Five minutes before race time he hushes the crowd from the back of the ute and delivers a carrot-and-stick pep talk while brandishing a scad of cash in one hand and a shackled felon in the other. He has borrowed the felon from the police lock-up to use as a prop for this speech. Two possibilities confront each man here today, he tells the crowd. Glory (he waggles the cash) or disgrace (he lurches the felon this way and that by an ear). Glory (waggles cash) or disgrace (lurches felon). Having linked sluggards with criminality and thus given himself licence to dream of Pan-Pacific records being smashed, Mister Bruce goes back into the kitchen to flick that switch.
The gun belches a zeppelin of flame and blows scrap into the air, cutting the high-voltage power lines which fall among the Matapit whipping and striking and spitting sparks while the crowd heaves and leaps as one animal to avoid them. Instead of heading off in a single direction, as athletes might at the start of a fun run in New York or Melbourne, the Matupit radiate like light from a star, howling like labradoodles afire, holding their heads in their hands, shedding Nikes in their wake. Some run off the dock into the harbour, some run for the church, some run for the jungle, and some who haven’t mastered the single Nike run widening circles toward a dream of safety. A smell of burning hair hangs on the morning breeze. The felon lies alone in the ash, smoke rising off him.
Nobody has fun. The felon is delivered back to the lock-up hairless, nude and blistered. Laughing at his complete deforestation, the police happily demand an extra carton of beer for his usage. Many of the athletes don’t re-emerge from the jungle for months. From time to time they can be seen peeking from behind trees, wondering how they stand with Mister Bruce.
Electricity is out across New Britain for two weeks. But if this bothers any Department, Bureau, Commission, Agency, Official or Authority then they don’t mention it to Mister Bruce. Half the bigmen of PNG think it a divine right of pharaohs to discharge artillery in the CBD. The other half regard his antics as Acts of God to rank alongside earthquake, lightning, tsunami and volcano. A burden to be borne, like malaria or leprosy.
Finally, two truckloads of linesmen come from the New Britain Electricity Commission to string new power lines. They work fast under the sullen eye of the great gun. When they have finished they stare up at the lines and then stare at Mister Bruce’s gun, which is itself staring angrily at the new power lines. Some of them feel a feeling that is just short of despair and some of them feel a feeling that isn’t.
For his part, the only flaw Mister Bruce can see in what he calls ‘FR1’ is trajectory. So he recalculates a trajectory beneath the new power lines and has Expendable Buloo and a gang of Matupit chock up the rear of the gun on bricks, and when this is done he announces the Second Annual Rabaul Fun Run to a reluctant public with his bullhorn and pamphlets. Safety arrangements are discussed and assurances given, and the prize money from FR1, being unclaimed, is consequently doubled for FR2, which lures many retired athletes from the jungle. As a safety measure Mister Bruce rigs up the extension cord so he can start the race by inserting a male socket into a female socket while standing right alongside the gun, having cleared a firing zone through the crowd.
By the morning of the second run Mister Bruce has surrounded the dangerous failure of the first with so much fanciful justification, people have come to see it as an aberration rather than a template. The Matupit are blaming God for sabotaging Mister Bruce’s meticulously planned event and are keen to admonish Him and absolve Mister Bruce by participating in a triumph. An air of solemnity hangs over the runners. They all want to do their bit to make this a memorable day. A thousand barefoot Matupit men limber and stretch stony-faced, staring off into the distance where fate, Mister Bruce’s congratulations, and two-thousand kina beckon. None have forgotten the proven link between dawdlers and criminals.
Women and children laugh and dance and sing songs. The women, like women everywhere, are not expecting their man to triumph. Dark-skinned schoolboys with blond curls sit astride the gun like parrots on a bough. Utes pull up in front of it and drivers stare down its maw to inspect the coconuts and crockery. People blow horns and set off firecrackers and chant songs while they wait for Mister Bruce to come outside and start the race.
