Through all the legs Will noticed a man who was rowing, sweat on his face, lathering white under his arms, yelling at the others. People jumped to it when he spoke and hands were cupped to dredge the canoe because there were no buckets. The oarsman had a small wooden sculpture hanging from his ear and he stared at Will too, but unlike the spitter he seemed to be laughing without moving his mouth. His lap lap hung open as a smile and Will couldn’t help glancing into its shadows. He couldn’t be sure what was moving in there as the oarsman reached back and forth, rowing.
‘He’s airing his differences,’ his mother said and gave Will a fright; he’d gone off into his own world but he could feel his face go redder than his arms, even than the burns on the arches of his feet. He made himself look away but he kept being drawn to the oarsman’s eyes and down to his lap lap. He rows for me, Will thought, but he didn’t know why.
As the jetty approached, he turned to the shore. Carson stood still at the centre of things. His legs looked solid as a wrestler’s, but tanned and hairy – they made his father’s seem skinny as rakes.
The oarsman threw the rope up, lassoed it tight around a post and knotted it, and Will slid past, trying not to look as he climbed onto the rickety slats of the pier. ‘Is everything flimsy here?’ he asked his mother, but she was already moving to the front, navigating through the natives unloading and talking in their language with red in their teeth. She loathed crowds, and his father was further on greeting Carson while Will stood on the jetty, mesmerised wherever he looked. Palm trees leaned away from the sea and dark women stopped to watch him, bright-coloured bundles on their heads. One had bosoms that drooped so low they reminded him of the pair of sleepy Dachshund puppies he’d seen at the Kilmore gymkhana. The nipples nothing like his mother’s, small and pellet-sized, hidden from sight.
When he looked back towards the sea, the captain stood alone on the drifting boat getting smaller and Will realised they’d been left. The late afternoon sun jutted through the trees like swords in his eyes and he felt as though his parents had forgotten him. His mother swept ahead to a house on stilts that resembled a giant thatched insect. Carson had his arm around his father, doing their catching up as they walked along a path to a weatherboard house among the trees. A garden of bright yellow flowers and a pair of palms towered like giant green-topped matchsticks on either side. Coconut palms, that’s what the money had been pissed into. Not like the straggly date palm in the garden at home that dropped its clumps on the lawn, then died.
Will hung back, waited for their bags – he was afraid of them being left – his transistor clock and travel Scrabble in the small green suitcase, his woollen pony he was not supposed to bring. Their suitcases were pulled on a cart by an old man who wore a long shirt just barely covering him, as if it was a uniform. He clunked the old wheelbarrow with its wooden spokes and squared-off wheel along the jetty. Will followed the bags along a path to the tall hut with legs where his mother stood waiting. Someone else touched his hair. It was the oarsman, guiding him forward, and he tried not to look at the man’s waist, afraid of a glimpse of the oarsman’s possible at such close range. His grandmother always said wash down as far as possible, and up as far as possible, but for heaven’s sake don’t touch possible. His grandmother who looked after him, but she’d been left back at Broadford to keep an eye on things. Will would keep an eye on things here.
Carson turned and shouted to his mother, ‘Annie, let Nonti put your bags up.’
He’d never heard anyone call her Annie. She was supposed to be Anne. And he’d never thought of his father as small, but compared to Carson he seemed short and narrow, Carson squinting, handsome and broad under his faded canvas hat, like the father in Swiss Family Robinson. ‘Come up and have a cuppa.’ He motioned Will’s mother towards the painted house but didn’t seem to notice Will.
‘Go, my manki,’ said the oarsman, who touched Will’s ear and walked off down the path through the trees along the beach.
Will watched him for a moment then walked over a square of thick lawn towards where his parents and Carson already sat in wicker chairs on an open patio in the shade of a faded grey blind. Everything seemed so green; it was as if the plants were growing before his eyes. The yellow flowers with thin red tongues from their middles, the petals like ears pushing in from the sides like they were listening. He looked back but the oarsman was gone, just the hut and the jetty and a row of canoes on the lagoon, and one small boat painted blue. Everywhere else was jungle.
