by Duff, Alan
The senior women took up wailing when they looked amongst their returned warriors and saw who was missing, howling worded lament for their sons and brothers and grandsons and nephews who were never coming home. Fathers and brothers and grandfathers and uncles openly grieved and bellowed out what terrible revenge would come upon the heads of the enemy who had killed their own, and they rushed forward in their angry grief and set upon the captives, killing them in due horrible manner, a sight of entrails and torn-out organs and genitals and screams of killers and killed; they grabbed at severed enemy heads and spat at them, they gouged out eyes and stuffed them into mouths, they reached up the spinal entry groping for brain, which became crushed matter between gnarled fingers; they held the sightless faces to their own and spat dire promise for the generations to come of this enemy tribe that their own deaths would be avenged over and over and over. For that was the way of this proud, ferocious, long-memoried people.
Freshly killed slave was hacked into pieces for the many hangi pits. Boy warriors pleaded with eyes to be assigned the task of killing more slaves so that they may sate their need to do murder. A senior elder saw this and he gave signal. The boys ran faster than the wind from the north-west to the slave compound, leaped upon several slaves like attacking dogs, though the more disciplined boys made battle practice of it, if one-sided, and parried with a taiaha, or a bone club, at a hapless slave before thrusting the point up under his groin and driving it as far as his young strength could, or the blade into throat in effort to sever a head.
So the air was rent with sound: of groaning slaves, of wailing women and vengeance-crying men and grief-stricken parents and yelling, crying children, and excited dogs. It thucked with sound of more slave bodies being hacked to pieces, of boys screaming in their killing state, of excited, exclaiming cries of victory and pride, of ancient chant being intoned by old men and women allowed to join them, it was clarity of every person filling their role in the chaos of a culture immersed sweetly, ineffably in war.
The dogs barked in canine understanding that extra food was forthcoming, and affection too, from appeased men of war, and their scenting of blood gave added excitement to canine brains.
Children rolled enemy heads in the dust and squealed with joy and just a little fear at sight of a face rolling over and over in the dust propelled by their hardened little feet, and pocked with wet patches of spit clearing for a moment a broken segment of tattoo pattern. They poked sticks at the eyes and some, with experience of the seashore from shellfish-gathering forays to that sliver of sea visible from the high sentry towers, said the eyes were like the jellyfish sea creature, except without the poison sting, and they stared for a contemplative moment at the dusty head but wondered not of it when it was a living, thinking man, since one did not consider his tribal enemy anything but a living threat or a dead one no longer.
Over all this the tohunga made call to the ancestors, plucking appropriately with necessary cunning the references and comparisons, the former defeats of this same enemy; he spat the enemy names as he uttered with true majesty his own tribe’s lineage; he turned his tongue to giving his tribe the stories of their greatness. He included in his oral weave the name of the now-tired warrior, Te Aranui Kapi, leaning his superbly muscled form against the wall of the dwelling of his favourite lover, threading the name into legend, installing a man into history as he stood there and the sun dried to crumbling the blood upon his body, and so said the tohunga of him: Six severed heads he did return home with! Lo, hear the name of Te Aranui Kapi, and lower your eyes.
By the firelight, under the stars, touched by moonlight, warrior men and listening villagers sit on hard earth, still eating, from the feast extended on into the night; they chew on dried fish, gnaw and nibble and suck on slave ribs, like playing on bent bone flutes. Fighters take their turn to stand and recount battle deed, whilst enemy heads on stakes surround the large fire in last beaten stare, or with plucked-out eyes, as their mortally defeated mana is spoken of in sneering terms. Re-enacting actions of spear and club blow, of feint and parry, a language unto itself of description best when it tells of man in clash against his inherited enemy; the enemy, as if from the moon, from another world hostile to these, an enemy for being in a different place of birth.
