The Worm King Read online

  Jerry and Āmiria were attempting to jigger up some attachment to the steering rod, which had become bent out of shape. She was filing down a thin piece of metal so it could be slotted into another piece which would in turn help support the twisted rod. The bus had only two functional torches: Jerry was using one to peer into the guts of the engine, while Kevin took the other. Kevin and Tamati initially tried using burning stakes from the fire, in an effort to conserve the torch, but in practice keeping them alight proved more work than they were worth and they thought it better to use the torch, and hold the unlit stakes as backup should the torch fail. The stakes had a knot of material around the top which had been rubbed over with candle wax.

  On leaving Tamworth, Lord Brown convinced them all the drive to Griffith would be easy as pie. There seemed no question of going near the coast until it became lighter. The other generally held view, was they should, at all costs, avoid Dubbo. Lord Brown persuaded the group the best recovery efforts to date were happening in Griffith, although Wiremu suspected he just wanted to hook up with that dwarf fūlla Āmiria told him about.

  From Tamworth they’d travelled west on the Oxley highway, through Gunnedah, then Rocky Glen and the badlands of the Coonabarabran before turning south, scouting the fringe of the Warrumbungles and through Gilandra. After this they left the Oxley highway, continuing south on the Newell highway which went through Dubbo. However before Dubbo, they cut west on a side road which took them through Narromine and brought them back onto the Newell, bypassing Dubbo. A short drive south of this was Peak Hill. This morning, on the outskirts of Peak Hill, Jerry said they definitely ort to stop and try to fix the steering. Wiremu wasn’t about to argue.

  From here they’d simply have to stay on the Newell highway, continue south through Parkes, Forbes, and all the way to West Wyalong. That’s a big stretch with bugger all in the middle, so more diesel will need to be found before that. Stay on the Newell, head south until Ardlethan (which Lord Brown said was just past Mirrool) then leave the Newell and go west through Barellan, Binya, Yanda, and hey presto, they’d be in Griffith! Yeah, piece a cake.

  Wiremu shook his head, disillusioned. He should never have left Whakatāne. Beside him, Peanuts looked away from Alistair for a moment and wagged his tail in agreement. Alistair held a branch vaguely shaped like a cricket bat. He swung it majestically, showing everyone a well-played stroke, but apart from Nigel and Peanuts, no one paid much attention. And Peanuts only wanted him to chuck the branch so he could bring it back.

  Wiremu decided to check progress on the bus. They’d positioned the fire so the engine was within the circle of light from the flames, but hopefully far enough to avoid any stray ember being blown into some exposed fuel pipe. The dog followed, cutting Alistair’s audience in half. Āmiria filed away steadily at the metal strut. Jerry’s torch was off, and his job appeared to be issuing instructions on the correct filing angle. He’d said earlier his eyesight couldn’t match Āmiria’s, and Wiremu wasn’t surprised to see her take over the filing. Right from the time the girl could crawl, she’d had this gift for figuring out mechanical gadgets. He knew he’d only get in the way and tried to tell himself a good leader knows when to delegate anyhow, so let her take on the critical job.

  His daughter’s lips were pursed in concentration and despite the chill in the air, sweat beaded her forehead. ‘Down!’ called Jerry. She shifted the file angle a minute fraction. Tim watched on uselessly. Rather than interrupt, Wiremu thought he’d take a look inside. The dog followed.

  The bus stank. From the top of the stairs, every footstep scattered a carpet of rubbish across the deck. Clattering cans, chip and biscuit packets, bottles, even broken glass. Why didn’t they just toss it out the window? That’ll be all that save-the-earth, greenie crap still hanging on. You’d think that’d be down the toilet for a while, the way things have turned out. He made a snap decision to clean the bus. A good leader’s supposed to take on the toughest jobs aren’t they? This had the same hollow ring as the leader delegating to his daughter when he doesn’t-know-shit theory. Nevertheless, he fumbled around until finding a large empty sackcloth bag. Up in the light, it read: 20kg Wholemeal High-Grade Flour, stenciled right across the middle. Just the ticket for collecting garbage, so he got down to it.

