by Anbara Salam
When Max felt the spiny toes of the beast in the flesh of his shins, he yelped out loud. The cool weight of its tail slithered over his trousers as it scuttled to the floor.
Marietta sat up on the bench. ‘Max? What is it?’
‘A rat!’ he shouted, leaping to his feet. ‘It crawled right over me.’
Marietta lay back down, sighing in exasperation. ‘Golly, Max, it’s only a rat. Leave it alone.’
‘I’m damned if I’ll leave it alone. The thing will have my face off while I’m sleeping!’ He rocked the bench from side to side to try to scare the animal out of the corner of the room. Its tail flickered under the bench. Marietta groaned, and sat up on her elbows. She stood, grabbed Max’s bushknife from his hands, and turned towards the scuffling noise.
‘For goodness’ sake, Max, I’ll get it. Stop your fussing.’ She pushed past him to face the corner, and as she passed him she gave him a little shove in the process.
He was overcome with the sudden urge to hit her. The side of his shoulder where she had pushed him felt as if it were burning. He jammed his knuckles into his forearm to distract himself from the rage. He wanted to shove her right over. To knock her face against the edge of the bench. For that rat to climb all over her. His whole body was rigid. If she so much as touched him again, he might slap her. He had to get out of that room. He walked straight through the door and out into the moonlight.
As soon as he was out of the nakamal, he wanted to shout and break something. He kicked at the stump of a tree lying in the grass and it crunched softly, a flurry of translucent mites seeping out of the hole. He shook off the insects in irritation and cursed. He started to walk blindly on the path, just to be moving away from Marietta. He walked down the path for nearly an hour. The sun began to rise. He realized he was tired now, and headachy. He was embarrassed about his behaviour. Storming off like a child having a tantrum. It was absurd. Imagine if someone had seen him. It was the sort of behaviour he most deplored in Bea, and yet here he was, out in the bush without his machete, without any food or water, because Marietta was annoying. It was ridiculous. He would have to walk back and raise Marietta. With some breakfast in him, and a cup of hot tea, he would feel better.
When he walked back to the hut two hours later, he heard Marietta’s snoring from outside the building. The rat was laid by the front door. It had been killed by a blade across its head, and its mouth was open, its two front teeth exposed. Max shuddered. It looked so human, lying there with the tiny tip of its tongue lolling out of the corner of its mouth. A nest of brown ants was swarming over its stomach. He shouldn’t have made such a fuss. It was only a rat, being a rat. It wasn’t doing him any harm. Now it was dead.
He sat down in the grass in front of the nakamal and put his head in his hands. The island was doing things to him. He was supposed to be here to set an example. He was supposed to be the level-headed one, not a little girl flapping about mice in the middle of the night. It was shameful. He was ashamed of himself. Marietta made him ashamed of himself.
In the morning they walked for hours without talking. There was no food at Salabot, and Marietta insisted they would arrive at Kalu-kalu before sundown, so they may as well push forward. Max had a headache from tensing his shoulders, and his calves were tight from jolting downhill during his night-time outburst. The day was heavy with humidity, and billows of condensation rippled through the grass. The closeness of the air made it difficult to breathe. Sweat dripped down his body, crawling between his thighs, gathering in the hair on his chest, soaking his shirt to his back. He longed to take it off and walk shirtless, as the villagers did. Distracted by his misery, he trampled through a thigh-high patch of Devil’s nettle, realizing his error only when the skin at the back of his knees began to burn and blister.
