Mr Peacock's Possessions

by Lydia Syson

  Hokee pokee wongkee fum,

  Puttee go pee kaibula cum,

  Tongaree, wongaree, ching, ring, wum,

  The King of the Cannibal Islands.

  ‘No you won’t,’ said Ma, ‘for there are no cannibals where we’re going, and if there were, we’d not be stopping.’

  The bosun was passing by. He gave Queenie’s plait a tug.

  ‘They won’t eat you if you’re a good girl and say your prayers,’ he said. Ma smiled and frowned all at once, and pulled her daughter closer.

  ‘A good girl? You’ll be their long pig,’ said Billy, pretending to eat Queenie’s arm. Then he sang the verse about headless wives. A day later he was calling Albert a lubberly haymaker, which made Ada furious, for by this time Albert had lost the strength to stand. He lay on deck, eyes restlessly closed, a basin beside him. He refused all food and turned his head away when his sister tried to tempt him to drink a little cold tea.

  Mrs Peacock’s concern grew hourly. Albert winced and groaned as she pinched up the skin on the back of his hand, again and again, and sighed at how slowly it flattened. She and Ada begged him to try just a nibble of biscuit or a scoop of water. Pa watched sternly from a distance, his face darkening. Eventually he pushed Ada aside, and knelt next to Albert himself, deaf to his clammy protests.

  ‘Stop this, son. I’m ordering you to drink.’

  ‘I’d rather die. Just want to die,’ moaned Albert, feebly shuffling away from his father’s raised hand.

  ‘I’ll clatter thee first.’ Jaws clenched. One great hand held the back of Albert’s head, the other thrust a flask between his lips, and stinging brandy splashed the boy’s bared gums. ‘Now drink,’ Mr Peacock commanded.

  Lizzie heard the harsh clunk of metal on teeth, and a choking gurgle. Ada wept loudly. Ma turned shakily aside. ‘Biscuit!’ ordered Pa, holding out a hand for the piece of hard tack Albert had rejected earlier. Lizzie passed it to him, and watched, compelled, as he smashed it into crumbs small enough to force down his son’s resisting throat and then held his jaw shut until he swallowed.

  ‘That’s better.’

  Later, Pa took Lizzie aside and told her of the steerage deaths he’d witnessed on his voyage out from England over twenty years earlier. Vomiting without respite, grown men and women had starved themselves before they ever reached land. Emigrants who’d saved for years for their passage. What a waste, thought Lizzie, seeing for the first time that it was love and fear, not anger, that made her father so fierce when he saw the death smear moistening his own son’s face. No wonder Ma had thanked him for his roughness.

  The ship plunged on through teeming nothingness, as full as it was empty. Albert kept forcing himself to eat, and Lizzie spent hours simply observing the horizon dip and rise, rise and dip, or slowly tip from side to side, as mesmerised as Gussie. The vastness seemed more marvellous and more hard to bear each time the sun rose, yet still there was no sign of land.

  Then, almost imperceptibly, the horizons ceased to shift.

  Slowly, slowly, everything else stopped moving too. The crew threw pails of water at the sails, to stiffen them into service against the slightest breeze. But none came calling. The Good Intent was completely becalmed. No amount of whistling made the slightest difference. The whole ship seemed to droop, and all that was on it. Even the gliding birds, which usually scraped the waves, had vanished. The heat rose, the smells rose, and the water became a sultry mirror. Until you looked straight down, at the clarity and depth and enormity below. Albert, happily leaning over still water at last, was the first to sight a jellyfish, pulsing, trailing, absurdly bright and oddly purposeful. The others joined him at the rail.

  From time to time, Billy sucked on a finger and held it up to test the air. Nothing.

  ‘What if we’re stuck here for ever?’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ admitted Albert. The calm had given him a glorious reprieve.

  ‘But what if we run out of food?’ Queenie was always hungry. ‘Or water?’ She sounded panicky.

  ‘Shhh,’ said Ada, wondering, worrying.

  Lizzie wanted to ask Pa, but he was in the cabin with Captain MacHeath.

  There was nothing to do but wait. Bodies sprawled on boards. Talk wilted. Nearing the evening, when it wasn’t cool but it was cooler, and the only sounds were the sigh of shrinking timbers and the odd whistle of a moving block, Mrs Peacock sat on deck, the baby in her lap. She took her yellowing meerschaum pipe from its soft leather case, and packed it with tobacco. At first she smoked in silence, nose to nose with the carved dog that clambered on the pipe’s flaring stem. Lizzie sat nearby, breathing in sweet woody smoke which rose as straight as a mast from the bowl.

