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The other guys Kevin Bates was with that morning leaned back all over the long benches as if they owned them. Acting up, smoking despite the signs, and they kept talking loudly about 'PD'. They had tattoos everywhere, hands, faces, ankles: they had jandals on their feet even in here. Like they were showing themselves off, Kevin thought. But ignoring him. He sat still and apart at the far end of one bench. He was hunched over the edge with his arms down on his knees. Waiting. Trying to seem indifferent. Kevin was a lanky, sandy-haired and soft-jawed youth. He looked, he knew, like the type of normal middle-class person the others might pick on. But they ignored him, talking only amongst themselves.

It was a long time before he realised what 'PD' meant. Periodic detention. These guys, Kevin thought, they were born so lucky that when they got punished, they didn't even need to be shut away in jail--they could hang around here instead.

When he was called, he found the man behind the counter was an amiable, middle-aged Maori in a white shirt. Paunchy, fleshy-faced, and with what was left of his wispy hair so long and badly combed over that it was mostly bunched around his ears. He grinned in a way that seemed surprisingly eager to please as Kevin sat down. Kevin looked across the brightly polished counter and wondered why was there no necktie on this guy--he'd wear one, if he were doing this sort of job. The man turned to his computer terminal and entered Kevin's details with his elbows raised and his fat fingers punching eagerly at the keys, as if maybe his skills were new and he wanted to have them on display. He paused to scan the monitor every now and then, rocking backwards long-sightedly each time and mumbling the date when Kevin had registered as unemployed.

Then he asked, in that mouth-full-of-cotton-wool, Maori way, whether this time Kevin was intending to apply for the benefit.

'I don't know,' Kevin answered.

But that was untrue; he'd expected to have a job lined up by now. And Michiko had made him promise to apply today, so they'd be sure to have something to live on.

'I been overseas, up in Japan on the JET scheme. You know, they send people to teach English and that,' Kevin said, and realised with some self-contempt that he was already roughening his own voice in imitation of the other fellow's. This fellow who already had a proper job. 'I been in the north on Sado Island for three years.'

'Japan, right.'

The man stared into his monitor as if trying to see through to the back of it and said nothing more, and Kevin thought, why was this guy pretending not to be impressed? Wasn't like he'd been up there too--he'd been here, obviously. Kevin looked away, past the other people sitting at counters for their interviews. The whole building was new, airy, with lots of aluminium-frame windows, and the lino was new and the white paper on the walls still mostly clean. Must be worth a few bob.

'So, you speak Japanese?' The man looked round at him and brightened again.

'Not really.' Kevin hesitated. 'No.'

The man returned to the computer, his shoulders arching backwards and his stomach straining up against his shirt.

'Nothing here, mate, nothing for English teachers.'

'Yeah, that's what they told me last time I come in here. But I thought if anything clerical or--'

'Yeah. It's...er...'

'Well, it's still...' The man was impressed now. Almost disbelieving. One plump hand left the keyboard and he gestured clumsily across the counter towards the other guys back on the bench. 'I mean, you'll get something, right? With that, eh?'

He smiled.

But Kevin hadn't got something--he hadn't, and he felt his own troubles rising up in his throat again. Because he'd promised her more. Michiko. And because he was the sort of person who couldn't get rid of an idea, once he'd let it enter his mind.

'I got married,' he said suddenly, 'and we've only been back a couple of months and...you know, we're just living in this flat at the top end of Lombard Street. I was a teacher up there.'

'Yeah, well,' the man said. 'Don't worry, you're only--' his eyes flicked to the screen '--twenty seven. And you are looking, right?'

Kevin nodded. He said clearly, 'This time I want to apply for the benefit.'

'Yeah, all right. Did you check out everything on the board in the lobby?'

Kevin glanced over one shoulder, pointlessly, across the room towards the wide glass-doors. He made a show of nodding, while the Maori guy was bouncing his fingers over the keyboard again--in thrall to that machine. Then the guy stopped, and yawned.

A slow, long yawn. He apologised.

