The Bone People (26 page)

the drink carefully into his father's hair and the man shrieks in surprise.

"Oath tama!" scrambling to his feet and grabbing for his son.

She stiffens. You hit him and I'll drop you like a log.

But Joe is smiling, and Simon ducks behind Kerewin giggling wildly, and whichever way Joe swings to catch

him, dives the other way.

"When you two jokers have finished using me as a maypole in your catch-as-can, we might get some tea and

tucker," says Kerewin plaintively.

They went on into the McKenzie country.

"Over there, there's Simon's Pass," says Kerewin.

"O? Simon's Pass?"

Joe looks at Simon. Simon says nothing.

"Who was this Simon anyway?"

"I don't know. All I've ever found out was, he was a Maori boy whistling down to

who rode a white horse called Dover."

"Evocative."

"Yeah... whenever we came this way as kids, my mother would say, There's Simon's Pass, we're nearly there,

and when we asked who Simon was, that's what she'd say."

"Are we nearly there, then?"

"Not berloody likely. That was just to shut us up."

The sun's come out again.

When they came out of the high country, they'd been enclosed in mist and greyness.

The cold seeped into the car, the dampness into their spirits, and they'd driven in silence.

But here, back by the sea again, it's light and warm.

"Let's stop," suggests Joe. "Boil a tea, maybe look around a few minutes?"

Kerewin glances at him.

"You're not in any hurry to get there?"

"You are?" he counters. "I mean, we got three weeks."

She grins.

"Okay..." the car is already slowing, ". . . what's the matter with Sim? Flu still getting at him?"

I think I know, but we say nothing. Yet.

"Carsick," says Joe, and the boy stirs. He is white and quiet. He looks at her and nods.

"Hell's bells, why didn't you say so before?"

"O, he'll be all right. He's always like it. Some fresh air and some fresh tea'll put life back into him. That's why I suggested the stop."

She shakes her head wonderingly. "I must say I like the lack of fuss. Every other kid I've known, and that

includes self, is yelping I-wanna-cat as soon as they feel remotely queasy. It's the fun of having the car stop,

or seeing your parents turn green. Very civilised, boy, very stoical, but if you had yelled we could have fixed

the queasiness hours ago."

She pulls off the road near a solitary pine. "More blight," morosely, but brightens, "We can use the bugger for firing, though."

She has set up a waterheater and loaded it with pineneedles and bark by the time the man and his child are

out of the car.

"Only thing wrong with yer average pine... soot. It fouls up the smokestack of this thing remarkably,"

popping a small twig down with great cheerfulness.

Her waterheater is shaped into two parts, cylinder on top of cone. Fill the cylinder with water, feed anything

flammable down the narrow top of the cone and away she goes. The fire is protected: the water heats fast.

The black smoke disappears: pale flames dance at the mouth of the firehole.

"Ready in a minute... e boy, go look in that blue canvas satchel on the back seat, and you'll find a small

bottle... wait a moment, you'll find a lot of small bottles. Better bring the whole bag to me." In an aside to

Joe, "I been waiting to try this goop out for years," leering fiendishly as she says it.

He smiles. "Sometimes you're very nice," he says enigmatically, and she has time to think about that before the child comes back with her bag.

The bottles are all gillsized or smaller, and contain oils or powders or pale liquids.

She pours a spoonful of liquid from one into a cup of cold water.

"Drink it slowly," and the child swallows it, obediently slow.

Sometimes Sim, you're too damn trusting.

"What is it?" Joe has knelt down, with his arms round the boy.

"Aha." She's watching Simon closely. "It's a patented Holmes mixture. Herb extracts and things. Incidentally, I have tried it on myself, and it doesn't taste too bad."

"I'd say it even works," he says a minute later. The colour is coming back into the boy's face. "What herbs?

We could make a million, eh."

"Distillations of mint, koromiko tips, manuka inner bark, and a little of the wicked weed... I don't think so. It takes too much time to gather and brew if you were doing it commercially. OK just for yourself, though. It's

effective for period pains and flu-type nausea, so I figured it might work on carsickness too."

