A Fringe of Leaves (34 page)

Members of other tribes, several of which must have shared the island, called on their neighbours at intervals to examine the phenonemon, their faces expressing incredulity, fear, envy, as well as worshipful respect for this demi-goddess temporarily raised from a drudgery which the blacks’ practical nature and their poverty-stricken lives normally prescribed. She played up to them. As she had conciliated Austin Roxburgh and his mother by allowing herself to be prinked and produced, she accepted when some elderly lady of her own tribe advanced to adjust a sulphur topknot; it might have been old Mrs Roxburgh adding or subtracting some jewel or feather in preparation for a dinner or ball.

What might have toppled the whole formal structure was a fever which frequently glittered in the divine as well as the human eye, stimulated less by the craving for food than by the forthright stench of male bodies, their hard forms prowling up and down, engaged in no discernible pursuit beyond that of stalking shadows.

God forbid! Not wholly bereft of her rational mind, Mrs Roxburgh would have expected disgust to protect her, yet knew too well that loathing can feed a fever; and now the skies, the goddess’s natural habitat, translated from watchet into peacock, and from peacock to flamingo, were what she had also to resist, along with the darkness in which human weakness plunges mortals.

During this time of tribal famine and individual fever, Mrs Roxburgh noticed that a play was being enacted round her, by the large, jowled woman, her chief tormentor among those who had discovered her alone on the beach, the big fellow who had driven the slave to shin up a tree and drag an opossum out of its nest, and the prettier of the two girls who had gone diving for lily-roots in the heat of the day. There was a night in particular when Mrs Roxburgh hoped she had no part in the play, the three evident protagonists of which were coming and going, prowling round the hummock on which she was sitting. Seated or lying, most of the others were too exhausted by hunger to notice. But herself became particularly aware of the flumping and stamping of pale soles beneath black feet, the smell of crushed ants and of armpits, the crackle of breaking sticks, and ejaculations of the roving actors.

She was forced at last to contribute to the action when the great warrior squatted beside her, placed the top of an index finger on one of her shoulders and drew the finger downward and across her body until it all but arrived at the nipple, to which it was obviously attracted.

At once the two aspirants for the fellow’s sinewy favours started a hissing and a chattering. Each of the women was armed, the girl with a club, her rival with one of the pointed sticks used for digging. Mrs Roxburgh might have experienced greater alarm had she provided more than the spark from which their emotional tinder took fire; she was but the indirect cause of the pandemonium which ensued.

Carried away by their jealous fury the two women were abusing each other. The man leaned against a tree and watched as though warming himself at the passions he had roused. When the more agile girl leaped at her rival and bashed her on the head so savagely that it was laid open. Bellowing with pain and rage the woman retaliated with such a jab that the yam-stick pierced the girl’s side below the breast. She fell without a sound, and the man saw wisdom in making off before anyone held him responsible.

There arose a frenzy of ear-splitting speculation as relatives of the contentious women rushed from different corners of the camp. The wounded victim was sat propped against a tree, from which position they could better examine the bloody mess her assailant had made of her scalp. Somebody brought a handful of charcoal and rubbed it in. Nobody finally seemed of the opinion that the deep gash was more than a superficial cut, though the woman moaned fearfully, and her complexion was drained of its black, leaving a sediment of dirty yellow. Eyes shut, she did not leave off grinding her head back and forth against the tree.

Dreadful shrieks from those in support of the young girl left Mrs Roxburgh in no doubt that she was dead. Yet she lay so naturally, her wound practically bloodless when the murderous stick was withdrawn from her side, her breasts so youthful and shapely, that she presented the same picture of grace and beauty as on the day when she rose laughing and spangled from beneath the quilt of water-lily pads.

Affected by her renewed acquaintance with death in the midst of continuing life Mrs Roxburgh’s pangs were revived, and she added her grief to that of the mourners, and took her place without second thought in the procession forming to carry the body into the forest.

But where they had allowed her to attend the funeral of the child she had nursed, now they waved her back, uttering what sounded like warnings; and a hitherto respectful, elderly man went so far as to punch her in the chest.

So she stayed behind, curled up on the edge of the fire, in the hut which was hers as much as anything she might lay claim to—excepting of course her wedding ring. As she fell asleep she felt inside the fringe of leaves which she had but recently renewed, and without detaching the ring, slipped it on as far as the first joint of her ring-finger. She hoped it might lead her to dream of her husband. But the night remained confused, her dreams filled with hostile and unrecognizable shapes.

By the first light of morning she saw that the child members of her ‘family’ had returned without their elders, and she fell to wondering how the mourners were conducting their vigil in the depths of the forest.

She crawled outside about dawn, and after first recoiling at the shock of cold, went shivering amongst the trees, somewhat aimlessly it would have seemed had she not invested her action with purpose by remembering how her mother-in-law advocated a ‘healthful morning constitutional’.

She was rewarded at last when the scrub through which she had been struggling was transformed into a mesh of startling if chilly beauty. Where she had been slapped and scratched at first, she was now stroked by the softest of fronds. Shafts of light admitted between the pinnacles and arches of the trees were directed at her path, if the hummocks and hollows had been in any way designed to assist human progress. But she felt accepted, rejuvenated. She was the ‘Ellen’ of her youth, a name they had attached to her visible person at the font, but which had never rightfully belonged to her, any more than the greater part of what she had experienced in life. Now this label of a name was flapping and skirring ahead of her among the trunks of great moss-bound trees, as its less substantial echo unfurled from out of the past, from amongst fuchsia and geum and candy-tuft, then across the muck-spattered yard, the moor with its fuzz of golden furze and russet bracken, to expire in some gull’s throat by isolated syllables.

