Kehua! (15 page)

At the end of the phone call Lola slams down the phone then calls Help the Harmed, tells them she is cancelling her membership,
they’re a racket anyway, she’s too young to go to Haiti, and she wants her money back.

She will stay and keep Louis company. She will find out if he is really gay. That will serve everyone right.

Beverley grew up more or less believing herself to be the daughter of Dr Arthur and Mrs Rita Audley of Coromandel, North Island,
New Zealand, the World, the Galaxy, the Universe, Space. Beyond the vision of her pumping knees on some desperate errand,
and the bloodied dress above them, and playing in the yellow dust under the macrocarpa hedge, and a young woman turning cartwheels
on the lawn – whom she assumes to be Rita – she has only the scantiest memories of her very early life. Usually between the
ages of two and three years, the brain of a child switches from the tactile and olfactory to the verbal processing of memories.
After that age we develop a self-image and can place other images within that main one – before that, all is amnesia.

Beverley was a bright child – as is Lola – and had developed her language skills, speaking, writing and reading early, so
more memories were likely to be retained. Experiences deposit images, and though childhood trauma can have the effect of wiping
out whole sections of memory altogether, Beverley was a tough and resilient little creature and the images remained. Which
is why I say ‘more or less believing herself to be the daughter’, etc., and not a simple ‘believed’. Ask little Beverley for
the names of her parents and she’d pause for a second before replying Arthur and Rita, and she’d look at you with a slight
air of doubt once she had done so.

When at the age of six her friend Evelyn Hammer confided that she, Evelyn, had been switched at birth, and was really a princess,
Beverley said, ‘I wasn’t switched, I was adopted,’ and knew it to be true, though how, she couldn’t say. Nobody had ever told
her, let alone suggested it. She thought she’d probably imagined it, just as Evelyn imagined herself to be a princess.

‘What’s adopted?’ asked Evelyn, and Beverley explained. ‘It’s when your mother dies and you get put up for sale and somebody
buys you.’

Rita was a young woman of twenty-seven when little Beverley, bloodied, came knocking for help at her farmhouse door. Rita
phoned the operator who phoned the neighbours and all quickly congregated at Walter McLean’s door, to find the horror of poor
dead Kitchie, his wife, inside. Nobody had to break down doors; nobody locked doors then. A search party went looking for
Walter, who was found in a nearby gully, lying dead, a blackened bullet hole in his temple. His dog Patch lay dead not far
away, his own Webley revolver was lying beside him, and assumptions were easily made.

The unfortunate Walter McLean had taken a knife to his faithless wife, fled the scene of the crime, and then turned his gun
first on Patch, then on himself. The child had woken from her afternoon rest to find the mother’s body and, brave little thing,
had run to the neighbour, local farmer’s daughter Rita Hardy, for help. Police from Christchurch, thirty-four miles away,
were called in, and both bodies were wrapped and transported quickly to the morgue in that city. The weather was hot. There
had been no real evidence of a lover, but the general supposition from the first was that there must have been. Kitchie, a
flirtatious lass from England who put on airs and was no kind of wife for a hard-working Canterbury sheep farmer, must have
driven the poor man to it. The name of Arthur
Audley, the newly qualified doctor, was bandied about as a possible lover – mainly because he was young and handsome and the
only local man anyone could envisage Kitchie taking an interest in – but the rumour soon died. Walter was known to have a
temper, and Patch was not the only dog he had shot. Dogs suspected of worrying his sheep got short shrift, sometimes off his
own land, and this had caused some local feeling. The inquests had been brief and to the point. Marital murder/suicide was
always unpleasant, but not a rarity in rural parts.

Rita, unusual in her generosity and kindness, had done her neighbourly best to befriend Kitchie in the early days of her marriage,
one of the few who did, and now extended that kindness to little Bev. Rita was lonely, plain, valiant and unmarried in a town
where most were married by the age of twenty. She had inherited the farm from her parents; it was going to rack and ruin but
she had property, so she had suitors. She also had her pride and her principles, and was almost thirty and still unmarried
when Bev turned up on the step. Rita thought that put paid to any chance of marriage – who would ever want to take on another
man’s child, let alone Bev, with her history – but she took her in nonetheless. Then young Dr Audley had come courting, and
been prepared to take Bev on. They would adopt her formally, sell the farm, and move north for the child’s sake, to be distanced
from scandal and memory.

