The Predictions (7 page)

Shakti flitted between us, handing each person a black felt package tied with ribbon. She placed one in my hand and whispered for me not to open it yet, adding, “It’s bad luck.” When she had given a package to everyone in the group, she stood to one side and raised her arms to the sky. “I present you each with a prediction—a glimpse into the future from the highest order of the sacred realms. In this task, I am merely a messenger.” She bowed her head and held her hands in prayer position. “Om shanti om. You may look at your predictions.”

I unfolded the piece of felt in my hand. Inside was a rectangle of cardboard, and on it was an ink drawing, the lines heavy, not at all like the delicate one Shakti had shown me in her caravan.

I squinted to make out the drawing, of a woman standing next to a man. The man was a king of some sort—he wore armor and a crown, and carried a shield and a sword. Above them was a giant heart, cartoon red, and at their feet an empty cradle. The woman had a big blue tear running down her cheek, a blob that was larger than her mouth. On the back of the card Shakti had written

In a faraway land your true love waits . . .
But your womb shall bear only sorrow.

The first part of the prediction thrilled me. Somewhere in the world, my true love was waiting. All I had to do was to find him. The cryptic words leapt off the page and straight into the ironclad part of my brain, where memories lived that I’d never forget, even if I wanted to. The second part barely registered. I was not planning on bearing anything with my womb, an organ that seemed wholly abstract to me.

Fritz stood next to me, studying his card. Even in the firelight, I could see it was wildly different from mine in one important aspect—the bright color. Almost the entire card was green, a riot of leaves and the trunk of a tree, colored brown. Inside this trunk crouched a boy. The tree sheltered the boy but he was also part of it, his feet mingling with the root system. Fritz had always been crazy about climbing trees, had from a young age tried to scale everything from the smallest sapling to the giant kauri that stood at the base of Mount Aroha. It was a way to give his clubfoot the finger, and his card made perfect sense.

Everyone crowded around, showing each other their predictions, and I let them see mine, but not for too long. I worried that sharing it would take away its power. For the same reason I tried not to be nosy about what the others got despite how curious I was. I saw flashes of this and that—a dagger of some sort on Timon’s card, and a wizard on Ned’s; on Meg’s a woman looking at her reflection in the
mirror—but I did not stop to consider what their symbols meant.

The mood was celebratory, and the adults came forward and embraced us, passing around a few bottles of homemade pear wine that we were allowed to try. Lukas hung back, taking no interest in anyone’s prediction, only in the booze. Wine was a rare privilege, and he and Timon guzzled as much as they could, trying to get drunk.

Nelly linked her arm through mine and squeezed it. She was fizzing with excitement and held out her prediction for me to see. Sure enough it was a version of the one Shakti had shown me in her caravan, the woman surrounded by love and happiness and children. It was even more colorful than I remembered, and Shakti had added the stick figure of a man, holding the woman’s hand.

“There he is,” she said, pointing to the stick man. “My husband! I wonder what these are?” She caressed the little symbols with her index finger.

“Your kids,” I said. “You’re going to have heaps of them.”

“How do you know?”

“Shakti told me.”

“Wow!” Nelly laughed. “What about you?”

Reluctantly, I showed her my prediction. She examined the front, then turned it over. “Crikey,” she said. “A fellow with a sword—and he lives in a faraway land.” She ran her finger over the handsome king. “That’s odd. I always thought you’d end up with Lukas.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “You guys always seemed made for each
other.” She ran her finger over the writing. “This other bit is weird. ‘Your womb shall bear only sorrow.’ What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” I said, feeling defensive. “I don’t even want to have kids.”

“Of course you don’t now.” Nelly looked again at the card. “But what about when you’re older?”

I took back my card. “I can live with that if it means I get him.” Then I vowed not to show it to anyone else.

Across the fire, Lukas was kidding around with the other boys, but he caught my eye and smiled. I hoped he hadn’t heard my conversation with Nelly.

It was time to go. Paul and Hunter had been flinging wet logs on the fire, and it hissed with steam as the flames extinguished. I hadn’t noticed until then that it was the only source of light, and as the fire went out, we were plunged into shadow. A couple of the adults lit kerosene lamps to light the way down the hillside, and Hunter split us into walking groups, two lamps apiece. Nelly and Meg had congregated around Hunter and Shakti and a few of the women, who were laughing and talking excitedly, but I didn’t feel like joining in and found myself bringing up the rear with Paul and the boys. Feeling tired after so much excitement, I mechanically followed the footsteps of the person in front of me and barely noticed Lukas walking next to me until his hand found mine in the dark. The feeling of it there was so natural, as if we had been holding hands all along, and after only the briefest glance into each other’s eyes, we went back to looking straight ahead.

