The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow

by Thea Astley

  Well, what can you say to that?

  My daughters have been swallowing their laughter as Doctor Quigley gives his little lesson on word origins, chattering on beneath the chattering tin roof, uninhibited by his position or the threat of a gliding topee. He holds forth robustly on the heinous properties of the Act.

  In the meantime bells ring for roster parade and a mile away Mrs Brodie lies gasping and bleeding in her airless bedroom at the residency.

  Let me tell you more. With asides. I’m coarsened by all this in a way I never was at that hotel in the Taws. Perhaps it is because we are a minority group of privilege at bay, really at bay, despite the hunched and brooding power of the law. It is that which holds us hostage. Protocol. Custom. The small-minded niceties of a lower-class elite. In particular I feel unable to do other than repress natural feelings of sympathy and concern because of that. There is no fear of the unfortunates we guard or tend, only reluctance to outrage the island’s equivalent of suburbia.

  This place has been called a penal colony but really it’s a rubbish tip for government guilt. Here there are men who have committed murder in payback according to tribal law but whom the white authority does not know how to punish, or even if it should. There are station hands who have cheeked head stockmen, girls who have served their sexual purpose and are sent here with gonorrhoea and babies. There are runaways, alcoholics and the old. Doctor Quigley insists on relating a belief widespread among white males about gonorrhoea. Over the coffee! What a dinnertime subject! ‘They think,’ the kindly doctor tells us, ‘they can rid themselves of sexual disease by having intercourse with a young gin. If they pass it on, the disease leaves their bodies. I wish,’ he adds with his whimsical smile, ‘medicine had other cures as simple as that.’

  ‘For Heaven’s sake!’ I cry in protest. ‘This is…is barroom talk. My girls! Please!’

  ‘Nonsense, dear lady! Nonsense!’ the doctor says, twinkling.

  He makes weekly visits to inspect the lockup where refractory workers are sent for weeks at a time, with black police helpers doling out the daily food ration of damper and tea and an occasional supply of nikki-nikki. He hears tales.

  Although the doctor is only thirty-six, a fact he let drop on Leonie’s sixteenth birthday which we celebrated a few days ago, he looks and acts in a much older way. Already he is developing an importance round the waist, a deliberate manner of walking and delivering his words that makes me think of that liturgical phrase I grew up with—ex cathedra. Leonie, however, hangs on his every utterance. He lets her hang.

  After Doctor Quigley’s uncovering of distinguished connections for Rosie Cooktown, I have to admit to wondering how many more of these bladey-grass dwellers have manorial ties. If I don’t watch myself I’ll be scanning for evidence of chinlessness and that god-of-the-earth, you-owe-me-everything saunter. ‘Feudalism,’ Mr Vine announces unexpectedly at breakfast, ‘is merely a breath away.’

  If you happened upon this island, sails bellied and straining to a landfall, as you balanced on deck with your eyes gummed to this mountain humped above riffled reef waters, you would be enchanted by that necklace of white beaches, foliage growing almost to the sea in a density of plaited vine, aerial roots, leathery green leaves and palms waving casual welcome feathers. Now and again as the boat rocked, an enchanting white-wall glimpse, the glare of a roof, the spurious domesticity of a cooking fire. God love us, you might say as Father Donellan said that morning of our one and only Mass, what a paradise of a place!

  The girls’ dormitory! The boys’! They’d slap you awake.

  Slab buildings, airless, small-windowed, bolted at night to prevent hanky-panky, earth floors scoured with lime to kill lice and fleas. Peg and Essie live in the dormitory, as do helpers at the clinic (Mrs Brodie is still bleeding) and the school. This is what is known as a ‘dry’ island. None of the blacks is allowed liquor. Nevertheless the men have to help unload the crates of whisky and wine for white staff and I wonder how deep their resentment is watching Captain Brodie dispense sundowners at his weekly get-togethers for the white bosses on the residency verandah. On special occasions at Shippers Vale I serve sherry or port, a small indulgence allowable, I think, for one who runs a respectable establishment. The doctor and the schoolmaster keep bottles of whisky in their wardrobes, the housegirls tell me, giggling behind pink palms.

  ‘You must keep it locked away,’ I had to reprimand both men, ‘otherwise the housegirls could be tempted—I don’t say they would—but they could sample it or give it to friends.’

