The Predictions

For Matthew, Rafael, and Hector—
all parenting is an experiment. Sorry!

And for Azedear—
with gratitude and love.

Gaialands

1978

W
E WERE RAISED AT
Gaialands to believe in freedom—personal, societal, spiritual—but in the years after I left the commune not a single day passed when I did not feel tightly bound by the fate laid down for me there.

Conditions on the commune were harsh. No electricity or flushing toilets or hot running water in the long winter months, and in the summer, no way to keep a beer cold, or even any beer. Despite all legends of hippie excess, no one on the commune was allowed to drink or smoke or take LSD or sleep with their mother. And then there was the groovy outdoor lifestyle. Each December we were hit with summer storms, days of lightning strikes and torrential rains that took out trees and burst the creek, drowning animals and flooding the surrounding paddocks, and that was in a good year. In the bad years we had to evacuate, returning when the valley had drained of water and our belongings were covered in silt.

But it wasn’t the weather or the basic facilities that made
living at Gaialands a trial. It was philosophy. The commune was never what anyone expected it to be—and nobody could stand it for long. People who had heard about us, hippies mostly, arrived at our gate with big, wonky ideas about dropping out of society and living where no one expected them to lift a finger unless it was to roll a joint. They wanted yoga and meditation and a smattering of Zen Buddhism and whole foods, but had no concept of how hard it was to grow all your food from scratch and how little time it left for other pursuits.

We didn’t welcome the hippies with open arms but we allowed them to stay a few days, feeding them up on nut roast and alfalfa sprouts and letting them sleep in the tepee down by the creek, which leaked when it rained and was too hot, during the day, to hang out in. If they lasted a week, the hippies were given chores: picking apples, chopping firewood, scrubbing pots; and if that didn’t make them leave, there was one task that always broke them.

Early in the morning, before the heat of the sun triggered the high-noon stench of feces, Hunter woke up the hippies and handed them a long-handled spade with which to dig out the long drops. These were six-feet-deep holes filled with communal excrement, and that was on a day when it hadn’t rained, when the shit hadn’t spread to the paddock. As one by one the hippies laid down their spades and refused to go on, Hunter, our self-appointed leader, rubbed his hands together with glee. He loathed hippies and nothing pleased him more than proving they were a no-good breed of dirty, privileged layabouts.

He drove them to the end of our driveway in his ute, and
there he gave them his farewell speech, so well rehearsed he could say it in his sleep. The climax, which followed a bunch of Marxist stuff about the cooperative labor ethics of a working organic farm, was an idiosyncratic take on an old Zen proverb. “Before enlightenment: chopping wood, shoveling shit,” he would say, waiting for his audience to grow agitated before delivering the punch line: “After enlightenment: chopping wood, shoveling shit.”

And then, one fine day in the spring of 1978, a woman turned up on the commune who single-handedly reinstated the hippie reputation we had worked so hard to destroy.

The afternoon she arrived, I was on pig duty with Fritz. The two of us shoveled pig shit into a wheelbarrow, trying to get the job done as quickly and as badly as possible. As the oldest, I was supposed to supervise. Fritz had just tried to run away from the commune again, and I had been told to keep an eye on him. To this end, I had so far handed out only one instruction, and that was to at least try to look as though we were doing what we had been asked to do. Just because we had grown up at Gaialands, and were stuck there, did not mean we shared our leader’s work ethic.

“Do you think,” said Fritz, leaning on his spade, “we could get away with rinsing the rest of the yard with a bucket of water? I don’t see why we have to get every last bit of crap—it only gets dirty again.”

“I don’t make up the rules,” I said. “I only know what happens if we don’t follow them.”

“You’re such a goody-goody,” said Fritz. “I can’t believe we’re related.”

“We weren’t—until a few months ago.”

“Can we change it back?”

“Nah. You’re stuck with me until one of us carks it.”

Brother-sister teasing was new to us, risky and untried. Barely a few months had passed since we had found out we shared a set of parents. Before that we had been forbidden to speak of such things or even to speculate. But I think I had always known Fritz was my kin. He had been born with a clubfoot, never treated, and though the other kids had teased him about it, made fun of his lopsided walk, I never had. Instead I had felt protective, as though his clubfoot was
my
clubfoot. There were other things too that made me suspect. Sometimes I heard him talking when he wasn’t, or I knew what he was going to say before he said it. When we were alone together we barely spoke, not because we had nothing to say, but because we didn’t need to talk.

