Both Sides of the Moon (24 page)

But it can’t be. It’s got a landing, rows of cell doors, and inmates milling around outside them, one hundred and more sets of eyes checking you out. Plenty throwing out challenge to you. And hatred. When you’ve never set eyes on each other. But that’s justice.

It’s white-painted walls and shiny grey linoleum. It’s rows of faces looking down on you from the upper landing. And rows of the same at your level. The wooden doors have slid shut behind you, they register after the event since the guard is there heading for a central control box, a glass cage with a concrete and steel one, and now he’s conferring with one of his colleagues. And all these eyes of your new peers are looking at you. You’re fifteen.

To think I had once looked forward to the affirmation of a borstal sentence. So here it is. I’m my ancestor Kapi and now I’m Tangiwai Kotuku, staring at another reality. These are society’s outcasts, its rejects. Look up there, staring down at me, with half his face tattooed with a comic-book character, Hot Stuff, I can pick it from here. Is he the Hakere of this lot?

Look everywhere. A sea of brown faces. A vast room of warriors now moved into their youth. I’ve stepped into one of my dreamscapes, the one meaning all over with truth. This is where the warrior journey terminates. They could be tattooed faces of exquisite, manfully endured design staring at me. They are young men in readiness, always, for war. Where no thought belongs. They could be my Maori ancestors in any village, except women and children are missing. This could be just before a battle starts then. I am not, surely, one of them?

So whose name is that being called out if it isn’t yours, kid?

I’ve done my borstal time, back to live with my father who visited me regularly, but I didn’t know that one-hour inmate visitor version of him, he was strained, as if he blamed himself, and his shyness made more acute in the stark truth of that cold room, even though in winter it had big radiators going, something about the place, of what to say, nothing to say, it’s probably for most all downhill from here, they were born on a steep slippery slope and what is my father supposed to say? I didn’t expect my mother to visit and she didn’t let me down. Warren came once with Dad but he found it too distressing, suffering for me, taken from him. I didn’t like him seeing me like this anyway. Besides, it wasn’t all bad. Mereana made sure of that, even from her grave.

I’m unemployed but I did get something from my experience, maybe not as good as the good Mereana might have hoped. But enough. Enough.

Two weeks short of a year, it’s written on my parole papers, the bigtime released convict with his tough papers, and I was tough in there. I had to be, it was survive or suffer, being locked up is not the worst of it. Irony there, of being sentenced for being violent and violence being your only means of protection. And you don’t just leave it behind when the big gate closes after you, even though it’s freedom out the front of the borstal van windscreen.

But I tell you, it’s almost worth doing the time to experience the release. My parole date was set, the morning took an age to arrive, I was in my civilian clothes, a screw drove me to a small town, I half expected it to be called Pinevale, but it had a Maori name, Tikitiki. He gave me a bus ticket to Two Lakes — One-way mind — the standard joke I’m sure.

I went out to Waiwera and saw Uncle Henry and Auntie Bubs
and cousins. They were okay with me, Uncle told me I was the first from his village ever to get sent to a borstal, and I thought he was telling me off till he grinned and said, but then they don’t do
anything
much exciting or different, do my Waiwera relations. So don’t you be letting any of them try and make you feel bad for it. I only told you to prepare you as I’m assuming you’ll be getting up to those baths. Yeah, I would. He asked did I take on Mereana’s wise words, and I said I did, sort of; it’s hard to be wise and completely truthful when you’re a teenager.

He had been promoted at his job at the hotel, from barman to bar manager. And I could see he was proud of it. Cousin Mat and I had nothing there, just a handshake, some forced smiles and he had to be on his way.

I walked past Chumpy’s house whistling loudly, but he didn’t come out. I felt big enough to confront him about what he’d said those years ago, to tell him he’d done me a favour, I had gained more than insight but almost got my life back. I asked after him at the bath, Betty Baker told me he was not well, his heart, that weight. He was only thirty-six. Good. A bodily curse from his ancestral past on its way to claim him.

I walked all over Waiwera seeing it with different eyes. The people were just as happy as ever, not up to much, not even talking about it. But no denying happiness, or is it contentedness. Except I’m not sure what it prepares you for, if life is about changes.

The thermal sights were still exciting. I visited Mereana’s white-washed concrete tomb, and so far her boiling beloved below had kept her to itself, where other tombs were surrendering to the corroding mouth of inner earth.

Faces I knew greeted me mostly without enthusiasm, maybe they were embarrassed, maybe I should have been. The few who paused to say hello made no mention of where I’d been. I asked Tama, a boy I’d been mates with, if he knew I’d just got out of borstal. He said he didn’t know I was in to get out, but didn’t ask what it was like or how I was or anything. He had to go. See you. Yeah, fat chance. Like Mat, drifted apart; perhaps since Mereana had died, she had been my tenacious hold until she got out the story. Or part of it.

