by Lydia Syson
Pa strode behind his family with the captain, carpet bag in hand, oblivious to his daughter’s trepidation. It seemed to Lizzie, turning back to watch the two men, that their roles had shifted: her father had grown in stature in the short time since they had landed on this island. With every step, each sweeping glance, Mr Peacock was taking possession of Monday Island. The idea strengthened her resolve.
‘We’ll berth in the shelter of those trees tonight,’ said Mr Peacock, turning the procession towards the head of the bay.
Leaving Ma and the baby encircled by trunks and cases, the children headed to collect firewood in the cool shadows and fresh scent of the gnarled and twisting trees that grew behind the camp and beneath the cliffs. They found plenty of fallen branches, and kindling, all good and dry. Loud cracks and snaps echoed out across the bay as they stamped and jumped, breaking up the smaller sticks into manageable lengths.
By the time the last crates arrived from the last jolly boat, full of the promised provisions, a welcoming fire was burning.
‘That’s the lot, Mr Peacock.’
The captain and Pa then turned their backs for a low-voiced negotiation over the carpet bag. Coins were counted out – eighty for the Peacocks’ passage, and ten gold sovereigns more for flour and beans, tea and sugar, candles and soap. MacHeath looked up at the sky, still clear but darkening fast, and shook his head as if in sorrow. ‘And we must be on our way.’
It should hardly have come as a shock. Yet it did, to everyone.
‘You’ve a powerful fine family, and no mistake, Mrs Peacock,’ he continued. ‘Top to bottom. I admire you all and I’m sorry to bid you all farewell. Oh, but I nearly forgot. Cook gave me this for the kiddies. While you get yourselves on your feet. But I can see that won’t take you long.’ From inside his brocaded jacket, he brought out a couple of greaseproof packages, which he sniffed approvingly before handing them over to Ma. ‘Salt beef sandwiches and plum cake, I believe. And now all that remains is to wish you every success with your new island home.’
It sounded so final. Until that moment, Lizzie could persuade herself it was all a game, an adventure. Even Pa had danced back and forth from shore to camp with a playful air, ruffling Billy’s hair and swinging Queenie on arms of steel. As faces grew suddenly serious, Lizzie’s stomach flopped like a fish. Soon they would be completely alone here.
Ma stumbled over her thanks.
‘We will see you very soon, won’t we? You will come by on your way back from Auckland with the new supplies we ordered? And … to take us off, if …’
‘Oh yes, Mrs Peacock,’ he assured her. ‘About three months, I should say. Now, coming to see us off, little birds?’
‘Of course,’ said Pa.
The surf was a good deal higher already. The family stood close together at the top of the sandbank and watched as the jolly boat pulled away. Even once out at sea and well on their way to the ship, not one of the rowers could spare a hand to return the children’s waved farewells. Only the captain briefly tipped his hat.
Then Lizzie wanted to call out to him (as if she’d ever be heard): ‘Wait! Come back! We’ve changed our minds. Don’t leave us here!’
She clamped her mouth shut with her own hand. Queenie’s face was already a picture of confusion and alarm. Billy was pale and drawn. Lizzie was old enough to pretend, and for the sake of Pa, she’d do her best.
‘This is it then,’ said Albert quietly to Ada. Standing with thin arms folded, face serene as an angel’s, he betrayed neither fear nor regret as he watched the departing crew. Perhaps it was the relief of dry land, however lonely and remote, a horizon that kept still, and the prospect of eating heartily again, nausea and fever reduced to bad dreams. Perhaps it was simply the hope of staying put. But if Albert could stay so calm at such a moment, how could Lizzie fret? Pa was there, right behind her, and Ma next to him, the cleverest, strongest, bravest people she had ever known.
In the middle of the bay, where the mightiest currents collided, the little boat paused, as if she had forgotten something, and the watchers on the shore held their collective breath. But she soon regained her course.
A hiccup in Lizzie’s heart as the jolly boat was hauled up. Another when they saw the anchor weighed. All alone now.
No more words from anyone, even when, with a bellying of canvas, the Good Intent sailed south.
At last Gussie began to cry and arch her back.