  The only cleanish area of floor was the driver’s area, and around his and Āmiria’s seat second back from the driver where they’d securely chained their pack to the armrest. His cleaning enthusiasm lasted until row seven. By then, the flour bag was nearly chocker, he’d cut his hand on glass, and taken numerous dings to the head from the underside of the seats. By row ten, reality had well and truly set in. He was cleaning a bloody bus! For what? Nuthin! And where are they goin? Nowhere! This is what Wiremu Ruarangi had descended to.

  He was Wiremu Ruarangi, the Cleaner of Buses, son of Tane Ruarangi who could trace his lineage all the way back to Tūhoe-pōtiki, the youngest son of Tamatea ki-te-huatahi, who in turn was a grandson of Toroa, captain of the Mataatua canoe which arrived at Whakatāne from Hawaiki in 1352 (Sir Peter Buck, the noted Māori historian, estimated the arrival of the Mataatua canoe at Whakatāne to be in 1350AD, counting generations back at 25yrs per generation, but Wiremu always said his rellies had never managed to turn up early for anything in their lives so he put it nearer 1352). The same Wiremu Ruarangi whose Tūhoe ancestors rallied alongside the great chief Rewi Maniapoto at the Battle of Ōrākau in 1864, when 300 warriors held back an overwhelming English force for three bloody days before being cut to ribbons by cavalry when they tried to retreat. And now here he was, cleaning a bloody bus in the dark.

  ‘I have come a very long way,’ said Wiremu to the dog.

  At row eleven, he found a gigantic bone Peanuts had been gnawing on, left over from roadkill they’d picked up somewhere near Gilandra. The thigh bone of a steer. He put this to one side, intending to smash it open later with a rock so the dog could get at the marrow and finish it off. Another handful of rubbish was jammed in, leaving barely enough room to tie a knot at the top. He stacked it up by the front door. It took only a few moments ferreting around to find an empty plastic shopping bag to replace the flour sack. At row twelve, under a mush of soggy newspaper lay an unopened can of food. Wiremu held it up to the light: Tom Yum Soup, authentic Thai, just add meat. The label was damp, but readable, and it had a ring-pull top so they wouldn’t even need the can opener.

  He really should’ve stayed in Whakatāne. This is what happens to those who deviate from the path: they end up with cold Tom Yum in the dark. The People of the Mist gradually mutate into the little-known, mysterious, Tom-Yum tribe, who inhabit broken-down buses and play much cricket. Through the window he could see Alistair tossing a pebble a few feet into the air, then attempting to belt it with his branch-bat. That’s another swing; another miss.

  Wiremu left Whakatāne when he was seventeen, after getting a Tainui girl from Ngaruawahia pregnant. The option had certainly been there (had he pushed it) to bring her back to Tūhoe kāinga, but in reality let himself be drawn away because he wanted to travel, and moving to the big smoke of Ngaruawahia, which was a lot closer to Auckland, seemed a step in the right direction. As it turned out their grim council house in Ngaruawahia was mouldy and cramped and they never could afford to go to Auckland anyway. Two days after moving in, there’d been a pack-rape incident directly over the road and they were interviewed by police for an hour even though they’d seen or heard nothing. Shortly after this, a pensioner at the end of the street was bashed to death for the nine dollars in her purse. There were only two good things about this phase of Wiremu’s life: he picked up a job as a builders apprentice, and the birth of his daughter.

  When Āmiria was ten months old, his wife went to the supermarket one afternoon and died in a head-on crash with a drunk driver. By a solitary stroke of luck, Wiremu was looking after the baby at the time and she’d been alone in the car. The drunk was a Rangatira from Tūrangawaewae marae and his misdemeanor got quietly swept under th
e carpet because he’d sadly been killed in the smash too. Wiremu thought this unjust, and a week after the funeral, got drunk himself, then went up to the cemetery on Taupiri hill and pissed on the dead Rangatira’s grave.

