Mr Peacock's Possessions

by Lydia Syson

  They could all have missed important clues during those early, heartbroken weeks, before they settled into their various convictions. Lizzie’s nursing a wild new hope: that Albert is still alive but deep in hiding – like Kalala’s father, long ago, before the sickness struck. Something had happened that fateful day, something so terrible Albert could not or would not return. He’d risk starvation rather than live subjected to his father’s will. He could still be living up on the cliffs at Clapperton Bay, waiting out the days, far from Pa’s scrutiny and rage, until the next ship came to carry him away. Couldn’t they all survive on next to nothing?

  As Lizzie passes the top of the track that leads down to the gully, her own bones seem to wobble like a compass needle, and she stumbles slightly. All that business about aitu. She still doesn’t know what to think. So Lizzie decides to make herself brave with song. A hymn? All she can find is disconnected snatches of words and tunes. A sea shanty sneaks into her head to cheer her.

  Hokey, pokey, winkey fum

  How d’you like your ’taters done?

  I like ’em done with their jackets on,

  Says the King of the Cannibal Islands.

  It’s been a long time since they last had a potato, with or without a jacket. ‘Taters’ hadn’t done as well here as Pa had hoped. Their leafy tops drooped yellow, and the potatoes rotted away before they were big enough to harvest.

  Last night it rained again. Moisture is in the air like the memory of a kettle boiling. The armpits of Lizzie’s blouse are dark and wet and her back is soaked in sweat. She wipes her face on her sleeve, and keeps going, along the ridge, past the turn-off towards the lake. And then she can’t resist it. Lizzie doubles back. A swim will calm her down and wash her stickiness away.

  The bones the bones the bones. Back in her head, full of vengeance.

  When she reaches the shore, she looks around, uneasy still. She sits on a rock, warm with the sun, and feels the navy blue of her tunic heating up against her thigh, heat penetrating flesh and fabric. It is like being slowly cooked.

  Inside out, or outside in? She can’t decide which garment to remove first. Her tunic buttons run up her back. She’d never thought before how inconvenient this was, or why a piece of practical clothing might be made this way. There was always somebody around at bedtime to unbutton her, and then she would spin round and unbutton her sisters in turn. If they were in a hurry, and Ma chasing them, the girls sometimes made themselves a small circle of unbuttoners, fumbling and bending and racing and unlacing in the shadows before tumbling under the covers.

  Lizzie can reach the top button, and there she starts. Then she works her way up from the bottom, and finally she slips her arms out, folds the tunic neatly and lays it down. She finds herself glancing back up the path, although she’s heard nothing. Nobody can have followed her. They are all busy with their own work. She can hear the distant fall of axes. She is safe, and free. So just for once, she can see no reason not to take off all her other clothes.

  Blouse. Petticoat. Vest. Be thankful I don’t make you wear a corset, Ma often tells the big girls. Only because she can’t get her hands on them, thinks Lizzie. She wonders if Pa will be shopping for stays as well as sheep when he goes to Auckland. The thought makes her feel peculiar, and she shoves it away. She’s his golden girl again. He trusts her. He tells her things that even Ma doesn’t know, that nobody on this island knows, except Kalala now.

  She will be a crutch for Pa, thinks Lizzie, while Ma is wrapped up in the baby and her silent grief for Albert. She will ask him more about his plans, for the sheep, the orchards, the trading post. Keep him thinking about the future instead of the past. How the loss of Albert must gnaw at him. How he must blame himself.

  Looking around for the last time, she removes her drawers, ready to run, quickly, splashingly, into the water. She feels a duty to get herself out of sight, even of herself. But this time, for once, she stops, closes her eyes and stretches. Now she is no longer marching, the air feels cooler. It brushes across her small breasts, hardening her nipples, which seem to freeze in shock at their own exposure. They are no more used to being in the open than the hair which now grows in her armpits and the other place where she has never looked, which is dark and absorbs the sun in a different way, warming the skin beneath. Everything is opening. She stretches again, and looks at herself. So pale, except for hands and feet and wrists and ankles. She makes a very thin mattress of her clothes, laying it right on top of the pumice pebbles and she lies down on top of it. She’s not wearing a stitch.

