36

Memory, by enabling us to recall some of what has happened to us, allows us to believe we exist in the present with a past and a self that is different and separate from others. Your dread about your mother’s Alzheimer’s now grips the depths of your belly. How much memory loss has she suffered? How much of the mother you knew is left to hold at bay the total loss of self and consciousness? How is she going to react to you after twenty years of your denial?

‘When did you last see her?’ Daniel asks Cheryl, as she drives him through the slow wind and up the steep hills into Khandallah, towards Pacific Sunset Park, the sun flowing in strips across the bonnet of their car.

‘Last Easter, when Mum and I came down to see her.’ Cheryl hesitates; she’d not meant to let that revelation slip. ‘Mum wanted to come but I didn’t want to tell you in case you didn’t like that. Mum, after she saw Grandmother, immediately took charge of all her legal and financial affairs.’ She pauses. ‘I’m bloody glad she did that.’ She reaches across and touches his shoulder. ‘Dad, she’s not as ill as you are imagining her to be. Stop being such a pessimist. And she has enough money to care for herself. Not many people can afford this place.’ To reassure him further she talks enthusiastically about the facilities and staff of Pacific Sunset Park, concluding, ‘Grandma has her own self-contained apartment in the front row with a fabulous view of Wellington Harbour, and a full-time care-giver she chose. He is Samoan-Māori, and she says he’s “so unusual and loving”’.

A short while later, they are driving through the front gates of Pacific Sunset Park.

‘Your grandmother is expecting you, Miss Malaetau,’ says the manager, a short rotund man. ‘But I didn’t know Mister Malaetau was coming too.’

‘We wanted to surprise her,’ Cheryl counters. ‘How is she?’

The manager hesitates and then says, ‘Physically, she’s very fit and well. But we can now never be sure of her emotional and psychological well-being …’

‘Why?’ Daniel interrupts.

‘She now talks mainly in Samoan. Like many of our family members – everyone here is a member of our Pacific Sunset family – she is reverting to the language of her childhood. And apart from Muta, her caregiver, none of us know Samoan. But we’re fixing that deficiency. Every week, a Samoan psychologist – Doctor Aneesee – comes to talk with her, and he gives us his assessment of her health.’

‘And?’

‘There’s been no deterioration in her memory since she joined us three years ago,’ he says. Daniel’s pessimism won’t allow him to believe the manager, but he doesn’t say anything.

The manager walks between him and Cheryl as they move along the walkway, through neat beds of flowers and shrubs, to his mother’s apartment.

The manager knocks on the front door. A few seconds later, it swings back decisively. In the doorway stands a man who must be Muta, smiling, in a navy blue silk shirt, black trousers and black shoes. His stubby fingers are alive with glittering rings. ‘Cheryl, Cheryl!’ he exclaims, and then encompasses her in his large arms. Cheryl hugs him and kisses him on the cheek. ‘Wow, expensive perfume, girl!’ he cries.

‘My dad can afford to give his daughter gifts like that. Eh, Dad?’ Cheryl laughs.

‘So this is your famous Dad, eh?’ Muta says. Daniel stretches his hand out, and Muta grips it softly. ‘Welcome to your mother’s beautiful home. Ia sūsū mai, ma tala mai ‘a‘ao!’ He steps aside and Daniel enters the apartment.

It has a familiar scent: lemon and coconut oil, his mother’s signature smell. Like a truth serum, it will continue to search out, expose and detail every memory of his life with her. ‘She is on the veranda in her favourite chair, enjoying her favourite view,’ Muta informs them. Cheryl and the manager wait for Daniel’s reaction. Daniel gazes at Cheryl but she looks away, leaving it to him.

‘Does she know I’m here?’ Daniel asks. Muta shakes his head, once.

‘Do you want Muta to tell her before you meet her, sir?’ the manager suggests.

‘No, I’ll talk to her first,’ Cheryl decides for Daniel. She holds Muta’s hand and they go out to the veranda, while Daniel watches. The lemon-coconut scent grips his heart and drags it up into his throat.

Tautasi, his mother, is sitting motionless in a white armchair, with her back to him. Only her silver-haired head is showing above the back of the chair. She gazes into the large expanse of wild summer sky and harbour stretching into the haze, and Eastbourne barely visible on the other side. It is a stark, unforgettable image of her; he identifies it as symbolic of the eternal loneliness that he has abandoned her to.