I take a bus out to see my cousin Jack and he’s pleased to see
me, the loved only son reminding me of what vitality love gives you, for he’s bubbling over with questions, wants to know every detail. Which I give him, like a visit to his father’s abattoir, it was some experience. His mother, my Auntie Girlie, is somewhere boozing, nothing’s changed there’s no reason for it to change. So I can tell my story in peace, get to catch up with my cousin who’s now left school and, as promised, got an office job and it’s got prospects.

I tell Jack that I saw Hohepa, he got a borstal sentence a couple of weeks before I was released. He had grown a powerfully muscular and necessarily angry body and soon let everyone know he was not to be messed with, even though he was the minimum age as I had been, just fifteen. It’s the life you have, if it isn’t self-belief. He remembered me and Jack, he paid a visit to my cell and told me if ever I needed a hand (at fighting) he was there for me. Said it with emotion, the only thing left alive in his eyes. Violent emotion.

Jack said he’d seen my mother from time to regular time on the circuit. Nothing to report there — oh, had I been told she’d changed men again? No, I hadn’t. Not interested either. But what’s he like? Jack laughed with both our knowing, she makes sure she goes with white guys because they don’t hit her back.

I stayed the night with him, we laughed at hearing his mother and father come home, drunk, as usual, bickering at each other. And she got punched and she threw a plate of food at him and they yelled, and we were in beds across from each other, shaking our heads but with grins, now that we were inured to these things. And I dared to think, safe.

Listening to them argue in bed and it turning to softer tones, and Jack was looking at the ceiling then, and doubtless so was his mother, as we heard the bed springs creaking, we giggled, they’d creaked ever since I’d known them, a lifetime ago. So nothing had changed and nor should it. Same old process, over and over again. No change. Or it would suggest some eyes had been opened.

At home Brian’s running wild; Ian has gone off to university, I don’t know what’s saved him that didn’t save the others. Warren’s flatting with a girlfriend. I go and see him. He’s more handsome than ever. She’s pretty good herself. Except I’ve walked in on an argument. He tries to protect me from it, saying he’s sorry to his girl, but she’s
not finished with her side, she wants to know who the hell I am and how come I just walk in like that?

I’m his brother. Oh, I’m sorry. No, I am. And for a moment there is nothing to say: I have entered their world, life goes on, it doesn’t just stop for sixteen-year-old borstal punks to come barging in like this. My brother’s in a relationship. Though it doesn’t look like he knows how to handle it. I think he wants to hit her. I think he wants her confidence, her uplifted defiant eyes to the world. I think he found owning her body and owning her soul weren’t one and the same. I think when he became the man, he got claimed by the boy he’d never been able to live. And I pass blame for this, I do. I do. For all of God’s suffering children of manhood forced on them before their time.

I saw it in the borstal, my brother, my cousins, confirmed of boys caught in man’s bodies loaded too early with too much
responsibility
, too much emotional strain, cursed by history’s ignorance. Fuck them all.

I thought I saw danger for my big brother’s girlfriend in his eyes. But I was wrong there. It wasn’t even danger I saw, but a
monumental
collapsing taking place — like a slave submitting to his inevitable doom. He couldn’t take it any more — he was battle-weary. Let history claim him then.

I’m at a funeral and looking at my mother do her act, she’s like the old stager who doesn’t know her curtain’s long gone down, she still thinks her public displays of inconsolable grief mean something. Even at this funeral. This one she doesn’t have to compete with her sisters to put on the big performance. This is all hers. (I think they’re saying, too, that she’d done it. Been responsible for his death. I think it gave them all a fright; yet far too late: what their lives had sown so they had reaped. Be one of theirs next.)

I’m looking at her and feeling at last lifted of burden about her: she’s not anything but an ordinary peasant woman who
happened
to make a louder noise. She’s the big queen bitch of the street, the neighbourhoods on her circuit, her lowly company, who got old. Look, flecks of grey in her hair. See, a body going to fat, fewer men on the available list. And I’ve seen my town, I’ve spied on it, I know what class is, I know what taste is, it’s not money, or form, it’s another means of showing enlightenment. A booze bitch can’t have class. Even a rare one no longer satisfied with herself can only want to have it and get a process started, a legacy on its way. And how many do that? Maybe they can’t; maybe nature is so lean with its givings they have virtually no chance of bettering themselves. Maybe I’m being too hard on the bitch — I mean woman. I mean person. I mean my mother.

