The Thrill of Falling: Stories

CHAPTER ONE THE GREAT GOD, ’ORO

When I was born I was very sickly.

My mother, May, told me that I had breathing problems and for three weeks I battled for life in an incubator in Gisborne Hospital. ‘Your father and I were told that you might not live and that it was touch and go. We were very distressed.’

Of all the visitors who came to watch over me, none was as vigilant as my grandfather, Koro. He would stand watching me, my deathly pale body wrapped in tubes to keep me breathing. And I know that he prayed incessantly to the great God, ’Oro:

‘Almighty One, son of Ta’aroa and Hina-tu-a-uta, come down from the highest heaven, Te Raituitai, and look kindly upon this poor child. Forsake him not, o ’Oro.’

Not only that, but, according to Mum, Koro decided to give me the name of ’Oro’s most famous priest, Tupaea, even though that name was reserved for my Uncle Tu-Bad’s son, who was instead called Seth.

‘He thought that might help,’ Mum said.

It must have done because I survived.

Throughout our family history there has always been someone named Tupaea.

Koro’s first name, for instance, was Tupaea and he always demanded that people not shorten it.

Behind his back, however, most people called him Big Tu (a few who didn’t like his lofty manners would add ‘tae’ to his name) and me Little Tu to differentiate us — and often they called me Little Tutae in public.

No matter how many times I fought for my honour, the name stuck: Little Shit.

This is the story of the very first Tupaea, the one who came from over the sea to Aotearoa New Zealand.

He’s the one to blame for the way I turned out.

CHAPTER TWO UAWA

I struggled into boyhood, an only child with an inhaler as my constant companion.

I became the kind of snotty-nosed eleven-year-old kid with spiky hair and shirt-tail hanging out of his pants who, at our small native primary school, was always on the sideline during school sports days. And although nobody could keep me out of the haka team, I was the skinny brown boy with the big hopeful eyes they tried to hide in the back.

Was I to blame, then, that denied a chance at real life, I would develop a fantastic imagination?

During class, I took to looking out the window so often that my teachers and other classmates worked around me and left me alone to daydream. The main road between Uawa and Gisborne ran past our school, and watching the cars, trucks, motorbikes and buses zooming by kept my imagination busy. ‘Where are they going?’ I asked myself as I pressed my nose against the window. ‘What kind of people are in the buses?’

Wondering who those people were, as they sped by, and what adventures they would have when they reached their destination, was more engaging than listening to Four-Eyes Wilson drone on and on about some dead English poet.

I often fantasised that there’d been a mix-up in heaven on the day I was born and, instead of being delivered to some movie star in Hollywood, I got sent to Uawa. One of these days, though, I was going to hit that road, you wouldn’t see me for dust, and go to … America, yeah, and bang on the door of some Hollywood mansion and, when Arnie opened the door I would yell, ‘Daaaaaad!’ Nobody would see me for dust.

‘Tupaea, are you with us? On the planet?’

‘Oh, s-s-sorry, Mr Wilson.’

Mr Wilson couldn’t help himself. ‘He’s b-b-back, everyone!’

After school was over, I escaped the jeers of my schoolmates.

‘Where are you g-g-going, Little Tu?’

I pushed past them and ran out the school gates and down the road. When I got to the bridge, about half a mile away, I opened my schoolbag to look for my inhaler; I was rasping for breath. Where was it? I couldn’t find it and in despair I stopped looking for it and leapt onto the railing.

I wanted to forget who I was.

The tide was coming into the channel below as I jumped.

Later that day, I arrived at the marae.

There were over five hundred people, seated on chairs facing the meeting house. Oh no, the welcome to the Pakeha guests, sheltering under umbrellas from the hot sun, had already started. And where was Mum? Sitting in the very front, watching the proceedings with the women as usual: no way would I be able to sneak in unseen.

‘Why is your hair wet?’ she asked when I joined her. ‘And have you been home and changed your clothes? No wonder you’re late.’

I tried to get my words working, Come out, come out wherever you are. ‘I–I-I’m sorry, M-mum …’

She didn’t wait for me to complete my answer. ‘He’s like his koro,’ she said to Mrs Rapaki, who was sitting nearby. ‘Always wants to look his best.’

Mum was always speaking for me.

I took refuge in my own thoughts. Wouldn’t you if you had the choice of sitting in the hot sun listening to long and interminable debates on Maori land or … going to Mars like Arnie did in Total Recall? Arnold Schwarzenegger was the man.

Koro, however, had insisted that all our family, including the children, be present. The government had sent a ministerial representative today to settle long-standing tribal grievances over confiscated land. That was him, prime steak in fancy duds, trying to smile, pretending to be happy. ‘It’s important for the mokos as well as for the grown-ups,’ Koro had said. ‘After all, they will inherit the land we get back.’ But all those speeches to listen to as the elders debated whether to accept the government’s offer, man oh man! And some of those rangatira were so in love with their own voices that they droned on and on. It was all right for them, sheltering on the paepae, the talking bench of chiefs in the shade of the meeting house, but what about the poor commoners sitting in the blistering heat?

Listening with the rest of the crowd, I counted the elders. Oh, why was I ever born! There were five or six more to go and, because rangatira always spoke in ascending order of importance, Koro was last. The old people on the marae relished the debate, sure, but with my limited understanding of the language I could only understand bits and pieces of what was being said. Nevertheless I did my best to concentrate, closing my eyes and trying to follow the various arguments.

‘Te kai o te rangatira he korero,’ Mum whispered to me, jabbing me with an elbow when I gave up and started to pick my nose. ‘Speechmaking is the food of chiefs.’

The elders were outdoing each other in castigating the government for its offer. They were certainly giving the poor official his beans.

‘Sit up,’ Mum said. ‘It’s Koro’s turn now.’

Koro always came last because he was from a senior ancestral line.

Tall and stately, he liked to wear a hat with a turned-down brim, but he always took it off when he stood to speak, as a mark of respect to the marae. It was also a magician’s trick as it revealed his silver hair, combed to perfection; he knew this irritated most of the other elders, who were balding.

Koro was nattily dressed too, in suit jacket and grey trousers. The main reason why he was formally attired was that he was a Maori Land Court official and had a particular station in life to live up to. Some of the other elders, no offence, looked like they’d just arrived from the cowshed. Koro’s unapologetic formality and dress was a further affront to them.

‘Keeps them in their place,’ Mum used to say, ‘just in case they’re thinking of a making a takeover bid for that final speaking slot on the paepae.’

Koro liked to dress like the true rangatira that he was. If he’d been living in the old days, he probably would have worn a beautiful feather cloak. Slaves would have carried him onto the marae so that his feet didn’t have to touch the ground, and he would have been fed by little boys putting morsels of food in his mouth so he wouldn’t have to soil his own fingers by touching them; the poor government man would have been on the menu.

He also spoke last because he was renowned for his eloquence and skill in the reo.

‘Te toto o te tangata, he kai,’ he began, deploying a well-known proverb. ‘Te oranga o te tangata, he whenua.’ The blood of man is supplied by food, the sustenance of man is supplied by land.

At his words, a loud sigh came from the people. ‘You can always count on Big Tu to express how we feel.’

‘Without the land we die as a people. Therefore, return it to us.’

No ifs, no buts, no maybes.

‘Take that message back to your government.’

And then he sat down.

The official was gobsmacked. I saw him turn to a flunky: ‘That’s it?’

Yes, that was it. After all, hadn’t Koro’s … er … lieutenants already conveyed his message?

I turned to Mrs Rapaki. ‘I’m named after Koro,’ I said, as if she didn’t know.

CHAPTER THREE WHAT’S IN A NAME?

It’s been twelve years since I thought of that day when I jumped off the bridge at Uawa.

That’s the Maori name of the place where I was born. The European name is Tolaga Bay, and the bridge is the one you cross if you are driving north into the township. Uawa or Tolaga Bay, what’s the difference! The town is still a place nobody ever heard of in a country way down at the bottom of the world. There’s no main street; instead there’s State Highway 35, which is the road linking Gisborne — or Gizzy as locals call it — with all the small communities of the East Coast.

The place hasn’t changed much either: a couple of blocks of shops, Hauiti marae on a road just before the bridge, a war memorial, a pub and a school with a playround and that’s about it. Not far away, Hikurangi Mountain, a strange humpy silhouette that’s spoken of in reverent whispers, looms over the land and sea; it’s the first place in the world to see the sun.

But I’ve changed and, sometimes, when I think back to the boy I was, I can scarcely recognise myself. Sure, I was unhappy at school: who likes to be mocked as incessantly as I was? Not that I was bullied in any way — more ridiculed, I guess; I’m not sure which is worse.

I can still see myself running through the school gates that day, and hear my heart thudding as I stood on the bridge. My lungs were hurting; I was trying hard to breathe in. I can remember looking to my left at my arm outstretched and then to my right to the tips of the fingers, and feeling the wind from the sea in my face. And when I took the first step, wheezing heavily, from the bridge into space …

One moment I was gasping for breath and then, all of a sudden, my lungs cleared.

And oh, for one moment there was a sense of weightlessness.

I’ve never forgotten that feeling.

All my life I think I’ve been trying to find it again, that clarity, as if all the world’s air were rushing into me and filling my lungs to the brim.

And that sense of defying gravity before the thrill of falling.

In those days, my parents May and Wally lived in a small house in Uawa.

Dad was a good-looking dude, quiet, but reputed to be a scrapper; he worked as a truck driver for the forestry. Mum was petite, curvy (whenever she put on weight and her waist disappeared Dad said he didn’t mind that she was built for comfort), businesslike and, because Dad was quiet, she often spoke for him too; you didn’t have to guess who was the boss in our family. Mum was a nurse in the hospital at nearby Te Puia, about an hour’s drive away. Sometimes she would take me there whenever my asthma was playing up, pedal to the floor and watch out anybody coming in the opposite direction. The hospital had been built around natural springs where, in the old days, the Maori would carry people to be healed in the bubbling waters, and it subsequently became a well-known destination for patients with tuberculosis. The hospital had a pool which I’d swim in, and good doctors who put me through therapies to increase my lung capacity and help my breathing.

At school I could well have stayed on the sideline or in the back line, always picked last in school games, but my exercises made me into a trier. At one concert, I stubbornly put my name down to do a breakdance and, billed as ‘The Terminator from the Future’, I appeared from artificial smoke, spinning and adding a bit of Michael Jackson moonwalking. Although my cousin Seth and others at school may have meant it sarcastically, I was very proud when I was proclaimed a mon-star, and a big hit.

As for Koro, he lived with my nan in an older, established part of the township, in a large rambling house down on the beach: two gables, a verandah facing the sea, and a driveway trimmed with flax. In summer, the pohutukawa grove behind the house blazed with crimson blossoms.

Nan’s name was Esther and she had her hair set every Friday at the local salon. She liked to wear floral dresses, never went without lipstick and was totally devoted to looking after Koro: ironing his shirts, pressing his trousers, shining his shoes and sending him off to work with a kiss on the cheek. She was an old-fashioned homemaker and she liked it that way. And she hated my inhaler! Whenever I went to use it, she would rush into the kitchen to boil some water and put some horrible-smelling herbs in it. Scolding me, she would drape a towel over my head and order me to breathe the fumes in.

‘Please, N-n-nan,’ I would splutter. ‘I’m all better now,’ even if I wasn’t.

Like most of the Mahanas — that’s our surname — Nan had shown she had good fertility and produced for Koro three sons as well as my mother, who was the youngest in the family. Actually, our surname should also have been Tupaea, except that Koro was from a female branch: although his mother was a Tupaea and she was the eldest, she married a Mahana, hence Koro’s name, Tupaea Mahana. This was always a particularly painful cross for Koro to bear. Though we had good relations with the other Tupaea families along the coast, especially at Anaura, sometimes some upstart would try to put Koro down on the marae by saying, ‘You’re just a Mahana.’

Koro would swiftly put them in their place. He was known for his devastating use of language, which he brandished as mightily as others might wield a taiaha. You attempted to pull rank on him at your peril. ‘That may be,’ he would counter, ‘but my mother was the first born while all her brothers, indeed, all your male ancestors too, were still in their nappies.’

Every Sunday Mum and Dad took me to family lunch with my grandparents. There, we joined my uncles Tu-Bad, Bo and Charlie and their families for the family roast. Sometimes Nan would set trestles outside under the pohutukawa where there was a breeze, and close to her sons as they tended the earth oven; she loved to get a whiff of the hangi.

I knew that Uncle Tu-Bad’s name was really Tupaea like Koro’s and mine. ‘How did he get the name he has now?’ I asked Mum one day.

‘Well,’ she pursed her lips, ‘Koro expected that he would be the one to assume the mantle of our ancestor so when he was a young boy he was sent to Te Aute College. However, he was expelled for skipping class and bad behaviour and, on his return to Uawa people would say, “Oh, that’s too bad.” They said it so often that the name stuck.’

While Mum had only had one son, my uncles and their wives had spawned sixteen cuzzie-bros between them, including Seth, Abe and Spade, who were my nearest male cousins by age.

I think in the early days this evidence that she wasn’t as productive as they were must have been painful for Mum. Koro, however, didn’t think that it was her fault at all. As he once remarked, ‘I always knew Wally’s blood was a bit … thin.’ He was referring to Dad’s ancestry (he came from a lesser tribe that lived ‘over the hill’) and social standing. However, what can you do when your daughter looks like she’s being left on the shelf because all the eligible Maori boys of her class and standing are going to university and meeting Pakeha girls?

As if, anyway, any local boy would marry the big chief’s daughter.

Get off the grass.

Apart from Sunday roasts, there was one other particular day every year that the family reserved for a special feast day and celebration: 23 October.

The annual gathering when I was twelve was typical. We all assembled for the usual fresh-air banquet of roast pig, and Dad and my uncles had been out diving for paua, kina and crayfish.

It was lovely under the trees, with the sun shining on the sea. After we’d eaten the pig, Uncle Tu-Bad leant back in his chair, puku full, and said to Nan Esther, ‘Well, Ma, now we can breathe easy. That pig was wandering along the road so if it belonged to somebody they won’t know it was me who picked it up because we’ve eaten the evidence.’

It was a joke (or was it?) but Koro got very upset at the thought that he, a court official, had eaten stolen goods. Beneath his irritation something else smouldered.

‘Jeez, Pa,’ Uncle moaned, ‘lighten up, willya?’

