Nation (7 page)

He looked into the dead eyes, staring straight ahead, and wondered what they would see down in the dark current. Would they see anything?
Did anyone see anything?

The shock of the question hit him like a blow. How could he think it?

Once we were dolphins and Imo made us into men! That was true, wasn’t it? Why did he even
wonder
if it wasn’t? And if that wasn’t true, then there was just the dark water and nothing was anything….

He stopped those thoughts before they could run away with him. The Daphne girl was watching him, and this was no time to be uncertain and hesitant. He twisted papervine together to fasten stones and pieces of broken coral to poor Captain Roberts and his wheel. Papervine got tighter when it was wet and didn’t rot for years. Wherever poor Captain Roberts was going, he was going to stay there. Unless he turned into a dolphin, of course. Then, quickly, Mau made the cut to release his spirit.

On the rocks behind him, the girl sang a song. It wasn’t all na-na-na this time. Somehow Mau could hear her voice better, now he’d heard her speak. There were words, probably, although they had no meaning to Mau. But he thought: It’s a trouserman chant for the dead. They are like us! But if Imo made them, why are they so different?

The captain was almost underwater now, still holding on to the wheel. Mau held the last stone in one hand and pushed the floating captain forward, feeling all the time with his toes for the edge of the rock. He could sense the cold of the deeps below him, too.

The current was down there. No one knew where it came from, although there were stories of a land to the south where the water fell like feathers. But everyone knew where it went. They could see it. It became the Shining Path, a river of stars that flowed across the night sky. Once in a thousand years, it was said, when Locaha looked among the dead for those who should go to the Perfect World, they would climb that path and send the rest back to be dolphins until it was time for them to be born again.

How does that happen? Mau thought. How does water become stars? How does a dead man become a living dolphin? But those were a child’s questions, weren’t they? The kind you shouldn’t ask? The kind that were silly or wrong, and if you asked why too much you were given chores to do and told that’s how the world is.

A wavelet broke over the captain. Mau fastened the last stone to the wheel and, as the captain slid gently under the water, gave him a push out into the current.

A few bubbles came up as the captain sank, very slowly, out of sight.

Mau was just turning away when he saw something rising through the water. It broke the surface and turned over slowly. It was the captain’s hat, and now that it had filled with water, it began to drift back down again.

There was a splash from behind him and the girl of the Daphne clan floundered past, her white dress floating around her like a huge jellyfish.

“Don’t let it sink again!” she shouted. “He wants you to have it!” She plunged forward, grabbed the hat, waved it triumphantly—and sank.

Mau waited for her to come back up, but there were just bubbles.

Could it possibly be that there was someone in the world who couldn’t—

His body worked without thinking. He ducked under the surface, grabbed the biggest lump of coral he could see, and dived over the edge and into the dark water.

There below him was poor Captain Roberts, drifting gently down toward posterity. Mau went past in a rip of silver.

There were more bubbles below, and a pale shape disappearing at the farthest reach of the sunlight.

Not this one, Mau thought, as loudly as he could. Not now. No one goes alive into the dark. I served you, Locaha. I walked in your steps. You should owe me this one. One life back from the dark!

And a voice returned from the gloom:
I recall no arrangement, Mau, no bargain, covenant, or promise. There is what happens, and what does not happen. There is no
should
.

And then he was tangling in the sea anemone of her skirts. He let the stone continue into the dark, found her face, breathed the air from his bursting lungs into hers, saw her eyes open wide, and kicked for the surface, dragging her behind him.

It took forever. He could feel the long, cold fingers of Locaha grabbing at his feet and squeezing his lungs, and surely the light was fading. The sound of the water in his ears began to sound like whispering:
Would it hurt to stop now? To slide back down into the dark and let the current take him? It would be the end of all grief, a blanking of all bad memories. All he had to do was let her go and—
No! That thought brought back his anger, and the anger brought strength.

A shadow fell across the light and Mau had to swim out of the way as the gently sinking captain went on past, on the last voyage he’d ever make.

But the light was no nearer, never any nearer. His legs were like stones. Everything stung. And there it was, the silver line, coming back to him again, pulling him forward into a picture of what could be—

—and rock was under his feet. He kicked down, and his head broke through the surf. His feet touched the rock again, and the light was brilliant.

The rest of what happened he watched from inside himself as he dragged the girl onto the rocks, and tipped her upside down and slapped her on her back until she coughed up water. Then it was a run along the beach to lay her down by the fire, where she vomited up more water and groaned. Only then did Mau’s mind explain that his body was far too weak to have managed all this, and let it fall backward into the sand.

