The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow

by Thea Astley

  Inspired no doubt by tensions of weather and relationships, I decided this morning to keep a journal of these last days. Am I wise before events? There isn’t time to write a great deal. The briefest jottings. A skeleton portrayal. Another terrible and unexpected invitation to gather at the residency, the superintendent persisting with the social rituals that preceded his wife’s death. A shambles of a gathering. Shouted accusations and countercharges. Blows exchanged. Their rage drives me home. Captain Brodie believes the doctor and deputy are trying to supplant him. Last month there was an official inquiry into complaints made by Mr Leggat and Doctor Quigley. I put all that down. (Half a page, half a page, half a page onward, mocks bright-faced Claire observing mother-at-desk.) To be found at desk is a pretty change after being found at bar, I tell her.

  The ceasing of wind and the interminable rain now falling in more or less predictable dumpings has turned the island into a stew-steam with moisture rising from the ground in heavy vapours that make walking more like swimming. There is a constant stink of decaying vegetable waste.

  Writing creates maps. Of a sort.

  Are maps about people or places?

  People and places. That evening, ah!

  Mr Morrow, dear man, less than useless, has left without ceremony. Grinner Jardine reports that he has rowed into the sunset. There was a small note left on my work-table and two weeks’ board. I am shaken after that turmoil at the residency. It is too hot to sleep. Leonie begins a passionate assault on a Scriabine prelude while Claire watches, twisting strands of hair. We’re all deluded by passion in this clamping climate as my daughter’s notes or Scriabine’s, gutted, almost, from the cheap but resonant upright, hang in the air, linger, create dissonance.

  An explosion blasts Scriabine apart. Leonie swings towards me but already I am running onto the verandah when a second boom rocks the settlement. My throat wrenches out a name. ‘Mr Vine!’ I cry. ‘Mr Vine!’ Who had gone to bed some time before but is sleepless as well and races to join us where we peer uselessly through the filtered dark. We are one protector less. The doctor and matron have long since returned to the hospital and we test out our fears behind the dripping creepers, seeing, even from where we stand, the first leaping flames stabbing crimson. There are distant shouts, rifle shots, the pounding of feet across the bridge, the sound of running. A woman’s scream carves the night then bubbles away.

  I want to scream as well but grip my daughters tightly as feet thud down the track again and over the bridge and we glimpse Captain Brodie racing his madness across the garden. He is moving in terrible jerks, a rifle in one hand, his swagger stick in the other. For one moment he pauses and looks up at his chilled audience by the steps and Leonie shouts, ‘What is it? What is it?’ but his eyes haven’t seen or have moved beyond us for he whips about and begins a spastic running back the way he has come, pushing past midnight into a next day, whose air is ruptured by more explosions and new bursts of fire.

  Mr Vine takes a torch and strides bravely into the night, into the drizzle which has just begun. We watch his flickering beam wobble across the creek and up towards Coconut Avenue and the fires, separate spires of light. Wary, I douse the lamps and steer my daughters into the shrubbery for safety, where we huddle beneath raincoats until we hear him return, feet stumbling across the verandah boards, voice calling softly to us. Even as he tells what has happened there are two more explosions following quickly, one upon the other, and greater sheets of flame scrawled on the dark.

  ‘It’s madness,’ he says. ‘Brodie’s gone crazy. He’s burnt the residence, the store and the school. He’s prowling round the settlement with revolvers and a rifle. His pockets are stuffed with dynamite.’ I watch my daughters’ eyes widen. ‘I spoke to him, just for a minute. Tried to reason with the man. He didn’t seem to know who I was. Told me to get off the island. He thinks,’ Mr Vine smiled wryly in torchlight, ‘there’s some kind of revolutionary plot to unseat him. Obsessed, poor bastard. I couldn’t find Quigley or the matron. Jardine’s skulking in the boatshed and Mrs Leggat has taken the storekeeper’s wife and kids to hide in the scrub near the ridge. Maybe we should do the same.’

  ‘I don’t know about you others,’ indomitable Leonie says in a no-nonsense voice, ‘but I’m going to make a very large pot of tea.’ And she stalks off through the dripping leaves to the house.

