The Books: “The Bone People” (Keri Hulme)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Excerpt from The Bone People – by Keri Hulme

God, what a wonderful wonderful book this is. Unforgettable, really – Hulme has a writing style all her own, and she really hasn’t written anything else, which makes me wonder about her. I would love to hear from her again. It’s like Katherine Dunn and Geek Love. Her mind is so singular, so itself – that she’ll only write another book when she is good and damn well ready. I don’t know much about Keri Hulme, but perhaps she’s like that. The book was a pretty big phenomenon when it came out – and it won The Booker. It’s difficult to describe a writing style, but I’ll give it a shot. Unlike a book with a more straight narrative, this one has an almost Ulysses-like stream-of-consciousness to it – the senses flow into one another, there are snippets of poetry and prayers woven into it, there’s also a hard edge to Kerewin’s sections – she’s a tough cookie, not always easy to like or sympathize with … but we are so inside her head that her issues become ours, we see the world strictly through her eyes. We may have some sense of how unreasonable she is at times, and how she should probably quit drinking … and how we wish she would just soften up a bit … life might seem easier to her if she did … but that’s not the story being told. Or – it IS, but it’s on Kerewin’s terms, not ours. By the end of the book, I loved her (and the other two main characters – but mostly her) so much that my heart hurt. It was not an easy love. I was aware of the fragility of life, and the beauty and redemption in human connection … and how we must, above all, try to (in the words of Auden) love our crooked neighbor with our crooked hearts. Life is NOT easy. Life does a number on us all. Nobody gets out of it untouched.

The Bone People is about three damaged souls … whose lives intersect. The world has either forgotten them, or has abandoned them because they’re too difficult.

Kerewin is the main character, and she will live on in your memory long after you put the book down. She is part Maori, part European – and there’s enough of the Maori language in the book that there is a glossary in the back. She is an artist. And probably an alcoholic. Something hurts her to the core. She drinks to soothe herself. She lives in a 6-floored stone tower on the shore (in New Zealand) – isolated, she never has to deal with other people … and that is the point for her. She can’t deal with humanity. She’s a tough broad. Unforgiving, hard … and only able to live on her own terms. She goes fishing every day for her meals, she has set up her life so that there is a huge moat around it. She lives in her tower (an awesome space…. I love how it is described in the book) – and does her best to avoid the human race. Most of the book is from her point of view, and a more arresting voice you will never hear.

One day – she comes home from one of her long walks – to find that a little boy has somehow broken into her house and is hiding out there. He is mute. I think he can hear fine – but he cannot speak. He communicates through writing notes. Kerewin is, to put it mildly, NOT a maternal person. She wants this little person OUT of her house. He has obviously been abused … he’s terrified … he’s running away.

Eventually – his father comes into the picture – Joe, another character I fell so in love with that it made my heart hurt. He’s another toughie. He’s abusive, he’s an alcoholic, but the pain that is there … How much he loves his son … The mother died, and has left the two of them behind … Joe is Maori as well.

So. The book is the story of these three people – Kerewin, Simon and Joe. An unlikely trio. And nothing in the book turns out the way you would expect. It’s not about Joe and Kerewin falling in love and making a nice home for Simon. It’s not about Simon melting the ice in Joe’s heart or softening Kerewin up. None of those Lifetime Movie moments happen. But other things do. And you ache, and long, and LOVE these people. You LOVE these people.

And above all of that: is the voice of the book, which you will see in the excerpt below. I would imagine some people might find it challenging – it’s not typical, or normal – you can tell that Keri Hulme, the writer, speaks a language other than English – there’s a Maori tilt in her language, you can feel the other words pushing themselves into the narrative – and it feels almost like a story being told round a fire, by someone of the old-school – someone who really knows how to spin a tale. There’s a fairy tale aspect to it – even though Kerewin, dark and heavy and angry, makes a strange and ungrateful princess in her tower. But isn’t that the way life is sometimes? I succumbed to Hulme’s voice immediately … it’s overblown, emotional, it’s deep and dark – she flies off into poetics – and then crashes back to earth, with the taste of whiskey, the smell of mold.

