Skins

by Sarah Hay

  Manning and Jem reached the end of the beach. Owens had vanished. They climbed onto splinters of basalt rock lying on larger slabs of rock. In some places creamy quartz ran in thick ribbons over the uneven surface. There was still no sign of him. They left the black and white rock and came down onto another beach almost at the base of Flinders Peak. Thick vegetation ran steeply up the side of the hill until it reached the stripy granite. Higher up were thick gashes in the rock where lizards and bats and birds hid amongst the caves and ledges and crevices.

  They thought they had lost him. They retraced their steps and then Jem saw two sets of prints higher up close to the thick scrub. Their feet sank into soft warm sand that after a while was wearing on their lower legs. The beach dipped where once a small creek had run down from the hill. The footprints vanished. They stopped. Jem was about to say something but Manning turned and grabbed his arm and put a finger to his lips.

  ‘Listen!’

  Jem listened but he could only hear the hooting of a bronze-wing pigeon and the occasional squawk of a gull that wheeled above and around the towering face of the nearby rock. Manning motioned for him to follow. They got down on their hands and knees and crawled under the sticks and branches that crisscrossed the dry creek bed. Water couldn’t have run there for a long time for although it cut sharply into the sandhill it was choked with debris. Marks in the dirt showed that Owens had been there, dragging something behind him. They rounded the bend, and Manning who was ahead suddenly sank back on his heels. He nodded in that direction.

  ‘They’re here.’

  ‘Who?’ whispered Jem.

  ‘Shush!’

  Manning took the knife from his belt. Jem watched him and felt for his own. Then he remembered he had left it back at the camp. But before he could say anything, Manning sprang upwards and ran, crashing and leaping through undergrowth and down onto a man whose trousers were around his ankles.

  After they had cut the boy free he ran into the bush. Manning and Jem weren’t saying anything to each other. They ambled along the beach at the base of the big rock. The sea sparkled in the channel between Flinders Peak and Goose Island. Manning knew that even though he had wanted to kill Owens he couldn’t. He glanced sideways at Jem who walked with his eyes on the ground. He swung his right arm backwards and forwards, holding his shoulder with his other hand. It felt as though it had been wrenched from its socket and his back ached. He realised he ached all over. And the bastard had grabbed him around the waist, catching his fingers in his money belt. Manning put his hand under his shirt. The belt was loose so he tightened it.

  Jem still wasn’t saying anything. Manning watched him pick up a stone and cast it out into the water. It skimmed the surface and bounced two or three times before it plopped and drew perfect circles that grew and grew. Manning picked up a rock too. It fitted in the palm of his hand, smooth and oval. He stroked it with his fingers for it felt nice and hot. He flicked his wrist and sent it skimming across the water, where it hopped several times before landing with a plop. Jem looked up and grinned. They hunted around for more rocks.

  Much later they sat in the sand facing the sea and were warmed by the low afternoon sun.

  ‘The Defiance … she was a dirty miserable schooner. The skipper, his name was Merredith. He was buying skins off the sealers. He said he was sailing for Swan River.’

  Manning drew patterns in the sand with his finger.

  ‘Didn’t get far. Left Sydney in August two years ago. We passed Cape Howe and the wind headed us and turned to a gale. We were blown off the land. She blew like one of them hurricanes. We were hove-to. The skipper said she ain’t going to stand up much longer. The sea is rising. The wind’ll be worse when the moon gets up. So we brought down the topmast and she lay-to a bit easier.’

  Manning paused, remembering.

  ‘But the waves, you ain’t never seen anything … they had curling monster heads, and they was like hills rising up and when we were in the hollow it was quiet. You couldn’t even hear the screeching of the wind. The helm was lashed and they was all below ’cept me. I was on deck for they couldn’t get me there. Them bastards scared witless. I prayed she’d break up and they’d be the first to get their bleedin’ feet wet. I didn’t care what happened.’

