Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  Just because you’re behind the front gate doesn’t mean no one can see you, I said to him. I was standing on the other side of the gate. I reached out and touched him on the shoulder to prove my point. He flinched, as if my arm had reached out from another world.

  I know that, he said, but he always went round the back after that.

  It was amazing how much people thought you couldn’t see—like the ladies picking their noses in carriages trotting by because they thought they were in a sealed capsule that you couldn’t see into. Or because it didn’t count if poor people saw you pick your nose.

  And later, so many people wouldn’t see what was right in front of them.

  Nonno Buti made a box for a rich Chinaman on the West Coast. It was a box with secret compartments so the Chinaman could hide his gold nuggets from the government.

  We were standing in the back of Nonno Buti’s workshop, admiring it. The box was lizard green, as big as an ice chest, and sitting in the middle of the workshop floor.

  He said, TALLYHO, TELL ME HOW MANY COMPARTMENTS THERE ARE IN THIS BOX! but I was so amazed by the box I couldn’t move. DAI, he said, pushing me forward, APRILA!

  Nonno Buti stepped back and watched me approach the box with great care, then open and close all four of its compartments, breathe on the varnish, and tap each surface for spring-activated doors or secret hollow pockets. When I looked back up at him he was smiling so hard that tears were squeezing out the wrinkles at the sides of his eyes.

  There are four compartments, I said, and Nonno Buti almost choked on his own laugh, he was that excited.

  NO, TALLY HO, THERE ARE TEN!

  It had taken Nonno Buti three months to make because he wanted it to be perfect, but now it was perfect and late, so he needed a coachman to send it down to Greymouth quick smart.

  I asked Nonno Buti who the coachman was going to be. Was it going to be Papà? Or Harry Crawford? But he said, NO, TALLY HO, YOU ARE THE ONLY COACHMAN UP TO THE JOB.

  It was going to be me!

  He had that wild look he got when he was really excited. Like he wasn’t really here, like he was riding around on shooting stars up in the solar system. That’s when Nonno Buti was the most fun to be around and came up with his best ideas—the wooden whale with lots of little Jonah-shaped oyster forks inside its belly for instance, or the saltshaker which was actually a bald man’s head with terrible dandruff.

  He said I could have Geronimo to keep if I thought I could make the trip in a week.

  A week? But I’ve never even been there before!

  I KNOW, TALLY HO, BUT AFTER YOU’VE FOUND YOUR WAY THERE IN A WEEK YOU WILL MOST CERTAINLY KNOW HOW TO GET THERE IN LESS THAN A WEEK IN THE FUTURE, WON’T YOU!

  He said it not like a question, but like a fact:

  The altitude of Mount Cook is 12,341 feet.

  The capital of Italy is Rome.

  Tally Ho will ride a horse to the West Coast in less than a week.

  All that night I lay awake thinking of a horse that could get me to the West Coast. I decided I’d need a horse that had an extra flap of skin which could be tied up on its back, or untied and buttoned onto its legs to make fins. That way, when the flap was tied up above its back, it could conceal its gills when on land, and then when the fins were buttoned down it would be able to breathe underwater when we crossed the Cook Strait. It would also have a head like a seal so that it could swim really fast, and would be blue so that it didn’t look out of place with the other fish.

  I’d seen a blue person before. Well, not really a person. A baby. It was my little brother who was born in Wanganui before we moved to Wellington. He slept the wrong way up in his cradle and in the morning he was blue. I asked Papà why the baby was blue and Papà whacked me across the back of my head with his shoe. Mamma was sobbing in the kitchen and boiling cloths to put on the baby to make him hot again, and I had to hold the baby and breathe on it. Papà was trying to get his feet in his shoes without undoing the laces so he could get to the doctor, but he didn’t have a horse so he had to steal the neighbour’s new bicycle. He’d never ridden a bicycle before but he learned straight away that morning. I always think about Papà on the stolen bicycle when I’m trying to do something I don’t know how to do. I think: If you don’t get it right a baby will die, and then I work it out straight away.

