The Bone People (62 page)

The light is just phosphorescence, eh? but when he lifts the

thing, he nearly falls.

He's tensed his muscles and pulled, and it's light light light,

no weight at all.

And there's an ecstasy as he carries it, a live buoying stream

of joy that makes him want to shout and sing and dance.

He can see streamers and fields of brightness round everything

he looks at: the very weeds and stones at his feet coruscate

with brilliant fire.

That's what Haimona meant by light? Aie!

Past the cave where the old woman's bones are entombed forever

-- he ran to look there, and the stone in his hands grew too

heavy to carry. He took the hint and turned back onto the

track.

Past the kaumatua's ruined garden, the miro tree uprooted,

the careful lines of corn and other vegetables fallen in disarray.

Not to worry, man, this is someone else's place now.

Not mine.

For sure as the light that lives steadily in the stone, he's going

home.

"Where you going, mate?"

"Anywhere south," says Joe, his grin wide, "I'm taking the south road home."

11 The Boy By His Own

The night gives up its hold reluctantly, but slowly, very slowly, the world comes back.

Because he kept attempting to remove the useful tubes they inserted, they restrained his hands.

He was still after that, for over a week.

Lying in the dark, lying without moving, listening helplessly to the voices.

It doesn't seem that the night is giving ground.

No familiar touch, no handholding, no-one he knows.

There is never anybody he knows.

So he lies withdrawn again, his tied hands clenched to the deep of nails in despair.

But little by little, the night is lifting.

Instead of the shifting shattered brightness, he begins to see outlines. The light is shot through with forms.

They crack and vanish and unexpectedly reappear; they splinter like a broken mirror when he blinks, but

now, for seconds at a time, he can see the chair. The cabinet at the side. His feet. They look, somehow, cut

off from his legs. He can see people again, briefly, as people, instead of dark, cores in the centre of lightning

oscillations.

He watches, his hope never quite dead, for them to enter.

In time, says his heart.

Wait, says his heart.

They'll come, says his heart.

They don't.

He weeps in the dead silence and he can't hear himself cry. It is only by the wet of tears that he knows it is

real crying.

Yet the night is ebbing away.

The hated voice grows weaker, cannot sing as freely. The old fears seem impotent in the face of what has

happened.

He shrinks from the impersonally gentle hands that feed and clean him, but he glimpses the faces now, and

they smile.

He doesn't smile back.

One morning, he discovers his hands are free again. For minutes, he doesn't dare move them. But nothing

happens. No-one conies in.

The hands feel strange; they've been restrained for so long they're apart from him, as though they belong to

someone else.

He brings them in front of his face. He stares at them as long as he can without blinking.

There is a network of pink scars over them he hasn't seen before. Cuts? Glass? Windows? Binny... wait. With

a new keen instinct for self-preservation, he stops-thinking about the windows right then. He just stares at the

scars, fresh and shiny and jagged.

There is a plastic bangle round his left arm.

He brings it close to his eyes, squinting to keep it in focus. There are letters of some kind or another. He

doesn't know what they

are.

I never had a bangle?

He spends the morning watching his hands, opening and closing his fingers, touching them together.

Absorbed in rediscovery.

But he keeps them by his sides when someone finally comes in with food. He accepts the food passively, but

instead of closing his eyes after seeing who the person is, he watches her as dedicatedly as he has been

watching his hands. He discovers the longer he watches the steadier his vision becomes. The nurse smiles at

him all the time, and speaks often. He can't hear what she says, and he can't tell what she is talking about

from the way her lips move. They don't shape themselves in the shape of words. He is frowning with

concentration at the end of lunch, and he still hasn't understood a word.

It's all silence.

During that afternoon, he sends his hands on forays round his body. By drawing up his legs, he learns that the

two cut-off lines at his ankles are bandages, covering what feel like holes. Once he has felt his legs and feet

with his hands, he can feel them again.

