by Thea Astley
The gulls screeched into his skull, stabbing and whirling.
And who lodged the complaint?
I can’t say that, I’m afraid.
Afraid? You’re afraid?
A little smile. Silence.
Tell me. I demand to know. Who was it?
I can’t tell you.
Can’t or won’t?
It wouldn’t be right.
Well, let me tell you something then. The lot of them, wasn’t it? The bloody lot. Leggat, Quigley, Cole. That louse Jardine with his brood of half-castes no one wants to mention. Oh yes. That lot.
You’re putting me in an awkward position.
So you agree? You admit it then?
They all signed. They all complained.
About what?
Your attitude. Your tactics with the natives. Physical violence, I understand.
Once! He accused me of punching a black woman. Me! A mere slap.
(That once! There must be a second and final knockdown for the doctor. One and one.)
His feet rejected contact with—refused to feel—the sandy earth of the tracks. Eyes watching him outside houses slid away. Now and then a voice called to him, Uncle Boss! But he had forgotten how to reply. Eaten up with fury that made him want to vomit, eyes failed to see, ears to hear, body to feel. His wife gone forever, killed by maltreatment. Maltreatment? No treatment at all. ‘Just keep those feet up, my dear, and rest.’ His children? He shook his head again. He hadn’t spoken to them for days. They had dodged away after meals, shrinking from his basilisk eye. Perhaps they, too, wanted him out. But no, he told himself as the pain raced up from his nape and burst into shooting delicious stabs, they weren’t there. They’d gone back to the mainland already for the new term. He was fighting this alone.
And he would show them, the traitors. He would destroy the whole island, everything he had built, everything.
My dears, my lovely roads, trees, houses, buildings, all my—
His brain whizzed with bullets and burst into fire. His glide became a spastic stagger, an uncontrolled hobble, as he went crippled towards the bungalow in Coconut Avenue.
They’d accused him of being a drunkard, a bully, an incompetent.
‘Davey!’ he shouted through the echoing hall. ‘Barbara!’ Only the shadows shifted, and the iron roof expanding in the heat cracked replies that drilled into his skull. He shouted for his wife again and again. Why wouldn’t she answer? All gone. They’d all deserted.
He dragged himself across to the bedroom mirror to seek his other self, the one he remembered as slim, handsome, not looking his forty-plus years, but saw only a madman in filthy tropic whites who grinned lopsidedly.
Rubbish! He was still spruce, his gear nearly clean, nearly pressed. Everything nearly but not quite.
He poured himself a drink from the bottle he now kept by his bed and tossed it down in one gulp to stop the whizzing of the bullets.
He drank all through that long hot afternoon and into the evening, listening to the shorthand of the rain. Once he looked into his children’s rooms to check on them from old habit. Barbara was breathing lightly, her face turned to the wall. Next door Davey slept with one hand outside the sheet clutching a book. The superintendent opened the louvres wider to catch the ragged puffs of breeze that came up from the sea.
He was surprised to see them there. Surely they should be back at their schools by now. Baffled, he rammed his knuckles into his forehead, worrying flesh and conundrum, then went back to the living-room and fumbled himself another drink, spilling half. He took it out onto the verandah and reeled into his settler’s chair as his head once more exploded in flames. Sip hate sip hate. He could sense the lot of them down the avenue, listening and waiting.
His mind a scribble-slate, all facts and non-facts, erase, rewrite, erase-rewrite, don’t spit, sonny, use your sponge, back then back then. Cancel. Everything to be cancelled.
He dozed but woke to mosquitoes and the dark. Dreams had bitten and he’d scratched at the flesh of memory. He was glad his wife and children were safe on the mainland. He could see their goodbye arms waving from the launch. Thank God for something. But not for the anger that sent him twitching down the steps and along the road blotted with the massive dark of mango and palm. Nothing moved except his body that he felt to be almost too cumbersome for his intention.
There was a glimmer of light in the deputy’s house and beyond that the looming slab of the store, the storekeeper’s residence and the annexe where Matron Tullman slept and was now, he hated blinkingly, in the pudgy arms of her Irish paramour. And fifty yards on the small armoury, to which only he and the deputy held keys: the gelignite and fuses for rock-blasting, the two rifles kept in case of riot. There never was a riot. It lay only in this cleft skull that even now shattered again with rockets of pain.