  She always was a sassy girl.

  I can’t bear to remember the rest of that night. The intermittent rain. The mosquitoes. The droning of water, waves, and the unexplained cracklings about the grounds, louder because the whole settlement was now wrapped in a silence thick as felt.

  But not for long. In one of those pauses between cloudbursts, nimbus peeled back like stage drapes and a watery moon lit a drama too melodramatic to be believed.

  Once more in that ambiguous light we glimpse the superintendent moving beyond the verandah rails, crouched and stalking, it soon becomes apparent, the matron and doctor whom he had surprised, we were told later, in the matron’s sleeping annexe at the hospital. Before the doctor could screech a warning to his partner, a shot had blasted a hole in his thigh. Brodie had pushed forward through the crotons outside the annexe window and taken aim at Matron Tullman who was busy trying to lug her portly lover into shelter, but the doctor tore himself free with a cry, ‘For God’s sake, woman!’ just before a second crack of the rifle lodged a bullet in the matron’s shoulder. Her thin squawk jabbed through leaves and then she began to run from the annexe, the doctor limping after her. She outdistanced him in no time at all, flopping about in her nightgown, face bloated with fear as she blundered down the avenue through the orange grove towards the little creek and the track leading up to our house.

  A filmic quality. In slowest motion.

  They created a frieze beyond the garden on the ridge above the creek, the matron panting in front, blood now running down her arm onto the starched white cotton, followed by pyjama-clad Doctor Quigley lurching, staggering, one hand shoved in his spurting groin, and some mad how Brodie, who must have doubled back through lawyer vine, loping after them, his rifle barrel jerking in parody of his movements. Then as we watched, a fourth figure appeared on the ridge-line, deputy Leggat racing with his rifle and shouting at his boss.

  A pause. Brodie stopped suddenly and stared not at but through his assistant, eyes plastered on insane distances. He raised the service pistol which he had stuck in his belt and fired wildly to a clicking stop. Momentarily he fumbled in his shirt pocket for bullets, then uttering a shriek of frustration ran back down the hill and began scrambling through trees on the far bank of the creek.

  The sequence: I am handicapped here. Leggat, I think, torn between duty and charity, glanced from us to the superintendent’s vanishing crashing figure then ran off after him.

  Between us we dragged and heaved the wounded pair onto beds. One of the black boys was sent to fetch ligatures and sutures from what was left of the matron’s annexe, where Doctor Quigley kept emergency equipment. He tended himself with the help of Leonie who, tight-lipped, handed clamps and sutures, listening to Matron Tullman who lay whimpering with her shattered shoulder and bruised skull. All this, while more shots cut the night, a further explosion and the leaping hunger of fires.

  I lit the lamps. What point in concealment? I made fresh tea.

  ‘Mother,’ Leonie asked as the three of us sat together in the dining-room playing at heroics, pretending everything would pass—her eyes were not quite innocent—‘what was Doctor Quigley doing in Matron Tullman’s room?’

  When morning grey seeps through we learn more. The deputy and the storekeeper creep down to check on our safety, their sooty red-rimmed eyes marked with horror. Mr Cole had gone rushing to his burning store to find Captain Brodie gawking like a pleased kid at a bonfire night. Madness! Idiocy! ‘What in God’s name’s going on?’ the storekeeper asked. ‘Oh, I’m just watching it,’ the superintendent says, cool as you like. ‘I’ve shot the doctor and the matron and I tried to get Legga
t. I missed the bugger but he can wait. And as for you, you’d better clear off while you’ve got the chance. I’m going to clean up this place. Get rid of the vermin.’

  It’s a rollcall. It’s appalling. It’s almost funny.

  And the children? Davey and Barbara?

  The deputy looks at us and then away. ‘That explosion,’ he says, ‘his house. They were inside.’

  We all swim in blood.

  *

  There’s an end to everything. Two of the blacks set off in a skiff to get help from the mainland. Another rows to the quarantine settlement on U-millie for medical help. The last of the rifles are handed out to police boys told to shoot on sight.