I had pushed the felt-wrapped prediction to the bottom of my shorts pocket, but knowing it was there, while holding Lukas’s hand, felt treacherous. Perhaps that feeling would go once he had shown me his prediction. “What did you get?” I said, turning to him in the dark and trying to make out his expression.

“No idea,” he said. “I threw it away.”

“You didn’t even look at it?”

“What for? It’s a load of crap.”

“What if it isn’t?” I said. “What if it’s true?”

I stopped walking, as did he.

“Please don’t tell me you believe in it.” His eyes were pleading, but his mouth was a smirk.

When I didn’t respond, we both knew what that meant.

I let go of his hand, and we continued on, the silence between us masked by the crunch of twigs underfoot.

Maybe Lukas felt bad about what he’d said because after a time, he added, “Anyway, who cares what I think. What’d you get?”

“You’re right,” I said, suddenly aware that I ought not to show him. “It’s silly.”

“So silly you can’t show me?” Now he sounded bruised.

Reluctantly, I handed him the prediction, hoping he wouldn’t be able to see it in the dark. He glanced at it for a few seconds, then handed it back, saying nothing.

“Well?” I said.

“Well, what? I’ve told you what I think.”

We couldn’t see two feet in front of us on the dark hillside, but the first part of the descent went off without a
hitch. We followed the same route we had taken on the way up, sticking to the tracks we had hacked out of the bracken. But about a third of the way down, the party at the front came to a halt, and word filtered back that they had lost the path—our tracks had disappeared. They were going to start forging their way through virgin bush, cutting new tracks.

The group I was with thought that was a crazy idea. “Why don’t we backtrack?” suggested Timon. “See if we can find the original path? We’ll be up here all night if we have to cut a new one.”

“Good idea,” said Paul. “Lukas, you tell the others and I’ll go back with Tom and Timon.”

Lukas called out to the group ahead of us to stop and wait. When there was no response, he walked up the path toward them and called out again. But still they ignored him. “Wait here,” he said, and disappeared down the dark track, while at the same time, Paul and Timon, with the other lamp, clambered up the hill in the opposite direction.

Seconds later, I stood in the pitch dark on my own, barely able to see my hand in front of my face. “Guys?” I called out. “Can someone come back?” I tried to walk in the direction Lukas had gone, but with no light to guide me, it was impossible to see where to put my feet. The ground was uneven, crisscrossed with branches, and fell away sharply to one side. The only way I could make anything out was to look above my head, where small patches of moonlight filtered through the trees.

I sat down on the path and waited. Sooner or later, I rea
soned, either Lukas would return, or Paul and Timon would come back for me. I could hear them scratching through the undergrowth somewhere behind me. And if I squinted, I could even see the head of a tiny, bobbing lamp. No reason to panic, not yet.

Sure enough, I had not been waiting long when from somewhere not far away, Lukas called out, “Poppy? Where are you?”

“Over here,” I replied as loudly as I could. “Only I don’t know where that is.”

“Stay put,” he said. “I’ll come to you.”

“Okay.”

He called out: “Keep talking. So I can hear where you are.”

I stood up, so my voice would carry further. “What should I say?”

“Anything. My name will do.” His voice had already grown louder; he was getting close.

“Lukas?”

“Say it again. I’m almost there.”

“Lukas.” A twig snapped nearby, and I turned my head in the direction of the noise. “Lukas, is that you?”

“Poppy,” he said, beside my ear—so close I could hear him breathing. His fingers brushed my arm, warm air hit my face, and I froze. Aside from my own pulse, all noise had drained from the world. I was sure that if I moved so much as an inch to one side, our bodies would collide, but when I did dare to move, we didn’t meet. I reached my hands out where I thought he was, but nothing was there. How could he have been standing right next to me, then disappeared?
Seconds passed while I waited for him to loom out of the bush, but the more I tried to see into the shadows, the darker they became. “Lukas?” I whispered, hearing panic in my voice. “Are you there?” But there was no response.

For a few seconds the silence ticked with the sound of my own heartbeat, then somewhere up ahead a branch snapped, triggering a landslide of soil and leaves. There was a bloom of light, and as the forest around me lit up, I saw that I was alone. Lukas was heading toward me with a lamp, but he was not by my side as I had thought.

“Poppy!” he said when he saw me. “Are you okay?”

