Three Times Dead (6 page)

Mark came to visit me soon after I got home. Mum led him in and then left to make tea. He sat down in the armchair opposite and said, “Good to see you home, Bevan.”

“It’s great but a bit weird,” I said. “Not used to being downstairs but it makes it easier to get around.”

“Have you had any more of those visions?” Trust him to get straight to business.

“No, maybe he stayed at home with his wife and the kid and it all ended happily. It was just a dream after all.”

He opened up the notebook that he had brought with him.

“I was looking up the tribes at Rangiaowhia – that’s just outside of Te Awamutu. The place is just farmland now, but back at the time of the Waikato War it was a major growing region for the Maori. They supplied Auckland with fresh fruit and vegetables.”

Mum walked in just then with a cup of tea for us both.

“History lesson,” Mark said to her with a smile. She rolled her eyes and left the room. “Anyway, Rangiaowhia was attacked during the war, one of the last battles of the war, in fact, and the tribes there were forced out of their homes and their lands confiscated.”

“So what became of the people there?” I asked, thinking of Reka and baby Toa.

“It says that the tribe Ngati Apakura travelled to the southern shores of Lake Taupo and an epidemic wiped them out a few years later.”

“So they don’t exist anymore?”

“There may be some strands of the hapu that exist amongst other tribes, but as an entity, no they don’t exist – another lost tribe of Aotearoa.”

Sudden tears sprang to my eyes as I thought of Reka and the baby, forced to move and then killed by disease. “If that’s the case, then none of the people in my dreams could be my ancestors.”

“Unless some of them survived. Reka might not have been in Rangiaowhia when it was attacked, or she may not have moved with her people. Or Haki had other children with another wife.”

“But that doesn’t make sense either. If what you say is true, then why would I see visions of people who died and who had no attachment to me?”

“I’m not sure, Bevan, but I have the feeling that the ancestors have not finished with you yet. There is still more to see.”

“Great!” I said. “More hallucinations – just what I need!”

“I believe there’s a reason for this. I can’t see it yet and I’ve asked God for guidance, but I’m afraid there has been no angel whispering in my ear, or a vision from above, so I think we have to just wait and see what happens, if anything. In the meantime, you have to get well and back on your feet.”

“You mean foot!” I laughed so that he knew I hadn’t taken offence. He laughed with me.

But when he left I felt unsettled by what he had told me about the tribes at Rangiaowhia.

There wasn’t much to do after that but lie around at home, play games on the Playstation, surf the net and wait for the first visit to the limb centre. School was out of the question; I’d already missed most of Term One and didn’t really have the motivation, or the mobility, to go.

Much to my annoyance, Mum stayed at home during that time to look after me, and working from her office at the side of the house. She used that office a lot when we were kids so that she could be a sort of at-home Mum, but when Katie moved into high school, she took an office closer to town. Now she reinstated the home office and seemed to enjoy the fact that I was reliant on her but I wished that she would return to the city office as I just wanted to be left alone. Gina came round from time to time, but we couldn’t get up to much with my room now on the ground floor and Mum home most of the time. I reckon sexual tension had as much to do with my bad mood as the boredom and lack of activity.

At least the pain in my stump eased off, but I overstated the pain in order to keep the good drugs coming.

Then I got my first appointment at the Artificial Limb Centre. I was both excited and scared. Excited because, with an artificial leg I believed I could start living a more normal life, but scared as I had to now move from my comfort zone into a totally different realm.

Mum drove me there. I saw an orthopaedic surgeon who looked over my notes and slid the x-ray film onto a box before throwing a switch that backlit it. There was my leg – half of it, anyway. I saw the two leg bones coming down from the knee, but on the left, where they were supposed to narrow down to the ankle, there was nothing.

“It’s good they’ve left you with a long shank,” the doctor said. “You’ll have more mobility in the knee joint and it’ll work much like your natural leg once we’ve fitted the prosthetic leg. It’ll take some getting used to and you’ll need to come in often to get it adjusted, but we’ll get you walking again.”

