by Nick Spill
“Rodders! It’s me! Clovis!”
“Shit! I thought you were in New York?”
“No. I’m back and being chased by cops. I need to borrow your car, just for tonight.”
“New York cops or the locals?” Rodney asked, still lying on his back.
“Locals. Can I? Please, Rodders.”
“Here. Fill it up with gas when you return it by ten tomorrow. And I want details. You with Plum?”
“Yes, but…”
Rodney searched in his overalls and pulled out a set of keys that he threw up to Clovis.
“Figures. Now plug it in.”
“I promise.”
Clovis caught them and put the plug back into the transformer. He rushed out of the door as he heard the sander start up.
Clovis found the cream colored 1965 Vauxhall Victor parked two doors up the road. The engine started immediately and he made a three-part turn, slowly backing to where he had left the others behind the hedge. He leaned over and opened the side door. Four figures came out of hiding one house farther down the street and ran to the car.
The Vauxhall struggled up the Ponsonby hill on a cold engine with its cargo. Clovis turned left at the top onto Ponsonby Road and headed towards Summer Street, a narrow road with cars parked on either side. The small wooden houses seemed to lean against each other they were so close together. Very few had any front garden to speak of. Young professionals had restored some to their earlier splendor, whilst others exhibited the neglect of absent landlords and overcrowded occupants paying too steep a rent. Clovis stopped near the end of the street, at his newly rented cottage.
“Here. I’ve got a few beers in the fridge, and I baked a couple of loaves of bread.” Clovis turned off the ignition and opened his front door. The light went on in the car. He turned to his mandatory guests, smiling. Mel, Henry and Wiremu burst out laughing. Plum, in the front seat, put her hand over her mouth. They knew he smelt bad, but he did not know he looked so ridiculous.
Plum brewed some tea while Clovis quickly bathed and put on fresh khakis. Wiremu went straight to the kitchen. His nose told him where the whole wheat bread was. When Clovis appeared, clean, from the bathroom, Wiremu was on his third piece of bread and manuka honey.
“Did you really make this, Clovis?” he asked, honey dripping down his fingers. Clovis nodded. “Then for a Pakeha, you’re okay!” Wiremu grinned and chomped into his unevenly cut thick slice. “My mother baked rewena with white flour. This is so much better. You must give me the recipe.”
Henry and Mel sat at the red Formica table and quietly sipped tea, black with no sugar.
• • •
“Tell me, why on earth were you carrying a shotgun up your pants and why fire it at those cops?” Henry asked what everyone had been thinking.
Wiremu finished his slice, savoring the last piece of crust as it disappeared into his mouth. He sat down on a red chair. Plum gave him a big mug of tea with lots of milk in it, as requested.
“After I gave you the pendant, about a week later, they raided my house. They found various weapons and charged me with anything they could think of. Illegal possession of drugs, although there were none in the house, illegal possession of weapons, consorting with known criminals, no TV license, no dog license and, of course, the classic resisting arrest.
“Well, all my friends, they’ve been arrested at least once over Maori land rights, you know, stuff like that. I must’ve been on probation at the time.
“‘Now, Mr. Wilson,”’ Wiremu put on his Pakeha bureaucrat voice and held his sweater as if it were a judge’s cloak. “‘This is your last chance to go straight and become a worthwhile member of the community.”’
Wiremu put his hand in his trousers and pulled out the shotgun. It was a Remington side-by-side double barrel, with as much of the stock and the barrel sawed off as possible. To Clovis’s untrained eye, Wiremu broke it in half. Wiremu took out the spent cartridges and left them on the table before putting the gun up his leg again. This was done casually, as if he was retying his shoelaces. Clovis noted that Plum’s eyes were the widest he had seen them since she first unzipped his pants.
“I was in Mount Eden for almost two years. There was no window in my cell. In the summer I had cockroaches and in the winter rats. It was so cold, I couldn’t sleep at nights. We only got one blanket. I got out and went back to Opononi. Things were going okay for a while, and then one night I was back in Auckland in a pub with me mates. I got involved in a brawl. It was stupid. Not even my fault. In fact, I tried to break it up. But that officer walked in with two other cops. You remember the one, Henry? At the party.”
