I think Keita was happy before she died. She kept saying during her last days, ‘We’re all still here.’ And so we are. That’s all I can think of for the days ahead, that we’ll be here keeping hold. It’s what Hamu and I have been given to do. We all have to survive but we want more than just surviving, that’s what Makareta has always said. We want the best of everything for ourselves and the children, everything right for them, but I don’t know yet how we will make that be.
I never thought there could be anyone else like Keita, but after Keita died, Mama Gloria became the new Keita, stubborn, determined, keeping us all on our toes. She misses Dadda, as we all do.
‘Fifty-nine is my ripe old age,’ Dadda said when we brought him home from hospital. There was so much wrong with him that the doctor said it was easier to tell what was right. His legs and hips had given out, he had pain in his stomach, his liver and kidneys weren’t functioning properly and his heart was playing up. We had turns at sitting by him, singing to him, happy enough for him to go when the time came.
As for the young ones, they seem confused, or some do, eating health food, smoking the taru kino and drinking top shelf. The old people say their confusion is because their whenua have gone down the slush hole with all the tutae and the rubbish, instead of being buried in the ancestral places where they belong. I think they must be right, or that must be part of it. These are some of the things I wanted to talk more to Makareta about. These are some of the things she and I have already discussed during our long telephone conversations.
Anyway, some of the young parents are bringing those ways back again now. Good on them. They’re bringing their babies’ whenua back from the hospitals, not too scared to ask for them. They treat the hospital as if it’s their hospital, brave young people. They’re giving their children the ancestral names, staunchly. It’s good that they want those things back again, or it’s good that they want to do things their way, because they have many needs. There’s been a lot lost to them.
I think the ancestors or God have made a mistake taking Makareta. It’s such a waste when the kids, all of us, need her so much. She’s got the knowledge of the old people. She has their language and their stories and the lovely kuia ways that children love, even though she’s not the age of a kuia yet. Also, she has the knowledge of new ways of doing things that are all right, comfortable for us, or she knows how we can change these things to make them comfortable and acceptable. It’s not sticking to the old ways that’s important, she said, but it’s us being us, using all the new knowledge our way. Everything new belongs to us too.
But she’s dead. We’re waiting here to call her home and it makes me hurt and sad.
I had an angry thought when I saw the group getting ready at the gateway to bring Makareta in. I had to stop myself from thinking it, because I know it’s not right to send bad thoughts to people arriving. I looked at our cousin Mata, whom I haven’t seen for nearly forty years, and wondered why it couldn’t have been her instead of Makareta being carried home. What use are you to us, 1 thought, then put the thought aside.
After that I turned my pain back to Makareta. ‘You come home to us like this?’ I said as they brought her through the gateway. Because ever since Polly died I’d been asking her to come home and build a house on her land. We needed her here. But she liked her life in the city, liked her work there. I know it was important work and we were all proud of that. She was well known all over the country, as well as in other parts of the world, for the work she did for our people — the advice, the help, the knowledge that she was able to give. But it wore her out. She could’ve rested here. We’d have cared for her, treasured her, the way we always had.
She sent Michael to us instead, telling us it wouldn’t be long before she came too.
Her coming was only a month away when she rang to tell me that she’d found our cousin Mata. Mama Gloria had been dreaming about Mata and saying that she’d never turned up the way Keita always said she would. ‘Her land’s here,’ Keita would say, ‘so one day she’ll come.’ I had a picture of Mata’s expressionless face in my mind, her outstretched arm and the magic marble.
But it was after she left here that Mata began to be a more real cousin to us. She was talked about often, even though her name was hardly ever spoken. They called her ‘Anihera’s one’. The old people, whenever they met, would ask Mama Gloria, ‘Have you heard any more of Anihera’s one?’
My mother would tell them about Keita writing to the woman who was Mata’s guardian but not getting any reply. Gloria had tried writing directly to Mata but her letters were never answered.
After a time people stopped asking, and Keita and Mama Gloria stopped writing the letters, but now and again we’d hear Keita say that the land would bring Mata back one day.
Now Mata is bringing back to us the one whose place I stood in when I was sixteen. Makareta has never told me if she thought it was what I would do. She’s never told me if it’s what she hoped as she watched from the window as the taxi pulled away that day. I never asked.
But I think I did right. If I had other dreams, if there was something else, some other part of me, what does it matter? If love is different from what I thought, what does it matter?
It was up to me before, it’s up to me again.
I think we’ve done all right, Hamu and me. Our as-is-where-is marriage is just as good as any do-it-yourself, pick-your-own. Better than most, I think.
MATA
Forty-three
I didn’t mind the hunger or the tiredness as I walked. I was glad of it, happy to have feelings that were only from hunger or fatigue. I wanted to walk forever, liking the night and the black road, not minding the sore feet, the aching body, pleased to be one of the street people. Somewhere further on I would have to sleep, but would do that only when I could walk no more.
The road ahead of me began to rise and curve and every now and again a vehicle approached. I would see the lights ahead of me at the bend, or hear the noise of the engine behind me, and I’d quickly cross to the side of the road to wait on the footpath until it had gone by. I don’t know why I had chosen to walk the middle of the road, but perhaps it was something to do with words that were going through my head —‘middle of the road, middle of the night, middle of nowhere’. I had picked up the beat of them, needing words churning through me that would keep thinking away. I guessed it was already past the middle of the night.
