Preservation

by Jock Serong

  By the time dawn glowed through the trees, they were resolved. One of the Javanese claimed he had heard a cry of distress up the hill, and it unified them in their decision. They wanted us all to stay where we were and begin a search for their leader.

  I told them we could not waste a day on the fallen, and any confrontation with the natives could cost us dearly. The ones I had met with Prasad were fierce individuals, warlike and intent on mayhem. It would not do to come into conflict with them in larger numbers. If the lascars wished to bargain or to fight for his return, then that was their choice. But the rest of us must keep moving.

  I could see I had convinced them before I finished talking, but one aspect of the response I hadn’t anticipated. Clark spoke up, spoke collectively to the remaining lascars. Well hello, I thought, a show of authority. They were not to take the boy, said Clark. His duty was with him, Clark, and he would not be allowed to desert his post. The boy was crushed anew, and the others were plunged into another round of agonised debate. It came to pushing at one stage—such demonstrative folk—but their decision was presented by the oldest remaining among them, the Mussulman. It pained them to be without the boy, especially as it was his father who had gone missing, but they would remain and try to rescue the old man; the boy would be released to Mr Clark.

  Here the lad surprised me again. The news was delivered to him in their language and he accepted it with his chin high and the tears still gleaming in their tracks.

  And thus, unburdened of the dozen, we prepared to resume the journey.

  28

  Charlotte had walked at dawn, but had not gone far. These were the terms of a compromise they’d struck. Joshua was resigned to her walking, and asked only that she did so early in the day, and stayed within the bounds of the cleared land.

  She had abided by the request, mostly. At the bluff where the sandstone projected over a short escarpment, she’d pushed on into the tree-line. The angling sun here glowed on the damp trunks of the eucalypts, and the birds—the heavy, loud ones she was still trying to understand—swept between their haunts, paying her no heed.

  She was careful to keep the hem of her dress dry as she passed through the undergrowth. She stopped and listened to her heartbeat and her breath slowing; to the smaller birds in secret conversation; to the dripping and the barksounds. It was all she needed.

  As she returned over the loose stones on the paths of the settlement, she pictured him alone in the small house, measuring the minutes of her absence. She scoffed too much at his worry: it was love speaking as fear.

  Passing the well in the small front yard she sensed a movement to her right, under the wide eave that formed the skillion roof.

  The girl was back.

  When Charlotte came in the door, Joshua was at the table, sitting a teacup in the palm of his left hand, as was his habit. She glanced sideways, in the direction of the skillion.

  ‘Boorigul returned overnight.’

  Joshua placed the cup carefully on the saucer. ‘I didn’t hear anything. How does she appear?’

  ‘Oh,’ now Charlotte could feel the sadness she hadn’t allowed herself when she spoke to the girl. ‘Someone has struck her, I think. She has a cut up here, at her hairline. A bruise too.’

  She took a cloth and adjusted the chain so the pot hung closer to the coals, her back turned to him as he spoke. There was an edge of frustration in his voice.

  ‘It puzzles me, this coming and going. If the girl’s presence at our house is causing disharmony somewhere else, why does she keep coming back?’

  Charlotte said nothing. She had no answer.

  ‘Who did it, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. I offered to wash it but she wouldn’t let me near. I feel so sad for her. She watches me in a way…she wants help but she will not accept it.’

  ‘You spoke to her?’

  ‘I tried just then, but she has so few words. She said she was out past the Cowpasture, on the flats where the yams are. With the women. That was all.’

  ‘She was gone a week. Good lord—did you tell her you were worried?’

  ‘Yes I did, and…’ she turned and smiled a little. ‘She looked at me as if I was mad. I don’t think she can understand that we worry for her.’ She heard herself, heard the irony in it, but Joshua appeared not to have noticed.

  ‘We put her up in our home! Of course we worry for her. I would have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘She leaves things in there sometimes. Little…pouches. Fishing lines.’

  ‘I’ve seen.’

  ‘I looked in one of them a while ago.’ Charlotte had wondered as she picked it up whether the girl left it there as a small experiment in permanence. ‘I felt like a busybody but…the things in there, I couldn’t understand them. Just stones and shells.’

