From the Ashes

by Deborah Challinor

  Taking the jar off her and putting it in its customary place, Ana replied, ‘If it’s stopped raining. I don’t fancy riding out in all this, do you?’

  ‘I don’t mind. I’m not scared of rain.’

  Jack came in then, his socks squelching on the kitchen lino. ‘Fucking rain.’

  Ana winced, though the kids all giggled. ‘Well, you shouldn’t have gone out without your gumboots, should you?’

  After that the morning seemed to drag on and on. Jack stayed in his room and the children plodded through their schoolwork, then Ana made the promised cheese scones and cold meat sandwiches.

  During lunch Jack asked, ‘Where’s David?’

  Ana told him, ‘In town.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Business.’

  ‘What business?’

  Taking a deep, calming breath, Ana said, ‘Just business, Jack. He’ll be back this afternoon.’

  ‘Bloody waste of time.’ Jack bit into a scone. ‘Should be out with the sheep.’

  At the word ‘sheep’, crumbs flew out of his mouth and landed all over the lunch things.

  ‘You’ve got terrible table manners, Grandpa,’ Jo observed.

  ‘Sheep farmers don’t need table manners.’

  Jo took a bite of her sandwich and deliberately spat it onto her plate.

  ‘Stop that!’ Ana exclaimed.

  ‘Grandpa did it.’

  ‘I don’t care what Grandpa did! Bloody well behave!’

  Jack reached for the butter. ‘Don’t be so hard on her. She’s only wee.’

  Ana turned on him. ‘Shut up, Jack. Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble?’

  Looking astonished, Jack stared at her. ‘Have I?’

  Ana put her elbows on the table and rested her head on her hands. He was unwell, she knew that. He couldn’t help it and she shouldn’t lose her temper with him. But that didn’t stop him from being unbelievably annoying. God, where had the old quietly strong, unerringly reliable Jack gone? She might as well be raising four children now.

  Everyone was silent for a long time.

  Then Jack said, ‘Where’s David?’

  *

  It had stopped raining so they all went out to check the sheep David had moved yesterday. Oddly, Jack didn’t need any help saddling Rex, his horse, or riding him, even though Rex was a bit of a bad-tempered bugger. David thought it was because being on horseback was so ingrained in his father it was automatic. He didn’t even have to think about it. It was only when he stopped to open a gate, or to do some other farm-related task, that things started to go wrong.

  When they got back to the house at a little before three o’clock, the Chevrolet was in the driveway.

  Ana rushed inside to find David at the kitchen table. He’d buttered a scone but hadn’t eaten it, and had made a pot of tea. She touched it: cold.

  She didn’t need to ask — she could see it in his face.

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said. ‘We’ve lost it.’

  She sat down, feeling suddenly sick. ‘We truly have lost it?’

  ‘Apparently Johnston won’t change his mind. According to his solicitor he’s already got new tenants lined up.’

  Ana couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘But we’ve been leasing off him for years. You have, at least. And Jack leased off his father.’

  ‘I know, but it’s something to do with being able to put up the rent if he gets in new tenants.’

  ‘Well, we can pay more, can’t we?’

  David closed his eyes briefly, and Ana could see this was hurting him horribly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Ana. It’s too late. We have to sell up — the stock, the horses, the dogs, everything.’

  ‘But . . . what will we do?’

  ‘I don’t know, love. I really don’t.’

  Chapter Two

  Auckland, September 1955

  The room was full of blinding, acrid smoke and she could feel the searing heat of flames all around her, though they hadn’t quite reached her yet. But they soon would. The noise was terrific but above it rose the piercing screams of people she knew she had to save — Daisy and Terry, Irene, Miss Willow and Miss Bourke, and dozens of others. She staggered around in the swirling hot darkness, reaching, reaching for them but never quite connecting, then realised with an awful soaring panic that she never would.

  With a cry of despair Allie Manaia sat bolt upright, her nightie stuck to her body with sweat. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and leant forwards, coughing to clear her throat and lungs of non-existent smoke.

  She felt her husband’s gentle hand on her back. ‘Another bad dream, love?’

  Allie nodded.

  ‘What about?’ Sonny asked.

