The Bone People (17 page)

correspondence with him on this, or any I other matter. He will not reply to any such correspondence.

I am, Sir,

Yours faithfully, scrawl.

Apparently one Gabriel Semnet, Secretary to His Lordship the Earl of Conderry. Isn't that luverly? Can't you

hear aristocratic nerves jangling all the way round the world? Sucks to his ancient overbearingness... though I

do like that bit about disgraceful propensities. Wonder what they were? However, assuming this isn't a wild

goose chase, I think I have a peer's remittance man to track down in his haunts of vice in this lowly colony of

NZ.

I have a purpose in life again!

But I've also discovered I'm a snob. For my first thought on discovering there was a possible though

improbable connection between Simon P and decayed Irish nobility, (bastardy? greatgrandsonship? the

tenuous link of gifts?) was:

Ah hell, urchin, it doesn't matter, you can't help who your forbears were, and I realised as I thunk it, that I

was revelling in the knowledge of my whakapapa and solid Lancashire and Hebridean ancestry. Stout

commoners on the left side, and real rangatira on the right distant side. A New Zealander through and

through. Moanawhenua bones and heart and blood and brain. None of your (retch) import Poms or

whatevers.

This is getting boring, ghost, I'm gonna immure you again. See you in another six years. snapping the book

shut.

"Did you know your son might have Irish connections?"

Joe sputters.

"The IRA? Yeah, I'd believe..."

"No, you silly bastard. Look at this."

He reads the letter, frowning.

Where on earth did you come by this? I didn't know anything about it--"

"I did the obvious thing. Went to the library and checked through the reference books until I found a coat of

arms that matched that ring. You know, on his rosary. Then I wrote to the bod concerned

and asked whether he had any antipodean relations who might be sporting such a thing, and that's the answer.

I wish I could get a photograph of the old bugger. There might be family resemblances or something. To wit,

Sim's split chin. Or the eyes. Or something. D'you reckon he looks Irish?"

Joe's still reading.

"Jesus," he says in a worried way, "what does he mean by disgraceful propensities?"

"Weelll, I should imagine in that ingrown aristocracy it could mean anything from an improper preference for

Scotch whisky, to a practised predilection for raping the cat."

He chokes on his coffee.

There's a full moon up, and the growing night is cold, silver, serene.

Kerewin sits patiently, chin cupped in her hands, watching the suneater flicker, miss a beat, die.

It's run for quite a while after the sun went down. 18.55.25 she notes, stopping the watch, and entering the

time. She adds another dot to the graph -- yep, the gradual decline, an inverse phi curve. Strange that the

suneater's curve keeps pace with some of her own.

She had begun a book of biorhythmic cycles for herself a long time ago, and when she first began to explore

the little machines, she had been curious to find out whether they might reflect cycles too. The suneater's

chart has been going for sixteen months: her set, for five years, six years o God this December. And I thought

a year would be enough to discover the rhythms of my body and mind... I'll finish it this year. The thing's

become an obsession.

For what does five years of accumulating snippets of wisdom add up to? Knowledge that I'm a changeable

sort of person--

O well.

She flicks the crystal casing of the suneater. Pretty toy. Pastime. As useful as all my other toys and time-

passers. As useful and pointed as myself.

Joe, coming through the library circle doorway next night.

"Himi said you were up this... holy God, what is that?"

A blob of shining light, making butterfly oscillations.

It came from a mirror focused on a crystal to which was attached many fine copper wires. The crystal was set

between two magnets, and it was turning blurringly fast.

"O that? One of my little um concoctions? Conundrums, anyway."

He came across and peered at it.

"It's a motor?"

"It might be if I could rig the thing up in some fashion to a driveshaft or belt. But the damn thing just goes

phhfft! if you start hooking

other bits to it. So I keep it like that, purring nicely along eating sunlight."

Eating sunlight... he winces.

"How did you make such a thing?"

Horror in his voice and eyes.