He managed to turn over in time to throw up what was left of the dreadful cakes and stared down at the mess. Does not happen, he thought, and the words became a declaration of triumph and defiance. “Does not happen,” he said, and the words got bigger and dragged him to his feet, and “Does not happen!” he shouted at the sky.
“Does not happen!”

A little sound made him look down. The girl was shaking, there on the sand. He knelt beside her and held her hand, which was still clutching the captain’s hat. Her skin was white, and as cold as the touch of Locaha, even in the heat of the fire.

“Cheat! I got her back!” he shouted. “Does not happen!”

Mau ran farther along the beach and onto the track that led into the low forest. Red crabs scuttled out of the way as he bounded along the trail of broken trees. He reached the big canoe and scrambled up the side. There had been—yes, there was that big blanket in the corner. He grabbed it and pulled, and something pulled back. He pulled harder, and something landed on the deck with a splintering noise.

A voice said: “
Waark!
Roberts is a dreadful boozer! Show us yer drawers!”

This time the blanket had come away, revealing a broken wooden cage on the floor and a very angry gray bird. It glared at Mau.

“
Waark!
Blessed are the meek, my sainted aunt!”

Mau had no time for birds now, but this one had a worrying glint in its eye. It seemed to demand a reply.

“Does not happen!” he shouted, and ran out of the cabin, the blanket flapping behind him.

He was halfway down the track when there was a flutter of wings overhead and a shriek of “Does not happen!”

Mau didn’t even look up. The world had become too strange. He ran to the fire and wrapped the girl as tight as he could in the blanket. After a while the shivering stopped, and she seemed to be asleep.

“Does not happen!” screamed the bird from a broken tree. Mau blinked. He’d understood it! And he’d understood it before, and not realized it.

Oh, there were some birds that could speak a few words, like the gray raven and the yellow parakeet, but you could hardly understand them. This bird talked as if it knew what it was saying.

“Where’s my grub, you vinegar-faced old piss pot?” said the bird, bouncing up and down eagerly. “Give me my rations, you ol’ hypocrite!”

That
sounded like trouserman talk, right enough.

The sun was low but still a hand’s span above the sea. A lot had happened in a short space of time that, on the inside, had lasted nearly forever.

Mau looked down at the sleeping girl. “Does not happen” was not enough. You couldn’t trust Locaha. There were no bargains. Now he had to think about
will
not happen. Death was not going to rule here.

He found his spear and stood guard until morning.

E
RMINTRUDE HAD HEARD THAT
when you drown, your whole life passes in front of your eyes.

In fact it’s when you
don’t
drown that this happens, as life races back from the start to get to the last known living moment. Mostly it’s a blur, but every life has its important moments that get more and more colorful the longer they are remembered.

In hers, one of them was about the map. Every life should have a map.

The map. Oh yes, the map. She’d found it in the big atlas in the library one wet winter afternoon. In a week she could have drawn it from memory.

And the name of it was the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean.

It was half a world of blue sea, but it was stitched together with seams of little marks, tiny dots that her father had called island chains. There were hundreds and thousands of islands and a lot of them were just about big enough for a coconut tree, he’d said. There had to be one coconut tree on every tiny island, by law, so that if someone was shipwrecked, then at least he’d have some shade to sit in.
*
He drew a picture of her sitting in the shade of a coconut tree, with her white dress and her parasol, but he quickly added, on the penciled horizon, a ship coming to rescue her.

Much later on, she was able to read the names of the groups of islands: The Bank Holiday Monday Islands, All Souls Island, The Rogation Sunday Islands, The Mothering Sunday Islands, The Hogmanay Islands…it seemed that the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean had been navigated not with a compass and a sextant but with a calendar.

Her father had said that if you knew where to look, you could find Mrs. Ethel J. Bundy’s Birthday Island, and loaned her a large magnifying glass. She spent long Sunday afternoons lying on her stomach, minutely examining every necklace of dots, and concluded that Mrs. Ethel J. Bundy’s Birthday Island was a Father Joke, i.e., not very funny but sort of lovable in its silliness. But now, thanks to him, she knew the island chains of the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean by heart.

She had wanted, there and then, to live on an island that was lost at sea, and so small that you weren’t sure if it was an island or just that a fly had done its business on the page.

But that wasn’t all. There was a map of the stars at the back of the atlas. For her next birthday she’d asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: “Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn’t paying attention!” And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair
and
knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who’d want a pony when you could have the whole universe? It was far more interesting and you didn’t have to muck it out once a week.

