The Predictions Page 4

  Shortly after their exchange, Meg piped up with, “Please read mine instead.” She had been watching eagerly from the sidelines, waiting for her turn. “I believe in it.”

  “Precious child,” said Shakti. “You’re too young to have your fortune told. Your personality isn’t formed yet.”

  “I’m not!” said Meg. “I’m almost fifteen.”

  “Then fifteen is when I’ll do your first reading. It will be your birthday present.”

  Meg counted on her fingers how long she’d have to wait. Her birthday was two or three months away, and I wondered how Meg’s entire personality could form in such a short amount of time.

  “I’ll go next,” said Sigi, positioning herself across the table from Shakti and rubbing her hands together in anticipation. “And, Meg, you come and sit next to me to give your good vibes to the cards.”

  Meg was delighted and nestled in next to Sigi. A few months into being a daughter, she was beginning to get the hang of it. Sigi would often stroke the hair out of Meg’s eyes, for no reason other than to touch her, and the two of them would look at each other in a wistful way that was also somehow greedy and exclusive. Their interactions mesmerized me, but I was glad I didn’t have to go through that myself. Since I’d found out Elisabeth had birthed me, she hadn’t changed her attitude toward me at all. She was still cool, businesslike, practical—­constantly preoccupied by all the mouths she had to feed—­and I couldn’t imagine her behaving any other way. To see her behave like Sigi would have been disconcerting. But still, I sometimes thought it was strange that she hadn’t acknowledged our connection at all.

  While Shakti shuffled her deck of cards, Lukas got up from the table and stalked off to the orchard by himself. In addition to avoiding Shakti, he had been doing that a lot lately—­trying to find places where he could be alone. I thought just this once I might go after him to see if I could draw him out of his sulk.

  I found him under one of the plum trees, stripping the bark off a sapling branch with his pocketknife. It was something the boys had done compulsively when they were younger but now they only did it when they were in a funk. By the time I got to him, Lukas had been going at the branch so aggressively that there wasn’t much of it left. His expression, by the moonlight, brewed with dark thoughts.

  “That was pretty harsh,” I said, standing above him.

  He didn’t look up, but continued to slice at the sapling. “She’s a goddamn phony. She talks total horseshit but nobody sees it because they’re all trying to get into her pants.” Lately, Lukas had been reading a stash of pulp novels we had found in a junk shop in Coromandel town and talking as though he was a hardboiled American detective, an affectation that I hoped would soon wear off.

  “Not everyone,” I said.

  “No. You’re not, but you still fawn all over her.”

  “You have to admit that she’s livened things up around here.”

  Lukas scoffed. “A talking monkey would have done that. Living here is like being buried alive.”

  “But that’s what I mean. It isn’t—­not anymore.” I wanted to tell him about the consciousness raising, how it had opened up my eyes to whole new world, but I was too embarrassed to go into detail. “She’s given us so much,” I said lamely.

  “She doesn’t care about any of us. We’re just playthings to her.”

  “Playthings? What do you mean?”

  Lukas reddened slightly as he said, “Do I really have to spell it out?”

  I didn’t give him the chance.

  “She can’t help it if she’s prettier than everyone else.”

  Still flushed, Lukas said, “Forget it, Poppy. The minute I turn eighteen, I’m leaving this loony bin behind.”

  He had been saying that a lot lately, and each time he did, I wanted to shake him. There were seven of us kids at Gaialands, and even though I knew it was silly, I felt strongly that if we could just stick together, we would be okay. “Where will you go?”

  “Auckland, probably. That’s where all the bands are.”

  Lukas played guitar, self-­taught, and even though he sounded okay to my ears, I wasn’t sure he was good enough to join a city band. “But you don’t have any money. Stuff isn’t free like it is here.”

  “I’ll get a job,” he said. “Like everyone else.”

  I was shocked. “You’d work for the man?”

  Lukas snorted. “There is no man. That’s just some communist claptrap Hunter made up to scare us.”