So that is what happened. Rita sold the farm and with the proceeds Arthur bought a practice in the town of Coromandel, on
the rugged, mysterious peninsula of the same name south-east of Auckland. Fifty years before, with New Zealand’s own gold
rush, the place had grown and swelled from sleepy fishing village to rough and raucous gold-mining town, complete with saloon,
banks
and whorehouses, but as the gold veins ran out and the population melted away, it had sunk again into a quiet, benevolent,
satisfied sleep, as might some respectable matron with a wild past.

It was assumed in Coromandel that Beverley was the Audleys’ child. Rita would have liked more children but Arthur had said
Beverley was enough and pointed out that a doctor’s wife always had a great deal to get on with. She had to keep the appointments,
run the surgery, offer medical advice when he was on his rounds, help at the hospital in an emergency and act as the neighbourhood’s
unpaid social worker. There was status, more so than in being a farmer’s wife, but there was work too.

There’s a nice solid patch of conventional prose to be getting on with. It works. No more faces now appearing in the wallpaper
and fading out again, no more mysterious footfalls, just the steady pitterpat of the rain falling the other side of the window,
and a firm reality.

‘Ve haf vays of making you write,’ the Great Cultural Gauleiter in the Sky is saying to me, in no uncertain terms. For your
information, the GCGITS is the one in charge of all cultural events in the Western world, big and small. He it is who creates
bizarre coincidences and accidents when any creative work is under way. It is his doing when the composer of the unknown music
‘just happens’ to be sitting next to the film director in the pub when he goes for a drink. Why John Stuart Mill’s maid just
happens to burn Carlyle’s manuscript, so an improved version has to be written. Burroughs’
Naked Lunch
is a well-known case in point – had his pistol not happened to miss the apple on his wife’s head and get her temple instead,
would post-modern fiction have got under way, would Kerouac’s paper-roll manuscript of
On the Road
have survived rejection by forty publishers intact? Was this why Kerouac told people
the book had been dictated by the Holy Ghost? The GCGITS (whose acronym is as unpronounceable as the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew
name of God) looks after, or destroys, the tiniest sparrow too, and is now producing ghosts out of the wall to dictate what
happens next in this book.

He and the GSWITS – the Great Screen Writer in the Sky who is composing the script for world events, and who alas is a rotten
writer, a B-movie writer, what with his fall of Troy, his
Marie Celeste
, his grassy knoll, his global warming, his Credit Crunch, his Bernie Madoff, his Underpants Bomber – is making fictional
events come so thick and fast I fear he’s building up to a really bizarre end – like a child’s story I just received. Written
for a competition by an eight-year-old boy, it finishes, as he gets bored, thus: ‘– and then suddenly there was a great explosion
and that was the end of everything – a-a-a-a-argh!’ The GSWITS and the GCGITS are down at the pub most of the time, I fear,
egging each other on. And there’s no one, absolutely no one, in charge of anything.

But this is just me putting off the moment of decision: I could now go and follow Jackson as he visits his supremely uninteresting
ex-wife and children in Battersea, and tries to down-scale her monthly maintenance cheque, I could stay with the young Beverley,
or I could give you a further update on Cynara, D’Dora and Lola. Or I could give you an update on me. Guess what, it’s going
to be me. Me, me, me, that’s all you get these days. But it is relevant, and for once I’m not in the basement.

Janice Barrington is an old friend; I knew her well when we were both young things in advertising and lived around the corner
from each other. I hadn’t seen her for some twenty years, and she hadn’t been to Yatt House before. I was pleased to see her
when I emerged from the basement and stopped work for the day. She was looking okay, if a bit shaggy-haired and startled,
and rather older than her years, with the unkempt look of people who live in the country, see no point in getting up to town,
and would weave their own clothes if they could. I don’t suppose I looked much better: a rabbit startled in the dark by sudden
headlights. The sunlight seemed very bright when I opened the door to her.