Which is very odd.

He realises he hasn't been conscious of his body for a long time. The half-moon marks in the palms of his

hands where his nails had bitten in haven't hurt him at all until now.

The fingers explore on.

The label on the chain round his neck is gone.

His face feels strange, with lumps in the bone of his jaw.

His scalp is half-covered by padded bandaging. He can feel stiff bristles of very short hair. His fingers stay on

the remains of his hair for minutes.

I dreamed of that....

They move on, following the contours of the pads at the side of his head.

He can feel three things now; the itching of his scalp; the long scar lines under the pads; the band that holds

them in place. It runs round his head. It covers his ears.

That's why I can't hear?

He snaps his fingers very close to his right ear. Nothing. Not a click, not the ghost of a click. Nor by his left

ear... hold on, something

like a very distant thud? It doesn't sound like the sharp click! he normally hears, but he can hear something.

Or is it feel something?

By evening, he has wakened -- it is as if he just climbed back into it again -- all his body. Some of it is

uncomfortable: his ankles ache, and there is a pain like a headache bothering him, and he's learned that if he

breathes in deeply, both sides of his chest get something like cramp.

Joe kicked... stop it there.

Mostly however, it is very reassuring, a feeling like coming home. He no longer feels fuzzy, just puzzled and

worried.

Where are they?

He has been here a long time. He knows, because all the cuts Joe dealt him have healed.

Weeks? Months? Years? If it was years you would have grown,

Clare.

But do you grow when you're asleep?

Are they being kept out?

He tries to go back over the obscure days, but there is not enough in them to make sense. He cannot

remember, he cannot remember... so he returns to the morning again, when he got up early and watched the

sun rise. Find them in that day, bring them back... going through the day slowly (blanking quick that out that

didn't happen not now) to Kerewin in the Tower... she turns away, shaking, so go on, on to the night-time,

through the night-time, happening by nappening.

He won't let it overwhelm him. He couldn't stop it before, the day happened again and again, inexorably, but

now, but now--

He reaches the doorframe again, and the hard hand pressing his hurt against it, and then his own slow drifting

blow.

He can't see where it lands. He can only hear the man's high scream. It hits him near the waist... can you kill

somebody hitting them with glass in the waist? Are they crippled?

His head hits the doorpost again.

Can you break ears?

He is whimpering uncontrollably when the nurse arrives, and shaking uncontrollably by the time the

pediatrician gangles in. He can see enough to know they are exchanging mysterious words, and though he

begs with one clasped hand, they don't know the sign and they can't read his eyes. The needle slides into his

vein, and he can't do anything about the night closing over again.

But it's the last fling of horror, the final clawing grasp of the night.

Piri, who has come over the hill to see Marama: (she is recovering valiantly, though worried sick she says by

what has happened, and how are Ben and Luce behaving? Not fighting, tell them please no... and, o dear,

look after Pa, take care of him for me, don't let him get upset and excited, and

"Course, Ma. Fine, Ma. No trouble, Ma. For goodness sake stop worrying Ma, and get some rest, eh? What'll

all these fellas," pointing in a swathe at the other three elderly ladies, all lacking visitors, so snoring with their mouths and ears wide open, "think of us?"

Marama retorts, What does it matter what they think? The whole world and her brother knows...) takes time

before he goes back, to try yet again to see Simon.

The other times the doctors and staff have smiled blandly, and said he's as well as could be expected, off the

seriously ill list, and progressing normally.

Which says fat bugger all, thinks Piri. We're still family, he tells himself stoutly. If I could be sure that

shitarse would stay away, I'd ask for Himi. He's too good a kid to waste, however damaged he is... but if Joe

comes back, ahh it'd never work. That mutt would always stick a finger in. Or his fist.

"Uhh hello," he says to the head nurse, avoiding her eyes, "would it be possible I see..." and before he gets any further the nurse gushes.

