Bloodlines Read online

  She wakes sometime later, too hot and clammy, a hand over her breast, moistness between her legs. It’s deathly quiet outside. So very still. She keeps her eyes closed, imagining someone else’s hand is resting over her. In that moment, she hates herself the most. Sam arching over her, slowly, tenderly kissing her, like some old silent movie.

  *

  ‘Have you seen Delilah’s thumb?’ Beth’s sitting at Val’s kitchen table the day after the storm.

  Val eyes her. ‘I have.’

  ‘Well, what should we do about it?’

  Val puts her coffee cup down. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What?’ Beth says, incredulous. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘We do nothing, Beth. It’s not our job, not our business.’

  ‘But Val, it’s disgusting. It’s infected. And it stinks. Have you smelt it?’

  ‘Shit,’ Val says, then closes her eyes, crosses herself, muttering an apology. ‘It’s worse then.’

  ‘Worse?’

  ‘I saw it a week ago and thought it was mending okay.’

  ‘Well it’s not now. It’s rotting,’ says Beth. ‘What happened anyway?’

  ‘Who knows. A cut that wasn’t bathed. An infected bite. A bug. Sorcery. If you ask the locals they’ll say it’s because she stole something and this is punishment. That’s why Ruth won’t let her out at the moment. She knows people will talk.’ Val takes a bite of her biscuit. ‘I just saw her one day with the noni leaves around it.’

  ‘Do they work?’

  ‘Absolutely. Same as drinking the tea ... I’ve never had malaria. You should try it too. Or eat pawpaw seeds.’ She takes a breath. ‘Beth,’ she says, ‘you can’t ride others people’s horses for them. I know it’s hard. They’ll be using local medicine. Trust me, leave it at that.’

  Later, Beth studies the first aid section of her travel book, reading about infections, syringes and cutting, how to suture a wound. She’d never had stitches herself, but when Eva taught her how to darn, she’d praised Beth for her steady hand.

  Beth knows she could sew skin if she had to.

  *

  Just as Beth’s about to knock, Ruth, dressed for school, is at the door. Beth has the strange sensation she’s been watched coming across the backyard.

  ‘Moning Misis Beth,’ Ruth says. ‘Come in, come.’ She turns sharply. ‘Hariap up, Delilah, make tea.’

  Beth steps inside the spotless kitchen. ‘I just wanted to talk to you,’ she says. ‘About Delilah’s thumb.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, I’m worried about it, Ruth. It looks very bad.’

  Ruth looks sharply at Delilah, who’s standing at the stove. Even from this distance Beth can see the girl’s thumb, rigid and swollen.

  Beth steadies herself against a bench with a box of yam and kaukau on it. ‘If I pay, can I take her to the haus sik?’ she says.

  Delilah swings around, big dark eyes pleading her to stop. Away from the laundry, no cigarette hanging from her mouth, she suddenly looks small. Ruth looks at Beth, to Delilah, then back to Beth.

  ‘For an X-ray, that’s all.’ Beth hears the tremble in her voice.

  ‘No,’ Ruth says finally. ‘Nogat haus sik. Her hand is fine.’

  ‘I know you don’t usually go to hospitals, Ruth, but I think this is serious. If they find there’s no problem, we celebrate.’ She slaps on a smile. ‘Mudcrabs and coconuts for everyone!’

  But Ruth isn’t laughing. ‘Thank you Misis Beth but Delilah is fine. Aren’t you Delilah? X-rays too much money.’

  Beth knows they cost three Australian dollars. Cheaper than a Fremantle coffee. ‘I can pay,’ she says. ‘No problem. Really.’

  But Delilah is saying she is fine, yes Aunty, fine.

  Ruth smiles slyly. ‘See,’ she says. ‘But thank you, Misis Beth, you people are always so good, so kind to us.’

  Shoulders hunched, Beth slinks back across the grass to her house, then thumps up the steps and slams the door behind her.

  *

  In the haus win after dinner, Beth watches Delilah peel back the leaves: dulled olive and spidery now, not the lush green of the tropics they were a week ago. The thin spine of a leaf sticks to skin and, biting her lip, holding her breath, Delilah pulls slowly. Twenty centimetres apart: one white head, one dark crouching over a thumb, swollen and black.

