Huia Short Stories 9

by Anahera Gildea

  The kids arrived on Friday night with a few extra bodies, who all slept crammed together on mattresses in the lounge. Early Saturday morning they disappeared down to the beach with their surfboards to catch the tide.

  I was attempting to make a quiche from a recipe I’d recorded off the cooking channel. The only problem was the TV was in the lounge room and I have the memory of a goldfish, so I had to keep running in and out to get the instructions.

  As I was cracking eggs into cream there was a knock at the front door. I felt I was at a crucial stage with the quiche and that if I left, it would be catastrophic. I am definitely not the multi-tasky type.

  ‘Come in, it’s open!’ I yelled, thinking it would be one of the kids’ friends, or a neighbour wanting to borrow something.

  ‘Hi …’ a soft, girly voice said behind me.

  I spun around and Anna was there, looking around my kitchen. I could imagine what she was thinking: the decor – the late seventies jaffa combination – would never be stylish again. ‘Ah hi …’

  ‘You’re cooking …’ she said, with as much surprise as if she’d caught me performing brain surgery.

  I grimaced. ‘Ah yeah, me and Nigella are like this …’ I said, crossing my fingers and holding them in front of me.

  ‘Who’s on top?’ she asked, laughing.

  She shouldn’t have. I got an erection so fast all the blood fled my brain and I thought I was going to pass out. ‘Don’t …’ I growled at her.

  ‘Don’t what?’ she grinned, knowing exactly what was what.

  I frowned. Mystified did not even begin to describe how I felt. I was thoroughly bewildered.

  She took the eggs out of my hands, and gently pushed me away. I stood behind her, watching her flit up and down the bench, grating, chopping, sautéing and beating as if she had a dozen pairs of hands.

  She rolled out the pastry, deftly lined the frying pan I was using as a pie dish and had the whole thing thrown together and in the oven in three minutes flat.

  I made us a cup of coffee and we sat at the kitchen table looking at each other.

  She stared at me for ages. Her eyes were golden brown again and they made my insides go gooey. At the same time apprehension began to twist my stomach tighter and tighter. I had to get it out of me before I exploded. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  Shit, had my heart stopped beating? Or was it starting up again after six months of being frozen solid? I didn’t know, but something large and overwhelming thudded through me.

  ‘But …’ she continued, holding a finger in the air. ‘I don’t like who I am when we are together.’

  ‘Oh …’ managed to slip out before I jammed my mouth shut. I didn’t want to talk. I had the feeling if I talked I would stuff everything up.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I turn into this pathetic useless creature.’

  I frowned.

  Her brows furrowed, creating this cute little dent between them. ‘You make things easy for me; but really hard at the same time …’

  Oh my God, I couldn’t believe I actually understood what she was saying. I nodded vigorously and I meant it.

  Her eyes widened with surprise, but I think she believed me. She took another deep breath. ‘I want to travel.’

  A wave of jealousy so intense it almost seared the hairs off my skin swept over me, and I forced back the words ‘with Steeeeeve?’, saying instead, innocuously, ‘I see … where do you want to go?’

  She shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’

  I swallowed hard, my eyes tightly closed; I didn’t want to see her lie to me. ‘Are you going with anyone?’

  ‘No …’

  It didn’t sound like a lie, and when I opened my eyes she was looking at me with a puzzled expression on her face. She wasn’t lying. No Steve huh? Awesome! I didn’t even have to think about it. ‘OK …’

  ‘Do you mean it?’ she asked, obviously startled.

  I pulled out my wallet, withdrew my credit card and laid it in front of her. ‘Just …’

  ‘Yes?’

  I wasn’t one to show my emotions. I’m far more likely to joke my way out of a painful situation. It was a stupid knee-jerk reaction, which hadn’t done me any favours in the past. I never felt more like crying than I did right then, but I didn’t. However, when my voice did come out it was tight and shaky. ‘… Come home to me!’

  I watched her eyes fill with tears and spill onto her cheeks.

  The timer on the oven pinged and I jumped up and rescued the quiche, dropped it on the bench and turned off the oven.

