The Predictions (23 page)

“Did the police ever find out anything about what happened to Fritz?”

“No,” said Loretta. “In fact, we’ve been thinking about holding a memorial. Not a funeral, as such, but something that means we can all get a bit of closure.”

Paul nodded in agreement. “We ought to put that poor boy to rest.”

Loretta glanced at Hunter, gauging his reaction, as she said, “It’s been ten years now.”

Hunter fidgeted a little in his seat but said nothing.

“We thought about asking one of the local
Kaumatua
for
a
karakia
,” said Katrina. “To bless his spirit on the journey to the next world.”

“Keep those old codgers out of it,” said Hunter. “He wasn’t a bloody Maori.”

Tom raised his hand. “I’m with Hunter. The last time we got the elders involved, they told us this land was
tapu
.”

“Maybe it is,” said Susie. “Maybe we shouldn’t be here.”

“Nonsense,” said Hunter. “When we bought this piece of land in 1961, there was nothing here. Now look at it—we’ve turned it into a slice of paradise.”

“Open your eyes,” said Katrina. “Your slice of paradise took one of our boys. Mother earth is angry!”

Hunter scoffed. “Gaia isn’t angry with us! We look after her. Everything we take from her, we give back tenfold.”

“Here we go again,” said Susie. “The patriarchy claims to know what’s best for mother earth!”

Several of the women laughed at Susie’s put-down of Hunter. They didn’t seem to put up with so much shit anymore but they certainly doled it out.

“What do you think, Poppy?” said Loretta. “Should we have a ceremony?”

“I don’t know.” I had been very quiet all evening but now everyone was looking in my direction, waiting for me to elaborate. “It would be nice to see the other kids—that is, if we could find them.”

“There’s a lot to consider, a lot to think about,” said Susie. “So here’s what we’ll do.” She put her fingers together to make a steeple and looked around the group to make sure she had everyone’s attention. “In a week’s time we’ll
hold a
hui
in the meetinghouse and try to reach a consensus.”

In the old days, a meeting was a meeting, but now it was a
hui
, after the Maori word, which had been adopted by liberal Pakeha. Was Susie the new leader of the commune? She was acting like one, albeit in a different, less masculine style.

Rain spilled from the mess-hut roof in sheets, and I huddled under the eaves with Zachary, waiting for a break that was long enough to risk dashing across the field to our cabin. The rain showed no signs of easing up—if anything it was getting heavier, more persistent. There was no way around it. If we wanted to go anywhere, we would have to get soaked. I said my good night to the assembled adults and ran out with Zachary sheltered in the lee of my shoulder, covering the top of his head with my hand. In the cabin, I toweled him off and dressed him in dry clothes, while I stood shivering in my wet ones and dripping water on the sea-grass matting. I understood now why airplane safety cards instructed passengers to put on their own oxygen masks first. What they really meant by “passengers” was “mothers.”

From the far corner of the room came the steady dripping of water on tin, and I noticed that someone had placed a pot underneath the leak in the roof. The cabin was lined with plywood, except that it wasn’t really a lining, because it was the only layer separating us from the great outdoors. As a result it was just as soggy inside as out, and I longed to be back within the solid, dry brick walls of our London flat. But that life was over now. I had defied the prediction one too many times and my punishment had been Lukas’s betrayal.

Gaialands

1989

F
OR THE NEXT SEVENTEEN
days straight, the rain came down, sometimes by the bucket, other times in drizzle so fine that it hung in the air, too light to drop to the ground. On days of mild rain, it was better for the soul to pretend there was none, and to go about business as though it was fine, ignoring wet hair, dank skin, soggy clothes, clammy bedding. We had learned this trick as children to make long spells of bad weather more bearable, and I resorted to it, instinctively, on about day eight or nine. But by day thirteen, when I had run out of disposable nappies and the cloth ones wouldn’t dry, and Zachary’s bum was red and raw with diaper rash, his crib sheets spotted with mildew, I was having a hard time keeping up the pretense and had succumbed to the waterlogged blues.

On the eighteenth day, I awoke to the rattle of birdsong in the trees around the cabin, and opened my eyes to a world blanched in weak, milky sunlight, no drizzle. I dressed
quickly and bundled Zachary into a makeshift sling, anxious to get out before the weather changed. I would feed him outdoors, where he could listen to the birds while he slurped. It was very early but a light was on in the kitchen. Someone was getting breakfast ready. I needed to borrow gumboots and slid my feet into the only pair on the porch. They were too big—my feet mooned around inside and rubber slapped my calves as I walked—but it was better than getting my feet wet or ruining my expensive London loafers.

I planned to cross the stream at the end of the orchard, then walk a little way up Mount Aroha to a clearing with a bench seat that caught the morning sun. But I got as far as the creek, which had swollen to a river, the trees at the edge of it submerged up to their lower boughs and netting driftwood and debris. Nothing remained of the little swing bridge that usually crossed the stream, not even the wooden platforms that bookended each side. I did not remember flooding like this, water licking the plum trees at the edge of the orchard.

