The Predictions Read online

  Shakti considered this for a moment. “Well,” she said, playfully, “maybe you’ll grow up to be an intoxicating woman?”

  Somehow, I doubted it. Shakti followed me down a dirt path that ran between the chook house and a hay barn, the bells on her ankles tinkling as she walked. She was certainly intoxicating. Next to her I felt like a troll. We passed by the orchards, where a ­couple of the boys were up in the avocado trees, whooping and hollering as they picked ripe fruit. Lukas climbed halfway down his ladder and wolf-­whistled. I waved back. Then he climbed back up the ladder, no doubt to speculate with Timon about who the pretty visitor was.

  “Who was that?” said Shakti, when he had disappeared.

  “Just Lukas.”

  “Just Lukas?” she repeated. “I’d call that a handsome young fellow.”

  “He’s the oldest of us kids—­and boy does he like to remind us.”

  “And he’s how old?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen,” repeated Shakti. “Wow.”

  Behind us, Nelly and Ned peeled away, Nelly giving me a secret wave. They were supposed to be picking avocados too.

  Shakti turned around and watched them go. “Are they twins?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are there more of you? More kids?”

  “Seven in all. After Lukas comes Timon. I come next, followed by the twins, Nelly and Ned. The youngest are Meg and Fritz. You met him too.” I paused, adding, “He’s my . . . brother,” to see if saying it out loud still felt strange, which it did.

  “You all have quite straight names for a commune. The one I’ve just come from, there were kids called Astral and Rainbow and Star.”

  “Is your name from a commune?”

  “No,” said Shakti. “It’s a name I have earned.”

  In the mess hall Elisabeth was in the process of setting the table for dinner. She was in charge of the kitchen, making up menus and rosters and supervising whoever was on cooking duty that day. We ate dinner early, when the heat had gone out of the day—­or in winter, the light—­then went to bed early and rose not long after dawn. We had to. Sunlight ruled the length of our days. The commune had no electricity, only candles, kerosene lamps, and a diesel-­powered generator for emergencies.

  I was surprised to have to introduce Elisabeth to Shakti. Elisabeth was Hunter’s life mate, and I had assumed she and Shakti would know each other. Hunter and Elisabeth had been married once, before they realized marriage was a capitalist construct.

  Elisabeth was her usual prickly self. Instead of welcoming Shakti, she said, “You’re our first visitor. It always starts this time of year, in the spring. Hippies mostly. They think they can come here and sit around getting high. They don’t want to lift a finger.” She was setting out chairs, and as she spoke, she moved an enormous stack of them from one side of the room to the other, showing off her strength.

  “We work hard at Gaialands.” She put her hands on her hips and looked squarely at Shakti. “Hippies don’t last long around here.”

  “Oh, I’m used to hard work!” said Shakti. “I’ve been living on an ohu. You’ve heard of those, right?”

  Elisabeth nodded. “We met some folk from the one near Wanganui.”

  “That’s the one I’ve been living on,” said Shakti. “Ahu Ahu.”

  “Across the river from Jerusalem?” Elisabeth was more interested now.

  Shakti nodded. “We had to do everything from scratch. It was like a frontier settlement.”

  I had heard of the place too, and the ohu scheme. Prime Minister Norman Kirk had leased shitty pieces of land to groups of young ­people to build communes. Most of them had lasted five minutes but the ­people who had started Ahu Ahu were made of stronger stuff.

  “Just getting to it was a mission,” said Shakti. “There’s no road access so the only way in was to cross the river. It was all right in the summer but in the winter”—­she whistled—­“boy, you took your life into your own hands. They had this basket, attached to a rope, operated by a set of pulleys. It was basically just a flying fox.”

  “Cool!” I said. We kids had been trying for years to build a flying fox across the stream, but the trees on either side were too low and we could never get the wire tight enough.

  “Nuh-­uh,” said Shakti. “Not cool at all. A death trap.”

