Huia Short Stories 10

by Tihema Baker

‘Why would he kill himself just because he ran out of money?’

  ‘There’s probably more to it,’ Jack says. ‘It’s just that sometimes problems get so much for some people they see suicide as the only way out.’

  ‘Do you know about Granddad’s friend Ralph Gibson who killed himself in the First World War?’

  Frowning, Jack says, ‘No I don’t, but it was a terrible war. The trenches, the gas, appalling conditions. My father was wounded at Gallipoli. He was lucky really because he got sent home, but he never really recovered. Sometimes he’d stay in bed for days.’

  Encouraged by Jack’s seriousness, he says, ‘Granddad talks to Ralph, and Mummy and Daddy want to put him in a home. They’re going to get Dr Stockby to say his mind has gone. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Maybe it’s for his own good,’ Jack says.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ he says emphatically. ‘Granddad’s old. That’s all.’

  ‘Do you want me to have a word with your mother?’

  ‘Would you? She might get angry.’

  Jack smiles, his chest heaves and he says, ‘I think I can handle that.’

  ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘To be the first to see the sea,’ Jack says, pulling himself up in his seat and peering wide eyed over the bonnet of the car. ‘Fir—’

  ‘First to see the sea,’ he shouts.

  ‘Damn, you beat me,’ Jack says as he pulls off the road. He stops the car and points to the beach far below. ‘Still some force in those waves,’ he says.

  The beach stretches in a wide grin of white sand and waves peel onto the shore in orderly procession. Jack has waited two days for the sea to calm since an unexpected southerly blasted up the coast soon after he set his crayfish pots.

  Memory of the storm still lingers in the sea, and Jack shows Callum how to read the pattern by counting the sets of waves as they reach the shore. ‘See,’ he says, ‘seven or eight waves together, then a lull. That’s when we’ll go for it.’

  The approach to the higgledy-piggledy cluster of baches is down a steep and narrow roadway cut into a limestone cliff. The surface of the road is corrugated into compact welts running across its width, and the Zephyr groans as it shudders towards the narrow bridge. Cottages perch on the banks of a stream. Tall grasses and wild flowers lap around their fringes. Curtains are drawn.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone live here?’

  ‘It’s a summer holiday place. Haven’t you been here before?’

  ‘Never. We don’t go to the beach much. Dad doesn’t like it. He says sea air wrecks everything. We go to the lake.’

  ‘Taupō?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve got a house there. Right on the lake. It’s really nice. It’s got a hot pool.’

  ‘No hot pools here,’ says Jack, laughing, as he pulls the car up beside a faded blue fibrolite wall. ‘Just lots of cold water. Come on.’

  Jack’s fingers run along the lintel. ‘I could do with a hand getting the gear out,’ he says, unlocking the door.

  The gear is an outboard motor, oars, and life jackets, stowed in different places around the room: oars strung up so they hug the ceiling, the outboard resting on a rack beside the door. ‘The life jackets are under the bed,’ Jack says.

  Callum lies on his side, and when he pulls out a life jacket, a blue metal butterfly falls with a tinkle beside his cheek. He scoops his mother’s hairclip up and puts it in his back pocket as he gets to his feet.

  ‘Found them?’ Jack calls.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Would you bring the oars? I’ll get this engine hitched up.’

  The boat, cradled on a trailer hooked to a rusty tractor, seems very small. He estimates it’s no more than twelve feet long. He taps the sides; it’s made of tin. Jack is attaching a fuel line to the outboard; its shaft and propeller sit in a bucket filling with water. ‘Do me a favour and turn the tap off,’ Jack says. ‘We’ll give her a whirl.’ With half a pull of the cord the engine snaps into life. ‘Let it warm up a bit so she doesn’t stall on us.’

  Jack tells him to stand on the back of the tractor and hang on tight, and he rides the bumps by bending his knees, bowing his head to the rush of sticky salt air stinging his eyes.

  On the beach, the crashing waves drown the thudding of the tractor engine, and when Jack swings in a U-turn, he jumps down onto the sand and follows the boat backing into the water.

  He holds the boat while Jack parks the tractor and trailer up the beach. The tide is coming in.

