Some Here Among Us

by Peter Walker

  ‘Really?’ said Rosie, with a tone of keen interest. ‘Will she really? Why is she going to kill us?’

  ‘She will kill you,’ said Morgan, ‘for sleeping here at the gate instead of coming up to the house.’

  ‘We couldn’t possibly come up to the house,’ said FitzGerald. ‘It was one in the morning.’

  ‘Two,’ said Rosie, yawning and stretching her long brown arms and twirling her hands experimentally.

  ‘That just makes it worse,’ said Morgan. ‘Every rule of Maori hospitality you’ve broken.’

  Despite his tone, he was amazed. Visitors – for him! It had never happened before. His father told him to invite people to the farm, but he never had. He thought of asking Adam and Candy but decided against it. ‘It’s too far,’ he said. ‘No one will come.’ He had gone down to the gate at six that morning just to see whose car it was parked on their doorstep – itself a rare sight – without thinking it would be anyone he knew. Nor had he recognised the first sleepers from what he could see – a tousled male head, a bare female shoulder. Then he saw Race asleep behind the car. For a moment, Morgan imagined Adam and Candy might be there as well, but he looked at all the sleepers again, one by one, and he knew they weren’t. He watched them for a while, wondering what had brought them there. He looked at Race. Where was he, Morgan thought, just then? Race was undoubtedly present there, in the sun, on the kikuyu grass by the car – what an old crate, Morgan thought, how did that get all the way up here? – but where did he, Race, imagine he was at that moment? A thousand miles, half a lifetime, away?

  Then Race opened his eyes and looked across the narrow road. Morgan put his finger to his lips. But the other sleepers began to stir as well, one after the other.

  ‘Every single rule in her book,’ said Morgan.

  A brown colt had come pacing up behind Morgan and put its head over his shoulder as he spoke. Morgan hoisted the great head and swung it away.

  ‘Back off,’ he said.

  It backed off and nodded its head three times, then began to crop the grass. ‘You’d better come up and face the music,’ said Morgan. They all got up and got dressed and, leaving their stuff on the ground or on the fence posts or draped over the car doors, which they left open, they crossed the road and through the gate into the big paddock. The colt pretended to take fright and galloped joyously in a great arc around the fence-line. The sun was burning down. Even in the middle of the paddock the cicadas sounded like a war zone. As they came near the house, two or three dogs stood up from the kennels under a row of pines and began to bark, throats lifted, plumes of their tails waving slowly. A woman came out on the veranda and stood watching them approach. Magpies, the Australian magpies, were bugling in the morning glare.

  ‘There’s my mother,’ said Morgan. ‘Every single rule in her book . . . These are friends of mine,’ he called.

  ‘Friends of yours!’ said Morgan’s mother, coming down a step or two. ‘Oh, my heavens. You didn’t sleep on the roadside?’

  ‘We couldn’t possibly have come in,’ said Rosie. There was a musical quality to her laugh. ‘It was at least two in the morning.’

  ‘Morgan! Your friends should have known to come in!’

  Mrs Tawhai looked formidable. There were stern lines on her face and an aureole of iron-grey hair around her head.

  ‘I told them,’ said Morgan. ‘If only they could behave properly like decent Maoris. Mum was probably still up at two in the morning,’ he said to the others. ‘She listens to these radio programmes on maths all night. She’s crazy about mathematics.’

  His mother looked at Morgan steadily as he made this remark.

  ‘Short-wave radio,’ said Morgan. ‘All she can hear is whistles and pops.’

  ‘He mocks me,’ she said. ‘His own mother. Oh, my goodness. Sleeping at the gate!’

  She came down off the steps and was introduced to them one by one, and then she led them around the side of the house through the orange and lemon trees and into the kitchen through the back door. There she began to make breakfast. Everything was old-fashioned. There was a green wooden dado around the walls of the kitchen, and a single tall sash-window. The window was filled from top to bottom with steep green hillside. The sound of baaing sheep came from the hill and from the yards out the back.

  ‘Morgan, I’ll need the shearers’ teapot,’ Mrs Tawhai said.

