The Predictions

  “Poppy!” called a woman’s voice. “Over here!”

  Under a tree at the edge of the orchard, Susie and Katrina lay sprawled on the ground, and between them, Zachary, cycling his legs in the air.

  “We’ve had such a lovely time,” said Susie, tickling Zachary’s tummy and making him giggle. “We were just saying how nice it was to have a baby here again.”

  “We’ve decided he looks like his dad,” said Katrina. “Especially around the eyes and chin.”

  “He’s got your mouth though,” added Susie.

  I scooped up Zachary. “He’s hungry,” I said, taking off with him clutched to my chest.

  It was hard to find anywhere to be alone on the commune. I had forgotten that part. Even the huts, which in theory were private, had such thin walls and such drafty windows that it was more like being outside than in a house. In the old days, when I needed time to think or just wanted to be on my own, I had walked off into the forest, hid behind trees, ignored the call of my name.

  Someone was calling it now, from the direction of the mess hut, where ten minutes earlier, the cowbell had rung for lunch. I wasn’t hungry, but I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why not. I just wanted to be left on my own to calm down.

  I hid in Tom and Loretta’s cabin, where I lay on the bed in fetal position, after settling Zachary in his crib. A few minutes later came a knock at the door.

  “I brought you some lunch,” said Sigi. “I’ll bring it in, shall I?”

  She bowled on in with the tray. I was lying with my back to the door, and she walked over to the bedside table, rearranged whatever was on it, and set down the tray. “Chickpea casserole,” she whispered. “So much nicer when it’s hot.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, trying to sound half-­asleep.

  “Are you unwell?”

  “No. Just tired.”

  “I’ll fetch my herbs—­make you a fortifying drink.”

  “Thank you but I’m fine.”

  I sensed Sigi hovering by the bed for a moment, then she went over to Zachary’s crib, where she made clucking noises and rustled the sheets and blankets, probably trying to tuck him in. He had been sighing before that, drifting off to sleep, but now he roused himself and started cooing and giggling, wide-­awake. Not only would he not sleep now, but also because he hadn’t napped, I wouldn’t be able to either, and the pair of us would be grizzly and fractious all afternoon.

  “Please leave him,” I said irritably, sitting up and glaring at Sigi. She gave me a wounded look.

  At dinner, the adults asked all the questions they had been too polite to ask the night before. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood, experiencing their loving inquiries as unwelcome intrusion. I wondered if they had started to suspect I was back at the commune because things had soured between Lukas and me. Perhaps they had guessed it the moment I showed up.

  “Tell us where you live,” asked Loretta. “Is it in a very posh part of London?”

  “It’s very small, a garden flat.”

  “And your neighbors, do they bother you?”

  “We haven’t met them. ­People keep to themselves.”

  Loretta sighed. “I suppose they’re used to having famous ­people in the neighborhood.”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “How long will you be here for?” asked Katrina. “You’ve come such a long way, you may as well stay for the summer.”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Maybe.”

  “If you’re here for the solstice,” said Sigi, “we should celebrate. We could invite Nelly and her husband, track down some of the others.”

  “Do you think they would come?” said Loretta.

  “They might,” said Tom. “If we knew where to find them.”

  “Is Nelly still in Opua?”

  “Yes,” said Susie, her birth mother. “She’s the only one who keeps in touch.”

  I thought of Nelly’s prediction, swarming with offspring and love hearts. “How many kids does she have now?”

  Susie chuckled. “At the last count, five. She told us Ned has one too. But we don’t know who the mother is. We think he’s still in Wellington.”

  “Is that where Meg is?” I looked to Sigi. She had tried so hard to make up for lost time with her daughter, once everything was out in the open. I hoped for her sake that Meg had stayed in touch.

  With an unhappy look, Sigi said, “I don’t know.”

  Katrina added, of Timon, “I don’t know where my son is either.”

  The room fell into a gloomy silence. No wonder they had been so pleased to see us. I tried to remember everyone’s predictions, as if they might hold clues to their whereabouts, but the only card I could recall with any degree of clarity had belonged to Fritz. No one, since I had been back, had mentioned him, and I wondered if they thought of him like they thought of the rest of us, just another kid who had left home and never come back.

