by Anbara Salam
‘Yes, Pastor.’ Aru smiled, nodding.
Max saw he was carrying a plastic bottle filled with water. ‘Out for a walk?’ he asked, stretching his hands behind his back in a studiously casual manner that he hoped looked natural.
Aru only raised his eyebrows.
‘Don’t you have a flashlight?’ Max motioned to Aru’s hands.
‘No,’ Aru spoke softly, ‘the moon is bright.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ Max looked back around the village. He noted the telltale flickers of candlelight inside three of the houses. It was obviously not as late as he had thought. Aru stood there, gazing at him mutely.
‘Were you praying?’ Max suggested, which was a reasonably safe guess.
‘Yes. And also purifying in the name of the Lord.’
Max looked again at the water bottle in his hand. ‘Oh.’ He motioned to the house, ‘Well, goodnight then.’
Aru gave Max a friendly wave.
Max waited for a few seconds for Aru to leave, but he did not move, so he was forced to go inside his own front door and close it. Without knowing exactly what he was waiting for, Max paused by the door, putting his face in line with a crack in the bamboo pattern. Aru was still standing by the house. He gave a barely audible sigh, took the bottle in one hand, and placing a thumb over the opening, shuffled backwards, sprinkling holy water over the hearth of their home.
6
Jonson smacked another tree trunk with his bushknife, and the blade glanced off with a bright clink. The tremor travelled through his arm and into his elbow bone. He wiped his face with his handkerchief. A weak breeze was blowing from Tangariku, and smoke from the village bushkitchens lingered in the humidity. ‘How much longer?’ he called to Garolf, who was leaning against a boulder, rolling a cigarette.
‘A little while,’ Garolf said.
‘This’ll be the end of me.’ Jonson massaged the tendon in the pad below his thumb. It had been a long time since he’d last wielded his machete, and the muscles in his forearms were trembling. Relief from physical labour was one of the few benefits from his appointment on Advent Island. He employed housegirls from the village to attend to every need he couldn’t acquire from them through coercion. The girls washed his clothes in the stream, and yet others came to sweep his house each morning while he slept. They decorated his house with hibiscus flowers, killed every spider, shined his shoes with pressed palm oil, and sharpened his razor with their bushknives. They prepared his food according to his specifications, baking loaves of dense bread from ground cassava flour. They laid his table with poulet fish, and cooled glass jugs of lemonade for him in the stream that ran from the mountains.
‘It’ll be sunset soon,’ Jonson said.
Garolf stretched his back and lit his cigarette. He put two fingers to his lips, and whistled so loudly that a startled parrot flung itself from the palms. Garolf raised his cigarette, as if it were a pistol, and pretended to shoot it down.
‘I don’t know why you brought me here. It’s like a farce,’ Jonson said.
Garolf shook his head. ‘Why so many complaints? Just a little while longer. It has to at least seem as if we care.’
‘And we don’t?’
‘You’re the District Administrator. Do you care?’
Jonson wrinkled his nose. His sole role on the island was sending the occasional routine report back to his CO on the progress of an airstrip project further north, near Panita. It had been half-heartedly started by some Yanks in the early forties, but had since ground to a halt as a muddy, bald patch of jungle, as if someone had melted a pat of wax and lifted a strip of the vegetation away. Runaways were certainly outside his purview, unless they were dangerous. Or intended to rob his kastom bank of ankle beads and painted feathers. ‘No, not officially.’ He mopped the back of his neck with his handkerchief. ‘But I’m not paying his wages.’
Garolf shrugged. ‘For now, all that matters is we seem to be looking for him.’
Jonson gestured to the palms. ‘And what if, while we’re pretending to look, he’s actually here? Sitting in a tree – laughing at us?’
Garolf tutted. ‘They all make the same mistake. Into the bush. Do you know how many runaways I’ve had in the last five years?’
Jonson shook his head.
‘Thirteen,’ said Garolf.
‘And they all just died in the hills?’
Garolf laughed. ‘No – nothing like that. A week in the bush, two weeks. They get hungry. They get careless, then they get caught.’
Jonson brushed a spindly beetle from his knee. ‘Is he a good worker, this one?’