He uses one hand to sort through the little bottles, still holding onto the boy with the other.

"Bit mysterious, your labels... what's Morph, and Wit Haz? Or Unhappy Sun Bum's Oil for goodness' sake?"

"Aw come on, they're all obvious. Work 'em out."

But she hustles the bottle back into the satchel quickly.

"You okay now?" and Simon gives her a thumbs up sign. "Right. We'll have some tea, and then get on the road again. You want to drive this last stretch, Joe?"

"Not unless you're tired. I'll hold him, and we'll contemplate the scenery. He's less likely to feel sick again that way."

"I'll believe you. I've never been travel sick, car, ship, train or plane. Though I haven't tried elephants or

camels yet. Or flying saucers or carpets, come to that."

"There's always a first time, scoffer. I thought I was immune until I took a canoe trip one Waitangi Day

regatta. O sweet Lord was I glad when the canoe tipped, and I could decently and secretly puke in the water."

"Urk for the other swimmers... or did they all drown?"

"Waikato's a fast river... besides there were quite a few of us feeling off colour. I think it was the mussels

beforehand, they might've been bad... could've been the couple of half g's I had though, or that hunk of pork.

Or the kinas, or the--"

"You hungry, man? Well, endure. It's only another forty miles to home sweet home and tea."

There was a wide bay, so wide that the hills to the north were purple and hazy in the late afternoon sun. There

was a small town, a straggle of houses and cribs, with a fishing fleet and store as reasons to unite them.

They passed it by.

There were rounded greenish hills that grew flax and scrawny windbeaten bushes in their gullies. There were

beaches covered in grey sand and beaches clothed in ochre golden gravel.

And there was the sea.

She let the car drift round the corner, revving so it corrected the slide into a turn after a judicious wheel twist.

"Sheeit! They've made a road out of it."

Joe bit his lip.

It doesn't look much like a road. A double rut of loose shingle, and thistles growing up the middle hump.

Ramshackle wire fences drooped on either side, almost overpowered by weeds.

"Kerewin says we're nearly there, sleepyhead," and the child yawns, and sits up in his lap.

There is a clump of macrocarpa shadowing the next bend in the ruts. A small neat house stands to the left,

and two old dog kennels under the shade of the trees, with a cattlebeast skull between them.

"Ned Pita's place," says Kerewin. "Now, there always used to be," and she brakes hard. Two steers loom in front of them, out from the shadow of the trees. "Bloody normal, nothing's changed," and to Joe, she sounds relieved, as though she expects everything to be different.

One beast breaks into a sharp trot, heading down the hill, and the other turns and baws mournfully, head up.

She edges the car at the steer, and it backs off, swinging its head side to side, favouring first one foreleg then

the other in an uneasy retreat. There's a lot of cattle around. They stand in blank-eyed clusters, except for the

beast trotting away in front. She accelerates, and the animal speeds to a rocking gallop, flinging its tail high.

"Stuhupid beast," snarling at it as though it caused her personal offence. It finally swerves to the side, its barrel heaving after the effort.

"Fences down, I take it?"

"Fences mainly non-existent. It's poor hard land to farm."

They're cruising down the last stretch of track. It winds to the beach. A cluster of baches in the hill-hollow to

the left, and three against the right. In front, there is another line of cribs right on the beach, and beyond

them, the grey Pacific.

"This is it. This is home."

She stops the car by an ochre-coloured bach at the end of the beachline,. by the shelter of a massive thicket of

African thorn. She gets out, and stretches her arms high about her head, weaving her body back and forth

under her stiff shoulders. She drops her arms suddenly, throws back her head and screams,

"YAAAHEEEAAAA!" and runs on to the beach.

Joe looks at Simon.

"Sea air," he says mildly to the child, who is staring at the running woman in disbelief.

She's standing on the orangegold shingle, arms akimbo, drinking the beach in, absorbing sea and spindrift,

breathing it into her dusty memory. It's all here, alive and salt and roaring and real. The vast cold ocean and

the surf breaking five yards away and the warm knowledge of home just up the shore.

