Lola’s BlackBerry lay on the floor. So did a rather old-fashioned real glass syringe full of a colourless liquid. Whatever
it was it would do no one any good. One obvious thing to do was to use the BlackBerry to call an ambulance. Help would come.
The other thing to do was use the syringe to jab in the raised vein in the calf of the semi-naked man where his bare leg lay
fallen to one side, and kill him, and take Lola out of Down the Steps, in the hope that she would never go back there or anywhere
like it, ever again. No one would know. This time she would make a better job of it than cutting the brakes; it had taken
her a long time to get round to it.
She had forgotten so much. She supposed you had to, the better to survive. She felt anger ebbing away as she pushed in the
syringe. Metal went more easily into flesh than you supposed, seeming almost to welcome death in, eager for it. She remembered
Arthur saying as much, long ago and far away, when he was joking about killing her mother. She plunged it in for Rita who
should have done it to Arthur. She thought perhaps she was doing it for women everywhere, to save them from having to. She
did it to the punters who had taken pictures of her and Dionne when she was a girl: to all the
men she had fled from, grabbing her purse and running downstairs: to the men who had loved her and left, to the men she had
wept over, to the men who shouted and bullied to drown her out, to Winter for having sold her, to Harry who insulted her by
preferring men, to Marcus who had robbed her mind, to Gerry for Fiona.
She killed them all, and as she did so thought she heard
kill, kill, kill
turn into
run, run, run,
and by the time the liquid had run out so had her hate. She remembered what she was about, wiped the syringe with her sleeve,
dropped it on the ground amongst the banknotes, put the BlackBerry in her pocket, slapped Lola hard on both cheeks, got her
to her feet and walking, and steered her out the door. Beverley no longer noticed the pain in her leg.
She looked back and the man lay unmoving on the floor; she felt fairly sure he would not wake. If he did, what would he remember?
If he did not, who would care? He had invited death and he had got it. She had got Lola. She would give the matter no more
attention.
There was no one about. It was three in the morning. She half pushed, half dragged Lola up the steps. This is the uphill struggle
that children always are, she thought. What’s new?
It had started to rain. She stopped supporting Lola when she reached a spot it was unlikely surveillance cameras could observe,
and let her fall to the ground, which Lola did quite readily. Beverley was amazed at her own cleverness. Lola was half naked
but it couldn’t be helped. Beverley turned and walked away and hailed a taxi. She looked back and already a group of people
were clustering around the fallen body. Someone put a coat over her. They would get her to hospital. Lola would have enough
nous not to get herself identified. She would be just another anonymous drug victim who accepted treatment and then disappeared
into the night. Lola had
Winter’s paranoiac blood in her veins, and evidently, and fortunately, more brains than he ever had. Lola would survive. Beverley
got the taxi to drop her on the corner and walked to her house: she tried not to limp but her command over her body was fading
fast, and by the time she got to Robinsdale she was holding on to fences and hedges for support.
At seven-thirty in the morning the doorbell rings. It takes a long time for Beverley to get to the door. It is Gerry. This
is the way things happen within families, she thinks: all coincidence. She sees her fate is settled. Gerry too is a natural
claimant to the whanau. He has no one else. He’s soaking wet when he comes in. The rain seemed to come out of nowhere. But
then he brings Fiona’s truly damp and dripping kelpie with him. The kelpie will appreciate the stream, the last visible tributary
of the River Fleet, and with any luck will take up residence there, harmlessly. Let Beverley not believe she will ever be
rid of Fiona.
The kehua is now looking for a good branch somewhere near Jesper’s house to cling to and recuperate. It is exhausted. It had
to move on with Lola from the comfortable quarters of Nopasaran but could find only an old branch sticking out of a dustbin
in the squat where Lola’s friends lived. Then Lola OD’d in the night, to blunt the remorse which beat about her head like
the wings of the Furies, but she got the message
run, run, run
; or at least the passers-by did, and they got to A&E just in time.
