The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy Read online

  That first night at Hoki Aroha, since there wasn’t a bedroom for me, I slept on the self-same couch Nico had been sitting on. That was okay; we have too much regard for space in the West. The couch sagged like an S in the middle, so I had a slightly agonising back in the morning, but nothing major. As it was, during my time at Hoki Aroha I slept in a liminal space, a gift for any writer. I was like Tony Warren, the creator of Coronation Street, who spent his childhood sitting under the table listening to his grandmother, his mother, his aunts gossiping. *I* now had extended family. *I* could listen to some gossip. This would be of the utmost use to a fiction writer, and I think even then, twelve-year-old that I was, I knew that I was going to pack down some gems at Hoki Aroha. At least I would if Nico ever came to from her trance and said something.

  I woke to two little cannonballs, who turned out to be my step-siblings, Zack and Zoë, jumping up and down on my stomach. Nico was bashing about in the kitchen, a few centimetres from my head. From under the army blanket I could see she wore her Mona Lisa smile, a red muslin dress, and Sascha, attached like a limpet. I pushed off Thing One and Thing Two to ricochet around the room, and sat up. After a while I inquired politely where the bathroom was. Nico seemed not to register me on her radar, but when I headed towards the beaded curtain, she gave an earthy chuckle.

  Hearing the laugh, Thing One paused mid-boing and gestured outside with a wide arm. ‘Stinky poos!’

  ‘And wees!’ piped Thing Two, and they screamed madly.

  I ventured out into the muddy yard. As I picked my way past the ten huts whose quaint crooked chimneys were all pumping out thick smoke and making the air choky with ash, I saw some of the residents, men with beards like Harry and women who looked quite a lot like Nico, and kids, lots of kids, all Pākehā, with greyish faces and snot running into their mouths. Honestly, they were so cute. A few of them stared at me vacantly as I passed. I think if they’d waved to me, or if I’d felt even the teensiest bit welcome by anyone at Hoki Aroha, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today. That sense of being an outsider has been one of the most important things in shaping my creativity, so I’m grateful, despite the fact that I felt like a hopeless piece of shit as I waded—eventually—through long wet grass to the bog that morning. I looked out for Harry, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  The long-drop, inside its little chalet, is, I’m sorry to say, outside my powers of description. I concede to the superior literary talent of Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting.

  Back at the hut, I spied a bowl of porridge on the table. My stomach was yowling like a cat, so I slid onto the wooden bench (this time in a shuddering manner because it was covered with something sticky) and asked Nico rather hopefully if it was for me. Nico maintained her characteristic silence which by this time was getting rather endearing. By way of answer, she sat at the table with Sascha on her lap and began to feed him tenderly from the bowl. He opened his mouth like a baby bird. As he masticated, his big blue eyes stared at me with an expression of smug entitlement. So adorable. I knew we’d have a lifelong attachment.

  There is something incredibly powerful about ignoring someone while maintaining a fixed smile. A smile can mean so much more than it is. My heartfelt thanks go out to Nico for teaching me a valuable lesson about subtext which I’ve used to great effect for several of my most beloved characters. People (Clancy, for instance) have commented that my portrayal of N is a brilliant example of subtext—she remains silent but her insults, conveyed through body language, speak volumes. I am hugely indebted to Nico for ignoring me for the entire year I was at Hoki Aroha. Thank you, Nico. Even though things between Nico and Harry didn’t work out in the end, I enjoy the regular updates I hear on the family grapevine. Nico lives on Waiheke Island and sells home-baked bread under the table at the farmers market to supplement her benefit. The adorable Sascha of the big blue eyes, who once scoffed porridge, brews meth in west Auckland, but that’s just a temporary thing while he saves up to take a course in glass-blowing. Things One and Two moved to Brisbane.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I have more tributes connected to my fruitful stay at Hoki Aroha. After breakfast on that first day (I learned to make my own porridge), Harry breezed in, incredibly happy, and announced that I was going to school. My heart leapt. Not that I’d ever had much truck with school, or rather the eight schools I’d already been to, but at least it would be something to do. Harry told me to go out into the yard and join in. I poked my face outside the hut, feeling a bit timid, and saw in the smoky haze a raggle-taggle troop of the most adorable children you’ve ever seen. They were around my age and upwards, older than the ones I’d seen earlier on my way to the bog, and they stared at me as if they’d never seen another human being.

