Ecopunk!

by Liz Grzyb

  There were days when he prayed for the trade wind to stir the torpid air, but the only breeze was, of course, outside, and it was blistering, desiccating, as though radiating from the mirage on the horizon that seemed to separate them from the rest of the world. There had been a storm at home and he could not help. He was adrift, marooned, with a pond of fish in a stagnant shed his only anchor.

  Something metallic struck the ground, bounced, rattled. The jarring noise spurred Mautake to his feet. He should’ve been alone here; there was no night shift in this shed, and the security guards didn’t come in, just checked the external doors, when they weren’t patrolling the fence that kept the protesters out.

  He sneaked in the direction of the sound. A drone lay on the floor, lights out, propellers motionless. He considered reporting it, but figured security would already know. He placed it on the edge of one of the garden beds. Maybe it had run out of charge.

  The unmistakable clunk and beep of an airlock opening echoed in the silence. The western freight door, he figured. Ted, coming back? Security, looking for their downed drone, or perhaps coming to move him along? He really shouldn’t have been in here after hours. He stuck his gloves in a nearby garden bed, hoping he’d managed to hide the action from the fixed cameras.

  Hushed voices made Mautake crouch behind a bed of banana trees.

  “What the fuck was that shit?”

  “Decontamination. Stop being a fucking pussy and find where they keep the coffee.”

  The sound of footsteps, tyres, came closer.

  The burring of hair on the back of Mautake’s neck told him something was very wrong; his heart pounded. Through the trunks, he glimpsed three men with a large motorised trolley. One wore a horse mask, another that of a cat, and the third, in a wolf mask, carried a short crowbar.

  “This don’t look like no coffee shed.”

  “Not cocoa, either.”

  “Where the fuck are we?”

  The cat stopped, tilted its head. “Rossco? Can you hear me, cunt? Where the fuck are we?”

  The horse used a remote to stop the trolley, then pointed at the trees. “What are those? They don’t look like coffee plants.”

  The wolf turned to the horse: “They’re bananas, ya dumb shit, but without the bananas. Fuck!” He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his jeans pocket and thrust it at the cat. “Check this. Fuckin’ sucks, not being able to use our phones.”

  Mautake drew out his phone, as quietly as he could, and triggered the alarm. Nothing changed: no sirens, no flashing lights, no blaring voices over the PA. He shadowed the men as they worked their way towards the fish pond, the piece of paper held up in front of them like a GPS. His anxiety rose with every tremulous step. What were the invaders going to do? What was he going to do?

  The cat said, “What the fuck are we gonna do with a banana tree?” He crumpled the sheet of paper. “Rossco swears we’re in the right shed, so his ‘signal’ says.”

  “There’s pineapples. What are they worth?” That sounded like the nasal voice of the horse, muffled behind the mask.

  “Hey, what about fish?”

  The wolf man, Mautake guessed by the voice, said: “We didn’t come here to go fuckin’ fishin’. Where’s the fuckin’ coffee? That’s where the money is. Spread out! Let’s have a proper gander.”

  The man in the horse mask picked up a garden fork from the trolley and walked towards the pond. “Fuck this shit! I’m gonna try to spear me a barra.”

  “Be easier to just let the plug out,” the cat said. “Like shootin fish in a barrel.” He cackled.

  Rage gripped Mautake, as sudden and fierce as the bite of a rokea. At home on the islands, it was well-known among the men who fished out beyond the lagoon that the tababa were cowards. You swam right at a tiger shark, they would leave you alone. Mautake uttered a silent prayer, hoping that these men were tiger sharks and not rokea, and stepped out of cover. “You leave the fish alone!”

  “Who the fuck are you?” the cat asked, still by the trolley.

  Mautake couldn’t see the third man. Damn. He placed himself between the men and the pond, his back to one of the tall regulator boxes.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Neither should you, dreg,” said the horse, hefting his fork. The tines glinted, only a short stab away.

  “Creffo,” the cat said, the word vulgar from behind his mask. “Taking our jobs.”

  “Did you apply?” Mautake stabbed a finger at the man, relishing the rudeness of pointing at a stranger, knowing well enough that Australians didn’t want to work “out west” for so little pay.