  I had heard of Jerusalem too, not the Holy City but its namesake, a small settlement up the Whanganui River. A famous poet started a spiritual commune there with a bunch of his followers but the newspapers were filled with reports of squalor and drugs and children with head lice. Then the poet died. It was one of the stories Hunter loved to tell to remind us of the difference between our commune and the ones started by “bandwagon jumpers and filthy bloody hippies.” Hunter and Elisabeth had started Gaialands in the early sixties, long before anyone in New Zealand had even heard of communes. They had gone on an overseas experience as undergraduate students and spent a long, hot summer on a kibbutz, returning to New Zealand eager to start one of their own.

  Shakti drank her tea and I sat next to her while mine went cold. I liked tea well enough, but I was too mesmerized to drink it. Two of the other women, Susie and Katrina, a ­couple, had come into the mess hut, and listened quietly to the end of Shakti’s tale about the ohu. “All winter it rained and rained,” she told us. “All of the buildings were makeshift and leaked like nobody’s business. The place was like a swimming pool; all the food got wet, ruined. I had to leave, before my caravan floated down the river.”

  “How did you get it across to the ohu?” I asked.

  “I didn’t,” said Shakti. “It was waiting for me on the other side.”

  I wondered what had happened to the other ­people living there, if they had stuck it out, eating ruined food and wearing soggy clothes. But Shakti didn’t say.

  “Anyway,” she said, “already I can see Gaialands is nothing like that place. I’ve dreamt of coming here ever since I met Hunter at the Nambassa Festival last year. It’s so good to have finally made it!”

  We had all gone to Nambassa the year before but it seemed only Hunter had met this dazzling woman, about whom he had said absolutely nothing in the months since. We were going to the festival again this year. Paul had built a wood-­powered combustion engine, and he and Hunter were going to demonstrate how it worked.

  “What part of America are you from?” asked Katrina.

  “Berkeley,” said Shakti. “My parents were professors.”

  We looked at her blankly. No one knew where this was.

  “The Bay Area—­near San Francisco.”

  “I went there once,” said Elisabeth. “Everyone was so stoned. Tripping on acid. No one washed. You could see fleas jumping off their skin. I couldn’t leave fast enough.”

  “That must have been a while ago,” said Shakti, laughing. “Things have really changed. Everyone’s into disco, and all the men are gay. Before I left I was the spiritual adviser at a self-­help clinic for women.”

  “What’s a self-­help clinic?” asked Susie.

  “We helped desperate women find men that aren’t gay.”

  “Really?” said Katrina, who was a lesbian. “What for?”

  “I’m joking,” said Shakti, adding in a serious voice, “it’s a health clinic. We helped women find their cervix—­and in a surprising number of cases, their clitoris.”

  “Oh,” said Elisabeth, reddening, and looking in my direction. “I’m not sure we need to mention that in front of Poppy.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Shakti. “Every woman needs to know how to find her clitoris.”

  “She’s still a girl,” said Elisabeth.

  “What’s a clitoris?” I said, then wished I hadn’t when the women around me all laughed.

  Shakti looked with curiosity from me to Elisabeth and back again. “Only the mos
t important part of your anatomy,” she said, addressing Elisabeth. “But I’ll leave the details to your mother.”

  “I’m not her mother,” said Elisabeth, sharply, while I backed this up with a shake of my head.

  “I’m sorry,” said Shakti, perplexed. “It’s just that you two look so much alike.”

  Elisabeth said, “What a person looks like is of little concern.”

  Shakti said nothing.

  “We do things a little differently around here,” said Susie, trying to patch things up. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I guess I’ll have to,” said Shakti, her smile broader than ever.

  Elisabeth began to clear away the teacups and wipe the table clean.

  Footsteps sounded on the porch of the mess hall, and then in walked Paul and Hunter, sheened in grease and sweat.

