Hiwa, page 29
‘Yup. No, I’m good.’
‘Any time, say anything any time.’
And then Hīnau watches Camas dip the needle into the ink and bring it towards her wrist. The needle head touches the surface of her skin and then pushes through. When Camas pulls it back out, it makes a satisfying pop. Not so bad. Camas begins working in earnest when Hīnau says nothing, following the pre-drawn lines.
‘Why have you decided to do this now?’
‘I hadn’t really thought about it before,’ says Hīnau, ‘but I visited a village site a few months ago with my cousin. I’d never done that kind of thing before, and afterwards I just felt different.’
‘Are you close with your other family?’
‘Yeah, my mother’s side – I’m definitely more familiar with them. I wouldn’t say close.’ Hīnau thinks about her grandmother briefly. She hasn’t seen or spoken to her in a few years. ‘But now I feel closer to whatever my father’s family is – was.’
Hīnau winces as the needle goes in a little too deep.
‘Sorry, my bad.’ Camas continues only when Hīnau relaxes again.
‘It was strange to see the land where something happened after you’ve learned about it. The places where I grew up were home, and I knew things happened there, but when I learned more stories – even big, new, scary ones – the places still felt the same. Home was still home.’
Hīnau’s skin is already red and inflamed, following the lines Camas has drawn.
‘But to see this place that was never truly home and know all the things that happened there. Bad things, old things …’ Hīnau remembers the figures that appeared in the longhouse that afternoon, emblazoned on the dry grasses and fallen wood panels. The drumbeats she couldn’t get out of her head.
‘I can imagine. Different?’
‘Yeah.’
Camas works in silence for a while, and Hīnau watches the tattoo grow, as though rising up from the skin below. It begins to burn, but Camas keeps a light, dependable rhythm. The work continues until twilight, when the birds begin their talking before they go to sleep.
‘I think I’m done. What do you think?’ Camas takes a paper towel covered in a yummy-smelling soap and cleans the wound. The stencil washes away until it’s just the design underneath the skin.
Hīnau feels something welling up inside her, but just says, ‘Thank you.’
Camas tidies up, makes another cup of tea, and sets some cinnamon-apple muffins on the table. Hīnau eats quietly and they talk a little. Hīnau can’t stop looking at her wrists. Camas walks her out to her car and makes sure she’s fine to drive. They kiss one another on the cheek and promise to catch up soon.
All evening Hīnau looks at her wrists. When she washes her face before bed, she sees them in the mirror, the markings her whole family should have. She sees the thousand different women who made her, clenched between the tattoo’s teeth in ink and blood.
Rawinia Parata
NGĀTI POROU, NGĀI TAHU
Rawinia Parata (Ngāti Porou, Ngāi Tahu) was born in Singapore to a Singaporean mother and a Māori father who was serving as an Officer in the New Zealand Army. She grew up in Ruatoria, in the Gisborne region, and was part of the first cohort of children taught in both kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa. A former senior adviser for Te Puni Kokiri, Parata has her own communications and project management company, Mai Rāno.
Parata is a graduate of Massey University’s Master of Creative Writing programme, and writes both fiction and drama. In 2021 her debut full-length play, Our Side of the Fence, won the Playmarket Brown Ink Award. Her fiction has appeared in Huia Short Stories 8 (2009).
Her story ‘Pai’ speaks to Parata’s kaupapa as a writer: giving more three-dimensionality to what she sees as ‘stereotypical narratives about the Māori experience’. The story draws on a real-life incident when one of Parata’s three children, who suffers from acute asthma, was hospitalised. It was a ‘frightening and traumatic’ experience, Parata says, that made her question her own parenting and ability to make decisions.
Written in the first-person and in discrete short sections, the story builds a picture of the lack of privacy and agency for hospital patients and their families. Bree, the story’s narrator, is a Māori solo mother who feels mistrusted and misinformed, no longer in charge of her own – or her daughter’s – fate. Her only ally, it seems, is Tracey Santiago, the cleaner who was a registered nurse back in the Philippines, another woman of low status at the hospital. This is a story about the powerless, both in and around the hospital bed, and in contemporary New Zealand society. And ‘Pai’, says Parata, ‘is a raw story about love’.
