Authors: Bianca Zander
Gaialands
1979
A
FTER THAT EVENTFUL NAMBASSA
Festival, Shakti did not return with us to live at Gaialands. On the final day of the festival she wandered into our campsite just as we were dismantling tents and cleaning up three days’ worth of rubbish. She was covered from head to toe in paint the color of egg yolks, her lips and eyes outlined in thick black lines. Only her hair was natural, and stood out in tufts between her legs, under her arms, and on her head. She was with another woman, similarly painted, whom she introduced as Marcia, one of the backup singers from the Plague. Lukas and I had seen the band earlier that day. The lead singer had been cobalt blue, the guitarist red, and both had painted their genitals. I had idly wondered, while they played, if they had dabbed at their penises with a brush or dipped them in a jar of paint.
After Shakti had introduced us to her friend, she collected a few of her belongings in a string bag, then waltzed off, not
saying where she was going or helping to dismantle the windblown canvas tents. Less than a week later, she turned up briefly on the commune with Marcia. They were driving to Auckland that day in Marcia’s car, a rusty beige station wagon with strips of peeling wood veneer down the sides, and stayed long enough to go for a swim in the creek, drink a cup of tea, and walk around the orchards, filling a basket with fruit. While Paul and Tom struggled under the willow tree to hitch the caravan to the back of the car, they watched. After months of not moving, it was wedged into the dried mud. When they were finally able to roll the caravan forward, something deep in its bowels made a snapping sound, but no one could find what had broken.
“That tow bar’s rooted,” Paul said. “You’ll be lucky to get over the first hill. I could fix it but you’d have to stay here for the night.”
The two women conferred. “We can’t,” said Marcia. “I have a gig tonight. There isn’t time.”
Against Paul’s advice, they attached the caravan via the rooted tow bar to the car, waved breezily good-bye, then drove off.
Tom shook his head. “Those birds will never make it to Auckland.”
“No shit,” said Paul. “But buggered if anyone could have stopped them.”
Three short months, almost to the day, since she had arrived on the commune and turned all our lives upside down, Shakti was gone.
I barely noticed her absence. In the days and weeks follow
ing the festival, it was not an exaggeration to say that Lukas and I went at it day and night, as if we were the first people in the world to discover sex. What we lacked in skill we made up for with enthusiasm—and months and months went by before I wondered if there might be more to sex than the frenzied humping we engaged in. The best part was the anticipation of his entering me, and the moment he did, but everything after that was an exercise in frustration as I chased down a sensation that seemed hell-bent on running away. I felt a growing sense of disappointment and blamed it on my own faulty anatomy. I wanted to talk to Lukas about it, but early on, and despite the fact that we knew each other so well, a precedence of silence had been set. There had been one night, not long after Nambassa, when I had worked up the courage to ask him if he knew how to find my clitoris. When he replied, “What’s that?” I had been too shy to show him what I didn’t exactly know how to locate, and the subject was buried, perhaps forever. I still enjoyed what we did, was even addicted to doing it, but it was like scratching at an itch that flared up every night without ever locating the source of irritation.
We shared a sleeping hut with five other teenagers, some of whom, like Timon, were bloodhounds when it came to any hint of sexual activity, and the rest of the time we were rarely alone. To get any privacy, if you could call it that, we had to roam to the far edges of the commune, late at night, or before dawn, to make love under the cover of darkness, and even then, there was no guarantee we were alone. Every snapping twig or rustling leaf made me pull away from Lukas and glance, possumlike, into the shadows.
One particularly clear and starry night, we had gone as far as the beach, where we made love under the lone pohutukawa tree that grew sideways out of the cliff. Afterward, we went for a swim to get the sand out of our bums, and Lukas told me about his plans to leave the commune. He had mentioned before that he wanted to leave, but I didn’t know how serious he was. Auckland was the first stop, he said, where he would form his own band. But as soon as he had saved enough money, he wanted to go to London.
“London?” I said, hearing in the word how far away that was. “Why not Australia? Isn’t that where everyone goes to make it big?”
