The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (7 page)

— Mocking me now from above —

‘… We wish all passengers a pleasant journey …'

‘This is it Queenie,' I said feverishly. ‘This is our carriage.'

Again she looked at me with dreaming eyes, from the midst of her friends. Round their heads some wore bands, worn the way our people wear their tipare when they are in costume. They looked like the wild guys I'd seen on the pictures on Saturday nights, back home.

‘My brother, Heta,' she explained to them, not sure whether to be embarrassed or proud, I was so different. So different from her too, though I'd not noticed it properly till that moment. Until then she'd just been Queenie. Now she was — different. She might have been pregnant but then again she might not. You couldn't tell for sure, her puku had fallen away in her jeans, but maybe it wasn't a baby. They wouldn't have minded at home. Well not so much that she couldn't have come back. One of the boys in the crowd threw his arm around her, casual and friendly.

‘… The Limited will depart in two minutes. All seats please.'

‘Get on, Heta,' she said and kissed me, quick and funny, on the cheek. ‘My love to Ma and Dad and the kids. Tell 'em I'm all right. Tell 'em I'll write.'

‘Aren't you coming home, Queenie?' I said, knowing the answer.

‘Home?' The vague embracing smile over her companions. ‘This is home now, brother. My friends. We take care of each other.'

I was on the step of the train. ‘On you get, lad,' said the guard. I stumbled backwards, the door shut in my face. On the platform Queenie's friends had
started to sing gently like a conversation between themselves, with the guitar laughing along with them.

Neon signals across the way were flashing on my horizon, I couldn't see her face for lights and tears. The train started to move. For one blinding instant Queenie's face and mine focussed on each other and she leapt at the train door. Locked maybe, it didn't budge and she fell back as the train gathered speed, loosening her grasp. I craned my neck around but already she had picked herself up and was catching the strolling band wandering along the platform. I guessed her face would be dreamy again.

‘Goodbye little sister — haere ra e te tuahine — haere ra e Kuini, haere ra,' my heart beat with the wheels of the train.

At home on Sunday Ma would say her prayers — ake, ake, ake, for ever and ever, amene — and I wondered, this time would she ever open her eyes again.

I bent down to change my aching feet out of the new shoes into the old ones. It was the least I could do for myself. I'd be travelling all night and all the next day too.

Back there, she and they together might ride easy into a neon night but my journey would not be so good.

M
R
W
ELLINGTON
-C
ROSBY
was working his way through the outstanding rates demands. It was February and the sun shone through the top half of the window that would not open, the part not painted mashed-potato cream. Light reflected from his bald patch, so that sweat ran into his eyes and fogged up his glasses.

Roberts, Roberts and Robinson, through Rogers, Rogers and Ryan, on through S; Smith, Smith, Smith, Smithe and Smythe, past Thompson, Tompkins and Turner … on through the alphabet with nice safe names, and for those that did boast the occasional hyphen, he bet they had a caravan, station-wagon, and a double roll-a-door, to go with it. He took off his glasses to wipe them, so that the room dropped away behind myopia.

And who would not exchange Wellington-Crosby for Smith, Smithe or Turner? Certainly he would, and if it had not been his mother's last wish the day before she had drawn her last breath at the TAB window one Saturday morning, he would have abandoned one or the other long ago. But … she hadn't gone through trial and sorrow to educate him, to be just a common Mr Wellington, or Mr Crosby. He was a gentleman.

Sighing, Mr Wellington-Crosby returned his glasses to the bottom end of his nose, and slid them thoughtfully towards his line of focus, as a large and magnificent woman sailed through the swinging glass door and under the crest of the city fathers.

‘Heremaia, Rebecca Rawinia,' she boomed.

Mr Wellington-Crosby jumped. ‘I beg your pardon?'

She repeated her name more loudly. Then, as he continued to stare, she pulled a crumpled piece of paper from a pocket in her muu-muu. ‘I've come about my rates,' she said.

‘Of course,' murmured the small man, beginning to collect himself.

‘You can't swing this lot on me,' said Mrs Heremaia, jabbing an eloquent
finger at the paper. ‘Man, I ask you, sixty-five dollars. Sixty-five-dollars rates for a patch of blackberry.'

Mr Wellington-Crosby took the paper and, after studying it, opened a long, grey filing cabinet. It took him a while to find what he was looking for, and, as he searched, Mrs Heremaia produced a transistor radio from her dress and tuned it in to ‘The Yellow Submarine', loud and clear. The city greybeards in their straight, wooden picture frames twitched their whiskers and appeared to roll their eyes.

‘Your land is incorporated under the Maori Land Court,' he said, coming up for air at last.