  ‘I’m sure they have value to her. Here we are, trading food and promissory notes and rum because none of us have any currency. It might be something like that.’ He smiled a little. ‘She means a lot to you.’

  That may have been what stirred in Charlotte’s heart. But more, it was the unspoken exchange of freedoms between them: the girl feeling her way towards domesticity, and Charlotte absconding from it at every opportunity.

  ‘Heavens, a girl takes up residence in our skillion and I start mothering her all of a sudden.’ She did not want to disown the feeling, not entirely. She lowered her eyes, and he held her and kissed her on the mouth. She stayed there long enough to feel the warmth of him.

  ‘Go and bother the governor,’ she said eventually.

  He kissed her forehead, a dry peck at the edge of her hair, and swept out of the house. As she watched him go she felt a wave of shame. She was already planning to confound him again.

  An hour later, Charlotte Grayling knocked uncertainly at the main door of the guesthouse and found it ajar. It swung back under faint pressure—the frame was not quite square, because that was the way of this place. Nothing submitting to order; nothing quite square. Mr Clark was not inside. His room was neat, the bed carefully made, a small pile of clothes folded on the chair. He’d been provided with his every want, she knew, and yet it seemed he wanted little. Perhaps the wants had died in him somewhere out there.

  She thought her husband might be with Mr Figge, though she wasn’t sure enough to keep a shiver at bay: the shiver she knew in the bush. The one that belonged to being lost. This was faithless in some way she couldn’t define. And so soon after his horror and fury at finding she’d been out there again.

  She wanted to help, she told herself. That was all. She looked once over her shoulder, out into the bleaching sun. The natives there who waited for something nobody knew, and the rigid upright English, weaving to avoid them. Then she closed the door.

  That first room wrapped her in its silence, its scent of warm timber. She placed a hand on the bedclothes as she passed, traced her fingers over the weave of the blanket and moved quietly to the second door. She knocked once more and in answer she heard the legs of a chair slide back over floorboards. Five light footsteps, the door opened and the lascar boy stood there.

  He seemed mildly surprised by her presence: his expression passed through shades of confusion and came to rest at deference.

  ‘Memsahib,’ he breathed.

  He stood nearly as tall as her, thin and delicate. Were it not for the shape of his face she thought he might pass for one of the natives. But his cheekbones were softer, just swells under his dark eyes, and his nose as short and finely tapered as her husband’s. There was a healing wound near his hairline, a jagged scabbed split in the centre of a bruise that suggested he’d been hit with something heavy. A dark fuzz shaded his upper lip, and long lashes filtered his gaze. The curve of one ear was torn across its outer margin; not cut but ripped somehow. It looked angry and painful. He lowered his gaze to the floor when he could no longer meet her eyes.

  They had dressed him in the clothes of a domestic servant: a neat white tunic that opened to show the meeting of his c
ollarbones and the delicate curve of his throat, but otherwise passed over him straight and square. His hands searched for a role in the awkwardness of their meeting: he settled on clasping his long fingers just below his sternum. His feet, dusted white at their creases, protruded bare from cotton trousers. His toes were still healing from where the landscape had punished them. The toenails were paler than his skin and in the places where they hadn’t split, they were as fine and pink as tiny seashells.

  She gestured back into the room behind him and he stepped aside. She drew the wooden chair, presumably the one he’d been sitting on, towards the bedside and sat on it.

  ‘Do sit down, please,’ she said to him, hearing her own station in her accent. He planted himself, with excruciating formality, on the edge of the bed. She drew her chair a little closer.

  ‘I’m Mrs Grayling. I believe you have met my husband, the lieutenant.’ She smiled at him and waited for an answer but there was none. The lascar boy only watched her.

  ‘Would you like to tell me your name?’ She looked up and into the dark pools under the lashes. He did not respond. In the stillness of the room she could discern that he was trembling. She was aware of his breathing, then of her own. She dusted at something imaginary in her lap and studied her feet now, in their battered satin shoes. ‘You have been through so much, you poor boy. I know a little about life at sea, you might appreciate, as my husband describes it to me. And of course,’ she smiled, ‘the journey out. Though we had a reasonable passage.’

