by Duff, Alan
If it’s not our house she and they are pissing up in, it’s on the circuit of my mother’s sisters, relations, hard-drinking friends. Of course they consider what everyone they know is doing to be normal. So do thieves find each other normal. And murderers. And what’s so bad about drunks anyrate? Are they complaining about themselves? Listen to this:
Hey, kid, which one are you? They never remember your name. They tell you you’re good-looking or say, Gee, you’re ugly. You never know if they mean either. Nothing in their fuzzy-headed world is real and yet it isn’t imagined either. They stumble through life, lurch from one drinking event to the next, never knowing nor experiencing reality.
Gee, you’re handsome gee you’re ugly, then the face will break out in smelly-breathed laughter and tell you, Hey, only joking, only joking, can’t you take a joke? And he or she looks at you demanding immediate acknowledgement in that impatient way of lifetime drunks. Everything is instant gratification: pleasure and expression of the emotions and demanding answers.
I said: I was only joking. Can’t you smile, boy? What’s the look for? A good mind to clip your ears — and I would if you were my kid. That how you look at a man jus’ trying to be friendly? A man, an auntie claiming she loves you, a cousin of your mother’s claiming she loves you, too. They all love you when they’re drunk. Till you say something to upset. Then they hate you. It’s the world, the head, they live in.
Beer-stinking faces that ask you stupid questions in their gibberish language: whassa capital of Hutatania then, smartarse? Huta-where? Hutatania. There’s no such country. Who said it’s a country? Well you can’t have a capital of a place that’s not a country. Yes you can. No you can’t. I can. No one can. Says who? Says the rules. Who cares ‘bout the fuckin’ rules? I do. Well I don’t. And I’m a adult and I can have my own rules, so there, get fucked.
I’m talking fully grown adults here, men and women in their thirties, forties, fifties. They start dropping off after that. This race doesn’t live long. Not many of them long enough to draw a pension. But they don’t fuckin’ care, so why should fuckin’ you?
Come into your sitting room from their boozing place, your taken-over kitchen, see your books on your shelves, see you reading and they go on the defensive. Whoaa now, what is this my eyes are seeing? Is that a book you got your prettyboy half-caste face buried in? And what would this book be about? Something high-falutin’ I bet. Like your daddy, eh boy? He gets you into all this stuff, don’t he? To make you cleverer than the rest, right? Turn you into a — They always look around, check for no witnesses first, since even they accept that this is another’s man’s house, another’s man’s kid — Turn you into a real li’l smartarse. Eh? Eh? A Clever Dick thinks he’s better’n my kids — Oh, don’t be looking those innocent eyes at me, our kids come home tell us the stories …
But I don’t even go to your kids’ school. (And you don’t care what your kids are doing.)
Know you don’t. I-know-you-don’t. You trying to make a fool of me? A smartarse Clever Dick is a smartarse Clever Dick, whatever the fuckin’ hell school he’s at. You got that? You got that, boy? He or she moves towards you, can’t see it’s a kid they’re facing up to, it’s just a face. A face that has upset them. A face that has triggered off a preconception in their wretched mind that they always said was not to their liking.
Ask him to leave you alone and he gets menacing. What’d you say? You giving me lip, sonny boy? Think your father’s gonna stop me kicking your fuckin’ arse? But they always look around again, just in case. Just in case there’s someone to answer to who’ll kick his arse right back on my behalf. But mostly, even a drunk knows where to draw even his stretched line.
Hey, lizzen, lizzen, I was only kidding with you, boy. Just testing. Don’t you know a joke when you hear it? Now you go back to en-joying that book. Won’t you now? Mutters under departing breath how he or she will get you, how you’ll keep. And how you are not fully one of them, not a half-caste. Not someone with a white father. In every person’s heart he is his genes. Warrior genes demand strongest loyalty. Blindly so.
We, me and my three brothers, don’t know these people, not to have a two-way conversation with, not to share an interest, a curiosity about something, to share a mutual wonder of the world. And though they’re part of our lives I hardly remember their names, they’re just regular faces, with each a highly similar behavioural pattern, embedded into our consciousness.
