Kris turned to pick up the last of the dirty dishes, ignoring me.
I shouted at him. ‘Hey, wait. Don’t turn away. I’m talking to you, man. Listen.’ My voice was louder than it should ever need to be. The alcohol had plugged my ears.
He hesitated. He looked back at me. There was a shadow over his face, but even so I could see him tense up.
‘You know Uva. You know all about her, don’t you?’ I demanded. My mouth hurt, my breath hurt, I stared so hard that my eyes hurt. I don’t know why I brought her into it, but I couldn’t help it. I was sure there was a link between them. ‘Do you love her?’ The words spluttered out of my mouth. I knew I was asking questions that Kris would never answer, but my head was spinning. I lunged forward to grab him by the shoulders. ‘Tell me. Or did you murder her too … Tell me, you …’
With one swift move, Kris deflected my hands and knocked my glass to the floor. It burst, splashing the wine between us. Kris’s lips disappeared into a sharp straight line and a stream of mercury seemed to flow into his hands. His butterfly knife was unfolded.
From the other room, Jaz called out, ‘What happened? What broke?’
We stared at each other, stupidly face to face. His cheeks tightened; he opened his mouth a crack. I could smell the wine on his breath as he forced each word out, crushing every syllable into the next. ‘Yes, I know her, but it has nothing to do with you.’
I wanted to shove the words back in his face and push out my own but, in the end, I had to look away. I thought he would kill me too if I even opened my mouth.
The next morning I emerged from my room charily, my mind still in turmoil. It wasn’t just the corpses or the drink; I had lost control. I worried not only for myself but for Jaz, for everything. I couldn’t tell what was right and what was wrong. I didn’t know what to do about the bodies. About Kris. Was he a danger to us all? I made my way, gingerly, to the dining room where Jaz was eating. When he saw me, he brandished a piece of toast. ‘Want some?’
‘Where is he then?’ I asked.
‘Kris? By the time I got up he had already finished digging up a new flower bed, or something, in the garden. He had a big spade with him. He’s gone out into the jungle now. Maybe he wants to cultivate that too.’ Jaz stuffed a buttery soldier in his mouth and then examined his nails minutely. ‘I really must do something serious about these today,’ he declared between chomps.
I swallowed two large glasses of water. It was all I could manage. Burying the bodies was not enough. Something more had to be done. I went and picked up the gun from beside the cutlery tray.
‘You planning on hunting some beasties, like our Kris?’
I steadied myself against the table. I clipped a spare magazine of bullets to my belt, not quite clear what to do, but resolved to do something. ‘I’ll see you later.’
‘You should eat while you can, you know.’ Jaz reached for my arm, but I brushed his hand aside. He was not my sage.
From the docking bay at the back there was a footpath that led to an old iron turnstile. It clicked as I let myself in. The path continued down to the flat land through which a small stream ran. Small pinched yellow gorse flowers grew beside it. I looked for some sign of Kris, but there was nothing to suggest which way he might have gone.
Mist seeped out of the jungle wrapped around the higher slopes. Within moments the sunshine disappeared. Clouds scudded along the ground until the whole place resembled a primitive battlefield; the trees lower down the hillsides were tilted like wounded heroes. I had an urge to use the gun. As a child I always wanted to be a warrior who could avoid my grandfather’s censure by running low, crouching close to the ground in an imaginary world of clean theatrical wars spurred by cute computer games, heroic films, and the mysteries of my father’s foreign adventures. On my little walks with Eldon, it was easier to imagine the enemy behind the roses, or hidden in the evergreens, than in the slipstream of the aircraft up in the sky where my father flew. Napalm tossers and suicide bombers, like kamikaze pilots, belonged somewhere else entirely. We were in the realm of cream teas and maids of honour. Fantasies of safety.
At the stream I splashed a handful of icy water on my face. Every drop was crystal clear; I could see new moss on the pebbles at the bottom.