  The boy had not moved, other than in constant, tiny shudders.

  ‘And you had the wreck…the wrecks. My, to go through that twice! And then you walked all that way, and you, obliged to attend to Mr Clark as well as fend for yourself…ward off whatever other dangers were out there. Perhaps these men…I don’t know about these men. I have met Mr Figge—’

  He looked up at her suddenly, horror in his eyes. In full daylight, that name had rung like a bell in the night.

  ‘Please. I can assure you Mr Figge does not know I am here.’

  She waited a little. ‘Strange surroundings, strange food. It seems the natives have been good to you and also…hostile.’ She was watching him carefully now, measuring his reaction to each sentence, to ensure her instinct was right.

  ‘You must have thought all was lost, and yet’—she looked around the room—‘here you are! A remarkable achievement. No, I wonder if that is the word, achievement. You will have a story to tell your children one day, at any rate.’

  His eyes roved left and right, always hidden by the lashes. He would not look at her. She was nearing him now, she knew.

  ‘How did you come to be at sea, young man? How does a boy farewell his family and board a vessel, never knowing when he will return, or what will become of him? Or them? What did your parents say when you told them you would go?’

  She could see him grappling, struggling.

  ‘I don’t have children of my own. Yet.’ She laughed a little, blushed; composed herself. ‘But I think I can imagine how it would have been for them. We left our own parents behind, the lieutenant and I.’

  The square light of the window formed a glint on his left eye, on its lower lid. The glint curved and lengthened, swelled into a tear.

  ‘You can tell me,’ she whispered. The tear rolled, then hung near his chin. ‘You can tell me everything.’

  The sudden intake of air startled her: his face broken by forceful sobs. She kept her voice to a murmur. ‘I think you speak English as well as I do. You’ve been silent because that was safest.’

  The sobbing was overtaking him now. His hands came over his face as his shoulders rocked. A strange wail escaped him and he strangled it, the effort only increasing his physical distress. She felt that she would cry, too: she no longer knew what to say. She had found out what she suspected, and now she had no idea what to do with the knowledge. Moving from the chair to the bed, she sat beside the boy and took him to her, an arm over his shoulders and a hand somewhere over his tear-stained hands and his hair. The grief moved through him like sickness; waves of constriction and release. He collapsed onto her breast and her hand fell to his ribs, which squeezed and expanded as if working to force something vile from his body. She stroked his hair and rocked him softly, though she did not understand her own actions.

  From somewhere deep in her bosom his voice rose as if it was her own, a sentence formed in momentary control of his weeping.

  ‘I no longer wish to hide.’

  She clutched at his hair and he trembled on and on under her hands. He was not a settler, this grief-stricken thing she held; had not been invited to the grand project of civilising. But he was not a native, nor a miscreant. Not entitled to be called a sailor, certainly not a soldier.

  He was neither man nor boy. He was something adrift and overlooked.

  29

  The governor’s kitchen had been a source of many favours to Charlotte Grayling and her husband. In a hungry township they were among a privileged few.

  The favour they cherished most was the new bread and eggs on a Sunday morning. At first it had been Joshua who would make the short journey to the servants’ entrance on the north side of Government House, but more recently Charlotte had made the errand a part of her morning walks, returning with the basket draped in muslin and smelling wonderfully of the warm loaf as she made her way back to their cottage. The walk was a display: her best dress and a chance to launch combative smiles at the neighbours.

  Sunday’s dawn had brought rain, bright droplets shaking from the limbs of the throwing trees. The natives had scrambled under bark shelters in the grounds of the houses. She’d had to increase her pace to a run, boots slipping in the quickly forming mud.

  On the way inside she found Boorigul nestled warm and dry under the skillion. She smiled at the wary eyes and tore off a hunk of the warm bread for her. The girl nodded and took the bread but did not speak.

  Inside the house, in the room that was the house, Charlotte fried the eggs in a heavy iron pan and sat down to breakfast across the table from her husband. He saw the distance in her eyes.

