Kokopu Dreams (4 page)

‘Hope so, bro,' Sean said. He was thinking they'd just come through a time that could have blown them apart. Any number of fates could have finished them — dogs, the rope, Dr Death.

Cally was on the mattress to Sean's right. He'd helped her pin her taniwha on the wall. Hemi was beyond her, then Marie. Sean leaned back, closed his eyes, breathed deep, and it suddenly came to him what he'd wanted to ask her.

‘Are you okay, girl?'

‘Yes, I am,' she said. ‘I like it here. I feel safe with so many people.'

‘How come you were all clean when we found you?'

She looked at him for a long time, trying to work out what he meant. ‘I told you,' she said, ‘the taniwha looked after me. I didn't get sick.' She threw him a sideways glance, like he was a bit simple. ‘Excuse me, I'm going to sleep now, I'm tired,' she said, and, burrowing under her blankets, she was soon giving off the rhythmic snuffling and snorting of a small creature in repose, oblivious to all about her.

Sean didn't find sleep so easily, though, and when he finally drifted off he had the first of many strange dreams.

He was back at Pukepoto, Te Rina's ancestral home. He was walking across McKinleys' farm towards the Waitangi Stream to find a place where he could take the kids swimming. It was midsummer. Everything was hot and dry. The stream looked idyllic from a distance, an attractive line of cool, green willows, but up close it was a series of dark impenetrable pools ringed with willow roots and choked with fallen trees and floodborne debris. He took his time, climbing the drystone walls and skirting the giant pig-pear tree, wasps buzzing drunkenly around its fermenting windfalls.

As he drew closer something shifted. The willows vanished. The stream was wide and clear. Waving grasses grew on the banks. A few metres back, feathery manuka danced delicately in a gentle breeze. Sunlight glinted on the water tinkling down rapids at the head of a long pool. He'd never seen anything so inviting. He peeled off his clothes and sat in the sun, the grasses tickling his side. He gazed at the water as it fanned out from the base of the rapids and magnified the coloured stones scattered along the stream bed.

Then something happened in his head. There was a noise like boulders cracking and rumbling in a snowmelt mountain torrent. Or maybe it was like the thunder of surf, and the hiss of a wave sweeping up a beach. Or maybe it wasn't a noise at all. Maybe it was like an eel insinuating itself through a field of marine grass, with the effortless ease of a Bach fugue or a Miles Davis solo. Whatever, it was irresistible.

‘Haere mai!' it said, but not in words. ‘Haere mai kei roto i te manga.'

Sean didn't hesitate. He stood up and dived, as far out as he could, and as he hit the water he experienced not the shock of coldness, but immersion in a cloud of emotion: triumph, sadness, pride, compassion and a feeling of great antiquity. He entered another world. He could breathe. His vision was sharper. Images rang in his head.

‘I'm Tinirau. I've been swimming the waters of Kiwa's ocean since your people lived in trees and ate raw flesh. I'm older than Kiwa. I'm older than anyone. I've watched the children of the land come and go, the people of the sea too. I endure. I watch, and guard. I'll be here long after this place is nothing but damp ground.'

Sean started drifting with the current. Above him the water swirled and the sunlight splintered. Chalcedony and carnelian were splashes of blood glinting on the stream bed. Soft grasses grew in the sand by the banks and wafted in the eddies. On the surface, stained glass melted and flowed. Rainbows formed and vanished like little daubs of light from a spinning crystal.

‘Beautiful, isn't it,' sounded in Sean's head like bells pealing.

‘Where are you?' he asked — or thought.

‘You can't see me. The sight of me might kill you. But you can believe I'm all around you. I'm the water sparkling in the rapids. I'm the gentle grasses waving in the current. I'm the tuna watching from his hole in the bank. I'm the koura under a rock in the shallow water. I'm the kokopu dreaming in the dappled shadows. See them, you see me. Love them, you love me.'

Sean drifted on, entranced, light and colour incandescent about him. He thought of Cally's paintings.

‘What about the little girl?' he asked.

