To the Islands (21 page)

‘Someone eye watching us,’ Justin whispered.

‘What? Where?’

‘In the door. There, look.’

Heriot, turning, followed the pointer of the brown finger and found the crack in the door; through which, as the sunblind lifted from his sight, an eye became visible.

‘You come away,’ Justin said. ‘Quick. Might be he kill you, brother.’

‘Hush,’ said Heriot. He watched the eye with anger and dislike and said nothing. And the eye, faded blue and veined, was non-committal.

‘Man,’ said Heriot, ‘if you are a man, come out. I’ve come a great many miles and this is discourteous.’ He grinned with his crooked teeth. ‘If you’re mad, come out, we’ll be mad together.’

Silence returned. The goat had retreated into the shack and was waiting, also motionless.

‘I’ll give you ten seconds,’ said Heriot savagely, ‘then I’ll come and put my fist in your disgusting eye.’

Slowly, from behind the door, an old man appeared, shambling in bare feet, a length of rusty iron in his hand. He was the colour of dirt from the ragged bottoms of his trousers to the straggles of his hair. Above his dusty beard was a face marked like dry creek country, with deep and gritty lines. Only the pale eyes seemed made of living tissue.

‘Good morning,’ said Heriot.

‘You’ll black my eye, will you?’ the old man said venomously. ‘Call me mad? I could take the scalp off you.’

‘Put down that weapon,’ Heriot ordered.

‘Fists’ll do,’ said the old man, dropping the iron. ‘You try it, mate.’ He spread his feet and raised two bony fists, the aggressive stance making more obvious the emaciation of his body and its tremulous weakness. Heriot, moving away without loss of dignity, said gravely: ‘Please, be calm. Now that I see you
in toto
, I’m truly sorry.’

They looked at one another, then slid their eyes away. Through the blazing light the spring showed cool and green, so that to look at it was, for both of them, peaceful. The old man, backing a few steps to lean against the mud-wall of the shack, said with sudden friendliness: ‘Ain’t me that’s mad. You’re the one.’

Heriot bowed his head.

‘What’s your name?’ the old man demanded.

‘Heriot.’

‘What Heriot?’

‘Just Heriot.’

The old man grunted. At the side of the shack the rooster crowed and flapped again. What sleepier sound could there be, thought Heriot, in the hot sun, when you’re tired to the point of dying? He came over to the old man and propped himself on the wall beside him. Justin was squatting ten yards away, watching them. ‘Cheeky bastard,’ muttered the old man, catching his eye.

Heriot yawned. As if by arrangement he and the old man let their backs slide down the wall until they were sitting on the ground.

‘Have you lived here long,’ Heriot asked, ‘Mr—?’

‘Sam,’ said the old man.

‘Sam,’ said Heriot. Silence fell again.

After a long lapse Sam inquired drowsily: ‘You wouldn’t—no, you wouldn’t have a smoke, would you?’

‘No,’ said Heriot with regret. ‘I’m trying to give it up.’

‘Haven’t had one for two years.’

‘Ah,’ said Heriot, ‘you have will-power.’

‘Come a long way?’

‘It’s seemed so.’

‘Been out a long time, by the look of you. Them clothes of yours—’

‘Yours,’ said Heriot, ‘aren’t elegant either, Sam.’

The old man rattled two pebbles in his hand and rested his head against the wall, staring into the sky. ‘Who cares?’ he said, half-asleep.

Justin rose and came cautiously towards the shade. He edged up to Heriot. ‘Ah, I tired now,’ he said, and lay down with his head across Heriot’s knees.

Heriot yawned again. And from far away, Sam asked: ‘Where you going?’

‘God knows.’

‘Stock?’

‘Here?’ said Heriot, smiling. ‘No. Two men and one horse.’

‘Used to be a bit of stock here one time. No good though. Everything shut down. No one around any more. It was a hell of a long time ago.’ His voice faded away into remembering.

‘You weren’t a missionary?’ Heriot said.

‘No, not me. Gardener, that was the last thing I was.’

‘I was a missionary,’ Heriot said.

‘What for?’ asked Sam, his voice increasingly somnolent. He edged away from Heriot and lay down, his knees up. ‘Keep on talking, you’ll know when I’m asleep.’

‘Expiation,’ said Heriot. ‘Yes. This is my third life. My third expiation.’

‘What was the others?’ asked Sam incuriously.

‘I suppose it was my birth, as a human being, that drove me to charity. Yes, that was the first. And then there was the massacre, done by my race at Onmalmeri.’

‘I heard of it,’ said Sam.

