by Anbara Salam
It became obvious, as the weeks passed, that Marietta was not going anywhere. In the evenings, once the muffled sounds of wheezy breathing could be heard, Bea and Max argued in low voices.
‘But she doesn’t even contribute –’ Bea gestured vaguely with her hand.
‘Beatriz!’ Max looked shocked.
‘Well, it’s true.’ She fixed him with a look, knowing full well Max was not as holy as all that. For weeks they had been feeding Marietta from their stores. All the money was donated by Max’s church, and his savings from when Marybelle’s was sold. That’s all they had, and when it was gone, there would be nothing.
‘We can’t ask her to leave,’ Max pre-empted, before she could suggest it.
‘Why not?’ Bea tipped her nose up.
‘Bea! This is a Mission House! Moreover, it was her Mission House before we even arrived. We can’t ask her to leave her own home, for goodness’ sake.’ Max glanced nervously towards the room where Marietta slept, pausing every few words to listen for any change in the snoring.
Bea made a whining noise, and curled her head against the top of his thigh. ‘But why? Why does she have to be here?’
Max rubbed his fingertips into her scalp and sighed, worried that if he said anything diplomatic she might fly into a temper.
Bea looked up at him. ‘I don’t want her here. She’s so …’ and Bea, normally so quick with insults, trailed off, exhaling through her nose. ‘She’s so big,’ she finally murmured.
Max gave her a quick kiss on the forehead, feeling a strain pull through his spine.
But Bea was right, Max thought to himself the following day, while strolling down to the coast, smoking his pipe. Marietta was just so big. Everything about her was big. Big voice, big appetite, big opinions. Her bigness expanded to occupy space he hadn’t even known was available in their tiny hut, in their tiny village. And there was a slight change, in Bambayot. A slight, but absolute change. Aru might not have mentioned her, but he certainly seemed to have no problem heeding her counsel. There was not one single incident of dark praying while Marietta was back from the East. No chanting. No screams in the night. Max watched her carefully, as she delivered the sermons on Sunday in his stead. As she spoke, her bare feet wiggled in the dirt on the floor of the church. He must have an awful lot to learn from her, he thought.
And as the days turned into weeks, it became clear Max would have to find a way to keep Bea and Marietta apart. The humming had reached epidemic proportions, and when it rose unbidden from Marietta’s bedroom, Bea’s eyelids visibly twitched with irritation. Marietta only addressed Bea in the loud, slow voice that Bea suspected she must once have used on her Latina maid. One Sunday, after church, Mabo-Mabon asked Bea if Marietta was her mother, and Bea had shouted, ‘No!’ so loudly that even Mabo-Mabon had raised her eyebrows in amusement.
Mealtimes were particularly difficult. There were still only two stools in Mission House, and until Willie, the self-declared village carpenter, could be bothered to carve a new one, two stools there would remain. Marietta always sat on the far stool, on the right, Max on the stool at the head of the table, and Bea perched awkwardly on an upturned crate, which left her half a head lower than Marietta and Max, and in direct eye contact with their mouths. Marietta ate hungrily, stopping to clear her throat in an unnecessarily gruesome way every other mouthful. Each time she cleared her throat, Bea paused, her spoon in mid-air, waiting for Marietta to spit out whatever she had dislodged, but she just swallowed, and Bea shuddered inside. And it was always God talk. Bea sat, patiently eating, while Marietta and Max lectured each other about the fulfilment of the Holy Spirit, or the story of Naboth’s vineyard. Or else they talked about the island.
‘And is it true he has his own currency?’
‘Yes –’ Marietta coughed and swallowed ‘– now this is interesting –’
That phrase had a special power to make Bea’s spirits drop.
‘– he only permits the use of “the Liki”, can you believe it?’ Marietta raised her eyebrows.
Max and Marietta chortled.
Max shook his head. ‘What an egotist.’