Pai
I’ve been holding this coffee for too long. The paper cup is starting to soften and the dark liquid inside looks sinister. Can you die from exhaustion? I should have drunk it when it was fresh and hot, when the nurse with the Stegosaurus tattoo on her wrist handed it to me. It’s cold now.
Hurried footsteps in the hallway give me chills.
‘Knock, knock,’ a voice says.
You can’t knock on a curtain. The dino-enthusiast nurse is back, stethoscope around her neck and a Disney Goofy brooch clipped above her pocket. She gives me a soft, encouraging look. The kind of look you give to the owner of an inevitably dying pet. I wonder for a second if I remembered to pour biscuits for Henry. Or maybe perhaps four days without food might inspire him to be a real cat instead of lying at the foot of the fridge pawing at the door.
‘How’s she doing today?’ Her badge says Losi. She has skin the colour of my coffee and smells like bleach and breath mints. It’s a pleasant mix, and I want to like her.
I shrug. Petulant and indignant. I’m not proud enough to care.
‘Hi baby,’ Losi says to my daughter. ‘You’re looking pink in the cheeks today.’
Pai doesn’t answer, or flinch, or move at all. Asthma attack. I repeat it to myself over and over like a mantra. Severe asthma attack.
Losi finishes her checks. She’s so gentle, brushing Pai’s fringe back with the back of her hand. For a second Losi closes her eyes. It looks like a silent prayer.
‘Is there anybody I can call? It’s a sad time to be alone.’ She sounds sincere. I shake my head, biting my tongue so hard I taste metallic blood. If there was somebody, don’t you think I would have called them by now? There’s nobody.
Four days. Four nights. Four mornings. Four afternoons. Pai is four.
My phone buzzes on the hospital night-stand. Work. Work wants to know if Pai has been released, but really, they want to know when I will be back stocking grocery shelves. As if there’s nobody else who can do it. I don’t answer.
It’s always just me and her. Me and Pai. Pai and me. We don’t know people. They don’t know us. She and I. We’re it.
The beeping of Pai’s machine matches the ticking of the clock. I watch it. My finger taps to its beat. Asthma attack.
Doctor Patel arrives. He announces his knock the same way Losi does, and flings the curtain back to expose a group of five peering sets of eyes in white coats. Patel. He’s told me that his parents moved here from India before he was born, so he’s a New Zealander. He has a wife who makes a mean roast and they support the All Blacks. All things I do not at all care to know.
He examines Pai and flicks a pen along her foot. I catch a glimpse of her glitter-painted toenails. I silently promise to paint them every night from here on out. Doctor Patel whispers to his groupies, and they clearly give him stupid answers because he sends them out to stand behind the glass and watch us. They too give sad eyes, possibly from the shame of being excused. I rub my temples and glance back at the ticking clock.
‘She’s doing much better,’ he says.
Severe asthma attack, I repeat to myself.
‘This attack was very serious,’ he says.
Asthma attack.
‘Her oxygen levels are still very unstable, but she is responding well to treatment,’ he says.
‘Excuse me?’ I sound too unsure.
‘Yes?’ Sharp and cutting. I should have spoken like that.
‘We’ve been waiting two hours.’
‘I’m sure you can see we’re busy.’
‘I can. But my Pai is very sick.’ Why does it come out a whisper?
‘Everybody here is sick.’
Food is brought on a tray. It’s mashed potatoes, stew and rice pudding. Pai loves rice pudding. I promise to make more rice pudding at home.
‘Knock, knock.’ A voice I don’t recognise.
‘I’m Denise. I’m the resident social worker. Do you have a minute?’ She has a mole between her brows and wears a suit that should have been shaken out before she got dressed. Of course, I have a minute. She knows I have nowhere to be.
