Beat Not the Bones (6 page)

It was 11.30 when he left Sylvia. The jeep was waiting pulled up by the side of the road, but Rei was nowhere to be seen. Washington, a little unsteady on his feet, but fairly clear-headed, looked up and down the road and whistled. The houses farther up the hill were still lit up, and from somewhere above him came the sound of Papuan voices, but the road was empty.

The wind had dropped and only a light breeze soughed through the fringes of the casuarina trees. He could smell the scent of frangipani. He paused, enjoying the cool night air. Then he remembered Rei and tooted the horn furiously.

The darkness ahead broke and a vague form appeared, moving hesitantly towards him. It was a police boy. Washington could see his belt shining in the darkness. ‘Oh, go away!' he said impatiently.

He tooted again, sat down in the front seat and lit a cigarette. Down the side of the opposite hill a loose white blob was moving towards him. It was all that could be first be seen of Rei, his white rami flapping. He arrived breathless. He had evidently been making a night of it. He was chewing betelnut, wore a hibiscus flower in his hair and had knotted round his neck one of Washington's new dishcloths. Under his arm he carried a guitar decorated with strips of coloured paper.

‘Where have you been?'

‘Boyhouse,' Rei said, smiling broadly.

‘Whose boyhouse?'

Rei pointed with a vague, sweeping gesture that took in most of the hill.

‘What taubada's boyhouse?' said Washington. The feeling of well-being that Sylvia's body had imparted was already drifting away. He felt suddenly suspicious of Rei, though he did not know why. What had he been doing? Who had he been talking to? He feared … he did not know what …

Rei did not answer. His smile had died. His face had become stupid and still, but his eyes seemed to grow larger and brighter. Washington, who could read these signs, knew he was nervous and might now say anything.

‘Have you been with any strange boys, any bad boys?' he asked more gently.

‘No, taubada.' There was no way on earth of telling what might be going on behind those lustrous eyes, staring now so steadily into his own.

‘All right. Get in and let's go home.' They had probably just been gambling. They would naturally not like being questioned. When Rei started up the engine and the jeep moved down the hill, Washington said, hoping to soothe the boy's ruffled nerves, ‘Sing to me Rei. What was that song you were playing up there?'

‘I no sing, taubada.'

‘Why not?'

‘Sore head,' said Rei, chewing again.

Washington looked away. They were passing along the dock side. A cargo ship was tied up against the jetty. It was still lit up and the lights from its ports tossed and broke as the water lifted and fell. There was no unloading that night and the jetty was deserted. Only one solitary native squatted on the edge of the wharf, his black, fuzzy head silhouetted like a flower against the sky.

Even Rei had changed, thought Washington. He had always been a fool, but a gay one. He was always happy. He would bring his friends up to the boyhouse and play his guitar and sing for hours on end – local songs, hillbilly songs, Samoan dances learned from the early Polynesian missionaries.

But now he only sang with his own people, making Washington feel a stranger. He went about solemnly, and quietly, in a manner altogether foreign to his nature. He had ceased to be childlike and had become enigmatic. Sometimes Washington felt he was hiding secrets.

All of them, thought Washington – retreating further from the comfort of Sylvia's caresses – including Rei, had turned against him. And he had been their friend. They had come to him with their troubles – a piece of old sheet for a sail, iron to patch a roof, a rusty knife, a letter to be written to a friend. He had made speeches at their weddings. But now they no longer came and there was nobody to sing to him. Rei, who wandered around looking enigmatic and doing things more efficiently than usual, was the only one left. He felt the whole brown race had smelt him out and no longer trusted him – conspired to shun him, perhaps, God knows, even more than this. He suppressed a shudder.

The road wound round the edge of the water. The tide was out, leaving a few yards of pebbly beach, and half a dozen native men with flashlights were fishing in the shallows. He could see the vague, shadowy outlines of their bodies. The road turned and led back past a long row of buildings towards the hills. A wild hillside with only one path threading over its crest loomed ahead. The road turned again and finished in a group of tumbledown iron sheds that had once been army stores.

‘There's no light,' said Washington, standing up and peering through the trunks of half a dozen coconut palms. ‘I told you to leave a light.'

