To the Islands (18 page)

‘Found weakness I didn’t know of. And despair. And worse than that. But I’m beginning to come out of it, it’s like waking, but I can’t tell myself it was a dream. Oh, God, that’s hard.’

‘Listen,’ said Rusty tentatively, ‘what’s the trouble? If I can give you a hand, you just got to ask.’

‘What did Cain use against Abel?’ Heriot demanded softly. ‘Was it a stone?’

He began to notice for the first time the face of the man opposite, how the eyes gazed and shifted, how the mouth moved with a faint throb of the cheek below the beard.

‘I wouldn’t know, mate,’ Rusty said warily. ‘Don’t go much on the Bible.’

‘But the first murder was done with a stone. The first tool, the first weapon—’

‘There was hands,’ said Rusty quietly, and his own hands, bony and red-haired on the backs, tightened. ‘Listen, what d’you want to talk about murder for?’

‘It’s a terrible thing. A terrible responsibility.’

‘Cut it out,’ Rusty said sharply.

Their eyes met, his red-brown eyes and Heriot’s faded blue ones, in a strange and listening stillness. Then: ‘They’ll send a revenge party after me,’ Heriot said. ‘That is always done.’

‘Shut up now!’ Rusty shouted, breaking free of the old man’s eyes and standing. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘If I had strength,’ Heriot said, ‘I could go to those cliffs and break them. Then there’d be boulders, and I’d break them, and break them into smaller stones, and break them into pebbles.’

‘Go ahead, if it’ll shut your mouth while you’re doing it.’

‘Then I’d break the pebbles until there were molecules, and break the molecules into atoms.’

‘Jesus, you’re mad.’

‘Then I’d break the atoms. They all have their moons, did you know, spinning round their own sun. I’d take that sun and break it into its protons and neutrons, and take the innermost of them and break it—’

‘Well, go on, finish your bloody breaking.’

‘And what if that should be God?’

The man came back and sat down hopelessly.

‘The stone I killed him with,’ said Heriot, ‘was full of God.’

‘Yes,’ said the man in an empty voice.

‘God was an accessory. He always is.’

‘No,’ said Rusty violently. ‘God forgives you.’

‘Your fingers forgive you, before you’ve used them. God is like that.’

‘No. He pays us back for what we done.’

‘We pay ourselves back. You know that. Because you know our crimes are like a stone, a stone again, thrown into a pool, and the ripples go on washing out until, a long time after we’re gone, the whole world’s rocked with them. Nothing’s the same again after we’ve passed through.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Rusty said. ‘No.’

‘But you must. Why are you here?’

The man’s hands were scaly on the backs, reddened with sun, never quite at rest. His eyes rose quickly to Heriot’s, then, as quickly, hid under their sandy lashes.

‘I come looking about the country. You never know, there might be something you could make a go of.’

‘You must have money.’

‘I’ve got a bit. What’s it got to do with you?’

‘I’m remembering,’ said Heriot. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

‘What are you getting at? What do you remember?’

‘Something that happened a few years ago.’

‘Well?’

‘The Wet uncovered the skeleton of a white man buried in a creekbed.’

In the light of Justin’s fire the man’s eyes flicked up to meet Heriot’s, and stayed there, burning a little with reflected light. Into them there came a curious expression, the expression perhaps of an escaped convict rescued by his own warders from country infested with tigersnakes and hostile blacks. Yet fear was dominant. He licked his lips, and swallowed, without intending it. ‘You’re mad,’ he said flatly.

‘No. Tell me.’

Behind their voices there was unvaryingly the roar of the waterfall, the quiet stirrings of horses. A faint wind coming up the gully touched the red beard.

‘Listen,’ Rusty said, ‘listen. It wouldn’t have been the money.’

‘No, it wouldn’t be. Not completely.’

‘Supposing two blokes was camped out week after week in the Wet. They could drive each other crazy after a while.’

‘Yes, they could.’

‘Supposing one of them had a dog, say, and it kept coming into the tent.’

‘And you said: “I’ll shoot that dog if it comes again.” And it came.’

‘He went for me. What else could I do?’

‘Your hands,’ said Heriot, ‘your wicked hands—’

‘But I didn’t mean to do it,’ said Rusty harshly. ‘I didn’t mean it. Oh, Jesus, what do you want to know all this for?’

‘And you buried him in the dry sand. But in another season the water came higher. He was there.’

