‘Hamas?’ she asks, pointing to the fish.
The woman twists and launches a spurt of brilliant red to her left. ‘Five kina,’ she croaks.
‘Tupela.’ Beth holds up two fingers.
The woman reaches for the fish and sends them skittling into a plastic bag.
Beth dodges children, dogs and rotting rubbish and heads to her favourite stall. The woman’s face lights up as Beth crouches in front.
‘Morning Misis Australia,’ she says, rocking back with a laugh, delighting in her joke. Her friend next to her hits her on the back, chuckling.
‘Morning,’ says Beth. ‘Wanpela plis.’
The woman’s big arms wobble as she stretches for the largest chunk of mumu tapioca: banana and tapioca baked with hot stones under the ground. She tears off oily banana leaves, wrapping the wedge preciously, as if it’s a finely decorated cream cake, and presents it to Beth.
‘Lunch. Kaikai,’ Beth says, patting her belly, and the two women smile.
‘You eat too much, you fat like us,’ the woman says. ‘You be fatti fat meri then!’ Beth laughs and waves away the suggestion. But heading home, she walks faster, vowing to exercise more often.
She can see their four houses when she hears a woman’s voice behind her.
‘Misis Beth! Misis Beth! Hello! Misis Beth!’
Beth turns to see a woman in a vivid lime meri blouse, a fringe of leaves tied around her hips, running toward her. Beth has seen her in the afternoons, standing under the big raintree by the gate, waiting for Dennis and his little sister Gloria. Her bare feet look like giant slugs and thwack the road as she hurries, her anklets tinkling. She carries a purple bilum in each arm and a bunch of thick, green bananas balanced on her head, curling down over her eyes, like some giant tropical spider.
‘Misis Beth,’ she says quickly. ‘Nam bilong mi Agatha. Pikinini bilong mi—Dennis na Gloria—go long Saint Mary’s, gutpela skul.’
‘Yes,’ Beth says, concentrating hard on the words. ‘Hello. Sorry, I only know English. Liklik Pidgin. Gut to meet you.’
‘Ha! Mi tok Pidgin, only liklik English. Tenkyu tru, Misis Beth. Gutpela helpim. Gutpela meri.’ Agatha drops one of her bilums and grabs Beth’s hand, shaking it eagerly, smiling broadly. ‘Ol pikininis laikum yu. Misis Val too. So laki. Lucky.’
Beth feels taller, her cheeks go warm.
‘Thanks God you and us,’ Agatha says. She pats the bananas on her head. ‘Me African meri now!’ And laughs, picks up the bilum, and walks on.
‘Bye, Agatha!’ Beth calls after her.
A little further up the road, Agatha spins around: ‘Lukim yu long lotu!’
Lotu? Beth searches for the meaning. Church. Everyone wants Beth in church. Salvation perhaps? God knows, she needs it.
*
Beth follows Val along the thin path through the mission. Singing and clapping fill the air. She can’t make out the words but she finds herself hurrying faster now, almost overtaking Val, eager to see inside the church. Two dogs sniff her legs as she walks through the door, and she’s immediately overwhelmed by what she sees: people. So many people. Three hundred or more sitting in a cavernous semi-circle of wooden pews, under a towering roof. There are soaring stained glass windows—the last supper, Jesus with fishes and loaves, the stable at Bethlehem watched over by a diamond-like star—and a central aisle of smooth, grey river stones. The stone altar is covered in a starched white cloth and strung with garlands of frangipani and the green leaves of a ginger plant. And up high, as if levitating above the altar, black Jesus is bolted to a large wooden cross.
Val and Beth sit on the left, two pews back from the front. A few moments later, Beth looks around quickly and is alarmed: she’s surrounded by men and teenage boys. Women and young children sit to the right of the altar. Anxious, she leans over to Val and asks if they should move.
‘The fans are better on this side,’ Val whispers. ‘And I’m certain God doesn’t care where we sit.’
Every time she kneels, moves, stands, every hymn she stumbles through, Beth feels dark eyes at her back. Mass is not like the thirty-minute express version offered in Hope Valley; here it’s a feat of endurance lasting over two hours. And with all these people packed in around her, the whole heaving congregation kneeling and rising and sitting and singing with the stench of perspiration and betelnut, Beth isn’t sure she’ll make it.
