Kokopu Dreams (5 page)

‘Know how you feel, kid,' he'd say, extending a large hand palm up.

‘Gimme five, bro,' he'd say then, all serious. Eric would glower and snort and then break into the most radiant smile, slapping Puru's hand and laughing.

They buried Eric in a hastily fenced cemetery, along with the middle-aged man who brought the flu, young Naomi who slipped away so quietly, her ethereal adolescence wrapped around her like the most insubstantial of shrouds, and Edgar's mate, Bill, who had often regaled people with his merchant navy adventures from World War Two, up the Clyde for a refit and brawling with the ‘poison dwarves' from Partic.

Sean felt Eric's death more keenly than the loss of his own family, and Puru was inconsolable. They wept and wailed over their family for three days but all the tangi didn't make them feel any better. All their work hadn't been enough. It hadn't saved Eric and the other members of their family and nothing could have helped. They were cheated and let down. They'd done their best and the hammer was still descending.

After the burial they gathered in the dining room for the traditional meal, except everyone was subdued, nobody was singing or laughing. Puru leapt to his feet in the middle of the meal, up-ending the table and scattering plates of food.

‘Fuck this!' he roared, berserk with grief and rage. He stormed out of the hall and by dark he'd demolished two classrooms. Charlene took him a cup of tea at one stage. He was still crying, she said when she returned. She'd put the tea down and moved away from the wild swings of his sledgehammer, tearful herself but frightened by the depth of his passion.

It was mostly Edgar who saved them. Sean wasn't really sure what he did, but somehow he inserted himself into all their lives and his gentle wisdom and humour was a most effective antidote against the depression that followed the sickness and the funerals. Sean asked him once how he felt.

‘I'm a tough old bastard,' he said. ‘Take more than a bug to get me down.'

Edgar had been a navigator in Lancaster bombers during World War Two. He' told Sean stories about their training at Edmonton in Canada. A British flag had flown from a flagpole by the gate. Orders were issued that everyone, coming and going, would salute it. The Kiwi contingent was unimpressed. Mindful of the historical precedent of Hone Heke, they cut the flagpole down and, chopping it up, fed it into the woodstove in their barracks during the thirty-below sub-Arctic winter. The Brits never did get the measure of the Kiwis and Aussies, Edgar said. Their officers were always making references to ‘colonials', but they couldn't hide their fear of these irreverent laughing men, to whom class was nothing but a joke and mana the only thing worth respecting.

‘We made our own way then and we're doing it now,' Edgar said. ‘Never mind the details. They'll only get you down.'

Edgar had spent over two years in a German POW camp. He'd eat anything and he hated dogs. And he knew all about details too.

They recovered. Their humour was blacker and overnight they'd become harder, but somehow they were closer, more centred in the moment, and more aware of each other. Brian had been paying special attention to Cathy, sitting close to her in the wharenui, bringing her food and even feeding her at times when her sadness overwhelmed her and left her unable to move.

‘You're just sweet on her,' Marie teased him after everyone was back on their feet and it was safe to talk to each other without a flood of tears or a bite in the leg. But everybody was pleased the day Cathy brought Brian a cup of tea.

‘I forget, one sugar or two?'

Actually, it was no sugar. Doug had achieved instant and universal abstinence when, with an evil grin, he'd waved a pair of pliers and offered to perform dental surgery on anyone who needed it. Between them, Doug and Marie had been handling all the medical matters like sprains, cuts, infections and even broken bones. They used the well-equipped school infirmary, and Marie's detailed knowledge of natural cures, but it took them both a while to regain their confidence after the flu.

But the outburst of libidinous behaviour that happened after the flu took them all by surprise. Sean eventually figured it was the biological imperative to reproduce in the face of a threat to the species. He'd read once about a horrified group of US Peace Corps workers who arrived in the aftermath of an earthquake in South America. The locals weren't interested in their clean-cut saviours. They were busy bonking.

Everywhere the young middle-class Americans looked, they were aghast to find bonking couples, and not just under bushes or behind buildings, but in the middle of the road and the village square, in full view, amid the rubble and devastation, with the finer things like decorum and discretion tossed to the wind.

Sean laughed, until he found out how they felt. One night he was in the kitchen describing to Doug how he'd tripped over a couple copulating in a doorway.

