The Predictions Page 5

  He was right that he didn’t need to remind us. We’d heard this speech so many times before that I sometimes fell asleep with his words ringing in my ears like a fire drill. We were privileged. The hope for the future! The chosen ones who would lead humanity into a New Age of enlightenment. The Age of Aquarius is nigh!

  I didn’t tell Shakti that at this point, I had glanced over at Lukas, and he had done something he never had before: he rolled his eyes at me and mimed a yawn. It wasn’t his reaction that surprised me—­we were all bored to death—­but the fact that he had directed it at me, and not his best friend, Timon, who sat next to him, and with whom he most often shared his asides. I had smiled back to let him know I agreed with him and then I felt warm all over, as though I had moved out of the shade.

  When I tuned in again to Hunter, he was still going strong. “You won’t have to unlearn bad habits, like we’ve had to. You’ll be free to love everybody the same—­to give to your community, your planet, without putting your immediate family first. I believe this detachment will lead to a higher consciousness that will benefit the whole of mankind. The Aquarian Age is coming, and you are the ones who will lead us to a new world order.” He put his hand on his heart and took a deep breath. “What we’re about to reveal to the seven of you is something we swore we never would, but in light of recent events, we realize that we have to. My only hope is that the work we have done here has created a foundation that cannot be undone—­that the seeds we have sown will bear fruit.”

  Hunter stopped at this point and looked around the room again and I could have sworn he was nervous. “Bloody hell, this is difficult,” he said, looking down at his notes.

  “Go on,” said Paul. “It’s now or never.”

  “You’re right. Let’s get it over with, shall we?” In a loud voice, Hunter called out the names of the adults, one ­couple at a time, and asked them to stand in separate groupings along the low wooden platform. First, Susie and Katrina, then Tom and Loretta, then Paul and Sigi, and finally he called to Elisabeth to join him. When everyone was in place, he signaled to Tom and Loretta to shuffle closer to Susie and Katrina, forming a group of four. Tom, in this grouping, appeared content, almost smug, an expression that was ill matched by his wife’s one of discomfort.

  For a few minutes they stood in silence.

  “Oh my word,” Nelly whispered, “this is it.”

  She had guessed but I hadn’t, not yet. Then Hunter called out my name and Fritz’s, and told us to come and stand next to him, and I did what I was told, stumbling up the short climb to the podium. When I turned around, I saw Fritz hadn’t followed me, and stood in his pew looking as defiant as ever. “Come on, Fritz, this is important,” said Hunter, summoning him with his hand.

  “If it was so important, why didn’t you tell us ten years ago, or better still, when we were born?” Fritz had already guessed too; I felt so dense.

  Hunter grimaced. He looked like he wanted to punch Fritz. “I acknowledge and honor your feelings, Fritz, but I’d like us to save any discussion until the end of the meeting.”

  Fritz didn’t move. He did obstinate better than anyone else.

  An edge crept into Hunter’s voice as he said, “Fritz. Get up here, now.”

  I caught Fritz’s eye and silently pleaded with him. C’mon. Don’t make me stand up here by myself. This did the trick, and an audible sigh of relief went around the chapel when he shuffled to the podium. This is bullshit, his expression said as he quietly took his place.

  Hunter called out to Lukas and Meg, the second youngest, to stand next to Sigi and Paul, and they did so obediently, Lukas with an air of resigned boredom. Sigi beamed at Meg, and then at Lukas, as though she had just won them in a lottery, and I noticed for the first time that Lukas and Meg’s sandy hair and freckled skin were identical to Sigi’s.

  Next Hunter asked Timon, Nelly and Ned to join the group of four that included Susie and Katrina. “Are you okay with this?” he said, directing his question at Tom and Loretta, the other ­couple with them.

  “We don’t have any choice,” said Loretta, looking pale. “Just get it over with.”

  Listening to Hunter call out names and watching everyone move to their places, I felt seasick, like I might fall over. We were about to find out who our parents were—­were in fact already standing next to them—­but instead of anticipation, joy, or excitement, I felt dread, as though we were all on a train that was about to go off the rails. Why were they doing this now? Had something gone wrong?

  When I looked at Nelly, I knew what it was. She was white knuckled, staring at Timon. Had she fallen in love with her brother? He was part of her group, along with Ned, her twin, but it didn’t make sense that they were grouped with two ­couples—­three women and Tom.

  It was Tom who said, “For goddess’s sake, Hunter, get on with it!” He put his arm staunchly around Loretta. She was tight-­mouthed, frozen.

  Hunter was grave. “The ­people standing with you are your next of kin—­your parents, your brothers and sisters, your children.” He paused, for effect, and grinned at me. “Hello, daughter.”

  He pronounced the word “daughter” as though it were in a foreign language, and my first instinct was to flinch. This was horrible, a cruel joke. For seventeen years the adults had kept our parentage a secret. For as long as we could talk, we had been forbidden even from speculating and now they were undoing all that because they had changed their minds? I glared at the man who’d just told me he was my father, and I didn’t think I trusted a word that came out of his mouth.