  She thinks of the native women she used to see on the Navigator Islands, barkcloth mats wrapped like long skirts around their waists, but above that quite bare, except for a necklace, because nobody has yet told them nakedness is not allowed. Breasts flop or swing or point or float. Bare like Eve. Now Lizzie too is bare like Eve, the sun warming her most private skin for the first time in her life. She likes it. She is at liberty.

  Eyes shut, every sensation intensifies. She shifts her legs a fraction, and the movement makes a noise like lips separating from a kiss. Coolness marks the damp spots where her inner thighs were stuck with sweat, and the fine hairs on her arms lift with the faint prickle, as if her body were tickling itself. The island is breathing on her.

  So this is sin. She shifts again, letting the sun fall on her stomach and the dark patch of hair beneath it and her pale thighs, which fall open just a little more. Tiny, unfamiliar darts of sensation zigzag across the surface of her skin, and somewhere deeper, less familiar too. There is a sturdy, sensible, practical part of her which completely understands why you can’t spend all your days like this. Far too distracting and enjoyable. You would never do any work.

  She becomes a drifting cloud, a speck of dust. Floating drowsily, mind light as her limbs, Lizzie has almost forgotten where she is and what she is supposed to be doing. She basks, refusing to think, allowing sensation alone to triumph. Her fingers explore. Lizzie gives herself up to a flow of disconnected thoughts and images – snatches of voice and light and shade and colour, memories muddled with dreams. From time to time, something undefinable traps this stream; she’s held back, momentarily, by an underlying sense of urgency, like a leaf or a stick in water catching briefly on a rock, before being gently tugged away by a stronger, more pleasurable undercurrent. Before she knows what’s happening, she’s gasping.

  The lake looks dark and uninviting when Lizzie staggers to her feet, and she has no idea how late it is. A vaporous wisp, just visible across the water, rises from the cave hidden in the cleft in the rocks above the water, the cave where Lizzie and Ada spent what was nearly their last night on earth. A few weeks later, when they all went swimming together, Pa had gathered all the children round to explain why the lake was always warm, and told them to be sure to stay well away from any caves and craters they might find on the island. ‘Just in case … he’d said, mysteriously.

  Lizzie had kept her eyes on her toes, only glancing once at Ada, trustingly, glad of their secret.

  Perhaps she had trusted Ada too much. She had certainly misjudged her loyalties. Perhaps Ada hadn’t kept the Oven a secret from Albert. Perhaps Pa hadn’t searched hard enough before. Lizzie looks across the lake again, to mark exactly where she had to climb. The steam was gone. Invisible. It always came and went, a moody measure of something far below. What a temperamental, shifty kind of creature this island was, a place where heat lurked unseen under the surface, and contours shifted from one decade to the next, where hot springs rose and vanished, rocks trembled unpredictably and the foul breath of the inner earth found unexpected ways to escape. A land which took in bones and spewed them out again.

  Knee bent like a lonely heron’s, Lizzie shakes out her drawers, and pulls them on one leg at a time, before wriggling into her vest, which she then tucks in. She hesitates before leaving her blouse and tunic and petticoat flattened and crumpled on the stones. Just for once she wants to be able to climb as fast and freely as she dares, no hems or poc
kets to catch on twigs, nothing to trap her knees as she ascends.

  A stupid place to hide, of course, but, as Pa had said months ago, wasn’t that just like Albert? He never did think things through. Lizzie could just see him panicking, terrified Pa would return and discover his disobedience. He’d made a mess of butchering the goat. He’d let another kid wander off. He’d abandoned his duties, and that meant no possibility of escaping punishment. But if he knew about the cave, it might have seemed a good place to hide for a few hours, at least, and maybe Lizzie would find some small clue to prove he’d been there.

  Longer-legged, older, and more experienced, Lizzie no longer has to stretch across awkward gaps, although in places the ledges seem narrower than she remembers. The plants have grown up quickly too, and there are more roots to hang on to, but the mouth of the cleft is also better hidden, and more easily missed. A few heaps of goat droppings, fairly fresh, remind her there’s nowhere these animals don’t venture in search of greenery. Always alert to the panic of trapped beasts hurtling to escape, Lizzie steadies herself in anticipation of a sudden rush of slippery hooves. And then she notices vegetation has been pulled away in places, and now hangs limp and dry.

