Kokopu Dreams (7 page)

Near Wellsford, Sean's curiosity about Matapihi's moko and gang patch got the better of him. ‘You're articulate with more than half a brain,' he said. ‘If you don't mind me asking, what happened to turn you into an outlaw?'

Matapihi was silent and Sean began to think he was offended by the question. Then Matapihi started talking.

‘I was head boy at my college. I topped the class in Maori studies, English and history. I was all set for an arts degree at university, maybe a career teaching.' He fell back into silence then spoke again.

‘During the holidays I got into a fight in the pub and bottled this guy. He lost an eye. I got six months for aggravated assault and — depending on how you look at it — things went downhill from there. I met some guys in boob that I liked and I ended up prospecting. My family sent me up north for a new life, but I don't think they understood just what a big tribe we were. While I was away I got my patch and my moko and I never regretted a thing.'

He told Sean about the fights he'd had with people who called him a smart-arse every time they saw him reading a book.

‘Trouble is I liked fighting as much as I liked reading. Hard to find-a place in that sort of world.'

They both laughed. Matapihi was familiar with the work of poets like Sassoon and writers like Graves. He understood their reluctance as badly led warriors and, like Puru and Mike, he wasn't particularly upset by society disintegrating.

‘Studying our local history gave me a very useful attitude,' he said. ‘That and all those people who couldn't see past the gang patch and the moko.'

They rode on, the shadows lengthening.

‘Do you know anything about Tinirau?' Sean asked.

Matapihi looked startled at the question.

‘He's a Polynesian god, isn't he?' Matapihi said. ‘He looks after regeneration and rebirth. Why do you ask?'

‘He's got something to do with all this,' Sean said. ‘I don't understand what, but I suspect I'm going to find out.'

Matapihi looked inscrutable. He took a small flute out of his zippered jacket pocket and blew a soft scale. Hamu stopped dead, threw his head back and gave a howl that must have been audible for miles. Matapihi hastily put the flute back in his pocket. ‘Fuck that,' he said. ‘So much for not attracting attention. We might get some visitors now.'

Just ahead was a small stream, watercress growing by the banks and long grass down to the water. The fence was trampled flat, but they stood it up to provide secure grazing for the horses and, with an ease that was becoming practised, Sean lit a fire. They were soon leaning back against their saddles, with a cup of tea and some rice salad leftovers.

Sean and Matapihi didn't have to wait long for their visitors. The short northern dusk was over in half an hour. Hamu growled and, when they looked up, they saw a shadow with a bushy tail slink past, just beyond the circle of firelight. They barely had time to get back to back. The first dog was right on Sean before he could shoot, but he stunned the animal with the butt and shot it in the head as it got to its feet. Sean shot another in mid-air, as it leapt at him, and another as it attacked from the side, sinking its teeth into Sean's calf, its grip suddenly vanishing as its hindquarters shattered. Sean could hear yelps and snarls, kicks and blows, as Matapihi used his tomahawk and knife. Then, from the darkness, came a sickening thump and a large Shepherd landed right in the fire, scattering coals and bowling the billy with a hiss and a cloud of steam. The attack stopped instantly. The two men looked around. A huge dark shape snorted, shook its head with a jangle of harness, and went back to its munching. They looked at each other, then at the seven or eight dead dogs lying at their feet. Sean grinned. Curried dog.

Hamu wasn't going to wait for curry. They built the fire up again and, by its light, Sean cut a hind leg off the black Lab that Hamu had been fighting. He took it off into the long grass on the other side of the fire, growling as loud as his messy mouthful would allow.

‘I'd prefer a Big Mac and fries,' Sean said, already started on the other leg. ‘But let's not get too fussy.'

The dog looked to be middle-aged and, being warm and soft, didn't butcher as easily as a sheep hung overnight, but they weren't talking cordon bleu. They weren't even talking Gordon Brown. Sean diced the meat, complete with bits of grass and foreign bodies, mostly obscured in the flickering light. They fried the meat in oil with plenty of salt and curry powder and let it stew in whisky. While it was cooking, Matapihi cleaned Sean's leg with whisky, smeared on some antiseptic cream and bandaged it. He was as fussy as Marie about infection and had some cheerful words to say about gangrene and radical surgery with a panel saw. They drank whisky with the curried dog.

