by Peter Carey
With these two emotional props removed Vincent went to pieces. He departed for Queensland to write but only got as far as Lismore where he was looked after briefly by communards.
His memory of events after this time is either unclear or so embarrassing to him that he is not prepared to reveal any significant details. He still insists that it all came to a climax two months ago with him being interned in Long Bay for assaulting a policeman at a demonstration, but I know this is untrue. It is possible he would have liked the idea of going to Long Bay, but he never has.
Now I can let you into a secret.
This is something I’ve been hoping might happen as I’ve worked. Had it not happened, this little account of Vincent’s involvement with Upward Island would still have been of some real interest. However, recent events mean that I may be able to pursue the matter in a more purposeful way.
Vincent assaulted me last night. He came home with some people I’d never seen before, demanded I feed them, abused me when I refused, and punched me in the mouth when they left.
I’m afraid that I am now angry with him. I can no longer be dispassionate. The tiny part of me that observed Vincent with godlike pity has gone. I talked of revenge before. I was speaking of some minor bitching revenge of exploiting his story for my own gain. Now, however, I have a broken tooth which will have to be capped. It’ll cost me two hundred dollars. My warfare with Vincent has come into the open.
I have told him to go and I will not change my mind. He knows it. At this moment his bags are packed but he is staying to finish dismantling the brick wall, a job he does with sullen thoroughness. He watches me typing over the top of it, a self-satisfied smirk on his face. I’d love to know what he thought he was doing with that brick wall. I’m sure it represents all kinds of incredible things for him. There is mortar dust over the dishes in the kitchen and all the furniture. There is mortar dust over the typewriter and between my teeth.
Well, Vincent my friend, the paper I work for is committed to sending me to Upward Island to look at this quaint little revolution. And now I’ve got a little background information from you, I’ll use it and broaden it in the best way I can. I shall publicize you, Vincent, both here and on Upward Island. I’m sure the leaders of Upward Island will be most interested to know who is responsible for their blue hands. I’m not sure if you’re legally responsible but I’m sure you should be.
PART 2
I have led you on with promises of a spectacular revenge, and now I will tell you that there shall be no revenge. Instead, I hope, a more substantial meal awaits you.
In four days on Upward Island I have seen three months’ planning come undone. Am I so shallow, so easily swayed? Am I like an adolescent girl, jumping from love to hatred with every change in the weather?
Whatever my mental balance, there is more than a little explaining to do. Vincent is sitting on my bed in the Rainbow Motel, Upward Island. The fan turns overhead. The cockroaches stroll casually across the concrete floor. In the corner, above the basin, a little lizard lies, occasionally making small bird noises.
Vincent informs me that he is a chee-chuk.
He leans back against the pillow and I observe for the twentieth time what I never saw until this week: what lovely legs he has: long, slim straight legs as deeply tanned as rich students on long holidays. He looks so clean, so healthy. His beard is gone and there is no longer anything to veil his fine sensitive chiselled features with those beautiful sad grey eyes. Vincent, did I tell you that even when I was most angry with you I loved your eyes? They are less of an enigma to me now.
We have not arrived easily at this still, calm moment in this little room. We have travelled via suspicion and rage. I have watched him, on other days, as he earnestly helped me prepare my article, providing me with facts I hadn’t known about his past, and easing my way into knowledge of his present. He has acted as my guide and denied me nothing and I watched carefully for his sleight of hand as he prepared the scaffolding for his own execution.
But there have been no tricks. Neither has there been remorse, tears, demands, or violence.
Instead I have come to envy him his calm, his contentment, his ability to sit still and keep his silence.
Vincent left for Upward Island on the day I threw him out. He had been planning it from the time he met me. He paid for the fare with money from my stolen books and records and a number of even less savoury transactions. I can imagine him arriving: bedraggled, dirty, full of guilt and speed in equal proportions, going from one bar to the next in search of someone who would forgive him the sin he hadn’t the courage to confess. He had no money, no plan, and existed in drunken agony at the bottom of the big black pit he had built for himself. He had come, classically, with remorse, but the remorse would not go away and with each day he fell further and further into the grips of despair. He couldn’t leave. It was impossible to stay.
It was finally Solly Ling, the new president himself, who picked him up off the floor and took him home. Taking him for a derelict (which he was) Solly set about drying him out. He found him clothes and gave him food and then, sternly, put him to work.
Vincent had never done sustained physical labour in his life. But now he was forced to work on the building of the Upward Island school. There was no alternative. He dug stump holes until his hands were raw and bleeding. He carried bricks until his arms only existed as a nagging pain in his brain. He poured concrete.
He spoke little and never complained. There was a logic in it. It was a penance. He accepted it.
Solly had cleared out an old shed in his backyard and there Vincent, wide-eyed and sleepless, listened with terror to toads and rats and flying foxes and other nocturnal mysteries slither and flap and eat and dig around the hut.
