A Boat Load of Home Folk (21 page)

Bong, went Mulgrave savagely. Bong.

In the church, people stirred and sat up and small children ran outside to pee quickly behind bushes while the warning tolled.

Deladier, black-chasubled, came onto the steps before the altar and raised his spiritual hand for attention.

“Dearly beloved in Christ,” he began, “we have come through a terrible crisis. A dreadful warning has overtaken our little town but by the grace of God nearly all have been spared. We mourn today, the souls of Katherine Eva Trumper, Dominique Fricotte, Paul Leonard Brinkman and Francis Nguna, all of whom perished in this dreadful hurricane. May the Lord have mercy on their souls and the souls of the faithful departed.” He paused for the congregation's amen and looked across the church at Lake who was curved against the font. He went on thinly, “We have all lost something, I venture to say, homes, furniture. A great deal of damage has been done. But could we not regard this sparing and rasing as a warning of God's goodness and power, of his authority to deal out punishment and to withhold it? Let us offer thanks that we have been spared so much.”

At the back of the church there was a fearsome clatter as the Tucker-Browns entered and banged into each other from their unsureness of ritual. Miss Latimer
took charge for a moment and steered them into seats, but Lake stood aside by the confessional and propped his forty-odd years against the wall and yawned.

“. . . this prison and church have been the only places spared apart from some of the houses along the lee of the hill. So, for a while at least, we must offer it, being God's house, for the use of everyone. I know you will treat it and everything in it with respect.” Deladier laced his fingers together over something he did not understand for a minute but felt to yield to a political gesture he should make. “As this is the only building large enough to be used as a meeting hall it will so serve for the next few days until things are organized and the repair gangs can start work on the hundreds of things that must be done. In the meanwhile, my dear people,” he paused to draw a spiritual breath, “in the meanwhile I wish to offer a Mass in thanksgiving for what might have been the narrowest escape any of us has ever had. After that, I ask you to remain seated while Mr Woodsall reads out a list of emergency duties which we all must share.”

Deladier wiped his fingers across his forehead which already perspired freely. For some unknown reason he was feeling faint and beckoned Mulgrave, who was serving, to open one of the end windows. The row of nuns down the front moved and swayed. They sensed something in their spiritual father. One went for a glass of water and then . . .
intoibo ad altare dei,
I will
go unto the altar of God, intoned the Bishop; and the rhythm of the Mass began.

“Best theatre in the world,” Lake whispered irreverently to Mrs Tucker-Brown who was listening puzzled to the antiphon and response of the congregation. “But the programme never changes.”

He got up and went outside. It hurt him to be there. Something bit away at him like a piece of wire and he could not translate the pain into tangible terms. The church had come aloud and alive like a hive and with its throbbing he went down hill towards the harbour-front, kicking at the rubbish and the remnants of homes amongst which some of the natives were searching. “'Morning,” they all said. “'Morning.” The old ginger Yank stuff seemed to have been emptied out of him by the wind-purge of the night before. His sins had even faded like a negative exposed to sun, and he remembered the prison room and the ulcerated patient with the too warm and searching hands who had joined his guilt to his and he felt nothing at all, no responsibility of any kind, no moral urgency. That was it, the end, the finish.

Down along the front as he paddled with his shoes dangling from his hand he came across a funny redheaded man with strange eyes who was turning over some deposit for riches of an undisclosed nature.

He talked softly and quickly to Lake with his face turned sideways from his smile, yet when he met his glance full on and the eyes blazed back, he saw that the
irises were surrounded by a strange white ring that held the lechery in check.

“What a night!” said ginger pop. “What a blinking night, eh?”

“Two nights,” Lake corrected. “We are two nights ahead now.”

“The
Malekula's
gone. I had a look yesterday. There doesn't seem to be a stick of it left.”

“We're stuck with him,” murmured Lake. He meant Greely.

“What's that?”

“Nothing. I said it looks as if we're all stuck in this spot for a while.”

