Sound (9 page)

He reefed the child from the whaler by one arm, yanking her up to his chest until he could feel her heart beating against his. She screamed with pain and started up a whine. He did not know the deep, steady authority in his voice when he said, “No one! No one touches this child.”

The music stopped. John te Marama, for no other reason than he was Billhook's countryman, leapt to his feet and glared lizardly around at the group, daring anyone to act. No man spoke. They
were all too shocked or drunk or both, though Jimmy the Nail and the captain were disturbed enough in their sodden slumber to roll over and snore deep draughts.

Billhook withdrew from the light with the child still clamped to his chest, as Smidmore struck up a new tune on his fiddle.

So the ne'er do well,

The son o' a swell,

He's bin cuckolded

By a sharpish blackfella.

Laughter.

Billhook stood in the dark beyond the bed of skins in the tea-tree forest where two men laboured over Dancer and Sal. He listened to the whalers climax with their odd, boyish whimpers, and watched their shadowy figures shamble away towards the fire still doing up their trousers. He shushed to the whimpering child. Then he gave the women a low whistle. They came out of the forest towards him, both of them limping, stooped and beaten.

“Get your skins,” he whispered in English. The child whined softly. “We'll go the other side of the island tonight.”

“You pulled out her arm,” Sal said to Billhook.

Despite the darkness he saw the accusing flash in Sal's eyes.

“Ae?”

“You pulled out her arm. Now do as I say, Wiremu! Just do as I say and quick!”

Sal gestured for him to distract the child, anything, anything, away from her port side. While the girl sat on a smooth chunk of basalt weeping with pain and cradling her left arm, Billhook obeyed Sal and took the only prop he had, the orca necklace. He rattled it against his palms, shaking the teeth against each other. The child turned and looked at Billhook, trying to see where the sound came from. He reached the white teeth towards her and as her hand stretched out, Sal, in one quick, brutal movement, grabbed the child's other arm, twisted it and pushed it back into its socket.

The child screamed. Then her cries fell away to whimpers of relief.

Dancer nodded and said something in her language.

“No one to look after her tonight, Billhook. Dancer, she said that,” said Sal.

“Will she be, will her arm be … where I pulled her …?”

“She will be sore.” And in the first moment of collusion with Billhook since the day that she greeted him at Kangaroo Island, she grinned and said, “But plenty, plenty sore if you didn't pull out her arm.”

They waded through prickly waist-high scrub and fell down muttonbird burrows until they found a place far enough away from the party of men; a reedy hollow where the only sounds that reached them were the wind and the swell against the granite. Even the penguins were quiet. In the morning, before dawn, Billhook left the women, the child and the dog and trekked over the penguin tracks back to the camp.

The scuffed dirt around the fire was littered with sleeping bodies, their faces cracked and the bush flies beginning to find them. It looked as though they'd been fighting, with blue bruises gathering on reddened brows and chins. Black flies clustered around the tattered remains of the first mate's ear.

Bailey was the only man awake, lying on a skin, still drinking from a bottle of rum, so far gone that he had come back again.

“Thanks for stealing me the child, Billhook,” he slurred. “She'll make me some money one day, not this day, but one day. Beautiful girl. She reminds me of Elizabeth.”

A kennel confession it was, because talking to Billhook did not count for Samuel Bailey. Billhook heard Bailey's accent change, from rough tar language, to the talk of some white men Billhook had met; the Englishmen with no beards, and scribblers in their soft hands. It made him listen; Bailey's slipping into another world. Billhook stepped over the captain to kindle the fire with brushwood. He blew on the coals and watched the curl of smoke seep through the twigs. He knew Bailey wanted to talk and he felt disgusted already with his wanting to hear it.

“It's against the law to sell a person these days.” Bailey struggled into a sitting position and nodded over to the tea-tree forest where he must have thought the women were sleeping, worn out from their labour. “Not illegal to own a slave, only illegal to sell one.” He slugged from the bottle of profit. He breathed in and started.

