Kokopu Dreams

For Ellie

GIANT KOKOPU
(Galaxias Argenteum)

‘Most people wouldn't know a kokopu if it jumped out of the water and bit them.'

Dr Edward Mcintosh (Freshwater scientist)

‘Te Kokopu? Haven't seen him around for ages. Mind you, he only does his dance at night.'

Uncle Wire

1

‘IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY for it,' Sean said to the ducks, busy with their early morning forage on the beach. Bush-covered hills were reflected in the glassy estuary waters, the sun an hour above the horizon warmed his back and glinted in the treetops.

Sean liked the glow. The weather reminded him he was far from the north, a hundred kilometres south of Otepoti, with none of the mangroves of Ngunguru or Hokianga and none of the steamy summer heat either. But the southern coast still teemed with fish and birds, and Te Tai Tokerau was a long way distant.

The birds were loud and the smell of honeysuckle strong. There weren't many people left and folk mostly knew how to behave. If they pushed here they'd get a bulge there. Every action had a price. Even doing nothing had a price. He was laughing at himself for thinking in slogans when his reverie was shattered by Bernie, the drake, chasing one of the chooks up the grassy foreshore with a great flapping and squawking.

‘Get out of it, you wally!' he yelled, throwing a gumboot. ‘That chook doesn't look anything like a duck!'

That morning when Sean had been woken just before dawn by a competing chorus of roosters, he'd lain in bed for half an hour wishing he wasn't alone and contemplating an hour of chores. Eventually he'd rolled himself out onto the floor, dunked his head in a basin of cold water — pure misery in the frosty depths of winter — dressed and lit the stove, before moving outside to collect the eggs and milk Phoebe, the goat.

Breakfast was easy. Comfrey tea with honey and fried potato cakes made from last night's spud mashed up with smoked fish and some chopped parsley. Sean still had clear memories of toast, finest quality local olive oil, margarine, coffee, orange pekoe tea, porridge and Weet-Bix. But never mind, he thought. Get real. Kidney fat is good enough to fry stuff. Potato cakes are fine. Sean still pulled a face though. Sometimes when he drank clover or chamomile tea he almost wept at the memory of a cup of coffee.

Dishes were still a chore. Hot water off the stove and into the sink with some of Debbie's soap. Sean had no idea how she made it but to his daily amazement it worked, lathering up like Sunlight or Palmolive. Debbie traded cakes of soap for fish and anything else she needed and Sean often laughed at the popularity of her product. They might be rude and crude, patched and cobbled, but at least they were nice to be near.

Soap had lasted longer than anything else in the supermarkets, except the hardware like crockery and cutlery, pots and frypans, and things like boot polish and paper. Some people kept the money though Sean preferred to barter. The small gold coins were handy, but there was something sad about people hoarding money — like they hadn't quite grasped what had happened, they were still waiting for Richard and Judy to read the news on the telly, or for Jim to announce that Glenavy was the place to be tomorrow, but watch that burn time.

Thirty-two people lived in Kokopu Waters. Thirty-two. It wasn't very many, Sean thought, and they still weren't reproducing. The biological term crashed in his head, splintering and cracking like a breaking window.

Everyone worked hard at keeping things together. Manu was down on the beach already. A former gang prospect and now a fisherman, whenever he could he braved the bar in his waka, netting and longlining and supplying the village with fish. Marama, his partner, was a naturopath and worked with Kamisese and Frangipani on keeping everyone healthy. Bill, a tattooed biker from somewhere near Picton, was a hunter. Pita was a carpenter; Derek looked after the plumbing. Sean was a gardener, a teacher and a sort of elder, though the position still made him feel like an imposter. Like today.

He'd been called on to officiate at the community's first wedding — a double wedding, Lydia and Whata, Dennis and Corinne. And everyone had high hopes.

‘Better be a good fix, bro,' Manu said. ‘We don't start having kids soon there'll be nobody to bury us.'

‘Nobody to bury us.' It wasn't fair. Sean had buried dozens of people, maybe hundreds, and so had all his friends. And they were doing their best, looking after each other and the life around them but it still wasn't happening.

His chores over, Sean took a walk down to the grove of fruit trees where the wedding was to take place. There were apples, apricots, cherries, walnuts, chestnuts, plums and even grapes. But no fruit on The Tree. It was an apple tree, Sean knew, ten years old but still barren. Every year there were glossy new leaves but no blossom — no fruit.

He stood for a while under a walnut tree, the sun climbing higher and leaves dappling the light, while he thought of a suitable ceremony. It was a problem. Lydia, who lived with his occasional lover, Alex, was a Buddhist. Whata believed in the old gods — Tane, Papatuanuku, Hine Nui te Po. Dennis was a Christian, Corinne didn't really know. Sean was bound to offend someone, especially if he tried to please everybody.