They were conscious of the stench rising from the stale water pools along the road whose gleaming skin had receded a little. Native children kicked the mud up and threw handfuls at each other.

“I've been sleeping on the beach since the storm,” said the other man. “It's not too bad except for the sandflies.”

Lake tried to be interested and patient, licking his lower lip and biting it gently, clutching and clenching his fingers in his pockets and staring past the old bright small-boy rapist face to the scimitar of green that marked the curve of port. From the battered garage near where they stood came the static of radio and an obscene blast of music.

“Excuse me,” Lake said. He poked his head in a gap
that had held a door and asked what had been on the news.

The man inside did not trouble his shoulders to turn but snuffled back word of the first plane in.

“When?”

“This morning.”

The long oh of decision, the long long tear-stained, in this case, way out. He could see abstracts of plane, wing-segments blue, white, partitioned, abstracted across sky in a blaze of speed and escape slashing cloud with silver that meant thrust through guilt.

“Thank you,” he said.

He turned away and saw the from-nowhere beach bum scuffling his way northwards along the eroded line of sea-wall. The wind made small biting movements and clouds lumbered over throwing great blue shadows across the land and sea. Lake turned and took his last look at the port and the rubbish that had climaxed his years there.

Johnny Terope had skipped Mass and, blissfully in state of mortal sin, was coming down the road with a basket balanced superbly on one lean shoulder. The sun cut sharp pictures into his face. He had not thought of the old lady for a whole day. Had not thought of her blue-goosey shanks or her dry grey hair and the ugly scarf or the wrinkled body or the gasping open mouth. He swung her wrist watch reflectively on a free finger and dismissed her ugly and meaningless body from his mind. There she receded into his shadowy
distances as she had tottered frightened from his robber hands two nights before. He would not know that his answer to her pleas—which had first baffled and then gained meaning for him, so that when he realized what it was she was really frightened of he had shaken his curly and explanatory noddle with the words “Oh, no! You very ugly laydee”—he did not know these words had been the final killer.

The watch threw little sun-spears back. He saw Father Lake and waved. The watch flashed.

“I see you, Johnny,” Lake said mournfully. They were meeting for the first time since.

“Him one-feller big storm!” Johnny said.

“Is your family safe?” Lake asked.

“Good-oh. Out fishing. At the lagoon.”

“I'm going,” Lake said. “There's a plane in today.”

“Today?”

The boy's eyes grew clouded and vague.

“Long time?” he asked.

“I'm not coming back,” Lake said.

“Not ever?”

“No.”

The boy slipped the watch into the pocket of his shorts. His basket was packed with jack-daw pickings from all along the front. This he slid to the ground to rest his arm and Lake saw on top of the jumble of things that had been taken by wind and flung up by sea his own blue note-book with the memorable jottings of a failure. Leaning down he flicked it open
and found the words “This is the middle of the world, the ripe seedy pulpy middle. . . .”

“That looks rather like my hand,” he said.

“Yes,” Johnny said gravely agreeing and looking with him. “Yes. I am keeping it to remember.”

Lake turned smartly at this but there was no insolence he could discern and only a fool would at this point have weighted the words more heavily. He offered his hand and the boy took it for a minute in the white-man gesture that he found decadent and meaningless. Lake found his head shaking from side to side as if beating against threads. Ginger-pop watched from the safety of one hundred yards.

“Go now,” Lake said. “Go.”

And in the centre of it all, like the red heart of a monstrous volcanic cone, his own blazoned guilt.

The plane's shadow raced over the strip.

All the discs, white and black, swung round, up, goggled. After disaster this incoming had the freshness of invention. The trees became rapt along the edges of the shell road. The ground waited. It was cargo day for all.

Platinum surfaces broke loose on the lagoon and zoned messages of respect or exhilaration pranced outwards from a sea that was sucking the last of the
Malekula
and Miss Trumper.

