by Alan Duff
Used to. Gary said it like a statement of cold hard fact; took a moment before Jake picked up on it though. But he did when Gary repeated it and then asked, They used to callim that? So Jake with another internal flooding, the opposite of the first; he wondered how it could be that a big moment of just seconds ago could so suddenly feel like it was long past and maybe hadn’t happened at all?
He wanted to yell in this Gary’s sneering face that it was still Jake The Muss, not in the past (tense) but right now — still. Except one of the things’t happened to a man was he couldn’t hold onto his best, his stronger moments, long enough to believe them like he used to. Used to. Gary was right then. Used to. (Used to be called Jake The Muss.) So, if the truth be known, and it was in this moment for Jake Heke, he felt like crying. For what was. (For what used to be but wasn’t.) But not in a pub, and not one he’d never been in before. Why, he hadn’t even cried at his daughter hanging herself. Nearly. But he’d got put off by the McClutchy crowd all bawling their drunk eyes out and falling over ’emselves with cheap sentimental shit which he knew was false in expressing their, uh, condolences. Hidden at son Nig’s funeral service, though, crouched down in the pines and behind a low hedge with Cody, a man’d cried for his son killed in the gang gun battle. ’Nless the tears were for himself, what his life had come down to, or ’nless those hundreds of people singing that sad hymn in Maori at the grave’d got him crying. Anyrate, Cody was crying, too, and he didn’t even know Nig.
Up came Gary’s eyebrows — Now what? Jake expecting the worst now Of smartarse comment, something sarcastic. What’s Muss stand for? (What?!) Jake astonished at the question. He’d never been asked that. It was just understood; and no madda how many times a man’d heard the term said crawlingly, suckingly, homagingly, fearfully, to or in hearing reference, he got the picture in his mind of himself, of the man of slabbed muscles, the weight of his chest muscles and the feel to his hand, the reassuring weight of them, the awesome always-ready power in both his punching arms. That’s what he saw and understood of The Muss when he heard it.
Was the brother Kohi who stuck his own bicep bulging arm out to show his brother, and Jake, what Muss stood for. Here. Tha’s what it means, Gary. This. Smiling all over he was. And his brother back at him. Like a secret exchange of laughter at a man used to be called Jake The Muss.
OUT IN THE NIGHT, it was still going in there, the new pub, pubs didn’t close anymore like in the old days, they could stay open till as late as they liked. He didn’t know, hadn’t realised, the town’d changed so much; new buildings, restaurants, them café type places, bars that weren’t big barnhouses like he grew up with and loved, he thought he knew this main street, Ruataniwha, from the lonely days of being toppled from his status by Grace’s cursing letter, of criss-crossing the street so he could see his reflection in the shop windows, take sustenance from it. He’d seen tourists around when before he hadn’t noticed them or maybe they weren’t so many a few years back, them Asians, but not Chinese like where he got his takeaway favourite, spare ribs, they had flatter faces (and crueller eyes) different bone structure in their face. Now the chinks had a bigger place, too, built a big fucken restaurant nex’ door to their takeaway place but closed that earlier now, he figuring it was cos they didn’t need the drunk Maori cussimas no more, not with the restaurant, and anyway the drunk Maoris from pubs like McClutchy’s were scattered now, and as he wasn’t one ofem he didn’t know what they got up to, where they got ’emselves a feed at the end of a drinking session. Come to think of it, walking up the main street pretty quiet now at two in the morning, he didn’t know nothin’ about anything of this world. Not nothin’. But one thing he did know, he was gonna take those brothers up on their invite to come hunting one of these weekends, wipe the fucken sneers off their faces, specially that Gary’s. Anutha thing: he wasn’t so drunk he was staggering all over, all ovah, the road. Drunk, yeah, but not blind.
He headed for the taxi place, his shoes padding along the footpath jus’ like a stealthy fucken cat, a big, muscly black one. Yeah. And the stars out. And a — suddenly he brought to a halt. The fuck was that I jus’ thought? Trying to recall the flash of, it seemed like insight. No, a memory of some sort. But no, it wouldn’t come. He walked on, a little bothered by losing it, started humming to himself, Armstrong’s ‘What A Wonderful World’, when he got it. And he stopped again. And lowered his head so he wouldn’t lose it. It was the humming, not by himself just then but from the dream.