Once Koro had calmed down, the family moved to the usual dessert of sponge cakes, jelly and ice cream, and then the adults shifted to wine, served in Nan Esther’s special crystal goblets. My uncles and Dad were more partial to beer but, hey, this was Koro’s house and beer was a bit common. As for me and my cousins, we were allowed fizzy drink, but I saw Seth, Abe and Spade switch their lemonade for chardonnay.

Koro stood up, tapped his glass for attention and began his usual toast. ‘It was on this day in 1769,’ he began, ‘that the man who began our clan arrived at Uawa and made himself known to us. He came in his waka from Havai’i, which we call Hawaiki, far across the sea, and he was descended from the original Ancients, the Maohi, who once ruled the world as far as the eye could see.’ He was using his arms to indicate, sweeping from one side of the sea’s horizon to the other. ‘They stretched all the way from Hawai’i in the north, Tahiti and Rapanui, Easter Island, in the west and down to us, Aotearoa, in the south-east.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Uncle Bo muttered, somewhat discourteously.

‘Today,’ Koro continued, ‘that great Polynesian nation has been carved up by the English, French, Germans, Dutch and Americans, and now Hawaiki is known as Raiatea, near Tahiti, in French Polynesia. It was there that Tupaea was born. All the highest and greatest bloodlines of Hawaiki chiefs converged in him and, as a boy, he was ordained as an acolyte in the service of the God ’Oro, Atua of the Maohi.’

My uncles’ eyes were getting that glazed ‘We’ve heard it all before’ look.

‘In our ancestor’s day, the great national marae and temple consecrated to ’Oro’s worship on earth was Taputapuatea, at Opoa. When it was completed the priests and people beseeched ’Oro to come down from the highest heavens and live among them. Lo and behold, a strong south-westerly wind began to blow and, amid flashes of lightning, ’Oro rode down it. He entered the temple and was acknowledged as the supreme god of the earth and the air. Thus his reign in Tahiti began.’

Koro lifted his glass and we followed him. ‘It was ’Oro who sent our ancestor to us,’ he said, taking the first sip. ‘Thus we give thanks to him.’

‘To ’Oro,’ we responded.

CHAPTER FOUR HOUSE OF MEMORIES

Our family grew up surrounded by stories about the original Tupaea, the one who began our dynasty in New Zealand.

Indeed, Koro took it for granted that we would absorb the narratives by some strange osmosis; he thought that because we had the blood of all the royal kings and queens of Tahiti in our veins that they ‘spoke’ to us too.

In particular, he felt that his son Uncle Tu-Bad (Koro never called him that) would overcome his limitations, now that he was an adult, and carry on the tradition of leadership in his generation. ‘When I die,’ he told Uncle during our family meetings, ‘you will take my place on the paepae.’

Koro had a large study off the front verandah overlooking the sea and, on one afternoon, while the rest of the family adjourned to other rooms to sleep off their kai, I overheard Uncle pleading with him to be set free of this obligation.

‘I can’t do it, Pa,’ he said, holding his head in his hands. ‘I’ve never been able to do it. Bo or Charlie would do a better job.’

The door to the study wasn’t quite closed. I knew I shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but I was mesmerised as I watched Koro facing his son. A huge Tupaea whakapapa chart entirely covered one wall. Two other walls had floor-to-ceiling bookcases. One was stacked with Koro’s genealogy books, carefully numbered and protected in plastic slip covers; open them and you would see his beautiful and clear handwriting. Another bookcase was filled with Maori Land Court records, copies of Hansard and out-of-print library books about the Maori people, especially our famous parliamentarian, Apirana Ngata. On a third wall were photographs, some very old, hand-coloured and in oval frames, of all our family ancestors. Koro also had metal cabinets full of genealogy books, maps and other memorabilia.

It was as if all that history was watching this struggle and witnessing the panic in Koro’s voice as he answered his son. ‘It has to be you,’ he said. ‘There isn’t any other son to do it.’ He had long ago realised that Bo and Charlie had no real interest in living up to the Tupaea legend. ‘I know you’ve always been reluctant to take up the role,’ he continued, ‘but you’re a late developer, that’s all. Can’t you remember when you were a boy how I would tell you the story of the tortoise and the hare?’

‘Yeah.’ Uncle Tu-Bad laughed. ‘That old story! Well, Pa, this tortoise will never make the finish line.’

‘Don’t give up,’ Koro answered. ‘There will come a time when you’ll rise to the challenge and when you do that, your family will all support you.’ The force of will in his voice was frightening.

I heard Uncle Tu-Bad moaning and saw him shaking his head, no, no, no. He was a big, burly man, fierce looking, but I’d always known him to be kind hearted. With a fierce cry he slammed his fist against a wall.

‘All I can say, Pa, is that you’d better not die any time soon.’

The news that Uncle Tu-Bad was hanging in there filled the family with relief. ‘He’s not a natural for the job,’ Mum said, ‘but I’m proud of my brother for trying to step up to the plate.’

It was in this atmosphere of renewed optimism that we arrived at Koro’s for Sunday lunch the following week where he told us of the Order of the Arioi.

‘One day,’ he began, ‘the God ’Oro decided to take a wife from among the children of men. He had two sisters, and he asked them, “Could you both help me find a bride?” They agreed and descended with him from their sky kingdom in Te Raituitai. Together the trio travelled throughout the Maohi nation inviting all the women, “Come and dance.” Although many of the dancers were beautiful, none of them appealed to ’Oro or his sisters, lacking in femininity and breeding.’

‘He was l-l-looking for someone like Nan, eh,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Koro answered, ‘someone who dressed as appropriately as her.’ He was referring to Nan Esther’s legendary modesty, always trying to keep her family in clothes that covered the entire body from neck to ankles.

‘Then,’ Koro continued, ‘just as ’Oro and his sisters were ready to give up, they found themselves in the vicinity of a red-ridged mountain. There, bathing at the foot of it, was a beautiful girl whose name was Vairumati.’ Koro saw that I was entranced by the story and ramped up the description a bit. ‘The old documents say that “her face was as the noontide light, and the lustre of her dark eyes shone forth like stars from the deep blue sky”. No wonder ’Oro was smitten. Although he returned to Te Ratuitai he asked his sisters to act as go-between.’

I was on a roll. ‘That’s how the gods b-b-behaved in those days, eh Koro?’

He nodded, approvingly. ‘They were always courtly and highly principled. Not like some of the dregs who live in Uawa.’

Seth jabbed me with his elbow. ‘Shut up, Little Tutae,’ he warned. ‘Otherwise we’ll be here all day.’

‘Anyway,’ Koro continued, ‘Vairumati was flattered that a god would give her attention and agreed that he could visit her. ’Oro was overjoyed when his sisters took the news back to him and he made a bridge from Te Ratuitai to earth, a rainbow which he could travel down to her home in the red-ridged mountain below.’

‘Was it like a slide, K-k-koro?’ I asked, edging away from Seth. I was really interested.

‘Maybe,’ he answered. ‘So began ’Oro’s courtship of Vairumati. On his first visit he conjured up a cloud to hide his descent and, when he emerged from the vapour and saw that Vairumati returned his interest, he took her as his wife.’

Took? Koro saw me open my mouth to ask a question … and he pressed the fast-forward button.

‘Every evening ’Oro …’ Koro decided to accommodate my fancy ‘… slid down the rainbow, and returned to Te Raituitai the next morning. And very soon Vairumati bore a son — ’

I opened my mouth again.

‘—who became a powerful ruler among men,’ Koro rushed on. ‘However, two of ’Oro’s god brothers became curious about his behaviour. Where did ’Oro go when he went down the rainbow? They set out to find the answer and saw him with Vairumati. Aue, but they should have brought gifts for the happy couple! Ashamed that they had come empty-handed, one of the gods transformed himself into a pig and the other into a bunch of red feathers and they presented themselves, in those ahua, to the two lovers. When Vairumati expressed her delight at the gifts, ’Oro decided to reward his brothers for their ingenuity.’

‘C-c-cool, Koro!’

Koro smiled. ‘’Oro transformed his brothers back into gods and constituted them …’

He was looking at Uncle Tu-Bad as he said the word.

‘… Arioi.’

On our way home that day, Mum and Dad were exchanging glances. Then Mum gave me a word of warning.

‘I wouldn’t appear too enthusiastic if I was you,’ she said.

In subsequent Sunday lessons, Koro told us how the Arioi quickly gained numerous followers and the worship of ’Oro spread quickly through all the islands of the Maiohi nation — and many pigs were gladly dedicated to ’Oro. Their leaders soon built temples and other sacred precincts on Hawaiki, Tahiti, Moorea, Maiaoiti, Huahine, Tahaa, Porapora and Maurua. Only high-ranking men and women were admitted and, because ’Oro and Vairumati had been beautiful, they had to be comely too. An important part of all the ceremonials was the carrying of a young pig to the temples where it was sacrificed and offered to ’Oro with red feathers.

So that was why we ate pork every 23 October.

And then the shit hit the fan.

Oh, there’d been rumours, but it wasn’t until Uncle Tu-Bad was arrested in a police sting that the news came out: he’d been cultivating weed in the backblocks behind Uawa. The operation had actually been the result of a patient surveillance and stakeout on a gang headquarters in Auckland. The police waited until they’d uncovered the courier trail, and it led them to the supplier on the East Coast — and eventually to Uncle Tu-Bad as one of the growers.

The arrests and subsequent trials in Auckland, Hamilton, Rotorua, Whakatane and Gisborne were reported on radio and television and in all the newspapers. The TV newsreader on one channel began the item by saying, ‘Among the accused caught in the recent nationwide drug bust was the son of prominent Maori court official, Tupaea Mahana.’

Koro, of course, was devastated. Not just by Uncle Tu-Bad’s guilt, but also by the shame of having himself and the family exposed to national scrutiny.

‘Why didn’t somebody tell me?’ he cried when the news broke. He was very angry with the family, especially when it appeared that Uncle Bo and Uncle Charlie and their wives knew about Uncle Tu-Bad’s activities, even Dad — I don’t think Mum did: if she’d known, she would have told Uncle to wise up.

Koro offered his resignation to the Maori Land Court, but it was declined: he was too good an official to lose. At the initial hearing in Gisborne, some people thought that he might use his influence to obtain a lighter sentence for Uncle Tu-Bad, but he didn’t: his eldest son was guilty and should face justice.

Like the other growers, Uncle was sentenced to two years in prison.

‘I wish I’d never named you Tupaea,’ Koro said to him. ‘Your ancestor will be grieving today.’

Uncle Tu-Bad’s eyes streamed with tears. And after Uncle went to prison, Koro moved swiftly to find somebody else over whose shoulders he could throw the mantle of Tupaea.

‘M-m-me?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes, the mana jumps a generation,’ Mum answered, trying to convince herself. ‘Now that your Uncle Tu-Bad hasn’t worked out, well, you seem to be the likeliest candidate. Ever since you were born, Koro’s always loved you. Not only that but …’ Mum bit her lip, knowing that her spotless reputation was to blame ‘… Pa’s furious with your uncles and that makes me, Dad and you flavour of the month.’

All I could feel was absolute terror. I clutched my inhaler, taking a deep draw on it.

‘And after all, you bear Tupaea’s name,’ Mum said.

CHAPTER FIVE ACOLYTE OF ’ORO

You know, Koro and Nan Esther’s house is still there on the beach at Uawa, No. 5 Pohutukawa Road. I’ve no idea why they should number it that way as there’s no 1, 2, 3 or 4, and the road goes on for a mile before you get to Roger Grant’s farm.

Koro still likes visitors. If you’re passing through Uawa, stop and say hello for me, eh? Tell him Little Tu sent you.

Don’t believe any of the stories he tells about me.

The mana skips a generation?

Well, what can you say when you’re only twelve, you want to please everybody and your mother puts the hard word on you? And who was I to disappoint Koro, the man who’d kept vigil over me when I was a baby and given the name of Tupaea to me rather than to Seth? So Koro told (not asked) Mum that I was to stay after every Sunday roast for extra tuition in Maohi history and culture; I think he felt that if he pressed automatic tuning in my head long enough, the ancestral broadcasts would come in loud and clear. Mum said yes (jumped) and Dad agreed (obeyed) because he never liked being disparaged by the Mahana family and always tried to please his father-in-law.

My uncles Bo and Charlie, and their wives, welcomed the fact that Koro had zeroed in on Mum, Wally and me when it came to what they called ‘all that Tupaea stuff’. So did Seth: he, Abe and Spade laughed at me, saying, ‘We’re glad that we’re not called Tupaea.’ And when my extra lessons began, Seth constantly asked me, ‘Does Koro have anything valuable? Any greenstone or whalebone? Any dollars?’ He hoped I’d be able to steal something that he could sell and, with the money, buy stuff to smuggle to his dad in prison.

On those Sunday afternoons, Mum helped Nan Esther clean and tidy up after lunch. Dad turned himself into a dogsbody by chopping Koro’s wood and doing odd jobs around the homestead and maybe obtaining a favoured look or two. Koro and I adjourned to the Holy of Holies, the corner of his library where he kept his archives about the Maohi and, especially, Tupaea. In the alcove was a rolltop desk and two chairs and, there, Koro began to seriously induct me into our family history.

The lessons began when he told me the worship of ’Oro became so widespread it reached the extremities of the Maohi nation, even to Aotearoa. So let me set the scene a bit with the day declining into darkness, and the sound of the sea soughing and sucking at the sand.

‘From around 700 AD,’ Koro began, ‘the time when Aotearoa began to be colonised by Maohi from Tahiti, all our tribal histories tell of journeys back and forth between New Zealand to Hawaiki. ’Oro’s priests were among that number, travelling the pathways illuminated in the heavens by the stars, not only to Aotearoa but also to other islands of the Fa’atau Aroha, the alliance of nations which worshipped him.’

Mum and Nan Esther were laughing in the kitchen and Dad was chopping wood out the back, but, already, I was putty in Koro’s hands.

‘They came in slim double canoes, and such pahi could make voyages of up to twenty days without provisioning. They were designed to skim the waves, their sails full before the wind. They would come down from Hawaiki to Rarotonga and thence to Aotearoa, which was in the direction of the morning sun.’

He went out onto the verandah to show me; I joined him there. ‘The priests would have come from that direction,’ he said; the sun was high above the brilliant ocean. ‘However, at some time in the fifteenth century, a comet plunged into seas just south of Aotearoa, creating an immense wall of water that struck the east coast.’ Koro made a chopping gesture with his hands. ‘Ka kotia te taitapu ki Hawaiki. The sacred seaway of the priests, especially from Hawaiki to Aotearoa and back, was cut.’

‘But ’Oro didn’t forget us, eh,’ I said.