‘No point in watching for ever,’ said Pa, brusquely. Though his reassuring hand dropped from Lizzie’s shoulder, she noticed he still did not move his feet. The family stood on shore, all eight of them, in silent vigil, until the ship was completely out of sight.
BEFORE
The camp took shape quickly. Before it got dark, Lizzie helped Pa rig up a makeshift tent at the edge of the grove of ironwood trees using an old sail donated by MacHeath. Sal settled down to feed her squirming puppies. When Ma was satisfied everything else was where it should be, she rescued the apron that had been protecting the big china mixing bowl, tied it round her own waist, and announced her intention to bake scones.
‘Flour, Ada. And salt. Over there.’ She waved her spoon at the food crate.
Ada rolled across a heavy fifty-pound tin, one of twelve Pa had bought from MacHeath, and set it by her mother. Then she found a knife to prise it open. The top was stiff, and there was a hint of rust round the edge. Hardly surprising after a few months sealed in a damp hold. The blade curved in protest, but eventually the lid shifted.
For a moment Ada could only stare. ‘Look, Ma!’ she said, crossly, shaking the tin as she tipped it towards her mother. Pa came quickly to inspect. Lizzie followed, peering over her sister’s shoulder. A soft fuzz coated the surface – vivid blue, almost green – Ada gave it an angry poke, and her tin spoon bent. The flour was a hard, solid mass. Inedible.
‘Unfortunate,’ said Ma, in her measured way. ‘But can’t be helped now, and we’ve plenty more. Let’s try this one.’
It was Ma’s turn to recoil from the musty smell. Without a word, Pa grabbed a third tin. No fresher. He only needed to shake it to realise that their entire flour supply was in the same condition. He threw it down in disgust, aiming a kick at the cylinder that sent it spinning. Ma tried to calm him.
‘Never mind. It must have been an accident. But we’ve hard tack too, and that’ll keep us going until we work out what the island can provide.’
Lizzie had already started rummaging.
‘Here … this should be it.’
Pa’s lips twitched and tightened as he emptied a mass of moving crumbs onto the ground, specked dark with weevils and their eggs. Ma shoved the ruined cabin bread into the fire with the edge of her foot to burn the pests as fast as possible. Queenie and Billy leapt to help her, aiming sharp, angry kicks at the mess.
No tears. No tears allowed.
Albert and Ada checked the sacks and shook their heads. There was barely a bean that hadn’t been hollowed out by pests. The rice too was infested, the lard rancid, and as for the promised tea, that was nowhere to be seen. Lizzie’s throat felt blocked, her lungs airless. She swallowed, and turned a face, falsely bright, towards her father’s. He would have a plan. Pa was never without a plan. The other children were already cowering.
With a vast roar, Mr Peacock booted one of the tins into the air and out of sight. Grabbing a stick from the woodpile, he whacked another in the other direction, into the woods, where it rustled through the leaves and got stuck in a branch.
‘He knew, the scoundrel. He knew. The—’
Gussie launched into screaming. Glaring at her husband, Ma jerked her head towards the beach. Pa made a strange animal noise at the back of his throat, and strode away, shouting, cursing, and kicking another tin before him.
‘Wait, Pa,’ called Lizzie, but he pushed her away from him, his rage like a scorching barrier, and left her shaking. He let fly with his foot again and again, until he’d been swallowed by the dusk and his grunts and shouts of anger were in
audible.
‘Come, children,’ said Ma, and they obediently turned back to the fire. ‘Let him be.’ Her voice took on a lilting tone, as if she were telling a story to the little ones to pass the time. ‘We have the sandwiches from Cook. Here, help me lay out the cloth, Lizzie. We’ll sit over here to eat them.’ As she laid them out, carefully dividing the rough hunks of bread into fair-sized portions, setting some aside for her husband, giving herself the small end of the loaf, she murmured to herself, half under her breath: ‘A terrible mistake, of course. No decent Christian would do a thing like that on purpose. But that awful climate. Destroys everything. How happy I am to be out of it. I’m sure it’ll be no time before the captain’s back with our new supplies – and plenty of them.’
‘Will he give our money back?’ asked Queenie.
‘Certainly. Why would he want to cheat us?’
