Black Marks on the White Page Read online

  The doors lock. The big one’s window crawls up the track until it is shut. Tiny red and yellow lights on the deck of the stereo begin to flicker on and before long, he hears the beginnings of an ethereal, unforgettable song.

  He closes his eyes.

  He knows now that this isn’t a simple two-man job, and in the morning, he won’t be surprised when he wakes in the truck to find a message saying he wasn’t supposed to just make the drop. He should’ve waited there at the wharf. He has until 8 am to get back and pick up his payment for the stone.

  THE COCONUT KING

  COURTNEY SINA MEREDITH

  THE COCONUT KING SENDS me a text/ he wants to meet up and give me some coconut oil/ it isn’t cold pressed/ his mother made it the traditional way in the sun/ he’s from a different island where the women are in charge/ their men wait on them at home like wives in the west/ Helena says it’s fine to have a holiday fling/ even if it’s with the blackest guy on the island/ my aunty says to keep away from him/ he’s a heart breaker/ she should know/ always getting caught on rusty men like rusty nails/ smartening up in a blue floral dress/ she puts on dangly earrings and does a twirl/ pretty as a picture/ I watch her leave the house smiling/ promise not to see the black animal/ lying through my teeth.

  Helena’s scooter works again/ hear it turn into my aunty’s drive/ look down at myself in a pink mood singlet/ blushing into red at the end/ wipe passionfruit pulp off my shorts/ stop in the mirror/ turn my neck both ways/ clean and slender/ hair smelling like honey/ skin soft like butter/ take some deep breaths/ watch the black ants march across the bench/ Helena yells out over the spitting engine of the bike/ hurry up and lock the house.

  We get to the markets while it’s still light/ the coconut king is sitting in a circle with his boys/ they fish and hunt together/ bark at tourists in hotels/ wearing next to nothing/ stamp and wail about the gods/ pull white women up from the audience to dance and dance/ warriors for hire/ call it round the world but it’s just round the room/ round and round the same island playing the same songs every Tuesday and Thursday/ he looks up/ sees my face/ jumps to his feet/ tells the boys to shut up/ does his best impression of a gentleman/ pats down the black curls of his chest/ creeping out from under his singlet/ wades towards me/ used to living underwater/ wades through an ocean of women staring/ saying dirty things behind his back/ looks at me like I’m the only girl at the market/ gives me a kiss on the cheek and two containers of white cake/ Helena’s eyes go wide/ she grabs them out of my hands/ stalks off to a table with shade/ takes out her phone to text her papa‘a boyfriend/ snaps a picture of the cake/ then a picture of her bust/ gleaming behind a sunburst knot.

  I walk around the food stalls with the coconut king/ watch his leather skin glistening in the heat/ beads of sweat push their way through his temples/ I let him rest his fingers on my elbow/ let him hold my hand for a second before my steak roll is ready/ we walk to the back of the markets and cuddle by the toilets/ he melts in my arms.

  The church took my grandmother’s stove/ she signed the house over in her will/ I go to the flat land where she used to live and feel all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up/ she was a quiet woman/ always by the window lathering coconut oil into her hair/ combing until the white teeth turned red/ pleased when her scalp was raw/ my aunty says not to think about it/ the missionaries gave her something to believe in/ we drive to a garden on the other side of the island to pick frangipani for guests arriving from America/ more old white men to line the pockets of the island/ my aunty asks why I keep smiling/ tell her the truth/ I’m still drunk from the night before/ when we get to the house there’s only babies rolling around on the deck and two dogs in chains/ the mum and dad aren’t home/ we fill up a plastic bag with flowers and take off.

  The darkest moments of the island unfurl in daylight/ geckos cluck/ fat with spirits/ in the car we talk about moves/ I want to inhabit his body/ how to move inside the coconut king like water moves inside the land/ Helena talks me through her wardrobe/ I can borrow whatever/ I’m going home in three days anyway/ her papa‘a boyfriend thinks I can do better/ someone with a brain/ we smile at each other while my aunty drives/ his blond eyelashes shine/ Helena’s riding shotgun and making a long list/ a shopping list/ a beautification list/ not that the coconut king will notice/ my aunty’s given up/ I’m old enough/ girls my age make up their own minds/ their own beds/ their own faces with clouds of powder.