She said hello, she wept on each of our brother’s shoulders; I’m sure if we had got talking she’d have picked up from the last incident, the last row she had with Dad, or one of her sisters, or
gambling
debt owed and never forgotten. She did say once that this was a tragedy of significance that ought get us all thinking.

I’m looking at her and my heart is getting with song, the one she’d not have heard her own people sing under her brother Henry’s leading, up there in the communal baths, but I have. When The Lights
Go On Again. Lyrics, words of what joys will the nights and days bring since it was composed during the war years in England during their blackout periods. I am looking at her and my lights are on again, my blackout period is at last over. She is like Ratanui, arriving in the midst of Hakere and his gang, and is quickly, as if to her right people, joined. Not even my father could change her.

I see a common woman who doesn’t deserve the title of slut. A slut is someone fallen from somewhere. A common piece of ordinariness has never risen to fall. None of them rose. None ever knew to try.

I see the people she is estranged to and yet they are here, to help send off one of her own to the spiritworld they believe in. And there sits the outcast member of her tribal family, without enough of even simple substance to practise these people’s cultural ways, to have at her access a certain dignity — no, she is content to swoop in on occasion and act like this, being seen as beside herself with grief. Though even I would not go so far as to say she came for the
aftermath
piss-up. Not this time.

Two days now of being in this meeting house carved with our ancestors, and though I am glad for the comfort these good people give to the deceased’s loved ones, and the male elders’ oratory thunder as if each is a Maori Moses from yonder hilltop telling man of the error of his ways and the course he must take to change, I know from Mereana’s explaining that the words are of names, ancestors’ names, of lineage, of ancestor worship, of ancestor infallibility, of battle deeds and a hundred, two, three hundred years past, the thousand of war totality, of remembered incident that retains importance still. To these people it does.

Even when it no longer is the working of them, nor of functioning world around them. I hear men making speech of what they are not, not now that the culture of war has been taken from them by the laws of the coloniser: it is continuance for its own sake. It is verbal posturing to speak of another’s long past deeds with a pride as if they are your own. Or else we would equally remember deeds of shame. But I am not too burdened with feeling the betrayer of them either, for how is it betrayal, as Wild Hair told my ancestor, if you think with a free mind? I anyway have enough of the warrior
in me and like it well enough not to throw it all out.

His guilt-stricken girlfriend has had to endure extra shock by sitting through the two days of his tangi with a race of people she’s barely experienced, and this lover experience of one has turned out as bad as it gets; she found him, hanging from the rafter of their rented house garage. Her mother is with her, and she is naturally as stunned by what suicide does to us all. But the local women are right there to support her, them, against grief, and my mother’s pointed ignorance and thus suggestion that she, the girlfriend, Natalie, might take most of the blame.

If you know her, this woman who can’t help herself, and we all know plenty like it, you can just hear the woman composing the array of wordings that ask the question of the girlfriend of her
self-deceased
son, Why did he do it then? How did you treat him? What happened that day, the time leading up to it?

This man gets up, I notice him because I’d seen him outside talking to Chumpy, or Chumpy was talking to him, a most earnest, secretive conversation from the fat man going to die soon of a heart attack. He coughs he’s going to start to speak.

He’s a mister average Maori man, middle-aged, you’d miss him in the street. He makes speech in Maori, makes the standard pointing reference to my brother’s coffin (his last defining pose there, I see his eyes open, telling what they were trying to tell me just last week) using a carved walking stick as pointing object.

He must be near to one of the last to speak because I see Uncle has gestured men over to the lid standing against the wall (going to take away my brother’s last portrait) and then I see Uncle Henry stiffen. And the man’s speech going on. And the older people’s same reactions following right behind Henry Te Amo’s.

I hear the name Te Amo, it is easy to pick out a familiar in even this thicket of streaming words. I hear Waiwera named, several times, and Te Amo again. I see Uncle’s face darken. Then I hear a name I know as well as any, Te Aranui Kapi. And the shock in Uncle’s face. Mine too. Finally the man sits down.

There is stunned silence. Then muttering amongst the women trying to rescue the situation but by the number of shaking heads they can’t. Or why would their eyes go to Henry and all their faces look determined or noddingly urging? Why would they look caught between two loyalties?

My Uncle Henry walks to the centre of the room. And he, too, addresses my brother’s body. And this is a real Moses thundering from yonder pine-covered hills right outside, if tone be the decider. I wish it could be in English but it isn’t.

He turns and uses his pointing finger at ancestral carvings and then at the last speeching man. And finishes in almost a whisper. But the man’s eyes remain defiant over whatever he has said. And Uncle Henry is fighting with the warrior in him again — I understand that. Completely. It’s just which one wins.