Expendable Buloo wanders, pensive, frowning. He is a youth trusted with much and doesn’t like the air of frivolity among the women and children here today. Upon first adopting Buloo as his manservant, Mister Bruce had told him ‘expendable’ was an Australian word for ‘prince’. Given this honorific Expendable Buloo has understandably come to look down on his people. He has given up betel nut to make his teeth white like Sachin Tendulkar’s. And he, above all others, would hate to see another disaster here today. With his arms folded and his eye sharp for error he wanders the scene, pokes at the bricks with his toes, slaps the mighty barrel of the gun, aligns his gaze along its length to assure himself one more time it is directed under the power lines and through the crowd. Wandering up the side of the gun he discovers the female and male extension sockets lying beside each other in the dust. ‘Harrhh,’ he points at them. Then waggles his forefinger in the air up alongside his head. ‘Mepella onepella goodpella man.’ For here is another of Mister Bruce’s oversights poised to ruin the perfection of the day. He picks up the male and female socket, one in each hand, thins his eyes at them, swivels them, smiles to see the three prongs line up with the three slits, and connects them.
Mister Bruce is sitting in his kitchen marshalling the dregs of his Corn Flakes with a Bowie knife when the gun goes off. Suzie finds him there on his knees with his forehead pressed into the chequerboard lino, asking over and over, ‘How many? How many?’
A question that will be asked for years to come. How many people disappeared in what became known as the Final Annual Rabaul Fun Run? There will be wild speculations. Armageddonesque estimates concocted by Matupit bigmen with an eye for compensation. It’s true some never come home. But how many take this cataclysmic opportunity to head for the hills and start a new life? How many men see a chance to desert ugly wives amid the smoke and confusion? How many unhappy wives, having stared down the jaws of mortality, run, emboldened, for their secret lovers?
No one can say the missing are pulverised and gone forever without Suzie becoming angry and swearing they’re likely-as-not just pacifists who, believing Mister Bruce has declared war on them, paddled to Australia seeking asylum, or took off into the jungle for the duration. And one fine day, when they realise he hasn’t commenced hostilities and has, in any case, got beyond fun runs, they will emerge, giggling, sorrowful, shame-faced, wanting to make amends for having made Mister Bruce look bad.
Mister Bruce doesn’t hold by Suzie’s theory. He takes responsibility for the missing. Sends men to help widows dig gardens. And won’t hear a word against Expendable Buloo. ‘Buloo,’ he says, ‘had aspirations. Witness his teeth. He was no scholar of cannonry, but he was well-meaning. Nowhere near as expendable as advertised – I wish I knew what happened to him.’
Mister Bruce scratches his neck nervously at any given estimate of missing persons, saying, ‘Thirty, you reckon? Thirty’s bad. Still, even the modern Olympiad had teething problems.’
Again, no word of complaint is heard from any Department, Bureau, Commission, Agency, Office or Authority. To the contrary, there is a freeing-up of funds toward Mister Bruce and the tourism board after FR2. It gets to where the government will grant him funding for any damned excitement he can brew up so long as it isn’t a fun run. A five-thousand kina endowment for his Pan-Pacific Shark-Calling Championship. Another ten-thousand for his Festival of Nude Islanders. A four-thousand kina disbursement for his Celebration of the Liberators, with which he tries to lure US veterans back to Rabaul to spray Matupit youths dressed as Jap soldiers with automatic gunfire as they helter-skelter through coconut groves shouting of Hirohito’s deathless glory in pidgin Japanese. All of these are essentially bribes to keep him from fetching his bullhorn out of his shed and announcing FR3.
&nbs
p; Every day he battles the mountain with new schemes. Every day the mountain erases Rabaul’s future and Mister Bruce redraws it again. If the ash won’t stop, then neither will he.
The ash is still falling. But one day, perhaps, when every one except pharaohs and fools has given up hope, Tavurvur will sleep. Then vines will snake across the earth, trees will grow, birds will return carrying their sweet song. Traffic will begin again, a joyful opera of hornblast and fistwave will play on the streets. The city will rise and Americans will come to dive among the splendors of the fish, the reefs and wrecks. Amid the bougainvillea and mango and birdsong, with Redskin and Green Bay fans waddling through markets in running shoes as expensive as Toyotas and swooping on newly hewn artifacts, no one will speak about the time of ash and the things that were done back then.