‘That was the second. It drove me to the mission. And then at the end there was my—my hatred.’

‘What’d that drive you to?’ murmured Sam.

‘That?’ said Heriot pensively. ‘That has made a lost man of me.’

The old man scratched himself. ‘Haven’t you ever been happy?’ he demanded, with disapproval.

‘Happy? Yes, sometimes. But in all my—expiations, there’s never been a reconciliation. And what less,’ asked Heriot, ‘what less could I hope for now?’

A sighing snore came from Sam. Heriot smiled. He lifted Justin’s head and moved his knees away.

Three goats followed him as he made his way to the spring. He climbed the fence that enclosed it and stepped through the jungle of cabbage and pumpkin vines towards the brushwood shelter under which the water lay in its cup of built-up stones. He took off his shirt and plunged his torso in the water, and drank deeply, too. But it was warmer than he had hoped, and less refreshing, and he rose spluttering and more tired than before. The sun on his back as he kneeled there seemed to be drawing the blood from his body, and the sick, revolting smell of rotting cabbage was in his nostrils. His stomach moved.

He rose then, shakily, to his feet, and went to the fence, and leaning there vomited, the goats scampering up to watch him. He felt that his body was being torn inside, but at last the retching stopped, he went back with his legs shaking to wash again at the spring.

The two men still lay supine outside the shanty. Pulling on his shirt, Heriot watched the goats nose tentatively round his vomit.

‘I am vile,’ he told the goats humbly. ‘I am vile.’

He climbed the fence and went back to the shack, his legs so weak that he seemed to himself to be fainting as he sank down by Justin, catching the sleeping man’s elbow in the crook of his arm.

Screaming, a flock of white cockatoos passed over the shanty and descended on the spring. But their storm of cries could not even suggest a dream to the three sleepers in the shade.

So long, thought Gunn dejectedly, and no sign of them. Is it time to go back? How am I to judge when we should give up?

‘Nothing yet,’ Rex said. ‘Nothing.’

‘No.’

‘Reckon we’ll find him, brother?’

‘I don’t know. This is a long way to come without seeing a track.’

‘Might be they went through gorge, brother.’

‘Even if they did, we should have cut their tracks somewhere.’

Stephen said: ‘Might be they...dead, now.’

‘No,’ Rex said loudly. ‘They not dead.’

‘You’d better get used to the idea,’ Gunn said. ‘Sorry, Rex. But don’t count on seeing him again.’

‘I got to see him,’ Rex said. ‘I got to talk to him. We never talk before.’

‘It might be too late,’ Gunn said. And he was thinking: So would I like to talk to him, clear up some things he wondered about me, whether I’d come back to the mission, for instance. I could tell him now, I could promise him. That’d mean a lot to the old man. So would Rex, much more. So would Stephen. But what chance have we got? Too late now.

Rex stared sullenly ahead. ‘You giving up, brother? You not caring about that old man now, eh?’

‘That’s not true—’

‘I never giving up.’

‘We must, sometime,’ said Gunn. ‘Sometime.’ Thinking: It’s hopeless, already. What’s the point of it now? They feel humiliated that he ran away to escape from them, but perhaps they’ll get over it, perhaps we’ll be able to help them forget it. What’s the use of all this stumbling through the wilderness?

The bush man, Naldia, far ahead, stopped, watching the ground, and dismounted, and squatted in the grass, peering.

The sullenness died out of Rex’s face and he came alive, kicking his horse forward, shouting to the older man: ‘
Angundja? Angundja?
’

And Naldia stood up and turned, grinning, proud. ‘’Ere,’ he called, ‘’ere. Track ’ere.’

‘And so,’ said Heriot, ‘there’s no way I can help you. I’m reduced to accepting charity at last.’

He looked around the wretched room, taking in the dirt floor, the sagging hessian of the bed, the rusted stove spilling out the old man’s only light. On the table lay a cooked haunch of goat, killed in Heriot’s honour, and now cold. ‘Though your charity’s very acceptable,’ he said.

‘You can’t help me,’ said Sam. ‘I don’t want no help. Plenty of people worse off than me. Well, plenty of natives, anyhow.’

‘How long,’ asked Heriot, ‘have you been out?’

‘Out? How d’you mean?’

‘Out of the world. Civilization. Out of touch, in fact.’

‘It’d be two years,’ said Sam. ‘Yeah, two years ago it was, last time I went down to the town. Hundred and fifty mile it is. I had horses then, but they died on me. Didn’t worry me, I was getting too old for it.’

‘Yes,’ said Heriot. ‘We do get old. Quite suddenly.’

