A Lesser Dependency

by Peter Benson

  ‌1

  In 1964, when Leonard was ten, old enough to think he knew what to expect, and bored, he walked from his home on Diego Garcia to play in a pair of wrecked planes that lay in the jungle beyond the village; operated by the British to protect their Indian Ocean interests, abandoned at the end of the second world war and haunted by the phantom buzz of bust radios and the noise of ripped wires twitching in the wind; Leonard was warned by his sister, Odette: half his age but she stared him in the eyes and shook her head.

  ‘I’m going, anyway,’ he said, and walked away from her. She watched the back of his head. He didn’t turn round. ‘Alright,’ she said and followed him.

  The sun boiled the sweat on their faces as they left their village and walked down the track that ran behind huts and vegetable gardens. Birds cried, they disturbed flocks of chickens and gangs of rats as a breeze clacked the leaves of the coconut palms that rose above the shore.

  ‘Come on!’ yelled Leonard. His sister was lingering by flowers. ‘We can pick them on the way home.’

  ‘I don’t want to pick them, anyway,’ she said, and caught up. ‘They’d only have got in the way. They smelt nice, though,’ she said, but he didn’t answer.

  They walked through the plantations and jungle. Coconut harvesters yelled and asked them what was happening, an abandoned animal shelter confirmed their path. Its thatch had been blown away, the roof beams were cracked and where animals had been safe was now open and pointless to mend. Whoever had built the place had given up and gone somewhere else.

  An hour’s walking made them hungry. Leonard said, ‘I’ll climb,’ at a coconut tree, but Odette said, ‘No. You catch.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I stretch further,’ she said, and was shinning before her brother could stop her.

  She climbed like a monkey, reached the nuts, waved and scared a cloud of birds away from the tree tops to the lagoon, where they flew around.

  She cut a coconut and threw it to her brother. He shook his head, but he was used to her. He cracked the nut on a rock, spilt the milk and cut some flesh with a knife (his own property).

  On Diego Garcia, the ocean was never more than yards away. They walked to a beach, sat on a rock, chewed and stared at familiar things. Leonard cleaned his knife on a cloth and spat into the lagoon. ‘One of thee finest natural harbours in the world’ – he didn’t know that. Others did, though – some people who ate coconuts with forks and did polite things with napkins.

  Leonard and Odette had never seen a napkin. They wiped their mouths with the backs of their hands and watched the sea rustle the coral flakes and leave tiny shells in ridges by their feet. The water was smooth and shone with a luminescence though the sun was high and dazed them. Tiny fish came to the shallows and dipped around, watching for food. The boy tossed some coconut into the water. The pieces sank, the fish sucked and blew.

  ‘We should have a net.’

  ‘They’re not worth it.’

  ‘Nice colours, though. See…’

  Beach disappeared over every horizon, thick and constantly moving jungle fringed the frame. A stand of palm trees whispering, wild donkeys butting each other in clearings, the distant rumble of the coconut train and the call of a fisherman in the lagoon. He was casting into deep water, seeing the fish before they knew he was about.

  ‘That’s Christian’s father,’ said Leonard.

  ‘No. It’s Michel.’

  ‘It isn’t…’

  ‘Leonard! I know who it is!’

  ‘You…’

  ‘MICHEL!’ yelled Odette.

  ‘YES!’

  They could have stayed on the beach for hours, but the thought of the forbidden made Leonard stand up and say, ‘Come on!’ He tucked his knife into his belt.

  They walked for the rest of the morning and half the afternoon before reaching the planes. Odette had been saying they were lost and should have done something else when Leonard brushed away some undergrowth and saw them.

  ‘NO!’ he yelled, ‘LOOK!’

  The planes were Catalina flying boats, blown from their marine moorings by rare cyclonic winds in 1944. Twenty years of jungle growth had swamped them, but in places their hulls shone through the vegetation. Leonard’s eyes widened as he moved towards them. Odette shook her head. She wasn’t impressed by other people’s junk.

  ‘I’ll be swimming,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t go far,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘You’re scared!’

  ‘Me?’ He looked at her. ‘Scared?’

  ‘You are. You’ve got that look on your face. I can tell. I always know.’

