Kokopu Dreams (13 page)

‘I'm sorry for all your loss, Auntie,' he said. ‘And I agree with you too, about people not coping, before or after.' What could he say that made sense? ‘Kids were killing themselves in the Old Times. Their parents did too, after the Fever, when everything changed and they lost all the things they thought were important.' He'd have to be careful here. He didn't want to end up sounding like some nutter. He thought for a moment. ‘If you'll pardon me saying so, being a woman you'll have a fair idea of what's important. As for me, I'm still finding out, but I never did believe anything worth having came out of a Cashflow machine.'

Margaret laughed and lifted her cup in a toast. ‘I think what you're saying is that you don't want anything to interfere with this delicious lobster, and I'm right with you there.' She looked to Sean like she wasn't fooling. The new world she was living in might have its disadvantages — he guessed she'd probably had a lot of trouble with people looking wrinkled and unironed — but she was coping, and clearly getting some satisfaction out of finding her skills valued and appreciated.

One of the young men, who'd been sitting at the other end of the table, came up then and spoke in Margaret's ear, before taking his seat again. She gave Sean and Kevin a long hard look, and spoke a little hesitantly.

‘You two look like you're capable of it, but I don't know whether you will or not.'

They were being lined up for something. Sean took a sip of tea, pretended nonchalance. Margaret spoke again.

‘We go to the markets at Kaikoura every three or four weeks, usually with the folk from the marae just down the road. Three times since last winter we've been held up and robbed by people living at the Clarence River mouth.'

She took in Sean's blank look.

‘It's about halfway. They stole our money and goods coming and going. We need to give them a fright, make sure they stop bothering us. Could you help us?'

Sean had a flash of exploding heads and burning buildings. He felt ridiculous too, like the hero of some spaghetti western. He explained about losing his ammunition and having no ammunition for Kevin's .308. He'd stripped and cleaned his sawn-off but it didn't feel particularly safe to threaten people with an empty weapon.

‘Don't worry about that,' Margaret said. ‘We've got ammunition here. We'll pay you too. Twenty dollars each to ride with us to Kaikoura and back.'

What could they say? The offer took Sean by surprise. It was probably time to have a good look at his negotiable skills. He envisaged his appearance — patched eye, dreadlocked, bearded and travel-stained. No doubt he looked like a few miles of bad road. He could see he'd make a plausible heavy. But as a career, even as a pastime, the idea didn't appeal. Still, the money and ammunition would be handy and he couldn't think of another way to acquire either. Trading eels on a stretch of coast teeming with fish and lobster? As long as they didn't have to hurt anyone.

‘Okay,' Sean agreed, after a quick eye signal from Kevin. ‘Just a fright? You're sure of that?'

‘I hope so,' said Margaret. ‘None of us want to see anyone hurt.'

A day later they set out, lobster in barrels on the back of a cart drawn by two horses. Two young women sat on the cart with bundles of fresh herbs and bags of glasshouse-grown produce, like chillies and tomatoes. Two men, one with a rifle and one with a crossbow, rode alongside. They didn't look at all intimidating, and nor did the contingent from the marae down the road. Except for an old man who winked at Sean when Margaret explained what was happening, they were all young people, carting dried fish and vegetables. Sean was starting to develop a really bad feeling about the trip. An hour out he was wishing they hadn't taken it on. The old man knew. He became very serious when Sean spoke with him.

‘This won't end well,' he said. ‘But it's been a long time coming and you look like you're up to it. None of our whanau is, and not the people from the tearooms either.'

He told Sean to expect three men in their thirties and forties, who used the threat of violence to get their way even if they hadn't hurt anyone yet. The old man, Poutu te Rangi, described them as bullies and cowards. He showed Sean a .22 rifle shaped into a handgun concealed inside his plaid jacket.

‘I've still got a couple of teeth left,' he said.

They passed a huddled collection of cribs, or baches as Sean and Kevin used to call them before they moved south, spread out around the Clarence River mouth. Nobody was about, but Sean could feel eyes on them, and he and the old man sat up most of the night when they camped in a grove of ngaio trees just outside the town.