“It’s only a stepping stone,” he said. “And I don’t want to be in a Kiwi or Aussie band that goes to London and tries to make it. I want to be in an English band.”
The scale of his ambition awed me. The fire lit under him at Nambassa had grown into a furnace. From that moment on Lukas devoted all his free time to music, at the expense of all other interests. At the breakfast table, he strummed his latest song, writing down lyrics on any scrap we had on hand, even toilet paper. At night we talked across the guitar, which was always in his lap or swinging from his back. Often there was no talking, only Lukas singing, and me listening, or pretending to. A couple of times, early on, I had made the mistake of thinking it was a sing-along, and I had tried to join in with harmonies, until Lukas had reminded me that I couldn’t listen to him and sing at the same time, and that what he needed most was an audience. So I got better at listening, even when it bored
me and I couldn’t pick out anything that sounded like a tune. He wrote a lot of lyrics about women, about their cunts, reassuring me that he was singing about a feeling or an idea and not about an actual woman, especially not me. The Lukas who made up songs, who belted them out in a clearing in the forest, was so much angrier than the boy I had grown up with, but if ever I mentioned this to him, he denied there was a split. “The songs tell me what they want to be,” he explained. “I just write them down.”
That same night on the beach, lying on our clothes, drying off after our swim, Lukas asked me to go with him to Auckland. I wasn’t surprised by the request—in fact I had been waiting for it and dreading it and planning what I would say in response. But until now, I hadn’t known Auckland was only the first stop, that he was going on to London as well. I thought about my prediction, of the true love waiting for me on the other side of the world, and even though I knew it was deceitful, and worse, to think like this, I said, “I’ll go overseas with you.”
“All the way to London?”
“Sure, if that’s what you want.”
He didn’t answer straightaway, and I thought he was working out how to say that he wanted to go without me, and I was gutted, even though I had no right to be.
But then he said, “Of course that’s what I want. I was afraid to ask because I thought you’d say no.”
I wasn’t ready to be apart from Lukas, and now that it wasn’t going to happen for at least another couple of years, I felt a huge weight lifted.
All around us, though, commune life was unraveling, and fast. We had started out the summer, as always, a tight group of seven. We planned our days together, did everything in a group, and were so used to deciding things by consensus that we didn’t even know we were doing it. Then, slowly, toward the end of that summer, some of us, the older ones, became bored by the activities we had filled our free days with as kids. Climbing trees and making forts seemed pointless. But Meg and Fritz still wanted to play those games. Fritz, in particular, was very much still a child. Increasingly, he was left out of our conversations, which often revolved around rock concerts and booze—things he knew nothing about. And when he couldn’t get anyone to roam with him in the forest, to trap possums or tip empty birds’ nests off their branches, he would stalk off on his own, determined to dam the stream with twigs or make bivouacs by himself.
One scorching-hot day near the end of what had been a particularly dry summer, we set out for the orchards as a group, running for a stretch to make it more quickly to the beach, then dawdling for a spell because it was just too darn hot. It must have been a Sunday, the only day of the week we did not have to do chores. I had been stopping now and then to canoodle with Lukas. After persuading Fritz to come with us, I had been paying him scant attention, and I recall feeling bad about that briefly, and calling out to him to wait up. He turned and stared at me for a moment, and I walked faster, trying to catch up to him, then just as I was making ground, his expression changed. I thought he might cry. “Fritz,” I said. “What is it? What’s wrong?” Then he turned
on his heel and sprinted in the opposite direction, yelling out to everyone that the last person to the other side of the forest was a rotten egg.
“Rotten egg” was a game we had played for as long as anyone could remember. If he had called out anything else, no one would have followed him, but the threat of being crowned rotten egg was a challenge that still held sway, even in this heat, and before Fritz had the chance to grab much of a lead, Lukas and I had taken off after him, and the others were legging it too.
Within seconds, I had lost sight of Lukas, who was faster than me at running and fiendishly competitive with the other boys. Sprinting through the dense avenues of macrocarpa pine, I remembered how frightened we had been, as children, to run through here alone. Even now, the closeness of the trees and their sameness made me think of an army that might at any moment turn on us.
