Both Sides of the Moon (7 page)

Ah now … where are you? (Where are they?) Where are we? Lift head, look around, everything kind of blurred and yet it isn’t: it’s clearer than a clear sober day. It’s the sharpest pencil-line drawing. The most meaningful brush-strokes of no art that you have yet seen, and only one picture. This-is-it. As far as the rickety little truck of drunken progress goes. Believe even your blurry-visioned,
clarity-stricken
eyes; look again, see yourself: bleary-eyed, bottom lip juts out, shoulders hunched, posture all gone, white man’s beer stuff done beat you Maori men and women.

Look around man and drunk woman, see into the air, every face a frozen image, slumped and swaying and stumbling and falling over and dribbling and guzzling and spilling and gushing and
gibberishing
and talking cheap Maori, cheaper English, shouting, piling loud claim over one another, hands hold on to beer bottles, beer glass, like drowning man to river he’s drowning in, drowning woman just the same; heads keep falling into space below shoulder-line, jerk up again, eyes caught in moment of same truth, same truth, of air stenched of boiling cabbage and boiling bones and boiled lives with dignity fallen off the bone — now tha’s a thought.

Need another feed, soak up the beer; look at fellow man and woman stumble to big pot on stove, ladle boiled mush of pork spine,
cabbage, spud, doughboys on to plate, stumble back, plonk down on beer-crate seat, at Formica table, fuckit, forgot a knife and fork, who cares anyway, eat with fingers, food better that way, close to it, fingers in bone hollows like fingers in cunt hollows, slurp it up in long noises of ecstatic appreciation.

Stuff the face, feel good feel bad same time, look around, feel confused but no reason why, or not reason to answer this dully
cognising
brain, so might as well fall over somewhere, go to sleep a few hours (but not too long, not too long: might miss out on party time) might as well. But not for too long.

Wake up: where am I? Oh, that’s right, at the party. Now, who was it died? Who we mourning for? How many days we been doing this? Ah, who cares, who gives a fuck — where’s a beer and what time is it anyrate? Nine o’clock? That all? Night or morning? Morning? Good. Got all day (another day) to drink up large. To Pera, that’s right, tha’s who died, tha’s who we’re here for.

Get drunk again, eh cuz? You and I, eh? Happy together, drunk together, die together — but after you, cuz! Two fullas look at each other go outside have a punchup, shake hands, touch beer glasses together, nemine, bro, leas’ we’re mates now.

Drink and might get lucky, fuck someone (someone’s mother. Someone’s wife. The illicit got more flavour, sweeter taste). Get lucky, fight someone, win the fight, though fights hardly ever won or lost, everyone always jumps in, does big act of breaking it up, or to get in a punch or two on the sly, or out in the open. Everyone shakes hands, mostly, and some men they openly weep, but everyone knows it’s only the piss weeping, piss talks and cries its own language, they all know that. Part of the game.

Sit around after, lick the wounds, wipe the blood trickles, trickle more beer down the throat and spill down chin, keep laughing and smiling about it, the fight, or whatever — Hey, don’t be goin’ to sleep! Come on, cuz, wake up, drink up, drink
up
! Be happy. Sing some songs. Anything. Yeah, that’ll do, I like that one. Ah tha’s nice. Oooo, and I love you sooooo! That was nice. Sing another one, eh? Gwon, for me.

So someone sings another one. For you. Ah, tha’s really beautiful, sing it again. Ah, you got a voice all right. Wha’s another
song? Yeah, tha’ one, I like tha’ one. Ah, this the life, eh, cuz? Drink up the large, sing up the large —
fight
up the large, anyone pisses us off, eh cuz? Eh cuz? Eh cuz? We know, eh?

They know this is Pinevale and therefore the world, it
mus
’ be the worl’, we’re fuckin’ in it aren’t we! In it and out of it. Yeah. It’s Pinevale. (Or anywhere on the same closed circuit.) We’re lucky, eh? Lucky why? Cos we’re drunk, we can get drunk all the time, if life is about that then we-are-lucky.

Us kids mucking around, trying to fill the days, get ready for another night, they can’t stop pouring the piss down them. Heard her on the phone to my father giving him the bullshit about her relations more in need for her than he and my brothers in need of wife and mother. She slammed the phone down at something he must have said, he can add another day to her time of absence for that. Fuck him.

Up the road from the piss-up at a big pile of sawdust from the mill. Slide on iron sheets down it; it’s an accumulating symbol
representing
these people’s working lives, their whittled-away boozing lives. We’ve seen this sawdust hill grow to a mountain over the years. Of Mum coming here for a party, a two-day binge of cards and beer. And then Auntie Molly’s turn to come over our way. The circuit’s round to go round.

