Beware of Dogs

by Elizabeth Flann

  Daybreak: Go outside for exercise and toilet.

  After an uneventful visit to the toilet rock, I returned, put on jeans and boots, filled my pockets with plastic bags and ties, and made a fast beeline for the copse of coast banksias. My heart leapt when I found their blossoms not just damp with dew, but heavy with moisture, hanging ready to drop their load. I squeezed four good bagfuls, sealed them carefully, and headed for home, stopping briefly to harvest the few remaining boobialla fruits on the way and scatter my leftover pits for the birds to recycle. I deposited the bags inside the cave, returned outside to remove my jeans and boots, and then happened to look up. The sky was black.

  6.00–8.00 a.m.: Housekeeping.

  It has not rained since I came to the island and I don’t think it had occurred to me that it could. I had no idea how my cave would be affected. Would it leak, even flood? I spent some time packing my damageable belongings into the backpack, which I placed on the rock ledge to await further developments. Rain would enable me to capture at least some drinking water, which made me wish I had managed to bring more suitable containers. It could also be an advantage if it deterred Dave from searching and encouraged him to leave. Furthermore, it would provide visual cover for me to go to my hide on the clifftop to watch for the boat. I’ve packed my anorak with weapons and a few boobialla fruits. There won’t be any need to carry water, which can be squeezed directly from the coast banksias along the way, unless the sun comes out and dries everything up.

  8.00–9.00 a.m.: First meal.

  Although the nausea had diminished, for once I was not really hungry. However, I ate my peanuts and sultanas, one at a time, forcing myself to finish them. I have realised how important it will be for my survival to stick rigidly to the timetable and not give in to misery or panic. My lapses of yesterday are already showing an effect, and I can’t afford to give in to such weakness again. I made myself drink a few sips of the nectar water and carefully decanted the remainder into my water bottle.

  Because I was planning to leave early, I reversed two items and instead of moving to the entrance space for exercise I have continued to write up my diary. I’ll get enough exercise walking out to the hide. I’m guessing the boat will come some time between eleven and one o’clock, so I plan to set out shortly. However, as the time nears I become more and more nervous. What if I run into Dave again? At least I am forewarned this time, and the path to the cliff is well overgrown, providing good cover, but the worst moments are going to be leaving the cave and crossing the ridge, where the terrain is more open. I know I have to do this, but I seriously wonder if I will have the courage.

  2.30 p.m.: Write up diary.

  I finally forced myself to go out. Despite my head turning anxiously all the way, I made good time to the hide and was settled in by just after ten. My heart sank when I saw the sky from that vantage point. Black clouds were rolling and building, and I could see lightning in the distance. The sea was a roiling mass of grey. By twelve there was no sign of a boat. Then the rain started, pelting down in torrents, and I knew they wouldn’t come. I waited for a break in the downpour, then finally realised there wasn’t going to be one. Protected as best as possible by my anorak and spare kitchen tidy bag, I made the dash back, not even bothering to cover my tracks, which would have been obliterated immediately by the sheets of water turning paths into treacherous streams. I fell a number of times and feared once I would be carried down a steep incline, but I finally managed to reach the path to the cave. There was no sign of Dave. I crouched behind the cover tree, and with great difficulty took off every bit of clothing, a task that took me almost half an hour. I was soaked to the skin and very cold, but at least I felt clean.

  I won’t dwell on the naked crawl into the cave, and the challenge of unpacking my dry clothes from the backpack while avoiding the small pools of water that had formed on the floor of the cave wherever there was a roof hole. I dressed myself in cleanish half-aired knickers turned inside-out, short-sleeved T-shirt, and the longest socks I could find, with my Amnesty sleep T-shirt over the top, and dried my hair as much as possible with a used and very dirty T-shirt.

