To the Wild Sky

by Ivan Southall

  Gerald looked back down the beach again. ‘Carol will catch up, I guess,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose we need to wait.’

  They helped Bruce on to his feet and bore all the weight for him that they could, though the fact that Mark was so much shorter made it awkward. It need not have done, but then it was too soon for Bruce to admit – even with surprise – that his ankle might have got him there without assistance.

  Jan came back to where Colin was sitting in the shade, patiently fashioning the cross. ‘They’re coming,’ she said, ‘all of them!’

  Colin grumbled, ‘I wish they’d done it a couple of hours ago . . . Gerald, too?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Must have got over his sulks.’

  ‘Or you shamed him into it?’

  They regarded each other with frankness and something like respect. ‘Jan . . . You’re all right.’ He said it in a way that pleased her, that for the first time in her life seemed to lift her up beside Carol. She had always been in Carol’s shadow. ‘Can you remember those prayers?’ Colin said.

  Jan sighed and at once felt less sure of herself; fluttery, frightened. Colin could be so stubborn. He’d asked her the same question several times and she had given the very same answer. ‘Have I got to?’

  ‘I reckon. Yeh, I reckon.’ And he went back to the cross again, binding its two members with wire from the Egret. It was stiff and springy, not easy to handle; Jan had had a real battle hacking it off with the spade.

  ‘I don’t know what religion he is, do I?’ Jan said. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘He might be Catholic or Protestant or anything.’ Jan was trembling.

  ‘Don’t see that it matters.’

  ‘Well, it does.’

  Colin shrugged. ‘We’ll have to get a nice tidy bit of metal from the fuselage, too, and scratch an inscription on it. Bruce does pretty good printing, doesn’t he?’

  ‘When he feels like it.’

  ‘Well, it’s something that he could do. If he can’t get round on his feet it’s something that he could do for us, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Jan was a rare one all right; a hard person to talk to. When she was busy with her hands she was quite different. Look how she’d jumped in that hole and dug like a navvy.

  Carol at last caught up with the others while they were resting. Gerald and Mark were the ones who needed the rest, not so much Bruce; in fact Bruce was wondering – simply from an awakening sense of what was fair and what was not – whether he should start hobbling along on his own. He felt that he might manage with less effort, anyway, than hopping on one foot.

  ‘Thanks for the lovely tie-pin,’ Gerald said to Carol.

  Her tired face immediately brightened. ‘That’s all right,’ she said.

  ‘It’s nice. Really nice, Carol.’

  She smiled again.

  ‘But you shouldn’t have spent all that money.’

  ‘I wanted to.’

  She hadn’t meant to embarrass him, but she did, and he could find nothing more to say.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Bruce asked.

  ‘Round the headland.’

  Bruce sensed, somehow, from her tone of voice that something was wrong beyond that headland. ‘We’re all going to the service,’ he said, with an inflection in his voice that said to Carol, almost as if she had heard the words: ‘Tell us about the headland later.’

  ‘The service for Jim?’ she said.

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘So nothing’s been saved? Nothing’s been picked up?’

  ‘Odds and ends, but first things had to come first.’

  ‘I reckon the other things should have come first.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Not from the way you stalked off.’

  Carol bit her lip. How like Jan Bruce could be. ‘I had my reasons,’ she said, ‘and your sister knows them better than anyone.’

  ‘Lucky you didn’t do her an injury when you chucked that spade at her. Blooming silly thing to do.’

  ‘I didn’t chuck it.’

  Bruce said, ‘We can’t make your wireless work.’

  Carol slumped a little and Mark said, ‘Come on; we’d better get along.’

  ‘I’m going to try to walk,’ Bruce announced.

  ‘What?’ squealed Mark.

  ‘Got to pull my weight, haven’t I?’ said Bruce stoically. ‘Got to try sometime. Might as well be now.’

  They helped him up – that much he felt he should permit – then pushed them away. It wasn’t difficult, though he took care to make it look heroic. There was pain, of course, but pain in reverse, spasms of it not coming in but going out like the jerks of a twisted rubber band. After he had gone through the act he caught the look on Carol’s face. If anyone had been impressed, it wasn’t her. In that instant, Bruce vowed he’d limp for the rest of his life if he had to, to convince her of her error.

