In the time he had taken to read aloud his first ever word, flames had tangled themselves in the rafters of the roof, and the wooden cross was burning like a flaring mast. From the belt loop of the frock McCreedy pulled a large hat. He slapped the dirt from the wide brim and placed it upon his head. It was a perfect fit.
In the opening of an eye McCreedy and the reverend have gone, figments of history, of my parched mind. Nelson Babbage and the first page of his journal are my only concrete reality of what has occurred here. And even if I saw nothing more than a fevered dream, I feel the keeper of terrible secrets. Though these might be my own if I don’t make it back to you.
Or am I to suppose fate was a crash in a creek bed to bring me here, to this ruined church and charred journal? A vision in thirst that had me believe all I needed to do for a drink was ask McCreedy for a sip from his canteen?
I’ve been pressing pen to page so hard I have a dent in my finger. My senses are shutting down. Took five minutes to count to ten. Blotches have appeared on my vision, blurred spots like fingers in front of a photo.
The hallucination burned what little energy I had left. I have to put it down to dehydration, a mirage. What am I supposed to make of such a scene, I don’t know? Where are my shimmering lakes? Streams of snowmelt quenching my thirst? That I might die without a final kiss from you should have delivered a vision of desire, not the imagery of murder, a Victorian priest and his convict killer. Did I resurrect a ghost from the pages of the journal?
Again the sun is setting.
But of course it is. I write as though it’ll be my last. Though the truth is that when I woke in the afternoon, my face burned scarlet, my body drying out like a withered chilli, the evening cool was fantasy.
But I’m here. If I sleep now I doubt I’ll ever wake. So I shall take a ladder and lean it upon the stone walls of our cottage, steadying the base as you climb up and nail down the final slate. And when you step off the bottom rung into my arms, together we’ll look up and watch the indigo roof actually glow brighter as the sun goes down.
Although I’m so dehydrated I haven’t opened my mouth in fear of it sticking open, I have the moisture to shed a tear.
Can you read this? I’m writing with a piece of charcoal cut from one of the charred beams in the church. The pen finally ran out, and when it did I felt most alone since the crash.
Even if I ran out of charcoal I’d cut my finger and write in blood.
I’ve built a fire in the ruin. Not cold, but the flames warm the desolate landscape, the distant stars and a dead moon rising.
Beyond my vision there’s a city rush hour of movement, an insect metropolis scourged by the tongues of lizards and the teeth of rodents. And these predators are the hunted too, the smaller reptiles and mammals running from their own demons, each death a transfer of energy and verve, the heat of the sun passed from plant to blood and back to earth.
But the cycle of living is absent from this starlit scene. The whole universe has frozen. I’m no more than a figure in a painting, a brushstroke fixed in time.
So when I see motion, the bright white dot of a satellite tracing an orbit above the stratosphere, the solar panels angling the light of the moon to my lonely fire, it’s as beautiful as an angel gliding through heaven.
Before I’m rescued, and just in case I’m not, I want to tell you something. And it’s with this need I’m suddenly energised, maybe a final burst of living for this one last entry. Because suddenly the fear of being unfinished, incomplete before you, makes me realise if I do anything right now, it’s to tell you the reason I didn’t want to speak about my parents is because I’ve never known them. Until last year they were as good as dead. I knew only they gave me up the day I was born, passing me on to a home, then an old woman called Nana May who potted jam and ironed my socks and read fairy tales till I slept and dreamed of those castles in the sky. Two days after my tenth birthday she died. I’ve always thought of her wandering the woods of Sleeping Beauty, or the garden of the Selfish Giant, picking apples and filling her apron pocket.
She left me well mannered, attentive and polite. A boy who made his own bed and washed the dishes, a good son. But ten’s too old for a new start, a new family. I bounced from home to home, foster parents and dormitories, stark rooms where we ran wild, rooms that were locked at night so we’d still be there in the morning. And those clattering canteens the mornings of my childhood, everything I owned labelled with my name. Until sixth form, when I realised that university was my escape, filling in a grant form with the words ‘Not applicable’ in the box for family.
