by Peter Corris
Violet died in an odour of sanctity in a hospital run by the Marists in Townsville, north Queensland. In her will she urged Leo to marry a good Catholic girl and raise all his children in the faith. She also left him a thousand pounds Australian. The money accumulated interest in the hands of a Townsville solicitor while Leo did his bit against the power of Nippon. After the war he went to Townsville and got the money. He spent a little in the fleshpots that had been established to service the US saviours, and took the rest back to Bougainville where he went into the business of salvaging and selling war surplus goods.
"I can get you a fleet of jeeps, well, three jeeps," Leo would tell a prospect in the Buka Club. "Barely used, spare tyres, spare battery."
"What's the petrol situation?" the prospect would ask if he was canny.
"Three bob a gallon at the bowser. I can let you have a few drums at a discount."
"Where'd you get it?"
Leo would rub the side of his nose and wink. From a puny, near stillborn infant, he had developed into a well-built man with thick, dark hair. Lean and hard in his youth, he was lately getting fleshy from spending more time closing deals over beers in the Buka Club than trudging along jungle trails. He approached life optimistically and seldom let sombre thoughts—such as what might have happened to the brothers and sister Violet had told him about—trouble him. He was making the transition from adventurer to salesman-businessman successfully.
"I suppose you could say I got the fuel from a grateful government." Leo held up two fingers to the native barman. "Did you know I was a coastwatcher?"
Leo was popular in the club and in the little town of Kieta, which was a dust bowl in the dry season and a swamp when the rains came. The Australians accepted him; the Chinese remembered his father as a reliable employee; the Marist missionaries remembered his mother as a devout woman. He had a lot of friends. Until he disgraced himself.
43
At thirty-six, Leo Clarke had had very little experience of sex. At home the subject was never discussed. Leo got the impression that Rusty and Violet had given it up for Lent at about the time he came along, and had never resumed. The priests and brothers at the schools he'd attended had disparaged it, of course. If there had been any homosexual activity at these schools Leo had never come across it. Later, out in the world which his teachers had described as sinful, he had found less sin than he'd hoped. Opportunities for sexual contact with white women were few in New Guinea and non-existent during his coastwatching period. A few quick, hot and unsatisfactory commercial transactions in Townsville and one drunken coupling on a Burns Philp island trader constituted Leo's entire sexual score sheet.
So he was entirely unprepared for the arrival of Lily Kobi Mong. Lily's genes were a compound of Chinese, European and Melanesian. One ancestor was a Scots blackbirder who'd raided the Solomons for labourers in the 1870s; another was one of the unwilling women the blackbirder had taken to a Queensland sugar plantation to work for three years at five pounds per year. Other predecessors were Chinese merchants, Australian seamen, Bougainvillean head-takers, one English missionary and one Polynesian girl—a child plucked from a beach on Tikopia by Harry Kobi Hong, Lily's father, who was master of a rustbucket schooner, and never returned.
In looks, Lily favoured her mother—she had a broad face but surprisingly delicate features. Her skin was light brown and her hair was jet black and straight, like that of the Chinese. Her eyes were slanted but green, her body was strong and rounded. When she moved she gave the impression that she might suddenly do something acrobatic, such as a handstand or a cartwheel. She spoke English, trade store Chinese, pidgin and the language of the people of the central east coast of Bougainville, all in a loud voice that did not invite contradiction.
In 1946 Lily was twenty-three. She had done four years of school as a boarder in Brisbane and she could keep books, but she knew that there was no future for her in Australia. She spent the war years working for the American army as a filing clerk, handling the records of the 'coloured personnel'. As soon as she could, she returned to Bougainville. She would inherit her father's marginal trading business, some long-term leases he held and a little cash. Lily had it all worked out—Harry Kobi Hong had taken to opium in his old age to ease the pain from the multiple injuries he had sustained in his shortish but hard life. He had, Lily judged, less than a year to live. She needed a husband to give her credibility in the commercial world, and children, but she did not necessarily require him to accompany her through the whole of life's journey. Therefore an older man would be best. However, he had to be a sound one—not a drunk, not a coward, not a fool but not too clever (Lily tended to think of men in negatives), free of venereal disease, and white.
