The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy Page 11

  That first night, Roger opened up a discussion on drainage. ‘Let’s talk to drainage,’ he said. Listening, carrying plates, I learned quickly that there was no drainage at Hoki Aroha, and that unless the community could come up with $20,000 to get connected to the town sewerage and wastewater system, things on the land were going to go from a bit smelly to cholerically toxic, and the commune would be shut down.

  Harry was all for digging a new channel down to the river. Valour said that that would be disadvantageous to the community, because the route went too close to the crop. ‘If the plot’s contaminated, what are we going to sell? Our own shit?’ There was a ripple round the table and the tenor of the discussion ramped up a notch. Hector, who had a manner like the social worker in That Sinking Feeling, thought that the community should take out a loan and pay to have the drains built by professional drainlayers.

  ‘That would serve ze community for ze next generation, yes?’ he said. He cited the example of how they cleaned up the Rhine.

  At this, Harry, Valour and a few of the other men got a bit heated, yelling and threatening and so forth, until Roger half rose from his chair and told them to settle down, that everyone’s voice was important, and everyone would be treated with respect because this was Hoki Aroha was about. He sank back down, and peace reigned. ‘So, what have we resolved?’

  ‘To dig a new channel down to the river,’ said Harry.

  Valour looked daggers at Harry. ‘You already said that, and I’m forced to repeat—’ and he launched into a tirade about Harry’s idea being the dumbest of all the dumb things they could possibly do. Not only would all the crap run near to the crop, it would go into the river and the fucking Māoris would complain about their fucking shellfish and there’d be some kind of fucking ritual down there and the fucking media would arrive followed by the fucking fuzz. He added, ‘You dumb fuck,’ which seemed necessary, given the seriousness of the allegations.

  Hector intervened here, the voice of reason. ‘Gentlemen, having a proper drain laid would serve ze community well in ze years to come, yes? And that would mean—’

  I was halfway across the kitchen with some cutlery when I saw Valour rush over to Hector, who just had time to say, ‘Yes?’ before he was punched in the mouth. He fell against the pile of wood in the corner. A couple of the other men ran over and joined in, Harry included, and soon they were like a cluster of peasants harvesting turnips in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I looked at the women to see what they would do about the fight, but they didn’t seem to turn a hair. Eventually someone hauled the men off Hector, they all collapsed back into their hand-hewn chairs, and the meeting was adjourned. As the dishes were also done, everyone bid each other goodnight and dispersed to their respective dwellings. Nico, carrying the baby, helped the bleeding Harry to limp over the uneven yard back to our hut. Things One and Two followed, crying a bit and sniffing and eating the snot that ran down into their mouths. I brought up the rear.

  I relate this event to show how, even though the philosophy of the commune was to foster mindfulness, it was at the same time a stimulating place intellectually and physically, full of talk and action, and for that I am grateful. It certainly wasn’t an environment where your mind would go to mush, despite the permanent fug of dope smoke. I’m happy to report that the culture described in Cinema of Unease was nowhere to be found.

  The next morning—only my second morning at Hoki Aroha, but it felt like I’d been there for months—I was in the hut when I heard loud yahooing in the yard and went out see what was going on. Several of the men including Harry were prancing about, slapping their knees and chanting. When Harry sashayed by and saw my puzzlement, he spluttered, ‘The blue meanie just, the blue meanie just …!’ but it was apparently so funny he couldn’t get the words out. Zac, one of the teenage boys who’d asked ‘Show me how’, was lolling against the fence, and he filled me in. The blue meanies were the inspectors who regularly visited the commune. There was the Council man who came about the drains, the Health Department man who came about the Dirt, and the Treaty man who had an envelope to deliver about some claim on the property under the Treaty of Waitangi, which was crap because the people at Hoki loved the land. Why do you think it had a Māori name? Zac told me that the Council man had just driven into the compound and gone away again at the sight of the empty yard, hence the celebration. I watched while Harry et al. did funny walks up to the doors of the huts and pretended to knock on them, to general hilarity. It was the beginning of a new day.