'You wouldn't believe the night I had.' He grinned confidentially, as if worried whether he should tell. 'See, my auntie and her new boyfriend come up from Otaki, and they stayed the weekend. So anyway, late last thing he gets really pissed, this fellow, and he has to go to work next morning, eh, so my auntie's got to drive them off home in the car.' The man chuckled. He leaned further back in his chair and rubbed a hand inside the open neck of his shirt against his broad collar-bone. 'On the way this fellow, he said to my auntie, stop the car, I've got to take a slash, eh. And he climbs this fence and he's doing his business into the river on some cockie's property, right, when he slipped and falls down the side of the bank. In the water! Shit!'

The man had been raising his voice; he looked past Kevin into the room. When he saw no one had noticed, he seemed pleased with himself and continued more quietly.

'So my Auntie May, she's a really big woman, I mean big fat, right...I don't know how she got across that fence, but she does, eh. And so she gets him up and carries him, right, carries him out of the water on her back...boy, that's love. Anyway he's stuffed, and she hurt her knee and then she can't get back over the bloody fence. So we get her...I mean, she rung us up on her cell-phone at half past one, the middle of nowhere.'

The man giggled in falsetto.

And Kevin thought, that's Maoris for you, always together. And he and Michiko, they didn't even live with his father--in his father's huge house on Victoria Avenue! Which the man owned freehold, no rent troubles, and still didn't seem to mind them not staying there.

The Maori guy was still talking.

'Well, I'm a bit pissed too, and my poor missus, she has to drive us both out half the distance to bloody Otaki till we can find them. Growling all the way, that woman, but can you blame her? So, they're all right, but the whole three of us together couldn't get my Auntie May back over the fence, and in the end we have to go wake the cockie up and get a ladder.'

Now the guy was laughing. Big belly laughs. Sliding around in his chair. Didn't care who heard him. Kevin thought of his father, rattling on alone in all that space. Limping with his left knee that never really healed, not even after the physio. His health failing. Because you just couldn't share even a big place with someone like that, set in his ways. Kevin promised himself that he wouldn't look at the board on the lobby again on the way out. That skimpy collection of job-offers, all stuck up there with brass thumb-tacks. And this guy, too busy yabbering, he probably only got his job because he's a Maori. Kevin felt a little guilty after deciding that, but he believed it all the same.

He came in the front door of the flat and saw Michiko in the hallway, sitting on the wooden box by the phone. Clutching the heavy black receiver with both small hands and laughing at something. Sitting stiff-backed so that her small legs could stretch out to brace her on the daggy straw-mats on the floor--mats stitched together instead of carpet: dry, scuffed yellow squares, they looked like straw anyway--and she was talking in Japanese. And crying. Her shoulders weren't shaking with laughter, Michiko was crying. Her delicate face screwed up, tears on her cheeks.

He asked, 'What's happened?'

'My grandfather died,' she wailed.

Michiko said something into the phone and then hung up. Kevin put his arms out for her but she didn't try to stand. He had to bend down, awkwardly, to hug her.

'I'm so sorry.'

'My mother found him, he was in his room.' She sobbed. 'He was...he ate a mochi and he couldn't swallow properly. In his throat. My mother telephoned to me, he died two days ago. Two days. They waited.'

'They waited?' He tried to squeeze her comfortingly, hug some of the pain out of her, conscious of how uncomfortable he was himself.

'They say their reason, it is so I don't need to go funeral today. But why?' She pushed him away and sat up to look at him through her long black hair, which had fallen, dishevelled, across her beautiful face. Her eyes were searching his with passion. 'Why they do that?'

He thought of her parents. A postman and his wife on that snow-swept dot on the map, they'd never been anywhere. Reasonable, frightened middle-aged people with three sons, but leaving their only daughter to the care of a foreigner and letting them go off together overseas. He knew they'd waited because of him. Because they figured he couldn't afford all that airfare so she could go rushing back. Because practical people, country people, they'd think of him like that. And because, the way things were going, if Michiko went back then she might stay there.

Kevin said, 'Maybe your parents worried about how much you'd be upset.'

But she just started to sob again, even harder. Her tiny hands gripped at his shirt-front, his good work-shirt she'd made him wear to the interview.

'Why they wait?' she said.