‘He is, yes, according to Ephraim. I pulled his papers.’ Garolf began to walk through the trees towards the hills, and Jonson fell in step beside him. ‘Thieu Nguyen. Came over to work for that French plantation on Epi, in 1930. Papers signed by his mother. Big rubber stamp on the page says “Coolies”. No signature, just thumbprints.’
Jonson kicked a young green coconut, and it toppled unsteadily into a crusty cowpat. ‘Hell of a long time to stay out here. He’s not one of the Tonks the French refused to take back?’
‘I don’t think so. Papers say he met a woman here. Married.’
‘His wife is here? At Sara?’
Garolf nodded. ‘Kid, too.’
Jonson shook his head. ‘And he still ran? What a bastard. Maybe he got himself a second wife, a local woman.’
Garolf shook his head. ‘You know how funny island boys are about Sinwa – they won’t even work on the same parts of the plantation as my Tonks. No way an island woman would marry one.’
‘I was joking,’ Jonson said, smacking Garolf lightly on the arm with his bushknife, ‘on account of his employer’s fondness for second wives.’
Garolf grimaced. ‘Great comedy. I’ll share it with Mame, and we’ll see if she still cooks you simboro after that.’
‘And his wife?’
‘Whose?’
‘The Tonk – his wife – did he run off because of her?’
Garolf drew from his cigarette. ‘Doubt it. Papers said she was a housegirl with a British family. Then a French one. Three or four languages, good handwriting. No way.’
‘She must be peeved.’
‘I suppose.’ Garolf sighed, blowing a curl of smoke. He rubbed his face, suddenly glum. ‘I don’t want to lose workers. I don’t want men to die in the bush. I don’t understand why they leave – where do they even think they can go? Join Liki and train in kastom?’
‘Maybe they just want to get out.’
‘They never stay out,’ Garolf muttered.
Neither he nor his father had ever instigated any precautions against runaways. His northern plantation at Sara was bordered on three sides by tabu hilltops and unpredictable streams. And Dadavoki in the South was hutched in by a shelf of mountain, and one narrow pathway to the landing strip. And after all, anyone reckless enough to abscond would easily be spotted on an island populated by 300 black islanders. Once caught, they’d have an extra year added to their contract, and be transferred to the other plantation. There was no conceivable benefit to running away – unless workers wanted to chance the sharky waters and swim to Ambrym. And in the plantations, they were offered decent pay, housing, even medical care. Garolf’s workers were not slaves. After their five-year contract was ended, he would pay their fare for a cargo ship to take them wherever they wanted to go. Provided that where they wanted to go was Port Vila.
Thieu’s sickness rolled over him suddenly. The day after he left the plantation, he had hiked deeper into the forest, up in the tabu hills. He walked until there were no flattened plants, and the trees were heavy with red berries and fallen nuts where no one dared to collect them. Clouds of webs bloomed between the boughs, and families of monkeys tittered in the canopy. That day, his limbs had been heavy, his head cramped, as if filled with warm porridge. Thieu had put it down to spending a night in the foul cave.
But as he lay in his hammock that evening to sleep, time spun away from him. He lost himself
to innumerable days vomiting yellow, his body seeping vile liquid between his legs and out of the corners of his mouth. He dreamed thick hallucinations, as grand as ballrooms. The sun pulsed above his camp. Ants crawled over him, picking off shreds of softened skin. At night, roaring howler monkeys circled round his camp. Slices of starlight through the canopy drew columns of whirring moths. In his half-sleep, Thieu thought he could hear the soft song of their music. He was sure Lien was there with him. He struggled to reach her. She smelt like talcum powder. Thin tears dribbled down his cheeks. She was waiting for him. He had failed her. Maybe Minh had already caught measles, maybe he was already dead.
As he wavered in and out of sickness, he tried to gauge how much time had passed. Spongy hair was growing on his face, and his T-shirt hung off him, crusted with yellow excrement and sparkling with crystals of salt. Silky white maggots wriggled in the folds of the mosquito net. He wrapped it around him like a shroud. He could not walk. He could not even pull off the leeches on his shoulder blades. He sucked on fibrous scraps of sugar cane. He drank water from banana leaves. He slept, dense, dreamless sleep. Sometimes, he was conscious he was awake. He watched black birds with bright crimson heads beating blurry wings as they nosed inside banana suckers. He heard brown pigs, small as kittens, shunting through the fallen leaves.
