The Secret Fate of Mary Watson (19 page)

17TH JUNE 1880

It’s been another week of sulky weather. A blustery wind from the east, rippling the skin of the waves as it tries to push them back to sea.

Every time I look at Bob, I see him through Percy’s eyes. Every time Bob looks at Carrie, I feel sick.

Coming on dusk. Sky coloured like the flesh of an orange, with white streaks of pith. The axe blade lifts, falls, splinters the chunks of mangrove wood. Backlit, Bob’s silhouette has found the hard core of air and is cutting it into stringy pieces. The resin’s molasses-pepper tang all around us.

I’ve deliberately positioned myself on a crate near the house, a few feet away from the chopping block. For want of something to say, I mention that I’ve noticed one of the Kanakas is missing his arm below the elbow.

Bob looks up, sweat on his tortoise-shell forehead. ‘Aye. A slug boat’s often got a stumpy. Tomahawks go astray.’

‘Is that what happened to Porter’s fingers? A loose tomahawk?’

‘Aye, but not on
Isabella
; a boat he used to work on.’

The axe falls again. A piece of sap-bleeding wood ends up six inches from my feet.

‘Watch it.’

I’m kneading bread dough in the bowl between my legs. It’s been oppressive in the gaps between the wind’s tantrums. Strange for the season. The air’s yeast has been rising all afternoon. I punch down the swelling stomach in the bowl. Hear the broken air pockets collapse with a satisfying burp.

Bob picks up another piece of wood and sits it carefully on the block.

‘How do they keep working, these stumpies?’ I ask.

The axe descends. He straightens, just stiffly enough so I know his back is still bothering him. ‘Hands are easy to replace with hooks. Now, an ear or a nose … like Nosy Ned, sliced right off … Ye can’t build a new honker out of spit and bailing wire.’

I roll the worms of dough still clinging to my fingers downwards into the bowl, wipe my hands on my apron and stand. ‘How could you accidentally chop off your own nose, no matter how drunk or stupid you were?’

His head turns briefly towards me. ‘I didn’t say they were by mistake. And I didn’t say they did it themselves.’ The axe comes down on the neck of the wood. ‘We’ll go fishing tomorrow,’ he adds. ‘Come hell or high water.’

‘Who will go with you? Percy? Porter?’

He looks sideways, mistaking my curiosity for anxiety at being left alone. ‘Aye. Porter’s always with me on
Isabella
. Fuller will be taking
Petrel
. Ye’ll be all right. Ah Sam and Ah Leung will be here.’

Dinner’s over. Carrie’s writing a letter home under a lamp in the corner, her tongue peeking from the side of her mouth. Percy’s playing solitaire at the table. Porter’s sewing up a sail, forcing a large needle through a leather brace and into the canvas. Bob’s spent half an hour teaching me the meaning of each flag in the box on Cook’s Look.

‘Now tell me once more,’ he says.

I look over his shoulder and into the dark corner. ‘Red diagonal cross, white background: I’m in trouble; need help. Yellow background, solid black circle: will you be back before nightfall?’

‘How would I answer affirmative?’

‘Blue, red and white stripes.’

‘Negative?’

‘Blue and white checks.’

‘What if we’re on a good patch and are going to stay overnight?’

‘You’ll hoist the blue background with white diagonal cross.’

‘Good.’ Bob pushes back his chair. It scrapes a little cloud of dust from the dirt floor.

Porter glances up from his labours. ‘You’ve got yourself an attentive pupil there, Bob.’

Percy’s hand stills on the cards for a second, then he continues his slow unpeeling.

Carrie dips her fountain pen in the bottle of ink. ‘You won’t have to run up a flag though, will you, Mary?’

‘I hope not.’ I stand up and gather the last of the dinner dishes.

The island outside is unremarkable: a furled flag in its dark box.

The next day, I hear him whistling at first light. Looping the thin filament of sound from one end of the still-dark house to the other. Casting out his net. Finally, I give in to the inevitable and swing my feet over the bed that Percy’s made for Bob and me out of mangrove wood. It’s utilitarian: four posts, and rough slats to rest the mattress on. But it’s better than sleeping on the floor.

I pull myself groggily into routine. Ah Sam’s in the cookhouse, the tea already steaming in pannikins. I yawn as I wander out to take one, and notice the liver spots on the back of his hand. I decide he’s older than I thought initially. Perhaps sixty, but strong and agile nevertheless.

Outside, salt vapour in my nose. A few yellow-breasted sunbirds land to peck with their black beaks the crumbs of damper I threw out for them last night. Bob’s already striding down to the beach. The sun on the water in front of him like a fuzzy layered pearl with a crimson shell around it.

