I kicked him then. Hard. With both feet. I aimed for the place men try to protect.
‘Bloody little bitch,’ he spat. ‘Don’t come running to me for anything.’ He staggered away, the balding patch at the back of his head shining briefly under the hallway light-bulb. It was about then I stopped writing poetry and reading Miss Barrett’s books and took up parties instead.
Bill took someone else to Kissin’ Cousins that Saturday, and I started sneaking out my bedroom window to those parties. Parties that sounded exciting when they were planned in huddles of damp, smelly uniforms by day, but by night were nothing more than a collection of sweaty bodies, puffing at Matinee cigarettes stolen from someone’s mother’s purse or guzzling bottles of DB, or spewing over the dahlias in the front garden. Whoever had the party never enjoyed it. Their night and next morning were spent mopping up sick, or scrubbing at patches of spilt alcohol on the Axminster carpet, or hiding broken glasses at the bottom of the metal rubbish tin. All before their parents came home. A few hours of popularity exchanged for weeks of pissed off parents and everything that came with that. The whole point was saying you’d been. Having someone see you at The Party was enough. You were instantly popular. Getting to these parties for me, though, involved a lot of preparation and agility (my bedroom window was over two metres off the ground.) I’d lie to my mother – something that was never easy, with her constant anxiety. I’d tell her I had a sore stomach and go to bed early, pretending to sleep. I became quite accomplished at stuffing my bed full of pillows and the wig Ruth had worn for the school production of Macbeth. Despite my mother’s mistrust of the world and everyone in it, she never caught me out. It was my father who did. I got back to my bedroom window around two one Sunday morning. On the way back I had an odd sense of foreboding – the party had not been worth the risk. They never were. A boy I hardly knew, the half-back in the college first fifteen, with the face of a weasel, had taken me into one of the bedrooms and put his hand up my skirt. He came at me like he had a job to do, a task to fulfil, a duty to perform. I managed to switch off and step outside myself – everything went off centre somehow, as though it was happening to someone else, and I felt nothing; nothing at all. Weasel-face bragged to his rugby mates afterwards, boasting he’d gone all the way. My reputation was left in shreds.
I ran home after the bedroom incident, holding my shoes, the soles of my bare feet slapping against the rain-hardened pumice roads. The shiny moon followed me, its luminous glow lighting up the street as though it were the middle of the day. Two beer crates from the back shed sat waiting where I’d left them under my bedroom window. I used them as steps to clamber back in, but something was wrong. The window I’d left unhooked, giving me just enough room to slip my hand in and open it fully, had been firmly shut. I was confused at first, but then realised whoever had shut the window must have found the pillows and wig stuffed in my bed.
There was a frost settling by then. The night air had a ghostly chill to it. The fog glowed orange in the street lights outside our house. I slept on the hard wash-house floor for the rest of the night, fully aware of my fate. First thing Sunday morning my father was up, whistling as he cooked bacon and eggs, while I shivered on the damp floorboards. Cooking smells wafted through the back door, mingling with the sickly smell of sunlight soap in the tub above me. I gagged on the combination of food and wash-house smells, and then vomited as I heard the door handle turn. I never ate bacon and eggs after that. The smell always set off a wave of nausea and a sheen of perspiration across my forehead. My father carried on whistling after he’d belted the shit out of me that morning with a leather strap he kept especially for ‘You Bloody Kids.’
So you see, I was preoccupied with other things. Katherine stayed on the periphery of my knowing. That first introduction was in the college library with Miss Barrett. We never read much during library period. There was always a lot of giggling between the ‘loose’ girls (a label I felt sure was now attached to me) and the cool first fifteen boys behind the tall bookshelves. Bill was one of those cool boys. His interest in me (had) waned after I hadn’t turned up at the Starlight that Saturday. He stopped speaking to me altogether when he heard about Weasel-face. Those of us who weren’t giggling behind the bookshelves pretended to read, our hands busy beneath the library tables passing potato chips and packets of jaffas. The packets would sometimes explode onto the wooden floor, causing a ripple of nervous giggles. When that happened Miss Barrett would roar ‘BE QUIET!’ Spit flying everywhere.
