‘Tai, Tai, may I have a drink?’ Gaualofa’s voice broke the spell.

  She blinked and smiled. ‘Of course, darling,’ she said, pulling out a cold can of Coke.

  ‘I’m not allowed fizzy drinks,’ Gaualofa said, regretfully. ‘Mum says they’re unhealthy.’

  Of course she and David knew that, but she glanced conspiratorially at David. ‘One won’t do you any harm,’ she offered. Gaualofa nodded eagerly and looked at her father, who nodded back. Gaualofa grabbed the can, pulled open the tab and started sucking up the Coke.

  ‘I’ll have one too,’ said David. It was bloody time they weaned Gaualofa away from her manipulative, heartless, unfaithful mother.

  The can hissed sharply as she opened it and extended it to David. She opened a can for herself and clinked it against David’s and Gaualofa’s Cokes. ‘Here’s to us and to all the birds!’ They drank together.

  Fast

  …And it is blinding morning, laced with the unpleasant odour of winter mud, bursting through the gap under your bedroom curtains and flowing over your duvet and up over your chest and into your nostrils and eyes. You remember, you push your legs out of bed, your feet find the floor and you re-hitch your ‘ie lavalava round your waist and start rushing for the bathroom. Shit, shit, shit, you’re going to be late for your 9.30 am lecture, again! No time to shave or have breakfast. Final week of lectures and then finals, and hopefully the completion of your MA and your graduation and getting a teaching job. You have to be at Professor Thalmer’s last class of the year because he is going to tell the class what is in your final exams on The New Zealand and Pacific Novel.

  All your family have left already: your father to his chef’s job at the Battersea on Ponsonby Road, your mother to the Williamson Street Foodtown and your sister and brother to Auckland University of Technology, where she is completing a BA in film studies and he is studying for a diploma in nursing. You fling your haversack into the back seat of your 1996 Honda Civic, which your parents bought for you two years before as a reward for completing your BA – you are the first in your ‘āiga to graduate from university. You slide into the driver’s seat, start the car and head for university, which, if the traffic is light, is only ten minutes away.

  Once you’re into Grafton Road and turning into the Owen G Glenn Building and parking, you know you’ll only be fifteen minutes late.

  Through the narrow glass partition in the back door, you look into the small brilliantly lit lecture theatre. Professor Thalmer is down in the front behind the desk, his purple-rimmed glasses glinting, and behind him on the screen is a PowerPoint slide of a list of items. You count the students quickly. You’re the only one absent out of the fourteen. And Graeme, your ally, is there.

  You pull back the door quietly; your heart is thumping like thunder and you hope beyond hope no one, especially Professor Thalmer, is noticing your entry. You start towards the empty seat beside Graeme. ‘So, my handsome Samoan Viking, I’m so glad you’re able to be with us today.’ Professor Thalmer catches you on your third slow step. Excruciating embarrassment: your ears hot, your heart thumping, your throat parched dry.

  ‘Hi, Jonas,’ Graeme whispers. On his retirement as a highly successful architect, Graeme decided to pursue the love of his life: poetry and the literature of his country. Balding, with long straggly wisps of white hair and a few days’ growth of white stubble, paunchy, always dressed in black polo necks, navy blue corduroys and thick-soled suede boots – he claims he’d been a beatnik. He is by far the oldest in your class and the one Professor Thalmer is most careful of.

  Using his prepared PowerPoint presentation, Professor Thalmer takes you quickly through a summary of all the topics and the novelists you’ve covered this semester. You’ve spent four years with him, from Stage One New Zealand Literature through his second-year course on the New Zealand/Pacific Short Story to his third-year paper, ‘Post-colonialism and Pacific Literature’, and now The New Zealand and Pacific Novel. Because New Zealand and Pacific literature is your passion, you’ve studied hard, doing far more than the required reading and research and writing and handing in your assignments on time, and he’s given you an A-minus average for each course, your best grade in all your studies. Yet you’ve never felt he respects your intelligence and ability; you’ve suspected that he’s unconsciously assumed that being a Pacific Islander, a Samoan – at least he knew that! – English is your second language, and because of that you’re struggling to cope with the literature of that language. So you can never break that A-minus barrier. (It is a joke among PI university students that all PI students start with C.) So it’s strange, bloody strange, that you continue to hold some admiration and respect for him. Or is it out of the fear that if you don’t pander to your lecturers’ tight-arsed egos they won’t give you good grades?

