The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  From the row of Hornes, Jennifer Horne-Smith’s voice rang out. ‘Yes, absolutely!’

  George Bogenvanu’s eyes flicked in her direction before he continued. ‘Today I come here to you by state-of-the-art twenty-first century technology, an Airbus H175 helicopter. I come from important Pacific Islands Forum meetings in major cities. From meetings discussing vital world matters like global warming and rising ocean levels.’

  He paused and sighed deeply. ‘Nevertheless, I take the time to observe old traditions’ (here he slapped his broad, grass-skirted backside) ‘and to make proper amends for a small, unfortunate but understandable moment in history.’

  In the crowd some women began moaning and keening again. George Bogenvanu waved an avuncular hand in their direction before continuing.

  ‘Their tears well from deep inside their hearts. Some of our people believe today’s ceremony will lift the curse on Okina which they think has blighted their lives and is drowning our island. The curse that is rapidly sinking our home. They believe God has always looked down on us for killing a missionary. For clubbing him to death. For cutting up his body on that flat rock over there – the Isaac Horne Rock, as we call it. For roasting him and eating him.’

  The Horne descendants all strained to see the Isaac Horne Rock, and Julie Truscott and Catherine Underhill exclaimed ‘Oh my God!’ and ‘No!’ and held their hands to their mouths. Light thunderclaps rolled over the mountains behind the village.

  ‘That’s why it was important for us to have this ceremony of reconciliation on this major anniversary.’ George Bogenvanu was winding up now. ‘Let me say we are deeply touched by your family’s presence. I speak for all Okina in wishing you, the descendants of the Reverend Isaac Horne, the greatest joy of forgiveness as we finally end this historical disagreement. God bless you.’

  Jennifer clapped vigorously, and the other Hornes, slowly at first, followed her example.

  Did he actually apologise? Damian wondered.

  *

  At sunset the island women laid out a party on the beach: a feast of beef, pork, chicken, oysters and fish; of cassava, taro, yams, coconuts and heaped baskets of fruit; with coconut-shell bowls of kava and bottles of beer to drink, as well as Australian and New Zealand wines flown in with George Bogenvanu on the Pacific Islands Forum helicopter.

  The trade winds blew more gently now, raucous birds began their night chorus in the palms, and the official party was ushered forward to sit in a circle on special cushions on the sand. As drinks were served, Bradley Horne got to his feet, with a little difficulty, and declared, ‘Let us now toast the generous and kind people of Okina!’

  Awkwardly, some clumsily standing, others sighing and half-rising before sinking down again, and some doggedly unmoving, the other Hornes raised their drinking utensils and repeated, ‘To the people of Okina!’ and Kevin Horne from Auckland, the oldest descendant, added loudly, ‘Happy anniversary!’

  Bradley Horne, a broadcaster on KEAR Christian Family Radio back in San Francisco, frowned and continued. ‘I’ve always seen myself as following in Isaac’s footsteps, and I believe that as good Christians we can now move on into the future. The past is the past. Sure, even a ritual killing seems wrong to us, and seeing where he died, where he was dismembered, whew. And, understandably, being cannibalised on top of that was always hard to accept . . .’

  Kevin Horne interrupted with a laugh. ‘We heard you Okinans even boiled his boots.’

  Bradley cleared his throat, raised his voice and continued. ‘But we’ve never borne any hatred to this village. Grandpa Isaac knew the risks when he came here. It’s what happened in those days when good men tried to spread God’s word. It was the island custom. But you folks have shown us great sympathy and kindness and Christian humility today.’

  As thunder rolled again across the mountains, he paused theatrically. ‘I’d like to think the coming rain is the sign of a new beginning. I feel the spirit of Isaac Horne is now at rest.’

  George Bogenvanu clapped half-heartedly. Then, still traditionally bare-chested and barelegged, he adjusted his grass skirt, buttock-bumped Kevin Horne aside, and squeezed himself in between Lisa and Jennifer.

  ‘It’s not us that’s stuck in the Dark Ages,’ he muttered. ‘With dirty fossil fuels. High-energy emissions.’ He turned to Lisa. ‘It thunders every evening. Believe me, there’s no rain coming.’

  *

  Kevin Horne had begun the feast with a brave swig of kava before switching to beer. Now, nursing a glass of red wine, he was keen to share ancestor-data with distant family members.

