by Nick Laird
“So we can split it into three parts. Who am I to love? My neighbor. What am I to do? I am to love him. How am I to do it? I am to love him as much as I love my self.”
It occurred to Liz that the second commandment made no sense. Such a formula required certain preconditions that were not, commonly, in place. Most people loathed themselves.
—
Usai leaned his head back against the church’s white clapboard, his Britney Spears T-shirt stretched across his lean frame. The sun shone very brightly on the whitewash but they’d tried under the coconut palms and it was just too dark, Paolo said, to pick out Usai’s features. Usai watched them from under his baseball cap, nervousness playing on his face. When Margo gestured that he should remove the cap, he lifted it off and exposed sharp cheekbones and wary, intelligent eyes, Belef’s eyes.
Josh stood forty feet away, talking to Watna and his tiny wife; on her hip she held a squirmy baby whose baptism—whose consecration—was being finalized, unknown to him, at that moment above his head. Usai, who during the service had helped with Communion, proudly in charge of the platter of wafers, did not need much prompting. In a rush he said, “Mister Josh brought us to the light of the church of Jesus Christ.”
Liz nodded like a real TV presenter—reassuring, fascinated—and asked, “Could you describe how that came about?”
Usai looked blank and Stan, holding the boom like a standard-bearer, added rather theatrically, “How you come to work this law? The law of Christ?”
Usai nodded gratefully.
“They come because of me. In Kutang they have God, but in Kirlassa we are in the dark. It was because I spoke and rang Papa that the New Truth come . . . You all hear the talk. I was a nothingman in my tribe. My father had gone and I had no pigs. But I am Christian, I am someone. We were in darkness.” He held his hands out, palms down. “And now we live in light.” He turned the palms over. “Before, we knew nothing, we were longlong and now we know it good. We work it like this. We go to church”—he leaned back and with one hand delicately pushed the side of the building—“on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.”
“And how do you get the people to come?”
“We believe in going on top to Papa . . . We all watch out good. Each man will boss his skin and keep it clean by what he does. But say a man fouls in the bush and loses his church for two or three weeks, then I will put a man’s name in the church book and tell it to Mister Josh. Mister Josh will point to this man in the church who was pigheaded or he will come to see the man and talk to him, and tell him that he will send it to the Big Man—”
“God?”
“Yes—the Big Boss God will know that the man has not worked the law good, and he will be punished. He will get no reward, he will not live forever, he will burn in the fires of hell underground.”
Usai smiled, pleased with his explanation.
“What about Belef? Your mother?”
Usai paused and looked at his hands. He glanced over at Mister Josh, who held Watna’s baby over one shoulder and was explaining something to the parents.
“I am crying for her.” He gave a little shrug. “I tell her, ‘You cannot live with this anymore. You cannot follow this thinking. It is the lies of ancestors, and they are all now underground burning in the fires.’ Mister Josh showed us pictures of them all burning in hell. I said to her, ‘You must forget about this old way of thinking and come inside the Bible school. You must finish with the old thinking for all time.’ I am crying for her. I tell her, ‘You will be in hell. You will be burning in hell for all time.’”
“She’s your mother—”
Margo looked at Liz with her special steely-producer glare. Liz shook her head unlike a real TV presenter—dismayed, a little disgusted.
Usai grimaced. He paused and then decided to say it.
“Belef doesn’t like that I am an elder, that I am an important person in the church. She thinks of me as little Usai. She is not with God, my papa. She uses muso. But it does nothing to me.”
“Muso?”
Stan said, “Magic.”
Usai pulled apart the steeple he had formed with his fingers and gestured towards himself.
“For me, I am not afraid. I can drink from a stream where a woman has washed or eat mushrooms from where the women walk along the path. Sorcery is not strong enough. Nothing can touch. The Lord is with me and bids me shine. I drank poison once and it was not strong enough.”
“Why would you drink poison?”
