by Rachel Joyce
“It’s not so bad,” Margery said slowly. “It’s not so bad, Enid.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Not at all. I’ve seen worse.”
She led the way. The most important thing was that she did not despair: Enid was watching her like a hawk. Her boots swished through the water and cracked on broken glass. But the roof had kept hold at the back of the bungalow. The bedrooms had not been flooded. The mosquito nets were intact. It would not take too long to set things straight. “Yes, Enid. It’s all right.”
“We did it! We did it, Marge!” whispered Enid, who had switched to happy again but only on a faint setting. She clung to Margery’s arm.
In her bedroom, Margery helped Enid remove her boots. She peeled off her shorts and top. Briefly Enid ducked to check her red valise was safe beneath the bed, then allowed Margery to help her into a slip. It was the first time Margery had seen Enid naked since the day she’d swum in the bathing pool, and her body was dark and thin and muscled, except for the very pale torso, which looked like a vest. Her breasts were fat and blue-veined, her belly already swelling. Suddenly she seemed too small for it. Despite herself, Margery laughed. Maybe it was just relief. The relief of being safe. Enid gazed down at her belly and stroked it as if she was proud of it, and laughed, too. Then Margery rigged a canopy above the bed with a tarp and sticks so that Enid would stay dry if it rained again. She pulled the insect net all round her.
“Marge, we did it!” whispered Enid, in weepy wonderment. “There’s nothing that can stop you and me finding the beetle now.” She dropped off instantly, one hand cupping her belly.
Enid slept on and off for the rest of the day. She got up to eat, and drink a gallon of water, then picked up her dog and went back to bed. She said she just needed to rest. After that she’d be ready to keep searching.
In her absence, Margery became a swarm of activity. She actually made herself dizzy. She swept away the broken glass, mopped the water, banged in hardboard at the broken windows, and another nail to rehang Enid’s precious Baby Jesus painting. She made new towers of what was left of the tinned food and threw away the packets of oats that were inedible. Outside she collected armfuls of sweet bananas to feed to Enid; she fixed the leaves back on the roof and secured them with rope; she fetched more water from the freshwater creek, which had swollen considerably with the rain. She scrubbed their clothes to get the red and sweat out of them—though their original colors had mostly gone now. She patched the worst of the holes, and used Enid’s knitting needles to pierce their boots so that when they got caught in rain in the future, the water could run through. She made something with yams and eggs that smelled so good Enid got up and ate it without talking. She hung out everything to dry.
As darkness poured in, she lit the only remaining hurricane lamp, and focused on her beetle collection. She found the specimens she could salvage. She wrapped them carefully, ready for transporting home. She retrieved what she could of her books and paperwork, and nailed loose pages to the walls to dry them. She sat up into the early hours of the morning, rewriting her notes. Outside, the sky was a huge glass ball, very dark, with sprinkles of stars. There was the murmur of insects and, far away, the ocean, and everywhere the scent of the very sweet flowers that seemed to be opening in the dark like candles, and pine.
Enid had been right. They could have died up the mountain. But they hadn’t. They had not been killed by floodwater or falling rocks or bouncing coconuts. They had survived. Margery had failed Enid on the ship, she had failed her at Wacol, she had failed her repeatedly on the mountain—it was shameful how much she’d failed—but now she was going to take charge. Wherever life had seemed to be going before, it was going to get there differently, with Margery at the helm.
It was as if forty-eight hours of nonstop talking had unlocked something new, and she felt not only big on the outside but big inside, too. So even though she had begun to fear she was wrong about the beetle—that it might not be in New Caledonia, or if it had been there once, it wasn’t anymore—she was going to get back on that mountain and keep searching. Who cared about a visa? This was her second chance.
Something about the words “second chance” pulled her up short. They seemed familiar. She had to stop and think hard. Then she remembered. When Enid had confessed she was still pregnant, just before the cyclone, she said she’d been afraid on Christmas Day that everything was over—and then she’d realized that the baby was her second chance. But there was something strange about that. Why would Enid have thought everything was over? She’d done nothing on Christmas Day except make paper hats and fiddle with the radio, trying to find a signal. Margery wished she could ask Enid exactly what she’d meant.
But even if Enid was awake and they were sitting on the veranda, Margery realized she wouldn’t ask. The differences between them—all those things she’d once found so infuriating—she now accepted. Being Enid’s friend meant there were always going to be surprises. Her red valise. That was another one. As she’d watched Enid doing her best to wriggle beneath the bed to check on it, she’d wanted to laugh and say, “Enid, what on earth do you keep in that thing?” But respect for Enid had stopped her. However close they were, it didn’t entitle her to Enid’s memories, and neither did it allow her to be part of Enid’s life before they’d met. Being a friend meant accepting those unknowable things. It meant saying, “Look! Look how big my leg is! And look how small yours is! Look how marvelously different we are, you and I, and yet here we are, together in this strange world!” It was by placing herself side by side with Enid that Margery had finally begun to see the true outline of herself. And she knew it now: Enid was her friend.