‘No light,' reiterated Rei, and they both stared at the black smudge on the hill ahead that was Washington's house.

‘Well, you bloody well go up and light it and come back with my torch.'

Rei, who did not like the dark any more than Washington, rolled his eyes.

‘
Go on!
Hurry up ! I don't want to wait here all night!'

Rei clambered out of the jeep and started slowly up the path. The darkness swallowed his head, shoulders, arms and legs, and left only his white rami floating away like a moth into the gloom. He started to sing.

Why does he sing now? thought Philip. To keep spirits away? What spirit is he afraid of here? Or did he, without knowing why, sense that there was no peace in that decrepit little hut?

The white moth of Rei's rami had disappeared but his voice could still be heard, chanting away up the hill. Washington lit a cigarette. In the tangled rubble of the sheds something moved. A door scraped and a piece of tin fell with a clatter to the ground.

‘Damn that boy!' he said aloud. He was beginning to feel nervous again and jerked violently as a flying fox stirred in a pawpaw tree. The leaves scraped and rustled with a papery sound, then the big, shadowy bat flopped out of the leaves, its heavy wings beating the sky. His skin had started to prickle. He stared at the path ahead.
What was that boy doing?
He tooted furiously on the horn, and in the next moment a light showed in his house. He caught a glimpse of Rei moving across the front door and then the point of torchlight moving towards him down the hill. He watched it pick out the path in a long, narrow beam. He heard Rei call out, ‘Wow! Wow!'

Across the beam of torchlight raced a thin, black dog. Washington sucked his breath between his teeth and clenched his hands in a spasm of rage. For a moment he could not move, then he flung open the door of the jeep and scrambled out on to the road. ‘Hold that dog!' he screamed. ‘Throw the light on that dog!'

The light bobbed up and down wildly, but the dog was almost down to the sheds. Washington clawed about on the ground and picked up a handful of stones. He threw them with wild, inaccurate fury. There was a rattle of struck tin and a faint yelp. The dog, headed off, was streaking his way. He kicked at it as it passed, but it was a gesture of fury rather than an attack, for the dog was at least five feet away. He cursed it savagely and threw another stone, this time taking careful aim. His mind was full of brutal images. He saw his boot crack the dog's skull, he saw a pointed flint pierce its eye. He heard its scream of agony. But it had gone, unscathed.

Rei was advancing slowly towards him.

‘Where was he?' he said. It was agony not to shout, to speak quietly and reasonably, not to frighten Rei.

‘Under the house, taubada.'

‘Under the house!' In spite of his efforts, his voice rose. ‘What was it doing?'

‘Nothing, taubada. Kaikai.'

‘Eating? What was it eating?'

‘Bone, taubada.'

‘A bone! What bone?'

Rei looked nervously away. ‘Nothing, taubada. Taubada's kaikai. Bone long taubada's kaikai. 'E take 'im long frying pan.'

Fear drained out of Washington's body, leaving a feeling of nausea and weakness. ‘Oh!' He remembered a chop bone lying in a frying pan outside the back door. He started to walk up the hill.

At about three next morning he woke. It was still and cool. Dawn had not yet come, but the sky outside his window was light and empty waiting for the sun. The leaves of pawpaw trees spread out like hands against the sky. Three glow-worms winked palely in the thatch above his head, their lights blinking on and off like the beating of tiny hearts. For a moment he lay in peace, as he had done in the old days before there was anything to fear, looking at the glow-worms and the pawpaw leaves. Then, remembering where he was, his naked body grew tense beneath the sheet. He lifted the mosquito net and his eyes, wide and wary, began their careful examination of the room. His gaze started at the foot of the bed and slowly moved across to the opposite wall. There were many objects which in this eerie hour looked odd and out of place. His raincoat hooked up on a nail over the front door showed no fold or crease, and might have been the dark, humped shape of a waiting man. But it was a phantom that he had faced before, that he had spoken to in fact on a previous evening and flashed his torch upon. Tonight he passed it by, and his gaze moved on across the wall. Here a boar's tusk glimmered like a disembodied smile. Three lime gourds set on a shelf had the stark, bone foreheads of human skulls. Tapa cloth rustled like the dry, whispering tread of rats. The only other sound was the faint tinny rattle of a bundle of bamboo jews' harps hanging on the opposite wall.

