Collected Stories (24 page)

These acts were in no way intended to curry favour or gain friendship (in fact they were some sort of substitute for wrath) but they succeeded in spite of that. The islanders took to him: not only was he educated but he was also prepared to work at the nastiest jobs side by side with them, he could tell funny stories, he didn’t flirt with their wives, and he’d negotiated the best damn prawn contracts they’d ever had.

It is doubtful if Vincent noticed this. He was not accustomed to being liked and would have never expected it on Upward Island.

Given his skills, it’s natural enough that he should have been co-opted as an assistant to the council. But that he should be elected formally to the council after only two months is an indication of the popularity he had begun to enjoy. Again, it is doubtful if he saw it.

On the night after his election to the council he sat on the verandah with Solly and looked out at the approaching night, a night that was still foreign to him and full of things he neither liked nor understood.

Solly was a big man. The stomach that bulged beneath his white singlet betrayed his love of beer, just as the muscular forearms attested to his years as a waterside worker. The great muscled calves that protruded from his rolled-up trousers were the legs of a young man, but the creased black face and the curly greying hair betrayed
his age. It was a face that could show, almost simultaneously, the dignity of a judge and the bright-eyed recklessness of a born larrikin.

He sat on the verandah of his high-stilted house, one big blue hand around a beer bottle, the other around a glass which he filled and passed to Vincent. The hand which took the glass was now calloused and tough. The arm, never thick, was now wiry and hard, tattooed with nicks and scratches and dusty with mortar. A flea made its way through the hairs and dust on the arm. Vincent saw it and knocked it off. It wasn’t worth killing them. There were too many.

As the darkness finally shrouded the garden a great clamour began in the hen house.

“Bloody python,” said Solly.

“I’ll go.” Vincent stood up. He didn’t want to go. He hadn’t gone yet, but it was about time he went.

“I’ll go,” Solly picked up a shotgun and walked off into the dark. Vincent sipped his beer and knew that next time he’d have to go.

There was a shot and Solly came back holding the remains of a python in one hand and a dead chicken in the other.

“Too late,” he grinned, “snake got him first.”

He sat down, leaving the dead bird on the floor, and the snake draped across the railing.

“Now you’re on the council,” he said, “we’re going to have to do something to get your hands in shape.”

“Ah, they’re all right. The blisters have all gone.” Vincent wondered what blisters had to do with the council.

“I wasn’t talking about blisters, Mr Economics. I was discussing the matter of your hands.” Solly chuckled. His white teeth flashed in the light from the kitchen window. “You’re going to have to take some medicine.”

Vincent was used to being teased. He had faced poisonous grasshoppers, threatened cyclones and dozens of other tricks they liked to play on him. He didn’t know what this was about, but he’d find out soon enough.

“What medicine is that, Sol?”

“Why,” laughed Solly, “little pills, of course. You need a few little pills now you’re on the council. We can’t have you sitting on the council with the wrong-coloured hands.”

Vincent couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They’d never discussed the blue hands. His mind had been full of it. Not a day had
gone by when the blue hands hadn’t caused him pain. But he had avoided mentioning them for fear of touching so nasty a wound.

“Eupholon?” He said it. The word.

“For a smart boy, you’re very slow. Sure, that’s what they call it.”

Vincent’s scalp prickled. He had said the name. How did he know the name? They knew about him. It was a trap. Now it would be the time for justice to be done. They would force him to take the poison he’d given them.

There was a silence.

“Solly, you know where I worked before?”

“Sure, you was the great Economics man.”

“I mean what company.”

“Sure, you worked for Mr Farrow.” Solly’s voice was calm, but Vincent’s ears were ringing in the silence between the words.

“How you know that, Solly?”

“Oh, you got a lady friend who reckons you’re a bad fella. She wrote us a letter. Three pages. Boy, what you do to her, eh?” He laughed again. “She’s a very angry lady, that one.”

“Anita.”

“I forget her name,” he waved an arm, dismissing it. “Some name like that.”

In the corner of his eye, Vincent saw the headless python twitch.

“That why you want me to take the pills?”

