Gordon, the picture man, would pack away the projector and films, take the screen down, then he and his family would begin sweeping the hall. One night you’d asked Gordon when he was going to get another Alan Ladd picture. ‘Alan Ladd, that’s your heart-throb, is it?’ he’d said. ‘They say he’s a bit short at one end. Has to stand on a step to kiss the ladies, or lean off of a horse.’
As you waited on the verandah with the primer children you could see Miss Jamieson at the piano, swaying a little in the light of two lamps held by Chum and Billyboy. You listened as the first notes of the mazurka sounded, picking in and out among the old reeds and boards of the meeting house before joining together filling the spaces, sweeping upwards, finding ribs and rafters. Then the notes came down, dispersing, until there was only one left. The people held themselves still for it, let it cling to them, then whistled and applauded. You walked the little children round to the side entrance and lined them up for their items.
‘Send them in, Maleme,’ Mr Davis said. He was wearing his dark-blue suit and a blue tie you thought might be new. It matched his eyes.
One day when you’d taken a message over to his house, Mrs Davis had been sitting on the back steps knitting a pullover, and not long after that Mr Davis had worn it to school. ‘I said four o’clock, Maleme,’ he’d said, returning to the classroom on that pullover day. ‘You were supposed to go home at four.’ You kept your head down, kept on writing, even though you’d wanted to look at him. Like Alan Ladd, only bigger, and would’ve looked all right in cowboy trousers, boots, chaps, gun belt, fringed jacket, big hat. On wet days he wore a floppy cloth hat to school.
You finished the line you were doing, numbered down, ruled off and put the work on the desk in front of him as though it were a prize. Sometimes the punishments he gave made you feel like laughing. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘cans for you tomorrow, extra duty on cans.’ But he’d had a stranded look when he said it, as though he didn’t believe. The new pullover was blue like his eyes.
It was Jacko who had called you Missy Can-can because of the number of times you’d been given extra duty emptying lavatory cans. After school one day you’d gone to the lavatories for the first can and taken it to the end of the playing field where the boys were digging the trenches, but listen, ‘Missy Can-can, Missy Can-can,’ listen to Jacko. You were tipping the can when he said it. If you let him get away with it, it’s who you are, Missy. You climbed through the fence, ran right round the edge of the playing field and climbed back through, went up behind him and shoved. Good, my sister. Up to his shins, pitching sideways. Hi Ha!
Coming out of the classroom behind you with a bundle of books, Mr Davis had said, ‘Can you get these keys, Maleme, and lock the door,’ jingling keys on his little finger under the pile of books. You unhooked them, locked the door. ‘Drop them in my pocket please.’ Then he’d asked, ‘What do you do … when you’re away, when you don’t come?’ A question trapping you. Not a little girl any more, too big not to answer. ‘We don’t want them knowing our business,’ Mama had said. But Mr Davis hadn’t waited for an answer. ‘You’d better go,’ he’d said. ‘You were meant to go at four.’
You ran out of the gate, listening to your feet echo on the pumicy ground. Not so smart/cause Gloria/Is not in love/With you. Which was nothing to do with it.
Nothing.
But you were pleased to have escaped the question.
The bleeding. Someone had to get water and wood on the days when Mama couldn’t walk or lift or carry. Someone had to lift the babies when she wasn’t strong. Someone had to bring the bucket, wash the cloths and clothes. ‘It’s only you can help me, Missy,’ Mama had said, her voice just a whisper.
It was time. You tucked the pois into the top of your piupiu, started the song and led the seniors in for the final items. The audience, recognising the tune that came from the dark, began to applaud, and as you moved into the light they joined in the singing, watching every movement and every expression to see if eyes, faces, hands, the click clicking of the skirts matched what the words and voices told, as one song moved into another. You caught a glimpse of Dadda leaning in through the window, knew Mama would be wild with him for singing so loudly.
People watched and began to applaud again as the canoe formed, the poi balls making white waves beside it, white birds above, taking them on long, long journeys.