On the third day, my mother, her brain addled and her violence sharpened by the days of beer drinking, got it into her head that a group of locals were ganging up on her. So.

So she asked them if they wanted to sort it out — right here and now! Come on, I’ll take the fuckin’ lot of you on! Spoken like a true grandchild of her warrior ancestor.

Now, women fighting has no redeeming, no mitigating quality; there is something against fundamental motherhood — as protective as nature has made it — that brawling does not do
anything
for. Women reduced to physical fighting is an assault worse on a notion precious to all of us, right? We’re talking hair pulled by the handful and coming out in clumps with the scalp end flecked with blood.

We’re talking punches that flail most ungracefully and nor with skill, and yet do so much damage thudding and skidding into flesh and turning female faces into hideous manifestations of pain and anger at being hit, of anger and some kind of wild joy at being in a brawl. We’re talking women slipping over in a puddle of blood, their fighting hands flailing for balance like in a hopelessly doomed dream.

It’s faces opening in scarlet welts of fingernails raking tracks down cheeks that a man caresses and smothers in sweet kisses and tells, presumably, he loves her and she, the face, answers in turn she loves him too — in her better moments.

This is eyes wide and wild and nostrils flared like angry cattle beasts and frightened cattle beasts destined for the slaughter room. We’re talking slaughter of dignity here so deep that physical
description
is almost relief. I’m seeing female animals ripping and pulling and scratching and punching and shrieking at each other — and different from the bar-room brawl of males. Which is kind of meant to be, if you’re looking only at basics. But women brawling?

Brawling males don’t fall over with such instant loss of dignity, displaying underwear and pubic hair and blackred patches of cunt bleed. Yes, cunt bleed. These bitches don’t have menstrual cycles — they have bleeding cunts and bleeding children who feel like cunts, believe us. Believe us.

Ask my cousin Jack. Ask my brothers. Ask Warren. Ask any child born into this sub-culture. It must be the warrior shadow still casting darkly over us. It has to have some explanation, it simply cannot be without reason — there I (us all) go again: trying to reason with the unreasonable. And to stop from crying.

Now our truck’s taking us back home, children on the back, little Hohepa’s had a hiding, we don’t know what for, we didn’t see it, the fuckin’ coward did it on the sly, blackened his child’s eye. Maybe his father heard about and saw the praise his son got from the other kids and us, how he turned his iron sheet into a dazzling display of
zigzagging
sledge and ski prowess down that sawdust ski slope, when he’d never before done this kind of thing. Warrior men, boozer men,
they don’t like to hear their children praised, it might make them feel too good about themselves. Which might take away some of your precious toughness.

The poor little fledgling bird has his eyes cast downward at the wooden plank floor of our truck tray and his parent-betraying nest, his hearse. Wind numbs our faces, history has turned another few blank pages of these people’s lives, the brawl still echoes in our ears, and up front they’re laughing about it.

And now Jack and I know that our mothers have their periods at the same time and why men get disgusted at them. And I know now from the comments made by the men during yesterday’s fight why my mother did that man with her hand — she was with monthly bleeding.

And we know about missing clumps of our mothers’ hair, that it grows back again. We don’t know about what’s been ripped out of us. It’s been a long funeral for whatshisname. And one coming before his time for a boy called Hohepa, I bet.

Yeah, and not only was there not even a photograph of my father but nor, of all the ironies, did he have any answers. You never seek answers to violence from someone who’s not violent. Violence
confounds
the non-violent, violence defeats them, it’s too frightening for them to contemplate. Violence appalls them, renders their analytical senses dull, punch-drunk. Violence is the antithesis of what they have found works for them and is the working of them. That’s my father. Give him a bit more, he deserves that.

Nor do you seek enlightenment from someone who is enlightened, not when he has no answers to violence, nor to your inner feelings of unworthiness, to the whys and wherefores of a race not his own — you don’t. Because an enlightened father has no answers.

I liked him, maybe loved him. I could talk to him, he’d come to whatever level of your conceptual age was required. You knew he was gradually pulling you up. He answered any question you put to him, even on sexual matters. He was liberated.

But I’d look at him, at our parental situation, at their
ill-matched
marriage, and think, he cannot know any more than me or he would have changed the situation.
He
is enlightened in
his
situational life from
his
parental background. Whilst his children, begat of two races, two poles of thinking, two extremes, are not. And cannot.

This is not a normal, flawed marriage, of unlikelies becoming an eventual compromise and acceptance of each their differences. This is a union born in someone’s bizarre imagination, a marriage of mind to emotion, an unnatural union of two irreconcilable races and their opposite ways of thinking. Fuck enlightenment. It didn’t work in our
house. It might as well have been a light left on in a room no one went into.

