The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (7 page)

Beatrice. Would you be mine? My wife. Forever and ever?

Her brave Archie, who had gone all alone to the islands! How happy they would be
with their house on the North Shore and a growing band of children. Of course, she
would have to leave her job at the museum, as all female public servants must do
upon marrying. But Archie would support her, and the children. And she would help
him with his work.

She was desperate to tell someone her good news. The only
person in the whole museum
who seemed to care about her since Archie left was Giles Mordant, the Cockney taxidermy
assistant. A flash dresser, young Mordant possessed a forced sophistication that
sat well with his sallow complexion. He had a way of joking that made Beatrice feel
like a younger sister, though it often seemed to her that she was the only one who
didn't get the joke. Mordant had the kind of face, she decided, that could be either
handsome or viciously ugly, depending on his mood. She was struck, too, by the terrifying
vacancy that could play over his eyes when he felt he was unobserved.

Beatrice ran across Mordant in the great hall, where he was tinkering with an exhibit.
‘Giles, I'm engaged to be married!' she blurted.

He didn't seemed particularly pleased. She showed him Archie's letter.

‘Blimey, Beatrice, what's this?' he asked, picking up the small object folded within
it.

‘Oh, that,' she said, trying to sound knowledgeable. ‘It's a foreskin. Archie says
it's an infallible love charm.'

Mordant was almost choking. ‘Beatrice, you do know what a foreskin is, don't you?'

‘It's the skin of a
fore,'
she lied, desperately trying to hide her ignorance, ‘which
is a kind of frog found in the islands.'

Giles burst into high-pitched laughter, attracting the attention of a group of schoolgirls.
‘Beatrice, that bloody thing is the end of Archibald Meek's cock, his penis, in other
words, which some savage has chopped off with a stone knife!'

The schoolgirls began giggling. One of them mimicked Giles: ‘The end of Archibald
Meek's cock!' This unexpected
announcement caused a vicar, who had been examining
an exhibit of seashells, and an elderly couple standing by the stuffed lion to evacuate
the gallery. Beatrice was convinced that both gave her dirty looks as they fled.
She felt herself turned to stone, unable to shift from the spot.

The schoolgirls stared gleefully at Beatrice, and everyone seemed to be hooting in
derision. All of a sudden it was too much. Beatrice ran to the women's toilet, in
tears. She sat in the cubicle a long time, holding the offending object between the
pages of the letter, as she considered flushing the horrid thing down the pan, along
with Archie's letter. A hard streak of spite arose in her. No, she thought. She would
not flush it. Instead, she would register it in the collection, where future generations
could read of horrid Archibald Meek's perfidy!

Beatrice returned to the anthropology store, filled out a label, and threaded a needle
with a length of cotton. She then stabbed the foreskin savagely, pulled the needle
and thread through, and attached a label to it. Holding it by the label so that it
dangled at her side, she walked to the cabinet where she kept the newly registered
objects and opened a drawer labelled ‘Pacific Islands: Charms and Fetishes'. Archie's
foreskin was slapped down next to a sorcerer's bag filled with bits of bone and claws,
and Beatrice slammed the drawer shut.

She was still standing by the cabinet when Giles Mordant visited. He said he wanted
to apologise to her, and seemed sorry for what he'd done. Could he see the object
again? Beatrice pointed at the drawer. Giles opened it, picked up the foreskin, and
put it in his pocket.

‘I think you should have labelled it “Archie's cock-end: an
exceedingly tiny specimen!”'
he said. ‘Tell Archie-boy when you next write to him that I've got his cock-skin
in my wallet, and, blimey, I intend having some fun with it!'

