"They want the Māoris out": provincial life in NZ
She hadn’t learned to shut her mouth. Howard was tired of Councillor Kemp harping on and on and on. He pushed himself deeper into the boardroom chair and leaned back as far as he could force it. This woman had ranted for the past five minutes, some of it in Māori, and his urge to exit the meeting room had swelled to the point where he craved the taste of a buttery Chardonnay - and now.
It took Howard five seconds to unknot his tie. His attention had moved to the bar and the stemless glass tumblers that sat upside down on a tray. It had to be the right glass today, a correct match, and he spied a pentagonal shape with a wide rim, light foot, upright and straight. It was a pity the wine selection didn’t match the choice of bowl.
The Executive Assistant was watchful, looking for his usual sign. He twitched an eyebrow. That should do it. A slight smile lit up her mouth. Her soft mouth. She set out the glasses one by one, clink, clink, then pushed a curl behind her ear - red or white? She tapped burgundy-tipped fingernails on a decent white, then scragged the bottle neck. Howard settled up onto the balls of his dress boots.
“Your Worship,” he began, addressing the Mayor who had a slight Pagliacci air about his nose…“I’m sure many of us are completely mortified that native birds are being massacred by wild pussies inhabiting our local bush.” Howard then swivelled and turned the back of his chair on Councillor Kemp, who had been in the throes of passing out wads of mint coloured copy paper.
“If it pleases your Worship,” Howard continued… “this important issue should be set aside for now, and given some good time at the next committee meeting.” The others sat forward. Howard knew he’d won.
“For Christ’s sake, Howard! There isn’t another meeting for three months!”
Had Councillor Kemp’s voice turned into a whine? Why, yes sir-ee, though her protest soon petered out and she crisped up like a thistle in a drought before crumbling back into her seat. It seemed that even if she hadn’t learned to shut her trap over the past year, at least she may have finally understood that wine o’clock on a humid summer’s eve was no time for horse trading.
Howard’s wine was poured and waiting. For a second he felt an impulse to throw the glass at the wall, or at the EA, though the feeling didn’t last and he relented, raising the rim to his lips.
The scent of peaches reached into both nostrils and relaxed the flesh above the bridge of his nose. A light buzz then drew over the tops of his eyelids as though soft fingertips held them down. It was enough. He swirled the liquid around his mouth, then a taste of smoke hit the back of his throat. It almost made him reach for a cigarette, but of course Caro had forced him to give them up in the late 90s. For his health. Oh how the tide had turned. A wisp of toffee made him stop and appreciate the winemaker a little more. He enjoyed a malolactic result. A transformation of acids.
The urban councillor, Grant, beckoned Howard to sit at the red corner couch. Sunshine beamed into the crowded room and found Grant mopping his forehead and bellowing. Howard squeezed in beside Grant’s rugby thighs.
“Jesus, thank you for shutting her up,” whispered Grant. “We’d still be here at midnight.”
“You owe me,” murmured Howard.
“If you say so.”
“I do. I need your vote to stop the ghetto garden.”
“The what?”
“You know. The community garden. More like a pot plot.”
Grant blinked. “What?”
Howard made a gesture as if smoking a joint.
“Oh, right, right,” said Grant. “And I need you on the freedom camping bylaw. Fuck the tenters, they’re all tourists shitting in the sand dunes, anyway.”
“Really?”
“Yes! Worse, the Beach Society is blaming the locals.” He lowered his voice and spoke behind his hand. “They want the Māoris out, and their fucking marquee, too. It’s like a fish market down there.”
Howard drained another and another glass, then noticed Councillor Kemp zig zagging towards him, looking like the grim reaper. Grant gulped his beer and skittered away, almost bowling over the Mayor, but Howard wasn’t overly concerned. His shoulders had dropped nicely, his eyelids still heavy. He welcomed the warm shift.
“Councillor Kemp. Not drinking?”
“Howard, why did you shut me down? Even the Federation agrees we have a problem with wild cats.”
“Ah, yes the murderous pussies.”
“Stop being a dick, Howard. We have to support it.”
He stuffed down a laugh. “I’m sure you're passionate about it, but our ward won’t pay for a lost cause.”
“How about the extinction of the tītipounamu?”
“I guess you’ll find out in three months?”
“Infuriating… anyway, how’s Caro?”
“Fine. She’s doing fine. Hosting the CWI tomorrow night.”
“Really? She’s so fricken strong. How are you doing?”
Howard rattled off the required response, but his mood had flipped and he excused himself to the bathroom. The glow was exiting his body. The next few minutes were a blur and he found himself in the carpark trying to remember what the Mayor had been blathering on about in the urinal while spraying piss on his boots. Something about Three Waters, more like tap, splat, and drain. Howard had excused himself from being droned to death by stating a true fact; he had to pick up the crayfish or Caro would kill him. They were feeding the CWI after all.