  ‘OK. You hop in and stand up front. You’re the eyes,’ Jack says as he pushes the boat into deeper water. ‘Wait for the lull, then count the next set. Seven to eight, remember. Then we go. OK?’ Jack tugs the starting cord and twists the throttle.

  ‘OK.’ The sea is a confusion of tumbling white water as tougher waves rush to overpower weaker ones ahead. Beyond the surf the sea is flat, but soon the calm is disturbed by a rising wave, then another, and another, and when he has counted eight, he shouts. ‘Go, Jack, go now.’ And Jack engages the engine.

  He staggers but deftly finds his balance, quickly squatting as the boat speeds across the foaming water. Already the sea is heaving up the first wave in the next set, and by the time they meet, the top of the wave is beginning to flutter. Spray whips his face as the bow pushes over the top, and skidding down the back of the wave, he turns to look at Jack, who meets his thrill-filled laughter with a bonding smile.

  Jack has set his crayfish pots on the edge of a reef where slick black snakes of kelp sweep the water like a submerged Medusa shaking her head. Two orange buoys, set a few feet apart, tease the thrashing hair.

  ‘First pot,’ Jack says, pulling back on the throttle and scooping the rope up with his spare hand. He hauls until the wire mesh cage smacks against the boat. ‘Whoopee!’ he yells, ‘Look at that, will yer, Callum.’

  The cage is round, the size of a bicycle wheel, and its depth of a few feet is filled with writhing crayfish. ‘So many,’ he says.

  ‘And mostly good sized males by the look of it,’ Jack says, hauling the pot into the boat. ‘Here, you hold the sack,’ and one by one Jack grabs the biggest crayfish and plops them in the sack where they thrash their tails in protest.

  The next pot is similarly full, and they have over thirty crayfish, but in the last pot an engorged octopus is wound around the inside of the frame, filling the entire space.

  ‘That’s the biggest octi I’ve ever seen,’ says Jack, ‘Have to kill it, or just leave it to starve to death.’ He looks up. ‘What do you reckon? Fast death or slow?’

  ‘Fast,’ he says, ‘Definitely fast.’

  ‘Want to do it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ and Jack passes him a long screw driver sharpened into a spike.

  ‘Push it hard right between the eyes.’

  The octopus’s head is squeezed against the wire mesh, and knowing black eyes watch him aim the screw driver. He lunges, but the octopus’s head slithers away, eyes glistening before they narrow to slits.

  He aims again, but as he does so, the water around the boat suddenly glistens with the brightness of a mirror reflecting full sun, and he looks into a shimmering void with the sense something is looking back at him.

  ‘What’s that thing?’ he says.

  ‘What thing?’ says Jack.

  ‘Something …’ and without thinking, he says, ‘We must let it go.’

  ‘You want to let the octi go? It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Yeah. We don’t need to kill it, so we must let it go,’ he says.

  Jack groans as he pulls the wire mesh apart.

  Callum sees what Jack cannot see – the octopus swimming away, side by side with a glistening, fleshy mass, the shape of which keeps changing, from an arrow to a disc and back again.

  ‘Strange boy,’ Jack says, smiling, and he smiles too, knowing they both feel better for not killing the octopus.

  On the way back to the beach he leans over the bow of the boat so his head is the prow,
and he extends his arms out, imagining he’s a gannet skimming above the waves.

  Jack slows the boat when they near the shore. The tractor and trailer look like Dinky Toys parked up on the sand, and between them, wave upon wave lumber their way to land.

  ‘I’ll tuck behind a big one. Just hang on tight. But, if anything happens, stay with the boat.’

  Jack steers into the trough behind a swelling wave, which rises higher and higher until it towers in front of them, and when its top crumbles, the roar is deafening. As if it has eyes for them, the wave suddenly collapses, and snatches at the boat, pulling them into its grip.

  ‘Hang on tight,’ Jack yells above the roar, but the boat slews violently to one side. Callum loses his grip, falling painfully before being tipped into the water. Gasping at the impact, he sucks water into his lungs. He’s coughing and gulping for air when another wave crashes over him. One arm hangs limply and will not move, but with the other he grabs a rope trailing behind the boat. The rope is ripped from his hand as he sees the boat picked up and thrown into the air. Jack is falling backwards in slow motion, his arms flapping like a wounded bird.