  Soon I was trudging after them through the compound behind a bearded man in bright red jeans who looked like Harry. All the men at Hoki Aroha looked pretty much the same, with their skinny frames, bushy beards and red trousers. We wended our way through some scrub until we were getting into tree country. As we traipsed along single file, we must’ve looked like the bedraggled actors on the set of another Hobbit film, plunging deeper and deeper into the forest. Eventually we halted at a small field cultivated with knee-high plants with almond-shaped leaves. For some reason, the growing had to take place way out here.

  The bearded man summoned everyone. We gathered around and he announced that we had a new person. Me! He called me Janet. I mentioned, smiling a bit with shyness, that actually I was Janice.

  ‘And Janet,’ said the bearded man, ‘you can call me Valour.’

  ‘Valour,’ I repeated.

  ‘Janet, here,’ Valour told the assembled crew, ‘is going to be joining our community, so I want you all to make her welcome.’

  I found myself the recipient of a row of hostile blue stares. In fact, I’m grateful for that, and I think by now you’ll be able to understand why: a comfortable life, some security, a sense of inclusion, is all anathema to the life of a writer. Those kids at Hoki Aroha who didn’t speak to me the whole year I was there, honestly—respect.

  Valour said he was going to show me a really important skill today. He came close and cupped his hand, which smelt strongly of mulch, under my chin. I stood stock still, not sure if squirming out from under his hand would be allowed, seeing he was the teacher. Finally, Valour stepped back and put his head on one side, considering me.

  ‘I suppose you’ve been at a school dedicated to the principles of dialectical materialism?’

  Perhaps I had been at a school like that. I wasn’t sure. But from Valour’s certain tone, I understood that he knew for a fact I’d been to one of these schools—he’d likely been talking to Harry and had prior knowledge of Ridgeway School, Brooklyn School, Clyde Quay School. I nodded.

  Valour leapt on this concession. ‘Ah, I thought so. Well, I’m pretty sure you’ll find that things are very different here. We’re a cool school, aren’t we, whānau?’

  Valour looked piercingly round the class and the whānau didn’t disagree.

  ‘We’re a cool school and we learn useful things. For instance.’ Valour, getting into his stride, pointed to a gangly boy of about fourteen. ‘Willow here wanted to learn how to balance the books so he’d know how to make a living wage from a crop. Can’t argue with that, can you? Willow asked, Show me how? So I showed him how. Didn’t I, Willow?’

  Willow nodded, trying not to smile.

  ‘And Zac here’—Valour pointed to another gangly boy—‘Zac wanted to learn how to build a drying shed. He asked, Show me how?’ Valour opened his eyes wide in an apparent rendition of Zac pleading to be shown how. ‘So I showed him how, didn’t I, Zac?’ Zac blushed with pride.

  Then there was another boy, Kai, who’d wanted to learn how to make clay pipes to sell and he’d said, Show me how, and Valour had shown him how, and there was quite an art to it, it wasn’t easy. Valour worked his way around the class, making the boys smile coyly one by one with stories of how they’d asked to be shown how, but h
e stopped when he came to the girls, who were looking at the ground anyway. It was a bit of shame, but they seemed not to want to learn.

  Valour turned back to me. ‘So, Janet, tell me, have you ever asked, Show me how?’

  I shook my head. Unfortunately, I’d never asked to be shown how.

  ‘Perhaps you could start right now, Janet,’ said Valour. ‘Why don’t you ask me, right now, here, “Valour, show me how.” What do you want to learn, Janet? What?’

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I felt my face flush with shame.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ insisted Valour. He was right up in my face and I got a whiff of gum disease.