So when he stood in the small clearing between the trees three hours later he did his usual thing. He pleased himself. He called out a formal greeting to the sea and the land and the people present. He said hello to Tinirau as well. You never knew with taniwha. Best to stay in good with those guys.

‘E nga iwi katoa, haere mai, haere mai, haere mai! Mauria mai te aroha me te rangimarie!'

He really meant it. Bring your love and your peace, all of you. Cloak everyone with all your good feeling. Wrap us in your warmth, everyone holding tight together, sharing strength and spirit.

They needed it. Sean could see people had been through the worst of the hells. They were battered, shell-shocked, wounded, some of them insane. But they were coping. They were still here, handling things, even doing okay. Except nobody was getting pregnant.

It hadn't mattered much for the first two or three years; they'd all been so busy surviving. Before the telly died, haggard-looking people, politicians mostly, described how an illegally imported rabbit calicivirus had mutated. It wasn't killing rabbits any more — they were a staple food now — and nor was it affecting cats and dogs, and not the native bat nor the little spotted kiwi. But it had been killing people with a type of haemorrhagic fever that'd travelled from the Mackenzie Country up and down the land like the wind, from Bluff to Cape Reinga in about three weeks. And that was the good news, Sean laughed bitterly to himself.

At about the same time the scientists' worst nightmare had come true. A woman exposed to a new, airborne, strain of Ebola got on a plane at Kinshasa. She'd infected everyone on the plane and wherever it landed they got off, either mixing with the locals or journeying elsewhere. It had taken less than a week for the epidemic to spread around the world and for people to start dying, their organs liquefying, blood coming out of every orifice.

But the Ebola hadn't come to Aotearoa. The mutated calicivirus had already seen the country tightly quarantined.

Not that it really mattered, Sean thought. The Curse of the Rabbit had wasted everyone without any outside help. Now, with no babies, it looked like they might all die out anyway. But they had to keep trying, they weren't quite ready to give up, and maybe the wedding would do the trick. Maybe this time.

Sean started the service.

‘We're all here to celebrate the love of Lydia and Whata, Corinne and Dennis, each for the other. We wish them every happiness, long lives, much joy, and if it's meant to be, lots of children.'

2

DAVID WAS THE FIRST to go. He was only twelve. He had creamy skin, luminous brown eyes and a smile that lit up the whole house. He would rather read than watch TV and he'd rather be outside playing fantasy games among the trees than inside with a book. He loved break-dancing. He'd twirl and posture on the kitchen lino while Che Fu rapped his urban angst and his sisters clapped and cheered. Once he ran away. He'd come back from Auntie Emma's place and his sisters had laughed at his haircut.

‘Where'd you get the Number One, Boy?' they'd giggled and spluttered.

‘I hate you all,' he'd said through the tears. ‘I'm never coming back.'

He'd waited, though, while Sean made him a cut lunch, sandwiches with thick slices of wild pork and apple sauce. Cousin George had just left a forequarter, staying for three days and smoking all the dak in the house. Just before dark, Sean had gone looking for David and found him in a puriri tree in the far corner of McKinleys' orchard, lonely and tired, sleepy with wild pork and stolen mandarins. The moreporks had just started calling and possums had begun grunting and coughing. David didn't need too much persuading to climb down and walk home with his stepfather, hand-in-hand because nobody was watching.

First David complained of a headache and Te Rina, his mother, put him to bed, fearing the worst after two weeks of horrorshow footage on TV.

‘It's starting, isn't it?' she said. ‘Maybe he's just got the flu.'

By 4 a.m. he had a raging fever, sweats and chills and real delirium, shouting and swearing and recoiling in terror from things only he could see. Te Rina bathed his head with cold water and between bouts of raving he managed to drink some. Late in the day he started bleeding, even his eyes. Te Rina and Sean just held each other and cried. It was probably their last sane moment together. They both knew what was happening and so did the older girls, Rewa and Kohu. If Sean carried anything from those days it was the knowing, even accusing looks of those two. Not that he felt guilty, at least not any more. Just haunted. And ashamed, for surviving.

They sat up with David all that night. He died just before dawn, the same time that Kiri, the youngest at ten, wailed suddenly.

‘Mummy, I've got a headache too!'

Four hours into her sweats and chills Rewa and Kohu went to bed. Not feeling too good. Just wanted to lie down.

‘We're going to die too, aren't we?' said Kohu. At fourteen years old, she could out-think most adults.

‘I doubt it,' Sean said. ‘It's probably just flu.'

She knew. She gave him a long look that he still saw in his dreams.

‘Bugger,' she said, before she started screaming some serious obscenities and tearing at the bedclothes.

