Some Here Among Us (7 page)

‘I told them,’ said Morgan. ‘If only they could behave properly like decent Maoris. Mum was probably still up at two in the morning,’ he said to the others. ‘She listens to these radio programmes on maths all night. She’s crazy about mathematics.’

His mother looked at Morgan steadily as he made this remark.

‘Short-wave radio,’ said Morgan. ‘All she can hear is whistles and pops.’

‘He mocks me,’ she said. ‘His own mother. Oh, my goodness. Sleeping at the gate!’

She came down off the steps and was introduced to them one by one, and then she led them around the side of the house through the orange and lemon trees and into the kitchen through the back door. There she began to make breakfast. Everything was old-fashioned. There was a green wooden dado around the walls of the kitchen, and a single tall sash-window. The window was filled from top to bottom with steep green hillside. The sound of baaing sheep came from the hill and from the yards out the back.

‘Morgan, I’ll need the shearers’ teapot,’ Mrs Tawhai said.

Morgan went out to the shearers’ quarters and after a few minutes came back with a brown enamelled pot that could hold a dozen or fifteen cups. The tip of the spout was chipped black under the enamel. Tea was made and Mrs Tawhai fried tomatoes and eggs and bacon, and Morgan made toast. Then there was more toast and marmalade and coffee was brewed.

‘Coffee,’ said Rosie. ‘Oh, my God. Real ground coffee!’

Mrs Tawhai looked reproving but all the same she was pleased. Her kitchen crowded with her son’s friends talking and laughing!

‘Morgan,’ she said. ‘The toast!’

The toast was burning. Smoke briefly blued the air. There was a brief rumble at the back door, the beating of a soft drum. It was the sound of someone knocking the heel of a rubber boot against a concrete step, and then Morgan’s father stepped in. He was stocky, shorter than his wife, dark-skinned, with a piercing eye. He seemed delighted to find six strangers in his house eating his food. In thick grey socks, he advanced noiselessly first to Rosie then to Race, as if selecting the leaders, then to Rod Orr, Dinah, Panos, FitzGerald in turn. He had the manners of a courtier, a duke.

‘It’s a pleasure, a great pleasure,’ he said. ‘We tell Morgan to ask his friends up here. “Ask them up,” we tell him but he never does. “It’s too far,” he says. And it is. We’re in the back-blocks here, I know that. But here you are! How long can you stay?’

‘We can’t stay,’ said FitzGerald. ‘We have to be back in town on Christmas Eve.’

‘You’ll stay tonight!’ said Mrs Tawhai, looking shocked.

‘Not even tonight,’ said FitzGerald. ‘We have to be in Wellington in two days. We can only stay today.’

‘Today! Morgan, they’re only here for one day. What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know what they’re going to do,’ said Morgan. ‘I have to work.’

‘Morgan!’ said his mother.

‘I’ll be cutting scrub,’ said Morgan. ‘Fifty acres of scrub I’m cutting these holidays.’

‘You’re not cutting scrub today,’ his father said.

‘I’ll look like Charles Atlas by the end of summer,’ said Morgan.

‘He’s not cutting any scrub today,’ his father said to Rosie as if stating a known fact.

‘Inches on in all the right places,’ said Morgan.

‘I go up the hill and cut scrub with him sometimes,’ Mr Tawhai said. ‘But we’re not allowed to talk. Even at smoko, we’re not allowed to talk. “The Aborigines in the desert,” he says, “sit under a tree to save energy and don’t talk.” “We’re not Aborigines,” I say. “We’re not in the desert.” “Ssshhh,” he says. “You’re wasting energy.” So we sit there on the hill like two blocks of stone and never say a word.’

7

After breakfast, Mrs Tawhai took Race into the hall and showed him various family photos and mementoes. She pointed to a picture of an old man in a top hat, and a sword sent to him by the Queen of England, and a photograph of a boy in uniform, slim as a wand, standing in front of a cannon’s mouth.

‘This boy swam out in a storm and saved people from a ship-wreck,’ she said. ‘This one’ – the man in the top hat – ‘at a single word from him, three thousand warriors became Christians.’

The sun sent light straight down the hall, stained pink and yellow and green by a glass door at the end. There was the sound of laughter outside on the veranda. The girls had had showers and then gone out to the garden, their heads wrapped in white towels like turbans. Mrs Tawhai frowned at the man in the top hat.

‘Three thousand warriors, singing hymns in the field,’ she said. ‘The chiefs went up and down the ranks beating anyone who didn’t keep perfect time. An English bishop who came to visit fainted away on the spot.’

She led Race away to find the others. They went through Morgan’s room which opened onto the veranda. The room was dark. There was a grey army blanket pinned up over the window.

‘A blanket!’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘Not even a curtain will do. It has to be a blanket. He has to be in the dark first, he says, to do any work, and then he turns a light on.’

She hooked back the blanket from the window, and stood looking around the room.

‘He doesn’t like it up here, really,’ she said. ‘The sheep or the shearing or any of it, not really.’

She looked at Race with a burdened expression.

‘He ran away, you know,’ she said.

‘Morgan?’ said Race.

‘Morgan,’ she said. ‘He ran away from home. He was missing for weeks.’

‘Why did he run away?’

Mrs Tawhai shrugged. ‘Some trouble at school. Nothing, really. He was thirteen, fourteen. But he was sent home and he was here with us and then he vanished. He headed for the horizon. Plus, he picked up various children on the way. And they all ran away with him.’

‘A sort of Pied Piper,’ said Race.

‘He was a Pied Piper! He was their leader, I do know that much. He was thirteen, fourteen – the others were only ten, eleven, twelve. But they got all the way to Ninety Mile Beach and no one ever spotted them. Do you know why?’