He knelt at a low table made from a big slab of wood. A teenage boy served iced coffee from a glass jug, pouring it into cups just like his grandmother’s Royal Doulton. Will looked at the boy’s long dark feet. A fine layer of skin seemed to stretch between his toes. At first Will thought it was some sort of shadow and reached to touch them to be sure they were real. ‘He’s a mermaid,’ whispered his mother as she lit a Virginia Slim.
‘Orpheus grew up in the water,’ said Carson, ‘comes from generations of fishermen. Don’t you, son?’
The boy nodded and smiled, walked into the house in his narrow cut-off shorts, his feet barely hitting the ground. Then they all looked out at the small fishing boats on the lagoon. ‘You can’t pretend it isn’t beautiful,’ said Carson.
‘Indeed,’ Will’s father said, removing his Akubra hat and running his fingers through his hair to stop it flopping over his face. His beak and bright blue eyes with their pink rims, the zinc cream white on his nose and the lumps in his jaw from grinding his teeth and always chewing on his pipe. ‘What do you think, Annie?’
Now he was calling her that.
‘I only came to see what we’re getting for our money,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ asked Carson as if he’d misheard, and for a moment there was silence. Carson’s jaw was all bone and broader than Will’s father’s, his skin even more out in the weather. His hands were like leather plates.
Will’s father took a drink from his cup, his little finger looking broken the way it bent. ‘I told her we’d been helping out up here.’
‘Who’s we, white man?’ said his mother, then let her cigarette arm swing wide as though she already owned the place. She was beaky too.
‘I mean us,’ his father said, ‘as a family.’ They looked like brother and sister, not parents; maybe that’s why they didn’t get on. Both of them sharp like birds. His mother looked red in the face. Strange sounds emanated from the forests and talking came from inside the house. Words that repeated like music.
When Carson asked about their trip his father said, ‘The crossing was calm as a Hindu cow,’ and Carson laughed but it wasn’t funny, just one of his father’s stupid sayings.
‘It was endless,’ his mother said, drawing deeply on her cigarette. She blew a smoke ring in Will’s direction because she knew he didn’t like her smoking, and he didn’t like coffee cold or hot. He was so tired he lay down on the straw rug beside the table and wished there was a dog. No sign of children his age, he’d only seen a baby being nursed by a girl as she walked along, a girl who looked much too young for a mother. He looked over at Carson’s legs, so muscly and hairy, his feet brown and wide, just inches away, sandals strapped across the veins. Skin leathery like his hands but the hair on his shins looked soft and bleached by the sun.
Gently, Will reached out, touched Carson’s calf and stroked it, so softly Carson didn’t seem to notice. Soft as the purr of a cat against his palm. He wanted to rest his head on Carson’s foot and sleep.
‘What’s happening down there?’ Carson shifted his leg and Will sat up and pretended to drink some iced coffee but it tasted like manure. His mother brushed the corner of her mouth with her little finger as if there was something to flick from there, then gave his father the hairy-eye like he was supposed to say something.
‘Would you like a biscuit?’ Carson asked her, then yelled for the boy, who came out with a tray o
f thin brown wafers shaped like fingers. Will examined the boy’s strange toes again as the tray was passed around.
‘We came to talk about a repayment plan,’ his mother said.
‘Must we talk about this in front of …?’ Carson tipped his cup towards the boy, who walked away. ‘They understand more than you think.’
‘Do they?’ said his mother.
‘Annie, Carson’s our host,’ his father said. ‘He’ll pay us back if he can.’