  During the course of my year at Hoki Aroha, I saw a lot of blue meanies try unsuccessfully to storm the commune. At first sighting of a neat white car bumping up the road in a cloud of dust, the cry would go up, ‘The blue meanies, the blue meanies!’ and within seconds the compound would clear and hut doors slam. I’d crouch under the window with Things One and Two, peeking out to see the bureaucratic vehicle reversing back down the chunky road. Then everyone would emerge and a party atmosphere would reign for a few hours. To tell the truth, I don’t know what the commune would’ve done for entertainment without visits from the blue meanies; it was the most fun anyone ever had. No one bothered to explain to me what would happen if a Blue Meanie ever did gain access. This discrepancy is something I will come to in the course of my Acknowledgements.

  For the present, my grateful thanks to all who were in residence at Hoki Aroha in 1992 would not be complete without describing the Dirt. Indeed, my *story* would not be complete without conveying the integral position of filth at the commune. The Dirt was a member of the community. Cleaning had not been high on my list of priorities at the age of twelve, especially while living with Sorrell, but part of my re-education at Hoki Aroha was to learn that cleaning is what OCD people and capitalists do in the *weekends* (in the commune, every day was the same, as nature intended it). Everything in the compound was filthy, from black, sticky floors to surfaces layered with years of grease to windows clouded like cataracts. The bathrooms were spectacular: the basins were a fuzzy grey, the walls pink with mould and the toddlers’ piss pots a rusty earwax colour and streaked darker inside. The smell was at first like a punch in the face, but it was something you got used to.

  As a reference, may I point the reader in the direction of the chapter entitled ‘The Scum’ in On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. In that novel, the mother has a head injury from being hit by a carriage door while getting out of a train. The members of Hoki Aroha had sustained no such trauma, but they did smoke a lot of weed. I could’ve written ‘The Scum’, not that I’m comparing myself with Ian McEwan, I hasten to add.

  The Dirt prompted many a visit from the Health Department man, but each time disaster was neatly sidestepped by everyone performing blue meanie drill until he went away.

  However, one morning it was different. I saw the events unfold from the smoky hut window. A little car, white as a dentist’s surgery, came chugging up the road as usual, and as usual the commune broke from its morning duties (the women hanging washing, men rolling joints on their doorsteps) and fled towards their huts. But instead of driving away, the white car stopped in the compound, the door opened, and a court shoe on the end of a stockinged leg emerged. The windows of Hoki flickered like old-fashioned videos on pause as the owner of the stockinged leg stood in the yard in her grey skirt and white blouse. She made her way, managing her heels in the clay rubble, and knocked on the first door. Amazingly, it was answered.

  Looking back, I think the commune allowed this health inspector in because she was a woman, and they thought she would be nice. At Hoki, women were lovely people, they were feminine and benign. The worst you could expect from a Hoki woman was the silent treatment, and although this could feel unpleasant, and perhaps even fuck one up for life, in the immediate present it posed no threat. It’s my humble opinion that living in this sheltered environment for years had made everyone at the commune forget what a woman from the outside could be like. This proved a fatal mistake; once she had breached the huts, the health inspector
revealed herself to be, although definitely a woman, not lovely, feminine or benign, but hard-arsed and horrible. One could not imagine this woman doing the dishes with any integrity whatsoever.

  To make matters more complicated, on the morning the health inspector arrived I was having a little setback. Of course, this wasn’t uncommon at Hoki. Most of the children had setbacks from time to time, of the stomach cramps and upchucking variety. When the knock came, I was lying on my couch curled like a nautilus. Nico looked up from the other end of the couch where she sat nursing the baby and reading The New Yorker. Without waiting to be invited, the health inspector pushed open the door, barked ‘Inspection!’ and stepped inside. She was skinny and white with a dark, gamine haircut like Donna Tartt and a clipboard hugged to her chest. I felt Nico rearrange herself with the utmost passive aggression.

