Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘No! I’m running out of time, she must know everything before I die!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Saffy, of course.’

  ‘What, your life’s story?’

  ‘Pfft! Of course not! Who cares about that? Money. She must know about money.’ She wouldn’t explain any further, but every day she’d print out what she’d written and lock it in the safe. Not that I would ever have looked at it. Saffron and Anna were a private duo and I was happy that the beautiful youngster took Anna’s mind off her own increasingly intense pain.

  Two months before Anna passed away she handed me a very large envelope she’d sealed with red sealing wax and imprinted with a stamp that carried her Dutch family coat of arms. I had never seen her use it before.

  ‘Nicholas, this is for Saffron. You must give it to her on her twenty-second birthday.’

  ‘Not her twenty-first?’ I questioned.

  ‘No, she will finish university, graduate and have her twenty-first birthday – for that I have arranged the Visa card. Then you must let her have a year to travel, find herself. Then on her twenty-second have a big party and give her this envelope. She has been enrolled at MIT and the London School of Economics – she will choose which one she wants. After that,’ she indicated the envelope, ‘these are her instructions.’

  Sick as Anna was, I felt the need to object. ‘Anna, you can’t control the girl’s life; she may not want to do as you instruct.’

  Anna looked at me. ‘That is for her to decide. There are instructions in there if she doesn’t . . .’ Anna paused. ‘But she will,’ she said with total conviction.

  Anna rapidly declined. She was now permanently bedridden, with a buzzer next to her bed, a nurse who slept in the room next door and a doctor who visited twice a day to administer morphine. She was mostly in a semi-coma with only brief moments of lucidity and couldn’t possibly manage to inhale the heroin even if I prepared it for her. If she wanted to call me she pressed the buzzer twice.

  Then in the dry season, on the 5th of April 1993, when the persimmon trees were bursting with fruit, great golden orbs hanging on the twisted leafless limbs, at two in the morning the buzzer woke me.

  I stumbled into Anna’s bedroom. It was the first time in two days she’d been sufficiently lucid to use the buzzer. The nightlight was on and incredibly she’d managed to sit up. ‘Come and hold me, Nicholas,’ she said in a whisper, ‘one last time.’

  I crawled into bed, careful not to hurt her. Then I gently took her tiny body into my arms. ‘Who would have thought that the brightest star in all creation was the first one I ever caught.’ She smiled a little, then whispered, ‘Thank you. Thank you for everything, my beautiful man. I only ever wanted you.’ And she died in my arms.

  Fifteen hundred islanders came to her funeral feast at Beautiful Bay. They came from every part of the Pacific – administrators, politicians, teachers and common people, hundreds of them, recipients of her and Joe’s Uncle Joe Scholarships. Joe started to make a speech and then broke down. Kevin, with a cigar in his mouth, kept telling anyone who would listen, ‘She was one helluva dame!’ Saffron, only fourteen, organised the island children to plant the remainder of the persimmon trees, seeded in the propagation shed by Ellison the previous wet season.

  That is, except for one robust seedling. It is traditional in the islands to bury a loved one in the garden, but as usual Anna had other plans. After the great feast I had her coffin placed on Madam Butterfly and sailed single-handed to Coffee Scald Island. Ellison had gone out the previous day in the motorboat with three strong island lads, his grandsons, and they’d dug her grave through the coral on the topmost knoll.

  They’d gone ahead after the feast and were waiting for me as the sun started to set and Ellison waded in and pulled Madam Butterfly into the shallows. The three young men, Ellison and I carried her coffin up to the knoll and lowered it into the grave. Then they returned to the beach and left me there.

  I said the same prayer I’d learned standing beside my father at countless native funerals. The one I’d said for the ten sailors all those years ago on the lonely beach in West Java.

  “I am the resurrection, and the life”, saith the Lord:

  “he that believeth in me, though he were dead,yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die . . .”

  For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels,nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Earth to earth; ashes to ashes; dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life.

  Amen.