The drive to Eddie’s house was a wind down. It had been a full day keeping the lid on things. Indulgent public spending. Gut-bloating boredom. But right now he enjoyed the weightlessness of relaxing in the ute as it hummed along the road. The tar blistered, mats of tiny bubbles pop pop popping under the tyre rubber. Out of the side window, beige paddocks flashed past and he resisted the urge to text the eager EA who knew more about his tastes than just wine.
Instead, he gripped the wheel and attempted to plan tomorrow’s work day: cut up macrocarpa limbs and help his mate’s widow clean up the farm to sell. Fuck his mate for hanging himself. Leaving two teenage sons. All because of a bad season? Coward. The phone beeped and three words blinked up at him, ‘Meet bridge later.’ Then a different sender, ‘don’t 4get the medicine and the crayfish.’
Howard pressed the accelerator to the floor, sinking into the seat, willing away the image of Caro sitting in her wheelchair at the side of the arena, no longer able to walk much less sit astride her favourite hack. That fucking horse.
“She’s no hack!” Caro had said two years ago, the day before she fell and ruined herself. “She jumps everything.”
He was about to leave her. To try for a baby with someone who wanted a family. To transform his life. Maybe start a vineyard himself, rather than work with bloody horses - more like leeches. But Caro had gone and cracked open her back.
He was lucky she was thin. And he was lucky to be strong enough to carry her to bed. To lift up her hips and slide the pan underneath. To carry her to their new white van. Thank god she was light enough for the nurse to handle cares during the day. To shower her, then push her out to the stables.
But to look into her hazel eyes and feel hope or happiness was now impossible for Howard. As impossible as saying the eulogy at his mate’s funeral. As impossible as not sending a text to a secret lover. He placed the phone in the glove box and turned down the long cul-de-sac to Eddie’s house.
The street was a mess. A whole separated village of half-finished houses on bare foundations. He knew the landlord. She’d dumped twenty removables here five years ago and was yet to paint the outside of any - roughcast or weather-board. Parched fat-hen and cooch clogged up the gutters. Shepherd’s purse and dandelion stalks spread over the verge.
He expected a group of snot-nose kids to run out of the crooked houses, but the front yards stood deserted of anything but deflated pool rings and broken toys, though there wasn’t a swimming pool in sight - only one hose that snaked its way out over the footpath, uncoiling from a wheel frame nailed to the wall. The grass underneath the hose had started to green up already and a small yellow sprinkler dribbled water onto the rutted road.
At the end of the cul-de-sac, next to Eddie’s piecemeal mustard villa, spread an overgrown half acre which had been annoying Howard for years. It was ripe to sell for a high profit for Council, but Kemp had proposed another ditzy project there. It would be his great pleasure to nix her community garden plan - an unnecessary waste of money in this place - and now with Grant off the fence, he had the numbers to dump it forever.
The steps up to Eddie’s front door felt brittle under his boots and Howard grabbed onto a wooden rail, propelling himself across a short porch. The wide door was open and busy sounds of a television show blared in the background. Howard stepped around a mound of small jandals and a giant aloe vera plant that looked like an alien hand, before calling out, then he knocked hard on the door frame. A shout erupted from inside the house, the wail reaching higher and higher.
“Come innnn! Uncle!”
Shit, thought Howard, not wanting to go in at all. Eddie insisted on calling him ‘Uncle’, and every time he heard it, Howard’s jaw ticked as though a weevil had crawled under the skin. He pushed into the small corridor and further into a lounge room. Here, the mystery of the missing street kids was solved.
A television hung on one wall, 65 inches at least, playing a vivid animated movie on the enormous screen. A dozen or so mostly Māori kids sat on the floor, cross legged, wearing shorts and tee-shirts, some in frilly togs, looking as though this was their classroom. They were all silent, arms folded, and only one of them looked away from the movie as Howard walked in. A little boy with a long mullet haircut.
“Are you that Mayor?”
“No. Watch your show, eh?”
The boy gave him a withering look and Howard moved further into the house. The room was long and narrow. Along one wall leaned an orange vinyl couch. It was covered in crocheted blankets and sprawled on top was an old Rottweiler dog that opened one eye, and then turned on its back, paws in the air, tongue lolling out, asleep and snoring in an instant. In the corner, a large wood-burner fire crouched on flowery tiles. Lining the wall hung many photographs of people whose eyes seemed to lock onto Howard’s every move.
Striped mats concealed the floor and air flowed through the house, surprisingly fresh, cooled by a ceiling fan. At the far end, through a rounded archway, opened another space where Eddie sat in his wheelchair at a computer desk. His legs were covered by a pink chequered blanket that accentuated sharp but lifeless femurs and kneecaps. A leather vest left both arms bare. Eddie rhythmically clicked the mouse while staring straight ahead.
