Keri Hulme - The Bone People

Kerewin smiles into the fire.

"So Haimona brings out this chesspiece, not to save himself the beating so much as to say something about you, you know?"

"I can imagine."

"Well, it started me thinking. He said how you started to teach him chess, and how you were patient with him when he tried to talk with you."

She remembers her sneers, and jibes, and coolness, and decides Simon/Sim/Haimona is a diplomatic little liar.

"And that you didn't exactly like him, but you were still kind and patient. That was impressive, because generally he's either treated as an idiot, or deaf as well as mute — you've no idea how many people raise their voices to him! Or they talk over him, as though he'll vanish and not be an embarrassment any more. It works too. He generally vanishes from that kind of person very fast." He broods a moment, hand back on his small son's shoulder. "So there it was. We spent an hour wondering why you were different, decent. And — how can I put it?" speaking to Simon now. "Good for you? Good for him," says Joe, looking straight at her.

Kerewin looks back, eyebrows raised.

The man eases down to lie supported by his elbows.

"I mean, it can be bad at school. He comes in for a lot of, o, a lot of petty bullying and shitslinging there. Not just because he's different being dumb, but because he's a bit of an outlaw." The child and his father swap grins. "Like this Monday, well Monday last week. He missed two schooldays before the weekend, and when he went to school on Monday, someone started having a go at him. 'Cops get you again, Gillayley,' style of thing."

Joe draws a deep breath.

"If you push him hard enough, he'll fight you to make you understand. It's his last resort, spitting and kicking… he'll do his damndest to punch into you what he wants to say. That's bad, I know, you know," wagging a finger at the boy, "but he's still trying to talk to you," lifting his eyes to Kerewin, "you know?"

"I can imagine," she says again.

"If you won't listen after that, or you fight him back, he'll despair, and literally throw himself on the ground. And stay there, and shake. It looks like a fit. It isn't. Say the medics. It is sheer frustration and despair that you won't listen, you won't converse, when he's got something to say that's important to him."

Kerewin nods.

"So last week, the little bastards do this push-and-tease-the-oddie business until Simon stupid obliges them by giving up and getting sick. And then you won't go to school for the rest of the week, will you?"

Simon is squinting at the gold grass floor.

"So. Today, I came here and left the note and then I took the morning off work, and went along with him to school to find out what started everything off this time. And all those sweet smiling little kids said, 'Your Simon started it, Mr Gillayley, he's bad isn't he?' And they all believe it, or know it's a very safe bet, on his Past record, that I'm going to believe it… but I don't know…."

Kerewin asks,

"What did the teachers say?"

"Nothing much. They didn't see it happen. Anyway, they've more or less given up on him now. Because he can be unapproachable

— you've never been coldshouldered till Sim's done it to you, believe you me! Even I've been on the receiving end- Some of the teachers tried to help. In his first year there, last year, one lady tried very hard, but it was too soon after. The death of my wife. And he was upset about that. So this year, they shoved him in the special class to begin with, all the slow learners and near nuts and that. Patently ridiculous, because he can read and write as competently as kids twice his age. Well, nearly. So then they put him in Standard One, and he's not fitting in there either. They recommend an institution of some kind or the other. For handicapped kids, you know the kind."

He leans over and ruffles the boy's hair.

"And they'll put you in that kind of place over my dead body," he says grimly.

"Look," he says, after a minute, "he's bright. He can understand anything you put to him, Kerewin. He doesn't need special care and attention. He just needs people to accept him."

She thinks,

There is something peculiar about all this pleading. As though I'm being set up, or primed-

She says carefully,

"You mentioned he was considered to be a bit of an outlaw. My radiophone operator said, quote, he's a well known local oddity, specialising in sneak thievery and petty vandalism, unquote. Is it just because he doesn't get on with people at school, or is there some other reason?"

Joe flushes.

"I should imagine his muteness, and the fact that my wife died, and he doesn't get a woman's care. I should think those reasons make him a bit unsettled."

He is watching the floor again, away from her, away from his son.

"There is a wildness in him sometimes," he says. "It comes maybe from those reasons. Like the running away… the child psych said he was trying to find his own mother, his other parents, even if he doesn't think that knowingly. That he won't face up, can't face up, to them being gone. Not here," still looking downward, still with the dark flush suffusing his face.

There's something bloody peculiar about this whole conversation. It doesn't feel right. Has he got some strange hope I'm going to be the kid's substitute mother? Bloody oath… and all you can do, Simon obstinate, is stare unconcernedly into the fire.

Almost as though he caught her thought, the boy turns round and smiles broadly to her. She smiles back, wondering again what happened to his teeth.

"How old are you, Sim?"

She says to Joe, while watching for the child's answer, "I guessed anywhere between five and ten, going by size and behaviour. I still would, but after what you've said, I'd bring the upper limit down."

The boy is looking at her in a considering way, mouth down at the corners.

Joe says softly, "He doesn't know. I don't know. Nobody does."

He picks up a chip of coal and flicks it into the fire.

"Well, you can see I'm not his blood father," he says into the silence. "Do you remember a Labour weekend three years or so back, when there were terrific storms? Out of season storms?"

"O, vaguely."

"Well, a gale caught a boat here then. A stranger cruiser. It sank off the end of Ennetts Reef. Everybody aboard came ashore. One way or the other."

The man has been talking quickly, almost convulsively, his eyes on the boy who is uncaring, not hearing, it seems.

"Well, meet some jetsam," he says, and his eyes glint, belying the callousness of the flippancy. The deep lines round his mouth are charmed into emphasis for his smile.

I bethought you grim and forty, but now I doubt you're much older than me. Maybe not as old as me.

The lines on his face seem drawn by an inward corroding bitterness, not age. A carelessness of life, an abandonment, death of wife and death of him, she thinks, as her answering smile begins.

"I see. Wreckage washed ashore as opposed to goods found floating. Thanks for answering. I shouldn't have been inquisitive, but it intrigued me. I don't have experience of children of any age group, but his years seem to vary a hell of a lot. One minute he looks about five, and the next he acts as though he's ten times as old."

"Excuse all this," she adds to the boy, who had sat up at the last exchange of smiles, proffering his father the black queen Kerewin had left on the floor.

"That's the way it seems to me every so often too," says Joe agreeably. "Ahh yes Haimona, the chess-"

The grin slides in again, above the strong spade-shaped chin.

"No," he says, "it's maybe seven, possibly eight, but probably six. Maybe even younger, but not likely. God knows. Nobody was at all sure how old you were originally," talking now to Simon P, "and you weren't much bloody help," says Joe.