It was when I arrived at the bend in the road that I heard someone call my name and, looking up, saw a woman standing on the footpath. ‘Mata, over here,’ she said. I wanted to walk on, wanted not to hear, wanted to keep on doing what I was doing and not be distracted from it, because I had made up my mind. I had instructed my feet. But my feet turned. I put them into shoes and crossed to the footpath. ‘Remember me?’ the woman said, ‘Makareta, the spoilt one, when we were little girls.’ She took my hand, put an arm round me. ‘This way,’ she said. ‘My house is up here.’
We were at the beginning of a long driveway lined with shrubs and trees. There were low ferns on either side, shielding lights that lit our way. ‘I saw you from the bus,’ she said. ‘I knew it was you and when I got off the bus I hurried up to the house because I knew I could watch you from there. I thought if I tried to walk back I might lose you.’ I didn’t answer her. All I could think of was that I was doing something I didn’t want to do.
The drive became steeper and Makareta turned me onto a narrow path that led through trees. ‘It’s quicker this way,’ she said. We went over a little bridge under which I could hear water running. There was a bush smell that I could remember from a long time ago. We continued on up a series of stone steps until we came to the house where a light shone over a solid wood door. ‘This is where I live all alone,’ Makareta said. ‘But not for long.’
We went into a hallway where Makareta took off her shoes, so I took mine off too, remembering something about the taking off of shoes from that long time ago. We walked on deep, white carpet into a lounge
where a dog stood and put his nose to me. He was white and shaggy too, just like the carpet. ‘It’s all right, Hipi, this is our cousin Mata,’ Makareta said. She arranged the cushions on a chair and I sat down into the deep comfort of it. I hadn’t said a word since we met and sat there feeling my grubbiness, my shabbiness, my dullness, my ugliness, my shyness. I’d wanted only to walk. ‘A cup of tea first,’ Makareta said.
It was a high-ceilinged room where I sat, with polished beams and large windows. One wall was lined with shelves of books and had a built-in sound system and television, and a cabinet that I guessed would contain music and video tapes. Wall lights lit up paintings that almost covered the two remaining walls. In the paintings were wooden figures that had been brought to life. Their dark faces stared out as though their hearts were broken, and there were patterns that curled in on themselves, or out from themselves in colours of feeling, strands woven into them as though they came from trees. Other patterns wove in and out into a flow or a clenching. There were birds that seemed to be people, and people that seemed to be birds. In some of them, people walked on long roads with banners flying.
As well as the lit pictures there were carved figures that were not lit, some large ones standing in shadows against the walls and smaller ones here and there on the shelves.
Makareta came with a cup of tea that she put on a little table by my chair.
‘Thank you.’ My voice sounded bruised and strange.
‘And then a bath. I’ll run a bath for you,’ she said, and went away. I repeated the words of the room over to myself—beams and windows, lights and shelves, books and pictures, colours and patterns and faces —to keep myself from thinking.
The bathroom was spacious and mirrored and the bath was warm and perfumed. I thought Makareta would leave me but she didn’t. She took soap and a cloth and began washing me, letting the warm water run down over me. I felt ugly and shy, but there was nothing I could do or say.
When Makareta had finished she went away and came back with satin nightclothes, wool slippers and large towels, which she left on a bench for me. By the time I had finished dressing she had a meal ready. It was poached fish, with lettuce, tomato, little beetroots and warm bread rolls. She had set it on a special tray for me with a white napkin and silver cutlery. I’d never thought of such things. She had her own tray too and we sat down in the armchairs with them on our laps. ‘I’ll have just a little,’ she said.
Later she took me to the bedroom where I was to sleep. She turned the bed covers back for me, helped me into bed and tucked me in the way a mother does. I didn’t want to want it, and I couldn’t speak. ‘In the morning,’ she said, ‘you can tell me everything that has happened to you since last we met, or tell me everything that has happened to you since before that.’ I could feel my eyes closing.
What I told her the next day was mainly about the waiting. First of all waiting for my mother to come, and then after that, waiting for there to be someone for me, a mother, a friend, a child, someone to love me that I would love. I had waited and wanted — until at last I had decided that I wouldn’t wait any more, wouldn’t want anything but what I already had, which was myself, shabby and ugly, my name, my little photo in its frame, my own two feet to walk me.
I talked and talked as I had never talked before, in a way that I didn’t know I could. It was as though the walking, the thinking and the not thinking, had jolted the tongue inside me. I told her all that had ever, or never, happened, wanting to talk on and on. I had come away so as not to want, so as not to be sitting waiting, yet here I was reaching, letting all that had waited and waited inside me pour out. I had found someone, even though I hadn’t looked for her, someone who treated me closely, as though I was part of who she was. I remembered that a long time ago she had given me a dress and shoes.
Then I remembered that I wanted not to want.