This excerpt is early on in the book. The 3 paths have not yet converged – but they are about to.

Excerpt from The Bone People – by Keri Hulme

It is still dark but she can’t sleep anymore.

She dresses and goes down to the beach, and sits on the top of a sandhill until the sky pales.

Another day, herr Gott, and I am tired, tired.

She stands, and grimaces, and spits. The spittle lies on the sand a moment, a part of her a moment ago, and then it vanishes, sucked in, a part of the beach now.

Fine way to greet the day, my soul … go down to the pools. Te Kaihau, and watch away the last night sourness.

And here I am, balanced on the saltstained rim, watching minute navyblue fringes, gill=fingers of tubeworms, fan the water … put the shadow of a finger near them, and they flick outasight. Eyes in your lungs … neat. The three-fin blenny swirls by … tena koe, fish. A small bunch of scarlet and gold anemones furl and unfurl their arms, graceful petals, slow and lethal … tickle tickle, and they turn into uninteresting lumps of brownish jelly … haven’t made sea-anemone soup for a while, whaddaboutit? Not today, Josephine … at the bottom, in a bank of brown bulbous weed, a hermit crab is rustling a shell. Poking at it, sure it’s empty? Ditheringly unsure … but now, nervously hunched over his soft slug of belly, he extricates himself from his old hutch and speeds deftly into the new … at least, that’s where you thought you were going, e mate? … hoowee, there really is no place like home, even when it’s grown a couple of sizes too small.

There is a great bank of Neptune’s necklaces fringing the next pool.

“The sole midlittoral fuccoid,” she intones solemnly, and squashes a bead of it under the butt of her stick. “Ahh me father he was orange and me mother she was green,” slithers off the rocks, and wanders further away down the beach, humming. Nothing like a tidepool for taking your mind off things, except maybe a quiet spot for killing …

Walking the innocent stick alongside, matching its step to hers, she climbs up the sandhills. Down the other side in a rush, where it is dark and damp still, crashing through loose clusters of lupins. Dew sits in the centre of each lupin-leaf, hands holding jewels to catch the sunfire until she brushes past and sends the jewels sliding, drop by drop weeping off.

The lupins grow less; the marram grass diminishes into a kind of reedy weed; the sand changes by degrees into mud. It’s an estuary, where someone built a jetty, a long long time ago. The planking has rotted, and the uneven teeth of the pilings jut into nowhere now.

It’s an odd macabre kind of existence. While the nights away in drinking, and fill the days with petty killing. Occasionally, drink out a day and then go and hunt all night, just for the change.

She shakes her head.

Who cares? That’s the way things are now. (I care.)

She climbs a piling, and using the stick as a balancing pole, jumps across the gaps from one pile to the next out to the last. There she sits down, dangling her legs, stick against her shoulder, and lights a cigarillo to smoke away more time.

Intermittent wheeping flutes from oystercatchers.

The sound of the sea.

A gull keening.

When the smoke is finished, she unscrews the top of the stick and draws out seven inches of barbed steel. It fits neatly into slots in the stick top.

“Now, flounders are easy to spear, providing one minds the toes.”

Whose, hers or the fishes’, she has never bothered finding out. She rolls her jeans legs up as far as they’ll go, and slips down into the cold water. She steps ankle deep, then knee deep, and stands, feeling for the moving of the tide. Then slowly, keeping the early morning sun in front of her, she begins to stalk, mind in her hands, and eyes looking only for the puff of mud and swift silted skid of a disturbed flounder.

All this attention for sneaking up on a fish? And they say we humans are intelligent? Sheeit …

and with a darting levering jab, stabbed, and a flounder flaps bloodyholed at the end of the stick.

Kerewin looks at it with slow smiled satisfaction.

Goodbye soulwringing night. Good morning sinshine, and a fat happy day.