‘They didn't care where they were,' he was saying to Doug when Robyn came in, wearing a predatory look that had an amazingly sexy effect when combined with her usual long skirt and high-buttoned blouse. She gave a little wiggle and lifted an eyebrow at Sean. As he got to his feet, the conversation with Doug forgotten, a flood of testosterone burst the dam he wasn't even aware of.

‘Your place or mine, girl?' he managed to joke before they were rushing for the nearest classroom, tearing their clothes off as they went.

Robyn left him limp and exhausted. He lay on the floor for an hour, his head under a desk, but when he regained enough strength to get to his feet all he could think was that he wanted to go again. He was hopping through the door, no particular person in mind, when he was knocked over by Robyn returning. She was towing young Mark by the hand. She didn't even see him.

The only person not affected by the lust that gripped everyone was Edgar. But he was certainly amused. He told Sean it was like Auckland after he was finally demobbed. He could have rooted himself silly, he said, except after two years in a POW camp he didn't have the strength and now he simply couldn't be bothered. He told Sean a joke.

‘They offered me super sex,' he said. ‘I told them if it was all the same to them, I'd rather have the soup.'

But for two or three weeks nobody was thinking about soup. All they could think about was how desirable was the person next to them. They didn't even wonder if the attraction was mutual. It was, for a while at least, and they went at it like there was no tomorrow — indeed, there might not have been, although that sort of philosophical gem was far from Sean's mind as he grunted and bonked along with everyone else.

Eventually everyone calmed down, and Sean was able to relate to people on a less carnal level. He especially liked spending time around Patrick. The man was discreet and near-invisible, but with an earthy presence, like the smell of a horse blanket or manuka in the rain. Patrick had grown up on a South Island high-country sheep station and had gone adventuring when he was sixteen. He looked like a mountain goat with his shaggy hair and satyr eyes and he was deceptively tough and strong. In his twenties, he and a friend had run overland treks in Africa, driving an old quad, a four-wheel-drive ex-Rhodesian Army truck, the length of the continent, braving the most amazing hazards from land mines to tsetse flies. Patrick laughed when he heard of Sean's equine intentions.

‘I'll come with you,' he said. ‘Just in case you pick yourself a failed pacer that trots like a water-filled balloon.'

Kevin, Patrick and Sean walked to the riding school together. They found half a dozen horses in an eaten-down paddock near a shed containing all the gear Patrick said they'd need — saddles, bridles, halters, reins, stirrups, surcingles, shoes, rasps, nails — and a big bin of apples they tipped out for the starving animals.

Patrick cast a practised eye over the six horses and chose three he thought would be suitable, shoeing them with an expert ease. Sean watched carefully while he worked and slowly became aware of a huge horse standing beside him, watching too, like he was sharing Sean's interest. His mane was shaggy and dreadlocked. He had ‘TZ Nirm' branded on his neck. The apples were making him fart, great gassy Braeburn billows that filled the shed where they were working and made Patrick laugh.

‘I think he likes you,' he said. ‘He's getting all emotional.'

When they mounted the three horses and rode down the drive they heard hooves following and turned around. There was their flatulent friend, a determined look about him, clearly not about to be left behind. So they stopped and Patrick shod him too. As soon as Patrick was finished, the horse walked over and stood by Sean. Sean looked at him, took the saddle off the first horse, saddled his new friend and mounted. Sure enough, he trotted like a water-filled balloon, but it didn't really matter.

He had a comfortable amble that suited both of them, even if they did lag behind on their way back to the school.

Sean named him Bojangles, Bojay for short. Bojay and Hamu disliked each other on sight. Bojay resented Hamu's freedom and every chance he got he'd try to stand on Hamu. On the other hand, Hamu resented Bojay's ability to eat anything green. Once, when he thought nobody was looking, Sean found Hamu trying to eat grass, his doggy face twisted with the bitter taste and what looked like utter disbelief.

They spent a week getting used to each other, most of the time with Bojay learning not to throw Sean when he fired his sawn-off from the saddle. Finally, Sean couldn't put off his departure any longer. He'd never been so torn about anything. He wanted to stay with his friends, but he was getting that early spring itch when the weather warms and the plants bud. He felt suffocated, and finally it was Jim who gave him the push he needed.

‘Bugger off,' he said. ‘But send us a postcard if it's any good where you're going.'

