Keri Hulme - The Bone People

Left bereft, go sift the wide expanse of wind… take issue with any straw that blows across your path and conjure hopes from

sticks that lie in the sand. Soul, your hopes are my hopes and my hopes are insane. So the meaning and signpost for the journey is Hope Obscure. And the sign is a ghost, still whining and bound in a cart.

There's a fine mist falling and the world is close about her. The truncated mass of the Tower looms behind. The sea is hushed.

The suitcase, and the Ibanez in its travelling case, are sitting by the locked Tower door.

She waits patiently under an umbrella for the night to become complete.

She has made a torch of rags and tow soaked in kerosene, wrapped round a billet of wood. It waits at her feet.

If I was an honest uncompromising soul, if I wasn't riddled by this disease called hope, I'd climb into the middle of my pyre and light a phoenixfire from there-

The dandelions look luminous in the evening. Many of the aureoles are wide open, as though the sun still shone.

On the other hand, my cardinal virtue is hope. Forlorn hope, hope in extremity. Not Christian hope, but an innate rebellion against the inevitable dooms of suffering, death, and despair. A senseless hope-

The great pile of wood waits darkly.

Pale moths are flitting all around, hordes of them like insect ghosts, flicking in and out of her vision. Time-

She lights the torch. It smokes blackly, then bursts into flame.

She flings it and it travels like a comet into the waiting wood.

The pile explodes, fire jetting, soaring, enfolding wood with eager flowers of flame. They rush and roar up in a tall soaring column.

If I hadn't my hope, I might have lasted ten seconds there… the air is all gone from round it… splendid dragon… the" glory of the salamander-

It burns down to a bed of embers ten feet across. Even then the dying fire is enough to light the side of the struck-down Tower. O dandelions, you must have known what was coming-

The moths are back after the firestorm: they fleet and tumble round her head and hands as she shifts the embers into a pile with a shovel. When it's complete, she digs the shovel into the ground, leaving it there. One more thing to do-

She takes a silk handkerchief from her pocket, and with her bare hands, scoops up soil, enough to fill the hollow of her palm. She secretes handkerchief and earth back in her pocket.

Wherever I go, however I go, I carry this earth for memory. And should I die in a strange land, there is a little more than just my flesh to make a friend and sanctuary of alien ground.

Kerewin picked up her cases, and walked away into the night.

"HERE?" says the bus driver incredulously. "Here?"

"Here," says Joe.

"But it's in the middle of bloody nowhere!"

"That doesn't matter. I can walk to where I'm going."

The bus pulled away in a rising whine of gears. The late afternoon sun glinted on the back window until it turned a corner. The noise faded.

It began to rain, a thick drizzle that clung to his clothes without really wetting them. He shifted off the road and started walking through the scrub towards the sea. It wasn't hard going: there was little gorse and less blackberry, mainly acre upon acre of manuka, stands of bracken, the occasional coprosma, no tall trees. But the scrub was high enough to prevent him seeing where he was going.

The bus driver had said,

"Well, you might meet old Jack in there. He comes out to the turnoff sometimes to collect his sack of flour and tea and tobacco. They call him the last of the cannibals, but I don't think he really is," and he'd laughed.

The sentence joggled in his mind.

"I don't think he's really the last of the cannibals," or "I don't think he's really a cannibal, but you never know-"

He could never imagine his great-grandfather, who had taken part in several feasts of people, as a cannibal. He remembered the old man only as a picture of a silver-haired fiercely dignified chief. He'd always imagined cannibals to be little wizened people, with pointy teeth.

"We're meat, same as anything else," his grandmother had said.

He shivered.

The manukas were blackened with blight and there was a pervading stink of swampwater throughout the bush. Even the concrete rooms and corridoring with their discreet bars and locks seemed more pleasant now.

He shoved his way onward, his pack catching and smashing branches, and all at once stopped.

He was on the edge of a bluff: below him, a scoured stone beach, with driftwood in tangled piles along the tideline. It was thirty shadowed feet to the bottom.

The kaumatua:

I have watched the river and the sea for a lifetime. I have seen rivers rob soil from the roots of trees until the giants came foundering down. I have watched shores slip and perish, the channels silt and change; what was beach become a swamp and a headland tumble into the sea. An island has eroded in silent pain since my boyhood, and reefs have become islands. Yet the old people used to say, People pass away, but not the land. It remains forever.

Maybe that is so. The land changes. The land continues. The sea changes. The sea remains.

Since I came here, I have left this land only twice. I walked the streets of towns the first time, and was ignored. The second time, people laughed behind their hands at my stilted speech, and stared at my face. "Keerist, what an antique," said one. So I quickly learnt the results of my desertion. I am tied irrevocably to this land.

And so. For this past life, I have kept watch, from dawn till star-pierced night. For this past life, I have waited, from the sun's dying until the bright midday. Watching over, watching for awakening: waiting for the sign. There is not long left for me to watch or wait, and still the stranger does not come. The digger has not delved. The broken man has not been found and healed.

Yet those were the ones you instructed me to watch and wait for.

Was it all illusion? Were your eyes blinded in the moments before your death? Have I cast aside the pleasures of life to endure only this pointless watch?

He stood sweating, looking down at the beach for a long time. A shag flew past in the twilight, and gulls wheeled and keened above his head. It could be Moerangi, four hundred miles south; it could be Moerangi, and nothing has happened, and along the beach in a firelit bach, they wait for him-

He shook his head, and stumbled back.

As though in a dream, he began to run. Somewhere near, he could hear a river that he hadn't heard before. You learned not to hear too much in prison. The manukas slashed at him as he blundered through, ears full of the river. The packstraps ate into his shoulders. You grew flabby and soft in prison, playing at working, ignoring the talk, enduring the time.

He stopped, breathing heavily, and shrugged the pack off. He listened carefully. The bush is filled with the sound of the river but he can't tell which way it is. Something moves and grunts nearby, and he turns sharply, his fists clenched.

The grunts stop. His heart settles again.

It grows very dark as he stands there. At last, he sighs and sits down beside the pack. He doesn't feel like eating, wanting only deep, dreamless sleep. He fumbles through the pack, sorting out the bivsac, and sets it up. The pencil torch is blindingly useless. It is better to work in the dark, even though he bangs into stones and bushes. He grows more and more tired.

Prop the pack against a stunted manuka: turn the boots upside down beside it: wriggle into sleeping bag, and again into the bivsac, and wait for sleep.

The ground is surprisingly springy except for a branch buried under his shoulders. And an evil little breeze drives straight into his face. It is bitingly cold, and the drizzle slides in with it. He puts his head inside his sleeping bag, and moisture from his breath builds up and wets the area by his face. His feet are numb.