Samoan dreams

SAMOAN DREAMS

short story by David Stringer

Tiny had seen a lot of things in his life — the far off hills turning gold in the morning and purple in the sunset, Annie dying from cancer, and even a UFO late one night out back on the farm … but nothing compared to the angel who suddenly appeared one night on Grafton Road. Tiny was, I came to discover, a man full of surprises. For one thing he wasn’t tiny — he was a huge man who had earned his monicker from battered rugby opponents he left in his wake — and his ‘angel’ was male, with a cheeky smile and a knowing wink; but all of that came later. At first the angel didn’t even have a name. He said where he came from names didn’t matter, but if Tiny needed one, then what was a good Kiwi name? All a-fluster, Tiny could only squawk out ‘Colin Meads’, the famous All Black (and Tiny’s own idol), so from that point on the angel answered to ‘Meadsy’. But as I said, Meadsy at first simply appeared as a bright white light hovering about the height of the street sign that pointed to the Auckland Hospital.
“A bit like that time I saw a UFO,” Tiny smiled slightly and turned to gauge my reaction on the first night I met him at the hospital. Seeing my interest he continued. “Out back on the farm one night, years ago it was. At first I thought it was one of them meteors, but it didn’t burn out, simply kept on heading towards the hills, zigged and zagged a couple of times then just faded away.”
I couldn’t help but tease a little. “Do you believe in little green men then?”
“God no,” he chuckled. Then his big face settled into seriousness. “But I know what I saw.”
And so he did. There was a refreshing honesty and simplicity to Tiny which I put down to his being a man of the land. Hundreds of storms and sunsets, birthing lambs and butchering stock had honed his heart to an acceptance of both the ugliness and the beauty of life. All of those fantasies which city men spin around themselves just deflate and blow away in the face of the land’s vast and quiet awareness. And he had been a rugby man too once of course, quite a promising one I’d heard, and you soon learn in the depths of a ruck, when the first knee or elbow crunches into your face, that bullshit talks but the truth walks. So I got interested when Tiny began telling me his story of Meadsy.
He had been finding his way by counting the streets as he always did, right into the heart of the darkness of that part of town where I work – and where we had kind of found each other in the weeks after Annie died. By all accounts she was a tough, straight-talking woman who had been beside him through all the years of hardship, the droughts and the floods, and even the earthquake of ’87 that buckled the land beneath their feet … but when in some kind of sad symbolic metaphor they found Annie was as barren as the land they clung to, he never once used it against her.
And then came the cancer. They found it too late of course, for she wasn’t a doctor-botherer, and in the blink of an eye their life together on the land was rooted up and left to die like a mangled stump in the sun … and their new life was hospital rooms and steel machines that swallowed her frail body to record the advance of unstoppable death. He was out walking the night she passed, when she released into the arms of her God like a puff of dust in the breeze, and he wasn’t there to hold those frail little hands, which he had done every day for the last few months of her life, and especially the last few weeks at the cancer ward.
“They’d done beautiful things, those hands.” He didn’t look at me, just stared straight ahead, and I wondered if there were tears he didn’t want me to see. “Wiped the sweat from my face for two weeks straight when I caught the fever … even milked her cow.’” He fell silent a few moments recalling her gentleness. “Heidi.” I must have raised an eyebrow so he explained. “Her pet cow, Heidi. Not for the freezer, that one.” He sighed and settled his eyes away into the distance.
And so he returned every night by counting the streets, perhaps in his own way hoping to find her here once more, which is where I would always find him, and gradually he told me his story. He was writing it too. He showed me all the scraps of paper he kept in his pocket because he felt it was something he wanted to share with people. He’d sit and write there at the little table in our lunchroom, such a big man all hunched up awkwardly, concentrating so intently on his mission until the social workers came to take him back home … but that couldn’t go on forever of course. Nothing does.
He first saw Meadsy on Grafton Road, as I said. It was the night Annie passed and Meadsy had come to let him know, so he could hurry back and be there in time to touch her while she was still warm; before the Earth takes back even the heat She temporarily loans us. The next time he saw the angel, so he related to me over a late night cup of Milo, was about a week later. He’d been feeling a bit low, and lonely, living in a boarding-house for elderly gents run by the Salvo’s or some such in a particularly grey area near the hospital. He didn’t have money (not with the cost of Annie’s cancer drugs), and it seems they had virtually walked off the land after it had come to belong to a big Aussie bank in Auckland; one where men who used moisturizer and perfume sniggered at the men with faces burned by the sun into a landscape of cancers.
Meadsy’s face was visible this time, and Tiny could make out clearly that he was male and sported a cheeky smile.
“He told me I could have any wish granted – anything, provided it didn’t change people’s ‘karma’ too much, whatever that is.” He nodded to himself, recalling the moment. “Said I’d earned it for being so kind and patient with Annie all those years.”
“So what did you ask for?”
“A hooker.”