The steeled stick quivers.

She pulls a rolledup sack from her belt and drops the fish, still weakly flopping, in it. She hangs the lot up by sticking her knife through the sackneck into a piling side.

The water round the jetty is at thigh-level when she brings the third fish back, but there has been no hurry. She guts the fish by the rising tide’s edge, and lops off their heads for the mud crabs to pick. Then she lies down in a great thicket of dun grass, and using one arm as a headrest and the other as a sunshade, falls quietly asleep.

It is the cold that wakes her, and clouds passing over the face of the sun. There is an ache in the back of her neck, and her pillowing arm is numb. She stands up stiffly, and stretches: she smells rain coming. A cloud of midge-like flies blunders into her face and hair. On the ground round the sack hovers another swarm, buzzing thinly, through what would seem to be for them a fog of fish. The wind is coming from the sea. She picks up the sack, and sets off for home through the bush. Raupo and fern grow into a tangle of gorse: a track appears and leads through the gorse to a stand of windwarped trees. They are ngaio. One tree stands out from its fellows, a giant of the kind, nearly ten yards tall.

Some of its roots are exposed and form a bowl-like seat. Kerewin sits down for a smoke, as she nearly always does when she comes this way, keeping a weather eye open for rain.

In the dust at her feet is a sandal.

For a moment she is perfectly still with the unexpectedness of it.

Then she leavs forward and picks it up.

It can’t have been here for long because it isn’t damp. It’s rather smaller than her hand, old and scuffed, with the position of each toe palely upraised in the leather. The stitching of the lower strap was coming undone, and the buckle hung askew.

“Young to be running loose round here.”

She frowns. She doesn’t like children, doesn’t like people, and has discouraged anyone from coming on her land.

“If I get hold of you, you’ll regret it, whoever you are …”

She squats down and peers up the track. There are footprints, one set of them. Of a sandalled foot and half an unshod foot.

Limping? Something in its foot so that’s why the sandal is taken off and left behind?

She rubs a finger inside the sandal. The inner sole was shiny and polished from long wearing and she could feel the indentation of the foot. Well-worn indeed … in the heel though there is a sharpedged protrusion of leather, like a tiny crater rim. She turns it over. There is a corresponding indriven hole in the rubber.

“So we jumped on something that bit, did we?”

She slings the sandal into the sack of flounders, and marches away belligerently, hoping to confront its owner.

But a short distance before her garden is reached, the one and a half footprints trail off the track, heading towards the beach.

Beaches aren’t private, she thinks, and dismisses the intruder from her mind.

The wind is blowing more strongly when she pushes open the heavy door, and the sky is thick with dark cloud.

“Storm’s coming,” as she shuts the door, “but I am safe inside …”

The entrance hall, the second level of the six-floored Tower, is low and stark and shadowed. There is a large brass and wood crucifix on the far wall and green seagrass matting over the floor. The handrail of the spiral staircase ends in the carved curved flukes of a dolphin; otherwise, the room is bare of furniture and ornament. She rubs up the stairs, and the sack drips as it swings.

“One two three aleary hello my sweet mere hell these get steeper daily, days of sun and wine and jooyyy,”

the top, and stop, breathless.

“Holmes you are thick and unfit and getting fatter day by day. But what the hell …”

She puts the flounders on bent wire hooks and hangs them in the coolsafe. She lights the fire, and stokes up the range, and goes upstairs to the library for a book on flatfish cooking. There is just about everything in her library.

A sliver of sudden light as she comes from the spiral into the booklined room, and a moment later, the distant roll of thunder.

“Very soon, my beauty, all hell will break loose …” and her words hang in the stillness.

She stands over by the window, hands fistplanted on her hips, and watches the gathering boil of the surf below. She has a curious feeling as she stands there, as though something is out of place, a wrongness somewhere, an uneasiness, an overwatching. She stares morosely at her feet (longer second toes still longer, you think they might one day grow less, you bloody werewolf you?) and the joyous relief that the morning’s hunting gave, ebbs away.