For three years I belonged. The other students, the rugby club, lecturers and friends, knew nothing of who I was, or was not. No false pity or tears. I thought I’d been born again, free of the past.
But then my parents returned, wanted in on my life now I was a graduate with a degree, a success. They tracked me down through the adoption agency. I arranged a meeting in a shopping centre, outside a fast-food restaurant, anonymous and sterile. From the mezzanine level I watched them wait and check their watches, unfold a piece of paper with directions. Like two lost tourists, these strangers that shared flesh and blood. I watched until my mother looked up to the balcony. We caught eyes. Did she recognise the boy she bore? But I left them standing there, apart from the world and, I hoped, feeling abandoned. By the end of that day I had a flight booked to Darwin.
So I flew to the other side of the planet, escaped. Or at least thought I had. Until you asked me to talk about my family. You wanted a history, and I gave you a blank page, not the story of failed adoption, foster care and neglect.
That first time we stood naked in the desert, the cloudless dusk blinking with stars, when we were silent, almost afraid of speaking, I was free again. Because I had a future, with you.
Now that’s in doubt. And only a dying man should have visions of murdered priests and burning chapels. So, if my rescue is late, can you do me a little favour and tell them I’m sorry. Sorry for them, myself, and you. Sorry that I kept you apart from who I am, and can only scratch the unsaid into a letter. Please tell them I would’ve given them another chance to know me, to talk. And hopefully I’d have forgiven them, maybe understood why they gave me up.
I stopped there because I fainted, chip of charcoal in my hand and head on the page. There’s more ink in this letter than water in body. But that feels good. To know a part of my soul has escaped evaporation.
Perhaps I should stop writing and save energy? But then this is what’s keeping me alive, you.
In the east I can see pale blue, the burning day behind. How terrifying that the sun will rise. And that my leg has lost all feeling below the knee.
But on this page I’m whole. What a strange place to suddenly explain myself, to give voice to this body. At the bottom of the world in the middle of a desert, yet not alone. Because I have something to write with, a piece of paper.
Is this it? No energy. And the sun flares up from the horizon. Risen. Must find shade, cool place. Water. Water.
Body burning.
What happens when I can’t write?
Show Me the Sky
1 August 1835
The Josephine seemed to anchor and sail in the break of a wave, with only its glittering deposit of guns proof that she had even called.
Dismayed that he had been ignored during the negotiations – as the officers had directed their conversation via myself to the king – the rev. had not waited to be asked on-board, instead inviting himself, so that he may ‘purchase essentials in a manner more civilised’.
Presuming I too would be making my way on-board, I accompanied the rev. to the pinnace, only to find myself bidding him farewell. The next morning, when four of the crew were required to shoulder his newly purchased trunk up the hill to the mission I was curious as to what he had procured and duly enquired. ‘No more than what is necessary to carry out the work of the Lord,’ was his enigmatic reply.
While the men hefted his trunk,
its contents clinked like the cart of a brewery along a cobbled lane.
3 August 1835
Two days the rev. has slept late and delivered ill-prepared sermons. Only when a messenger of King Tanoa shook him from his drunken dreams did he wake before noon today.
Together, seated before an angry king firing insults into the air like fat from a hot pan, we heard how the officers from the Josephine had hoodwinked his majesty – the guns worked, but the kegs of powder had been filled with pepper.
Either daringly or foolishly, the rev. offered that the Lord had punished King Tanoa for refusing His word, the Gospel truth. I translated as courteously as possible, understanding that denigration of the ruler of all Fiji was as good as a blaspheme against our Saviour. When he unravelled my over-polite syntax to discover he had just been criticised, he shooed us from the fort with the barrel of a musket, roaring we were lucky it was seasoning in the chamber and not gunpowder.
Shaking, sweating, calling the king a ‘traitor of God’, Rev. Thomas swore that those who challenge his authority ‘challenge the authority of the Lord Himself.’