Cheryl and Muta go round the chair and face her. Cheryl reaches forward and down into her grandmother’s outstretched arms. In their deep embrace, Daniel feels their unqualified alofa for each other, and he wants to flee from it. Cheryl sits down on the right arm of her grandmother’s chair and, with her left arm round her shoulders, talks to her, but he can’t hear what they’re saying.

‘I’ll leave you to it, sir,’ the manager interrupts his concentration. ‘I hope it all turns out the way you expect.’ He turns and leaves.

‘All Cheryl’s told her is that she has a visitor – someone she knows well – and she’s eager to meet you,’ Muta informs Daniel when he returns. ‘I think that’s best, sir. Some days, her recognition and memory are spot on; some days, not so good. Some days she believes you are other people from her past. O uiga lava ia o le ma‘i lea ua maua ai si ou kigā.’ Muta turns to go, then stops, and says, ‘If it’s of some consolation, she talks about you often …’

‘But may not recognise me today?’ Daniel asks. Muta nods.

When Cheryl beckons Daniel with her right arm, he sees her arm as a fishing line reeling him in, and he lets himself go with it, apprehensive but now wanting, yes, yearning to see and know. He tries to smile as he moves up to Cheryl, and she winds her arm round his waist and takes him round the chair.

Slowly, with her eyes and face enthused with the wondrous glow of recognition, his mother rises to her unsteady feet, smiling as she stretches her frail arms to him. He moves into her embrace and warmth and familiar smell and all that he has known of her and their life together, and with her warm breath surging into his ear, she cries, ‘Arona, Arona, ua e koe sau e asi mai a‘u!’ Shocked for a surprised moment by her misrecognition of him, Daniel hesitates, but when he feels her tears on his left cheek, he starts weeping too, and then sobbing. ‘Ua leva e ke le‘i koe sau. Ia ku‘u loa le kagi. Ku‘u!’ She caresses his head, which is pressed against her shoulder, consoling him, though she believes she is holding Aaron. When Daniel’s sobbing eases, she holds the sides of his face and, pushing his head back, so she can look into his eyes, she asks, ‘Arona, where is your friend Dan? Ga lua o i le aoga i le kaeao?’ He looks up at Cheryl, who nods once.

‘La e gofo Dan for their rugby practice,’ Daniel says, accepting her reality and playing along with it, though he is still alarmed – and jealous? – she is seeing him as Aaron.

‘Ou ke le maga‘o e lakapi Dan. Ke‘i ua lavea.’ She pauses and then says, in English, ‘It’s his father who want him for to play rugby. And Dan always does what his bloody father want him to do. Ask Cheryl.’

‘Yes, Granddad always gets his way with Dan,’ Cheryl agrees, though she wasn’t alive in the time period her grandmother is now living in.

‘Dan should be like you, Arona,’ his mother says. ‘You love your mother and always do what she want, eh, Aaron.’ Daniel nods repeatedly. ‘Aumai se gofoa mo Arona,’ she says to Cheryl, who brings over one of the folding chairs and puts it beside her. She pats the chair, and Daniel sits down on it. ‘Fai ia Muta e fai se kakou morning tea,’ she says.

Cheryl says yes, and disappears quickly into the apartment, leaving Daniel abandoned and once again exasperated by Aaron’s dominant presence in his life. Aaron had been his mother’s favourite child in their neighborhood – but then he was every other parent’s favourite too. How are you to resolve your relationship to your mother when she is seeing Aaron and not you? Daniel asks himself. Or is she only pretending? Daniel scrutinises her: as usual, she is neat and tidy, but she isn’t physically the mother he knew when he was at high school. He is shocked by how much she has aged and shrunk. Her skin has loosened and hangs from her bones, and through her pale and wrinkled skin shines a glowing fragility: a glow that will keep expanding until it has claimed all of her, at her death.

‘And how are your mother and your sister and brother?’ Daniel hears her asking.

‘They’re well, thank you, Mrs Malaetau.’

