Excitedly, we catch the train back to London. But all the way in, I’m plotting how to get those pills away from Whero …
Damn, Dermot’s watching her with hawk eyes.
Worse is to come.
Dermot and Tupou go out for a beer, but Whero is tired so begs off and, instead, we come on home to find somebody waiting.
Petera, in the darkness, with only the moon coming through the window.
‘Didn’t I tell you,’ he begins, looking at me dangerously, ‘that you’re not invited?’
I cuddle against Whero, she’ll protect me from him. ‘What do you want?’ she asks him. ‘How did you get in? Who gave you a key?’
‘You gave me one,’ he lies. ‘Don’t you remember?’ Then he says, ‘What about the pills?’
‘She doesn’t want to take them any more,’ I say.
‘Why not?’ He turns to Whero. ‘It’s not Red’s right to steal your pills from you.’
Whero defends me. ‘Red’s my best mate. She’s only looking after me. We both know what the pills do. They make me … go back.’ She begins to sob and, before I can stop him, Petera folds her in his arms.
‘There, there,’ he whispers. ‘I know you don’t want to think of home …’ he moves in closer ‘… and it’s hurting you because the closer you get to the truth the more it’s killing you.’
Whero moans and slides to the ground. Petera kneels on his haunches, lowering himself to her level. He gently places a hand on her shoulder.
I try to warn her, ‘Whero, no!’ but she instinctively leans into him for support.
I turn on the bastard. ‘I’m the one she needs, the one who always helps her when she calls out. I’m the one with balls who can look after her, and I’m the one who brought her here from all her memories of New Zealand so that she could start a new life in London.’
‘Is that so?’ He stands and casually approaches me. ‘Well, it’s my turn now.’
I look at Whero, pleading for her to help me, but she’s finding it difficult to breathe. And then Petera takes a swing at me. The back of his hand smashes into my jaw, sending me flying some distance across the room.
He’s calm and clinical as, methodically, he begins to beat me up.
‘Red’s not right for you,’ he says to Whero. She tries to get up and stop him but it’s almost as if his blows are also raining on her.
‘Please,’ she says to him, ‘you can’t do that to her … to us.’
This time Petera punches me in the guts. Whero howls with pain. ‘Leave her,’ he says to me.
He’s split my lip. My stomach really hurts. Another punch. ‘Fuck you,’ I tell him as I go down. I’m on the verge of blacking out.
Petera kicks my skull. Whero holds her face in her hands.
‘Leave!’ he shouts at me again, his spittle spraying. ‘Leave us. Leave her.’
He kicks me again and again and I lose consciousness.
And all is darkness.
PART TWO
AT THE SAME TIME AS THE SPIRAL IS GOING FORWARD, IT IS RETURNING
My eyes flicker, and I see Whero staring into them. She has put me in bed and we’re lying side by side, covered with a quilt.
Oh, Whero, we’ve seen a lot of the world since we met as children, haven’t we? Of course I haven’t been with you all the time but, somewhere, somehow, we’ve always met up and, hey, girlfriend, we’ve always been there for each other, right?
‘Are you okay?’ Whero asks, tenderly stroking my face. ‘Petera gave you a bad beating. I should have called the cops.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I answer. ‘Hold me close, girlfriend?’
She does so and I wince. ‘Well, not too close.’ And as she settles against me I remember the first time we met.
Oh, how I’ve always loved that girl!
She must have been about eight — I was the same age — and she and her mum, Anahera, had come back to the East Coast over the school holidays so that Whero could spend time with Kotare’s kin.
The day was hot, the sky blue as the sea, and Whero was playing in the water, not too far out, where the reef was. It was low tide, foam sweeping before the wind from the sea, and the shoreward part of the reef was exposed. Whero saw a seahorse, flashing through seaweed in one of the pools and she got so excited, running up the beach yelling, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ She was like her father: he loved Tangaroa’s domain too.
Anahera was asleep in the shade of some bushes, so Whero decided not to wake her up. Instead, she sat down beside her mother and then, seeing her father’s guitar, carefully picked it up and began to strum it.
Ouch. She strummed badly. She hurt my ears. She must have hurt Anahera’s ears too because she stirred and woke up.
‘Oh, sorry, Mummy. I was trying to play the tune but I can’t hit the right chords.’
Smiling, Anahera held Whero from behind and guided her fingers on the guitar:
She put the guitar aside, leant back and looked out at the sea. ‘This was where your father and I first met,’ she told Whero. ‘Right here, nine years ago now. We had our romance, here in the sand. Oh, he was a handsome boy, your dad — don’t you ever listen to people who say otherwise. He hated it when the beach was polluted. Him and all the people from the marae, including his Auntie Polly, had a tangi here — such a sad sound for such a beautiful day. They respected Tangaroa. Since then, nobody comes here. Just me and you.’
‘Will Daddy ever be back with us?’ Whero asked.
‘We have to hope so,’ Anahera replied. ‘When we return to Auckland we’ll go out to the hospital to see him, eh? I know he will be looking forward to seeing you. We can take him fish ’n’ chips, eh? He always liked fish ’n’ chips!’ She hugged Whero. ‘In the meantime, you and me have each other. This is where we belong … together.’
Then Whero remembered. ‘Mummy, I saw a seahorse!’ With that, she ran ahead of Anahera, splashing quickly across the shallow water to a low rocky staircase in the lagoon. She searched for a moment in one of the pools and, ‘There it is!’
In a trice, Anahera had the seahorse fluttering in her hands. ‘It got stranded here when the tide went out,’ she said. She cradled it carefully and, swiftly, motioning to Whero to follow her, went to the edge of the reef where the sea turned blue. ‘Here we go,’ she said.
The seahorse was delicate and luminescent. It whirred and scintillated in the sunlit sea and then, slowly, began to descend into its depths.
‘Haere ra, seahorse,’ Whero whispered. She was so sad, so sad.
The sky was a mirror and so was the sea. When Whero looked into the water I looked back. As she returned to the beach her mother didn’t see me coming up behind Whero and slipping my hand in hers.
‘Kia ora,’ I said. ‘My name’s Red.’
Of course, Whero, when I first met your father, all I could see was a sweet, sweet man.
He was pulling a sack of kai moana up the beach and, at the time, I thought he was a bit of all right. In fact, he was one of the best-looking boys I’d ever seen, and very different from the city boys of Onehunga, always so sure of themselves. He was a country boy, living on the marae, and so he had a natural goodness that attracted me to him. He loved the sea, he was always respectful to Tangaroa. He was cheeky too and innocent and I don’t think he knew that I was planning to get him for my very own.
I guess you don’t see people the right way when they’re in their own environment. Even when we were married, and he came with me to Auckland, I still attributed his happy-go-lucky ways to a tender heart. But it soon became apparent that he wasn’t cut out to be a city boy. Even worse, he couldn’t handle stress. And when you were born, and there was pressure from Mum and Dad for him to get a job — he really did try, my darling Kotare — that’s when I began to notice troubling things about him.