Kokopu Dreams (17 page)

‘How did you guys get across Cook Strait?' Sean asked. Hemi looked him straight in the eye and spoke without a flicker of a smile.

‘We didn't go that way,' he said. Actually they'd crossed the strait with Geoff and had heard a lurid tale of Sean and Kevin's storm-tossed voyage years before. They'd also stayed with Zed and Fiona and had heard an even more fanciful story about how they'd crossed the renamed Ngerunui Plains, fighting off lions and packs of wild dogs.

They helped Hemi clean up a house for him and Cally, and the pair of them fitted into the community as if they'd been there all along — and in a way they had. That was one of the things Sean learned over the years, that people kept their past with them, the important thing being how easy it was to live with. Sean had no trouble living with his, but he was very wary about spending too much time wandering around in it. If he wasn't suddenly blasted with a noise like a train wreck, he'd be bumping into some long-dead auntie or uncle.

‘C'mon, boy,' Sean would hear. ‘Watch what you're doing.'

One day he saw Cally down at the foreshore. She was getting large and so were the others. Cally was gazing intently at a spot a few metres out in the water where huge bubbles were rising. She was having a boy, she told Alex and Sean, and they were going to call him Tinirau.

‘Do you want to have a baby?' Sean asked Alex that night. She gave him a look.

‘Doubt it,' she said. ‘Been there, done that. I've even got the tee shirt somewhere. What about you?'

Sean thought for a moment. ‘No thanks. The dreams are enough.'

But were they? Were they really? He reached for the bowl on the bedside table.

‘Here,' he said. ‘Try one of these apples.'

CHRIS BAKER grew up in small towns all over the North Island. He worked in New Zealand and Australia as a journalist and editor and left the profession for fencing, bush and farm work, driving, construction work and concrete finishing. An environmental campaigner in the 1970s, in the 1980s he was a Labourer's Union job delegate at the Marsden Point refinery expansion before moving to Brighton, south of Dunedin, where he now lives.

‘I'm currently confined to a wheelchair (multiple sclerosis) and am writing full-time. My ancestry is Polynesian (Samoan), Celtic and Anglo-Saxon. I regard myself as a Pacific person, and my thanks to Ngapuhi Nui Tonu and particularly Ngati Hau and Ngati Korora for taking me in and allowing me to feel like I belonged somewhere.'