  ‘Tell me about when you were little,’ she tempted at last.

  ‘Oh, it’s too hot for stories.’ Ma blew on her daughter’s face.

  Queenie crept round to Ma’s other side, and leaned in to listen, stroking Gussie’s hair with an idle hand. Mrs Peacock gently tapped her fingers away, and told her to mind or she’d waken her, and then there’d be no peace.

  ‘Please tell us a story,’ whispered Queenie, undeterred, prepared to be patient.

  ‘Tell us about winter,’ said Lizzie. They both knew it was just a question of getting their mother started. ‘Winter when you were little I mean. In London. When it was cold. Really cold.’

  ‘Cold enough to see a crow’s breath? Oh, that’s too long ago. I can hardly remember those days.’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ said Queenie, lifting her skirts a little to encourage the air in, and letting them fall. ‘Tell us about snow. That’ll cool us down.’

  ‘Snow?’ Mrs Peacock sucked on her pipe and smiled. ‘What can I possibly say about snow that I’ve not told you before?’

  Queenie thought for a while.

  ‘Does it really melt the soonest when the winds begin to sing?’

  ‘That’s just a song,’ Ma told her. ‘But I suppose it’s true enough. If it’s a warm wind.’

  ‘And what does snow feel like? Is it hard or soft?’

  Billy hovered nearby, wanting to listen, not wanting to admit it. He cocked his head, and appeared to concentrate on his whittling. Voices carried easily in this stillness. Low laughter came from the captain’s quarters, where MacHeath was once more entertaining and advising Mr Peacock, over brandy. Ada and Albert also settled themselves within hearing distance of Mrs Peacock, sitting back to back for support. They’d been playing draughts, their set borrowed from the second mate, but Albert always beat Ada, and anyone else he played, including the second mate.

  ‘Snow can be hard or soft,’ said Mrs Peacock. ‘It all depends.’

  ‘Please, Ma, can’t you just tell us?’ begged Queenie.

  ‘What more is there to say? I’ve told you often enough how it sparkles in the sun.’

  ‘Like the sea?’ asked Lizzie.

  ‘A little like. Not much.’

  ‘Like stars?’

  ‘No, not like stars either.’

  ‘But how does it sound?’ Queenie asked, deflated.

  ‘Like nothing at all. Quite, quite silent as it falls. It hushes the world, at first, though when you walk on it, it makes a kind of crunching sound. And by the end of the day, it’s made everything noisier than ever. When it’s melted.’ She could hear that peculiar gritty splash made by wheels and hooves and boots, cobbles and kerbs, sweepers and omnibuses, soot-stained slush collapsing from gutters. But she couldn’t put it into words. ‘Dirty stuff, snow is, in London. And perishing cold.’

  ‘Oh, I want to see snow. I want to see the world all white …’ Queenie blew out her lips and closed her eyes.

  ‘You don’t have to go to England. There’s snow enough in New Zealand, up high. There were blizzards on the gold fields not long after I came to Napier Town. Terrible stories in the newspaper – avalanches, and miners swept away, and skeletons found months later. Ask your father. No, don’t. What am I saying?’

  So Lizzie led the talking somewhere el
se, to her own old days.

  ‘Tell us about New Zealand now. Tell us about where I was born,’ she coaxed.

  ‘Ah, Nuhaka,’ said Ma, with a dreamy sigh. ‘There was a spot you could see out your days. Full of promise, Hawke’s Bay: lovely climate, natives so hardworking—’

  ‘Wasn’t I born there too?’ came Albert’s voice from behind Ada.

  ‘That’s right.’ Mrs Peacock gently stretched her stiff legs. ‘Yes, we had high hopes then. We thought flax was going to be our future.’

  The first few years had gone well enough, she told them. The satisfaction of seeing the paddocks round the mill draped from top to bottom with drying fibres. The scream of the new stripper sounding all the day in the sheds – like music when you thought of the money it would make them. Why, its speed was a miracle! Soon they bought a scutching machine too.

