Helena had gently slipped away.
The image Timu had kept of that terrible day was her face on the pillow, looking amazingly smooth, and so peaceful that it reminded him of their good times—the years before Mark was born.
Six years had passed since then, but the guilt engendered by what Timu, during those nights when he couldn’t get to sleep, thought of as a murder had finally caught up with him. It had set off a chain of disasters, the last link of which was just about to yield. Bladder cancer: a smoker’s cancer, so they said.
He’d already had one operation to treat the condition. It had merely gained him a little time. These days, his urine was saturated with blood, and all he could do was grit his teeth and bear it. Another operation would only gain him a little more time, and he didn’t want to end up like Helena. Beevan would observe confidentiality: that was the only thing that mattered.
“If there’s anything I can do . . . ”
Timu shook his head. What was the point? Solitude couldn’t be shared, or else only with death. He put on his jacket.
“Here,” Beevan said, slipping a box of pills into his big hand, “take these. They’ll help you cope.”
Timu nodded, muttered a gruff good-bye, and left the medical center.
Outside, the sun was shining for everyone.
Mark . . .
7.
Paul left Red Hill the day he turned eighteen, barely a week after the episode on the waste ground. They were hiring part-time workers at the Kmart in Newmarket. Paul found a room near the centre of town, rented by the week. He put his things in a bag and left the family house, without a word of explanation.
Mary did admittedly cry a few tears, but her maternal feelings soon dried up. She said goodbye to him without suspecting how final this good-bye was. Thomas, more pragmatically, simply wished him good luck.
His younger brother, John, was playing on the street with some local kids when Paul opened the gate and ran to him. “Where are you going?” he asked, seeing Paul’s suitcase.
“The North Pole,” Paul replied. “To see the polar bears.”
John was all of eight years old, and didn’t think of himself as a little boy anymore. “Are you leaving?”
“Yes.”
“Will you come back often?”
“No.”
John’s face dropped.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Paul said. “I’m not going to war.”
That didn’t make him laugh. Paul neither: it was time to go.
“Well, good-bye, old son.” He turned to look along the dismal avenue that was the only world they knew. “And try and get out of here, OK?”
John stood there in his short pants, looking at him with a mixture of fear and admiration, like a dog looking at a wolf. Paul patted his half brother on the shoulder and left. His foot balanced on his skateboard, John watched him walk as far as the bus stop, right at the end of the street. The South Pole would have been closer . . .
The abortive encounter with his father, Hana, the waste ground, the Douglas sisters spitting, the stone he had thrown at the only person he had ever loved, the mud that had filled his throat ever since: Paul had decided to forget all that. He didn’t know what would happen. He had lost everything.
He was hired for a trial period on the checkout of the Kmart, and when that worked out well they offered him a part-time contract. Paul accepted—it was either that or Red Hill. The city center, its broad streets, the ocean, the people: everything was new, even the wind. The wind that blew along the avenues was laden with salt, not the smells of the abattoir. No violent confrontations here, just shop windows filled with the promises of the West, all on special offer.
Paul would stroll along Queen Street, spending the few hours he had in trying to forget. With his timetable at the supermarket—three hours in the morning and four in the evening, the busiest times—these afternoons in town were always too short. And he never met anyone. As for the employees at the Kmart, those who had similar positions were too worried about losing their jobs to make friends, and those above him in the hierarchy stuck rigidly to a system that barely tolerated them.
Paul was alone but, thanks to a bold stratagem that allowed him to avoid being routinely searched on the way out of the Kmart, he would steal books. Piles of books.
At first he would steal just anything, or at any rate books that didn’t take up so much room, then he started to select, to choose particular subjects, to avoid bestsellers and books on order from customers and concentrate on the best works. Not much Maori literature in among them, maybe because that was basically an oral culture. The exception was Alan Duff, who at the time—the days of white repentance—stood out from his contemporaries by pinning the blame on the Maori community. His ideas were so controversial that Paul wasn’t sure what to think of them: should the Maoris of New Zealand adapt to Western ways or continue to vegetate on the outskirts of cities that would end up devouring them if they couldn’t be assimilated socially? The question still interested him, but, as with most things, he didn’t know what to do about it.