‘When he can,’ his mother said. She pushed her cigarette into an ashtray even though it was only half done and Will wished she wouldn’t waste cigarettes and he wished the wafer he’d taken wasn’t so stale. But he liked the red flowers in the vase; hibiscus like the yellow ones, the same as his grandmother had in a tub beside her front door. The ones he used to call hibiscuits. They belonged here, he could tell, not in his grandmother’s garden. As he wondered if flowers got homesick, he noticed a hairy grey creature like a big-eared bat nestled in a corner of the overhang, right against the awning.
‘We’re almost breaking even,’ said Carson. ‘If the next few years are kinder than the last …’ He trailed off.
A chorus of croaking began and Will looked out through the glare at greenish-brown shapes that now sat on the lawn like barking cowpats. His mother breathed out smoke from a new cigarette. ‘I just happened upon the bank statements,’ she said. ‘You can imagine my surprise.’ She was on a mission.
‘Look,’ said Carson, ‘you’ve both been very generous.’
Will looked up at the black eyes of the silent bat, its ears like a dog’s, and listened to the croaking lawn.
‘I wasn’t given the chance to be generous,’ said his mother.
Will was sick of this conversation and the looks on everyone’s face, as if the mean tide was coming in. ‘What’s making the noise?’ he asked.
‘Cane toads,’ said his father.
‘I have an old cricket bat,’ said Carson. ‘Would you like to go and practise on them?’
‘No thanks,’ said Will and then he hesitated, looked down at Carson’s legs. ‘What’s manki mean?’
‘It means my little man,’ said Carson, a wafer almost in his mouth. ‘How do you know that?’
Will just shrugged and pretended to sip from his cup.
*
The sound of the toads faded to an echo as they walked in procession through the rows of coconut palms, the late afternoon a bright purple line above the clouds that lay on the water. A man with a machete up a tree cut coconuts that thudded to the ground like severed heads. Another man shinned up a nearby trunk, quick as a lizard. They were headed to the sing sing his father had promised.
‘The place looks well,’ his father said.
‘What part’s ours?’ his mother asked. She was a dog with a bone and Will could tell that Carson wasn’t pleased, the way he glanced at his father so seriously.
‘Anne, darling, for Christ’s sake, must you?’ His father poked his pipe towards his mother.
She touched at the top button of her dress as if offended. ‘I’m just looking for some satisfaction,’ she said.
A whooping sound rose like a bird that was laughing and Will’s foot was hurting, from the sunburn and the place where the blister had almost healed, but it was blistering afresh, he could feel it. The foot hurt from the day he’d gone to the steeplechase, when he took the thermos to the car and promised his mother he wouldn’t open it. But before he placed it in the picnic basket he broke the promise, turned the lid to see inside and accidentally tipped it. Boiling water poured into his gumboot. That whole morning he walked around the point-to-point course in agony, watching the horses jump the brush fences in straggly groups, too afraid to admit what he’d done.
‘Tough is good, but stupid is stupid,’ his mother told him in the hospital waiting room. He didn’t let her see him cry.
As they walked through the palms his foot rubbed against the strap of his sandal. He stopped and leaned down to examine it. ‘Most likely sunstroke,’ his father said but his father had already forgotten about the trip to the hospital where he’d admired the nurses.
‘It’s my foot,’ Will looked up and said to him, ‘you priceless idiot.’
His father looked at Carson, shrugged.
‘You let him talk to you like that?’ asked Carson.
‘Someone has to,’ said his mother.
An angular dog with a gash on its flank sniffed along behind her and when Carson shooed it away, Will wondered if the man was nice or not. Then a native was walking through the trees. He wore a headdress of red feathers and white paint on his face. It was the oarsman dressed up as a chief. He had on an elaborate red-patterned lap lap that was longer than the one he wore in the canoe, and a necklace of what looked like teeth all strung together. More like miniature elephant tusks.
‘Annie, this is Loodstar,’ said Carson. ‘He’s our local leader.’
His mother raised her new cigarette. ‘We saw him on the canoe,’ she said. ‘Very festive.’