  ‘And then …’

  Albert bit his lip. He could just about remember the night the flax mill burned to the ground, along with the newly dressed harvest, and both machines, and who knew even now if the first spark had been malice or ill fortune? He remembered Pa snatching him up from slumber, a bonfire smell indoors, a threatening crackling roar heard through a wooden wall. The mill was a tinderbox. Nothing could be saved. Lizzie was convinced she also had some memories of the fire – black billowing smoke and crashing timbers and screams to pierce your heart – but maybe it was only the telling of the disaster she recalled, and Ada’s sobbing afterwards. And so the ever-growing family left Nuhaka, and pressed north, and now Ma admitted for the first time how close she’d come to turning back on the long overland trek to Ohiwa. On and on they plodded, sodden and chilled by endless rain, the horses’ heads getting lower and lower. But Pa had strength and will enough for all, she told them. He’d walked for hours with Albert on his shoulders, talking all the while about the new venture, keeping them going, despite the wet and cold and the never knowing where they’d sleep next.

  ‘And what was it, Ma? The new venture?’ Queenie always wanted to know what happened next.

  ‘A harbour hotel, in a new settlement, in the Bay of Plenty. On a beautiful spit. But Ohiwa had everyone fooled. You wouldn’t know to look at it but that sand was always on the move. You can’t build a settlement on sand. We didn’t know till it was too late, and so many people were buying up land round there, and they had such grand schemes, so we thought perhaps we could make it work … Anyway, your father doesn’t give up without a fight—’

  ‘No,’ said Lizzie, proudly.

  ‘And he did his best.’ Ma sucked on her pipe, and Gussie sighed in her sleep. But even Mr Peacock’s best couldn’t make that hotel pay. North they went, then along the Bay, to try their hand at farming. This was a life that suited Ma and the little ones much better – raising maize and potatoes under vast skies in Whakatane – and that was where Billy and Queenie were born.

  Plenty proved not enough for Mr Peacock. It wasn’t his, you see. Land was scarcer there by then, and the acres they farmed belonged to another man, a speculator, Ma said, far away in England. Not many more years had passed before they abandoned Whakatane too, leaving only the smallest of graves behind, setting sail with trading-post ambitions, first for Auckland, then to the South Seas.

  Perhaps they shouldn’t have pressed on when they found they had missed the moment in the Friendly Islands. Perhaps they should have known better than to take on another hotel in Apia. But who can ever predict what you’ll find, anywhere you go, and by the time they reached Samoa, Gussie was well on the way and they had to stop for a while …

  Ma’s voice died away, as if she blamed herself for the timing of things. Pa will be happier now, farming again, thought Lizzie. He was surely made to coax life out of land, not coins from strangers’ pockets.

  ‘It is good to settle,’ said Ma. ‘But sometimes it’s better to move on. You have to settle in the right place, you see, or there’s no point. I’m making you no promises about Monday Island, mind. You can never know it’s right until you get there. So now we shall see what we shall see and put our best foot first.’

  Then she made their scalps tingle in a different way, ordering all the girls to brush and plait their hair again, as she wondered aloud what on earth had led them to imagine that there could be any reason here, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing happening, to be letting standards slip.

  Each night, they bedded down on deck among the stacked copra sacks and stared at the stars until sleep came. So very many to see, more and more the harder you looked, and so much brighter above sea than land. They might have been flung there, seeds cast by a careless sower, shining in clusters like islands on a Pacific map. Lizzie floated among them for hours, staring at the most distant dot of light, until she noticed that great swathes lay even further beyond, each shining pinprick so minute that together they formed luminous drifting smoke, twisting veils of light or ghostly lace. The sky wasn’t empty, any more than the sea.

  ‘Upside down,’ said Pa one evening when they were getting ready to bed down for the night, and Lizzie was staring into teeming nothingness, trying to tell reality from reflection, where water ended and where sky began. ‘The stars, I mean.’ Ma nodded and smiled at Pa, and the blanket she was shaking out hung slack for a few seconds while their meeting eyes shared some memory they’d never tell the children. Queenie stuck her head between her knees and peered upwards through her legs to see what difference it might make.

  ‘The moon’s upside down here too,’ Pa added.

  ‘To you, maybe. But not to us,’ said Billy, bravely, as he lay down. He was pleased to feel his father’s hand in his hair. Just a rub and a fond pat. He closed his eyes, and dreamed of a fresh wind coming and ports he’d maybe never see.

