by Anbara Salam
‘Mr Jonson, Fritchard was hunting flying fox in Central, and he caught the Tonks,’ Titus shouted from the treeline.
‘From Sara?’ Jonson hobbled in the waves.
‘Yes! A family of them! Come quick, they’re in the nakamal.’
Jonson hesitated. His thighs were outlined by the fabric of the shorts, and his nose was painted with zinc oxide. His sandals squelched water. ‘They’re in the nakamal at the moment?’
Titus lifted his eyebrows.
‘And who’s with them?’
‘Fritchard, of course.’ Titus licked his top lip. ‘He’ll get his reward now?’
‘Mr Sugarcraven will be responsible for that. Not me.’
Titus waited as Jonson crossed the beach, watching his feet with an amused curl to his lips. Jonson was aware swimming in sandals made him an object of ridicule in the village, but his pride did not go so far as to volunteer the soles of his feet to water spiders.
‘You were out by the plane?’ Titus glanced sideways at him as they waded through the slow water of the stream and down towards Bwatapoa. ‘The other day I heard the ghost drowned someone there.’
Jonson’s wet shorts dragged on his stride, and irritably, he blamed Titus for his bedraggled exhibition in the centre of the village. ‘It’s perfectly harmless,’ he snapped. ‘That Jap’s ghost has better things to do than hang around drowning people. It’s probably in the forest settling down with a ghost family.’
Titus’s eyes grew wide.
‘Where were they found anyhow? The Tonks?’ Jonson said.
‘On top.’ Titus pointed up into the mountains. ‘Taking taro from a garden.’
Jonson stopped. ‘They didn’t eat it, did they? Raw?’
Titus shrugged. He pushed ahead of Jonson, and stooped through the nakamal door, then stuck his head back out and gestured for Jonson to enter.
Fritchard was crouching on the left of the doorway, listlessly probing his hair with a wooden comb. The runaways were huddled on the bench in the back right corner. The man was bare-chested, one arm clamped around a young woman. On her knee she was jiggling a baby of perhaps a year old. The exposed skin of the two adults – their faces, necks, forearms, his shoulders and chest – were covered in scarlet mosquito bites. The man was filthy and downcast as a flat tyre. He was deeply tanned and smeared with mud, his fingers black with dirt. He was so thin the bones in his breastbone rippled with each breath. The woman was less dishevelled, but her eyes were rimmed with purple circles. They looked up at Jonson, then exchanged a glance he could not interpret. Jonson tapped Titus aside and took a step into the middle of the nakamal, dripping water on the floor. His sandals squeaked under his weight, and his sodden shirt was clinging uncharitably to the round flesh on his belly.
‘My name is Mr Jonson,’ he said, trying to muster as much gravitas as was possible while wearing Hawaiian print. ‘I am the British Administrator on Advent Island.’
The couple exchanged another glance, and the man chewed his lips.
Jonson addressed him. ‘Are you feeling well? You didn’t eat any taro, did you? Any taro leaves?’
But the man just kept chewing and looking at the floor.
Jonson turned to Fritchard. ‘Did they eat anything from the garden? Have they been ill?’
Fritchard shook his head. ‘I gave them oranges.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Only oranges.’
‘Would you like some water?’ Jonson asked, but the man didn’t meet his eye. Jonson mimed drinking from a glass, and the woman gave him a brief nod.
Jonson turned around to address Fritchard and Titus. ‘OK, you two are to guard them from now on,’ he said. ‘And find somebody to walk to Sara. Fritchard, can you ask Tole to go?’
Fritchard plunged the comb in his hair, and stood up to leave. Jonson called after him, ‘And get a girl to bring them drinking water.’
Jonson inspected the baby. Other than three pink scratches across its cheek, it looked healthy; cheerful, even. It opened its gummy mouth and blew a spit-bubble. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ he asked the woman, enunciating slowly.
She shook her head.
Jonson lost interest – it hardly mattered anyway. Polite niceties with Garolf’s delinquents would earn him no favours with anyone. ‘What do babies eat?’ he asked Titus.
