Kehua!

by Fay Weldon

  Alice’s mysterious pregnancy

  Beverley had always had a suspicion that the child was in fact Winter’s – so had not pressed her daughter too hard. There was such a thing as too much information. Winter Max was no blood relation of Alice’s, after all, just a stepfather, and Cynara had turned out a fine healthy child. If you thought about it there was a look of the Maidments about Cynara – the stockier build, the pig-headedness. Better, then, not to think about it: if you did the generations became too confused – Cynara became Richie’s half-sister as well as his niece.

  But if it was indeed the case, no wonder Alice had fled north: not because of the shock-horror of family history but because her daughter did not want to be reminded of the horror and confusion that she herself had created in her own generation, sleeping with her mother’s husband. No wonder in the end she had confirmed her allegiance to Jesus – she could not shake off the need for ongoing forgiveness. And Winter’s sudden flight had less to do with the struggle, with Bolivia and Che Guevara, than just getting away from the mess. He had welcomed death, as perhaps Walter had, in his time, as preferable to the disaster that was life.

  ‘Invent a medical student,’ implored Beverley when her daughter’s pregnancy became apparent, ‘if you don’t want to tell me who the father actually is.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want,’ wept Alice. ‘It’s that I can’t. Oh, Mum!’

  Was she weeping for herself or Winter? From guilt or grief or distress? What’s a mother to do except not give the matter too much thought? It was not as if Winter was around any more, to berate. And he had already made sure he had no exclusive demands on her, Beverley, or she on him, as is the manner of revolutionaries.

  ‘Or if not a medical student,’ said Beverley, ‘try an officer on leave, who was killed before he could marry you. One hears that one a lot.’

  But Alice felt she had a duty to the truth. And if the truth was not possible, silence was next best.

  In the course of her heredity and genetics module at Leeds, she was told that since sex was no longer about reproduction but recreation, when it happened within the family it was hardly of consequence. It did not feel quite like that to Alice; she felt the Freudian version was more likely, in which, though the horror and revulsion when it comes to inter-family sexual relationships were a mere social construct, knowledge of its incestuous begetting would stunt the development of the child’s superego so that it remained infantile, sadistic, perfectionist, demanding and punishing. Alice did not want her baby’s superego thus crippled. Better perhaps no baby at all, remembering that every baby you give birth to keeps out the next one, who might have a better chance in life.

  The same advice echoed through the generations. If you don’t know who the father is, invent one. Buy a wedding ring from Woolworth’s, otherwise it’s Epsom salts from Boots or gin from the pub or both and try lying in a too hot bath. Today’s equivalent being the morning-after pill, or if you’re still too drunk the morning after, down to the doctor in a week or two, and to the clinic, and whoosh, baby’s gone. The baby is like the puppy, not just for Christmas, the baby is for life and a whole string of other lives, and a kehua attached to every one; the trees are alive with the sound of flapping. No wonder girls get scared.

  Alice made for the clinic, and would have got there only Beverley hauled her back and made her the offer: ‘You keep the baby, I’ll take it on.’

  The baby was born, and at the age of three weeks christened Mary. It was there at the christening service, in the charming surroundings of St John’s in Hampstead, moved by the hymns and sunlight gleaming through stained-glass windows, that Alice began her intense relationship with Jesus. Winter was by that time off to Bolivia, whence he would never return. The baby was left in the care of Beverley. Alice took the tube down to King’s Cross, and the train back to Leeds and her studies. Beverley took it on herself to rename the baby Cynara. When Cynara was sixteen, Alice claimed the girl as her own, wrenching her from her grandmother’s care, renaming her as Mary and taking her back into her own household. Cynara, or Mary, disliked her stepfather and the dislike quickly developed into a feminism of almost religious intensity.

  And now here’s Lola, Winter’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter both, contemplating sex with her uncle, and seeing nothing wrong in it. The incestuous tendency, after all, has come down to her from both sides of the family. It must be a very aggressive gene.