Koro put an arm around my shoulder. ‘No, mokopuna, he didn’t.’

That evening, as we were driving home, Dad looked across at me and grinned. ‘How was it today?’ he asked.

I looked up at the evening sky. ‘G-g-good,’ I answered. There were so many stars up there, eavesdropping from heaven. Good? It was better than that.

Dad was in a mischievous mood. He pretended he was holding a microphone. ‘Hello, Little Tu, are you receiving, over?’

Mum scolded him. ‘Wally,’ she said, ‘have more respect.’

Even the spring, with pollen aggravating my asthma and turning it into severe bronchitis, and keeping me in bed, couldn’t stop the momentum of Koro’s storytelling. When he found me miserably trying to breathe in a room hazy with a humidifier he would kiss me on the forehead, and prop up pillows to support me. ‘Are your Maohi ancestors speaking to you today?’ He would sit behind me, lift up my pyjama top and start massaging my back. Even though I sometimes protested, ‘Puh-lease, Koro’, he would carry on regardless.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he would ask grumpily if I tried to pull the pyjama top back across my skinniness and poking-out ribs. ‘I’m your koro. Ever since you were a baby, looking after you has been my job.’

He would resume his lessons whether I wanted him to or not.

‘Our ancestor, the original Tupaea,’ he began one day, ‘must have been born in Hawaiki around 1720. That’s when the worship of ’Oro was at its height in Tahiti. The Maohi may have worshipped many gods but ’Oro displaced them all; he became not only their most powerful god but the one God, Te Atua. And the society of the Arioi had grown to thousands of acolytes, sailing in great fleets from place to place, dancing, singing and praising ’Oro.’

I submitted to Koro’s rubbing and massaging and his strong hands kneading and opening the cavity in my ribcage so that my lungs would expand. Sometimes it hurt.

‘The most beautiful, the most sacred among the Arioi was Tupaea,’ Koro continued. ‘As a boy he was consecrated to ’Oro. He quickly became high priest and guardian of all the arts of ’Oro and the Maohi.’

‘What did he look like?’ I asked.

‘This is difficult to even imagine, but our ancestor was considered to be without physical flaw. He was tall and handsome, and he was also blessed with great intellectual powers and warrior skills. To mark his status he was given a special tattoo that radiated from the base of his spine, spreading and curving around the hips, and meeting again in the small of his back. One of these days, mokopuna, you’ll be as handsome and clever as him.’

Me? Dream on, Koro. And then he hit me sharply, ouch, to dislodge the phlegm that clogged my lungs.

But you can understand, can’t you, why Tupaea filled my daydreams?

On those infrequent days when I was well enough to go to school, instead of seeing cars and buses go by, I began to imagine, instead, an Arioi faery fleet, led by Tupaea.

The most famous waka was Hotu or Sea-swell, decorated with matiti, long pennants of many colours, and mou, small circular mat sails attached to the tops of the masts. Bunches of feathers tipped each mast. Behind Hotu would have been a flotilla of sixty to seventy waka, carrying up to seven hundred Arioi.

‘The Arioi,’ Koro said, ‘drew large gatherings wherever they went, and Tupaea never disappointed the waiting worshippers. Hotu and the fleet would come sailing out of the sun like brightly skimming birds. Each waka had a raised platform on which the Arioi danced. To the sound of song, conch shell, flutes and drums, the fleet would manouevre through the sparkling emerald sea, the breaking surf. Then the celebrations would begin: feasting, dancing, singing and exhibitions of athletic prowess that went on into the night.’

No wonder that, while the rest of the class got on with Four-Eyes Wilson’s English class, I was locked into my ancestor’s story.

But in the 1750s Hawaiki came under attack from nearby Porapora. Alas, the God ’Oro may have been above all others, but humankind, even in Tahiti, was driven by hubris.

‘Nothing could save the sacred marae,’ Koro told me. ‘Therefore, in the middle of the night, when the battle was at its highest peak, Tupaea rescued from Taputapuatea the sacred to’o in which ’Oro resided, a cylinder sheathed in red feathers. Tupaea also took the royal loincloth that symbolised ’Oro’s connection with the children of men. While Tupaea’s faithful guards fought a desperate rear-guard action, he escaped with the cylinder on Hotu and fled to Papara, the royal seat of Purea, the greatest ariki then living among the Maohi. She was regarded as the queen of Tahiti. Safely esconced, he became high priest and adviser to Purea and her husband.’

Koro showed me a small framed portrait of Purea. She was tall, beautiful and her curly abundant hair was bound with a piece of red tapa decorated with tropical feathers and flowers. Beneath a cloak of regal red she wore an ankle-length pare of white tapa patterned in yellow.

‘But there was one more task to do. A new marae for ’Oro had to be built. “Would you raise such a marae, o Queen?” Tupaea asked. She agreed, saying, “Let us call it Mahaiatea, and let it be the greatest temple compound in all the Maohi nation.” Once it was completed, the God was taken within.’

While Four-Eyes Wilson droned on, I liked to sketch Mahaiatea in my school book. I drew a pyramid with eleven large steps leading up to a sundial. I sketched bird-like figures, heralds of ’Oro, guarding the pyramid. On the middle of the top platform I drew the imposing figure of ’Oro, carved in stone, overlooking his earthly dominion.

The ancient Egyptians may have had their pyramids, and the Aztecs their great complexes and temples to the sun god.

We had Mahaiatea.

Of course my pretence couldn’t last.

One day when Koro asked me the usual question, ‘Are your Maohi ancestors speaking to you today?’, and although I answered yes, I had a panic attack.

Please don’t think less of me that I lied to him. I wanted to be an obedient and dutiful grandson and to serve ’Oro, like one of those altar boys at church. My imagination was always playing tricks and sometimes I did sense voices and hear the sound of distant Tahitian drums.

However, puberty kicked in and I realised that all my pretence had led Koro to believe that the ancestors really were speaking through me.

If that was happening, then I must have a particular destiny, right?

And that should be nurtured, right?

Wrong.

CHAPTER SIX THE FALL OF AN ALTAR BOY

There was a whole lot of life out there.

I started to rebel, not necessarily against Koro, but certainly against the strictures of small town life in Uawa. In this I was aided by my Uncle Bo who liked to press beer on me and my cousins Seth, Abe and Spade, who, despite my gangling appearance and asthma, soon had me shoplifting with them. I wanted to be cool, I wanted to belong, so while I spoke nicely to Mr Merton in the dairy they ducked behind him and raided the cash register or took cigarettes and sweets.

Very soon, like them, I was skipping school and rebelling against anything that I was told to do. Koro soon noticed. He knew what Uncle Bo was up to, and he grew concerned for me because he’d always harboured a hope that I’d become a lawyer and, maybe, a judge. ‘They’re the ones who have the power,’ he told me, ‘not a Maori Land Court clerk.’

Yeah, well, I wasn’t the only one with daydreams obviously. Becoming a lawyer was way off base.

Inevitably, there came a time when I wasn’t as interested in his Sunday afternoon lessons and, in the end, he rapped my skull with his knuckles. ‘Knock, knock, is anybody in the whare? Aue, te hoha o te tamaiti. You’re getting to be like your ratbag cousins. And if you don’t watch out you’ll end up in prison like your uncle.’ Indeed, he became embarrassed by the regularity with which he was asked to intercede on our behalf by Maori wardens who didn’t want us to get police records. ‘When you appear before the judge,’ he growled, ‘don’t tell them who your grandfather is, otherwise people will know that we’re related.’

Everybody began to ask, ‘Whatever happened to Little Tu? Where’s that nice boy gone to?’ They commiserated with Mum and Dad: ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a phase that young boys go through. He’ll be back.’

Oh yeah? How easy it is to be a good boy one minute and a bad boy the next.

Egged on by my cousins, I set fires in people’s letterboxes, shoplifted, broke into houses and cars, and I took to regularly jumping off the main Uawa bridge, scaring people as they drove across it. I was further encouraged by Seth, Abe and Spade; I was such a trier, probably hoping to show my cuzzies that despite my infirmities I merited their attention. They realised I had no fear and, hey, maybe I might actually kill myself in my jumps and they would inherit all Koro’s money. And anyway they could make some dollars out of my foolhardiness.

I was too innocent — or dumb — to disagree when they suggested that I turn my jumping into a money-making operation. They created traffic jams until enough cars had stopped and then pointed me out as I stood on the railing of the bridge. ‘Stop him, please, he’s going to kill himself!’

There was always some heroic old man who would come running and yelling, ‘Don’t do it, son!’ and try to talk me out of it. I would pretend to go along with him but, at the last moment, I would trip …

And that feeling … and all of a sudden, my lungs clearing. Then the clarity as if … somewhere I would find … perfection.

Then, oh, for one moment that sense of weightlessness, of defying gravity before the thrill of falling.

The audience would appear at the railing, ashen-faced, to see if I had survived.

What was I doing? Sitting at the bottom of the river, ho hum, fiddle dee dee, giving them a heart attack.

I would arise like a merman and wave, and my cousins would go cap in hand to ask for money from the now applauding drivers. It was a scam, sure, but my cousins made a lot of money (I got a cut, so I wasn’t entirely blameless) until, one day, Koro happened to be in one of the cars. He witnessed the whole charade and watched me jump off the bridge. By the time I reached the road, Seth, Abe and Spade had taken off.

Koro clipped me over the ear. ‘Are you a muttonhead or what?’

I was thirteen when Uncle Tu-Bad was released from prison, early, for good behaviour.

All the family welcomed him back except Koro. When he knocked on the door of the homestead, Koro said to Nan Esther, ‘Tell him I’m not ready to forgive him.’

His response was stern and implacable but Uncle Tu-Bad took it well. ‘I deserve it,’ he said.

We all thought that Uncle Tu-Bad would revert to his old ways and resume his plantation activities but he had a few surprises for us.

One day, he really surprised me. I was sitting at the back of his place, smoking weed with Seth, Abe and Spade, when he discovered us. I thought he’d be okay with that but, instead, he hauled Seth off his arse and slapped him over the head. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, boy?’

He didn’t like the idea of Seth introducing me to drugs of any kind.

‘Not Little Tu,’ he warned Seth. ‘Apart from anything else, Pa would kill me if he found out Little Tu was smoking dope.’

Then he looked into my eyes and ruffled my hair. ‘You stay away from this stuff.’

That didn’t stop my cousins and me from running away from him, laughing our heads off. But I’ve often wondered whether they liked me at all. Maybe not. I think to them I was a follower, somebody they could order around.

Before anybody could stop us, we’d snatched a little old lady’s car while she was in the post office and went hooning around Uawa in it. Then we were squealing down the old wharf to do rubber-burning wheelies at the end.

Not for long. Uncle Tu-Bad must have rung Koro because they both arrived before the cops could put out an alert on the car.

‘Thanks, son,’ Koro said to Uncle Tu-Bad. They shook hands and then Koro grabbed him in a tight embrace. ‘I’m glad you’re home among your people.’

Uncle Tu-Bad took Seth, Abe and Spade with him; Koro hauled me into his car and we got out of there. ‘Why are you such an idiot?’ he yelled at me. ‘You’ll never get to be a lawyer the way you’re going.’ He drove me home to Mum and Dad’s place. As we went through the township, he pulled his hat down over his face so that nobody would recognise him. I was a bit aggrieved by his action.

‘Koro, I don’t think I can be a lawyer or whatever you want me to be. P-p-please give up on me.’

He looked at me, astonished, and almost crashed the car. ‘How can I do that?’ he asked. ‘You’re the one whose name is Tupaea.’

I pleaded with him. ‘Why should his name make any difference?’

My koro stopped the car. He thought I was stupid. Didn’t I know? He was always assuming that I knew things and that I never had to be told. What was I? A mind reader?

When he finally answered my question, his voice sounded the way it did whenever he was chanting karakia: hushed, focused, as if he was in the presence of the ancestors.

‘Giving you Tupaea’s name is like investing you with his spirit. Haven’t you learnt anything?’

He knocked on my head again. ‘Somewhere inside you his mauri resides and, pae kare, boy, one of these days it’s coming out, whether you like it or not.’

CHAPTER SEVEN THE JOURNEY OF THE HOLY ARK

‘We were very distressed.’

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?’

Died? I hadn’t known that.

And then, in a temper, Koro uttered some rather choice remarks about Dad. ‘And you … you were a no-hoper in Uawa and you’ll be a no-hoper in Wellington.’

Mum’s back went up. ‘I will not let you say those sorts of things about my husband,’ she said. ‘He’s been a good son-in-law to you, Pa.’ With that she bundled me into the car.

Wally started the engine. ‘Thank you, dear,’ he said to Mum. He was grateful to her for choosing him, but also disturbed at all the fuss. What if he didn’t make better passage in the world and we had to come back with our tails between our legs?

Koro just had time to thrust something through the window at me. ‘Take this with you,’ he said. ‘It will protect you.’

It was a red feather.

My mother’s eyes widened. I heard her mutter under her breath, ‘And maybe it’s time Little Tu had a rest from this …’

She shut her mouth before she could say the heretical words ‘mumbo jumbo’. Instead, she motioned to Dad.

‘Time to go, dear, before anybody says something they might regret.’

And that was that.

CHAPTER EIGHT DETOUR

There’s a photograph of me with Mum and Dad that must have been taken fairly soon after we arrived in Wellington.

It’s a very nice picture of Mum. The camera has captured her side-on so that you don’t see that her beam has broadened a bit. And because it was taken without her putting on the usual face she liked to show to the world, she looks very pretty. The wind has blown a few strands of hair across her face and, laughing, she’s put a hand up to push them away. It’s a film star pose, and she looks good doing it.

What’s surprising about the photograph is me. I’m taller than Mum, and even taller than Dad, who was five ten. When did that happen?

Mum and Dad must have bought me a jacket. I’m wearing it, so you can’t see how skinny I really am, but the shoulders reveal that I’m filling out. Those wings of mine are folded away in there somewhere.

I’ve taken a step back and tucked my head in. I’d never thought of myself as good-looking — my hair was too bushy, my eyes were squinty, my nose was too long, my lips were too big — so didn’t like having my photograph taken. But those same squinty eyes are bright and expectant.

I won’t say that the move to Wellington was easy.

We arrived during the school break between the first and second term. Mum and Wally settled us into a small two-bedroom flat that Dad’s brothers had found for us, up zigzag steps on the slopes midway between Berhampore and Island Bay. From the south-facing windows you could see the sea.

