The Predictions

  She stopped what she was doing and glared at him. Mud streaked one side of her face, and the look in her eye was feral, almost crazed.

  Louder this time, and more for our benefit than Shakti’s, Hunter repeated, “I said, ‘Do you need a hand?’ ”

  Shakti looked past him in the direction of the chapel, fixing her gaze on the window where the rest of us stood crowded at the glass. “Fuck you!” she yelled, at the top of her lungs, and adding, for good measure, the fingers. “And fuck your lousy commune!”

  And that was the last we saw of her.

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  CHAPTER 21

  Gaialands/London

  1989

  A few days later, a letter arrived, postmarked London. It had been so long since I had seen his handwriting on anything that I had opened it and started reading before I realized whom it was from.

  Dearest Poppy, it began, I am so sorry for everything.

  A landslide of emotion hit me, but I read on.

  When you found me in Cologne, I was the most out of it I have ever been—­not just from the overdose, but far away from the man I want to be for you, the man I am. I have loved you since I was ten years old, maybe even since before that, when we were four or five, and the adults started to leave us kids alone in the huts for the night. Whenever I woke up and it was too dark or I was having a nightmare, you were the first person I thought of and wanted to be near. I guess other ­people get comfort from having their parents around (I don’t know) but the only person I get that feeling from is you.

  I had to stop reading at that point and find a tissue to blow my nose. I felt exactly the same way about Lukas—­that he comforted me from the trials of the world—­but I had never been able to put it into words. Of course we meant more to each other than lovers. We hadn’t been able to rely on our parents so we had relied on each other for everything, since we were kids.

  The next part of the letter was about how he had started going to rehab. No one had forced him to go—­he had rung up the clinic himself and booked in for rehabilitation treatment for addiction to alcohol and narcotics. He honestly hadn’t realized he was addicted, he wrote, until he took the overdose in Cologne, even though he should have seen the writing on the wall months before that. Marlon had introduced him to everything initially but the ongoing problem was that it was all too easy to get whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. He didn’t have to go out and buy the drugs on the street from a dealer; Fran did all that. She had contacts in every city. He thought that was how she fed her own habit—­by taxing whatever she procured for the band. He wasn’t trying to blame her for the mess he was in, but she had enabled him to a level that he would not have been able to reach on his own. Even that wasn’t her fault, he wrote. We were the first band she ever managed, and none of us knew what we were doing. We made every rookie mistake in the book.

  I read that part again, struggling to remember the conversation I’d had with Lukas before I walked out of his hotel room. He’d said he was waiting for Fran, that she hadn’t come back, and I had assumed it was because they were having an affair. I’d assumed the same thing from the photograph Paul had shown me but on its own, there was nothing suspicious about a singer and his manager snapped together in a bar. A manager’s job was to be with her band all the time and photos were taken wherever they went. And Lukas had been waiting for Fran to come to his room that night, not because he was sleeping with her, but because she was his supplier.

  I didn’t waste time writing him a letter back. I packed up Zachary and my things and the next day Paul drove us to the international airport in Auckland. I had just enough in my savings account to pay for our airfares, and once I had booked them I rang Lukas and told him to meet us at Heathrow at the other end.

  “Did you get my letter?” he said, sounding worried that I hadn’t.

  “Yes, I got your letter. It made me cry.”

  “You’re not mad with me about the drugs?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I thought you were shagging your manager.”

  “Good god,” said Lukas. “Perish the thought.”

  Heathrow Airport was jam-­packed with the endless variety of nationalities and colors and social groups that did not exist anywhere outside of London, but even among that crowd, Lukas stood out. It was one of the only times in our life—­the other was when I came across him performing in that basement bar in Chelsea—­that I had ever got a true first impression of him, seeing him as a stranger would, and not as a person might see a member of their immediate family. The ridiculous curls were gone. He had put on weight, had cut his hair short, and wore normal clothes. He looked once again like the boy I loved, and had done for as far back as I could remember.

  Approaching him, I suffered a sudden bout of shyness, a fear that someone like him, someone famous, couldn’t possibly love an ordinary girl like me, and it was the first time I knew to call it that, and not to mask it with a trick or a prediction that would keep him at a distance.

  Lukas’s expression had been neutral but the minute he saw us it bloomed with love. I had not seen him look like that for a very long time, not on the day we were married, not in the hospital when Zachary had pneumonia, perhaps not even on the day our son was born. The real Lukas, I realized, had been absent for a very long time. He smiled his goofy smile, mirroring mine, and we wrapped our arms around each other and sandwiched Zachary in the middle, the heart of our little family.

  “What have you been feeding him?” he said, squeezing the fat rolls on Zachary’s arm. “He looks like a pudding.”

  “So do you,” I said, patting his stomach. “Maybe not a pudding but a champagne socialist.”

  “I don’t fit my leather pants anymore. If Marlon finds out, he’ll fire me.”

  “Isn’t that what you want to have happen?”