The dark and the boundaries of nothing. If he could weep, the humanity he was trying to suppress would overcome the rage. He lusted after the rage, after purging. Officer material, they had said.
Anyone who’d been to a private school, no matter for how short a time, and understood the rigours of boarding school and self-discipline must be officer material.
Forget those years of early milkings in frozen dawns, the six-mile bike ride to school, the smeared slate, ink-stained copybook. Later, the yes sir no sir of thirty small boys herded into classrooms, cricket teams, football warfare, boiled cabbage dining-halls and tearful dormitories would create officer material. The British lion roared and he was sucked back into its stinking breath and waded through mud in western Europe to return with what was called glory to the farm, to marriage, to a humdrum scratch for subsistence.
He’d leapt at this chance on Doebin. Leapt.
He’d kept his swagger stick, first as an affectation, then as a handy weapon for snakes. See him stride and glide, swagger stick prancing in his hand as he inspects his kingdom. He doesn’t know he’s even swinging it. He doesn’t know it alienates Leggat, Cole and Jardine as an abominable pretension.
He has forgotten it now as he lays the gelignite and fuses beneath the residence verandah, giggles a moment, remembering the Somme, lights the fuse and moves back across the road to watch. It is too late for him to hear or even believe the wake-up panic of his daughter, Davey’s startled bird cry.
The whump, the obscenely beautiful blaze and the skittering figure of Uncle Boss racing across a backdrop of scarlet in the spatter of rain towards the matron’s annexe brings out like an halloo the braver of his staff, who watch, stunned, and hear a rifle shot and the crash of china toiletries. Another shot and they cannot see, as the invading superintendent sees, the good doctor staggering across the bedroom clutching his groin while a madman takes aim for Matron Tullman’s jugular, misses and begins beating her with the gun stock.
The pain in the superintendent’s own head drives him out into the night and he is aware of a wall of fire somewhere to his left but cannot connect for the moment. As his head clears, he patters suavely, neatly, back to the roadway and towards the office where he drenches an outer wall with petrol and tosses a match. It’s unslakable, this thirst for reprisal. The school’s thatched roof is crackling in dream satisfaction.
He stands back smiling.
Leggat accosts him in the thick smoke-filled pall now slashed by busy fires, choking and coughing on questions.
The superintendent shakes his head, forcing down that terrible agony. ‘That cunt of a doctor is dead. I’ve shot him, him and his mistress.’ He shutters his eyes with both hands, the rifle dangling, and fights to remember. ‘My house, the lot. I’ll destroy the whole place before I let you take over.’ Recovering, he looks up and glares and Leggat can see nothing but teeth and gun barrel. ‘It’s your turn.’
His rifle spits at emptiness as Leggat sprints into shadow and back towards his house. Someone is shouting at him. Cole? ‘You’ve killed your kids, you bloody maniac!’ And he hears himself mumble through shock and horror, ‘They aren’t here, you fool. They’
re not here.’
Are they? He doesn’t know. Cannot believe. Better, he rationalises, trying to help himself, they’re dead than know their father a murderer.
He races after the fleeing deputy who is shadow now with shadow wife and children chivvied into hiding in the scrub behind the avenue. The night is filled with the sound of scurrying movement, the houses untenanted.
The superintendent pranced like a fire demon, feet high in caracols and curvets, down the rain-soaked avenue, leaving behind him sprouting pillars of fire—residency, store, school. From the corner of his eye he spotted the doctor and the matron staggering into the night, toting their wounds towards Shippers Vale.
He raced after them, swinging rifle and a stick he picked up as he ran. He could hear footsteps thudding behind him but the pain in his head blotted purpose and swung him about, diverted. There were shouts, cries. Now and then he heard rustlings from the hidden enemy, the whimper of children huddled against uncovery, their parents shushing. His madness sped him beyond even that as the rain drummed harder, hammering on leaves, until his ecstatic jouncing took him to the jetty and the government launch moored alongside the hulk of an old coastal steamer and the settlement runabout.