  They listened to the gentle sigh of the ocean as its waves slapped the sand and swept it in half-circles all the way along the beach. The sun was retreating quickly and the sand beneath them was cold. Jem rubbed his arms. About half a mile back they saw Owens stumble out of the bush, his shirt torn and flapping behind him. When they couldn’t see him any longer they got to their feet and headed back to the camp. The air grew cold as the sun sunk further. They wandered, two small figures against an immense backdrop of wispy strands of coloured cloud in a lavender sky and a dark velvet sea that spread out to surround distant islands.

  He pushed back the thin branches that crossed his path. He could hear Jem trampling heavily behind him. Wet air had descended into the hollow and the sticks he fought back were slimy to touch. They came out into the other clearing and saw firelight winking through tangled wattle. It was the black women’s camp. The dark shape of a woman glided before the fire. Manning stopped.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Jem came up against him.

  ‘There’s no one about,’ said Manning uneasily.

  Jem shrugged and they continued to the hut. Manning stood back as Jem went before him. The air was dry and smelt of smoke and damper. Dorothea and Mary looked up.

  He stood with his back to the fire, staring into the dark corners of the hut. He felt her eyes on him. He registered her appearance, her soiled gown and her bare, blackened feet. She was like all the dirty whores he knew. There was one who had been kind to him once. It was his mother. But he never thought of her because she was dead. He had been taught to hate her and other women like her when he began working with mariners.

  ‘Look like you fell into a bush.’ Dorothea glanced at him and then towards her sister who smiled.

  He knew it. They were making fun of him. He turned back to the fire, warming his hands and relishing the heat on his legs. He would show her who she could laugh at.

  When he could smell his trousers singeing he left to stand in the doorway. From there he could hear snatches of coarse voices from over the sandhill. Anderson had returned from the mainland and the others must have been down on the beach. Lights appeared, glowing torches held above the heads of solid shapes on the crest of the dune. Behind them the sky was yellow and purple where the sun had not long set. Slung between the featureless men were two large kangaroos. They were dumped in the middle of the clearing and the animals’ ungainly legs sprang up and fell sideways.

  Jem came up behind him and they both moved outside to get a better look. One of the men pointed his torch at a pile of firewood. Yellow tongues licked at the kindling. Faces glowed and flickered. Anderson pushed between Dorothea and Mary who stood in the doorway and then came back with a knife. Its blade caught the reflection of dancing flames. Smooth white wood was thrown on top of the fire and devoured by a shower of sparks and long tendrils of light. Balls of smoke rolled into the air and drifted randomly, stinging eyes and choking throats. Men and women drew closer like moths to its fiery brightness.

  Anderson leant over a kangaroo and cut through its fur. He parted the hide from the body as though he were peeling the skin of a vegetable and threw it aside. The strange triangular body of the naked kangaroo gleamed white in the light and was marked with a web of purple veins. He cut a slit in the flesh of a hind leg and drew out of it a long white tendon. He wound it around his wrist and then reached for the other leg. Thick ropy muscles bulged from his forearms and his forehead shone. Shadows deepened the lines between his eyes and around his mouth. He stood up and straightened his back and then reached down again to cut through the taut skin of the belly, releasing its contents, like water bursting from a split in a water bag. He fastened back the sides of the stomach with wooden skewer
s and pulled out the steaming slippery coils of intestines. The black women who had been standing in the shadows came forward. They placed the guts onto the coals they had flicked out from their own fire and used sticks to turn them over.

  The air was rich with the sizzling smell of meat roasting. The animal’s heart and liver were baked in its chest. Sparks spat out from the fire. Owens stood up and Manning noticed the blood crusted on his face and his swollen eye. He waited for him to look towards him but he didn’t. Someone put more wood on the fire and a shower of orange light shot up and lit the low bush and the thin pale trunks behind them. Smoke surged towards him and it felt as though his eyeballs would melt. But when he moved away, the cold air embraced him so he quickly shuffled back.

  His eyes were drawn to the bright coals. He thought he could see a face or perhaps it was more like a skull. An eye socket glared red and then turned grey and disintegrated as a log collapsed above it. He felt warm and well fed. It was enough. He felt like a moth that had broken from its cocoon, emerging in a new skin, discarding the old that had been worn by the lad. Many hours at an oar had brought its reward. He straightened his arms, satisfied by the ache in his muscles. He breathed deeply and glanced around at the firelit faces. They wouldn’t cross him now.

