The High Places (26 page)

Eric and I parted in town. He made no reference to the doctor, but also no promise of a lift back to the school. I walked through the sandy streets to the end of the beach farthest from the dock, observing the population as I myself was no doubt observed, and I hoped that once I left the island I would never see a place like it again in my life. I longed for escape. The supply ship sat smugly in the harbour, equipped with its doctor, and I was tempted to board it waving a white flag. But who then would free Mabel? If she doesn't belong to God, she belongs nowhere. I must remember to write that into my grant report.

I thought I might find Darwin on the beach, but I found the protesters instead. They talked in groups in the extended shadows of the palm trees. I walked toward them with my hands in the pockets of my trousers, and when they saw me coming they stirred with hope and indignation. I stopped a few feet from them, and despite the failing light they peered up at me with their hands cupped over their eyes, as if the absurd sun of the island's midday had forced them into a permanent habit.

‘Good evening,' I said.

‘Hi,' they chorused.

A blond boy stood, handsome, a kind of voluntary Achilles. He advanced toward me. ‘Maybe you can help us,' he said. He seemed to be wondering aloud. A ripple of assent went through the group: Yes, yes, they seemed to sigh, maybe he can help us.

‘I hear you're looking for transportation,' I said.

‘Do you have a car? Even better, a truck?' said the boy.

‘A bus?' called one wag, and they laughed.

‘Where is it that you'd like to go?'

‘We need to get to the other side of the island,' said the boy. ‘Do you know of a scientist, a Dr William Birch?'

‘Bill Birch, yes. Sure I do.'

‘And you're not him?'

‘Me? I'm no scientist,' I answered, and for some reason they all laughed again, perhaps in relief. The boy began to explain to me that he – they – objected to the work Dr Birch was doing with a certain captive squid. He was guarded, but furious. They'd all been together on some kind of ecology project in the Cook Islands when news of Dr Birch's work broke, and had talked their way onto the supply ship.

‘That was only three days ago,' the boy said, with pride. ‘We're here before the media.'

‘So you want to get to Dr Birch,' I said.

‘No one seems to know where he is,' said the boy. ‘It's like he's a hermit or something.'

It thrills me to know the locals protected me from that lovable, good-looking, deluded band.

‘I know where he is,' I said, ‘and I'll do what I can to get you to him.'

They rose up as one then, and surrounded me with their relief and zeal, shouting names at me and asking mine.

‘Eric Anthony,' I said. ‘Now tell me, what would you have said if I'd been Dr Birch?'

‘We'd have said we were marine biology students,' said Todd, the Achilles. ‘Who wouldn't want to see a colossal squid if they had the chance?'

And they asked me to take a photo of them, all together on the beach; it was a beautiful picture, sand-lit, and they pressed together inside its frame with such health and trust that I wanted to – I did – like them, very much. And I knew they would help me if I asked them to; they would swim out across the bay, they would remove the net, they would farewell Mabel with me, sending her seaward, and every second of her escape would be captured on their phones. Mabel would swim forever in a digital sea. She'd be free, but all the world would know her.

In town, I had more luck than they had finding transportation. I paid for the use of a utility truck owned by a friend of Eric's and the crusaders climbed into the tray with their knapsacks. I even bought them supplies and checked the batteries in their torches. The townspeople watched us. Again, it pleased me to think that the only person they would betray me to was myself. Todd rode in the front with me. He asked what I did on the island and I told him I taught in a Catholic school near Dr Birch's camp. I told him we would pass the school and that they should walk up to visit me there whenever they needed to get into town. He asked if I lived at the school, and I said yes. He asked if I was Catholic, and I said yes. This all came very easily. Todd is an earnest and admirable young man. I'd be proud to have a son like him. But he plays no part in my vision of freeing Mabel, and my principal concern was to cause him as much inconvenience as possible. To accomplish this, I dropped him and his cheerful gang at the head of a trail leading to a beach a few bays east of my observation station and told them that Mabel, far from being trapped in a small inlet, was enclosed by the coral reef and had the whole lagoon to move around in.