Lola so nearly died she can’t even remember it, but your writer knows how near a thing it was. Now she’s gone to her father’s
to recover, and weeping she tells Jesper about her and Louis, while blaming Jesper for abandoning her and making her do it,
while he tears his hair out and paces the room. She suddenly pulls herself
together and sits up straight, and says, ‘Well, actually, I did it not you. And at least he wasn’t a blood relation.’ She
then says she’s decided against going to Haiti. She’s too young and she’s going to be good and go back to college. Or she
might stay on a year at school and try for Oxford.
The kehua finds a home under another diseased lime tree which is dropping its sticky stuff all over the parked cars, and folds
its wings over its ears and hangs like a bat. It quite fancies Oxford, where at least they know how to look after trees.
The garden needs children. With Luke’s lot joining, I can see the place might even become a marae in its own right, a rather
strange, pakeha version of one in a foreign land, and about as far as you can get from home, but there are more than enough
hapu, living, deceased, unborn and undead, from McLeans generations back, clustering around the place to compose a quorum,
a new colony for the iwi. The kehua are becoming quite acclimatised; just as flora and fauna disperse from country to country,
why shouldn’t they? And Robinsdale’s large garden might just about pass as a urupa, a place of natural beauty that you can
come back to from distant places and know that this is where you naturally belong. But there are of course still rituals undone,
grievances unsettled, to be attended to before it can possibly happen.
Luke, having reluctantly left Robinsdale the night before, is already back in it, talking – how he talks: whom can he have
got that from? No one will know before Alice appears. Cynara has turned up, but not Lola, who to everyone’s relief has rung
to say she is staying with her father, back unexpectedly from Dubai. He has ’flu and she must look after him. No one can contact
Scarlet, and Louis will not answer his phone. Alice is late. Her flight from Manchester has been delayed and the roadworks
on the M1 are disgraceful. How did she keep a baby secret from her family? Why and how did she have it adopted out?
Gerry, who has reckoned on getting Beverley to himself, sulks at not being the centre of attention, goes to his room – he
will have to wait to share Beverley’s – and starts searching the Internet for jobs in London, preferably North London. It
has occurred to both Beverley and Cynara that Luke might be Gerry’s son but neither will voice the suspicion for fear it is
true. It is fairly clear from his sulks that if it is the case, Gerry has been told nothing about it. Luke is younger than
Cynara, older than Scarlet. When did it happen?
Alice at last turns up and embraces Luke. Luke embraces Alice. It is a reunion which goes well. Alice wears the kind of clothes
Rita long ago wanted Beverley to wear, decent, tweedy and unadventurous, reassuring to a long-lost son. She tells Luke she
had no option but to give him away: her husband Stanley would not accept another man’s child. ‘The other man’, Luke’s father,
was a good-looking medical student who abandoned her.
So that is why she went north, thinks Beverley, nothing to do with Harry’s death or the scandal, just that she was pregnant
by the wrong man. Sometimes it is difficult to think well of one’s own daughter.
Luke lectures in anthropology at the ANU, Canberra. He tells Alice about the couple who adopted him. His dad is a doctor,
his mum a nurse. He had been lucky with his parents. They are a kind and pleasant Kiwi couple (he refers to New Zealanders
as Kiwis – which annoys Beverley at first; she thinks of Kiwis as shy, timid, insect-ridden birds, but Luke – like his half-sister
Cynara, never one to mince words – says, ‘You have to remember you’re rather old, Gran, and have been away from home a long,
long time’). When they were working for NGOs in developing countries, they sent Luke to Thames High School for Boys, where
he boarded. And yes, he had gone on school outings to the Auckland Library: why, he asks?
No matter, says Beverley. Anyway it’s all pulled down now, he says.
‘Never mind,’ says Beverley. So Luke presses her further and she tells him, and all of them, of her trips to the Auckland
Library and how she had discovered her origins, and about the murder. ‘My father murdered my mother.’ It seems to her as if
she is relating a dream.
‘Oh Mum,’ says Alice, ‘don’t distress yourself. I know all that already. I have done since I went on a school trip to Paris.
