The Bone People (50 page)

side decorations, working the stone-tipped drill with precision and painstaking care. Piercing it again, and

smoothing the inside circle to an oily fineness. The kaumatua would have rubbed the finished ring against

belly and nose to make that shine, for many months. A long time in the making, a long time worn.

"It hasn't got a name," she is saying. "It's a family piece though, and it is guaranteed pre-pakeha."

She touches it one last time.

"It was one of the bits I got when the family gave me the boot." She doesn't say it was the only piece she got of the family inheritance. AH the rest of her collection she has bought.

She had sneered at the hook when she first unwrapped it. Trite contemporary junk, she thought. Look at that

diamond hard shine. She stashed it away with the rest of her pieces, still wrapped in the brown paper Joe had

given it to her in. She hadn't noticed the engraving or the braid wrapped in a separate piece of tissue.

The second week she took it out, and looked it over with dry-eyed care. Much love from Hohepa and

Haimona, aue... the braid is finely-done, five-ply and rounded. Joe has had the jeweller seal the ends with

clips of silver, fitted permanently into the hole in the her matau. The braid is just long enough to go over her

head--

She slips it on, and the green jewel lies by the cross and the medal and the pendant she always wears.

A hook to his jaw and a hook in his thumb and a kind of a hook in my heart, by God--

Each morning, when Joe goes in to Whangaroa to report according to the terms of his bail, Kerewin goes up

to the library circle.

It is stripped entirely bare now, except for the forlorn shelves round the walls. The books are packed in cases,

and stowed in the cellar. The swords are greased thickly and laid away on a cellar shelf. The chest of jade and

the drawers of shells are locked and sealed into three tin trunks. (Joe had played with the shells like he was a

child again. "Anana! I never knew fish made such shapes in all the world!" picking up one spiked and

trimmed like a pagoda, while holding another as meticulously curved and sharp as a

carpenter's bit. "And look at these colours!" Lime green snail shell and flamingo pink conch and a cowrie as gold as the setting sun. "Where'd you get these, e hoa?" as he wraps them up carefully. "O, bought them. A lot in Japan, a lot here. They were supposed to be delight and inspiration. They turned out to be the same sort

of detritus as everything else. Junk and mathoms and useless geegaws the lot of them, shells, rings, goblets,

books and swords... and my pounamu... it was beautiful to have them at first, but all the magic has worn off.

Little by little it has all gone away.")

There are three things in the library that were never there before: a packing-case; a cushion; and a lump of

clay, swathed in wet cloth. And every morning, she kneels down, toes crossed behind her and chin tucked in,

as though she were meditating.

But her fingers begin sliding over the clay, moulding. For the first time in a year, she knows exactly what she

wants to make and how to make it.

Beads of clay flattened, beads of clay raised. Day by day, the three faces grow. The blunt blind features

become definite, refined, awake.

Back of head to back of head to back of head: a tricephalos.

It's easy to model her own face, and that is finished first.

Joe is there each day: she can pick the detail she requires and grow the clay face next morning to match it.

But remembering the child's face pains her. She has to strip away the vision of how it looked the last two

times she saw it. The bloody swollen mask on the floor, broken nose and broken jaw. And the horrible

indentation in the side of his skull where he had been smashed against the door frame. Or neatened, whitened,

bandaged with care, but looking lifeless. O, his eyes had opened several times, but the seacolour had gone

and he didn't see her. He didn't see anyone or anything. His eyes look dead.

(Elizabeth Lachlan said, "We don't know how much damage there is. All we've done is remove the clot and

repair the bone. He may not be able to see. It's almost certain he won't be able to hear, and it's likely he has

suffered irreversible harm as far as his mental processes are concerned." You mean mind, lady? She had

stood impassive, saying nothing. The doctor had shrugged. "But we don't know. We won't know until we've

had him over in one of the major hospitals for a head scan. And we won't know fully even then until he's

recovered enough for us to ascertain in other ways the sum total of his injuries. If he recovers," she had said finally, "if he ever recovers.")

She concentrates on the way the child was at Moerangi, at the Hamdon pub, out in the boat. By the bonfires,

when he sang for them. Peaceful in the firelit bach.

Gradually, his unbroken face is moulded by her hands, small and angular and smiling again.

You were a strange child, Simon gargoyle, an unknown quantity in so many ways. I wonder what you would

have turned out like, had you been left to grow up whole?

Smoothing the narrow double point of the cleft chin.

Twisted, with a streak of meanness and sadism in you, as Joe was so plainly afraid? A musician, full of zany

fire? The dancer, the sweet singer, the listener to the silence of God on deserted beaches -- ae, you had music

in you. Ordinary sinner, extraordinary sinner, or some new kind of saint? All too late now--

The clay lips smile as well as the real ones did.

At the end of the fourth week, she has finished it. She lets it dry slowly, so it doesn't crack. She has in mind a

wild way to fire it.

Joe saw it once.

His curiosity bettered his sense of privacy, and he turned back the cloth on the draped hump.

The clay faces are still dark and damp.

Simon smiles at him.

Kerewin is gazing off into infinity.

And he has a look of wondering attentiveness, as though some great good news is about to be broken to him.

He circles the triple head again and again, staring at each lifesize face. The hair of their heads is entwined at

the top in a series of spirals. Simon's hair curves back from his neck to link Kerewin and Joe to him. Kerewin

wears the greenstone hook, he, his Moerangi pendant.

Round and round, and with each circumambulation, the faces become more alive.

Aue! She saw us as a whole, as a set. And soon we'll be parted forever. (Not forever, not forever, not

forever.)

He covers it with trembling hands.

The next time he was in the library, when they came up the spiral to start knocking the Tower down, the

tricephalos had gone.

His case was stood down: he was remanded on the same terms as when he'd been charged for the next two

weeks.

