Potiki

by Patricia Grace

  But then I remembered what we had talked about, that schools were all right for some, but that you didn’t always find what was right. I thought of Manu saying that there were no stories for him, and that there were cracks in the floor and kids that fizzed like bees. I remembered that everything we needed was here.

  What would be right then for a little one who called out in sleep, and whose eyes let too much in? What would be right for one who didn’t belong in schools, or rather to whom schools did not belong? What was right for one who had a fear of disappearing and who could not find his stories?

  Then I knew that nothing need be different. ‘Everything we need is here. We learn what we need and want to learn, and all of it is here,’ I said to Hemi, but he had always known it. We needed just to live our lives, seek out our stories and share them with each other.

  So I didn’t become the teacher, or rather didn’t become once more the teacher that I had trained to be. There was no need for a room to be changed because a boy had become five and could not find himself in schools. I became instead a teller of stories, a listener to stories, a writer and a reader of stories, an enactor, a collector and a maker of stories. But I only shared in this. What really happened was that we all became all of these things – tellers, listeners, readers, writers, teachers and learners together.

  The stories that I had to share were childhood stories of the railway house, of school and holy pictures, and a boy and a girl on a horse. They were of games and gardens, and loneliness, and of looking out at trains. They were of going away and returning, and of death and birth.

  I had other stories too, known stories from before life and death and remembering, from before the time of the woman lonely in the moon. Given stories. But ‘before life and death and remembering’ is only what I had always thought. It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that all time is a now-time, centred in the being. It was a new realisation that the centred being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction towards the outer circles, these outer circles being named ‘past’ and ‘future’ only for our convenience. The being reaches out to grasp those adornments that become part of the self. So the ‘now’ is a giving and a receiving between the inner and the outer reaches, but the enormous difficulty is to achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced so exquisitely. These are the things I came to realise as we told and retold our own-centre stories.

  When James and Tangimoana came home from school they brought their stories with them. School had a place for them. They had no fear of disappearing into cracks in the floors, the one being too careful and sure, the other too sharp and nimblefooted.

  James’s school stories were about the earth and the universe. This school earth was divided by lines – latitude, longitude and equator. The people of this school earth lived in countries which were in continents, oceans and hemispheres. Some of the people in some of the school countries lived in eggshells on paper snow, some lived in matchstick villages by a paint sea crowded with dot-eyed fish. Others sat by cellophane fires with silver chocolate-wrap feathers in their hair, and others had cardboard homes behind a paper wall that could not be climbed by the sea.

  It was the charted rainfall, the sun, the hurricanes, the monsoons, the typhoons and snow, and it was the cross sections of mountains, rivers, land and soil that told people what their lives would be.

  This school earth was an orange – tilted, and squeezed top and bottom – which took a whole day to turn, and a whole year to circumnavigate the tennis-ball sun. And it slotted into a universe which could be viewed through a peep-hole in a cardboard box, paper planets dangling from threads against navy-blue space, and light coming in through the cellophaned cutout in the box’s lid.

  James had stories also of light and sound, of multiplying, dividing, adding and taking away. And we found that we all had stories of all these things, and that one dovetailed into another.

  Tangimoana had stories of people. Some of these were book stories of queens and kings, monsters, charmers, murderers, ghosts, orphans, demons and saints. And we had our own heroes and heroines, enchanters, wrongdoers, outcasts and magians to add to these stories from books.

  Some of her stories were living stories of the people about her – raw-handed, mad Margaret at school who stared and pointed into the corners of the room, Billy who cried, Sila dressed in gowns and flowers, Julieann who made pencils and rubbers disappear by touch. Some of the stories were about herself, and about us too. She wrote all of her stories down in old exercise books or on scraps of paper. They were stories, poems, lines, pages, which she left for us to find and read.

  In the evenings Hemi would come home with his work stories, which were stories of men with swinging knives and blood on their hands, who pulled the hides from the hanging carcasses, then cut and sliced, and sent the carcasses swinging down the chains. Their days were enfolded in the smell of offal burning, and everyone dressed as white as doctors. He told of when he was a boy and of how he had been given work and knowledge on behalf of people.

  Mary would tell us her stories too, which were not always exactly the same if you listened carefully, of talking-man and angry-wife, trick-man and singing-girl, pretty-man and fighting-mother and no one for the loving-man with the big big hammer.

  There were the stories that Granny Tamihana had to tell which were weavings of sorrow and joy, of land and tides, sickness, death, hunger and work. There were stories that other members of the whanau told as they came to share our mornings with us.

  Then there were the stories from newspapers and television that we read and viewed each day. And there were the stories we found in library books which we went to exchange every few weeks.

  Gradually the stories were built upon, or they changed. None changed more than Hemi’s which told more and more about people who were not working any more because there was no work for them, and of people who were beginning to be cold and poor. More and more he was telling about the land and how the land and the sea could care for us. It could care for those who had gone away too, but who would return now that work was hard to find. ‘There are things I can tell you in stories,’ he said. ‘But I can show you too, and then you’ll really know that everything we need is here.’

