The trouble was compounded because the house in Amberley where this murder happened was never properly purified, nor, indeed,
were the bodies of the dead. The Christian rituals were not adequate. The karakia, prayers of exorcism, were not spoken. The
ritual spraying of water never happened. The local kehua could not escort the deceased home and, the way I see it, attached
themselves instead to the desperate little morsel of life that was Beverley, and thereafter did their duty by her. Decades
later they were still there, hoping to chivvy her back to join her hapu, to find her urupa, her beautiful place, to be eventually
with the whanau. They would follow her to the ends of the earth until it happened, until one day she finally chose to up sticks
and make for home, and then they could get home too. Half blessing to her, half curse, her kehua welcomed change, anything
to hasten the day.
Run, Beverley, run!
It was in their interests that she did.
Aroha and Tahuri call by briefly and unexpectedly, on their way to stay with friends in the West Country, and I come up from
the basement for air, and we have coffee in the kitchen. Tahuri goes downstairs to see if the dried-up daddy-long-legs is
still there on the windowsill and to my shame comes back to report that it is. She says she doesn’t like it down there and,
when asked why, claims she has seen a kehua. Her mother assures her there are no such things. She loses interest. For her
it is not so big a deal.
‘But if there were,’ I ask Aroha, ‘and you could catch kehua like the measles, would your children and your children’s children
catch them too?’
Aroha says she supposes yes, since they too would be whanau. Family. Ghosts and spirits in many cultures, she points out,
are used as metaphors for a hereditary dysfunction: curses last even unto the
seventh generation: she cites
et ta grandmère!
, the mysterious French insult. Things come out of your family history to accost you. The present is always haunted by a past
which needs to be acknowledged, purified. So I can see I am on the right track. And that the shower as Beverley washed her
hair and stood naked under flowing water, together with Scarlet’s inadvertent blessing, could indeed shift something in the
scheme of things. Certainly even this partial purification stirred up the kehua, pulled them back from listless dormancy,
gave them a whiff of the possibility of change. Surges of natural affection have great power in the unchancy spirit world.
Beverley now finds herself able to face one or two facts about her past, which hitherto she had not.
When Beverley was seventeen and fled her adopted whanau to the Antipodes, she assumed, as the young do, that she would be
able to start a new life fresh over, but no. See it like this: that kehua came after her, with their naggings and their dubious
advice, and so it was never really a new life, just a variation of the old. The trauma when she was three, as Kitchie died
in a welter of draining life blood, and the
run, run, run
instruction which made her daughter’s stout little legs run one-two, one-two, white knees pumping, to safety, could never
be quite forgotten either by Beverley or her kehua. Weakened and dispersed over decades as her kehua were, resigned to sitting
it out a long way from home, they revived on occasion to parrot the phrase. Sometimes they were heard, sometimes not. Sometimes
it could be misconstrued as
kill, kill, kill.
As Aroha pointed out that day on my basement stairs, when the subject of the kehua first came up, they are not all that bright,
being dead.
But Beverley was lucky to hear them loud and clear on her seventeenth birthday, and did indeed respond to them, and just as
well. That was in Coromandel, when her kehua were nourished by their native soil, and strong. On later occasions their advice
was not necessarily good. This is the problem with ‘the other side’. It is all too prone to error, misjudging what goes on
in our real world. The connections are often faulty. The keys that Uri Geller twists are no good for opening doors, the spoons
he bends won’t scoop dessert, the watches he stops won’t tell the time, the worst ghosts in the night can do to you is turn
your hair white. What’s the use of that? The Church of England provides ‘deliverers’, once called exorcists, to free buildings
of lingering spirits but does so reluctantly and with as little publicity as possible. Take these things seriously and they
become too serious. Write about them and they may become true. But I won’t dwell on that.
But I will just mention that in 1987 I wrote about a three-year-old who escaped alive from an air crash: she was in the very
back of the plane with the smokers – those were the days – and the tail broke off and circled down like a sycamore leaf and
landed in mud. ‘Oh come on now!’ said my editors, but a couple of months later a four-year-old was sole survivor of the crash
of Northwest flight 255 in Detroit, Michigan. ‘It’s where the toddler sat that allowed her to survive,’ a spokesperson said.
