She started hurrying to the meat and fish section. ‘You should know all that from reading Borges, who was once your favourite writer and who you introduced me to.’ Why was she being so aggressive, deliberately belittling me? Why was she so bloody upset just because I asked her to go beyond the boundaries of a dream?

  I hurried up to her back as she chose a rack of lamb and dropped it on top of the potatoes. She began again. ‘So the plot line for Dyer Beauchamp is a variation of that: genius who uses his major handicap and gift, led by his mentor and manager and utterly devoted mother, to win the world’s love for a while, but instead of riding off into the triumphant sunset, he’s left with his dying but devoted father in their lonely family home in their lonely street, which he fills every day with his marvellous playing.’

  Without waiting for me to answer, she strode to the fish counter, which was misted over with condensation, and, using a small light blue sheet of waxed paper, picked up a whole snapper with silver, bulbous eyes. She held it up to my face as it dripped, and asked, ‘You want that for dinner?’

  IV

  Williamson Avenue was a glittering river of late morning sun over which heavy lines of traffic were running, separating us from Café Oceania across the street. Andrea wasn’t deterred by the traffic: she simply stepped off the footpath and, with her charming smile and holding out her right arm, slowed down the next car. Then she stepped through the gap and, stopping at the middle line, again charmed the left-lane traffic to a halt and stepped through. I waited until the traffic lights stopped the vehicles and then hurried after her, my whole being taut with angry tension and trepidation at meeting Regina and her problem.

  Regina was waiting for us when we entered the cafe. Most of the tables were occupied, and the fierce sizzling and smell of frying bacon and sausages and coffee saturated the air. She got up and waved us over to her table. It was one of our favourite eating places; we had taken Regina there ever since she was a child. Physically my daughter looked like me – a delicate, slighter, kinder, handsomer female version of me, or so her mother and everyone we knew kept telling her (and me) as she’d matured, as if I’d find that a hugely uplifting compliment. I didn’t – in fact I’ve always felt anxiously uncomfortable about it. At first Regina had loved it, taking it as a sign she was ‘Dad’s girl’. But when – and I can still remember that cruel, painful happening at her fifteenth birthday party, when she was surrounded by all her awkwardly self-conscious friends – her best friend Tricia said, ‘Gosh, Regina, you look just like your Dad!’ and Regina declared, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘No, I don’t!, a swiftly delivered stab into my heart wounded the cord of love that bound us.

  When we reached her she embraced her mother, kissing her on the cheek. As Regina gazed at me over her mother’s shoulder, I once again experienced the startling pain of that stab. ‘Hi, Dad,’ she said, stepping away from her mother and holding her hand out to me. I clutched it firmly, pulled her into me and kissed her on the cheek, and was hurt when she pulled away swiftly, smiling. ‘How are you, Dad?’

  ‘Good, good,’ I said, and took my seat. We’d meant, with my parents’ enthusiastic encouragement, to have three children but, after Regina, trying to raise her and at the same time working fulltime and building up our careers, the three children remained Regina, whom Andrea indulged beyond the limits I demanded of a respectful, dutiful daughter.

  We ordered quickly and, when the waiter was gone, were left in awkward heated silence, because even though Andrea and Regina found it easy to make small talk between themselves, I’ve never found it so, and after Andrea’s treatment of me in the supermarket I certainly wasn’t feeling charitable and ready to lay myself open to a continuation of that abuse.

  ‘Mother, you remember a few years ago you were into the Genome Project and read and talked about it all the time?’ Regina asked. Andrea nodded, nonchalantly. ‘Well, it’s completed now – I read that in Time magazine.’ I caught a short wounded pause in Andrea’s manner – annoyance? I was surprised by this because I was usually the one who underrated our daughter’s intelligence and, by trying to hide my attitude from Regina and Andrea, merely made it more obvious. Before Regina could continue, the waiter arrived with our drinks. I drained half my beer quickly, the stark cold of the liquid bursting up to the back of my eyes, stinging them.

  ‘Dad, you shouldn’t drink cold things so fast!’ Regina said, watching the tears brimming from my eyes.

