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Short story: The Visit from the English Cousins, by Janis Freegard

“You don’t have to come,” Ellen said. But Tama said no, no, he wanted to; he’d been looking forward to meeting them. After all, Ellen’s cousins were only in Wellington for the weekend. “You’d think they could’ve spent a bit more time with us,” said Ellen. “Three weeks in Australia and only a fleeting visit here.”
Tama said nothing, waiting while Ellen fussed around looking for the right pair of earrings to wear: “What about these?”— holding pieces of paua to her ears; Tama nodding. Ellen saying again, “You really don’t mind them having our room, do you? It’s only for two nights. But with them having the little boy …”
Then there was the rush to the airport, Ellen driving faster than usual and telling Tama all over again how she hadn’t seen Jacqui since she was twelve and of course she’d never met Bill; how funny to think that the girl she’d last seen all those years ago had a kid of her own now. Tama was gazing out of the car window, going “Mmm, mmm” at regular intervals. Ellen knew he wasn’t listening, but it was enough to have him there. There was something steadying about him; she loved that. The city whizzed by: the Basin Reserve; the Mount Vic tunnel with its symphony of tooting car horns; Evans Bay; the sculpture on the roundabout—giant metal tussock, red, white and black, clattering and swaying in the wind.
The plane was late; they needn’t have hurried. “We can drive back round the bays,” said Ellen. “That way they can see at least a bit of Wellington. Maybe we could take them up the top of Mount Vic, then have lunch at one of those cafés at Oriental Bay. That’ll be OK for Jamie, won’t it? I think he’s three now; he’ll have to sit on someone’s lap in the car. Do you think we’ll fit them all in?”
“No worries,” said Tama and smiled that calm smile of his that made everything all right. Ellen didn’t know what she’d do without him.
“What if I don’t recognise her?” said Ellen while they drank flat whites at an airport table where they could keep an eye on the Arrivals screen. “I mean, it’s years since I’ve seen her. People don’t always look like their photos. I’ll be watching out for a twelve-year-old girl and she’ll be nearly thirty.”
“You’ll recognise her,” said Tama. Ellen was glad he’d come. She’d met so many of his relatives—dozens of aunties, cousins and brothers. It seemed like he was related to half the North Island. She was proud to have relatives of her own to offer, for once. And wondered, not for the first time, what Tama’s Mum and Dad really thought of her, a strange English girl who stumbled over Māori words and didn’t know what to do at family gatherings—should she insist on helping with the dishes or should she sit there in the garden with a beer like Tama’s mum told her to do? Whatever she did, she always felt there was something she hadn’t understood properly.
Some of Tama’s nieces and nephews were going to Kōhanga Reo and Ellen felt inadequate when they spoke to her in Māori, and she had no idea what they were saying and couldn’t reply. “Don’t worry about it,” Tama told her. “I can barely speak the reo myself.” But he could really. Sometimes they’d eat their tea in front of Ōpaki, one of the Māori language programmes on Whakaata Māori. Ellen enjoyed the TV series Ahikāroa, but unlike Tama, she was totally reliant on the subtitles.
Ellen liked to watch him scoop up his nephews and nieces and throw them into the air, saying things to them she didn’t understand while they giggled and squeaked. Tama’s mother would say, “Time you had some kids of your own.”
And Tama would put the niece or nephew down and tell her, “Mind your own business, Mum,” but Ellen knew it made him sad.
She’d met Tama at work, in one of the temping jobs she’d had when she’d first come out here. Her first week at the department was his last. She’d gone along to the pub for his leaving do, feeling out of place and missing her old friends more keenly. But her shyness wore off after a few beers and a group of them ended up dancing in a series of bars on Courtenay Place, until it was only her and Tama left and she realised she didn’t want the night to end.
The plane had landed; the travellers were trickling along the arrival corridor. Ellen searched each face for traces of Jacqui, recognising her immediately as she emerged: there was a family nose they both bore. Ellen ran forward to give Jacqui a hug and in the midst of “How was the flight?” and “This is Tama” and “Pleased to meet you, Bill” she had the sudden thought that she should have got a present for Jamie. It was too late, of course. She’d have to buy him something special for lunch.
Jacqui and Bill barely seemed to glance at the harbour as Ellen drove them round the bays. She was disappointed; she’d meant it as a treat. Instead, they complained about the heat in Australia and how long it took to drive anywhere there. Whingeing poms, thought Ellen. Was that how people saw her?
She followed the winding road past St Gerard’s, the old monastery, up to the top of Mount Victoria and parked next to the pyramid-like Byrd Memorial with its pink and blue ceramic tiles. They all walked up to the summit together. Ellen was pleased when Bill took out his camera to capture the cityscape with its hilly backdrop and sea foreground, and felt absurdly proud when Jacqui said, “Wow, you’re so lucky to live here.” Ellen pointed out her old flat near the university and the Terrace high-rise where she worked now.
“He seems very nice, your chap,” said Jacqui, when the men had wandered out of earshot. Ellen looked over and saw that Jamie had taken Tama’s hand and Tama’s face had lit up the same way it did around his nephews and nieces. He was showing the boy the spinning wind turbine above Brooklyn, while Bill took Te Papa and the Beehive into the custody of his lens.