‘Somebody has to do this,' Poutu explained. ‘There's no right or wrong in it, just getting on with things.'

Poutu — never mind the ‘Uncle' — knew as well as Sean that giving people a fright might well involve killing somebody, and there wasn't a lot you could say about it.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘that's not so important.' Oh yeah, thought Sean. What is?

‘We've been waiting for you,' the old man said.

We? Who's we?

‘It's the Maeroero,' he continued. ‘Somebody has to put things right with them.'

Put things right? How?

‘Talk with them. Find out what they want.' Poutu looked worried.

‘We don't really know what you have to do. Maybe you know already, maybe you don't. But we all depend on you.'

Hope you're not too disappointed, Sean thought.

The Kaikoura markets were full of people, laughing, gossiping, jostling, wheeling barrows of fruit and vegetables and greeting old friends. The Kekerengu folk sold and traded all their goods and by mid-afternoon they were ready to leave. They camped out again that night and by midday on the following day they were approaching the river mouth. Everyone was worried, looking nervously about.

Four men on horseback were strung out across the road around a corner. They had shaven heads and black gear. Rifles were levelled. Sean saw a couple of swastika tattoos.

The two carts were side by side. Sean was riding out in front, his sawn-off drawn and cocked and resting across the saddle. One of the men called out.

‘Just drop your goods and money over the side and ride on!' He addressed Sean directly. ‘And don't you even think about it. We'll waste you!' He looked surprised to see Sean, and a little nervous. He didn't even notice Kevin, who'd been beside the cart, chatting with one of the young girls from the tearooms.

Sean shrugged. Behind him he heard bags of coin tossed to the road and goods joining them.

‘That's the story,' said the man who'd spoken. ‘Nice and ...' He didn't get a chance to finish. Poutu's .22 shot took him right between the eyes. The others whirled around to what had looked like a bundle of rags in the back of the cart. One of them managed to fire a round, but Sean's shotgun blast hit him in the chest the same time as the shot from Kevin's .308. It blew him out of the saddle and stopped everyone.

‘Drop your weapons or you're both dead,' Sean said to the remaining two. ‘Fuckin' oath!' he heard from Kevin. The stalemate lasted all of three seconds, before two rifles clattered in the road.

‘Now put everything back on the carts and fuck off. And no more trouble, not ever.'

The two men, one of them probably only eighteen, looked incredulous for a second. They dismounted and replaced all the bags. Then, wheeling their horses, they galloped down the road and onto the shingle beach. As soon as they were gone everyone leapt to the cart where Poutu had been riding and lifted the blanket. The old man had blood all over his face from where the shot had creased his scalp. Sean thought he was dead at first and one of the young women from the marae started to wail. But Poutu opened his eyes.

‘Stop that racket, girl,' he said. ‘You'll give me a headache.' He looked around then and eventually focused on Sean. He felt the wound on his head.

‘I didn't see that one coming,' he said. ‘Did you get them?'

A few kilometres up the road, Kevin rode forward and joined Sean.

‘You know,' he said. ‘I was expecting to see Colin. I just know we'll run into him somewhere.'

Sean looked at Kevin. ‘He's not our only worry.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You're not going to believe these little guys.'

‘What little guys?'

14

SEAN AND KEVIN FELT READY to face the future. Packed in their saddlebags were shotgun shells, a handful of .308 cartridges and forty dollars worth of one and two dollar coins. They were stocked up with herbs and spices, flour, vegetables and dried fish. But mainly they'd developed a lot of confidence in their ability to handle trouble, even if the spectre of a gap-toothed and enraged Colin still lurked at the back of their minds.

Sean had decided to keep quiet about the Maeroero but Kevin asked him straight out.

‘What little guys?' he said. ‘What did you mean Colin isn't our only worry?'

Oh dear, thought Sean. How on earth could he explain the Maeroero? He tried anyway.