  Callum is pushed under the water by a crashing wave. His eyes are open and all around him millions of tiny bubbles sparkle like the Milky Way, and coming towards him is the pulsating glittery presence he had seen with the octopus.

  21

  His eyes won’t open properly and his sight is blurred as if gauze is stretched across his face. Behind the veil, Jack Madden and his mother sit on chairs close together beside the bed, and behind them stands a white-coated doctor with ginger hair.

  His head is cushioned with pillows, his arm strapped across his chest. He hasn’t spoken yet.

  ‘We have a compression fracture of the wrist with severe bruising, three broken ribs, luckily no lung punctures, but he did take in a lot of water,’ the doctor says mechanically.

  ‘When will he be able to talk?’ he hears his mother say.

  ‘In his own time,’ the doctor says. ‘He’s on painkillers and still in shock.’

  He closes his eyes when he recognises the blurry figure that appears beside the doctor.

  ‘What the hell have you done?’ his father barks.

  ‘He’s going to be OK,’ Jack Madden says.

  ‘And you,’ his father says, ‘What were you thinking to let this oaf take Callum out in a boat?’

  ‘Please, John,’ his mother says.

  ‘It’s OK, Kathy,’ Jack says, rising to his feet. ‘He’s right. It was too much of a risk to take.’

  ‘Is that some sort of apology?’ he hears his father say before their voices fade away.

  ‘I know your whakapapa,’ he hears a deep voice say.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  The dullness of his senses makes him think he may be dreaming.

  ‘Over here.’

  His eyes find the voice. The curtains have been pulled aside, and an old man is sitting on the bed beside his. He’s wearing a long white nightgown, and his feet don’t reach the floor. His thick hair is cut short and sits atop a polished bronze head like a silver beret. His blue lips are moving.

  ‘I knew your grandmother.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Mōrehu. She’s here with Manu.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your tipuna. He’s here to make sure you’re OK. He knows what happened to you.’ The old man has no teeth. His gums are grey.

  ‘Something saved me,’ and he tells the old man about what he saw when he was trying to kill the octopus.

  ‘Ah, killing te wheke,’ the old man crouches forwards. ‘Go, on.’

  His memory of what happened is as vague as his dreams where images merge and time makes no sense.

  The old man’s eyes sparkle. ‘Sounds like Moremore to me,’ he says.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Moremore. He’s the child of Pania and Tangaroa.’

  ‘Pania, like the statue on Marine Parade?’

  ‘Yes, that’s her. I saw Moremore when I was a boy,’ the old man says. ‘We were collecting kaimoana in the estuary. Just over there,’ and he points out the window. ‘This was before the earthquake.’

  Through the darkness he can see lights at the airport shimmering in the distance, and he knows where the airport is built had been a tidal lagoon before the earthquake of 1932 heaved up the land.

  ‘First we knew about it was hearing the old people yelling. They saw Moremore was making the tide come in very, very quickly. We had to cross streams in the mud flats to get back to land, and they were filling up fast. One of the them yells out, ‘Who’s got a dirty kete?’ We all look at Tama and make him throw back his pipi. But the tide was still pouring in so we all emptied our kete, and suddenly the water stopped. That’s when I saw Moremore. To me, he looked like a shark with pink skin like a baby, mind you, that’s what the old people told us we would see if we ever saw Moremore. But he can be any shape, you know. He’s from the other world.’

  A nurse in a white uniform comes between them. ‘Enough talking, you two,’ she says, and she pulls the curtain.

  22

  Breakfast is brought to him on a tray with metal arms that hug the mattress.

  ‘No breakfast for you, old soldier,’ the nurse says to the old man in the bed next to his, ‘your op’s for ten o’clock,’ and her shoes squeak on the polished linoleum floor as she efficiently walks away.

  He puts down his spoon and cranes forward so he can see the old man.

  ‘Were you a soldier in the Great War?’ he asks.

  The old man slowly turns his head and meets his eye.

  ‘Did you know Ralph Gibson?’

  The old man’s cheeks bunch and his lips pinch.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  In the ward there are four beds, the two opposite unoccupied. One wall is windows from hip height to ceiling, and at the swing doors leading to the passageway, a girl is waving. ‘Grandpa,’ she shouts.

