by Rachel Joyce
Margery held her fists tight and looked up at a diamond spot of sunlight. She counted in her mind the time they had left. One, two, three, four…seven weeks. Seven weeks until the middle of February. It was nothing. The chances of finding the beetle were so small they were practically nonexistent. She thought of all the extra things she would have to do now that Enid was pregnant. Carry both haversacks. Put up the hammocks at night. Not to mention taking the lead. She was not up to it. She knew she couldn’t do what Enid had done. She held her fists so tight they felt ready to crack.
“Enid,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t—”
But Enid interrupted: “What’s that noise?”
A sudden coldness swept through the forest and seemed to reach into the heart of her. The air smelled damp and acrid. In a flash it dawned on Margery that the thing that had been wrong was the silence. The lack of insects. Now the air was full of movement, and every tree was roaring, like the whaps of a helicopter’s propeller, a million swishings. The sky turned solid. Black. Enid couldn’t have been expected to know, but Margery should: a storm was on its way. They should have got off the mountain ages ago.
As if on cue, Enid’s hair flew out. She clutched her belly. She shrieked. “Shit, Marge! What can we do?”
It was the worst in years. Everything the cyclone could destroy, it did. Within hours, there was flooding all over the island. Rumors of landslides. Trees came down. Rivers burst their banks, a nickel mine collapsed, and the two major coastal roads from south to north were closed. Houses in Nouméa went without electricity, while whole shantytowns were flattened. The ocean was vast, breakers crashing all the way up the beach, ruining shops and restaurants. The British consul sent out a reminder not to drink water unless it was boiled, with an offer of free blankets and food.
Despite the heavy wind and rain that were still raging outside, Mrs. Pope’s Three Kings party went ahead. Her paper chains remained intact, as did her nativity scene and Christmas tree. She told Mrs. Peter Wiggs, also known as Dolly, that she was expecting at least fifty.
In the end it was over two hundred. The consulate villa was packed. Maurice must have invited every waif and stray he’d ever met. Mrs. Pope had a little quartet playing Christmas carols in the hall and wore her gold king costume, but she ran out of mince pies after half an hour. Worse, barely anyone had bothered to dress up. All people wanted to talk about was the cyclone. Either that or the big story that had just reached New Caledonia about the call girl Nancy Collett and the Woman With No Head. (“Though technically she must have a head,” said Mrs. Pope to Dolly. “It’s ridiculous that the newspapers have given her a name like that.”
“It’s because she’s a woman,” said Dolly: “If she was a man, they wouldn’t make a joke of her.”)
The British consul introduced his wife to the POW who’d arrived recently. It was a trick he often pulled: Maurice would drag her over to meet some social misfit, then disappear. This man had been hassling them for days, ever since Maurice rescued him from the French police. He just kept showing up at the front door, asking if his passport was ready. Maurice had given him a change of clothing. Some extra currency to tide him over. But he kept waiting outside. Mrs. Pope had even spotted him asleep at the end of the garden.
He proudly showed her his passport. He turned to the page with his new visa stamp. He said he’d only just got it.
“And you’re hoping to travel north now?” she said, to make conversation. There was something not right about him. His hair was shaved too short and he had a habit of speaking over her shoulder. He was also sweating hard and as thin as a rake. Obviously, one had to be kind to the man because he’d been a POW and everything, but she couldn’t help wishing he was a bit more civilized. “I think you’ll be lucky after the cyclone. There are only two roads that go all the way to the north and they are both closed, Mr. Mundic.”
He mumbled something she couldn’t catch. She thought it might be about a person he was looking for. A British woman.
She said merrily, “Well, we have quite a few of those here!”
But he didn’t laugh. He said something about a beetle.
“Oh, do you mean the two women who went north?” she asked. “But they left over a month ago.”
“Two?” He knocked his head, as if he had something inside it that shouldn’t be there. “Two of them?”
“Yes. They came for cocktails.”
“Two?”