I watched him shuffle over to the water trough with an empty bucket and return with it full, at which point he flung water at the yard, standing back to survey the results.

“Bugger,” he said, throwing the pail aside. “I’ve made it worse.”

He had. Propelled by the force of his sluicing, the water from the pail had briefly flowed uphill, and then, according to the laws of physics, flowed downhill again, bringing with it all the shit we had scraped up that morning.

I didn’t have the heart to tell Fritz off. Better to lean on my own spade and laugh at the inanity of being made to shovel the same shit twice.

We were easily distracted after that, looking out for
trouble. The sound of an engine straining to climb the loose gravel on the last stretch of road before the commune was all the encouragement we needed to abandon our task. We stood, hands on hips, waiting to see who would appear over the hill. I expected a car but the first thing that came into view was the yellow roof of a gingerbread house, like something out of “Hansel and Gretel.” The car that towed it was a thing so rusted and barnacled that it might have been a fishing trawler.

Fritz scratched his head. “What is that?”

“Some sort of caravan?”

At the crest of the hill, gravity took over. The car swooped forward, out of control, propelled by the weight of the gingerbread house behind it. Missing the curve at the bottom of the driveway, the car then fishtailed through a pile of rotten avocados, picked up speed, and set off on a direct collision course with the pigpen. And in the pigpen, my brother.

“Fritz!” I called out, and he turned and looked in my direction instead of moving out of the way.

The pigpen fence gave way like paper. The car was seconds from impact. Seemingly in slow motion, his head swiveled back toward the oncoming car and stayed there. With not a moment to spare, I leapt out of my gumboots and across the pig shit toward him. Here the slipperiness worked in my favor, and I skated the last few feet in time to grab him around the waist and fling both of us out of harm’s way.

Squeals and oinks filled the air, along with the sound of metal grinding against metal, and then a loud bang as the car
slammed into the stump of an old oak tree. This stopped the car, but not the carriage behind it, which shunted forward, driving a long metal tow bar clean through the vehicle’s boot. The car made an awful splitting sound while the caravan, which I now saw was painted midnight blue under its yellow roof, swayed from side to side before settling intact on its wheelbase.

Over by the water trough, the pigs snuffled around, unharmed, and my gaze returned to the car, whose windscreen had shattered in its frame, concealing the driver. For a few ugly seconds, I feared we would have to retrieve a corpse. But then, the driver’s door swung open, and a woman exclaimed joyfully, “Wow, what a ride!”

I still could not see her, but below the driver’s door, a bare foot and an ankle festooned with silver bells peeped out. When it encountered pig shit, this foot retreated, and the door closed.

In slow and jerky increments, as though the glass had come out of its hinges, the driver’s-door window lowered to reveal a living mirage.

I was used to the commune women: plain and hearty; milk-washed or sunburned, depending on the season; and sturdy as livestock, built for work. But this woman was the human equivalent of a Fabergé egg, existing only to charm and beguile. Beside me, Fritz gasped.

“Oh my lord! I seem to be stranded,” she exclaimed, and the two of us stepped forward, eager to assist but mute.

The woman laughed openly at our efforts. “You’re very sweet but I think what we need is a man—don’t you?” Her
accent was American and soft like waves lapping at a beach.

Valiantly, Fritz held out his hand. “I’m strong for my age.”

“I’m sure you are,” she said, stroking the offered hand, then rejecting it, “but I doubt you could lift me an inch off the ground.”

She sat resolutely in the car, while Fritz tried his best not to look crestfallen.

“Oh look,” she said, pointing out the window, “one is coming!”

From far away across the paddock, Hunter strode in our direction, arms waving. Halfway to us he broke into a run—something I hadn’t seen him do since we were kids. Behind him, at a slower pace, others followed.

“Hunter,” said the woman. “I’d recognize that beard anywhere.”

“You know Hunter?” I was taken aback.

“Oh yes,” she said. “We share a deep connection.”