He said in the afternoon, "The lawyer says it's because they're waiting to see what happens. With him."

It's the first time the child has been referred to, even obliquely.

"In case it's murder," he adds shakily.

She grimaced.

"Elizabeth doesn't think it will, will come to that. She went on the plane with him on Friday. She said they

didn't learn anything new from the scan. She said it's just a matter of waiting." He shuddered. "E hoa, I don't mind what they do to me, but I hate this waiting."

"So do I," she said sombrely, and she wasn't referring only to the coming trial, or the child's coma. Each day, the pain and pressure in her gut has grown more intense until now it nags like toothache. She dreads the

moment when the knife will strike again.

Everything has been packed away now. The livingroom circle is the only room in use, and it is spartanly

furnished. Two stretchers for sleeping on (Piri brought them one morning: he said very little, but they joined

in hongi for the first time); some cooking gear; one sheepskin mat in front of the fire; Kerewin's black guitar

on the wall.

They spend the afternoons breaking down the upper circles; the neat stone blocks dislodged one by one to

hurtle down into the dandelion-studded lawn.

The dandelions are surviving, but only just. They seem to be making a special effort to breed past this

menace. The afternoons are full of their ballooning seeds, silver and prodigal in the sun.

They have become expert wreckers. It had been hard at first, blistered hands and stretched aching muscles.

But you grew accustomed to the heavy swing of the sledge hammer, built it into a rhythm. You grew wise to

the ways of stone and nailed wood, and learned to turn their solidity against them. Lever with a crowbar, tap

in a wedge here, a judicious smack with the hammer, and down falls more of the Tower.

She saved very little of the upper levels: the great sister curve from the library, and the seashaded windows

from the bedroom, and the golden niche where the boy had stood centuries ago; the plumbing and the solar

waterheaters; the handrail of the stairway, taking particular care of the dolphin heads with their benign

engraven smiles.

All the rest of the wood and furnishings she sent splintering and crashing downwards in a frenzy of

destruction.

Joe protested once.

"It's a waste of good wood, Kere. You might want to build again." She had smiled meanly at him. "I don't think so. Besides, I am short of wood. I need quite a lot of wood. This'll help," smashing the hammer through

the smooth floorboards.

He was afraid to ask her what she wanted the wood for.

They are short evenings.

They spend an hour after tea, sometimes talking about the day, sometimes drinking quietly; sometimes sitting

in silence until She plays her guitar infrequently, and the music is always dispirited and sad. It has the kind of

loneliness behind it that haunts old graves. Forgotten, dead, gone... she knows a lot of that kind

of music.

And when the talk has run out, or the drink has turned sour, or the companionable sitting has grown tense,

they say Goodnight and go to their separate beds.

Each night it is the same. They spend a long time listening to each other trying to go to sleep. It is always Joe

who sleeps first. He whimpers as he dreams, a small scared animal sound, strange in a grown man.

And what sound do I make when the memories come crowding in too close? I don't know, and I care even

less.

She lies stiffly still, night after night, her mind focused in fear on the thing that has invaded her. The wild

spreading cells that grow and grow. It is always near dawn before sleep comes.

The suneater is still going, perched on the sill of the great livingroom window now. Late in the last week, she

stops it. Quite simply. She crushes it in her fist.

Looking at the small pile of bits, Nearly two years running and now you're dead. I wonder if someone will

make another like you?

She feels no remorse. All her feelings are dulled these days, as though life is already going, slowly leaking

out and ebbing away.

Maybe it will make my dying that much easier... when I come to die, there will be little left to die.

I'm already a ghost with set wings, stalking tombstone territory.

Three days to the firestorm.

Three days to go.

Joe says that morning,

"I'll stay in 'Roa for a couple of days, if that's all right with you?"

"Of course it is."

"Okay then... I need to sign the papers for the house, and get everything sorted out. Before."

"Of course," but she says it more gently this time.

He pushes the hair away from his face. "You'll be all right, e Kere? I mean, I'll come out each night if you

want some company.""I'll be fine... take good care of yourself, and I'll see you Friday."

"Ae. E noho ra," as he swung away down the steps.

"Haere ra."

She listens to his footsteps clatter away.

"Everything sorted out," means the bare house cleared; the budgie given away to the Tainuis; the lawyer seen again and the house disposed of. Preparations for what may be a long stay behind stonier walls than these.

She sighs, and starts on the final work on the Tower.

She finishes nailing the last sheets of iron on the temporary roof to the livingroom circle, and has clipped up a

PVC guttering before the afternoon begins. She no longer marks passing time by meals, but by the position of

the sun. She doesn't feel like eating these days, though over the past week her appetite for drink has returned.

So she is playing a melancholy thoughtful tune, her mind cloistered in a wine haze, when the radiophone

buzzes.

It takes several seconds for her to realise what the sound is. More than a month gone by since it rang. And

last time... taipa.

"Ah, hello?"

"Hello," says the operator, in subdued tones. "I've got a call for you from Doctor Lachlan waiting."

Lachlan? Lachlan? Sheeit, that's Simon's doctor, Simon's?

Her heart has started to beat crazily fast.

"Put her through."

"Right away."

The voice is distant. She turns the volume control full up, concentrating against the haziness of the wine.

"Hello, Elizabeth? What'd you say?"

"I said, is Joseph there?"

"No, he's in town."

"But I've tried his number and he--"

"You'd better leave him a message here if you can. I don't know exactly where he is at the moment, and he's

had his phone cut off... he got some nut calls the week he came out of hospital. Nasty ones."

"Oh..." the voice fades and fuzzes.

"Oath, this is a bad line... I can't hear you, Elizabeth."

"I said, in that case would you mind telling him that Simon is conscious but not recognising me, and not