Why can’t I do it? thought Ellen. He wants children so badly; he’d be such a good father. Women were supposed to want to breed—what was wrong with her? She’d always expected that at some point her biological clock would kick in, but it never had. She could imagine herself fathering a child, somehow—inserting a tiny piece of herself into someone else’s body and standing back to watch it grow. But the idea of a little human parasite growing inside her, completely dependent on her, made her want to bolt.
“We could adopt,” Tama had suggested, when she’d struggled to explain it to him, but she knew she couldn’t even do that. She’d tried to want it, but simply didn’t. Not enough to dedicate the next eighteen or twenty-five years of her life to supporting another human being. She couldn’t do it just for Tama; you had to want a child for its own sake.
She’d tried to talk to a friend about it once and the friend had told her she was just being selfish, which had stung. But maybe the friend was right. Or was she just too lazy?
She watched him throwing Jamie up into the air, while Bill aimed his camera at them. Jacqui was still waiting for a response. “He is nice,” said Ellen. That wasn’t enough. “He’s a lovely man.” She realised a return compliment was expected. “You and Bill look happy together.”
Jacqui shrugged. “It’s an effort to get him out of the house sometimes. He’d watch football twenty-four hours a day if he could.” She smiled. “I had to convince him he’d be able to see all the matches on satellite television or he’d never have come.”
“We’ve got a team in Wellington,” said Ellen. “The Phoenix.” She felt pleased she had a football team she could show off to her cousin. “But Tama’s more of a rugby man.” Tama referred to football as soccer; rugby was football to him. She thought of the times she’d sat with him through the windy stadium nights, swaddled in woollens and waiting for Captain Hurricane, the mascot, to run around the field with his oversized head. It was her favourite part of the game. That and snuggling into Tama to keep warm. They’d moved in together quickly—within three months of meeting. It had just seemed right. They had a level of closeness Ellen had never found with previous boyfriends. Tama complemented her the way a cup matches a saucer. We’re like steamed pudding and custard. They did that sometimes, finding matches: We’re sausage rolls and tomato sauce or We’re Camp Mother and Camp Leader. But whenever she thought about it, there was only room for two.
There was this one time. When they hadn’t been together that long—a couple of months maybe—and Ellen had thought she might be pregnant. She was “late”. Only a few days, but she was usually like clockwork. She’d started to panic; her thoughts focused on how she could get rid of it, how she could make it stop. She couldn’t shake the image of herself as a cow—a kind of organic factory. For producing young, producing milk. It wasn’t what she wanted. When the blood came a week later, she’d cried with relief.
Tama had taken Bill and Jamie down the path to the Byrd Memorial. Bill was focusing his camera on the Antarctic rocks set into the front wall under the bust of Byrd.
“Do you think you’ll ever come back to England?” Jacqui asked and Ellen was surprised to find how easy the answer was.
“No, this is my home now. I’m a Kiwi. A holiday, maybe. Tama and I could come over and visit you next time.”
“Maybe you’ll have a little one of your own by then, a little second cousin for Jamie to play with.”
Ellen smiled noncommittally. She wasn’t going to try and explain the whole thing to Jacqui when she didn’t properly understand it herself. Why couldn’t she want a child? Why couldn’t she want a little Tama to make him proud? He had endless patience; she could see it in the way he gifted his time to his nieces and nephews, reading them stories, lobbing balls for them to catch, letting them beat him at Monopoly. She knew how much pleasure it gave him.
“It’s OK,” he’d say, when she asked him if it really bothered him. “I’m happy with you.” But she had the sense he was hoping she’d change her mind. Sometimes she wished she could. But you needed to want a child in your heart. Maybe you needed an excess of love and she only had enough for Tama.
Ellen and Jacqui turned from the view and headed down towards the Memorial, pausing when Jacqui asked whether the red carved pou with its three white feathers was a totem pole. Ellen tried to remember what Tama had told her about the feathers representing the Raukura, a message of peace from the prophets of—where was it? Parihaka? Maybe this was a pā site.
But Jacqui had stopped listening. She was yelling, “Jamie! No!” and starting to run. The boy had clambered to the top of the railings separating him from a sheer bank of gorse that dropped metres to the road below and was stretching out his arms to be a wind turbine. Bill and Tama were hunched over Bill’s camera with their backs to him. Ellen saw Tama’s head spin round at Jacqui’s panic, his body moving instantly towards the boy. Two strides, then his arms were reaching out just as Jamie lost his balance, just as Bill’s camera clunked to the ground and he yelled his son’s name. And then the catch, the merciful catch; a small boy laughing in the certainty that nothing could ever hurt him; Tama’s strong arms handing the son to his parents; a white-faced Bill saying, “I only took my eyes off him for a second”; Jacqui’s thank-yous and her eyes glistening with relief; Tama looking shy and ruffling Jamie’s hair, saying, “It’s nothing.”
Ellen could see, looking at him at that moment, how great his longing really was. He would never be everything he could be until he was a father. A child was something he needed to be complete, but she was never going to give him that. She realised then—with a pang that shot through her like a speargun—that she would have to leave him. Because he would never leave her. And it would have to be one day soon. She knew her heart would shatter. She knew there was no other way.

Taken with kind permission from the richly varied new short story collection Wild, Wild Women by Janis Freegard (At The Bay / I Te Kokoru, $25), available in bookstores nationwide.

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