The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish

by Dido Butterworth

  Beatrice returned to the anthropology store, filled out a label, and threaded a needle with a length of cotton. She then stabbed the foreskin savagely, pulled the needle and thread through, and attached a label to it. Holding it by the label so that it dangled at her side, she walked to the cabinet where she kept the newly registered objects and opened a drawer labelled ‘Pacific Islands: Charms and Fetishes’. Archie’s foreskin was slapped down next to a sorcerer’s bag filled with bits of bone and claws, and Beatrice slammed the drawer shut.

  She was still standing by the cabinet when Giles Mordant visited. He said he wanted to apologise to her, and seemed sorry for what he’d done. Could he see the object again? Beatrice pointed at the drawer. Giles opened it, picked up the foreskin, and put it in his pocket.

  ‘I think you should have labelled it “Archie’s cock-end: an exceedingly tiny specimen!”’ he said. ‘Tell Archie-boy when you next write to him that I’ve got his cock-skin in my wallet, and, blimey, I intend having some fun with it!’

  Chapter 5

  By morning tea Archie’s office was beginning to feel like a cell in the insane asylum. It was impossible for him to think. He needed air. Could Beatrice have been frightened by his uncouth appearance, he wondered? It wouldn’t hurt to buy a new suit and get a haircut. Then he’d go to the Maori’s Head for lunch with whatever colleagues he found there. Perhaps they could shed light on why Beatrice had changed. But first he needed to set up an experiment—one he had devised as he’d walked away from the director’s office that morning. He went to the collection store and returned with three bones—the leg bone of a kangaroo, the rib of a dugong and the jawbone of a human. They had been kept as trophies in native huts, and were stained brown with smoke. He arranged them on a windowsill in the anthropology common area, where they would be exposed to sunlight for several hours each day. Then he placed a piece of cardboard, on which he had scrawled ‘Do Not Touch’, across one end of the bones.

  The heat of the midday sun was baking the city. The place was largely deserted, except in the shadows. Archie, now the very picture of tonsorial and sartorial elegance, strolled down Bourke Street and into Woolloomooloo. Despite lying between the museum and the up-market suburb of Potts Point, the dockland area, known locally as ‘the loo’, had earned a reputation as being the most dangerous part of Sydney. The muddle of narrow lanes between tiny half-derelict terrace houses were the haunt of sailors, where cheap rum and women were easy to be had. It was far grimier than Archie remembered it. Tin lean-tos had been set up in every nook and cranny, and the rags that served as bedding for those sleeping rough lay everywhere.

  Prostitution had always flourished, but now there seemed to be a girl loitering in every doorway. Some, who were not so young, looked so unhappy that Archie decided they’d been put there by their husbands. And the street urchins! They’d increased from a smattering to a persistent cloud. One particularly dishevelled lad was carrying a bowl of soup to a tired-looking whore—a sight that simultaneously touched and revolted Archie.

  ‘Mister, got thruppence?’ The scrap of a specimen looked up at Archie imploringly. His shaved and scabby head hadn’t seen a mother’s care for weeks. Archie handed over a shilling, and suddenly the street was filled with kids scrambling for the coin.

  At the boxing club on Dowling Street there was a commotion. Archie peeked in. Someone had given two scrawny runts gloves, and a crowd of men was egging them on as they clobbered each other. The smaller boxer, who must have been all of eight, already had a split lip, and tears were welling in his eyes. ‘And they call the Venus Islanders savages,’ Archie muttered as he pushed his way through the crowd, grabbed the larger boy and walked to the door. ‘Find a bigger kid to pick on,’ he shouted. He stopped in the street and put the boy down. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked as he untied the boxing gloves.

  ‘Louie Lopes,’ the boy replied. ‘My mum’s dead.’

  Archie forked out another bob.

  It was only when he got to Dago Joe’s fruit barrow, and the old Italian greeted him as if he’d been gone five days rather than five years, that Archie began to feel at home. ‘Some lovely bananas today, Mista Mik?’ Joe cried.

  ‘Not today, Joe. Maybe tomorrow. Good to see you again, though!’

  ‘Buon giorno, Mista Mik. Good onions.’

  ‘Good on you too, Joe.’

  Joe had a genius for mishearing the King’s English. But he was also the most successful fruiterer in East Sydney. His barrow was perpetually surrounded by a gaggle of women. He had once told Archie the secret of his success.

  ‘Don’t serve anybody until there’s plenty customer around. Tell the good story, and make de lady’s eye. That way they stick about, and even more come!’

  Walking had cleared the cobwebs and given Archie a keen appetite for the cheap and cheerful kind of counter lunch the Maori’s Head offered. He decided that he would not ask anyone directly about Beatrice. That would be too embarrassing. But he would keep his ears open.

  The bar was sparsely furnished, dark and cool. White tiles covered the floor and extended halfway up the walls.

  ‘Archie Meek? Been a while hasn’t it, love? Where’d ya get the tan?’

