Slide’s boy was carrying in the boxes the launch had unloaded on to the end of the wharf. A lot of grog. Tins of food. It’s grim if the stores run out, and I’ll say this for Slide, things might run down but they don’t usually run out. You might end up eating hearts of palm out of a can when what you wanted was baked beans, but at least it’s food.
I once asked Slide, How come hearts of palm? He replied, Why not? There are a lot of things in the world, Ken.
The opium doesn’t run out. So far it hasn’t, and everybody has faith that it never will. Nobody ever questions its just always being there. Maybe they’re superstitious; better just to go on having faith. Maybe things would be better if it did, I said to Slide once. He laughed at me. After everyone had killed each other, you mean?
Andrea never notices the opium. Well, I suppose he notices, just pretends he doesn’t. The fact is the place runs smoothly. Well, until the girl was murdered. It’d be good to think that it was some passer-by, but we never have those. No tourists come here. The boat is the only way in. Occasionally there’s somebody who may be official, but they don’t stay, they leave on the same boat. It comes in, unloads the stores, takes the venom and goes again.
The Lizard has a tent, quite a fancy affair with its own verandah. Spangle and his wife live in one of the shacks; Slide has the best of them. The fisherman’s is okay. There’s a guy called Tarantin who lives round the bend of the track with his old mother. The Chinese have a kind of compound of huts and lean-tos and canvas shelters; I am never sure how many of them there are. Sometimes I squint at it, when the sun is glinting off the flattened paraffin tins that form their roofs, and see a fabulous palace of many pavilions, but that’s hard work even for my imagination.
That’s about it, except for a couple of old-timers further down the river. And the hippies that live by the creek, further inland. Creek; more of a swamp. There are kids with bites all over, but they don’t seem to notice. And of course me; I was lucky there was a shack, more tumbledown even than most, but it was vacant. It belongs to Slide; I expect everything does. He put a tarp over the roof so it’s fairly watertight.
Slide’s store is closed by a wooden shutter that folds down to the counter. The shutter has a huge padlock that he never clicks home; even when it’s down it doesn’t necessarily mean that the shop is shut. On the evening of Andrea’s visit he beckoned me over to what he calls the terrace, and put a bottle of his whisky on one of the rickety tables. I know if I sit with Slide often and long enough I’ll learn all there is to know about this place. Slide’s okay to talk to, the others are hopeless, you have to play cards. When you drink with Slide you know he’s totting it up, it’ll end on the slate with all your other purchases. Only yours, he doesn’t expect you to pay for his.
Sometimes the whisky is some terrible moonshine that comes from a still somewhere off in the mangroves. Tonight it’s halfway decent, not Scotch of course but some okay colonial imitation. The stomachs are strong here. I sometimes think that Slide likes me, and that’s probably why the others accept me. We all look the same: me, Slide, the Lizard, the fisherman, Slide calls him the Fisher King but I’ve never thought he was that good at his job. If we depended on his fish to feed us we’d get pretty hungry. We’re all burned mahogany by the sun, our eyes a bit watery, dressed in singlets and shorts and thongs, our bodies worn and sinewy. Even Spangle, who’s probably the youngest, looks a scrawny old bird.
The dead girl is the daughter of the fisherman. If he’s the Fisher King does that make her the Fisher Princess? She used to flit, down to the shop, along the edge of the river, a thin and child-shaped little woman with a great red frizz of bushy hair on her head and a poignant little face. She wore dresses like nightgowns and it’s as well she didn’t go out after dark or you’d have taken her for a ghost. I thought of her in the whisky as I took a pull of it, a kind of memorial toast. Wondered if maybe now her figure would flit through the dark nights of the river, really a ghost. I wished her spirit rest. I suppose you can’t expect that until her murderer is caught.
Know what a cheroot is? said Slide. He pumped the paraffin lamp and lit it, casting a yellow gloom over the tables, the beaten earth of the terrace, the single tree that leaned over his yard. The whisky looked very brown in the glasses. I read somewhere that whisky in its natural form is colourless, that the brown is caramel. I suppose it’s to make you think of peat and amber-coloured mountain becks. I often think of words like beck, and brook, when I look at this oily river and its sluggish creeks. But we can’t choose the words we live with.