‘Well,’ Mum said when she stood in the passageway and saw how run-down the place was, ‘we’ve made our bed and now we all have to lie in it.’ She was not only referring to us but also to Koro, because no sooner had we moved in and had the telephone connected than he started to call. In the middle of the night.

From my bedroom I would hear Mum answering the phone and talking to him. ‘Hello? Yes, Pa, I’m here. Yes, we’re fine. How are you? And how’s Ma? No Pa, we’re not coming home. Please Pa, try to understand. And Little Tu? No, I won’t wake him, he’s fast asleep but he’s fine, Pa, fine.’

We moved our furniture and the rest of our belongings in. Dad immediately went to work for the Wellington buses so that we could pay the rent. I remember watching him battling a southerly as he walked down the steps. He looked forlorn and hesitant and, partway down, he stopped, as if he was about to turn back. ‘No, Dad,’ I whispered. ‘You’ll be okay.’

He saw me at the window and waved before continuing down to the street.

My mother has always had hidden resources, a quiet but determined strength.

While Dad was working, she made me help her paint the walls of the flat — she got the rent down by telling the landlord it would increase the value of his place — and, after the paint had dried, I put my posters of Arnie on my bedroom wall. I had three now, and the one of Arnie in dark glasses, wearing a leather jacket and astride a motorbike, was my favourite. On a whim, I sellotaped Koro’s red feather to his hair; now Arnie looked like a mean Red Indian dude.

Mum was hesitant at first about what I’d done, then shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, I guess that’s as good a place as any.’ As for Dad, when he saw the feather on his return, elated, from his first day on the job, I heard him whispering to Mum in a way I wasn’t supposed to hear, ‘At least Pa didn’t go up to the cave in the hills and get that old piece of ironwood.’

Once we had finished the painting, Mum found me a speech therapist. At the same time, she was a whirlwind, organising the house for ‘her men’, and every now and then she would don one of her smartest outfits and go looking for a job so that she could supplement Dad’s income. Success! She was put on a waiting list for nursing staff at Wellington Hospital in Newtown.

Mum also checked out the high schools in the area and took me to Wellington High to enrol because it was co-ed and multicultural. Mum filled in the paperwork, and then we were interviewed by Mr Van Dyke, one of the deans of the school. As soon as he started asking me questions, like ‘So, Tupaea, can you tell me what options you were doing in Tolaga Bay?’, Mum began, as usual, to answer on my behalf:

‘He did Maori.’

‘Is there anything else we offer that you like the look of? Food technology maybe?’

‘Japanese and classical studies could be interesting,’ Mum answered. ‘He might go to university after high school.’

University? Not that again.

Mr Van Dyke was looking at me in a quizzical manner. I started to get flustered and turned to Mum. ‘I can t-t-talk for myself, Mum,’ I said.

Her eyes widened. Obviously things were changing all around her. Then she shrugged, got up, kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘He’s all yours.’

When she left, the dean smiled at me encouragingly. ‘Mothers are like that,’ he said.

Not long after that, Mum was called in to Wellington Hospital and offered a position. One of the reasons why she was successful was because, at her interview, she looked around at the Pakeha faces on the interviewing panel and said, ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, looks like your lucky day has just walked through the door, eh?’ She knew she had Maori skills that the hospital didn’t possess.

Koro kept ringing. It was so sad hearing Mum talk to him. ‘Hello, Pa, is that you again? Please stop doing this. We’re fine, Pa. And Little Tu has started at Wellington High. Pa, please don’t cry. You’ll only make yourself sick. Yes, I’ll tell Little Tu you called.’

Over the next months, we all began to adjust to the city. I think Mum never really became a Wellingtonian; it wasn’t Uawa, but it would have to do. After a while, though, she developed a good social circle.

Dad couldn’t have been happier. He was with Ralph and Tommy, and could go skindiving for paua on his days off or when he pretended he was sick and couldn’t come with Mum and me to church. Every now and then, he would take Mum to a local pub that was a renowned watering hole for Ngatis, as people from the East Coast were called.

After a while, the telephone calls from Koro began to diminish as he realised we weren’t coming home.

Out of sight, out of mind.

I have to confess that the God ’Oro and his emissary on earth, Tupaea, took a back seat to the excitement and challenges of a new school and a new city.

And I was determined to start Wellington High with a fresh slate. I didn’t want to be that same young kid with a stutter. My speech therapist was a lovely lady who worked hard on my plosives, and when the second term started I had the stutter under control most of the time. My greatest triumph was to introduce myself on my first day to the English class:

‘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.’

Suddenly, my lessons with Koro came flooding back into my memory. Hadn’t he told me about the Dolphin?

‘When Europeans arrived in the South Pacific,’ Koro had said, ‘Tupaea must have known that the Maohi world would be changed forever. But for good or evil? There was amazement at first when the Dolphin arrived, but then Maohi — and Tupaea and his queen Purea also — realised that Captain Wallis and his crew on the Dolphin had come to conquer, and they retaliated against the invader. Of course the Dolphin was a gunship, but Tupaea and Purea weren’t to know that. It wasn’t until the battle at Matavai Bay, on the north coast of Tahiti, that they witnessed the full and lethal power of the Dolphin’s guns.

‘They sent out three hundred canoes, carrying some two thousand men onto the water. “Attack!” Tupaea ordered. That’s when the Dolphin’s great guns were brought into action with a savage twenty-four-gun broadside, and another and another. Within minutes bodies filled the bay, turning the sea blood red, and there were more deaths as further broadsides were aimed at the shore where thousands of spectators had gathered.

‘“What is this death-dealing aitua,” Purea asked Tupaea, “that can cut our great canoes in half as if they are just floating sticks of wood? Look how it roars and, immediately, people fall around us.”’

Listening to Mrs Miller, I was almost bursting out of my skin. I wanted to tell her that I knew the story.

‘Another expedition was planned under the joint auspices of the Admiralty and the Royal Society,’ she continued, ‘and James Cook was chosen to lead it. He was given command of the Endeavour.’ She began to point out on a map the incredible voyage from Plymouth. Then she said the words that made me sit bolt upright:

‘Cook established his observatory at Matavai Bay, where the Dolphin had anchored three years earlier. He stayed for almost two months, waiting for the transit, and unlike Captain Wallis of the Dolphin he was able to make friendly relations with the Tahitians. Among them was a Polynesian sailor called Tupaea, who joined him on board the Endeavour. After the Transit of Venus was observed, Tupaea sailed with Cook to New Zealand.’

Tupaea a sailor?

And he joined Cook on the Endeavour?

I couldn’t help myself. ‘That can’t be right,’ I said.

That night, I rang Uawa. Nan Esther answered the telephone. ‘Can I speak to Koro?’ I asked.

I was very cross and embarrassed, having tried to explain to the class about our family story of Tupaea — and being laughed at when I insisted he arrived in New Zealand on his own waka.

‘I thought Tupaea came to Aotearoa on the Hotu,’ I said. ‘You never, ever told me our ancestor came with James Cook, on the Endeavour. Why not?’

‘James Cook?’ Koro replied, as blithe as a bird. ‘Tupaea didn’t come with James Cook. James Cook came with him!’

Couldn’t Koro understand? My ancestor had just been blown out of the water.

CHAPTER NINE TUPAEA RESURGENT

Ah well, blame it on my vivid imagination.

I’d assumed that straight after the battle of Matavai Bay, Tupaea had sped back to Mahaiatea, on the south coast. Dismayed by what he’d seen of the Dolphin’s death-dealing powers, he’d embarked on a desperate mission: he must, for the second time, save ’Oro and protect him unto death.

Tupaea hastened up the steps of the sacred pyramid and there, under a swollen moon, removed the ironwood cylinder and royal loincloth, spiriting them on board the Hotu. Escaping under the cloak of night, he soon had the outrigger skimming like an America’s Cup yacht over the jagged reef. No wonder they pinched the design.

Quickly, quickly now, for the white strangers must be close behind! Already the Dolphin had opened fire, its shells falling closer and closer.

But Hotu surged ahead, into the cloak of night. Relieved, Tupaea looked up at the million stars strewn across the night heavens. Where could he go?

To the farthest ends of the earth, the land at the bottom of the world.

Yes! He would seek the sacred seaway that had long ago been cut to Aotearoa. Surely, there, among ’Oro’s fiercest worshippers, the God would find sanctuary.

As it happened, Koro was due to visit Wellington for a few days, because here’s the thing: although he stopped telephoning, he began visiting.

‘If the maunga can’t come from Wellington to visit Mohammed,’ he said, ‘Mohammed will have to go to the maunga.’

Every five or six weeks Nan Esther drove him from Uawa to Gisborne, where he boarded the cheap early-morning flight to the capital. He generally stayed for three or four days, as long as his job at the Maori Land Court allowed him.

‘We just have to go along with it,’ Mum said when the visits started. ‘Goodness knows, Pa must have a lot of leave owing. And he loves you, Little Tu,’ she added, looking at me, ‘and he pines for you.’

Actually, I never found Koro’s visits a burden; I looked forward to seeing him. The problem was, though, that as our flat only had two bedrooms Mum said I had to give up my bed for him.

‘Don’t do that,’ Koro told her. ‘We can bunk in together. It will be like a sleepover, eh moko, and we can talk all night if we want to.’

Well, though I wasn’t keen to share a bed with my grandfather, things have a habit of working out. Although Koro complained on his first visit about my snoring there was something really nice and comforting about nodding off to the sound of his voice, like surging waves coming across the midnight sea.

I almost blotted my copybook, however, on a subsequent visit. Dad had gone to collect Koro from the airport, and they were coming up the zigzag steps when Mum gave a small scream. ‘Quick,’ she said, ‘you forgot to take that red feather off your Arnie poster and put it in the wakahuia.’

She was referring to its more appropriate location in the small carved box which we kept in the sitting room on what I called ‘The Altar’, the ledge above the fireplace, where it was surrounded by family photographs.

The reason I had forgotten to remove the feather was that the poster was no longer Arnie looking like a mean Red Indian dude but Tupaea looking like Arnie. I was almost tempted to leave the feather there.

No, perhaps not. Not yet.

I was surfing after school with Horse and Bilbo when Koro arrived.

Mum had told him where to find me, and he caught a taxi to Lyall Bay where we were sitting on our surf boards, waiting for waves just beyond the causeway. The planes were soaring from the airport, close by, into the wild blue yonder. Although I was more focused on my studies, I’d never lost the wonderment of a Uawa schoolkid pressing his nose hard up against the window, except now I was watching planes, not cars and buses.

When I saw Koro get out of the taxi and pay the driver, I felt a rush of joy and told my mates, ‘I’m going in now. See ya.’ Although he was wearing a hat and three-piece suit, Koro took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers. He couldn’t wait for me to come ashore and waded out to his knees. ‘Still got some leave left, I see,’ I said.

He laughed, embraced me as if we hadn’t seen each other for centuries, and then appraised me. ‘What’s happening to you? You look a different boy. Where’s my skinny mokopuna gone? Well, whoever you are, are your Maohi ancestors speaking to you today? They were riding on surf boards, too, when Cook arrived in Tahiti.’

‘Yeah,’ I said sarcastically, ‘just before Tupaea joined him and c-came to New Zealand on the Endeavour, eh Koro.’

‘And your stuttering’s not so bad now. Good boy!’ Koro followed me back to shore. ‘Anyway, Cook’s not important. He should count himself lucky that Tupaea came to New Zealand on the Endeavour. It was such a tub, and not as militarily equipped as the Dolphin. Nevertheless,’ he added enigmatically, ‘Purea and Tupaea had already let one Pakeha boat go and they weren’t about to let a second slip through their fingers.’

It was always Koro’s habit, on the first night of his visit, to take me out to a special dinner. In preparation, Mum laid out a pair of good trousers and a shirt. She couldn’t wait to get rid of us.

‘Why don’t you and Dad come with us this time?’ I asked her, as she primped and prodded and smoothed me down.

‘You know that we’re banned,’ she answered. ‘And me and your father like to have the flat to ourselves sometimes so that we can be ay-lone.’

‘Oh, Mum, puh-lease.’

Koro was such a sharp dresser and I like to think that we turned heads whenever we entered a restaurant. Our waiter asked him, ‘Would you and your son come this way?’, no doubt figuring that flattery would get him a good tip.

We took our seats and Koro gave the menu to me: if he didn’t allow me to take charge, how was I going to become a gentleman like himself in polite society? I asked the waiter about the specials, then ordered Koro’s favourite chardonnay. Because he was always channelling Tupaea — when did he ever stop? — I made a silent bet with myself that we would start talking about our ancestor before the mains were served.

I won.

‘Yes,’ he said, sipping his wine, ‘our ancestor did depart with James Cook from Tahiti. It happened five weeks after the transit had been observed. Of course Tupaea would have known that Kopu — the Maohi name for Venus — was due to make its voyage across the sun, but when Mr Green invited him to look through the main telescope, I think even he was shaken by what he saw.’

Venus, moving like a waka, bucking in the blazing eye of Rangi, its timbers smouldering and its sails bursting into flame, before it sailed into the cool universe beyond.

‘He would have cried out, “Make haste, o waka, go quickly!” and shared a telling glance with Purea. And from that look must have come Purea’s decision:

‘“Yes, great priest, when the Endeavour leaves our shores, you must go with it.”’

Let’s cut, then, to the evening before the Endeavour’s departure. Tupaea went with Purea to Mahaiatea to pray to the God ’Oro. Some people say that something staggering occurred: the God commanded Tupaea to take him from Mahaiatea.

Thus, when he and a young acolyte, Taiata, went on board the Endeavour some say they had with them not only priestly clothing, conches, drums and flutes but also a secret cargo: a large ornate chest that was immediately taken below.

‘As the ship sailed away,’ said Koro, ‘the shimmering water was alive with canoes. Tupaea climbed to the topmast head and waved farewell. From the shore, Purea and thousands of the Arioi were chanting prayers for him. He put the past behind him and set his face northward. That was where England was, and where he thought he was bound. But …’

‘But?’ I asked, my fork hovering. I never liked Koro’s buts.

‘The Transit of Venus might have been the stated purpose of James Cook’s voyage,’ Koro said, ‘but the unstated intention was to find the great southern continent — Terra Australis Incognita. Our ancestor, Tupaea, found himself hostage to the desires of the empire. Instead of sailing north, the Endeavour turned south.’

We returned from the dinner to find Mum and Dad’s bedroom door closed.

Koro gave me a look. ‘Still sleeping together and doing you-know-what at their age. Disgusting.’

In my bedroom, although I was tired, I saw that Koro was warming to his subject. I put earplugs into my ears. ‘How are you going to hear with those things blocking me out?’

