The Imaginary Lives of James Po¯ neke by Tina Makereti
Iam not yet seventeen years of age, but I have a thought that I may be dying. They don’t say that, of course, but I can read it in their many kindnesses and the way they look at one another when I speak of the future. Perhaps I do not need their confirmation, for surely I wouldn’t see all I can in the night if I weren’t playing in the shadow of death. So when they come and ask about my life, I tell them all. What else is there for me to do? I don’t feel it then, the brokenness of my own body. I feel only the brokenness of the world.
From here, in the shadows, I can see a piece of London’s sky and the roofs of countless houses. The curtain is flimsy, and I have asked Miss Herring to leave it aside, for I am so high in this room and the sky is my only companion these many hours. At night, I see the beetle making his slow, determined way between cracks. I smell the city rising then: black smoke, the underlying reek of p... and sweat, the sweetness of hung meat and fruit piled high in storage for the morning, its slow rot. My own.
The street waits, and the beetle crawls, leg over leg, down the brick side of the house. From his vantage point, I see it all: every detail in the mortared wall, the coal dust that covers it; the wide expanse of London Town, lights shimmering along the Thames and out into a wide panorama more delightful than even the sights of the Colosseum.
I wish I could tell you the air is fresh here, but no, it is stench and smoke and fog rising, obscuring the pretty lights. Yet I love it, love this dark and horrid town, feel the awe rising even beside the dread. It is a place of dreams.
Sometimes I follow the moth who finds her way on swells of air, a ship catching currents established lifetimes ago, knocked sideways by the draught of a cab passing, the hot air expelled from a gelding’s nostrils.
The moon is different here, not a clean, clear stream, but a wide and silty river. She lends her light all the same, so that I might see the faces that pass. And they pain me, it’s true, for every face is one I know, and I cannot say whether they are living or dead. I see all the misses and misters of the streets of London, and the ones of Port Nicholson.
The worst of it is when I see the tattooed face, or hear the music of the garden orchestra, see gaudily dressed couples dancing circles, the spectre of shows pitching illusions into the air: tricks of light, mechanical wonders, wax figures bearing features I knew only for the first few years of my life.
I couldn’t even remember my mother’s face until I was confined to my bed, and now I see her every night, a doll animated by a wind-up box. The acrobats then, and my friends from the card table. Warrior men and women of my childish and dark memories, from before I learnt about the world of books and ships.
My shipmen, both loved and feared. They don’t speak, my friends and enemies and loved ones, but I know they are waiting; I know the streets below are teeming with them, even when the hour grows late and all decent men should be in their own beds.
It is as if I travel through all the old battles each night until I reach him, and though I know not whether he still walks the solid Earth, I always find him. Billy Neptune, even now grinning and ready to make fun. He is the only one who sees me. ‘Hemi, good fellow,’ he calls, ‘back to your bed! What is your business out here amongst the filth of the streets? Not the dirt, mind you, I mean people like us!’ At this he laughs his short, booming laugh, a sound that breaks open in my chest like an egg spilling its warm yellow centre.
‘What is it like?’ I ask him every night, or, ‘How are you?’ But he doesn’t answer.
‘Ah, Hemi,’ he says. ‘What games we made of it, eh, my fine friend? What games.’ And he goes on his way, and I go on mine, circling the restless world.
These past few nights I seem to have gone further than before, and this morning Miss Herring commented that I looked more tired than I had yesterday, when I had seemed more tired than the day before.
‘Are you not recovering, Mr
Po¯ neke?’ she asked. ‘Should I ask Miss Angus to bring the doctor again?’
The doctor has been three times already, and though he works his doctoring skill on my body, I’m afraid he does not have medicine for what ails me.
‘No – all is well, thank you, Miss Herring. Only, I do not seem to sleep at all, and travel the world in my imagination through the long night instead. It seems as real as you standing right here this morning.’
The maid shook her head and smiled, as she always does when I use her name, for I am the only one who addresses her formally, and no one has yet found a way to correct me in this habit.
‘Mr Po¯ neke, I believe you’ve travelled to the very ends of this Earth. You must have many memories of adventures beyond what’s normal.’ She hummed as she made to clean the fireplace and reset the fire. I suppose Miss Herring and I enjoy an uncommonly open interaction, one that she would not enjoy with more formal masters. But I am not a master, and my position in the house has always been unusual, and I have a great need of companionship, spending so much time alone in bed as I do.
‘It is a dark night I go out in, and I am liable to see ghosts.’
At this she drew in a sharp breath and blustered about, leaving as soon as she saw Miss Angus arrive with the soup she brings each day. Miss Angus enquired after my health, and I repeated what I had told the maid, save for the part about ghosts.
‘Sometimes I wonder – if I had a way of telling my story, perhaps it
I wish I could tell you the air is fresh here, but no, it is stench and smoke and fog rising, obscuring the pretty lights.
wouldn’t haunt me so. What think you, Miss Angus?’
‘It seems like as fine a way to pass the time as any.’ Miss Angus sat with her sewing in the chair she’d set up by the window for such a purpose. She is endlessly patient with me, endlessly considerate. It is a comfortable room, and easy to talk. And so I did, describing how only three nights before I had begun to leave the London of my dreams.
