The Dream Swimmer, page 19
Tiana called, Tamaa –
Tiana did not know how long she searched, but it could have been a hundred years, a thousand years or a million years. Her body was drenched with fever and sweat. Blood was spilling from the gash of her vagina. In exhaustion, she cried out, Come to me, Hine Te Ariki –
When her mermaid ancestress came, Tiana was so weak that all she could do was to wrap one of her arms in Hine Te Ariki’s hair. Dangling there like a rag doll, she instructed Hine Te Ariki.
Take me to him.
Then she lost consciousness.
Hine Te Ariki sniffed the darkness. She caught the smell of the male heir. Her paua eyes glowed like beacons as she began to power upwards. Up, up, ever upward she went, the giant flukes of her tail sweeping powerful strokes through the blackness. Her mistress, caught in her hair, bumped and swayed in her wake.
Another hundred years passed.
Then, there it was. The lip of Te Kore, the opening of the black hole, the great Abyss filled with showering stars. With a cry, Hine Te Ariki swam against the centrifugal force, through the star showers and out.
The dazzle of the universe played like gentle lights across Tiana’s eyes. Although she was in great pain, she nuzzled Hine Te Ariki’s neck in gratitude. She pulled herself up on to Hine Te Ariki’s back and put her arms around her ancient ancestress’s neck. Behind her she could hear the roar and feel the trembling of the universe, and she knew that Time’s Tide was coming. She had only a few seconds before –
On the other side of the universe, a light winked. The morning sun on Mount Hikurangi.
There, and mark.
The tide consumed them. Tiana urged Hine Te Ariki forward. And before she could even think she was falling from her dreams, tumbling from Hine Te Ariki from darkness into light.
‘Tena koe, Tiana,’ Riripeti said.
Tiana woke, eyes bloodshot and unfocused. She made a slashing motion in the direction of the voice, and fell from the bed on to the hospital floor. The fall winded her and she cried out.
‘Where is my son?’ Tiana hissed.
Watching Tiana crawling across the floor, Riripeti realised that Tiana had intersected her destiny.
Tiana was at the end of her strength. She heard noises like oriental wind chimes, and saw the hem of a long black dress. She looked up. Riripeti held her son in her arms.
‘Give him to me,’ Riripeti said.
‘No,’ Tiana answered.
Tiana always had a habit of lifting her face to the light. When she did this she was made almost beautiful.
‘Never,’ she said.
Tiana’s decision to keep me, her first born, was not surprising.
‘Your mother was an orphan,’ Mereira, Tiana’s girlhood friend, told me when I found her living in Mataura in the late 1980s. Although fifty-odd years had passed since the taking of the photograph of her and Tiana in their horse-wrangling days, Mereira looked recognisably the same. Her hair was grey and curly, and her eyes wrinkled and sparkled when she smiled. She was in an old people’s home and was only too pleased to tell me about Tiana.
‘I think,’ Mereira pursed her lips, ‘that you must have been the first good thing ever to happen to her. Her life with that tohunga, Huirangi, was hard enough, but when she was taken by Old Sally and Whiro, things only became worse. No wonder she ran away from the Coast and came to Hastings. Didn’t you know? Didn’t she ever tell you about the terrible things that Whiro did to her?’
After Huirangi died in 1923 Tiana went to live with Old Sally and Whiro. Tiana was six, and stayed with the old couple until she was sixteen. There was nowhere else to go.
The first six years or so spent with them were tolerable, and she received only moderate beatings from Whiro. Old Sally and Young Sally were also beaten, regularly, every Friday night after Whiro returned, drunk, from the pub. Eventually Old Sally managed to get her daughter away to a boarding school in Gisborne. But she couldn’t do anything for Tiana.
Whiro’s alcoholism meant that my mother and Old Sally lived in a situation of increasing tension. The Depression only made matters worse and the farm, in a remote back block, two hours from the main road, fell on hard times. Old Sally tried her best to keep Whiro away from Tiana, but when in 1928 she fell ill, she knew it was only a matter of time before he would violate her.
