Both Sides of the Moon

by Duff, Alan

  Look, Mother, look around at the eyes on you, how they set you apart from them. Look at their proceedings, their dignity, they come from another place from you, you are an embarrassing intruder, who if you weren’t related to them would be subject of an elder’s bellowing speech.

  For a people not self-conscious, they manage a lot of squirming at the sisters’ grief-stricken act. Then an elder makes a speech that even us younger ones who don’t have the language can hear is perfunctory. We’re at a party we weren’t invited to. Girls, your act has been milked, you were sprung before you arrived.

  They’ve left Hohepa’s father, with me and Jack, standing there about twenty feet from the coffin, with nowhere to go since he being the male accompanying us is expected to reply to that short, supposedly welcome speech.

  But he’s got the face of a boozer; boozers don’t know this culture, no time, no inclination to learn. He’s got the stranded face of a boozer who wants out of here, he only came for the piss-up. Left his son stranded out there on the back of his truck, in this place he’s never been to before, the local kids will be giving him hell, especially with a face like he’s got.

  There’s justice here in this man not knowing what he has to do and none inclined to assist or relieve him of his strained social, ceremonial burden. He is so desperate he whispers to us that he doesn’t even know who this dead guy is.

  Finally, the two queens take their leave. We can almost hear the sigh of relief. Been a long hour for everyone. Normal grievers are expected to be around for the three days’ duration. Here they’ve endured enough in an hour.

  We depart, Jack and I know, with a hundred and fifty sets of contemptuous eyes on our mothers’ backs and on that of the man without culture and therefore their respect. And we don’t blame them, do we, Jack, our old-hand eyes say as soon as we get outside and get our shoes back on.

  As for Hohepa, sure enough, the truck’s surrounded by jeering, finger-prodding kids and his father yells at them to fuckin’ piss off before he starts kicking arse. But it’s only to gain revenge against these people for how they treated him back there, or why would he whack his son and tell him off for crying and not sticking up for himself?

  Us two cousins are paused before climbing on to the back of the truck, seeing the same image: that this could be Hohepa in his own hearse. But, oh well, now to the real purpose of this visit. And it ain’t children.

  Pass the beer, dear. Have some fun, hon. Giz a kiss, miss. Kiss my bum, dumb. Gee, you’re ugly, girl. Heck, you’re fat, boy. Fill me up again.

  We’re at Auntie Molly’s, she’s the second to youngest sister of four, married to Uncle Bill, he’s a millhand at the company that owns and rents out this entire village. Of life-contented boozers. Our mothers are amongst their own kind. The deceased Pera whatever-hisname is only a vehicle, for emotional mention, for self-compliment on how grieving they are, to tell how good he looked in death (when he wasn’t much in life). And then how is every one of you, anyway? And good to see you, it must be, what, a month? Nah, not that long. We were over your way last time. For Shonty’s boy’s twenty-first. Oh, that’s right. Ended up in a big fight. That’s right. But only because that Betty Bennett said something to Girlie, didn’t she, Girlie? She said something all right — said I was a cheating bitch, that I cheat at every card game, even my own sister’s. (Which she does.) Which you do. Which I don’t. But you do. I done it once. More than once, Girlie. Well, a few times then, but not all the time. Anyrate, that’s in the past, it’s in the past now, and our thirst is in the present, right here and now. Let’s get started.

  How the time flies when you’re drinking. Drink day and night, night into day, grab a feed from the big pot on the fire-stove, plenty more where it came from, boiled pig bones don’t cost much, the Pakeha would only throw them out, doesn’t know what he’s missing, the white man, these lovely spines of swine boiled till the meat falls off, suck the marrow from the hole, dig out with practised fingers, skilled even in their drunkenness, the pockets of meat in bone recess, in the catacombs of calcified skeleton structure, ah there’s a bit, mmm, and here’s a bit, mmm, social swine eating pork swine. And keep that beer flowing; it keeps the talk, the fun, the expanding expression, the sweet-all of it going. Flow, beer. Sweet flow.