  ‘Actually, darling, the Genome Project was completed three years ago, and their revolutionary findings are already being explored and used by hundreds of scientists and businesses,’ Andrea corrected her. I was dismayed – in the past it would have been me saying that. At university and since, Andrea had learned all she could about cells, DNA, genomes, chromosones and the Genome Project, and had filled our dream reading with that knowledge, transforming her grandmother’s belief in gafa with the whole connectedness of DNA and cells. She decided that our past lives and the people we knew then were all contained in and connected through the cells. It made sense to me, and she’d always been patient explaining it all to Regina, but here she was humiliating our daughter.

  ‘How’s work?’ I asked Regina, and she looked relieved I’d saved her.

  She picked up her knife and fork and, looking directly at me, said, ‘Its good, Dad. I’m still enjoying it.’ Regina was working as a law clerk, a job our company’s lawyer had given her, with Andrea’s encouragement. I’ve always been upset by our daughter’s inability to hold down jobs for long.

  ‘Darling, you really have to complete your law degree if you want to go any further in law,’ Andrea interjected, and I caught the wince in Regina’s facial muscles. Why was Andrea behaving in this awful way? Regina had spent three years at university but had dropped out after meeting Ralph, to my huge disappointment. Andrea had again defended our daughter by contending that perhaps Regina didn’t have the ability to get a degree, which she didn’t really need anyway. I’d reminded Andrea that she herself had come from a very poor ‘āiga from a backward village in Samoa, but through relentless hard work and scrimping and saving every cent she had completed two degrees – and with first-class honours. I also took Regina’s ‘failure’ as a reflection on us as parents and as high achievers. ‘You’re just a bloody snob and tight-arsed father,’ Andrea had accused me. ‘Loosen up!’

  I took a mouthful of bacon and tomatoes. ‘And are you still enjoying your karate classes?’ I asked my daughter.

  Dismayed by her mother’s reversal of roles, Regina observed her warily from the corners of her eyes. ‘Yeah, Dad, I should have my black belt by the end of this session.’

  Andrea was now into her food, her head lowered, hiding from the inanities my daughter and I were exchanging. I was the one who usually did that.

  ‘Congratulations, darling!’ I replied, now deliberately enjoying seeing Andrea excluded. ‘I never completed mine. Too much other work.’ A foolish admission in front of Andrea. So I added, ‘Your mother completed hers, of course.’ We both expected a reaction from her, but she continued eating as if she’d not heard.

  V

  When Andrea had nearly finished her meal, she glanced up, blinked and then, deep black eyes focused on Regina, asked, ‘And how is Ralph?’ She’d always admired Ralph, and had quickly agreed with Regina’s wish to marry him. I’d considered Ralph an unreliable, smooth-talking wastrel, and had opposed it. All these weeks since Regina had rung us about their separation, Andrea and I had carefully avoided discussing it, not even in our interrogation of her dreams.

  Regina swallowed twice, avoiding our eyes. Trying to smile, she said softly, ‘He’s okay, he’s fine. Yes, he’s fine.’

  ‘That’s not what we’re asking about, darling,’ Andrea continued.

  ‘Then what are you asking about?’ Regina challenged her, and I was glad for her – if a little surprised. She’d never questioned me and her mother in this defiant way.

  I saw the trace of a sly, sarcastic grin on Andrea’s face as she turned to me. ‘Your father didn’t want you to marry him,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘No, he didn’t, Mother. In fact he ordered me not to!’ Regina retaliated – and was it satisfaction I was experiencing right then? I caught Andrea staring at me, but I maintained my silence, refusing to be party to her unexpected attack on our daughter.

  ‘Yes, he ordered you and you took absolutely no notice of him and now look what’s happened!’ Controlled but utterly merciless, she stopped her voice from reaching the pitch at which those near us would hear.

  Regina caught the encouragement in my demeanour and replied, in the same controlled manner as her mother, ‘And what has happened, Mother?’

