‘You strong,’ Teva says in English.

  ‘Yes, you very strong,’ Ma‘amusa echoes.

  ‘Yeah, tough!’ She laughs. She knows her cousins are quite fluent in English after spending four years at Samoa College, where English is the medium of instruction.

  ‘You not need to do all this,’ Teva says.

  ‘No, this work for Hamo people not Pālagi,’ Ma‘amusa elaborates.

  ‘I’m not Pālagi or Hamo, I just want to learn,’ she counters. When Teva laughs and Ma‘amusa joins her, Laura joins them too, and the smoke and fale and surroundings vibrate with their laughter. ‘I don’t even know how to make a fire,’ she admits.

  ‘But there is electric stove in the Pālagi kitchen in the house,’ Teva points out.

  ‘But I’m not a Pālagi, I just want to learn.’

  ‘What is the use of open fires in New Zealand?’ Ma‘amusa asks.

  ‘Good bloody question,’ she replies, ‘but I just want to know how to make a fire like this.’

  ‘What about the electric kettle in the kitchen?’ Teva tests her. ‘It is quicker and no smoke.’

  ‘Don’t care, just teach me how to make a fire,’ she ends it, her eyes and nose now choking with smoke-induced tears. ‘You teach me Samoan too, okay?’ They nod eagerly. ‘From now on you talk only in Samoan to me, all right?’

  ‘What if you don’t understand?’ Teva asks.

  ‘Never mind, only Samoan, okay?’

  ‘Okay!’ They chorus. ‘We use the “t” or “k”?’

  ‘I’m not a faife‘au,’ she jokes, ‘so use the “k”.’ She struggles up, swallows back the tears and phlegm, catches it at the back of her throat and then, with a loud swacking sound, spits it out of the fale, like she’s seen Lemu do. She takes the end of her clean ‘ie lavalava and wipes her mouth and the choking tears from her eyes. Her companions try not to laugh when they see the black charcoal streaks she leaves on her face and ‘ie lavalava. Yes, their strange friend is learning, they decide.

  ‘Laura, ‘o ‘oe ‘o le lōia, ā?’ Ma‘amusa asks. They wait as she struggles to figure out the question.

  Teva starts interpreting but Laura says, like a real Samoan: ‘Se, ‘aua!’ So they wait, knowing lawyers aren’t dumb: only very smart and intelligent people go to university and graduate as lawyers, Lemu has told them repeatedly, and every ‘āiga in Samoa wants their sons to be lawyers, so to be a woman and a lawyer, Laura is doubly intelligent. ‘Koe fai … fai mai lau … fesili,’ she requests.

  ‘Māgaia lau fa‘a-Samoa, Laura!’ Ma‘amusa congratulates her. So Teva repeats her question.

  Laura’s face glows, her eyes alight with discovery. ‘‘Ī, ‘o a‘u o le lōia e lē iloa – e lē iloa kafu se afi!’ Her companions clap, and she claps with them. The smoke has cleared, and the fire is now flaming freely under and around the soot-caked kettle.

  She’s suffered a week of Pālagi breakfasts of cornflakes, fried eggs, toast, butter, marmalade and coffee because she doesn’t want to offend their hosts by asking for Samoan meals. When she told Dan that the previous night, he’d hedged, and she knew he too didn’t want to cause offence. Dan in New Zealand, where he’d grown up, is more difficult to understand because he’s ‘at home’ there, blending in easily with everything. But in the past week of their first visit together to Malie, where she’s expecting him to be even more part of everything, she is seeing him more clearly, because he is definitely not fitting into what is expected of him. Being a Samoan, Malie is expecting him to know about what that is and behave accordingly. And the Dan she loves has never wanted to conform to what the majority of people want in most things; not in New Zealand anyway. Here he is caught between being that and being ‘a proper Samoan’, which, she’s now convinced, he doesn’t really know much about. She’s deriving enormous enjoyment out of observing him wriggling and squirming as he tries to walk that endless tight rope. Here, the people have accorded her what she calls pre-forgiveness: being a naive, manner-less Pālagi, they expect her to break and trespass and be ignorant of every feature of civilised Samoan behaviour, and when she trespasses, forgiveness is automatic. Poor Dan, though! My beautiful, tortuously introspective darling is caught in the quagmire of identity and his people’s demanding expectations.

  ‘O le ā le breakfast fa‘a-Samoa?’ she asks her companions, after struggling to formulate the question.

  ‘O le fa‘alifu, le koko Samoa …’, Ma‘amusa starts.

