7

In much Western literature and thought, it is assumed your so-called mind and intellect are located in your brain, and your emotions in your heart and stomach, separate from your body – your veins, muscles, flesh, sinews. (You found out recently that the Hawaiians locate intellect and thought in the na‘au, the intestines, and you are now trying to find out why.) Yet you know, after living it out, that all these – if they exist – are in fact inseparable. Your reaction to anything is a total, fused reaction of intellect, emotions, heart, body, mind. (You don’t want to be sidetracked by the eternal debate as to whether such divisions of the self are real, or whether once again reality is being viewed through thought-up concepts. Anyway, real or not, reality is what you believe it is.) So whenever you can’t escape recalling that one crucial event that has come to determine how you think, feel and believe about Aaron, and, through that, how you view your ‘tribe’ and yourself, your recollection is determined by the totality of all that you are and your possibilities. And over the years, as you’ve changed as a person, that has changed with it.

So this afternoon, as you watch the haunted Aaron surfacing from the haze over the Pacific, you re-experience to your darkest core that unravellable fusion of shock, surprise, amazement, sexual arousal, dismay, fear and horror that brimmed up from your belly and radiated swiftly into all your limits that afternoon at the end of winter, at the end of the your last primary school day, at the end of what you later identified as your innocence as a child. Sweat seeps out of your pores, and you shut your eyes and curl back in your chair …

Arthur Helters is small, fragile small, with large freckles, bad skin, dirty red hair and grime-ingrained nails, and he stinks of neglect. He can’t return anyone’s gaze, and he lisps and can barely be heard when he works up the courage to speak. And because he has just joined the class, he isn’t one of you – not yet. Many small, physically fragile and disabled people exude that certain vulnerability that makes you want to protect and help them. Arthur isn’t one of those. All that he is signals he is an obvious target for the stronger, which means everyone in your class. There is nothing about Martha Dewwer – who joined your class the same time as Arthur – that makes her as conspicuous as Arthur. She is Palagi, like nearly all the class; she is chubby and pimply and acned like most of the girls; she performs averagely, like most of the class, in everything; she never volunteers answers or behaves in ways that make her a bloody show-off, better than the rest of the class; like most of the girls, she isn’t attractive to the boys, like Aaron and Paul and you, who determine what that is; compared to Mere, the superstar beauty and brains in your class, Martha is just plain.

So why them? That is what has puzzled you all your life. Poor miserable Arthur because his absolute vulnerability invited abuse? Martha because she just happened to be there, just one of the many that Aaron could have chosen from your class?

Aaron lived with his mother, brother and sister in Napier Street, which branched off from your street; Paul and his family lived in Howes Street, just behind yours; Mere and Keith lived in Franklin Road, at the end of your street. So it was easy for your tribe to come together at any time; in truth, when you became inseparable friends, you made sure you became members of one another’s families, considered and loved by your parents and relatives as their children. So you could move from house to house as if they were all your homes.

Over the years, Freemans Bay and Ponsonby, centred on Wellington Street, became your special territory; your tūrangawaewae, Mere called it. You knew all the maps that made it up: every street, every twist of them, every corner, all the families and people who lived permanently in it. Despite being stereotyped by the media and the people outside your territory as the poorest and worst slum area in Auckland, you all loved it; considered it the ‘proud indefatigable heart’ of your lives (your Faulknerian description of it when you were finishing your MA, and Faulkner was a hero of yours.)

It is cold, and though you are wrapped up in your father’s thick woollen overcoat that smells of him and his tobacco smoke, the cold cuts up your spine and lodges in the back of your neck and in your ears and face. You can hear your shoes thudding into the wet pavement as you run towards Aaron’s house. He isn’t expecting you, but you’re used to going to one another’s homes whenever you feel like it.

The insides of your nostrils hurt from the cold. One more lamp post and you’re there. You don’t pay much attention to the black pick-up truck outside Aaron’s house. You glance up: the black sky is aswirl with wind that is driving the storm clouds across the heavens, and for a second the silvery image of the white owl you saw at the zoo the month before catches your attention and then vanishes. Why the owl?

