Things Bright and Beautiful

by Anbara Salam

  The forest was starting to clear now. She must nearly be at the top of the hill. She couldn’t see much slope in front of her. She was close. She tossed the bushknife over the top of the ridge, and used her elbows to pull herself over the edge. Her exposed knees grated on rough bark and a feathery insect skittered over the skin on the back of her legs. She could see the pallid columns of the colonial house looming out of the murk. Her arms were shaking. She crawled the last distance to the door, sliding the bushknife ahead of her on the grass. When she clambered on to the porch, she nudged at the door with her head, and it yielded. She crept over the threshold and into the house, as mildew showered sharp-smelling spores into her hair. She leant her back against the door and it shut with a creak. Yet more spores sprinkled the dust. Bea doubled over and threw up a mouthful of liquid on to the wooden floorboards.

  29

  It was still dark when she woke. Bea heard the shriek of a crow and sat up in one motion, disorientated. She held her breath, her heart drumming. The bird screeched again, but it wasn’t a crow. There were no crows on the island. It probably wasn’t even a bird, she thought. She shuffled herself backwards against the wall, straightening her legs out in front of her. The place smelt acidic and dank.

  Moonlight streamed through the windows on to the bare floorboards. Bea patted the bandage on her right leg, convinced it would be wet with blood, but it was only damp and crusted with mud. She desperately wanted to undo the wrapping and check on her ankle, but she was counting on the compress to squeeze it back to its normal size. Her right hand was stinging. The handle of the knife had dug deep into the gash, and she could feel the wound thrumming with each pulse. She wiped her other hand on her thighs and, wincing, tentatively probed the cut, rolling out grains of grit stuck into the soft flesh. She was going to have to clean it somehow.

  Now her eyes were more adjusted to the gloom, dim shapes appeared in the shadows. There was a wooden chest against the far wall, and a card table on the left-hand side, near the window. The rest of the room was bare. Bea squatted forward on to her right leg and stood up shakily. Her whole body was stiff and aching. She didn’t want to leave the house. She listened for the sounds of people approaching, but there was nothing.

  She opened the cracked door, leaking more mould, and limped as fast as she could to the bushes. She didn’t even look around her – worried she might see people coming. Bea poked in the undergrowth with her foot until she found a couple of bamboo stalks. She twisted a green stem over and rinsed her hand with the dribble of water within. She tried to drink from the second stalk, but it was barely enough to wet the inside of her mouth. The not-a-crow sounded again. She didn’t want to be outside any more.

  Bea hobbled back towards the house, and stood still by the open window, convinced she would hear them coming now. She took the bushknife in her left hand and walked through the big open room to the back, where there was a narrow staircase. It was almost totally black there, and Bea moved tentatively on to the first step, worried it would be rotten through and collapse under her weight. The boards creaked, but they were mostly solid. The third step was sodden through in the middle. She put her legs either side of the sagging wood and crept upwards. A thicket of webs coated the staircase; she spun the bushknife in circles to clear a passage, gathering soft white bundles.

  At the top of the staircase, she turned into the room on the right. It was bare. A white lizard scuttled heavily across the roof. She crossed to the window, and leant forward to look out over the hill below. In the distance she could see moonlight on the close water of the coast. The tree cover was so dense, she realized she might not even be able to see anyone coming, after all.

  Her foot scuffed against something concealed in the dark under the window. It appeared to be a rectangular wooden box. Bea prodded the box with the bushknife and the blade made contact with something loose and spongy. She knelt to look more closely. It looked like a shrine. A chicken bone, half a coconut shell, and what looked like a braid of hair were piled on top of the box. Bea probed the plait with the tip of the knife, and a flurry of tiny white mites poured from the fibres. Suddenly, she didn’t want it in the house with her. She kicked it with her good leg. The coconut shell wobbled. She picked up the box and threw it straight out of the window. She heard a soft crack as it hit the grass underneath, but fluffy tufts of the hair flew back from the window and stuck to the fine webs over her arms. She coughed and scraped, and then curled herself into a crescent at the back of the room.

  Bea woke on the floor, instantly alert. A noise had woken her. She lay perfectly still, blood singing in her head. The sound again. It was the noise of someone climbing the stairs. She heard a heavy tread, a musical chime from the blade of a bushknife against wood. Bea’s heart stammered. A wave of adrenaline shook her body. She set her teeth together. If she played dead, maybe whoever it was would go away.

