The Predictions (9 page)

“We’ll have to tell the adults,” said Lukas. “Who’s going to come with me?”

None of us wanted to. We looked at our feet.

“I’ll do it, mate,” said Timon.

We hated it when the oldest boys took charge, but the other side of this was that they sometimes acted heroically.

At first light the next morning, Lukas and Timon, wearing solemn expressions, knocked on the door of Hunter and Elisabeth’s hut and were ushered in, while the rest of us huddled in the bushes nearby to wait. A haze of fine droplets hung in the air, waiting to evaporate or turn into rain and making it harder to see what was going on.

Hunter came out first and saw us straightaway but didn’t speak. Behind him, Lukas and Timon emerged, their faces downcast with shame. They must have been given a grilling.

All that day, search parties went out from the commune and came back without Fritz. Tom drove the old Land Rover up the access road, as far as he thought Fritz might have made it on foot, but he came back with nothing but an empty gas tank. We followed any orders we were given to the letter but otherwise kept quiet. In the evening, Hunter and Tom drove reluctantly to Whitianga to notify the police, an organization they neither respected nor had any trust in. A couple of times a year, going back at least a decade, the cops had turned up at Gaialands to bust us for growing marijuana. Each time Hunter informed them drugs were banned from the commune, but they didn’t believe him and kept coming back with their dogs. He had even once given them some pamphlets, outlining the philosophy behind his antidrug stance, but we had found those a few days later in a bush at the side of the road.

No one on the commune had much time for the pigs, as we called them, even though it was an insult to our animals, but on this occasion we had no choice but to ask for their help. To their credit, and to Hunter’s surprise, they came through. At seven the next morning, a dozen men in uniforms arrived with flashlights and sniffer dogs. They cast an ever so slightly distasteful eye over the wild chooks and composting toilets, then set off into the forest. One of the cops remained behind to question us, and we told him what we could remember of the events leading up to Fritz’s disappearance. They wanted so many details. What had he
been wearing, not just “shorts and a T-shirt,” but what style, what color, what shop it was from. The questions baffled us, and our answers—“Whatever was in the box that morning,” “We share all our clothes,” “They’re mostly homemade”—utterly bewildered the cops. Only Nelly seemed able to answer with any certainty. “It was a green tank top with the number three on it,” she said. “I remember thinking it was getting tight, that it wouldn’t fit him much longer. He must have grown over the summer.”

“What sort of green?” the cop asked.

“Bright green,” said Nelly. “The color of new spring grass. The three on it was white.”

We told him about playing rotten egg in the forest, how Fritz had started the race but hadn’t come out the other side in the clearing, and the cop had said, “Aren’t you a bit old to be playing those sorts of games?”

The cops didn’t ask if Fritz had ever tried to run away before, and none of us mentioned it, though I worried that was vital information that ought not to be omitted. Then the policeman made us sign a joint statement, and right before he handed Lukas a pen, he said, “Can you lot even read or write?” and I was glad we hadn’t told him.

I signed on the dotted line at the bottom of the police document and stared at the letterhead, at our six names in a row. Six, not seven. Fritz was missing. Gone. Here was an official document to prove it.

After the police found nothing, the wider community joined in the search, looking for Fritz in nearby towns and in remote stretches of the Coromandel ranges. They showed
his photograph on the six o’clock news, though we didn’t see it because we had no television set. The week after Fritz went missing was the closest I think Hunter ever came to buying one.

In his search for Fritz, Hunter was relentless—and secretive. He roamed the hills, around the clock, and would often show up haggard at the breakfast table, not saying where he had been, but the red eyes and flashlight giving him away. We overheard the other adults whispering about him. Was he too proud, someone wondered, to admit he was falling to pieces?

Meanwhile, Elisabeth, Fritz’s mother—my mother—let nothing show, and I saw this as ultimate proof she was cold and uncaring. It hardened me against her for good.

While Hunter roamed the surrounding bush, looking for Fritz, I searched for clues closer to home. I climbed to the top of all his favorite lookouts, searched his bed, and walked through the macrocarpa forest a thousand times, retracing his final movements, trying to imagine what had been going through his head and what might have happened to him. Despite my intuitive feelings about him when he was around, I could not tune into his absence.

One awful consequence of our communal life, the fact that we shared everything, was that Fritz had left behind nothing to remind us of him. Not one scrap of clothing or book or toy had been uniquely his. The only thing he alone used was his bed, and that sat unmade, stripped bare, a gaping wound in the sleeping hut.