She remembers Eva telling her sternly that she had to go to mass every Sunday until she was seventeen. And then she could choose. It had been the same for Clem, who’d shrugged his shoulders when Beth pleaded with him all through her teenage years, insisting that it meant a lot to Eva. He’d tapped his chest and said I tune into here, and then he’d said he thought about all the jobs he needed to do that week, all the sheep he would shear. I think about the farm, he’d said softly. You, me ... then softer still ... and yer mum.
Once Eva had said that Beth might go travelling when she was older, that there were Catholic churches all around the world which would make the place a bit familiar, a bit like home. If Beth needed help, she could ask a nun or a priest. She remembers Eva’s voice, all whimsy: Just imagine the ‘Our Father’ in some village in Argentina or Greece or Italy. At least you’ll know what to say. Beth had slumped further into her seat, and turned to look at the newly ploughed paddock.
As if, she’d thought. She’d never imagined leaving Clem.
Papa bilong mipela yu stap long heaven
Ol i santuim nem bilong yu
Beth can decipher a few words in the ‘Our Father’ but most of it bewilders her. And there are some English hymns she’s never heard before. After Communion, a special offering is made to Father Aloysius by four young men, bare chests caked in pale mud and faces white with powder. Their green leaf skirts part as they dance down the aisle and Beth can see bright yellow shorts underneath. The tallest one holds the woven basket of money and greens, chokos and snake beans aloft as the four of them sashay towards the altar to the beat of kundu drums, hips gyrating, clenching their fists overhead. The whole church is singing and clapping and the place is suddenly bursting and Beth can feel spirit, like electricity, like fire, all around her. All those years of stilted masses in Hope Valley, and then the girls’ school, making sure her students listened, recited prayers, sang the predictable hymns. Like robots, done because one ought to or should, not this heaving joy of here and now.
Val’s been in PNG for over thirty years, and knows her staff is better than most. She doesn’t mind giving toothbrushing lessons to new teachers who arrive chewing betelnut, even though it’s prohibited in their contract and painted on a sign staked to bamboo at the front gate. She has Ruth with the Year Ones and Lena with the Year Eights: two reliable teachers who always do more than expected. They are eager to impress, her staff. Hard workers and good people, even if some of them do arrive an hour late, blaming the local bus that ricochets off potholes as it heads to town from the villages in the south.
Once, Mr Reis is late three times in one week and Val calls him to the office.
‘Yes, Misis Val. It is true. I am sorry. I am very bad,’ he says, and smiles. Then he stands and walks out.
They’re timid, really, which Val knows is a blessing, but she catches herself at times talking to them like children. It’s old Mrs Samin, half-national, half-Chinese, sitting quietly, staring at her in staff meetings or in the staffroom, who keeps her honest. Mrs Samin’s always early and looks immaculate: her meri blouses are tailored by the women out the back of Lim’s, and her teeth are always, always clean. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, Val had said in her first year at Saint Mary’s, and Mrs Samin had smiled beatifically. Mrs Samin didn’t suffer fools and Val, over the years, has sought her counsel on staffing matters: What should I do with a teacher having an affair with a married man? On financial matters for the school: Is this too much to ask for semester fees? And on religious matters: Just how do your people marry Jesus with local belief?
The teachers do anything Val
asks: incorporate new programs, attend extra meetings after school, fundraise on the weekend. Many of them stay late, and Lena and Ruth are in their classrooms after church on Sundays.
Val doesn’t work that hard herself.
*
Val is happy. At the end of Beth’s first month on the island, things are working out better than she’d imagined: Beth seems to like her house, and the teachers adore her. Mrs Samin often mentions how efficient Beth is: she’s doing all the photocopying now, and it’s always ready for the first lesson. Saves Val time and heartache: the new photocopier confounds her. And she knows that Mrs Samin brought Beth crab soup for dinner one night—the ultimate mark of respect. She sees Beth work through her lunch breaks, stuffing down crackers and fruit while going through the afternoon’s lessons with Lena, or preparing for art with Mr Reis. And her work at staff meetings has been invaluable. Val can leave her to brief staff on literacy ideas or student behaviour initiatives.