  “What about the rat race? That’s real.”

  “Only to hippies. To everyone else, that’s just progress. I don’t want to live in the dark ages for the rest of my life.”

  Lukas gently poked my leg with the stick he had sharpened. When I grabbed the end of it to stop him, he pulled me down next to him on the ground and pummeled my shoulders and back. We had been roughhousing since we were little, but this time when he started wrestling with me, I had an involuntary urge to submit to his physical strength, to let him win. Only when I offered no resistance we butted heads, our skulls knocking together like a ­couple of hollow coconuts.

  The sound of it was worse than the pain, but I cried out anyway.

  “Poppy?” said Lukas, springing apart, confused. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No.” Whatever the submissive urge had been, it was gone, and I wished I had fought back when I had the chance. I got to my feet. “Last one to the mess hut is a big fat moron.”

  “Don’t be an egg,” said Lukas, not moving.

  He had never refused to race before, and it threw me, so I called him a dick and took off for the mess hut, trying to run off all these odd new sensations.

  Rumors had been going around that in addition to doing tarot-­card spreads, Shakti had been slowly and methodically compiling the astrology charts of everyone who lived at Gaialands. I was not sure what this entailed, but I was certain that if everyone else was getting one then I wanted one too. Weeks went by while I waited to be asked. Then Nelly had hers read and I could no longer bear it. On the pretext of delivering Shakti some coconut oil she had ordered from Auckland to smooth her hair, I made my way across the field to her caravan. A ­couple of the tires had gone completely flat, giving it a tilted appearance, and I wondered if it bothered her to go about her business on a lean.

  Halfway to the caravan I paused to consider something that had never occurred to me before. Did my outfit look okay? We shared clothes and lived in the sticks. Other than checking if what I was wearing was warm enough or too hot, I had never given clothes a second thought, but lately I had decided that I wanted to look more like a girl and less like a Coromandel bushman. But as for how to go about this, I was stumped. Boys and girls on the commune shared clothes. In the summer we wore running shorts and faded T-­shirts with slogans for tractors or sports teams, and in the winter, dungarees or cords with a Swanndri or woolen jumper. Susie knitted all these jumpers to the same pattern, and they were stored in a trunk in our sleeping hut. We all wore them, moaning all day long about the coarse, scratchy wool. Sigi and Elisabeth occasionally wore faded shift dresses or sarongs, but nothing of the sort had found its way into our communal clothing trunk. We couldn’t just go out and buy anything new—­we didn’t have money. I sometimes handled it when I worked in the Gaialands veggie shop, but other than that it never passed through my hands.

  That day, I doubled back to our sleeping hut, found nothing except more shorts and more threadbare T-­shirts, then made my way to the washing line and helped myself to a flowing Indian skirt I had seen Elisabeth wearing once or twice. It was a commune. We shared everything. Didn’t the skirt belong to me as much as it belonged to anyone else? It was the first time in my life I had worn anything other than pants.

  Eagerly, I rapped on the door of Shakti’s caravan and waited, adjusting the ties of the skirt one more time. After a short interval, the door opened—­she
hadn’t asked who was there—­and she stood in front of me naked.

  “Poppy!” she said. “Nice skirt.”

  “I brought you this,” I said, thrusting the coconut oil into Shakti’s hands and wishing I hadn’t changed. I didn’t feel like myself and was unsure how this new version of me ought to behave.

  “You look pretty,” said Shakti, holding out her hand. “I’ve been wondering when you would visit.”

  I took her small, agile hand and was pulled into the caravan, where Shakti had candles and incense burning, the air so thick with fragrance it was hard to breathe. My eyes darted about, greedily taking everything in. It was dark inside but the space was bigger than I thought it would be, with the bed tucked away on a platform at one end. This left enough room for a small round table and chairs, plus a kitchen area, shelves, and bench seats. Every surface was covered with batik cloths, shawls, cushions, lace, and on top of these were stacks of books, potions, candlesticks, trinkets, a lunarscape of carved boxes, copper vials, divining instruments, and fertility dolls. Shakti caught me drinking it all in and laughed. “I collect things,” she said. “As if you couldn’t guess.”