“How soon?” I asked.

“We’ll get the cast off first and have a look at the condition of the stump, and then we’ll show you how to strap it. You’ll strap it yourself every day. We’ll call you back to make a cast of the stump and then we’ll make up the socket. From there we’ll make up the leg according to your needs. You’ll have to come in fairly regularly to get the socket checked for the fit, and there may be several adjustments before we get things right. Every amputation is unique and every fit is different. It may take months before you’re walking normally on the leg.”

“Months!”

“You didn’t really think it was a matter of attaching a piece of plastic and you’d be up on your feet, did you?”

“Well, I …” The truth was I hadn’t thought about it much at all. I just knew that I wanted to get upright again, walking on two legs like a normal person.

“Right, let’s get the cast off and show you how to strap it.”

We left the clinic about an hour later, my stump a bit lighter because the cast was now off, but in a lot of pain from the strapping. I didn’t know if I could do it that tight, but Mum assured me that she could do it for me. I wasn’t looking forward to that.

That night I took a whole heap of painkillers to dull the constant throbbing in my stump, and passed out on my bed.

“Are you sure you’ll be ok on your own?” Mum asked as she dug around in her handbag for her keys.

“I’ll be fine, Mum, really.”

“Well, ring me on my mobile if you need me. I’ll have it on all the time.”

“I’m not going to ring you while you’re seeing patients.”

“But what if you fall and can’t get up again?”

“Mum, I’m not a baby. Go.”

“Ok then, but I’ll be home for lunch.”

And to check that I was still ok, I thought. I watched from the breakfast nook as she retrieved her car keys out of her bag and headed for the door.

“Ok, just text me if you need anything,” she said as she reluctantly headed into the garage to her car.

I heard the automatic door whine as it went up; her car reverse and the door wind down again. The crunch of the tyres on the gravel and then she was gone. I breathed a sigh of relief and picked up my mobile to text Gina.

She texted back almost immediately; she had been waiting. I smiled and drank my coffee, listening to the silence. You wouldn’t think that you could listen to silence, but you can. For weeks there had been nothing but noise around me. Even in the dead of night at the hospital, there was always something on. I’d come to appreciate the moments when there was no sound at all.

The doorbell rang, punching through the silence. I gathered my crutches and pulled myself onto them, steadying as I took that first swing. I hated the crutches, they made my hands ache and chafed at my armpits and I couldn’t wait until that artificial foot was ready. The doorbell rang again as I slowly made my way out of the kitchen and across the hall to the door.

“I’m coming!” I yelled out.

“I certainly hope you are,” Gina said when I opened the door. “Mmmm, do I smell coffee?”

I closed the door behind her and followed her into the kitchen. She’d found the filter coffee by the time I got there and had poured herself a cupful, adding milk from the fridge. She’d been at my house enough times to know where everything was.

I sat down beside her and picked up my abandoned coffee cup.

“Are we going to drink coffee all day?” I asked before taking a sip.

“I don’t think so. God, I thought your Mum was never going to go back to work.” Then she leaned forward and kissed me.

You can put the rest together: empty house, me and her alone, and, apart from a few embarrassing moments dealing with clunky crutches and getting from kitchen to bedroom, it was like we hadn’t been apart for months and I wasn’t missing half a leg. I think in a way I needed it more than any treatment – a way of affirming that I was still a man even though part of me had gone.

Afterwards I ran my hands through her hair and drew a lazy circle on the tip of her shoulder. Her skin was a dusky shade of brown which contrasted with her blonde hair. Her skin always went dark in summer, as soon as she got into the sun.

“Are you Maori?” I asked, surprising her and myself, as I didn’t mean to say it.

“Would you love me any less if I was?”

“Don’t be silly.” I kissed the tip of her nose.

“My grandmother is from Italy,” she said. “She came here after the war. Her name is Angelina - I'm named after her.”

“What about your father?”

“I don’t even know who my father is. Mum won’t talk about him much. Just says he was a loser that got her pregnant, married her and then left.”