  ‘You others mightn’t be aware that the New Zealand Hornes inherited some papers that Isaac delivered to the Royal Geographical Society. They detailed his earlier missions around these islands. On one occasion he counted thirty-five human jawbones hanging from a hut.’

  Jennifer broke in. ‘George, that was a wonderful ceremony,’ she said. Her hand rested momentarily on his bare shoulder. ‘You have a beautiful island.’

  ‘This is like a dream,’ Lisa offered.

  ‘The Royal Geographical Society applauded his speech,’ Kevin persisted. “Twenty smoke-dried human hands were hanging in the same house,” Isaac told them. Outside, he’d counted eighty-five notches in a coconut tree. The natives told him each notch represented a human body they’d cooked and eaten there.’

  George Bogenvanu looked up from his conversation with Lisa, sucked an oyster from its shell, then another. ‘So that’s what the savages told him?’

  ‘Very long ago now,’ Jennifer commented. ‘On another planet.’

  ‘Getting back to the boiled-boots business,’ said Kevin, ‘apparently after eating Isaac here on Okina, they cooked his boots too, and ate them with a vegetable called bele. Can you shed any light on that sacred habit?’

  ‘Ha. ha. Bele, also known as slippery cabbage. My favourite vegetable, bele. You’re eating it now!’ rumbled George Bogenvanu. ‘But no Methodists’ boots on the menu tonight. Or Methodists either, unfortunately.’

  Then, to Jennifer’s obvious displeasure, he ignored the rest of the party and focused his attention on Lisa.

  *

  Jennifer wasn’t the only one rattled by George Bogenvanu’s concentration on Lisa. Seated by his hosts on the other side of the festive beach circle from her, Damian naturally noticed another man’s keen interest. Especially a huge, semi-naked, exotic and (in the circumstances) influential man. The master of this particular universe.

  And his wife was hanging on this man’s every word. Their heads were almost touching. Intimate. Meanwhile, Jennifer was now ostentatiously disregarding them. Nervily, she scrabbled through her bag, exclaimed ‘Shit!’ and asked a serving woman for a cigarette.

  Damian, jealous and becoming angry, was struck by the helplessness that sometimes affected him on boats and islands. Even in his home city, at a party aboard a yacht on Sydney Harbour. Even on New Year’s Eve. Especially on New Year’s Eve. The realisation that you couldn’t get off the boat if you wanted to. You couldn’t leave. The same applied to islands. You had no control over events on an island. You were the dupe of whoever was in charge.

  In this case, not until the bloody Reef Explorer picked them up tomorrow afternoon. Weather permitting.

  Meanwhile, what was the protocol for disrupting a cannibal descendant’s flirtation with the wife of a cannibal victim’s descendant? As a civilised person, an honoured visitor (as the islanders insisted, despite his present cross-legged discomfort on the sand), what could he do?

  And then chief Tomasi Tetuani, sitting beside him, leaned across and began peppering him with facts and figures on Pacific Islanders’ superior football skills and overwhelming representation in the rugby teams of bigger nations, his hulking physique blocking Damian’s view of Lisa and George Bogenvanu. And when he next looked, they were gone from the party.

  A phrase, a sentence, loomed over Damian, and made his head throb. Words to do with the islanders’ ceremony, words for their saying s
orry, for making amends. The Okinans insisted on it:

  There has to be an element of exchange.

  *

  The Horne family’s accommodation was a tin-roofed and louvred guesthouse behind the church: separate male and female dormitories used for visiting Presbyterians and VIPs and, come election time, touring politicians.

  Knowing no other place to look for Lisa, Damian made his way there, his mood worsened by Jennifer’s bitter announcement as he’d left the party: ‘If you’re looking for your wife, she disappeared with George.’

  ‘It’s OK. They’re just . . .’ he began, and didn’t know how to finish.

  ‘Sure,’ said Jennifer. ‘Just a bit of cultural appropriation.’

  The birds were silent now, the wind had dropped completely and he could hear the surf booming even louder on the reef. Flying foxes whirled and flapped over the village, and crabs scuttled across the square and over the church steps. The air smelled of fish and frangipanis.