When he grew strong enough, he propped himself on to his elbows and forced himself to eat as much sugar-cane pulp as he could stomach. He needed to get back to Lien. It took him two days until he could stand upright, and even then, his vision slanted and rang with dizzy sparkles. He scrambled through the sodden leaves on the forest floor, and collected soft, rotting green fruit studded with custard-coloured grubs. He gobbled handfuls of them, the worms popping in his mouth with a metallic taste. Monkeys cackled and chittered in the highest leaves, sometimes thumping down into the lower branches and peering at him. Once, six of them surrounded him while he was emptying his bowels and pelted him with nuts. He crawled towards the nuts with his trousers around his knees and ate them ravenously; grateful the monkeys had already cracked open the husks.
Thieu made a slingshot out of his belt, and spent the better part of a day launching rocks into the tree where the monkeys seemed to live. His shoulder ached from the effort and he had to stop every fifteen minutes to stretch out cramp in his hand. But shortly before nightfall, he caught one of the monkeys right in the eye socket, and it plummeted to the ground with a pitiful squeal. He ran to its quivering figure and bashed in its skull with the handle of his bushknife in a seizure of mad triumph. He built a fire, and pulled off its hair and tufty little moustache. Its naked carcass looked like a small child. He did not know how to prepare it to eat, but sliced open its belly and pulled out the slimy guts. He split it open over the burning wood, filled its flesh with smoke, then pulled off strands of flesh and ate them in ropes. That night, Thieu dreamed he was crouched over a hot fire, feasting on the corpse of a baby.
After two days of eating from the monkey, he gathered some strength. He painstakingly cleared the earth of the sugar-cane pulp, and checked for termites. He spent an afternoon constructing a rain shelter from pandan leaves, and arranging branches as brackets where the mosquito net could be hung. When it was ready, he collected their supplies and buried them in shallow earth under his hammock. It was time to collect Lien.
For two weeks after Thieu’s escape, Lien made the appropriate pantomime of despair. She cursed him, and she wailed. She deliberately left her hair uncombed. The other women closed ranks around her, forbidding any whispers of Thieu’s scandalous desertion. They entreated her to sleep late, and offered to cover her shifts. It was enough to make Lien feel almost guilty. Small presents were left on her hammock – pink hibiscus flowers, or wilting bars of Australian chocolate. She lay awake, clutching Minh to her chest and rocking him, reassuring herself her fraud would be justified, eventually. And then she began planting the seeds of her disease. She complained of headaches, and chewed the inside of her mouth until it swelled up. Twice a day, she walked to the guava trees outside the plantation, and poked inside the knot in the wood for their shell signal. Nothing. She realized, in a moment of shivery clarity during breakfast, that the shell could have fallen on to the ground and been overlooked. Lien jiggled with nerves, and ran back to the guava trees as soon as the meal was over, peering desperately into the mud for the broken shrapnel of the shell. Two more weeks passed. Nothing. There were only two possibilities, she realized; either he was dead, or he had truly abandoned her.
She began to mourn Thieu in earnest. She lost her appetite. She imagined on a delirious, unquiet loop all the terrible things that could have happened to him – fallen into the river, killed by a fallen tree. Trinh offered to look after Minh, but Lien wouldn’t let him out of her sight. She refused to move into the nurse house, afraid of the infection that might be lurking in the linens. Trinh slipped her a handful of sedatives and warned her not to nurse Minh as long as she was taking them. But Lien ignored the pills. After dark, she sobbed herself into snatches of deep, oblivious sleep. Often, as she cried into her pillow, Tran would reach out and grip her naked foot through the mosquito net in solidarity. The gifts of peanuts and home-made soap continued.
