To the Islands (12 page)

‘And where do we look for him?’ Dixon asked.

Gunn said: ‘I’d pick Onmalmeri.’

‘Where the ghosts are?’

‘He often said he thought it was beautiful, and how he wished he had a few days to ride out and camp there.’

Helen said softly: ‘He once told me he’d like to be buried at Onmalmeri. He loathed the cemetery here.’

‘I’ll go there,’ Dixon said. ‘One last thing—what about Rex?’

‘Helen will talk to him,’ Gunn muttered restlessly.

Helen stood up and went to the table and laid her book down there. ‘I might as well tell you,’ she said, leaning over it, her back to them, ‘what I’m going to do.’

‘Well, tell us.’

‘I don’t know if you’ve thought of it, but Rex, when he wakes up, probably won’t remember anything. Retroactive amnesia.’

She felt their faint movements of relief and surprise.

‘Well,’ said Dixon, ‘that’d be a break. That’d be apples, that would.’

‘But I’d tell him,’ she said.

Way said: ‘I still find it incredible. Utterly.’

‘He wasn’t well,’ Helen said. She was tired, and sat hugging her knees on the edge of his veranda, with the drowsy scent of frangipani close above her head. ‘I’ve been afraid of—not this, exactly, but some sort of breakdown. I think we’re right to fear—well, the worst.’

In his jungle-garden finches haunted the dark green of the poincianas, the frangipanis, the creepers, fluttering restless as butterflies round the dripping leaves. ‘But to take Justin...’

‘I don’t know why he should have done that. It’s all much more puzzling now than it was last night, before we knew Justin had gone. But it’s more hopeful, if there’s someone with him.’

‘Of course, there’s not much chance of finding tracks, after this wind and rain. Why do you feel so certain he went to Onmalmeri?’

‘I don’t feel certain, father. But he often said he loved the place, and it had—associations. You remember?’ she asked, unable to add, since he knew so little: It is where the murdered people are, the murdered.

Mrs Way, cradled by a deck-chair in the tendrilled shade of her veranda, clicked with her morning tea-cup. ‘Poor Mr Heriot,’ she said sadly. She was a lean, grey Englishwoman, kindly and calm.

Helen said to the garden: ‘It needn’t be too late, it needn’t. Don’t you believe Terry will find him?’

‘I only hope,’ Mrs Way confessed. ‘This country—so vast...’

‘He
must
be at Onmalmeri. If he isn’t, Terry will have wasted nearly two days. If only Justin had told someone—’

‘He didn’t,’ Way said. ‘Ella and Stephen can’t remember when exactly he left the house. But he took his spears some time before going away, so it sounds as though he meant to make a long trip.’

‘You didn’t tell me that, dear,’ said Mrs Way. ‘Now I feel much more optimistic. Perhaps Mr Heriot, not being quite—stable, thought a long journey through the bush would be good for him.’

‘We can’t be sure of anything, of course. That’s why I don’t want to report his disappearance until we’ve done as much as we can to find him. But I’ll have to, if he’s not at Onmalmeri. He could hardly object, even if he chose to be lost—with two of the best of our wretched little handful of horses, incidentally.’

‘I don’t think you need be cross with him yet,’ Helen said quietly.

‘I’m sorry, Helen. I still find the whole thing hard to believe.’

Across the road Harris clanked a few notes on the bell, bringing Helen to her feet. ‘Thank you, Mrs Way. I must go to the store, and then back to Rex.’

‘Are you pleased with him, Helen?’

‘Oh, yes, fairly. It will take time.’

‘Such bad luck he has, poor man. First his wife, and now this.’

‘Yes,’ Helen said, ‘very bad luck. But he’ll survive this, with that hard head of his. I must go.’

Inside the store Harris, free of customers and glad to talk to someone, stood rolling a cigarette. He looked up and smiled at her with his old, dry face. ‘Out of smokes?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Can you see me craving?’

He reached for a packet and entered it in his book. ‘I reckon you smoke more than you earn. Should roll ’em.’

‘I think I will from now on.’

‘Three and a half inches we’ve had. That’s raining.’

‘But it seems to be over,’ she said, looking through the door at the bright sunlight. ‘I hate it like this, just after the sun comes out.’

‘It’s sticky, all right.’

‘Harry,’ she asked, lighting a cigarette, ‘what do you think about this—about Mr Heriot? We never hear your opinion of anything.’

