Into the River (11 page)

The first few weeks was a period when everyone sorted each other out. People made mistakes and suffered the consequences. A junior would wander into the senior section of the dorms and return snivelling with a bleeding nose. There were the boys who were left out. They hung around trying to ingratiate themselves into the established groups, usually unsuccessfully. There had to be a reason to take them in. They had to have something to offer.

Then the enforcing began for real. They were all given nicknames. Stephen became Stephanie. Wade became Dumbo. Mitch was Tarzan and Te Arepa was called Maori. They struggled to keep their old names but it was hopeless. They all had to be re-branded, with a Barwell’s name. Even the tutors used them. Te Arepa hated his. He knew survival depended on getting a new name. A name like Te Arepa was like saying “I’m Maori” every time he introduced himself. “Maori” tied him to all the things at school that were
inferior
or didn’t work properly.

A bad kick on the sports field?

“What a Maori one!”

His old shoes?

“Maori shoes!”

Bare feet in the dining room?

“Maori shoes!”

A new name was crucial.

Even Adam Neeson (his so-called “Buddy”) called him “Maori” and (when he was trying to be funny) “Chocolate Thin”.

It was like he carried the mark of Cain.

Stephen seemed to be an expert on these matters. There was an early bid to call him Girl because he was a bit girly but he managed to head it off with “Steph”. It was a name he’d had at other schools and it seemed a perfect fit.

So it was Steph whom Te Arepa approached, asking what he could do.

“It’s difficult. You can’t really control what people want to call you. All you can do is to think of a name for yourself and then work hard at getting it to stick. What does Te Arepa mean, anyhow?”

“It doesn’t mean anything … it’s a name. I’m named after this ancestor … the boy who saved the tribe.”

“Hmmm,” said Steph. “Ancestor name. Any others? What would you like to be called?”

They both thought for a while.

“What about Diego? I have this Spanish ancestor, Diego Santos.”

“Not bad.” Steph weighed it up for a while, then he discarded it. “No, too foreign. You’ll probably end up being called wog or dago. What else?”

“Well, all the other names are Maori names, or Pakeha versions of them.”

“How did this Diego come to be part of your family?”

Te Arepa laughed. He immediately thought of the full version, the “authorised version” as told by Ra. “It’s a long story, believe me. Takes about a week to get through. But in the end, he was being taken back to Wellington to be tried for piracy on a ship called the S.S.
Devon
. As it rounded the East Cape, he jumped overboard and swam to shore.”

“Then he became one of you?”

“He did a few other things first but that’s it, more or less. My people took him in because he was such a good fighter. Not a big man, but a cunning one.”

“How about Devon?”

“What about it?”

“How about Devon for a name? It’s sort of halfway between Maori and wog and you’ve got a claim to it.”

Te Arepa thought about it for a while. He liked the idea: it was a sort of happy compromise.

“Okay,” he said uncertainly. “So how do I go about changing my name?”

“Just tell everyone that’s what you want to be called from now on. Ignore your old name and all the other tags people try to lay on you, otherwise you’ll end up being “Nigger”, like Graeme
Hartnell
calls you. He was the one who named Wade Royle “Dumbo”. He hung that on him the first day.”

“He’s scary, that Hartnell. I don’t like him too near me in the showers. There’s no telling what he might do.”

Steph glanced around. “True, he’s bad news. He grabbed my balls in the lunch room when I was carrying a full tray of food. He made out it was a joke but I reckon he gets off on it.”

“So, Devon you reckon?” said Te Arepa.

“Yeah. It suits you. Put it there, Devon.” And they slapped palms.

Later, the two of them took to rebranding Wade. They changed his name to the usual for a kid with sticky-out ears: Wingnut. Mitch was fine with Tarzan, but in the end it always came back to
Mitch, because Mitch seemed so right for him.

The Mitch incident: it was a bit like this.