  Ellison returned with his grandsons and filled Anna’s grave, then they departed and Ellison returned with a watering can filled with fresh water and I planted the last of the persimmon trees where my darling Anna rested for eternity. I watered it in and handed the can back to the old man who had been at my side almost every day of my life for over fifty years. He turned to me and said, ‘Yumi everywan kum ia today for say tang yu for life long missus blong yumi. Mifella everyman missim hem tumas and mifella everywan lak tellem sori tumas long masta Nick.’ [We are here today to give thanks for the life of our mistress Anna. We will miss her very much and we would like to tell Nick we feel sorry for him.]

  Then Ellison left me and I heard the motorboat departing. It was dark by now and I spent the night with Anna. Dawn came in a brilliant splash of light and I had no more tears to give my beloved. I waded through the shallows and hauled in the anchor and set sail for Beautiful Bay.

  And now, let me tell you about my beautiful godchild, Saffron, returned from Europe for her twenty-second birthday. Marg came over to Beautiful Bay, as well as several of Saffron’s school and university friends from the islands and from Sydney. Joe and Lela, of course, and Saffy’s dad and mum, Joe Junior and Francis. We gave her a lovely party at Beautiful Bay and then, late in the evening, I drew her aside and handed her Anna’s envelope.

  ‘What is it, Uncle Nick?’ she asked, taking the plain brown manila envelope and examining the inappropriately elaborate red seal.

  ‘I don’t know. Your Aunty Anna instructed me to give it to you on your twenty-second birthday. Perhaps you should wait until tomorrow to read it. It took her weeks to compile.’

  When Saffron came to breakfast the following morning she was puffy-eyed and said she had read all night. ‘Uncle Nick, I’m overwhelmed; it’s going to take weeks for me to digest. But she wants me to go to MIT near Boston or LSE in London.’

  ‘Yes, that much I know. What do you think?’

  ‘London,’ she said without hesitation.

  ‘You mean you agree to go?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That’s the frightening bit. She has placed nearly a billion dollars in a Swiss account in the name of a foundation she’s called ‘Women Against Rape’. She wants me to run it – the foundation. One of its major purposes is to supply legal fees to support any woman who has been raped to bring a case, anywhere in the world. The interest on the billion dollars is to be for these legal fees, as well as for refuges, shelters, counselling and support. Then she says in 2005 or thereabouts there will be income starting to come from an oil and gas interest she has in the Timor Sea. I’m to go to Indonesia soon to meet Justice Budi Til to be briefed. This second lot of money, when it comes on stream, is to be used for the rehabilitation of women who have suffered as a consequence of rape.’

  ‘Whew! How do you feel about that, sweetheart? You don’t have to take it on, you know.’

  ‘Yes, Aunty Anna says it’s my call.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She’s left a hundred million in a separate account. She says if I don’t want to do the foundation, then she expects me to turn the hundred mill into a billion by the time I’m forty; anything less would be an insult to her memory.’

  I laughed. ‘Eithe
r is an awful lot of responsibility for a twenty-two-year-old.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll do both. Aunty Anna has been training me all my life, until she died, I mean.’ Saffron was suddenly sombre.

  ‘Saffy, you’ve got a couple more years in which to take your masters degree, or more if you want to take a doctorate, plenty of time to think about it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I won’t change my mind.’

  ‘The second lot of money, it won’t be forthcoming. The United Nations have taken over East Timor and when they get independence the oil reverts to them and only a bit to us.’

  Saffron sighed. ‘You’ll never make a businessman, Uncle Nick. Aunty Anna took her percentage of the oil and gas fields and split it among the various international oil exploration companies bringing the field into production. She exchanged it for shares in each of them. She doesn’t own any Indonesian oil but she does own an awful lot of shares in Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, Exxon, Phillips Petroleum and others. The oil income is perfectly intact, I accessed her numbered account in Switzerland early this morning; there’s already a couple of hundred million in the second account.’

  ‘Why do I bother? Anna could always sniff money and make plans years ahead of anyone else.’

  ‘Yes, you have to plan before anyone else has started to think or act, that’s her first rule. “Saffy, think hard, very hard. Then act hard, very hard. Then never regret anything you’ve done.” That’s her mantra,’ Saffron said, with all the assurance of her BA in economics and twenty-two years.