  ‘… Ma se i‘a falai po‘o se pisupo,’ Teva ends the menu.

  Laura remembers and looks at the basket of taro and bunch of green bananas, which she and Dan had fetched from the plantation two days before and had put on the far rafters of the kitchen fale. Beside those is a large black pot. Dry coconuts lie outside by the firewood, and, getting up quickly, she hurries over, takes down the pot and goes to the outside tap. ‘‘O le ā le mea ‘ua kupu?’ Teva calls. Ma‘amusa gets up to go and help her, but Laura waves her back down to her seat of coconut husks.

  They watch her as she staggers back with the pot now full of water, thumps it down next to the kettle on the fire and goes over to the rafters. Teva brings the pot’s silver lid and puts it on the pot. Laura – and they marvel at her strength – pulls down the hefty basket of taro, and with one hand and on well-muscled legs carries it over to the valusaga outside and dumps it there. Again, more work, Teva and Ma‘amusa sigh and look at each other, and they get up stoically and go to fetch the basins, other ingredients and implements needed for making the Samoan breakfast their Pālagi lawyer friend obviously wants.

  ‘Why not make your Samoan breakfast in the kitchen?’ Dan suggests hesitantly when he comes out and finds Teva teaching Laura how to husk coconuts using the dangerously sharp mele‘i. One wrong move and you can impale yourself on it.

  ‘Kaukala in Samoan,’ Laura demands. She jabs the coconut down onto the sharp point of the mele‘i. Dan jumps over and stops her. ‘‘Ou ke fia iloa fai!’ she insists. So he steps behind her, his body tight against her back, his jaw pressing down over her right shoulder, grips her hands from behind and, pressing down on the impaled coconut, twists, and levers part of the husk off the coconut shell; then once again jabs the nut down on the point and twists and levers up, and another strip of husk peels off, and so on until the whole shell is bare of the husk. All the time she’s breathlessly aware of his warm body, his slightly musky odour and his bulge against her buttocks. ‘Sexy, too, darling,’ she whispers. ‘You’ve never been closer!’

  ‘Fa‘aaogā le gagaga Samoa,’ Ma‘amusa reminds her, and they all laugh.

  So for the next hour or so, they teach Laura how to split open the nuts, scrape the meat out of them using a tuai and squeeze the milk out of the meat; and to scrape the skin off the taro and, using the heavy machete, cut them into pieces and lower the pieces into the boiling water; they then help her roast the cacao beans, peel off the hard skins and pound the beans into a paste in the wooden pestle; and when their breakfast is almost ready, her cousins congratulate her on being ‘the best lawyer cooker of Samoan food in the world!’

  ‘In Samoan’, she reminds them. So they look at Dan who, grinning widely, interprets:

  ‘Laura, ‘o ‘oe ‘o le lōia e gumela kasi i le makā‘upu kau kuka i le lalolagi.’ Dan and Ma‘amusa and Teva bow to her, and she curtsies to them. When she looks round, the rest of their ‘āiga are on the veranda and in the faleo‘o, grinning and applauding.

  She prefers to serve their Samoan breakfast the Samoan way, but when she hurries to the dining room to prepare for that, Fa‘alua has already set the table the Pālagi way, with cutlery and crockery and even serviettes.

  Since arriving she has felt uncomfortable being treated as a special guest, eating in the Pālagi house’s dining room, with only Lemu and Fa‘alua and Dan, while the rest of their ‘āiga ate afterwards in the faleo‘o. There are some things in the fa‘a-Samoa that she will never conform to, and one of them is the strict division between class and age groups, the matai and elders receiving all the respect and preferential treatment while the untitled men, women and children serve them and then eat separately, afterwards. This time, she sets places for Teva and Ma‘amusa at the table, and, when her cousins refuse that, she gazes heatedly at Dan, who orders them to sit down at the table.

  In tense silence, the others take their places, with Lemu at the head of the table, as usual, and for the first time Laura experiences not one twitch of guilt about offending her hosts.

  ‘Good morning,’ Lemu greets them, in English. ‘Laura, will you please say our grace for the breakfast that you have prepared?’ What? She stops herself just in time from declining automatically, and for a lost moment she doesn’t know how to react to Lemu’s request, and everyone, especially Dan, experiences a tense awkwardness. Finally, she banishes her qualms about being an atheist, convincing herself that, from what she’s observed of Samoan behaviour, religion is more a social custom than anything else.

