Things Bright and Beautiful

by Anbara Salam

  Thieu frowned. ‘How could the water be cleaner than a mountain stream?’

  Lien dismissed him with a wave. ‘It’s a proper city,’ she said. ‘With a proper hospital. And special equipment, from Australia. And medicines and pills. All we have is that –’ She gestured derisively in the direction of the nurse house.

  ‘We can’t put our lives in the hands of a stranger,’ Thieu said, hearing the tremor in his own voice.

  ‘Don’t be dramatic.’ Lien scratched at the top of her hip. ‘She’s not a stranger. Not exactly. Trinh says it will be fine. So I know it will be fine. And she’ll cover for me. She’ll say I’m ill in the nurse house with Minh-Binh. We can’t just wait around here until we all catch it. And Sugarcraven won’t even know I’m gone.’

  But Sugarcraven would know Thieu was gone, that part was clear. Nurse Trinh was not going to cover for him. If he was caught, he’d be stuck hauling coconuts for an extra year at half pay. Thieu watched Lien limping back to the plantation on her swollen hip, dread curdling in his stomach. He wasn’t sure which scared him more – Lien’s delirium of scratching and picking, or the fact she was right. What punishment could be worse than risking their son’s life?

  Over the next month, they created a plan. And to Thieu’s relief, even the prospect of their escape was enough to reassure Lien, who grew almost giddy with the promise of leaving the plantation. Thieu would go first. He’d creep out at night and set up camp in the tabu part of the jungle where no one went. After his disappearance, Lien would pretend she had been abandoned. She’d cry and wail and curse him for being so weak and feckless. After a fortnight, she would feign the beginnings of illness, complain about headaches and swollen white spots in her mouth. She would wait until he left the signal of a shell in the knot of a guava tree by the stream, and that night, she would creep out to meet him in the wash house. Trinh would say Lien and Minh were quarantined in her bunkhouse. In the meantime, they would follow the coast down to Marietta at Bambayot, and she would help them board the Duchesse to Port Vila.

  And so, the second night of the whiteman’s visit, Lien watched from beside the meal hall as the fire in the nakamal was stoked. She heard Sugarcraven’s whistles and followed the plates of papaya being delivered to the nakamal. It was a dark night, and Sugarcraven was already on his third round of kava. Lien took a great breath of relief. It was time to start their escape. Soon, Minh would be safe. They would all be safe. She imagined tucking Minh under crisp white sheets, the rattling sound of a fan overhead, a gleaming hotel kitchen.

  In the meal hall that evening she flicked Thieu on the back of his arm. When he turned she blinked at him, twice, and mouthed, ‘Je t’aime.’ Slowly, Thieu nodded, and as soon as she had turned her head, he crossed himself.

  After dinner, when the curfew ching was beaten, Thieu followed the lines filing into his dormitory. He lay in his bed and listened to the sounds of yawning and scratching and coughing. After a couple of hours, the chirrupy snoring of Nguyen in the hammock above joined the chorus of soft body noises filling the room. Thieu walked out of the dormitory and into the wash house, collected his pack, and crept out into the jungle.

  The moon was covered in gauzy dark cloud, but he knew where he was going – a path wound through the palms on the other side of the plantation. It was still Sugarcraven land, so the coconuts were off limits. But the plants were well trampled, and the track led down to a thin stream bordered by guava trees. Thieu squinted up at the trees in the darkness, but they had been picked bare. He left the trail before the stream, and climbed the hill towards the fallen banyan tree, where he had hidden the escape kit. Over the last month, he and Lien had collected two hammocks, a blanket, a threadbare mosquito net, the head of a small hammer, a rusty bushknife, a box of matches and five candles. He steadied himself on the slimy creepers covering the banyan trunk, and groped his way to the base of the tree. Thieu kicked the earth until he hit a soft lump under the soil, then knelt and dug in the dirt with his hands. He pulled the sack free, brushing wet clods of earth from the fabric. He stood for a moment. What if he just buried the bag back in the hole? What if he just threw it into the forest, and returned to his bed? He could tell Lien that the bag was gone – that someone had stolen it. But he thought of how the escape plan alone had soothed her strange energy, calmed the scratching, the prophecies of pestilence. How would she cope if he asked her to stay? So he pulled the strap of the sack over his head, and looked around at the gloom of the jungle. A warm breeze rustled through the leaves, and insects chattered in the undergrowth.