  I was still cold. Fortunately most of the cave was dry, and the temperature seemed to have remained the same as usual, which meant that if I could warm myself up, I would probably stay warm. I took every item of dry clothing out of my backpack, folded the pack up and covered it with the sheoak branchlets I used to soften my sleep. I sat on this cushion of relative warmth, removed the long socks and replaced them with a shorter pair, draped the dirty T-shirt over my dripping hair, the long socks around my neck and the remaining pair of socks on my hands like gloves. I couldn’t exercise without dislodging my makeshift comforters, so I just sat there, taking deep diaphragm breaths in the hope that they would stimulate my circulation, feeling like a damp but dignified, well-swaddled Buddha.

  4.00–5.00 p.m.: Second meal.

  This time I was hungry. I gradually untangled myself from my coverings and found that though not yet warm, I was no longer feeling deathly cold. The food helped, and when I finished eating I shucked the extra clothing and did what exercises I could in the sitting position. The entrance was still full of wet clothes, so I used the energy gained from the food to deal with them. I was able to hang the jeans from the tree root and the socks on the inside of the cover tree. They would only be visible if someone moved the tree, and if they did that, I was in trouble anyway. I also put out my water bottle, wedged upright in a little depression in a nearby rock. That was risky but at this hour I felt it was a reasonable risk, and in no time at all I was able to bring it inside full to bursting with lovely clear, clean rainwater.

  I didn’t go out to the toilet. The rain was still coming down in torrents and I knew I could last the night if necessary. Even with the nectar, I’m drinking so little now that one toilet visit a day is enough. My bowels have been totally inactive on the restricted diet. What the health implications are I don’t know, but at least I’ve made it this far in sufficient health to be able to move around and to think relatively clearly. But I’m beginning to worry. I’ve got enough food for only three more days, and I don’t think I can cut my ration any further without endangering mobility.

  There is no likelihood of the boat coming back before Monday, which is four days away. Even if Dave leaves then, I don’t know how I can manage to get off the island, but at least there’d be access to the water tank and barbecue, and even possibly the cabin if I’m really lucky.

  Sunset.

  It will be dark soon, but the rain shows no sign of abating. The pools below the roof holes are slowly spreading and I hope they don’t reach me in the night. They’re not large, and I’ve put the dirty T-shirt on the only one that threatens my sleeping space at the moment. I hope I don’t end up having to sleep standing up.

  On a hunch I crawl through to check out the entrance, and am horrified to see fingers of filthy water beginning to flow in. I have no containers, no towels or rags. All I can do is use my sheoak branches to try to soak up the inflow, dooming myself to an uncomfortable and uneasy night. I line my sleeping area with plastic bags, place my folded backpack under me as a kind of buffer cushion and wait, without much hope, for sleep. The time is 5.10 p.m. on Thursday the 19th of April.

  * * *

  Darkness falls and in my weakened and exhausted state I dream an oddly comforting dream . . . I am back in Madagascar, but not as a child, nor as I am now. I am older, and more like my mother, but I know it is myself. I revisit all the old familiar haunts, and they come back to me in perfectly delineated detail, untouched by time. There are people there, but they are not people I know. They are incredulous when I say I used to live there. ‘No, no,’ they say. ‘No foreigners ever lived here.’ I ask for Ulysses’ store, but am met with blank incomprehension.

  I wake, feeling safe and happy, in spite of the negative reactions of the people in the dream, and then remember where I am and the thought comes to me, sharp as pain, I want to go home.<
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  But where is my home? If I went back to Madagascar no-one would welcome me, except perhaps Ulysses, and my dream tells me there’s no guarantee of that. Abel told me during his England visit, amused at my surprise, that the Malagasy didn’t really like us, and only put up with us out of natural politeness and of course for what we could offer them. He had played with them, studied with them, and I had always thought they were his friends. ‘We were in their country, telling them everything they believed was wrong,’ he pointed out. ‘Why should they like us?’

