The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow Page 7

  And he met his landlady and her daughters in their kingdom across the little bay and unpacked his belongings in a hut suspiciously like a boi-haus at the far end of the boarding-house garden.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ Mrs Curthoys (that was her name, wasn’t it?) was saying. ‘But we are full up at the house at the moment.’ She sighed, quite prettily he noticed, and made a regret signal with her handsome mouth. ‘But feel free to come and go as you wish. The living-room—’ lots of smiles and motherly intent, ‘meals, of course. The piano. You’ll have more privacy here and the girls, Peg and Essie, will look after your laundry and so on.’

  Your daughters? he had foolishly asked.

  Arpeggios of disclaiming laughter.

  He apologised for missing their names. Leonie. Claire.

  Reading? he wondered. There was a kerosene lamp beside the stretcher in his room but he had never worked one before and made useless shruggings until Mrs Curthoys gave him a fast tutorial on adjusting the wick, suggesting, half-whimsy, half-menace, he be careful to turn it out before sleeping. Fire, she warned with plump waving hands. Fire. They were so dependent on pumps and of course…Hands flung consequences outward.

  ‘I know nothing about pumps,’ he said mildly.

  ‘But I thought…’

  He shrugged. They exchanged tight smiles.

  ‘My goodness!’ Mrs Curthoys said. ‘You certainly will need coddling.’

  After all, he lasted barely two months in his gestures towards realism.

  The clerical work was nothing. The rollcalling of his gangs of resentful black workers took up the early part of his morning as he directed them from one assignment to another, watched by moustache-fondling Leggat whose stroking fingers were implicit with criticism. Morrow marvelled how, in that flattening heat, the blacks could hew, shift rock, dig trenches, lug bags of earth and sand, heave timber. Those skinny legs and arms! Those long-enduring faces! When Leggat took time off to work in his own garden, Morrow helped supervise as well the doling of rations and was overseen on these occasions by a grudging storekeeper.

  ‘They’re pitiful amounts, aren’t they?’ He could hardly believe the single scoops of flour and sugar, the mugs of treacle, the rare small lumps of corned meat.

  ‘Don’t gab about what you don’t understand,’ Cole said flatly. ‘We get lots of do-goods like you coming in wanting to change the world. Why don’t you stick to what you know, eh? Whatever that is.’

  Squashed.

  He helped the churlish boatman direct unloadings at the jetty in sprays of obscenity. ‘This is your big chance, you silly bugger,’ Jardine told him as they watched four blacks stagger shoreward with crates of meat from the supply launch, ‘to get off this fucker of a place. No boat now for a month, probably. Longer, if the weather drops.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he replied.

  And, ‘Sundowners at six!’ Captain Brodie announced brightly, gliding up behind both of them. A royal command. Morrow was gummed in by sweat and curling seas, sinking below his Plimsoll line into the stink of rotting fish, leaves, black bodies and his own mortal reek.

  That was an order, sundowners, clutched-at colonial bathos, to be taken on the verandah of the superintendent’s house, the white mastas keeping up the flag, outpost of empire on the no-go area of Coconut Avenue. Already he had attended five of these weekly gatherings, listened to the repetitive gossip, the sly malicious digs, watched with interest the abrasive stirrings of Doctor Quigley, deputy Leggat, and the lower-order resentment of the storekeeper and the boatman who wrestled silently with patronage so that he could sense it stick in their gullets. Wives clustered. The schoolteacher, a sad dilapidated Scot, simmered over a grudging whisky. The bottom ranks got sozzled.

  Repetition can provide rhythm and lyric beauty.

  Week one. Week two. Week three. Week four. Week five.

  Week six brought changes.

  Year-end was upon them.

  Storeman Cole’s wife remained at home. Leggat sulked. Jardine, who was aware that the whole settlement would crumble without his tending of generators, pumps and launch engines, became abusive and told Captain Brodie that he was a bullying prick. Prick? Mrs Leggat had never heard the word. She was Viennese. ‘Vot iss prick?’ she asked over the teacups. No one answered. Mrs Curthoys pressed her lips together, fighting smiles.

  ‘A failed prison farm!’ drunken Jardine was shouting.