“The cop with the close-set eyes?”
“Yeah. Grimble’s his name. Did he have it in for me. Three cops who weren’t even there testified that I started it!”
He paused to take a deep breath. There was no artifice in his delivery. He was, Clovis thought, giving them a full explanation.
“I got seven years. I was one of the first to go to Parry. Paremoremo, their maximum security prison. D block. No grass, no earth, no land to see or touch. It was designed specifically to break Maori spirit. This was their secret plan. And that’s who they put in there. Maori. After all, we’re the most locked-up race in the world, after the Aussie Abo. Over half of all prisoners are of Maori blood, and one out of three Maori men will appear before a court by the time they’re seventeen. That’s what they say. And I’ve seen it.
“I refused to let the Pakeha beat us. I became the head of the debating team. A librarian. A big brother to all Maori boys they put in there. We grew strong and built solid friendships. No, the Pakeha wouldn’t beat us.”
“But why carry that?” Henry asked. He was angry at Wiremu. It was one thing to claim you were downtrodden. It was another to be so stupid.
“They’ll put you away for life now. Attempted murder of a cop,” Mel shot out.
“They’d put me away, regardless. Besides, I need to protect myself. I’m not going back in again. I have too much to do.”
“But you can’t rely on violence to achieve your goals.” Mel made an effort to calm down. She had felt an immediate empathy for this giant Maori, but she was exasperated by his attitude.
“Yeah.” Wiremu bowed his head. “I don’t. We don’t. It’s only a last resort. They use fear and violence to maintain their safe little status quo. But we don’t want that.”
“What do you want?” Mel’s tone was a little patronizing, although that was not what she intended. Her eyes were fixed on the spent cartridges.
“Where have you been? The so-called Treaty, the Springboks tour, the Land March? Uh?” Wiremu said this gently, not wishing to aggravate Mel anymore.
Clovis looked up at the thick patches of grease on the kitchen ceiling and the spider webs in the corner. It did look disgusting, but he had sworn to Plum that he was not going to paint another rented house. Besides he had his violin practice everyday. At least four hours of fiddling. Clovis began to move his right arm.
“Your arm!” Plum let out a scream.
He looked down saw a large bloodstain. He thought it had stopped bleeding in the shower.
Plum undid the buttons, whilst Mel quickly slid his shirt off his back. An experience he would have relished under different circumstances. She bent down and examined his wound.
“A superficial laceration, no stitches required. You’re a little flabby, Clovis,” Mel whispered as she dressed his arm, pinching his waist playfully. Clovis was more flattered by the attention than by the truth of her observation. He looked guiltily at Henry who was absorbed in buttering the last piece of bread.
“So what happens now?” Henry asked. He stuffed the bread into his mouth. What was he doing in a rundown Ponsonby shack with a Maori radical who had just tried to blow away the Auckland police force, an overweight redhead from the hippie era and a Chinese girl who looked so innocent she must have been a hooker? And Mel was tending to this redhead’s injured elbow like he was the reincarnatio
n of bleeding Jesus Christ himself. Just an ordinary Friday night in Ponsonby. How he loved being back in New Zealand. He was alive again. Back in the magical land. God’s Zone. Here was his home, where something unexpected always happened. How amazing it was to be with Mel. Now he had three new weird friends. Expect the unexpected should be the motto for the country. Not like New York at all. There you were lucky if anything happened. It was far too provincial, far too insular. There was no spontaneity with the people. They all seemed so closed off. Here he felt positively unjaded. Here, everyone was alive. So alive they were bleeding in the kitchen!
“You’ve got your audition tomorrow, Clovis.” Plum gave her lover one of her cross-eyed looks.
“Tomorrow?” Clovis looked confused.
“What do you play?” Henry asked, but Clovis was already addressing Wiremu.
