Beat Not the Bones

by Charlotte Jay

  ‘Don’t send him back,’ Stella said.

  ‘He might as well go with you now that he’s here,’ said Seaton briskly. ‘And it disposes of one of the carriers.’

  ‘He’s a clerk,’ said Stella. ‘Not a carrier.’

  ‘If he’s here without leave,’ said Seaton, ‘he loses his status. He can carry. We ought to be able to find you two more somewhere.’

  Washington tipped back his glass and swallowed the rest of the gin. He saw it would be unwise to protest further. The gin made him optimistic. Hitolo’s cowardice was well proven. He had caught the fever of terror as quickly as any of the primitive Maiola boys.

  Washington looked at Stella over the rim of his glass. She had won. But how had she managed it? She must have paid him well. He would not relish the Bava valley. And if she had tried to protect herself did she know what was ahead?

  Stella came and sat between them. She put down the spray of orchids on the table and picked up her glass. Her eyes met his, and she smiled, sweetly, vacantly, as if she had no idea on earth who he was.

  CHAPTER 15

  It was barely light. A thick mist hung over the river and bound the trees on either bank. The water was black, and mist steamed off it like smoke rising from boiling oil. It was deathly still. The long, animal shape of a log rocking slightly just off-shore seemed to move through some sluggish pressure of life within itself.

  But in the stillness there was a curious tension. Stella felt that the jungle was sleeping and would move, when it wished, beyond the accepted limits of plant life. The huge spreading roots of the trees would stretch and claw in the mud, sucking up some rich, black substance to swell the succulent trunks and the gigantic blades of leaves. Branches would reach out, feeling their way in the air, following scents and sounds, to clutch at the life that moved there.

  Stella felt that the jungle was more animal than vegetable, that there would be danger in touching a leaf or breaking a twig, that the plant thus assailed would retaliate in a hungry, primordial fashion of its own. As she climbed from the boat on to land, she felt she had stepped on to putrid human flesh. Her foot sank into mud – not soft, boggy mud that slid up around her instep but strange black rubber matter that the foot sank into but did not break.

  Washington took her hand and helped her up on to firmer land. They stood side by side, looking back at the boat while the boys heaved across the stores. The district officer had given them two – one a police boy – who came from a lower Bava River village, and they had picked up one other boy from Maiola when they arrived the night before.

  They did not speak but kept silence as if in fear of waking someone. And even the district officer – not a fanciful man – gave his orders in a low voice. Some presence brooded in the trees. To have spoken out loud, laughed or whistled would have been like blasphemy and aroused vengeance. They were all on shore now. Hitolo came last, his dark body moving like a shadow out of the water. He stood a little way off and the mist folded around him, shrouding his ankles and wrapping about his shoulders. Stella, looking across at his dim shape thought, This is how we all look to one another. This is how I look to them. The process of annihilation had begun.

  This meditation brought in its train no fear or regret. Never in her life had she held such a loose grip on reality. The hour itself was dreamlike, but Stella’s senses were already befogged. She had lost the power to make all but one decision, like a swallow beating its wings south by instinct, undismayed by weather, preferring death to retreat, held doggedly to its course by the knowledge that there is no other choice. The past, which had endangered this journey, existed in her mind as a void out of which disturbing sensations she could not afford to examine sometimes emerged. She had even forgotten David. She was no longer lonely. She did not remember having loved or having lost love – even these memories were dangerous. She just stood at Washington’s side, waiting for the carriers to collect their equipment and the first step forward to be made.

  The village, a little ahead and hardly visible under its umbrella of palms, was showing signs of life. There were hushed sounds of movement and here and there a figure appeared in the doorways of the thatched houses. Half a dozen children stood staring at a distance – small, shadowy creatures with enormous, gnome-like heads, appearing at this grey, sunless hour more like jungle goblins than humans. Maiola was the most northerly point of the Kairipi district and they did not see white men often, nor even uniformed native policemen.

  Seaton was coming ashore, assisted by two police boys who stood ankle deep in the mud.