"You really wanna know?" She exudes fake eagerness to tell. "Well, I have a grasshopper and haphazard mind y'know, a brain that listens to all sorts of things as well as itself." Patter, patter. "Annnd, one day this idea plopped into my mind that mirrors and sunlight and crystals and magnets and whatnots should...

anyway, my gut tingled the right way. So I made it." She flipped a hand at it. "Kerewin's little toy, mark 18."

"But how?"

"I dunno. I've made a lot of the little beasties. One works off 'steam produced by strong sunlight. Very

sporadic. Not satisfactory. Another one that I really like works off goodtempered humans. At least, it only

goes if you touch it, and only if you're happy. You sulk, it sulks... o, they're fascinating wee things but not

useful, if you get what I mean?"

Joe shudders slightly.

"I haven't the faintest idea why they work. Or even how," she adds.

"You give me the cold bloody horrors sometimes, Kerewin."

She smiles, her smile full of fangs.

He thinks,

Sometimes she seems ordinary. She is lonely. She drinks like I do, to keep away the ghosts. She's an outsider,

like me. And then sometimes, she seems inhuman... like this Tower is inhuman. Comfortable to be in,

pleasant, if you ignore the toadstools in the walls, and the little trees and glowworms in holes by the stairs,

and the fact that nobody else in New Zealand lives in a Tower... maybe I've got it all wrong--

He had thought, from Kerewin's guarded talk over the past month

hat she had broken up with her family over a relationship they

didn't approve of. She didn't approve of? That her loneliness, being

apart from her family, had driven her to this part of the country

where none of them lived. He could understand that.

He shakes his head.

Don't worry your heart, Ngakau. Just like her.

He says to Kerewin's grin,

"If I had that thing in my house, I wouldn't sleep until I knew what made it work." She picks it up. "Here you are then."

It burrs on, quivering with light, whining with energy, unholy, in her hand.

"Shit no!" ducking even touching it. "I only meant that it's not normal... I've never even heard of anything like it, and if I'd made it, I'd want to find out o I dunno..."

"My poor innocent suneater ..."

She's put it down, and is refocusing the mirror.

"It doesn't worry me. I figure if I'm meant to find out more about it, I will."

He shakes his head dubiously.

"You know what that reminds me of? Things Himi makes. Things he reckons make music."

"O yes. The music hutches..."

... that had been a week ago, when she'd gone for a walk along

the beach. The boy had tagged after. He sat down a little way

apart when she stopped for a smoke. He started picking up

debris off the beach, and randomly at first, and then with a

steady and abnormal concentration, he had built a spiralling

construction of marramgrass and shells and drift chips and

seaweed.

"What are you doing?"

He whistled and pointed to it.

It whistles?

He lay down on the sand with his ear by it, and she went

to him, puzzled. Simon got up quickly. Listen too, he said,

touching his ear and pointing to her. So she did, and heard

nothing. Listened very intently, and was suddenly aware that

the pulse of her blood and the surge of the surf and the thin

rustle of wind round the beaches were combining to make

something like music.

She adds, "They only make music when someone's listening. They're focusing points more than anything, and

I'd love to know where he got the idea for them."

Joe says sourly,

"O God knows where. He started making the bloody things about a year ago. Now he's obsessed by them."

He scowls.

(The child, when first discovered building them, had written for him THEY MAKE MUSIC. He was feeling

wild and joyous from the vigour of the sea wind and the roar of the sea, and had hugged him tightly, and

called him a nutcase. But he was worried by the look in his eyes. Secretly, when Simon was sleeping his

drugged uneasy sleep, he had stolen back down to the beach, and examined by torchlight the structure his

strange little son had built.

Feeling foolish, he had lain down beside the husk and listened, absorbed, for nearly quarter of an hour. Then

he became scared,

"It's different," he assured her. "It's got fourteen kinds of eyeballs in it."

He had gone to especial trouble to get the fourteen different fish. "Even unfroze a whitebait," he told her.

