Eli and Sissy were sitting in the kitchen deep in discussion one afternoon when I returned from feeding the horses. It was some months after Mrs Spry’s funeral. Scattered across the surface of the table were proof sheets which Rose was picking through, circling postage stamp-sized images that showed potential.
‘What do you think, Rose?’ Eli asked.
Rose looked up abstractedly from her proofs. ‘About what, hon?’
‘About turning that house that Alistair used to live in into a residency or fellowship. You know, for artists and writers and stuff. The accountant said it would be quite good tax-wise for the marae.’
‘That’s a great idea,’ I said, cutting in to their conversation and sitting down. ‘Whose idea was that?’ I looked expectantly at Rose and picked up one of the proof sheets.
‘Nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘Eli was looking through some of my art magazines and saw all those residency and fellowship adverts and got a bit of an idea happening at the last hui.’
‘And I’m the handbrake as usual,’ added Sissy. ‘We can’t afford to give them any money, Eli, and who would want to come and live in that dump and not get paid?’ she asked in despair.
‘That place is pretty fantastic, Sissy,’ I pointed out. ‘But instead of a new person each year, make it for a longer period – two, even three years.’
Rose, Sissy and Eli looked at me long and hard and I suddenly felt as if I had walked head-first into a carefully prepared trap. I dropped my gaze and concentrated on Rose’s photographs. ‘These are amazingly good,’ I told her. ‘You should do a book.’
I had been over to Alistair’s old place almost daily since the idea of me possibly living there had been floated by Eli in the kitchen of the Goshen. It was all just a formality. For starters I was the only applicant, which is always helpful in such matters, and I had been invited to tea by each and every member of the committee since applications had closed. The lack of applicants was no doubt due in part to the fact that Eli had forgotten to send the advertisement to the appropriate publications.
‘Kia ora, Connie,’ said Wiremu Brown after clearing his throat to stop the gossip session that was on between Sam Para and Nanakia Yelavich. ‘Thanks for coming in. We’ve looked at your application and like the idea very much.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, pleased.
‘Does your mother, ah I mean Rose, know what you want to do?’ asked Agnes Harris, taking the minutes and keeping Wiremu on track. I looked to the ceiling. Telling a lie was pointless.
‘No,’ I replied finally. ‘I was kind of hoping Eli would sort that one out for me. He appears to have a knack for handling Rose.’
One or two members of the committee started giggling and Sam started to say something, but stopped when his wife kicked him under the table.
‘Morning tea’s up,’ said Eli, popping his head through the scullery hatch from the kitchen next door. ‘Oh, and Rose is keen for Connie to do some writing to go with her photos. So everything’s pretty sweet all round.’
‘Is that a motion?’ Agnes asked, writing furiously.
‘Certainly sounds like it,’ replied Rena, Sam’s wife.
‘Second,’ volunteered Wiremu.
‘And that’s a resolution passed,’ said Agnes crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. She glanced at her watch. ‘Great. Time for a feed then off to be an iwi consultant for the afternoon.’
‘Government job. Nice for some,’ said Nanakia, extracting a handkerchief from his pocket and blowing his nose noisily. ‘Like the Post Office in the old days.’
‘Oh cheer up, Nanakia,’ said Eli, depositing a cup of tea and a plate in front of the grumbling kaumatua. ‘I made that fruit cake you like and put a good bit of butter on it.’
Nanakia clacked his false teeth excitedly and looked me up and down. ‘You’re Eli’s girl, aren’t you!’ he stated.
‘No, my dad’s dead,’ I explained. ‘Ages ago when I was a baby. Car crash down Wanganui way.’
‘Are you arguing with me?’ Nanakia replied belligerently, crossing his arms over his chest and rolling his head back so that he could have a proper look at me.
‘Give it a rest, Grandpa,’ said Agnes, who was standing across from Nanakia and me, packing the minutes from the meeting into her briefcase and eating a mutton sandwich. ‘Ignore him,’ she told me, snapping her briefcase shut and placing it on the floor beside her. ‘He gets a bit funny sometimes. Hasn’t really been the same since Gran died a couple of winters back.’
Eli brought me over a cup of tea and a slice of bacon and egg pie. He did most of the marae catering. Originally the job of supplying food for the various meetings and functions had been Sissy’s, but as time went by it became pretty evident to everyone that it was Eli who possessed the talent with the wooden spoon and skillet. So when he eventually returned to Goshen and Rose for good – an odd but utterly appropriate expression – Sissy untied the apron strings from around her waist and firmly knotted them around the slim hips of her baby brother. According to Agnes, since Eli had taken over the food, hui attendance had gone up by forty-three percent.
