by Baker Chris
His head spun as he lay down. A new home in the south? Making peace with the Maeroero? What did they want? He lay for hours thinking about what he’d heard, and finally he drifted off into a deep and refreshing sleep. When he awoke, everyone had gone from the hall and Mihi was poking her head around the door to call him for breakfast.
‘Come on, you mangere thing,’ she laughed. ‘Wash your face, have a kai and get moving. You don’t have all day.’
Inside an hour Sean was mounted on Bojay, ready to go. Mihi stood alongside.
‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘One more thing.’
She stepped forward and spoke in Bojay’s ear. He stiffened and Sean imagined his eyes opening wide. Mihi slapped the horse’s rump and he pranced off, a high-stepping trot, like a dressage champion, light and graceful, with Sean holding on in disbelief. When he was over his astonishment, he stood in the stirrups, turned and waved. Mihi and Sophie were standing together, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Mihi looked like she was laughing, but she might have been crying. Sean was too far away to see.
Sean was almost on the outskirts of the city. Whangarei might have been coming apart but the place felt like it was pregnant with new life, moist and warm in the early spring, holding its breath and about to burst forth.
The countryside was another matter though. Things had fallen apart there too, but the broken fences and paddocks of dead sheep, slain by dog packs hungry for food and delirious with the sport, were even more disturbing than the urban upheaval Sean had almost become used to. Cattle wandered on the roadside and in and out of paddocks, surprised to see a human, but lifting their heads only briefly as Bojay clopped by. Ducks, having been spared last May’s shooting season, grazed the paddocks alongside turkeys looking for grubs. Occasionally they passed a farmhouse. Sean imagined the contents reeking as the weather warmed up. Already he could see thistles, gorse and ragwort sprouting on what had once been pristine farmland. He passed dairy herds, each guarded by a proprietorial bull, sometimes with young bulls looking on from a respectful distance. Occasionally the bodies of cows that had died while calving, no farmer to assist, lay ignored by their grazing sisters.
Sean took a break in the middle of the day, lit a fire and boiled the billy. He had a glimpse of peace, a taste of freedom. He thought of all his friends — Brian, Marie, Jim, the others at Ngahere. He knew he’d miss them, even badly, but it seemed like they were all with him. He’d never been able to ‘compartmentalise’, to shut the memory of people away while he got on with something new, and everyone he’d been close to in the past ten years sat with him by the fire — Te Rina and the kids, Uncle Wire with his wry smile and knowing chuckle, Auntie Mihi too. Sean laughed to himself as he sipped his tea and ate the fried bread Auntie Mihi had tucked into his saddlebag. That was quite a crowd of them travelling south.
He remembered Auntie Mihi’s words, ‘You’ll pick up the rest of the story if you survive your travels ...’ He thought of the Maeroero too. He didn’t really understand. Everything seemed unreal. He was in the grip of events he couldn’t even try to shape. Warm and drowsy under the midday sun he lay back for a siesta, trusting to Hamu and Bojay to warn of any danger. A colourful parade of mythical beasts and people both alive and dead danced in his mind.
That afternoon he rode past the turn-off to a well-known beach resort where people had cavorted in the sun and surf beside an oil refinery and two oil-fired power stations, one mothballed as soon as it was built when the price of oil hit the roof. He thought of the millions of litres of product, from crude oil to high-octane petrol, leaking into the harbour from holes rumoured to be in the bottom of every tank in the refinery’s ‘farm’. So much for the shellfish beds. So much for all the fish that could now start multiplying without being netted to the very limit of their capacity to replenish themselves. The Whangarei area might have been beautiful, with its lush familiarity, but suddenly he was glad he was leaving. The destruction around him matched the ugliness that he knew, too well, lay close to the surface. He wished, not for the first time, that he could talk with Uncle Wire.
‘Not your worry, boy,’ the old man would probably say. ‘You can’t sort out all those things by yourself. Just look after your own backyard. Keep the chooks out of the garden. Fix the holes in your fence.’
