Once Were Warriors

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  1. A Woman in Pine Block

  2. Two Kids on a Bench

  3. They Who Have History

  4. … And Those With Another

  5. Tennessee Waltz

  6. Jake and the Broken of Hearts and Spirits

  7. The Night’s Last Act

  8. The Visit

  9. Loveless, She Stumbled

  10. They Who Have History II

  11. The House of Angry Belonging

  12. Visits

  13. Letter from the Grave

  14. Hark! The People Cometh

  15. The Will of The People

  16. Deep Tattoo

  17. Love Is Where You Find It

  18. And Still They Cometh

  19. So Life, It Is for Those Who Fight

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Chris Else and Barbara Neale, my agents, of Total Fiction Services, for their visionary advice. My publishers, Bob Ross and Helen Benton, for their faith.

  Richard King, who edited the book and agreed to forgo the conventions.

  1. A Woman in Pine Block

  Bastard, she’d think, looking out her back kitchen window. Lucky white bastard, at that glimpse of two-storey house through its surround of big old trees and its oh so secure greater surround of rolling green pastureland, while she — Clicking her tongue, Oh to hell with him. Or good luck to him, if she wasn’t in too bad a mood.

  Good luck to you, white man, for being born into your sweet world, and bad luck to you, Beth Heke (who used to be a Ransfield but not that life was so much better then), for being married to an arsehole. And yet I love him. Just can’t help myself, I love the black, fist-happy bastard. And she’d light another smoke, and always went ahh in her mind and sometimes aloud because she liked that first hit against the back of her throat, and she’d squint through the drifts. And wonder.

  And sometimes she’d be upstairs, looking out her bedroom window at the view on the other side of the house, the front. If you could call it a view; just a mirror reflection across the street of her house and the half next door and the whole fuckin street of exact same state dwellings. A mile-long picture of the same thing; all the same, just two-storey, side-by-side misery boxes. Only thing different was the colour of the paint job, and even then you hardly noticed it. And your neighbour through a few inches of wall.

  And Beth’d watch the kids; the scab-kneed, snot-nosed, ragamuffin-clothed kids of the area doing their various things out there. Beth wondering, all the time wondering. At them. The kids. The unkempt, ill-directioned, neglected kids. And her own kids. How were they going to fare? How were they faring now? If you could call living in this Pine Block state-housing area faring.

  For hours at a time, sometimes, she’d watch the mirrors of her existence outside, down there below her and Jake’s bedroom window. And feel like a spy. Spying on my own people. Them out there. Us. The going-nowhere nobodies who populate this state-owned, half of us state-fed, slum. The Maoris. Or most ofem are.

  Feeling like a traitor in her own midst because her thoughts so often turned to disgust, disapproval, shame, and sometimes to anger, even hate. Of them, her own people. And how they carried on. At the restrictions they put on themselves (and so their choiceless children) of assuming life to be this daily struggle, this acceptance that they were a lesser people; and boozing away their lives and the booze making things all distorted and warped and violent.

  And not having dreams. Like him out the back there, Trambert; of dreaming of one day owning a house like him, and a farm. Mr fuckin white Trambert with the big stately dwelling (Oh very funny, Beth) and endless green paddocks that backed onto the line of miserable state boxes erected on land he’d once owned but sold to them, the government, so they could house another lot of brown nobodies. To dream; of being like him, with acres and acres of land to feel under your feet, and hundreds and hundreds of sheep growing fat and woolly to add to your thousands and thousands in the fuckin bank. To dream. Of peace in the world; like Trambert must have peace in his nice white world. While here, down there on the street below, are kids practising to be the nothing nobody, but violent, adults of the future. Jesus, Beth, any wonder you feel you need a drink.

  The footpath: it began life as a tarsealed walkway, then cracks started to appear, and then little sags. And a hole’d develop. And the kids, the mindless kids even in them days, they found you could pick away at a crack and soon you’d have a section of footpath, and they’d dash these biscuits of walkway to the ground, smashem to smithereens, playing like Samson because he was all the rage in those days. Wasn’t long before there wasn’t much footpath to walk on. A woman had to walk on the road. But she hardly noticed then. Not in them days, a newly married girl moved into a spanking new state house (her and Jake’s half of it, that is) provided by a kind government who didn’t charge much rental.

