To the Wild Sky

by Ivan Southall

  ‘Everyone else says we should. And if we don’t move off mighty soon we won’t be able to. We’ve got to think of Jan and Colin. They were awful sick yesterday.’

  Gerald pulled a face.

  ‘They lost the lot! They must feel worse than we do. And we’ve got to find water.’

  ‘Do you reckon we could drink the sea?’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Oh, grow up.’

  ‘You can’t drink sea-water, Gerald. You know that. They reckon it kills you or drives you mad or something. I reckon we’ve got to shift somewhere else or sling that raft together while we can.’

  ‘Build a little one if you like and put it to sea with a note on it. That might do some good.’

  Bruce grunted.

  ‘Not a bad idea really,’ Gerald said, warming to it. ‘Write it on a hanky or something; one of Carol’s with Carol’s lipstick. Better still, build half a dozen of them and shove them all off to sea with notes on them.’

  ‘Yell, and then wait for fifty years for someone to find them.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going to take that attitude —’

  ‘It’s no different from what you’re saying about a big raft, Gerald. Honest, it’s not. We’ve just got to build it!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not, for Pete’s sake?’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘Look, all this talk about dying’s not so stupid. How long can you last without water in a hot place like this? Not long. Not long enough for notes to find their way across the ocean. Golly, Gerald, we could be dead by tomorrow.’

  ‘Where’s Carol?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  Gerald gave a heave on his wing section and Bruce trailed after him. ‘We could be dead by tomorrow.’

  Gerald suddenly wailed, ‘I know. I know.’

  Carol, with a good stout stick in her hand, had walked inland a way, skirting the marshy land. The stick had a knobbly root on the end like an old-fashioned walking-cane. Perhaps she had walked a mile, perhaps two miles. She didn’t stop until she was sure the others would never see her, nor find her either, even if they came deliberately looking. The earth was still sandy, even way back here, and endlessly undulating, but with undulations rarely so deep that her visibility was shortened. The vegetation was brittle-looking stuff, and sparse, and it wasn’t difficult to find a clean piece of ground to lie on, though first she took the precaution of carefully looking around. Once or twice she had looked back and seen Gerald or Mark, but that hadn’t happened for a while. Then she got down, flat to the earth, closed her eyes, and waited.

  She tried to think back to years long before she was born, back 100 years, back 200 years to the unwritten days before white men had come. It was a picture that formed easily enough. In different places she had seen the things that made up the picture; all she had to do was bring them together. And listen.

  The wind spoke. Leaves spoke. Even the ground spoke. The ground had a beat to it, like a slow human pulse. It was probably the sea on the shore. Or did the earth have a heart, a great booming heart way down below, down deep? She thought of dark men and dark women and dark children sleeping in the earth. She thought of Jim sleeping in the earth. She heard voices and sighs in the earth and bare feet padding the earth; not real feet, the feet of ghosts. Even the years slipping back had a sound of their own, like wheels passing by, like wheels far away, drawing farther and farther away.

  After a while, after perhaps ten minutes or perhaps hours, something seemed to click in her head. She awoke and the sun was no longer burning against her back. The sting had gone out of the heat of the day, but all the sounds were still there, above her and below her, and she felt different, unmistakably so. Comfortable, as though the earth had become a feather bed; rested and relaxed.

  Her eyes opened almost languidly, and the earth was against her cheek, sand was in her mouth, the breeze was in her hair. Her hair had fallen over her eyes, diffusing her sight, lending to the bush a golden hue that did not belong to it. ‘I’m still a white girl,’ she thought, almost as though she would not have been surprised to find that her hair had turned to black. ‘Do I know where to dig for roots? Shall I get up from here and find water? Has it happened?’

  She didn’t know, but there was a dreaminess in her. She felt slow and sleepy. So comfortable. She felt like something that had grown in the ground, that belonged, like a tree perhaps.

  There was a pair of eyes, beady eyes she thought, looking at her. Two pairs of eyes on two long pendulous necks. Four long legs. Something stiffened in her, something went taut. Nerves and sinews stiffened.

  Emu. Full-grown emu.

  It was part of the emotion, of course, part of the picture she had thought up for herself. But she didn’t move, didn’t flicker an eyelid. She played out the part.

