The Bone People (8 page)

"Kerewin Holmes," she says as their hands touch.

A hard warm hand, and her eyes go back to his face.

He smiles, an amiable grin.

Hell unholy! It's that joker from the pub--

and the pink paper plus the stream of fucks becomes a roaring ribald laugh in her mind. She grins hurriedly

back. You and your berloody doorway Vikings Holmes, and uptight dignities... though it's a nice grin, merry

as his fosterling's, it must be fostered, and her smile grows, rounding her cheeks and squinching her eyes

narrow.

"And I'm very glad to meet you," she says, the laughter in her mind sneaking into her voice. "Both," she adds to the boy, and he

chuckles, strange little sound in the shadows.

Joseph Gillayley laughs quietly, bassing behind it.

"Well come!" says Kerewin. "Come on up. There's coffee at the top, and it'll be a helluva lot warmer."

Simon drops by the fire, spreadeagling himself.

Joseph stands in the doorway, his black eyebrows quirking.

"Well, I like it," she says defensively.

"O?" he asks. His big hands spread. "O, the room? It's magnificent... that window--"

He stands still a moment, then shakes himself. "No, I was watching my son. Sorry," again the odd shaking. "I can't get over the way he's made himself at home."

"O. O yeah," she shrugs and pours a cup of coffee. "You drink coffee, Mr Gillayley? I know your son does."

He turns from contemplating the boy's relaxed sprawl, biting his lower lip.

"Yes, I do, thank you." He looks down at the grass matting. "Urn, would you mind calling me Joe? This,"

pointing at his son, "refers to you as Kerewin." He glances up, checking for approval, disapproval.

"Good. It'd please me if you called me that too." She pours coffee into another mug. "I don't like getting mizzed or mistered either."

Joe smiles. His lips are full, and beautifully outlined.

"Joe," he says, pointing to himself. "Kerewin," he bows gracefully, "and Simon pake."

He straightens swiftly. "Did it surprise you, the contrast?"

His smile has deepened, not with derision or hurt or contempt, but as though it is a good joke.

"You bet!" She leans back against the bench. "You know what? I was expecting something big and blond, and for some unaccountable reason, dumb and boisterous to boot. And aside from the blond part, I couldn't

reasonably justify... o God! I didn't mean dumb that way, I meant stupid--"

Joe says quickly,

"It doesn't worry either of us. Truly."

He looks back to his child.

"Simon, get up from there, and come and give," he hesitates, "give Kerewin a hand. And can I help you too?"

he asks. "Yeah, grab your cup. Do you have sugar? Because the only stuff I've got is brown. I've got a few

kinds of honey though."

"Brown sugar'll do nicely." He spoons two measures into his cup and Simon's.

"Listen you," he calls. "Come over here. At once."

The child rolls to his back and shakes his hands in the air. He gets to his feet in a hurry though.

"That bit of byplay meant Okay," says Joe, staring at the boy. He switches his gaze back to Kerewin, mellows it with a smile, "or shall we say, I'm coming or doing, so you needn't yell."

"I know this bit," and she snaps her fingers for Yes and No.

"Most of it is shortcuts." He blows on his coffee. "One time we tried proper sign language. It got him good at spelling, but it was too slow. He likes to say things as fast as possible, preferably without having to write

them down. All you need to know about his hand-language is that it's mainly derivation. You know, from an

object, or a way of doing things that is ordinary, or from ordinary things, or things... O b, bother," and the

bother sounds so forced after the fluent stream of obscenity a few nights back that Kerewin laughs out loud.

"A right mess-up," says Joe, his face darker by a flush. "Was it the bother?" She nods.

"Well, I'll admit that it's not what I'd ordinarily say, but I was getting mixed up. I was lecturing, or trying to."

He is looking down at the floor again. "Umm, Kerewin?"

"Yeah?"

"I'd like to talk to you a bit if you've got the time to spare. Otherwise, I'll just say thank you properly, and we'll go?"

"By all means, talk."

They went to the fire and sat down round it.