Why anything? he thought. Why not live in Auckland where there'd be better chances for a job? And he thought again of the guys at the dole office, talking about periodic detention and just waiting for their money. Because if the system couldn't use you, it figured out how much to give you to go away. But he didn't want her to go back, he loved her! Pretend you aren't floundering, he told himself--he wished she'd stop crying so angrily--protect her, fight for her.

'When we left,' Michiko was saying, 'my grandfather was frightened he never see me again. And I promised to come back in one year.'

Kevin looked down at her. 'I'm so sorry,' he said.

'Only one year!' she wailed. 'But he was old!'

Her teardrops on the floor were blotching the straw-mat things. Kevin raised Michiko to her feet and began to manoeuvre her upright along the hallway towards the dining-room. Getting her to move wasn't easy.

'I've got the benefit,' he said. 'If my father signs the form and explains why we're not staying with him, then...' He could hear the doubt already falling into his voice.

'Because your father, we're here,' Michiko said, weeping and gulping air. Her voice hardened as she said, 'He must sign, or we go.'

'There's no one else to look after him here. Not like with your parents.'

And as soon as he said it, he felt guilty. Though it was the bare truth. After being so full of himself on Sado and of how much better he was going to do once he got off that rock--after all of it...Kevin shuddered at the thought of going back. Yet this, this was all he'd managed.

Unsteady, she was still crying--he finally got her sat at the dining-table. That long, ugly table they'd picked up in the second-hand place. Maybe he should make her a cup of tea. Tea...Christ! Kevin sat with her and gave her another hug. She turned and leaned against his chest. He looked up over his thin arms at the cracks far off in the old plaster ceiling, trying not to sigh.

There was no way it was going to be easy to get his father to sign that form. The old guy, so proud of his independence: he'd rather die than admit why they were back in New Zealand, let alone why they weren't staying with him. Because Kevin couldn't stand his own father--he thought Michiko had probably figured that out by now. Maybe she could persuade him to sign--she never caved in on things. Kevin imagined the old man flinging the paper onto the table. Think of your self-respect! He didn't deserve all this. Something welled up in his heart and then he was crying, too. Because she'd started sobbing hard again and he couldn't stop her--and because he couldn't get a job or get a break and organise the dole, and he couldn't stop people dying or even protect her from his relatives.

Michiko was still sitting in the dining-room with the cup of tea cold on the table. Staring across at something, the skirting board. Waving him away when he suggested he would sit with her. And he was getting hungry, in the pit of his stomach. Kevin hated thinking about food but he couldn't help it. He offered to make something himself and she'd waved him off again, irritated.

'I do it later,' she snapped.

He tiptoed round the rest of the flat, knowing he wasn't being any use. Better than this--why couldn't he do better than this and get something right? He went back into the dining-room and sat down with her for a long time, waiting as the hard summer light slanted from the windows and dark was beginning to fall.

At last she sighed, deeply, and then rested her hands on her knees as if to get up.

She said very clearly, 'I want to go church.'

Why would she...? Like all people when truly surprised, Kevin felt the words sink into him and nothing come out. He gazed at his wife's small-featured, determined profile. Michiko wasn't even a Buddhist. She wasn't anything, as far as he knew.

He asked, 'A local church?'

'I will pray for my grandfather.'

All those times on the island he'd rattled things hanging from ropes in the shrines they'd visited. Stood tossing a one-yen coin at the open spaces in a box, clapped his hands, thought it silly. No, no, she'd always said, do it right--but all he'd felt with his hands pressed together was a lonely, Christian guilt.

When Kevin got up from his chair, he wondered whether he'd become round-shouldered, or if it was just from the way he was trying to give her his arm. Before leaving the flat, Michiko sprinkled salt on them both at the front door, so that he felt the grains of it left in the gap between his socks and shoes.

They walked in the quiet, cooler temperatures of the evening--the heat still coming off the old asphalt--to the only church he could think of. In the Square ten minutes away, and when they drew near, he was pleased with his choice. The church up ahead, it looked good in the street-lights, like an ancient church in a picture. The weathered-brick walls along the front and the broad, arched window at the top, and a big, square brick tower sticking up far into the dark on one side. They approached an open doorway in the base of the tower, and as they stepped up into the carpeted entrance and paused, there was a musty smell, like a church.