  The health inspector clacked around the hut in her heels, going over everything with a fine-toothed comb. She turned the taps (a hopeful gesture, because of course there was no running water), lifted the lava-lava under the sink and poked around, and—this last performed with a wince—nudged the chamber pot by the bench with her pointy shoe. Frequently she shook her head and scribbled on her clipboard and wiped her fingers on a wet wipe plucked from her shoulder bag. All through, she maintained an expression of extreme disgust. Finally I came under her gaze. She put her head on one side.

  ‘What’s the story with you?’ she asked matter-of-factly.

  I was about to explain how I had excruciating pains in my intestines and felt sick to the pit of my stomach, but Nico eyeballed me in a terrifying way from the other end of the couch.

  I blinked up at the inspector. ‘Nothing,’ I squeaked.

  The inspector leaned down and put her cool palm on my forehead. For a split second I was plunged into a little reverie whereby a concerned adult was offering me sympathy and support; this concerned adult held a cold cloth to my brow, brought me chicken soup on a tray, and worriedly called the doctor. Such were the workings of my fevered imagination. In reality, the health inspector sprang back as if burned. ‘Good gracious!’ She turned to Nico. ‘This child has a high fever. She needs to see a doctor.’

  Nico looked at the inspector as if she were a train on her distant horizon. Kudos to Nico, she maintained this impressive mindfulness while the inspector demanded to know if there was any Panadol in the house, dug some tablets out of her own bag, expressed disgust at the smeary glass on the bench and cleaned it with one of her special wet wipes, expressed more and greater disgust at the pitcher of water, then sniffed it and apparently decided it was drinkable.

  While the inspector scribbled busily on her clipboard, I felt another retch coming on, but Nico’s gimlet gaze was clear: Do not on any account throw up. This was the most attention Nico had ever paid me, so part of me felt special. I did my best to oblige and everything oozed painfully downwards in my body. This is how I know about translation.

  The health inspector thumbed through her list and spoke to no one in particular. There were a couple of things, she said, that might need some attention, which turned out to be a New Zealand way of saying there were twenty-five shockingly bad areas of concern. From the haze of my sickbed, I didn’t understand why she was bothering to tell us all this. It’s not as if we didn’t know the chamber pot lived next to the bench, the cupboards were infested with cockroaches, and there was a dead rat under the table. Across the room, Nico was half smiling and rocking the baby in a way that said to this woman, ‘Uptight bitch.’ If Nico had been looking at me like that, I would’ve understood perfectly that I wasn’t behaving in a cool way and would’ve taken immediate steps to remedy the situation by being quiet and still. But the Nico treatment wasn’t working on the health inspector, not one bit. Instead, she made more notes on her clipboard and looked at Nico with a loathing gaze.

  As soon as she’d gone, briefly blocking the light in the doorway, I leaned over and vomited into the red plastic bucket. Nico lit a joint and listed verbally the health inspector’s attributes, which were strangely feminine. I felt a warmth fill the space where my breakfast had been to have Nico take me into her confidence so.

  I lay back on the couch and listened to the health inspector’s heels and taut voice roving from hut to hut. A while later, I was woken from a feverish doze to hear a commotion in the Big Kitchen—a lot of shouting and banging of pot lids and smashing of crockery—and someone shouting, ‘Harry, Harry, smashing things won’t do any good!’ This was followed by an almighty crash that sounded as if the cabinet that held the crockery for the whole commune—the very cabinet I stocked with clean dishes in my job as a girl—had been pushed over.

  I looked at Nico and said, kind of nervously, ‘Do you think that was Harry?’

  Nico nodded benignly as if the crash was a train on her distant horizon.

  All things must pass, and eventually the health inspector’s car whined out of the compound. A rousing cheer followed her exit, and a bit of a shindig ensued. No doubt several green bottles of indeterminate liquor were passed about. At one point I sat up groggily and peered through the grimy pane. The health inspector’s list was being bandied about and quoted from, to much hilarity. ‘Rat droppings in food storage area. Handwashing facilities covered in toxic mould. Food in the safe unsafe for human consumption.’ Each item on the List was recited in a posh, declamatory, Sam Hunt kind of way.

