by Alan Duff
Now I’m bein’ hauled up — fuckim. In his face: Ooo, you so strong Mista Apeman. You been doin’ WEIghts? (Haha-fucken-ha.) Spit out bits of my physical existence (who cares? Weren’t much of an existence anyrate.) Had bad teeth anyrate.
Is all slow motion to me. Ever since that day of the burning, whenever the crunch comes on the reel of life slows down. So I can see it bedda (HAHA!) — Urghhhhhh! Stupid idiot thinks my laughter’s at him when it’s at me, my funny li’l mind. Ya would wouldn’t ya? (Take that. And this.) You’re so screwed up you think the world’s down to jus’ one person who counts. Yeah, you heard right. Bang! Do it again, mista, I’m still tellin’ ya. You think your hurt is the only thing’t means anything in this worl’. But what about mine? What about kids asleep down the road, in this town, this country, who’re hurtin’, what about them then? Or’re you th’ only person on the planet. I know: the only ape in the jungle! HAHAHA! Laugh inis fucken face. Laugh-in-his-fucken-face. (Oh, now lookit this: he’s pulled out a gun. Been sittin’ tucked into the back of his (filthy) jeans all this time. I knew he was beyond his normal wild t’night.)
Thata gun? (I wish I remembered that line the movie-star woman said. Oh, well, nemine. It don’t madda. Nuthin’ maddas.) He’s got it out now, it’s a commitment. To his manhood. As if I’m a threat to that. Huh? You wha’? I am near to laughing inis face again. You wha’, wha’d you say jus’ then? Justa make sure I heard right.
He says: How’d ya like a bullet up your cunt.
How would I? HAHAHAHA! Mista, I had worse up there, know what I mean? (Oh, he knows alright. Jus’ lookit his face now.) Ape, ya bedda not explode before your gun does, bro. Here it comes — bang! ’Nutha whack for the road. Feel bedda now, Mista Bullet? No, Mista Bullet doesn’t, why he sticks the gun down there, at my bizniz (some bizniz. It’s bankrupt!) my cunt, my hole, my box, my snatch, my twat, their and his bitta (dry) meat. It never belonged to me, not from when the firs’ uninvited man helped himself to it, not since the moments in time my life disowned me, dispossessed me of myself. Funny that, how violation of my vagina should be my entry card, my passport to the gang countries (to hell) when I never had ownership of any sexuality, no actual feelings that were the same sweet shivers I dreamed they could be, and Nig Heke a few times took me close to knowing.
So. So I look at the real cunt and askim: A bullet up my cunt? Like I said, I had worse an’ I had bigger. And then I laugh: Ha-ha-ha-ha-hah!
Uhhhh! this one in the guts, taken my breath but not my spirit but still fall to the ground, can’t help it, my wind’s gone, can’t breathe. God, men. Fucken men. I shoulda been a lezzie. Women don’t hurt each utha. Prob’ly the, uh, sex side woulda been bedda, too. Softer. Like Nig was. Oh how I ’(n)joyed with him. He was gentle — gentle — with me. Apeman, hell, he caught me same time as I caught him, we was both on a downer, it sure weren’t his li’l cock I enjoyed. I jus’ up and accepted him as my man and took what came. All the cocks I knew, had inside me, in every hole ’cept my ears, only one evah gave me feeling down there was Nig. I think cos he was loved, by his mother; she’d given him a base. He pulled me up onto it. (Oh, Nig. I’m so sorry, man.) The rest, they was jus’ weights, like live corpses humpin’ up and down on me, flippin’ me ovah on my back like a dog, uh-uh-uh-uh, wonder they never started barkin’, cos plenty sure had bite soon’s they had their way; they done it this way that way any which way when I couldn’t feel it hardly any.
Oh, but a man in his state’s got no mercy, he’s got no eyes to see, he’s left even our world (he’s the forming stuff of mankind, star stuff, stardust, violently marrying matter) it’s why I’m coming up off the wall and now slammed against the wall (all the atoms of himself his terrible inner core are banging against each utha). And now even the prez is joined in, he’s jus’ tole Ape to kick me if I don’t shuddup. Ya can’t be standin’ up to a man. These are real men, or so they truly think, I dunno about believe, there is a difference. But really, you guys, you’re jus’ fucken children. (There, take that.) Ya never grew up. Ya can’t. (You can’t.)
