by Anbara Salam
‘Do you like island cabbage?’ Santra asked, swinging an elbow up on to a wooden post. Her skin was dark brown, her cheeks round, and she wore two tight braids in her dark-blonde hair. On her forehead there was an amateur blue tattoo of an ‘x’, similar to a Christian cross, underlined by two lines, as if for emphasis.
‘Yes.’ Bea smiled, not even realizing it was a lie. She looked around the cabbage bush, desperately trying to find inspiration for something to say, anything that might lure her into a conversation.
‘I like island cabbage,’ Santra offered.
They smiled lamely at each other.
‘Where are you from?’ Bea asked finally.
‘On top.’ Santra gestured vaguely to the mountains. In silence, she looked over Bea’s dress, her basket, her muddied feet. Finally, Santra joined her, and they picked cabbage side by side for the next hour.
Santra was rather taciturn, except when telling stories. And when it came to island scandals, Bea was a captive audience. Bea probed her for details of the marriages, deaths and affairs going on in the other villages, stopping her every few words to work out who was who. Santra told her about whiteman Jonson and his ‘bush marriages’ with the Bwatapoa girls in their taro gardens. She told her about when Patrice Kwani beat his wife with a tin of Spam at Aru’s store, and how Ephraim Bule used ‘leaf magic’ to cure his impotence. She told Bea of the robbery up North at Jonson’s kastom bank, where the assailant had transformed himself into a macaw, and flown out of the window to escape capture. She told Bea about Chief Willy’s wish-granting great eel that lived in Homo Bay on the east coast, while Bea giggled helplessly.
Santra claimed to be in her late teens, although she regularly changed her mind about her age. She farmed her own garden up top, supplemented by foraging in the jungle. Endlessly horrified by Bea’s enthusiastic incompetence, Santra tolerated Bea’s clumsy attempts to help with the solemn patronage of an older sister. Santra lived in a tiny squalid village in the hills in Central, with her husband Charles. Bea occasionally walked up top with her, and sat outside Santra’s grimy, smoky hut, while Santra braided pandan baskets to sell at the market, and Bea merely sunned her tropical sores, whistling. She allowed Bea to join her on some of her hunting trips. She plaited a loose-weave cage, and they trekked for hours upstream to a small waterfall further in the North. They lifted mossy rocks to make a deep, still dam in the stream and dipped the cage in to catch crayfish. It was Santra who had persuaded her that naus fruit were delicious; Bea had been ignorantly eating the unripe green fruit, without realizing it was supposed to be orange, and soft like a peach. It was also Santra who first convinced her to enjoy laplap.
Laplap was a slimy island jelly which came in three varieties: the whey-yellow manioc kind, soft purple taro laplap, and chewy banana laplap – simboro – made from unripe fruit. Once a month or so, in Santra’s village, the women would dig small, deep pits, and lay hot stones from the fire at the bottom, layering the stones with banana leaves. Then the grated manioc, or taro, in a great mush, would be spread over the leaves and topped with coconut cream. It would be covered and left to cook for hours, steam gently rising from cracks in the leaves. When the pit was uncovered, the laplap, in all its glistening, gelatinous glory, would be lifted out, and sometimes, for special occasions, adorned with thin slivers of Spam. Once Bea’s palate had acclimatized to island cuisine, she looked forward to eating laplap, even savouring its repulsive wobbly tastelessness, especially as when Santra cooked it, she fried tiny baby squid in palm oil to adorn the top with a crispy garnish.
Santra was a meticulous and generous cook, and often turned up to Mission House with extra fruit or a head of cabbage to supplement Bea’s suppers. On the day of Pentecost, she came to Bambayot especially to hear Max’s sermon in church, and Bea was thoroughly touched. Despite the cross tattooed on her forehead, she was certain that Santra was not at all religious. Her husband, Charles, liked to declare to anyone who would listen that he could turn into a flying fox at night. When they came to Bambayot for Pentecost, Charles jostled Max about the ribs with his elbow, and claimed he could prove his powers of transfiguration.
‘Last night I flew down here and I was one of the bats outside your window.’
Max eyed him wordlessly.
‘Yes! I watched you and I can prove it.’
Max opened his arms in a silent invitation, smiling at one side of his mouth.