  ‘Just do it quick,’ Beth whispers. ‘You know, like a bandaid. It’ll hurt less.’

  Delilah stops. ‘Bandaid?’ Beth goes to explain but Delilah says: ‘No. Isi isi. I do it slowly.’

  She draws back the last leaf. It sticks to thick dark globs of blood. She winces and Beth steadies her elbow. Delilah keeps tugging at the leaf, and then whimpers.

  ‘The old man in the broken city do this,’ she says.

  ‘Broken city?’

  ‘Behind the mission. They live in houses of tin. No electricity.’

  Underneath the leaf is white like cold mutton fat, a combination of open wound and new skin. And lime powder, Delilah tells her, which the old man blew into the gash before they chanted and whispered and placed the leaves on top, patting them down, signs of the cross. Number One tea and tenkyu tru, thank you very much.

  ‘You okay?’ Beth asks gently.

  ‘Mi orait.’ Delilah closes her eyes and pulls. A green liquid oozes out. In places it is greyish, and has coagulated.

  ‘Misis! Wanem? What is it?’

  With a ball of scrunched-up toilet paper, Beth touches some of the thick gunk. It’s like gristle: solid and thick. It hooks on the paper and gently, gently, she tugs one way, twists the other, trying to break it free. But it’s no use. Beth tries turning the paper again but Delilah gasps, throws back her head to stop the tears.

  ‘We’ll leave it,’ says Beth, touching Delilah on the shoulder. ‘Let’s wrap you up again.’

  Delilah reaches for the leaves on the bench.

  ‘Not those,’ Beth says. ‘I’ll do it tonight, and we’ll go to the hospital tomorrow.’

  ‘No Misis. No haus sik!’

  ‘There’s no other way now. This finger is bad. It’s getting worse. Rotting. Samting kaikai yu.’ Beth knows the Pidgin is wrong but she’s desperate: she doesn’t want Delilah to lose her thumb. ‘They will X-ray it, see if it’s got to the bone,’ she says, standing up. ‘Come on, come to my house, we’ll fix you up there.’

  After the kettle boils, Beth fills a plastic container with hot water, adds cold, mixes in Dettol. She swirls the blue-white liquid with a cotton ball, then gently dabs it on Delilah’s thumb. Delilah steadies her wrist with her right hand and bites her bottom lip again.

  ‘Mi orait, Misis, mi orait.’ But she looks drained.

  Then Beth pats the wound with dry cotton wool and wraps a thin white bandage from her travel kit around it. ‘You want me to come home with you?’ she says.

  Delilah shakes her head. ‘Nogat. Mi orait.’

  ‘I’ll come in the morning then—before school—and tell Ruth we go to the hospital.’

  She watches a forlorn Delilah duck under the clothesline and head past the tanks for home.

  The smell of Dettol in the sink. Remember Beth: you’d come off your bike on the dirt drive and Clem had come racing when he heard the screams. Those big strong arms, Bethy, can you feel them now, carrying you down the drive, up the path and through the front door to the kitchen, all the time crying your big gulpy sobs? He’d pushed the lunch dishes aside, then carefully sat you on the sink, dabbing pungent milky Dettol on the grazes, coating ragged raw white skin and bits of stone, his big shearer’s hands dab-dab-dabbing away.

  You’ll be right, love. Remember? In a day or two, she’ll be good as new. And he’d tossed the cotton ball into a pot, wiped his hands down his trousers and said, You stay here, I’ll go get yer mongrel bike.

  *

  Beth and Delilah sit under a tree, waiting for the radiographer. Wantoks are busy soaping laundry in big buckets, or cooking food on small gas burners along the concrete pathways. The place has the stink of
overboiled kaukau and burnt rice. Clothes hang limply from makeshift clotheslines strung around the gardens. There are gaping holes the size of tennis balls in the flywire of Maternity, and two mangy dogs snarl and nip at each other in front of the AIDS Klinik.

  Beth hates hospitals.

  Delilah keeps saying, Aunty is fine ... she knows X-ray is orait.

