Mr Peacock's Possessions Read online

  ‘Do you think the Garden of Eden was like this?’ Ada asked, wiping a trickle of juice from her chin.

  ‘No, tidier,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘At first, maybe. But it must have got out of hand quickly. I mean before Adam began to delve. Let’s ask Ma.’

  Lizzie was reminded of Pa’s dry question to Robson in the bar, just before she was forced to dart away. Where was the snake?

  ‘Hold out your skirt,’ she said. ‘We must take some for the others.’

  ‘In a minute.’ Ada ploughed on. ‘We need to find Sal first.’

  They found themselves back on something that might once have been a path, and followed it into an area that must once have been a clearing.

  ‘Sal! Sal!’ Ada called. ‘Sal!’

  A faint yap-yapping came back to them.

  ‘She’s after something. I wonder what?’

  ‘Something she can eat, probably.’

  ‘Hope it’s something we can.’ Lizzie didn’t blame Sal for wanting to rush off. ‘Let’s leave her be, and we’ll see what she comes back with. The poor thing’s been cooped up at sea with those puppies for so long.’

  Heading back to the vines, Lizzie tripped over something hard, hidden beneath the ferns and scrambling weeds. A rock? She held her bleeding shin and hopped around while Ada pulled away at the vegetation.

  ‘Look, Lizzie! Bricks! Who could have left them?’

  ‘Robson, perhaps? Why didn’t he say? Or have they been here even longer?’

  ‘There were other settlers too?’ said Ada, surprised. ‘I didn’t know. Can you find any more bricks?’

  Scattered though they were, there were probably enough to build a fireplace, but not even the smallest of houses. Anyway, something to please Ma and Pa.

  ‘Shall we take some now?’ Lizzie said.

  ‘Later. Better to come back with more hands, and something to carry them. Oh, but look at those …’

  More berries, black and juicy these ones, hanging in long strings from a tall straggling bush with dark glossy leaves. Lizzie picked one, rolled it in her fingers, sniffed at it. She was about to eat it when Ada stopped her.

  ‘Do you have any idea what they are?’

  ‘No,’ she said, undeterred. ‘But they look delicious.’

  Ada knocked the berry out of her hand, and crushed it underfoot.

  ‘Don’t be a fool. You’ve no idea what they could do to you.’

  When they got back to the camp, and Ada told her story and showed the leaves, Pa raised a hand to slap Lizzie and she felt her legs turn liquid. But he let it drop, almost as quickly, and called all the children to come at once. They shuffled their feet and made their faces solemn, and even Gussie stared so intently at her father you’d think she understood too. These were tutu berries, he told them. No need for punishment if they had actually eaten them: they’d not be there to punish.

  ‘Don’t even touch them!’ he said, fiercely. ‘Never, ever. They are deadly.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Pa. I didn’t know.’ Hot and flushed, Lizzie held her hands behind her back determined to wash them thoroughly.

  ‘So that’s what killed the other children?’ Ma said, unable to stop herself.

  Pa nodded, and admitted that Robson told him that one of the earliest settler families had lost three children to tutu berries. Lizzie couldn’t tell if ignorance or desperation had made them eat them and didn’t want to ask.

  ‘Where are they buried?’ asked Albert later. He shivered. ‘Did Pa say?’

  ‘No. He probably doesn’t know,’ said Ada. ‘Fancy not telling us before.’

  ‘He has so much on his mind. And he probably didn’t want to frighten us, not when we’ve just arrived. Or make us sad,’ said Lizzie. ‘It’s very sad.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ said Albert, in a tone of wonderment. ‘I thought you were in for it then.’

  ‘Oh, Pa would never hurt Lizzie,’ said Ada, confidently. ‘You know that.’

  She took his arm, and they wandered off together, looking round from time to time in a way that made Lizzie certain they were talking about her. Left with Queenie, she told herself she didn’t care, and told Queenie that she’d certainly help her look for the poor dead children’s graves, just as soon as they’d collected more firewood for Ma.

  ‘And if Billy says anything about ghosts, you’re not to listen,’ she added, meaning to comfort. ‘He’s only teasing. Ask Pa.’