  I racked my brains but came up with nothing. Just beyond my concentration, I could hear the other kids snickering. This was the teensiest bit unfair, as I hadn’t had the advantage of being at a cool school. In all my years at various State Primaries I’d never been invited to ask, ‘Show me how.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Valour finally, releasing me from a kind of spiritual vice. He paced around in a professorial way. ‘See, Janet, I’m not surprised you don’t have a clue what you want to know, because I bet you’ve been at a school where they shut you down. Did you go to a school where they shut you down, Janet?’

  I had to admit that I had. In my defence, though, I think I’d moved enough times to avoid being hermetically sealed by the policies of any school in particular.

  ‘I suppose they taught you reading and writing, did they?’ asked Valour. He was smiling at his joke while distributing gardening implements to the class.

  ‘A bit,’ I conceded.

  The other kids tittered and brandished their hoes.

  ‘Maths?’ asked Valour, playing to the crowd.

  I humbly nodded.

  ‘What about science?’ called Valour to all and sundry.

  I could not tell a lie. I’d learned general science.

  The kids doubled up laughing. By the time they’d subsided, Valour seemed to soften a little and was stroking his beard, looking at me kindly, no doubt concerned at the terrible turn my education had taken.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Janet.’

  ‘No,’ I chimed in quickly, ‘it’s not my fault.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it very different here, Janet. I think you’ll find that here we don’t shut people down. It’s the opposite, isn’t it, whānau?’ He enlisted the kids’ mumbles. ‘We open people up.’

  Now Valour and the children plunged into their tasks: weeding the rows, checking the plants for some disease I couldn’t catch the name of, and spraying a white chemical onto them for which Valour wore a mask but there didn’t seem to be enough for the kids to wear. There, under the blue sky, on the tilled field, in the beautiful clean air, we toiled, and I tried to keep up although I was hampered by my limited past access to the epistemology of the dope crop.

  I want to break off from this idyllic scene for a moment to express my huge thanks to Valour. If it hadn’t been for him, I might’ve gone for my entire schooling without asking, ‘Show me how.’ If I’m honest, I didn’t want to be shown how to grow hectares of weed, but that seemed to be pathetically beside the main pedagogical principle that Valour was trying to get across. And here I only mention it as tiny aside to the main gist of this, which is my enormous gratitude to Valour, who is serving time in Mt Eden Prison now. That was nothing to do with the crop. It was the girls.

  In the afternoon, a bearded man named Hector, who had just arrived from Germany and had a nice new pair of Birkenstocks, taught us how to make a clay wall with beer bottles embedded prettily in it. Hector also greeted me with a caress of the chin and face which extended to opening my mouth a little. This seemed to be the conventional way to say hello at Hoki Aroha.

  At midday we all sat around eating the packed lunch the women had prepared earlier. I noticed that Hector disappeared into the bush with one of the girls. I wondered if she needed special tuition because she had not asked, ‘Show me how.’ Perhaps Hector was giving her special instruction in what it was important to be shown. Somehow I hoped I would not need remedial help with Show Me How.

  I started going every day to help grow and harvest the rows of the semi-tropical plants and to learn skills like building shithouses with beer bottles in them, fashioning clay pipes which got baked in a kiln, and making two columns of figures, one for debit, one for credit. But that first night I was initiated into the evening rituals that marked the end of each day at Hoki Aroha.

  At six o’clock, everyone assembled in the Big Kitchen for supper. The community, which I now saw numbered about fifty, sat at long tables while several women in bright purple and orange muslin brought out the food, and everyone bowed their heads over their rough earthen plates. I did the same, while peeking up at the bearded man at the head of the table who seemed to be in charge and who said grace in Māori.

  I tucked into my food, which that first night was a big stew from a communal pot with everything in it, a bit on the sloppy side and truth be told not much taste to it, but I could see I was going to have a more nutritious diet while I was Hoki-side than I’d had with Sorrell, where fridgelessness reduced us pretty much to pies from the dairy. At the commune there was no fridge, but you know what? It didn’t matter. The produce was gathered fresh every day from the land (a fact I’d picked up from the karakia). I was to learn that something new was added to the pot every day. Sometimes it got a little repetitive, such as when the bean, broccoli and cabbage crops failed and there was just carrots for a few months. Over the week, the flavour of the stew would get better and better, until it didn’t, and that was not a very good night, but the next day one of the women, maybe Nico, would decide it was time to start a new pot, and this was quite a festive occasion and a bottle of undisclosed liquor in a dark green dirty-looking bottle might be passed around among the men and some of the teenage boys. They would get drunk in a very short time, and sometimes a fight would erupt later.

