I had a good day’s writing down in the basement, in spite of everything. By the evening hobgoblins and foul fiends had fled
away.
This evening I went out into the garden, which at the moment seems the most neutral place around here. And also of course
to get a little sun for my skin. They say you need ten minutes’ exposure to sunlight a day, so your body can produce the vitamin
D it needs. Let them say away, I am fair-skinned and burn easily and try to be in the shade whenever I can. Though thinking
about it I realise the caution only set in when I was thirty-five and my sister died of melanoma, a skin cancer. It was after
that that the sun suddenly stopped being my friend, and became a dangerous, glowing ball of light which didn’t like me and
I didn’t like it, and I dived underground.
But it’s evening now, and the light is beautiful and calm. I need have no fear of lightning strikes and sudden visions of
kehua, at least for the next few hours.
The sun is too low in the sky to be dangerous; our hilltop is suffused with a golden glow; and the white clouds are rimmed
with pink, and over to the west above the stone wall the whole sky is streaked with oranges and reds. It is like a child’s
colour wash of a sunset, but expertly done. The wall is old, made from nicely dressed blocks of stone taken from the ruined
abbey – after the dissolution of the monasteries the townsfolk were allowed to carry off the stone to compensate them for
what amounted to the sudden lack of social services.
Do not think the abbeys of this country fell gently into ruins; people as well as buildings were hacked to death. I don’t
know where the stone was originally quarried but it seems to throw back a grey-pink glow that’s all its own when the setting
sun strikes it, as if at any moment it was going to burst into flames. Everything carries memories of the past, and the past
is a mixed blessing. What starts with violence turns into beauty, and vice versa. Thanatos, the death wish, is as strong as
Eros, the will towards life: they seem to take turns.
There is a pets’ graveyard in the garden patch near the stable block where once the Bennetts kept their gig. Just a row of
head-stones for family pets, dogs and cats, I daresay a rabbit or two, or even a parrot; though you wouldn’t get too many
of those in a lifetime. Lucky if they don’t outlive you. You might find a few slim remaining bones of these once-beloved creatures
if you dug, but the rooting wildlife will have had more than enough time to scatter the remains over a hundred years or so.
This is the most neglected part of the garden: it is shaded and overgrown, and a little spooky, but I do want to see how the
pear tree is getting on. It clings to the brick wall of the old stables: no claw-hold here for my own kehua, for I may well
have collected a few on the way. I comfort myself with the thought that at least my sister had a proper funeral, and was properly
mourned.
There is nothing inside the stables, when I pull open the creaky door and look, but spiders, a few glass windows still valiantly
whole but clouded with murk, some garden chairs we forgot to take out last summer, and a hole under the eaves where swifts
in search of spiders understand how to dive, retrieve and get out again as fast as they can. I think I may be getting the
whiff of cigar smoke and a man’s voice calling,
Here Patch. Here Patch.
Please no. I retreat, back from the step.
And then, looking down, I see what I never noticed before: that there are words engraved on one of the larger stones. I look
more closely.
Patch the Collie, 1890–1904, RIP.
And I have just remembered that months back this was the name I pulled out of the blue to give to the McLean dog, which got
shot back in the thirties for the crime of witnessing a murder. I don’t quite see how, outside in the glowing air, and the
sun setting so punctually, to timetable, rationality ruling, this is significant. I must have seen the inscription once upon
a time and forgotten that I had.
And then I hear the sound of car wheels on gravel and know it is Martin and his collie Bonzo. I wonder if Bonzo is a descendant
of the original Patch.
Bonzo makes his usual galloping inspection of the garden while Martin, Rex’s friend, rings the doorbell. Bonzo doesn’t see
me. Nobody goes into this part of the garden. As soon as Bonzo’s done the garden, he does the house, casing the joint, up
first to the attic where Rex works, then to the basement where I do, making sure everyone is where he expects them to be,
or has good reason for being elsewhere. But today he takes an extra turn around the garden and sees me and stops short, almost
skidding, baring his teeth, like a dog in a cartoon, one who’s just seen a lady with her head tucked underneath her arm. It
is me he is looking at.