“Well, that was a good day,” said her father when they were coming back from one meeting.

“Yes, Papa. I think Dr. Agassiz is certainly providing evidence for the Ice Age theory, and I shall need a bigger telescope if I am to see Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.”

“Well, we shall have to see about that,” said her father with hopeless parental diplomacy. “But please don’t let your grandmother know you shook hands with Mr. Darwin. She thinks he is the devil.”

“Gosh! Is he?” The prospect had seemed quite interesting.

“As a matter of fact,” said her father, “I believe he is the greatest scientist who has ever lived.”

“Greater than Newton? I don’t think so, Papa. Many of his ideas were first voiced by other people, including his own granddad!”

“Aha? You’ve been in my library again. Well, Newton said that
he
stood on the shoulders of giants.”

“Yes, but…well, he was just being modest!” And they had argued all the way home.

It was a game. He loved it when she assembled her facts and pinned him down with a cast-iron argument. He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty that dismissed all opposition.

In fact there was always something a little naughty about going to the lectures. Her grandmother objected to them on the grounds that they “would make the girl restless and give her ideas.” She was right. Ermintrude was already pretty good at ideas, but a few more are always welcome.

At this point the racing line of life speeds up, to get past some dark years she never remembered except in nightmares and whenever she heard a baby crying, and leaps ahead to the day when she first knew she would
see
islands under new stars….

Her mother was dead by then, which meant that things at the Hall were now run entirely by her grandmother, and her father, a quiet, hardworking man, didn’t have much spirit left to battle with her. The wonderful telescope was locked away, because “a well-brought-up young lady has no business looking at the moons of Jupiter, whose home life was so different from that of our own dear king!” It didn’t matter that her father very patiently explained that there were at least thirty-six million miles of difference between Jupiter, the Roman god, and Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. She didn’t listen. She never listened. And you put up with that or you hit her over the head with a battle-axe, and her father didn’t do that sort of thing, even though one of his ancestors had once done something really horrible to the duke of Norfolk with a red-hot poker.

Their Royal Society visits were banned on the grounds that the scientists were nothing but people who asked silly questions, and that was that. Her father came and apologized to her about it, which was horrible.

But there were other ways to explore the universe….

One of the things about being a quiet girl in a very big house is that you can, if you try, be invisible in plain view, and it is amazing what you can overhear when you are being a good little girl helping Cook in the kitchen by cutting out pastry shapes. There were always delivery boys or men from the estate wanting a cup of tea, or Cook’s old friends just dropping in for a chat. The secret was to wear ribbons in your hair and skip everywhere. It completely fooled people.

Except her grandmother, unfortunately, who put a stop to the visits below stairs as soon as she took over the running of the household. “Children should be seen, but not be seen listening!” she said. “Off you go! Quickly, now!”

And that was that. Ermi—Daphne spent most of her time doing embroidery in her room. Sewing, provided you weren’t doing it to make something useful, was one of the few things a girl “who was going to be a lady one day” was allowed to do, at least according to her grandmother.

However, it wasn’t all
she
did. To begin with, she found the old dumbwaiter, a sort of elevator just for food, that hadn’t been used since the days when her great-great-aunt had lived in Daphne’s bedroom on the top floor and all her food had to be hauled up five floors from the kitchen. Daphne didn’t know much about the old woman, but apparently a young man had smiled at her on her twenty-first birthday and she’d gone straight to bed with an attack of the vapors and stayed there, still gently vaporizing, until she completely vaporized at the age of eighty-six, apparently because her body was fed up with having nothing to do.

The dumbwaiter had never been officially used since then. Daphne, though, had found that with the removal of a few planks and the greasing of some wheels, she could haul it up and down by its pulleys and eavesdrop on several rooms. It became a sort of sound telescope to explore the indoor solar system that revolved around her grandmother.

She gave it a bit of scrub, and then another because—yuck—if the maids weren’t going to carry a food tray up five floors, then they weren’t going to—yuck—carry down anything else, like the guzunder.

It was an interesting education, listening to the big house when it was unaware, but getting it was like tipping out a jigsaw puzzle on the floor and trying to guess at the picture from looking at five pieces.