‘Calliope can see me whenever she wants. She understands. She respects and believes. She doesn't fear me. She even loves me.'

Ahead a darkness grew. The banks closed in, lined with knotted tree roots. The bottom became muddied. Suddenly Sean was afraid.

‘Don't be frightened,' came a far-from-reassuring feeling. ‘Nothing here will hurt you. It's just ugly.'

Sean was plunged into a pit, one of the willow-lined pools. Down he sank, aware of his naked vulnerability as he came close to the sides, tangled roots hiding dark cavities. The water was chilly and tasted bitter. A greenish-grey light was just enough to see by but not bright enough to cheer. His heart froze, and as the bottom came in view he cringed. It was muddy, carpeted with bones, bits of wire, a set of rusted bed-springs, a car chassis, discarded machinery.

‘Welcome to my spare room,' said the voice, not a trace of amusement. ‘You can stay here as long as you like.'

Sean looked around at the sheep skeletons, the corroding metal. He tasted chemicals in the water. What could he say? He couldn't think of a worse crime than turning the sparkling stream into this disgusting pit.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. He'd been fighting the ugliness for years, but he'd always felt he was still a part of it.

‘So you should be. Did you imagine you were exempt from the workings of the law of cause and effect? Did you think your greed was without price? But most of you are gone now and, even if it's too late for this place, there are still streams where the kokopu does his nightly dance. You should go there. There's nothing for you here.'

Sean sank to the bottom, overcome with a dreadful despair. He lay on the mud, his eyes stinging in the now-acrid water, and sobbed.

‘Piki mai, kake mai!' boomed in his head like the opening bars of a symphony. ‘Stop lying there feeling sorry for yourself. Get up. Calliope asked me to help you so I did, and I've given you all the help I feel like giving. You know what to do!'

Sean didn't know. He just wanted to get out of that dreadful cheerless place and back to the sunlight. He started swimming upwards, choked on the water, and had to hold his breath. When his head broke the surface, he swam to the side of the pool and clambered out, his flesh creeping at the touch of the willow roots. He found his clothes a little way upstream after climbing around pools and over fallen trees. They were hanging in the branches of the dead willow that lay across the dark water. Caught up next to them was the rotting carcass of a sheep, drowned in a recent flood and half eaten by water rats. He dressed quickly and scrambled up the bank, back into the sunlight.

He was on his mattress in the wharenui. It was early morning, just light enough to see. Cally was lying on her side, watching him carefully. Her head was propped on her left hand.

‘I didn't know your name was Calliope,' Sean said.

‘Course,' she replied. ‘It's Greek. She looks after people who write long poems. I haven't written one yet, but I'm going to. Did you like where the taniwha took you?'

Sean looked at her. He couldn't think what to say. What was real? What was a dream? He thought he'd woken up, but as people stirred around them, disturbed by the conversation, he felt disjointed, detached, like the fragile state after a mushroom vision that had blurred all the boundaries and trampled the physical rules.

He pulled himself up against the wall and sat there with his head spinning. Goya-esque images of impaled sheep, accompanied by Verdi arias, strobed and echoed in his mind. Cally called him back.

‘You'll have to leave here, won't you?' she said.

He took a few seconds to collect himself, the realisation slowly dawning on him. Of course he'd have to leave. He'd just been given the hard word, clear and succinct for all its outlandish delivery. He had no idea of the consequences of staying but, looking across at Cally, he knew that, even if he didn't understand what was happening, he'd best go along with events. Go with the flow, as the old hippies might have said. He felt like an old hippie. He felt like Alice in Wonderland.

‘I'm late, I'm late,' he muttered.

‘What?' said Cally.

‘Nothing. It's just a book about some strange things that happened to a little girl.' She gave him a hard and searching look. On the wall behind her the jewels on the taniwha sparkled and glowed.

5

EVERY DAY WHILE the autumn lasted, they dug and planted, chopped and gathered, and every night they talked. Some of them hadn't coped with all the death and the loss of the people they loved. They took extra care with those who hadn't handled their lives exploding in their faces. When Cathy was confronted with the aftermath of the Fever, she unfocused her vision and turned off her speech. She wasn't alone in her oblivion and nobody was surprised either.

