Beat Not the Bones (15 page)

‘He'll be all right,' said Stella. ‘We'll be back. You'll see.'

A faint smile touched the corners of Sylvia's lips. It died, but the corners of her lips were still raised. Her face, with its tear-stained cheeks, looked ghastly. Stella turned to the door, feeling her way with an outstretched hand. She believed, then, that they would not come back. She closed the door and looked down the steps to the road. For a moment she hesitated, understanding what Anthony had meant when he said it was better not to act. Then a transport truck drew up at the gate. A driver flung open the front door. They had come for her luggage – it was too late.

CHAPTER 14

The skipper started up the engines at 10.30. The crew was unfastening the ropes that held the ship to the wharf. Washington had gone into his cabin and closed the door.

Stella stood alone, looking down into the water lapping under the jetty piles. No light fell here, and she could see scarlet and white sponges bursting out from the wooden stalks of the jetty. Fish as thin as leaves, wearing brilliant, improbable colours, flashed about like hummingbirds. Her mind was dazed and empty. Sylvia had been thrust away behind the locked doors; broken promises had sunk like dregs to the bottom of her heart. There was nothing but the water slapping on the sides of the boat. Patches of coloured oil spread out in changing shapes, a swollen, burst cigarette butt dropped on the pier floated by. Someone had spat out a gob of betel juice that broke and spread like an opening flower. Beneath the intermittent surface scum, the water was pellucid. Transparent and blue at depths where it should have been black, it offered to the eye an ocean bed which, in temperate lands, would have been decently obscured. Huge, hyacinth-blue starfish clung to rocks, sliver cans winked and flashed, and seaweed waved like bleeding fingers over the obese, spotted bodies of the beche-de-mer.

Stella leaned on the rail, fascinated and horrified. The churning of the engines went on unheeded. She hardly realised that they were leaving until the marine world quivered and broke with the movement of the ship. The jetty drew slowly away and the water fanned out from the sides of the ship in long corrugated ribbons. She looked back at the town, its bleached tin roofs scattered about like white stones among the flame trees.

They were leaving this ordered outpost. Soon Marapai would be a spot on the map, a tiny ink blot on a page of virgin ferocity. They were striking out into the wilderness, where they would be competing for existence with mud, leeches, sea-snakes, slugs and crocodiles. Here, all the defences they had drawn on in Marapai would be useless. In this environment they must discard all they knew and adopt a different attitude. In the jungle, the rules of the golf club and the private school would no longer apply. They would fall back upon less refined defences, instinctively adapt their behaviour to that of the hungry bird and the sea-slug. Nothing that her father or David had taught her was now of any use. She was on her own.

Behind them the wharf grew smaller with extraordinary rapidity. With each moment Marapai was more infinitesimal. An hour ago it had been the whole island, now it was almost swallowed up. As they moved towards the long coastline stretching ahead, the land they were seeking reached out to them, hungry and waiting for victims.

Stella turned her back on the sea and faced the human bustle of the little ship. She felt dismayed and lonely. Not loneliness from being without a husband, a father, a counselling voice or supporting hand, but the loneliness of an insect in a forest or a bird in a desert sky. She dived back into the hustle of the ship, clinging to human beings.

On the top deck they were carrying twenty or thirty passengers: women with grass skirts bunched up around their knees, babies at their breasts; small, owl-eyed children who sat and stared with placid acceptance; and old men whose skin hung in purple folds from their shrivelled shoulders. Stella stood looking at them. One of the women shyly smiled, but no one else seemed interested in her. Then she noticed one who stood leaning on the rail of the ship, occasionally throwing her a serious, expectant glance. He wore a pair of khaki shorts, a wrist watch and a slim string of coloured beads round his throat. It was some moments before she recognised him.

‘Hitolo!'

Instantly he smiled and came towards her.

She was conscious of a profound relief. ‘What are you doing here?'

He planted himself, smiling and triumphant, in front of her. ‘I came,' he said.

Had Trevor obtained permission for his release, or had Washington arranged it? she asked herself optimistically. These questions with their implications of well-being and goodwill the censor permitted.

‘I tried to get permission for you, Hitolo, but they wouldn't allow it. They said you belonged to another department and could not leave your work.'