I couldn’t speak. I was too stunned.

“What happened?” He rushed to my side. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“I thought . . . I thought someone was standing next to me.”

“I’m here now.” He put his arms around me, and I sank into his chest. Some people, when you hugged them, were lighter than you expected, filled with air, but not Lukas. He was more solid than he looked, radiating a steady, comforting heat. In that moment, I didn’t ever want to let go of him.

“I stopped the others,” Lukas said, “but it took some bloody convincing.”

Before we pulled apart, I stood on my tiptoes and sought out his mouth, wanting to taste his warmth with an eagerness that amazed me. Everything about Lukas was so familiar that I had expected kissing him would be like going into a room I had been in before. And in some ways it was. I knew the scent of his breath, what the small of his back would feel like when I put my hand there, how his skin would be
firm yet soft. But I was ill prepared for my response. When I kissed Lukas, I wanted to consume him. I wasn’t ready for the strength of my desire and pulled away, astonished.

Afterward, we said nothing. Lukas seemed just as unable to comprehend what had happened as I did, but I took his hand, like before, and we searched around for the others.

Paul, Tom, and Timon had set off up the hill behind us, but we soon heard their voices coming from a position parallel to us on the hillside. At first they weren’t loud enough for us to be able to make out what they were saying, but then we heard “Over here! We’ve found the path.” It was unclear quite where “over here” was, but Lukas suggested we go back for the others and then retrace Paul and Timon’s steps up the hill. The process was more complicated than it needed to be—some stragglers had insisted on continuing to hack their way down through the undergrowth—but eventually all sixteen of us stood in single file on the same part of the slope, the number confirmed by a head count, and ready to commence our descent.

Paul and Timon led the way down from there and were much more cautious to not lose the path again. Even so, progress was painstaking, and several hours passed before we finally reached the lower slopes, where thick native bush gave way to meadows that were dotted with wildflowers during the day. My sandaled feet were black with forest mulch and my legs were covered in scratches. It was the chilliest part of the night, the air like a cold bath, and in the silvery light of the meadow, I felt tired. The descent had taken so long that we had lost faith, and it showed on our gloomy
faces. Even Shakti looked spent, as if she had left her magic power on the mountaintop, and now she was mortal like the rest of us. I remembered the phantom on the hillside, the one I had thought was Lukas, and realized it hadn’t been him at all but the man in my prediction, the one I hadn’t met yet. He was there still, had followed us down the mountain, shadowing us, a few paces behind, even as I held on tightly to Lukas’s hand.

Nambassa

1979

F
OR THE LAST FEW
summers we had traveled to the Nambassa music festival near Waikino, at the bottom of the Coromandel Peninsula. There wasn’t only music at the festival, but also workshops on yoga, whole foods, meditation, rammed-earth housing, and recycling for biogas fuel—all the stuff that we had been doing for years but others still thought of as alternative. The guy who ran it was a friend of Hunter’s and a regular visitor at Gaialands. He was trying to raise money to build an eco village where he could ride out the social and economic collapse that was coming, in 1980 or perhaps 1981, that would destroy the world order they loathed so much. On one of these visits, he and Hunter had stayed up late into the night talking about it, and they were still talking about it the next morning when we met in the mess hall for breakfast. Paul and Hunter were going to the festival to demonstrate a wood-fired tractor, and the women were selling vegetables and fruit,
but the seven of us were going for the rock bands and not much else. We had been talking about it for months.

We set off the day before the festival in a convoy of utes and Land Rovers, packed to the roof racks with people, produce, and canvas tents. Lukas had his acoustic guitar. He was hoping to find some dudes there he could jam with, or better still, a band he could join. I was holding his hand, which I had done nonstop since the night of the predictions, and speculating, which I had also been doing nonstop, as to whether his hand, or my hand, would ever wander anywhere else. The desire to touch him was strong and constant, but I wasn’t sure it was right to lead him on if I was going to spend my life with someone else.

We had not gone very far past the turnoff to the festival site when we were forced to get out of the Land Rover and walk the rest of the way. Half of New Zealand was on their way to Waikino for the weekend, and the road was backed up with cars and house trucks almost as far as the turnoff to Thames. The closer we got to the festival site, the less clothes people wore, and by the time we had passed through the entrance gate and made our way across the paddocks to the festival village, I was starting to feel like a prude in my crocheted bikini top and running shorts. It was hard not to stare at all the bare breasts, comparing the different shapes and sizes.