“You can stay here as long as you like. Violin,” Clovis answered Henry. “I audition for the Symphony Orchestra. Second fiddle.”
Clovis wanted to get to know this huge Maori who had mana and a princely bearing. Clovis had spent hours describing Maoris to Americans in New York, not always accurately, and yet he had been close to only one, Rua the drummer. Clovis did not know their history or understand their language. Now was his chance.
“Yeah, Clovis. I won’t be able to go home. They’ll be watching for me.”
Plum shot another cross-eyed glare at Clovis when she thought nobody was looking. She sensed they were getting involved in an affair that would have an unpleasant end, for everyone involved.
They retired to the small living room, which contained one sofa facing an empty wall with faded carpet covering the wooden floor. The bare walls had been painted an off-white over layers of aged wallpaper. The entire house was a dry cinder box.
Clovis got the last brown bottle of DB beer. He came back to see Wiremu sitting on the sofa next to Mel. Plum sat cross-legged on the carpet looking like she belonged there, whilst Henry, with a wry smile, stretched out on the floor with his back to the wall directly opposite Wiremu.
“I have no other way to do this in the Pakeha’s world. What do you expect me to do? Sell life insurance? Or work in the freezing works with a bunch of embittered commies?”
Clovis held up the bottle. “Last one. Any offers? What do you expect freezing workers to be like? You don’t expect them to run around in tutus or ‘Desert Song’ outfits? Singing ‘I like bananas ’cause they’ve got no bones!’ Do you?”
Mel laughed. Clovis threw the bottle to Wiremu who caught it and tore the cap off with his teeth, took one long swig and offered it to Mel. She declined, and Wiremu passed it to Henry. He checked the level of the liquid and took a polite drink before offering it to Plum and Clovis. They both shook their heads. He handed it back to Wiremu.
Plum Blossom rolled her eyes behind her eyelids, a favorite trick of hers that indicated, “here we go again!” When Clovis had teased her about this, she had replied, “Clovis, when you fiddle, the cows hide behind the moon.” She was kidding, she loved his violin playing. It turned her on. That such a big man with long thick fingers could draw from that instrument such a delicate sweet tone never ceased to amaze her.
Henry turned to Clovis and asked him. “What kind of music do you play?
Wiremu was still trying to talk to Mel. “…you know there’s a saying take away their language and you’ll take away their culture. That’s what Franco did to the Basques. It was illegal to speak Basque in Spain. He tried to destroy their culture. The same happened here. Up until 1952 it was illegal to speak Maori in our schools. My father used to be caned and sent home if he spoke Maori. And my grandmother would always take him back to school and curse the teacher in Maori. A real heavy makutu.”
“Anything,” Clovis replied to Henry. “I love classical, baroque and jazz rock fusion, even learned some ragas, but that takes some doing and it blew off my tonality.”
“But your grandmother wouldn’t condone what you did at that pub, would she?” Mel said.
“She’s dead. If I get to her age, I’ll probably think different. But I have a lot of anger in me, and I’m not afraid to show it at the right time.”
“How do you play jazz and rock stuff?” Henry asked, trying to ignore Mel’s argument.
“Okay. But there are ways to show your anger, ways to channel it, without resorting to violence. You’re never going to achieve your aims by violence against the State. They have the power, the resources. They’ll always win, in the end.”
“I’ve got a special pickup and magnetic microphone I attach to the bridge of my violin plus a whole lot of foot gear. Shit. Plum, remind me to pick all that up from Matthew. I’ve got cords and stuff over at his place. He’s probably lost them all by now.”
Plum nodded, although she was trying to follow the other conversation.
“I’d love to hear that.”
“I thought that too when I was younger and a little naive. Now I know better.” Wiremu turned to Clovis. He switched to a lighter tone, as if he had heard their dialogue and said: “Now what are you going to play for us?”
Mel stood up and announced they had to leave. She had a 6:00 A.M. start on Saturday. This saved Clovis from playing in front of the guests. A task he was in no mood for. Clovis and Henry swapped phone numbers whilst Mel invited them over for a meal on Monday night. Wiremu made a point of shaking hands with Mel as they said good-bye and looking her in the eyes.