  “Did the police ever find out anything about what happened to Fritz?”

  “No,” said Loretta. “In fact, we’ve been thinking about holding a memorial. Not a funeral, as such, but something that means we can all get a bit of closure.”

  Paul nodded in agreement. “We ought to put that poor boy to rest.”

  Loretta glanced at Hunter, gauging his reaction, as she said, “It’s been ten years now.”

  Hunter fidgeted a little in his seat but said nothing.

  “We thought about asking one of the local Kaumatua for a karakia,” said Katrina. “To bless his spirit on the journey to the next world.”

  “Keep those old codgers out of it,” said Hunter. “He wasn’t a bloody Maori.”

  Tom raised his hand. “I’m with Hunter. The last time we got the elders involved, they told us this land was tapu.”

  “Maybe it is,” said Susie. “Maybe we shouldn’t be here.”

  “Nonsense,” said Hunter. “When we bought this piece of land in 1961, there was nothing here. Now look at it—­we’ve turned it into a slice of paradise.”

  “Open your eyes,” said Katrina. “Your slice of paradise took one of our boys. Mother earth is angry!”

  Hunter scoffed. “Gaia isn’t angry with us! We look after her. Everything we take from her, we give back tenfold.”

  “Here we go again,” said Susie. “The patriarchy claims to know what’s best for mother earth!”

  Several of the women laughed at Susie’s put-­down of Hunter, which he would never have tolerated in the old days. They didn’t seem to put up with so much shit anymore but they certainly doled it out.

  “What do you think, Poppy?” said Loretta. “Should we have a ceremony?”

  “I don’t know.” I had been very quiet all evening but now everyone was looking in my direction, waiting for me to elaborate. “It would be nice to see the other kids—­that is, if we could find them.”

  “There’s a lot to consider, a lot to think about,” said Susie. “So here’s what we’ll do.” She put her fingers together to make a steeple and looked around the group to make sure she had everyone’s attention. “In a week’s time we’ll hold a hui in the meetinghouse and try to reach a consensus.”

  In the old days, a meeting was a meeting, but now it was a hui, after the Maori word, which had been adopted by right-­on Pakeha. Was Susie the new leader of the commune? She was acting like one, albeit in a different, less masculine style.

  Rain spilled from the mess-­hut roof in sheets, and I huddled under the eaves with Zachary, waiting for a break that was long enough to risk dashing across the field to our cabin. The rain showed no signs of easing up—­if anything it was getting heavier, more persistent. There was no way around it. If we wanted to go anywhere, we would have to get soaked. I said my good night to the assembled adults and ran out with Zachary sheltered in the lee of my body, covering the top of his head
with my hand. In the cabin, I toweled him off and dressed him in dry clothes, while I stood shivering in my wet ones and dripping water on the sea-­grass matting. I understood now why airplane safety cards instructed passengers to put on their own oxygen masks first. What they really meant by “passengers” was “mothers.”

  From the far corner of the room came the steady dripping of water on tin, and I noticed that someone had placed a pot underneath the leak in the roof. The cabin was lined with plywood, except that it wasn’t really a lining, because it was the only layer separating us from the great outdoors. As a result it was just as soggy inside as out, and I longed to be back within the solid, dry brick walls of our London flat. But that life was over now. I had defied the prediction one too many times and my punishment had been Lukas’s betrayal.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER 16

  Gaialands

  1989

  FOR THE NEXT SEVENTEEN days straight, the rain came down, sometimes in buckets, other times in drizzle so fine that it hung in the air, too light to drop to the ground. On days of light rain, it was better for the soul to pretend there was none, and to go about business as though it was fine, ignoring wet hair, dank skin, soggy clothes, clammy bedding. We had learned this trick as children to make long spells of bad weather more bearable, and I resorted to it, instinctively, on about day eight or nine. But by day thirteen, when I had run out of disposable nappies and the cloth ones wouldn’t dry, and Zachary’s bum was red and raw with diaper rash, his crib sheets spotted with mildew, I was having a hard time keeping up the pretense and had resorted instead to going out of my mind.