“Christ no.” Solly roared with laughter, a great whooping laugh that slid from a wheezing treble to deepest bass. “Christ no, you crazy bastard.” He stood up and came and sat by Vincent on the step, hugging him. “You crazy Economics bastard, no.” He wiped his eyes with a large blue hand. “Oh shit. You are what they call a one-off model. You know what that means?”

“What?” Vincent was numb, almost beyond speech.

“It means you are fucking unique. I love you.”

Vincent was very confused. He slapped at a few mosquitoes and tried to puzzle it out. Every shred of fact that his life was based on seemed as insubstantial as fairy floss. “You don’t care I sent the pills here?”

“Care!” the laughter came again. “To put it properly to you, we are fucking delighted you sent the pills here. Everything is fine. Why should we be mad with you?”

“The blue hands …”

“You are not only crazy,” said Solly affectionately. “You are also nine-tenths blind. Don’t you notice anything about the blue hands?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re bloody blind. All the best men got blue hands. All the bravest men. We’re bloody proud of these hands. You got blue hands on Upward, Vincent, you got respect. How come you can live here so long and not notice that? We had to beat that damn guard to get these hands, Vincent. When the time came to kick out Farrow, everyone knows who’s got the guts to do it, because we’re the only ones that’s got the hands.”

“So I’ve got to have blue hands, to be on the council?”

“You got it. You got perfect understanding.”

“OK,” Vincent grinned. He felt as light as air. He poured himself another beer. He wanted to get drunk and sing songs. He didn’t dwell on the idea of the blue hands. That was nothing. All he said was, “Where do I get the pills?”

Solly scratched his head. “Well, I suppose there must be some up at the warehouse. You better go up and take a look.”

Vincent started laughing then, laughing with pure joy and relief. The more he thought about it, the funnier it was and the more he laughed. And Solly, sitting beside him, laughed too.

I imagine the pair of them hooting and cackling into the dark tropical night, a dead chicken at their feet, a headless python twitching on the railing. Not surprisingly, they were laughing about different things.

Late the next morning Vincent set off to walk to the warehouse. He felt marvellous. In the kitchen he cut himself some sandwiches and on the dusty road he found a long stick. He walked the three-mile track with a light heart, delighting in the long seas of golden grass, finding beauty in the muddy mangrove shoreline and its heat-hazed horizon.

Vincent in white shorts with his cut lunch and walking stick like a tourist off to visit Greek ruins.

The warehouse shone silver in the harsh midday sun. There was something written on the side. As he came up the last steep slope he finally made it out: someone had painted a blue hand on the longest side of the building and added, for good measure: WARNING — DEATH. He wondered vaguely if this had been the manager’s work.
How gloriously ineffective it had been. What total misunderstanding had been displayed.

He was still a hundred yards from the warehouse when he saw a man, dressed in white shorts like himself, standing at the front of the building.

The man called.

Vincent waved casually and continued on, wondering who it was. The man was white. He had seen no white people until now.

As he walked up the hill, being careful not to slip on the shale which made up the embankment, the man disappeared for a second and then came back with what looked like a rifle. Vincent’s first thought was: a snake, he’s seen a snake. He grasped his stick firmly and walked ahead, his eyes on the ground in front.

So he didn’t see the man lift the rifle to his shoulder and fire.

The bullet hit the ground a yard ahead of him and ricocheted dangerously off the rocks.

Vincent stopped and yelled. The man was a lunatic. The bloody thing had nearly got him. Even as he shouted he saw him raise the rifle again.

This time he felt the wind of the bullet next to his cheek.

He didn’t stay to argue any longer, he turned to run, fell, dropped the sandwiches and stick and slithered belly down over shale for a good twenty feet. When he stood up it was to run.

From the next hill he saw the man with the gun walk down the hill, pick up the sandwiches and slowly saunter back to the warehouse.

Imagine Vincent, cut, bruised, covered in sweat, his eyes wide with outrage and anger as he strode into the Royal Hotel and found Solly at the bar.

“Solly, there’s some crazy bastard at the warehouse. He shot at me. With a fucking rifle.”