‘Always the polite Arona, eh. You should get your friend Dan for to act like you. I spoil him too much; let him get away with anything. His father don’t even try for to stop me.’ She stops, and withdraws into herself. ‘Ae, ese le poko o si a‘u kama,’ she says, surprising Daniel, and when Daniel glances at her, he sees tears in her eyes.

‘Yes, Dan is certainly the brightest in our class, Mrs Malaetau,’ Daniel says. Strangely, he doesn’t feel dishonest.

‘I force him to do the best at his schoolwork. I make him study and study, and I take him to the library and make him read all the books there.’ She thinks about that, chortling. Daniel has to agree with her: she made him do two hours of homework every night, and she marked and checked it; and though she hardly read herself, she insisted he spend three hours at the library every Saturday morning while she did her shopping. He watched three movies of her choice on TV weekly and one movie of Dad’s choice at the local cinemas on Saturday mornings, and had to do hours and hours of revision before every test and examination. The study routine freed him from all family chores he didn’t want to do: all he had to do was tell her he had homework, and she would cancel those chores.

Muta wheels in their morning tea on a trolley, stops it beside her and waits. Morning and afternoon teas were one of the first Palagi rituals she’d insisted was central to their becoming an educated and civilised aiga, and New Zealanders. As a child, Daniel and his father had to be patient as she taught them that ritual, which, she claimed, had first become part of their aiga’s traditions when her father’s father’s father, the first in their illustrious aiga to be trained as a pastor, at Malua, adopted it from his Palagi missionary teachers. Daniel waits to see if she will ‘officiate’ – her term – this morning tea as she has always done in the past. He waits, hoping she will. Daniel glances up at Muta, then at Cheryl, who both look concerned.

Muta doesn’t wait any more: he takes the teapot and places it on the woven pandanus mat at the middle of the table. Daniel notices, with spiralling anxiety, that his mother is just staring blankly at the table. Muta arranges the teapot (which even has a woollen tea cosy around it) and the crockery and cutlery in the way Daniel recognises his mother has always insisted is ‘the correct Palagi way’.

‘Your mother has taught me well, sir,’ Muta says, apologising for her absence. ‘I’m just an ignorant Hamo when it comes to things like this.’

Cheryl reaches forward and starts pouring milk into her grandmother’s cup. ‘Yes, she taught me well too,’ she says. ‘A warm cup and then the milk first …’

‘And you let the teapot sit for four minutes before you pour it,’ Daniel hears himself saying.

As they pour and share out the tea, Muta and Cheryl continue, light-heartedly, to elaborate the ritual the way she has taught them. But Daniel admits to himself that the infectious spark that was always in his mother’s eyes when she served her teas is now absent, and his sorrow returns like the brown sparkling liquid filling the white cups. ‘Ah,’ Daniel hears himself sigh a short while later, when he sees her right hand grip her cup. ‘Ahhh,’ he sighs longer, when her thin knobbly fingers grip the cup handle firmly, and she lifts the cup to her mouth. ‘Ahhhh,’ he sighs even longer, in intense hope, when he sees her take her first sip, and her little finger stays erect and upright like a victorious flag, the way he’d always seen her grip the cup, so central to her life in New Zealand, the way ‘proper ladies hold their tea’.

‘Dad, do you remember us as kids trying to imitate Grandmother’s way of holding her cup?’ Cheryl interrupts him. ‘Why does she always have her little pinkie stuck out like that?’

‘Because, girl, it is the proper English way!’ He mimics his mother.

‘Yeah, just like my favourite actress, Grace Kelly in High Society.’ Muta mimics her too. Daniel tries not to laugh with the other two, realising that his attempt at saving the situation with light-hearted levity is only making it sadder.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Muta says, ‘but I think she’s very tired. She’s been up since six …’

‘And, Dad, Grandma’s memory swings wildly’, Cheryl says. ‘Great one minute and …’

‘… Gone the next,’ Daniel says.

Muta obviously knows his mother’s favourite biscuits: he picks up the plate of coconut crispies and extends it to her. She turns and gazes up at him, with a faint smile. She chooses a biscuit, and takes a small bite of it. Her smile widens as she chews.

