Bugs

by Whiti Hereaka

  ‘B, what do you think?’

  ‘Well, we can’t stay here.’ We speed past the AC Baths, where the roof drips with condensation from the earth-warmed pools below. ‘He’s probably looking for you by now.’

  ‘Nah.’ Jez sounds too casual, like he’s trying to convince himself as well as me. ‘They were drinking.’

  ‘Yeah, because they’d really be concerned about drunk driving.’ We’re driving past Owen Delany Park, and I wish we’d just gone here. I wish we’d listened to a dumb band and laid a picnic rug out and watched the fireworks. ‘What were you thinking, Jez? It’s not just your place he’ll be looking for you; it’s the whole fucking town.’

  ‘Then let’s just go,’ Jez says. ‘Just drive somewhere else; just cruise up the bypass and go.’

  ‘Like Mum would let me just go off for the weekend …’

  ‘No, B. I mean really go.’

  ‘We can’t go; exams start next week.’

  Jez laughs at me. It is soft but cutting. ‘Exams? Fuck B, we’re on different planets.’

  I lean forward, put my arms around Stone Cold’s seat, like I’m hugging her through it. ‘We’ve got exams though.’ Two against one; we’ll make him see sense.

  ‘Auckland,’ Stone Cold blurts out. ‘We could go to Auckland. Get a flat, get jobs.’ She turns onto the bypass and merges smoothly into the traffic: just another car heading north, heading away from Taupō.

  ‘What? But I thought you wanted to stay; you didn’t want to go to boarding school.’

  ‘I didn’t want to leave you guys,’ she says. ‘We’ll stay together, right?’

  ‘What will Shelley say?’

  ‘Who cares what she has to say! I’m free, Bugs. I can make my own decisions.’

  I let go of her seat and sink back into mine. Jez whoops and cheers, ‘Road trip!’ and turns up the music loud, so in the back I only catch snippets of what they’re planning.

  So big there, no one will find us …

  I’ll get an agent and go on TV, it can’t be that hard …

  Set up a studio, a couple of tats a week should cover …

  Totally inner city, like a loft or something …

  They’re excited, talking over the music, talking over each other. Our lives are like balloons tied in a bunch, bumping against one another but separated so easily by the slightest breeze. I lean my head on my window and look at the world as it narrows between our headlights. And maybe it will be OK; maybe it’ll be the life they imagine: a studio of his own, a TV and film career for her …

  And me … what will I be doing in their lives? In the audience, clapping, cheering them on?

  This is how it happens. This is how I become what they expect. A statistic, not smart enough just to pass. Not smart enough to make my own decisions. A car, a boy, one night and everything I hoped for, gone. Those shards of memory of Mum sitting there staring at the wall, the curtains drawn against the hot summer’s day, while this song mixed and eddied with my cries. And she’s so young, and so tired. Tired of thinking about the stupid decision that led her here: a car, a boy, one night. And life is unfair, but a child doesn’t have to know that, so she leans over me and picks me up, soothes my cries and says to me, It’s all right, you’re OK, because she knows I will be.

  Memory and time fold in on each other like a hospital corner pulled tight. And it’s me now, sitting at the table in some random run-down flat, cleaning for a living, staring at the wall, remembering this night, this moment: me just going along with it because I’m afraid to hurt them. I’d rather I hurt instead. The shards twist free from my memory and pierce my heart because we’re on the same road, listening to the same song.

  ‘I can’t.’ I say it to myself first and then I lean forward through the gap in the seats. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What?’ Jez switches off the tape deck, and it’s all quiet, except for me.

  ‘I can’t go with you guys.’

  ‘But it’s just exams.’

  ‘No, they’re important.’

  Stone Cold accelerates. ‘They say that, but are they really? You don’t have to go back; you don’t have to be what they expect of you.’

  ‘It’s what I expect for me.’

  ‘We can’t turn around now,’ Stone Cold says. ‘Jez can’t go back, you said so, and we have to be together; we have to be, Bugs.’ She’s doing some crazy kind of pleading, like I’ve got a gun to her head.

  ‘Drop me off at the farm,’ I say. And Stone Cold starts to cry.

  ‘B.’ Jez turns around to look at me, but without any light in the car we’re just shadows, just shapes in the dark: neither of us is real.

  ‘I’m OK Jez; I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Jez.’ Stone Cold’s voice has a hysterical edge to it.

  ‘Drop her off at the farm, OK?’

  The stereo is off and the car is quiet, but there’s a buzzing in my head, and I remember his hand on my hip, and her lips on my mouth, and the bite of the needle, and the strange green light as we squish into that pod together.

  I wish I had given Jez that rabbit paw, because he’s always needed luck. I wish I had told him about the rabbits – about how I felt like a god for an afternoon – and then I remember his face as we pulled away from the Cock, that smile; and I know I don’t need to describe it to him. He’s had that feeling. Dying and living at the same time.

  Stone Cold pulls up to the farm. I get out of the car and lean down to the front windows so that we’re all face to face. The glass of the windows isn’t the only barrier, though.

  I raise my eyebrows at them and tip up my chin, instead of saying I love you, because that would be too cheesy, too TV movie to be real.

  Jez won’t look at me. He just looks straight ahead, like if he takes his eyes off the road for a second he’ll be trapped here.

  ‘Jez, will you finish off my tat?’ Because it’s always been Jez and me. Me and Jez: that’s how it has always been. Will always be.

  ‘Course.’

  I watch as they pull away. Their headlights narrow and disappear around a corner, and I can’t see them any more.

  Epilogue

  So what did you expect? Did you think that maybe you’d find out what happened to us in the future – me and Jez, Jez and me?

  I should apologise. I’m the one who put that rifle in your hand; made you look through the cross hairs at the rabbits to be picked off, one by one. I made you think that you’d have that feeling too, like a god, knowing everything.

  I should apologise.

  But I’m not going to.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the Māori Literature Trust, Huia Publishers, Te Waka Toi: Creative New Zealand and Te Puni Kōkiri for their support of the Te Papa Tupu incubator programme.

  My thanks must also go to Alia Bloom who challenged, questioned and helped me to shape Bugs’s world.

  Without the support of Alia and Te Papa Tupu, Bugs would not be the book it is today.