‘Don't go swimming,' I said. ‘She's probably pretty angry by now.'

‘Are colossal squid dangerous?' asked Todd.

‘Deadly.'

I told them Bill Birch moved his camp from place to place in the jungle, so they might have trouble finding him at first. I said that he was essentially harmless, that the machete he carried was only for cutting paths; I warned them too that he was hard of hearing and jumpy when startled. I said I knew they were responsible kids and would act with appropriate caution. We unloaded their gear onto the road. I moved the truck so the headlights shone down along the trail. They remarked on the audible ocean and seemed much less nervous than they should have been; they said goodbye, they expressed their gratitude, and then they plunged off into the humid trees. When they were far beyond the beam of my headlights, Darwin bounded onto the road like a stricken kangaroo.

‘There you are,' I said.

He climbed into the truck and sat rigidly, like a boy waiting for a roller coaster to descend its first hill.

‘You've never been in a car before, have you?' I said.

He shook his head. I gave him quite a ride. There are some hairpin bends on this old volcano that can knot your intestines like a skilful sailor. By the time we got back to the observation station, we were both giddy as schoolboys. We walked out onto the cliff and looked down at Mabel. It was dark, of course, and colossal squid are not, to my or anyone's knowledge, phosphorescent, but I would be willing to swear that I saw her outline glowing very faintly from the bottom of her bay.

That was last night. I slept late this morning, day 498, and spent the afternoon writing this account. Now Darwin is with me, and it's pleasant to see him in the fullest light of the day; he seems more definite and in this way more ordinary. The weather is clear, so we amuse ourselves by pretending we can see New Zealand. I don't know what's become of Eric; I don't know what report he's given Father Anthony. No one has come looking for me. I imagine the supply ship has left by now. I imagine I'll spend the next month in town living on this newly discovered goodwill of the locals, just another oddball wanderer. The protesters will find me, eventually, and we'll make friends; we'll laugh together when they hear what it is I've done, and one of the girls, less pretty, perhaps, but kind, will take pity on me. I'll resign my position, of course. I'll take the next ship; I'll go home. Darwin says he won't come with me. He's scornful of Australia and talks of England with the adoration of exile. This is all as it should be. Unless, unless, I get too close to Mabel, and she takes me with her.

In these last few minutes I've felt the swimmy brimming that precedes an attack of vertigo. I feel it as a pressure in my feet. Soon, I know, the earth will fall away from them, and this too is as it should be. My head seems to press outward. To myself I say,
Shark, anemone, starfish, seahorse, eel
. My main concern was that if Eric raised the alarm, Father Anthony wouldn't permit the girls to take their daily swim. But here they come now, down the mountain. They're singing, of course, and Faith is among them. She's singing softly. She likes to swim. She'll wade out into the water and the other girls will follow her. What is it about being immersed in water that's so exciting, so vital to us? We all experience it – this thrill of feeling the medium we move in as something dangerous and contingent. It reminds us of the artifice of oxygen and gravity, the sheer unlikelihood of their provision. We feel the water close around our arms and legs and we make our way through it with difficulty and determination, singing and proclaiming and making promises, kneeling and rising and sitting and standing. It feels like the unbearable presence of God, His hands on our submarine chests. A blowfish might waft past, inflated, with a look of dumb surprise on its face. I have basketfuls of fish ready to feed to Mabel. The girls will take hold of the net; I'll watch as they rise through the sea with it into the air. The light will billow and flare around them in the bright wind, and their hands will reach out to Heaven as if strung on trapeze wires. I'll wade through the shallows, wet to my stupid waist, then I'll kick downward and swim. Darwin will observe from the shore in his nineteenth-century socks. And Mabel will fly seaward, holy and beautiful, a bony-beaked messenger bringing no news.

