Bloodlines Read online

  ‘Hot water?’ says Beth. ‘Drinking water in your taps? No malaria? Typhoid? Yaws?’

  ‘Details, details,’ he says, waving a thick hand through the air. His eyes are bloodshot and he’s got the big purple nose from drink, but Beth can’t help warming to him.

  They eat crab omelette and then Val heads to the bar.

  Beth turns to Bill, asks him why he came to PNG.

  He takes a long drink of his beer. ‘Guess I came up here for adventure,’ he says. ‘She really was the last frontier in those days.’

  ‘Must have been incredible.’

  ‘Specially the Highlands. There was talk of cannibals still, yer know, and head hunters, things like that.’ His breath whistles. ‘When I first arrived I went to a village up near Kundiawa, the most amazing mountains. Impenetrable jungles. These people, in this village, Beth, they’d never seen a white man before, the little kids went running and screaming into the jungle, or rubbed at my arms trying to get the white off.’ His voice is soft now with memory. ‘A bloke could wear what he wanted, drink how much he wanted—not like home. Lots of blokes came here for that. Some folks came because they wanted mini Australia, their nice little suburb repeated. They didn’t last long!’ He takes another sip. ‘Guess others came because they just didn’t fit anywhere else.’

  ‘Like Roo?’ The words spill out, and Beth reddens.

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ he says slowly. ‘You know, we’re only mates—if that’s what you’d call it—because we’re Australians and we’re here. We’d never be mates at home.’ He finishes his beer in three long gulps and places the glass square in front. ‘So why are you here?’ he says.

  Suddenly everything goes quiet. Beth feels her skirt sticking to her legs. ‘For school,’ she says. ‘To help Val.’

  ‘Uhuh,’ he says, but doesn’t look convinced. ‘And what about a fella, Beth? You got a bloke at home? Or here maybe?’ He winks.

  ‘No,’ she says, and drains her wine. ‘To both.’

  ‘Well, just as well. These local blokes up here, they don’t know how to treat their women right—’

  ‘And Australian blokes?’ she asks. ‘Like Roo?’

  ‘Fair point. He’s a bugger to the women orright.’ Bill waits a little, then adds: ‘At least nowdays, if you did want a black man—’

  ‘Which I don’t,’ she says, ‘black or white.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘Or woman. I’m not gay either.’

  He laughs. ‘Well, back then, in the early days, men like Roo had as many girls as they wanted. They could pay the father in rice or pigs. But not you Beth, if you wanted a black man you could be charged. They didn’t like the idea of one of their women with a blackfella.’

  ‘Well, no fear of that then,’ Beth mutters.

  *

  After they’ve all had a swim, Bill declares that these people are the best people on the planet.

  ‘You’re family to them if you do the right thing,’ he says. ‘Wantoks. Do anything for yer.’ He runs the towel over his big belly, dabs under his armpits. ‘Bloody funny though, there was this birthday cake at Lim’s one day in the display case—remember Val? The one that said in bright pink icing: Happy birthday and underneath write from all of us.’

  ‘And what about the time they sold meatless pies at Lim’s?’ Val says. She turns to Beth. ‘There was no meat that day but they made the pies anyway and sold them just the same! A pastry shell warmed up!’

  ‘You know, though,’ says Bill, ‘I came up here thinking I knew more than them, the nationals, I knew best. But the more I’m here, the less I know.’

  ‘That’s life, Bill,’ Val says. ‘Everywhere, I reckon.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He looks out at the waves breaking over the reef, and belches. ‘Whoa, sorry about that. Must have been the omelette!’

  Val ignores him. ‘In one breath you love them and the next you’re screaming with frustration. Like the time I tried to organise an incident report system at school, you know, to record what happens. And one day, I found this girl crying in the library, a gash in her knee, blood dripping on the floor and Patrick Reis was at a computer, proud as anything, saying Misis Val, I am just doing the Incident Report! Perhaps next time, I said, helping the girl up, you could attend to the injuries first!’

  Bill chuckles. ‘We’ve all got a story, Beth, about this place,’ he says. ‘You’ll find yours.’ Then he adds: ‘Or it’ll sure as hell find you.’

