Keri Hulme - The Bone People

wishing-Maybe, considering this rintin shambles of a night,

I should wish something for them… for Simon, what? A real name? No, something better. A shield to raise against his dreams, and for the other, a relief of that need he shows so plainly, for dead wife and dead child. But there's only one way to do that, send him to them- Anyway to hell, I forgot to wish.

She walked on, her bare feet sinking in the sand. There was a crust on it from the past night's rain. No-one walked on this beach much.

O chief of my children, primate of woes, come sink in the fleece of your old mother, Earth… but seriously Holmes, there is something wrong with the brat, beyond what Joe says. For that matter, there's something wrong with the fella as well.

Chanting into the night,

"O all the world is a little queer, except thee and me, and sometimes, I wonder about thee."

I know about me. I am the moon's sister, a tidal child stranded

on land. The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent

in my blood.

You're talking bullshit as usual.

Only what to do about the urchin's bitter dreams? Or the man's

evil shadows — the ghosts riding on his shoulders? The miasma

of gloom that shrouded his lightning smile?

He'd come back into the room, the tears barely dried on his cheeks, cups of coffee in his hands.

"Do you know what? He's smiling in his sleep."

She got the impression that that didn't happen too often.

The coffee was strong and sobering.

"I've got to go to work tomorrow eh."

"That's today now."

"Yeah, that's the hell of it."

"I used to hate that," she said. "Having to get up at some ungodly hour to go to work. Feeling out of kilter with my body time. That's the thing I value most now, that I can get up at five, before the sun's awake if I wish, or stay in bed till tomorrow."

He sighed. "I'd love that. But I work in a factory, work in a factory, work in a factory-"

"I know. I've worked in factories too."

"You know what I think's worst? It's not getting up."

"The monotony? Noise? The twits around you? Bosses?"

"No, being a puppet in someone else's play. Not having any say." He spread his hands and looked through the fan of fingers. "It has its compensations, I suppose. I've paid off the house, and I've got some money in the bank. We're clothed and we eat. All the good old pakeha standbys and justifications. Though it's hard hours. I start at seven and I never get home before five. Sometimes six. Even seven. Too long to be away from Haimona, eh?"

"Sounds it, a bit… what does he normally do during the day then?"

"School," said Joe laconically. "He's meant to go to my cousin's afterwards. And when he goes to school, he mainly does too."

She asked hesitantly,

"If you don't have to work, all the time, why don't you take a break?"

"I'd dearly love to take a decent holiday. I've got several weeks coming to me… but I don't know. I've tried it all ways. Stayed at home, and we got in each other's hair. Sent him to Tainuis while I took off, and he fought Piri's kids, antagonised all the adults, even Marama. And she thinks he's an angel incarnate. So then I tried I one of those bus-tours, last Christmas. We went north. I thought

he might like seeing all the places I grew up in. Something a bit different from here."

He leaned back and lit himself another cigarette.

"Sweet Jesus, was that ever a disaster. I wound up locking him into the hotel bedroom wherever we stayed for the night, and going down to the bar and drinking myself blind. Right way to win friends and influence people, eh. You can imagine what we were like during the day… I won't do that again."

He bent his head.

"I forget how much I paid out for damage to hotel bedrooms, but it wasn't altogether his fault I suppose."

The fire crackled.

Kerewin said,

"You like fishing, don't you?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I could find out whether any of my ex-family are using the baches at Moerangi. That could be an idea for a holiday you might like to consider. Not much to do except fish, but it's nice there. Quiet. Healing."

Joe nodded, looking at her quizzically.

"Ex-family?"

"O, we rowed irreparably…"

We wounded each other too deep for the rifts to be healed.

She sat down on the damp sand, stretching her legs in front of her and leaning back on her hands.

Strange.

Webs of events that grew together to become a net in life. Life was a thing that grew wild. She supposed there was an overall pattern, a design to it.

She'd never found one.

She thought of the tools she had gathered together, and painstakingly learned to use. Future probes, Tarot and I Ching and the wide wispfingers from the stars… all these to scry and ferret and vex the smoke thick future. A broad general knowledge, encompassing bits of history, psychology, ethology, religious theory and practices of many kinds. Her charts of self-knowledge. Her library. The inner thirst for information about everything that had lived or lives on Earth that she'd kept alive long after childhood had ended.

None of them helped make sense of living.

She watched the sealight grow.

What the hell did I offer my sanctuary to him and the brat for? Though I've left myself an out… I can always say They are there. Maybe I should just sneak away to the baches myself… they used to say,

Find the kaika road

take the kaika road,

the glimmering road of the past

into Te Ao Hou.

The moon came out of a cloud bank

Ah my shining sister, bright core of my heart, maybe this year in Moerangi I'll find a meaning to the dream?

A mist was obscuring the depth of stars. The night grew towards dawn. She got up unsteadily and stretched, groaning against the stiffness.

Sitting on wet sand, what'd you expect numbskull? Numb bum, rather… anyway, twenty minutes' walk to bed, and a long lying in… thank God for wine, and so easy sleep. Moerangi can rest holy and ghostly in my dreams tonight.

And as for those teeth? She grinned.

Undoubtedly, somewhere beneath not too distant waves, deceitfully mirroring a babyhood of milk and honey, small ivories….

She stares at the screaming painting.

The candlelight wavers.

The painting screams silently on.

She hates it.

It is intensely bitter.

O unjoy, is that all I can do? Show forth my misery?

All the fire has gone.

She is back in the haggard ash dead world.

She picks up the painting and slides it away behind her desk.

There are a lot of drawings, paintings there.

The new one can scream in company.

And what's the use of keeping them?

A pile for keening over?

"You are nothing," says Kerewin coldly. "You are nobody, and will never be anything, anyone."

And her inner voice, the snark, which comes into its own during depressions like this, says,

And you have never been anything at anytime, remember? And the next line is-

"Shut up," says Kerewin aloud to herself. "I know I am very stupid." But not so stupid as to take this.

I am worn, down to the raw nub of my soul.

Now is the time, o bitter beer, soothe my spirit;

smooth mouth of whisky, tell me lies of truth;

but better still, sweet wine, be harbinger of deep and dreamless

sleep-

"Wordplayer," she says sourly. "Mere quoter," feeling her way down the dark spiral to the livingroom circle.

And until the time Joe wakes, groaning at the shrill snarl of the alarm clock, groaning at the thought of another dull and aching day; until the time Simon wakes, and listens, and dresses very quickly, and exits via the window for his new retreat; until then, Kerewin drinks her way into a kind of cold and uncaring sobriety.

It's as though nothing has changed.