  After dinner—in summer as the sun sank and threw long dark arteries over the weedy compound, in winter with the coal range glowing in the Big Kitchen—the little kids would scatter underfoot, the teenage boys retreat to lurk darkly in the shadows, and the women and sentient girls including yours truly would do the dishes. The dishes were not done lightly, for a start, on account of there being no running water. Earlier in the day, buckets had been carried up from the stream one hundred metres away. I learned that water is heavy and that as you walk with it, a tide gets established in the bucket which gathers momentum, growing bigger and bigger until it’s a neap tide and half the water is slopping out of the bucket and disappearing (pardon my ings) into the parched yard which doesn’t need water because only weeds grow there, and this can be annoying because it means you’ve lost so much water on the journey that it’s going to take even more journeys to fill the wetback. The wetback situated on the side of the coal range is in turn fuelled by wood gathered from the forest. Carrying an armload of wood from the forest half a kilometre away is a poky, spine-wrenching exercise and once you’ve done this several times in a day, your arms and your back are quite sore and your chest and forearms are scratched to pieces. However, once the hand-carried water was bubbling away merrily in the wood-fuelled wetback, the dishes proper could begin.

  Twenty women and girls were involved in the dishes, and on that first night as I picked up what was once a tea towel only to have it snatched out of my hands by an outraged older woman, I learned that doing the dishes was a privilege, and convened by the established matrons of the commune. Chastened, my fingers stinging after the flick of the rag, I stood politely to one side and waited to be given a job. One doyenne in particular, a grey-maned woman called Barb, officiated this evening at the big stone tub. I watched as she rolled up her muslin sleeves seriously, plunged her fleshy hands into the murky water, and got to work. This was no child’s play. Making a lather by swishing yellow soap in a little cage on a stick—a task I could only just glimpse if I stood on tiptoes—took some e
xpertise. Once Barb had produced a thin film of fat on the surface of the water, the scrubbing began. She went at it like a cattle-wrangler, head down, all elbows and sweat and grunt, getting through fifty plates, an array of cutlery like a huge catch of fish, plus random pots (but not the Pot). Simultaneously, a chain of older girls brought more water from the creek and topped up the wetback and set extra cauldrons brimming on the range. About half a tree went into doing the dishes. A fleet of established matrons swooped in and out, plucking washed dishes from the draining bench and giving each one a good polishing with a rag. They polished as if their life depended on it and stacked them on the nearest table. Lastly, and this is where I came in, and felt lucky to do so, the younger girls ferried the dried earthenware, extremely carefully, from the table to the big rough-hewn cabinet on the other side of the kitchen and stowed them away, coming back for more like sparrows.

  All in all, doing the dishes at Hoki Aroha was a lot of donkeywork, but it didn’t feel like that in the least; it felt like an honour.

  While the dishes were being done, a meeting was taking place at one of the big tables on the other side of the dining hall. If The Meeting was populated only by men, that wasn’t the result of any kind of prejudice, it was just because the women hadn’t finished the washing up yet. I have to add here that everyone at Hoki knew that the women’s jobs were valued very highly by the men, probably more so than their own jobs. At the beginning of each meeting, as I ferried clean dishes, I would hear from the edges that the first item on the agenda was to thank and honour the women of Hoki Aroha, who were wāhine toa, strong women, the backbone of the community. Roger would raise a hand: ‘All respect to the wāhine of Hoki Aroha.’ And the other men, including Harry of course who was at the table jiggling his knees, would chime in raggedly, ‘Respect, sisters.’ The women wouldn’t notice this tribute, as they were too busy scrubbing fat off pans with pig-bristles and trying to stop the sweat running into their eyes, but the sentiment was there.