‘Useful stuff, this,' said Matapihi, holding up the bottle. ‘Wounds and cooking.' He tried some more of the curried dog. ‘This is really horrible.' He screwed up his face. ‘I'd better have another plateful.' He finished and wiped his tin plate clean with a handful of grass. Sean did the same before they sat back with the last of the whisky.

‘You can tell me your story and I'll tell you mine,' Matapihi said.

So Sean told him about Te Rina and the kids and life at Pukepoto, the stone walls, the eels in the creek, the patch of taro and the bags of kanga wai below the puna.

‘We had running water,' Sean told him. ‘Run down the hill and get it.' A little eel had lived in the puna. It kept the water clean and sweet.

‘Every bath night I had to cart a dozen jerrycans of water up the hill. I had to do it again on washing days.' Sean drifted back into memories of Te Rina and the kids. Matapihi spoke very gently.

‘What happened after they were gone?'

‘Hard times, bro. But I guess we were lucky. A group of us made ourselves at home on the high-school marae.'

‘How come you left?' Sean looked at Matapihi. Maybe he'd understand.

‘I had a dream,' he said. ‘A taniwha told me to go.' Matapihi didn't seem surprised, but he'd been embarrassed when Sean mentioned the Fever. Before Sean could ask him why, Matapihi started on his own story.

Matapihi had been living on the coast, out from Waipoua Forest, near a place called Kawerua. Sean had dived in the lagoon there, for kina and lobster. He'd been aware of a settlement on the fringe of the forest, nestled in the coastal scrub, avoided and feared by everyone he knew, north and south of the forest.

Matapihi lived there for a year after he'd been patched up. The people there gave him his moko, designs he'd never seen before, telling him he was now marked as belonging to them. And never mind the modern needles. They'd used the old method, chiselling the skin and rubbing in pigment so his face looked carved. He'd never known pain like it, he said.

‘What about the Fever?' Sean asked him. ‘Wasn't that pain just as bad?' Matapihi looked away.

‘I wouldn't know,' he said. ‘I didn't get sick and nor did anyone else in the kainga.'

Sean nearly dropped the whisky bottle in surprise. ‘What do you mean, "nobody got sick"?'

‘And that's not all,' Matapihi continued. ‘There was no electricity, no radio or TV, and, as far as I know, no contact with anyone, except maybe one or two forestry workers. But the people in the kainga seemed to know exactly what was happening. They even predicted it; about three months before it all hit the fan. They knew when I should leave. "Go and look after your own," they said. They predicted you too. They had you down as a threesome. I had no idea two of you would be a horse and a dog. Maybe that's their little joke.'

Sean was speechless. First Cally and the taniwha, then Auntie Mihi. Now Matapihi and his people.

‘What did they say about the Fever?' he asked.

‘They said it was "utu",' Matapihi replied. ‘I suppose you know what "utu" really means?'

‘It means "price". It's got more to do with the law of cause and effect than revenge.'

‘You got it. Forget all that Hollywood crap. It's karma, simple as that.' They were both silent then, gazing into the fire. Sean remembered Auntie Mihi telling him he'd pick up pieces of the story along the way. Matapihi's tale felt like a big piece.

From there south to Auckland, about seventy kilometres, the subdivisions and settlements grew thicker. From Orewa it felt to Sean like an attenuated suburbia, houses most of the way, occasional ‘lifestyle blocks' and patches of bush covering land too steep or unstable for building. At the turn-off to Paremoremo, they looked at each other, imagining the scenes that had played out in that sad place. They saw people who fled at the sight of the two travellers, even though they were dismounted and seated by a fire.

‘Fuck it,' said Sean. ‘Maybe they had some decent tea. I could have used a cuppa.'

‘They probably think we come from Pare,' said Matapihi. He looked depressed. ‘I've never even been there. I did my time in Mt Eden and that place was horrible enough.'

