The Bone People by Keri Hulme Read Free Book Online Page A

last used during Tower-building,
    and gets ready to go to sleep.
    But she sits a long time, staring at the fire.
    "Of all the daft days... fit for the logbook, I think."
    She takes it from the bottom shelf of the grog cupboard, and dreams what to put in it.
    The pages are mainly blank, because there are 1000 pages. There are no headings, dates, day names. She has
    filled in some pages at random with doodles and sequences of hatching. Small precise drawings and linked
    haiku. Some days were a solitary word. "Hinatore" says one, "Nautilids!" another.
    She notices the child's battered sandal by the andirons and draws it with careful realism on a page she marks
    "Today."
    Then she lies back in the sleeping bag, hands behind her head, and listens a long time to the rain--
    in
    Between waking and being awake there is a moment full of doubt and dream, when you struggle to remember
    what the place and when the time and whether you really are.
    A peevish moment of wonderment as to where the real world lies.
    And there is nothing so damned and godforsaken, thinks Kerewin, as to wake up looking at a pile of dead
    ashes.
    Not only looking at: practically in. With some atavistic instinct her body had moved closer and closer to the
    only source of heat as the room grew colder during the night.
    Interesting if the whole lot had caught fire, eh. Immolated Holme in more ways than one... what would burn
    though? me; the matting probably; shelves and grog and the records and stereo; cupboards; o precious guitars
    -- and then the stone walls would stop it going further. But a fine contained inferno. A private introductory
    malbowge.
    She shudders and crawls out into the cold.
    What a mental inventory to make -- the worldly goods to accompany the cremation to Valhalla -- and at the
    hellish time of
    and she suddenly remembers, standing naked and shivering and glowering at the world, the guest. The
    vandal, the vagabond, the wayward urchin, the scarecrow child -- six thirty three ay em.
    It is dark outside still. The moon glows palely, slewed away in the west. And through the thickness of the
    Tower walls, she can feel frost.
    Aue and ach y fi, the cold and my chilblains. And that bloody little bugger upstairs. All miseries hemming
    me in together.
    "Sheeit and apricocks," says Kerewin to the immune walls, and gathers her clothes on, hustles them on, and sneezes and shivers her way to the shower room.
    Somewhat warmer, cleaner, and altogether more self-possessed -- that is herself some twenty minutes later.
    Now venturing into her bedroom with the same lightstepping care she would use on looking into a taniwha
    cave.
    "Brushing the embers out of my hair and whistling merrily," she announces, "it's me."
    She can hear breathing, but the boy's idea of a comfortable bed was to pile the quilt in a heap and crawl
    somewhere inside the centre. She can't see any part of him.
    "To unearth anything, we begin by digging," but she isn't very keen on the idea.
    "Hey! You there?"
    No answer. No movement.
    So she untangles the end of the eiderdown and pulls it away.
    He sleeps, pale and quiet, his mouth open. The small angular face no longer looks tight and strained. He
    sleeps in a strange twisted fashion, head turned to one side, body warped round. He also sleeps with his
    clothes on, sandal and all.
    -His eyes slide under their lids side to side, and open. His arm comes over abruptly, shielding his chest, and
    the other wraps across his face in an instant.
    Then, out of his unsure second, he lowers his arms, looking surprised and sheepish all in the one face.
    "Well, good morning, and where did you learn that luverly block?"
    The boy raises his eyebrows for an answer, disclaiming knowledge. The bruiselike shadows under his eyes
    have deepened to mauve.
    "Did you have a good sleep? Or are nightmares catching?"
    He smiles.
    "Mmm. Well anyway, in case you're wondering, it's tomorrow, the Tainuis are safely over the hill, your
    father is picking you up sometime