Jungle Rock Blues, page 13
However, that was later. Now, with the rain sounding on the roof and with that big hunk in the doorway, getting his feet rained on but not caring, and why should he, she was making a little home, and so there was a happiness in her. Women and homemaking, this is not a generalisation we’re encouraged to make, nevertheless I suggest there’s some truth in it – go on, think the less of me. Also, after the alarms and strangeness of her recent days, for June the prospect of a real bed, of walls, these things gave her comfort. Now it was her turn to sing. Shrimp boats is acomin’, their sails are in sight ...
They ate rice, which was strange to him, flavoured with manuka, and drank manuka tea. The use of the leaves of this tree, which the New Zealanders also call tea-tree, she had learned of in her preparatory reading and, for Caliban, who for so many years lived hungry among gorillas while they complacently munched it, this was a strange kind of triumphant homecoming: This is what we do with manuka! Going to the fireplace, he put his nose over the pot and inhaled, as she had done. His cheeks clammy with steam, he smelled something good. He took the sensation deep into his chest. It was remarkable the way human beings – he had learned this term – did things to their food. But this was a quality he was beginning to understand more and more, that human beings changed everything they came into contact with. They made things into other things. They had a design, a shape in mind – manuka, pot, fireplace, chimney. Far away in the back of his head it may be that he wondered what shape June had in mind for him. But this thought was as deep buried as any question about what he might make of her, especially when here she was, all homework now done, and drawing him to her. And one more time with the buttons.
The rain beat steady on the roof, then began to beat harder. On the bed frame, on the mattress of grasses, June and Caliban paused to listen. Outside in the dark, rain pelted down on the ten million leaves, burst into little streams that ran headstrong down the hillsides. Far away, the gorillas huddled, miserable, and waited for morning. Ants were flooded from their nests. In the cabin, June wanted to shut the door but Caliban wouldn’t have it. Being shut in made his heart pound. This worried June, who knew that ship’s cabins were small places. Perhaps they could sleep on deck? But he would have to learn – have to. Meanwhile she didn’t fight it. Instead she drew him to his feet and insisted that they went outside.
The rain wasn’t quite what she’d imagined – colder, and the twisting ropes of it made patterns in the dark which were suggestive, scary. But she pulled him to her and kissed him hard. It was like being in the waterfall, except that the fall of the water there had the quality that you could never outlast it. This was for now. This was once only. “I understood I would never be here again,” she wrote in her book. “We would be leaving all this behind.” And she dragged him down and had them fuck in the mud.
Of course the humpy had its own magic and two nights later, when the ground had dried, they slept there again.
But the seasons were changing. It was appreciably cooler. The wetas, she noted in her notebook, were quieter, slower to respond to Caliban’s provocations, less aggressive – soon they would be sealing themselves in their caves, shoulder to shoulder like cows in a herd, and waiting out the winter. She imagined them packed in there – it seemed like too much energy in a confined space. Of course, woe betide the wetas who were last to wake.
She had at least two publications planned now – a paper on the wetas, and a broader, more popular study on Caliban in his valley. To this end she had him explore further than he had ever done, to push outwards. Together, they climbed the ridgelines, went deep into the dark, tangled places of the hinterland. Everywhere she sketched, took photographs, collected specimens.
Her body was browner. Not the dark, ancient tan that lay leather upon Caliban’s skin, but she was through the worst of the sunburn and would look, she thought, upon her return as though she had been in a tropical paradise. Good.
Caliban was in shorts. She had done a final, thorough inventory of the cabin and found an old pair of trousers, gone in the knee, which had been used for rags. She cut them down, patched a hole, and buttoned him into them. One problem solved.
Caliban wore the shorts as though they were something he was forced to carry.
June’s face, when Caliban tried to see it, was composed of curves. The rising arc of the brow, the arch of the eyebrows, the concave, out-sloping line of her nose – retroussé, this is called. These were so unlike the shapes of his own face, or of the gorillas. On the underside of her left forearm were three moles, widely spaced, like the marks he’d seen on the pale tops of mushrooms. Caliban saw that these marks made a triangle – he saw that pattern. This had a connection to the three poles he used to construct his humpy. He knew of three stars that stood in this arrangement in the night.
There were so many parts of her to see – so many ways of trying to see the astonishing thing that she was.
At night they studied the books, June talking carefully about each picture, picking out details to explain. Caliban frowning. June was careful not to stroke him at these times, he was very responsive to touch. She loved to listen to him learning. It happened so fast – in sudden leaps. He had her accent, she noted.
She did not, as his “autobiography” claims, teach him to read and write. That he did himself and it took years. This book is its culmination. Nor did she eat raw meat or “encounter the noble Maori tribe who rules that land,” or need to be rescued from being raped by Terjick. This is pure fantasy, but for the rest of his life Caliban had to live among people who took such stuff for gospel. Only a liar would say he had no benefit from such mythologising. But it hindered his struggle to find the thing inside him.