Leo Clarke was perfect for Lily's purposes. She arranged for one of the mining engineers, a breed that began sniffing around Bougainville as soon as the last shots of the war had been fired, to introduce her to Leo at the Kieta slipway, where she was supervising the refurbishing of one of her father's trading cutters. The bar of the club would have been better but Lily, as a coloured person, was barred. In preparation for the meeting she had stayed out of the sun for three weeks, applied a lightening makeup and wore a dark blue sharkskin suit.
The engineer had run up a debt in the Hong trade store and was therefore anxious to oblige Lily. "Mr. Clarke," he said, "I'd like you to meet Miss Lily Hong."
Leo saw slanted green eyes, a fine nose and lips and small white teeth. He smelt a perfume that took him away from the rotting kelp on the beach and the reek of stale, trapped seawater. "Miss Hong," he said.
Lily shook his hand. Good grip, she thought, no broken blood vessels in the face. "Mr. Clarke. Do you have a boat here?"
"Well, no, looking for one as a matter of fact. I've got a salvage job. Need a supply boat."
Lily's white-gloved hand rested on Leo's slightly grubby white linen sleeve. "Perhaps I can help you."
The engineer tipped his sun helmet to Lily and left them. She kept hold of Leo's arm and allowed him to walk her along the jetty to where the Hong cutter was being painted. It was close to midday in November and the sun was high and hot. Lily opened her sunshade and Leo instinctively moved closer to her underneath it.
"That's a good boat," Leo said, pointing at the cutter.
Lily smiled. "Perhaps we could come to an arrangement."
They discussed money and boats for a time, and then Leo invited Lily to have a drink with him at the club. As soon as he spoke the words he felt them turn to stones in his mouth. He stopped in mid-stride. Lily squeezed his arm.
"It's all right," she said. "I understand. We can have a drink at my father's place. There's a private room."
Leo knew the Hong Club, but had never been inside. He knew that some of the Americans left behind by the war, the mining chaps and an anthropologist fellow who'd passed through recently drank there. It wasn't exactly no place for a white man.
"Righto," he said.
Kieta did not exactly have a Chinatown. True, there were more Chinese trade stores in the short street where the Hong Club was situated than in other places, but there were commercial and government buildings too. And the whole place was changing fast. The Americans and the mining people talked big.
"They say Kieta could outstrip Moresby," Leo said over the first gin and tonic in the small courtyard behind the club. A fan stirred the air and moved the fronds of the potted palms Lily had moved into place that morning.
"It's exciting," Lily said. "Oil? Gold? A boom?"
Leo nodded. "Could be. Well, it'd soon pass a small operator like me by."
"Not necessarily." Lily refused Leo's offer of a Craven A, judging that he would prefer women not to smoke. In reality she smoked a packet a day. "You should be in a position to supply certain needs. Not all the operators'll have big money to start with. They'll need vehicles and equipment and be happy to take what they can get. You've got marsden matting?" This was the heavy metal sheeting the Americans had used to build roads, bridg
es and airstrips.
"Acres of it," Leo said.
Lily nodded and signalled to the boy for another drink. She was dying for a cigarette and feeling like other things too. Leo wasn't bad-looking, with his good teeth and strong chin. A bit slow but he can see a joke, she thought. She took off the jacket of her suit and draped it over the wicker chair. Under her silk blouse her breasts were full and heavy. She leaned forward as Leo lit another Craven A.
"Let me have a puff," she said. "Sometimes I like just to have a puff or two. You don't mind, do you, Leo?"
Lily had repressed the Oriental side of her nature in the furnishings of her flat. No paper blinds, silk coverings or brassware. Her furniture was as modern as a Myers catalogue and the regular Burns Philp shipping service from Australia could make it—paisley coverings in the sitting room, Wedgwood and Swedish stainless steel in the kitchen, walnut veneer in the bedroom. She steered Leo towards the walnut veneer, collapsed onto the bed with him and allowed him to kiss and handle her a little before she took over. She stripped off his jacket and shirt, pulled off his shoes, socks and pants and let him lie, hot and sweating, on top of the chenille bedspread while she shrugged off her jacket and let her skirt drop. Leo's eyes adjusted slowly to the dim light; he saw lace-edged silk and sheer nylon and heard the whisper of the fabrics as they glided against Lily's skin.
