‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
‘Holy fuck.’
‘You’ll be back, then?’
‘Not on your life.’
‘Yeah, you will.’
After he left, Marcus walked to the beach where he had first met the man. He went down to the water, took off his shoes, rolled up his jeans and waded in. He crouched down, leant over, and got water up on his hair and beard, then shook his head to let drips fly out and off. Back on the dry sand, he shook himself again, to get as dry as he could, and stood for a few moments. How long? Everything—all sense and thought—was now infused with an unfamiliar feeling. What had he visited? What flight had he made? He had not been far from where he stood now; he had seen the world, not so different, despite the portable telephone the girl had been carrying, and the clothes, and the cars. Superficial differences. No—the jet. There was some desolation in it, an empty sense that time held no promise. He should have been leading the support group, and instead he had ESCAPED FROM TIME. Could he now reinsert himself in it as if nothing had changed? He was desperate to see the girls. He would have liked to go to the Miramar shops too. What would be different? There was no shimmer, no transformation, except, he thought, whatever was happening in his own eyes. He began to make his way home. It was only once, only once. He thought about Joanie. How had she talked to herself, after her first trip? And, anyway, what time was it?
When he arrived, Lilly was with the three children.
‘I finished my group early.’
‘Oh, good.’
He sat with them, joined in their story.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘The feminist activist Shulamith Firestone had written about the need for a comprehensive revolution that included the ABOLITION OF GENDER DIFFERENCE, the ABOLITION OF CHILDHOOD and the MASTERY OF NATURE. It is not known whether she travelled into the future—though certainly, in New York of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when she was active in the feminist movement, there would have been no shortage of opportunities to “plug in”.’
‘Certainly, she wouldn’t have been impressed by what she saw, if she’d travelled to the future. No progress seems to have been made in the abolition of gender difference. She argued that it should be made “culturally unimportant”, but it seems culturally as important as ever, from the reports we have had. Cultural images of hypertrophied men and over-sexualised women seem to prevail, as far as we can tell, no matter what other progress has been made.’
‘Thirty-three years—is that too short a time? What change could we expect? Firestone hoped that the nuclear family would break down, that monogamy would no longer be the norm, and that children and adults would live together communally. Children would no longer be separated off into a socially constructed sphere of helplessness and brainwashing, but would learn at the heels of the adults. Contraception and reproductive technologies would be available to all. This change would take generations. Firestone understood that our minds are created by the circumstances in which they are formed. Situations perpetuate themselves; scars remain on the mind from one generation to the next. Finally, sexuality would be freed from the conventions of OWNERSHIP into which it had been forced; it would also be freed from the NATURAL LIMITS imposed by the bearing and raising of children.
‘(How difficult to accept that we can never see or live this future. How difficult to raise ourselves above our own circumstances, to steer ourselves towards the post-revolutionary world, navigating even our own scars. How difficult to know whether we are being steered, all the while, by our own unfree minds.)’
‘Whether or not she travelled—which is to say, whether she was encouraged or discouraged by what she might or might not have seen of the future—she gave up activism in the early 1970s. She struggled with her own mind. She was mentally ill. (How is it possible to survive, faced with the future?) She had believed (did she still?) in CYBERNATION, the technological control of nature and administration of the economy. The economy would be a cybernetic system, the work of computers.’
‘In the future, it seems as if money is disappearing. We are finding it difficult to establish how and where money changes hands. This is especially true of the great stock exchanges. Very little trading is visible, at least not between one human being and another. Can it be true that money is simply vanishing from the future economy? We have seen that very powerful computers exist—is it possible that they are in control of the economy, as Firestone and many others hope?’
Lilly came home one afternoon from meeting some members of the Abortion Action Group. They were, she told Janet, needing to work on something public, to counter the actions of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child. Lilly was fired up and thoughtful at once.
‘Do you remember, in the middle of the year, there was the United Women’s Convention?’
Janet said, ‘I was there!’
‘You were?’
‘For some of it.’
‘It made me angry.’
‘The Convention?’
‘So many reformers, so many people who just wanted more women’s access to positions in the same old corrupt system.’
‘Oh. I quite enjoyed it.’
Lilly looked at her. She laughed. ‘Yes, so did I. But the SPUC women—the long arm of the whole Catholic world.’
‘Were they there?’
‘Oh yes. And the churchy types, the good-hearted ladies, the organised ladyhood. All the people sitting on their seats. The idea that you have to support women no matter what their opinions, no matter whether they represent deep conservatism.’
‘I was sitting on my seat.’
‘Ha! So was I. But it has to be about action, about our willingness to get up and fight for what we want. Not sit and listen. To do something.’
‘Yeah.’
Lilly said, ‘Karen from the group wants to join us.’
