From Under the Overcoat (17 page)

That is what I didn’t understand, on the night that Tāne called us to the house. My father was standing in the doorway but he had shrunk. I could see great dark spaces above his head and around his body.

His head hung low, his dark curly hair falling forward over his face.

‘Dad, are you okay?’ I said. ‘Are you sick? What’s wrong with you?’

My father said nothing. He didn’t lift his head.

Tāne spoke. In the flickering light of the candles, I saw that his hand was still on my mother’s shoulder.

‘For a long time, things haven’t been right,’ Tāne said.

I looked at Mum again. This was probably going to be a bit of a telling off. We had these family meetings now and again, where we all got pulled into line for playing up. Mum and Dad would let things go for ages, then they would decide
Enough’s enough
, and get us all in together for a kōrero. That’s what this was. A telling off.

‘We’re sick of living out here in the wops,’ Tāne went on. He was staring at Dad. ‘We’ve had enough, man. We’re going.’

‘Where?’

‘We’re going to the city. No future here, no jobs, no nothing.’

‘No.’ Barely a whisper, this new voice of my father.

‘You can stay. Please yourself. Mum can please herself too. But we’re going, all of us kids.’

Outside the house and inside my head, the pressure rose and fell. The pain was like fire.

‘No one asked me,’ I said. ‘No one has asked me.’

Tāne stepped out from behind my mother’s chair. Every time he took a step forward, he seemed to grow taller, broader. I looked back at my father, who seemed to be disappearing with each of Tāne’s movements.

‘What are you doing, Mum? Staying, or coming with us kids?’

The idea was so stupid, I laughed. I cracked up, you’d say these days. Outside the storm was cracking along too; the wind had come up and was hissing through the crannies of the weatherboards, bringing a chill to the room. Rain smashed hard against the windows, as though it was knocking to come in and dampen my pōrangi giggling.

What were my brothers doing? Nothing. They sat quite still, at my mother’s side, and let Tāne speak for them. After a time, I stopped laughing.

‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Tell him to cut it out.’

My mother had lost her will to speak. Her eyes were dark, empty. I watched as they filled with tears. She didn’t brush them away; they ran down her face in two tiny wet lines. I looked over again to Dad. He had put his hands against the doorframe, as though he needed it for support to stop him falling to the ground.

Tāne started pacing around the room. He pulsed life,
energy. I had always been frightened of him, my oldest brother; the only one to take on Tū and win a fight. He put himself out there as a peaceful guy but look out if anyone challenged him.

‘Mum won’t let us down. What mother would let her kids go off to the city? On their own?’ Tāne was ranting now.

A terrible tight feeling was building in my chest. I’d had enough of this. Tāne had gone pōrangi. Bloody crazy. I got up off the floor and stood before him, between his huge body and my father.

‘Kāti,’ I shouted at him. ‘Cut it out. What do you think you’re doing?’

He pushed me away. ‘Keep out of this,’ he said. ‘You’re the youngest, you don’t understand.’

The power came back on, though the wind and the rain were still howling outside. I turned back to my mother. Under the harsh glare of the bare light bulbs, she looked so pale. She was sobbing.

‘Tāwhiri’s right,’ she screamed at Tāne. ‘You’re mad. I don’t know what all this is about, but I’m not leaving. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘You see?’ I shouted at Tāne. ‘What are you doing? They’re happy. We’re happy. What else do you want?’

My father looked up at Tāne. ‘Don’t take her, son,’ he said.

Tāne loomed tall over Dad. ‘She’s going, Dad,’ he said. ‘We’re all going.’

It was like a strange dream, none of it making sense but rolling on anyway, out of control. Mum didn’t want to go. Dad didn’t want her to go. The whole thing was driven by Tāne, supported by all my other brothers.

I went to Mum, still in her chair. I wanted to climb into her lap — as the youngest, I could still get away with doing that — and she reached forward to pull me towards her. But Tangaroa kicked out at me, forcing me away from her. ‘Get off,’ he hissed. ‘Don’t be such a baby.’

Back to Dad I went, backwards and forwards between the two of them, trying to make reason. The house was shaking in the storm and the air pressure in the room rose and fell, rose and fell. My ears were hurting more and more and my rash had returned. My whole body burned.

Tāne leaned over Dad and spoke quietly into his ear. ‘Let us go, Dad,’ he said, pushing me away as he spoke. ‘Let her go. She can’t survive here without her kids.’

He and Dad had locked eyes. I fell back from them both; whatever this thing was, this enormous thing, it sat between them now.

‘Go,’ Dad said, waving his hand, dismissing us. ‘All of you, go. Take her with you.’

He walked away, down the hallway, into the darkness.

Tāne turned and smiled at me. ‘In time,’ he said, ‘you’ll understand.’

My brothers had released my mother; she sat slumped in the chair, her mouth turned down at the corners like a sad clown’s. Tāne spoke to me quietly. ‘Go and pack your bags,’ he said. ‘We’re going tonight.’

I was full of rage: the rage of not understanding, the rage of powerlessness, the rage of being the youngest. It started as the itch, then it built up inside me to something I couldn’t control. It bubbled hot beneath my skin; my whole body turned pink, then dark red, as though I’d burned myself
under the sun.

I think you’d say today, I lost the plot. I don’t actually recall the moment, but some time later, I found myself sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. The table was broken, smashed into pieces. The candles were waxy pools on the floor, stomped flat. Every window was shattered, the thin curtains ripped from their rails, the stuffing torn from the insides of the armchair and sofa.

