by Neil Grant
He takes a run past the beach to get his bearings. On the way back, he swings in at ninety degrees and makes a run for the beach. On either side are the dark hulks of rock, angry and quite prepared to kill. He realises then how soft his skin is, how unprepared he is for battle. The wind is in his ears, whispering, you will never do it. The sharks are hunting penguins. You are only meat, screams the wind.
And then he is through, his bow slamming into the beach, the outboard pushed out of the water. He kills the motor, leaps from the bow and pulls the boat up the beach. Safe for now.
10
LION ISLAND IS A MANED HEAD snarling at the ocean and a fattened rump shunning the land. Its mouth, a cave, is fringed with gnarled banksia and ribbon grass; dripping, as if with saliva. Rudra heads for the cave to escape the wind and the rain. He saw the cave as they passed by on their last fishing trip, but knows that the whole island is a reserve and that landing is not allowed.
He skirts the narrow beach and clambers over the rocks. He begins to climb, through the rain that’s coming down in sheets, making the rocks black and slick. He tucks the thing under his shirt and battles the thick scrub along the ridge, as lightning forks into the sea. When he reaches the sea cliff, he shuffles over the edge, dropping onto a rough shelf. Here the wind is at its worst – howling over the sea at him and threatening to tear him away. He shuffles sideways to the dark mouth of the cave, a large sheet of rock blocking most of its entrance. He slips through the narrow gap, feeling the pressure of rock across his torso as if he is clamped between the jaws of a beast. Inside, abandoned by summer, he sits shivering in his shorts and T-shirt. At least he is out of the wind.
Outside, a slice of sky mocks. He places the thing on the dirt and stretches out beside it. Suddenly, he is more tired than he has ever been or ever wants to be. He feels fatigue pressing on his ribs and the sides of his head. He closes his eyes and wonders why this place is called Lion Island. Lions do not belong. Aboriginal people surely had a better name – one that would have suited not only the shape but its place in the world. But the name Lion Island persists. Everything needs a name. Naming something brings it into the world. Makes it real.
Rudra reaches out his hand and touches the nameless thing. Can he call it a skull? Not quite yet. He looks beyond it to the chaos outside. He pulls it to his stomach, curls around it like a seed husk, warms it. Imagines it erupting like the flame trees along the bay road. And he drifts.
The animal can see everything – the twitching of muttonbirds beneath the sandy soil, cicadas pitching through the sky, the dark lust of sombre mopokes chanting in the trees. It can smell blood and bone; and the sinew behind its knees tightens at the chance of them. It is a brutal remembering of past kills, an excitement that bruises through its body like a drug.
It takes to the water, snarling at the salt. The animal needs sweet meat to relieve it of its anger. It knows where to find it. Swimming is no problem – broad pads are paddles, the skin between them so like webs you might think it belonged there and nowhere else. The tail is a rudder, three foot of bone and sinew allowing it to swim for hours and still hunt and kill. It is built for this and nothing else. When it arrives, it is to the sound of snapping and tearing, to the tang of unleashed blood. Its tongue brushes the tips of his teeth so lightly. And deep in the tidelands they wait and wish it would not come.
Rudra wakes to the thrum of a motor across the sea. And he remembers he left the dinghy on the beach. If he had thought a little harder, he would have camouflaged it with branches and seaweed. It could be the park ranger or it could be his dad. Either way it will be bad.
The storm has retreated, leaving stillness about the island. He smells Champion Ruby on the still air as he leaves the cave. Down on the beach, Wallace pulls a rollie from the corner of his mouth, staring up at Rudra as he descends the hill. Tangent is running around him like a mad thing, and when he spots Rudra he comes bounding forward.
‘Yer dad’s looking for you,’ Wallace says. He jerks his thumb back at the tinnie. ‘You need a tow back?’
‘I’m right.’
‘You gotta come home, you know. Sooner or later you’ll have to face Cord’s music.’
‘What’d he say?’
‘Said nothing. Your mum, though, she’s worried about you.’ Wallace takes a drag at his smoke. ‘How come you got that?’ he asks, pointing at the object.
