Things Bright and Beautiful Read online

  During the dry season, on the last Friday of the month, an aeroplane from Port Vila made attempts to land on the island. The pilot would call ahead to the radio that lived on the site of the chief’s hut, and Old Mobe, who now lived in the shack, would give a quick account of the mud, surrounded by snotty-nosed kids who assembled to see the monthly miracle of the plane arriving. On those Fridays, Max would set off at dawn for the five-hour walk to the strip, and wait all day for the telltale whirring sounds approaching from the west. No one was sure what time the plane was supposed to land, since even aviation seemed to operate on ‘island time’– that frustrating consequence of life without clocks.

  When Max and Bea had first arrived in Bambayot, even the schedule of the church services had been baffling. According to the laws of ‘island time’, worshippers turned up whenever they had decided it was ‘morning’ and therefore time for church. This entailed a steady trickle of people into the church between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. Max started his services promptly at ten, which meant that for the rest of the day, doleful latecomers would be knocking on Mission House and peeping dejectedly through the window.

  In fact, the only person in the village who could tell the time was Moses – Knox and Joyce Turu’s eleven-year-old son. Five months before Max and Bea’s arrival, two WHO workers had come to the island as part of a yaws eradication programme. Housed in Noia Saruru, their arrival had incited excitement all along the south coast. Chief Bule had called a meeting, and demanded volunteers to go down to Noia Saruru in kastom dress and dance around a bit, in the hopes of soliciting money which could be used to buy playing cards and cigarettes from Santo. Moses Turu was one of those ‘volunteered’. His poor lolling tongue and wayward eyes evidently moved one of the workers so much that they offered him his watch as a gift.

  Moses was then granted the honour of custodianship over the Bambayot ching. The ching was a scraped-out, split tree trunk, carved at either end to represent bearded men. Max had no idea who had carved it – it was certainly far beyond Willie’s capabilities. The ching lived in the centre of Bambayot village, and produced a loud, hollow booming sound when bashed with a wooden club. It became Moses’ responsibility to work out what time the church singers should commence their practice, and run down to the ching to alert the other villagers. On the days when Moses was not in the village, practice slipped back into island time. After the first couple of misstarts, Max also enlisted Moses’ support to announce the beginning of service.

  Island time offered a lot of luxury for private contemplation. Nobody was ever in a rush. Nothing ever happened ‘suddenly’. Meeting any villager, any boat, or any aeroplane, would inevitably require a lot of patient sitting around for a few hours either side of the appointed time. At first, Max carried books around with him in his island basket, ready to use the extra time productively. After a while, he rather got into the spirit of it, and began to do what everyone else did. Sit on the grass and stare off into nowhere.

  Waiting for the aeroplane, though, was a special kind of excitement. His heart always leapt when he spotted its white body, a small tin can against the sky. It seemed anachronistic somehow, like a visit from the future. Max held his breath as the two-seater tentatively came in to land, glancing off the bumps in the grass and whining to a stop inches from the bog. On the days when the plane merely circled over the strip like a large gull, and headed back west again, Max felt a crochet hook of disappointment picking at the lining of his stomach. Standing at the strip with his shins coated in orange slime, another five-hour walk ahead of him, Max sometimes felt a horrible vertigo; that seen from the plane, he might be mistaken for a smudged and dirty villager, standing shoeless on a cult site, staring at the sky and praying. It was only post, he would say to himself. It would arrive eventually. If not this month, then next. After all, such inconveniences are part of the fun of living on the island, he would point out to himself.

  All mail was handled through these flights, and in the grey months when no landing was possible, Max felt a deep longing, bordering on obsession, for the post. In the days before the landings, he would have brief, fevered dreams where he was holding a great bushel of letters in his hands, full of important information, and they would start to blow away with the wind, slipping one by one through his grasp. He tried his best to disguise his feelings in front of Bea. He knew it was a vain thing to worry over, and in the mornings before he walked to the airstrip, he made a point of mentioning the ten-hour round trips in the service of ‘a bracing walk’ or ‘a chance to witness to the people’. But as Max trudged through foamy streams, between banyan trees, through swampy puddles, he rebuked himself for lying. It was obvious that Bea didn’t care, either about the mail, or about his interest in the mail. And after all, who did she have to communicate with?

