by John Harris
They headed inland, climbing the slopes with ease, scrambling over fallen kauri pines that had been choked with parasite creepers, stumbling over vines and thrusting chest-deep through the giant fern. Several times they startled the blundering parrots out of the trees above their heads, shrieking raucously, so that they started with alarm and Frankie jumped nearer to Willie in an instinctive movement.
“Come on, Wishbone,” he said, pushing her away. “What you scared of – bogies?”
“Scared?” Recovering, she started to boast to hide her discomfiture. “I’ve seen things that’d turn your hat round. Keep going, Willie boy, I’m right behind you.”
They had climbed through the first belt of undergrowth and could see glimpses of the lagoon and – occasionally – the Tina, foreshortened by the height and framed by the palms, when Willie halted and grabbed Frankie’s arm.
“Hold it, kid,” he whispered. “There’s something ahead of us.”
They crouched, tense and expectant, and a young black pig snuffled through the grass in front of them.
“Oh, boy,” Willie breathed.
He hoisted the bow from his shoulders and, fitting one of the deadly little arrows, took aim.
“Hurry,” Frankie whispered. “He’s moving. If you leave it much longer, you’ll only have his backside to go at.”
The bow twanged and the arrow thumped into the trunk of a tree alongside the pig, which immediately squealed and bolted into the undergrowth again.
“Aw, nuts, I coulda done better with a catapult and me eyes shut,” Frankie yelled as they crashed through the ferns after their quarry.
They climbed further, trying to follow the blundering path of the pig, then Willie halted again by a bank.
“I can hear it again,” he said. “It’s up top there somewhere. Come on, kid, I’ll boost you up.”
He took her by the arm and the seat of her faded blue jeans and hoisted. As he lifted, the threadbare material ripped and Frankie gave a shriek of alarm and clutched at her rear and Willie dropped her as though she were red hot.
He stared at her for a moment then burst into a roar of laughter. She glared at him red-faced, trying to perform impossible contortions to ascertain the extent of the disaster.
“That’s it, go on, laugh, you great silly bonehead,” she yelled. “Wouldn’t think of doing anything to help, would you?”
“Do anything? What could I do?” Willie lay back and howled.
“Well, for a start, you could stop cackling like an old hen on a nest and see if you’ve got something on you to mend ’em with.”
Still laughing, Willie fished in his pocket and handed her a piece of copper wire. “That’s all I got,” he chuckled. “Oh, Jesus, you look a fair sight!”
Still furious, Frankie twisted round again, trying to push the wire through the torn trousers.
“Take ’em off,” Willie suggested. “You’ll manage better.”
“With you there? What you think I am?”
Willie waved a hand in disdain. “Go on. I got better things to look at.”
She struggled for a few minutes longer, then Willie scrambled to his feet and, taking her arm, flung her face down on the bank and sat on her legs.
“Let me go, you great coot!” she shrieked.
He snatched the wire from her fingers and performed a hasty repair. “It’s a fair rent,” he commented. “It’s a good job I’m not embarrassed easily.”
“I am. Go on, enjoy yourself. Your eyes are sticking out like organ stops.” Almost in tears of rage, Frankie twisted into an impossible position to glare at him.
“Ah, you’re all skin and bone.” He hoisted her to her feet with the damage repaired.
“Cripes, you’ve pulled it tight,” she said, feeling herself tenderly. “It don’t half dig in.”
“Don’t fret yourself, kid. You look like something off a Christmas tree now.”
He gave her a whack across the behind and pushed her away and she twisted again to see herself stern-on.
“It looks like you’ve been playing cat’s cradle,” she said critically.
She paused and straightened up, her brows puckered with bewilderment. “Willie,” she said, suddenly serious. “Do I act silly? I mean, do I behave like a kid out without its ma for the first time?”
Willie stooped to pick up the bow and arrows. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“You’re always pulling my leg.”
Willie rose and hitched the bow over his shoulder. “When a bloke pulls a girl’s leg,” he said, hitting on a home-truth unconsciously, “it’s because he likes her. It’s the one he makes passes at he don’t like. He’s a little scared of that kind and tries to show off.”
