I kicked my Chucks through the glass pane in the front door I’d had replaced after my mother refused to wait until dusk for me to collect her mail. Determined to be a heroine and get to the mailbox with all her cords and tubes intact, she’d stumbled and put her walking stick through it. Taupara was his name, the walking stick. He was our tipuna, our ancestor. On her ‘off’ days, my mother would lie back on her La-Z-Boy and stroke Taupara’s wooden bones. She’d talk to him like to a friend, a confidant, and giggle when he answered. I kicked the stick gently into the hallway, out of sight, the fire in my belly simmering somewhat. Then it returned, and I ripped down the curtains my mother had specially made. Thick, heavy, second-hand drapes, which were supposed to shield my body from the inevitable blisters and damaged corneas and tiny tumours of skin cancer that fate had designed for me anyway. We couldn’t afford the UV window filters. ‘Next year, Bub,’ she’d promise every spring. ‘Next year we’ll get them for sure.’
My uncle – through association, not blood, not that it really mattered – appeared at the living room door. His reflection was badly splintered in the remains of an oval mirror which had wept shards over the hearth below. I heard jingling towards me, spun around and struck out. Keys chinked to the floor. I watched my uncle hold his nose together while shaking his head from side to side, shaking out the energy of the blow. And I flinched as droplets smarted from the creases at the corners of his eyes: dark eyes squinting, face darker than usual. But then the voice: gentle and smooth, even at thunder pitch.
‘Bloody hell, Ata,’ he said. ‘Pretend to be tough around other people, but drop the act with me, eh?’
I half-shrugged but didn’t apologise. Told him to leave.
He ignored me. Pointed to the bay windows and frowned. ‘Atareta, those curtains save your life,’ he said.
‘It’s like a bomb shelter in here,’ I said.
‘Like a bomb’s gone off, more like.’
‘It’s like a bomb shelter,’ I said.
‘Well, this bomb shelter saves your life.’
‘I don’t have a life.’
‘Don’t say that,’ he said.
‘But it’s true. I don’t exist during the day. Never did, never will.’ And that was the truth. I spent every day quarantined from the day. I lived my life, if you could call it living, under the sombre frown of the moon. Never got to whoop-whoop and scream around our cul-de-sac on bikes with the other kids, and then chase Mr Whippy’s ice-cream truck down the hill-and-dip at full speed. Never got to help my mother mow the lawns or paint the fence green, then admire my sun-dried handiwork. Never drank Diet Coke on the veranda steps and sploshed ants with the remaining liquid. Or squealed at a hose aimed at me as I jumped on a trampoline in a pair of Barbie togs, marveling at the rainbow necklaces streaming over me in the air. Never experienced any of my cousin’s memories. Never did.
My uncle looked at me. ‘I can’t lose you too, Atareta,’ he said, ‘not to that as well.’ He turned his back to me and scraped the prickles around his chin and cheeks across the upper arms of his polo shirt. I spread myself, arms akimbo, on my mother’s living room floorboards and watched him rehang my mother’s drapes.
The next morning I sploshed on my sunscreen, covered up, hatted up, visored up, sunglassed up, and cashed in the Bonus Bonds my mother had bought me. Over fifteen thousand dollars worth, including the odd win here and there. But I left the five hundred dollars worth of Bonds she’d bought in advance but never given me. I found them under her pillows when I slept in her bed: her hospital bed, in her bedroom, with the squeaky mattress that still smelled of Britney. She was always at home with me, or I’d be at the hospital with her. Then she was sent home. For good, they said.
In the afternoon, the orderlies came to pick up my mother’s bed and her hospital equipment. They said they were sorry for my loss. All three of them arranged their lips into straight lines and nodded in unison – even the hunched guy with oily bangs and white iPod buds poking out of his ears. They worked quickly and quietly, and when I entered my mother’s half-stripped room, I found that they had folded her bedding and left it in a neat pile on her La-Z-Boy, with the envelope she’d left under her pillow sitting on top. I had opened the envelope again – Bonds still intact – and pulled out the rose-pink card, signed in a deteriorated scrawl: ‘Luv, Mum.’
