The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow

by Thea Astley

  Small-farm, small-town boy, Captain Brodie, army-translated to officer class with a medal or two for bravery on the Western Front. Simple himself. How would he know where disloyalty might spring? But they all thought he was right for the job after the big wind tore out the heart of the settlement at the Heads and it was relocated on a fairytale island.

  How he’d worked! No time for sunflower dawns or the floral effects of moonlight. Not much time for the wife he’d taken just after repatriation. And then the children—all impedimenta, he sometimes felt guiltily, despite a stubborn and persisting love. But the island welded them closer. How he’d slaved in this place, helping with clearing, road-making, the building of houses and office, small clinic and school; supervising the bladey-grass huts, the dormitories, and rejoicing in the sweat that rivered out of him in the festering weather. My kingdom, he thought, said aloud, gloated proudly. I’ve done the lot.

  Staff, of course. And not soon enough. A solo performance for months before he got a deputy, a mechanic/carpenter, a storeman, a ragtail procession of casual medicos until…! And a hit-and-miss run of temporary teachers unable to cope. They had all joined him gradually. Joined him! He held his cracking head between his hands while the pains raced up the back of his neck and split and spilt into a florid orgasm as if his brain were about to burst. Relief for a few moments and then once more the mounting pressure.

  All that. The work, the tightness and closeness of community—fishing with the native boys on late Sunday afternoons, running a football team, bullying, chiacking, watching over them in his own rough-handed way. But loving them. Ah yes! Loving. All of that he had established and survived, and now, my God, now, as he’d suspected for months, plots for his removal, the slimy connivance of deputy and storeman, doctor and matron.

  Behind him in the house he could hear his children cough stir whimper in their sleep. He thought of calling his wife and remembered she was gone and shook his head as if remembrance were part of an ugly dream. He’d drunk too much that Christmas evening amid the claustrophobic socialising and the ragged streamers and tinsel and cotton-wool snow of Christmastide stuck up here in the melting tropics. Treachery, he inwardly raved, beneath the mildewed holly and mistletoe, the limp branches of artificial pine, treachery alongside the paper tree with glass baubles sitting crooked in a pot while the whole bunch of them, betrayers, time-servers, bloody Judases, all quietly planned his downfall as their stomachs rumbled for next day’s roast dinner.

  The pain surged into his head once more and he bent forward, gripping the arms of his chair and vomiting a thin yellow bile onto the verandah floorboards.

  He spun beneath memory-flash and resentment. He saw himself shuddering and holding his glass in one quaking hand as he’d rocked backwards and forwards in the living-room of the residency (native artifacts, rattan deckchairs bulging under the bums of staff and wives), all of the party slightly tipsy and reaching that point where universal love would swing to belligerence. It had been 90 degrees in Coconut Avenue. Mrs Deputy Superintendent had begun playing Christmas carols on the gramophone. The thin sounds had fluttered and wavered, mocking the lights as the generator hiccupped.

  My island, he recalled saying, my island is a…a…

  Model of its kind? Doctor Quigley had interposed, rising and going to the sideboard to splash more whisky into his glass along with irony.

  Beyond the verandah was a blackness no black was permitted to enter. No Christmas lights or candles sparked after curfew. In the small village groups scattered through the bush, natives slept in their huts under palm-leaf roofs waiting for morning white-joy with its extra ration of bully beef.

  ‘…the snow lay all around, deep and crisp and even,’ droned the turntable, the distorted carol singers like a bad joke.

  That’s it, he had said thickly. A model of its kind.

  And you playing mine host to perfection.

  The doctor, pox him, had sauntered across to the verandah doors, staring into hot darkness while the voices on the gramophone petered out but the turntable kept up a maddening click. Its revolutions would die, too, in their time. Deputy Leggat had eased himself up (scratching unembarrassed at his crotch in front of the women, the sod) and joined the doctor. The matron and Mrs Deputy went round once more with culinary pacifiers no one wanted. Somebody had donated mince pies.