  Colin and Jan stood side by side at the head of the grave and the others stood at the foot, Bruce vaguely cross because Jan hadn’t taken any notice of him. They bowed their heads, not then because of reverence but because they were shy of looking at each other, shy of reddening eyes and of their uncertainty. They didn’t really know what they were doing.

  Colin said thinly, ‘This is going to be a proper funeral; as proper as we can make it . . . Do you know what religion he was, Gerald?’

  Gerald drew a sharp breath and after a while said, ‘I don’t know – I don’t know that he was any.’

  ‘I’m sure it makes a difference . . .’ It was Jan, with her voice breathless and breaking away.

  Then all was quiet and hollow and strange, except for gulls and waves beating and heat. The heat was there like another person, like another presence. They sweated from the heat; Carol for a heady moment felt faint from it.

  Colin’s hand at last crept out and held Jan by the wrist. ‘Go on,’ he whispered.

  But she couldn’t. She tried to start, she tried and tried, but there wasn’t a thought in her head; just a frantic emptiness. And Bruce knew; he looked up at her and saw her and prickled with discomfort.

  Colin waited and waited in growing dismay, his heart-beat almost stifling him, a sharp-tasting remembrance of his sickness in the Egret welling up. Someone whimpered; Mark, he thought; and Jan was panting, drawing great breaths and trembling so violently that it frightened him. He squeezed her wrist desperately, trying to urge her, trying to force her, but not a word came out of her.

  His own jaws were trembling, his tongue was dry, but he drove them to speak for him. The voice didn’t sound like his own at all. ‘We’re here to bury Mr Jim Butler. He was a nice man. He liked to fly in the sky . . . I suppose he did like it, did he, Gerald?’

  ‘Yeh. I suppose so.’

  ‘God made the sky and everything else that Mr Jim liked, too, I guess. He – made Mr Jim as well so must have known about him. Trouble is, I don’t know whether Mr Jim knew about God – an’ all . . . Did he?’

  ‘Golly . . . I don’t know . . . Well, he must have done, mustn’t he?’

  ‘Mr Jim didn’t have time to – say good-bye to his friends or anything. He died all of a sudden like . . . But I reckon God must have been there because if He hadn’t been we would have died, too. I mean, Gerald’s never flown an aeroplane properly before, on his own, has he? I reckon God must have been there all right, so if He was there afterwards He must have been there before . . . Aw gee . . . Jan; say the prayers . . . say something.’

  Jan shook. She had never prayed out loud, except as one of a crowd or to read from the printed page. She had known it would happen. No voice. Nothing there. She was so ashamed.

  Mark started crying because he didn’t like the silence or Colin making a fool of himself, and every one else standing round shifting their feet and breathing heavily and not knowing what to do. Then Carol said hesitantly: ‘Forgive us for not being able to pray properly
to you for poor old Jim. But we’ve never been to a funeral before. We don’t know what to say.’

  Then she wondered whether it was right and decent to go on, whether she might make of Jan a more bitter enemy than she already seemed to be, but even while she wondered about it her words stumbled on.

  ‘He was so manly and so clean. He had such a nice look about him. He couldn’t have had a face like that if he was a bad man; he couldn’t have had a light like that in his eyes if he’d been ugly inside.

  ‘And thanks for bringing us here, the rest of us, in safety, but forgive us for being nasty to each other. And for forgetting that Gerald was marvellous and that Bruce kept us calm and that Colin got us ashore and that Mark has been so very good. And for forgetting that but for Colin and Jan, Gerald would be dead like Jim. We’d be putting him in the ground, too.

  ‘Thanks for bringing us here to try to do the right thing for Jim, because if we hadn’t come together like this something awful might have happened to us. I don’t know what; but something was beginning to happen; something was going wrong. Even if we starve; even if no one ever comes for us . . .’

