Mr Peacock's Possessions

by Lydia Syson

  He nods. She waits, shakily. And once more the affliction seems to pass, like a fever breaking.

  ‘They are leaving me,’ he says, standing and shaking out his limbs, wiping his face on his shirt. ‘Come. I have had my warning, I believe, and now perhaps will have some peace. But I think they will return.’

  ‘To me too?’ Lizzie asks, drawing back.

  ‘No. I believe …’ He shakes his head. ‘No, I wonder … I think … I feel your aitu must be your own.’

  ‘Albert?’

  He nods, with a disarming muddle of conviction and pity.

  ‘But I told you. Albert’s gone. He’s not on this island anymore. You know what Ada said—’

  He fills the space she leaves.

  ‘I think she’s wrong.’

  ‘No!’ Too loud. Lizzie stares at Kalala. Unbearable that Ada could be mistaken. But, if Lizzie is honest with herself, the story became less plausible the moment she began to tell it to Kalala in the moonlight, and registered the doubt in his face. She tries again, slowly and quietly.

  ‘Ada insists he has escaped.’

  ‘Of course. She wants her brother living. She has to believe it. But you know it’s impossible. One of us would have seen him.’

  ‘Even in all that excitement and confusion?’

  Kalala is blunt.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He could not have stowed away after we left the beach? When the rest of us came up to the flats?’ Her pleading voice betrays her desperation.

  ‘I went back myself. I helped to push the longboat off. There was nobody hiding there. I’m certain.’

  There is something miraculous in the sheer certainty of Kalala’s calm, firm disavowal. Lightheaded, Lizzie tries to mimic his steadiness while she absorbs this new shock. She thrusts her hands deep into the pockets of her pinafore, letting her fingers fidget for a few moments with their contents, turning over a length of vine-twine, a scrunched-up handkerchief, a candlenut, hardly able to let herself follow the direction of his thoughts. Then she tightens her fists. She is still allowing herself hope.

  ‘So Albert is still here, you think? Still somewhere on this island.’

  He nods. Kindly, gently, as if he is cradling her with his eyes. So gently that it means she can’t avoid taking the next step.

  ‘But … he’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘I believe he is.’

  A tingling wave crawls over Lizzie’s scalp. She squats, quickly, shakily, before her legs can let her down, and stares furiously at the ferns and moss and rocks around her feet – each fine hair and particle of soil seems curiously distinct. She roots herself as deeply as she can. Her mind feels sticky, slow as treacle. Yet only moments pass before her understanding of what must be done slides into certainty.

  ‘Dead,’ she says. Assuring herself. ‘Then we gave up too easily before.’ Her body its own lever, she thrusts herself back up to standing. ‘When we searched for him. We will have to start again.’ Then she looks directly at Kalala. ‘Will you help me? He must be somewhere. Or there must be some sign of what has happened.’

  ‘We searched the whole island before.’

  ‘We were all so upset. Bewildered. Too hasty. I want to look again.’

  ‘Because you feel his presence?’ asks Kalala, inspecting her face earnestly, as though it might tell him something her lips won’t admit, or perhaps to test the seriousness of her intent. She senses he admires her determination and that thought strengthens her. ‘But not here … not in this place?’ he continues.

  ‘No, no. Not here. Not anywhere in particular. I wish I did. I wish I could.’

  At that moment Queenie calls impatiently. She’s waited long enough.

  ‘Come back here!’ Lizzie calls down to her, hoping her voice will stay firm and clear. ‘We need to go back!’ Her arms drop back to her sides and she assesses Kalala in turn. ‘I’ll wait for her. You go and find the others and tell them we will meet them at Crater Lake.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I will. But first tell me … is there anywhere on the island that you feel your brother’s presence? Anywhere it is strong? Like this place for me.’

  Frustrated, Lizzie tries to think, but all she can do is shake her head.

  ‘No. Nowhere I’ve been since he vanished. During the day, I feel nothing. The opposite. When I think of him I feel dead and dry and cold inside.’

  ‘But at night?’

  A thousand pinpricks fall on Lizzie’s neck.

  ‘You know … I dream.’

