Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [101]
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You have a head.’
I needed explain no more. The man with the musket switched it for a club. He stood on the neck of the man I had killed with the rock and set about disfiguring his face. Then he stopped, stood back from his bloody work and swapped the club for an axe. The blade rose and fell without ceremony. In one blow he had cleaved off the head, executed a man already dead. He put down the axe and looked up. ‘Your shirt, take it off.’
I unbuttoned the cotton skin and dropped it over the ledge. He snatched the shirt from the air before it hit the bottom and opened it out as though checking the size. I thought he would either tear it in two or try it on, but he draped it over the head and wrapped and bundled it like a breadfruit to carry home to his wife. Next he looked up to where I stood, a look beyond my body as merely prey, and commanded in a low and steady growl, ‘And never come back.’
Then he swung the head over his shoulder and turned. The man with the broken elbow tucked the bible beneath his good arm and together they walked away. All of them trod in the blood that seeped through the shirt and dripped on to the rocks.
18 September 1835
Three days now I have trekked deeper into the interior. Here the grand Rewa River is no more than a brook hopping over stones. Clouds slide down from the mountains, tangle in the leaves and stream across the rocks like liquid ether. While walking these whispering trickles I often stop and run my palm over the velveteen moss, peeling away handfuls to wipe the sweat and dirt from my brow. I have eaten only the fruit that has freshly fallen, for my appetite, despite this hike further and further into the hills, has disappeared.
Perhaps I am not hungry because my body has left me. By now the men will have returned to Rewa and presented my death to Naraqino and the Rev. Thomas. Will the men plead ignorance when they hand over the bible as my journal?
19 September 1835
So far I have roamed avoiding villages, but today I wanted company, to hear the voices of others. When I heard men and women singing while they bathed in the stream beyond the path, instead of creeping away I went closer.
This tiny village, no more than a collection of huts clinging to a steep embankment, rises from a stream between terraces of vegetables to the plateau above. All day I have watched the men, women and children cook, clean, fish, play, sing and laugh. The dialect here is so alien I barely understood a word. They are completely without iron, guns or clothes, any evidence of foreign lands. I imagine the white man is still no more than a whispered myth, a fairy tale to tell their children.
Never have I seen a people so content.
20 September 1835
In the glow of the coming dawn I write. Before the sun rises I must bury all of my possessions where they might not be found: a pair of heavy cotton trousers, socks, shoes, a leather satchel, a dictionary, my handkerchief, the quill and the blade for cutting its nib, a pot of ink, and this journal. I will lay it beneath the earth as though I were burying a body, a soul only to be resurrected if the pain of return meant freedom from the missionaries for my beloved Fiji.
Then I will walk into the village quite naked, no clothes upon my back or words upon my tongue, nothing remaining of Nelson Babbage, neither name nor language. I forsook my family, the bosom of my mother and the pride of my father, for a belief in God and England. And I cannot say this has made me into something I am not, because I am. But with this knowledge I am liberated, a lump of clay which can sculpt itself, Naqarase Baba, free to laugh, dream, sing, and love.
Stolen Car
He saw a woman in blue, her outline blurred, as though he was looking at her underwater. Then he surfaced. She was a nurse bent at the foot of his bed.
‘You’re a very lucky boy.’
Jimmy stared and squinted. His head was bandaged. He looked at the equipment, computer screens and a drip, the nurse.
‘Am I in hospital or prison?’
‘Hospital, of course.’ She