The Predictions (5 page)

“Ah, Lukas,” said Shakti. “Doomed to fall in love with unavailable women.”

I wondered how she could have drawn that conclusion about Lukas from what I had told her, but she didn’t explain, and I didn’t ask.

“As far as I know, he’s never had a girlfriend.”

Shakti smiled, beguilingly, and got up to boil the kettle for a second pot of tea, refreshing the tea leaves with scalding water. “I don’t suppose Elisabeth was all over you and Fritz,” she said, settling across the table from me again. “But I could be wrong.”

“She wasn’t.” In fact, if anything, Elisabeth had been even more aloof than usual, barricading herself in the kitchen and bottling enough fruit to last through half a dozen winters. “And Hunter stuck to his word, too.”

Shakti shook her head and sighed. “That must have been a confusing time for everyone.”

Confusing and raw. That night, after the meeting, was the only time in the history of Gaialands that anyone forgot to sound the cowbell for dinner. But the worst part had been the crying that came at night from the adults’ huts. There were loud male voices, slamming doors, and at breakfast the next morning, red eyes and silence. In the daytime, the women neglected their chores or went about them at a slower pace than usual. Over in the workshop, the men shouted and cursed at their machinery. When the combustion engine that Hunter had been working on failed, he exploded in a fit of rage.

None of this was talked about openly among the seven of us kids, but it was silently agreed upon that we would not allow ourselves to be drawn into whatever catastrophe had overcome the adults. We achieved this by spending more time on our own, taking tents and camping at the base of Mount Aroha for several nights, inventing reasons to hitch, in groups of two or three, into Coromandel town. We grew even closer than we had been before.

Then one day, to our relief, it all stopped. Normality was restored. The majority of the adults ceased trying to be mothers and fathers and went back to behaving like the group of caring but slightly detached parents they had always been. They must have had some sort of discussion among themselves but if they did, we were not party to it. We experienced this as a kind of victory. By getting the adults to back off, we had won, and I thought it served them right. We had become the thing they had engineered us to be: a generation of kids who loved everyone the same, who had no favorites among the men and women who had raised them.

I didn’t say any of this to Shakti, but in my opinion if the adults didn’t like the way we had turned out, that wasn’t our fault. It was theirs.

From off in the distance, the cowbell sounded for dinner. I hadn’t realized it but for the last few minutes, I had been staring out the window of Shakti’s caravan, lost in thought, and only dimly aware of what she had been doing. I saw now that she had gathered up the cards with the strange hieroglyphics. She was shuffling through them, studying what she had drawn. Seeing her do that reminded me that I had forgotten to ask for the thing I had come here to request.

“You know how you’ve been compiling everyone’s astrology charts?” I began.

“I was,” said Shakti. “But I’m starting to think you folks might need something stronger.”

“Stronger?”

“To shift the energy around here.”

I had no idea what she meant.

“Whatever it is, it’s going to have to involve all of you—the adults, but also the kids. Maybe a . . .
ritual
of some sort.” At the word “ritual” her eyes lit up. “Yes, a cleansing ritual,” she repeated. “Or a rite of passage.” She had risen from her seat and was busy going through a set of drawers that were built under the kitchen bench. “Or maybe something that combines the two.” She pulled out folders tied with string and sheaves of loose paper, and a few well-worn hardback books.

“Tell the others I’ll be late for dinner,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll get Elisabeth to keep a plate warm for you.”

Much as I wanted to stay, I knew I had been dismissed. I had been in Shakti’s caravan for hours, and I was exhausted and hungry after so much talking. It had been a relief to unburden myself, but as I wandered away from the stand of willows where her caravan was parked, I also had the uneasy feeling that I had gotten caught up in the moment and said too much.

On my way to the mess hut for dinner, I passed the ruins of an old wooden fence that had once functioned as a kind of playpen when the seven of us were little. The space it enclosed was large and grassy and shaded by trees, and there had always been two or three adults stationed inside it with us. They had built it, I supposed, to shield us from the many hazards to be found on a working farm—silage pits and machinery and exuberant bulls—but also to prevent us from wandering into the creek.

Inevitably, the day arrived that we were more interested in climbing out of the enclosure than staying inside it, and it was a memory from this era that assaulted me on my way to dinner that night.

