The Predictions (28 page)

“Well,” said Loretta, “the same goes for your dirty
underpants. Who do you think scrubs the skids out of those?”

“Skids?” said Paul. “What skids?”

But quiet Loretta wasn’t finished. “Or the toilet seats. They don’t clean themselves. Nor does the shower block. You get three hot meals a day, thanks to us”—she looked at the other women, who nodded—“and then we do all the dishes.” Loretta had shaken off Tom’s embrace, and he stood by her side, dumbfounded. “Has it never occurred to you we might not like cooking and cleaning—that we might want to have a go at something else?”

I could scarcely believe she was voicing the exact same ideas that Shakti had planted in her head all those years ago.

“You can have a go at shoveling shit,” said Paul. “All you have to do is ask.”

“Good as gold,” said Loretta. “And you can scrub your own undies.”

I couldn’t help it. After all the tension, I let out a snort of laughter. I tried covering it with a cough, but everyone had heard, and turned to look at me.

“Strewth,” said Paul, shaking his head and grinning. “Poppy’s right. We just found out Fritz is alive and all we can do is stand here bloody arguing.”

“It’s a bit of a shock, to be honest,” said Susie. “All this time, well, I thought you blokes were to blame.”

“Us?” Hunter glanced from Tom to Paul. “How?”

“I thought Gaia had cursed us. That she wanted us to destroy the commune and start afresh.” She shook her head. “Grief makes you think crazy things.”

“That wasn’t all grief,” Hunter said. “We did a few things wrong, here and there. I’ve had a long time to see the error of our . . . of my ways.”

They stood for a moment in silence, and then Katrina exclaimed, “Which one of us is going to look for him?” She threw her arms in the air and whooped for joy. “Our darling boy Fritz is alive!”

At last, the dour mood lifted. One by one, each member of the group broke into smiles, as though finally the news had set in.

“We’ll all go,” said Paul. “We’ll comb the streets until we find him. Then we’ll bring him home to Gaialands where he belongs.” To Hunter, asking far more than if he was coming to Sydney to find Fritz, he said, “Sport, are you in?”

Hunter gazed out the door through which Shakti had disappeared and then turned back to his comrades. “You bet.”

A cheer went around the parents, the sound of reuniting over shared love for a lost son, and I realized how badly they’d needed to find him, that they had been waiting for something that would bring them back together.

The noise woke up Zachary, and he looked to me for the reassurance only I could give him. It was one of those moments when I felt very keenly that his life was in my hands, just as mine had been in the hands of my parents, and theirs in the hands of their parents before them, a chain of loving but sometimes incompetent responsibility that stretched back to eternity. For the first time in my life, I felt compassion for the adults. All parenting was an experiment, and however wrongheadedly theirs was conceived, they had
carried it out with the best of intentions. Behind every misguided step had been love.

I had carried Zachary over to the window, where it was quieter, and glanced out when something colorful in the distance caught my eye. Some fifty feet away, at the end of a row of sleeping huts, where there was a partly covered area we called the loggia, though it was no more than a lean-to held up with sticks, a woman struggled with a large bundle of what looked to be clothing or textiles. The bundle obscured the woman’s head, but I didn’t need to see her face to know that it was Shakti. She came to the end of the loggia and paused. Her car was parked not far off but between it and her was a stretch of sticky mud that had been all winter in the making. This mud cropped up in the same place each year, and I had stood in that same spot where she now hesitated, deciding whether to take the long, sensible way around or to risk walking through it. Never one to retreat, Shakti adjusted her load, hitching it high on her shoulder, and stepped, barefoot, into the bog. The first couple of paces seemed to go okay, but roughly a third of the way across, the bundle of clothing came unbalanced, and in an effort to right it, Shakti overreached, striding where she ought to have tiptoed. Her legs went out from under her, and the bundle swayed violently to one side before coming undone in a cascade of multicolored silk. Shakti landed, ungracefully, on her backside, the fabric spread out across a nice, wide area.

Up until this point, I had been passively transfixed, as though watching a nature program on television, but now I wondered if I ought to go to her aid. I was next to use
less with Zachary in my arms and the adults were still in a huddle at the other end of the chapel. “Hunter,” I called out, “come quickly.”

He came to the window and stared out at Shakti, now extricating her saris one by one from the mud, and scratched his head, unsure what to do.

Presently, Paul came and joined us. “Looks like she needs a hand.”

Hunter turned to his mate. “You reckon I should give her one?”

“Your call,” said Paul.

With undisguised eagerness, we crowded in front of the glass to watch the show. In gumboots and shorts, his year-round uniform, Hunter strode purposefully in Shakti’s direction, then, when he was still some way off, called out to her. “Do you need a hand?”