  A day or so later, when I was starting to get better, I crawled over to the Big Kitchen in search of food and saw that the dishes cabinet indeed lay face down as if it had got very drunk on indeterminate liquor. No one had bothered to put it upright. Nor was there a single plate intact and the meal had been eaten off big leaves (the traditional Māori way, fitting the bicultural principles of Hoki Aroha, I might add). I sat at one of the long tables trying to sup a thin gruel from a leaf (difficult) while the women and girls cleaned up around me, not that there was much to do. I was excused from my duties owing to my setback. A Meeting began, with the usual chime, ‘Respect, sisters!’ Roger said they were there to discuss the visit of the health inspector, the breached trust between Hoki Aroha and social services and the collective and personal trauma suffered by the community. The other men nodded and ahhed in agreement.

  At this point, Harry held up the List as if it were the used snotrag of someone with one of the respiratory ailments the residents of Hoki Aroha tended to come down with. There was general disgust at the sight.

  ‘So,’ said Harry, scanning the room with a wide-eyed stare, ‘how to proceed?’

  ‘We ignore it of course,’ said Valour. ‘We ignore the state.’

  Roger spoke: ‘All those in favour of ignoring the state?’

  The Ayes rushed in.

  One voice, however, could be heard thrusting up from the chorus with a dissenting ‘No.’ Everyone swivelled suspiciously towards Hector.

  ‘I merely suggest,’ said Hector in a reasonable tone, ‘that we consider fixing one or two items from ze List, yes?’

  There followed a few seconds of silence, then general hubbub. In the midst of the clamour, Harry stood up and spoke in a voice that began strained but grew in fruitiness. ‘Fix a few things? Fix a few things? Fix a few things?’

  Valour joined in. ‘Fix a few things from the List?’

  Hector, remaining seated, spread his palms. ‘It seems ze sensible thing, yes? The harassment from ze Council would cease, and who knows, maybe ze children would stop getting sick, yes?’

  I glanced at Harry. He would undoubtedly throw a small, sympathetic look in my direction as I sat shivering at the table slurping gruel from my rubber leaf. But Harry didn’t have time to consider the welfare of his first-born because, at that moment, the List was tweaked from his hands by Hector, who perused its contents, his brow like a fleur-delis. Harry blinked and snatched the List back. Then Valour grabbed it, and then the teenage boys joined in, ripping the List from each other as they spilled out into the twilit yard bellowing like young bulls. There ensued a giant game of
tag which criss-crossed all over the compound, involving everyone expect me who was too sick and the women who were too meek. Everything in the path of the game was sent flying, bottles and buckets and stray cats. In and out of the huts it raged, and into the bush and back again and finally, when it seemed the players were exhausted, a stick was poked through the List and it was held high. Someone found another stick and lit it on fire and reached up and set alight the document and everyone went quiet and it was an awe-inspiring sight to see the List burning, burning against the darkening sky, a cape of fine ash falling.

  I cannot underestimate what I learned witnessing the members of Hoki Aroha rise up against the Kafkaesque figures of authority who visited in their neat little cars, the subversive way they thumbed their communal nose at the List and in the end claimed back power from the state. In the end, all I can say is—to Harry, Roger, Hector, Valour—I am so grateful for the lesson in activism. Without it, I would not be a fraction of the writer I am today.

  Over the months I got used to the rhythm of life at Hoki Aroha. Because the commune’s kaupapa was to be self-sustaining, everything ticked over simply in a clean and green way. Living so far out in the country meant the air was fresh, apart from the smoke from the chimneys which could be dense at times. Plus a couple of times a day a convoy of six or seven badly tuned utes revved out of the yard bound for town, for beer and cigarettes and fun, leaving a thick fug of exhaust hanging in the air for an hour or so. The old pickups weren’t in the best condition, but the community wasn’t materialistic, so there was no choice but to use gas like there was no tomorrow. Really, it was an idyll.