“That’s right.”
“No. You’re wrong. Miss Benson’s traveling alone.”
“No. She has her assistant, Mrs. Pretty. Do you know her, Mr. Mundic?” She asked this question only because he had begun to do something very odd. He was rubbing his fingers, twisting the joints, and clicking them. She’d never seen such vast hands. Then he did something even more strange. His eyes filled with tears. “Why?” he said. “Why? Why would she say that? I’m leading this expedition. I saved her life.”
Mrs. Pope glanced over her shoulder for her husband, but he was deep in conversation with some young woman she’d never seen before. She said vaguely, “Miss Benson never mentioned that.”
“She didn’t?”
He pulled an old notebook out of his pocket. It was a tatty thing, and the pages were crammed with writing. Not just sideways, but even up and down. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, then flicked through, trying to find a fresh page. “Where were they going?”
“Poum,” she said, to rhyme with “room.”
“How do you spell that?” He shoved his notebook against the wall. In the end she had to give him the word letter by letter; he couldn’t get it right. He kept crossing it out and trying again.
She said, “I do hope they survived the storm. We warned them not to go. Maurice didn’t mention you were from the Natural History Museum.”
He ignored her. He just kept trying to spell Poum. Such a small word, yet he couldn’t get the letters in the right order.
“They were held up here for a whole week. There was a problem with her luggage. It got lost. Do you know if she found it?”
Now he turned. He cocked his head. “Not her collecting equipment?” he said. And to her confusion he actually laughed, his thin face raked open, as if he knew something she didn’t, which was not a situation Mrs. Pope liked. On the whole, it was the other way round. She changed the subject.
“Will you be here for Valentine’s Day, Mr. Mundic? We’ll be having another special party at the British consulate. Lots of paper hearts. Terribly jolly.”
Even as she said it, she regretted it. She had no idea whom she could pair the man up with. And she liked to do a little matchmaking on Valentine’s Day. She had once dressed up as Cupid, wings and all.
Fortunately, Mr. Mundic said he wouldn’t be free. He was heading north. “Poum,” he said. And again he stared at the word he’d written in his notebook. “Is it a big town?”
This time it was Mrs. Pope’s turn to laugh. It was the idea of Poum being a town. She hadn’t heard anything so funny in ages. She couldn’t stop. “A town? It’s no more than a few huts. You’ll find your colleagues in no time.”
But Mr. Mundic wasn’t laughing anymore. He stared at her, stone cold, as if she had insulted him, then elbowed his way out of the room, and left.
* * *
—
Later Mrs. Pope called a private meeting of the British wives in the kitchen. The staff were washing up, but she kept her voice low so they wouldn’t understand.
“Something is going on,” she said. “Those two women in the north are up to something.”
“Do you mean espionage?” cried Dolly, who read too many thrillers.
“I don’t know, but whatever they’re doing, I don’t think it’s about beetles. There’s something suspicious about the man who’s joining them.”
But here she was interrupted. One of the servants was wai
ling about the carving knife. It had gone, she said. It had gone from the drawer. Someone had walked out of the British consulate with the British consulate’s carving knife.
They were lucky to be alive. They made their way down the mountain slowly, stunned, exhausted, gripping each other tightly, too shocked to feel hungry. Their clothes hung wet and shriveled to their bodies, and their boots creaked. All around there was nothing but felled trees and uprooted trunks and moving channels of water. The bungalow—if they ever got to it—would have been flattened and carried away.
“Are you all right, Enid?”
“Yes, Marge.”
“That’s it, Enid. Another step. It’s nearly over.”
* * *
—
They had been caught up the mountain in the storm for forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours of gale-force winds and rain. “In the case of a cyclone,” wrote the Reverend Horace Blake, “be sure to secure all doors and windows. It is advisable to sit under a table or mattress for the duration of the storm. Unplug all electrical appliances. Do not on any account go outside.”