Miss Barrett was thin and grey-haired. She spoke in clipped, guarded sentences, holding herself in, releasing only tiny bits in measured doses, as though she was afraid to let go: afraid that if she did we might take advantage somehow, or that she would tell us things she might later regret. When she turned side on, there was almost nothing to her. The small mounds on her chest tried hard to announce themselves: prove something to the world; let everyone know she was, in fact, a woman. They were at odds, almost obscene on her thin, mannish body. She dressed neatly, nothing out of place – but to us she was always old-fashioned with her tweedy skirt, thick beige stockings, court shoes and dull green or pale blue twin-sets. Her outfit was always finished off with a string of fake pearls and earrings to match. You got the feeling there was more to her than met the eye though, and it was in the library we got a hint of what lay underneath. In the library she came alive. Her voice got louder, instead of softer as it should do, and her hair fell out of its stiff grey waves, hanging in loose tendrils down the side of her face.
As I said, it was Miss Barrett who introduced me to Katherine that first time, but I wasn’t interested then. At that point I’d given up wanting to find out about anyone or anything new, and because this Katherine came from a wealthy family with all the privileges that money could buy I just wasn’t interested. How could she possibly know what it was like for those of us who had nothing, or who lived in households where strange things happened and erratic behaviour was the norm? I chose not to get to know her any further, and like I said I was preoccupied with other things. Who she was and what she did just didn’t matter.
It wasn’t until years later that I ran into her again. My sister Ruth had moved overseas. She never married, claiming our parents had put her off for life. I was married with children by then. I’d trained as a nurse, and worked night duty. That way I could be home during the day with my children. I thought I was doing them a favour, but in fact they would have been better off with a babysitter (there were no child-minding facilities then) for all the good I was to them during the day. After being up all night changing wet beds in the geriatric ward, I was never quite with it during daylight hours. In the library, though, I could sit quietly and flick through books. The younger kids weren’t at school then. They would spend hours in the children’s corner reading or playing with the puzzle box. Sometimes during the school holidays, a storyteller visited, and all four children would sit on the mat like statues, sucked into the story. It was during one of these storyteller mornings that I bumped into Katherine again, and it was Witi Ihimaera who introduced me to her this second time. I was browsing through books in the New Zealand section, and found ‘The Washerwoman’s Children’. I started reading and couldn’t stop. It was the longest period of reading I’d done in years. I felt as though I knew those children and their journey into adulthood. It was something to do with their isolation and constant struggle. I recognised them immediately. I searched the library shelves while memories of Miss Barrett came flooding back. I finally found what I was looking for under M. The Kelvey kids.
At this point in my life I no longer took people at face value. It was the nuts and bolts of a person and their life experience that interested me. As I sat in the library that morning reading more than I had read in all the years since college, I discovered that Katherine knew. Despite her upbringing and the affluent world she lived in, she knew. She understood what it might be like for those Kelvey kids, and it was this understanding, this knowing, that stirred something
inside me – like a flame being rekindled. After that second meeting I was hooked. The more I found out about Katherine, the more I wanted to know, and because of that eagerness, that obsession almost, I found myself bumping into her all over the place. It was like buying a make of car you rarely saw, then seeing it everywhere: on every street corner, invisible until your interest had been aroused. It was at this point I could not stop myself. I was driven to finding out all I could. I thought of Miss Barrett and Bill Tāwhai and wondered what had become of them.
After meeting up with Katherine again, I found I could make sense of my past. I focused entirely on getting to know everything I could about her. I left the children with their father and travelled by myself to Wellington. I wanted to find the house she once lived in, absorb everything I could: her essence, her life force. I stood outside her old house like a stalker would and just stared. Once inside, I came to know the triumphs and tragedies of her life. Although she had a privileged upbringing, Katherine showed the world in her stories that she knew about the unfairness, the misfortune, the oddness of the human experience, and it was her absolute understanding of these things that transformed everything.