Eldon had always argued that no one could really justify the taking of another person’s life. But kneeling there I wondered, perhaps the dead couple were not caretakers. Perhaps they were retired despots. Experts in their day with truncheons, electrodes and flames. Torturers and murderers. Terrorists. Their victims, then, would have been avenged. Perhaps that is as it should be. Or maybe Kris knew of dangers that I did not. He had already killed two soldiers in our defence. Was that also wrong?
A sinewy brown swerve between the rocks in the water twisted into the flash of a wild trout. Wouldn’t it too value its own life more than those around it?
I had a difficult calculation to make. I got to my feet and followed the path around the side of a small hill, and then down to the first of the tarns. A placid pool that seemed to absorb effortlessly the turbulence of the stream gushing in through the stone sluice. I wished I could too.
From the other side of the pool the stream flowed on more sedately, stretching long strands of brown weeds into the second tarn lower down. I walked beside it, the memory of the night salting each crevice inside me, hardening me for things that I didn’t know were yet to come. I wanted to purify myself in the warm sun wishing that light in itself was forgiving.
The morning sun returned, ripened. The mist and cloud vanished. The air thickened, slowed down, softened into something summery. All around the ground uncovered itself. My thoughts slowed down; the sky widened. Eldon appeared, a young boy hiking about the vale. Was this what my father came looking for: the fount of Eldon’s youth? The dreamland of all those childhood stories that the old man had nourished one generation after another with? But the colours and shapes, the climate and temperature, seemed much more mine than his. It was as though I had arrived somewhere I had been before, rather than he. Perhaps that is what we all discover. That we’ve been here before. That everything we do has been done before.
I stopped moving and there was complete silence. The air itself seemed to doze, waiting. The stream rested motionless on the surface. Nothing moved. Not even a blade of grass. Then, a few steps further on, I noticed the sound of water dripping through the hillside, moss oozing. The green, the growing, came from giving, not taking. What did Eldon really give me? What did Uva give me? Wasn’t it the idea that things could be made better? That nothing was impossible, that our lives should not be limited.
The path forked. I took the left, hoping that Kris might have taken the other. I realised that the vague idea I had had in going after Kris was wrong. He had his karma, I had mine. It was not for me to judge him.
I passed the next tarn and the one after that, observing the occasional popple and threading, in my mind’s eye, those iridescent fishhooks in the glass case indoors. One life ends, another goes on. I saw then that even if Kris had shared a life with Uva, it did not matter. It did not have to alter what we had found together. Or so I thought I must believe.
A frog croaked. A moment later my eyes lit upon a single white moth. Nearby, on a piece of granite, a solitary fly rubbed its diamond wings; grass seed swayed. The sounds of wildlife rekindled Uva’s vision: flowers springing open, feathers unfurling. All God’s creatures dancing, spinning the earth and binding us together in one eternal space. Yes, all of us.
I followed the trail into a forest of eucalyptus and pine. The narrow red clay path rose up through a screen of rubbery vines and twisted, spongy trees into a final patch of grassland before reaching the end of the plateau. The last stretch was a hundred metres of frenzied vegetation; wave upon wave of trees and bushes piled into each other as though a spate of growth had been arrested in mid-flight: brought up short at the end of the world. I reached a rock ledge with a wall of cloud right up against it. Thick vapour hurtled from b
elow. Surging up to the height of the tallest trees, it then curled in and dissipated. The jet of white was tantalising. I wanted to step out into it and be lifted off the edge of the earth. To leave all my tangled emotions behind and give myself up to the wind. But I didn’t. I stepped back and watched the trees drip with precipitation.
Then, unexpectedly, the cloud cleared; in the brief moment before the next one shot up, I caught a glimpse of the lowlands two thousand metres or more below. A carpet of green. Samandia.
There had to be some way I – we – could get down to the plains, the forests, the aboriginal lake. It was closer than I had expected, as a bird might fly. Fresh clouds thickened quickly, obscuring the scene once more.
After a while I followed the cliff path around the outcrop of trees to where I thought the cloud might be thinner. It brought me to a clearing: a concrete arena with two large domed sheds on the far side and a tube of iron – twin rails – that ran up to the edge of the precipice. I made my way cautiously along the perimeter, avoiding the painted markings on the ground.
