Kataraina is published by Scribe, available now.
Many years after the girl shot the man
We are telling this story. A clambering of vines seeking up towards the sun, then wanting, again, the groundwater.
Sometimes after telling more we walk into the bush, towards the bulging part of the river behind a series of grassy hills, rem nants of what was our life here. It was a place we’d lay down plastic, squirt Sunlight liquid and slide and slide under the hot pale sun, never imagining that one day we’d shoot the man who owned the land. We’d walk over those hills, a day of telling behind us, take off our clothes, go into the cold quick awa, let it rush over our face and hair.
When you shoot a man something inside you wants to be rep ulsed by who you are. You can’t ever manufacture – through deeds or words or service or prayer – a certain goodness again.
Telling allows us to live in the plain and pointless space of proving the moving, flailing, contesting and yielding parts of a contradiction to all be true, or at the very least honest. Tika. Pono. Together we listen. One of us might sometimes create the whistle, scratch, whistle, scratch of lead on paper. Who even does that any more? She does. Kataraina.
Hear us rush towards each other, blue and green and silver and brown and murky and chalky and clear tributaries coming down different sides of our mauka, to find each other, flow through and over each other. We meet at the growing beast, to pull up our history, the impressions left of an existence, life drawn in the earth preserved as mātātoka – as fossils.
If our stories are vines, are we the sun coaxing them up, out of their whenua, or are we their whenua?
No. We are the rinsing. We crave the rinsing and we are the rinsing.
Ko wai tātou?
Ko wai tātou.
One month after the girl shot the man
Almost a week before we left Rakiura we walked into Māori Beach for a night’s campout. Jade wanted to say goodbye to the island, and even if she could have said it anywhere, from the ferry even, she wanted it to be Māori Beach.
Colleen and Hēnare stayed behind, while we went: Ārama, Beth, Taukiri, Jade and Kataraina. We were still not ourselves. One month is nothing to murder. And some of us – Ārama and Beth – sometimes forgot that Stuart Johnson was not even the first victim; he was not even the second. And if we went right back through our whakapapa, his murder could be deemed quite unremarkable, par for the Te Au course, even. Maybe that’s what made it worse. Made us feebly wonder in each of our own inner worlds who was next? So at Māori Beach, with its great curving band of pale sand encircled by low forested hills and the soft fat water of Wooding Bay, and under the southern sky, we wondered if this place was to be our end. Each place we went we wondered if this supermarket, street, dream, pie, drive, walk, morning, afternoon, evening, night, kiss was to be our end. Māori Beach, isolated and pretty, was only one of the more poetic possibilities, soaking our wonderings, giving
it a disconcerting weight.
Māori Beach was not our end.
Taukiri lit a fire and around it we ate buttered bread and small salted venison steaks. Ārama and Beth ran up the beach to find the river mouth, a vivid blue channel of the freshest water we had ever seen, pouring quick into the southwest Pacific. We returned to the camp and the rest of us were arranged as if posing for a Department
of Conservation tramping brochure. Taukiri crouched at the fire, which glowed on his handsome face. Jade resting on a picnic blanket she’d brought. (She had patted it, asking Kataraina to sit with her, but Kataraina, Kat, Aunty Kat could not sit.)
Kat was standing near the shore, her arms folded tight across her chest, impenetrable, even to the beauty of the Rakiura twilight. A snapshot of any one of us would have made for a great tramping brochure. No one would have guessed how consumed by violence we were.
Of us all, Ārama – our little Ari – was the most willing to pre tend. He was the one who believed pretending everything was okay, seeded okayness. The rest of us were of the whakaaro that pretending encouraged more pretending. Especially Kat.
But camping! What a precious memory. And so, to stop pacing and stop Jade from patting at the picnic blanket, Kat suggested camping activities. We played spotlight in the grassy backshore. We took a torch up to the river to see if we could spot an eel, though we didn’t. We drank warm Milo around the fire before bed. Then it was Ari patting at the picnic blanket. ‘Come sit here by me, Aunty,’ he said.
‘I’m all goods,’ she said, standing, her lower body at odds with gravity, her upper body battling its many selves for the right to peace.
‘But come on,’ he whined. ‘Knock it off,’ she said.
Ari’s eyes watered.
‘Don’t be a sook,’ she said. ‘Surely, you’re harder now. “Django”, wasn’t it?’
And we felt this was quite mean, even Kat, who decided it was time to take her Zopiclone, go get a moe in, on a bloody camp mat, yeah right eh, hahaha.
Tomorrow she could start her day over the same way she had for a month. Forgiving us all for shooting him before she’d gotten to the bottom of a secret question that had barely bothered her before he died, but since he was shot tormented her. The question, once a dog barking somewhere distant, was now a shrill bird busting its head bloody against the glass pane of her heart.
Two years after the girl shot the man
Nothing much was ever happening on the grass oasis, near, and yet away from the swamp. Maybe the grass place was safe from that growing beast. It was hard to doubt it would be eaten up, too, the way fences, roads, sheds were being consumed around it. This was what we returned to, after the camping trip at Māori Beach and the ferry ride across Te Ara a Kiwa. We’d stood together, to say bye again, or at least seeyalater from the catamaran’s stern.