‘They tell me that too,' he said and his grin split wider. ‘I came here five o'clock this morning and sat with the women. They are only natives; so no one noticed me.'

Her hopes sank away. But he had come – it was something. ‘I'm glad you came,' she said. ‘You will stay close to me, Hitolo, won't you?' She cast a glance at the dense, forested coastline dipping on their right. ‘I'm frightened' – his eyes seemed to widen and darken, though he still smiled – ‘of the jungle,' she said. ‘I've never been in the jungle. I shall need help. Don't leave me alone, Hitolo.' He smiled and nodded. But she felt he had barely understood. Perhaps he had not even heard her. His mind was turned inwards, to a purpose no less urgent than hers. She knew what it was and understood that helping her, if he should undertake to do so, would be incidental.

They drew in to the wharf at Kairipi at four on Friday afternoon. Stella, standing on deck, looked across the diminishing strip of water at a small, wiry man with a lean face, a beaked nose and a ginger moustache, who stood waiting for them on the wharf. Three Papuan policemen stood rigidly behind him. He made no movement and gave no smile of welcome. When he lifted his hand and touched the brim of his topee, the salute was so obviously not for her that she turned her head to see who he was greeting. Washington was standing just behind her.

She had hardly spoken to him since they left Marapai. He had retired to his cabin and his meals had been taken to him there. The skipper had said at dinner that he was a bad sailor, but Stella doubted this and felt that he was avoiding her. She saw him later in the evening leaning over the prow of the ship eating a mango and dropping the rinds into the water. They exchanged only a few polite words.

The district officer boarded the ship. Thomas Seaton was an abrupt, methodical man who had been in the Territory for twenty-five years. He was tough and inarticulate and admired these qualities in others above all else. He distrusted comfort and learning and held in contempt the university-trained patrol officers who came up from south. They had been scientifically prepared for the jungle, rather than cast forth in innocence to learn the hard way. He drank a glass of beer with the captain and then left the ship to take his two guests on an inspection of the station.

Kairipi was built on an island. It was safer in the old days, Seaton explained to Stella. Now it was rather inconvenient, as they only had two boats and something was always wrong with them. The fools in Marapai had no idea about engines. He could manage better himself, and he was no mechanic. Just two hands and commonsense was all he had.

The island was quite small, not more than a mile all round. It was flat-topped and its steep sides were covered with coconut palms that leaned out over the sea. The top of the island was like a large garden. An avenue of palms had been planted from end to end, and small paths, which led to the police barracks, the court, Seaton's house and the patrol officer's house, crossed it at right angles every hundred yards or so. Flowering shrubs and trees had been planted along every path and under the coconut palms – frangipani, crotons, caliphers and hibiscus. Everything that grew in this place looked larger and more luxuriant than in Marapai, and Stella, who felt that she had seen nature at her most vivid and opulent, looked around her with fresh astonishment. She saw now that Marapai was tamed. Perhaps the white culture, that had cooled the native blood, had in some way reduced the flowers too. Here were the limits of extravagance. Here anything might happen.

They walked slowly. Stella hardly spoke. Occasionally Washington asked a question. Seaton talked in short, clipped sentences and pointed out landmarks with his cane. At 5.30 they had exhausted everything that he considered interesting. They had visited the courthouse, a new building, constructed from sago palm, that prisoners were thatching. One of the police boys had been sent up a palm tree to pick a spray of orchids for Stella. Seaton and Washington had taken off their hats and stood with bowed heads by a scrupulously kept grave where a former illustrious district officer had been buried. They walked now on the landward side of the island. The district officer waved his cane through gaps in the palms, pointing to the mouths of rivers. Below them the land dropped to the water. The bay was sheltered and the water still, bearing on its surface perfect, undisturbed images of the land behind. All around stretched undulating, forested hills. There were mountains behind, but the clouds clung low above the forest and flattened the horizon. The land was grey and soft behind a mist that seemed to breathe from the forest. ‘And that,' said Seaton, waving his stick, ‘is your river. The Bava River.' The point of the stick quivered, their eyes swung round. Neither spoke. ‘There,' the point of the stick jabbed at the sky, ‘round that point the river turns. That is the Bava River.'

Stella stared at the break in the grey shore line, eyes fixed like a sleep-walker's. She was afraid.

