The Burning Island Read online

  Inside I stirred up the morning’s coals, hooked the kettle on the idleback and swung it over the new fire. I cleared the clutter from the table to find space for his cup: fabrics I’d been sewing, plates with old food adhering, the books—Lord, the books. I watched the man’s eyes wander over the space, taking in the chaos, trying to assemble something from it.

  ‘I teach,’ I said to him, by way of heading off the inquiry.

  ‘Ah,’ he replied. ‘Your mother is a very clever woman. Something you inherited from her, perhaps?’

  I must have reacted—did I bristle?—because he seemed startled at my reaction.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he stammered. ‘Have I…?’

  ‘Was. She is deceased, Mister…Srinivas. Many years ago now.’

  ‘Oh dear me, I am sorry. So sorry.’ He dropped his head and when it lifted his face had crumpled. ‘I did not expect…I knew her briefly. She was very good to me.’

  My hands had taken to fussing with the bottles and glasses on the bench. All of this was ill-advised. A stranger in my house, a stranger tugging at strings tied to the past. As usual, I hadn’t thought this through. ‘Any other painful subjects you wish to raise?’

  ‘I can only apologise,’ he sighed. Waited. Came to a decision. ‘Yes, there is one.’

  ‘It was a rhetorical question.’

  ‘I need your father.’

  ‘Need him?’

  ‘I need him to do something for me.’

  I shrugged, determined to give nothing away. But the bitterness stung my mouth now.

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘I have lost a boat, miss. A boat full of valuable things—livestock, timber and, most tragically, people. A crew, passengers.’

  ‘Where did you lose your boat?’

  ‘Bass’s Strait. She was two hundred forty-three tons, a hundred foot long. The Howrah.’

  ‘That’s a substantial vessel, sir. Rather careless to…lose such a thing.’

  He spoke again in a way that was addressed more to himself than to me. It seemed a habit of his. ‘Maybe I should have expected this. It was passing through those islands…Where the Sydney Cove was wrecked.’

  I poured the tea and watched him rotate his cup to set the leaves spinning. ‘The Furneaux group?’

  ‘You know the geography, then.’ He was silent a moment, picking at a fingernail.

  ‘What do you want my father to do about this?’

  ‘He must go and find it. In his interest, as much as mine.’

  ‘He cannot,’ I said abruptly.

  I’d startled him. He gathered his thoughts with evident care. ‘Is your father, then, also…deceased?’

  ‘No, he is…alive. He is no longer in the service of the King, so I do not see how he can be of assistance to you.’

  The dark eyes indicated a change of tack. ‘It is not the King’s concern. Would you take me to him, perhaps? I should discuss this with him directly.’

  ‘No. I will not do that, I am sorry.’

  The visitor sighed. ‘These are difficult matters, young lady. Difficult things to—’

  ‘Very difficult, no doubt. But you see I’m not so very young. And I am busy.’ I waved a hand at a pile of balled wool on a side table. The fowl had taken to nesting in it. ‘I have domestic standards to maintain. So let us not waste each other’s time.’

  He smiled reluctantly, the first time I had seen the smile. It was gentle. ‘You have your mother’s spirit, if I may say so. A sad and lovely thing to behold.’

  ‘And a long walk for the beholding.’ The man made no attempt to get up from the chair he occupied. He had sipped barely half an inch from the tea.

  ‘You cannot come here and make these demands—’ I stopped myself.

  I thought about it, too briefly I now realise, and was swayed by the affinity I felt for the man. A form of relenting, I suppose; one I should not have indulged.

  ‘Oh, go on then—tell me why you must involve my father, or take your leave.’

  ~

  He told me he remembered my father as a good man, though he was angry with him for a time. My father had promised him his freedom in return for testimony against Figge and Clark, then changed his mind and had Srinivas placed under guard. Seated in my kitchen after all these years, Srinivas said he could see that my father had been trying to protect him from the malevolent Mr Figge. The Bengali spoke that name with the faintest of shudders.

