Beneath the Blonde (26 page)

I left a note for Gaelene, put it in the letterbox, the one piece of that old house not made new and we just drove away. Drove here.

Ruby hasn’t lived here for years. She died in ‘81. I cried for her then, silent karanga in my small room. I cry for her still, I tangi alone and whisper a silent karakia. I hope she will accept my prayers. Ruby died the weekend the game was stopped at Hamilton. But John had moved her out of that old house a couple of years earlier. Starting to do well for himself in Auckland, he bought her a house much closer to town. She said it was what she wanted. But I knew it was too far from the sea. Closer to her daughters and their babies but too far from the sea. Too far to hear the wave lullaby at night. Too far from me. They just boarded up the house once she was gone. And it wasn’t tiredness that killed her, or all those years of caring for others, or giving and giving until she was too tired to give more, but cancer. A long, slow stomach cancer that killed her from the inside, poisoning her slowly until she couldn’t eat anything, couldn’t swallow, until the kai that had been her mainstay became something to taunt her with.

Ruby had fed us all, holiday after holiday, fed armies of kids on God knows what, God knows where from. A dish of kumara and fresh sweet watercress usually or if we were really lucky maybe a wild pig one of her brothers would bring back from hunting. For years Ruby waded sideways through doors, creaked herself down into unwilling armchairs and her hand was a soft fist of fat flesh and kisses, even when it whipped the back of your legs for running
across the road without looking, for talking back to the grown-ups. But the day they finally came to carry her out she weighed in at five stone. John could have carried her himself. She had been such a big woman my whole life and all there really was to her was this tiny skeleton underneath.

I planted a tree for Ruby that weekend. A kowhai. Yellow flowers to hold the sun from her laughter. I planted it in a quiet place in the bush, one of those bits of bush near the sea that the tourists and inlanders don’t know about. Just me and Gaelene. We used to go there when we were little. It was our rest area. I hope Ruby is resting.

My whole life Ruby had been there, huge and warm, holding it all together, the house, her family, her own kids and everyone else’s kids too. I was strange there, down at her place. Little bright white kid, a skinny, long legged Pakeha runt, I stood out long before I wanted to be noticed. Every holiday, every long weekend, my mum would ship me off down to Ruby’s and then it would just be all us kids, free in the sunshine, laughing and swimming until we fell into bed, five kids to a room and no talking after ten and waking up at six because there was so much to do and so far to run. I loved those holidays, and I never felt bad about it, never felt like my mum didn’t want me. It never occurred to me until I was about fifteen that she sent me to Ruby to get a break herself—I thought it was a present to me. Ruby was a koha for me, this big mountain of a woman. Just touching her dress felt like coming home.

At Christmas, in those too few years until my mum got married again, we’d go down the week before the big day and the men would go out fishing and maybe hunting, the ones without jobs or the ones on holiday, and the women would be in the kitchen. The big kitchen with the window you could lift out to make it easier to pass the plates of food through. Sometimes Gaelene would come down too, but even when we were tiny Gaelene always wanted to be
out there where the men were going, wanted the fishing and the hunting, wanted to be digging in the garden. At night when we sang in the garage she wanted to be the one playing that “ringadicky-ringadicky” strum on the ten guitars, not sitting at the back, not doing the cooking, the cleaning, the harmonizing, the caring. Gaelene never could remember to sit at the back on the marae, she always thought she belonged up front. It was hard for her, I know. But not for me, I loved it. All of it. When Gaelene was there I didn’t stand out so much, she had that shock of white blonde hair and it took the attention away from me. And at Christmas time anyway my aunty would come up from Wellington and she had Pakeha kids too. Well, she had one Pakeha kid and one Maori kid. Ruby used to say all she needed was a Samoan kid and she’d be all of Auckland. And she had him too, eventually.