They were all lining up for the showers. Just the juniors at this stage; the seniors were allowed an extra half an hour in bed. Hartnell was the duty senior, in charge of feeding the juniors in and out of the showers for the regulation three minutes. As each new set of six boys put down their towels and scampered into the shower with soap and flannel, Hartnell scored a well-aimed flick on their arses. If any boy was too quick for him he ordered him out of the water and made him present his arse for an extra-special flick. Steph and Devon walked into the showers, slowing for the regulation branding. It smarted but not for long. Hartnell was so busy giving Wingnut an extra-special stinger that Mitch walked right past unscathed.

“Come back out, Tarzan, I’ve got something for you.”

Mitch either didn’t hear or pretended not to, so Hartnell dragged him naked and slippery out of the shower stall. The others watched in awe as Mitch, eyes full of soap, neatly slipped out of Hartnell’s headlock, hauled the senior’s thigh upwards, and they both crashed on to the hard tiled floor … with Mitch on top. There was a sickening double crack, as first Hartnell’s back and then a moment later his head smacked the wet tiled floor. They both lay there, stunned for a moment. Neither boy said a word. Then Mitch clambered up, went back into the booth and carried on showering as though nothing had happened. Hartnell got up slowly off the tiles and stood quietly against the wall, his face drained of colour. The others all stood around in the steamy enclosure waiting for the inevitable.

But nothing happened.

After the regulation three minutes they moved out and the next boys were gestured in without as much as a flick. Hartnell just
glared at them, the back of his shirt soaked from the fall on the wet floor. Devon and the other two sneaked looks at Mitch while they stood together at the wash basins cleaning their teeth. Everyone knew Mitch had broken something that should never be broken. By dropping a senior he had shaken the foundations of every rule they slavishly obeyed.

And yet, he seemed to have got away with it.

The following day the incident was the talk of the whole school. Even the house staff talked about it. The only person who didn’t talk about it was Mitch.

That afternoon was the school swimming sports. Devon, Steph and Wingnut had already been eliminated from the competition during PE periods but Mitch was a finalist in every event he entered. The glamour race for the juniors was the one hundred metres freestyle. The race came down to a competition between Mitch and another boy called Paul Swain, from Pompalier House. Paul looked like he was born to swim and he trained with a swimming club outside the school three nights a week. He had beaten Mitch in the longer distances but couldn’t match his raw power over the short hauls.

Around the pool the tiered seating was swarming with boys clothed in house colours. Marsden’s house colour was yellow so many boys had loyally yellowed their hair with food colouring. Some of the younger teachers, especially those who were old boys, wore coloured clothing, or the old striped blazers that had been part of the uniform twenty years ago.

“Regardez!”

It was Steph. He was pointing to Mr Simmonds, all decked out in a short-sleeved, white safari suit.

“My God, he’s fresh out of Africa. Fresh from sorting out the fuzzy wuzzy on the greasy Limpopo.”

“Except for the shades. They’re new, I think,” Devon replied.

“Could be right. Let’s go down and take a closer look.”

They climbed down from the bleachers and wandered towards the gateway to the houses. It was clear that the swimming sports were not Simmonds’s chosen duty: he lurked in the shade, just “putting in an appearance”.

Steph sidled up to the housemaster. “Love the glasses, Mr
Simmonds
. Dolce et Gabbana est?”

“Pro patria mori, Stackford,” he replied dryly, then added, “Where are you two going, might I ask?”

“A quick comfort stop before Mitchell’s big race.”

“Make sure you come right back.”

“You can rely on that sir, veritas lux mea.”

“Hmm … in the parlance of the plebs, I would possibly say, ‘Yeah, right’.”

Devon was quiet for a while, but when they were some distance away, said, “I don’t know how you get away with that, Steph.”

“That’s the advantage of a Latin education, Devon. It’s like being a Freemason. Special treatment whenever you bump into a fellow member.”

The one hundred metres was the last event before the relays and it would decide the Junior Swimming Champion: Mitch or Paul. The final eight swimmers stepped up on the blocks as their names were called. They stood there, proud and twitching and shaking their arms, big in the shoulders, small from the waist down: they all had swimmers’ physiques. Mitch was different, brawnier. Thicker in the waist and legs. The Marsden supporters erupted when Mitch’s name was called. He gave them a wave and then swung his arms like rotor blades. On the other side of the pool, Devon could see Hartnell, all scowls and eyebrows. The gun went off and Mitch did a high, show-offy dive and then powered along the surface of the pool. He had no style — most of his body seemed to be out of the water — but he made up for it with
unbelievable
power.

