He hears the fall of footsteps around him: running, mostly. There is a little niggle in his brain that the footsteps sound wrong – the impact of them is soft, not at all like the click clack of soles against the road. There is no traffic, but that’s understandable because of the accident …
The bus. Riki remembers it all – it stretches out in his mind even though it only took a few seconds. He didn’t see the bus; he was looking down at his phone. But he heard its horn and the shouts of people on the footpath. He remembers being slammed in his side and the phone flying from his hand, and stupidly worrying that it would break.
He must have hit his head hard, that’s why he’s confused. The voices around him now are a mixture of English and another language he can’t quite place. And although the people around him sound panicked, they don’t seem to be panicked about him: the kid who was hit by the bus.
He opens his eyes, and it is darker than he thought it would be. How long has he been here, how long was he out? He starts to calculate in his head. It was just after nine in the morning when he was hit – surely they wouldn’t have left him on the street till evening. God, why does it matter what time it is? Why am I still on the street?
He groans as he pushes himself up to sit. At least he can move. He aches all over, but it doesn’t seem as if he has broken anything. He turns his head slightly and looks at the buildings, trying to orient himself geographically. Was he outside Kirk’s when he was hit? But this can’t be Kirk’s: that only takes up a block, and here the whole street looks old-fashioned. Where are the high-rises? The walls of glass and steel?
Where is he? He can’t think of anywhere in town that looks like this – not in his lifetime anyway.
Where am I?
Riki’s breath quickens. He stands up, testing his limbs for injury. He’s a little dizzy, but he can’t tell if it is physical or mental; it’s like he can’t process what he’s seeing, none of it seems real. He pats himself down as if to reassure himself that at least he is real. If he is honest, it is to reassure himself that he is alive.
He seems to have lost both his phone and his satchel. He’s sure he was wearing the bag across his body – how would it have come off on impact? He steps out on to the road, looking down for his phone. The road is unsealed – it is little more than compacted earth.
This isn’t right.
He has to touch his head again; he feels off balance. He looks up and sees his satchel – some guy is carrying it, the strap clutched in his fist. The guy is wearing a long tunic over pants – you don’t see a lot of guys wearing clothes like that in town.
‘Hey!’ Riki calls out. The guy turns around and sees Riki, then he runs.
‘That’s my bag!’ Riki runs after him, but he has no power in his legs, and his head spins. He stops to catch his breath, and the guy is lost in the crowd.
There seem to be heaps of men on the street – and there’s shouting, both angry and excited, like the crowd at a big game. People in fancy dress are spilling out of buildings: women in long skirts and camisoles, or those weird old-fashioned knickerbocker undies. Some of the men are dressed in long robes and turbans, and some of them are dressed like soldiers. Not in camo – old-school khaki.
The soldiers are chasing the other people out of the buildings; they’re throwing chairs and small tables, jars and bottles. Broken objects start to pile up on the street. Riki just stands and stares for a moment, then he sees his satchel in the gutter. He picks it up. The strap has been cut; that’s how it came off. The bag is empty – his wallet and books are gone. Worse, Te Ariki Mikaera’s diary is missing. Te Awhina is going to kill him when he gets home.
He hears a crashing above him – glass is breaking from an upstairs window. He looks up to see the end of an upright piano hanging over the street. The piano shudders as the men inside try to push it out.
‘Come on fellas, put your back into it.’ The voice has an Australian twang.
Riki can hear them groan as they push against the piano. The window frame splinters as it moves forward, and all of a sudden gravity takes over and it falls.
He scrambles away before it lands.
Hit by a bus and then crushed by a piano? Who am I, Wile E. Coyote?
He looks up to the window, or rather the hole in the wall, and sees three or four men pointing and laughing at the piano. It hasn’t smashed entirely – it landed on one corner, so its side crushed and the back has blown out. Some of the strings are breaking, so it almost seems as if it is playing itself. The whole scene reminds Riki of one of those old westerns – it is like the entire street is involved in some huge bar brawl.
‘Hey mate!’ One of the men from the window calls out. Riki looks up again. It’s hard to make the guy out against the light at his back. He holds up his hand and waves, and Riki waves back.
