The Bone People (2 page)

living room with a huge

fireplace, and rows of spicejars on one wall, and underneath, on

the ground level, an entrance hall hung with tapestries, and the

beginnings of the spiral stairway, handrails dolphin-headed, saluting

the air.

There'd be a cellar, naturally, well stocked with wines, homebrewed

and imported vintage; lined with Chinese ginger jars, and

wooden boxes of dates. Barrels round the walls, and shadowed chests

in corners.

All through the summer sun she laboured, alone with the paid,

bemused, professional help. The dust obscured and flayed, thirst

parched, and tempers frayed, but the Tower grew. A concrete

skeleton, wooden ribs and girdle, skin of stone, grey and slate blue

and heavy honey-coloured. Until late one February it stood, gaunt

and strange and embattled, built on an almost island in the shallows

of an inlet, tall in Taiaroa.

It was the hermitage, her glimmering retreat. No people invited,

for what could they know of the secrets that crept and chilled and

chuckled in the marrow of her bones? No need of people, because

she was self-fulfilling, delighted with the pre-eminence of her art,

and the future of her knowing hands.

But the pinnacle became an abyss, and the driving joy ended. At

last there was a prison.

I am encompassed by a wall, high and hard and stone, with only

my brainy nails to tear it down.

And I cannot do it.

I Season Of The Day Moon

1 Portrait Of A Sandal

"... like our bullock, Jack. Bugger'll be on the old age pension before he's killed."

"Yeah, but look who's laughing meantime?"

There was a rattle of laughter round the bar.

Kerewin, sitting apart, rang a coin on the counter and beckoned

the barman.

"Same again?"

"Yes please."

This ship that sets its sails forever

rigid on my coin

is named Endeavour.

She buys a drink to bar the dreams

of the long nights lying.

The world is never what it seems

and the sun is dying...

She shrugs.

Wonder what would happen if I started singing out loud?

The beer moves in a whirlpool to the lip of the glass: the hose

withdraws.

"Had a nice night?" asks the barman politely.

It's the first thing anybody has said to her.

"Yeah."

He hands her back the change.

"Fishing been any good?"

How long did it take to get round town that I had bought a

boat?

"O fair enough," she says, "fair enough."

"Well, that's good...." he mops the bartop cursorily and drifts

away down to the other end of the bar, to the talk and the overcurious

people.

It's late, Holmes, way after eleven. There's no point in staying.

There had been no point in coming to the pub either, other than

to waste some more time, and drink some more beer.

Guffaws.

Somebody's in the middle of a rambling drunken anecdote. A Maori,

thickset, a working bloke with steel-toed boots, and black hair down to his shoulders. He's got his fingers

stuck in his belt, and the heavy brass buckle of it glints and twinkles as he teeters back and forwards. "...And then fuckin hell would you believe he takes the candle...."

I'd believe the poor effing fella's short of words. Or thought. Or maybe just intellectual energy.

The word is used monotonously, a sad counterbalance for every phrase. "And no good for even fuckin Himi

eh? Shit, no use, I said...."

Why this speech filled with bitterness and contempt? You hate English, man? I can understand that but why

not do your conversing in Maori and spare us this contamination? No swear words in that tongue... there he

goes again. Ah hell, the fucking word has its place, but all the time?... aue.

Kerewin shakes her head. No use thinking about it. She drains her glass, slips off the stool, and heads for the

door.

The group at the end of the bar turns round to stare. The man stops his yarn and smiles blurrily at her. She

didn't smile back.

"Goodnight," calls the barman.

"Goodnight."

The crayfish moved in silence through clear azure water. Bright scarlet armour, waving antennae, red legs

stalking onward. Azure and scarlet. Beautiful.

It was about then she realised she was in the middle of a dream, because living crayfish were purple-maroon

and orange: only when cooked, do they turn scarlet. A living boiled cray? A crayfish cooking as it walked

calmly through a hot pool?