  When we were in Wanganui Papà was a fisherman like he is now, but back then Mamma and me would go down and meet him in the afternoon when the water was white as milk and the sky was the colour of jam. The fish piled up on the wharf made one big monster with a hundred eyes and sometimes tentacles, too, and broken jaws on all of its faces.

  Once they really did catch a monster. It was a giant blue fish that was as long as Papà and five times as fat. It took ten men to drag it up onto the beach and its whole right eye was as big as my head. The fish was very surprised to find that things could live out of the water. He was trying to work out where the coral and seaweed had gone, and why everything was pressed down onto the ground and not floating around his head like it usually was.

  A man saw me staring into the eye of the fish and asked me if I knew why it was blue. I said no, and he said it was because it had turned into a man-fish after being a brown woman-fish.

  Why are the women-fish brown? I asked, and he shrugged and said he didn’t know, they were just more boring.

  When the baby turned blue I asked Papà if it was turning into a man-fish. Papà didn’t reply, he only had strength left to steal the neighbour’s bicycle and work out how to ride it. And guess what colour the bicycle was? It was brown, not blue, and by the time Papà came back the baby was grey.

  The morning after Nonno Buti gave me my West Coast assignment I went straight to his house. Nonno Buti was at work but Nonna was in the kitchen cutting up an octopus for cacciucco. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen for a second and waited for her to ask me what I was up to. She didn’t.

  I sighed loudly, and she reached up to untie the sage that was hanging in the window. Then I nuzzled my head between her bosom and the arm she was using to cut off the tentacles. Nonna had a lot of bosom, so this manoeuvre could cause suffocation if I didn’t push her bosom in with my forehead to create an air pocket for my mouth.

  Nonna still didn’t ask me anything. She gave me a leaf of sage to eat and kept cutting. It was hard to speak with my face so close to an octopus massacre, so I had to pull my head out, swallow the sage and tell Nonna that I was going to become a cart driver on the West Coast.

  She threw the octopus head in a tub and asked, What, when you grow up? and I said, No, next week, to deliver a secret box to a Chinaman.

  Straight away Nonna said Buti! under her breath and wiped her black hands on her apron. The inky streaks make it look like she was ready for war.

  When I visited Nonno Buti at his workshop the next day I could see that he was very sad, as if the stars he’d been riding around on in the solar system had finally crashed into the ocean and now he was deep under the water where the giant fish had been. He said, Mi dispiace, Tally Ho, you cannot take Geronimo out anymore. You will have to wait until you are older before you can make deliveries for me.

  I wasn’t worried, though. Nonno Buti once told me that anything was possible if you imagined it hard enough, it just mightn’t happen the way you expected. He wanted to be the first man on the moon when he was a kid, for instance, but he ended up in New Zealand working next door to a man who sold telescopes, which was close enough.

  When Papà came home that night he was thrown into the room by a fierce wind, but it wasn’t a southerly or a northerly, it was coming from inside him and it was pushing him towards me.

  I was sitting on the floor shelling peas into a bucket. I could have sat at the table, but I liked sitting on the floor because I could fold my legs up like a foal.

  He stopped in front of me. The wind was still pushing, but he was standing still so the wind was running circles up against the inside of his face, making it red.
r />   What are you doing? he said.

  I thought it was obvious.

  Shelling peas, I said.

  He picked me up by the back of my collar. The front of the collar choked up under my chin. Then he walked me out the back door still holding me up like this, like I might actually be a foal who didn’t know how to use its legs yet.

  When we were out the back he looked around. He wasn’t sure which way to go next, so we stopped there, near the back door. It slammed shut, and I jumped because I thought for a second that I’d been smacked, but it was only the door. Nothing hurt.

  Do you know who I spoke to down at the jetty? he asked me.

  It wasn’t a question I was supposed to know the answer to, but I had to say something otherwise I’d get whacked, so I said, No.

  Sister Katherine is who. And do you know what Sister Katherine said to me?

  No.

