The Predictions (27 page)

Pat slid onto the bench seat next to me, and Barb shunted close to her side, bowls of porridge in hand. They had both drowned it in molasses, a rookie mistake, and I watched them take a big mouthful, thinking it was golden syrup, then gag.

Pat sniffed the contents of her spoon. “Well, that was an interesting flavor.”

“Molasses,” I said. “You’ll get used to it”

She grimaced. “Really? I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s packed with iron.” I nodded at pregnant Barb. “You’ll need that. There’s no meat within a hundred miles of this place.”

Barb swallowed it down, bravely, while Pat spooned hers off to one side. “Crikey, we had a rough night,” she said. “Barb found a weta in her bed, and being the gentlewoman that I am, I had to see it off the premises.”

“It was huge,” said Barb, speaking for possibly the first time in two days.

“Poor Barb almost crapped her pants,” added Pat.

Barb nodded agreement while Pat used her spoon as a ruler to demonstrate how big the weta was—the length of the handle—and how she had flicked it off the bed with her bare hands. I struggled to remember a night of my childhood when my sleep hadn’t been disturbed by one critter or another: slugs, centipedes, cockroaches, daddy longlegs, and the occasional white-tail spider. Often put there by one of the boys but not always.

From across the table, Hunter and Shakti watched this exchange—he with amusement, she more like a cat when it picks up the scent of a nearby dog. It wasn’t just Pat’s tale that was turning Shakti off but her whole demeanor, so forthright that it was obvious, from even this small interaction, that Pat alone, out of all the humans in the world, would be immune to Shakti’s charms. Sure enough, after a few minutes, Shakti got up and left, Hunter’s gaze tracking her. If I had thought he was docile before, with Shakti around he was ten times worse.

“Hunter,” I said. “The cabin I’m staying in—I think there’s a problem with the roof. Would you mind taking a look?”

“Sure,” he said, still in a dream world. “How about later?”

“I was hoping we could look at it now—while Zachary is with Katrina.”

I wasn’t sure what I was going to show Hunter at the cabin. A number of things were broken or falling off it, but I suspected they had been that way for years. There had been a roof leak, but Paul had patched it up a few days earlier. Halfway across the still-soggy field, with Hunter in tow, I remembered the rotten floorboard on the veranda that I had almost put my foot through. I showed it to him, and he agreed it was dangerous and needed to be seen to. “I’ll ask Paul to fix it right away.”

“How did it go in Whitianga?” I said, training my eyes on Hunter so as not to miss an iota of his reaction. “Did you hand over the shirt?”

For a moment he was blank. “The shirt?”

“The tank top Fritz wore. You were going to give it to the cops in Whitianga.”

“They said they would look into it.”

“That’s all? They didn’t ask where you found it?”

“I told them, and they said they’d look into that too.”

I suspected he was bullshitting, that he hadn’t handed in the tank top at all. Of course he hadn’t. He was too besotted with Shakti, and she had likely encouraged him not to. “Did you tell Shakti about it?”

“She didn’t know how it got there.”

So he had told her. “What about the caravan? How did that end up in the estuary?”

“She doesn’t know. She said she abandoned it at the side of the road. This is years ago. Right after she left here. She and her friend—Margie, Margot—”

“Marcia. Her girlfriend.”

“We don’t know that’s what they were.” Hunter’s cheeks reddened. “Anyway, they drove here in that old rust bucket to pick up the caravan. Shakti said they hadn’t got very far up the road when the tow bar snapped. The caravan rolled off into a ditch, and they left it there.”

“They just left it there?”

“You know what Shakti’s like—she doesn’t care for material possessions. She’s more in tune with the spiritual side of life.”

I was speechless.

“Poppy, look, I can understand why you might find it hard to see me with another woman but what she and I have—

“Believe me,” I said, dreading what he might say. “It’s not that.”

“I was going to say,” he continued, “that she has a pure soul. She’s incapable of doing something that would deliberately harm another person.”

Talking to him was a lost cause. He was so cunt-struck he was seeing fairies. If Shakti had anything to do with Fritz’s disappearance, I would have to confront her about it myself.

“Are you coming to the hui?” asked Hunter.

“Is that today?”

He nodded. “Susie wants us all to be there. It’s about the memorial for Fritz.”

A hui would mean hours and hours of talking, discus
sion that went around in circles, everyone getting a chance to be heard, even if they had nothing to say—then thrashing it out to reach a consensus that pleased no one but infuriated the least number of people. We had covered the process, exhaustively, in women’s studies. I could think of nothing worse. “Do you think we should have one? A memorial.”