I would have been about three or four. I had climbed to the top of the wooden fence post, whereupon I stood up and turned around and proudly waved to the other children. One of the women shrieked and ran toward me, shouting. The noise and the expression on her face frightened me and I tried to shuffle away from her, toppling backward—or maybe it was forward—and hitting the ground with a crunch.
The next din came from me, screaming and yelling and tears. One of the women picked me up and comforted me, folding her arms around me and drying my eyes with the hem of her dress. She did this to soothing effect, but only for a moment before I was prized out of her arms by one of the other women. The faces of these women have blended together to form a single motherly presence, and the same is true of all my early childhood memories. What I remember most clearly is the first woman’s tears and the firm voice of the other woman as she said, “You can’t do that—it isn’t your turn.”

After the conversation with Shakti, the memory took on a note of desolation. I had always thought the adults were united in the way they had brought us up in a litter, like puppies, but that wasn’t the case, not even close. At every stage, there had been disagreements and doubts and at least one of the women had tried to buck the rules.

Gaialands

1978

I
VISITED SHAKTI’S CARAVAN
on my own one last time that spring. I was still disappointed that she hadn’t offered to do my astrology chart, and when I finally summoned the courage to ask her outright, she refused.

“All that is irrelevant now,” she said, gathering up the growing pile of cards she had been embellishing with ink and watercolor. “I’m working on something bigger. It’s really going to shift a few paradigms—yours included.”

“Is that what the cards are for?”

“Eventually.”

“Can I see one?”

Shakti hesitated. “You can look at this one, but the drawing isn’t finished and I haven’t written the words to go with it.” She handed me a card festooned with symbols around the central figure of a woman. “This prediction is for a girl,” she said. “These symbols here represent fertility, and these ones here mean love.”

“Why are there so many of them?”

“Because the girl is destined to have many children and always be loved. She’s very fortunate. I see great harmony in her future.”

The woman in the card was little more than a stick figure in a dress, and a bright childlike sun shone down on her. I hoped it was my prediction but the fact that she’d let me see it meant it was more likely to be for someone else. “Do we all get one of those?”

Shakti took the card from my hand and shuffled it back into the pile. “All will be revealed.”

She poured me a thimble of tea, which tasted bitter, as though it had brewed for too long. Across the table, I noticed Shakti had half a dozen long hairs growing around her nipples and tufts of kinky hair sprouting from her armpits. I didn’t have that yet, and thought how strange and furry that must feel.

Shakti caught me studying her and said, “Have you ever gone nude? It’s so freeing to be in the world in your natural state.”

The question alone made the skin on my neck grow hot. “Not since I was a child.”

“It could be good for you to do it again. Empowering.”

“You mean embarrassing.”

“Embarrassment is just another name for fear. What are you afraid of?”

I felt put on the spot. “I don’t know.”

“Trust me,” she said. “You will feel so liberated. Think of it as a rite of passage to womanhood. You don’t want to be stuck in childhood forever do you?”

“I guess not.”

I had not, in my mind, agreed to anything, but Shakti seemed to think I had, and proceeded to come up with a plan that involved a dawn meditation the very next morning, before anyone else on the commune was up. I tried telling her that someone on the commune was always up before you were, but she thought I’d meant it as a joke and didn’t realize I was genuinely worried about being seen.

I did not sleep much that night, but none of my fretting and worrying resulted in a watertight excuse to withdraw. At dawn, Cowboy the rooster crowed his daily lament, and I climbed out of bed, resigned to my fate.

We had arranged to meet at the far edge of the forest just before sunrise and I was already late. Shakti had suggested coming to our sleeping hut to wake me, but I had told her not to because I didn’t want any of the others to notice I had gone. Even before I went into the orchard, I looked behind me to make sure no one was following. Tiptoeing through the woods, I tried to psych myself up for what was in store by remembering I had run around naked as a child all the time. Before the age of thirteen, the seven of us had stripped off in front of one another without a second thought, had spent whole summers bare-bummed and carefree on the beach. All I had to do was channel that same nonchalance and I would be fine. But cutting through the woods, following a path so familiar that I could navigate it in the dark, I couldn’t do it. I felt as though every tree, every blade of grass, every bird, was looking at me and getting ready to laugh. Then I remembered what Shakti had said, about how doing this
would make me a woman, and that if I didn’t go through with it, I would be stalled, forever a girl.