  Ah now … where are you? (Where are they?) Where are we? Lift head, look around, everything kind of blurred and yet it isn’t: it’s clearer than a clear sober day. It’s the sharpest pencil-line drawing. The most meaningful brush-strokes of no art that you have yet seen, and only one picture. This-is-it. As far as the rickety little truck of drunken progress goes. Believe even your blurry-visioned, clarity-stricken eyes; look again, see yourself: bleary-eyed, bottom lip juts out, shoulders hunched, posture all gone, white man’s beer stuff done beat you Maori men and women.

  Look around man and drunk woman, see into the air, every face a frozen image, slumped and swaying and stumbling and falling over and dribbling and guzzling and spilling and gushing and gibberishing and talking cheap Maori, cheaper English, shouting, piling loud claim over one another, hands hold on to beer bottles, beer glass, like drowning man to river he’s drowning in, drowning woman just the same; heads keep falling into space below shoulder-line, jerk up again, eyes caught in moment of same truth, same truth, of air stenched of boiling cabbage and boiling bones and boiled lives with dignity fallen off the bone — now tha’s a thought.

  Need another feed, soak up the beer; look at fellow man and woman stumble to big pot on stove, ladle boiled mush of pork spine, cabbage, spud, doughboys on to plate, stumble back, plonk down on beer-crate seat, at Formica table, fuckit, forgot a knife and fork, who cares anyway, eat with fingers, food better that way, close to it, fingers in bone hollows like fingers in cunt hollows, slurp it up in long noises of ecstatic appreciation.

  Stuff the face, feel good feel bad same time, look around, feel confused but no reason why, or not reason to answer this dully cognising brain, so might as well fall over somewhere, go to sleep a few hours (but not too long, not too long: might miss out on party time) might as well. But not for too long.

  Wake up: where am I? Oh, that’s right, at the party. Now, who was it died? Who we mourning for? How many days we been doing this? Ah, who cares, who gives a fuck — where’s a beer and what time is it anyrate? Nine o’clock? That all? Night or morning? Morning? Good. Got all day (another day) to drink up large. To Pera, that’s right, tha’s who died, tha’s who we’re here for.

  Get drunk again, eh cuz? You and I, eh? Happy together, drunk together, die together — but after you, cuz! Two fullas look at each other go outside have a punchup, shake hands, touch beer glasses together, nemine, bro, leas’ we’re mates now.

  Drink and might get lucky, fuck someone (someone’s mother. Someone’s wife. The illicit got more flavour, sweeter taste). Get lucky, fight someone, win the fight, though fights hardly ever won or lost, everyone always jumps in, does big act of breaking it up, or to get in a punch or two on the sly, or out in the open. Everyone shakes hands, mostly, and some men they openly weep, but everyone knows it’s only the piss weeping, piss talks and cries its own language, they all know that. Part of the game.

  Sit around after, lick the wounds, wipe the blood trickles, trickle more beer down the throat and spill down chin, keep laughing and smiling about it, the fight, or whatever — Hey, don’t be goin’ to sleep! Come on, cuz, wake up, drink up, drink up! Be happy. Sing some songs. Anything. Yeah, that’ll do, I like that one. Ah tha’s nice. Oooo, and I love you sooooo! That was nice. Sing another one, eh? Gwon, for me.

  So someone sings another one. For you. Ah, tha’s really beautiful, sing it again. Ah, you got a voice all right. Wha’s another song? Yeah, tha’ one, I like tha’ one. Ah, this the life, eh, cuz? Drink up the large, sing up the large — fight up the large, anyone pisses us off, eh cuz? Eh cuz? Eh cuz? We know, eh?

  They know this is Pinevale and therefore the world, it mus’ be the worl’, we’re fuckin’ in it aren’t we! In
it and out of it. Yeah. It’s Pinevale. (Or anywhere on the same closed circuit.) We’re lucky, eh? Lucky why? Cos we’re drunk, we can get drunk all the time, if life is about that then we-are-lucky.

  Us kids mucking around, trying to fill the days, get ready for another night, they can’t stop pouring the piss down them. Heard her on the phone to my father giving him the bullshit about her relations more in need for her than he and my brothers in need of wife and mother. She slammed the phone down at something he must have said, he can add another day to her time of absence for that. Fuck him.

