by Anbara Salam
Garolf licked his lips. ‘No.’
Garolf had invited Marietta to take a tour of his plantations, with the vague idea he might set up Protestant churches onsite, though not out of any religious motivation. Rather, Garolf had been impressed by the sour-faced converts in drab smocks who staffed the Protestant boarding school on Santo. He reasoned anything that could encourage such structured and gloomy dedication to productivity would be a benefit to his industry. But Marietta never came. He wrote to her on four separate occasions, but didn’t even receive a reply. The only time he had met her was a chance encounter during a visit to Chief Liki’s sorcery school.
Liki’s proficiency in leaf magic was renowned throughout the island, and Garolf had heard rumours of a special leafy brew that bestowed upon its consumer superhuman powers of concentration. It enabled men to stay awake for days at a time, jittery with energy. Liki used this concoction in potent spell-casting to stave off winter cyclones, but Garolf had other uses in mind. Liki had never warmed to Garolf, pronouncing him the archetypal island boy corrupted by the lure of louche ‘modernity’. Garolf knew it was unlikely Liki would part with the recipe for this potion, but he had nevertheless trudged through days’ worth of slimy jungle to reach Liki’s miserable outpost near Black Shark Rock.
There, Garolf had been instructed to leave his shorts and T-shirt outside the compound, to cleanse himself in the salty marsh near the rock, and tie a nambas over his groin. He stood in the mud outside Liki’s hut for an hour, waiting to be received, and being bitten by midges. At last, Liki emerged from his hut, accompanied by an elderly whitewoman, dressed in Western clothing, and hobbling on one leg with a stick as a cane.
Liki waved imperiously in the air at Garolf, instructing him to kneel before him in the grass. Garolf begrudgingly obeyed. He watched with disbelief as Marietta Hardwood, for that was the only person it could be, kissed Liki on both cheeks, smacked him playfully on his bare behind, and limped off towards the nakamal. Garolf spent another twenty minutes grovelling before Liki at the front of the hut with his request. After Liki delivered a long soliloquy on the importance of maintaining island tradition – kastom – in the age of machines, Garolf’s appeal was promptly rejected.
Garolf did not write to Marietta Hardwood again.
‘And are the natives at Bambayot treating you well?’ asked Jonson.
‘Fantastic, thank you. I’ve had phenomenal support.’ Max gathered the taro crumbs in the centre of the banana leaf, and tipped them into his mouth. Not knowing what to do with the leaf, he folded it and placed it inside his island basket. He pulled out the Johnson’s Baby Powder tin he was using for tobacco, and packed his pipe. Garolf shuffled forward on the bench as he threw the end of his cigarette into the earth, and the wood creaked all the way to the far wall. Max wondered if he would be sleeping in the nakamal, and looked around for a mosquito net. On the walk up North, he’d imagined the Sugarcraven plantation as a gleaming mansion, white as a wedding cake, with servants dressed in pressed linens. But on the stretch from Mangarisu, he’d passed through miles of monotonous coconut palms attended by scruffy Vietnamese workers wearing caps improvised from woven pandan and cardboard breakfast-cracker packets, so he’d begun to have his doubts.
‘And Mr Jonson, you’re based in –?’
‘Bwatapoa,’ Jonson said. ‘West of here, on the coast.’
Max nodded.
‘I’m the British District Administrator for the province.’
‘Right.’
‘I’ve been stationed here for five years.’
‘Super.’
Jonson shot a despairing look at Garolf, who wriggled his eyebrows and grinned.
‘And did you have much contact with Mrs Hardwood?’ Max asked.
‘I never had the pleasure,’ Jonson said.
Jonson had made the journey to the yam festival in the South at Rangi, for the express purpose of making the acquaintance of the only other white person on the island. It had been a miserable journey on the Duchesse, as an unexpected storm had swept in, and the ocean had been rough, the boat unsteady. He’d been terribly seasick for the first time in his life, and gratefully hobbled ashore at Rangi almost delirious with the desire to brush his teeth. To celebrate the festival, there had been many days of dancing and intricate rituals that appeared to involve the liberal daubing of each other with red earth. The night after Jonson’s arrival, the locals had prepared a feast, with a slaughtered bullock, flying foxes, and even a couple of cats. He was surprised at the lack of yams on offer, and only later learnt it was the festival to celebrate the fertilization of the yams, not their harvest. All the women and children were shuffled into one hut to eat their feast, while the men sat together in the nakamal. The chiefs were seated at a huge log outside the nakamal, near to a large bonfire.