“How can we?” said Hunter. “We don’t know where he is.”

“But you think he’s still alive?”

“I don’t know,” said Hunter. “Nobody does.”

When I went back to the mess hut, Katrina and Zachary weren’t there, and no one seemed to know where they had gone. Even though I knew he was with an adult, and theoretically should be safe, I felt anxious, a sensation that came over me whenever I had been separated from him for even a short time. I searched all the obvious places: Susie and Katrina’s cabin, the chapel, the orchard, and the schoolhouse, now used as a library. Then, with a rising sense of panic, I looked in all the places I hoped they would never have ventured: down by the river, so swollen it would be treacherous even to look at; anywhere near the toilet block, where each long drop was a six-feet-deep, shit-filled grave. I was still getting used to the way my maternal instincts went rogue, always calculating the potential for fatality in nearby hazards, even if the baby was safely tucked up in bed. But Zachary wasn’t tucked up in bed—I didn’t know where he was. By the time I arrived at the door of Hunter’s cabin, the only one I hadn’t yet investigated, Zachary had met with a dozen violent and catastrophic ends, and my nerves were completely shot.

On my way up the front steps, I heard a sound that was music to my ears: Zachary bleating with the first signs of hunger. Or perhaps someone was sticking him with a pin. I didn’t care—he was alive. With some urgency, I pushed open the door, strode into the cabin, and then froze at the grotesque pantomime before me. Relief turned to bewilderment, horror, as I stared and stared, trying to make sense of it.

Seated with legs crossed on the end of the bed was Katrina. She was smiling and nodding encouragement to another woman, also seated on the bed but at the head of it, against the wall. This other woman had no clothes on. She was propped up with pillows, her long, muscular limbs a glossy nutmeg brown, ill matched to the pink, squirming baby in her arms. The anatomy of it was easy to understand. The woman was Shakti, the baby was Zachary, but what was she doing to him? She had cupped her hand around the back of his head and was pushing his mouth toward her bare breast. When he got close to the nipple, he thrashed his head from side to side, kicked his legs, and complained, but Shakti ignored his protests and pressed on, trying to maneuver her breast in the direction of his mouth. “Suckle,” she was saying, “please, just once.”

I had entered the room without knocking or announcing my presence, but the two women were so absorbed in their task, Katrina murmuring encouragement, and Shakti concentrating on Zachary, that they hadn’t noticed I was there.

I managed to call out “What on earth are you doing?” before charging for Zachary and trying to wrestle him away from Shakti.

I got as far as the bed. Katrina grabbed me around the waist from behind, stopping me in my tracks. “You don’t need to worry,” she said. “What’s happening is natural.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, trying to push her off. “He doesn’t like it.”

Deranged with concentration, Shakti folded Zachary more securely in her arms and while he screamed into her chest, his hands white and curled into fists, his body rigid with distress, she tried once more to ram her breast down his throat.

I escaped from Katrina and put my hand in between Shakti’s breast and Zachary’s mouth, shushing to calm him down, at the same time working to free him from Shakti’s arms, devilishly strong after a lifetime of yoga. “Please,” she said, in a plaintive register. “He almost took it.”

Zachary had switched from screaming to the really desperate cries that make no sound.

I felt Katrina’s hand on my shoulder, squeezing it. “Let her have one more try.”

“For fuck’s sake, can’t you see how upset he is?” To be taken seriously, I’d had to yell.

Shakti released her grip, finally, and I lifted the baby from her. Letting go of him, in a pathetic voice she said, “I just wanted to know what it feels like to nurse.”

“Shakti can’t have children,” said Katrina. “That scar she showed us, on her cervix—the botched operation.” She lowered her voice to a whisper: “She thinks they damaged her uterus.”

I recalled Shakti’s self-examination, how she had urged us to take back our bodies from the medical profession. No
wonder she didn’t trust anyone with a scalpel. That doctor really had butchered her. And then, I remembered my prediction.

“You’re the one that’s infertile?” I said unkindly. “
You’re
the one with the womb that shall bear only sorrow?”

Shakti sobbed—something I had not known she was capable of. “To be a mother,” she said. “It’s all I ever wanted.”

With the better part of me, I felt for her. To be denied the one thing in life she wanted was cruel. But in the end I couldn’t forgive her for yoking me to her misfortune. “Did it make you feel better,” I said, “to share your misery?”

