Keri Hulme - The Bone People

No address, no date, no signature, the small box of cigars as an envelope, and nothing heard from her since.

A tumbled rahui means nothing, it was a random chance, an accident of the earthquake… Sweet Lord,he thinks, why couldn't it have been Luce in the bog where the ground is naturally shaky?

Going flat on his face in the slime, I couldn't give a damn for him, the two-faced stirrer, going to the police behind everyone's back-

He stamps the earth down hard round the re-erected pole.

The free-flowing spirals face the sea once more. He lays his hand on it a moment, and then sets off for the gorge.

The great overhang has gone.

There is a pale gash on the freshly exposed rock above the pool. And the pool, the living green pool, is buried under a thousand tons of rubble. He stands on the track, stunned.

This is not real. It is nightmare country. It can't have happened.

He stumbles up the rock-strewn slope.

"No it isn't, no, not all dead, no please, please no please no," begging like a child in the end.

His arms outstretched, standing on the edge of ruin, Why?

And one part of his mind says sagely, It was all an old man's dreams and fancies, and there were explanations for what you saw and felt that have nothing to do with mysteries, and another part says Listen, and the sage bit goes on, It's just some rocks that have fallen in a rainwater well, and the other says Listen, and the wise bit over-rides it saying, You are a young man yet with plenty of things to do, you're whole and healed and flourishing, and you're released from any promise you gave; you've a future now, not an immurement in dank swamp country, and the other side says LISTEN!

"Just crickets and treefrogs," he says dully. "Just beetles and mothwings thrumming."

Here?

He's been here at night and in the day and there have been flies. Some flies. A few flies.

A morepork calls close by, and its mate answers from further up the gorge.

The early evening air is alive with noise.

His breath held until it's painful, he searches round the buried pool.

It's a hump in the dusk, a round, a disk, a thing the size he could hold in his two spread palms. Settled on a broken-backed rock, balanced on the crack as though it had grown there. It looks very black or very green, and from the piercing, the hole in the centre, light like a glow-worm, aboriginal light.

"You're cheerful, mate." "Yep. Nice day and all eh?"

"Too right… pack go in the back?"

"You mind if I keep it in the cab? It can stay on my lap?"

The driver shrugs.

"Suit yourself, mate. There's room down by your feet. Shove her

there." "Right." Whistling merrily, propping his feet on the pack.

He had been afraid to touch it, but the drawing power of it

was immense.

He had walked to it, sat by it, hands over it, hands on it.

It felt like stone, it was stone, fine-grained cold stone… no

tingling or warmth, nothing out of the ordinary, Ngakau.

The light is just phosphorescence, eh? but when he lifts the

thing, he nearly falls.

He's tensed his muscles and pulled, and it's light light light,

no weight at all.

And there's an ecstasy as he carries it, a live buoying stream

of joy that makes him want to shout and sing and dance.

He can see streamers and fields of brightness round everything

he looks at: the very weeds and stones at his feet coruscate

with brilliant fire.

That's what Haimona meant by light? Aie!

Past the cave where the old woman's bones are entombed forever

— he ran to look there, and the stone in his hands grew too

heavy to carry. He took the hint and turned back onto the

track.

Past the kaumatua's ruined garden, the miro tree uprooted,

the careful lines of corn and other vegetables fallen in disarray.

Not to worry, man, this is someone else's place now.

Not mine.

For sure as the light that lives steadily in the stone, he's going

home.

"Where you going, mate?"

"Anywhere south," says Joe, his grin wide, "I'm taking the south road home."

The night gives up its hold reluctantly, but slowly, very slowly, the world comes back.

Because he kept attempting to remove the useful tubes they inserted, they restrained his hands.

He was still after that, for over a week.

Lying in the dark, lying without moving, listening helplessly to the voices.

It doesn't seem that the night is giving ground.

No familiar touch, no handholding, no-one he knows.

There is never anybody he knows.

So he lies withdrawn again, his tied hands clenched to the deep of nails in despair.

But little by little, the night is lifting.

Instead of the shifting shattered brightness, he begins to see outlines. The light is shot through with forms. They crack and vanish and unexpectedly reappear; they splinter like a broken mirror when he blinks, but now, for seconds at a time, he can see the chair. The cabinet at the side. His feet. They look, somehow, cut off from his legs. He can see people again, briefly, as people, instead of dark, cores in the centre of lightning oscillations.

He watches, his hope never quite dead, for them to enter.

In time, says his heart.

Wait, says his heart.

They'll come, says his heart.

They don't.

He weeps in the dead silence and he can't hear himself cry. It is only by the wet of tears that he knows it is real crying.

Yet the night is ebbing away.

The hated voice grows weaker, cannot sing as freely. The old fears seem impotent in the face of what has happened.

He shrinks from the impersonally gentle hands that feed and clean him, but he glimpses the faces now, and they smile.

He doesn't smile back.

One morning, he discovers his hands are free again. For minutes, he doesn't dare move them. But nothing happens. No-one conies in.

The hands feel strange; they've been restrained for so long they're apart from him, as though they belong to someone else.

He brings them in front of his face. He stares at them as long as he can without blinking.

There is a network of pink scars over them he hasn't seen before. Cuts? Glass? Windows? Binny… wait. With a new keen instinct for self-preservation, he stops-thinking about the windows right then. He just stares at the scars, fresh and shiny and jagged.

There is a plastic bangle round his left arm.

He brings it close to his eyes, squinting to keep it in focus. There are letters of some kind or another. He doesn't know what they

are.

I never had a bangle?

He spends the morning watching his hands, opening and closing his fingers, touching them together. Absorbed in rediscovery.

But he keeps them by his sides when someone finally comes in with food. He accepts the food passively, but instead of closing his eyes after seeing who the person is, he watches her as dedicatedly as he has been watching his hands. He discovers the longer he watches the steadier his vision becomes. The nurse smiles at him all the time, and speaks often. He can't hear what she says, and he can't tell what she is talking about from the way her lips move. They don't shape themselves in the shape of words. He is frowning with concentration at the end of lunch, and he still hasn't understood a word.

It's all silence.

During that afternoon, he sends his hands on forays round his body. By drawing up his legs, he learns that the two cut-off lines at his ankles are bandages, covering what feel like holes. Once he has felt his legs and feet with his hands, he can feel them again.

Which is very odd.

He realises he hasn't been conscious of his body for a long time. The half-moon marks in the palms of his hands where his nails had bitten in haven't hurt him at all until now.