“To show the power of Jesus! I drank bleach! Watna ate the poison put out for the rats in the church. It is impossible to hurt those who believe in Christ Almighty.”
Usai closed his eyes and opened them slowly; he had a courtesan’s long lashes. The steeple was re-erected.
“I am sorry about your sister.”
“Of course.”
“Your mother thinks she died because Amulmul was angry and wanted to punish her for leaving the ways of the old gods. She says Amulmul wanted to show he was the true Wind of God.”
Usai looked from Liz to Margo, but he saw that the producer wasn’t going to interfere. He scratched his eyebrow, shrugged again and said, “The Wind of God killed Kaykay because she didn’t believe enough. The true God is a jealous god. Belef causes much trouble in Slinga. But we should talk about the one true church of Jesus. He bids us shine. He will bring rewards.”
“What do you mean ‘rewards’?”
“The rewards of Christian life. And when we heard about the Mission coming, about Mister Josh arriving, we were so happy.”
“Why?”
“We knew that God was coming.”
“But I understood that God didn’t even exist, as a concept.”
Usai looked at Stan.
“Did you know Papa, before?”
“We didn’t know Papa, but we knew we wanted a new life.”
“Did you think the planes that would come to the airstrip were bringing stuff for you? Did the villagers all think they were going to be rewarded?”
“The reward is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“And where is Heaven? Near Sydney?”
Usai looked at Liz with a flicker of confusion.
“It’s in the sky.”
“Just behind the clouds?”
Usai leaned back a little in his chair and said nothing.
“And how do you get there? To Heaven? By aeroplane?”
“No.” He gave her a long, cold look. “You have to die.”
CHAPTER 27
After a lunch of rice and manioc outside the rest house, Margo went for a nap in Paolo’s mosquito net, a feat involving much detailed negotiation about when exactly she would remove her boots. Paolo—though he always looked like he’d spent several days evading capture—was as fastidious about his belongings as he was about the cameras. It was his habit to represent them like their lawyer: My sleeping bag will not like muck upon it. My rucksack does not want your feet on it.
Paolo and Stan were playing cards and smoking with the bodyguard Posingen. Liz decided to walk down to the square. Paolo and Stan called over to her to come and join them, but she waved them off and went on. Leftie was weeding Belef’s garden on his hands and knees. Stan had said that her main garden was an hour’s walk away, that the land here was poor and had been farmed out years ago.
“Hello.”
Leftie looked up.
“Do you speak English?”
“Little, little.”
“Where’s Belef?”
Leftie pointed round the side of the mountain.
Outside the school, a few boys played with a tree kangaroo they’d tied by one leg to a stump. It was brown with reddish patches, its nose an obscene pink. Part koala, part wallaby, part baby bear, it squealed and showed its teeth as they poked it with sticks, and she was thinking how she could persuade
them to let it go when she became aware of a presence at her side. She looked down to see Namor, the boy with white in his hair, looking at what she was looking at.
“Hello.”
The little hand inserted itself into her hand, and he pulled her along, up the path.
“Oh OK, where we off to? How’s your back? Your back, it’s better?”
He said nothing.
They entered the forest by a path she hadn’t been on before, an opening down at the edge of the square, and the trees in here were closely spaced. It was dark and felt cool and his hand was dry and tight on hers. After a few minutes, satisfied she was definitely coming, he let her go suddenly, and jogged a few steps ahead, turning every so often to smile at her.
It made sense that Belef would find telephones to the dead in trees; they were taller than us, they touched the emptiness of sky, and went deep into the earth. They reached down to the dark past and stretched up to the open future. She pushed a palm against a narrow trunk as she walked past and there was a sudden rustling above and a shuffling of the light scattered on the forest floor. She couldn’t see the boy.
