His eyes are fixed on her face, but they don't entreat.
They are lustreless and unsouled.
Except one thing flickers. A last spark of spirit, waiting without Joe Waiting in the knowledge that she will react with disgust and horror. Waiting for the final reason to die.
But he has come back this once, to make sure: to offer one last time whatever of him she will take.
She makes it very short, the waiting time. She folds her hands over her stomach, containing the dull ache.
"Ngakaukawa, kei te ora taku ngakau. E noho mai."
And he covers his face and weeps.
Later, his eyelids spongy and fat from crying, he says,
"I have been wanting to weep for a long time, but I couldn't."
"I wept, but only a little. It didn't seem that weeping was going to do any good."
He sighs.
"It doesn't change anything. It just makes me feel a bit more alive. I don't know whether that's good. While you're alive, you're hurting."
"It's the possibility that when you're dead you might still go on hurting that bothers me," she says grimly.
"Yes." He stares at the broken guitar hanging on the wall. "Aue, yes."
The only time she had wept was when she went back to Pacific Street to clean up. Sick stomach or nothing, you can't expect him to come home to this-
Congealed spatters. Against the door. On the floor. Joe's blood, from the glass dagger sent so neatly into his stomach.
("Funny," said Morrison. "Two in one day. D'you know that old fart Daniels?"
"I heard already."
"Yeah, well, he got it from a splinter too… broken off a half g of that rotgut he primed himself on. The glass went in a bit lower though."
The constable is weary and ill-looking. He shuts his notebook and puts it back in his tunic pocket. "Christ, if only I'd known," he'd said, shaking his head, and then caught the look in her eyes. "It can't be helped, Miz Holmes," he'd offered. "We none of us have got that kind of foresight. It can't be helped.")
Blood from the child, from his ruined body and head.
Pretend it's fish blood. Weak cool fish blood. Different lymph, different platelets, non-mammalian. Won't corrode or stain the hands, right?
She managed to clean it all up before she was sick.
Leaning back against the sink thinking, Holy mother, this is a
day and a night to forget. Looking round, checking all is normal, no relics of violence left. (Belt picked up and coiled away in a policeman's drawer, glass dagger in safe police hands.)
And on the end chair, out of the way where he'd left them in those careful clumsy folds, Simon's shirt and T-shirt.
The tears stung her eyes. Shaking her head, Stop it, stop it, crying won't help them any, and weeping more and more.
She sobbed uncontrollably for minutes, her voice climbing higher and higher, and at its peak, the violent stabbing pain cut in again, leaving her with breath enough only to gasp.
Beneath her hands, pressed in deep against the agony, she felt the hard alien lump in her belly for the first time.
She is carefully disinterring the bonsai grove.
"You need a hand with that?"
"No thanks."
"I've finished wrapping all the pounamu… God, you've got some beautiful work there."
She glances at him. "You want any bits, help yourself."
He shakes his head.
He asks, scuffing his shoetip against the stone step, "You ever, you know, take a look at it?"
She dusts her hands free of sandy earth fastidiously, and opens the neck of her shirt. "The present? Yes."
It hangs there as he had imagined it: the pale shining braid he'd made, the semicircle of dark green against the pallor of her skin.
She buttons her shirt again without commenting.
He blinks away his ready tears.
"Emmersen's brother spent most of, of Monday engraving that… I asked him to get it ready for me by evening no matter what, and he did."
She has turned back to the unearthing of her small trees.
"Mmmm," as though she didn't hear him properly and didn't care to know. "Did you say Marama liked plants?"
"Yes," says Joe sadly.
"I'll give these to her then. They might amuse her."
The her matau is hook-shaped, and the inner curve is lined with silver. In tiny italics the jeweller has engraved, Arohanui na H H.
Later that day she asks,
"E hoa, would you accept this?"
He stares at the translucent ring poised between her fingers.
"I understand the old people used to fasten the leg of an especially favoured calling-bird with it, but they used them as jewellery too… I thought it might um, complement the long and straight of your pendant."
He takes it wordlessly.
Centuries ago, people had laboured with great skill on this piece of unflawed jade. Piercing it to make the side decorations, working the stone-tipped drill with precision and painstaking care. Piercing it again, and smoothing the inside circle to an oily fineness. The kaumatua would have rubbed the finished ring against belly and nose to make that shine, for many months. A long time in the making, a long time worn.
"It hasn't got a name," she is saying. "It's a family piece though, and it is guaranteed pre-pakeha."
She touches it one last time.
"It was one of the bits I got when the family gave me the boot." She doesn't say it was the only piece she got of the family inheritance. AH the rest of her collection she has bought.
She had sneered at the hook when she first unwrapped it. Trite contemporary junk, she thought. Look at that diamond hard shine. She stashed it away with the rest of her pieces, still wrapped in the brown paper Joe had given it to her in. She hadn't noticed the engraving or the braid wrapped in a separate piece of tissue.
The second week she took it out, and looked it over with dry-eyed care. Much love from Hohepa and Haimona, aue… the braid is finely-done, five-ply and rounded. Joe has had the jeweller seal the ends with clips of silver, fitted permanently into the hole in the her matau. The braid is just long enough to go over her head-
She slips it on, and the green jewel lies by the cross and the medal and the pendant she always wears.
A hook to his jaw and a hook in his thumb and a kind of a hook in my heart, by God-
Each morning, when Joe goes in to Whangaroa to report according to the terms of his bail, Kerewin goes up to the library circle.
It is stripped entirely bare now, except for the forlorn shelves round the walls. The books are packed in cases, and stowed in the cellar. The swords are greased thickly and laid away on a cellar shelf. The chest of jade and the drawers of shells are locked and sealed into three tin trunks. (Joe had played with the shells like he was a child again. "Anana! I never knew fish made such shapes in all the world!" picking up one spiked and trimmed like a pagoda, while holding another as meticulously curved and sharp as a
carpenter's bit. "And look at these colours!" Lime green snail shell and flamingo pink conch and a cowrie as gold as the setting sun. "Where'd you get these, e hoa?" as he wraps them up carefully. "O, bought them. A lot in Japan, a lot here. They were supposed to be delight and inspiration. They turned out to be the same sort of detritus as everything else. Junk and mathoms and useless geegaws the lot of them, shells, rings, goblets, books and swords… and my pounamu… it was beautiful to have them at first, but all the magic has worn off. Little by little it has all gone away.")
There are three things in the library that were never there before: a packing-case; a cushion; and a lump of clay, swathed in wet cloth. And every morning, she kneels down, toes crossed behind her and chin tucked in, as though she were meditating.