Jungle Rock Blues, page 6
At first, the pen-and-inks did not interest him. But how he drank up those faces. Everything has a face, increasingly he saw this. Caliban saw faces in the trees, he saw faces in the mud of the paths he trod with his dirt-thickened soles. The face of the weta, with its oval eyes. The sensitive nose, slender, of the deer. The pig’s ringed peepers. But nothing like these. Some of the men were dark-skinned, like Terjick and Zembak. Look at this wild-eyed chap with a bone through his nose. Caliban did. He looked and looked.
The inevitable happened. This is from an interview, an account where he seems to have been a little more at ease than usual. The interviews were, for the most part, painful and false things. “So, Caliban, how many lions did you kill today?” But here he is talking to an unidentified reporter from the Plains Dealer in 1959 and for once he talks about something that mattered to him. “I was washing at the stream. A leaf went past on the top of the water. Then I saw something else there and I saw it was my face. I’d seen this thing in the water before but I hadn’t looked at it. It looked just like a picture from my book and I sat down and had a good talk to it.”
For me this is right up there with the day when man first walked on the moon.
7
I trust that this is now clear: I am proud of Caliban. He was an autodidact, a natural, completely self-taught, and, when he first appeared on the world stage, somewhat raw. But gradually he became more polished, and his poise and style represent a feat among feats. It makes me think of the Tahitian “savage” Omai who was taken from the Pacific by sailing ship to England in the 1770s, where, despite his strangeness, he impressed all who encountered him with his intelligence and grace. And yet Omai had his fellows to grow up among. Caliban had to create himself from scratch.
The other two books from the cabin show on one hand the great works of humankind – bridges, dams, zeppelins, skyscrapers, locomotives, highways and gardens – and on the other, pictures of the animals of the world.
Official records show that the cabin also contained a popular medical encyclopaedia, a dictionary, some scientific books, a collected Shakespeare, The Origin of Species, The Well-Tempered Clavier (did someone plan to build a piano?) and so forth. No novels, no poetry apart from the Sonnets. But he never gave these strongly-bound objects more than a glance. Books without images held no interest for him.
*
So now the gorilla-boy, his head full of pictures, lies on the gorilla hillside in the early moonlight and looks up at the stars. His humpy is built, the improved model he is so proud of and he is lying outside it, his back on a rather scratchy bed of bracken. The stars are like so many pinholes in a curtain – the light behind it must be very great. The moon is a flying hunk of rock, but he doesn’t know that, he sees only a face and he strains to hear what the moon is saying. Around him, gorilla sounds can be heard, small grunts of companionship. He grunts to Nudu and she grunts back. A large, red-eyed moth comes, moon-dizzy, and is captured by Jimpi, who knows that Caliban will eat this and so he brings it to the boy. A hunting owl glides into the clearing, wobbling on its wings, and passes low, perhaps two metres above Caliban’s resting head, and its target-eyes look down and find his, watching back, and in both creatures there is a little jump of surprise and recognition before the bird glides away into the shadows. Later he hears the scream of a mouse.
During the day, when the air is full of thistledown and birds are flying lines across the valley, the gorillas find some shade and snuggle down to take a break from the heavy work of eating leaves. The trees make tall shapes, clouds go past like floe ice, cicadas are drilling. Caliban watches a hawk covering a hillside, its wings spread on either side of a wire in the sky that it seems to slide along. But there is no wire. The bird loops and turns, passes close. It is a creature of the air, a thing of feathers. Back and forth above the green hillside its feathers take it, rising on the updraft, sliding back down like a skier.
Caliban stands, extends his arms, and the warm wind which is coming up the hillside plays on the underside of his skinny extensions, providing just the faintest sense of lift.
*
He swings through the trees with the greatest of ease.
Yes, swinging from vine to vine, and letting go. Flying. Then coming to rest, exultant, upon a rock: his throat opens, and from him pours a mighty noise, the bushland yell which, years later, gave a thrill of terror and blood to audiences who’d come for rock ’n’ roll.