“That’s not why I did it,” pleaded Shakti. “I was trying to help you. The way you were brought up . . . I was worried what would happen if you ever had children.”

“As you can see, we’re doing just fine.” I had been holding Zachary to my chest, comforting him, but he was still naked, and now he peed on me. The warm liquid seeped through every layer of my clothing, the last clean lot I had. I felt no disgust, his urine was comprised of fluid from my own body, but Zachary was wet, and shivered with cold.

“Why did you take all his clothes off?” I said, looking around for something to wrap him in.

“Skin to skin,” said Katrina, handing me a terrycloth jumpsuit. “Such a beautiful way to bond.”

“With your own baby,” I said, for myself but also for Elisabeth. “Not with mine.”

Gaialands

1989

T
HE HUI WAS IN
an hour’s time. I did not want to go. I did not wish to face the strange adults who had raised me, or the woman who had turned her sorrow into mine. But for the sake of Fritz, to honor his memory if nothing else, I had to go. There was also the matter of the tank top. I had meant to confront Shakti about it, but in the confusion—the horror—of seeing her trying to breast-feed my baby, I had forgotten about it entirely. Before I did anything else, I wanted to know if Hunter had taken the T-shirt to the police or if, as I suspected, he had hung on to it, done nothing—either to protect Shakti, or because he had taken her at her word.

I waited until the last possible minute to carry out my plan, when I knew Hunter and everyone would be assembled in the chapel, waiting for the hui to begin. Then, with Zachary stowed in the sling, I took a roundabout route through a grove of lemon trees to Hunter’s cabin, which he had been sharing of late with Shakti. The door was unlocked, just as
it had been for the last twenty-five years. “If I wanted to lock my door at night, I’d move to the city,” was one of Hunter’s favorite maxims.

Sure enough, the tank top I was looking for was exactly where I had expected to find it: in the drawer Hunter had shoved it in, still near the top. The blood on the tank top had dried to an orange crust, and when I tried to unfold it, the most saturated areas of fabric stayed glued together in a lump. Unsure if it would prove anything, or be of any use, I stashed it in the sling under Zachary’s sleeping body.

A few minutes later, I slipped into a pew in the back row of the chapel. Paul glanced behind to wink at me, but the others stayed facing the front, where Susie was perched on a small podium. Her seating position, her manner, was that of someone who wanted to lead the meeting without appearing as though they were. In the front pew to her right, Katrina sat next to Barb and Pat. In the pew behind them sat Loretta and Tom, he with his arm around her. Sometime in the last week, perhaps while I had been in Auckland, Loretta had chopped off all her hair.

Across the aisle, as though they were wedding guests from the groom’s side of the family, sat Hunter and Shakti, and behind them, Paul and Sigi, her hair long and flowing, like Shakti’s. Everyone talked among themselves, waiting for the meeting to start. Susie chewed on her nails. She appeared to be gathering her thoughts, running through a speech in her mind. I had seen Hunter doing the same thing before one of his long diatribes and wondered what it was she had rehearsed to say.

Zachary stirred, and I remembered the tank top, stashed in his sling. Now that I had it in my possession, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. I hadn’t thought this through at all.

Susie stood up and cleared her throat. “We’re here to reach a decision about Fritz, whether it’s time to have a memorial.” She gulped, and her voice, when she started speaking again, was shaky. “He’s been gone ten years, and the majority of us think the time has come to mourn him. We need to close the wound.”

From the pew to her right, where Katrina and Loretta and the lesbians sat, came murmurs of assent. From the other side: silence. I had expected Hunter to protest but he didn’t.

“Does anyone want to get the ball rolling?”

No one said anything.

I put up my hand. Everyone turned to look at me.

“Yes, Poppy?”

I had been about to show everyone the tank top, then chickened out. “We could put it to a vote?”

“We could do that,” said Susie, “but I’d prefer to reach a consensus.”

Someone in the left-hand pew, I think it was Paul, groaned. A consensus could take weeks.

In the middle of this exchange, Shakti had leaned to whisper something in Hunter’s ear, and when she was finished, he had turned and whispered back. This went on, back and forth, loud enough that we could hear the swish-wish-wish of their whispering, but not a word they were saying,
until Susie rapped her knuckles on the side of the podium.

“For goddess’s sake. Don’t just sit there whispering like a couple of schoolboys. If you’ve got something to say, spit it out.”

Hunter and Shakti turned to face her, then Hunter glanced one last time at Shakti before he stood up.