  Morgan went out to the shearers’ quarters and after a few minutes came back with a brown enamelled pot that could hold a dozen or fifteen cups. The tip of the spout was chipped black under the enamel. Tea was made and Mrs Tawhai fried tomatoes and eggs and bacon, and Morgan made toast. Then there was more toast and marmalade and coffee was brewed.

  ‘Coffee,’ said Rosie. ‘Oh, my God. Real ground coffee!’

  Mrs Tawhai looked reproving but all the same she was pleased. Her kitchen crowded with her son’s friends talking and laughing!

  ‘Morgan,’ she said. ‘The toast!’

  The toast was burning. Smoke briefly blued the air. There was a brief rumble at the back door, the beating of a soft drum. It was the sound of someone knocking the heel of a rubber boot against a concrete step, and then Morgan’s father stepped in. He was stocky, shorter than his wife, dark-skinned, with a piercing eye. He seemed delighted to find six strangers in his house eating his food. In thick grey socks, he advanced noiselessly first to Rosie then to Race, as if selecting the leaders, then to Rod Orr, Dinah, Panos, FitzGerald in turn. He had the manners of a courtier, a duke.

  ‘It’s a pleasure, a great pleasure,’ he said. ‘We tell Morgan to ask his friends up here. “Ask them up,” we tell him but he never does. “It’s too far,” he says. And it is. We’re in the back-blocks here, I know that. But here you are! How long can you stay?’

  ‘We can’t stay,’ said FitzGerald. ‘We have to be back in town on Christmas Eve.’

  ‘You’ll stay tonight!’ said Mrs Tawhai, looking shocked.

  ‘Not even tonight,’ said FitzGerald. ‘We have to be in Wellington in two days. We can only stay today.’

  ‘Today! Morgan, they’re only here for one day. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know what they’re going to do,’ said Morgan. ‘I have to work.’

  ‘Morgan!’ said his mother.

  ‘I’ll be cutting scrub,’ said Morgan. ‘Fifty acres of scrub I’m cutting these holidays.’

  ‘You’re not cutting scrub today,’ his father said.

  ‘I’ll look like Charles Atlas by the end of summer,’ said Morgan.

  ‘He’s not cutting any scrub today,’ his father said to Rosie as if stating a known fact.

  ‘Inches on in all the right places,’ said Morgan.

  ‘I go up the hill and cut scrub with him sometimes,’ Mr Tawhai said. ‘But we’re not allowed to talk. Even at smoko, we’re not allowed to talk. “The Aborigines in the desert,” he says, “sit under a tree to save energy and don’t talk.” “We’re not Aborigines,” I say. “We’re not in the desert.” “Ssshhh,” he says. “You’re wasting energy.” So we sit there on the hill like two blocks of stone and never say a word.’

  7

  After breakfast, Mrs Tawhai took Race into the hall and showed him various family photos and mementoes. She pointed to a picture of an old man in a top hat, and a sword sent to him by the Queen of England, and a photograph of a boy in uniform, slim as a wand, standing in front of a cannon’s mouth.

  ‘This boy swam out in a storm and saved people from a ship-wreck,’ she said. ‘This one’ – the man in the top hat – ‘at a single word from him, three thousand warriors became Christians.’

  The sun sent light straight down the hall, stained pink and yellow and green by a glass door at the end. There was the sound of laughter outside on the veranda. The girls had had showers and then gone out to the garden, their heads wrapped in white towels like turbans. Mrs Tawhai frowned at the man in the top hat.

  ‘Three thousand warriors, singing hymns in the field,’ she sai
d. ‘The chiefs went up and down the ranks beating anyone who didn’t keep perfect time. An English bishop who came to visit fainted away on the spot.’

  She led Race away to find the others. They went through Morgan’s room which opened onto the veranda. The room was dark. There was a grey army blanket pinned up over the window.

  ‘A blanket!’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘Not even a curtain will do. It has to be a blanket. He has to be in the dark first, he says, to do any work, and then he turns a light on.’

  She hooked back the blanket from the window, and stood looking around the room.

  ‘He doesn’t like it up here, really,’ she said. ‘The sheep or the shearing or any of it, not really.’

  She looked at Race with a burdened expression.