Not until his eyes had reached the door did he see it. It was standing in the doorway, blocking out what he should have been able to see behind – the hillside, the banana trees, the corner of the boyhouse. None of this was visible, only above its head a few pale stars. It was a man. A little man, a native. He was not Rei or for that matter any houseboy, for he wore no rami. As soon as Washington saw him, he could smell him too. The whole room stank with the odour of his flesh. Native flesh, unwashed, primitive native flesh. Not the sweet, musty odour of the coastal people who washed and swam in the sea, but the rank stench of a primitive inland man who rubbed pig fat on his skin.

Panic seized him. His hand shot out, his fingers clawed the first thing they touched, which was the half-empty rum bottle on the table beside his bed, and he flung it at the open door. The bottle struck the side of the door and rolled down the steps to the ground outside. The shadow had gone. It seemed not to step aside but to fade away, leaving clear the sky with its pricking stars, the hillside and the long floppy leaves of the banana trees. There was no sound but the faint drip, drip of the spilt rum, the tinkle of the jews' harps and the dry, husky flap of the tapa cloth.

Sobbing with terror, Washington lay as if chained to his bed.

CHAPTER 5

At 8.30 the next morning the phone rang on Washington's desk. He let it ring for a few moments, then lifted the receiver and said sulkily, ‘You're late.'

‘I'm sorry, darling,' said Sylvia, who phoned him every morning at 8.15. ‘I've only just arrived. I've been round at Staff, looking after a lost lamb. Has anyone come into your office during the past few minutes?'

There was a pause while he looked around. ‘Only a girl.'

‘A thin girl with short hair, looking frightened?'

‘I wouldn't say frightened. She's talking to Finch.'

‘She's the girl you bumped into last night,' said Sylvia. ‘An extraordinary creature. She's only just arrived and had to report at Staff this morning. But she was scared to go alone, so I had to go with her.' Then she said, with a certain note of self- satisfaction, ‘She's not Warwick's daughter, she's his wife.'

There was no answer from Washington and she went on. ‘What do you suppose she's doing here? It's odd, isn't it? She's so terribly young. I feel sorry for her and yet I wish she wasn't here. She seems unbalanced, makes me shiver. I have an odd feeling about her …'

‘How do you know who she is?' said Washington. His voice sounded far away for his head was turned away from the phone.

‘Oh, I know. From things she says. And she's working for your department. She wanted to get into Cultural Affairs where her husband used to be, but Nyall's secretary's on leave, and they've put her in there, relieving. She was upset about not going into CA, but when she heard about Nyall … Hello! Hello! Are you there?'

‘Yes, I'm here. I've got to go now.'

‘You haven't told me how you are. Are you all right?'

‘Rotten. I've got a bout of fever coming on, I think. Didn't sleep last night.'

‘Darling, you should be home in bed.'

‘I might go home too. I've been thinking about it.'

‘I'll come up and cook for you. Poor darling … Philip!'

But he had hung up.

Trevor Nyall entered the Department of Survey at ten. Stella, sitting in his office at the far end of the building, heard voices outside saying, ‘Good morning, Mr Nyall,' and a man's voice heartily replying, ‘Good morning, good morning.'

She waited, staring at the typewriter on the table before her. But he did not immediately appear. On the big, empty desk in the corner a loose sheet of paper lifted in the air, drifted down and settled on the floor. She did not move to pick it up, but sat, waiting, her hands gripped in her lap.

The door flung open and a gust of wind swept down the length of the building. The paper soared and dived at the window. A file flapped over on the desk and a jam tin tipped water and frangipani flowers on the floor.

The man who had entered shut the door behind him and bent to pick up the paper. It was quite a task because he was tall and broad and his face, when he straightened, was beaded with sweat. It was a handsome, arresting face. His hair was thick and iron grey, his skin yellow tan, his eyes brilliant and youthful. He had an air, not exactly of complaisance, but of satisfaction. You would think, to look at him, that he had found life to his liking, that he had not been baulked, frustrated or put down, and had managed to make his way in the world without damage either to his conscience or his desires.