After she has methodically chewed her smiling way through the biscuit and sipped half her cup of tea, she holds out her hands, palms upwards, and Muta wipes them clean, while Cheryl wipes her mouth gently with a clean serviette. ‘Right, Mrs Malaetau,’ Muta says. She rises to her feet and, without looking at anyone, shuffles to the large multi-coloured sofa across the room. She stops and looks back at Muta, who hurries over and, with his hands, brushes the top of the sofa, and then fluffs up a thick velvet cushion and places it at the head.

‘There you are, Grandma,’ Cheryl says softly, and helps her stretch out on the sofa. As Daniel observes all this, he is again snared in the bitter truth that in her present state he doesn’t exist. But it’s better to be misrecognised as Aaron than not to exist at all. Cheryl takes a fluffy white blanket from Muta and stretches it over his mother, up to her chin. Daniel starts regretting her long banishment from his life: years he could’ve used to be with her, wasted and irretrievable years. But even more unforgivable is his abandonment of her to other people, and ultimately to this incurable unforgiving loss of self (and the mother who knew him and could have now cursed or forgiven him.) ‘Have a good nap, Grandma,’ he hears Cheryl say.

He jumps up and rushes out onto the veranda, into the blinding light of the sky and the slow wind that is heavy with damp and the unpleasant smell of iodine.

Everything before and above him is now united in a haze that the summer light has turned into the colour of burnished gold. Below, in the bay, he discerns the outlines of three ships ploughing barely visible troughs in the water towards the opening into the Straits and unknown destinations – and escape. Across the harbour the Eastbourne landscape and hills are merely a grey outline that sweeps and curves to his left and escapes outside his vision. All sounds are muffled, as if Cheryl has thrown his mother’s soft blanket over them too, to stop them from disturbing Tautasi’s sleep. Tautasi. Yes, that is his mother’s name: a name that she changed many times after they settled in New Zealand; a name she once admitted to Daniel didn’t suit ‘my new self in New Zealand’; a name that Daniel came to realise didn’t fit, either, her passionate love of Hollywood movies and actresses: Susan Hayward, Olivia De Havilland, Maureen O’Hara, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Esther Williams, Doris Day, Cyd Charisse, Marilyn Monroe, Betty Davis, Jane Russell, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Jayne Mansfield, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and others. What is her name now? It’s an unwelcomed question Daniel tries to reject.

‘She hasn’t forgotten you, Mr Malaetau,’ Muta’s consoling voice enters from over Daniel’s shoulder. ‘She talks about you often, and always with admiration and alofa.’

‘Yes, Dad, the last time I was here, she never stopped talking about “my poko son who top his class always,”’ Cheryl echoes. She hands Daniel his cup of tea. ‘I’ve refilled it.’

‘What is the name she now uses?’ Daniel forces himself to ask. There’s an awkward silence from the others. ‘Does she use her Samoan Christian name?’ Daniel takes a sip; the tea is correctly hot and sweet, the way he likes it.

Daniel senses Muta leaving the question to Cheryl, who clears her throat and says, ‘Yes, Dad, the name she’s always used, Tasi.’

‘Tautasi,’ he emphasises. ‘That was her full name. Tautasi: a family name on her father’s side.’

‘I always thought it was Tasi,’ Cheryl says, shifting over and standing against his left shoulder.

‘You know, of course, she’s always loved movies …’ Daniel remarks.

‘She still does!’ Muta exclaims. ‘Especially movies of the fifties and sixties …’

‘… and she has never considered her very Hamo name Tautasi worthy of her favourite Hollywood actresses.’ Daniel hears an admiring, ironical shift in his voice. ‘So during the time I knew her, she gave herself a series of very Hollywoodish first names: Emerald, Janine, Elizabeth, Susan, Joan …’

‘Wow, I never knew that, Dad,’ says Cheryl.

‘Movies were the constant, unchanging love of her life, and that shaped her.’ He pauses and then, with some pride, admits, ‘I inherited that love – and through her and the movies came my passion for stories and poetry and fiction, and telling and writing my own.’ With his next swallow of tea, he toasts his mother, as he used to see her rise to her feet and toast her favourite actresses on television, at home.

‘I never knew that either, Dad.’

Daniel notices that the haze is thinning and the harbour is turning into a silver-black plain of long ripples, swells and cloud reflections that are also caught in his cup of tea.