  II

  Jim greets everyone as he swaggers easily towards the bar, saying he loves the place all right: the faded glory of the hotel, green paint flaking off the walls. He even loves the stinking dogs with their stretched tits, too lazy to get up from under the hibiscus hedge.

  ‘Ahh Justice, good to see you, friend,’ he says, leaning on the counter.

  ‘Mister Jim. I heard you was coming. You want SP beer?’

  ‘Make it two. This is my new sailing mate.’

  ‘Hello,’ Justice says. ‘You must be the pirate.’

  ‘What? Pirate?’ says Jim. ‘Are you serious? This bloke struggles to kill a fish!’

  Justice smiles. ‘Well, Mister Jim, I come to work this afternoon and that’s what they say. Mister Jim the white man is back in his boat and he’s got a pirate with him.’

  Jim roars with laughter. ‘Well then,’ he says. ‘Justice, meet Pirate.’

  Pirate remembers Jim talking up the cold SP beer they’d soon be murdering at the hotel. The mudcrabs and food markets too. It’s good to be on dry land again, and after months at sea, talking to someone else. Like the kids they met on the way to the hotel, one of them perfectly balanced on a greying dugout, oar trailing in the water, shouting in words Pirate couldn’t understand. The younger boy, sitting in the front, had grabbed the rope on the side of Jim’s yacht, rubbed a hand along the wood, asked where they’d come from. South America, New Zealand, Australia, Bougainville. But Pirate knows he just wants to stay still a bit. Grow a bit. All this time on water, he feels he has shrunk a little.

  He and Jim take their drinks, sit out the back overlooking the jungle.

  ‘You know, I can clear all this up right now,’ Jim says. ‘But Pirate kinda suits you. It’s the long hair—the rebel thing or something.’

  That’s a laugh, Pirate’s thinking. Jim’s in his fifties, been sailing round the world for the last five years, picking up travellers along the way. Before that, he’d been a gold miner in West Africa, a crocodile hunter on the mainland near the West Papuan border.

  ‘Nah, I’m okay with it,’ he says. ‘We’ll only be here for a few weeks anyway. I don’t care what they call me.’

  And he doesn’t. There’s something irresistible about having a new name, his identity unknown, even to himself.

  After they’ve feasted on crabs cooked in coconut and sunk more beers than Pirate cares to count, Jim, off to say hello to old friends, leaves him at the bar.

  ‘You got a Misis?’ Justice asks. He’s wiping the counter with a dirty green towel.

  Pirate laughs. ‘If I did, I’d hardly be here talking to you, Justice!’

  Justice looks confused.

  ‘No,’ Pirate says quickly. ‘I don’t have a wife.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Pirate throws the question back: ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yeah, I have wife. And two small boys. In the village down the highway.’ He points to his right, his dark eyes large and wistful.

  ‘How often do you see them?’

  ‘Mostly one month I see them. I go for a day, maybe two. It is hard with the work. She is with my mother. Sometimes they come to the market.’

  Pirate downs the last of his beer, places the can on the bar and looks around for Jim. ‘That’s a tough gig, man. You miss her?’

  ‘Sometimes yes, sometimes not,’ Justice says. He spits on the counter, rubs at a stain. ‘I like taking the boys fishing.’ He turns and begins wiping the next bench, the towel smearing greasy streaks along the wood. ‘There’s a white woman here,’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘She
’s nice. Long hair like snakes. Works at the mission school. Maybe she be your wife.’

  ‘Nah mate,’ Pirate says. ‘I’m not after a wife.’ He looks up to see Jim pissing in a potted palm. He shakes his head, says goodbye to Justice and walks outside, heading for the dinghy.

  Val likes Fridays best. She marches the students, holding hands, a long python making its way across the road and up the hill to church. As they walk, the teachers reprimand them about their uniforms: You, messy boy, tuck that shirt in! and Those shoes are dirty, little girl! and Where is your face? Pull your hair back. Saint Mary’s students are the only ones on the island who wear a uniform: maroon-and-white checked dresses for girls, black shorts with a maroon shirt for boys. Val sends them home if they don’t have shoes, but she can’t help admiring the way they make do, wearing shoes like flippers, a good three sizes too big, slap-slapping along the cement to class.