  13

  LIZZIE KEEPS PRAYING THAT ALBERT WILL SUDDENLY reappear and put all their hearts to right again. Hers is beating somewhere near her throat. She’s not even sure what scares her most, but she knows she’ll forgive her brother anything and everything if he’ll just come back now. He doesn’t. The search parties set off, all in their different directions, with Ada, Billy and Queenie first to leave, with Spy. Pa and Lizzie are the last pair to go, and the sight of Ma standing by the fire, hand in hand with Gus, watching everybody else vanish, hardly knowing what to do with herself as she waits, makes Lizzie want to run back and offer to keep them both company. Except Pa has chosen her, and she can’t let him down.

  She’s surprised then, and a little disappointed, when he suggests they separate almost as soon as they are both in the forest and out of sight and earshot of the others. Of course. He’s right. This way they can cover more ground between them, without causing her mother unnecessary anxiety. More chance of finding Albert faster.

  ‘It’s like fishing,’ she agrees eagerly. You have to spread your net, as wide as you can.

  ‘And you know the island better than all the others,’ says Pa. ‘It won’t take long to get to Goat Point and then you can work your way back. I’ll go straight to the lake, with Sal. We weren’t far off when I left him. All those odd cracks and crevasses in the rocks around the crater. It’d be just like Albert not to see the danger in taking shelter there, though heaven knows I’ve warned you all. I’ll make a thorough search.’

  His sudden embrace briefly crushes the breath from Lizzie, and a few tears too. Released, she swallows, and almost confesses that she’s more familiar with the perils around the lake than he knows, but there’s no time to waste: Pa’s already wishing her luck, and telling her not to worry. She nods, and wants to tell him the same. He’s drawn and haggard this morning, horribly so, as if he can’t admit even to himself how much he’s worrying about Albert.

  Setting off as instructed on the track towards the western bluff, she soon reasons that if Albert were on this or any path, he’d have found his own way home. She will have to hunt harder if she’s to be the one to find him. Of course she doesn’t need Pa to find her way, she tells herself, flattered. She surely knows each rock and promontory almost as well as her father, the fissures and the paths and the gullies, the dead ends that stop you short and also the winding, goat-trodden loops that take you back upon yourself and spin your senses round. But it seems she doesn’t.

  After a night of little sleep and half-heard voices, she is easily tired. An hour or two into the hunt, she has lost the track completely. Her familiarity with the island is weaker than she believed. Of course she knows the ways from here to there and back again, but there are more in-between places than anyone could guess, and they get harder and harder to tell apart. And now that she’s searching alone, she can see it’s not like fishing at all. You can hardly take a net through trees and undergrowth, and the wider they spread themselves, the bigger the holes they leave between. Maybe it’s more like hunting, she decides, but she doesn’t like to think of Albert as prey, and she pushes the thought aside. She begins to run, as fast as it’s possible to over ground that’s so uneven, so up and down, over narrow, vanishing paths made only by goats.

  Under the thickest canopy, where the light is almost green, Lizzie cannot see the sun. Down in yet another gully she cannot see the sea either. Deprived of clues, she calls yet again, shrieking now as resentment turns to terror:

  ‘Albert? Where are you? Can’t you hear us? We’re all looking for you! Answer!
Can’t you just answer?’

  Sounds inside and outside her ears become hard to tell apart. A seedpod bursts open and startles her. The rustling whip of a lizard’s tail leaves her breathless. Or perhaps a rat’s. It could be nothing else. Or have other new arrivals slipped ashore, unseen, while children and parents were distracted by the Esperanza? Lizzie chastises herself for this crooked way of thinking, and then the whispering starts and stops again. The faster she thrashes through the undergrowth, the harder it is to track the noises. Time and again, strange sounds send her flailing, beating her way through rattling leaves. Striped tree trunks flicker.