“No,” said Solly, his eyes wide.

“Yes,” said Vincent. “The bugger could have killed me.”

They bought drinks for Vincent that night and he finally learned that the guards he had once employed for Farrow were now employed by the council to continue their valuable work. Those with blue hands did not want them devalued.

And Vincent, nursing his bruises at the bar, tried to smile at the
joke. It was not going to be as easy to get his blue hands as he’d thought.

Faced with the terrifying prospect of death or wounding, he began to consider the possibility of blue hands more carefully. Whilst they would give him some prestige on Upward Island, they would make him grotesque anywhere else, of interest only to doctors and laughing schoolchildren on buses. He saw himself in big cities on summer days, wearing white gloves like Mickey Mouse. He saw the embarrassed eyes of people he knew and, he says, my own triumphant face as I revelled in the irony of it: Dr Strangelove with radiation poisoning.

If there had been anywhere left to run to, he would have gone. If there was a job he could have taken, he would have taken it. Even without this, he would have gone, if he’d had the money.

But he had no money. No chance of a job. And he was forced to consider what he would do.

And as he thought about it, lying on his bed, drinking with Solly, nailing down the roof on the schoolhouse, he came to realize that not only couldn’t he leave, he didn’t want to. He came to see that he was liked, respected, even loved. For the first time in his life he considered the possibility of happiness. It was a strange thing for him to look at, and he examined it with wonder.

What was so wrong with Upward Island?

He couldn’t think of anything.

Did he miss the city? Not particularly. Did he miss friends? He didn’t have any. Did he miss success? He had failed. Strangely, he had become somebody: he was Vince, he worked down at the school, he cleaned bricks, he did the prawn contracts.

On the morning of the second day after the shooting he came to the realization that he had no option but to stay. And if he was to stay he had no option but to get his hands the right colour. He looked the prospect of the warehouse in the eye and was filled with terror at what he saw.

Vincent was frightened of snakes, lizards, bats, spiders, scorpions, large ants, and noises in the night he didn’t understand. He used what daylight he could and crept to the point in the track where the warehouse was just visible, then he sat on a rock and waited for darkness.

His face and hands were blackened. His shirt sleeves were long. In his pocket he carried the torch Solly had given him. As the sun set a crow flew across the sky, uttering a cry so forlorn that it struck a chill in Vincent’s heart.

The sky turned from melodramatic red, to grey, and slowly to darkness. He edged painfully up the path convinced he would put his hand on a snake. A rustle in the grass kept him immobile for two minutes. He stared into the darkness with his hair bristling. A toad jumped across his boot and he slipped backwards in fright. He pressed on, crawling. His hand grasped a nettle. A sharp rock pierced his trousers and tore his skin. Tiny pieces of gravel inflicted a hundred minor tortures on his naked hands. A flying fox, its wings as loud as death itself, flew over him on its way to a wild guava bush.

Yet there were few noises loud enough to distract him from his beating heart. It felt as if his head was full of beating blood.

Slowly, very slowly, he edged his way to the warehouse. Once it had been nothing more than a word in a memo, but now it gleamed horribly under a bright moon, the colourless words on its side clearly visible and exactly calculated in their effect.

The guards were well paid and took three shifts. They were established in very good houses, were given three months’ holiday a year and were encouraged to bring their families to Upward. They were stable, serious men, and if they mixed little in the society, they were certainly vital to it.

Tonight it was Van Dogen. They had teased Vincent about this, saying Van Dogen was the best shot of them all.

He could hear Van Dogen above him, walking up and down on the gravel. Once his face flared white from the darkness as he lit a cigarette. Vincent watched the tiny red speck of cigarette as it swung around the building like a deadly firefly.

Now, he made his way slowly to where there was no red dot, to the back of the warehouse where the water tank stood. For here, he knew, was the way to the roof. Onto the wooden stand, then to the tank, a slow dangerous arm lift to the roof. Now he moved on borrowed sandshoes across the vast expanse of metal roof, a loud footstep disguised by the noises caused by the contraction of the metal in the cool night air.