  Up the road from the piss-up at a big pile of sawdust from the mill. Slide on iron sheets down it; it’s an accumulating symbol representing these people’s working lives, their whittled-away boozing lives. We’ve seen this sawdust hill grow to a mountain over the years. Of Mum coming here for a party, a two-day binge of cards and beer. And then Auntie Molly’s turn to come over our way. The circuit’s round to go round.

  On the third day, my mother, her brain addled and her violence sharpened by the days of beer drinking, got it into her head that a group of locals were ganging up on her. So.

  So she asked them if they wanted to sort it out — right here and now! Come on, I’ll take the fuckin’ lot of you on! Spoken like a true grandchild of her warrior ancestor.

  Now, women fighting has no redeeming, no mitigating quality; there is something against fundamental motherhood — as protective as nature has made it — that brawling does not do anything for. Women reduced to physical fighting is an assault worse on a notion precious to all of us, right? We’re talking hair pulled by the handful and coming out in clumps with the scalp end flecked with blood.

  We’re talking punches that flail most ungracefully and nor with skill, and yet do so much damage thudding and skidding into flesh and turning female faces into hideous manifestations of pain and anger at being hit, of anger and some kind of wild joy at being in a brawl. We’re talking women slipping over in a puddle of blood, their fighting hands flailing for balance like in a hopelessly doomed dream.

  It’s faces opening in scarlet welts of fingernails raking tracks down cheeks that a man caresses and smothers in sweet kisses and tells, presumably, he loves her and she, the face, answers in turn she loves him too — in her better moments.

  This is eyes wide and wild and nostrils flared like angry cattle beasts and frightened cattle beasts destined for the slaughter room. We’re talking slaughter of dignity here so deep that physical description is almost relief. I’m seeing female animals ripping and pulling and scratching and punching and shrieking at each other — and different from the bar-room brawl of males. Which is kind of meant to be, if you’re looking only at basics. But women brawling?

  Brawling males don’t fall over with such instant loss of dignity, displaying underwear and pubic hair and blackred patches of cunt bleed. Yes, cunt bleed. These bitches don’t have menstrual cycles — they have bleeding cunts and bleeding children who feel like cunts, believe us. Believe us.

  Ask my cousin Jack. Ask my brothers. Ask Warren. Ask any child born into this sub-culture. It must be the warrior shadow still casting darkly over us. It has to have some explanation, it simply cannot be without reason — there I (us all) go again: trying to reason with the unreasonable. And to stop from crying.

  Now our truck’s taking us back home, children on the back, little Hohepa’s had a hiding, we don’t know what for, we didn’t see it, the fuckin’ coward did it on the sly, blackened his child’s eye. Maybe his father heard about and saw the praise his son got from the other kids and us, how he turned his iron sheet into a dazzling display of zigzagging sledge and ski prowess down that sawdust ski slope, when he’d never before done this kind of thing. Warrior men, boozer men, they don’t like to hear their children praised, it might make them feel too good about themselves. Which might take away some of your precious toughness.

  The poor little fledgling bird has his eyes cast downward at the wooden plank floor of our truck tray and his parent-betraying nest, his hearse. Wind numbs our faces, history has turned another few blank pages of these people’s lives, the brawl still echoes in our ears, and up front they’re laughing about it.

  And now Jack and I know that our mothers have their periods at the same time and why men get disgusted at them. And I know now from the comments made by the men during yesterday’s fight why my mother did that man with her hand — she was with monthly bleeding.

  And we know about missing clumps of our mothers’ hair, that it grows back again. We don’t know about what’s been ripped out of us. It’s been a long funeral for whatshisname. And one coming before his time for a boy called Hohepa, I bet.

  11

  Yeah, and not only was there not even a photograph of my father but nor, of all the ironies, did he have any answers. You never seek answers to violence from someone who’s not violent. Violence confounds the non-violent, violence defeats them, it’s too frightening for them to contemplate. Violence appalls them, renders their analytical senses dull, punch-drunk. Violence is the antithesis of what they have found works for them and is the working of them. That’s my father. Give him a bit more, he deserves that.

