Rose returned to the kitchen with a thoughtful expression on her face.
‘Who was that on the phone?’ Hebe asked.
‘It was Sissy,’ replied Rose. ‘She wanted to know if the four of us would like to come over to Nanny and Pop Wai’s place for Christmas dinner.’ Although Sissy had long since married and moved to a home of her own, Christmas Day was periodically held next door at the Wais’.
Hebe, Mrs Spry and I looked hopefully at Rose. Democracy was a dirty and unheard word in our house.
‘You won’t have to cook if we go to the Wais’,’ Mrs Spry pointed out, quite reasonably.
‘Well, she has asked me to make a trifle,’ said Rose quickly, making it quite clear that it wasn’t all smooth sailing for her, the sacrifices that she made were endless and myriad. I desperately tried to think of something I could do to sweeten the deal still further for Rose, but as there wasn’t even a bowl or a wooden spoon I could lick clean, the whole situation was rapidly taking on all the qualities of a lost cause.
‘But why would they invite us for Christmas dinner?’ asked Rose. ‘Christmas is a family occasion.’ She picked up the ceramic pepper shaker modelled on a windmill. There had once been a salt to match, but I had dropped it long ago, smashing it to smithereens on the floor.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Rose, our families have known each other for years. It’s by no means beyond the realms of being neighbourly. In fact, it’s only strange because it’s actually what people do.’
Rose rubbed at the base of the windmill with her garden-grimy thumb, a picture of intense concentration. For once she seemed adrift, incapable of making a decision for us all. She looked very small and young.
‘The odd barbecue, yes, but Christmas dinner is something altogether different,’ she said in a puzzled voice. ‘It’s a family occasion.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ cracked Hebe. ‘Knowing Auntie Sis, there will be a cast of thousands and it won’t be flash at all. Betcha Eli will be there and probably the Pakeha school- teacher too.’
‘She’s not your aunt,’ corrected Rose quickly, cutting across Hebe’s guest list. Rose looked pleased, nevertheless.
‘His name’s Alistair,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘The Pakeha schoolteacher. His name is Alistair.’
‘What would you know, Connie?’ Hebe asked, rounding on me. ‘Bet you just made that up.’
‘Did not.’
‘Enough,’ said Rose and started to clear our breakfast dishes from the table and stack them in the sink. ‘More than enough.’
‘Actually,’ Mrs Spry said, ‘Connie’s right. Lovely chap. I’ve chatted to him in the bar a few times. He’s very good-looking.’
Rose turned both taps above the sink on and crashed the cutlery on top of the dishes noisily.
‘Auntie Sissy has invited us to Christmas tea,’ I told Nanny Smack, whom I had found hovering in the corner of my bedroom after dinner.
‘That’s nice, isn’t it,’ she replied, her crotchet hook flashing in and out of the blue of tomorrow’s sky.
‘Yeah, but I don’t think Rose is keen,’ I continued sadly. ‘So we probably won’t be going.’
‘Well, Cookie,’ my ghost observed, ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything you can do about that.’
‘Still not fair,’ I complained. ‘I never get to have any fun.’
But all of us were wrong. We did all go to the Wais’ for Christmas tea in the end, even Nanny Smack. And Hebe was right. Eli was there, and Alistair too.
‘Kia ora, kia ora, Merry Christmas and all that,’ Eli said when we arrived at Nanny and Pop Wai’s. Eli and Sissy’s husband George were tending the hangi fire burning beneath the stones. Tall amber bottles of Lion Red were clutched in their big brown hands as they stood sweating around the fire, coughing when the wind shifted and the smoke curled itself around them.
‘Bloody men,’ said Sissy fondly, from her location behind a trestle-table loaded with wire baskets.
‘Ai,’ said Nanny Wai, who was helping wrap up tinfoil parcels of pork, shellfish, kumara, potatoes, pumpkins and wild turkey.
‘My little mokopuna is off to university next year,’ Nanny Wai told Rose proudly. Sissy’s oldest had got into the pre-law programme at Victoria University.
‘Yes, I know, isn’t that fantastic,’ Rose replied, kissing Nanny Wai on the cheek. ‘Merry Christmas, Nan.’
‘You too, girl, you too.’
‘Have those useless men got you some drinks?’ Sissy asked, taking in our empty hands.