June discovered that the radio could be tuned and she tried new stations. Caliban growled when she touched the knobs, but she made soothing noises and soon they were listening to talk – nasal male voices discussing the dipping of sheep, an egg-free recipe for pikelets – and assorted symphonies. Caliban stared at the little speaker – how could so much be in there? Then, late one night, when she had switched to long wave, “Listen to this,” she said, “this is from the States!” And through the hiss and whistle they caught American voices which were full of a brash energy. So slick, she thought – it was some cornpone southern station, with jumped-up southern music. She didn’t care for it, but she could see that Caliban was fascinated and so she let the dial be. The deejay’s voice came through, like jive from outer space: “... now do like the Dewster says and make like a bunny rabbit. Well, not exactly like a bunny rabbit, it ain’t gracious to run so fast, ever’body see how white yo’ tail is. Whoa, not sure where this is headed, betta get me outa here – try this, it’s from the Big Boy, Arthur Crudup, this is That’s All Right – and it is! So get yo’ tail unnailed – and tell ’em Phillips sent ya! Dee-gaw!” (Looks terrible written down, but that really is how Dewey Phillips sounded!) Caliban’s face close by the speaker, his expression moving around as each new turn in the music came through. June tried to imagine what was passing behind his eyes. Clouds, a train of clouds.
He liked to have her remove every item she had on her person. The cheap ring she wore on her pinky, the shiny bangle, the necklace with the little locket, containing a tiny picture of her dad, now dead, these things he collected and placed in a neat pile. There was an order to the way he liked her to remove them – first the ring.
He struggled to do buttons up – what exactly was the point? But quickly he was an expert at undoing them.
How can it be autumn, she wondered, and the leaves not fall? But it was definitely cooler.
12
Then they were packing and preparing to leave the valley.
They had made a last trip to the wetas, now hibernating, and, moving cautiously, crept right up to the rock wall where Caliban had said their cave would be. June photographed the dung field, the bones, the marks on the bark of the trees. She put her ear to the bung of hardened slime at the cave’s entrance and imagined them behind it, a mass of spines and bulbs, pulsing slowly. The smell of them in there – phew! She took a final photograph, of an antenna, like a devil’s whip, lying abandoned on the ground, and then they left that place – as far as Caliban was concerned, forever.
There were keys on a nail and June locked the cabin, and took them with her – this led, four years later, to the breaking of the lock and was probably responsible for the early deterioration of that place. His books she had in her backpack, along with her camera, which had captured every aspect of the valley.
She had prepared for their departure for several days – getting them to each of what she guessed were his favourite places and having him say the word Goodbye. Goodbye waterfall – did he understand? She also took him to the bones of the man she was now sure must be his father and had him bury them, and make a cross. Carefully, at her instruction, he tied the two sticks together. She had him select a small bone, from a finger, as it turned out, and this was carried in the backpack too.
Together they worded a note, which June wrote and then pinned to the door of the cabin. It’s now in the Archive – faded and curling: This cabin was built by the man whose grave may be found near the windmill. In all likelihood he is the father of Caliban, who was raised in this valley by the gorillas. Until it is proved otherwise, the cabin and all its possessions are the property of Caliban. You may use them but please respect them. If you have any information which may correct these facts, please mail it to Caliban, c/- McMay, 383 Fairway, Petaluma, California, USA.
The invitation to use the cabin was, June knew, at cross-purposes with locking it. She tried leaving the door unlocked. She tried leaving the note inside. In the end she left the two things to contradict themselves.
Caliban looked at the note on the door, fluttering in the wind. So this was how those black bugs in the books worked – he had never really understood before. It was like the territory marks that the wetas made – you could say something and it kept on being said, even though you weren’t there. He decided that he would learn to write.
The burying of his father’s bones had an unexpected consequence. After he had lashed the two sticks together for a marker, Caliban led them high to an isolated piece of ground, a thickly covered spur that ran down from the main ridge to come to a hillside point which hung in the air, then dropped away. It was an exposed spot, lonely, covered in low spiky thorn. There was an edge to the wind – a hawk floated slowly past. It was a hawk-wind place, tossed by updrafts – June shivered. But from here the whole circle of the valley could be seen. Then, down in the thorns, Caliban showed her a small opening, elongated, and at its head there was another pair of sticks, this time held together by two screws.
Why had he never shown her this before? They squatted. June said, “Your mother?”
Caliban’s face didn’t change. “Maybe.”
“Your father carried her up here and dug a hole for her.”
“Maybe.”