"Ahh," she sings wordlessly, hugging herself, oblivious of the two behind her. She stamps her feet in the

shingle, bends down and throws off her boots, and stamps again, bare feet tensing against the damp cold

stones.

"I am back!" she calls in a high wild voice, "I am here!"

The wind blows more strongly it seems, and a larger breaker than the ones before comes crashing down in

front of the woman and sends long white fingers speeding towards her. The foam curls round her ankles and

Kerewin cries aloud with joy.

"O Thou art beyond all good but truly this land and sea is your dwelling place--"

She spins round, dancing herself round, spreading her arms wide in a welcome, her eyes alight.

Tendrils of her joy and possession steal to them, and the man runs across the gap calling, "Tihe mauriora!"

and Kerewin laughs and holds him and hongis. And the child runs into them both, literally, blind in his need

to be with them.

She picks him up, and holds him one-handed on her hip.

"Tihe mauriora to you too, urchin."

One arm still round Joe's shoulders: they are knit together by her arms. She can feel their heart beats echo and

shake through her.

She says softly, but clearly above the thunder and swash of the sea,

"Welcome to my real home. For now it is your home too."

Nobody says anything for minutes.

Aue, if only we could stay like this, thinks Joe, and at the other side Simon stares down at the nearby waves

with no fear at all.

Then Kerewin shakes her head and says, "O berloody oath, can you see my boots round here anywhere?"

"That big sea," she adds thoughtfully, and puts Simon down on his feet, and unlinks her arm from Joe. She

grins to the child, "Tuppence a sock boy, and a shilling a boot, shall I translate?"

He grins back, shaking his head. Nothing for nothing, his hands making noughts and circles in the air.

They find one sock, sodden and sandcovered.

"Well, the sea'll give the rest back," she says resignedly. "Or it won't, as the case may be. I prefer going barefooted anyway."

"May you what?" asks Joe, watching Simon. The boy crouches, and unbuckles a sandal, and looks at his

father again.

"O sure, if you want to. It's your feet."

He-ell, watching the child take off his sandals and socks, now there is a thing about childhood I had forgot.

Imagine having to ask whether you can go barefoot or not--

But she remembers similar requests and prohibitions now, from twenty years and more back. "The childhood

years are the best years of your life--" Whoever coined that was an unmitigated fuckwit, a bullshit artist

supreme. Life gets better the older you grow, until you grow too old of course.

Simon stands, walks round, grimaces.

Cold and hard, the gravel under your tender unaccustomed feet?

"Yeah," aloud, Kerewin the unsympathetic, grinning like a hyena, "bit hard on the soles until you're used to it eh... o, and a warning for you. See that thorn bush?"

The thicket rears behind them, a livid green impenetrable mass, studded with wicked-looking pale spikes.

"Walk wary of it. There's bits and pieces of it strewn all over the beach. You stand on a hunk, and you'll think the splinter you got a while back, nothing, nothing at all. Okay? Watch where you're going, especially near

the bushes."

Joe says, "Somehow I find the idea of shoes extremely appealing. It's winter, remember you fellas? Kerewin,

look at your feet. They're turning blue for goodness' sake." Her toes have gone a dull bruised-looking pink.

"It is a bit chill," admitting it with reluctance. "I suppose we better get a fire going... c'mon, I'll unlock a bach or two, and we can settle in."

She tells them, "We own five of these baches, all of us owning them, not anyone separately."

"What if some of your people turn up and want a bach?"

"Well, we'll only be using two. Besides," she shrugs, "I sent a telegram saying I would be here until the middle of June. That'll keep them away."

The two baches she opens squat next to one another, an iron boatshed between them. They are roughcast

buildings, one supplied with electricity, the other heated by an old coal range. Small, neat as the inside of

ships, with that compact air of a cabin, the baches contain a minimum of furniture.

"That one is known as the New Bach," she says, pointing to the ochre crib next to the thorn bush, "because we acquired it last of all. This one," over the small footbridge past the boatshed, "is called the Old Bach because we got it first. We're fairly pedestrian with names here."