I think I loved him, though. I’m sure I did. As much as his own whiteman’s ill-at-ease with physicality would allow him to be loved, even by his own children. He would tell us he just wasn’t a demonstrative type and nor had he come from a demonstrative family. We wondered how he demonstrated with our mother in bed — with a handshake? A formal request to make love?

He was a good man, a good father. He wanted much for us. He urged us always to look people in the eye when we were speaking or being spoken to and not be like so many of our browner cousins, spending life staring at the ground. Yet we saw him unable to hold other people’s gaze himself, how he’d wipe at his brow, and his hands would go up behind his head, eyes close as if fighting with the shyness devils in his head. He told me once, without actually saying it was our secret, that shyness is as bad as being physically crippled.

Poor Dad, he was in a game whose rules he didn’t understand. He wouldn’t play it but he wouldn’t leave it. He was the genteel man in the midst of rough-house players. He was the gender separation that made men and women different in the world he came from, to this where they drank and swore and fought and fucked like men. We figured it was only in bed that they found something in common. And even then, she was hardly faithful to him. We knew that he knew but he would never say. It would not be in keeping with the stoic way of his raising. He was a kind of pallid silver birch choked by a
never-flowering
rata vine.

He was in a life that his younger educational aspiring didn’t equip him for; he turned up with a university degree when the asking qualification was to be good with your fists, or at least powerful enough of personality that no man, nor woman, dared touch you.

But she crawled and mauled all over him, and took part of our respect away for him for not being the man circumstances required. Her people said of him that he was like a nice lost boy who turned up one day at the wrong doorstep but stayed on. Which is why we wanted him to punch his way back to us respecting him more.

Analytical man and his opposite don’t fit. Each enrages the other. Countries must be like that and go to war on it. His reasoning
was our mother’s cause for violent anger. She not only didn’t
understand
logical thought, she despised it. His arguments were just more scar tissue on her bitter memories. His pointing out to her a mistaken statement of fact was an insult that she would never forget. His trying to restrain her from assaulting one of her card opponents was a betrayal of her, and he therefore deserved any act with which she wished to betray him back. They were more scars. It was how her mind worked. How the minds of all of them, more or less, work. Kids figured out the rule before educated father: don’t-try-and-
reason-with
-them.

He used words to sooth our troubled souls from what our mother was making happen around us. He explained everything to us, from ant colony social infrastructure to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, or any definition we asked for and then more of his own. He tried to pull in history for us to take lesson from, he admitted, very different lives. Though he never said make the most of it. Just tried to find some perspective. That never fitted.

After a major incident at home, Dad would try and focus us on singular things out in the future, or the coming rugby game on Saturday, or take us to the lake for our Sunday swim, or a long walk and long talks. But he wouldn’t talk about her. Our mother. His shameless wife. Or her sisters. Or her drunken, violent men and women mates. He refused to be distracted by personalities. It was concepts he focused on.

When we persisted with our plea that he give her back some of her own, he said he had no intention of punching anyone, let alone a woman, even one like our mother. He said the Irish and Baltic people were volatile, fighting races with clannish, tribal outlook like the Maori, and where had that got them? Locked in endless turmoil, stultified thinking calling itself religious, tribal, political difference when it was simply proof of no advancement being made, according to our reasoning, logic-revering, sweet, inadequate father.

Who could argue with him — but who would confer with such a man of such a thinking out of his environment? You just take him at the face value he was prepared to give, and feel affection for him. Wanting it to be love.

Words were his tools: spoken, in written form in his books
and journals and magazines. Words were her weapons, from her volatile heart, her raging emotions, her lustful-born condition, and what alcohol brought out of her mouth and translated to her fists, her raking bitch-nails.

Words were what to hurl at the enemy. The enemy was
whoever
was nominated on the day, who nominated her/himself, in the heat of the moment or at the whim of her heated moment. Words were her taiaha, her mere. (Lack of the right words, too many of the wrong, were spearings and clubbing of us.)

Purely physical, wholly the hedonist, she hasn’t yet taken physical shape has she? Not when she is an impression, when her meaning is not a picture but an impact on lives. Articulate, eloquent words on her?

Here’s an impression:

My mother, the thing which gave birth to me, about ten stone of her then, about five foot four, attractive enough if you can be objective, but no class catch, hardly that. Black wavy hair, good smooth Maori skin, brown eyes, great Maori pearl-white teeth — when they’re smiled and not bared. If she were a prostitute she’d have plenty of regular customers. If she were a whore she’d be the one men would get into trouble over. Disposition and style of a fishwife, though. Movement of an athlete — a fighter. That’s her, the creature that conceived me in some moment of love or just sexual height, now straddled upon her female victim scratching her face. My mother, ladies and horrified gentlemen and neighbour children of our street. Well, someone’s got to have one like it.