  She likes being still and quiet in that big, beautiful church, staring up at black Jesus flying over the altar who, she knows, sees her. Sees Her. The students sit still and silent for over an hour, sometimes even two. Imagine that in Queensland! It’s the staff Val has to worry about, though. More times than she cares to recall she’s had to stand and walk to Mr Reis, gently nudging him awake. Once, before she could get there, he’d rocked forward then backward, cracking his head on the back of the pew. He’d woken up, disoriented, and the students around him had giggled and snickered, wriggling in their seats and whispering. Val had to sit there then, away from her place under the most efficient fan, to settle the Year Sevens and remind them that the Good Lord was watching. Always watching.

  She loves the singing, the students belting out hymns that she learnt at school. ‘Amazing Grace.’ ‘The Lord is My Shepherd.’ Father Aloysius uses prayers and songs in Pidgin and Val finds her feet tapping, her heart full as she stands, surrounded by her black flock, singing up the good word to their God. He’d have to be up there smiling, for sure.

  Val doesn’t teach on Fridays. After morning tea, she stickytapes the Do Not Disturb sign to her door and completes the weekly accounts, arranges staff pay. She gets the old metal box from the safe under her desk and puts the pay in small brown envelopes, like the ones they used in Cairns after communion, collecting for the poor. She always needs a few nips of gin to get her through the task. Nothing outrageous. After lunch, she supervises work parade, the best endeavour she’s witnessed in thirty-seven years of education, black or white. She assigns each year group a cleaning duty. Her favourite job she saves for the older students. They burn rubbish in the old forty-four gallon drums lined up along the back fence: wood, plastic, paper all upended. A big fourteen-year-old strikes a match and the flames jump into life, the rest of the school stopping their jobs to watch, captivated.

  ‘Back to work!’ Val yells, intoxicated by leaping flames and the dense black clouds of smoke. ‘Home time soon!’ Then: ‘Get the bush knives, Abraham, from the garden shed. Ask Moses. Bring five.’

  And Abraham would saunter off around the corner, then return a few minutes later with gleaming knives almost a metre long. She takes a group of them to the jungle further on in the mission and they slash away at the palms and creepers encroaching over the walkway. She imagines what the odd tourist sees when they look down from the church: all these black kids busy in the yard, bent over bush brooms, washing out the toilet blocks, burning rubbish, cleaning the school ute, and she, a small white woman nearing sixty in a navy skirt and pink blouse, a machete in her hand, surrounded by boys with their shirts off, muscles bracing, hacking back jungle in the baking afternoon sun.

  At half past two she gathers the students in rows under the flagpole and provides a summary of the week. When the students sing the national anthem—Shout our name from the mountains to the seas. Papua New Guinea—it makes her heart swell. She loves looking at them, some of the little ones straining when they reach the chorus, and her staff, upright and proud, singing loudly too. She loves the place. She’s been at Saint Mary’s fifteen years and likes to tell the mystified teachers they’ll have to carry me out of here in a box. In her time, she’s overseen the building of the library, the staffroom and two new classrooms. She’d found Mary in the garden shed and had her repaired and painted by Moses—even if her lips are now too full, too red like some Hollywood tart—and the grotto built to house her. The school has extended beyond Year Eight and she dreams, dreams, prays and dreams that one day there will be Year Twelve graduation ceremonies.

  At assembly, the sun beating down, perspiration trickling between her shoulder blades, she presents special awards for good work and model behaviour and, when needed, redresses misdemeanours. Sometimes there’s graffiti in the boys’ toilets—usually about Ruth, only once about herself—or fighting after school or too much noise at lunch time, but truth be told, there are only ever minor transgressions and she loves the kids, the school itself. She feels that it’s expected, this list of wrongdoings; she sees the staff shaking their heads, making tsk tsk sounds, poking the shoulder of a student as she goes through the paltry list, and she’s returned to childhood, taken to confession by her father. She’d had nothing wrong or immoral to declare then either, and often fabricated whole swathes of poor ethical choices: I stole five shillings from Father’s wallet, I ate chocolates from the special box, I swear all the time to myself.