By the time my uncle came over, I’d tidied the rest of the house and organised for an agency to find a house-sitter. I didn’t expect him to be impressed with my decision.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Your condition, your skin: you can’t go overseas. For God’s sake, Ata, it’s summer in Europe!’
‘I know.’
‘But?’
‘I’ve booked everything online. Used my savings. I leave next week.’
‘But the flights?’
‘Are all at night. And I have my visor. It’s under control.’
He slumped onto a chair and stared at me. Didn’t say anything for a while. Scratched at the crescent-shaped scar behind his left ear. And stared. ‘But it’s summer, Ata; it’s summer there,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘You hate summer.’
‘I know.’
‘So why go? Are you trying to punish me, punish yourself, your mother?’
‘I’m not trying to punish anyone.’
‘But you hate summer.’
‘I know. But I’ve done it before, and I’ll be careful. Promise.’
At that particular moment I didn’t know for sure that I’d be careful. Other than my uncle, and his wife and daughter, who both seemed to steer clear of me, I didn’t have any family. My mother was gone, as was the father I never got to know, and apart from my mother’s house, the only inheritance they’d jointly left me with was a recessive gene they’d both carried and obliviously passed on to me. Cursed me with, I sometimes thought.
But my condition hadn’t stopped me from living. My mother and I watched television and read magazines and dreamed of going places and meeting glamorous people in exotic locations. Although I wasn’t going to be anything like my mother. I was determined to leave Gisborne. Out of guilt or shame or regret or something else entirely, my mother had consented to me going on a three-month exchange to Germany when I was sixteen. It was a controlled, safe affair, and Hannelore, my German ‘sister’, was everything in a host that I wished I would be one day: fun and genuinely interested in which song I thought would be number one in the charts that week, in swapping clothes, in taking me to the pub to play cards until we got kicked out at the midnight curfew, or pretending we were in our twenties and chatting up random guys online. Hannelore made me feel normal, and we still kept in touch.
Of course, I never met anyone who knew my father in Germany: not that I’d expected to. Yet when I returned home, to number 59 Hinemoa Heights, I somehow felt closer to him. But my father was gone too, as were the blood brothers I had mourned from a distance, and whose graves I sometimes visited.
And right now, going overseas just seemed like a rational thing to do. Either that or stay and wallow in death’s shroud, that was how I saw it.
‘What would you do?’ I asked my uncle, accusingly. Then I told him, and myself, that I wasn’t being reckless or careless. I was simply choosing to explore my German heritage and perhaps, this time, to find members of my father’s family. I was choosing to live my life.
2
According to my mother, fifty-nine had always been her lucky number. Were she still alive I would remind her that she had died two months short of her fifty-ninth birthday, that her weekly combinations of five and nine had never translated into the Lotto jackpot she reckoned hovered just over the hill, and that I had had fifty-nine operations (depending on whether you counted every mole removal as a single operation) before I was nine years old.
But I guess we did OK with our ex-state-home, even if I often thought of it as a bomb shelter or a prison. Some days I believed it was death’s cruel joke: forcing me to dog-ear m
y days through fabled lives I’d never live; teasing me to come out and play like a normal kid just so that it could catch me off guard and turn my insides out. Other days I wanted to run outside and melt in the sun just so I wouldn’t have to hear the normal kids any more: the constant others in my narratives.
When I was five, my mother enrolled me at the local primary school. The school couldn’t get funding for UV window filters, and they weren’t prepared to black out an entire classroom just for me, so I was given a small ‘classroom’ to myself – which was really a large cupboard that had an air-conditioning unit installed to meet health and safety requirements. My teacher would check on me periodically, and I ate lunch in my classroom too. My uncle made my cousin, Fleur, sit with me during most play times and at least half of the lunchtime break. She didn’t mind at first. Sometimes kids would sneak up and bang on the door and shout things like, ‘Nyah, nyah, weirdo, catch me if you can,’ knowing full well that I couldn’t. But Fleur would catch them. She’d bolt out the door, after making sure I had my visor on and was covered up, and would give them all a good bollocking. They never did it more than once.