‘I’ve got training at Jean-Luc’s in the morning,’ I groaned.

‘You try to go too fast,’ Jean-Luc was always complaining. ‘Slow down. Concentrate on conditioning and stretching first. Then get your basic skills into your body so that it does the work without thinking.’

However, he’d allowed me to do some floorwork — flares, dive rolls, handsprings, aerial cartwheels — and, sometimes, if I was a good boy, some work on the vaults. ‘Shows promise,’ he kept saying, knowing that I was champing at the bit and that I wanted to get back on the rings. ‘Before you go there, Tupaea, we must still build strength into your arms and mid-section. But it is not enough to attain physical perfection. There are many others who also do that. You yourself must contribute your …’

He was flailing for the right English words.

‘What sets you apart, Tupaea? What makes you different, comprends?’

‘I don’t understand,’ I answered, puzzled.

He tried again. ‘What is the essence, the personality, that makes everything you do yours? It must come from your head and heart as well as your physique. From your histoire, too, mon petit! It will give you the grace and originality to triumph, the thing that only you, Tupaea, can do!’

Koro wouldn’t be stopped. When I switched off the light, turned my back on him and closed my eyes, his voice came rolling over me, more surging waves travelling through the moonlit sea.

Ah well, may as well ride them in.

‘You know that Cook hadn’t wanted Tupaea to come on the voyage?’ Koro began. ‘It was only at the request of Joseph Banks, who paid for Tupaea’s and Taiata’s berths, that Cook agreed to have them aboard. Banks thought of Tupaea, initially, as a curiosity — like a pet lion or tiger.’

Koro was massaging my back, sometimes giving it short hits with his open palms. Even though I no longer required it, he couldn’t get out of the habit. And I was too blissed out to tell him.

‘I think James Cook’s attitude was more personal,’ Koro said. ‘He was probably affronted by Tupaea’s mana and didn’t wish to acknowledge that a Maohi was equal to him. Apparently our ancestor’s proud and austere attitude did not make him popular with the Endeavour’s crew.’

I hated the thought of Tupaea being isolated on the English ship. ‘He did have f riends on the voyage, didn’t he?’

‘Banks, despite his attitude, yes,’ Koro conceded. ‘The artist Parkinson perhaps, as well as the astronomer Green and Banks’ two black servants. Who knows? Tupaea and Taiata may have taught them how to coax Maohi rhythms from the conches and deep-toned drums they’d brought on board, eh?’

On that chuckling thought, I finally succumbed to tiredness.

‘But how can I find Tupaea?’ I murmured sleepily. ‘Tell me, Koro, where should I seek him?’

‘Yes, Little Tu, we have to acknowledge that the Endeavour’s story belonged to Cook and Banks and, therefore, why should our ancestor have a place in the documents? Nevertheless, Tupaea is there. You must look not at but through the documents, moko.

‘Beloved grandson, look also past the written to the unwritten. Put yourself into the spaces between the words on the page. Go past the spoken to the unspoken. Seek the priest in our own language, not the language of the coloniser.

‘Mokopuna, be your own navigator.

‘Your ancestor is waiting.’

CHAPTER TEN THE ARRIVAL OF THE ARIOI

‘Through various karakia and chants the Arioi priest was able to recognise the ancient star clusters — there they were as of old! — and by the position of the sun on the horizon, plot the way ahead. When Tupaea noticed the myriad passages of birds in the sky, he knew that land was nigh.

‘There came a sunset when the young watch, Nicholas Young, sighted a promontory. Cook called the land New Zealand but your ancestor Tupaea knew otherwise: this was the fabled land of Aotearoa. And Tupaea realised ’Oro — or destiny — had a different purpose for him: to reinstate the connection that had long ago been severed.

‘He saw tall mountains, white cliffs, fertile land and then a village, with smoke coiling from many cooking fires. For the first time, he glimpsed the people, descendants of the Maohi voyagers.

‘He knew he would be the first priestly visitor for over three hundred years. But would the people remember?

‘He said to Taiata, “Bring me my robes.”’

Hello, Little Tu, are you receiving, over?

This is what I saw.

The sky was a strange colour that day, with the sun a fiery glowing ball, sending sunbursts from its surface.

The Maori, watching from the shore, were struck with wonder at what they saw. What was that moving across the blazing eye of Rangi? It was a strange magnificent waka, bucking amid the solar flares, its timbers smouldering within the raging solar sea.

‘Make haste, o waka, go quickly,’ they cried. With a roar of relief and acclamation they saw the canoe negotiate the transit and sail through to the cool universe beyond. Then it tipped and plunged headlong from the highest heavens like a fiery comet. Through the atmosphere the waka flamed, into the foaming sea.

What wonder was this? The canoe emerged newly born from the waves. It was like a huge island, with wide bluff bows, a raised poop and a square stern. The large sails made the island look like it was carrying its own clouds above it.

A brilliant rainbow arched from the highest heaven, and birds shrieked and flew from one end of the earth to the other. ‘O iwi, bow down,’ the birds commanded. ‘The Arikirangi is coming.’

And Tupaea slid down the rainbow, landing on the strange island.

The people gasped, for he was a man without physical flaw.

On his head was a circular cap, like a woven helmet, and from it sprouted a tall headdress made of beautiful red, yellow and black feathers. His body glistened with oil, and around his midriff and thighs he wore a girdle of red feathers. A shoulder cape reached down to the waist and was tipped with a fringe, this time of yellow feathers.

He had not come alone. A small boy child alighted alongside him, draped in pearls; they stood on the floating island, shining in the rainbow’s holy light.

Once Tupaea was satisfied that all the people had gathered, he began to chant:

A hee mai te tua, e ia papama ’ehe

No te tai a tau te po …

The sea rolled, the tides mounting

For a period of nights …

As he chanted the small child took up a great conch-shell trumpet, a putaiiteaeha, which brayed from horizon to horizon. Then he beat out intoxicating rhythms on some drums, and the whole universe swayed as Tupaea began to dance:

E po fanaura’a atua, o te po Mua Tai’aroa;

It was the God’s birth night, the night of Mua Taia’aroa

O ’Orotaua atua i fanau mai i te reira po …

’Oro taua was the God born that night …

Dipping and swaying, Tupaea lifted his arms to the sun, lowered them to the earth. When he twirled and gestured, the feathers he was wearing gleamed like a cloak of many colours.

’Oro atua o te Reva e te whenua nei;

’Oro, god of the Air and Earth;

’Oro haia; ’Oro atua o te Arioi

’Oro manslayer; god of the Arioi.

Then Tupaea revealed the beings which had come with him: goblins of ghastly white, in red skins, tricksters and devious. The people marvelled when Tupaea bade the goblins bring him to shore on smaller waka, for as they rowed they had their backs to the land, which meant that their eyes were at the backs of their heads.

There, on the sand, the small child brought forward a cylinder.

Tupaea unveiled the ironwood that had been stored within a sacred canopy covered with feathers, and offered it to the Maori people. ‘Do you remember?’ he cried.

With tears of gladness, they nodded their heads. Oh, it had been such a long time since ’Oro had been among them!

‘Then bow down before the great God, bow down!’

From that moment onward, all the people honoured the priest: ‘Arikirangi! Tupaea! Haere mai! Greetings, captain of the Endeavour!’

CHAPTER ELEVEN — TUPAEA IN AOTEAROA

E mokopuna, you may wonder why Maohi of Aotearoa thought Tupaea was the captain of the Endeavour. Well, his arrival had been foretold long before by Toiroa, a tohunga from Mahia. ‘Arikirangi, high chief, he is coming,’ the tohunga said. ‘He comes with red and white strangers.’

Now, with Toiroa’s foretelling in mind, it may appear contradictory that the Endeavour was strenuously opposed by Maohi when it attempted first landing. Tupaea, however, wouldn’t have been surprised by this! Even in his own homeland of Tahiti, this was how the people traditionally responded to strange visitors.

What were the circumstances? A fifty-strong warrior group attacked Cook’s landing party. The aggressive warriors did all they could to repel the floating island. A Maori warrior was killed during the beach encounter.

Tupaea, in fact, stopped further bloodshed. He spoke in the language of the Maohi to the attackers. It was the first korero between Maohi priest and Maohi iwi of Aotearoa for more than three centuries. And they understood!

This only confirmed his status as captain and, therefore, it was to Tupaea that all questions were directed:

‘Is the floating island yours?

‘Have you come to re-establish the Fa’atau Aroha and the sacred seaway to Hawaiki? If so, welcome, we have long awaited your arrival!

‘But who are these red and white strangers who have arrived with you? Why are they so transgressive of Maori custom, not responding to our challenge by acknowledging our rangatiratanga, and, instead, coming onto the land without our permission? We will leave you, o great priest, to punish your goblins and tricksters.’

From that moment, the news spread throughout Aotearoa that the Arikirangi had truly arrived.

During all the initial, and tense, encounters that followed — for, oh, the actions of the red and white strangers were sometimes sacrilegious, belligerent and hostile — it was with Tupaea that we wished to korero, talk. Indeed, Tupaea was so desirable that one of the tribes tried to steal away Taiata, presuming that if they did so Arikirangi would be compelled to stay among them!

Tupaea captained the Endeavour onward, and he arrived at Anaura on 20 October 1769. There he was invited by the paramount chief, Whakata Te Aoterangi, to his palisaded kainga. He was offered hospitality and he begat the dynasty that takes his surname in Anaura.

Ko Arikirangi tenei ra te haere nei!

E mokopuna, three days later, on 23 October, Tupaea arrived in Uawa on the Endeavour.

A welcoming party called him from the shore, ‘Haere mai, e Arikirangi, nau mai, kua tae mai! Come among us, great lord, you the physical manifestation of ’Oro, come under the cloak of love!’ War canoes were sent out to his waka, and he was garlanded with flowers. When he set foot on the land, over a thousand men and women greeted him with song and haka.

For six days, we of Uawa were determined to show our greatest hospitality. Great feasts were organised for Tupaea, together with marvellous entertainments, reaching far into the night. Of course, his goblins and tricksters were sometimes like irritating children, but we put up with them for the privilege of having Tupaea in our midst.

He was the guest of honour at Te Rawheoro, the great Maori house of learning in Uawa. Can you imagine the scene, Little Tu? Great crowds gathered to greet him, some having travelled from other tribes to the north and to the south. Sometimes, sessions were limited as tohunga and other sacred priests met him in whare wananga to try to close that gap of three hundred years. We invited Tupaea to travel throughout Uawa, and he consented. We were moved by his ancient tales of Hawaiki and of the current politics and culture of the homeland we had left many centuries before. He thrilled us with his stories of Mahaiatea and his queen, Purea. Wherever he went he was treated with great reverence. Valuable cloaks and ancient ornaments were given to him to take back as tribute to ’Oro’s marae and its sovereign lady.

Why? We knew it was not his destiny to stay.

There was one inspiring event when Tupaea escaped the rain by talking to us within a high-arched cavern. Thenceforward, the cave has always been known as Te Ana no Tupaea. Even today, when you visit it, people say that if you put your ear to the walls you can still catch past echoes of the liturgies of ’Oro which he intoned and the blessings that he gave to the people.

It is written that during the farewell arose the sound of acclamation, a thunderous haka and women in karanga.

‘Haere atu ra e te rangatira!’ the women called. ‘Hoki atu koe ki a Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pamamao! Return safely to our ancient homeland, Hawaiki, the proud land, the long land, the land far away.’

Children were named after Tupaea. Places were called after him.

Mokopuna, he begat our dynasty in Uawa.

Ka haruru te moana!

The sea mounted, the tides rolled

Ka haruru te whenua

Thunder roared across the land

Hail to thee, Arioi, hail!

CHAPTER TWELVE THE THRILL OF FALLING

I turned seventeen and, one day, when I was taking Koro to catch his plane to Gisborne, he gave me a quizzical look.

‘You once asked me, when you were a boy, what our ancestor looked like.’ We were standing at the gate before he boarded. ‘Looked in the mirror lately?’

I should have been more self-aware but, yes, I realised what he meant. I’d now reached my adult height and for some time had wondered why everyone around me had shrunk: Koro, Mum and even Dad; I’d filled out too. I was in my final year at Wellington High where, wonder of wonders, something clicked into place: from being a trier I’d come through to the A team and my grades had improved as well. If only things were like that at home.

Koro was a mindreader. ‘Be kinder to your parents,’ he said.

‘Dad’s all right,’ I answered. ‘It’s Mum who’s a pain in the arse.’

‘I won’t have you using that kind of language,’ he reprimanded. ‘And you mustn’t say those kinds of things about May. She’s worried about you all these years and, now that you’re becoming an adult, she finds it hard to let go. We all do. You may have grown up, but to us you’re still that little baby in the incubator struggling to breathe.’

‘Could you tell her to cut me some slack?’

‘Well, maybe she would if you weren’t so secretive. Where do you go when you sneak out the window at nights?’

Uh oh, so Mum knew. And was I about to tell Koro, with his old-fashioned morality and attitudes towards modesty and … everything?

‘Perhaps if you asked her nicely,’ Koro said, ‘and told her where you were going, she might say okay.’

I did; she didn’t.

One thing was for sure: the dream that I go to university seemed possible after all. I wasn’t unenthusiastic and, as Dad used to say, ‘It beats working on the buses.’

Mum started to give me a lot of unsubtle hints. ‘I was speaking to Mrs Samasoni in community services and she says that your mate Alapati [alias Bilbo] and some of the other boys at Wellington High are going to Victoria University next year.’ Or, ‘One of the medics, Dr Granger, you know him, he tells me there’s an open day at the university next weekend. Do you want to hop along and take a look?’

One afternoon, I caught her on the telephone to Uawa. She had the decency to blush before saying, ‘Koro wants to speak to you,’ and beating a hasty exit.

‘Is that you, Little Tu? Your mother tells me you want to do law at university. I’m proud of you for making that decision. Don’t worry about those application papers. I’ll get them for you and we can look at them together when I’m next in Wellington, eh?’

Once upon a time I’d have had a panic attack and reached for my inhaler. Although I felt that Mum and Koro were ganging up on me behind my back, most of all, I was glad that I was fulfilling Koro’s wishes, even if I wasn’t sure that they were my own.

I was also loving Jean-Luc’s gym, and closing on my friend Thierry.

‘You start gymnastics later than most,’ Jean-Luc said, ‘but you already have un physique d’ange when you come to me, so that makes up for lost time.’