It was everything they could do to stay upright. Margery had found a deep crevice between two boulders, and there they had wedged themselves, clinging to one another, the dog, and as much of their kit as they could grab. They had lost one net. Several traps. A bottle of ethanol. Even Enid’s baseball cap. The noise had been a roar. Margery had never heard anything like it. Wind had come in slashes—pointless wearing her helmet: it was worse than repeatedly knocking herself on the head. The tallest pines bent at an angle, and bananas shot through the air, along with coconuts, leaves, branches, a flock of birds. Splinterings, crashings, hissing, sucking, cracks as loud as gunfire. Now and again came the faraway roar of breakers against the reef. Incessant lightning—flashes of violet, yellow, silvery-white that briefly lit some new part of the forest and then snapped it away. The storm was so intense it was hard to see how it could ever stop. Their hair flew wild.
“We will die!” Enid had shrieked. “We will die!”
In her terror, something happened to Margery that had never happened before. As everything imaginable whipped through the air, too fast for her to see, she began to talk. And not even about anything meaningful. She said to herself, “Margery Benson, you are now a talking machine and you will not give up.” While Enid cowered and sobbed and screamed that it was over, Margery voiced whatever came into her head. She named an animal for every letter of the alphabet. She did the same with countries of the world, market towns, and capital cities. So long as she talked, she kept her terror at bay.
“Marge?” Enid shrieked. “What does it matter? What do I care if you can think of an animal that begins with X? Shut up. We are going to die!”
But Margery did not shut up. She kept talking. Stuck up a mountain in a cyclone, Margery felt she and Enid were like kites flying in opposite directions while held by the same hand. But it was vital that she did this. It was vital that she kept her terror at bay, and looked after Enid, who was not only pregnant but also convinced this was her last day on earth. So Margery leaped from one subject to the next, while Enid continued to scream that it was over. And the more Margery talked, the more she voiced every word in her head, the more certain she felt that she was alive, she was not going to die, and she would not let Enid die, either. All she had to do was keep talking.
Boys’ names. Girls’ names. Dates of famous battles. The wives of Henry the Eighth. Every British king and queen since Alfred the Great. Lists of saints. Lists of poets. Lists of ingredients for wartime recipes. Lists of anything she could think of.
Night fell, the wind howled; Margery kept talking. So cold now she was shaking from head to foot, Enid cried, “We’re going to freeze to death!” But Margery would not give in to the cold in her toes, the cold in her ears, the cold that was so cold it began to feel like heat and made her want to sleep. She held Enid hard and bullied her to keep awake by listing months of the year, then spelling them backwards until it occurred to her to list entire families and subfamilies of beetle species, including all their Latin names. She had thought she was at the end of her tether, had believed she wanted to give up, but faced with the very realistic possibility of death on a mountain, and with Enid’s terror at losing another baby, she had realized she was not fragile and neither did she want to die. She wanted to live. She wanted Enid and her baby to live. She wanted that so much. All she had to do was keep talking.
As the wind screamed to new heights, the palest light showed in the sky and began to brighten, very slowly. She could not tell exactly how long it took to get light enough to see, but it was a long, long time.
Then the rain came, and it was like no rain she had ever felt, not even in New Caledonia. It fell from the sky in rods. It coursed down the trunks of trees, it tipped from leaves, it hurtled down as far as she could see, drowning the forest, crushing and mashing it, until the roar filled her head. It bounded from the summit in foamy red brooks, exploding before her eyes. Now trees were not flying past, and neither were boulders: they were swimming, tossed and bullied and half submerged by the water. Nothing seemed rooted or solid anymore. “We will drown!” Enid cried. She cried again when she dirtied herself. “We will get hit by rocks! We will get hit by trees!” Enid clutched her belly as if the storm might take that, too. And throughout all this Margery continued to talk.
Did Enid know how many different types of beetle antennae Margery could name? “No!” Enid yelled. “I don’t!” Never mind: Margery would take Enid through every single one of them. And she did. Short. Stubby. Resembling a toothbrush. Resembling a feather…Another hour was gone.