I loved it then. There was a row of years, maybe ’69 to ’74 when it was exactly the same, year after year. When nothing changed and no one got older, taller maybe, but nothing really changed, at least not that you noticed. We did the same things and sung the same songs and even the first couple of years that my mum was married, it still didn’t change, even after the baby came. But by the time the baby went to school it was all different, my new dad didn’t like it so much down at Ruby’s, he didn’t really feel part of our family and my aunty met her next man and she stopped coming up from Wellington and then sometimes I’d just go down to Ruby by myself but it wasn’t the same. Ruby was always there, always the same, but the people had changed. They wanted me to change too. I don’t know why. John had gone away to school, to Hatu Petera, and when he came home after third form he wasn’t John anymore, he was Hone and then Ruby was so proud of him. Not because of doing well in his exams or because of the rugby—though he had done well and he was going to be the Captain of the First Fifteen one day, everyone said so—but because he was Hone
now. She was so proud that he was Hone. And they started to sing songs I didn’t know the tunes to and Ruby said I was always welcome, I was her whanau too. I know she meant it, but I don’t know if the others thought so. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the words. I knew all the words, I’d always been able to understand the words. I just couldn’t follow the tune any more. The tune grew away from me.

Then Gaelene moved to Auckland and she was so different and they had a big house and our new baby came and my mum was so much nicer and happier with the new baby and my new dad and I did get a bike and everything should have been good—it looked good, all new and shiny. It wasn’t good though, because I wanted what had been. I wanted it to be like when I was the little one. When I used to climb on Ruby’s lap at night and get into her dressing-gown, she’d button it up around me and I would sit there while she laughed with Wai and they shared tea or a couple of bottles of beer. I was warm there between her body and the pink nylon, scarred by cigarette burns along the hem, and I felt the same as her and while her brown skin was different to mine, it was not so different. She promised me that one day the freckles would all join up and we would be the same. But they didn’t. We never could be the same.

And then there just wasn’t anywhere for me to be. No home. No safety. The places and the people kept changing. They changed their names and their identities and their faces and their bodies. And on the day they carried Ruby out for the tangi I tried to call Gaelene. Tell her what had happened. How our childhood was dead, my one place of safety had shrivelled and shrunk and was a thin, dried out old lady, too weak to lift her head from the pillow, too tired to want to try. Too dead to have the will. I tried to call Gaelene. But Gaelene wasn’t there either. Gaelene was dead too.

We sit in the boarded-up kitchen, Siobhan and I, sun slatting though what used to be garden centred windows. We drink tea from the flask I have with me, there are no biscuits, but anyway she is nicer than I expected, more real. I had not talked to the others, not really. The drunken conversation with Alex didn’t count, the water thrown syllables of Steve not the same as words. She is quite pleasant, this woman. She asks me to explain and so I do. In the very beginning—me and Gaelene at school, me and Gaelene at my house, at hers. Here, playing in Ruby’s house, Ruby’s garden, the long hot summer holidays. She is smiling. “It sounds like a nice childhood, Shona, fun, warm.” I agree with her, “Yes. It was. Even in winter we held a dream of warmth. I’ve lived in London for a while now, even though I’ve never liked the city, the size. It’s easy to be anonymous there, plenty of work if you don’t care what you do. I’m not there for me, I’m there to follow Gaelene’s progress. You are easy to follow, you know. Your tour dates, the places you stay, all that information. The world is so small when you know where to look.”

I remember I am telling her about the weather, the cold. “After I’d been in London a couple of years I was surprised when I came home to visit last winter, home to New Zealand. I was surprised by the frost and the cold and the rain that falls here for three days at a time. I must have rewritten my childhood. It must have been cold sometimes.”

“Greg says it felt like it was always hot. His New Zealand stories are all about summer.”

I frown. I don’t like how she keeps calling Gaelene by the pretend name. I want her to admit the truth. “Her name is Gaelene.”

She smiles at me. I do not want her to smile at me. I should be the one smiling. I am in control. This is my story.

It is on the edge of my mouth to tell her to stop smiling when I am distracted by the mess around me. Under the faded lino of dulled gold and red squares the floor is wooden, old boards laid down when rimu was everywhere and all the houses were built of the strong red wood and the pine tree was still just an idea for making money, bringing jobs to flat, thirsty volcanic land. This lino has been torn up in patches, a fire laid months or years ago against the wall where the oven stood, a cumbersome early electric model that baked cakes lighter and sweeter than any since. Children must have played here in the past few years, there are comics and empty cigarette packets. They did not know Ruby, did not know the woman to whom they have shown such disrespect. I think she would forgive them. I hope she will forgive me.

