by Graeme Kent
‘You have many admirable qualities, and life around you is seldom dull, Sister Conchita,’ she had told the young nun, her heavily lined face at odds with a slight twinkle in her eye. ‘But if I may say so, you sometimes experience a desire to explore matters that, strictly speaking, are none of your concern. It certainly enlivens whichever mission you happen to be in at the time, but it can have its repercussions among the older and more settled members of our order. Most of them have had enough excitement for one lifetime. Perhaps if you were to spend less time on your self-imposed investigations into the transgressions of others and more on developing the virtues of humility and obedience, it might be the better both for you and for our order as a whole. You are an exceptionally observant young woman. By all means continue to sum us all up, but perhaps it would be wiser to keep your conclusions to yourself.’
‘Yes, Reverend Mother,’ Conchita had replied contritely, resolving yet again to try to make herself a more conforming member of the organisation. ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘As for Marakosi Mission,’ went on the mother superior, ‘it was once a byword for activity in the Roviana Lagoon. Father Karl and the sisters toiled, literally, for many years in the heat of the sun. However, for some time they have withdrawn behind their walls. See if you can reintroduce them to the world around them. It will be good for them—but be tactful!’
It was up the authorities to enquire into the bizarre death of Ed Blamire, decided Sister Conchita. But there were no authorities in the area. She had just been told that Inspector Lammond, the Western District police officer, and his sergeant were enquiring into a crime on the other side of the lagoon. It could be weeks before they returned. In the meantime, who was there to discover the truth? Certainly not her; her natural curiosity had got her into trouble with the islands’ church leaders before, and had even, on one not-to-be-repeated occasion, drawn upon her head the opprobrium of the Bishop himself.
But why had Clark Imison and the other tourists in the rest-house seemed so unconcerned about the death? Or were they unconcerned? They had certainly been arguing about some letters when she had entered the lounge. There was plenty to think about. Fortunately she had time on her hands before she reached her next destination. She set her course for Gizo and gentled her canoe across the lagoon as the sun climbed to its apex in the cloudless sky.
An hour later, she was only four miles from her destination. She was passing one of the many small and apparently uninhabited islands in the lagoon. It was about a hundred yards wide by seventy yards long, with a ring of white sandy beach and a profusion of the spiky green foliage of the tall casuarina trees covering its centre. Beautiful coral shoals surrounded the beach. Frigate birds made languorous circles in the sun. Behind the atoll were several others, equally minute, apparently joined by a coral causeway.
At the sound of her outboard motor, two islanders ran down from the fringe of trees, shouting and gesturing to her across the turquoise water. Instinctively the young nun cut out her engine and headed for the shore. Gradually she drifted closer to the two men waiting on the beach. They were young, fiercely muscled and clad only in loincloths. She could see their dugout canoe already drawn up on the sand. Presumably they had landed on what seemed to be a deserted island to fish from the reefs. Something there had alarmed them greatly.
The two men splashed out into the shallow water and pulled Sister Conchita and her canoe up on to the beach, assisting her out.
‘Quick time,’ urged one of them worriedly. ‘Whitefella, himi sick too much!’
Sister Conchita hurried through the trees. As she moved over the rough scrub underfoot, her brain reacted like a camera, automatically taking snapshots of the bush area. She passed hibiscus bushes with scarlet and white flowers, giant ferns and tiny orchids. Coarse spiky grass grew everywhere to a height of several feet. She noticed one patch, a few yards long, which had been flattened, presumably by the weight of a canoe dragged up from the shore. They crossed several rock pools of rainwater.
The nun followed the men to a clearing among the trees a few yards inland. There the scream of cicadas sounded like humans in pain. The open area seemed to have been used as a camp. A one-man tent was pitched in the centre. There was a scoured petrol can three-quarters full of rainwater. The ashes of a wood fire smouldered close by. She noticed the charred remnants of several gutted small fish discarded among the embers. On the ground lay a long sapling fishing rod.
Sister Conchita hurried over to a sleeping bag outside the tent. A white youth lay inside it. He was perspiring freely and thrashing around, muttering incoherently, in the grip of a fierce hallucination. She heard him say ‘Painim aut! Painim aut!’ and then he was silent. She leant over the boy, wondering if he was dying.
Chapter Six
KELLA STOPPED PADDLING and looked ahead at the ruined logging island of Alvaro rising jaggedly out of the sea ahead of him. This is what suulana ano asa must be like, he thought with a shudder. The notorious bottom of the pool into which the souls of the dead sank was reputed to be a place of fire and torment where unmentionable practices were carried out and the forsaken ghosts of the dead wandered screaming in torment among the fires of the eternally damned.
