IN MATHEMATICS, THE FIBONACCI NUMBERS, or Fibonacci series, are the numbers in the following integer sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 … The first number is 0. The second number is 1. Each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. The Fibonacci pattern of numbers is often found in nature, in leaf arrangement, tree branches, flower petals, sunflower seed heads and pine cones.
Jeff had discovered that there were currents of events that escaped logical planning. For example, if you couldn’t think of a word you let it go and soon after, some tide would wash it up, unbidden, on the shores of your mind. It was the same with wanting something. You could chase it, like a dog after a cat, and all you did was wear yourself out. Give up the chase, and it came to you. There were no rules about this. No one, to the best of his knowledge, had come up with a formula of possibilities for this phenomenon. It just happened.
After a week of desperately seeking Maisie, he gave up. Some of the crazy things she’d said were making sense in a weird sort of way. Andy had left school. Winston in quicksand? Well, maybe debt could suck you under. But what did she mean about Helen on a cliff edge? Was that about an accident or something else? Jeff was full of questions. There were things he’d half forgotten. He needed her to repeat them. He also needed her full name again, and address so he could visit her. Searching the city was a waste of time. He went to the library every day after school. He even stood against the verandah post outside the Chinese restaurant, but she didn’t appear. He didn’t know what else to do.
He met Andrea at McDonald’s and although she was smiling and lively, he was aware of a jittery distance between them.
“Beck is coming tomorrow,” she said.
“I know.”
“He’s flying in with a police escort and he’s going to that new prison. Mark is going to help me get to Auckland to see him.”
He wanted to say, what about me, but he didn’t.
Andy unwrapped her burger. “Did you see his photo in the paper? He’s lost a lot of weight. His hair is short. He looks a lot older.”
Jeff wasn’t hungry. He nudged the chicken wrap in front of him. “She told me you would leave school. That old woman. She told me, and you said –”
“Jeff, don’t have anything to do with that crazy creature! She’s demonic!”
He continued, “I asked you if you were going to leave and you laughed at me. You said of course not.”
Her eyes softened. “Oh, Squidgy, I had to go. I felt rotten leaving you, but look, one day you can come and live with us, Mark and me. Mark is amazingly kind and considerate. He’s always thinking about other people, and you know what? He loves me exactly as I am, and Jeff, I am so in love with him!”
He picked up a chip and then dropped it back in the packet. “What about the law degree?”
She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. “I’ve left school. There’s no turning back. If I was going to change my mind, Mum made sure I didn’t. She went to the school and cleared my desk and locker. Did you know that?”
He nodded. “Yeah. She found the letters from Beck.”
“Oh! Trust her to snoop! Well, that’s no longer important, thank goodness. No more hiding things. I’m in the process of getting a job.”
“Where?”
“I’ve got two interviews coming up, the restaurant at the Klaxton Hotel and the museum café. Aren’t you going to eat that?”
He looked at her. “Dad has to sell the house.”
“What?”
“If he doesn’t get the money back, he’s in trouble. Big trouble. He invested money belonging to some of his clients.” Jeff broke a chip in half. “Even if he does sell the house, it’s got a mortgage. There mightn’t be enough left over to buy something else.”
She leaned towards him. “What does Mum think of that?”
“Not much.”
“I know. More arguments, more cat and dog fights.”
His throat was closing up and he was close to tears, but he had to say it. “It might help if you came back.”
“Not a hope!” she said. “I’m truly sorry, Squidgy, but that won’t happen. Never!”
“At least talk to Mum.”
“I’ll do that when she stops calling me names.” She reached across the table. “If you aren’t hungry, I’ll take that chicken wrap for my dinner tonight.”
He pushed the food towards her hand. “Don’t you eat with – you know, Mark?
She wrapped it in a paper serviette. “Not always,” she said. “Sometimes he has dinner with his children.”
“Children?”