The boys—Lukas, Ned, and Timon—tore off straightaway to find the bands, but Nelly had promised to attend Shakti’s yoga workshop, and she persuaded me to come with her. I was reluctant to go in search of Shakti but went
for Nelly’s sake. Since Lukas had been taking up more of my time, I had been feeling guilty about neglecting her, my best friend. We found the yoga workshop on the hill above the village, where someone had built a mandala decorated with multicolored flags. Underneath it a half dozen people creaked from mountain pose to downward dog and back again. Shakti stood at the front, guiding and demonstrating in loose Indian pants, her voice slow and mesmerizing, as though trying to hypnotize her followers into a deep sleep. When the session finished, everyone bowed, then Shakti went and stood by a tent pole and got undressed.

We went over to join her.

“Isn’t this just the most wonderful place?” she said, introducing us to her friend Johannes, who had sailed all the way from Holland on a ketch. This boat was moored off the beach, and Shakti told us she was planning to swim out there later to meet some other friends. Johannes was tall and blond, with a long shaggy beard, and he was about to do a Reiki demonstration under the mandala.

“As a matter of fact, I need a volunteer,” he said, looking hopefully at Nelly, and then at me.

A few minutes later, I lay under the flags on a folding massage table, eyes shut, my body covered with a yellow blanket, while Johannes hovered his arms slowly up and down my torso. He had warned me that I might feel strange sensations in my belly while he performed his spiritual surgery, but despite my best efforts to surrender to the experience, to feel what he said I would feel, the only thing I was aware of was the displacement of air as he flapped his arms above
me. I tried very hard not to nod off, but at this too I failed. Johannes woke me up with a persistent prod to the shoulder.

When I went to stand up, he said, “Don’t forget to drink plenty of water. It helps your body to release all the toxins.” He warned me that I might feel dizzy for a few hours while the surgery healed. “The energy around your heart chakra was very blocked,” he added. “I had a hard time shifting it.”

Shakti, who had been listening in, said, “Really?”

“Yes,” he said. “You were right.”

I was annoyed that Shakti had talked about me to her friend, but I said nothing.

The boys were at the Aerial Railway, but it took us a long time to find this oddly named stage, and so many people were crowded near it that I worried we wouldn’t see them at all. Then I heard someone singing very fast and very out of tune, beating out a rhythm on the side of his guitar. Some of the lyrics were familiar but the melody was mangled beyond recognition. Then the person playing it came into view. It was Lukas, head down, strumming furiously.

I felt so embarrassed. What was he doing up there, playing so badly in front of people we didn’t know? We had joked about it on the way to Nambassa, all the hippies, bonged out of their trees, trying to play Dylan. Now Lukas was one of them. It took all my self-control not to run up and stop him.

But when I looked at the faces around me I was startled to find they weren’t cringing. People were nodding in appreciation. Some were guys with short, spiky hair, but most near the front were girls. A few had their eyes closed in rapture. One woman, very pretty, licked her lips. Whenever Lukas
glanced up from his guitar, he appeared scared, not from stage fright but from something else, and it took me a while to work out what that was. There was something predatory about these women, and they weren’t embarrassed about his playing. In fact, they wanted to fuck him.

I had multiple reactions at once. First, to laugh out loud. How absurd! Then I panicked, because these women wanted something that was rightfully mine. I had never known such possessiveness, and the force of it made me giddy. A hectic few minutes followed, and by the time Lukas reached the end of his song, my view of him had utterly changed. On the final strum, I rushed to him.

“There you are,” he said, looking triumphant but also wanting something from me, which I guessed was approval.

“You did great,” I said. “Really great.”

“Thanks, Poppy.” He grinned and bent to put away his guitar. Most of the women had dispersed, but a few stuck around, checking out Lukas but also waiting for a sign from me. I understood what was expected, what I had to do. While Lukas fiddled with his guitar, oblivious, I put my arm around his shoulder, claiming him.

Sure enough, within seconds, the few remaining women had lost interest and walked away. Lukas stood up and smiled at me. “Shall we go?”

“Yes,” I said, and leaned in to kiss him, not in the usual timid way but with purpose. When I let him go, Lukas was dazed.

“Crikey, Poppy, what happened?”

“Like I said, you were great.”

We made our way in a group to the main stage, a gargantuan wooden structure in the bottom of a natural amphitheater. The arch above was painted with cosmic symbols and a giant eagle beneath an exploding sun. Thousands of people danced in front of the stage, their bare feet stomping up clouds of dust from the bone-dry earth.

“Come on,” said Lukas, grabbing my hand. “Let’s go right to the front!”

