by David Hair
‘Yes, we are.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Tourists. Kathleen!’
Colleen looked from Mat to the woman, wavering between fear and avid curiosity.
Mat wasn’t sure who would appear, a child with glasses or a demure-looking young woman, but the measured tread on the stairs told him it was the latter. It was a treat to see his mother’s jaw drop at the sight, as a slender figure in a cotton frock of pale blue with white lace made her way down, her pretty but solemn face curious. She took in Mat and Colleen with a pause and a stare, cocked her head sideways and said, ‘Hello. You are …?’
‘Oh my …’ Colleen choked.
Mat stepped forward. ‘Miss … um … Beauchamp?’ The young woman bobbed her head. ‘My name is Matiu Douglas, and this is my mother, Colleen. She is studying your writing, and would love to talk with you about it.’
If she doesn’t swoon.
The young lady looked at Colleen, who was seemingly stricken dumb. Her expression was far from welcoming, a mixture of impatience and slight curiosity.
‘Mother’s thesis postulates that you are the greatest writer New Zealand has ever produced,’ Mat added earnestly. He wasn’t sure on that, but there was a strong sense of self-regard about this young woman, so he figured a bit of flattery mightn’t go amiss.
The writer preened ever so slightly, then shrugged as if this were all so terribly commonplace. ‘Very well.’ She indicated the sitting room to her left, and extended her hand to Colleen, looking her modern attire up and down with some puzzlement. ‘What interesting clothes you have. Call me Kass,’ she added as an after-thought.
Mat watched his mother melt.
‘Uh, I’ll just wander around out the back,’ he murmured. He glanced at Mansfield’s mother and grinned. ‘Is there anything I can do to help you out, ma’am?’
He ended up chopping firewood in the Beauchamps’ back garden, watched by a rotating cast of children from all over the neighbourhood. Below, the waves hissed in the small inlet. There was a narrow walking bridge over the gully, heading back into town, and a constant flow of pedestrians in colonial garb. Sailing ships filled the harbour, and swarms of gulls circled them, shrieking as they sought scraps, shellfish and anything at all edible. Wellington in Aotearoa had that otherworldly glow he associated with the Ghost World — all the colours were a little more vivid, as though someone had taken an old sepia-toned picture and coloured it in with oil paints. It was as though his eyes were just that little more open, his nose a little more sensitive. In an old-world city that wasn’t necessarily entirely a good thing: the smells arising from the seashore were certainly fragrant, but not in a good way. Smoke from wood and coal fires filled the air, and the gully stank of rotting seaweed and, no doubt, dead fish. It felt good to be there, though. He liked the way that Wellington was both a big city and a small one: compact around the harbour with everything in walking distance.
I think I could live here …
‘Mat?’ Mum’s voice came from around the front, a little tremulous. ‘Time to go.’
He put the axe away, farewelled the children formally, then walked around to the front of the house. Colleen was waiting with Mansfield, and they seemed tentatively relaxed around each other. The writer abruptly pecked Colleen on the cheeks and asked, ‘Tell me, are you wearing men’s clothing?’ in a coy yet intense way that reminded Mat of what his mother had told him earlier. Watching his mother blush as the same thought occurred to her was a treat.
‘No, no, this is just the fashion of my time,’ Colleen blurted.
Mansfield sniffed, and seemed to lose interest in them all at once. She looked away, appeared to develop a fascination for a moth that fluttered past, then spun and walked away without a glance back.
Mat took his mother’s arm, stammered thanks and led his mother away. He didn’t look at her until they were out of sight of the property, then glanced sideways. Her right eye was dripping like a leaky tap. ‘You OK?’ he asked.
‘You should have warned me,’ she chided, but she didn’t sound angry.
‘I guess, but you’d have run a mile.’
‘I suppose I would have.’ She blew her nose. ‘Well, she certainly is rather … intense …’ She wiped her brow. ‘Mat, that wasn’t really fair. But it was fascinating. Really, really wonderful. I don’t know how I can use it in my thesis, but I’m glad it happened.’
From his mum, that was a big admission.