I came to the end of the woods, and there was Shakti, sitting cross-legged in a skimpy Indian sari, facing the sea and the rising sun, her hands resting on her knees, finger and thumb pinched together to form a tiny oval. When I got closer, I saw that she had her eyes closed in meditation, and I sat down next to her and imitated her pose. For a couple of minutes, she didn’t register my presence, and then she whispered, “Are your eyes shut?”

They weren’t—but I quickly closed them. “Yes.”

“It’s just us here,” said Shakti. “Just us and the sun.”

I heard her whip off her sari and opened my eyes a fraction to confirm it.

“That feels better,” she said with a sigh.

Below the thin fabric of my T-shirt and shorts, my skin tightened, as though I had shrunk a little bit in size.

“Take your time,” said Shakti. “Wait until it feels right.”

She was waiting for me to take off my clothes but I wasn’t sure how to go about it without first standing up. “I’m wearing shorts,” I whispered. “I didn’t really think this through.”

“No matter,” said Shakti. “Start with the T-shirt. One thing at a time.”

I pulled the T-shirt over my head and crossed my arms to cover what wasn’t there. Perhaps above all, I didn’t want Shakti to see how flat chested I was.

“Ommm,” she said next to me. “Om shanti om.”

I had heard these chants before, when the women practiced yoga, and wasn’t sure if I was meant to join in, like
the other women did, or to stay quiet. I whispered, “Do you want me to say that too?”

Less patiently than before, Shakti said, “Up to you, honey.”

I decided not to. I still had not taken off my shorts, but uncrossed my arms and moved my hands to the ends of my knees, where I pinched my thumb and forefinger together. A cool breeze tickled my chest, a sensation that was not unpleasant, but that also felt wholly inappropriate, given that we were supposed to be meditating.

“How are you doing with those shorts?” whispered Shakti. She had apparently changed her mind about letting me do things on my own schedule. “Let me know when you’re done. I won’t start the meditation proper until then.”

I was holding things up. Very quickly, as though it was no big deal and I was just about to take a shower, I stepped out of my shorts and underpants and hurriedly sat cross-legged on the grass. Bits of it were spiky, and I discovered why sitting bare-arsed on kikuyu grass is a terrible idea. Shakti, when I looked over at her, was sitting on her sari, and I quickly did the same with my discarded shorts.

“I’m ready,” I said, and closed my eyes.

“Great,” said Shakti. “I’ll start us off with a chant for peace.”

The sun was coming up fast, turning the backs of my eyelids orange and warming my skin all over. I must have been sitting in a slumped position, which wasn’t unusual for me, because the next thing I knew, Shakti had placed one hand in the small of my back and another on my shoulder,
and pushed them in opposite directions to straighten my spine. She had strong hands, like a man’s.

My chest was thrust forward at an alarming angle—like I was trying to make more of what little was there—but I didn’t dare move in case she tried to correct me again.

“It’s a beautiful sunrise,” Shakti said softly. “Let’s chant.”

She started out quietly, her voice gradually building in intensity until it was booming and deep, almost a growl. I joined in with a weaker sound of my own. For a few seconds I forgot my nakedness. But then the fact of it came back to me in the points of my skin that were most exposed to the sun. Bits of me were warm, too warm, and other parts tingled in response. I recognized the sensation, though I had no experience of where it was going, or knowledge of how to control it. As best I could, I carried on chanting, and dug my bottom into the hard earth, which seemed to help. The feeling didn’t go away, but nor did it get any stronger.

I risked opening my eyes a little, to see if Shakti was looking my way or had noticed. Her chants seemed to be reaching a crescendo, and she looked completely out of it, eyes tight shut, her skin flushed and glistening with sweat. She even seemed to be straining against something, as though an unseen force was pushing against her. At the height of the chanting, her voice faltered for a second, and she paused to catch her breath before carrying on in a more subdued fashion. This was unlike any meditation I had ever been a part of, and I shut my eyes, quite bewildered.

When it was over, and by over I mean that Shakti fell silent, I reached for my T-shirt, which I pulled over my head,
and then my underpants and shorts, which I stood up to put on. Even fully clothed, my heart was pounding as though I had been caught doing something I shouldn’t, and I shook out my arms and legs to try to make it stop.

Shakti opened her eyes. “Wow. That was intense. It must have been our combined energies.” She stretched her arms above her head and stood up. “How was it for you?”

I was not sure what she was asking me, or what the correct response was, so in as neutral a voice as possible, I said, “Okay, I guess.”