  Nor do you seek enlightenment from someone who is enlightened, not when he has no answers to violence, nor to your inner feelings of unworthiness, to the whys and wherefores of a race not his own — you don’t. Because an enlightened father has no answers.

  I liked him, maybe loved him. I could talk to him, he’d come to whatever level of your conceptual age was required. You knew he was gradually pulling you up. He answered any question you put to him, even on sexual matters. He was liberated.

  But I’d look at him, at our parental situation, at their ill-matched marriage, and think, he cannot know any more than me or he would have changed the situation. He is enlightened in his situational life from his parental background. Whilst his children, begat of two races, two poles of thinking, two extremes, are not. And cannot.

  This is not a normal, flawed marriage, of unlikelies becoming an eventual compromise and acceptance of each their differences. This is a union born in someone’s bizarre imagination, a marriage of mind to emotion, an unnatural union of two irreconcilable races and their opposite ways of thinking. Fuck enlightenment. It didn’t work in our house. It might as well have been a light left on in a room no one went into.

  I think I loved him, though. I’m sure I did. As much as his own whiteman’s ill-at-ease with physicality would allow him to be loved, even by his own children. He would tell us he just wasn’t a demonstrative type and nor had he come from a demonstrative family. We wondered how he demonstrated with our mother in bed — with a handshake? A formal request to make love?

  He was a good man, a good father. He wanted much for us. He urged us always to look people in the eye when we were speaking or being spoken to and not be like so many of our browner cousins, spending life staring at the ground. Yet we saw him unable to hold other people’s gaze himself, how he’d wipe at his brow, and his hands would go up behind his head, eyes close as if fighting with the shyness devils in his head. He told me once, without actually saying it was our secret, that shyness is as bad as being physically crippled.

  Poor Dad, he was in a game whose rules he didn’t understand. He wouldn’t play it but he wouldn’t leave it. He was the genteel man in the midst of rough-house players. He was the gender separation that made men and women different in the world he came from, to this where they drank and swore and fought and fucked like men. We figured it was only in bed that they found something in common. And even then, she was hardly faithful to him. We knew that he knew but he would never say. It would not be in keeping with the stoic way of his raising. He was a kind of pallid silver birch choked by a never-flowering rata vine.

  He was in a life that his younger educational aspiring didn’t equip him for; he turned up with a university degree when the asking qualification was to be good with your fists, or at least powerful enough of personality that no ma
n, nor woman, dared touch you.

  But she crawled and mauled all over him, and took part of our respect away for him for not being the man circumstances required. Her people said of him that he was like a nice lost boy who turned up one day at the wrong doorstep but stayed on. Which is why we wanted him to punch his way back to us respecting him more.

  Analytical man and his opposite don’t fit. Each enrages the other. Countries must be like that and go to war on it. His reasoning was our mother’s cause for violent anger. She not only didn’t understand logical thought, she despised it. His arguments were just more scar tissue on her bitter memories. His pointing out to her a mistaken statement of fact was an insult that she would never forget. His trying to restrain her from assaulting one of her card opponents was a betrayal of her, and he therefore deserved any act with which she wished to betray him back. They were more scars. It was how her mind worked. How the minds of all of them, more or less, work. Kids figured out the rule before educated father: don’t-try-and-reason-with-them.

  He used words to sooth our troubled souls from what our mother was making happen around us. He explained everything to us, from ant colony social infrastructure to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, or any definition we asked for and then more of his own. He tried to pull in history for us to take lesson from, he admitted, very different lives. Though he never said make the most of it. Just tried to find some perspective. That never fitted.

  After a major incident at home, Dad would try and focus us on singular things out in the future, or the coming rugby game on Saturday, or take us to the lake for our Sunday swim, or a long walk and long talks. But he wouldn’t talk about her. Our mother. His shameless wife. Or her sisters. Or her drunken, violent men and women mates. He refused to be distracted by personalities. It was concepts he focused on.