‘I been here fifteen years. Raising me own tucker and all that. The goats was left here, lot of them gone wild, but I raise up a few. And I got me garden. Don’t look too good now,’ Sam said apologetically, ‘been going off for years. Need some new seed, that’s what it is. Same with them scraggy old chickens, but I like the sound of them. Live on nothing at all, they do.’

‘You too, Sam,’ said Heriot.

‘I keep alive,’ Sam said. ‘God knows why.’

‘It’s hard to die,’ Heriot said.

‘You’re right there.’ The wizened face peered through the firelight, suspicious, curious. ‘You’re a queer sort of bloke, rolling up like this.’

‘I am,’ said Heriot, ‘a queer sort of bloke.’

‘What went wrong with your place?’

‘Nothing,’ said Heriot, glancing sidelong at him. ‘What went wrong here?’

The old man shifted in his chair, sour-mouthed, his eyes full of resentments. ‘You know the story,’ he said. ‘Don’t have me on.’

‘I don’t know it, Sam. Or if I did, I’ve forgotten.’

‘It was—that trouble. Nothing but trouble we ever had with them natives. Didn’t like the whitefellow, see, weren’t going to take nothing from him—excepting clothes and tucker and tobacco and the like of that, of course. Take any amount of that.’

‘I know. We make the best or the worst of them. But why did they hate you?’

‘Never had no idea,’ Sam said. ‘Never could see it myself. Ah, the missionaries, they was a bit hard, maybe—you know, holy, not what you’d call laughing men. And some of the natives went off on stations and come back again hating the white men there. They was too clever, you see, too big for their boots, not right for stations.’

‘What were they right for?’ Heriot said.

‘Couldn’t tell you, mate. I know this, but—they wasn’t right for here. Just one blow-up after another, all the time I worked here. Then we got the real blow-up that finished it off.’

Tenderly feeling the welt on his shin: ‘What was that?’ asked Heriot.

The old man looked at him disbelievingly. ‘You heard about that, mate. Don’t tell me.’

‘I can’t remember. My memory’s not good now.’

‘The bomb,’ Sam said patiently. ‘You know, the bomb the Japs dropped here. Fell in a trench, killed three of the only four white blokes we had here.’

‘And that was the end,’ said Heriot. ‘I remember. But we were busy ourselves then, I suppose I forgot soon after. I remember the planes, of course, and the people running out of the village into the hills, but they didn’t bomb us. And there was Broome and Darwin and the
Koolama
to think of.’

From a dark corner: ‘I could see their face,’ said Justin.

‘Whose face?’ Sam demanded.

‘Them Jap. One time I hiding in the hills and they went over, and I could see these little men looking down out of plane with big goggle on their eyes. I thought I going to die then. I reckon they see, but they just went on, they didn’t even bomb me. I real scared that time.’

‘Imagine it,’ said Heriot dreamily, ‘setting out with a load of bombs for a country you’d never seen and wanted to conquer, and when you got there—nothing. Nothing at all for hundreds of miles. And then a few little houses that no one would want to destroy. They must have felt lonely at first.’

‘That old man Wandalo,’ said Justin, ‘he made real good corroboree about when they bombing Broome.’

‘Cyclones have done more damage,’ Heriot said. ‘
O imitatores
,’ he said scornfully, ‘
servum pecus
.’

‘Voo parlay fronsay,’ Sam said. ‘Ooay l’estaminay silver play?’

Heriot peered at him through the flickering light. ‘You’re an old soldier,’ he said. Their eyes met and slid away, distrustfully.

‘That’s right,’ said Sam.

‘I am, too,’ Heriot said. ‘I am, too.’

‘All right,’ said Sam harshly. ‘What do you want us to do? Sing songs together?’

‘No. Anything but that.’

‘Took a lot of time to forget those days,’ Sam said. ‘A lot of time.’

‘I know that, Sam.’

‘You say it ain’t easy to die. It ain’t easy to kill, neither.’

‘No, harder, much harder.’

‘And when you get to want to do it—’

Heriot said sharply: ‘Don’t say that, Sam.’

He had broken something then. A stillness fell over them, and they were wrapped in memories; Sam, on his chair at the table, head bent over his hands, scrawny profile outlined by firelight; Heriot on the sagging bed, his face turned to the dark floor. Outside, the silence of the moon.

‘What are you thinking, Sam?’

The old man licked his lips. ‘Thinking we was all animals, that’s all. Just animals. No, worse.’

‘And suffer more for it. We have pity, and conscience, and reason. Those things hurt.’

‘I made a muck of my life,’ Sam said.