The humming of that dream of the chinks and the whites and the snobby group of Maoris was the same humming he picked up from the Douglas family back there in Marty’s Bar, still humming right now to maybe the tune of music but still a family hum, still the engine of togetherness. Whilst he, Jake Heke, had and heard no such thing. Any wonder he gave out a long, resigned sigh. Nothing to hum about. Though he did manage a grin at that thought, nothing to hum about … Jakey you ole fool, you. Yet he was humming that Satchmo song.
EIGHT
HE’D HAD THE wall built onto the existing so they couldn’t see the encroaching (and quite architecturally hideous) subdivisions of cheap tacky housing of, one must face it, the masses. (On land he’d sold to the developers he should have realised would have the social responsibility of cockroaches.) But he hadn’t even got that right — or the bricklayer contractor hadn’t; Gordon Trambert had simply let the man get on with it, he anyway had far more important (and pressing) matters on his mind, simply assuming that the chap would match his bricks to the existing wall, given old bricks were long a middle-class demand for walls and paving (and their unoriginal sense of the aesthetic) and were freely available. Nor had he noticed in anymore than a peripheral sense the difference of matching, buried that he was in his financial affairs. The height he’d ordered meant supportive columns, again he assuming the contractor’s taste, but the extra thickness of brick columns every six or seven paces were out of proportion and with poured concrete centres, and that distinct line that showed where it had been built onto — all in all a bloody disaster aesthetically. But he could hardly demand the fellow tear it down, although he did have an angry session of re-negotiation of the contract and damned if he was backing down on it. Though he did settle at a what-the-hell five percent off the price. That was when he thought he had more money than he did.
He’d had it built, he came to realise (rather late), so he’d not see the truth of not just the approaching spread of imitation-wood-grain-cladded box houses (that poor families could get into on little or no deposit and not often get out of for reasons Gordon Trambert had stopped trying to fathom of the poor, their low-ceilinged attitudes and aspirations) but the other truth of his folly — foll-ies. Failures. They were a plural.
More and more he saw the truth in the adage, that the first generation builds it, the next consolidates, and the next spends (blows) it. One managed less and less a laugh of irony when ordinarily he tried to find the humour in even the worst situations. Not that one was the life and soul of parties. But he could enjoy a laugh, including at himself.
Each morning he woke at exactly three, no matter what time he put himself to bed, which was usually late as he pored over his papers, his undeniable evidence of mounting debt, his files of land sales so the family farm was no longer viable in size, and anyway farming had always been a roller coaster, with more downs than ups; farming was a way of life not a business, or certainly not run on business lines, a simple equation of return on asset value showed that. And he hadn’t accepted it should be just a way of life; so he’d looked at various businesses and was especially attracted to the idea of having a capital partnership in a restaurant, given Two Lakes’ steadily rising tourist numbers attracted by the thermal spectacular sights out at Waiwera, and the lakes themselves, as well — oh irony — the professionally run farm that entry-paying tourists poured into daily by the tens of coachloads to see sheep being shorn, dogs rounding up sheep, and other stereotypical farm activities that were a novelty to Asians, Ameri
cans, Europeans from crowded cities, and had made its innovative farm-owners rich. He thought he could clip the ticket by feeding some of the tourists.
It started off in a rush. And ended in a long extended hiss of escaping cash, virtually all of it Gordon’s, which he’d acquired by selling land and then a parcel of Glaxo shares left by his father’s estate, after a successive run of poorly chosen chefs and that business dream — or nightmare — word of mouth with the tourist operators who wouldn’t touch the place, meaning it was off their recommended list. So morale went down and down; he and his working partner blamed each other, they tried desperately for local trade instead, but word of mouth was waiting for them there, too, they’d signed a long lease, it took over a year to find another tenant, and even that cost a cash incentive plus the first six months’ rent paid on the new leasee’s behalf. When Gordon Trambert’s accountant told him his venture had cost $320,000 in just two and a bit years, he’d put on the big act of bravado and told the long-serving family accountant whose firm had looked after his father’s affairs, nothing ventured nothing gained, in that somewhat pompous voice he’d acquired from, he figured in his honest moments, private schooling and, back then being young and vulnerable, wanting to be regarded as truly one of the chaps. As in traditional farming family meaning landed gentry, which he was but wasn’t: something about Two Lakes, probably the Maori influence, made a mockery of that snobbish outlook. It wasn’t New Zealand anyway, though there were enough anachronistic pockets of the type, especially in Canterbury, where inordinate pride in one’s background was de rigueur.
