Hiwa, p.9
Hiwa, page 9
That night in my dreaming, I saw killings, people dying, screaming, and dying. And then in my waking hours the people were still there, dying, screaming, and dying. They called to me.
‘Come and be dead with us, you may as well. You’re no good here. Useless prick. Good-for-nothing-prick. Do the world a favour.’
I got a rope and noosed it; pulled the knot and loosed it. Slipped it over my head. Tightened it around my neck.
Kāore moko.
I thought I’d died; I lived and cried.
The ambulance took me to hospital.
The dying, screaming, dying wouldn’t go away. The nurse gave me an injection. Then she gave me another one the next day, and the next and the next.
And Nanny never came.
And Lucille never came back.
On Sunday afternoon, when the V-8 people left town, me, Kowhai, Mangu and Whero, Waiporoporo and his missus Aggie, Karukuri and Panananui got three trolley loads of squashed flat-as cans. The dude from Foodtown who drives around in the van marked Foodtown said, ‘That’s stolen property.’
And Kowhai said, well, we stole it first. The dude said for us to tip the cans out so he can take his trolleys. So we tipped the cans out of the New World trolleys.
‘These aren’t my trolleys,’ he said.
And then Karukuri said to him to pick those bloody cans up and put them back in our trolleys. He did. And Kowhai started singing ‘Mellow Yellow’.
‘I’m just mad … ’ he sang. A song about Saffron. A Chinese girl.
I have a date with Huitamaki every Friday at the Anglican Church gold coin lunch.
Luncheon, Huitamaki calls it. She’s teaching me how to talk flash.
We have fish. Tangaroa sacrifices his babies all over the world every Friday because the CEO of all Gods told him to.
One time when I was at Kāwhia and as-stoned-as-the beach, I saw a Fisheries officer confiscate this other dude’s boat, trailer and car and the dude had to walk home. That’ll teach him for being greedy. But Tangaroa, he will take everything. He’ll even take you if you’ve been disrespectful or greedy which is the same thing especially when you take too much pāua and crayfish and the baby snappers.
On Thursdays we go to the St Vincent de Paul Hall.
Vince is a Dutch dude. He was a painter who cut his ear off and sent it to his Mrs. True. Cut his taringa off and sent it to his Mrs by ear-mail and when she gets it, she says, ‘What’s this ear?’ because she’s a Pommie sheila. Vincent the painter wrote a cool, cool-as song too about that Pommie sheila: ‘Starry, Starry Night’. He kills her for being too beautiful for the world.
I said hey to Hui, and she said, ‘My name is Huitamaki. I am the daughter of Tāmaki-makau-rau.’
‘Well, Huitamakimakaurau then, which one of your father’s many lovers are you privy to-be-bastard to?’
Slap. Crash.
‘What the hell are you doing down there, Hui?’
‘You have to pick me up from off this floor. You’ve insulted me. I’m swooning.’
She holds the back part of her left hand against her forehead and her right-hand fingers are spread out over her left titty. Breast.
‘Breast!’ she shouted at me one day at the Richmond Church dinner.
And the lady that was dishing out the kai said, ‘No breast dear, this is meat loaf.’ I was about to say it, but she took the words right out of my mouth.
‘If you want breast, dear, you go to KFC.’
But we don’t go there. Anymore.
Whero said the best day to go to KFC is Tuesday. To the Frankton shop. Whero said the people who go there on a Tuesday waste kai because they’re rich then. That’s their payday. Ours is a Thursday. The babies don’t eat the chicken they just suck at the secret recipe and the parents throw the rest in the bin. We went there one Tuesday. Whero said to a lady, can I have that breast after he’s sucked the secret recipe off? The lady slapped his face. The tattoo-faced father wore a leather jacket with the picture of a monkey on the back, and he smashed Whero. Whero said he saw stars.
The Tuesday parents at KFC Frankton are bene-rich; they throw kai away.
Throw it away. Just like that.
I read the Times at proby this morning and looked at the pictures of the V-8s.