In the cabin of the Nita, he dragged off his drenched clothes and crept under a blanket, insomniac with fire, with bullets, wondering about his children. Cole’s shouted accusation had jolted him but he refused to believe. Could not believe.
And then their memory was blurred and replaced by the ranked faces of the foe.
He woke early from his half-sleep, pulled on his scarlet bathing-costume, and elegantly armed with bullet belts across shoulders and around his narrow waist stepped from the Nita onto the jetty. He held a rifle and revolver and cut a murderous dash.
How his brain burned.
He had forgotten wife, children, the ashes of burnt-out buildings and years. A small surf fizzed along the beach but he could not see it. In the shoreline scrub a bird hawked and coughed. He could not hear it. He craved havoc like a numbing drug. Racing back he sloshed benzine through the bunkroom and on the decks of the launch, tossed a lighted match down the hatchway, and springing nimbly over the side waded to the runabout. As he wobbled astride the little rocking boat, his rocking brain absorbed fire. The Nita went up with a roar.
Fire cleansed. Cleansed.
Beyond that glazed dawnlight he could see the furtive shapes of some of his boys watching from the shelter of the trees. He raised his rifle and laughingly fired into a sky he hoped to bring down, a final curtain. Rain answered. He pointed the deadly eye of his rifle straight at the heart of Danny Tombo who had stupidly ventured onto the beach. ‘Uncle Boss!’ the fool was calling. ‘Hey, Uncle Boss!’
‘Here!’
Danny Tombo wanted to slither back to the casuarinas. ‘Uncle Boss?’ Voice and legs quavered.
‘Here, I said. On the double. You come quick, eh!’
The boy came slowly to the edge of the water and paused. The superintendent felt his brain boil.
‘I said here, damn you! I mean here!’
Tombo waded out to the runabout, putting one terrified hand on the rocking gunwale. His eyes jittered with terror.
‘In!’
The boy kept his face averted from this maniac, watching his big splayed toes in dawn water, his body frozen into stillness until the nudge of the rifle barrel energised him. In seconds he was seated in the stern, dragging on the starting cord of the outboard until it hacked into clatter and edged away from the burning launch, described a wide arc and bucketed off towards U-millie, a shadow sister of Doebin at the end of the superintendent’s pointing finger.
Brodie hunched up in the bows, still gripping the rifle, still gripping his rage. The bandolier sagging across his bright red bathers made him not a comic figure but one of eccentric tabu. Spray whipped hair and thought into curls, and his mind, overturned momentarily by the beauty of his seesaw world, relinquished the horror he had left behind, that turmoil of fire and gun-blast, until it was the limpest fag-end of a nightmare that lingered only along the lonely margins of his obsession.
He grinned at Danny, who refused to look. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey Danny! We’re friends, eh?’
He screamed his plans against the wind and the noise of the motor. They would go to U-millie and get food from the lazaret, then head off to Noogoo and camp there for the day.
‘Whaffor, Uncle Boss?’ Danny asked, keeping his eyes on the nearing beaches of U-millie. ‘Whaffor?’
‘Until,’ the superintendent replied enigmatically. For a moment his blaze of happiness was soused. Across reef waters he could see clouds boiling up on the northern rim. He muttered, ‘I will kill them all.’
‘What you sayin?’ Danny asked.
‘I will kill them all,’ the superintendent shouted.
‘Who, Uncle Boss?’
‘My enemies. All of them.’ He straightened, tightened his grip on the rifle and made a mock-threatening movement. ‘Not you, boy.’
The sun had climbed well up above the lacquer-grey water and lurched behind storm cloud. U-millie loomed—the beach, the huts, the lazaret roof glinting at the back and someone, tall and thin as an exclamation mark, striding down to the landing stage over the rocky pathway.
‘Le bon docteur! Another!’ the superintendent was hissing between teeth. ‘Le médecin malgré lui!’ he said, thinking of Quigley. ‘Danny, when we ground, go and ask Doctor Clereau for meat and bread.’