  We walked hand in hand down the causeway to the car park building, where Lukas had trouble finding the car he had borrowed from a friend, an old yellow Renault Five. It was rusted on the outside and filled with apple cores and parking tickets and squashed polystyrene cups, but Lukas didn’t mention the car’s shabby appearance because he knew I didn’t care. We had been brought up not to mind that sort of thing, and we still didn’t mind it, nor did we have to explain.

  “You’ll never guess who came back at Gaialands while I was there,” I said, remembering that I hadn’t told him yet about any of the insane stuff that had happened.

  “Who?”

  “Shakti.”

  “That crazy witch?”

  “The very same.”

  I told him of Shakti’s deception, how she had helped Fritz run away to Sydney, and that Elisabeth, when I rang her up and told her, had immediately set off to find him, not caring if it interfered with anyone else’s plans.

  “Wow,” he said, incredulous. “That’s some heavy shit.”

  “I know. They want to find him and bring him home to the commune, but I’m not sure he’ll want to go back.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t go straight to Sydney to look for him.”

  “I wanted to,” I said to Lukas. “But I wanted to see you more.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “With all my heart,” I said, resting my hand on his knee, then feeling self-­conscious about it being there.

  Lukas drove on in silence, studying the oncoming cars, and then I lost my nerve and withdrew my hand.

  “I liked it there. Put it back.”

  When I did as I was told, he moved my hand a little closer to his crotch, before turning to me and grinning. “I guess it’s safe, now that you don’t believe in it, to tell you what was in my prediction.”

  “I knew it, you dick. I knew you were only pretending you didn’
t look.”

  “Of course I looked.” He stared straight ahead at the road, teasing out the moment, a smirk playing at the edges of his mouth.

  “And?”

  “It was nothing.”

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’?”

  “There was literally nothing in my prediction. It was a blank piece of card.”

  “She left it blank?” Of all the things it could have been, I had not expected that. “And that’s why you thought it was bullshit?”

  Lukas laughed. “Finally! My wife sees the light.”

  I laughed along with him, mainly to mask my incredulity, but then, when I thought about it, I wondered if he’d waited so long to tell me his prediction because it had meant something to him once. If he had really always thought it was bullshit, knowing Lukas, he would have used the contents, or lack of it, as ammunition at every available opportunity to prove the same thing to me. But he hadn’t. When it came to us, he had been insecure, and I didn’t think that was all down to how much stock I’d held in my prediction. Had he been under the influence too? Was it in the way he’d lost his nerve when we first got to London, and later on, in the way he’d hit self-­destruct? He had gone after success, money, fame, but when he got those things, he found they weren’t what he wanted, and not just because he hadn’t achieved them on exactly his terms. “That blank card,” I said. “Are you sure it didn’t scare the crap out of you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It would have scared me.”

  “You’d have let it.”

  I dropped the subject. If I had stumbled on the truth, Lukas wasn’t ready to admit it. And maybe he was right not to. I had given my prediction too much power, and irrespective of how false it turned out to be, through that one act of stupidity, I had very nearly lost all I loved.

  “I’m so sorry for everything I put us through.” The words sounded so inadequate, barely hinting at how immensely at fault I had been, and I supposed I would find myself repeating them many times in the years to come. “I’ve been such a fool.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” Lukas said. “I’ve been foolish, you’ve been foolish—­we both got taken for a ride by a filthy, rotten hippie—­but it doesn’t matter because we found our way back to each other.”

  Lukas’s description of Shakti made me smile, and Zachary chose this moment to pipe up from the backseat with an enthusiastic “Ooowah” of his own, as if he had been listening to our conversation and had something to add. When we both turned to look at him at the same time, he was so pleased to have drawn our attention that an ecstatic grin spread over his entire face, crinkling his eyes and sending drool down his chin. He had put so much effort into the exclamation and the smile that afterward I thought he would collapse from exhaustion. I loved him so much it brought a lump to my throat.

  “And we’ve got him,” said Lukas, beaming in my direction.

  I took a deep breath, the first since we had landed at Heathrow, and made sure to measure our good fortune. We had Zachary. We had each other. We had left the commune far behind but I would always have the best part of it with me in Lukas.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOR YOUR LONG-­DISTANCE LOYALTY, dedication, and enthusiasm, even though we’ve still never met, thank you, Lisa Grubka. For patience, encouragement, and incisive editing, Katherine Nintzel and Margaux Weisman. Thank you also to everyone at William Morrow, Fletcher & Company, and Foundry who helped The Predictions on its journey.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Creative New Zealand for the research and writing of this book.

  I am indebted to Grimshaw & Co. and the Sargeson Trust for enabling me to finish it—­and for not minding at all that my son was born while I was on residency.

  Thank you to my early readers and fact-­checkers: Marian Evans, Janis Freegard, Rachael King, Sarah Laing, Jonathan Lane, Cris and Peter Roberts, and Stephen Stratford.

  Thank you to my colleagues and students at Auckland University of Technology, especially James George, for giving me somewhere to write and for keeping me on my toes. I must also acknowledge Dizengoff for letting me use their café as a study.

  Thank you to my friends and family, especially Azedear, Chris, and Lesley, for looking after the nippers and egging me on. And for sticking with a novelist as a wife—­Matthew, you are a genius.