Beachmasters, p.1
Beachmasters, page 1
THEA ASTLEY
BEACHMASTERS
About Untapped
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Acknowledgements
Impulses from Maggie Paton’s Letters and Tom Harrisson’s Savage Civilisation.
The Literature Board of the Australia Council for a writing grant.
Notes
The pidgin used throughout generally follows the South Pacific French spelling. Dialect words and custom references are drawn from a number of areas in the one island group.
While the revolution in this novel may have recent historical parallels, the islands and the characters are fictional.
There has been only one peril in the Pacific, the white one.
—Tom Harrisson
I know what happens
I read the book
I believe I just got the goodbye look.
—Donald Fagen
Mifala i man.
No animol. Okey!!
—Banner slogan at a Pacific island demonstration
In the waters of these islands there is a certain fish whose eyes, like the eyes of the chameleon, are able to look in opposite directions at the same time.
Like aeland Kristi.
Kristi last winter and the summer before that, while the wind off the Channel was munched by the wooden teeth of the shutters.
Like man Kristi—man bush or man solwata.
Like the colons and the British ex-patriates and the rag dolls District Agent Cordingley with his wife Belle and French District Agent Boutin and Madame Boutin and Planter Salway and his grandson Gavi and Gavi’s maman, Lucie Ela, and Madame Guichet and Chloe of the Dancing Bears and a beach bum from the big land, man blong Australia, whose real name was never known, with a lifetime of small riots behind and more in his blood like bubbles.
And, too, oh in this litany, pray, your eyes east-west, pray for Hedmasta Woodful, now and at the hour of the changing, and for the Bonsers, mechanics of more than boat engines, for Planter Duchard and family, and above all, for the big man, the yeremanu, Tommy Narota, part Kristi, part Tongan, part Devon, who has taken on his new native name, abandoning that of his sea-faring adventurer daddy, along with his ceremonial dress of Bipi fringed tablecloth and lace antimacassar loin-wrapper. Send your prayers east–west or north–south for the vanikoro to pluck up with its swoop of a beak.
And pray in three tongues: in Seaspeak, in English, in French; for there are three ways of praying.
The eyes move two ways. The voice moves three. Two-eyed. Triple-tongued. While the wind is eaten by the shutters and the small canoes move down the thick blue waters of the Channel towards Trinitas or Emba.
The sea rocks. The palms shake out clicking scales of music drier than sand. There are only silver scars left behind the little boats that soon no one at all will be able to see—scars, boat, water are all one. As man and land are one. Man ples. And therein, in that unity of land with man, lies the trouble.
It is time to storian.
Fifteen days after they locked the yeremanu, Tommy Narota, away in Mataso town gaol for seven years on the grounds of treason and inciting to rebellion against the state, a young boy shoved his way through the clutter of bad-wishers and the merely curious outside the gates and, calling through the bars, held his hands out to be taken. ‘Metuan,’ he kept calling. ‘Uncle.’
Tommy Narota, stripped of his military second-hands and wearing only a Chesty Bond singlet and too big white underpants, looked around bewildered, as all his moments were bewildered now, an attempt at a smile on his plump daddy yam face.
There was no one he knew outside the gates; only a few ni-Kristi there to gawk and shout rage sounds, a couple of followers who had escaped the military net, none of his women and a knot of abusive children on their way to school. He limped over to the gates and took the boy’s hands and then one of the guards hustled him along and another one grinned and the gawkers, the prison forecourt, the gates, the block shadow of the mango trees blue in the butterscotch morning, were the last sharp photographs he took with him to his cell.
But he had many other sharp-edged memories going back, going back, to his white daddy, one of those island knockabouts that Europe spewed out in the Pacific, a big bugger of a man, bearded ginger, with pale Anglo-Saxon skin and blue eyes, his appetite for sun and women, liquor and the sea, making him a force all those years ago, longtai’m bifor, when he traded and peered for landfall along the black sand coasts.
And how many hapkas did papa sire?
Some said ten.
Some twenty.
There were six before him, Tommy Narota knew, grown up and gone away into yam gardens on other islands by the time he and a younger sister, Seruwaia, were conscious of the roaring patriarch and the brown-skinned woman who were their parents. Tommy had thrown white, as they said in those parts; well, in some respects. Like Seruwaia. Clad in a blander skin, their features boned differently, but the hair a giveaway.
Papa, playing at custom, drinking kava in the sacred ground with the other men, listening to stars sing earthwards, stars moons galaxies dropping from the skies as they contemplated the stones. Papa not believing the stone magic or the star magic or the crazy klevas raving above the navilahs, but drinking, none the less, passing the gourd as they storied on and numbing old-world yearnings that leaked from dropping stars into drooping ragged beard when he sang later on the nasara ground as the dancers clicked nut anklets, ‘Tom’s gone to Hilo’, ironic with ‘I’ve never seen a sight since I be born, like a big buck nigger with his sea-boots on’ or—and or—just that. Papa in the heavy dark stippled with fireflies.
