The Predictions

  A long trestle table ran the length of the mess hall, but the adults only took up one end of it. Since we kids had left, they had never had a full table. They would have finished eating hours before and were now deep in conversation. They fell silent when we came in, all eyes on the newcomers, Pat and Barb.

  “We brought a ­couple of mates back with us,” said Susie. “They needed a break from the city.” She introduced the women, and hands were dutifully shaken, though with none of the warmth I had received at my homecoming. “I thought we could put them in the children’s hut.”

  “Oh,” said Loretta. “Tom and I have been sleeping in there.” She looked at Tom, and then at Zachary and me. “Just while Poppy’s here.”

  “Good thing there’s so many bunks,” said Susie. “You don’t mind sharing, do you?”

  “Not really,” said Loretta, looking peeved. “The more the merrier, I suppose.”

  Easygoing Tom smiled. “No skin off my nose.”

  I waited for someone to ask how long Pat and Barb planned to stay, but no one did, and the women themselves didn’t mention it, leaving me to wonder whether Susie had overlooked this information or left it out on purpose. Instead, she told Pat and Barb to take a seat, and began passing bowls of food in their direction. It was the commune way to share what we had, no questions asked, but even so, a few of the men gazed sadly at Pat and Barb’s plates, what would have been tomorrow’s lunch.

  I noticed the seat next to Hunter was vacant but that someone had been sitting there and left behind an empty plate. I searched for Shakti, half expected her to materialize, but she did not seem to be around. I was suddenly very tired, and immensely relieved when Paul offered to carry Zachary and our bags to the cabin.

  Zachary, bless him, chose that night to sleep through for the first time—­a feat he did not feel compelled to repeat—­and I hardly knew myself when I woke up the next morning. My head was bracingly clear, as though someone had got in there with a bucket of ice water and sluiced it out. On waking, I had risen from the bed and checked, with no little anxiety, to make sure Zachary was breathing, rejoiced that he was still asleep, then gone outside to listen to the birdsong on my own, a rare treat. So high was I on that eight-­hour block of sleep that I wanted to sing too, or dance, or take up karate, but I was not the only one up. Far away across the still dewy field, a lone figure practiced yoga. It was no more than the brushstroke of a straight back in downward dog, but that was enough to accelerate my pulse. Shakti. After all this time, would I be able to stand up to her?

  I was in the mess hut, eating breakfast, when she walked in, bold as anything, and sat down next to Hunter, kissed him, and slid her arm around his waist, as if he was her property. “Hello, Poppy,” she said, digging in to the bowl of porridge that Hunter had obediently fetched for her. “I hear you’ve got a little one. What a lovely surprise.”

  Was she already toying with me—­alluding to the fact that I had bucked her prediction? The animosity I felt toward her was difficult to hide. “His name is Zachary,” I said, checking to see the baby was indeed where I had left him, over by the window in Katrina’s arms. “He’s five months old.”

  “Well, he is truly a blessing,” said Shakti, smiling with what was either genuine appreciation or audacious shit-­kicking smugness. “I can’t wait to get to know him.”

  I could not finish my breakfast.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and walked out to the porch of the mess hut, where I struggled to control my emotions. I pulled on the first pair of gumboots I found, paced to the edge of the paddock, burst into tears, told myself to get it together, grow a spine, harden the fuck up, then sniffed like a drainpipe, wiped my face on my sleeve, and marched back to the mess hut to face my nemesis.

  She was every bit as beautiful, damn it. Older but still the exotic plumed creature plucked out of a fantasy world and stranded on earth among dull and clumsy oafs. Around her I had always felt so ugly, so inadequately feminine, and nothing had changed. She still had the power to dazzle me.

  I wasn’t the only one. When I looked over at Hunter he was awestruck.

  Pat and Barb arrived in the mess hall looking tired and disheveled. They eyed the vat of gray, lumpen porridge warily, as if it wasn’t quite the whole-­food smorgasbord they had hoped for. Yes, I felt like saying, we really do eat that stuff three hundred sixty-­five days of the year, even on Christmas morning; do you still want to stay? I wondered what they had made of the long drop, not as monstrous as it had once been, but still dire enough, most mornings, to make your underpants retreat up your legs.

