Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  The driver recognised me, of course, and I wanted the taxi to swallow me whole, but instead he told me about how he’d known my old man and he was a big fan.

  I was astounded as he told me story after story which mirrored exactly what the old man had been telling us when he used to get home from the pub wasted. Even that his nickname was the Destroyer of Men. Tears ran down my eyes in the back of the taxi and I left an extra 50-dollar tip as a soiling fee.

  By the time the kind driver dropped me home, I was feeling better than I had felt in a long time. If you look at the shots of me avoiding news crews from that day, I’m looking heaps more together.

  Of course, I wish the old man was still here, so I could lie to him that I always believed him. Or, at least to tell him that I’m sorry I thought they were stories he was making up because he was wasted.

  My father, who gave me his name because he couldn’t think of a better one, is why, after every try I score, I point to the sky and pretend to be eating corned beef and rice and then I cry.

  Love you, Dad.

  Mum

  I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I had grown up being boys with Daniel LaRusso from The Karate Kid instead of Ghost. Don’t get me wrong, Ghost is a brother, he is a part of me now like a rib, one that can occasionally become sore and annoying, but is mostly all good.

  But if Daniel LaRusso and I had been boys, I could have done karate lessons with him from the friendly old Japanese caretaker who looks after the apartment building. I would have had Daniel’s back and he wouldn’t have got such a savage beating from those Cobra Kai eggs, until Mr Miyagi stepped in and single-handedly defeated the five attackers with ease.

  I could have been alongside Daniel as he trained for the All Valley Karate Championships to take on the arrogant Johnny Lawrence. I would have been able to tell Daniel not to get mad at Mr Miyagi when his training began with menial chores. It wasn’t that Mr Miyagi was making him his slave but, rather, that Mr Miyagi was getting him to do repetitive movements that would become muscle memory.

  Of course, Daniel did eventually go on to make it to the final of the All Valley Karate Championships, and when he looked down and beaten, somehow miraculously managed to do the crane and beat Johnny. But I could have got him there earlier and Daniel could have avoided all the angst, despair and insecurity he went through. Ghost often points out to me that this is a film and not real life, therefore I couldn’t have been boys with Daniel LaRusso. But he’s just jealous.

  Ghost likes to point out that if I had helped Daniel in that way, the film would have lost about 40 minutes in running time. And, to be honest, The Karate Kid might have benefitted from being 40 minutes shorter. I watch it for inspiration most nights when we are on the road, and there are times when I have to fast-forward bits so I can go to sleep on time.

  Everyone in every team I’ve played for knows that the original old-school 1984 Karate Kid is my favourite film. But not many — probably only Ghost — know this is because, in Mr Miyagi, I see my mum. Not that my mum was an American karate master war veteran haunted by their past life in Japan. No, it reminds me of my mum, Faye, in the way Mr Miyagi orders Daniel LaRusso around, never seemed to give him praise, but always believing in him. It was my pyscho little sister, Purity, who first put a rugby ball in my hand, but it was my mum who I owe for getting me started on the path that landed me a life of living the dream.

  Mum wasn’t one of those mums who cleaned my playing gear and drove me to every practice or game. I never even saw her at my games. Because although my little sister and I were the first children that my parents brought from Samoa, eventually we were joined by my other siblings once our parents found jobs and could afford to bring them over. And from then on, we barely saw Mum, as it seemed she spent every waking minute working. It was a real shame. And not just because my older brother Fatu was such an arsehole and would run the house as his own personal fiefdom with him as the lord and the rest of us as his serfs, but because, like all kids, we really needed our mum. But if she didn’t work too, as a family we would have struggled even more.

  I was enjoying my rugby as a kid, and when I started getting player of the day, I’d be so excited I couldn’t wait to come home to show my mum. But she was never home. When she wasn’t doing shifts at the factory where she worked, she had her cleaning jobs at the hospital and at the airport. After she finished work, I would stay up until she got home and I would always tell her about my games. She always promised she’d try and make it to see one. But she never did.

  Instead, Mum told me to keep practising hard so that when she did make it to see a game, I wouldn’t embarrass her by playing a stink game. So I began to work harder at training, taking it real serious, so that when Mum did make a game, she would be proud. But she never came. Not even when I started making age-grade rep teams. Not even when I got my scholarship to Bling’s and made the First XV and became one of their star players.

  When Mum was home, she was bone tired, and a bit short-tempered. Consequently, when us kids got a bit boisterous and played up, her way of asserting control was through her Bible-approved method of not sparing the rod. Her weapon of choice initially was her hands, which were quite hard and calloused from her work. Later, she moved on to the wooden spoon, and over time to the flat blade of the machete. About then, we always behaved, because we didn’t want it to evolve past that point.

  Eventually, I began to resent my mum for being absent, apart from when she had to come home to give us hidings, because Dad was also busy and couldn’t. There was one day when I had her on about this. I think it was at the height of my being a dramatic teenager and I was feeling reckless.

  ‘Why, Mum? Why? How do you think it makes us kids feel when the only time we see you is when you’re giving us a hiding?’