Bea watched him with disbelief. Why did he always have to speak so pompously when he talked to Marietta? Max didn’t behave normally when he was around her. He was trying to impress her. And she was flattered by his deference to her authority as the island know-it-all.
‘Now, “the Liki” is nothing more than young namele leaves punctured with holes. But you can’t buy anything with actual currency – only these leaves!’ Marietta continued.
‘And they say money doesn’t grow on trees,’ Max quipped.
Marietta snickered again.
‘I don’t understand,’ Bea heard herself saying. ‘How is that any different to our money?’
Max and Marietta both stared at her.
‘What’s that, my dear?’ Marietta asked.
‘I mean – our money is from paper, also from trees.’
Max and Marietta shared a look, and Marietta stared down at her plate, grinning to herself. Bea saw a flicker of humour dilating Max’s nostrils.
‘No, my dear, it’s just a saying,’ he said.
Max and Marietta exchanged another look of suppressed hilarity, and Bea had to restrain herself from smashing her plate on the table and walking out. Stupid little Bea wasn’t a missionary. Sitting here, taking smug looks from her husband and this awful, annoying woman. Max read mutiny in Bea’s expression and maintained a polite silence for the rest of the meal.
In the early evening, Max and Marietta went to the village nakamal, the men’s traditional drinking hut. Women were not supposed to even look too hard at the path to the nakamal, although apparently Marietta was an exception to the rule. Perhaps, Bea thought bitterly, she was so old and fat she didn’t count as a woman any more. Bea, in a desperate act of rebellion, spent her evenings reading on Marietta’s stool, resting her feet on her own crate. She kept the fire going, and sipped endless cups of watery tea. In the beginning, in the days before Marietta, the night-times had been the worst. The sudden blanket of darkness yanked over before you had a chance to strike a match, the unplaceable movement of insects in the house. Now, the early evenings perversely became her favourite part of the day. The wind breathed heavily into the jungle, boys on the beach strummed aimlessly on a ukulele. Bea would pick up one of Max’s books and pretend to herself she was reading it, while pausing every few minutes to gaze out of the window. The village was quiet, the hush of kava settled upon it. Faint smudges of light from fires could be seen as women cooked for their families. There was the soft giggling of girls sent to lay food on the path to the nakamal, the beats of a ching drum as the girls alerted their fathers to the arrival of their taro.
Max spent all his time with Marietta, together in the vestry, or out on walkabouts. Before, Bea went with him on his witnessing missions. Yes, it was boring, but she at least had a chance to leave the village. Now, it was always Max and Marietta, Max and Marietta. They traded the death tolls of Pacific battles, and prayed together for the poor heathen souls in Korea. They snapped Bible verses back and forth and bickered imperiously about theologians with German names. Those private conferences, shared jokes, pious remonstrations – they were all the influence of Marietta. There was something about Marietta, thought Bea, as she scrubbed her clothes furiously in the bucket; there was just something all wrong about her. Something inherently bad about the way she cleared her throat like that. About the way she picked island cabbage from her teeth with her finger. About Marietta’s colossal grey brassieres hanging from inside her room – what had been her own room. About the way she pushed the floppy lock of hair back from her face, over and over. Why didn’t she just pin it back? Bea brushed and brushed. Bea dropped the brush into the bucket and cried hot tears into the knees of her skirt. She wiped her face with the back of her forearm, picked the brush up again, and sighed. It would be fine. Maybe Marietta would go back East. Maybe she would go back to Australia. Even
tually, she would leave and they could be alone again.
Max was starting to regret his own insistence that Marietta stay with them indefinitely. At home, her presence was unavoidable, as if the moment they entered through the door of Mission House, she grew to be three times her size. Marietta’s body was like an exclamation mark. She would just appear, and announce herself. Corpulent. That was the only word for her. Her sniffing and wheezing, her heavy breathing as she moved about the house. She bathed only once a week, and the dank, goaty smell coming from her clothes repulsed him. She scratched under her arms at the dinner table, so he could hear a rasping sound from where fingernails met hair. Her very footsteps began to irritate him. She had a flat-footed way of walking, where each tread slapped heavily down on the floor all at once. It woke him up in the morning before the sun had even risen. Max became convinced she was walking like that deliberately, to remind him he was lazily dozing in bed while she was already up and about, ready to start the day in the service of the Lord.