Leo's gin intake had been judged to a nicety by Lily. He was relaxed in mind and aroused in body. "God, Lily," he breathed. "You're beautiful."
"Yes," she said. She unbuttoned her blouse, bent forward over the bed, reached behind her back with both hands and unfastened her brassiere. Her large, round breasts seemed to tumble forward towards Leo's hands. Suddenly his palms and fingers were full of warm flesh; he trapped her big, brown nipples in the V between his thumbs and forefingers and squeezed hard on them. Lily moaned and strained away from him. The nipples extended and stretched like rubber. Leo let go and his mouth opened; Lily clasped her breasts together and pushed both nipples past his straining lips.
"Suck," she said, "suck hard."
Leo sucked. He felt her hands move inside his underpants. Lily freed his penis and worked on it with nails and fingers as the black sergeant from Tallahassee, Florida, had taught her in Brisbane. When Leo was fully erect she guided him inside her and clamped her thighs together, bringing every muscle she could control into play.
"Only real young pussy is tight pussy," the sergeant had said. "When a pussy passes eighteen, it's experience that counts."
Lily gave Leo the benefit of her experience, which amounted to six months with the sergeant, a shorter time with a white US officer and several flings, more or less alcohol-affected, with several other military personnel. An English nurse who'd learned a lot in boarding school was one of her more sober partners. Lily participated enthusiastically in all exercises and took care against becoming pregnant when appropriate.
"Oh! No!" Leo came mightily inside Lily's cream-and diaphragm-protected vagina. His hot, uncontrollable rush had been delayed just long enough to give him an intensity of pleasure he never imagined could exist.
Lily disengaged herself, pushed back the bedcovers and pulled a sheet over their sweating bodies. They shared a cigarette. Lily making sure to have one puff to his four. Leo was oddly embarrassed, which Lily found charming.
"You are a nice man, Leo," she said, handing back the Craven A. She kissed his mouth allowing just the tip of her tongue to pass between his lips.
"I'm mad about you, Lily," Leo said hoarsely. "I thought this sort of thing only happened in books. Not that I've read many of those sorts of books, or any books for that matter."
"What sort?"
"Well, you know—dirty."
Lily found this a promising line of talk. "D'you think what we just did was dirty, Leo?"
"God, no, it was wonderful."
"Even if I'm a nigger?"
"You're not! You're . . . God, who cares? I love you!"
Lily smiled. "We've talked business and had lunch and sex. Is that enough to say you love me?" Lily let the sheet slip as she spoke; one of her ripe breasts pushed against Leo's arm.
"Yes, why not? Love at first sight."
Lily tweaked her nipple so that it stood out, hard and quivering, from the puckered brown flesh around it.
"Let's do it again," she said.
They met the next day and the next. Leo was even more ardent when he was more sober, and Lily was convinced that she'd caught her fish. The tenth time he told her he loved her she moved away a little and took a drag on the shared cigarette. "Do you want to be rich?"
"I don't care," Leo said.
"Do you want to stay in Bougainville?"
"With you? Yes. Or anywhere else."
"Do you want children, Leo?"
Leo liked children. "Yes."
"Do you care what people think of you? What they say about you behind your back?"
Leo answered almost before she had stopped speaking. He had a sense that he was making a deeper commitment than he'd ever made before but he didn't flinch from it. "No, I don't give a damn."
Lily kissed him and probed his mouth with her tongue. She was surprised and pleased to find that she liked this simple, easy man. The nurse had told her that some people were excited by being abused; Lily found that she was excited by getting her own way. She stroked Leo's cock with her long lacquered nails. She'd been prepared to put it in her mouth if necessary but it seemed that she wouldn't have to. He really does seem to be in love, she thought.