“Okay?” Shakti laughed. “Just ‘okay’? Well, I guess it was your first time, so we shouldn’t expect too much.”

We did not say much on the way back to the commune. Breakfast was already under way, the mess hall jammed with hungry teenagers and adults, the rise and fall of conversation, and the clunking of spoons and bowls like an out-of-tune orchestra. I deliberately did not sit next to Shakti, but squeezed in next to Nelly, who asked me where I had been all morning. “Shakti and I went for a walk,” I said, and she replied, “Not in the nude, I hope.”

For the rest of the day, Shakti was missing from the commune, along with one of the shared cars, but she reappeared in the evening with a box of half-melted Pinky bars she had bought in Coromandel town. The others pounced on the chocolate bars but I held back, feeling strange about what had happened that morning. I still couldn’t say one way or the other if something was wrong, but every time she came near me, my body pulled away from her.

Shakti was her normal genial self, perhaps even more
full of smiles than usual. Later on, after we’d had our customary post-dinner sing-along of folk hits, accompanied by Paul and Lukas on the guitar, she took me aside, holding me by the arm so I couldn’t squirm away, and presented me with a gift wrapped in tissue paper. “Go ahead,” she said. “Open it.”

I did as I was told. Inside the paper was a leather necklace, the attached metal pendant a cross hanging from a circle. It was ugly, a symbol of some kind, but I didn’t know what it meant. “Thank you,” I said, as she took the pendant from my hands and hung it around my neck, standing back to admire it, then coming in close to whisper in my ear, “I’m so proud of you. Today’s the day you became a woman.”

BETWEEN SEPTEMBER AND DECEMBER
each year was birthday season at Gaialands. In the space of those four months, six out of the seven of us had birthdays. At the close of 1978, Timon turned seventeen, the twins and I turned sixteen, and the younger ones—Meg and Fritz—turned fifteen. The odd one out was Lukas, who had turned seventeen the previous May, and had cultivated a crop of fuzzy hair on his upper lip to prove it.

We were used to the eccentric cluster of our birthdays, but Shakti seized upon it as hugely significant, a sequence that could only have been divinely ordained. “Everything in nature happens for a reason,” she said. “There are no accidents.” And so it was decided that in the month of December, after the last birthday had been celebrated, she would
hold her ritual, a ceremony called the Predictions. “Think of it as a rite of passage,” said Shakti, when she announced the date. “A ritual to seal your seven destinies.”

As December drew to a close, momentum gathered, and an air of anticipation overtook the commune. The adults held secret planning meetings and went to Whitianga for supplies. Shakti’s caravan was a hive of activity, day and night. The seven of us, however, were kept in the dark. This secrecy, so we were told, would result in a more powerful outcome.

Some preparations were stranger than others. A few days before the ritual was due to take place, a noise woke me early one morning. I was tired, and it was still dark in the hut, so I didn’t open my eyes. Assuming it was one of the others getting up to pee, or an animal scratching in the dirt outside, I drifted back into a half sleep. The noise went on, punctuated by snipping sounds, which blended into a dream in which a woman was making a dress and cutting off threads as she sewed. It was only when I heard the door to the sleeping hut click shut that I opened my eyes and realized that the snipping sound had been real, not part of the dream at all. Why had I heard scissors, of all things? I sat up and looked out the window, the ledge of which was right by my bed. In the soft early light, I made out the figure of a woman in a billowing caftan crossing the field, heading away from our hut. She walked purposefully and, halfway there, stopped to examine or adjust whatever she held in her hand. For a second or two, scissor blades glinted in the day’s first sun, and then she carried on walking. It was only when
she veered off in the direction of the willow trees, where her caravan was parked, that I realized it was Shakti. She did not normally wear caftans, and it had been the presence of this garment, more than anything, that had confused me.

Despite my reservations about Shakti, I was excited to take part in the Predictions and eager to find out what my future held. Most of the other kids shared my enthusiasm. Only Lukas had doubts. Several times in the lead-up to the ceremony, he had told me how silly he thought it all was.

The day of the ceremony, timed to coincide with the summer solstice, dawned bright and loud with chirping cicadas. By eight in the morning their chorus was deafening, heralding a scorching day and a balmy night to follow. Conditions couldn’t have been more perfect. But at half past eight, we discovered Lukas had gotten up early and disappeared, leaving the remaining six of us to try to figure out where he was. Everyone was in agreement that we had to find him.