  She said, ‘I hope your daughter is feeling better, everyone misses her so.’ Have you been sick?

  I coughed because my throat felt scratchy after the collar had crushed it. Also to check if I was sick. Maybe I was sick. There was still time. I opened my mouth and tried to catch some pollen on my tonsils.

  Pitiful, Papà said. Why aren’t you going to school? We bring you to this country for a better life, and you are not going to school. Why? What are you going to do?

  This time I wasn’t supposed to answer. I could have told him it was alright, that I was going to be a coachman on the West Coast, but he didn’t want to know. His eyes weren’t saying, Tell me the answer, his eyes were scared, like he was looking in a mirror and saw a monster—half lizard, half cicada—open its wings to fly away.

  Papà said if I was going to run around like a boy instead of going to school then I would have to work like a boy and see how I liked it.

  I nodded, and looked at my shoes, and tried to act punished.

  We sailed to Rona Bay on the side of the harbour where the jungles were full of warriors and the sands were golden and flying fish leaped out of the water and into your boat, sacrificing themselves for your dinner. At first the other fishermen were quiet because there was a kid who kept jumping around and they wanted to talk about the women back in Italy and fights and horses, not be on their best behaviour.

  Ah, don’t worry, Nina is tough as old boots, Papà said, but he looked more worried than them because we both knew his old boots needed to be resoled every month and weren’t very tough at all.

  When we started sailing over to Rona Bay the moon was up and the sound of waves licking the boat made all the fishermen feel as small as prawns, so they talked to make themselves feel less edible. A man called Bert did most of the talking. He told me he came here by accident when he was fourteen after he was shipwrecked in a place where people wore gold in their noses and rode elephants through the streets. He got on a ship he thought was going to Australia but instead it came here.

  Why didn’t you stay there and have a pet elephant? I asked, and he said, Because I wanted to see what life would be like at the end of the earth.

  It turned out life at the end of the earth was the same as it was in Italy but colder and with less military service.

  If I’d been allowed to talk I would have told the other fisherman that I already knew how to row properly. You don’t sit down like you see New Zealanders do, you stand up like they do in Venice. Then you can row for hours. But instead the other men talked and I sat next to Papà while he tied knots in his dragnet. I held the net up so it didn’t get tangled, but Papà touched me on the arm and said, No, don’t hold it like that. Give it to me, it will be quicker.

  When we got to Rona Bay, the other men took the smaller boats around past the rocks, and Papà and I stayed in the big boat out in the harbour. He was quiet and I was trying to think of things to say. A penguin swam past with its head sticking up out of the water.

  Look, Papà, a penguin! I said.

  He nodded. After I said it, it seemed like a stupid thing to say. He could see that it was a penguin. He knew what a penguin looked like.

  Good weather for fishing! I said. I hoped it was good weather for fishing. I wanted to show him that I knew.

  I watched Papà move the rudder. He was squinting out into the horizon. The sun wasn’t all the way up yet, but the clouds were bright in that way that made you feel like you had soap in your eyes. He wasn’t even looking at his hand move the rudder. Papà could do lots of things without looking. He could tie a knot by flicking his wrist and twisting the rope around his fingers, and sometimes he would reach out for a rope and tug it out from the blunt metal teeth that were holding it down, and then give it a pull, or loosen it, and the sail would flick around to the other side of the boat.

  That was tacking. Tacking is when you change direction. And reefing is when you pull in the sail so it has less of a belly and the boat doesn’t capsize. And port means left and starboard means right. If the sail gets loud and thrashes around like a horse going crazy, that means you’re pointing into the wind and you need to make a decision about which way you’re going to turn. I was trying to think of a way of showing Papà that I knew these things, but he was looking at where the birds were circling above the water with a tight look on his face that meant, Don’t talk, I’m thinking very hard.

