Visitants (21 page)

‘Will you come with us, Osana?’ Mister Cawdor said to me.

‘I would like to stay, taubada,’ I said, ‘with the men. I have goggles. We could hunt for turtles, taubada, in this water.’

‘Good, then,’ Mister Cawdor said. He had not looked at me or at Mister Dalwood or at anything except the trees ahead.

When the dinghy was near the muddy shore nobody moved but the two Dimdims, who were taking off their sandals, and among the trees the headman, the one from the canoe, who had crossed the point to come and wave.

‘Look, taubada,’ I said to Mister Cawdor. ‘Your friend.’

‘Who is my friend?’ Mister Cawdor said; then saw, and stood in the dinghy and called: ‘Keroni–
O
!’

That man Keroni, because Mister Cawdor had remembered his name, was like a madman. He burst out of the leaves and vines, he ran through the water. ‘O, my taubada,’ he was panting. ‘You have come back. O, my friend.’

‘E, I have come back,’ Mister Cawdor said, laughing at him. ‘Just for a little. Soon I must go, my friend.’

‘Come,’ Keroni cried, holding out his arms to Mister Cawdor. ‘I will take you. I will take you.’

‘Thank you,’ Mister Cawdor said, ‘but truly, I can walk to the land.’

‘No,’ Keroni cried, ‘taubada, no. There are stone-fish, taubada. There are sharks, taubada. Taubada, you seize my hand.’

So Mister Cawdor put his hand in Keroni’s hand, I think just for help while he jumped into the water. But Keroni caught him, and stood in the water holding him, like a baby, but as proud as if Mister Cawdor had been a huge bush-pig.

Mister Dalwood was looking amazed. ‘You know that bloke?’ he said.

Mister Cawdor laughed, out of breath, and I think too weak to stop Keroni from doing what he wanted to do with him. ‘Yeah, I know him,’ he said. ‘But he hasn’t done this before. Has he, Osana?’

He looked at me, and suddenly we both understood. Our two faces said: Yes, that is why Keroni would carry a Dimdim through the water. Because those other times it was the sinabada, Missus Cawdor, and Keroni carried her and had a rich reward.

‘I do not know, taubada,’ I said. ‘I forget.’

Already Mister Dalwood was splashing in the sea. The water was as deep as his knees as he ploughed towards the shore. ‘Come, come, come,’ he was saying, in the language. ‘Quick, quick, quick.’ And in English: ‘You pair of goons.’

‘You forget?’ Mister Cawdor said in English to me.

‘I forget everything,’ I said. ‘Now you, taubada.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said, with a still face, and turned his head.

Then he tried to stand in the water, but the headman still clung to him, muttering, and so he said: ‘Good, then, let us go,’ and he and Keroni went away through the narrow gap of sea, and into the green shadow where Mister Dalwood was waiting.

And I thought: In this house there is peace. It was a house that nobody lived in, except the Government now and then, stopping off from a work-boat bound elsewhere. But they kept it in good repair, for the children to play in, perhaps, and the women to sit on rainy days making skirts or mats, looking out over the sea. The men mended the thatch, and the women and children came together under it. The great planks of the floor, hewn up in the coral ridge jungle, were polished by their sandy feet and their thighs and the sweat of their palms.

When we came across the strait from Vaimuna the women were already running to the house with sleeping-mats in rolls on their heads. They had carpeted the veranda for us by the time we reached the steps, and were crouched in the sand below, keeping their heads lower than ours, but nodding and beaming.

So we climbed the steps and sat down on the mats, enthroned at dead centre of that sandy spit, with the houses in a semi-circle behind us, and the cliff and the forest further back, the sea on either side, and ahead the strait and the Vaimuna jungle.

‘It’s quiet,’ I said, after a while. We were sitting cross-legged, looking down from a height on the Vilakota people, who squatted in the sand with their faces turned up to us. They were smiling, but they said nothing. They were quieter than the palms in the air behind and above.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d like to spend a week or two here.’ He was watching the headman’s wife come slowly up the stairs, and smiled at her as if they’d known each other a long time, but didn’t speak. He just watched her hands, setting down a sort of carved oval tray in front of us, and pouring something hot and colourless out of a cheap enamel teapot into two tin cups.

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘How did she come by a teapot?’