Chapter 5

By morning tea Archie's office was beginning to feel like a cell in the insane asylum.
It was impossible for him to think. He needed air. Could Beatrice have been frightened
by his uncouth appearance, he wondered? It wouldn't hurt to buy a new suit and get
a haircut. Then he'd go to the Maori's Head for lunch with whatever colleagues he
found there. Perhaps they could shed light on why Beatrice had changed. But first
he needed to set up an experiment—one he had devised as he'd walked away from the
director's office that morning. He went to the collection store and returned with
three bones—the leg bone of a kangaroo, the rib of a dugong and the jawbone of a
human. They had been kept as trophies in native huts, and were stained brown with
smoke. He arranged them on a windowsill in the
anthropology common area, where they
would be exposed to sunlight for several hours each day. Then he placed a piece of
cardboard, on which he had scrawled ‘Do Not Touch', across one end of the bones.

The heat of the midday sun was baking the city. The place was largely deserted, except
in the shadows. Archie, now the very picture of tonsorial and sartorial elegance,
strolled down Bourke Street and into Woolloomooloo. Despite lying between the museum
and the up-market suburb of Potts Point, the dockland area, known locally as ‘the
loo', had earned a reputation as being the most dangerous part of Sydney. The muddle
of narrow lanes between tiny half-derelict terrace houses were the haunt of sailors,
where cheap rum and women were easy to be had. It was far grimier than Archie remembered
it. Tin lean-tos had been set up in every nook and cranny, and the rags that served
as bedding for those sleeping rough lay everywhere.

Prostitution had always flourished, but now there seemed to be a girl loitering in
every doorway. Some, who were not so young, looked so unhappy that Archie decided
they'd been put there by their husbands. And the street urchins! They'd increased
from a smattering to a persistent cloud. One particularly dishevelled lad was carrying
a bowl of soup to a tired-looking whore—a sight that simultaneously touched and revolted
Archie.

‘Mister, got thruppence?' The scrap of a specimen looked up at Archie imploringly.
His shaved and scabby head hadn't seen a mother's care for weeks. Archie handed over
a shilling, and suddenly the street was filled with kids scrambling for the coin.

At the boxing club on Dowling Street there was a commotion. Archie peeked in. Someone
had given two scrawny runts gloves,
and a crowd of men was egging them on as they
clobbered each other. The smaller boxer, who must have been all of eight, already
had a split lip, and tears were welling in his eyes. ‘And they call the Venus Islanders
savages,' Archie muttered as he pushed his way through the crowd, grabbed the larger
boy and walked to the door. ‘Find a bigger kid to pick on,' he shouted. He stopped
in the street and put the boy down. ‘What's your name?' he asked as he untied the
boxing gloves.

‘Louie Lopes,' the boy replied. ‘My mum's dead.'

Archie forked out another bob.

It was only when he got to Dago Joe's fruit barrow, and the old Italian greeted him
as if he'd been gone five days rather than five years, that Archie began to feel
at home. ‘Some lovely bananas today, Mista Mik?' Joe cried.

‘Not today, Joe. Maybe tomorrow. Good to see you again, though!'

‘
Buon giorno
, Mista Mik. Good onions.'

‘Good on you too, Joe.'

Joe had a genius for mishearing the King's English. But he was also the most successful
fruiterer in East Sydney. His barrow was perpetually surrounded by a gaggle of women.
He had once told Archie the secret of his success.

‘Don't serve anybody until there's plenty customer around. Tell the good story, and
make de lady's eye. That way they stick about, and even more come!'

Walking had cleared the cobwebs and given Archie a keen appetite for the cheap and
cheerful kind of counter lunch the Maori's Head offered. He decided that he would
not ask anyone directly about Beatrice. That would be too embarrassing.
But he would
keep his ears open.

The bar was sparsely furnished, dark and cool. White tiles covered the floor and
extended halfway up the walls.

‘Archie Meek? Been a while hasn't it, love? Where'd ya get the tan?'

Nellie had always had a soft spot for him, but before it was because he was a sweet
kid. Now, Archie sensed, she might develop a different kind of appreciation. He was
about to reply when a stentorian voice hailed him from the gloomy interior. It was
Courtenay Dithers.