  She had dreams then. But they got lost along the way. Sixteen years is a long time. For dreams to stay alive. And wasn’t as if the dream was to be a Trambert, a Mrs Trambert, no. Just to have a whole house with her own bit of land under her feet that she and Jake and their kids could call their own. But nothing like a few hidings — from the man sposed to be part of the dream — to reduce life and its dreams to thoughts that grow to disbelief, how the mind went: Come on, Beth, don’t kid yourself. You ain’t going nowhere but Pine Block. Trying to fight it — at first — lying in wait like some cunning animal for Jake to be in a good mood and then swooping in on him: Ah, Jake … I was thinking, you know, about us and, oh just, you know, life in general, and where it’s taking us. But you think he’d listen?

  Even in his better moments he just looked at a woman, gave her one of those smiles. Of dismissal. Telling her she was kidding herself. And he’d ask her why she wanted to be different from everyone else, wasn’t she satisfied and who’d she think she was anyway? Ah, dreams.

  Sixteen years is a long time. To live in hell. Well, maybe not hell, she wouldn’t go that far. There’s been good times, and not a few either. Wasn’t as if the flames’d been licking at her feet all these years, now be fair, Beth. Hahaha, laughing at herself. Oh Beth, you’re a one at times. But then again, it sure ain’t heaven neither or what is Jake doing here? Hahaha, have to laugh, eh girl. Better’n cryin about it. (Though a woman did have her moments.)

  Or she’d be watching the TV. An afternoon soapie. Young and the Restless. Time-killing, time-passing stuff if a woman was too broke to go join a card school somewhere or her face too beat up to go anywhere — (I ain’t having em looking at me sniggering to emselves, whispering their told-you-so’s to each other as if they got Husbands of the Year, laughing at a woman for marrying Jake when everyone knew what he was like, with his fists, how fist-happy he was. But so did she: I just thought I could see the, you know, potential in him. And anyrate, not as if he’s his whole life punching me up. Only when he’s drunk, and then not every time, not even half the time, what would they know, those sniggering whispering bitches out there? As if they can talk) — and she’d spot something; something right out of kilter, not related to the programme, not properly. Something, someone in the background.

  A passing truck and she’d catch the flash of its sign on the door and might read something or other Seafoods, and she’d sit there thinking about what kind of seafood those Yanks ate, while the Yanks she was sposed to be watching were doing their usual drama stuff, beautiful people being nasty to each other, rich white bitches and bastards not satisfied with life being kind to em, they have to go and hurt each other. Or it might be a waiter in one of their flash restaurants the stars were always having dinner and lunch in, and Beth sitting there thinking how she’d feel ha
ving to wait on some flash bitch dripping with jewellery and silk all over and treating her like shit. I’d probably slap the bitch’s face. But I’d make sure I’d been paid up my wages first, laughing at that, at herself, her peculiar thoughts.

  Other day it was a bookcase. Fulla books of course. Of course; what bookcases are for, aren’t they? Oh come on, Beth, at herself for being stupid in her mind. Silly. Like a teenager. Like Grace. Her daughter. My thirteen-year going on fifty-year-old. Hardly like her. She smiled, her face’d crack. And it occurred to Beth that her own house — no, not just her own house but every house she’d ever been in — was bookless. The thought struck her like one of Jake’s punches, dunno why. So much so she had to get up and walk around; paced up and down the downstairs passage, smoking, unable to ease her agitation. Bookless. Bookless. We’re a bookless society. It kept hammering and hammering home. Soon it was like a sense of loss, almost grief. And she thinking, Jesus, what’s wrong with me? So what if this house has no books, what’s the big deal about books? But it kept nagging away at her.

