Hiruhārama

Have you ever taken the hand of someone not quite twice your age, a girl, a girl with twisting black hair? At night, when the river is a wide streak of shine swelling with sandflies. Did you lose your shoes in the stinking mud and then cling to each other, pale blue and winceyette in the Wet grass, lips apart, daring to breathe? Did she tell you the moon was a woman and so were all the saints, and did she show you their pictures?

It was after she first saw the nuns that she decided to wear pale blue. She only had two pale blue things: a long dress to her ankles and a jersey from her cousin who was three years younger. She wore both that night. And always the necklace, the tiny birdcage tinkling against her chest. Did I take it between my fingers that night, hold it to my ear, hold it there and sway so the chiming bell would ring for me?

Help me to remember. Trace it with your finger in the dark in the woodshed. Wade into it up to your knees, bunching your skirt between your thighs and skim stones across it. Brush it, smell it, plait it.

On one wall in the lounge is a black-and-white photograph of the river Jordan. On its bank stand three men with black skin, one with a moustache, they are old and one stands with his foot on a boulder. They wear flowing trousers and waist sashes, hats like cones with flattened peaks. They stare so intently at the water, it’s like they’re waiting to glimpse a tuna, or saying how bloody poor the whitebait have been this season. The opposite wall is pinned with coloured postcards of the city of Jerusalem. Domes and sky and Sacred Mosques, The Church of the Nativity, The Manger at Bethlehem.

We trail in. In front of the postcards we stop, staring, and she drops my hand. Then she springs aside and meets my eyes.

‘Kia haere ki te tiki i te pukapuka!’ and we uplift the book, nod to it, walk sacrificially back from her uncle’s bedroom to the sofa beneath the River Jordan. We sit, she reads aloud,

‘The Children’s Picture Dictionary of Saints,’ and places her palm on the cover. I trace the shape of her fingers in the red leather, we marvel at the gold leaf. Then it is opened: one side rests on her leg, one on mine.

Perhaps it was just that the female saints were the ones who always got

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their pictures painted. Some of them did have names like Andrew and Barnabas but their hair was so long and their faces so smooth, and we’d never seen any men who looked like that, so soft. One of them, called Saint Phillip, looked just like her Aunty Marama, even wearing a headband that looked like a tupare.

‘All the saints are women,’ she hums into my ear. ‘They all live up the river, at Jerusalem. They wear blue dresses and blue veils, I’ve seen them. I’m going to be a saint one day.’

I drop onto the floor and put my chin on her knees.

‘I’ve seen them.’ She turns her head to the net-curtained daylight. ‘And I know the real name of this river, e hoa. To us it’s Whanganui, Te Wai-nui-a-Rua, that’s what we’ve always said, that’s how we’ve always known it. But that’s not its real name. It’s Jordon. It’s the River Jordon.’

Her hair and her brown eyes gleam.

The man who lived with them, we called him Uncle Crim, he always felt angry to me, but with a smiling face covering it all up, like scalding milk with a skin on it. His eyes had a milky look too, but he could see out of them OK. His face looked sunburnt all year round, his hair was yellow next to it. Sometimes in the afternoon when he was in his bedroom he would be talking away, booming, like he was really telling someone what for. Aunty Marama told us he was talking to his tupuna, Captain Cook. We giggled, but she didn’t.

‘Kei konei tēnei tangata, e noho rawa ana,’ she said sideways, while she set the table. ‘Go and have a look.’

So we snuck to Crim’s bedroom door and saw the dummy dressed in a blue uniform with gold fringe and gold buttons and a sword on its belt, and a photograph of Captain Cook sitting where the head should be.

When we asked Aunty Marama what Crim stood for she said Criminal and laughed. I thought it stood for Crimson. Aunty Marama said he was a bit strange, we had to make allowances. He had had a hard life. She said no one else would be kind to him except us so be patient, be loving.

But the thing was that it was never Aunty Marama that he played tricks with. It was us kids, me and her, but mainly her, and he was cruel.

The weta wasn’t the worst, but it was still bad. He just walked up behind her one day while she was at the table and placed it on her head. I was on the other side of the table but I didn’t see the weta until it fell in her plate and panicked and ran towards the edge of the table and then dropped into

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her lap. Then she started to scream. The weta clung to her blue dress and even when she stood up and stamped and backed into the wall and hit at it, still it clung there until I smashed it off with my shoe and stood on it. For ages she wouldn’t stop flicking and rubbing her hair.

That night, was it so long ago? That night was the worst. When like balsa my bones floated to sleep in the warmth of her bed and her circling arm; but then waking, waking with the shaking bed, that red face right up to hers, her knees forced apart and one pressing into my side again, again, again.

Afterwards she said she wanted to wash herself in the River, to cleanse herself of sin.

She says this while she piggy-backs me over the stile, while my wet cheek rubs her hair with the rhythm of her steps, while the shining chime in the tiny birdcage around her neck sings. And when she has taken off her pale blue jersey and her pale blue dress; and when she has opened the book at St Phillip and placed it in my hands; and when she has clasped the chain and its birdcage around my neck and I have felt its delicate shiver against my skin—by then the river is wider and darker than ever. By then the woman she calls The Moon is already walking on the water.

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Still Life

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Father

In a red Falcon Five Hundred space pod
launched on a backroad
hyphenating into the black inlaid
with starry paua on posts
we sang

Willie Nelson and Anne Murray
and Hotel California without noticing
harmonising
our petroleum voices igniting
the vinyl miles between us.

Since then embracing has occurred
embracing and the gentlest
of rocking
I have been taking notice
stowing every punch like cargo
for the journey:

we’re loading up again
fuelling up getting ready
to ride the lyrics
to ride the eyes of possums
to ride the sea’s generous back
our bones smashed together
on every wave.

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Letter To My Mother

His camera’s gone back and his
photo’s wearing thin. We packed
up, our albums smell of tea.
I have coathangers, cassettes.

There is a woman whose
cradled face would bless my hands:
she is a sugared lemon-
slice to make saliva rush

in bursts into my waiting
mouth and drown my words—shall I
go on?—she wets my dreams. Can
you stand much more before your

leaping blood abandons me
to my cankers? Before you
have to boil the jug or light
up? Together, though, we left

at last. And no flying fists
he just fell silent. Grunted
goodbye, ended our two week
flinching stint, slammed shut

your 27 years. Your
twenty-seven years. Did you
ever flick a curling black-
and-white from its corners, tap

it, press your finger into
its waving edge? Did you cry?
Was it the old blue suitcase
with the broken locks you sat on?