They climbed higher and higher, winding up alongside a steep drop on to a sort of municipal garbage pit. Max looked over the edge of the path at the heaps of rubbish. The rusted frame of a truck stuck out from piles of garish plastic trinkets that must once have washed up onshore. The trash was mingled with rotting vegetables, dying grass, nangalat cleared from the bush, mouldering creeper vines. Clouds of flies thrummed over the waste, and banana palms grew here and there from the refuse. With so little wind, the wretched stink of decay from the dumping ground squatted over them. As they climbed, Max could hear the distinct hush as a sheet of rain from the hills crept closer to them. And it started to rain. Slowly at first, then dark grey clouds rolled across the sky like marbles and split open. Water fell in one continuous flow. He could only see rain in front of him. He could only hear rain in his ears. Within seconds Max’s clothes were stuck to his body. He could barely move one leg in front of the other, the fabric was stuck between his thighs where it chafed and clawed with every step. He looked ahead for Marietta, but she was gone. He couldn’t even see her.
He was suddenly filled with a bolt of rage. He was always waiting for her. But she never waited, she never, ever waited for him. How was he meant to know where he was going? What was he supposed to do – sit and wait for her to realize she had left him behind, like a child in a department store? Well, that’s what he would do. Damn her. He would sit here like a child and wait for her to realize. She’d have to puff all the way back to get him. Maybe she would learn to wait. For once in her blasted life.
He sat down in the sopping grass. It made no difference, he couldn’t have been more drenched with water. He crossed his legs, and scratched at the rash spreading across the back of his knees.
He heard her calling for him from somewhere. Typical. She was too lazy to even walk back for him. But somehow, the noise was coming from below – how was she below? And then Max realized. She wasn’t up ahead of him. She had fallen.
He called out for her, but the rain muffled his voice. Like when it snows, he thought aimlessly, it’s quieter somehow. It soaks up all the sound. He edged along the path where she had last been.
Through a thick fringe of manioc leaves he saw Marietta two metres beneath the path. She was balancing on a slimy, dripping mud ledge over the garbage pit. Her elbows were hooked over exposed root nodules, she was grasping at the slope with her hands, tearing clods of mud, wet leaves. One foot was wedged into a shallow divot in the slope, the other was dangling over the edge of the garbage pit.
‘Oh!’ she yelled.
Max looked down at her foot. It looked so small against the drop. His hands began to shake. He thought he might be sick. He tried to move towards her, but he couldn’t. Somehow he couldn’t move. She’s going to fall, he thought. But it was as if the words were typed as a subtitle, he saw them visualized as letters at the bottom of his vision.
‘Help, damn it,’ Marietta was saying.
Max stared at the back of her hair turning dark with wet mud.
‘Max,’ she yelled.
Max’s arms were trembling.
She stepped backwards on to the crumbling ledge. With each tread, more earth tumbled below. She twisted her belly, her neck craning. The roots began to splinter. She turned around to face him. More earth rolled from under her feet.
He should stab his bushknife into the mud so she could hold the handle. He should drop down, and hold out his hand. He should.
He took one step forward.
And then she was gone. And there was a noise. Or maybe there wasn’t a noise. He thought he heard her, cracking against the ground. But he couldn’t possibly have heard it. Not over the rain. It wasn’t like in the movies. He didn’t see her eyes growing wider in her head. She just dropped. He stepped forward again and peered over the edge. There she was, lying in the pit, amidst the plastic rubble and rotting compost. Her right leg was crookedly out to one side, and her right arm was moving a bit, only a bit.
He stood and watched. Her arm flailed and flailed, it was grabbing pointlessly at something. He couldn’t see her face. It was too wet. There was too much water. He backed away from the edge.
He backed away, and he left her.
Part Two
* * *
14
Bea had waved Max and Marietta farewell from the porch, but didn’t even wait until Max’s red hair was out of sight, before she slammed the door to Mission House and sighed deeply. The house seemed extremely quiet without Marietta’s sniffing and spluttering. She didn’t envy them their witnessing trip. The walk to Kalu-kalu would be tough and slippery, and it was only a matter of time before it began to rain again.
Bea changed out of her island dress so she could garden. She decided to risk the tabu of trouser-wearing, since most people were sheltering inside their huts. She put on a pair of damp linen trousers and pulled the belt buckle. Given the nutritional poverty in which they lived, Bea felt rather disappointed she could wear the same notch as before they came to the island. She reasoned that a diet of white rice was not great for the waistline. Bea stretched out her shoulders, tied her hair back into a tight bun, and picked up her bushknife.