‘That right?' said Mrs Heremaia. ‘Don't know about that.'

‘You must have signed some papers once, don't you remember?'

‘Sign this, sign that, all the same to me.'

‘Well it must be so,' he said, patiently.

‘So what's that to me? My old lady always paid the rates on that bit of scrub, but she died six months back. So this letter comes for her — hey, why'd you send it to her after she's dead?'

Mr Wellington-Crosby made a mental protest that the heavenly records had not adjusted themselves to the rates file, and shook his head with wonder and solicitude.

‘I don't know how we came to make such a mistake,' he said. ‘I'm very sorry.'

The music had turned soft and mellow.

Mrs Heremaia shook the radio vindictively and because the music remained the same, she switched it off and repocketed it.

‘Anyway,' she said, ‘I'm not paying those rates. There's a lot of fellas own that bit of land, or so my old lady used to say, and it seems like that's what you're telling me too. So you better find all them fellas and tell 'em to pay sixty-five dollars, not me.'

Mr Wellington-Crosby cleared his throat to explain. ‘You've always owned this land you know. You and eight others. Which means you've always been equally liable for the rates. Only your mother's been good enough to pay for them in the past, and it's only now that she's — er — passed away — that you have to worry.' He paused for breath and fanned himself with the rates demand. A near thing that, he had nearly said ‘dead' for ‘passed away', so very unkind that. Not the sort of thing a gentleman would do.

Mrs Heremaia scratched her ear with her finger, found it unsatisfactory, and produced a hairclip from her muu-muu. Maybe, thought Mr
Wellington-Crosby
, with fascination, maybe, if I ask for a tin of condensed milk, and two
packets of tea, she will be able to produce them from that supermarket-sized garment.

‘You know,' she said, leaning over the counter confidentially, ‘my mother, she swapped that land for a sweet bit of property up the back of the lakes. What do you think of that?'

‘I don't know,' the little man muttered feverishly.

‘If you ask me, it's that fifty acres round Rotorua that we own.'

He was silent.

‘That's if you ask me.'

Silent still.

‘Ah well, looks like that's that then,' she said. ‘It was simple. Fancy her paying all them rates on the wrong bit of land.' Gathering herself together, Mrs Heremaia headed for the door.

‘Stop,' cried Mr Wellington-Crosby. She turned back, a beautifully
modulated
swivel of large but unruffled flesh, and looked at him, long and cool, so that inside him said, ‘I'm so hot, I'm so hot,' and outside him the crisp white shirt burst into wet rivers of despair. And this time it was she who was silent.

‘See here,' he said. ‘I can't let you off your rates, just like that. You'd get into trouble.'

‘Not if you told me I didn't have to pay.'

‘Then I'd get into trouble.' He trembled. Big lady, have mercy.

She shook her head slowly. ‘What do you reckon I oughta do?'

‘You could get in touch with the Maori Land Court.'

She nodded her agreement. It gave them both time.

After she left, the rates clerk sat down and ate a peppermint. His digestion was no good at all, and this had knocked him. It must be the heat.

But the heat went on day after day, and things were no better at all when Heremaia, Rebecca Rawinia, came back to the office with Tuhoro, Albert Tai, a week later.

‘My brother-in-law, mister,' she said, standing at the door, and urging the man forward. It looked as if she was tickling his spine, for he twisted and wove on shiny, pointed shoes without advancing a step. A shifty character, thought Mr Wellington-Crosby. A scoundrel, you can always tell these types by their sharp ways.

But he was no fool this Mr Tuhoro. Oh no. A self-respecting man was he, good at both his jobs, a painter on his own account by day, and a dance band leader by night, quite an entrepreneur; and he always paid his rates, and his light bill and the phone, not to mention his income tax, caught you up this secondary employment, and why PAYE couldn't do all it promised and save a man the everlasting worry, he didn't know. In fact, you name a department,
any of these outfits that were out to keep a man poor, he had owed it, paid it, and had a clean bill of health.

Mrs Heremaia shrugged behind him. ‘He's always like that, Tuhoro, my brother-in-law,' she said, approaching the counter. ‘But what he says is true. He owes nobody anything, and he works hard to make sure things stay that way. Except for this,' and she waved the rates demand, now a tattered remnant, under his nose, ‘and this he does not want to pay.'

‘But if he is an owner — did you get in touch with the Maori Land Court?'

Yes, and indeed, how could Mrs Heremaia forget to do what he said, taking his advice as seriously as she did? All the other owners then, bar her mother, were alive and well, the eight of them, and all, bar Tuhoro, disgruntled as they were, would pay the rates. Well no one had got in touch with Auntie but she did what she was told these days, so there was nothing to worry about there.