“And you aren’t scared of me?” Frankie felt disappointed.
“Why should I be?”
“No, why should you be? I’m just a kid.”
“I like you fine,” Willie went on. “You’re all right. You aren’t always fixing your hair and complaining because it’s too hot. You can keep up with me. You’re the sort of kid a bloke likes to have around.”
“I see.” Frankie answered thoughtfully, at the back of her mind the wish that keeping up with Willie wasn’t such hard work and the feeling that it would be nice if he’d ask her just once in a while if she were tired. “I just wondered.”
“You don’t want to worry about things like that,” Willie urged, preparing to move on. “They’re not important. Come on. Don’t let’s hang around. We might spot another pig.”
He set off ahead of her, the old unrepentant prowling Willie of the Sydney streets who had suddenly become the self-confident hunter, all those instincts which had made him what he was attuned for the chase, all the single-mindedness and cruelty which had resulted in the fight that had put him aboard the Tina making him able to kill without compunction.
“OK, Willie!” Frankie suppressed a sigh that was young and bewildered and impatient. The child of old parents, she had been starved of youth all her life and while she wanted to keep up with Willie, to have him tease her, she also ached for an affectionate word from him, not just the brisk word of one skilful tracker of wild pig to another.
She trailed after him, dragging the stick and sack she had brought, suddenly with no heart for the chase.
Three days later, in the early evening, four weeks to the day since they had first sighted Aranga-vaa, the newly named Boy George hoisted her sails and turned towards the entrance of the lagoon.
They raised the mainsail first, narrower now that Rosa had cut a good four feet off its width, then the new jib they had made to Joe’s instructions, an affair like a patchwork quilt, and finally the narrow little sail on the mizzen mast aft. With the wind in them, they bellied open, slapping at Willie and Frankie as they freed them. Slowly, the Boy George headed for the breakers at the entrance to the lagoon and made for the open sea, so that they all tasted the bitterness of brine on their tongues again and felt the dampness of the sea on their hands. Above their heads the sooty terns cried a farewell from their wheeling squadrons over the masthead, sharp and clear against the rolling masses of cumulus that hung on the mountain top.
“She looks fine,” Rosa said happily, glancing about her at the trim vessel, her decks swept free of shavings. “She looks like a fully rigged ship.”
“She sail like a fully rigged brick,” Joe said contemplatively as he felt the pull of the wheel. “She rolls about like she got-a the belly-ache.”
They all had stomachs satiated with pork from an uproarious celebration party the night before at which Joe had succumbed so much to the effects of food and the excitement that was obvious in Rosa that he had sung Santa Lucia to them from beginning to end. Below deck were the remains of two young pigs in salt and a few salted birds. Along the decks were strung strips of pork and fish drying to pemmican in the sun, and by the mast hung two stalks of bananas and bunches of drinking coconuts.
Rosa glanced round at the stream sparkling in the sunlight as it danced down
the hillside to be lost in the lagoon. The bright flare of flowers was fading, disappearing into the darker greenery of the bush as they drew away. “We got to go easy on water now,” she sighed. “I’m going to miss the baths.”
She smiled at Frankie hanging perilously over the bows watching for the nigger-heads of coral that rose like monstrous cauliflower’s under the surface. Her eyes were patient but there were lines of strain on her forehead and the wrinkles on her face seemed deeper. She was weary with the work they had done but uplifted by their success.
She watched the land slide past her, almost without it registering in her mind, her body slack and content, her hands heavy in her lap.
She looked across at Willie, well knowing how much they owed to his youth and enthusiasm, and there seemed in him just then some of the same pride that Rosa felt as he moved about the deck, his bare feet slapping the boards while he performed the few tasks attending their departure. He wore only a pair of trousers and his body was burned a golden brown, his fair hair bleached white by the sun. Knowing how far they had gone towards anonymity, Rosa felt a flooding affection for him and a fierce determination to hide him whatever his crime.
