Keri Hulme - The Bone People

She gets to her feet. She says in a strained voice,

"I want you to come and look at something."

"Right." He stands gracefully.

Thin etched arch of storm

and eggshell blue sky before it;

far away, goldened by a retreating sun,

grey streak and wash of rainclouds

over the brawling Tasman sea.

Lone gull, sentinel, king gull, watch gull, night black wings, head white as a snow wave and cold barbarian eye: gull the solidity, all else mist and wraithness sea spume spun to light.

A moon shining a broken road

oversea;

a lone woman naked to her waist

waits at the edge of moonlight;

a shadow person watching for meaning

somewhere.

She doesn't say a word, holding up the boards and canvases from behind her desk one at a time.

A group of lights that look living crystalled in a circle; a tree in the middle waiting.

Sunlight metalling horizon to silver; long stretch of ruffled grey. A matt white line of breakers. Behind the steel, clouds reach darkly up tops shaded by cold still light.

Abstract, but it is as real a winter sea, winter sun, he has ever seen.

She shuffles through them quickly, paintings full of strange lights and torn lands and odd people who scowl or stare or smile distantly at him.

He practically snatches the last one out of her hand.

Kerewin on a board.

Wildly curly hair, darkly brown, but the normal highlights have

turned to streaks of gold and red and grey, wheat-colour by

her temples; bushy hair so alive, he startles himself looking

for eyes or fingers among it.

Broad pale face, fleshy cheeks; the V of flesh of her forehead

heavily shadowed so it becomes a brand.

Narrowed cynical intense eyes, neither blue nor grey. Lively

stone eyes, hating life. Thin twisted upper lip, fat lower lip,

chin wedged out, ever-ready to confront the worst.

A grim face, stupid, but redeemed by the harrowing eyes.

Look up from it, and there's the same person staring back. A piece of soul enshrined in paint.

He drinks the painting in.

"These are the only things in my life that are real to me now. Not people. Joe. Not relationships. Not families. Paintings. That remind me I could."

She is sliding them back behind the desk, screamers and mysteries and the weeping loving pieces of her sea and land. She holds out her hand for the self-portrait.

"But something. Something has died. Isn't there now. I can't paint." There are tears in her voice, but none in her eyes. "I am dead inside."

He still holds the painting.

"May I have it?"

There are tears in his eyes.

"Have? Not buy?" The harsh burst of laughter sneers, hits at him.

"Whatever price you ask, I will pay."

She is suddenly very weary. It hasn't meant anything to him.

"Ah, keep it. I see better work in the mirror daily…."

"It is, it is real."

Admiration she is used to. Giving paintings away she is used to. This awe she is inured against. She doesn't reply.

He says softly.

"Whatever you ask of me, I will do. Whatever you want from me, I will give."

"Even absence?"

He draws his breath in sharply.

"If you wish it…."

She hits the desk with the side of her hand and the crack echoes round the library.

"Forget it. Have the painting with my blessing. You're welcome to the gibbering thing, a poor gift to a good friend. But stay a good friend. Don't come any closer to me, just close enough to be always welcome."

He places it down reverently. He leans over and takes her shoulders.

She stiffens, pulling away.

"You don't want to hongi with me?"

Her taut shoulders relax.

I salute the breath of life in thee, the same life that is breathed by me, warm flesh to warm flesh, oily press of nose to nose, the hardness of foreheads meeting. I salute that which gives us life.

He sighs loudly, then says, strongly, gaily,

"It's a great gift. A time when it's right to hongi, ne?"

She has pulled away again, leaning on the other side of the desk.

"I suppose so."

She shivers. Something is crawling up her spine with claws on all its thousand feet.

"Let's get back to the fire and have another drink, eh? Leave that thing here for the moment. I'll frame it and bring it round for you sometime soon, okay?"

"Okay."

He props the painting against the desk and says, as though he only just thought of it, "Are you afraid of kissing? You know, of men?"

"I don't like kissing."

"I suppose it's a matter of taste." Thoughtfully, as though she'd asked him for his opinion on osculation, instead of giving that flat conclusive answer. "I like kissing… Himi likes kissing… in fact, he thinks he can cajole and explain and talk his way out of all kinds of trouble with his kisses. Like they're part of language, eh. If he's in a good mood, everyone gets a helping."

"I've noticed."

"I wondered, did anyone ever," shrug, "you know, hurt you so you don't like kissing? Love?"

"Nope."

She picks up the lantern and the shadows spin round the booklined walls.

He doesn't move.

"I thought maybe someone had been bad to you in the past, and that was why you don't like people touching or holding you."

"Ah damn it to hell," she bangs the lamp down on the desk and the flame jumps wildly.

"I said no. I haven't been raped or jilted or abused in any fashion. There's nothing in my background to explain the way I am." She steadies her voice, taking the impatience out of it. "I'm the odd one out, the peculiarity in my family, because they're all normal and demonstrative physically. But ever since I can remember, I've disliked close contact… charged contact, emotional contact, as well as any overtly sexual contact. I veer away from it, because it always feels

like the other person is draining something out of me. I know that's irrational, but that's the way I feel."

She touches the lamp and the flaring flame stills.

"I spent a considerable amount of time when I was, o, adolescent, wondering why I was different, whether there were other people like me. Why, when everyone else was fascinated by their developing sexual nature, I couldn't give a damn. I've never been attracted to men. Or women. Or anything else. It's difficult to explain, and nobody has ever believed it when I have tried to explain, but while I have an apparently normal female body, I don't have any sexual urge or appetite. I think I am a neuter."

He picks up the painting again, considering it.

"Maybe you have so much energy tied up in this, you have none left for sex." He doesn't sound doubting, or horrified. "Sublimated is the jargon, eh." He looks at her. "I'm not being funny, but that's a Maori thing in a way… I used to carve a lot, and one of the old prohibitions was, while engaged in a carving, you did not lie with a woman or spend your seed, as the euphemism goes. It wasn't that sex was bad, but because all the energy was tied up in a tapu thing, was needed for it."

"Maybe so," says Kerewin heavily. "I don't know."

"Are you a virgin then?"

"Yes."

He puts the painting down and grins impishly at her.

"Well, take it from one who is very experienced, sex is hell of an enjoyable but not the be-all and end-all of things. I had it best in my life with Hana my wife, and it grew better all the time we were with each other. Because we learned to know each other with more than our bodies, sharing more than our physical excitement… like that, it's wonderful, it truly is. Otherwise, like now, I feel it as a need, something I want more or less to relieve myself of, but it's not overpowering. You need never be scared my cock's going to rule my head. Or my heart, eh."

He is comforting her.

He is being brotherly, friendly, almost fatherly, she thinks he thinks, denying her difference is ruinously odd.