  “Apply this,” the third man said, stepping out from behind the regulator, crowbar swinging.

  Tababa were cowards, it was true, but the rokea, they were vicious. You never took a bonito from a rokea once they’d had a taste. Big enough to overturn a canoe, they were the ones that got you.

  * * *

  When Mautake’s vision clears enough for him to get his bearings, he is on one knee, the man with the wolf face looming above, the bar raised.

  Mautake lunges, a weak tackle, and gets slammed in the back by what is likely two elbows. But he drives the wolf man back into the pond wall and over they go, entwined, splashing into the water.

  Strange, he thinks, distantly, that he might drown in the desert.

  * * *

  When the government man in the jobs van at the Cairns camp mentioned Galilee, Mautake was hooked. A new start, the man said, a “garden of Eden” under glass: greenhouses at the fringe of the Queensland outback, hectares and hectares of fruit and vegetables where coal mines once had been, greenhouses each bigger than Pig Island, where he and his sister had swum and fished and hunted cray, a self-sufficient garden, fed by water tanks and artesian bores, recycling its waste into fertiliser and power, supplementing fields of solar panels and wind turbines.

  It was a far cry from tending the little garden at home, paddling out past the reef to fish for bonito and trevally or simply lounging around the lagoon. They were surrounded by rolling plains of crunchy grass and ruddy earth, with listless, drab trees, their leaves hanging down under the weight of the sun. The project site looked like pictures of the moon, with mounds of earth and craters scarred by tyre tracks, and rows of giant, rusting mining machines lined up like an army awaiting deployment. And there were the great hangars of the greenhouses, some just skeletons, others complete, the glint of glass in the burning sunshine as blinding as sunlight on wave tops. Yes, he missed the sea, those cooling waves, the scavenging gulls, fish fresh from the hook or net. But the sea was as much threat as benefactor. The reefs were dead or dying, the fish species different to those of his youth and less plentiful, the birds fewer, the mangroves thinning like an old man’s hair despite attempts to replant them, the coconut palms and breadfruit trees turning brown with salt poison.

  “I’ve seen this place where you are, on the internet,” Grandfather had told him one night over FrigateBird. “It’s a long way from the ocean.”

  “Galilee is far from the sea, it’s true,” Mautake said. “But Australia is one big island.” He laughed, but the chuckle couldn’t hide the fact that, yes, he missed the ocean. “Anyway, Galilee is a today home. We can earn enough here to buy land. Somewhere by the coast, where we can fish.”

  “Can a person have two homes?”

  “The heart is big. Big enough for two homes or even more.”

  The old man wiped his face, revealing age and weariness. “Time is running out, Mautake. Perhaps it’s good you are away from the sea. It isn’t the friend it once was.”

  “It is as it always was.”

  “No, we have angered it. It rises up to punish us for our arrogance.”

  “Our arrogance?”

  “We are being driven from our home, as we were at the beginning, when we were driven from Matang for our disobedience to the wishes of Nakaa.”

  “The pastor wouldn’t like to hear you talking about the old stories.”
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  “Driven out like Adam and Eve, then. Either way, it’s the price of disobedience.”

  “In both stories the people are forced to leave because they have knowledge they weren’t meant to have. But we have been driven out because the I-Matanga had the knowledge and ignored it.”

  “We all ignored it until it was too late.”

  Mautake pursed his lips, swallowed the familiar arguments of blame and lost opportunities. “Is that why you stayed? Some kind of . . . atonement? For the whole world?”

  Grandfather raised a hand, placating. “No, Mautake. I stayed because this is my home and I’m far too old for fresh starts. The sea and I are—were—old friends. I hope it may once again be a friend to you, Grandson.”

  “The ocean’s in my blood. Even here, I feel it. I miss it. And you.”

  “You’re a good boy. We look forward to your return, Mautake. The sons of the islands always come home.”

  True enough, once, when the young men would leave to crew foreign vessels and return wealthy to settle down.

  “But not the daughters,” Mautake said, the undertow of sadness pulling his spirits lower.

