8 – The Visit

Short Info:  Beth has saved enough money through not drinking to hire a car and to go and visit Boogie.  Whole family is happy and excited, even Jake.  Things turn sour when Jake stops at the pub and the parents both get drunk.  The visit to Boogie never happens.

Themes:  Parenting / Alcohol / Pride / Maori Culture

The chapter opens with Beth feeling proud of herself for not drinking and for saving money to see Boogie.  Duff builds a mood of happiness, emphasising both Jake and Beth’s pride in their rented car. The children in the back having fun too, except for Grace.  Beth wondering briefly what was wrong with Grace, “Kid’d been even quieter than normal lately. Beth couldn’t figure it out, other than putting it down to teenage stuff.” (P94).

Comments made about how life ‘opens up’ when you don’t spend all the money on booze and gambling.  The family have a ‘flash’ car, food in the boot, jovial atmosphere.  Husband and wife are joking to each other, for once, it doesn’t upset Jake’s pride.  The family cruise around the streets together, enjoying the looks they get, Jake calm for once.

They stop at a lake, Jake and Abe joke around, play fighting each other.  Beth wonders if he’s started smoking ‘dope’ because he is so happy.  Abe wonders if their ancestors used to row their waka on the lake and if they’d fought there, “Sure they did.  Your ancestors, boy, they were fighters,”

Jake turns sour as they drive through the white neighbourhood (Ainsbury Heights) and snaps at Beth. “So Beth not willing to push it, afraid she’d bring it right out his old hatred, resentment of anything that had white skin, had a job, owned a house, had a car.”(P98).  P99 – Beth thinks about how Maori are no good with money.

They drive past the exit to Beth’s old village and she thinks on her mother and father, how they never showed love either, ‘her father never showed his love to Mum because he was of that school of being gruff, tough, manly – MANLY – and happier when he was around his mates, drinking with them …” (P101)

Pages 102 and 103 consider the Maori slave past – in particular, Jake’s family – and maybe cause of Jake’s temper and quick pride.  “We weren’t allowed to play with many other families in our pa.  No way, not the Heke’s, man.  Don’t play with them, you’ll get the slave disease.” (P102).

Jake sees some mates and ends up going in to the pub for a drink.  Beth and the children are left waiting in the car.  Beth goes in to try and coax him out and ends up staying also, despite hating seeing the abandoned children running around in the car park.  They get drunk together and miss Boogie’s visit.

Beth gives the children money for food and a bus ride home.  Meantime, Jake and the fullas go out to the car where they promptly eat the feast prepared for the visit.  “She looked around her . . . at them, the feeding animals gorging on what felt like her very own body, such a violation did it feel.” (P111).

Chapter ends with Mark Heke (Boogie) “The housemaster on the evening shift coming up to him: Mark Heke, it appears your visitors are not coming.  And the kid saying, Yes they are. Yes they are. How kids get when they won’t face the truth.” (P113)

2 – Two Kids on a Bench (Grace’s POV)

Chapter Two – Two Kids on a Bench

Themes: Youth mirroring Parents : Hopelessness : Music : Alcohol : Violence : Manhood

Short Info:  Introduction to Grace and Boogie (Jake and Beth’s children), Family life,

Grace and Boogie are together in the courthouse, waiting to hear the sentence for Boogie’s misbehaviour.  We learn about Boogie’s personality here – he’s a ‘sook’, a ‘wus’ – the opposite of his manly father.  He is picked on because of this, and so tries to commit crimes, etc. to live up to the Muss name.

‘Oh Bog, you’re such a sook at times.  You really are.  No wonder the old man picks on you.’ – Grace to Boogie (p22)

Grace ponders Maoriness and boys, and reflects on her relationship with Boogie – ‘…maybe she loved him more for being sort of a freak, a standout from the rest of the Pine Block roughies, let alone a son of Jake Heke.  Boys: they make such a big deal out of being tough.  It’s the most important thing in the world to em.  Specially Maori’s.’ (p22)

We discover that Boogie is ‘hated’ by his father ‘Ain’t no kid of mine they can’t look after emselves.  His own kid. And being disowned because he couldn’t fight.  What about Boogie’s other qualities? Always near the top of the class, very kind and very sensitive to the kids that everyone else forgets about, or scorns.’ (p23)

Discover that Boogie hates violence but goes around telling all the other kids that his dad is Jake The Muss, tough guy, etc and boasting about older brother Nig.

Scenery descriptions of the court officials, mostly Pakeha, dressed nicely ‘Funny that, how one side of the double doors are one race, and the other this race: Maori.’ (p24)

Grace recounts the fight at their house the night before and Jake the Muss yelling and cursing.  ‘Aw, shut ya mouth, woman’ (to a bystander in the fight) As if she hardly existed.’ (p25).

