Lieutenant (18 page)

He was going to go on, his voice louder now with excitement, his hands drawing pictures on the air of
you and me
, of
all
of us
, of
me and these others but not you
.

‘Rooke, I am beside myself with fascination,’ Silk said. ‘But Sophocles and Homer are not to the point. The point being, I have given your name to the governor. He has your name and he knows you to be the best man for getting us there and back without losing our way. Now there’s a good fellow, we leave on Wednesday, and will be gone two days, and there will be no more of this business of spearing our men as they go about their business in the woods.’

There was a long silence. The beam of sun had moved, or perhaps it was Silk’s shoulder.

Rooke watched his foot, moving the toe of his worn old shoe into the sun, out of the sun. He could not say to Silk,
I
cannot do this, because the men we bring in might be the uncles, the cousins,
even the brothers of Tagaran
. Could not say,
I cannot do this, because I
am too fond of Tagaran
.

Fond?
he imagined Silk repeating.
Too fond of a native girl to
obey an order?

‘Do not ask me,’ Rooke said. ‘As you are a friend, do not ask me. I would not deny you, only do not ask. I have friends here among the natives. As you know.’

Silk cleared his throat.

‘Yes. I am, shall we say, aware. But Rooke, think: this is not a request, it is an order.’

Rooke watched dust puff and subside in the shaft of sunlight. Dust seemed weightless, until you watched it fall.

‘You know as well as I do, Rooke, the way they hide in the
woods. We know how clever they are at hiding. When have we ever succeeded in finding natives who did not want to be found?’

His face was warm, coaxing.

Silk was right. They watched from behind trees and rocks, their skins part of the speckled light and shade of the place. From half a mile away they would hear the passage of thirty men through the woods, sixty feet crushing leaves and twigs underfoot, sixty hands pushing bushes aside, thirty kettles clanking on thirty packs. Not to mention the officers. Another three packs, another six shoes. Two of them belonging to himself.

‘Rooke, old fellow,’ Silk said, ‘You know the governor cannot let the spearing of that poor wretch go unremarked. His own gamekeeper, a terrible lingering death ahead of the poor devil. A show of force is required. Thirty armed men: would he be ordering a force of that size to take a handful of natives? You could think of it as a piece of theatre, Rooke, if you wished.’

Rooke could imagine Warungin in his gregarious mood, telling the story of how the white men had blundered through the woods while he watched from behind a tree.

‘I know you are a man of principle, my friend, and I respect you for it,’ Silk said. ‘Your scruples do you credit. But this is a simple enough thing, two days on the march and then life will resume as before.’

He did not wait for Rooke to say yes. ‘We leave on
Wednesday, at sunrise. I will send the lad out with your rations and so on.’

Silk was too quick, Rooke thought. He had run along the broad road of his argument and arrived at the end, panting and pleased, while Rooke was at a standstill, trying to remember how to put one foot in front of the other.

Silk reached for his hand, shook it.

‘Good man, Rooke. Until Wednesday!’

And was gone.

It was time for the evening reading of the instruments. Mechanically Rooke went through the motions. He walked between each instrument and the ledger, dipping the pen in the ink, putting the number where it belonged.
Wind, S-S-W, 3 knots.
Weather, fine. Remarks: none
.

He wished Gardiner were here. His absence was like a cold wound. He was the only man whose advice he would trust. What would Gardiner say?

He remembered the grim way Gardiner had agreed that they were all loyal subjects of the Crown. He had never again referred to the duty that was
by far the most unpleasant he ever had
to execute
.

Gardiner would spell out the consequences of refusal. Rooke had done the same for him: remind him that the service
of humanity and the service of His Majesty were not congruent.

It had been simple enough to speak to Gardiner of duty. It must have sounded glib, he thought now. He wished he could tell Gardiner,
I am sorry, my friend, I spoke too easily
.

Until this point in his life he had allowed himself to be propelled by circumstance, situation, need. He had never had to take the grain of life in his bare hands and twist it to another shape. Never stopped and asked,
But what am I doing?