And don’t eat fish out of the harbour, Sean thought. He had a sudden picture of the yacht gliding to its berth, its crew dining on shellfish and various finny delicacies, the taste unimpaired by subtle and pervasive poisons that would reverberate down whatever generations were to come. Auntie Mihi’s words came to mind. They might be the ones left alive but they’d still have to pay, for the things they knew about and maybe for a whole raft of synergies. Surprises could now incubate undisturbed in the silt of harbour bottoms and riverbeds, the deltas and littorals that marked the coastline. Auntie Mihi’s mythical monsters seemed less real, especially in the bright sun, but the environmental nasties became more frightening as he rode on. Perhaps they’d have to wait years for some of them. Perhaps some would lie in ambush for generations.
Sean felt a hollow loneliness. He’d give anything for the sight of a busload of tourists, a convoy of camper vans, even a lone farmer chugging up the road on a tractor. Bojay’s hooves reverberated on the tarseal. Hamu trotted along, oblivious to the cloud of depression that had crept up on Sean. Bojay smelled very horsy and Sean’s stock saddle reminded his unaccustomed muscles just how used to six-cylinder well-sprung comfort he’d become. He thought then of spending the night at Waipu. He remembered the shops and houses, dusty cars with dog boxes, trailers with scraps of hay and baling twine, tourists looking out the window of the tearooms, bemused and intrigued by the rural theatre unfolding under their scrutiny.
The place looked the same as he rode through, just quieter. Nobody in the tearooms, nobody in the stock and station agents that had been gradually modernising, giving away wet-weather gear with the drench and charging like city boutiques for the same comfortable clothing and solid footwear he’d once been able to afford.
Sean glanced down at himself. He was really a mess, stained and torn. He needed new jeans, new socks, new underwear, a jumper for under the swanny. He decided to kick the door in and help himself, but when he tied Bojay to a telegraph pole and approached the shop he found himself paralysed. He couldn’t put his boot to the door. It was like trashing his memories. He looked at his reflection in the plate-glass window, a display of chainsaws on the other side. He felt like a criminal, like everything was his fault. He cringed. But he still needed new clothes. He stepped up to the door and apologised out loud for what he was about to do, except he couldn’t think who he was saying sorry to. While he was pondering the question the part of him thinking ‘what the hell!’ took over and he shattered the glass door on the third kick.
He changed in the middle on the shop, poking his tongue out at the cardboard cut-out of a rural figure bedecked in moleskin trousers and an expensive jumper.
South of the township he found an implement shed with some old bales of hay in the back. Bojay munched while Sean boiled water from the nearby cattle trough and unwrapped some more of Auntie Mihi’s fried bread. He thought about food for the coming months. The fried bread wasn’t going to last beyond breakfast and he had nothing to cook either. Puru had told him there wasn’t much you couldn’t eat if you had to and Sean could see he was probably right. Puru had grown up low on the totem and had probably devoured his share of nutritious berries and those bullety little apples that seemed to thrive in suburban back yards.
Sean hacked up and burned an antique dresser, drank several cups of tea and ate all the fried bread. He saw himself catching and cooking eels and chickens, gathering roadside greens, digging self-seeded vegetables. He even thought of dogs. As soon as he did Uncle Wire popped into his head, stamping, doing obscene pelvic thrusts and baring his remaining teeth.
‘Kill ‘im, boy. Eat ‘im too. Turn his mana into shit!’
7
WHEN SE
AN AWOKE, sun shining, clouds scrolling across a blue sky, he had a human version of a seagull’s breakfast — a cup of tea and a look around — before riding back to Waipu to pick up some food from the supermarket.
The place was dark, and just like the Ngahere emporium it stank. He ignored the smell and helped himself to brown rice, soy sauce, curry powder, cayenne pepper, salt and olive oil. He also picked up a frypan and on the way out a packet of Ginger-nuts. They were a bit soft, but so what. Feeling pleased that he at least had some provisions in his saddlebags, he rode south.
