The Scarlet Macaw

by S. P. Hozy

  Use the money to buy passage on the next ship, and consider it my wedding gift to you. No one will be happier to see you than I (except, of course, Francis Stone!) and we will both see to it that you are happy, comfortable, and above all, safe.

  I promise. In anticipation of seeing you soon, I remain,

  Yours,

  Edward Sutcliffe Moresby

  Annabelle embarked on the P&O steamship Narkunda on February 5, 1924. She had used Sutty’s cheque to pay for her fare, but had debated with herself long and hard before booking passage. Her father’s sister Ethel, herself recently widowed, had come for Christmas and had been persuaded to stay on. Her only child, a son, had taken the Public Services Examination and had been accepted in the British Indian Civil Service. He had left for Bombay in November and Ethel had found the loneliness more than she could bear. Although Annabelle’s father was reluctant to see her go, her aunt had assured her that he would be fine and that she was looking forward to keeping house for him. He was her favourite brother, she said, and it would also help her to have something to do.

  So Annabelle had no more excuses for not going to Singapore, other than the fact that she did not want to go, but she didn’t dare say that to anyone for fear it would get back to Francis. If she hadn’t loved him with all her heart, she might have found a way out of going. Or she might have tried to persuade him to come back to England. But she knew it was his dream to write and, because she had no dream of her own other than to marry Francis and have a family, she could not take away his chance to see it through. They would find a way, as he had said to her so many times. They would be happy.

  The ship was to travel by way of Gibraltar to Port Said and Aden, then on to Bombay, Colombo in Ceylon, Penang Island, and then down the Straits of Malacca to Singapore. It would take about a month to get there and Annabelle fretted that she would be bored and alone the whole time.

  Much to her surprise, the trip turned out to be relatively pleasant. After a few days of nausea that came in waves — a description she came to understand firsthand as she experienced the ship’s rolling beneath her in perfect harmony with the undulating sea — she found her “sea legs” and was able to take walks on the passenger deck and even enjoyed gazing at the stars in the seemingly endless black night sky. Standing on the ship’s deck she could believe that the world was flat, for there was nothing beyond the water and the sky. They came together in the distance like two sheets of paper whose edges were sealed by the unseen hand of God.

  She was seated in the dining room with a couple from Brighton who were doing God’s work in Borneo. They told her about the history of the Anglican Church mission in Brunei and how the “White Rajah” of Brunei, James Brooke, had invited the first Anglican missionaries in 1848.

  “White Rajah?” Annabelle queried. “I must profess my ignorance,” she said. “I know nothing about the history of this part of the world.”

  The Hendersons, a pious young couple who had been married only a few years and who shared a zeal for bringing heathens and cannibals to God, were only too glad to enlighten her.

  “James Brooke,” Harold Henderson explained, “was originally in the Bengal Army attached to the British East India Company in Calcutta. This would have been around 1818 or 1820. After he resigned from the army, he tried his hand at some Far East trading, but by all accounts he didn’t do so well at that. In the 1830s he came into some money — an inheritance from his father — and he bought a ship and sailed for Borneo. Well, when he got there, to a place called Kuching in Sarawak, there was some kind of fighting going on, an uprising against the Sultan by the native Dayaks, who were headhunters and pretty fierce fighters. James Brooke threw in his hand with the Sultan and helped settle things down, and for that, the Sultan made Brooke an official Rajah of Sarawak. Rajah means prince or chief. And he actually ruled the place, too. It wasn’t just an empty title.”

  “My goodness,” said Annabelle, a little breathlessly, “that’s quite a story.” Beryl Henderson, a small woman with thin arms and large hands that reminded Annabelle of a washerwoman’s, was nodding in agreement.

  “Yes,” she said. “Isn’t it? It sounds like something out of Kipling, made up, you know. But it’s all true.”

  Harold, a reedy man with narrow shoulders, a thin neck, and hair the colour of an orange tabby cat said, “Yes, absolutely. Every word of it is true. He ruled as Rajah until he died in the late 1860s, and then his nephews inherited his position. One of them, his great-nephew, actually, Vyner Brooke, is the Rajah as we speak. He has been since his father, the second rajah’s death.”

  “And are there still headhunters and cannibals?” asked Annabelle, wondering how far Borneo was from Singapore.

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact there still are, you know, back in the jungle,” said Harold. “But we’ve been making steady progress over the years, and many of our converts among the Dayaks have themselves taken up the cause and have brought many of their heathen brethren to Jesus.”

  By “we” Annabelle took it to mean that Harold was referring to the Anglican Church, not himself and Beryl. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, although not as glad as she would have been had he told her cannibals no longer existed in that part of the world.

  Beryl picked up the thread of the conversation. “Doing God’s work is not easy,” she said, “but it is rewarding beyond measure. For every soul we are able to bring to Christ, we feel God’s presence become ever stronger. He loves us and protects us from harm. You cannot imagine how grateful we are that He has brought us to this place so we can do His work and spread His word. It is its own blessing.”

  “Indeed it is,” said Harold. “Indeed it is.”