  He was conscious of Jem’s presence beside him. His head rested on his arms and he closed his eyes but he could still see the dull glow of the fire. Then he noticed voices behind him. For some reason they made him uneasy. But before he could turn around something flashed in front of him and then he felt it, cold under his chin. He sensed faces turned towards him. Movement behind him and pain in his back, dense and solid, which spread. Someone had kicked him. He grunted and fell into the knife. The blade burnt. He closed his eyes and swallowed the darkness. His head was wrenched back by a hand clasped to his hair. The blood on his neck cooled and he looked up into the eyes of Anderson.

  ‘No one steals, not on my island.’

  Head wrenched further back until he thought his neck would snap. Finding it difficult to breathe. Suddenly he was let go. His head flopped forward and he shook his hair. He reached up to his neck and ran his hand over the scratch that was wet. Glancing on the ground behind him, he saw Anderson’s broad feet.

  ‘I ain’t done yet. You stole from him.’

  ‘Hey.’ He turned towards Anderson and saw for the first time Owens beside him. ‘I didn’t steal off him. He’s lying!’ He looked over at Jem. ‘That’s the truth ain’t it?’

  Jem nodded, looking around nervously.

  ‘You’d be a lying little snake for as I reckon you got his money.’ Anderson turned to Owens. ‘How much does he owe you?’

  Owens cleared his throat and his good eye narrowed.

  ‘I ain’t sure. About four quid, I reckon.’

  Manning brought a hand up to his waist.

  ‘No it’s mine! It’s me savings.’

  ‘Give it up or I’ll slice it off and it won’t be all I’ll be slicing.’

  Manning looked back towards the fire, seeing briefly the way Owens had cringed before him that afternoon. He sighed bitterly. He stood up and glared with hatred at both of them. At least Owens glanced away but Anderson just stared back. He pulled the belt from under his shirt and handed it to Anderson. The fire crackled. Anderson entered the hut with Owens and Isaac. A few minutes later he returned and tossed the belt back to him.

  Manning left the fire, the sound of men’s laughter echoing in his head. He scuffed the damp sand with his feet and brought a cold hand up under his shirt and retied the belt around his waist. There was a slither of light from the moon glinting on the liquid surface. The foam on the edge of the wave looked like the white scalloped frill of a petticoat that was pulled back and forth over the sand. It swirled around his toes and felt warmer than his blood. He tore a strip from his trouser leg, dipped it in the sea and wiped his neck. It stung at first but he knew it was only a shallow cut. He tossed the piece of rag away then ripped another strip from his pants and tied it around his neck. He held his battered hands out in front of him. The skin had split between his knuckles. He turned them over and felt the hard lumps of scar tissue that had misshapen his palms. He rubbed them together for they were cold and then he buried his face in them. The hardest thing was he knew why Anderson didn’t believe him. He told him he had lost his money when the Defiance was wrecked because if he hadn’t someone would have found a way to take it off him.

  He noticed on his way back that there were a pile of skins and two barrels hidden in a sand hollow. Instead of taking the track, he had come up through the bush to the clearing. Jem lifted his head briefly as Manning settled but he didn’t say anything.

  After he had unrolled his bedding Manning looked up at the clear night sky. White pinpricks of light were arranged in misty clusters. The stars more bright and sharply defined than ever. The Southern Cross winked above him and it reminded him of another time he had lain awake looking at the stars. He was in the bilge of a whaleboat, his head resting against the seat trying to sleep. The swell dropped off. Instead of being rolled around at the bottom of the boat, which rubbed raw the sores on his body, the sea gently rocked him. He knew then that they must be close to land.

  It had been five months since they had left the wreckage of the Defiance on the beach near Cape Howe. They had sailed close to the coast, hauling up occasionally for water and game. Now it was close to the end. The two Negroes they had collected along the way, Bathurst and Brown, lay at the bottom of the boat and lifted their heads. They woke the Dutchman and Captain Merredith, asleep at the steering oar. Land-ho. The two black women also stirred. The sky lightened to reveal a metal-grey sea and a deep indented bay lined with red mud cliffs. They took to the oars and rowed alongside them until they reached a small rocky point on the northeastern side of Kangaroo Island.