  I pulled her out of her seat and wrapped my arms around her. My cheek rested on the top of her glorious red hair; my hands rubbed up and down her back as if I was trying to soak her in through the palms of my hands. Touching her somehow opened me up, and it all came tumbling out.

  ‘I love you Anna; you’re so beautiful you make me ache all over; you’re so amazing I don’t deserve you. I wish I’d never done all the things that pushed you away and I wish I never have to lose you but if I do …’ I couldn’t finish. I wanted to say, ‘that would be alright,’ but saying it out loud would probably kill me. So I left it unsaid and I let her go.

  It’s been a year since that Tuesday evening I came home to an empty house. I was made redundant two and a half months ago. It doesn’t matter. I was beginning to hate the job with as much passion as I used to love it. I handed my redundancy cheque to my wife. With that and the money from the sale of our house she bought a small boutique B&B and cafe at the seaside.

  Now I’m making beds, vacuuming carpets, cleaning loos, scrubbing, polishing and dusting. I also wash laundry, mow lawns and garden borders. I rinse dishes and stack them in to a sanitiser while she barks orders at me like a sergeant major, and I love it.

  Waiwhetū Wishes

  K-T Harrison

  To the beach was a short run.

  On the way back, I dragged my feet and stumbled. Stopped. Exchanged the kaimoana-laden kete from the hand that was harakeke-plait indented to the one that wasn’t. Stopped. Opened-closed, opened-closed the plait-marked hand. Stopped. Picked up the pipis that had fallen through the gaps in Kenny-Boy’s kete, because I was following him. Stopped. Rubbed my leg where the kina spikes had poked. And stopped. To catch my breath. We would rest when we got to Tōtara. But first I had to stagger up the steep track with this load and try not to think about the kina prickles.

  Stabbing me.

  ‘Hey Boy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I got a secret.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I show you will you promise not to tell?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Cross your fingers to cancel out a lie?’

  ‘Yep.’

  I crossed my heart and my fingers, and Kenny-Boy made his thing go hard.

  It stood like the middle bit in the ponga before it becomes a fern branch. It was a thick fat huhu grub.

  ‘Do you want to touch it?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go on, rub it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sook-arse bastard,’ he said. ‘For that, you carry both kete home.’

  ‘Where’s Kenny-Boy?’ Granddad said.

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Why you carry those by yourself?’

  I crossed my fingers.

  ‘Kenny-Boy’s got a sore puku.’

  Later, I tried to make my thing go hard but it wouldn’t.

  Kenny-Boy was twelve and I was nine.

  We all lived together back then. Nanny and Granddad, me and Kenny-Boy, and Doris and Josie. In our house, our village: Te Whenua Pai.

  That same year, Aunty Linda came to look after us because Nanny was at the hospital in Hamilton.

  We’d had a whānau hui at the marae. The Aunties said that we should be split up and live with them.

  They argued with Granddad, and Granddad sa
id ‘No.’

  Individually, the Aunties were tōtara.

  Thick-trunked and with branches that reached out and grabbed you. Slapped you. Together, the Aunties were the ngahere we weren’t supposed to go into, but did once. Formidable. In their home clothes they laboured hard: in the gardens, in the woolsheds, at the creek on washing day, cooking at the pā or shelling mussels, in the paddocks at lambing and then again at hay-making, in the urupā on clean-up days and in their red-band gumboots. On town days or dance nights, in their going-out clothes, they looked like the maize in the fields just before harvest. Pale green outer leaves turning to gold, wiry auburn huruhuru and yellow stalks deeply rooted in the soil. Their faces and hair shone with the Rawleigh’s products they shared; they didn’t smell like mussels, and they looked nice. Almost.

  They argued; drank cups of tea, ate fried bread. They argued; ate boil-up, kaimoana and kānga wai. They argued; nibbled their way through madeira cake, picked at the chocolate-and-yellow-and-pink cake with the pretend cream between the layers. They stopped arguing and went home for tea.

  Granddad said no.

  And Aunty Linda came to help him mind us.

  She was Nanny and Granddad’s second eldest daughter.