Vincent and Solly ate together, mostly in silence, for Vincent was terrified of revealing anything of his past. But Solly was a patient man and a curious one. He sensed Vincent’s education and with one question one day and another the next he finally learned that Vincent was a lawyer and an economist, that he had worked for big companies including several banks. At that time the island council was making heavy weather of the constitution and one night Solly broached the subject with Vincent and he watched with pleasure as Vincent took the thing apart and put it together in a neat, simple and logical way. The next day Vincent met the council. He was patient and self-effacing. Solly watched him and saw a sensitive diplomat, a man who listened to every speaker and was able to see the value of a sensible objection, but who could also politely point out the disadvantages of a less sensible one.
It was a touchy business. The council could have rejected him, found him patronizing, or too clever by half. But none of these things happened. Vincent’s guilt had made his nerve ends as raw as his blistered hands and he felt their feelings with a peculiar intensity. He acted as a servant, never once imposing his own will.
His service to the council, however, was but a drop of water on the fires of his guilt. He sat in the old Waterside Workers Union shed where the council meetings were held and all he could see were the blue hands of the councillors. Surrounded by the evidence of his crime there was no room for escape.
He drafted three new prawning contracts and volunteered for the unpleasant job of cleaning the mortar off the old bricks for the school. He painted Solly’s house for him and went on to start the vegetable garden.
These acts were in no way intended to curry favour or gain friendship (in fact they were some sort of substitute for wrath) but they succeeded in spite of that. The islanders took to him: not only was he educated but he was also prepared to work at the nastiest jobs side by side with them, he could tell funny stories, he didn’t flirt with their wives, and he’d negotiated the best damn prawn contracts they’d ever had.
It is doubtful if Vincent noticed this. He was not accustomed to being liked and would have never expected it on Upward Island.
Given his skills, it’s natural enough that he should have been co-opted as an
assistant to the council. But that he should be elected formally to the council after only two months is an indication of the popularity he had begun to enjoy. Again, it is doubtful if he saw it.
On the night after his election to the council he sat on the verandah with Solly and looked out at the approaching night, a night that was still foreign to him and full of things he neither liked nor understood.
Solly was a big man. The stomach that bulged beneath his white singlet betrayed his love of beer, just as the muscular forearms attested to his years as a waterside worker. The great muscled calves that protruded from his rolled-up trousers were the legs of a young man, but the creased black face and the curly greying hair betrayed his age. It was a face that could show, almost simultaneously, the dignity of a judge and the bright-eyed recklessness of a born larrikin.
He sat on the verandah of his high-stilted house, one big blue hand around a beer bottle, the other around a glass which he filled and passed to Vincent. The hand which took the glass was now calloused and tough. The arm, never thick, was now wiry and hard, tatooed with knicks and scratches and dusty with mortar. A flea made its way through the hairs and dust on the arm. Vincent saw it and knocked it off. It wasn’t worth killing them. There were too many.
As the darkness finally shrouded the garden a great clamour began in the hen house.
“Bloody python,” said Solly.
“I’ll go.” Vincent stood up. He didn’t want to go. He hadn’t gone yet, but it was about time he went.
“I’ll go.” Solly picked up a shotgun and walked off into the dark. Vincent sipped his beer and knew that next time he’d have to go.
There was a shot and Solly came back holding the remains of a python in one hand and a dead chicken in the other.
“Too late,” he grinned, “snake got him first.”
He sat down, leaving the dead bird on the floor, and the snake draped across the railing.
“Now you’re on the council,” he said, “we’re going to have to do something to get your hands in shape.”
“Ah, they’re all right. The blisters have all gone.” Vincent wondered what blisters had to do with the council.
“I wasn’t talking about blisters, Mr. Economics. I was discussing the matter of your hands.” Solly chuckled. His white teeth flashed in the light from the kitchen window. “You’re going to have to take some medicine.”
Vincent was used to being teased. He had faced poisonous grasshoppers, threatened cyclones and dozens of other tricks they liked to play on him. He didn’t know what this was about, but he’d find out soon enough.
“What medicine is that, Sol?”
“Why,” laughed Solly, “little pills, of course. You need a few little pills now you’re on the council. We can’t have you sitting on the council with the wrong-coloured hands.”
Vincent couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They’d never discussed the blue hands. His mind had been full of it. Not a day had gone by when the blue hands hadn’t caused him pain. But he had avoided mentioning them for fear of touching so nasty a wound.
“Eupholon?” He said it. The word.
“For a smart boy you’re very slow. Sure, that’s what they call it.”
Vincent’s scalp prickled. He had said the name. How did he know the name? They knew about him. It was a trap. Now it would be the time for justice to be done. They would force him to take the poison he’d given them.
There was a silence.
“Solly, you know where I worked before?”
“Sure, you was the great Economics man.”
“I mean what company?”
“Sure, you worked for Mr. Farrow.” Solly’s voice was calm, but Vincent’s ears were ringing in the silence between the words.
“How you know that, Solly?”
“Oh, you got a lady friend who reckons you’re a bad fella. She wrote us a letter. Three pages. Boy, what you do to her, eh?” He laughed again. “She’s a very angry lady, that one.”
“Anita.”
“I forget her name,” he waved an arm, dismissing it. “Some name like that.”
