39

When Laura and Daniel pick up Daniel’s mother and Muta at the airport, at midday, she doesn’t recognise them, even when Cheryl introduces them by their names. Neither is she mistaking him for Aaron. She sits between them on the back seat and, ignoring them, describes their flight in enthusiastic detail to Cheryl, who is driving. There are no disconnections in time, location or sequence in her telling: she is in the present, and looking forward to her new apartment in the city she’d first lived and worked in. Lemu and Mahina and other members of the Tribe are in her story, but Laura and Daniel are absent – as if they’d not existed in her life. But Daniel isn’t upset by that; not then, anyway, because she is well, physically, and he is happy to be with her.

Her furniture and other possessions arrived two days before. Supervised by Cheryl and Laura, a team of workers arranged them in her new apartment the way she’d had them in Wellington. Laura insisted that large photographs of her and Daniel and Phillip, as individuals and as they looked now, be put in her gallery of photos in the sitting room.

‘Ese le magaia o lo‘u apartment, Muta!’ Daniel’s mother congratulates him as she moves round the sitting room; they follow her.

‘Thanks to Laura and Daniel,’ Muta replies. She pauses and glances at Laura and then at Daniel. She is focused, puzzled – then, like a wave of light, a smile of recognition spreads across her face, and she steps into Laura’s fierce embrace.

‘Thank you, Laura. It’s been so long, eh?’ She cries into Laura’s shoulder. ‘Where you been all this time?’

Laura hugs her tightly.’You’re been away so long,’ she whispers.

‘And where’s Dan?’ she asks. When Daniel hears that he almost bursts with hope. ‘Where’s my brainy son?’ Laura turns her round to face Daniel.

She swings away from Laura and into his arms. ‘You still good looking, boy!’ she says, burying her face in his neck. He cries silently into her hair. ‘What’s wrong? O le a le mea ua kupu?’ she asks, pushing him back and gazing up into his face. ‘I’m home, Daniel in the lion’s den. No need to worry; no need.’ She reaches up and wipes his tears away with her fingers. ‘Ku‘u loa lou kagi.’