It might also have been the town’s particular love of rugby, a game which brought people together and had nothing to do with their racial, social or financial backgrounds. Solicitors played in the same team as meat workers. A Maori carpenter might captain a team containing a doctor, an accountant and successful businessmen. A Pakeha labourer might be the best player in the team. Gordon Trambert thought it the country’s great equaliser. So why the acquired accent in times of stress, Trams? he did ask himself from time to time, and applying that nickname he’d got at the very school the accent came from. There was just something about Two Lakes that precluded any form of extreme social separation and he hated himself when he lapsed into snobbery. Or took refuge in it. Though God knows his home in comparison to his encroaching neighbours, let alone the two-storey State houses still visible from their upstairs windows, was a palace. And so, they all had reason to know, was the way of life utterly foreign to what they, the Tramberts, and the Heatheringtons of Isobel’s clan, knew.
Before the girl hung herself on the oak of Gordon’s maternal grandmother’s planting at the turn of the century, he and family had occasionally looked at that line of ugly State two-storey houses and yet assumed the residents to be happy-go-lucky, and content. Indeed, Isobel had gone further to say how glad she was that this country, almost alone in the Western world, had a social conscience that housed those whom she called less well off, less fortunate, less educated and how she didn’t mind paying extra taxes if it was essentially achieving the egalitarian New Zealand dream, when what she did know was her family under her husband’s financial management hadn’t paid taxes in years and used every avenue there was to avoid them as an honour-bound duty. Besides, one was entitled not to pay taxes on losing business ventures. (If, that is, a man wouldn’t face up to what the losses reflected.)
On still nights the singing, partying State-house voices had carried across the paddocks as they were in those days (only six years ago) and on occasion, when he and wife and children had been having a summer evening drink at the outside table, he and Isobel had sung a few grinning lines to snatches of song carrying across to their own pleasantly, slightly fuzzy heads of a few gin and tonics. They had particular memory of a Patti Page song they used to sing, if in raucous and somewhat tuneless voice, when he and Isobel had met, at Lincoln University doing agricultural degrees, no comparison to that song that drifted regularly to their evenings’ outside hearing: ‘Tennessee Waltz’. One night the air conditions must have been perfect for they’d heard a woman singing it with such astonishing voice at first they thought it must be a recording, though brief pause of laughter and then continuation of the song by the same voice told them it was real. A voice resident there, in that light glowing outline built along a low ridge that sloped gently down to their farm and had in fact belonged to the family, sold by Gordon’s father at a price he couldn’t refuse. A voice that, with proper training, could be gracing the nation’s ears.
Then that poor, wretched girl, her self-taken death, had changed their outlook entirely. All was not well with that visible world from their own. All was not well with the Trambert’s smug assumptions of it. And most certainly the child’s world was about as bad as it could get. Both still had dreams of it.
He’d spotted her — in disbelief to say the least — from their bedroom when he happened to glance out at the day to come. She hung like a portrait from his father’s war encyclopedias of hanged captured soldiers, political figures, of anyone hanged: a quite quite gruesome sight. Except this was clearly suicide. He’d near collapsed with the shock; called out to Isobel who happened to be sitting on the lavatory, that she’d better come quick. Before she arrived at the window he had thoughts — fears — of his children seeing this, his eyes riveted to the sight unbelievable, of the corpse of a stranger hanging from their tree.
