Three Times Dead (4 page)

It was dark by the time Haki approached the village at Rangiaowhia. He had left Matiu in Otawhia while he had run across the lands towards his wife’s village. The moon guided him now that the sun had set, and as he neared he heard the women singing a waiatia. Was it a song of greeting or a song of sorrow? He could not tell.

He searched the village for the birthing hut, which would be set aside from the others, his head turning as he listened to the song, using the sound to lead him there. It was clear that it was a song of greeting. His son had been born.

The women rose from their mats on the ground at the entrance to the hut as he approached.

“You cannot go in,” they said as he drew near. “She is resting.”

“I must see my son!” He tried to push past them but they formed a line and he did not want to offend them by forcing them aside. “Let me through!”

“But you have come straight from the battlefield,” one of the women said. “You are tapu.”

“Whakahoro has been performed,” Haki said, exasperated. “The tapu has been removed.”

The eldest woman looked over to the tohunga, who nodded, and she turned to go into the hut, returning a moment later carrying the baby wrapped in a blanket. She placed the bundle in his arms and he looked down at the face of his son. He was at rest, his eyes closed and his mouth pursed as if waiting to receive the breast. In spite of the cold night air, Haki peeled back the folds of the blanket to make sure that his son was whole and complete. The baby’s eyes opened, startled by the sudden chill, and his face puckered.

“He is strong?” he asked the woman in front of him.

“He fought his mother on his way out,” she confirmed. “He has exhausted her.”

The baby wailed loudly. Haki smiled as he folded the blanket around the squirming body.

“He is a warrior, born in a time of war. His name is Toa.”

“Bevan, Bevan, can you hear me? It’s all over now. The operation went well.”

I tried to speak but my mouth was dry and there was a chemical taste on my tongue. The skin on my thigh was burning, blotting out the pain I had come to know from my stump.

I finally managed to speak. “It hurts.”

“On a scale of one to ten?”

“Ten,” I answered.

“Ok, we’ll give you a bit more morphine. Would you like some water?”

“Yes,” I answered.

I sucked in the cool water when I felt the straw rest on my lips.

“How’s that pain now?” the nurse asked.

“Nine.”

“Let’s try and get that down before you head back to the ward.”

“Why does it hurt so much?”

“They took a piece of skin from your thigh to attach to the stump. The donor site is like an open wound, a graze, and that’s why it is so painful – all the nerve endings are just beneath the skin. It should heal quickly though. They’ve also put a cast at the end of your leg to reduce swelling. That will hurt a bit too. We’ll get it under control. More water?”

I was keen to get rid of the anaesthetic taste from my tongue, but it lingered no matter how much water I drank, even as they finally moved me out of recovery and into the ward. Mum was there to greet me when they wheeled me in. She’d moved all my gear and the get well cards from the HDU into this space. It was a four-bed ward and I was near the window. It was bright daylight outside. It felt like another world out there beyond the windowpane.

“How are you feeling?” Mum asked.

“Crap,” I said, because I did. I couldn’t decide which pain was worse – the donor site of the skin graft or the end of my leg. And I felt nauseous, too. The nurse was fussing around the bed and I was grateful when she put the familiar button in my hand.

“You know how this works?” she asked.

“I sure do,” I said. I pressed once and the machine behind me beeped reassuringly. The analgesic topped up that which I had already taken in down in recovery, and I could feel that easy lethargy overtake me.

“The doctor will be around to see you later,” the nurse said as she hurried out.

I turned my head and looked out the window at the blue sky beyond. I wished that I was out there, with two legs instead of one and a half, and on my skateboard or surfboard, I didn’t care which, as long as I wasn’t tied to this hospital bed.

Mum showed me a box still wrapped in cellophane. “I got you a new phone.”

“Nice,” I said as my eyes closed. The lethargy was slowly turning into 'don’t give a shit' and I let the feeling overtake me. I wanted escape and I welcomed the release that came with drug-enhanced oblivion, even if was filled with realistic dreams.

Haki watched as Reka attached Toa to her breast. The baby rooted hungrily and then drank deeply, his eyes half closing and making a satisfied small grunt as he took in each mouthful. Reka looked over at Haki and smiled.

“He feeds like you,” she said.

“I don’t grunt like that.”

“Maybe not when you’re feeding,” she said and laughed. “He’s strong like you too. He will be a great warrior.” She curled Toa’s fingers around one of her own and looked into the baby’s half-closed eyes. “Will you be around to teach him?” Her voice was soft, almost pleading.

“I will have to go soon. My brother has gone to help strengthen the pa at Meremere to stop the invasion and I must join him. We must stand or our land will be lost. I fight for you and for Toa. If I do not then there will be no land for Toa to defend.”

She gave a small nod but a tear ran down her cheek. He had heard that women became like children after giving birth and cried for no reason. Reaching over, he wiped the wetness from her skin.

