Kehua! (11 page)

The tohunga, priests, of the Ngai Tahu, in whose Southern lands the murder happened, were in no position to perform the cleansing
ceremony. The two bodies, sullied, ended up in the morgue in Christchurch instead of in the local Maori standing place, the
Takahanga Marae, and the pitiful remains were cursorily dealt with. So much so that some of the local kehua were obliged to
follow little Beverley all the way up to Coromandel in the subtropical North, the land of the Ngati Whanaunga, to where she
and her new, makeshift family, Rita and Arthur, had escaped. The kehua hoped to gather the child back into the fold; the adoptive
parents to save the child from scandal and distress. All meant well.

But here in Coromandel the Ngai Tahu kehua were not at ease, though they stayed. They were used to rolling pastoral land,
not this craggy watery beauty. Their presence stirred up rival taniwha, those disagreeable monsters that rise from time to
time from the deep dark pools of the bush to protect the iwi, or tribe. Taniwha are clad in fur and feather, grand as any
tribal chief, both protector and destroyer, with a row of cruel spikes along the hulking backbone, great creatures with birdlike
heads, vengeful eyes and savage, toothy, curved beaks, there behind your eyelids when you go to sleep. Whatever frightens
you, that’s what they’ll be.

The clustering, sheltering, rattling kehua are nothing compared to the taniwha when it comes to terror, but are lighter on
their feet
and clearly get about more. As little Tahuri suggests, the overhead locker of an aircraft will do just fine if they are obliged
to travel, as once did the hold of an ocean liner when Beverley left her native land and came to England.

It was on D’Dora’s advice that Cynara did not put more obstacles in Lola’s way when she announced that she was going to stay
with Scarlet. D’Dora was a great advocate of tough love. ‘Never show you care’ was her motto. ‘The one who shows most love
loses.’ And since D’Dora’s tactics had worked so well on her, Cynara, leaving her a trembling, love-sick, sexually obsessed
wreck, with her marriage finally ended, and rumblings from senior partners that she had brought in the wrong kind of clients,
she could see such tactics might well work with Lola. If she told Lola to go, Lola would want to come back. And Cynara loved
Lola, though it was sometimes hard to remember.

‘Go,’ she’d said. ‘Go, if your Aunt Scarlet will have you, though I bet Louis kicks up a fuss. I don’t suppose you can do
her much damage; she thrives on media attention.’

Lola did not hang about. Within hours Scarlet was on the phone to Cynara saying Lola wanted to come and stay, and that was
okay with her, but was it with Cynara? And Cynara was saying Scarlet should be aware that the letter from Help the Harmed
might never turn up: why would a respectable charity take on a disturbed girl who wasn’t yet seventeen? They might take her
money but hardly her. At which Scarlet felt so strongly on Lola’s side she quite forgot about Jackson and how she wanted Cynara
to say no.

‘I don’t think you should call your own daughter disturbed,’ she said. ‘Frankly, Cynara, with all this D’Dora business I think
we could fairly say you are the one who is disturbed.’

‘I am not disturbed,’ said Cynara. ‘You are homophobic.’

They brought the phone call to a quick end. Alice had trained both girls to keep the family peace at all costs. Some families
row all the time and are in a perpetual state of ‘not speaking’. Alice found this vulgar, and un-Christian. ‘If you can’t
find anything agreeable to say,’ she would tell them, ‘don’t say anything at all.’ The family solution, if things got tough,
was just to stay out of each other’s way for a while.

‘It’s not going to be more than a week or so, I suppose?’ Scarlet asked Lola, all the same.

‘Oh no,’ said Lola. ‘Days, I imagine.’

Though in truth Lola too suspected that Help the Harmed had found out that she was not yet seventeen, and were delaying her
passage until her birthday in three months’ time. There had been various text messages on her mobile from them which she failed
to open. She was not really all that keen on going to Haiti.

