Hiwa, p.12
Hiwa, page 12
Hislop chose not to name the location in ‘Scarce Objects’ because she doesn’t whakapapa to Ngātikahu ki Whangaroa, the local iwi. Like the men in her story, she says, and the hippies who arrived in the 1970s, her family were outsiders in Totara North. The point of view in ‘Scarce Objects’ moves between two of the women – Hana and her cousin Angel – and omniscient narration. This, Hislop says, is ‘part of the “not-quite-reality” of the story. I wanted it to shimmer like a mirage.’
Scarce Objects
Hana waited until low tide, when she was able to cross back over the mud flats to the house. When the land drained, the cable roots underneath the house were visible. Some pencil-like, others cone-shaped, sticking up through the rotting decking. Criss-crossed vines swelled the drains, and the foundations seemed to be collapsing under the weight of the trees. But Hana wasn’t thinking about the state of the house. She was thinking about tides and wind direction and reclaiming what was theirs. In the city, she’d been down to the bar on the wharf and met excited pale-faced men there who would be perfect.
When she got to the house, she took off her mud-encrusted boots. The steps to the front door crackled with dead leaves and the windows were coated in a thick layer of salt. Everything was the colour of setting concrete.
Belle was sprawled out on a grubby-looking mattress on the porch, holding her nose. She was new and wasn’t used to things yet and everywhere was this smell, a cross between river sewage and shellfish. Miri and Wai were in the back kitchen sorting the kāpia, ready for boiling down. When the kauri trees started coming down the women used the kauri gum to make useful items. They needed to do something.
‘You’re back,’ Belle said, eyeing Hana up from underneath her thick fringe.
‘No shit.’ Hana sprinkled water on her hands before coming into the porch. ‘And you’re doing nothing again, I see.’
Belle made a face. ‘I thought you weren’t talking to me.’
Hana knew Belle was already itching to be gone. That she’d heard about the city, where there were clubs; where they served mataī beer in tall glasses and the dialect was different. She wanted to go there, she’d told Hana. They’d had an argument. Hana said if any of them ever took that road, they’d have lost right there, and that Belle had better work a lot faster if she was ever going to go anywhere. Belle had spat a pale gold ball of kāpia on the wooden floor.
‘The wind’s picking up,’ Hana said. ‘Not that you’ll be remotely interested, Belle.’
‘What happened at the wharf?’ Wai yelled from in the back. ‘Any sign of Angel?’
Angel was Wai’s cousin, who used to live with them. Belle stood up and followed Hana out of the porch into the kitchen.
‘Unfortunately, no Angel,’ said Hana. She missed Angel. It was mean of her to disappear like that from the last house, with whoever the man was. Hana hoped it wouldn’t last.
In the kitchen, a large wooden table was covered with nubs and chips of kāpia, the kauri gum piled roughly according to size. Wai was standing at one end surveying the collection; Miri was at the sink. ‘But I talked to some men. I let one of them buy me a drink.’
As a general rule they didn’t approach strangers, but last week Hana told the women what they already knew; the objects were becoming scarce. ‘We’ve given up things, had to,’ she’d said. ‘There needs to be a balancing – we need something in return.’
Miri put a large pot in the sink and turned on the tap. The water often came out tinged with algae, or swarming with tadpoles, which they collected and put in saucepans to grow. ‘Woah. And?’
‘They talked in fast, strange accents, but I picked up enough to make sense. He said he’d been a sailor but not anymore. He was going to work at a place called The Colony.’
‘The Colony? What’s that?’ Belle laughed, looking at the ornaments carved from kāpia on the shelf: a gum teapot with a little gum cup, an elaborately carved gum head.
‘It’s a place where the driving dams help float kauri, the only buoyant native timber, didn’t I know.’ Hana rolled her eyes. ‘When water is released from behind the dam, the logs cascade – get this, he really said that – downstream with it.’