Jonson, meanwhile, was led curtly away from the entrance to the nakamal, to a separate log on the other side of the bonfire, where a stool had been set to act as a table. On the stool had been placed the only piece of cutlery in the village; one solitary spoon. As an honoured guest, Jonson had been offered the luxury of the use of the spoon, and an esteemed position directly in the smoke where there were fewest mosquitoes. Eyes streaming, Jonson dolefully spooned up his supper of bullock and rice, trying his best to ignore the laughter and whooping from the nearby huts. Serge, one of the chiefs, strolled over to offer him the choicest cuts of cat from a platter of banana leaves. This delicacy was proffered along with a detailed explanation of how the creature met its demise; a hollow bamboo stake inflated up its paw featured in one of the stories. Jonson’s seasickness thus returned with vengeance, and he spent the rest of the meal emptying the contents of his stomach behind an avocado tree.
After the festivities had wound down, and after he had relieved himself of the worst of the queasiness, it became apparent that after being jovially hosted in the ladies’ hut, Hardwood had disappeared without even stepping out to introduce herself. After a long and confused discussion about how Jonson was not related to this other non-islander, the two men sent out to retrieve ‘the whiteman’s mother’ reported that Hardwood had last been seen daubed with earth, dancing at a festival in Central. Jonson spent the night sleeping on a bench in the nakamal in the company of stupefied kava drinkers in various stages of sedation. In the middle of the night, one of the men roused the rest of the hut by leaping on to the bench, screaming about a huge snake at the top of his lungs. The ‘snake alarm’ was duly sounded, machetes were grasped, torches were lit, someone proficient in leaf magic ran outside to pick the special foliage that would supposedly hypnotize the snake. They searched the hut for signs of the beast for ten minutes before the screamer was further interrogated. At which point it became apparent the chap had been sleepwalking. Jonson never felt the urge to court Marietta Hardwood’s company again.
‘Thanks for the meal,’ Max said. ‘Lovely taro.’
Garolf smiled, a gold tooth glinting.
Jonson cleared his throat. ‘Do you follow cricket, Pastor?’
‘Afraid not,’ said Max.
Jonson and Max exchanged closed-mouth smiles. The first cockroaches crawled from their nests and scuttled across the floor.
The next morning, Max was woken by a booming ching at the north of the village. The sun had not yet risen, and dark shapes still crept across the floor of the nakamal. Max hopped in the doorway until the plantation workers were all gathered in the meal hall, then relieved himself behind a banyan tree. Shortly after 5 a.m., Jonson attempted a muffled knock on the thatch of the nakamal. As the sun rose, a young Vietnamese boy served them two bowls of rice pudding made with powdered milk and sweetened with mashed banana. After they had scraped their bowls, Jonson ordered two cups of black tea. They sipped from their cups in silence, as Max glanced over to the doorway, wondering when his promised tour would materialize. The nakamal was dank and gloomy, and Max’s shoulders were tight from the hard bench.
‘Can you tell me a bit about Sugarcraven. Is that his re
al name?’
Jonson wiped a dribble of tea from his chin. ‘Garolf’s father adopted the name. His father – Lomani – was blackbirded to Australia. You know what blackbirding is, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ said Max, tersely.
‘Barbaric practice. Just dreadful.’ Jonson shook his head. ‘Basically kidnapping. They say thousands of island men were taken to work on those plantations.’
‘Mmm.’ Max thought it best to keep his opinions about the British role in repopulating Australia to himself.
‘Apparently, the name was given to him by his overseers on the plantation. Craven and Kendall. The sugar company – you know.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I mean, he wasn’t really blackbirded. He stole a canoe and went out himself. Voluntarily.’
‘He volunteered for slavery?’ said Max.