‘We’ve only been here twenty seconds, Sis. All in good time,’ Rose said.
‘Oi,’ Sissy shouted, ignoring Rose’s protests. ‘Get Rose, Mrs Spry and the kids a drink, you useless buggers. They’ll die of thirst in this heat.’
‘Yeah, yeah, keep your hair on, woman,’ Eli shouted back, burying his shovel in the ground and taking a long pull from his bottle of beer.
‘Rum and Coke?’ he asked, joining us at the table, his fingers floating hungrily over the baskets of food.
‘That would be delightful,’ I said, ‘just the thing.’
‘You were really good in the end-of-year play at school, Con,’ said Eli.
‘I know,’ I replied, ‘but why am I always the bloody narrator?’
Everybody except Hebe laughed. ‘You’re such a show-off, Connie,’ she said scornfully, sloping off to where Sissy and George’s two boys were waxing their surfboards and taking sneaky swigs at the bottle of beer that their Uncle Eli had slid them on the sly.
‘I’ll get you a fizzy drink, eh Con?’ Eli said.
‘Fair enough,’ I replied, ‘but I’d make Rose’s a triple if I was you.’
‘Good idea,’ Eli said, heading towards the drinks table. ‘Maybe even a quadruple.’
I giggled. Eli was the best.
Holding carefully in both hands my cool glass bottle of raspberry fizzy drink, with two stripy straws, I headed inside to say hello to Pop Wai who was already moaning about the heat and hiding out in the cool of the kitchen.
‘Merry Christmas, Connie,’ he chimed, waking from his catnap at the table with a start as I let the screen door bang behind me.
‘Pai marire,’ I said happily in my best water language.
Pop Wai looked a bit confused, ‘Good and peaceful,’ he said. ‘Ha, not for long.’
I gave Pop a hug. ‘Got to go and say Merry Christmas to the tipuna,’ I told him.
‘Ai, ai,’ Pop replied nodding his head thoughtfully, ‘good to think about the tipuna on a day like this, yes.’
‘Ai, ai,’ I agreed, taking a slurp of my fizzy drink. The bubbles of the carbonated water doing a snap, crackle and pop in my nose. Nanny Smack was in the Wais’ lounge visiting the tipuna when I strolled in. The photographs that covered the hallway at the Wais’ place merely represented the overflow from the lounge. The lounge was where the really big cheeses lived.
‘Come here, Cookie,’ Nanny Smack said. ‘I have something to show you.’
Rose, Sissy and Eli entered the room, noisily talking among themselves.
‘There she is,’ Eli said. I looked around to see whom they were talking about. The grown-ups sat down on the gold velour lounge suite that was Nanny and Pop’s pride and joy. Us kids weren’t allowed on it at all, not even to watch TV. My mother ran her fingers vaguely through her hair with the hand that held her cigarette. Ash drifted to the carpet unnoticed.
‘Connie, come here, there’s a good girl,’ she said in a funny slurry voice that was exactly like Mrs Spry’s when we got home from school or after lunch in the holidays and at the weekends. I looked at Rose long and hard and didn’t budge an inch.
Eli was sitting on the arm of the couch above her. He reached down and stroked Rose’s bare forearm briefly with the back of his fingers. She shrugged it off in irritation. A flash of hurt clouded his face for an instant.
It was now or never, I reasoned. If I didn’t ask now, I knew deep down that I would never again be able to muster the courage or find Rose quite this drunk. I pointed to a framed photograph of two toddlers in matching pale-blue sailor suits on the oak sideboard. ‘That’s my father. Nanny Smack said so.’
A deafening silence crashed down upon Rose and Sissy’s meandering conversation. Alistair had come into the lounge and was now standing by the door shifting his weight from one foot to the other uncomfortably. I looked at my own feet. I was wearing my new jandals. He had heard, you could tell.
‘Grub’s up,’ he said.
‘Connie, where do you get these ideas from?’ Rose asked distantly from the couch. She spoke to me, but looked at Alistair.
‘Nanny Smack,’ I ventured in a small, hesitant voice. Rose’s tolerance of Nanny Smack was an endlessly shifting territory.
Rose looked embarrassed. ‘Connie’s imaginary friend,’ she explained quickly to Alistair.