And it was while listening to two of the maids talking about Albert the stable boy and how naughty he was (a state of affairs they didn’t entirely disapprove of, apparently, and that she was starting to suspect very strongly had nothing to do with how he looked after the horses) that she heard the argument in the dining room. Her grandmother’s voice cut through the ear like a diamond on glass, but her father was using the calm, flat voice he always used when he was very angry and didn’t dare show it. By the time she’d pulled up the dumbwaiter to get a better listen, the argument had been going on for some time:

“…and you’ll end up in a cannibal’s cooking pot!” That was the unmistakable sound of her grandmother.

“Cannibals usually roast their food, Mother, not boil it.”—And that was certainly the quiet voice of her father who, when he was talking to his mother, always sounded as though he was determined not to look up from his newspaper.

“And is that any better, pray?”

“I doubt it, Mother, but at least it is more accurate. In any case, the Rogation Sunday Islanders have never been known to cook anyone al fresco in any kind of utensil, as far as we know.”

“I don’t see why you have to go to the other end of the world.”—And
that
was her grandmother changing her line of attack.

“Somebody must. We have to keep the flag flying.”

“Why, pray?”

“Oh dear, Mother, I’m surprised at you. It’s
our flag
. It has to fly.”

“Do remember that only one hundred and thirty-eight people have to die and you will be king!”

“So you keep telling me, Mother, although Father always said that claim is rather weak when you consider what happened in 1421. In any case, while I’m waiting for that very unlikely death toll, I might as well do my bit in the service of the empire.”

“Is there any Society there?” Grandmother could say a capital letter so distinctly that you heard it.
Society
meant people who were rich or influential or, preferably, both. Although they shouldn’t be richer and more influential than her.

“Well, there’s the bishop—jolly decent chap, apparently. Goes around the place in a canoe and speaks the lingo like a native. Doesn’t wear shoes. Then there’s McRather; he runs the dockyard. Teaching the native lads to play cricket. As a matter of fact I’m to take some more bats with me. And of course there will often be a ship in, so as governor I’ll have to entertain the officers.”

“Sun-struck madmen, naked savages—”

“They wear pads, actually.”

“What? What? What
are
you talking about?” Another thing about Grandmother was her belief that a conversation consisted of someone else listening to her talking, so even mild interruptions seemed to her to be some strange, puzzling inversion of the natural order of things, like pigs flying. It baffled her.

“Pads,” said Daphne’s father helpfully, “and protective thingummies. McRather says they’ve confused hitting the wicket with hitting the batsman.”

“Very well then, sunstruck madmen,
seminaked
savages, and the Royal Navy. And you really think I will allow my granddaughter to face these perils?”

“The Royal Navy isn’t very perilous.”

“Supposing she marries a sailor!”

“Like Auntie Pathenope did?” Daphne could imagine her father’s faint smile, which always made his mother angry, but then, so did practically everything else.

“He was a rear admiral!” her grandmother snapped. “That’s not the same thing at all!”

“Mother, there is no need for this fuss. I have told the king that I will go. Ermintrude will follow in a month or two. It will do us good to be away for a while. This house is too cold and too big.”

“Nevertheless, I forbid—”

“It is also too
lonely
. It has too many
memories
! It has too much silenced laughter, too many unheard footsteps, too many soundless echoes since they died!” The words came out like slabs of thunder. “I have made my decision and it will not be unmade, even by you! I have told the palace to send her out to me as soon as I am settled in. Do you understand? I believe my daughter would!!
And perhaps at the other end of the world there is a place where the screaming can’t be heard, and I may find it in my heart to grant God absolution!
”

She heard him walk to the door, while tears met on her chin and soaked her nightgown.

And Grandmother said: “And the child’s schooling, may I ask?”

How did she manage it? How did she come out with something like that, when the silverware and the chandeliers were still jingling with tinny echoes. Didn’t she remember the coffins?

Perhaps she did. Perhaps she thought that her son needed to be anchored to the Earth. It worked, then, because he stopped with his hand on the door handle and said, in a voice that almost didn’t shake, “She will have a tutor in Port Mercia. It will do her good, and broaden her horizons. You see? I have thought about this.”

“It won’t bring them back, you know.” That was her grandmother. Daphne put her hand over her mouth in sheer shock. How could the woman be so…
stupid
?

She could imagine her father’s face. She heard him walk to the dining-room door. She waited for the slam, but that wouldn’t be her father. The sharp little click of the door shutting was louder in her head than any slam could be.

At which point Daphne awoke, glad that she had. The broadened horizon was red but the back of the sky was full of stars; she was stiff to her very bones, and she felt that she’d never eaten in her life, ever. And this was very convenient, because the smell coming out of the pot was fishy and spicy and was making her drool.