  Kalala won’t say it directly, but she understands what he is asking of her. Rather than escape her dreams, she must confront them. Instead of avoiding sleep, she must perhaps embrace it.

  ‘But nothing is clear … I can’t remember. In the morning.’

  Don’t make me remember, she wants to say. Don’t make me sleep.

  ‘If you could know what has happened to him – if we can somehow discover – perhaps he will leave you in peace.’

  ‘Perhaps. Do you believe that? Can it be right to believe such a thing?’

  Kalala seems equally confused.

  ‘I don’t know. My mother believes it, though she keeps it quiet. Mr Reverend has faith only in the Holy Spirit. He will hear no talk of ghosts and spirits.’

  ‘You really think he is telling me to look for him?’

  He shrugs, but hardly carelessly.

  ‘You think I’m telling myself.’

  ‘Whoever … whatever … I’ll help you.’

  So Lizzie puts out her hand, as she has seen her father do, making an agreement. And she remembers taking hold of Kalala’s arm, in the dark, on the cliff, the night before, and the way he slid away from her, as if perhaps his Reverend has warned him away from girls as well as ghosts.

  ‘We’ll shake on it,’ she says firmly. ‘Yes? I’ll ask my father about the bones. I’ll make him tell me what he knows about this place. And we will both keep looking for Albert. No giving up.’

  From out of nowhere, noise envelops them. Spy and Sal barking, all the boys yelping as they career into the gully. They have lost their goat. And Queenie is climbing back up to them, grumpily complaining.

  ‘What have you two been doing all this time?’ she calls.

  Lizzie feels caught out, guilty of anything they care to suspect.

  ‘Say nothing,’ pleads Kalala.

  30

  LIZZIE PASSES THE VEGETABLE GARDEN, AND THE goats. The trees in the new banana grove already rise above her head and at their base sprout new pups which will soon be ready to split and plant again. It reminds her how much time has passed since Albert vanished. Four months now, nearly five. The Esperanza could return any day now. And then what? As she walks across the stretch of land burned earlier, old ash billows round her ankles. At the top, new fires are dying down.

  Kalala looks round first. At his turning a ripple goes round the others, and a temptation to tease that’s quickly squashed. Billy frowns at his sister’s invasion, and Pa calls to her.

  ‘Is something wrong? Someone hurt?’ He gestures to the others – keep gathering up the tools, no need to stop and gawp – and hurries over. ‘Is it the baby? Is it Mrs P?’

  ‘No, no,’ calls Lizzie. ‘Nothing like that. I just wanted to see the work.’

  ‘You had me worried,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. Sorry that her appearance has become a bad tiding. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘It’s heavy work here.’

  Lizzie thinks of all the heavy work she’s done since they first landed on the island. Building the houses, moving the grass, carrying the camp oven up the cliffs with Ada’s help. Won’t there be more heavy work for her when the Islanders depart and the Peacock family is all alone again?

  ‘We’re packing up now,’ adds Pa. He doesn’t want her here.

  ‘I see,’ she says. She removes a thorny twig caught in his beard, and hands it to him. He tosses it away. His eyes seem to smile. It’s never easy to tell what his mouth is doing.

  ‘So,
Lizzie. What do you reckon to this? What do you see when you look now?’ he asks, nodding towards the cleared land. ‘Tell me what you see.’

  She stares at torn and blackened stumps and dusty ash, the pits and hollows in the grey powdered soil where tree roots have already been routed. There’s a right answer and a wrong answer, she’s sure.

  ‘Earth …?’ she says, checking his face.

  His eyes glitter like the sea behind him as he looks with pride at the devastation all around.

  ‘Our land. Peacock land. Ours for ever now. We’re getting closer to taming it all the time. I’ll tell you what I see: orchards, orange groves, growing from here to there. Acres of grass. Hundreds of sheep. And what would you say to a little wooden house one day, painted white perhaps, with a veranda and glass windows? What would you say to that, my little Lizzie?’

  Lizzie rarely looks towards the future now, the habit her father taught her. It can’t sustain her. Her imagination always trips on Albert.

  ‘Do you know what I’ve decided?’ Mr Peacock announces, not noticing her silence. ‘We need a new name. I like the sound of Peacock Island. I want there to be no mistake who owns this land. Not ever. What do you say?’