  ‘Well, you’re all set, I think,’ he said. ‘If you get going straight away you’ll have the best part of your day’s march over before it gets too hot. You don’t want to walk in the afternoon, Mrs Warwick, if you can help it.’

  Stella nodded, but his words floated far over her head. As she saw it they would never stop walking. They would go on and on like pilgrims in legends until they reached their destination. It did not seem to her that they would grow hot or tired or that they would need food and rest. Their bodies only existed to get them to Eola, and would make no demands on them.

  ‘Might rain – might not,’ said Seaton. ‘After noon. Won’t rain before. Uncertain time of year. Should be all right. Too early for rain. And if you get lost, Mrs Warwick, you’ve only got to remember, follow the river. Fact is, you can’t get lost. Follow the river, it’s well tracked on this side, your husband told me. Can’t see that anything can happen to you.’

  Only Eola, she thought. Only Eola can happen to me.

  Seaton was holding out his hand. ‘I’ll be back for you in a fortnight. If you’re not here, then you’ll have to get hold of canoes and come down on your own. Unless you’d like to wait for a couple of months when the patrol officer will be back.’

  ‘We’ll be here by then,’ said Washington. He spoke loudly, but his voice dropped away towards the end of the sentence. He cast a quick, nervous glance at the smoking wall of trees. ‘How long does this mist hang around?’ he asked in a whisper.

  ‘Only a couple of hours. Don’t ask for the sun. You won’t like it when you get it.’

  It was hot now, but there was steamy moisture in the air. Stella’s hands were moulded together by an emanation from her skin. She thought of the beche-de-mer that crawled on the sea floor at Marapai.

  Seaton was saying goodbye to Washington. She did not hear what they said. Their voices rang out like whispers in empty rooms. There was nowhere for the sounds to drift to, no emptiness. The air was thick like a sponge, sucking up their words and the breath they exhaled. As they stood, breathing and speaking, the air around them grew closer and thicker.

  ‘Well, goodbye again,’ said Seaton, lifting his hand in a sharp salute. The engines of the little boat started up. Seaton, sitting now in the stern, was a white shape with a grey, featureless face.

  Neither Stella nor Washington moved. They waited while the last link that bound them to the law of Marapai and the western world broke loose. Two long, oily ribbons broke out from the stern of the boat as it moved slowly down stream. The water swirled, as if to reveal monstrous, muddy, submerged life boiling beneath the mist. The boat disappeared round the bend of the river. Only the sound of its engines outraged the silence.

  Washington turned to face the village. ‘Well, we might as well be off.’ He had tried to be jovial, but there was a hollow ring in his voice. Faces in this gloom were bloodless and pale and Stella, glancing up at him, wondered if she also wore a moon pallor.

  They walked side by side. ‘I must say,’ he said in the same jovial whisper, ‘I’m all for starting a bit later than this.’

  ‘We might as well go on,’ she said, ‘since we’re awake and ready.’ She did not know her own voice.

  The village was built in a semi-circular form, leaving a broad half moon of mud between the water and the houses. They could see them more clearly now – squat grey shapes that looked alive on their stiff wooden legs, the ragged thatched roofs like the
drenched plumage of birds. In the centre of the village was the large, downy shape of the men’s long house, with its curved back swooping up into the sky like the prow of a canoe and its tall, conical face shuttered down upon its secrets. No dogs barked, but here and there they crept out from under the houses and slunk back and forth, mangy hides rippling over their bones. A few of the older men had come out to look at the departing whites. One of the women belonging to the guide followed a little way and then dropped behind. Stella glanced over her shoulder and saw her standing in front of her house, her frayed leaf skirt bunching out from below her hips, one hand dangling at her side, the other held across her swollen belly.

  Notions of civilisation are only relative, and now that the district officer with his motor boat and his western law had gone, Stella saw that these people, who had seen white men, who lined up for the census, who had a village policeman with a badge on his tunic and whose people had been tried in a court of law, represented order, security, peace. She watched the young woman drop behind with a sense of loss. Three children were still following them and two young boys, one armed with a bow and arrows, had crept out of a house and joined them noiselessly as they passed. Then the mist closed up behind and the village was gone. The path led on into the wall of trees ahead. The mist wept down from their leaves like white slime. Moving forward, they pressed against damp, heavy air.