‘Let’s bait them,’ Wai said, holding up a piece of kāpia the size of her fist. ‘Make something happen. ‘That kauri doesn’t belong to them.’
‘He said where he comes from there isn’t any of this beautiful wood, with its fine grain.’ Hana had smiled: let him believe this was new information to her. He smiled back and said he was lucky to be going to work for a man called Henry Sallow.
That night, the women formed a plan, even Belle agreeing that Hana knew best. Hana would go to The Colony, and she would talk to the men. There had to be a way to restore things.
The tide was out when she put on her boots and went down the steps and across the mud flats. It was a half day’s walk to the wharf and from there she would find Sallow. The sun was high in the sky and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Later, they’d wonder how they’d missed the signs something terrible was coming.
When she got back the next morning she wasn’t like their Hana. There was no raucous laughter, no banging of doors. She lay down in her room, her mouth moving without any sound. It was her face, but it was blank. Wai clocked the bruising around her thighs and wrists, and nudged Miri, pointing at Hana’s feet. Hana still had her boots on.
‘What’s going on?’ Miri asked.
Hana pretended not to hear, turned her face to the wall. Belle was standing in the doorway.
‘Why have you got your boots on inside, Hana?’ Belle said. ‘That’s a filthy habit.’
‘Men,’ Miri said, pointing to the blood on Hana’s shorts.
‘Bringing all the dirt inside,’ Belle said.
‘Shut up, Belle,’ said Wai.
Belle shrugged, but they could see fear in her eyes. Not because of the tone in Wai’s voice, but because of what the men had done to Hana.
‘We’ve let things slide,’ Wai said. ‘And this is the result.’
It was silent for what felt like a long time. Wai started to mutter under her breath, then it became a hum. Quiet at first, gradually getting louder until Miri started singing the song with Wai, and Belle, relieved she knew the words, joined in too.
When Wai appeared on Angel’s verandah, Angel stared at her, not understanding at first. But her voice turned low and frantic, and Angel knew Wai was telling the truth about Hana. It had taken Wai two days to find Angel, and she was dirty and tired. Angel couldn’t stand to think of those men hurting Hana, or Wai or anyone.
‘Let’s go,’ she said. Hana had been good to her when she had lived with the women. And nobody had told Angel what living with a man would be like.
She hadn’t exactly noticed the sick worry in her stomach, but, as she and Wai approached the house, Angel realised it was gone. She knew Wai still hadn’t forgiven her for disappearing, but Hana’s situation seemed to have forced her into a state of acceptance.
They crossed the mud flats and Belle came out onto the porch, chewing something. ‘So this is the famous cousin we’ve heard so much about.’
It was Angel’s first time here. Inside, she couldn’t keep her focus in one place; her eyes darted around the room as she absorbed the details. There were portrait photographs on the wall, some people Angel recognised, faded black-and-white in assorted frames. A gun lay dismantled on the bench beside a can of oil, the bits laid out neatly, a rare sign of order. There were twisted rags everywhere.
‘How long have you been here?’ Angel asked.
‘Few months,’ said Miri, exhaling. ‘But it feels like forever.’
The collection had overtaken the house, spilling out of the back room and onto the porch. Wooden shelves lined the walls of every room, some of them bowing under the weight of the objects. Angel walked about, looking at everything, picking up the occasional item. She ran a finger around the inside of a tuatara jawbone. A bat skeleton embedded in limestone lay next to a possum skull. Bigger items were stored on the verandah, under the corrugated-iron roof. A moa skeleton assembled from stray bones stood beside two skeletons of kurī.
The item Angel loved the most was kept in a carved wooden box beside Hana’s mattress. No matter what house they had been in, Hana made sure the box was right there. Angel was younger than the others and always asked Hana if she could see it before she went to bed. In the night, there was the crackle and bark of branches moving in the wind, the call of a ruru, the rustle of things hiding. Hana always sighed, but she would open the box – it was something she could do. ‘Remember you’re only here because you’re Wai’s cousin,’ she would say.
