He was an old man going on a journey. But not really so old, only they made him old buttoning up his coat for him and giving him money. Seventy-one that’s all.
People had been peeing in the subway the dirty dogs. In the old days all you needed to do to get on the station was to step over the train tracks, there weren’t any piss holes like this to go through, it wasn’t safe […] Good sight though seeing the big engines come bellowing through the cutting and pull in squealing, everything was covered in soot for miles in those days.
That’s something they don’t know all these young people...Tamatea a Ngana, Tamatea Aio, Tamatea Whakapau – when you get the winds – but who’d believe you these days. They’d rather stare at their weather on the television and talk about a this and a that coming over because there’s nothing else to believe in.
The two kids stood swaying as they entered the first tunnel, their eyes stood out watching for the tunnel’s mouth, waiting to pass out through the great mouth of the tunnel. And probably the whole of life was like that, sitting in the dark watching and waiting. Sometimes it happened and you came out into the light, but mostly it only happened in tunnels.
Funny people these pakehas, had to chop up everything. Couldn’t talk to a hill or a tree these people, couldn’t give the trees or the hills a name and make them special and leave them. Couldn’t go round, only through. Couldn’t give life, only death.
Railway station much the same as ever [..] Same cafeteria, same food most likely, and the spot where they found the murdered man looked no different from any other spot. People came there in the hard times to do their starving. They didn’t want to drop dead while they were on their own most probably. Rather all starve together.
And up there past the cenotaph, that’s where they’d bulldozed all the bones and put in the new motorway. Resited, he still remembered the newspaper word, all in together. Your leg bone, my arm bone, someone else’s bunch of teeth and fingers, someone else’s head, funny people. Glad he didn’t have any of his whanaungas underground in that place. And they had put all the headstones in a heap somewhere promising to set them all up again tastefully – he remembered – didn't matter who was underneath. Bet there weren’t any Maoris driving those bulldozers.
They’d be given equivalent land or monetary compensation of course.
But where was the sense in that, there was no equal land. If it’s your stamping ground and you have your ties there, then there’s no land equal, surely that wasn’t hard to understand.
He was an old man and his foot was giving him hell, and he was shouting at them while they sat hurting. Burn me up I tell you, it’s not safe in the ground, you’ll know all about it if you put me in the ground. Do you hear?
He turned into his bedroom and shut the door. He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time looking at the palms of his hands.