The child was seated in the tail of a plane which came down in mud. And even as I write this they’ve just picked out of the
sea a six-year-old sole survivor of an aircraft flying into the Yemen.
The run, Beverley run advice is embedded in her consciousness – much as today’s journalists are ‘embedded’ in a war, as if
the army was conscious of itself as an entity with a single personality, rather than a muddle of dangerous activity. One way
or another the kehua’s admonitions are, years later, still fluttering round Beverley’s head, beating her skull with their
shadowy wings, though by now she is
so old her legs will scarcely carry her anywhere. Immobility traps her. On occasion she may even have heard
Kill, Beverley, kill before you are killed.
If so perhaps the mother’s kehua linked with the father’s, he being the perp, to use the language of US cop fiction. The
perpetrator. The perp and the taniwha are the same kind of creature, thrown up by the dark pools of any culture: destroyers
and protectors both, villain and hero, like the Mafia boss. The thing that frightens you, and threatens you, yet keeps you
in order, that’s the taniwha.
It is conceivable that whenever Beverley gave birth the kehua split and multiplied and travelled, even in this strange new
Antipodean land of piled-up concrete, mist and rain. A whole tribe of them by now, clustering round Beverley’s female bloodline,
embedded no doubt in the mitochondrial DNA, coming down through the female line, prodding and murmuring,
Run, Alice, Cynara, Scarlet, Lola, run, run, run,
so they all hear it and partly hear it. It’s in their heads as they wake up.
Look at Scarlet this morning, with Lola egging her on. One long
Let’s get out of here.
They run instead of turning and facing. Fair enough in a three-year-old – quite right not to turn and look: who else could
have been in that slaughter room? – but scarcely appropriate in adult women. Even Alice in her turn has chosen to run; if
she sings hymns loud enough she can blot out the voices. Richie, being Beverley’s son, and male, will have been spared them.
Be that as it may, we can be satisfied that the ritual purification in the marae, the tribal meeting house, did not happen
as it should. The burial in the Anglican church of Amberley did not suffice. Too few people attended; the vicar was too old
to understand what was going on, having been told only by the Bishop in Christchurch that the young man was not to be buried
in consecrated ground,
but only the young woman. It seemed so odd and unkind an instruction that the vicar told the churchwarden who told the gravedigger
to bury them both together. And the gravedigger chose outside the wall because the ground there was softer and easier to dig
and he too was old and tired. Whatever the rites, from whatever religion, and however apparently unreasonable, they need to
be properly observed.
It is possible, on the other hand, that when Scarlet played the shower over her grandmother’s body, some part of the purification
ceremony was completed, and the hovering kehua just left Beverley and went to Scarlet, because Beverley is old and tired,
and Scarlet young and vigorous, in the same way a magnetic current leaps from what is weak to what is strong. We will see.
And again, the question of why the kehua claimed little Beverley as their own in the first place may need more explanation.
Kehua do not usually bother the pakeha. Perhaps it was more than pity; perhaps the little blonde girl had just played in the
yellow, sandy soil too much, and they claimed her only as she ran along the dusty road, one-two, one-two, in her little cotton
blue and white check dress with the white collar, and then went back to claim Kitchie and Beverley’s father too, chattering
and clattering, summonsed by the sudden violence of their demise.
We find it as hard to understand the motivation of the restless undead as they find ours.
The weather’s getting warmer. The wind has switched to the southwest. The basement ghosts are coming into their own again.
Just as I had begun to be confident that the earlier phenomena were nothing but this old house adapting to the weather with
creaking joists and contracting plumbing, and that all the new fictional characters I was bringing to life on the page just
happened to be throwing up random Mavises and Cooks and Mr Bennetts, I am obliged to rethink. Even as I write this I see a
pattern emerging on the old faded striped wallpaper I stare at when I raise my head from the keyboard. It looks like a face:
round large eyes, a slash for a mouth, shaggy hair. A rather cruel face. I look again and it’s just splodges of damp: of course.