  Thieu walked higher into the hills, placing each foot carefully to muffle the noise. An hour into the bush, he set up a rudimentary camp in the shelter of a mossy boulder. He cut three giant palm leaves, and crawled inside the shallow cave, arranging the branches over its mouth. Inside, there was barely enough space for him to sit with his arms around his knees. He peered up at the dripping walls – what if it was the home of some jaguar? He sniffed the dank air for any signs of musk or droppings. But it smelt only of cold vegetables. Thieu squirmed as the damp moss seeped through the seat of his trousers. He thought about singing to keep any wild beasts away, but then perhaps someone might hear him?

  Instead, Thieu sat in his cave in the jungle, cursing Trinh and her whitewoman under his breath until the sun rose.

  4

  While in Port Vila, Max had insisted on loading a huge wooden crate full of imperishable goods. At the time, Bea had resented the extra inconvenience of shopping and packing. Under Max’s instruction, she procured tins of Spam and corned hash, packets of SAO crackers, and dehydrated soup mix. Their most substantial investment was a 25kg bag of rice, which Max carried on to the boat with them. But once they had arrived on Advent Island, Bea was grateful for these emergency supplies. The corned hash was the closest thing they had to meat, and the sack of rice provided their main source of food. Unfortunately, it also provided a happy home for a family of rats who cavorted in it after nightfall, but as long as Bea picked out the droppings, it still served them well.

  The villagers ate only what they could grow for themselves in their garden allotments, which was mainly taro or cassava. Bea had heard rumours of the days when Aru’s store sold peanuts and fresh loaves of bread, but now it contained a disappointing assortment of cargo-ship oddities. Mabo-Mabon claimed that Aru had even sold individual doses of brandy from a bottle. But that was before his wife became a vampire, and he became a Christian. When Bea informed Max of this, he dismissed her with a wave of the hand.

  ‘Idle rumours. You really shouldn’t contribute to gossip.’ But after a moment, he had run his finger under his moustache, and looked at her from the side of his eye. ‘Willie told me his wife died from malaria.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Bea licked her lips. ‘See, they couldn’t conceive. And Aru went to a leaf doctor, and he said she was cursed with a feeding demon from the jungle –’ she rubbed her stomach ‘– living inside her. She lost three babies, one after the other. Mabo-Mabon said she would hear her crying all night –’

  ‘Bea –’

  ‘– but then one day she vanished. Apparently, the demon took her over, and she turned into a sort of vampire.’ She paused. ‘Although, it sounded more like a mosquito type of monster. Mabo-Mabon said they suck the juices out of dead corpses. And they live near Hot Wata –’

  ‘Beatriz, really –’

  ‘– because they like the sulphur smell of the hot spring.’

  Max rubbed between his eyes.

  ‘And they sleep standing up inside banyan trees,’ Bea added as quickly as she could. The image of Aru’s monstrous ex-wife had stayed with her. She saw it again now, with hectic clarity – a woman with a long proboscis curled from her lips, sleeping upright in the folds of a banyan trunk, her wicked face turned away from the light. She swallowed. ‘Anyway, that’s why his store has no food in it. And why he’s so religious.’

  ‘Beatriz!’ Max raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s enough.’

  Bu
t Bea wasn’t listening. ‘Do you think, if you asked Aru, he would find a spade to sell us?’ She looked down at the callous in the centre of her palm. ‘It’s terribly awkward to dig the garden with a knife. I can’t quite get used to it.’

  Bea was not a natural farmer. She had been raised in a shabby, but still grand, mint-green house on the outskirts of Caracas. After the early death of her mother, Beatriz grew up as the spoiled pet of her father, Luis, and her brother, José Rafael, who was older by nine years. At school, she was a favourite of the nuns, who took special pity on her on account of her motherlessness. Bea had long learnt that mentions of her dead mother seemed to get her whatever she wanted. It made adults tip their heads, and then pat hers softly. In truth, she didn’t remember enough of her mother to feel any sadness about it, but it added a sort of pathetic drama to her life that she almost enjoyed.