  I’ll never forget what happened next — another hiding.

  After that, I decided that’s just the way it was, and thought better than to question my mum ever again. I thought my mum just didn’t care. But then I found out how wrong I was.

  It was playing for Bling’s, in the annual match against our fierce rivals from across town, Glamour. The game was tied, but in the last minute I got an intercept and was heading for the line for the game-winning try, when out of nowhere one of the Glamour spectators tripped me. I had been heading for glory, with no opposition players near me, and I thought I was in. The last thing I expected was a foot trip from the sideline.

  I went flying head first into the turf and spilt the ball. Instead of giving us a penalty or whatever you give when an opposition supporter illegally trips you, the ref blew his whistle for the knock on. But before anyone could protest that blatant misruling, there was a kerfuffle from the sideline and I heard someone shout, ‘Hey, that cleaner lady is attacking that man!’

  I looked over, and there was my mum in her cleaner’s smock attacking the man who had tripped me, using her fists and her feet in a way that would have beaten even Daniel LaRusso in the All Valley Karate Championships.

  Soon it was all on, as other parents became involved and the players were taken off the field for their own safety until order was restored. A few parents received life bans from attending schoolboy rugby games again, since the Auckland Union was taking a hard line on stuff like sideline parental riots at games. My mum was taken to court and charged with assault, but Bling’s halfback’s mum was a Queen’s Counsel and she represented my mum for free and got the charge thrown out.

  But that Saturday afternoon, when our family picked up Mum from the holding cells, all I could do was smile at the fact that she had been to a game and seen me play. She told me sternly, in the car on the way home, that she’d been to most of them, but never wanted me to see her, so that I would keep practising hard.

  That’s my mum — Mr Miyagi!

  Fatu, My Elder Brother

  People often ask me, if I wasn’t me, who would I like
to be? Well, to be truthful, only one person has asked me that. That was this bored eight-year-old kid in a classroom where I was giving a role-model talk, one time in West Auckland. The teacher was embarrassed that no one was asking me questions and had glared at this one poor girl until she asked the question. She must have been the go-to pupil when everyone else was too uninterested to bother making the alleged role model feel important.

  I chewed over this question for a bit and thought of some of my favourite rappers from the early 2000s, but decided not to mention any, since the youngsters wouldn’t have heard of any of them. Plus, many of those rappers have since been revealed to be a bit odd. And then I thought of Bernard Clemens.

  Bernard Clemens is this white guy from London. It’s not that I want to be a white guy, or from London — although some of the nicest players I’ve smashed in tackles have been white guys from London. (Off the field, many of them are decent blokes and great to have a lemonade with after the game, once the swelling around their ribs goes down.)

  The reason I dreamed of being Bernard Clemens is because he currently holds the world record for doing the longest fart ever — 2 minutes and 42 seconds. As aspirational as that feat seems to most people, I do appreciate how some can make an ‘ew’ face at this and wonder why I would aspire to be Bernard Clemens. Let me explain by telling you about my big brother Fatu, a real arsehole.

  Fatu was someone who haunted my childhood to such a point that I have blanked a large part of that part of my life out of my memory. I can remember clearly our family coming to New Zealand from Samoa when I was little. And I can remember my little sister terrifying me when we were playing out in the backyard (but more on her soon). And I can also remember that once we arrived, my mum and dad had to spend a lot of time working in order to support their family, our relatives back in our village, and the community at our Samoan church.

  But after Fatu followed us to New Zealand a few years later (he’d been staying with relatives in another village for reasons my parents never fully explained but were probably to do with him being an arsehole even as a kid), I started blanking things out of my life — mostly to do with him.

  What I do remember is that because Mum and Dad were working all the time, for a lot of the time it was just us kids at home with big brother Fatu in charge. And he treated us younger siblings like his subjects; like he was Caligula, and we were the ordinary garden-variety Roman people in the decades after Jesus was killed. Or like he was Gargamel and we were the Smurfs, but brown instead of blue.

  I think scientists need to take samples of Fatu’s DNA to see if they can isolate and identity the arsehole gene. Then they could put it in that big-ass Hadron Collider in Switzerland and try to obliterate it from humanity. Fatu was such an arsehole that for many years I pretended not to have a big brother and would only publicly acknowledge that I have parents and sisters.

  Ask most top players to name some of the influential figures for their rugby careers and most will mention family. It’s no different for me and I wish I had stories about how Fatu used to teach me how to sidestep in the backyard. Or stories of how he’d come to all my games and always took me aside to soothe my tears if I had a stink game. Or even stories of how much I looked up to him as he played, and that I aspired to be like him and that the competition between us is what drove me to be the player that I became.

  Instead, all I have are half-buried memories and tales of woe about how he persecuted me. Fatu was like a big mean cat, and I was like a helpless traumatised mouse that is trying to play dead so that he’d piss off and I could escape to safety.