You smoke it, I said, it’s like a cigar.
It comes from India, he said. It’s open at both ends. Originally from India. Could be anywhere now.
Andrea said it would solve the mystery.
Andrea will solve the mystery. He’s a clever girl.
I nodded. So Slide knew about Andrea.
Not least because he isn’t a girl, said Slide, and no one twigs. You know, he said, his mother called him that. Apparently there’s some Italian painter of that name. She looked at books of beautiful pictures before he was born; supposed to give her beautiful thoughts and so she’d have a beautiful baby. It’s a bloke’s name, there, apparently.
Slide looks sceptical at the best of times, and at that moment even more so. You have to wonder, he said. Maybe in Italy, but not here. It could have an effect.
Why doesn’t anyone else know?
They don’t know much, Ken. Better like that.
I suppose he is quite beautiful.
True.
Slide took out a packet, a yellow box with some pattern in red and gold. He opened the lid and slid back cellophane. Cheroot? he said.
Where did you get these?
I’ve got a lot of things in there.
He lit it for me. It was quite coarse, but it didn’t taste stale, as it might have done, I thought, being something Slide had had forever. Do you sell a lot of these?
Not a lot, no.
I said if I sat drinking with Slide I’d eventually find out what there is to know about this place. But I should also have said that it could take a very long time.
Cheroot’s a French word, he said. They got the word from India.
Slide’s got three books in the store, has had for a long time, I reckon. The same three. But you often see him sitting on his terrace, reading. Not one of the three. I suppose that’s where he gets to know about cheroots and such.
Why do you stay here, Slide?
Got to live somewhere. He blew fragrant smoke into the air. Why do you, Ken?
I shrugged. I was writing my book, but I didn’t want to tell people that.
One day you’ll finish it, he said. Then you’ll see. Whether you leave or not. Can, or want to.
So he knew that, too. I laughed. But I could feel my cheeks getting hot. Shame-faced. I turned it towards the river, secretly flowing past the wharf. This immense burden of water, always flowing, always and never the same.
People are funny, he said. They get fond of the places they live in. Even so god-forsaken as this.
I looked along the track. The shacks were dark. Nothing to do at night, nobody reads, there’s no television, they just go to bed when the light goes and get up when it comes back. The opium is not a night-time activity. Only the Chinese palace showed wavering slits of lamplight, or candle flame.
Why do we say god-forsaken, I wonder? I think God is more here than in most places I’ve been. What do you say, Ken? Will we find God here?
Maybe, if we look for him.
Good point.
We’d got to the stage where the conversation had become lazy; our voices were, and my brain, but the subject matter was too energetic for me. The level of the whisky had dropped considerably. I wasn’t sure I could afford much more. I stood up, and stretched.
To our cots, said Slide, our virtuous cots. He drained his glass and stood up, too. He raised his hand and padded with the slow gait of the fat man round to the back of his emporium
, the bottle under his arm.
When I first came here I used to get up at dawn to watch the harvest, but there’s not a lot to see. The snakes begin to stir in the grey morning twilight, and the men suddenly sinuous as ghosts disappear into the scrub and come out with hessian sacks with the creatures inside. They keep them in boxes under the wharf, for coolness, and then just before the launch is due they milk the venom. It’s a skill these people have. The money’s okay, not a lot but not bad for the amount of effort involved. They’d say it was dangerous work, but they make it look easy. Not that you’d catch me trying.
Slide told me that at one time, when there were a lot more snake catchers on the river, they’d make dry ice with carbondioxide cylinders so they could milk them straightaway and freeze the venom. But they decided they didn’t need that much effort; the launch just brings a sackful of the stuff, and they put the newly harvested venom in that. I said to Slide that some entrepreneurial person could probably get them a much better price, organise a market that would make them a lot richer.