When they walked up the hill to the villages on top, and out of respect for Marietta’s impaired leg, Max slowly made his way up the path, he would hear a honk behind him, ‘No, not that way – this way is much quicker. Really, Max, haven’t you been this way before? I’m amazed.’ Marietta knew the villagers by name, and Max was forced to trot along behind her as she talked animatedly in badly accented but fluent Kunu, asking after the health of old people, murmuring appreciatively over people’s pigs or new wives, confirming rumours and gossip. Max stood towering over her shoulder and mimed comprehension, sucking at his pipe, desperately trying to pick up any words he could. He could have asked Marietta for lessons, but she assumed he already knew more Kunu than he did, and he was too ashamed to declare his ignorance. Sometimes, he wished she would just go away on a walkabout, and stay away.
In a way, Max got his wish, because almost two months later, he killed her.
Part One
* * *
FIVE MONTHS EARLIER
1
Advent Island didn’t at all resemble the postcard of tan, smiling honeymooners that Max had shown her. It was not even a landscape, Bea thought to herself – it was just land. She looked out at the ocean. It was flat and lifeless, unmarked by even a slit of foam. The day was so overcast that the sea and sky blended on the horizon in a leaden grey haze. The air was still and thick with water. It was difficult to breathe.
On their honeymoon in New York, Max had taken her to see South Pacific as ‘preparation’ for their trip. She ate two hot dogs during the intermission and smeared mustard on her blouse. Watching George Britton and Martha Wright dance about the stage of the Majestic had hardly been appropriate training for the dank beach and drab sea lying before her.
Tiny translucent hermit crabs stirred along the shoreline, and the sand wavered like an optical illusion. Four metres to her left, the bloated and skinless corpse of a cat was washed on to the beach. Bea closed her eyes. She had lain awake in Port Vila only three weeks before, imagining a beautiful riot of flowers and gilded parrots. But there was only jungle, and air, and sea. And everything was only green, or grey, or black. Except for her and Max. She opened her eyes. At least with no breeze she couldn’t smell the cat.
Instead, she could smell the sickly perfume of the rainforest. It reeked of a complex confection of decay. Even on the beach, far from the treeline, she could smell the rotting trail of smashed papayas that littered the coastal path, and the musk from the warm, hairy bodies of the two long-limbed black monkeys wheezing in the coconut palms. And there was the damp mustiness of her clothes. It didn’t matter how often she soaked, and pressed, and hung, and scrubbed, and rinsed them. She could detect it on her skin even after she had undressed at night. She stank of the treacly mildew of the jungle.
The sun was beginning to drop towards the horizon. Soon, it would curdle with red, and minutes later, there would be whole, complete blackness. Bea stood up, brushed a hermit crab from the lap of her skirt, and began the walk back to Bambayot.
Bambayot village was set on top of a hill about a ten-minute walk up from the coastline, in a small clearing of rainforest. Behind the village, the land rose almost vertically. The mountains were well tracked with footpaths to and from the farming allotments, but to Bea’s untrained eye, at first it had looked as if an unbroken green sheet of jungle simply sprang from the back of the settlement.
The village itself was a jumble of bamboo houses and chicken droppings. There were eight families living permanently in Bambayot, and each family had two huts: a larger one for sleeping in, and a smaller bushkitchen. Chief Bule also had a ‘holiday home’ he occasionally slept in, further east of the village. The houses were distributed over a slope that rose gently upwards towards the rocky forest in the north.