  Another little watchdog chore. I’m becoming fat with righteousness.

  A few nights ago an inexplicable case of drunkenness when Jericho Cooktown and Joshua Friday were heard singing loudly and shouting obscenities at midnight in the main street of the settlement. Blacks are not allowed there unless they are working. It would be interesting to know which misdemeanour of a possible four was the most repellent to our gliding superintendent: the theft of liquor, breaking the curfew, drunken behaviour or trespass in the sacred territory of the whites.

  I plump for the last.

  Yet Captain Brodie is doing his best. New dormitories are being built on stumps with wooden floors and decent rainproof iron roofs. Only the women will still be caged—there is no other word—from the sexual attentions of the young men. ‘They’re just animals,’ pronounces Mrs Storekeeper Cole panting with propriety and a sherry-loosened tongue. Her mean-fisted husband nods agreement. (Mrs Brodie is still confined to bed while her husband plays host over his worries.) ‘Nonsense!’ Brodie roars. ‘Bloody rubbish!’ Behind him in his living-room is a photograph of the Doebin Island rugby football team with the superintendent proudly sitting centre row, three team members away from Billy Cooktown’s older brother Manny whose white ancestry comes through nicely on this camera portrait. Manny is nineteen.

  Doctor Arnold would have been proud of him.

  This week at breakfast Doctor Quigley is reading Salammbô. In French. My convent school had given me enough of the language to recognise Flaubert, if only as an occasion of sin. Perhaps Madame Bovary had been placed on the Index and we had blushed our horror as we took furtive peeks at Gustave’s plump mustachioed face in an encyclopaedia of European writers.

  After years behind the bar I am beyond shock and was not opposed when the doctor offered to help Leonie and Claire with their French. ‘A little conversation,’ he suggested, thickening his brogue lovably. The Irish always have better French accents I had noticed, recalling baby-faced Sister Pascale who made us take parts in Le médecin malgré lui. Malgré moi, or in spite of some tinkerings of warning—sexual, of course, having been brought up in a religion that seems to regard sex as the only sin and a matter of female responsibility—I agreed.

  The woman tempted me! our visiting convent pastor would thunder at retreats. A tiny statement that appeared to absolve males from all blame. Y’see, m’dear, he would croak at one or all of us urgent for pastoral advice, men can’t help it. It’s the nature of the beast, for goodness’ sake! It’s up to the women, not the men at all at all.

  The trouble was, we believed him.

  I writhed.

  We all writhed—the world and its crime on our young shoulders—but mocked the old fraud later with passable mimicry.

  ‘Maybe,’ I heard Claire whispering to Leonie at supper, ‘if all the women in the world ceased trying to look attractive—no pretty clothes, hacked hair, pimples, filthy nails—there’d be no problem.’ She seemed to have Matron Tullman in her sights.

  ‘Oh tosh!’ her sister hissed back. ‘That never worried cavemen. Muscle power! Don’t you see? It’s the structure, the deliberate structure. We have to find poorly paid jobs or a keeper. Ergo, as Mr Vine would say, we have to turn into shop window goodies. I swear I once heard Mother say that marriage was legalised prostitution.’

  Now, those were ugly words, especially to one who had worked non-stop since that long ago exchange of vows and rings. But she had a point. I could
see that.

  I could see that. Despite shock.

  Starck and Weber are missed. They departed in a flurry of psalms and good wishes, to take their mission to the desperate flatlands beyond Cloncurry. They forgot to take with them the large jar of boiled lollies that bribed piccaninnies to join their Bible classes.

  I mustn’t make fun. I mustn’t belittle. They had few possessions beyond their clothes. They had endless kindness. Whatever money they had, they spent on extra bandages and proprietary medicines that they lugged with them on their evangelist trips to the far side of Doebin. The blacks called them Jesus fellas. ‘She bin Missus Jesus, that one,’ Essie told me once over the washing up. ‘She bin kind all right.’ Thank you for that, Essie (whose hair has almost grown back). I stand reproved.

  But their well-meant amateur first-aid infuriated Doctor Quigley.

  ‘Will you leave it alone, woman!’ he snapped peevishly one morning at a startled Miss Starck. ‘You’ve done entirely the wrong thing for Jobie Friday. It’s not an infection, for sweet Jesus’ sake! It’s an allergy.’