  Any mail that did arrive was handed to him by the pilot, having been pre-sorted at Vila. Max then solemnly carried the bundle back to Bambayot tucked inside his shirt for safekeeping from unpredictable showers. Once back in the village, he locked himself inside the vestry. On the table, he set the mail out in a precise mosaic with a small, even margin around each one. Most of the letters were months old. All were soggy and rumpled, mournfully drooping, the ink dangerously close to seeping off the corners. Since his first parcel of post, Max had replied to necessary people, requesting they only address correspondence in ballpoint pen or in pencil, to make sure it would survive water damage.

  Max filled his pipe with island tobacco, slowly shredding it into the bowl, enjoying the delayed gratification. When lit, he would start opening the mail with a bronze letter-opener Bea had bought for him the year before. The letter-opener did more harm than good to the distressed and sopping envelopes, but nevertheless, it was part of the fun. Normally, Max received two or three reports from the DA; requests for information or routine updates on the province. Included in this was usually a typed page with notes on news from the British Administration. He received polite postcards from women from his Boston church, promising care parcels – which never arrived on any plane, but would, he supposed, contain a handful of luxuries from home that frightened him to even imagine. He was also sent regular statements from his accountant on the remaining savings from the sale of Max’s bar.

  It had been named after his mother, Marybelle, who ran away from her mother’s poky apartment in Providence at fifteen, cut off her hair, painted her eyes, and found her true calling dancing in a nightclub in central Boston. Max’s father, also named Max, was the co-founder of Lucky Clover Ale, and before long, his parents’ respective professions brought them together. Despite all the gloomy predictions from his mother’s friends among the dancing girls, and the knowing eyebrows of his father’s business associates, the two settled down to have an entirely conventional marriage, and a red-headed child. During Prohibition, his parents combined their talents to establish a small, but well-frequented speakeasy in the basement of an abandoned drugstore.

  And so, Max grew up happily unchaperoned, inventing games under tables, keeping company with many shapely legs, abandoned cigar butts, shined shoes and overturned glasses of home-brewed Lucky Clover Ale. He entertained himself with a bizarre assortment of impromptu toys offered to him by bar clientele – glossy maracas, jewelled tie pins, collar stays. Max developed a detailed vocabulary of curse words, and the precocious pomposity of a child who has been treated as a tiny adult for his whole life.

  At school, he wasn’t much of a student, but he still managed an anodyne sort of popularity, aided by his embellished folklore about dancing girls. When he asked to go to Sunday School with a friend from his baseball team, his parents exchanged a glance, then helped him to comb his hair carefully each Sunday.

  Max’s parents regarded his growing interest in church as an eccentric character quirk. Marybelle would grimace in amused horror and toss her hands in the air. ‘He’s always been an old soul.’ Max started staying late in church on Sundays, reading coloured storybooks about Noah’s Ark to the toddler class. Then h
e spent Wednesday evenings at church as well, helping Pastor Robert to prepare mealy lamb stew for the homeless. When he begged to join the YMCA ‘Juniors for the Lord’ camp one summer vacation, Max Senior signed his permission slip with barely a word about his child’s burgeoning holy conscience. Max returned from summer camp with poison ivy rash, an impressive spray of freckles, and a litany of robust songs about Jesus’ enduring love.

  His parents never went to church, although from time to time his mother turned up at a bake sale or fête looking incongruous among the pastel-coloured church ladies. Max would spot her instantly in the crowd, wearing a black velvet hat and scarlet lipstick, like a sleek tropical bird that had been accidentally released into the pigeon house at the zoo.