  What was it I used to boast? I’ve always tried to run a respectable place?

  As the sun comes up there is another explosion from the jetty below Shippers Vale. The house rocks. Glasses shatter. We trample through terror and blood. It is too much. A nightmare. Goggle-eyed Essie sidles in, Peg trailing, to say that the superintendent has blown up Doebin’s launch and in the drizzling morning is heading in a runabout for U-millie. ‘Tucker,’ she explains. ‘He need tucker real bad. Store bin gone.’

  He is isolating us.

  The day crawls by in tensions. There is nothing to do but wait.

  Shamelessly we cringe in the house and live through another night. A medical orderly on U-millie has come over by barge and dressed the doctor’s and matron’s wounds. Captain Brodie, he says, was given water and meat and set off for Noogoo Island to sit out the day. He spoke rationally, the orderly reports, but kept a revolver at the ready.

  ‘Poor man,’ Leonie says surprisingly. ‘Poor man.’

  In the second dawn we keep watch from our verandah, our eyes fixed on the jetty and the water beyond. The settlement is deserted, the women hiding among the trees near the dormitories. Leggat has mustered the police boys, who handle their guns with reluctance. They like Uncle Boss.

  Shame, here.

  The white lords retreat as the superintendent in a scarlet bathing costume steps ashore from the runabout holding a rifle. A small wind riffles his hair in an orphan splash of sun. Two of the black boys sent to deal with the crisis are hiding in the mango trees near the waterfront. From our verandah we can see the branches shake as they crawl along the limbs into foliage cover. But a third young man steps forward. It’s Billy Cooktown’s older brother Manny. His skinny body trembles in his ragged shirt and shorts as he handles with bravado the rifle issued by deputy Leggat. ‘Stop, boss!’ he cries, inching towards the crazed figure in the bathing suit. The superintendent smiles. ‘So they have to send my boys to get me,’ he says. ‘Where are all those yellow bastards hiding, eh?’

  ‘Please boss,’ Manny says. ‘Please.’

  The superintendent raises his rifle and takes another step along the jetty.

  ‘You put that gun down, eh?’ Manny pleads.

  The superintendent answers with a shot fired into the moving tree branches and automatically the boy with the rifle replies. Question. Response.

  Brodie screams once with the shock of it and falls onto the splintered planks, blood seeping from a hole in his stomach.

  It was Leggat’s voice I heard before and behind that blast. I would swear to it in any court of law.

  ‘Shoot to kill!’ he had ordered.

  *

  Where is the borderline between innocence and guilt, that perilous divide Captain Brodie trod?

  The police boys brought the superintendent back on a litter beneath cloud that had swaddled the whole island in threat. There was no break in that muffling velvet. They put Captain Brodie on a stretcher in what was left of the charred hospital. Cowards—I include myself—emerged from corners in time for the police launch from the mainland. The superintendent died that afternoon, his lips refusing reasons. His body was taken aboard the Malita along with Doctor Quigley and the matron, the storekeeper and his wife and Mrs Leggat, who seemed to have lost her English and was reduced to cries of outrage and grief in German.

  At a sobersides meal that evening Mr Vine announced that he, too, would be leaving when the launch returned. Only some foolish sense of obligation kept him here. ‘Doctor Quigley,’ he informed us as he fiddled uninterestedly with his cold cuts and salad, ‘had written his resignation anyway. He told me he’d been thinking about it for some time.’

  Leonie raised a flushed face distorted by emotional drench and cried, ‘But he can’t! All the blacks, poor things. The babies! All those old people!’

  Mr Vine looked at her over the tops of his glasses. ‘They did very well without us for thousands of years. In fact, my dear, they did a lot better. In any case, there’ll be a replacement. We’re all replaceable.’

  That’s the pity of it.

  And we too would be gone. There were so many things now I would never fully understand, yet I was resigned to that, to my ignorance of the world. Life is too brief.

  But Leonie and Claire had all the time I had wasted and an avidity for understanding. Since I first howled into the light, I have lived through changes that are merely the beginning of things I simply accept, although now my daughters claim that they are dragging me screaming into a new, a different, place.