  And so it was because of our little bird that stories became, once more, an important part of all our lives, the lives of all the whanau. And although the stories all had different voices, and came from different times and places and understandings, though some were shown, enacted or written rather than told, each one was like a puzzle piece which tongued or grooved neatly to another. And this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined.

  6

  Toko

  I know the story of my birth. When I was born my borning mother was not much older than me, and now I am older than she is.

  I don’t know who my making father is. Roimata says that my making father could have been an old man with a rolled blanket and a tin can that used to visit here once. Well never mind. My making father could be a ghost, or a tree, or a tin-can man, but it does not matter. I have Hemi who is father to me.

  I was born on the beach stones on a day with no colour and my borning mother carried me into the water. She would have left me there for the birds, mistaking me for something she had found. Or she could have kept walking with me out into the water until the sea closed over us, and we would both have belonged to the fishes. But my sister Tangimoana, in her red shirt, came and snatched me away from my first drowning and hurried home with me.

  Then Roimata, who is a mother to me, took me and peeled the skin from my two-colour eyes so that I could see. She turned me up to let the stone fall from my throat, then she shook breath into me and wrapped me in warm towels. My brother lay down by me and slept.

  Soon my Granny
Tamihana came with all her gifts. She blew all wrong things away to clear and free me, and rubbed the bubbles up to save me from my second drowning. She gave me magic from by her ear, and gave a name from when she was a girl.

  My Uncle Stan went down to the sea to look for my other skin but the water held too much grey. He dived and searched until dark, and my father Hemi when he came home, and my brother James and all the people helped too. They searched but they could not find my old shell to bring home and bury. My old self went to the stomach of a fish, and for a long time after that there could be no fishing by anyone, no shellfishing, no swimming, no playing in the sea.

  Perhaps it is the magic from Granny’s ear that gives me my special knowing, and which makes up for my crookedness and my almost drowning. But I have been given other gifts from before I was born. I know all of my stories. There was nothing anyone could do about the crookedness of me.

  7

  Roimata

  My children and their cousins were like cicadas, kihikihi, chittering in the sun. They would pile the beach wood at one end of the strip of sand, keeping aside the long, straight pieces which would be used as weapons.

  We had become tellers, listeners, readers, writers, enactors and collectors of stories. And games are stories too, not just swallowers of time, or buds without fruit. Games, as played-out stories, also define our lives – but I did not understand the children’s war games. I could not tell what their war games were a reflection of.

  When we were children we had played our war games too. The beach had been a place of battle for different kinds of wars. In one war the beach was a battlefield lined with soldiers, and beach stones were hand grenades lobbed into driftwood tanks, or torpedoes screaming towards submarine targets. Beach sticks were rifles with bayonets tied to their barrels. Aeroplane arms ran the sand amid shell and machine-gun fire. Every death was heroic and dramatic, but done with quickly – every hero dying and regaining life again and again.

  The beach was a far-away country where we played out what had come to us through newspaper, radio and film. Because then, somewhere across the sea, there was a real war that gave recognition to our games.

  And there were other wars from across the sea too, but which had come from other times. On Saturdays we went to the pictures, on Sundays we made the stories our own. The beach became rock and desert and lawless towns. We rode driftwood horses and had wood six-shooters, arrows and bows. Or sometimes we stood on log ships driving the enemy into the sea with white swords.

  In yet other war games we fortified our villages and fought with clubs and taiaha in battles which mirrored, not the battles shot into our lives from other countries, but the running, leaping, dancing battles which came to our lives in our own stories from a different age.

  But I could not grasp the meaning of the war games that the kihikihi played. Their games did not seem to be of a past, or of another country. There were no guns, no vehicles of war, no clubs or swords. The sticks were sticks, the stones were stones, the big logs were barricades, no more than that. There were no new voices and no new names. There was nothing different in clothing except for light bands round their foreheads which they sometimes wore. There was no enemy, or rather the enemy was not known.

  So all that could be understood and remembered was that Tumatauenga withstood all challenge in the beginning, and that he has stood astride the earth since and will forever. There was no comfort in remembering it.

  There was no comfort in remembering that Tu became stronger, not weaker with challenge. The onslaught by Tawhiri caused Tu to place his feet even more firmly on the earth. Tawhiri thus strengthened Tu, as conflict always strengthens conflict.

  Not even Tane and Tangaroa could stand against their brother when he took revenge against those who had not assisted him. They could only stand by as Tu pounded the heads of their children and cooked and swallowed them. There could have been only one comfort for Tane and Tangaroa in all of this, and that was in knowing that death becomes life – that what goes down under the club of Tu and enters Tu’s belly becomes new life in the body of the earth. Death is a seeding.

  But there was no comfort for me in remembering these things as I turned the ancient stories in my mind.