To run from one side of the wood to the other took about seven minutes. We had timed it once, with an old stopwatch of Tom’s. It was a far enough distance to get lost or disoriented in but we knew the path so well that none of us ever had. On this particular day, in an effort to be more sophisticated, I had worn flip-flops, and about halfway across, where there was a gentle slope, I tripped on a tree root and stubbed my toe. I stopped just long enough to rub the toe and find my errant shoe, before setting off again, but it was enough to send me permanently to the rear. For the last half of the race, I couldn’t see or hear anyone, and I was sure that when I reached the other side of the forest I would be the rotten egg.
But when I popped out into the clearing no one jeered or called it out. Instead they scanned the forest behind me, waiting for someone else to appear. I did a quick head count. Six of us had made it through but one was missing. Ned said, “Where’s Fritz?”
“He wasn’t behind me,” I said, doubling over to catch my breath. “No one was.”
Lukas wiped the sweat off his face with a towel. “It’s not like him to call a race, then lose it. I reckon he’s playing a trick on us.”
“He’ll be out in a jiffy,” said Meg.
For a few minutes, all six of us peered into the forest, expecting at any moment for Fritz to appear, and then, when he didn’t, Timon said, “You lot can wait for him. I’m going for a swim.” He sauntered in the direction of the cliff edge, where a path ran precariously down to the beach. “Last one in the water is a bloody idiot.”
Even though I was worried about Fritz, when Lukas followed him, I did the same, thinking only of how refreshed I would feel after diving into the surf at the bottom of the cliff. Relief from this heat was only a scramble away, and I couldn’t get down the hill fast enough. Once in the water, I forgot about Fritz altogether.
We horsed around in the waves for a long time, treading water and dunking each other and body surfing, until every muscle in my body felt battered and wrung out. Nelly had brought a bag of apples, and we shared them around, wishing we had thought to bring a drink. All that salt water had made us thirsty. Then the six of us lay on the sand and dozed
in the breeze, rousing only when a fly ticked our skin or a loud set of waves crashed ashore.
We had been out in the sun all summer long, and every summer before it, adding sunburn to sunburn, and except where it had peeled off and was pink, the skin on our backs was a deep chestnut brown. Out of all of us, Meg was the brownest, and I had been studying her lovely tanned shoulders when I noticed Ned and Timon doing the same thing, only more furtively. There was no doubt about it, she was turning into a beauty, but I was still astonished when she looked back over her shoulder and smiled at the boys. She liked the attention, encouraged it.
Hours and hours passed and the shade from the pohutukawa moved down our bodies and reached the water’s edge, bringing with it a chill. When someone suggested it was time to go back, I groaned at the thought of trekking up the hill and perspiring all over again.
We got back to the commune just as the cowbell sounded for dinner, and the six of us made a beeline for the mess hut, trying not to look like we were rushing.
I was halfway through my second bowl of spinach and chickpea curry when across the table Nelly caught my eye. “Where’s Fritz?” she said with alarm. “He should be back by now.”
“He’ll be up a tree somewhere,” said Ned, “eating berries, pretending to be a possum.”
“He’s never missed dinner before. Not even that time he ran away.” My stomach clenched with dread. “What if something’s happened to him?”
“Don’t worry,” said Lukas. “He can’t have gone far.”
The adults did not seem to have noticed Fritz was missing and we decided to search for him on our own before alerting them. Looking back, I can see this was an unspoken acknowledgment of guilt. We had left him alone in the forest. We hadn’t been looking out for the youngest in the group. The burden of guilt I carried was heavier still. He had run off in the first place because I had been ignoring him.
We took kerosene lamps and an emergency battery-powered flashlight and combed the surrounding orchards and forests in pairs. When we found no trace of him, we searched further afield, and long into the night, before heading back to the sleeping hut to regroup. Some of the others thought Fritz had run away again, but I was adamant he hadn’t. “He had nothing with him. Those other times he was prepared. He planned it.” I didn’t tell them about the sad look he had given me just before he ran off. I felt too bad about it.