‘Over the years, when people asked me why I write, I’ve given some very elaborate, fanciful reasons why – all bullshit to impress readers and critics and enhance my reputation. I was confidence tricking, like my mother used to do to get better jobs and enhance our aiga’s standing, I now realise.’ He laughs. ‘I used to condemn her for it, for being “dishonest”, but I learned from her how to do it, and I did it.’ He continues laughing. ‘For years now, I’ve known that writing fiction and poetry is a con game; that so-called truth is what you can make people believe is true. All so-called art is tricking. My mum used to see movies and then retell them to me and Dad, or anyone else who was willing to listen, in the most passionately persuasive and believable ways. She was – is – the best storyteller I’ve ever known.’

‘I’ve never met that side of my grandmother,’ Cheryl intrudes, wistfully.

‘I’ve been lucky, girl,’ Muta says. ‘Whenever Mrs Malaetau is with “her Daniel” she is that incredible storyteller.’

‘How does she use language then?’ Daniel asks him.

‘In her inimitable way,’ Muta replies.

‘How, Dad? C’mon, how?’ Cheryl encourages him.

Daniel places his now almost empty cup on the veranda railing. For an instant he catches his shimmering reflection in the brown liquid. ‘From her I learned that when she and Dad first came here, she could read a lot of English – she’d completed Samoa College and had her School Certificate, and had worked as a clerk in the Treasury Department – but she didn’t speak much of it because of lack of practice. As soon as they shifted to Freemans Bay and their flat and her job at the hospital laundry, though, she “took to it like a shark to human flesh” – in huge ravenous hunks – and she didn’t care what people, including her beloved son, thought of the way she spoke it. And did she murder the poor language! She ate it up, and then ate it while she was speaking it. I was so ashamed of her unashamed spoken English, I avoided being seen with her at public places. “Daniel, I know you are ma of me ’cause of the way I kaukala the English, but I still speak better English than the kiwi do. You wait and see, I gonna speak better and better, like Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man. Fa‘akali a, the more movies and books I learn from the better I get.” And lo and behold, she did improve – not just grammatically but in developing her own unique way with language and storying. I think I stopped being ashamed of her way when I started high school, when I became aware that whenever she held the floor, as it were, her audience was held spellbound by her way. It wasn’t just in the way she used language but in the manner she storied and paced her narrations. And, while she told her stories, she exuded charisma, a term that was a buzz word at that time.’

‘Would mana be a more apt term, sir?’ Muta suggests.

‘That’s it, Muta. That’s it, she had mana. You’re a genius, mate!’

‘When she is well, she still has it,’ Muta says.

While his mother sleeps, Daniel asks Muta to show him round her apartment, believing the surroundings she has created for herself will hold revelations, clues and evidence about who and what she is.

He can’t believe the expensive neatness, the spick-and-spanness of it. No sign of anything Samoan or Pacific. No family photographs anywhere – she used to cover their family walls with those photographs, circled lovingly with lei. But then he hasn’t seen her for a long time so he is in the second skin of someone he doesn’t know.

‘So was your mother always this neat?’ Muta asks, as he shows him the apartment.

‘Is the tidiness you or her?’ Daniel replies.

Muta grins. ‘Mainly her. I merely carry out what she wants me to do.’

‘Ever since I’ve known her, she’s been a stickler for neatness,’ Cheryl confirms. ‘Whenever Phil and I stayed with her, man, it was always: “Yeah, we Hamo people got to show these smelly Palagi how to be clean and healthy and godly.”’

‘Well, it was my father who maintained and kept our house; he did most of the housework and cooking,’ Daniel informs them. ‘Very un-Hamo, eh. Very unmanly! And I hid that from my friends. During the weekends she tried, really tried, to do the housework, because she, being a woman, was supposed to like that work. Poor Mum didn’t; her heart wasn’t in it, and she wasn’t good at it. Dad usually ended up redoing the housework. Eventually, because she had the full-time job and enjoyed it, she became the breadwinner, and Dad did the housework and looked after me. One good thing I suppose about Mum was she never hid that from others. That of course didn’t stop me from feeling ashamed that my father was doing woman’s work.’

