Rārangi Pūtahi
I first wrote a much shorter version of this piece in 2018 – the day the man knocked at my door – but something was missing. When I reframed the story within the context of my own whakapapa journey, and also addressed the different versions of ourselves we all have, the story began to come together. This meant that, rather than singling out the differences between the man at the door and me, I could focus on our commonalities.
My whakapapa lines are still blurred, but the journey continues.
I know something isn’t right the moment I hear four knocks on our front door. I’ve got my hands in the sink, scraping Rice Bubbles off cereal bowls. The lunchboxes are half packed, and empty school bags dangle from their hooks. I’m thinking about the day ahead – opening then closing the filing cabinets in my mind – trying to decide which story on my desk needs editing first. It’s like this, being a mum and a writer, a constant tension between doing dishes and writing words – the two things inhabiting completely different worlds. Or, maybe it’s more like having to shift between two versions of me within the world, with the daily switching leaving the edges of me blurred. But anyway, there I am at the sink, when I hear four tentative knocks sound out.
My hands pause, fingertips resting on the dish brush. I look up, ears pricked for where the kids are in the house.
‘Go to the bathroom and clean your teeth, girls!’ I call out.
‘Who’s at the door?’ asks Hazel.
Good question, I think, drying my hands on a tea towel. ‘Probably just a courier.’
But couriers always press the buzzer, and it’s too early for Mum or my sister, and no one else has the gate code. I head down the hall, pulling tight my dressing gown cord. Then it happens again: four taps, louder this time.
‘Coming!’ I call out.
Through the long, narrow gap I create between door and frame there is a stripe of man. Māori, about 30. Tall, black jeans, red hoodie, and a black New York Yankees cap. There’s something skittish about him – in the way he tugs at the peak of his cap and shifts his weight from one foot to the other – that sends prickles washing over my skull. I swallow. Make the stripe of him slightly wider. It’s strange how quickly your mind works when you’re uneasy; images start to slide themselves onto your mind, like the optometrist lenses dropped into those big heavy frames at an eye test. Lens one: school dad? No. Lens two: courier driver? No. Have we met before? No. I press my shoulder into the doorframe, wedging myself in the gap between inside and out.
‘Can I help you?’ I say.
‘I need your help,’ the man says, then steps forward, as if to come in.
‘Sorry. Stop!’ My heart lurches into my throat, my mind reaching out towards the girls standing at the sink on their purple stool.
‘What’s happened?’ I say. ‘How did you get in?’
‘Can you please call the police?’
It’s as if a thimbleful of cool water has been tipped down my collar and instantly, I feel isolated and interminably female.
‘Jez?’ I call out, hoping my husband has come inside from the shed. ‘Tell me what’s happened,’ I repeat.
And down come the lenses again. Lens one: a slain body bleeding on the street. Lens two: a car crunched against a power pole. Lens three: a man’s fingers squeezing my throat. I peer outside and scan the sky, and the rim of sea that’s visible between the pōhutukawa over at the reserve, trying to intuit which lens it might be. But there is nothing. Just the closed white gate and the power lines slashing the sky. I observe him – darting onyx eyes with dark crescents beneath, frayed cuffs, ochre stained fingertips – and conclude he must be high, or mentally unstable, for something is definitely awry.
‘Please, I need your help,’ he says. ‘I can’t go back out there.’
Two pairs of footsteps down the hall, two little girls pressing against my thighs. I push them back, out of reach. They seem to know not to ask questions.
‘Okay, we can help you,’ I say.
The man holds his hands, palms together, between his thighs like an upside down prayer, his face dappled with a beautiful light that’s making him squint. I look up – it’s coming from the silver disco ball left hanging from the porch roof after last year’s birthday. Mosaic light, spooked eyes. He steps forward again and from some primal place inside my brain there’s an imposing voice telling me he must not cross the threshold.
And then Jez is here; he pushes past me and through the stripe of space into the wide-open world. He herds the man away from the door, away from the children and me. My throat is dry. The disco ball sways.
‘Who is that man?’ whispers Georgia.
My arm curls over her shoulder. ‘Shhhh, tell you soon.’
‘What’s up mate?’ Jez asks, voice sharp. ‘How did you get onto our property?’
‘I’m sorry,’ the man says. ‘I climbed the fence, I had to get away. I’m in danger.’
Jez walks down the path towards the gate. ‘Come and show me.’
‘No!’
I flinch.
‘I can’t go out there, they’ll see me,’ the man says.
I’m breathing, summoning my intuition, gauging the threat. My whole body reacts, ready to fight or flee: skull prickling, heart thumping. Jez stands on tiptoes to look over the fence, then turns to me and shrugs.
‘Please, man, can you call the police?’ He sits down on the front steps and pulls his red jacket around him. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t wear this,’ he says, now shrugging it off. ‘The colour. Red. Too distinctive.’
Jez mouths something to me.
‘What?’ I mouth back.
