‘Thanks for the clothes,’ Laura said to Mere.

  ‘That’s okay; sorry I didn’t have anything better and they’re not your size.’

  ‘And thank you for getting us here safely last night.’

  ‘Thank Dan. I thought I was fine until we got into the bloody cold of the car park, and then I collapsed. You were too bloody high to tell us your address.’ She laughed and then added, ‘Daniel is always there when you need him.’ Eyes twinkling, she said, ‘You’d like him; he’s your type.’

  ‘And what type is that?’ she asked.

  ‘Frighteningly intelligent, shy, reserved, annoyingly reticent when he wants to be, and a fucking good poet and writer …’

  ‘I’m not like that,’ Laura interrupted, ‘and I can’t write for nuts and I’m as dumb as nails …’

  ‘Pull me other leg, girl! You may be reticent, but you’re articulate enough to ring and thank him and maybe teach him not to be so reticent.’

  Later, as Mere drove her to her flat in Mt Eden, Laura said to her, ‘Your mother’s the greatest, Mere. She wants me to choose between Hina and Auntie. I’ll call her Auntie. I’ve never had an aunt.’

  ‘She’d like that, and she is the greatest. It takes great character to overcome the shit she’s been through. Or you can say, her battle through the shit has turned her into a mighty mum.’ She stopped, and Laura sensed Mere didn’t want to continue in that direction.

  Heavy sweeping rain buffeted their car as they drove up Mt Eden Road, the front window wipers, at their highest speed, screeching as they struggled to keep the window clear, and Mere clutching the steering wheel and concentrating keenly on the road ahead, which was busy with traffic that swished by like large sea creatures. Up the driveway, they stopped in front of a two-storied block of apartments that was barely visible through the torrential rain. Mere sighed audibly and said, ‘Fuck that!’

  ‘You want to come in and see my place?’ Laura invited her, again feeling exposed, vulnerable, in case Mere refused.

  ‘I can’t drive back in this shit.’

  ‘Better wait till the rain’s over,’ Laura said, elated. She’d moved into the two-bedroom apartment three years before when she’d turned eighteen and, for the first time, was entitled to the trust fund her grandmother had left her. The trust was mainly the money from the sale of her grandmother’s house and the collection of Māori artifacts after her death; the value of that had increased hugely over the years. Laura had survived the foster homes until she was sixteen and then went out on her own.

  They both flung their car doors open, slammed them shut and, in the cold dark deluge, scrambled up the steps onto the front veranda, along it and up the stairs to the second storey.

  They were soaking wet and shivering when Laura unlocked the front door and they rushed into the apartment. ‘Bloody cold!’ Laura ran and switched on the heaters, pulled two beach towels out of the linen cupboard and flung one at Mere, who caught it as she was stripping off her drenched clothes. Laura wrapped her towel round herself and, under it, stripped off her wet clothes. She got out two more towels, which they wound round their wet hair, and then, wrapped up to their necks in the beach towels, they knelt and huddled round the large central heater in the fireplace, rubbing their hands together, shivering.

  They warmed quickly and Laura put on the electric jug and made some instant mushroom soup, which they sipped in front of the heater. ‘Nice apartment,’ Mere remarked as she looked up and around the sitting room.

  Awkward, with a rising sense of guilt, Laura said, ‘I was able to move into a place like this after I got some money from my grandmother.’ She paused and, avoiding Mere’s scrutiny, added, ‘Before this I had to live in skungy, awful places.’

  ‘You’re lucky, Laura.’

  ‘You want to look around?’ Laura invited. Mere jumped up and, with her towel parted down the front, exposing part of her breasts, belly and navel, she followed Laura. ‘I haven’t got much,’ Laura apologised.

  ‘But they’re your things, Laura, they’re yours, and you’ve furnished and made this flat your own.’

  ‘I suppose you can say that,’ Laura replied, pleased. ‘Because I’ve never had much, I’ve reduced my life to essentials; to what a poet once described as the “Zen of things”.’ Mere was silent as they moved from room to room, and Laura hoped she was liking what she was seeing: she’d painted all the walls in cream and hung just a few framed photographs of her favourite trees on them; there were Pacific blue window curtains in all the rooms, and three large posters she’d framed with discarded rimu timber of her favourite actor, Marlon Brando, in shiny black leather motorcycle gear and wicked sexual smile, her favourite philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, and her favourite animal, the rat.