From the boat on the way over, it had been easy to see how isolated they were. Impenetrable jungle spread out as far as the eye could see over the island, and Max had pointed out the white dot of Bambayot Church in the midst of all that green. As the boat drew closer to the shore, Bea could see a six-pronged waterfall through the jungle to the north, and a glimmer of an old-fashioned western building high up in the hills to the south. Here and there along the shoreline, she could make out the odd clearing among the leaves, where smoke from village fires wound up into the air.
The main features of any island village were usually either a church, or a nakamal, the low-roofed ceremonial hut used for drinking kava. Bambayot was unusual, because it had both. The nakamal was south of the village, at the bottom of the hill, a stone’s throw from the huts of Willie Kakae and Edly Tabi, the only two confirmed ‘bachelors’ of Bambayot. The rest of the villagers lived on top of the hill. Smoky, cramped and muddy, the village was overrun by blond-haired, brown-skinned children with swollen bellies and running noses, poking pores in the dirt with hibiscus switches. According to Max, possessing both brown skin and blond hair was a native quirk of the islands, and not, as Bea had thought, the resultant product of one white and one black parent. The church had been built at the front of the village at the bottom of the slope, where it could easily be accessed by boat. And behind the church, at the top of the hill, was Mission House, the place Bea now thought of as home.
Mission House was made from woven bamboo and pandan leaf, with a natangora palm thatched roof and a generous porch. Their central room was outfitted with one of the two stone floors in the village, with a lean-to kitchen that had been nailed on to the right-hand side of the building. The ‘living room’, as they generously called it, was bare of furniture, apart from their two stools and a splintery, unsanded wooden table which sat under the window on the left.
At the back, a narrow corridor led off into two bedrooms on either side. Bea’s bedroom faced the church. From her window, she could see the top of the huge wooden cross nailed to the top of the building, and an expanse of grey water beyond. In bed at night, if she listened carefully over the shifting and sucking sounds from the jungle, she could hear the ocean against the shore. Max’s bedroom also had one window that looked out past the edge of the village and on to a steep forested incline.
On the boat from Caracas in the early days of their marriage, Bea and Max had shared a narrow bunk for the duration of the journey. In that narrow bunk, Max dedicated himself to performing his nuptial duties with solemn administration. But as soon as they arrived in Boston, Max had retreated into his childhood bedroom, allocating Bea his father’s old room, still fusty with the faint aroma of a long illness.
It had been some relief, therefore, to find Mission House equipped with two bedrooms. Bea begged Max to take the larger one, since they discovered in there a mysterious trunk containing a squealing nest of rat babies in the tattered shreds of what had previously been women’s underpants and a collection of crossword puzzle books. Bea refused to stay again in a bedroom haunted by someone else’s belongings.
Their bathroom was set in an outhouse to the left of the main house, behind a rough semicircle of banana trees. Th
e lavatory was only a great hole in the ground, and there was a crude but functional shower, improvised from a small rainwater well, a pump and a rusty-looking pipe suspended at Bea’s shoulder height. Max declared the previous missionaries must have gone through a lot of bother to set it up. Bea wished they had bothered to make a door as well, since both facilities, although separated from each other by a pandan screen, were nevertheless completely open to the elements. Max reminded her it could be much worse. The other women from the village splashed themselves along the banks of the river using buckets, or simply sat in the stream, fully clothed, rubbing themselves with slabs of soap. Bea thought back to her bathroom in her father’s house. It had been tiled and white, with a proper door, and a lock with a key. There, she had had Elizabeth Vera to heat water for her on cold, rainy days, and fill up the tub with the heads of camomile flowers.
To make matters worse, the only route to reach Mission House bathroom was to leave the front door and circuit the whole building. During the daytime, Bea found this mortifying. Often, while crossing in front of the house, someone from the village would spontaneously pop up over the hedge, and demand to know where Bea was going. At first, she had pointed vaguely into the shrubbery around the back of the house, colouring in shame. As time went on, Bea began to lie cheerfully, and declare she was going ‘walkabout’.