Isobel proved calm in a crisis, calmer than he; she went straight to the children, a sharp rap on each door, telling them something terrible had happened and to come immediately. Out on the landing she’d told them straight, that outside a tragedy had happened, she didn’t know why or anything else about it, only that on their property was a girl who had hung herself. Then she called the police. Nor had she ordered the children not to look for themselves. After the call to the police she’d hugged each in turn, Alistair first because he was the more sensitive one, then Charlotte who was hardly without frightened and confused tears herself, but still made (born) of sterner stuff than her younger brother. But it was Alistair who’d be likely to dream about this from hereon, Alistair who’d near to wilfully embrace it as a tragedy which he’d churn over in his always turmoiled mind and somehow include himself in the process. His father thought this even as he stood awaiting his wife’s decision on what to do next.
They went outside, but with firm words from Isobel to Alistair alone that if he felt the sight would upset his delicate nature then he’d best stay inside. But if he thought not seeing it would cause him self-doubts on himself, then he should ready himself (Girl, prepare yourself, get ready your spirit … for the journey to the Spiritworld, it is yours, girl … yours alone). Gordon had taken the trouble to ask a Maori friend who had once worked on the farm, knowledgeable in the cultural ways of his people, what the different chants at that last day of funeral at the traditional meeting house he’d attended would have meant. Harry Pukapuka had told Gordon that particular farewell would have been said at a suicide; Gordon Trambert had memorised it from Harry writing it down. Harry had gone to pains to explain that the words of the girl going alone should not be taken in the European literal sense, but be seen as a journey which she had, for reasons of her own which her people respected, chosen to take. Her arrival in the Spiritworld, Harry explained, would be met by all the ancestors welcoming her. Welcoming, Harry had emphasised in that quiet but firm way of his.
Alistair had chosen not to come out. Either way Gordon knew his strange son was going to make something of this in his mind. Charlotte walked behind her mother. A bird was trilling from the same tree. The sky overcast grey, and chilly. The child’s face a deep red, her legs splotchy, tongue between her teeth. Oh, it was a terrible terrible sight. The more poignant that she was barefooted, and her clothes had that poor look. (Gordon Trambert thankful there was no breeze putting sway to the awful sight.) Just a teenager, Charlotte’s age.
AT THE FUNERAL Gordon Trambert had not seen sight of the father, or anyon
e likely to be, in the Maori meeting house, itself a large building built along traditional lines and big enough to sleep a couple of hundred mourners. Magnificently carved outside and in, he’d never seen one before, yet Two Lakes, he later took the trouble to find out from Harry Pukapuka, had dozens of such buildings. But then Gordon had only dared stand at the doorway, or just to one side of it, in the last hour before burial proceedings and try not to be seen as staring in. He caught the last of male elders making speeches in their flowing Maori tongue, punctuated by explosions of emotion, but Gordon Trambert with musical, discerning enough ear to hear the lilting quarter-toning in the chants, that the enunciation of even a foreign tongue to him was perfect. Going from the meeting house to the cemetery had worried him for the Range Rover he drove (even though it was five years old). But no one seemed to notice it, perhaps they didn’t care for such things either way. The whole funeral process had moved him; the way the emotions were out in the open, grief getting to grieve instead of the restrained manner with which his English/Scottish ancestory people saw off their dead.
He had a call to make not so far away which he did after the funeral. Found himself driving back past the cemetery, out of a morbid curiosity he supposed and of course that the girl — Grace her name, such a lovely name for a child he had got better glimpse of in her open-state coffin, amazed at the undertaker’s skill in transforming that face that had been so grotesque when he first set horrified eyes on it — that she, uh, had killed herself on his (our) property. Then he saw that rather bizzare-looking figure whom he now knew as Toot Nahona, this wild-haired apparition lurching as though drunk, or on that glue these kids sniff, and the two sextons staring at the same figure as he sank to his knees one end of the grave. Gordon Trambert’s first thought was of a dramatic Shakespearian-like posture. Especially when the kid picked up the flower and held it to his chest, his head fallen on his shoulder. Except the stage this kid had walked tormented onto was his alone, or so he clearly believed. Gordon Trambert felt then that in a way he was privileged — if that was the word — at seeing a fellow human being in a moment of spontaneous purity expressing grief, love, friendship, possibly guilt.