The Bone Tiki Read Free

Tama didn’t know where she was. She’d been a frail little woman with wide staring eyes and scarred wrists. Her smile had been sudden, and pixie-like, and when Hine made her laughit was a strange, tinkling laugh. She’d seemed, well…a little mad, as if she were fourteen years old still, despite her old body. But Mat remembered that afternoon. It was the afternoon he found out what he was good at.
    He’d been bored, sketching patterns on pad paper, feeling frustrated because the things inside his head wouldn’t come out right. Wai-aroha had watched him. She’d told him he had talent that just needed to find a way to come out—like a stream blocked by a fallen tree. She’d picked up a pencil, made a couple of small changes to his sketch, and there in front of him was the design he’d been visualising. A koru and a Celtic knot, intertwined, the drawing that was now on his bedroom wall.
    ‘It would make a good carving,’ she had remarked. ‘Do you like art?’
    He’d nodded mutely.
    ‘When you find what you are good at, you find why you are alive,’ Wai said, before she walked away, as if she had forgotten him already.
    Mat had stared at the drawing, feeling a flush of trembling excitement. Already he could see how the two pendants would fit together, expressing something so powerful to his parents they would stop fighting, and remember they loved each other. And more than that, he had a new vision of himself. Instead of a dismal future working in an office, or labouring, or driving a truck or something like that, he began to see himself as an artist—drawing, carving, making things people admired. That vision was still inside him.
    Wai had hugged him when he left, her arms thin as gnarledtwigs. She’d shown him a pendant she wore, carved from bone. A hei-tiki—a man-shaped pendant. An ugly thing, but she had clasped it as if it was a holy relic.
    ‘When I die, Matiu, you should have this tiki. Maybe you’ll know what to do with it. Because I don’t.’ Her eyes had welled up with tears, and she’d turned away into Hine’s arms and sobbed like a child. Soon afterwards Hine had driven Wai away to wherever it was she lived. He’d never seen her again, but Mat still remembered how confused and embarrassed he’d felt.
    So the tiki was rightfully his, whatever Tama and Puarata were cooking up. But how was he supposed to make them see that? He had no idea. And the way Puarata sounded made him feel almost too scared to try.

2
Puarata
    T hey drove some time in silence, until Tama Douglas decided to practise his courtroom skills by dissecting Mat’s most recent school report card. As if Mat was an opponent in court, Tama Douglas built up a head of steam with his questions. Gentle first, until his eyes glinted dangerously, his voice became sharper, his probing more intense. He started with the ‘results’ (the only good one was in art), then built up to ‘effort’. Mat wasn’t trying hard enough. Why not? Didn’t he understand that education was a privilege, that it would enable him to rise among his people? Did he want to be just another Maori drop-out? Mat didn’t finish his maths homework. Didn’t he understand his future was at stake? And why had he dropped out of the rugby team? Why were his best marks in art, of all things? What use was that? That was the past—his people neededmen who would embrace the future. Didn’t he understand how much more he could earn in law, or accountancy, and how rare and therefore valued these skills were among Maori?
    Mat squirmed in the passenger seat and tried to explain himself. It was only Year 11, he was only 15, these things didn’t really matter. And what was the point in flogging yourself in subjects you knew you’d drop in sixth form? Why not concentrate on what you were good at? And why get yourself killed playing rugby in the meantime, he nearly added, but Tama Douglas had played for the Bay when he was younger, so he mumbled something about injuries.