Becky Manawatu returns

One month after the girl shot the man
Almost a week before we left Rakiura we walked into Māori Beach for a night’s camp-out. Jade wanted to say goodbye to the island, and even if she could have said it anywhere, from the ferry even, she wanted it to be Māori Beach.
Colleen and Hēnare stayed behind, while we went: Ārama, Beth, Taukiri, Jade and Kataraina. We were still not ourselves. One month is nothing to murder. And some of us – Ārama and Beth – sometimes forgot that Stuart Johnson was not even the first victim; he was not even the second. And if we went right back through our whakapapa, his murder could be deemed quite unremarkable, par for the Te Au course, even. Maybe that’s what made it worse. Made us feebly wonder in each of our own inner worlds who was next?
So at Māori Beach, with its great curving band of pale sand encircled by low forested hills and the soft fat water of Wooding Bay, and under the southern sky, we wondered if this place was to be our end. Each place we went we wondered if this supermarket, street, dream, pie, drive, walk, morning, afternoon, evening, night, kiss was to be our end. Māori Beach, isolated and pretty, was only one of the more poetic possibilities, soaking our wonderings, giving it a disconcerting weight.
Māori Beach was not our end.
Taukiri lit a fire and around it we ate buttered bread and small salted venison steaks. Ārama and Beth ran up the beach to find the river mouth, a vivid blue channel of the freshest water we had ever seen, pouring quick into the southwest Pacific. We returned to the camp and the rest of us were arranged as if posing for a Department of Conservation tramping brochure. Taukiri crouched at the fire, which glowed on his handsome face. Jade resting on a picnic blanket she’d brought. (She had patted it, asking Kataraina to sit with her, but Kataraina, Kat, Aunty Kat could not sit.)
Kat was standing near the shore, her arms folded tight across her chest, impenetrable, even to the beauty of the Rakiura twilight. A snapshot of any one of us would have made for a great tramping bro­chure. No one would have guessed how consumed by violence we were.
Of us all, Ārama – our little Ari – was the most willing to pre­tend. He was the one who believed pretending everything was okay, seeded okay­ness. The rest of us were of the whakaaro that pretending encouraged more pretending. Especially Kat.
But camping! What a precious memory. And so, to stop pacing and stop Jade from patting at the picnic blanket, Kat suggested camping activities. We played spotlight in the grassy backshore. We took a torch up to the river to see if we could spot an eel, though we didn’t. We drank warm Milo around the fire before bed. Then it was Ari patting at the picnic blanket. “Come sit here by me, Aunty,” he said.
“I’m all goods,” she said, standing, her lower body at odds with gravity, her upper body battling its many selves for the right to peace.
“But come on,” he whined.
“Knock it off,” she said.
Ari’s eyes watered.
“Don’t be a sook,” she said. “Surely, you’re harder now. ‘Django’, wasn’t it?”
And we felt this was quite mean, even Kat, who decided it was time to take her Zopiclone, go get a moe in, on a bloody camp mat, yeah right eh, hahaha.
Tomorrow she could start her day over the same way she had for a month. Forgiving us all for shooting him before she’d gotten to the bottom of a secret question that had barely bothered her before he died, but since he was shot tormented her. The question, once a dog barking somewhere distant, was now a shrill bird busting its head bloody against the glass pane of her heart.
Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Mākaro Press, $37), the sequel to her celebrated modern classic debut novel Auē, available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to coverage of this new novel. Tomorrow: a review by Lauren Keenan, author of historical novel The Space Between.