The Whale Rider (7 page)

Ah yes, the clouds. The third event had been a strange cloud formation
I had seen a month before above the mountains. The clouds looked like a surging sea and
through them from far away a dark shape was approaching, slowly plunging. As it came closer
and closer I saw that it was a giant whale. On its head was a sacred sign, a gleaming moko.

Haumi e, hui e,
taiki e
.

Let it be done.

twelve

I wish I could say that I had a rapturous return. Instead, Nanny
Flowers growled at me for taking so long getting home, saying, ‘I don’t
know why you wanted to go away in the first place. After all —’

‘I know, Nanny,’ I said.
‘There’s nothing out there that I can’t get here in
Whangara.’

Bang
came her hand.
‘Don’t
you
make fun of me
too,’ she said, and she glared at Koro Apirana.

‘Huh?’ Koro said. ‘I didn’t
say nothing.’

‘But I can hear you
thinking
,’ Nanny Flowers said, ‘and I know when
you’re funning me, you old paka.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Koro Apirana said.
‘Te mea te mea.’

Before Nanny Flowers could explode I gathered all of her in my arms,
and there was much more of her now than there had been before, and kissed her.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t care if you’re
not glad to see me, because I’m glad to see
you
.’

Then I handed her the present I had bought her on my stopover in
Sydney. You would have thought she’d be pleased but instead,
smack
came her hand again.

‘You think you’re smart, don’t
you,’ she said.

I couldn’t help it, but I had to laugh. ‘Well how
was I to know you’d put on weight!’ My present had been a beautiful
dress which was now three sizes too small.

That afternoon I was looking out the window when I
saw Kahu running along the road. School had just finished.

I went to the verandah to watch her arrival. Was this the same little
girl whose afterbirth had been put in the earth those many years ago? Had seven years really
gone past so quickly? I felt a lump at my throat. Then she saw me.

‘Uncle Rawiri!’ she cried
‘You’re back!’

The little baby had turned into a doe-eyed, long-legged beauty with a
sparkle and infectious giggle in her voice. Her hair was unruly, like an afro, but she had
tamed it into two plaits today. She was wearing a white dress and sandals. She ran up the
steps and put her arms around my neck.

‘Hullo,’ she breathed as she gave me a kiss.

I held her tightly and closed my eyes. I hadn’t realised how
much I had missed the kid. Then Nanny Flowers came out and said to Kahu, ‘Enough
of the loving. You and me are working girls! Come here! Be quick!’

‘Nanny and me are hoeing the vegetable garden,’
Kahu smiled. ‘I come very Wednesday to be her mate, when she wants a rest from
Koro.’ Then she gave a little gasp and took my hand and pulled me around to the
shed at the back of the house.

‘Don’t be too long, Kahu,’ Nanny Flowers
shouted. ‘Those potatoes won’t wait all day.’

Kahu waved okay. As I followed her I marvelled at the stream of
conversation which poured out of her. ‘I’ve got a baby sister now,
Uncle, she’s a darling. Her name is Putiputi after Nanny Flowers. Did you know I
was top of my class this year? And I’m the leader of the culture group too. I love
singing the Maori songs. Will you teach me how to play the guitar? Oh,
neat
. And Daddy and Ana are coming to see you tonight once
Daddy gets back from work. You bought me a
present
?
Me
? Oh where is it, where is it!
You can show me later, eh. But I want you to see this first —’

She opened the door to the shed. Inside I saw a gleam of shining
silver chrome. Kahu put her arms around me and kissed me again. It was my motorbike.

‘Nanny Flowers and I have been cleaning it every
week,’ she said. ‘She used to cry sometimes, you know, when she was
cleaning it. Then she’d get scared she might cause some rust.’

I just couldn’t help it; I felt a rush of tears to my eyes.
Concerned, Kahu stroked my face.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said.
‘Don’t cry. It’s all right, Uncle Rawiri. There, there.
You’re home now.’

Later that night Porourangi arrived. Among the family he was the one
who seemed to have aged the most. He introduced me to Ana, for whom I felt an instant
warmth, and then proudly showed me the new baby, Putiputi.

‘Another girl,’ Koro Apirana said audibly, but
Porourangi took no notice of him. We were used to Koro’s growly ways.