‘Archibald Meek! Long time no see, old chap! How were the Venus Isles? I hope you
cadged me a bat or two, and some of those giant rats the place is famous for?'

When Archie first arrived at the museum he idolised Dithers. A decade and a half
older than Archie, the curator of mammals carried his Cambridge polish lightly. His
handsome face, with its aquiline nose, looked almost patrician to Archie, while a
tinge of sadness around his dark eyes revealed a deep empathy with the world. After
lunch, Archie would seek Dithers out for a private conversation about Beatrice. He
saw his old friend as an oracle on all things—but especially women. Much later, Archie
would think how strange that was, since Dithers had lived alone as long as he'd known
him.

Archie's eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. Dithers was taking lunch with some colleagues.
Around the table sat the artificer Roger Holdfast and his idiot son Gerald. They
were responsible for constructing exhibits, and mounting specimens within them. Holdfast's
crew cut made his head look like a bristly brush. Below it his eyes were haunted
and his lips set hard and
thin to the point of vanishing. Gerald followed his father
around like a puppy. Just now he was staring at Nellie, open-mouthed, as if she were
dancing the cancan.

Next to Gerald sat Eric Sopwith, the retired curator of molluscs. His watery eyes
and ruddy nose testimony to a long-standing romance with the bottle. And Giles Mordant
was there too, wreathed in the brittle arrogance of a man whose ambitions outreach
his abilities. Mordant had disliked Archie from the moment they met, and the feeling
soon became mutual. You'd never guess from the look of him, Archie thought, that
he made a living stuffing rats and lizards. Such a flash dresser. Everyone said he
had tickets on himself. He even wore those newfangled vulcanised India rubber gloves
as he gutted and skinned.

All those present, except Giles, greeted him warmly.

‘My shout,' said Eric. ‘What'll it be, Archie? Your old favourite, Castlemaine? Bet
it's been a while since you've wet your whistle.'

It had indeed been so long since Archie had drunk anything but yangona that he was
quickly tipsy. Between them, Dithers and Sopwith had seen more Pacific islands than
Archie had had hot breakfasts, and they were soon roaring with laughter at Archie's
accounts of the predicaments he had got himself into. But when it came to the effects
of yangona, Eric became serious. The drink was made from the roots of a shrub, which
were chewed by village virgins and spat into a large wooden bowl. There, the saliva
and juice fermented into a frothy grey liquor. It was a curiously intoxicating drink.

‘I hope ye didn't have too much of that stuff, laddie,' said Eric. ‘It has a strange
effect on the mind. Ye ken that Kidson
went stark raving mad with it in the Feejees?
Became paranoid in the end: swore the Methodists were out to get him.'

At first, Archie had been revolted by the brew. It looked and tasted like old sock
water. But it wasn't possible to live in the Venus Isles without drinking huge quantities
of the stuff. At every hut he'd visited he was required to swill down a half-coconut
shell of it, and when the men told stories at night, the yangona bowl never ceased
doing the rounds. Eventually Archie had become quite fond of it. And he
had
noticed
that the world seemed different after a yangona party.

Giles Mordant sparked up. ‘The Venus Isles have made you quite a man, haven't they,
Archie? Though not a complete man, I suppose. Just a
bit
off, eh, old nakker?'

Mordant's smarmy superiority irritated Archie—it was as if the assistant taxidermist
had something over him. After all, Archie hoped soon to be a curator, and Mordant
was a mere technician. Moreover, he had no idea what Mordant was talking about, and
evidently neither had anybody else. The conversation reverted to Archie's island
adventures.

Dithers asked whether Archie had anywhere to stay. ‘Doss down with me, old chap,
if you like. I've still got the room in Stanley Street, and I'm hoping to go to Africa
to study big cats before too long. Got a grant application in with the National Geographic
Society, and could be away some time. If I get the funding you're welcome to look
after the place while I'm gone.'