He stopped at about midday, on top of the Brynderwyn Hills, built a fire and boiled the billy. Gingernuts and a cup of tea. Bojay was munching and Hamu was asleep by the fire, despite the warmth. While Sean waited for the billy he gazed down at the view. He could see all the way to Whangarei — the hills standing like sentinels at the mouth of the harbour, patchwork paddocks and smudges of bush, with ribbons of road, red-roofed farmhouses and a surf-laced coast. Te Tai Tokerau stopped with the southernmost puriri tree, but for Sean the north had always ended at the Brynderwyn Hills. He’d driven the miles to Auckland often enough, stopping at pubs and tearooms, but the small towns he’d passed through always felt like someone else’s turf, despite familiar names on the shopfronts and the same goods on sale, toasters, bedlinen, crockery and garden tools, that were being displayed from Kaikohe to Oamaru. He thought of Kaiwaka and laughed to himself as he remembered Uncle Wire on a trip to Auckland telling a tale of how the town got its name.
‘You probably think it’s got something to do with food gathering,’ he’d told Sean with a perfectly straight face, relaxed on the blanket-covered front seat, the late morning sun warming the car. ‘That’s nonsense. Where is the kai? Where are the waka? It’s always been damp and cold here in the winter, fogs and mists every night. "Kaiwaka" is the sound of somebody with a chest complaint clearing their throat.’
Sean had already eaten about half the packet of Gingernuts and without thinking he dunked one, the requisite three seconds counted quickly. It broke off. He was left holding a forlorn segment. As he watched the rest of the biscuit fell from his fingers into the tea with a small splash.
Probably the sinking of the Titanic was accompanied by more dismay. Sean really didn’t know. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. When he tried to fish out the floating disc of biscuit with his knife he ended up with a mass of pieces that looked like nothing so much as a cup of warm sick. He was finished. He sat there, cup in one hand, knife in the other, tears running down his face. How could things be so bad? Why did everything he touched turn to shit? There was no hope anywhere. What was the point?
The fire went out and grew cold and still he sat there stricken — his eyes open but seeing only dead people and burning houses, Cally’s paintings, Mihi’s words. All bullshit. He was forced to look at himself, a pathetic figure in stained rags sitting by a dead fire with a tin mug of cold polluted tea in his hand. For the first time he felt like killing himself. The thought of chewing on the muzzle of his sawn-off brought him back. He flung the tea, cup, disintegrated biscuit and all, right away and stood up so quickly his legs gave way and he went down full length in a patch of thistles by the fire.
The pain revived him. About a zillion needles pierced every piece of exposed skin, even his face. He leapt to his feet again.
‘Fuck it!’ The oath helped. This time he managed to stay upright. To hell with the tea. Fuck the Gingernuts. He spent the next ten minutes pulling out prickles, the worst of the crop in his forehead and left cheek. He quickly packed everything — even the remaining Gingernuts — mounted up and rode off. As he left, two mynahs started squabbling over the jettisoned remains in the long grass. Hamu barked at them but they ignored him.
As Sean rode down the mountain, bush to his left, steep banks falling away to his right, he crossed two slips, already covered in bracken and manuka and a tangle of young blackberry shoots. At the bottom was a garage and tearooms.
He dismounted and tied Bojay where the horse could reach a patch of grass beside the tearooms, and went inside hoping to find tobacco and a new lighter. As he walked around the counter he heard the unmistakable buzz of trail bikes, at least two and close by. He carried on, pocketed a packet of Park Drive, Zig-Zags and a lighter and walked back out the door as three men pulled up. A man in jeans and a red nylon jacket unslung a rifle and pointed it at him. The greeting died in Sean’s throat.
‘Take your weapon out very carefully and lay it on the ground,’ he said. ‘Then put your hands on your head.’
Sean was confused. What was this? What was the point in robbing anybody? The other two walked up to him and, as he straightened from laying his sawn-off on the ground, one of them, not a word, belted him on the side of the head with his rifle butt. Sean fell to his knees, and the man spoke again.
‘Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to rob you.’ He laughed and pointed to the man who’d struck him. ‘Colin might eat you though.’
Colin was a few years younger, with teeth missing and dirty blonde hair. He had an unpleasant grin and he looked Sean up and down. He was the sort of guy Sean would have avoided in the pub. Sean slowly got to his feet, shaking his head in an effort to clear it. How would he handle this?