  ‘… So, I’m now going to go through the exam questions – oops! Sorry!’ Professor Thalmer’s eyes shine with fake horror. There’s a scatter of student laughter. Graeme doesn’t laugh. Professor Thalmer sniggers and corrects himself. ‘Sorry, I’m going to talk about the topic areas I’ll be giving you exam questions on. If you’re shrewd, you can just get the last three years’ exam papers and all the questions will be there.’ You and Graeme don’t join the laughter of your class mates.

  ‘God, he loves himself,’ you hear Graeme whisper. ‘We’re going to need a strong cuppa coffee after this corny shit.’

  Looking straight at Professor Thalmer, you reply to Graeme, ‘Shit, yeah.’ Over the last three years, Graeme has been the only student who has been in all your Professor Thalmer classes, and you usually have coffee or lunch together at least once a week. As a superannuitant, Graeme can simply audit his courses and does not have to do the assignments or sit the exams, but he always does, and insists his lecturers award him grades for them. When he doesn’t like the grades or disagrees with his lecturers’ remarks on his essays he challenges them. Graeme doesn’t take notes at lectures but recalls everything almost verbatim, and when he makes a presentation, he doesn’t refer to notes or a prepared text, yet he is always absolutely fluent and delivers without faltering. Name any poet he admires and he can quote verse after verse from their work. Photographic memory? You’ve wondered but have never asked him.

  All your sessions in this class are student seminars, each presenter talking about the topic for at least twenty minutes and then leading a class discussion for the rest of the session. At the start of the course, Professor Thalmer got you to choose your seminar topics, and then set a date for each seminar. Graeme chose to give the third seminar, on the intriguing topic ‘Courage and Architecture in James George’s Novels’. As usual, it was flawless in delivery and innovative and original in analysing the novels, complex and sophisticated in the way he wove in the latest theoretical readings while simultaneously undermining them with a mesmerising sense of irony and fun, which, you sensed, Professor Thalmer didn’t appreciate because it was aimed at his style of lecturing and reading. And as usual Graeme conducted the class discussion with verve and tolerance and insight, getting every student to participate fully and with enjoyment. He also used it to murder the theoretical jargon that Profesor Thalmer and his pet students are fond of using.

  ‘Well, Jonas,’ Graeme says as you leave the lecture theatre, ‘we’ve survived another semester of the great Professor Thalmer.’

  ‘He’s not that bad,’ you try to say.

  ‘Contrary to the Kiwi stereotype of you being violent and mean, you Samoans are too generous, Jonas,’ Graeme says, chortling.

  ‘Thank you for your generosity,’ you say. Graeme guffaws and punches you lightly on the arm.

  Graeme needs a left knee replacement, and he refuses to use a walking stick or crutches, so you have to walk at his hobbling pace to the Student Union building. Once you jokingly suggested he should get one of those fancy motorised wheelchairs that go faster than Superman, and he’d laughed and said those were for ‘the lazy Kiwi middle class, who are too cowardly to face the cleansing pain of worn out joints and souls’! That comment still puzzles you.

  Since your first coffee together, Graeme has insisted that he pay. ‘You’re a bloody poor student, Jonas,’ he’d reasoned. ‘And I know you Samoans are big on reciprocity, so I’m reciprocating you, Jonas, for your generosity towards egotistical pricks like Thalmer and your kindness towards old bastards like me. Is that fair enough?’

  You take the lift up to the restaurant.

  The café is fairly full but there is an empty table near the front windows. Graeme joins the short line at the counter while you hurry over and take the table that looks down at the courtyard four stories beneath you. Your legs grow goose pimples and nausea nibbles at the tip of your tongue. Heights have always frightened you. You look away from the drop, and sit down with your back to it. ‘What’s the matter? You look as pale as a Pālagi,’ Graeme says when he sits down opposite you.

  ‘So you know what the Samoan is for Pākehā?’ You try distracting him.

  ‘Too right, mate, I have a good teacher of Samoan!’

  ‘Your teacher is shit-scared of heights,’ you admit.

  ‘Just like Melissa,’ Graeme says. Melissa is his wife, his third one, and at least fifteen years younger than him. ‘I designed and built at least six of Auckland’s highest buildings and she’s absolutely refused, even at their official openings, to go above the third floor. And would you believe it? She’s the most nerveless person I know, afraid of nothing, except heights of course.’