The first hangar was empty, but in the second one I found an aircraft. A flying machine made in the shape of a giant peacock.
IV
Flight
The story of the giant peacock – the sky chariot from the island’s most mischievous myth – was immortalised, for me, in the video I had found in my flat last winter: my father’s only real bequest.
In the opening shot, fresh yellow leaves fill the screen. Birds trill between them in a pulsing tapestry of song more real to me than the rattle and squeak of the tape itself as it plays, again and again, in the small grey study that was turning into something between a shrine and a crucible day by day. The camera pans the bloodshot clouds, and my father begins a true traveller’s tale, his bottled voice promising a brilliant world of renewed life. ‘This is what I see every morning from my balcony.’ He zooms in on a tree full of bright yellow flowers, a vast cage of golden chains. ‘This is the most wonderful tree in the neighbourhood. Dozens of different birds come to it. And if you look carefully you’ll see them, climbing and turning, singing and hiding everywhere in the blossom. Marc, you would love it.’ He then turns the camera on himself. ‘This may be right in the middle of town, but it is magical …’ His face beams, never to grow old. Each time I see it I pause the film, unsettled by the knowledge that too soon my own age would surpass his and head inexorably towards my grandfather’s.
‘This evening I’m going to the grand exhibition that has opened for the Independence celebrations.’ My father grins. ‘I’ll film it for you.’ One of his teeth is chipped, breaking the line in his mouth a little. The TV screen then fills with a crowd of people: figures in sarongs, trousers, dresses slowly moving in a wrinkled line. The picture is grainy, reddish, the light low, but festive illuminations garland the trees. His wry comments seem to be jokes directed especially to me, his only child: ‘Everything here is now topsy-turvy. You see, to get in we have to go in around the back. The entrance is the exit.’
From the very first viewing my heart is virtually in the camera as it moves shooting from elbow level, as though my father is cradling it, like a hunter, as he walks. The camera is jostled and the picture jumps from side to side. I want to reach for his invisible hand, to steady it with mine. Older, perhaps even wiser now. But whenever the camera zooms I feel myself zoom too, a child again, next to my father, watching some chef chopping roti, or a craftsman twirling a lathe. ‘This is a huge exhibition, food of all kinds, stalls, shops and, of course, all the Forces. Over there behind the police band, is the army.’ Then the film cuts to a fuzzy blizzard where I yearn to take my place, like my father, everpresent between a tapehead and a cathode ray. Something more than imagining, but less than memory. An electronic chimera like any of the swarm of other youngsters there with him in the next frame, squashed into a stockade packed with weapons and army vehicles. ‘Pay is good in the army.’ He lowers his voice. ‘But the military needs to aim at the younger generation: for kids it’s the cool commando uniforms, the fancy knives, the sheer power of the tanks and the big artillery guns that are more attractive. Marc will understand.’ He homes in on a hut with camouflage nets draped over it. ‘That’s the war box,’ he explains. ‘Inside they have simulated a combat scene. A virtual reality show. Mortars blasting, machine guns, tanks crunching through the forest. The kids love it.’ A queue of children, some as young as I had been when my father made the video, stretches right round the small compound, wriggling to get in. ‘They are trying hard to make this business exciting. The idea is to turn it into a sort of Disneyland for them.’
Then the camera cuts to a long thin glider mounted on a grey platform. A small group of boys are listening to a pilot demonstrating the controls inside the cockpit.
‘This shot is really for Dad, if he ever comes around to watching it.’ His voice falters. ‘He took me up in one of these – a K13. I’ll never forget that first flight. It was the first time he let me pilot. I really felt he had some faith in me then. That was when I learned that with confidence – if you knew which way the wind blew – you could control everything. You have to, otherwise you fall out of the sky, isn’t that so?’ He looks appealingly at the camera as though he expects to find Eldon there. I understand what he wants, even if Eldon never did. But I could not imagine myself up in the sky with him; with either of them.