Entrepreneurial, said Slide, pronouncing the word in a set of small bites as though he’d never heard it before, let alone pronounced it, and wasn’t sure he could manage it now. He squinted. What would be the point of that? he asked.
More money, I said.
What would be the point of that? What would they spend it on, here?
They could use it to get away.
Then they wouldn’t be venom hunters. Logic, he said, logic, Ken.
I’ve given up getting out of bed at dawn to see the snake catchers melt away into the scrub, I’ve kept my old habits of late to bed and late to rise even though it means buying a lot of paraffin, but I do sometimes still watch the milking. Spangle is the best at it, the forked stick, the grasp of the head, the opening of the mouth. Tarantin’s mother is the next best. She smiles so widely her teeth nearly fall out and she makes a strange violent action with her arms, but she gets the job done slickly, in the end.
There seem to be certain days for the opium-smoking: they happen in their own time, people know though it never seems to be discussed. I wonder where it comes from. I guess the Chinese grow it, in the hinterland somewhere; they’d be the ones you’d expect to have the skills. I don’t know, and I don’t ask. I don’t smoke it either. I thought of what Slide said, about me not leaving. He’s wrong there. I’ll go, when the time’s right. It isn’t yet.
Once he said to me, Ever think you’d like to find Xanadu. Staring into a glass.
Xanadu, I said, my voice a bit husky from the drink; it was moonshine that night, I remember thinking they should colour it pale blue, as a warning.
Not just a fragment, the whole thing, Slide went on. No interruptions here.
It was then I realised he was talking about the Coleridge poem. I had thought about opium, what it might do for me, but there were too many bad warnings. No happy endings. As Slide said, the poem was only a fragment. And anyway I’m not a poet. Doesn’t it take more than it gives, I said.
Maybe, replied Slide.
I’d learned that conversations with Slide didn’t have ends. All my time in this place, I realised, would be just the one dialogue. It was like a piece of music, with themes uttered, dropped, reiterated, not always articulated but never lost. There was never any hurry to move it along. Another day Xanadu, or opium, would come up. Afterwards I wondered if he’d had thoughts along those lines, himself. I thought I should have said, What about you? It might have been polite.
I supposed the venom hunters spent their profits on opium. The food wouldn’t cost much. Sometimes the hippies brought in fresh vegetables that they’d grown, and fine green stalks of marijuana, but people didn’t have the habit of fresh much, around here. The grass was good, healthy, out of the ground; I sometimes took on a bit of that. Opium. If I took up opium I’d have to become a venom hunter.
The day after the launch left it came back again. We were sitting by the wharf, on Slide’s terrace, playing cards. Spangle was winning. The launch turned the corner of the river and its melancholy horn sounded. I nearly said, How sad is the sound of the horn in the mangroves, but I thought, I’m not that silly. I might have, to Slide.
We all looked at the launch, it never comes except once a week, and for a moment I wondered if it was yesterday, if somehow the intervening events had been a moment of hallucination, and here was the launch arriving, and Andrea would step off in his high-heeled shoes and his flirty red jacket and tell us, The cheroot is the clue. But if it hadn’t happened yet, how did I know it.
Andrea did step off, but today he was wearing jeans like a second skin and a silk shirt the colour of cream, with little red shoes like ballet slippers on his feet. He skipped down the steps and sat with us. Lizard said, Back already. Andrea said, Alas, and Slide came out of the emporium, pulled a chair from the other table and sat on it, back to front. We finished the game. Slide said, Deal you in? Andrea shook his head. Nobody said, Why are you back here so soon? I suppose they knew. Slide got up, in his ponderous yet efficient manner and got a bottle of whisky. The good stuff.
Slide brought a bunch of shot glasses, spread them out, and filled them, pushing them in front of us. Andrea smiled. On duty? Picking it up and taking a mouthful. Spangle shuffled the cards, neatened them, and put them on the table. The launch gave a cough of steam.