  You first met Melissa at their home, in Freeman’s Bay right at the water’s edge and looking across the harbour and up at the Bridge, at their oldest grandson’s twenty-first birthday. (You’d not wanted to go, but Graeme had insisted over three lunches that his ‘bloody wasteful mokopuna need to meet someone who’s focused and bloody hard-working. Besides I need an intelligent drinking mate’.)

  You don’t know much about art, but you recognised a Hotere and a Pule as Graeme took you into the spacious sitting room. You’d expected a large, palatial home with a swimming pool, and it is large, three split levels large, with lots of rooms and equipped, furnished and carpeted lavishly, and there is a swimming pool, but as Graeme said it was ‘a very messy, shambolic reflection of me and my beautiful Melissa.’

  You’d expected it to be a lavish, expensive party with lots of wild students and their wild friends and raucous music and dancing fuelled by unlimited alcohol and food such as caviar and champagne and whatever else rich people’s parties are supposed to have, but you counted only about fifty guests, including Graeme’s two daughters from his first two marriages and their husbands, his son with Melissa and his wife, his four grandchildren, other relatives and Ralph’s, the birthday boy’s, friends. You’ve grown up with Pālagi but you’ve never felt fully comfortable at their functions, but after Graeme introduced you to Melissa and some of his family, and he put a glass of champagne in your hand and said ‘Ia Manuia! and you drank with him, and his grandchildren immediately drew you into their celebrating circle, you slid right into their family and into the party. You’d expected Graeme, like your father would have been, to be in control of that gathering, but you soon observed he wasn’t. Melissa, a tall, stately woman with short-cropped silver hair and wearing what appeared to be a Pacific-blue puletasi with light frangipani motifs on the front and black pearl earrings, was in charge, in a quiet, almost unnoticeable way. You recalled Graeme telling you that Melissa had been a VSA volunteer in Samoa, years before.

  Over dinner – after Melissa introduced Ralph and you all toasted him and he spoke and thanked his parents and grandparents and then blew out the twenty-one candles – Melissa brought her food and sat down beside you at a table beside the swimming pool. ‘I expected someone older,’ she told you. ‘Graeme finds all young people, including his mokopuna, difficult, so when he came home and told me he’d found a good classmate, I assumed it would be someone older than “young people”.’ She laughed softly. ‘You must also be exceptionally bright and able, because he can’t tolerate “unbright” people who believe they’re brighter than they are! And best of all, he’s so chuffed you’re the first Samoan friend he’s made, without my help.’ She went on to talk about her VSA year in Samoa and ‘her Samoan ‘āiga’, which now had a branch in Auckland and which she maintained close ties with. Since that party, you’ve lunched with her and Graeme many times.

  The waiter brings Graeme’s double-strength latte and piece of carrot cake with a dollop of cream, and your flat white, mince pie and mixed salad. Two Samoan students you know wave at you; you wave back and hope they don’t come over – they don’t. Three of your MA class smile and head towards you, but when they see Graeme they veer off to another table. ‘Do I have a bad smell?’ Graeme asks. You pretend you don’t know what he’s referring to. ‘Are they scared that my making their Professor Thalmer look like an amateur will jeopardise their grades?’ You don’t understand that. ‘That because I’m belittling Thalmer’s ego he’ll take it out on the whole class?’ he explains.

  ‘I guess so,’ you reply.

  ‘Then how come you don’t mind being seen with me?’

  ‘Cos, no matter what, I’ll get another A-minus, as always.’ You both laugh.

  He spears his carrot cake, digs out a hunk of it and shoves it into his mouth. ‘You know what we should revive?’ he asks through his bulging mouth.

  ‘Yeah, cannibalism!’

  His eyes bulge with mirth and he can’t swallow his large mouthful of cake. You hope he doesn’t choke as he laughs, bits of food flying out of his mouth. ‘That’s good, yeah, fucking cannibalism so we can gobble up second-raters like our Professor Thalmer!’ You’re no longer self-conscious about laughing with abandonment in that public place.

  A short while later, after Graeme dries his tears of mirth and wipes his face and clothes clean of food, he asks, unexpectedly, ‘What are you going to do with your MA?’

  You shrug your shoulders. ‘Teach at high school,’ you reply. High school: that’s what your careers advisers and your teachers told you best suited your abilities, strengths, interests and grades. Because of that, your parents have supported that too. So you’ve never seen yourself doing anything else.

  ‘Are you interested in doing a PhD?’ he asks.