  33

  AS IT GETS LATER AND LATER, ADA, LIKE ME, BECOMES restless and twitchy.

  ‘Do you know where Lizzie is?’ Sideways like a crab, she asks me this when she comes to collect our fellows’ supper dishes. At once I am on my feet. Five faces stare at me.

  ‘No,’ say I. ‘I know only that she went to fetch oranges. And grapes. I will look for her, if you want me to.’

  ‘I do,’ says she, most firmly. ‘Now.’ Looking only at me. ‘Take the dog, Spy.’

  The dog is not accustomed to my command, and tries to follow her back to the kitchen fire.

  ‘Go on, off you go, good boy, find Lizzie,’ she orders. ‘Go with Kalala.’

  She shoos him off, quietly, not letting her eyes settle on me, uneasy at the attention the animal might draw to us. For some few moments he trots from one to the other of us, checking, wondering, head moving like a somebody watching a throwing competition. I quickly smack my thigh and whistle through my teeth as Mr Peacock does – as Sidney taught me – and soon I am Spy’s master.

  Yet I have no chance of a quiet leave-taking. Questions pursue us. Vilipate first. Of all the four who came here with only our language, Vilipate is the fisherman, a most nimble catcher of English words, which he puts together ever faster.

  ‘Another child gone?’ he asks me.

  Luka catches Ada’s backward glance.

  ‘Does this island eat children?’

  Iakopo questions only with eyebrows, while Pineki – never serious – asks me where my girl is waiting. I kick him, hush the rest and turn my back on all but my brother. This is not the time to bring so many Peacock eyes upon us. I must find Lizzie. Besides, my head is growing large again. I can waste no more time here. I must be fast and fleet of foot, and I must gird up the loins of my mind too. I do not want to be among the trees of the forest when darkness comes, and I know how fast it will fall.

  Solomona walks with me some way, promising me his prayers. But he also presses on me a stick, which I weigh in my hands as I walk.

  ‘Button your shirt,’ he tells me, and slaps my back to push me on my way. ‘God be with you.’

  The dog, Spy, runs ahead – flies ahead – and then worms back to me, begging me to follow faster. At every join and fork, and there are many, he stops. His tongue lolls, and he looks at me sideways. Where now? He does not always like my choices. The main path, I tell him. We should stay on the path that will take us most quickly to the other bay.

  When we pass the turning which now I know will take us to the gully I cannot enter, my head pulses like a jellyfish. I must make it small again, small and solid, so that I can think and see clearly, exactly as I must. The aitu have kept silent ever since I met them at Nightbell Gully. With Lizzie’s help, I have skirted that place since. But still I beg them to leave me be tonight.

  The trees grow thicker, taller. Once I thought this island rich and generous and full of life. I could not help but crumble the soil between my fingers. Dig too far at home, and the rocks resist, breaking your tools, shock-shuddering your arms. The richness here now smells like rottenness.

  I ask the dog. Do you smell decay? What do you dream? I ask him. Can you hear the curses of a one-eyed captain? The dog looks up at me with pity, and trots forward faster.

  I have never used her name out loud before, only in my head, but I trumpet my hands and I call her. Over and over again, I shout ‘Lizzzz-zzzeeeee, Lizzzzz-zzeeee,’ louder and louder each time. A saw’s teeth buzzing back and forth, back and forth, between my ears, against my tongue. But when I let silence in to hear her answer, only the dog’s barks echo.

  At the top of the track that turns towards the lake, Spy lies down with head on paws and will not shift for all my shouting. I whistle and slap my thigh until it stings, again and again, and finally I come back to him, and raise my stick. Though he presses himself into the ground, and whines, he does not move.

  ‘I do not need you,’ I shout at him, walking away. ‘I can find her on my own. I will leave you behind.’

  Ai, ai, ai. I know this is not the truth, and so does he. Only Ada’s fierce eyes keep me walking through this island, and my fears for Lizzie. My head grows and floats and thumps and before my eyes light dances, but I will not let the other voices in.

