The old hall was as accommodating as trees. On the way home from school, and when they were younger, the kids would stop and bounce their bald tennis balls against its wall—sevensies to onesies, right hand, left hand, whirls and claps. They planted their feet on it doing against-the-wall handstands, their eyes dropping from their heads. The recessed doorway was a ghost house, a witch hole, a tick-a-lock home base.
Dogs sniffed the bottom edges of the building before lifting a leg. Sparrows and starlings scrabbled and fluttered in the spoutings and corrugations, and when the time was right made their nests. It was the birds, dogs, and kids that gave the hall its animal smell.
But, while the outside of the animal retained its spots—grey and white dried splashes left by season after season of bird, flat black pennies made by the bouncing balls, patches of dog dribble, and the smeared footprints with toes pointing earthwards—the inside now had a new look. The walls had been painted pale blue. The old stage had new blue satin curtains, and new facings, painted white and edged in blue glitter. The leaking roof had been mended and the ceiling strung with twisted streamers of pink, white, and blue crepe paper. From the centre of the ceiling hung the blue moon.
On weekdays with the door shut and no light or sound coming from within, it was still the ‘old hall’, but on Saturdays it had become the ‘Blue Moon’ dance hall. And on those nights once the lights went on and the doorman was ready with his tin and his roll of tickets the band would string out its first few notes, and the turning mirrored ball would be spotlighted in blue. Then the floor would quickly fill with dancers all measled with moving blue light.
Bob gave an uneasy lead, striding deep into the corners and not knowing quite how to come out of them again. His arm about her waist exerted no pressure, and the cupped hand in which she placed hers could just as easily have been holding one of the hairless tennis balls they’d kicked goals with, or chucked again and again against walls.
‘Apprentice electrician,’ he said. ‘With my old man.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘I like it okay. What about you, what’re you doing?’
‘I’ll be leaving school at the end of the year.’
‘Then what?’
‘Don’t know. I might go nursing.’
‘You like it all right do you? School I mean.’
‘I’m sick of it. Glad this is my last year.’
‘I really hated school. Couldn’t get away quick enough myself.’
And just then Mereana had a sudden picture of him at seven years of age standing in front of the class wearing a white shirt and a pair of navy shorts, his fair hair oiled into the shape of a shell. His face was entranced, and shocking to look at, and a sudden stream of pee was running down his leg.
Now after remembering that, it was difficult to speak: he had noticed her shift of memory. ‘The band’s all right.’ she said.
‘I hear they’re having a singer later on.’
‘Probably the same one they had last week.’
‘She’s all right too.’
His legs at seven years of age had been thin and veiny.
As Lizzie danced past, the blue light turned the red spots on her cheeks to purple. Reuben Hails’ large hand on her waist moved her first away then close as they toed round the floor. Looking at Reuben, Mereana could read the contempt that Lizzie was too close to see, and which in any case she had never learned to see. Lizzie’s large eyes, fringed by large curled back lashes, rested like two sea anemones just above Reuben’s shoulder.
‘Your cousin and Reuben are hitting it off,’ Bob said to her.
‘Lizzie.’
‘Yes. I don’t remember her so well.’
‘She missed quite a lot of school.’
‘She was sick a lot wasn’t she?’
‘Yes but she’s okay now, or supposed to be.’ (Her lung was ‘cured’—like salted pork.) ‘Do you know Reuben well?’
‘He’s older. Used to be in my brother’s class. He thinks the sun shines out of his arse.’
It was a long speech for him. She liked Bob, who had no questions behind the eyes, no hidden slivers of glass in the cupped hand, and the light and shadows spinning across his face came only from the turning spot-lit ball. Mereana put her hand into the triangle that he’d made with his arm as the music frittered away, and he led her to her seat.
‘Bob. Bob-ee,’ Macky sang in her ear as she sat down beside him. ‘La-la-la.’
‘Give us a cig,’ she said.
He drew in on the cigarette that he was smoking, then passed it to her. ‘Last one,’ he said. Reuben’s elbow crushed Lizzie’s hand to his side as he walked her towards them. Macky put his head back and blew smoke balls towards the ceiling. ‘Reuben Hails,’ he said, ‘has got a theory … about dark skinned women….’ Reuben turned to Lizzie, twitched the corners of his mouth, and walked quickly away. ‘Did you know?’