In the far corner there are possum droppings. I remember sleeping here at night, hearing the morepork on the telephone wire and the night we kids heard the possum in the loft. Tui, John’s uncle, had to climb up and get it down, he went up wearing the thickest gloves and still came back, his arms scratched and bloodied, baby possum wild in his hands. I thought they would let it go, us kids standing around in our pyjamas staring into its frightened eyes, tiny young/old face, but Tui took it outside and held it face down in a bucket of rain water. Drowned it. John and the other boys had wanted to do it themselves, talked about how they would kill the possum, John wanted to break its skull with the softball bat, but Tui said he couldn’t do that. It would
be too hard. Possums have the hardest skulls, he said. So he drowned it instead. Water is soft, but stronger than a softball bat. And he told us it was kinder, better for the possum, better for the land. The possums kill the native birds and trees, they are a pest, brought here by the English like the rabbits and the deer, all pests. John said that if Bambi and Thumper were pests, why were there no possums in Fantasyland? But it was too late for those questions and we had to go to bed. I dreamt about drowning the possum that night. I wondered if it just closed its eyes underwater like the kittens did when my mum had to drown Squeaky’s babies. Squeaky was our big black cat and once a year his girlfriend Mama Cat would come back, leave a litter of kittens and then go again. She was wild as the possum, she had the kittens in the corner of the shed, fed them for a week or two and then left. Squeaky stayed behind, licking the kittens, crying for Mama Cat. We kept one of the babies and Tracey Myers had one and Kimberley Dickens had two but my mum drowned all the rest. I said she was mean but she said that’s just what you did. When I was an adult I’d understand. You have to do the right thing. And she’s right. I do understand. You have to do the right thing.

Then I am explaining about Gaelene and me, how we will be once this is all over. Why I had to make a clearing to find Gaelene. She doesn’t understand. She keeps stopping me and asking for explanations. I am happy to tell the reasons, I want her to know.

“I had to make the boys go away. They were taking up too much space. Getting in the way. You are all in the way. You are all too much a part of it, you make it easy for Gaelene to live the lie. I had to stop you aiding her corruption. I want to help Gaelene find her way home.”

I am telling her the truth but she doesn’t know how to
listen to it. She interrupts again, “But don’t you see that how he lives his life is Greg’s choice?”

I stare at her, don’t know what she means, why she won’t let me talk.

She carries on, “Greg couldn’t keep living as Gaelene. He was never Gaelene. It wasn’t him. He was never really Gaelene. He had to become his real self.”

I shake my head, “You’ve influenced her badly.”

She holds up her hands in frustration, her movement too big in this quiet house. The plastic lid of the flask holding her tea shakes at the action, the table is not steady, the chairs are not level on the floor that has been vandalized by marauding ten-year-olds.

She tries to persuade me, “No, Shona. It wasn’t me. Greg was already Greg when I met him. I never knew Gaelene.”

I don’t believe her. Gaelene is still there. Somewhere in that façade there is my best friend. My blood sister. I will find her again. Siobhan stands up, her eyes dart to the back door where we entered. I had pulled the boards away from the door to let us in. We are not ten-year-olds, we are grown women, there is no thrill for us in climbing through a broken and dirty back window. I wonder if maybe she has heard something that I have not. I stay silent for a moment. I can hear my heart and think maybe I can hear hers. Her heart beats faster than mine, less steady. But then she does not know the house, is not comfortable here. I ask her to sit down, she refuses. I move towards her. I do not know when the knife came to be in my hand. Was it before or after she stood up? Have I been holding it all along? Did I hold it at the house? I look at the knife and am not even sure when I picked it up. Maybe the knife belongs to Pat. Perhaps with this she has carved roasts and cut chops. It is a sharp knife. I know I have a plan to follow. I have to make Siobhan stop using the name Greg. I have stopped the others. Gaelene will be able to acknowledge the truth if people stop going
along with the lies, colluding in her fantasy. It has been too easy for her, too many people have made it easy for her. She needs me to help her back to Gaelene.