rushing into my room and wrapping it for warmth in a bath towel.’ He paused, fully contained in that memory, his caring hands around Noa again. ‘I realised as I held it, I had to save it: if I didn’t, I would die. Yes, die. I rushed with it to my mother, crying, pleading with her to save it. We couldn’t afford a vet, so we had to save it ourselves. We needed milk and a baby bottle. I didn’t hesitate: I ran to the nearest supermarket and stole what we needed. Yeah, stole the stuff. The kitten needed it, I needed it.’
He went on to detail how his mother had warmed the milk and put it in the baby’s bottle, and Aaron had stayed awake all night in front of their only heater, cradling the kitten and feeding it the bottle whenever it woke. At dawn the kitten was warmer and breathing easier, but he had sensed, with a ‘desperate fear’, it was still in danger. ‘You know fear, its real depths, when you are afraid for the life of someone or something you love,’ he said.
He had found the address of the nearest vet in the Yellow Pages – Dr Janet Prasad’s Veterinary Clinic. He had gingerly bundled the kitten into his haversack and, in the waking light of morning, peddled to the clinic with all his frantic might. ‘In the span of that journey, I experienced the worst dimensions of fear, and realised that in order to conquer it I would do anything. Anything to save that – that abandoned kitten.’
Fortunately the clinic was attached to a home. When Aaron pounded on the front door of the clinic and couldn’t rouse anyone, he scrambled down the side path and, sobbing, pounded on the door of the home until it was flung back by a diminutive, angry middle-aged woman in a crimson dressing gown. In the dazzling passage light, as Aaron described it, she looked as if she was on fire.
Before she could chastise him, he flung himself down and, clutching her slippered feet, pleaded, ‘Please save my kitten, please!’
Aaron paused again telling the story, gazing into memory, smiling. ‘For three days, Dr Janet Prasad kept Noa in her clinic. I refused to go home or to school, even when my mother pleaded with me, so Dr Prasad let me sleep in her only son’s bedroom – he was away at university studying medicine. Once in a while, genuinely generous and kind strangers enter your life. Dr Prasad was one of the first in mine. We had no money to pay her, so while Noa was recovering, I cleaned the clinic and the house, helped with the cooking, washed the dishes, did the laundry. Dr Prasad also let me help her treat Noa, and taught me something about cats. And about aroha: about compassion, generosity, reciprocity, respect, loyalty. By extending her alofa to Noa and me, she secured my alofa.’
It was dawn of the third day of their party. He continued the story, and his memory was as sharp and as clear as a laser. ‘I can still see the boy who I was, with the now healthy Noa in his haversack, peddling home, his heart jangling with joy and gratitude. Did you know that cats can’t be anything else but cats? They refuse to be trained; won’t do anything they don’t want to do. They are magnificent in their independence and honesty, and once they love you, they will love you forever. Unlike humans. I loved that animal more than anyone else, even Dr Prasad, who checked Noa every six months, refusing p
ayment, and gave me a job cleaning her clinic and backyard on Saturdays.’
Laura paused in the doorway into the dining room. Their dinner was already laid out on the table. Aaron and Phillip had made use of their best linen tablecloth and serviettes, cutlery and crockery, and candles. Everything, especially the champagne-filled glasses, sparkled in the candlelight. ‘What are we celebrating, guys?’ she asked.
‘You, Madame,’ Phillip said, bowing and pulling back her chair at the head of the table. She went and sat in her chair.
A grinning Aaron said, ‘Yes, celebrating your – your courage and survival, Madame.’
They sat down opposite her. Phillip raised his glass and said, ‘Here’s to the best mum in the world!’ She held the stem of her glass and realised her throat was choking with tears. ‘We love you.’
‘Too right, Laura!’ Aaron declared. Her hand and arm trembled as she raised her glass towards them. They clinked glasses, and she took a long sip and cleared her throat of tears.
‘Great champagne,’ she said, and took another long swallow.
Later, while they were enjoying the main course, Laura suddenly felt a need, and asked Aaron, ‘Do you still remember Noa?’ He looked puzzled. ‘Your cat – the one you saved?’
His whole face ignited visibly with joy and pride. ‘Shit, yes! And the wonderful Dr Prasad. You have a fantastic memory, Laura. How come you still remember that?’
‘’Cause I have a fantastic memory, silly.’
‘But I was only ten when Noa came into my life,’ he insisted. ‘Long before I met you.’
‘You forget that you’re a very vivid chronicler of your own history, and you spent a raving three days describing it to us while we were at varsity. Three bloody exhausting days!’
‘Exhausting but not boring, right?’ Aaron quipped.
She laughed and asked, ‘Why Noa? Why that name?’