  Who does and who is done unto? When it comes to sex it can be hard to tell. Lola is young but far more experienced sexually than Louis, who had had only four loves in his lifetime, and the fourth, earlier in the day, was by far the most explosive and has emotionally exhausted him. He is just so tired.

  ‘You look really bad,’ says Lola now to Louis, ‘but you’ll get over it. It’s not as if you two were married or had any children.’

  Louis sits down on the sofa and begins to weep. Lola sits beside him and says, ‘Can I make everything feel better again?’ in the gentlest way, and Louis knows that after a few formal protests this is exactly what he will do. As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb and serve Scarlet right, and serve Samantha right too, for stirring up old emotions and then leaving him in the shit, and D’Kath for bursting in on them and bringing up memories of disgrace at school, and Lola too, for simply being there and daring to behave in this outrageous way. Sixteen is not too young for sex; anyway she claimed to be seventeen for Help the Harmed and if that’s the way she wants it who is he to stand in her way?

  He and Samantha had been sixteen when first they met and rolled together on the infirmary’s beds. Louis shuts his eyes and does as he is told: he lets Lola take most of his clothes off – she has none worth removing – and it is like being a small child again: she pushes him so he lolls against the back of the sofa, his cock still half erect with memories of Samantha, takes it in her mouth in the most practised way, and then sits on top of him doing the splits so she has an ankle on both arms of the sofa, quite the little gymnast, and then bounces up and down with her skinny little thighs, wailing and gasping, therapeutically stretching her inner leg muscles the while, until she is satisfied. After which she abruptly removes herself with no thought for his coming at all.

  Louis is astonished at the uneroticism of it all; he has not met it before, but then, as he realises, he has met so little before. He feels quite sorry for her. She is like a housewife, he thinks, who asks a guest for dinner, cooks the meal, and serves it only to herself. By comparison, Scarlet is generosity itself.

  ‘I have you in my power now,’ Lola says, looking up from her mobile, where she is already busy interconnecting with the rest of the world. ‘I can cry rape and I’m bound to win and the criminal compensation board will give me £20,000 and I can go to Haiti without waiting for Help the Harmed to get their act together.’

  Louis turns pale. He can see it is all too likely. He needs Scarlet. She will know what to do.

  ‘Don’t worry, Uncle Louis,’ says Lola. ‘Only kidding. I feel a lot better now. Thanks!’

  And she goes off to her friends, saying she’s more than paid for her keep by doing the housework. She says Scarlet can keep the top, she doesn’t need it any more, there’s only a small tear under one of the arms.

  Louis says pathetically, ‘But Scarlet has gone.’

  And Lola says, ‘Don’t you believe it. It’s on Twitter that Jackson Wright is all washed up; so she’ll be back.’

  And Louis hardly knows what to think. He goes to bed and sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.

  The peace and quiet of the basement

  At the moment it is really very eerily quiet and normal down here. No chatter and clatter from Mavis or Cook, no cigar smoke. The peace was making me uneasy. Then I realised I couldn’t even hear the birds singing or the keyboard clacking. So I took time off and went down to the nurse at the clinic and had my ears checked, and yes, there was a lot of wax, which had to be softened and washed out. I am sorry to plague you with this really r
ather disgusting detail – bad enough when characters have afflictions, but one hardly wants the writer to offer hers up as well – but it is relevant. The nurse said yes, in the build-up to the blockage one could get all kinds of sound effects in the ears, and yes, sudden changes of temperature might well affect the wax, hardening or softening it, though she hardly thought the sense of smell would be affected. On the other hand – ears, nose, throat – yes, it was possible. So all is explained. Well, quite a lot of it. It doesn’t explain the dog who wasn’t Bonzo walking past my window. But the unlikely is not the impossible.

  I walked back from the clinic hearing everything so clearly it was almost painful. I could hear the drains beneath the pavement gurgling; the sound of the church bell ringing a celebratory carillon was as clear as that of the men moving a skip and shouting each other instructions. My ears had temporarily lost the ability to sort out irrelevant sound from the relevant. Within half an hour my hearing was back to normal, and I was able to dismiss the thought that though I’d assumed the church bells were coming from All Saints, the bells had been removed in the seventies. My sense of near sound and distant sound had been confused.