  Studying the coconut king one night drinking cheap vodka/ dark and wide like a massive shadow with paws/ after the vodka he kisses my hand and leads me down the beach far away from Helena and her papa‘a boyfriend/ closer to the edge of trees and rocks/ as clouds cover the moon/ the coconut king takes off his shirt/ lays it across the wet sand/ he takes off his pants/ kneels down on his crumpled clothes with both hands reaching out to me/ come and dance he says/ the waves are playing our song.

  Sheets on the line hold their breath/ show off sharp ribs/ hold hands breathe out/ everything is moving on the island/ old faces reappear/ asking the same old questions/ why did they send you away/ were you a bad girl/ is that why your tongue is a dead fish/ did you kill your own tongue/ spitting city trash/ sitting unconscious in your own skin/ far away from your people/ sitting on the surface/ is it like being covered in plastic/ they ask over and over again/ flicking their dusty tongues between English and gibberish.

  Helena lies in the sun/ waits for her glass to be filled/ I pour pinot noir/ her papa‘a boyfriend has turned to gold/ he sits down on the grass beside us/ rolls a joint/ they’ve got a cat who likes to fight/ maybe they’ll get married and stay on the rock/ teach the cat to love the heat/ Helena wants to study long distance/ do it on the internet in town once a week/ they’ve both gotten used to seeing the dead/ things go on here/ the elders are healing people by ending their lives/ moving their souls into animals/ that explains red-eyed roosters and goats looking for privacy/ why the wild pigs cry like boys/ they say that’s what happened to my grandmother/ the church swapped her for a dog/ took all of her land/ sold all of her jewels/ Helena’s papa‘a boyfriend jokes about me and the coconut king/ does he seem like a normal man/ how can I not feel what he is/ sleeping with a mountain ghost.

  The coconut king turns up on his motorbike/ I kiss Helena on the forehead/ wave goodbye to her papa‘a boyfriend/ think about staying away for a while/ send my aunty a text that I won’t be home tonight/ she replies with a smiley face.

  We curve our way around the land/ climbing high above the sea/ pull up in front of a small house/ he says it belongs to him/ inside there’s no electronics only coconut shells and soft fabrics/ a single bed neatly made/ boxes of beer and posters of wrestlers on the walls/ I hitch up my long skirt/ fan my face with a car magazine beside the bed.

  The coconut king sits on the floor in front of me/ rests his hands in his lap/ goes soft around the mouth/ everyone wants me to stay/ goes soft around the eyes/ tells me to cancel my flights/ it’s easy he knows the number/ his brother will answer/ my aunty will get a refund/ I can stay with him on the mountain/ my tongue won’t be a dead fish/ he knows where they’ve taken my grandmother’s stove/ we’ll make them pay.

  He says all of these things with the back of his head bleeding handfuls and handfuls of blood/ the room fills with small red waves/ staining the heavy flowers of my long skirt.

  POOR MAN’S ORANGE

  KELLY ANA MOREY

  BECAUSE NONE OF US wore a watch we never knew what time it was once we disappeared into the rows to pick. Especially on surly days when the cloud cover blotted out the sun. So Jolene bought a clock and wedged it in a grapefruit tree right in the middle of the orchard. Every so often we would send one of the kids to find the clock, and that’s how we marked the passage of the day.

  It was the end of winter and I had heard about work at the orchard by word of mouth just in time for the first harvest and juicing. There would be a second in three months’ time, for the fruit that had been left to sweeten on the trees. We worked six days a wee
k in whatever conditions August threw at us. For a few days there, after a run of weather so gentle we thought spring had arrived, we had three days of snow showers driven in by a persistent southerly that had travelled up the country from Antarctica in a short, sharp, icy fury. Our fingers and lips turned blue and on we picked. It dropped to below freezing at night in the factory as we juiced, but at least we were out of the rain. In a funny way juicing was harder. When we picked we were moving constantly, but juicing meant standing on a concrete floor for six hours, either slicing the fruit in half, or pushing the sections onto the spinning juicing cones just enough to crush the golden liquid out of them but leave the bitter pith. I would go to bed sometime after midnight, the rhythm of the factory echoing through my shattered body like a stuck record. Too tired to sleep. Too tired to sleep. Too tired to sleep.