“Hey, Uncle. The boys brought them in last night. Over there,” he said, imperceptibly moving his head. A red chilly bin stood in front of an oak sideboard.
“Thank you,” said Howard, the weevil back under his skin. He picked up the heavy bin and poked a stiff crayfish feeler back under the lid. Then he noticed a basket sitting on top of the sideboard, cellophane wrapped, filled with gourmet jars and boxes tied up with twine, and … Howard paused over a creaky floorboard. Was that a bottle of …? Endeavour? He couldn’t quite believe it. What a waste, a two hundred dollar bottle of wine here, in this place. The label showed a sailing ship anchored in a bay.
“A nice drop there,” said Howard.
“Looks like it. I’m eating hakeke tonight, mate. Fried mushies.”
“Mushrooms?”
“My guy told me to drink that stuff with truffles, but I’m not that flash, eh.”
“Your guy?”
“I have heaps of Pākehā admirers, not just you. Stay for a cuppa?”
“Sorry, I can’t. That paddock will be mown Monday, alright?”
“And make sure they mow the verge, as well, eh my friend?”
“Sure. Did you take care of our monthly?”
“Of course, Uncle. The medicine’s in the bin. How about we open that 2013, eh?”
“Now? Look, I can’t.”
“Go on, mate. You can do it.”
Muffled giggles reached them from the next room and Howard’s feet became heavy, weighed down as though magnetised to the floor. His palms ached.
“Just one then.”
“Oh it’s all yours. None for me, eh. I just like the look of it.”
Eddie opened a Coke Zero while Howard drank the 2013 Chardonnay from a port glass. The entire experience didn’t disappoint.
The wine held the pull of thirty months being caressed by oak barrels and a caring hand. A light grapefruit bouquet and a complex palate. Cashews? He would think about the toasty notes a year from now. He and Eddie drank to the discovery that they’d both caught the biggest eel in the same creek as boys, just down the road.
Howard nodded towards the wheelchair. “How did it happen?”
“My younger days. No self respect, eh. Now I’m my own CEO.”
“Living your best life, eh Eddie? In the ghetto.”
“At least my woman didn’t fuck my best mate, eh, Uncle?”
Howard stared into his glass. His cheeks felt stretched thin. The room became stuffy and hushed, and he watched a mottled brown lop-eared rabbit, bigger than a Jack Russell, cross the room as if in slow motion. Its front paws and chest were creamy white and it pushed itself along so sluggishly that Howard thought it might keel over as it leaned to one side, the potential of it being toppled by a loud noise or killed by a wild cat rose with every stretched second.
But it never happened. The lop-ear stopped in the middle of the sea-green rug to clean its whiskers, then it finally levered itself forward on impossibly long back legs, hopping towards the kitchen. Neither of the men mentioned the rabbit, and by the end of the bottle the kids had disappeared back out to the street and Eddie was once more ensconced in front of his computer. The Rottweiler was now sitting beside Eddie’s wheelchair, its wide toothy grin getting wider at every tick of the clock. It was time to leave.
The chilly bin was full of ice, giving him two hours grace at least until the nurse left Caro. The coolness of the river lay only a few blocks across town, and Howard found his way around the curve of a metal road and parked under the old railway bridge. His view consisted of graffiti and piles of dumped concrete. Wild willows and birch trees held canopies of lime coloured leaves. The chatter of cicadas.
The air wasn’t any cooler under the trees. It was thick and stuck in his throat. Howard leaned against the bonnet and took a breath from a small vape, coughing out a cloud of smoke. The river was low. A trickle really. The stones were covered with bleached slime as though something dying had left a trail. He turned away and lifted the lid of the chilly bin, then uttered a strange belch. His eyes stung. On top of the purple crayfish bodies lay a snap-lock bag. It contained a small dark bottle with a rubber eye dropper. On the label it read:
CBD Tincture 20ml - THC intact
100% Vegetable Glycerin Infused
Best of Local Herbal Remedy
Howard tumbled the familiar bottle in his fingers. It was a little squeeze of green-gold oil that for a year had taken his wife’s pain away. And his. It was the only thing that had worked. The only thing that cradled her to sleep. A rich sleep. Each night, Eddie’s brewed and aged cannabis drops melted into two deep glasses of golden Chardonnay and turned the wine into an extra buttery elixir, the richest butterscotch, with a hint of cut grass. He thought of his wife’s eyes, peaceful and rested, the hazel hidden beneath quiet lids. And he thought of a soft mouth, a request, a wish to transform from one thing to another.
Next week's short story, by Airana Ngarewa, is "The pā is a lonely place".