Scarlet had been shocked to hear Lola’s account of what was going on at home. Cynara seemed to have flipped her lid. Of course
people should be free to choose the sexuality they wished, and Scarlet of all people understood the compulsion of sexual desire,
but throwing out a husband and father against the daughter’s wishes, and moving in a lesbian lover was surely extreme. She
would of course, now it was a
fait accompli
, give Lola every help she could. Lola was ‘difficult’, everyone knew: but then Cynara was difficult too. Scarlet had always
believed she could make a much better business of bringing up Lola than her sister ever had. And, even if Lola did find out
about Jackson, the girl wouldn’t tell Louis. She would
surely be on Scarlet’s side.

Lola would have to use the raw upper grey alcove for sleeping, Scarlet warned. The concrete here was unpainted and gloomily
greasy and it was quite a climb. The more congenial lower alcove, cosier, painted grey and pink, with the original cushioned
flooring, was currently being fitted with safety rails. English Heritage and Building Regulations between them had negotiated
for months with Louis’ lawyers over how best a compromise could be made between respect for the architect’s Brutalist vision
and the survival of the occupiers. They had come up with a stainless-steel option of slim, elegant rails, which horrified
Louis, but which Scarlet actually rather liked. Louis had no option, such was the bureaucracy and the legal cost of arguing,
but to seem to accept the compromise graciously. It was within the bounds of possibility that the health and safety authorities
could condemn Nopasaran as unfit for human habitation, if such was their whim. They had power to do almost anything, so far
as he could see. So he had best be polite.

Scarlet for her part could not see what the fuss was all about. The only real worry about the alcoves was the way sound travelled
– you could practically hear the sound of clothes rustling as guests undressed, let alone anything else. Rails would make
no difference.

‘You’re sure Louis won’t mind?’ Lola had asked. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance.’

‘Of course he won’t mind,’ said Scarlet. ‘You’re family. Just don’t smoke.’

What is that fluttering in our ears? Is it a build-up of wax that requires a visit to the doctor’s? It could be anything,
anyone from anywhere: the distant flapping of the kehua, or the Furies, or the soft footfall of the grateful dead, or the
faint trotting hooves of the watery Northern kelpies? Once the other side kept to their own
centuries, their own lands. No longer. It is all globalisation now; the movement through time and space of the traditional
emissaries of the dead becomes worldwide,
sans frontières
. Just a change of pressure in the head, there but barely there as they arrive, or depart satisfied if temporarily depleted.
Take your choice: go off to the surgery to check symptoms, hide your head in the sand, or, if you’re old-fashioned and wise
like some of us, pray.

Well of course, yes, Louis would mind. The tributaries of the narrative swell, the river banks can’t hold the volume, the
pressure of events past and present is too great, the flood waters of the narrative spread over the fields. Fish around down
there in the mud and you come up with all sorts of extraordinary things, such as the detail of Louis minding.

Louis could put up with guests easily enough for a night or two, but much longer and they tended to get on his nerves. He
liked silence at mealtimes, an end to the hysteria of the day. Scarlet, contrary to one’s expectation, didn’t mind the quiet
at all; her days were busy and peopled enough and she could get on with her book, or
The Week
, or
Vogue
, and liked to read while she ate. Or, now she could just sit and dream about sex with Jackson until she trembled on the verge
of orgasm and had to stop her breath coming so quickly in case Louis noticed. Louis for his part much appreciated Scarlet’s
capacity to be silent. Previous live-in companions had got offended and demanded attention and conversation, and had ended
up moving out.

Scarlet acknowledged that life with Louis could be very companionable. Sometimes she thought how dreadful it would be if they
had children, because she would never get to read the end of a page, let alone a chapter, without having to get up and
do
something. Louis on the other hand thought he would rather like to be distracted from the increasing melancholy of his thoughts
by the cheerful prattle of children. If you brought them up properly and with a certain amount of kindly discipline, he was
convinced, they would be quite quiet and not argue with him.

He could see Lola as a case in point: too clever for her own good, a victim of state education and wrongly handled by her
family. But he liked her, and rather admired her. He saw her as a free spirit. The more Cynara tried to turn her into a boy,
the more determined she was to be a girl. He liked the McLean family: he enjoyed their energy and eccentricity: he liked Beverley,
and going round to Robinsdale for family teas and parties. He was sorry Jesper had been dismissed but no doubt he would be
back in one form or another. D’Dora was a surprise but he, Louis, could cope better than most. D’Kath and she were both members
of the LGS, a gay and lesbian subgroup whose members prefixed their given names with D for Dyke, the better to declare to
the world their gender orientation, and he knew what it was wise to say and not to say.

