The next morning Auntie Pat rang again. She was agitated and seemed to need reassurance.
‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ she said, ‘for always being on your case about Cliff Harper.’
‘You don’t need to be sorry, Auntie, I understand.’
‘I’ve been carrying Sam’s story around with me for so long. The burden of it has been so heavy. It’s been a burden I have carried with love, but I don’t know how much longer I can do it. I guess we’ll just have to keep on hoping, won’t we? Keep on going until it is resolved. And if it isn’t, well, we will have tried our best. You will try your best, won’t you, Michael?’
‘Yes, Auntie Pat. You know I will.’
I put the telephone down. It was too early to telephone Cliff Harper and try once more to talk to him. I resolved to do so that evening.
Depressed, I dressed for the day. I looked into the mirror, and I felt like shattering it with my fists. Who could I turn to for help? I couldn’t even pray to God, because why pray to a god who denied his kingdom to gay men? His prophets had established homosexuality as a sin. They had all denied gay men and women a place in the main narrative of the world — God, his prophets and his followers.
My grandfather had been such a follower. He had tried to remove Sam physically from the family and to obliterate all traces of him. How I hated him for that. I wanted to picture him collapsing beside the broken body of his son on that day he had taken Sam out to the burial place on the farm. I wanted the bastard to weep, ‘Sam! Oh, my son!’ — to weep so hard that after he’d used up all his tears he would begin weeping blood. I wanted to hear him wail as he pushed Sam’s body into the pit he’d dug for it. Throughout all the years afterwards I wanted his eyes to rot from the constant weeping.
Most of all, I wanted to curse the God that Arapeta believed in:
Yes, better indeed to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.
I hoped that when he died Arapeta had gone to a worse place than that to which he had consigned his son. I wanted crows to come out of the sky to take their retribution, to slash and claw and rip my grandfather, to spill his entrails open in some sacrifice for his unbending righteousness. I wanted him to be denied any possibility of redemption.
Grandfather Arapeta had consigned Uncle Sam to Te Kore, The Void. He had disconnected him from the umbilical cord of whakapapa, and sent him falling head over heels like a spaceman trailing his severed lifeline through a dark and hostile universe to oblivion.
This was how it was done to all gay men and women. But if we were lucky, oh if we were lucky, someone remembered who we were. Someone stopped us from becoming invisible. Expunged from memory. Deleted from the text.
Auntie Pat had, at the last moment, caught the lifeline:
‘I’m here, Sam. Hold on, brother.’
If we weren’t lucky, however, we were gone.
Forever.
I met Roimata and she was fury incarnate.
‘The whole conference is a jack-up,’ she said. ‘It’s been rigged and we’ve been hoodwinked into coming.’
When Roimata was angry, watch out. But we had a dilemma. The paper we had come to present, ‘The New Zealand Perspective: The Maori Experience’, was scheduled to take place in the afternoon. Immediately after the opening ceremony Bertram Pine Hawk himself had asked us to err on the side of the positive.
‘We must honour the millennial spirit,’ he said. ‘The theme must be on the achievements of indigenous peoples and on reconciliation. You understand, don’t you?’
To be fair, there was nothing wrong about celebrating indigenous achievement — and the concert after Bertram Pine Hawk’s address had been a spectacular showcase of indigenous dance, theatre, literature and music. Writers Lee Maracle, Thomson Highway, Jeannette Armstrong and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm had shown that First Nation literature was in superb hands. The fantastic Chinook Winds dance company had brought the house down with their ‘From the Mayan to the Inuit’ production. But I knew when Roimata began to sing under her breath that she hadn’t been fooled one bit:
‘You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative —’
She looked over at Bertram Pine Hawk, who was laughing unawares.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I have news for you, Mister In-Between.’
‘Perhaps things will be different today,’ I said to Roimata, not very hopefully.
We hastened over to the museum, and mingled with the delegates in the foyer again. Such proud people — Inuit, Anishnaabe, Chippewa, Tutchone, Okanagan, Algonquin, Saulteaux, Mohawk, Inuvialuit, Cree, Ojibway, Metis, Cayuga, Teme-Augama, Seneca, Kwakiutl, Inuk, Maliseet, Dogrib, Dakota, Huron — should not be denied their sovereign right to speak out, speak against. Even if it destroyed the orchestrated harmony established by the Council.
Roimata decided we should split for the two plenary sessions on offer. On the way into her session she bumped into Lang, Sterling and Wandisa, who just happened to be standing next to each other again. They took her immediately under their wing.
I hurried to the other session but stopped when I heard a voice calling:
‘Michael, can you spare a moment?’
It was Franklin, looking shy and rather diffident.
‘I know this is short notice, but I wonder if I might ask you to accompany me this evening.’
‘Where to?’
‘The opera. A benefit. Everybody will be there and I am in the VIP party. Unfortunately, I have been let down by my partner —’ Franklin’s eyes flickered. ‘The opera is Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. But perhaps you’ve got other plans —’
Franklin sounded so sad and disconsolate that I felt I had to accept.
‘I’d be delighted to come with you,’ I answered.
Then it was lunchtime, and Roimata and I met in the cafeteria to exchange notes.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we hoped that things would get better. Not in my session. The Council is playing the conference very close to its chest. All they want is to be supported in their programmes. They’re good programmes, mind you, but I will not bribed. So what happened at yours?’
‘It’s the same as at home,’ I said. ‘Everybody’s playing Happy Family. Nobody wants to bite on the bullet.’
‘Oh, well,’ Roimata said. ‘Bertram Pine Hawk and his organising committee, they are such dears, but it looks like we’ll have to do our usual Maori thing.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘I’m going back to the hotel to get dressed to kill. You and I will just have to hijack this conference and take it to the place it’s supposed to go.’
‘And where’s that?’ I asked, feeling very afraid.
‘To the cliff and over.’
Two hours later, we were on.
The location was the First Peoples’ Hall, and it was crowded. Roimata was looking radiant, but there was a cutting edge to her beauty. She had dressed entirely in black and had placed three white feathers in her hair. I was reminded that her mother was from Taranaki and that, by wearing the feathers, Roimata was acknowledging her ancestral links with Parihaka, the village which had been the great site of resistance during the Land Wars.
I felt a momentary lapse of confidence. In the front seats I saw Bertram Pine Hawk and some of the members of his committee. Lang’s grandfather, Albert Pentecost, was with them also, dignified and compelling in his authority. Further back, I saw Lang himself, Sterling and Wandisa.
‘Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?’ I asked Roimata.
‘Probably not,’ Roimata answered. ‘But we’re not here to be liked. We haven’t come all this way to say things that people expect to hear or because we want them to love us. We have to tell it the way we see it. The way our heart and our history wants us to say it.’