To the Wild Sky

by Ivan Southall

  ‘Flowers, that’s all. Only flowers. Everything grown over and spidery. Flowers all run wild; thousands and thousands of marigolds and sunflowers. And they’re all along the beach, spread everywhere. I didn’t see them going. I saw them coming back. Flowers, but nothing you can eat.’

  ‘You can eat sunflower seeds.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Of course you can,’ Jan exclaimed. ‘You know that, Carol. They make cooking oil out of them and all sorts of things. And like Col says, there must be water there somewhere. There must be a well or a spring or something. Once we start looking we’re just bound to find it, and maybe a house, too, good enough to live in – after we fix it up a bit.’

  ‘Live in?’ wailed Mark. ‘Swipe me, we’re not going to stop here for ever, are we?’

  Suddenly, everything seemed to be different. They were excited and Carol got caught up in it despite herself. Their renewal of good spirits was so infectious that even her annoyance with herself for failing to recognize sunflowers as food didn’t last overlong. She was annoyed with herself for being so helpless where practical matters were concerned. She could put words together, but not actions. She was annoyed with herself because Jan had thought of the seeds and she hadn’t. Carol had the blood in her veins but Jan had the instinct! Of course, sunflowers were not native to the country; white men had brought them in; but that was a poor sort of excuse. Fancy imagining that lying on the ground might awaken an instinct in her, when Jan didn’t even have to stop to think. Jan just knew it or did it without hesitation. She did things like bringing Gerald back to life, and knew things about sunflower seeds – and that people and fresh water went together. But walking along with them all, cheerfully, took the sting out of it.

  Gerald walked with Carol and carried her suitcase; it was not that they were separate from the others, but Gerald managed to keep close to her, sometimes brushing her with his free hand. The physical contact added to his confidence in himself, for his mind was not without its worries, not without its after-tastes of failure; his leadership had never been tested before and he hadn’t come out of it well. Colin had come out of it better, but it was Carol who was strong in the things that mattered, even though she was a girl. That was what Gerald decided. Physical strength didn’t matter, not with a girl. Carol seemed to have strength left over for others to draw on. He had never looked to her as a source of strength before. He had looked upon her as someone to impress with his cleverness. She was an unusually pretty and personable girl, and if a fellow was to be seen with a girl at all, better with her than another, because she was a cut above the rest in town.

  So he walked beside her and brushed her with his hand and smiled when she looked at him and tried to give the impression that he was still the Gerald of old. But with the others it was different. (Carol forgave completely, but they didn’t.) Something had risen up again, though maybe they didn’t know it was there. It wasn’t like a wall or a fence or a high mountain, but something was there that seemed to make them more distant. For they walked as in a crowd with laughter and chatter (and occasional flashbacks into sadness) and impatience – impatience because Bruce was so slow; but sometimes when Gerald spoke no one listened. It wasn’t that they snubbed him; they didn’t hear. It was like being a little boy again trying to get a word edgeways into a grown-up conversation.

  ‘You know, looking at this thing the way we should,’ he said, ‘I don’t know that we should have left the crash so soon.’

  It got through to Carol but Jan cut in with something about food. Eating sunflowers, she said, would be like chewing up a mouthful of teeth, if they couldn’t boil them first to make them soft. ‘And who’s got some red-hot spit to start the fire?’ Her coarseness jarred on Gerald.

  Colin said, ‘I reckon we ought to go fishing. We could make spears and try throwing them from the breakwater.’

  ‘Or bird-nesting,’ shrilled Mark.

  ‘Off the breakwater? What sort of nests would they be?’

  ‘Well, if we really are up north,’ Bruce said, ‘we might find turtle eggs, mightn’t we? You know, you dig ’em out of the sand. And what about turtle soup? They say that’s beaut.’

  ‘And oysters,’ said Mark, ‘maybe with pearls in them. Would a fella die if he swallowed a pearl?’

  ‘Or crabs.’

  ‘Crab meat’s poisonous.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘It is, you know. Isn’t it Jan? You’ve got to be careful with crabs.’

  Later, Gerald said, ‘Goanna meat’s not bad if you cook it right. I’ve tasted it.’ But then the conversation had turned to other things.