"Well, it was this chessman, the queen. Borrowed," he says with a grin, handing it back. He lets his hand drift down to settle on his son's shoulder then. "I was going to give him a hiding, because that seems to be the only way to get across the message that he's not to go roaming off to other people's houses and burgle them or

whatever... and he produces the chessman. Sort of like a truce-flag?" Joe's hands go up, imitating Simon's

gesture. Simon is still, holding his cup.

"Up till then, all I knew was that he had gone to your place and broken in, and that you'd looked after him

until Piri picked him up. Piri said you seemed a nice sort of person. A lady, he said you were. Sim wasn't sure

whether you were man or woman until Piri said that," the man's grinning again.

Kerewin smiles into the fire.

"So Haimona brings out this chesspiece, not to save himself the beating so much as to say something about

you, you know?"

"I can imagine."

"Well, it started me thinking. He said how you started to teach him chess, and how you were patient with him

when he tried to talk with you."

She remembers her sneers, and jibes, and coolness, and decides Simon/Sim/Haimona is a diplomatic little

liar.

"And that you didn't exactly like him, but you were still kind and patient. That was impressive, because

generally he's either treated as an idiot, or deaf as well as mute -- you've no idea how many people raise their

voices to him! Or they talk over him, as though he'll vanish and not be an embarrassment any more. It works

too. He generally vanishes from that kind of person very fast." He broods a moment, hand back on his small

son's shoulder. "So there it was. We spent an hour wondering why you were different, decent. And -- how

can I put it?" speaking to Simon now. "Good for you? Good for him," says Joe, looking straight at her.

Kerewin looks back, eyebrows raised.

The man eases down to lie supported by his elbows.

"I mean, it can be bad at school. He comes in for a lot of, o, a lot of petty bullying and shitslinging there. Not just because he's different being dumb, but because he's a bit of an outlaw." The child and his father swap

grins. "Like this Monday, well Monday last week. He missed two schooldays before the weekend, and when

he went to school on Monday, someone started having a go at him. 'Cops get you again, Gillayley,' style of

thing."

Joe draws a deep breath.

"If you push him hard enough, he'll fight you to make you understand. It's his last resort, spitting and

kicking... he'll do his damndest to punch into you what he wants to say. That's bad, I know, you know,"

wagging a finger at the boy, "but he's still trying to talk to you," lifting his eyes to Kerewin, "you know?"

"I can imagine," she says again.

"If you won't listen after that, or you fight him back, he'll despair, and literally throw himself on the ground.

And stay there, and shake. It looks like a fit. It isn't. Say the medics. It is sheer frustration and despair that

you won't listen, you won't converse, when he's got something to say that's important to him."

Kerewin nods.

"So last week, the little bastards do this push-and-tease-the-oddie business until Simon stupid obliges them

by giving up and getting sick. And then you won't go to school for the rest of the week, will you?"

Simon is squinting at the gold grass floor.

"So. Today, I came here and left the note and then I took the morning off work, and went along with him to

school to find out what started everything off this time. And all those sweet smiling little kids said, 'Your

Simon started it, Mr Gillayley, he's bad isn't he?' And they all believe it, or know it's a very safe bet, on his

Past record, that I'm going to believe it... but I don't know...."

Kerewin asks,

"What did the teachers say?"

"Nothing much. They didn't see it happen. Anyway, they've more or less given up on him now. Because he

can be unapproachable

-- you've never been coldshouldered till Sim's done it to you, believe you me! Even I've been on the receiving

end-- Some of the teachers tried to help. In his first year there, last year, one lady tried very hard, but it was

too soon after. The death of my wife. And he was upset about that. So this year, they shoved him in the

special class to begin with, all the slow learners and near nuts and that. Patently ridiculous, because he can

read and write as competently as kids twice his age. Well, nearly. So then they put him in Standard One, and

he's not fitting in there either. They recommend an institution of some kind or the other. For handicapped

kids, you know the kind."

He leans over and ruffles the boy's hair.

"And they'll put you in that kind of place over my dead body," he says grimly.