"Enjoying it?"

"Yeah," said Kerewin, deftly avoiding another eyeball. She noticed Joe wasn't too keen on swallowing them

either.

He admitted when she finished, "There was really only cods' eyes there... unless you count the scallop's... but there truly was fourteen different kai moana. I thought you'd like the macabre touch?"

She looked at him consideringly.

"Mmmm. But you wait and see what's going to be lurking in my next offering."

Despite the hammer she gave him,

("Ah hah, worrying isn't it? Do you eat it, or does it eat you?")

tea this night turned out to be rock oysters.

"The only patch of rock oysters on this coast," says Kerewin triumphantly. "I couldn't believe it when I saw them first. I don't think anybody else knows about them. They're a freak colony. I've taken care of them since

I found them, but I figured now they should be harvested for their own good."

They knocked them off the rocks in dozens --

"Kerewin, isn't this illegal?"

"Yep. Isn't it enjoyable?" --

and carried half a sackful stealthily away.

Back in the livingroom circle, Joe asks,

"Do you remember asking us if we wanted to come and have a holiday at a place of yours?"

"Yes." She looks at the dirty white shell, shining white and brown inside with purple shadows where the

muscles had hung on.

"Well, I can take holidays soon, and Himi's got the May holidays coming up. Can we?"

"Yes."

He wipes his hands on the seat of his jeans.

"You coming too?" very casually.

She bites the last oyster in half.

"Umm, I don't know."

It is very peaceful. Leaning back, eyes closed, she can hear the , a rattle from something the boy is playing

with, the rustle of Joe's paper.

"Hey, did you read this?"

"Nope. What?"

"Some tripe from these back-to-the-landers. You won't believe it, but here goes--

"The breeding of guinea pigs requires a minimum of land, little time, and practically no outlay. They feed on

scraps, grass-clippings et cetera, and their flesh is nourishing and tasty. They return a reasonable amount of

meat per beast.. shit, they give recipes even! I ask you, can't you just see Mrs Average slaughtering little

Mary's pet guinea pig for the Sunday roast?"

She grins, eyes still shut.

"Nope, not yet. But if food ever got really short, I can see the knives come out all over suburbia... they've got a point, these fanatical fellas. The more self-sufficient you are the better."

"I had noticed... don't you bloody dare!"

The sudden yell jerks her eyes wide open.

The boy stands quickly as Joe orders, "Give them here. At once."

A box of matches, tossed to the man.

"Sailing bloody close to the wind, Haimona."

Simon stares back, unmoving, his body taut, his face hard.

Joe throws the box in the air, again and again.

"Just what in the name of all gods and little fishes is going on?" she asks plaintively.

Joe sighs. He catches the box a final time, then holds it up.

"He thinks it's funny to flick matches. You know how?"

He faces the fire, takes out a match, holds it against the striking strip with his thumb, and flicks it. The match

flares explosively into flame and arcs into the fire.

"Dunno who taught him to do it," he says wearily. "Maybe he taught himself. But he had one all lined up ready for a go. At you."

She looks at the child, and then down at the floor. There's the match, lying right where the brat dropped it at

Joe's yell.

You poisonous little creep.

"You," to Simon. He doesn't move.

"Turn round," Joe has a snap in his voice she hasn't heard before.

The boy turns slowly, insolently slow. He doesn't look at her, staring off to one side.

"I don't think that's funny, throwing fire at people. Why do you?"

The angular face is blank as a mask.

"Ah to hell with you then." Kerewin swivels her chair around, turning her back on him.

"What were you saying, Joe?"

He's still eyeing his son, his own face set and hard.

"Well," eyes unmoving, "Well, I was going to say that I had noticed this place is pretty self-sufficient."

She settles back in the chair again, and makes her voice low and easy.

"I'm a secret back-to-the-lander." She laughs. "Not really, but you know originally this place was going to be a dome or a yurt or an icosa. I was going to build it out of recycled goodies. Run goats and fowls, and a