  ‘Can you do that?’ Lizzie asks. ‘Call a whole island whatever you like? Won’t it spoil the maps?’

  ‘It’ll change the maps,’ says Mr Peacock, exhaling satisfaction at the prospect. ‘We’ve earned that right. Anyway, Monday Island’s only what everyone calls this place. It’s got some Frenchy name on the maps. Don’t ask me to remember it. And other names too at other times.’

  Kalala, Solomona and the rest are loading their broad shoulders with the crooks of trunk and branch they will take down to season in the storehut: ship’s knees. Monday Island’s inexhaustible currency. Keels and deckbeams strengthened by wood they’ve cut will travel the world in years to come, so Mr Peacock often boasts. He shouts a last command.

  ‘On you go. That’s the way, Billy. We’ll follow down soon.’

  Then Lizzie and Pa are alone together, as they’ve not been for months. She feels affectionate hands on her shoulder, as if they’d direct her gaze, and his breath on her neck, and the force of his attention, and she basks in it all, just as she once used to. Her father’s beard is wild again, long enough to tickle Lizzie. She twists and smiles up at him and never wants to move again. He’s like a living mountain, a harbour at her back. Lizzie leans against him, pushing away all the uncertainties Ada has planted in her heart, and her loving comes back to life. Ada and Albert never understood him. Content with so little, they saw his strengths as weaknesses. Lizzie knows better. It’s hard work to build something that can endure, to make a success of life. You can’t give up. Where would they all be now if their father had let those early setbacks triumph?

  ‘You’ve done so much these last few months,’ she says. ‘I hardly know the place.’

  ‘We’ll tame this island yet,’ he says again. ‘We’ll have to control the goats, of course, can’t have the beasts wrecking my orchard … we need to get some of that cat’s claw up here … maybe some cats too, for the rats, in case they follow us here … and in another few years, I’m thinking we’ll have to clear a driving road, so we can water the sheep at the lake. Three hundred acres we could have on this side, I reckon. Oh, to think of all the time we wasted at Clapperton Bay.’

  ‘We didn’t know,’ says Lizzie. ‘How long will it be, Pa, before we get the sheep?’

  ‘I’ll fetch them from Auckland when we’re good and ready. When we’ve cleared enough ground, and the grass is growing, and we’ve enough to trade, and can smoke another ship to the bay. We’ll need more grass seed too. Finer. Water tanks. What else?’

  ‘Can I come with you to Auckland?’

  She turns to face him, and finally he looks at her. He stares at her for a moment, long enough to see her properly, and shakes his head. And there. Gone again, it seems. Whatever it was that held him. Was she too young, too old, too female or simply useless to him now? Would he have taken Albert? Will he take Billy?

  ‘I’d like to, spadge. You know I would.’ He holds her hard against him, and surely there’s a catch as he inhales. ‘But your ma will need you all the more when I’m gone.’

  He closes the conversation with one last sweeping look at the day’s work, picks up his tools, and starts walking home. He’s slipped her mooring, and soon she’s running after him, feeling a fool, feeling she has wasted an opportunity.

  ‘Pa, Pa … wait for me.’ She needs to speak up quickly. She needs more time. ‘Will you show me how far you’ll clear this season? Can we walk that way?’

  ‘What? Through the burning? You’ll scorch your soles.’

  But he slows his stride, enough to let her catch him up. She thinks of Kalala and her promise, and takes his arm.

  ‘We could walk through the upper terrace?’ she offers.

  ‘We’ll be late for dinner.’

  He starts to walk faster again, and, panicking, her thoughts spill out so fast she can’t even make a question of them.

  ‘Pa, the bones.’

  He stops.

  ‘What bones?’ He speaks so slowly, with so much hidden threat that Lizzie is silenced. Her arm slides from his.

  ‘I said, what bones?’ he repeats, fiercely.

  ‘You know, Pa. The ones in the Nightbell Gully. The pig bones we found and buried. Ages ago. You said … you said …’

  ‘I said you were not to think of them again. Have you touched them? What have you done, Lizzie?’

  ‘No. Nothing. Why shouldn’t I think of them?’

  ‘Too frightening for little girls.’

  ‘Pig bones! Little girls, maybe.’