  Val feels like a fool, standing under the national flag, faded as it is, Bird of Paradise flapping, pretending that these good people are bad. And now that Beth’s here, she feels it more acutely. And so, assembly is always cut short and Val ends up leading them in a round of the Rosary, keeping an eye on her silver watch, waiting for the bell at the end of the day. At any rate, she figures, the Good Lord is just what they need before the weekend, when they’re no longer in her care and anything can happen.

  Then it’s down to catch the post in her gleaming white ute, and if the plane’s come in from Moresby, she’ll pick up a copy of The National before heading to The Bilas by four. Pimms or gin. Or both, most likely.

  ‘Dad ... it’s me.’

  Beth can hear rustling as Clem changes the phone to his good ear. ‘Beth? Bethy? How are things, love?’

  ‘Yeah, fine, Dad. How are you?’

  ‘Oh, you know this time of year a man could do with a swimming pool strapped to his back. Still forty-five at six last night. Only got to forty-one today though. A cool change!’ And he’s laughing at the joke he’s been making for years.

  ‘How’s Eva?’ she says.

  ‘Yeah good, love. Good. Up here more than she needs to be, just sniffing round, checking up on me. Dropped over pie for tea. Smithson’s fence still needs fixing. And the old water pump in the far paddock has given up the ghost.’

  His talk rattles her, the ordinariness of it: she could almost be back home. She rests her head against the cool tiles. If she doesn’t stop him soon, she’ll lose her nerve.

  ‘Clem,’ she says. ‘I don’t have much money, the phone will cut out soon. I need ... I need to tell you, Dad, that I’m not coming home.’

  Silence.

  She hurries on. ‘I want to stay a bit longer, that’s all.

  Val says there’s plenty more work and I really like it up here, there’s Lena and Grace and the kids at school and everyone. It won’t be for long. Just a few more months.’

  ‘Right,’ Clem says slowly. ‘You reckon you’ll be away for your birthday, then?’

  ‘Um, yeah, I guess so.’ She suddenly realises she’s never had a birthday away from him.

  ‘Right, love.’

  ‘Well look Dad, I gotta go. This is Lena’s phone, you know, costs a fortune.’

  Nothing.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you.’

  ‘As long as you’re all right, Beth.’

  His voice is quiet, and she softens. ‘Yeah Clem,’ she says. ‘I’m fine. I’m good. It’s just ... I’m not ready to come home yet.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘It’s not enough anymore.’

  The ph
one clicks dead. She puts the handpiece back in its recess. She feels heavy and slow as she walks out the back door to the haus win, where Lena’s slowly flipping a fish, turning the colour of tea from the smoke.

  ‘My sister, susa,’ Lena says, concerned when she sees Beth. ‘Wanem?’

  ‘Clem. My dad,’ Beth says, crouching on the ground. ‘I told him I was staying. And then the phone cut out.’

  ‘He want you home,’ Lena says, swinging the plaitedreed fan through the smoke.

  ‘Yeah. I guess,’ Beth says. ‘But I’m staying, Lena. Too much fish to eat!’

  And Lena’s beautiful fleshy face splits in laughter.

  She talks about family and her home village further south, and Beth’s glad of the distraction. Then their talk shifts to the Year Sevens who are reading Goodnight Mister Tom. Beth’s not sure how she’ll make a novel set in England in World War Two sound engaging for these island kids, but Rotary donated a dogeared set and Val’s determined they be used.

  When Ruth bustles out her back door, calling apinun and waddling off to visit a friend, Beth asks Lena about the tattoos criss-crossing her forehead.

  ‘For headaches,’ she says. She tells Beth that when Ruth was young, her family heated pieces of glass in the sun, held her down and cut the skin, and how the blood leaking out would remove the source of the pain. ‘She got headaches yet, still does,’ Lena adds, shaking her head. A year later, when Ruth was fifteen, they recut the lines and rubbed ash in to darken the marks. ‘For bilas,’ she says, and smiles. ‘Decoration.’

  The day finally softens and clouds stroke the early evening sky. Beth watches as Lena lights a mosquito coil, the thin thread of smoke rising.

  Later, Beth thinks of Clem, alone in the big kitchen on the farm. She thinks of Sam too, wonders where he is living, how he is managing.

  All she knows for now is that it’s easier to keep away.

  Pirate wakes groggy. He can smell oil frying and staggers up on deck to see Jim cooking breakfast.