The last time he had seen Alvaro had been during the war. Then it had been as beautiful as any of the other atolls in the Roviana Lagoon, and it had remained a tranquil haven for its inhabitants throughout the fighting, even if it had lain on a dangerous route, where for the best part of a year Japanese destroyers cut through the surrounding water and Mitsubishi G4M3 bombers soared vengefully overhead, seeking the small scouting American PT boats. The passage of a decade and a half had certainly changed that. Now the island was little more than a tortured scar, suppurating on the surface of the lagoon. The coral reef that had once surrounded it had been torn from the seabed, leaving only a few jagged, blackened stumps. The water surrounding them had been transformed into a slurping cauldron of hollowed-out oil-stained debris and floating mangled logs and rubbish. The narrow strip of beach was little more than a series of dumps for abandoned, rusty machinery cannibalized almost into extinction. Huge patches of discoloured diesel oil mottled the scuffed surface of the sand. Floating in the water in a large wooden pen was the business of the island: piles of logs waiting to be collected and winched aboard by the timber ships when they arrived. On the far side of the pen, a launch bobbed at anchor. Painted in white letters on its side was the inscription Alvaro Logging.
The coastal mangrove swamps with their slender, distorted trees, being of no commercial value, were still in place and continued to ooze stinking mud and thrust their tangled roots grotesquely into the air, like the clutching talons of drowning witches. The mouth of a sluggish river coughed gobbets of red mud into the sea where its banks had been eroded by bulldozers. Smoke drifted over the island from dozens of bush fires lit to clear land in the interior.
Most prominent of all from his vantage point was a glaring white track thirty yards wide made of compacted and rolled lump coral, crawling miles inland through the swamp forest to the hundreds of species of more valuable trees available on the slopes of the mountain in the centre of the island. These were in the process of being uprooted in their hundreds and transported down the slope by the logging company. Large rolls of black plastic sheeting littered the side of the track, ready to be rolled over the surface should the rains come and stop work.
On either side of the path inland from the beach was a contorted assemblage of tin-roofed houses, sheds, tarpaulins and canvas tents erected haphazardly for the workers on the island. To make room for this shanty town, bulldozers and excavators would have torn the topsoil from the ground, uprooted trees and demolished the huts of the islanders who had originally lived there on custom land.
Kella muttered a short prayer to the agal I matakwa, the sea ghosts, for his safe deliverance from his recent journey. From the bottom of the canoe he picked up a coconut that he had found lying on the ground at Munda. He hefted it in his hand and t
hen threw it into the sea behind the dugout as a propitiatory offering to his ancestral sharks that, according to Lau custom, would have accompanied him unseen on this trip so far from his home island.
He steered his canoe into the shallows and dragged it up on the discoloured and pitted beach. He had hired the dugout from Joe Dontate at the Munda rest-house earlier that morning, after negotiating a trip on one of the irregular charter flights linking Honiara with the Western District. He had expected the usual battery of caustic remarks from the one-time boxer. His path had crossed that of the wily and truculent Dontate on a number of occasions, and despite their mutual respect, there was little love lost between them. However, the Western man had seemed too preoccupied with a flock of disorganized and vocally demanding American tourists squawking like demented chickens around him to do more than direct a virulent scowl in the direction of the police sergeant. If he had to spend more than a few days in the lagoon, decided Kella, he would pay an island craftsman five pounds to build him his own small canoe.
He picked up his rucksack from the bows and stood and surveyed the sight before him. Although his face remained impassive, he felt sick. Close up the island seemed in an even worst state than it had done from a distance. He knew that the desecration of the interior rainforest inevitably meant that in addition to erosion, the habitats of hundreds of birds and small animals would have been destroyed, diminishing sources of food for the few remaining indigenous inhabitants. All the available coral had been removed from the reef. If the company wished to drive the track even farther into the bush, it would also be removing all river gravel suitable for bedding rock, thus further poisoning the island’s main drinking water supply. He could see that no efforts had been made at reforestation. Creepers and weeds were smothering any new trees trying to sprout.
There was less noise than Kella had expected. Patched-up tractors, bulldozers and chainsaws all waited beside the track to be moved inland. The area had an oddly unfinished and temporary look. On the edge of the logging camp he could see a 350-horsepower Cummings engine still in its marked containers, and the prefabricated units of a steel barge waiting to be assembled. The whole area was so haphazardly constructed, and with such little regard for hygiene or protection from fire, that Kella instinctively stooped and smeared his arms and legs with mud from the mangrove swamp as some sort of protection against the malarial mosquitoes that he knew instinctively would proliferate viciously in such conditions of neglect.
Two groups of men were standing facing one another in the rough undergrowth at the beginning of the track leading inland between the trees. One of the groups comprised forty or fifty sullen Malaitan men in lap-laps or shorts. The other was made up of a dozen white technicians, probably Australians. With a sinking heart, Kella saw that some of the latter, for the most part weedy specimens, were carrying rifles. To make matters worse, it did not look as if many of them were familiar with the use of the weapons. None of the white men was relishing the situation. Kella had met others like them on the handful of expatriate-owned cattle farms, copra plantations and fish-canning operations among the islands. These were mostly drifters, aimless fugitives from the law and domesticity, possessing minor engineering skills meaning nothing back home in Australia but which were still sufficient to earn them a comfortable living in some Third World countries. For the most part they were unprepossessing physical specimens, but their rudimentary sense of survival, honed in many similar situations across the Pacific, was sufficient for them to know that at this moment they were in danger of being overrun by the incensed Malaitans.