  She tried to hold her breath, but it came heavily out of her nose like snoring. Her right arm was pinned under her. She tried to move her fingertips but they were stiff and useless. The handle of her knife was cradled in her stomach. She inched her left hand to touch the handle of the blade. It was crusty with dried blood. There was no point. What would she do with it anyway? She held her breath.

  ‘Bea?’ It was a woman’s voice. A bare foot pressed down beside her. Bea felt her chest rising and her eyelids twitching.

  ‘It’s Santra.’

  Bea heard the knife being laid on to the floor. Santra put her fingers on either side of Bea’s head, and pulled her face roughly into her lap. Bea couldn’t understand what was happening. Was Santra sent here by them? Bea stopped struggling. God knows it didn’t matter. If she was going to die, better that Santra should do it. She gave up. Let it be over quickly.

  Santra shuffled round so she was crouching over Bea’s face. Her eyes were large, but the expression was unreadable. ‘You are crazy,’ she said.

  She rubbed Bea’s left arm, and probed at the impromptu dressing on her leg. She pushed Bea’s head back roughly and opened her eyes with her fingers, inspecting her pupils. ‘OK?’ she said.

  Bea stiffly pulled herself up, and the room swam. She thought for a second she might be sick.

  Santra braced her by her shoulders and gave her a few smart pats on the head. ‘You’re fine,’ she said.

  Bea nodded dumbly, and then looked up at her. Santra’s face was expressionless. ‘It’s so nice of you to come,’ Bea said. Then she spluttered helplessly with laughter.

  Santra ignored her hysterical giggling, and instead pulled Bea’s right hand towards her. Bea let out a yelp as Santra’s hand touched the swollen flesh. Santra forced her fingers apart, even as Bea tried to wriggle away from her. Santra looked into the cut, and pinched hard at each of Bea’s swollen fingers.

  ‘This is one bad hand. It’s really bad. Can’t you smell it?’

  Santra held Bea’s hand under the wrist and flopped it towards her. Bea could smell something – a dirty, sweet stink. Was that her own hand?

  ‘You’re going to lose this hand.’ Santra made a chopping motion at Bea’s wrist.

  Bea prised it out of Santra’s grip, and held it protectively against her chest. ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘No, Santra – I cut it, on a bush. That’s all. It will be fine. I just need to wash it.’

  Santra pulled her impatiently by the left shoulder over to the needles of light coming in from the window. She pulled open the hand and stepped back. Bea peered at it, now afraid to look. The whole palm and fingers were swollen. The sore that extended up into the little finger was pulpy and grey and overlaid with a long oozing cut. Soft patches of peach-coloured pus were seeping through the skin all over her smallest finger and into the palm.

  Santra watched Bea’s face carefully, then took Bea’s smallest finger, and gave it a hard pinch. Bea yelped from the anticipated pain. But there was none. She couldn’t feel anything. It was like an alien thing attached to her.

  ‘I just need penicillin, that’s all. It will he
al just fine,’ Bea said.

  Santra looked into her eyes. ‘And where are you going to get medicine?’ she said.

  Bea realized with a creeping horror that Santra was right. Where could she even get the pills from now? Everything was back in the village.

  ‘Maybe on the main island? Or up in the North?’ Bea heard the pleading in her own voice, and stopped talking.

  She would never last long enough with it in this state. She’d die of blood poisoning before she even got there. The veins would go black and track all the toxic stuff back to her heart. She’d die on the road. They would find her and say Ukunu got her in the end. Well, to hell with that.

  ‘Let’s take it now,’ she said to Santra. ‘I can’t bear to wait. You do it. Do you know how? You do it. Can you do it? I can’t do it.’

  Santra chewed on one side of her lip and pointed at Bea’s torso. ‘Wait here,’ she said. She picked up her bushknife from the floor and walked straight down the stairs without even looking back.

  About an hour later, Bea heard Santra coming back through the forest to the house. She knew it was her this time because Santra was singing in her high, girlish voice. Bea was crouching in the corner of the downstairs room. She had tucked her hand under her other armpit. What was she supposed to do? Sit there looking at it, reminiscing about all the wonderful times she and her hand had spent together?