She took a pencil and paper and counted how many tins they had left. Enough for a month. No more. That would get them as far as early February. She fetched her purse and counted the money. If they were careful, she could afford the fuel back to Nouméa, with a little extra to spare. Their clothes and boots were in a bad way, and one of the hammocks would last barely another week. But it was her legs that were the real problem. She fetched the magnifying glass and a knife.
Margery unrolled her socks and took off the bandages. The skin was red-hot and swollen where the bites were infected. She took a pen and drew a ring around each one. Ten in all. Then she placed the tip of the knife over the first, and looked away as she sliced the blade into her skin, as if it were a peach, trying to lance the pus. Pain showered right through her. It was like nothing else—though, conversely, she completely forgot the agony in her hip. Afterward she washed the wound and applied iodine. She wrapped it in lint and a clean bandage, but it went on stinging like mad. Attracted by the blood, a cloud of mosquitoes billowed up.
Only five weeks ago, she’d spent her first night in a hammock and felt desperate to stop. Now her assistant was pregnant, and Margery’s legs were a write-off. Most of her equipment was gone, and they were down to the last of the tins. But she was hanging on by her fingernails to find ways to keep going.
She took the knife, wiped it, and braced herself to lance another bite.
He had the carving knife, the Panama hat, and the yellow towel from the RMS Orion, as well as his notebook, the map, and his passport with the new visa stamp. He crouched low, where he could keep the bungalow in view.
It had been easy getting north: the British consul’s wife had been wrong. And she’d had no right to laugh. He had left their villa with the things he wanted—the knife, the British consul’s wallet, and a bottle of red wine—and hitched a lift with two Dutchmen heading north for the mines. He showed them the word “POUM” in his notebook, and then the cross on his map, and they said they could take him halfway, if he sat in the back with their kit. They tried the west coast road but it was closed because of the cyclone, so they crossed the island to the east coast road instead. They asked if Mundic was there for work, but he’d had enough of talking, so he pretended he was asleep. After a few hours
, they dropped him off and said something he didn’t understand about a river. But it didn’t matter because he had taken one of the men’s binoculars from his kit bag, as well as a spare battery. He didn’t want the battery, but he took it anyway.
After the lift with the Dutch, he had walked until he came to a little town with some shacks and a café. He ordered a plate of fried fish and wrote it down in his notebook so he wouldn’t forget, and he wrote about the two Dutchmen, and then he showed the man at the bar the word “POUM” but the man said, “Non,” like it was closed. Then he took hold of Mundic’s notebook and drew a picture of a river. He pointed up, like the river was in the ceiling. Then Mundic got it. He understood. It was like the men in the camps when they had code words so that the Japs wouldn’t understand when they were planning an escape, and he realized the fellow was telling him that the river was not in the ceiling, it was north. The river was in the north. The guy said, “Non,” again. And Mundic began to understand that the river was blocking the east coast road because of the cyclone and there was no way he could get past.
So he drew a picture of a boat, and the man rubbed the tips of his fingers, like he wanted cash.
But the cash wasn’t a problem because he still had the woman’s purse from the cargo ship—he didn’t even have to bother with the British consul’s wallet.
The next thing he knew he was getting into a little fishing boat with an old chap in a hat and he was saying, “Poum,” and pointing at the word in his notebook, and the man was laughing and saying, “Poum wee wee Poum.” And it made no sense but Mundic pulled out the bottle of red wine from the British consulate, and the sky was so starry it was like it was filled with holes, and he drank the red wine, and he watched as the stars split up and down, and the oars of the little fishing boat pulled through the water, and even though it was choppy because of the wind, a great happiness surged through him. He had been a free man for five years, but this was the first time he truly felt it.
And now here he was. In Poum. The boat had docked by a broken jetty and he walked until he found some old men and some goats, and he had drawn a picture in his notebook of two women, and a big bloke in an old café had pointed the way down a dirt track. So he had walked another few miles, and there were banana trees and red parrots and ferns that were as big as towers and cacti the size of people, and far away he could hear the ocean. He went past a shantytown, and when the boys ran out to shout, “Hello, Monsieur!” he yelled at them to clear off, like the men in the cargo ship in Brisbane had shouted at him. He had walked through the red dust until the track came to a stop and all he could see were the trees and all he could hear were the insects—and there it was, this horrible little bungalow. He thought it was all a mistake.
Then there was Miss Benson. She was ahead of him on the veranda. And she was dressed like a man, and helping the blonde, and at first he wanted to wave and say, “Hello! I made it! I’m here now to lead the expedition!” But he didn’t because he saw that Miss Benson was helping the blonde, like she was very sick, and he drew back, slashing his way through ferns and elephant grass with the knife, to a place where he could hide and find out what was what.
He stayed a long time, and he felt strangely powerful, watching the bungalow when they didn’t know, writing facts about them in his notebook. Later he went to Poum, found himself a room, and slept, then remembered to buy fresh fruit because of the beriberi. The next day he came back, and knelt in his hiding place and took notes. Sometimes the blonde appeared with a mangy dog, but she looked dead on her feet, and she held on to her belly, and he saw now what the problem was. She was up the duff. She was a lousy assistant.