Lizzie could think of lots of reasons. Those tins must have lain in the depths of the Good Intent hold for years, mouldering away in one tropical island station after another, rejected by the ship’s cook, never thrown away, and nobody but the Peacock family foolish enough to make an offer for them, sight unseen.
‘Why didn’t Pa check?’ whispered Albert, voicing what they were all wondering, now.
‘Shhh,’ said Lizzie. ‘They came out of the hold so late. Maybe MacHeath showed him a different tin … Or maybe he just trusted him.’
She remembered the two men drinking together in the captain’s cabin, long into the night, during the calm. She remembered MacHeath’s exaggerated wink when they first stepped on board weeks ago. It made her want to poke his eye out.
Mrs Peacock nodded at the children and closed her eyes.
‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen.’
Lizzie nibbled at her sandwich, determined to make it last as long as she possibly could. Sal bounded over and sat up on her hind legs as Albert had taught her, and the puppies staggered around in the crate’s sudden emptiness, whining and yapping and falling over.
‘She can smell the meat,’ said Albert, whose own hunger had returned with a vengeance. ‘Poor old Sal. She can have mine, I don’t mind.’
‘We’ll all give her a bit,’ said Lizzie, quickly, peeling open her sandwich with a pang, and passing a string of beef to Ada, who was already doing the same. ‘That’s only fair.’
Billy was a little more reluctant, and Queenie was eventually shamed into giving up some of hers too. She gulped down the rest and then turned to her mother, with eyes remarkably like Sal’s.
‘Is there any more?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Ma, firmly.
‘Nothing at all?’ persisted Queenie, ignoring her sisters’ warning glances. ‘Not even another orange?’
‘What will we eat tomorrow?’ said Ma. Gathering herself, she regained her familiar authority. ‘I’ve boiling water here, good and hot. That’ll fill you up.’
‘Just thinking there might be nothing to eat makes you hungry,’ Albert remarked.
‘Don’t think it then,’ said Lizzie.
Round the fire, the children’s faces glowed and darkened, foreheads and cheeks picked out and then abandoned by the light of flames as heads moved to listen to the shadows beyond. Ma rummaged in the carpet bag for the big Bible, but she kept it shut on her lap, and pressed her lips shut too. Family prayers were family prayers. They couldn’t start without Pa. But it wasn’t just that, thought Lizzie, humming a few consoling lines of ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’. Billy joined in with the words of the second verse:
Though like the wanderer,
The sun gone down,
Darkness be over me,
My rest a stone …
Ada put a warning finger to her lips.
‘What’s that?’ asked Queenie.
Tantalising silence. A few crackles from the fire. Then a series of guttural squeaks and splutters came from the woods. Leaves murmured, edge to edge. Twigs cracked. Lizzie clutched at her sister’s sleeve.
‘How do we know there’s nobody else living on this island?’ she said.
‘Do stop that nonsense,’ said Ma.
‘Where’s Pa?’ said Queenie, very quietly.
She and Billy stared at Lizzie and Ada and Albert. A low whistle came from the darkness.
BEFORE
A parson-bird had briefly deceived them. It was singing again at dawn, as familiar in daylight as so many other things here – flowers, trees, ferns and fowl – familiar, yet not quite right. Or perhaps a different bird, for the call Lizzie heard as she woke was stranger and closer, awkward wheezing and cackles interrupting outraged hoots, its flight as noisy as its call. Then she saw it: glossy dark feathers, almost black, tufts of white quivering at its throat. It eyed her curiously where she lay, stiff and chilled, a few feet from a pile of ash and embers and a cold cauldron. Not far off, Ada and Albert slept on, huddled together for warmth like the babes in the wood in the song. Blackbird Island, remembered Lizzie.
That first, unforgettable evening, Mr Peacock materialised reassuringly from the night after a few hours. You’d never guess how he had raged earlier. Ma quickly lit a candle and read a passage about taking no thought for the morrow, and Pa recited a psalm: ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning’. After that, the usual hymns. One by one, the children’s voices dropped away as sleep overwhelmed them, until only Lizzie sang on with her parents. Pa carried Queenie to the sail’s shelter, draped across his mighty forearms, and came back for Billy. Lizzie watched drowsily while Ma banked up the fire for the night, and then covered Albert and Ada where they lay. She must have done the same at last for Lizzie, for she didn’t remember falling asleep and it was light when she woke.