  Bruce said, ‘We didn’t make that S.O.S. or collect up the wreckage either.’

  ‘Plenty of time,’ said Colin. ‘If we’re as far from Coonabibba as we reckon, they won’t be searching up here for days.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. They’re bound to spread the search out, pretty soon, you know.’

  ‘As far as this? Rats. Don’t forget that they’ll be thinking that Mr Jim was flying it. They’ll never dream that we’re up this far because old Gerald did the flying.’

  In a while, Gerald said, ‘Parts of the wreckage might be useful for cooking pots and things.’ But then Jan started up on history.

  ‘1874 you said, Carol, didn’t you? If we put on our thinking caps we might crack it. If it really is a deserted coast – except for this settlement . . . Well, there can’t be too many like it, can there?’

  ‘It might be a mining town,’ Bruce said, ‘and there were hundreds of those, you know. They sprang up and died down. Hundreds of them.’

  ‘On the beach?’

  ‘Well, why not?’ Maybe it was a port for a mining town farther upstream. You said there was a creek, didn’t you, Carol? I still reckon we might find a town back inland a bit.’

  ‘Particularly if there’s no fresh water, you mean?’

  ‘Yeh, that’s right, Carol; you took the words out of my mouth.’ (She hadn’t, but it wasn’t the sort of thing a boy could admit to a girl who hadn’t known you could eat sunflowers.) ‘Yeh, if there’s no fresh water there must be a town farther up.’

  ‘There might be crocodiles up the creek,’ said Mark.

  ‘If there are, boy, you’d better watch out, or we’ll throw you to them.’

  ‘Do crocodiles lay eggs?’ Mark wondered. ‘I reckon it would be beaut to eat crocodile eggs.’

  ‘Crocodile eggs! Yeh, they lay ’em; same as kangaroos.’

  ‘Aw . . .’

  ‘They do lay them, Bruce,’ Jan said.

  ‘Kangaroos do?’

  ‘Crocodiles!’

  ‘Come off it, sis. You’re as soft in the head as he is . . . What are we going to do about cooking pots? Has anybody given that a thought?’

  ‘We haven’t got anythin’ to cook yet, have we?’

  ‘Maybe not, but you’ve got to prepare. You’ve got to think about these things. You can’t hold a handful of water over the fire to boil it, can you?’

  They were not paying attention to Gerald and he wasn’t used to it. They would never know, ever, what he had been through. He was quite sure of that. For six hours he had carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Then he had broken. If they remembered anything, they remembered mainly that he had broken. The rest was a bad dream largely beyond their recall.

  In the old days he had been the centre, like the sun with planets in orbit, simply because he was Gerald Hennessy. Then for six hours, like a giant, he had burst the bonds of boyhood and become a man. But the strain of remaining like a man had been too great and because of it he had become a planet himself, and a not very important one at that, so far out from the centre that sometimes they forgot he was there. But when Colin spoke they listened; when Jan spoke they listened; when Bruce spoke they listened; even Mark got a good-natured hearing. There was a moral in it somewhere. Gerald couldn’t put a finger on it, but something older and wiser was taking root in him.

  Then, out
of nowhere, he remembered setting 000 degrees on the compass of the aircraft. Remembered so distinctly setting it and for hours flying it. He undoubtedly had gone north – not west at all – just as Bruce and Colin had said he had. How far north? A great distance; that was plain to see. New Guinea perhaps? He had not been serious when he had suggested it.

  New Guinea might be dangerous. In remote and inaccessible parts it was still a savage land. The last savage land on earth, he had heard someone say. There were people who ate human flesh; people who fired poisoned arrows. People in warpaint and plumes and with bones through their noses. There were deadly snakes and malaria mosquitoes and swamp fevers. Perhaps this settlement past the headland had not been abandoned but wiped out?

  Gerald said, ‘I reckon we should do something about arming ourselves. I mean it, you know. With clubs and spears and stones for throwing and things like that. To be on the safe side.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ Carol exclaimed.

  ‘Just to be sure, that’s all. It could be New Guinea, you know. I did fly north. I’ve remembered.’