  I tried to busy myself about the room, tried to make distractions. This story I’d heard in pieces, in moods, the leaden frame around my childhood, and much heartache besides. Governor Hunter was long gone, recalled to London, his name now just an inscription on a limestone slab; my mother was also in the ground. This story had belonged to me and my father, no one else. And this stranger had lived it.

  As I reflected on this, the tale continued and found its way to the matter of the lost vessel. Srinivas knew something had gone wrong with it because it should have returned from Hobart, empty, by June. Things go awry with commercial voyages—even I knew that. Delays, disputes. Srinivas told me he was used to obstacles. But this delay was different, he said. There was no word at all.

  Eventually a letter came through the governor’s office. Some items from a wrecked vessel had been found. One of those strange symmetries: Mr Munro, a self-appointed leader among the sealers of the straits, had found them on Preservation Island, the place where, all those years ago, Srinivas’s voyage on the Sydney Cove had ended and his ordeal had begun. He talked in a long-winded way, which I did not entirely follow, about how certain types of flotsam tend to reach shore when a ship breaks up, certain other types when it beaches and items are jettisoned, and so forth. Some sink and vanish, apparently, but some do not. ‘One can tell a great deal about the catastrophe by the nature, and sequence, of what reaches shore.’ I felt a sick certainty that he was referring to the bodies of the dead.

  His eyes were elsewhere now, apprehending the demons that afflicted him.

  Munro’s letter did not lay claim to the discovery of a shipwreck: only to traces that must have come from a ship or ships. Fragments of cabin fittings and a captain’s sea chest containing correspondence and the ship’s papers, which Munro claimed he had not read. It seemed to me that reading the ship’s papers to identify the vessel would be the first thing that anyone would do, but Srinivas appeared unconcerned.

  ‘I do not assume that he is able to read,’ he said. ‘In any case, I am satisfied by the description of the chest. It is my vessel.’

  And indeed if, as he said, it was an Adige chest of the kind my father once owned, it would be unique: the ones I’d seen in other homes differed in all sorts of ways. Each was an individual act of craftsmanship.

  I had taken a seat at the table as he spoke, and my eyes kept drifting to the embarrassing mess I had made of my small home. But Srinivas was fixed upon his tale and took no notice of what was around him.

  Munro had made clear to him that, beyond these scraps of debris, there was nothing else. He’d thoroughly searched his own shoreline and those of the islands nearby, he said, adding that he was by reputation a trustworthy soul and, in recognition of that, he had been appointed the local constable, or some such title.

  Srinivas looked at me now, an air of expectation about him.

  ‘They all must have perished, then,’ I said finally, at something of a loss. ‘I am sorry. But these are common risks, are they not?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he said, with something of the manner in which I would speak to the Coopers’ younger child. ‘But there are aspects to this, aspects that disturb me. This was a good vessel, in capable hands. There was no talk of storms. You eliminate the common causes—the weather, incompetence, an unseaworthy boat—and then you must look more widely. An isolated society of lawless men: yes, you would consider that. Men who live off the sea, who might not be above committing a deception, an outrage. False lights, or…’

  ‘This is wild talk,’ I replied. ‘There are patrols through those islands, everyone knows it. You need only ask them to carry out a specific search.’

  He responded in a way I had not expected: he waved an irritated hand at his own face and told me no one would conduct a search at the behest of a Bengali. I hadn’t considered this, but I knew immediately he was right.

  ‘I have private means,’ he said then, ‘and I am long accustomed to achieving private ends.’

  I had diverted him, and soon enough he returned to the thread of his story, to the other aspects of it that he believed to be nefarious. A striking choice of word: the sea took its share of vessels and lives every year; it was blind and indiscriminate. To hear talk of deliberate malice was something new.