‘Join us?’
‘Move in.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ Then: ‘Were you asking my permission?’
‘You’re one of us. You and Peter are both members of the house.’
‘Then you have my permission.’ A pause. ‘Where will she sleep?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll see if she can share Sandra’s room for the time being.’
‘Why’s she moving?’
‘She likes what we’re doing. She wants to move out of the bourgeois household. She wants to be in proximity to people, cramped and making do and coming up with solutions together with her comrades. She needs a place—but I think it’s part of the same thing for her, it’s part of action, part of not sitting down.’
‘That’s what this house is? Is she… ’
‘Leaving her husband? No. Well, she already left him. A while ago.’
‘Okay.’
Lilly said, ‘Small steps.’
Was it? Janet thought about standing up for what she wanted. Yes—but what, now, did she want? What fire was in her? Did she only need to remember her own husband, and get him back? Or did this house, with its noise and confusion, its action, only make her old house seem dark and quiet?
‘What did it mean for people to be living together in a rural commune or even in the city, in a house?’
‘People have always lived together. This situation, where people live as individuals or isolated nuclear families, it’s a very recent thing. We were just going back to how things naturally are. People come together for support. For warmth and sharing, for food, for, you know, economics. It makes so much sense. We were opposed to all the walls and fences that people built between each other.’
‘But it wasn’t always easy.’
‘No.’
‘Most of the rural communes didn’t last very long?’
‘No, they didn’t. And the urban ones—they were trying to be conscious about how they lived. It’s not that they were just going back to old ways of living together. They wanted to think about how to live, how to have a new way of living together. The urban ones survived longer because
they were convenient for people, young people moving to the city or leaving home. If you count the smaller ones, there were a lot of them, but I suppose maybe a lot of them were nothing more than just shared flats. So they survived a bit longer, but I think they lost their consciousness of living, of being the representatives of how things could be, PIECES OF THE FUTURE.’
‘Was there a practical change alongside the change in consciousness?’
‘There were practical difficulties. Living without structure created its own kind of problem, a kind of tyranny of structurelessness. They thought things could just manage themselves, I suppose. They would have meetings about day-to-day organisation, rosters for housework and gardening, contributions to the budget and so forth. Those were easy conversations—many people had been in shared flats at one point or another. But in the urban communes everyone was interested in something more. The meetings were also times to work out their differences, and they really, they turned into kind of power struggles. They could be very brutal. Many of the people wanted to talk about structures for living that would get around that problem—but then those ideas became fodder for the power struggles. They wanted non-hierarchical structures.’
‘What’s a non-hierarchical structure?’
‘I don’t know. They never really solved the problem. There were all kinds of pressures from the wider world and residues of old ways of thinking. They came from different classes, and there was always the question of ownership—property ownership, you know, which meant another class difference within the houses. They could set up ownership in trust, but then not everyone who moved into a place had the same commitment to it, to living there. Some came almost accidentally, because they needed somewhere to live in a hurry. There were always ideological differences anyway—some of them didn’t want to have anything to do with the state and the law, which made setting up trust deeds difficult.’
‘So it was a disaster.’
‘No! They were working under very difficult conditions. I, personally, still believe in another kind of future.’
‘Still?’
‘Still. I think the spirit of their experiments lives on. It’s changed how people think, maybe only in small ways. I can’t put my finger on it—but people are less and less tolerant of authority. In some cases, the urban “big houses” only set themselves up as temporary projects anyway, with a five- or ten-year lifespan. They were supposed to be TRANSITIONAL STRUCTURES. They were BUNKERS OF FUTURE POSSIBILITY, holding something, some future, safe through the storm.’
‘What storm?’
‘I see the world, sometimes, as a storm.’
They were gathered in the living room, and the children were falling asleep in the heat. Peter’s face looked pained as his eyes closed—they opened again and he let out a cry. Marcus and Janet looked at one another. Marcus smiled a half-grimaced smile and took Peter off upstairs to his bed. He came up again with each of the girls in turn. Dani hardly woke, and Sarah not at all, but Peter stayed awake. Marcus sat with him and read him a book. ‘Are you okay?’
‘My leg hurts.’
‘Where?’
Peter pointed to his upper leg, near the groin. ‘Let’s see how it is in the morning. Can you try and sleep?’
‘Okay.’
Marcus stayed with him, read him another book, and watched his eyes slowly close, before returning to the meeting. It seemed as if it might go on for a long time.