Beyond the orchard, the newly hatched river flowed into the forest and through a gully where the banks on either side were steep and crisscrossed with bracken. There was a path through the forest that ran alongside it, but higher up, and that was the path I took with Zachary, stopping after about ten minutes to sit and feed him on a low, moss-covered log. Water from the log soaked into the backside of my pants, but I barely noticed it. I would have sat cross-legged in a puddle if that had been the only place available in which to feed him. Along with a lot of other
things I swore I’d never be, I was becoming one of those mothers who took pride in her martyrdom.

After being cooped up for weeks in the various huts and shared spaces of the commune, it was nice to be alone, or at least alone with Zachary, who didn’t mind if I stopped talking to him, so long as his tummy was full. For weeks, I had seethed privately with anger and confusion over the picture of Lukas and Fran, but over time those emotions had burned off, and what was left behind felt very much like grief.

Zachary bounced up and down in the sling as I walked. He seemed to like the motion, and his eyes slid drunkenly closed. We had come to the edge of the forest, to the clearing that fell away to the sea in scraggly grass-covered cliffs. It was a place of disagreeable memories: the humiliation of being made by Shakti to strip off, and that awful rising anguish when Fritz didn’t come out of the forest after rotten egg. I did not wish to linger and soon found the still well-worn track that led down to the beach. As kids we had loved this bay, spending whole days here with little more than a bag of apples between us.

The geography of the beach was so altered as to be barely recognizable. Where normally the creek sputtered out across the sand in rivulets, a wide, rippling current flooded the paddocks bordering the beach and then lurched toward the sea. It cut the beach in half, making the far side of the bay inaccessible without wading across it. But the thing that caught my eye was pushed up against a tree in the swampy field in the middle of the bay. From this distance, it looked
like a cubby house or a toolshed, though I didn’t remember there ever being one down here, on the beach.

All morning, Zachary had been light in my arms but he was starting to feel like a dead weight, pulling down on my back and shoulders. Halfway to the shed, or whatever it was, I thought about turning back but I soldiered on. Something about it was intriguing, perhaps the way it listed to one side, or the fact that the closer I got, the more familiar it seemed. I had almost walked right up to it before I recognized what it was—not a shed but a caravan, Shakti’s old caravan. The wheels had shorn off and it was buried up to its axis in clotted, buttery mud, but otherwise it was more or less intact, the moon and stars still painted down the side.

What the heck was it doing on the beach—and not in Auckland or wherever Shakti had taken it? It made no sense. The last time I had seen the caravan, Shakti and her friend Marcia, with the cloud of hair, had been towing it away from Gaialands behind a rusty beige station wagon. No one had thought they would get very far, but even in a four-wheel drive they would never have made it here. The beach was inaccessible by road. How else could it have got down here? The women had left Gaialands ten years ago at least, though apparently Shakti had been back to visit Hunter since then. All manner of things had been swept away in the recent floods—the bridge over the creek, for one—and debris littered the beach, including a few large trees. Had it washed up here on its own? The corners of it
did
look battered, as though it had been tossed about in a rough sea, then thumped in the side with what might have been an overhanging branch or two . . .

I gave up wondering how the caravan had arrived on the beach and focused instead on trying to open the door. It rattled a little but wouldn’t budge. Either it was locked or wedged shut, so I went around the side of the caravan to look in one of the tiny windows. The glass had popped out but I peered inside, careful to avoid any jagged edges. My first impression was of wreckage: broken glass, smashed crockery, mud, and wet cloth. But slowly, the outlines of objects emerged: a bulbous orange pot with a wooden handle, a few damp books and candle stumps, a sprig of something that might once have been lavender. Considering how long it had been abandoned, and its possibly violent journey to the beach, it could have been in worse shape.

I tried the door again. It was locked, but on one side of the frame, a few hinges were coming loose, and I found a sturdy-looking branch to prize it open with. In his sling, Zachary mewled to signal he was waking up. A sour smell was coming from his nappy but it would have to wait until we got back. I hadn’t anticipated we would roam this far, or be out this long, and hadn’t brought anything to change him with. I chatted to him for a moment to soothe him, silly words that mothers say to their babies when no one else is around, and Zachary hummed and gurgled back in a code only I understood. I hadn’t known before about this covert language, the way even the smallest baby could tell his mother, and only his mother, what was wrong.

Shakti had cleaned out most of her belongings at the time of abandoning the caravan; that much was clear when I stepped carefully inside. Everything that was left behind
had been drenched at one time or another and was now in various stages of decay. There were ruined paintbrushes; glass jars stained with paint; a china teapot that had split in two, one half with a spout, the other with a handle. Nothing much was salvageable. Water puddled on the corkboard floor.

Near one end of the caravan, where Shakti had slept on a small platform behind batik curtains—now reduced to matted, moldering rags—there was an upturned cardboard box with a pile of wet notebooks and paper spilling out of it. Holding Zachary close, I made my way gingerly toward it, testing each portion of the spongy floorboards as I went. When I reached the platform, I sat down next to the box and took off the sling, resting Zachary on a section of the mattress that was relatively clean and dry. Released from confinement, he flung up his arms, arched his back, and pointed his toes, a comical routine that was an exaggerated version of someone stretching. When I grabbed his foot and pretended to eat it, he giggled. “Ub-bub-bub-bub-bub,” I said, and Zachary replied: “Oowaah oowaah,” a noise that denoted enthusiasm.

