SOMEONE LEFT the marae door open. That was when the fairies snuck in. They had been journeying up the river from the coast, looking for a haven. It had been a long, hard journey, treading up the river while the water flowed downwards to the sea. And the Whanganui moved particularly quickly, in a perpetual race with the deeper, slower Waikato; rejoicing in its victory at being the first to guzzle seawater into its wide, gulping mouth.
The greedy behaviour of the river had the effect of making the progress of the fairies, or the patuparehe, much like that of a man trying to run upwards on an escalator that was going down. But they needed to go.
They travelled up the river, past where the globe artichokes grew outside an old homestead. Here a poet with only one true soulmate had loved many women on a dusty mattress, to the harsh, repetitive rhythm of the springs on his wirewove bed. There was mustiness on the bare wooden floor boards now. Where there had once been a community, there was now an emptiness and an echo of a memory of a fullness of people.
They journeyed past places where farmhouses had once been and only gardens remained, tall with flowering chestnuts and fig trees. The patuparehe saw an old woman in a scarf wandering among them, collecting clippings and seeds in her apron, trying to save those heritage plants for her grandchildren.
They saw the bleached stick–barricades jutting out of the ground, proud and sharp still, where a prophet had led his people with visions. Visions as bright and clear as diamonds, sparkling in his eyes and spilling out like running river water, flowing over his followers.
Finally, in Tūhoe country, they reached a ford where the river passed smoothly over the rounded stones. Here they smelled the warm scent of recent laughter bubbling up from the water, and heard the echoes of voices in the mist. The smell of soap was there, sour and clean. The patuparehe shivered as a single entity, experiencing their expectation like a child with pure sugar on the tip of her tongue.
They left the river and headed down a road where dust lay smooth like silver silk in the moonlight, and continued on until they reached a marae. Here was the haven that they were seeking. But the spirits of this marae were awake, and they were warlike. ‘This is not your marae,’ they said. ‘Leave here at once.’
Discouraged, the patuparehe wandered a little further down the road. A short distance away, they came to another marae, and this time the spirits were asleep. But it was too risky to enter by the window. Although these spirits were peaceful and had been slumbering for a long time, the window was their domain. The only way that the patuparehe could get in to the marae was to enter by the door, as a person would.
Fortunately for them, the door had been left ajar. They spilled inside, brushing aside the wispy tendrils of mist that tried to hold them back. The air in the marae was dark and thick with spirits. It was heavy with Māoriness. This was what the patuparehe had been looking for, a place where they could continue to exist. They needed the old Māori ways so that they could carry on being. They had no place in the new world, where they were becoming weak and faded. Before the spirits could wake, the patuparehe darted into the nooks and crannies of the marae; twining themselves into the cracks of the tukutuku panels, creeping behind the pāua–shell eyes of the ancestral carvings.
But one of their number lingered, hovering above the sleeping bodies, whose collective breath rose and fell like thistledown on the wind. Amongst all the dark sleep–tossed heads lying on white cotton pillows, there was one he found himself particularly drawn to. She lay on her back, face up, with her chin tilted upwards towards the painted kōwhaiwhai patterns on the roof, as if in prayer to them. The single patuparehe drew in closer.
The woman was young, but her features were old Māori, like women he had known a long time ago. The lines of her nose were like the curves of a wave breaking on to a beach. Her lips were thick and full; purple, like miro berries ripe with juice. Her skin was brown and warm, like the earth sleeping beneath the wharenui. The patuparehe drifted closer and closer, straining to see in the half-light. He had not looked at such beauty in a long time.
He brushed against her mouth, just as she sighed deeply in her sleep. Her inward breath created a spiral of air that she gathered into her lungs, and the patuparehe found himself caught in it, sucked into her throat in dizzying circles of confusion. Unable to believe his luck, he travelled quickly up through the inner passages he found, lodging himself in her brain, her hinengaro. He had found his haven.
Once the patuparehe had ensconced himself in the woman’s head, naturally there was a little less space inside it, and parts of her mind had to rearrange themselves. Everything became a little different for her, and what was one thing when she went to sleep became another slightly different thing when she woke. And when she did open her eyes, she saw, as always, the photo of her grandfather hanging on the wall above where her pillow lay.
Her koro wore his khaki army uniform, and his features were soft and young. Handsome, even. The woman sat underneath the portrait. ‘Come to breakfast,’ the others told her. ‘We can smell the fried bread cooking. We want to put the mattresses away.’ But the woman refused to move. ‘My koro hit my mother,’ she told them. She said it over and over again.
‘He shot the Germans,’ they told her. ‘He was a fine man.’
She remembered her koro’s face, dark with rage, as he hit her mother with a fence batten. Her mother lay on the ground, her wounds soft like jelly; beaten and bruised like Māui’s fish. ‘He used to hit my mother,’ she said again.
‘He was a good man,’ they told her. ‘Look at his medals.’
The woman sat there all day. ‘Something is wrong with her mind,’ they whispered. ‘She will not even come to the river for a wash.’