Spangle’s wife came along the road from their shack, in her short shorts and tied-up shirt, her high-heeled sandals quiet on the dusty track, her long brown legs forced into small steps. She came up to the table and looked at Spangle. He didn’t catch her eye. No woman has ever looked at me like that, and I don’t think I would want one to. It was a naked look, raw, full of longing, love, desire, all moiling together, and with utterly no hope. She dropped her heavy dark lids over the splendid brown and bluish white of her eyes, but she couldn’t hide the tremble of pain in her mouth. She bent her head so her swags of dark hair fell forward beside her face. Andrea stood up swiftly and brought a chair, placing it with a kind of gallantry at the table, filling one of the little glasses with the good whisky for her.
Slide filled the glasses again. Everybody drank, not tipping it down as you do with a shot glass but slowly, even contemplatively. Andrea’s face was sorrowful. No venom today, he said. That can follow the usual timetable. We all sat and drank. It was like a very dull party, where there is nothing to say, except it wasn’t, because there was so much tension in the air; I imagined everybody felt as strung up as I did.
Andrea leaned back in his chair, his body a fluid curve across its round metal back. Still got those cheroots, Slide, he asked. Slide nodded. And you’re still smoking them, Andrea said to Spangle. He nodded. But not you, Mrs Spangle. She shook her head. People didn’t smoke much tobacco here. Their rations of opium, that seemed to do them.
Mrs Spangle. I supposed she had a name, but I didn’t know it. She looked at Andrea. I’d like to put a dress on, she said. He nodded, and she walked off; we watched the taut movement of her calf muscles as she picked her small steps down the track.
She came back after a while, wearing a dress of some stiff shiny material that creaked as she walked, in a bright purplish pink colour, the colour of hibiscus, if there had been any about. It was strapless, in a boned heart shape that fitted against her chest. She wore the same sandals, and it occurred to me that her walk was as though her body was shackled, that chains prevented the free long steps that her legs were made for. She carried a white plastic handbag, very shiny and cheap-looking, and when she sat down she put it carefully in her lap and held it tightly between her two hands. It had an orange plastic buckle that clashed with the dress. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sadder object than that clumsy white plastic handbag, so big, so shiny, so ugly. Andrea put more whisky in her glass and she took a long sip.
Everybody seemed to know what was happening. Well, up to that point. I wondered that nobody needed to speak of it, but there was evidently an understanding. She held the handbag tightly in one hand a
nd undid the buckle, sliding the other inside the bag. She felt for a moment, and brought out a tarnished brass compact. I’d never seen her wear make-up; powder in that climate would set like mud after rain with creeks of sweat running through it. Andrea’s fine dark skin was never touched by it.
She put the compact on the table, and her hand back in the bag, felt around, and pulled out a snake, a small and, I knew, particularly poisonous one. People took breaths and drew back. Her other hand pushed the bag away, and with a quick movement pulled the boned top of her dress down, marion halligan so her round brown breast popped up over the top of it, and in the same moment she applied the snake to it. All the men stood up, chairs fell over, and then they remained where they were as she dropped the snake and fell back in her chair. She looked up at Spangle, that look of love, and longing, and no hope at all, then slid down into the dust. He kneeled and held her, and after a while she was dead. Not an easy death, or a pretty one, but at least Spangle held her tight through all the indignities of it.
Andrea and Slide and the rest of us walked down to the end of the wharf and looked at the boat. Nobody seemed to think of trying to save her.
Of course not, said Slide. Not a hope.
Don’t you have antivenene in the fridge, I asked. After all, this was a community of poison hunters. They must be prepared for accidents.
His gaze shifted to the bend in the river where the launch had disappeared, taking Andrea and the stretcher that had appeared out of its depths and carried off the shrouded body of Spangle’s wife. We’d laid her on it and wrapped a worn white sheet around her, the creaking hibiscus-coloured dress springing out as we tried to enfold it. Slide shrugged.
It bit her fingers, he said, in the bag. That would have been it, she wouldn’t have needed to apply it to her breast.
Did she have a name, of her own?
Aurora.
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