Someone had a joint, and they began to pass it around. The conversation fragmented into a hum. Lilly refused the joint and passed it to Marcus, who partook. It was, of course, the moment when the meeting itself could be declared over. Karen went to fetch a guitar; Marcus went to fetch his. How long since he had played it? He watched Karen’s fingers for a time, trying to match the chords she was playing. Then: he had it—and they played together while she sang. Someone opened a window—and all the noises of the spring night entered, a background only, but one that stretched the feeling of the room out over the valley. There were a few people walking on the streets. Their footsteps, their conversations, were audible now and then. The meeting had raised more questions than it had answered; more, they thought (without thinking it) than it was possible to answer. In this way, the project of the house was woven around unanswered questions, including the larger question: Pen.
The next day was a Saturday, and one by one the inhabitants of the house emerged into the garden or the kitchen. They met with hugs. Lilly and Marcus sat on the top terrace, on a bench they had installed the week before.
Marcus said, ‘I must remember to ask Peter about his leg.’
‘What about it?’
‘He said it hurt last night.’
‘Oh.’ The children were awake, somewhere inside. She said, ‘I think this is going to work well, this house. It’s not our house anymore.’
‘It’s pretty crowded.’
‘Yep.’
‘And we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.’
‘Yep.’ (A laugh.) ‘I liked last night. If we have meetings like that every week… ’
Peter raced out. He saw Janet and ran to her, giving her a hug around the legs. Marcus called out to him. He waved and made to run back in. ‘Hey! Come up here.’
He came up. ‘What?’
‘Is your leg sore this morning?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, that’s good.’
‘It never is, once I get up.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It only hurts at night. When I get up it gets better.’
‘You mean it’s been hurting before?’
‘Yeah.’
Lilly said, ‘How much.’
‘Lots!’
‘I mean, how often.’
‘Every night.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
‘I did. I told my mum, and I told you.’
‘Oh… did you? I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
He turned and ran down. By now Janet was coming up to them. ‘What’s that?’
‘Did you know about Peter’s leg?’
‘No?’
‘He says it hurts him every night in bed.’
‘He did say something once. Before Pen. But he never mentioned it again.’
A silence. Then Lilly said, ‘He’s been crying at night because of his leg?’
Janet said, ‘What could it be, Marcus?’
‘I don’t know. There are forms of arthritis that affect kids. It might be something like that.’
‘Arthritis?’
‘We’ll have to take him to the hospital.’
‘How long has he been… ’
Marcus said, ‘Kids can be… it can be hard to tell. They don’t always say, and sometimes if pain goes on long enough it can start to seem normal to them.’
A silence between them—not only an absence of sound, but a feeling that infected the sounds they could hear, that overlaid the view down over the garden terraces to the house’s roof and across the valley. The discussions last night were only the smallest arrangements, common to any group living together, and anything more had been only a feeling. Karen and Sandra were down below, in and out of the back door, still infected by it. Peter’s pain—a minor thing?—flattened that feeling for Janet, Marcus and Lilly, revealed it as a fragile thing. It seemed strange to be talking about the hospital now, about the state’s health provisions, about setbacks and concessions and the inability to cope just by themselves—the inability to be more than they were.
They spent a week following the final progress of the Land March. When the marchers came in to Wellington, Marcus and the others in the house took the day off, and they all joined in for its final approach to Parliament. The children skipped school—they were in their raincoats, spending time on shoulders or walking with the adults. Tom P, they assumed, would be near the front—the flag was visible up ahead, but the group from the house was a long way back. They were welcomed into the march by the people next to them.
Peter: ‘My leg hurts.’
‘Okay.’ Janet hoisted him up. ‘You’re heavy!’ He was up beside Sarah, who was on Marcus’s shoulders, her fingers interlinked on his forehead.
The marchers were mostly Māori, from all over the country, having gathered during the month-long journey on foot and in buses from Northland. They put the children down now, stood at the edge of the grounds and listened. ‘Mr Speaker, through you to the honourable Prime Minister, I wish you to receive this Memorial of Right, signed by the various tribal elders of New Zealand. Greetings to you to whose Assembly is vested all the powers to amend and adjust all laws which inflict injustice and hardship upon the Māori people, and in whom is vested the power to confirm all promises which were made to give relief to the indigenous people of New Zealand under Her Majesty’s Magna Carta “Long Live The Queen”. Your Māori people pray, firstly: that an enactment of Parliament which enshrines the spirit and intendment of this Memorial shall incorporate in it the protective principal of entrenchment whereby it shall not suffer repeal or amendment without the assent of the Māori people, such assent to be forthcoming by the expression of the majority of all those persons eligible to vote as Māoris in a national referendum. Secondly: that all pernicious clauses in every statute of the present day or in new statutes in the future, which have the power to take Māori land, designate Māori land, or confiscate Māori land, be repealed and never to be administered on the remaining Māori land at the present day and whereas management, retention and control remain with our Māori people and their descendants in perpetuity. Ake ake.’
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