Three weeks after Fritz disappeared, the police scaled down their search operation, and the sniffer dogs were sent
back to Auckland to root out a new missing person. The sergeant who spoke to us said he didn’t like to leave an open case, he was usually a finisher, but he had been given his orders and they were to move on. None of us liked the way he spoke about Fritz as a case and not a person, but it was worse once the pigs had gone because then he wasn’t even an open case. He was nothing.

The weeks of missing turned into months and at some point, though he didn’t talk about it with any of us, even Hunter stopped searching for Fritz. Even I stopped searching. We thought there was nowhere we hadn’t looked.

We went about our routines, carried out our chores, grew vegetables, chopped wood, shoveled shit, but it was as though the lot of us were trapped in tar. We couldn’t move forward, and we couldn’t go back. Without a body there could be no funeral, but to hold out hope against hope was to welcome in never-ending misery.

ONE MORNING, AFTER HE
had been missing a few weeks, I recalled the image on Fritz’s prediction: a boy entwined in a tree, with roots for legs and branches for arms. At the time of the ceremony I had thought it funny Fritz would end up with a tree, not a wife. But now that same image was a sinister prophecy. Fritz hadn’t married a tree, but the forest army had taken him and was not going to give him back. Those trees that had always seemed so threatening had finally lived up to their promise, and so had Shakti’s card. His prediction had come true, just like mine would. Just as, one by one, they all would.

Auckland

1980

O
UR FINAL YEAR ON
the commune was one that I tried to forget. Fritz had never struck me, out of the seven of us, as the linchpin. But without him the group quickly came unstuck. Perhaps it was only coincidence but when friendships and alliances that had been so solid fell apart, I couldn’t help tracing it back to Fritz’s disappearance. For starters, he and Ned had been tight, but without Fritz around, Ned focused all of his energy on Meg. Timon had a crush on her too, and what had started on the beach that afternoon as shared admiration soon mushroomed into a bitter rivalry between the two boys. They scrapped openly, fistfights at the dinner table and refusing to share the few possessions we owned. Lukas tried to play peacemaker but his unwillingness to take sides only soured his relationship with Timon, who thought his best friend ought to fight in his corner.

Meg wasn’t overly interested in either of the boys but
gave just enough encouragement to each of them to stoke both their fires.

And Nelly, because of her history with Timon, couldn’t stand to be in the same room as Meg, which made it awkward for everyone else. When I tried talking to her about it she said I couldn’t possibly understand because I had snared Lukas without even trying, and what did I know about heartbreak?

I mourned my lost friendship with Nelly. I loved being intimate with Lukas, but there was so much I couldn’t share with him, my feelings not just about the prediction, but about plenty of other stuff too. Having sex with him had made us closer in some ways but also more distant. I had to be careful not to say things that would hurt his feelings, and the list of those things seemed to grow day by day. He had never been this sensitive before. For large parts of that year, I felt lonely.

As 1979 became 1980, the six of us limped on, still sharing sweaters and sleeping quarters and our parents, but the old joy of togetherness was gone. A few days after Lukas turned nineteen, he announced he was out of there. He couldn’t stand it a minute longer. Auckland beckoned. I was only seventeen, too young, but he had waited for me as long as he could and there was no way I was going to let him leave without me. And then, at the back of my mind—but way, way back where I was barely conscious of it—was the thought that I was taking my first steps toward fulfilling my prediction. The adults tried to talk us out of leaving, but our minds were made up, and though they had forced many things upon us in the course of our short lives, in this
instance they were philosophically bound to grant us our freedom. Hadn’t they, after all, raised us to refuse the shackles of the nuclear family? Having done so, they couldn’t very well insist we remain with them forever.

What began with Lukas’s announcing his departure quickly turned into an exodus. Despite the fracture in their friendship, Timon followed Lukas and me to Auckland, where he soon discovered Meg wasn’t the only girl in the world with lovely shoulders. Within six months, he had slept with every waitress in the central suburbs and saved enough for a one-way ticket to Melbourne, Australia, where he planned to do more of the same.

Ned chaperoned Meg to Wellington, where she intended to become an actor on the stage. She had so far applied for drama school, and was hopeful she would be accepted. In letters, Ned sounded still very much in love with her, but reading between the lines, it seemed she did not reciprocate.

Nelly stuck around on the commune for the longest, but even she met a boy at the Sweetwaters festival the following year, a boat builder from the Bay of Islands, and not long after her eighteenth birthday, she was pregnant with the first of their children. She sent me a postcard, a peace offering, when their baby girl was born. The following summer, we went to their wedding on a Northland beach not far from Opua, where they lived, and Nelly, already four months pregnant with her second child, seemed well on her way to fulfilling her prediction. Nelly didn’t invite any of the adults to the wedding, so Ned gave her away, and Lukas and I signed the register to witness the union.