But they became quiet when you and Tati walked out into the space at each end of the canoe and started the long pois circling, held breath as your wrists secured the rhythm and your feet and hips began to turn, head and eyes shifting, watching the turning balls. ‘Hey Missy, hey,’ you heard our father call as the clapping and whistling broke out all around you — you and your big teeth, smiling.
On the way home in the truck Manny stood on the tray and sang ‘Bid Me to Love’ like Mrs Davis, then ‘Dayo’ like Harry Belafonte, everyone joining in. His feet moved as though he was riding the drum,
Come Mr Tallyman,
Tally me banana.
Daylight come
And I wanna go home.
E rua nei aku ringa
E rua nei aku ringa
E rua nei Baba Lou.
You took your new pen out of its box, hooked it to the top of your blouse and pressed it against your chest, your heart. Blue as the sky. You and Billyboy had been given the pens as farewell gifts from the school committee and Mr Davis had said good things about you when he presented them, things that made you feel lonely and strange.
The beams from the headlights cut through each other and picked out the bumps and dips as the truck footed round the hills. ‘Dark moon,’ our father sang and everyone else stopped singing because they wanted to listen to his voice.
Away up high up in the sky,
O tell me why,
O tell me why,
You’ve lost your splendour.
The song hadn’t got to the top of the hit parade because of ‘Love Letters in the Sand’, but you’d liked it better. Your light withdraws. Is it because I’ve lost my love?
Mortals have dreams,
Of love’s splendid schemes,
But they don’t realise,
That love can sometimes bring,
A dark moon, Baba Lou-a,
I hear you calling, calling,
Calling for me,
E rua nei aku ringa.
I have two arms, Baba Lou.
Thirty-nine
You followed Rahera onto the bus on your first day of high school and suddenly found yourself sprawling in the aisle with Billyboy on top of you. Everyone in the bus was laughing. Manny, coming in behind, grabbed the boy who had tripped you, pulled him to his feet by the front of his shirt and punched him out of the door. The driver turned in his seat, put his foot into the middle of Manny’s back and sent him flying out too, turned back, slammed the door and drove off.
Noise. Some were laughing, others shouting, swearing, telling the driver to stop the bloody bus. But he drove on, clicking his chewing gum, swinging the big wheel this way and that travelling the winding road.
At school the driver took you to the headmaster’s office along with Billyboy and the swearing cousins. ‘I won’t have it,’ the headmaster shouted. ‘You pa kids and you mill kids fighting in the bus on the first day.’ He was oversized, red and spitting, with ears that might fly him away. ‘Thistles,’ he said. ‘Report at lunchtime and you can dig out thistles. Next time I’ll cane the lot of you.’
You and Billyboy were put into 3C, and Alamein told you that the pa kids were always put into 3C. ‘It’s the bottom class, the dumb class,’ she said. ‘Teachers don’t like 3C.’
You’d looked forward to starting high school, having shoes, having new clothes. And you’d liked the idea of having new books and coloured pencils to make maps and diagrams with, like the ones Makareta had shown you in the books she’d brought home from boarding school.
But much of the time in class seemed to be spent copying work from books or the blackboa
rd, work that you didn’t understand and that was never explained. If you tried to work neatly someone would lean over and blob ink onto your book. You always had to make sure you got them back, otherwise how could you be you? After a while your books and the books of the others in the class began to look like the half-used books that Manny used to bring home — blotted, smudged, the edges of the pages scuffed and grey and swollen.
Our brother Manny didn’t return to school after being kicked off the bus. He was fourteen and a half and Dadda found him a job on the roads. He saved money and bought slippers for Mama and sometimes at night our mother would put them on and sit holding her feet in front of her. When she went to bed she’d put the slippers away in a box under the bed where she kept her wedding shoes. Ha, you were jealous about the slippers, wanted to work and have money so you could buy something for Mama too. And Manny was putting money in a tobacco tin, saving for a new house, he said.