“Hello?” She walked a few tentative steps into the collage of green stems and cords and vines climbing, draping, veiling. “Namor. Namor.” She tried “Jojo.” She looked at her watch. 13:37. Realistically they could only have walked for ten, maybe fifteen minutes into the forest. And he’d only been gone a few seconds. He’d probably stepped off the path to go to the toilet. She should just wait here. A gloomy spot, dense thickets on both sides of the path. She backtracked a few meters to a little clearing where a tree’d partially fallen—the forest was too tightly packed to achieve horizontality—and stood propped and rotting against its neighbors, swaddled in moss and ivy. Several saplings strained upwards in the new light its death occasioned.
She waited. 13:48. She decided to head back, but after a while the path split and she wasn’t sure. They’d been walking at a slight downwards gradient, basically, so she took the higher option; it wound round several thick-trunked acacias and petered out in an unfamiliar patch of dusty-looking ferns. She retraced her steps to the fork and tried the other route.
This path split several times and she hazarded guesses. She was staying mostly level, and appeared to be rounding the side of the mountain. But she hadn’t come from a bigger path onto a smaller one. Or had she? And she didn’t remember seeing this rock with feathery yellow moss on one side of it. But then if she had been coming from that direction . . . The trees were too dense again to see much now; it was like being indoors, like being in fog, the world up close and within arm’s reach. Slightly breathless, she stopped and called again and listened. Was that the river? Or a breeze rounding in the canopy?
She turned and tried the alternative from where the path last split, but after only a few minutes, the path wound back on itself and she was returned to the rock with yellow moss. Now she could find nowhere that looked familiar. She walked on and on, unsure if she was heading towards Slinga or not; the path curled and sloped up for a bit and then down and she thought she recognized this silvery tree trunk with peeling bark but wasn’t sure. 13:56. She shouted Namor again, as loud as she could, and there was a movement in the bracken. She turned expecting to see him but there was nothing.
The fear she’d been accumulating needed, all at once, to be tallied, and she sat down at the foot of a tree. The trees themselves constituted presence, so many presences. They made a company of beings round her. Discreet company they were too—silent, incidentally protective from the sun, whispering among themselves. They were not hostile, nor were they on her side. They were bystanders, witnesses, they would not intervene.
It was impossible that no one would come along from Slinga. If she just sat here, very still. Several hundred inhabitants. Hadn’t Stan said? Or a thousand, was it? Her backpack: three pens, a banana already soft at one end, a bottle of water with an inch or so left in it. Her notepad. Her phone. She checked in the small inside pocket. A fifty-pence piece. Some paper clips. She turned the phone on and checked that there was still no reception. She took a selfie against the tree trunk, looking at the camera blankly. Immediately she took another, trying to appear suitably lost and scared and alone, trying to respond outwardly, adequately, to the situation. Her hair looked greasy. She tied it back properly and tried again. She looked appropriately worried now, and her cheekbones looked good. She deleted the two previous. She wished she had a real camera with her; this would have played well within the episode, this incident—“an unguarded moment,” Margo would have called it.
She leafed through her notebook, finally writing on a fresh page in large looping cursive, “I got lost in the forest.” She added, “It’s not the sort of forest you want to get lost in.”
She stopped and leaned back against the tree trunk. A great vitality ticked round her, invisible. Each corner filled with insect traffic or a feathered consciousness flicking from bough to branch to ground. But all remained just out of apprehension. Ah here was a small, dull, brown bird on a branch. Hop hop and away. She looked down at her boots and grew aware of a large, black, glossy beetle moving across the space between her feet, hauling the shield of itself along. It climbed the hillock of her right hiking boot and descended and continued its journey.
She counted—five slow breaths taken all the way down into her chest and back out. She watched a single ant traverse the acreage of a broad heart-shaped leaf two feet from her nose. She stood up and held onto the tree trunk and pressed her head against it.