Stella had never seen a photograph of him, and she put down his familiarity to the fact that he was so exactly as she had imagined him. He glanced across at her, smiled and said, ‘Good morning.' His smile was charming. It isn't everyone, she told herself, her heart warming towards him, who would smile at his typist, and she thought of the man on the hill who had not smiled.

‘I'll pick them up,' she said.

‘Thanks, it's rather a way down for me.' His voice was strong and hearty. Stella, bending down beside him to collect the scattered flowers, was beginning to tingle with excitement. He exhaled an air of vigour and optimism that had already infected her. He would help her.

‘You must be my new secretary.'

She stood up. ‘I am Stella Warwick,' she said.

His heavy, dark lids lifted. His hands, which had been held clasped together on the desk, broke apart and lay there, fingers curled, palms upward. ‘No,' he said softly and shook his head.

He sat and stared at her, then he rose and walked around the desk towards her. He took her hands and, looking down at her, said, ‘Oh, you poor girl. What are you doing here?'

Stella's eyes filled with tears. She was happy. She had found a friend. He would look after her, tell her what to do and how to do it.

‘What are you doing here?' he repeated, still holding her hands.

‘I came to see you. I wanted your help.' She fixed on him the wide, dependent, childlike gaze that had so endeared her to her father and her husband.

‘Of course I'll help you. I'll do anything I can for you.'

‘I came to find out why my husband was murdered.'

He did not start or flinch but gazed steadily back into her dilated, shining eyes. Then he pulled up a chair and made her sit down. He walked to the door, opened it, looked outside, shut it and turned back. He stopped in front of her, looked down at her and slowly shook his head. ‘Stella,' he said, ‘your husband was not murdered. He committed suicide.'

‘No, you're wrong, Mr Nyall. He was murdered.'

‘Now, don't think that I'm surprised that you should think so,' he said, smiling down at her. ‘You don't like the idea of suicide, do you? You think that it's dishonourable and you know that David was not a dishonourable man.'

Stella felt his words did not do justice to what she felt and moved to interrupt him, but he held up his hand and went on, speaking in the gentle, explanatory tone with which people were prone to address her and which reminded her now of her husband. ‘But this isn't a romantic fabrication. This is true.'

He beat his fist on the palm of his hand. ‘It will be hard for you to understand. This isn't Australia, Stella. People here behave differently. We are none of us in this country normal, balanced human beings.'

She looked at him gravely. She felt she had never seen anyone so normal and balanced. ‘Everyone says that David had debts,' she began. ‘I know he was extravagant and he hardly left anything. But debts …' She paused. ‘He didn't care about money.'

He shook his head at her indulgently. ‘How simple it sounds to you. He was a gambler. He borrowed a great deal of money from his friends.'

‘I see no reason,' she insisted, ‘why you should think he killed himself.'

‘If you stayed here for a month or so,' he said, ‘you'd see reason enough.' He spoke slowly now, emphasising each word with a movement of the hand. ‘This place is heartbreaking, Stella. Just heartbreaking. We have before us an insurmountable problem.' He had turned away and was pacing the room, speaking now in an expansive way as if addressing a larger audience. ‘This is a young, savage, uncultivated land, full of people who are amongst the most primitive in the world. I wonder if you understand what that means. We must not only teach them from scratch our western ideas of law and religion, we must drag them, as it were, in a few years, over aeons of time. And so much that we have done has been wrong. It's not always been our fault; the problem is immense. And frequently this country attracts the people who just want to make money. They make it impossible for us.' His eyes returned to Stella's face. ‘To those of us, Stella, who feel strongly about all this, the past few years have been heartbreaking. Think of this country as a young child whom we are trying to turn into a respectable adult. People like David have in mind a bright, strong youth, with all our knowledge and none of our corruptions, but what does he find himself producing? A cheap, shoddy waster, who isn't an adult and isn't a child. A sort of sly, seedy ten year old, who isn't even happy. It's terrible.'

Stella did not understand. ‘Are you now telling me that gambling and owing money to his friends had nothing to do with David's death?'