  When she wasn’t talking with the Hendersons, Annabelle found herself observing the social mores aboard ship. There seemed to be a lot of single young women like herself on the way to take up married life with a young man who had served his time either in the civil service or in the commercial service with some trading company or other. Most companies forbade their new employees from marrying during the first — and sometimes even the second — five-year term of employment. It often took eight or ten years for a young man to begin earning a salary large enough to accommodate a wife and family.

  “Bloody unfair, I say,” said Maisie Turner, who was about to celebrate her twenty-ninth birthday. “Why should some rubber company tell me when I can get married?” She and Annabelle had been getting their hair washed in the ship’s beauty parlour and had struck up a conversation. Annabelle thought that Maisie was very attractive for her age, but noticed that there were already little pouches forming under her eyes. She could see a varicose vein snaking down Maisie’s left calf. It does seem unfair, she thought, to make people wait until they’re almost thirty to marry. But she guessed they had their reasons.

  She noticed that there were a lot of handsome unmarried men on the ship, returning from home leave, and Maisie and some of the other girls went dancing every night. There was no shortage of male attention on board the ship. If she had wanted to, Annabelle knew she could probably dance all the way to Singapore, and with a different man every night. But she had no interest in other men, nor did she particularly want to drink cocktails and smoke cigarettes the way Maisie and her chums did. Many nights when she gazed up at the stars, she wished with all her heart that Francis could be there with her. How romantic it all was. In the middle of the ocean you could imagine that time had stopped forever and that the ship would never dock. There might be nothing in the world beyond this ship, and the ship was a tiny speck in a grand universe. What earthly difference does it make, she wondered, if you brought a hundred or a thousand or even ten thousand heathen headhunters to Jesus? What did anything matter in a universe so infinite?

  Chapter Six

  Maris had sent an email to her brother Ray telling him her arrival time and asking him to meet her at Vancouver airport. After nearly twenty-four hours of travelling, she was never so glad to see anyone. He stood head
and shoulders above everybody else, his fierce blue eyes fixed on the automatic doors as they opened and closed, ejecting three or four people at a time, like a giant Pez dispenser. His dark brown hair was almost black and clipped close to his head, but even so, the unruly curls he had always hated could not be tamed. He looked younger than his thirty-five years, maybe because he was so thin, or maybe because he wore a yellow stretched-out T-shirt with a smiley face on it, under a plaid flannel lumberjack shirt whose sleeves ended an inch above his wrists.

  “Ra Baby,” she called as she pushed her luggage cart through the gate. “Am I glad to see you.”

  Ray rolled his eyes. “Are you gonna start that again?”

  “Start what?” she said.

  “You know I hate that name.”

  She laughed and threw her arms around him. “Okay, Ra Baby,” she said, hugging him so tightly he couldn’t escape. “I won’t call you Ra Baby any more. I promise.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “I’m glad to see you haven’t grown up yet, Maris. Because if you grow up, that means I have to grow up, too. And I’m not ready.”

  While Ray went to get the car, Maris thought about what he’d said. Growing up had never been on the agenda while they’d lived on the commune with their mother, Spirit. In fact, the whole idea had been to stay close to the soul of childhood, to embrace innocence, and even to hold on to a kind of unknowing, especially about the outside world. “I want you always to remember how precious and special your life is now,” their mother had said. “Don’t let anyone take that away from you, not your father, not society, not your lovers when you have them, and not your children when you have them. Promise me?”

  Of the three of them, only their sister Terra walked in the shoes of an adult. She had been married for fifteen years to a stockbroker and they had two daughters, Emma and Alison, and a huge, faux-Tudor house with a kitchen that was bigger than Ray’s whole apartment. Terra had opted for the comforts of the conventional life, just as their father had, and who could blame her for that? There were things that Terra never had to worry about in this life. Like who she was, how she was going to pay the rent, whether or not she was doing the right thing. Her parents had named her well. Terra’s feet were firmly planted. She was the least introspective of the three of them and could make a decision without waffling. “The buck stops with Mom,” she always joked about herself. “And Mom always knows best.”

  Ray, on the other hand, was living in a rooming house in East Vancouver. He was unmarried and still lived like a student. When they got to his place it was Maris’s turn to roll her eyes.

  “Ray,” she said, “you’re such a cliché. Look at this place.”

  “What?” said Ray. “This is my home you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, please,” said Maris, shaking her head. “I mean, empty pizza boxes and beer bottles? The unmade bed? And — yuck — green stuff growing in the sink? There’s no way I’m opening that fridge.” She laughed. “I still love you, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with you.”

  They had hauled her suitcase and the trunk Peter had left her up two flights of stairs. All Maris wanted was something to drink and a place to sleep. “Which is my room?” she asked, looking around.

  “Ha ha,” said Ray, “very funny. Since there is only one room, you can either have the pull-out couch with the dirty sheets or the futon on the floor with the sleeping bag.”

  “That’s a tough one,” said Maris. “Uh, can I see the sleeping bag?”

  “As it happens,” he said, “I actually had it cleaned after my last camping trip. But only because I accidentally made my bed on a pile of bear shit that I didn’t see in the dark.”