Sean knew he wouldn't find anywhere better, but that wasn't why he was going and everyone seemed to know that. They made him gifts of a saddle-blanket, a tarpaulin with cord and rubber ties, and a tomahawk. Ralph came shyly up to him and handed him a book; Pablo Neruda's poems, stamped inside the front cover ‘Property of Ngahere HS Library'.

‘You can return it next time you're passing through,' he said, laughing and pretending not to notice Sean's watery eyes.

The night before Sean left they had a feast in the dining hall — no drink or dak, but speeches, songs, and plenty of tears. His resolve was seriously shaken and all the questions he'd been asking himself resurfaced: Was he going too soon? Did he have to leave at all? Was a dream a good enough reason? Cally helped him through that one.

‘Yes, you do have to go,' she told him. ‘But don't worry. I'll come and find you when I'm older.'

He didn't doubt it. The next morning, when he kissed and hongi'd a line-up of about forty people, Cally and Hemi were at the end.

‘Don't forget,' she said. ‘We'll find you.'

6

RIDING THROUGH WHANGAREI gave the place a very different aspect. Sean thought he'd seen it all when he'd driven through with Mike, Puru and Kevin, but high up on Bojay, and moving at his unhurried walk, everything looked completely different. It wasn't just a better view of the old order breaking down. Sean saw the emergence of something entirely new, something very strange and scary too.

Thousands of dead bodies stunk in the spring warmth. Roadside verges were tangled masses of long grass and the lawns he passed weren't any better. Already hedges grew out over footpaths, betraying cars parked neatly in drives and at the roadside, most of them with tyres deflating. He felt ill with the stench and a rollie burning between his lips didn't help much. It certainly didn't seem like an auspicious start to their journey. Bojay ambled down the centre of the road, his hooves rhythmic on the tarseal, already cracking and sprouting grass and weeds.

From the top of the Ngahere Hill — a notorious piece of road on which the local hoons had traditionally wiped themselves out, failing to negotiate its steep curves on drunken Saturday nights — Sean saw smoke from a dozen fires right across the city. Kensington Park with its rugby and hockey fields and netball courts was no longer geared for weekend sport. Now it was fenced and grazed and smoke rose from a kitchen built onto a hall once used for A&P shows. No more ‘Best of Breed' or champion sword-dancer, Sean thought. No more rep sport or racing either, proud parents and team followers barracking from the sidelines, freezing in the driving winter rain, and punters agonising over their bets during the regular race meetings. It looked like people had occupied three of the local schools. Smoke rose from the tavern near Kensington Park where a kitchen had been constructed in the car park, and from Whangarei's one urban marae, a home to folk from all over the north.

A lone yacht, with a gentle breeze barely stiffening its stays'l, glided towards its berth. Sean imagined people fishing the harbour and gathering shellfish, scallops and giant Pacific oysters. The Pioneer Inn, a motel block near the yacht harbour, was occupied, its barbecue facilities under cover of clearlite and canvas. While he watched, tiny people moved back and forth from gardens behind the motel units. He pictured the ornamental cacti and palms replaced with fruit trees, taro growing in the stream trickling down the hillside in a series of swampy pools, its ponderous tubers and glossy leaves a dietary revelation to people accustomed to potatoes and peas.

But, from where he sat on Bojay, the place might as well have been deserted. Almost as strong as the stink was the silence. No cars.

They moved towards the town centre and the main road south. There were more signs of new life, but the evidence of disaster was right in Sean's face, everywhere he looked. He thought of visiting the communities he'd seen from the hill, but decided he didn't want to take the chance of running into the men Ralph had confronted. He'd spent the past few weeks wrestling with the prospect of much strangeness and difficulty and he didn't need to invite trouble, he decided.

In the town's former commercial heart, wind-blown paper and seagulls were everywhere, shop windows broken and merchandise spilling out onto the footpaths. He saw a rat scuttling into a pile of rubbish. Cockroaches and other insects were feasting on the rotted remains of meat on display in butchers' shops and delicatessens. Brightly coloured umbrellas, which had kept the sun and rain off shoppers sipping their lattes at wrought-iron tables, hung in tatters, shredded by the winter winds. The sun shone in a clear sky, but the desolation felt far worse than the suburban emptiness they'd almost come to accept in Ngahere.

