The Predictions

  Zachary fell asleep on Katrina’s lap. Sitting in the simple mess hut, with its worn wooden floor and wholesome smell of oats, I let go a little, and allowed myself to relax for the first time since he had been born.

  I noticed, around this time, that I hadn’t seen Elisabeth. Of course she might have gone for the day, or been working in an outlying field, but I thought someone would have fetched her by now. And then there was the cake: she never would have made one that bad.

  “Where’s Elisabeth?” I asked. “Is she away?”

  With apprehension, a few of them glanced at Hunter.

  “Elisabeth left Gaialands,” he said. “It was not long after the last of you children had gone.”

  “She left when we did? But—­” I was going to add “But she didn’t even like us,” then stopped myself. “What happened?”

  Hunter cleared his throat. “She had her reasons, I’m sure.”

  “Your poor father,” said Katrina. “She left without a word. Just packed up and left in the middle of the night. A friend picked her up.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “We don’t know,” said Loretta. “The city, maybe?”

  “The worst of it,” said Tom, “was that she took her bloody recipes with her.” He held up a glob of cake. “No offense, ladies, but the grub round here hasn’t been the same since.”

  “Feel free to step into the kitchen, mate,” said Susie, teasing. “There’s plenty of room for one of you blokes.”

  “No, no,” said Tom. “I know when to stay out of it. The last thing we need is to burn down the kitchen.”

  Everyone laughed, but underneath the friendly banter was a hint of tension that I did not remember being there before. In the old days, the women had known their place, which was in the nursery, laundry, or kitchen, and they had certainly never made jokes above or about their station. Perhaps it wasn’t the women who had changed so much as Hunter. He had once been a bear of a man, fearsome to us kids, but since then he’d shrunk, or had the stuffing knocked out of him, and he seemed less intimidating, docile even. And hadn’t Katrina openly referred to him as my father? That would never have happened before.

  Susie patted Hunter’s arm to get his attention. “I wonder if your girlfriend will visit this summer?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” said Hunter. “She’s just a dear friend.”

  Susie winked at me. “Just a friend, eh? A dear friend who sleeps in your hut?”

  The women laughed heartily, and Hunter stood up, clearing his throat and clumsily gathering up the dishes we had used. He would never have stood for being mocked in the old days, and I waited for him to give the women a ticking off, but he didn’t. When he had left, Susie leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Ever since Elisabeth left, he’s had annual visits from Shakti. You remember her, don’t you?”

  “A little,” I said, though the opposite was true.

  “Turns out she isn’t a dyke anymore,” said Susie. “She converted.”

  “Now she comes to see Hunter,” said Katrina. “Mostly in the summer but this year she dropped by in the winter too.”

  “We reckon she’s trying to get knocked up,” added Susie. “Happens to us all.”

  “Even I looked at men twice at that age.” Katrina glanced apologetically at Loretta. “But of course I was happy to use the turkey baster.”

  “I should bloody hope so,” said Susie, tickling Katrina at her waist.

  “How old is Shakti?” In the past she had only seemed “older than me” but now I wanted to know by how much.

  “Over forty,” said Sigi. “But she looks good for her age so it’s hard to tell by how much.”

  “Better than the old boilers around here,” said Loretta, and the women cackled, really cackled, like they had in the past when no men were around.

  Later in the day, after Loretta had taken me on a tour of the slightly damp vegetable gardens and the new and improved composting toilets, she and Susie started fussing about where Zachary and I would sleep that night. I said I didn’t care, that I’d be happy on the woodpile, I was that tired, but the two women wouldn’t hear of it. They went off in search of the most suitable place, while I went for a wander of my own, arriving after a time at the children’s hut.

  At the door, I hesitated. The two women were inside, in the midst of a heated discussion.

  “It’s too dirty,” Loretta was saying. “Look at all the cobwebs. And over there—­rat droppings.”

  “She grew up here,” said Susie. “She won’t mind.”

  “She’s got a baby now,” said Loretta. “And they’re used to staying in fancy hotels.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “He’s famous,” said Loretta. “Of course they do.”

  “We didn’t bring them up to have airs and graces. And besides, where else can they go?”

  “They can have our place—­mine and Tom’s,” said Loretta decisively. “It won’t be as good as what she’s used to, but at least there’s no rat poo.”

  I had been on the verge of announcing my presence, and insisting that we sleep in the children’s hut, when I realized how awkward it would be for the two women if they knew I had overheard their conversation. Instead I crept back to the mess hut, where Katrina had been minding Zachary. He had woken up crying and hungry, and I sat down on a pile of cushions to nurse him, watched closely by Katrina. After a time I noticed she wasn’t just admiring Zachary but was staring at his mouth on my breast.

  Zachary chomped on, oblivious, and half a minute later, Katrina snapped out of it and gazed wistfully at me. “Do you know?” she said. “Breast-­feeding you kids was the happiest time of my life.”

  “Really? I find it kind of tiring. Especially in the middle of the night.”

  “Well, that’s because you’re the only one doing it.”

  I was curious. “Isn’t that how everyone does it?”

