by Lydia Syson
His father taught us the letters’ names. An alphabet, he said they were, and held them to a looking glass, to show us how each sign would look when printed. Later, when I went to school, I learned to see them better the other way. In time, I would help Mr Reverend to put the letters in the right order to make our words, and it was my task to bolt the tray to keep the lines all safe. He called me his compositor. You have to think backwards to do that work, he said, but I had started by thinking backwards, so it was quick and easy for me. The ‘k’s and ‘l’s always finished too soon. The letters for my name. We never had enough. He asked me if I ate them. It took me a moment to see this joke. He made many jokes with serious face. Sidney too. It is a thing for which I hunger now. Mr Peacock is a serious man all through, inside and also outside.
Mr Reverend wrote to his people in England, which sometimes he calls Albion, asking for extra ‘k’s and ‘l’s . We are still waiting. Mr Reverend is a man of great patience. It is long and slow work to make our island’s Bible. So there are many stories I yet know nothing of, and much to ponder and discover in the book I carry.
Up on the bluff, the breeze teases the printed paper, so thin and light, each page holding the reversed shadow of the next. Maybe these new stories will push away the ones that come for me each night and make me fearful. Flickering Bible leaves turn into noisy wings which cause my heart to flutter. I catch and pin them down, fearful they may rip and fly away and vanish into the heavens. Directly above my nails, square and lined with the day’s dirt, I see my brother’s name is printed. The Song of Solomon. A sign, I think. The place I must surely study first, the place perhaps to ease my doubting. What is the Lord’s purpose in snatching children to his bosom before they are grown? Fathers from their children? Wives from husbands. How must we understand the shape of His justice?
I start to read.
Sounds rise faintly from the beach but do not pursue me: the fellows hurling clubs and shouting. Soon I am in another place entirely, a place of curtains and chariots and myrrh. A great heat burns my neck, but it is not the sun. It comes from within, from the Song of Solomon. Many words here I hardly know how to say – like camphire and Kedar and spikenard and En-gedi. There are words which make me hot and shifty – lusty words I wonder at. Does Solomona know they hide here, Holy, beneath his name? Has he read this talk of kisses and mouths and beds of green? And what of Mr Reverend, who preaches chastity with such passion? Behold, thou art fair, my beloved.
I have no Beloved. But when I read this, my body aches for such a person, better than wine. My body aches to be Beloved. These verses intoxicate me until I close the Book, stare out to sea and think of cold waves to drench my loose desire. Doves’ eyes. Behold, thou art fair. My finger still rests between these pages, marking this magical place I have found. I cannot let these words vanish.
I cannot resist. I read on, and on.
Apples and flagons, and yes, I am sick of love. I long to sing this song. Lips like a thread of scarlet make me weak and shorten my breath. O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
But then I hear the swish of cloth that tells me a female comes, and a shadow falls across me. I crush my arms around my legs and hide my pages. Half-remembered words hold their sweet echo: I am black, but comely … Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.
‘What are you doing?’ says Queenie. She stands with her hand in Lizzie’s.
‘He is reading the Bible, like Ma used to like to do,’ says Lizzie. ‘Can’t you see?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am reading.’ The sun hath looked upon me. My feet buzz where I have squashed them and I stagger upright to stamp the feeling into them again, losing the Song and falling instead into Chronicles, where name after name after name is numbered on the pages and all these names mean nothing to me. I show the Book to them.
‘Don’t stop on our account,’ say Lizzie, not fully pleasant. ‘Sit down again.’
‘What are you reading? Is it Psalms?’ Queenie ask, jiggling like a boiling pot.
‘No, not Psalms,’ say I.
‘So? What? And will you read it to us?’
‘Hush now, Queenie. Kalala doesn’t want to be bothered with reading to us.’ Lizzie give her sister’s hand a little shake, the telling-off kind, not too strong, and she explains as she lets it go: ‘Ma used to read us psalms from the Bible, and sometimes stories, but now she never has time.’
‘No. She’s very busy. She has much to do,’ say I.