‘Why?’

‘They slept in cemeteries,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘Maoris are very superstitious. They wouldn’t dream of going into a cemetery at night. But Morgan didn’t care. He’s never cared about things like that. They were as safe as houses there. No one ever looked in the cemeteries. He was missing for weeks.’

She stood in the veranda door and looked down at Morgan and his visitors; they were talking and laughing in the shade on the south side of the house.

‘Weeks!’ said Mrs Tawhai. She went down into the garden.

On the table in Morgan’s room was a typewriter with a piece of paper furled in it. Race rolled the paper so he could read the whole page:

The para-poets arrived at dawn,

In waves they came, rocking

Through the morning shades,

The golden rocking-cradle air,

They couldn’t hide or fire back, it was

Easy to shoot them as they fell,

Or simply shoot their shrouds –

One bullet in the silk and down

They whistled – crash! – but still more came,

Thumping on roofs, in trees, the onion patch,

Then stopped to smoke a fag

Under the olives, behind the jakes,

And only then they opened up, began to sing,

Declaim, compose, complain,

Declare, opine, put on corduroy,

Velvet, polka-dot, take wine –

‘The youth who has never aspired’ they sang,

‘To ride the clouds unfurled

‘Of what use is his life to him,

What use is he to the world?’

The locals ran at them with brooms,

With foot-long spanners, monkey-

Wrenches, but the girls fell in love all the same,

Offered them water – them!

The invaders! – and bared their breasts,

Oh yes, but thats

‘That’s
what
?’ Race thought. He stared at the page. He had never thought of a poem being half-finished before. It was like seeing a fire burning alone in a wood. Then abruptly he wound the page down again, and stepped out on the veranda and down into the garden. Plans were being made to go for lunch at the pub twenty miles back along the coast.

‘Morgan, I want you to wear one of your good shirts,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘I don’t want you going in there looking like a vagabond.’

‘Mother thinks we dress badly,’ said Morgan. ‘We’re just
scruffy
.’

‘I didn’t say that. I just found myself agreeing with Grammaticus the other day.’

‘Who’s Grammaticus?’ said Dinah.

‘Old Prof. Blaiklock in the
Weekly News
,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘What did he say? “I wish the undergraduate gown was still in use. Nothing is served by the cult of the tattered sports coats and bohemian disregard for hair and dress.” ’

At this, they all laughed – not too loudly – no one wanted to offend Morgan’s mother – but merrily enough all the same. No one wore old sports coats any more. Condemning the fashions of youth, Prof. Blaiklock had chosen one a few years out of date.

‘He’s old, he’s retired,’ said Morgan. ‘You know the old guy who checks out the books at the library? I’m sure that’s Grammaticus.’

‘What rubbish,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘Professor Blaiklock is a distinguished scholar. He will not be checking out library books to undergraduates.’

‘Well, it looks just like him,’ said Morgan. ‘Where’s the
Weekly News
? Race, help me find the
Weekly News
.’

He and Race went through to a sitting-room on the other side of the house.

‘Liddy and I are breaking up,’ said Morgan.

The panels of the sitting-room were carved with tall Maori figures. Their eyes were shell. Between the legs of each figure was a smaller one – the next generation.

‘She wants to finish it. I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing I
can
do, not from here.’

Morgan picked up some of the papers on the floor and glanced at one or two magazines left open on the sofa by the fireplace. The grate had ash in it from the previous winter.

‘The weekends are worst,’ he said. ‘I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of her being more or less raped by some rich red-neck farmer she thinks she’s in love with.’

‘Go and see her,’ said Race.

‘I have,’ said Morgan. ‘It didn’t work. I went to Palmerston to see her. She went out every night and left me there in the flat.’

‘Well, I never met her,’ said Race, not knowing what to say.

‘I don’t know how I stood it,’ said Morgan. ‘She made it plain I was of secondary importance.’

‘Drop her,’ said Race.

‘She loves me,’ said Morgan. ‘I happen to know that. But she loves this social whirl she’s in. One I despise.’

They stood there under the shining-eyed figures.

‘Here we are,’ said Morgan. ‘The
Weekly News
.’

They went back to the group in the garden on the shady side of the house.

‘Here, you see,’ said Morgan.

They all looked at the picture of Grammaticus above his weekly column. He had a noble, Roman-emperor air to him.

‘Definitely the crazy old guy at the library,’ said Morgan.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Tawhai.

Mrs Tawhai took the
Weekly News
and began to read aloud. ‘Watching this summer’s student turmoil in Paris was the philosopher Cioran, one of the gloomy band who have emptied life of meaning. “Human history,” he writes “is an immense cul-de-sac. Life is a passionate emptiness, all truth is a hoax.” Hence the amusement on the face at the gallery of the Odéon, while the students bawled for a brave new world below.’

She read on a little, to herself, then handed the magazine to Morgan.

‘Mum adores Grammaticus,’ said Morgan.

‘Morgan’s great-grandfather had three thousand fighting men at his command,’ said Mrs Tawhai. ‘At a single word from him, all three thousand became Christian. And now
he
doesn’t believe in anything.’

‘It’s a different era,’ said Rosie.

‘Come here,’ said Mrs Tawhai.

Morgan stood up and went over to his mother.

‘I want you to wear your good white shirt,’ she said.

‘OK,’ said Morgan.

She looked at him. His hair was touching his collar.

‘
Look
at you,’ she said.

Suddenly, before he could move, she put the tip of her finger on her tongue and smoothed his eyebrows, one, then the other, a fierce lion with her cub.

Late that afternoon, after lunch in the pub, they drove back to the farm, Race at the wheel this time, and they dropped Morgan at the five-barred gate and then Race turned the old Chev round in the narrow road and they drove away.