  But Beth’s not convinced that Ruth knows they’re here. They’d stopped at school to check but couldn’t find her anywhere. And the blood seeping through the dirty bandage round Delilah’s thumb made Beth give up the search and head for the haus sik.

  A man carrying a pot of rice scuffs past in thongs.

  ‘These people,’ Delilah scoffs. ‘They drag their shoes. They don’t know how to wear them.’ And she tosses her head back, laughing. She takes a cigarette from her bra and is fussing in her bilum for matches when the radiographer finally arrives: an old barefoot man with long nose hairs.

  ‘Good morning,’ he says. He holds Delilah’s hand tenderly, scrutinizing the thumb. ‘Very sore, is it? It looks terribly nasty.’

  His English is formal, and Delilah’s eyes brim with tears.

  The old man deftly takes three X-rays, then tells them to meet the doctor tomorrow. He will explain everything, he says.

  ‘You will be okay,’ he soothes, patting Delilah’s arm. She sucks in her bottom lip.

  People stop Delilah to ask about her thumb. She’s changed from trying to hide it to showing it off. Away from Ruth she thrives on the attention. They stop under a tree, where Beth dabs Dettol on the oozing wound and re-bandages the thumb, recalling Val’s voice: She’s gaining something from this thumb, Beth. Being with a white woman means something here. Knowing Delilah, she’s lapping it up.

  1975

  They hear about it later: how Harry Smithson was hammering the harvester through the far paddock when he hit a rock. It was the hottest December day Hope Valley had seen in twenty-five years. And then at just that moment the wind had picked up and the spark was racing before he could do a thing about it. Rose had been in the garden with Clem when the first flames licked the sky, when he’d told her to head to Eva’s, then flew down to Smithson’s in the ute.

  Rose joins Eva with an army of women at the little stone CWA hall in town; they bake scones, pack sandwiches with salad and curried egg, mix gallons of juice to send out to the men. Although the overhead fans are on full and the radio blares, they can still hear the constant wail of sirens. They hear that the fire’s jumped the railway line and the town might have to be evacuated; all hope rests in the river that winds through the hills. Rose has never known anything like it: these women milling about, fussing over bread and butter, Hope Valley and their men. She remembers as a kid when the bushfires savaged the Blue Mountains, but she’s never known community like this: everyone busy with a job, talking over each other, offering buoying jibes to lift the spirits when there’s news of the fury outside. Even so, Rose can’t help but worry.

  ‘He’ll be all right, love,’ Eva clucks. ‘He’s been fighting fires since he was a kid. Left school whenever he saw smoke, and was hitching a ride on the first ute out of town. School uniform as black as coal.’

  Rose rides a wave of nausea and head pounding, back raw with pain, she leans against the wall by the urn. She’s never felt so much love.

  Close to midnight Clem comes home, everywhere black except his teeth and the whites of his eyes. Rose runs a deep bath and they climb in together, him nestling against her, closing his eyes. She cradles him, shampoos the soot and grime from his hair, scrubs his shoulders and arms, the water turning black around them.

  Beth hurries up the steps and knocks harder than she intended.

  ‘Misis Beth.’ Ruth swings open the door mid-knock, as if she’s been waiting for this exact moment.

  ‘Morning, Ruth.’ Beth peers past her. ‘Delilah ready?’

  ‘She’s gone to early market.’

  ‘But the doctor has the results today.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I can walk to the beach and go from there.’ Beth turns to leave.

  ‘No Misis Beth,’ Ruth says firmly. ‘Delilah’s thumb, the X-ray, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘We don’t want any operation.’

  ‘But she might lose it.’ Beth hears the snap in her voice. ‘Honestly Ruth, it’s infected.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. No X-ray. No operation.’

  Beth is stunned. ‘This is serious, Ruth. We need to do something.’

  ‘We are, Misis Beth.’ Ruth’s words sting. Beth goes to speak but she’s not sure what to say. How can doing nothing be something? She stands in the doorway, wanting to come inside, beg Ruth to change her mind, but in the end she shrugs her shoulders and heads home.

  Later she sees Delilah out at the water tanks: the bandages are gone, the thumb wrapped in noni leaves. Lena tells her they’ve been back to the broken city and seen the magic man.