I blink and run fingers through my hair. The sea air has made it coarse and wiry, like the saltbush that grows all over the island. If it weren’t for Carrie — a constant reminder of the beauty I lack — I could abandon vanity altogether in a place like this.

‘No squall today, Ah Sam?’ I ask as he steps out to empty the tea slops.

‘No squall today,’ he says with some authority.

Close to shore,
Isabella
and
Petrel
dip like dancers bowing to each other across the water. The Malo Island Kanakas wade through the shallow swell, carrying out hessian bags to store the slugs. The one-armed man has a tangled lump of shark hooks on
the ends of pieces of weighted lines to drag the filled bags of slugs to the surface. I’d thought, somehow, that these Islanders were mute, not having heard them utter a word. But now they’re talking to each other in their own tongue. Even from sixty yards away, the sound carries. Deep, dry voices, like wagon wheels on a hard-packed road.

Bob’s pushing his legs through the water, heading for
Isabella
. I hear him yell something to Percy who’s walking down towards the beach. The high-pitched squeal of some adjustment on one of the luggers, like a squeaky shoe pulled onto a hard foot. Everywhere, day’s early dazzle throws down its broken pieces of mirror.

Carrie moves up beside me. She looks at the pecking birds half a yard from where we’re standing. ‘We’ll be all alone when they go.’

‘Yes. Just you and your mad sister.’

She hugs herself in her nightdress, her face still crushed with sleep. ‘I’m sorry I said that. Mary?’

‘Hmm.’

‘Did Mama ask you to bring me here?’

I look her in the eye, but briefly. ‘Yes.’

I sip my tea, and taste the metallic edge of overbrewing.

18TH JUNE 1880

When I go to collect the eggs, the coop’s a frenzy of feathers; a churned-up smell of acrid manure and panic.

I call for Ah Sam as he’s passing on his way to dig another nightsoil pit. There’s not much room in the pen; even less when he follows me in, shovel in hand. His body odour mixes with the poultry smells — joss sticks, dried fish. There’s a whiff of human excrement still clinging to the spade. I’m reminded of Bob’s theory that you need an overdeveloped sense of humour and an underdeveloped sense of smell to appreciate the Chinese. As if a slug fisherman is as aromatic as a rose.

I put my head in the nesting box.

‘Careful, maybe snake,’ Ah Sam says.

Not oriental smells now, just stale wet straw and blood. A dead chicken slumped in the corner; one of the ducks next to it, mauled
and lying on its side. Its chest rises and falls erratically under blood-damp feathers.

‘Put it out of its misery,’ I say.

I step back out and let Ah Sam take my place. A single dull thud of the shovel. When he emerges, there’s blood mingling with the other messes on the blade.

‘Lizard?’ The muscles in my arms are quivering.

He nods, then points to a spot in the corner where the wire’s been torn apart. So much for Percy’s reinforcement. My still-irritated palms are sweaty. A hot tide of rage surges in my head.

‘Why didn’t it eat them? Why leave them like that?’

A furrow between Ah Sam’s eyes. ‘You disturb them. Maybe another hole at back. They are hungry for egg first, then meat.’

‘What they’ll get is my new-found rifle skills,’ I say. ‘Check for more holes and throw the carcasses in the nightsoil pit. Oh God, it stinks in here!’

I step under and out of the wire door to take a lungful of fresh air. Now, I can think a little more clearly.

‘They can obviously get through the wire. What’s the best way to stop them, Ah Sam?’

‘They have big claw.’ His hand describes a huge-hooked talon in the air.

I look down at the shovel. ‘Wood. They can’t claw through wood, surely? What about some of those logs Porter floated around from the other side of the island?’

‘They for slug, missy. And they climb up.’

I presume he means the lizards and not the slugs.

‘We’ll tie them together, one on top of the other log-cabin fashion, on the inside of the fence. With the chicken wire on the outside, so that the lizards can’t climb.’

He looks dubious, but the plan makes perfect sense to me. He puts on his hat and his eyes disappear in its shadow. He knows we kill the odd chicken and duck for the table ourselves, and probably wonders what all the fuss is about.

‘It’s my poultry, Ah Sam. I decide when it lives and dies. Not some lizard.’

He nods again, this time with a tad too much tolerance for my liking, as if I’m half-witted and in need of sympathy. ‘Boss not like it, missy.’

He’s right. Bob won’t like it. He’ll do a Scottish reel when he sees his precious smoking logs shoring up my chook pen.