But Will wasn’t sure if she meant festive now or festive then, and what sort of name was Loodstar? He noticed how his father didn’t greet the man, though he typically said hello to everyone, even waved at buses in Alice Springs in case there might be someone on board he knew. Instead, his father turned to the boy from the house. ‘Could you carry Will on your shoulders?’
‘I take him,’ said the oarsman-chief and Will was hoisted up, hands tight around his calves. It took the breath right out of him. But up on the tribesman’s shoulders, his thighs against the man’s neck, watching out between red feathers that sprouted from the oarsman’s head, was like being stroked by the sun. He could see everything – a woman with a papoose walking at an angle through the rows of tall trees, a stooped man in the distance with a bow and arrow who hid behind a narrow trunk. Will played the lookout among the knots and feathers in the tribesman’s hair and he realised his foot barely hurt at all. He could feel his doodle against the oarsman’s neck and wasn’t sure he wanted to get down.
They approached a clearing, a group of huts that weren’t on stilts. A crowd of women emerged in grass skirts with shells at their waists. Some of their breasts looked out like parking lights, others fell low to their bellies. A pig with its legs tied lay upside down above a fire. The pig from the boat. Tied up and burning.
The chief lowered Will, careful not to mess with the feathers, and as the women danced their beads and bosoms bounced. Black stripes streaked their cheeks; their mouths smiled but their eyes didn’t. A few of them reached to play with Will’s hair but he stayed close to the chief, who sent them away. A man crouched up a tree with a mask like a bird of paradise; others appeared from the forest. A woman whirled a cloth that turned like a kaleidoscope. This was a sing sing. Drums beat and dancers painted in white clay did a follow-the-leader around the shaking women.
‘Mudmen,’ his father said proudly as if he knew them all, and he did seem to know some, the way they smiled and nodded. His mother unfolded her chair and sat, and the chief was given a tall chair of his own.
Will tried to get the right angle so he might see inside the new lap lap but his mother threw a stick at him. ‘Watch the limbo,’ she said. She was onto him, so he watched his father hold the limbo broom. A woman bent back so low her shoulders almost brushed the earth, and still her breasts got caught on the broomstick. His father’s face gleamed as he flipped the stick so each bosom flopped down by her side. His father was an expert at this – the nipples met the dirt and the native men laughed, the betel nut bloody in their teeth. All except the chief, who watched his mother and Carson whisper. A boy about Will’s age swung a bunch of nuts tied on the end of a stick that made a clacking sound and Will wondered if the boy would play but all he did was look at Will strangely and make a face.
Carson crouched beside his mother and
she whispered hard. ‘It was eight hundred pounds,’ she said through her gritted teeth, ‘for six years. Every year of Will’s life.’
‘Don’t you get on your high horse,’ said Carson, but that made no sense – she hadn’t ridden a horse since Will was five, after she hurt her back.
‘We need that money,’ she said. ‘He needs to go to boarding school.’
Will almost said he didn’t want to go to boarding school but he didn’t interrupt. They talked as if no one noticed, watching the natives line up behind a strip of leaves on the ground.
‘It’s time for the dash,’ said his father. He handed Will the broom and went to join in. His father looked like a child in his shorts and jacket, enthusiastic, lined up with all the others, the spitter from the boat and the man who said cah cah.
‘Annie, I would have lost the place,’ Carson said, almost pleading. He put his hand on Annie’s shoulder but she shrugged it off; still, her whole body shuddered in a way he’d never seen.
‘We’d settle for the deed to the island,’ she whispered but still she didn’t look at Carson, her eyes glassy in the fading light. Carson rose, his whispering finished, took off his hat and pushed a knuckle against his mouth. His head was shaking slowly as if he didn’t know what to do.
‘Car, you could have come back to the mainland and lived like a normal person,’ his mother said, looking up. He had a play name too.
‘I couldn’t do it, Annie,’ he said. ‘You know that.’ His hands clasped themselves into a prayer. ‘Live that life. All bottled trout and polo.’
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 35