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her. She’s cool. But not cool enough for Lena to linger and talk, say an old friend’s name.
    The strip of paddock she found was about half a width of a football field. Back on the rise of her old street she was able to see over the high brick wall (I don’t remember it being that high) the Trambert house already with lights on when dusk was still coming down. And she could see the tree, a huge one it was, a towering spread losing to autumn coming on. Found her heart hammering. And her thoughts running parallel with the gathering dark. (Or my sister.) Trying to imagine what Grace must have been thinking. And why the Trambert place? Why there?
    Sheep grazed in the paddock, taking no notice of her presence , though she knew there’d be plenty of eyes out those little box windows wondering at her. Stuff them. Let ’em wonder. (Why the Tramberts?) Her mother said the man himself had come to the funeral, a fine-looking man she said and with great dignity. He’d come to the house, too, just to pay his respects and ask if there was anything he could do. She said he’d got awkward all of a sudden and then she realised it was because he wanted to give her money. (But she didn’t take it. Good for you, Mum!) Not that this Trambert man had meant anything except kindness. Though the neighbourhood was talking when Grace was hardly in her grave that theremust’ve been something going on between them. Polly could hear the voices now — when she was too young to hear them at the time — So why’d he offer the mother money if he wasn’t, you know? And why’d she pick his tree to do it off, there’s plenty trees closer than his place. But the letter from Grace ended that: it was Jake, her own father. Grace’d given the letter to Toot and Toot gave it to Beth and that was it for Mister Jake The Rapist Muss. Oh, how she hated the man. Hated him.
    It didn’t take any figuring to know Trambert’s missing land was money in the bank. Money. It was one thing Polly Heke couldn’t get her mind around; she got emotional, she got angry, she got resentful and envious (when I’m not an envious person normally, not even at Kylie Leech getting a modelling contract up in Auckland). For it seemed to her that somehow white people — come to think of it, Asians, too, and probably even more so — had ensnared money with rules and mysteries only they knew so brown people, Maoris and Pacific Islanders, couldn’t get their hands on it. And where she was right now, moving across a shortened stretch of land (I’m trespassing, hahaha!) behind her housing brownskins, it was like a one-way bulldozer carving out little pockets of area for a moneyless brown family to live in, whilst shunting the pay dirt over to the Tramberts. The fucken Tramberts, though she tried not to swear. Especially that Charlie had near fully converted his adopted Heke children to his way of thinking, which was about dignity and — shit, she used to think it was — stuff like that. Swearing, specially for a female, was on his hit list. (Well, I’m swearing now, Charlie Mr Welfare Officer middle-class Maori. Polly Heke’s saying that Mr fucken Trambert gets to have all the money so fuck him.) Though she did put a somewhat guilty hand to her mouth at those thoughts, or those forbidden words, that is.
    Grace’d never said anything about the Tramberts. Though she might’ve and Polly didn’t remember; it was a long time ago. Now she was standing in the part shadow of the very tree Grace took her life on. Or from, as the Pine Block people put it. Part shadow because as she got closer the shadow came from the old brick wall and less the tree, which she thought must be oak for no other reason than oak would be these people. (These lucky white bastard people.) Why the Tramberts?
    When she looked up at the wall several centimetres taller than her for the second time, she could see a clear line of it having been added to, though it was the same style brick. That got to her; it