The Burning Island by Jock Serong

Author:Jock Serong
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781925923520
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

ST ANTHONY’S FIRE

I walked out there with Munro and the doctor, away from the coast and slightly north. The ground was open grassland, some shrubs and a waterhole to our right. The goats were all around us, advancing with their dreamy smiles then retreating at any sudden movement. The houses stood isolated on a rise, and as we drew nearer we could see children playing on an abandoned cart in front of them. We came to a dry-stone wall made from flat pieces of limestone. A finger-long lizard stood tall on the top row of stones, watched us and whipped into a crevice.

Adults had left the houses now and were headed towards us. They walked normally enough, and were dressed as I would have expected for islanders. But as they came nearer, I began to see the extent of their suffering. Their skin was covered in great red lesions: on some of them the boils were closed but on others they were weeping pus or had erupted and formed into scabs. A mother carried a tiny infant in her arms, the child’s face peeling as though she had been terribly sunburnt.

The doctor introduced himself and they did likewise. I do not remember their names now. There was hesitancy in their muttered words. Shame, perhaps a taint of suspicion. I noticed that Munro would go nowhere near them.

Gideon was explaining that he was a man of divers learning, and that he wished to help if he could.

Now they were more inclined to talk: the sickness had made them outcasts and they were lonely. They told him it had started in the early spring; at first just cramps and flux. Then the suffering had taken all sorts of bizarre turns: the sores on their skin, strange feelings of numbness, terrible itching—even fits. But it was not until they began to exhibit ferocious manias that they were separated from the community. The anguished shouting, the delirium, filled the night and terrified their children. People did harm to themselves, swearing and racking and convulsing. The rest of the islanders had abandoned them, fearful of contagion.

The doctor was listening to all of this, as before, but only half-listening.

‘So you say, you said to me, that the symptoms had advanced to mania before the patients were quarantined?’

The islanders took a moment to unpick Gideon’s terminology, then agreed.

‘And the infant?’ he asked brusquely, addressing himself to the mother. ‘It still feeds at the breast?’

She lowered her eyes and nodded faintly.

Until now, Gideon had been addressing them from a distance of perhaps ten yards: now he crossed the threshold of the gateway in the wall and stood closer among them. The sun lit upon the broad base of his neck, above the collar where the skin was tanned like leather. He showed no fear of transmission: he approached without hesitation a man who appeared to be the woman’s husband, and with a cursory May I? began to probe at the suppurating wounds on his face.

‘Perfectly safe,’ he muttered in our direction.

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