Sean rode on, away from the town centre, past the deserted banks and office blocks, past the local newspaper office. The photos on display in their special window box were yellowing in the sunlight, the word EASE all that remained of a banner in front of a box of newspapers, full of a special edition pulped and congealed after four months out in the weather. He rode past the municipal rose gardens. The wishing well was about to vanish under climbing rose shoots that threaded their way across the untended mesh cover. Ducks splashed where their stream, in winter flood, had broken its banks and formed a small lake in the middle of the ornamental beds. Further up the road, a private hotel stood in the midst of herbaceous ruin. Inside the open door of the Pentecostal church next door, rain blowing in had lifted the lino, and tracts were scattered about. Outside on the glass-covered notice board ten-centimetre-high letters spelled out IT'S NOT TOO LATE.

Half a kilometre on, Sean turned left, passing the dairy factory, for years notorious for a regular discharge of protein-rich waste into the nearby stream. Periodically small boys had been photographed for the local paper staggering under the weight of a giant eel — taller than them and thick as a man's thigh from the regular dairy food diet. Somebody had driven a milk tanker through the glass frontage of the factory office. It sat there, stainless steel glinting in the sun, looking as if it was being excreted by the building. Paper from the office leaked through the shattered wall, and inert power lines were draped across the back of the immobile machine.

Just up the road from the factory was the marae. Smoke curled thinly from the chimney as it had no doubt done for decades while meals were cooked for visitors. Sean remembered the steady stream of people uprooted from their rural havens and resettled in Whangarei so they could work in the area's new factories, making glass and cement, bagging fertiliser and tending railway rolling stock. Te Rina and Sean used to help with the annual Christmas dinner, when the marae hosted two or three hundred of Whangarei's pensioners. Twice, cousin Joe and Sean had done a hangi, out at Pukepoto, driving the steaming baskets into town. They'd cooked chicken, pork, legs of mutton, treats like terotero, puddings, vegetables and bags of stuffing fragrant with herbs. There was kanga wai, teroi and bowls of raw fish, kina roe and marinated kutai for the old folk familiar with such delicacies. The young people had waited on the tables and entertained with song and dance. Local churches had helped with the transport and even politicians, local and national, had been permitted to make a brief appearance and escape unscathed, protected by a traditional goodwill.

Sean wasn't in the least surprised to find the marae occupied. It felt the same as it always had, warm and comfortable, a substantial and enduring oasis with a life of its own. To him the marae existed in its own time at its own pace, and it wasn't any different now.

Two old women sat outside the wharenui enjoying the sun as he approached. They looked up at the sound of Bojay's hooves.

‘Kia ora!' Sean called out, dismounting as he approached. They both stood and the three of them hongi'd, the old women's skin like rice paper, warm and soft and smelling of lavender when he kissed their cheeks.

‘You took your time,' one of them said. ‘But you're here now. Is everything alright?' She gave Sean the sort of piercing look that he knew would leave him flayed, exposed, if he had anything to hide.

‘Everything's fine, Auntie,' he said. Who was she? What did she know?

‘I'm Mihi. This is my friend Sophie. And you're Sean. Where on earth did you get a name like that, by the way?'

Sean had been around enough to know that conversations with elderly people were often like chess games, innocent remarks hiding unfathomable motives and leading to unimaginable ends. Words were often the crudest and least eloquent form of communication. So he tried to appear impassive, knowing that his involuntary reaction had probably already given her the answer to a question she hadn't even asked yet.

‘You'll be staying the night,' she said to him. ‘There's a paddock around the back for your horse.'

He wasn't going to argue. Curiosity and the thought of a shared meal easily overcame his desire to be out on the road, travelling south, away from the stink.

‘You'll want to be on your way. You've got a long journey ahead of you. But there are some things I need to say to you before you leave.'

Sean took Bojay around the back, unsaddled him and released him in a paddock with two other horses. The horse grazed unconcernedly, but Hamu wasn't impressed when Sean tied him by the kitchen door. Inside Sean waited. For the rest of the day he drank black tea, smoked too much and wondered what Mihi had on her mind.

Around dinnertime, two young men in white AFFCO overalls started frying grated potato with chopped-up onion and celery leaves, the delicious-smelling concoction bound with beaten egg. Finally Mihi appeared.

‘Smells good,' Sean said, as casually as he could. He'd learned over the years, mostly the hard way, that it never paid to appear disgruntled or at all put out by events. Right or wrong, any display of irritation was instantly interpreted as evidence of inflated self-importance, a serious impediment to progress in any area. Mihi laughed.