  She picked up a fringed shawl and tied it in a knot around her waist—­hardly covering anything, but modest compared to nothing at all. Then she cleared objects off the table, a set of watercolors and a stack of thick pieces of cardstock. The card on top was painted with strange hieroglyphics, almost recognizable as an alphabet but not quite.

  “What are those?” I asked, pointing at the symbols.

  “Runes,” said Shakti, shuffling them into a pile and putting them away. “Would you like some tea? I have chamomile, peppermint, or nettle.”

  “Peppermint, please.”

  She balanced a small orange cast-­iron kettle on top of a portable gas burner and shook out some leaves into a red enamel teapot. Then she reached into an earthenware jar and pulled out something that was banned from the commune, a large bar of supermarket chocolate. She broke off a square and handed it to me, holding a finger to her lips to let me know it was our secret. I wasn’t sure whether to eat it or save it, and settled on both, nibbling off a section and letting it melt on my tongue. God, it was delicious. She poured the tea into cups the size of thimbles.

  “Those are tiny,” I said.

  “Japanese,” she explained. “Given to me by my first lover. An older man. He really knew how to make love to a woman.”

  “Oh,” I said, scandalized, bringing the tiny cup to my lips, then yanking it away when I realized the liquid was piping hot. I spilled some on my T-­shirt and clumsily tried to wipe it off. “Sorry.”

  “It’s your birthday next week, isn’t it?” she said.

  “November eighteenth.”

  “Ooh la la—­a Scorpio.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s intense. Scorpios are deeply emotional—­and elemental. They’re drawn to matters of life and death—­almost to the point of obsession.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Are we all like that? The twins and Fritz were born the same month.”

  “They’re a week or two after you though, so they fall in the next sign. Sagittarius is a different breed altogether, much lighter of heart. How funny that you were all born so close together though, almost like someone planned it.”

  “They did plan it. I mean, all the babies were born within two years of one another, then they stopped having any. I’m not sure why. Maybe seven was enough.”

  “That’s so fascinating.” Shakti blew on her tea, then carefully took a sip. “I’ve been watching how you all behave around one another, and I have to say, some of the stuff I’ve seen is, well—­it’s a little messed up.”

  “That’s because the way we were raised was . . . unusual.” I had just opened the door to more questions, I realized, but I couldn’t think how to turn back without offending Shakti.

  “You told me you were raised in a group. Does that mean you lived with your mom and dad until a certain age, then you were all lumped together?”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t mean that.” I wasn’t sure how to continue. This was the part that always freaked everyone out. “It means we were raised in a group from day one.”

  “From birth?”

  “From birth.”

  Shakti let out a whistle and shook her head. “That’s even more nuts than I thought.” She looked at me with a sad expression. “You poor, poor creatures.”

  I had known this would be her reaction, but coming from her, the pity was strangely gratifying. I wanted more. I found myself adding, “We didn’t even know who our parents were until earlier this year.”

  “Holy smokes!” she exclaimed, and her shock was like a drug. I wanted to tell her everything—­to have her listen to me all day.

  “They called us all in for a meeting,” I began, deciding that I would not leave out anything. “We had no idea what it was going to be about.” Once I was sure I had Shakti’s rapt attention, I continued, going back a little way to the end of summer, when Nelly had first confessed to me that she had fallen passionately in love with Timon. For as long as possible, I tried to prevent her from saying anything, but as summer rolled into autumn, she only grew more determined to tell him how she felt. Nelly was too bold and too lovesick to wait any longer. She was convinced he felt the same way she did, and because she was so sure of it, the next thing I knew she had me helping her to write a love note.

  “That’s so sweet,” said Shakti.

  “It could have been—­but things didn’t work out exactly as she’d planned.”