‘I just wanted to talk to you about how things are at home?’ I hear it. She made sure I could hear it. The accusation. Life-threatening asthma attack.
‘This is a very serious case. Pai is very unwell. Do you have good ventilation in your home?’
Speak, I command myself. ‘We have windows.’
‘I see.’ She takes notes with her eyebrow raised high enough I could slap them down from the air. ‘Is it … a clean home?’
Asthma. Pai had an asthma attack. She had an asthma attack while I was working. Pai had an attack. Pai was attacked.
‘And where were you when Pai first fell ill?’
‘At work.’ My traitorous voice shakes.
‘And who was caring for Pai?’
‘My neighbour.’ It comes out a shriek.
‘These are standard questions.’
I nod. What else can I do? They’re standard questions. Pai had an asthma attack while I was working.
‘What do you know about your neighbour?’
‘What kind of question is that?’
‘The standard kind.’
Mrs Josephine has been our neighbour since Pai was all of six months old. The day we moved in she climbed over the wire fence and scratched her knee on the blackberry growing near the letterbox to ask if she could hold the baby while I carried boxes inside. That day she sat on the step cradling Pai and pointed out obscure shapes in the clouds.
‘Well enough.’
‘Are you aware that Josephine Henderson is a recidivist drunk driver?’
‘What has that got to do with anything?’
‘Well, it hardly says “responsible babysitter”, does it?’
Denise the social worker is getting on my last nerve. I want to storm out and throw the curtain behind me but I get the very clear sense I’m being threatened. That Pai and I, we’re being threatened. I squeeze my knees together and soften my face.
‘Mrs Josephine doesn’t have a car and she doesn’t drive.’
‘Well, legally she can’t, but that’s beside the point. Your daughter has been hospitalised four times in the last twelve months.’
‘It’s been a tough year.’
Denise’s voice is so shrill and patronising that I can’t bear to listen anymore. Four times I have sat in this chair, in this room, and listened to that machine beeping. Pai has been admitted, treated, and sent home four times.
The first time Pai got sick it was a cough. A squeaking kind of cough that had a song at the beginning and end of each breath. Slick with sweat, her caramel skin looked pale. I had no credit, no car, no money for an after-hours doctor. That night she slept on my chest and I counted her breaths. Her chest whistled and harmonised with the wind blowing the curtains. Early that morning I carried her to the emergency department. The reception nurse wasn’t impressed. It had started raining two blocks from the hospital and our jackets were soaked through. The paediatrician called the social worker.
Denise takes notes until she realises that I am done talking to her. She tells me that she’ll come back later ‘to talk’. I don’t say goodbye, or even give her the courtesy of a nod.
Pai has a nasal cannula that’s too big for her nose. Losi had to tape it down to keep it in place. Her lips look blue to me but her stats haven’t changed. She has her father’s lips, the best and only thing she ever got from him.
Tipene was a nice man, the kind of man who asked me questions and listened to the answers. Meeting him felt like the beginning of new life, of hope, of what normal is for everybody else. He had hazel eyes too, like Pai but darker. I didn’t see it then but now that I think back, there must have been pain in those eyes.
The afternoon it rained so hard the river came up over the bridge, Tipene left us. Pai was four months old. He walked out and didn’t ever walk back in. I door-knocked everybody we knew and found him shacked up, his face nuzzled in a pretty blonde girl’s neck. I could have screamed, kicked the door in, or even cried. I didn’t. I held Pai close and didn’t look back. She’s got his lips.
The sponge bottom of a mop darts back and forward under the hospital curtain. Tracey Santiago, the Filipino cleaner with straight black hair, white teeth, and soft clear skin appears in the crack.
‘Is now a good time?’ Tracey waves the spray bottle of bleach. I summon a smile and she backs herself in. Her hands look dry, I notice, wiping down the benches, the tabletops, machines, and mopping the floor around Pai’s bed.
She picks up Pai’s chart to study it. Surely she doesn’t need to sanitise the paper.