My whare was in one of the photos on page four, the one of the six dudes with their arms around the car sheilas. Behind them there was this fence, follow that fence along and you can see the corner of a blue building, but that’s all the photo had room for. If there had been room, you would have seen where to turn at the corner of that building and you would have seen the road you walk down for about ten-and-a-half minutes and then, behind the cricket stadium where Pakistan beat Waikato once, you would have seen where to cross the road and there’s where my whare is. You would have seen it if the photo had been bigger.
My whare.
Right there. My front doorstep. My whare in the newspaper, but proby wouldn’t let me cut it out and he told me to sit down and stop reading over his shoulder.
‘It’s rude,’ he said. I was trying to tell him about my week.
When the chequered flag goes down, the powered-up cars race out of town. They turn left on to the road where all the motels are. Then they go up Te Rapa straight, zoom past BJ’s ($45-a-night), past the base, around the roundabout a few times to show off to all the sheilas, then up the road that goes all the way to Auckland.
If I was driving, I’d go straight across the main road at the lights, go past Pizza Hutt to the Ara Rima – Five Cross Roads, cross myself and think, how many did He need to die on? Then I’d cut everybody off at the base of the Maunga by the main trunk line. That’s the route I would take. Toot-toot toot-toot-toot. Toottoot. I’d bury my foot and say hey to my whānau up there on the maunga, hey whānau. Dugindugin. Dug in, that’s my V-8 sound; dugin, dugin, dug in all along the Great South Road.
Wait for the green, wait, wait. Wait. Vroom, vroom, dugin dugin dugin toot out to the sheilas. Slow down past the for real popos in their fast-as popo cars.
I got Karukuri, Panananui and Huitamaki with me in this red Holden. In the lane next to us there’s Kowhai, Mangu, Whero, Waiporoporo and Aggie in a Ford they can’t afford to be caught by the popos in. So, we’re lined up at the lights; vroom, vroom dugin dugin dugin. They get the arrow.
‘I want a mimi,’ Huitamaki says. ‘We have to stop.’
‘You have to wait.’
Dugindugindugin. Green. Go.
Left into the wholesales to buy a Country.
Huitamaki mimis behind the hairdressers. Karukuri goes in the wholesales. I push my foot down on the gas, vroom, vroom, and all these sheilas perv at me. So, I give them my coolest smile: wink. I give a quick look to see where Huitamaki is, I show the sheilas how I would kiss them, and they push their fingers in and out of their mouths. I’m glad Huitamaki’s not in the car yet. She’d get jealous of those girls giving me the come-on signals.
‘Another time, babes,’ I yell out to them. They clutch their pukus and show me what they can do with their lips. Huitamaki jumps in the car, and I wink at those sheilas, laters. We take off.
Go past Hukanui Pā and crawl through the village at seventy. Then I give some gas, open her up. Huitamaki opens up the new Country box and we pass the bladder around.
Kowhai, Mangu, Whero, Waiporoporo and his missus Aggie go through the snail’s pace town where the kids beat Hana Koko up one year for wearing a red suit. From the bridge they wave to the King.
2H8R. Kia ora Kiingi.
Double lane passing. Red car racing. Blue car pacing. Brown cows grazing in the fields where the slayed lay strewn. Hoppity past the old soldier camp redeployed now to the old camp soldier, to the last postcolonial post, post-graduated school of the well-endowed.
‘There’s them,’ Huitamaki says. We have to wait at Taupiri, and they go past waving like queens. We pull in at the awa. He piko, he taniwha.
In the 1860s, we took a little trip, down the tikawhata to the mighty why-catowe. We took a heap of puha, and we took a heap of pork, and the car ran out of petrol, so we all got out and walked.
Take your white crosses down sad clowns and tie me kaanga wai down.
Vrooom, vroom dugin dugin dugin. Kowhai, Mangu, Whero, and Waiporoporo and his missus in their blue Ford; us in our red Holden. Stop.
Ngāpuhi, Ngātiwhātua, two Ngātiporou, two Arawa, two Islanders, and me: Waikato–Tainui hard, we all got some reason to stop at the maunga. We hop out of our flash cars. We go down to the awa and splash each other and ourselves with the water.
‘Tēnei te tangata pūhuruhuru, hupane kaupane.’ Panananui, Waiporoporo and his Mrs, Aggie, pretend to be All Blacks but they’re just black.