We lived in Auckland for more than three years, dossing at first on couches in various slum villas in Freemans Bay and Grey Lynn, before moving into a slum of our own, a half-converted basement on the slopes of Arch Hill. We paid ten dollars a week for the indignity, enough to cover the power and phone bill of the students living upstairs. Our hovel was so damp that a variety of translucent fleshy pink mushrooms grew in the corners of our bedroom ceiling, and so cold that an entire winter passed without either of us getting completely undressed. We had sex in the woolly jumpers and hand-knitted socks we had brought with us from the commune, and in the scummy, lopsided bathroom sink, we doused either from the waist up or waist down, but never both at the same time. When we weren’t dying of bronchitis or gastroenteritis or stumbling home drunk, we were saving like crazy for our airfares to London. We never ate more than once a day. Beer was considered a meal. Add a meat pie and that was a banquet. In photographs from that time, despite the starvation, I am pudgy, a raccoon-eyed, pasty punk beneath a scrum of dyed black hair. We smoked a lot of roll-your-owns, crammed with cheap Fisherman’s tobacco, and what we didn’t save went into slowly paying off a magnificent red Fender Stratocaster that Lukas had put on lay-by—a guitar so tenderly saved for and anticipated it may as well have been our first child.

Irrespective of the squalor, we were never happier. We had grown up not being allowed to drink, smoke, eat meat, wear leather, believe in god, or love our parents in the normal way. Every pie, every roll-your-own, every secondhand
biker jacket and pint of beer before lunchtime, was a strike against our puritanical upbringing. The night Lukas paid off the last ten bucks and finally brought home his baby, he placed it in the living room on a throne he had built out of cushions. When the Fender Strat wasn’t being played, it was proudly displayed, the only gleaming thing in our sordid, fungus-ridden world. In Lukas’s mind that guitar
was
his future, his ticket to a better life. His ambition was enough for both of us. I was just grateful to be included in his plans. He was different from other boys in bands. Some of them were in it for the perks or the groupies, and drank their way to oblivion eight nights a week. But not Lukas. He considered all that a distraction. He was too ambitious to have anything other than a steady girlfriend. Those early band names, when Lukas was still trying to be a punk, were designed to revolt: the Rioters, Vulture Culture, Urban Parasites, Reject Street, Arch Hill Rats. My job was to put up posters in coffee shops and Laundromats, anywhere with a blank wall and an owner who wasn’t too squeamish. The band lineups were a revolving door of bassists, drummers, lead guitarists, and even synth players, depending on whatever sound variation Lukas was trying on at the time. He moved on quickly from punk, which had fallen out of favor, to a style of music that was more friendly on the ears, if you liked synthesizers, but still rebellious in spirit. He tried on vocal styles like new hats. The band names cycled on: Candyhead, the Clownz, Blister Sister, Cherry Rope. I went through all these iterations with him, trying to make sense of what I heard, until at some point the sounds fell into place and I wrote gig reviews,
which we sent in to
Rip It Up,
Cracuum,
and
Inner City News
. The rest of the time I was at university, not very studious but going on protest marches and debating feminism with lesbians in the student union Women’s Space. It was something to do while Lukas gigged and gigged, playing in any venue that would have him, from the suburban RSA clubs to local pubs and beery student parties. If they made it to the end of the set without being bottled offstage or the amp blowing up, the gig was considered a success. Not many were. Most gigs ended in a fight, with either band or patrons thrown out of the venue, sometimes both. No one ever got paid. We shared a job washing dishes in a Parnell restaurant. I was better at it than Lukas but got paid fifty cents less an hour.

At the end of three years, I had a B.A. in women’s studies (useless) and Lukas was no more successful or well known than he had been at the start, but he knew what a pop hook was, how to hold together a rhythm section, and who not to be in a band with. Lukas wanted us to move to London before a little bit of success tempted him to stay. He wanted to be fresh when he got there, to be ready for the climb. “I need to be hungry,” he explained. “I need to have a fire in my belly.”

To make what little money we had saved go further, we sailed to London, via the Panama Canal, on a cargo ship carrying frozen spring lamb to the supermarkets of Europe. The crossing was diabolical. Rolling seas, prison slop, and a cramped, stuffy cabin thick with diesel fumes. Every dollar we saved on the crossing we paid for in puke. We disembarked in Southampton as pale and thin as junkies, not a
good omen, but an apt one. Just over three years had passed since our last day at Gaialands, and four since Fritz had disappeared. But we still were not adults, and nothing had prepared us for the scale and assault of London.