  I think my path is true. I believe it to be so. It is where she told me she would go. Yet something turns my feet without my granting, and I am walking now on the other side of the mountain, downhill again, towards the lowering sun and towards the lake path and the waiting dog.

  He comes running, low, towards my ankle, and I hop and skip, lest his teeth are bared. He nudges me on, and then runs ahead again, and then spins back and repeats all this until I am at the shore of the dark lake where I dived, and dived again, and dived once more, and Lizzie is lying on the stones, and I drop my stick and run to her.

  No. Not to her.

  I am mistaken.

  Only her empty tunic, dark and creased, and her blouse, both topped with a white garment which should be underneath, which I have seen only hanging on a branch or line before, on washday. Lizzie herself has been sucked away. No. I’m wrong. Foolishness. She has taken herself somewhere. But where? Buttons fly from me as I tear at my shirt, and zigzag towards the lake, over the rasp of light and rolling stones. Before I reach the water, the dog begins to bark again, quick and half triumphant, a multitude of blows which slice the air, bounce from rock to rock, and drive into my heart.

  He vanishes into greenery and shows again at the other side.

  I follow.

  He scrabbles, loping, leaping ledge to ledge. I pursue him up the rock face, past plants pulled from their roots, knocking off rattling stones that bounce below, a slow measure of passing time that tells me I must hurry.

  *

  I duck my head through the arch of the cleft and enter a foul-smelling split in the earth I never knew was there. Blocking my own light, I have to let my eyes remember how to see in darkness, while I crouch down and feel my way forward, shirt flapping. Then I reach her hair, and shoulders white as a shark’s belly. She lies face down.

  The dog barks again, summoning me with a quick dull echo, and Lizzie does not stir. I push the sniffing, nuzzling, poking animal from her head, shove him from us, twice. When I turn her body over, her mouth falls open though her eyes are closed. Then I breathe again, for she is breathing, but this noxious air catches in my nostrils and makes me choke and gasp. So much foulness.

  I turn her over to drag her backwards towards the light. The cave is too low and narrow to lift her, and its rough floor reaches for her skin and clothes as if it would trap her. Small, quick backward steps, one two, one two, scraping to the light, bent-backed, head half turned on twisted neck so I cannot see the hanging shelf of rock that hits it. Eyes scarlet and gold. Shake away p
ain. Keep heaving. Though my load is heavy, my muscles have been strengthened over time by all the trunks and roots and trees that do not want to quit their growing grounds, and pit themselves against me. It is easy to be strong for Lizzie.

  Out in air and light, I spit out the stench, and wipe my mouth, and crouch on the ledge beside her. I am thinking too fast for fear, though I know it is close. I push away the dog, and then let him return, and finally I sit with her head and shoulders across my thighs, not knowing whether to shake or shout or stroke her back to life, and trying all at once. Blue branching lines beneath her skin. Scrapes and grazes on its whiteness where she has fought the enclosing rocks. Her linen marked with mud and maybe blood. But her bony chest is too thin and bare to hide its rise and fall. I know at once she lives.

  I talk to her, nonsense, in English and my own language, and then I start to pray – the Lord’s Prayer first, and then the Shepherd’s Psalm, and when I reach the valley of the shadow of death, I begin to beg the Lord. Make her eyes open. You have it in your power. Prove yourself if you would not have me doubt you. And I remember Solomona, who tells me always I must pray for grace not favour, the grace to submit to His will at all times. The grace to bear life, and death, together.

  Yet finally He hears me. She doubles herself, away from me. I dare not touch her. When she turns back to me she cannot speak; her jaws clatter and click, her throat contorts, and she gags on every syllable. ‘I-I-I-I-I,’ she says, like an animal. Stuck. She looks to the cave and gulps for air and starts again with another sound: ‘He-he-he-he’.

  ‘Tell me,’ I say. Her neck is tight. Her fists two stones. She unlocks her teeth.

  ‘Go-go-go-go-go.’

  Back into the cave? That is where she points, and then pushes me, hard, so I stumble.