  But why do I have the sense that I am being laughed at, that they are playing grandmother’s footsteps? One child goes ahead, and the others creep up behind, and if the one in front suddenly turns round and if someone is discovered to be moving, that person is out.

  The weather’s been heavy lately, full of thunder, and very humid. Today really black clouds are blowing our way and seem to be piling up just the other side of the lonicera hedge which marks the edge of the garden some sixty feet away. Well, more or less lonicera – in the manner of unkempt hedges everywhere it also includes attractive intrusions of holly, hawthorn and roses. A single red rose and a shower of white ones stand out clearly against the black backdrop of clouds. I am so taken by it I stop typing and just stare. I would go and get my camera except that this would mean climbing up the stone stairs, worn down by the footsteps of the likes of Mavis, and Cook, and the laundress, yes, and occasionally Mr Bennett and his kind.

  A crack of thunder comes so loud it makes me start up from my chair. A zigzag of lightning leaps through the clouds almost without pause and makes everything as bright as daylight for a second: everything is visible except for some reason the roses. My computer screen blinks and cuts out. I panic. But when I turn it on again – fortunately we have a kind of surge cut-out gadget – every word is there. I saved, thank God, before I stopped to stare at the roses. Even better, the leylandia just the far side of the hedge was struck and split – I have never liked it because it’s an unnatural heavy green colour and it has blocked the view out of my bedroom window, and now the leylandia is no more, it is gone. And the rain came pelting down and did the garden no end of good, and everything smelled of fresh wet grass. So all was well.

  Almost well. I say almost, because I’ll swear that in that instant flash of light I saw a cluster of kehua hanging from one of the trees in the hedge, swinging gently in the rush of cool breeze that came just before the rain started down. It was only the vision of an instant, but there they were. This is not good. This is outrageous – what are they doing in my life? They are a fictional conceit. I brought them to this country. They come and go at my behest.

  No wonder the dead staff are bloody laughing: they know what’s going on. The spirits of the world are in collusion. I knew it was dangerous walking the edge of the occult. The more you think about it, the more it’s there. But I shan’t give up. I am not so far from the end of this book. The kehua of the South, the kelpies and selkies of the North may unite and riot, I shall stay down here and write.

  Upstairs is too unhappy at the moment. The carillon I heard, from the bells that weren’t, was surely celebrating the end of the First World War, from which two of the Bennett sons, William and Ernest, never came home. What good victory now? I can’t bear it. Mr Bennett and Mavis’ carryings-on are bad enough but Cristobel’s grief is too near me, as she roams these now-desolate rooms. It is every woman’s grief. Perhaps that’s what brought the kehua to my garden: they are bent on joining together all the sorrowing families of the world, the ones destroyed by violence. They are learning globalism.

  And now for something completely different

  When Beverley had done her bit at the prompting of her kehua and had called Gerry and Louis, thus stirring up their lives enough to wake the dead, she calls her granddaughter Cynara to point out that Scarlet has left Louis and that she hopes Lola is not going to be homeless, because at this time in her life the girl needs guidance.

  ‘She can come and stay with me if she likes,’ says Beverley. ‘I’ll take her on.’

  The kehua move closer, fluttering from the hornbeam at the end of the garden to hang from the branches of the wild cherry or prunus avium, which rubs its branches up against the windows of Beverley’s conservatory, and which in spite of Harry’s advice she had declined to have removed. (Harry is the second husband, if you remember, the troubled gay architect.) Sooner or later the glass panes are going to start cracking and breaking under the pressure of foliage. Beverley, waiting for Cynara’s reply, finds her ears are blocked and stuffy and blows her nose, which doesn’t help, but just makes sound the more distorted.