“Aaaaaahahieahieahieaa ...” The Caliban call. The call of the hunter, the victor, the one who is master of all he surveys. For a generation it was imitated by boys climbing trees the world over. Up on his rock, Caliban is only a ten-year-old and his voice nothing to what it later becomes, but he makes the most of what he has and so the sound that comes out of him echoes through the valleys, falling like an avalanche on the bush-covered slopes. Caliban! Caliban! Caliban!
Squatting beside the stream, he floats a leaf and watches it slide away on the water’s muscled surface. He knows all the words to Mule Train, Some Enchanted Evening, and a song with a lyric that goes Toodle oodle oodle oodle oodle too-too that I have never been able to track down, but he doesn’t know what any of these sounds means. He sings carefully, he always had a good ear, and finds another leaf to float.
Absent-minded, he crunches on a small frog – bites off its head to stop the wriggling.
When he puts the books side by side he can have a picture of a gorilla’s face from the animals book and a picture of a white man from The Faces of the World. He would like to do this beside the stream so that he could see his reflection and the other two faces together, but he will not take the books from the cabin. The gorilla stares fiercely back at him, a version of Terjick, all brows and no nose. And then there is this other thing which maybe looks a bit like him. Caliban slides his gaze from one picture to the other, and he can feel himself changing allegiances. It’s a painful sensation, he’s losing the gorilla-soul which has his feeling for family in it, his feeling for company and shared lives. But there is another feeling too, one which has been growing. Huh – that is what he calls this. He tries to make the sound come from deep inside his belly, a grunt of a sound, something that is solid enough to have the Empire State Building in it, the Flying Scotsman, the Grand Coulee Dam.
The Faces volume has a final picture, a double-page spread taken at maybe a League of Nations gathering, and here you can see many thousands of people, of all races, their faces turned upwards towards something that is behind the camera, a political speaker perhaps. I run my eye over them and a voice starts up in my head: spics, wops, wogs, kikes, honkies, niggers, polacks, slopes, chinks, towel-heads, russkies, they’re all people and somehow these are the words I’ve learned for them – redneck arseholes, queers, fruitcakes, morons, losers, suits, airheads, swanks, spoons, fatties, nerds, junkies, crims, cowboys, dreamers, babes, studs, a pencil-necked geek – the gamut of humanity peering upwards, in every kind of rig-out, hair piled up or greased down, with facial furniture, and headwear, and neckwear, and visible underwear, little dogs clutched like lovers, one guy picking his nose, a cluster of cops on horses, and children held up so they can see and be seen – it’s the Milky Way. It’s the you-must-be-here-somewhere assortment of humankind, and what is it I’ve learned? For Caliban this picture never wore out. He would stare at it while the radio played ten songs. When he looked up he was dizzy. The company of his fellows – and then the silence of the bushworld: this was a painful re-entry.
One morning he was scrutinising the picture of the Aborigine when it occurred to him that beside the dark face there was something that was slim and upright. But then down in the pen-and-ink the slim thing was horizontal to the ground – the Aborigine was throwing it.
It took him a while but the day came when Caliban took one of his humpy poles and spent an afternoon throwing it. It could be thrown very well, he found. It went where you threw it.
He became an expert spear-chucker.
He saw that the spear in the pen-and-ink had a sharpened end and so he sharpened the end of his spear too – at first with his fingernails, which was painful, but he was generally used to a bit of pain, and then, another breakthrough, with the edge of the spade. His new, improved spear, made from a specially selected manuka pole, was sharpened with the blade of the slasher. Then he began to think that the slasher itself might be a thing you could wield.
A wonderful period followed, when he took each item in the cabin outside into the light and studied it anew, to see how it might be used. The books could be thrown, but not as satisfyingly as the spear – their wings didn’t seem to work very well. The eggbeater could be used to burrow into a rotten log, for grubs, but it wasn’t as good as your fingers. The whiskey in the bottle was, as has been established, nice to look at. But for Caliban what appealed most readily about his new tools were the possibilities they offered the killer.