He goes a few paces into her bedroom, and it is almost as if a loving upraised hand – his mother’s, because it smells of lemon and coconut? – is pushing into his chest, unexpectedly, stopping him. He finds himself looking at what is standing on her bedside table, under the blue lamp: a framed photo of him, in his full PhD graduation regalia, on the town hall stage, smiling and shaking hands with the Chancellor. He hurries to it; it is not one of those taken by the official university photographer. This one was taken by someone who was sitting in the audience, halfway up on the next tier. His hands trembling, he picks it up and scrutinises it.

‘Dad, she took it,’ Cheryl admits. ‘At first I loved it, but over the years I’ve grown bored with her very detailed stories about being at your graduation, and how she was so proud of her son being one of the first Hamo to get a doctorate, and how Phil and I should get doctorates too.’

‘Yes: degreed, bewigged. That’s what she always wanted me to be, just to show the “whole ignorant Hamo community how educated our family is”.’

‘It’s about the only photograph in her house,’ Muta says. He places the photo down, and hurries back past Cheryl and Muta into the sitting room.

Muta and Cheryl tell him they are going to cook some fa‘alifu talo and a sapasui for lunch, and disappear into the kitchen, leaving him again exposed to his mother. She is breathing easily, her face suffused with serenity, arms folded across her chest, and Daniel retreats to the only bookcase in the house, against the far wall.

Most of the shelves are empty, but in the middle shelf, huddled at the centre, are all the books he has written. He hesitates from touching them, afraid of what he may find, but he is encouraged – the books are further proof that his mother still holds him in value (a pompous, dishonest way of describing it). He notes the titles quickly: all his published books, all published after she’d left. Fearfully, he pulls out the first one – his first book, the novel The Final Return. He opens it, flicks to the title page and there, in her ornate handwriting, he reads, his heart filling with sadness and love: ‘For me, this is the most wonderful (and saddest) day of my life, to get a copy of my beloved son’s first book’. Further down, there is a message from a Robert Hummont: ‘To my beloved Elizabeth, Happy birthday, Darling.’ Her first Palagi husband? Daniel flicks through the book, thinking, with intensifying self-pity, about how she may have considered his novel. Pity books she didn’t like. He notes as he flicks through the other books that she’s written messages to him in their title pages, messages that add up to: ‘I la‘u tama o Daniel, I’m leaving these copies of your books to you, hoping you read what I’ve written in them. (I’ll be dead by the time you find them.) Firstly I need and want your forgiveness for what I did to you and your father …’

‘I’ve never told you, Dad.’ Cheryl breaks into his thoughts, the strong smell of sautéing garlic following her from the kitchen. He doesn’t look at her. ‘But most holidays Phil and I spent with her, she got us to read her your poems and stories, aloud. And when she thought we weren’t reading it well, she showed us how to. Grandma should have been an actor …’

‘She was, Cheryl,’ he murmurs. ‘Her whole life was a series of large roles. She was into Meryl Streep when … when she left.’

‘That explains the way she reads most of your poetry,’ Cheryl laughs. ‘Like Meryl Streep!’ It is uncanny and gratifying how Cheryl then recites one of his latest poems – in her grandmother’s voice and in Meryl Streep style.

‘Dad, why do writers always need reassurances about the value of their writing – why?’ Cheryl asks.

‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that that is probably why I and other writers do what we do?’ He tries joking. ‘The writing, especially the publication, is visible proof we may be good at something.’

‘Pathetic, Dad. Anyway, do you want me to tell you what your mum thinks of your writing?’

‘How much?’

‘For free, Dad. And it’s going to be good for your miserable ego.’ She pauses, sighs deeply and declares, ‘She has always loved your work, and tells that to anyone who comes into her view – and, as you well know, her view includes the whole planet. But of course that can’t be the so-called objective praise you so badly need. After all, she’s your mother, and biased.’

Almost an hour later, Daniel helps Muta and Cheryl set out their lunch on the dining table. The delicious sight and smell of the taro and sapasui make Daniel’s mouth salivate. Within a few minutes of Muta’s prediction, his mother wakes, slips off the sofa, straightens her clothes, carefully folds her blanket and, smiling at everyone, shuffles over to the table. ‘Ese le magaia o le magogi o le kakou meai, Muta,’ she congratulates Muta.