  ‘He ran away, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Morgan?’ said Race.

  ‘Morgan,’ she said. ‘He ran away from home. He was missing for weeks.’

  ‘Why did he run away?’

  Mrs Tawhai shrugged. ‘Some trouble at school. Nothing, really. He was thirteen, fourteen. But he was sent home and he was here with us and then he vanished. He headed for the horizon. Plus, he picked up various children on the way. And they all ran away with him.’

  ‘A sort of Pied Piper,’ said Race.

  ‘He was a Pied Piper! He was their leader, I do know that much. He was thirteen, fourteen – the others were only ten, eleven, twelve. But they got all the way to Ninety Mile Beach and no one ever spotted them. Do you know why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They slept in cemeteries,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘Maoris are very superstitious. They wouldn’t dream of going into a cemetery at night. But Morgan didn’t care. He’s never cared about things like that. They were as safe as houses there. No one ever looked in the cemeteries. He was missing for weeks.’

  She stood in the veranda door and looked down at Morgan and his visitors; they were talking and laughing in the shade on the south side of the house.

  ‘Weeks!’ said Mrs Tawhai. She went down into the garden.

  On the table in Morgan’s room was a typewriter with a piece of paper furled in it. Race rolled the paper so he could read the whole page:

  The para-poets arrived at dawn,

  In waves they came, rocking

  Through the morning shades,

  The golden rocking-cradle air,

  They couldn’t hide or fire back, it was

  Easy to shoot them as they fell,

  Or simply shoot their shrouds –

  One bullet in the silk and down

  They whistled – crash! – but still more came,

  Thumping on roofs, in trees, the onion patch,

  Then stopped to smoke a fag

  Under the olives, behind the jakes,

  And only then they opened up, began to sing,

  Declaim, compose, complain,

  Declare, opine, put on corduroy,

  Velvet, polka-dot, take wine –

  ‘The youth who has never aspired’ they sang,

  ‘To ride the clouds unfurled

  ‘Of what use is his life to him,

  What use is he to the world?’

  The locals ran at them with brooms,

  With foot-long spanners, monkey-

  Wrenches, but the girls fell in love all the same,

  Offered them water – them!

  The invaders! – and bared their breasts,

  Oh yes, but thats

  ‘That’s what?’ Race thought. He stared at the page. He had never thought of a poem being half-finished before. It was like seeing a fire burning alone in a wood. Then abruptly he wound the page down again, and stepped out on the veranda and down into the garden. Plans were being made to go for lunch at the pub twenty miles back along the coast.

  ‘Morgan, I want you to wear one of your good shirts,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘I don’t want you going in there looking like a vagabond.’

  ‘Mother thinks we dress badly,’ said Morgan. ‘We’re just scruffy.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I just found myself agreeing with Grammaticus the other day.’

  ‘Who’s Grammaticus?’ said Dinah.

  ‘Old Prof. Blaiklock in the Weekly News,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘What did he say? “I wish the undergraduate gown was still in use. Nothing is served by the cult of the tattered sports coats and bohemian disregard for hair and dress.” ’

  At this, they all laughed – not too loudly – no one wanted to offend Morgan’s mother – but merrily enough all the same. No one wore old sports coats any more. Condemning the fashions of youth, Prof. Blaiklock had chosen one a few years out of date.

  ‘He’s old, he’s retired,’ said Morgan. ‘You know the old guy who checks out the books at the library? I’m sure that’s Grammaticus.’

  ‘What rubbish,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘Professor Blaiklock is a distinguished scholar. He will not be checking out library books to undergraduates.’

  ‘Well, it looks just like him,’ said Morgan. ‘Where’s the Weekly News? Race, help me find the Weekly News.’

  He and Race went through to a sitting-room on the other side of the house.

  ‘Liddy and I are breaking up,’ said Morgan.

  The panels of the sitting-room were carved with tall Maori figures. Their eyes were shell. Between the legs of each figure was a smaller one – the next generation.

  ‘She wants to finish it. I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing I can do, not from here.’

  Morgan picked up some of the papers on the floor and glanced at one or two magazines left open on the sofa by the fireplace. The grate had ash in it from the previous winter.