  “I was right about the car,” said Paul. “It’s rooted. But we’ve moved the bloody thing to where it won’t cause any more trouble. And the caravan—­”

  “Under a willow tree down by the river,” said Hunter. “We thought it would be nice and quiet for you there.”

  “Thank you,” said Shakti. “That’s kind.”

  Katrina offered to show Shakti the way to her caravan.

  “I’ll take her,” I said, my heart beating faster at the tiny lie I was about to tell. “I’m going down to the river anyway—­to clean off this pig shit.”

  IT HAD RAINED SO much that spring that the area down by the river was a bog, and we made our way cautiously around it on narrow mounds of dry earth. I kept apologizing for the terrain and once or twice thought of offering Shakti a piggyback, as though she was some kind of princess, and I was . . . what? Her manservant?

  The caravan had sunk about a foot into the soft, buttery mud. Shakti was thoughtful on the walk and had barely spoken, but now she turned to me and said, “Elisabeth—­she is your mother, isn’t she?”

  “She birthed me, yes.”

  “She gave birth to you. Then why did she deny it?”

  “Because we don’t say ‘mother’ and ‘father.’ We call the adults by their names. They raised us in a group.”

  “Of course. It’s a commune. They brought you up together.”

  She hadn’t exactly understood my meaning but I was reluctant to explain. The few times I had explained to outsiders that we were raised without knowing who our parents were, they had reacted with shock or disapproval, and I had learned to keep quiet about it, to let ­people assume whatever they wanted.

  Shakti walked around her caravan as best she could, inspecting it for damage, while I studied the symbols painted on the side. Alongside the moon, there was Saturn, and one of the blue planets; I didn’t know its name. Signs of the zodiac were dotted about, a few constellations, and some symbols that looked like letters of a foreign alphabet.

  “She’s a beauty, huh?” said Shakti, completing her circuit and climbing the steps at the front to stand on a little wooden porch. “Whenever I find symbols that mean something to me, I paint them on the outside—­kind of like a patchwork quilt for the soul.” When she opened the door, an upside-­down stool and a stack of other items blocked the way. “Oh dear,” she said, stepping over them. “Everything must have moved around in the crash.”

  I craned my neck to see inside the caravan, drinking in the potpourri of books and tapestries and sculptures of dripping candle wax.

  Shakti deftly positioned herself in the doorway, blocking my view. “I’d invite you in but I need to sort out this mess before I have visitors.” She smiled, then closed the door emphatically.

  I stood in the mud, not moving, wanting to get back the feeling I’d had a few minutes earlier, when I was with Shakti. In something of a daze, I climbed the porch steps and stood dumbly in front of her door.

  “Dinner is at sundown!” I called out. “There’s a cowbell, but you might not hear it from here!”

  When there was no reply, I wondered if I should knock on the door and hesitated a moment too long. Something at my feet caught my eye, a playing card of some sort, and I bent to pick it up. On closer inspection, it turned out to be not a playing card but one from a deck of tarot. Some of the women had tarot cards, but they hadn’t got them out for a while. This one showed a picture of a man and a woman, naked, and between them a deity of some sort, suspended in a puffy cloud. I was studying it intently when Shakti flung the door open, giving me a fright.

  “What was that about a cowbell?” she said.

  “It—­it rings,” I said, stammering. “To let you know when it’s dinnertime.”

  I had foolishly tried to hide the card behind my back, but of course Shakti had seen it. “What’s that in your hand?” she said.

  Embarrassed, I handed it over.

  Shakti examined the picture. “Very interesting,” she said, with a look that was filled with meaning. “Very interesting indeed.” She held the card to face me. “The Lovers,” she said. “Do you know what this means?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, not really.”

  “Well, it can mean you’re going to be faced with a huge decision about an existing relationship—­or that maybe you’ll face a temptation of the heart.”

  At the word “temptation,” a hot patch flared on my neck.

  “Or,” said Shakti, “it can signify the thing that drives us out of the garden—­like Eve when she bit the apple.”

  “We’re atheists,” I said.

