PROLOGUE                                                                                                Back

             Paul Calvert woke about an hour out of Auckland on a train journey back from dreamland. Tired, slightly nauseous. Will this travel never cease? He thought, because he didn’t want it to. Will this railway soon finish? He wished it wouldn’t! It was early in the morning as the train passes through station after station. Knowing it isn’t long before arrival, melancholy floods him, brought on by a mixture of memory, the landscape and the motion of the train: together these create a kind of perfection like lovemaking which he knows must end.

           Papakura Station, newly painted and dripping with dew, is a peaceful welcome to the Auckland boundary. Calvert had a warning that Papakura was up ahead twenty miles or so before when he had passed through a cutting and the earth was red with a topping of bright green grass against a dark blue sombre sky. He thought ‘papa kura: soon we’ll be in Papakura’. Papakura Station stands still as his train moves slowly out and he catches sight of a suburban train filling with early morning commuters on the far platform which will follow his train into Auckland in ten minutes or so. These are things that will happen but Calvert is dreaming . . . in dreamland, te wahi moemoeä, horrific transvestite fear over the strait, I am my mother dying . . . I fly in an ever-encircling stranglehold moving towards the ceiling . . . looking down I can see myself . . . tobacco-picking job doesn’t begin . . . I leave for the darkness of self-absorption . . . an overnight stay lasts two weeks and a girl with a name like Rhodesia talks me down . . . passing Middlemore Hospital Calvert is now almost awake as the train moves lazily towards Mangere.

             The dining car normally closes north of Papakura but he manages to persuade the people in it to give me a cup of coffee. This is his first trip to Auckland from dreamland for some time. Hoping he has left dreamland for good this time, Calvert is unsure what he will do from now on. There will be no one to meet him at the station. He has been away so long that all his northern friends have either dispersed or forgotten him, and his family who are in Auckland don't know him since he went into the exile of te wahi moemoeä.

            "He kura kanga e hokia, he kura tangata e kore e hokia," As his carriage passes over the points near Westfield which take the train onto the Waterfront-Orakei Deviation, Rangi's last words to him ring in his ears, each word punctuated by the boom-cha-boom, boom-cha-boom of the train. Only now as he enters excitedly the outskirts of his childhood haunts does he begin to understand the explanation of her ancestral proverb. Fighting off illusions and tiredness he attempts to reach a fuller comprehension of what she'd meant by saying, ‘You can return to a treasured place, but not to a treasured person’, From the train window he catches a glimpse of ghetto-like Glen Innes, spread out like a ragged carpet, spread out like an inaccurate map of his past. Paul Calvert knows he is almost home - not the home of people, but the home of places and ghosts and memories

. . . in the dream I was sitting on a sofa in the house of an old friend with the improbable name of Shamus O'Shamus . . . we had met up in dreamland after not seeing each other for some time . . . she walked in on our literary language, it was Rangi, my never-to-be-wife, kahore täku hoa wahine . . . our eyes met without fear and our hearts wanted to run away with each other . . . things are never simple in dreamland and she left me desolate    . . . still she haunts all my dreams and I love her like the moment I met her . . . when the darkness descends she is there telling me how you can never return to a treasured person  . . . Paul Calvert notices the carriage has gone dark. It is eerie when another train going the other way blows its whistle and rushes by inside the double-track tunnel, sounding like a resurrected dinosaur hearing itself roar for the first time in two million years.

            The train emerges from the tunnel out into Meadowbank and Calvert feels torn from every side by emotion. Memory-images of the past are before him as though they are here, palpable! The train goes faster but for him it has stopped! It moves but doesn't move! Up to the right he can see the church which was part of his old school. Two horses run down the hill as the train frightens them and he is a nine year old boy looking down through the bushes which surround his school.

            Calvert can see the early morning train from Wellington that he is now on rumbling along the tracks and two of the horses that belong to the rich kids at his school are running down the hill, they must be scared. The time-train passes under the Orakei overbridge as it moves through Orakei Station, and he can see the mysterious gin factory to the left - he could never believe that that's what it was when he was young because he thought all things like that came from overseas.

            Well this train moves . . . in dreamland trains move . . . if they move at all it is through the efforts of our labour . . . before Rangi arrived, before the cold set in . . . before the fire of ice burned my heart to a frozen cinder . . . in this land I helped to keep the trains going . . . going through tunnels and climbing steep gradients . . . when no trains came we would dig and lift and heave ho! . . . hey-up!, hey-up!, hey-up! . . . another sleeper lies in a ballast bed . . . replace that rail up at 339 was the order of the day . . . and how can a man work wearing two coats, eh Flook!!! . . . pipi and paua sizzling on a shovel . . . but these dreams detract from immediate emotions for here he is on a train going through his home and all he can do is dream.

             Orakei, Calvert struggles to understand the meaning of the word, but the train is moving again for him. He can see the old sewer pipe he and other kids used to walk across to Parnell and back. Parnell Baths, Judges Bay pass without comment and the train becomes entwined in the mesh of rails that is the Auckland rail yards, slowing to a crawl as an early goods train heads out of the yards, southbound, two engines pulling fifty or so wagons . . . my brother has just laughed himself to sleep in the bed next to me . . .  we stay up till late talking and laughing . . . “Don't shoot, I've got six wives and a children” and we both roar our heads off . . . mum calls out “Shut-up you two, go to sleep!” . . . now he is asleep and mum and mad and the two girls asleep in the next room, and gran asleep in the front room . . . not me, I lie awake in the dark, I don't like to sleep because you don't know anything . . . but as I lie in the dark I can hear the steady rumble and drone of a goods train going through the night . . . through Orakei Station . . . I don't care where it goes but that sound haunts and terrifies me . . . if it wasn't for that sound I wouldn't know I was alone . . . I want mum to come in and put her arms around me and say it's all right . . . she used to but now I'm too big . . .