Then we stand in a circle, reach out and hold each other’s hands.
Hold. Grip tight. We close our eyes and try to remember the reasons why we stopped.
They’re all up there on that Maunga.
‘We may be Country folk, but we’re not entirely unreasonable,’ says Huitamaki, the cardboard Māori who always tries to talk flash.
‘Let’s go up there.’
‘Where?’
‘Up the Maunga.’
‘No. We have to come down first. We’s as high as kites floating above the clouds.’
‘Let’s go home.’
Vrooom vroom, dugin dugin dugin. Yellow-town that’s subsiding on the East-side. East mine. Brown town. Lion-Red town. Awa green, mean Māori mean where the kai shop serves you breakfast in bed if you bacon and egg it.
Huntly, to be bluntly speaking.
Shut up, Huitamaki.
‘Okay, left over the bridge right into Harris, over the railway track, speed past the Kings’ house, turn right and go past the powerhouse, go over the bridge, turn right at Rango’s then we better take these cars back, eh. Cause I’m nearly finished proby and I don’t want to do any more.’
I’m sitting in seat E18.
‘Hey you. Get off that seat.’
It’s a pretend popo. He talks to his left shoulder. He calls it Roger. Roger makes a beep sound. The popo wears a real sheriff’s badge.
‘Get, go on, get. You can’t sit there.’
Karukuri was a pretend popo once.
One time he dressed up like the CEO popo and he saluted all the other popos and they saluted him back. Snapped. He got locked up for pinching the CEO’s clothes and saluting. Then he had to spend some time in hōhipera. He got free food and board and the Panepoakas gave him free drugs. That was good: it was wintertime and for three months, he still got full pay. When summertime came, he wasn’t judged to be so mad anymore. He was allowed to go home with his whole heap of money. So, he went back to our whare and cleaned it out and waited for us to come home because we were still mad and up there.
Yesterday, Mangu borrowed a V-8 to see if Victoria was a good route. He crashed through the self-opening doors at the poupou station and ended up inside. He went to the hōhipera. He’ll be out soon. Waiporoporo and his missus Aggie are up there too, because of last night.
In the short time between bars-shut and street-sweep with the truck that beeps, when all the people had gone home, we were searching the streets for stuff that the drunks drop, like money or jewellery or half packets of tobacco, and butts we can take apart and re-roll. There was me and Kowhai, Panananui, Whero and Karukuri, and Waiporoporo and Aggie.
One minute I was walking beside Riffraff and the next I heard a popo-cop car screaming, like it was coming up behind me. A purple shirt whizzed past me, but when I rubbed my eyes and looked again, it was only Aggie running pants-less up the middle of Victoria. Then Waiporoporo raced past. The flashing lights popo car cruised by: the driver waved, the passenger popo talked to his hand. Up ahead, Aggie had turned into the Casino and Waiporoporo followed her. The cops took Aggie and Waiporoporo away in separate cars. By then it was daylight and we stood next to Riffraff and waved as they went by.
Then we went home.
Now, me and Karukuri, Kowhai, Panananui and Whero, wait for the others to come home. They should be home soon. They’ll come. Then we’ll all go up to the London Street Hall gold coin dinner.
In a few weeks, the wealthy farmers will come to town. On their big tractors, they will compete to see who can carve Papatūānuku up the best in the shortest time; they will show off their crop yield per half-acre of the whenua, they will brag about the high fat content in the milk their cows produce; their pigs will be the meatiest and their sheep the woolliest. And they will win. Win-win.
At night they will come into town in their big flash cars and get very pissed in the all-night bars. Then they will go back to their motels and have a soak in the spa pools so they can be good for the next day’s competing. They might want to swim in the awa that their cows tiko in; they might, but they won’t. It’s too cold in the winter and it’s so paru that not even we will swim in it when it’s warm. They’ll boast about the holidays they had last year, and the ones they’ll have in June: abroad, where they will swim in crystal-clear water that is good enough to drink. Bali, I think. The town rests when the farmers leave. We all get some rest. Then it will be next year.
Somewhere around March, hot air balloons hang around for a few days. The sky space is very pretty then. Beautiful. The puffy pillow colours billow and drift.