‘There are many ways of committing suicide' – Trevor tapped a cigarette on a silver case – ‘and here you find them all. Sometimes it's drink, sometimes it's gambling, sometimes it's just general moral disintegration.' He paused. ‘I'm more distressed than I can say that you've got this idea in your head. Believe me, it's best to let the whole thing lie. You'll only injure David's reputation.' His face cleared and he smiled at her. ‘You must come and stay with us and we'll show you some of the country. You can have fun here, sailing, golf … Who knows, you might meet someone here, you're young …' he ended optimistically.

Stella contained her anger. ‘It isn't true,' she said, ‘what you said about David.'

A faint frown appeared between Trevor Nyall's brows. The corners of his mouth drooped.

‘You see, David wrote to my father.'

‘What!' he said sharply.

‘He knew he was going to be murdered, and he wrote and told my father. He might even have told him who the murderer was.'

Nyall's face had entirely altered. His lips were tight and thin, his eyes had lost their softness.

Stella's heart lifted at these signs of firmness and strength. Now he'll help me, she thought.

‘What do you mean? Did you see the letter?'

‘I've told you. Only part of it.'

‘Did your father tell you what it said?'

‘No,' she said, ‘he couldn't tell me.'

Stella had not heard from her husband for three weeks. He had written to her the day before he left on the trip to Eola and warned her that there might be no word from him for some time. But by the end of a month she had looked forward to news. The postman, like most postmen in suburban streets, had taken an interest in the almost daily correspondence he had been delivering, and rarely failed to pass remarks about the devotion of husbands and the compensations of separation. He had been so concerned over the sudden cessation of letters that she had found it necessary to explain to him that David was away. One morning at about ten o'clock she was returning home from the shops at the end of the street, and met him finishing his round. He had just slammed the gate of a house about twelve doors down from her own. He swung his leg over his bicycle, but seeing her, dismounted again and smiled.

‘He's back, Mrs Warwick,' he called.

‘A letter for me?'

‘Not for you, for your father.'

Stella ran up the front steps of the house, calling her father's name. Since his recovery he had spent his mornings sitting in a room on the east side of the house, which caught the morning sun. She flung open the door of this room. ‘You've had a letter, Daddy! How is he? Is he back?'

The high back of her father's chair was turned to the door. A fire was going, for though it was spring and the plum blossoms outside the window were already falling, the air was sharp, and there had been heavy morning frosts. The room was filled with sun, but the silence chilled her. The flames of the fire were weak and pale, as they are in morning sunlight. ‘Daddy.'

His hand moved and dropped listlessly down the arm of the chair. She moved across the room and round in front of him. She thought he might be asleep, but he was staring into the fire. Stella did not at first notice the grey pallor of his skin and the loose folds of his cheeks, as if life were already leaving his flesh to sag and crumble. She looked at the table beside him, and there was the envelope with its green air mail stamp and familiar writing. But the envelope was empty.

‘Daddy, David …' she looked at him. His eyes were still fixed on the fire. She forgot the letter, saw the shrivelled horror in his face. It struck her that his eyes were trapped forever on some point in the fire from which he could never again break free.

‘Daddy, what's the matter?'

‘I'm not well.'

She looked around her wildly, feeling helpless and terrified. ‘What can I do?'

His eyes still fixed on the fire, he raised a hand and groped in the air. She bent over him and his fingers struck her face, fumbling on her cheeks and lips, as clumsy as the hands of a baby.

‘Is that you, Stella?'

He did not turn his head. ‘My poor little daughter,' he said. ‘You are all alone. Murder! Murder!' Tears started into his eyes, and his fingers, groping up her face, closed over a lock of her hair and dragged her head towards him.

She pulled back but his fingers had locked in death. The last of his life poured into that clutching, desperate grasp. And when she jerked her head away strands of her torn hair were still clutched in his hand.

The phone was on the windowledge by the side of the fireplace. Her father sat staring into the fire, his eyes wide and unblinking; his hand, still holding the torn strands of hair, dropped slowly to his knee. His mouth was setting into a tight, twisted line. One side of his face was quivering, the other was rigidly, terribly still. She could not bear to look at him. His jaw dropped and closed again to lock into its final immovable lines.