Inside the box, the kauri-gum hair was a tress of silky blond. The gum had been melted, spun into threads, then plaited while warm and tied with a ribbon.
Now she was back, there were things Angel wanted to tell the others: they needed to know the men were the same everywhere. But Hana didn’t need to hear that. What happened to Hana had changed everything. They were all together; Wai said that was all that mattered.
Hana and Miri stood at the stove, in front of a large pot, and Wai and Belle sat at the big table. Angel was standing, watching Hana. Hana’s hair was matted with salt, and she had bite marks on her neck.
‘Hana,’ said Angel, but it was Wai who got up from the table and came over.
‘One of those days,’ Miri said, ‘when you’re about to give up and then everything falls into place. Check it out.’
Angel pretended she hadn’t noticed the state Hana was in, but nobody was fooled.
‘War wounds,’ Wai said, bumping her knuckles against Angel’s chin as she passed.
‘Do you know what this is?’ Miri asked. Hana jerked her head up and peered over the steam. Miri held up a scrap of metal. There was a depression in it, a glassy substance inside.
‘It’s the lead from the ship out on the mudflats.’ It wasn’t surprising Hana knew what it was. Hana had been collecting for years. Hana was a doer. And now Hana was unravelling.
Miri shrugged. ‘Strange, looks like tītī fat inside.’
She dropped the lead and reached out her right arm to lean on the bench beside it.
‘I thought this meeting was urgent?’ Belle said. ‘Wai?’ As soon as it was high tide, Angel and Wai needed to leave to find Sallow.
Wai ignored Belle, but picked up a stick, and dipped it into the pot. ‘Okay, so we need to remind ourselves why we’re doing this.’
She twirled the kāpia around the stick then squashed it onto the bench. Angel tried to see what she was making. Then Wai picked off a small cube of the soft, hot gum and dropped it back into the pot. She paused, then held up the melted-down cube, which she then mangled into something – a little figure of some sort. Angel realised it was a kāpia doll Hana with a little black hat and black boots. As Wai talked, she danced the kāpia Hana from side to side.
‘Hana went down to Sallow’s to talk,’ she said. Hana’s head jerked up again at the mention of her name, and her eyes moved back and forth with the kāpia Hana.
‘She told them this is our home,’ Wai said. ‘She suggested they arrange a meeting, invite everyone. It was no longer working, she said, things could be lost. Maybe had been already. But the men had secured a big job, and every one of them was out of their mind on whisky.’
Hana brought her hands up, clasping them behind her neck. Her eyes didn’t leave the kāpia Hana.
‘Kept going on about their patch of paradise,’ Wai said. ‘When she tried to leave, they wouldn’t let her.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Grim. Not Hana. Not a chance in hell we could let that go on.’
Wai dipped more gum into the pot and began working on it.
‘I’m making taki,’ Wai said. ‘You know what they are?’ Angel shook her head. ‘Kind of like a decoy. For you and Wai when you go. The kāpia protects us.’
‘It didn’t protect Hana though,’ Angel said, in a low voice.
‘There wasn’t one for Hana when she went to Sallow’s,’ Wai said. A noise came from Hana’s throat. Wai shuddered and turned the stick between her fingers. ‘We got complacent. None of us are invincible.’
‘You’ll take a taki doll each with you,’ Miri said to Angel and Wai. ‘These men have to own their mistakes, to live with them.’
When the tide came in, Angel and Wai got ready. Wai dressed Angel in blue dungarees like her own, and a coarse grey shirt, a clasp-knife in her belt. She tied Angel’s taki doll around her neck and put her own in her pocket. Wai was small, but thick with muscle. She could easily pass for a man. They had the same nose, but Angel was more girly, with her full mouth and hair down to her shoulder blades. When Hana had suggested she cut it, Angel shook her head.
‘Your looks aren’t going to protect you,’ Hana told her.
Angel pulled out the taki doll necklace she was wearing, so it was on the outside of her dungarees. With its golden kāpia face, hard black boots and jaunty hat, it looked ready. Hana nodded.