Home from school to your mother brawling.

Fuckin’ big scrap on the front lawn of your father’s neat tending. Fight-ring confines defined by garden patches and stony footpath because the man of this house doesn’t like concrete, it’s obscene to his eyes, but so is this, his mowed and edge-trimmed front lawn seething with adults in violent tumult.

At half after the hour of three of a lovely sunny day.
You had it signalled from around the corner. You saw women neighbours hurrying to get best vantage point but without being spotted by the beer-encrazed women brawlers. You saw old Mr Hodge shaking his head in disgust again as he always does, with that slow, incredulous walk towards the fight, his back to you. But you know how his eyes will be bulging in disbelief and, yes, a certain atavistic urge to do same: to give these uncouths, these primitives, some of their own back. But differently; in the name of justice and what is right.

In the jungle, boys and girl children of these jungle dwellers, beasts in their prowling place, at number nineteen Marsden Street, after Samuel a coloniser who did so much good for his claimed British Empire country, but not for these creatures: he went right over their heads, they were fighting back then as now, in a jungle just as savage as a suburban one, except murder is now no longer permissible, unless murder of their children’s hearts.

You know, you quicken your pace, feel your face flush, you turn sick inside, the very air feels crushing — you have to stop, catch your breath suddenly lost, suddenly drowning. In a sea of
shame
, of being the son, one of her children, of a mother like no other in this neighbourhood, this entire town of your yearning, searching, blindly groping looking that can turn itself to spying, and worse. (A thief is evolving in me. I want to steal what others have. And another beast stirs in me, though I know not what form he’ll take.)

Yeah, and your head can barely lift; you understand shame vividly because it has nowhere to hide. And if it did, then it would be different. Bearable.

Hey, shame is the eyes of others declaring it. No eyes, no shame. Listen: shamed kids are defeated kids, shame takes away their daily triumphs, turns every little victory to mush. You’re ashamed of even breathing. Which is existing is it not?

You’d rather turn and run, who cares where, you’d rather that not be a police siren and that they didn’t know this address off by heart. You wonder where the fuck Warren is. You care more for what he can do for you than what this is doing to him. He’s just got to save you, not save himself. But it is a siren and they do know the address off by heart. In two days her name will be in the paper — again. The
buzz goes around the neighbourhood: She’s been at it — again. No! Again? Yes, again.

Here, read it for yourself:
In the Two Lakes District Court Mrs Heta Burgess pleaded guilty to charges of causing a public
disturbance
and damage to police property, namely a police shirt and two police issue ties. The judge expressed concern that this was not Mrs Burgess’ first court appearance. Mrs Burgess spoke defiant words in response to the judge. The judge ordered her to be silent.
Then he asked what her children wanted to ask her but never could:
what was troubling her so?

She told him she didn’t feel so troubled, indeed she felt quite good considering she had been in a fight, and anyway why was she the only one charged, and on top of that, why press charges when it was a family affair hurting no one but each other? And your Honour, her very words there for the town to see,
We do it all the time. What’s the big deal?

Big enough deal for the judge to fine her quite heavily and our father to pay it. Otherwise no big deal, mother. Not if not to you. Not if your children don’t count, their shame, their spotlighted state, the sniggering, the public humiliation.

You go to school after she’s been written up in the court pages, hahahha, your mother was in court, everyone
saw
it, my father
read
it.
My
mother would rather be dead than be in the paper like
that
. Well, who wouldn’t.

You catch glance, glimpse of your different neighbours, their reactions. Some despise you, they put you into the same Maori
category
of never being able to civilise you, can’t take the jungle out of you.

And you worry it’s true and when your turn is coming. But the Ropihas across the road are Maori and they’re good people. So are the Mahere family top of the street. Maybe the rumours are right, there’s something wrong with our mother’s family’s heads. They’re not all there. It’s the Te Amo family, Uncle Henry excepted, who are wrong. Not a good part of the Maori race. Except we know it spreads far beyond our mother’s family. And it is Maori. It is Maori.

On our street you get those decent people who are concerned for what this is doing to you, it’s obvious to the whole watching,
witnessing street, that this can’t be doing your, um — well, your development much good, as Edith Dover says, and Mr Hodge gruffly agrees with in that manner of theirs, meaning they know the Burgess kids are being destroyed and so are a whole lot of families like them, but in those days they didn’t have the language yet for this.

Shame brings the sweat streaming from your forehead, it whips up a wet stink under your arms, it feels like a disease has caught you again, a lurking latent virus has struck. You tell yourself the words your father does: you are not responsible for your mother’s action, nor those of her relations. But it doesn’t work, sorry, Dad. It doesn’t get off the ground.
Shame hurts.