Near the stage, the crowd was denser, the air thick with perspiration and marijuana smoke, the yeasty smell of beer and tobacco. Men in leather vests were arriving with wooden crates of booze, loading empties into the slots vacated by full ones, and wrenching off bottle caps with their teeth. Someone passed Lukas a beer and after he had swigged on it, he passed it to me.

The next thing I knew I was drunk. We had come down here with Nelly and Timon, but now I didn’t care where they were. The crowd around us chanted “sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll!” and the frenzied energy was contagious. Lukas craned his neck toward the stage, then turned to me and yelled, “Look! Split Enz are on!” and even though I had only a vague idea who they were, a wave of excitement rose in my chest. A cheer went up—“Split Enz! Split Enz!”—followed by a powerful surge toward the stage. Lukas grabbed me around the waist and together we were pulled into a riptide. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of the band—a handful of men in checkerboard pajamas, their faces painted geisha white under stiff peaks of cartoon hair. As the rolling, heaving crowd pushed and
pulled my body from all angles, their guitar riffs pinged in my ears. By my side, Lukas was having a religious experience, his body leaning toward the music, playing an imaginary guitar, and I realized how badly he wanted it to be him up there onstage.

At the end of their set, we stumbled into the dark, wooded area behind the stage. The forest there was cool and welcoming and quiet. A whining noise filled my ears, and my voice, when I tried to speak, sounded like it belonged to someone else. I decided not to try anymore, and Lukas did the same, guiding me silently through the trees with one arm around my shoulders. We stumbled along, until we found ourselves climbing a mound and reaching a boulder, where there was a flat spot, invisible from below and shielded from above by trees. Still without words passing between us, we started kissing, and before long, the hands that had always been so respectful, that had never wandered off course, were all over the place. Our clothes flew off and I was stretched out naked on the warm stone next to a body that I had not seen in its entirety for several years, during which time it had become lean and muscular and in certain places thick with dark, wiry hair. It was the hair that scandalized me most. How had Lukas grown it, this manly pelt, when his chin and upper lip bore only fluff? He climbed on top of me, and even though we were about to do something neither of us had done before, we did not, as I had often feared we might, need instructions. His penis, which had grown vastly in size—a feat that was somehow exciting and off-putting at the same time—was nudging between my legs when Lukas
suddenly pulled back. “Are you sure you want to do this?” He stared into my eyes. “Because we can wait.”

Breathlessly, I said, “Wait for what?”

“I don’t know. It just feels sudden, like you’ve changed your mind.” His erection hovered between us, a third party with a mind and a plan of its own, and I adjusted my hips to meet it, to take it in—a move that Lukas stopped with his hand. “You never wanted to do this before.”

He was right. I had never wanted to do this before, and the difference was that I had realized his value. He was a prize, and if I didn’t claim him, someone else would. Unable to explain any of this without coming over as a scoundrel, I said, “We’ve known each other forever. Why not?”

He shook his head, frustrated, and his voice turned hoarse with emotion. “It’s more than that for me. I’ve wanted to do this for so long—as long as I can remember. Night after night, lying across from you in the dark, I’ve imagined what it would be like to climb into your bed and—”

“Wait,” I said, interrupting him. “You’ve wanted to do this since we were kids?”

“Haven’t you?”

“Not really,” I said truthfully. “Before that night on the mountain, I thought of you more like a brother.”

Lukas rolled off me, and I realized I had hurt his feelings after all.

“But that night, something changed. I can’t explain it but I really want to do this.”

“But are you sure it’s me you want to do it with?”

The question floated between us. Was he wondering,
like I had, if he was only a stopover on the way to my true love? “I do,” I whispered, pushing those thoughts away. “I want this more than anything.”

Lukas didn’t respond with words, but propped himself up on one elbow and leaned over me, staring into my face, then pressed his free hand solemnly over my heart, as if it would tell him the truth. I felt tested by him and didn’t trust myself to move or speak. Against his palm, my heart thumped wildly, so wildly that his expression became curious and then faintly amused. He moved his hand away from my heart and ran it down my belly and over my pubic bone, where he pushed his fingers carefully, but decisively, into the hot, wet cleft between my legs. I bucked underneath him, an intense spasm that caused me to gasp and made Lukas laugh out loud.

“I believe you,” he said, and for a few seconds, I was mortified, before Lukas plunged his mouth to mine, driving himself into me with such force that I was the one who felt claimed, and there was nothing to do but surrender to a bond that had been growing since the day we were born.