  ‘You must be joking! With only an A-minus average, the department won’t let me do a PHD.’

  ‘Have you actually talked to the head of department about it? Even Thalmer?’

  You shake your head, and say, ‘You know Thalmer gave me the A-minuses.’

  ‘Okay, so just tell him how you feel about that; just let him have it.’

  ‘That would shut the door completely,’ you say, but you feel encouraged.

  ‘Are you bloody sick of hearing the self-righteous confessions of old fogeys?’ he asks, from under his closely cropped white eyebrows. You can almost hear him chuckling.

  ‘Not as long as it is a captivating, inspired, meaningful unpacking of that old bugger’s story.’ You imitate Professor Thalmer’s tone.

  He guffaws. ‘Throughout my childhood and early life you know what my teachers and parents and everyone else, including my classmates, came to believe? That I was a mental retard: mentally handicapped was the uncool vocab of that time. In a literate culture if you can’t read or write properly, you’re fucked. They knew nothing about dyslexia in those terrible days. I couldn’t read, and they equated that with retard intelligence. So they “promoted” me from class to class to get rid of me. And as I suffered my bloody parents’ abusive treatment, I believed I deserved it. At the age of sixteen they took me out of school – I wanted out too – and apprenticed me to a butcher, a friend of my father’s.’ Graeme went on to explain that he was so ashamed of himself he even believed that his obsession with drawing – he drew on everything and all the time – was another feature of his retardation. At the butcher’s, because he didn’t have to know how to read and write properly, he learned by doing whatever the butcher showed him, and found his body, his eye, his memory absorbing everything with faultless accuracy, but again he was too unsure to reveal that to anyone. And he continued to draw with an obsessive compulsion, finding he was drawing everything he was doing at the butcher’s, right down to the minute details of the various parts of the slaughtered beasts, and learning the names of all those parts. ‘Is your dad a kind and generous man towards you?’ Graeme suddenly asks. He waits for you to decide.

  ‘My father is tired and stressed most of the time: the result of working too hard to pay for us to get a good education and never have to do what he and our mother do,’ you confess. ‘It is also not the Samoan thing for a man to show affection for his loved ones, publicly.’

  ‘And your mother?’ He pursues you, and you don’t understand why.

  You nod repeatedly, annoyed. ‘She’s a bit overboard with the public display of parental love.’

  ‘Well, mine simply saw me as a burden, a lifelong burden, and a public stigma, evidence that their genes might not be normal. So when I got my first pay packet they arranged for me to board at a male boarding house mainly for sickness beneficiaries,’ he continues. You can feel the bitterness in his voice. ‘At first I felt utterly abandoned, but …’ – his eyes light up with a piercing brilliance – ‘a few weeks later, alone in my spacious room away from every element of my dreadful serfdom, I suddenly felt released. I had a sanctuary in which I could do what I liked and not be judged useless, a nong, a halfwit, a moron, an idiot, a dummy, a mental retard, and now “an intellectually challenged person”.’ He pauses, breathing deeply, elated. ‘And at work, that kind and generous butcher Fred Calhoun found my stack of drawings behind the freezer and, instead of berating me for wasting my time and his, simply went through them, studying each one slowly. Yeah, Jonas, he didn’t need to tell me how he was feeling, no. I could feel it, observe it in his manner, hear it in his silence. And for a moment I couldn’t believe it. He was, so he told me a few minutes later, amazed. And what was I doing there instead of developing my talent?’ Graeme lowers his head and gazes into his coffee. He goes on to say that Fred gave him time off work to attend the art classes one of his friends was teaching at a nearby polytech. In those days it didn’t matter how talented you were; you had to write essays and sit written exams. Failing those meant the end of your studies. So he started printing the words he wanted to learn into his drawings and memorising them visually. He would take his textbooks and course hand-outs home and pay one of the beneficiaries to read them aloud to him. He would memorise those, or at least those sections he had to know to pass. And as he did that he was composing his essays in his mind and then, after he was satisfied with them, laboriously writing them down. ‘Melissa reminded me years later that I was doing what you Samoans did before the introduction of written language: memorise everything, catch reality in your memory, translate it into oral language – poetry, oratory, song, music; carve it out of your environment, out of the spirits in the wood, the clay … Fuck, I’m sounding like all our over-literate academics, tied to the technology and limitations of writing and written language, eh?’ He gazes across at you, unsure of your reaction.