Riki lowers his hand and turns to walk away, and the guy calls again, ‘Boy! Wait there!’
But Riki keeps walking, avoiding the people on the street as much as he can. There are shouts of Gypo bastards! and Gypo scum! and women’s screams. There are men smashing whatever they can find, or looting from shop windows. There is a hint of smoke in the air – have they set fire to the piles of rubbish on the street? And then whoosh – a building goes up in flames. Whatever is going here – wherever ‘here’ might be – Riki wants no part of it. He’s not going to wait around on the street for some random.
He can’t walk very fast; he’s still feeling dizzy, and he can’t seem to get his feet to go in a straight line. People must think that he’s drunk, the way he’s staggering around.
‘Mate!’ Riki hears that guy again, and turns around. He looks into the crowd, but it’s a sea of khaki. He turns away again.
‘Pūweto.’ Riki stops; he’s not sure if he really heard it.
‘Pūweto! Te Ariki Mikaera Pūweto!’
It’s weird hearing his full name. Te Awhina only uses it when he’s in trouble – which he seems to be right now, to be fair. The guy even has that same scolding tone his mother uses. It’s like something deep inside him recognises the person in charge, so he stops and turns around again.
‘It is you, Pūweto.’
The guy pushes his way out of the crowd, and he and Riki stand face to face about a metre apart. They are the only men standing still in what must be a crowd of a couple of thousand. Riki thinks of them as the eye of the storm, and laughs.
‘Are you all right, Pūweto?’ The guy is Māori, familiar-looking, as if he might be related to Riki in some distant way. Not a first cousin, but maybe a cousin’s cousin – familiar enough that Riki’s nanny would say Whose boy are you? He is a little bit shorter than Riki, but holds himself as if he were the taller of the two. He is probably in his twenties – older than Riki – and solidly built. He could flatten Riki in a tackle and wind him for the rest of the game.
‘Do I know you?’
‘What have you been drinking? That grain alcohol?’
‘I haven’t been drinking.’
‘You can’t fool Jack, boy. I can see you swaying about.’
Jack. ‘You’re Jack?’ Riki’s legs give way, and he stumbles towards Jack.
‘Yes, I’m Jack. You must be three sheets to the wind if you can’t even recognise me.’ Jack grabs Riki’s shoulder, and Riki can feel the power in his grip. Jack is real and solid. How does Jack know me?
‘I thought you went curio hunting in the Dead City. Did you find that grand tomb?’
‘What? Tomb?’
‘I drew you two a map. Did you get lost?’
Riki shrugs and shakes his head. The movement makes his vision go strange: he can only see Jack’s boots; the rest of the world has been blotted out by a black halo.
‘I told you to take the map. You can’t rely on your memory in a place like this.’ Jack smiles and winks at Riki. ‘Thought you might have been courting a mummy, but here you are in the Wazza with the rest of us.’
‘The Wazza?’ The name sounds familiar to Riki, but he can’t qui
te grasp it.
‘Mummy’d be safer to court, eh? Probably catch less fucking a dead Gypo whore than a live one.’ Jack plucks at Riki’s hoodie. ‘What are you wearing, boy? Some sort of Gypo get-up? Where’s your tunic?’
‘This is all I have …’
‘They took your tunic?’ Jack shouts to the crowd. ‘The bloody Gyps took my mate’s uniform!’
Jack whoops with excitement. ‘We’ll get them, boy. You’ll see, we’ll rout the bastards out.’
It’s all too much. Riki can’t make sense of anything he sees or hears or smells. Everything is wrong. He feels faint, and he leans heavily on Jack’s shoulder. He heaves and Jack turns, saving his boots from Riki’s vomit.
‘Woah there, boy. You can’t take the drink, eh?’
‘I just want to go …’
‘All right, all right, I’ll take you back to camp. Where’s Mata?’
‘Mata?’
‘Let’s not go through this again. Matatau. You two were supposed to be visiting the Dead City together.’
Riki shrugs. He can’t answer Jack – he has no idea who Matatau is, and doesn’t know anything about the Dead City. Although it sounds ominous. For a moment Riki considers the possibility that he has died; that the accident has killed him and he’s ended up here. He dry retches.