  Without looking at him, Allie croaked, ‘Not sure.’

  Though she was. It was always the same horrible nightmare — being trapped in Dunbar and Jones department store while it burnt and not being able to save anyone. But that had happened over eighteen months ago, so why was it still haunting her? Surely she should have put it behind her by now? Everyone else who’d survived the fire had. Even the wreckage on Queen Street where Dunbar and Jones had stood had been razed and a smart new building was going up, as though a terrible tragedy had never even occurred there. So she couldn’t tell Sonny she still often dreamt about the fire, or anyone else, either. They’d think there was something wrong with her.

  ‘Do you want some water? Or a cup of tea?’

  ‘Just water. Thanks.’ Her mouth was as dry as sand.

  Sonny padded out to the kitchen, flicking on the hall light. Don’t leave me, she wanted to blurt, afraid of being left alone. Twenty-two and still frightened of the dark. She might see poor little Daisy sitting in the chair in the corner, or sexy, loud Irene. She glimpsed them on the street sometimes, but not really, of course: they were dead and buried in Waikumete Cemetery. Would they be bones yet, lying cold and abandoned in their coffins?

  She heard Sonny open a cupboard door, get a glass and fill it with water from the tap. He was such a good husband. It was a pity she was turning out to be such a useless wife. She glanced at the bedside clock: Christ, a quarter to four. Thank God it was the weekend.

  *

  She couldn’t get back to sleep and wanted a cigarette, but they were in the sitting room and she couldn’t be bothered getting up to fetch them. Instead she lay next to Sonny, listening to his gentle snoring. They’d got engaged not long after the fire, even though they’d only been going out together for about three months. Everyone — especially her mother, and Sonny’s mother, Awhi — had told her it was far too soon, and that it wouldn’t last. But she and Sonny had seen the terrible mess the fire had made of people’s lives, and didn’t want to waste any more of theirs not being together. She didn’t care that she hadn’t known Sonny long, or that she was Pakeha and he was Maori, or that he only drove a delivery truck for Smith and Caughey, or that neither of them had any money, and she knew he didn’t care about any of that, either.

  They’d married in April the previous year. She was working in the cosmetics department at Smith and Caughey, a job she’d got straight after Dunbar and Jones burnt down, and she’d used her staff discount to buy some nice material from the drapery department for her wedding dress. They’d had a church service, then a reception in a hall at Orakei, near where both her family, the Robertses, and Sonny’s extended family lived. They’d invited several hundred people and served hangi food, sandwiches, pies and cakes, with lots of beer on the tables, laughter and shouting, a live band, dancing, kids sliding around the floor in their socks, and a few unplanned fights outside in the carpark. Some of the Pakeha guests hadn’t stayed long, but on the day Allie hadn’t had time to worry about that. Then everyone had waited for the early baby. She’d arrived — remarkably early, in fact — in August and they’d called her Irene Hana, after Irene Baxter, who’d perished in the Dunbar and Jones fire. But Irene had seemed such a grown-up name for a baby, so everyone was soon
calling her Hana.

  She was beautiful, healthy, thriving, bright and utterly adored, and then, just before she was four months old, the unimaginable had happened.

  Allie had been woken by the discomfort of swollen, leaking breasts: Hana had slept right through the feed she usually demanded at two in the morning. She’d risen and gone to the baby’s bassinet and found her still sleeping. Pleased, because perhaps Hana was weaning herself off her night feeds, Allie had turned away, but then she’d looked back — Hana had seemed very, very still. Her eyes had been closed and she was on her belly with her head to one side on the little pillow, exactly as Allie had left her when she’d put her down.

  She’d touched her baby’s cheek and her skin had been as cold as marble. That was when Allie had screamed.

  Their beautiful little girl had gone, and no one had been able to tell them why.

  After the funeral she’d returned to work at Smith and Caughey. It had been better than sitting around the flat floundering in misery, crying, and wishing things were different. By February Sonny had packed up Hana’s things and taken them round to his mother’s house because she couldn’t cope with seeing them every day. She suspected he couldn’t, either. They’d decided to try for another baby straight away, but it was nine months down the track now and nothing had happened. Why not, they wondered, when she’d so effortlessly, and accidentally, fallen pregnant the first time?