‘Yes.’
She waits with folded arms, stands planted, and Queenie the same.
‘You can go on if you like.’ A kindly nod from Queenie. Both still standing.
I remember the stick in the ashes the day of our landfall. That strangeness I quickly forgot: these palagi children who do not know their letters. Even Vika know her letters. Mr Reverend took care of that. You cannot enter the Fellowship of the Church if you cannot read. Everyone wants to be in the Fellowship. Always better inside than outside. So all the children on our island learn. Some fellows learn chapters and verses by heart better than they can piece them out, word by word, but that is their secret.
‘Ma’s got newspapers in her trunk. With pictures.’ The little girl sways with her boasting.
‘Quite a number,’ says Lizzie. ‘English ones, left in our hotel in Apia. Called the … the … the …’ She looks in the sky to remember, eyes scrunched up. ‘The Illustrated London News. The stories aren’t new now, of course, but we don’t care.’
Then Queenie sadly adds: ‘But we never look at it. Ma doesn’t have time.’
Like a song.
‘Let’s ask her if we can show them to Kalala? Can we, Lizzie?’ Queenie spins from me to her sister. ‘There’s an elephant on the front of one … a dead elephant. Do you remember? The soldiers shot it to eat it. In Paris. All that meat! Have you ever seen an elephant? I haven’t.’
‘No,’ I say. E is for elephant. That’s what the schoolroom chart says. So I too have seen a picture.
‘Such a big animal. From a country far away called India, where the Queen is Empress now, Ma says. A nose like this that can hold a bun,’ Lizzie put her arm in front of her face and wave it, and I step back, and Queenie jump and do the same with her arm. ‘And great big ears like this, Ma says.’
Both girls put their hands to their ears and flap them, and then use their arm to make their noses long again. They look very funny and I am soon laughing. And then I am sad for I know what Mr Reverend would be thinking. These children will be in darkness until they can read for themselves.
‘Are there any stories about elephants in your book?’ Queenie ask.
‘I have not found one yet. But there is a story about a devil, and another about some fishermen. Do you know them?’
Queenie shakes her head, and Lizzie looks uncertain. I open the Bible again, and I find the verses, the ones which are safe and which I know how to find. ‘I will read them to you, if you want me to. This is Matthew. Chapter four.’
24
THE IDEA OF READING PURSUES LIZZIE. SHE IS disturbed by a sense of outrage, which settles in odd ways and lets in draughts, like a blanket in the night tugged between sleepers. Outrage, or shame? She pushes aside a memory of Albert in the kitchen at the hotel, tracing flowered letters with his fingers and begging their mother for help, and all she says is: ‘That’s St Paul’s’, mysteriously, before seizing the paper to stare greedily at the pictures herself. Why had Lizzie never cared to read before? She suspects Kalala pities them. Certainly he looks at them oddly. We do not meet his expectations, she thinks, any more than he meets ours.
There’s been no time. It’s not been needed. It’s hardly needed now, she tells herself. It didn’t help Albert. Her thoughts turn ugly. Could every savage read nowadays? They’d been left behind. What else had they failed to learn?
A few days later she kneels in her parents’ hut, pressing fingertips into gilt, then opening the cover of the family Bible, and letting pages slither by with a sense of hopelessness and the smell of age. How difficult could reading be? Ma made it seem natural and easy – almost unimportant. Lizzie had assumed one day, when she was older, she would simply open a book and know what the marks meant. Pa only read in his head, when he needed to, never aloud, never for anyone else’s pleasure. Kalala read beautifully, slowly and deliberately, curving his voice to the meaning of each phrase, pausing not just to take a breath, but to give breath to the words he uttered. He made them live. A few tripped his tongue, from time to time, and he had to run at these twice or maybe three times. The obstacle leapt, he then sped up, as though reading downhill, carried by his own force. So different from his brother Solomona. Solomona the solemn, the even-handed, who landed on each word with so little distinction you might think he was fearful of giving one more weight than its share, as if such a thing might bring chaos and retribution.