She shuddered. The crayfish moved more quickly through the blue crystal sea and the fog of dreaming

increased--

It is still dark but she can't sleep any more. She dresses and goes down to the beach, and sits on the top of a

sandhill until the sky pales.

Another day, herr Gott, and I am tired, tired.

She stands, and grimaces, and spits. The spittle lies on the sand a moment, a part of her a moment ago, and

then it vanishes, sucked in, a part of the beach now.

Fine way to greet the day, my soul... go down to the pools, Te Kaihau, and watch away the last night

sourness.

And here I am, balanced on the salt stained rim, watching minute navy-blue fringes, gill-fingers of

tubeworms, fan the water... put the shadow of a finger near them, and they flick outasight. Eyes in your

lungs... neat. The three-fin blenny swirls by... tena koe, fish. A small bunch of scarlet and gold anemones furl

and unfurl their arms, graceful petals slow and lethal... tickle tickle, and they turn into uninteresting lumps of

brownish jelly... haven't made sea-anemone soup for a while, whaddaboutit? Not today, Josephine... at the

bottom, in a bank of brown bulbous weed, a hermit crab is rustling a shell. Poking at it, sure it's empty?

Ditheringly unsure... but now, nervously hunched over his soft slug of belly, he extricates himself from his

old hutch and speeds deftly into the new... at least, that's where you thought you were going, e mate?...

hoowee, there really is no place like home, even when it's grown a couple of sizes too small--

There is a great bank of Neptune's necklaces fringing the next pool.

"The sole midlittoral fuccoid," she intones solemnly, and squashes a bead of it under the butt of her stick.

"Ann me father he was orange and me mother she was green," slithers off the rocks, and wanders further

away down the beach, humming. Nothing like a tidepool for taking your mind off things, except maybe a

quiet spot of killing--

Walking the innocent stick alongside, matching its step to hers, she climbs back up the sandhills. Down the

other side in a rush, where it is dark and damp still, crashing through loose clusters of lupins. Dew sits in the

centre of each lupin-leaf, hands holding jewels to catch the sunfire until she brushes past and sends the jewels

sliding, drop by drop weeping off.

The lupins grow less; the marram grass diminishes into a kind of reedy weed; the sand changes by degrees

into mud. It's an estuary, where someone built a jetty, a long long time ago. The planking has rotted, and the

uneven teeth of the pilings jut into nowhere now.

It's an odd macabre kind of existence. While the nights away in drinking, and fill the days with petty killing.

Occasionally, drink out a day and then go and hunt all night, just for the change.

She shakes her head.

Who cares? That's the way things are now. (I care.)

She climbs a piling, and using the stick as a balancing pole, jumps across the gaps from one pile to the next

out to the last. There she sits down, dangling her legs, stick against her shoulder, and lights a cigarillo to

smoke away more time.

Intermittent wheezing flutes from oystercatchers.

at

The sound of the sea. A gull keening.

When the smoke is finished, she unscrews the top of the stick and draws out seven inches of barbed steel. It

fits neatly into slots

in the stick top.

"Now, flounders are easy to spear, providing one minds the toes." Whose, hers or the fishes', she has never bothered finding out. She rolls her jeans legs up as far as they'll go, and slips down into the cold water. She

steps ankle deep, then knee deep, and stands, feeling for the moving of the tide. Then slowly, keeping the

early morning sun in front of her, she begins to stalk, mind in her hands and eyes looking only for the puff of

mud and swift silted skid of a disturbed flounder.

All this attention for sneaking up on a fish? And they say we humans are intelligent? Sheeit...

and with a darting levering jab, stabbed, and a flounder flaps bloody holed at the end of the stick. Kerewin

looks at it with slow smiled satisfaction.

Goodbye soul wringing night. Good morning sinshine, and a fat happy day.

The steeled stick quivers.

She pulls a rolled-up sack from her belt and drops the fish, still weakly flopping, in it. She hangs the lot up by

sticking her knife through the sack neck into a piling side.