  All at once that seemed to be the end somehow, or the beginning of the unknown, and the words dried up, stopped. In a while Jan started stammering the Lord’s Prayer, and Gerald, as though groping in a fog, pinned his silver wings to the tie wires of the cross.

  14.

  Too Far and Too Many Sharks

  Gerald’s watch, a good automatic, had alone survived the rigours of water and sand, and by the time they started back to where they had slept the night it was just on ten minutes past eleven.

  They started out together, but little by little fell apart, straggled along in pairs, each keenly aware of every other person, but shy. In a way they felt they knew each other differently from ever before; in another way they were silenced by the shyness that had begun in Carol’s words and had worked outwards from her into them all; a shyness that drew them together in obligation to each other, but tangled them up when they tried to talk. It wasn’t a cold feeling, it was a warm one, but awkward. Jan felt it was like looking into a mirror and finding that the reflection there was not only of herself but of everybody else as well. (A distinct improvement.)

  They came back to where they had started from, Jan and Bruce last of all; Bruce limping, and not needing to act the part, either. He stretched out on the sand thankfully, but the others stood round as though waiting for something to happen.

  Gerald started out to speak in a formal way, twice started, but stopped. He had been going to say that he was sorry, but then felt it didn’t really matter; everyone knew he was sorry; they didn’t need to be told. Carol had cleared the air. To apologize would be to look back; stir up things that were better left where they were in the past.

  Then Mark flopped down and drew circles with his forefinger, not exactly sad circles, but pensive ones. Carol fiddled with her wireless for a while. What a singularly useless thing a wireless was when it wouldn’t make a noise. It was an awful shame. It really was. Then she opened her suitcase and spilled out its contents, and self-consciously – because every one was watching her – separated them to dry in the sun. Colin looked them over; all girl’s things, but there was a blouse that might do him at a pinch. Then he caught sight of Bruce’s map in the sand. It was too small, he decided, too crowded, so he smoothed a larger area and began to draw another one, eight or nine feet across. Jan was hungry; her stomach rumbled and ached and she wanted to talk about it, even complain about it, and there was Mark, only a yard or two away, putting stems on his circles, making them into apples. Jan felt so hot, so hungry, and she was beginning to feel dry in a most disturbing way.

  ‘I reckon we ought to have a swim,’ she said, and looked round, almost surprised that the voice breaking the silence was her own. ‘Don’t you? It’d cool us off.’

  ‘Yeh,’ said Colin, ‘perhaps we should.’

  ‘Well, I reckon we ought to sit in the shade, anyway,’ Bruce said, ‘it’s stupid sittin’ here. We don’t have to live here just because we slept here, do we?’

  That was a point. It was like walking into the wrong house at night by mistake, then waking up in the morning and calling it home.

  ‘We’ll all get sunstroke or dehydrate or something if we stop here,’ Jan said.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Mark.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘Dehydrate?’

  Jan sighed. ‘I don’t know, exactly.’

  ‘We’ve got to have a plan,’ Gerald said, ‘I think that’s agreed, isn’t it?’ (It was good to be able to join in again, even though it was an effort to sound natural.)

  Colin looked at him, relieved, as they all were, that Gerald was trying to be himself. ‘Yeh, we’ve got to do some planning, Gerald, like working out where we are. Take this map —’

  ‘You’ll never do it, Col. There’s more to it than you think, you know.’

  ‘Well, we can try. Then we’ve got to decide whether we stay here or start walking.’

  ‘Mustn’t leave here,’ said Gerald. ‘Never leave the scene of the crash. That’s a rule, you know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s wreckage that they come looking for, and wreckage is easier to see than people. Not that there’s much left of the Egret, is there?’

  ‘We could collect it,’ Bruce said, ‘what’s left of it, and make it look better, couldn’t we? Make it into an S.O.S. perhaps.’

  They thought about it and Colin said, ‘It’s an idea, all right. Make an S.O.S. out of stones, anyway, a good long one, say a hundred yards long.’

  ‘Crumbs . . .’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t take long, not if we all helped.’