‘I’ll deal with the boss. Well … don’t just stand there like a tin shilling. The new pit can wait. This can’t. Chop, chop. Tell Ah Leung to help you.’

He puts down the shovel with care. Breathes out deeply. When I put my hands belligerently on my hips, he shakes his head, turns, and makes his small, deliberate steps towards the beach.

The sun’s at about four o’clock when Ah Sam yells and I hurry outside. I can’t identify the luggers at this distance, but one tacks towards the island, dark as a kernel against the apricot flesh of sky surrounding it. The mainsail’s paler: bulging with air.
Isabella
.

I grab the apron from the cookhouse. Ah Sam, in the distance, runs towards the boiling tank and kneels to light the wood fire under it. Ah Leung empties a bucket of sea water into it, then hobbles back for more. A rope of seagulls swoop and circle, tying themselves in knots in the air above.

By the time
Isabella
is anchored in shallow water, I’m in the midst of the action. Fire laps the sides of the blackened tank, sending out its tongues of sear.

Three Kanakas, one after the other, jump overboard. Each of them carries a hessian bag of wriggling slugs. They dump them unceremoniously at the water’s edge. Ah Sam drags one over to the tank. Ah Leung pulls a knife from the waistband of his trousers and slits open the loose string stitching at the top of a bag. Then they lift it from the bottom, Ah Sam taking most of the weight, and pour the wriggling contents into the tank.

The smell is the first thing that hits me. Oily sea and hot muscle. The sight is worse: the tortured movements of those fat, bloated bodies. I tell myself that they are simple creatures, that they can’t feel pain. But I don’t quite believe it. Some of them have ejected their internal organs in a mess that floats on the surface in a lumpy white scum. A sour taste rises in my throat. Ah Sam hands me the stirring paddle with a sympathetic look. The heat up close feels like it’s lifting the surface of my skin.

A witch with her cauldron, I stir the horrible porridge. Flame like acid on my ankles. Some of the slugs are three inches long, some almost a foot. Some dark, some mottled. Still others armoured with what look like spines. All of them are hideous.

More bags reach shore. Ah Leung and Ah Sam pour in more live creatures to mix with the dead. A Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Now the sky’s awash with screaming birds and sticky flies. The fire breathes in and out. I would swear it’s far longer than twenty minutes before Bob finally yells at the Aboriginal boys to douse the flames.

The slugs cool in their filthy stew. I leave off stirring, rub the back of my hand across my sweaty forehead. There’s an angled pain between my shoulderblades. A film of filthy ointment coats my skin.

Bob dips a wide, flat strainer into the tank, lifting the cooked
bêches-de-mer
from the water. I watch dully from a distance, sitting on the sand, weighed down with tiredness. All I want is a bath.

Percy’s not yet back with
Petrel
and I’m dreading the sight of his sail. The whole process will have to be repeated.

I catch Porter’s eye as he gathers the discarded hessian bags on the beach, using the fingers remaining on his right hand like pincers. He’s exhausted too. As he bends over, his shoulders seem to fold in on themselves. Wrinkles stack up under his eyes.

‘What happens now?’ I call.

He shuffles slowly over. His shadow blocks the bright flood of colours on the sunset water. ‘They’re gutted and pegged out to dry for a few days. Then they’re taken to racks in the smokehouse and cured.’ He rocks back and forth on his heels as though to unkink a cramp.

‘I know that. I mean, do we have to wait for Percy?’

‘Percy’s onto a good patch over near Eagle Island,’ Porter says. ‘He’s staying out overnight. Should be back about lunchtime tomorrow.’

I move my shoulders around, trying to loosen the tight belt inside them. ‘Thank heavens for that.’

Bob empties another still-steaming scoopful of slugs onto the sand and then runs his knife longitudinally down the bodies. The guts not already ejected in the water are flicked away on the end of his knife, into a flurry of seagull wings and beaks. I watch his surgical strikes. No movement wasted.

The smaller slugs are turned inside out on the sand, held open by a hinge of skin. Charley Sandwich holds down the bigger ones that would tend to curl inwards, while Bob hammers wooden pegs through them to keep them flat. The whole perimeter around the staked slugs will be covered with old sailcloth to keep the birds away.

Already the sky has darkened to blue ink. The trees behind us have put on black overcoats.

‘Why don’t you go and put some dinner on?’ Porter says gently.

Bob looks up from his butchery. ‘Aye, go on. All the men must be fed.’

‘Ah Sam?’

‘I need him and Ah Leung here.’ Bob’s words are curt and brook no argument.

Well, that’s that, then. Not a word of thanks. And how anyone could eat with the stench of slugs all over them is beyond me.