“I will keep you safe,” he said. “No matter what happens, you will be safe. Even when I am far away, know that I am fighting for you and Toa. If the white men draw near, I shall be ahead of them, coming to protect you. I promise.”

She smiled up at him but the tears still flowed down her cheeks. As he kissed her, he felt the wetness on his own skin.

It was dark outside when I woke. My cheeks felt wet and, when I raised my hand, I realized that I was crying. Hastily I wiped the tears away. Mum heard me move and turned towards me just as I had cleared away the evidence. She smiled.

I was aware then of the pain from both my thigh and stump and reached for the magic button, but it was gone. “Where’s the drug thing?” I asked Mum.

“They decided to take it away. They’re trying to reduce the medication for the pain as they need to get you mobile, and the drugs are just making you sleep too much.”

“Mobile? I only have half a leg.”

“Don’t get angry at me, Bevan.”

“Well then, can you
please
get me something for the pain?”

“I’ll call the nurse.”

She reached over and pressed a button. I heard a beeping somewhere outside of the room and a nurse entered soon after.

“He wants something for the pain,” Mum said.

The nurse looked at the chart. “We can give him tramadol and paracetamol, that’s what the doctor has prescribed.”

“Just get me something,” I said, the pain was making me squirm. “What day is it?” I was losing track.

“Wednesday.”

Where did Tuesday go? I thought. The days were blending into one. The nurse returned with a green capsule and two white round pills. I swallowed them with the water she gave me.

“The doctor will be in tomorrow morning to talk to you,” she said as she put the beaker down. “You’re doing very well.”

It didn’t feel like I was doing very well. I could hardly concentrate for the pain.

“Why can’t they bring back the PCA?”

“They have to wean you off or else you become dependent,” Mum said.

“I can deal with that.”

“No you can’t, Bevan. You needed it when you first came out of theatre but you’ve got to do without it. I should know.”

“You don’t know shit – you’re not a doctor!”

“I’m a doctor of psychology, and you don’t need to talk to me like that, Bevan.”

“You know about minds, Mum, but nothing about bodies and it’s my body, or what’s left of it, that’s lying here, in pain. You have no idea what that’s like.”

“No, I don’t know what it’s like but I’m here to support you.”

“Don’t give me that crap. You’re just doing the dutiful mum thing but I’m a bloody cripple now. What kind of life am I going to have? I’m sick of all this shit!”

“It’ll be all right, Bevan. You’ll get an artificial leg and you’ll be able to walk again.”

“Like that’s going to be normal! I’m not going to be able to surf again, or do anything ever again.” My nausea was growing with my anger. “My life is fucking over!”

“It’s not over, Bevan,” Mum said as she leaned forward. I don’t know what she intended to do – maybe she was going to give me a hug. I will never know, for at that moment I vomited all over her, the remains of the white and green pills floating around in watery bile. So much for that. After Mum had cleaned herself up, the nurse came in and gave me an injection for the pain.

You may think that hospital was a cruisey time when all I had to do was pump myself full of drugs and hallucinate, but think again. I’m just going over the highlights here. True I was out of it for most of the first week, but the second week was really tough. I was more conscious, which meant I was more aware of the pain. I was also more aware of the hospital routines. Apart from night-time, I was rarely left alone. It seemed that the nurses were always coming in taking my temperature, blood pressure, checking on the various intravenous lines that were set up. Every so often the vein into which they fixed the line would collapse and then a specialist nurse had to come in and set up another one. That hurt. Then there were the dressing changes, and the bag changes, one for piss and the other for “gunk” as Mitch so eloquently put it – the stump juice that drained off my leg. I hated to look at it because it always made me sick. The doctors would come around in the morning and look at the chart and comment on the amount of fluids coming out of me and mark something on the paper. I started eating, but nausea was a problem and my stomach seemed to have gone on strike, which meant everything I ate either sat in my gullet until it came up or else it went down and got stuck somewhere in my intestines. I lost count of the number of enemas I had.

The first time the physios tried to get me out of bed, I fainted. Luckily, I had not quite left the bed, so I kind of slumped back down onto it. They said it was normal as I had been lying down for so long and the heart was not used to pumping blood right up to the top of the head. The next time they got me standing upright using some kind of metal frame on which I could lean all my weight, called a Zimmer frame. Old people use them. That was fine until the blood all rushed downward, drawn by gravity, and, not only did the bloody stump throb so much that I almost cried, but I nearly passed out again. The physios seem to be used to that because they had put a webbed belt around my waist and were able to pull me back up and onto the bed.

I came to hate the physios. Not their fault really, as they were only trying to get me up on my feet, getting me mobile which they said would not only help my bowels, but would also mean they could take out the catheter. Now that was something to look forward to.