And older, ten, eleven, hunting with pig clubs through the mori trees out beyond the village gardens where jungle billowed down the mountain slopes in waterfalls. But mainly with papa on his boat, harvesting the waters out beyond Buala and learning another language of wind and current.
From his hot cell he could hear hooter blasts from boats in the Channel beyond Mataso and the blasts became all those stima days and the women broad-lapped along the quay with the fish strung nicely or spread on plantain leaves, the yams, the taro, the woven baskets of dragon plums and Malay apples displayed for the wai’tes from the ships. His big day, this, coin-cadging from a misis with scarfed hair and little biting heels, from others who squealed with cameras to their eyes, tekim piksa; or making a nuisance of himself at the wharves, rope-hauling, canoe-paddling, diving, giggling, circling, watching the gavman men.
The mission school, where there was too much singing, taught him to pray, to read, to draw a map of his own island like a vast green mitten and mark on it Pic Kristi, the rivers Quiros and Tasiriki and a big dot for Mataso town.
At twelve he went to the nakamal, became a man, drank kava and watched his papa cough himself to extinction, saw his mama waste from the lack of the big blusterer and ran off from his fishing village to the black dot on the map where he odd-jobbed for Bipi and the Chinese trading stores, light-skinned enough to show promise but too dark, of course, to get anywhere on an island with a long white memory of planter picnics and drinks on verandahs and the cocktail gabble of the ruling classes.
The two worlds did not touch, could not touch, except through feelers of resentment and envy.
People kept saying ‘war’ in Mataso town. There was big-eyed talk of great explosions and burning planes and ships like islands sinking to the north, long wé, long wé, past the yam gardens and the fish tides and the dusty stores of the Boulevard d’Urville. And then the war came in the shape of thousands and more thousands of American troops who planted a town overnight and watched buildings sprout like stinging-vine. And more came and more and buildings clustered like turtle eggs and there were blacks as well as whites wearing masta clothes and handling guns and radios and army trucks.
He’d never seen such cargo.
Hanging about the camps, an attractive hapkas, smiley, gentle, obliging, he’d run errands, let them josh him, watching their wastefulness with food and equipment and begging throw-outs. There were official buried caches of radio and engine parts wrapped in rubber and lead. He made a small living from selling off the stuff he dug up later when no one was around, selling back, sometimes, to Yankee privates who kept their mouths shut because they were going to sell off in their turn. Mataso town became a city of Quonset huts and hospitals, PX stores, cinemas and canteens on newly constructed roads that jammed up with jeeps and trucks and carloads of men with strange accents; and later there were planes flying in and out, in and out, from the coral landing-strip at Kapi and bomber landing-fields higher up in the hills.
His sixteen years hadn’t stretched his frame much but he had a strange dignity in his grubby alertness that ignored ragged shorts and mission issue singlet. Too old now to care that the succour of family was gone, even Seruwaia gone now across the Channel to Emba as house-girl for a red-mugged planter; but wrung, even while unaware of the cause, by the furies of mixed blood. He found shelter outside Mataso town where a group of ni-Kristi drawn like copra beetles by American cargo had made an abandoned drying shed a sorting house for scrap, the expensive detritus of these wry-mouthed newcomers.
They were a sad little group.
Strutters with cast-off forage caps, wind-breakers with colour patches, army shirts and loincloths. There was a stack of canned food and a fancy opener whose working no one had solved yet, a battery radio, a pile of comic books no one could read except Tommy and an army cot with broken legs. They took turns sleeping on it.
The army used some of them to help coast-watchers camped on rocky scarps about the island. Tommy Narota spent three months with a British planter from Thresher Bay, stationed on the seaward slopes of Pic Kristi watching American bombers thunder north into wet dawns.
The war didn’t mean much.
When the planter sickened with malaria, Tommy got him down, somehow, bushmen from the hills helping, to the mission at Port Ebuli. Only Père Bonnard thanked him. The war still meant little. He understood nothing of the loyalties of these intruders. He understood only the excitement of their possessions.
In the weeks before the last troops pulled out as the war ended, or they said it had, some giant bomb long wé long wé, bringing it all to an abrupt close, he watched horrified and close to tears as Yankee bulldozers shovelled tons of food ammunition guns tractors jeeps still in their crates demountable buildings radios, oh everything, olting, off a southern point into the deep running tides of the Channel. The water hissed and sucked and swallowed army furniture, road-making equipment, rescue boats and generators with blue indifference. The Channel ate and ate and the trucks kept going and coming, crammed with gear and the bulldozers kept shoving until even they, and then the carrier trucks, were propelled driverless into the Pacific on a mound so high that the driving cabins of the monster waste-heap could be seen at low water.
Tommy had stood staring with a group of islanders as machines disappeared into the sea and he had run forward alongside the second last of the trucks, pleading with them not to do it.