  BUT THERE WAS GOOD stuff too. I loved the way the orchard smelled. It was organic so it didn’t have the acrid reek of chemicals I had encountered at the other two orchards I’d worked at on previous holidays. Here my travels amongst the trees were scented with the sweet beckon of crushed flowers and the sharpness of citric oils from the fruit and leaves, which left your skin smelling and tasting like oranges. I also liked the quiet, because home usually wasn’t. Yes, I did like that, how peaceful it was, for although we worked in teams of three or four, often all you could hear apart from the wind beating against the shelter belts was the continuous dull thud of the fruit hitting the tarpaulins we set up under the trees. There were no machines, not really, just people picking bin after bin of pale golden fruit. Not real grapefruit, but Poor Man’s Orange, Citrus paradisi. The family who owned the orchard and fruit juice company were what made it so good too. They — Aden and Jen, and their three teenage daughters, Jolene, Alice and Mimi — picked and juiced alongside us, and made sure we were all well fed. I almost instantly became friends with Alice who was seventeen like me. She had horses and during our break in the afternoon, between picking and juicing, she would take me riding and we would canter for miles along a limestone track that led up into the hills of a neighbour’s farm. The wind blowing and the rocking-horse motion of the mare beneath me as she dug deep to climb the hill sections. The slow trot home on the sweating horses. It was better than sleeping or crashing out in front of the television until work started again at 6 pm, which is what the others did.

  AND THEN THERE WAS Cy.

  Cy was the orchard manager who lived in the cottage near the factory. Married, rather happily I suspect. With three kids under five. But never mind. I wasn’t the only one. We all loved him. Alice used to say how lucky I was to be living in the sleep-out in the garden at Cy’s place, and would make up these long involved stories, usually containing murder, massacre or just plain bad luck, to get rid of the wife, who was actually very nice. I always said that I was more than happy to share, but Alice said there was no fun in that. Alice and the other girls would flirt with Cy, wolf-whistling when he took his shirt off on hot days as he picked alongside us. The only time I ever really looked at him was through the viewfinder of my camera, in case he could somehow see what was true, for me anyway. Because I’d always been afraid to look. You know, truly gaze into someone’s eyes without irony or humour or some other agenda that skirts around the edge of everything in order to say absolutely nothing.

  DAD HAD SENT ME the camera and a heap of film, mainly black and white, a few weeks before I started at the orchard. The camera wasn’t new by any means, and it had none of the technology that cameras have these days, but it had a good lens and was more than up to the job required of it. Lorna was pretty scathing about the gift.

  ‘When I married your father, my father said “He’ll never have a bob to his name”, and he was right,’ she said when I showed her the camera. She had a point. Dad wasn’t much more than a name on my birth certificate. It was an old hurt, but I hadn’t wanted to hear it that day, so I had gone and sat in the band rotunda at King’s Park even though it was raining, looking at the camera on my lap, knowing Mum was wrong. I stayed there for hours. Even after it got dark. It wasn’t until a man in a raincoat walking a Yorkie came and sat beside me and tried to get me to touch him that I decided to go home. Lorna wasn’t there. She’d gone out with her new boyfriend, the one with the Miami Vice suits who filled her up with Coruba and silly ideas, which she really didn’t need any help with. They came home sometime after I’d gone to bed, waking me up by putting Led Zeppelin on the record player, because Lorna liked to fuck to Stairway to Heaven. Still, with the music up so loud at least it blotted out some of the noise coming through the walls from the bedroom next door. I wondered how long it would be before I’d have to listen to her begging him not to hurt her. My mother was the kind of woman who men hit. I didn’t like him, the new boyfriend; I didn’t like the way he looked at me.