She might have continued on her blissful journey and ended lost had other voices not broken in and a most delectable smell mingled with the scent of drifting smoke. She altered course in the direction of the voices, and eventually came upon a party of blacks whom she recognized as members of her tribe. All appeared and sounded languid as a result of their night’s activities; their faces when turned towards the intruder wore expressions which were resentful and at the same time curiously mystical. She realized she had blundered upon the performance of rites she was not intended to witness. There was no immediate indication of what these were; most likely the ceremony was over, for she sensed something akin to the atmosphere surrounding communicants coming out of church looking bland and forgiven after the early service.

The morning air, the moisture dripping from frond and leaf disposed Ellen Roxburgh, naked and battered though she was, to share with these innocent savages an unexpectedly spiritual experience, when she caught sight, to one side of the dying fire, of an object not unlike a leather mat spread upon the grass. She might have remained puzzled had she not identified fingernails attached to what she had mistaken for fringes, and at one end, much as a tiger’s head lies propped on the floor at one end of a skin rug, what could only be the head of the girl she remembered in life laughing and playing amongst waterlilies.

After swallowing their surprise at the intrusion on their privacy, the initiates regurgitated; it came spluttering back as rude and guttural sounds of anger. Women rolled up the dark skin, as well as gathering the head and what she saw to be a heap of bones. It was easy to guess from the greasy smears on lips and cheeks how the flesh had disappeared. The revolting remains of the feast were stuffed inside the dillis which accompanied the women on their outings. Mrs Roxburgh might have felt sickened had the stamping and threats of some of the men not frightened her instead. The elderly man who had punched her the evening before to deter her from following the funeral procession, ran at her now, but stumbled over a tree-root, and no longer being at the height of his powers, fell prostrate before arrival.

The party moved off, driving the offender before them. As it seemed their urgent aim to leave the scene of their rites as quickly and as far behind them as possible, they hurried past the culprit after a while, and soon forgot, or did not bother to look back, to insult and remonstrate.

Mrs Roxburgh followed, not so far behind that she would be likely to lose her way. As she went, she tried to disentangle her emotions, fear from amazement, disgust from a certain pity she felt for these starving and ignorant savages, her masters, when she looked down and caught sight of a thigh-bone which must have fallen from one of the overflowing dillis. Renewed disgust prepared her to kick the bone out of sight. Then, instead, she found herself stooping, to pick it up. There were one or two shreds of half-cooked flesh and gobbets of burnt fat still adhering to this monstrous object. Her stiffened body and almost audibly twangling nerves were warning her against what she was about to do, what she was, in fact, already doing. She had raised the bone, and was tearing at it with her teeth, spasmodically chewing, swallowing by great gulps which her throat threatened to return. But did not. She flung the bone away only after it was cleaned, and followed slowly in the wake of her cannibal mentors. She was less disgusted in retrospect by what she had done, than awed by the fact that she had been moved to do it. The exquisite innocence of this forest morning, its quiet broken by a single flute-note endlessly repeated, tempted her to believe that she had partaken of a sacrament. But there remained what amounted to an abomination of human behaviour, a headache, and the first signs of indigestion. In the light of Christian morality she must never think of the incident again.

During the days following the rites in which, she had to admit, she had participated after a fashion, shoals of fish appeared in the straits separating the island from the mainland. This in itself would have given cause for joy, although nothing to compare with the netting of a sea-monster on the ocean side.

The fishermen were beaching the creature helplessly parcelled in the net as the rest of the tribe broke through the trees fringing the shore shouting, ‘Dugong, dugong!’ and raced down over the dunes, breasts flipping, arms thrashing the obstructive air. One little boy who turned a violent somersault paused but an instant to decide whether he had broken his neck.

Almost before the beast was dispatched by spears, individual butchers began hacking at the flesh. Fires were kindled in the evening light, while anticipation brought out a glow in dark skins long before the feast itself was ready. In the rush to satisfy their own hunger the blacks were less conscious than usual of their slave, who succeeded in raking from the coals a lump of the rather blubbery flesh. Her eyes were bulging as she strained to chew, her lips running with fishy fat, and she all but growled a warning at one of the dogs, who kept a prudent distance, trailing his plume of a tail as he watched her for scraps.

He did not receive any, however. Mrs Roxburgh’s only thought was to fill the hollow of her own insides, and regardless of whether she might burst, to grab another slice out of the ashes if she were lucky and remained unnoticed.

This evening her every stratagem succeeded. Uncomfortably gorged, she rubbed her greasy hands with sand to appease a convention she faintly remembered through the veil of exhaustion hanging between herself and it. She was tolerably happy, happier in fact than the principal source of her unhappiness should have allowed. In ‘not remembering’ she continually recalled the incident of incalculable days ago. It seemed less unnatural, more admissible, if only to herself. Just as she would never have admitted to others how she had immersed herself in the saint’s pool, or that its black waters had cleansed her of morbid thoughts and sensual longings, so she could not have explained how tasting flesh from the human thigh-bone in the stillness of a forest morning had nourished not only her animal body but some darker need of the hungry spirit.

Her lips had not closed from brooding when the blacks started wrapping any scraps of dugong in wads of grass, gathered together their possessions, and departed in some haste for their camp on the other side. So she had to follow or be left behind in darkness. The blacks themselves she suspected of being afraid of the dark, and for that reason had taken the precaution of renewing the firesticks they were carrying with them on the journey. As they climbed the ridge separating the ocean from the straits, night was poised in readiness to close in upon them. Several times the travellers’ chatter broke, and was mended but diffidently. Silent consent seemed to call a halt beside a small lake, on the surface of which torch-light and the ghosts of their fleshly forms underwent a series of fearsome fluctuations. Their customary wailing, either of supplication or lament, which broke from the wayfarers at this juncture had never been more appropriate.