She had once been as bright, smart, rational and self-possessed as, say, Scarlet, but had married a mean kind of man, who
had left her with two small babies and no means of support other than state benefits. She had moved to Glastonbury, thinking
she might as well be poor in Glastonbury, home of the Festival, astrologers, crystal shops and King Arthur, as anywhere else,
and soon discovered everyone who lives there is, by rationalist standards, and indeed mine, nuts. The further south-west you
go in England, the more spiritual, poetic and poor everyone becomes. Janice’s children are grown now and one of them – as
his horoscope predicted, you may be sure – ended up rich and sufficiently unlike his father to house
his mother in a nice little new bungalow just outside the town. I was glad for her.

She came in through the front door to our house and the first thing she said (instead of what most people did: ‘What a lovely
house, aren’t you lucky, just look at that view’) was: ‘Oh dear, I don’t know how you can live in an old house like this.’
Which I took to mean she was jealous and wanted to make me feel bad.

I said, but the English like to live in old houses, and she said houses sop up the vibes of whoever lived in them, reflected
them back, and were pretty much bound in the end to infect anyone who lived there with bad karma. The older the house was,
the worse the effect. She personally had felt so much better since she started living in her new bungalow. More energy, no
more depression.

It was not a good start to a reunion. But old friends are old friends and I excused her inwardly on the grounds that she had
had a difficult life, and I made her coffee and we chatted about the children and so forth, but actually I wanted to get back
to Beverley, Scarlet, Cynara, Lola, friends and family. We were sitting in the kitchen when she suddenly shivered and said,
didn’t I feel a cold draught, so I closed the window I had just opened. I had offered her hot milk in her coffee, and left
the pan on the Aga, and it had boiled over. Not much, I’d got it in time, just a drop or two – but she’d raised her eyebrows
and said, from the look of me I’d been working too hard. Thanks.

‘Here it comes,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘I knew it. The poltergeist smell.’

I asked her what kind of smell poltergeists had and she said it was very distinctive. Acrid, like electrical wires overheating
and a slight metallic whiff of opium poppy. Had I noticed any activity? I said I had not, and to me it smelled like burned
milk. She then
said she had been studying as a medium and could tell from my body language I was in denial. I ignored this and said I didn’t
know people could study to be mediums, I thought it was a gift which you either had or didn’t have, and personally I was pleased
not to have it. Here and now were quite enough to be getting on with. She said there was more to life than getting through
it, and I had a sense of déjà vu, and realised it was Scarlet saying, ‘There is more to life than passing it on.’ So I replied,
like Beverley, ‘You could have fooled me,’ and then thought really it was pretty pathetic to be mimicking your own fictional
characters.

Janice looked around the house without much interest and asked me how I coped with so many stairs. She looked in my pretty
living room and shuddered, saying something very unhappy had happened here. She poked her face around the door to the basement
stairs and said, ‘Ugh, I’m not going down there, darling. Bright red smudges on little blue shoes. Terribly like blood.’

I thought, ‘That’s okay, she’s only picking up on little Beverley, and at least now we know her shoes were blue,’ and then
thought it was really wise to stay away from the occult, it could so easily drive you mad.

‘I’d try to stay above ground, if I were you,’ she advised, ‘there are so many walk-ins about. It’s the war, you know.’

Walk-ins, it seems, are spirit refugees from the Twin Dog Star Sirius, where a war is going on between the organic and the
inorganic life forms. Yes, we are on the side of the organic. Mostly they’re a high form of life, angel incarnations of an
elevated kind, but there are one or two baddies amongst them, who tend to hover at ground level or below. They can move into
your body at will, and can make you steal, cheat and even murder someone without you knowing anything about it.

‘How convenient,’ I said, and she looked hurt, and I was sorry. But I was feeling thoroughly foolish for having succumbed
to my own other-world fantasies. I could see them all of a sudden for what they were, nourishment for saddos and weirdos with
not enough to do. It would have been polite to offer Janice lunch but I didn’t. I just wanted her to go.