  “We ran it more like a co-­op. When the babies were hungry, whoever was nearby fed them. At night, we took turns on duty, so everyone got a good sleep.”

  If I had ever known this, I had forgotten it. “You fed all the babies—­not just your own?”

  “You kids shared everything, including breast milk.”

  I looked down at Zachary and tried to imagine someone else feeding him. “I don’t know if I could do that. It feels too intimate.”

  “Well, it is,” said Katrina. “But that’s why it was so wonderful. I felt so bonded with all you babies—­not just the ones I had given birth to.”

  “And everyone went along with it?”

  “Yes, in fact it was easier for the women, like Loretta, who couldn’t breast-­feed, and Elisabeth, who didn’t like it. They didn’t have to.” Katrina stared off dreamily into the distance, her eyes filling with tears. “It was the most magical time at Gaialands. We were one big happy family. There was so much love.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  Katrina smiled. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, it doesn’t take much at my age.” She reached over and patted Zachary’s head. “Just try to remember that saying: ‘The days are long but the years are short.’ Blink and your kids have grown up and left home.”

  I thought I knew what she meant, but I also couldn’t wait for Zachary to grow up, so I could talk to him. The fun would really start then.

  Susie and Loretta appeared in the doorway of the mess hut. “We’re putting you in our cabin,” said Loretta. “It’ll be the most comfortable for you and the baby.”

  “Where will you sleep?” I asked.

  “In the kids’ hut,” said Loretta. “Tom and I don’t mind a bit of dust.”

  “I wouldn’t mind it either,” I said, hoping to disabuse them of the idea that I had come back from London posh. “You should have seen the squat we lived in. Besides, I feel bad abo
ut kicking you and Tom out of your beds.”

  “You won’t change her mind,” said Susie. “She’s a stubborn old chook.”

  “That’s right,” said Loretta. “We’ve made up the beds and that’s final.”

  Tom and Loretta’s cabin was built around a set of stained glass windows salvaged from an old church. It was one of the last dwellings to be built at Gaialands, and for most of our childhood they had lived in a simple wooden shack. Then one day Tom had gone on a trip to Auckland and come home with the windows, which the men had propped up on large wooden joists, the two sets facing each other. Without working to a plan, they had built the rest of the cabin around these windows, using whatever lengths of wood they had to hand, as well as what they had salvaged from the old shack. The finished cabin had four walls, but no two were the same—­or even completely straight. Atop the wooden structure was a tin roof, higher on one side than the other, and the outside walls were bright red, with white around the windows. It was straight out of a fairy tale, and like all the homemade buildings at Gaialands, it leaked. Over the long, wet winter months, Paul, the carpenter of the group, spent his days up a ladder, patching roofs.

  Going to sleep in their cabin was a strange experience. As a kid I’d never really been allowed inside, especially not at night. Loretta had placed a sprig of wildflowers on the pillow of the double bed, and next to it was an old bassinet for Zachary, made up with pilled flannelette sheets. Loretta said they had been saving it, just in case one of us decided to come back to the commune to have babies. I was amazed when Zachary went straight down to sleep in it, but I shouldn’t have been. I was learning that babies were nothing if not contrary.

  When Zachary woke in the middle of the night to be fed, I wrapped a blanket around us both and went outside to sit on the veranda. It was a beautiful night, freezing cold, but so clear that when I looked up into the sky, it took my breath away. In between the usual array of stars were a million more, as though each one had exploded into glittering shards. A planet, too, pulsed bold and orange, amid streaks of white and purple space dust. Had it always been so dazzling? Underneath it, I felt very small, awed and lonely. I wondered what Lukas was doing. If leaving him had been the right thing to do, then why did I miss him so much? I kissed Zachary’s face and held him close, tried to soak up his warmth, his contentment.

  We went back to bed, Zachary in the cot, and me on Tom and Loretta’s soft, doughy mattress; then later on, after he had refused, for hours, to sleep, Zachary tucked into the nook of my arm, and me, in the middle, afraid to do more than catnap in case I rolled on top of him or he fell out of the bed. A typical night all in all.

  Not long after dawn, Zachary awoke, smiling and gurgling and eager to get on with the business of being alive, while I felt like someone had gouged my eyes out and replaced them with old worn cricket balls. We stalked the mess hall, waiting for food, company, signs of life, but the adults no longer seemed to get up with the birds. After what felt like hours, they arrived. Breakfast was porridge, gritty whole oats glued together and eaten in front of a group of eager, caring faces. How had I slept, how had Zachary slept, had there been mosquitoes, had we been woken too early by the rooster, was the bed comfortable, the porridge up to scratch?

  “Yes, thank you,” I said to everything, too knackered to elaborate.

  After the breakfast bowls had been cleared away, Susie and Katrina asked if they could take Zachary for a stroll around the orchards and I was so grateful I wanted to kiss them.

  Everyone else went off to do chores except Paul, who stayed behind and shyly presented me with a large cardboard folder tied with string.

  “We collected all the clippings,” he said. “You know, about Chea-­tah.” Paul pronounced the band name hesitantly, as though afraid to get it wrong. He opened the folder and began leafing through it. “There’s some from Auckland too, from before you left, about the other bands he was in. And there’s a review here somewhere . . .” He rifled through a few more pages until he found a dog-­eared sheet of newsprint. “Here it is. Look, Poppy, there’s your name.”