  She took her mind over dwelling after dwelling she’d been to, relations’ homes, her own childhood home, friends. But no. It was bookless. She thought why? Almost in anguish. Why are Maoris not interested in books? Well, they didn’t have a written language before the white man arrived, maybe that was it. But still it bothered her. And she began to think that it was because a bookless society didn’t stand a show in this modern world, not a damn show. And I live in it, don’t I? and my kids.

  She went upstairs, went through the kids’ rooms, trying to find a book and finding only comics and magazines, karate mags, boxing and rugby mags under the two older boys’ beds, and — (Oh, what’s this? A Penthouse snucked right away underneath Nig’s bed. The eldest. Her favourite. My Nig. Flicking through the pages — good God. What’s this? Recoiling in horror at the sight of a woman in full-colour naked glory with her — her fanny exposed for the whole wide world to see. Slamming it shut. Staring at the ceiling, at the door, she didn’t know where to look; at the poster-covered walls deceptively adorned with pictures of males in fighting poses, boxers, karate jokers, thinking: well, well, well. My boy’s growing up. Not having seen a Penthouse before. Thirty-four years old and I haven’t seen or even known of a magazine like this. Finding herself opening the mag again, discovering several sections of glossy photographs of women stark naked and looking pretty, you know, sexy for it despite their brazenness. Beth’s heart thumping just a little more than normal. And a tingle, just a little one, down there, of sex. Of wanting sex. Oh wow. Far out, girl. You’re thirty-four and you’re getting turned on by a few photos of naked women. Are you around the twist? But it wasn’t a latent lesbian desire suddenly brought out of her, she knew that. Just sex. She quite liked sex. With my husband. When he feels like it, and I don’t mean feels like doing it for himself.) — and after she was recovered she searched on, in the girls’ room, Grace and Polly’s. Mags and comics. No books. Teenage girl mags with pages and pages of pictures of prissy white girls dolled up, or in skimpy swimming outfits, why would a Maori girl with dark skin even for a Maori want to read look at stuff like this when she had no chance of looking like them? No chance. Then Beth realised she was thinking like Jake about her thirteen-year-old daughter’s prospects, her future. Oh, let her read this kind of stuff if that’s what turns her on. But no books. And Polly, she was ten and her school reports had her getting poor grades for reading so she wouldn’t likely have books under her bed, though Beth did check just in case Polly surprised her. So she went downstairs and it wasn’t necessary to go into the sitting room cause sure weren’t no books in there, up to the kitchen where she sat down feeling quite drained. Thinking over and over again: bookless. We’re bloody bookless, all of us.

  Then the council came along with men and machines and they laid a concrete footpath in place of the ruined old. Fixed the vandalising little kids right up. So they, the kids, painted things on it, with old paint from backyard sheds, or stolen from somewhere; obscenities, hearts with arrows through them and initials inside of who loved who, and hearts with who hated who and the heart dripping with blood; they marked out hopscotch squares, noughts and crosses grids, with paint and lipstick and from spraycans (till they discovered, this new generation, the high to be got from sniffing the fumes from a can of spray paint) for years the kids put their marks on the footpath. So it looked no different to the area, the tone of Pine Block: neglected, run-down, abused. And, you know (a woman’d have to think hard to find the right word), prideless.

  Made her want to weep sometimes. And not so much for her as for her kids. Their future. If you could call it that.

  Walking along the street, not just Rimu Street but any of the nine or ten that crisscrossed each other in this perfect pattern, the car wrecks. More and more the car wrecks appeared on front lawns, down the side of a place (and out back) and stayed there. Sat out on front lawns, up on wooden blocks or bald tyres, promising to be fixed, done up (Tomorrow, man. Gonna start on it tomorrow.), rusting away, making the place look more and more like a wrecker’s yard, stead of a place you were meant to raise your kids, send em out as decent citizens. Rusting monuments to these people, their apathy, their couldn’t give a fuck bout nuthin or no one attitude.

  Ooo, made a woman wild sometimes. Had her wanting to march up to some ofem ask em, didn’t they have any fuckin pride, doesn’t it occur to you to do something? But of course she couldn’t. Not in Pine Block. Not as a Maori to another. They’d lynch her. And anyway, who’m I to talk? Way I carry on myself at times, specially when I’ve had a few. Not as if I’m some angel living amongst the heathens. These are my people. I love em. Or so she forced upon herself.