I guess I don’t need to tell you I did a double-take and kind of spluttered, “A hooker?”
He turned to look squarely at me and chuckled a little. “Yeah, and not one of them cheeky little buggers in the front row neither … I just wanted a young woman.”
Well I did warn you that Tiny was full of surprises.
“You see,” he continued, “I’d been kind of alone, shall we say, for quite a few years. Annie didn’t see a need for sex if we couldn’t have children, so we never …. ”
And I began then to sense those depths of quiet tragedy and frustration that underpin the lives of most of us, like that great big piece of an iceberg you never see. So all I could do was nod and he carried on.
“I feel embarrassed about it now.” He avoided looking at me and I noticed how he clenched and unclenched his big gnarly hands. “I guess he caught me by surprise a bit, you know.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, it’s not every day you see an angel, mate. I’d have been surprised too.”
He let out a long sigh, “Yeah … maybe I was just being a smart-arse, I dunno. But anyway, I asked to have a beautiful young female, for company like. Just once. Before I give up the ghost like poor Annie. God bless her.”
I nodded. “Fair enough. I’d probably ask for the same, given any wish. Couldn’t you have asked for a few more wishes?”
He chuckled, a rumbling chuckle that boomed in his big chest. “Pretty much came to that too, mate. But it’s a long story and I’ll tell you.”
And with that I made us another Milo and he continued.
“Well Meadsy, you know, he just gimme a knowing smile and disappeared like, so I thought I’d upset him, but not three or four minutes later this gorgeous young thing appears out of the blue and starts talking to me.”
Now I can’t recall how many nights it took for him to recount this all to me, but it got to the point where I was just hoping for one more meeting, one more chance to hear the whole story. Eventually I did, and as Fate would have it, he finished it on the very night they came for the final time to take him back.
Her name was Maddy, she was all legs and blonde curls and she had an apartment nearby, servicing the Flash Harry’s from Parnell. From the beginning nothing really felt right – it was just too different from all that he had ever known, like he was being dragged into an alien world, a world of the young, the female, the tech-savvy city dweller. She burned patchouli incense in her apartment and took incessant calls and texts on her iPhone, and he had to duck under a clothesline of drying feminine underwear on his way to the toilet. His discomfort was only to get worse. When Maddy insisted on a condom and suggested she put it on for him, he suddenly realized the, shall we say, nitty-gritty of just what he had got himself into and declined her offer. To complete the dismal failure Maddy even began to give him the bum’s rush as she had another client booked in and due to appear at any time. So he paid her the money she asked for and stumbled outside to make his way back home.
Well Tiny thought that would be the end of the matter, but he felt so bad he went back a couple of times looking for Maddy, to apologise for his “slip”. So he’s out there one night when Maddy walks up in thigh-high leather boots and a short skirt despite the chill in the air.
“If her skirt had been any shorter mate, she’d of had to powder more cheeks.” He chuckled, more to himself than to me.
Of course she misunderstood his approach and figured he wanted to try for a repeat. “Hey Pops”, she stroked his arm, “did you get some Viagra over the Net then?” Which he found pretty incomprehensible — he just wanted to talk to her about turning her life around. Had she thought about going to university? Which made her laugh apparently.
“Pops, half the chicks at uni are turning tricks like me to pay their frigging fees. I should know, they’re undercutting me the shameless bitches.”
And things went downhill from there, as they probably just had to. Her boyfriend drove by and wasn’t too impressed with some old guy trying to reform his source of income. I suspect Tiny’s size would have scared the youth enough so that there wasn’t any violence, but he’d been shaken by his brief contact with a world of such callous greed and degradation. And he felt bad that he had rubbed against that world and some of its filth had clung to him, yet he hadn’t been able to rub some goodness off back. He lurched off into the darkness with her words ringing in his ears:
“What gives you the right to criticize my life, grandpa? You sure wanted a part of it the other night.” And together with her pimp they shouted obscenities after him as he hurried away.
I’m sure that was the night we found him wandering around where the blue flashing police lights bounce off the brick walls and car yard signs. By this time we were getting concerned about him and were keeping an eye out as we drove the ambulance near the hospital. I remember he seemed particularly upset that night – didn’t utter a word, which was unlike him. I made him a particularly large cuppa and eventually got him chatting while we waited for his “minders” to arrive.
“There were other wishes you know,” he confided, then waited silently for my response. I looked at him and he continued. “Oh yes, I did see Meadsy again, not too long after that business. I says to him, ‘Mate, that didn’t go too well, all that’.”
“And what did he say to that?” I had to struggle to keep a straight face.
“He offered me a second wish.”
The old sod was a natural story-teller and wasn’t going to miss a moment of suspense. “Which was?” I prompted.