“We can’t have a memorial for Fritz because we don’t know that he’s dead.”

Moans of frustration emanated from the right-hand pew. “You’re living in cloud cuckoo land,” said Katrina, getting to her feet. “And it’s not fair on the rest of us. We’ve been in limbo for ten years. He was our son. We all loved him but it’s time we accepted he’s gone.” Her voice faltered. “I just can’t do this any longer.” She sat down, in tears.

“Katrina’s right,” said Tom. “We all miss him but it’s time to face facts.”

“And what exactly are they?” said Hunter.

“Mate, he’s dead,” said Tom. “Fifteen-year-olds don’t just disappear into the forest, never to be heard of again.”

“Fritz did.” Shakti tried to stop Hunter from saying anything else, to pull him back down to seated, but he was rigid with frustration, and wouldn’t budge.

Susie eyed the pair quizzically.

“Hunter, Shakti, do you know something we don’t?”

Hunter gave Shakti a pleading look. She shook her head.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“Then stop wasting our time,” called Tom, across the aisle. “Sit down.”

Hunter sat. Susie waited for the unrest to subside. “Well,
if no one has any other suggestions, I propose we kick things off with a show of hands.”

“Just call it a bloody vote,” said Paul. “We all want to get some sleep tonight.”

“Do we all?” said Susie. “Or by ‘we’ do you mean the men?”

Paul sighed. “Oh for fuck’s sake, can you leave gender out of it, just this once?”

“No, I can’t,” said Susie. “Women have been oppressed for thousands of years, and we cannot just leave it out.”

“Excuse me,” I said.

While they were arguing, I had wiggled out of my pew and made my way to the front, standing in the space between the two aisles, on what I hoped was neutral ground. I held the tank top aloft, pinching each of the shoulder seams between thumb and forefinger. There were audible gasps when everyone saw it. I spoke at full volume so everyone could hear.

“This is the shirt Fritz was wearing on the day he disappeared.” More gasps, and someone drew our attention to the blood. “That’s mine,” I reassured them. “I found the shirt in Shakti’s old caravan, and used it to bandage my leg. I don’t know what it was doing there but I think Shakti does.”

I turned to look at Shakti, and so did everyone else, while she stared straight ahead, determined not to meet anyone’s gaze. From her profile, I tried to read her expression. It wasn’t neutral, but nor was it the face of a person who has just been found guilty of committing a heinous crime. If anything she looked vaguely self-satisfied.

“Do you have an explanation for this?” said Susie, stationing herself in a wide-legged stance, arms folded, in front of Shakti.

Shakti didn’t respond but Hunter stood up and squeezed his temples in exasperation.

“You’ve got it all wrong!” he said. “You’re jumping to conclusions. Shakti didn’t do away with Fritz, she—”

He was stopped by Shakti, who gripped his arm and vehemently shook her head.

“You’ve got to tell them,” he pleaded with her. “Otherwise they’ll think you’ve done something awful.”

“Tell us what?” said Susie, turning to Hunter. “This is exactly the kind of bullshit we’ve had to put up with from you for years.”

“Hear, hear!” said Pat, even though she had been at the commune for all of five minutes.

“Yes, Shakti, what is it?” said Sigi, trying to sound reasonable, calm. “If you have some information about Fritz, you must share it with us.”

Finally, Shakti stood up. The smug look had gone from her face, and she seemed, for her, to be nervous, at a loss for what to do with her hands.

“I have to go back to the beginning,” she said, hesitating. “Otherwise you won’t understand.”

“Try us,” said Susie, bristling.

Shakti scanned the faces of the small gathering, then reached for Hunter’s hand. “When I first came to Gaialands, I could see there was a lot of suffering.”

A few people murmured their dissent.

“Suffering?” said Susie. “What do you mean by that?”

“I’m talking about the way the children were brought up, not knowing who their parents were.”

Dissent became hostile silence.

“I think you all knew by then that your experiment had failed, but you couldn’t admit the effect it was having on the children.” She appealed to the gathering with a smile but was met with cold stares. “I did what I could to try and put things right. First, with a healing ritual, the ceremony I called the Predictions, and then”—she pointed at the soiled green tank top, now hanging limply at my side—“I helped Fritz to start a new life.”

“You did
what
?” said Susie, incredulous.

Shakti looked to Hunter for reassurance, but he wouldn’t acknowledge her.

“Fritz wanted to run away,” she said. “So I helped him.”

No one breathed. Our collective disbelief leached the air from the room. But Shakti seemed to take this as a sign we were captivated. She continued, more confident than before.