‘You came home and lit a candle. I saw you reading, then you went to bed. And you snore like a huge pig!’ He whooped with laughter.
Bea couldn’t help but giggle at Max’s expression.
‘Well, he’s not wrong!’ she added, as Max shook his head and sighed.
Santra didn’t appear to be too concerned with the regular transformation of her husband into a bat, since she had brought one to cook for Bea, carefully wrapped in leaves in her island basket. Bea accepted the gift uncertainly, tucking the body on the shelf in Mission House kitchen while they attended service. They entered to Aru’s church singers performing ‘Amazing Grace’, and Charles crossed to the men’s side, while Santra took a seat on the back bench next to Bea. After the girls had finished their song, Aru left his ukulele at the front of the church and hurried down the middle aisle, carrying a Bible. Averting his eyes, he handed it to Bea.
‘Uh, thank you,’ she said, not sure what she was supposed to do with two Bibles.
‘For your friend,’ he said.
Dutifully, Bea handed it to Santra, who accepted it expressionlessly.
As soon as Aru turned to the front of the church, Santra handed the Bible back to Bea and instead pulled her pandan fan from her island basket. Bea slipped the second Bible behind her back, and rested against it so it was out of sight. It occurred to her for the first time that Santra probably couldn’t read.
After Max preached from Acts 2, the service concluded with Aru’s church singers performing ‘What A Friend We Have In Jesus’. Max stayed behind to shake hands with the churchgoers, Charles went to Noia Saruru in search of Willie, and Bea took Santra back to Mission House. Trying to find a way to thank Santra for coming to Max’s sermon, Bea offered her one of their extraordinarily precious cans of tinned tomatoes, but she misunderstood the gift, and asked Bea to open it for her. After half an hour of stirring away, Santra presented her with what looked like a small, bloody baby, with broken bones sticking out of its mutilated body.
Bea squeaked, and half rose from her stool before she had time to stop herself. Santra muffled a wheeze of laughter. Bea looked at the plate more closely. Now she could see more clearly that it was, indeed, a huge bat that had been simmered in tinned tomato sauce. Its leathery wings were still attached to it, crookedly hanging from the side of the plate, smeared in red. The head was twisted to the right, swollen from the heat of the pan, its mouth open. Santra had thoughtfully cut the front of the bat open for her, and she could see the purplish meat surrounding the bones inside the animal.
Santra returned with a fork, and placed it on the table beside the bat with such finality that Bea realized she would have no choice but to sit down, and with a smile on her face, eat the animal. She felt shaky as she combed a scrap of pale lilac meat from around an unidentifiable bone. She lifted it to her mouth, and took hold of the sliver of flesh with her teeth, trying not to let her tongue make contact with it. But once it was inside her mouth, she could taste it against her gums. It was like chewy, undercooked lamb. Bea sat upright in surprise, still suspiciously probing the meat with her tongue.
When Max came back to Mission House twenty minutes later, she was unselfconsciously pulling ropes of cartilage from around the bone and eating them with relish, leaving delicate hairline streaks of red tomato sauce and bat juice across the side of her cheek. Max glanced between Bea’s face and her dish. Bea suddenly remembered the plate resembled the crime scene of a brutal baby massacre, and put her fork down by the sad remnants of the swollen bat, barely recognizable now she had pulled out and devoured its inside
s. Both Max and Bea reviewed the plate in silence, and in the few seconds that passed while he stood and she sat and the bat lay dead between them, Max looked at Bea with a mingled sense of pride in her unfussiness, and the odd feeling he didn’t recognize her any more.
8
Before Max and Bea left for their great adventure, his church in Boston had thrown them a farewell tea party. It was a bitterly cold day, the sky a distant pale shade of blue. The church hall was unheated, and the jugs of fruit cocktail sitting by the window had filmed over with a discreet layer of frost. Max was in his element, his cheeks flushed with excitement, his laugh louder than ever. He swept between gaggles of church ladies, reciting their soon-to-be address carefully, over and over.