Titus grinned, and cupped his own breasts.
‘All right, thank you, that’s quite enough.’ Jonson waved him to stop. ‘Ask Fritchard to find it a banana or something.’
‘Shall we take them now?’ Titus leant against the doorway.
‘Take them where?’ Jonson realized he was about to play host to a family of scabby fugitives in his spare room. ‘No, absolutely not, they can stay here until they’re collected.’
‘And then we’ll be rewarded?’ Titus said.
‘When Mr Sugarcraven arrives, we’ll see what kind of mood he’s in.’
17
With the worst of the weather finally exhausted, Bea began to tend her garden in earnest. Santra came by nearly every day to help. Mostly, that meant Santra told stories while Bea worked, and Lorianne listened nearby, scratching her scalp. Bea couldn’t help but feel as if a strange pressure had been lifted from their home. With Marietta gone, Mission House seemed so much larger. She cleared Marietta’s belongings from her old bedroom, and started sleeping in there again. Sometimes she missed Max’s presence in the evenings, but he was a lot less grumpy now they were both sleeping properly.
Bea decided she would begin the project of sourcing some of the food she had been dreaming about during the rainy weeks. She showed Santra her book of botanical sketches. Santra was not used to looking at pictures, and Bea had to stand behind her, explaining the drawings to her in words, until Santra could see the image. She had once made a quick doodle of a carrot in her notebook, to explain to Santra the lacy fronds growing around Mission House.
Santra had stared at it for some time before handing it back to her, saying, ‘I don’t know who that is.’
First on Bea’s list was to collect some of the cocoa pods she knew they had passed on one of their trips on top, while catching crayfish. She had no idea how the seeds turned into the food, but the first thing was to get hold of the raw ingredient. For the chocolate mission, Santra and Bea travelled uphill, north of Bambayot, then took a right through a slow river. They walked for an hour upstream through the shallow water, cutting overhanging plants away with their bushknives. They left the river, and scrambled up slippery rocks in dense jungle dotted with tiny chestnut-coloured orchids.
They crossed into fields of soft white grass in the shadow of a vast overhanging crag. They climbed over the dead body of a huge strangler fig tree, and joined another stream to wade up to a waterfall, split to form six thin spouts, which flowed in a slow trickle into an ankle-deep pool. They stood with their backs against the sharp rock, and let the water wash over their heads like an icy shower.
Near the six-pronged waterfall, Santra pointed out the cocoa trees. The pods looked gorgeous, like tapered mangoes. Santra had no idea which ones were ripe, so they gathered a couple of green, red and orange ones for experimentation. Bea felt excited. If she could get this to work – she could make her very own Mission House chocolate.
They turned back on themselves and followed the stream up even higher to a waterfall Bea had never visited before. Almost hidden behind a crack in the stone, the pool was shallow around the edges and extremely deep in the middle where the water changed to dark blue. The waterfall came over the south-east side in a heavy, noisy rush of white water. Santra put down her island basket and bushknife, and looked around them. In one motion, she ripped off her dress. Bea looked away. Santra was impossibly thinner than the billowy folds of the island dress had suggested. She took a couple of steps to the side of the pool, and jumped inelegantly into the water. She splashed around, cheering. This had to be beyond tabu. If Max had any idea, he would be horrified. Bea deliberated for a moment. She should really sit b
y the side and keep watch, in case anyone came by. She could put her feet in the pool. But the temptation of sunlight over the bare skin of her body was overwhelming.
Bea peeled off her own dress, and holding her hands over her breasts, she crept over to where Santra had jumped into the water. Santra was watching her naked body, with a horrified expression on her face. Before she lost her nerve, Bea leapt. The water was icy. The temperature knocked the breath out of her chest. She struggled to the surface, coughing, to see Santra splashing around in circles. Santra paddled over to her.
She nodded her head up and down towards Bea’s body. ‘So you’re not black under your clothes,’ she said in mock disappointment.
Bea giggled, trying to concentrate on keeping her head above the water.