‘What about the rest of them? Big Mo, Little Mo and Rewai? Have you seen them?’
Riki shakes his head. He doesn’t know who Jack is talking about.
‘I’m not dead, am I?’
‘Dead drunk, but not dearly departed, no.’
Someone overhears and calls out, ‘Dead? Someone’s dead? One of our boys has been killed! They killed one of our boys!’ And there is a brief hush as those words sink in. Riki can feel the shift in the crowd’s mood – they’ve turned feral. He can see men on horses at the end of the street coming towards them with rifles at the ready.
Jack sees them too, and pulls Riki down a side street. Riki is too weak to fight against him, too confused not to follow. ‘I think it’s time we made ourselves scarce.’ He guides Riki along what seems to be a random maze of side streets until they reach a tram station.
‘Is this a dream, Jack?’
Jack has his arm around Riki to help him up. ‘More like a bloody nightmare. Stand up, eh?’
A soldier on a horse rides up to them. ‘Evening, lads.’ He sounds like he’s from Coronation Street. ‘Have you been at the Wazza tonight?’
‘No,’ Jack says. ‘We’ve been curio hunting. This one had a bit too much sun. We’re heading back to the camp before curfew. What’s happening at the Wazza?’
Riki remembers now. ‘The riot.’ He must have whispered it aloud because Jack elbows him.
The soldier narrows his eyes at Jack. ‘Nothing to concern you. Get yourself back to camp, quick smart.’
The Battle of Wazza happened on Good Friday in 1915. Riki wonders if it is the same day as back in 2015, but a hundred years earlier. The beginning of April, well before Te Ariki and the rest of the Contingent joined the action at Gallipoli; before they had seen actual war.
‘Tommy git,’ Jack says, as the soldier rides away and a tram pulls up. ‘I suppose you don’t have any coppers for the fare, eh boy? I’ll put it on your account then, eh?’
Jack helps Riki onto the tram. Riki sits down, feeling dead tired. He’s afraid of closing his eyes, but he can’t help it. The world is too confusing, and he needs to shut it out just for a while.
He’s shaken from his sleep. ‘C’mon, Pūweto, we walk from here. Just be careful not to roll your ankle in those slippers of yours.’
Riki looks at his feet. His shoes do look like slippers. What the hell is going on? He’s still here, wherever ‘here’ might be. It must be a delusion, or a dream. But can you be woken within a dream?
‘Hey, Te Ariki!’ Riki looks up at Jack, who is a few metres ahead of him now. ‘Kia tere, eh? You can stare at your feet back at the camp.’
It’s not far from the tram stop to the camp. They crest a small hill and from here they can see some of the camp below. Some of the tents are lit – the lamplight making the canvas glow almost yellow. Most of the larger tents – Riki guesses that those are communal or the officers’ quarters – are brightly lit. The smaller, cone-shaped tents are sparsely lit. Riki remembers seeing photos of tents like these, of this camp, in Te Awhina’s research.
The camp, the tents, the uniforms: this must be his imagination. Perhaps the years of listening to great-great Te Ariki has seeped further into him than he had thought. The stories, the history – yeah, the subconscious sees more than we think it does. Creating the world of our dreams from fragments of our own life and what we remember. It’s his subconscious creating this thing that seems so real. He must be in a bad way after the accident, and this is his brain’s way of protecting him; although why it chose this place he doesn’t know. Perhaps it was because he was reading Te Ariki Mikaera’s diary that morning, whenever that was. The funny thing is that usually when Riki thinks of history it’s in grainy black and white. This place is full-on colour, HD crisp and surround sound. It is so real.
‘Mind the guy ropes.’ Jack is so real. Riki can’t remember any of his dreams being so vivid – but perhaps dreams are like this while you’re asleep. Maybe they’re only vague and disjointed when you wake up.
