Witi Ihimaera - The Thrill of Falling - Stories

I never realised, until later in life, how much my parents had been affected by my infant struggles to breathe. Wally says that the sight of my small body, wrapped in tubes, was almost too much for Mum to bear. I suspect he was also speaking of himself, because my father has always been the soft-hearted one.

When Mum couldn’t have any more children, well, that did it: they patiently set about building my body and increasing my stamina so that I could triumph over my debilitating asthma.

So it was that when I was going through my bad ass phase, they built me a home gym in one of our spare rooms. Without realising it — even though they knew that I idolised Arnie — they gave me something that I became really keen on: body building. The consequence was that I stopped hanging out with my cousins so much. ‘Man oh man,’ Dad said to me once, ‘did we have a lucky escape.’

Dad bought me an inclined bench press. The following Christmas, one of my presents was some barbells. That same day, our outing was to Te Puia Hospital where even Mum got into the pool (‘Close your eyes, Wally’) and splashed around while Dad and I raced each other from one end to the other. Every now and then Dad pretended to get cramp and let me win: ‘Good boy, you showed your dad up, didn’t you?’

Koro got into the act on my thirteenth birthday with some parallel bars, and Nan Esther found a medicine ball in a local op shop. Very soon, Dad had stopped parking the car in the garage and converted it into a larger gym space that could take, as well as the above-mentioned items, a pair of rings that he was able to buy cheap. If you were going past our house at six in the morning, like as not the light was on in the garage and there I’d be with Dad doing basic upper-body workouts, including exercises for the chest, back, shoulders and arms, push-ups (‘Just one more, Little Tu’), bench presses, back extensions, concentration curls and other routines. If you were really lucky, you might catch Wally hoisting me up onto the rings to exercise my arms: ‘Okay, son, now swing away to your heart’s content!’ All this work was designed mainly to sculpt my upper body so that it would have a large, beautiful fan-like muscle complex. In particular, Dad aimed to give me a V-shaped back so that my lungs would have room to expand and contract like unseen wings, Come out, come out, wherever you are, and fly me through the world.

Well, that was the idea.

Sometimes Dad would scratch his head, walk around me after a session and say, ‘They must be hidden somewhere in that body of yours, son.’

Dad and I could still have been there in Uawa, training, except that when I turned fourteen he made a huge decision.

We were sitting in the lounge watching television when he gave a small cough to draw attention to himself and said to Mum, ‘I want to join my two older brothers, Ralph and Tommy, in Wellington. They’re driving buses for the city council.’

Now, I think that Dad had expected Mum to immediately veto the idea. If she’d told him, ‘No’, he would have accepted her decision. Instead, Mum blinked once — Was this really Wally speaking? — and then she must have seen Dad for what he was: a kind and patient man who had followed her throughout their lives but who now wanted to take a chance and prove something, perhaps only to himself. I suspect all those years of being looked down upon by Koro and the Mahana family had marked him and he no longer wanted to be the family dogsbody. Also, there was no more wood to chop.

Although she was upset at the prospect of leaving her beloved father and Nan Esther, Mum decided to support him. ‘Okay,’ she said.

‘You’ll come with me?’ He didn’t quite believe it.

‘It will be good for all of us,’ she answered.

At the time, I didn’t know what Mum meant.

I soon realised that she, also, was making a bid for freedom. For too long the assumption had been that, as the only daughter, she would always stay at home close to the parents and look after them.

Koro and Nan Esther were horrified when she told them of our plans. ‘You’re going to leave us?’ Nan Esther wept. Mum stared them both in the eyes and her gaze never wavered. ‘You have your sons to look after you, Tu-Bad, Bo and Charlie and their wives.’ Her unspoken message, of course, was: It’s their turn now.

Uncle Bo and Uncle Charlie weren’t happy about that idea. Having Koro and Nan Esther around their unwilling necks would mean they’d have to sharpen up their otherwise slack lives. ‘You’re the girl of the family,’ Uncle Bo said. ‘It’s your job to look after Pa and Nan, not ours.’

When my uncles had been children and Mum was unable to defend herself, they’d found it easy to force her right arm behind her back and give it a sharp twist to make her submit. Not any more.

‘Oh, is it now?’ she flared. ‘Time for you lazy sods and your hopeless wives to do some work for a change.’

Mum and Dad’s action was desertion and dereliction of duty, but in Koro’s case there was more: he didn’t want me to leave. ‘You and Wally go to Wellington,’ he said after one of the Sunday family gatherings, ‘but leave my moko here so that I can bring him up myself. How will I be able to talk to him about Tupaea with me in Uawa and him down there in the capital?’

Mum compressed her lips and folded her arms. Leave her only child in Uawa? ‘I’m doing this as much for Little Tu as for me and Wally,’ she began. ‘Maybe he needs some time out from Uawa.’

Time out? I saw Koro open his mouth to say something — taking a break from your culture was a foreign notion to him — but she ploughed on.

‘There are other matters to consider about his upbringing too. You know very well that there are some bad influences on him here …’ she eyeballed Uncle Bo and my cousin Seth ‘… and Pa, we’ve been lucky to head Little Tu off at the pass. He was only two clicks away from going bad on us, joining a gang and doing courier work. Don’t think I don’t know what goes down. Apart from which, specialists in Wellington will give him better help with his asthma and his stuttering.’

Although the arguments were long and furious she wouldn’t budge. ‘No, Pa. Wally is my husband and where he goes we all go, and that includes Little Tu.’

Seth, Abe and Spade wanted me to tell Mum and Dad I wanted to stay because they were my mates. Sure.

‘If you go, Little Tutae,’ they said, coralling me at the back of Mr Merton’s dairy one day, ‘Koro’s going to pick on us and we’re not interested in that Tupaea shit.’

Did I give a toss? They gave me a black eye, but I didn’t care.

On the day that we left Uawa, Koro was distraught.

Our house had been sold, the household belongings had already gone ahead of us and we were ready to leave in Dad’s ute. Then Koro arrived, and Uncle Tu-Bad was with him. Was Koro disappointed that I hadn’t made any fuss about leaving him? I couldn’t look him in the eyes. I was ashamed that I was letting him down.

‘Why do you insist on taking my moko away from me, May?’ he cried. He was rocking back and forth, tears streaming from his eyes, flailing his walking stick. He couldn’t believe she would kidnap me from his presence.

Mum stood her ground. She found an unexpected ally in Uncle Tu-Bad. Something had happened to him while he was in prison. I don’t know what it was — maybe it was those Maori language and culture lessons they gave inmates — but something had softened him.

‘You go, sis,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about Pa.’

Still Koro didn’t want to let me go. ‘Little Tu almost died when he was born,’ he cried. ‘How will I be able to save him again if something happens to him in Wellington?’