But her fingers begin sliding over the clay, moulding. For the first time in a year, she knows exactly what she wants to make and how to make it.
Beads of clay flattened, beads of clay raised. Day by day, the three faces grow. The blunt blind features become definite, refined, awake.
Back of head to back of head to back of head: a tricephalos.
It's easy to model her own face, and that is finished first.
Joe is there each day: she can pick the detail she requires and grow the clay face next morning to match it.
But remembering the child's face pains her. She has to strip away the vision of how it looked the last two times she saw it. The bloody swollen mask on the floor, broken nose and broken jaw. And the horrible indentation in the side of his skull where he had been smashed against the door frame. Or neatened, whitened, bandaged with care, but looking lifeless. O, his eyes had opened several times, but the seacolour had gone and he didn't see her. He didn't see anyone or anything. His eyes look dead.
(Elizabeth Lachlan said, "We don't know how much damage there is. All we've done is remove the clot and repair the bone. He may not be able to see. It's almost certain he won't be able to hear, and it's likely he has suffered irreversible harm as far as his mental processes are concerned." You mean mind, lady? She had stood impassive, saying nothing. The doctor had shrugged. "But we don't know. We won't know until we've had him over in one of the major hospitals for a head scan. And we won't know fully even then until he's recovered enough for us to ascertain in other ways the sum total of his injuries. If he recovers," she had said finally, "if he ever recovers.")
She concentrates on the way the child was at Moerangi, at the Hamdon pub, out in the boat. By the bonfires, when he sang for them. Peaceful in the firelit bach.
Gradually, his unbroken face is moulded by her hands, small and angular and smiling again.
You were a strange child, Simon gargoyle, an unknown quantity in so many ways. I wonder what you would have turned out like, had you been left to grow up whole?
Smoothing the narrow double point of the cleft chin.
Twisted, with a streak of meanness and sadism in you, as Joe was so plainly afraid? A musician, full of zany fire? The dancer, the sweet singer, the listener to the silence of God on deserted beaches — ae, you had music in you. Ordinary sinner, extraordinary sinner, or some new kind of saint? All too late now-
The clay lips smile as well as the real ones did.
At the end of the fourth week, she has finished it. She lets it dry slowly, so it doesn't crack. She has in mind a wild way to fire it.
Joe saw it once.
His curiosity bettered his sense of privacy, and he turned back the cloth on the draped hump.
The clay faces are still dark and damp.
Simon smiles at him.
Kerewin is gazing off into infinity.
And he has a look of wondering attentiveness, as though some great good news is about to be broken to him.
He circles the triple head again and again, staring at each lifesize face. The hair of their heads is entwined at the top in a series of spirals. Simon's hair curves back from his neck to link Kerewin and Joe to him. Kerewin wears the greenstone hook, he, his Moerangi pendant.
Round and round, and with each circumambulation, the faces become more alive.
Aue! She saw us as a whole, as a set. And soon we'll be parted forever. (Not forever, not forever, not forever.)
He covers it with trembling hands.
The next time he was in the library, when they came up the spiral to start knocking the Tower down, the tricephalos had gone.
His case was stood down: he was remanded on the same terms as when he'd been charged for the next two weeks.
He said in the afternoon, "The lawyer says it's because they're waiting to see what happens. With him."
It's the first time the child has been referred to, even obliquely.
"In case it's murder," he adds shakily.
She grimaced.
"Elizabeth doesn't think it will, will come to that. She went on the plane with him on Friday. She said they didn't learn anything new from the scan. She said it's just a matter of waiting." He shuddered. "E hoa, I don't mind what they do to me, but I hate this waiting."
"So do I," she said sombrely, and she wasn't referring only to the coming trial, or the child's coma. Each day, the pain and pressure in her gut has grown more intense until now it nags like toothache. She dreads the moment when the knife will strike again.
Everything has been packed away now. The livingroom circle is the only room in use, and it is spartanly furnished. Two stretchers for sleeping on (Piri brought them one morning: he said very little, but they joined in hongi for the first time); some cooking gear; one sheepskin mat in front of the fire; Kerewin's black guitar on the wall.
They spend the afternoons breaking down the upper circles; the neat stone blocks dislodged one by one to hurtle down into the dandelion-studded lawn.
The dandelions are surviving, but only just. They seem to be making a special effort to breed past this menace. The afternoons are full of their ballooning seeds, silver and prodigal in the sun.
They have become expert wreckers. It had been hard at first, blistered hands and stretched aching muscles. But you grew accustomed to the heavy swing of the sledge hammer, built it into a rhythm. You grew wise to the ways of stone and nailed wood, and learned to turn their solidity against them. Lever with a crowbar, tap in a wedge here, a judicious smack with the hammer, and down falls more of the Tower.
She saved very little of the upper levels: the great sister curve from the library, and the seashaded windows from the bedroom, and the golden niche where the boy had stood centuries ago; the plumbing and the solar waterheaters; the handrail of the stairway, taking particular care of the dolphin heads with their benign engraven smiles.
All the rest of the wood and furnishings she sent splintering and crashing downwards in a frenzy of destruction.
Joe protested once.
"It's a waste of good wood, Kere. You might want to build again." She had smiled meanly at him. "I don't think so. Besides, I am short of wood. I need quite a lot of wood. This'll help," smashing the hammer through the smooth floorboards.
He was afraid to ask her what she wanted the wood for.
They are short evenings.
They spend an hour after tea, sometimes talking about the day, sometimes drinking quietly; sometimes sitting in silence until She plays her guitar infrequently, and the music is always dispirited and sad. It has the kind of loneliness behind it that haunts old graves. Forgotten, dead, gone… she knows a lot of that kind
of music.
And when the talk has run out, or the drink has turned sour, or the companionable sitting has grown tense, they say Goodnight and go to their separate beds.
Each night it is the same. They spend a long time listening to each other trying to go to sleep. It is always Joe who sleeps first. He whimpers as he dreams, a small scared animal sound, strange in a grown man.
And what sound do I make when the memories come crowding in too close? I don't know, and I care even less.
She lies stiffly still, night after night, her mind focused in fear on the thing that has invaded her. The wild spreading cells that grow and grow. It is always near dawn before sleep comes.
The suneater is still going, perched on the sill of the great livingroom window now. Late in the last week, she stops it. Quite simply. She crushes it in her fist.
Looking at the small pile of bits, Nearly two years running and now you're dead. I wonder if someone will make another like you?
She feels no remorse. All her feelings are dulled these days, as though life is already going, slowly leaking out and ebbing away.