And he thought of the men at Songkurai and the march to the railway lines and how, when someone fell at your side, you couldn’t stop. You couldn’t even look. You had to go on without them. He thought of laying the tracks and how, with every piece he’d carried, another man seemed to collapse. He thought of the rock they’d hacked through every day, and the river water at their feet, and the jungle that was so dense he’d thought he’d never see his way out. He thought of the dead lying on rice sacks and the stench of broken bodies. And the thoughts came so fast he had to sit very still with his arms round him and say, “You are a free man, you are a free man. It’s okay, son, eat your fruit.”
Three days of watching Miss Benson. He wrote his observations in his notebook, like what time she got up and what time she picked bananas and what time she put out the lamp at night. And it was all right when he fixed on those things. He was back in the present.
Now he lifted his binoculars for a better look. He could see her burnt arms as she leaned on the broken railing of the veranda. The splits in her boots. He could see the bandages up her legs, and the way she had to hold her hip so she could walk. He guessed she hadn’t found the beetle.
It was different now that he knew she’d stolen her equipment. The rules had changed again, just like they’d changed when he’d saved her life on the ship. There was this new secret feeling between them. He lay back and closed his eyes, and he could hear the insects, he could feel the heat, and it seemed he sank down into a place that was warm and red and full of comfort.
He just had to work out how to lose the blonde.
They drove to Poum to celebrate being alive. That was Margery’s idea. She went with her hair dyed: that was Enid’s. Margery did not want new hair, she liked her hair the way it was, but Enid had flown into a rage when she said no—she absolutely refused to go to Poum unless Margery changed her hair—so Margery had caved in. She caved in mainly because they needed to eat something that wasn’t Spam or bananas. Enid had one last bottle of bleach left, and the transformation of Margery’s hair took thirty minutes. She’d had no idea you could do so much damage to a human head in so little time. Her hair was bright yellow. Her eyebrows, by contrast, seemed dark in an evil way. She looked like a child killer. Enid, however, was oblivious to that. She was delighted.
“No one will recognize you,” she said.
Yet another Enidism that made no sense. Even if no one had noticed Margery before, they couldn’t fail to spot her now. But it was not the time to cross Enid. It had been nearly a week since the cyclone, and she could pass from happy to preoccupied to fierce in the space of a jiffy. Also, she tried to hide it but she was unsteady on her feet. It wasn’t just her belly that had swollen, but her neck and wrists and ankles. She carried herself like a pot of water that she didn’t want to spill. It could take ages for her to get down the steps of the bungalow, and her pockets were weighed down with shiny stones and feathers for good luck. She refused to see a doctor, even though Margery said they had enough money to drive back to Nouméa.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she would say. “I’m pregnant. It’s not an illness.” In an ideal world, she’d have spent all day on the veranda, talking babies and knitting tiny clothes.
Whenever Margery suggested getting back to the expedition, Enid agreed, then came up with a good reason as to why they shouldn’t: either the mist, or Margery’s limp, or just a feeling she had that this was not the right time. But ever since the cyclone, the weather had been beautiful. The sky was a clear blue, like the inside of a shiny bowl, sunlight fanning between the trees, and the air was as clean as a knife. Margery often stood gazing at the mountain, the two prongs at the top that she knew now resembled a pair of chimneys. She watched the clouds pass overhead, their shadows crossing the land beneath, or the early-morning sun—a slice of gold rising above the horizon, taking shape and spilling light like treacle. Despite the constant pain in her calves and hip, she was impatient to get back.
Enid borrowed Margery’s best frock to go to Poum because everything she had was too tight. Her hair wasn’t so yellow anymore—it was laced with black—but she’d overdone it with the makeup. She didn’t look evil, as Margery did: more like a woman who’d been at the same party for three weeks. Now she hauled herself into t
he jeep. Maybe it was the purple frock but she seemed massive. She’d put on her pom-pom sandals as well. They seemed tiny.
“Are you sure you’re fit to drive, Enid?”
“I’m not an invalid, Marge.”
She asked Margery to look after her handbag and yanked the jeep into first gear. Then she drove at an incrementally slow pace down the track, traveling all the way to the left side to avoid the smallest holes on the right. They weren’t so much driving as treading water. It would have been quicker to hitch a lift with a tortoise. Even trees had more movement.
Margery had barely seen the boys from the shantytown since the cyclone. They had visited the bungalow a few times, once trying to sell her eggs—she’d bought them to feed Enid—and then trying to sell her Enid’s old battery radio. She didn’t want the radio so she gave them chewing gum and sent them packing. Now, when they appeared, shouting, “Hi-ya! Hi-ya!” they didn’t even need to trot to keep up with the jeep, though, out of politeness, they went backward just to give Enid a fair chance of getting ahead. Meanwhile she clung to the steering wheel and sat with her seat jammed forward, peering at the dirt track as if it were the middle of the night.
“You think I’m a bad driver.”
“I have never said that.”
“You think I’m not safe.”
“Enid, we couldn’t possibly hit anything, even if it lay down on the track and waved a flag.”