Keri Hulme - The Bone People

"That sounded very good… you okay now?"

He's still shaking but nothing in his face shows he is suffering any longer.

Icansing!Icansing!Icansing! it sifts him like a wind, a tumult in him like the rush of music… smiling and crying at the same time isn't the way to show it to her, but it's all he can do for the moment.

She waits. She says very little, and whatever she says sounds like the sea. But her words come more clearly as the joyous chaos in him settles.

"… and there you were. Marvellous-"

A little later she asks, "What happened?" He looks at the nearby mound.

Bird, he says, hands beating as wings, then makes the cutthroat

gesture.

"Dead when you found it?"

No he says, his eyes sombre suddenly.

'You had to put it out of its misery?" Her voice is so gentle it doesn't sound like Kerewin at all.

"Aue," she says to his Yes, "I've had to do that a few times, with animals… it is always bad at the time."

The shadow stays on him a few seconds longer, but then excitement sweeps through again. You hear me? touching her face, his ear and mouth, making the circuit twice.

"Of course I heard you singing," now it sounds exactly like Kerewin. "What do you think I was doing? Contemplating the scenery or some damn thing? And yeah, you're a wonderful brat… if we don't get home soon though, lunch'll be cooked to a cinder and Joe will be lurching round, spreading the dreaded lurgi everywhere."

Speaking of lurching: just standing the child is so unsteady, he drags on her hand for support. His feet are a dull purple colour.

Gonna have to be a carry job, Holmes… cold and panic and relief and whatever else this little executioner has been inflicting on himself, have about got him down.

She stands, saying, "Simon Pi Ta Gillayley, and translate that how you like — I can think of fifteen meanings for ta, and quite a few for pi but only one of each that fit — if you've given yourself frostbite, and I have to drink a glass of lemon juice in consequence," picking him up without a visible trace of queasiness, "I'm gonna get drunk tonight just to wash the taste outa my mouth. And a drunk Holmes is a mean kind of spider."

He leans cosily close. Ah, it's all good… he doesn't give two knobs, as Piri says, for drunk spiders or Kerewin making puns on his second name. He's got this sweet high feeling everything is going to work out fine from now on, and it's as heady as gorse wine.

He wrinkles his nose. High's the word, he sings in himself, and giggles in a kind of whimper, all the way back home.

It's been a smooth week: this is the first flaw in it.

For his cold had cleared up in a record two days;

("and two bottles of whisky," says Kerewin, pointedly.)

the weather has held fine and windless;

("Maori summer," he says. "In the middle of winter?" "When better to get a bit of brown in?")

and the fishing has been superb.

Simon's made the acquaintance of barracouta, ling, trumpeter, and rig, and red cod, kelp cod, and rock cod.

He gets taught to use a scrubbing brush without getting his bandaged thumb in the way.

He cleans fillet after fillet after fillet that Kerewin slices away from rigid fish. Sometimes the world seems all silver scales and gelatinous eyeballs and bloodcoloured seawater. And the squabbling squawling greed of gulls.

But Kerewin boasts, "Another record year for the Holmes and Gillayley Smoked Fish Corporation!" The racks in the smokehouse are filled with slabs of ling and couta and cod, already pickled and dried. "A hundredweight in there if there's an ounce — keep us going a while back in Whangaroa, e Joe?"

Ulp, thinks Joe. It's been fish for breakfast, dinner and tea, and it looks like it's going to be fish for snacks, chowders and sandwiches for months ahead. He sighs. You could get tired of fish.

But you don't get tired of this place, he reflects, while standing outside the old bach wondering how to approach Kerewin.

He relishes the days at sea, whether fishing or simply lazing in the weak winter sunshine. He walks the beaches a lot: the reefs aren't alien places any more. The black rocks have their secrets, but he feels welcome there now. And best of all, he loves the quiet evenings when the wind has dropped and the homing birds call high above his head, mysterious and lonely. Ah, peace, peace… it is well named, this place of healing beauty where you can, in perfect safety, sleep by day-

Only, at the moment, Kerewin is playing something brutal and discordant.

Aue. If she feels like that sound… even Himi wouldn't like that.

And his child is now passionately, wholeheartedly, openly in love with music.

"He's worse than the transistors," says Kerewin. "He's been warbling along the beach like a demented canary… y'know a way to shut him up?" "No way! It's great." He's still not sure on all the details as to why his son has suddenly discovered he can sing — "Well, port a beul, wordless mouth music," Kerewin the cyclopaedic — but he is as delighted and enthusiastic as the child with the ability. It's the only vocal advance Simon has ever made, and besides, as Joe tells her repeatedly, "Sweet Lord, it's tuneful. He really can sing")

Simon's had sound nights all this week, and there's been no trouble of any kind during the days. Ah, we never had it so good, thinks Joe. For the child is sweet-tempered, he's happy, he's helpful, he's entertaining (and he's healing up beautifully, from the belt-cuts on his body to his hook-bitten thumb).

He starts.

"Eh, I must've been dreaming, tama. You want your shirt and suit?"

The boy flips an affirmative, and pulls faces.

"At that?"

Yes.

"I think it's pretty horrible too," he whispers. "But you get your gear, and I'll go and talk," holding up crossed fingers.

("Where's your old jeans?" he'd asked a few days back. Kerewin said blithely that she'd chucked them out. "They fitted where they touched, and that was hardly anywhere. Can't you get him some clothes that fit? I'm tired of seeing the brat go round in what looks like the tailend of the ragbag." "Thanks. Can I help it if he doesn't grow like I'd planned?" But she said since it was her aesthetic sense that was offended, she'd shout the boy new clothes. In an Omaru store she says to Simon, "Open slather, boy. Choose your own gear." She likes his choice of jeans, of a denim suit, but tries to dissuade him when he opts for a florid lime and tangerine silk shirt. "I mean, those bright flowers are okay Himi, but don't you think those blue whirlpool things are a bit much?" "I'll shout you that," says Joe, and to Kerewin's groan, "I think I'll have one myself too." "Ah hell, you'll get mistaken for an Islander, and goodness knows what they'll think of him." "I can imagine," says Joe ruefully, looking down on his son. The child's hair reaches half-way down his back now, and with the flowery silk, and his earring, and Kerewin's turquoise pendant he's taken to wearing — "E, they'll think you're some kind of leftover mini-hippy," and both adults laugh. He pushes Simon's fringe out of his eyes. "You look beautiful really, tama. Tika.")

He listens to the savage tune Kerewin is throttling her guitar into producing, and thinks, I'll talk, but will she listen?

It's not blues, it's not rock, it's not folk or imitation electronic,

and sure as hell, it's not any Maori music he's heard before. He says, at the inner door,

"E hoa?"

Notes rear and slash at him.

"What are you playing?"

"Shark music," says Kerewin sweetly. "Dirges and laments, coronachs and requiems, all for my fellow sharks."

He shudders.

She feels like that?

O God.

He had said to Simon when the two of them came back, "What's the matter? Have you upset her?"