By the end of the first lap he was two body lengths ahead. On the second lap Paul Swain began to close in on him. He glided
through the water with hardly a ripple. It was just a question of whether Mitch had enough lead to hold him off. They seemed to touch the far end at the same time, but Paul was declared the winner. Mitch lunged up onto the side and ran along to pull the exhausted Paul from the water. It was clear to Devon that he had let him win: an act of breath-taking generosity.

That night, Paul Swain came and joined them in the dining room. He told them about his dream: to go to the Olympics. Mitch said it was a cool thing to wish for, and reckoned if anyone could do it, Paul could.

Later, in the dorms, the talk was still dominated by swimming. Steph told the story of Cassius, who had swum the Tiber in full flood. Mitch must have been tired, because he went to sleep almost straight away. After that it was just whispering; there was a rule about talking after lights-out. Devon heard the click of the door at the end of the passage and shished Steph immediately. The last thing they wanted was an extra duty, the standard punishment. For a while it all went quiet and Devon wondered if he had been mistake. He was about to give the “all-clear” when he heard muffled whispering. Something was going down.

Three figures burst into their pen with hoodies up over their heads and handkerchiefs covering their faces. It was impossible to see who they were. Two of them pulled the blankets over Mitch and held them down tight. The other one began to thrash him with a hockey stick. Hard blows, like chopping wood. Again and again. Up and down the length of Mitch’s body. There was no let-up. Devon longed to do something but couldn’t move. He lay immobile, frozen with fear, while his friend was being beaten not two metres away. For a while Mitch thrashed around making noises like an injured animal but couldn’t even raise his arms to shield himself from the next blow. Devon lay motionless, listening to Mitch groaning and crying. Gradually all movement ceased and he seemed to go limp.

The two who were holding down his legs and arms released them. “Jesus you’ve killed him, you fucken idiot,” one said, and then both ran off. The third figure, with the hockey stick still clenched tightly in his hand, stayed still for a moment, checking to see whether there was any movement in the other beds. Devon closed his eyes until they were just slits, terrified of giving himself away. The last assailant leaned close; Devon caught the sharp stink of his sweat. He straightened up, and Devon was certain that this was the prelude to a blow to the head, but the attacker wandered off, hockey stick resting jauntily on his shoulder. As soon as the door closed, the room-mates jumped out of bed at the same moment and rushed to his limp form. Steph pulled back the covers. Mitch lay still. His eyes had rolled back in his head; the whites stood out in the murky light.

Devon was aghast; he was dead. He certainly looked dead. Steph ran off somewhere while Wingnut stood beside the bed waiting to be told what to do. Then Mitch began to whimper. The two of them carefully lifted his head and shoulders. He was surprisingly heavy. Devon squeezed in at the head of the bed, trying to support him. Steph returned with a wet towel and a basin of water. He dabbed it about on Mitch’s bruised face. Devon could feel life trickling back into Mitch’s body as he slowly returned to consciousness.

No one said anything: they all knew who had done this, and why.

“Let’s get him into the shower.” It was Steph.

He and Devon took an arm each and they half walked, half dragged him to the shower room. Devon hated himself, was ashamed of his cowardice. If only he had done something when it counted.

In the glare of the bright lights Mitch looked like he had been in a car accident. They stripped him off and put him in the shower but he was unable to support himself, so Devon went into the water with him. There were welts all over him; the worst were on
his arms and legs. They were wide purple bars, angry around the edges. After a while Mitch leant against the wall of the shower, face against his arms, and began to take his own weight. Every now and then he spat blood on the floor.

“Who’s going to get the housemaster?” Devon asked the other two.

They both looked back blankly.

“We can’t,” said Steph. “It doesn’t work that way. Mitch knows that. Housemasters are for official stuff. This isn’t official.”

“You’re going to let these arseholes get away with it?”

Mitch turned to Devon, bleary eyed, but said nothing.