It wouldn’t be long before I would join Thierry on the rings. Meantime, for preparation, Jean-Luc put me through sessions at the pool close by the gym. From the low dive board he had me practising pikes and tucks into the water. He was really firing my core but ‘Shows promise’ was all he would say after each session.

Shows promise? I showed much more than that! And I was earning my body shape and mid-section as Jean-Luc sculpted me with his punishing exercises.

‘Do you know how to carve an elephant out of stone?’ he asked me one day, as I was sweating with the exertion. ‘It is not only achieved by chipping the elephant out of the granite but sometimes by chipping away everything that is not the elephant.’ I think he meant that as a compliment.

Along with my physical reshaping came something else. Jean-Luc had mentioned that physical perfection was not enough. What was my essence? What was my personality? What set me apart? Certainly my self-confidence was developing and, with it, fearlessness. Is that what Jean-Luc was looking for?

Here’s one example of how it showed itself.

There was always rivalry between Wellington High boys and Scots College boys, not only in sports events but also out of school.

One day, Thierry, Horse and Bilbo and I discovered that a bunch of Scots guys were meeting every Saturday to show off by jumping from a superstructure of four levels and zigzag pathways that took you down to the harbour, into the water below. ‘Let’s go and spoil their party,’ I said to Thierry.

From that day, a duel developed as we challenged the others to jump from the lowest level and then by degrees upped the ante by ascending for other jump-offs from higher points; if you were the last man jumping, you were the winner. Passers-by liked to watch and applaud. After a while word got around and people came every weekend especially to watch.

Nobody from either school, however, had attempted to jump from the fourth level because it was set back from the other pathways. You would have to clear the three levels below by jumping out twice as far and, if you misjudged the circle of plungeable water below, splat. To make matters riskier, that circle of entry was not large — maybe three metres wide — and you couldn’t even see it from the top.

What the hell. Both sides had been talking of doing it for a while and, on the last day before our schools broke up, I thought, It’s now or never.

‘I’m going for it,’ I told Thierry, Horse and Bilbo.

Actually, Thierry was the better contender but he said, ‘My father would kill me if I did something like that. And you … well, you don’t have a father like him!’

Came the day, and I’d decided against it, but some Scots College boys arrived and … what’s a guy to do? Backing out was not an option.

‘You’ve got to jump five metres out to even clear the superstructure,’ Thierry warned, ‘and how can you guarantee you’ll make the deepest water?’

The only way to do this was to run at speed up the stairs, change into second gear when you got to the ramp leading to the fourth level and then kick into third gear so as to obtain enough propulsion to make the leap. But … if you put on too much speed, you would end up overjumping the target.

Was it my fault that the local newspaper had sent a reporter and photographer? Well, I’d developed into quite the showman, and (excuse me, Koro) was buggered if I was going to risk my life for nothing. Taking my example from those times when I jumped off the Uawa bridge, I told Thierry, Horse and Bilbo to start working the crowd for dollars and bets. ‘Yeah, we’ve got a contender here,’ they jived, ‘so put your money down!’ And Thierry showed off some backflips and double somersaults that were part of his repertoire, and the crowd oohed and aahed.

No business like show business.

I put on a show too. I made a great play of chalking my take-off point on the fourth level and seeking the advice of sightseers. ‘Hey, maybe I should move the chalk mark to the left?’ I measured out my approach, pretending to be anxious about the uneven surface. ‘If I trip, kiss me goodbye, folks!’ I encouraged some of the Scots College boys to jump with me and, getting into the act, they made a few run-ups before shaking their heads and leaving me to it.

By the time I made my final sprint I had the audience in the palm of my hand. As I ran, somebody in the crowd called, ‘Don’t do it, son!’

It was too late. My heart was thudding as I approached the take-off point. I crossed my fingers, hoping that I’d chosen the right spot. I saw the chalk mark.

Nailed it.

Took a step into space. Counted to three and prayed. Looked to my left at my arm outstretched and then to my right to the tips of my fingers.

The air rushed into my lungs.

Oh, my body flexed and for one unbelievable moment there was more than a sense of weightlessness. With great clarity I felt that defying gravity was indeed possible and …

In that moment I could find the perfection I was seeking.

Then came the thrill of falling.

There I am, in a photo on the front page of the Dominion, watched by alarmed sightseers, leaping for my life:

WELLINGTON HIGH STUDENT CELEBRATES LAST DAY AT SCHOOL WITH DAREDEVIL DIVE

Just a dive? Didn’t the photographer see the pike, half-pirouette and somersault that I executed to stop myself from overshooting and to ensure that I entered the circle of water feet first?

When I got home, my pockets brimming with dollars collected from the grateful punters, Dad patted me on the back. As for Mum, she was always on my case and she went blue in the face telling me off. ‘You could have been killed!’

To be truthful, I almost shat my pants and, soon after, the city council banned all jumping from the spot.

The photograph was published in Uawa. When Koro saw it, he sent me a brief note: ‘Still a muttonhead.’

Jean-Luc wasn’t happy either. He harangued me for at least ten minutes in front of everybody at the gym, before passion drove him to his own language.

He may have been looking for self-confidence and fearlessness — but stupidity?

No, he wasn’t looking for that.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE FORCE OF DESTINY

Not long after my daredevil dive, the phone rang for Mum late in the evening. Calls that come after midnight are never good news.

It was Uncle Tu-Bad. ‘Could you come home, sis? Ma’s died. I’m with Pa right now. He’ll need all of us.’

My beloved Nan Esther had slipped away in her sleep.

Mum, Dad and I went back to Uawa immediately to support Koro. ‘Those brothers of mine,’ Mum said, ‘couldn’t organise themselves out of a paper bag.’

She was wrong. When we arrived, Uncle Tu-Bad had already taken charge. He’d sorted out the death certificate and selected a casket. The only thing he hadn’t done was to dress Nan before she was taken down to the marae. ‘I thought I should leave that to you, sis,’ he said to Mum. ‘Ma would have preferred her own daughter to put a lovely dress on her, comb her hair and make her pretty.’

Uncle had even organised the ceremonial aspects at the marae and got all the relatives on the job catering for the many visitors who were expected to arrive to farewell Nan.

‘Do you see what your eldest brother is doing?’ Koro said to Mum after she had embraced him and cried on his shoulder.

During the funeral, Koro was formal, dignified and strong. After all, he was a chief and his people — there must have been over six hundred on the marae — expected a certain restraint in the face of death. Tall, stately, his silver hair combed, he was the proud rangatira receiving everyone with immense generosity. They cried; he didn’t. They wanted comfort; he gave it. A loud sigh came from the people. ‘Yes, you can always count on Big Tu to show us all, by his example, how to rise above our grief.’

Behind the scenes, however, Koro found fault with Uncle Tu-Bad even when there was no fault, sending him and Bo and Charlie out on more expeditions to catch fish, hunt pigs and find succulent forest roots so that the visitors would have extra delicacies to praise.

‘Pa,’ Uncle Tu-Bad would say to him, ‘could you let me handle it?’ Since his return from prison he’d got involved with the community and the marae, and people were looking up to him.

Mum didn’t escape Koro’s critical gaze either. ‘Tell the women more visitors have arrived at the gateway,’ he would say to her. ‘I won’t have anybody complaining that they had to wait in the hot sun. And make sure the young girls in the kitchen have lunch ready and on time. It was late yesterday.’

As for my cousins and I, we were on constant clean-up duty: the showers, the latrines, the grounds and so on. Seth, Abe and Spade eyed my height and shoulders with some respect, but that didn’t stop them from trying to put me down. ‘You d-d-do the latrines, Little T-T-Tutae,’ they mocked. ‘That should be s-s-second nature to you.’ They laughed and laughed as if it was a great joke.

‘I wouldn’t go there if I was you,’ I said, deliberately articulating my words and squaring off. ‘You clean those latrines, because if you don’t you’ll be down them.’

They got the hint.

Yes, in public Koro presented the perfect image of a chief.

However, late at night, when everybody was asleep, I would catch him weeping on Mum’s shoulder. She was looking after the budget for the funeral, balancing the outgoings with the koha the mourners would leave to help pay for the tangihanga.

‘What will I do without your mother?’

I found these private revelations of Koro’s vulnerability surprising, almost shocking. How would he cope when we put Nan into the ground? Uncle Tu-Bad had led a crew up to the graveyard to dig the hole. ‘You boys too,’ he said to me, Seth, Abe and Spade. I was only too willing to do that for Nan; after all those times she made me breathe her herbal fumes, I owed her.

Watching Uncle as he directed the work, I couldn’t help but think how proud Koro should be of his eldest son. Later, when we buried Nan, I heard him say to Koro:

‘We’ll be all right, Pa. Don’t worry, we’ll be all right.’

The question was what to do with Koro, now that he was a widower.

Soon after the tangihanga, Mum, Dad and Mum’s brothers got together. They all looked to Uncle Tu-Bad to chair the meeting. ‘May will have to move back to Uawa to look after him,’ Uncle Bo said. ‘She’s the girl in the family.’

‘Just because she’s the daughter,’ Uncle Tu-Bad answered, ‘doesn’t make May the one to take sole responsibility.’

‘Pa’s a pain in the arse,’ said Uncle Charlie, ‘and he’ll get worse now that Ma’s not around. He’ll need a housekeeper to keep him in the manner he’s accustomed to and we can’t afford to hire one. May’s the best person to do the job.’

Mum was glaring at Bo and Charlie. ‘You brothers have got this all sorted out, haven’t you. Don’t I have a say?’

Wally made it easier for her. ‘I know you think I like my job in Wellington, dear, but family is family.’

None of us heard Koro joining us. ‘Talking about me behind my back already?’ he asked. ‘Well, I’ve made my own decision about what I want to do. May can’t move back to Uawa. Are you all stupid? She and Wally have got good jobs down there and I’m not going to ruin Little Tu’s chance of going to university.’

I thought he was going to claim his independence and tell the family that he was quite capable of looking after himself. Instead:

‘So, if the maunga can’t come to me … I will go to it,’ he said. ‘I’m moving to Wellington.’

‘We’d love to have you, Pa,’ said Mum, ‘but we haven’t got any room.’

‘Esther and I had savings,’ Koro answered, ‘and I’ve had a good pension plan for years, so now that I’m retired that will ensure my financial independence. I’ll rent the homestead out and we’ll buy a house in Wellington together.’

I could see the wheels turning sluggishly in Uncle Bo and Uncle Charlie’s minds. Pa spending his money and not leaving any to them? They didn’t like that either!

‘You go for it, Pa,’ Uncle Tu-Bad said.

The proposal meant a lot of travelling back and forth between Uawa and Wellington.

Mum, Dad and I returned to the capital, and Mum started looking for a property with at least three bedrooms and space for Koro’s library. When she’d narrowed down the choices, Koro flew to Wellington and, finally, he and Mum settled on a big old place in Island Bay: two double bedrooms overlooking the sea, one single room at the back, a huge basement, double garage and sleepout.

‘You’ll like it here, Pa,’ Mum said. ‘You can have one of the bedrooms in the front. Wally and I will fix up the basement for all your books and whakapapa, but some of your precious things will have to go to a storage unit out at Porirua.’

‘And will Little Tu have the room at the back?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I think he’s old enough to sleep by himself now.’

Gee, thanks, Koro.

‘Oh, him,’ Mum answered, as if I didn’t matter. ‘Can’t you see that he’s got his eye on the sleepout? At least if he goes in there he won’t wake us up when he goes training in the mornings and he won’t have to sneak out the window any more to be with his mates or those girls who keep hanging around him.’

As always, I zipped my lip. If I protested Mum might present evidence and I might not be able to refute it.

Once the sale was settled, we drove back to Uawa to help Koro to pack. Ralph and Tommy came with us, having hired two huge moving trucks for the job.

Uncle Tu-Bad organised a big farewell for Koro at the marae. People from Uawa know how to throw a good party, no matter what the occasion, and Koro was extolled and honoured for his leadership and generosity. During the celebrations, he revealed another reason why he was coming to Wellington with us.

‘Look at those elders,’ he said to Mum. ‘They can’t wait to see me go so that they can move one up on the paepae!’ He cast a proud glance at Uncle Tu-Bad. ‘Well, they’d better not do that too soon because it looks like the tortoise has put on speed and is coming through. Maybe I should have left sooner to leave him space to do it, eh.’

Came the day we were supposed to leave, there was no sign of Koro.

‘I think I know where he’s gone,’ Dad said. ‘Probably to see Esther and say goodbye to her.’

We drove out of Uawa to the family graveyard and, sure enough, there was Koro’s car, parked at the bottom of the cliff face that rose starkly from the bush. The cemetery was lovely in the sunlight; the cliffs behind were tapu, sacred, like palisades climbing to the sky and honeycombed with potholes and tunnels.

‘There he is,’ Dad pointed.

‘He’s been up to that bloody cave,’ Mum groaned when she saw him emerging from the trees.

He had something wrapped in a blanket. ‘What’s that he’s carrying?’ I asked her.

‘Don’t,’ she warned me, knowing I was teasing. ‘You know what it is.’ She wound down the window and yelled, ‘I’m happy to have you in the house, Pa, but that ironwood and whatever or whoever is in it is going straight into the storage unit.’

When he came to the car, Koro looked at me, puzzled.

‘What is your mother talking about?’ he asked.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN SLIDING OUT OF THE SKY

Koro came to stay.

At first Mum, Dad and I were concerned that he would be lonely staying home by himself. What were we thinking! Two weeks after he arrived in Wellington the phone began to ring.

‘Hello, Uncle. Why didn’t you let me know you were in town? Could you help me out? I have to attend a land meeting with Ngati Awa and you’re just the right person to go onto their marae with me. I’ll send a car to pick you up.’

‘Tena koe, rangatira. I have to talk to some bankers today: would you come with me as my elder? The car will be there in half an hour.’

Again, the phone. ‘May I speak to Mr Mahana? Oh, Mr Mahana, I’ve been given your name. We’re looking for a kaumatua for the proposed heritage pathway around the eastern bays and I’ve been told you’d be perfect.’

‘Will you be home for tea?’ Mum would ask, as Koro smoothed his hair and tightened his tie.

‘Better not wait for me,’ he would answer. ‘I should have realised that my poor nephews and nieces would want someone from Uawa to be on their paepae. Had I known, I would have moved down earlier.’

Meanwhile, I was successful in obtaining one of the places for Maori in law at Victoria, and also got a Maori scholarship to help pay for my fees and give me an allowance.

How could I possibly fail? Koro had strong-armed every Maori politician he knew.

