‘I’ll go back to the car,’ I say. ‘Stay here, so I know where you are.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going any-where.’ He puts his gun on a table and sits down. I walk away. Looking back through the glass panel of a door I see him place his elbows on the table and clasp his hands tightly together in front of his face. He leans his forehead down on his hands. I hurry through to the old building and out to the car, get the torch, and walk quickly back. He has taken a bottle of whisky from a bar and is pouring some into a glass.
‘On the house. Have one.’
‘I think I will.’
I get a glass and join him, leaning my shotgun against a chair.
‘Cheers.’
He drinks quickly and refills. We are both nervous. We sit with our backs to the window so we can keep the corners of our eyes on each side of the cineramic warp of the room. Although we know there is nothing there, round the curve.
Apirana rubs his hand over the tattoo on his left arm, a greenish-blue mark on smooth brown. It seems to represent a cross or a sword. The words LOVE and HATE intersect, blurred.
‘Neat, eh?’ he says, in a mockery of a thick Maori voice, the tone suggesting an odd ambivalence, a self-parody; ‘You know what a boob tat is?’
‘No. I’ve no idea.’
‘A tattoo done in jail. Or borstal. Or DC.’ He glances up. ‘Detention centre. Or remand home.’
I drink some more whisky. It burns inside my throat.
‘It was when I was a kid,’ he says; ‘nothing really. I got in with these kids a bit older than me. We stole a few cars, you know, messed around. Just bored, I mean, nothing bad. The cops fell on us like a ton of bricks.’ He pauses, rubbing his arm slowly, staring into the memory of what happened. ‘And we got done. In court, the whole thing. Sent me to a…lock-up for kids. A place of detention for juvenile offenders.’ His voice becomes formal, sarcastic. Then he looks at me. ‘You know what goes on in those places? Nobody does. You’d never know.’ He gives a sudden snort, like a laugh, cut off, covering his left arm with his right hand. ‘The warders were ex-cops, ex-drill sergeants, South Africans, Rhodesians. Full-time bastards. You face the wall. Stand to attention. They keep you there for hours. They put a pencil between the wall and your forehead. You got to hold it there. If it drops they punch you in the kidneys. You go down, they kick you. They know how to do it so it doesn’t show. That’s the welcome room. They make you strip. Shave all your hair off. Spray you with delousing powder. Shove you under an ice cold shower. Back to attention with the pencil till you dry off. Or fifty press-ups.’ He nods, staring into space. ‘They break kids pretty easy. I’ve seen them make kids go face down and lick their boots. I mean, really do it. Lick the mud off. Or dog shit. I’ve seen them do it.’
There is a long pause. Neither of us moves. Then he says, ‘But even after the welcome room…I knew they couldn’t break me.’ He stands up and walks away a few paces, his back to me. ‘Anyhow, I was broken.’ Then he walks off slowly, trailing his fingers on tabletops, wandering around the big curved room, in and out of the pieces of sunlight.
‘What happened?’ I say, finally. I feel sick. But I keep my hands anchored round my glass. He stands about five paces away, still rubbing his arm slowly.
‘I’m a bit of a fake, really,’ he says; ‘a phoney, you know; all that stuff about tangata whenua, I can say that, but…you know what broke me? When I got through the welcome room at that place, got locked up with the other kids…well…most of them were Maori. And they had a few who kind of ran the place. At their level. They had their own welcome. The screws—I mean, the warders—they knew what went on. It went on all night.’ He paces up and down, looking at the carpet. ‘I knew nothing. Well, I thought I knew a bit. But nothing, really. I didn’t know people could… You wouldn’t believe it. My own people. What they did, and made me do. And they were Maori. That broke me. The screws, cops, South Africans, you expect them to be bastards. You could deal with that. But when your own people fuck you. And make you, make you—’
He closes his eyes, stops; then, heaving his chest full of air, goes on in a rush. ‘And the other thing was, I mean, all the time I was in there, it wasn’t more than seventy miles from home, and they let you have visitors, once a month, and letters. My old man had a car. My brother had a motorbike, and he was working ten miles away. Okay, I knew they weren’t much at writing. But…all the time I was there…they never came to see me. Not once. Nobody. That, I mean, that…’
Swallowing hard, and pausing, for the first time he looks directly at me. ‘You know what? I thought, if I was dead, it’d be okay. They’d take a week off work, they’d go a hundred miles to a tangi, to your funeral. They’d make a real thing of it. But I was just alive. Too bad. What the hell. Who am I, anyhow? And I wanted to be dead, to force them to be there. My family.’ The tone of his voice changes, thickens to the recognisable parody of Maori speech. ‘Great bloody people, with the aroha, eh? Everyone says that. Must be true. Eh boy, you know that, eh?’