  The male dormitory was in shadow and there was no movement inside. On the beds were only the darker lumps of their travel luggage. In the female quarters, however, there were quiet voices and the glow of lamplight. He went up the steps and his wife and George Bogenvanu were there.

  ‘This is Telei,’ said Lisa, introducing a small girl of six or seven. ‘Say hello. Her name means “precious”. Tomorrow in another ceremony she’ll be handed to you.’

  She was smiling warmly and her hand was on the girl’s hair. Damian had no conversation, on any level or on any subject. He and Lisa had no children of their own.

  ‘We took a dear person from your family,’ said George Bogenvanu. ‘So we give you Telei, a dear person of ours, in exchange.’

  ‘Not physically. A ceremonial gesture only,’ Lisa said. ‘Telei is an orphan with a serious case of the local eyesight problem. George told me all about her and her grim chances otherwise. I’ve said we’ll accept responsibility for her treatment and education. We’ll keep in touch with her.’

  ‘In anything to do with cannibal compensation and reparations I always ask the wife,’ said George Bogenvanu.

  After I spotted a python climbing into her picnic basket and yelled out, I got chatting to a young woman down at Black Lake. She had a badly scarred face and a baby. She flipped one of her sandals at the snake, casually backhand, like she was throwing a frisbee; the snake uncoiled itself from the basket and slid up the nearest camphor laurel, and we got talking.

  Diamond pythons aren’t venomous but it’s still a conversation starter to find one nestled in your sandwiches, near a newborn baby and all, and we went on to discuss local snakes in general, especially the number of dangerous eastern browns around this summer.

  ‘I hold the cane toad responsible,’ I told her. ‘It’s their fault the snake ratio is out of whack.’ I explained how before the toads migrated down here from Queensland, red-bellied black snakes used to keep the browns’ numbers down by eating their offspring. But not only did the toads get a taste for young black snakes, the adult blacks liked to eat cane toads, and then they died from the toads’ poison.

  Sitting cross-legged on the grassy bank overlooking the lake, she seemed a typically serene Northern Rivers girl. Tumbling blond hair. Slender, tanned limbs. But under the hair her left cheek was shiny and crumpled like silver foil. The other side was pretty. While I tried not to stare at her scar, I outlined my theory and she nodded in an attentive way, brushed a bunch of hair aside and aimed the baby’s mouth at a breast. The fontanelle began pulsating gently and the baby’s ginger head fluff moved up and down as it nursed. It was a very new baby, still red and raw looking.

  ‘End result,’ I went on, ‘fewer black snakes – venomous, but relatively shy with humans – and many more browns – highly venomous and aggressive.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ she said.

  After our lengthy snake talk we introduced ourselves and I said, ‘Do you mind,’ and I sat down on the bank as well. ‘I’ve been walking for two hours. Daily exercise.’

  She said her name was Cynthia but she called herself China. ‘So you’ve been to China?’ I asked. ‘Or maybe you admire Chinese things?’

  She said no and not particularly. When she was little her father had called her China, as in rhyming slang: China plate – mate.

  ‘We were very close, daddy and daughter. Then when I was twelve he went out for cigarettes one Saturday night, just like in a film, and never came back. He strolled off eating a Granny Smith apple.’

  Ten years later she was working behind the bar in a Newcastle pub when her father came in. That was a shock. He saw her, downed his beer quickly and hurried off down Hunter Street. ‘I didn’t run after him. If that was his attitude, bugger him.’ Of course he had a drink problem. He was a country-town pharmacist who could never remember whether he’d made up a prescription correctly. He couldn’t trust himself and threw so much medicine down the sink that he went out of business.

  China wasn’t at all self-conscious about her naked breasts but she slanted her head so the non-scarred side was facing me. She said her baby daughter’s name was Ayeshia, pronounced Asia, and she spelled it out. Keeping up the China connection, I guessed.

  ‘We live down there on Sugarcane Road,’ she told me, pointing south-west. Her partner Pete was part-managing a macadamia-nut farm for city investors: three Sydney surgeons needing a tax break. They didn’t necessarily want a profit and were embarrassed that the nut price was going gangbusters at present. The Asians loved them.

  ‘Pete’s definitely growing only maccas these days,’ she said firmly, switching the baby’s head to the other breast. ‘Not weed any more, not since the police crackdown.’