‘It’s not all darkness here, Mum. There are good things, too. Things worth preserving — and fighting for.’
‘I suppose.’ She frowned at him. ‘Did you take me there to try to win me over, Matty Douglas?’
‘It was your idea, remember? I just … I dunno, sort of did what seemed right.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Though of course, if we can’t fix the Treaty, then it could come to war, and Te Rauparaha has thousands of warriors at his command, only a day’s march from here. They’ve got muskets and all.’
‘Te Rauparaha? Have I heard of him?’
‘Big war leader of the Ngati Toa. Here in Aotearoa he’s probably the most powerful Maori leader in the southern part of the North Island. He’s not all that friendly with the colonists either. If things go badly, he might attack.’
Colleen looked away, blinking back her tears, and for the first time she seemed to notice that they were in a quite different version of Tinakori Road to that she’d entered. Carriages and wagons, all horse-drawn, were trundling along the street, and all the men were in old-time shirts and trousers, and the women in bonnets and dresses with big bustles. She and Mat were drawing some strange looks from passers-by.
‘Mat, will you take us home now?’
‘Sure.’ He led her to a spot near the walking bridge across the gully, took his mother’s hand, and shifted them back to New Zealand. A tall man walking by gave them a startled look and immediately cleaned his glasses, but apart from that it seemed they weren’t noticed. There was a café on the other side of the motorway, and Colleen led them straight there, ordered a wine and downed it quickly while Mat had a coke. Then she ordered another round.
‘Well,’ she said, fixing Mat with an I-can’t-believe-I’m-doing-this look, ‘tell me more about this Treaty-forging idea of yours.’
The prisoner
Her cellphone rang, and Everalda van Zelle snatched it up, peering with her good right eye to see if it was the caller she really, really wanted it to be.
It wasn’t: it was Carly from the tattoo joint adjacent to her tarot parlour at Victoria Park Market in Auckland. ‘Hey, Carly!’ Evie greeted her with a tense grin. ‘What’s up?’
‘Hey, Patch! Where you at, honey?’
‘I’m outside a prison.’ Evie looked about the carpark, of which her rental car was almost the sole occupant, apart from a clutch of really tough-looking white chicks smoking by a fence. They looked like they might have wandered off the set of one of those American backwoods movies in which innocent travellers have their cars break down, and get eaten by the locals. They looked like the locals, not the innocents.
‘Better than inside, I s’pose. Which one?’
‘Arohata.’ She wound the window down — the rental smelled of the previous customer’s cigarette smoke, despite the ‘no smoking’ stickers.
‘What? In Wellington? What you doing down there? No wonder your stall isn’t open!’
‘Yeah, well … short notice. I’m just about to visit this, um … friend of mine is.’ My birth mother. ‘Whatcha want?’
‘Just to hear your gorgeous voice.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘And to tell you that there was this guy hanging around looking for you. Mrs Hong told him you were away this week, but he went from stall to stall, checking up. Ted told him you were down south.’ Carly’s voice took on that faintly sneering tone it always had whenever she mentioned Ted, the terribly earnest young guy who ran the smoke shop. He carried a very obvious torch for Carly, despite the fact that he was a dwe
eb and she was the sort of militant dyke that should have frightened him half to death.
‘Who was this mysterious stranger?’
‘I dunno, just some guy.’ Carly didn’t take much notice of men. ‘He left about half an hour ago.’
‘Old? Young? Short? Tall?’
‘Ted said he looked like that missing league player, Byron Whatsisname.’
Evie felt a chill run through her. ‘Byron Kikitoa?’
‘Yeah, him. Don’t ask me, though — I wouldn’t know him from a bar of soap. And anyway, isn’t he dead or living with Elvis or something?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Anyways, I thought you’d wanna to know. Hope he’s not a stalker. When you coming home?’
‘Thursday. I’m going to see my m— uh, friend, right now, then I’ve got some stuff to do down here.’
‘Watch out for the weather — I saw on the news that there’s a big storm coming on Thursday night. The airport might end up closed, they reckoned.’ Carly’s voice dropped off and she shouted out to someone. ‘Sorry, Patch, I gotta go. This chick just came in, wants her nipples pierced.’