  Pat slid onto the bench seat next to me, and Barb shunted close to her side, bowls of porridge in hand. They had both drowned it in molasses, a rookie mistake, and I watched them take a big mouthful, thinking it was golden syrup, then gag.

  Pat sniffed the contents of her spoon. “Well, that was an interesting flavor.”

  “Molasses,” I said. “You’ll get used to it”

  She grimaced. “Really? I find that hard to believe.”

  “It’s packed with iron.” I nodded at pregnant Barb. “You’ll need that. There’s no meat within a hundred miles of this place.”

  Barb swallowed it down, bravely, while Pat spooned hers off to one side. “Crikey, we had a rough night,” she said. “Barb found a weta in her bed, and being the gentlewoman that I am, I had to see it off the premises.”

  “It was huge,” said Barb, speaking for possibly the first time in two days.

  “Poor Barb almost crapped her pants,” added Pat.

  Barb nodded agreement while Pat used her spoon as a ruler to demonstrate how big the weta was—­the length of the handle—­and how she had flicked it off the bed with her bare hands. I struggled to remember a night of my childhood when my sleep hadn’t been disturbed by one critter or another: slugs, centipedes, cockroaches, daddy longlegs, and the occasional white-­tail spider. Often put there by one of the boys but not always.

  From across the table, Hunter and Shakti watched this exchange—­he with amusement, she more like a cat when it picks up the scent of a nearby dog. It wasn’t just Pat’s tale that was turning Shakti off but her whole demeanor, so forthright that it was obvious, from even this small interaction, that Pat alone, out of all the humans in the world, would be immune to Shakti’s charms. Sure enough, after a few minutes, Shakti got up and left, Hunter’s gaze tracking her. If I had thought he was docile before, with Shakti around he was ten times worse.

  “Hunter,” I said. “The cabin I’m staying in—­I think there’s a problem with the roof. Would you mind taking a look?”

  “Sure,” he said, still in a dream world. “How about later?”

  “I was hoping we could look at it now—­while Zachary is with Katrina.”

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to show Hunter at the cabin. A number of things were broken or falling off it, but I suspected they had been that way for years. There had been a roof leak, but Paul had patched it up a few days earlier. Halfway across the still-­soggy field, with Hunter in tow, I remembered the rotten floorboard on the veranda that I had almost put my foot through. I showed it to him, and he agreed it was dangerous and needed to be seen to. “I’ll ask Paul to fix it right away.”

  “How did it go in Whitianga?” I said, training my eyes on Hunter so as not to miss an iota of his reaction. “Did you hand over the shirt?”

  For a moment he was blank. “The shirt?”

  “The tank top Fritz wore. You were going to give it to the cops in Whitianga.”

  “They said they would look into it.”

  “That’s all? They didn’t ask where you found it?”

  “I told them, and they said they’d look into that too.”

  I suspected he was bullshitting, that he hadn’t handed in the tank top at all. Of course he hadn’t. He was too besotted with Shakti, and she had likely encouraged him not to. “D
id you tell Shakti about it?”

  “She didn’t know how it got there.”

  So he had told her. “What about the caravan? How did that end up in the estuary?”

  “She doesn’t know. She said she abandoned it at the side of the road. This is years ago. Right after she left here. She and her friend—­Margie, Margot—­”

  “Marcia. Her girlfriend.”

  “We don’t know that’s what they were.” Hunter’s cheeks reddened. “Anyway, they drove here in that old rust bucket to pick up the caravan. Shakti said they hadn’t got very far up the road when the tow bar snapped. The caravan rolled off into a ditch, and they left it there.”

  “They just left it there?”

  “You know what Shakti’s like—­she doesn’t care for material possessions. She’s more in tune with the spiritual side of life.”

  I was speechless.