  He’d been full of braggadocio he recalled, wiping the thin vomit from his lips. Only a fortnight before, there had been an official investigation of complaint: bullying, striking the natives. Someone had reported him. But the inspection cleared him. Lily Friday admitted it had only been a slap on the arm. ‘Why, Lily?’ the government inspector had asked. ‘I called him nogood bossman!’ Lily admitted. ‘And why would he do that, Lily?’ Head hanging. Shuffling. ‘I stay out too long with boy.’ ‘You marry this boy soon, Lily?’ Silence. ‘You want to marry?’ Nodding. ‘How long you stay out, Lily? You miss your job, eh?’ All night, she tell them. Matron wait and wait at clinic.

  I’ve made this place, he had shouted at the group by the doorway. Me! Twelve years of grind, by God! What would you lot know about it? Slashing the jungle back to the hills, cutting out tracks, turning them into roads, building the houses, the bloody houses you live in, by the way! Hospital, store, school, my God! Say thank you, all of you! Say thank you for the school, Vine! It’s all due to me. Say thank you, Doctor bloody Quigley!

  Quigley had turned, his face horribly amused and not hiding it. ‘You’re a bully,’ he had said softly. ‘Bullies get things done through fear. They’re afraid of you out there. It’s not your island, dammit. We’ve all had a hand in it. And your hand has fallen harder than most.’

  At those words there had been a ringing in his skull. A voice—his?—asked what did the good doctor mean? Everyone was watching with bright eyes as the superintendent, his body still boyish, swung across the room to fling drink at the doctor’s immaculate front—who did an impertinently careless brushing and said, ‘Your hand, dear boy, landed somewhat brutally on Lily Friday. She came to me for treatment for bruising. Well, not to me personally, but to Marcia. You’re a rough bastard, sir!’

  Brodie remembered drawing back a bunched fist and swinging a cruncher that landed on Doctor Quigley’s jaw, knocking him into a welter of faded carols and crumbled mince pies into which he too stumbled. The superintendent had hauled himself upright by the sideboard and panted unpleasantly.

  (He panted unpleasantly now.)

  Then he and the doctor had done a frightful tango onto the verandah where someone had pulled them apart.

  ‘Anyone else?’ he’d challenged.

  No one moved. Wives made time-we-were-going murmurs and the matron bustled forward with her officious bust, her officious vowels, and snapped, ‘Come come now, Captain Brodie! You’re making a fool of yourself!’

  Horrible! Horrible! Shaking her hands off without a glance into that sensual face, he went back to the living-room and saw the doctor’s nose had bled richly on the matting, spreading into a crimson map that reminded him of the island. He didn’t remember hitting the nose and soon the room, dark shapes lurching down steps and through garden, was empty.

  Everyone, he had shouted drunkenly after them. Everyone, happy Christmas!

  If Davey Brodie and his sister Barbara found their father strange in the next week, silent, brooding, impatient and over-excitable as though a kind of scrub itch raged through his mind, their father was not aware. He was hardly aware of them at all, or the week passing. Hardly aware of a dead wife except in bursts. Only of aloneness and this bursting skull that paralleled the build-up so that in those monstrous temperatures not even the deep shade of the mango trees along the avenue soothed.

  Davey, kid sister trailing, wandered along the crushed-coral avenue in the opposite direction to his father, who was walking with that stupid jerking stride towards the office, muttering to himself. Davey Brodie quailed, pulled his hat-brim low over his freckles, and scuffing at gravel headed towards the hill across
the creek where he knew Mrs C and her daughters would welcome him and ask nothing. Since Christmas he had found that the children of the deputy and storeman were being kept away. He was contagious, he imagined, kicking a stone resentfully. He knew all the whispers: mad! Crazy as a galah! Lost control! Doesn’t even know we’re here!

  He began to sob.

  Mum, he thought and tried not to think, remembering the wisp of a blood-drained face watching him from the bed in the shadowy front room, the family pictures set all along the dressing-table near her tired old hairbrush with the combings still curling greyly off the bristles. ‘Be a good boy, Davey. Look after your dad.’

  The nod had vanished in the gulp, the touch of his mouth to her cheek, the awful smell of blood—so much of it, he knew, as they waited vainly for the mainland launch.

  That was it. Be a good boy, Davey, and the old man carrying on like one of the black moodjas at a ceremonial funeral, carrying on for days, weeks, until as suddenly as the grief started it stopped, and his father, with a new and glaring shell of brassy assurance, took up his duties again with meticulous vigour that bordered on the insane.