It took a few moments for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. The salt water was right up under the house now. Wai pulled the rope attached to the boat and Angel climbed in. It felt good to be on the water again. Wai grabbed her paddle. The lanes were narrow and winding, walled with mangroves, and could be difficult to navigate until you got out on the river. It would be light in a couple of hours.
For a long time, there was nothing at all except mangroves. Angel didn’t sing, but Wai kept singing for longer than usual, her face illuminated by the torch strapped to the bow. The branches of ancient pōhutukawa bent down to scrape the water. There were golden kōwhai and trees laden with wild peaches. Against the narrow strip of sky visible, clouds collected then dispersed, and the deep blue began to lighten. Finally, there was an opening ahead, and they pulled clear of the trees and joined the outgoing tide. They lifted their paddles and drifted now, glad of a rest. They’d never seen anyone else out here, but sometimes they came across an abandoned raft or canoe. And Angel sometimes heard the voices of the drowned, although the others said she imagined it.
They passed over the heads of eels, tāmure and flounder. Angel saw other things too: fins and tails close to breaking the surface, then stretching and changing. They knew these paths of the sea and their changeable moods. And there were the ancient floating logs, which sometimes behaved in a disconcerting way. The estuary looked more like a wasteland, the huge, waterlogged kauri trees floating and bumping along as far as the eye could see.
They left the boat tied to an old pūriri at the edge of the mangroves and climbed onto the nearest tree trunk. They could walk from here. Even though the tide had turned, it seemed to Angel that nothing was moving; that their walking towards the harbour made no difference to where they were. The logs underfoot had ridges in circular patterns; it felt like walking over bones. They didn’t talk, going in single file. It was safer that way. Miri had misjudged a log once and slipped down. Her foot was crushed, and it took a long time to work her free.
The Colony glittered in white isolation in a clearing of bush near the wharf. Henry Sallow’s day-to-day business was cabinets and dining tables, but his house imitated the Taj Mahal, even set on a raised plinth with four towering minarets. It was built from kauri and the dome on the top was covered in marble. Dozens of smaller, prefabricated Taj Mahal models for keeping meat and tobacco fresh were stacked outside the sawmill. Wai laughed when she saw them. She told Angel that at lunchtime the staff would fish off the ramp – often catching so many tāmure they were thrown to the dogs or left to rot.
The walls of the mill were hung with every crosscut saw you could imagine, teeth shaped like miniature finials. Freshly sawn kauri logs were stacked tightly everywhere and there were two new-looking boats, half-painted. The ground in the yard was smooth, flattened by the men’s boots coming and going, in and out.
Angel squatted and pissed on a stack of pallets, the hard light of day on her face. The cicadas were deafening, like a warning. Sallow was in the yard, working on the prefabs. He had his back to them. Two other men were sawing a log nearby, using a crosscut saw. It was making a loud vibration. Wai gave her a look to tell her: Now. She pulled her dungarees up then unbuttoned the top two buttons on her shirt. May as well use it. The hat of the taki doll was just visible. She waited, hidden, the side of the knife digging into her thigh.
Wai whistled, and when Sallow turned in her direction his face was the colour of eggshell.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, as though he was trying to remember his manners. But when Wai stuck out her hand he struggled to smile.
‘Forgive my intrusion,’ Wai said, ‘but it seems you’ve been taking something that’s not yours.’
‘We’re about to stop for lunch. No point hanging around. I suggest you go home or come back later.’
Home. In the shadows, Angel tried the word out on her tongue. The way he said it, it sounded unfamiliar.
‘Everything you see here is pre-ordered. First day of next week the next flotation of kauri will be ready – panelling, sarking, architraves.’
Angel arranged her hair so it fell in the front, and walked out into view. Sallow looked at her hair and unbuttoned shirt and down at her legs, as if he owned her. Men like Sallow were always saying that she had stolen things, which was the wrong way round.