  “Poppy, look, I can understand why you might find it hard to see me with another woman but what she and I have—­

  “Believe me,” I said, dreading what he might say. “It’s not that.”

  “I was going to say,” he continued, “that she has a pure soul. She’s incapable of doing something that would deliberately harm another person.”

  Talking to him was a lost cause. He was so cunt-­struck he was seeing fairies. If Shakti had anything to do with Fritz’s disappearance, I would have to confront her about it myself.

  “Are you coming to the hui?” asked Hunter.

  “Is that tonight?”

  He nodded. “Susie wants us all to be there. It’s about the memorial for Fritz.”

  A hui would mean hours and hours of talking, discussion that went around in circles, everyone getting a chance to be heard, even if they had nothing to say—­then thrashing it out to reach a consensus that pleased no one but infuriated the least number of ­people. We had covered the process, exhaustively, in women’s studies. I could think of nothing worse. “Do you think we should have one? A memorial.”

  “How can we?” said Hunter. “We don’t know where he is.”

  “But you think he’s still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hunter. “Nobody does.”

  When I went back to the mess hut, Katrina and Zachary weren’t there, and no one seemed to know where they had gone. Even though I knew he was with an adult, and theoretically should be safe, I felt anxious, a sensation that came over me whenever I had been separated from him for even a short time. I searched all the obvious places: Susie and Katrina’s cabin, the chapel, the orchard, and the schoolhouse, now used as a library. Then, with a rising sense of panic, I looked in all the places I hoped they would never have ventured: down by the river, so swollen it would be treacherous even to look at; anywhere near the toilet block, where each long drop was a six-­feet-­deep, shit-­filled grave. I was still getting used to the way my maternal instincts went rogue, always calculating the potential for fatality in nearby hazards, even if the baby was safely tucked up in bed. But Zachary wasn’t tucked up in bed—­I didn’t know where he was. By the time I arrived at the door of Hunter’s cabin, the only one I hadn’t yet investigated, Zachary had met with a dozen violent and catastrophic ends, and my nerves were completely shot.

  On my way up the front steps, I heard a sound that was music to my ears: Zachary bleating with the first signs of hunger. Or perhaps someone was sticking him with a pin. I didn’t care—­he was alive. With some urgency, I pushed open the door, strode into the cabin, and then froze at the grotesque pantomime before me. Relief turned to bewilderment, horror, as I stared and stared, trying to make sense of it.

  Seated cross-­legged with one leg dangling off the end of the bed was Katrina. She was smiling and nodding encouragement to another woman, also seated on the bed but at the head of it, against the wall. This other woman had no clothes on. She was propped up with pillows, her long, muscular limbs a glossy nutmeg brown, ill matched to the pink, squirming baby in her arms. The anatomy of it was easy to understand. The woman was Shakti, the baby was Zachary, but what was she doing to him? She had cupped her hand around the back of his head and was pushing his mouth toward her bare breast. When he got close to the nipple, he thrashed his head from side to side, kicked his legs, and complained, but Shakti ignored his protests and pressed on, trying to maneuver her breast in the direction of his mouth. “Suckle,” she was saying, “please, just once.”

  I had entered the room without knocking or announcing my presence, but the two women were so absorbed in their task, Katrina murmuring encouragement, and Shakti concentrating on Zachary, that they hadn’t noticed I was there.

  I managed to call out “What the fuck are you doing?” before charging for Zachary and trying to wrestle him away from Shakti.

  I got as far as the bed. Katrina grabbed me around the waist from behind, stopping me in my tracks. “You don’t need to worry,” she said. “What’s happening is natural.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said, trying to push her off. “He doesn’t like it.”

  Deranged with concentration, Shakti had folded Zachary more securely in her arms and while he screamed into her chest, his hands white and curled into fists, his body rigid with distress, she tried to ram her breast down his throat.

  I escaped from Katrina and put my hand in between Shakti’s breast and Zachary’s mouth, shushing to calm him down, at the same time working to free him from Shakti’s arms, devilishly strong after a lifetime of yoga. “Please,” she said, in a plaintive register. “He almost took it.”