Santra waved her closer to the falls, and shouted over the noise, ‘Let’s go under – there’s a cave.’
Santra took a deep breath, dived under the water, and vanished. Bea waited for a few seconds, then copied her, hoping she was kicking in the right direction. She kicked as hard as she could through the turbulence, and looked up to see Santra’s legs in a still ceiling of water above her. When she broke the surface, they were both bobbing in a shallow cave behind the waterfall. Bea looked around it nervously, expecting a new range of special and monstrous cave spiders. But to her eyes at least, it was bare. Santra helped Bea to hoist herself up on a sharp ledge which ran around the back of the cave. It scraped over Bea’s buttocks, and she tried not to wince. It was too noisy to talk, so they sat and shivered, watching the blue light shining through the falling water. This was the South Pacific of South Pacific, Bea thought.
While Bea was busy gardening, and gossiping, or whatever she was up to, Max recommitted himself, whole-bodied, to his spiritual mission on the island. He rose early to pray, and practised fasting two days a week. He went witnessing in Central, careful to be back in Bambayot long before dusk. It was on one of these witnessing trips that he heard Bea’s dog had been eaten. Some boys in Kumuvete had apparently captured the beast and cooked it up. He walked from Rangiran to Kumuvete to investigate the rumour, where the boys’ father offered Max the dog’s thigh bones to take home with him. Max politely declined. He arrived back at Mission House later than usual that evening, as Bea was preparing their meal of rice and island cabbage.
‘Beatriz,’ Max sat down at the table, ‘I have something to talk to you about.’ He gestured for her to take a seat.
Bea perched on the stool, straining to listen for the water boiling in the kitchen.
‘It’s about New Dog.’
‘Oh.’ Bea felt relieved. He was wearing the serious expression he usually reserved for admonishing parishioners.
‘I’m afraid, I think – she was, she has passed on.’
Bea cocked her head to the side. ‘Oh, that’s a shame!’
Max felt taken aback. She looked as if she had just been informed her train was delayed. The ugly urge to provoke her bubbled in his chest. ‘She was captured last week, and then killed.’
Bea reviewed the most enthusiastic practitioners of smacking New Dog in church. ‘Was it Othniel?’ she asked.
Max shook his head. ‘No, a couple of boys in Kumuvete, and –’ he paused, grappling with the conflicting desire to comfort and upset her ‘– I’m sorry. I know you enjoyed having a pet.’
Bea shrugged. ‘She lived a good life for an island dog. Did you know Rainson told Moses to bash her with that club – instead of the ching?’
Max watched Bea in amazement. How many times had he seen her feeding that dog scraps from their table? How many times had he heard her whistling for the beast? She had spent a full week cutting her wool coat and restitching it into a dog bed. ‘I’m afraid to say it was killed for meat.’
Bea wrinkled her nose. ‘Yuck. I bet that would taste awful,’ she said, offhandedly, standing and crossing to the kitchen where she peered into the simmering water.
Max watched her through the doorway. ‘I went from village to village, trying to find out what happened. It took all day.’ He could hear the whiney cadence in his voice. Why had he wasted the whole afternoon if she didn’t even care? Wasn’t she going to thank him?
‘Poor you,’ she said, picking through the rice. ‘You should have said – I would have come with you. Did you see Santra? Or Charles?’
‘Beatriz,’ he said, so sharply she turned to him. ‘You’re not upset?’
She put the bowl of rice down. ‘What do you mean?’
The expression on her face was irritable, accusatory, as if she were being harassed. Her pet had been roasted and eaten! Who on earth would shrug that off? Did she have no ounce of sentimentality? He thought of how grateful he had been for her forgiveness, after what happened with Marietta. He remembered how he had knelt, clinging to her in the garden – and felt suddenly squeamish – as if he had embraced an automaton. She was still looking at him.
‘Why do you want me to be upset?’
After a beat he said, ‘Nothing, never mind.’ Then petulantly, he added, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
But she was staring at him. ‘Understand what? Did you do something?’
‘What?’
‘Did you do something – to New Dog?’
