‘Jeeze, I’m sorry, I shoulda left it alone.’
‘Don’t be sorry. Like I said, you say those things one too many times in the wrong place, someone’ll put your eyes out — worse. He needs telling now an’ again. Stop that violence before it gets out of his mouth.’ The old dog started to bark. Frank could see its hackles were up and one of its eyes — the one that wasn’t already clouded over — showed the white.
‘Eleanor! Shuddup!’ belted Linus in a voice that made the dog sit down and then stand up again.
Keen to change the subject Frank said, ‘Been thinking I might get a pup. Be glad of the company.’
‘What? These bastards not enough for you, eh?’ he said, pointing his bottle at Mary who looked stonily back. Frank laughed.
‘Nah, mate,’ said Linus, ‘can’t have a dog out here — won’t work. Too much snakes or somethin’. Have a look at Eleanor there — she doesn’t like the place. Won’t get down outta that tray. She won’t drink the water here, won’t take the meat. You ask Haydon about it — he’ll tell ya. He went through three pups before they called it a day. One old dog too. They just keep going off. Might be there’s something in that cane or that bush. If there is, he sure likes a dog now and again.’ Eleanor whined, but with a sharp look from Linus she was quiet again.
‘Well, what about those two?’ asked Frank, pointing at the chickens who were now looking at Eleanor.
Linus drained his beer. ‘Chooks are fine. They get up in the trees. Goats are good too — I’ve seen people around here keep a goat or two. They’ve got horns, I suppose. Mad bastards anyways, with their yellow eyes, give me the willies.’ He banged down his bottle. ‘Anyway, hoot hoot, off I go.’ And he hefted himself up with the help of the post that held up the veranda. For a moment it felt like the place might collapse but in the end it was okay and Frank waved Linus off. He found himself alone again and tried not to look at the sugar cane.
10
‘Hell, it’s only natural,’ Flood said. ‘You hunt the beast, you kill it, you take the horns.’
There was a pause while he pulled a small piece of food from the back of his mouth and sucked his finger clean of it. He was evidently happy with the food at the compound, the bully beef and potatoes.
‘I heard one guy takes the heads — bleaches them out. Prob’ly be worth something when this is all over.’
‘He wouldn’t be able to lug around a sackful of heads,’ said Cray, who was propped against a tree, with a pad of paper and a pencil stub.
‘Bullshit.’ Flood spat and it landed heavily in the bracken. ‘Anyway, I’m starting a little collection of my own.’ He tried to catch Leon’s eye but Leon looked away and pretended he was listening to something else. ‘I’m gonna to take the trigger fingers.’
‘You’re full of shit, Flood.’ Cray shifted so that he was turned away from him.
Flood chuckled, then drew hard on his cigarette, the orange tip glowed bright enough to light up the sticky little mouth it poked from. As he exhaled he let out a few more humps and giggles, then looked away.
Leon busied himself with picking out the heavy green mud from the grooves of his boot with a twig. He started shaping mud round twigs, using it like modelling clay. It wouldn’t hold together that well when it was dry, so he kept it small. His father had made a sugar model of him when he was born, made it the right size so that it fitted with the wedding figures from their cake. When he’d been about five, his father had taken the baby down out of the bell jar to show him. It was in a cradle that rocked when you nudged at it. A blue striped blanket came up to his chin and his pink fingers clutched at the edge of it, minute dots of white for fingernails. The cradle fitted right in the middle of his palm, the size of a sugared almond. When the shop bell rang and his father went to serve a customer, Leon had simply popped it into his mouth, without even really thinking about it. The sugar had been old, but it was still sweet, and when he took it out of his mouth again the colours had all run and the thing looked a mess. His mother walked in just in time to see the baby go back into his mouth and her scream brought his father running.
‘What in hell?’
Leon kept his mouth closed over the baby.
His mother had tears in her eyes and a hand over her mouth. ‘He’s eating his baby self,’ she whispered. They stared at him in silence. He blinked.
His father’s face went red, then he laughed loudly so the place echoed. ‘Well, then, I suppose that’s fine,’ he said. ‘Taste good, does he?’
Leon nodded, his mother stared and his father went back to the front of the shop, still giggling, saying over and over, ‘My word. My word, my word. There’s sugar in the blood for you.’
The mud baby that Leon made, sitting in the damp shade of a rubber tree, was in swaddling, no arms or legs, just a little blackish-greenish grub, with two seeds from a split pod of some kind for eyes. With a grass stalk he put in details — eyelashes, a smile, a triangle nose and circles for cheeks. He put it in a strong patch of sunlight on the root of the tree and left it to bake. Cray was oiling the handle of a machete. He held it up to show Leon and passed it to him, so that he could see that on the wooden handle were all kinds of carvings, birds and leaves of minute detail.
‘For the wife,’ Cray explained, ‘she wanted something’d be good in the garden — we got this fireweed and bramble problem. Got this old promise to sort it out when I get back.’
Leon felt the weight of it in his hands. ‘’Sa keen handle — where’d you find it?’
‘Took it off a Cong. Shot him in the throat and took his knife.’
He held Leon’s gaze for a moment before pulling hard on his cigarette and looking down at the ground. ‘Carved those things meself.’
Leon nodded. ‘She’s a beaut.’ Some sort of bird laughed loudly. ‘Really nice. You work on wood back home?’
Cray looked up again, squinting and nodded. ‘Mainly I make rocking chairs.’
Leon carried on nodding and handed back the blade. ‘Funny place, this.’
‘That is the fucking truth, mate.’
When it was time to move on, he checked on the mud baby and found it had dried a shade lighter. Stupid to want to take it. But he wrapped it carefully in a fat leaf anyway. It’d fall to pieces. He put it into a zippered pocket and shifted his pack on to his back, careful not to knock it. He shook his head at himself and made off after Cray.
In the night, along with the things that loped in the undergrowth, the tide of mosquitoes and biting beetles that hissed and whined around Leon’s ears, there was the sound of heaving. Someone was sick and in between the cries of the man Leon could hear a neighing, a rucking up of earth with claws like something rejoicing in the sound. He pulled his soft cap over his ears and curled in a tight ball, the butt of his gun poking at him like the cold nose of an animal.
When the sun came up, it was Flood who lay chalkily under his netting, an orange crust round his mouth, to be lifted out with his malaria. Leon breathed shallowly. Of all the bastards to get sick.
‘That means you get the gun, old matey,’ said Pete, planting the thing at his feet. ‘Clive’s your second.’ He passed over the extra rounds and felt the machine gun heavy in his hands. It was like he’d never held one, never trained with the rest of them. To kill a man. To kill thirty men. All at once. There was a moan from Flood and he felt anger rising in him. Couldn’t the bastard just live with it? It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that the arsehole was faking it. Better to pretend to be sick than shoot yourself in the foot. But he saw a greenness in Flood’s skin where the jungle had crept into his blood and was pushing out of his pores. He stood with his new gun, his back to the section, not looking at anyone, trying not to think.