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Koro always came last because he was from a senior ancestral line.

Tall and stately, he liked to wear a hat with a turned-down brim, but he always took it off when he stood to speak, as a mark of respect to the marae. It was also a magician’s trick as it revealed his silver hair, combed to perfection; he knew this irritated most of the other elders, who were balding.

Koro was nattily dressed too, in suit jacket and grey trousers. The main reason why he was formally attired was that he was a Maori Land Court official and had a particular station in life to live up to. Some of the other elders, no offence, looked like they’d just arrived from the cowshed. Koro’s unapologetic formality and dress was a further affront to them.

‘Keeps them in their place,’ Mum used to say, ‘just in case they’re thinking of a making a takeover bid for that final speaking slot on the paepae.’

Koro liked to dress like the true rangatira that he was. If he’d been living in the old days, he probably would have worn a beautiful feather cloak. Slaves would have carried him onto the marae so that his feet didn’t have to touch the ground, and he would have been fed by little boys putting morsels of food in his mouth so he wouldn’t have to soil his own fingers by touching them; the poor government man would have been on the menu.

He also spoke last because he was renowned for his eloquence and skill in the reo.

‘Te toto o te tangata, he kai,’ he began, deploying a well-known proverb. ‘Te oranga o te tangata, he whenua.’ The blood of man is supplied by food, the sustenance of man is supplied by land.

At his words, a loud sigh came from the people. ‘You can always count on Big Tu to express how we feel.’

‘Without the land we die as a people. Therefore, return it to us.’

No ifs, no buts, no maybes.

‘Take that message back to your government.’

And then he sat down.

The official was gobsmacked. I saw him turn to a flunky: ‘That’s it?’

Yes, that was it. After all, hadn’t Koro’s … er … lieutenants already conveyed his message?

I turned to Mrs Rapaki. ‘I’m named after Koro,’ I said, as if she didn’t know.

CHAPTER THREE

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

1

It’s been twelve years since I thought of that day when I jumped off the bridge at Uawa.

That’s the Maori name of the place where I was born. The European name is Tolaga Bay, and the bridge is the one you cross if you are driving north into the township. Uawa or Tolaga Bay, what’s the difference! The town is still a place nobody ever heard of in a country way down at the bottom of the world. There’s no main street; instead there’s State Highway 35, which is the road linking Gisborne — or Gizzy as locals call it — with all the small communities of the East Coast.

The place hasn’t changed much either: a couple of blocks of shops, Hauiti marae on a road just before the bridge, a war memorial, a pub and a school with a playround and that’s about it. Not far away, Hikurangi Mountain, a strange humpy silhouette that’s spoken of in reverent whispers, looms over the land and sea; it’s the first place in the world to see the sun.

But I’ve changed and, sometimes, when I think back to the boy I was, I can scarcely recognise myself. Sure, I was unhappy at schooclass="underline" who likes to be mocked as incessantly as I was? Not that I was bullied in any way — more ridiculed, I guess; I’m not sure which is worse.

I can still see myself running through the school gates that day, and hear my heart thudding as I stood on the bridge. My lungs were hurting; I was trying hard to breathe in. I can remember looking to my left at my arm outstretched and then to my right to the tips of the fingers, and feeling the wind from the sea in my face. And when I took the first step, wheezing heavily, from the bridge into space …

One moment I was gasping for breath and then, all of a sudden, my lungs cleared.

And oh, for one moment there was a sense of weightlessness.

I’ve never forgotten that feeling.

All my life I think I’ve been trying to find it again, that clarity, as if all the world’s air were rushing into me and filling my lungs to the brim.

And that sense of defying gravity before the thrill of falling.

2

In those days, my parents May and Wally lived in a small house in Uawa.

Dad was a good-looking dude, quiet, but reputed to be a scrapper; he worked as a truck driver for the forestry. Mum was petite, curvy (whenever she put on weight and her waist disappeared Dad said he didn’t mind that she was built for comfort), businesslike and, because Dad was quiet, she often spoke for him too; you didn’t have to guess who was the boss in our family. Mum was a nurse in the hospital at nearby Te Puia, about an hour’s drive away. Sometimes she would take me there whenever my asthma was playing up, pedal to the floor and watch out anybody coming in the opposite direction. The hospital had been built around natural springs where, in the old days, the Maori would carry people to be healed in the bubbling waters, and it subsequently became a well-known destination for patients with tuberculosis. The hospital had a pool which I’d swim in, and good doctors who put me through therapies to increase my lung capacity and help my breathing.

At school I could well have stayed on the sideline or in the back line, always picked last in school games, but my exercises made me into a trier. At one concert, I stubbornly put my name down to do a breakdance and, billed as ‘The Terminator from the Future’, I appeared from artificial smoke, spinning and adding a bit of Michael Jackson moonwalking. Although my cousin Seth and others at school may have meant it sarcastically, I was very proud when I was proclaimed a mon-star, and a big hit.

As for Koro, he lived with my nan in an older, established part of the township, in a large rambling house down on the beach: two gables, a verandah facing the sea, and a driveway trimmed with flax. In summer, the pohutukawa grove behind the house blazed with crimson blossoms.

Nan’s name was Esther and she had her hair set every Friday at the local salon. She liked to wear floral dresses, never went without lipstick and was totally devoted to looking after Koro: ironing his shirts, pressing his trousers, shining his shoes and sending him off to work with a kiss on the cheek. She was an old-fashioned homemaker and she liked it that way. And she hated my inhaler! Whenever I went to use it, she would rush into the kitchen to boil some water and put some horrible-smelling herbs in it. Scolding me, she would drape a towel over my head and order me to breathe the fumes in.

‘Please, N-n-nan,’ I would splutter. ‘I’m all better now,’ even if I wasn’t.

Like most of the Mahanas — that’s our surname — Nan had shown she had good fertility and produced for Koro three sons as well as my mother, who was the youngest in the family. Actually, our surname should also have been Tupaea, except that Koro was from a female branch: although his mother was a Tupaea and she was the eldest, she married a Mahana, hence Koro’s name, Tupaea Mahana. This was always a particularly painful cross for Koro to bear. Though we had good relations with the other Tupaea families along the coast, especially at Anaura, sometimes some upstart would try to put Koro down on the marae by saying, ‘You’re just a Mahana.’

Koro would swiftly put them in their place. He was known for his devastating use of language, which he brandished as mightily as others might wield a taiaha. You attempted to pull rank on him at your peril. ‘That may be,’ he would counter, ‘but my mother was the first born while all her brothers, indeed, all your male ancestors too, were still in their nappies.’

Every Sunday Mum and Dad took me to family lunch with my grandparents. There, we joined my uncles Tu-Bad, Bo and Charlie and their families for the family roast. Sometimes Nan would set trestles outside under the pohutukawa where there was a breeze, and close to her sons as they tended the earth oven; she loved to get a whiff of the hangi.