  A month after this Wiremu had his REVELATION. In retrospect, it seems obvious that any man who goes through trauma of this nature will tend to reassess his general role, and direction in life, but at the time it’d been earth-shattering. Wiremu spoke with the wise men: the Tohunga at the marae. He even tried incantations and other various karakia to find out what his ancestors might, or might not, advise. Then the REVELATION hit him, and it said: You have a child to take care of. Your ancestors, before the Pākehā arrived, were tribes of warring cannibals, and the Pākehā turned out to be not much better. In fact, the only truly impressive thing your hapū ever did was manage to sail all the way to Aotearoa in the first place. They were explorers! New Zealand, Wiremu had been told, was the last place on the entire planet to be settled by humans. His ancestors weren’t just explorers: they were the greatest explorers; reaching the islands at the very ends of the earth! And tucked away deep in the forests of the most inaccessible parts of New Zealand, at the very, very end, lived the Tūhoe.

  With all this in hand it was just a matter of putting the pieces together. To look after his daughter properly he had to play the Pākehā game and make some scratch. This would entail exploring: there was no doubt. Ngaruawahia and scratch are not words that ride together easily. So he took Āmiria to the mines, on the north-west coast of Australia, where they had excellent childcare facilities and the scratch was massive. Obviously, his wife’s whānau, as well as his own, were not keen on that decision, but the REVELATION had told him exactly what to say:

  ‘Y’all can get fucked. I’ve got a job to do.’ And that is exactly what he did.

  From Perth he quickly worked his way up the coast, finding employment as a builder in Port Hedland and squeezing in a part-time job at a mine in the Pilbara. The mine was a big commute but they were more than happy to help out with costs and hours because, if truth be told, one of the HR women interviewing Wiremu had been immensely sympathetic of his solo-Dad status which certainly hadn’t done his case any harm.

  After seven years in Hedland, he thought the girl should go to a better school and opted for Sydney. By then, he’d built up a decent stash of cash, thank you very much; enough to put a sizable deposit on a house in Manly. More importantly, he’d completed his Master Builders certification and a construction boom was kicking-off in New South Wales. So bags were packed and over they went. When he looked back, it seemed the days in the wild north-west were probably the best of his life. Well, best bar one. After they shifted to Sydney his wife’s whānau started coming over more regularly, to help look after the girl. He also began taking Āmiria back to Whakatāne and Ngaruawahia on more frequent trips, now that he had the dough for travel.

  Strangely, the whānau hadn’t wanted to come over when he was living on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert in the arse-end of nowhere. No, it was a much better idea when Wiremu moved to his luxurious pad (by their standards) in Manly. Over the years they’d leached off him good and proper and he hadn’t thought Āmiria was ever particularly close to her “uncle” Tamahere and his overbearing wife, so the fact they’d almost certainly perished in the Sydney tsunamis didn’t affect him as much as he might’ve thought. In Tamworth they heard about the waves hitting the coast the day after it’d happened. Wiremu quickly arrived at the gut-wrenching decision his daughter would have to get to him, because she knew where he was but not vice-versa. If they crossed paths in the dark, with him going south while she was making her way up to Tamworth, they may never get another chance. He decided to give her a month. When his daughter arrived in Tamworth: that was by far and away the best day of his life. There had been only 16 hours left before the full month was up.

  The bus floor was as clean as it was ever going to get so he got off, via the front this time after levering open the broken concertina door with his arm in order to squeeze through. The air felt cold and gritty but sweet relief after the smell inside. Āmiria and Jerry were still at the engine, Jerry back on the file, and Tim continuing to watch over Āmiria’s shoulder. Wiremu walked up silently and tussled the boy’s head. He looked around startled, and guilty. Wiremu suspected Tim was keen on her, and he ort to frown, but it was funny more than anything because she could drop the kid easily if he were game enough to actually try anything.

  ‘How’s she lookin?’

  ‘Bloody strut’s tricky to get level,’ said Jerry, without looking up.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ his daughter agreed.

  ‘Hey! You watch your mouth girl!’ It came out sharp; perhaps a touch more so than he’d intended. Tim stepped back. Jerry looked up briefly and returned to his file. Āmiria was contrite for about two seconds, then grinned. He used language like that all the time; he knew it, and so did she. Potty-mouth was the least of his parental concerns.