He killed everything he encountered.
He always sat down at once and ate his kill. Pigeons wriggled fatly on the end of his spear and then were fat in his stomach. Weasels, stoats, rabbits. He tried to spear a worm, just because it was fun to exercise a skill. He ate better, and began to grow. He cut his hair back with the edge of the slasher and was no longer forced to endure lashings when the wind blew. Now he was always looking at himself and his surroundings to see what improvements he might make. He became ambitious – he considered killing Jimpi, just to see if he could, but then looked at Terjick and decided against it. But ambition is a thing that is always finding a higher peak.
Thus the day came when he went swinging through the trees, armed with the slasher and his best spear, and went upcountry, into the thicker, higher parts of the bush where no gorillas ever ventured, settled himself into a tree and waited. He was on a solid branch, feet side by side on its back, curved like the claws of a bird, clinging on tight. He was squatting. The slasher was propped up against the trunk. In his right hand was a spear. Below was a path.
The path came down from the ridge and along it, he knew, in time, the pigs would come. He had seen them often while squatting here, as they passed, single file, grunting, squealing, two metres below. They always paused and looked to the left, where there were several piles of Caliban-dung. The branch was a good place for shitting from and if it meant that the pigs lingered, this was a good reason to produce afresh. Caliban concentrated.
Then there were sounds on the path.
The sounds were from further away than he’d first thought – they were louder. Loud noises are uncommon in the bush. The creatures have to insist upon their territories, it’s true, but to make a fuss of yourself means that eventually someone will come and see if you might be good to eat. But this wasn’t just loud noise, it was a commotion. Not pigs. Caliban’s ear told him that it was a gorilla, howling. What would a gorilla be doing up here? But he was not mistaken. Into view came a gorilla, quite large, being dragged, kicking and screaming. Dragged by a weta, which had its jaws sunk deep into her shoulder. The gorilla was Nudu.
How calculating are the wild creatures? We like them when they behave as we think humans should. The mother fox fought to her death to protect her cubs – good, we say. But they do figure the odds. Caliban did look carefully to see how many other wetas there were. He did think twice. Criticise him if you must. Some creatures say, She’s gone, I have to live on – do you see the other wildebeest circling back to protect their straggler from the lioness? But it wasn’t more than a single thought. I call this intelligence. Then he flung his spear.
He followed it down, bearing his slasher. How effective the spear would have been against the hairy pigs is a moot point – it was only sharpened wood. But he had gravity on his side, and good muscles. His throw plunged it into the thorax of the weta and brought it to its knees. A great spiny leg came up and thrashed at the pole which was sticking from the shiny armour of its side. But its jaws did not release their hold. Nudu’s eyes burned at Caliban – now she was silent. He swung the slasher and hacked at the flailing limbs. The jaws still had their hold. Close by, more wetas could be heard. Caliban slashed Nudu free. His skills with the blade were not so finely honed. He cut her. She cried out. But there was no time to worry about that. The weta carcass was falling slowly to its side, the ooze from its organs beginning to fill the air with a fetid cloud. Caliban choked on his own vomit – seized Nudu’s arm – dragged her free. Swung them up into the tree.
Now other wetas arrived and were maddened by the smell of that ooze. Their scrabbling below was urgent. Caliban hoisted his mother onto his back, set off along the branch. But Nudu could not hold on, and they made an unbalanced whole. Caliban’s foot slipped – a weta had been forced upwards by its fellows, was treading on the wetas below, and its extended claw, thrashing, caught Caliban’s ankle, leaving a deep gash. Caliban lurched, began to fall. With a desperate effort he managed to right them, hoisted Nudu to his chest where one arm could encircle her, grasped the vine he had snagged close by, and, his feet slithering in blood, launched them.