Often she finds Beth stooped over a teacher’s desk at the end of the day, still going through lesson plans. And once, she was on a chair balanced on a desk, tying a papier-mâché Neptune made by a student to a piece of rope strung across Mr Reis’s classroom. She sees Beth on duty at lunchtime, walking near the flagpole, children clamouring around her. Even Lena’s shy high school students are beginning to thaw. Val doesn’t know much about love but she knows this place is exactly what Beth needs.
But sometimes she sees the strain on Beth’s face, or the big sad stare. And every so often, Beth’s voice wavers and she won’t meet Val’s eye. Once, Val mentions a couple of Brazilian men—friendly, interesting types—volunteering at the hospital and staying at The Bilas. She suggests that Beth might like to meet them, to talk to people her own age, but Beth quickly changes the subject.
And then on Thursday morning Val overhears some of the women talking in the staffroom.
Dispela meri, Beth, sori long en.
Ai wara save pundaun.
Val hasn’t seen Beth crying.
‘Ruth.’ Val’s voice is steady as she walks into the staffroom, interrupting the women. ‘You know we speak English here. Classroom or not, we speak English. Always has been like that.’
‘Sorry Misis Val,’ Ruth says, brushing biscuit crumbs off the table into her hand, scooping them into her mouth.
Val walks back to her office, relieved that she has a small bottle of gin in the bottom drawer. Beth crying? How could she have missed it?
*
Val drinks gin. And brandy. And Pimms. And anything else, if push comes to shove—which it usually does—when the boat with the monthly delivery hasn’t come. She only has to walk through the gate at The Bilas, hello the guard at the door, and Justice is reaching into the fridge for tonic, quickly wiping a tumbler with the cleanest corner of a greasy tea towel and pouring two measures of gin. If there’s ice that day, he adds a cube.
‘Misis Val,’ he calls out that afternoon, smiling. His teeth are filled with buai, even though the staff isn’t meant to chew betelnut at work and a faded Noken kaikai buai long hia sign hangs above the fridge. ‘Here he is, your drink, ready and waiting.’
And a queenly Val walks up the steps, heading straight for the bar. And as always, she tells Justice that he makes an old woman very happy.
After greeting Patrick from the post office, Tom from Fisheries and Doc Mathers, she sits at her usual table near the hibiscus hedge, ignoring the pathetic dogs sprawled underneath, and takes out The National. Ten minutes later Val has another gin and a small packet of roasted peanuts from Indonesia and savours them, one at a time, reading every article, hankering for news from Australia. For this one part of the day, away from the bamboo huts and blue brick classrooms of the school, where little kids constantly swarm around her and teachers ask endless questions, where she doesn’t have to deal with broken plumbing or blocked sewerage, late school fees or driving a tiny student shuddering with fever to the hospital, she imagines herself as some colonial woman, just in town from her big oil palm plantation, having a drink before meeting her husband. But there is no big plantation. Or husband, big or otherwise, and deep down, Val is glad for it. She wouldn’t want to clean a big house, she has no interest in growing things—much less palm oil that wrecks the place—and men are more trouble than they’re worth.
She’d had a fellow, once, who was interested, when she was twenty-two. He was Barry West, a sugar cane farmer from Babinda, a tiny speck in the shadow of mountains south of Cairns. She’d enjoyed her visits to the family plantation on Friday nights, especially sitting in the garden at dusk, black cloud of fruit bats flying overhead. She’d liked the sound of the evening breeze ruffling the cane, and Barry’s dad talking about cane prices, Vietnam and Whitlam. He drank scotch neat, belched regularly and told bawdy jokes, filled Val’s glass with gin, and then played the mouth organ till he told Barry it was time to take the young girl home. And in the old EJ Holden Barry would drive them north along the highway, the car quiet after all his dad’s noise, so different from her own father.