  ‘You can’t. Don’t pretend you’re Mother.’

  Odette looked away. ‘I’m going swimming.’

  Leonard sat in the remains of one of the aeroplanes and hummed to himself. He tried to imagine it breaking from the jungle and rising to circle the lagoon before dipping and flying west.

  West (1200 miles away) was Mauritius – his father had been there – it was a big country. He climbed into the place where the cockpit had been, sat down beneath a faded pin-up of Dorothy Lamour and imagined the smashed instruments and broken controls working and clouds passing.

  He thought about other countries he could be flying over, and oceans, as the noise of Odette’s swimming came through the trees. Africa, France, England.

  He was thinking when something cracked in the jungle and everything hushed. Birds stopped singing, and when he listened for his sister, her splashing seemed to melt away. Another crack, a breeze and the sun was sinking.

  Stories of spirit pilots and the phantom buzz of broken radios had attracted Leonard, but when he was alone and where some ghosts might be, a creeping zinged down his spine and jangled in his ankles. Crack, again, and he yelled ‘OI!’, jumped out of the ‘plane and ran through the jungle to the beach.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard something! By the ‘plane.’

  ‘Of course you did. All sorts of things live out here,’ she said, and walked out of the water and along the sand.

  ‘But it wasn’t just anything. It was breathing.’

  ‘You couldn’t hear that!’

  ‘I could!’

  ‘Scared now?’ said Odette.

  ‘No… I’m not.’

  They walked home as the sunset took daylight and wrung it bloody red. Pieces of sky turned fleshy pink and burnt into the night, boiling the sea orange, turning it gold where it met the sun…

  ‘We’ll be late for food,’ said Odette, and pulled her brother along the beach.

  ‘It’ll keep.’

  ‘Not hot. You want it hot?’

  ‘Alright.’

  Leonard’s imagined crack followed him through the trees. He wondered what shape and colour it was. He had heard all about the spirits Georges’ mother worried about. Odette mumbled about why did she always end up following him.

  They passed a hamlet. People called and gutted fish on stones. Other children played with ducks, women didn’t bother to worry. Cats chased rats up trees. The smell of cooking and woodsmoke, and the cry of a bird drifted across the lagoon as the roar of surf broke along the seaward reefs.

  ‘Come on,’ said Odette. ‘We’ve walking to do…’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘Faster.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  They walked as the stars came out and the lights of their village blinked across the water. These illuminated the old huts and neatly thatched roofs. A signpost pointed to places everyone knew the direction to; old people whispered. Three men pushed a stalled jeep along the road as Leonard and Odette walked up the beach and were home to their mother’s ‘I was going to call you. It’s hot!’

  ‌2

  East Point, Diego Garci
a’s largest village, had a shop where the islanders – the Ilois – could stock up. It could supply food, clothes, fishing tackle, wine and wedding rings (sold on the understanding that a Christian wedding was planned). Its counter was worn and marked from people’s hands rubbing it and knives, sometimes. The shopkeeper was a whittler. He was whittling when Leonard appeared, kicked a stone and asked for a barrel or crate.

  ‘Take a crate. I’ve got plenty. They’ll only go on the fire.’ He pointed to some.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you for asking. You could have had it anyway, but it was better having you ask.’

  ‘Odette told me to.’

  ‘She’s a good girl. She was here yesterday and I thought that. For such a young girl too – full of news.’ The shopkeeper shook his head at the thought.

  ‘She looks after me.’

  Leonard dragged the crate home, sat on the beach and watched his father in his boat on the lagoon. A flock of birds soared over it, waiting for scraps as coconut and banana trees waved in a lazed, generous breeze. A crab scuttled across the beach. The sky was clear and deep blue. The sun rose.

  Leonard pulled the crate down to the tide-line and yelled to his sister.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come here. Help me,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Odette didn’t hear on purpose. She wanted to clean a duck. She had reared it herself.

  ‘Help me!’

  ‘I’m cleaning the duck…’

  ‘But I can’t move this!’ The crate had snagged on some rocks. He tugged. ‘It’s stuck.’