“I’m Poppy. And this here’s Fritz.”

“Shakti,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”

A couple of pigs had strolled over to sniff the car, perhaps eager to meet her too, and I tried to shoo them away. “Come on, girls, leave the lady alone.”

“I thought Gaialands was vegetarian,” said Shakti, eyeing the pigs with pity.

“It is,” I said. “They’re more like pets. They eat our scraps and turn it into manure.”

“Of course,” said Shakti. “How silly of me.”

One of the pigs, Doris, who thought she was human, wandered back to the car and head-butted it repeatedly.

“Would you look at that?” Shakti reached out and tentatively scratched the pig’s head. “She’s welcoming me. Telling me I’ve come to the right place.”

“She does that to everything,” said Fritz, slapping Doris’s huge hairy backside to get her to move. “She’ll get bored in a minute.”

“Never ignore a sign,” said Shakti. “No matter how humble the messenger.”

“Shakti!” called Hunter, reaching the pigpen and skidding across the last stretch of filth. “You made it. Are you all right?”

“Never been better. Though I am sorry about the pig house. I lost control coming over the hill.”

Hunter surveyed the damage, then waved it away. “We were thinking of building a new one anyway. Maybe now we’ll actually get around to it.”

If there were plans to build a new pigpen, this was the first I’d heard of it.

Hunter leaned in through the open car door, and Shakti reached up and put her arms around his neck. He carried her, bridelike, across the mud and settled her gently down on a patch of grass. She wore a flimsy sarong, tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. The hem flitted up, revealing a thatch of black hair.

I pretended not to have seen and tried not to blush. When I looked at Fritz, his eyes were popping out of his head. A second later, he turned on his heel and sprinted across the paddock.

No sooner had he left than the twins, Nelly and Ned,
made it to the crash site. Nelly was the girl I was closest to, and we told each other everything, or had done so before the business with Timon. She was still cut up over that.

“Where’s Fritz off to in such a hurry?” she said.

“He’s gone to wash his eyeballs in the river.”

“What did he see?”

I nodded in Shakti’s direction. She was deep in conversation with Hunter, her back turned on the wreckage.

“Who’s she?” asked Nelly.

“A whole lot of trouble,” said Ned, surveying the damage. “If that’s who was behind the wheel.”

“She lost control coming over the hill,” I explained. “It wasn’t her fault.”

“That thing shouldn’t even be on the road—it’s a wreck.” Ned was obsessed with cars and couldn’t resist trying to lift the front bonnet to inspect the engine.

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” said Paul, one of the fathers, who had arrived from his workshop, still in his overalls, a wrench in one hand and a grease-splattered towel in the other. “You don’t want to blow up the commune.” He shook his head. “That thing’s a goner.”

He walked over to Shakti and introduced himself, wiping his hands on his overalls first. I heard him say, “Well, love, you won’t be leaving here in a hurry,” and Shakti replied, “Oh, that’s quite all right, I hadn’t planned to.”

“Poppy,” said Hunter, waving to me. “Why don’t you take Shakti to the mess hut and fix her a cuppa? Get out the honey. She’s had a bit of a fright.”

We kept beehives and harvested honey made from the
nectar of manuka bushes, prized for its medicinal qualities. But we also weren’t allowed to eat it. We bottled the stuff and sent it to Auckland, where it fetched a tidy price before being sent overseas. It was one of the few products we sold to the outside world, one of the few exchanges we made that resulted in money. Hunter’s idea was to live a cash-free existence, but we couldn’t barter for engine parts, or farming tools, or the sacks of grain that we needed to get through the winter.

I clomped over to Shakti in my gumboots. The pig shit inside them was starting to dry. They’d be hell to clean out.

“This way,” I said.

We set off in the direction of the mess hut, Shakti gliding next to me, with Nelly and Ned trailing behind. I told Shakti who they were but didn’t properly introduce them.

“And you’re Poppy?” said Shakti, with another one of her smiles that felt like a kiss. “What a pretty name.”

“You think so?”

“The poppy is a beautiful flower—and it gives us opium, one of the most powerful narcotics known to man.”

“You mean a drug? Drugs aren’t allowed on the commune.”