• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 827 0

Victorians liked to paint the anaglypta in their dreary halls and studies. Henry held Domenica’s hand as she stepped gingerly into the boat. Then he himself boarded, whipped the small outboard engine into life, and untied the boat’s painter. In the heavy, mist-laden air, the engine was almost inaudible, like the purring of a cat. Domenica sat forward and watched the water slip past the side of the boat as they cleared the shallows that provided natural protection for the jetties. The water was flat and almost olive-coloured, and as she watched it, a flying fish suddenly launched itself into the air and skimmed the wavelets, a flash of silver against the green. “Pis bilong airplane” (lit: aeroplane fish), observed Henry, pointing at the ripples where the fish had re-entered the water. They moved away from the coast and soon they were unable to see anything but the all-enveloping mist. Domenica wondered how Henry would be able to navigate in these conditions – was it some sixth sense, the inbuilt feeling for direction enjoyed by pigeons and cats? And pirates? Or was he counting on being able to see something when the mist lifted?

After half an hour or so, Henry cut the engine of the boat, sat back, and wiped his brow with the engine cloth. He smiled at Domenica.

At the Warehouse 329

“Do you know where we are?” Domenica inquired. Henry shook his head. “Yumitupela lus,” he said simply. “Lus bilong sno” (You and I are lost. We are lost in this fog. Sno is fog in Neo-Melanesian Pidgin. There is no word for snow, unless, possibly, it is fog).

105. At the Warehouse

Domenica had never panicked in all her years of anthropological fieldwork. She had remained calm when she had been obliged to spend four days in an ice shelter with some hospitable Inuit in the North-West Territories of Canada before weather conditions had allowed help to arrive from Fort Smith. That had been an interesting time, and she had learned a great deal about local counting rhymes and fishing lore. Then, in the New Guinea Highlands, she had been resolute in the face of a demand from some of her hosts that she be sold – for an undisclosed sum, and purpose – to a neighbouring group to whom some ancient debt was payable. Reason – and market forces – had prevailed in that case and the matter had been settled. But even when it looked as if the decision would go the other way, Domenica had been dignified and detached. “If I were ever to be sold,” she told herself,

“then I would prefer to be sold at Jenners.”

Now, drifting in that silent boat with the retired pirate, Henry, she was determined that she would remain cool and collected; not that there was much point in doing anything else. Henry, it seemed, had no idea of where they were, and the persistence of the fog meant that they were unsure of the location of the sun, or of land, or of anything for that matter, apart from the water, which was all about them.

She tried to work out how far they were from the coast. The engine on Henry’s boat was not a large one, and they could not have been making much more than four knots. If they had been travelling for half an hour, then that suggested that they could not be more than a mile or two from land, assuming that they 330 At the Warehouse

had been heading on a course directly out to sea. It was quite possible, though, that they had been following the coast and that at any moment the fog would lift and they would see mangrove within yards. But then there were currents to be taken into account, and they might, in reality, be miles out by now, out in the Malacca Straits and directly in the course of some great behemoth of a Taiwanese tanker. That would be a sad way to go; crushed beneath the bows of the oil industry – tiny, human, helpless.

Domenica sat back and closed her eyes. She had decided that she would simply wait it out and think while she was doing so. And there was a great deal to think about. Had she made the right decision as to the distribution of her estate after her death?

The lawyers at Turcan Connell would look after that very well

– she was confident