I was tired of all the shadows of the city, I said, thinking of my personal ghosts. Instead of my usual wandering I sped to the wharves, and there I took a ship and walked among the men as they worked.
I did not tell her that all my ghosts found me on the ship, that I had simply moved them along with me. These crews of my old life took me over the oceans, faster than ever before, until we were again in Barbados.
From there, each time Miss Angus came to attend me, I told her of a different night’s travel. Sometimes we stayed aboard ship, or were tossed again in the wreck of the Perpetua; other times we returned to my wandering days in New Zealand. Despite never straying from the tasks in front of her while I spoke, Miss Angus seemed serene and even entertained by my foolish stories.
After a week of such adventures I feared I may have confused Miss Angus with all my tales of roving about the world. I hadn’t told them in any sort of order – it does not happen that way in the telling of a tale, and it is hard to keep my mind straight when my existence is so still. Time makes its own game when life is so slow and painful, my entire world now nothing but this bed, four walls and window. I cannot even rise to relieve myself, and so all modesty goes out that window with my mind, though I find the telling alleviates the dreams somewhat.
Occasionally Miss Angus frowns and asks where this or that island is, what I mean by a foreign word or shipman’s phrase. My descriptions are of no use to her, I fear. She has no reference point beyond the river, no experience of the world beyond London’s centre.
The strangest place for her might be the land of my birth, which had no grand buildings, no trains, no exhibition halls or galleries, no palaces, barely a newspaper or carriage when I left it. I was just a boy, half wild and fully lost, and the world around me an unmapped forest. I knew there was trade and ships – of course I knew that – but I could not imagine this world that seems to be made up almost entirely of those things.
In my earliest memory there is green everywhere, leaves and leaves of it in a great pile, my mother working beside me, and, when I look up, more. It is the wide umbrella of the ponga tree I see, its many brothers and sisters encircling us. A kind of speckled light is thrown over everything as it breaks through gaps in the trees’ canopy.
My mother works the flax until it is soft, and folds it into her many layers. I cannot tell you what it is that day. Often she made wha¯ riki – the mats we used to line our homes or sleep upon. Or kete – those were quick and easy to make, and sturdy, for gathering our food or carrying things from one place to the next.
Some long winters were spent working at a cloak – I remember this because the muka fibres were so fine and I was not to touch them even though she let me play freely with the broad green leaves before they were stripped down to soft strands.
No, this day it must have been a kete, something easy and light, I think. It must have been warm, for I remember no cloth or cloaks hindered our movement. Even so, the undergrowth smelt like wet dirt and rotting leaves, the kind of smells that signal not decay but new growth. It was my game to imitate my mother’s work by lifting and folding leaves one over the other, though mine did not stay together or transform into a whole as hers did.
Even Nu, my sister, tried to help, but I had more game than goal in mind, so my failures gave me as much pleasure. When I wandered away she came after me, calling in a high voice, or scolding when I took too long. She tried to work at her own weaving when I was settled. Sometimes ka¯ ka¯ parrots came down to make off with our scraps.
Sometimes tu¯ ı¯ birds yodelled at us like singers from the opera. We talked to them as if we knew their language. Perhaps we did. It was just the world. We listened and tried to call back, my sister entertaining me with her imitations while our mother worked.
I do not know how old I was, but I cannot have been more than four or five. Everything for me was sight and sound and flavour, the grubs beneath as fascinating as the pretty leaves above. The forest litter, rot, all of life. The delicious squirming and leaping of my small-child’s body. Our simple entertainments.
Sometimes we wandered away to join the other children while our mothers worked together. Nu was my constant companion; I couldn’t tell you her proper name now. If I was hungry she found a morsel for me to eat, some dried fish or meat from the night before, fern root to chew. She never let me out of her sight.
I remember all this because what came after was so sudden and preceded by such stillness. It was the birds who first went quiet. Nu was dangling from the branch of a tree overhanging a little creek we liked to play near. All of us children were making our noisy way across, and my sister thought she might do so without touching the water. I tried to copy but fell to the riverbank, then pretended I was happy to watch her swing above, almost as if she could touch the tops of the trees. Looking up, always looking up at my sister.
At first we didn’t know what was missing. We were being loud enough for our mothers to hear us, and the sound of nothing came over us slowly, swallowing our voices one by one until we too were silent, straining our ears, listening.
I don’t know how long that moment of silence was, but when I think back I am suspended there. Everything slow and quiet and wrong. Then a loud noise came in, a sharp cry that shattered the still. Sound rushed towards us then, our mother’s cries: ‘Tamariki ma¯ ! Rere atu! Come away now!’ All of it at once – scooped into my mother’s arms, but where was Nu?
Where was Nu, my big sister? And my mother ran and ran and put me down under branches and then there were the sounds of weapons on flesh, and something else, too, sharp and so loud it sounded like the world had split in two. I stayed hidden because I was small, and silence had now been pushed into me and planted there. And no one saw me even though my mother lay down and looked right at me. She couldn’t see me, though. I understood this when she looked and looked until her eyes became clouds.