  The girls who left to study or seek work, if they found a partner overseas, they would usually go live with them; it was the way of it, for the woman to move to her husband’s kainga. And then there was his sister, who could never come home. God have mercy.

  “No, not the daughters.” Sorrow made a cloud shadow on Grandfather’s face. “Tanoata gave her life so we could make new lives elsewhere. She’d be proud of you, Mautake. We are all proud of you.”

  Saltwater welled in Mautake’s eyes. The talk, with all its familiar concerns and undercurrents, upset him. How could his people survive this far from home, without the rhythms of the islands? Come the day his grandfather didn’t answer, that would be another link to his homeland lost. Home was a memory, and time ate at memory like the sea ate at the sand. What would he be, when there was nothing left but water?

  * * *

  Mautake breaks the surface and draws an urgent, painful breath. Men are shouting. How did they get in here? The site was meant to be secure. Security was “top notch”, they’d been told. So where was it? Why hadn’t the drones, the guards, answered his alarm?

  He finds his feet, hauls himself upright despite the pounding in his head. His waterlogged clothes drag on him like an octopus.

  The man in a horse mask is helping the sputtering wolf man out of the pond.

  “Stay in the water where you belong,” the cat says, punctuating the warning with pokes of the garden fork.

  Mautake gasps for air, his throat burning where he’s coughed up water. Water is in his eyes, up his nose; he stinks of fish. “What do you want?” he asks, stalling for time.

  “I want my country back,” the wolf man says. He’s lost his mask—he isn’t any older than Mautake, his face tanned and cancer scarred, his hair cut short.

  “Fuck! Your mask!” the horse says, and looks towards the ceiling, as though surrounded by drones, which he should be.

  The unmasked man retrieves his crowbar from where it fell and faces Mautake, who takes a step back, well out of reach of both bar or fork.

  “Where’s the coffee, creffo?”

  “Yeah, dreg. Where’s the coffee?” the horse adds, his voice whining like an electric buggy at full throttle. It’d be funny without the menace of the weapons.

  Mautake smiles despite the pain in his head, is rewarded with a look of confusion on the maskless man. He focusses his wavering vision on the man.

  “You’ve got the wrong greenhouse, buraei. Nothing here but fish and pineapples, and the pineapples aren’t even grown.”

  The cat shouts: “Rossco, you fucking useless cunt, this isn’t the coffee shed.”

  “Ask him if the cameras are still blocked,” the wolf man says.

  “Yeah, cams are looping, alarms are locked. Says it’s not his fault, the sheds are identified by numbers, not contents.”

  “Fuckin’ nerd couldn’t find his arse with both hands,” the horse says. “What do we do now?”

  “You, kanaka boy,” the wolf man says. “Take us to the coffee.”

  “I don’t think so, buraei.” Mautake shapes up, doing his best to stop from shaking. Blinking hard, to keep the darkness at bay. “There isn’t any coffee. Those trees only got put in last year. So you can . . . you can fuck off!”

  “This is our country, dreg,” the cat said. “You’re the one should fuck off.”

  “No, I-Matanga took one home from me. You’re not taking this one.”

  “This ain’t your home, creffo. Never will be. Not even if they bury you here.” The wolf man smacks the iron bar into his palm, and the cat laughs, gives a sharp jab of the garden fork.

  “Sleeping with the fishies,” the horse says with a bray of laughter.

  The wolf man hefts the bar like it’s a baseball bat and steps over the rim into the pond. Mautake crouches. It makes sense his last stand will be in the water, that it will claim them all in the end.

  * * *

  He told his sister, “Don’t go.” He wanted it to sound like a command, but it came out more as a plea.

  “Who are you tell me what to do?”

  “I’m your brother.”

  Tanoata raised an eyebrow, smiled. “You aren’t the head of our utu, little brother, not even our mwenga. But don’t worry, I’m not leaving you here to drown.”

  She’d come back from uni on Fiji filled with ideas, her engineering degree forsaken. “We can’t engineer our way out of this one. As the British did with Banaba, now we must do with the rest of the islands. Water tanks and sea walls aren’t going to cut it. The I-Matanga have to pay.”