I advised that we should quieten our preaching, for a king disdained is a foe possessing pots and pans large enough to contain our limbs. But the rev., his fear now transformed to anger, was a man with God on his side and not to be intimidated.
‘Compared to Christian stratagems,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘the cunning of the devil is the mere subterfuge of a child.’
5 August 1835
Yesterday, an hour before dawn, the rev. hissed, ‘Nelson, Nelson,’ into my ear and woke me from sleep.
Did I believe that Jesus Christ died so that we may live? Was it by the grace of God that we even breathed? ‘Yes, Yes,’ I answered, before he enquired if I were a solider worthy of a mission for the Lord. ‘Of course,’ I replied. The Rev. then told me to dress and meet him outside.
He led me from the house to a vantage point so that he could point to a lone palm on a ridge several miles inland. In that orange glow the trunk and leaves seemed no more than a painted backdrop, but it was clear enough for the rev. to mark it ‘a tree that will bear no fruit, yet soon be abundant with a harvest of Jesus’.
I asked, ‘How?’ incredulous at his certainty.
He then slipped back into the mission and returned holding what looked like a coconut, only with a long black stalk dangled from its underside. ‘The captain of the Josephine drove a hard bargain, but the work of the Lord has no price.’
He asked if I knew what would happen if he lit the fuse, and I said I did. I knew that a powder blast this size would burn the clothes off a man fifty yards away. ‘Or the boughs off a palm tree,’ added the grinning rev.
He then fished a handsome silver and gold timepiece from his waistcoat, carefully opened the back casing and set the mechanism precisely to his own, before slipping it into my pocket. ‘At one minute to midday, not a second before or after, you must light the fuse of this here charge and retire as though you had tugged on the tail of a Bengal tiger.’
A simple instruction, I acknowledged, but where and why?
‘In the top of that lone palm, my dear Nelson, so that those who witness the blast will believe it a summoning of God ordained by yours truly.’
I asked him if it were not a false miracle we were performing, and that to introduce heathens to Jesus by deception was surely a gross sin.
‘Let us ask God by lighting the fuse.’ He then placed the bomb in my palm and with his fingers closed mine around it.
It took me three hours to make the ridge. I had prepared the necessary sticks to twist into flame and, as instructed, kept the smallest, clean-smoking fire tended until the time arrived for me to shin the trunk of the condemned palm. With a smouldering twig in my teeth, I climbed to the thatch of leaves and wedged the bomb between clusters of green coconuts. I checked the watch – 11.56 – and clung on till the minute hand nudged 11.59. I then put the twig to the fuse. Sparks fizzed. I dropped to the ground and scrambled, fearing an early detonation would fell the tree upon my head.
When the bomb blew, as loud as a crack of thunder, as bright as a flash of lightning, the top of the tree vanished, nothing left but a charred and smoking trunk, smouldering like a frayed end of burning rope.
Far below, in a clearing wide enough to see all the way to the top of the mountain, the rev. had just clicked his fingers. The men gathered around him had fallen to their knees, believing he had the power to make any of them disappear in a puff of smoke.
Only it was not King Tanoa who had been courted with sorcery, but his younger brother.
When Naraqino saw the palm explode on the command of the rev., he too had knelt on the earth. At once the rev. promised Naraqino the protection of Heaven and Earth if that when he rose he would accept that there was one true God and pledge his soul to Jesus.
On my return to Rewa, hearing news of this allegiance with Naraqino, I warned the rev. that the king would see this as treachery, thus endangering our lives to his jealous rage.
‘For that too I am prepared,’ smiled the rev., invigorated with the accolade of a miracle-maker. Then, even with the sun still not set, he suggested we retire to the mission. We were escorted by two of Naraqino’s most trusted warriors into our rooms, where four more already waited.
I have written these words with the two more men, both armed with clubs, watching over my person. I doubt I shall sleep. I trust these men with my life no more than I would do a hungry guard dog.