Hamu picked that moment to make his move. If ever Sean needed proof the dog could think his way through trouble this was it. He charged out of the cafe, where he’d been lurking, straight at the guy on the bike, the one who was holding a rifle on Sean. The dog leapt just as the fellow swung his weapon around. Somewhere over the road a rifle cracked and Hamu’s leap carried an already-dead body to the ground. Colin’s jaw dropped. Sean reached forward, grabbed the lapels of his leather jacket, and pulled him into a headbutt. His mate stepped back — too close to Bojay, who kicked him. Sean heard the guy’s thigh bone crack as he fell with a shocked scream. Another rifle shot from across the road laid Colin out on the forecourt.
Sean looked up then at where the shots had come from just in time to see a man slither down the clay bank into the overgrown water table, rifle held high overhead. As he clambered onto the road Sean saw he had a striking full-face moko. The fellow on the ground, with the broken leg, clutched himself and moaned. Hamu growled.
‘Good shit,’ said the guy with the moko. ‘I’ve been waiting all day for them.’ He walked up to Sean and they shook hands and hongi’d, like they were meeting under the most civilised of circumstances. ‘Sorry if you got hurt,’ he said. ‘That was a good crack in the melon.’
The guy with the moko turned to the man Bojay had kicked. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort you out,’ he said. Sean watched the wave of relief that passed over the injured man’s face turn to horror as his tattooed companion walked towards him taking the tomahawk from his belt. Sean turned his back. A strangled cry of protest was cut off by the sound of a blow to the head.
‘Give us a hand with these bodies, we don’t want them lying around stinking the place up.’ Sean helped him drag them to the fence at the back of the tearooms and together they tossed them over, watching while they rolled to the bottom of the steep paddock. He didn’t see one of Colin’s eyes flicker, and his left hand clench and unclench.
‘The dogs’ll take care of them,’ said Sean’s rescuer. ‘They were really bad bastards. Let’s have a cup of tea and I’ll tell you just how bad.’ He turned to face Sean, gazing at him directly. ‘My name’s Matapihi. You can call me Matt if that’s too much of a mouthful.’
Sean had a sudden picture of his new friend growing up mispronounced and Anglicised. ‘Matapihi sounds fine,’ he said. ‘You sure cast some light on my life. Thanks for your help.’
They made a fire of the hacked-up toilet door and, after checking the water tank for drowned animals, filled the billy and sat it in the middle of the flames.
‘Wouldn’t BP love this,’ Sean laughed. ‘Naked flames on the forecourt.’ He watched an imaginative suggestion and redundant phone number blister and vanish in the flames. ‘Tell me abo
ut those guys.’
‘I’ve been hunting them for a week,’ Matapihi said. ‘They’ve been ambushing people on the highway, and the other day I found their camp. That’s why I didn’t fuck around with them.’ He saw Sean’s questioning look and continued. ‘They were probably going to eat you. I found some remains and a big spit at their camp. We can do without shit like that.’
They sat with their tea, ate the rest of the Gingernuts and some stale Crunchie bars from the cafe. Sean told Matapihi he was heading south.
‘Maybe we can ride together,’ Matapihi said. ‘I’m off to Auckland. Off to the Big Feijoa. That’s where my people are, whoever’s left.’
He looked into the flames and it occurred to Sean that you didn’t have to blow a fuse working out what people were thinking. His own family was gone, Matapihi’s probably was too. Every time they stopped all those loved ones were there, a reminder of who the survivors were, what they’d had and just how alone they’d become.
Matapihi stood up and stretched. The snarling dog’s head on his black tee shirt matched the patch on his leather jacket. His moko stood out in the glow of the setting sun. It looked sculpted, ridges of skin following the whorls and curves of the pattern. Sean tried not to stare.
‘We can spend the night at Kaiwaka,’ Matapihi said. ‘I’ve been staying with some people in the pub there. We’d better get moving before dark too. My horse is in a paddock just up the road.’
Sean and Matapihi rode together the few kilometres to Kaiwaka and a group of about a dozen people greeted Matapihi with huge relief.
‘Are you okay?’ they cried to him while he and Sean were dismounting. ‘You’ve been ages. We were really worried.’
‘No problems,’ said Matapihi with a bit of a swagger. ‘They’re all dead now.’
He introduced Sean and promised everyone a good story after a meal.