  Where was the stick? Could she be swifter than they were? Could she stun a bird bigger than herself? Whether that bird was imagined or real?

  ‘The emu is a curious bird.’ She had heard that somewhere. ‘When it sees something it has not seen before, the emu will stand and stare.’

  Carol started trembling inwardly, from astonishment more than anything. The emus were really and truly there. And then she thought, Perhaps that’s the way the dark people did it. Just stayed in one place, still and quiet, waiting. Perhaps you don’t find animals by looking for them. Perhaps you lie doggo and wait for them to find you.

  The stick wasn’t far. There it was. Probably within reach if she moved like lightning.

  Then she said to herself, ‘No good stunning it, is it? I’ve got to kill it. Can I possibly kill an emu, or will it fight back? I mean, how do I really kill it? Will it really fight back and will the other one go for me? Perhaps if I aim for a leg as hard as I can I’ll maim it and bring it down, and then I’ll have to beat it on the head. I’ll have to hit over and over again, the way those awful men kill kangaroos, and it’ll struggle and kick and cry out. Oh, the poor thing. Then it’ll lie there all bleeding and dying and banging itself on the ground.’

  Then she said to herself, ‘And afterwards I’ll have to drag it home, though I don’t suppose it matters much if I can’t. The others can come and help me. They’ll say, “How’d you do it, Carol?” And I’ll say . . . I’ll say I was tired and went to sleep and woke up and there they were and I got up and killed one. “Gee, Carol,” they’ll say, “how’d you do that?” And I’ll say, “I took a big swing at it with the club and killed it.” “Gee, Carol,” they’ll say, “you, Carol; you of all people.” “But I had to, didn’t I?” I’ll say, “I mean I had to. It was food. It was our life or its life, wasn’t it?”’

  She had begun to feel cold and sickened and afraid. But her fear was not of the birds; it was of her own clumsy self. She just wasn’t made that way. She wasn’t an athlete and never had been. She was clumsy at games; she’d never even mastered how to throw a ball properly. Not in a lifetime could she match an emu in speed or strength, emu that could run like the wind and slash with claws as big as hammers.

  She remained there, breathless, trembling, peering out through golden hair into a golden bushland ruled over by two giant birds.

  It was no use. She couldn’t do it. She’d have to let them go away.

  But then the others would say to her, ‘You didn’t even try? Oh, Carol. All that meat. We could have lived off it for a week.’

  She shot out a hand, wildly and frantically, and threw herself to her feet, and in that instant the birds bristled and reared six feet high.

  She slung the knobbly stick with all her might but missed by yards, and in seconds too short to recall they were gone on long, loping strides.

  She stared after them, angrily, humiliated, until the bushland was empty and silent again. Until long after that, she stood there.

  Mark reeled down the sand with a load of sticks twice the size of himself. ‘For crying out loud,’ Gerald exclaimed. ‘What are you building? A house for the little pig?’

  M
ark dropped his sticks in a heap. ‘Gee, did you catch a pig?’

  Gerald looked appealingly at Bruce then scowled at the wing section he had dragged home. And Mark blushed and dropped his eyes.

  Colin was on his way back, too, apparently with an armful of shells. He kept on dropping them and wearily picking them up again. ‘Mussels, I reckon,’ Bruce said, ‘he’s been chipping away at them for hours.’

  ‘I don’t know what we would have done with a pig,’ Mark said, ‘eatin’ a pig raw would be real gruesome . . . It’s a beaut house though, Gerald, isn’t it?’

  ‘It might be if it had a roof on it.’

  ‘Well, that’s something it won’t be getting,’ Bruce growled, so deliberately that he sounded his ‘g’s. ‘He’ll be wearing out the tomahawk on sticks. We should be keeping it sharp for things that matter.’

  ‘Like what?’ piped Mark.

  ‘Like that raft.’

