Witi Ihimaera - The Whale Rider

It was then that Nanny Flowers surprised us all. ‘Oh, yeah yeah, you old goat,’ she said.

We had a big family dinner that night with Maori bread and crayfish and lots of wine to drink. Nanny had invited the boys over and they arrived with a roar and a rush of blue smoke and petrol fumes. It was almost as if I had never left. The guitars came out and the voices rang free to make the stars dance with joy. Nanny Flowers was in her element, playing centre stage to her family, and one of the boys got her up to do a hula.

‘Look,’ he cried with delight. ‘The Queen of Whangara!’

There was a roar of laughter at that one, and Kahu came running up to me, saying, ‘See how we love you, Uncle? We killed the fatted calf for you, just like the Bible says.’ She hugged me close and then skipped away like a songbird.

Then Porourangi was there. ‘Is it good to be home?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Yes,’ I breathed. ‘Just fantastic . How has it been?’

‘Much the same as ever,’ Porourangi said. ‘And you know our Koro. He’s still looking.’

‘What for?’

‘The one who can pull the sword,’ Porourangi laughed hollowly. ‘There are a few more young boys he’s found. One of them may be the one.’

Porourangi fell silent. I saw Koro Apirana rocking in his chair, back and forth, back and forth. Kahu came up to him and put her hand in his. He pushed her away and she dissolved into the dark. The guitars played on.

Over the following weeks it was clear to me that Koro Apirana’s search for ‘the one’ had become an obsession. Ever since the birth of Kahu’s young sister he had become more intense and brooding. Perhaps aware of his own mortality, he wanted to make sure that the succession in the present generation was done, and done well. But in doing so he was pushing away the one who had always adored him, Kahu herself.

‘You’d think the sun shone out of his —’ Nanny Flowers said rudely. Kahu had come to the homestead that morning riding a horse, with the news that she’d come first in her Maori class. Nanny Flowers had watched as Koro Apirana had dismissed the young girl. ‘I don’t know why she keeps on with him.’

‘I know why,’ I said to Nanny Flowers. ‘You remember when she bit his toe? Even then she was telling him, “Yeah, don’t think you’re going to keep me out of this!” ’

Nanny Flowers shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, whatever it is, Kahu is sure a sucker for punishment, the poor kid. Must be my Muriwai breed. Or Mihi.’

Mihi Kotukutuku had been the mother of Ta Eruera, who had been Nanny’s cousin, and we loved the stories of Mihi’s exploits. She was a big chief, descended as she was from Apanui, after whom Nanny’s tribe was named. The story we liked best was the one telling how Mihi had stood on a sacred ground at Rotorua. ‘Sit down,’ a chief had yelled, enraged. ‘Sit down,’ because women weren’t supposed to stand up and speak on sacred ground. But Mihi had replied, ‘No you sit down! I am a senior line to yours!’ Not only that, but Mihi had then turned her back to him, bent over, lifted up her petticoats and said, ‘Anyway, here is the place where you come from!’ In this way Mihi had emphasised that all men are born of women.

We sat there on the verandah, talking about Kahu and how beautiful she was, both inside and outside. She had no guile. She had no envy. She had no jealousy. As we were talking, we saw Koro Apirana going down to the school where seven boys were waiting.

‘Them’s the contenders,’ Nanny Flowers said. ‘One of them’s going to be the Rocky of Whangara.’

Suddenly Kahu arrived, dawdling from the opposite direction. She looked so disconsolate and sad. Then she saw Koro Apirana. Her face lit up and she ran to him, crying ‘Paka! Oh! Paka!’

He turned to her quickly. ‘Go back,’ he said. ‘Go away. You are of no use to me.’

Kahu stopped in her tracks. I thought she would cry, but she knitted her eyebrows and gave him a look of such frustration that I could almost hear her saying to herself, ‘You just wait, Paka, you just wait.’ Then she skipped over to us as if nothing had happened.

I was lucky enough to get a job in town stacking timber in a timber yard and delivering orders to contractors on site. Every morning I’d beep the horn of my motorbike as I passed Porourangi’s, to remind Kahu it was time for her to get out of bed for school. I soon began to stop and wait until I saw her head poking above the window-sill to let me know she was awake. ‘Thank you, Uncle Rawiri,’ she would call as I roared off to work.

Sometimes after work I would find Kahu waiting at the highway for me. ‘I came down to welcome you home,’ she would explain. ‘Nanny doesn’t want any help today. Can I have a ride on your bike? I can ? Oh, neat .’ She would clamber on behind me and hold on tight. As we negotiated the track to the village I would be swept away by her ingenuous chatter. ‘Did you have a good day, Uncle? I had a neat day except for maths, yuk, but if I want to go to university I have to learn things I don’t like. Did you go to university, Uncle? Koro says it’s a waste of time for a girl to go. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t a girl. Then Koro would love me more than he does. But I don’t mind. What’s it like being a boy, Uncle? Have you got a girlfriend? There’s a boy at school who keeps following me around. I said to him that he should try Linda. She likes boys. As for me, I’ve only got one boyfriend. No, two . No, three . Koro, Daddy and you . Did you miss me in Australia, Uncle? Did you like Papua New Guinea? Nanny Flowers thought you’d end up in a pot over a fire. She’s a hardcase, isn’t she! You didn’t forget me, Uncle, did you? You didn’t, eh? Well, thank you for the ride, Uncle Rawiri. See you tomorrow. Bye now.’ With an ill-aimed kiss and a hug, and a whirl of white dress, she would be gone.

The end of the school year came, and the school break-up ceremony was to be held on a Friday evening. Kahu had sent invitations to the whole family and included the boys in the list. ‘You are cordially invited,’ the card read, ‘to the school prizegiving and I do hope you are able to attend. No RSVP is required. Love, Kahutia Te Rangi. P.S. No leather jackets please, as this is a formal occasion. P.P.S. Please park all motorbikes in the area provided and not in the Head- master’s parking space like last year. I do not wish to be embraced again.’

On the night of the break-up ceremony, Nanny Flowers said to me, as she was getting dressed. ‘What’s this word “embraced”?’

‘I think she means “embarrassed”,’ I said.

‘Well, how do I look?’ Nanny asked.

She was feeling very pleased with herself. She had let out the dress I had bought her and added lime-green panels to the sides. Nanny was colour blind and thought they were red. I gulped hard. ‘You look like a duchess,’ I lied.

‘Not like a queen?’ Nanny asked, offended. ‘Well, I’ll soon fix that.’ Oh no, not the hat . It must have looked wonderful in the 1930s but that was ages ago. Ever since, she had added a bit of this and a bit of that until it looked just like something out of her vegetable garden.

‘Oh,’ I swallowed, ‘you look out of this world.’

She giggled coyly. We made our way out to Porourangi’s car. Kahu’s face gleamed out at us.

‘Oh you look lovely,’ she said to Nanny, ‘but there’s something wrong with your hat.’ She made a space for Nanny and said to her, ‘Come and sit by me, darling, and I’ll fix it for you.’

Porourangi whispered to me, ‘Couldn’t you stop the old lady? Her and her blinking hat.’

I was having hysterics. In the back seat Kahu was adding some feathers and flowers and what looked like weeds. The strange thing was that in fact the additions made the hat just right.