  The old man raises his arms, and the girl runs to him. Her feet are bare and brush the floor without a sound. Three more children follow, and he knows them. They’re his cousins. And the tall woman wearing a long shawl is his Aunty June, and beside her is his Uncle Mo.

  He tells them what happened to him, and the old man says, ‘It was Moremore all right, no doubt about that.’

  His cousins stare so fiercely he looks out the window.

  ‘I should have known this boy before now,’ the old man says.

  ‘He’s Hiraani’s mokopuna, and GT’s.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘The father doesn’t mix.’

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘Probably,’ says his Aunty June, and she sweeps her hand over her father’s brow. ‘You all ready for your op, Dad?’

  ‘As ready as I’ll ever be,’ the old man says.

  Orderlies come, and a nurse says, ‘It’s time, Mr Wallace.’ The old man hugs his daughter and grandchildren, and he shakes Mo’s hand.

  ‘Good luck, Mr Wallace,’ Callum says.

  ‘Thank you, boy. We’ll talk later,’ Mr Wallace says, and Callum’s cousins, aunty and uncle follow the bed being wheeled away.

  Later they return, surrounding the bed being wheeled back in to the ward. In the meantime, the doctor with ginger hair has looked into his eyes with a torch.

  ‘Everything went well,’ says his Uncle Mo.

  ‘When can he come home?’ asks one of his cousins.

  ‘In a few days,’ says his Aunty June.

  Mr Wallace is fast asleep, and when a nurse pulls the curtain around the bed, she tells his visitors they must leave. ‘We’ve made enough concessions for you already,’ she says huffily. Later she returns, and he hears her say, ‘Ah, you’re back with us.’

  In the afternoon his mother brings the first cherries of the season cradled in a paper box, and a bag of Minties and Herodotus.

  ‘How’s Granddad?’ he asks. ‘Have you told him what happened to me?’

&nbs
p; His mother looks away when she says, ‘We’re very worried about Granddad.’

  ‘You’re just worried about the merger with Selby’s,’ he says. ‘You’re not really worried about Granddad.’

  ‘It’s for his own good. We’re doing what’s best for him,’ his mother says earnestly, looking at him now, but in her eyes he sees betrayal.

  ‘You can’t put Granddad in a home for old people.’ His voice is raised. ‘He just talks to Ralph, that’s all.’

  ‘Shhh,’ his mother says.

  ‘If you do this to Granddad, I’ll hate you, Mum,’ he says, turning his head to the pillow, and when his mother strokes his hair, he brushes her hand away.

  He watches the last of the day withdraw, and knowing the Earth is traveling at about 67,000 miles per hour around the sun is a fact he comprehends with no more surety than the gravity pressing with a force of 14 pounds on every square inch of his body. However, it comforts him to know that their darkness is someone else’s light.

  When the nurse says goodnight, the curtain is still drawn around Mr Wallace, but as soon as she leaves the room, the old man says, ‘You awake, boy?’

  ‘Yes. Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Good as gold,’ Mr Wallace says. ‘Now what’s this about Ralph Gibson?’

  His words come in a torrent. ‘Granddad talks to Ralph, and Dad says he’s gone senile and wants him put in a home. If I knew what happened to Ralph, I’d know why Granddad talks to him, and I could tell Dr Stockby and Mr Grosser, and they’d understand because Granddad and Ralph were best friends, always.’

  After a long silence Mr Wallace says, ‘Ralph and George joined up straight away. They rode their horses down to Wellington. Did you know that? All the way from Hastings to camp, on their horses. And silly thing was they had to give them up when they got there, and next thing they’re on foot, and officers are riding their horses. They were both under age, you know. After Gallipoli, they became part of 1st Battalion. That’s when I got to know them, in Egypt, before we got shipped to France.’

  ‘Could you tell me what was Ralph like?’

  ‘He was a tall man was Ralph. Over six feet and as skinny as a bean, but my word, he was strong. He was lightweight boxing champion for a while, because of his reach, but he gave that up. They wanted to make him an officer, but he didn’t want that. GT didn’t want to be an officer either. By France, they were both sergeants, and we all wanted to be in their platoons. They managed to stay together in the same company all through, right until the end.’