Craftsmen fashion flutes from old, dried-out bones of slave and cooked and eaten enemy. Men, women, children all, take nourishment, grow muscular strength and spiritual well-being from the flesh of the conquered. They give laughter after laughter eruption to the stars up there seen forever of men and his condition. They gorge and gorge upon the sweet flesh, and men take longer glance upon women for taste of live sweet flesh, just as soon as the tales are told and the songs are sung and the revered ancestors are remembered in chant and the dead are paid tribute to and the sentry posts checked to see all is in order and readiness for a people always at war, but with love and art too.
Lovings in the night, under the roof shadow, outside under the same stars, the same coating of moonlight, to the same cicada rhythms as when they ate and talked and laughed. Sexual makings and takings in the night, of tender coupling with wife, or rough claimings of slave woman, low-ranked woman, quick and brutal and so urgently violent it takes slave woman low woman along on its thrusting wave, so like the taking of enemy man.
A babe cries, another suckles on mother’s good-giving breast, a dog gives sleepy growl, a child talks in his sleep, each sentry pads softly his length of vigil, or looks out into the night, the star-spread vasthood, wondering not, or but a little, at beginnings, life origins, meanings beyond these fortified walls and conquered nearby territories.
A last warrior makes glad cry of climax after his wife; an old warrior snores; old women check with experienced eyes that all is well. Then at last they sleep. With a moon laying a cloak over them.
And dreaming eyes seek meaning in the jumble of living images made macabre, bizarre, sometimes discerning, very occasionally enlightening. Another day has died. They always do. Like lives. Like all living things. Nothing, except in these people’s minds, their certain ideas, survives for so very long.
13
Vulnerable has its moments. You discover your attractiveness to females, older ones, in being vulnerable. They like that in a boy, they find it sexually attractive, they want to fix it with their touches and the soft wet treasure they’ve got to offer. Boy finds this out by and by, that this shame and social alienation are good for his sexual life, give him experience before his due time. The touch back there had no face that I saw? Well it grew one as the years passed. It started to talk to me and one day invited me inside. Her house to start with.
Where she wanted to talk, about those days, of my mother doing what she did, insisting I recall incident after incident, looking into my eyes my vulnerability, oh you poor boy, you poor undeserving boy, I’ll never forget your little face, you would go all red, your eyes would fill up but they wouldn’t spill over. I used to think if I just gave you a gentle push your tears would spill forth. But you would break out in a sweat, your school shirt would go all clammy, the oddest thing. Oh, you poor kid! you didn’t know you had a neighbour who cared so much, did you? No. (No, actually, a boy didn’t. Not this much.) With sex written all over her Mrs Average face.
She told the boy: I would watch you and see how you needed comfort — oh, I should have approached you sooner — I’d lie awake nights thinking of you, seeing your hurt little face, trying to get into your mind to see how you were feeling. I’d watch you go past my house on your way to school, my you run fast, a sprinter eh, and be so proud of how you tried to act as if the shameful day hadn’t happened. I, uh, confess to starting to get shameful thoughts myself — No, I mustn’t say that, must I? (Say what?) Well, I will say it, why shouldn’t I, I can trust you, I can, can’t I? Whatever we talk will only be between me and you, promise me, Jim. Promise me?
I promised her. And received the jolt of her signalling intent when she put a hand on my bare knee and her fingers spread out
and seemed to be saying she was trying to engulf me. I knew sex then, electric charge running all through me, but confusion and, yes, a kind of shame; and yet I wanted her to take me through this process of whatever was going to happen. I’d die for it to happen.
I saw husband Harry’s new wallpapering, yellow and white flowers, in a blur. Wife said, he did such a good job, you’d think a man like that would be good with his hands, but would you believe he’s not? With a catch in her voice.
I’m following husband’s wallpapering efforts down a passageway just like ours, it’s stamped out of the same design the government applied to its nationwide housing programme, so it’s not as if I hadn’t walked these hallway walls before, though never with a woman’s hand in mine, and never could I have imagined breathing like this could be so written with meaning. Talk? What is talk in the face of this?
