Hana had taken shelter behind dark glasses. He presented the tickets to the man in the cap.
“OK, get on.”
“Where are we going?
“Over there.”
Yellow ticket: destination Great Barrier. A three-hour journey across the restless Hauraki Gulf, fifty miles from Auckland. Two round-trips a day to the wildest inhabited island in New Zealand.
The lack of infrastructure had ended by putting tourists off, the company that had once run a shuttle had suspended the service, preferring to double its capacity toward Waiheke, which was closer. To get to Barrier, you now had to fall back on two local air companies or the little black-hulled freighter that supplied the island with merchandise. A nauseous cloud of fuel smoke pursued Paul and Hana onto the upper deck as the boat left the quay.
Hana had changed a lot in nine years. So had he, probably. After all that waiting for her return, he looked older than his thirty years.
He offered her a cigarette.
“No, thanks. How did you know I was back?”
“I saw the notice of your grandmother’s death in the newspaper.”
“I didn’t see you at the funeral.”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“You always invited yourself, didn’t you?”
“I just never quite understood the way I was invited.”
It was a reference to the wero on West Coast Road, but that had been a long time ago, and Hana didn’t pick him up on it. In the shelter of the gulf, the water was a tropical blue. Hana stretched her arm over the guardrail to catch the sea spray. Paul was silent for a moment.
Leaning on the rail, two Chinese kids were throwing their ice-cream cones into the churning propellers while their parents looked on affectionately, seizing the opportunity to take photographs.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I came?” Hana said without looking at him.
“No.
“You’re right not to.”
Impossible to know what she was plotting behind her sunglasses. The breeze ruffling her blouse loosened a button.
“Not for something dirty, at least?” she said.
He shook his head. “Not any more.”
“A pity,” she said, doing up the button. “It was quite good last time, wasn’t it?”
“Not bad, yes.”
Cape Reinga. The thought of it made him want to throw up.
A flight of seagulls passed across the sky. The Pacific glittered, its multitude of small reefs like so many nature reserves, but he was the one who had washed up at her feet. Hana was like a block of marble. Her grandmother’s death had clearly had a profound effect on her.
A heavy swell rose from the sea. Squeezed up against the prow of the freighter, the children screamed at every wave that swept the deck.
“What have you been doing all this time?”
“Seeing things,” she replied, evasively. “And you? I heard you’d become a cop. Some kind of Maori specialist, from what I’ve been told.”
There was no irony in her voice.
“The guy who runs the department is a Maori,” he said, trying to sidestep the issue. “He made me aware of the issues.”
“Fitzgerald’s a traitor,” Hana declared.
“He’s a good cop.”
“The Maoris have better things to do than collaborate with the pakeha authorities.”
“You’ve been away a long time,” he said. “The country’s changed.”
“Oh, really?”
Hana might be in mourning, but she hadn’t lost her anger.
“All that period of repentance is over,” Paul went on in a deliberately neutral voice. “The authorities have apologized for the land confiscations, they’ve paid, now we’re quits and it’s every man for himself. They say we have to adapt. No one has a choice anymore. Under the current policies, the poor are considered at best as welfare recipients, at worst as scum. And you know as well as I do that the Maoris have always found it hard to adapt to the system.”
“Your system.”
“Yes, our system,” Paul conceded. “That’s why there are so many Maoris in prison.”