‘Well,’ Jonson shook his head, ‘it wasn’t quite slavery. Even blackbirded men were paid wages, after all. In fact, his father used most of his wages on the Tongan whore in the local “Sugarhouse”. Hence where I suspect he actually got his name.’ Twin pink dots appeared at the top of Jonson’s cheeks. ‘That was how he was, uh, conceived. Grew up care of an albino nursemaid from the Solomon Islands, hanging around the outskirts of the plantation with all the other swollen-bellied bastard children of the kanaks.’
‘Gosh, that’s awful,’ Max said, staring into his teacup.
‘Well, eventually his nursemaid was fired – went blind. So Lomani brought Garolf back to the New Hebrides to get him circumcised. Lomani was wealthy, by native standards, he’d stashed away some traditional currency – pig tusks, bracelets and mats, confiscated from his Melanesian underlings. Actually, we take exactly those sorts of items at the kastom bank now.’ Jonson paused, tactically, poised with trivia about the success of his bank.
Max picked a scrap of tea leaf from his tongue. ‘So he came back home?’
‘Not exactly. Lomani couldn’t go back to his own village. As I said, he stole a dugout to leave. And without the permission of his chief, well, it’s a big tabu.’
‘I can imagine. So he’s from Advent Island?’
‘Yes,’ Jonson said. ‘Although, as I said, Tongan mother.’
‘Ah yes, of course, sorry.’
‘So, they caught a cargo ship to New Caledonia, then from there another freighter to the New Hebrides. And ended up here in Sara. Have you heard of Masoe-manu?’
Max twitched, but before he could answer, Jonson shook his head. ‘Sorry, no of course you haven’t. He was the old chief here. Agreed to tutor Sugarcraven in kastom.’
‘So he’s a chief?’
Jonson nodded. ‘In a sense –’ he rubbed his fingers together to indicate money ‘– or rather, should I say –’ he curled his fingers to demonstrate tusks, and spluttered, flushed with pride at his own witticism.
Max nodded.
‘And Lomani, he knew what he was doing. All this flat land –’ Jonson waved his hand at the village. Although Max had not seen any of the flat land, he nodded. ‘Within two years, he’d started the copra business.’
Max sat back. ‘And his father still lives here?’
‘Oh, no. Deceased. And the plantations went to Garolf.’
Max whistled. ‘Some story.’
Jonson swallowed the last gulp of tea. He’d barely strung so many words together in two years, and his throat was burning. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s got quite a story.’
Garolf took Max on a tour of the plantation just before midday. He walked him through the anonymous palm forest and handed him coconuts, inviting him to gauge their age by the amount of liquid sloshing inside. He pointed out the workers’ wooden dormitories, and the two wash houses with pump-showers. He showed him halved nuts drying in the sun, and the fabulously expensive piece of machinery that squeezed the coconut fat into drums sent off on cargo ships to New Zealand every six months. He pointed out the company store where workers could buy tins of Spam, slices of Chinese soap and Australian cookies from their wages. Meals were cabbage, bananas, and taro farmed on an allotment behind the plantation.
‘Kids are all in the gardens,’ Garolf said, pointing behind the plantation to the far north of the village.
‘You employ them?’ Max asked, trying to keep the conspicuous judgement out of his voice.
Garolf laughed. ‘No. But they come anyway.’ He turned around and grinned at Max. ‘I leave the Tonks to that part of life.’
At the west of the village, behind the meal hall, Garolf pointed out a small thatched palm hut in the shade, under a rock boulder, where Max could hear a child wailing.
‘That’s our hospital.’
‘You have a doctor on staff?’
‘A nurse. There she is – that’s Trinh.’ Garolf pointed to a short Vietnamese woman with grey hair peeling a banana in the shade of the nurse-house doorway. ‘She was in Santo selling cookies and waiting for the French to put on more boats. But,’ he shrugged, ‘you know what the French are like. The Japs were being rounded up for the “work camp” on Gaua Island and everyone was getting shaky. Got to snap her up! My own nurse!’
The dingy nurse house at the back of Sara plantation was the closest the workers came to healthcare, since there wasn’t a doctor on the island. Do Thi Trinh’s equipment box lived on the top shelf, outfitted with a rusty lock. She carried the key around her neck on a thin chain as prevention against theft. Although the sum total of her treasure chest was: three rolls of bandages, a box of safety pins, a thermometer, six vials of iodine drops, a bottle of phenobarbital tablets and twelve packets of Australian vitamin pills. All the workers had received cholera injections upon their arrival in Vila, and WHO workers had come to the plantation to administer yaws injections. But aside from that stab on the arm – and their mosquito nets – medical supplies were paltry, and supplemented by home-brewed lime-leaf tea and lozenges made from wild garlic. Between the chopping and the husking and pressing and baking, the plantation was full of people with scalded wrists, nubs for toes, stumps for fingers, creeping sores and swollen bellies.