At first, Fleur and I spent our lunchtime watching DVDs together, or swapping stickers from our sticker books, or Fleur would fill me in on all the ‘big kids’ gossip. But it didn’t take long for her to tire of Disney reruns and playing elastics and listening to music quietly, always quietly. Sometimes I was allowed to go outside at little play time in the mornings (as long as I was covered up with gloves and sunglasses and my special hat with the clear UV visor and material that reached down to my elbows), though this didn’t happen very often, and never when the sun was at its worst.
Most kids kept their distance outside too. I thought it was because they were scared of Fleur, until I overheard some boys near the water fountain around the corner as I was catching my breath under the awning.
One of them said, ‘You can catch it, you know, if you get too close to her: if you breathe in her air.’
Another replied, ‘No you can’t, liar: you have to touch her actual skin. I dare you to touch her skin.’
Then someone else: ‘Eee, gross! Not me. I dare you back to sneak up and touch her. I dare you to touch her skin.’
Eventually, keeping me company seemed to become just another chore for Fleur, and I felt the onset of her disdain before she felt the need to articulate it verbally. After one term, and many teary nights on my part, my mother began home-schooling me.
But at home, without Fleur’s protection, my ex-classmates – and fellow Hinemoa Heightians – still wouldn’t leave me alone. They’d wait until my mother was in the backyard, as far away as possible, and then dare each other to sneak under my bedroom window and yell at me through the walls. I despised late afternoons, between the end of school and dinner, until I realised that the CD player and recorder I used for my school work could actually belt out Tūranga FM at a decent volume.
My mother had bought number 59 Hinemoa Heights just before I was born. ‘It was a bargain, Atareta,’ she said to me once. ‘It’s cos people reckon you gotta go through the Hood to get here. And not many people wanna do that, and those that don’t mind can’t afford the deposit. Lucky we got your uncle, eh?’
Our yellow two-bedroom home, which was perpetually grey to me, stood at the top of a cul-de-sac on Kaiti Hill, right next door to my uncle’s house. It had an enormous backyard and bordered on a not-so-well-kept council reserve. We called our home ‘The Ponderosa’.
‘Because it’s our own little sanctuary ranch,’ my mother had said – even though what she really meant was because she’d fallen in love with some cowboy dude on TV and fantasised about running a ranch with him.
On a full moon, my mother would grab a torch and help me climb over the back fence. We climbed over a stile my uncle had built so we could be lady-like in the moonlight: not that anyone ever saw us or we really cared. She’d guide me up the fifty or so metres to the top of the hill, where we’d plonk ourselves down on a couple of tree stumps. She even engraved our names into the stumps: Makareta on her stump and Atareta on mine. Over the years other names appeared too, in black vivid mostly, not engraved like ours. But they were fleeting comments of no consequence: ‘Fat Fleur takes it up the arse,’ for example, or ‘Brent is a homo’ or ‘Atareta will suck your blood and anything else.’
The phone number beneath the last one surprised me. They’d scribbled down the Domino’s Pizza number instead of ours. But I still couldn’t let my mother see. More than graffitied rubbish – which my mother said was an indicator of a poor education and slack parenting – my mother hated it when kids made fun of me. I’d heard it all before though. Insults shot through the air like rugby balls, or needled through my bedroom walls. Nicer kids called me Moon Child. Otherwise, I was a werewolf, a vampire, a taniwha, Harry Potter’s witch-bitch or just plain pōrangi in the head.
If my mother saw or heard anything like that she tracked down the culprits with Sherlockian ease, gave their parents a lecture and threatened everyone involved with libel – she seemed to have no qualms about using my uncle’s legal practice to her advantage. At times, my mother didn’t seem to care that I preferred to stay in the shadows and just coast along below the radar, trying not to draw more attention to myself than Xeroderma pigmentosum already did.
Even though it was my last night in Gisborne – my last night in Aotearoa – I knew I would miss that spot in particular. New names I didn’t recognise had appeared on the stumps: Dreysynka, Teniquah, Shakeeyra and Chérazz. Names that sounded as though they’d been dragged from the pages of a science fiction comic or a really bad chick-lit novel (neither of which could be found on my mother’s bookcase).