Silk’s logic seemed unassailable: the expedition would fail, and so there was no reason to refuse it. But if the governor were merely performing a piece of theatre in the interests of intimidation, where was the fearsomeness, what was the deterrent, if the terrific procession met not a single native because they were all laughing from behind bushes as it passed?

‘The logic is faulty, you see.’

He was startled to find he had spoken aloud.

Still, the central fact remained: the expedition would fail. Whether or not the governor hoped to capture six natives and whether or not Silk hoped the same, it was almost certain that no native would be caught.

Almost.

‘It could be done, however,’ he said. He could see how a man might get into the habit of talking to himself. It cleared the mind, to hear the words aloud, as if spoken by a sympathetic other who knew you as well as you knew yourself.

‘I could do it.’

R
ooke could have gone looking for Warungin or Boinbar, but that would have meant allowing himself to know what he was doing. Instead he set off towards the settlement as if on some errand. He watched his feet on the uneven ground and did not think beyond one step, another step.

He left the thing to chance, and chance gave him the boy Boneda, sitting by the track on a rock. He could not have been waiting for Rooke, but showed no surprise at seeing him. He held out the thing in his fist: a fat lizard, not quite dead. In a stream of words and gestures Rooke only partly followed, Boneda said something to the effect of,
I caught it over there, it ran
very fast, I am going to eat it and it will be very good
.

There was something that the eyes of the natives did when
they smiled, a gleam under their heavy brows, so that the smile seemed to come from within as much as from the play of muscles on the face.

‘I want to see Tagaran.’

It sounded very blunt, like that, but it had to be clear, and he trusted Boneda’s English more than his own
Cadigal
.

‘Will she come to visit me? Will she come to my hut? Will you tell her,
kamara
wants to see her?’

Boneda said something Rooke could not follow, pointed in a generally west direction with his stick, and was gone, springing up the rocks towards the ridge.

Had he understood? Rooke did not know. He turned and made his way back to the hut.

He lit his fire, just a few sticks smoking away together. That was to say,
I am at home and would welcome a visitor
.

Then he lay on his stretcher, hands under his head, staring up at the shingles without seeing them.

He did not sleep, but had submerged into a stupor when there was a shadow in the doorway. Tagaran was there, hesitating. He swung his legs down and sat on the side of the bed. She was alone. She had never arrived alone before.

She came in and sat at his table, smoothing at the grain of the wood with a finger. She was waiting for him to speak. He was waiting for a miracle that would free him from the thing that had fallen on him like a great heavy cloak.

He got up and sat at the table opposite her.

‘Why?’ he asked in English. ‘Why did the black man wound the white man?’

Her face, wary, lifted to his.

‘
Gulara
,’ she said, just that word. Angry.

‘
Minyin
gulara
eora?
’ Rooke asked, Why are the black men angry?

He knew the answer, but needed the words. Needed the thing they were used to, the question and the answer.

‘
Inyam
ngalawi
white men
.’ Because the white men are settled here.

He thought perhaps she needed it too, backwards and forwards, word and word.

One long hand smoothed down her forearm from elbow to wrist as if she were cold. He saw a line of pink dots that marked the graze she had received from
the person from
Charlotte
.

She was looking down again. He could not see her face, only the tip of her nose and her hair.

‘
Tyerun Cadigal
,’ she said without looking up. The
Cadigal
are afraid.

Her fingers smoothed at the mahogany as if she could rub away the surface and see something else beneath it.

‘The musket,’ he began. ‘Remember. You asked me, you wished, to learn. To make it shoot. To load it and shoot it.’

She went on rubbing at the polished wood, but he knew she was listening.

‘Why, Tagaran? Why did you wish to know? Will you tell me?’

He heard the water slapping fretfully against the rocks at the foot of the promontory. A loose shingle rattled, the canvas of the dome creaked, a gull gave a long rueful cry. He might wait all day and hear other things, but he saw that he would not hear an answer.

He went back a step.

‘
Minyin
tyerun
Cadigal?
’ he asked, why are the
Cadigal
afraid?

‘
Gunin
.’ She looked him straight in the eye. Because of the guns.