For me it is the scene with the great wooden peacock with its rich mix of history, legend and myth that is the real moment of communion. Even the quiet entrance to the air force arena, a square of restrained flowers and orderly hedges, is potent with promise. When the huge bird with its outstretched wings, each feather carved like a petal, fills the screen I, like my father, am awestruck. ‘The first aerial chariot’, my father rolls each word with wonder, carrying me, his son, with him into a fabulous past of magic heroism and fantastic celestial odysseys.
As the lens widens to show the pretty coloured lights strewn along the hedges like landing markers, two young men drift into the picture, their brief conversation captured for ever by the camera.
‘This is the first aircraft. Not bad, no?’
‘But I thought those Wright brothers were the buggers who made the first plane.’
‘No man, that was much later. In America or somewhere, no? That was just a nineteenth-century thing, no? Our fellows did this a long time before that.’
My father’s quiet laugh bubbles out of the tape then, spilling a moment of paternal delight into my wanting, waiting life. ‘Separating myth from history is impossible now. Everyone has a fantasy with which to stake their claim for the territories in our heads.’ He pauses. ‘Who can tell where the truth lies?’ The picture goes dark for a second and I wonder, every time, what he was really up to in those last months. Was Cleo right about his mission of mercy? Or Eldon, who saw only delinquency? Then a plaque comes into focus. ‘Look at this board: it even gives a date. It claims two islanders were the brothers who invented this Trojan peacock, in 2525 BC. And that it was used to bring the most beautiful woman in the world to this verdant paradise, away from the tedium of a husband whose only passion was playing with bows and golden arrows.’ His disembodied voice takes on a sudden urgency. ‘A voyage of love, like all our journeys. Next week I’ll have some time to go to our place on the coast. Remember the wildfowl centre? On the next video I send you’ll see what it looks like now.’
But there was no other video. Those words to my mother were his last to any of us. Every time I heard the passion glow in them I felt my blood ignite.
‘I’ve found something,’ I called out to Jaz in the courtyard. ‘Come with me.’
Jaz’s face lit up. ‘Kris, here he is.’
Kris, who was busily cleaning a steel apparatus, ignored us both.
‘Look,’ I started but then wavered, catching sight of his knife. Ever since I had met Uva I had come to believe that all our actions were somehow always measured against an idea of what they ought to be. That there was a pu
rpose and a pattern, that our lives were ethereal links in a great sacred chain that must not be broken. But in Farindola I began to see I might have been misled. That there is only chaos before us whichever way we look and that we must each find our own means of survival in a world of mounting disorder. Eldon must have known it. And Cleo. Why do the old hide the truth from the young?
Kris squeezed some oil into the hub.
I took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry about last night. I guess you must have done what you thought was best. I know that now. Let’s put it behind us, forget it. I’m glad that you’ve buried them. Now come and see what I’ve found.’ It was feeble, I know, but it was all I could do.
Kris continued to clean the metal without a word.
‘It’s quite an extraordinary machine.’ I made a last effort to entice him.
‘Machine!’ Jaz made a face, pressing the tip of his nose flat with his thumb.
Kris put away his contraption and stood up; his mouth still clamped tight.
Only when I showed them the hangar and Kris saw the aircraft, did he finally give in. His whole face softened. He stroked the graceful curved neck, the fuselage trimmed with thin strips of varnished coconut wood, flecked with bits of beaten copper and riveted with brass studs; he practically swooned. While Jaz flounced about the tail, Kris took his shoes off and climbed up the moulded footholds to where the hollow wing was fastened. He tested the white mastic which, like cartilage, lined the join; he seemed pleased with its texture and went on to check the seals around the door at the nape of the bird. The aircraft had been designed to carry two people: a pilot and one passenger in a feathered cockpit carved out of the peacock head. Most of the body was moulded out of titanium or fibreglass, but made to look like real wood, and copper, at its most sensuous points: the throat and the wingtips. The underside also had two wood-veneer circles, for balance, inlaid with laminated peacock feathers. Kris straddled the back of the creature and prised open the canopy of the cockpit. He slid in beneath the skin, glowing with pleasure. His hands jumped from knob to button; he checked all the instruments and levers. The tail and flaps flickered into life as the strings and rods pulled and pushed, lubricated by their auto-pulse grease nipples.
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