She thought of Belef on her telephone tree and found herself thinking of her parents’ phone number. She murmured it out loud and heard herself say, “Mum?” The forest breathed around her, an immensity of listening, of attention. She found herself whispering to her mother that she loved her, that she didn’t want her to die. She saw her mother sitting on the edge of her mattress, high on morphine and steroids, her eyes half closed, her fingers fumbling at the buttons of her nightgown.
She raised her head from the tree trunk and the thought occurred to her that she could just walk into the forest. Just keep walking forward and forward and forward until she fell down. She had the old urge she felt at the edge of a cliff or with a bottle of pills in her hand. There was a deep desire within her to join the teeming machine around her, to go back to the timeless and inanimate . . . She took a few steps into the jungle, into the thickness of shadow. Two more of those small brown nondescript birds sat silently on a branch a few feet above her head and looked at her. One flicked itself upwards, and a second later the second followed. It occurred to her with the clarity of a slap that she didn’t want to be alone in the world anymore. She wanted a partner. If she had a partner—or even children; but slow down Liz, slow down—would she take this step into the forest? Or this one? She stopped. She was tired of being on her own. She didn’t want to have to stop herself from walking into oblivion. Where was her partner? Why was she always alone? She felt a rush of hatred. At herself, at the jungle. She was scared and she was sick of this. She hated this place. She hated the desperation of everything, the poverty and filth. She hated the way the day dropped away to night like a shutter slammed down. She hated the way even the trees reached out to grab whatever they could. Everything was naked and real and awful. She hated Belef and Leftie and Napasio. She hated all of these people, with their inability to give a straight answer, with their filthy clothes and ignorance, with their idiotic faith in magic and the dead. She hated the fact they made her distrust the things she knew were true. She hated the Werners. She hated their tragic faith. It was so frightening, so dangerous, so boundless, so extreme. She hated this island and its insects and its mud and its labyrinthine paths where there was no escape, where there was no hope, only more leafs and more bugs and more ways to disappear.
There was a sound, a glugging sound, like how a bath concludes its drainage with a deep glug-glug-glug. Then an incredibly low frequency purr. She
heard it but felt it also—it vibrated inside her. The richest deepest bass she’d ever heard. Next a clicking noise and a dry bark, then about ten feet away a cassowary strutting into sight. Its bright blue head down, then up, picking a way through the undergrowth. Obscene red wattles swung from its neck and on its head jutted a large black crest like a dinosaur might have.
Huge, taller than Liz. According to Stan they could kill with one kick, its middle claw a dagger, its leg effectively a piston.
It turned its head and stared.
A long, narrow beak curved unpleasantly out from a face with a garish quality of drag about it—inexpert makeup, lavish lashes. The bird gave her a haughty once-over and Liz stayed perfectly still. It registered nothing of interest and ducked its head back down, shaking the black, frilly ball of its body. Another few clicks, a baritone purr, and it strutted off-stage. Still she stayed completely still.
Was it gone? Back to its life of insects and leaf litter and rotting fruit? She looked hard into the patchwork of greenery and shadow and it was not there.
She clapped her hands, thinking that might drive it deeper into the undergrowth, away from her. The echoes snickered briefly. She clapped again and the echo came back a second later, slower somehow. She clapped, twice, and two echoes came back, even slower. She made three claps and four echoes came back. She heard what sounded like a laugh. Over to her left Namor sat in the crook of a tree about ten feet from the ground, clapping in response and laughing, the little shit. She ran towards him but he shrieked and jumped down and skipped off.
Liz shouted, “Now hold on. Just wait one minute please. Where the hell—”
She stopped shouting. He moved fast and it took all her concentration not to lose him again. She glimpsed the white of his hair between the trees and he darted off barefoot. He would turn back at corners to watch for her and wait for her approach, but when a few meters were left between them he slipped off again, his body unimpeded as a fawn’s. She felt old and heavy and tired. He sat now on a decaying tree fallen across the path and she reached him and pointed ahead, in the direction he was leading her, and said, “Slinga? Slinga? We are going to Slinga, yes?”