This little ploy lasted two years. Paul lived alone in a room for fifty dollars a week, his mind grew as the books took over all available space—Gibson, the head of personnel, never noticed a thing—and he still hadn’t forgotten anything. That stone still stuck in his throat.
Other girls were no help. The image of Hana in the mud continued to haunt him. It would come to him in his dreams, in waves, a black tide over the ruins he was trying to rebuild, for her sake. Paul had fled Red Hill as Hana herself had done a little while earlier, but he had forgotten nothing: her body on the other side of the hedge, the terrible remorse that had seized him by the throat after he had realized what he had done. Gorging on books, he had reconstructed himself piece by piece, ready for the day when he found her again—because he would find her again. And then suddenly there she was, as he was sitting at the supermarket checkout.
Suddenly faced with that incredible sight—Hana, with a carton of milk in her hand—Paul held his breath.
She had changed in two years. She wasn’t wearing tight-fitting clothes anymore, but a blouse and black pants that really suited her. The way she held herself had changed too. It was as if she’d grown taller. Her face was harder, darker, more beautiful. She was nothing like the girl he’d abandoned on the waste ground in Red Hill, filthy with mud.
Hana didn’t say a word, not even hello. She placed her quart carton of milk on the conveyor belt and waited for her change. Not knowing what to say, Paul was silent. The same smell. The same attraction . . . Hana took the few coins he held out to her and, still without a word, walked away, her carton of milk in her hand.
The next customer placed his articles on the conveyor belt, but he didn’t exist. Hana turned back to look at the checkout, where Paul sat watching her go. She took something out of her pocket and threw it toward him. A stone rolled down the conveyor belt.
Five days had passed. Apart from the state of his nose, there had been no notable developments. Hana and Pita Witkaire were conspicuous by their absence. Osborne had managed to contact an influential member of the Tainui tribe who hadn’t been very forthcoming and had pointed him in the direction of another hapu.17 After another series of fruitless calls, he had spoken to a man named Hira Te Hae, who told him that Pita had in fact been to see him the previous month. They’d gone fishing together, talked about the good old days, but he hadn’t heard from him since then. As for Samuel Tukao, the name meant nothing to anyone. It was as if the lawyer had never been a part of the Tainui tribe. Even Osborne’s former contacts in the community were evasive.
The intertribal meeting was due to take place in two weeks. Why had Pita Witkaire suddenly vanished? Was he also looking for his granddaughter? Hana had dropped out of sight, but the letter sent to her parents was only a smoke screen. To get her away from what? From him? His sick paranoia had regained the upper hand. He was falling back into bad habits, the kind he’d gotten into in Sydney, as if none of this had served any purpose.
Inevitably, his inquiries into the burglary at Nick Melrose’s house hadn’t gotten him very far. Osborne had questioned the chiefs of the main tribes in the area, among them the Ngai Tahu, who advocated a return to tribal roots, representatives of various native groups, the radical branch of Ratana, the spiritual and political force that for some time now had been allied with the Labour Party, and the leaders of the Mana Motuhake party, advocates of self-determination—all without any concrete results. He had even gone to the south of the island to meet the Ngati Kahungunu chiefs, but the only lead he had found had taken him back twenty-five years, to the events of Bastion Point, where Zinzan Bee had been one of the protesters.
Bastion Point. The episode dated back to 1977, when the Ngati Whatua tribe had occupied the lands of their ancestors, then the property of the British crown, to prevent its development for construction. This occupation had been the first in a series of Maori protests that had shaken the country. Although the Bastion Point protesters had finally been expelled by force, the Waitangi Tribunal had been set up to hear their claims. This tribunal had forced New Zealanders, more specifically the pakehas, to confront their past. In signing the Treaty of Waitangi, which had been deliberately badly translated, the Maoris had thought they were ensuring the right to oversee the actions of the Whites, whereas in reality the Whites had been assuming power. Basically, the lands ceded in return for blankets and muskets belonged to nobody: the Maori had thought they were merely renting them out. The confiscations that had followed the Maori wars, then the policies pursued until 1950—which had encouraged colonists to build settlements on native land without the natives being able to defend themselves—weren’t anything like what had been taught in school. They had amounted to theft, pure and simple, especially of land considered tapu—sacred—and taboo. The treaty had not been applied, on the principle that “a document signed by a European government and a primitive people could not have any value in the eyes of the law,” and the rebellion had been violently suppressed.