‘We know this is very difficult,' Sean or Jim would say. ‘The trick is to find a bright side. And if you do, let us all know.'

The Ngahere people avoided the shops, preferring to compete with the dogs for sheep, search out suburban veggie gardens, and catch eels and pick watercress in the creek behind the school. The kids had guarded that place jealously, Brian said. They started with various ecological studies and had come to love a bit of genuine, wild beauty in their midst. Sean soon found a healing tranquillity in the place, and he often fished there for eels, especially at night with a kero lamp, some ripe bones, sneaked before somebody put them into a stew, and an unbarbed gaff.

‘Here, catch this, little brother!' Sean would call out as he slung an eel up to where Hemi was waiting on the grassy bank with a taro sack he'd found in the storeroom. Hemi's black gear was dark green and brown after three or four weeks. He still didn't say much, but he didn't miss much either, and he was very quick with the eels. Cally went with them a few times, till Hemi handed her a smallish eel that wrapped itself around her arm and barked.

They smoked the eels in the chimney whenever they weren't burning treated timber. The boss cook was a fiftyish Pakeha guy called Doug. He'd learned the craft of feeding lots of people without electricity in the army, and while there had sussed that the art of being a good officer was to delegate anything that mattered and take the blame for everything. He kept up an endless supply of black tea for the people who would volunteer to peel vegetables or do other useful things, so they could take some time to sit on an upturned milk crate by the fire.

‘It burns a lot of wood,' he'd say, ‘but so what. Plenty of that around.' There was too. They indulged Kevin by demolishing the Henare block and feeding the timber through the fireplace, roasting meat, simmering stews and boiling rice, taro, potatoes and pasta. They needed the carbohydrate for energy, Marie told them. She took charge of the menus and brought a considerable knowledge of matters dietary and medical to bear on the business of keeping everyone healthy. To Sean's relief they didn't have to worry about food or shelter. They cared for each other too, especially those who hadn't been cared about much before, and that was more people than you might have thought.

Two of the young men were particularly fine examples of parental and societal neglect. Once they recovered from the initial shock they weren't too distressed by what had happened. Apart from everyone dying, they were even pleased.

‘Saves me the trouble,' said Puru, a young Black Power prospect, abused and bullied at home, expelled from school and, at only seventeen, already locked into a depressing cycle of crime, court and jail. He didn't mind seeing everything trashed, he couldn't have cared less. Finally he was being valued and even liked. Puru took charge of fencing the school playing fields into paddocks and organising a nightly dogwatch to protect their flock of sheep and the three dairy cows they were hoping to milk in the spring.

Brian and Sean used the school metal and woodwork shops to shape their shotguns into sawn-offs, less accurate but very effective under twenty metres. They regularly did the dogwatch, not sleepy for a second after an attack in the first week by a pack of about eight dogs, luckily not too hungry but mean and determined enough. Smart too. The dogs fought in pairs, one attacking noisily from the front while the other came in silently from the side. They must have practised on somebody, Sean said. He told Jim about the rifles in the sports shop.

‘Good job,' said Jim. ‘There are still people round I wouldn't trust with a sharp stick.'

Jim had his own rifle and would occasionally vanish for a day or so, reappearing with a dressed sheep over his shoulder. Once somebody asked him where he was going, pikau on his back, rifle slung over his shoulder and axe in hand.

‘Woolly pigs,' he said cryptically, a phrase that soon entered the common parlance, whenever somebody wanted some time out.

Jim was a Tarara, of mixed Maori-Dalmatian ancestry. Late in the 1800s a lot of Dalmatian men left Europe, looking for a new life away from chronic unpleasantness in the Balkans. When they arrived in Aotearoa, they worked in the gumfields of the north. Isolated and marginalised by the British settlers of the day and beguiled by the locals, some of them married Maori women. Eventually Dalmatian brides-to-be arrived and many of the local women were abandoned. But some of the marriages survived and Sean had met Maori people with names ending in -ich and -oj. Jim's marae was near an old gumfield on the west coast but he preferred to stay close to his wife's marae, a few kilometres outside Whangarei. He told Sean his story late one night in the kitchen.