Rudra holds it up. ‘We took it, Maggs and me, from Cord’s office. It’s the thing we pulled up from Flint and Steel.’
‘You should chuck it back in the bay and be done with it,’ says Wallace – a deep mistrust puckering the corners of his eyes.
They sit down. Tangent hassles the gulls along the water’s edge, snapping wilfully at the air between them. The water rolls shells up the beach. Years to turn shell to sand. Hundreds more to grind stone to powder.
‘I’m going to take it back,’ says Rudra.
‘Back where?’
‘To wherever it belongs.’ The words are falling untested from his tongue. He doesn’t know what he is saying. It’s tiredness. Maggs would say, You’re a bit emotional, mate. Rudra looks about him. ‘It doesn’t belong here. I know that.’ Rudra thinks back to the article about Mungo Man. Of forty-two-thousand-year-old bones willing themselves back home.
Wallace butts out his rollie in the sand and pops it into his pocket. There is an art in his silence. It means something. But it is a language that Rudra does not fully understand.
‘Think I should?’ Rudra pushes his toes into the sand. ‘Take it back?’
‘It’s trouble, I reckon. But your dad will want to have his way. You need to play this one clever.’ It’s not an answer.
Rudra follows Wallace’s wake from the beach and towards Patonga. As they enter the bay, the seagulls harangue them, turning above the boats in swooping runs, their quick little eyes rimmed with silver. Rudra sees his dad waiting on the pier, arms folded, and his mum, two steps behind, hair tricked into a bun. He feels a dart of fear or excitement inside him, he can’t tell which, and draws the object to his belly as if protecting it.
Wallace ties up first but Cord doesn’t even acknowledge him. His eyes are on Rudra, jaw muscles working on something invisible. Nayna puts her hand on Cord’s arm and he flinches her off. The tender noses the pier and Cord reaches down and grabs the painter, forming a lazy bowline.
‘We were so worried,’ says Nayna.
The chainsaw cicadas suddenly stop and Rudra hears the whistling kite give one sharp shriek before she comes angling down from the pines to land on the end of the pier. His dad has never hit him. And surely he won’t now, in front of witnesses.
Rudra looks past his parents along the beach towards the creek mouth, where his didima is picking gingerly down to the water’s edge. He wants to run to her – his new-found family. To the safety of her arms. He can see now, even from here, she is staring out to sea. What is she waiting for?
The kite shrieks from the end of the pier and Rudra is drawn back into the moment. He unwraps the thing and shows it to the new storm-washed day. Holds it up so his mum and Cord can see it, plain, in the light. Cord holds out his hand – a hand so big, like an uprooted tree. Play this one clever, Wallace said. With his dad standing there in front of him, it is inevitable Rudra will give it over.
Slipping his fingers into the holes, he plucks it cleanly from the cloth and, as his mum exhales her fears, drops it gently into Cord’s huge palm. Rudra will get it back again, he is sure. And then he will return it.
His dad squats down on the pier, places the thing on the concrete. ‘When I was your age,’ he begins and rests the tips of his fingers on the pier to balance himself, as if this is going to take a while.
‘One autumn. Muttonbirds. So many we had to get a tractor onto the beach. Buried them by the thousands. They fly up to Kamchatka, you know.’
Rudra doesn’t know. Doesn’t know what a Kamchatka even is. But more incredible still is so many words from Cord.
‘
Five thousand clicks up. And five back.’ He pauses and looks at the thing. Runs his hand over it, plunges his fingers into the holes.
‘They get tired. Real tired. Crosswinds. Off the coast of America. They fly till they drop into the sea. And the sea doesn’t care. Just keeps on doing its thing. Doesn’t have any respect for what they been through. What they seen. The sea doesn’t care for details.
‘Me and your Uncle Tam. I don’t think you’ll remember him.’
Rudra shakes his head.