  They made camp in the gully away from the rust-coloured boulders that lined the water’s edge. A few days later they built a hut. Brown had been a ship’s carpenter on an American whaler. They cut through the thick scrub behind the camp to the tall timber that grew in a valley about a mile away. While they worked Brown told Manning how he and Bathurst had deserted their ship. They stole a whaleboat and along with three other hands headed for the coast only to be swamped by a wave. Brown and Bathurst swam ashore. They didn’t know what had happened to the others.

  The black women kept them fed on a diet of small emu and kangaroo. Merredith had taken them aboard his vessel to trade them for skins. But since they were shipwrecked before they reached any sealers he took one of them for his wife. After she lay too close to the fire and burnt her leg, he called her Bumblefoot. For a while Manning lost track of time. There was always plenty of food and most of the time he was left alone. But he never lost sight of his goal, which was to reach Swan River.

  He had liked the old Dutchman. They used to sit away from the others under a thick gum, and over the noisy chatter of the pink and grey birds, the Dutchman would tell him stories of being on an English man-o’-war. The old man had fought in the French Revolutionary Wars. His ship mutinied when the captain gave them five-water grog instead of three-water. The weather was bitter he said, and no man could endure it on a spirit so thin.

  Sometimes their neighbours would haul up on the beach in front of the camp. They would only ever come by sea for inland was a knotted mess of impenetrable scrub. Many had lived on Kangaroo Island for years. Clothed in skins of all sorts, with sealskin caps and matted manes of hair, they would come ashore on battered whaleboats with greasy canvas strung tight above the gunwales. Often they would have with them three or four black women and dogs. The first time they visited Manning noticed that the women had bits of their ears cut off. Then one day he saw one of the sealers crop the top of his woman’s ear when he thought she was too slow getting his flask from the boat. When they left, Merredith would put away his musket. Then he would release Bumblefoot and the other one from the hut where they had been hidden with the precious pile of skins.


  Manning remembered the day it all changed. It was late afternoon and the sea rippled red and silver like molten metal. He was looking east, where a thick strip of land stretched across the water, and behind it, lit by the sinking sun, was the mainland, when a whaleboat came into view as it rounded the point from American River. Its six oars dipped into the sea and orange light followed the ripples as they fanned out from the bow and sparkled. The man on the seventh oar, standing at the stern, steered the boat towards the camp. A dirty sail hung limply above their heads. Manning could see it was overburdened with men, women, dogs and supplies. As it scraped the rocky bottom, most of them jumped out into the shallows and waded towards the hut. Manning, who was higher up in the bush, watched uneasily. He saw the old Dutchman come out to greet them. Merredith and Brown followed. There was a shout from the black man in a red shirt with a black bandana around his neck. He and Brown slapped each other on the back and the stranger punched the air with his fist. Manning didn’t know it then but it was Anderson.

  He leant up against the rough bark of the eucalypt behind him and watched as they unloaded the whaleboat. Anderson waded back and forth through the water. His wet trousers clinging to the powerful shape of his legs. He hoisted a barrel from the boat and slung it across his shoulders. Suddenly Bathurst crashed through the undergrowth near Manning.

  ‘Hey, what’s up?’

  ‘We got visitors.’

  ‘Well I’ll be …’ Bathurst caught sight of Anderson. ‘Hey brother!’ Anderson looked up and his face slowly opened into a smile.

  Manning was never sure whether Bathurst and Brown had known Anderson before then. They called each other brother but he never heard them talking about being on the same ship. That night, however, Manning realised he would have to be careful. No man was as well armed as Anderson, and his men didn’t seem to be with him by choice. He listened carefully though when Anderson started to talk of his plans to head west. There were islands there, he said, with water and wallaby and thousands of fur seal. But first Anderson said he had to build another boat. And over the weeks that followed that was what he did, using the native pine, and she-oak and eucalypt that grew in the scrub behind them.