‘Hands to yourself, or you’ll get debarred and struck off or whatever,’ Evie warned.
‘Can’t do the piercing without copping a feel, honey. When are you gonna get yours done?’
‘Like, never!’
‘Shame. Hey, if I fancy her, I’ll send her to you to get her cards done, so you can tell me if she’s worth pursuing.’
‘What? To see whether there’s a tall dark lesbo in her future?’
‘Right on! Hey, gotta go! Spotcha, Patch! Smoochy hugs! Bye!’
The connection went dead, leaving Evie grinning momentarily, until what she’d been told really sunk in. Byron Kikitoa was looking for her, and she was lucky he hadn’t found her. She hoped fervently … would have prayed if she’d thought it would help … that Carly would be alright. The tattooist’s life could be tough enough; what with her parents and most of her friends having ostracized her for being gay; all kinds of arseholes abusing her; and well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning churchy types trying to convert her. Love and life were hard enough without all that happening too.
Just be grateful, girl, that you’re a straight chick trapped in a hopeless one-way love affair with Mat Douglas, and risking the wrath of the Death Goddess for your trouble.
She sighed deeply, and stared through her car window at the big, plain, blocky building in front of her. Arohata Prison had been built in the 1940s as a women’s borstal, had a six-year stint as a youth prison in the 1980s, and then was converted to a medium-security women’s prison in 1987. It stood on a hillock at the south end of Tawa, a village-suburb 20 kilometres north of Wellington, sheltered from the southerly wind but full in the path of the northerly that was ripping down the valley. It was sunny now, but Carly was right: the forecasts said there would be a southerly change coming, with rain, probably hail, and gale-force winds. Wellington: four seasons in one hour.
Evie knew she was procrastinating, but was disinclined to move nonetheless. The fact was that she was scared of the woman she was here to see, and that wasn’t a good thing when she was your mother. Donna Kyle was only her birth mother, though, not the person Evie regarded as her real mother: the dotty, flighty but loving Florence Elise van Zelle of Auckland, who’d cared for her all her life. But Donna was the person she got half her genes from; and that was bad enough without knowing that the other half of them came from Puarata. Donna was also the person who had blinded her left eye, to aid her magical sight.
No wonder Mat won’t return my calls. Even I don’t want to be around me, with a gene-pool like that.
Her phone rang again, and she snatched it up, her heart thumping when the screen said ‘Home’.
‘Hello?’
‘Evie?’ It was her father. Her real one.
‘Dad! What’s up?’
‘Nothing.’ His gruff voice, which hadn’t lost its Dutch accent despite forty years in New Zealand, sounded unsettled nevertheless. ‘A man came looking for you. I didn’t like the looks of him, so I didn’t let him in.’
Oh shit. ‘You should call the police, Dad.’
‘I already have: Mike Pierce from three doors down is a cop.’ His voice dropped. ‘Are you in trouble, love?’
‘No. Honestly. He’s just this prick who caused trouble a few weeks ago.’ Understatement.
‘You never mentioned.’
‘I deal with the public, Dad. There’s always a dork quota. If anyone gives me shit, Carly scares them off.’
‘This guy didn’t look like the sort who’d be scared of much, Evie. He looked like trouble. You need to be careful.’ Dad ran a building company, and he knew tough when he saw it. ‘When are you flying home?’
Dad thought she was visiting a friend. ‘Thursday, on the four o’clock flight.’
‘OK. Here’s Mike: I’ll go talk to him. I snapped a photo of this guy through the window before I answered the door. He didn’t like that one bit. You take care, and I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’ She smiled fondly as the connection broke, then sagged back into the car seat.
Byron Kikitoa was looking for her.
In June, in the Ghost World of Aotearoa, in the midst of a gun-fight in old Arrowtown, Byron Kikitoa had shot her. She still had the scar, an ugly puckered wound in her stomach, widened by the cut marks made while the surgeon retrieved the bullet. It should have killed her, in fact it would have, but Mat had bargained with Aroha, who was channelling Hine-nui-te-po, the Goddess of Death. As a result, Evie had been restored to life. She remembered nothing of the experience but a floating feeling, like the edge of a dream. For all her tarot magic and visions, a single shot had been all it took to almost kill her.