 

The High Places

In the fifth year of drought, Jack prayed for rain. His wife was always praying and had developed a pinched, devout look, which Jack found more and more distasteful as the drought years passed. He felt her praying in bed beside him, with her hands folded in the bony country of her ribs, and was irritated by her little offerings to Heaven. She went to church every Sunday and took the children, who were invariably difficult when they returned home. For a long time, Jack thought this was because of the drive: two hours there, two hours back, shuddering on the torn, hot seats of the truck. The girls on Sundays were skittish and rude, and they complained: about the heat, the flies, and the style of their church dresses. During the week they kept to themselves. They stayed in their bedroom – the Girls' Room – taking lessons by two-way radio. But on Sundays they were reminded of what it was like to be among people, and it was this, Jack concluded, that made them unruly. They teased him on Sundays, which he quite enjoyed, until one of them went too far. Then by certain gestures of his, and his tone of voice, they knew to stop.

The boy was harder to understand, not because he was wild but because he spent his Sundays vague and blushing. Jack disliked his son's solitary nature. There was no form to it. It had a feeble, dreamy quality, and he was always worse after church. Then he would take his Bible and sit outside under the red gum to read. Grass had never grown under the red gum, even before the drought, but the ground was littered with the bark and leaves the tree shed. The messy ground sloped down to the dry waterhole, which was itself such a white, rocky pit in the afternoon heat that the boy, on the bright ground under the loose tree, appeared to be sitting and reading his Bible in a lit haze, in a ring of fire. He was sixteen. He was old enough to know it was too hot to be outside, too fruitless to read the Bible, too dangerous to sit under the fragile limbs of a red gum, known with good reason as widowmakers. Watching his son beneath the tree, Jack felt a tightening of the inner organs. Every Sunday, the boy came to dinner only reluctantly, as if ashamed to need any sustenance beyond the word of God. And he kept his Bible with him at the table, by his plate, where its blank burgundy face accused Jack of something he couldn't identify: some form of neglect, some deficiency, some failure of will or spirit.

There was a Sunday in the fifth year of the drought, before Jack had begun to pray for rain, on which the boy came to dinner willingly and, rather than just leaving the Bible on the table, opened it and cleared his throat, preparing to read. The girls giggled. They were all younger than he was, with smoother skin and blonder hair; they considered their brother weird. Jack's wife turned her tired, ready face to her son. The kitchen buzzed under neon light and the moths of early evening battered the window screens. Jack took a lamb chop in his hands.

‘Listen,' read the boy. ‘I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed – in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.'

Jack bit into his lamb chop.

‘Amen,' said his wife.

‘Can we eat now?' asked the oldest girl, and as if her question had been a form of permission, she and her sisters took up their knives and forks and began to scrape and chew.

‘We will not all sleep,' said the boy. ‘But we will all be changed.'

‘All right, son,' said Jack, and the boy gave him a dim, unseeing look, put the Bible down, and turned to his dinner. The family ate without speaking, and when they had finished it was night.

In bed, Jack felt the slight movement of his wife's hands as she prayed.

‘Do you ever pray for rain?' he asked her.

‘Not specifically,' she said. ‘I pray for God's will to be done.' And she leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. Her body was like the thin run of a creek in the bed, a low creek that puts out the small noises of a comfort it can't deliver.

Jack's mind turned over his son's phrase: ‘We will all be changed.' He liked the sound of it. It seemed generous to him. But the dead rising imperishable bothered Jack, who had killed and buried most of his sheep when he couldn't afford to feed them; he knew the rot and stink of a sheep left too long. He amused himself, anyway, with a vision: he heard the last trumpet, which sounded like the reveille, and saw his sheep rise from the earth, whole and round and white, like silly clouds. He smiled in his dry bed, and slept.

*   *   *

The next day was one on which Jack always felt certain of himself. It was time, on Mondays, to create the world again. Jack and the boy drove out to the western edge of the property to repair fences. The shake of the truck over the ridged paddocks produced so much noise that whole thirsty flocks of birds flew out of the few trees. The boy, too, was different on Mondays: obedient, attentive, with a sort of waiting stillness his father took for concentration. They worked together all morning, although they both knew there was no need to repair these particular fences, which kept nothing in or out. The land was flat and grey. There was no wind, but the soil was so fine it flew up with every kick or shuffle of a boot, and that was like wind. The boy sang a little. They worked hard through the long, steady morning.