‘I got sick, same as everyone around me. But I woke up. They didn't. I nearly lost it then. I sat by the stream over the back for hours, and every time I went back, thinking maybe it had been an awful dream, they were still dead ... I lay in the stream for hours,' he told Sean. ‘I got clean but I didn't wake up.'

‘So what'd you do?'

‘I cleaned them up and set fire to everything. Then bugger me if I didn't get hungry.' Sean remembered the roast chicken. ‘So I ate the neighbour's pet goat. Then I took his car. Mine was burned up.'

‘Thirty houses around Mira's marae,' said Jim. ‘Nobody alive, only dogs.' He spat into the fire. ‘They didn't look too hungry either, so I shot the fucking lot.' Sean finished rolling his cigarette and lit it.

‘I checked all the houses then,' he said. ‘I just wanted to hear somebody say "hey, bro!" But I didn't hear a thing. So I set fire to every house.' Sean poured glasses of brandy and pictured him at his terrible task, grim-faced and dry-eyed, all alone and unable to weep.

He wept in the Ngahere High School kitchen though, a candle on the table and some classroom framing in the fireplace throwing a soft and gentle light while Jim gave it all up. Sean wept with him. He couldn't help it. A karanga or someone else's tears would bring on the waterworks every time. The tears and snot could flow free. That night they slept on the concrete floor, passed out in front of the fire. Doug tossed a blanket over the two men and put pillows under their heads. Next day they had the worst hangovers either could remember.

‘Serves us right I suppose,' Jim said, bleary and bilious in the sunlight. ‘But I don't care, I needed that.'

A few days later Kevin hot-wired a car. Puru, Mike, Kevin and Sean drove to the centre of Whangarei. They wanted to see how things were. Through the open window came a mind-numbing stench. The town centre was deserted. Broken glass and wind-blown paper were strewn across the landscape.

Puru wrinkled his nose. ‘Man, this sucks,' he said, just before Kevin stalled the car at a stop sign. ‘You don't have to stop, cuz,' he continued. ‘Who's going to give you a ticket now?' Kevin didn't reply. He was trying to start the car. When it wouldn't he turned to Puru.

‘It's knackered,' he said. ‘Got your cellphone? We better call AA.'

They were attacked by three different packs of dogs on the five-kilometre walk home. Ralph appeared during the second attack. Sean shook his head in disbelief at the middle-aged man with his quiet refined voice. Ralph wore a blood-spattered powder-blue tracksuit and carried a machete. He saved them a lot of ammunition. He leapt, crouched and struck with a savage abandon, severing spines and cleaving skulls. He hadn't yet learned to wear leather on his forearms and both his sleeves were in tatters with the flesh beneath torn and bloody. That night in the wharenui Sean asked him why he was alone and walking north when they met.

‘A woman was raped where I was staying,' he said. ‘It wasn't right and I said so. The three men who did it told me if I didn't shut up they'd kill me.'

‘What about the woman?' said Mike.

‘I asked her to come with me, but she said she'd stay with what she knew. I think she felt safer where she was, horrible as those people were, and she might even have been right. I certainly couldn't say.' He gave Sean a searching look and seemed to see something he could relate to. ‘I'm an investment consultant. I like to listen to Mozart and Puccini. Read Proust and Camus. Or I used to. All the people I knew, my wife and daughter, my friends, are gone. I can't live with those fellows.' He gave Sean another look, almost apologetic. ‘Excuse me talking about myself. I never had to before.'

‘You're welcome,' Sean said, thinking of what lay in store for this quiet, professional man, with his suddenly discovered penchant for mayhem and his ‘death before dishonour' stand against the lowlives in his former community. ‘I haven't heard any Mozart, but if you go in the kitchen you're likely to hear Dizzy Gillespie on Doug's boombox. Feel free to use the school library too. Bound to be something for you in there. And don't worry if you don't like the music. The batteries won't last forever.'

