Dice by Claire Baylis

Author:Claire Baylis [Claire Baylis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2023-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

KAHU WOKE ON Sunday nauseous and desperate to leave. He felt only marginally better after the team manager forced him to eat some toast. He’d screwed up his life yesterday; it was as simple as that. The hundred-metre butterfly, his only realistic shot at the New Zealand team, had been a disaster. He’d scraped into the final, and then placed fifth, adding four seconds to his best time. His stroke rate had been way off and he’d felt like he was in one of the dreams he used to have before kapa haka competitions in year ten, when he knew he’d missed too many practices because of swimming. In the dreams his movements were wooden and his timing was out, while the others, in perfect synchronisation, made their hands wiri, chanted and stamped, and he’d still been trying to catch up when they’d finished their pūkana.

Today was the two-hundred-metre fly—the race he always struggled with. This year he hadn’t gone to university or taken a proper job, so he could maintain his training load. Through school, he’d half-arsed his commitments to be at swimming. He’d barely partied with his mates because he was an athlete. He’d broken it off with Pania because she’d been so down on him prioritising weekend competitions. And because he’d stayed in Rotorua to keep swimming, he’d ended up on the trial. Tomorrow, the other jurors would ask him what had happened; he should never have mentioned it. Now he’d have to admit failure, and then go back into that courtroom and listen to the final arguments, and this week they would have to decide if the boys were guilty. And his mum had told him that while he had to listen to the other jurors, he had to speak up too, and he had to believe the decision was right.

He wanted a way out of this. All of it.

He’d felt trapped like this once before. Auckland Airport gate lounge. A year ago. Sitting with his mates and his brother on their way to Guatemala. Everyone talking fast and loud, even Īhaka, who was more than a year younger than him, but Kahu had suddenly wanted to jump up and go back the wrong way down the moving walkway, back past the passport people and the security guards with their doorways, and out into that public part of the airport where all the whānau had gathered to see them off. He wanted to go into the dark Auckland night and get on the bus back to Rotorua, back to his house and his school and his swimming club, and just be himself, not the confident, lucky, Spanish-speaking Māori world traveller they wanted him to be.

His brother hadn’t understood what it would be like—that there’d be times travelling when they had to face things alone, like when the soldiers had taken them off the bus from Guatemala City to Tikal, and had singled out Kahu and Matua Tai, and made them put their hands up against the

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