  ‘All depends, though, doesn’t it,’ said Gerald, ‘on where we are? They mightn’t come looking here, might they?’ (It was a foolish thing to have said. He wished he could call it back.)

  Colin prodded his map. ‘We’re up here somewhere, I reckon, in the tropics.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Bruce, ‘and we’re looking out west into the Gulf of Carpentaria, from a coast that runs north and south.’

  Colin was surprised; that was something he hadn’t expected from Bruce. ‘Cape York Peninsula,’ Colin said, ‘that’s what I reckon, too. We’re down on it somewhere. A thousand miles from Coonabibba. We are, you know.’

  ‘We can’t be. I didn’t fly that way. I headed more west than north.’ Gerald was beginning to feel that he belonged again. ‘Look, I know something about these things, not much, but enough to know that you can’t work it out without proper maps. You’ve got to know the exact distances and wind speeds and courses and all sorts of things. Honest, Col, I wouldn’t lie to you. You’ve got to have instruments; parallel rules and protractors and dividers and mathematical tables. Gee, navigating an aeroplane’s a pretty big thing.’

  ‘It might be, but we are facing west from a north-south coast, like Bruce says. That’s common sense. You don’t need anything fancy to prove it.’

  ‘There are hundreds of places you can face west from – bays and inlets and estuaries . . . Look, if you say the Gulf of Carpentaria, I could say New Guinea or up in Indonesia somewhere.’

  ‘Now you’re making it silly. We all know the Egret couldn’t fly that far.’

  ‘Why couldn’t it? It couldn’t fly to the Gulf of Carpentaria, either, without a dirty great tail wind behind it. And we had it, I’m telling you. We had a beauty.’ He shouldn’t be saying these things and he knew it. He had a responsibility and he wasn’t honouring it, but the thought seemed to demand that it should be stated. ‘We could be almost anywhere at all. I don’t know which way the wind was blowing and we’ve no hope of finding out now – nor then, either. Unless that wireless will work, and I’ll lay any odds you like that it won’t. It wasn’t a party, you know. I didn’t know what way I was going. I didn’t think we’d even get out of it alive . . .’

  Then he caught sight of Carol, frowning, warning him not to start
looking back. Perhaps to make sure that he didn’t, she said, ‘There’s an old settlement past the headland, but no one lives there any more.’

  ‘A what?’ said Colin.

  ‘A breakwater and – and stone houses all fallen down.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I wouldn’t kid about that.’

  They stared at her then all started talking at once and Bruce managed to get the last word. ‘I told you there’d be a town, didn’t I?’

  ‘It’s not a town. Nothing like it. It’s dead.’

  ‘You mean a ghost town?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean even that.’

  ‘Just round that headland!’ said Jan. ‘Just down there?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘Crikey. Let’s get crackin’. What are we stopping here for?’

  ‘Yeh, let’s get moving. Let’s get everything together and get moving. How far you say? Just round that headland?’ Colin started bundling Carol’s clothes back into her suitcase. ‘Come on, everybody; grab your shoes and all.’

  ‘Please,’ cried Carol, ‘it’s a dead place. No one’s been there for ages and ages. We’ve got to be sensible. We’ve got to be careful, even.’

  ‘Careful?’ echoed Bruce.

  ‘Snakes and spiders and scorpions and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Aw, come off it, Carol.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got to think of these things. That’s where you find them, in – in broken-down old places. It’s creepy. I was frightened.’

  ‘Oh, Carol!’

  ‘Well, I was, and you will be, too. I think we ought to stay away from the place, that’s what I think.’

  ‘You can’t expect us to do that,’ Gerald said. ‘What’d you tell us for, then, if that’s the way you felt about it?’

  ‘Yeh, that’s silly, Carol,’ said Colin. ‘I mean, if there’s a town there must be water, mustn’t there?’

  ‘It’s not a town. It never was. 1874; that’s the date I found. Nearly a hundred years ago.’

  ‘But there must be water!’

  ‘There’s a creek, but it’s salt.’

  ‘And probably things we can eat, growing there,’ Jan said. ‘Bananas, maybe. Coconuts. Things like that.’