  By then it was well past noon and the sun rode high and the headland was close and their shadows on the sand were very short.

  *

  Bruce got left behind after they crossed the headland and saw the breakwater. He wanted to run, too, but it wasn’t in him.

  ‘Wait for me,’ he shrieked.

  But they didn’t.

  ‘You lousy lot,’ he yelled. ‘Wait on . . .’ But they streaked away from him, Colin and Jan out in front (Jan ran like a boy), then Mark, then Gerald with Carol’s suitcase banging against his leg, then Carol. Carol wasn’t made for running in fleet-footed company. That was obvious. Bruce had noticed before that some girls, even slight and shapely girls, lost their grace when they tried to run.

  ‘Hey, Carol,’ he bellowed, ‘What’s the hurry? You can wait, surely?’

  Then was appalled by his own cheek. She was Carol Bancroft, after all, even if she did run like a duck. But she waited, apparently not reluctantly, and Bruce hobbled up to her floundering for the right words to say. ‘Strike me pink,’ he panted, ‘you’d think they were running for a prize. And there’s nothing there, is there? You said there was nothing.’

  ‘Not much,’ she agreed, ‘nothing to get excited about, anyway . . . It’s just that it looks good from here. I thought it looked good from here, too, first time.’

  He had called her back and now he was alone with her. And almost tongue-tied. What a fellow could say in a crowd and what he could say after the crowd had gone away were two different things. She was such a smashing girl, even all wind-blown and bedraggled and hot like this. Poor old Jan looked like a red-faced yokel beside her. ‘I – I didn’t think it’d be so far,’ he stammered. ‘I’m about done in. This leg, you know.’

  She took his arm and helped him along. (Golly, he hadn’t meant that.) From the weight that bore on her she knew he wasn’t shamming. ‘Do you think that Gerald could be right,’ she said, ‘that we’re in New Guinea?’

  It was pretty good, that pressure of her hand on his arm. Carol Bancroft holding Bruce Martin’s arm!

  ‘Blowed if I know,’ he said. But he was letting himself down badly. She had asked his opinion. It was up to him to have one. ‘It’s a horrible thought,’ he said importantly. ‘And what can we do about it? I mean, we just can’t walk out of here. If we don’t know where we are, we don’t know which way to go, do we? But I can’t see how Gerald works it out. Honest I can’t. I didn’t think tail winds could do that.’

  ‘Are you worried about it?’ There was a degree of concern in her voice, as though his opinion counted.

  ‘I suppose I am. Well, aren’t you? I mean, we could be here for years. Really and truly years. We could grow up here, even, just the six of us. If we don’t get sick first, or killed, or anything.’ He looked at her tenderly, then said hesitantly – willing himself not to say it but saying it just the same, ‘We might end up marrying one another some day. Well, some of us. There are only two girls and one’s my sister and I guess you’d want to marry Gerald, anyway.’

  His earnestness embarrassed her. ‘That’s silly talk, Bruce,’ she said. ‘It could never come to that.’

  ‘It isn’t silly talk. Not if you think about it. You hear of that sort of thing and it can still happen, can’t it?’

  ‘People getting married?’

  ‘Being left here to grow up! Not finishing school or having bands to listen to or books —’

  ‘We’ve got Oliver Twist.’

  He pouted. ‘And a wireless that won’t go! Bloomin’ thing! But having to make our clothes out of bark and needles out of fish bones and . . . I mean, there are spots like this where people just never come. Thousands of square miles and people just never come here for jolly good reasons.’

  Her hand had dropped away from his arm and they weren’t walking any more. The shyness had gone. Something else was there. ‘Carol,’ he said, ‘what if it’s an island? There are hundreds of islands up here, even big ones, and no one lives on them and no one goes near them. I mean, you know that. We’ve learnt about that. Places not fit to live on. What about Molineaux Island. The settlement they had there. No one knew it was there for ages and ages until some pearlers put in for water and found all the ruins and graves and bones and everything. Everybody reckoned they were making it up until some history bloke dug out the records. Everybody on Molineaux had died of some sickness or other about a hundred years ago . . .’