  ‘Why the rat?’ Mere asked. ‘That is strange, Laura.’

  ‘Rats taught me how to survive.’ She suddenly didn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘But your life couldn’t have been all that terrible.’

  ‘Because I’m Pākehā?’

  ‘No, because your family had money,’ Mere countered, and Laura knew she was trying to evade her stereotyping.

  ‘One day I’ll tell you about it,’ she murmured, and immediately sensed Mere wasn’t going to pursue that any further.

  In her spacious bedroom, where everything, except the books in the bookcases, was in various shades of blue, Mere whooped and swept her long arms over everything. ‘You must dream in blue, Laura!’

  ‘No, I just like blue bedrooms. None of the other rooms are in blue, right?’

  ‘Right, but this is a blue womb …’

  ‘Guess you can say that,’ Laura said. ‘Mere, that’s the best description I’ve ever had of it.’

  ‘And it’s so Zen!’ And then Mere whooped again. ‘Now I understand why you describe your apartment that way: it’s stripped down to the essentials: no waste, no decadence, no overindulgence.’

  This time, Laura considered Mere’s philosophical description too fanciful and unnecessary. She just wanted to live in a place that fitted her shape, suited her simple needs and kept out the demons who’d killed her mother. But she wasn’t going to offend Mere by telling her that; no, Mere and her friends and her mother were her friends, her family, she hoped with all her belief and courage.

  Absences

  It had rained heavily all night and the dull, steady, drum roll of it on the roof had made Fale sleep soundly until dawn. Now, the breeze weaving in through his half-opened bedroom window was heady with the odour of wet vegetation, compost and the soaked earth of the newly turned vegetable beds that he and his dad had planted last week with three types of lettuce, capsicums, carrots, tomatoes, cabbages, leeks, string beans, and two types of potatoes and kūmara – before his dad had gone away again. They had also replanted the plot of taro with a new variety that was supposed to grow well in New Zealand’s temperate climate.

  They’ve done it every spring since Fale could remember, and everyone kept telling him he had green fingers like his dad. As he smelled their garden in the breeze, his whole body warmed with pride. Nothing like digging up the black soil – he was no longer afraid of the hordes of earth worms that wriggled out of it, because they were his fertilising friends – and turning it soft and pliant with a hoe, and then, after mixing plant food into it, smoothing it down with his bare hands.

  ‘I don’t use gloves,’ his dad told him at the start, ‘because I want to feel the earth, be close to it, feel it flowing through my hands. You know the Samoan names for soil?’ His dad held up a large fistful of it. ‘Ele‘ele, palapala. And those are the names for blood also. So, when you’re planting things in the soil, you are planting them in the blood of the earth.’

  Over the spring and into the summer, Fale loved watching the astonishing miracle of the seeds sprouting and breaking up into plants and those maturing and him caring for them, protecting them from pests and diseases. He loved it because all that lush green growth belonged to him. He and his dad had given birth to it.

  Fale rolled out of bed, pulled his dad’s Auckland Blues rugby jersey over his t-shirt, and, careful not to wake his family, crept down the dark corridor, through the kitchen that still smelled of the pisupo and fa‘alifu kalo he’d helped his mum cook for dinner, out the back door and onto the porch, where he stood with folded arms – it was still chilly – gazing across their garden and up into the dawn that was flooding the eastern sky. On the back steps, his dad’s black jandals lay at the top of the pile of family work footwear. He shoved his feet into the jandals – still a bit too big – and went down the three steps and across the narrow back lawn, the flapping jandals leaving squishy footprints in the wet grass.

  There was a tightness in his groin, so he walked quickly between the vegetable plots to the corner of their back fence, well away from the garden and compost boxes, and pissed noisily against the fence, shivering occasionally.