  ‘I’d never call it that,’ the superintendent said softly, watching his dying wife, more out of focus than the bad snapshot on the filing cabinet, hand round tea to the ladies. Mrs Brodie had been permanently damaged by weather and the unrelenting energy of her husband. Pregnant, Morrow realised, eyeing the thickening waist, the drawn cheeks. In other rooms lurked a son and daughter whose voices played harmonics above this drawing-room ritual so that he was suddenly cowed, wincing over the sharp sherry in his glass, by the merciless progress of decades and the number of his years. How could he believe in the him-ness of self? What proved he was he, chipped at and smoked out in his fourth-plus decade? An age that the unseen young behind those timber walls would regard as having no future, for that was how he had thought at their age: that the world and its prospects ended for anyone older than he was at that precise ripe-for-plucking time.

  He decided on desperate small talk with Mrs Curthoys who was holding her cup in a genteel way and enquired about the ages of those unseen voices, though he knew.

  ‘Eleven. Twelve.’

  ‘Ah! The world is their oyster.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Mrs Curthoys appeared hesitant, regretful, not as confident as he’d imagined through six weeks of breakfasts and dinners. ‘And for you too, I suppose. In a way. For all of us, really. New beginnings.’

  Foolishly idealistic she suggested that the world was anyone’s oyster at any age. Was it possible to throw off prejudices, habits, old sins, old charities and start peeled back in such a place? Sometimes in the last few weeks he had found himself lusting after the stone lace of Lisbon and St Roque, the barley-sugar balconies of Venice, places where unknown language alone guaranteed outer silence and inner, instead of this chantilly of tropic leaves, an unstationary fabric that wove new patterns by the minute.

  Stasis. He wanted that, he thought.

  And what used you do? they had asked on his arrival.

  Books. I was in the book trade.

  You write books?

  Afraid not.

  They lost interest then. He watched jaws drop, eyes flicker away because not even authorial pretension could absolve his uselessness.

  Mrs Brodie has died in a welter of blood despite all Doctor Quigley’s ministrations.

  Overheard half-sentences at breakfast hint at a miscarriage and a physician too much under the weather from the latest sundowners to save mother or child. The matron, it is reported, was sulking at the vital time and had stalked off to walk round Settlement Bay. A lovers’ tiff?

  Since this tragedy Captain Brodie has, understandably enough, behaved erratically. He would like to apportion blame, Morrow can tell, but he holds himself in a deadly check that merely aggravates his wretchedness and fury.

  For days after the sad little funeral there was oppressive gloom and then he came suddenly to life with irrational tantrums, shouted and conflicting orders, his cringing kids dodging parental demands.

  ‘Must keep going,’ he announced in the office at a briskly summoned meeting of staff. ‘My wife would have wanted that. Very devoted to this place and what we’re doing. Absolutely devoted.’ His eyes glanced involuntarily at the top of the filing cabinet. But he had already removed the photo and his gaze drifted away and lost itself in trees.

  The men sat in silence not knowing what to say. It was as if the superintendent, launched on private grief, had forgotten they were in the room. The clock on his desk tocked seconds, tocked minutes, and through that embarrassment came the sound of a stifled whimper and the gulp-snuffle of repressed tears.

  Deliberately Jardine emitted
an offensive belch.

  ‘Right!’ Captain Brodie snapped, coming to. ‘What the hell are you all sitting about for, eh? There’s work to be done. Let’s get on with it. I’ll have no slacking.’

  Then the boatman, head waggling, eyes rolling, semaphored insulting forehead tappings that the superintendent missed.

  ‘Really,’ Leggat reproved when they had walked some distance along the avenue, ‘the poor devil’s had a rough time, Jardine. No need for you to be so bloody rude.’

  ‘You arse-licker,’ the boatman said. ‘Thinking of taking over?’

  Morrow lagged behind them both, unwilling to involve himself in partisanship but sufficiently slow for the pounding feet of the superintendent to catch up with him.

  ‘One minute!’ Brodie was shouting. He grabbed a frantic handful of Morrow’s shirt. ‘One minute, you men!’ Breathless, he could hardly puff his words out. ‘Drinks as usual, eh? No need to let old habits die. Sunday week. Same time. Joan would have wanted that.’

  But that was to be the last party for all of them.

  Morrow hated to remember.