  Her remaining piece of crisp bagel crunched as Andrea stabbed her fork into it. Carefully she placed her knife across her plate, straightened up and, rigid face and burning eyes snaring her daughter, declared, in barely a whisper, ‘What has happened is, you’re in the shit again!’

  Incredible! How could she berate our daughter this way? But before I could react, Regina, tears tumbling down her cheeks, her body trembling, grasped at my aid. ‘Dad, are you going to let her talk to me like – like that?’

  I reached across, grasped her shoulders and said, ‘Its okay, darling, your mother didn’t mean it that way.’

  ‘Yes, I did!’ It was a slicing blow that cut my breath away and severed my daughter’s windpipe, left her gasping. I jumped up and, holding her tightly round her shuddering shoulders, started steering her out of the restaurant, people trying not to scrutinise us too openly.

  Once outside on the busy footpath I continued holding her; waited for her to swallow back her pain. I handed her my serviette, which she used to dry her tears. ‘I’m sure your mother is already very sorry about her behaviour, darling,’ I tried. ‘I don’t know why she’s behaving the way she is this morning.’

  Regina twisted out of my embrace, face distorted into a rage I’d never seen there before. Holding me at arm’s length, with my reflection trapped in the centre of her eyes, she declared: ‘Dad, she meant every cruel word of it. Yeah, she fucking well meant to hurt me!’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ I insisted. ‘She’s never treated you like this before.’

  ‘So why’s she hurting me now?’ Then, focusing on me, she said, ‘All our life together you’ve been the one who’s put me down. To you I’ve been a dumb, ugly person unworthy of being your daughter.’ I opened my mouth to protest but she said, ‘Don’t, Dad, don’t. You know that’s true!’ As she wheeled to flee from me, I tried to hold her arm but she shrugged me off. She paused, and, holding the noonday world’s full attention, said, ‘And now you’ve got her treating me the same way. Yes, she came here from a poor ‘āiga in a poor village in a poor country, but she married you and you turned her into a pretentious fiapālagi!’ She waited and watched the truth gushing up from the unhealable wound in my heart and then said, ‘Our ‘āiga reckon you’re so Pālagi you’ve only got temporary suntans!’

  VI

  Borges, I think, once claimed that we exist only in one another’s dreams. As I waited for Andrea to come home I wanted my reality to be that: that Andrea’s totally unexpected attack on our daughter had been true only in a dream that I’d wake from. After I’d watched Regina disappearing into Foodtown, I’d hurried to our car and driven home, without Andrea, unable to shake off the truth of Regina’s accusation that I had never considered her a daughter worthy of me – and that I’d somehow persuaded her mother to believe that too.

  ‘Thank you for leaving me stranded!’ Andrea started as soon as she entered our kitchen, where I was sitting having my second coffee. ‘I had to walk three bloody miles from the café.’ She was always precise about distance.

  ‘Good on ya!’ I heard myself saying. ‘In the dream we’re in, it couldn’t have been all that strenuous.’

  She dumped her handbag on the table in front of me, her face flushed with anger. ‘What the shit are you talking about?’

  ‘You’re the one who believes in dreams,’ I said coolly. I sipped my coffee. It was turning cold.

  She thumped herself down on the stool opposite me, her armpits and front of her t-shirt drenched with sweat. With both hands pressed against her face – a gesture I was so familiar with – she sighed deeply, as if everything was beyond exasperation, and recited through her spread fingers: ‘“Although it sounded all the year round; although it rang out sometimes as early as half past six in the morning, sometimes as late as half past ten …”’

  ‘Why re-quote me that?’ I deliberately interrupted her, continuing the interrogation.

  As she took her hands away from her face, I knew there would be a superior smile there. ‘Because, my darling, you and your daughter need to be reminded you can never read dreams.’

  ‘So why are the Bengels and their savant son’s music important to us?’ I wasn’t going to relent this time. ‘And why is Dyer Beauchamp’s playing so, so sad?’