  The sea was as clear as breath. A lorry back-fired and stalled on the road behind them. Their father cast a line, squinted at something he couldn’t make out on the shore, and he waited.

  Ducks had been introduced to Diego Garcia by enterprising people with good ideas. Aylesburys, Khaki Campbells… Odette’s was a Muscovy. The breed is a good forager, intelligent, grows quickly to an enormous size, and though not a heavy layer the female is an attentive sitter. They are not averse to life in the tropics – Piebald, Plain White, Black and Blue, Black and White – the breed comes in a range of colours, all have yellow legs.

  They have a reputation for bad-tempered behaviour, and many breeders treat them as geese or keep Cayugas instead, but Odette knew nothing about this. Hers was gentle, let her stroke his bill, and didn’t think for a moment that his mistress was anything but sentimental about him. He didn’t know he was meat. He couldn’t count to five, he didn’t know she’d forget his noise. She smiled and kissed the top of his head.

  ‘It’s stuck!’ Leonard would not give up. He heaved and fell over. Odette said, ‘Leonard,’ to the duck, and shook her head.

  ‘Please!’

  ‘I’m coming,’ she said, and went to help.

  He pulled and she pushed until the crate bounced off the rocks and into the lagoon. He picked up a paddle and steered out. She gave one last push. She stood up to her waist in the water and her dress floated around her like a flower-bed. Leonard balanced himself, sat back and headed for his father.

  ‘I’m coming!’

  ‘Don’t sink!’ Odette yelled. ‘I’m not saving you!’

  ‘I don’t need saving!’

  ‘Good. Because I won’t.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to, even if I was!’

  No wind.

  The sound of splashing and barely moving ocean-swept miles. It touched a sand spit and dabbed at some beach grass. The sun boiled, sheets of heat slammed anything that moved.

  Nothing moved. A veil came down and covered everything, so any noise became silence, silence curled like smoke and turned into a sound. A coconut dropped out of a tree, thudded onto the beach, rolled across a line of weed and into the sea. Odette blinked and broke the spell. She watched her brother paddle away, whistling and waving his free hand above his head.

  Raphael watched his son come in a crate. He shook his head and reeled his line. He looked at his catch and gobbed a ball of phlegm into the air. He tidied a corner of sail and leant over the side.

  ‘What’re you doing out here!’ he shouted. A reminding puff of wind blew off the ocean and ruffled the lagoon. ‘And in that! You could drown!’

  ‘It’s not leaking! I could go further than you…’

  ‘But you won’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you stop here.’ Raphael tossed a rope. ‘And catch that.’

  The rope was long and heavy. Raphael had brought it years before and coiled it carefully. ‘Pull yourself in,’ he said, and he hauled the sail before picking Leonard out of the crate and sitting him in the boat.

  ‘I paddled all that way,’

  ‘You’re a big boy now.’

  Raphael had done the same when he was a boy. He tied the crate to the back of the boat and let Leonard steer home. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘I steered for my father to a ship that moored… there.’ He pointed across the lagoon to where the remains of a jetty stuck out. ‘We gave them vegetables and chickens for their beer and cigarettes. I had a photograph taken.’

  ‘A photograph? Where?’

  ‘I never got it. He was going to post it but forgot. I kept a cigarette packet but it blew off.’

  ‘What did you keep it for?’

  ‘It had a woman on it, sitting on a gate in America. There was a mill and an aeroplane.’

  ‘I could look for it.’

  ‘No point.’ Raphael shook his head, stood up and began to furl the sail. ‘I lost it years ago.’

  An hour later, Odette’s duck ruffled its feathers and aimed a beady eye at Raphael. The man flashed a knife. It was sharp, likely and its tip was serrated. ‘Here.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Hold him,’ he said to Leonard.

  A pair of dogs barked at a lorry. The humidity was steady. The duck quacked.

  Leonard laid the duck on its back and put a stick across its neck. The sound of laughter drifted across the lagoon.

  Odette smiled. Her friend was going to be a meal, stuffed and roasted, surrounded by cooked vegetables on a table set up on the beach. She fetched a chair.

  Her mother was sorting rice. She had a jar of coconut milk to pour over the bird and a pile of tomatoes.