Te Rina sat with the three girls for the rest of that day, all night too, and the next day. She bathed them, she gave them drinks, she read to them from the Bible. Sean didn't know what to do with himself. He made Te Rina cups of tea and tried to hold her hand, but mostly she didn't notice him. Twice in those interminable hours she turned to him, an awful knowledge in her eyes, and whispered ‘Hold me ...' and he did, for a few moments, before she turned back to her children.

The three girls were lying there covered in blood. Kiri looked impossibly small and ancient. Te Rina pushed their beds together and lay down with them. At least it seemed to Sean that she did. He was away with the fairies himself by then. He even remembered Te Rina saying, ‘I've got a headache!' and laughing. He'd had to lie down himself, shivering and sweating.

When he was finally able to think about that dreadful time, he remembered drifting in and out for many hours, or was it days. Places he hoped he'd never go again, no clear memories of them, just the most shocking ugliness, hellish noises and the worst pain he'd ever felt, demons hammering and shrieking on the inside of his skull.

When he woke it was daylight and he was covered in blood. Everyone was lying about him, silent and bloody. He was on David's bed, next to the boy's cold and sightless body. The bedclothes were crusted with blood. Sean knew he was awake but he couldn't open his eyes properly. Everything felt warped and blurred. He lay for a while trying to sort out what was real and what was a dream, then he heaved himself off the bed and promptly fell on the floor. He wanted to throw up. He crawled out to the couch, climbed onto it and slept. Sort of sleep, a disgusting parade of eviscerated animals, blood and entrails everywhere. He woke in the night, drank about a gallon of water, and went back to sleep.

The next time he woke the rooster was crowing. He managed to get onto his feet this time, feeling like shit. He stood disorientated, his head stuffed with earthworms and dog turds, all squirmy and foul. He lurched to the back door and threw up on the lawn. More blood. What to do? The copper was full of water so he stuck his head in it and some of the fog cleared. He took a bucketful out on the lawn and tipped it on his head. That felt better too, so he stripped off, got another bucketful and a cake of soap and washed himself clean of all the blood.

Back inside the power was off so he lit the fire, hung the billy on the hook in the chimney, and made some tea. Black. All the milk was turned. He found a packet of biscuits after shutting the door on the rancid mess in the fridge and sat on the front porch, the cat cleaning itself by him, knowing things were real and wishing he was dreaming. Without thinking he got up, walked across to the fence, climbed it and was three-quarters of the way through McKinleys' orchard before the knowledge that the neighbours were probably dead too hit him with a jolt. And hitting him just as hard was the realisation that he was alive — how come?

He walked back home, let the chooks out, had another cup of tea and some more biscuits, and lay down on the old couch on the porch. When he woke up it was night and everything was so quiet: no radio or telly; not a car anywhere; not the girls arguing; not Te Rina laying down the law about somebody's muddy feet. Nothing.

Off in the distance a dog barked and Sean couldn't remember hearing a lonelier sound, a sadder noise. It started him crying. He lay on the porch floor and sobbed. He didn't even know what he was feeling. Maybe it was aroha for his family. Maybe he just felt alone. Maybe it was a release of agony it would take him years to work out. Maybe he wanted Mummy to put the light on and give him a cuddle and a glass of water. Maybe it was all of that. Who knew? He slept again, on the bare boards with a blanket pulled off the couch, and the rooster woke him again at daybreak.

He lay there feeling lonely like he never had before. He thought of his mate lying dead and cold inside and quickly pushed the image aside. He knew he'd have to deal with this, but not just yet, please.

He thought instead of when he and Te Rina had met, when they were both nineteen and he was so attracted by her laugh and the brown warmth of her. Everyone had a rosy vision for the future. The dole was thirty-eight dollars a week, enough to live on if you could grow your own dak, get your wine from the McWilliams jumbo bin in Hobson Street and you didn't mind picking the lock on the Nestle bin in Parnell where they dumped all the reject chocolate. He smiled at the memory of a night with Aussie Bill, wading through broken glass in the McWilliams bin and finding what appeared to be a full bottle of Creme de Menthe. They'd cracked it on the way home, down the Ho Chi Minh trail through the domain to Parnell where they lived. Bill had taken a swig, gasped and spat. They'd examined the label by torchlight. ‘Coloured water. For display purposes only' it said in small type. Sucked in again.

Sean had discovered both he and Te Rina came from the same district, and that they shared a rather old-fashioned sense of right and wrong. They were also ambitious in that they both wanted to further at least some of the causes of radical politics — Maori nationalism in her case, environmental awareness in his. Not for the first time, Sean felt he must have looked a bit of a prat with his long hair, dungarees, obligatory earring and hippie manaia around his well-scrubbed young neck. He'd had to hide his surprise when Te Rina accepted a lift to the bus station from the employment conference they were both attending. In the tearooms, before she left for her home in the north, they'd talked and, if there wasn't any hormonal upheaval, there was certainly a joyful and willing intellectual encounter, an ease and a depth Sean hadn't often found. But callow, feckless youth and all that — he'd let her go and hadn't seen her again for seven years.