The garden was in bad shape. The earth was soupy, and the new seedlings were nowhere in sight. Bea wondered if during the next storm, she could find a way to pot some cabbages and carry them into Mission House? Although Max might think her truly nuts, if she began populating the house with pet vegetables. Bea started to pull sloppy weeds out of the earth around her carrots, but within a few minutes, she heard a low grumble of far-off thunder in the north. It grew colder. Soft drops of water began to fall.
Without Max and Marietta in the way, Bea decided to get ahead on the housework. She swept and washed the floors, and wiped the window frames. Max always told her to leave the spiders alone, but when he wasn’t around, she instituted a ruthless cull of anything hairy-legged. In the top right corner of the wall in the corridor, she found a silver spider with a body the size of a plum. It was carrying a white egg sac on its back. Bea shuddered in anticipation before swatting it with one of Max’s boots. The legs twitched underneath the sole, but as soon as she raised the boot, a flurry of tiny translucent baby spiders spilt from the burst sac and scattered over the wall. She leapt back in horror, squeaking, before attacking the newborns with the shoe. But it was too late, they had escaped.
After scraping the bottom of the boot on the front step, Bea retreated a safe distance into the living room, and washed some of her own clothes in the bucket. Out of spite, she hung them to dry in Marietta’s room. Bea sat back at the table and darned her blue skirt and two pairs of Max’s socks. The light was dim, and she was concentrating so hard she was getting a headache. She didn’t dare light a candle before nightfall, since their supply was running low. No cargo ships had come by the island since their trunks arrived, and no doubt the bad weather would delay the next shipment even further.
Three weeks previously, she had walked up to Aru’s store, hoping she might be able to buy extra candles to carry them over until the next boat. But there was a chalk notice written on the sheet metal inside: ‘No Candles. No Flour. Please fast and pray.’ It wasn’t only candles and flour in low supply. With the garden in such a state, there wasn’t much to supplement their bag of rat-rice. Bea’s fingers lingered on one of the tins of corned hash in the pantry. It wouldn’t be fair to break into their stash without Max and Marietta, but it hurt her stomach to think of it. Bea regretfully put the can back on the shelf.
That evening she climbed into Max’s bed, and tried to make herself as cosy as possible. She picked up Max’s Bible, intending to allow herself enough candlelight for one page of Song of Songs, since Max wasn’t around to spoil her pleasure with exegesis. But her eyes fell over the shape of the words instead of reading them. Idly, she opened the book to the blue-bordered note of his prayer list glued to the back page. His parents’ names were written in black ink in Max’s neatest handwriting. In pencil underneath: Beatriz, Filip, Leiwas, Mabo-Mabon, Willie, Charles, Santra, the people of the New Hebrides. She stared at the list for a few moments before blowing out the candle. Why was her name in pencil? It hardly seemed fair to be scribbled in alongside Leiwas and Willie. Surely, he could have taken the time by now to go over his own wife’s name in ink? Would he notice, if she wrote over it with a pen, before he got back? She blinked into the dark, thinking of the prayer list in the back of her own Bible: Max. She pulled the sheet over her shoulders and fell asleep to the sound of rain dripping from the eaves of Mission House. During the night the squalls picked up again, and she slept fitfully, waking to the noise of rainfall crackling and hushing, as if the jungle were full of radio static.
The next morning, the rain had temporarily stopped, though the air was humid and the clouds low and broody. Bea walked around the shallow bush behind Chief Bule’s hut to look for food. She tried all her usual spots, but the storm had knocked the ripe fruit off the branches, and the earth smelt sweet with rotting pulp. Up on the left behind the ridge, there was a young banana palm that looked almost ripe. She held it steady with one hand, and inexpertly chopped down the heavy head. A large drop of plasticky sap fell on to her shirt, and she tutted in frustration at her own clumsiness. Banana sap stained clothes like nothing else – it would never come off.