Sean could see Mike thinking ‘takes all sorts'. Mike had met Puru in Mt Eden when he was doing eight months for ripping off his employers — a firm of investment consultants.

Sean wondered if he'd say anything to Ralph, but he chose not to. Instead he said, ‘Bet you were a gun at tennis, eh bro!'

‘How did you know?' replied Ralph, already a world away from investment opportunities.

Mike laughed. ‘If you swung a racquet like you swung that machete, move over Pistol Pete, Rocket Ralph is here!'

Ralph laughed too. He looked at Sean again.

‘You know, dreadful as this sounds, if I don't think about my family too much, this new life is a lot more interesting than the old.'

Over the next few days Sean kept getting flashes of the awful feeling of vulnerability that came over him when the car broke down. He was conscious too, more than ever before, of the detachment and isolation he'd felt when the car door slammed. He suspected he was alone, though, in his distrust of motor vehicles, so he kept quiet — until Edgar spoke up.

‘You were lucky,' he said to Sean in the kitchen one night. ‘You might have been badly mauled. Even killed.' Edgar must have been a mind-reader, Sean thought. He'd never trusted cars and he'd always regarded the top speed of a bicycle as the absolute upper limit, even if he had acknowledged convention and convenience by driving an old gold-metal-flake Vauxhall Cresta. It had lime green, imitation lambswool lining overhead and flashing lights to show the firing order. The kids had been ashamed. When Sean drove them to school they made him drop them off around a corner two blocks away.

‘Big shrink!' they told him. ‘What if somebody sees us?'

But he was relieved to hear Edgar's misgivings, and the old man's next words opened up a whole new world.

‘There's a riding school about a mile up the road,' he said. ‘Maybe you could try riding horses. You'd probably be safe on a horse.'

And there it was. Sean knew he'd be leaving soon. He didn't know where he'd be going either. For all he knew he'd be travelling the length of the country. A horse. Of course. He laughed to himself at the old song. Then he remembered that in the whole of his life he'd never ridden a horse and he knew absolutely nothing about them. He had read somewhere they had a lot in common with cats — a snippet of information that eroded completely the little burst of enthusiasm and confidence Edgar's words had wrought. Edgar's next words didn't help either.

‘But you won't get me on a horse. I'd rather wait for a bus.

Sean sighed. Tomorrow.

Two teenage girls and a middle-aged man drove into the school the next day. The man lay feverish and incoherent on the back seat. They put him to bed. That night Marie spoke to Sean in the kitchen.

‘You know, if he's got anything contagious those girls'll have it too, and before long the rest of us as well.'

Marie was right. It was contagious. Within two days the man was dead and both girls were sick, and inside a week some of the community were experiencing symptoms that scared them all. A few of them, needing privacy for nocturnal activities, had moved their mattresses out of the wharenui and into classrooms and offices. When the first of them started hallucinating with accompanying sweats and dizzies they all moved back in together and held their breath while they examined each other for signs of blood. To their vast relief there weren't any, but it was a mean illness, a strain of flu they decided. There was awful dehydration brought about by everything going at both ends, nonstop, terrible vomiting and diarrhoea. Luckily they didn't all get sick at once and anyone still on their feet brought water, cleaned up and did their best to look after everyone. Hemi and Cally didn't get sick at all. Hemi took Sean's sawn-off and ran the dogwatch every night, some nights on his own, and Cally kept the kitchen going, feeding the fire and even managing to cook watery stews that were probably exactly what people needed.

It killed four, including little Eric, and that left a bigger hole in Sean's heart than almost anything. He never stopped missing the kid. Eric was three. Walking the streets in the first week, Jim heard him crying from hunger, fear and loneliness.

‘Man that kid could holler,' he'd told them. ‘I heard him about a block away.' Jim had stuffed him in a backpack and fought his way back to the school marae. Everyone who found their way there soon fell in love with Eric. Sean had never seen anyone throw food like Eric. He would hurl a bowl of stew against the wall, shattering the plate and covering a vast area with his meal. Puru always laughed.