As the day progressed, the country began to change. The steady beat of the cane rows faltered, became staccato. Smaller fields with arable crops began to appear. The clapboard shacks lost their stilts and grew corrugated-iron hides. Route I twisted, turned, shrugged its bitumen shoulders and began to mount the Great Dividing Range in a series of switchback bends. The rainforest, furry with ferns, woven with lianas, tumbled down to meet their puny SUV as it laboured up the inclines.
There were no more road-trains. They came upon trucks, with a single semi-trailer, inching through the hairpins, and forming temporary moving bridges across the churning streams in the upland gullies. The only other traffic consisted of open-topped five-ton police trucks. In the backs of these sat squads of impassive Tugganarong, their hands clenched on their rifles, their eyes vacant.
They stopped for a counter lunch at a bar in Hayden, the hill town where Tom had tried to buy the Gandaro spirit wagon for Tommy Junior. The native craftsmen and trinket sellers were gone from beneath the baobab tree. There were hardly any auraca wagons or rickshaws in the churned-up mud of the streets. Walking past the ATM where he had withdrawn money all those weeks before, Tom half expected to encounter the old wino, but he wasn’t around either. Indeed, there were few hill people in Hayden, and, of those that were splashing between the concrete boxes of the stores, a mere smattering were Anglos of any description.
Sitting at the bar, struggling with a burger engorged by eggs, tomatoes, pineapple chunks, cheese slices and bacon rashers, Tom observed: ‘I hadn’t exactly taken in how few Anglos there are actually living up here. The local people must depend an awful lot on the tourists — what do they do when they’re gone?’
‘Ah, now, Brodzinski.’ Prentice twisted his independent fringe with his nicotine fingers. ‘Your bing-bong never does any work, as such. Sits in his longhouse, chews his engwegge, chucks a few seeds out the door. Soil up here’s so bloody fertile he doesn’t need to even till it. When the taro comes up, he sends out the womenfolk to pull it and pound it.’
Tom yearned for the native barman to come over and slap Prentice, but he was glued to the TV above the bar, which displayed the spark and puff of automatic weapons, and a tanker turned on its side in the desert sand, like a whale stranded on a beach.
The sound was turned down, but in the coloured strip that ran along the bottom of the screen marched the thread: ‘Roadside ambush east of the Tontine Townships renders 22 lives non-viable. Insurgents blamed. .’
‘You know what they say, Brodzinski,’ Prentice continued. ‘The Tugganarong are the ethnics the Anglos wish they’d discovered when they got here, while this lot’ — he pointed flagrantly at the barman — ‘are the ones they actually did.’
‘I don’t give a shit about that,’ Tom said. Then, calling to the barman, he pleaded, ‘Hey, fella, you wouldn’t mind switching on that heater of yours, wouldya? I’m freezing here.’
They reached the top of the escarpment an hour or so after lunch. Tom regretted the shot he had taken to warm himself up. No matter how carefully he adjusted the car heater, he was either too warm and sleepy or too shivery to negotiate the potholes that now began to crater the blacktop.
Prentice didn’t notice any of this; he was rustling the capacious pages of one of his own national newspapers. Tom couldn’t conceive of how he had managed to buy it in Hayden. Prentice insisted on giving him terse, verbal updates on a sports game that was of consuming interest to him: ‘Addenley’s been bowled out, there’s no way we can avoid the follow on now.’ Even though back in Vance, Tom had told him that he knew nothing of the game and cared still less for it.
While Tom struggled with the steering wheel, peering through the misted-up windshield, his indolent companion reclined, feet up on the dash, as if he were on a motorized Barcalounger. And if Prentice valued his neck enough not to light up in the car, he never the less asked every few miles, when Tom thought they might stop. Then, in anticipation of his ‘fag break’, he withdrew a filter-tip from its box and toyed with the miniature white penis, until his chauffeur — gnawed at by attraction and repulsion — pulled over.
At least the landscape was worth stopping for. As Prentice turkey-cocked, gobbling smoke, Tom surveyed the cloud forest. The canopy fell away from the road, dipping into dells, then swirling up in frills and ruffs of greenery, from which surged the petrified waterspouts of volcanic plugs. Cloud snagged on these rocky nodules; while in the deep valleys, where the Handrey’s terracing created the contours of an actual-sized topographical map, the mists slowly roiled.
The overall impression was at once homely and fantastical, an effect heightened, once they resumed the drive, by the pasturage of Anglo farmsteads, with its drystone walls and too-green grass, upon which grazed Friesian cattle. Their chocolate and white jigsaw markings were utterly incongruous: kids’ stickers, crazily affixed to this alien environment.
Handrey longhouses were set high up on the vertiginous slopes. Some of these were, Tom guessed, enormous, their curved walls of smoothly adzed logs making them appear organic, not man-made.
Wild auraca huddled near the treeline, nuzzling their long necks together: the furry boughs of subsidiary copses. Once, a family group broke across the road in front of the SUV: bull, cow, three or four calves, leaping wall and ditch, their hooves slithering, their necks waggling. Tom braked hard, and Prentice, roused from his paper, said, ‘Magnificent beasts.’
Tom cursed, put the car back in shift, drove on.
Shortly before dusk they reached the Tree Top Lodge, where the Brodzinskis had spent the three happiest days of their vacation. Tom had hung on to the prospect of a relaxing break here all the way from Vance. He recalled giggling gaggles of naked brown kids leaping into the pool, and mingling easily with the tourists’ paler, pinker children.
Their parents had lain around on the teak decking of the teardrop-shaped pool, while the brown kids’ parents brought them chilled drinks and meaty tid-bits on bamboo skewers.
Up in the cloud forest, Tom, Martha and the kids had been at ease. There seemed none of the ethnic tension that otherwise marred this idyllic land. Tommy Junior had emerged from his virtual world, and, wearing skin-tight swiming trunks, he bombed the multiracial pool with his own murky-brown body. The kids had squealed with joy; the adults flinched indulgently.
That night, in their beautiful cabin — a small-scale replica of a Handrey longhouse — Tom and Martha had tenderly embraced. This was enough.
The Handrey mob had gone. Tom dredged up some names and put them to the wet-season manager, a mean-featured old Anglo man who sat behind the reception desk in the darkened lobby.
‘Hildegard,’ he inquired, ‘and is it Harry? I thought they ran the place. . on behalf of the Tribal Council.’
‘Tribal Council!’ The old man guffawed. ‘Don’t make me shit meself. The owner puts them bing-bongs in during high season for local colour.’ He was chewing engwegge, and Tom found it difficult to take his eyes off the long bristly hairs that crawled on the old man’s Adam’s apple.
He missed a spittoon with a stream of juice.
‘That mob,’ he said, smacking his stained lips. ‘They couldn’t run a piss-up in a bloody brewery.’
The old Anglo’s hands shook as Tom handed over his and Prentice’s documents. He glanced cursorily at the laissez-passers, then turned the register so Tom could sign it.
‘You can sign for him too,’ the old man rasped, and Tom wondered if he had been over here so long that he could tell their respective grades of astande simply by looking.