“The plan came together so serendipitously—as though the universe wanted it to happen. Fritz met some friends of mine at Nambassa who had a yacht. They needed a deckhand from Auckland to Australia. We arranged for me to pick Fritz up on the road outside Gaialands and take him to meet Johannes. I had hoped to pick up my caravan as well, but Fritz and I found it at the bottom of a gully—the old girl wasn’t going anywhere. I gave Fritz new clothes so he wouldn’t be recognized, and we left his old ones there. To be honest, I thought you’d find it sooner.” Here, Shakti paused,
and tried to make eye contact with someone, but none of us would look at her. “Anyway,” she continued. “The good news is, Fritz isn’t dead. This whole time, he’s been living in Australia. In Sydney, I think.”

Shakti stood before us, smiling, awaiting a positive response, cheering or applause, then—
thwack!
—out of nowhere came a fist powered by a decade of wasted parental grief and centuries of patriarchal oppression, a fist so righteous that when it socked Shakti on the jaw, she folded to the ground as if the puppeteer above her had cut her strings.

Susie recoiled, as shocked as anyone that she had knocked Shakti to the ground, cradling her fist as though it had betrayed her, as if she was ashamed of it. But she had nothing to be ashamed of. When Tom patted her on the back, muttering, “Good job, Suze,” he put into words what we had all been thinking. Any one of us could have punched Shakti. She deserved it.

Hunter helped Shakti to her feet. On her face, even a split lip was fetching, the blood congealed in a single, perfect droplet, like a beauty spot. She did not try to fight back, but cowered behind her hands, playing the consummate victim, after playing the reluctant hero.

Around them the gathering stood in traumatized silence, each person processing the news in his or her own way. Katrina wept, her tears profuse but making no noise, while Loretta buried her head in her hands, and was comforted by Tom, moist eyed but holding his emotion in check. I sobbed too, for the years I’d lost with my brother, and wished with all my heart that Lukas could be here.

There was a lull in which no one said anything, then everyone reacted all at once, showering Shakti with pent-up abuse.

“How could you?” said Paul. “We loved him.”

“I cried every night for five years,” said Katrina. “All that grief—all that suffering.”

“How long have you known?” said Tom, addressing Hunter.

“Not long,” he said. “I swear.” Throughout all this, Hunter stood at Shakti’s side, shielding her with his arm, while his face told a different story. “You know I grieved with the rest of you.”

Paul glanced at Shakti. “And yet you can forgive her?”

Hunter said nothing, nor looked at anyone.

When the hubbub had died down, and it was quiet enough that she would be heard, Susie instructed Shakti to “Pack up your things, leave tonight, and don’t ever think about coming back to Gaialands.”

Upon hearing this, Shakti straightened her spine and defiantly addressed Susie. “This place could have been paradise on earth but you ruined it for yourselves.” Then, with as much dignity as she could muster, she walked regally out of the chapel, followed, to the door, by Hunter, her loyal, if chastened, lapdog. But in the doorway, after Shakti had already walked out, he hesitated, then turned and spoke to the assembled group.

“If she goes,” he said, “then I go too.”

“Hunter,” said Paul, “think it over. Don’t throw away your life’s work—at least not for her.”

“I have thought it over,” said Hunter. “And there’s no longer a place for me here.”

“Bullshit.” Paul shook his head. He had always been Hunter’s right-hand man. His ally. “There’s always a place for you here, brother. You made Gaialands what it is.”

“That’s right,” said Hunter. “I poisoned it.”

“He’s made his choice,” said Susie. “No one’s forcing him to go.”

“Aren’t they?” Paul glanced around at the assembled group. With the addition of Pat and Barb, women now outnumbered men two to one. “Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to do all along—to get rid of us jokers?”

For once, Susie was lost for words. She looked to Katrina for backup.

“Not all the men,” said Katrina. “We still need a few of you.”

“Yeah, right” said Paul. “To fix the bloody tractors.”

“Actually,” said Pat, “I’m a qualified mechanic.”

“And the latrines? Who’s going to dig those in the middle of the winter when the ground’s like concrete and the shit’s frozen solid?”

“We’re strong,” said Susie. “I’m sure that between us we can dig a hole.”

“Sure you can,” said Paul. “But up until now you haven’t wanted to. You can bitch all you like about how hard it is to be a woman, how the likes of me and Hunter here have held you back, but not one of you has ever put your hand up to help us shovel your shit.”