Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [66]
When the bush burns to embers I’ll crawl again. Hardly know I have a broken leg and dislocated shoulder. A laughable pain against thirst, my swollen tongue.
A pile of bricks in the bush is now my best chance.
I said I was going to crawl on when the bush burned down. I didn’t. I looked across the silvered land, a vista of rocks and dead trees lit by a thousand suns, and saw nothing but a cold and lonely ruin. I thought, Why not die here? Why struggle to another place that you are not?
I curled into a ball, a foetus on the sand. And then the miracle was nothing more than going to the toilet for the first time in two days. I knelt and cupped my hands, filled my palms and lifted hot, glorious piss to my mouth.
You must forget taste and smell, trivial senses to hydration. Right there and then, my tongue swollen and blistered, lips cracked and bleeding, it was a glass of vintage champagne.
I’ve crawled all night since this drink, and I’m almost at the ruin. It’s just a pile of rubble, a broken building. But to see worked stone, a brick, a straight line chiselled by a human hand and not millennia of crushing oceans and broken stars, is to know I’m not the only one.
I write this by the burn of the coming dawn. A morning so quiet and windless, I swear I can hear flames roaring on the surface of the sun.
The vultures snapped at my heels for the final kilometre. They didn’t need to fly to keep pace with my crawl, wobbling behind like drunken tramps. When I threw handfuls of sand, twigs, the dried-out carcass of a dead lizard, the vultures mockingly dodged and hissed, chuckled and raised their ragged wings.
Once at the ruin I slung lumps of stone and boulder, chunks of rotten wood from a decayed beam protruding from the sand. Only after the vultures skulked into the stand of gum trees did I have a chance to pause and absorb this crumbled structure.
I’ve dragged my body into a broken church to die. I know it’s a church because I dug beneath the sand and found a scorch-marked pew. I don’t know what I expected, searching in the rubble. Maybe just a reason to have crawled here? But deep beneath the drifted sand, splinters of charred wood and broken benches, I discovered a blackened candlestick, two steel ball bearings, and a leather-bound journal. Though the covering has bubbled with whatever fire tumbled this house of God, the pages remain intact – all unreadable except the first, as the entire manuscript has decayed and melded into a single block of paper.
The opening paragraphs, dated 14 September 1834, introduce a Nelson Babbage of Whitechapel, a Fijian returning to his island after ten years of living and studying English in London. I wish there were more to read, an adventure to share. The company of another so far from home.
Show Me the Sky
10 May 1835
A week in the bosom of my brothers and sisters, and I seek my journal for solace, not the ears of my family. I am a stranger in my own home, the boy who sailed away half-naked, now a man unknown in clothes. England is in my voice, on my skin, the way I stand in a pair of shoes.
When the boat ran aground, my people did not flee in fear of the white men, a ship of cannons anchored in the bay. No, they fled from astonishment at their brother in a suit, buttoned up in a shirt and pair of slacks.
Then, from the retreat came the pointed spears and loaded barrels, bowstrings taut with sharpened arrows. I stood on the prow of the boat and announced my name, that Kasanita was my mother, and Dreketi my father. Beyond the ends of pointed sticks came a cry of my name, an echo of my own voice. It was Lau, my younger brother! He pushed through the pack to the front, stood a yard away to look me up and down and confirm it was I, then hugged my body so hard I could not take a breath.
A great chatter rattled the guarded ranks. Spears were lowered and muskets downed. ‘But what of the ship and its great guns?’ someone called out. ‘He’s led the white man here to plunder our