Festival of Miracles by Alice Tawhai

Author:Alice Tawhai
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869694616
Publisher: Huia (NZ) Ltd
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Open Your Mouths

FENCING ON THE EAST COAST is the best job in the world. We get out of bed in the dark, and the sun comes up over the horizon while we set up the fence posts. It slides upwards into the paling sky, golden orange and runny above the dawn sea, like the yolk from a real farm–laid egg.

Every morning I say, ‘Look at that,’ and George says ‘Yeah, I must get a desk job,’ and we laugh, because he stole that from a Toyota ad.

George and me have been fencing together for a while. He doesn’t talk much to many people, but he tells me things that he’d never tell anyone else. That’s probably due to us spending so much time together on our own. Talking to each other is a bit like talking to yourself.

Sometimes what he says freaks me out. Like the time he told me how his uncle Tuki had interfered with him when he was younger. It was a shock to me, because I’d heard about his uncle Tuki heaps of times. It sounded as though he’d had quite a bit to do with George’s bringing up.

‘Why don’t you do something about it?’ I asked. ‘Why not go to the police and make the bastard pay for what he did to you?’ George wiped his eyes with the back of one of his hands. ‘Because I look at my uncle Tuki with his kids and my auntie May, or down at the pub with his rugby mates, or bringing in a wild pork on his ute, and I find it hard to believe myself,’ he said. ‘Like it was a different life, my underneath life. How can it fit into the normal happy life of my uncle Tuki? He doesn’t speak about it, and neither do I. It’s as if it never happened, and I wouldn’t want to bring it back. Anyway, it doesn’t really affect me.’

And George hasn’t brought up the subject directly again. He’s a single man, never really settled down. He finds it hard to trust people or get close to them. He prefers to tell me stories about his whānau, especially his big sisters Cairo and Alamein. They were twins, and George reckoned they had magic in them. He was even a bit jealous of them, I think.

‘Right from the time they were little, they were treated special by our koro,’ he said. ‘He had them from birth, and he was the one who chose their names. Our mother didn’t want them because they had club feet and she was working. Cairo was crippled on the left foot, Alamein on the right. If they put their crooked feet together, you could see how they had rubbed against each other before they were born.

‘I didn’t think that it really slowed them down myself. They just hard out played on it when Koro was around. They always got out of doing things, and they got everything that I didn’t get.’

‘Such as?’ I asked.

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