Bea was a little overwhelmed by the attention. The small community of women had become something like her friends. They had championed her as their own Dolores del Rio – beautiful and exotic – although Bea knew she was neither. They had taught her the Pledge of Allegiance, taken her to quilting circles, patiently corrected her English, and slipped her recipes for pot roast and American cookies. Bea’s throat felt thick. She did not really, now she was officially being bidden farewell, want to leave. Irene, an English widow whose daughter had emigrated to America after the war, pushed into Bea’s hands a blue hardback book. Bea read the title out loud, 101 Things for the Housewife to Do.
Irene smiled at her, with a tooth-shaped gap on the left side of her mouth that made her look lopsided. ‘My daughter swears by it,’ she whispered conspiratorially. ‘Now don’t forget, God will only make a home so happy. The rest is up to us.’ She nodded, and gave Bea a tight, lavender-scented hug.
Bea smiled speechlessly and patted the book with appreciation until Irene had disappeared to find Max. 101 Things for the Housewife to Do and the Bible were the only two books Bea had brought with her to the island. She had never been a keen reader. Growing up, she had a shelf of storybooks and fairy tales in English, which her mother had bought before she was even born, hoping for a little girl. These lived on the left-hand side of her bed, and Bea never opened them except to draw a finger over the illustrations of the dancing princesses on page eleven, lingering over their impossibly fair hair and tiny feet. Now, 101 Things was one of her only possessions. She had gone into the hospital in Venezuela owning nothing. And after some time had passed, she had begun to remember her childhood room with longing. She thought of the sewing basket stuffed with coloured ribbons and glass beads, and her mother’s tiger’s eye bracelet. She thought of the wide-toothed comb with mother-of-pearl handle, and her old First Communion dress, which had been kept packed up in a hatbox. Bea used to guiltily unwrap the dress from its tissue paper, seduced by the rustle of the train. Pressing it under her fingers, she would try to imagine what she would look like as a bride in a long white dress and veil.
Now her possessions were few and practical. Max, to his credit, had made gestures towards Bea’s love of beautiful objects, understanding it was as much a form of nostalgia as of vanity. For their first Christmas, he had nervously presented her with a white, teardrop-shaped opal pendant. Bea was at once touched and embarrassed. She wore the necklace for the rest of the day, and ever after kept it wrapped in tissue paper in a wooden box that once held a boot polishing brush. Max assumed she was making a brave gesture of rejecting worldly things. Of course, Bea could never have explained to him that opals were desperately bad luck, and its trembling milky radiance recalled a drop of semen hovering glutinously in the hollow of her throat.
The book and the necklace were both among the scant items of Bea’s belongings that made it to the New Hebrides. And despite herself, Bea found flicking through the pages of 101 Things to be a curious form of self-punishment. Every now and again, Bea opened the book and allowed herself a few minutes of delicious torture. The photograph of the smug housewife, with her carefully set hair, neat day dress and calfskin pumps. The white carpet across which she effortlessly pushed her vacuum cleaner, holding on to the handle with one carefree hand. Bea enviously touched a finger to the picture of that vacuum cleaner. She didn’t even have a proper broom. She looked over at the broom with contempt. It was a bundle of small twigs, held together by vine. When swept over the floor, it didn’t so much sweep up dust as liberally disperse the tiny butter-coloured spiders living in its dry climate.
One particularly painful spread exhibited two photographs of a washing machine and drying machine. A washing machine! Bea’s heart hurt. She did all their laundry with a wooden slab and a bucket. Sometimes she carried their washing to the stream, and stood with Santra in the foamy water. Santra laughed her high-pitched hissing laugh as she expertly slapped her island dress on the rocks, twisting it in her arms again and again, the arc of her muscles contracting. Bea could barely lift the wet clothes above her head.
It was their fourth month on the island before Bea could finally put 101 Things to its proper use. It was about five in the afternoon, the women of the village had stoked their fires ready for the dark evening, and the men were beginning to grind the kava in the nakamal for the first shells. Bea was sitting at the table in Mission House absently running her fingers over a patch of hardened white crust on a tropical sore over her left elbow. Sharp whistles began to sound from the hills, the children gathering on the high ledge that overlooked the sea. The whistles grew louder, until Bea was certain something was happening. She carried her bushknife to the edge of the village, to where women had left their fires, trailing babies and machetes, joining the chorus of whistles.
Down by the shore a large fire had been lit, and a circle of boys were stomping round the flames, whooping and jostling each other in an imitation of kastom dancing. Yellow lights were twinkling low over the water. Tufty red hair rose up from the coast as Max climbed the hill with giant strides, his face alight with joy.