  On the eighteenth day, I awoke to the rattle of birdsong in the trees around the cabin, and opened my eyes to a world blanched in weak, milky sunlight, no drizzle. I dressed quickly and bundled Zachary into a makeshift sling, anxious to get out before the weather changed. I would feed him outdoors, where he could listen to the birds while he slurped. It was very early but a light was on in the kitchen. Someone was getting breakfast ready. I needed to borrow gumboots and slid my feet into the only pair on the porch. They were too big—­my feet mooned around inside and rubber slapped my calves as I walked—­but it was better than getting my feet wet or ruining my expensive London loafers.

  I planned to cross the stream at the end of the orchard, then walk a little way up Mount Aroha to a clearing with a bench seat that caught the morning sun. But I got as far as the creek, which had swollen to a river, the trees at the edge of it submerged up to their lower boughs and netting driftwood and debris. Nothing remained of the little swing bridge that usually crossed the stream, not even the wooden platforms that bookended each side. I did not remember flooding like this, water licking the plum trees at the edge of the orchard.

  Beyond the orchard, the newly hatched river flowed into the forest and through a gully where the banks on either side were steep and crisscrossed with bracken. There was a path through the forest that ran alongside it, but higher up, and that was the path I took with Zachary, stopping after about ten minutes to sit and feed him on a low, moss-­covered log. Water from the log soaked into the backside of my pants, but I barely noticed it. I would have sat cross-­legged in a puddle if that had been the only place available in which to feed him. Along with a lot of other things I swore I’d never be, I was becoming one of those mothers who took pride in her martyrdom.

  After being cooped up for weeks in the various huts and shared spaces of the commune, it was nice to be alone, or at least alone with Zachary, who didn’t mind if I stopped talking to him, so long as his tummy was full. For weeks, I had seethed privately with anger and confusion over the picture of Lukas and Fran, but over time those emotions had burned off, and what was left behind felt very much like grief.

  Zachary bounced up and down in the sling as I walked. He seemed to like the motion, and his eyes slid drunkenly closed. We had come to the edge of the forest, to the clearing that fell away to the sea in scraggly grass-­covered cliffs. It was a place of disagreeable memories: the humiliation of being made to strip off by Shakti, and that awful rising anguish when Fritz didn’t come out of the forest after rotten egg. I did not wish to linger and soon found the still well-­worn track that led down to the beach. As kids we had loved this bay, spending whole days here with little more than a bag of apples between us.

  The geography of the beach was so altered as to be barely recognizable. Where normally the creek sputtered out across the sand in rivulets, a wide, rippling current flooded the paddocks bordering the beach and then lurched toward the sea. It cut the beach in half, making the far side of the bay inaccessible without wading across it. But the thing that caught my eye was pushed up against a tree in the swampy field in the middle of the bay. From this distance, it looked like a cubby house or a toolshed, though I didn’t remember there ever being one down here, on the beach.

  All morning, Zachary had been light in my arms but he was starting to feel like a dead weight, pulling down on my back and shoulders. Halfway to the shed, or whatever it was, I thought about turning back but I soldiered on. Something about it was intriguing, perhaps the way it listed to one side, or the fact that the closer I got, the more familiar it was. I had almost walked right up to it before I recognized what it was—­not a shed but a caravan, Shakti’s old caravan. The wheels had shorn off and it was buried up to its axis in clotted, buttery mud, but otherwise it was more or less intact, the moon and stars still painted down the side.

  What the heck was it doing on the beach—­and not in Auckland or wherever Shakti had taken it? It made no sense. The last time I had seen the caravan, Shakti and her friend Marcia, with the cloud of hair, had been towing it away from Gaialands behind a rusty beige station wagon. No one had thought they would get very far, but even in a four-­wheel drive they would never have made it here. The beach was inaccessible by road. How else could it have got down here? The women had left Gaialands ten years ago at least, though apparently Shakti had been back to visit Hunter since then. All manner of things had been swept away in the recent floods—­the bridge over the creek, for one—­and debris littered the beach, including a few large trees. Had it washed up here on its own? The corners of it did look battered, as though it had been tossed about in a rough sea, then thumped in the side with what might have been an overhanging branch or two . . .