  He’d been happy to leave, had known all along he had no place there, that the boys who played cheerfully with the cricket and football gear left behind by the London Missionary Society, who allowed him to participate in their famadihana rituals, to visit their families and join in their meals, would forget him the minute he was gone. They were not friends at all, just a congregation, made up almost exclusively of boys lured by the promise of learning English, my pragmatic father’s way of ensuring regular attendance and food supplies. I think he hoped to save some souls and train them for the ministry, and he was regularly hurt and surprised when, armed with their new English skills, they lost interest in the church and got jobs in the fledgling tourist industry or, more commonly, the government.

  None of them would remember me. Girls in Malagasy society did not have even the limited freedom their brothers had. Except for the few who came to Moe’s Sunday School, who were just as shy as I was, I rarely met any. The London Missionary Society still has a website that coordinates an elaborate network of penpal communication between children of missionaries and children they met at the various stations around the world. The society no longer operates in Madagascar. I’m not surprised. Even my father gave up eventually.

  No. Our family left Madagascar, and the tides of Malagasy life closed over our memory, leaving no trace.

  England is not, and never will be, home for me, although Tante Leni and I maintain a dutiful correspondence. She wrote a strangely incoherent letter when my mother died, and even offered to come out to Australia if I needed her. Perhaps she was suddenly aware of the role her big sister had played in her life.

  I think the only time she and my mother met after their respective marriages was at my graduation from the University of Manchester. Somehow my mother defied all my father’s strictures about vainglory and worldly success, and turned up, flanked by both Tante Leni and Uncle Raoul, to witness my moment in the sun. I thought at the time my uncle had paid for her trip, but now I wonder if she used her secret cache of shares.

  She brought me a tiny set of red and green woven baskets that made nostalgia well up and almost overwhelm me, and an umbrella with a carved handle in the shape of a lemur’s head ‘for the English rain’. I was so pleased to see her I thought my heart would burst. I hope she knew.

  I want my mother. My mother who is both vividly alive in my memory and forever fixed as a broken, frozen, bloated travesty of herself, surrounded by dirty melting ice. In Madagascar, I would have been able to make things right by performing famadihana. Why don’t Western societies have ways of looking after our dead? I don’t even have her body. I can’t even visit her. I feel a horrible sense of guilt, of having let her down.

  The occasional church visitors who would arrive unexpectedly, looking uncomfortable and out of place, by camion-brousse, zebu-cart or, on the most desperate occasions, by clapped-out bicycle, were horrified by famadihana. They saw it as primitive and savage. I don’t agree.

  If I could take my mother’s bones, handle them reverently, wrap them in clean linen, and tell her all my news, I’m sure I’d feel less terrible about her death. ‘Civilisation’ can often mean denial. Civilisation is leaving your parents’ bodies and their possessions to be dealt with by officials, by strangers. No Malagasy would let their parents down like that.

  The mother who came to my graduation was very much alive. ‘You have a special friend?’ She said it in the Dutch way and it took me a moment to realise she meant a boyfriend.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I’d like to meet him.’ She said this tentatively, as if it might be asking too much, but there was determination underneath. I explained that Jonathan was studying law, so we weren’t graduating on the same day. Not being fond of formal occasions, he had gone on an expedition with the rock-climbing club.

  ‘You met him there?’ I nodded. ‘Not at church?’

  I was dumbfounded. ‘No.’

  To my amazement, my mother began to laugh. ‘Goed. Good!’

  I guess after losing first her old life and then her son to the church, she was not eager to lose her daughter as well. Perhaps that was why I, unlike Abel, made an effort to visit whenever I could afford to, no matter how far afield my father’s crazy evangelism took her.

  This time, however, she was visiting me and while my uncle and aunt were with us and the formal proceedings were going on I was reminded of why I could never feel at home in England, and why Jonathan had chosen not to share in my special day.

  I had learned at school the complete disdain the English superior classes held for anyone they considered inferior to them. I don’t know whether it was my funny accent, my Dutch nationality, or the fact that my family lived in Madagascar (‘Where?’) but this deeply institutionalised snobbery still seems to me to epitomise the English. No matter how nice an English person may seem, even those in a lower place in the hierarchy are able to pinpoint any given person’s class status within seconds.

