Keri Hulme - The Bone People

His stomach convulses, knotting with fear.

He swallows violently to keep the vomit down.

Joe is surrounded by pulses and flares of dull red light.

He says in a low anguished voice,

"You have ruined me."

He says,

"You have just ruined everything, you shit."

He doesn't say anything more, except when he has turned the chair against the table.

Joe says, "Get over."

He does. He lays his arms in front of him, left hand stiff, and his head on his arms.

He sets his teeth, and waits.

The world is full of dazzlement, jewel beams, fires of crystal splendour. I am on fire.

He is aching, he is breaking apart with pain. The agony is everywhere, hands, body, legs, head. He is shaking so badly he cannot stand. The hard wood keeps griding past him. He keeps trying to stand. Joe's voice is thin and distant.

"When did you get this?"

"When did Bill Drew give you this?" "How long have you kept this?"

He is pulled up and held into the door frame. The wood gnaws his body.

He pushes forward with all his strength against the hand that pins him down. He is thudded back into all the teeth of the wood.

"When did you do this?" "When did this happen?"

Sliding the sliver out of the wrapping, his hand trembling uselessly. He fists forward. It seems a foolish feeble blow.

But I need to stop the wood coming through.

Joe screams.

The first punch hit his head.

His head slammed back into the door frame.

The punches keep coming.

Again.

Again.

And again.

The lights and fires are going out.

He weeps for them.

The blood pours from everywhere.

He can feel it spilling from his mouth, his ears, his eyes, and his nose.

The drone of flies gets louder.

The world goes away.

The night has come.

IF ONLY was the tapu phrase. If only I had If only I hadn't

The trench my worried thoughts have worn towers on either side. I can see a bar of sky… there is no more room for anything but pacing, wearing down, round and round in my worry trench.

For now it's life on the straight and narrow, the harrowed way. No more casual nights, drunken by candlelight or flare of crowd. No more communion with mirrored self or the uncaring stars.

Communing means uncovering: drinking means thinking.

If I think it becomes if only, and if only is the tapu phrase.

What else can I do?

She hid all her opal rings. The seaglint disturbs her. Like they're eyes on her fingers.

Strangely, the worst thing of all — worse than the shambles she had come in on, worse than the disfigurement and non-recognition — was that they had shaved off his hair.

She remembers the shock in his eyes when he saw her cut hair.

If only I had

Shut up.

Taipa.

The second week, she started packing.

The third week, on a Wednesday morning, she turned from contemplating the bare library walls, and stopped, shocked.

The man is standing in the doorway, watching her.

His face is more dead grey than living brown.

He says softly,

"Piri told me about this. If you want me to, I can maybe help. If you don't want me to, shake your head and I will go away."

His eyes are fixed on her face, but they don't entreat.

They are lustreless and unsouled.

Except one thing flickers. A last spark of spirit, waiting without Joe Waiting in the knowledge that she will react with disgust and horror. Waiting for the final reason to die.

But he has come back this once, to make sure: to offer one last time whatever of him she will take.

She makes it very short, the waiting time. She folds her hands over her stomach, containing the dull ache.

"Ngakaukawa, kei te ora taku ngakau. E noho mai."

And he covers his face and weeps.

Later, his eyelids spongy and fat from crying, he says,

"I have been wanting to weep for a long time, but I couldn't."

"I wept, but only a little. It didn't seem that weeping was going to do any good."

He sighs.

"It doesn't change anything. It just makes me feel a bit more alive. I don't know whether that's good. While you're alive, you're hurting."

"It's the possibility that when you're dead you might still go on hurting that bothers me," she says grimly.

"Yes." He stares at the broken guitar hanging on the wall. "Aue, yes."

The only time she had wept was when she went back to Pacific Street to clean up. Sick stomach or nothing, you can't expect him to come home to this-

Congealed spatters. Against the door. On the floor. Joe's blood, from the glass dagger sent so neatly into his stomach.

("Funny," said Morrison. "Two in one day. D'you know that old fart Daniels?"

"I heard already."

"Yeah, well, he got it from a splinter too… broken off a half g of that rotgut he primed himself on. The glass went in a bit lower though."

The constable is weary and ill-looking. He shuts his notebook and puts it back in his tunic pocket. "Christ, if only I'd known," he'd said, shaking his head, and then caught the look in her eyes. "It can't be helped, Miz Holmes," he'd offered. "We none of us have got that kind of foresight. It can't be helped.")

Blood from the child, from his ruined body and head.

Pretend it's fish blood. Weak cool fish blood. Different lymph, different platelets, non-mammalian. Won't corrode or stain the hands, right?

She managed to clean it all up before she was sick.

Leaning back against the sink thinking, Holy mother, this is a

day and a night to forget. Looking round, checking all is normal, no relics of violence left. (Belt picked up and coiled away in a policeman's drawer, glass dagger in safe police hands.)

And on the end chair, out of the way where he'd left them in those careful clumsy folds, Simon's shirt and T-shirt.

The tears stung her eyes. Shaking her head, Stop it, stop it, crying won't help them any, and weeping more and more.

She sobbed uncontrollably for minutes, her voice climbing higher and higher, and at its peak, the violent stabbing pain cut in again, leaving her with breath enough only to gasp.

Beneath her hands, pressed in deep against the agony, she felt the hard alien lump in her belly for the first time.

She is carefully disinterring the bonsai grove.

"You need a hand with that?"

"No thanks."

"I've finished wrapping all the pounamu… God, you've got some beautiful work there."

She glances at him. "You want any bits, help yourself."

He shakes his head.

He asks, scuffing his shoetip against the stone step, "You ever, you know, take a look at it?"

She dusts her hands free of sandy earth fastidiously, and opens the neck of her shirt. "The present? Yes."

It hangs there as he had imagined it: the pale shining braid he'd made, the semicircle of dark green against the pallor of her skin.

She buttons her shirt again without commenting.

He blinks away his ready tears.

"Emmersen's brother spent most of, of Monday engraving that… I asked him to get it ready for me by evening no matter what, and he did."

She has turned back to the unearthing of her small trees.

"Mmmm," as though she didn't hear him properly and didn't care to know. "Did you say Marama liked plants?"

"Yes," says Joe sadly.

"I'll give these to her then. They might amuse her."

The her matau is hook-shaped, and the inner curve is lined with silver. In tiny italics the jeweller has engraved, Arohanui na H H.

Later that day she asks,

"E hoa, would you accept this?"

He stares at the translucent ring poised between her fingers.

"I understand the old people used to fasten the leg of an especially favoured calling-bird with it, but they used them as jewellery too… I thought it might um, complement the long and straight of your pendant."