  The kids played in the car wrecks. Used em as playhouses. You could see them at any time of day wriggling and crawling and wrestling away in there, or just sprawled out amongst the cobwebs and the spiders and exposed seat springs and the rusty jagged metal edges that added to their infected, half the time pus-oozing wounds, and the steering wheels sucked on by every mouth that ever sat in a wreck, because they must be suckable you only have to watch the kids. As Beth might find herself doing without even knowing she was half the time.

  And there was one house had an old wringer washing machine stuck right outside the front door, bold as you will, it’d been there for years, ever since Beth could remember. And the grass — sposed to be the bitch’s front lawn — grown halfway up its fat, chipped girth, weeds sticking out its belly, and a slimy moss formed all over the rubber wringer rollers like a disease. God. Even some of the people looked upon that Barton woman’s pridelessness as a standard to which they’d never fall. Not that far.

  A woman’d come home from town — in a taxi, feeling like Lady Muck, for a change, steada Lady Blues who ain’t got no money — her supermarket shopping filling the taxi boot and she, Lady Muck, in the back not wanting the ride to end, as if she was a princess. And she’d be looking out the window and she’d notice the Pakeha houses, how most of em had well-kept lawns and nice gardens with flowers and shrub arrangements and some with established trees and others with the foresight to have young ones planted, and Lady Muck’d start feeling depressed. Then the vacant lot of land separating Two Lakes from Pine Block that no one, not in sixteen years, had ever built on, it’d fill a woman’s vision with its ugly overgrown look, remind her of what was to come. Pine fuckin Block. And she’d feel like whatshername, Cinderella, in her taxi, waiting for it to turn into a pumpkin at the sight of her residential reality, and the rotten little kids everywhere, and the mean-faced teenagers, and the gang members sauntering around like they owned the place. No gardens here. Not trees, nor plant arrangement, not nothing.

  And she’d pay the driver, and she’d be stood there, on the soiled concrete footpath, with her eight or nine plastic shopping bags at her feet, thinking of the six mouths she had to feed as well as his, Jake’s, the animal, and his fuckin boozing mates coming around drinking all night and then wanting to be
fed, and she’d trudge up her footpath feeling old.

  An old woman at thirty-four.

  And she’d come back for the other bags, careful not to take each load inside or there wouldn’t be anything to come back to. And she’d turn and there’d be her through-the-wall neighbour, Jill, just happened to have come outside to sit on her front doorstep the way they do, wanting to know everything, to see some action, something they could wag their tongues over. But Beth having to smile through her teeth, Hi Jill, to the woman because she and her husband were good to borrow from, especially beer. And smokes. Fixem up on payday, Thursdays, out of what Jake gave her from his unemployment, which was half. The other half was his. And you forgot to add an extra bottle or two as a thanks, they didn’t talk to you for a month.

  Inside, in the kitchen, slumping in a chair, it was usually the kitchen for what use a sitting room with hardly any furniture to speak of and what there is you wouldn’t get two bob from the second-hand shop for, only the TV down there, oh, and my good old record player, but I wish I could afford one of these flash stereos they have these days even the kids’ve got em I do love my music, and the TV hardly worth watching, those soaps didn’t fool a woman, inspire her to wanting to be like them, the nasty vicious unhappy beautiful creatures, Jesus Christ, if they’re real then who wants to be a Yank whitey?

  And her mood’d feel like this heavy weight pressing down on her, a kind of blackness with it. But I’m a fighter, I ain’t the type to lie down and let people, life, roll over me. Even him, the fuckin animal, I don’t exactly crack up shaking to death or screaming when I know it’s coming, a hiding. To hell withim, there’s been times when a woman laughed in his face, with her blood pouring from it, and toldim: You go right on, mister. You’re still an arsehole. O life, but sometimes I wonder about you, what I did to deserve what you threw at me.