“Bleak grey mood to match the bleak grey weather,” and she hunches over to the nearest bookshelf. “Stow the book on cooking fish. Gimme something escapist, Narnia or Gormenghast or Middle Earth, or,”

it wasn’t a movement that made her look up.

There is a gap between two tiers of bookshelves. Her chest of pounamu rests inbetween them, and above it, there is a slit window.

In the window, standing stiff and straight like some weird saint in a stained gold window, is a child. A thin shockheaded person, haloed in hair, shrouded in the dying sunlight.

The eyes are invisible. It is silent, immobile.

Kerewin stares, shocked and gawping and speechless.

The thunder sounds again, louder, and a cloud covers the last of the sunlight. The room goes very dark.

If it moves suddenly, it’s going to go through that glass. Hit rockbottom forty feet below and end up looking like an impoded plum …

She barks,

“Get the bloody hell down from there!”

Her breathing has quickened and her heart thuds as though she were the intruder.

The head shifts. Then the child turns slowly and carefully round in the niche, and wriggles over the side in an awkward progression, feet ankles shins hips, half-skidding half-slithering down to the chest, splayed like a lizard on a wall. It turns round, and gingerly steps onto the floor.

“Explain.”

There isn’t much above a yard of it standing there, a foot out of range of her furthermost reach. Small and thin, with an extraordinary face, highboned and hollowcheeked, cleft and pointed chin, and a sharp sharp nose. Nothing else is visible under an obscuration of silverblond hair except the mouth, and it’s set in an uncommonly stubborn line.

Nasty. Gnomish, thinks Kerewin. The shock of surprise is going and cold cutting anger comes sweeping in to take its place.

“What are you doing here? Aside from climbing walls?”

There is something distinctly unnatural about it. It stands there unmoving, sullen and silent.

“Well?”

In the ensuing silent, the rain comes rattling against the windows, driving down in a hard steady rhythm.

“We’ll bloody soon find out,” saying it viciously and reaching for a shoulder.

Shove it downstairs and call authority.

Unexpectedly, a handful of thin fingers reaches for her wrist, arrives and fastens with the wistful strength of the small.

Kerewin looks at the fingers, looks sharply up and meets the child’s eyes for the first time. They are seabluegreen, a startling colour, like opal.

It looks scared and diffident, yet curiously intense.

“Let go my wrist,” but the grip tightens.

Not restraining violence, pressing meaning.

Even as she thinks that, the child draws a deep breath and lets it out in a strange sound, a groaning sigh. Then the fingers round her wrist slide off, sketch urgently in the air, retreat.

Aue. She sits down, back on her heels, way back on her heels. Looking at the brat guardedly; taking out cigarillos and matches; taking a deep breath herself and expellng it in smoke.

The child stays unmoving, hands back behind it; only the odd seaeyes flicker, from her face to her hands and back round again.

She doesn’t like looking at the child. One of the maimed, the contaminating …

She looks at the smoke curling upward in a thin blue stream instead.

“Ah, you can’t talk, is that it?”

A rustle of movement, a subdued rattle, and there, pitched into the open on the birdboned chest, is a pendant hanging like a label on a chain.

She leans forward and picks it up, taking intense care not to touch the person underneath.

It was a label.

1 PACIFIC STREET
WHANGAROA
PHONE 633Z COLLECT

She turns it over.

SIMON P. GILLAYLEY
CANNOT SPEAK

“Fasinating,” drawls Kerewin, and gets to her feet fast, away to the window. Over the sound of the rain, she can hear a fly dying somewhere close, buzzing frenetically. No other noise.

Reluctantly she turns to face the child. “Well, we’ll do nothing more. You found your way here, you can find it back.” Something came into focus. “O there’s a sandal you can collect before you go.”

The eyes which had followed each of her movements, settling on and judging each one like a fly expecting swatting, drop to stare at his bare foot.

She points to the spiral stairs.

“Out.”