  ‘By golly,’ Gerald said, ‘you take some convincing!’ He sounded hearty enough, but didn’t feel it, and got away from the problem by stepping through Jan’s doorway of sticks. He was frightened of the raft idea because he knew it was his duty to fight it and he wasn’t top-boy any more. Too many were against him. And the only weapon he had was argument, and so often he was weak in argument. Bert, the taxi man, tied him up in knots, and at the moment there was something about Bruce that was something like Bert. That same argumentative streak that always got Gerald rattled in the end. (‘Steer clear of them, son,’ his father had said.) So Gerald turned his back on it and had found Jan at her fireplace before he remembered that the same streak, in even stronger measure, ran through her.

  She looked up at him, flushed and dishevelled, surrounded by her collection of fire-sticks that wouldn’t burn. ‘I can’t,’ she panted, ‘the rotten thing. It just won’t and my hands are so sore.’ She turned them up to him, with several blisters formed and one blister broken. ‘I’ve tried and tried.’

  She was close to tears and Gerald felt awkward and wished he had gone somewhere else.

  ‘If we can’t start a fire, Gerald, we can’t stay here. We can’t eat raw any of the food we’re going to find around here. We just don’t know what those people died of. It might be something in the ground, and the water’ll need boiling even after we find it. We’ve got to light a fire or build a raft. One or the other. While we’re strong enough.’

  Even when they weren’t looking for a fight but just looking for sympathy it ended up on the same note, though Gerald’s attention hadn’t been entirely with Jan; he had been staring at a little perfume bottle, probably Carol’s, that had obviously failed to make fire along with everything else, along with all the different sorts of wood, the flat sticks and the grooved sticks, the soft ones and the hard ones, that Jan had tried in every possible way. Even the green bottle that looked so old it might have come out of Noah’s Ark.

  ‘Where’d you get the bottle?’ he said.

  Jan sighed. ‘Mark found it.’

  ‘There might be more!’

  ‘What good would they be, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘For notes. Golly, Jan; notes. There might be dozens of bottles if we really look for them. That’ll be better than any raft. We can do a circuit round the island chucking them into the sea every couple of miles. We can have them drifting out to sea all round us in every direction!’

  Colin came in, wind-burnt and sunburnt, pink from head to foot, pink pants and pink skin, with Bruce and Mark at his heels. (Mark saying, ‘Gee whiz; you’ll be sore.’) He spilled a heap of shellfish at his feet and said, ‘We won’t die, anyway. What else have we got?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Gerald, ‘unless Carol brings something back.’

  ‘Crikey,’ said Colin. ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Not a bloomin’ thing,’ grumbled Bruce. ‘It’s crazy staying here. We can’t live on those things. Be like eatin’ slugs or worse. They’re probably poisonous.’

  ‘Cockles poisonous?’ cried Colin.

  ‘Who said they were cockles?’

  ‘I did. They look like them, don’t they?’

  ‘I don’t know. Never seen a cockle except in a bottle.’

  Gerald said, ‘Mark found a bottle, didn’t you, Mark? I reckon we ought to put a note in it and push it out to sea.’ (Mark’s eyes lit up.) ‘Then tomorrow we should see if we can find some more.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Mark enthusiastically. ‘Yeh, I’ll say!’

  Jan pulled a face and Bruce said, ‘We won’t be here tomorrow not if I’ve got any say in it. And Col thinks the same, don’t you, Col?’

  Colin looked uncomfortable. ‘In a way,’ he said. ‘I suppose . . .’ Then he sat down and started cracking shellfish with the tomahawk.

  ‘Don’t wipe me off like that,’ said Bruce, almost indignantly.

  ‘I’m not wiping you off. You know how I feel. I reckon we should go, but . . . Heck, there are all sorts of things to think of, aren’t there? What if we do drift out to sea?’

  ‘We’re not going through all that again,’ Bruce half shouted. ‘If we start thinking of everything that could go wrong we’ll sit here till we rot.’

  ‘Better than rotting in the middle of the ocean.’ Gerald hoped to sound stern, but there was much more fear in his voice than resolution. ‘I don’t know why you’re so stubborn. It’d be awful, Bruce. It’d be terrible. It’s so silly.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s silly about trying to help ourselves!’

  ‘Don’t let’s start fighting again,’ Colin said nervously. ‘It’s not worth it. We’re friends; not enemies.’

  ‘Yeh,’ said Mark, ‘what do we want to be fightin’ for all the time?’