  One of the memories of his oppression that I cannot suppress was on my first day of school in New Zealand. Fatu’s intermediate school year hadn’t begun yet so he was given the job of walking me to school. The morning had started well enough with me looking forward to my new school life in this new country and glad that my big brother was looking after me. But thanks to Fatu thinking it would be hilarious to walk me into a forest and leave me, that day ended with me being the subject of a search by police and, eventually, the very nice people at Search and Rescue. It was only Fatu’s incredible acting skills and claims that I had run away from him which saved him from getting a hiding from our freaked-out mum. Instead, I got the hiding and, from there, the elder sibling psychological abuse just continued on a daily basis.

  There was the time he told me that our local supermarket was giving away Penthouse magazines for free and that he’d put in an order which I had to pick up for him. I walked out in tears once the kind checkout staff made me realise that I’d been the subject of a cruel but highly effective practical joke. Another occasion was when he took me into his high school to use in a presentation to his science class on how flammable curly hair could be when exposed to a lighter. It took weeks for my scalp to return to normal. To this day, I prefer to keep my haircuts close. And I’ll never forget the time he tied me up and hung me upside down from a tree in our backyard so Fatu could pretend I was a banana tree and that he was Jean-Claude Van Damme in the movie Bloodsport, kicking something to harden up his feet for kick-boxing.

  But back to why, for a long time in my life, I wished I was Bernard Clemens.

  Of all of Fatu’s cruel jokes, by the far the most painful came when our parents would head off to their night jobs and us kids would go to bed. Fatu and I shared a room and we slept in bunks. Despite being the younger, smaller and lighter brother, I got the bottom bunk. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would wake up to Fatu pulling my sheets over my head and trying to suffocate me. I would beg for air and he would relent by opening one corner of the sheet, but then he would fart into the gap and then cover me up again. Fatu wouldn’t even care as I gasped that I was dying, both from the stench and also the lack of air. He wouldn’t do it every night, just the nights when we had cabbage and eggs for dinner. Looking back, I should have seen those things as signs and just run away from home those nights.

  During my playing career, commentators would often remark on my upper-body strength and my ability to break the first tackle and get over the advantage line so I could get away an offload and put Ghost or my wingers into space. They would marvel at this ability, and rightfully point to it as one of the most important features of my second-five armoury and they would wonder where this strength had come from. Truth be told, the seeds for my ability to do that were planted on those miserable nights when Fatu would hold me down under my blankets and fart into the vacuum. It was those nights when, even as my lungs were screaming for air, when my very soul would be crying out to live, that I resolved to one day be so strong that Fatu couldn’t do that to me any more.

  So I trained, and trained, and trained, building up my strength and explosive power to a point when Fatu couldn’t torture me any more. I dreamed that one day I would be strong enough to do this back to Fatu and give him a foul taste of his own acrid medicine. By the time I was strong enough to fight back, Fatu had left home to go to university in Wellington. He did pretty well too, and got a heap of degrees including law and political science. I was upset that I never got to exact my revenge, but all this training to get Fatu back paid off in another way in terms of my rugby development. I was always one of the stronger players in the teams I played for and this continued as I got older.

  Still, I haven’t forgotten my dream to get Fatu back, and one day I will get him back. I don’t care that he is now an MP and the National Party’s social development spokesman. I’m going to contact this Bernard Clemens guy in London and ask him how he developed that devasting skill. And then one day when Fatu comes over to stay, or when I am in Wellington and stay with him, I will have my revenge.

  I am still working with professionals to try and work through some of these painful aspects of my childhood. They’re working with me one therapy session at a time to try and recover other more positive memories of my childhood so I can work through some of the issues I developed. Sure, I get that,
in a really perverse way, Fatu was an instrumental figure in developing me into the player I am. But I don’t care. Some things only fellow younger siblings will understand. And one of them is the everlasting need to pay back the arsehole older sibling.

  You wait, Fatu. I don’t care if I have to do this in the debating chamber of New Zealand’s parliament. You’re going to get it, and if I can get Bernard Clemens to train me, it won’t be pleasant!

  Purity, My Little Sister

  If I’m real about things, probably the biggest influence of my rugby career was my little sister, Purity — the psycho who may or may not have tried to stab me in the eye with our best butter knife.

  Sure, on some levels Purity is completely insane. And yes, there was a time where I became convinced she was an actual demon who had escaped from hell, to the point where I drew a pentagram on the sitting-room floor, hoping I’d be safe from her by sitting inside it. I wasn’t and then Mum gave me a hiding for drawing on the carpet.

  But, looking back, I now realise there was sometimes a method to her madness and she actually had a beating human heart beneath her evil façade. Sure, most of the time there was no method and she was just being evil, but every now and then some humanity would peek through the clouds of insanity.

  Like the time when I became depressed about living in New Zealand. The weather was too cold and it rained all the time in Auckland and I missed my friends in Samoa and the warm weather and the beaches. So, I stayed in bed for days dreaming of beaches and warmth and the only thing that got me out of bed was Mum and the wooden spoon. But even then, when Mum had gone to one of her three jobs, I would go straight back to bed again. Mum and Dad got really worried about me. My aunties told them I was obviously possessed by a spirit, so they brought the minister in to perform an exorcism — but that finished when I spewed on him.