Barry had wanted to see her on Sundays too but Val had commitments: Sunday morning Mass, teaching Bible class to the under twelves, then family luncheon. Val suspected that if the cards had fallen a certain way she could have had the big house, the plantation and the man all right, but Barry West had grown tired of her pushing his hands away when they slid up her skirt, or having his tongue bitten when it probed her mouth. Jeezes, he’d say, yer can’t even kiss properly. She’d feared that the tormented Hail Marys she whispered afterwards in the quiet of her bedroom were not enough to rid the filth she felt seeping through her skin. One day Barry had stopped calling for her and she’d heard he was courting Mary from the chemist, a Presbyterian.
Val’s not sure why this has all come up again—she hasn’t thought about Barry West for over thirty years—though she likes to think she’s learned from the experience: a healthy distrust of men and a generous liking for gin. There is only one man for her anyway and he’s two thousand years dead, and no trouble at all. So she doesn’t have a clue what to say to Beth. She’d like to offer words of wisdom, some bite-sized sentiment that could ease the troubled soul she sees some days, but each time the words are marbles in her mouth and in the end she says nothing.
She sits sipping her gin, staring at the cheap flights from Moresby to Wewak—a summer bonus—and as she waves to Justice, then taps the tumbler for her third, she says to herself dramatically: Bethy girl, I ain’t got nothing for ya, I ain’t got no sugar.
1975
Dog barks and runs to the back door when Rose drives up in Smithson’s Holden at seven o’clock. Clem has the fire roaring and mutton stew—the only thing he knows he can’t spoil—bubbling away on the wood stove in the kitchen. He smooths down his shirt, pats his hair around his ears, momentarily closes his eyes, Please God. He walks outside and Rose, her face alive and beautiful, comes towards him carrying a white pie dish.
‘Lemon meringue,’ she says, offering him a peek under the tea towel.
‘Bewdiful.’ He kisses her cheek, takes the pie from her and Dog, like a pageboy, leads them into the house.
‘Wow Clem, it’s roasting!’ Rose says. She tosses her pink cardigan on the lounge chair, fanning herself by the fire.
‘Nah love, we’re having stew!’
The table is set with the yellow tablecloth that he borrowed from Eva, and his only un-chipped plates, tarnished cutlery with yellowed enamel handles, and small green glasses. A white candle balances in a jam jar in the middle of it all. They sip Tom’s homemade ginger beer and Rose coughs as the sharpness bites the back of her throat. Clem serves the stew with chunks of brown bread and they talk about the sheds, the fog shrouding the valley that morning, what they might do over the summer. But when Clem asks Rose about her family, she looks away, says she’s not close to her parents. There’s something in her voice, offhand but kind of sad, that makes him think he’ll save it for another time. And so they watch the candle flickering betwe
en them, the soft glow making Rose’s face full and dewy, and then, moving his plate aside, he reaches over and brushes her cheek with the back of his fingers. She turns slowly, takes his hand, turns it over and nuzzles the rough skin, then clasping her hand tight around it, kisses his palm.
‘Thanks for cooking for me, Clem,’ she says, looking straight at him.
He stands and walks around the small table, Rose still holding his hand like they’re doing some old-time dance. He takes her in his arms, the slender, magnificent Rose, and she looks up at him and he feels his heart surge as he bends toward her. He kisses her softly at first, then pushes her against the table, their mouths warm, tongues searching. He pulls back fistfuls of hair and Rose yelps, then he kisses a line up her neck to her chin. He stands back.
‘I want you, Rose,’ his voice all throaty. ‘Only you.’
He leads her into the lounge where the fire dances shadows on the walls and they undress each other. Clem watches Rose unfold before him: breasts creamy against tanned arms, belly flat like river stone, and he trembles as, one by one, she undoes his shirt buttons and slides her hands inside, over his shoulder, gently easing away the fabric. Clem reaches for the blanket on the couch and they shiver underneath, fumbling with the rest of their clothing.
Close to midnight he sees her throw on his shirt and walk to the kitchen. She comes back with the dessert, sits nestled between his legs and feeds him kisses and lemon pie. Cool and tangy against her hot mouth.
And so the night passes with more pudding, cups of tea, mallee logs thrown on the fire, sparks like shooting stars, the two of them lying entwined under the blanket. Sometime near dawn, Clem hears a magpie warble down near the dam and he looks at Rose, crooked under his arm, hair tickling his nose, hears her quiet pht-pht dolphin breathing, and knows he’s never felt so happy.
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