The Bone People (12 page)

She wasn't smiling back at the child.

Was it being a listening ear for the man?

Someone to tell troubles to? Suspicions?...

And what is the attraction for a disturbed and zany child here?

Me? Nah, he knows I don't much like him.

"What about school though?" undecided what to do. . He frowns briefly. Picks the notebook off the table, and weighs it in his hand, then takes a slip of paper from an unsealed envelope in the back of it.

It is another note from Joe, this time excusing his son's absence from school on the grounds of sickness for

the week to come.

Simon is writing while she reads it.

I AM SICK SOMETIMES

"Conveniently, like now?" She returns his excuse. "How often do you actually turn up at school? Monthly?

Or just a couple of times a year?"

He's writing again. JOE SAYS I GO, I GO

"I'll bet." She thinks, Hell, imagine if they both think I'm going to put up with him all the times he misses. No way.

He is looking at her narrowly.

I KNOW WHAT THEY DO. He stops, searching for a word, his teeth clenching in exasperation.

She sits down at the table again.

"You know what who does?'

He grinds his teeth.

"Is it about school, and your absence therefrom?"

No.

Then he nods.

Shakes his head.

He is actually shaking all over with the effort of trying to find a way to show what he wants to say.

"Is it a word you need? Or a whole sentence?"

He hits the table with the pencil and it breaks. Point smashed.

He puts his face in his hands.

She picks up the pencil, takes out her knife and sharpens it carefully, whittling away little resinous curls of

wood. There is a faint fresh smell of cedar: it must have been an old pencil. As she makes a new point on the

lead, she says slowly,

"If you like, we could start again at the beginning of this conversation, and feel our way to the words you

want."

He puts his hands down on the table and avoids her eyes. He's been snivelling but quietly.

"So. Here we are at the beginning. How often do you go to school?"

MOST DAYS

He looks at that, shakes his head, and with one hand guarding his eyes, amends,

SOME DAYS

"And that's of each week?" Yes, he nods. "For some days of each week, the days Joe says you're to go to school, you go to school. Right?"

He is grinning again. Weirdly, through the tears and the breadcrumbs and the muttonbird grease. MOST

TIMES, writes Simon recalcitrant.

"Occasions Joe don't know about, you play hooky? Stay away from school?

"Goodoh," to his nod, privately thinking Ratbag.

The child hugs himself, and his face goes tight again. He points to her face.

"I show an expression of disapproval or something?"

He looks puzzled momentarily, and then shakes his hand, No. He screws up his mouth at the notebook and

pencil, and writes reluctantly,

I WONT STAY HERE ALL THE TIME. I KNOW WHAT THEY

DO.

"I'm beat. If you mean you're not staying here all the times you're absent from school, you're dead right. I'll be doing other things often, and won't want you underfoot. But as to this other -- you know what who does?

To whom?"

Simon looks at the table.

"Hey listen, some things are easier if you're not concentrating on them. Come and do some drawing with me,

and forget the lost words for the moment eh? If it's important, you'll find a way to tell me, and I'll find a way

to understand."

He slides off the chair and comes round the board table. He stares at her for long moments, his face

unreadable. No expression in the intent stare. Then he holds his hand out, reaching for hers.

She gets up quickly, forestalling the contact.

"You'd better have a wash, eh. I mean, I'm going to. Before drawing. Grease and chalk and charcoal don't go

well together."

Babbling again, Holmes. He's not contagious.

But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who

cannot talk... oops.

Simon still has his hand out, and his smile there, turned smirk, as though he knows perfectly well her

reluctance to touch anybody's hands and is amused by it.

"What's this for now?" but gives her hand.

Thanks, mouths Simon, kissing her hand, the grin widening after.

O those bloody nonexistent teeth... draw out where they went, anything, but the staying barbs of this gentle

courtesy.

Kerewin appalled.

She works with charcoal, every shade of black bearing across the white paper.

Trying again to catch the spider shadow of the morning's dreaming, but netting at random this time.

Smudge. Then a razor fine line, so keenly black it aches. Illusion of looking into a knife-thin ominous chasm.

She makes several more of them, slewed at intervals, and in the midst of them, quite suddenly, near the oily-

looking smudge, she has captured something.

He can't help glancing up at the slit window.

He had heard the door bang shut, and the sound of singing, and he had climbed up into that window. But the

sounds came closer, and he thought of what the owner of the house might do to him... the ground was far

below, the floor inside in shadow at his feet. If he jumped... the pain in his heel had him part-crippled

already, and if he hit it on the floor... so he had stayed, stiff and horribly scared.

Two times ago, he had been trapped. And the young man, very young man smooth and bearded, the young

man who held his shoulder had pushed him hard against the upright of the fence and

He felt sick to the pit of his stomach, and his mind blackened.

This time! said the voice urgently.

The sun on his back in the window, and how the figure below had turned and looked straight at him, though

he hadn't moved at all.

She stands back from the board and looks at it for a long time. Her gut sense says that any alteration will rip

the network and allow the lively shadow to escape. Yet it feels unfinished... she closes her eyes hard, and in

the dull red at the back of her lids, sees what she needs.

Redbrown, redbrown as red chalk, earthcoloured reminder.

"Stammel and murrey," she murmurs happily, "ruddle and madder and o solferino," hunting with gusto through the chest of chalks.

It had looked with fear and surprise at him, but had made no move to harm him. Sharp flames flickered round

it, like small fiery knives. But it listened, listened sometimes with care. And when it found out he was hurt,

even that small hurt, it had helped.

The elation built up in him. He battered it down, but it kept coming back. Not again, he told himself, I don't

believe it. Not again.

The name was Kerewin Holmes, and he had said it inside himself, melding it to his name, all the times it

prowled round the room, or made the meal, or took him up the narrow haunted stairs that twisted upon

themselves, like the inside of a corkscrew.