And on this grey day, we could see the ghostly outline of our mauka, Hananui.
‘One day we could climb it,’ Kat said, as if the confinement of the ferry was making her restless.
‘Yuck,’ Jade said. ‘That looks high.’
Back in Kaikōura we were reunited with Tom Aiken. We pulled up and there he was, in gumboots and a green hunter’s polar fleece, pulling a vine away from a window frame. The house looked as if it had been picked up and plonked where it was. So much budding about it. Bare patches were now tendrilled. The birdsong was a chorus. It was dusk when we arrived home; the autumn air was cool and damp. We crossed his green yard, which had not long ago been wood chip and pale brown mud, some grass.
Tom Aiken stopped pulling the vine. We stared at one another, and no one knew what to say. Blue swamp hens crossed the yard in front of us, as if we were not there. They disappeared into the dense bush and headed towards the swamp.
Holding up the blade in his hand, he said, ‘I wanted to leave it, but … we need this house.’
‘I missed it,’ Beth said.
‘Welcome home.’ He looked around the property. ‘Hard to believe eh.’
‘How long were we gone?’ Kat said.
Not very long ago it had been summer, a summer when Beth and Ārama went back and forwards between the two houses. They’d walked the dry gravel road or cut under the fences and darted through paddocks to reach each other and press sticks into each other’s backs and say, hands up, ya hear. Now, the entire landscape of farmland appeared to have reverted, wild with life: mānuka, rimu, kōwhai, nīkau, ponga. Some grew overnight. Bold. Hungry. Obscenely generous, the air was so fresh and rich.
This evening, though, two of us were on the grass: Jade resting, Kataraina restless.
‘Always wished for grass, to sit on, lie on, read on,’ Jade said. ‘It’s the dream,’ Kataraina said, pulling weeds from our herb
garden.
‘We should also eat our kai out here tonight.’ ‘This bloody mint is strangling the thyme.’
‘Taukiri can play his guitar. We could light candles.’
You could sit? thought Jade, and she put her head back onto the picnic blanket.
Kataraina continued pulling up weeds. The sun was bright on her face and hair. She paused and looked out past the trees to the kūkūwai, the water almost red in the lateafternoon light. She could hear the youngest of us, Beth and Ārama, bursting through the ponga and mānuka, spilling out to the grass armed with sticks of toetoe, the sun’s light attracted to the soft translucent plumes above their heads.
Beth whipped Ari and luminous toetoe particles scattered then floated, making time look slower, harnessed. She tripped on her own toobig gumboots and fell. Taukiri stepped out of the house
with his guitar, sat down beside Jade, his face red from napping in the sunroom.
‘What should we do for kai?’ he said, tuning his guitar, spurring time on again with the question, which made Aunty check it on her phone.
‘A picnic.’
He started strumming, and singing, ‘A picnic before she leaves us before she goes, before she breaks our hearts. So much going and leaving, who will keep us from drowning ourselves in the swamp …’
‘Oi. What’s with all the songs about being left.’
‘Mummy issues. We will keep from drowning ourselves in the swamp we will keep ourselves from wanting to look inside the tani wha’s mouth …’
‘Fish wraps? The leftover butterfish.’
‘Make us butterfish wraps, my aunty, my aunty.’ ‘You want me to sing a verse?’
‘No one wants that. You have not been blessed with the Te Au voice.’
‘I got some Te Au fight though – you want that?’
He laughed, but we were gone again to the water to dip the toetoe in it, and watch it come away and float on the toodark, toodeep water. Taukiri stood up. ‘Fish wraps can’t be that hard to make. I’ll sort dinner eh.’
‘And the boy is a man,’ his mother said. He flexed his muscles.
‘And the man is a boy,’ his aunty said, thrusting some dill and parsley at him. ‘Chop it fine. Mix it in with our mayo.’
Tom Aiken returned, and all six of us ate butterfish wraps with young watercress leaves, sliced tomato and a fresh dill and parsley mayonnaise on the grass – Kat pacing, her food in her hands. ‘Great choice, wraps!’ – until it got damp, and the sun disappeared,
then the candles we’d lit were not enough to comfort us, and when the moon came up and the strange quiet began, as if a silent movie was being projected onto an invisible screen, we retreated into the house to play gin rummy.
Beth and Ari watched a cartoon in our lounge. We were so lucky they had found a path back to childhood after it all. As if they trod a path back through the dark trees of what happened, we said. He only put one plaster on his knee today, we said. Beth squeezed her eye shut and pointed her fingers at a bird and pretended to shoot it only twice today – that we saw, we said.
In the lounge, Beth unscrewed the cap from the imaginary bottle again. She passed it to Ari. He took the imaginary bottle, and we drank imaginary courage from it.
4 January 2020, field study day one, 5.30–6.30am
The scientist would pray at the Waiautoa before she worked.
Her karakia revered te taiao – what karakia wouldn’t?