"Look," he says, after a minute, "he's bright. He can understand anything you put to him, Kerewin. He doesn't need special care and attention. He just needs people to accept him."

She thinks,

There is something peculiar about all this pleading. As though I'm being set up, or primed--

She says carefully,

"You mentioned he was considered to be a bit of an outlaw. My radiophone operator said, quote, he's a well

known local oddity, specialising in sneak thievery and petty vandalism, unquote. Is it just because he doesn't

get on with people at school, or is there some other reason?"

Joe flushes.

"I should imagine his muteness, and the fact that my wife died, and he doesn't get a woman's care. I should

think those reasons make him a bit unsettled."

He is watching the floor again, away from her, away from his son.

"There is a wildness in him sometimes," he says. "It comes maybe from those reasons. Like the running away... the child psych said he was trying to find his own mother, his other parents, even if he doesn't think

that knowingly. That he won't face up, can't face up, to them being gone. Not here," still looking downward,

still with the dark flush suffusing his face.

There's something bloody peculiar about this whole conversation. It doesn't feel right. Has he got some

strange hope I'm going to be the kid's substitute mother? Bloody oath... and all you can do, Simon obstinate,

is stare unconcernedly into the fire.

Almost as though he caught her thought, the boy turns round and smiles broadly to her. She smiles back,

wondering again what happened to his teeth.

"How old are you, Sim?"

She says to Joe, while watching for the child's answer, "I guessed anywhere between five and ten, going by

size and behaviour. I still would, but after what you've said, I'd bring the upper limit down."

The boy is looking at her in a considering way, mouth down at the corners.

Joe says softly, "He doesn't know. I don't know. Nobody does."

He picks up a chip of coal and flicks it into the fire.

"Well, you can see I'm not his blood father," he says into the silence. "Do you remember a Labour weekend three years or so back, when there were terrific storms? Out of season storms?"

"O, vaguely."

"Well, a gale caught a boat here then. A stranger cruiser. It sank off the end of Ennetts Reef. Everybody

aboard came ashore. One way or the other."

The man has been talking quickly, almost convulsively, his eyes on the boy who is uncaring, not hearing, it

seems.

"Well, meet some jetsam," he says, and his eyes glint, belying the callousness of the flippancy. The deep

lines round his mouth are charmed into emphasis for his smile.

I bethought you grim and forty, but now I doubt you're much older than me. Maybe not as old as me.

The lines on his face seem drawn by an inward corroding bitterness, not age. A carelessness of life, an

abandonment, death of wife and death of him, she thinks, as her answering smile begins.

"I see. Wreckage washed ashore as opposed to goods found floating. Thanks for answering. I shouldn't have

been inquisitive, but it intrigued me. I don't have experience of children of any age group, but his years seem

to vary a hell of a lot. One minute he looks about five, and the next he acts as though he's ten times as old."

"Excuse all this," she adds to the boy, who had sat up at the last exchange of smiles, proffering his father the black queen Kerewin had left on the floor.

"That's the way it seems to me every so often too," says Joe agreeably. "Ahh yes Haimona, the chess--"

The grin slides in again, above the strong spade-shaped chin.

"No," he says, "it's maybe seven, possibly eight, but probably six. Maybe even younger, but not likely. God knows. Nobody was at all sure how old you were originally," talking now to Simon P, "and you weren't much

bloody help," says Joe.

Simon smiles a bland smile that somehow makes his face seem empty.

Joe turns the queen round in his fingers, examining it from all sides.

"Kerewin, politeness aside, was he good?" His voice deepens further, sounds less strained. The scarring lines that run down his

cheeks and embitter his eyes and the corners of his mouth, lighten a moment. "You see, you--"

She says hurriedly,

"O, he was an excellent guest. He slept most of Saturday, and Piri Tainui arrived before lunch yesterday. At

breakfast practically. He was no trouble, I assure you."

"Lucky for you," says Joe to Simon. "Good for you," he amends, and shuffles the child's fringe back off his face. "Hell, I feel as awkward as a cow in a bog... I was going to say that you strike me as someone who'd