They’re us and yet they couldn’t be further from us. Not unless we each give in, surrender to their unthinking ways. Aspire only to be like them. Smiling that we’ll learn to enjoy it and want no other. Or why wouldn’t they be complaining?
She asks that all the time of my father: Mister, if it’s so bad, and I’m so bad, my sisters, my friends are so bad, then how come we’re not complaining? How come it’s what we want to do?
Powerful logic if you’re happy being a pisshead. If you’re happy losing it every regular once in a while to outbreaks of violence. And you don’t rate motherhood all that highly, if at all. She feeds us doesn’t she? The house is pretty clean isn’t it? So she shares the household duties with her children — so what? So does near every other mother she knows. In fact, she’s puzzled at why normal isn’t considered normal. She turns the question back on my father every time. Unless it makes such undeniable good sense and truth she can only swear at him, and give veiled hints that any wonder she is what she is, with a husband who doesn’t understand her. But then excuses — when they can be bothered to offer one — are tools of their trade. Turn irresponsibility to a joke. Or throw it in your face: you fuckin’ have it, if it bothers you so much.
Our father doesn’t fit the house that is his. He doesn’t fit the story, he doesn’t fit any sequence of logical argument he reveres. We liked him but couldn’t quite make it love. Love wasn’t a concept familiar in our house. A mother is the origin of all love. Or you have to make monumental effort to find it for yourself. Monumental. Affection was his preferred word over love. Love can be crazy, out of control, unpredictable. Affection is none of that.
No one could figure why he, an educated man, a calm man of moderate drinking, moderate everything except in choosing his marriage partner, would have stayed with her.
My father doesn’t fit so I won’t try and make him fit. He did beyond the call of his fatherly, manly duty except in one area: he should have smashed her to a pulp and thrown her out.
He should have rejected his own code, temporarily put aside his moral principles, and done the bitch. He should not have allowed her repeated assaults on him to happen without same reply. And then he could have sat us down and explained that sometimes violence is justified. We’d have believed him. And then he’d have fitted and we could have reshaped ourselves, with his more respected, affectionate assistance, to something more meaningful.
But he didn’t. Principle won. His kids, I’m sorry to be telling him not so many years later, they lost. Most of them did. When one is too many to lose of your children. To death or failure or, worse, despair. Death is over. Failure can be rationalised. Despair is the cry from the living graveyard.
He only fits as an abstract. A curiosity to them, his wife’s friends. Not her sisters, they at least knew and came to kind of respect his quaint ways. It was the non-family regulars who found him fascinating — if a drunk can be fascinated by anything. They’d go for a leak and end up peering around our parents’ room, not to see how Heta Burgess lives, but how the white husband does. You’d hear them giggling like surprised children: Ooo! so neat and tidy! Look at all those books! Since books aren’t part of their lives. Not when knowledge isn’t.
And they whisper and giggle, is this where they do it? And giggle back, well, where she does it with him! Not the only bedroom she knows in town. They really think that tired old observation is funny.
You catch them fossicking about in Dad’s drawers, in cupboards, rummaging through Dad’s bookshelves, feeling the material of his suits in hi
s wardrobe. Dad complains he’s missing items of clothing. We found a man standing in Dad’s bedroom in one of Dad’s suits! And he asked us did he look good in it or what? And he was laughing at our astonishment. We think of them as monkeys, out of control but with sufficient intelligence to be curious. But not enough to learn.
Our father was a decent man who didn’t deserve this. Not as extreme as this. Not so hardly any of his story, his validity, would enter any picture or meaningful memory of his offspring’s lives. He didn’t even think to have a photograph in the house of himself. As if he knew how posterity would treat him. He was just a good man. A fine one. An intelligent, enquiring man. A moral man in a social, amoral mess. Who didn’t fit — who couldn’t fit. When drunken visitors to his house did. By imposition. As a warrior race does. It’s in the blood. It’s in the thinking. Well, the unthinking. I’m trying to state facts, not argue a case. They’ll make their fuckin’ own.