Tonight, I will meet with her again. I have The Complete Stories of Katherine Mansfield on the bedside table. It sits beside my reading lamp as a bible might for someone who believes in God. As always, before I start to write, I will flick through the pages to the story of ‘The Doll’s House’. I will read again about the Kelvey kids, or the washerwoman’s children as Witi called them, and as always I will stop – my eyes glistening with tears, on the page where Kezia showed the Kelvey kids the little lamp.
Hineraumati
Helen Waaka
Mum takes me to Jo’s place on her way to the works – early as. It was Jo who told the Youth Aid Officer about the course. Mum said it was better than doing nothing all day. I wait in Jo’s lounge – watch TV with no sound until they all get up, then I get her kids breakfast. I have mine while I wait for Jo to have a shower. She speaks to her kids in Māori. She drops me off at the course on the way to her job at the Kōhanga.
I wait outside the office and text my friend Lisa. Wt u up2? I am waiting for an answer when I see this guy wearing brand new sneakers come in the door. I know they’re brand new cos they’re white as – the colour of toothpaste. His hair is curly brown with blonde streaks and a few pink ones. He looks real cool with that pink in his hair. He smiles at me like he can’t help it.
‘Got a smoke?’ he says.
‘Yeah,’ I say. He laughs too, like he can’t help it. We go round behind the office and light up. We stand saying nothing – just passing the smoke backwards and forwards.
‘Better go and fill in those forms,’ he says, and takes a last drag. He smiles the whole time with his mouth, but not with his eyes. They are the colour of cooking chocolate – the stuff Jo uses to make biscuits. When you look at him it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking. There’s this older Māori guy sitting by the office with a name badge on his shirt. Robert. He strums a guitar and watches us. It’s like he’s sucking us into the room with his music. A few others turn up – some in flash cars. A woman with blonde hair and boobs pulls up in a red sports car. Another woman with tats on her chin arrives. She’s another smiler.
WTF. I text Lisa again Thyr weird!
This sucks. An old guy turns up. His hair and moustache are covered in grey streaks and he’s got a pot belly. Heaps of old as people. He sits down next to that Robert guy. Someone else sits outside at the barbecue table filling in forms. Another girl comes in and sits beside me, texting. She looks like I feel. Like she doesn’t want to be here. The tutor comes into the room. He’s younger than the old ones and older than the young ones. If I’d seen him in the street I wouldn’t have looked twice, but here everyone looks straight at him.
‘Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome,’ he tells us. Robert plays a song on the guitar. A himene, he says. Some know the words and sing with him, but the rest of us stand looking at each other or the whiteboard. The tutor says a prayer in Māori. A karakia. At least I know that much. I look at the floor and say ‘Āmine’ at the end. Jo always says a karakia before meals at her house.
‘Hope you like artwork,’ he says. ‘Over the next few weeks you’ll be doing a lot of it, and I want you to keep a journal. That way you can look back and see what you’ve learnt. See how far you’ve come.’
This sux, I text Lisa under the desk. Hav 2 keep a jurnl Dumb as.
Told U, Lisa texts back. Wot U up 2 l8r?
The tutor talks to us in Māori. Can’t understand a word he’s saying. Then he tells us about himself. In English. He goes on about mountains and rivers and other dumb stuff. Tells us his name is Anaru. Anaru Heremia. Then he tells us to do the same. Boring.
‘Don’t worry about the reo though,’ he says. ‘Just tell us a bit about yourselves. Where you’re from, who your whānau are, why you’re here.’
Stink. I don’t know any of that shit. I hate talking in public. Some of the others get up and know heaps of stuff about who they are and where they’re from. Even the Pākehā ones. Then it’s the guy with the pink in his hair.
‘I’m Paora,’ he says. ‘Just got out of jail.’ Paora doesn’t tell us what he was in for. I can’t even guess. ‘I live with my koro. He made me come to this course.’