Flushed of round face, visibly shaken, he turns and goes over to Warren’s casket.

Warren’s three brothers and father are the pallbearers and Jack and Uncle Henry. The hearse stands outside. Uncle helps put the lid on. He’s crying. We all are. I drink in his face, my brother’s, they’ve done a good job, they usually do don’t they.

I drink in his face. Of the man with stubble grown from two days’ lying here in state; man keeps growing, it looks cruel, as if the rest could have been saved. The boy inside who never got out is now all there in innocent repose. He has the look as if moonlight is brushed upon his face. And the reason now throwing herself at the men
putting
the lid over him, screaming in a most unseemly manner.

But then she has always been unseemly like that. Nothing to measure it against, or another that made her want to. She’s just a reaction that can be no other, of wanting this moment never to happen, like a bad card hand dealt her and she’s in too big, not to gaze upon her child’s face for the last last time. It was different when she walked out on Dad and us. She had a choice of seeing us, we were in her thoughts, from time to time, if she so chose or was taken by.

She cries and screams out his name and, you know, it doesn’t mean anything. Leaves me cold. My brothers, too, as we stand ready to take up that weight, carry him for once, lifted of weight. (Of weight, brother. Of your weight.)

Uncle Henry snaps at her to damn well control herself, son or no son.

This is like our mother the day our father informed she had left home and was never going to return. And she didn’t. My brother has left and he’s never going to return, never. Another mention in a newspaper, like criminal court proceedings: they don’t mean much if you don’t know them. If you’re not the son of the publicly named defendant. If the life lost and worded as there being no suspicious circumstances, if such a young and early departed life is not up to much and wouldn’t ordinarily be. If people only knew. Which ordinarily and understandably they don’t.

Uncle Henry led the singing at the graveside along with his war men of Come Unto Me. Even though nephew of Henry’s wasn’t strictly supposed to be accorded this tribute, and I think he’d decided in the last moment because I saw him at the town cemetery going from mate to singing mate. They sang it mightier and more moving than any had heard it, even though Warren wasn’t up to much, even though the manner of his death being of his own hand. Just a young man who the warrior with tattooed face stepped up and took away.

I found out afterward from Uncle Henry himself of what the speaker had said. Seemed Kapi’s old tohunga, Te Tono, had decided not to attempt to reinstall self and family with a related tribe, so complete was the defeat by the enemy warned by Kapi’s cowardice. Te Tono arrived in the Rotorua area, later called Two Lakes, its literal translation the better to signify its universal qualities. He took from his vast storehouse of tribal knowledge over a good part of this land and used connecting tale to inscribe himself as a long-lost blood relation to a high Rotorua chief. And thereupon wasted no time in entering the defiled name of Te Aranui Kapi into the oral history of this people who weren’t really Kapi’s at all.

And so the name had quickly faded into obscurity. But then there is always someone who has need of the most obscure or
insignificant
knowledge that may be turned into weapon against others.

This speaker at my brother’s tangi had referred to a life taken by its own hand as not unknown to this person’s antecedents. Had they not in substantial numbers taken their lives rather than live in shame? And was not the cause one Te Aranui Kapi, who had a
childless 
union with a woman said to be like the moon: ugly on one side, beautiful the other? But did not Kapi leave a woman named Tangiwai Kotuku with child, which she bore and raised and gave it the name of Te Amo, meaning supporting? And does not a defiled being pass down to future generations, not diluted so fast by marriage that others do not have memory? For I am Te Tono, this mister average man said, doing my solemn duty to my father’s sacred name, and the mana that this man’s actions took from him. You, Henry Te Amo, are a
descendent
of him. As is that young man lying dead by his own hand.

Henry Te Amo’s reply was thus: We are all sinners and sinned against, the Bible says this and so has every man of every tribe and every race said so. For it is true. When I sin against you, member of Te Tono hapu, then you may do your worst to me. Your words here, where I am thought highly of, could be called sin against me and mine. But you look a man of no threat to me, nor significance that others would hear you and pay heed.

If I and my nephew lying at peace there are sinners, then pray strike me down, or show means of exacting punishment. These carved ancestors are mine whether you make counter claim or not. Just as the child who is adopted into any family becomes the child of those parents. You, of Te Tono name, and related to the man who takes his living from the rents paid on his inherited land, are fittingly
descended
from a tohunga line of known manipulation of men. Perhaps it is you who should be explaining away the sins of your forefathers. Though I shall not bother to demand that of you, since you are not worthy of one more moment of my time. My nephew awaits the love of our farewell.