You poor little vulnerable boy, Edith would love to have taken care of you. But then again how would I have been when you grew older, looking like this, have you ever kissed a girl before? (No, not an adult girl in her own home passage.) I can’t have children, you see. (I don’t see.) Oh? Which is an advantage — for that thing anyrate. What thing is that? You don’t know? You really haven’t guessed? Oh, you poor vulnerable young man, that’s why you appeal, you bring out the caring, loving woman in me! And your not knowing, well that’s another attraction in itself. Isn’t all innocence?
She took my other hand so I am in her hands literally, figuratively, she’s playing mother and lover at once, either one this boy is happy with, but rather the lover as we enter her place of experienced lovings. Boy is scared, as she takes a young man by the hand into her bedroom, to a place he never knew till then existed. Made him understand the fuss men make of his mother and fuss she makes herself, its importance to her.
Funny, in the first instance of entry it felt so similar to the feeling of entering a Waiwera thermal bath. So warm. So right. Nor was the scent, the smell, an unfamiliar that a Waiwera bather’s nostrils had not known before. Vaginal smell in the changing shed. Woman smell around you.
She, it, was with words that streamed out in strangest gasps and exclamations; I was standing outside under her night window-sill listening to ourselves. Her and me. Me and her. Her to me, me of her. It, she, had hair defining her, her cunt. Cunt beautiful. Cunt engulfing and all-meaningful. Cunt the word that sings, not proffers obscenity. What is obscene about a woman’s cunt? What possible offence could be taken by description of that which is the centre of all our loving and birthing, and not a little hating and much of life’s meaning?
She was convinced, she moaned the words in my ear my everywhere, this was meant to be. I was too far gone, at the time, to wonder if she wasn’t as vulnerable, as lost, as wretched, as I. She wore a smile as wide as her spread-eagled legs. I entered both. She was my first, the sky my geyser broke forth into — at night, one night, with just our eyes seeing in the dark to know.
But every daylight day of shame didn’t bring surprise fucks. And that night I dreamed not of woman wet and gasping all over me, of kissing lips and hungry probing tongue and giggles of approval at my fast learning, none of that. I dreamt of being engulfed by a police siren, and the cop car running over me. And driving it was my mother, in a torn police shirt and a ripped police tie. And all the neighbours, including my very first lover, were stood around laughing at my predicament. And everywhere was smeared with blood. My face was coloured scarlet red, with shame.
14
And anyway, Edith was later. An occasional payback time, a few times a year for two years practising like my slut mother, giving myself to the first free bidder, playing easy pants. Edith, plain housewife Edith, with her bodily riches, but her person, after we were through, revolting me for the ease she betrayed her husband for me. Beginning as my lover, she finished as my unforgiven mother. Edith: the reward for being vulnerable when otherwise it — she — has nothing going for it.
But in real life, not Edith’s bed of desire and then disgust, you take yourself out of that house, your own house and you go in the opposite direction to Edith’s. You go here and there, at a clip, in a stealthy haste, peering into house windows of other’s homes, their lights, their movements, their voices, their private doings you have no right to be spying on. It must be you’re trying to steal the spirit, the essence from their lives, or just borrow it, partake of it for a while, or so you tell yourself.
And then it became items you found lying around, of no value and yet you coveted them, piling them under the hedge at home, feeling this odd sense of satisfaction exactly like revenge feels.
Some homes are the same as your own. Maoris drinking and singing and acting dangerous even when they’re having a good time, though there are your father’s kind doing the same, just in smaller numbers and there’s less that dangerous air about, like being in the presence of unruly dogs.
You meet kids on a regular basis out just like you, roamers of the night, runners from home, some are more tortured, some are just adventurous, some are natural-born thieves, a few are so troubled, disturbed, you steer a mile from their night-roaming circuit, you avoid them like you would a mirror after you’d been beaten up.