Old Sally died less than a year later, when Tiana was eleven. ‘Run, Tiana,’ she said on her deathbed. ‘Get away while you can.’ Her eyes were sympathetic. She had, in her own way, loved Tiana.
At Old Sally’s funeral, Tiana was nowhere to be seen. When Young Sally turned up to mourn her mother, Whiro told her that Tiana had left. Young Sally wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe him so badly that she refused to acknowledge the cries for help that came from the dog kennels down by the shearing shed. Even when she went down there and heard the dogs barking and a young girl calling to her, ‘Sally, please Sally,’ and saw the young frightened eyes that peered at her from the kennels, she closed her ears and eyes to Tiana’s predicament. When Young Sally left, never to return, she left knowingly. She left my mother a prisoner.
Tiana was chained up with the dogs for two weeks. When Whiro came to feed them, she got fed. When he came to give them water, she drank with them. Like the dogs, she had to fight for her food, and Whiro would laugh and laugh as she and the dogs bared their teeth at each other.
Then Whiro took Tiana off her chain and led her into the house. He bathed her. He joined her by five dogchains reaching from his bed to the kitchen and bathroom. That night he said, ‘Come, Tiana.’
By the time he had finished with her, she was his. Whenever he said, ‘Come,’ she came. When he said, ‘Sit,’ she sat.
(I would say that your mother was subjected to consistent sexual abuse, my psychologist friend said. It may have happened even earlier than your story suggests. We have to remember that child rape in isolated rural communities was not uncommon. I know you don’t want to believe that Old Sally condoned such behaviour but perhaps there was nothing she could do about it. Rural women were often considered to be owned by their husbands, and the level of abuse Old Sally no doubt received herself would have disempowered her, made her a victim. Who knows? She may well have welcomed the turning of Whiro’s attentions from herself. At least she had the sense to get her daughter out of there as quickly as possible. But as far as your mother was concerned, Tiana was not a blood relative.
Whatever, there’s no doubt that from the age of eleven your mother was brutalised. To be treated like an animal is hideous to the imagination. To know that on top of this was six years of enforced vaginal penetration makes the matter horrific beyond comprehension. What this must have done to her psychologically I can’t begin to imagine.)
Whiro kept Tiana in a state of total servitude for the next two years. He locked her in his room every night. He set her to work the farm every day. Whenever he left the farm, he chained her. When he returned, drunk, he thrashed her.
Tiana began to dress in boy’s clothes. She did a man’s job. She became, to all intents and purposes, a man – stockman, shearer, cattle handler, fencer. As a sideline she developed a talent for breaking in horses. However, no boy’s clothing could protect her from Whiro. From the night Old Sally died, she herself was broken by him.
Only twice in all that time was she allowed to go into the nearest town. Company bewildered her. Like all animals she was distrustful of people. Even if she had wanted to, she would not have been able to tell anyone the viciousness of her life. She could not say, ‘Help me.’ She realised she must rely only on herself.
When Tiana was fourteen, she decided she’d had enough. She was old enough now to realise what Whiro was doing to her and she was no longer as subservient.
The first time she ran away Tiana sought sanctuary from nearby farms. But Whiro’s neighbours feared him too and they had washed their hands of him long ago. They washed their hands of Tiana. They told Whiro to come and get her.
‘Don’t come back to us,’ the neighbours said. ‘You belong to Whiro.’
Tiana ran away again. She kept running away, and away, and always she would be returned to him. Every time he beat her, laughing and laughing. He thought it was a game.
‘Wherever you go, you will be returned to me,’ Whiro said. ‘If you aren’t, I’ll come and find you.’
One day, Tiana made it to Gisborne. She went to the boarding school and asked for Young Sally.
‘Yes. I’ll help you,’ Young Sally said.
Instead, she telephoned her father. He came down on his truck and picked Tiana up. He beat her.
Tiana spent two years trying to run away.
When she was sixteen, traumatised though she was, she ran further than she had ever gone before. She ran past Gisborne, past the edge of the world as she had known it, to Nuhaka, where nobody knew Whiro. Then, just to make sure, she hitched a ride with some Maori fruit pickers going on to Hastings. What they thought of her I don’t know, but Tiana always had an emphatic way about her.