  So now she was back to being just ordinary Mrs Sonny Manaia, which wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. Sonny was lovely. He was handsome, bright, funny, honest, a hard worker and he loved her, but she’d quickly discovered that some people were offended by a Maori being married to a blonde and very fair-skinned white girl. They took it out on her too. She’d been told she could ‘do better’, often by women, and some men treated her with less respect, pinching her backside and making snide remarks. She’d once even been called a whore, which was ridiculous because she’d only ever been with one man, who she’d married!

  She really didn’t think she did need to do better. Sonny probably could, though, and that knowledge hurt her very much. She tried so hard to be the cheerful, energetic girl he’d first gone out with, but it was so difficult when some days she could barely drag herself out of bed, she felt that low. The gloomy predictions made by their mothers that the marriage wouldn’t last were coming true already, and she had no idea what to do about it.

  And it was all her fault.

  *

  She held on to Sonny, her thighs pressed against his, her arms wrapped around his waist, leaning over hard as he took the tight corner off Kepa Road a little too fast, then tore along Coates Avenue, the engine of his Indian Chief roaring. Her hair whipped behind her in tattered streamers and crisp air bit at the bare ankles below her capri pants, reminding her of why they went to work in Sonny’s battered old truck and not on the motorcycle, but she loved the bike almost as much as he did — unlike her mother, who never stopped making digs about it being a death trap.

  They pulled up outside her parents’ house with a minimum of unnecessary revving (no point rubbing it in), opened the garden gate, parked the motorcycle on the lawn, and went round the back. Hardly anyone used the front door.

  ‘Mum’s hydrangeas could do with a prune,’ she remarked, pushing past enormous caps of blue and lilac flowers leaning over the path.

  The house, a state house rented by Sid and Colleen Roberts ever since it was built, sat on a sloping quarter acre on a ridge overlooking Okahu Bay and the site from which the Ngati Whatua — Sonny’s people — had been evicted by the government several years earlier. The Roberts family had lived in the Coates Avenue house so long — since 1939 — that, of the children, only Allie vaguely remembered living anywhere else.

  Allie and Sonny climbed the ten scoria-red concrete steps to the back door. Allie knocked lightly and went in.

  ‘Morning! Something smells nice.’

  ‘Hello, love,’ Colleen Roberts said from the kitchen bench. She set down her knife and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Hello, Sonny.’

  ‘Morning, lovebirds,’ Sid said from behind The Truth.

  Allie’s sisters said nothing, Donna busy reading a magazine and Pauline concentrating intently on painting a toenail, a sweep of her fair hair falling across her face like Veronica Lake’s. Allie frowned; she’d been wondering where her bottle of Revlon ‘Cherries in the Snow’ nail varnish had gone.

  ‘You look tired,’ Colleen said, peering at Allie.

  ‘I’m OK. Is that my nail varnish?’

  Pauline looked up. ‘This? I dunno. It might be. Can we go for a ride on the Indian?’ she asked Sonny.

  ‘Maybe, after lunch.’

  ‘No,’ Colleen said emphatically.

  ‘Fancy a beer?’ Sid asked.

  ‘No, he does not,’ Colleen said, ‘and neither do you. It’s not even twelve o’clock. I can make you a nice cup of tea, though.’

  ‘That’d be lovely, thanks,’ Sonny said.

  ‘Do you need a hand, Mum?’ Allie asked.

  ‘Someone could pick some leeks. There’s a lovely crop just come on in the garden.’

  When her father showed no indication of moving, and neither did Donna nor Pauline, Allie exclaimed, ‘You lazy buggers. Mum’s not your slave, you know!’

  ‘You’re the one who offered,’ Donna countered.

  Sonny asked, ‘How many do you need?’

  ‘Oh, you’re a love,’ Colleen said. ‘Three or four?’

  Allie followed him outside, grumbling, ‘God, they’re lazy. Mum works five days a week, and then comes home and has to wait on them hand and foot!’

