The Predictions (4 page)

Late one night, Nelly and I crept out to the orchard armed with a pencil and a stack of brown paper bags taken from the Gaialands fruit stall. Not the most romantic of notepaper, but it was either that or rip a page out of one of the novels on the schoolhouse bookshelf. Paper, like every
thing else that had to be bought from the outside world, was in short supply on the commune.

Nelly was so wound up that she couldn’t hold the pencil steady. She told me she’d had a crush on Timon for as long as she could remember—since she was four or five years old. “You write it,” she said, handing me the pencil.

“I can’t. I don’t even like him.”

“All that teasing—you know it’s just a front, eh? Underneath it, he’s a sweetheart.”

“He is?”

Nelly dictated, “Start with ‘Dear Timon’ . . .”

“This is weird.”

“You are.”

I wrote down the words.

“Put that you think he’s good at woodwork. That
I
think he is,” she said.

“But he’s hopeless at it. Remember that three-legged chair?”

“That’s not the point. He
wants
to be good at it.”

I was alarmed. “You’re going to lie?”

“Flattering a man is how you make him love you.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s obvious.”

It wasn’t obvious to me but I did as I was told and wrote it down, making sure my handwriting was neat but also a little different from how it usually was. “Do you want me to write that you love him?”

“Shit no,” Nelly said. “He’d run a mile.”

The next day, after breakfast, Nelly had posted the note
in Timon’s gumboot, one of dozens lined up in pairs along the porch. We were not allowed to wear them inside, eating barefoot, or in hand-knitted loose-fitting socks, one of the only items of clothing that wasn’t shared. The adults had, in the early days, shared socks, but in the wet winter months, foot fungus grew quicker than field mushrooms. For the same reason, no one shared gumboots either—or we tried not to. Most gumboots looked the same, and pairs often got mixed up by mistake, which is exactly what happened when Nelly tried to pick Timon’s out of the lineup. Several minutes later, she watched Hunter come out of the mess hut and push his big hairy foot into the gumboot with the note in it.

“Now what do I do?” asked Nelly, panic stricken.

“Nothing. With a bit of luck he won’t even find it.”

Days of dread followed. Nelly was sure everyone was looking at her, that everyone knew about the note, not just Hunter but Timon as well. I promised her that wasn’t the case.

“And was it the case?” said Shakti, interrupting.

“Not quite,” I said. “We were both wrong.”

“But the note triggered the meeting?”

I was enjoying her impatience, the power it gave me. “Yes,” I said. “But we didn’t find that out until right at the end. First, we had to sit through a sermon. You know what Hunter’s like.”

Shakti nodded. “I do.”

The meeting was in the chapel, a scrappy tin-roofed barn at the end of the chook run. We called it that because the seats in there were pews that had been salvaged from a derelict church in Coromandel town. I liked the pews. They were
solid, finely hewed, and had arrived on the commune with Bibles still slotted in the back, the first I’d ever seen. I had admired the fine vellum paper and marveled at how much text was squeezed onto each page. But after hippies and the nuclear family, the thing Hunter hated most in the world was religion. He ordered us to tear off the spines and use the soft vellum as toilet paper, which we did, without argument.

Hunter opened the meeting the way he opened every meeting, with a speech that went on for twenty-nine years. Lately these had been about oil shock and getting prepared for an economic collapse the following year, but on this occasion he went all the way back to Gaialands’s founding philosophy. He talked about how they had wanted to break away from mainstream society, the stifling conventions of the suburbs, white picket fences, meat and potatoes for dinner followed by cricket commentary on the wireless. Then he got around to the seven of us, how we were the first generation to be born at Gaialands and how special that made us. “You alone are unique among men—and women, of course,” he added.

“You have grown up with an unrivaled spirit of freedom that we have instilled in you from birth. To grow up outside the constraints of conventional society, liberated from the shackles of the nuclear family, well”—he paused for effect and looked at each of us in turn—“I don’t need to remind you how privileged that makes you.”

He was right that he didn’t need to remind us. We’d heard this speech so many times before that I sometimes fell asleep with his mantra ringing in my ears. We were privileged. The hope for the future! The chosen ones who would
lead humanity into a New Age of enlightenment. The Age of Aquarius is nigh!