Cool. Someone else who doesn’t want to be here.
‘Don’t know about my ancestors or any of that stuff aye. Think my iwi is Ngāti Whātua. Don’t know my hapū.’ He shrugs like he doesn’t care.
I hate this shit. My knees shake when I stand up.
‘My name’s Mereata. I’m from here. From Waiapu. Yeah. Don’t know much about my tribe or anything else. Nah. I’m here cos I’ve got nothing else to do.’
I sit down again. Feels like everyone is looking at me. I look at the desk and pretend to write something so no one can see how much I am shaking.
‘Kei te pai,’ the tutor says. ‘Up to you to find out about your iwi, hapū, maunga, awa and tipuna. That’s your mahi kāinga – your homework. Ask your whānau – your aunty or uncle to help you. Don’t forget your journal. Write it down.’ Yeah right. Can’t wait for this dumb course to end.
Monday
Dumb night. Had to get up in front of the class and tell them about myself. Had nothing to tell. Nah. Don’t want to go back.
Wednesday
Still dumb. About twelve of us. Yeah. Mostly Māori. A few Pākehā. The tutor got Big Boobs to read the prayer at the start this time. He did the closing one. That guy Robert sang a song on the guitar. Some of them – even the Pākehā ones – knew the words. Felt stink. Don’t know any words to any of those songs.
Friday
Boring again. Got there late. Went to Lisa’s after Jo dropped me off. Had a smoke with her, but then went back to the course. Mum’d go mental if I chucked it in. He said we start our artwork next week. He’s taking us down the river to collect things. Need shorts and jandals. Boring.
Tuesday
Didn’t go to course yesterday. Stayed at Lisa’s. Mum went psycho when I got home.
‘I’m responsible for you! If you get into any shit – ANY shit,’ she yelled, ‘they’ll send you away.’ She went on and on. ‘Christ, I’m working my butt off and this is what you do.’
Least I didn’t go cruising the shops like Lisa wanted me to.
‘It coulda been worse,’ I said.
‘Just keep away from that stupid little bitch,’ said Mum. ‘She’s nothing but trouble, that girl. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.’
Wednesday
Learnt about pepeha today. Might visit Aunty Lena. Haven’t seen her for ages.
Friday
Didn’t go yesterday. Hung with Lisa at her boyfriend’s place. The tutor told me if I miss any more classes I’m out. He said there are others waiting to do the course. They missed out because there weren’t enough places.
‘If you don’t want to come, don’t,’ he said. ‘It�
�s not too late for someone else to take your place. Up to you.’
Monday
Went to the river. Took our chairs down on the back of his ute. Put them on the shingle. He made us sit on the chairs and listen to the river. Then he told us about the creation story. How Papatua-something and Ranginui were stuck together until one of their sons Tāne-somebody separated them. After telling us the story he said nothing for ages. Just stood on the stones by the river and leaned against the stick he had. The sky was black with rain clouds and the air smelt like wet leaves. I kept waiting for him to say something but he didn’t. I looked over at the others and they were all waiting too but he didn’t say anything. All you could hear was the river flowing over the rocks. Yeah. That’s when I heard someone whisper. I could feel their breath like the wind on the back of my neck. It blew the hair away from my head, but when I turned round, there was no one there. Looked like it was going to rain the whole time, but it didn’t.
Wednesday
Started my artwork. Collected all these rocks and leaves and stuff while we were at the river. He wants us to make a model of the things that are important to us. Our mountain, our river. Whatever. Visited Aunty Lena on Monday night. She was pleased to see me. Hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe. Haven’t seen her for ages. I asked her about my pepeha and she told me. I’ve written it down but can’t say the names properly yet. She told me what I heard at the river was our tipuna. Yeah. Lisa texted me again, last night. Wants me to go hang at her place and stay the night. Wants me to cruise the shops with her. Miss her, aye and the cool things we used to get up to.
Huia Short Stories 9 Page 26