‘It’s a cargo ship,’ he called, holding out his hand for her.
He looked so like a schoolboy standing there – his hair disarrayed and his face sunburnt – that Bea sprang forward to take his hand, forgetting the tabus they would be breaking. Together they hurried to the shore; the months of treading the hill had provided good practice at rolling with moving gravel underfoot, and navigating slippery patches of orange mud.
‘The lights were visible about an hour ago.’ Max was speaking so quickly Bea could hardly understand him. ‘It’s the boat that runs from Santo and it will most certainly be stopping here tonight. The boys have lit a fire, I wish I had a stronger flashlight or we could have used it as a signal. That’s why they’re whistling. It was supposed to have come last month but for some reason it didn’t – I don’t know why – oh, look –!’ He broke off suddenly with a gasp as they rounded the mango trees arching the coast. ‘Can you see?’
He stood behind her, the soft hair of his beard against her cheek, and pointed out towards the flickering light where a dull shape was outlined against the deepening pink of the ocean.
‘Max!’ Bea grasped his outstretched pointing hand, crying out louder than she had meant to. She clung on to his arm and lowered her voice to a strangled whisper. ‘Do you think –?’ She could hardly bear to risk completing the sentence.
‘Our trunks?’ Max finished for her, and she felt the smile on his face as the apple of his cheek pressed into hers. ‘It’s possible, it’s entirely possible.’
It took an hour for the ship to finally draw to a stop in the shallows by the village. The Bambayot men brought their kava shells to the shore, and knocked them back under the mango trees before wading into the water to carry boxes of supplies, of kava roots and matches on to the shore. Bea crouched on her haunches as close to the fire as she could risk without setting her island dress alight, slapping at mosquitoes and nudging New Dog out of the way. Max was striding up and down the beach with Edly Tabi, rolling barrels of fuel and making inane small talk about the size of the ship or the quality of the kava roots.
The boat stood in the shallow water for ten minutes before Bea spotted a single pal
e face jostling through the crowded deck. She squinted harder. Was it a whiteman?
Jonson had boarded the ship at Mangarisu. He strode lopsidedly up to the shore, drying his hands on his pockets. Max stood on the beach and greeted him with an unnecessarily vigorous handshake. ‘Mr Jonson, this is a welcome surprise.’ Jonson’s fingers were smooth as pebbles under his own.
Jonson retrieved his hand. ‘I made the trip this far to secure your belongings – you never can rely on the honesty of the locals, I’m afraid. They are prone to forget some objects, indeed, have a destination.’
‘Our trunks?’
Jonson nodded, supplemented by a squeak of surprise as Max gripped him around the shoulder.
‘Oh, thank goodness. God bless you, Mr Jonson!’
‘Yes, quite welcome,’ Jonson muttered.
Max and Jonson retrieved the battered trunks from the ship and relayed them on to the beach, where Ralph Poulet declared himself custodian of the boxes and leapt from one to the other with so much enthusiasm that Max didn’t have the heart to stop him. Jonson produced a list from his pocket, copied from the ship’s manifest from Vila, and they discovered one of Bea’s trunks was unaccounted for, eventually located under a dozing, grumpy young woman destined for Ambrym.
As they waded through the shallows to help unload the village’s supplies – barrels of oil, boxes of questionable tinned fish, Chinese soap and soggy breakfast crackers – Max felt emboldened by the victory of his possessions. ‘Mr Jonson, may I ask you a personal question?’
Jonson tensed, sensing the topic on the horizon. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, tersely.
‘Are you at all related to the esteemed Mr Jonson, the pilot?’
‘Yes,’ Jonson said.
‘Distant cousin?’
‘Not so distant,’ Jonson said, bending to rinse his hands in the surf.
Jonson was the younger brother to a decorated RFC fighter from the Great War, who had run away to enlist before he was even old enough. Occasionally on the London tube, Jonson would catch sight of that awful government poster of Bernard staring out into a patriotic middle distance, a tasselled blue scarf flapping around his neck, holding his helmet in his hands as if it were a prize-winning cabbage: ‘B. A. M. for Britain’ printed across the bottom.