She put the food in her bag. “He’s been separated from his wife for over a year. She’s a very cold woman. But he’s a good father. It’s nice to know there are some good fathers in the world. You take care, little brother.” She got up, hoisted her bag straps over her shoulder, then bent over to kiss his cheek. “I’ll text you about Beck.”
He stayed seated after she had gone and didn’t move until an attendant came to wipe down the table. By then, he’d been sitting so long that one leg had gone to sleep. His sister might be in love but there wasn’t much of it leaking out. He limped down to the bus stop and caught the next bus to the bottom of the hill. He felt tired. He felt empty, as though something had drained all his blood.
He got off the bus, his pulse pumping air in his ears, and there, in the glass shelter waiting for him, was Maisie.
* * *
He’d got used to her smile, the broken grey teeth edged with black and the way her eyes narrowed to shards of dark glass.
“Maisie, I’m so glad –” He stopped. He didn’t know what he was glad about, only that seeing her made a difference. But he had to admit he was still not one hundred per cent sure of the dream-keeper story. Was she an old lady like Great-aunt Rose, imagining things? He dared to ask the question. “Are you really Maisie?”
“At the risk of repeating myself, Maisie left the dream weeks ago. I thought I’d made that clear. She gave me permission to use the body she was leaving.” The woman hit her stick against the concrete. “But use is not the word for something useless.”
“So what do you want me to call you? Maisie? Dream-keeper?”
She put out her hand and touched his face. Her fingers were cold against his cheek. “I told you, Maisie will do. Dream-keepers don’t have individual names. They’re a category.”
He scratched the back of his neck. “Do you like being Maisie?”
“Like? What is there to like? Arthritis, deafness, memory loss, palpitations and now, kidney failure!” She drummed her stick at each ailment. “It’s like jumping into a car that’s ready for the scrap heap.”
“I mean, do you like being human?” He was looking directly into her eyes. When she didn’t answer, didn’t blink, he said, “You don’t look sick. You have a lot of energy.”
“That’s the fuel that goes into the car,” she said. “But it’s the state of the car that counts.” She leaned towards him. “This is rent-a-wreck. The engine’s had it. Do I have to spell it out? I can’t be in your dream much longer, Number Nine.”
For a couple of seconds he studied the thin, lined face and the intense eyes. There was so much he wanted to know. “You said things. They didn’t make sense, before. But now – now I’ve got feelings about them and I’ve got questions.”
“What do you want to ask?”
He hesitated, then said, “How did you know about my family?”
“There’s no copyright on knowledge,” she snapped. Then she turned her head to look at the sea. “It’s my job, Jeff, and there are ways of knowing that are beyond the function of a small human brain. For example, I understand the bond between you and your brother. When you think about him there is pain in your upper chest and arms. Right?”
He nodded, suddenly afraid. No one but he could possibly know how he felt when people talked about Beckett.
“But your clever little brain hasn’t worked out why the pain should happen. Has it?”
This time, he shook his head.
“So that’s my answer,” she said. “You can’t understand how I know about your family, but at least you can accept the limitations of the human brain. Now what’s the next question?”
He opened his school backpack. “Is it okay if I write things down?”
“As long as you’re fast about it,” she said.
He took the notepad out so quickly that his bag dropped to the floor of the bus shelter and books slid out. He didn’t pick them up.
“Number 7B Aurora Council Flats, Newtown.”
“Nine!” he said. “That’s perfect!”
“What?”
“B is two. Add two to seven and you have –”
“All right, all right. What else?”
He held the pen ready. “What exactly, is the definition of a dream-keeper?”
“I’ve told you many times.”
“I know. But now I want to write it down.”
“It’s a spirit that comes into the dream. It inhabits a body – a person, or maybe an animal.”
He wrote a few sentences then said, “That sounds more like a movie than something real.”
Her smile came back. “Real! Remember what I said about limited understanding? You think this little life is reality? Fiddlesticks!” She clenched the stick between her knees and threw up her hands. “How many times do I have to tell you! It’s about ten per cent of reality. The moment you get a body you lose the memory of the other ninety per cent. Even if you don’t understand that, you’d better believe it.” She turned on the seat so that she was facing him. “In the dream you call life you know only what comes through your five senses. Right?”
