Witi Ihimaera - The Thrill of Falling - Stories

‘My first name is T-Tupaea and I come from the … East Coast.’

From that moment I was improving all the time.

I also embraced the challenge of becoming a city boy. I was still more imaginative than intellectual, and therefore enjoyed art and music more than maths and science. I also began to revel in languages; all those Sunday lessons with Koro had given me an interest in learning and, more important, the habit of patience.

But I was also filling out and a kind of physical symmetry came into my life, equalising it in some strange way. Starting in the second term, when friendships had already been formed, made it a bit hard, so I decided to join the kapa haka team. When I began to walk to the back row the tutor, Mr Ropata, stopped me and said, ‘What are you doing back there? Come up to the front.’ To the front: what was he talking about? I didn’t know what to do in the front! I was accustomed to being behind everybody else and copying what they were doing: hands up in the air when they did, and stamping my foot when they stamped their feet.

The next time was when I decided to try for the C indoor basketball team but the phys ed teacher picked me for the B team. At Uawa I’d always been the last to be picked. What was happening? I hadn’t realised that, though I was still as skinny as, I’d gone through a couple of growth spurts.

However, my selection brought trouble because I displaced another boy, so his mates decided to rough me up a little, just to remind me of the pecking order. Man, they were big Polynesian guys, and their brother must have been Jonah Lomu. I tried as best I could to fight back with the skills I’d been taught by my cousins in the Uawa Whare Wananga of Fisticuffs where the main law was: ‘Fight fair if you can but, if you’re in a corner, do down and dirty.’

I was lucky. There were other boys from the East Coast who I was related to, like Horse — already built like a brick shit-house at fifteen — and Bilbo, and they came to my rescue. They allowed me to join their crowd and I came under their protection.

Need I tell you of the second aspect of school that I enjoyed? Wellington High School had lots of pretty girls. A plus was that I could admire girls like Peggy Roberts or Gail Johnson and, unlike in Uawa, they wouldn’t turn out to be a cousin, even if five times removed.

And then, one day, I met Thierry. School was out, and I was on my way through the gates when I saw him surrounded by a group of other boys, the same ones who’d roughed me up. They were baiting him and he was crouched on the ground, cowering behind his schoolbag, saying, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

Horse, who was with me, said, ‘This isn’t our fight.’ But I’d seen Thierry in my maths class. He was a fair-haired boy, graceful, and I couldn’t pass by; I knew what it was like to be picked on. Somewhere in the past few years I must have made a decision that I wouldn’t stand for it again — or stand by and watch someone else taking that crap. ‘That’s enough,’ I said to Thierry’s tormentors. We began to square off when Mr Van Dyke appeared. ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked. ‘Thierry, aren’t you late for your gym training?’

Gym training? My eyes lit up. Since Dad had started work on the buses our morning sessions had become almost non-existent. The bullies took off and I helped Thierry up. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He was already hurrying away and, as I was going in his direction and Horse and Bilbo weren’t, I waved quickly to my two mates and followed him.

‘I didn’t want to get into a fight,’ he began. ‘I’m not a coward,’ he added defensively, ‘but I’m competing this weekend and if I’d fought those guys I could have damaged my conditioning. They could have laid me up.’

‘What gym do you go to?’ I asked.

‘My father’s,’ he replied. ‘It’s not exactly a gym.’

Curious, I plied Thierry with more questions, but he wouldn’t divulge any more information. ‘All right,’ he said in the end. ‘Come next week, bring shorts and a singlet and if you can get past my father …’

I was unprepared for what I saw when I arrived the following week: a couple of young children were doing floor exercises and some older boys were practising on vaulting apparatus. I realised what Thierry meant: this was a school for gymnasts, and among the athletes were some who were top class and I recognised from television.

Finding the changing room, I put on my black shorts and T-shirt. Gloomily I looked at myself in the mirror: a hick-town hori stared back. When I went back out I saw Thierry exercising on one of two sets of rings. Below him stood his instructor.

‘Alley-oop!’ the man cried, and Thierry executed a two-and-a-half twist before landing. His instructor grinned and patted him on the back, then saw me waiting.

‘You must be … Tupaea?’ he asked in French-accented English. ‘I am Jean-Luc, Thierry’s father. He tell me lot about you. I am grateful you assisted him. His tournée was an important one.’ Before I could stop him, he was appraising me: gently measuring with his hands my chest, shoulders, forearms and mid-section. ‘Strong wrists, biceps good, mid-section good … You work out a lot?’

‘Just the normal, I guess.’

Without waiting for my reply, he lifted Thierry onto one set of rings and then, before I could say no, hoisted me onto the other. Until that moment my body had been relaxed. But his action caused it to flex, Come out, come out, wherever you are , and all of a sudden those wings, folded beneath my shoulders, unfurled.

Jean-Luc was astounded. ‘So … we discover another body within your body!’ he exclaimed. ‘It comes out from the chrysalis.’

Then he was all business. ‘You have some experience, oui?’

‘Oui,’ I bleated, trying to keep myself steady.

‘You follow Thierry’s example? We do a set of warm-ups, so I can consider your stamina, conditioning and flexibility, and you follow the leader, oui?’

‘Oui.’ I was holding tight to the rings and attempting to keep them from shaking.

Jean-Luc began to issue instructions to Thierry. ‘Dead hang, Thierry! Now kip support!’

He turned sharply to me. ‘Follow, Tupaea, follow!’

Ugh, aaargh, got it.

Jean-Luc snapped out more orders to both of us. ‘Handstand, Thierry! Sustain 1, 2, 3, 4 … Sustain, Tupaea! … 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 … bon! Lower to support, Thierry! Cross pullouts 1, 2, 3 … Follow, Tupaea! Good boy!’

Good boy? That’s all I get for my effort?

‘Fall back to inverted hang, front lever, back lever, front lever, back lever, dismount.’

Thierry flipped off the rings; I followed, crashing to the ground. Thierry looked as fresh as a bird; I was sweating like a pig.

‘Okay, Tupaea,’ Jean-Luc said. ‘You show promise. Tell me why you want to come to my gym?’

‘To get fit,’ I answered, somewhat lamely.

‘Oh, no no no!’ he smiled, giving me a knowing look. ‘You want more than that, eh mon petit?’ He walked to a small desk and wrote an address on a pad. ‘You go to this doctor and get thorough examination. And if you pass, I take you.’

Things were happening to me that I didn’t recognise myself, but others did.

Not long after that, the God ’Oro sent my ancestor Tupaea sliding down that rainbow of his, back into my life. They started messing with my head again.

It happened during history class when Mrs Miller took us for a lesson on Captain Cook.

‘The scientific world was buzzing with excitement about the Transit of Venus, expected on the third of June 1769,’ Mrs Miller began. ‘Three years earlier, the British ship HMS Dolphin had discovered an island called Tahiti, renamed King George’s Land after the reigning monarch, George III. It was decided that this was the ideal location for making scientific observations of the transit.’