  Late one night, Nelly and I crept out to the orchard armed with a pencil and a stack of brown paper bags taken from the Gaialands fruit stall. Not the most romantic of notepaper, but it was either that or rip a page out of one of the novels on the schoolhouse bookshelf. Paper, like everything else that had to be bought, was in short supply on the commune.

  Nelly was so nervous that she couldn’t hold the pencil steady. She told me she’d had a crush on Timon for as long as she could remember—­since she was four or five years old. “You write it,” she said, handing me the pencil.

  “I can’t. I don’t even like him.”

  “All that teasing—­you know it’s just a front, eh? Underneath it, he’s a sweetheart.”

  “He is?”

  Nelly dictated, “Start with ‘Dear Timon’ . . .”

  “This is weird.”

  “You are.”

  I wrote down the words.

  “Put that you think he’s good at woodwork. That I think he is,” she said.

  “But he’s hopeless at it. Remember that three-­legged chair?”

  “That’s not the point. He wants to be good at it.”

  I was alarmed. “You’re going to lie?”

  “Flattering a man is how you make him love you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s obvious.”

  It wasn’t obvious to me but I did as I was told and wrote it down, making sure my handwriting was neat but also a little different from how it usually was. “Do you want me to write that you love him?”

  “Shit no,” Nelly said. “He’d run a mile.”

  The next day, after breakfast, Nelly had posted the note in Timon’s gumboot, one of dozens lined up in pairs along the porch. We were not allowed to wear them inside, eating barefoot, or in hand-­knitted loose-­fitting socks, one of the only items of clothing that wasn’t shared. The adults had, in the early days, shared socks, but in the wet winter months, foot fungus grew quicker than field mushrooms. For the same reason, no one shared gumboots either—­or we tried not to. Most gumboots looked the same, and pairs often got mixed up by mistake, which is exactly what happened when Nelly tried to pick Timon’s out of the lineup. Several minutes later, she watched Hunter come out of the mess hut and push his big hairy foot into the gumboot
with the note in it.

  “Now what do I do?” asked Nelly, panic stricken.

  “Nothing. With a bit of luck he won’t even find it.”

  Days of dread followed. Nelly was sure everyone was looking at her, that everyone knew about the note, not just Hunter but Timon as well. I promised her that wasn’t the case.

  “And was it the case?” said Shakti, interrupting.

  “Not quite,” I said. “We were both wrong.”

  “But the note triggered the meeting?”

  I was enjoying her impatience, the power it gave me. “Yes,” I said. “But we didn’t find that out until right at the end. First, we had to sit through a sermon. You know what Hunter’s like.”

  Shakti nodded. “I do.”

  The meeting was in the chapel, a scrappy tin-­roofed barn at the end of the chook run. We called it that because the seats in there were pews that had been salvaged from a derelict church in Coromandel town. I liked the pews. They were solid, finely hewed, and had arrived on the commune with Bibles still slotted in the back, the first I’d ever seen. I had admired the fine vellum paper and marveled at how much text was squeezed onto each page. But after hippies and the nuclear family, the thing Hunter hated most in the world was religion. He ordered us to tear off the spines and use the soft vellum as toilet paper, which we did, without argument.

  Hunter opened the meeting the way he opened every meeting, with a speech that went on for twenty-­seven years. Lately these had been about oil shock and getting prepared for an economic collapse the following year, but on this occasion he went all the way back to Gaialands’s founding philosophy. He talked about how they had wanted to break away from mainstream society, the stifling conventions of the suburbs, white picket fences, meat and potatoes for dinner followed by cricket commentary on the wireless. Then he got around to the seven of us, how we were the first generation to be born at Gaialands and how special that made us. “You alone are unique among men—­and women, of course,” he added.

  “You have grown up with a unique spirit of freedom that we have instilled in you from birth. To grow up outside the constraints of conventional society, liberated from the shackles of the nuclear family, well”—­he paused for effect and looked at each of us in turn—­“I don’t need to remind you how privileged that makes you.”