  Wiremu Ruarangi was worried about his daughter mostly because she kept growing up too fast. He let her get away with things his own father would’ve never in a million years tolerated. It could be something to do with her brains, he suspected, and they’re a complicated business. Unusual things had definitely been happening in her noggin from before she could walk. He often wondered where it stemmed from—certainly not his side of the family. The way she could build things, and work out puzzles and crosswords and the like was extraordinary. And brave! Almost fearless.

  Almost.

  Occasionally, in the last year or two, the odd thing happened and this look of pure unholy terror flashed over her face, and he could never for the life of him work out what’d caused it. Then he’d have to rethink everything done up to that point. Where’d he gone wrong? His attempts at psychoanalysis seldom reached any useful conclusion. He must just be a bad father.

  ‘Come on girl,’ he said gently. ‘Have a break from that, and we’ll go over the fire and cook this up.’ He waggled the can of Tom Yum.

  ‘ . . . so McGregor was on the last ball of the over, and at the other end Howarth had just hit three 4’s in a row, then the wicketkeeper—you won’t believe this—called the umpire over! I’ll tell you, the crowd were gobsmacked!’ exclaimed Alistair.

  Lord Brown shuffled to one side allowing Wiremu, Āmiria and Tim to sit. Ken went to help Jerry on the engine. Wiremu had no idea a cricket game could go on for that long, so he said to Alistair, ‘I had no idea a cricket game could go on that long.’ John the Hat laughed; Alistair looked offended.

  ‘Can do, can do,’ he replied tartly. ‘What sport do you play then? Everyone’s an All Black over there, aren’t they? Haw! Haw! Haw!’

  Wiremu failed to smile, only squinted and cocked his head shooting Alistair a piercing stare. ‘Black? What did you say? What do you mean by that then?’

  Alistair spluttered and tried to backtrack, saying he hadn’t meant any of this, or that, or anything and Wiremu decided to let the poor twit off easy. It was hard keeping a straight face anyway. He glanced down, noticing the forgotten can of Tom Yum.

  A twenty-liter, soot-stained cooking pot with a makeshift wire handle was being used as a billy. They’d raised it on a rough circle of unevenly-sized stones next to the fire, although John the Hat, who’d volunteered to set it up, placed it a fraction too far from the actual fire so it was taking ages to heat. Would’ve been much more efficient to build a smaller, separate fire for the cooking. The billy contained a mixture of canned food so everyone received a bit of everything therefore no one could complain. Wiremu pulled the top off the Tom Yum, got to his feet, went and lifted the lid and poured it in. They’d already done a billy-load of mixed cans two of hours ago, before Kevin went out, and the Tom Yum combo couldn’t possibly be any worse than that.

  He sat back down. ‘That’ll give it some curry.’ Alistair fidgeted nervously, still unsure whether he’d avoided a beating. ‘To tell you the truth Alistair, I don’t follow rugby these da
ys. You know, I played it for quite a while at school, even played Aussie rules a few times when we were living in Port Hedland. And had a brief crack at league when we came to Sydney. Ended up thinking they were all a bit tame, if you want me honest opinion. And cricket? You call that a sport!? It’s a disgrace!

  ‘Pighuntin’s me main sport now. I’m in the building trade, so it lets me slip over the ditch every three or four months for a long weekend huntin. Whenever I can, really. The thing is, it keeps you fit, you get to roam around some pretty good country, and sometimes get a big pile of free meat to take home. On top of that, I can even take the girl out!’ He smiled at his daughter. She looked chuffed.

  ‘You take her out hunting?’ frowned Alistair, incredulous. ‘Not with real guns?’

  ‘Course I can!’ trumpeted Āmiria proudly. ‘I went last time and helped get this—’

  ‘You helped get the tea ready!’ Wiremu cut in, stopping her before she embarrassed herself. She had been on their last hunt, but he’d kept her well back from the action because the boar turned out to be a monster.

  ‘I’ve seen those pigs,’ bleated Alistair. ‘They’re pink, the poor things, and they keep them in those dirty little sties, all caged up. We got a pamphlet in the mail about it and Raymond thought it’s a scandal.’

  So Alistair definitely was a poof.

  Wiremu continued. ‘We were in the Ureweras, just before all this happened.’ Alistair looked blank.