  I said I’d heard of that. Helicopters and sniffer dogs, grumpy cops in riot gear tramping through the tropical rainforest, getting tangled up in the lawyer vines and spiky palms. Meanwhile bikers went unmolested and made ice in their backyard sheds.

  She shook her head in wonderment and the scar glistened in the sunlight. ‘Even the old pot establishment that made this area what it was, the pre-hydroponic guys, are under threat these days. Even cop-friendly blokes – old drinking mates, top surfers and footballers – are being arrested.’

  The far bank of the lake was quivering in a heat mirage over Sugarcane Road so you couldn’t tell where the lake ended and the cane fields began: a chequerboard plateau of sugarcane stretching to the horizon. An ibis stalked past and two purple swamp-hens scuttled along the shore.

  ‘Your Pete’s not being harassed then?’ I asked. A bit impertinent of me, but age allows you that sort of presumption. By now I was wishing a good life for this frank, scarred girl. And her baby daughter, born in the wrong climate for a redhead.

  ‘Not now. He did a lot of thinking and reading inside, and he’s more into the natural life than ever. He’s not a stoner any more, or a dealer. He’s so obsessive these days it’s not true, fighting the good fight against fluoridation of the water supply and child vaccinations, anything governmental. Every weekend he’s out poisoning camphor laurels. You know that camphors are feral weeds that poison rivers and kill wildlife? Not to mention being bad for humans. They’re not native Australian trees – they were introduced from Asia.’

  ‘From China. And we’re sitting in the shade of one now.’

  She let that go. ‘The camphors are the toxic enemy that Pete’s sworn to eliminate. He says they even encourage drug use.’ A flicker of irony showed on her face. ‘Their thick canopies hide the crops from the police choppers.’

  ‘He must have his work cut out.’ The Northern Rivers landscape is enveloped and softened by millions of camphor laurels. Everywhere, the attractive rounded trees moderate the scenery. From the air the ground looks like the green European countryside of the model railway I had as a kid. At ground level the trees remind me of big bunches of broccoli. The camphors thrive where the cedar cutters and cattlemen razed the rainforest known as the Big Scrub in the nineteenth century. Farmers hate them because they shoot
up everywhere. The hippies hate them because they’re not native vegetation. They’re ideologically unsound and not your noble Aussie eucalypts. Farmers and Greens in cahoots against a common enemy – a tree. That’s one for the books.

  While we watched a cormorant choking on an eel, I thought about little Ayeshia, still guzzling away on the breast. And of rubella, polio, meningococcal and tetanus, too, not to mention measles, mumps, whooping cough and diphtheria and the free government vaccinations that could prevent kids from catching them these days. And the daughter Margie and I lost to meningitis in 1984 – Emily. And then Margie going suddenly three months ago.

  I’d never sleep if I didn’t walk every day to tire myself out, to slow down the adrenaline. Around the lake takes me two hours at medium pace, then I dive in to cool off.

  The cormorant gagged for about five minutes but eventually got the eel down. I was surprised the bird could even see an eel in Black Lake. Tea-trees dip into the lake and leach their tannin into the water. In the shallows it’s yellow and warm and disconcertingly piss-coloured, but as you wade out the water turns orange, then quickly reddens to a deep burgundy. Dark as a blood test.

  Twenty metres from shore the redness darkens to pitch black. By the time you’re waist-deep you can’t see the bottom. Then the lake bed falls sharply away. Who knows how deep the lake is now? The water temperature is layered, warmish for a metre or so down, then suddenly cold. Swimming overarm feels threatening if you have your eyes open. I swim backstroke so I don’t have the sensation of swimming into an abyss. If you were drowning or slipped under on purpose your body would be hard to find. I’ve occasionally given it some thought.

  Strange how this weird soft water doesn’t sting your eyes, and your skin feels smooth when you get out. Then you forget what it was like out in the deep. How pessimistic it made you feel.

  A dusty white Toyota HiLux pulled up sharply then, and a burly red-bearded fellow got out and strode over. He wore a black cap with a motor-oil logo and sunglasses perched on top of it. ‘There you are!’ he said, half-smiling and frowning simultaneously, and squatted down beside us. ‘It’s getting bloody late, China. I wondered where you’d got to. Off with one of the old boyfriends maybe.’