"Pavane for a dead infanta, by Ravel," she says at the music's end. She plays it again and again that night, seeming to have forgotten all the rest of her repertoire.
As Joe drinks more, he becomes garrulous. Several times he goes over the way he beat up the child, seeking to find a pattern in it, a meaning for what happened. Each time it comes up, he exclaims in wonder,
"You know, that's the first time he's ever hit me? First time, and what a hit," shaking his head, halfpuzzled and halfproud, that Simon had had the forethought to conceal the splinter, and the initiative to use it.
A hit indeed. A little deeper, and the glass shard would have sliced through another artery and bled him dry before Kerewin's arrival.
"It wasn't that hard but God! did it hurt… I never thought he would go for me like that, not using a knife or anything. He's never even hit me before… he fights sometimes, beforehand, you've got to struggle with him but he never tried to hurt me. He always gives up, he always does what he's told. So I never looked for it to happen… e Kere, when he started moving his hands I thought he was going to say something about Bill Drew's note and then wham. Oath, it went in so easy, he didn't have to push. Just like a knife into hot butter, whizz and there it was, deep in my gut and me bleeding
like a stuck pig. I was so mad he'd thumped me back, ah Jesus I just hit him as hard as I could till he went out. Then I went down too."
"You know what?" he asks yet again, on the last recital, and she shakes her head tiredly. She has become more and more sober as the night has worn on. "I think I was trying to beat him dead," says Joe. "I think I was trying to kill him then."
He says something in passing that Kerewin wishes he had never revealed. A few words, but they make for horror.
He says, "I don't think I'm the only one that's hurt him. He had some bloody funny marks on him when he arrived."
He falls asleep before dawn.
She watches the moon draw away to the west, and the southern cross take a header down the south horizon. Orion pales to a distant ice glitter, and one by one, his stars go out.
The sky flushes brilliant crimson.
Red sky in the morning. Warning. O I know it's only weather
words, but…
watching the blood sky swell and grow, dyeing the rainclouds ominously, making the far edge of the sea blistered and scarlet.
Dawn, and in the east, another star dies.
It made the national news on Friday evening.
"And in Taiwhenuawera today, a man was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for what prosecuting counsel called a savage and brutal attack on a defenceless handicapped child. However, the magistrate, Mr P. S. Seward, commented that the child involved could hardly be called defenceless since he had stabbed his foster father, Joseph Gillayley, in the stomach during the assault. Gillayley, a year old labourer, spent two weeks in hospital recovering from the wound. His seven year old foster son has been removed from his custody which, as Mr Seward remarked drily, will be a move beneficial to both parties.
The government intends to introduce new legislation during the coming session which will…"
snap.
And that's the end of the news. She stood up and flexed her shoulder muscles.
Time to hit the road, Holmes. Time to get gone.
She wondered if she would still be alive three months from now.
She folded the stretchers and left them outside under a canvas for Piri.
She packed away the sleeping bags, and cleared out all the remaining food.
Have a feast, gulls-
She stowed her backpack into a large suitcase, added a few clothes, all her remaining smokes, the last of the bottle of Drambuie, Simon's rosary and three books.
One is the Book of the Soul, the one she normally keeps under lock and key.
One is the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
The last is peculiarly her own.
It is entitled, in hand-lettered copper uncials, "Book of Godhead", and the title page reads,
"BOG: for spiritual small-players to lose themselves in."
It contains an eclectic range of religious writing.
The Diamond Sutra and The Wisdom of the Idiots.
The Tao te Ching, and Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love.
The Bardo Thedol, and extracts from Buber's Hasidism.
The first, second, and fourth wings of the I Ching, and Hahlevi's Tree of Life.
Selections from the Upanishads and the works of the sixteenth century Beguine, Hadewych.
Teilhard de Chardin's Hymn of the Universe, and Reps's Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
The Book of Job, and Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon.
The New Testament of Jesus Christ, and Masnawi by the Sufi, Jalal-uddin al Rumi.
It has illustrations. Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Blake's Ghost of a Flea. A drawing of Pallas Athene she'd made after a dream. Thirty mandates, from the Grand Terminus to one she'd created three years ago, a steady indrawing of spirals and psirals and stars.
It was a book she had designed to cater for all the drifts and vagaries of her mind. To provide her with information, rough maps and sketches of a way to God.
She has a feeling her need for the numinous will increase dramatically from now on.
Left bereft, go sift the wide expanse of wind… take issue with any straw that blows across your path and conjure hopes from
sticks that lie in the sand. Soul, your hopes are my hopes and my hopes are insane. So the meaning and signpost for the journey is Hope Obscure. And the sign is a ghost, still whining and bound in a cart.
There's a fine mist falling and the world is close about her. The truncated mass of the Tower looms behind. The sea is hushed.
The suitcase, and the Ibanez in its travelling case, are sitting by the locked Tower door.
She waits patiently under an umbrella for the night to become complete.
She has made a torch of rags and tow soaked in kerosene, wrapped round a billet of wood. It waits at her feet.
If I was an honest uncompromising soul, if I wasn't riddled by this disease called hope, I'd climb into the middle of my pyre and light a phoenixfire from there-
The dandelions look luminous in the evening. Many of the aureoles are wide open, as though the sun still shone.
On the other hand, my cardinal virtue is hope. Forlorn hope, hope in extremity. Not Christian hope, but an innate rebellion against the inevitable dooms of suffering, death, and despair. A senseless hope-
The great pile of wood waits darkly.
Pale moths are flitting all around, hordes of them like insect ghosts, flicking in and out of her vision. Time-
She lights the torch. It smokes blackly, then bursts into flame.
She flings it and it travels like a comet into the waiting wood.
The pile explodes, fire jetting, soaring, enfolding wood with eager flowers of flame. They rush and roar up in a tall soaring column.
If I hadn't my hope, I might have lasted ten seconds there… the air is all gone from round it… splendid dragon… the" glory of the salamander-
It burns down to a bed of embers ten feet across. Even then the dying fire is enough to light the side of the struck-down Tower. O dandelions, you must have known what was coming-
The moths are back after the firestorm: they fleet and tumble round her head and hands as she shifts the embers into a pile with a shovel. When it's complete, she digs the shovel into the ground, leaving it there. One more thing to do-
She takes a silk handkerchief from her pocket, and with her bare hands, scoops up soil, enough to fill the hollow of her palm. She secretes handkerchief and earth back in her pocket.
Wherever I go, however I go, I carry this earth for memory. And should I die in a strange land, there is a little more than just my flesh to make a friend and sanctuary of alien ground.