All the same, it wasn’t nice.
It’s a wet and windy March: the drains outside this window blocked last week and there was quite a flood; rainwater flowed
down the concrete stairs from the garden to basement level, and under the back door into the corridor, and was only held back
when it reached the stone step up to this room where I work. Like the major traumas of the past, these events are never quite
over. Mop up as we will, now I have faces on damp wallpaper, alarming me. I’m going upstairs for some coffee. I turn off my
laptop. I do not want anyone who does not understand it to see what’s on the screen. The face does not look as if it belonged
to anyone computer-literate.
Novels do not drop ready written from the skies. They have to be written in real time. Your couple of hours’ reading is my
half-year’s work. Don’t think I’m grudging you – get to roughly the halfway word-count and the process begins to be enjoyable.
You know enough about your characters, and what they are going to do next, to stop feeling anxious and insecure and accept
them, even taking pleasure in their company. Like Scarlet at the moment, I’d rather have Jackson, rat that he is, than uptight
Louis – though I can un-uptight him at will, tilting the balance of choice in his favour. And I know pretty much by now how
Lola is going to meet her come-uppance. At five o’clock this morning I was startled awake by the clear realisation of what
was going to happen at the end of the book. I sat upright in bed like someone in a cartoon, hair sticking up.
There is a degree in which novels will write themselves if you allow them to, but the process of allowing them to do so is
tiring, difficult, and registers with the writer as really hard work. You use bits of the brain which are not normally exercised;
it’s like taking a strange dog for a walk on the end of a lead: it either charges ahead in the wrong direction, or has to
be tugged behind, or turns and snaps at your ankles, or worse, just sits down on its haunches and stares at you. When all
you were doing in the first place, in taking the dog for a walk, was fulfilling some social obligation – a favour you owe
the neighbour who looked after your cat, or your friend who is sick. It’s bitter. But by the time you get the creature home
again, you are normally on good terms, albeit exhausted. I am on good terms with this novel.
I wasn’t sure at first about the kehua business but it becomes more and more convincing. It is as plausible a way of explaining
the way some of us turn our lives into a mess as any therapist’s
notion of compulsive behaviour. The sins of the past, the traumas that our forebears endured, come back to haunt us, like
stains through wallpaper. If you don’t bother to strip the old wallpaper off, but cut corners, just putting up new over old,
it looks fine at first, but give it a bit of damp and eventually the old pattern shows through and you are left with a mess
and have to start all over again. I can see the troubles of my own life, forget Scarlet’s, as being due in great part to the
tragedies and traumas that afflicted my own family’s past, though they did not include murder. Their restless ghosts are still
with us; we try to forget them, but they speak to us in our sleep.
End of coffee break. Back to the laptop.
Today’s New Zealand is no longer a country of embattled pioneers; it is regarded by the rest of the world as the most socially
conscious and peace-loving nation in the world. The rich myth and legend of the Maori peoples feed into today’s culture, though
the battles on the way were fierce. If you go up to Coromandel these days, up to the subtropical North, where the pohutakawa
trees line the rocky coast, and the dolphins sport in a warm sea, and in the deep dark kauri forests where the tui birds break
the silence and the bellbirds chime, you could well believe that the spirit of the taniwha has been put to sleep. But it is
too much to hope that, with Scarlet’s inadvertent blessing and the purification of the shower, the kehua hanging around Beverley’s
head could finally have been satisfied and gone home. Resolution is not so easy.
The modern translation of all this being ‘The tendency to dysfunction in a family is hereditary, until therapy undoes the
traumas of the past.’ Without therapy it may take several generations for the family to, as they say, ‘move on’. And yet ‘moving
on’ is such a giving up, such a disgustingly timid denial of the realities of the
past, of rage and discontent and vigour, such a flaccid response to the savagery of those Maori wars – while Hone Heke’s rebellion
was being put down, this house was being built – such a welcoming of entropy, I am reluctant to embrace it.