Page 116 of Kiwi Sin
Afterward, Aunt Constance said, “We could go to our flat for a cup of tea and lunch,” and looked shaken. Her expression had been horrified when Patience had given her own statement, and I could feel her wondering,Did this happen to Harmony, too? Should I ask her?I thought,You probably should,but didn’t say so. Patience would talk to Harmony, and if there were something there, I had a feeling it would come out. You couldn’t always rush things. You had to give people time and space to make their own journey through the darkness. They had to believe that there really was light out there, and that they could find it.
Daisy said, “I have a shift,” and looked like the last thing she wanted was to talk about sin. Valor’s, Gilead’s, hers ... who knew? The breach between the families was healing, maybe, but it wasn’t healed yet.
I said, “Thanks, but I have heaps more things to do today,” and Daisy and I dropped them off and drove home.
I took off my school uniform for the last time in my bedroom in Gray’s yurt, with flowers that I’d cut this morning scenting the room from the cut-glass pitcher I’d bought with my own money, and then I sat down and filed the forms requesting an exemption to the waiting-until-eighteen rule for marriage. I pressed the button that said “Submit” three times in a row and didn’t worry about the number of people who’d told me that it was already March, and my birthday was in June, and why couldn’t I just wait? Then I went down to the garden and helped Iris with the animals and told her about my plans. She said, “Reckon you know best,” and I thought that a person who’d been brought up knowing she was a woman but with everybody telling her she was a man might understand how it felt to be me.
I asked, forking up dirty chicken bedding from the floor of the coop, “Is this what it was like for you when you told your family you were a woman?”
She said, “Worse. But I reckon if you do a thing that everybody’s telling you is wrong and mad, half the world wants to hurt you for it, and your parents chuck you out of their house for it, and all you feel after all that is relieved, and like there’s no choice and there never was—that’s the right thing for you to do. Grab that wheelbarrow and help me shift this compost.”
On Saturday night, I looked at flats online with Gabriel after dinner at the table in the yurt as Priya sat at the kitchen bench and did her maths homework. An hour later, I lay across the bench seat in an old ute with the windows steamed all the way over, got my first lesson in how to help a man have an orgasm, and thought,I hope the court doesn’t take long, because neither of us can stand much more of this,and also,I wonder how much a bed costs.
On Monday, I went back to work for Laila.
Stepping into the studio, with its Gothic church windows, its cushioned posing table, and its baskets of props, felt like coming home. I’d worked here for barely six weeks, but they’d been the best six weeks of my life. And when I held the first baby of the day, a brand-new girl with golden skin and black curls, and felt her body melting into mine, when I bent my head to smell her baby scent, when her arms waved without direction before her fist closed around the collar of my shirt and held on, I knew this was where I was meant to be.
There’s a difference between telling yourself you’re lucky andfeelinglucky. The difference is joy, the kind that seeps all the way into you like warm honey, that makes the sky look bluer and the birdsong sound sweeter.
The difference is getting to be yourself, and being loved for it.
On the next Sunday, we went back to Mount Zion.
* * *
Gabriel
It was nine o’clock, as always, when I climbed out of the ute with Oriana in front of that gate. The rest of them were climbing out, too: Daisy and Gray and Priya, my mum and dad, and, to my surprise, Frankie, whom Daisy and Gray had collected in Wanaka.
The yard wasn’t empty today. What looked like all of Mount Zion was lined up there, in rows. Women, children, and men—hundreds of them. I heard a grinding sound, and the steel gate slid open on its track.
The crowd parted, and a figure came through, leaning on a stick. The Prophet, who’d always been a lion of a man, his gait now halting and uncertain. A stroke, maybe.
Hard not to see it as the wrath of God.
A man walked beside him, offering an arm, and another followed after. Valor, accompanying his grandfather, and Oriana’s father following behind. Loyal Worthy, a short, stocky man with broad, hard hands. The flat stare from Loyal’s pale-brown eyes didn’t change one iota on seeing four of his twelve children for the first time in months.
The little group stopped a few meters from the open gate. The space between us loomed like no man’s land, the zone between two entrenched combatants in a bitter war, and that was how it felt.
I didn’t want to step through that gate.
The Prophet said, “The doors are open.” His speech was as loud and confident as ever, and I found myself wondering whether his mobility was actually impaired, or if this was a bid for sympathy in the trials he had to see coming.
An old man,they’d say.No point putting him in prison. What harm can he do?
The harm had never been in his body. It had been in his twisted mind and his clever tongue and his absolute conviction.
Dad said, “So you’ve said. Are you paying people as you’ve promised, too?”
“We’re starting to,” the Prophet said. “Working out the accounts now. It’s complicated.”
“It’s not complicated.” That was Daisy. “There’s a minimum wage. Timekeeping forms. Payroll firms. Gray could show you how to do it in a day.”
“I don’t require help from infidels,” the Prophet said. His own blue eyes were flashing, and, no, nothing much had changed. “I need help from my blood, from the man I’ve trusted most. I assume that’s why you’re here, Aaron. Come in and see what I’m doing. There are no secrets here. There never have been.”
Dad said, “That’s what I’m here to see and discuss, yes.”
“Just you and Constance,” the Prophet said. “And Gabriel.” His hooded eyes landed on mine, their stare nearly hypnotic. “Who will be at my left hand, if he returns.”