He nodded. “What I see, hear, taste, touch, smell.”
“So in the dream you think you know everything. You don’t. You know only what your body allows you to know. The other ninety per cent is the realm of spirit.”
For a moment he was acutely aware of colour and form, the folds in her padded jacket, the green-and-orange dress that lay around her thin legs, the small bushes outside that collected bits of paper and other rubbish, and the smell of the sea that rolled against land and sky. In that moment, it seemed that his senses were bombarded with information. He looked down at his notes and said to her, “My sister Andrea thinks you’re some kind of devil.”
He wondered if she’d be offended, but she thought it funny. She laughed and slapped her knee. “Your sister shouldn’t believe everything she thinks! Devil or angel depends on the kind of human judgements you make. It has nothing to do with the reality.”
“But you and me sitting here. Isn’t this reality?”
“No, no!” She looked frustrated. “It’s only a small part of it! Jeff, you are a spirit renting a body for a short time in order to add to the increase of Light. You come with a plan – the body you will inhabit, the tools you will have, and the growth you need to accomplish. Some spirits have a modest plan. They take on a body for a short time, or they choose a path that is not too demanding. Others are more ambitious.” She was talking so fast, she was spitting through the gaps in her teeth. “A difficult path has greater growth potential, but it can be dangerous. You see, Number Nine, when you take on a body there’s the forgetting. Suddenly, the spirit is a prisoner to body experience and it doesn’t remember –”
“Stop!” he said. “You went too fast.” He lifted the pen. “I can’t write all that!”
“Then write this down,” she said. “Your family chose demanding paths and now they’re in grave danger because they have lost the memory.”
“Memory?” He paused at the word.
“The other way of knowing. I said that when you come into a body, there is a forgetting. That’s true. But every spirit brings a spark of the Light with it. The Light is a guide, like a compass. It’s a little memory of the big reality. In the dream, people call it heart knowledge, although it has nothing to do with the muscle that pumps blood.”
He said slowly, deliberately, “What exactly – does – a – dream-keeper – do?”
“Oh! Shut your cakehole, Number Nine!” she snapped. “You keep saying you don’t understand, and when I try to explain, you interrupt –”
“I need to know.”
Now she was annoyed with him. “A dream-keeper is a nanny, guardian, shepherd, tour guide, angel, advisor. We are spirits. When the dreams are in danger of becoming nightmares, we jump in. But we can only work with someone who hasn’t lost the memory. That’s you, Jeff. You still know the Light within you. So it’s my job to help you. Your task is to fan your Light into a flame. Got that? It will bring back the memory of Light to your entire family.”
He thought for a while. “You mean love? That’s it, isn’t it? Love!”
“You found a good word for it. There are others: forgiveness, compassion, empathy! But the words are just words unless they connect with the Light in you. Write that down, too.”
He wrote hastily, hoping he would be able to read it. This is like a story, he thought as he wrote, like some kind of myth or legend. Parts of it felt right.
She coughed and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “The reality is too big for human language. At school you learn about metaphor, allegory, parable. Well, don’t you? Okay. The words themselves don’t really matter. When they match the Light in you, you will respond to them. You’ll get what you call a feeling. Is there anything else you want to know?”
He knew there was a multitude of new questions that would attack him as soon as he got home, but right now, he couldn’t think of one. He said, “You told me things that have happened, like Dad in the quicksand. I suppose that was a metaphor, but Andrea’s was real. She left school. Everything has changed. Mum goes between crying and shouting. Beckett is coming back to New Zealand and our house has to be sold. Is anything else going to happen?”
She looked at him, her eyes bright and unblinking. “Yes,” she said. “There is more to come. It’s up to you, Jeff. When it’s time, you’ll do what you need to do. But it will be without me. I can’t stay in the dream much longer.”