  ‘Maude?’ Raphael called her. ‘Fetch a sack. I’ll do it now.’

  ‘I’ve got this one.’

  ‘It’ll do.’

  Everyone was happy; they looked forward to eating and watched Raphael strop the knife before taking the duck’s beak, pulling it and snapping the neck. He cut the head off, tossed it onto the beach and started to pluck. Feathers filled the air, Odette sneezed, a dog picked up the head and took it away.

  Leonard stuffed the bag with feathers while the knife dripped on the beach. Maude told him to wash it off before she poured some drink and sat down to wait for the duck to cook.

  ‌3

  A tractor hauling guano stalled and spilt half its load on the road behind Maude’s hut. The driver shrugged, said, ‘Suppose I’ve got to fetch a shovel,’ and began to walk back the way he’d come. Maude watched him go before shouting, ‘Fetch some bags! And buckets! Quickly.’ She pointed at the guano. ‘We’ll have some of that, RUN!’

  Many people collected the guano and carried it home for their gardens. Leonard threw some at Odette. When he showed Maude, the woman didn’t say anything. She was carrying a wild donkey. She was small, but the donkeys were small too, more like big dogs.

  She was digging the garden and waiting for guano. She heard a donkey in a ditch, so she climbed into the ditch and began to heave the animal out. Leonard and Odette came back to find her walking out of the jungle with it in her arms, and when they asked her what she was doing she said, ‘Giving it a lift.’

  The children laughed and said something stupid, but they couldn’t see their mother’s expression. The donkey was in the way. Small donkey, small face, a big laugh for the children. But the animal had broken a leg and couldn’t walk on its own. It struggled but Maude could restrain
it. A rooster crowed.

  ‘He’s broken his leg,’ said Maude.

  ‘Will it mend?’ said Odette.

  ‘In the end. He’ll need tending.’

  ‘I’ll help.’

  ‘I know you will.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Leonard. He was quieter than his sister, and often left out. Not this time – he arranged some leaves under a propped sheet of galvanised. ‘He’ll like this bed,’ he said.

  ‘It’s better than ours!’

  ‘Or mine!’ Maude laughed and pinched him, and when the tractor driver arrived with a shovel she laughed as the man scratched his head and stared at the sky, as if the guano had been sucked up and into the clouds.

  Like her children, her parents and her grandparents’ grandparents whose bodies had been mourned with the spirit-seeker and the story-teller present at Minni-Minni, Maude had been born on the island, dropped in the sand and tuned to the rhythms of tiny island life or twisted like a lemon in a drink. Doing the same things for years. She felt messages in her bones.

  Presentiment. She felt a spasm, just sitting on the veranda. A girl had gone into labour, three miles away. No relation, it was evening, Maude ran all the way without telling anyone where she was going. Leonard and Odette watched her go and sat down to wait for their father to come home.

  The girl was lying on coconut mats with women all around. The atmosphere in the hut was warm and relaxed; a chicken sat on the bed and blinked.

  Maude acted as reassurer to the girl, who trusted the woman. Maude’s reputation had aged to myth; the best counsellor, confessor and soother. A dog barked, some men hung about outside with bottles, back early from the plantations and wanting food now; they drank, smoked cigarettes and listened for the girl to take long, deep breaths.

  She did. The sun bent flowers out of clouds and the girl went ‘woo woo woo’. ‘Woo woo woo!’ Maude held her hand and made her count ‘One, two three, four… count sparrows in the trees!’ she said, and patted a damp cloth across the girl’s forehead.

  When the contractions quietened and the girl rested her head to one side and gazed at the lagoon through gaps in the walls, Maude dampened her own forehead and remembered her children coming. They had been easy births, and both times Raphael had helped. He was an unusual Ilois man, and took time off from work in the plantations to be there. His big hands were cut but gentle when they wrapped themselves around one of hers and he told her to count. ‘Count sparrows in the trees,’ he’d said, ‘or wagons on the coconut train.’ It had been trundling through the jungle as Leonard’s head appeared and when Raphael yelled about ‘a boy!’ Maude sat up immediately, took the child, wiped his face and said, ‘Pass me a cloth. Just look at the mess! I can’t do it with my hands…’