  Bea grew up sheltered and indulged, with her own nursemaid who lived with them long after her babyhood. She had a large room at the top of the house overlooking a row of red hortensias, and a thick-limbed orange tree. She was the proud matriarch of a large family of curly-haired rag dolls in hand-sewn dresses, and the devoted amateur veterinarian to a procession of sickly kittens. Although slow to read and to count, she chattered incessantly, gulping large breaths between sentences like a swimmer. The twittering and gulping continued even during mass, and often landed her in trouble with the nuns. She didn’t mind, since the punishment was being sentenced to an hour sitting alone in the confessional. There, she would swing her feet over the edge of the seat, place her rosary over her head, and pretend she was a magnificent queen holding court over her kingdom.

  Her family had grown some vegetables in Venezuela – at least, the gardener had. But she’d had no interest whatsoever in grubbing around in the dirt. Even the closest her father had ever come to farming had been his managerial role on the pineapple plantation. When Max first brought up the topic of their Advent Island vegetable garden, she had imagined herself in a wide-brimmed hat and long canvas skirt, languidly pruning the stems of some birds of paradise.

  Once they arrived in Bambayot, Max had pointed into the jungle creeping up around the corners of Mission House, and declared it an excellent place for their garden. Chief Bule thought this hilarious, since everyone’s gardens were on top, carved out of jungle on the flat plains above the first mountain. But Max was insistent – it would be much more economical, he explained, to grow crops around the house, rather than walking for hours each day.

  After Max declared victory over the placement of their garden, Bea expected they might work together to oversee the clearing of the land, and the planting of the crops. Max had merely smiled. He told her that, traditionally, farming was women’s work. It would make him seem unmanly to the other men in the village if they were to see him growing crops. Besides, it would help her to make friends, he offered generously.

  But with their garden now right in the middle of the village, Bea became a reliable source of local entertainment. Eleven-year-old Moses Turu liked to loiter in the corner of the porch, watching her in silence. He was a quiet little boy, with eyes that looked in different directions while the pink tip of his tongue lolled out of his mouth. His mute spectatorship unnerved Bea no end.

  Moreover, it seemed to Bea that when anyone in the village felt like stepping out of their hut, they made sure to walk up by Mission House to gape at her ineffectual farming efforts. It was the least elegant way she could have imagined acquainting herself with her new neighbours. As she squatted in the dirt on her haunches, wiping sweat from her face with her forearm, she was the victim of, as she felt it, constant catcalling from passers-by who would holler inane and persistent questions.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Can I have that?’

  She had no idea how to respond to these comments. She had no idea what she was doing. After two weeks of misery and mosquito bites, pulling oily succulents from the earth and piling them up before her, Mabo-Mabon turned up at the hedge border of Mission House. She led in tow her teenage daughter, Leiwas, her ten-year-old son, Clinneth, and little Joylee. Trailing behind Mabo-Mabon’s own troupe of children were Abel and Gracie Poulet’s children, Judy and Ralph. Mabo-Mabon let herself into the garden and grabbed Bea wordlessly by the hand. Sitting Bea before a pile of twigs, she demonstrated that Bea should cut them into strips, sorting the springy vines from the woody brush.

  While Bea and Mabo-Mabon crouched on the floor by the porch, sorting piles of kindling, the small band of children immediately set to work hacking down all the vegetation around Mission House. With furious strokes, not a single mutter or grimace of complaint, the whole area was bare within the hour. Bea watched them open-mouthed. She felt so ashamed of her own ineptitude. All the villagers must have been talking about her, gossiping and laughing about the stupid whitewoman who couldn’t even do the work of a child. Even six-year-old Joylee, who was dressed only in a man’s old T-shirt, was handling her machete with an astounding power and speed that was beyond Bea’s wildest capabilities.

  Once the area had been cleared, however, Bea assessed her new garden with a glimmer of imagination. Over the following weeks, she slowly taught herself how to bind fences, to rake the soil with her bushknife, and to transplant seedlings from the bush. She spent hours each day pacing the allotment, patrolling for slugs and pulling weeds with vindictive triumph.