Now Byron wants to finish the job.
For a second she wished the previous customer had left their cigarettes behind. Then her real weakness kicked in: she had to fight the urge to pull her tarot cards out and do a reading, right there in the front of the car. To divine the danger and learn what precautions to take.
But it was five to ten, and she needed to be inside. With a heavy sigh, she pulled the keys out of the ignition, pushed open the door and got out. Her legs felt untrustworthy as she went to the visitors’ gate, queuing with the burly hillbilly chicks and a Samoan family who had been waiting inside, a massive squad of them who seemed to be here to see several of their clan, even though surely not all of them would be allowed in. She was processed last, going through a metal detector, sniffed by a dog for drugs, and patted down by a hard-faced middle-aged Maori woman with business-like stoicism.
‘What’s this?’ the woman asked, fishing a card from Evie’s pocket.
‘It’s a playing card.’
The woman squinted, turning it over twice, then handing it back. ‘It’s got a picture of a key on it.’
‘Uh-huh. It’s supposed to inspire my mother to be good and get early release.’
The woman grunted. ‘I doubt that’ll be happening. That way.’
Television had led her to believe that the prisoners would look like psychopaths, but they all looked pretty ordinary to Evie. Sad, too; their eyes flat and hopeless, even as they smiled wanly at their loved ones. When they moved it was at a slow shuffle, despite there being no cuffs or leg-clamps like on telly. There was just no reason to move fast.
They’re kinda like zombies, shuffling about, soulless. Reason 1056 not to end up in prison.
As this wasn’t a high-security prison, the meetings took place in a common room filled with desks and chairs. Evie saw her mother, waiting alone in the corner, all of the other prisoners visibly staying well clear of her. She sat opposite, eyes lowered. Donna Kyle. My mother. Eventually she found the courage to lift her head.
Her mother was of middling height, rake-thin and pallid. There was a faded Maori moko etched into her chin, the old-fashioned way, leaving the flesh ridged and furrowed in decorative swirls. Her lips were almost
bloodless, and the peroxide had faded from her hair, leaving it a dirty grey-blonde. She looked more like an autopsy photo than a living person. Even her eyes were dead, and so was her voice. ‘Daughter.’
Evie just stared, her words forgotten.
‘Well, don’t you have a greeting for your mother?’
‘Are … are you well?’ Evie bit her lip. It was an absurd question.
Two years ago, Donna Kyle had almost died. To heal her, Puarata had used the blood of a legendary creature of Maori legend, the patupaiarehe, a pale night-stalking creature something like a vampire, but not the romantic Hollywood sort. A thing that was consumed and debased by its hunger. Ever since, Donna had slowly been degenerating into such a being. Her battle against this had finally been lost in February, when her control had snapped in desperation to kill the man she hated above all others: Asher Grieve, her father, and the man who had sold her as a child to Puarata.
Afterwards, Donna had handed herself into the authorities in Aotearoa, uncaring of what they did to her. Because of her slaying of Grieve, her sentence had commuted from death to life in prison. Whether this was mercy or not it was hard to say, as Donna’s existence could not have been easy. They’d placed her in the real world because there were too many in Aotearoa who would take justice into their own hands.
‘Do they … feed you?’ Her mother looked haggard, almost emaciated.
Donna’s lip curled. ‘Rare steaks. I suck them dry. Anything else I need I take from any prisoner stupid enough to come near me.’
‘Do the guards here know what you are?’
‘One does. Mistress Screw, I call her. She’s from the other side, too.’ Donna tipped her head towards a woman standing with arms folded by the doors. She looked scarier than any prisoner, Donna excepted; a slab of muscle and enmity glowering over the proceedings. ‘She makes sure my cell has silver bars, and that I’m left alone. Sometimes she brings blood-bags.’ Donna’s lip curled. ‘She likes to watch me suffer.’