She stopped what she was doing and glared at him. Mud streaked one side of her face, and the look in her eye was feral, almost crazed.

Louder this time, and more for our benefit than Shakti’s, Hunter repeated, “I said, ‘Do you need a hand?’”

Shakti looked past him in the direction of the chapel, fixing her gaze on the window where the rest of us stood crowded at the glass. “Fuck you!” she yelled, at the top of her lungs, adding, for good measure, the fingers. “And fuck your lousy commune!”

Gaialands

1989

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, a letter arrived, postmarked London. It had been so long since I had seen his handwriting on anything that I had opened it and started reading before I realized whom it was from.

Dearest Poppy,
it began,
I am so sorry for everything.

A landslide of emotion hit me, but I read on.

When you found me in Cologne, I was the most out of it I have ever been—not just from the overdose, but far away from the man I want to be for you, the man I am. I have loved you since I was ten years old, maybe even since before that, when we were four or five, and the adults started to leave us kids alone in the huts at night. Whenever I woke up and it was too dark or I was having a nightmare, you were the first person I thought of and wanted to be near. I guess other people get comfort from having their parents around (I don’t know) but the only person I get that feeling from is you.

I had to stop reading and find a tissue to blow my nose. I felt exactly the same way about Lukas—that he alone
comforted
me from the trials of the world—but I had never been able to put it into words. Of course we meant more to each other than lovers. We hadn’t been able to rely on our parents so we had relied on each other for everything, since we were kids.

The next part of the letter was about how he had started going to rehab. No one had forced him to go—he had rung up the clinic himself and booked in for rehabilitation treatment for addiction to alcohol and narcotics. He honestly hadn’t realized he was addicted, he wrote, until he took the overdose in Cologne, even though he should have seen the writing on the wall months before that. Marlon had introduced him to everything initially but the ongoing problem was that it was all too easy to get whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. He didn’t have to go out and buy the drugs on the street from a dealer; Fran did all that. She had contacts in every city. He thought that was how she fed her own habit—by taxing whatever she procured for the band. He wasn’t trying to blame her for the mess he was in, but she had enabled him to a level that he would not have been able to reach on his own.
Even that wasn’t her fault,
he wrote.
We were the first band she ever managed, and none of us knew what we were doing. We made every rookie mistake in the book.

I read that part again, struggling to remember the conversation I’d had with Lukas before I walked out of his hotel room. He’d said he was waiting for Fran, that she hadn’t come back, and I had assumed it was because they were having an affair. I’d assumed the same thing from the photograph Paul had shown me but on its own, there was nothing suspicious about a singer and his manager snapped together in a bar. A
manager’s job was to be with her band all the time and photos were taken wherever they went. And Lukas had been waiting for Fran to come to his room that night, not because he was sleeping with her, but because she was his supplier.

I didn’t waste time writing him a letter back. I packed up Zachary and my things and the next day Paul drove us to the international airport in Auckland. I had just enough in my savings account to pay for our airfare, and once I had booked it I rang Lukas and told him when to meet us at Heathrow at the other end.

“Did you get my letter?” he said, sounding worried that I hadn’t.

“Yes, I got your letter. It made me cry.”

“You’re not mad with me about the drugs?”

“Not at all,” I said. “I thought you were shagging your manager.”

“Dude,” said Lukas. “The first rule of rock ’n’ roll is don’t screw the crew.”

“I don’t think she follows that code.”

“Oh, everyone’s slept with Marlon. That doesn’t count.”

Heathrow Airport was jam-packed with the endless variety of nationalities and colors and social groups that did not exist anywhere outside of London, but even among that crowd, Lukas stood out. It was one of the only times in our life—the other was when I came across him performing in that basement bar in Chelsea—that I had ever gotten a true first impression, seeing him as a stranger would, not as a member of my immediate family. The ridiculous curls were gone. He had put on weight, had cut his hair short, and wore normal clothes. He
looked once again like the boy I loved, and had done for as far back as I could remember.

Approaching him, I suffered a sudden bout of shyness, a fear that someone like him, someone
famous,
couldn’t possibly love an ordinary girl like me, and it was the first time I knew to call it that, and not to mask it with a trick or a prediction that would keep him at a distance.

Lukas’s expression had been neutral but the minute he saw us it bloomed with love. I had not seen him look like that for a very long time, not on the day we were married, not in the hospital when Zachary had pneumonia, perhaps not even on the day our son was born. The real Lukas, I realized, had been absent for a very long time. He smiled his goofy smile, mirroring mine, and we wrapped our arms around each other and sandwiched Zachary in the middle, the heart of our little family.