“It’s a long story mate,” he sipped at his Milo and gazed off as if into the distance back on the farm. “When I was a young fella my parents sent me off to boarding school in the city, here in Auckland. A lot of us farm boys were there — we did agriculture classes so the kids called us ‘Ag-dags’ — but we were mostly bigger than them so …. Anyways, one year the school first fifteen was going on this rugby trip to Western Samoa, being as how many Samoan boys we had in our team — God they can play rugby them fellas. So we raised the money and this one year we all went to stay in a village in Apia. Don’t ask me now the name of it … Vai something-or-other. Beautiful place and a few of our boys had family there — ainga they call it, I remember that. The family I stayed with had a daughter about my age, you know, 18 or so. Malia her name was. I think it’s Samoan for Maria. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever set eyes on … still is. She came to watch all our games, massaged all my bruises after the match with some special stuff they had … it was like she was my mate you know? I never had that feeling again — not even with Annie.” He shook his head slowly, savouring the memories. “Annie was a tough bugger, more like a work mate, another farmer … but Malia … she took me once I remember, up a hill to this wonderful place where some famous writer was buried, quite near to her house — we had such a great day …. That night we made love in a little fale, you know, like a thatched hut, just out the back of her family’s house. We had to sneak there — and look out for her brothers. I reckon it was the first time for both of us. I’ve just often wondered …. We never made love again — just that magical once. Then the team had to go back to New Zealand. I promised her I’d write, I’d come back and we’d get married, but ….”
“What happened?”
He was silent for a long time, his big hands clasped round the now cold mug. “My parents wouldn’t allow it.” He sighed, a genuinely long, sad sigh. “My parents, my friends, my mates … everyone said ‘Marry a girl from your own culture — it’s just too difficult — don’t be a fool’ … you know how it is.”
“So did you ever see her again?”
He was silent for a long while. “Kind of. Just a few days ago.”
“What? She’s here? In New Zealand?”
“No mate. That was my second wish, you see. I asked Meadsy. Because I’d always wondered …. What would my life have been like if I’d never listened to all of those … buggers.” He turned to face me squarely, that big face and eyes taking me all in, into his deepest spaces. “You see mate, here I am, old and lonely, aren’t I … nothing much to show for it all now is there? Malia was all laughs and smiles, a warm brown body and long black hair …. Perhaps we would of had grandkids now….”
He turned away and I put my arm around his shoulders. “So what happened — with Meadsy I mean?”
“He took me there. I dunno how he does that … it’s a funny feeling, like you’re a bit pissed or something, kind of light-headed. There’s a bright light and then when you can see again, you’re there aren’t you, in bloody Western Samoa. How does he do that?”
I shook my head in awe; we both looked at each other a while, like old buddies sharing a secret I guess.
“She was dead,” he said. “Malia was dead.”
“Oh no?”
“Yeah mate. She had passed away two or three years ago from some illness. I was able to see her family — all the kids playing — her husband, he was about my age now too. They didn’t see me — it’s like I was invisible or something — but I could see all of them no problem. And her … I could see her somehow, just before she died. She was still beautiful. Grey hair and all that, but beautiful. And I could just know everything about them, in my head like. They seemed happy. It wasn’t her village though, so she must of moved.”
What could I say? I just continued to hug him, a big old fella at the end of his life and ruing his missed chances, as we all do. We saw the “minders” coming through the doors and somehow we both knew that this would be the last time. He was being put under ‘care’. Dementia they called it. You know, where you get lost a little bit, and tend to make things up — that kind of thing. They don’t tell you when you come into this life all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, that the ending is often pretty lousy and ignominious. Or perhaps they do but we never want to listen.
He slowly stood up and shook my hand, his strength still impressive. “Thanks for the Milo, mate. And the ear. I’ve enjoyed our chats.”
“Me too. Goodbye Tiny.”
He seemed to hesitate, then, “I had a third wish, you know. Old Meadsy said everything comes in threes.”
And with that he just tapped his nose in that time-honoured symbol of a secret knowledge shared, turned and was escorted to the waiting vehicle. He gave me that last knowing glance as they drove away and was gone, into another life. I walked slowly into the lunchroom, and as I sat down I saw all the torn up scraps of paper, the story he’d been writing, thrown into the rubbish bin. He’d let it all go, you see – as we all must do one day.
And I guess that would be the end of the story really, except for an extraordinary thing that happened only a few days after that. I was on duty as usual, a Saturday night, awaiting the call to go out and tend yet another drunken bash-up or idiot who’d overdosed, when the doors opened and two men walked towards me. I knew Sa of course, the burly security guard who’d taught me to love taro, but the other man was new to me.
Sa looked a little embarrassed. “Says he needs to speak to you, Joe. He knew a lot about you so I figure it’s genuine.” He turned to the other man and spoke to him in Samoan, then moved away to give us some privacy, but still staying around to protect me if necessary! Always the professional, Sa. I stood up to greet this man who said he knew me, offered him a seat, which he declined. Still holding my hand he appeared bashful, ill at ease in these strange surroundings … but his words, oh, I’ll never forget his next words.
“Sir, I have come to find my father, Tiny. Can you help me?”