  When Max graduated from high school, his parents were not at all surprised when he announced his decision to go into the Church, and his seminary fees were paid for with the profits from years of illegal moonshine. Max continued to live at home, and took the tram four times a week to central Boston, where he received lessons in Bible study.

  Marybelle was killed in an automobile accident two weeks after Max’s twenty-fifth birthday, and his home life was irrevocably shattered. After Marybelle’s funeral, a tacit pact developed between Max and his father, and they never spoke of her. In the evenings, before he went to the bar, Max Senior read the sports pages in the hard-backed red armchair, while Max studied awkwardly on a small card table. And each evening as the house settled, with the gentle sounds of shifting wood floorboards and creaking door hinges, despite himself, Max would look up at each noise, fully expecting his mother to walk through from the other room. Then, catching the cocked, expectant expression on his father’s face, they would both look down, pretending to read, cheeks burning at the inexpressible cruelty of their disappointment.

  And so, Max became a missionary.

  In 1946, after the war was over, Max received a telegram that his father was sick, and he returned to Boston to find impassable heaps of grimy snow piled against the front door. For the last four years of his father’s life, Max nursed him with all the dedication of a son with an unseasonable suntan. He turned him to prevent bed sores, washed him twice a day with a sponge, and cleaned out his bedpan. Occasionally, he carried his father downstairs to sit upright in his red hard-backed chair with a blanket tucked around him. Max only left the house to buy groceries and attend church. He arranged Bible cell groups in the living room, serving hard shortbread cookies to his guests and checking on his father every half an hour. In his own childhood bedroom, Max cleared a space in among the tin soldiers of his boyhood, and tacked a simple map of the world. He looked at it before he went to sleep, wondering when he would next have the chance to follow God’s missions abroad.

  In 1952, after his father had passed, the bar was left to Max. He sold Marybelle’s, and with more money in his pocket than he had ever owned, Max decided it was at last time to visit somewhere on his map. He had originally intended to go to Brazil, but changed his plans on a whim, when a now elderly Pastor Roberts put him in touch with an ex-cell member who was working for the Empires of Christ – a hardy, but quite mad group of American Protestants setting up missions in Venezuela.

  Pastor Roberts was now a short-sighted, but still sprightly 92-year-old. Since they’d arrived in the New Hebrides, Max had even received a delayed Christmas card from him, dictated to his wife, slipped in with one of the newsletters from his old church in Boston. The newsletters contained spiritual readings, birth and death notices, and a featured hymn. Max cherished these newsletters and always saved opening them until the very last. He pored over them until his eyes stung from tobacco smoke, reading and rereading them until he knew each line by heart.

  Their first mail packet had been disappointing. There was only one notice from the DA, and two letters to the former missionary addressed in pencil. Obviously, the last occupant of Mission House, ‘Mrs Hardwood’, had given the same instructions to her family or friends. They were back-dated from the previous year. He asked Aru if the last missionary had left any forwarding address, but Aru sniffed and shook his head. Max spent a couple of evenings idly wondering what he should do with them, before sending them back to her church – the address of which was stamped inside the Bibles in the church.

  In June, yet another arrived. After the other letters had been consumed, with still no sign of promised parcels, Max, in a twitch of annoyance, swiftly tore open Mrs Hardwood’s envelope, not bothering with the opener. He slid the letter out as far as ‘Dear Marietta’, and panicked, slipping the letter, unread, on to the fire that evening. Bea went to bed early, grumpily pecking him on his forehead and slipping away before he could get a hold of her waist and request a proper kiss goodnight. He propped himself awkwardly up in bed, and wrote a letter to her church, balanced on the back of The Screwtape Letters. He informed Mrs Hardwood that post was still arriving for her, and would she kindly notify her friends of her new address, as her clutter was still arriving on their doorstep.

  Three weeks later, she turned up on their doorstep.