Danny shook his head. He cut the motor and the keel grated on sand while he kept watching wavelets slap and break on the side of the boat.
‘Too scared, Uncle Boss.’
Whatever threat the superintendent might have intended was erased by the sudden rush of pain dancing into his skull. He dropped the rifle and clamped his head between both palms, whimpering. By now Doctor Clereau had reached the landing stage and he watched as the superintendent bent painfully forward to retrieve the rifle. Its eye inspected him as the superintendent, mad in his bathing-suit, his portable arsenal, glared above the sights. ‘I have killed the others,’ he announced. ‘I have killed that bastard of a doctor. I need supplies. Are you my enemy too?’
Doctor Clereau’s lips tightened. He had been half prepared by a garbled and frantic radio message from Doebin. He forced a smile. ‘Certainly not.’ An infusion of reassurance into his shaken voice while keeping one eye on the trembling trigger finger of the superintendent. ‘Of course you can have whatever you want.’
‘There’s a good chap,’ the superintendent said, emerging from spasm. ‘You and me, Jean Paul, we could run the place like a dream. Go on, Danny, go with the Doctor Boss. No. Wait. Better still, I’ll follow to see you come back. I need you, boy. I need you at the tiller.’
‘No need for that,’ Doctor Clereau said. Turning from the beach they began to walk stiffly to the settlement and the storeroom in ridiculous procession, with the carnival figure of the superintendent at the rear springing along in his canvas shoes, rifle and now pistol cocked. He was vested in cunning and mind-change. He ordered Danny Tombo back to guard the runabout. Native nurses scurried away as he and Clereau reached the first huts of the settlement. For one terrible and lucid moment the superintendent sensed he carried death on his shoulder like a monkey, monkey fingers pointing.
‘So you’ve killed everyone?’ Doctor Clereau asked, realising the folly of words but humouring him as he loaded a lump of beef and some bread into a knapsack.
The superintendent became uncertain. His neck quivered under the premonitory onslaught of that scalding rush.
‘The doctor,’ he replied. Enumerating. ‘That whore of a matron. That leaves you to help me start again.’ The pain receded and he gave a charming smile. ‘And my kids, of course. They’ll help rebuild when they’re finished school. I just have to go back tonight and see to Leggat and the storekeeper.’
‘Of course,’ Doctor Clereau agreed gravely. ‘But of course. Will you be right now?’ He nodded at the food pack and he
lped the superintendent sling it over his shoulder, where it nuzzled the bullets.
‘As right as I’ll ever be.’
But when he rocked down to the beach Danny Tombo had fled to hide his terror behind one of the huts. The superintendent, stumbling on driftwood and gashed by memory, forgot his absence in seconds, dumped the food into the belly of the boat, dragged the anchor from the sand and yanked furiously at the starting cord. Clereau stood by on the beach to watch him leave, stretching out a placating but ineffectual hand. ‘Don’t touch me!’ the superintendent screamed as the motor blasted into life. ‘Get your bloody paws off!’
The doctor nodded and waved the little boat into the distance. The sun was well up now, but clouds bellied with rain were sweeping in. The thunder was more in the mind. He ran a hand through his sparse hair and made one last attempt, shouting, ‘Let me know if you need…’ to the superintendent’s rigid back. Under his breath he whispered, ‘Que le Dieu vous sauve.’
The superintendent did not turn round. As the runabout swung towards Noogoo he sat in the stern facing a new shore. His face held the blankness of a traveller who had discovered too much.
I am waiting for nightfall, the superintendent told himself, beached in a cove on Noogoo. He told himself many things. Inelegantly he wolfed damper and bit into a slab of corned meat beside his fire. The flames reminded him of something else, though his tortured head had trouble discovering what. A house? A store? Those scarlet petals like a monstrous corolla matched the turmoil in his skull. Flower or fountain? He preferred fountain, recalling sparklings of water and scintilla-like rain, like go-ah that now began to fall in the late afternoon and persisted as he huddled under the shoreline scrub. He yelled for Tombo. He could see him out there in the shallows with his gunbara, spearing fish, his back in a different storm from the seething lightning within Uncle Boss.