He had his spidery elbows on the counter and his chin in his hands, staring outside. ‘I don’t know. I’m just wondering, like everyone.’

‘Do you think he would—well, kill himself?’

‘Might. You hear of that sort of thing happening.’

‘What, here?’

‘Well, there was one, not on the staff, but doing a job here. Good few years ago. You take an old man like Heriot, just going to leave the place and not knowing anywhere else much—he might do it.’

‘But having Justin with him—wouldn’t that stop him?’

‘No. If he asked Justin to come with him, that’d mean he wasn’t up to anything, but if Justin went after him to bring him back he’d do what he was going to do and tell Justin to get out of the way. It’d annoy him, being followed like that.’

‘You’re very resigned,’ she said hopelessly. ‘I couldn’t be.’ Like him she stared out at the warm, damp sunlight towards which the smoke from their cigarettes was slowly tending, climbing up and out in peaceful ripples. ‘But Terry will be at Onmalmeri late this afternoon, and he will be there, Harry, he must be.’

It was mid-afternoon when Dixon arrived at Onmalmeri. After the long day’s ride over rocky hills, through man-high canegrass studded with little broad-leaved trees, the
gan
, the wild orange, the wild kapok; after the river flowing shallowly over rock and the ascent to new hills from which one looked down on islands of dense pandanus and cliffs burning red in the light or dull in shadow; after great distances of earth bared by old fires, and sudden cool clumps of gums, and the inescapable rock in boulders and floors and cliffs, he came on a new river, and across the river the cliff of Onmalmeri thrust up from its dark pool.

There was a bird which he had never seen but which he hated savagely, it was there now in the trees or hidden in the pandanus, making its sound like a baby’s crying and answering itself with a madwoman’s laugh.

Stephen and Gregory were with him and followed him when he dismounted and went down to the water. He lay on his stomach over a flat rock and drank, and sat up again and looked across the pool at the cliff. Galleries ran along it at water level, but above, it was a vast crumbling wall, crazily built of square chunks of rock, coming out in sudden corners edged with red light or bending away into shadow. Pandanus grew at water level in one of its inlets, bright green against the red rock, and trees and spinifex sprouted from its high crannies, or at its top, hundreds of feet above, stretched out against the sky. From across the shadowy pool came to him the low, slow lap of water and a sudden crack of sound as two rock pigeons burst from their shelter far above.

‘We’ll have to go on foot,’ he said, ‘up and down the pool and all around, looking for them.’

‘More better, brother.’

‘You go that way, Gregory. It won’t take you long. Fix up the horses and make us a cup of tea for when we get back, it’ll take us a while.’

‘I do that,’ Gregory said.

Dixon stood up. He would have liked to stay longer in that green coolness under the rustling pandanus, but he said: ‘Come on, Stephen,’ and began rapidly walking away, pushing through the densely growing trees, tearing aside curtains of creeper. The insane bird persevered with its hysterics somewhere among leaves.

Stephen said, quietly thrusting after the white man: ‘Might be you better yell out, brother.’

‘You do the yelling. You blokes know how to make yourself heard.’

The brown man stopped and shouted: ‘
Bau!
’ through his cupped hands, and waited, but there was only the echo returning, muffled by trees, from the cliff. He shouted again.

‘Leave it,’ Dixon said, ploughing on. ‘We’ll go farther.’

So they continued, crawling under bowed trees, avoiding saw-toothed pandanus leaves, breaking through creepers and through low wattles, and came finally past the pool to where there were only rocks, round boulders worn by water and smooth under boot-leather, with clumps of spinifex growing between.

‘Any use going on?’ Dixon asked.

‘There one more pool, brother.’

Dixon took off his hat and wiped his forehead. ‘You lead the way,’ he said.

Walking behind the native he felt, suddenly, regret at his own awkwardness, for Stephen moved over the rocks with the sureness of a bird, but he stumbled and slipped, having always to plan his next step, to tread carefully. He saw himself for the first time as a stranger, cast without preparation into a landscape of prehistory, foreign to the earth. Only the brown man belonged in this wild and towering world.

‘What do you think about all this, Steve?’ he asked abruptly.

‘What that, brother?’

‘Heriot sort of adopted you, didn’t he? And isn’t Justin your cousin’s husband?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must be wondering what’s happened to them.’