‘Grace figuring that it must be a kind of madness comes over em when they’re boozed up; and maybe its also fear, so they yell and scream, just like kids do when they’ve been unexpectedly frightened’ (p25)

Grace sees her father’s violence as a disease / illness ‘Oh God, I hope it’s not inheritable.  Whatever it is that Dad’s suffering from.’ (p25)

Grace comforts the smaller kids whilst the fight goes on ‘On and on and on into this lovely night, this lovely night and lovely children corrupted, ruined, raped, and all you can say is shake? Put it here, brother?  And next week, next month, next year, for all the years of your terrible existence, you lot’ll be doing the same’ (p26)

Music playing after the fight – seeming to sort everything out.  Women fighting  ‘… it wasn’t hard for experienced girl to picture em hanging onto each other’s hair, clawing at each other, taking big raking gouges out of one another’s facial skin, spit flying, froth bubbling out of frantic mouths, eyes bulged blood red with the effort, the booze, and that certain madness that afflicts a girl her own race and only them . . .’ (p27)

First foreshadowing of Grace’s suicide ‘No wonder a girl felt she was going half-mad, or didn’t want to live no more, not here, in this house, in this street.’ (p27)

Woman’s role to cook.  Beth refusing, Jake hitting her because of it.  Grace waking in the morning to broken beer bottles, overturned crates etc.  the kids cleaning it all up ‘And Huata was too young yet to know Boog’d failed the test of pending manhood, but he’d learn.  He’d be one of the judges one day against one of his own peers.  All boys are judges against their own.’ (p29)

Back to the present, courthouse, Grace’s shame that their parents aren’t there, the welfare officer patronising them with the ‘Maori’s and their late nights’ comment. ‘The mothers with fags in their mouths, in hands that had a tattoo, an arm with one, two of them that Grace could see.  Most ofem – there’d be eight or nine mums – fat things.  And most wild-looking.  The Lost Tribe . . .’ (p30). Mother hitting a small child across the face in front  of the welfare officer and he being powerless to do anything but admonish the woman.

1 – A Woman in Pine Block (Beth’s POV)

Chapter One – A Woman in Pine Block

Themes: Hopelessness : Maori Lifestyle : Alcohol : Violence : Dreams : Other cultures : Books

Short Info:  Introduction to Beth, the kids, the setting of Pine Block, Jake Heke, the idea of being Maori

This chapter introduces us to Beth Heke, a Maori woman, a wife, a mother.  We immediately learn about how Beth covets her neighbour, Mr. Trambert’s (“lucky white bastard” page 1) property and lifestyle. He lives close to, but separate from, Pine Block in a nice house on a nice street. Beth goes on to describe Pine Block “A mile-long picture of the same thing; all the same, just two-storey, side-by-side misery boxes” (page 7). She compares her own neighbourhood to that of the ‘white’ neighbourhood and how run down and depressing it is. Pine Block is full of rusting cars, cracked footpaths, broken down houses, washing machines on the lawn (page 12), rubbish over-flowing in the gutters, sending kids to bed with no sheets.  Tells us that she feels like a queen riding home in a taxi with groceries and observing the Pakeha world “And she’d be looking out the window and she’d notice the Pakeha houses, how most of em had well-kept lawns and nice gardens with flowers and shrub arrangements and some with established trees …” (page 12).

Beth goes on to discuss the children of the neighbourhood, including her own children “Beth wondering, all the time wondering. At them. The kids.  The unkempt, ill-directioned, neglected kids.  And her own kids. How were they going to fare?” (page 7). She discusses the plight of the children and how parents neglect them because of the booze. She states that she would never neglect her own children, no matter how boozed she was. Talks about the children who are so alone that they live in car wrecks, sniffing glues and so on.  No wonder then, that children want to join the local gangs as substitute families. The neighbourhood gang is called The Brown Fists; ‘Though there were kids who’d joined with their arch-rivals, the Black Hawks, across town, and so got to do battle, often fatal, with their Pine Blocks brothers and cousins and childhood friends.  Maori against Maori’ (page 15). Beth despairs at the thought of her eldest son, Nig, joining a gang.

We are introduced to Jake Heke for the first time through Beth where we learn about his violent nature, “and yet I love the black, fist-happy bastard.” (page 1). We learn that Beth dreams but she has been suppressed for so long by her living conditions and her husband that they barely exist anymore. She dreamed of being like Mr. Trambert and how her life has turned out to be nothing like that at all, She had dreams then.  But they got lost along the way.  Sixteen years is a long time.  For dreams to stay alive.  And wasn’t as if the dream was to be a Trambert, a Mrs. Trambert, no.  Just to have a whole house with her own bit of land under her feet that she and Jake and their kids could call their own. But nothing like a few hidings – from the man supposed to be part of the dream – to reduce life and its dreams to thoughts that grow to disbelief.’ (page 8).

Beth ruminates on what it means to be Maori as she looks down upon the wasted landscape of Pine Block ‘Feeling like a traitor in her own midst because her thoughts so often turned to disgust, disapproval, shame and sometimes to anger, even hate.  Of them, her own people.  And how they carried on. At the restrictions they put on themselves …” (page 8). Her discussion leads on to thinking about other cultures that she sees in the ‘soaps’; Americans who are ‘beautiful people being nasty to each other, rich, white bitches and bastards not satisfied with life being kind to em.’ (page 9). Whilst thinking about ‘the Maori problem’, Beth ruminates on the fact that nobody reads and whether this means something or not, ‘And it occurred to Beth that her own house – no, not just her own house but every house she’d ever been in – was bookless.’ (p10)  ‘Why are Maori’s not interested in books?  Well, they didn’t have a written language before the white man arrived, maybe that was it.  But still it bothered her.  And she began to think that it was because a bookless society didn’t stand a show in this modern world, not a damn show.  And I live in it, don’t I?  and my kids.’ (p10)

We learn a lot about Beth’s own nature, including the fact that she perceives herself as being strong, a fighter, even in the face of a husband who beats her.  This foreshadows her change of character later in the text. But I’m a fighter, I ain’t the type to lie down and let people, life, roll over me.’ (p13)