Washington cast a glance at Seaton's profile. Had he guessed what it was all about? Did he know more than he appeared to? Beneath the ginger moustache, Seaton's lips were closed like the mouth of a trap. Washington had a profound distrust of silence.

Seaton glanced at his watch. ‘Six. Time for a drink.' He swung around abruptly and marched down the path. Washington fell into step beside him and Stella walked behind.

‘Can you take us up the river?' Washington asked.

Seaton fixed his eyes on the path ahead. ‘Could be done. Though it's time the administration realised that district officers aren't tourist bureaus. We don't sit on our tails all day like these book-fed boys they send up from the south.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Washington, trying to be charming. ‘I don't like it much either. It's orders, you know, and, by the way, confidential. The director doesn't want it to get around.'

‘I don't gossip,' Seaton snapped. Just as Washington distrusted silence, Seaton distrusted loquaciousness, and any sign of such a vice in himself was repressed. He had lived in the Territory long enough to know something of the results of indiscretion. As he saw it, there was no greater evil than a gossiping tongue. He never talked of personalities and never made a statement unless certain of his facts.

They were now walking down the main avenue. The tall trunks of the coconuts formed a deep shaft down which the sunlight drained to the path at their feet. ‘Of course not,' said Washington. ‘I was instructed to tell you, that's all.'

Seaton grunted and his stride lengthened. ‘You won't find it easy to get anyone to go with you,' he said abruptly.

‘Why not?'

‘Boys seem even less keen about the place than they were before.'

Washington was silent. He wanted to question Seaton further but dared not, for fear of what he might learn. Yet it was best to know, it was best to set off armed with all the information he could gather.

‘Do you know why?' he said at last.

Seaton shrugged his shoulders. ‘Same old thing – vada. The boy dying upset them. Hard to get out of them what it's all about. Funny stories.'

‘What stories?' said Washington.

‘Nonsense, all nonsense,' said Seaton, twirling his cane and turning up the path that led to his house. ‘Bigger and better vada. Say they've learnt to fly. They say they can walk without leaving footprints. You know, I don't care much for anthropologists, but they are the only people who can take fear out of a Papuan's life.'

‘Without footprints!' Washington laughed inanely.

‘Everything gets put down to them. Anyone dies. Pigs stolen at Maiola. River floods. The people are scared to death. I was in Maiola three weeks ago taking the census. If you'd been earlier you could have come with me then. Confounded nuisance going up the river again so soon. Doubt if you'll get those Maiola boys to go nearer than a day's march, you know.'

‘It won't matter,' said Washington, ‘as long as they can put us on the way.' The news cheered him in a way. The sooner the boys dropped out the better. It was all to the good if they refused to go far. He was, in a way, as dazed as Stella and realised no more than she what was ahead. He dared not even think of Eola. His mind shrank from it. He had laid his plans but had not yet realised that they must be executed.

Seaton had stopped abruptly, slapping his heels together as if about to salute, and waited for Stella to catch them up. They faced the house, a large, low building. On a patch of lawn in front of the verandah a flag fluttered from a white pole. Seaton led the way up the steps, calling for his boy.

The house was so austerely furnished as to appear uninhabited. There were no curtains on the windows, no cushions on the cane chairs, not even grass mats on the floor. Washington looked around him with contempt for the barren soul that was content to live like this. Half a dozen dusty books, their covers gnawed by cockroaches and blotched with mould, sloped in a home-made shelf. A detailed map of the district was pinned on the wall. On a low wooden table were three hibiscus flowers in a jam tin – a concession to visitors.

‘Sit down,' said Seaton, pointing to the chairs.

Stella appeared not to hear and wandered over to the louvres. She stood looking out to sea, the spray of orchids still in her hand. Every time Washington looked at her she appeared younger and more helpless, carrying a mute air of acceptance. She seemed merely to wait.

Seaton was pouring out gin. He half filled a tumbler, slopped a dash of water into it and handed it to Washington, who sipped it with distaste. It was lukewarm. It angered him that a man who could have lived like a king on this flowery island should put up with warm gin. He saw no virtue in schooling the body to accept anything.

‘Anyway,' said Seaton, swallowing and wiping his moustache, ‘you won't be wanting as many boys as you had last time. Regular battalion.'