Did Enid understand the complicated mating patterns of the stag beetle? Did she understand the differences between a weevil and a carabid? “Of course I don’t, Marge!” Excellent. Sit tight, Enid. We’ll run through those as well.
Then the mountain gave a monumental crack and the earth swayed and a whole side seemed to break off and slide past, like a table upended. Tree trunks, broken-off branches, boulders, a boiling avalanche of water and leaves and stone. Margery clung to Enid, and Enid clung to her dog. They cowered in their hiding place while the ground shook and roared as if the entire earth was being washed away, while Enid sobbed and sobbed, and Margery continued to talk about the anatomy of a beetle. Never in her life had she been so grateful there were so many species. If necessary, she had enough source material to go on for weeks.
Toward the end of the second day, the wind dropped and the rain paused. The return of calm felt like a question in the air, waiting. Margery dared to crawl out to check the path but had barely gone a few yards before the wind took up again. It was even worse than before. Too late it occurred to her that this was the eye of the storm, the dangerous moment of hiatus before things got even worse. The wind snatched the hurricane lamp out of her hands and smashed it on the ground, where it went crashing and shattering as if it were at least twenty times its size. She lifted a foot to get back to Enid, and was hurled to the ground. Crawling on hands and knees, she was assaulted by branches and leaves and stones. She even accidentally punched herself. “We will die!” roared Enid, for the twenty-three hundredth time. “We will die and no one can help us!”
Another night on the mountain. Another night of talking. Then at last the wind lowered, light came, the cloud drifted away, rain fell more softly. Margery pulled herself out of the crevice, then helped Enid.
Now they made their way down, moving as if tied together by a rope. Enid was weak. Margery’s voice was hoarse. Somehow the killing jar was still safe in her haversack and so were her helmet and the insect net. The dog was also safe. But they had lost nearly everything else. The path was filled with rubble and stones and fallen trees. Giant boulders the size of furniture blocked the way. Stones rattled beneath their feet like china, and in other places rivulets came up to their knees. Steam rose from every part of the earth. The air was fil
led with whistles and birdsong. Margery took both haversacks. She helped Enid over one fallen tree after the next; they waded through water, while Enid held her tummy with one hand and Margery with the other.
“Enid? Is the baby all right? Can you feel it moving? One more step, Enid. You’re doing so well. Keep going. One more step. That’s it. And another. Keep going, Enid. Look. The wind has almost gone. We did it. We’re safe. Are you all right, Enid?”
“I’m okay. The baby is, too. But could you please stop talking, Marge? I can’t think.”
A bird of prey circled overhead, wondering if they were dead enough to eat.
* * *
—
A miracle. The bungalow was in one piece. It was still standing. In fact, it looked the same—if not slightly better. A few palm leaves were missing, but they could be fixed. There were no broken steps because the steps had already been broken; the same with the wraparound veranda. The tarp on the roof had not flown off but slightly flattened itself. The door seemed to be hanging at less of an angle. The bungalow, it occurred to Margery, had been through so many cyclones, it couldn’t get any worse. It was, in effect, cyclone proof. And seeing it again, she felt a whoosh of love. It struck her as the best bungalow in the entire world.
“Home!” yelled Enid. “Marge! We did it! We’re home! We did it!” But she couldn’t make the steps. Margery practically had to lift her to the top. Afterward she had to go back and fetch the dog.
Enid wasn’t just weak, she was jumpy, too. When Margery opened the door and a quantity of wildlife spilled out, including an eel, she shrieked. Then she blinked, bewildered, at the threshold, surveying the mess. The floor was a lake of water and strewn with branches, papers, tins of Spam, and the floating remains of all the specimens they’d risked so much to find. The Baby Jesus painting had fallen from the wall. Some of Margery’s display cases and jars had been blown from the study, and many were smashed. Her books were soaked.