And you would think that I’d taken the loss of my foot really well, but I’m skipping over the bits where I absolutely lost it. I usually took it out on Mum who was with me the most and an easy target. But sometimes the nurses and caregivers got it with both barrels. I’m not proud of some of things I said or did; all I can say is that it is a good thing that hospital beakers are made of plastic because several of them landed on the other side of the ward. If I was a bowler in a cricket team I would have taken the opposite team out in a couple of overs, such was the force and speed of my overarm.

So all in all, not the greatest time in my life, but looking back now, at least I was protected from myself, which was not the case when I got out.

Back to the highlights:

Josh came to visit me while I was in hospital. I didn’t expect that. We didn’t have good history. When he’d criticized the way I surfed, I’d beaten him up so bad that he’d had to go to A&E. Then Gina and I had a fight and she’d gone off with Josh, just for spite, I reckoned. I sorted that out but then she headed off back to the city and I was left at Piha with Mitch and Scott. After all that I never really could understand why Josh hadn’t let me drown. I guessed there were better people out there than me.

“I came down with my Dad,” Josh said. “He’s here on business.”

“He’s working then?” I asked. Josh’s dad had gone bankrupt the previous year and he’d lost the business.

“Yes, he’s working for a construction company. He’s finding it hard after being his own boss for so long, but at least he has a job.”

“And I saw your house sold.”

“Yeah and now we’re renting, which is ok, I guess. Not too far from the old house either. Life goes on.”

Conversation ground to halt then as he glanced down towards the end of my non-existent leg. Yes, life went on, but not as we knew it.

“Hayden came out of hospital last week,” Josh said eventually.

“How’s he doing?” I asked, as if I cared. Josh had been teaching Hayden how to surf at Piha over the New Year, but that came to a halt when Hayden was hit by a car.

Josh shrugged. “He’s ok.” I knew Josh felt guilty because it was him that had stepped out into the road and Hayden had pushed him out of the way taking the impact instead. But that was their issue, not mine. “When do you get out?” Josh asked.

“Not sure, they want to make sure the wound is healing well and that I can cope moving around on crutches. Then they’ll transfer my records to Auckland Hospital and I’ll go there as an outpatient. They also have to fix an appointment with the Artificial Limb Centre.”

“Oh,” was all Josh could find to say to that. He stared into the distance for a while, obviously thinking about what to say next. This was the reason I got so few visitors – it just got awkward. “So, are you coming back to school this year?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been that good at school. Not sure why. Rhys and Katie are the brains of the family; I got left out of that particular gene pool. Did you know I had to repeat a year?”

“I didn’t think that happened any more.”

“Happened to me, last year of intermediate school when the teachers said I wasn’t ready for high school and my parents agreed, so I stayed another year. I was real angry. That’s when I started to take it out on people. It didn’t help me learn anything, repeating that year, just made me mad and bad. By the time I got to high school, I had quite a rep.”

“I noticed.”

I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation with Josh. We’d not had much to do with each other since Piha and I knew that he’d been sucked in by Gina, so I couldn’t blame him for what she’d done. I had to admit that I missed Gina though; she hadn’t been back since she walked out on me. “Have you got Gina’s number?” I asked.

“Gina?” Josh looked at me like it was a trick question. “No, I erased it from my phone. Don’t you have it?”

I picked up the iPhone that Mum had got me. “New phone – mine was smashed in the accident, numbers smashed with it.”

“But hasn’t Gina been in to see you?”

I looked out of the window, remembering the disaster that her visit had been. “I was a bit of an arsehole when she came.”

“I thought you were going to go easy on her.”

“It’s been … difficult,” I said. “After Piha I hadn’t wanted to be with her in case it all went wrong again and then, when I started going to church, she went funny on me. Said she didn’t want to have anything to do with the Jesus stuff. When she came to visit me here I said some things and kind of pissed her off. Maybe it was the drugs talking, I don’t know.”

“What did you say?”

“I … can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Did you and Gina ever, you know … get it on?”

Josh laughed and then stopped when he saw that I was serious. “No, we never did, not that I didn’t want to, and it came close a few times but she always pushed me away. I thought it was me, but I think it was you.”

I leant my head back on the pillow, relieved. I mean, I should have believed Gina first off, but I had to make sure. When I looked at Josh, he was frowning and I saw him thinking about what I had said.

“Is she pregnant?” he asked.

“No, she says she’s not, but I wondered, you know, if she was then who …”

“And you asked her this?”

I nodded.

“I can see where it went wrong then,” Josh said and smiled. “No wonder she was pissed off.”

“Yeah, it didn’t go so well. And I told Mitch and Scott to fuck off as well, so there’s goes that contact.”

“Can your folks find out for you?”

“My folks seem to think that Gina is bad for me.”

Josh laughed and said, “I’ll see what I can do, but I don’t feature in any of her circles, so not sure how that’s going to work out.”

“Maybe she’ll come back.”

“We’re talking about a girl here, Bevan, you should know that when they’re pissed off, they are seriously pissed off. You haven’t got a hope.”

I knew what he said was true but I wanted to make amends. That was back when I actually cared enough to want to do something.