  An argument had broken out between Doctor Quigley and the superintendent.

  ‘You power-hungry bastard,’ the doctor was railing, careful to remain vertical but leaning ever so slightly across his brogue and a fifth drink. ‘You might run the island but you don’t run my hospital, damn you. You don’t run my health programme.’ Mrs Leggat was so startled she slopped tea. ‘This place needs someone new. New brooms, boy. New brooms. You’ve been here too long, you power-drunk little man. What the place needs is fresh blood.’

  The superintendent’s face went white.

  ‘Blood!’ he roared. ‘Oh God, you allowed plenty of that! You let my wife die, you incompetent! Let her bleed to death while you watched, you slipshod butcher.’ He swung a punch with a hand still clutching a whisky that splattered in the doctor’s eyes. Yelps of pain. Female screams. The two men waltzed, locked, onto the verandah where the doctor’s nose dripped redly onto the boards along which Cole waddled his bulk to pull them apart.

  ‘A conspiracy!’ the superintendent was shouting. ‘A conspiracy to take over.’ He was marooned between sobs and rage. His voice bellowed down the darkening funnel of Coconut Avenue to the listening thatch of the bladey-grass huts where his work boys sat over their cooking fires.

  Morrow had placed his glass carefully on a table and walked towards the steps.

  ‘Don’t you bloody go!’ screamed the superintendent. “Who the hell are you to go like this, eh?’

  Morrow hadn’t known the answer. Who was he indeed!

  ‘I’m no one. Not anyone at all.’

  Doctor Quigley was hunched over the rail beside him spluttering mucus and gore.

  ‘I’m the one who’ll be remembered!’ Brodie shouted. ‘I made this place! I created all this!’

  ‘Och, you prognostic bastard!’ the doctor roared, swinging about. ‘All what at all? All bloody what?’

  Matron Tullman kept tugging busily at the doctor’s arm. Morrow wondered if venery or concern motivated that over-bright gladeye. ‘Come away now, do. Come along, Tom.’ She worried the doctor’s flesh like a heeler, her fingers snapping at fabric.

  Come along, please! To that fruity big Irishman with the velvet vowels which would punctuate mealtimes with a dash of French, a slice of Ovid! For nearly seven weeks Morrow had observed him at breakfast rolling his handsome eyes at the elder Miss Curthoys whose response, he gauged, was not all innocence. Despite an air of white muslin and sprigged flowers, a suggestion of unruliness in the curls, there was an acolyte fervour as she leaned across buttered toast, lips parted to absorb. Morrow had wondered and wondered.

  Ah, the mess of things, he thought. The mess when hurtling human comets collide. His heart ached for something lost so many years ago. He was unsure of the exact nature of that loss, and trying not to think of his once wife found himself sleepless in the boi-haus, tossing under the mosquito net to the noisy silence of rainforest and the steady applause of the sea.

  He walked away from the superintendent’s house, shouts rioting behind him and heavy clouds forming a slurry of black surging air that threatened the whole island. He was a dab at symbols. He had had enough. He would present himself the next morning at Brodie’s office and, I am not suited, he would say. I don’t think this is what I want.

  He didn’t get a chance to say that.

  The superintendent sat restlessly behind his desk, the ruffled ashy sea behind his own ruffled drink-rotten skull. A hand intercepted Morrow’s opening words.

  ‘Please. You mustn’t judge us by that little outburst last night. Let me explain myself. Things, well, things are difficult. In the beginning, you understand, I handled this place alone. Did the lot. Ran the boats, supervised the building, looked after the blacks. They like me. I’m fair. Tough but fair. They call me Uncle Boss, you know. God, I’ve seen cooboos here grow into men and women. Watched them marry, have kids of their own. Twelve years of it. And damn little help.’

  Morrow heard him out, all the lime pondering the nature of isolation, the difference between withdrawal surrounded by others and withdrawal surrounded by no one.

  Abruptly he said, ‘I must leave. I’m sorry. I simply cannot stay.’

  The superintendent’s mouth tightened. ‘There’s no supply launch for a month, Morrow. You must do this through the proper channels.’

  ‘Rubbish! You have other boats.’