The bristles on the ridge of his back go up; he is growling, snarling as he backs away. I am hurt: I am upset. Does he see
something unnatural in me? Am I still the ghost? Or perhaps the dog that comes bouncing towards me is not Bonzo at all, but
Patch? He turns and makes for the house, and down the corridor into the kitchen, tail between his legs; which is nothing at
all like his usual body language, but he is certainly Bonzo. I follow him into the kitchen, where he too seems confused, and
has had to sit down to
recover his composure. He recognises me as me, with a reluctant banging of his tail on the floor as if I had played some dreadful
trick on him, and he is now prepared to accept me as myself, but only just.
Rex is on his way home from the market. I am glad to take a break and drink a pot of tea with Martin, whose presence is as
always genial and reassuring. He is a calm man. He has faced enough physical danger in his working life not to be afraid of
fancies. He chuckles at Bonzo, and reassures him too.
When they’re gone I go back down to the basement. I might as well write some more.
The purification ceremony was up to a point inadvertent. Luke’s first thought on hearing of the murder/suicide in Amberley
was to hope that at least the McLeans had been properly buried and their homestead cleansed. He was not a superstitious man,
and believed himself to be perfectly rational, but respect is due where respect is due. The Maori had been well established
in North Canterbury at one time – though few choose to live there today – and it remains a numinous place. The old religions
break through everywhere. If both Walter and Arthur, or either one, had Maori ancestry it would not be surprising. A number
of English missionaries had gone native and had had to be recalled, but not before their offspring were settled in the area.
And the Coromandel and Kennedy Bay hapu were powerful enough to drag Beverley into theirs, and include any dependent kehua,
which would be hard on her heels.
He’d never heard of kehua travelling overseas. Traditionally, sanctified spirits travelled north to join their ancestors in
Tane. They slipped down the trunks of the pohutakawa trees of the far North-West, lined up on Three Mile Beach, and then followed
the path the setting sun lays upon the glittering water to reach that golden land. But he supposed if a few were restless
enough they could end up in England, land of the long grey cloud, or even Scotland. Luke wondered how they would get on with
the kelpies, the water ghosts
of the North, and he laughed, and the others joined in, out of family loyalty rather than because they found him funny; just
very, very loquacious. But in family life you have to take the rough with the smooth: that is the point of it.
Your writer did not laugh as she listened. She kept her head down and tried to concentrate through the noises that were now
coming at her through the walls from all sides. The dog barking, Cristobel wailing, Mavis giggling, Cook swearing, and still
she was all too conscious of the change in the fall of the light, as something passed in front of the window where the little
straw birds sat, and when she looked, they were at least in the same place, though now they were lying on their sides, so
they were staring at each other and not at her. Which seemed to be slightly better. If things are impersonal one can cope.
She thought perhaps her own wairua were passing by, not the grateful dead, but the helpful unborn.
Just as well, as it turned out, that Scarlet’s wairua were there in the ornamental kiwi plant in the penthouse at Campion
Tower, albeit snuggled up to her kehua, asleep. The children were clamouring for a barbecue in the garden. Luke nipped round
to Waitrose to buy the best steak, though his new-found grandmother berated him for his extravagance. In his tour of the garden
– a veritable urupa, he called it, the place you always want to return to, the beautiful place where you feel grounded and
at home – he’d taken a twig of the kowhai tree to examine it closer. Now he placed it beneath the steak as it cooked to give
it flavour. Beverley hobbled out of the house, helped by Gerry, with greater ease than she had thought possible. She had been
reared in New Zealand, after all, and if there is something to be done, you do it, weakness or not.
Beverley thought Luke was overcooking the steaks and bent over the barbecue to turn them. At that moment the barbecue, behaving
so far like a quiescent sunspot, suddenly went nuclear, and a surge of flame leapt upwards and singed her hair, and the kowhai
twig caught fire instead of baking gently. This twig, remember, was child of a bush which had spent a long time in a pot crafted
by a local potter out of Amberley clay, and plants too, like the birds and the animals, have their own wairua, or soul. At
any rate the two flames mixed and as her hair burned and others screamed and ran around trying to put the flames out, the
necessary oblations for Beverley were complete.