  Three nights later Lizzie woke, startled: the ship was on the move again. She staggered to her feet, head spinning with relief, guided by the gleam of brass fittings, the starlit glow of billowing canvas, until she saw her father beckoning her. Together they paced the quietly creaking ship and stopped to watch the stern wave raging with light, millions of sparkling particles in a stream of water. At the bow, the same mysterious radiance rushed in a silvery stream from the wing-like fins of flying fish, skimming the water in threes and fours, aloft for impossible distances and leading the way, it seemed, like guardian angels.

  BEFORE

  Landfall.

  A word to trip a seafarer’s heart.

  Lizzie heard it in the early morning, called out from the top of the mizzenmast, then echoing round the ship. What could Little Admiral Billy see with those sharp dark eyes of his? Lizzie could make out only the faintest smear, just a snagged thread on the horizon.

  Hours later, the snag took shape. Another full watch had been rung – ‘All’s well!’ – before their island passed from ghostliness into anywhere you could imagine landing. It slowly grew into clarity. A line of hills – here was a mountain, even, green with forest. The peak disappeared into wispy cloud, making its height hard to judge. Darkness pooled purple in front of a curving ridge. Closer the ship came, until the pale rocks of cliffs could be distinguished rising in humps like the coils of a sea monster, divided by shadowy green ravines. At first they appeared to drop straight down into the sea, but as the Good Intent made headway, a few strips of beach appeared below, and they could see a line of breaking surf. Lizzie shielded her eyes with her hand and longed for Pa’s spyglass. Though she had put the waving palms and milk-white sands of the Friendly Islands far behind her, she had never anticipated a sight as inhospitable as this.

  Mrs Peacock emerged from the hold, where she and Ada had been making sure everything was packed up again, and nothing forgotten. Queenie, silent at last, leaned against her mother’s stiff skirts for comfort, and Gussie, now on Ma’s hip, pointed at something with a soft sigh and twisted herself round to search her mother’s face for clues. Was this a time to be happy or sad? To laugh or cry? Mrs Peacock betrayed nothing, but her grip on the baby tightened.

  Mr Peacock was on
the poop deck, standing beside Captain MacHeath. Both looked grim. The first mate shook his head, face closed; the bosun gave the gathered children a pitying look, followed by a phoney grin. Robson’s last advice had been to land on the North Beach: in a westerly the surf wouldn’t be half as heavy. Clapperton Bay, on the other side, was a poorer place to land by far. If only he’d known himself, all those years ago. Pa had told MacHeath all this.

  Except today the wind was coming from the north-east, and blowing hard. Vast, navy blue rollers crashed onto the shore, as if commanded to smash stones to sand by nightfall. It was difficult to imagine how the surf could be higher anywhere.

  Mr Peacock turned to the captain, shouting to be heard: ‘Can we wait till the wind changes?’

  More head-shaking. More shouting.

  ‘Could be days. I’m in a hurry. We lost enough time when we were becalmed. I can afford to waste no more.’ MacHeath clapped a hand on Mr Peacock’s shoulder like a sympathetic friend. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. We’ll have to see how we fare on the other side.’

  So the schooner swung west, following the line of pale, stiped cliffs around a jutting bluff. (‘Not too close! Keep her away!’) With its jagged pinnacles, and sharper drop, this coast looked even less promising. As they rounded the westernmost point of the island, Lizzie’s stomach began to knot.

  ‘Do you think—’ she whispered to Ada.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Peacock sharply before she could finish. ‘Wait and see. Then we will make our judgement.’

  That was when Queenie shouted out: ‘Sharks!’

  A pack of ten or twelve was following the ship, or so it seemed, swimming swiftly just below the surface, the curved fins on their backs breaking through the water one after another in a rippling rhythm.

  ‘Is this the place?’ asked Billy, doubtfully, looking at a tiny cove beneath a curve of towering cliffs.

  ‘No – look!’ Lizzie shoved him in the right direction to look beyond the next bluff, where the stretched crescent of a wider bay was finally beginning to show. A good strip of sombre grey streaked with brown – sand, or shingle. Hard to tell. To be sure it was at the foot of an ominous wall of cliffs rising higher than any they’d seen yet – at least a thousand feet – with eye-fooling flat lines of grey and yellow, looking like Egyptian pyramids from the illustrated newspapers. Sailing in, you saw the steepness from a different angle, and the illusion vanished. Then it seemed the mountain had been sliced in two, immeasurably long ago. You couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the other half. Perhaps the trees wondered too, for they seemed to peer down to look, slowly falling from the top, straggling down the cliff face in their efforts to join the greenery at the bottom.