“That Weed. Weed because she wee'd all down my leg when I got her. She's a fey sprite. Never seen a girl so pretty except one … she reminds me of those children, like beggars they were but worse, trying out the streets, just babies. Where were their mothers? Couldn't see what was going on under their own noses, too drunk, too poor, fathers away fighting Frenchmen. T'was not my fault Billhook. They needed a feed and a bed. Mine own mother so ill with the melancholia and a doctor who gave her pills. Father worked at the victualling office, supplying the war. He watched those children come and go, he did. He knew which ones needed his help. He would have them home – but only for short stays lest they stole something. Got so the kids would come up to me in the street and ask for food and a bed. I'd run home and ask my father. ‘Is it William?' He would ask. ‘Solomon? No, not that Solomon boy. He's trouble. Elizabeth. Go and get me Elizabeth.'

“So I'd find her. That girl, eight or nine, she would follow me home in the cold, with rags wrapped about her feet. Father would take her hand and lead her down the hallway. The day the war ended I was sickly, had messed my own bedclothes and the servants were sleeping. Mother was sleeping. She always slept. I walked down the hallway towards a crack of light, dragging my stinking vomity blankets.

“Elizabeth looked straight at me when I opened the door. She still looked hungry … no not hungry. Nothing. Elizabeth was on my father's lap, he with a blanket over them both and the fire blazing merrily. He was lurching and squirming … she didn't look hungry, she looked pinched, like someone had pinched her face into a point, pinched her so hard all the blood had gone out of her.

“Now that was no hanging offence, Billhook. No money changing hands there. Those kids just needed a feed. Ha! They
got one too. I was a boy of twelve when old Scarface quit his war and I wanted to go to sea with the merchants but father wanted me to complete an education. He must have wanted me to get him kids, too. Still I took to skiving off school and going down to the docks. Watching the ships coming back from the Antipodes and the Americas. Watch those tars disembark and head off for the drinking houses or the brothels or their homes where the wives were. But I was still tied to my home by father's wishes and the money that went with it.

“I saw Elizabeth one day, at the docks. She must have been about eleven or twelve by then. She looked at me askance and I knew she knew who I was but she didn't want to say. Her eyes were gone all hard and grey. They were once so pretty and blue. Her lips were so full and now they pressed tight. The pox was about her mouth and she seemed a bit wobbly on her feet, but not in the manner of a drunkard, though she took a bottle from her skirts and tipped it above her head, poured red wine into her mouth so her lips bloomed again. No she didn't walk like a drunkard. She walked through the piers on air, not quite touching the ground, not wafting in an unearthly way but like the girl didn't want congress with such coarse things as cobbles and planks.

“She walked through crowds of men. Her skirt was fine red velvet but the hem was ragged and torn. A gift from a john, no doubt. She wore a green waistcoat and a shirt that was white once.”

Bailey stopped, returning to that day in his mind.

“Her hair was orange and her skin pale. She walked by a mob of tars and they all stopped talking. They turned to look after her. One nudged the other and then he caught up with her. She didn't need to hustle, with those nice baby tits. The man caught her arm and she turned to him with a smile trained to turn
upon any strange sailor she needed money from. For the next bottle, I suppose. Something to eat. Tobacco. Some rouge for all that unwrecked beauty. I watched her walk away with the sailor towards the bridge under croft, hips swaying, slim hips swaying like a child trying to be a woman, by the sailor's side.”

Bailey slugged from the bottle of rum, spluttered and then farted. “So I was right. She was just a whore.” He nodded again towards the tea-tree forest. “Just like those whores. Little Lizzie was always a whore, giving up herself to any scrawny syphilitic tar. She was better off being fed by father had he not lost interest in her when her tits sprouted. But … looking back … that day the
Elk
came in fresh from the Cape and looking for crew and that's how I came to be in the colony. Without father's blessing. Although he victualled an entire navy, he failed to victual me for my troubles.”

He turned to stare at Billhook with scorched blue eyes. “He said something odd the day after I saw him from the hallway. He said, ‘Samuel, what you observed is an ancient manorial right.'
An ancient manorial right.
But I'll never live in a house again, Billhook, let alone a manor. The halls … the hallways do me in.”