  And that leaves yours truly and Dr Tony Freeman, at whose suggestion I have written all this. In the time it’s taken, almost two years, the nightmares have persisted, in fact, if anything they have grown worse. I’m shit scared of having another one. I hate them, hate revisiting the battlefield in the phantasmagoria of a dream, double-tapping my Owen as the bastards advance, a Jap soldier getting close enough to lunge at me with his ridiculously long bayonet, parrying his thrust, reaching for the blade I keep secreted in my boot, coming in under his heart, seeing him sink to his knees, me staring down at the surprise on Anna’s beautiful young face as my wrist twists and the knife slices through the main artery from her heart. Then waking in the dark screaming, clutching the pillow, thinking I have Anna in my arms with blood running from the corner of her beautiful mouth.

  I sent Tony Freeman what I laughingly called my manuscript. The note attached simply said: ‘Tony, don’t know if this will help any. But if and when you can be bothered to read it, yes, I’d like very much to see you. Nick Duncan.’

  He called me at Beautiful Bay a week later and was kind enough to say it was a remarkable document of a man’s remarkable life.

  ‘Fortunate life,’ I replied.

  ‘Nick, I have a suggestion. I’m due some holidays. Why don’t we return to Bloody Ridge together, work this thing through on the spot?’

  ‘Tony, how long have you got?’

  ‘Well, stretching it, two weeks.’

  ‘Would you consider coming over to Beautiful Bay and sailing to Guadalcanal on Madam Butterfly?’

  He paused for a millisecond. ‘Got me, you bastard,’ he replied.

  God knows I’ve spent enough time in Honiara over the years but I’ve never been back to Bloody Ridge. I would get out of the plane and scurry across the wet tarmac, knowing that if I looked over my shoulder the low rise would be just behind me, just over a mile away.

  There was no particular reason I told myself, I just hadn’t. Why revisit the past? Which was bullshit, of course, I realise now it was what is called avoidance.

  Tony explained when we’d been talking out at sea. ‘Nick, the reason you return to places where bad things happen is to attach the feelings you have, the feelings and emotions causing problems. We need to attach them to the place and time the traumatic events took place.’

  I moored Madam Butterfly off the Point Cruz Yacht Club and we dealt with the customs and immigration formalities. Our local manager met us as we came ashore with one of the company’s four-wheel-drive Toyotas and we set off directly. It wasn’t all that long and I realised we were bumping up the potholed path to the ridge where I’d been all those years ago in September 1942.

  We reached the low crest and, looking back towards the airfield, I was reminded how important this strongpoint had been. If the Japs had overrun us here the airfield and the battle would have been lost.

  In the valley before the ridge I remembered the huge pit and the Jap soldiers being bulldozed into a mass grave. I realise I can barely remember where it was. The years had blurred the contours, and the long grass, like sheets over battles past, had covered everything. Even the foxholes were only just recognisable, as many had collapsed and slowly filled up again over the years.

  Standing near the top of the ridge, looking down the valley, there were no screaming Jap soldiers, just the grass waving gently in the light breeze. The imagined crump-crump of artillery was replaced by a soft distant rumble behind Mount Austen, where the usual afternoon thunderstorm was brewing within the roiling cumulus.

  My legs suddenly felt weak, and slumping down on a small ledge I just sat there feeling numb. Instead of the horrifying screams of banzai charges and men dying, all I could hear was the rustle of the grass kissed by the breeze. Somewhere behind me two children were shouting at each other, playing on the top of the battlefield, oblivious to the several thousand invisible bodies over which they were running.

  It was all gone. All past tense. There was nothing here, just a low rise overlooking the airport. All the caterwauling ghosts and howling demons had disappeared, only the memories remained. As I sat silently beside Tony a lot of things seemed to drain away from me.

  Nick Duncan of the fortunate life had survived, while so many had not. That was just the way things were. Vale sweet spirits for whom the sun will never go down. Then, I don’t know why, I knew the nightmares were over. There would be no more battles while I slept. I could rest in peace and dream of holding sweet Anna in my arms.

  List of Sources

  Armstrong, Lance, Good God, He’s Green, Pacific Law Press, Hobart, 1997.