‘Well then, why do you object so much to paying the rates on a perfectly good property of which you are a legal owner?' said Mr Wellington-Crosby.

‘I didn't want this land,' said Tuhoro. ‘Look, she has this bit of land, this fifty acres up country, and she swapped it for one acre. Porangi, that ol' woman, nuts.'

The rates clerk looked at Mrs Heremaia accusingly. ‘You told me the other way round.'

‘We all make mistakes, mister.'

‘So you do own this piece of land?'

‘Not me,' said Albert Tuhoro.

‘You signed for it, brother-in-law.'

‘Only because your blimn' sister made me. I don't want that land. Hell, man.'

The clerk ate a peppermint and chewed his ballpoint.

‘If you're a corporate body we can of course extract the rates from the revenue of the property.'

‘And what revenue, man, would you take from an acre of blackberry?'

‘You could make blackberry jam, Tuhoro brother,' said his sister by marriage, who looked as if she did not like him overmuch.

‘Blackberries, yes
blackberries. Can't have those inside the city boundaries,' Mr Wellington-Crosby said briskly. ‘Noxious weeds you know. Definitely have to get rid of those.'

Mrs Heremaia and her brother-in-law were instantly united. She adopted her fighting stance, and he was the spokesman.

‘When would we get the time? Me, look, I keep a good section and two jobs —'

‘All I was going to say,' broke in the other, frantically chewing his white hot sweets, ‘was that if you cleared the blackberry, you could grow potatoes, pay the rates and all make a profit.'

Mrs Heremaia extracted cigarettes and matches from her muu-muu pocket, and lit a cigarette. She leaned her back and the tip of an elbow on the counter, shook her hair from its scarf, so that it fell down her back in a shower, and she rippled in sighs as she gazed out the door at the teeming asphalt in the February sun.

He was not a man for poetry or fancy thoughts, Mr Wellington-Crosby, his digestion took care of that. But it did occur to him that the council might have been spared the great sum of money they had paid for that Lindauer to hang in the council chambers. One look at Mrs Heremaia and you had an impression to keep in your mind as long as any painting. A woman who could be loved, and he wished he had love in his soul. And oh how hot it was.

‘Council buy us the seed?' she said, over her shoulder.

‘Oh no, you'd have to buy the seed yourselves,' he said.

‘Council's got plenty of money.'

‘Not that much.'

‘Bring you a sack of spuds.'

‘No deal.'

‘Your missus'd be pleased.'

‘I have no miss — I am not married.'

She drew long on the cigarette. ‘Tuhoro man.'

‘Yes Rebecca.'

‘We'd better think of selling that land.'

‘Good idea that.'

‘It was my mother's land.'

‘It was the land of all of us, so she said. What we were to have for our own, but she swapped fifty acres for this. That is our inheritance, this land she has divided amongst us. I cannot feel for an acre of land in city streets.'

‘Strangely said, city man,' said his sister-in-law, still gazing down the street.

‘It might be more valuable than the fifty acres,' interjected Mr
Wellington-Crosby
.

Mrs Heremaia nodded, and left. It was not a time for speaking. As Mr Tuhoro followed her out, the rates clerk felt himself subside with relief. It really was simple, she had brains that woman, and courage too. He would not have dared suggest they sell the land.

The following day, he mentally added speed of action to her qualifications. She must have moved quickly amongst her relatives, for in the morning, soon
after the doors had opened, she was there, this time with a tiny woman leaning half on a stick and half on her arm.

‘This is Auntie, Mrs Hatu,' said Mrs Heremaia, indicating the tattooed bundle under the black shawl, and there was a note of weariness in her voice.

He nodded gravely across the counter to her. Gravely because he
appreciated
that there was a new turn of events, and, like his mother had said, oh how long ago, a gentleman must always respect the feelings of others. And again he wished his name was either Mr Wellington or Mr Crosby, for in this matter he might then be spared responsibility.

Auntie did not nod back. She did not do anything except hold her ground and peer across the counter.

‘Auntie can't write,' said Mrs Heremaia, determined to be done with it.

Mr Wellington-Crosby looked down at the enlarged peppercorn resting its chin on his high gloss counter, and was not surprised.

‘Auntie just made a mark on the title papers. Well she says she didn't actually, but somebody did.'

‘Well if she didn't, who did?' he implored.

‘Maybe my other auntie. That is, my great-aunties they are really. This one's sister. They can't write, none of them. So they make a mark.'

‘Yes?'

‘Well this one, she says it's not her mark, she knows her mark, an' it's not her mark.'