  “The card doesn’t care what you believe,” said Shakti. “The important thing is that you picked it up.”

  “Only so I could give it back. I wasn’t going to keep it.”

  “I know,” she said, smiling. “But there’s no such thing as coincidence.” She held the card to her chest and glanced above her, sweeping her free arm across the vast, empty sky. “The map is up there—­written in the stars.” She fixed me with a cosmically charged stare. “All we have to do is follow it.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER 2

  Gaialands

  1978

  LESS THAN A MONTH after her arrival Shakti had won over almost every individual on the commune. Not only had she charmed us, but she was made to do barely any chores, or only the ones she found pleasant and achievable. I never once saw her with dirt-­covered hands.

  As far as the men were concerned, she needed to do no more than flutter her eyelids or glide by in a flimsy sarong, or better still, glide by in nothing at all, and they were bewitched. She was so startling to look at that even Paul, who was notably devoted to his life mate, Sigi, grew flushed and starry eyed whenever she was nearby.

  Winning over the women required a little more time and attention, but at this she was no less skilled. Within a week or two, she had Katrina and Susie getting up with her at dawn to practice yoga by the creek, naked, the three of them lifting their buttocks high in the air for downward dog, oblivious to the huddle of teenage boys stationed close by behind a large boulder. I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes, but I had heard the boys whispering late at night in the sleeping hut. That is, until Lukas told them to quit their gasbagging and go to sleep. I took this to mean Lukas was not a part of their spying, a fact I noted with a strange satisfaction.

  When she was on the roster to help in the communal kitchen, Shakti was meek and subservient, which eventually got her on Elisabeth’s good side (or as close to it as was possible with Elisabeth). In the schoolhouse, which was Sigi’s domain, Shakti taught bits and pieces of American history as well as rudimentary Spanish she had learned from a Latino grandmother on her father’s side. But she always worked under Sigi’s direction, and never in a way that was showy or took away from Sigi’s lessons. Compared to Elisabeth, Loretta was a walk in the park, as easily won ove
r as the men. She had always been into astrology and palmistry, which Shakti practiced, along with tarot and runes and just about every system of divination known to humanity. In fact, the two of them were soon in cahoots, planning some kind of mass astrology chart that encompassed every inhabitant of Gaialands, and probably some of the animals too.

  One Sunday afternoon, after she had been with us about a month, Shakti spread the word that the women were to gather that night for a secret meeting—­no men allowed. Along with Nelly (but not Meg, who was only fourteen), I was surprised and flattered to be included. Our instructions were to remain behind in the mess hut after dinner until all the males had left.

  When they were gone, Shakti closed all the doors and lit candles and incense that infused the room with the too-­intense smell of flowers. It was a warm night. Many of the women had been hard at work all day, and beneath the floral scent was a punch of underarm odor.

  “Next time, we’ll fashion some curtains,” Shakti said. “But this should do for tonight.” She cleared a space on one side of the room, scattering cushions in a random formation on the floor, and instructed us to sit or lie in whatever position we found most comfortable.

  “It’s important to feel relaxed,” she said. “Because tonight is all about sharing.”

  Rather than relaxed, a few of the women looked more uptight than usual. We sat about as we had been told, some cross-­legged or with knees folded underneath, trying very hard to impersonate a chilled-­out vibe.

  Someone triggered a round of nervous laughter and over the top of it, Shakti said, “I can’t believe you’ve never done consciousness raising before.”

  “We’ve heard of it,” said Katrina, “but I guess we never felt the need.”

  “We’re hardly oppressed housewives,” added Susie.

  At this statement, Shakti raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Well,” she said, after a long pause. “In that case, it might be a good place to start the discussion.”

  Katrina said, “You want us to talk about housewives?”

  “Sure, why not?” said Shakti. “What does the idea of a housewife mean to you?” She fixed her gaze on Loretta, who was trying to be invisible. “Loretta—­do you want to start?”