‘My people are dead,’ she told the boss of the gang. ‘I’m looking for work.’
‘Your mother was so wild,’ Mereira laughed. ‘When I first met her we were both working as fruit pickers, and I thought she was a boy. The way she walked, the way she talked, was just like a boy. There was a rodeo and she entered it to earn some extra money. They gave her a real tough horse to ride and she got bucked off. That’s when I realised she was a girl.
‘Tiana was a real worker, I tell you. We became great mates, though there were times when I almost gave up on her. I mean, one of the first things I had to teach her was how to be human. She used to do this thing with a knife, always pointing it at me when she was angry. It took ages for her to open up to me. When she told me about Whiro, that’s when I began to tell her that life was not supposed to be like that. I know your mother grieved over the childhood she had never had. But you know her, she never cries.’
Tiana was happy in Hastings. She began to dress as a woman and when the fruit-picking season was over, she and Mereira teamed up and joined a horse-wrangling gang as cooks. Tiana was a good cook – she’d had years of experience – but when the head wrangler discovered Tiana’s talent at breaking in horses she was switched over to that side of his operation.
Some months later Tiana ran into the familiar figure of Young Sally. ‘Dad’s been looking all over for you,’ Young Sally said.
‘I am not going back to him,’ Tiana replied.
A few weeks later, however, Whiro arrived in Hastings. He saw Tiana working the horses and, for a moment, didn’t recognise her. When he saw how womanly she had become, he wanted her more than ever.
Whiro kept watch on the quarters where Tiana and Mereira slept. One night he arrived in his truck. He walked into the quarters and looked at Tiana.
‘Tiana, come,’ he said.
As soon as the words were spoken, the lights went out of Tiana’s eyes. She turned to follow him. Mereira tried to stop him, but Whiro backhanded her across the room. Whiro took Tiana to the small hut where he was staying overnight.
‘Sit, Tiana.’
He took out a chain and went to chain her to the bed.
That’s when Tiana lifted her face to the light.
My mother has these rages, and once they are upon her they can never be stopped by anything or anybody. Grief for her slavery, her subjugation, rushed out of her. All she could think of was that this man had stolen her girlhood from her. The pain of those years demanded that she exact a retribution – utu.
Tiana always kept her knife with her. Even before she lifted it she was spitting and snarling. With a howl, Tiana slashed at Whiro’s face.
A spurt of blood arced into the air, and Whiro cried out.
With a hiss she slashed at his scrotum.
Whiro cried out again and cupped his balls to keep them from spilling out.
With a moan, Tiana severed the tendons of his left leg.
Whiro fell to the ground.
Methodically, Tiana beat him. She started from his feet and worked upward, totally immobilising him with pain. She cut an X in the skin above his heart.
‘Don’t try to find me again,’ Tiana said. She placed the point of the knife where the X intersected. ‘Next time I will aim for the heart, cut it out and eat it.’
(What astounds me, my psychologist friend said, is that your mother was able, despite all those years of physical, sexual and psychological abuse, eventually to surmount Whiro’s domination. Where did she find her sense of self-worth? How did she keep sane? How did she manage to educate herself, after she had got free of Whiro? Given the sexual damage to her psyche, it must have caused her tremendous terror to agree to marry.
All this, I am sure, explains your mother’s great extremes of mood. Although she’s managed to come out pretty well there’s no doubt those early memories must be very close to the surface. In times of stress, wham, there they are. No wonder her violent tempers and her unreason. She has tried very hard, I think, not to be in turn vicious or abusive. Can we blame her if she has failed? Given her history I think not. I really think not.)
Whiro got himself patched up in Hastings Hospital. Masculine pride made him refuse to tell the staff what had happened. He went back to Gisborne and showed Young Sally the bruises and scars. He said Tiana had gone mad. When he returned to his farm he also made a great show of telling everyone that Tiana was porangi.