Bea carried the bananas to Othniel and Jinnes’ house. She hoped that out of Christian duty, they might offer her some food in return. One person could not possibly hope to eat all the bananas before they went bad. The bushel was heavy, and a stripe of brown ants crawled from the suckers and over her forearms. She rested it by the front of the house and called in through the doorway. But there was no one there.
Bea looked around her at the village. The bushkitchens weren’t puffing out smoke. It was oddly quiet. There weren’t any children squabbling over the ching. She pulled off three bananas to eat later, making sure to pick them at the root, so they would preserve for longer. She lifted up the rest of the bushel and walked through the mud, peering at each house in turn. The whole village was empty. She made her way towards Willie’s nakamal, and spotted Edly Tabi sitting on the branch by the bottom of the hill, playing with a piece of twine. She manoeuvred down the hill towards him.
‘Hello!’ She smiled at him.
Edly nodded by way of a reply.
‘Where is everyone?’ she asked.
‘Funeral in Bavete,’ he said, pointing to Central.
Bea nodded. Perhaps she should be offended that she hadn’t been invited. She offered Edly the bananas, and he took them. He put them down in the sand beside the branch, and continued to examine the fishing line. He didn’t say thank you, or even make eye contact.
She walked back to the house. She gobbled the three bananas while sitting in Max’s bed, and threw the peels out of his bedroom window. There was a nervy, hollow feeling in her stomach. She tried to read, falling into an uneasy sleep in the early afternoon.
The next morning, Bea walked around the village in the drizzle, to see if Jinnes and Othniel had returned. Truthfully, she was hoping for Lorianne. But there still wasn’t anyone there. She could hear a new, odd wailing sound echoing in the hills. It was a low, musical moaning that rose and fell, and seemed to be echoing all around in the forest. It wasn’t until later she realized it was the sound of mourners at the funeral.
Bea took another tour through the shallow bush. Eventually, she spotted a single ripe pomelo high up on a tall, young tree. It was far too narrow and straight to climb. She collected rocks from around the hill, and threw them up at the pomelo, hoping the tough skin would protect the fruit when it fell. It took almost half an hour for it to swing and drop. Bea gratefully gathered it up in her arms. It was almost the size of a soccer ball. She ate half of the pomelo for lunch, half for supper. It was sour and acidic, and produced jabbing pains in her stomach. But at least it wasn’t rice. The crying sound went on and on and on through the night.
The next day, while touring the village in search of more rogue fruits, Bea became convinced she could hear someone calling her name. But when she paused to listen, there was nothing. She thought the crying from the funeral was playing tricks on her mind. She haltingly circled the huts in the village
. There was still nobody there. She lingered on the hill, hoping even to catch sight of Edly Tabi, but he was nowhere to be seen. Bea began to feel afraid. Where was everyone? Where was New Dog?
She had a horrible thought, that maybe she didn’t exist. Maybe she wasn’t real. Maybe she had died, and not noticed, and this was the afterlife. Maybe she was a ghost. She shook her head to dislodge the thought. Imagine how disappointed Max would be if he heard her say such things. She lowered her imaginary screen, and apologized to God in her head.
Bea walked towards the stream at the north of the village, hoping the fast-moving floodwater might have dislodged coconuts from the palms on top and washed them downstream. What if, she thought, everyone had moved from the village? They had started a new village somewhere. Or perhaps an infectious disease had swept through, and they were all lying dead inside their huts. She turned towards the village, wondering if she should go back, and check inside the houses. But this was madness! Edly had told her they were away for a funeral. With all the rain, nobody would have tried to make the journey back until the streams subsided. First, she thought to herself, she needed a proper meal. She would find a coconut, then she would light a fire, and cook some rice, even if it took all day.