Almost as though he sensed she was thinking about him, Willie turned towards her and glanced back at Aranga-vaa. The steep spires of rock where the tenuous mist whirled through hidden valleys were dwindling now and the land fell away to the low reef on either side of the entrance to the lagoon. “Pity we couldn’t stay,” he said. “I enjoyed that place. But they’d find us if we did.”
As the old boat whispered her way to the growling surf, he drew a deep breath and felt bigger than he had ever felt before. He had conquered seasickness and sunburn, and the need for cigarettes no longer troubled him. All the things that had once seemed so essential to his existence no longer had a place among his wants as his needs slipped into a new and truer perspective.
He decided he would view Sydney more clearly when he got back, and then he remembered he wasn’t going back; he was never going back. The realization came as a shock to him and he felt a sickness at the pit of his stomach – a nostalgia for familiar narrow streets, and a tremendous desire to borrow a little more time to examine more closely the things he had never before had the desire to study or the sense to look at.
For a moment the black weight of knowing he was a fugitive oppressed him, then that curiosity he had always felt for the immense silence of Aranga-vaa caught his attention again and he forgot his unhappiness.
The sun was low as they passed through the reef on the ebbing tide. The light was fading rapidly and as the ship rose and fell on the open sea they lost all sense of being in a boat, of being anywhere but in a universe of sky and water.
The first porpoises broke surface ahead of them in a sparkle of light and formed up in escort as the terns began to thin out and return to the land.
“You know,” Willie said – more to himself than to the others, his voice a little awed at the thought – “I feel as though I’ve never been alive till now.”
Frankie turned, sprawling on the foredeck, and they all looked up at him, startled by the unexpectedness of the announcement. He stared back at them, then grinned foolishly and fell silent. As darkness came the stars were clear and bright. And the sea was wide and lonely and empty with only the old boat heading out from Aranga-vaa, growing smaller and smaller and smaller until she was only a dot on the wide surface of the water.
Part Two
One
Going east from Aranga-vaa, north towards the Tongan islands and east and south again through the Cooks, you come to the George IIIs, a group of islands reaching out like a pointing finger to the Societies. They hang in the sea like a string of brilliants edged by blazing beaches, the giant rollers of the Pacific thundering on their outer fringe in a majestic diapason of sound, to send mounting crests of spray high into the air and set the whole chain of islets quivering to their roar. Inside their sheltering reefs of coral the lagoons are polished opal, and along the shore the palms bend their tufted heads to the direction of the wind like so many acolytes bobbing to an altar.
Over them, reflecting the colours of the lagoons, hang scraps of cumulus by which the ancient navigators from Tonga used to steer. Some of the islands have beaches a mile wide with sand so dazzling it hurts the eyes, others have coral gardens below the surface of the water in vivid greens, blues, yellows, purples and blacks. Others have pearls in their inland lakes. And others sharks.
The most distant of the George III islands is Fleet, and there is a village there and a store, all built of magnificent Norwegian wood taken from the wreckage of a timber ship which piled up on the reef in 1911 and still lies there, its bones just visible below the surface, half covered with coral sand, its weed-grown holds the halls of the purple parrot fish and the crêpe-skinned surgeons, its clouded ports their exits and their entrances.
It was at Fleet where the newly named Boy George made her first call for stores three weeks after leaving Aranga-vaa, chiefly because Joe remembered the George IIIs as a scattered and isolated group largely uninhabited by Europeans and not likely to be over-populated with officials.
“We got to have stores,” he said. “OK, let’s pick ’em up where there ain’t no big-a-shots. On Fleet ain’t enough to choose a football team. Last time I go only one guy live there. Villey or Villiers or something. He go there to dodge-a the nagging wife.” Joe looked sideways at Rosa in the vain hope that the implication might encourage sweetness. “He like the sun and the birds and the quiet. Only the sun fry him and the birds don’t ever sing and the quiet begin to drive him crazy.” He shrugged. “He forget how far she is from the trade routes.”
“That was years ago,” Rosa said. “Maybe it’s different now.”