She stayed there underneath the portrait. As dusk fell inside the marae, the woman’s eyes adjusted to the light. When the others came back inside after dinner, they found her standing with her arms upstretched to the ceiling; reaching, grasping. She could see a tiny light where each patuparehe nestled, either high in the rafters made of raupō slats, or sprinkled around the walls. ‘It is as if the stars have come to shine inside our wharenui, bringing the whole world in with them,’ she said, twirling around in delight and wonder.
When they heard that she could see them, the patuparehe knew that one of their number had entered into her. They left their perches and clustered around her like a swarm of fireflies, keeping just out of reach of her searching fingers. ‘Get out of there,’ they hissed with their magic, trying to reach their brother inside her head. ‘Come to us!’
But it was the woman who answered. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’
‘We must keep together,’ called the patuparehe. ‘Together we exist. Separately, we are nothing!’ But the patuparehe within was warm and snuggly nestled, and he pretended not to hear.
At first, the people just looked at the woman, unsure of what to do. Eventually, some of the men carried her, kicking and struggling, to her mattress, underneath the portrait of her koro, with its slightly frosted glass. ‘He used to beat my mother,’ she told them. ‘He hit her with a fence batten.’ A group of kuia sat by her side into the night, bathing her head and saying the old karakia. The woman looked upwards, to where the patuparehe had returned to their places.
She felt as if she lay on the floor of a huge cave that was lit with glow worms. The patuparehe inside her head glowed too, but his light did not burn her. It warmed her with magic and beauty, and a smile touched her lips as she lay with her eyes wide open and bright.
The next day, the woman’s younger cousin led her out the back to the toilets, because if left to herself, she would not have gone. The wharepaku were built from rough wood, and the roof was made of corrugated iron. Tiny scented mānuka leaves lay in the long furrows of the tin and on the dirt under the bare feet of the two women. Because it was summer, each tree was dusted with tiny white flowers.
Looking down from a miro tree, a wood pigeon cocked his head at the woman and regarded her with one of his round eyes. His blue–green feathers shone in the sunlight, contrasting with the cream colour of his breast. He had come out of the deepness of the bush to flit about in the folds at the edges, hoping to feast on the ripe red berries that were sometimes to be found there.
Being the most magical of all the birds, he sensed the patuparehe. He made a soft, gurgling enquiry, rolling it about in his throat. ‘What business does a patuparehe have with a woman?’ he asked.
The patuparehe did not want to answer, but he was bound to, because the question had been asked of him by a wood pigeon. ‘I cannot resist her beauty,’ he said. ‘It has been a long time since I have seen such a woman. Even the breath that she draws into her body is sweet, like the fresh smell of the wet bush when the raindrops spill onto the leaves. I have chosen her to be my haven.’
‘She was not yours to choose,’ said the wood pigeon. ‘It is not right that you love a woman.’
The woman heard him say this last sentence, and said to her cousin, ‘See that wood pigeon? He tells me it is wrong to love another woman.’ And her thoughts got mixed up with the thoughts of the patuparehe. ‘To love a woman is a beautiful thing. There can be no wrong in that.’
Her younger cousin told her people that the woman had said she had heard the wood pigeon speak about love between two women.
The kāumatua held a council in the marae. ‘Let her be,’ said some. ‘There is nothing to show that she is unhappy.’ ‘No,’ said others. ‘There is a demon in her head, and it must be driven out.’
Inside the wharenui, where the woman still sat beneath the portrait of her koro, the patuparehe made one last appeal to their brother. ‘You threaten our haven,’ they pleaded. ‘The spirits will waken and expel us!’
‘I have my haven,’ he replied.
The people took her to a place where the river spilled into a deep pool, and the water was greeny–blue from the reflection of the overhanging bush, the same colour as the feathers of the wood pigeon.
They led her in until she was waist deep. One of the kaumātua stood behind her, and thrust her head under the water. She struggled, but other hands helped to hold her down.
Beneath the surface of the river, the world was a clear green, tinted by the gold of the sunlight coming from the inaccessible world above. Bubbles from her mouth danced past her wide open eyes in slow motion; colourless and beautiful. The world slowed, and she prepared to stop.
Water began to enter her nose. The patuparehe felt the pressure, squeezed against the walls of her head. There was no longer enough room for him in there. But although the woman had ceased fighting, he still fought on; clinging to the richness of her mind with the fierceness of a warrior.
Eventually, the water drove him out. Patuparehe dance across the water. They do not swim. To immerse them in water is to drown their magic. He shot out through the woman’s ear, moaning in agony, and bobbed to the surface.
They dragged her from the river. She was not breathing, but they drained the water from her, and breathed karakia into her mouth. After some time, she began to draw air into her lungs on her own.
But something in her mind was missing. The patuparehe had hollowed out a space for himself that could not be refilled, and had worn the hollow smooth and firm from the habit of his presence. From that day on, the woman was as a child, simple in her thoughts. And the patuparehe, weakened by his submersion in the water, grew disorientated. He travelled along the river and beyond, searching for the marae, searching for the woman, unable to find either.
And when the wind howls around the corners of the marae on a stormy night, the patuparehe inside the marae listen. When the Tūhoe mist rises, they watch the door. Wondering, always wondering if it is their heartbroken brother, coming home to their haven.