Lizzie puzzles over Kalala’s verses when she is fishing from the rock with Pa, one rare afternoon; preoccupied with the plantation, her father rarely calls on his daughters for help now he has a gang of fine fellows working for him, muscled and tireless and obedient. Men, not boys. She doesn’t miss the sudden eruptions that shattered the air whenever Albert had messed something up, but she misses Albert. To judge from Pa’s brooding silence, he must too. Lizzie baits his line for him, and hopes he will talk to her, like he used to. But he stands hunched and concentrating, all focus on the water and their catch.
Lizzie thinks about the stories Kalala tells them. The net thrown from the boat in Galilee one last time, that net which came up full and flashing with fish. When she watches the black silhouettes of pirate birds as they plunge into the water and soar up again with wriggling silver trapped in long, hooked beaks, she thinks of the fowls of the air who sow not, and neither do they reap, and yet are fed. She thinks about the lilies of the field, neither toiling nor spinning. She wriggles her sticky shoulder blades and longs for fewer clothes.
Back among the women that afternoon, stabbing her needle into workcloth, taking up a pinafore for Gussie which fitted Queenie when they first arrived on the island, she wonders exactly how long those who mourn must wait to find their promised comfort? Ada’s new tranquillity amazes and angers Lizzie. The small rip she noticed in her own chest when Albert first went missing is behaving like an untended tear in an undergarment; out of sight, it lengthens a little day by day, thread by frayed thread, catching on things as she passes, and getting only bigger.
She’s doing a lot more sewing now than she ever used to. And washing, and ironing too. The girls don’t dig and hunt much now. There’s time for other things, and Ma calls this a blessing. They can prepare for hungrier months, cure goatskins, make rugs and covers for when it gets a little colder. Ada and Lizzie will learn the womanly arts, and Queenie too, and not before time, for one day they’ll be wives themselves, though how that might chance is never touched upon. Mrs Peacock feeds the baby and issues orders, and watches over the girls as she never has before. No more slapdashery around here. Something else is making her keep her daughters close, but Lizzie can’t tell what. Lizzie doesn’t call it a blessing. She is beginning to feel like one of the island’s rats, running round and round and round the old metal buoy on scrittling claws, unable to leap back into her old life.
*
A few days later, Lizzie tips out a basin of bruised taro peelings, fish heads and mashed-up tonga beans. The chickens dart forward, heads jerking, as if someone has told them to walk not run. She squats by the birds, chin in two hands. The two speckled hens always step aside for the brown one. The preening rooster stands a little to one side, keeping an eye on the others. You’d think he owned them.
‘Ladies first,’ says Queenie, joining her, squatting down to watch too. ‘He always does that. Any eggs?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Do you think there’s something wrong with them?’
‘I don’t know. Ask Ma.’
Albert would have known, thinks Lizzie. If he were here, he’d devote himself to watching them, crouching motionless for hours until he had worked out the problem, then found a way to solve it. Queenie sighs, stands and stretches.
‘Look,’ she says, pointing towards the shade of the tree by the Islanders’ hut. Kalala sits, legs outstretched, head bowed over Solomona’s English Bible. Solomona is asleep, and so is Vilipate. Iakopo, Pineki and Luka are swimming, out of sight. They are a good match for the surf. ‘Shall we ask him for more stories?’
She runs off. Lizzie follows with less enthusiasm, and lets her sister do the talking, content to hide behind her keen demands. Kalala is obliging, and the girls sit down. This time he reads them a new story: about a brother who cheats his brother and deceives his blind father. When Queenie asks Kalala about his own father, he tells them that he was taken away on a ship long ago.
‘Didn’t he want to go? Why did he let them take him? Why didn’t anyone stop them? Where is he now? Will he come back?’
Kalala looks to his lap.
‘Too many questions,’ whispers Lizzie. ‘You’ll make him sad.’
‘I don’t know,’ says Kalala, honest and matter-of-fact. ‘Nobody knows. Solomona was just a small boy, no bigger than Gussie now. He knows only that it was the will of God. That they were deceived and stolen.’ His fingers scrabble idly while he talks and when they find a stone, he tosses it in the air, as if to mark his thinking.