  THE NEXT DAY I went to the library and stole a book on black and white photography. I still have it. It taught me mostly everything I needed to know. I took lots of photos that long month when I took the job at the orchard. It was easy enough to get Mum to sign the note I’d written about nursing a sick relative, which got me out of school a week either side of the August holidays. So I packed my bag and caught the bus north, arriving at the orchard five hours later. Sitting beside Cy in the ute as he drove through the trees, heavy with first fruit and still bright with white blossom, to his place, tucked under a jacaranda, where I was staying for the next four weeks. The sleep-out wasn’t anything special, but it was warm and dry and no one came scratching at my door at night. No wonder I fell in love.

  One night, when the pick was almost all over, Alice kissed me. We were tired after a long week; pushing hard to get the last block done, we’d worked longer and longer hours. It was almost 3 am and a huge full moon was hanging in a mackerel sky. Alice and I were sitting side by side outside the factory, laughing at something lame and sharing a joint. I can’t even remember it happening. One moment we were talking and the next I was drowning. We kissed for a long time, and I wondered if I too tasted of oranges. ‘I’ll miss you,’ said Alice, when we came up for air. ‘Come back for the pick in November. It’s much more fun and a lot warmer.’

  ‘I will,’ I replied.

  ‘Good. I’ll tell Dad,’ she said briskly, as if nothing had happened. ‘Right, I’m off to bed.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ I said, watching her walk away across the orchard towards the family house. She had almost disappeared when I saw a lit cigarette parabola towards the ground from under the pear tree, and a figure step out from the shadows and into the moonlight to join Alice.

  THREE DAYS LATER THE trees were bare. It was time to go home. Cy didn’t say much as we drove into town so I could catch the bus. He waited with me until the bus pulled in, though I told him to go. As I was about to board he grabbed my hand, pulling me towards him.

  ‘Look at me,’ he said. And I did. Clear blue eyes, sandy close-cropped curls and crooked teeth. ‘Keep yourself safe,’ he continued. The instruction was urgent, like I needed to listen, take it to heart. ‘I will,’ I mumbled, dropping my gaze, not really understanding why he had said those words, wondering if he somehow understood something about me that even I couldn’t wrap my head around yet.

  When I got home Lorna was out, the fridge was empty and the power had been switched off. I found the unopened bill on the kitchen table and walked into town and paid it. That night, I sat eating fish and chips at the kitchen table in the dark, waiting for Lorna to come home.

  ‘So you’re back, then,’ was all she said two days later when she walked in the door. She had a black eye. ‘I fell over,’ she said, though I hadn’t even asked.

  I had made a bit over $1400 in four weeks, which was a fair bit in those days. Minus the $100 for the power, and $5 for the fish and chips, I put the balance in the bank, keeping the account book in my locker at school so Lorna couldn’t find it. On the inside door of my locker I kept a calendar and crossed off the days until November. I did my last exam and didn’t hang aroun
d for prizegiving. Or to provide Lorna with too many details beyond a phone number and a general statement of intent.

  ADEN WAS WAITING FOR me at the bus station. Not Alice or Cy, as I had spent three months imagining. Still, it was good to see him, and I was so absorbed in the absoluteness of my own anticipation, I barely noticed how quiet he was as we climbed into the truck. He’d never been much of a talker though anyway.

  ‘How’s Alice?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll see for yourself soon enough,’ Aden replied dryly, as we drove over the railway crossing and headed out of town.

  Alice was pregnant, and contentedly incubating her stolen baby. And Cy was gone. There wasn’t much more than that to be said about the matter, so we pulled out the tarpaulins and ladders and began to pick the second half of the orchard. But something had changed. Although I had thought Alice was the centre of my world, she was so far removed from me now, sitting sleepily under the trees, clipping the stems and buttons off the fruit and piling it into bins, that I had begun to think I had imagined the kiss. And although Alice couldn’t ride, she let me take her mare out, but it wasn’t the same without her. Everything had changed, and time passed slowly. The clock seized after it was left out in the rain one night and I stopped following the transition of the sun across the sky. Time became about how much of the orchard was still emblazoned with the brightness of fruit, and how long it would take to strip that colour completely out of it. I stopped talking almost completely, and barely listened at all to the somnolent hum of tranquil conversation that meandered around, fading in and out of earshot. All anyone was talking about was the solar eclipse anyway.