A trip with your dad and his new girlfriend - what could possibly go wrong? By Josephine Stewart-Tewhiu.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler or read on.
Whenever I think about my dad, I think of the smell of real black leather jackets. I think of his beautiful smile, how proud he is of who he is. I think of his epic cooking skills, and I think of the many, many different lives he’s led.
Street gangs, jail, heroine addiction, a chef for a Greenpeace boat, an actor (he was one of Jake’s mates in Once Were Warriors), a house painter, alcoholism, a stint with Destiny’s Church, four different children to four different women, and counting.
He’s a 5’6” Maori man, and in his day he was very very handsome – he still is, but in his day he was rock-n-roll gangsta good-looking.
So, whenever people ask me about my dad I always say, “Oh. My dad. My dad’s a bit of a rolling stone.”
I had just turned 18 years old when my dad suggested we take a trip to Samoa. He’d been seeing this woman called Matara for a few years and her family lived there, so he thought it would be a great idea if we all took a family vacation together. I was really excited. I love travelling.
I should’ve known something was up when dad called me to tell me that Matara had been arrested while buying our plane tickets because she was dancing, naked, in a public fountain. But Dad, being Dad, was like – “It’s all good. We’re still going on the trip.” I was relieved, because I had these romanticised ideas of Robert Louie Stevenson, long white beaches, resorts, coconuts…
The day of our trip arrives, and we’re running very late, so we’re all separated on the plane.
As we’re approaching Samoa, the flight attendant comes over to my dad and says – “Your wife’s not feeling very well. Will you swap seats and come and sit with her?” Dad does, of course, and we land.
As everyone disembarks, I see my dad making his way down the aisle towards me. He looks at me, he looks concerned, and he says – “Matara won’t get off the plane. Will you come and talk to her?”
So I walk down to her row, and I sit with her and she’s staring out the window, lost in thought.
“Matara, would you like to get off the plane?”
Silence.
I try again.
“Matara, do you want to get off the plane now?”
She finally replies, from far away… “I can smell my mothers spirit.”
Her mother was still alive, so I genuinely did not know what to do with this information. So I say – “Okay... That’s cool. Do you want to get off and you can come and see her?”
As soon as the words are out of my mouth she jumps out of her seat and runs off the plane. I follow her and the first thing to hit me is the heat. It permeates everything. It’s on my skin, it’s in my hair, and it’s in my lungs.
I see my dad, who’s patiently waiting in line for customs. I see Matara who’s rolling on the tarmac, laughing. When I see her lying there I get really frustrated. I march over to her and snap – “Get up! We’ve got to go through customs, we’re going through the airport, and we’re doing this damn trip!”
Matara leaps to her feet. She just runs. She’s like a greyhound. She runs straight through customs. No one stamps her passport. No one seems to care. And just like that, she’s gone.
Meanwhile, Dad and I get through customs, and we get to baggage claim. Dad instructs me to get all of our luggage while he goes to find her.
Somehow, I manage all of our bags, I leave the arrivals gate, and suddenly I feel scared, and lost, and I don’t know what’s happening, and just when I’m about to burst into tears and cry like a small child for my mother, my father himself walks right in front of me. His head is bleeding, and he looks really disoriented. I stop him and I say “Dad, what happened? Are you okay?”
He replies – “Matara’s trying to take her clothes off. I tried to stop her and she hit me in the face. I have to go and find her.” And he just walks away. As he’s walking I see in the distance Matara, naked, running through the airport, out the airport doors, and then she’s just gone. I think, “Oh fuck. What is happening?”
I find my dad, and we find Matara; she’s dancing down on the beach she’s having a great time, she’s in party mode, so we put her on the back of a truck and we take her to the local hospital.
There’s dust everywhere. There’s no glass in the windows of the hospital. There’s no doctor because the doctor’s in Japan, so there’s all these nurses sitting around her as she’s writhing on the bed and they’re all nodding, and they’re saying, “She’s possessed. It’s fine. She’s just possessed.”
And I think “What do you mean, ‘possessed’?”
I’m in my first year of uni, so I’m taking life very seriously, and I say “No. She’s not possessed. There’s something really wrong.” (Just a little side note, we take her to the doctor's house, she’s lying on the doctor's bed, she takes off her wedding ring and she says to me, “My dead ex-husband wants me to give this to you,” and I don’t know what to do so I just take it.)
Anyway, we send her to her family’s home. My dad’s friend very kindly puts us up for the night so we can have some respite because the day was actually quite full-on. It was really intense.
So the next day, we get up and we go to her family’s house to visit her. Her family’s beautiful, there’s dozens of them, and they’re so welcoming and warm. They want me to feel comfortable so they sit me in a chair in the living room. But then they all sit on the floor in front of me. Everyone is on the floor except me, and I really want to join them, but I’m too polite to move, I’m worried I’ll offend someone. They just look up at me, they stare, they smile, and they ask me questions about where I’m from, and what I do, and my family back home.
But in my periphery, out the window, I can see Matara, dancing topless, on her father’s grave. See, I learned something in Samoa, and that’s that they bury their family on their land, which I think is really special. But she’s dancing on her dad’s grave.
Again, no one really seems to care or be bothered by this. So I’m trying to politely answer; “I’m studying, I’m doing a Bachelor of Arts…” but I’m constantly distracted by this naked dancing.
Eventually my dad comes to find me and he says, “Matara has written a letter for us, and she wants me to read it out loud.” So we sit with Matara. Dad has the letter, he opens it, and then he just freezes. I look over his shoulder, and I see that the letter is addressed to Celine Dion, and her husband Rene.
My dad starts reading and he changes Celine Dion's name to his name and Rene’s name to my name as he reads it out loud. He really commits and Matara just sits there, and she nods and she smiles. The letter gets crazier and crazier and it rambles, ending with ‘Michael Jackson came to visit us but we weren’t home’.
I remembered leaving there, and saying to my dad, “You should get a doctor to see her. Something’s really, really wrong.”
So my dad pays the money, and we put her in a private hospital, and she’s sedated for a few days. My dad and I, we get this little holiday together. I get my beach, my resort, my white sand, but of course it’s my dad's style – which is hitchhiking with this old American tourist and his young Samoan girlfriend, who’s about my age. It was deeply strange; bad news, and I walked away from them feeling quite sorry for her.
Anyway, we get back, Matara leaves the hospital, and she’s fine, but we just don’t talk about it.
Unbeknownst to my dad, while we were away, I made a collect call to my mum. I begged her to book me a plane ticket. I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to be in Samoa anymore, I didn’t want to be on this trip. I wanted to come home. And my mum, being my mum, did. She booked me a flight home, and I flew home early.
When I finally caught up with my dad, I tried to talk to him about it.
“We should probably talk about what happened, because that was fucked up.”
My dad paused, and he looked really sad. Then his black eyes started twinkling, and this little smile grew on his face and he said: “Oh yeah. Samoa, eh? The heat’s enough to make you go crazy.”
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Rhianna McCormick-Burns
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