“You mean you are going to die.”
At that, she began to laugh, a rumble in her chest that reached her mouth and eyes and then shook her entire body. She coughed and whacked her stick against the concrete. “There is no such thing as death,” she said.
* * *
Mrs Wilson could be tough. She gave Jeff five out of ten for his project on Dmitri Mendeleev, saying that the topic given was a historical figure, not the significance of the periodic table. He was disappointed and indignant, disappointed for himself, and indignant that Mendeleev’s achievement should be dismissed like that. But then Mrs Wilson was not a physicist. Paul got nine out of ten for writing about Henry VIII, who achieved practically nothing worthwhile, and Salosa got a full ten for six pages on Captain Cook. Jeff was pleased for them both. His five out of ten was an explosion of red ink, not done with Mrs Wilson’s birthday pen, nor by a good Russian pencil. He supposed it really didn’t matter. If he had to rate his personal disappointment on the same scale, it would be two out of ten, small compared with other events in his life that hit the full score.
At lunch break, it was raining, and he sat in the recreation room with his sandwiches and his notebook, trying to ignore the noise around him. This was the day Beck was flying in, and no one in the family would be at the airport to see him. I’m sorry, Beck, he whispered to himself. I’m so horribly, terribly, awfully sorry.
He looked at his notes. He hadn’t written all the old woman had said, but the words he’d scribbled prompted his memory and he was able to fill most of the blanks. It wasn’t craziness, he decided. It was a story, like Maui and his brothers netting the sun, like Orpheus going into the underworld to find that girl with the strange name. It was one of those stories that had echoes in it, vibrations, like patterns of numbers. The patterns meant something but he didn’t know what. Maybe only a “dream-keeper” could offer a mathematical sequence that made sense of the story.
He read the notes again and underlined two things that seemed engraved inside him. It’s up to you, Jeff. Light. The words escaped his brain but they were in his chest and stomach, and he didn’t know what to do with them.
Someone was standing in front of him. “Hey! Jeffrey Lorimer!”
He raised his head and saw it was Clive.
“Your brother is Beckett Lorimer, right? The drug dealer?”
“Yes.”
“My father says taxpayers’ dollars are rescuing him from a prison in Thailand.”
“Yes. I suppose so.” He saw a gleam in the stare, heard the voice reaching for every ear in the recreation room.
“More taxpayers’ dollars for keeping him in that flash new prison in Auckland,” Clive announced.
Jeff shrugged. “A prison is still a prison.” He looked down at his notes.
But Clive hadn’t finished. “Your sister, Andrea. She’s living with a married man. He’s got two kids. My parents know his wife. What’s wrong with your family?”
Everyone was watching, waiting for his answer. Jeff felt very tired. The only thing he could think of was something the old woman had thrown at him yesterday. “Shut your cakehole,” he said.
* * *
He went to Paul’s place after school, to have another session on the drums, do homework, anything to avoid going straight home. Mr Fitzgibbon and the dog were in the backyard. He was mulching the vegetable garden, and the dog, scratching in the compost, had rotting plants over its nose and muzzle. Mr Fitzgibbon stopped to ask Jeff how things were. Jeff wasn’t sure what he meant, but guessed he’d heard something, so he told him about Mr Staunton-Jones. Mr Fitzgibbon didn’t know, and he looked shocked. “One and a half million dollars!” he exclaimed as though that was all the money in the world. “What a terrible thing to happen!”
Jeff nodded. Mr Fitzgibbon was very tall, and up close, Jeff was talking to faded blue jeans and gumboots crusted with compost. “It’s really awful,” he said, patting the dog. “We thought he was such a kind man. He fooled everyone.”
Mr Fitzgibbon put his hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “Nearly always, evil tries to disguise itself as virtue. Tell your dad we’ll pray for him, if he thinks that will help.”