And there were things hanging on the walls, and dark secret places where small trees grew, and gardens of

brightly coloured toadstools, and it had passed these as though all houses had such things in their walls.

Even with his hurt and tiredness, the elation kept growing.

Big and strong, strong as Joe, stronger than Joe it came with sure suddenness, Kerewin Holmes covered with

flames like knives. And a fierce hidden flame inside it, that sometimes dimmed taking all the over-lights with

it, sometimes sank so far down that he was afraid it would never emerge again, and he would be left to face a

husk that babbled. It is a beginning again he hugs it close in his inside self, a beginning again, afraid and

excited at the same time.

A beginning, and I never thought there would be another beginning. Just the end.

The end is still there, he told himself that while it talked at him.

The words, the words, that chattered and bubbled round his ears... words that had been spoken across his

head before, but never to him... many parts to them, to be stored and untangled at leisure. Like 'penitential'--

He can store any sound he wants to, and duplicate it inwardly.

"Aside from the penitential part," says Kerewin again, and her voice seems to float to him across the strange round room.

A border. A deep thick border, encrusting that left side. Make it totally opaque, with nary a vestige of

underlying paper showing. Then, skim it out, thin it gradually to a mere shade of itself, finest earth-tinted

mist seeping to but not onto the edge of the dark web.

Then one could never be sure that the red was not an evil devouring fog, creeping up to the netted shadow's

last stronghold, last retreat.

She grinds the chalk heavily across the paper, layering it, pressing its essence out, until chalk and paper

seemed to blend. The red becomes an encroaching fungus that spreads gradually but with terrible sureness to

the thing that whines and wriggles and can't get out from between the prisoning chasms that bite down to it

like knives.

A fly droned through the air.

He stretched himself quietly on the floor, arms away from his sides, flat on his face, so he went nearly cross-

eyed looking at the interwoven grass matting when his eyes were opened.

The elation was still at home in him. It had come to climax last night when her hand and Joe's had touched,

with him aching and unsteady and overwhelmed with joy in the centre.

The horror was still at home in him.

It was almost always there.

The only defence he could raise against the dark and the horror and the laughing terrible voice were his

golden singers, the sounds and patterns of words from the past that he had fitted to his own web of music.

They often broke apart, but he could always make

them new. So he lay prone on the floor, and listened to them, and made Kerewin part of them, part of his

heart.

The hours sing by.

She begins a pattern of scrolls, but their coils become tangled and hectic so she screws them to oblivion. She

starts on another group of curves. Over on the stand, the creeping fungus with its screaming centre is drying

under a coat of clear sprayed varnish. Every time she looks at it, she feels a shiver of pride and satisfaction.

Another real thing! I am not dead yet! I can still call forth a piece of soul and set it down in colour, fixed

forever--

The curve-group isn't working out.

"Sss," says Kerewin and swings round at last. "Hey you'" She has forgotten about him till now: his self-effacement is perfect. She looks down, worried that he lies so still, guilty because she had forgotten

completely he was in the room. Then Simon turns his head, and his eyes are open and unblinking. For a

moment, they look at each other.

Hell, his eyes go funny colours,

but she says gruffly,

"Up. Come and look at this."

He doesn't like it, his face whitening, and his eyes going darker still. He cups one finger in his other hand,

tightens the hand as the finger tries to get away.

Kerewin grins with triumph and delight.

"That is it!" hands on hips. "That is exactly what I wanted to show. And even you see it!"

"What have you done?" and picks up the pad before he can take it. "Nothing?"

Nothing.

Joe comes hurrying up the stairs, Simon a step behind him.

"Ready for tea?" he calls. He still has his helmet on, plastic-guarded face, green swelling head, a warrior fresh returned from the mundane war.

She thinks, Berloody cheeky, mate. First send the kid here, and then expect tea again -- there's limits to tribal

affinities, and is going to say something sharp and icy when the man takes off his helmet and holds it out to

her.

"He did tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"Uh uh."

Simon takes the helmet and holds it to her instead.

"About tea," says Joe, eyeing his disorderly son, who has spent the last two minutes dancing round him. He had come down as soon as he heard the bike, and Joe had wondered at his pallor.

He says, "You forgot to say, didn't you?"

Me?

"Yes, you... o crikey, I thought one simple message would be safe enough unwritten. Kerewin, e hoa, I had a

brainwave when I sent this one here. Since you gave us tea yesterday, I'd get tea tonight. Did you like your

lunch?"

"Yeah, superb. I haven't had muttonbirds for months, and I didn't think the season began for a while."

Joe grins. "Secret source. Well, those were for him staying here, whether he stayed this time or not. I know he stayed, I checked with Tainuis on my way home. So then I rushed and got tea ready. It's special. Wild pork

and corn. I even bought a bottle of wine to go with it, and that's something for this beer drinker to do. Why

didn't you?" swinging round on his son, "why not?"

He is annoyed that all his effort and anticipated joy may be wasted. "Why not, eh?"

Simon, unfazed, writes SURPRISE on his hand.

"I'll say it's a surprise, but a bloody nice one too," says Kerewin. "I was just thinking about lighting that cursed range and getting some sort of hash for tea, and here I am offered a feast. Wait two seconds while I

change my rings to some suitable for dining out in," and she cackles, derisive of herself. "Are you really serious? You actually want me to come and have tea with you?"

"Hell, yes. It's not a joke or anything. Listen, bloody brat, do as you're told, not keep things for surprises.

That sort of practice backfires."

The boy nods, about one affirmative for each word.

"Distinctly sarcastic," Kerewin watches him with glee. "Well, it's nice to get a surprise like this, so faulty memory or deliberation, it turns out well. How're we going?"