  He pointed to my byline, under the heading, “Rat Piss.” It was a review of one of Lukas’s more obnoxious bands, which I had tried to pass off as the next big thing. I quickly skimmed through it. Oh dear. That was the gig where the bass player had urinated into a bottle, onstage, and pretended to drink the contents, to prove what an authentic punk he was. Maybe he really had drunk the contents. He was a bit of a loose cannon. “Oh dear,” I said, looking over it. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  Paul chuckled. “We were glad when that phase was over.”

  The folder held dozens of pieces of carefully folded, yellowing newsprint, and more recent additions on thicker, glossier magazine paper. Paul kept up a running commentary, telling me which album had just come out and how it was doing in the charts. He was an expert, quoting statistics left and right, and I quickly realized that even though no one in New Zealand had known quite what to make of Cheatah, and they’d not had any hits here, every step of their progress had been reported in the newspapers as a matter of slightly confused national pride. “I can’t believe they got so much coverage here,” I said. “Lukas is the only New Zealander in the band. The rest of them are English.”

  “But he’s the lead singer,” said Paul. “That’s a big deal.”

  “Look at this story, though,” I said, reading out a newspaper headline. “ ‘Cheatah’s Second Album a Massive Flop in the UK.’ Why would they report that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul. “I guess they need an angle.”

  “The funny thing is, that’s what Lukas feels like,” I said. “A failure.”

  Paul was quiet for a moment, thinking. “I worried that might happen. He was always too ambitious for his own good.”

  “Too ambitious?”

  “Yeah, if you want something that much, and you don’t get it—­or you get something else—­it messes with your head.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  Paul smiled. “In my younger days I wanted to be an architect.”

  “But you built all the houses on the commune.”

  “Those are not houses,” said Paul. “They are follies.”

  We both laughed.

  “Well, you don’t seem screwed up about it.”

  “I’ve got Sigi to thank for that. But there were some ropey years, while I came to terms with the fact that I’d never be Frank Lloyd Wright.”

  “You were aiming high.”

  “And so is our Lukas.”

  It hit me then why Paul had kept all these clippings, why he had been so eager to share them. He was tremendously proud of his son. In the last few years, he had probably shown this same folder to everyone who had passed through the commune. I felt guilty. Through all the years, we had not so much as sent a postcard. How would I feel, I wondered, if Zachary cut me off like that?

  “I’m really sorry we didn’t keep in touch,” I said to Paul, gently touching his wrist. “We didn’t think about what it would be like for you guys.”

  “Of course you bloody didn’t,” said Paul, eyebrows arched in surprise. “And I did the same to my parents. Couldn’t wait to escape their clutches. Mum in her apron, always trying to feed me up, for what I was never sure, and Dad banging on about the rugby. Two years later, he was gone, and Mum was on her own, but do you think that made me visit her more often? Not a chance. I had just met Sigi and we were the only two ­people in the world that had ever fallen in love.” He put his big, burly hand over mine and looked me in the eye. “So not another word about it, okay?”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  Before we had found out who our real fathers were, I had always hoped mine was Paul. He was kind, sensible, funny—­all the qualities Lukas inherited. It made me happy to think that at least Paul was now my father-­in-­law—­and the grandfather of my son. “Did you k
now Lukas and I got married?”

  “Yup,” said Paul. “We read about that.”

  “In the paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Shhh, lass. What did I tell you?”

  “I know. But that’s awful.”

  “I’m sure it’s here somewhere.” Paul leafed through the folder, then read from a clipping. “ ‘Expat Kiwi glam rocker Lukas Harvest married his childhood sweetheart in a registry office in Chelsea at the weekend. No details on whether or not the ­couple wore leather, but we heard a shotgun went off during the ceremony.’ ” Paul laughed. “Guess they knew about the baby.”

  “Let me see that.” I wondered what kind of tabloid had run a story that dreadful. The cutting was tiny, taken from the In Brief column of a newspaper—­the Auckland Star. Next to it, a postage-­stamp-­sized photo of Lukas and me in a nightclub booth. My head was turned away from the camera and my hair was so big, so back-­combed, that you could only see the tip of my nose. Further down, a low-­cut top and cleavage, lots of cleavage, more than I had ever had in my wildest dreams, or even after Zachary was born. I looked again. Not my cleavage, not my nose. It could have been—­even I had been nearly fooled—­but it wasn’t me. It was Fran.

  I handed the clipping back to Paul and he held another page in front of me, but I couldn’t focus on it. “Excuse me,” I said, getting up from the bench. “I think I need a rest. The jet lag is catching up.”

  “Of course,” said Paul. “You must be shattered.”

  In a daze, I walked to the orchard, looking for Zachary and the women, hoping the sight of him might cleanse the photo of Lukas and Fran from my mind. I started to panic. Where was he, my precious baby, and why had I let him so casually out of my sight? I walked through the orchard. The trees had bloomed and dropped a carpet of white petals on the ground.