  Zachary had switched from screaming to the really desperate cries that make no sound.

  I felt Katrina’s hand on my shoulder, squeezing it. “Let her have one more try.”

  “Can’t you see how upset he is?” To be taken seriously, I had yelled.

  Shakti released her grip, finally, and I lifted the baby from her. Letting go of him, in a pathetic voice she said, “I just wanted to know what it feels like to nurse.”

  “Shakti can’t have children,” said Katrina. “That scar she showed us, on her cervix—­the botched operation.” She lowered her voice to a whisper: “They removed her womb.”

  I recalled Shakti’s self-­examination, how she had urged us to take back our bodies from the medical profession. No wonder she didn’t trust anyone with a scalpel. That doctor really had butchered her. But then, she had gone a step further.

  “You’re the one that’s infertile?” I said unkindly. “You’re the one with the womb that shall bear only sorrow?”

  Shakti sobbed—­something I had not known she was capable of. “To be a mother,” she said. “It’s all I ever wanted.”

  With the better part of me, I felt for her. To be denied the one thing in life she wanted was cruel. But in the end I couldn’t forgive her for yoking me to her misfortune. “Did it make you feel better,” I said, “to share your misery?”

  “That’s not why I did it,” pleaded Shakti. “I was trying to help you. The way you were brought up . . . I was worried what would happen if you ever had children.”

  I had been holding Zachary to my chest, comforting him, but he was still naked, and now he weed on me. “We’re doing fine,” I said, as the warm liquid seeped through every layer of my clothing, the last clean lot I had. I felt no disgust, his urine was comprised of fluid from my own body, but afterward, Zachary was wet, and shivering with cold.

  “Why did you take all his clothes off?” I said, looking around for something to wrap him in.

  “Skin to skin,” said Katrina, handing me a tank top and a terrycloth jumpsuit. “Such a beautiful way to bond.”

  “With your own baby,” I said, for myself but also for Elisabeth. “Not with someone else’s.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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&n
bsp; CHAPTER 20

  Gaialands

  1989

  THE HUI WAS IN an hour’s time. I did not want to go. I did not wish to face the strange adults who had raised me, or the woman who had turned her sorrow into mine. But for the sake of Fritz, to honor his memory if nothing else, I had to go. There was also the matter of the tank top. I had meant to confront Shakti about it, but in the confusion—­the horror—­of seeing her trying to breast-­feed my baby, I had forgotten about it entirely. Before I did anything else, I wanted to know if Hunter had taken the tank top to the police or if, as I suspected, he had hung on to it, done nothing—­either to protect Shakti, or because he had taken her at her word.

  I waited until the last possible minute to carry out my plan, when I knew Hunter and everyone would be assembled in the chapel, waiting for the hui to begin. Then, with Zachary stowed in the sling, I took a roundabout route through a grove of lemon trees to Hunter’s cabin, which he had been sharing of late with Shakti. The door was unlocked, just as it had been every night for the last twenty-­five years. “If I wanted to lock my door at night, I’d move to the city,” was one of Hunter’s favorite maxims.

  Sure enough, the tank top I was looking for was exactly where I had expected to find it: in the drawer Hunter had shoved it in, still near the top. The blood on the tank top had dried to an orange crust, and when I tried to unfold it, the most saturated areas of fabric stayed glued together in a lump. Unsure if it would prove anything, or be of any use, I stashed it in the sling under Zachary’s sleeping body.

  A few minutes later, I slipped into a pew in the back row of the chapel. Paul glanced behind to wink at me, but the others stayed facing the front, where Susie was perched on a small podium. Her seating position, her manner, was that of someone who wanted to lead the meeting without appearing as though they were. In the front pew to her right, Katrina sat next to Barb and Pat. In the pew behind them sat Loretta and Tom, he with his arm around her. Sometime in the last week, perhaps while I had been in Auckland, Loretta had chopped off all her hair.