Kevin couldn't see past the corner to inside--he hoped they could just slip in somewhere at the back if there was a service going on. Explain to the vicar if need be. The guy, he'd have to understand, wouldn't he? Kevin thought of everything he'd been through and he ought to be allowed...but he admitted he didn't really want to do this, if there was maybe some way he could wriggle out. But Michiko was calm now so he stepped forward. As he led the way, she reached for his hand.

She whispered, 'If your father would not sign that form, we go back Japan.'

There was no one else inside: nothing going on. Just the high space up in the rafters with dim lights above them, and the long rows of wooden pews on either side, off to the choir-stalls and the altar, the cross. And the carved, round thing for speeches across the way, the pulpit--amazing, how beautiful. That golden wood everywhere, what was it? His mother used to send him to Sunday School, and he could scarcely remember any of it. Hadn't been in a church for a long time. Too long, he thought. Kevin looked up and saw some lights on a bank of stained-glass windows along one wall, commemorating fallen soldiers. With an historical, torn flag up by the ceiling--why? it was a mystery.

And nobody around in the quiet but Michiko, waiting beside him. He walked her halfway up the aisle, chose a pew, motioned for her to sit down--wasn't there something more holy about sitting at the rear? He showed her how to slide forward off the pew and kneel. Kevin himself bent over as if trying to hide but Michiko knelt with her back straight, praying hard. She gripped her small hands together tight; she looked like a survivor in the water reaching for a lifeline. She closed her eyes.

Kneeling with her, Kevin tried to think what he'd say if someone came in. But he heard only the occasional sound of a car, passing outside. Long moments of complete stillness. When he'd been a boy, going to sleep, noise carried so far in the perfect night that he'd been able to hear the comforting sound of the goods trains shunting on the far side of the city. He'd lain among the blankets and thought of God gazing protectively on his house and town. Nothing changes for you in a place like this. He thought of high school, one afternoon. How from the narrow windows of D Block, the sky outside had looked so blue, and their grey uniforms–the shorts and flannel shirt and jersey--smelled dusty, woolly, and he felt so bored. Being called out of class to the office, and strolling the long way across the asphalt to the main block wishing for once, just once, for something. The woman, the headmaster's secretary with her nervous, kindly eyes, she met him halfway--did he have his bag? No? Better go back and get it, they're waiting for you at the headmaster's office. Your father is waiting. He said, what is it...bad news? She said, yes, get your bag. And he knew straight away someone had died. He went back to the class trying to tell himself it couldn't be mum, it couldn't be, it couldn't be, and he entered the room to a wave of laughter.

The teacher cried, 'Bates, you just missed a howler!'

He'd never heard anything so inappropriate. And he'd gone back to the empty house with his father, who made a cup of tea...

He looked at Michiko. That was what she was going through. And he was impressed--her stickability, to believe in anything now. In this big, big room, in a religion that isn't even hers. Ah, he was stuck, Kevin thought, and his knees hurt. He hadn't even been smart enough to pull down the personal cushion-thing he saw now, for kneeling on. Oh God! he wanted to cry out. Cry out for help. Sinking, he was stuck and sinking! The old man was never going to sign that form, he'd never get a decent job here and they couldn't afford to go on living even in the crummy, made-up way they did at the moment. And she, she was going to go back to her snowy island, without him. Trapped in this sinkhole alone. Hot tears pooled in the corners of Kevin's eyes; he felt close to collapse, to hysteria. That was what she was going through--some things beat you down so hard you never get up. A curse! he felt it raining down on him from the rafters.

Michiko unclasped her hands. She opened her eyes.

'I'm sorry, I make you worried,' she whispered.

His heart fluttered with happiness--in his surprise, he didn't know where the feeling came from.

'That's all right,' he managed to say. 'How're you doing?'

'Okay. I talk to my grandfather. We go home now.'

Still nobody in the church. They stood up. They were going to come and leave and no one would notice. Kevin helped Michiko out into the aisle again--their feet padding on the well-worn parts of the carpet. And as they went, he found himself praying quickly, over his shoulder when they neared the last pew. Praying that they'd make it all the way to the door and not get caught.

Copyright Ian Richards, 2008

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