I kissed her forehead. “But he made you, so he couldn’t have been all that bad.”

“That’s about the only good thing he did, according to my mother. Why all these questions all of a sudden?”

“Mark thinks I may be Maori.”

“You? But your name is Campbell, and your father is Scottish.”

“It’s his father that came from Scotland. My mother’s family came from Australia.”

“Then why would he think you were Maori?”

“I had some strange dreams while I was in hospital. Mark came up with a weird theory that I was being visited by my ancestors, but I haven’t had any more since I came off the drugs. It seems like they were just hallucinations.”

“And you wonder why I went off you for a while with all this talk of visitations and holy spirits. I’m glad you’re back, Bevan.”

She snuggled into my arms and I closed my eyes. “I’m glad you’re back too, Gina,” I said before I drifted into sleep.

Haki ducked low as the projectile flew high above his head. It exploded behind him sending clods of earth into the air. Stones rained on his back and he flinched as a large one took him on the shoulder. A man was screaming; he had been hit.

Haki peered out between the gaps in the palisade at the ship moored in the river. It had attacked them the previous day, throwing iron shells into the air that came at speed towards the pa before exploding into shards of instant death. The guns from the British fort at the old Te Teoteo pa also spat their missiles so that attack had come from two sides, but the pa at Meremere had held. The warriors shot at the soldiers from behind their palisade even though there was no hope of ever reaching either the men on the ship or the men at the old pa. Still, it made them believe that as long as they fired, they could not be overtaken. They held out for two long hours and then the gunboat in the river had moved on, past the pa, further up the Waikato before returning in the night.

In the morning more guns had been loaded onto the boat as well as a large volume of men, and Haki knew that the assault they were waiting for had come. He, along with the other warriors, had watched as the boat came close to Meremere, and they prepared their own artillery pieces. But they were short of ammunition, and it would not last long against replenished supply on the British Army’s boat.

They would defend the pa with their lives regardless.

A puff of smoke indicated that the gun on the ship had fired again. Haki heard the shell as it travelled through the air – a shuddering scream that sounded like a spirit had been released. He could even feel it, the air being pushed away as it fell from its high trajectory towards the pa.

It landed, exploding to his left and again he hunched down as the ground heaved under him and the soil splattered over his back. He loaded his musket, determined to counter-attack, but there was no one at which to aim his weapon – they were hidden behind the hard metal sides of the boat in the river, or behind the high sod walls of the fort. Frustrated, he fired the musket at the boat, but he knew that his bullet flew harmlessly for the range was too long.

“Save your bullets,” hissed the man beside him.

“They will not come out of their holes!”

“They will come,” the man assured him.

Behind him their own artillery fired, a loud percussion that reverberated through the pa. Their ammunition was futile: chain, scrap metal and iron weights, whatever they had been able to salvage from their stores and it didn’t have the range or the force of the British ammunition from the boat’s guns but it was preventing the boat from coming close to shore and offloading the men that hid in its depths.

As Haki watched, one of the heavy steelyard weights penetrated the skin of the vessel and a thin column of smoke came from the hole it had blasted in the boat’s superstructure. He was heartened by this; their attempts were not completely in vain.

The ship answered with a barrage of its own. Haki watched as the shell rose high above him, appearing to pause at the apex of its flight. Again he drew his head in, waiting for the press of earth around him. It landed close, knocking him sideways and blowing out his eardrums. Earth, stones and liquid showered him. Dazed, he sat up, wiping the liquid from his face. It was red – blood! His own? He looked over at the man who had spoken to him earlier, but all that remained was a torso that still twitched.

Enraged, he stood up, his musket in one hand and his patu in the other. He held both weapons high and yelled at the boat, the sound muffled through his damaged ears. The second gun had spoken and a shell arched high in the air. Haki ignored it, hurling abuses at the men in the boat below him even though his words were lost in the din of battle. The shell was falling towards him but he didn’t duck down. He was not going to hide any longer.

It exploded behind him and the shockwave tossed him over the palisade and onto the slope below. As his head hit the ground, everything went black.