Keri Hulme - The Bone People

He shakes his head numbly.

"I said, I hope your father knocks you sillier than you are now, you stupid little bastard. I said many such pleasantries, all intended to hurt… damn it Joe, I'm just as culpable as you are. More so, in that I could have stopped it happening and I jumped in to inflame the whole thing. If I'd said, No, don't hit him, or No, wait till I get round there and we'll talk it out. If I'd said… to hell, I didn't, and there's nothing I can do about it now."

She gulps down the remainder of her drink, and refills the glass.

"I did plenty, e hoa, and I'm not likely to forget any of it. Not least, that when I hung the mike up after talking to you, I knew Simon was in for one hell of a hiding, and I was glad."

She holds the bottle out to him. "The bad part for me is that you're paying and I'm not. You'll have a definite penance, and I'll have only the miasma of memory to endure. Which is plenty in one way, and nothing in another. Drink up."

Her voice is still cool and detached.

She is making it easy on me, trying to share the blame… but it makes sense. She did have the chance to stop me thrashing him.

And he recalls the wordless choking of pain the child had made, holding the phone in his ineffectual grip while Kerewin hit him with words.

Aue, that must have hurt him to hear things like that-

He doesn't feel as leprous with guilt, as isolated and criminal any more. He wipes away his tears with the heel of his palm, and takes the whisky bottle. Clink clink, and another golden measure poured. He selects himself a smoke, one of the clove-impregnated Indonesian ones, and lights it on an ember. It crackles and sparks as he inhales.

"Ah, e hoa, you didn't do much bad… I did so much more."

"The intent is sin as much as the action, and believe you me, if I could have hurt Sim without killing him that afternoon, I would have hurt him… hell, I was wild." Her fingers are plucking the guitar strings lute fashion. "So stupidly wild… I could buy a thousand guitars like that… it was just that it was special. The second guitar I ever owned — I literally played the first to death — and given to me by my mother. I used it as comforter and cocelebrant and resonance chamber for my thoughts for over twenty years-"

She settles the black guitar-body close to her, and begins to play.

It's a slow haunting tune; melancholy, yet it embraces the listener, drawing one onward rather than down.

He remembers it in the months to come, playing it so often in his mind that when he next picks up a guitar, his fingers settle into the melody without him meaning them to.

"Pavane for a dead infanta, by Ravel," she says at the music's end. She plays it again and again that night, seeming to have forgotten all the rest of her repertoire.

As Joe drinks more, he becomes garrulous. Several times he goes over the way he beat up the child, seeking to find a pattern in it, a meaning for what happened. Each time it comes up, he exclaims in wonder,

"You know, that's the first time he's ever hit me? First time, and what a hit," shaking his head, halfpuzzled and halfproud, that Simon had had the forethought to conceal the splinter, and the initiative to use it.

A hit indeed. A little deeper, and the glass shard would have sliced through another artery and bled him dry before Kerewin's arrival.

"It wasn't that hard but God! did it hurt… I never thought he would go for me like that, not using a knife or anything. He's never even hit me before… he fights sometimes, beforehand, you've got to struggle with him but he never tried to hurt me. He always gives up, he always does what he's told. So I never looked for it to happen… e Kere, when he started moving his hands I thought he was going to say something about Bill Drew's note and then wham. Oath, it went in so easy, he didn't have to push. Just like a knife into hot butter, whizz and there it was, deep in my gut and me bleeding

like a stuck pig. I was so mad he'd thumped me back, ah Jesus I just hit him as hard as I could till he went out. Then I went down too."

"You know what?" he asks yet again, on the last recital, and she shakes her head tiredly. She has become more and more sober as the night has worn on. "I think I was trying to beat him dead," says Joe. "I think I was trying to kill him then."

He says something in passing that Kerewin wishes he had never revealed. A few words, but they make for horror.

He says, "I don't think I'm the only one that's hurt him. He had some bloody funny marks on him when he arrived."

He falls asleep before dawn.

She watches the moon draw away to the west, and the southern cross take a header down the south horizon. Orion pales to a distant ice glitter, and one by one, his stars go out.

The sky flushes brilliant crimson.

Red sky in the morning. Warning. O I know it's only weather

words, but…

watching the blood sky swell and grow, dyeing the rainclouds ominously, making the far edge of the sea blistered and scarlet.

Dawn, and in the east, another star dies.

It made the national news on Friday evening.

"And in Taiwhenuawera today, a man was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for what prosecuting counsel called a savage and brutal attack on a defenceless handicapped child. However, the magistrate, Mr P. S. Seward, commented that the child involved could hardly be called defenceless since he had stabbed his foster father, Joseph Gillayley, in the stomach during the assault. Gillayley, a year old labourer, spent two weeks in hospital recovering from the wound. His seven year old foster son has been removed from his custody which, as Mr Seward remarked drily, will be a move beneficial to both parties.

The government intends to introduce new legislation during the coming session which will…"

snap.

And that's the end of the news. She stood up and flexed her shoulder muscles.

Time to hit the road, Holmes. Time to get gone.

She wondered if she would still be alive three months from now.

She folded the stretchers and left them outside under a canvas for Piri.

She packed away the sleeping bags, and cleared out all the remaining food.

Have a feast, gulls-

She stowed her backpack into a large suitcase, added a few clothes, all her remaining smokes, the last of the bottle of Drambuie, Simon's rosary and three books.

One is the Book of the Soul, the one she normally keeps under lock and key.

One is the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

The last is peculiarly her own.

It is entitled, in hand-lettered copper uncials, "Book of Godhead", and the title page reads,

"BOG: for spiritual small-players to lose themselves in."

It contains an eclectic range of religious writing.

The Diamond Sutra and The Wisdom of the Idiots.

The Tao te Ching, and Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love.

The Bardo Thedol, and extracts from Buber's Hasidism.

The first, second, and fourth wings of the I Ching, and Hahlevi's Tree of Life.

Selections from the Upanishads and the works of the sixteenth century Beguine, Hadewych.

Teilhard de Chardin's Hymn of the Universe, and Reps's Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.

The Book of Job, and Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon.

The New Testament of Jesus Christ, and Masnawi by the Sufi, Jalal-uddin al Rumi.

It has illustrations. Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Blake's Ghost of a Flea. A drawing of Pallas Athene she'd made after a dream. Thirty mandates, from the Grand Terminus to one she'd created three years ago, a steady indrawing of spirals and psirals and stars.

It was a book she had designed to cater for all the drifts and vagaries of her mind. To provide her with information, rough maps and sketches of a way to God.

She has a feeling her need for the numinous will increase dramatically from now on.