Free Visitants by Randolph Stow Page B

looking out on the lagoon in the last of the light, hearing the voices in his bedroom. I listened to Kailusa trying, in the language, to persuade him to come out and take delivery of me, and to him saying, I could guess pretty rude things about the snotty-nosed cadet he’d never wanted to have and had tried to keep away. At last Kailusa came back with the lamp into the dim room, and said to me: ‘Taubada come, taubada,’ and I looked and he was there. His stockings were round his ankles and his hair was on end, and his eyes were like that man Two-bob’s, Metusela’s, so wide that they showed white around the brown. Even at that hour, six in the evening, he had a bouquet of rum. For a long time, half a minute, we stared at each other, with Kailusa between us holding the lamp, and the first thing I thought was: he’s dangerous.
    But that morning, in the MacDonnell’s mouldering spare room, before we left for Kaga, he looked simply tired, no longer wild inside. And I thought: He’s got used to it, he’s going back, to the way it must have been before.
    ‘Tim,’ he said, ‘you
want
to go to Kaga, do you?’
    ‘You know me, I want to go everywhere.’
    ‘It’s not work,’ he said, ‘just a Sunday drive. I found something in an old patrol report I’ve been planning to ask them about.’
    ‘I won’t understand a word,’ I said, ‘but I’ll get to see Kaga.’
    ‘That’s my boy adventurer,’ he said. ‘Listen, you go and have kai, then check that Sayam and the crew are ready to leave. And chase up Osana.’
    ‘Ah, shit, Alistair. Do we have to take Osana with us, even on a Sunday?’
    ‘Yeah, we do. Otherwise his belly will be red-hot. It’s called diplomacy.’
    ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll sort it,’ letting him see my martyr’s face through the closing door. ‘Oh, let me tell you something that’s in store for you: the MacDonnell’s small-house.’
    ‘I know it well,’ he said. ‘A man of your size ought to get danger money.’
    ‘There’s a pit in the coral that goes clear to the centre of the earth, and it looks like nothing’s keeping the seat up but the white ants holding hands.’
    ‘That’s the way the MacDonnell’s going to go when he goes. Poor old bugger, what a tomb.’
    That must have come over to him as a vivid picture, because when I left him he was lying back laughing, looking about twelve years old.
    A gust of wind came down the passage as I turned from the door, all the scents of the morning on it, the sea and the grass, frangipani flowers and chickens, the leaves that have every smell between vanilla and hay. On the veranda I filled my lungs with it, the sweetness and saltness of the island after dawn. I sat at the table by the edge of the veranda and gazed down, through the rough flapping leaves of a pawpaw, on the bright lagoon, and the spotless
Igau
that was going to take us through all that freshness to something fresh again.
    From where I was I could smell ripe pawpaws among the leaves. Then another scent cut across that, and I looked round and saw the girl behind me, the greyish sprigs of sulumwoya withering in her arm-bands.
    ‘Hi, Saliba,’ I said. ‘Have a good night?’
    The English words must have meant something to her. Her face, which might be plain if it ever had time to be, began to beam good will, and she laughed all over.
    ‘Good,’ she said. Her voice is deep and high at the same time, coming from the back of her throat. ‘You good, taubada?’
    ‘Good too much,’ I said. ‘Saliba, you me go long Kaga?’
    ‘E-e-e-e,’ she cried, giving wild nods of her head, skirt and everything. ‘
Bi ta los’
,’ she said, which I knew by that time meant: ‘Let’s go.’
    In her hands was a tray which she held pressed hard to her diaphragm, with two breasts on it and half a pawpaw on the plate that said
South Australian Government Railways.
She came beside me and put down the tray on the table. As she reached to set the plate in my place, I leaned