  He looks at her sharply, and walks on, speaking over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes, I can see you’re not a little girl. Nor Ada. That’s all too clear. And that’s why I’ll caution you now. Keep away from those kanakas, my girl. I’ll not say it again. I hope I won’t have to. Keep Queenie away too. She’s growing up faster than you know.’

  It’s going wrong. The conversation is swerving from her grasp. She runs after him, calls out her question.

  ‘But they’re not pig bones, are they?’

  ‘No. No. They’re not. You’re right.’ He stops, and sighs, and rubs his face wearily. ‘Kanaka bones, I believe. From long ago. Men who died before you were born.’

  ‘Here? There were Islanders here before?’

  ‘There were.’

  ‘From the Rock?’

  ‘Perhaps. And other islands too. Robson told me – cautioned me, I suppose. When I pushed him that is. Every Eden has its snake. They had some visitors they didn’t welcome. It’s why they left. But those kanakas weren’t here by choice – theirs or his. Blackbirded, they were.’

  He can see she has no idea what he means.

  ‘Forget I told you. Not pretty. Better not to know—’

  ‘No, I want to.’

  He can’t keep her innocent. He’s just said she’s not a little girl.

  ‘It was a long time ago, Lizzie. Nothing to do with us. No need to think about it now.’

  He starts walking again, and she’s forced to follow, but she won’t give up.

  ‘Not so very long ago,’ she protests. ‘Tell me what happened. Who were these kanakas? Why did they come here? To work for Robson? And what do you mean … blackbirded?’

  ‘You don’t know of blackbirding? No. Why should you? You’re such a sharp one, I thought perhaps … well, it’s a nasty business.’

  Such reluctance to come clean. As if he can still protect her from the truth.

  ‘Please tell me Pa. Why “birding”?’

  Mr Peacock thought for a moment.

  ‘Because you round ’em up and catch ’em, I suppose.’

  Mutton-birds, thinks Lizzie. Fat, glossy mutton-birds. You don’t even need to trap them. You can take ’em as you please, just pluck ’em from their messy nests and eat them up.

  ‘Or it’s the colour.
Blackbirds … natives … But it’s trickery, plain and simple. The blackbirders lure the men with the promise of trade, or Bibles, or contracts they don’t or can’t ever understand.’

  ‘The Stolen Ones,’ she says, echoing Kalala, understanding at last. She takes her father’s arm again, for comfort, and his rough skin rasps comfortably against hers.

  ‘Yes, stolen’s about right. I’ve heard of slaver captains dressed as priests. I’ve heard of crew with guns and harpoons. Outright violence. Either way it’s an evil business. It’s true laws have changed since then. Boats patrol now. Even kanakas get wiser, perhaps, but how can you blame them for falling for the recruiters’ tricks? How do they know what greets them on the other side? Too little’s changed, I’d say, and the Lord knows slavery happens still, all over, or near enough. Men will lie and men will drink and men will always scheme and cheat. And be cheated. It’s too easy, you see, when all the young men on all the islands want to get on ships and get away. The world needs workers. If it’s not sandalwood, it’s guano, if it’s not cotton, it’s sugar. Or silver to be mined. They call it the Labour Trade now, not slavery, but what’s the difference? Queensland’s the new Louisiana, they say.’

  A new thought sickens Lizzie.

  ‘But, Pa, our workers weren’t blackbirded? Pa, Pa … Solomona and Kalala and the others … Nobody stole them?’

  ‘Lord, no.’ He squeezes her hand again, and pulls her close, as if he’d like to hide the horror. ‘Our boys came here with willing hearts, and they’ll go home wealthy. Compared with their brothers at least. Fair exchange. No robbery.’

  Of course. Of course. She only needs to ask Kalala.

  ‘And are there other bones, Pa? Have you found more?’

  ‘Full of questions today, aren’t you?’

  He doesn’t want to answer them. Not so long ago he used to praise her for her doggedness. His little terrier, he called her, proudly.

  ‘Bones you’ve not told us about,’ she persists. ‘On other parts of the island?’

  His face has hardened, shutting her out again. He looks at her suspiciously, mutters about bad dreams. Too late for that. He’s hiding something.