‘I was a nurse in Manila,’ she tells me.
‘But a cleaner here?’ It comes out more bluntly than I intend.
‘I make more here as a cleaner than I did in the Philippines as a registered nurse.’ Her accent is thick, but she talks slow enough for me to understand.
‘That’s sad.’
‘No, I’m happy here. I take my son to school and am home to make dinner. It’s a good life.’ Tracey nods at the chart. ‘Her obs are improving, slowly. She’s getting better. She just needs more time.’
Time, she says. We definitely need more time. Between work, cleaning our sad excuse for a house, and getting tossed up by Nanny Merle for getting Pai to kōhanga six minutes late every day, I could use more time.
‘Why is she always late?’ Nanny Merle asks, bending to embrace Pai. My traitorous daughter leaps straight into her arms.
‘Because we have to walk.’ I ain’t taking her shit anymore.
‘Lots of parents walk and make it here on time for karakia.’
‘Well, I walk slow.’
‘Not good enough. Maybe you should run.’
‘Knock, knock.’
I have come to despise verbal knocking, but welcome Losi’s familiar voice. She shuffles in and beams at me.
‘There’s a handsome man here,’ she says, sounding intrigued. ‘He’s come to visit Pai.’
‘I don’t know any handsome men,’ I say.
‘Oh, come now. No need to be shy. He’s very good-looking.’
I laugh. I mean, what else can I do? This whole situation is absurd.
‘Please let my man in,’ I say, and Losi dances off, pleased with herself.
I smell him before I see him. That same cologne, the one in the black glass bottle that sat on our dresser for ‘special occasions’. If I were an animal, my hackles would have risen. He turns the corner and has the good sense not to meet my gaze. Lord help me now.
‘The cheek of you to walk up in here like you own the place.’ I spit out every word. Losi spins on her heels and ducks out of sight.
‘Come on, Bree. Don’t be like that.’
‘Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?’
The Senior Nurse with thick white streaks raises an eyebrow and I know that’s the last warning I’m getting.
‘I came to see the baby,’ he says, looking at Pai.
‘Well, she’s not a baby anymore.’ If I could slap the back of his head without getting thrown out of the hospital I would. I ball up my fists and let my fingernails pierce my palm.
‘I see that.’ When he places his hand on the bed, I notice the wedding band and have to force down my gag reflex.
‘Don’t you dare touch her,’ I say, my voice low. I swear to God that if he does, I’ll kill him. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I got a phone call. Social worker tracked me down, and said baby had been in and out of the hospital and wasn’t in good shape.’
‘She’s getting better,’ I say. Tracey the cleaner said she was doing better.
‘Why is she getting sick in the first place? Four attacks in the last year.’ I hear the accusation in his voice.
‘If you’d been around, you would know why your daughter is sick.’ My voice wavers and breaks. Weak.
‘I had to get myself together.’ Finally, Tipene meets my eyes. His are soft and sad, the colour of a muddy puddle.
‘Is that right? Well, you all together now?’ I’m stuck between rage and agony, willing myself not to shout, not to cry.
‘Actually, yes. I am.’
‘Well, good for you. Now let yourself out. You’re good at walking away.’
‘What do you need to take better care of her?’ The tone of his voice makes me want to retch.
We’ve been here together before, me and Tipene – in this hospital, just once. I started labouring in the McDonald’s drive-through. Sharp pains like waves crashing on me, over and over, another one arriving just as the other left. When we pulled into the car park at maternity, it was raining hard. Tipene sat in the car finishing his Big Mac and fries while I waddled, bag in hand, to reception. I should have known then that I’d be raising Pai on my own.
By the time he made it into the delivery room I was breathing heavy and praying for my life. During the last hour of my labour, he rubbed my back, held my hand, and was the man I always hoped he could be.
Pai was born in the middle of a storm but her arrival was a moment of absolute peace and clarity. Holding her against me and breathing in her scent, I felt intoxication. I whispered her name, Paihere.