They didn’t swing far. Below, the wetas gave chase. At the first transfer to a new vine Caliban dropped Nudu – she slid to the ground, barely able to slow her fall. Her fur was matted with weta ooze, which was seeping into her wound, where it smoked, but she made no sound. He went down – he no longer had his slasher, and the wetas were coming – gathered her, and set off, staggering, down the path. Her body snagged on bushes and trackside scrub. But the crashing behind them told him he could not hesitate. He could smell the wetas getting closer. He staggered on. But in his mind a cool eye had looked ahead and he had a plan. Ahead there was, thirty paces, a fallen trunk which cantilevered out horizontal from the bank, which he would be able to run along. The wetas would come too, but he would seize the vine he had snagged there, and swing free.
This plan carried them far out into the clear air. But Caliban had not managed to make his usual run-up and so they didn’t have the speed they needed to reach the next vine. They swung back. The wetas were waiting on the trunk.
Caliban managed to turn himself and arrived with his legs thrust out, so that his feet hit the shoulder of the first weta, which scrabbled like a man on a slippery pole, and fell. But the second weta seized him.
The creature had launched itself forth to make the seizure and this gave them new impetus – together the three swung back out into the air. But the weta’s weight was too great and Caliban’s hands began to slip down the vine. Then the weta slipped. It had never managed to get a hold with its jaws and now it began to slither away. Its claws went across Nudu’s back and down Caliban’s leg, leaving deep weals. Then it fell and they heard it crash into the scrub below.
Slowing them as best he could, Caliban allowed the vine to pass through his hand and encircling arm. They came to its end and he lowered them as far as possible, then let go. They fell beside the weta, into its ooze, but its head was crushed and it was no longer interested. Together they made their escape.
At the stream Caliban bathed Nudu. She let him. The other gorillas gathered to watch.
The blood and gore washed away easily enough but it was the ooze in her wounds which gave her no peace. Her eyes watched him. He bent over the rend in her flesh and applied his lips to it. The ooze filled his mouth and he began to gag. His tongue was burning and he paused to wash it, then went on. Finally it was all gone and he crawled away to be sick.
The other gorillas closed in, making small noises and patting her. They licked her wound too, dribbled their saliva into it. Terjick carried her back to the clearing where they had been sleeping that afternoon and settled her there, and they built a shelter over her. She made no sound.
Caliban bathed his leg. The cuts there were long and savage, he studied them with care. Like a cat he ate grass, and applied handfuls of mud to the wound to keep the flies off. Then he crawled back to join her.
The ooze poisoned Caliban and for several days he lay, mouth-parts burning, in the clearing beside her. The gorillas brought him water in their mouths and he rinsed as often as he could. His leg was matted, a congealed mass of mud and blood and ooze and pus that he knew would become septic. Nothing a few pills wouldn’t fix, of course. And in fact there were pills that might have been helpful in the cabin but he couldn’t read their labels. So he brushed away the flies and washed it. He was feverish.
In his fever he saw the people in the crowd photo come swarming towards him. They were making a loud noise – a kind of buzzing, maybe. Like insects. Their mouths were working, he could see inside their mouths, but he couldn’t see what was in there. Black holes. Now he was a hawk, floating over the valley, looking down on the gorillas, seeing the tops of the trees, puffy, and when he looked in any direction all he saw were trees and trees and trees.
When Jimpi brought him water, this fever vision held. Even as he leaned over him, Jimpi’s face was stretched long, the Jimpi in there was remote. Their mouths touched, the water went from body to body. Jimpi’s serious eyes, his shiny black-faced hairiness, the small grunt of sympathy – Caliban took all this in from far away, from up in the trees.
After four days he made himself get up. He fell, and got up again. He dragged himself down to the stream and washed. His mouth stung, he washed it again and again. His leg couldn’t be stood on, it felt like a heavy club attached to his thigh.
He stayed among the gorillas. Their affection was restorative, it was a thing he could feel, inside him, as firm as a muscle. They didn’t move so much, fed around that place so that he could be among them. They didn’t care that he was a Huh. Even Terjick came to stand over him, blocking out the sky. His bent finger traced the wound. He sat down heavily, nearby, then lay down on his side and put his hands, sleepy-sign, palm to palm under his head for a pillow, and closed his eyes. He was keeping Caliban company.