I didn’t tell Shakti that at this point in the meeting, I had glanced over at Lukas, and he had done something he never had before: he rolled his eyes at me and mimed a yawn. It wasn’t his reaction that surprised me—we were all bored to death—but the fact that he had directed it at me, and not his best friend, Timon, who sat next to him, and with whom he most often shared his asides. I had smiled back to let him know I agreed with him and then I felt warm all over, as though I had moved out of the shade.

When I tuned in again to Hunter, he was still going strong. “You won’t have to unlearn bad habits, like we’ve had to. You’ll be free to love everybody the same—to give to your community, your planet, without putting your immediate family first. I believe this detachment will lead to a higher consciousness that will benefit the whole of mankind. The Aquarian Age is coming, and you are the ones who will lead us to a new world order.” He put his hand on his heart and took a deep breath. “What we’re about to reveal to the seven of you is something we swore we never would, but in light of recent events, we realize that we have to. My only hope is that the work we have done here has created a foundation that cannot be undone—that the seeds we have sown will bear fruit.”

Hunter stopped at this point and looked around the room again and I could have sworn he was nervous. “Stone the crows, this is difficult,” he said, looking down at his notes.

“Go on,” said Paul. “It’s now or never.”

“You’re right. Let’s get it over with, shall we?” In a loud voice, Hunter called out the names of the adults, one couple at a time, and asked them to stand in separate groupings along the low wooden platform. First, Susie and Katrina, then Tom and Loretta, then Paul and Sigi, and finally he called to Elisabeth to join him. When everyone was in place, he signaled to Tom and Loretta to shuffle closer to Susie and Katrina, forming a group of four. Tom, in this grouping, appeared content, almost smug, an expression that was ill matched by his wife’s one of discomfort.

For a few minutes they stood in silence.

“Oh my word,” Nelly whispered, “this is it.”

She had guessed but I hadn’t, not yet. Then Hunter called out my name and Fritz’s, and told us to come and stand next to him, and I did what I was told, stumbling up the short climb to the podium. When I turned around, I saw Fritz hadn’t followed me. He stood in his pew looking as defiant as ever. “Come on, Fritz, this is important,” said Hunter, summoning him with his hand.

“If it was so important, why didn’t you tell us ten years ago, or better still, when we were born?” Fritz had already guessed too; I felt so dense.

Hunter grimaced. He looked like he wanted to punch Fritz. “I acknowledge and honor your feelings, Fritz, but I’d like us to save any discussion until the end of the meeting.”

Fritz didn’t move. He did obstinate better than anyone else.

An edge crept into Hunter’s voice as he said, “Fritz. Get up here, now.”

I caught Fritz’s eye and silently pleaded with him.
C’mon. Don’t make me stand up here by myself.
This did the trick, and an audible sigh of relief went around the chapel when he shuffled to the podium.
This is bullshit,
his expression said as he quietly took his place.

Hunter called out to Lukas and Meg, the second youngest, to stand next to Sigi and Paul, and they did so obediently, Lukas with an air of resigned boredom. Sigi beamed at Meg, and then at Lukas, as though she had just won them in a raffle, and I noticed for the first time that Lukas and Meg’s sandy hair and freckled skin were identical to Sigi’s.

Next Hunter asked Timon, Nelly, and Ned to join the group of four that included Susie and Katrina. “Are you okay with this?” he said, directing his question at Tom and Loretta, the other couple with them.

“We don’t have any choice,” said Loretta, looking pale. “Just get it over with.”

Listening to Hunter call out names and watching everyone move to their places, I felt seasick, like I might fall over. We were about to find out who our parents were—were in fact already standing next to them—but instead of anticipation, joy, or excitement, I felt dread, as though we were all on a train that was about to go off the rails. Why were they doing this now? Had something gone wrong?

When I looked at Nelly, I knew what it was. She was white knuckled, staring at Timon. Had she fallen in love with her brother? He was part of her group, along with Ned, her twin, but it didn’t make sense that they were grouped with two couples—three women and Tom.

It was Tom who said, “For goddess’s sake, Hunter, get on with it!” He put his arm staunchly around Loretta. She was tight-mouthed, frozen.