Jack walks into one of the big rectangular tents, and Riki follows. It is set up like a wharekai – tables with long benches to sit at, and a bench where the men are served at one end. It’s lit by old-fashioned lanterns: the kind with glass chimneys and wicks dipped in oil. The tent is pretty quiet, a few groups of men here and there. Some laugh with their friends, some are solemn. Riki is struck by how each man is so different, despite their uniforms making them look the same. How could he imagine all of this; each individual so clearly defined? He has always accepted that he has a limited imagination – he was never one of those kids with imaginary friends, and he hated writing stories at school because he could never think of anything to write about.
So how is this possible? How could he create this reality? Has he been wrong about himself? The sand underfoot, the coolness of the evening … all of this world around him is too detailed and rich.
A group at the back yells out.
‘Jack! Te Ariki! Come have a drink with us.’
There are three of them sitting at the end of a long table. Two of the men are definitely related – they look like they might be brothers, or at the very least cousins. It’s not only their looks. Their mannerisms are similar too. When they smile, they lean their heads back like they can’t quite contain their joy. The other man is older than the rest of them, maybe in his thirties or forties. He reminds Riki of Jase, so he can’t help but think of this guy as the father of the group. There are cards on the table, but it looks like the game was abandoned a while ago – the dealt hands are face-down.
Jack and Riki sit down, and the older guy slides a bottle of beer in front of them. ‘None for the little lord, Rewai,’ Jack says, sliding the bottle away from Riki. ‘He can’t hold his drink. I found him wandering around the Wazza, drunk.’
‘I’m not drunk,’ Riki says, and everyone laughs.
Jack pours a glass of beer. ‘Good thing I found him. Things are kicking off in the Wazza. I expected to run into you blokes, not the boy.’
‘Me and Little Mo have had our hearts broken one too many times, eh?’ says one of the two that look like brothers. ‘Thought we should keep Rewai company, stop him mooning about his wife.’
‘I’m not mooning. I miss her.’
Riki laughs. ‘Mooning’ must mean something quite different here to what he automatically thinks of. He can’t imagine Rewai downing trou for a brown-eye. The others are looking at him, so he tries to explain mooning as he understands it.
Rewai gives him side-eye and says, ‘How much has the lad had?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Jack. ‘Enough to be robbed of his tunic and boots. Have you seen Mata?’
<
br /> ‘He came back a couple of hours ago. Acting strangely, eh Big Mo?’
Big Mo nods.
‘You’re both called Mo?’ Riki asks ‘Big’ Mo, who is the smaller of the two brothers.
Rewai raises his eyebrows. ‘But not as strangely as this one. Has he been hit on the head?’
‘Wait, wait, wait,’ Riki says. ‘You’re both called Mo?’
Little Mo nods, and Big Mo speaks slowly, as if Riki is slow: ‘Yes, mother named us all Mo. I’m Amos …’ he nods at his brother ‘… and this is Moses.’
‘And there’s Moana and Moata at home,’ Little Mo says. It is obvious that Big Mo usually does the talking.
Riki had thought that maybe the ‘Big’ and ‘Little’ referred to their relative sizes – perhaps the small one was call ‘Big’ to be ironic – but he figures now that these are references to their age. He wonders about the other two Mos: are they large and medium? Or maybe at home they don’t need to be differentiated; maybe they’re all just Mo.
‘All just Mo,’ Riki says aloud. It seems familiar: he has a picture in his head of a mother giving her kids the same name, and when she called one,they all came running. What was that? A Dr Seuss story? Yeah, but those kids weren’t named Mo. What was their name? Riki can’t remember, but that’s obviously how his mind has dreamt this up. He laughs again, and Little Mo joins in.
‘Where’s Mata now?’ Jack says to Rewai.
‘I expect he’s sleeping it off back at the tent.’
‘Mo and Mo.’ Riki laughs again, even though it’s not funny. He just feels hysterical now.
‘I think the boy might need to sleep it off too,’ Rewai says.
Jack stands up and pulls Riki to his feet. ‘I’ll see you blokes later.’ He pulls Riki out of the tent and grabs a lantern. ‘Here, hold this for me.’
Riki looks at the flickering flame, unsure if he’s ever looked at a flame so closely before. He must have, to have imagined this one so clearly.
‘C’mon Pūweto, before they discover that a lamp is missing.’
Legacy Page 3