Shut-your-fucken-mouth, sista. The cheek to call me sista when he’s sayin’ that. Or — But he doesn’t say what. Or what? I ask him. Or what? But he’s not sayin’. He c’n see Ape’s got the gun. Ya can’t hurt me — But dammit, in sayin’ the word I up and fucken cry. Me. When I hardly evah cry. Tears are a woman’s way of saying she’s weaker than a man. But I ain’t weaker than these two arseholes. I think I’m cryin’ cos there’s a third party but yet I can’t have my say. I’m cryin’ because he’s sided with Ape, he hasn’t heard my side of the story. Ape’s got it inis head that I wanna go with Abe, says I got the hot eyes forim all the time when I don’t. I jus’ keep seein’ Nig inim, I keep lookin’ at Abe and thinkin’ he shouldn’t be in this gang, he should be at home with that mother they got who gave ’em their love base even witha ole man like they had. (And take me outta here with you — please.)
Prez, where’s the rule says I can’t look at anutha brutha or talk toim? I thought tha’s why we joined, cos we’re a family. Aren’t we? Aren’t we? But his eyes are cold. Cold like that gun barrel is. They don’t like women, I shoulda known that. They hate us. We’re their fuck-up mothers they c’n take it out on. If they liked women they wouldn’t think nigger men in America’re so fucken cool and hotshit callin’ their women bitch and ho. (Oh-oh. I think he’s gonna use that thing. It’s his cock: he’s pulled it out and now it’s gotta be emptied.) From looking at someone sposed to be my man I’m lookin’ at my executioner.
… WE WAS HANGING around this music shop in town, me and two of the sistas, two bruthas (to pro-tect us women, hahaha, whadda fucken joke), shaded up so people, Real People, wouldn’t know how much we hate, envy, admire and don’t unnerstan’ ’em. But mainly to hear the music cos Maori gangies love their music. And we were there, even if we’d never admit, not hardly even to ourselves, cos of a need for people, even Real People. To ourselves, out loud, we’d go, Real People? Man, they suck. Makin’ out our daily strolls down the main street are only to scare ’em, snarl at ’em, show ’em how bad we are; truth is, it’s the broken connection we’re secretly hangin’ out for, our end of the wire is still severed on the ground hissing and crackling, whilst they’ve repaired theirs, connected it up with uthas bedd’n us, who try harder. So fuck ’em, is what we say when we mean sumpthin’ else.
Cos we were a group we got our guts, our (false) courage to walk on into the shop (gwon, stare) take our sweet fucken time lookin’ at the CDs ovah at the Rap section and the S for Soul beside that. Then a brutha, emboldened by being a gangie withis mates to back him, goes up to the counter and asks the white fulla does he have a CD by a singer called Speech. Pretty weird name but how it is; weren’t our li’l baby to name, hahaha. The brutha thinkin’ he was pretty smart to be askin’ for a singer called that. Well, the honky looks it up on his computa and fuck me if he doesn’t have it. Well, I’ll be, we all say at once. Good, says the brutha. Play it. Track two. Which was titled (aptly so) ‘Ask Somebody Who Ain’t (If You Think The System’s Working.)’ Long title. Very apt. But then in anutha way, I was thinking, the system was workin’ for us by the fulla agreein’ to play it on his stereo.
And we stood there in our glad, sad an’ dirty rags, behind, unnerneath, armoured by, our shades, or bold enough to have ’em up on our head but poised to come down like shutters at end of a shop day in the ghettos we came from and lived in; strangers in our own town, our country (to ourselves), thinkin’ how staunch we were gettin’ ’em to play our music without sayin’ please, and yet feelin’ very uncool bein’ in here, their shop, their stereo, their CD selection, their money, their everything that we weren’t. After we listened to it there was this feeling, we dunno, of somehow feeling bedda about bein’ in here. The music’d not only fluke-united us but it took away so many of our fears. I think cos it put us on familiar — very familiar — territory where we knew, even us scumbags, we ruled.
So Angel goes up to the whi
teman, Can you please play track seven. Please, if you will. Angel. The man goes back, Are you intending to purchase this, uh, madam, when we knew he wanted to say bitch. And Angel goes, Yeah, sure. Course we are. When we weren’t. Or not that I knew of, not when we had Speech at home that’t come from a burglary somewhere.