But the view hadn’t changed. From our stumps you could see the ocean. A few trees blocked part of the view, but mostly it was just bracken and ferns and wild raspberry brambles, which rolled down the other side and melted into random homes about two-thirds of the way down, mere metres away from Kaiti Beach.
I loved the beach, but hated summer with a passion. In summer the days seemed to begin even before the tūī and the fantails and the sparrows had washed the pīkaru from their eyes. And it seemed like forever before the sun pushed off again. Besides, I had formed a special bond with the frowning moon – or at least, we tolerated each other’s presence – and I mistrusted anyone and anything that burned bright like the sun and with that much intensity.
When I was younger, my mother or my uncle took me to the beach often, in single file, down a makeshift track along the side of Kaiti Hill. As I got older, I’d scramble down the hill by myself or, on the moon’s dimmer nights, I’d coerce Fleur into driving me there. She generally left me in the car, keys still in the ignition, and floated off to her own little clique of friends. ‘Don’t get into too much shit,’ she’d say through bleach-streaked hair. ‘Dad will have a cow otherwise.’ I tried not to mind being left behind. But I’d watch Fleur’s size 16 hips and double-D cups swagger off towards her latest catch (they were always ‘catches’, never ‘boyfriends’) and I wished I had her suntanned bulk and oozed her confidence. Wished I wasn’t stuck with the boyish limbs and modest B cups and skin that would only darken with melanoma.
Alone, I’d pretend I was one of those superstars or actresses when I walked along the sand, wearing only my togs and a lava-lava, outside. I’d close my eyes and imagine that the granules of sand sliding between my toes were golden, not grey, and they twinkled before me like the tiny pieces of glass and stones and shells and bones they’d been ground from. I’d imagine Robert Pattinson or Orlando Bloom stepping out from the shadows, or emerging from Davy Jones’ locker: they’d see me and be mesmerised by my beauty and take me away to live in Hollywood or Las Vegas – somewhere where life began at dusk, not dawn.
Generally, my Cinderella dream-spell would break before midnight, when all the local hoons would begin racing up and down the beach, and when the really underage teenies would gather in their gazillions, drinking Purple Goann
as and Steinies and having way too much Sex on the Beach. My cue to leave was when the drunken slurs got louder and the dumping of bottles and used condoms and McDonald’s wrappings began, and I didn’t quite know how to react to it all.
A girl had called out to me once: thought she knew me, called me ‘Shaz’, I think. Brimming with new-found confidence from my three-month excursion to Germany, I’d sauntered over. When I got closer she must’ve realised that she didn’t know me, but she didn’t seem to care. She started talking about random people I didn’t know, and offered me the tap of a plastic bladder of supermarket wine that I’d watched being passed around the circle of mouths as I’d walked over. I shook my head: said I’d had a bit too much already, even though I hadn’t. I thought about bringing down some bottles of my mother’s caramel Mudshakes, or sneaking some of Fleur’s Chardon stash from the boot of her car.
As it turned out, once I’d left their circle of wine-stained lips, I’d forgotten their names. But it was nice to know just how normal I must look at night, unmummified, without my hats and shirts and jackets and sunglasses and visors and SPF-one billion. I went home, looked at myself in the mirror and saw my mother – just paler and with more freckles.
Kaimoana
Mark Sweet
Inside, the marble floor and recessed windows with thick steel joinery are all that’s left of the old Public Trust Building. The twisting staircase is gone, and the plaster mouldings imported from Liverpool are hidden above a ceiling, so lowered I can nearly touch the acoustic panels on the roof. Fluorescent lighting is recessed, and the partitioning in oak and glass has been replaced with a row of doors and mirrored windows I cannot see into.
I tell a woman behind a shield I have an appointment. Mr Campbell for Mr McDonald. She says ‘please take a seat over there,’ pointing to a row of five upholstered chairs framed by rubber plants in shiny stainless pots. She picks up the telephone and looks at me as she talks.
Huia Short Stories 9 Page 18