In this new age of safety and ease, when Rabaul is again the Pearl of the Pacific, long-absent friends will descend like aliens from the mountains, smile sheepishly, embrace their families, and stain each other’s blouses with happy tears. Buloo himself might sidle from the deep bush and stand before his people waiting to be judged, hoping to be loved.
Here is a boar’s left one.
She was a rare jewel and Owen was itching to get his hands on her. Everyone who knew him knew he would have her. But on the day the people of Sydney heard he had paid two hundred pounds for her they could not look each other in the eye. They stared down at the ground and poked at nothings in the dust with their shoes and sighed and mentioned the weather and the bushfires and wool prices, and packed tobacco viciously into their pipes and drew hard on them. Because they knew what would be done to her by Owen. They knew an innocent was to be defiled. They knew it would come to this…
This now. With her shaven and gagged and strapped to a table while Owen, whispering instructions to his manservant, enters her. And learned gentlemen in dark suits lean down from viewing balconies nodding in fascination, murmuring, ‘Remarkable,’ ‘Extraordinary,’ ‘Bravo, Owen.’ As Owen narrates his own assault in his thin voice…
‘I am now dissecting the neurocranium suture for access to the frontal lobe. You will notice, gentlemen, her struggles will diminish dramatically once I have broached it.’ Owen labours with saw and hatchet. ‘The skull … is … inordinately thick. And the frontal lobe is … is, oh yes, most decidedly … as I had thought and predicted, elongated like that of the orang and most dissimilar to that belonging to Archbishop Polding, I would hazard.’ He holds up something resembling wet blubber as peals of laughter ring about the oak panelling of the operating theatre.
Owen bends to his work again; his hands holding scalpel and forceps are out of sight inside the great skull of the gorilla for minutes, and when they emerge they hover twitching with triumph and glory above the now dead beast. ‘Gentlemen,’ his thin voice is even higher than usual with excitement. ‘You first fellows of this colony, this … Sydney … you shall be thankful I finally caught up with this sinister ape here of all places on the globe.’ He gazes up into the viewing balconies to meet his admirers. ‘I have been after the gorilla, as you know. And perhaps, knowing my reputation, you knew I would have it, too. But be happy I caught it here, in your young town. Because it is here in this happy colony I have the great and important duty to pronounce the gorilla has no hippocampus minor …’
Owen waits for this to resonate with his audience and seeing that it doesn’t he goes on. ‘Gentlemen of Sydney, possessing no hippocampus minor the gorilla’s brain cannot be related to that of Man and the wicked fantasy “Evolution” is smashed like a dodo egg. The evolutionists, with their rank notion the ape is our cousin, are wrong.’ Owen bows his head and these first citizens of Sydney cheer and clap at this happy news. ‘Hear, hear, Owen.’ ‘Hear, hear.’ ‘Hallelujah.’ ‘Praise be to God.’ ‘Amen.’
But there is one, a young man, his views on himself marked by ostentatious sideburns and a claret waistcoat, who is not near as impressed by Owen as is the rest of this learned, darkly dressed audience. He has sat becoming more and more agitated as the operation has proceeded, and has for some while been pulling at his waistcoat buttons and pouting scornfully down upon the surgery. On hearing Owen’s announcement of the missing hippocampus minor he can stand it no longer. He rises to his feet and shouts with the voice of an English gentleman, ‘I wonder what a chimpanzee might say gazing upon your brain, Owen. If he mistake it for a pig’s gonad, Sir, and pronounce, “Oh … here is a boar’s left one,” then his anatomical knowledge might be judged equal to your own.’
Amid a wild censure (and some stifled laughter) and much apologising to the visiting English professor by his Sydney hosts, this young man is thrown bodily from the operating theatre into the dust of Pitt Street and his buttocks are footed a dozen times with the pointed Spanish riding boots that are in vogue with the gentry. He is told he is a debauchee for mentioning a pig’s privates in public and a fool for doubting Owen. Furthermore told that a fool should keep silent for his own good. And he does. For the next twenty years.