  At the doorstep Santra motioned with a smart whistle for Bea to come with her. Bea rose stiffly and limped after her, suddenly reluctant. She didn’t want to lose her hand outside – in the jungle. It would drop into the dirt and rot. She had imagined it in the house. But then – her hand. Not attached to her. Lying on the wooden floor. What would they do with it? Would she pick it up and take it with her? Bea had an image of leaving it propped on the shrine she had destroyed.

  Santra whistled again more impatiently, and Bea picked up her pace, too tired to think any more. Let what was going to happen, happen. Santra led her out of the house and to the left, under a striped bush. The light was dropping, it must be about 4 p.m., thought Bea aimlessly. Santra walked quickly, following a trail Bea couldn’t make out. She ducked under palm fronds, climbed under the exposed root of a strangler fig tree. They walked for less than ten minutes and came out by the edge of a small, muddy stream. Santra stopped and waited for Bea to catch up with her, then motioned further downstream. Bea wanted to say she had changed her mind – but no words came out. Bile swam in her stomach.

  There was a fire smoking, nearby the bank of the stream, and littered around, Santra had been cutting something, Bea couldn’t see what very clearly. Santra held out her hand for Bea’s bushknife, then balanced it over the edge of the woodpile so the blade rested in the fire. She picked up one of the bits lying on the ground and held it out to Bea. It was a piece of breadfruit, and Bea felt her eyes widen. She stuffed as much as she could fit in her mouth and chewed it roughly before swallowing. She wanted another two hundred breadfruit. She looked at them wildly, waiting for Santra to offer them to her, but instead, Santra guided Bea to the edge of the stream, and pushed her on the shoulders until Bea was on her knees in the grass.

  ‘Put it in there –’ Santra pointed to the water ‘– don’t touch the bottom,’ she said. Bea held her hand under the stream. Her shoulder was aching. She shuffled round until both her feet dipped into the shallows, and watched the stones glowing under the water. After ten minutes, Santra came over and gently touched her on the shoulder. She inspected the very cold hand, and told Bea to come back to the fire, holding her hand up over her head. Bea felt a little silly walking back towards the fire with her one-armed salute. Icy water dripped down her arm.

  Bea sat in the grass out of the direction of the smoke, and Santra offered her another piece of breadfruit. When Bea reached to put it in her mouth, Santra suddenly gripped her arm at the wrist and above the elbow joint, and, putting her whole body on top of her, smashed Bea’s elbow down on to a slab of flat rock. The nerve at Bea’s elbow rang all the way up her arm. She screamed out, and tried to grab the arm back from Santra, but Santra pushed her to the ground.

  This is when she kills me, Bea thought, in panic. She was going to kill me all along. Bea was flat on her back. Santra sat on her outstretched arm, facing away from her. Bea felt sudden pressure as Santra bound tight strips of vine around her wrist. She tied another two around her fingers. Bea’s heart was hammering. Pins and needles prickled over her scalp and her back. Santra grunted as she smashed down on Bea’s elbow again. Bea tried to spit out the breadfruit, but the huge piece was still in her mouth, it was choking her. She bit down on it and tried to struggle against Santra but she couldn’t budge her even a fraction.

  Bea gave up flailing and tears ran from her eyes, drips of snot from her nose mixing with the huge shard of breadfruit in her mouth. She closed her eyes and began to whine.

  Santra took her knife, and laying Bea’s hand flat against the rock, in one sudden swift chop, sliced off Bea’s little finger. The pain pulled at a seam in her body, a runner-bean string that shot through her elbow and spine and rimmed the sockets of her eyes. Bea screamed. She screamed and flailed and moved and pushed. Wet, warm blood dripped down her forearm. Still, Santra didn’t budge. Bea could smell the iron. Another chop and the fourth finger came off, too. Bea screamed even louder. She couldn’t have imagined more pain could be added to her pain. She felt breadfruit coming into her throat, she was choking on the vomit, she couldn’t breathe. Was Santra going to take the whole thing off, one finger at a time? She couldn’t take any more. She would kill Santra herself before she took any more. She would push her into the stream. She would stab her in the eye with her own damned bushknife.