I stopped talking and took out the photo of my mother to show her. ‘This is my only piece of luggage,’ I said. ‘I want to walk away before I find myself wanting more than this. I’ll walk, and either I’ll keep on living, or I won’t.’
She sat down beside me and put her arm round my shoulders. ‘I need you,’ she said. Strange words. I had never heard them spoken before. ‘I’m tired and I need your help. I’m selling up and moving back home and there’s all the packing to do, all the things to sort out. It’ll take three weeks, perhaps four. If you’ll help me I won’t have to call on Michael or our cousin Missy, or anyone else. And if you come with me you won’t have to walk any more.’
‘People go away,’ I said, ‘or they die.’ I don’t know why I said it. ‘I don’t know people for long, then they go away, or they die.’ I listened to myself say it in my own flat voice, my own unfeeling way.
Then I decided I would help her. She had the house to sell and communications to make with the children’s father. She had papers that she wanted to go through and arrangements to be made with her lawyer. She was in between cars, had sold one and was waiting for the delivery of another, more suitable for out in the wop-wops, she said.
She went about doing what she needed to do and I began the packing.
It was a house of beautiful things, some of which she wanted to take with her, some of which she wanted her cousins to have. I used to dream about houses but never houses like that. I used to dream about belonging in a house with my own family. I’d have pictures in my mind of rooms and furnishings, windows, cupboards and fireplaces, dishes, glasses, knives and forks and things. I’d go over them in my mind. But I always had trouble seeing my family, picturing a family for me. The figures in the houses were always shadowy. They were borrowed families, people that I’d seen through a window or on a train, and I was trying to make them my own. Sometimes there would be just me and my mother, whose face I couldn’t remember. I would build a house around us and this mother and I would sleep in each other’s arms.
Makareta spent most of her time in her office sorting books and papers, or, once the car arrived, out seeing lawyers and land agents, while I worked from room to room wrapping and packing. It was a house of many rooms, which I worked steadily through. In the late afternoons I would walk to the shops for a few supplies, then come home and cook a small meal for us. If I hadn’t been there to cook, I don’t think Makareta would’ve eaten at all.
In the evenings we talked, and each day I looked forward to that. Nothing had matched it in my life. I was unafraid about enjoying those times together because I knew that they would soon end. I had made up my mind to give myself to the task that was to be done, and at the end of it I would go on my way.
Sometimes Makareta talked about a house for me, on land she said was mine, but I didn’t really listen. I knew just to accept for now that we were together, that something was happening to me for now, fleetingly. I knew not to want, not to have dreams —to have just myself and wherever my feet would take me. My life was not something that mattered.
By the end of three weeks everything was done, everything was packed and labelled. I was sorry when all the work was finished. The labels read —Back Home, Cat House, Parrot House. New owners were to move into the house in two weeks’ time. Makareta tired easily and often rested in the middle of the day, but apart from that she looked well and cheerful. She was big-boned but not fat. She was beautiful.
Often I would hear her on the phone talking to her son Michael or to Missy, discussing houses and land, and me. She was looking forward to going ‘back home’, and the house that she had arranged for was almost completed. She had a deposit for me too, for a house she said, but I couldn’t think about that. Whenever she mentioned it, it drove me silent. There was a cousin with a bulldozer who would clear the site for the house as soon as I said yes. ‘Tell me yes,’ she would say. ‘There’s no one to live on your land but you. There are children you can give it to if you want, later. But for now tell me yes. Say you’ll go and live there, to let the people know you, especially the ones who knew your mother, because there are people ther
e who grew up with her, who remember her. Do it for them. Aunty Gloria tells me I have to make you come home, so say yes. If you want a child to inherit your house and your land, the old people will tell you who.’ I had learned not to want a house with or without a family inside. How could I? How could I want when I had given up wanting? None of this made sense to me.
She talked about the old lady often, the granny who looked after her when she was a little girl. ‘She’s by me,’ she said. ‘I can’t see her, but sometimes she leans on me, sometimes she tickles my arm letting me know she’s there. I hear her talking into my mind. When I’m lonely I talk to her, or when I need to sort something out. I was lucky during all those long nightshift hours when I worked as a nurse because she was there. I don’t know how I would’ve managed without her. And when I’m needed back home she sends me there. I was home when Wi died, I was home when Keita died, because she let me know but I don’t see her … Michael’s the one, she said, “the one who sees.” “Who’s there?” he’d say when he was little. “Who’s there with an old face?” I’d tell him, “That’s Kui Hinemate who looked after me when I was a girl.” ’ I thought Makareta was a little strange from some of the things she said.
I was sorry when all the packing was finished. The walls looked different without their books and pictures, and the house seemed emptier without the eyes of the carved figures looking out from the corners and down from the shelves. But still it was a beautiful house, surrounded by dark green trees. Through the windows, through the trees, there was the blue and white harbour, and at night the sea of orange and yellow lights.
Makareta arranged for the Cat House and Parrot House boxes to be collected, and before going to bed I shifted them into a room close to the front door for the carriers who were to come the next morning.
That night I couldn’t sleep, but lay awake reminding myself not to want, telling myself that all I had was me, my name, a photo, my two feet, and that there was nothing else that was anything to do with me.
Cousins Page 24