  Friendship

  Laura needed one more stage one paper to complete the BA section of her BA LLB, so she enrolled in Anthropology I: An Introduction to Pacific Cultures. She’d heard it was an easy option – besides, she’d always been fascinated with things Māori and Polynesian, inheriting that, she now believed, from her grandmother Nettie, who she and her mother had stayed with and who had cared for her whenever her mother had suffered ‘another bad spell of her illness’ and checked herself into the ‘hospital’, sometimes for weeks, with Laura praying that her stay would be permanent. As time had passed, she’d ceased feeling guilty about it. Her grandfather had died before she was born, and she knew little about him because Nettie and her mother had erased him from the family history they fed her. Grandma hadn’t remarried, preferring raising her daughter (and later Laura) on her own in her comfortable home on Ngāmotu Beach in New Plymouth, living off her salary as a teacher and the small but careful inheritance her farming parents had left her. Laura preferred Grandma Nettie to her mother not because Nettie played to the stereotype of the grey-haired, loving, overindulgent grandmother who spoilt her grandchild but simply because her mother – and she’d always found it difficult to remember her name – was insane, and her illness was worsening with every year, and she was in precarious jeopardy of her mother’s blazing demons, who spilled out of her visions and tried to invade her heart. With Grandma and in her house she was safe from them; they daren’t invade her dreams because she was protected by the Māori artifacts, especially the ferociously faced carvings, which Grandma had strategically placed around their house. When she asked Grandma about the carvings, she’d admitted she knew little – and didn’t want to know more – about those ‘pagan idols your grandfather collected, using up most of his salary each month.’

  Winter was cold and damp, the brisk wind cutting into her face, so she was relieved to get into the large lecture theatre that was almost full, and she squeezed into the second to last row. She unwound and folded her long woollen scarf, took off her black beanie and shoved them into her satchel. The theatre was noisy and already smelling obnoxiously of damp sweaters, wet shoes and bad body odour; row after row of students appeared in semicircles below her, where there were a long desk, a moveable lectern and blackboards. There were about 200 students, and she didn’t know any of them, although in her three years at Auckland University she did not come to know and befriend many students: she’d never felt safe, comfortable, secure in large groups, or with a large network of friends who expected you to adhere to a group code of behaviour. She loved people – certain people anyway – but every time she really worked to become a loyal, trusting, self-giving member of a group of friends, she just couldn’t go all the way; some inexplicable dark distrust lodged in her core adamantly refused to allow her to contribute herself, unconditionally, to the pool of selves that comprised the group. As far back as she could remember, she’d not had more than three friends at any given time. Three; why three? Or, as her driven mother would have challenged, why not four or five or two hundred? To her mother, numbers had magical properties that, if not interpreted and used correctly, would harm you, even cause velvety dragon-like creatures from the Great Wall of China to erupt into your bowels and devour all your succulent family secrets, which had been stored there since the blazing instance of your conception …

  She broke from her thoughts when the lecturer – and she was pleasantly surprised he was Māori/Polynesian and in his thirties at the most – walked self-consciously past her and down the aisle, while most of the students watched and wondered about him. Suited in navy blue, white shirt and red tie, with abundant kinky black hair, finely chiselled face and tight fatless body, she imagined him coming straight out of Rousseau’s and the European Enlightenment’s visions of the Noble Savage. Yeah, and she was ready to pay him her full attention. But right then someone, who was standing above her in the aisle, pressed her bony knee against hers, and nudged her twice, rudely. She glanced up and saw another Noble Savage, who, in her height and immaculate black sweater and jeans and bearing and arrogance, couldn’t be denied entry into the seat next to her. So Laura slid over to that seat and allowed the ‘beautiful Polynesian maiden’ – a princess? – to ease into her seat. This was the closest she’d ever been to a Māori, and she realised – and was intrigued about it – that she wanted to be that close.

  ‘Tēnā koutou, good morning, my name is Doctor Maurice Matangi, and I’m Ngāti Whātua!’ their lecturer started. Laura turned her attention to him.

  ‘Yeah, and I hope you know a lot about that, doctor,’ the Noble Princess beside her challenged under her breath, and so Laura’s attention, on her left, focused on her, while her attention to her right remained with the handsome, fearless one in the front.