  Brown, Bob, Memo for a Saner World, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2004.

  Buckman, Greg, Tasmania’s Wilderness Battles, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2008.

  Gee, Helen, For the Forests, The Wilderness Society, Hobart, 2001.

  Henton, D. & Flower, A., Mount Karwe Gold Rush PNG 1988–9, Mt Kare Gold Rush Cotton Tree, Queensland, 2007.

  Jones, Richard, Damania, Jones-Fuller Bookshop (publishing division), Hobart, 1972.

  Kingsbury, Damien, The Politics of Indonesia, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2005.

  Law, Geoff, The River Runs Free, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2008.

  Lohrey, Amanda, ‘Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 8, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2002.

  MacQuarrie, Hector, Vouza and the Solomon Islands, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1946.

  McQueen, James, The Franklin: Not Just a River, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1983.

  Newton, M. & Hay, P., The Forests, Matthew Newton, Tasmania, 2007.

  White, Osmar, Time Now, Time Before, William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1967.

  Acknowledgements

  While we are always aware of the writer, a story usually has a large invisible group of helpers – not just the professional team that works behind the scenes, but the unpaid help of mates and the kindness of strangers. Without their knowledge my own work would amount to a very slim and inaccurate volume. I thank them all.

  Neil and Barbara Crowther, Luganville, Vanuatu; Gayle Stapleton, Port Vila, Vanuatu; Greg and Lorraine Woon, Yarramalong; Trevor Kanaley, Pacific Islands and Canberra; Senator Bob Brown, Hobart; Helen M. Gee, Hobart; Geoff Law, The Wilderness Society, Hobart; and Peter Thompson, presenter of Talking Heads, ABC television.

  Guy Cooper, the inspiring Director and Chief Executive of the Taronga Conservation Society Australia, incorporating Taronga Zoo an
d Taronga Western Plains Zoo; Dr Peter Harlow, Manager of Herpetofauna, Taronga Zoo; Linda Newton, Major Gifts Manager, Taronga Foundation; Michael McFadden, Supervisor of Herpetofauna, Taronga Zoo; Joanne Kee and Suzie Galwey, Research and Conservation Fundraising, Taronga Foundation.

  John Olsen, artist and painter of frogs and all things beautiful.

  Dr Niall Doran, Coordinator, BookEnd Trust, Tasmania.

  Yasuko Ando, Japan, and ‘Toshi’, owner of Toshi’s Japanese Restaurant, Mittagong, NSW.

  Those who read every chapter as it came off my computer and advised and added and sometimes even disagreed, and those who picked up the phone when I called for help and then gave it unstintingly: Adam Courtenay, Tony Crosby, John Forsyth, Dr Tony Freeman, Alex Hamill, Marg Hamilton, Celia Jarvis, Christine Lenton and Dr Irwin Light.

  Elizabeth Marantz, Melbourne, who so very kindly gave me the inspired title, Fishing for Stars.

  Now for the daily and heavyweight working division:

  My full-time researcher Bruce Gee, who was available at any hour of the day or night, seven days a week and never failed to find the information I needed, to advise, to suggest and even outline what we came to call ‘possibilities’ – his suggestions on what might happen in the narrative. Bruce was both indispensable and invaluable, his input always cogent and insightful – I simply cannot thank him sufficiently.

  Teacher and noted grammarian John Adamson (Sir!), who read and then sternly marked every chapter and sometimes despaired at my grammatical incompetence. It took me sixteen books to learn that you can’t fool around with grammar while Mr Adamson is looking over your shoulder. At times it was bloody infuriating but I sincerely believe the book is all the better for his insistence.

  She who must be obeyed, my editor, Nan McNab, who was unfailingly helpful, persistent, correct, polite but tough, thoughtful, insightful and at times when I disagreed, annoyingly, she would mostly turn out to be correct. Turning a chapter inside out and asking an author on a tight deadline to rewrite is very dangerous work. Nan managed it on several occasions with aplomb. These are all the ingredients needed in a great editor. Good books are invariably made better by good editors whereas bad ones are the author’s fault.