“What have you been feeding him?” he said, squeezing the fat rolls on Zachary’s arm. “He looks like a pudding.”

“So do you,” I said, patting his stomach. “Maybe not a pudding but a champagne socialist.”

“I don’t fit my leather pants anymore. If Marlon finds out, he’ll fire me.”

“He can’t fire you. You’re his muse.”

We walked hand in hand down the causeway to the car park building, where Lukas had trouble finding the car he had borrowed from a friend, an old yellow Renault Five. It was rusted on the outside and filled with apple cores and parking tickets and squashed polystyrene cups, but Lukas wouldn’t mention the car’s shabby appearance because he
knew I didn’t care. We had been brought up not to mind that sort of thing, and we still didn’t mind it, nor did we have to explain.

“You’ll never guess who came back to Gaialands while I was there,” I said, remembering that I hadn’t told him yet about any of the insane stuff that had happened.

“Who?”

“Shakti.”

“That crazy witch?”

“You were right about her.”

I told him of Shakti’s deception, how she had helped Fritz run away to Sydney, and that Elisabeth, when I rang her up and told her, had immediately set off to find him, not caring if it interfered with anyone else’s plans.

“Wow,” he said, incredulous. “That’s some heavy shit.”

“I know. They want to find him and bring him home to the commune, but I’m not sure he’ll want to go back.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t go straight to Sydney to look for him.”

“I wanted to,” I said to Lukas. “But I wanted to see you more.”

“You really mean that?”

“With all my heart,” I said, resting my hand on his knee, then feeling self-conscious about it being there. “I never want to be apart from you again.”

Lukas drove on in silence, studying the oncoming cars, and then I lost my nerve and withdrew my hand.

“I liked it there. Put it back.”

When I did as I was told, he moved my hand a little
closer to his crotch, before turning to me and grinning. “I guess it’s safe, now that you don’t believe in it, to tell you what was in my prediction.”

“I
knew
it, you dick. I knew you were only pretending you didn’t look.”

“Of course I looked.” He stared straight ahead at the road, teasing out the moment, a smirk playing at the edges of his mouth.

“And?”

“It was nothing.”

“What do you mean ‘nothing’?”

“There was literally nothing in my prediction. It was a blank piece of card.”

“She left it blank?” Of all the things it could have been, I had not expected that. “And that’s why you thought it was bullshit?”

Lukas laughed. “Finally! My wife sees the light.”

I laughed along with him, mainly to mask my incredulity, but then, when I thought about it, I wondered if he’d waited so long to tell me his prediction because it
had
meant something to him once. If he had really always thought it was bullshit, knowing Lukas, at every available opportunity he would have used the contents, or lack of it, as ammunition against me. But he hadn’t. When it came to us, he had been insecure, and I didn’t think that was all down to how much stock I’d held in
my
prediction. Had he been under the influence too? Was it in the way he’d lost his nerve when we first got to London, and later on, in the way he’d hit self-destruct? Perhaps underneath all that striving had been the
fear he’d amount to nothing. “That blank card,” I said. “Are you sure it didn’t scare the crap out of you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“It would have scared me.”

“You’d have let it.”

I dropped the subject. If I had stumbled on the truth, Lukas wasn’t ready to admit it. And maybe he was right not to. I had given my prediction too much power, and irrespective of how false it turned out to be, through that one act of stupidity, I had very nearly lost the love of my life.

“I’m so sorry for everything I put us through.” The words sounded so inadequate, barely hinting at how immensely at fault I had been, and I supposed I would find myself repeating them many times in the years to come. “I’ve been such a fool.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” Lukas said. “I’ve been foolish, you’ve been foolish—we both got taken for a ride by a filthy, rotten hippie—but it doesn’t matter because we found our way back to each other.”

Lukas’s description of Shakti made me smile, and Zachary chose this moment to pipe up from the backseat with a deliriously enthusiastic “Ooowah” of his own, as if he had been listening to our conversation and had something to add. When we both turned to look at him at the same time, he was so pleased to have drawn our attention that an ecstatic grin spread over his entire face, crinkling his eyes and shooting drool down his chin. He had put so much effort into the exclamation and the smile that afterward I thought he would collapse from exhaustion. I loved him so much it brought a lump to my throat.

“And we’ve got him,” said Lukas, beaming in my direction.

I took a deep breath, the first since we had landed at Heathrow, and made sure to measure our good fortune. We had money, health, brick walls to keep out the rain. We had Zachary. We had each other. We had left the commune far behind but it was the glue that held us together.