Kella increased his pace towards a big white man wearing unpressed grey trousers and a once white vest, who was standing angrily a little in front of the other expatriates, expostulating with the sullen Malaitans. He was the only whitey in the group making any effort to confront the resentful islanders. He was a ruined avalanche of a man in his forties, some six feet six inches in height and broad-shouldered, but with all his physical attributes beginning to melt and sag downwards. Jowls swung from his chin like wind chimes, and a once impressive chest had slumped obscenely to his stomach. While his body drooped, the big man’s face seemed to have a life of its own and had expanded sideways, although at the same time his features had shrunk to those of a carelessly constructed snowman, with two buttons for eyes, a truncated carrot of a nose and a mouth that was little more than a perfunctory slash. His head was completely bald. He reminded Kella of an extra in an Ed Wood horror movie. He glanced briefly at Kella as the policeman approached him.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded in an Australian accent.
‘I’m Sergeant Kella, British Solomon Islands Police. I’ve come about the vandalism on your station.’
‘I’m Jake Michie, the logging manager,’ said the Australian abstractedly, not taking his eyes from the Malaitans before him. ‘What’s the matter, don’t I deserve a white officer?’
‘Believe me,’ Kella told him, summing up the situation, ‘the last sort of policeman you want now is a white one.’
‘Is that so? Well, black or white, you’ve chosen a bloody bad time to get here. As you may have noticed, I’ve got a bit of a mutiny on my hands at this precise moment in time.’
Kella looked over at the wantoks. They were ominously quiet. If this had been a normal work dispute, the demands, insults and accusations would have been flying through the air by now. But the islanders, most of them young and rope-muscled through years of harsh manual work, were plainly preparing for a fight. These were the itinerant labourers of the islands, with no land of their own at home, a close-knit industrial force that toured the Solomons restlessly, picking up work wherever it could. These Malaitans, and others like them, forced to leave their own overcrowded island, usually toiled hard and uncomplainingly for their meagre pay and uncaring employers. It would have taken an important matter of principle or custom for them to down tools like this. They were plainly disturbed by something that had happened. If they decided to charge, the Australians with firearms might possibly be misguided enough to pluck up enough resolution to shoot. The gods only knew what the consequences would be if that happened.
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Kella.
‘I don’t have any idea. The first thing this morning the bastards refused to go into the bush to saw trees down. They wouldn’t give me any reason.’
‘You probably didn’t ask them in the right way,’ said Kella. ‘Wait here. And tell your men to put their rifles down. If the Malaitans rush you, they won’t get off more than a couple of shots before you’re all overwhelmed.’
Michie hesitated, but nodded. Without another glance at the hapless technicians, Kella walked across the sand-dusted scrub to the labourers. He had been recognized. A murmur of greeting tinged with awe reached him. He had already picked out the probable leader of the Malaitan workers, a slightly older man with greying hair and a steady gaze. He stopped in front of him.
‘Hello,’ he said respectfully in the Lau dialect. ‘My name is—’
‘Everybody knows the aofia,’ said the older man. ‘I am Zoloveke. You are a long way from the artificial islands. Have you come here to do whitey’s work for him?’
These Malaitans were a particularly tough and cynical bunch. Their itinerant lives kept them away from their homes for months and even years at a time. They would treat many of their traditional leaders and authority figures with scepticism, and would not be easy to convince.
‘If you know that I am the aofia, then you will know that my duty is to keep the peace among Malaitans,’ said Kella. ‘That is why I have come to Alvaro, just in time, I think, to see you preparing to chew on rifle bullets. What is the problem? Why haven’t you started work yet? Are you so tired that you have decided to work the white man’s hours?’
The Malaitan snorted contemptuously at the implied jibe. ‘The first work party that left to go into the bush this morning met a kwisi bird,’ he explained. ‘It spoke only once. Do you know what that means?’
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‘Of course,’ said Kella, comprehending the problem with some relief. The matter was serious, but not as grave as he had feared. ‘I may have spent many years away from Malaita at the white man’s schools, but I still remember our customs. Leave this with me.’
He walked back to the big Australian. ‘They have had a custom sign warning them not to work this morning,’ he said.
‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’ exploded the big man. ‘What those kanakas want is a boot up the backside!’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Kella. ‘Those men are Malaitans, the fiercest warriors in the Solomons.’ He raised his voice so that the technicians could hear him.
‘You lay a hand on just one of them, and you and every one of your men will be dead on the beach before the sun rises further over the trees, and I’ll have a hundred forms to fill in afterwards. I doubt if you’re worth it.’
The panic-stricken technicians started muttering. Kella raised his voice to explain. ‘The first Lau party to leave the camp this morning saw a kwisi bird flying towards them. That’s a grey bird about the size of a blackbird. It’s always chattering. But this particular bird cawed only once. That was the sign that worried them. With reason.’
‘What bloody sign?’ asked an exasperated Michie.
‘A single note from a kwisi bird means “No!” or “Turn back!” It’s a warning. In the old headhunting days, if a war party came upon a kwisi bird that spoke only once, they would abandon their expedition, no matter how important it was nor how far from home they might be, and turn back and refuse to fight. That still applies today.’