  Nellie had always had a soft spot for him, but before it was because he was a sweet kid. Now, Archie sensed, she might develop a different kind of appreciation. He was about to reply when a stentorian voice hailed him from the gloomy interior. It was Courtenay Dithers.

  ‘Archibald Meek! Long time no see, old chap! How were the Venus Isles? I hope you cadged me a bat or two, and some of those giant rats the place is famous for?’

  When Archie first arrived at the museum he idolised Dithers. A decade and a half older than Archie, the curator of mammals carried his Cambridge polish lightly. His handsome face, with its aquiline nose, looked almost patrician to Archie, while a tinge of sadness around his dark eyes revealed a deep empathy with the world. After lunch, Archie would seek Dithers out for a private conversation about Beatrice. He saw his old friend as an oracle on all things—but especially women. Much later, Archie would think how strange that was, since Dithers had lived alone as long as he’d known him.

  Archie’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. Dithers was taking lunch with some colleagues. Around the table sat the artificer Roger Holdfast and his idiot son Gerald. They were responsible for constructing exhibits, and mounting specimens within them. Holdfast’s crew cut made his head look like a bristly brush. Below it his eyes were haunted and his lips set hard and thin to the point of vanishing. Gerald followed his father around like a puppy. Just now he was staring at Nellie, open-mouthed, as if she were dancing the cancan.

  Next to Gerald sat Eric Sopwith, the retired curator of molluscs. His watery eyes and ruddy nose testimony to a long-standing romance with the bottle. And Giles Mordant was there too, wreathed in the brittle arrogance of a man whose ambitions outreach his abilities. Mordant had disliked Archie from the moment they met, and the feeling soon became mutual. You’d never guess from the look of him, Archie thought, that he made a living stuffing rats and lizards. Such a flash dresser. Everyone said he had tickets on himself. He even wore those newfangled vulcanised India rubber gloves as he gutted and skinned.

  All those present, except Giles, greeted him warmly.

  ‘My shout,’ s
aid Eric. ‘What’ll it be, Archie? Your old favourite, Castlemaine? Bet it’s been a while since you’ve wet your whistle.’

  It had indeed been so long since Archie had drunk anything but yangona that he was quickly tipsy. Between them, Dithers and Sopwith had seen more Pacific islands than Archie had had hot breakfasts, and they were soon roaring with laughter at Archie’s accounts of the predicaments he had got himself into. But when it came to the effects of yangona, Eric became serious. The drink was made from the roots of a shrub, which were chewed by village virgins and spat into a large wooden bowl. There, the saliva and juice fermented into a frothy grey liquor. It was a curiously intoxicating drink.

  ‘I hope ye didn’t have too much of that stuff, laddie,’ said Eric. ‘It has a strange effect on the mind. Ye ken that Kidson went stark raving mad with it in the Feejees? Became paranoid in the end: swore the Methodists were out to get him.’

  At first, Archie had been revolted by the brew. It looked and tasted like old sock water. But it wasn’t possible to live in the Venus Isles without drinking huge quantities of the stuff. At every hut he’d visited he was required to swill down a half-coconut shell of it, and when the men told stories at night, the yangona bowl never ceased doing the rounds. Eventually Archie had become quite fond of it. And he had noticed that the world seemed different after a yangona party.

  Giles Mordant sparked up. ‘The Venus Isles have made you quite a man, haven’t they, Archie? Though not a complete man, I suppose. Just a bit off, eh, old nakker?’

  Mordant’s smarmy superiority irritated Archie—it was as if the assistant taxidermist had something over him. After all, Archie hoped soon to be a curator, and Mordant was a mere technician. Moreover, he had no idea what Mordant was talking about, and evidently neither had anybody else. The conversation reverted to Archie’s island adventures.

  Dithers asked whether Archie had anywhere to stay. ‘Doss down with me, old chap, if you like. I’ve still got the room in Stanley Street, and I’m hoping to go to Africa to study big cats before too long. Got a grant application in with the National Geographic Society, and could be away some time. If I get the funding you’re welcome to look after the place while I’m gone.’

  By the time they’d eaten lunch and were onto their second round of shouts, Archie was asking about the museum.

  ‘You should know that Polkinghorne’s vanished,’ said Dithers with some emphasis.

  Vanished? Cecil Polkinghorne was Archie’s supervisor. It was to him that the painfully shy teenager had applied for a museum cadetship. He was a queer old coot, sure enough, but Archie had grown rather fond of him. Polkinghorne had started out as a museum guard, and there his career might have ended if he hadn’t developed a fascination with the Egyptian room. Enthralled with antiquities, he took a course in classical archaeology, following which he applied for a curator’s job.

  The museum had its own reason for wanting to move Polkinghorne on. He was without doubt a diligent guard. But a purple growth had sprouted on the tip of his tongue and swiftly swelled to the size of a cherry. Not only had it given him prodigious buck teeth, but it left him incapable of speaking without spraying his listeners with saliva. When Vere Griffon arrived he’d experienced the problem firsthand. The guard, who was somewhat in awe of the new director, had drawn himself up at his approach, saluted, and sprayed out, ‘Cecil Polkinghorne, sir. At your service!’