  His blasphemy routed them. It was a week before they left.

  But he is not Doctor Cure-all. Mrs Brodie is bleeding to death.

  Matron Tullman has radioed for help from the mainland in this chancy weather so close to Christmas. The heat builds in great buttresses against a drained blue sky. At night sulking clouds roll across gritty moonlight.

  No help arrives. The doctor and matron spend whole days with the superintendent’s wife trying to arrest the bleeding that ends, finally, in the weakened scream of a premature birth, the baby unformed, the mother gushing out her life into packed towels.

  ‘She’s gone,’ unshaven Doctor Quigley announces at breakfast, his thumb marking the place he is up to in Salammbô. ‘We tried, my God! Matron and I did try.’

  Not hard enough, Brodie was to screech at him later that morning, but now the doctor is wagging his head from side to side as if confronted with an imponderable problem. ‘No eggs, this morning, thank you,’ he tells Essie. ‘Just tea and toast.’ And he dives head-first into Flaubert.

  Heartless or simply professional? He has, by the way, lent his over-thumbed copy of Bovary to Leonie. Is he a cultured man or a cultivated one? He is given to odd jest. Only last month he was seen leading a pig by a string along the main road to the hospital. His public explanation before putting down the animal was that it was diseased. His private, that Jimmy Kadura, the pig owner, was a burri burri man.

  ‘A tiny bit, now, of cultural history,’ he said over dinner, addressing Leonie, all curls and flush. ‘I must introduce you to Tristan Corbière. Have you heard of him, m’dear?’ And to her shaken head, ‘Ah, no matter. A desperate melancholic who once painted eyes on his forehead—that’s what Brodie needs, eh?—donned a mitre, the profane lad, and strolled pig-a-hoop, in evening dress—the poet, that is—through the streets of Rome.’

  Leonie was clearly enchanted by this bit of literary gossip. And is even more so when, on this terrible morning of Mrs Brodie’s death, he looks up suddenly from Salammbô and says softly, ‘Ah, poor Captain Brodie. “Tais-toi, tais-toi. On n’aime qu’une fois.”’

  ‘And who wrote that?’ Leonie asks.

  ‘Jules Laforgue,’ and ‘Matron Tullman,’ the doctor and I answer as one.

  The doctor regards me with drained eyes. ‘You mistake me, dear lady. You mistake me.’ And he closes his book abruptly and leaves the table.

  The high seas and the rain. The outer whirling edge of a cyclone that has struck the coast one hundred miles north of here. Trees around Shippers Vale assume grotesque shapes, green hair streaming. Verandahs are lashed by delinquent creepers that are torn to rags and disintegrate in air. Sky is water that batters and batters in one monstrous waterfall.

  We buried Mrs Brodie yesterday, committed her to earth without formal blessing, for it was impossible for Father Donellan to reach us until the seas lost muscle. Surely our own goodwill meant more. Davey and Barbara sobbed but their father was dangerously quiet as deputy superintendent Leggat read aloud the service for the dead and we all recited the Lord’s Prayer. Rain fell unendingly on watchers, grave, and flowers gathered by the black women whose tears—they were forced to stand at a respectful distance—increased the deluge all about. Amen, we all said. And then my daughters sang the twenty-third psalm while Davey and Barbara rubbed relentlessly at their eyes.

  There was no wake in the Irish sense of the word but I did invite the superintendent and his children, the deputy and his wife, the storekeepers and even Mr Jardine back to the boarding house for refreshments.

  Poor Captain Brodie could barely sip his tea, moving agitatedly between rain-slashed shutters and the doors open to the verandah. Conversation broke into monochrome phrases like the glaze on a plate. Useless words. From our angled eyes we watched his sad erratic pacing, his pauses to stare out from the windows towards the bay and the jetty no boat could reach in that wind-rucked surf which rose in giant pleats, doubled on itself and crashed violently on the beach. Sky and sea became one blot of shouting grey.

  Suddenly Captain Brodie spun about to face us all, fixing a manic glare on Doctor Quigley and Matron Tullman.

  ‘You killed her!’ he shouted. ‘You two simpletons killed her! You pair of bloody know-nothings!’ He flung his head back and screeched his pain and horrible loss at the ceiling. A gecko scuttled. There we all were with faces frozen like stricken saints. ‘Oh God oh God! You inefficient bastards! You useless murdering bastards!’ Then he slammed down his cup and strode jerkily into rain that instantly soaked and flattened his clothes and moulded his skinny frame against the keening wind.