  She’d left Te Whenua Pai when she was a girl, and she lived in Auckland with her husband and their girl. All five of the Aunties – Emma, Hazel, Jessie, Julia and Maureen – lived with their husbands and children in the village, but the three uncles were just photos that hung on the back wall of the wharenui.

  I’d only seen Aunty Linda once before.

  That Christmas, Uncle Jimmy had been Hana Koko. He’d mixed the presents up.

  The Aunties moaned at him, and Aunty Jessie told him to sleep his haurangi off in the wharenui.

  Aunty Linda came with her husband called Uncle Richard, who was Pākehā, and their girl called Ruth, who was four. Uncle Richard sipped out of a real silver flask.

  ‘Medicinal purposes,’ he said.

  Aunty Linda talked gentle.

  She clapped her hands like Miss Metcalfe at school.

  ‘Children, children,’ she said. ‘Here please.’

  We all gathered beneath Tōtara. Even the grown-ups. Uncle Richard brought a big carton crammed with brightly wrapped parcels from the boot of their car. Then he sat down, drank his medicine and, red-faced, sweated.

  Aunty Linda called out Ani’s name.

  Ani stood beside Aunty Linda; covered her mouth with her hands. She received the present. Then, ugly Ani – who kicked the ngerus’ pukus while they ate their kai by the water tank, punched our backs for no reason, glared at us all the time and never smiled – smiled.

  Aunty kissed Ani’s cheek. She looked like the Pākehā ladies in Nanny’s Woman’s Weekly book we used in the wharepaku when we ran out of Herald squares. She had pale pink lips and smudged blue eyelids, and wore some creamy coloured beads around her neck that Kenny-Boy said came from Japanese oysters. She wore oyster earrings too.

  ‘Thank you Aunty.’

  Ani clutched the candy-floss-covered parcel to her chest. She walked real slow; her eyes glistened. It seemed like a magic wand had been waved over her. She sat down. But she didn’t open her present.

  One by one Aunty called us; we raced up to her. Accepted her gift.

  Aunty Linda smelt different to the other Aunties.

  She smelt like room four on the flower show day we had in November. The headmaster, Mr Garcia, opened the doors to let us in after judging. When I walked in to room four, the sweet-scented air rushed into my nose and made me giddy and merry. They’d had to close the windows and doors so the bees couldn’t get in and sting the judges, Mr and Mrs Parsons from Morrinsville. I sat on the chair that was for Mrs Parsons and I sneezed and sneezed until the giddiness went. Then Mr Garcia told me to get out. My flower didn’t get a prize.

  Aunty’s face felt like ngeru fur.

  Green flecks flickered in her eyes.

  I was magic-ed.

  ‘I saw her titties when she leaned forward,’ Kenny-Boy said.

  Ani punched his back. ‘Be quiet.’

  He shoved her. She punched him again.

  ‘Now children, please don’t fight. This is the birthday of baby Jesus. We must be happy. Now open your gifts, and Merry Christmas to you all.’

  I don’t remember who started it, and don’t know why, but we all clapped. I gazed after Aunty Linda as she walked away; the other kids did too.

  Aunty Linda dressed different to the other Aunties.

  The spiky heels of her pointy-toed red shoes sunk into the soft ground, so she jerked along the grassed part until she got to the concrete. Red roses on her skirt swayed like pōhutukawa flowers caught in a sea breeze: danced to the moana melody. A tidal tune. Swish-swish-swish. She didn’t wear the cardigan sleeves on her arms; instead, they hung loose and bounced against her hips. The sun made streams of shimmery light all the way down her long reddish brown hair, which gleamed like Chestnut’s coat after Granddad brushed it.

  Aunty Linda was magnificently beautiful.

  ‘Go on then you fullas,’ Aunty Jessie said. ‘Open up your presents. Hurry up: we want a jack.’

  I wanted a jack too. A present from a shop in Auckland had to be better than one from the shop in Hamilton.

  The grown-ups said that us pā kids liked to make loud noise.

  We played noisy, ate noisy, laughed noisy, cried noisy and had loud noisy fights. That time though, we were quiet.

  And us pā kids usually did everything together.