But he wouldn’t break the silence on my account. He lifted the cup and tasted it, while the woman studied his face. He said to her: ‘Our very great thanks,’ seriously, and she smiled, seriously, and edged away down the steps, with her back bowed and her head lower than ours.

I took the other cup and tasted. ‘It’s hot water,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s a flavour in it.’ And he went on sipping, gazing at the sea.

So I tried again, and did find in it, that time, something a bit sweet, a bit perfumed, maybe flowers or leaves, but faint, and hard to pin down.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘you could have a week or two here by yourself, if you wanted.’

‘Not just yet,’ he said. ‘But I will take a break, at Christmas. I’ll go to Jack Manson.’

‘Who’s that?’ I said. Because he had always seemed to have no friends, and nobody wrote to him: from embarrassment, it could have been.

‘A bloke who came up here when I did,’ he said. ‘He’s at Vuna, not far away. He’s got a wife who was a nurse, and she can cook.’

‘At last you’re talking sense,’ I said.

‘It’s the nagging,’ he said. ‘It’s worn me down.’

All the time he had been watching the jungle on the other shore, and I turned my head to see what he saw. On the lagoon beach, hidden by the soggy undergrowth, someone had lit a fire and the smoke was rising, a little darker than the grey-white sky.

‘What is it,’ I asked him, ‘a signal?’

‘No,’ he said, still sipping at that petal-tea or whatever it was. ‘They’ve got their turtle.’

‘Oh God, no,’ I said. ‘No. I’m going to stop them.’

‘You’re not,’ he said.

‘Well, make them kill it, anyway. You know they’ll be cooking the poor bloody thing alive.’

And they cry, I was thinking, while I took my shirt off. Someone told me that. They cry like babies.

‘Tim,’ he said, ‘you can’t swim that. You’ll be lost off the map, and then what will your hulking great brothers do to me?’

But I was already going down the steps, and muttered back at him: ‘I’ll find out if I can swim it.’

‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘And what about the other turtles?’

‘
What
other turtles?’ I said.

‘All of them,’ he said. ‘All the turtles in the Pacific.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘up your sweet reason.’ And I walked on, over the sand and up to my knees in the sea.

Then I knew, of course, that he was right. Between the two islands there was something like a canyon, and the tide-rip would have got hold of me and swept me far out, past the reefs of Vaimuna, where the bright white reef-herons were standing like the wreck of a fence. I knew he was right, because I remembered that bit of a rock-islet we’d seen from the
Igau
, with one little tree on it heavy with sea-birds’ nests, and the sharks jumping out of the water and snapping.

So I stood where I’d stopped, staring at Keroni’s canoe on the other side, which was empty because Keroni was enjoying the barbecue too, and I waited for a shout to let me down easy.

But there wasn’t a shout, only a whisper. Keroni’s wife, squatting at the edge of the water, was breathing: ‘Taubada, taubada,’ and pointing back towards the resthouse, towards him, meaning that I was ordered home.

Slowly I turned to face him, and suddenly it struck me how extraordinary it was, that geometrical arrangement that put him at the centre of the world.

Between me and the resthouse was a semi-circle of people, their brown backs towards me. Behind the resthouse was an equal semi-circle of houses, rain-stained grey-brown. The houses followed the contour of the crescent of grey cliff, which was outlined against the sky with a crescent of forest.

The resthouse stood on stilts at an equal distance from two seas. On the right the water was dark and swelling, on the left flat and green. The open veranda of the resthouse was square, and was covered exactly with matting. At the centre of the matting Misa Kodo sat, cross-legged in white clothes, looking out.

I thought: Yes, that is what a king would look like. Not like Mak. Not like Dipapa, even. But remote like that. Alien like that. Now he looks like he must feel.

When I came back to Wayouyo that first night I looked down from a high point on the path and saw a glow like a fire far away near the stones. I could not think what the fire might be, because all the bushes were still dripping with the rain, but I did not think it would be anything else but a fire.

My aunt was surprised when I scratched on her house-wall and hissed and called to her. I called: ‘It is I, Saliba,’ and heard her muttering inside: ‘Salib’, Salib’,’ as if she did not believe. But soon she came to the doorway, and I said: ‘Aunt, I have come back to Wayouyo, I will stay here a while, I have quarrelled with Misa Makadoneli.’ So then she made kind noises, and led me into her house, and I lay down and slept where I used to sleep when I was small.