  The wind was strong. We only had one sail up and it was reefed, so it wasn’t even all the way up. The wind was strong enough that the boat was tipped over to the side and we had to lean in the other direction to balance things out. Then Papà said, Take the helm. He said it without even looking at me. Take the helm, like I would know exactly what to do. I couldn’t believe it. I stared at him, and he said, Sbrigati, cambia il vento, so I held the rudder with two hands, in case I accidentally let go with one of them.

  I was steering the whole boat. I could have taken it out of the bay. I could have sailed to Australia or Italy or Ireland, but Papà said, Pull the rudder to windward. To windward! Subito!

  I couldn’t remember if windward was the way the wind was going, or where the wind was coming from. I moved the rudder to the direction that the wind was coming from. Which was the starboard side. The right side. East.

  No, Nina! Windward! he said. He pushed me off the rudder and moved it all the way to the port side, so far over that it touched the side of the boat. The sail started flailing around and I hoped what I’d done didn’t mean we were going to drown. I looked out for more penguins so Papà couldn’t see my lip begin to quiver.

  I saw one. Another one by itself, with its head straining up out of the water. He was looking really hard for something, anything, but he couldn’t see us.

  We caught warehou mostly, and seaweed, and an octopus and three dead tree branches. We caught the penguin, too. It was tangled in the net with a fish gripped in its beak. It was frightened, but it wouldn’t let go of the fish. I had to grab the penguin on the body holding the wings down. It made a high, wheezy noise and tried to wriggle out of my hands, which meant The net is wrapped twice around my left wing, please be careful.

  Here, let me do it, Papà said, reaching over.

  No, I can do it, I said. I already had his head half untangled. But Papà brushed me aside with his arm so that I slipped off the seat and the penguin pecked him on the finger. He said, Cazzo del uccello! and ripped it out of the net so that it got a deep cut in its wing, and threw it back into the sea. The penguin swam away with its head straining forward, squawking an alarm signal to all the other birds in the harbour. Don’t go near that boat, they will try to rip your wings off.

  See? Papà said. You would have hurt yourself.

  On our way back to Wellington, I didn’t feel like doing anything but watch the mountains in the very far distance. Bert saw me looking and told me that on the other side of those mountains was the West Coast. He said you could find gold in the ground there, but it was very wild country and you had to be careful not to get eaten by pigs. You could have a Maori guide, which helped you not get eaten by pigs, but it raised your chanc
es of getting eaten by Maoris.

  Mamma always said that when we first came to Wanganui the Maoris used to come to her door. They would trade a whole wild pig for a cake of soap, then eat it like cheese. Mamma laughed every time she told that story, but she forgot that she couldn’t speak English when she got off the boat and once bought cheese instead of soap from the grocer.

  The other fishermen sang songs about Napoli and cried about leaving their mammas, even though they were grown men. Then why did you leave? I asked them, and they shook their heads as if to say I could never possibly understand.

  When we took the fish to the Taranaki wharf the fishmongers saw how dark the other fishermen were and wouldn’t buy the fish from us. The other men were Italians like us, but because they were from the south they looked more like Greeks. We were from the north and if we kept our mouths shut and stayed out of the sun we looked like regular New Zealanders. Even so, the fishmongers waited for the Scottish fishermen. Papà wrapped two big warehou in newspaper to take home and threw all the rest into the harbour right in front of the fishmongers’ eyes. He said Italians once ruled the earth. Italians built the roads in Scotland, but it was too long ago for anyone to remember.

  The sky was the colour of cloudy lemonade and getting clearer by the second as we walked along the waterfront with our two fish. There were so many ships. At least one of them had to be a pirate ship. There were clippers and steamers and barques and full-rigged ships. They squished their fenders against the dock, creak creak, as if their fenders were fat pigs with secrets and the ships were holding them up against the dock until they gave up and told everything. There were piles of boxes and crates and barrels too, and sometimes men in coats buttoned all the way up walking with legs stiff as guns, making sure nothing got stolen. Then there were the men huddled behind the gates, waiting for work. There were thousands of them, it seemed, and who should I see in the throng of hungry men but Harry Crawford.

  Papà, look! I said, and Papà said, What now?