We’ve found them asleep on our beds. Found a couple fucking on Warren’s bed and they told me and Warren to get the hell out of it and carried right on. They’ve dumped vomit at our bedroom door, left the toilet bowl and lid filthy with liquid shit or spew, the floor awash with missed urine. Smears of period blood. Oh, don’t tell any of their wide range of children about period blood.
When it isn’t books, our sitting room is drunken, snoring bodies. An aftermath fight is like a storm has been through. But there’s been times when it could have been a little church with a choir going. We swear. But not to God. God doesn’t belong here. Not to rational, atheist man. Not to Polynesian tribal people converted themselves to God of Piss. And always had Tu, God of War.
Look, they’re like wild children who know no rules. Or do know but have every intention of breaking them. Wild innocents who are genetically programmed — or something — to break out fighting at the drop of a wrong comment, the blink of a challenging eye, the glance of a slighting look. Answering insult is like answering a beer thirst: immediate gratification.
No place for intelligent, rational, good man to fit, even in his own house, his own children’s lives. Say he got overpowered by forces greater than his mild self. His father was famous, but it doesn’t matter what for, since fame gets no better fare in this house of disorder. His mother was artistically and socially eccentric, and herself a little wild and free for her time, but more acceptably so. They, Dad’s parents, were the least confounded at how their eldest son had ended up, in the life, the marriage and the race that he did. Because confoundment has a touch of denial in it, and neither was a denying person; liberated, free of mind and spirit that they were. We knew them. But they don’t fit; even less so. If you know all this, then know that the fit is even more impossible.
Know, too, and respect or not at your choice, that there must be a quality of survival about the warrior that can resist all influences, especially for the better. But still it survives. It withstands pressures of better-educated, better-trained minds — hell, it laughs in their faces. So you’ve got at least to doff a hat the warrior way.
It’s a sketch, a necessarily selective outline. No such thing as autobiography, not true, not exact, not near truth or exactness. And my father would at least be proud that this son sought broader explanation and did not concern himself with talking about people when it is concepts the wiser person is interested in. Concepts.
10
But not their concept of a funeral, a Maori tangi, it’s not concept but event. And it leads to a better event. It’s a concept in their minds that isn’t truly one. Someone dead is an excuse. So we’re off to another funeral piss-up: my mother and her sister Girlie and her son, my cousin Jack, and this man we’ve not seen around so often he’s a familiar, but he’s got a familiar dangerous look about him. He’s a man who’ll hurt you, like a man who’ll get in first, but he’ll pick his mark, he won’t be a walking challenge to everyone, they know how to survive do this type.
Fast conveyed as much as a small Bedford truck will along a forest road of pines supplanting the original native forests of our native ancestral half. It screams not with victorious, murdering man, but with engineered chainsaws bringing life mightier than mere man crashing down in a whipping of air and boom of great stalk rendered defeated. Meaning, symbolism going by us. And meaning accompanying us in the form of the driver’s son, he’d be eleven, twelve, a little younger than us. His name is Hohepa.
Up in the front cab they’re warm and start early on the beer. Whilst we’re cold and drinking in gulps of speeded air, with a single double blanket to share. And this strange-looking kid starting to trouble us.
What’s wrong, kid? Nothing. Suit yaself. Most of them, these dog-beaten types, have nothing to say, even when they want to. Little shit looks like a fledgling bird in an abandoned nest, the poppy eyes have grown a lowering lid as if he knows he’s going to die. Hey kid — what’s wrong with you?
Nothing, I said. And where’s Pinevale, is it far, what’s it like? the abandoned baby bird wants to know. We shrug, It’s the same as anywhere, what else would it be?
Then the bird kid asks, Will we be staying inside a Maori meeting house or somewhere else? We ask why? Because, he says. Because why, kid, unless you want a smack around the ears? Because I feel safer there with all the people sleeping around you.