  Elbow-high in suds at the sink, Val is whispering decades of The Rosary when she hears the front door being wrenched open. She swings around as Beth stalks in, rage filling the room.

  ‘I just don’t get it!’ Beth is fierce. ‘Can’t they see? Why did she even bother going to the hospital, or having the X-ray, why the bandages, if they were going to do their own thing?’ Beth flops on the couch and kicks off her thongs. ‘She could lose it.’

  ‘I know,’ says Val, drying her hands on a tea towel.

  ‘Why haven’t you spoken to them?’

  ‘I told you before, Beth. It’s not my place.’

  Beth looks at her, exasperated. ‘God, this country!’

  ‘Beth,’ Val says quietly, coming to stand near the couch, ‘if they don’t ask, don’t offer. Things are different here.’ She sits down. ‘Say they go ahead with the op, and some cowboy doctor who’s never done anything like this before gets the job, and he butchers her hand and it’s worse than ever. What then? You thought about that?’ Beth stares at her. ‘They’ll blame you. And there’s nothing worse than that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Beth shakes her head in disbelief: ‘Payback?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘I’ve seen it before, years ago, in Moresby. I guess if you truly want to be a part of life here, you play by their rules.’ Val takes a deep breath. ‘You ought to know anyway, Beth,’ she says, ‘there’s some things you can’t prevent. Or fix.’

  Beth reddens.

  ‘There’s another thing I’ve learnt,’ Val says, quietly. ‘You can’t live other people’s lives for them so you don’t have to look at your own.’

  And Beth is up off the couch and storming out, the door whacking the side of the house.

  ‘This place is bullshit,’ she hisses.

  Beth stews. She spends the next few hours cursing the island, its people, the weather, tells herself she’ll book a flight on Monday and go back. She’s heard the story of a man in town who stole a car and two pigs: a spear in the back of the head. And the man who drove into a tree, killing his mate. He’s being kept safe in the lockup; the relatives are out to get him. She knows there’ll be compensation to sort out: pigs, money, maybe birds, will be offered. She is raw with fear and anger, heat and confusion.

  But when she hits the water late afternoon, dives into the coolness, she tries to let Val’s words settle. And the more she hears them, really hears them, she begins to understand. She kicks hard at the water, as if she could kick free of herself. Meddlesome. Very Enid Blyton, she thinks sarcastically, rolling onto her back and looking up at the brewing sky. She’s done it again, like the time she almost told Lena to teach that PNG anthology.

  She feels a fool. Longlong white meri.

  1975

  It’s like grubby snow, everywhere, as far as Clem can see. His shirt’s sticking to his back and he wipes at sweat pouring down his face. It’s already forty degrees at ten in the morning, and off to his left a willy willy starts up, slow
ly spinning white-grey ash into the air, a contrast to the gnarled black trunks of marri and York gums and the knobby stumps of mallees. Bigger logs still smoulder but in some trees he can already see new shoots—a tiny splinter of green thrusting upward. A starting over. He examines fences that will need replacing: twisted and buckled barbed wire, and posts burnt almost to the ground. Probably makes sense to pace it out now and get a quote in like other blokes, but he can’t bring himself to do it. It’s only been a week and it feels too soon; almost mercenary. He and Rose have been lucky: the wind hurried the flames towards town. But by the time the fire was out Smithson had lost two sheds and four paddocks, and all the farms between his and Hope Valley were gone. It was a miracle no homes were lost, that the river saved the town.

  The sun hits the twisted carcass of Smithson’s hayshed, the tin turned in on itself at improbable angles, like the silver Opera House so far from home.

  Dog barks and noses into a rock pile and drags out a charred goanna.

  ‘Ah yer like it well done, don’t yer mate?’ Clem says and he heads to the ute, Dog following with his catch.

  Clem shades his eyes as he looks down toward the creek line and shakes his head in wonder: one red gum, tall and matronly, stands untouched on the far bank. And beyond that, his own place, then Tom and Eva’s farm further up the valley. Golden in the sun, unscathed.

  It’s not that she isn’t curious. Far from it. Lena has mentioned him. So has Delphon, and now here’s Val, serving up soup and fishing for news.

  ‘That boat, the wooden yacht about a hundred yards off the wharf,’ she says. ‘You seen it?’