Lake scuffed gravel and remembered Greely lost in sanctimony during the
agnus dei.
The old lamb in his
wolf's pelt. And watched the white flecks spring out from his muddy shoes. They sprang in spurts like hard rain until the plane lurched down, landing badly and bumping too fast, then too slow. Hands everywhere tightened on something.

The others had been skulking in the Glare Bar, huddled over the counter with their inner griefs held tight for comfort while the wild sky outside tidied itself and prepared to send them off. Kathleen held hers like a child in the womb while Gerald could not meet her positive eye, though his furtive glances were capable of going everywhere else. Her pain beat limply against the prisoning walls and she remembered the later months of pregnancy when she would place her welcoming mother hand on the drum of her belly to interpret the answering throb of the child within. Hullo, little pet, little pet, she used to whisper. How's your funny little face? All crushed up? Like mine now, she knew.

Yes, they were waiting at the Glare Bar and this postcard had not altered a jot, for the plantations had held the wind away from the low glass building. They were waiting and they held their grief and they watched the sky.

“Any time now,” Gerald kept saying. Miss Paradise was nibbling the edge of the lemon that had propped up her gin. The mantle of her friend had descended and fitted too closely. They had swapped party pretties once but never hair shirts. In her aloneness she had
trailed after Father Lake who refused to comfort, so absorbed was he in his corrupt revival. Kathleen kept looking away from the husband she could no longer bear to observe, wishing he had been a basher rather than a verbal killer. The more she had pleaded with him the more stubborn his revenge. When she said after love-making, “I want to go to sleep now. Say something nice”, there would be a long pause, then, “I want to go to sleep, too.” There had been those electric moments she recalled almost with amusement when his only words had been, “Are you ready?” or in the pause afterwards, “Did you know they're asking six and a half for their house?” She was tired of the burnt offerings of self she had made to his gratitudeless face. Thick-skin would never notice, but he bent across to speak.

“That's the one I'm sorry for.”

“What one?”

“The priest.”

“Why?”

“Where have you been these last two days? You must have heard the talk. They'll tolerate any sort of heterosexual nonsense in these places but none of the other.”

She stared away above the trees. The plane doors were being opened and a pretty hostess was farewelling with her face caught in commercial rapture. I will walk sideways or crab-wise, she decided, after this, to
avoid the lilt and fall and the rhythm that men create in me.

She said coldly to Gerald, “If I threw myself off a building it wouldn't make any impression on you unless I landed on you.”

“That's the sort of absurdity you should reserve for a lover. Come on. It's time to go.”

He was thinking of Miss Latimer, brownly and coldly amused at his advances which she had repulsed with a directness he had never before endured. He would punish Kathleen in due course, but with niceness and negativity. Pad, pad, pad. They walked out to join the priest and Miss Paradise followed, trying to catch up in spirit though her tongue was congealed in a glue of words.

Kathleen Seabrook, urging her legs, went ahead of all of them remembering and resenting. There was this man and that: the one who had asked if he could take his teeth out first (Why, for God's sake? It's better. That's why). And there was the one who had taken her after he had pleaded and pleaded to a sleazy motel on the Windsor Road and had been incapable. (It's first time nerves, he said. Let's get out of here, she sobbed.) And there was the one she loved who wanted her only on his own playboy terms.

And here they were now like a row of penitents strung out behind each other with their grips (twelve coloured snaps, a tape recorder and two watches, a length of silk never to be made up, two addresses, a
toy ship that the mast kept dropping from) and they were all with good-bye, stern under the smile faces moving onto the stairs and into the brightness of the hostess.

“Here you are,” Gerald said, clutching her arm from habit, but he was diverted by the impersonal communication of the hostie and forgot the brown body in Erromango Street.

“It was fun knowing you,” he had said fatuously to her that morning before he had left the broken house, but could not breach Marie's boredom that propped itself on elbows and stared ahead. This made him touch her unemotional arm with an eager finger that sought confirmation at least of the words. But she gave nothing away and to a man who also gave nothing this was an excitement.