‘Three years, it was. Three years, waiting.’

‘And you went on, working and wandering, as if nothing had happened.’

‘But I kept wanting to go bush.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rusty said vacantly. ‘Don’t know.’

‘What do you do, out here, all alone? What do you think about?’

‘I don’t do nothing. I don’t think, I just—I just wait for something to happen to me.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. I just wait.’

‘And nothing happens?’

‘No, nothing.’

Heriot leaned back in the shadow. ‘Nothing ever happens,’ he said.

And truly nothing happened, though their strange, watchful understanding seemed to expect it. Only a sigh came from Justin in his sleep and a pebble rattled from the hoof of a horse.

‘You ought,’ said the man with the nervous hands, ‘you ought to be scared of me. Yeah. You ought to be careful.’

Heriot put his hand over the clenched red one. ‘You’re not scared of me,’ he said. ‘No. We’re all lost here.’

‘What are you looking at, Paul?’ Gunn asked.

The long-legged man shaded his eyes against the morning sun. ‘Someone come up, brother,’ he said, pointing back. ‘Blackfellow, riding.’

After a moment Gunn picked out, among the low trees, the figure of the horseman. ‘That’s an old man, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘He’s got his hair tied up in a rag, like Naldia’s.’

‘Old man got no horse, brother.’

‘Well, keep watching him,’ Gunn said, and in a little time, while the rider was still to Gunn a shape of indistinguishable age, Paul murmured, with a painstaking concealment of surprise: ‘That Rex, brother.’

‘What?’

‘It Rex, all right. I know him.’

‘Well,’ Gunn said quietly. ‘Well.’ And waited for Rex with a scowl growing on his face.

Rex also, when he came up, was frowning, uncertainly, and could not face Gunn and his disciplined anger. There was sweat on his face, below the bandage, and stubborn determination in his thick mouth.

‘Well,’ Gunn said again. ‘You followed us.’

‘Yes, brother.’

‘Didn’t bother to say good-bye to Sister Bond, I suppose?’

‘He don’t know, brother.’

‘And where do you think you’re going?’

‘I—I want to go with you, brother. I want to help you looking for Brother Heriot.’

‘You clot,’ Gunn said viciously. ‘You idiot. Do you think it’s going to help us to have you tagging along, likely to get a haemorrhage at any minute?’

‘I better now,’ Rex protested. ‘Sister Bond, he say that himself.’

‘Did she say you could go riding round? In this country?’

Rex said defiantly: ‘I want to go with you. You can’t send me back now, brother.’

That was true, and Gunn’s face admitted it. Ahead of them lay the untracked country, hiding somewhere among its blue bluffs and green pools two solitary men, and already it had been openly confessed that hope of finding them was on the ebb. And what is it to me, asked Gunn of himself, what is it to me if he chooses to put himself in danger? The old man’s done more to earn his life.

‘Well, you’ve messed us up properly. Hope you realize that.’

‘I know. I sorry, brother.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Gunn said sourly. ‘Doesn’t matter at all.’ He turned away and left Rex to the curious attentions of Stephen.

‘You ain’t going,’ Rusty said. ‘Now?’

‘It’s a long way,’ Heriot said. ‘I don’t even know how far.’

The red man looked up at him with the eyes of a lonely dog. ‘Thought you was going to stay with me. After all we talked about—’

‘No,’ said Heriot remotely. ‘That wouldn’t be possible.’

‘All I told you—’

‘I know. I know it wasn’t easy.’

‘You listened to me. You knew what I was talking about.’

‘Yes, I understood you.’

‘Listen,’ Rusty said, pleading with him, ‘listen, I told you things no other bloke in the world knows. I felt good after that, I thought you was going to stick with me and—teach me things, about—God and all that. But you ain’t the same bloke as what you was last night. Jesus,’ said Rusty, ‘you ask me what I feel like, and when I tell you, you don’t care no more. What sort of a snooping bastard are you?’

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ said Heriot, ‘no way I can help you. All we could do for one another we did.’

‘How’s that?’

‘We showed each other we weren’t alone.’

‘Just so we could be alone again?’

‘I must go on. There might be—something, ahead of me.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ Rusty offered. ‘I got nowhere to go. Yeah, I’ll come.’

‘No one can,’ said Heriot.

‘What about the black? You’re taking him, ain’t you?’

‘He’ll come back,’ Heriot said, ‘in time.’