They have names: Dickie-boy, Hoop, Patrick, Rhonda, Tane. They want you to do things with them, to form a group, their own tribe, make alliances, how about a gang; and you try it for a while, but it doesn’t work, it feels you’re missing too much of what’s there, what you’re seeking: it’s in one of these houses. Or it’s in the bigger picture of them all. It’s not with other kids like you, that only gets you into trouble faster. You manage to stay wide of them, a loner (a stupid boy still with hope that you’d be different).
I found out my town, I went out and discovered it, I saw into a thousand households. Cello strings, children’s screams.
You go by, glance, you linger, you find a way to sneak in, first check for dog or the plural of them, slip over a fence, crawl under a hedge, slide down a footpath, clamber over a wall, tiptoe down a drive you’re not supposed to be on, pulled by an image in a window, a night scene not concealed enough by curtains, it’s like walking right inside a movie, to see a couple kissing, dancing, hear them talking as you crouch under the window, muscles primed for flight, there’s things going on everywhere, it’s life, if most of it dull, it’s love expressing itself being defined by the station the house radio is on or the record they’re playing, or the silence or the cacophony. It’s a symphony out there, discordant and occasionally perfect. Cello strings and children’s screams.
I move from house to house, I’m a creeper, a lurker, I’m a perver, I eavesdrop on the instruments of the human night, it is changing me: I am becoming what I see. Yet I cannot be what others are.
My hedge pile of stealings is growing, I have more flower pots than a store selling them, I could dig half the town’s gardens with my array of hand tools. One night I took the next step, I entered a house, I found a purse on the bench, I took it, I got out on to the street not knowing where to rush my excitement to since I couldn’t count my loot at home.
I sat in a bus shelter, and when my hand touched upon the crisp of money, my childhood felt restored, salvaged. And then I spent the next several days spending it — one pound seven shillings and threepence — on ice-creams till I was sick of them and tired with finding another shop where my face wouldn’t be known to buy the next. I discovered cashew nuts and ate several packets. Then the money was gone, and I woke up that same night to my mother screaming abuse at my father and my real childhood restored.
You go where feet tell you to go, heart is the map. In amongst the mysterious chokings of thermal ground in Domain Park; become another apparition in the steam veils, slip behind the steam curtains, put boiling water or mud pool between you and the world beyond, watch the day die in the changing blues of boiling water, fearing to fall in, fearing more, though, the plunge into yourself your boiling thoughts.
And then one night you hear footsteps behind and feel that sta
rtle, that physical jolt of fright, that spurt of body chemical somewhere inside that yells danger and yet excitement at the same time, and you turn and you know who it is, he is fate making his appointment, even when you’ve never set eyes on him before. But still: you know.
You know by his same wanting smile, and yet nothing else of him is like you, of you. But he is fate all right, he knows it in his smile, it’s right behind his trying to be casually friendly; he’s a fuckin’ big liar come to make fate’s claim on you.
And he’s big, very big, a powerful man, and you know murder lurks there, so you ease away from the pool edge, your dangerous, council-forbidden side of the boiling wet, and he throws his hands out in that way of supplicant, lying innocent, hey?
Hey, I only want to talk. Hey, shit. He doesn’t just want to talk, kid. He wants you.
But they all want me — everyone in the park, on the circuit, in the lonely loop, wants the same thing: me, and any other lost kid with enough beauty and or innocence to take; it’s our young fresh years they want, not each other, older and old, uglied by birth and events, predators gone past the point of being prey themselves, monsters who have never been desirable.
Look, even a kid cognises they want love, if a warped form of it. It’s in the moments of forlorn, lovelorn stare before the other checks in, the brief times of repose in ordinarily grizzly faces where something good and decent shines as though behind a muddy window — I’ve seen them, I’ve hurt inside for them, I’ve seen grown men of the park world howling for life that can never be. So don’t be telling me they’re all and only monsters and perverts. You just learn to keep them from thinking your sensitivity is a weakness. You let them know you’ve faster legs, and muscles developing that will want revenge; so let them talk, while away their miserable hours relieved just to have company, not hard to do. But don’t be touching, don’t be asking. And don’t deny that one there is your fate awaiting.