By the time our taxi arrived at the first gate, it had been swung back on its failing hinges by kids who had swarmed from wherever kids swarm from – creek banks, long grass, treetops and bolt holes – and who now decorated every plank of it, vertical, horizontal, upside down, right way up. Attired in cut-down shifts and shorts made from adult cast-offs and flour bags, they came running, hems hanging, holding up britches, batches of black hair flopping in mops.

They were easily able to keep pace with the car, which now had no formed road but only rutted cart tracks, potholes and creek beds to make its way along. The kids cast dead mānuka brush onto mud patches so wheels wouldn’t become bogged, or they pulled branches and large stones out of the way as the taxi, one wheel in front of the other, was edged along by Hermie Krauss, who loved an opportunity to show what his cab could do.

All this time, while their scabby arms pulled away rocks and put down branches, the kids’ muddy faces, with their excellent teeth on display, were calling out to me through the open windows of the taxi, ‘Unca Aki godda lady and a plack man. Uncle Aki godda lolly.’

Once free of the creek crossings, the holes, ruts and rocks and a second gate, and as the cab crossed the home paddock where the grass had been cropped by house cows and a few sheep, I threw out Minties and toffees, keeping the unwrapped lollies – blackballs, liquorice allsorts, jelly babies and jubes – to be handed round later.

Chapter 4

Oriwia

When Aki stopped at Jimmy Shop’s store in an overloaded taxi, Oriwia said to herself, ‘Here comes that husband I’m supposed to have.’ Her next thought was that she didn’t want a husband who spent more than half his life at sea. Now that Dad Jimmy had had a stroke, and since her sister had left home and married a road digger, all the work of the shop was left to her. What use was a sailor when she needed a man on the spot, someone to carry tins of kerosene, sacks of sugar and bags of flour, a man to collect goods from the railway and heave stuff from here to there. Someone to help lift Father Jimmy. Muscle was no use to her on the other side of the world.

And who were the other two men with him – one blacker than anyone she’d ever seen and with sunburnt eyes, the other dressed-up one a kind of what? Nothing. Or a rabbit. As if he might suddenly run off on a zigzag rabbit path, shot at. Aki had a tooth missing since she’d seen him last.