But right now he picks himself up, and rubbing his poor stomach and his dizzy head and his boot-buggered buttocks he staggers down to The Rocks, gazing all about him in wonder as he goes. For after the hovels of New Zealand, Sydney is a grand vision. Her wide streets are a helter skelter of gigs, landaus, and phaetons driven by liveried servants. After South America, unspeakably uncivilised, this place is all fine horseflesh and grand architecture and the young Englishman tells himself that ancient Rome in all her imperial grandeur would not be ashamed of such a colony, and he thinks it high among the wonders of the world and puts its magnificence down to the force of the parent country. Because here scores of years have wrought what many centuries have failed to achieve in South America. He congratulates himself he is an Englishman, and curses the fact Owen is one as well.
A very famous one. Richard Owen is the scientific man of the hour. A tall striking figure with glittering eyes. The Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Owen stands triumphant as England’s reigning anatomist, dissecting whatever dies at the London Zoo to an audience worthy of Hamlet. He has graced this far-flung colony to collect marsupials for his scalpel, and to conduct a series of lectures on The Immutability of Man. What a stroke of good fortune that he ran into a gorilla here. For, though he would have liked to destroy Evolution before a congregation of dukes, earls, lords and professors in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the gorilla is rare and had to be taken when chance presented.
The young gentleman with the sideburns and claret waistcoat stumbles into the King’s Head Hotel. The bar is dark, unlit, bare boards both floor and walls. On one wall is posted a bill, black ink on yellow canvas, stating:
Wombell’s Travelling Menagerie
Presents
Nusuzu … The Beast
A … Gorilla
The Salacious Black-Skinned Ape
Of Africa
A Truly Barbarous Spectacle Sydney Cove Flat, Friday through Monday Entrance 1 penny. (Strictly No Ladies nor Women nor children nor dogs Admitted)
The young Englishman wonders about the stated barbarity of the spectacle. What sort of goading and hostility must they have subjected this poor animal to in order that she become even remotely barbarous? For he recognises the gorilla as female, and knows her as a herbivore and peaceable.
But it is 1836 and ‘gorilla’ has suddenly become a household word. There is a flood of interest in the new black-skinned ape. Scandalous stories and macabre tales of ferocity and woman-snatching are travelling the colony.
To glimpse any ape in captivity is a thrill. And the East India Company has seized on the public’s fascination and arrived at the Sydney Cove docks with baby chimps and orangs that have been snapped up by zoos. But never a gorilla. No one had ever seen one. Until a year ago. When Wombell’s Travelling Menagerie, which paid top prices at dockside, managed to purchase a young female. And named it Nusuzu.
Wombell’s menagerie has travelled hundreds of miles
over this last year. At its head has marched a smallish brass band of drunkards honking tubas and trumpets scavenged from a Napoleonic battlefield, and behind them three bullocks strung about with bells and hung about with long-haired rugs in order that old, potbellied Wombell (topped with a rug himself) could pass them off as yaks.
Wombell had a close knowledge of suckers, but knew almost nothing of animals. Looking at Nusuzu he supposed her a slavering carnivore and attempted to feed her any and all of his other attractions that expired en route, and cursed her and poked her through the bars with a pointed stick for cantankerously fasting and pig-headedly wasting away when she was his star attraction. He took her for a finicky diva and sautéed numbats for her. It was only when his Siberian timber wolf died and was tossed into Nusuzu’s cage as an irresistible morsel and she began to pick grass seeds from its coat and nibble hungrily at them that Wombell supposed such a devilish-looking beast might possibly be an eater of plants. He began to feed her eucalyptus then, and though she didn’t appear to enjoy it, she ate it and gained condition and began to break a pleasant antiseptic, almost medicinal, wind. Until science, in the form of Owen, came calling with its promissory note written out under the guarantee of the London Zoological Gardens.
‘I will take a rum,’ the young Englishman tells the barman. ‘And you may take that bill down, Sir. The beast will not be appearing. The show cannot go on. She is dissected. Misrepresented. Her hippocampus minor denied.’
‘Ahh, then,’ the barman says. ‘Does Wombell have a lion? Only, I was going to go and see that show. But if his hippo has died and his gorilla is dissected, then, I would need a lion. A bull lion with a ruff. Not a bald-necked bitch lion.’
Pepsi Bears and Other Stories Page 12
