The Bone People

This chapter looks at Simon’s experiences in the hospital and in foster care. Despite the beating and the terrible words he heard from the artist, he still loves Joe and Kerewin and waits for them to take him home. He is unable to communicate, despite having hearing aids, and is relieved when Piri comes to visit him. The man tells him Joe is in jail and Kerewin has disappeared. Simon does not fully understand what has happened and what it means for him. In a misguided attempt to protect him, a nurse makes things worse by telling him he is going into foster care. The boy does not believe her and refuses to communicate with the hospital staff.

Simon is placed into foster care. He is deeply unhappy and becomes emotionally disconnected from his surroundings. He feels abandoned by the adults in his life and keeps running away, believing that Joe must be at their house.

After several months, despite still being physically weak, Simon finally manages to run away for long enough to reach their house. To his shock, someone else lives there now. He makes his way to the tower, believing that Joe must have gone to live with Kerewin, and feeling deeply hurt by what he thinks is their abandonment. To his despair, he sees that the place has been burnt down. He is apprehended while kneeling on the ground in front of the ruins.

Kerewin travels aimlessly around the South Island until the stomach growth becomes so painful that she is unable to sleep. She visits a doctor, asking for a prescription for a sleeping aid and pointedly refusing his insistence on conducting tests.

Kerewin consults a specialist, a woman, whose best guess is that the artist has a tumor. However, without tests, it is impossible to diagnose Kerewin’s illness with any accuracy. The artist inquires whether the growth could be caused by stress and unhappiness, but the specialist has no definitive answer. Kerewin explains she does not want to undergo treatment at a hospital. In her view, the entire system is dysfunctional as different departments and specialists do not communicate amongst themselves, so there is no holistic cancer treatment. The treatment that does exist seems to her worse than the disease.

The next time Kerewin talks to the doctor, he entreats her to stay and be taken care of either at the hospital or by his wife, who is a nurse. The artist refuses, preferring to be on her own. She has obtained a jar with mushroom extract, which is a potent hallucinogen and an untested painkiller, and plans on self-medicating. Kerewin leaves most of her belongings at a storage facility, taking only the bare necessities to survive, as well as her most treasure possessions, such as Simon’s rosary and her guitar. She decides to go roaming while still physically able to.

Kerewin is now traveling and sleeping in the wild. She wakes up after a night of drinking, feeling depressed at the sight of her thinning and sagging body. Her hands have become infected and are leaking pus. Eventually, Kerewin goes to her family’s cabin in the mountains. The day she arrives, the pain increases, and she faints for the first time in her life. The artist establishes a routine, taking walks every day, attempting to draw and write, and cooking dinner in the evening. However, her condition worsens, and her skin is becoming hard and mask-like, seeping pus from the cracks.

At a later time, Kerewin is feeling relatively well physically but begins to despair, realizing how close to death she is. In the third week of her stay, Kerewin loses her strength and is barely able to crawl outside to take care of her bodily needs. She is unable to eat or maintain the fire. She also has terrible nightmares of Simon and Joe dying and of her family slowly killing her. Kerewin’s mind begins to wander, and she talks to herself and the sky. She feels as if her bones have disappeared. Eventually, she thinks she encounters a small, wiry person, but she is unable to communicate and passes out.

While sick, Kerewin either has a true visitation or a vision of one, in which a “thin wiry person of indeterminate age./ Of indeterminate sex. Of indeterminate race” comes to help her out (424). The person gives her a special drink, after which the artist regains her faculties. She thanks her visitor, who demurs and claims Kerewin would have healed on her own. After the wise person is gone, vanishing “into the misty outside,” the artist realizes that “the thing that had blocked her gut and sucked her vitality is gone” (425). Joyful, Kerewin falls asleep.

After her healing sleep, Kerewin looks at herself in a mirror and is repulsed by the sight. The dead skin is peeling away. She has lost weight, so her body is flabby and slack. She is also beginning to smell and undertakes the long process of washing, scrubbing, and cleaning both her body and her clothes. After her bath, she sleeps again and wakes up rejuvenated and feeling happy and hungry.

While meditating outside at dawn, the artist realizes she has been given a second chance and decides to make amends with Joe and Simon as well as with her family. She contemplates a strange dream in which she is welcomed by “strangely clad people, with golden eyes, brown skin” (428). They touch her gently, and she begins dissolving, her bones sinking into the ground. All movement ceases, and “the land is clothed in beauty and the people sing” (428).

Kerewin leaves the mountain hut and goes back to the beach house at Moerangi. While taking a walk one day and visiting an old marae, or sacred site, she experiences a moment of communion with nature.

Kerewin decides to recommence writing in her diary. She reflects on the past year, with its trials and tribulations and the changes she has undergone. Kerewin is painting again, feeling happier, and getting progressively healthier. She decides to rebuild the Maori Hall at the old marae. The people in the nearby town are at first curious but indifferent. However, they gradually begin helping out, and eventually the hall is finished and has “a heart of people once more” (432).

While working on rebuilding the communal hall, Kerewin finds a stray blind kitten and adopts her, naming her Li. She also meets a professional diver who is happy to attempt to salvage the yacht that Simon was on. While the man begins diving, she reaches out to Piri, asking him to help her rebuild her home. This time, however, the building will spiral out from the center, allowing for privacy, but also serving as a communal home or a temple, as needed.

After several days, the police phone and inform Kerewin that the diver has found a number of objects that clarify Simon’s past, among them large quantities of heroin. The adults on the boat were drug traffickers, which explains the boy’s fear of needles. After writing out the events of the past year, Kerewin burns her diary as both an offering and a symbol of the past and prepares to leave Moerangi for home.