  He saw suddenly into her mind with that dismaying intuition of his. ‘Carol,’ he said, and weakened. ‘You don’t think —?’

  ‘Well, it could be, couldn’t it?’

  Jan felt frightened again, breathless, with an uneasiness that wouldn’t settle on any one thing but darted about in all directions; an uneasiness that didn’t want to ask questions but was surrounded by mysteries.

  It wasn’t a settlement at all. It was as though men had come here just for the sake of a stupid fight against the bush, just to show how clever they were, just to show how brave they were, but had never looked like winning; had been whipped and beaten and broken and stamped on. They should not have come here – any more than she should have come here.

  They were not nice ruins, like the ruins she saw in photographs, all softened with ivy, not age-old ruins of nice places where people had been happy a long time ago. These were strangled ruins, where people had been lonely and desperate and cut off. Mad people, surely. If not mad before they came, mad before they got away; or dead before they got away.

  Nothing was the way she had thought it would be; even the creek was just an arm of the sea or a tail of the sea, now seventy or eighty yards wide, surging inland, rushing and hissing among the trees. And what sort of trees were they that salt water didn’t kill? Trees rooted in ooze and sand and salt; trees with unhealthy appetites, that’s what they were. Somehow, she’d thought there’d be gentle sands, but the tide was in, high, and the sands were swallowed up, and it seemed as though the tide could come higher yet and press her back into the bush, perhaps pin her there, imprison her there.

  It was the disappointment, the cruelty of it, the let-down.

  Carol hadn’t said it would be like this. Old, she’d said, and dead, but not strangled. And still being strangled years after it was dead. For a while, at the graveside, Carol had seemed to Jan like the best friend she’d ever had, because Carol had saved her from complete humiliation. Carol had cleared up so many things, put so many things right, but now she had come into the wrong sort of reckoning again. Carol had told them of this place and then had tried to talk them out of it. But she hadn’t tried hard enough!

  It was horrible, like the half-seen places that terrified Jan in her dreams. Even the idea of eating sunflowers now seemed like the absolute end. They were so garish, so unreal, so harsh. They didn’t want to be eaten. All they wanted to do was glare.

  ‘Let’s go away,’ she said, in a little voice.

  ‘But fancy
people living here?’ Colin was looking round again, squinting and twisting his mouth. ‘Whatever for? Whatever would they do here? How can you imagine it being a town or anything, ever? What’d they do with themselves?’

  Mark came out of the scrub and said he’d found the ruins of four huts and a chook house, but if they thought he was going to live in any of them they had another think coming. ‘It’s sad,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? Real sad. Even for the chooks it must have been.’

  Gerald was nervous and couldn’t stand still. ‘We’ve got to be sensible, you know. It’s all right in some ways.’

  ‘What ways?’ said Jan sullenly.

  ‘For the search planes. Better than where we were. It’s the sort of place that’d draw the eye. The breakwater, and all, and a long line of rocks on the sands made up into an S.O.S.’

  ‘I reckon Carol shouldn’t have told us.’

  ‘That’s silly, Jan. We’d have found out, anyway.’

  ‘But there’s no water or bananas or coconuts or anything.’ She didn’t want to go into details, she feared details, but they started tumbling out just the same. ‘You can’t drink the creek water; it’s salt. We’ve got to find fresh water and something to eat. Whatever are we going to do if we don’t? You had something yesterday, Gerald, but Col and me, we were sick . . . And we’ve been working hard. And I’m thirsty. Not just ordinary thirsty. I don’t like being thirsty the way I am.’

  Colin said, ‘Gee, Jan. We’ll find something. I’ll bet you we do, as soon as we start looking.’

  ‘But we’ve been looking all the time. All the time we’ve been looking, all morning, everywhere. I mean, there hasn’t been a minute that we haven’t been looking; not really. We can’t eat the leaves off the trees. We’re not caterpillars.’

  Mark laughed.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Jan.

  ‘Whaffor? What have I done?’

  Colin scowled. ‘Yeh. Shut up. We’ve just got to start looking harder, that’s all . . . I don’t know; for a while I thought things were going to be all right.’

  ‘We were fooling ourselves,’ said Jan.