The word was like a gunshot in itself.

‘Brugden,’ he said. He would have given the poor devil his other name, but realised he did not know it. Tagaran tilted her face even further towards the table. She knew who Brugden was, and what had happened to him.

He took a breath and made himself go on. ‘Brugden will die.’

Tagaran did not look at him. So far he had told her nothing she did not already know.

‘They are going out after Carangaray.’

She looked up as if he had shouted. Her hand went to her mouth and her face changed shape around this piece of information.

He sketched the movement of putting a musket up to his shoulder.

‘Tomorrow.
Parribugo
. For Carangaray. For others too. Six men. Six
eora
.’

He held up fingers to show her.

That was probably enough, but having come so far, there was a luxurious yielding in going all the way to the end.

‘
Piabami
Warunginyi
?
Will you tell Warungin? I would like you to let Warungin know.’

Tagaran looked straight into his eyes. She understood, he could see that. Not just the words, but the significance of him having said them to her.

‘
Piabami
Warunginyi
?
’ he said again.

There was a pleasure in using her language for this. Each word started emphatically and dropped away, and each sentence did the same, a sequence of diminuendos. It was a language whose very cadence sounded like forgiveness.

‘Botany Bay,’ she said. ‘For Carangaray.’

And copied his gesture, the musket up to her shoulder.

‘Yes,’ Rooke said. ‘Tomorrow, in the morning.’

He could hear a bird above them chattering as if scolding, the dry whisper of the leaves. Everything was going on as it always had. For centuries, for millennia, the forebears of that bird had sat out there and the forebears of those leaves had whispered in that breeze. Only in here were things changed.

‘I too. I am to be of the party.’

It was a relief to say the words, but did not give the satisfaction he had hoped. Like a child, he had thought that putting the
thing into words would make it go away. But it was still sitting between them while outside that callous bird did not seem to realise there was nothing to sing about.

‘What is to be done, Tagaran? What is to become of us?’

This was a question beyond the game of words. It was out of the reach of their grammar lessons.

She went over to the fireplace and held out her hands to the coals. He thought it was her polite way of ending their conversation. But then she turned back to him and held out her hands for his. She pressed his fingers with her own. He felt her skin warm and smooth.

‘
Putuwa
,’ she said, pressing and smoothing. ‘
Putuwa
.’

Their hands were the same temperature now.

‘
Putuwa
,’ he repeated.

She pressed harder, smoothing with larger gestures and he understood the word to mean the action she was performing, that is to warm one’s hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person. In English it required a long rigmarole of words. In England a person who warmed their hands by the fire did so in order to thrust them into their pockets and keep them warm. Tagaran was teaching him a word, and by it she was showing him a world.

Everything in his life had come down to the sensation of her fingers against his. The person he was, the history he carried within himself, every joy and grief he had ever experienced, slipped away like an irrelevant garment. He was nothing but
skin, speaking to another skin, and between the skins there was no need to find any words.

A laughing jackass began to peal from somewhere up on the ridge, and as if she had heard a clock chiming, reminding her of something she must do, Tagaran let go of his fingers.

‘
Yenioo, kamara
,’ she said, I am going, my friend. She looked up at him and he thought he saw in her face the same thought he had:
This is the last time we will see each other
.

He groped for words and none came. He would not give a word to the bleakness he felt. Could not say it:
goodbye
.

He followed her out of the hut, watching her climb the rocks. As he hoped, at the top she turned. He raised his arm, straight up, the hand opened towards her, and she waved back. Then she turned and was gone.

In his mind he went with her, following her along the path, turning towards the camp in the next bay, watching her go down the long traverse of the hillside past the big rock that was as far into her world as he had ever gone. She would arrive in the clear place where the fire sent up its column of smoke and the women sat on the ground as if growing out of it, where the children ran and poked among the mangroves and where, when the sun went down, they all came together to eat and sleep.

The picture was so vivid in his mind that it was a shock to find himself not there but here, alone on his windy point.

Putuwa
.

Just as he did, she knew that something ugly was on its way. But she had left him a word he would never forget, and the weight of trust it carried.