He spreads his arms to the lowering sky and runs over the edge.
For a moment he seems to hang there, space below his feet, and then he plummets with sickening speed.
The first hardness in his breath, thudded out of him leaving him groaning with no air to groan on.
The second is his arm snapping like a stick beneath him.
And the third is himself swearing, You stupid shit, you could've killed yourself, and for fucking nothing.
He says it again and again, like a litany, while the blackness retreats and his breath comes back in shuddering sobs.
He struggles to sit up, holding his arm so the bone doesn't move. He leans his head against his shaking knees: his whole body shakes, with shock and hurt and crying.
E atua ma, wairua ma, if there are gods, if there are spirits, o, people of this place, I am made known by my stupidity. Aid
me.
His own bone sticking out of the flesh, a weak china blue colour, like a pig bone in a butcher's shop freshly laid from the meat.
God god god make the pain go away-
He presses it back into his arm and blood pours out. He retches. I've got to keep it in but o god what with?
He gains two pieces of wood in a staggering search, neither of them wholly straight nor smooth. He binds them on his arm with his handkerchiefs. He is weak and clumsyhanded, and it takes a long hurtful time. He derides himself when he moans,
"You can hand it out but you can't take it,"
but he is sick again before he finishes the binding, and cannot talk then, even to spur himself on.
He watches his hand darken and engorge, but he hasn't any more strength to loosen the sticks.
Look at my veins. Gnarled and thick like I'm already an old man. Jesus, I'm cold.
He pulls himself slowly to his feet. He can't feel the stones he walks on. Painfully, he gathers dryish chips from beneath the damp piles of driftwood. He collects several large knots of wood. Each time he bends over, he feels sick, as though he must fall.
He piles the kindling in a heap; holding the matchbox in his mouth, lights it.
He huddles over the little flame, sheltering it with his body. It smoulders a long minute before flaring. Gradually, gingerly, he adds the bigger pieces, building them round the flames in a cone shape…
"Lang doon the cluny isles," sings Kerewin, balancing another
chunk.
"What does that mean?"
"How the berloody hell should I know?"
She twists a piece of wood to one side. "Hey look! See how
perfectly that reciprocates that shadow?"
"It's drizzling again."
"You couldn't shift anything more, or the whole lot would
topple, visually."
"And we're cold to boot."
"O to hell with the weather," snaps Kerewin. "You're not dying
of it. Look!"
"Himi's shivering. And my teeth are chattering."
"Ah ruin it then." She squats by the pile and strikes the match. The flames creep along the twists of grass, flare and soar into cracks between logs. Very soon the fire is roaring: Kerewin builds more towers and wigwams about it, containing and directing the flames.
The drizzle has no effect. Simon crouches close as he can to the artistic inferno, and he kneels behind him, arms outspread, catching the warmth and keeping his son from the draught.
She loved to sit and talk by those masterpiece fires of hers, to keep watch until they sank to quiet ashes. He could name them all; the pipi and potato fire they taught Simon to cook on; the fire when all the flames had been tinged with violet; the rata fire by the Tower; and the fire on top of Moerangi hill, the witch fire, when streaks and spires of green and blue ran riot through the heart of the flames. And this one, the spider fire, when the katipo crawled out and Kerewin let it crawl into the palm of her hand.
"Seen many?"
He looks cursorily into her hand.
"Jesus! Drop it!"
"Why? It won't hurt me. Or you either." The little katipo strolls unhurriedly across her palm. "I'm not squashing it. It's not bothered. It's not going to sink its fangs into me. And it wouldn't do me much harm if it did. Although it might skedaddle you," she says warningly to Simon, who comes finger forward, closer. "Take a good look at it, Sim. Aside from the seasnake, and you'll usually find that only in the heathen north, this is New Zealand's sole poisoner."
Little Death, examining unfamiliar ground.
Kerewin put her hand on the ground, and after a while, the spider vanished into the marram grass.
Or did it?
His arm is bloated and aching, as if all his nightmares were spider poison dreams, and nothing else.
"But I'm not mad yet." He murmurs it. "I'm sitting by a smoking fire on some godforsaken beach with a compound fracture of my forearm. I'm sane and nearly sober and about had it."
He lies down wearily by the fire's edge.
"Ten minutes," he says, more lowly still.
I am a waste, a wilderness of alien gorse and stone that scores all who enter. O, Kerewin can stalk through in her grim and withering way, because she is self-contained, wrapped in iron, and I cannot reach her except on the terms she admits. Very
few, very hard-
And Haimona… ah dear God, my Haimona… Haimona storms through any wilderness though it tears him bloody. I am afraid
of his ardour. I am afraid of him. So they track my waste,
and the waste yields nothing blessed yet. And no-one else
attempts this desert-
O, I am hamstrung by foreign images… all the luminous
childhood pictures are sunk beneath the gorse, the stones…
I cannot warm or heal the woman.-! cannot warm or heal the
child….
Any of them-
Coming home that Thursday, with no idea, no hint of what was to come. What already was. Ae, she'd been sick. But it was the 'flu. Everybody gets the 'flu in winter. And Timote was colicky, but that was probably a virus. Everybody gets a virus in winter. And then the terrible bare unbelief. I had no shield for that mood of death. I could not believe so much of me could be cut out so swiftly, leaving only a gaping depth of anguish.
And there was nothing, no-one to take their place.
I could not cry for days. My chest was tight, my jaw muscles clenched so hard they ached all the time, even when I drank myself into a stupor. It might have been better if I had gone with her, home for the burying but… aie, everything I looked at, thought of, touched or tasted or smelt carried a burden of memories. Reminded me that they were gone. For ever. And only Haimona left behind-
The best part of me was lost then. What remains is a deep ulcer that will not heal, a waste.
I have nothing to give Kerewin that she will have. I have nothing to give Himi, not even the shelter of my arms and heart. I know I exacerbated his reckless wounding of himself, but now I am not allowed to give him even shelter-
I am just a waste… and the worst thing I bear is the knowledge that others have borne far worse distress and not buckled like this under it. They have been ennobled by their suffering, have discovered meaning and requital in loss… O Hana Mere, why did you eat the food they offered you? Why did you not return to me?
Aue, the roots of the tree are long and descend into darkness. The shore is wave beaten, and there is nothing beyond but the unceasing immeasurable sea.
The kaumatua:
He is not a big man, not tall, but he is very heavy. To lever him off his side and wrap the blanket round him, has tested my strength to the limit. I have spread his coat over him, and built the fire a little closer, and rested. His arm is badly broken, and badly set. Shortly, I will undo the cloths and wash away the blood, and reset the bone.
I shall try to rouse him then, and feed him whatever he will eat. Afterwards, there will be time to consider what to do.