Hunter was grave. “The people standing with you are your next of kin—your parents, your brothers and sisters, your children.” He paused, for effect, and grinned at me. “Hello, daughter.”

He pronounced the word “daughter” as though it were in a foreign language, and my first instinct was to flinch. This was horrible, a cruel joke. For seventeen years the adults had kept our parentage a secret. For as long as we could talk, we had been forbidden even from speculating and now they were undoing all that because they had changed their minds? I glared at the man who’d just told me he was my father, and I didn’t think I trusted a word that came out of his mouth.

I wasn’t the only one floundering to make sense of it all. Timon, who had been silent up to now, piped up. “What about us?” He swiveled to face Susie and Katrina and Loretta. “Which of these women is my mother?”

“I’m your father,” said Tom, proudly, “and your mother is”—he squeezed Loretta, who stood rigid by his side—“your mother is Katrina.”

Katrina smiled, sheepishly, and everyone stared at her, and then at Loretta because it didn’t make sense that Tom had fathered children with Katrina and not with his wife.

“Loretta can’t have children,” said Tom, as Loretta burst into tears. Everyone avoided looking at her, although she tried to smile bravely and said, “At least I’ve had a taste of
what it’s like to be a mother. That wouldn’t have happened outside the commune.”

Upon hearing of Loretta’s infertility, Shakti actually gasped. “That poor woman,” she said solemnly, placing her hand over her heart. “Imagine her pain.”

“I guess,” I said, though truthfully I couldn’t. The cause of Loretta’s pain was outside my realm of experience; at that point in the proceedings I had been more consumed with my own—and with Nelly’s. “Here’s where it gets really weird,” I said, enjoying Shakti’s spellbound expression.

Throughout the meeting, Nelly had been very quiet, but she was unable to contain herself any longer. “Timon can’t be my brother,” she burst out. “He looks nothing like me—or Ned!”

“That’s because he’s your half brother,” Susie had said calmly. “I gave birth to you and Ned.”

“My
half
brother?” repeated Nelly. “I don’t understand.”

“You and Timon have the same father,” said Tom, standing a few inches taller and grinning like a fool. “Me. We could scarcely believe it when Susie fell pregnant with twins.” For a moment he flushed with pride at having fathered a miracle, before remembering the poor barren woman standing next to him. Loretta had by this time stopped crying and was doing her best to appear not to care.

“I think you can guess why we had to tell you,” Hunter said, fishing a piece of paper out of his pocket and handing it to Nelly. “I believe this belongs to you.”

It was the love note.

“Oh, wow,” said Shakti. “That’s so dramatic. How did Nelly react?”

“She ran crying from the barn.”

“Poor girl.” Shakti shook her head. “I don’t understand how they could have been so naïve.”

“Who?”

“Your parents. I mean, what did they think would happen when you all hit puberty? That you’d just carry on playing cowboys and Indians and not try to have sex with each other?”

“No one’s done that.”

“Not yet.”

She was right. Our parents had been naïve. Even before the love note, things had been slowly changing, and the adults should have noticed sooner. We hadn’t, for example, showered together since we were about thirteen, when the gaze of one of the boys had lingered a little too long on the newly formed bumps on Nelly’s chest, and the tiny curls sprouting between her legs, and she had seen them looking and covered herself up for good. I was older than her but a late bloomer and even though I had nothing to cover up, I did the same. As did Meg, and then the boys, bringing to an abrupt end the rowdy soap and water fights we had enjoyed since we were little.

“Was that the end of the meeting?” Shakti asked. “Or was there more?”

“Hunter tried to tell us that nothing would change because they didn’t want it to. He thought we could all just carry on as before, as though we hadn’t just found out they
had been lying to us for seventeen years. He said to try and remember our beliefs—”

“You mean
his
beliefs,” said Shakti.

“Yes,” I said, with dawning recognition, though I wasn’t quite sure yet of what. “
His
beliefs.”

“What about the other adults? How did they behave?”

I opened my mouth to speak and found myself choking up. “Some of the parents, like Sigi, tried to turn back the clock. Now that her children knew she was their mother, she expected to have a special bond with them. She wanted to be close. Meg was okay with that for a while but Lukas went the other way—he didn’t want anything to do with her.”