Your writer, in conjuring this tale of murder,
adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse, takes
you first to a daffodil-filled garden in Highgate, North
London, where, just outside the kitchen window,
something startling shimmers on the very edges of
perception. Fluttering and chattering, these are our
kehua - a whole multiplying flock of Maori spirits (all
will be explained) goaded into wakefulness by the
conversation within. Scarlet - a long-legged, skinny
young woman of the new world order - has announced to
Beverley - her aged grandmother - that she intends to
leave home and husband for the glamorous actor, Jackson
Wright - he of the vampire films. Beverley may be well
on her way to her ninth decade, but she's not beyond
using this intelligence to stir up a little trouble. And
neither are the kehua outside the window. The sins and
traumas of the past haunt us all. Call them hungry
ghosts, grateful dead, dybbuks, kelpies, poltergeists,
furies or kehua, we carry them with us - across
continents, oceans, decades and generations. Quite how
they became attached to a three-year-old white girl is
the origin of your writer's tale.Suffice to say that
murder is at the root of it all, that Beverley and her
female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden and
that this is the story of how they learn to live with
their ghosts, or maybe how their ghosts learn to live
with them - |
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