  ‘For settlement business. Not for some employee whim.’ He smiled, mouth downturned. We shall suffer together, the smile seemed to say. ‘Don’t let’s prolong this. Shouldn’t you be down at the stores?’ He consulted a roster. ‘Cole is expecting you right this minute.’ The superintendent raised his voice and shouted to the adjoining room, ‘Leggat! Leggat! Take Morrow down to the ration lines, will you?’

  The deputy appeared, coaxing his moustache, his eyes shifting busily. As they left they heard the superintendent lock the door behind them.

  In the avenue below the administration office, Morrow shook off the weedy man’s arm. He surprised a look of gloating on the features watching his.

  ‘Get your hands off me,’ he ordered. ‘I’m not staying.’ He strode through the deputy’s protests back to the boi-haus and packed his bag with the nothings of those weeks. The housegirl who was sweeping the path outside watched him as he stamped past to the boarding house, up over the little hill above the beach and down to Jardine’s shed, beyond goodbyes even to those who had been kindest.

  The boatman, skin gleaming with grease and sweat and a hot impudence as he stared up at Morrow, was working at a bench, stripping a motor down.

  ‘Need something, mate?’

  Exposed, driven, forced to beg favours from this lout!

  He said, ‘I need a boat. Can you sell me one?’

  ‘Can I what?’

  ‘A boat. A small rowboat. I want to get off here.’

  Jardine grinned, his teeth glinting foxily through oil smears.

  ‘Well, this is sudden. Place getting too much for you?’

  ‘Just a simple answer. Can you?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ Jardine laid down a spanner delicately. ‘Anything’s possible—at a price.’ And, ‘Get on with that fuckin job, Sambo, while the boss and me talk business, eh?’ Manny Cooktown, face sullen, rubbed his hands on a bit of waste and went back to hammering a sheet of metal, while Jardine steered Morrow out to the uncut grass behind the workshed where untidy piles of pipe and wood scrap foundered in weeds. There was a dinghy overturned beneath a rain tree. ‘There’s that,’ Jardine said, pointing. ‘Still seaworthy. Sold it to some drongo a couple of years back. Came to settle on Culgaroo. A stupid bastard. Didn’t know a fuckin thing about survival. I got tired of having to go over to help him out of his messes but Brodie was always a sucker for these up-themselves Poms. Said he was a writer. The stupid coot had dragged along a wife and kid. They didn’t stay long, mate. Anyway, he was always shooting off and lea
ving them to fend for themselves. Left the boat behind when he cleared out. I’ll sell you that.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Thirty.’

  ‘Twenty, and a hand lugging it down.’

  ‘Done,’ the boatman said quickly. He gave a gross wink. ‘You rowing back to town, eh?’

  Although Morrow didn’t want to explain, didn’t want to exchange the smallest of emotional confidences that might bind him to this fellow, he watched satisfaction spread over the boatman’s face—the thought of crossing the superintendent welding quitter and stayer into a vile chumminess.

  That same day, a small landfall. Two hills linked by palm groves. A coral beach and sand-spit at the northern end and granite sea-worn cliffs to the south. Rainforest scrub choked with pandanus and wild banana and lit by the dim candles of orchids. In the heart of the island a tea-tree swamp. Symbols persisted.

  He discovered all these things on the first day.

  A rusting tin hut still leaned into blue winds and hoarded remnants of the last owner: a camp oven, the pole skeletons of makeshift stretchers and half a dozen invoices for supplies made out to Sanford Rim.

  The nightmare of it!

  Any thoughts he had of staying fled before those ghost reminders as he inspected a half-filled water barrel, a collapsed cesspit and the middens of oyster shells left carelessly near the hut doorway by the gorging writer. But for that! was his resentful reaction as he kicked through a tangle of weed-choked sweet potato vine. But for that!

  He walked down to where he had beached the dinghy and sat looking at Doebin three miles away and the airy ellipses cut by two eagles swinging between the islands, envying the birds their indifference to gravity. His shoulders throbbed from rowing, his middle-aged heart pumped too fast and he cursed himself for folly.

  Saint John Bosco, he reminded himself, is the patron saint of editors. A prayer mightn’t go amiss on this sand-spit, some cowardly aspiration seeking guidance.

  At least rest, the saint, someone, advised. Buddy! Morrow said aloud to the nutmeg pigeons, the gulls.