  Before the doctor could open his mouth Matron Tullman, her handsome face haggard from sleeplessness, was energetic with rebuttals: all we could possibly…the weather…drugs didn’t…too weak already with months of…refusal to go to the mainland when she…absolutely not their fault. To end with a savage coughing/weeping fit that distracted the lot of us, allowing the deputy and his wife, the Coles, schoolmaster Vine, an embarrassed Morrow and boatman Jardine to mumble apologies as they sidled out. Thank goodness Brodie’s children had already gone home directly after the graveside ceremony.

  Doctor Quigley strengthened himself with a large whisky, lowering his portly form into an easy chair. Now and again he flapped a there-there hand at the sobbing matron.

  ‘Understaffed, you understand, Mrs Curthoys. All of us here understand, I would hope. The only authority that doesn’t is the government. Over four hundred natives, one qualified sister, four unqualified native assistants; limited medicines, equipment. Dear God, what can one do, I ask, eh?’ He leant back and began a list. ‘Every sort of social disease, begging your genteel pardon, Mrs C. Syphilis, gonorrhoea, Hansen’s, tuberculosis, Weil’s fever, to say nothing of the childhood ailments and accidents—the gashes, fractures. All this apart from the results of domestic violence. We haven’t even proper isolation bays, only quarantine laws the native police boys can’t quite enforce, despite the curfews. Do you see all that?’ He gulped the last of his whisky in one searing draught. ‘I am only, as the poet says, a lunar reveller who makes circles in pools.’ His delicious French accent took over, slowly, distinctly. ‘“Je ne suis qu’un viveur lunaire/Qui fait des ronds dans des bassins.”’

  ‘That makes me cry,’ Leonie whispered, gazing at the harassed doctor over the rim of her teacup. And promptly began shedding tears. But they were for everything.

  ‘“Tais-toi, tais-toi”,’ he said softly, and held his consoling and hovering hand in check after assessing Mama, to say nothing of Matron Tullman, riddled with professional defeat, offence and jealousy, who heaved herself majestically up and announced her intention of leaving, numbering aloud the cases at the little hospital that required her attention: an old man with a broken leg, a child with whooping cough and a woman about to give birth.

  ‘One departs, one arrives.’ The doctor’s sententious remark was in poor taste, I felt, w
atching the pair as they fussed about for raincoats and umbrellas still dripping on the verandah. Leonie observed them through damp lashes.

  Those hustled goodbyes. To everyone, living and dead.

  And it is goodbye for us as well in a way.

  We are about to leave our island.

  One week. Two.

  Captain Brodie has drawn back into his pain like a snail. Gossip limns him. His right hand has begun a terrible tapping, a nervous tic he cannot control. Deputy Leggat finds he is taking over his boss’s duties in addition to his own, turning the pre-cyclone eight-hour day into a dawn-to-dusk of patching: roofs, walls, bogged roads, choked drains. What a potch of a business! Leonie has been practising her French and the piano for long alternating periods all day and moons between times about the verandahs and garden saying, ‘“On n’aime qu’une fois.”’ I think she thinks she is Emma Bovary. How do I put a stop to such fantasy, to the endless replays of sentimental Chopin nocturnes?

  Captain Brodie has locked himself in his house and refuses to speak to anyone, especially on matters of control. His children, confused by loss, tag off along the beach between here and there, faces blank with grief. Their housegirl prepares their meals but the trays outside their papa’s door remain untouched.

  If these were memoirs in the truest sense, they would still give no evidence of revelation. It is hard to clarify thoughts in this heat.

  Last evening, in that strange half-hour before the sun drops like a rock into the sea, Captain Brodie emerged from his locked bedroom, his house, his garden, and was seen gliding along Coconut Avenue past the repaired government buildings, and eventually crossing the footbridge that spans the creek before Shippers Vale. He was moving swiftly, eyes shadowed by that pith helmet he affects, striking out on the bush road towards the dormitories, ignoring the waved hands, the greetings. ‘Him eyes funny,’ Essie said to me as she lathered dishes. ‘I see him. Him eyes real funny.’