  But that time, before I removed the silver-coloured bow, untied the knot in the silky green ribbon and opened up the dark blue paper with a million jingle bells to see what was inside – that one time I needed to be alone. I turned my back to the others. I sat hunched over my parcel, so I was the first one to see that Aunty Linda had given me a book called Oliver Twist.

  ‘Mine is a book called Heidi,’ said Ani. And she showed us her book.

  The cover was a picture of some maunga with snow on them in the background, and in front there was a Pākehā girl sitting in some long grass. A boy who held a funny looking tokotoko in his hand stood beside the girl. In one corner, some goats ate grass beside a grumpy-faced girl in a wheelchair. Ani rubbed her hand backwards and forwards over that picture like she was trying to get into it with those Pākehā kids. She tucked the paper, the pink ribbon and the bow into the leg of her bloomers. She hugged the book and she smiled at us. I thought she must be smiling at something I couldn’t see, like the kēhua Granddad said Uncle Jimmy talks to all the time, or something else.

  Ani smiled.

  And she looked.

  Stupid.

  Her Christmas card was a picture of Mary, dressed like the nuns in Morrinsville, holding the baby Jesus. Mary had a circle around her head. The circle went from one ear, over the top of her head, to the other ear. She didn’t look happy with her baby though. When Aunty Jessie brought my cousin Lily back home from the hospital, she looked real happy. Her and Uncle Jimmy smiled at Lily all the time. But Mary looked like Josie after she’s been crying for nothing. Sad, miserable and red-eyed.

  ‘What’s that rubbish?’ Uncle Hone said. ‘Bloody rubbish.’

  He snatched the card from Ani and wrenched it open. A five-pound note fluttered out. Uncle Hone grabbed it and stuffed it in his pocket.

  ‘Tight bitch.’

  He tossed the card at Ani.

  ‘I don’t want to see any of that bloody rubbish lying around the house. I find it, I’ll burn it.’ Uncle Hone pretended to hold a glass, and he tilted it up to his mouth. He pointed to his house and walked towards it. Uncle George followed.

  Ani put the card inside the book and closed it. She carried that book around with her everywhere she went for a long time afterwards. When she had mahi to do she put it down beside her. But one day in January when we went to get some pipis, she didn’t have it.

  ‘My father used it to light the wood range,’ she said. ‘I cut all the Herald u
p for the wharepaku.’ After that Ani was back to her ugly self, but at least she didn’t look stupid any more.

  Kenny-Boy tore at his envelope and opened the card. ‘Dumb words,’ he said. ‘And no money.’

  The card showed a Pākehā Santa Claus who looked like Uncle Richard, and his book was called Treasure Island.

  ‘I’m gonna get out of this place, go to that island and get me some of that treasure. I’m gonna be the richest fulla from Te Whenua Pai and I’m never gonna come back to this dump.’

  We all got books.

  Josie got Little Women. And Doris got a collection of stories about some Pākehā girls called Cinderella, Goldilocks, Snow White, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty. The baby girl called Thumbalina looked like Lily.

  I rushed home and put my book under my pillow because we didn’t have a bookshelf like at school. The Bible lived on top of the wireless, and Granddad kept his Best Bets in the back pocket of whichever of his three pants he was wearing at the time. He had one for work, one for home and one for town and the races. When I opened the book and saw the words in it I knew that I would have to get better at Janet and John and their kurī called Spot before I could read this one. Ani and them saved their papers and ribbons and bows. And us boys gave ours to them. Really though, I wanted to keep mine too. But I copied what the other boys did in case they called me a sissy.

  By lunchtime Uncle Jimmy was up. He met Uncle Richard at the table.

  ‘Richard Collins is the name: people call me RC for short.’ Uncle Richard stuck his hand out for Uncle Jimmy to shake. Uncle Jimmy swallowed the kai he was chewing.

  ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘RC. Those are my initials. That’s what people call me. Get it?’

  ‘OK then arsey, pass me that pig head over there.’

  Uncle Richard took a sip of medicine.

  ‘What’s that you got there, arsey?’

  ‘It’s real silver. For medicinal purposes.’

  ‘I better hold on to that: can’t trust these Māori.’