And now the measles.
It was Nurse Trinh who had buried the six camp babies on the far side of the stream. And it was Trinh who had advised a young married couple, Lien and Thieu, to take their new baby and run away from the plantation.
Since the first camp baby fell ill, Lien had become obsessed with the measles. She chattered about it at every opportunity, reeling off home-made remedies, and delivering long, gruesome anecdotes about plague until her bunkmates begged her to stop talking. Thieu tried to divert her attention, requesting a recital of her filthy French limericks, or tempting her with gossip about Ephraim Bule, the plantation manager. But Lien remained fixated on pestilence. She rose in the night to check on Minh as he slept on his little wooden shelf, watching him as he dozed in limpid baby sleep, convincing herself all the while that he was dead. It was his impossible stillness. She could only bear it for a few moments before poking him with a fingernail. She hadn’t managed more than half an hour of rest at a time for weeks. Thieu’s bunkmate, Nguyen, reassured him it was normal for new mothers. He patted Thieu on the hand, and told him Lien would get over it.
‘He sleeps now,’ he said, ‘but you wait. When he’s screaming through the night, she’ll never look back. By the time the next one is born, she’ll laugh at the idea of waking a baby.’
But Thieu hadn’t heard her laugh since Minh was born.
Lien wore her tiredness badly. Her attention wavered at work, her fingers slipped as she cut the coconut flesh from the cups, and she sliced herself across the forearm twice in a single day. Then she developed a rash. It appeared only days after Tran’s two-month-old baby had taken ill. Tran and her baby were moved from the dormitory into the nurse house, but Lien lay awake at night, her heart racing, listening to the infant squalling in the shack. The rash began to spread over the outside of Lien’s thigh, and she insisted that Thieu ‘inspect her’ for signs of the disease. Behind the guava tre
es at the south of the plantation, she stripped off her T-shirt and jeans, and stood naked in front of him, turning so he could check for any red spots.
Thieu watched the expression on his wife’s face as she spun round, gesturing to the splotches on her thighs. He pointed to the purple scabs over his knuckles, and tried to reassure her it was merely a patch of copra itch or ringworm. But over the next week, she started picking at the rash. She scraped off the top layer of skin so that the scales glowed through, scarlet. She picked until it became infected and blistered with pus.
When Tran’s little girl died, Lien didn’t sleep for three days. She cried silently into her taro, and began to pick at a mosquito bite on the soft flesh of Minh’s belly.
Gently, Thieu suggested she pray to St Aloysius.
Trinh suggested they run away. That they take their baby and go to Port Vila. And that Marietta, the whitewoman at Bambayot, would help them.
‘But isn’t it just a rumour?’ Thieu jiggled Minh up and down in his arms. ‘I never heard of this whitewoman.’
‘Of course it’s not a rumour. Everyone knows it’s not a rumour,’ Lien insisted. ‘Her name is Marietta – she’s an old whitewoman, a missionary. And don’t you remember Nguyen Thi Huong? And Pham Van Phu? She helped them both get to Vila, to work at the hotels.’
Vila’s two honeymoon hotels were the gold standard in Lien’s hierarchy of luxury. The invocation of them now brought Thieu brief reassurance. ‘You want to go back to being a housegirl?’
‘That’s not the point,’ she said, licking her lips. She tapped Minh on the nose. ‘I don’t care where we are, just as long as it’s safe for Minh-Binh.’
This was a new nickname, and Thieu hated it with the same suspicious dread he projected on to the manic energy which had produced it. ‘What if it’s a scam? This whitewoman takes money from Sugarcraven to trap us?’ Thieu imagined the three of them huddled in a cage, like birds ready for market.
‘Trinh says it will work, that’s how we know it’s not a scam. And then we’ll be on our way to Vila. To a proper city. And it’s so much cleaner there. The water is cleaner.’