  But it had stopped. Bea felt herself jerked forward as Santra held her hand under the stream of icy water. The pain was also a throb now – a pulse-pulse throb that Bea could feel inside her eyeballs. Her whole body was shaking. She struggled to sit upright and threw up vomit and spittle down the front of her body, wiping her neck feebly with her good hand. Bubbles popped at the edge of her vision. She felt far away from her own head.

  Santra took Bea’s bushknife out of the fire, and covered Bea’s eyes with her good hand. Bea leant her head back down again. It didn’t hurt any more. She felt sleepy and confused. Santra pressed the burning knife on to the wound and Bea smelt cooking. From very far away, she realized that she was the one cooking.

  30

  That evening, they sat around the fire by the stream. Bea never wanted to see breadfruit again, so Santra had collected a pile of naus for them to eat.

  ‘You were gone for so long,’ Bea said.

  Santra scrunched up her nose in confusion.

  ‘Before, I mean. I thought maybe we weren’t friends any more.’ Bea pushed her fingernail into the pith of the naus. She felt her cheeks redden.

  ‘I came,’ Santra shrugged. ‘But he told me to leave.’

  ‘Who?’ Bea sat forward. ‘Max?’

  Santra nodded. ‘He told me not to come to the village any more.’

  Bea said nothing. The silence went on for a few minutes. ‘How did you know I was here?’ Bea asked her.

  Santra smiled. She threw a slice of peel into the fire, where it smoked wetly. ‘I followed you. It wasn’t hard.’

  ‘You followed me? From the village?’

  Santra raised her eyebrows in a ‘yes’.

  Bea imagined Santra watching her scramble up the hill, only a few steps in her wake. It made her feel like a fool. She had been flailing about like a madwoman, when Santra was calmly walking behind her the whole time. But then, Santra hadn’t come to the house until today. She must have traced the mess of a trail she had left behind. The scramble didn’t seem so foolish or rushed now. The men must know where she went, too. Everyone must know.

  ‘Why did you follow me? Why did you come here?’ Bea was afraid to meet Santra’s eye. She felt embarrassed by the debt she owed her. For Santra to come to find her – it meant trouble. When Aru and Max found o
ut, she would probably be locked in the church, marched to the ocean. She would be cleansed and saved and purified for who knows how long. Her husband would be so ashamed.

  Santra still hadn’t spoken.

  Bea couldn’t help herself. ‘Does Charles know you’re here with me?’ she said.

  ‘He knows.’

  Bea rubbed her right forearm. She massaged it up the arm, towards her heart. Somehow she felt that rubbing it downwards towards the hand might make the blood come out of her fingers. Like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. It pulsed with pain at every heartbeat. She would never be able to sleep.

  Bea leant her head back against the wall. ‘Will you tell me a story?’

  ‘What story?’ Santra picked her teeth with her fingernail.

  ‘A real one. Just a real story.’ Bea wanted to hear about something – with no demons. No magic. Something normal. ‘A happy story. A wedding story,’ she said. ‘Tell me about you and Charles, your wedding. Were you happy?’

  Santra rocked back on her heels. ‘The other day, there was a woman whose name was Santra. She was married up in Central to Charles. Her wedding was happy, with singing and storyan. The old whitewoman missionary came to the celebration, even though she wasn’t invited. But she made gato so it was OK. There were many flowers because it was in July. Santra’s family had a feast, with a roast pig, and simboro and poulet fish. After the wedding, Santra and Charles lived with his parents, and they built their own house together. Their new house was small, but it was close by the gardens so it was OK. Sometimes a black puppy came to the door and Santra fed it taro.

  ‘After a year past the wedding, the couple still had no babies. A man called Aru came, he talked to Charles. He said they needed prayers over Santra so she could have babies. Charles did not like that. But Aru came anyway. He came to the house and he said prayers over her. Many prayers. Many words and spells. And then Santra, she had one baby die. It came out after pains, it was small – not like a baby – like a bird. She was very sick. But after some time she wasn’t sick any more. But then Aru came again and he prayed more. He told Santra she can’t have any babies, because of darkness in the forest, darkness in her soul. Aru made a mark on her head with a pen and a needle. But it didn’t help to make babies. Santra told him it wouldn’t help – only one thing can make babies anyhow, and that’s a man’s cock.’