  His mother had told him the history of their section and home. Theirs was a large, original Ponsonby section that his mother’s parents, who’d died before he was born, had bought cheaply in the late 1950s, when Ponsonby had been considered a working class slum. Over the years, they’d renovated and enlarged the original house, and made his mother promise she’d never sell it. When she married his dad, they’d continued to honour that promise, despite the lean times they sometimes experienced, especially whenever his dad was unemployed or away and the real estate agents offered them huge sums of money that most of the other Māori and Pacific Island families couldn’t resist. One way or another, his parents kept them clothed and well fed and defiantly proud – and it was easier now that his mother had a good job. Dad was a wizard fix-it man, doing all the painting, plumbing, electrical and carpentry repairs on their house and to their property. Now the property was worth well over a million, he’d heard Mum telling Dad last Christmas.

  While dawn changed into morning, Fale inspected the vegetables, squatting down and brushing the dirt or insects off them and picking up bits of rubbish. When he heard his mother clattering round the kitchen he knew it was time to water the plants, so he connected the hose and, after pulling it out into the garden, started watering them with a fine spray. All this he’d learned from watching and imitating his dad.

  The back door swung open. ‘Fale, you’ve got to get ready for school!’ He sensed his mother watching him and knew what was coming next: ‘Are you going today?’ The pleading tone (and hope) in her question stirred his guilt.

  Fale squirmed, finally calling over his shoulder, ‘Okay, I’ll go!’ He’d missed a few days each week when his dad had been home.

  ‘You have only a few weeks till your NCEA exams, Fale.’ Now it was no longer a plea but an accusation. ‘And you have to pass them if you want –’

  ‘Okay, you don’ hav’ta remind me!’

  He switched off the hose and rolled it back on its roller. The vegetables, border shrubs and flowers glistened lushly, the water dripping off them. He felt them gazing gratefully up at him. You lucky bastards, you’ve got me taking care of you.

  Fale shaved quickly, using his dad’s shaving cream and razor, wincing as he dabbed his dad’s expensive aftershave into his face. He loved the smell of it and the knowledge that his friends envied him for having such flash aftershave and deodorant. The girls loved it too! Yeah, especially Rochelle. And Rochelle was there wrapped round him, and he was wrapped round her in her bed with her parents away at work, and they were shagging slowly, slowly because that’s how she liked it until she was heaving up wildly … Hard-on, here it comes! And he reached down and wrapped his hand around it. Hot, hot, hot! God, god, he loved the lemony scent of her hot skin and her clutching heat and her mouth and tongue …

  ‘C’mon, Fale, I’m going to be late for work!’ Fou, his older sister, cut him off from the explosion that always made the back of his head feel like it was going to blow open. ‘C’mon!’

  He pulled up his pyjama pants and stuffed his dad’s toiletries back into his sponge bag. ‘Just bloody well wait a minute!’ He unlatched the bathroom door and pulled it back violently, but before he could leave, Fou pushed past him.

  ‘Christ, Fale, look at this mess,’ she snapped. Fale was already out the door, running back to his room. ‘Bloody lazy shit,’ she cursed after him. But there was that special love in her voice, the love she’d forged with him back when he was five and she was eleven and they’d watched their father leaving for the first time. That time, he was away for eight long, long months.

  Like his dad, Fale didn’t allow anyone else to get him his breakfast. Like his dad, when he found the foods he really liked, he stuck to those. This morning, when he got to the kitchen and got out his usual, his mum and Fou were already having their breakfast. Fou said, ‘Hell, you’re a bloody creature of habit, Fale, and you’re still without hairs!’ His mum laughed.

  ‘Betcha I’ve got more than those peanut-muscled boyfriends of yours,’ he answered, sitting down with his heaped dish of cornflakes, tinned peaches and milk.

  ‘Betcha they have jungles of it,’ Fou retorted, reaching over and jabbing her forefinger into his right bicep. ‘And they certainly have mountains of those compared to your molehills!’ She was six feet tall and ever since they were children she’d been mad on sports, getting into her school’s netball, swimming, aerobics and weightlifting teams with their mum’s dedicated support. She’d graduated from university two years before with a degree in sports management and was now a personal trainer at one of the leading gyms.

  ‘Yeah, but I betcha their brains are so microscopic you can’t find them in all those mountains,’ he quipped. They laughed together, Fou ruffling his hair and wrecking his spiky hairdo.