His eyes fill up and glisten. In the fury of the last sentence he leans towards me, contorted with the expression of the parody, his voice going hoarse. He straightens up, flicking his head sideways as if the stinging in his eyes is a nuisance he can shake off. His control reasserts itself. I sit hypnotised.
‘I thought maybe they never came to see me because I’d let them down. Disgraced them. I hadn’t done anything very bad. And they didn’t ever care much about the law, the cops, the court, that was all pakeha shit. But I thought, maybe that’s it. I could have understood that. Then. Then I got out. I went home. And life was going on. Oh, they said, you’re back. You know, like that. Oh, you’re back. Get the spare mattress out. We’re off down to the pub. Get some chips, eh, here’s five bucks, see to the kids, will you? And that was it. They said, hey, and next time, don’t get caught, boy. Happy people. I hadn’t got them down, at all. They’d really taken it in their stride. Hardly noticed. Was that good? You think I should’ve understood? Don’t you reckon, after everything I’d been through, I should have known better? I was still very stupid.’
He comes back, sits down, rubs his hand over his face briefly.
‘My mind was full of strange ideas, considering.’
The impulse, which seems to be outside my own power, to move my hand across the table in some gesture of understanding weakens halfway. I prevent complete surrender to it, but it’s there, and he notices.
‘And back at Turangi,’ he mutters, ‘when you said you didn’t have any family, there I was, acting the Maori, “What, nobody?”, like that was the weirdest thing. Jesus.’
‘But you went home. Last week. You went back.’
He nods, slumped in the chair.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Because…I didn’t know what else to do.
Or maybe I’m still a bit stupid. There must be something in me that’s not, I mean, that wasn’t completely’—and he appears to hover on the brink of the word ‘dead’, which I know is what he intended to say; instead he says, after a moment—‘rubbed out.’ And looks up. ‘You know? Still there.’
I nod. He seems a much weaker person now, more vulnerable. His voice carries on, his own line of thought imposed on mine. ‘Maybe it’s in everyone,’ he says; ‘somewhere. No matter what happens.’
He says this vaguely, its implications not fully considered. I don’t show what I think of it. If he had looked through a microscope at even the smallest bits of life he would know that the basic impulse is self-preservation. Everything else is decorative, spare-time indulgence. Or, as he should know, treachery, delusion. Yet I feel sympathy for him. It produces itself from this not wholly controllable source within my own experience, something I’ve set my face against. The movement of my hand across the table was almost as involuntary as the muscular reaction of the limb of a dead animal in dissection, causing the same moment of surprise. But it did have its reason. I can’t help it. Is that dangerous and treacherous for me? The feelings he described were the same as those which once nearly beat me down a long time ago; I see the process repeated and extended around another person with the force of a breaking wave, a great mass of social equipment, splintered emotions, broken words, panic, pain, all pounded together indiscriminately. And against what the rational part of my mind tells me, that people losing their balance will convulsively grab at each other, even clutch at strangers by instinct, there is the realisation that something mysterious has to be taken into account since our admission of those vague feelings of recognition between us. The idea that we are not in fact strangers to each other returns unnervingly. It is still inexplicable, beyond this.