June scraped at the yellow lichen that hung from the crosspiece. Her fingernail worked at the old wood. “Usually there is the person’s name,” she said, “and the dates.” But there were no clues.
“D’you want to dig her up?”
But they left her there with the hawks and the view.
Caliban never agreed at any time in his life that this was definitely his mother. Perhaps he hoped that somewhere she was still alive. Perhaps he wanted to keep seeing the face framed by black hair, rather than old bones. Perhaps he didn’t want to interfere with his feelings for Nudu. But maybe he missed something? Maybe there was something buried in there with her that might have made a connection for him? He brooded on these things for many years.
Then, when the time came, June McMay glanced back at the cabin in its clearing and said the goodbye words but Caliban didn’t speak. She tried to make him, she thought it was her responsibility. “There it is. Have a long look. Darling, I have photographs.”
Suddenly she was not feeling quite so sure of herself, as her book explains. “I had told him what I had in mind and he had agreed. But this was like those treaties signed by the Indians – how much did they understand of phrases like, ‘the lawful pursuance of civilisation’s destiny’? Did Caliban make a real choice? Not if this means he knew what he was going into. But who among us knows that, really? He was physically stronger than me, much, and could easily have resisted. In fact, if he had required me to stay I would have found it hard not to do so! My bowie knife against his hand and eye – a toothpick against Tyrannosaurus Rex. But he shouldered his slasher, put on his marching shoes, so to speak. And we hit the road.”
Caliban led them towards the gorillas and she thought that they would farewell them too. His approach again was cautious. This time they were wearing their clothes – Caliban looked terrific in shorts, she thought. But then, when he was sure of the position of the group, he climbed a tree. She looked up and saw he was retrieving something. He put it in his pocket – the first time she had seen him do this. Then he settled himself on a high branch and seemed to gaze out over the valley.
She looked up into the branches and saw him there, then considered the way he had ascended – without a sign to her. And so she stayed where she was. Sat down and waited, amid the small sounds of the bush. He was at least an hour.
What Caliban had collected, up there alone, was a bone of Nudu’s body, from the small number that had snagged and remained. He was aware now of this bone in his pocket. It was new to him, this feeling for things. The way that things could be given names, and the way that the names had muscles in them, and the way that those muscles pulled at you. It was new to sit on a branch with clothes on, too new, and so he took the shorts off, a difficult manoeuvre when you’re up a tree, and dropped them down through the branches. He saw the woman down there pick them up. He saw the top of her hair, he hadn’t seen this before, the way her sun-coloured hair was divided down the middle of her head, the way it seemed to grow outwards from a point towards the back. She didn’t look up. He watched as she folded the shorts, placed them neatly beside her, sat down again. He could feel muscles working in his head as he looked at her. He didn’t have words for what he was feeling. She’d said so many words to him and he’d done his best to collect them. He felt he now had a great many things inside him and this was a strange feeling – it made him feel as the shorts did, that he had to carry these things, and that they were hard to understand, the precise benefit of them, plus they seemed to be awkward, to get in the way. To catch and to snag. To be a trouble. He knew this word and up there in the tree, with the valley around him, he said it out loud, quite clearly: “Trouble.” He heard the sound of his own voice, sensed the pocket of air in front of him, where the sound was, and the way the sound was out in the valley now. For so many years he had been dedicated to not making any sounds – to treading carefully and making his blood slide silently through his pipes. Now he had put something of himself out into the air, that seemed to be it, something from all the things inside. He wasn’t sure it felt good to do this. But he was going to have to, he thought, if he was to become the thing he sensed inside himself.
His eyes went slowly over the valley and he didn’t know what he was trying to see. Always when he’d looked he was looking for something. There were the trees, and the trees were arranged into the shapes he knew – leaves, branches, trunks. Among the leaves were shadows and inside the shadows, if he looked for a long time, he could see in there too – into the dark. His senses would go into the shadows and draw out the hidden world. His nose went everywhere, in the valley there were no places that were hidden from him, and everywhere he could simply look and know.
Whereas in her backpack, the things there, these things were impossible to know.
He looked down and saw her still down there and he had a strong rush of feelings which made him want to say a word out into the air. He wanted to say her name. But he resisted. He kept looking down and that made the feelings come more strongly. It was frightening, it made him giddy – he was never giddy. But he kept doing it. He felt his heart flexing its muscle. Gripping the branch, he tried to understand what was happening. He felt her calling to him, calling him down out of the tree. He could see the shorts there beside her, with the bone from Nudu’s body inside them and the bone and the woman were close together in a way that muddled him. He wanted her to look up. There she sat, still, and he knew she was listening. She was calling to him but she wouldn’t look. He felt his feelings swelling, rising – suddenly they went click, and solidified inside him, and then he felt calm, and content that he was going to go with her.