  Lizzie stops trusting herself. She begins to doubt the island. Its noises have not changed but now she is alone in the forest Lizzie hears them freshly. Birds whose unremarkable cries have kept her company on hunting expeditions for nearly two years squawk like frightened children among the fleshy leaves of mousehole trees, whose branches meet high above her head. She catches something of Albert’s voice; misrecognition pierces her just below the ribs. The air itself feels violent, as though the island is gathering itself for something. She imagines it breathing, heaving, maybe shifting. Unless she’s the one who’s been tilted off balance by the throbbing pressure inside her own head and lungs, from running too fast, too full of fear.

  She cups her hands around her mouth and shouts, twice: once from her strangled throat, the second time forcing the sound out from somewhere deeper, lower.

  ‘Al-bert. Al-bert. Can. You. Hear. Me?’

  Not a sound.

  As Pa so often complained, Albert was clumsy. Even before the accident that lamed him, he used to trip, or barely make it to a rock he leapt for. Those strange aches and pains in knees and ankles he kept complaining of – ever since the flux – his swollen toes and fingers … Lizzie wished she had taken them more seriously. He had probably tangled himself up, and fallen. Perhaps hit his head and staggered off too mazy to find his way. How frightened Albert must have been, lost and alone in the forest all night.

  But surely – with so many searching – someone must have come upon him by this time. Lizzie wants this to be true. She is impatient for this fuss to finish so that their new life on this island can finally begin. Albert has probably sauntered home with Ada, she tells herself, and even now Ma and Gussie are fussing over him. While the rest of them behave like fools, Albert is eating the first batch of biscuit warm from the camp oven. She wants to scramble down to North Bay, and hear a fine hullabaloo, and run between the huts and see Albert’s face look up.

  Lizzie feels the empty groan of hunger. Her anger towards her brother reignites and festers. She should have taken Ada aside, and questioned her, properly, before they separated. They had so many secrets together, Ada and Albert. They were always disappearing somewhere, always together. She must have some idea where he could be. Lizzie has had enough. She wants to go home.

  At last she calms enough to notice landmarks. A pile of rocks, the particular contortion of an ironwood tree – an elbow rather than a knee – all these give her a better idea of which way to go. And finally, unexpectedly, she is back on the path itself, and it’s widening out, and here are fresh goat droppings, and she’s getting higher and briefly lower and then much higher. Soon everything feels familiar again, and she realises how far she’s come. Almost to the western tip of the island.

  Lizzie decides to keep going, right to the very edge, where the trees thin. To come so far and not look out to sea? It would be a waste – a squandered opportunity. At Goat Point she’ll check for ships, the coming weather … and something else as well. Yes, here, just as she was expecting, she meets that other path, zigzagging like a line of scalp wriggling through hair parted and plaited in a hurry, which will take her to the flat, rocky promontory which makes her shudder, but also thrills her.

  Today the sea is a blue so intense and luminous you could lose your mind gazing at it. It’s the blue of Albert’s eyes in sunshine. She has to raise a hand against the glare of it, and hold back whipping strands of hair with a crooked elbow. There’s nothing but sea to see. No sails, no clouds. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of unbroken ocean. A milk-white foaming rage directly below beats loudly and invisibly against sharp shoreline rocks also hidden from sight.

  Cowardly, she tells herself. To come all this way and leave without certainty. If she doesn’t look, even if there’s no proof of anything, she will never stop imagining what she might have witnessed. So she crouches down and begins to crawl, knee by knee, palm by palm, towards the edge of the rock where she’s been standing, finally lowering herself to slither, belly-down. She’s done this before, a few times, to frighten herself as much as anything, but only with Ada or Billy holding on to her feet, and urging her on. A few more inches. There’s nothing here her grated fingertips can cling to. The slope of the rock remains in her favour and she knows she cannot tip. Her stomach lurches anyway. Stiff-necked, she raises her head a fraction, inches on a little further, and then peers over and down.

  A whistling roar engulfs her, and then a crash. Another hard on its heels. In her mind, the noise pulls her down, all the way, tugging at her reason. She almost wants to fall. She pictures herself hurtling through space, flying like a pirate bird, plunge-diving with a purpose. Her body feels leaden and light at once.