Most of the bits of paper inside the box were covered in washed-out pencil sketches, not easily decipherable, but as I flicked through them, I gradually started to recognize a few of the motifs. Here were a man and woman holding hands, drawn in a simple, childish style, and another showed a picture of a tree like the one that had been in Fritz’s prediction. My heart sank at the sight of it, and I reached into the box for another sheaf of paper. There were drawings of a tiny little
crib, and another of a teeny tiny coffin. There was the wording from my prediction, next to variations:
barren, childless, infertile.
A child that is born won’t live.

How many different versions could there be? I had always thought Shakti was the deliverer of the predictions and not their creator, but for the first time I considered the possibility that she had made up their contents. Not only that, but I saw how much deliberation had gone into her work, as if she had been trying to achieve a particular outcome, or had set out to manipulate our fate. But
why
she would interfere like that was beyond me. As if in answer to my question, a flash of light tore through the caravan, and from way off in the distance came the long, low rumble of thunder, the storm returning, in greater force. We would have to hurry back to avoid getting soaked, or worse, getting struck by lightning. I folded Zachary into the sling and hoisted it over my head, took a moment to check he was settled comfortably, then glanced around to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind. At the last possible second, my eye caught on something hairy in the bottom of the box, a dead animal, a possum or a bush rat. It was the color of sand, with darker and lighter patches, pepper and salt, not an animal but—what was it? To get a better look, I pulled aside the paper that covered it.

It wasn’t hair-y—it
was
hair. Human hair. Swatches of it, in different shades, separated in places by elastic bands but mostly just mussed together. I had the odd sensation of looking at something very familiar but not recognizing it, and then, in the next moment, knowing exactly what it was. I saw some of that hair every day. It was mine.

What was my hair doing in this box? I tried to make sense of it, and remembered long ago waking up in the children’s hut to the sound of scissors, and then seeing Shakti, instrument in hand.
Shakti had cut off a chunk of my hair.
She had brought it to her caravan and tied it with an elastic band and then what had she done with it? I tried to stay calm, rational, but there was nothing rational about collecting people’s hair. It was creepy, unhinged, the action of a psycho.

A gust of rain blew through the open window of the caravan, cold droplets that I didn’t want to get caught in, not with Zachary. It was time to head off, but I was rooted to the spot, determined to find an explanation for the hair. I grabbed the nearest book—an astrology tome—and prized apart a few soggy pages. It was filled with finely printed charts, circular diagrams, zodiac symbols, weird equations, and maps of the constellations, but no witching spells or instructions for how to make a voodoo doll. The book underneath it held more of the same.

Lightning cracked the sky, followed by a roll of thunder, right above our heads this time. I scrambled for the door, forgetting, in my haste, to tread gently on the rotten corkboard, which gave way, under my gumboot, as though it was week-old Madeira cake. I sank past the knee into a dark, glutinous hole. By some miracle, my other leg had folded gracefully underneath me and I had put out my hands in front of me to stop the fall. I thought it was a lucky escape but then Zachary wailed, and my heart lurched wildly as I checked to see if he was okay. He appeared to be all right, not a scratch, but he was still crying and in my panic, I thought he was hurt,
until I realized the pain I could feel was coming from my own leg. I looked down. I couldn’t see anything. But then I slowly eased my leg out of the hole, and it came out minus the gumboot. I had scraped the skin off my kneecap, and the area was pooling with blood. I searched for something to dab it up with and grabbed a mildewed T-shirt out of a nearby plastic bag that was bursting with old damp clothes. On my knee, the cloth turned red, and when I lifted it up, I saw the cut was a proper gash, much deeper than it had at first seemed. But there was no time to worry about that. No one knew where we were or was coming to get us. The only way back was to walk. I tied the T-shirt around my leg and stood up. The gumboot was fairly well embedded, but after a couple of tugs it came out sloshing, and I tipped it upside down while a foul brown liquid trickled out.

It was raining pretty hard by now, and I had to walk hunched over to shelter the baby. I was worried about being out in the open, where lightning might strike us, but staying in the caravan, which had floated once and could float again, out to sea, didn’t seem too sensible either. Zachary appeared to understand that things weren’t going too well for us and added to the vibe with a constant high-pitched squawk. I tried not to think about the noise or the pain coming from my leg or the water that was dripping on us from all directions and focused instead on marching forward up the cliff, through the forest, through the orchard, across the paddock, one foot in front of the other until my gumboot hit the porch steps of our cabin.

Inside, I laid Zachary on the bed while I stripped off my
wet clothes. He was comparatively dry but shrieking with such intensity that anyone would think he was dying. In my underwear, shivering, I sat on the edge of the bed and jammed a breast into his mouth, cutting him off mid-shriek. Red faced and thrashing, he continued to grunt angrily even as he gulped down milk, letting me know how furious he was that he’d had to wait.