Free The Bone People by Keri Hulme

the kind."
    He leans over and ruffles the boy's hair.
    "And they'll put you in that kind of place over my dead body," he says grimly.
    "Look," he says, after a minute, "he's bright. He can understand anything you put to him, Kerewin. He doesn't need special care and attention. He just needs people to accept him."
    She thinks,
    There is something peculiar about all this pleading. As though I'm being set up, or primed--
    She says carefully,
    "You mentioned he was considered to be a bit of an outlaw. My radiophone operator said, quote, he's a well
    known local oddity, specialising in sneak thievery and petty vandalism, unquote. Is it just because he doesn't
    get on with people at school, or is there some other reason?"
    Joe flushes.
    "I should imagine his muteness, and the fact that my wife died, and he doesn't get a woman's care. I should
    think those reasons make him a bit unsettled."
    He is watching the floor again, away from her, away from his son.
    "There is a wildness in him sometimes," he says. "It comes maybe from those reasons. Like the running away... the child psych said he was trying to find his own mother, his other parents, even if he doesn't think
    that knowingly. That he won't face up, can't face up, to them being gone. Not here," still looking downward,
    still with the dark flush suffusing his face.
    There's something bloody peculiar about this whole conversation. It doesn't feel right. Has he got some
    strange hope I'm going to be the kid's substitute mother? Bloody oath... and all you can do, Simon obstinate,
    is stare unconcernedly into the fire.
    Almost as though he caught her thought, the boy turns round and smiles broadly to her. She smiles back,
    wondering again what happened to his teeth.
    "How old are you, Sim?"
    She says to Joe, while watching for the child's answer, "I guessed anywhere between five and ten, going by
    size and behaviour. I still would, but after what you've said, I'd bring the upper limit down."
    The boy is looking at her in a considering way, mouth down at the corners.
    Joe says softly, "He doesn't know. I don't know. Nobody does."
    He picks up a chip of coal and flicks it into the fire.
    "Well, you can see I'm not his blood father," he says into the silence. "Do you remember a Labour weekend three years or so back, when there were terrific storms? Out of season storms?"
    "O, vaguely."
    "Well, a gale caught a boat here then. A stranger cruiser. It sank off the end of Ennetts Reef. Everybody
    aboard came ashore. One way or the other."
    The man has been talking quickly, almost convulsively, his eyes on the boy who is uncaring, not hearing, it
    seems.
    "Well, meet some jetsam," he says, and his eyes glint, belying the callousness of the flippancy. The deep
    lines round his mouth are charmed into emphasis for his smile.
    I bethought you grim and forty, but now I doubt you're much older than me. Maybe not as old as me.
    The lines on his face seem drawn by an inward corroding bitterness, not age. A carelessness of life, an
    abandonment, death of wife and death of him, she thinks, as her answering smile begins.
    "I see. Wreckage washed ashore as opposed to goods found floating. Thanks for answering. I shouldn't have
    been inquisitive, but it intrigued me. I don't have experience of children of any age group, but his years seem
    to vary a hell of a lot. One minute he looks about five, and the next he acts as though he's ten times as old."
    "Excuse all this," she adds to the boy, who had sat up at the last exchange of smiles, proffering his father the black queen Kerewin had left on the floor.
    "That's the way it seems to me every so often too," says Joe agreeably. "Ahh yes Haimona, the chess--"
    The grin slides in again, above the strong spade-shaped chin.
    "No," he says, "it's maybe seven, possibly eight, but probably six. Maybe even younger, but not likely. God knows. Nobody was at all sure how old you were originally," talking now to Simon P, "and you weren't much
    bloody help," says