I ran into Dionne at the Louvre. She was blonder than ever and standing on the plinth next to some dignitary or other who
was cutting a ribbon, but I recognised her at once. She used to look after me a lot when I was small. She took me out to tea
and told me all about Arthur and Walter and all that. We had brioche and apricot jam. It was a long time ago.’
‘Dionne had no business telling you,’ is all Beverley can say.
‘No more than you had telling Cynara,’ says Alice.
‘Hang on!’ says Cynara to Alice. ‘Stop. You mean my grandmother Beverley had my mother, you, by my great-grandfather Arthur,
and you had me by your stepfather? Is there such a thing as an incest gene? My God, supposing Lola gets pregnant.’
Luke is beginning to look quite put out. So is Gerry. They have come here on a momentous day to put their own lives in order
and the women are upstaging them.
Politely the women desist, and turn their attention to the men-folk. There are no secrets left.
How they’re crowding around me now, these characters. They too want to get out of here. Time is compressing. They’re trying
to wind this story up. The kehua are back in the cherry tree at Robinsdale now, up against the window, attracted by event,
and the promise of more, but looking over their batlike wings at the kowhai bush, which is in danger of getting too damp,
developing mould. Gerry’s dripping kelpie is perhaps making matters worse. Someone is going to have to do something about
that, in time. The tree may have to be replanted away from the stream nearer the house.
Luke has decided it’s warm enough to have a barbecue in the garden. Luke loves to cook. He learned from a tohunga when he
was small. The tohunga was a Samoan, working as the cook in a refugee camp, a vast man who wore a ragged tie-dyed T-shirt
in reds and yellow and greens which reached to his knee, and sandals on dirty feet. But he could cook anything even remotely
edible and make it taste good, and the child watched and learned, and pattered after him as he performed the rites and rituals
of his calling. Today Luke notices the wilting kowhai tree and fears it doesn’t bode good. The habits of kehua and kelpies
alike are not unknown to him, and come to mind; he has after all studied anthropology.
He is on a sabbatical in London with his wife and children, but even scientists are affected by the knowledge they pick up
along the
way. His wife is up in the Hebrides recording the folk myths of the outer isles, and the children are in the garden, running
around under the sprinkler, fully dressed and avoiding the water rather than seeking it, because it is frankly not that warm,
happy enough, if complaining from time to time that their ears are still stuffed up from jet lag, and claiming that boiled
sweets would clear them.
If Janice from Glastonbury was around she could probably learn to see hanging kehua in the same way she has learned to see
haloes and recognise walk-ins from the binary Dog Star Sirius.
Even Janice is down here in spirit, good God. At least there has been no more bell, book and candle stuff going on, though
twice now the power for the basement has blown, but I had everything on the computer saved on its emergency battery, and the
black-outs lasted only a couple of minutes anyway. Rex says there’s a loose connection somewhere: the wiring is ropy down
here and someone will have to come in to look at it. I say, not until I have finished the novel. He says, surely I can work
upstairs, but how can I explain that upstairs now is even more disconcerting than downstairs? Rex was out last night and I
didn’t dare go up to my study to do another hour’s writing, I was too scared. That hasn’t happened before. When I can see
and hear the past it’s not so bad; when they’re silent it seems more sinister. I took sleeping pills and went to bed.
But even through the pills I dreamed of Scarlet and Lola. I am getting fond of Lola. She’s just into the madness that sometimes
possesses teenage girls when they are allowed no escape into romance, and end up bouncing their skinny thighs on top of older
men.
And then I dreamed of Cynara, Dowson’s Cynara, not mine, a ghostly figure from a lost age.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finish’d and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
Dowson’s Cynara was ‘Missie’ Adelaide, the owner’s under-age daughter at his favourite Soho restaurant. He was hopelessly
in love with her. We know too much. It was a better world, I think, before we all became so cynical and knowing, before women
wanted to be men, when sex was deep, mysterious and forbidden. I blame the men.