He'd worked as a journalist in those years, and Te Rina had become a power in the political world. Radical had become chic, and when the local radicals were invited into the tent, for finger food and a discreet bonking, Te Rina had taken a closer look at the attractions of life in the north. Sean had become disillusioned too, even cynical, as they'd watched first the Old then the New Right swallow what they thought was real social progress.

Te Rina's family had grown by four in that time, four tough and feisty kids. She'd dived in the deep end of the gene pool and had grabbed whatever she thought would give her lively and interesting kids, leaving a wake of chewed-up men as she'd made her relentless progress. Sean had been under no illusions about being the answer to any maiden's prayer. He'd felt well out of his depth as he'd fitted himself into her household after it became clear that they were still good friends and they'd take their chances moving north together. They'd got married in a Grey Lynn living room, loaded their gear and all six of them into a rented one-ton truck, and they were off, out of the Big Smoke, away to make a new home in the Deep North.

The old people in the north had gone out of their way to be good to Te Rina and her family, and to Sean. They'd encouraged him to learn about fires and cooking, shelter, and most especially about the welcome and care of visitors and what he had come to see as the overwhelmingly precious nature of life. He'd been constantly reminded that some of them saw him as a rather leaky vessel in which to entrust the teachings that had sustained them all their lives. But that didn't stop their kindness to him, and once he'd seen what was happening he was overwhelmed by the patient way they unwrapped his middle-class Pakeha upbringing and grafted on a view of the world where every action had consequences and aroha really was the only response to utu.

Sean had started off working as a journalist but before long he was doing bush and farm work, fencing, building, and attending hui all over the north. He'd loved it. Whenever he could he'd helped out in the kitchen, stoking fires, butchering sheep, preparing vegetables, scrubbing pots, cleaning camp ovens, and listening to the old folk chat about their lives, unchanged for generations, not greatly affected by the trappings of modern society. He'd suspected the twentieth century was just a bad dream for most of them, and somehow the things that were real and important to them had got through to him.

Those old aunties and uncles had offered gentle advice, nodding approvingly or looking away politely. He'd taken on as many of their customs and ways as he was able to grasp and he often heard Uncle Rangi or Uncle Joe laughing.

‘At least the roof doesn't leak, boy. At least there's something to eat tonight.'

Things were the way they were and you just handled them. And if there was any hurt involved they'd encouraged him to take as much of it as he could on himself.

‘Eat it, boy, till you've got a real gutsache. Then have a good shit. You'll feel better after a while,' they'd say.

Thinking of the old ones calmed Sean and stopped his tears. The rooster was crowing away like he couldn't care less, not silenced by a soaking rain or even by Uncle Wire's dog broken free from his chain and trying to find out what was wrong, where was everyone? Sean could feel the smoothness of the boards in the porch floor and see the kaka beak growing so that the black and rattly seedpods from last spring's red flowers hung through the railings. The dog looked at him with deep suspicion, like all this disorder was his fault. It cocked a leg on the nearby gatepost and sidled over beside him.

Sean sat up, his head clear but very delicate, like the colours were too bright and the noises too sharp. The dog licked his face, its tongue smooth and warm and the gesture bursting with all the love and trust in the world. And Sean remembered there were people inside, they were here, now, and they needed looking after. He lit the fire in the copper and while the water was heating fed the dog some stinking mince from the fridge. When the water was hot, Sean took a bucketful in to Te Rina and the kids. He found a cake of soap and some clean towels.

It took him all day and all the hot water to wash them. He cried. He sang to them: nursery rhymes, old Rolling Stones songs, bits of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley anthems, hymns like ‘Whakaaria Mai' and ‘Tama Ngakau Marie'. He changed their bedding. He brushed their hair and when he'd finished they all looked so peaceful. Not happy or sad, just not really there. He told them he loved them all and kissed them goodbye. Had he done enough? What else was there?

He fetched a can of petrol from the boot of the car, poured it all through the house and tossed a match from the door. The dog watched with him from the stone wall at the back of the house while everything burned up with an awful roar of finality. As the window glass exploded most of Sean was saying goodbye to his family — to Te Rina's dreams, to Rewa's poetry, to the laughter of the others and to the life he'd known. The world grew emptier as the flames died. But deep inside, a part of him was saying ‘What the fuck do I do now?'

He was stung by a sharp pang of hunger, a reverberating wrench that had him over the back fence and through the orchard to Uncle Wire's place. The front door was shut and when Sean opened it, knowing the old man would probably be dead, the smell hit him full on. His empty gut heaved.

He left the door open and he and the dog sat outside on the steps. Slowly Sean collected himself. If he wanted food he'd have to go in the house. Anyway, it was only Uncle Wire. The old bugger always did have a lot of character.