He yelled in French, in English, in Seaspeak.
‘Shift your goddam ass!’ the driver had roared, revving up and preparing to jump from the cabin.
The G.I. was fed up with the place, the stinking heat, the black stupes who got in the way. He’d picked up a dose somewhere, too, and the drugs in his system were taking a goddam time about working. He swung his truck close to the yowling black and reaching down from his cabin gave him a shove. ‘Haul ass!’ he screamed again. Christ! The mother-fucker seemed to be crying. Christ!
Then the driver had leapt and taken Tommy down with him onto the coral. They were both skin-ripped and bloody. ‘Oh you stupid son of a bitch!’ the G.I. said, smearing away at his own bleeding skin.
Tommy let his blood drip down his fingers, down from his knees and watched the last truck plunge into the Channel.
There was nothing anyone could do about it. The dangerous gutters along the coast were nagged by tides. The equipment could never be pulled out.
Nothing was left behind but abandoned Quonset huts, fifty miles of new road the weather would claw at and memories of insanely wasted wealth.
For a long time the island felt empty.
Père Leyroud who had sat it through at the mission of St Pierre, saying Mass as if there weren’t even the echo of a war, confessing troops, baptising their half-caste babies and making hospital rounds, offered Tommy Narota a caretaker’s job for the mission school and garden. Tommy lived in a small hut at the back of the priests’ house. He had three shirts, an old army jacket, two forage caps and a rifle he had found abandoned in one of the huts on the way to Bomber Three site seven miles from Mataso town. He had as well a great pile of mildewed copies of Time magazine. He concealed the rifle from Père Leyroud in a disused oil drum that he buried under a mound of leaves and garden clippings beneath the tali trees. Sometimes at night, he’d take the rifle out and sleep with it rammed against his naked skin. At weekends he took it to the old drying shed to swagger or flashed it before other young men who hung about the town’s back streets. For cigarettes, they could hold it.
Père Leyroud found him interesting. He odd-jobbed, unhurried and cheerful as he scythed grass, swept out classrooms and mended snapped wires along the burao fences, all with a slow but positive calm, unlike the other islanders who had worked for him. ‘I knew your father well,’ he said one day to Tommy Narota, paused with a broom in the afternoon quiet of the school.
Tommy smiled and waited.
‘He was a good man,’ Leyroud said. ‘Perhaps,’ he added tactlessly, ‘not by Church standards. But all in all.’
‘I don’t remember too much,’ Tommy lied.
‘Where,’ Père Leyroud asked, settling his round little body onto a desk, ‘are all those brothers and sisters, eh?’
‘Go finis,’ Tommy said, still grinning. ‘Olgeta go longtai’m finis.’
‘Don’t use Seaspeak, Tommy,’ Leyroud said gently. ‘Use French. Or English. You’re a bright chap.’
Too bright, he was lamenting, understanding Tommy’s irony.
And too bright for custom, for colonial rites.
He encouraged Tommy to read but apart from devotional works he had only a small supply of romans policiers and some travel books in English. Tommy preferred to pore over the mildewed copies of Time.
One morning after early Mass, Leyroud looked in vain for his yardboy. He wanted him to drive to the wharves to collect a crate of equipment for the newly opened science block. The door of Tommy’s hut hung open. The nails where his spare shirts, two caps and army jacket had hung were empty. The mattress was rolled up neatly on the camp stretcher and a note in careful mission hand lay on the box he had used as a table.
Dear Father, the note read, this day I go to drive truks for a planter at Bay of the Two Saints. This is man work, I think. Sweeping is nothing thing. Thank you for much.
The dozers had moved him with a kind of poetry, the heavy long relentless sweep of the blade, the swing of the arm, the high cabin seat, yeremanu high, hands sweat-greasy on the steering wheel, sheltering under the cabin roof as rain or sun slashed, the plucking at gears. And control. Control. He was clearing great acres of dark bush for Duchard who wanted to graze cattle on the foothills. The Adventist mission had asked him to level a sportsfield. The gavman men took him on to help with road making. At weekends he borrowed the dozer and made a private track through custom territory to an inland place he had decided to settle for himself. If he ever settled. The tensions between earth and air, the consciousness of the glade, dealt lovingly with leaf and water. It was his private kingdom and he called the place Vimape. But when the jobs ran out with the gavman and the missions and the planters, once more he was hanging about along the waterfront cadging work on inter-island trading boats.
He was quick, a natural sailor, tuned in to sea-rhythms.
The next time he was in Mataso town Mista Bipi sent for him looking curiously at this brown fella whose prowess was talked about as far as Trinitas.
‘You hapkas, eh?’ Mista Bipa knew he was. Tommy swallowed his resentment.
‘Malcolm Orwin was my father,’ he said. Remembering Père Leyroud’s words. He wouldn’t use Seaspeak when wai’tes did. ‘He was the best sailor round these islands.’
Mista Bipi went a small red.