Sean had to agree with him. He remembered doing a week on remand. He'd got all bloody-minded and refused to admit to anything, even his name and address. The judge had seen fit to administer the ‘short sharp shock' he probably hoped would bring an endless queue of young men to their senses. It must have worked. Sean didn't do it again. One week in that mouldering, medieval pile of black rock, in a wing with the rapists and child molesters, eating food that made Gregory's Kai Kart menu look like haute cuisine, was enough for him. He pleaded guilty, grovelled, and got a suspended sentence.

A few hours later, the sun set and darkness gathering, they rode around the corner that once gave a spectacular view of the illuminated glory of downtown Auckland. The city was dark and the harbour bridge spanned the Waitemata in near invisibility. A little way on, they rode past the site of the old Barry's Point tip and Sean thought of Archie Green, the poet who used to visit their house, drunk and horny enough to make a leg-humping dog look restrained. At one stage Archie had lived in the tip, in a humble dwelling cobbled together from timber scraps and cardboard boxes and furnished with a discarded mattress and other unwanted accoutrements. He had found a girlfriend, a recent resident at the old Kingseat Psychiatric Centre, and, for a few weeks, local residents had been beguiled nightly by the unrestrained cries of Archie and his paramour in the transports of passion. People complained. The authorities had been unable to ignore Archie. They'd bulldozed his dwelling, forcing him and his girlfriend back into the frosty bosom of polite society, where, in their efforts to remain free-spirited and creative, they'd caused much alarm and consternation in public places and especially in Sean's home.

But all was silent now, carpet warehouses alongside paint factories hiding their secrets in the growing gloom. No mangroves until Sean and Matapihi came right to the motorway leading to the harbour bridge. Movable barriers across the road ahead were just visible as they rode towards them and by the time they got there the darkness was complete. Sean was listening to the horses' hooves when suddenly a diesel generator burst into life and the whole area was blasted with light.

He resisted the temptation to stare into the spots and floods and he saw the welcoming committee just as the leader spoke. There were four of them, old-style petrolheads, with greasy jeans and leather jackets. Each had a rifle trained on the pair. They looked barely out of their teens.

‘Tolls,' the fellow said. ‘Some of whatever you're carrying.' He didn't sound too convincing. Sean thought of Crocodile Dundee — ‘Just kids having fun.' Matapihi rode forward. Sean watched the group take in his moko and his dog's head tee shirt.

‘We've got fuck-all of anything,' Matapihi said. ‘But I'll tell you what we'll do. You'll stand politely to one side while we ride on through, and nobody will get killed.'

Sean saw two of the young men swallow nervously and, over the sound of the generator, he heard the ‘snick' of safety catches being released. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Hamu trot forward, cock a leg and pee on the generator. There was a shower of sparks, a small explosion, a loud yelp and they were plunged into blackness. Matapihi must have been as familiar as Sean with moving around in darkness. They both reacted a lot quicker than the young petrolheads. They rode ahead together and for good measure Sean drew his sawn-off and fired a blast into the air.

They slowed their brisk trot at the top of the bridge. The moon glowed over the city. Sean could see Matapihi on his horse. He was shaking with laughter and he burst into a loud guffaw at the same time as Sean.

‘Dogs one, humans nil,' he chuckled.

Downtown Auckland was dark and empty, shop windows broken and rubbish blowing in the streets. The place felt even more depressing than at the height of the mid-nineties power crisis.

‘Okahu Bay,' said Matapihi. ‘Round the waterfront.'

The harbour felt better, more wholesome than the empty buildings and immobile cranes outlined against the rising moon. Yellow and gibbous, it showed the face of a young Polynesian girl, as clearly defined as in one of Cally's paintings. They passed the Parnell swimming baths and the yacht club, the sea loud against the retaining wall and pohutukawa trees growing over the road.

‘Good night for eels,' Matapihi said. ‘Not so good for fishing in the sea. Too much light.' He sounded nervous. ‘I haven't seen my family for ages. I've been resigned to the worst for a long time now.'

Sean thought about Matapihi's family, his parents, brothers and sisters. Not the homecoming he must have dreamed of.

8

THE FOLK AT OKAHU BAY wept over Matapihi. They laughed and cried and hugged and kissed him. They didn't let him out of their sight. All the time they were close to him, embracing him, touching him, and for three days not letting him do a stroke of work. He didn't mind. He was pleased to be home, among his family. His parents were dead and so were three brothers and two sisters. Everybody tangi'd over the grave, so many people dead, seven in one hole.