  A handful of sealers had turned up in port, said Srinivas, making splendid men of themselves, loaded with money. One such man, an islander named Drew, strode into a Launceston rooming house looking—and here Srinivas suddenly became awkward—for the services of a good woman. I nearly laughed: from all I’d heard, no one would seek a good woman in Launceston. But the point was that the man carried a fortune in cheques and heavy coin, and had no good reason for the possession of either.

  This, I told him, was circumstantial. He was undeterred. ‘Circumstances are strands in a rope,’ he told me: it was their combination that mattered. When I asked him for another such strand, he told me that a cooked leg of mutton had floated ashore on Preservation Island. This time I did laugh, and Srinivas conceded a smile. ‘They don’t tend to sail the seven seas, mutton roasts.’

  But his face quickly turned serious again, and he talked of rumours he’d heard: the use of lights to lure ships to their destruction. It had been put directly to him—he would not say where—that the crew and passengers had been murdered, the vessel plundered.
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  ‘The islands are wild places,’ he said finally. ‘A closed society. I cannot rely on anecdotes alone, because they tend to the outlandish.’

  He meant no irony by this, I firmly believe.

  ~

  When he was done, I drank my own tea in a gulp and set the cup down, said nothing in response.

  ‘You remain unwilling to take me to your father?’

  ‘He lives out of town.’

  ‘Perhaps the next time he comes to town, then?’

  ‘He doesn’t—I take him everything he needs.’

  ‘You’re not making this especially easy.’

  ‘I see no reason to. And it is in my nature to be uncooperative.’

  ‘Yes. I see. Can I ask for your assurance that you will tell him about me? I can provide a vessel, provisions, everything. He will be well paid for his trouble.’ His voice was pleading now. ‘I feel sure he will want to help.’

  ‘I will speak to him,’ I said, finally. ‘You have my word. I do not expect he will be able to help you.’

  MY FATHER IN THE LEAF LITTER

  I no longer make the long journey to my father’s house.

  I remember doing it that day because it was one of the last times: out along the ridgeline that tracked south-west into the open country beyond town, and then into the enfolding forest. I undertook it often enough back then, the hours of it, the mare and me alone in the trees. This time it was a Sunday in late November, and I went bearing a dozen eggs, a brace of dull-eyed fish and the request from Srinivas for an appointment.

  The way out to my father’s house began in the early morning as a road, but for most of its length was barely a cart-track. In its lust for expansion, the settlement was very quick to tell you what a road was, and the grandees were very quick to attach their names. This track had no name: it was an informality, an idea shared by others who had retreated to the hills. No signposts, no nameplates on the houses.

  I was still unnerved by my encounter with the old Bengali. The ferocity of his speech, the idea that emotional wounds could remain as bright and fierce over a lifetime as they were the day they were inflicted. I knew already that the wisest thing I could do was to keep myself and my father out of the reach of this drowning man, lest he pull us both under.

  I was nervous now, in fact, twitching and straining to listen to every sound the bush made. When I stopped to eat, I crouched with my back to the trunk of a tree, peering out and even behind it. This was not my normal state. I climbed back on the mare with a look over my shoulder. The man’s fixation was contagious, and now it was me with the wild eyes.

  The mare threw her head and shied once or twice when we were deep in the hills. The contagion had afflicted her, too.

  She knew the bend in the trail where the trees opened to frame a view over the valley, dull greens turning blue in the warm air. She knew to stop at the gateposts my father had cut from standing eucalypts. It was afternoon by now, his secret place hidden by the forest and the hours of travel. I tied her off by the gate that had failed in the winter and now hung askew from its post-hinges. Looping the reins over the timber was a formality. She knew to wait there.

  The house was bark over a frame, a shingle roof. It was nothing to admire. Square, modest, at one with the surrounding trees because it came from them. Four apple trees, a pear, a persimmon and a fig, planted long ago in a time of industry.

  The dog burst into frantic yelping before I’d passed through the gate and did not let up. She knew me well, yet she maintained this insistence on warning him of my approach. I had never understood why he needed a dog so large—or so vocal.