But the night was very unquiet, the rain was rough in the trees, and there were other sounds. Once I heard men’s voices shouting, a long way off, and later men’s feet running on the path. Then my aunt’s husband came in, dripping with wet, and stumbled over my legs in the dark. ‘
Avae
’?’ he cried out, and my aunt said, with sleep in her voice: ‘It is Salib’, she will stay with us.’ ‘All right,’ he said, and groped his way towards his sleeping-mat and lay down. But he did not sleep for a long time, I heard that. Through all the sounds of the wind and rain I heard him lying there, awake.

The first sign of activities near the stones was seen by SALIBA when she returned to Wayouyo from Mr MacDonnell’s house in the early hours of October 30th. She reports having seen a ‘fire’, or ‘lights’. This is not confirmed by any other witness, but she happens to have been alone, very late, at one of the few points of the island from which the area of the stones is visible from a distance. Her aunt’s husband, TOBEBA’I, and the VC, BOITOKU, both deny having been there. So do all other Wayouyo males.

On the following day, SALIBA was bringing her aunt’s water-bottles from the cave when she met BENONI on the path. They talked of her presence in the village, which she said was due to a misunderstanding with people in Mr MacDonnell’s house. Then she asked him if he knew the reason for the noises in the night, mentioning that she had heard men running and shouting, and that her aunt had heard a conch being blown. She said that several women had heard these sounds and had been discussing them in the water-cave, and that they were ‘afraid of what the men will do’.

Since his quarrel with DIPAPA, who disinherited him for alleged adultery and never formally re-instated him, BENONI has lived in the Mwamwada hamlet of Wayouyo. When METUSELA arrived in the village, DIPAPA gave him BENONI’s former house in the chief’s hamlet. This action caused something of a sensation in Wayouyo, and led to resentment and suspicion on the part of BENONI and his supporters, directed both at METUSELA (whom many described as ‘a deformity’) and at DIPAPA himself.

From his house in the Mwamwada hamlet it would not have been possible for BENONI to hear the sounds described by SALIBA, since Mwamwada is removed from the chief’s hamlet and from all the main paths. During that day, however, he had noticed a change in the attitude of some of the men towards himself. They were, he says, ‘whispering together’ and ‘turning away from me’. He also had the impression that ‘SALIBA was warning me’.

SALIBA says that she had no such intention, that she assumed that BENONI would have been involved in any activity of the men, and was simply curious to see his reaction to her remarks. She was surprised that he seemed ‘very angry’. When she reached her aunt’s house, she noticed that he was walking towards the chief’s hamlet. She called out: ‘Where are you going?’ (a sort of politeness here) and he replied: ‘You will see, I will stop all the noises in the night.’

All his women were gone from their houses, to the gardens or to fetch water from the cave. The door of Metusela’s house, that used to be mine, was fastened shut. There was nobody left but the old man, my uncle, like a roll of matting on the shaded platform in front of his house. He lay with his head in the curve of his ebony pillow, held up by the arms of little ebony men, his hands, on the mat, open like spiders, as if they were waiting for something alive to fall from the thatch.

I thought that he was deep asleep, as I might have been myself on a day like that, with the still heat and the white sky, and the smoke of the cooking-fires climbing straight up without a stir. But as I came close his eyelids quivered, and his eyes opened and were staring at me, cloudy and bright.

‘Are you well?’ I said.

For a long time he looked at me, he thought about me, before his face moved. Because he was old, so old that nobody could remember his childhood, his mouth had grown thin, and like rubber. When he spoke, all his skin stretched, and his whole face was different, more smooth.

‘I am sick, a little,’ he said. ‘I am very old.’

‘Sleep, then,’ I said. ‘I will go.’

But I did not mean to go, and he knew it. And at last he said: ‘What is your wish?’

‘My uncle,’ I said, ‘the women are talking.’

‘Truly?’ he said, and he almost laughed, meaning that I was a fool, that the women were always talking.

‘Of sounds in the night,’ I said. ‘Men running and shouting. One heard a conch.’

‘I heard nothing,’ he said. ‘Only the rain.’

‘Myself,’ I said, ‘I heard nothing. But today men are talking about something. I see them muttering together.’