‘At least they're all together,' he said.

Sean was made welcome too. He was aware they'd killed the fatted possum, so to speak. They served up pork and fish, and three times they killed two cattle that fed the four hundred or so of them for nearly a week each.

‘Been a hard winter,' said one old guy to Sean. He stood on Bastion Point looking out to Rangitoto, protected from the summer rain by a grey blanket over a really sharp seventies suit — wide lapels, maroon with a fine yellow pinstripe — Cuban heels on a pair of zip-up dress boots. ‘We need to keep our strength up.'

They ate well, but very carefully. Frugality came easily to the folk who'd been paying market rents on the bennie. So did the idea of communal gardens, fishing and other food gathering. And especially, so did the idea of work. Sean remembered an old saying, something about giving your guest a spade on the second day.

Matapihi wasn't a guest, he was family. They all felt like family, like they had at Ngahere and Kaiwaka too. But blood's thick stuff and Sean certainly caught the fallout from Matapihi's status as an honoured and respected family member. They both got three days R & R, lying around in the sun, swimming, eating and talking with the old ones. And then they got to work, the most demanding work Sean had ever done.

‘C'mon, you guys!' shouted Monty standing in the doorway on the fourth morning, when it was just light enough to see. ‘Hands off cocks, feet in socks!' What did he want? It was warm and comfortable in bed.

‘Fuck off!' said Perry. Monty heard. He strode to Perry's mattress, bent down and whipped the blankets off. As Perry lay naked and wide-eyed with shock, Monty promised him a bucket of water next time.

‘We're not here to fuck spiders,' he said.

‘Don't mess with that guy,' said Vaiga later. ‘He's had fifteen years in the army.'

They buried everyone around them. The circle grew daily as gangs moved from house to house and street to street. Somebody worked out how to get petrol out of service station tanks and two men in their forties — a pair of real hoods, a Pakeha guy called Stan and Matapihi's cousin, Jackson — picked up the flashest backhoes they could find, stereos and air-conditioning. They worked with the burial crews, digging a hole in each lawn and filling it in after everyone in the house was laid to rest. Sean gagged and retched for the first three days.

‘Careful you don't miss anyone,' Monty said. ‘We have to do this right.'

The old people attended each burial and made sure whatever was left behind wasn't going to cause trouble for the living. Every relative of everyone there was buried or burned before Sean and Matapihi arrived. Nobody said it out front, but the thought of a landscape peopled by kehua was very alarming, for some of the Pakeha folk too. Every day half a dozen gangs of about six workers each, women and men, went burying everyone who'd died.

Monty had the crews well organised. Sean saw him most nights, when everyone gathered in the spectacularly carved wharenui. Usually he talked with the old folk, making sure people were handling the work. He knew when someone needed a break.

‘Leave Gary in bed,' he'd say. ‘He needs it.' Or else he'd pull somebody off a burial detail for a quest to find some obscure tool.

One of the most surprising things about Monty was his immaculately pressed uniform. How did he get those knife-edge creases? Sean pictured him removing his trousers at night and laying them carefully beneath his mattress. They never saw him rumpled, nor without a black beret, a gleaming regimental badge pinned in the front.

Sometimes he'd tell somebody to report to Opetaia for fishing duties. Several times Sean laid longlines from a catamaran, the wind blowing spray in his face and washing off the stench of his work. He went droving too. Once, four of them on horseback brought back twenty cattle from somewhere behind Pukekohe. When they got the cattle home, they started grazing them on the Tamaki Bowling Club greens and ended up letting most of them go in a cul-de-sac, fencing off the lush suburban lawns and overgrown roadsides with barbed wire and standards banged through the tarseal.

The young ones, the ones kept away from any really dirty work, waited on tables, did the dishes and worked in one of the five kitchens that never really slept, cooking food, running wetbacks, and providing endless cups of tea, like Doug had done in Ngahere. Auntie Rose had charge of the provisions. Most nights she talked with Charlie who looked after the gardens.