• • •
Mel rested on Henry’s chest. She watched a bead of sweat run down his bicep then stroked his pendant. The bed covers were at their ankles and they breathed heavily.
“It’s cold.”
“Tears are cold.” Henry had taken the pendant out of storage and worn it for the first time on Friday night.
“He really reacted to this. Didn’t he?”
“Yeah. I’d forgotten how much power this is supposed to have. I’ve been away such a long time.”
“Too long.” She moved her body up to his face to kiss him on the lips. “What power?”
“Didn’t I tell you about the Tear of Tane?”
“No. You’ve been mysterious about this.”
“Really?”
“Yes. You change the subject.”
“Oh. I thought I’d told you? Well, here goes then. I will leave nothing out.” He rolled Mel over and kissed her.
“You can leave that out until you tell me.” She pushed him off, playfully but with enough force for him to realize what she could do.
“Once upon a time, before Maoris came here, Tane was the god of the forest. But the forest was in danger. Bugs were eating the roots of the trees, and unless something was done, the forest would die. Tane called all the birds together and asked for their help. The Kiwi bird was a bird of paradise and lived in the treetops. It was the most beautiful bird in the forest and very proud. When Tane told all the birds what was happening, none of them wanted to help to save the forest. Tane was in despair. None of the birds would volunteer or even offer a suggestion. There was silence in the forest.”
“Well?”
“I’m pausing for dramatic effect. So, seeing that none of the other birds were going to do anything, the Kiwi stepped forward and said he would go and live in the undergrowth and eat all the bugs and save the forest. So the Kiwi became a fat, flightless, ugly bird eating bugs at night. It lost all its bright colorful feathers. Tane was so moved by what the Kiwi did that he shed a tear. Tane had never cried before. The tear fell to the ground and turned to greenstone and was lost for thousands of years until a Ngapuhi, a tohunga, found this piece of pounamu lying in the forest floor. It was black and covered in moss. No one would have recognized it. But the tohunga picked it up and immediately recognized it as the Tear of Tane. He cleaned it and put it around his neck. And with the power this pendant gave him he was able to guide his leaders to victories over other threatening tribes until the Ngapuhi were feared and respected throughout Aotearoa.”
“That’s a beautiful story. Bu
t if it’s such a precious totem, I mean, it’s really valuable, how come Wiremu gave it to you, a Pakeha?”
“The Tear was passed down to Wiremu’s grandfather, and when he died he left it to his wife, Wiremu’s grandmother, who gave it to Wiremu. She told him that, whoever saved him from something terrible, and he would know what this was, then he should without thinking pass the Tear of Tane to that person. No matter who it was. And this he did.”
“That party and the police?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t believe it. It’s just too much.”
“I think this whole night has been too much.”
Mel went to sleep on his chest, her hand resting on the pendant. He went back to that party. He kept getting these flashes from his New Zealand past.
He was in a house packed with long-haired teenagers. Most of the men were drunk, and the women were dancing to very loud music. Land of a Thousand Dances. Uniformed police ran into the house waving their batons and forced everyone out into the street where there were more police and a large van, the Black Maria.
Henry, with very long hair and beard, had been talking to Wiremu in the kitchen. The police removed all the Maoris from the rest of the men at the party and lined them up against the wall. Henry had walked over to Wiremu and stood next to him. At first, with all the shouting, the police had not noticed him. Then they tried to grab him and separate him from Wiremu. Henry did not resist, but as two policemen held his arms tightly, another officer came up to him and addressed him.
“What do you think you are doing, boy?” the officer had shouted.
“I was having a conversation with this gentleman in the kitchen. I merely wanted to continue this,” Henry began, in his most measured voice. “We were discussing the relative merits of Tamaki Grammar School’s First Fifteen versus my Mt. Albert Grammar School’s First.”
“And?” The officer was hooked.