  The kehua love event. They sniff it in the air. It makes them chatter and clatter. They like the idea of the family massing together: ideally of course it would be in the marae in pakeha Amberley, the dead and the living at peace together, all the rituals done. As it happened both Walter and Arthur had Maori ancestry, albeit diluted, from the bloodline of the great South Island warrior Te Rauparaha, but that was something you kept quiet about in Amberley in the 1920s. But the kehua have almost forgotten their purpose: which is to get Kitchie and Walter, Rita and Arthur, and little Beverley and all her descendants back with the whanau at last. The kehua have come to like the flora of this northern Antipodean land, the oaks, willows, ashes and aspens, with branches which are far easier to hang from than the pohutakawas whose cheerful red fronds are scratchy, let alone the kauris so tall and smooth you have to find an updraught to reach even the lowest branch. The flowering cherry suits them very well.

  Beverley says she can well understand that Lola might find it difficult at her age to lose a father and find a second mother, and needs a place to be where there is less tumult than there was likely in her new future, either at Nopasaran with a distraught Louis, or at Parliam Road with her mother and D’Dora. At which Cynara, emotionally and physically exhausted by a wild night in The Dungeonette, accuses her grandmother of being homophobic.

  ‘Could you repeat that?’ asks Beverley, whose ears are giving her real trouble now. Cynara does. Beverley is hurt and angry.

  ‘Good God,’ she says to her granddaughter. ‘I was married to Harry for long enough. Have you forgotten that?’

  ‘Yes but it was you who drove him to his death,’ says Cynara, who believes in frank speaking – one of the reasons Lola is in such difficulty now. ‘Poor man. D’Dora reckons that speech you gave at the funeral was the most remarkable piece of homophobic hypocrisy she’d ever heard in her life.’

  Chatter, chatter, chatter, go the kehua. This is not going well. Their agitation is infecting all the members of the clan.

  Up in the North Alice feels a migraine coming on and takes to her bed.

  Lola, in a taxi on the way to her friend the party-drug dealer, feels stuffy in the head, opens a window and a cinder flies into her left eye, which spoils her looks for days and in fact never really goes away, like the ice splinter in the eye of the Snow Queen. It puts Lola off sex for years. Before she’d walked out on Louis she had left a message on her mother’s answermachine to say she had just bonked her Uncle Louis and serve everyone right. Now she wishes she hadn’t. She needn’t have worried. D’Dora had picked up the message and wiped it. Information meant power; secret information meant more power.

  In LA Richie is struck by a sudden violent sore throat, and is on t
he phone to his physician. His children Waldo and Merielle catch it from him: it seems to be some kind of antibiotic-resistant bug, and lasts several weeks.

  Gerry had, I think, picked up some kind of plaintive kelpie water spirit of Fiona’s on the shoreline of Kalsoy, now crouching unseen up there in the luggage rack on his flight to Aberdeen. Something at any rate caused a leaking bottle of water to drip from the luggage rack so that Gerry’s trousers were drenched.

  Louis’ kehua – Louis still being an honorary member of the hapu until we know whether Scarlet’s departure is permanent – crack a pane of glass in the atrium skylight and drop splinters down, which fortunately miss Louis. He doesn’t hear but, traumatised by women, sleeps on.

  Cynara’s sight is blurry. Perhaps she is getting a migraine, for she has had a lot of stress lately; a lot of tying and blindfolding went on in The Dungeonette. Her grandmother has made her a kindly offer, and she has repulsed it. What had D’Dora done to her that she returns evil for good? Her kehua, sensing danger, move closer on the dusty branch of the plane tree. Run, run, run, they plead. Time to get out of here!

  And all Cynara wants to do is not to have to listen to her grandmother, to have a quiet night’s sleep without D’Dora, and not have to think about Lola: just run. But where could she go?

  You can blame any number of injuries and accidents on the troublesome, and now globally peripatetic, undead. Kehua work in particular through ears and eyes, but with noses and throats in reserve. Their nature becomes clearer and clearer in your writer’s mind now she’s back in the basement and has caught an actual look at the kehua hanging upside down like fruit bats, leathery wings folded over their ears.