  ‘We’ve got another big order for uniforms so I’ll be late home tonight,’ his mum said. She was branch supervisor for a large clothing company. ‘Fale, you cook whatever you like.’ Automatically, Fale started objecting, but she caressed the side of his face. ‘You’re a great cook, son,’ she said.

  ‘Not as good as Dad,’ he heard himself saying. He regretted it at once.

  Fou jumped up, reached across, hugged him, and plastered a huge kiss on his forehead and another on their mother. ‘Love ya. Fa!’ She rushed out.

  Later, when he came out of his room with the blue haversack his dad had bought for him and which was now bulging with his books and other school things, his mother (who as usual at that time of day looked smart and strikingly beautiful) stopped him and inspected his appearance. ‘Fale, you look tidy today; keep it up, son.’ She unzipped his bag and shoved his lunch into it. ‘Your favourite: ham and cucumber and mayonnaise sandwiches, and a blackberry muffin.’ He shuffled uncomfortably but then hugged her and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’ Fale could feel her melting into tears. ‘Don’t worry, Mum, Dad’ll be okay – he’s always okay.’

  Their street was empty of people when he came out of their house. He stopped in their gateway and texted his friend Richard with the mobile phone Fou had given him for his sixteenth birthday. As he walked down towards John Street, some Ponsonby Intermediate students approached him. He recognised most of them from his street, and nodded at the ones who smiled and nodded at him. ‘Hi, bro,’ a skinny kid with cut-off jeans, a holey t-shirt and bare feet said, raising his eyebrows. ‘Hi, bro,’ he replied, feeling good with the brother-acknowledging-brother routine.

  Richard was waiting for him in front of his two-storeyed house at the top of John Street near the junction with Richmond Road. With a shock of red hair and heavily freckled white skin that burned with the slightest kiss of the sun, Richard was one of the few Pālagi still going to St Paul’s, street-tough and skilled enough to survive and navigate the Tongan-Samoan domination of their school.

  He was the only one Richard allowed to call him Rick; one of the few Richard invited home to play electronic games and watch porno and go into the chat rooms and chat up girls on the elaborate system his computer-programming dad had helped him build. Richard – who was at his house at least twice a week, who had a crush on Fou, and who his mum and dad treated like their second son – was the only friend Fale allowed to help him with his garden.

  ‘How’s your dad?’ Richard asked, after they made fives. Bony, angular and frail-looking, he only came up to Fale’s shoulder.

  ‘Gone back.’ He didn’t want to go there. ‘And Fou’s as beautiful as when you last saw her a few days ago.’

  Richard grinned. ‘How’s the garden?’

  ‘Growing like mad. Fucking growing like, like …’

  ‘Like Miss Timble’s pubic jungle?’ Richard interrupted. Miss Timble was their maths teacher.

  ‘Dunno Rick, cos I haven’t seen that!’ They strolled towards their school.

  On the other side of the street, many of their fellow students were milling round the Busy Oven Bakery, buying and eating meat pies and other pastries.

  Guilt and worry and distress about his studies started clogging Fale’s attention and churning up his stomach as soon as they entered the front gate of the school. He saw some of his teachers getting out of their cars in the parking lot.

  He was so far behind, all his course assessments – except for art – were unsatisfactory, and Fale knew he was lucky that his mother didn’t know how to read the complicated assessment system, letting him read his reports for her. For last semester’s report, he told her he got excellents in art and physics, merits in phys-ed and maths, and satisfactorys for the rest. He felt like shit when she hugged him and congratulated him for doing so well. His dad never asked him about his studies, but Fale knew his dad got his information about it from Mum. Fuck, she was going to die when she found out he’d been lying his head off! And when she found out he’d been ducking a hell of a lot of classes, she was going to kill him!

  Form period. Their class of fifteen and their form teacher, Gregory Marshall, were already seated. ‘Good to see you at school today, Fale. You too, Richard!’ Mr Marshall singled them out even as they were trying to hide at the back of the room. ‘But I’m sad to tell you, the deputy principal wants to see you. Now.’ They shuffled forward, heads bowed, trying to ignore their classmates’ muffled laughter and Mr Marshall’s searching look from under his bushy eyebrows. ‘Sorry, guys, but it’s about your absences and abysmal grades,’ he whispered as they went past.