The Beachcomber's Wife by Adrian Mitchell

Author:Adrian Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, FA, FIC041000
ISBN: 9781743054772
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2017-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

IV

On a whim, I have placed four books about his bed, his Milton, Shakespeare, Defoe and Thoreau. They can be his guardians this night, though I leave it to those worthies to sort out which of them has which responsibility. It surprises me that I don’t feel more uncomfortable with him lying there in the next room. Yet it is not as though he is some stranger to me. We have lived long enough together for him to be a familiar presence.

The discomfort will come when he is taken away, or buried, or whatever is to happen. He will be gone then.

And I will have the less need for my hearing trumpet.

Earlier this evening I was looking for any sign that the rain might be lifting, the clouds parting, hoping that the sun might begin to break through. That is when we see the eerie glow, yellowish into an increasingly rosy red that foretells a better morrow. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. But I could see no such prediction. Nothing to raise my hopes, nor my spirits.

Since that time, the weather has if anything worsened. The buffeting against the house has increased in its severity. This will be an evening for huddling.

Naked ladies are not the only ornaments on his walls. There are fishing spears and digging sticks and woven dillybags and the remnants of a net, and on a shelf curved bark bowls something like coal scuttles. The natives use them for carrying around anything from a piccaninny to a dead lizard, from a mound of berries to a catch of fish. There are all sorts and varieties of pearl shell fish hooks too, some incomplete, some broken, some with a length of twined hair still attached. Boomerangs, of course, and shields with patterns on the outside, two with charcoal figures drawn on the inner surface. He was proud of his collection, as proud as if he had made the items himself. In the flickering light from the lamp they look sombre, even sinister. Solidified shadows of times past.

Goodness knows how he acquired these trophies. Some he will have traded with natives who visited from time to time, whenever the mood or the season was apt. Others he will have found, either here or on other islands nearby, or over on the mainland. Some may have been given to him by passing fishermen who knew his reputation as a collector of bits and pieces. If there is a story attached to each of these, as I suppose there might be, then I don’t know it. Over the years he became reasonably friendly with the native family who camped on the island, on the next beach around, and with their acquaintances from the mainland or other islands whenever the oysters were ready to harvest, or when bird nests were ready to pillage. They would just turn up, slowly paddling across the channel in their frail little bark canoes, so low in the water you wondered that they did not sink.

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