  He couldn’t wait for school holidays to end. Couldn’t wait to get away from the great gloomy house and his daft dad. Not even his sister comforted, gone silent since. He was tired of listening to what wasn’t said. Suddenly old, he knew he was too young to be listening to silences, to be trying to interpret their sticky voids.

  The girls were waving to him from the verandah as he trudged up the path between the crotons. Behind him Barbara whined trying to catch up. As Claire raced down the steps to meet him her bare feet slapped across the boards, her gingham skirt flashing between the wooden posts, while from an inner room her mother’s voice, amused, unruffled, admonished, ‘Shoes on!’

  Gee, Davey thought disloyally, home.

  His father, meanwhile, impelled by furies, glided at speed throughout the settlement, visiting the boys’ and girls’ dormitories, calling unexpectedly at the grass huts of those blacks he had made his special interest. He was touting support. He wasn’t touting support. He was compelled. He hardly knew where he walked or why. My people! he kept saying. His wild eyes frightened them.

  From behind shutters storekeeper Cole watched with narrowed eyes as later that day Brodie drove his car, the only one on the island, at a slow and elegant speed past the administration block, the little hospital, the school, only to turn about and drive back again. And again. And again. On the fourth trip down Coconut Avenue, the superintendent punished the car by swinging it onto a snigging trail, shoving it along in low gear over the ungrubbed scrub roots and coral lumps towards the family settlements farther out.

  Brodie smiled as he caught movement at Cole’s window. Sorry, old man, he had said to the storekeeper’s suggestion that he, too, might buy a car. Only one car on the island. Can’t clutter the place with tinware, can we? In any case the barge has refused to allow any more to be loaded. It was tricky enough with mine.

  While he drove he waggled his head with unlaughing glee over Cole’s resentment of the privilege of rank. He’d had six boys travelling on the barge with his secondhand Ford to keep an eye on the lashings. Six loyal boys! Six of the best! Thoughts screamed gull-like round his head, dived and pecked.

  How had all this threat of settlement decay come about? He’d heard all the arguments from lawmaker to politician, from country farmer to town shopkeeper. The difficulty, they said, the insuperable thing always has been to make those damn Abos want to work! Why should they, perceptive sympathisers pointed out, when they can obtain all they need from a few days’ hunting? Then we must remove their means of subsistence, the sheepmen cattlemen farmers said. Then they’ll have to work. But what’s worse, they said, the buggers have no respect! Don’t understand master–servant relationship at all. No concept about who’s boss. They go on as if they’re doing us the favour when they spend a few days mustering or turn up to chop a bit of wood or clear a paddock.

  Well, aren’t they? You don’t pay them!

  Brodie had fallen out with half his old farming community with those words. Nothing more than a few sticks of nikki-nikki or a handful of flour. You call that fair pay?

  But they argue with me as if they are equals, for God’s sake! Don’t they know who I—

  The gentlemen, the prelates pointed out, seemed unaware that Aboriginal society had been a near perfect democracy with all the concepts of sharing that Christians so assiduously avoided. You’ve plunged them, they warned in letters to newspapers and parliamentarians, articles in magazines, into a stratified society, a capitalist system. They don’t understand. They simply don’t understand.

  And one weary squatter back of the Taws commented to his fellow moaners, They don’t give a fuck.

  Well, he did. Captain Brodie had savaged his inner being for them in a kind of benevolent despotism. Perhaps that’s what it was. He didn’t know what else to offer. He’d worked bare-backed alongside them in the first years, handling a pick with the tribesmen. Okay, the rations weren’t so good. He was limited by government funds. But at least they were kept from the floggings and fornication of mainland squatters and their farmhands. He was not a flogger. He was a fanatic.

  The car jammed against a fallen log and he got out cursing. His head split, cracked open, the gulls stabbing again and again, and he sagged down in the grass at the trackside. Anyone who starts from nothing with nothing, he mumbled, must be a fanatic. How else create? As he had created, starting off with a few score blacks dumped there summarily by a government feigning care and concern, sixty terrified wretches who could communicate only within their tribal groups but had nothing except sign language to make connection with strangers.