‘You were just a baby when he … ’ He swallows visibly. ‘Well, you were just a baby. Anyway, we found this muttonbird still alive. Brought it home and had it in a cardboard box. Your grandad said it wouldn’t live. That we should take it back to the beach. Let nature do its thing. But we were kids.’ That could be a smile, but never on Cord’s steel face. Could be wistfulness or nostalgia or a hundred other abandoned emotions? ‘Just little kids,’ Cord says. He gets up, holding the thing like a bowling ball. His fingers in the holes. The eye sockets, Rudra thinks accepting it for what it is.
‘Your grandad got that muttonbird in the night. Took it back to the beach.’ He shrugs. ‘Best thing for it. Let nature do what it must.’ Cord takes the bundle under his arm and starts to walk down the pier. Before he is out of earshot, Rudra hears him say, ‘You’ll understand why things are the way they are when you’re older. Why sometimes you just got to shut up and take it.’
11
‘IN THE END, IT WILL BE BEST,’ says his mum.
‘But this is my home,’ Rudra replies.
‘He will calm. And you will come back. For now, though, it is safest if you live with Wallace.’
‘Safest, Mum?’
‘Your dad is not a bad man. He wouldn’t hurt you. But you took something from him and he needs to think things through.’
‘Did he tell you that?’
Nayna peers into her teacup; into the leaves that predict a storm. ‘He said there must be a reckoning.’
‘What does that even mean.’
Nayna shrugs. ‘I think he is embarrassed if this ever gets out. That his son would steal from him and there would be no consequence.’
‘You say he would never hurt me. How can you be so sure?’
‘I can’t, Rudra. But I need to believe that there is enough good in him.’
‘Why do you defend him?’
‘If not me, then who?’
‘What about you staying here?’ asks Rudra.
‘I will be fine.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I have to trust.’
‘In what?’
Nayna does not answer. Instead, she draws Rudra to her and hugs him like he is eight years old and the world does not matter.
Rudra packs his bags and walks to the creek. He waits there, skimming stones across the mirrored water. Wallace arrives in his dinghy trailing a cloud of Champion Ruby. They cross the narrow channel without exchanging a word.
Didima is in bed when he gets inside Wallace’s place. Her skin has a grey tinge to it that Rudra doesn’t like the look of. Her breath smells like ripe fruit.
‘The dog shouldn’t be on my bed,’ she says.
Tangent growls when Rudra tries to move him.
‘Leave him. He knows I am close to death.’
‘We should call a doctor.’
‘We can’t bring a doctor all the way out here.’
Wallace appears in the doorway. ‘Do we need a doctor?’
She gives him a smile – weak but sweet. ‘No doctors, Wallace. A cup of cha will fix me.’
‘I can do that,’ he says and disappears into the kitchen.
‘Perhaps I will die quite soon,’ says Didima, slumping back on her pillows.
‘You’re not going to die, Didima.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because you’re tough. Because you are the daughter of a honey-collector and the wife of a solution-wala.’
‘I am the widow of a solution-wala,’ she says carefully. ‘And I am old and tired.’
‘But you can’t leave now, Didima. Not just when I am getting to know you.’ There is a whiny edge to Rudra’s voice that he doesn’t recognise. ‘I need to know who I am.’ It comes out all wrong. He doesn’t even know what it means, all clunky and full of holes, sopping with neediness. ‘I need to know who Mum was before she married Dad. What your village in the Sundarbans looks like. Who my great-grandmother was.’ Now he is gushing like a broken pipe.
Didima forces herself up onto her elbows. ‘Come closer.’ She kisses him on the cheek, her lips as crackly as cured grass. ‘I’ll give you those stories on one condition.’
‘What’s the condition?’
‘When I am finished you let me go. And when I go, you burn my body and take my ashes back to the Sundarbans, to my village. And you scatter those ashes in the waters around my island. And you tell everyone you are the grandson of Prinika Thakur, and that Sarin Thakur, the solution-wala, was your grandfather. And your great-grandparents Sutej and Vhristi were from Baghchara.’ She falls back on the pillow. ‘Then you will know who you are.’
Rudra returns home to fetch some clothes. His dad is not there and the only thing he feels is relief. Nayna is in the kitchen cooking. ‘Take this to your didima,’ she says, and hands him a paper bag. ‘I made her ladoos.’
‘I think she’s sick, Mum.’