  Complaints from the sprinkled and befuddled had been accumulating, and it was with some relief that the director had, upon Polkinghorne’s graduation, assigned him to a role away from the public—as curator of archaeology.

  ‘What do you mean, vanished?’ asked Archie.

  ‘Just what I said. Around three years ago. He left work one evening and never came back. The most popular theory is that he fell off a ferry and drowned. But no one saw anything, and no body was found.’

  ‘There’s summat rum about it, Archie. I fear the worst.’ Eric Sopwith shook his head, his eyes more watery than ever.

  ‘Utter rubbish, Sopwith,’ exclaimed Mordant contemptuously. ‘Bumstocks saw him getting onto the ferry that night, and he didn’t disembark at Balmain. No doubt about it. Polkinghorne drowned and his body was eaten by sharks. The harbour’s full of them now that the abattoir at Homebush dumps blood and offal into the water by the ton.’

  For a moment silence reigned. ‘I best be off,’ said Roger Holdfast. He and Gerald rose from the table as one. ‘The skeleton of the giant sloth needs articulation, and work for the new exhibition is falling behind.’ Dithers announced he had a report on giant rats to complete.

  Mordant seemed to find the diminished company not to his liking. As the assistant taxidermist stood up he got out his wallet with a flourish, and winked at Nellie. ‘There’s a few treasures in here, love. How would you like to be paid?’ There had been no tab. Nellie looked confused as she peered into the open wallet. Mordant snapped the wallet shut and turned to Archie. ‘Welcome back to the happy ship HMAS Museum, Archie. Consider this my homecoming present.’

  Archie, concluding that there was something seriously awry with Mordant, was about to rise too when Sopwith laid a hand on his arm. ‘How about staying for another’un, Archie? I’ve a few things I need to tell ye.’

  Archie got in first. ‘How could Cecil Polkinghorne have disappeared? It beggars belief, Eric! I still remember the first day I came to work. There was the director in the centre of the long table, sipping his tea, with the curators lined up on either side. Polkinghorne was immediately on his right. It looked like Michelangelo’s Last Supper.’

  ‘Aye, those were the days!’ enthused Eric. ‘The institution’d be a far better place if the director had continued taking tea with his staff, rather than locking himself up in that great office of his.’

  Mind you, it hadn’t all been fun working with Polkinghorne, Archie recalled. When they were alone in the collection, the older man would sometimes become rather too excited, especially when he was explaining the process of mummification and how the bowels were removed with a hook via the anus. The salivary spraying was one thing, but the way Polkinghorne would stand rather too close, his hands groping about as if trying to insert a hook into his young cadet, was quite another. Nothing untoward ever happened, but in those first few years Archie sometimes felt that it might.

  ‘Could it have been anything else?’ Archie asked Sopwith. ‘Could he have…offended somebody?’

  ‘Laddie, take my word for it! There’s summat suspicious—mighty suspicious—about Polkinghorne’s vanishing. I saw the man on that very day. He was not happy; had a falling out with the director, they say.’

  ‘But not bad enough to top himself, surely?’

  ‘This place is mighty changed, Archie. And so is our director. He’s become angry and domineering. And he’s rifling the collections for their treasures. After Polkinghorne went, he shipped off the two best mummies to America, to be sold. I tell ye Archie, there’s summat mighty rum goin’ on.’

  Beer disappeared down Sopwith’s throat like water in desert sands, especially as the cry ‘last round’ rang out. To his shock, Archie realised that it was nearly 6 p.m.—way after closing time at the museum. He was more than a little unsteady on his legs as he meandered back to his office. It had been a momentous first day back.

  The su
n had sunk low by the time Archie left the museum, but it was still stinking hot and the road reeked of molten asphalt. Dithers’ rooms were only a few hundred yards away, behind the museum, and Archie decided to go on foot. His trunk had been delivered to the museum, and he struggled to get it across Yurong Street and into the cash and carry, where he bought some biscuits as a gift for Dithers. He was covered in sweat as he dragged it along the street and up the narrow stairs of the boarding house to Dithers’ room.

  The white walls and ceiling were stained yellowish-brown with tobacco smoke. A narrow barred window, which was nailed shut, ornamented the far wall. ‘Put your trunk down there, Archie,’ Dithers said, pointing to a tiny clear space at the foot of one of two narrow beds that took up much of the room. He was absent-mindedly puffing on a durry while reading a scientific publication on the diversity of Australian bats, and seemed not to notice the heat. Archie could reach the space indicated only by stepping around and over piles of dirty clothes and books. Dithers was notorious for his chaotic office, but it was a paragon of tidiness compared with this. It dawned on Archie just how cramped life would be until Courtenay left for Africa.

  Dithers put down his publication, pulled a whisky bottle from under his bed, and groped about in a pile of soiled shirts before coming up with some shot glasses. ‘We must have a dram to welcome you home!’