I was covered in blood; my hands cut. There was no sign of my brothers or my mother. I got up and walked through the dark house: everything belonging to them was gone, it was as though they had never lived there.

I heard crying. I opened my parents’ bedroom door. My father was on the bed, curled up like a child. I climbed onto the bed and lay behind him, wrapping my arms around him. ‘I’m not going, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m staying with you.’

WITH THE HANDS ON
the clock not moving, I have no idea of the time. The late afternoon light in the newsroom hasn’t shifted either. The others in the school group are nowhere to be seen.

‘Shall I go on?’ I ask the boy, and he nods. Green eyes glistening, are they tears?

MY MOTHER AND BROTHERS
never came back. They settled in a big city a long way away. They immediately thrived there, stunted plants that had finally found water and sunshine. Tāne became an influential person in the conservation
movement, Tangaroa an entrepreneurial fisherman, with his own fleet of fine trawlers. Haumia and Rongo pooled their knowledge of plants and gardening, and together established a big chain of gardening stores. Tū? No prizes for guessing. Soldier first, then later a politician.

A bit of gossip here, a snippet from a newspaper there. That’s how I found out what they were up to. It was of little interest to me; I could think only of my mother. I obsessed over her. I couldn’t leave home, couldn’t risk leaving my father in his fragile state. I made do with scavenging news of her from any source.

I watched, listened, read. Once, when I was lighting the fire in the kitchen, I happened across a photo of Tū in an old newspaper. He was in the foreground, at a lectern, giving a speech about the importance of maintaining old military alliances in an ever-threatening climate of unrest, or something like that.

Behind Tū’s earnest face was my mother. Her hands were clasped beneath her chin, almost as though she was praying. She was looking at the back of Tū’s head, but the camera had caught her face perfectly. The expression was one of rapture, absolute, unconditional devotion.

I finished lighting the fire and hammered on my father’s bedroom door.

‘I need to talk to you,’ I shouted. I expected the usual response:
Go away, leave me alone
. But for once, he called me in.

He was sitting up in bed. Although I saw him most days shuffling around the kitchen, it was only then, swaddled in dirty bedclothes, in the middle of a too-big bed, that the true depth of his despair revealed itself. Everything about him
had turned grey: his hair, his skin, even, it seemed, the room. The air was heavy and putrid — the windows had not been opened since my mother had left. Black mould grew up the walls and across the ceiling. It was as though my father was embedded in the calm, foul vortex of an ugly storm.

‘Enough,’ I said.

He looked at me as though he had no idea who I was.

‘Let’s go. Let’s pack up our stuff and go to the city.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘We can’t stay here, Dad. This is hopeless. Look at you. Look at us.’

‘No. It could never work out.’ He recited the words slowly. His eyes wandered to the window as he spoke. ‘She made a choice. The boys ahead of me.’

The itch was coming: the tingle on my scalp, the prickle on my neck.

‘I stayed with you, Dad. Now you should do something for me.’

‘I owe you nothing,’ my father said. ‘It was your choice to stay.’ And he turned away from me again.

The rash spread like fire down my body, across my shoulders, down my arms and chest and into my groin. It came down my face, searing my eyelids, parching my lips. I ran my fingers over my mouth and felt the fragile skin beginning to crack. I started for the door, for my usual hiding place under the house. Then I remembered — there was no one to bother now with the scratching, no one except my father, who no longer cared about me.

I got as far as the front door of the house. A rage was building inside me but it was different from the rages I had
experienced in the past, the ones heralding a storm. It was a rage against myself — my stupidity at choosing to stay with my father, with a man who clearly did not value my sacrifice.

The blind white anger that had engulfed me the night our family split came over me again. My last recollection was standing in the doorway, looking out at a beautiful clear, warm day. My next knowing moment was coming to, in the same place at the front door, in the middle of a hailstorm — a whiteout of freezing cloud, ice balls as big as my fists smashing hard against my face.

I stood quite still, cold white mist touching my hot skin, cooling it down. It was beautiful relief. I tore my shirt off and let the invisible droplets take the rage out of my body. I closed my eyes. The cool brushed against my eyelids like an iced feather.

I should have been frightened, but the relief was too great for me to feel panic.

The day unfolded like most others around that time; my father remained shut in his room, exiting only to nibble at whatever he could find in the kitchen and to use the outhouse. I roamed the hills around our house, bare-chested, enjoying the delicious chill of the mist on my tender skin. I stayed out until night fell and the mist turned into a thick wet fog. I lay on the grass and tried to peer through the strange white stillness to the stars.

While I looked at the fog and the sky, I started to think about the whiteout. How I had not felt its approach. How I had wished for something to cool my itching, raging skin. How I had wanted something like that so badly, and how I had got what I wanted.

I MISUSED MY GIFT
. Instead of letting the anger build up inside me, I had a bit of fun.

I’d think of Tangaroa out fishing, bringing home kai for them all to share while my father and I made do with the sad, straggling remains of my mother’s vegetable garden. A wild storm would pummel the seas, tearing his precious boats to pieces and casting fisherman to their death.

I would think of my two green-fingered brothers and their successful gardening shops. A salty wind would blow hard from the sea, through the rows of plants, burning their green leaves to a black, brittle crisp.