  ‘We’re not fightin’,’ Bruce said sharply. ‘We’re talking about serious things.’

  Colin sighed half-heartedly. (Anything for a quiet life.) ‘Well, I don’t see anything wrong with putting a note in a bottle; do you, Jan?’

  She brushed the hair from her eyes with a self-consciously girlish gesture and went back to regarding her hands as if they were part of a picture of absorbing interest. They thought she was thinking about it, but in fact the question had hardly registered on her mind.

  ‘Surely you don’t have to think about it,’ Gerald said. ‘It’s common sense.’

  Bruce drew a quick breath but Jan said, ‘I suppose it’s something. Yeh, I suppose it’s something. You never know. Maybe pearlers or prawn fishermen or someone’ll pick it up. There must be ships out there somewhere.’

  But she didn’t really care; she was too much aware of her own discomfort; of her hands and her thirst and her deep, deep sense of foreboding. That they had actually taken notice of her she didn’t realize until the activity round about made it obvious. They had spread out a handkerchief on the suitcase and Gerald was writing the message with Carol’s lipstick. They had accepted her word! Her word had settled it! Oh dear, surely everything wasn’t going to depend on her?

  Gerald wrote, ‘S.O.S. Sea Wall Molineaux.’ There wasn’t room for anything else. It was difficult making letters small yet clear enough. In a way Gerald felt thwarted, but he made the best of it. ‘It’ll do,’ he said, and held it up for inspection.

  ‘A real S.O.S.,’ Mark hissed. He was anxious to be off to launch it into the sea.

  ‘Doesn’t make any difference what you say,’ said Bruce. ‘No one’ll ever read it, anyway.’

  Gerald made an impatient noise and poked the message in the bottle, then jammed a short stick into the neck after it, forcing it and turning it, bruising the wood. ‘The water will seal it,’ he said, ‘it’ll make the wood swell.’

  ‘Yeh,’ muttered Bruce, ‘and then break the bottle.’

  ‘Gee, Bruce,’ said Colin.

  Bruce didn’t quite know what to do with himself. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to be a misery . . . but crikey, I just can’t see how we’re to last the distance. We’re too far away from people. We’ve got to help ourselves.’

  ‘That’s what we’re tr
ying to do,’ said Gerald. ‘Who’s coming?’

  Mark was immediately at his side. ‘Let’s carry it, Gerald. Let me throw it.’ Gerald had wanted to throw it himself, but he gave it to Mark, and then one by one they trailed down to the water, even Bruce and Jan.

  ‘Put a smile on your faces,’ Gerald said. ‘O.K., Mark. Chuck it.’

  They stood there and watched it bob away on the receding tide but it wasn’t exactly a moment of hope. The ocean looked so huge and the bottle looked so small; and the warm world of people and parents and places and streets and traffic seemed to be farther off than the stars.

  16.

  The Golden Rule

  The light on the beach had begun to change. Even the leaves of the trees were flushed as though washed in orange dyes.

  It might have been dust still in the air from yesterday’s storm in the south, or perhaps smoke from smouldering volcanoes far across the sea. Smoke could have come down on the tail-end of the monsoon. Or perhaps it was something peculiar to Molineaux. Perhaps it was like this every evening.

  But it was strange (creepy, Mark said), like the light one might expect to find in a high and lofty place inhabited by spirits, where creatures not quite human lived. A beautiful light, but not ordinary, not naturally the way that light should be.

  They talked about taking a swim to cool off, hoping that water on the outside might help to relieve some of the thirst on the inside. The boys, leaving the home beach to Jan, went across the headland to bathe on the other side. Jan seemed to want them to do that and assumed a frozen look when Bruce said, ‘Aw heck, sis.’ But they went, and going down through the rocks found a few fish stranded in pools, small brightly coloured fish as nimble as quicksilver that they managed to catch in a wild hysterical scramble with their hands.

  ‘Are they poisonous?’ Mark said.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Black teeth,’ said Mark. ‘See.’

  The tide was some distance out again and the sea was calmer. Farther out it looked almost glassy, becoming a brilliant mirror for the lengthening rays of the sinking sun. It made the water look hot, made it look like a sea of molten lava, as though steam and fumes and flames should have lapped at the shore.