  The children left them first. Stella did not see them go. But glancing behind a quarter of an hour later she could make out a single file of the two boys from the lower river village, the guide from Maiola and last of all Hitolo with the two village boys. She felt a pang of regret for the little brown children who had gone home to sleep.

  They walked for another hour. The jungle was still shrouded in mist. It still seemed that there was a demand for silence. They walked single file for, though the path was well trodden, it was narrow and the undergrowth sprang up on either side, grey, rank and forbidding. Then the path widened into a clearing under large trees. Here the undergrowth had been cut away; the villagers apparently used this part of the river bank as a landing-stage. Three long canoes made from hollowed logs were drawn up at the water’s edge. The ground around them writhed with huge, twining roots. They could see through a gap in the branches the river, flowing more swiftly here. The steaming emanation of mist had almost gone and hung thinly among the trees on either bank.

  Washington paused and looked back. The boys, who had not straggled much, closed up and stopped. ‘Who are those two?’ It was the first time he had spoken since they left the village. With the mist gone, speech was possible.

  The two youths stood back shyly from the rest of the group. Side by side, their naked brown bodies and woolly heads almost identical, they looked on, serious and uncomprehending. ‘Village boys, taubada,’ said the police boy in police motu. He was a tall man with a thin, beaked face and distended earlobes that dangled in split strips.

  ‘Tell them to go home.’

  Stella did not understand the language that Washington was speaking, but as the police boy called out there was no doubt about his meaning. The two boys turned away, hesitated, looked back, looked at each other, and walked off down the path. She watched them, the outlines of their bodies growing more and more spectral. They were gone. She turned and looked at Washington. For no more than an instant they stared at each other and read each other’s hearts.

  Jobe did not kill my husband, she thought. This man Washington killed him, and now he will kill me.

  It was then – as Anthony Nyall had said, too late – that she realised that she did not want to die. ‘Are we stopping here?’ she asked.

  He looked away from her and nodded. ‘It will give the carriers a rest.’

  She felt the crystalising of their relationship shock him as it had shocked her. But her thoughts were clear and arranged. She knew that what she was thinking and feeling had been arrived at days ago and set aside for the moment of danger – the glimpse into Washington’s heart.

  Washington had sat down on the root of a tree and was lighting a cigarette. The carriers had dropped their loads. She sat down in front of him. ‘Why did you send those two boys away?’ she said.

  He threw her a darting glace. ‘We have enough. They might hang on for hours and then we’d have to feed them. And they might panic and upset the carriers.’

  ‘Because of the vada men?’

  He did not reply.

  I must protect myself, she thought. She looked around her and her thoughts were quick and alert. She sensed that there was something to guard against in the fear of vada men. On the last trip the carriers had panicked and the white men had gone on alone. Even Hitolo had lost his head. It must not happen this time. Possible dangers, possible defences against them, passed through her mind. She did not feel afraid – not now – a new vitality had risen in her that gave her an extraordinary sense of power. It did not occur to her to turn back, though now she saw different reasons for going on. She was a match for Washington. She felt that. He looked pale and ill, his hands trembled. It’s not only fever, she thought. He’s afraid. And he doesn’t want to kill me, he’ll only do it because he must, because I threaten his safety, or because some other fear compels him. He’d do anything to get out of it.

  Washington behaved as if he were the hunted one. His eyes searched the trees around them. Every now and again he would sit still for a moment and stare at the ground, then in the next moment his head would be raised, staring at the path ahead, the path behind.

  She stood up and walked past the carriers to Hitolo. He too was squatting on a tree root, smoking a cigarette. He looked up at her, but did not stand. She felt he looked strange and suspected that for a moment he did not recognise her. ‘Hitolo,’ she said softly. ‘Do you think these men will stay with us? Will they be frightened?’