  I wasn’t the only one floundering to make sense of it all. Timon, who had been silent up to now, piped up. “What about us?” He swiveled to face Susie and Katrina and Loretta. “Which of these women is my mother?”

  “I’m your father,” said Tom, proudly, “and your mother is”—­he squeezed Loretta, who stood rigid by his side—­“your mother is Katrina.”

  Katrina smiled, sheepishly, and everyone stared at her, and then at Loretta because it didn’t make sense that Tom had fathered children with Katrina and not with his wife.

  “Loretta can’t have children,” said Tom, as Loretta burst into tears. Everyone avoided looking at her, although she tried to smile bravely and said, “At least I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to be a mother. That wouldn’t have happened outside the commune.”

  Upon hearing of Loretta’s infertility, Shakti actually gasped. “That poor woman,” she said solemnly, placing her hand over her heart. “Imagine her pain.”

  “I guess,” I said, though truthfully I couldn’t. The cause of Loretta’s pain was outside my realm of experience; at that point in the proceedings I had been more consumed with my own—­and with Nelly’s. “Here’s where it gets really weird,” I said, enjoying Shakti’s spellbound expression.

  Throughout the meeting, Nelly had been very quiet, but she was unable to contain herself any longer. “Timon can’t be my brother,” she burst out. “He looks nothing like me—­or Ned!”

  “That’s because he’s your half brother,” Susie had said calmly. “I gave birth to you and Ned.”

  “My half brother?” repeated Nelly. “I don’t understand.”

  “You and Timon have the same father,” said Tom, standing a few inches taller and grinning like a fool. “Me. We could scarcely believe it when Susie fell pregnant with twins.” For a moment he flushed with pride at having fathered a miracle, before remembering the poor barren woman standing next to him. Loretta had by this time stopped crying and was doing her best to appear not to care.

  “I think you can guess why we had to tell you,” Hunter said, fishing a piece of paper out of his pocket and handing it to Nelly. “I believe this belongs to you.”

  It was the love note.

  “Oh, wow,” said Shakti. “That’s so dramatic. How did Nelly react?”

  “She ran crying from the bar
n.”

  “Poor girl.” Shakti shook her head. “I don’t understand how they could have been so naïve.”

  “Who?”

  “Your parents. I mean, what did they think would happen when you all hit puberty? That you’d just carry on playing cowboys and Indians and not try to have sex with each other?”

  “No one’s done that.”

  “Not that you know of.”

  “I think I’d know.” But she was right. Our parents had been naïve. Even before the love note, things had been slowly changing, and the adults should have noticed sooner. We hadn’t, for example, showered together since we were about thirteen, when the gaze of one of the boys had lingered a little too long on the newly formed bumps on Nelly’s chest, and the tiny curls sprouting between her legs, and she had seen them looking and covered herself up for good. I was older than her but a late bloomer and even though I had nothing to cover up, I did the same. As did Meg, and then the boys, bringing to an abrupt end the rowdy soap and water fights we had enjoyed since we were little.

  “Was that the end of the meeting?” Shakti asked. “Or was there more?”

  “Hunter tried to tell us that nothing would change because they didn’t want it to. He thought we could all just carry on as before, as though we hadn’t just found out they had been lying to us for seventeen years. He said to try and remember our beliefs—­”

  “You mean his beliefs,” said Shakti.

  “Yes,” I said, with dawning recognition, though I wasn’t quite sure yet of what. “His beliefs.”

  “What about the other adults? How did they behave?”

  I opened my mouth to speak and found myself choking up. “Some of the parents, like Sigi, tried to turn back the clock. Now that her children knew she was their mother, she expected to have a special bond with them. She wanted to be close. Meg was okay with that for a while but Lukas went the other way—­he didn’t want anything to do with her.”

  “Ah, Lukas,” said Shakti. “Doomed to prefer unavailable women.”

  I wondered how she could have drawn that conclusion about Lukas from what I had told her, but she didn’t explain, and I didn’t ask.

  “As far as I know, he’s never had a girlfriend.”

  Shakti smiled, beguilingly, and got up to boil the kettle for a second pot of tea, refreshing the tea leaves with scalding water. “I don’t suppose Elisabeth was all over you and Fritz,” she said, settling across the table from me again. “But I could be wrong.”

  “She wasn’t.” In fact, if anything, Elisabeth had been even more aloof than usual, barricading herself in the kitchen and bottling enough fruit to last through half a dozen winters. “And Hunter stuck to his word, too.”

  Shakti shook her head and sighed. “That must have been a confusing time for everyone.”

  Confusing and raw. That night, after the meeting, was the only time in the history of Gaialands that anyone forgot to sound the cowbell for dinner. But the worst part had been the crying that came at night from the adults’ huts. There were loud male voices, slamming doors, and at breakfast the next morning, red eyes and silence. In the daytime, the women neglected their chores or went about them at a slower pace than usual. Over in the workshop, the men shouted and cursed at their machinery. When the combustion engine that Hunter had been working on failed, he exploded in a fit of rage.