“We gotta to take the chance,” Joe replied. “We gotta to get stores. The salt pig don’t last for ever. If it’s a different bloke, tough-a luck! We gotta to do some quick thinking. If it’s the same bloke, he’ll be so old now, we don’t have to worry anyway.”
Rosa still hesitated and Frankie joined in, reaching across the table to wag an enthusiastic finger at her mother. “Listen, Mama,” she said. “Some time, some day, we’ve got to meet people. We can’t just go on for ever keeping out of people’s way. We’ve got to have stores. Well, let’s go into Fleet and try out the boat on ’em. Let’s go and see what they say about her. Let’s go and see if they recognize us. If there ain’t many people there, like Pop says, we ought to be able to get away smartish before they can do anything about it.”
“Suppose they got a wireless? Suppose they’re in touch? I wouldn’t like to have ’em take the boat off us after all the work we’ve done.”
Willie rattled the chart as he turned it round for Rosa to see. “Look, Mama,” he said, indicating it with a fork. “There are plenty of small islands in the George IIIs, so we ought to be able to hide up again pretty quick if we’ve got to.”
Rosa nodded at last, somehow convinced by Willie’s slow drawl when Joe’s staccato chatter and Frankie’s noisy persuasiveness had left her unmoved. “OK,” she said. “It sounds sense, I reckon. Let’s go and see what they got to say about the boat.”
They approached Fleet cautiously. They had passed through the scattered atolls of the Ha’apai group and skirted the perfect cone of Kao to Palmerston with its intense electric-blue lagoon, without seeing anything more than a distant schooner or a native canoe. While they lowered the sails and rolled gently to the blue swells that caught the sun as they swung down on the scrap of land before them, Rosa studied the island doubtfully, seeing it in her mind’s eye swarming with officials and police and debt collectors, all anxious to impound the Boy George. She ran her eyes over the three-mile circle of rock and sand that rose at one end to a low scrub-covered hill.
“I ain’t sure,” she said doubtfully, her mind full of fears again. “I ain’t so sure now.”
“Aw, Mama,” Frankie insisted, “we’ve got to try the boat on someone some time. Let’s tr
y here.”
“Suppose they recognize her? They could stop us getting out of the lagoon.”
“Mama,” Joe pointed out, “there ain’t enough people on Fleet to stop a match-a-stick getting out.”
“It might have changed.”
“Fleet ain’t-a big enough to change that much.”
Willie, who had been listening to the arguing for some time without talking, interrupted:
“Take it easy,” he said slowly. “Let’s sleep on it. Let’s stay outside for the night. We can sail up north and come back in the morning for daybreak. That’ll give Ma time to think it over.”
As though that were the answer to all their doubts, they broke into smiles and Rosa looked at Willie gratefully.
“Maybe that’s the best,” she said.
“I gotta the idea,” Joe said suddenly and they all turned towards him. “At the other side of Fleet is a spring on the steep side of the hill. It comes down in a pool and runs away into the lagoon. That’s where they got the store. That’s where we take on water if we want to. Only, also there is a beach below the pool outside the lagoon. Let’s pick up water there. Two-three trips and we can fill the tank. That way we got time to look her over and think about it. Ain’t-a too far to walk. We can go inside tomorrow.”
They all applauded Joe’s idea and hurried to hoist the sails again and make headway round the island.
It didn’t take Joe long to find the beach that led to the spring and they loaded the dinghy with all the containers they possessed and rowed for the shore. Heaving the boat up the beach, they set off for the trees and began to climb, casks and cans slung about their bodies. But the slope was steeper than Joe remembered and he began to be amazed at himself for suggesting such labour.
“Maybe,” he said, mopping the perspiration from his face, “we are now all crazy.”
Half-blinded with sweat as she plodded upwards, Rosa anxiously watched Willie and Frankie pressing on ahead, their young muscles carrying them beyond the other two as they competed against each other to see who could set the pace, Willie striding out unthinkingly, Frankie determined not to be outdone and thrusting painfully through the bushes he pushed aside with ease, struggling to keep up with him until Rosa and Joe were out of sight behind them.