SIX

'Wow,' Olga said, 'wow. So that's why that mayor in the States finally got hauled off to jail for shooting a black woman twenty years ago and why all that stuff about the Lost Generation in Australia is coming out. The Skeleton Woman. Brilliant. I must tell my sisters about this. They'll want to hear you tell the story too.'

Rose was not absolutely certain Olga was serious and it really didn't matter one way or the other. It was true that most long-held secrets did come to light in very strange ways. Look at the way that man, now forty, who killed his fifteen-year-old girlfriend because she smiled at someone else all those years ago, has just been arrested; and that woman who killed her children, three of them, buried the bodies in the vegetable garden and said her ex-husband had got custody and taken them to Australia. The skeletons were dug up twenty years later after the woman went into the local police station and confessed — prodded, Ada reckoned, by the Skeleton Woman.

'It's morning,' Olga said, 'I'd better get to work. What are you doing tonight?'

And that was the start of it. Rose doesn't really know now why she stipulated the one night a week. Self-preservation? Fear? She only knows that, at the time, having Olga to stay over one night a week was the most she could manage. This — thing — she felt was too much; she needed time, time to think about it, time to get to grips with the strangeness of it. She doesn't know why Olga accepted her dictum. Perhaps she thought Rose would change her mind? They saw each other most days or spoke on the phone, and sometimes there was a longing to forget caution and say, see you tonight, but Rose didn't. She knew she was walking very carefully across an abyss and she was buggered if she was going to fall in. Not then, not ever again, was she going to abandon her independence, her home, her separate existence. If she did, she'd be lost.

'Before you,' Rose told Olga once, 'I hardly knew any Māori more than to say hello.'

Olga smiled. 'Maybe it was safer that way. For you.'

She had a point. 'But,' Rose said, 'whether you're Māori or lesbian or heterosexual, in some company the margins are where you live.'

Olga scoffed. 'Margins? That's a head thing Rose. Of course people try,' she said, 'my sisters got a bit turtly when I said I had realised I was a lesbian, but Leo and Mum and Dad were OK. Some of the whānau look sideways, but they just have to get over it. You can't let the majority call the shots. They will if you let them.'

'What about your family and me?'

'They'll get used to it.'

'I don't think your sisters like me.'

'It's not you. It's us. It's what we represent. They tend to forget, or not want to remember more like it, that it's all happened before, plenty of times, just not in their family. And it's usually heterosexual. So they've not only got the Māori-Pākehā thing, they've also got us. They don't like it. Not in their whānau.'

'Is that what they say?'

'That's what they say.'

'How do you stay so — so calm?'

'Me? Calm?' Olga laughed. 'You know what they call me? Rocket. That's my nickname.' She hugged Rose. 'You're the one Rose, you're the one. With you I'm calm.'

'I don't know what to do.'

'You don't have to do anything.'

'Sometimes I feel as though I'm drowning in guilt.'

'No guilt,' Olga said, and now she sounded angry, 'no guilt. OK? For Christ's sake Rose, it's guilt that writes those bloody pathetic letters to the paper every time there's a settlement, guilt that moans when someone talks about closing the gaps and they think it means just Māori, guilt when someone jumps up and down when a council suggests having seats sets aside for Māori. Guilt sucks.'

Rose, who'd marched during the Springbok Tour, been part of groups since that discussed domestic racism, had done the Project Waitangi course on the Treaty of Waitangi, had attended classes in te reo Māori which hadn't taken, felt that if she wasn't allowed guilt and she couldn't plead ignorance, what was left? She was adrift and it was too hard.

'Just live with it,' Olga insisted, 'live with it. It'll get easier.'

Olga took whānau responsibilities seriously. 'Depends a lot on how you've been brought up. Mum and Dad were very serious about keeping in touch,' she told Rose, 'particularly as they mixed, because of Dad's job, mainly among Pākehā. I think my father's family saw him as something of a John the Baptist, the forerunner, the spreader of words among strangers. But they knew he could do something for the young Māori who were coming from the country to the city who didn't know a soul. He made contact with the Ngāti Pōneke Young Māori Club and took lots of youngsters there when they turned up on his door homesick to the core. Ngāti Pōneke was the place where they started to feel that maybe, if they could just come to the club every week, they might be able to hack life in the factory where they were working, might somehow be able to survive living in the city. Nanny and Koro had known Temuera Tokoaitua who was the pastor at Rangiatea in Otaki in the thirties. Great man. He used to bike to the railway station in Otaki, catch the train into Wellington and bike to St Thomas's in Newtown to take the service, then hop on his bike, ride back to Wellington Railway Station and travel home to Otaki. Dad knew Kingi Tahiwi who organised the choir as well. So Nanny and Koro insisted Dad take the job in the Hutt, but they said he must come home every third week. They said it only takes a couple of generations and with the third you're in trouble, and they were right. Do that and you've got once were warriors all over the place.'

Olga called the book and the film Once Were Warriors brilliant documentaries. She added, 'Puti could take you to some houses where Once Were Warriors happens every night.' Olga had three sisters. The oldest, Puti, the one who scared Rose the most, worked for Child, Youth and Family; the next one, Marama, was a case manager for Work and Income; and Makere, the one next to Olga, was a theatre administrator for Patu Whero Productions. Rose didn't know why she's so certain they don't like her — they're all pleasant, Puti especially, which is probably why Rose was scared of her. She was the one closest to Olga, the one Olga loved and argued with the most. Sure she was friendly, but when she looked at Rose, there was a reserve, a coldness. Rose was certain she was not imagining it. Puti didn't think that Rose is good enough for her baby sister.

'How did you get your name?' Rose asked Olga.

'I'm named after Mum's best friend who was on the train at Tangiwai.'

Rose remembered that tragic rail accident on Christmas Eve, 1953. There'd been a sudden discharge of water from the crater lake on Mt Ruapehu and a huge lahar smashed down and took the Whangaehu Bridge with it. The passengers didn't have a chance. The train came charging along to the bridge and just fell into the air and down to the torrent below. A few of the passengers managed, with the help of two who'd got out, to escape, but only a few. Many of the passengers had been travelling home for Christmas, a Christmas that was now, and forever after, marred for their relatives and loved ones, and for those who survived the horror.

'Mum's friend Olga was on her way to be with Mum who was due with me. They were young nurse probationers together and they'd both been at the births of each other's children. It was a promise they made after seeing the way some nurses treated Māori patients. Olga wasn't Māori, but she wasn't going to have my mother given anything but the very best. I was born three days after Tangiwai. There was never any question what I'd be called. Olga Irihapeti — Olga, after Mum's friend, and Elizabeth, because the queen was here on her first state visit as queen. Mum's a bit of a royalist I'm afraid.'

Puti, Marama and Makere were all, as was Olga, as much constrained by habit, protocol, family pressures, as anyone else. Olga and her sisters took seriously their attendance at tangi and made huge efforts to be there at least long enough to pay their respects. Olga worried for days if she had to miss a tangi she thought she should have attended. Olga and her sisters lived and worked in the day but the past, family events, history, was a living presence. They looked into the eyes of the past, the future was behind them, touching them on the shoulder every now and then just to keep them on track. You had Olga and you had the woman in Once Were Warriors and you had Knock-Knock, thought Rose.

When Rose complained to Olga about Knock-Knock it was the first question she asked. 'Māori?' she said and Rose nodded.

Olga rubbed her forehead as though tired. 'Never ending,' she said, 'never ending.'