‘We're ready for another half acre,' he'd say. ‘No worries,' Auntie Rose would tell him. ‘Cattle coming in tomorrow.' Sean was amazed how much ground twenty cattle could rark up and fertilise in a week. He was surprised, too, at the effect of two dozen pigs on a street-full of suburban gardens. They'd go down over a foot for some bulbs and tubers, evacuating copiously as they went.

Every day there was work to do. ‘Man, that guy just doesn't let up,' Perry said to Sean after Monty had told the burial crews to mark their completed streets on a big map on the wall. Monty made sure the crews were followed two or three days later by the kids, harvesting anything worth the effort from the suburban veggie gardens. Some of the kids were wary about the recent burials, but the old ones talked to them.

‘Just say a prayer for each family,' they said. ‘Say thanks for the kai too.'

The old ones and children lived on the hill overlooking Okahu Bay. Everyone else stayed on the flat, in construction-site smoko huts. Each hut slept about twenty people and was set up with a water tank and a long-drop dunny. A fleet of small trucks kept up a stream of goods. Everyone knew the petrol wouldn't last forever.

‘We should be stocking up on sawn timber,' Rawiri said.

‘Medical supplies,' somebody argued.

‘Both,' a third person asserted.

The community was shaking down rapidly. ‘Leave that little guy alone,' Sean heard several times from one or other of Matapihi's patched-up warrior mates when some unhappy person tried to cause trouble. ‘You want to fight somebody, fight me.' Sean laughed to himself when he remembered TV ads depicting the placatory, ‘He ain't heavy, he's my brother' approach.

Sickness and death hadn't stopped either. One fisherman had drowned. A squall had sneaked around an island and driven him onto rocks when he tried to run before it. Some people had been driven crazy by everything that had happened. They were kept especially close, so they didn't hurt themselves or anyone else either. Matapihi and Sean arrived at the tail end of a sexual frenzy, just like the outburst in Ngahere. The old people had kept the kids occupied while everyone else bonked anything that moved. A group of gardeners complained about copulating couples flattening young corn plants until their own activities saw a bed of tomato plants destroyed.

‘This is a bit much,' Matapihi said to Sean while they were both taking a breather. ‘I mean, I like to get my rocks off but where does it all end?'

‘Don't think about it so much,' advised Sean. ‘It won't last forever.'

Sean had a mattress next to Stan in their hut. Over their heads were photocopies of astonishingly crude cartoons and useful sayings, like ‘When you're up to your arse in alligators it's hard to remember about draining the swamp', and ‘I'm so happy I could just shit'.

‘I lost a wife and four kids, all teenagers,' Stan told Sean late one night. He'd made a funeral pyre of his Pt Chevalier home and walked to Okahu Bay. Stan laughed away Sean's worries about the doom and gloom.

‘What doom and gloom?' he said. ‘Anyway, shit happens and if it gets on you just wash it off.'

Sean couldn't argue with that, and he certainly wasn't inclined to argue with the old man Matapihi took him to one night. He looked about a hundred and twenty and he scared the bejasus out of Sean.

‘This is Uncle Morepork,' Matapihi said. ‘He knows who you are.' After they hongi'd the old man came right out with it.

‘You've met the Maeroero,' he said. Sean started to explain about the paintings, but he interrupted with a snort. ‘Don't get on the wrong side of them. You won't know another moment's peace.'

Uncle Morepork told Sean about the Maeroero. They were reject fairies, given life and set free to guard the mauri of the place. They took their duties very seriously, he said, and echoing Auntie Mihi's words, told Sean they were now free to act as they saw fit.

‘Nothing to stop them now,' he said.

‘How do I make peace with them?'

‘All they want is for people to live properly.'

‘How do I manage that?'

‘You know the rules, boy.' Uncle Morepork scratched his head. His white hair was thick and wiry. ‘You could try a gift. They might like that.'

‘"Might?" What if they don't?'

The old man gave a chuckle. ‘Then I wouldn't want to be in your boots.'

After six weeks at Okahu Bay, Sean started moving south again. Matapihi and three of his mates rode out with him, all the way to the Bombay Hills. They were going to bring back some cattle.