Bilbo decided to join me at university (‘Could you call me Alapati now, mate?’) but Thierry went to work with his father at the gym, and Horse decided to go overseas for a gap year. While I was in the line enrolling, I met a cute Maori girl, Marama Te Puni.

‘You’re not from the East Coast?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, puzzled. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ In private, however, I was thinking, Yay, not a cousin. As well, I needed to know somebody who looked like they had brains and could help me out; it was an added attraction that Marama was also pretty.

My university studies began well.

First-year law required me to take a general course — I chose arts: Maori, history and philosophy — plus legal studies. I gave English a miss; if I’d paid attention to Four-Eyes Wilson that might have given me the confidence to tackle it. Despite my anxieties, I took to my arts subjects as to the manner born. Much to my surprise, Koro turned out to be a help rather than a hindrance, mainly by doing his ‘homework’ at the same time as I did mine. Whenever he wasn’t helping out somebody in Parliament he liked to bring home piles of books on Maori and Polynesian culture.

‘Gee, Koro,’ I would tease, ‘how many of those did you steal from Wellington Public Library this week?’

‘Concentrate on your homework,’ he would growl.

To help pay for my studies, I got a part-time weekend job cleaning windows, but, hold on, these weren’t just any old windows and not from the inside either. No, they were high tower buildings and some of those windows were thirty storeys high.

Bilbo — sorry, Alapati — got me the job. You may have seen us, lowering ourselves down the buildings on scaffolding, hooked on safety lines like mountaineers. Alapati knew I had a good head for heights, and he and I liked to swing like monkeys across from one side of the building to the other. On my part, the big plus was the money, so, after I got my certification, there I was, earning more than most of my mates and, as well, doing law.

Jean-Luc saw me one day. ‘You are fearless too?’ he asked. ‘Are you not afraid you might fall?’

The thought had never entered my head.

Yes, and sometimes, something arose at university to remind me of Tupaea. During a history lecture, for instance, while the professor was talking about Captain Cook’s voyages throughout New Zealand, I was looking through his words and wilfully reading the history my way, Koro’s way.

‘Throughout the rest of his stay Tupaea captained the Endeavour on a circumnavigation of Aotearoa. Wherever he went the people cried out, “Tupaea! Tupaea! Welcome Tupaea, ariki no Hawaiki!”

‘Sometimes he tried to warn them about the red and white strangers. He often succeeded. On occasion, he didn’t. But they were magnanimous in their forgiveness; after all, the goblins and tricksters were under his protection.

‘The circumnavigation proved that there was no great southern continent. Cook’s masters in Great Britain had thought that the eastern coast of Aotearoa was its edge; they should have asked Tupaea as he would have told them it did not exist.

‘Near the end of the voyage, while the Endeavour lay at anchor in the sparkling waters of Waitangi, Tupaea invited Ngapuhi chiefs on board. The chiefs exchanged gifts of cloaks and mere with their visitor from Hawaiki.

‘Then came the time when Tupaea told them, “E’oa ma, e ’aere ana au.” His sojourn among them was ended.

‘The news was carried from one height to the other across Aotearoa, and a huge ululation of sadness and grief sounded even unto Te Raituitai, the highest heaven, as they beseeched ’Oro: “Will you not allow your priest to stay with us?”

‘War canoes accompanied Tupaea’s ship Endeavour to the horizon. There, flocks of birds were hovering, ready to accompany the priest onward and away.

‘Tupaea set his face northward. Finally, he was bound for England.’

I thought my version was better.

And, another time, the God ’Oro suddenly popped into my head during a philosophy lecture.

We had a guest from Europe who was talking about ancient myths. I thought of Four-Eyes Wilson — if he could see me now.

Then the lecturer said something interesting. ‘Of course, today, there are still many societies for whom the myths of Olympus or Valhalla, of gods, goddesses and one-eyed monsters, are still as real and as relevant as they were in ancient times.’

The lecture hall rippled with amusement. ‘What or how,’ the lecturer continued, ‘would they feel if Cyclops, say, had survived the ages of man and lived in a cave on Mount Olympus … or even here, in New Zealand, near Invercargill! Our rational mind would refuse to admit that possibility, but what if?’

As the laughter rose I thought to myself:

‘Mate, you don’t know the half of it. Maori still live with their own versions of Cyclops. Mine had his house in a cave at the back of Uawa where he slept in an ironwood cylinder and was kept warm by a royal loincloth of red feathers. Now he’s in a storage unit in Porirua.’

Then, one evening, I went to train at the gym but discovered a CLOSED sign on it and the words CONFIDENTIAL PRIVATE SESSION. Puzzled, I shrugged my shoulders and turned down the corridor. As I was leaving I saw Thierry. ‘What’s this about?’ I asked.

‘My father is taking a special clinic for a gymnast from overseas. He arrived this afternoon from Europe and he returns tomorrow.’

‘He’s here for just one night?’ I was accustomed to visitors turning up at the gym. Some of them were world-class athletes who were perfecting some routine. Others wished to train for a routine that was beyond them, and wanted Jean-Luc to help them achieve a breakthrough. Or, more seriously, they required remedial work after some injury.

This secrecy was different. ‘I can ask Father if we can watch if you like,’ Thierry said.

I followed him past the sign and into the gym. Jean-Luc was taking the visiting gymnast through some conditioning and stretch exercises. Thierry spoke to him and pointed me out. Jean-Luc hesitated and asked the gymnast. At first he shook his head, but then he made a small moue, okay.

The gymnast went back to the conditioning and stretching, Jean-Luc speaking quietly and insistently to him. ‘No, you must continue! Thirty more repetitions! No, is still not enough! Fifty more stretches so that when you pump up you can reach maximum chest expansion! Your body is not at the level it needs to be to guarantee the excellence of your performance! Comprends?’

Not until Jean-Luc was satisfied did he allow the gymnast to complete the warm-up. And as he stood, Jean-Luc was measuring the gymnast’s chest, biceps, thighs and manipulating his feet and massaging the ankles. ‘Okay? We get in the harness now and you show me what you do.’

The gymnast turned, lifted his arms, and Jean-Luc fitted the harness to him. ‘Yes, Maître,’ he nodded. It was that action of lifting his arms that allowed me to recognise him:

He was the famous aerialist, Maurice Sernas, of Le Cirque du Monde, one of the most spectacular international circuses in the world.

‘What is Sernas doing in New Zealand?’ I asked Thierry, as I watched the aerialist approach a hanging rope. I’d noticed the rope many times before, but it was usually rolled tightly within the rafters.

‘He’s halfway through a tour with his new act, Boléro, for the Grand Chapiteau, the big top, and he has struck trouble with the performance. Circus acts depend on split-second timing and if one performer is out of synch he can destroy the entire choreography of the others. So Sernas has come to Father for a diagnosis.’

‘Why Jean-Luc?’ I asked.

‘Sernas is a former student of my father’s,’ Thierry answered, looking at me as if I was stupid. ‘Jean-Luc is the world expert in the corde lisse.’

The corde lisse!

It is considered the finest and bravest of all the aerial disciplines. Although the trapeze is still a main attraction, no circus today would even think of putting on a programme that did not have on its bill the best corde lisse exponent it could afford.

Climbing the suspended rope by a series of fluid wraps, hoists and pulls, and every now and then executing beautiful release moves and fluid acrobatics, the aerialist reached the top of the rope.

And then, down he (or she) would come. The suspended rope was an axis by which the aerialist described angles on a vertical plane. The vocabulary depended on the theme of the performance, and this was where the corde lisse reached the heights of athleticism and enchantment: anything was possible as the aerialist wrapped and unwrapped from the cord and described astounding arabesques in the air. You could be as athletic, artistic and imaginative as you wished.

The rumours were true, then: Jean-Luc had once been an aerialist. In France he ran off to join a Russian circus, and as a young man attained fame for his daring and virtuosity on the corde lisse. The circus had toured the world, including Australia. The troupe had taken a flight to Auckland, one of the cities scheduled in the tour.

You must have heard the story, it was in all the newspapers: they were stranded when one of the directors ran off with the takings. Jean-Luc and the other performers managed to get back to Europe but he never forgot his sojourn in New Zealand.

Ah, yes, New Zealand had always been regarded as a place where Baby Austins and planes with propellers went to die. At the end of his career, still a young man, Jean-Luc drifted down to that well at the bottom of the world, married a New Zealand girl and settled in Auckland. He had never been forgotten by circus colleagues who continued to send him their budding aerialists.

Or, as in Sernas’ case, sought him out when they were in trouble.

‘We begin,’ said Jean-Luc.

Sernas gripped the rope, the gym resounded with Ravel’s Boléro, and, to the insinuating and insistent rhythm of a snare-drum, Sernas went into action: he hoisted himself up with a front flip, snapped into a hip wrap knot, and by a series of other manoeuvres he kept climbing.

I’d never seen anything as masculine and beautiful. As Sernas hoisted himself further — sometimes deliberately unwrapping himself so that he fell a few metres, causing me to blanch — Jean-Luc shouted approval and guidance. ‘Yes, Sernas, good! No, Sernas, inhale! Yes, Sernas, excellent body extension! No, Sernas, tighten the solar plexus! Yes, parfait!’

The music mounted, seeming to climb with Sernas, and it was at the height of its passionate and percussive rhapsodic zenith when he reached the top of the rope and then … oh …

He launched himself down into an increasing wider and wider number of revolutions, toe drops, holds and spins.

My heart was in my mouth, the routine was so … spellbinding and breathtaking.

I happened to look at Jean-Luc and saw him give a slight shake of his head. ‘He pushes his technique. Why?’ Even so, Jean-Luc greeted Sernas exuberantly. While Sernas was recovering, they went into a huddle and I knew that Jean-Luc was giving him notes.

‘But what is wrong then, Maître?’ Sernas asked. ‘Why do I feel this great sense of — ’ He couldn’t find the words.

Jean-Luc interrupted him. ‘Two problems only. The first is easily fixed. You must extend the time you take for your warm-ups. After all, ten years have gone by in your career, oui? What you came by naturally as a boy must be worked harder for, now that you are a man. The warm-ups are two-thirds of the iceberg that the audience do not see. But you need the conditioning for the one-third that they do see!’

He chuckled, patting Sernas lightly on the back. Then his face became serious. ‘Regarding the second problem, I am not sure … But go through your routine again and I will try to locate it.’

As he spoke, his eyes gleamed, yes, as if he’d realised how to find it.

The music began again, provocative, demanding. Sernas gripped the rope.

Jean-Luc turned to Thierry. ‘Switch off the lights,’ he said.

Sernas looked at Jean-Luc, shocked. ‘I won’t be able to see what I am doing,’ he said.

‘Sernas,’ Jean-Luc commanded, sharp, peremptory. ‘Pay attention! Carry on.’

While Sernas went into his routine, Jean-Luc moved about purposefully, setting small arc lights — maybe four or five — on the floor of the gym, training them on Sernas. Then I saw that they were not focused on Sernas, but on the rope itself.

During the run-through, it was not Sernas that Jean-Luc was watching but the rope.

What was that? I thought I saw something. The second problem: the rope quivering, as if too much stress was being put on it. And when Sernas reached the top, the quivering was still visible, as if he and the rope were fighting each other.

Sernas descended; Jean-Luc handed him a towel. Sernas looked at the older man and I thought he was about to weep, but Jean-Luc smiled reassuringly at him. ‘I bow to you,’ Jean-Luc began. ‘When you first came to me you had the heart of a cub and now … you have the heart of a lion. You are the greatest exponent of the corde lisse in the world. And now I will tell you what the second problem is … and it is more serious than the first.’

‘This is why I am here, Maître.’

‘You no longer have a partnership with the rope,’ Jean-Luc said. ‘As soon as I switched off the lights and you cried out, “I won’t be able to see what I am doing”, I knew it.’

I looked at Thierry, not daring to breathe.

‘I was watching the rope and I could see the pressure you were putting on it, the way it trembled and shivered, as if it was carrying the weight of two people not one … And, to some extent, it is. The rope supports you, but it also supports the great expectations that you have of your performance. Thus you do your spectacular work but you expand the arabesque a little wider, you hold the lean-out a bit longer, you establish a different centre of gravity for the piston, you reach further in the hang, you delay the transition between the crucifixion and the dive, comprends? You are performing on technique, you are imposing on the good will of the rope. Before you know it, pouf, your timing has gone up in smoke, pouf, your technique goes into the danger zone, pouf, you are micro-managing your performance, pouf pouf pouf! No wonder the rest of your cast are bewildered, because they take their cues from you and, if you are even a few seconds out …’

‘I understand, Mâitre,’ Sernas answered.

‘Good,’ Jean-Luc said. ‘So my remedy is this. Return to Le Cirque du Monde. You will get through the season all right, but … once it is over, come back to me. We must find the heart of your performance, the essence, and offer it to the rope! What is it, Sernas? What is the histoire that the rope can lovingly embrace? The “you” which you can give the rope so that you and it can work in balance and harmony as you fly in the great and splendid darkness that is our world.’

Jean-Luc hugged Sernas. ‘Thierry will take you back to your hotel now. We will have another session tomorrow before you go back to Europe. Sleep well.’

I waited until Thierry and Sernas had left the gym.

‘Still here, Tupaea?’ Jean-Luc asked. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

But …

Can you see, now, why I did what I did?

I told Koro, Mum and Dad that I was quitting university. Of course they were all upset, especially Koro and Mum. ‘But you’ve only just started your studies,’ Koro said.

Mum turned to Dad. ‘This is what happens when you take care of your child when he’s coughing his lungs out. When he grows up, he throws it all away.’ Then she turned to me. ‘Oh, well, it’s your life.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I answered, holding my ground.

And Koro angrily asked, ‘How will you become a lawyer? How will you fulfil the dreams of your ancestor? You’re ruining your career.’

‘There are other ways,’ I said.

‘Like what, mokopuna?’ He was losing his temper.

I wasn’t sure yet. Oh, and don’t think that I couldn’t have made it in law: my grades were pretty good. Was I making the right decision?

‘I won’t have it, Little Tu!’ Koro shouted. He began to bang his walking stick on the floor in a temper. ‘I will not let you leave university.’ I looked at him tenderly. Oh, he’d never been afraid to resort to melodrama, using emotional blackmail. I knew his tricks inside out.

‘All my life you’ve taken it for granted that I would become what you wanted me to be,’ I said, as I kissed him on the forehead. ‘I only wish I could do that for you, but I can’t any longer.’

‘Don’t speak to your grandfather like that,’ Mum exclaimed.

‘You have to let me go now, Koro,’ I continued. ‘Trust me, and let me be who I want. Not what Mum wants. Not what you want. But what I want.’