‘You can guess it easy enough,’ Mereana said.
‘What’re you talking about?’ Lizzie asked. She was breathless.
‘Throw your eyes in there,’ Macky said nodding towards the supper room. ‘Sausage rolls, cakes, sandwiches. Food,’ he hooted. ‘When are we going to have food?’
‘Just watch out for Reuben,’ Mereana said to Lizzie.
Charlotte and Denny Boy came over. ‘I think the next one’s going to be the supper waltz,’ Charlotte said.
The sea spread beside them like a length of tossed shot silk. The old bus sailed the sea’s curve, its headlights catching the white tips of the waves.
When they got off the bus they could hear the sea niggling at the shore stones, then there was the skirr of sprayed road metal above the grind of the gear changes as the bus backed, turned, and rocked away in the dark. They lifted a hand to Bob whose face and hand appeared briefly at the back window. She liked Bob whose eyes held no questions. The kiss in the bus had made no demands, had taken away nothing apart from a small breath.
‘They shouldn’t have gone with him,’ Lizzie was saying.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ Mereana said. ‘Anyway we said to you to watch out….’
‘I know.’
‘Why did you then?’
‘Well he said only for a minute. Then when we walked along….’
‘He wanted to get you in under the trees with him.’
‘He got all funny when I wouldn’t….’
‘It’s because of his theory,’ Macky said to the stars.
‘Anyhow what about Charlotte? She was dancing round with him. Smiling and all that, after I came back and told yous what had happened.’
‘Don’t worry about Charlotte.’
‘What’s on anyway? Where’ve they gone?’
‘Some sort of party up at Ian and them’s place.’
Then as they came nearer to the home gate they heard singing and saw that all the lights were on at their Aunty Connie’s place. They began to hurry, over the stile and over the plank across the creek, under the thick dark of the willows and up the gravel path to the door where they studied the row of shoes at the doorstep. Uncle Kepa.
‘Uncle Kepa.’ The room was warm and-beery and noisy as they hurried in to greet him.
As he approached the wharf gates he saw the boy look up and start towards him out of the dark. Then, strangely, he thought he heard the boy say his name.
He waited as the boy limped towards him, and then there was the boy’s face under the light for him to see. And Christ! it was his own face. This was himself approaching. He held his breath. This was himself surely, at sixteen, going off to sea after the death of his grandmother, with some old clothes in a brown paper parcel. This was himself, broad cheeked, full lipped and dark, hair standing up like a kina, clutching his parcel to his side.
But no, this boy was smaller, more stooped, and he dragged a slightly turned shoe over the footpath, down the guttering and across the pot-holed road towards him. Yet under the buttery light it was his face, his own sixteen-year-old, young face. He heard his name again.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve looked for you,’ the boy said. ‘There’s no place for me here, so I looked….’
‘My drop kick,’ he breathed out of his past.
‘I didn’t know … so I looked. There isn’t any place….’ Kepa paused a moment then said, ‘There is a place,’ and he took the parcel from the boy and pushed it down into his swag.
‘You didn’t stay long,’ Mereana said to Denny Boy. ‘At the party I mean.’
‘Long enough,’ he said.
‘What did you do?’
‘Me? Nothing.’
Uncle Kepa was pulling himself up out of the armchair. He staggered slightly and almost toppled. Denny Boy and Charlotte stood and took an arm each. ‘You haven’t ask me yet,’ he said.
‘But Charlotte did,’ Denny Boy said to Mereana. ‘Asked you what Uncle?’
‘You haven’t ask me yet….’
‘What did she do. What did Charlotte do?’
‘Put a left hook on his jaw. He dropped like a bomb.’
‘You haven’t ask me yet, if I brought you a monkey.’
‘A monkey!’
He stumbled towards the bedroom.
‘Fell back on Geddy’s fence and stabbed himself before he hit the ground,’ Charlotte said.
‘In here. There my babies. Funny uncle … he found you a monkey.’ Then he showed them the boy asleep.
They were looking down at Uncle Kepa with all his years taken off like old skins, and all the engine room grease and callouses and tight muscle removed by a reversal of time from hands and arms.
‘Kip,’ he said. ‘My little one from Aussie.’
He lifted the blankets and got into bed beside the boy Kip, who moved only slightly. ‘Funny uncle,’ he said, then seemed immediately to be asleep.