The first few days, we cowered in pubs and in Tube station foyers, too scared to set foot on streets that seethed with speeding vehicles and mobs of unruly, shouting people. We had believed rustic Auckland, with its wide avenues and seven-car traffic jams, was the big smoke, but it was little more than a village. We didn’t know where to stay, what to eat, who to trust, and all within the first week, we demonstrated our greenness by getting lost, mugged, and on one occasion, peed on, when a tramp relieved himself uphill from where we had flopped down for a rest in an underpass near Marble Arch.

A passerby, dressed no less shabbily than we were, took pity on us and guided us to a semi-derelict squat, at the seedy end of Edgware Road, that he shared with a dozen other emaciated kids. The place seemed all right the night we moved in, or at least warm and dry, and best of all it was free. But we soon discovered the catch. Everything that wasn’t on our person got stolen while we slept, including, one dismal night, the shared toothbrush we had left in a scummy tin mug by the kitchen sink. Calling it a kitchen sink implies that the room it was in was used as a kitchen, and maybe once it had been, but it was now a storehouse for used hypodermic needles, and the only thing cooking, not on the stove but in blackened teaspoons over naked lighter flames, was a crumbly brown powder that came wrapped in white paper
squares. To eat there risked hepatitis or accidental overdose, so we ate on the street or at a greasy spoon, toast with jam, or baked beans if we had enough coins. At night we huddled together on the heavy wool coats we had brought with us from New Zealand and tried to ignore the stench.

Not a day went by when I didn’t miss the serenity and ease of Gaialands, where we had eaten fresh food and bathed every day in a river as clear as glass. At night, I dreamt I was back there, running through the forest with the scent of pine needles in my nostrils or lying on the beach with the sun warming my skin.

After a month had gone by, we stopped ever mentioning the reason we had come to London, especially after Lukas’s beautiful red Fender Stratocaster had been stolen from him in broad daylight at a Tube station. A string bean of a kid, a Gypsy, had come up and asked Lukas for directions, shoving a map in his face. While Lukas squinted at the map, he put his guitar case down for a second, and the kid ran off with it. Lukas leapt over the barrier after him, but the kid had timed his theft to perfection and squeezed onto a Circle Line train just as its doors were closing. From the other side of the barrier, I watched Lukas punch the moving train with his fists, then chase it the length of the platform, shouting abuse and mowing down anyone who got in his way. He was escorted from the station by a guard, told off for causing a ruckus and for trying to board a train without a ticket.

Lukas vowed to rip “that little wanker’s head off” if he ever set eyes on him a second time, but even as he was saying
it, we both knew he would never see the boy, or his guitar, again.

Walking back to the squat, wanting something else to feel as broken as he did, Lukas destroyed a steel and concrete rubbish bin. I tried to lead him away from it, to calm him down, but he shook me off and went back to finish what he had started, removing the metal canister and hurling it across the pavement, strewing rubbish everywhere, then picking it up again and throwing it into the middle of the road. It was broad daylight; he was lucky not to get arrested, just stared at by a few passersby, who, like me, were too afraid to stop him.

From that day on, Lukas was like a loaded pistol, and I never knew when he would go off. One night we walked several miles to see a band in a Camden pub, and the band was good, really tight, but Lukas started heckling, yelling out that the music was shit. He was thrown out of the pub, and afterward, standing on the pavement, I asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing.

“That was the worst band I’ve ever seen,” he raged. “Someone had to tell them how shit they were!”

“How could you do that to another band?”

“Did you see the lead singer? What a cunt.”

“They were good, and you know it.”

“I could play better than that with my arms cut off.”

I laughed. “You’re just jealous.” I knew I shouldn’t have said it but it was too late to take it back. Off he went, a tirade against not just the singer but the drummer and guitarist too. For half an hour, I tried to talk sense into him, tried to
placate him; I even tried agreeing with him, but that only made him more mad, so that in the end I gave up, and we walked the rest of the way to the squat in silence.

That night, as we lay on the coats, shivering, I tried to think of a day since we had arrived in London that we hadn’t argued, but there wasn’t one. The disagreements had started off small but were getting bigger, and in between explosions, I had tiptoed on eggshells, held my breath. A week or so later we reached our lowest ebb, in an alleyway behind a Chinese restaurant, where we had gone to scour the dustbins for discarded takeaway containers of food. We were starving, hadn’t eaten since the night before. Sometimes, if a wrong order got made, they would throw the whole lot out, and you would find it, cold but untouched, in the dustbin. At the exact same moment, we spotted a full container of fried rice and both lunged for it, spraying the contents across the ground like confetti, losing it all. I sprang back from the evidence, ashamed, while Lukas slid down the graffitied brick wall of the stinking alley and buried his head in his hands. “We can’t go on like this,” he said.