‘I'll be sorry to see Hamu go,' Matapihi said. ‘He does most of the work when we're droving.' He looked serious. ‘We'll miss you too. Tell you what, though, I won't miss the curried dog.'

They both laughed, through the tears.

When Matapihi and his friends rode off Sean sat for a long time letting the thoughts and feelings tumble about, and everywhere were contradictions and confusions. He was free again. He was trapped again. He'd lost another home. He was home once more. But he was on the road again. He was moving and all the bets were off.

He wheeled and rode south, into the hills that used to look so neat, groomed and corduroyed. Now they sprouted all sorts of weeds, prickly and leafy. He passed Tipene, St Stephen's, the college where tension between the two strongest cultures in the country had produced some very high-powered men, in business and politics and all those arenas that meant nothing any more. He started passing roadside stalls. A bank of black and purple thunder clouds rolled in from the north-east and he made it under cover just as raindrops the size of small grapes started splashing in the dust and on the tin roof above him.

Most of the produce in the wooden-floored shed had rotted in the boxes and trays around the walls. Some carrots were still okay and he tossed a handful out the door to Bojay. A few sacks of spuds were still good too, and so were some pumpkins and crates of kumara. Sean filled four small onion bags with vegetables.

He grabbed a bag of pickling onions and some mixed nuts, and found himself a box to sit on by the door while he waited for the rain to stop. It didn't, so he made himself comfortable under the awning and fried himself some vegetables. Night fell and rain rattled on the roof. He lay awake thinking of what Uncle Morepork had told him about the Maeroero. A gift? What?

He rode the deserted highway in the morning sun, enjoying birdsong from bush that seemed a season away from engulfing everything. At the bottom, he passed Pokeno, the turn-off to the Coromandel and the Hauraki Plains. He remembered two years' secondary schooling in Paeroa, and hitting what he thought was a peak of educational achievement when Mr Fraser had written on his sixth-form report card that ‘Sean cooperates passively'. He was still reliving adolescent small town scenes buying a dozen at the back of Ernie Bishop's hotel and rolling the Mk II on the way home from a dance in Thames, when Meremere reared up on his left. The power station didn't look any different to Sean. Still lurking. Still looming too, with the same haunted quality of primitive and abandoned technology crumbling into ruin.

On his right was what he'd always thought of as the great grey-green greasy Waikato River. On every bend a taniwha. Further up the river was a string of unattended dams, water spilling over or roaring through till turbines corroded and seized. Powerboats, with their spectacular antics, and fit young rowers had used the hydro lakes most weekends. As Sean rode he saw, through gaps between the trees, young men paddling carved waka, sunlight flashing off the water.

The road led south as the river meandered north. He remembered one summer when they'd run out of water in Auckland and had started talking seriously about piping water from the Waikato so people could wash their cars and water their lawns. Folk from both Waikato and Auckland were upset at the mixing of mauri for no good reason that they could see. No wonder the Maeroero had been upset, Sean thought. No wonder Cally had seen them stamping about like Rumpelstiltskin, crying despairingly, ‘That's enough, that's enough!'

Uncle Morepork's warning made more sense. He felt a sudden affection for the gnarled little guys he'd seen in Cally's paintings. They'd had no show in the old world. Maybe they'd get a better deal this time around.

His attention was suddenly caught by the double stack of the Huntly power station away in the distance. What a very expensive way to boil water. Sean hoped the Maeroero were happy to see the giant machines quiescent and the stacks cold, emitting nothing. As he drew closer, he could see seagulls perched on the rim of each chimney, preening and resting as they journeyed up and down the river.

Sean didn't feel like adventures in the small town of Huntly. The last time he'd driven south, traffic had been bottlenecked there and everything was covered in a fine black and ochre dust from the coal and bricks that had underpinned the local economy. No doubt things were different now, nonetheless, he stopped at the next creek and rode through trampled and broken fences to a spot about three paddocks away from the road. He unsaddled Bojay, strung his tarp in the willows, boiled the billy and sat back with a cup of tea. He felt relaxed, in command. There was a natural nervousness at being in somebody else's territory, but the more he let that thought mill around, the more it felt like his turf, and even if he wasn't from there he was still welcome.