One lunchtime in the second term you were watching the older girls practising basketball when the sports mistress asked you to fill one of the places. Afterwards she told you you could be in the team if you had black stockings and basketball boots. Hi Ha! Basketball was for you. All afternoon you could think of nothing else but how you could get stockings and boots.
That was the day you found out that if you sat at the back of the room, kept quiet and pretended to write, then nothing would happen to you, and that if you didn’t hand your book in at the end of the lesson it wouldn’t be asked for. And from that time onwards you spent much of your time in class copying words of songs into your hit parade book, or writing the names of singers, decorating them with loops and swirls and coloured pencils — Elvis, Patti Page, Cry Johnny, Frankie, Louis, Debbie, Harry, Pat Boone. In your own world, Missy.
By the end of the afternoon you’d worked out what you would do.
After school you didn’t get on the bus to go home. Instead you went out the back gate and ran the five miles into town to wait across the road from the pub for Dadda.
He didn’t see you at first, not until you walked up beside him smiling your best and taking his arm. ‘Dadda, I’m in the basketball team,’ you said.
‘Hey, my Missy.’
‘I need money for stockings and boots.’
He laughed, putting his hand into his pocket. ‘Look at this,’ he called to one of his mates. ‘My daughter come to take my money before I swallow it.’
‘That’s the girl,’ his mate said.
‘In the basketball team. Shoes and whatnot.’
‘Good on you, girl.’ The man raised his eyebrows and crossed the road. ‘See you in there, Bob.’
Dadda pulled out a ten-shilling note and some coins. He gave you the note and you pick, pick picked the coins off his hand and went running. ‘Hey, what about my beer money?’ he called. ‘Little bitch tart, worse than your mother.’ Laughing as he crossed the road.
Mama was angry with you at first, until she realised what a good idea it was. ‘Every pay day,’ she said, whispering with the wonder of it, ‘you can go and get the money and do our shopping. I can go down Keita’s and ring the shop to get the order ready for you.’
So once a week you’d go into town, and after you’d done the shopping you’d go to the pub where Bessie had a job as a kitchen hand. It was a warm place. Pay night was the busy night and the boss didn’t mind you coming in if you wanted to help. You could make tea and toast for yourselves as long as the work was done. The pub was meant to close at six but it never did. It was always eight or nine before Dadda and Nonny came out and you started for home.
There was a fourth-form girl called Ama who had a scrap-book of film stars. Some of the pictures and stories had been cut from magazines but she had autographed photos too, which she’d written to Hollywood for. At lunchtimes on the days when there was no basketball practice you and Ama would sit with your song and star books and talk about the songs you liked, the pictures you’d seen, the film stars you were in love with. Even though Alan Ladd was still all right, Johnny Weismuller, Hedy Lamarr and Margaret Lockwood the wicked lady were your favourites at the time.
At home there was some excitement because fundraising had begun for the new marae dining room. Every Saturday night there were card evenings and socials, and once a month, dances were held in the local woolshed. You’d be there helping to sweep out the shed, cover the walls in ferns and decorate one of the shearing stands where the band would play. Outside, a tent would be put up for the beer drinkers. And lights would be rigged up on poles — the way men do it — with leads running everywhere. You all learned to step over connections and duck under loops of cords. If you tripped or tangled yourself, all the lights went out. All very ‘behind’, according to Tuahine.
Tuahine was Billyboy’s older sister who had gone to the city to work. She came home telling of the films she’d seen, the dances she’d been to, the good times she was having. Jingly Tuahine. See her? She had clothes, hairsets, money in her pocket and lived the life of a movie star, it seemed.
But still she always turned up to the woolshed dances, in her cerise or burnt-orange clothes, her hairsets, bright lipsticks, nail polish, three-inch heels and dangly earrings. She was the one who got you all rock ’n’ rolling, laughing about it, telling the band their music was old and ‘behind’. You followed her everywhere.