  Max watched Bea’s increasing obsession with their garden with indulgent bemusement. She spent all day hatless in the sun, and was constantly streaked with grime. She was beginning to look like a native – she carried her machete with her everywhere, reflexively rolling its handle in her calloused palm in the manner of a villager. He understood her preoccupation. While their crops grew, they were resigned to plain, boiled white rice for every meal. Sometimes Bea forgot to comb through the rice properly, and a softened and mushy rat dropping would turn up in the supper, like a prize in a cracker box.

  The monotony of the rice was supplemented by a sad parade of depressing island vegetables. Occasionally there were chalky blocks of taro donated by Mabo-Mabon – or, worse, island cabbage. This stubborn and abundant weed dripped a clear, viscous mucus that disintegrated into a slimy, dark green jelly, not entirely unlike loose wallpaper paste. As if eating it were not enough of a punishment, Bea liked to deliver it to Max along with detailed lectures about its proclivity to take over her garden beds.

  But Max didn’t have much energy to help with Bea’s crusade against foliage. Despite their conversation, Aru had not ceased his ‘dark praying’. Twice, in the last three weeks, Max had been woken by screaming from the church. The first time, Max had marched down to the church in disbelief. Aru had explicitly agreed to consult him if such an occasion were to occur again. Leiwas was again prostrate on the floor, surrounded by the same five girls. They were chanting, slapping their fists on the wood of the building to expel the evil. Leiwas was again sobbing and wailing. Max strode straight in through the door. He sat on one of the benches at the front of the room. But Aru and the girls carried on with barely a glance in his direction. He had hoped sitting quietly in the corner might dampen the hysteria. But it made absolutely no difference.

  The second time, the exorcism had taken place at night. Max woke in the middle of the night to hear the strangled scream of a young woman straining on and on. The chanting was louder, accompanied by whoops and shouting. Outside the church, he saw the flicker of candlelight. There were maybe ten people in the building this time. The church singers were there, but also Edly Tabi. Leiwas was no longer the centre of attention, she was part of the circle. Max entered the hall cautiously. In the darkened room, he saw the eyes of the performers turn, all at once, to look at him. There was a slight pause. The hair on the back of Max’s neck rose, and he felt a distinct sensation come over him. It was not threat exactly. It was something closer to territorialism. He was intruding.

 
Prostrate in the centre of the room was Sousan. She lay on the ground with her legs apart, softly groaning, twitching in agitation. The church singers turned back to the girl, and recommenced their praying. It was utterly haphazard. Some were clapping their hands, others shaking and crying, repeating exhortations to ‘cast out’ the demon. Some were manically gesturing, as if they were sweeping with an invisible broom.

  Max resumed his position on the bench at the front of the church. He wasn’t sure what he could do, except wait it out. Maybe he could approach Aru again after they had finished. Or walk the poor girl home, and see if he might talk some sense into her. After only a few more minutes of waiting and watching, Judy Poulet – the eleven-year-old daughter of Abel and Gracie – turned to him. Her eyes were wide. She looked as if she were having a tantrum. She faced him, muttering, chanting, and raised her hands. Walking towards Max, she placed her outstretched hands on Max’s shoulder and crowed out, ‘In the name of Jesus, I cast you out!’

  Max sat rigid. He was being exorcized. By an eleven-year-old girl. If he made any motion whatsoever, any noise, it was bound to be interpreted as his collusion in the charade. He might look as if he were, in fact, in need of blessing. Or worse, he might look as if he were hostile to the blessing.

  Max maintained eye contact with Judy, his heart racing. She pressed the palm of her hand into his forehead, and continued to squawk, her eyes still wide, her whole body rigid with concentration. Max suppressed an acute, hysterical urge to start laughing. He watched her face as she continued, her palm rough against his skin. Then she was gone, back towards the circle of worshippers.

  Max’s eyes prickled. This was absurdity! Eleven-year-old girls exorcizing the Pastor! Why was she even in the church after dark – she should have been in bed hours ago. Did Abel and Gracie know where she was? Did they approve? What was Aru even doing here, at night, with all these young women? And Edly Tabi – he must have been twenty years old. Was he there for a chance to spend time with all these girls? Sousan was still lying on the floor with her legs akimbo, her island dress pulled up over her knees. As if reading his mind, Leiwas carefully picked up Sousan’s leg and brought her knees back together, tugging the dress down over Sousan’s thighs. Max looked away in disgust.