I bit into the piece of pie. It was slightly warm and juicy. ‘Yum. What’s your secret?’ I asked, reverent and awe-struck in the face of his culinary skills after a childhood of being tortured by Rose’s cooking, which was at best indifferent.
‘Store-bought pastry,’ he said with a wink and a big grin. ‘That’s between me and you and my rolling pin, Con.’
‘To the grave,’ I promised, crossing my heart.
Sissy joined us. She was happy and relaxed. ‘The committee will confirm your appointment in writing in a couple of days and then you can move in whenever. The boys have almost finished work on it so it’ll be nice and tidy.’
‘Then what?’ I asked.
‘Just keep us in touch with what you’re doing every couple of months. We all appreciate that Rome wasn’t built in a day.’
I had been in the cottage for less than a week when Sam walked over from the marae where he and a couple of others were giving Sissy a hand cleaning up the gardens. He carried a cardboard box which the rural delivery guy had dumped on the front porch of the pub so he didn’t have to bring his van over the rutted and narrow track that led to my latest location.
‘Lazy bastard,’ Rose said good-naturedly when she rang to tell me about the box’s arrival. ‘He bloody knew I’d make him take it to your place so he dropped it on the front porch and buggered off before I could catch him. I ran it over to the marae and Sam said he’d drop it off later.’
Sam set the carton down on the floor gratefully and took off his hat, wiping his forehead with a faded blue handkerchief. ‘Christ that’s heavy,’ he said. ‘What’s in it, rocks?’
‘Nah, worse,’ I said. ‘Books. At least you can get a decent hangi going with stones.’
We both laughed much harder than the joke truly deserved. ‘Good one, Con,’ Sam said, wiping the tears from his eyes.
I suddenly remembered that it was Sam who had brought the boxes of books that Alistair had left for Hebe really, more than me, all those years ago. They had stayed on at the pub after I had ventured over the hills towards the half-light of the Little Sisters of Bethlehem and the bazaar that was indelibly the Flying Carpet. I had asked Hebe if she had wanted to take them with her when she moved up north to teach, but she had seemed reluctant to disturb them from their shelves in one of the back bedrooms at the Goshen. ‘Leave them,’ she had said, running her fingers like a lover across their spines. ‘They’re relatively content here for now.’
Hebe had rung me up a few days after the confirmation letter for the residency had arrived at the pub. ‘Oh,’ she said, when I told her where I would be living. ‘That’s why I had to ring you. It all becomes blindingly clear now. Take the books back.’
She was right. There would be a certain sense of completion in Alistair’s books finding their way home.
Sam patted the carton. ‘You still getting these?’ he asked.
‘No, not really,’ I lied because, as Rose so often said, sometimes it’s easier than the truth. Sam looked around the room at the mainly empty shelves which had been built into various walls around the house. Only my favourites and Alistair’s had been relocated. The books that had arrived mysteriously during those dreamlike years of university and transitional flats reeking of ancient fridges and suspect plumbing lurked in another of the abandoned bedrooms at the Goshen, keeping company with Mrs Spry’s romance and serial-killer fiction.
‘You’ve got heaps of books all right,’ Sam said. ‘Have you read all of them?’
‘No, actually I haven’t, but I always mean to. Maybe I should open a second-hand bookshop or something.’
‘Yeah, I reckon,’ he said, immediately more comfortable with the books now that they had been translated into the ordinary.
The box, on the other hand, like all the others wasn’t even in the realm of the everyday. It was covered in stickers, exotic stamps and water-smudged, ink-blotted officialdom. It had come, as always, by sea, its country of origin irrevocably lost on its slow journey, touching ports and harbours so small that I never imagined they existed. The myriad of connections, missed opportunities and false starts irretrievably rupturing the beginning. The parcel was addressed to me at ‘The Pakeha School Teacher’s Old Place’ which made me laugh. Sitting inside on top of the books was an envelope with ‘Connie’ typed on it which I opened. ‘Keep the home fires burning in the land of light and abundance’ was typed across the top of the paper. It was unsigned as usual.
‘Nice,’ said Sam, reading the note over my shoulder. ‘Ahi ka roa.’
‘Ahi ka roa?’ I asked, dredging up a long-forgotten memory.
‘Ask Eli, he’ll tell you all about it,’ Sam advised.
Rose rang again that evening. ‘Bianca’s had puppies,’ she announced happily. ‘Two little bitches. One is completely black and the other is completely white just like Circus was.’
‘I’ll take the black one,’ I said.
‘Good girl,’ Rose said. ‘That’s the spirit.’
Above the sound of the sea and the haunted call of the morepork that night, safe in my house that faced west, I remembered where I had heard the words ‘ahi ka roa’ before.