‘They're reject fairies,' he said. ‘They caused the Fever.' Kevin gave him a long look.

‘It's all that dope you smoked with Zed,' he said. ‘You're losing it, man.' He shook his head and changed the subject.

On their own the Kaikoura coast felt quite different. Sean made Kevin laugh when he called out to the seals and the gulls that squabbled on the rocks as they rode by. They even waved to some people at the mouth of the Clarence River. The people waved back, too. Maybe they didn't recognise either Sean or Kevin, or perhaps they did.

‘How many people do you know wearing an eyepatch?' Kevin pointed out.

They stopped at their old campsite outside Kaikoura and enjoyed fresh fish and veggies fried with chillies. They leaned back against the trunk of a ngaio tree, drinking tea with wild honey like old campaigners. But let's not get carried away, Sean said to himself.

Next day they rode through Kaikoura. The locals greeted them with waves and cries. They'd set up their stalls under the shop awnings, and they watched as Sean and Kevin continued south into the dense bush that shaded a steep and winding road.

Their path reminded Sean of the old gravel roads of the Tai Tokerau backblocks. But in that region, in Winston Peters' Ngati Wai country, north of Kaitaia, around Whangaroa Harbour, in places like Hokianga and Herekino, people had lived everywhere. Families made themselves comfortable in anything with a roof, driven from the cities by high rents and no jobs.

Here there was nobody. They rode for two days before they even saw a dwelling and they didn't bother investigating. Derelict homes were unmistakable. The paddocks on the hills around this house sported broken fences, with occasional pigs and cattle foraging among the young gorse and broom. Everything was dry and as they came down onto the north Canterbury flats, after three days, they could see the place was suffering a severe drought. What pasture remained was burnt by the sun and a hot wind blew from the nor'west. They crossed two big rivers that were reduced to a trickle, and smaller streams that were dried up completely. After the travellers had two thirsty days, they learned to use whatever water they found, though Kevin drew the line at the scummy bottoms of near-dry cattle troughs. Sean even dug down two feet, in the sun-baked gravel of a stream bed, for some brackish water that he scooped into his hat for the animals. The water did absolutely nothing for the potatoes they boiled in it.

‘Forget the tea,' Kevin said. ‘It'll taste like crap.' They drank the veggie water instead. It made Sean very nostalgic about curried dog.

Just north of Christchurch things became a little greener. They found small streams with dark pools shaded by willows, where they all drank their fill. They were even able to wash. Eels, trapped by the drought, examined them from the shallows. Sometimes it was easier to travel at night, cooler and well lit, with a rising moon in the cloudless sky and the hot wind reduced to a whisper. They weren't moving fast.

Sean's first dream came when he and Kevin were dozing in the leafy shade of a willow on a hot afternoon. Bojay and Sofa were making a meal of the leaves overhead, and Hamu twitched and yelped as he chased rabbits in his sleep.

Sean felt at home in the dream. It was only a fragment. After he woke it took him a long time to separate where he'd been from the place where he was.

He'd been standing on the foreshore of an inlet. Houses peeked through trees behind him. Ducks and chooks fossicked along the high-tide mark and in the shallows before him. He wasn't wondering where he was. He didn't even realise when he'd woken. He lay in the dappled sunlight on the stream bank, his head on his rolled-up saddle-blanket. The scene was just as vivid when he replayed it with his eyes wide open. Dragonflies darted and hovered over the cool water. A cloud of midges gathered. A fantail herded and ate small insects.

They stayed by the stream that night, dining on rabbit cooked with a herbal mixture devised by a young woman at Kekerengu. The meal was delicious, the ground soft and warm, and the alarm birds — spurwing plovers, they later discovered — woke them at first light with their urgent cries high overhead. They took their time with a breakfast of reheated leftovers, while Bojay and Sofa continued devouring the foliage that was even now changing colour and starting to fall.