  But there’s nothing there to see. No sign. No sharks. It could not be cleaner, whiter, this moving tracery of foam, rising and falling below, all feathery down and scalloped lace, hiding and revealing the black rocks beneath, and the dark depths that surround them. Lizzie retreats, only partly relieved: if Albert had fallen here, would he be washed away by now, or worse? She edges backwards until she feels safe enough to stand. Then she turns and runs back down the path, twisting and jinking like the goats they once saw leap from here. The day they first discovered the point. When, after a desperate chase along tracks far more overgrown then, a pursuit so frenzied the memory of it made her heart beat now, she and Pa and Albert came so close to capturing the milk goat Ma had begged for. They’d thought they had her cornered, that there was no way out. Lizzie will never forget her horror at the animals’ panicky leap, how the whole small herd had kept on going, plunging from the clifftop as if winged. Nor can she obliterate the ruby-flecked foam, the triumph of the sharks below, quick and bloody and messy and clean at once. They came so fast. You’d think they had waited all day.

  Lizzie runs again, on and on, away from there, running back home, until an urgent swish and snap of leaves and twigs and branches brings her to a lung-heaving halt.

  14

  PINEKI IS MY SEEKING-COMPANION, FOR WHICH I AM glad. Though not a serious person, he is quick and sharp. He notices how we come – they send us first on Rough Haw Track – and turns it round in his head, always keeping a measure, so we can find the proper way back. Pineki tells me how he would delight to be the boy’s finder, how this would crown our glory in Mr Peacock’s eyes, and smooth all paths ahead for all the gang. This hope quickens our step and sharpens our looking.

  When we were deck-watchers on the Esperanza, it seemed to us a fellow could swiftly circle this island. Landed, we see that Monday is indeed many times smaller than the Rock, our fortress atoll that stands alone. Yet walking is harder, slower here, paths are fewer, fainter, more scrambling. No circuit road. No fringing reef to calm its fury, the sea is more violent, but by some trick often seems more distant. Less of beauty here in my eyes. The ocean does not break through holes in the land in rainbowed plumes of spray, or creep into our multitude of coral caves. No arches, no canyons, no patterned, pointed rocks twisting towards the skies, clad with green like forests, nor vast tree roots like sheltering walls, where a fellow can sleep, or hide, or meet a person, unseen.

  This kind of thinking will not help my soul to settle. It brings so clear a picture of home to my mind I feel a yearning hunger in my belly. My heart is overcast. I hear in my head my mother’s voice, and Vika calling back to her, and I see them as they move through the Mission House, talking to M
r and Mrs Reverend, collecting laundry, sweeping, tidying. All the little everyday jobs. For all the years I can remember, my mother has kept house at the Mission. Since first our father was taken. And since our father’s father sorrow-sickened. They look after us and we look after them, and they say we are their island family. Perhaps we brothers have the greater luck. Knowing home so well, at least I can hold this picture in my heart. Our family cannot see where Solomona and I now stand. They can only wonder. But there is a pattern to their days worth cherishing. We cannot tell how even this day will end.

  Pineki asks if I think this boy is hiding, and why, and what sort of boy he is. How can I tell? I say. What do you think? He shrugs and tells me there may be many secret spots we cannot see. If a body wants to hide on this island. We walk, considering. Always looking. White skin. Blue eyes. Open or shut? Pineki still harks on about hiding. Easy for some short time only, he says. Or maybe as a game. Yet hiding can never be easy without help, I tell him. All bodies need food, and water. And I think Albert cannot be playing. No boy, not even a larrikin boy – if he is one, and that I doubt – no loving child could want to hide-and-seek so long, making his parents white with worry, and his brother and his sisters weep. Yet the way his sisters and mother speak of him … like a child, not a man. A child in need of help; a strange and beautiful boy.

  Well, this is a mysterious way in which for God to move, I think, to conceal this Albert boy, and stop his homecoming. (I must learn to think more like Solomona, I tell myself, as I have often done before. He is my elder.) We must keep faith and hope in our hearts, until revelation is granted us, I say to Pineki. And then I tell him that with so many people looking, we are like a third hand. When we return to the houses, we will find the Peacock family whole again, unbroken, and all will be well.