It was dawn and she welcomed it. ‘Haea te ata, ka hāpara te ata.’ She acknowledged the waking birds, especially the wrybill that used its crooked beak to scavenge beneath the river rocks. ‘Ka korokī te manu, ka wairori te kutu.’
The morning, so important. ‘Ko te ata nui.’ How it spread into the day. ‘Ka horaina.’
The dawn chorus. ‘Ka taki te umere. He pō, he pō. He ao, he ao, ka awatea.’
She knew the braided river to be part of an ancient pounamu trail tying Kaikōura coast with Lewis Pass and on to the West Coast; the ara tawhito was how her ancestors once brought the children of Waitaiki – the pieces of pounamu broken from her – across to trade with her eastern ancestors.
Cairo was the name of this scientist and she was a descendant of the pounamu trail. It was as if she’d been loosened from the melted snow and had tumbled through the Arahura gorge to be folded in harakeke and trekked over the alps herself.
She’d made the journey east to study a swamp. When she first saw the deep green lagoon, oxygen poured into her lungs, pulling her ribcage up, separating the bones, and she didn’t want to let the breath go. This had all been pasture – square patches in different shades of brown and green – now it was harakeke and raupō, wīwī and water. The ferns, grasses, mosses, trees, birds and insects, which grew there and flew over, under and around the kūkūwai, were a
spectacle. Its mauri, its life force, hummed with original energy. Her visit to the braided river that morning was not only spir
itual. She was interested in seeing the place where a botanist had rediscovered pygmy goosefoot.
Pygmy goosefoot. Wild spinach. The land starfish. Parahia. A plant her ancestors might have ripped by the handful from the kūmara crops as a weed, presumed extinct.
She scoured the dryland. This was the same place the botanist had rediscovered the herb, after no recorded sightings in more than fifty years. She continued walking, her eyes becoming sore. She needed to see the plant, dubbed a phoenix risen from the ashes. A Lazarus. The seeds – she wanted to pocket some. But she would not. The seeds could remain dormant for years and years. Then when conditions were right for the herb, the seed would sprout its leaves and roots, and churn out thousands of seeds to be carried away by water. Moved by the braided river, moved by the wind and birds.
She spotted the plant. It was small and unremarkable. She squatted to look. It was, as she expected, like a scruffy, sprawling land starfish with small green leaves. ‘Tēnā koe i tēnei ata,’ she said to the plant, and laughed. ‘You’re not much to look at, are you?’
The river flowed silver beside her, parallel timelines merging near the rising sun.
Cairo had studied the aerial shots of Waiautoa. Braided rivers fascinated her. She thought if she were ever to build a time machine, she would model it on a braided river. Somehow. She laughed quietly to herself. Time machines. A morning search for a resurrected plant. She snapped her fingers about the corner of her left eye. The logical side of the brain. ‘Wakey, wakey,’ she said. She took out her pencil and notebook and began work. She described the edges of the phenomenon. The distinction between
the old and the new was plain. Beyond the spectacle, a drear of gorse, weeping and cracked willow. She walked further upstream. Bog pine and weeds and willow and gorse and broom.
She saw two people on the stone island, a diamond in the braid of the river. They were up against the edge, cutting gorse. She wrote about them in her notebook. Two people, a young man and a woman, cutting gorse growing on the riverbed. They are at the line between …
She paused writing, unsure how to log what she was seeing – and indeed if she should – so she could decipher it later in the study when she would go through her observations.
They are at the line between … what has happened and what hasn’t happened.
She questioned using figurative language but could not prod uce a more succinct analysis. She reminded herself that their field study had recently begun, and once she understood more she might better describe the kūkūwai and its borders. She followed the river back downstream, cut into a recently built track, reached the saltmarsh and crossed it all the way back to the swamp.
Thirty-seven years before the girl shot the man
Kataraina Te Au is born on a chilly November night in 1981. These are facts that can’t be changed. Not then, not now. Nanny Liz comes to her son’s house, to her daughterinlaw’s house, to the house soon of her granddaughter Kat. It’s an old story, and we can see it all as if we are there. Nanny Liz comes from the pub. Hēnare called her there and asked to speak to Lizzy Te Au. The bartender shouted, ‘Who?’ into the phone, yelling over the noise in the bar.
‘Lizzy.’
‘Oh,’ he said, and then shouted, ‘Oi, Lippy Lizzy, you got a man asking for you.’
‘Hello,’ Nanny Liz shouted back.
‘Ma,’ said Hēnare down the phone, ‘Colleen’s having contrac tions. We’ll head to hospital soon.’
‘Early? Auē. Okay, I’m getting in a taxi now,’ she said and hung up the phone.
Nanny Liz arrived soon after to her son’s little cottage by the sea. She walked in with rain falling off her face and hands and strands of hair. She was wearing a red Angora jersey and black velvet leggings.
‘Where is she?’
Aroha came to the room, rubbing her eyes. ‘Nanny,’ she said. Hēnare picked up the girl and kissed her. ‘You should be asleep,
like Toko.’
Nanny Liz walked to the father and his daughter and kissed them both on their cheeks and Hēnare said, ‘I’ll make you coffee, Ma. The old man still there?’