Leo, masterfully easing her legs apart, was in no doubt at all.
Father Damien O'Connor married Leo Clarke and Lily Kobi Hong as a matter of duty. Leo had managed to stumble through enough of the rituals and observances in a preliminary interview to convince the priest that he had been raised in the faith, however imperfectly. Lily was delighted to discover that Leo was a nominal Catholic. She foresaw a measure of respectability in the church wedding and profit in business association with the missionaries. She took instruction and O'Connor found her an apt pupil, although he sensed that something other than piety motivated her.
As he performed the service in the small, hot, prefabricated church, Father O'Connor was struck by how few white faces were in the congregation—the mining engineer who had introduced the happy couple, two employees of Leo's, the anthropologist just back from a field work session in the bush and an American beachcomber, already drunk and hoping for more alcohol to follow. As well, there were several of Lily's siblings, half brothers and sisters with more or less mixtures of Melanesian and Chinese blood, several of their wives, husbands and children, and a blue-black young man from Buka who was hoping to enter the priesthood.
"God bless you," the priest said.
Leo kissed his bride enthusiastically. He was hot inside his stiff collar and dark suit, but Lily looked cool and demure in white. He hoped she would let him undress her; he wanted to undo the hooks and buttons that ran all the way up her slim, straight back, but he suspected that there were rituals involved in marriage that got in the way of such pleasures. As soon as he could he pressed a ten-pound note into Father O'Connor's moist hand.
"I hope you know what you're doing, my son."
For an answer Leo gave him a wink. He felt Lily's firm grip on his arm.
"We have to see my father first, dear," she said. "Then we can go to the reception."
The last word sobered Leo. "I tried for the club," he said, "but . . ."
"Never mind. At the Hong Club we have a better gramophone and Melbourne beer. We'll have a real party."
"Goodo," Leo said.
Harry Kobi Hong had suffered a stroke a few weeks before his daughter's wedding. He had never believed that the event would take place and was now probably barely capable of understanding it. But Lily needed him to understand. It would help her to keep a firm control over the business if her father could give her some sign of approval.
Still dressed in their wedding clothes, Leo and Lily entered the sma
ll bedroom behind the largest of the Hong trading stores. The smell of incense in the church had made Leo queasy and he was looking forward to a few head-clearing cold beers. The smell in the sickroom almost made him gag. The aromas of opium and ointments hung in the hot, dusty air, and dead insects crunched in the seagrass matting under Leo's feet. Lily touched his arm. "He is rotting," she whispered. "I'm sorry. Try to stand it. It's very important."
Leo swallowed, then tried to hold his breath. He did as Lily told him—shook the thin, grey claw of a hand and let the slanted eyes, clouded by cataracts, rest on his face. Lily, shining like a pearl in her white dress, bent close to her father, kissed his cheek and whispered in his ear.
"What are you saying?" Leo asked. He had to breathe, he might as well speak.
"I'm telling him that you are an Englishman and my husband."
"Hardly English," Leo said. "I was born on a ship on the way out. Parents were English, though."
Lily nodded. "You must tell me about it." She bent and spoke again. A shiver seemed to run through the sick man. Lily called out sharply, and two of her brothers brushed aside the bead curtain and entered the room.
Harry Kobi Hong's twisted face contorted as he fought for speech. The sounds he made were like animal noises to Leo but Lily's brothers understood. They nodded, approached the bed and touched their father's hands. The sick man's eyes rolled back; he freed his hands and flapped them from his wrists like broken-winged birds. He made the noises again and drooled down his whiskery chin onto the sheet. Lily wiped his face. She twined his hands together and put them on the bedcover. She kissed his grey, furrowed cheek and signalled for Leo to move away from the bed.
When they were out of the room Lily reached up for Leo's puzzled face. She clasped it in her hands, forced it down and kissed him hard on the lips.
"Thank you. You were wonderful." Lily's passion was genuine; she had got her own way. "You'll get your reward later. And, darling, I do want to hear about the boat from England and your parents. Our children should know everything about their wonderful father."