  There they will be, the pair of them, like figureheads against the guardrail of the prow, the salt from speeding waters turning their hair into a mass of briny knots, their profiles carving the wind.

  Sitting here watching Mr Vine struggle with his supper, struggling with my own, I am impatient to leave.

  Things are always better, I assure myself, somewhere else.

  And how do I know?

  I know. But that’s another story.

  Bin clearin, his dadda said. All time bin clearin.

  And then the buildin of the bladey-grass humpies and more people come from all over, from up near Cape Grafton where they found the footprint of the first blackman in the rock. Sacred, that place. First blackman. And then more migaloo come, white ladies who talk bout God all the time and teacher show them how to read migaloo.

  Chant chant chant.

  He gets bigger. He works on the rock gang. They clear trees and roll stones and rocks to load them onto a cart. They blow up dead coral to pound, make lime. They plant coconut trees and mangoes.

  No sittin under them trees. Mustn’t stay in migaloo place. Uncle Boss he build hospital he call it with timber brought over on the schooner Clyde. But first they build houses for the migaloo, proper houses with tin roofs. Houses for the storeman and the new nurse she look out for hospital, black girls’ sleep house, sleep house for boys. And later, eh, school and maybe little church.

  Work work work.

  Then more people. Men in chains who were put into camps and set to clear roads and put up buildings and every Friday they all line up, his dadda, mumma, uncles, for tucker rations: flour, sugar, salt, rice, corn beef, maybe, sometimes little bit syrup.

  It was hard. Too hard, sometime. But there was his dadda and mumma and Jericho and Billy gettin bigger now. An he got new brother, Normie. Yowl yowl yowl. This humpy too small, mumma say.

  Uncle Boss give out lollies sometime when he feelin good. An Mrs Uncle Boss a real nice lady. Special days she let her kids play with him, him and Davey go fishin, climbin, swimmin. Too bad when them bells went. Crack your head! That Davey he got so brown couldn’t tell them apart, the missus say. Which one’s Manny? she ask. And laugh. Then Davey he go away to school on the mainland.

  The boss he start football team. Still got photo. There’s me in the back row and Uncle Boss sittin so good-lookin down front, little smile on face. He train us real hard. The missus laugh a lot them days, laugh and keep Uncle Boss sweet till she get sick. Then it all change so fast.

  How you keep up?

  THERE’S A STORY IN THIS

  There’s a story in this, he told himself, idiot new-chum sailor, his muscles hauling the dinghy through the sinews of water. Blistered hands, raw with salt, blistered face, his burning palms skidding pain on the oars, ro
wlocks wobbling, tides shoving or dragging. And the sun. The sun the sun the sun over eye-searing blue.

  I am porous, he decided, swing dip pull. Porous. How often had he commiserated with, encouraged, sometimes envied those scribblers who had haunted his office in the Great Portland Road with their manuscripts, doggy from too much travelling, long mendicant lines of writers over the work of whose lucky few he had swung dipped pulled with editorial comment that usually offended and shoved them up on their rickety high horses, unwilling to change even a comma.

  All this I’ll put down.

  He would write his own version of those eviscerated thrillers, adventure yarns, travellers’ tales he had passed from his desk to copy editor and on to the presses, overcome by the throbbing egos that picked up their newly birthed book with its garish jacket as if it were the Bible Koran Torah that would change its reader’s world.

  God! He was living all that stuff!

  And the land-shelf drew closer hour by hour.

  Wouldn’t say how he got here, didn’t have to, in those days when it was easy to sail in on a British passport, no questions asked. I mean, the accent was enough, not quite Oxbridge but passably rounded and honed from a not very successful private school near Eastbourne—swing dip drag—and not that he had anything to hide except a festering boredom with grubby London, the class pecking orders, people having to know their place. What was his place, for Christ’s sake? So he had tried the States first, home of the democratic brave and the free, going straight to the heart of it, New York, staring at the non-compassionate features of the goddess of liberty doing a matrona caritatis over the harbour and the stone towers but not offering a living hand.