  None of this was talked about openly among the seven of us kids, but it was silently agreed upon that we would not allow ourselves to be drawn into whatever catastrophe had overcome the adults. We achieved this by spending more time on our own, taking tents and camping at the base of Mount Aroha for several nights, inventing reasons to hitch, in groups of two or three, into Coromandel town. We grew even closer than we had been before.

  Then one day, to our relief, it all stopped. Normality was restored. The adults ceased trying to be mothers and fathers and went back to behaving like the group of caring but slightly detached parents they had always been. They must have had some sort of discussion among themselves but if they did, we were not party to it. We experienced this as a kind of victory. By getting the adults to back off, we had won, and I thought it served them right. We had become the thing they had engineered us to be: a generation of kids who loved everyone the same, who had no favorites among the men and women who had raised them.

  I didn’t say any of this to Shakti, but in my opinion if the adults didn’t like the way we had turned out, that wasn’t our fault. It was theirs.

  From off in the distance, the cowbell sounded for dinner. I hadn’t realized it but for the last few minutes, I had been staring out the window of Shakti’s caravan, lost in thought, and only dimly aware of what she had been doing. I saw now that she had gathered up the cards with the strange hieroglyphics. She was shuffling through them, studying what she had drawn. Seeing her do that reminded me that I had forgotten to ask for the thing I had come here to request.

  “You know how you’ve been compiling everyone’s astrology charts?” I began.

  “I was,” said Shakti. “But I’m starting to think you folks might need something stronger.”

  “Stronger?”

  “To shift the energy around here.”

  I had no idea what she meant.

  “Whatever it is, it’s going to have to involve all of you—­the adults, but also the kids. Maybe a . . . ritual of some sort.” At the word “ritual” her eyes lit up. “Yes, a cleansing ritual,” she repeated. “Or a rite of passage.” She had risen from her seat and was busy going through a set of drawers that were built under the kitchen bench. “Or maybe something that combines the two.” She pulled out folders tied with string and sheaves of loose paper, and a few well-­worn hardback books.

  “Tell the others I’ll be late for dinner,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll get Elisabeth to keep a plate warm for you.”

  Much as I wanted to stay, I knew I had been dismissed. I had been in Shakti’s caravan for hours, and I was exhausted and hungry after so much talking. It had been a relief to unburden myself, but as I wandered away from the stand of willows where her caravan was parked, I also had the uneasy feeling that I had gotten caught up in the moment and said too much.

  On my way to the mess hut for dinner, I passed the ruins of an old wooden fence that had once functioned as a kind of playpen when the seven of us were little. The space it enclosed was large and grassy and shaded by trees, and there had always been two or three adults stationed inside it with us. They had built it, I supposed, to shield us from the many hazards to be found on a working farm—­silage pits and machinery and exuberant bulls—­but also to prevent us from wandering into the creek.

  Inevitably, the day arrived that we were more interested in climbing out of the enclosure than staying inside it, and it was a memory from this era that assaulted me on my way to dinner that night.

  I would have been about three or four. I had climbed to the top of the wooden fence post, whereupon I stood up and turned around and proudly waved to the other children. One of the women shrieked and ran toward me, shouting. The noise and the expression on her face frightened me and I tried to shuffle away from her, toppling backward—­or maybe it was forward—­and hitting the ground with a crunch. The next din came from me, screaming and yelling and tears. One of the women picked me up and comforted me, folding her arms around me and drying my eyes with the hem of her dress. She did this to soothing effect, but only for a moment before I was prized out of her arms by one of the other women. The faces of these women have blended together to form a single motherly presence, and the same is true of all my early childhood memories. What I remember most clearly is the first woman’s tears and the firm voice of the other woman as she said, “You can’t do that—­it isn’t your turn.”

  After the conversation with Shakti, the memory took on a note of desolation. I had always thought the adults were united in
the way they had brought us up in a litter, like puppies, but that wasn’t the case, not even close. At every stage, there had been disagreements and doubts and at least one of the women had tried to buck the rules.

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  CHAPTER 4

  Gaialands

  1978

  I VISITED SHAKTI’S CARAVAN on my own one last time that spring. I was still disappointed that she hadn’t offered to do my astrology chart, and when I finally summoned the courage to ask her outright, she refused.

  “All that is irrelevant now,” she said, gathering up the growing pile of cards she had been embellishing with ink and watercolor. “I’m working on something bigger. It’s really going to shift a few paradigms—­yours included.”

  “Is that what the cards are for?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Can I see one?”

  Shakti hesitated. “You can look at this one, but the drawing isn’t finished and I haven’t written the words to go with it.” She handed me a card festooned with symbols around the central figure of a woman. “This prediction is for a girl,” she said. “These symbols here represent fertility, and these ones here mean love.”

  “Why are there so many of them?”

  “Because the girl is destined to have many children and always be loved. She’s very fortunate. I see great harmony in her future.”

  The woman in the card was little more than a stick figure in a dress, and a bright childlike sun shone down on her. I hoped it was my prediction but the fact that she’d let me see it meant it was more likely to be for someone else. “Do we all get one of those?”