Keri Hulme - The Bone People

Solidity of glass, metal that evaporates under your squeezing fist, until the only solidity is your painfully ground teeth. That alone is reality. And do this under a smile, with guarded face, lest someone see and sneer.

She moves, without haste, over the miles to the toilet again. Brushes past the woman coming out, throws open the toilet door, and throws up down the toilet, violently. Pulls the door hastily closed

Beer and whisky and wine and little baby cockles… she kneels, head on her arms, waiting for the retching to stop.

O mother of us all, that's the first time in my life I've ever been sick through drinking… this is the gift he would give me?

Her breath condenses on the silver bar of her rings.

Te koha… aha koa iti, he pounamu… he's probably forgotten about it, if it existed. I'd better too.

He is standing under the phone, the public phone on the wall. His head is down, eyes closed, arms folded, slumped against the wall.

"E Joe?" breathing into his ear.

"AieeE!"

"Sorry fella, but you looked like you'd gone to sleep eh?"

"Orrr," he massages his face, his eyes, his neck.

"You all right?"

"Drunker'n hell." Squints at her. "You okay?"

"Worse for wear too-"

He stretches, groaning.

"Got us a taxi ordered… said it was for you, but I'll go to Tainuis' eh. Pick up tama. It's on the way."

"Beaudy. I'll shout you home."

His eyes fix on her.

All pupil, black, blank, but with an ice-glitter sheening them.

"Yeah." Eyelids hooding the blackness. "You do that. Shout us outa the way home."

They wait in awkward silence for the taxi to arrive. They sit in silence all the way to the Tower. The driver whistles tunelessly under his breath the whole way.

So much for merrymaking, Holmes… you should've stayed home happily strangling the meece-

She gets out by her bridge. "Goodnight, Joe." And because that sounds baldly rude, she adds, "Thanks." He smiles, a dark bitter smiles that makes the deep lines on his face seem more like scars than ever.

"For nothing, eh?" He leans out. "Open it sometime. You can have it as a memento of those two idiots who used to bother you and waste all your valuable time." He puts the small packet in her hand. She stares at him. His eyelids droop.

"G'night," he says, and leans away from her, into the covering dark.

Her hand tightening into a fist, she goes to the driver's window.

"That should be enough to cover the trip both ways," passing him a note. "Gee thanks," he says guilelessly.

She slams the back door of the taxi. The driver says something like Toodleloo in the background, and puts the car into reverse. It goes, headlights cutting a slice in the night. The lights vanish. The sound dies…,„,

She leans against the tower door,

"Well, that seems to be that."

A far-off cloud in the deep of space. The drunken circling stars.

"Aue, Mere-mere quite contrary," she trys to laugh.

Or is it Kere-kere quite contrary?

She closes the door with a thump! as though that would keep the phantoms of the night outside.

TRY KEEP ALITT ill Ion guron

your feee he slumps.

The world goes away some more. The night comes closer still.

Blinks in weary vagueness.

Try.

Keep eyes. Them open. See the dark come.

Can't.

Nothing.

Badbadbad.

Fucking useless Clare.

Among the chaff and evil reedy voices round that hummock in unconsciousness he can hear the one he hates. Singing. It's too near the threshold but go back up….

Hey! shh Sant' Claro dulce and gentle

a throbbing double kick, and the plateau tilts. Deeper, it welcomes. The voices are rejoicing.

"Ah no."

He hears himself say it. For one second the bonds at his throat loosen. And he is bitterly sick.

Another kick. A raking almost harmless kick, but it tears across the skin of his chest. Across Kerewin's bruise island. Something breaks.

He feels the air stir, Joe slip after the kick.

Crush. And the dead weight doubles his pain.

The world tilts more, and helpless he begins to slide, downwards, underground, into the box. Turning pinioned. Sound. A scream.

Suffocating. Deep dark.

It is almost night.

That morning he watched the sun come up, head on his arms, his arms on the window sill. That morning Joe was in a bitchy mood, saying, "Don't go round to the Tower."

That morning, Mr Drew leant across his desk, frowning, and handed him the envelope. "You'd better take that home to your father, Simon."

He didn't go back to school after the lunch break.

He went round to Binny Daniels, hoping for money, however he can get it.

From the gateway he could see the old man was dead.

The flies were humming a strong lively song. They were impatient when he came through them, skidding onto him, face and eyes and hair, as though they thought he was more of the feast.

Binny Daniels had slipped and fallen. He'd done that often enough.

This time, he'd fallen on top of his half g of sherry. It broke apart under him, bits tinkling down the path. But a long freak shard had daggered in, into the old man's groin. He had bled a lot. Great clots and puddles of blood have spilled on the concrete. The flies seethe merrily over them, jostling and shoving and wanting room for more.

Binny Daniels had tried to hold his artery's pulse to a stop. But his fingers are narrow and fleshless and they ache with arthritis, and the remaining strength ebbs out so fast. He still clutched at the hole though, the glass blade's tip sticking obscenely out. Diamond bright in the afternoon sun.

He'd been sick, and the odd fly had buzzed eagerly up and landed on the halfdigested pulp, and he'd been sick again.

He went round to the Tower anyway.

Kerewin said,

"You better not come here any more. Your father won't be dead keen on it."

She'd asked, "Where's my knife? The special one?"

She didn't believe he hadn't got it. Wise Kerewin. He'd taken it before the holiday.

The knife is Kerewin's talisman, her athelme. Made from German steel, superbly tempered. The bone handle is riveted with three steel pins, and near the pommel is a brass-lined hole. A thong of rawhide

can be twisted through the hole and looped over the knife handle. The thong is attached to the sheath. The knife can't fall out.

"I know I haven't lost it," Kerewin said.

There is no guard on the knife. A dimly golden crosspiece separated the curve of bone from the curving blade.

He can see each detail clearly. In the flaring lights, it is all he can see.

The sheath is made of leather, oiled to a deep russet red. A rim of shagreen capped the sheath above the rivet that completed the stitching. A second thong, which could be tied round the thigh, hung in a plait from a steel-lined hole at the end of the sheath. A long time ago, Kerewin had engraved runes on the leather, filling the gouges with white enamel, and they are still there.

When he first picked up knife and sheath, he had traced the runes and she had said,

"They're letters, but not our kind. They're called runes, cen, os, and hagall. My initials. They also have other meanings. It is a strange and providential chance that what they stand for and my initials, are the same thing."

There are more runes carved into the bone handle. An inscription, said Kerewin.

"Indeed, a dedication," she had added thoughtfully.

These runes are worn down to unreadable fineness.

It is mysterious, but he must remember it all. He is in the mystery, and needs to remember.

It is a small heavy knife, comfortable to hold, and excellently balanced.

It is good for throwing — she had sent it thunking into the wood under the window to show him how.