Jimmy, Smidmore and the captain spent an age in earnest debate, on the beach beside the whaleboat. The captain, with his florid face and waistcoat over his corpulent, barrel body looked as though he was winning. Jimmy's rags and kangaroo skins, his scarred face and Smidmore's long hair and turned eye: those things and their predicament lowered their ranking in the captain's eyes below that of pirates and just above the black women they had, and made grounds for a good deal.

Smidmore and Everett walked back up the hill to the camp where the sealing party waited.

“Two barrels.”

“Two fucking barrels!” spat Bailey.

“And three iron pots, two oars and a mainsail.”

Sal gave a short, ironic laugh.

Jimmy turned and backhanded her so that her head rocked sideways. “Don't think you're worth that much, Sal. That's for all our skins.”

“Do they have gunpowder?” asked Billhook.

“Yep, but they ain't parting with any.”

Bailey said in his quiet voice, “How do we know this American is telling us any truth at all?”

Jimmy had already thought it out. “If he's lying and Boss turns up at King George Sound looking for us and a good market for skins, then we've got the skins on Fairy plus the skins we get at the Sound, plus we got two barrels of rum for our own trouble.
Fair enough. If he don't, we have some rum we can sell on if need be. Always said I won't work for no man again.”

Jimmy told his own story of working for the whalers. That he'd come out from England on a whaler that wrecked on a reef on the north-east coast. They were marooned for two months before rescue. During that time, they caught seal and ate it raw, drawn its blood to drink. One of the men made a boat from sealskins, paddled off towards the mainland never to be seen again. After their rescue, the whaling company Jimmy the Nail had worked for started fitting a new ship and hiring crew in Hobart. The captain didn't hire Jimmy the Nail when he went asking. “Reckoned I was bad luck,” he laughed. He gave up on the whaling life and went to live on Kangaroo Island. “No more working for the man.”

“Organised that one well then, didn't yer,” commented Bailey.

Billhook was unconcerned with the story or deals between the whalers and the sealers. His motivation for journeying to the colony was never based on commerce. But he also understood that a drop in the market for seal meant his people would not be able to buy as many guns as they needed to fight off Te Rauparaha. He walked away from the small knot of men and women, his mind worrying at the Ngati Toa invasion, at not being able to see his father's body, at his missed chance to settle Kelly in Van Diemen's Land. He was on the wrong side of the wrong country, futile and powerless.

“We'll be off to King George Sound, then?” he heard Smidmore say.

“Yep, on the morn. No need to hang around here, workin' for the Yanks. Best to be away. There'll be more people through the Sound too. We'll get back to Van Diemen's alright from there.”

The sealers began breaking camp in the afternoon, pulling the shelter sails away from rough, peppermint bough frames and
folding them neatly in the boat. They rolled any surplus sleeping skins around cleaned guns and into tight wads of fur and steel. They collected bladders of water from the spring. Smidmore went over the boat, checking every rope, clew and block. The sealer women gathered seed from the acacias and rushes, for they knew they may not make landfall for days and then, not for long enough to forage. They dug through the rough soil by the reedy hollow with their sharpened sticks for grubs that were tasty and fat and checked their lizard traps for the last time.

In the evening, they drank rum around the fire and ignored the carousing noises drifting across the water from the whaling ship. The women threw three of the black lizards they'd caught onto the coals, belly down. The child gasped as the lizards' carcasses stiffened in the heat and stood up as though they were about to run out of the coals, their heads moving from side to side. Jimmy snorted with laughter. “Bet she never gets sick of seeing that.”

Smidmore gave Sal a flask to drink from and she and Dancer passed it between themselves. Like some of the men, both women had swollen eyes and grazes from the previous night. Sal touched Dancer's face and Billhook heard her mutter a question. Dancer shrugged and smiled ruefully, showing dark gaps where her teeth had been incised. Later, as Billhook huddled into his skins, he heard Dancer singing the chanting story that she sang often in the eve; the child and Sal patting the earth in rhythm. No one talked about the child, nor did they argue for whether or not to take her to King George Sound. Why would they? She was coming too.