  ‘In Samoan,’ Dan says, and she can feel him enjoying that.

  She clears her throat, softly, and then, hesitantly but deliberately, she prays using the ‘k’: ‘Le Akua e, fa‘amolemole fa‘amaguia mai iā Lemu ma – ma lo mākou ‘āiga ‘ākoa.’ She pauses; now more sure of herself, she continues, ‘Ku‘u mai iā Kanielu se loko fa‘amaualalo ‘auā e lē iloa e ia oga fai se kuka magogi pei oga mākou kukaiga ma Keva ma Ma‘amusa. Fa‘afekai mo mea‘ai ‘ua e foa‘i mai mo mākou kino. I le suafa o Iesu, Amege!’

  Lemu chuckles and thanks her. ‘You speak better Samoan than your husband,’ he adds.

  ‘Hear that, Kanielu in the lion’s den?’ Laura laughs.

  ‘That’ll be the day!’ Daniel counters.

  Neighbours

  Apart from his lawyers, no one, including Anne, needed to know, Eric decided. It was overcast, with the heavy mattress of grey cloud hanging low, keeping the humid heat trapped in the city, and the nine o’clock sun hidden from view. He increased the pace of his walking, his thick-soled tramping sandals crunching mutedly over the footpath, sweat dripping down his body and soaking his t-shirt and shorts. He walked four times each week, for forty-five minutes, round the streets of Ponsonby, and had done so since he and Anne had shifted into Lincoln Street three years before. On the week days, if he had a full schedule of lectures and appointments, he walked early in the mornings. Otherwise, in summer, he preferred to walk just before evening when it was cool, and during winter at midday when it was less cold.

  He turned into John Street and started uphill, on the last stretch of the walk before turning into his street. Hardly any traffic and only a young couple coming downhill, dragged along at a brisk pace by their magnificent husky. The couple glanced up at him as they hurried past, the young man raising his eyebrows in greeting. Eric acknowledged him with a nod. For a brisk moment, he inhaled the strong smell of dog.

  His double-storied home was halfway up Lincoln Street, on the left-hand side. Just before it was the large white house, with the dark grey roof, that belonged to Jim and Mata Mein, a retired Samoan couple in their seventies – he’d been an executive in a supermarket chain, and she’d worked for Social Welfare. They’d been living there for over forty years. The Meins were the best gardeners Eric had ever known. Along the front of the house was a lush garden of ponga, nīkau and Tahitian pōhutukawa, with an undercover of ground ferns and grasses. Behind the house, taking up the second half of the back yard, was an even more enviable vegetable garden, which Jim was proud of showing them whenever they were over there. Bordered by feijoas, a couple of lemon trees and an avocado tree, the garden contained potatoes, tomatoes, green beans, carrots, different types of lettuce and other vegetables and herbs. Throughout much of the year, most of the street benefitted from that garden’s abundant harvest.

  Dressed in his usual gardening clothes – worn jeans, a faded Manu Samoa rugby jersey and Adidas cap, working boots and grey gardening cloves – Jim was in the front garden, weeding and pruning. He saw Eric and waved.

  Eric stopped. ‘How’s the gardening?’ Eric greeted Jim, going up to the white fence and into the fierce odour of freshly uprooted weeds and cut branches.

  Smiling widely, Jim replied, ‘Bloody difficult to maintain the gardens at our age and in this heat.’ Ever since he and Mata had gone over, with a gift of vegetables, to welcome Eric and Anne the first week they’d shifted in, he’d grown to trust them, despite his wish, during the first year, to maintain a wary aloofness. Anne was the openly trusting one, and she and Mata soon became friends. Eric followed Anne into their affections. Now Jim and Mata considered them generous neighbours; the first Pālagi neighbours they’d allowed to be that.

  ‘Looks great to me, Jim,’ Eric said. ‘And you’re younger and fitter than anyone in our street!’ He meant that: Jim looked as if he was only fifty-five at the most: Eric’s age. On their second visit to the Meins’ house, Eric had discovered that the Meins had a bench press and a full set of weights, on the back veranda, which they used five days a week in strenuous one-hour sessions. ‘One weight-training session a day keeps osteoporosis away!’ Mata had declared, jokingly. And they’d been doing it for over thirty years.

  The strong enticing smell of coffee greeted him as he entered the house, bent down, pulled off his sandals and lined them along the wall. ‘Hi!’ he called as he headed upstairs to the bathroom.

  ‘Coffee’s ready,’ Anne replied.