On the outskirts of Christchurch two people rode towards them. They were both in their early twenties, a young Pakeha man and a Maori woman. The man had suffered a serious beating. He had teeth knocked out. Fresh swelling around both eyes was purple and bloody. His nose looked broken, his clothes were bloodstained and torn. One arm hung useless at his side.

She seemed in better shape, but her face carried some mean-looking bruises and her eyes had a haunted quality.

The fellow managed a ‘Gidday.' She didn't say anything.

Sean and Kevin got as far as a brief ‘Kia ora' before the battered state of the pair blew any formalities away.

‘You guys are in a bad way,' Sean said. ‘You looking for help?'

‘We're getting away.' The woman spoke for the first time. ‘Out of the city.'

He needed cleaning up. Sean had no idea what she needed, apart from safety. Returning to the city was out of the question. He looked at Kevin, who nodded.

‘Come on then,' Sean said. ‘I take it you've got no objections to riding west.'

It wasn't a hard decision. Sean and Kevin suspected Colin was somewhere in the city, at home with the skinz who had long made the place their stronghold. Turning west and taking the inland road was a relief, even though Sean had been looking forward to seeing what had become of the trees and flowers he remembered from calendars. But they could see that bad trouble lurked somewhere in the city. So west it was, and they wasted no time in putting several kilometres between themselves and the city.

Clayton was his name, Hoheria was hers. They'd met at the Cathedral Square markets and had spent the past six months looking for somewhere to live. They'd finally decided to move away from Christchurch in search of another community.

But they weren't quick enough. They'd been accosted by four skinz, and a tall skinny guy with dirty blonde hair. The attackers tried to force Clayton to look on while they raped Hoheria. He'd fought ferociously. They almost killed him. Leaving him for dead, they all ravaged the young woman. She was left unconscious. It was night when she came to and dragged her still-insensible partner around the back of a nearby house. She remembered the blonde one saying that they hadn't finished, they'd be back. He didn't say what they'd do, but she was terrified. Barely able to move, she recovered their horses and lay on the back porch with her arms around her mate wondering if she'd ever feel like a person again. Some time in the night Clayton regained consciousness and the two of them tried to comfort each other. At dawn they began their ride out of the city. They had no clear destination in mind. They just wanted to get away from the nightmare.

Sean and Kevin called a halt at midday under the shade of a row of poplars. A cup of tea. Something to eat.

‘Excuse me,' said Hoheria hesitantly. ‘Could I please have that hot water? We need to get cleaned up.'

‘Feel like some fried veggies?' Kevin asked.

‘No thanks. We'd better keep moving.'

That night they talked Hoheria into stopping and they camped by a willow-lined stream. The young couple spent over an hour immersed in a deep pool. Sean shot a turkey with the crossbow and tried to cook food for four in one frypan. A good meal helped them relax. As a full moon rose, Sean could see they were slowly rejoining the land of the living. They were both relieved to be alive and in a safe place, but Hoheria still looked around at every noise. Sean and Kevin did their best to reassure her, especially about Hamu's abilities as a watchdog. They slept around the fire, Clayton and Hoheria in each other's arms and Sean and Kevin wrapped in their saddle-blankets.

Sean dreamed again, a magical little village by the sea. This time there were people in the dream, smells and noises too. He could hear surf and a dog barking. He saw wide, dusty, sunlit streets and cottages from his childhood, windows and doors forming friendly faces. Men and women wearing colourful patched clothes walked with arms around each other. There were no old people, and no babies either. He heard laughter and casual chatter. Wood smoke tickled his nose and when he sneezed he woke up, lying by a dead fire under a full moon. This time the dream had come with a sense of urgency, the feeling time was running out. Where was the place? Where did the dream come from? What did it mean? He lay in the moonlight wondering.

Magpies woke them, warbling away as the hot sun rose. They took turns bathing in the stream and when Sean got back Hoheria was helping Kevin fry turkey and potato leftovers with freshly gathered chickweed. Clayton was trying to get some movement back into his left arm, immobile after a kick in the elbow while he lay on the ground.