Well, Angel gets it started by picking up from the opening line. It was about flowers, petals, how that hippy generation was into that sorta stuff. (Like ours could’ve been too. I like flowers.) But then Angel got shy and dried up. So I took it over and she came back in again, so did the uthas. The song w’s called Let’s Be Hippies, which is the las’ thing we wanted to be, even secretly. Hippies are white people. But what we wanted was to sing this song and as close to the original as we could, tha’s what we wanted in our hearts of aching, yearning hearts.
We dunno what happened what took ovah us. We did know that the White Folk in the shop maddered less and less to us as the song unfolded and we, like flower petals, like sunshine, with it. Guess the smoke in the car on the way musta helped, musta sparked sumpthin’. By the time we hit the chorus with Speech and his own chorus we were soarin’, baby. Man, we’ve hit with all the practice Speech himself musta put into it and we had, too, at our pad, our long idle days of bein’ (government-paid) gangies (it ain’t a glamorous life, as most’ll well imagine it ain’t, but not us, not to start with) unemployed, nuthin’ to fucken do and no do anyrate to do it even if it walked up to us with a (beautifully) written invitation. But the nights were ours, we raged at nights, our li’l petals came out in the blue cellophaned light, and now Doodie took the high harmony in his beautiful — man, jus’ beautiful — falsetto like a — like a lake, if a lake could sing, if something clear and shining, deep and well with its own peace was capable of converting to voice then Doodie was a lake.
The timing was everything in this powerful chorus. But we were there. We were right there. And we all knew, the five of us, that if we were never to get nothin’ right again in our lives we had to get this right. So we lifted our heads, closed our eyes, pulled down the shutters to our shopfront faces, but only so we could sing, to make fuck-sure we were gonna pull this one off. Hell, was only a few sung lines of all our lives we had to get right. Jus’ a few lines.
The words were about release and how just one lousy day of it’d do. (One lousy minute, honey bunny, is what we were talking — well, singing. Yeah, singing, baby. Us, a buncha Hawks who once were li’l sumpthins that didn’t and couldn’t work out. Us.)
With phrasing that was big, tight and difficult. But (God) we got it. We goddit. We sang it the second time with even greater confidence than the firs’, as much as we did amongst ourselves back at the pad, but shit that didn’t count, that wasn’t like this, witha audience of Real People (Suck on this, People.) Havin’ ourselves and bein’ stars front of our own audience, our own mirrors. We were knowing performing excellence outside of our, uh, comfort zone. And when the lines came about the guy not wanting to sex with her, I thought, Wow. Tha’ right, a fulla who don’t want sex he just wants to spend one perfect day with her (me)? And he asks is that OK? Baby, Mista Speech and any man who thinks like that you’ll not only get your perfect day you c’n have the sex withit, too — afterward.)
Then we walked outta that shop. Out onto the main street (where I was when Nig my beloved got shot. We were line-ups across the street, Maoris and fuck-ups the same, but against each utha. Stood there with some of us tooled up, hatin’ each utha without ever knowing why. Shots rang out, they echoed in the canyons of human construction, in the canyons of a few of us our minds, and Nig got catapulted backwards, blasted by a Hawk came running across the road witha shottie and let rip.) Now we were a new batch ’cept me walking lined-up across the pavement not to fuck People off but cos’f what we’d done, the place we’d gone to, the music released from us. We were jus’ kids enjoying a perfect day.
JUST ONE DAY to release … the line coming back to me with a gun stuck not in my place down there where men took false refuge, or jus’ plain shot their (heavee) loads into, but at my face which they ignored, where the real story was. (And scoured into my heart.) Only a few understood me, Nig and oh, tha’s right, Mulla Rota. Poor Mulla, still in the utha gang, still in jail even when he was out, briefly, supposedly free. I told him of the fire. I told Nig and I told him down the passage, Abe. Oh well, won’t be tellin’ no more to no one, not witha gun stuck in my face ’bout to go off.
Gotta gun in my face and the mind behind the face is with one word from that song: release. It’s why I’m smilin’ and he’s frowning, he wants to see fear before he pulls the trigger, but I won’t be givinim that. The smile’s from my heart, when heart was pure and untouched, a potential, when it was a potential to be anything it wanted, anything this pretty li’l girl from Mangakino, middle of nowhere but still a somewhere, an anywheresville of this big world, this tiny world, anything I wanted. One perfect day in my life.