The other man sat down dejectedly on a rock and bit his thumbnail. ‘Well, I can’t stop you,’ he said. ‘This is mad. Every bloody thing’s mad. I don’t know.’

‘It has happened before,’ said Heriot, ‘often, in this country. Hundreds of...outlaws, like you and me, in lost man’s country.’

Rusty’s forehead wrinkled under the red forelock. ‘What are you running away from? What was it you done?’

‘I wanted to kill someone,’ Heriot said quietly. He stood woodenly by the rock with his stiff hands hanging down, and the wind moved in his white hair, and his eyes were empty as the sky. ‘That was my—that brought me here.’

The other’s eyes moved up his face, puzzled, looking for deceptions. ‘Wanted to? Didn’t you do it?’

‘But that isn’t important,’ said Heriot, with faint surprise. ‘It makes no difference at all.’

‘Except to the bloke.’

Then new thoughts moved behind Heriot’s eyes like yachts on an empty sea, and for the first time he remembered Rex alive, and what it must have been to be Rex, to take pleasure in clothes and women, to be sullen and rebellious and know the causes, to suffer injustices and to invent injustices in order to resent them. He thought of Rex dancing by canegrass fire and delighting in the rhythms of his body, or subsiding into sleep under shade at midday, or swimming, or hunting, or sitting round a fire at night talking or singing to a guitar. Rex’s life presented itself whole to him, the struggle against sordor, and then the defiant return to sordor, and the bitter pride underlying it; the old tribal grievances, real or inflated by legend; the fights and the humiliations, the quick gestures of generosity and the twists of cruelty; all the ugly, aspiring, perverse passions of a living man.

‘Now I know,’ he said from a great distance, ‘I know why I’m going on.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked the man, soft as canegrass in the wind.

‘Because all this time I’ve been deceiving myself. Telling myself I was old and weak, and I’m not. Telling myself I wanted to die, but I don’t, no, and I never will. All this has been self-pity, nothing else.’

He scrubbed his forehead with a brown fist. ‘Now I remember—the things I used to know.’

‘What?’ asked the man, still intently watching. ‘What did you know?’

‘About crimes. About being born out of crimes. It was because of murders that I was ever born in this country. It was because of murders my first amoebic ancestor ever survived to be my ancestor. Every day in my life murders are done to protect me. People are taught how to murder because of me. Oh, God,’ said Heriot savagely, ‘if there was a God this filthy Australian, British, human blood would have been dried up in me with a thunderbolt when I was born.’

‘You can’t help being born, mate.’

‘I’m glad to have been born now. This is a good time for it, with the world dying. The crimes have mounted up now, we can sit and enjoy the stink of our own rot.’

He turned away, his eyes full of the farther hills. ‘I know life comes out of crimes,’ he said, ‘and we go on from one crime to another, and only death ever quite stops us. I could go back and they could hang me, and that would put an end to it. But all my life I’ve stopped off, here and there, to try to do some good on my way. I’ve tried to atone for being a man, and now it’s a habit. So I have to go on, this way, where there might be something to do besides die. The other way there’s nothing, only dying. But on this way I’ve already given—not much, but a little, a little food, a little cold comfort. There may still be things to do, and things to find.’

The other man looked down at the rocks between his feet. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s been nice seeing you.’ His voice was lonely.

‘Yes,’ said Heriot. ‘This has been—this has been an oasis to me. But we say good-bye to everything.’ He held out his hand and the other man took it, glancing up moodily from his rock.

On the wire screen, bellies to the interior light, little pale geckos and green frogs clung and slowly breathed, twitching occasionally to engulf a mosquito.

‘Ah,’ said Dido, mountainously stirring, ‘he was a good man. Too good for natives. Maybe he was hard, but they got to be hard some time.’

Helen said: ‘But was he so hard? I think he was only—well, just a bit bitter.’

‘In the old days they was hard. They had to be like that, not soft like now.’

‘Do you think we’re too soft?’

Dido looked down at her locked fingers, distress spreading over the moon face. ‘There lot of no-good people here now. Lot of men, just lazy, gambling all the time, bad husbands. Lot of no-good women, too, not looking after their babies right.’

‘There are no-good people everywhere, Dido.’

‘He was example,’ Dido said passionately, ‘example to us all.’

‘I know. If you mean hardness in the way he had it, towards himself, I can see you’re right. We haven’t that.’