  At the slightly less snobbish University of Manchester I was almost acceptable. Jonathan, as an Australian exchange student, a ‘colonial’, for some reason was not. (Perhaps it was more due to his transparent scorn of the ‘ponciness’ of the English students.) Through climbing, and an informal Australian network, we formed our own society, rarely mixing with the English at all, to everyone’s satisfaction.

  But when Uncle Raoul turned up at my graduation all the sycophants came out of the woodwork. You would not believe the number of friends I suddenly acquired. It was good in one way because my mother must have thought I was highly popular, but it made me determine that never, ever could I live in a country so dominated by caste.

  I think if I had stayed on in England to do my higher degree, they would have tried to befriend me, for the sake of the connection. Even weeks after, people who had never spoken to me before would stop me in the corridor. ‘How’s Sir Raoul’ they’d ask, as if he was a familiar mutual friend. ‘Are you going home for the summer break?’ Perhaps they were hoping for an invitation. Fortunately I didn’t stay around long enough to find out.

  And Nederland? I have no memory of it, no sense of connection, but it was always regarded, especially by my mother, as Home. Is your nationality a product of where you live, or of the culture you grow up with?

  One thing the missionaries had left us was a set of ancient encyclopaedias. These were dated in the 1920s, so they pictured a world long gone, but I found them comforting, with their pages of maps of all nations, potted

  (and sanitised) histories, and quaint views about the non-English world. Madagascar, for example, seemed to have no people in it at all, judging by the pictures, but lots of animals. There were pages of lemurs, sifaka and aye-ayes, not to mention orchids and exotic birds, none of which I had ever seen.

  It was in these pages that I first discovered the world view of Dutchness – plump rosy-cheeked flaxen-haired people wearing funny clothes and wooden clogs on their feet. When they weren’t skating on the Zuider Zee, or tiptoeing through fields of tulips, they seemed to spend all their time making cheese.

  My parents were tall, dark-haired people who wore ordinary clothes. Abel resembled them in build and features though lighter in hair and complexion, but I was totally unlike any of them. Almost everything about me was medium and undistinguished – complexion, height, weight, hazel eyes – except for my hair. Jonathan, in an unusually romantic moment, said it made me look like a Boticelli angel. It was lighter than that, though, a sort of m
id-brown streaked with red, but it was definitely my best feature.

  My mother’s memories of Home, the ones she shared with Abel and me, were of bicycling tours, eating Rijsttafel at an Indonesian restaurant on very special occasions, spending holidays with Vader’s family on the island of Terschelling. The only familiar images in the encyclopaedias were the cheeses. My mother’s family had been cheesemakers and she sometimes told us funny stories of the various mishaps attendant on the dairy business – cheese failing to set or setting too hard; the efforts of mice and rats to get to the ripening cheeses; rainy market days when all the cheese sellers had to compete for customers. There was a photograph of the market in the encyclopaedia. I wondered if Moe had worn a white hat with flipped side wings and coloured ribbons. I couldn’t picture it.

  What little else I know of Dutch culture has come from the occasional homesick remark from my mother or, even more rarely, from Vader. One thing he did miss was the Dutch religious observance. ‘They go to be with God,’ he’d thunder, throwing off his hat as we returned from the tiny church, when only a sparse congregation turned up to hear his fire and brimstone because there was a festival on in the neighbouring village, ‘Not for entertainment. This is a Godless land. Godless!’

  I wonder if the modern Dutch population is equally devout. I wonder also if I’ll ever go there to find out.

  Jonathan always thought of me as Dutch. His final words as he saw me off on the plane to Western Australia were: ‘There’s a lot of Dutch people in Perth. Maybe you’ll fit in there.’ I was stunned. I hadn’t known I didn’t fit in.