  ‘Church is at ten this week,’ he started. ‘Then I thought we could walk in the town?’

  A bland, obliging smile as she took another forkful.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked gently. She did not look up.

  ‘I didn’t have the chance to speak to you last night,’ she began. ‘You were out in the afternoon. I believe you might have been walking with Mr Clark. Anyway, an idea came over me and I…’

  ‘What?’ Joshua Grayling’s face began to darken.

  ‘Please don’t be upset with me.’

  He waited.

  ‘I went to visit the lascar boy, Srinivas.’

  His face passed through shock to confusion.

  ‘Charlotte, why? That’s…’ he looked up in exasperation; found a drip coming through the rafters. ‘You can’t just take a hand in this because it interests you. It’s a delicate situation. And what might people think? You, going and visiting upon a young man without me?’

  They were the arguments she had expected him to make, but she was not entirely contrite.

  ‘Do you want to know what I found out?’

  He sighed, ran a hand through his hair as another droplet landed there. ‘What?’

  ‘He speaks English. Perfectly. And he wants to talk about what happened out there.’

  Grayling recoiled in shock. ‘Talk? Talk to whom?’ He studied her. ‘You’re not suggesting that you meet him again?’

  She swung her napkin into a fold. ‘I don’t believe he will do it any other way. I have his confidence.’

  ‘But how would I know you’ve accurately conveyed to me what he says? I’d be left with…with your hearsay!’

  ‘Darling, please. I’m not hearsay.’ She watched him calmly. ‘You have the commission from the governor, my love, but we both know that’s not how this place works. Our interests are shared: everyone must contribute what they can.’r />
  ‘For God’s sake, Charlotte! There’s expertise involved here. You don’t just—I am experienced at this…’

  She fixed him with a sceptical look but he blustered on.

  ‘Don’t pretend this is about the greater good of the colony! This is about you wanting to involve yourself in a confidential matter. One that is of the utmost importance.’ He stood and swept his coat from a chair, then took up the journal and his writing materials. ‘Please convey my apologies to the reverend. I will be gone for the morning.’

  She had stood as well now, a mischievous smile forming. ‘You didn’t forbid me.’

  He grunted and slammed the flimsy door behind himself.

  30

  When the memsahib returns, Mr Clark, I will tell her everything. What follows from that, I cannot say. But I will have to bear it.

  We were five now, broken and walking apart.

  Sleep was the only escape from my grief. My father, who was everything, had been taken from me. I had no doubt at whose hand.

  That first night, I felt Mr Figge’s eyes upon me in the dark. There was no fire: the damaged tinderbox could be made to work, but not often. There were no natives at hand who could make us a fire. But his eyes burned in the dark: they glittered like shattered glass and never left me.

  He stood that night, walked towards me, to where I slept. The horror arrived before he did: I woke as he loomed over me and cried out, knowing no help would come. You, Mr Clark: you could hear my cries. But I knew enough of you by now to know you would take no steps. Even as he came like a shadow to close the space between us I heard you, maybe even saw you, roll over to turn your back. And Mr Thompson was half-dead. And Mr Kennedy never cared.

  I thought of my father, my countrymen.

  And then his hands were on me.

  His knee pressed into my back, forced my belly hard against the earth. And he took me by the hair, his fingernails biting into my scalp, and he twisted my head to one side. Hush now, he whispered, though silence was no real concern of his. His face came down close to the side of mine and his rotting breath spoke from a place inside him where things decayed in darkness. And I prayed to the birds that were silent, and to the Kurnai, and the Thaua, the Walbanja and the mother I’d left grieving and my father wherever he might be—I prayed to them all but none of them answered, and he brought his mouth down to my ear and his lips were hot and wet on it and the noise of it was loud and sudden like a thunderstorm in close somehow and his tongue was in my ear, squirming and exploring in there, his breath making animal sounds and grunts behind the sticking noises of his mouth. Then his teeth bit down hard on my ear and I cried out again as a giant force struck the back of my head—like mercy, because for an instant I had no idea where I was. He had hit me only with his fist but the blow had power and it was hard as iron.