Witi Ihimaera - Uncle's Story

‘Jason? Jason —’

I was still depressed by my argument with Jason when Friday come around. That evening I was to drive out to Porirua to meet a man named George. Of course Auntie Pat had assumed that I knew George’s surname, which I didn’t, and when I’d rung her to ask her, she was either out or watching one of her beloved old movies on Sky’s Turner Classic Movies network. She’d had a satellite dish put on her roof just so she could tune in. Not even the telephone could take her away from all those melodramatic scenes with their sweeping violins when the hero kissed the heroine. Her favourite star was an actor called Guy Madison, who appeared in Till the End of Time . She had a whole scrapbook of photographs and clippings about him.

On a wing and a prayer I arrived at the Porirua Tavern. The bar was big and brash, dating back to the days when drinking yourself stupid was the name of the game — and bar owners provided carparks that took up to a thousand cars to enable you to do it. Carpet deodorant could not mask the overriding smell of cigarette smoke and spilt beer. One look at the roistering, carousing crowd in the public bar — wall to wall Maori and Pacific Islanders — and I knew there was only one hope of finding a man named George, one of the most common names of Maori men, and that was no hope. To make matters worse, I arrived right on show time. The lights went down just as I had paid for my beer at the bar.

Great. Now I’d be stumbling around looking for somebody I didn’t know in the dark.

A spotlight came up on a small stage at floor level. A fifty-ish singer came forward. A good-humoured cheer went up.

‘Hey,’ the singer grinned, ‘you can do better than that!’

This time he was rewarded with a bigger roar of welcome, and this seemed to please him. He was wearing a very bad wig, sunglasses, a dreadful white retro suit with bell bottoms, and a wide-collar half-unbuttoned disco shirt. With a gold chain around his neck, he was a throwback to the disco dinosaur days of the 1970s.

‘Thank you, folks, and thank you all my loyal fans —’ The crowd started to laugh. ‘— for coming along for this little stroll down Memory Lane.’

The band started to play, the singer took the microphone in his hands and began to sing that great Maori anthem to Mum, Dad, the Maori flag and puha pie, ‘Ten Guitars’. Once upon a very long time ago, the singer must have had a pretty good voice. All the bass notes were there. Trouble was, whenever he tried to reach for the high ones his voice wobbled like a train going off the rails and his suit split open, exposing a startlingly white and gruesome beer gut. But he was obviously a local favourite, and the punters sang along in the chorus — and they sang the high notes for him.

The song concluded with whistles, applause and stamping feet. The singer bowed, wiped the sweat off his brow and, to much laughter, took off his toupee and began to fan himself with it.

‘Thanks, folks,’ he said, ‘but now we’ll leave the singing to the younger fellas, eh? Put your hands together, because here they are, the ones you’ve really been waiting for, the Porirua Punishers!’

The atmosphere immediately changed. Black and Polynesian rhythms crisscrossed the bar room. From out of nowhere dry ice started to drift across the stage. Laser beams started to strike through the blackness. Two hip men and two girl singers strode out into the light.

‘Oh, wahine, haere mai ki au,’ the boys sang.

‘Oh, taku tane, let the good lovin’ flow,’ sang the girls.

‘Let’s do it! Get down to it! Arohaina mai —’

The audience roared. There was nothing like being in a bar filled with Maori and Pacific Islanders on a night when the music was cool, sweet and moaning with love, sex and wild dreams. A few minutes into their bracket, though, I checked my watch. I was supposed to meet George at eight and it was already half past. I walked through the crowd, targeting every fifty-ish man who looked like he could have been a Vietnam Vet. The only Vietnam soldier I had ever seen was Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies, so I looked for an older version of Sly. Somebody who once could have worn a red bandanna and, bare-chested, operated a machine gun with one hand and shot down a helicopter with it.

No such luck.

I decided to call it a night. I walked to the bar, intending to put my glass down and leave. The singer had divested himself of his white suit and was pulling handles. The lights blazed on his bald head. One of the patrons called to him:

‘Pae kare, George, you can still show those young fellas a thing or two.’

George grinned. Our eyes connected. For a second I saw surprise in his eyes. He nodded and reached across the bar to shake my hand.

‘You must be Michael. Patty told me you’d be coming tonight.’

George led me into another bar, empty because it was being renovated. ‘It’ll be quieter in here,’ he said. Gib board was stacked against the walls. Bags of cement, flooring materials and timber was strewn around the room. Muttering to himself, George kicked away some planks, found a couple of chairs, motioned me to take a seat and cracked open two beers. We sat drinking, the thump thump thump of the band coming through the walls. Neither of us said anything for a while and, as a way of beginning, I showed him the photograph of Uncle Sam with Cliff Harper. His hands trembled as he looked at it. He must have registered Harper but, if so, he pretended not to notice him. Instead, he pointed at Sam:

‘Yeah, that’s my mate. That’s the bastard. You want to know about him, right?’

‘As much as you can tell me,’ I answered.

He nodded. He went quiet for a moment. He looked at me, as if wondering how much he should say.

‘We must have been a bit younger than you — Sam, Turei and me — when we joined up to fight in Vietnam. God we were young. We were two years out of school and the war had been going on for about four years. Sam was our leader and we were his followers. Sam grew up hearing about his Dad’s exploits in war. You know about Arapeta, don’t you.’

‘He died before I was nine,’ I answered, ‘but I’ve heard the stories.’

‘Arapeta was the man ,’ George said. ‘Some people thought he was more formidable than his older brother, Bulibasha. Strong as an ox. Never gave up. Stubborn as. Fast with his fists. I’ve heard he was a hard husband and a hard father. He wasn’t a person to cross but you have to hand it to him. He knew what was right and what was wrong, and very few people challenged him. He had guts. Anyway, Arapeta was about 24 when he married Auntie Florence. Sam was born two years later, and me and him are cousins on Auntie Florence’s side. We’re the same age, so that must mean Sam was born in 1948. Turei was a year younger.’

George chuckled to himself.

‘You know, they tell a story about Sam when he was born. When he came out of Auntie Florence’s womb, his hands were bunched up into tiny fists and the first thing he did was to poke Arapeta in the eye. Apparently, Arapeta poked him back: ‘You want to fight me, eh?’ The hospital had never seen such a sight as that — a proud father, skipping and boxing with his newborn son in his arms. From that time onwards, Arapeta was inseparable from Sam. When Sam was two, Arapeta bought him some boxing gloves. Sam liked nothing better than to box with his Dad. The trouble was that Arapeta always won. You’d think a father might pretend to lose some fights to his son, but Arapeta never did. Ever. By the time we were all at high school, it was still the same. Sam was a high flier. In the fifth form he was a prefect. He was Most Popular Boy and vice captain of the First Fifteen. But you know what his Dad used to say to him? “Only a prefect? I was head prefect! Only vice captain? I was captain!” Arapeta loved raising the bar to another rung, and that used to make Sam mad.’