One night you were standing together under the light at the corner of the woolshed and looking across to the tent where the uncles were standing with their backs to you. Her three-inchers were sinking into the ground and she was throwing her arms about to balance herself and she yelled, ‘Hell’s teeth, butcher knives. All dressed up for the dance, big boots and butcher knives,’ and sat down in the sheep dung and laughed until she cried. You laughed because she laughed — not because of the sight of our uncles bending their elbows, dressed in bush shirts and boots, their knives strapped round their middles. ‘They’d die, they’d die,’ she kept saying in amongst her laughing and crying. And you knew that ‘they’ were the city people who owned cars and radiograms and modern clothes, who saw all the latest films and lived the life of stars. You began to dream of having a share of all the up-to-date things, all the fun and excitement of city life.
Sometimes Tuahine brought friends home, along with cars and engagement rings. Ponty? He didn’t fit your idea of ‘star’, in spite of his royal-blue suit, suede boots, string tie and sideboards. He was little and old-looking. Manny and Billyboy were better, you thought.
He could dance though, rock ’n’ roll like nobody’s business, no matter how old the music. One night Tuahine threw the engagement ring at him in the middle of a dance and it fell down through the spaces in the floorboards. The next morning, when you were all cleaning up, she was under the shed crawling about in the sheep marbles, crying and looking for the ring. Her man was stretched out asleep under the pines and his boots were gone.
She found the ring and came up to help pull the ferns off the walls. ‘I’m in love, I’m in love,’ she was saying as she bobbled along dragging the fronds. ‘Especially with the ring and the car.’ You thought of being in love too, living the life of a star.
When you turned fifteen you took a job at the hotel. You liked the big kitchen with its wooden benches and big sinks where there was endless running water. Under the benches were shelves with curtains across them where all the pots and bowls were kept, and up above the benches were cupboards full of dishes. There was a special bench for salt and pepper shakers, sauce bottles, sugar bowls and butter dishes. There was an electric stove as well as a big wood stove that kept the place nice and warm. It was winter when you left school, and it was good to arrive at work in the mornings and walk into the warm room.
Not far from the job was the Moonbeam dance hall, which was an old pavilion in town that had been painted and hung with streamers, coloured lights and a spinning mirror ball — not a lot better than the woolshed apart from the mirror ball. But to you it was an exciting place, a star place, a place for music and
dancing and love. The men in the band wore cowboy outfits that sparkled and played music on instruments that gleamed — even though they were no better to listen to than the home-grown woolshed band. The music was still out of date, according to cousins from the cities.
At the Moonbeam you danced with your brothers and cousins and were in love with everyone else, dreamt of being danced away and kissed in moonlit gardens by someone glimpsed over Manny’s or Billyboy’s shoulder, who could look like Audie Murphy, Elvis or James Dean. Mortals have dreams.
On some nights the band leader would offer the microphone to anyone who wanted to get up and sing. It took you a long time to do it, but one night when your dress was all right and you had new shoes, your feet took you to the stage steps, stepped you up. Then you began to sing and every other sound stopped. When you’d finished everyone clapped and clapped for you.
Your job was to rinse the plates and stack them ready for washing, scrape and soak the pots and oven dishes then take the bucket of scraps out and tip them into the bin for the pig man. The dishes had to be put away and the woodbin kept full. And when all the pots and pans had been washed you would help scrub down the benches and mop the floors before Mrs O’Keefe came back with the shopping.
It was a good job where you could save money. You thought you would keep the job until after Makareta’s birthday, then you’d go and stay with Tuahine in the city, be a singer, be a star.
Forty
The mists of morning sighs
Rise
You ran in the dress that Makareta had given you, calling to her as the taxi moved down the wheel tracks. Bub was behind you and our mother stood at the top of the drive, pressing her hands to her chest.
Makareta was looking out of the back window of the car and her hand was up by her face scarcely waving. The hair you had just been brushing filled the frame that was the window.
Cousins Page 19