He tries again. ‘Gang,’ he’s saying, and I get it. Red and black are Mongrel Mob colours.
While Jez phones the police I go inside to calm the girls, who appear more excited than scared. I get them busy colouring in, then pour a cup of water. The half-scrubbed bowls languish in the sink. Schoolbags still dangle from hooks. My fingers are on the tap, moving the lever from right to left, and as I stand there at the bench, it’s as though the edges of me are dissolving: a version of me wants to help the man outside, but another version is drenched in fear, unable to decode the situation. I place the cup on the bench and watch my girls colouring, inside the lines and out.
It feels like the time, years ago, as a teenager, when I’d pulled to a stop at a red light in my old Mazda at a Queen Street intersection, on the way home from uni. Just as I’m changing tapes – probably the Chilli Peppers or Lenny Kravitz or Prince – the passenger door flings open and a dishevelled looking woman, whom I’ve never seen before, slides into the passenger seat.
‘Stop! What are you doing?’ I say.
My senses are alight as I absorb her holey green jumper, grey trackies, and bright pink slippers. The smell of unwashed hair and stale smoke. My hands grip the steering wheel, heart free-falling to belly.
‘I just really need a lift. Can you take me up to Ponsonby?’ she says.
There’s no music, just a tape in the mouth of the player, and then the light turns green. I look across at her, she’s staring straight ahead and I can see she’s been crying. The car behind me toots and I have no choice but to drive on. That’s the same feeling I have now, more than twenty years later, of my body being on full alert, and coming up with two entirely different scenarios. Am I in danger, or is this person in genuine need?
Luckily, that time on Queen Street, nothing bad happened, and I dropped the woman on Ponsonby Road, where she shuffled away without waving. Looking back now, I wonder why I didn’t just pull over. Get out of my car and demand that she get the fuck out. Or drive straight to the police station. That’s what I’d do now. That’s what I hope my daughters would do, when they’re older. I wasn’t brave enough or sure enough of who I was, then, to take a stand. The edges of my identity were too permeable. But things are different now, aren’t they?
Outside, with the man still sitting on our front steps and Jez still on the phone to the police, I realise something: I need to sharpen up the blurriness of this scene. The only way to do this, I think, is to slide over it a lens of common ground. I imagine it like a Venn diagram, with each of our circles intersecting in the middle. There in the middle I see written, ‘he’s a son, I’m a mother.’ And this: ‘He’s Māori, I’m Māori’. But the minute I think those words – I’m Māori – they begin to dissolve from black font into thousands of nonsensical pixels. I am Māori, I say out loud, and my daughters look at me, then at each other, giggling.
It was only five years ago, at 37 – 17 years after Dad had died – that I discovered my Māori tūpuna. After months of research I unearthed the name of Dad’s birth father, and traced that line back to 1837, back to Kohukohu in the Hokianga, back to my great-great-great grandmother, Witaparene Minarapa, and back to her Ngāti Whātua chief father, Mohi Te Hokaanga II, and his wife Harihura. Since then, I’ve spent many hours researching iwi and hapū, but have more questions than answers. These tribal lines are blurred.
I pick up the glass of water and head back down the hall.
‘Kia ora,’ I say, offering it to the man.
He shakes his head, but takes the cup anyway and raises it to his lips. I swallow, take a breath.
‘Ko Caroline toku ingoa,’ I say, holding out my hand.
His brown eyes flick up to meet mine.
‘Ko wai tō ingoa?’ I say, stumbling over the long o of tō.
‘Lloyd,’ he says. ‘Lloyd Paku.’ (1) He nods over at Jez talking on the phone. ‘The police’ll find my name pretty quick, but I’ve changed, people change.’
He shakes my hand for a millisecond, puts the cup down on the steps, then stuffs both hands into the pockets of his jeans. My breath is shallow in my chest. The pōhutukawa across the road are still. A kingfisher, a kōtare, watches us from a power line spanning the street.
‘Nō hea koe? Where are you from?’ I ask, hardly believing I can recall more than kia ora from my beginner te reo classes.
‘I cannot kōrero too well,’ he says. ‘But I’m from Kennedy Bay, Coromandel, we’ve been gifted land there.’
I remember reading about a land dispute at Kennedy Bay a few years ago.
‘What iwi are you?’ I ask.
‘Ngāpuhi,’ he says, ‘and Ngāti Porou.’
His eyes dart around the yard, scanning, it seems, for danger. He’s mentally unwell, not high, my instincts tell me at this point.
‘My whānau is from Kaipara and Hokianga,’ I say. ‘Te Roroa and Te-Uri-O-Hau – or at least I think that’s right, I’m still trying to work it out. Ngāti Whātua, and Ngāpuhi, like you.’
His eyes stop moving and come to rest on mine. He looks calmer, I think. As am I. We have whakapapa in common.
‘Anything you need? Kai? More water?’ I ask.