‘Gorgeous,’ says Huitamaki.
I wonder what it’s like to drift away and never come back.
But. I would come back: I’d miss them all.
Kowhai, Mangu, Whero, Waiporoporo and Aggie, they’re all for the blues. Karukuri, Panananui and me, I’m Hakitero, we’re for the reds. They’ll be back next year, those flash-looking fellas, their flash cars, and the flash sheilas.
Next year. Man, I can’t wait.
‘Get, hey you, go on, get. You can’t sit there. Off you go.’
It’s time for me to go anyway. My next appointment is about now or yesterday, doesn’t matter. And I’m due for my injection about two weeks ago. I’ll go home after that. I read in the paper that some people want a commuter train up to Auckland. I hope they don’t get it. I don’t want them to use the tracks. I hope they never find use for them. Ever. That’s where I live.
Aramiha Harwood
NGĀPUHI, NGĀTI MOEREWA, NGĀTI RANGI
When he was seven years old, Aramiha Harwood (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Moerewa, Ngāti Rangi) moved, with his family, to rural Victoria in Australia. Although his whānau later returned to New Zealand, he remained overseas, and he currently lives on Boon Wurrung country with his wife and children. His waka, he says, is both Matawhaorua and Air New Zealand flight NZ123, from Auckland to Melbourne.
An ethnographic researcher at RMIT, Harwood has worked and written in the fields of Youth Pathways, International Education, Māori Identity, Cultural Precincts and Australian First Nations genealogies, ‘exploring the narratives,’ he says, ‘of diverse voices in time, place, age and circumstance. Much of my research has focused on identity as a nexus of individual and structural influences – formed and changed by our everyday interactions.’
His story here, ‘a.k.a.’ – his first fiction publication – can be read in this context, drawing together strands of his own experience as part of ‘Ngāti Kangaru’ and the historical fragments of the nineteenth-century life of the Māori sealer ‘John Mye-tie’. Although it may read as creative nonfiction, Harwood/his narrator tells us: ‘Like my names, the border between truth and imagination becomes blurred.’
It’s an exploration, the author believes, ‘of being Māori in Australia’ in different centuries. ‘There are stories behind all of our names, which belie the great depths of who we are.’ Harwood is alert to racism and xenophobia, both in Australia and New Zealand, and in the invisibility of whakapapa and history for Māori living overseas. At the same time, he sees emigration as essentially hopeful, a leap of faith. ‘We move forward, as our ancestors did when setting out for distant lands past the horizon. We make new names for ourselves and we create our own stories.’
That creation of identity, often in the face of hostility and mis-naming – accidental or deliberate – informs both strands of ‘a.k.a.’ In the story, Harwood challenges the notion of homogeneity in Indigenous populations – Māori and First Nations peoples – and the complex ways the immigrant populations of Australia perceive more recent arrivals. (His Vietnamese-born mother-in-law is suspicious that this ‘Māori foreigner’ is simply angling to marry his way into permanent residency.) In researching the history of John Mye-tie, Harwood documents the process of discovering truths behind ‘new’ names, and must confront the way Māori, too, have been complicit in the subjugation of First Nations women.
Harwood acknowledges the people of the Kulin Nations – the Boon Wurrung, the Gunai Kurnai and Wurundjeri – as the Traditional Owners of the Land on which he has written this story. ‘I recognise Elders past, present and emerging,’ he says, ‘out of deep respect and appreciation.’
a.k.a.
ARAMIHA is my name. My parents explained its meaning to me when I was a child – the path to the meeting or the mass. It’s a name I like, I guess. Bringing people together, sharing common ground on their way to communication. I am named after my Uncle Aramiha Werekake/Wilcox, also known as Mick. He was the eldest son of eleven kids. He went to war with the 28th Māori Battalion, and was captured in Greece in 1941. The story from my whānau is that the Germans caught him stealing chickens in a Greek farmhouse in Thermopylae. I don’t know if that’s true or not: it doesn’t show in his service record. But I choose to believe it – it makes a good story! He held much mana amongst my whānau. My dad met my mum through him. When it came time for my mum to marry my dad, it was my uncle’s blessing which resolved matters. So my parents named their first son after him.