"O good, Mr Tainui isn't it? Would you come this way please? Doctor won't be a moment, and I know he'll

be glad to see you." Doctor? What about Himi?

The nurse turns and beckons from further down the corridor, by the door at the end.

"Would you come in here now, Mr Tainui?" she says, her smile all teeth.

He expects distortion, disfigurement: maybe an inert and helpless log of a child.

What he gets is one astounded Simon.

O yeah: his hair is gone to a fine gold fuzz, and there's a set of godawful purple-red scars welting the side of

his head, and those neat dark circles he'll produce on the slightest provocation ring his eyes, and make them

look inhumanly large, and he's whiter than the sheet he's sitting on, and it looks like (squeezing his eyes

narrow and checking fast) he's lost three more teeth -- mouth hung open, eyes fixed on him.

"Am I unwelcome? Or don't he know me now? his heart shrinks inside him.

One eye isn't tracking properly either, but damnall Haimona! do something! Don't just stay static like that,

and the child shrieks, flinging his arms wide open, and the bloke sitting by the bedside gets an ear full of fist.

One thing about having four kids: you know when you're wanted, needed hard.

After a while the hoha dies down. The doctor rubs his ear ruefully. Simon burrows in against Piri as though

he'd like to get inside him, arms and legs wrapped round all he can reach. Piri murmurs to him, questions he

isn't supposed to answer, endearments for his heart, "E taku her piripiri, what you been doin? What they done

to you, eh? Gentleheart, we miss you, you been feeling bad alone? Lonely, e tawhiri? Never mind, ease up

now, Piri's here, Piri's here."

It takes a long time even for Piri's practised hands and voice to get him calm again, he is so hungry for the

affection, the cuddling, Piri thinks. '

Well, I suppose all these fellas are kind enough, but they wouldn't have time to hold him and that... holy hell!

What a room! Bare except for two sticks of furniture, no colour, no nothing for him... and why's he all by

himself? Just as bloody well I called by.

The doctor's been silent all this while, just fingering the ear Simon clouted every now and then, and watching

them with a detached sort of grin on his face.

"Come on e Himi, sit round now boy."

and stops, realising at last that the boy isn't responding to his voice, but to the movement of his hands.

"If you yell loudly, he'll pick up some of it," says the doctor softly. "He's got residual hearing in one ear."

"Ah Christ," says Piri. "Ah Christ, this isn't fair."

He doesn't yell: he catches Simon's eye and then asks him fingerfashion. You can't hear me? and the boy says

No.

"Christ," says Piri again.

He takes a felt-tip out and writes on the back of his tobacco pack, I AM V. SORRY ABOUT THAT, LOVE,

YOU WANT ANYTHING? and the boy snatches the pencil and box as though he's been starved of them.

Once he's got hold of them however, it takes him a minute to get them settled to write on, and longer to print

the words. The printing is awkward and cramped and slow.

Piri says in a cold voice,

"When I get hold of my cousin, I'm gonna beat his head in and see how he likes it."

The other man doesn't comment, watching the child narrowly.

He says in his soft accented drawl,

"A week ago, he couldn't really write. Or read... two months ago I would have said he'd never communicate

in any way again. He's getting better very quickly, you know."

piri, bitterly:

"Not long ago he could read and write better than my ten year old, and now look at him."

"Given enough time, and the right kind of care, he'll read and write as well as ever he did, I think."

"Yeah?" says Piri, with a world of doubt behind the sound. He looks down at the note Simon is holding for

him.

JOE OK AND WHERE AND K PIRI HOW LONG I HERE CAN I COME HOME

"Don't worry if it's a bit scrambled," says the doctor. "He's getting there, but it takes him time."

The boy keeps his eyes fixed on Piri's face in a disconcerting unlevel stare.

Piri looks over it, over to the doctor.

"I can make it out, but it's not how he used to do it. And bloody hell, would you believe the first thing he asks is how that prick is?"