‘Thanks for everything,' he said. ‘Things were looking really black for a while there.'

Sean laughed. ‘You wouldn't care to rephrase that?'

Hoheria stopped her stirring. ‘They're getting browner by the hour.'

When they were packed and mounted and riding through Darfield, cleaned up like the small towns they'd seen elsewhere, she dropped back to where Sean and Bojay were cruising along in the rear. Where was Sean from, she asked. Who was his iwi? From Ngapuhi, he told her, surprised at her resilience, her ability to look beyond her own hurt. His ancestry was Samoan and Irish. He didn't know about Kevin. She was Kahungunu, she said, but she wasn't sure about anything any more.

‘Nearly everyone I knew is gone now. Everything is different since the Fever. Where does that leave Clayton and me?'

Sean felt like replying ‘Why ask me?' but he suddenly remembered Auntie Mihi. He looked at Hoheria, trust in her eyes despite her horrible experience. He had to say something.

‘You're a Pacific person,' he told her. ‘And it doesn't matter what happened. You're still Ngati Kahungunu. Maybe it isn't such a big deal any more. Maybe it's more important than ever. Your choice. It always was.' He felt like an imposter, a charlatan.

But it was enough for Hoheria. She thanked Sean and rode ahead to Clayton. Sean heard the sharp hiss of an indrawn breath as Clayton stretched and flexed his arm, and reached out to caress her shoulder. She spoke to him and he laughed. Maybe Sean's words had been of some help. He wondered what she'd said.

‘You've got a big mouth, mate,' he said to himself.

For the next two hours he felt a rising tide of responsibility, waves of alarm and a deep and irresistible current of uncertainty swirling around him. He thought of Auntie Mihi, Uncle Wire, and all the old ones who'd navigated the treacherous waters of the twentieth century, equipped with nothing more than the collective strength of their own characters and the teachings of those who went before them. He'd never thought of Uncle Wire silenced by doubts, but he must have had his moments, invisible to Sean in his youthful arrogance. He could hear the old man chuckling as if he was riding alongside.

‘Now you know what it feels like, boy!'

Now Sean did know. He was so busy thinking about Hoheria's state of mind and wondering how she was able to keep going after such a horrendous invasion, that he missed the turn-off that led down to the Rakaia River, through places like Glentunnel and Windwhistle. Clayton had a good map in his shoulder bag but he couldn't see very well through his swollen eyes, and before long Sean realised they were heading into the Alps.

A few kilometres past Springfield, deserted and windblown, they boiled the billy and consulted Clayton's map. A southerly front blew over. Clayton and Hoheria must have been accustomed to such weather, but Kevin and Sean couldn't believe the sudden plunge in temperature and the way the freezing wind knifed through their swannies. Sean was suddenly aware of Hamu at his back, out of the wind and leaning against him for the warmth.

According to the map, they could take a southerly turn at Lake Lyndon and skirt the northern end of Lake Coleridge, then follow the Acheron River down to a road running alongside the Rakaia River, opposite Mt Hutt. As they climbed towards Porters Pass, a feeling of foreboding grew in Sean. They rode around rocky bluffs and between hills steeper than any he'd seen. Stony slopes and tussocky promontories marked their progress. Hawks soared high overhead in the pale blue sky. The streams had names like Kowhai and Rubicon and the water was icy sweet, spilling into rocky pools and tumbling down miniature gorges. Sean battled with a growing anxiety, a certainty of trouble on the way.

The sun was glowing gold above snowy mountains as they came to Lake Lyndon and the turn-off they'd been looking for. They made themselves comfortable below the road on the lake shore. As they sat there resting, Clayton nursing his wounds and Kevin and Hoheria tending the fire, a gust of wind from the east brought the distant roar of motorbikes. Sean leapt to his feet and called to the others. Kevin heard the bikes too and stopped to listen.

‘They're coming this way,' he said. ‘They're onto us.'

‘How do they know?' asked Hoheria, her voice tremulous with fear.