‘Oh, be quiet,’ Nanny Flowers said.
‘Girls can do anything these days. Haven’t you heard you’re
not allowed to discriminate against women any more? They should put you in the
jailhouse.’

‘I don’t give a hang about women,’ Koro
Apirana said. ‘You still haven’t got the power.’

It was then that Nanny Flowers surprised us all. ‘Oh, yeah
yeah, you old goat,’ she said.

We had a big family dinner that night with Maori bread and crayfish
and lots of wine to drink. Nanny had invited the boys over and they arrived with a roar and
a rush of blue smoke and petrol fumes. It was almost as if I had never left. The guitars
came out and the voices rang free to make the stars dance with joy. Nanny Flowers was in her
element, playing centre stage to her family, and one of the boys got her up to do a hula.

‘Look,’ he cried with delight. ‘The
Queen of Whangara!’

There was a roar of laughter at that one, and Kahu came running up to
me, saying, ‘See how we love you, Uncle? We killed the fatted calf for you, just
like the Bible says.’ She hugged me close and then skipped away like a songbird.

Then Porourangi was there. ‘Is it good to be
home?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Yes,’ I breathed. ‘Just
fantastic
. How has it been?’

‘Much the same as ever,’ Porourangi said.
‘And you know our Koro. He’s still looking.’

‘What for?’

‘The one who can pull the sword,’ Porourangi
laughed hollowly. ‘There are a few more young boys he’s found. One of
them may be the one.’

Porourangi fell silent. I saw Koro Apirana rocking in his chair, back
and forth, back and forth. Kahu came up to him and put her hand in his. He pushed her away
and she dissolved into the dark. The guitars played on.

Over the following weeks it was clear to me that Koro
Apirana’s search for ‘the one’ had become an obsession. Ever
since the birth of Kahu’s young sister he had become more intense and brooding.
Perhaps aware of his own mortality, he wanted to make sure that the succession in the
present generation was done, and done well. But in doing so he was pushing away the one who
had always adored him, Kahu herself.

‘You’d think the sun shone out of his
—’ Nanny Flowers said rudely. Kahu had come to the homestead that
morning riding a horse, with the news that she’d come first in her Maori class.
Nanny Flowers had watched as Koro Apirana had dismissed the young girl. ‘I
don’t know why she keeps on with him.’

‘I know why,’ I said to Nanny Flowers.
‘You remember when she bit his toe? Even then she was telling him,
“Yeah, don’t think you’re going to keep me out of
this!” ’

Nanny Flowers shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, whatever it is,
Kahu is sure a sucker for punishment, the poor kid. Must be my Muriwai breed. Or
Mihi.’

Mihi Kotukutuku had been the mother of Ta Eruera, who had been
Nanny’s cousin, and we loved the stories of Mihi’s exploits. She was a
big chief, descended as she was from Apanui, after whom Nanny’s tribe was named.
The story we liked best was the one telling how Mihi had stood on a sacred ground at
Rotorua. ‘Sit down,’ a chief had yelled, enraged. ‘Sit
down,’ because women weren’t supposed to stand up and speak on sacred
ground. But Mihi had replied, ‘No
you
sit down!
I am a senior line to yours!’ Not only that, but Mihi had then turned her back to
him, bent over, lifted up her petticoats and said, ‘Anyway, here is the place
where you come from!’ In this way Mihi had emphasised that all men are born of
women.

We sat there on the verandah, talking about Kahu and how beautiful she
was, both inside and outside. She had no guile. She had no envy. She had no jealousy. As we
were talking, we saw Koro Apirana going down to the school where seven boys were waiting.

‘Them’s the contenders,’ Nanny Flowers
said. ‘One of them’s going to be the Rocky of Whangara.’

Suddenly Kahu arrived, dawdling from the opposite direction. She
looked so disconsolate and sad. Then she saw Koro Apirana. Her face lit up and she ran to
him, crying ‘Paka! Oh! Paka!’

He turned to her quickly. ‘Go back,’ he said.
‘Go away. You are of no use to me.’

Kahu stopped in her tracks. I thought she would cry, but she knitted
her eyebrows and gave him a look of such frustration that I could almost hear her saying to
herself, ‘You just wait, Paka, you just wait.’ Then she skipped over to
us as if nothing had happened.