Part of Scarlet’s attraction for Louis, indeed, had been that she was a McLean. Now, asked by her whether he minded Lola coming
to stay, he said without hesitation, no, I don’t mind at all, and rather surprised himself. Lola had an annoyingly whiny voice,
would be under his feet, interfere with his routine, and might even try to smoke, a habit he detested. On the other hand she
had to be rescued from her mother, who was evidently going through a patch eccentric even for a McLean. Three years back he
would have said instantly no; the girl was obviously in trouble with her oestrogen. But she had grown out of that now, and
certainly so had he.

Even while she asked Louis whether he minded Lola coming to stay, Scarlet chafed. Fuck it, anyway, why did she need his
permission? She invited who she wanted. This was her house as much as his, morally if not legally. Louis had said once, at
the hectic time of the abandoned wedding, that he’d put Nopasaran in joint ownership, but Scarlet didn’t think he’d ever got
round to it as she’d never been asked to sign anything. And it would only have stirred up Annabel, who had put £50,000 towards
the mortgage, and there would be no end to the lawyers and the explanations. Annabel loved consulting lawyers. It wasn’t as
if Lola would be any extra cost to Louis. She, Scarlet, paid the food and utility bills, and promptly, almost as though the
sooner she got rid of her money the better.

Louis had difficulty parting with money. He wasn’t exactly mean – he just viewed all bits of paper in a domestic context as
suspect and dealing with them was a waste of talent and time. Yet at MetaFashion, it seemed, he was perfectly efficient. But
that is so often the way of it, she supposed. People’s neuroses surfaced at home, while at work they appeared perfectly reasonable
people.

‘Of course Louis won’t mind,’ Scarlet had said. She really wanted to help poor Lola. Sure, she needed to sit her exams, and
get her degree and so on, but there was lots of time. Lola had been fast-tracked through the educational system much too young;
do her good to catch up with a bit of real life. If you could cope with inner London as Lola did, you could cope with Haiti.
For all her apparent street wisdom, Scarlet was just an innocent. Three weeks later there will Lola be, on the end of the
phone to her mother, bad-mouthing poor Scarlet and demanding to come home.

Cynara is already worn out when Lola’s phone call comes. Physically, because she’s in the middle of shifting so much of D’Dora’s
‘stuff ’ out of her own bedroom, which until lately she has shared with Jesper, into the spare room. Until D’Dora’s arrival,
the spare room was designated as Lola’s bedroom. But D’Dora has decided to use it to store her ‘stuff ’, thus freeing up space
in the marital bedroom as D’Dora likes to call it. The couple plan to have a civil ceremony as soon as Cynara’s divorce goes
through. D’Dora’s ‘stuff ’ is bulky, heavy and strange; it consists of odd-shaped exercise machines, S&M dungeon basics –
stocks and shackles which she swears she doesn’t use but doesn’t want to throw away – mountain-climbing gear, and at least
six pairs of muddy boots – albeit only a size three. D’Dora is very tiny and very pretty. All of which, plus craft equipment
for a home business they mean to set up together, results in Cynara finding herself moving, with D’Dora’s ‘stuff,’ into Lola’s
room while D’Dora stays conveniently out of sight. D’Dora works for Kids R Us, where she counsels deprived children, which
is why she is a trained expert in ‘tough love’.

Cynara is worn out emotionally because of the tough love imperative. She wants Lola back home again but then D’Dora will withdraw
her love and Cynara can’t bear that. The discovery that she’s a lesbian seems to have rooted Cynara somehow in her physical
body, so her intellectual being doesn’t get a look-in, and that’s shocking; she is so used to it being there, censoring her
capacity for pleasure. She’s taken to eating butter rather than margarine, simply because it tastes better, regardless of
the fact that it’s not good for you. She needs time and space to get used to her new self. And she doesn’t think she’s fit
to look after Lola any more; look at the mess she’s made of it so far.

It is unfortunate that Lola calls her mother in Parliam Road after three weeks’ silence, just as these thoughts are going
through Cynara’s head.