One night, Lien was roused from warm dreams to the sound of a bird calling outside the window above her head. Reflexively, she ran her fingers over the puffy scabs of her rash, listening as the bird flew by the bunkhouse, showering the slats with grit. She climbed out of her hammock and crossed to shoo the bird away from Minh’s shelf. And as she stood there, a pink shell flew through the window and skittered at her feet. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands, heart hammering. Was she dreaming? Another shell knocked her on the elbow. She peered into the darkness. Was it really him?
Lien gathered Minh and walked barefoot to the wash house, her insides squirming. In the dim light of the wash house, she stepped carefully over the puddles on the floor, and kicked away a couple of curious cockroaches. ‘Shush, Minh-Binh,’ she whispered, jiggling him up and down, although he wasn’t fussing.
There was a scuffling noise from the shower room, and she turned the corner with acid bubbling in her stomach. A figure was standing on the far side of the room under the window. His face was splattered in thin facial hair and brown mud. He was wearing a mosquito net over his shoulders like a cape, and holding a rusty bushknife in one hand. Blackened toenails curled over the sides of his feet. A stripe of cockroaches were climbing up into the net and over his left shoulder.
Lien took a step back, and swallowed her scream. It was her husband.
7
As the months passed, Bea became able to notice the great variation that the Creator of nature can achieve using only green. The way one’s eyes become adjusted to the dark, Bea’s eyes became adjusted to green – she could distinguish the liana’s wealthy emerald from the old-pickle colour of the orange tree. The lozenge-shaped spiders were striped with lime, while the tiny beetles that appeared each dusk glowed like resinous, oily grapes. Amidst the gauzy jade weeds in her vegetable garden, she sought out edible clover that unfurled as neatly as a newly minted dollar bill.
But as the rainy season limped to an end, the relentless mire of green began to fracture. Candy-pink hibiscus flowers appeared in the hedges, crinkled at the edges like crêpe paper. Crimson-headed honeyeaters buzzed at the tips of banana suckers. Gigantic butterflies swarmed in and out of the palms, streaked with electric-blue zigzags. Occasionally, in the fringes of the coconut palms south of the village, there was the bright flash of parrots, a conflagration of colours so impossibly lurid they looked like novelty recreations of themselves, made from marzipan. And slowly, the incessant months of rain beat themselves out against the mountains. And slowly, frail seams of coloured life were stitched into the jungle, and on to the sky. And just like that, Bea woke one morning in June and realized Advent Island was beautiful.
Max was astonished at Bea’s newfound appreciation for the island. He wondered if her change in spirit
s was because her garden was now producing edible food. Although it was strange food – no doubt about it. Their evening meals of ‘hedge’ had been replaced by long, fibrous ‘snake beans’, starchy chouchoute squash, zucchini flowers and bitter purple-sprouting alfalfa. But Bea was spending less time in the garden, and more time walking about on her own. She never seemed to go anywhere, just strolled up and down the northern path. Max couldn’t fathom what joy she derived from it. When he asked her, she claimed she was enjoying the view. Walking alone like that, with her basket tied across her forehead and that demonic dog in tow, people were bound to talk. But he daren’t say a word, lest he upset the balance of her unlikely cheerfulness. And besides which, she had finally made a friend.
Bea met Santra two weeks after Easter. Bea had been picking island cabbage from a scrubby patch of land behind the village when she noticed a young woman approaching from over the hill. Bea sighed. Almost every week, a local passer-by would draw close to examine her skin, then stand, gawping at her, drawing small circles in the dirt with their bushknife.
Bea had been forced to realize that her daydreams about friends on the island had been utterly misguided. Only Mabo-Mabon ever spoke to her. In the months before they arrived, Bea had conjured for herself a small group of women who would gather in her house after church to drink lemonade, and sew and gossip, and pray. They would be fascinated by her hair, and squabble over whose turn it was to brush it. She would become an auntie to their sweet babies. She would teach them some Spanish songs, and they would ask endless questions about life in America, breaking into appreciative gasps when she showed them photographs she had brought with them. Instead, children clustered outside Mission House window to watch her while she scrubbed the stone floor on her hands and knees. Giggling, they used dirty fingers to tap on the windows as if she were a tropical fish in an aquarium, before running away.
But Santra was not prone to giggling, or to running away.