  “So bears really do shit in the woods?”

  “Yes, indeed they do. Luckily, it was fairly old and fairly dry bear shit, otherwise we might not be talking because I’d be bear shit myself. But I did think it would be a good idea to have the bag cleaned. It was pretty disgusting. I even went for the ‘sanitized’ option, with deadly chemicals.”

  “Hmmm,” mused Maris. “That almost sounds like the grown-up thing to do. But I’m betting Terra would have burned it and bought a new one. That would be the really grown-up thing to do.” They both laughed.

  “Dare I ask if you have anything to drink? I’m dying of thirst.”

  “Well, I have beer … and beer. Which would you like?”

  “Uh … I guess I’ll have a beer. You mean you don’t have any pomegranate juice?”

  He pulled two bottles of beer from the fridge and unscrewed the caps. “If you want pomegranate juice, go stay with Spirit. And if you want Perrier, stay with Terra. I’m a beer and pizza guy right down the line. You will not find a single lentil or a Brussels sprout in this house.”

  “I sure hope you have coffee. I’m going to want some tomorrow, whenever I wake up.”

  “Ah,” he said, “coffee there is. A nice Colombian dark roast, freshly ground today for a French press coffeemaker. My one luxury.”

  “Ooh la la,” said Maris. “I’m impressed.”

  They drank their beer and Maris told him about her flight. She’d had a three-hour layover at Narita airport in Tokyo and hadn’t slept at all. She’d watched three movies and eaten several meals and snacks, all of them tasting the same. Maris had a theory that all airline meals were made out of soybean product, cut into the shapes of various foods, dyed the appropriate colours, and injected with artificial flavours.

  “God, I’m tired,” she said. “What time is it?”

  “It’s 11:00 p.m., Pacific Standard Time,” he answered. “Time for bed.”

  Maris slept until ten the next morning. When she woke up — on the futon, on the floor — the place was miraculously tidy — no pizza boxes, no beer bottles, no old newspapers. Even the stainless steel sink was gleaming. Ray had been to the bakery and bought fresh croissants and cheese Danishes. He was sitting at the table reading the newspaper when she stumbled across the room.

  “Did you do all this for me?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “The fun’s over. Where’s my real brother? Where have you taken him?”

  “Contrary to previously observed and incriminating evidence,” said Ray, “I’m not actually a complete and total slob. I only have occasional lapses. Coffee?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. But let me take a shower first. I feel like I’ve been on a plane for twenty hours. Come to think of it, I have been on a plane for twenty hours. And why did I dream about bears all night?”

  Ray got up to plug in the kettle. “The blue towel is clean,” he said.

  “And sanitized?”

  Ray sighed. “Gee, you’re even funnier than I remember. When are you leaving?”

  She stuck out her tongue. “How about the day you get married?”

  “How about the day you get married?” he retaliated.

  “Touché,” she said. “You’re funnier than I remember.” She closed the bathroom door. “Oh, wait,” she shouted through the door. “I forgot. You’re not my real brother. He’s been kidnapped by aliens.”

  Ray smiled as he measured coffee into the French press. He really had missed her.

  Maris devoured the croissants and Danishes and savoured the coffee. “Mmmmm,” she kept murmuring, until Ray told her to stop.

  “You’re a hummer,” he said. “It’s annoying.”

  “I’m a what?”

  “A hummer. You hum, you know, ‘mmmmm,’ while you eat.”

  She laughed. “You’re kidding. I don’t. Do I?”

  “You do. And it’s not an endearing trait. It’s probably why you don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “We won’t go there.”

  “You’re right. We won’t go there. Not unless you want to talk about your non-existent ‘girlfriend.’”

  “I only have two words on the subject,” he said. “Biological clock.” He put up his hands to stop h
er from responding. “That’s all I’m going to say. End of discussion.”

  She grabbed a section of the newspaper and glared at him. She was definitely not in the mood for this conversation.

  After a few minutes of silence he said, “Do you hear something ticking?”

  “That’s it!” She jumped up and started swatting him with the rolled-up newspaper. “You are such a pig!”

  “Ow! Ow! Ow!” he laughed. “I’m just softening you up for Spirit. You know she’s gonna want to talk about it. She’s on my case all the time. ‘You need to have kids, Ra. They’ll centre you.’ Yeah, I wanna say. Centre me in a deep hole that I can’t climb out of.”

  Maris sat back down. “I know,” she sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want to have kids, it’s just that … well, I’m not sure I want to raise them alone, the way Spirit did. It was rough for her, despite what she says. And I wonder what she might have done with her life if she hadn’t been shackled with us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, as an artist. She’s very creative, you know. Where do you think we get our artistic sense from? Do you think you would have been such a good photographer or I would have been an artist without her encouragement?”

  “I notice you didn’t say ‘good’ artist,” Ray said. “How’s your work going, anyway?”

  “Not so good,” she said. “Ever since Peter died, I haven’t been able to see things in colour, if you know what I mean.”

  Ray pointed to a wall of framed photographs behind him. They were all black and white. “Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean. But is that a bad thing?”