Keri Hulme - The Bone People

and asked whether he had any antipodean relations who might be sporting such a thing, and that's the answer. I wish I could get a photograph of the old bugger. There might be family resemblances or something. To wit, Sim's split chin. Or the eyes. Or something. D'you reckon he looks Irish?"

Joe's still reading.

"Jesus," he says in a worried way, "what does he mean by disgraceful propensities?"

"Weelll, I should imagine in that ingrown aristocracy it could mean anything from an improper preference for Scotch whisky, to a practised predilection for raping the cat."

He chokes on his coffee.

There's a full moon up, and the growing night is cold, silver, serene.

Kerewin sits patiently, chin cupped in her hands, watching the suneater flicker, miss a beat, die.

It's run for quite a while after the sun went down. 18.55.25 she notes, stopping the watch, and entering the time. She adds another dot to the graph — yep, the gradual decline, an inverse phi curve. Strange that the suneater's curve keeps pace with some of her own.

She had begun a book of biorhythmic cycles for herself a long time ago, and when she first began to explore the little machines, she had been curious to find out whether they might reflect cycles too. The suneater's chart has been going for sixteen months: her set, for five years, six years o God this December. And I thought a year would be enough to discover the rhythms of my body and mind… I'll finish it this year. The thing's become an obsession.

For what does five years of accumulating snippets of wisdom add up to? Knowledge that I'm a changeable sort of person-

O well.

She flicks the crystal casing of the suneater. Pretty toy. Pastime. As useful as all my other toys and time-passers. As useful and pointed as myself.

Joe, coming through the library circle doorway next night.

"Himi said you were up this… holy God, what is that?"

A blob of shining light, making butterfly oscillations.

It came from a mirror focused on a crystal to which was attached many fine copper wires. The crystal was set between two magnets, and it was turning blurringly fast.

"O that? One of my little um concoctions? Conundrums, anyway."

He came across and peered at it.

"It's a motor?"

"It might be if I could rig the thing up in some fashion to a driveshaft or belt. But the damn thing just goes phhfft! if you start hooking

other bits to it. So I keep it like that, purring nicely along eating sunlight."

Eating sunlight… he winces.

"How did you make such a thing?"

Horror in his voice and eyes.

"You really wanna know?" She exudes fake eagerness to tell. "Well, I have a grasshopper and haphazard mind y'know, a brain that listens to all sorts of things as well as itself." Patter, patter. "Annnd, one day this idea plopped into my mind that mirrors and sunlight and crystals and magnets and whatnots should… anyway, my gut tingled the right way. So I made it." She flipped a hand at it. "Kerewin's little toy, mark 18."

"But how?"

"I dunno. I've made a lot of the little beasties. One works off 'steam produced by strong sunlight. Very sporadic. Not satisfactory. Another one that I really like works off goodtempered humans. At least, it only goes if you touch it, and only if you're happy. You sulk, it sulks… o, they're fascinating wee things but not useful, if you get what I mean?"

Joe shudders slightly.

"I haven't the faintest idea why they work. Or even how," she adds.

"You give me the cold bloody horrors sometimes, Kerewin."

She smiles, her smile full of fangs.

He thinks,

Sometimes she seems ordinary. She is lonely. She drinks like I do, to keep away the ghosts. She's an outsider, like me. And then sometimes, she seems inhuman… like this Tower is inhuman. Comfortable to be in, pleasant, if you ignore the toadstools in the walls, and the little trees and glowworms in holes by the stairs, and the fact that nobody else in New Zealand lives in a Tower… maybe I've got it all wrong-

He had thought, from Kerewin's guarded talk over the past month

hat she had broken up with her family over a relationship they

didn't approve of. She didn't approve of? That her loneliness, being

apart from her family, had driven her to this part of the country

where none of them lived. He could understand that.

He shakes his head.

Don't worry your heart, Ngakau. Just like her.

He says to Kerewin's grin,

"If I had that thing in my house, I wouldn't sleep until I knew what made it work." She picks it up. "Here you are then."

It burrs on, quivering with light, whining with energy, unholy, in her hand.

"Shit no!" ducking even touching it. "I only meant that it's not normal… I've never even heard of anything like it, and if I'd made it, I'd want to find out o I dunno…"

"My poor innocent suneater…"

She's put it down, and is refocusing the mirror.

"It doesn't worry me. I figure if I'm meant to find out more about it, I will."

He shakes his head dubiously.

"You know what that reminds me of? Things Himi makes. Things he reckons make music."

"O yes. The music hutches…"

… that had been a week ago, when she'd gone for a walk along

the beach. The boy had tagged after. He sat down a little way

apart when she stopped for a smoke. He started picking up

debris off the beach, and randomly at first, and then with a

steady and abnormal concentration, he had built a spiralling

construction of marramgrass and shells and drift chips and

seaweed.

"What are you doing?"

He whistled and pointed to it.

It whistles?

He lay down on the sand with his ear by it, and she went

to him, puzzled. Simon got up quickly. Listen too, he said,

touching his ear and pointing to her. So she did, and heard

nothing. Listened very intently, and was suddenly aware that

the pulse of her blood and the surge of the surf and the thin

rustle of wind round the beaches were combining to make

something like music.

She adds, "They only make music when someone's listening. They're focusing points more than anything, and I'd love to know where he got the idea for them."

Joe says sourly,

"O God knows where. He started making the bloody things about a year ago. Now he's obsessed by them."

He scowls.

(The child, when first discovered building them, had written for him THEY MAKE MUSIC. He was feeling wild and joyous from the vigour of the sea wind and the roar of the sea, and had hugged him tightly, and called him a nutcase. But he was worried by the look in his eyes. Secretly, when Simon was sleeping his drugged uneasy sleep, he had stolen back down to the beach, and examined by torchlight the structure his strange little son had built.

Feeling foolish, he had lain down beside the husk and listened, absorbed, for nearly quarter of an hour. Then he became scared,

"It's different," he assured her. "It's got fourteen kinds of eyeballs in it."

He had gone to especial trouble to get the fourteen different fish. "Even unfroze a whitebait," he told her. "Enjoying it?"

"Yeah," said Kerewin, deftly avoiding another eyeball. She noticed Joe wasn't too keen on swallowing them either.

He admitted when she finished, "There was really only cods' eyes there… unless you count the scallop's… but there truly was fourteen different kai moana. I thought you'd like the macabre touch?"

She looked at him consideringly.

"Mmmm. But you wait and see what's going to be lurking in my next offering."

Despite the hammer she gave him,

("Ah hah, worrying isn't it? Do you eat it, or does it eat you?")

tea this night turned out to be rock oysters.

"The only patch of rock oysters on this coast," says Kerewin triumphantly. "I couldn't believe it when I saw them first. I don't think anybody else knows about them. They're a freak colony. I've taken care of them since I found them, but I figured now they should be harvested for their own good."