‘And so you think you know what that is now, do you?’ he asked.

Come out, come out, wherever you are. ‘I think so,’ I answered.

‘Not good enough,’ he thundered.

‘All right then, Koro,’ I said. I took a deep breath. ‘I want to be my own navigator.’

For a moment there was silence. Then Dad gave a slight cough. ‘Well, Little Tu can’t be clearer than that, eh dear?’ he said to Mum.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN ONE YEAR LATER

I live in Marseilles now. The winter quarters of Le Cirque du Monde are on the outskirts of the city.

I’ve been training hard. Jean-Luc is my choreographer, and together we have created an aerial act. I’ve practised each element of the act, the combination of held postures and drops — arabesques, hip wrap knots, crucifixions, dives, lean-outs, pistons, windmills and miracle splits — over a thousand times, but it feels more like a million.

Koro has been staying with me.

Letting me go? Well, it helped that Uncle Tu-Bad finally made it to the end of the race. Koro has begun to talk to him again about Tupaea; he is the rightful heir. Even better, Koro’s planning to return to Uawa soon.

Not that I could rid myself entirely of Koro. Do you think Mum would have let me come over here without a chaperon? Get off the grass. And Koro had, of course, been bereft at the thought of my leaving New Zealand. ‘It was bad enough when your mother brought you to Wellington, but now you are going to France?’

He had acted as if we would never see each other again. In a moment of passion, I said to him, ‘Come with me, Koro.’

I really meant it. He’s my best friend. I’m glad he came.

On our trip over here I wanted to give Koro a surprise.

‘We’re stopping a few days in Tahiti,’ I told him.

The flight arrived around midnight, and as soon as we’d checked into our hotel, all Koro wanted to do was look at the starlit sky. ‘There they are, mokopuna,’ he said. ‘The directional stars and constellations still looking as they must have in Tupaea’s time.’ He was in the grip of deep emotion as he pointed out Matari’i, the Pleiades; Ana muri, Aldebaran; Ana mua, Antares; Te matau a Maui, the hook of Scorpio.

I knew he was thinking of his ancestor, for, you see, Tupaea never did get to England.

On the return home the Endeavour dropped anchor in Batavia. There, Cook set to repairing the vessel as well as allowing time for those crew who had scurvy to recover from it. But Batavia was an unhealthy city criss-crossed with canals filthy with litter and excrement and, all around, swamp filled with clouds of malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes.

‘Some of the ill were kept on board,’ Koro said, ‘but others were carried onshore and put into tents. Nobody knew anything about malaria in those days and didn’t realise it was carried by the mosquitoes. Multiple bites made the sick get worse and they succumbed to the fever. Dysentery, from contaminated local water, also weakened them, and the ship’s surgeon himself was the first to die.

‘Aue, Tupaea and Taiata also must have been bitten. Some desperate and kindly attempts were made to find fresh fruits for them both, but it was too late. Taiata died, racked by fever and attacked by a cold and inflammation on his lungs. Tupaea was unconscious at the time and didn’t even know the boy had gone until a few days later. When he was told, Tupaea was inconsolable, crying out for him.’

A star fell from the highest heaven, Te Raituitai. Together, Koro and I watched it trailing across the night sky.

‘Can you imagine,’ Koro asked, ‘our ancestor bewailing his fate? He knew that he would be next to go. Who would mourn him and prepare him for the journey to Rohutu noanoa, the Tahitian paradise, to meet ’Oro after his death? Who would administer the last rites? Where was the grand temple where he would be surrounded by his relatives and friends? Who would come for his bones to take them back to Raiatea? How would they find him? When he did, indeed, succumb to death, he and Taiata were both buried on the island of Eadam.’

‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘how Purea felt when she heard that Tupaea had died?’

‘I imagine she took the news very badly,’ Koro replied. ‘She would have ascended to the topmost staircase of Mahiatea and looked across the sea towards Batavia, attempting to invoke a pathway for his spirit and Taita’s to return to Hawaiki.’

Then I asked the question that had long been bothering me. ‘Why did Tupaea decide to join James Cook on the Endeavour in the first place, Koro?’

‘Don’t you know?’ he answered. ‘When he left Tahiti he was on a diplomatic mission for Purea.’

Between the arrival of the Dolphin and the Endeavour, Purea had suffered a huge defeat at the hands of the fighting chief Tutaha. At one of the battles, the sand had been covered with the bones of her defenders and Tupaea himself had been wounded by a spear tipped with a stingray’s tail; it pierced his chest.

‘When you reach England,’ Purea said to Tupaea, her eyes burning bright, ‘I want you to be my ambassador and petition King George to support me to regain control of the Maohi nation. An alliance with such a rich and powerful king could help me to oust Tutaha and take back sovereignty. Ask King George in my name, as one sovereign to another of equal standing to me, to give me waka as powerful as the ships I have seen and fill them with cannon and arms so that I might fulfil this task.’

‘And Tupaea too,’ Koro continued, ‘had his own vested interest in obtaining Pakeha arms. With them he could return to Raiatea and take the island back from its conquerors and for ’Oro. Who knows, Tupaea may have realised that the Pakeha would be back in Tahiti again and that, at some point, the Maohi might need to go to war with the pale strangers, using their amazing armaments against them.’

There was one other stop before we resumed our journey to France.

I took Koro on a plane to Porapora and then a small vessel across the lagoon to Hawaiki — or Raiatea, as it’s known. There was mist on the water, but as we approached the island it lifted, and a beautiful rainbow appeared.

I should have known that Koro would be reduced to tears. ‘Thank you, mokopuna,’ he said.

We found the local rangatira. ‘As soon as the rainbow appeared,’ he smiled, ‘I knew somebody was coming.’ We shook hands and pressed noses. Koro was weeping with joy and, for the first time I could recall, speechless.

‘My grandfather and I are descendants of Tupaea, the Arioi,’ I said on his behalf.

The rangatira called a huge meeting, which lasted into the night. Above, the stars were dancing, eavesdropping.

But all that Mum wanted to know when I rang her from Tahiti was: ‘Did Pa give that ironwood and red cloth back?’

‘You’ll have to ask him,’ I said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN ARIKIRANGI INCARNATE

Tonight’s the night.

The unveiling of the Cirque’s new production, Oceania.

Mum and Dad have arrived after a long trip from Aotearoa to Paris and thence down to Marseilles. At the airport, the first thing Mum asks me is whether or not I have a girlfriend; she still harbours a hope that I might come back to New Zealand and to Marama — but Marama has found someone better.

‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘her name’s Odile Dessaix.’

She looks at Dad. ‘Oh no, what happens if we have French grandchildren!’

He smiles at her. ‘Actually, dear, it’s about time Little Tu started thinking of marrying and … any moko will do.’

The traditional Grand Chapiteau has now become an arena show so that it can play in cities where the big top can’t go and where more people can be packed in. There’s no ceiling however: the darkness is criss-crossed with wires and aerial equipment of the kind that is usually behind the scenes — and the stunts are more perilous.

I’m able to spend a little time getting Koro and Mum and Dad to their seats. They’re sitting with Odile; Mum is telling her lies already, you know, about what a difficult baby I was and all that kind of stuff.

Koro arrives with hair combed to perfection. The women sitting in the same row are overwhelmed by his handsomeness. Mum growls him. ‘Don’t get any ideas. Our plane goes back in three days and you’re not staying in France any longer.’

I leave them because I must start my conditioning. Things go wrong only when you don’t allow enough time to warm up.

Half an hour later.

Good, the daylight has completely faded and the night has fallen. I’m still stretching, limbering up, conditioning and will continue to do so right up to my appearance. While I’m doing this my dresser and make-up personnel are getting me ready: body paint, spandex, costume. ‘Do not forget to check the rope when you are up on the platform,’ Jean-Luc says. ‘Otherwise — ’

‘I know.’

The sound of the deep bass comes rumbling throughout the arena. I watch the beginning of the show from the wings. Not an empty seat in sight. The audience is silent, expectant. The announcer’s voice projects through the inky space. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, bonjour and welcome. Come with us as we take you back to the ancient islands of the Maohi.’

I am still warming up. ‘More stretches,’ Jean-Luc says, ‘more.’ Suddenly the strobe lights are everywhere, creating a kaleidoscope of colour. To the sound of a thousand drums, faery waka begin to enter. They’re in the form of a flotilla of brightly skimming birds, and aboard are beings of exotic and incredibly beautiful appearance.

The crowd erupts into applause. The beings are the Arioi, wreathed and garlanded, they gyrate and dance on the platforms as they skim across the floor of the arena. ‘Homai te tahi mata’i na matou,’ they sing to the great God ’Oro, ‘’ei ahi na muri. Give us a breeze to encompass us from behind so that we may sail as smoothly as upon a bed. Let our prayers take us safely, O God, even into the harbour of the land to which we are going. Look kindly upon us; have pity upon thy shadows. Forsake us not.’

They are quite a spectacle, in their extravagant costumes with tall headdresses. Some are tumblers, others are acrobats, a few are flame-throwers, and they’re all dancing, back-flipping, tumbling and rolling.

Others fly in on aerial silks, ethereal, spell-binding, weaving the colours of the Pacific Ocean together.

‘But the world is changing for the Maohi,’ the announcer interrupts. ‘As foretold by the ancestors, wizards and goblins and strange apparitions are coming to change their world.’

Down go the strobe lights, and up comes that deep rumbling bass again. The audience watches agape as from out of the starlit sky appear two death-defying Russian swings. And from either side of the arena come acrobats to fly across the night like comets, trailing long tails of fire.

The rumbling sounds grow louder, reverberating through the space and juddering every seat. A huge blazing sun begins to rise above the arena. Shimmering behind it, the shadow of a waka.

‘Your conditioning okay?’ Jean-Luc asks me as he prods and pokes me; he’s as bad as Koro. ‘All right,’ he nods, satisfied, ‘up you go.’

I nod as he presses the button and the winch begins to pull me up to the highest point of the arena.

‘Take your position.’

I hear the roar from the crowd as the dazzling globe rises higher and cantilevers over the audience. It’s almost above them, on top of them. If something should go wrong and it should fall …

It’s horizontal over the arena now, and that menacing ghost image hovers on the other side.

The waka punches through the incendiary sun. The timbers are smouldering and the sails burst into flame as the ship falls through the blazing eye of Rangi. Descending slowly, its sails taut, the waka tips.

The crowd screams as it falls, ready to crush them. Their fear turns to relief as, all of a sudden the waka swings and begins to circle the arena. The gun ports open and from them come volley after volley of cannon fire, broadsides that deafen the audience.

The audience put their hands to their ears. Smoke, red-tinged, obscures the waka but …

There it is! Applause greets it as it settles into the centre of the arena.

It is the Endeavour.

Strobe lights hit the waka again and again. The image it presents is of one of power and domination. Submit to me, oh you who look upon me.

Silence falls. The smoke drifts away.

I’m standing on a platform high above the arena where the audience can’t see me. There’s room for only one person. But I can see the audience far below, the thousands who have come to today’s première.

It’s a strange life up here in the dark. You’re alone but the darkness is filled with expectation. Things can come alive up here. You can daydream. Let your imagination soar.

It is, indeed, a great and splendid darkness.

All these years, my ancestor had been waiting.

Come out, come out, wherever you are. Jean-Luc had helped me to find him. ‘It is not enough to achieve physical perfection. What is the essence, the personality that makes everything you do yours? It must come from your head and heart as well as your physique. From your histoire, too, mon petit! It will give you the grace and originality to triumph, the thing that only you, Tupaea, can do!’

Koro had been unconvinced and I had to show him. I took him to the gym. He watched in the darkness as I coiled and unwrapped myself.

‘To see you wrapped up like that … You looked like the baby in the incubator again with cords in your arms and down your throat. And now …’

The announcer cuts through the silence again.

‘In the southernmost part of the Maohi nation, the people gather to confront the goblin apparitions.’ Three carved Maori war canoes appear on the stage, confronting the shimmering ship. It is such a powerful moment, this first encounter of Maori with the invaders.

I settle my headdress. Among its feathers is the red feather that Koro gave me many years ago; it’s my lucky charm. I wait for the rainbow, the colour of black pearls glowing, through which I will slide down to the great god ship below.

‘But this time,’ the announcer continues, ‘the Maohi people do not need to worry. The God ’Oro has sent his emissary, Tupaea.’

‘Time to go to the rescue,’ Jean-Luc says into my face mike.

‘Count me down,’ I answer.

‘Ten, nine, eight, seven …’

What’s this? Some interference.

‘Six, five, four, three …’

Hello, Little Tu, are you there, over?

‘Two, one, and you’re on. Open your wings, Tupaea.’

They’ve been resting, relaxing. Now they begin to flex, and the wind is rushing up beneath them, and I lift.

The strobe lights hit me. I am the Arikirangi incarnate.

The rainbow bridge begins to glisten. Ancient voices call through the sound system. The audience gasps.

Nobody has ever negotiated the corde lisse from this enormous height before, but the rope and I are in partnership. Here in my own Te Raituitai, I look to my left at my arm outstretched and then to my right to the tips of the fingers.

I grasp the rope and take the first step into the dark air. From below, I know that my entrance is spectacular. All the spotlights catch me as I glitter gold in their glow …

All my life I’ve been searching for this perfection.

The air rushing into my lungs … and oh …

Then comes the sense of weightlessness and, yes, it is possible to defy gravity.

Up here, I’m in perfect suspension between heaven and earth, slowly twisting and turning and tumbling and unwrapping myself.

Glitter explodes like silver rain across the audience.

Ancient drums and conch shells raise fanfare after fanfare as I slowly descend the rainbow bridge to the Endeavour below. The audience applauds my beauty.

Hovering above the prow, I unroll at the horizontal, spinning, spinning, spinning down.

At the last minute I release the rope.

The audience screams.

Oh, the thrill of falling.

The screams turn to applause again as I alight on the prow of the Endeavour.

I bow to the three Maori waka.

I make a further bow to the audience and, in particular, to the place where my Koro must be sitting. I’m wearing a circular cap, like a woven helmet, and from it sprouts the tall headdress of beautiful red, yellow and black feathers. My body glistens with oil and around my midriff and thighs I wear a girdle of red feathers. A shoulder cape reaches down to the waist and is tipped with a fringe, this time of yellow feathers.

And then I begin to dance.

I was named after the man who was the captain of the ship called the Endeavour. He brought the God ’Oro to Aotearoa.

Can you see, Koro? Can you see?

My name is Tupaea.