Tiana never saw Whiro again. She did, however, go back to Gisborne just once to confront Young Sally. This was during the Second World War, in 1942, the year before Tiana met my father. At the time Young Sally was working in a department store. Tiana strode in, dressed in a two-piece suit and high heels. She was twenty-four, and had achieved a singular beauty. She waited at Young Sally’s counter and then lifted her face ever so slightly until Young Sally recognised her.
The first words my mother said were, ‘You saw me that day, Sally. I called and called to you.’
Young Sally always closed her mind to things she didn’t want to see.
‘Dad is still living, you know,’ Young Sally said. ‘That was a bad thing you did to him. After all we did for you.’
When Whiro died, Young Sally never forgave Tiana that Whiro had left her the farm.
Then, early in 1943, Tiana met Te Ariki.
Eighteen
In the old people’s home in Mataura, Mereira burst out laughing when I asked her about the night when, after their marriage, Te Ariki brought Tiana by train from Hastings to Gisborne to meet Riripeti and Ihaka.
‘Oh, your mother always told that story,’ Mereira said, ‘but it’s too romantic. It’s not the truth at all –’
‘Tell us again, Mum. Tell us what happened when you and Dad got married in Hastings and you arrived back in Gisborne on the train.’
My sisters and I are huddled in bed with Tiana in our house in Crawford Street. Dad is away shearing up the Coast. We loved the story of our parents’ runaway marriage.
‘Was your mother really there? Was Daddy’s mother really there? Did they separate you both without a word, and did grandmother take him and your mother take you? Is it really true that you didn’t set eyes on each other for eight months?’ Our mother trills with laughter. ‘And was it raining as hard as it is tonight?’
Our mother hugs us close. ‘You kids are so hardcase,’ she says. ‘And Tamatea is the funniest of all.’
We giggle. Tiana pauses. Then she begins. ‘Yes, it was a night just like tonight and –’
The train pulled into the railway station.
It was Saturday 11 June 1943. The ornate clock on the platform was splattered with rain. 10.40 p.m.
The Gisborne stationmaster was cross. The train was late and he wanted to get home to bed. He had telegraphed down the line to Wairoa to ascertain why there was a delay. Apparently there were slips on the track caused by the earthworks at the Mohaka Viaduct. Rain. Nothing but trouble for railways. Brought down slips, made rivers swollen with silt, washed out bridges, disrupted timetables, brought everything to a halt. Worse than that, delays had people bellyaching and coming into the office every five minutes to ask when the train was due. Goddam viaduct.
Except for that Maori woman out there, in a Lagonda if you please, with two men and two boys who must be her sons. Sitting out there with the headlights full on and the interior lights blazing as if they had no worries in the world about flat batteries. Sitting out there as if they were above the other people waiting for the train on the platform. Ah well, it was their funeral. Say, maybe they’re expecting a body on the train? Nothing on the manifest. Ah well, at least no passengers would be bellyaching about having to travel with a dead body.
And now the woman is signalling to me to come over to her. In this rain? Her husband can drive her damn Lagonda over here. All this mud. Why doesn’t she come over here? Or send one of her boys. Strapping lads by the looks of them. Dammit to hell, I’d better get over there otherwise she might complain. Where is that train?
The stationmaster grabbed a coat and ran out into the rain. The mud splashed against his trousers. He was wheezing when he reached the Lagonda and he was irritated. But when Riripeti opened the window and he looked upon her face, he forgot all about his own discomfort. Beneath her domino her face had an unearthly beauty. Her eyes were lustrous. Her hair was threaded with pearls.
‘The train is late, Mr Stationmaster,’ Riripeti said.
‘Yes,’ the stationmaster answered. ‘There’s been a delay near Mohaka.’
Suddenly, the tracks began to sing. Some horses close by started to whinny. Their breath puffed out of their flaring nostrils like jets of steam.
Riripeti adjusted her domino. She looked at Ihaka and Tamati Kota and nodded. Raindrops fell on her face, which suddenly flared as the huge front eye of the train burst around the corner
and the train pulled into the railway station.
The clock on the platform ticked 10.46 p.m.
Seated in the train, Tiana took Te Ariki’s arm and hugged him. This man was hers. Who would have thought she would get married?