  10

  As fast as they could, Lien and Thieu made their way to Marietta. Nguyen had once told Thieu about a trail that led to the west coast. So, he reasoned, all they needed to do was cross the trail, and walk straight, tracing around the highest peaks until they reached the third large river. This would lead them down to Bambayot, where they would wait for the Duchesse. But these instructions were not easy to follow. The slopes were gushing with water from rainfall higher in the hills, and new streams simply appeared from one day to the next, so it was impossible to tell which ones were ‘large’ until they had seen enough to judge. And there was no such thing as ‘walking straight’ in the forest. They meandered in incremental gestures, corralled by impassable ledges, and then walked back on themselves for hours to pick up the route at another pass. They hiked through thickets of wet leaves, over craggy hillsides, and trudged through steamy, treacherous marshes of sodden earth. They were besieged by clouds of gnats and mosquitoes, and Lien bundled Minh in the net to protect him from the bugs, winding it over her back to carry him in a sling. To stay hidden from islanders, they had to travel only in tabu areas, dashing through open land at night. This quickly became another difficulty – deciphering where ‘tabu’ ended and the village paths began. They stuck to the densest, most awful parts of the jungle. Any time they came across a boar trap, or a line of trampled plants, or notches in the boughs from machetes, they retreated back into the unloved heart of the forest.

  One morning, they broke through a rank of sturdy bamboo poles into a small clearing that was fluttering with hundreds of butterflies. Black and blue stripes flickered in the air as the butterflies nipped at the surface of a shallow rock pool. Lien and Thieu sat gratefully in the glade, and Lien unwound Minh from his chrysalis of mosquito netting to bathe him in the warm water. He bounced on his knees and clapped clumsily at the butterflies. The bamboo waved in the breeze, knocking together in hollow chimes. Lien took off her jeans, rinsing the rash on her thighs. Thieu leant over and kissed her on the chafed red flesh, and then washed his hair in the pool. They ate a handful of peanuts they had picked in the bush, and Lien recited Tan Da poems while Thieu drowsed, Minh chewing his own feet on the blanket.

  In the early afternoon, three wild pigs snuffled in between the trees and slurped the pond water, then climbed over the rocks and urinated into the stream. Thieu pounced on the animals, but they scattered with a snort. He chased the largest for almost half a mile until it turned back and charged at him the other way, baring razor-sharp tusks. Thieu hid in the lower branches of a lime tree until it lost interest, and returned to the clearing, bruised and humiliated. They decided not to camp in the glade that evening, in case other, larger animals came to drink there at night.

  They walked south of the clearing, and came to a curtain of oozing thorns crowned with purple orchids. They circled round, looking for a break in the thorns, and eventually wriggled through the cavity of a fallen
tree trunk, passing Minh through between them. They looked out on to a narrow gorge carved into mossy rock. The bottom of the valley was a little muddy, but Thieu declared it a lucky find – no wild boars would be charging them in their sleep. Lien built a fire in the bottom of the crag, and they covered the aperture with a sheath of leaves to sluice off rain. Thieu hooked their hammocks between the rocks, and they slept in a ribbon of smoke from the embers to fend off mosquitoes.

  In the middle of the night, Minh began shrieking. Six inches of foaming, murky water was lapping at their feet. A swarm of frogs had clambered into the groove while they were sleeping. There were hundreds of them, leaping and flashing in the moonlight like tiny green gemstones. Lien gripped Minh in panic, and he wailed even louder. She plucked a frog from the soft baby folds of his neck, whispering, ‘I’m sorry,’ over and over. Thieu ripped their hammocks down, and Lien clutched at their scant supplies with her one free hand. With a bubbling gurgle, the water rapidly surged up to their knees.

  ‘Get out, get out,’ Thieu shouted, and they scrambled for the bank as the water surged up, and up again, a metre in five minutes, and they clutched Minh and leapt over fallen logs and crashed through oozing thorns, as ice-cold water swirled around their shins. They walked slowly for an hour until the sun rose, then collapsed on a rocky outcrop at the base of a papaya tree and stared at each other in a daze.