  Soon enough my father would yell at it and the poor animal would stop. I had nearly reached the verandah when I realised he had not. Normally by this point in my approach he’d have sworn at her or thrown a tin, then stumped out to greet me. I studied her, lowered my body to a crouch. She had never rushed me, but the curl of her snarling lip suggested she would not allow me passage without word from her master. I looked up. No smoke from the chimney.

  ‘Father?’

  The dog cocked her ear at my inflection, as if she wondered the same thing I did. She was uneasy, and I could see now that she was chained. I felt sure the chain was short enough that I could pass her by and reach the doorway. Eyes on mine, she anticipated me. A bowl was upturned just beyond her bed of old blankets. She had defecated on the boards of the verandah, within feet of her bed. Her nose was dry: she was thirsty.

  And now I saw that she was leaping in distress, not hostility. The chain jerked and its links rang. At the top of her rush the dog reached a paw in my direction and the chain yanked her back. She made a sound of pain as her shoulder struck the boards. I came forward slowly and stroked her. She whimpered.

  The door had no lock and wasn’t latched. I knocked and called once more and felt afraid again. I was four hours from town, enclosed in the forest. The dog’s tormented state had worked some ill on me and the shadows all insinuated. I pushed the door and rushed in, wanting to confront whatever trouble it was that had taken root here.

  He was on the floor, beside a fallen chair and half beneath the table. I took it all in as best I could, too much of it at first. A candle had burnt down to the surface of the mantel and charred it, though the fireplace below was cold and unused. And the filth—the indescribable squalor of the place—it took my breath away, the stench and the shock. My father had been living like this, again. I should have known, should have been here; I had allowed my own life to intervene. Not for long, but long enough for this to happen.

  I kicked through a platoon of bottles, some standing, some fallen, to an outstretched hand. I felt his cheek: warm under the sharkskin of whiskers. In a surge of fright, I slapped him—an eye opened but saw nothing. A noise from his parched mouth, no more, but it denoted life.

  I slid my fingers through the lank hair at the back of his head and tried to lift it. Stickiness: a wound between my fingers, blood congealed on the floorboards. The hair was matted by it, the collar of his old shirt stained brown. New horrors announced themselves: the powerful vapours of spilt booze and something worse. He had soiled himself, then. His trousers, normally secured by a length of cord that strung suspended between the points of his hips, were bunched around the tops of his thighs.

  I kept a vision of this man in my mind, one that carried me through the glades of his decay. His dark hair swept back and oiled, his uniform, the firm jaw, the confident smile that creased his eyes. His hands that bore authority and tenderness on sculpted fingers. This was before his great losses, before he turned mad and volatile and unpredictable. Here now were those fine fingers, curled in the grime, stained by tobacco, scarred and blunted by life.

  I hauled him up and onto a chair, a deep one with arms so he wouldn’t fall. I filled a bucket at the barrel under his eaves, cleared the hearth of its refuse and lit a fire. He dawned slowly, murmured something. I found bedding, clothing, unused and tolerably clean. I tore the clothes from his body and the sheets from the bed and threw them in the fire. It roared and consumed the vile things. Once the water was heated I ran a cloth, warm and wet, over his sickened body and he stirred a little but still could not speak.

  The sins and insults ran off him with the clouded water. The wound in the back of his head was a split—most likely made when his head struck the floor—its edges swollen, the bruise already dark and proud. He had done it some days ago, then. I could do nothing with it, only make sure it was clean and work the crusts of old blood out of his hair.

  When the blood was gone, I took the scissors from the shelf in the wash-house, elegant ones with courting swans or herons moulded into the handles, an artefact from his life before. Blunt now, but sufficient. I snipped his hair until it was neat again. As I concentrated on his forehead, his eyes wandered out past me, somewhere in the indeterminate distance, pupils scrolling left and right to follow sounds.