In the corner of his eye, Vincent saw the headless python twitch.
“That why you want me to take the pills?”
“Christ no.” Solly roared with laughter, a great whooping laugh that slid from a wheezing treble to deepest bass. “Christ no, you crazy bastard.” He stood up and came and sat by Vincent on the step, hugging him. “You crazy Economics bastard, no.” He wiped his eyes with a large blue hand. “Oh shit. You are what they call a one-off model. You know what that means?”
“What?” Vincent was numb, almost beyond speech.
“It means you are fucking unique. I love you.”
Vincent was very confused. He slapped at a few mosquitoes and tried to puzzle it out. Every shred of fact that his life was based on seemed as insubstantial as fairy floss. “You don’t care I sent the pills here?”
“Care!” the laughter came again. “To put it properly to you, we are fucking delighted you sent the pills here. Everything is fine. Why should we be mad with you?”
“The blue hands…”
“You are not only crazy,” said Solly affectionately. “You are also nine-tenths blind. Don’t you notice anything about the blue hands?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re bloody blind. All the best men got blue hands. All the bravest men. We’re bloody proud of these hands. You got blue hands on Upward, Vincent, you got respect. How come you can live here so long and not notice that? We had to beat that damn guard to get these hands, Vincent. When the time came to kick out Farrow, everyone knows who’s got the guts to do it, because we’re the only ones that’s got the hands.”
“So I’ve got to have blue hands, to be on the council?”
“You got it. You got perfect understanding.”
“OK,” Vincent grinned. He felt as light as air. He poured himself another beer. He wanted to get drunk and sing songs. He didn’t dwell on the idea of the blue hands. That was nothing. All he said was, “Where do I get the pills?”
Solly scratched his head. “Well, I suppose there must be some up at the warehouse. You better go up and take a look.”
Vincent started laughing then, laughing with pure joy and relief. The more he thought about it, the funnier it was and the more he laughed. And Solly, sitting beside him, laughed too.
I imagine the pair of them hooting and cackling into the dark tropical night, a dead chicken at their feet, a headless python twitching on the railing. Not surprisingly, they were laughing about different things.
Late the next morning Vincent set off to walk to the warehouse. He felt marvellous. In the kitchen he cut himself some sandwiches and on the dusty road he found a long stick. He walked the three-mile track with a light heart, delighting in the long seas of golden grass, finding beauty in the muddy mangrove shoreline and its heat-hazed horizon.
Vincent in white shorts with his cut lunch and walking stick like a tourist off to visit Greek ruins.
The warehouse shone silver in the harsh midday sun. There was something written on the side. As he came up the last steep slope he finally made it out: someone had painted a blue hand on the longest side of the building and added, for good measure: WARNING-DEATH. He wondered vaguely if this had been the manager’s work. How gloriously ineffective it had been. What total misunderstanding had been displayed.
He was still a hundred yards from the warehouse when he saw a man, dressed in white shorts like himself, standing at the front of the building.
The man called.
Vincent waved casually and continued on, wondering who it was. The man was white. He had seen no white people until now.
As he walked up the hill, being careful not to slip on the shale which made up the embankment, the man disappeared for a second and then came back with what looked like a rifle. Vincent’s first thought was: a snake, he’s seen a snake. He grasped his stick firmly and walked ahead, his eyes on the ground
in front.
So he didn’t see the man lift the rifle to his shoulder and fire.
The bullet hit the ground a yard ahead of him and ricocheted dangerously off the rocks.
Vincent stopped and yelled. The man was a lunatic. The bloody thing had nearly got him. Even as he shouted he saw him raise the rifle again.
This time he felt the wind of the bullet next to his cheek.
He didn’t stay to argue any longer, he turned to run, fell, dropped the sandwiches and stick and slithered belly down over shale for a good twenty feet. When he stood up it was to run.
From the next hill he saw the man with the gun walk down the hilt, pick up the sandwiches and slowly saunter back to the warehouse.
Imagine Vincent, cut, bruised, covered in sweat, his eyes wide with outrage and anger as he strode into the Royal Hotel and found Solly at the bar.
“Solly, there’s some crazy bastard at the warehouse. He shot at me. With a fucking rifle.”
“No,” said Solly, his eyes wide.
“Yes,” said Vincent. “The bugger could have killed me.”
They bought drinks for Vincent that night and he finally learned that the guards he had once employed for Farrow were now employed by the council to continue their valuable work. Those with blue hands did not want them devalued.
And Vincent, nursing his bruises at the bar, tried to smile at the joke. It was not going to be as easy to get his blue hands as he’d thought.
Faced with the terrifying prospect of death or wounding, he began to consider the possibility of blue hands more carefully. Whilst they would give him some prestige on Upward Island, they would make him grotesque anywhere else, of interest only to doctors and laughing schoolchildren on buses. He saw himself in big cities on summer days, wearing white gloves like Mickey Mouse. He saw the embarrassed eyes of people he knew and, he says, my own triumphant face as I revelled in the irony of it: Dr. Strangelove with radiation poisoning.