  She didn’t expect a response because Sonny had heard all this before. He knew Sid, an ex-watersider, had been more or less unemployed and on the invalid’s benefit since badly breaking his leg (on the way home from the pub) four years earlier, and that both Donna, seventeen, and Pauline, a year younger, could be handfuls. They both worked — Pauline in The Cedar Room, Smith and Caughey’s tearoom, and Donna as a nurse aid at Bethany Maternity Home in Grey Lynn. To everyone’s amazement — because until recently she’d been the real tearaway — Donna had decided she wanted to be a nurse, had applied and been accepted but couldn’t start her training until she turned eighteen, so was gaining work experience at Bethany. Now Pauline was the problem, being cheeky and rude, sneaking out at night, hanging around with milk-bar cowboys and generally behaving in a way that sorely tested Colleen and Sid. Allie was amazed some days that her mother didn’t just walk out on her family, but she knew she never would. She wasn’t that sort of woman.

  Sonny made a sympathetic ‘mmm’ noise.

  ‘I mean, I know the girls work, but Dad could put the tea on, or at least get the veggies started.’

  Sonny looked at her as though she were mad.

  Allie laughed. ‘It’s not that hard to peel a carrot. He can grow them — why can’t he peel one?’

  It was true, Sid’s vegetable garden was magnificent. At the moment it was replete with neat rows of celery, broccoli, silverbeet, cabbages and cauliflowers, leeks, onions, potatoes, parsnips, pumpkins and carrots. Far more than one family could eat, so he gave at least half the produce away to neighbours. He had a little orchard too, though at the moment only the apple and lemon trees were fruiting.

  Sonny took a garden fork and eased a few fat leeks out of the ground.

  ‘Rex!’

  Allie and Sonny looked at each other.

  ‘Rex! Here, boy!’

  The voice was coming from next door. Allie stuck her head over the fence. An elderly man was wandering around the lawn, looking agitated. Must be the new neighbours her mother had mentioned.

  ‘Lost your dog?’ Sonny called.

  The old man stopped and stared at them. ‘No. My horse.’

  ‘Oh. Right,’ Sonny said. Then, ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Don’t,’ Allie whispered.

  ‘Can’t miss him,’ the man replied. ‘Got a red blanket u
nder his saddle. Rex!’

  A woman appeared at the house’s back door. She spotted the old man, trotted down the steps and hurried across the grass.

  ‘Hello, I’m Ana Leonard. We’ve just moved in. I see you’ve met my father-in-law, Jack. I hope he’s not being a nuisance.’

  ‘No, no,’ Allie said quickly. ‘I’m Allie Manaia and this is my husband, Sonny. We’re visiting my mum and dad. You’ve met them?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Your mum brought some baking over the day after we arrived. A cake. So lovely of her.’

  ‘She’s like that.’

  Sonny said, ‘Er, Jack says he’s lost his horse.’

  Kindly, Ana said to Jack, ‘I think I saw him down by the feijoas. Why don’t you go and have a look?’ Off Jack went. When he was out of earshot, Ana said, ‘He’s not very well. We had a farm before this. He misses everything about it, especially the horses.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The farm,’ Sonny said. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘Oh. Hawke’s Bay. We ran sheep.’

  ‘You must be finding Auckland a big change, then,’ Allie remarked.

  Ana just nodded, looking at a complete loss for a moment.

  ‘Are you Ngati Kahungunu, then?’ Sonny asked — a bit bluntly, Allie thought.

  Ana smiled. ‘I am. Well spotted. Most people can’t even tell I’m Maori. My father is Joseph Deane. His father was Kepa Te Roroa and his mother was Tamar Murdoch, nee Deane, from Cornwall. My mother is Erin Deane, whose parents were Jeannie and Lachlan McRae from Scotland. They were all sheep farmers. My mother and father still are.’

  Sonny rattled off his own family tree, which was something Allie had learnt a lot of Maori folk did when introducing themselves to other Maori. She’d done it herself, once, to one of Sonny’s many uncles, listing the names and Irish and English birthplaces of her parents and grandparents. The man had stared at her for several long, silent seconds, then walked off. Maybe he’d thought she was being cheeky.

  ‘So what brings you to Auckland?’ Sonny asked.

  Reappearing, Jack said, ‘Not in the feijoas. Fucked if I know where he is.’