‘Sick?’
‘She keeps talking about dying.’
‘Old people do that, Rudra. It’s probably nothing.’
But Rudra sees that it could be something. That, as quickly as she arrived, his Didima could slip from their lives without warning.
‘Take her the ladoos, Rudra.’
‘She’ll like that.’
‘And Rudra?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry about your dad.’
‘It’s not your fault, Mum.’
Nayna purses her lips. ‘I wish it were different for us, Rudra.’
‘You’re stuck, aren’t you, Mum?’
She waggles her head and her eyes well with tears.
‘I’m sure it can be different,’ says Rudra. ‘But it will have to come from you. I know it’s big, but we could try without Dad. Even just for a while.’
Nayna plants a kiss on Rudra’s forehead and he leaves the house with his suitcase of clothes and a paper bag of sugary goodness.
‘Ladoos, Rudra?’ says Didima, sitting up in bed.
‘Mum made them.’
She pops one of the balls into her mouth. ‘Coconut ladoos, Rudra.’ She shuts her eyes. ‘My daughter made coconut ladoos for me.’
‘I’ll put on some cha.’
‘Good boy.’
When he returns with the cha, most of the ladoos are gone.
‘Oh, I ate too many ladoos, Rudra. Does your mother not know I have no willpower?’
‘Here’s your cha, Didima.’
‘That will fix me. Plenty of sugar?’
‘Yes, Didima. Always.’
‘Good. Now sit here and listen to the story about the disappearing island.’
Rudra sits on the edge of the bed. Tangent groans and rolls over so Rudra can reach his belly for a scratch.
‘I was born on an island called Baghchara. We were not a rich family but we were well-respected. My father’s father had been a big man with the Britishers but we had fallen on hard times and soon, like most in the Sundarbans, we turned to the forest for help. This is how my father became a honey-gatherer – a mawali. He was the youngest of four boys in a family of ten. There were a lot of mouths to feed. He started going into the jungle with my grandfather when he was six. He never got to go to school but he was a clever man, and kind-hearted.
‘My mother was an only child, which was very rare back then. Her mother, my didima, had died in childbirth and her father had never remarried. She was brought up by her aunt who thought of her as a slave. She was married to my father when she was ten but they did not live together until much
later.
‘I was born during the monsoon. They called me Prinika, which means the girl who brings heaven to earth.’ Didima smiled as if embarrassed. ‘A bit of a grand title, I always thought. But in a way the heavens do come to earth during the monsoon so maybe that is what they really meant.
‘It is a worrying time in the Sundarbans – the monsoon. When the grand rivers rise – the mighty Ganga and the Brahmaputra – the people of the Sundarbans look for higher ground. It is not when the rain first falls that the floods happen. It takes a while for the water to find the sea. But when it does, it all finds the Sundarbans.
‘Our island, Baghchara, was a down island – meaning, people didn’t think much of it. The people who lived there were mostly fishers, woodcutters, honeymen and the like. There wasn’t much for people to do on Baghchara, but I loved it. It was my home. And when you are quite young it is not as if you need much other than water to swim in and trees to climb.
‘After the tragedy we moved away.’ Didima looks out of the window. She can see the creek from here and the sickle-curve of the bay.
‘What tragedy?’
‘That,’ she blinks twice as if willing away tears, ‘is a story for another time.’
‘You said you were going to tell me about the disappearing island.’
‘And I will, Rudra. Be patient.’ She smooths down her covers. ‘I wonder if I might have just one more ladoo. Really, they are so delicious. I cannot help myself.’
Rudra hands her the bag and she pops one into her mouth.
‘Coconut ladoos remind me of the Festival of Lights – Diwali. On Baghchara, such a pretty sight you have never seen. The water dotted with candles in small boats. The trees garlanded in lights and flowers. So very lovely.’ She sighs at the memory.
‘I remember leaving Baghchara. My friends on the dock. The ferryman carried me to the boat because it was low tide. The mud was sucking at his legs as if it did not want him to take me from it. I remember thinking, even though I was so young, it was a bad way to leave. But my mother could not wait for the tide. She was finished with the place.
