Keri Hulme - The Bone People

The kaumatua stands quickly, his humour gone as fast as it came. He moves Joe's hand aside, washing over the cuts with his lotion. It stings hard but the bleeding diminishes.

"Now stand carefully, please. I shall do up your jeans for you. Good. Place your arm across your chest. That is right, good. Lift your other arm. He, now you can lower it. Good man. That is firm? Ah, see if you can move the broken arm? No? Very good. Now lean against me. Walk a little more, a little more, just two steps more… e very good."

The soft high voice is receding into darkness. The bands holding his right arm to his chest feel uncomfortably tight, but the arm is secure. He can feel the old man taking his boots off him, can hear him saying, "E, that is good, now lean back. That is the pillow there. Gently now."

The bed is hard but the blankets are soft and warm. A little while of darkness later, he hears the kaumatua say,

"Open your mouth. This is medicine." A soft distant chuckle. "Not a concoction of manuka bark or anything so interesting, e kare, but a modern medicine that brings sleep."

The taste is sweetly familiar.

"Kerewin," he murmurs, "e Kere, I smell like your painting and now I taste like him," and he smiles as he sleeps.

He is swimming down a foul mud-coloured river.

Not really swimming: the water gets so shallow that he can pull himself along, hands walking on the river bottom.

He knows he must not get his hair wet by the foulness. But already the long strands at the back of his neck are contaminated, and he is horrified corruption has touched him. He paddles and handwalks along, head reared high out of the water.

Immediately in front of him, is a very low bridge. He has no choice but to lower his head into the stinking stream. Retching, he slides down, water creeps into his mouth, and to his surprise it is sweet-

Ahead, weeping willows, foreigners, trail into the water. The stream narrows until he has to stand up, for he can no longer float. The water trickles over his feet, sparkling and ice-clear now.

He looks down at Hana, who lies on her back smiling up at him, her face relaxed and full of joy. The stream flows from her vagina in a steady pure rivulet.

"E honey, I thought you were asleep-"

"Joe, why would I sleep? It's time to feed Timote, ne?" She shakes her head from side to side, and amidst her thick long hair he sees his little son moving his toes back and forward with his fingers as though to find out how far they'll go. He smiles gravely at Joe, but goes on playing, absorbed in these mobile toes.

He lies down beside Hana, stroking her forehead softly. The grass beneath his hips is warm and dry and prickly, but the sensation is not uncomfortable.

"E Hana," he says, beginning to breathe more quickly, "e taku hine."

Hana reaches for his hands and brings them to her lips. She kisses them. She says,

"Well Joe my love, you'd better feed first then." Her breasts before him are still swollen with milk. The milk is sweeter than the riverwater. Timote crawls out of the soft deeps of Hana's hair, and falls asleep near Hana's other breast. A hand strokes his hair, a small pale crooked hand. "Ssss," says Haimona. "Ae," says Hana to him, her face sleepy now but still calm, "you suck by Timote, my Himi, my heart child, my honey." But as the boy begins to drink, Hana's face changes. Her skin goes grey and begins to run with sweat.

"Aue, the moths, the moths!" she cries out, and her voice is harsh with terror.

To his horror, he discovers he is sucking the fat furred end of an enormous moth. Hana and Timote begin to dissolve, to break

up into whirling clouds of fire-eyed moths. Haimona cries out, wretched and forlorn, and he echoes the cry.

"Aue, Hana, Hana!" he calls in anguish, grasping at her fading body. His hand is full of sliminess and a fine hairy powder. The moths begin to swirl round him, their bodies slapping against his bare flesh with a pattering sound that becomes louder and louder as the moths swarm out of the ground in their millions.

He gasps, spitting out moth-dust,

"Hana! O God, Hana! Help me!"

"Hana!" His heart is pounding in his breast, and it feels like a thumb is blocking his throat.

"Hana is dead," says a calm voice.

Joe raises himself on his left elbow, shaking.

"I was dreaming," falling back against the pillow, "a nightmare."

The kaumatua is sitting by the range. The door to the fire-cavity is open, and he is partly lit by firelight, a dark straight figure wrapped in his greatcoat.

He says again.

"Hana is dead."

"I know."

"When the dead are dead, you cannot bring them back. Not by memory, or desire, or love."

"I know," says Joe, more softly.

The kaumatua sighs.

"But you are still calling to her. I have been listening to your dream. It is eery listening to a man talk to ghosts in his sleep."

"I did not ask to dream of her," anger in his voice, "I did not mean to. It just happened."

"The interesting thing," says the kaumatua, as though he had not heard Joe's last words, "is that she has now become a moth."

He shakes his head gently.

"And you must know what that means, o man of wisdom, hmmm?"

"No I bloody don't. I don't want to find out either." Even as he speaks, he feels unpardonably rude.

"But you do," says the kaumatua. "You slept well, but now you are afraid to return to sleep. It is better that we talk. Or that I talk," he amends, and smiles his thin no-smile to Joe lying in the shadows at the end of the room. His teeth glint.

The last of the cannibals… Joe is silent. He is afraid to go back to sleep, but not because of the bus driver's careless phrase. The dream would continue, would worsen unbearably. He had wondered, when the nightmares began two years ago, whether he had infected Simon with his bad dreams. Or whether Simon had infected him.

Now, he grits his teeth until his jaw aches. The old man knows too much, if he can listen in to dreams-

"Maybe you know about moths, eh?"

Rain batters the old roof. A burst of wind makes the metal groan, as though it is tired of standing alone against the weather. The kaumatua clears his throat. There is the sudden flare of a match, then a sucking noise as he draws on his pipe.

"When it came time to bury my grandmother, I was instructed to eat part of the corpse, and let the rest of her decay. I was to clean and oil and ochre the bones, and hide them away. Then, she said, she would rest in peace and not bother me."

He spits into the firebox.

"Well, I got the piece prepared and cooked, but I couldn't eat it. I carried out the rest of her commands, but it hasn't seemed sufficient. She buzzes in the back of my head like a bluebottle sometimes."

The iron stirs, moaning again, and the rain beats steadily down.

"E well," says the kaumatua. "All that used to give me bad dreams. Now I just wonder what she would have tasted like."

He puts sticks on the fire, and leans back in his chair again,

"After all, she told me how to make her rest. It's my fault that she lingers, waiting, nei?"

He takes the pipe out of his mouth, and blows the ashes from the top of the bowl.

"In a lot of ways, I am stronger than she is, now. So, if she has any thought of revenge for my neglect of her instructions, there could be an interesting scene."

Sweet Christ, he's as barmy as a coot.

"No, I'm not mad," says the old man gently, and Joe jerks, because he hadn't spoken it.

"I was trying to show how the dead return as voices and dreams quite often. Sometimes, there are very good reasons for their persistence in our world. Sometimes, we have failed them."

Joe lies very quietly, biting his lips.

Look after our child, she had said. And I have hurt him. And I have lost him.