He’s either afraid of ghosts, the dark, or his father, as he keeps throwing glances at the back his old man’s head. We’re staying in Pinevale village. The funeral is at a pa not far from there. Probably stay at our uncle’s place. In a big tent, with lots of people around. So don’t worry about it.
But he does; he looks plain miserable. I whisper to Jack, though, that we’ve seen kids like this in lots of places. He just says, Yeah. Everywhere. And the wind takes his last word.
The flicker-by of trees and light does something to my brain, but not so I can hear atavistic echoes of a man, my ancestor, his alleged panting, cowardly running. But I can see Maoris roaming this once-forested land with no thought that it would ever be any other. I feel sorry for them. But surely it’s been for the better.
But then is a little truckload of Maoris like this for the better? Hell, I don’t know. Why do I trouble so over this Maori stuff, what we are, what we used to be, what we’ve become? Why can’t I be normal?
Well, for starters, when you hear a piercing Maori woman’s voice calling your little truckload group a welcome on to their marae, their tribal heart, even this little rural nowhere, you feel this Maori claim over that part of you that is them. And if it wasn’t for the fact that young Hohepa was ordered by his father to stay on the back of the truck and not get off for as long as we took, this would be totally engrossing. For I love the way they send off their dead. I just don’t like my mother’s or her competing sister’s way of displaying apparent grief.
But even they, Mum and Auntie Girlie, are reduced by this starting ceremony of shrill-voiced, kind of formalised sobbing welcome, as we scuff with demanded slow dignity of hands clasped in front, heads lowered, over dirt ground that must be a sea of mud in the rain. Voice calling us into their wharenui meeting house, of magnificent carved gable ends and carved door entrance.
I like this feeling of walking into a vast room full of people sat on mattresses on the floor, the women in black, the male elders on benches leaned forward on carved walking sticks, or sitting erect, fine, proud-looking men of sturdy build from warrior genes.
I like everywhere with traditional carvings and woven wall panels and centre poles of elaborately carved figures, taking me back to their and my past, a series of depicted ancestors, those steadfast postures, those bulging eyes of the warriors, the serene contrasts of carved motherhood, womanhood depicted. And real women clusters assessing each arrival of mourners come to pay respects to them as much as the deceased. The narrowing of their eyes at my and Jack’s mothers. The asking of who is the man with them?
The singing has aching poignancy, whether a hymn adapted to Maori wording or a traditional Maori chant. I gain strengt
h (and fear) from the elders’ posturing, animated speeching. I marvel at how still is death in an open casket, and yet how it fits so with this room, these people, here to say farewell, here to carry some of the grievers’ burden.
I take breath at this large room filled with people who will do this for three days, at them as if wanting to go back to what they were — and this is close — when they were a simple, warrior race with all known concepts set down in their rote-learned minds like a carving, a woven pattern, but no more than the eye sees.
I look at these people and think this isn’t so bad, this isn’t floundering in some social chaos, some lost, self-destroying cultural desert. These people are reasonably okay, they’ll get by, not flourish, but get by. Whilst these arrived visitors, now moving forward to display their grief, who the women are stiffening, expecting postures over, they seem of another kind, members of a different, lower tribe.
Two drama queen sisters competing to throw grief-stricken live bodies over the absolutely still dead one (I don’t remember seeing that face on their drinking circuit), wet sobbing lips on waxen mouth, warm-blooded hands on cold blood-still face. And the pair of cheap-arse mourners are another definition to themselves. Why do they insist on behaving like this?
Oh, Pera! she, especially, wails; my mother as though to an audience, as if on a real-life stage, thinking her part is played with such commendable grief. Later she’ll ask me, What did they say about me? Did they talk about how upset I was? Did I get some of them crying again? Did you hear them say how fast we got here to pay respects? I bet they did. I bet they said things like that. (I bet they didn’t, Mum.) Did they say how close Pera and I were, and that’s why I lost it like I did? (No, Mother. They sniggered and sneered into their hands, they hid in pulled-out handkerchiefs. They must have said: Look out, the drama queen bitches from Two Lakes have arrived. If only they weren’t from a related tribe.)