You hesitate again at the bottom of the front steps into the house, turn and look back at the pick-up truck. Recognise it as belonging to Feau ‘Mako’ Schultz and Bonzy Scotman, who’d dropped out of high school at sixteen and were already in trouble with the police for theft, burglaries, assault and extortion, and other misdemeanors, and were feared by most of you as unrelenting bullies. Once at the dairy at the bottom of your street, when you went to buy milk, they cornered you before you went in, twisted your arms until you cried out in pain, and demanded you hand over the money your mother had given you. When you refused, Feau shoved his forefinger along your arse groove and hissed into your ear, ‘Ya don’t give us the money, kid, and we’ll shove more than this up ya!’ As they ran off with your money, you cried, realising you’d pissed yourself with fear. What are they doing in Aaron’s home in the middle of the afternoon? But you remember seeing Aaron with them a few times before. You remember Mere saying to Aaron, ‘Shit, man, you got ya head screwed on right?’

You don’t go into the house, but veer left and down the narrow footpath between the house and next door, a slippery surface that stinks of rotten leaves and mud, and which you have to navigate carefully.

Behind the house you are sheltered from the wind. You go to fetch the stepladder from the toolshed, and recall Mere ordering all of you, whenever Aaron talked admiringly of Feau and Bonzy, to ‘stay away from those gangster bastids.’

You expand the step ladder, push it up against the wall of the house, stamp it firmly into the wet mushy ground, steady yourself and then mount the steps – one, two, three – up to the windows that look down into the kitchen and dining room.

Your heart is thumping, thumping, thumping, your ears echoing with your excited breathing, your throat sandpaper dry, your eyes burning with expectation, though you are trying to persuade yourself that your desire, your undeniable need to see, to know, is ‘sinful’ (your father’s description). What if Aaron’s in trouble with those bullies? You have to save him – yeah, that’s why you have to do this. You shut your eyes tightly as you raise your face up over the window ledge. Stop. Open them, now.

And once again it is there, in all its forbidden, repulsive beauty, as it has been since that afternoon although, over the years, you have denied it to yourself by not ever confronting Aaron with it and resolving it. Now as you again view it, like a film that you’ve edited repeatedly according to what you’ve learned about yourself and others over the years, you weep silently for Aaron and Arthur and Martha, who you could have saved but, in your compulsive fascination, voyeuristic enjoyment and cowardice, didn’t. And by not saving them you allowed Aaron to pursue the hypnotic self-destructive darkness in himself that you witnessed in its full splendour and terror for the first time that afternoon. You also allowed those unremitting gangsters, Feau and Bonzy, to get away with their terrible crime, leaving you craving for Arthur’s and Martha’s forgiveness.

Because you’ve been in and out of it since you’ve known Aaron, you know that dining room in intimate detail but, when you look down into it this time, it feels new, different; bristling with danger, threat, fear. It is without sound, because you are shut outside it.

The light on the far wall behind the red sofa is on, and caught under its stark interrogating light are three figures.

Martha is sitting with her face buried in Aaron’s middle as he stands, with his back to you, his buttocks clenching and unclenching, his trousers down at his ankles.

A tearful Arthur is cowering at the other end of the sofa, bent forward, shaking arms wrapped around his thin knees, trying to hide from what is happening.

Directly beneath you, enthroned in the rickety dining room chairs, their feet extending out towards the others, are Feau and Bonzy. Feau’s right hand is moving in his lap, his taut back and head pressed back against the wall, while Bonzy, who is leaning forward, is stroking Aaron’s buttocks.

Aaron periodically glances back over his shoulder at Bonzy, his face aglow with desire and pleasure. You want to look away, but, as you watch, your sight and total being won’t allow you.

When Bonzy rises up and, unzipping his fly, walks up and against Aaron, you want to warn your friend, but you don’t, you don’t. Why? Suddenly Feau is a hungry darkness that separates itself from the wall and extends towards Arthur. No, no, no! But your voice chokes in your throat.

Arthur, sick with fear and sobbing, jumps up and tries to escape, but the darkness that is Feau envelopes him and forces him back onto the sofa …

Now Aaron is dead, and you don’t know what became of Arthur and Martha, who, to your immense relief, didn’t enroll at your high school, and disappeared, physically, from your life. Feau and Bonzy went to borstal a few months later for other crimes and didn’t return to live permanently in your neighbourhood. Throughout your life, you’ve read and heard stories and rumours about their careers as criminals. Just before you left for Hawai‘i, Aaron boasted that one of his ‘business associates’, Feau ‘Mako’ Schultz, was now the ‘King of Dope’ in Auckland. You pretended you didn’t know who Feau was, and Aaron left it at that, But you knew Feau and Bonzy were intertwined permanently in Aaron’s life, rooted there in their abuse of Arthur and Martha.

Online, Daniel books his air fares to New Zealand and Aaron’s funeral, far too late to admit his cowardice to Aaron and ask for his forgiveness.