  The children would move forward, running towards the walls of piled wood. They would hurl the stones, then run in yelling waves, up and over the barricades hitting and jabbing with the long sticks before turning and retreating. There was no enemy – or the enemy was unknown and unseen, behind the barricade.

  There was nothing there that came from film or ancient story. There were no gunfighters or marching armies, or cutthroats, no battlefields or fortified villages, or quiet deadly pathways through a jungle.

  ‘What are the wars about, Toko?’ I asked.

  ‘Fighting,’ he said.

  ‘But fighting who?’

  ‘Just enemies.’

  ‘And who are they? Who is the enemy?’

  ‘We don’t know yet, but they have stolen from us.’

  ‘What have they stolen?’

  ‘We don’t know yet but it’s something to do with our lives.’

  ‘And where? What place, what country?’

  ‘No place, or just wherever you are, because it’s not good to have your life taken out.’

  ‘Well what is it then, the life that’s being stolen?’

  ‘We don’t know yet, but it might be something like a glowing heart of all special colours, pink, green, brown, blue, purple and silver.’

  ‘And where? Is it on the moon, or out in space, in the desert, out at sea?’

  ‘It’s just an ordinary place. It’s where you are.’

  ‘And what will happen?’

  ‘We don’t know. We don’t know if we will get our purple, pink and silver back that has been snatched from our throats and our eyes. We don’t want our special glowing colours pulled from the insides of us and dropped on the road under the feet that sound like hammers.’

  ‘Whose feet, tramping on the red and silver?’

  ‘We don’t know, we can’t see them, but I think one day we’ll know.’

  Toko is a gift that we have been given, and he has gifts. He has a special knowing. I held him to me and felt afraid.

  ‘Do you know about the kihikihi?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They are already old when they are born. They leave their old lives clinging to a tree and in their new lives they are given glass wings. Their eyes are blood-red jewels. They fly up to drum in the sun and birds drop down from the sky.’

  8

  Toko

  I know the story of when I was five. The story has been told to me by my mother Roimata, my father Hemi, my sister Tangimoana, and my brothers James and Manu. But also it is a remembered story. Five is old enough to remember from, and five is not very long ago.

  It is a big fish story.

  Hemi needed bait for the next day’s fishing, and after tea he asked James and Tangimoana to go out on the lagoon with him to catch herrings. James went to the shed to get the little herring lines with their tiny silver hooks. My father cut up little pieces of bacon fat for bait.

  I followed James to the shed, climbed up and took a heavy line from the shelf.

  ‘We don’t need that one,’ James said.

  ‘I need it,’ I said.

  James didn’t argue with me. He never minded and always let me do whatever I wanted to do. I followed him back to the house taking the big line with me.

  ‘That’s no good, we don’t need that,’ Tangimoana said.

  ‘I need it for my big fish,’ I told her. She did mind.

  ‘Not in the lagoon. There aren’t any big fish in the lagoon, only little ones.’

  ‘There is. There’s a big fish for me,’ I said.

  ‘Only herrings, and anyway you can’t come.’

  But I knew there was a big fish for me, and I knew that I would go. That’s what I remember very clearly about that night. I remember the sureness that I had. I re
member clearly that I knew. I knew that I would go. I knew that there would be a big fish for me.

  My father Hemi said, ‘You can come Boyboy if you sit still in the boat. I’ll give you a little line but you be careful.’

  ‘I got my line,’ I said. ‘For my big fish.’

  Hemi did not argue with me, but my sister Tangi stared at my face, and I think she was angry with me. Well I don’t really remember Tangimoana staring at my face, but I know that’s what she always does. She stares at your face. No one can escape from her.

  The day was just changing to be night, and the sea was like chocolate wrapping that you’ve smoothed with the nail of your thumb. I did not feel small that night the way the sea can make you feel small sometimes. I carried my big line with me. My mother Roimata had taken one of the hooks off to make it safer, but it didn’t matter because it was only one big fish that I was going to catch. I only wanted one big hook for my one big fish. She put a piece of paua on my one big hook. The piece of paua was for bait, but it was also to cover the barb so that it would not hook itself into me. I do not remember that, but I’ve been told.

  Tangi and James carried an oar each and I carried only my line, but I did not feel small. I didn’t feel small when Tangimoana and James helped Hemi pull the dinghy down to the water. I hurried in my special boots and Hemi lifted me into the bow.

  Two pulls and we were out into the middle of the lagoon. Tangi put bread on to the water to bring the herrings. The water was a soft orange colour I remember, and little herrings put their mouths to the water’s skin making sharp circles which widened and widened on the surface of the water.

  My father and my brother and sister pulled the lines about over the surface of the water and the herrings popped onto them time after time. They wanted me to have a little line so that I could catch herrings too. They were all enjoying themselves I remember – and I’ve been told – but I did not want to have enjoyment and herrings. I knew why I waited. I was quiet and excited, and I knew. There was a big tin in the dinghy and it was quickly getting filled with herrings.