You don’t know my father, Jeff wanted to say, he’s allergic to stuff like that, but instead he nodded again. He didn’t want to upset Mr Fitzgibbon further by telling him that the police weren’t doing anything fast, and Dad had to sell their house to pay back his clients. That would have been too much. He turned and went inside to see Paul.
* * *
Helen’s first words were, “Where have you been?”
“Paul’s,” he said. “Mr Fitzgibbon drove me home.”
“Why didn’t you send me a text? You know the rules.”
“I forgot.” That was true. Getting in touch had been the last thing on his mind.
She slammed a cupboard door. “Do you know what’s happened? Your idiot father has invited a land agent to look at the house. What do you think of that?”
He didn’t answer.
She said in a louder voice. “I said your idiot of a father is selling our home. This place is half mine, but was I consulted? Of course not!”
Jeff knew she wasn’t talking to him, but to Winston who was somewhere near, probably in his office. He was right. His father came into the living room, walking unevenly. His eyes were red. He had been drinking. “You’re a bit late, son,” he said to Jeff.
“It’s a pretty picture, isn’t it?” Helen said. “The financial genius who was going to buy – what was it? A villa in Tuscany? An island in Fiji?”
Winston swayed slightly and put his hand on the back of a chair to steady himself. “Don’t!” he bellowed. “Do not make me the criminal! This was an – an investment in good faith. I did everything I could –”
“Good faith!” She spat the words back at him. “You played up to him. You saw him as an old rich man who was giving you his property cheap, because you were like a son. Yes, Daddy Warren. I’ll look after your beautiful little kingdom, Daddy Warren. But as soon as it was yours, you planned to sell it to the developers.”
“It was an investment!” Winston looked confused. He put his hand up in a helpless gesture as though he was trying to clear the air of words. “I did it for you, Helen! I did it for my family!”
“No! You did it for greed,” said Helen, “and now your family will be homeless.”
He lurched forward, angry now. “Will you bloody well shut up? We’ll get the money back. Eventually. Until then we can rent a house.” He held his hands out to her, his voice shaking. “All of it, Helen, everything I did, was for family!”
“You have no family, Winston,” she said.
“Stop!” Jeff cried. “Stop it!”
“You destroyed us!” Helen said. “Your children, one by one, and now me. Yes, me, Winston Lorimer! If this house goes, so do I.”
Winston hit her.
His fist came up twice. She shrieked, spun around and with the second blow, fell to the floor.
Jeff ran to his mother. She was on her back. Her arms and legs were at sharp angles against the white marble tiles. Her lip was bleeding down the side of her face, but she wasn’t knocked out. Jeff took her left arm and helped her into a sitting position. She was crying. There was a red mark on her left cheek.
He turned to his father, who was still standing by the chair. “Dad!”
Winston stepped backwards, shaking his head, little shakes as though he didn’t believe any of it.
Helen stood up, touched her mouth and looked at the red on her fingers. “That does it,” she said, and went to the bathroom.
Jeff was now crying, huge gulping sobs. “Why, Dad? Why did you hit her?”
Winston sat heavily in the chair, staring at him, but it seemed to Jeff that he wasn’t seeing anything. “What a bloody mess,” he growled.
After a long time, Helen came out of the north wing of the house, wheeling an overnight bag. Her lip was still oozing blood. She ignored Winston, and said to Jeff, “I’ve booked a motel. Grab a few things, Jeffrey, just enough for the night. We’ll collect the rest tomorrow.”
Winston looked at her, but said nothing.
“Please, Mum,” Jeff said. “Please, don’t!”
“I said, pack a bag. Come on, Jeffrey. Hurry up! We’re getting out of this hellhole.”
“I don’t want to go,” Fresh tears were spilling. “Mum, let’s stay. Please?”
“We are going!” She nudged her bag against his leg. “Do as I tell you!”
He felt that all his insides were being torn up like bits of paper and tossed into the wind. But there was something else in him, something strong that remained. He walked over to Winston who was sitting as still as a rock, and put his hand on his shoulder. “No, Mum,” he said, “I’m staying with Dad.”