He felt himself flinch. ‘Good grief, what? Of course not!’
Bea hadn’t moved. ‘You’re sure?’
Max blinked. ‘Did I eat your dog? What are you saying?’
Bea rolled her eyes. ‘No, not eating. Just – you always hated – and with the handkerchief – maybe?’ She gestured vaguely.
To his horror, Max felt his lower lip wobble. ‘I’d never –’ But he swallowed the rest of his remonstrations.
Bea resumed picking through the rice. ‘Because if you did, you should tell me now.’
Max shook his head, silently. A thread of frustration tugged around his throat. It wasn’t fair, to bring up Marietta, so casually. As if he were as bad as those boys – running around in the bush, killing other people’s pets, throwing their bones to rot in the jungle. Eating a dog!
She looked up at him. ‘OK, Maxis, it’s OK. Don’t worry.’
He swallowed. ‘I’m sorry about New Dog.’
Bea exhaled through her nose. ‘Me, too.’
He lingered in the doorway. The water in the pot began to bubble and Bea gave the bowl of rice one last shake. ‘You are careful, though, aren’t you?’
She frowned at him.
‘When you walk around the bush? You don’t go too far, too deep? I mean –’ and he stopped, not knowing what he meant. For some reason, he recalled the spider-crab, the clicking sound of its joints across the path, the vivid moment he had believed it a real mutant creature from deep in the forest.
‘Oh, I’m fine.’ She tipped the rice slowly into the boiling water. ‘Santra’s the careful one. I just do what she says.’
After the issue of New Dog had been resolved, Max turned his attentions to the Bambayot church. There was a broken window, a hole in the roof, and a spongy fungus had spread all over the side of one of the walls. He enlisted the help of Edly and Willie with repairs, and after some thought, Max also asked Willie to carve a new stool for Aru, which could be left in the vestry. Willie said he would do it ‘next week’, which in island time meant Max could expect it within a month or so. But it was a start. Max was convinced that, with time and mutual respect, he and Aru could come to an understanding. And he would need a new comrade, now, on the island.
Between Marietta’s return, and the interlude of Chief Tabi’s funeral at Bavete, there hadn’t been a single incident of dark praying in the last two months. Leiwas’ wedding had taken place shortly after the deluge, and after a teary farewell, she had been sent off to Central to build a new house with her husband. Perhaps, Max thought, that had something to do with the lessening tension. It might have been Leiwas’ fears that had driven the whole nonsense forward in the first place.
Max enlisted Aru’s help with Marietta’s Language dictionary. Aru flicked
through the pages quickly, before asking for a pencil. He went through it page by page, correcting and crossing words out. Max was delighted. Why had he never considered asking Aru to accompany him as a translator? After their first session with the dictionary, Max asked Aru if he would consider acting as his tutor. He desperately needed help improving his Language, and he would need someone to navigate him around the villages, now Marietta was gone.
Aru looked down at his knees and said quietly, ‘Pastor, I will help you.’
‘You’ll come with me, on witnessing trips?’
‘Of course.’ Aru smiled.
Max clapped his hands together. ‘Great. I’ll be so glad to have the company.’
‘Mrs Anlon won’t be with you?’
‘Hanlon,’ Max said, gently. ‘And, well, probably not.’
‘She’s with Santra Matan?’
Max rolled his eyes, good-naturedly. ‘At least her dog is gone.’
Aru shook his head. ‘That dog smelt so bad. Eating it must have –’ He pulled a face.
Max laughed. ‘You’ll help me, then? You and me – we can rely on each other?’
‘I will help you,’ Aru said. ‘You and me.’
That night, Max awoke to an urgent knocking on his bedroom door. He half started out of bed, fumbling for matches.
‘Hello?’ he called.
The door opened, and Bea emerged, cupping her hand around a candle, her nightdress slipping over one shoulder. There was a pink crease from her pillow across her right eyebrow and cheek.
‘Maxis!’ she hissed. ‘Can I come sleep in here?’
He blinked. ‘Well, sure – what’s wrong?’