Muta grins shyly. He pulls back the chair at the head of the table and invites her: ‘Madam.’ She slips into the chair, thanks him as he pushes the chair under her, waits for them to sit down, bows her head and then, in the way Daniel has always remembered, says grace in Samoan. Then she shakes open her serviette and, spreading it across her lap, gazes across at him, her eyes again sparkling with the enjoyment of having company.

‘Ia, Aaron, o ā au mea sa fai i legei aso?’ she asks him. An intense surge of healing relief immediately radiates through Daniel, knowing she is alive again, and he no longer minds being mistaken for Aaron – if being Aaron kept her alive. So for the whole meal and the rest of the afternoon, while the haze clears and summer sings on, she and Daniel as Aaron and Cheryl and Muta, who hadn’t existed in that period, are back in Daniel’s Freemans Bay high school days, with Daniel, her son, in the third person, at the centre of that world.

Later, as Daniel is leaving her apartment, he asks Muta and Cheryl, ‘How come she sees me as a teenager and through Aaron?’

‘Ask her memory!’ Cheryl jokes. ‘Your mum now lives in vertical time, subject to a memory, a time machine, that is short-circuiting.’

‘E, suga, that’s a mighty way of putting it,’ Muta laughs.

‘Cheryl, that is a very accurate way of describing it,’ Daniel congratulates her. And he has only two days before he returns to Auckland for his mother to short-circuit him into existence; only two days.

On his way back to his motel, he is puzzled and worried by Cheryl’s silence. ‘Would you mind if she doesn’t recognise you as you are?’ Cheryl asks.

‘I need her forgiveness,’ he confesses. ‘For that she has to see me. But I’m dreading that; dreading it more than anything else in my life.’

When he visits her at mid-morning the next day, she and Muta are playing suipi at the dining table. She glances up and, seeing him, says, ‘Lemu, ua fiu Muka e kau mafai e malo ia ke a‘u!’ She hoots loudly and slams her cards down on the table.

‘I, Lemu, ua ou fiu!’ Muta plays along with Tasi’s misrecognition of Daniel as his father. ‘I’m the champ!’ his mother exclaims. She starts regathering the pack.

‘Granddad can beat you,’ Cheryl challenges her. ‘Eh, Granddad?’

‘Okay, Granddad, try and beat me!’ she laughs, handing Daniel the pack. So, smiling, Daniel sits down opposite her and, trying to recall and fit into his father’s identity, shape and manner, he shuffles the cards. Just before he deals them out, he gazes at her. Recognising her usual intense concentration and enjoyment of the game, his heart sings with alofa. When he remembers that his father usually lost to her – he won mainly when she allowed him to, and he knew that – he plays accordingly.

That evening, not long after he gets back to his motel room, the phone rings. It is Laura. He doesn’t feel any reservations any more about talking with her. She wants to know about his mother. He describes in detail what has happened so far, and is surprised at how relaxed he is.

‘We have no aiga in Wellington, do we?’ she asks. He is puzzled but intrigued by her question. ‘You know, people who could visit her and take care of her if there’s an emergency?’ She is talking to him like she used to before the divorce.

‘Only distant ones – some of Dad’s cousins who’ve never liked Mum.’

‘I’ve discussed it with Cheryl and Phil, and they agree we should shift her to Auckland to be near us.’ She pauses, and he intuits that she’s remembered she shouldn’t be talking with him so familiarly. ‘Mere and the others think so too. And she has enough money to do that.’

‘Why not? We can help her better that way.’ And he needs time to repay his mother for his denial of her.

‘That’s wonderful. I’ve already checked, and there is a branch of Pacific Sunset in St Mary’s Bay, and they’ve got three empty apartments for sale.’

‘And I suppose you’ve checked them?’

‘I took Cheryl and Phil and Mere, and they all liked one in particular.’

‘So you and your devious kids and Mere have carefully walked me into this plan?’ He pretends offence.

‘Yes, but we had to make sure you liked it …’

‘How do you know I like it now?’

‘Your devious daughter rang me yesterday and told me she felt that you’d go for it!’ She laughs, and he finds himself joining in.

‘I think we should ask Muta if he would shift to Auckland with her,’ he suggests.

‘That’s a wonderful idea.’

‘Hell, Laura, you are all so bloody devious!’ He continues laughing.

‘Yeah, Dan: Muta has already agreed to come to Auckland and look after her!’