‘They reckon they come out camping and get lost,’ Stephen said.

That was Way’s thin story, and he was pretending to believe it. Dixon grinned wryly, picking his way along behind.

The stones gave place to earth and canegrass and they arrived among trees again, before a little pool so sheltered by cliffs that lilies still floated delicately on its water, untouched by the late wind and rain. The cliff opposite had been split in halves by a landslide, and a huge passageway littered with boulders ran up through it, ending in a rock wall and the sky. The enormous chunks of rock thrown down in the ruin stuck up sharply at the pool’s edge, or rose out of it like islands, and from among them, twisted and tortuous, a wild fig tree thrust out its branches of dark, shining leaves towards the water.

Stephen said: ‘Brother—some people reckon Brother Heriot went to finish off himself.’

Dixon stared at the cliff. ‘It might be true. Sorry, but you ought to know what’s going on.’

The world was utterly silent. ‘Brother, why he do that?’

‘I don’t know, Steve.’

‘I thinking—I thinking might be he do it—because of me, brother.’

‘Ah, come off it.’

‘Because—I’m no good, I’m thief, no good. And my sister—you know? That why I think that, brother.’

‘You’re up the pole,’ Dixon muttered uneasily. ‘Just help me find him, don’t worry about yourself.’

‘I going to help you, brother. That old man, he just like my father to me.’

‘Well, give him another shout, then.’

The man cupped his brown hands to his mouth and shouted: ‘
Bau!
’ over the water, and got it back again as a far, desolate echo. ‘Nothing,’ he said, in an empty voice.

‘Let’s go back.’

‘I coming, brother.’

Returning over the stones, looking at the high rocky hillside between the two pools: ‘You could climb up there,’ Dixon said. ‘You could look down over the whole place. You coming?’

Stephen nodded, they moved across the stones to the hill, climbing up steps of rock and up the rock bed of a vanished creek and among red boulders in canegrass. Dixon panted, swore involuntarily when he slipped on canegrass stems flattened over rock. Stephen showed tender concern.

Coming finally to the top of the hill, where meagre gums grew from rock, they stopped for breath before tramping on to the cliff. A wind had come up across country, stirring the leaves and the tall grass. Dixon opened his shirt and felt it cool on his sweating chest.

At the edge of the cliff, on an overhang above the water the country filled his eyes, beauty struck at him, and in a strange stillness of mind he recognized it. He looked at a land of rock, a broad valley between cliffs and hills, even the floor of it studded with broken stone. But the pools were bright blue under the sky, and the endless hills blue also. In some places the water was almost obliterated by lily-leaves and grass, in others fringed with dense trees and pandanus. Below him, many miles down, he thought, lay the Onmalmeri pool, shrunken by distance, dark, dark green among its thickets of wattle and pandanus, its creeper-choked gums. He picked up a stone and threw it far out, and it swerved and landed with an echoing clatter in the clump of pandanus at the cliff foot. A cry of birds broke out.

On the far bank, beside the smoke of his fire, a tiny man, Gregory, looked across at the noise. The toy horses started and stared.

What am I thinking? Dixon asked himself. But it’d be easy to give up here, to get out on an overhang and drop into the water. That’d be a death to die, you could easily do that, with the water just about calling you on. Wonder if those little crocs would eat a dead man, they don’t touch live ones.

Gregory had seen them and called out, his voice rising, magnified by echo, so that it seemed impossible such sound should come from so small a figure.

‘
Bau!
’ shouted Stephen over the empty country. ‘
Bau! Bau!
’

But there was no answer beyond echo, and presently Gregory called: ‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ Dixon repeated. The lonely echo threw up in its broken voice: ‘Nothing.’

In the narrow gorge, sunset firing the farther cliffs, Heriot sang to himself, under his roof of rock, songs of loneliness and silence.

Presently he himself lapsed into silence, listening to the rapids downstream, watching the shadow slowly creep up the cliffs. His blanket smelt of acrid woodsmoke, and his clothes, and his skin, an annoyance that Justin did not notice, being inured to sleeping all night in the stink of burning cadjiput branches.

‘I should have gone to Onmalmeri,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t feel so closed in there.’

‘No, brother,’ Justin said automatically. He sat, idle and bored, propped against the cliff base, on a rock beside a few bream which he had speared in the pool with his prong-wire.

‘We’ll go on, we’ll go tomorrow.’