He shakes his head. I nip back inside to check on the girls, before grabbing my phone and typing his name into Google. Scanning the results page, my eyes are drawn to a 2002 Herald article. Fuck. Lloyd was wanted for aggravated robbery. He is considered dangerous, I read, so should not be approached. I steady myself at the bench, careful not to let the kids see my face.
I’ve changed, he’d said, people change. And they do. I’m no longer that girl in the car on Queen Street, so maybe he’s not the guy in the paper anymore. Regardless, before I head back outside, I remind the girls to stay inside.
‘So, can you tell me what happened out there,’ I say to Lloyd, gesturing to the street.
He shakes his head. ‘I can’t, they’ll get me.’
‘Who’ll get you?’
‘Them, the ones who found out. They’re after me.’
He leans in towards me. My throat constricts. Jez takes a step towards us.
‘I’ve realised what it is,’ Lloyd whispers.
‘And what is it?’ I say, my voice squeaky, unreliable.
A myna bird screeches overhead and lands in the tī kōuka tree, the leaves swaying like seaweed.
‘They’re actually gods from the underworld,’ he says. ‘They’ll tear me apart.’
‘No wonder you’re scared,’ I say. The pit of my stomach curves upwards, underarms prickling.
Jez has finally been put through to the right department and he’s telling them we have a man in our yard who seems confused and is refusing to leave.
‘His name is Lloyd Paku,’ I call over. ‘From Kennedy Bay in the Coromandel.’
Turning back to Lloyd, I ask if the gods had spoken to him.
‘They’re watching for me,’ he says, kicking a stone off the path. ‘They’re going to get me. You don’t understand.’
‘Try me,’ I say.
He leans in close, his breath sour. ‘I have to stop living my life as it has been,’ he says. ‘It’s all over.’
Cool air rushes out of my lungs and Lloyd collapses back down to the step, head in hands. I want to say something profound – he’s already erasing the line around himself, trying to disappear – but only manage platitudes. Poor bugger, I think. Real or not, on our street on this cold, clear winter’s morning, he’d seen things I couldn’t. Things that had hunted him down.
Eventually, a police car pulls into the driveway, blue and red lights flashing but siren silent. A male and a female police officer walk in, male officer with a notebook in hand. Out on the street a man walking his dog pauses to rubberneck, and our neighbour Nancy calls out, ‘Are you okay?’ I give her a thumbs up.
Lloyd asks the police to take him to the station.
‘We’re not a security company,’ the male officer replies.
‘I know this looks bad,’ Lloyd says, ‘being on these people’s property and all, but it’s the gang, the Mongrel Mob, they’re going to…’
‘Going to what?’
‘Can’t say,’ he says.
‘Do you have anything on you?’ the female officer asks, her hand on her baton.
Lloyd shakes his head. ‘No, nothing.’
The officers have bookended him on the path and he appears glad for that.
‘When was the last time you took drugs of any kind?’ she says.
‘Ages ago,’ says Lloyd. ‘I know what this looks like, but…’
‘We can’t help you if you don’t tell us what you’re afraid of,’ says the male officer.
I think of what Lloyd told me about the gods from the underworld and that the police should know that. But before I can say anything the male officer speaks again.
‘Firstly, let’s get off these people’s property. We can take you back to your accommodation if you tell us where that is.’
They escort Lloyd down the path towards the gate. He looks back over his shoulder at me.
‘Awhina mai,’ he says, his voice a smudge of cloud in the sky.
Mai, I’ve heard before, as in kōrero mai, meaning talk to me. Or whakarongo mai, listen to me. But what’s awhina? And then I remember. Awhina means help. Help me. I step towards him and touch his arm.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ I say. ‘Go with them, they’ll help you.’
The policewoman frowns at me, and Jez raises his eyebrows. Even after the police car drives off with Lloyd in the back seat, the kōtare still stands guard above us, and I shake my head in disbelief, for I'd researched the sacred kingfisher for a story, and found out they’re a sign of mental and spiritual activity. The air seems to bristle with it. I feel the edges of me pulse, and I am both inside and outside my body. I go back into the house, back to the cereal bowls and schoolbags and stories. I’ll never find out if Lloyd has a place to go, or whānau in Auckland to take care of him. Damnit, I think, dropping the dish brush into the metal sink with a clang. I should have done more.
That night I lie in bed, mulling over what happened, sliding lens after lens down over the scene, trying to find a clearer view. I think of the heat of Lloyd’s skin through his hoodie when I touched his arm; and I think of the wanted-for-robbery version of him, and the version that sought help at our front door. I think of the tiny overlap of our Venn diagrams. I think of the younger me in my car on Queen Street, and the me that hugs my kids and laughs with my husband, and the me that rises before the sun to write. I think of my Māori and my Pākehā blood, and I think of pōhutukawa and tī kōuka and kōtare and the ocean. All of these things, tonight, are somehow within me – barely contained by a permeable outline – and it may all evolve tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. But for tonight, all the lines intersect. Rārangi pūtahi.
(1) Not his real name.