  At first he had looked hopelessly at his band of kidnapped: snivelling kids, adults frightened and sullen. But he’d won them! He’d won them!

  He learnt words. He said jawun-jawun—friends. He said jawun-jawun ngayu—my friends. No time for fanaticism. He’d lived in the welter of creation. Or was fanaticism something unanalysable that embraced without one’s awareness? Twelve years of unending struggle and the government sending more and more poor-fella half-castes rounded up as if the bullimen were droving sheep.

  Doebin became an occasional interest spot for tourists from the mainland, ferries with whites in holiday mode for whom the black women displayed their yagal mats, their mura mura and bundu baskets, while the boys dived for coins or sold pieces of trochus fetched up for hard-eyed mainlanders. His people became curiosities for nosey gapers, as did his kingdom fashioned from cajoling, bullying—yes, even that!—and sweat.

  As his head surged with climactic pain he lay facedown in the grass and whimpered. Staff, he moaned on the subsiding waves of agony, nit-picking undedicated timeservers waiting for better appointments. Even the school he had commenced. For a while anyone who could read or write gave a grudging few hours weekly. Probationary teachers from the mainland were blooded there. They didn’t last long. Fledgling doctors put in six-week appearances. He wrote ferocious letters to a southern bureaucracy demanding full-time assistance and here he was landed with uppity traitors who had no conception of…couldn’t imagine the difficulties, the…Liars! Destroyers!

  Ah, the doctor! He sobbed aloud. Joan had bled for weeks, her life seeping out to comforting medical rumbles. ‘Keep your feet up,’ Doctor Quigley assured, who was nothing but bedside manner when it came to dealing with the wives of staff. He was less attentive to blackskins. ‘Just rest, my dear. That’s all we can do.’

  He’d left it too late. They’d all left it too late. Sweet Jesus! he cried into the lank grass. By the time the superintendent took matters into his own hands and had his boys carry his wife up to the little hospital while he radioed for a launch from the mainland, things were beyond help. His wife’s thinned and anxious face had looked up from the makeshift pallet as the juices drained away. ‘The children,’ she whispered or rather shaped with her pallid lips.

  He had squeezed he
r hand. ‘Of course,’ he had whispered back. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of them.’

  The children? He writhed on the trackside and wondered where they were. He couldn’t remember. Back at school on the mainland? His daughter? Was she back in the house? At the convent in Townsville? With her cousins on the tableland north? And Davey? Was he away, too? He couldn’t recall seeing either of them since that drunken night. He thanked God they weren’t here to witness their father’s shame. But they wouldn’t witness his defeat.

  He propped himself up on stratagem. His head whirled momentarily and the pain simmered, rose briefly up the nape of his neck and subsided. He would destroy the whole edifice he had built. His mind-fire would spread out and envelop buildings, gardens, enemies. His thoughts sharpened with the daring of that decision.

  For days he locked himself in his office, deaf to knockings, to staff pleas, numbed with drink. His children quivered in the residence in the care of a housegirl. He no longer remembered he had children.

  Then unexpectedly he emerged in the flush of madness.

  Another part of the forest.

  Elderly boyish, despite hangovers, despite forty-plus years, gliding and jerking back through the bush tracks to see Manny Cooktown, his chief boy help. He had seen Manny grow to manhood—having watched him blubber off that first boat with his daddy in leg-irons, a snotty seven-year-old, his nose streaming mucus, his eyes gummed with tears and pus—into a tall muscled miracle fisherman and crack shot when he borrowed the superintendent’s rifle to bag bush pigeons for the stewpot.

  Yet within yards of Manny’s grass hut he swung about suddenly, pivoting on remembered rage and resentment. Calling me that! A drunken bastard!

  He grabbed his head in both hands and wobbled it. It wasn’t Manny at all. He couldn’t get things straight. It was that Irish body-plumber who was reeling with liquor himself, belching and farting and almost spewing over the ladies’ cupped hands. A stream of charm and whisky. And not just that! He’d started the investigations, hadn’t he? Or was it that slimy Leggat? Someone had brought that prowling official nosing round the island, questioning the blacks, checking on him! A long-beaked, tight-lipped bureaucrat!