Ma was still asleep, unusually. Once again, Pa was nowhere to be seen. Lizzie moved carefully and quietly around the camp, turning over a half-burned log to uncover its hidden heat, feeding its glow with the dried ferns and twigs Albert had tucked away from the damp night air the previous evening, and building up a sturdy teepee of sticks and logs, so that Ma would wake to a good cooking fire.
Lizzie wasn’t sure what she’d be cooking, but they’d need fresh water. She picked up the billycans without a clink, and set off across the damp, dewy tussocks, anxious to get an impression of the island entirely on her own. By the time she reached the marshy edge of the lagoon her hems were drenched. In she waded, moving slowly and scooping water from the surface while winking bubbles spun up from the mud below. She meant to go straight back to camp. But she could hear the breaking surf, and surely it wouldn’t take long to climb to the top of the sandbank to see how the beach and the bay – their beach and their bay – looked in the first coral-flushed light of the very first day.
The sand bore the mark of an even earlier visitor. And here came Pa, striding towards her from the rocks, rod balanced over one shoulder, two substantial fish in his other hand. He smiled as soon as he saw her, holding his catch a little higher, waggling the fish so their scales flashed and sparkled. Lizzie waved and ran to meet him.
‘What beauties, Pa!’ she said. It was no exaggeration. The fish were big, and bright blue, one more silvery than the other, both with tiny yellow spots scattered like stars across their solid bodies. ‘Oh look at their faces! Don’t they look at you so crossly – those funny lumps are just like eyebrows! I’ve never seen anything like ’em.’
‘Nor I. Reckon they must be some kind of drummer fish. Anyway, he let himself be caught easily enough. Maybe that’s why he’s so fed up. Got the fire going have you, my spadge? Let’s see if they taste as good as they look.’
They did. Their flesh was firm and sweet and there was plenty of it. Once they’d finished off the last of the ship’s cook’s sandwiches, everybody was satisfied. And breakfast had come easily enough to fill the children with a new confidence about the meals ahead. While they were clearing up plates and mugs, and heating water for washing up, Ada did what she and the others often did. Brushing past Lizzie, she
leaned into her ear. ‘Go on. Ask Pa now. He’ll say yes to you. Quick, while Ma’s in a good mood too.’
Pa was unrolling a large tent which had first seen service in the Maori wars. This would be their home until they had built something permanent.
‘Can we explore now, Pa?’ she asked.
A brief glance at Ma, an even briefer nod back, and Mr Peacock replied:
‘Off you go. Not too far though, and not too long either. There’s far too much to be done.’
But when Albert stood up to follow them, Pa blocked his way.
‘No, not you,’ he said. ‘I need you here to hold the pole up. You don’t need strength for that, just steadiness.’
Ada hesitated, then raced off after Lizzie, with Sal at her heels. They looked back to see Albert swathed in canvas, while Pa shouted instructions, and Billy counted out tent pegs.
‘Which way?’ said Lizzie.
‘Let’s look for Pa’s orange tree,’ suggested Ada, wisely. ‘There may be other fruit trees nearby too.’
Mr Peacock had left only ten or twelve fruit on the single surviving orange tree, and some of these yet to ripen fully. Creepers entangled the citrus. Soon it would be shaded completely by the crinkly, shiny leaves of matipo bushes. Yet Ada’s instincts were right. You could just about make out where the old orchard had once been planted.
‘Do you know what peach trees look like?’ asked Lizzie.
‘Only when they’ve got peaches on them,’ admitted Ada.
Sal dashed ahead on some invisible trail, followed by Ada, scrabbling through saplings. The girls pushed through, trying not to let the branches spring back in each other’s faces in their eagerness, ducking under the climbing tendrils. It was Lizzie who first noticed the grapes, hanging down in graceful bunches, almost thrusting themselves into her hand when she reached up for them, perfect in their misty translucence. She shoved three or four into her mouth at once, bursting tough, sour skins on her tongue, and called Ada back.