He smiled at me. ‘I believe I have had the pleasure of a previous introduction with the lady herself. A Hauhau witch by all accounts. It’s interesting that Connie should have a taste for revisionist histories at such an early age.’ I decided then and there that I liked Alistair a bit more than a lot.
‘Eh?’ replied Rose, looking more than a little perplexed. ‘Honestly, she has the most fantastic imagination, endlessly making stuff up. I don’t know where her stories come from, I really don’t.’
Rose crouched down so that she was the same height as me and pushed my hair behind my ears. In a gentle voice she said, ‘Why do you think this is your father in the photo, Connie?’
‘Because my dad’s name is Elias, it says so on my birth certificate, and so’s his,’ I explained, pointing at the twin on the right in the photograph.
‘And I checked with Nanny Wai and she said that was true. His name is Elias and he’s dead too, like my dad.’
‘She’s right on that count, Rose,’ Sissy said, ‘That’s Eli’s twin. Our mother took him with her to Auckland when he was just a bubba because he was born with a bad heart. They were going to do an operation, but it was risky for a little kid. Nana probably forgot to tell Connie that he died when he was a kid. Long time ago. He would only have been thirteen or fourteen. Not that that seems to make much difference in her mind. The old people don’t believe anyone’s dead, just moved house.’
‘Sounds like the same little world all of her own that Connie lives in,’ Rose said. ‘Sometimes people have the same name, Connie, but it doesn’t mean they’re the same person. I’m sorry.’
Sometimes Rose’s logic is irrefutable.
I felt the hot prickle of tears behind my eyes. Nanny Smack had disappeared at the first sign of trouble. Like a green log fire you had to watch her like a hawk or else she went out. Bloody Nanny. Bloody Christmas.
‘Funnily enough,’ Alistair said as we all trooped out back to eat Christmas tea, ‘I’ve always assumed that you were all related.’
Later that evening Eli walked Mrs Spry and me home to the pub. Mrs Spry and I had run out of steam at about the same time, which Mrs Spry said was ‘fortuitous’. Eli was giving me a piggy-back home, because my legs were on their last legs and all but done in.
‘That Alistair’s a nice bloke,’ Eli said to Mrs Spry conversationally.
‘Mmm,’ she replied.
I rested my cheek on Eli’s shoulder. He smelled of wood smoke, sweat, beer and loyalty like he always did. Down on the beach we could see Hebe running like the wind, Circus yapping hysterically beside her. Her long white hair whipped around her face as she ran faster and faster.
‘That girl’s out of her fuckin’ tree,’ said Eli, in a way that made it sound like a good thing.
‘Indeed,’ said Mrs Spry, also following the fleeing form of my sister with curious eyes. Hebe vanished behind the rocks at the end of the bay.
‘What’s she running away from anyway?’ Eli asked.
Mrs Spry shrugged. ‘Who knows? But if you’ll excuse the cliché, what are any of us running away from?’
I buried my head further into the curve of Eli’s neck and shoulder, rubbing my face against his skin. The conversation had got boring as adult conversations tended to.
‘I love you Eli,’ I breathed into his ear. He had a long green teardrop of nephrite hooked through his lobe. When he took it out to show people the beauty of the pounamu, you could see right through to his neck because the hole in his ear was so big from the weight of his single frozen tear.
‘Kia ora, Connie. Good to know that I have your heart,’ he said and hitched me up another notch on his back where I clung, tenacious as a mussel on a rock.
Mrs Spry sighed. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Eli, I really don’t. Maybe one morning you’ll wake up and find that you’ve finally stopped caring. It would at last have burnt itself out.’
Eli shook his head. ‘Maybe, maybe not. Don’t think I’ll stick around, though, under the circumstances. I’ve got some things happening down the line that I need to see to, so I reckon that’s as good a place to be as anywhere.’
‘Are you leaving, Eli?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, Connie, just for a while,’ he replied.
‘You will come back, though, won’t you?’
‘I’ll always be around, Con, you know that.’
I pushed a little harder. This was the closest I had ever got to getting a straight answer out of a grown-up. ‘Do you promise, cross your heart, hope to die and burn in the eternal fires of hell?’
‘I promise,’ Eli replied.
‘Spit,’ I said. And he did.
Rose was still wearing the same clothes at breakfast on Boxing Day.