  ‘They stay, Mrs Warwick. Two days maybe.’ He was using short, simplified sentences and unconsciously she addressed him in the same way. ‘You find out what they say. You tell me, Hitolo. You do that?’ He nodded, but there was no look of understanding in his face.

  ‘And you stay near me, Hitolo. Don’t you hang back at the end. You walk close behind, and you watch all the time and see I don’t get hurt.’

  ‘Yes, sinabada.’

  She left him and went back to Washington. He had finished his cigarette and was grinding it into the mud with his heel. She stood looking down at him. She felt for him none of the passionate loathing that had been an offshoot of despair and that she had felt for Jobe. She believed she knew him and understood him. And you cannot hate someone you know, she thought, any more than you can love somebody you don’t. And there again Anthony Nyall had been right. She had never known David – this was becoming more obvious – and looking back over the past few weeks she saw her actions as an hysterical protest against never having loved him. Her presence here was a final protest. She did not regret the loss of love. The return to Marapai was not now something to dread but something to work for with all her strength. ‘Shall we go now?’

  Washington started and looked up. Slowly he rose to his feet and they went on.

  CHAPTER 16

  Washington looked at his watch. The luminous dial showed the time to be twelve. He could hear no sound outside and, within the hut, only Stella’s soft breathing. They had stopped for the night in the first of the river villages where the carrier from Maiola was known. The people had been friendly and had given them the use of an empty hut on the outskirts of the village.

  Within the hut it was hot and airless. He had discarded his shirt and lay only in shorts. The sweat on his body pricked and crawled like the feet of insects. He lifted the mosquito net, slid out from beneath it and fixed it in place before the insects could swarm in. He stood up and looked across to the corner of the hut where Stella was sleeping. The mosquitoes descended upon his naked skin. He flicked them away from his lips and eyes and felt among his clothes for a shirt to throw over his shoulders. There was no movement from Stella.
He could not see her clearly, only the faint outline of her body beneath its dim tent of netting. Outside there was no moon, but the sky was light. The doorway faced into a wide patch of cleared ground, around which the village huts were collected. He could see the tops of trees and a few pale stars.

  He moved quietly to the doorway, sat down on the steps that led to the ground and put on his socks. It was unwise wandering round in these places without shoes, but he did not want to wake the boys. Lastly he put his hand in his shirt pocket and drew out a midget torch and the small carved coconut that he had taken from Anthony Nyall’s desk. He waited, listening.

  He was not afraid. At least, not as afraid as he had been in his own hut at Marapai. Stella gave him confidence. She slept so deeply and peacefully in the hut behind him. They had walked nearly eighteen miles that day, and she had lain down at nine o’clock and slept almost immediately, like an exhausted child. Her attitude gave him courage; she was not intimidated by the jungle, nor by the people in the village. She accepted the bizarre situation they found themselves in as ordinary. Throughout the day she had been eager, practical, interested. They had not spoken much, but every now and then, glancing back over his shoulder, he had caught her looking about alert and wide-eyed. She seemed intensely curious about everything around her, and utterly unafraid. The uneasiness of the three local carriers had failed to impress her. The irony of this – that Stella should inspire him with confidence – did not pass him by, and he smiled in the darkness. Then he stood up and, flashing the torch on the ladder, climbed carefully down to the ground.

  Hitolo and the three local boys were sleeping under the hut. Ahead, the path faded into darkness. Washington threw only a brief glance in this direction. Here the jungle closed in over the sky, and he could see in the foreground only a few dim shapes of the larger trees. Behind this the darkness might have been solid. He knew that if he looked long enough he would see receding planes reaching back into the trees, darkness moving, coiling like smoke, clotting into thick shadows that blinked with the orbs of eyes. He knew all the tricks of darkness. Its slow, heaving shapes and darting tongues had displaced sleep now for many weeks, its tiny lights stabbed his eyeballs as he lay in his bed in Marapai. He knew all the dangers of staring too long at a fluttering leaf or a firefly.