  In the bathroom, he stripped off his drenched t-shirt and dried his face and upper body with a hand towel. On his way down and to the kitchen, he shoved on a clean t-shirt, combed down his long bristly hair with his fingers and suddenly realised he was hungry.

  Dressed only in her blue bathrobe, Anne sat at the dining table, drinking her coffee out of her favourite mug and reading that morning’s Herald. She’d just showered and washed her hair, so a white towel was wrapped round her head, and her face and arms were still red from the shower’s heat. The coffee plunger, the small jug of hot milk, honey and his mug were in the middle of the table. He poured his coffee, put milk in it and, after honeying it, sat down opposite her.

  She always looked neat, tidy and clean, an outward manifestation of her devotion to keeping the world around her in order, in logical symmetry and design and therefore easier to understand and manage. When he’d first met her, six years before, she’d just left her marriage and her lucrative partnership in the successful advertising company that she and her husband Bill had established, and was trying to establish a new company. The recession had stopped that, so for the past year, while working as a consultant, she’d been researching the financial feasibility of various business possibilities.

  ‘Would you like some scrambled eggs, darling?’ he asked.

  ‘No thanks,’ she replied without looking up from the paper. He waited but she didn’t offer, so he went to the stove, pulled out the small iron frying pan, got out three eggs and, within a few minutes, was cooking scrambled eggs and some sliced tomatoes. ‘Got any lectures today?’ she asked.

  ‘Just one at four,’ he replied. He started laying out his breakfast on the table.

  She got up and, unwinding the towel from her head, started drying her hair with it. ‘Mata and I are picking up Jeannie later and going for lunch at the Fish Market,’ she told him. Jeannie was Mata’s only daughter and Anne’s age. Anne and Mata loved seafood, especially fresh oysters and ota, and lunched at the Fish Market on the waterfront once a week. He and Jim, who didn’t like any raw seafood, sometimes went with them. She paused and asked, ‘Would you like to join us?’

  ‘I’ve got to prepare my lecture and mark some essays,’ he lied, sensing that Anne really wanted only females there. She was gone swiftly.

  From the windows of his study he could see into the Meins’ backyard garden. His whole body tingled healthily from the pummelling heat of the fast shower and the hard towelling he’d given it. He sat down in front of his computer and switched it on. Jim was now hoeing round the potatoes, sweat dripping off his face and arms. Such dedication and care, he thought with envy. Before they’d bought the house, which they’d both liked on their first inspection, he’d hesitated when he’d found out that their neighbours were Samoan and retired, but when he’d raised his reservations with Anne, she’d confronted him with, ‘What’s wrong with Samoans and superannuitants?’ Immediate affronted defensiveness on his part; he’d been lost for what to say. ‘Eric, I don’t give a damn about the racist stereotypes. I love the house and what we can do with it.’ This was their first confrontation, his first glimpse of her frankness and intolerance of anything that appeared to be discriminatory on grounds of race, gender, age and so forth. ‘And going on the huge price they’re asking for this house, the Meins, being Samoans, haven’t brought the property values down in this street!’

  When Eric looked down again, Jim was leaning on his hoe and drying his forehead and arms with a dirt-stained hand towel. Jim glanced up and, seeing him, waved. He waved back. He was so glad that they’d bought the house, and the Mein family was one of the main reasons for him feeling that way. They’d even built a gate between their backyards the year before, and Eric had paid for all of it. You live and learn. People were what they were, not what prejudice dictated or predetermined.

  He opened his email. The third email was a lengthy one from his lawyers detailing their dealings with his father’s lawyers and the contents of his father’s will. He emailed them back, instructing them not to let anyone, including Anne and his surviving relatives on his father’s side, know anything about the will or that his father had died.

  For a long contemplative while, he sat watching Jim working, and remembering his parents with deepening sadness and regret. Even with his first wife, Pamela, in their ten-year marriage, he’d deliberately not told her the truth about his father (and his mother). For Pamela, he’d created parents with a brief history: at high school, his mother became pregnant – she never told anyone who the father was – and, after giving birth to him in a family and society that totally condemned birth out of wedlock and adopting him out, she’d died of incurable leukaemia. Later, when he’d realised that telling such lies – well, not really lies – only led to you telling more to make the first ones credible, and you had to remember those lies for the rest of your life in order not to contradict yourself and be exposed, he panicked every time someone asked about his parents. He broke from his recollections and noticed that Jim wasn’t in the garden any more and the newly hoed soil round the potatoes was a wet, glittering black.