The kehua that had followed Beverley, pleading with her, since she was a tiny child, and all its descendants too, as the hapu
split, and split, and split again, could now return home to the marae satisfied. But the marae was not there any more, the
urupa, the beautiful place, was covered by bungalows, and TV aerials and mobile phone and police masts, and would be hard
to locate even if anyone still cared. They chattered and quaked and covered their eyes against reason, and leapt back to the
kowhai tree, which recovered from its grief at losing them and stood proud again. The kehua thought they might as well stay;
the conservatory could be the marae, the urupa could be found in the garden, Winter, Harry and Marcus could be gathered in,
and even Fiona and Gwyneth. And no contrary instructions being received, the kehua settled in, content.
Just how much of a drama it was no one noticed. They were too busy dousing Beverley and allocating blame. As it happened Beverley’s
scalp was hardly touched though her hair was noticeably thinner and frizzled at its ends. Gerry wound a tie-dyed scarf in
red, blue and green around her hair, and she forgot about the damage to it. He did not mind how much or how little hair she
had, Gerry said. He was after her mind, and her experiences, not her body, and she was rich in both.
It was a gallant speech. He said he wanted to marry her but she was dubious about that. It would interfere with the children’s
inheritance. He was whanau, she accepted that, but only a rather recent member. She was not sure whether she wanted him in
the house. He was not as young as he had been, and his eyes watered.
The anticipation of change and event was already reverberating through the subtext of the spirit world, and up in Campion
Tower Scarlet’s wairua woke with a start, and up in the decorative kiwi her kehua went into alarm mode, and just as well,
because even as Alice’s flight was delayed and the traffic on the M1 ground to a halt, Scarlet, her face disfigured by rage
and hate, was advancing on Jackson with a serrated bread knife raised about to strike, slit and slice. The past had sensed
a time slip and was seeping through as best it could.
This is what had had happened between Scarlet and Jackson.
After their first night together Jackson had brought Scarlet coffee and toast in bed and instructed her not to leave crumbs.
Well, it is the natural habit of men to instruct young women. Scarlet had objected.
‘Don’t you shout at me,’ said Scarlet.
‘Don’t you screech at me,’ said Jackson.
Scarlet’s kehua, always sensitive to raised emotion, rustled in the blissful comfort of the ornamental kiwi plant. They were
half inclined to start up their habitual refrain as duty demanded,
run, run, run,
but did not. The wairua were snuggling up so close and cosy to them it seemed too much bother. Yet why, when of all times
now she needed their advice, did the kehua not squawk and
flap their alarm, as the blackbirds did when the buzzard got the jackdaw?
I just got up and cleaned the cobwebby windows. I used the Windolene, which is kept with the other cleaning materials and
cloths in the old pantry. Don’t ask me why I suddenly felt the need, after months of living and working down here with the
spiders and the ghosts, to get round to doing this. I thought if I looked more clearly out to the garden I would see more
of what was really there than what I thought was there. Spirits surely dislike dust and dirt and dereliction. I can see I
have been colluding with them to make their life easier. The ammonia smell of the cleaner quite masks that of the drifting
cigar smoke, at any rate. It was very powerful in the pantry just now. God knows what Mr Bennett had been up to down there.
Enough about cleaning. Back to the computer. Perhaps a bad tohunga had indeed got hold of the wairua of Scarlet’s aborted
babies? These wairua are apparently easily led. Perhaps someone was ill-wishing her? Perhaps someone who wanted her cushy
job, or an ex or discarded wife? Perhaps Briony would have had Jackson back if she, Scarlet, had not been around throwing
herself at Jackson, offering all sorts of sexual delights, apparently with love thrown in for good measure? Someone like Scarlet
could not hope to live without encountering envy, no matter how hard she smiled.