‘And your mother?’ Queenie tips her head, frowning at Kalala.
‘She also does not know.’ A thoughtful pause. ‘But she keeps hope alive,’ he adds. ‘She watches every ship. Perhaps he will find a way to return to us one day. What is life without hope?’ Lizzie feels that word as an admonition. Have they given up all hope, since Albert’s empty funeral service, so settling and unsettling both at once? His speech finishes with a hollow flatness that does not marry with its claim. She senses he’s repeating another’s words.
Then Kalala tells them another story. Not from the Bible. More trickery.
‘Once upon a time,’ he begins, because this is how Mrs Reverend used to begin all the stories for children. ‘This one is about a rat and a land crab and a shorebird. Together they build a canoe, a vaka, but before they go down to the sea with it, they wonder what they will do if it turns over in the water. “I will swim,” said the rat. “I will fly,” said the bird. “I will sink,” said the land crab. They set off on their voyage, and sure enough …’ says Kalala, because this is what Mrs Reverend always says. His words float in the air, like a lure in water.
‘What?’ Queenie leans forward.
‘Sure enough,’ says Kalala, ‘the canoe capsizes. And the rat swim, and the bird fly, and the land crab sink. The rat swim and swim and swim, almost as far as the reef, but … but … but … he begin to sink.’ Kalala makes small plopping noises with his lips. The noises of a drowning rat.
‘Good,’ says Queenie, with satisfaction, sitting back against Lizzie. ‘I hate rats.’
Kalala holds up a warning finger. His story isn’t finished.
‘Just in time the octopus swim by. “I will help you,” he tell the rat. With one long arm, the octopus place the creature on his head. He hold it there safe, and with the other seven arms he swim careful, careful to shore. He set the rat on a rock, and the rat shake himself, and thank the octopus, and then he say: “I left a present for you! It is on the top of your head.”’
A short dramatic pause.
‘What? What has he left?’
Kalala cannot say. But he is smiling, wickedly. A short breath from Queenie that turns into laughter, as she understands Kalala’s struggle to find the right word for the last part of the story.
‘He’s left a … a turd? Dung? Droppings?’
‘Yes! Can you imagine the anger of the octopus? He can never forget such an insult. He is still chasing the rat to this day. So
if you want to catch an octopus, you have to make a rat for him to catch, with a cowrie shell for body, and legs that sweep the water like little rat feet, and a long tail. And when he comes out from the rocks and the reef to catch the rat, quick as quick, ready to throttle his old enemy, then you have him! You can catch the octopus.’
‘We must tell Pa,’ says Lizzie.
Kalala shrugs. That’s up to them, he seems to say. It’s not his place to tell Mr Peacock anything.
‘This story isn’t in the Bible, is it?’ Queenie asks, doubtfully, and Kalala shakes his head.
‘From my island,’ he says. ‘But I tell you another story from the Bible soon. I will find one you like.’
‘Come on, Queenie. Time to leave Kalala in peace. Thank you for the story.’
Queenie turns to Lizzie and says again, quite crossly now, inviting Kalala to hear:
‘Why can he read and we can’t?’
Heat flushes Lizzie’s cheeks.
‘I told you.’
‘Tell me again.’ Creeping alarm makes her sister petulant. The natural superiority this small island queen has always taken for granted is looking shaky.
‘We’ve just never learned.’
‘Why not?’ asks Queenie, lower lip jutting.
Lizzie is making excuses. She won’t say a word against her father in front of Kalala.
‘There’s never been time. Too many other things to do. Anyway, what would we read?’
‘Is it too late?’ Queenie asks Lizzie, but she is really asking Kalala.
‘No,’ says Kalala. ‘Everybody learns to read on our island. Of course. All ages too. So that we can all receive the Word of the Lord. It is never too late for light. Ask Solomona.’
They settle begging eyes on Kalala.
‘Can you teach us?’ asks Queenie.