I look at the ocean longingly. Toy with the idea of walking in fully clothed just to feel the cleansing wash of the waves. But in the end, I just stand at the moving white lace on the edge, rubbing sandy palmfuls of cold water up and down my arms.

The sun’s almost gone to bed when Bob and Porter finally come to sit under the rustling pandanus near the house. They shovel in the stew I made from pickled pork, a cabbage and some gnarled carrots Ah Leung dumped on the doorstep a few days ago.

Ah Sam, Ah Leung, the black boys and the Kanakas have already been fed. They lined up earlier for a heaped plate and a torn edge of damper. Carrie took her dinner and scuttled inside, frightened by the big Malo men with their bottomless silence and almost luminescent mahogany skin. I wasn’t scared of them, but fascinated. Handing them the food was the closest I had been. But not close enough, it seemed, to crack their code. Each of them took a plate gently enough, but with no expression. Not so much as a twitch of mouth or eyebrow. Unlike the Chinese, who use their features as a device of concealment, these Islanders, to my eye, seem able to remove themselves altogether
from their circumstances. A poker player would love to own such a face.

While Bob and Porter eat, I watch the Kanakas wander away to their bark humpies down along the beach. The few times I’ve had to brave the outdoor privy at night, ten feet from the house, I’ve seen their fires fifty feet to the north. At first my heart stalled, mistaking them for mainland blacks, until their size gave them away. I’d stood transfixed then. The flames seemed to rise to their chins, the huge halos of their heads floating above.

Bob’s and Porter’s plates are empty and on the ground next to them. They’re having a smoke and swatting mosquitos.

‘Very nice, thank you, Mary.’ Porter sits on the ground with his back to a tree, ankles crossed, relaxed. Almost asleep judging by the hooded droop of his lids.

Bob says nothing, but his medicinal balls talk slowly to each other. He’s brought out the flagon of rum from the house and is drinking straight from the neck, his dirty-nailed thumb in the opening of the handle.

‘Will you kill me a goat, Bob?’ I ask.

I know he’s let loose some goats on one of the small offshore islands. I can’t face the thought of half-rotten salt pork for one more meal.

He puts the flagon down and wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve. ‘I’ll give some thought to it,’ he says. ‘When I’ve nothing else to do.’

The exposed yellow belly of the black snake on the horizon finally rolls over into night. A few high birds in the distance seem motionless.

Porter uncrosses his ankles. Bob offers him the flagon. He takes it, hitches up his belt. ‘I could do it, Bob.’ He lifts the
bottle by his two-fingered hand, supporting it with an open palm and his thumb on the underside, lifts it to his mouth. Swallows. Puts it down again, then wipes his mouth with a none-too-clean handkerchief. ‘The goat, that is.’

‘Compliments on her cooking. Aiming to please. Ye wouldn’t have taken a shine to my wife, would ye?’

I can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

Porter’s face colours to deep plum.

I answer for him. ‘Don’t be a fool.’

Bob catches up with me near the house, half an hour later. I’m emptying the slops bucket. His fingers bite into my shoulder and his scarred face is an inch from mine. Saliva bubbles at the corner of his mouth.

‘Don’t ever call me a fool in front of another man.’

He stinks of slugs and rum, and some red pepper of arousal that makes me want to get as far away from him as I can.

‘I’ve stirred your stinking catch, now leave me in peace.’

‘I’m tellin ye, don’t flirt with him or ye’ll be sorry.’

The scar is in stark relief; a pale fault line in the landscape of his face.

‘Will you beat me up? That sort of sorry?’

His smile is like the knife blade he used on the slugs. ‘Keep pushing and ye’ll find out.’

Carrie wanders into the doorway, backlit by the lamp in the house. ‘What’s going on?’

Bob looks at her for a long, sickening minute. ‘Ye’re a bonny filly. Useless as a kingshood hanging on a mare, but bonny. How did ye end up with such a nag for a sister?’

‘Leave Mary alone.’ Carrie’s voice is surprisingly firm. Her face is pink, her eyes blazing.

I stand between the two of them. Hold her back with one arm. ‘Go away, Bob,’ I say quietly. ‘Before you do damage that can’t be mended.’

‘I’ll second that.’ Porter steps out of the darkness.

Despite his slight build and the fact that he, too, has been drinking, he’s still sober. I see it.

So does Bob. The odds of winning or losing flit across his eyes, apparently falling in Porter’s favour. He glares at me, then staggers drunkenly into the night. The medicinal balls clank unevenly.

I let go of the breath I’ve been holding.