  I gave up wondering how the caravan had arrived on the beach and focused instead on trying to open the door. It rattled a little but wouldn’t budge. Either it was locked or wedged shut, so I went around the side of the caravan to look in one of the tiny windows. The glass had popped out but I peered inside, careful to avoid any jagged edges. My first impression was of wreckage: broken glass, smashed crockery, mud, and wet cloth. But slowly, the outlines of objects emerged: a bulbous orange pot with a wooden handle, a few damp books and candle stumps, a sprig of something that might once have been lavender. Considering how long it had been abandoned, and its possibly violent journey to the beach, it could have been in worse shape.

  I tried the door again. It was locked, but on one side of the frame, a few hinges were coming loose, and I found a sturdy-­looking branch to prize it open with. In his sling, Zachary mewled to signal he was waking up. A sour smell was coming from his nappy but it would have to wait until we got back. I hadn’t anticipated we would roam this far, or be out this long, and hadn’t brought anything to change him with. I chatted to him for a moment to soothe him, silly words that mothers say to their babies when no one else is around, and Zachary hummed and gurgled back in a code only I understood. I hadn’t known before about this covert language, the way even the smallest baby could tell his mother, and only his mother, what was wrong.

  Shakti had cleaned out most of her belongings at the time of abandoning it; that much was clear when I stepped carefully ins
ide. Everything that was left behind had been drenched at one time or another and was now in various stages of drying out. There were ruined paintbrushes; glass jars stained with paint; a china teapot that had split in two, one half with a spout, the other with a handle. Nothing much was salvageable. Water puddled on the corkboard floor.

  Near one end of the caravan, where Shakti had slept on a small platform behind batik curtains—­now reduced to matted, moldering rags—­there was an upturned cardboard box with a pile of wet notebooks and paper spilling out of it. Holding Zachary close, I made my way gingerly toward it, testing each portion of the spongy floorboards as I went. When I reached the platform, I sat down next to the box and took off the sling, resting Zachary on a portion of the mattress that was relatively clean and dry. Released from confinement, he flung up his arms, arched his back, and pointed his toes, a comical routine that was like an exaggerated version of someone stretching. When I grabbed his foot and pretended to eat it, he giggled. “Ub-­bub-­bub-­bub-­bub,” I said, and Zachary replied: “Oowaah oowaah,” a noise that denoted enthusiasm.

  Most of the bits of paper inside the box were covered in washed-­out pencil sketches, not easily decipherable, but as I flicked through them, I gradually started to recognize a few of the motifs. Here were a man and woman holding hands, drawn in a simple, childish style, and another showed a picture of a tree like the one that had been in Fritz’s prediction. My heart sank at the sight of it, and I reached into the box for another sheaf of paper. There were drawings of a tiny little crib, and another of a teeny tiny coffin. There was the wording from my prediction, next to variations: barren, childless, infertile. A child that is born won’t live.

  How many different versions could there be? I had always thought Shakti was the deliverer of the predictions and not their creator, but for the first time I considered the possibility that she had made up their contents. Not only that, but I saw how much deliberation had gone into her work, as if she had been trying to achieve a particular outcome, or had set out to manipulate our fate. But why she would interfere like that was beyond me. As if in answer to my question, a flash of light tore through the caravan, and from way off in the distance came the long, low rumble of thunder, the storm returning, in greater force. We would have to hurry back to avoid getting soaked, or worse, getting struck by lightning. I folded Zachary into the sling and hoisted it over my head, took a moment to check he was settled comfortably, then glanced around to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind. At the last possible second, my eye caught on something hairy in the bottom of the box, a dead animal, a possum or a bush rat. It was the color of sand, with darker and lighter patches, pepper and salt, not an animal but—­what was it? To get a better look, I pulled aside the paper that covered it.