Extract: Poorhara, by Michelle Rahurahu

ERIN can hear the whaanau whispering, and they won’t tell her why. She’s ditched school to help her aunty clean houses—even though she has a full-time job looking after all the moko. But no one cares, and soon she will be picked clean, like the bones in her maamaa’s bedroom. STAR is home for the first time in years, and he’s worn the same clothes for days. Everything feels unfamiliar: the karakia, his nephews, the house that he grew up in. He’s too scared to tell his family that he’s bombing back at uni. And the past is an affliction, a gently rising tide. It is 178 years after colonisation. Together, the cousins escape. Free-wheeling across the countryside in a car without a warrant, they cast their net widely. Their family mythologies, heartaches and rifts will surface, and amidst them the glint of possibility: a return to the whenua where it all began. A tragicomedy set in the confines of a 1994 Daihatsu Mira, Poorhara is a journey of epic proportions—a poignant, expansive and darkly funny first novel written by a true poorhara.

Extracted from Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, RRP $38.00. Erin pushed against the wood of her late maamaa’s door, the last door at the end of the hallway. When her maamaa died, the room was permanently closed up by the whaanau. She once had a theory it was because they were keeping piles of money or something. The maatua said it was raahui, to give the room time to be cleansed, but when she asked more questions they wouldn’t answer.

wutz Up w/ mi Maamaaz r00m? y iz evry1 s0 w3ird abwt itt

I don’t know. Everyone just fell apart when she died. It’s like they think of her as a disease they don’t want to spread. Guts for them because it’s already in all our bloodstreams. Saying that, I don’t even want to go in there.

l0l k cuz datz whea eye k33p mi bonez

Is that... Tika?

hw wld eye no g3t dis eye ask’d al da maatua y da r00m wz clos’d dey al h@d diffrnt answrz

How do u know a Fearn is lying?

hw

Their lips are moving.

lol nyc 1 p@ul henri evry1 iz s0 scar’d ov da d@rk

She wasn’t really allowed to go in, but it seemed disrespectful not to say hi to Maa’s hau if it was in there, slowly ebbing out. The hallway was darker than her room, damp and stuffy, like the inside of a mouth, and Maa’s room was completely dark. She knew the light didn’t work in there. She used her phone torch instead.

She was sure the memories she had of her maamaa were made up or put together from other people’s memories, but they were solid in her head: Maamaa digging into a chest of dolls; Maamaa filling her hands with marbles; Maamaa holding a finger over her mouth, scratchy linen against her face; Maamaa still and unnaturally pale, her uncle standing over them. Maamaa lying on the bed, her eyes open and white, maggots crawling over her rotten skin. She wished she had her maamaa’s bones. Something solid to hold onto when she missed her, something that had been with her maa her whole life. Instead, she kept scavenged bones from the roadside, and the beach, and the lake. Mostly birds and fish. She dried them, cleaned them badly, and sat them in neat lines on the furniture, which had been covered with blankets. They started to stink but she didn’t mind. She hung out in there whenever she felt like stepping out of time. Not waiting for her Maamaa: she’d witnessed her mannequin face cushioned in her coffin, slept next to it even, and then watched it get lowered into the ground. The bed, which was made, sat unfettered with bones—it was a place to lie and think. The room had a weird quality to it. She saw shadows split in half and pace back and forth on the walls. She had memories that didn’t make sense, daydreams. Once, she saw a silhouette sitting on the bed, clearly joking about something; it pretended to light a pipe then held it to its mouth and made exaggerated puffs; she had burst into laughter. Erin flopped onto the bed and cried into the linen until she felt a hand on her shoulder. That made her feel better. After her cry session, she scampered up to the roof of the main house. The roof was where she liked to go when she didn’t want to be found. It was easy to get to—all she had to do was climb the high fence bordering the side of the garden and hop right up. It was harder to see where she was going at night so she crawled, feeling the ridges and riding them like waves. She could hear the discordant hum of adults chatting and smoking outside. Uncle Joe had put on some oldie tunes, chucked some seats out in the yard. Koro was stationed in the centre in his chair, a steel walking stick attached to his wrist by a black rubber band, but no one was talking to him. He had that waiting look in his eyes. For the first time, she considered that what he might be waiting for wasn’t a spiritual arrival— maybe he was waiting for the next part of his life to start. His children were all getting old, so now what?

She heard a playful shriek from the backyard. The kids marched single file around the house to the gated garden. Erin felt the divide between them all. She didn’t want to be a mum, not really, because it would be another mouth to feed with endless questions and grabby hands. She wasn’t even a good proxy mum to her cousins—she didn’t have good answers to questions, and she hated fighting with her uncles and aunties because she cried too easily. The world needed more people who were whole. Apparently her maamaa hadn’t wanted a kid. The aunties brought that up sometimes but they’d soften it with words like, oh but she loved you when you came, oh but she was so happy she did. Erin understood that, at least a little bit. Sometimes a new pregnancy in the whaanau was announced and she had dark thoughts about dipping into the world outside this one and throwing the fetus down into Rarohenga, like a fish that exceeded the quota. Nothing wrong with you bub, she’d whisper. We’re just full up.

Poorhara is available in all good bookstores now.