‘Bet you're hungry by now,' she said. ‘Come on through to the dining room.'

Sean followed her into the hall. It filled with about fifty people, many of whom he'd known in the past. Some smiled at him. Some looked surprised. Some embraced him, offering their commiserations. They had all lost children, parents, spouses, he knew, and in turn he offered his own sympathies. Mihi sat him beside her. After they'd eaten he spent the next hour talking with those around him about how they'd managed to establish themselves and who was involved with the Ngahere group.

Slowly the dining hall emptied as people left to attend to chores, or simply to sit outside for a smoke and a chat. When only Mihi and Sean were left, she patted his hand and moved her chair back.

‘Let's get comfortable,' she said. She waited while Sean stood and helped her with her chair, then she led the way into the wharenui.

It was already dark outside and the hall was lit with a couple of kero lamps. Tukutuku panels adorned the walls and kowhaiwhai covered the exposed beams overhead. Carved ancestors gazed out from the walls and held up two poles supporting the backbone far overhead. Flax mats softened an already well-worn floor as they padded across. Mihi indicated the end of her mattress, and Sean sat cross-legged while she piled cushions and pillows against the wall and snuggled into them with a blanket over her legs. Other people were in the house but it felt like they were alone, just the two of them. They sat in an easy quiet till finally Mihi spoke.

‘Which road are you taking south of Waikato?'

‘I haven't thought much about it,' Sean replied. ‘Right down the middle, through Taupo, I suppose. I'm not even sure where I'm going.'

‘Don't! Travel through Taranaki instead.' He was surprised when she looked at him with apprehension in her dark eyes.

‘I can't protect you from all the dangers you'll face but I can tell you this much. There are things abroad now that have been in hiding from man and the more terrible of his works. Do you know the story of Kurangaituku?'

Sean thought of the bird-headed monster, commemorated by a rock south of Tokoroa. He thought of the miles of pine trees too. He shivered when he imagined riding through them, camping among them. And Kurangaituku — he remembered Uncle Rangi laughing when he admitted to being scared riding his pushbike past an old church and graveyard on his way from Ohaeawai to the late shift at the Moerewa dairy factory.

‘You won't see anything,' he had said. ‘You'll be safe from kehua.'

However Auntie Rehu hadn't been so sure. If Sean saw anything, she'd told him when Uncle Rangi wasn't listening, swear at it and burn some of his hair. It was good advice, he was sure, but he'd been more nervous than ever pedalling through Pakaraka in the moonlight, the old church white and spectral in the trees. He must have come close to an Olympic sprint record on nights when the moon and the writhing mist made the headstones waver and the picket fence on the roadside lean towards him.

Mihi's words chilled him. ‘Things abroad that have been in hiding from man ...' He knew Mihi wasn't just telling stories. Of course things were abroad that had never found a place in the old society. And ignorance was no protection against them. Swearing and burning hair probably wouldn't be much help either, Sean thought, especially when a two-metre nightmare, with giant weka legs and an axe-head beak, developed an appetite and went hunting through the pine forests for something warm-blooded and meaty.

‘Don't worry, Auntie,' he said. ‘I won't go near that part of the country, not now.' She gave him another long look before speaking again.

‘I'm from north Hokianga,' she said. She named a place Sean had stayed at a few times. ‘I was a district nurse there. We did things our way too. We kept close to the earth.' She laughed. ‘Our waka had hooves and tails and our medicines came from the forest. We've always known about the way things were. We have a canoe tradition, nothing like the others, and we're not from Taiwan either, but that's none of your business. We know there's more to death than leaping off at Cape Reinga. That's the other thing I want to talk to you about.'

She shifted about, made herself comfortable.

‘Excuse me,' she said. ‘I'm getting on a bit.' She must have been well into her eighties but she didn't look in the least frail. ‘I'm sorry about your family.' She gazed at Sean. ‘I'm sorry about mine too, but they're not thinking about us. They're reborn now and not human either.'

She saw the shock on his face and laughed. ‘And I'll bet not one of them wants to be prime minister or make a lot of money. But you knew things couldn't carry on the way they were.'

Sean could think of nothing to say.

‘That's your work in the south,' she continued. ‘Find somewhere to live and make a new start. It won't be as easy as it sounds either.' She stopped talking while Sean thought about what he'd just heard. She caught his attention again with her next words.