I was lucky enough to get a job in town stacking
timber in a timber yard and delivering orders to contractors on site. Every morning
I’d beep the horn of my motorbike as I passed Porourangi’s, to remind
Kahu it was time for her to get out of bed for school. I soon began to stop and wait until I
saw her head poking above the window-sill to let me know she was awake. ‘Thank
you, Uncle Rawiri,’ she would call as I roared off to work.

Sometimes after work I would find Kahu waiting at the highway for me.
‘I came down to welcome you home,’ she would explain. ‘Nanny
doesn’t want any help today. Can I have a ride on your bike? I
can
? Oh,
neat
.’
She would clamber on behind me and hold on tight. As we negotiated the track to the village
I would be swept away by her ingenuous chatter. ‘Did you have a good day, Uncle? I
had a
neat
day except for maths, yuk, but if I want to go
to university I have to learn things I don’t like. Did you go to university,
Uncle? Koro says it’s a waste of time for a girl to go. Sometimes I wish I
wasn’t a girl. Then Koro would love me more than he does. But I don’t
mind. What’s it like being a boy, Uncle? Have you got a girlfriend?
There’s a boy at school who keeps following me around. I said to him that he
should try Linda. She likes boys. As for me, I’ve only got one boyfriend.
No,
two
. No,
three
. Koro, Daddy and
you
. Did you miss me in
Australia, Uncle? Did you like Papua New Guinea? Nanny Flowers thought you’d end
up in a pot over a fire. She’s a hardcase, isn’t she! You
didn’t forget me, Uncle, did you? You didn’t, eh? Well, thank you for
the ride, Uncle Rawiri. See you tomorrow. Bye now.’ With an ill-aimed kiss and a
hug, and a whirl of white dress, she would be gone.

The end of the school year came, and the school break-up ceremony was
to be held on a Friday evening. Kahu had sent invitations to the whole family and included
the boys in the list. ‘You are cordially invited,’ the card read,
‘to the school prizegiving and I do hope you are able to attend. No RSVP is
required. Love, Kahutia Te Rangi. P.S. No leather jackets please, as this is a formal
occasion. P.P.S. Please park all motorbikes in the area provided and not in the Head-
master’s parking space like last year. I do not wish to be embraced
again.’

On the night of the break-up ceremony, Nanny Flowers
said to me, as she was getting dressed. ‘What’s this word
“embraced”?’

‘I think she means
“embarrassed”,’ I said.

‘Well, how do I look?’ Nanny asked.

She was feeling very pleased with herself. She had let out the dress I
had bought her and added lime-green panels to the sides. Nanny was colour blind and thought
they were red. I gulped hard. ‘You look like a duchess,’ I lied.

‘Not like a queen?’ Nanny asked, offended.
‘Well, I’ll soon fix that.’ Oh no, not the
hat
. It must have looked wonderful in the 1930s but that was
ages ago. Ever since, she had added a bit of this and a bit of that until it looked just
like something out of her vegetable garden.

‘Oh,’ I swallowed, ‘you look out of this
world.’

She giggled coyly. We made our way out to Porourangi’s car.
Kahu’s face gleamed out at us.

‘Oh you look lovely,’ she said to Nanny,
‘but there’s something wrong with your hat.’ She made a space
for Nanny and said to her, ‘Come and sit by me, darling, and I’ll fix it
for you.’

Porourangi whispered to me, ‘Couldn’t you stop the
old lady? Her and her blinking hat.’

I was having hysterics. In the back seat Kahu was adding some feathers
and flowers and what looked like weeds. The strange thing was that in fact the additions
made the hat just right.

The school hall was crowded. Kahu took us to our places and sat us
down. There was an empty seat beside Nanny with ‘Reserved’ on it.

‘That’s for Koro when he comes,’ she
said. ‘And don’t the boys look
neat
?’ At the back of the hall the boys were trying to hide behind
their suit jackets.

Nanny Flowers jabbed Porourangi in the ribs.
‘Didn’t you tell that kid?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t have the heart,’ he whispered.

For the rest of that evening the seat beside Nanny Flowers remained
empty, like a gap in a row of teeth. Kahu seemed to be in everything: the school choir, the
skits and the gymnastics, and after every item she would skip back to us and say,
‘Isn’t Koro here yet? He’s missing the best part.’