“Writers are liars,” Neil Gaiman once said. That felt like a charming, witty remark before it turned out Gaiman was worse than a liar, pulling the remarkably douchey stunt of dumping his wife Amanda Palmer and their child here in NZ during a Covid lockdown and bolting back to Ireland flouting all the rules and thus proving himself to be not just economical with the truth but also a colossal wanker.
Writers do lie. Most of us lie. Some of us are better than others. I come from a long line of world-class liars. From the opening page, my new novel Nine Girls is obsessed with lies and the power they wield. The narrator Titch, now aged 12, is reflecting back upon her six-year-old self, specifically the day she came home from school to find that her goat, Twinkle, had upped sticks to go work for Santa. Despite the fact that Twinkle is only supposed to be subbing in for a sick reindeer, he never comes home again. Santa keeps him, and so every Christmas Eve after that, when Titch’s Mum tucks her up in bed to await the arrival of the big guy in the red suit bearing gifts they listen out for Twinkle’s hoofbeats on the roof as he makes his landing by the chimney.
This story is real obviously. I mean, not real in the sense that a goat actually went to work for Santa. Real in the sense that my parents did this to me.
It is one thing for a child to discover on the playground at school that Santa isn’t real. In my case that realisation was quickly followed by another more pressing worry: if Father Christmas is imaginary then where the hell is my goat?
It was not the only elaborate lie that my parents told. This sort of pathological behaviour, the commitment to the convoluted fib, was considered everyday currency in our extended whānau.
The long con is an art form to some. George Clooney has become famous for pranking his mates on movie sets with gags that are determinedly slow burn. There was the time he made Matt Damon, who was trying to lose weight for a role, believe he was actually getting fatter by having the wardrobe mistress gradually adjust his costume bit by bit each day, slowly taking in the waistband on his trousers. There was another time he found an appalling painting in a dumpster, signed it as his own work, and then gave it as a birthday gift to the actor Richard Kind, forcing him to hang it on his wall for a whole year before he fessed up.
Good stunts both, but frankly that’s amateur hour compared to the stuff my whanaunga regularly dished up to small children for sport. The pivotal ‘lie’ at the centre of Nine Girls, my Nan’s pakiwaitara about the tapu gold, is long con at its best – with the added complication that I believe it to be true. As a kid my Nan frequently told me the story of the gold buried on our farm next to Taupiri Mountain during the Tainui Wars and her brothers’ attempts to lift the tapu, pretty much exactly as Titch tells it in the book. Like Titch too, who states she doesn’t believe in Santa or God, I do very much believe in tapu and I do believe that the buried gold is still there underground on the banks of the muddy Mangawara.
When I decided to write about my family I had no interest in turning their story into that other kind of self-serving lie, the memoir. What I wanted to do was stick to my knitting and tell an epic, middle-grade adventure and at the same time capture what life was really like growing up in 80s Ngāruawāhia in a family that was unknowingly reconciling itself with the downstream consequences of being colonised into abandoning their taha Māori.
Nine Girls naturally pivots from the ponies I am famous for. Instead, Titch’s companion on her journey is her tupuna in the form of Paneiraira, a fat, black, loquacious river eel. Pan insists from the get-go that he is very honest tuna and all the stories he tells Titch, about her tupuna wahine, Irihapeti Te Paea Hahau Te Wherowhero, about the raupatu, the terrible events at Rangiaowhia, and the lies that an opium-addicted Governor Grey laid out in front of Queen Victoria to justify an invasion of the Waikato that was nothing more than a venal land grab, are all true. Titch’s stories too, about Bastion Point, Raglan golf course, the Springbok Tour are factual in their telling. If there are any lies in Nine Girls, they are ones that don’t matter. The sort that, as Doris Lessing puts it, make a “better job of truth”.
My people once were liars. Still are, for that matter. A couple of weeks ago I went to Ngāruawāhia for my cousin Joy’s 60th birthday. It was a surprise party involving 180 guests, and by its very nature it was a tribute to our skill as liars. We had all been misdirecting Joy for weeks that we had nothing planned at all for her and on the big day her son Ash told the whopper that he was taking her for a quiet dinner in Te Kowhai and on the way he just needed to stop by for a minute at the Rugby League Club because he had to pick up his brother Hunter and pay his respects at a tangi.
This seemed to me to be a really bad plan.
“Why a tangi?” I asked my cousin Lauren.
“To explain all the cars outside,” Lauren said.
“Who’s died then?”
“I dunno.”
When Ash turned up with Joy we could hear them bickering outside in the carpark. Ash was trying to convince his Mum it was only polite to pop in and pay her respects to the whānau pani. Joy was complaining that she didn’t even know whose tangi it was.
Ash, incredibly, blagged her into it. And so it was that my cousin walked into what she believed to be a stranger’s tangihanga and 180 people jumped up out of nowhere and scared the shit out of her.
“I just want to say…” Joy said with tears in her eyes looking around the room, “I just want to say…Jeez. Youse all are such liars.”
Nine Girls (Penguin, $22), Stacy Gregg’s new middle-grade novel, is available in bookstores nationwide. She also has a picture book out this month that is a mostly true story about the Easter Bunny.