6 August 1835
As we paddled across the mouth of the estuary from Rewa to Bau, the chapel burned. The sun had just risen in the east, but all villagers, both sides of the river, watched this bloom of flames as they would the break of day. The rev., sitting at the right hand of Naraqino, perched upon the trunk of stolen muskets as though it were his throne, seemed to read my thoughts.
‘Fear not, Nelson,’ he consoled. ‘Remember Jesus in Matthew: Every government divided against itself is brought to ruin, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. One government for one God, and the leader of that single house is he who has pledged himself to Jesus.’
I translated to Naraqino, and he smiled then reached across to pat the rev. on the back.
Before dawn, Naraqino himself had crept into the chapel. To light his way he had carried the lantern of the rev., removing the candle from the glass and touching it against the reed walls. While flames brought King Tanoa and his men rushing from the fort, agents of Naraqino leaped from the bushes to steal away the chest of muskets.
With these thieves and vagabonds we are now allied.
7 August 1835
Believing that a quick dunking from the hand of the rev. would bring him eternal life and power on earth, Naraqino was baptised in the Rewa River. Once his wives had dried his body, he immediately decreed that no other dweller of Bau may ‘wash in the river of Jesus Christ’.
The rev., instead of righting a wrong – for all sinners may bathe in the blood of Jesus – said nothing but announce that Naraqino had shown his subjects the light, and those loyal to their leader should follow his example.
All residents of Bau were obliged to attend this sham of a ceremony, including the two dozen men gifted with a brand new musket. Loaded with the gunpowder procured by Rev. Thomas from the Josephine, at the command of Naraqino, the men fired into the sky above Rewa. The crackle and flare was for King Tanoa on the opposite shore, so he may know that Naraqino is now the keeper of guns, and God.
8 August 1835
Though the rev. seems content to dissolve the scriptures to suit the vices of Naraqino, he does hold more sway here than he did on the other side of the river. He has already declared that a heathen temple and chapel must not stand in the same village. Naraqino, ever ready to please the man who dissolved a palm tree in the click of a finger, has ordered that the temple be destroyed and a chapel erected in its place without delay.
He has also dispatched warriors into the hills and told
them not to return unless with the body of the runaway high priest – dead or alive.
9 August 1835
The temple illuminated the village the entire night. When the timbers and wooden idols burned down from glowing crimson to cooling ash, the captured high priest and two of his disciples were tossed upon the embers to fan the flames.
Naraqino feasted on their flesh for his breakfast, and though the rev. declined when offered a seat at his table, for one horrifying moment I believed he considered in partaking.
While Naraqino and his guests cut into the body of the high priest, men with axes set about chopping down trees for the chapel.
10 August 1835
The new chapel shall be the tallest building in all Fiji, taller than the grand house of Naraqino, taller than the fort of King Tanoa. All the carpenters are busied with the labours of construction, and the toil of so many men committed to a house of God should be a vision to savour. Alas, when Naraqino – carried aloft to the site in his chair – sees any man tire, he is quick to threaten that if the chapel is short of building materials, ‘It will be the bones of the idle that replace them.’
11 August 1835
Last night the Rev. Thomas drank kava with Naraqino. Though only a liquid derived from a plant, it has opium-like qualities, and when imbibed in large amounts stupefies close to a total paralysis. Back on Lakemba, the rev. had declared it ‘a tool of subjugation brewed by the devil’. This morning his tack was that: ‘What grows from this good earth must have been sown by His divine hand for a reason.’
He had drunk through the night without sleeping. The whites of his eyes were lined with the tributaries of swollen blood vessels, as though a red river deep within his being had burst its banks.
14 August 1835
For two days now I have done little but pray. Sleeping with one eye open has left me in no state for little else but my translation duties. If not assisting the construction of the new house of God, I am recounting the misadventures of Naraqino into English for the rev. – either boasts of his murders, or fanciful tales more fiction than fact, including that he once killed a man with his stare alone, that the spirit being Kalou came to him in a dream and prophesised the rev. coming, and that he killed a shark by putting his hand down its throat and tearing out its heart.
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