The water round the jetty is at thigh-level when she brings the third fish back, but there has been no hurry.

She guts the fish by the rising tide's edge, and lops off their heads for the mud crabs to pick. Then she lies

down in a great thicket of dun grass, and using one arm as a headrest and the other as a sunshade, falls quietly

asleep.

It is the cold that wakes her, and clouds passing over the face of the sun. There is an ache in the back of her

neck, and her pillowing arm is numb. She stands up stiffly, and stretches: she smells rain coming. A cloud of

midge-like flies blunders into her face and hair. On the ground round the sack hovers another swarm, buzzing

thinly through what would seem to be for them a fog of fish. The wind is coming from the sea. She picks up

the sack, and sets off for home through the bush. Raupo and fern grow into a tangle of gorse: a track appears

and leads through the gorse to a stand of wind warped trees. They are ngaio. One tree stands out from its

fellows, a giant of the kind, nearly ten yards tall.

Some of its roots are exposed and form a bowl-like seat. Kerewin sits down for a smoke, as she nearly always

does when she comes this way, keeping a weather eye open for rain.

In the dust at her feet is a sandal.

For a moment she is perfectly still with the unexpectedness of it.

Then she leans forward and picks it up.

It can't have been here for long because it isn't damp. It's rather smaller than her hand, old and scuffed, with

the position of each toe palely upraised in the leather. The stitching of the lower strap was coming undone,

and the buckle hung askew.

"Young to be running loose round here."

She frowns. She doesn't like children, doesn't like people, and has discouraged anyone from coming on her

land.

"If I get hold of you, you'll regret it, whoever you are--"

She squats down and peers up the track. There are footprints, one set of them. Of a sandalled foot and half an

unshod foot.

Limping? Something in its foot so that's why the sandal is taken off and left behind?

She rubs a finger inside the sandal. The inner sole was shiny and polished from long wearing and she could

feel the indentation of the foot. Well-worn indeed... in the heel though there is a sharpedged protrusion of

leather, like a tiny crater rim. She turns it over. There is a corresponding in driven hole in the rubber.

"So we jumped on something that bit, did we?"

She slings the sandal into the sack of flounders, and marches away belligerently, hoping to confront its

owner.

But a short distance before her garden is reached, the one and a half footprints trail off the track, heading

towards the beach.

Beaches aren't private, she thinks, and dismisses the intruder from her mind.

The wind is blowing more strongly when she pushes open the heavy door, and the sky is thick with dark

cloud.

"Storm's coming," as she shuts the door, "but I am safe inside--"

The entrance hall, the second level of the six-floored Tower, is low and stark and shadowed. There is a large

brass and wood crucifix on the far wall and green seagrass matting over the floor. The handrail of the spiral

staircase ends in the carved curved flukes of a dolphin; otherwise, the room is bare of furniture and ornament.

She runs up the stairs, and the sack drips as it swings.

"One two three aleary hello my sweet mere hell these get steeper daily, days of sun and wine and jooyyy,"

the top, and stop, breathless.

"Holmes you are thick and unfit and getting fatter day by day. But what the hell...."

She puts the flounders on bent wire hooks and hangs them in the coolsafe. She lights the fire, and stokes up

the range, and goes upstairs to the library for a book on flatfish cooking. There is just about everything in her

library.

A sliver of sudden light as she comes from the spiral into the booklined room, and a moment later, the distant

roll of thunder.

"Very soon, my beauty, all hell will break loose..." and her words hang in the stillness.

She stands over by the window, hands fistplanted on her hips, and watches the gathering boil of the surf

below. She has a curious feeling as she stands there, as though something is out of place, a wrongness

somewhere, an uneasiness, an overwatching. She stares morosely at her feet (longer second toes still longer,

you think they might one day grow less, you bloody werewolf you?) and the joyous relief that the morning's

hunting gave, ebbs away.