  She had always been the better storyteller, the better singer. People listened to her when she spoke in the maneaba.

  He tried to distract her, saying, “Hey, remember when we would walk out to Pig Island and catch crayfish?”

  A mistake, as soon as he said it. “Pig Island is gone, little brother. There are no crays.”

  And so she and her “collective” set sail, students mostly, but some families too, to “highlight the cause”. The truth of what happened had never been decided, but, though it had cost Tanoata her life, she had achieved her aim. The sinking of the boat by the Australian Navy ship had caused waves around the world. Australia, under a fresh government, opened its doors.

  But not everyone was happy to say “g’day”.

  * * *

  “What the fuck is going on here?”

  The woman’s voice cuts across the men, freezing them in place.

  Mautake looks past the man with the bar, the man with the fork with his foot poised on the low wall of the pool, as though frightened to get wet, but keen to hurt. Oh no. Not Jess. She has a friend with her, not her boyfriend Mr Steinhardt, but her assistant from the C&C shed the robbers had been looking for. Thank God they’d got the wrong shed.

  “Fuck, fuck,” the guy in the horse mask says.

  “Back off, bitches,” the cat man warns with a poke of his garden fork.

  “They seen my face, man,” the guy with the bar groans.

  “Fuck, fuck,” the horse man says, louder, even more urgently.

  Mautake takes a sloshing step forward. The bar slams into his left arm, knocking him sideways, but he keeps his feet and dives low, shoulder ramming into the guy’s guts. He stumbles, topples, and Mautake and the wolf man go under the water once more.

  When Mautake comes up, breathless, arm numb, barely able to focus his eyes, his opponent is crawling in the pond, feeling for the bar. Jess is wrestling the cat for his garden fork. Her assistant has the horse man on the ground, one foot on his chest, the man’s arm twisted at an angle in her hands.

  The man in the pond stands, dripping water, the bar gleaming like a freshly caught fish.

  “I’m gonna bash your brains out, creffo.”

  Clutching his arm, Mautake manoeuvres, trying to keep out of the man’s range, looking f
or a way to disarm him and not finding any.

  A buzz, like a swarm of bees, grows louder overhead. A drone swoops, like a diving cormorant, from the dark of the ceiling. It hisses as it pulls out of its dive at head height and sweeps between them, heading towards Jess, who has been knocked off her feet, her enemy turning to run.

  Mautake smells something that reminds him of a herb, thyme maybe. His gaze catches that of the wolf man, the two of them shaking off the distraction at the same time as the drone zooms past. He tries to crouch, but his muscles protest, suddenly stiff, as though he’s been standing in the one position for hours. He tries to stand, can barely straighten. His arms are too heavy to lift. His mind feels even further clouded, dull, as though he has just woken. The robbers are also in trouble. Wolf man stands frozen as though on guard, the bar held across his chest; the cat leans against the trolley with one hand on the handle as though about to spew. The women aren’t moving either. Jess has her hand over her mouth and nose, face turned away from the drone hovering above them. Her friend has let the man go, has one hand in her pocket, the other up as though trying to scare the drone away. The man at her feet has crawled not even a body length, now lies unmoving with his head lifted off the floor on crab-like elbows. His mask sits on the top of his head like a second skull, his human face frozen in a rictus of panic.

  Mautake’s breath comes hard. Like he’s drowning. He can’t move a finger, a toe, his head. His unblinking eyes burn. Lights flash red and blue and amber; he hears vehicles.

  Then Ted is spraying an aerosol at his face. The constriction in his chest eases, air rushes into his lungs. His limbs loosen, muscles aching as though with flu. His mind feels foggy.

  Mautake sags and Ted grabs his arm. Agony erupts; Mautake twitches, groans. Ted switches his grip to the other arm and lowers him to the rim of the pond.

  “Take it easy, Wombat. Give it time.”

  Security guards are attaching long restraints to the three boys who have all the co-ordination of newborn calves. Jess’s friend sits sprawled back on her hands, legs out, as though picnicking. A guard is helping Jess walk on wobbly legs towards Mautake and Ted.