  ‘The weekends are worst,’ he said. ‘I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of her being more or less raped by some rich red-neck farmer she thinks she’s in love with.’

  ‘Go and see her,’ said Race.

  ‘I have,’ said Morgan. ‘It didn’t work. I went to Palmerston to see her. She went out every night and left me there in the flat.’

  ‘Well, I never met her,’ said Race, not knowing what to say.

  ‘I don’t know how I stood it,’ said Morgan. ‘She made it plain I was of secondary importance.’

  ‘Drop her,’ said Race.

  ‘She loves me,’ said Morgan. ‘I happen to know that. But she loves this social whirl she’s in. One I despise.’

  They stood there under the shining-eyed figures.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Morgan. ‘The Weekly News.’

  They went back to the group in the garden on the shady side of the house.

  ‘Here, you see,’ said Morgan.

  They all looked at the picture of Grammaticus above his weekly column. He had a noble, Roman-emperor air to him.

  ‘Definitely the crazy old guy at the library,’ said Morgan.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Tawhai.

  Mrs Tawhai took the Weekly News and began to read aloud. ‘Watching this summer’s student turmoil in Paris was the philosopher Cioran, one of the gloomy band who have emptied life of meaning. “Human history,” he writes “is an immense cul-de-sac. Life is a passionate emptiness, all truth is a hoax.” Hence the amusement on the face at the gallery of the Odéon, while the students bawled for a brave new world below.’

  She read on a little, to herself, then handed the magazine to Morgan.

  ‘Mum adores Grammaticus,’ said Morgan.

  ‘Morgan’s great-grandfather had three thousand fighting men at his command,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘At a single word from him, all three thousand became Christian. And now he doesn’t believe in anything.’

  ‘It’s a different era,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Come here,’ said Mrs Tawhai.

  Morgan stood up and went over to his mother.

  ‘I want you to wear your good white shirt,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ said Morgan.

  She looked at him. His hair was touching his collar.

  ‘Look at you,’ she said.

  Suddenly, before he could move, she put the ti
p of her finger on her tongue and smoothed his eyebrows, one, then the other, a fierce lion with her cub.

  Late that afternoon, after lunch in the pub, they drove back to the farm, Race at the wheel this time, and they dropped Morgan at the five-barred gate and then Race turned the old Chev round in the narrow road and they drove away.

  ‘Didn’t Morgan look sweet standing there in his white shirt,’ said Rosie, and for some reason she laughed, as they rode away in the dusk and went up around the cliff-face road.

  8

  At the end of the summer Race and Panos took the night train from Wellington to Auckland. They had both decided to go and live there that year. Panos had been studying medicine in the South Island. Now he wanted to become an actor. Race was still studying biology. He only wanted a change of scene. Auckland was a big city by comparison to their home towns. It was sprawling and hazy, laced with motorways. The sea at the city’s foot looked dirty in dawn’s early light. Ships sailed away east into a morning glitter. Grapefruit and oranges grew along suburban avenues, anyone could pick them. On the train, he and Panos spent a lot of the journey chatting up two sisters in the seats opposite. Race then spent the first days in Auckland buying textbooks and visiting real-estate agencies. At night, he and Panos and the two sisters, one a beautician, one a hairdresser, went to the movies and then back to the girls’ flat, which was piled high with feminine clothes, on the floor, on the sofas, on every hook and rail. After a week, Race had found a place to rent, an old cottage between the university and the railway yards. He moved in, but after three days Panos had still not put in an appearance.

  On his third night there alone, Race woke just after midnight. He stared at the ceiling. His heart was pounding. He could still feel the heat of the sun on his face in the dream he’d just woken from. It was a simple enough dream: at the start he was climbing a tree, going up round the trunk as if on a rough spiral stair. In some places the branches were difficult to get through, he felt the prickle of pine needles in his face and sticky resin on his hands. Then he noticed that someone else was climbing above him. He stopped and looked up and saw that it was Morgan. Morgan stopped climbing as well, and looked down at him with a most stern and penetrating expression. It was as if he was examining Race’s fitness for the most serious test that could ever be imagined.