I ask the Ape: You sure ’bout this, what you’re gonna do? Not to save myself. Not at all. It’s cos I’m sure he can’t do the time for it, not a life sentence, a minimum of ten years. (Even my life’s worth sumpthin’ to the justice system.) That what he thinks he’s saving of his soul, his man-pride, his (tattooed) face, the very manhood he thinks he’s doing this for is what’ll desert him. One night — it won’t be day — in his cell, it’ll be a night like this, early hours, he’ll wake up to a thunderstorm goin’ inside him. Then he’ll be in anutha place, a cold frozen place shivering, shaking all ovah and all his lies and falsehoods he’s wrapped himself in’ll shed from him like clothes. Nah, he won’t be able to do the time.
Oh well. His face isa p’cture the same as the prez’s. I never spoke the prez’s name not even in my mind, cos Prez is all he was and is, a title, a membership he hides behind like Jimmy Bad Horse does, real men, real leaders wouldn’t be presidents of gangs of fuck-ups and monsters. Real men’d be presidents out there in the wider world. Or of good gangs. I’m smiling at them both, it’s a wonder they can’t see how pure the smile is. Go on then, I offer softly. Do it.
I see his hand trembling, so’s his jaw, his hurt he’s building up for himself — himself, not me. I’m just another cause — so he can do this. The filming in his eyes. And still I smile. I smile. He takes a shuffle closer, he wants to say something, to justify himself. (But what can he say?) He wants me to beg for what he ain’t gonna give me. I smile. I just smile. Everything’s so clear now. Words, faces, meanings, but not my life. No, I don’t think what I got dished up was a very fair call. But, oh well, how the cards fall, as they say, for some.
I see it leave the barrel. But first of his eye. I see the trigger squeeze register in his eye. Now I see it leave the barrel I do (I do. I do.) And they’re the words I’m hearing, not the thunder of death hurtling for me. I hear them as marriage-vow takings, one to the other, one in echo of the other: I do. I do. That’s what I’ve said to that force, that thing, just left its beautiful dark cave, that opening to my next and last world: I do. Tania says: I do. I’m saying so the bullet, when it takes me, takes me good. Forever in my perfect day …
Light. Light. Light, ligh’, li’lies and this softest of darknesses on the fast way; with it the mother I knew and the father I didn’t saying goodnight and sorry so sorry, but it’s alright. It’s alright, now it is. This’s so much better than I thought and hoped it would be. Got my own sorries to say to my sister, my two brothers. That’s alright, Tarns. Wasn’t your fault. We’re here where everything is forgiven, and there’s Nig. Hello, Nig. Smiling my pure smile atim. Tarns is home.
HOME! (I GOTTA go home!) The shot is one echoing, reverberating word in Abe Heke’s mind: Home! Home.
Right by the door, light a yellow spill slicing his feet, waiting to hear a moan, a sound to say she was alive. But all he got was a stream of words, a whispered exchange of voices he knew well enough when at ordinary level and yet didn’t know (these aren’t my bruthas, these are mongrel-dog cunts). His teeth comin
g together so hard they coulda cracked.
Shit, man. Man, she pushed me too far. Yeah, I know she did, man, but man you fucken killeder. Look ater. Man, I c’n see that, not fucken bline, what we gonna do now? What we gonna do, man, is fucken life in the can we don’t getter outta here. The fuck you puddit iner head for? Man, I tole you: she pissed me off. I tole her to shut the fuck up. Yeah, I know you did. I tole her the same. But fucken hell, Ape … she’s — Well, maybe she ain’t? See anything movin’? Nah, man, she’s wasted. Ape, you killeder. How many times you gonna tell me that ’fore you think I know I did? Alright then, now what?
Now what? Prez, what about him down there, fucken Mista Smoothie? Finish it off while we’re at it. While we’re at it? Man, while you’re at it. I never killed no one. But yeah, if he’s gotta go he’s gotta go. May as well finish off what ya started.
They whispered his name. They’ve killed her and now it’s his turn! He rushed for the window, but part of him left back there, with her, Tania (who else would she have? Never even knew her surname. Never knew her, except the story of her two bros and li’l sister burning to death. Well now she’s dead. She’s a Weight until they stick her in a hurriedly dug grave. They’ll come for me, find I’m gone, that’ll make ’em panic, but I’ll keep, that’s what they’ll be saying, that cunt’ll keep; lug her downstairs, into one of the car boots, take her out to the forest somewhere. Out there they’ll be arguing over who digs the hole: Man, was you shot her. Yeah, tha’s right, why I shouldn’t have to dig the fucken hole. But I’m the prez. An’ I’m the sarge-’t-arms. Even in concealing a murder, no one wants responsibility.
