Show Me The Sky Page 2

  Yes, I flicked my lighter and lit the fuse.

  The bike was dead. I wanted it to have a glorious, flaming end. Not decades of rust in the desert wind. In Easy Rider, Peter Fonda burns out like a landed comet, a ball of fire billowing across the highway. This is the best part of the film, when the dream of freedom is granted.

  Insanity, I can hear you exclaim, sacrificing my bike. Like a Bedouin killing his camel, a sailor sinking his ship. But the plume of smoke is a beacon, an SOS on the cloudless blue. Just as I dropped down into a small trench, the tank exploded like a cannon.

  The race for my survival has begun.

  The sun is setting. I’m writing propped against the bank of the creek. No one has answered my distress flare. Yet. My foolish shortcut has taken me at least 30 km from the marked track, which at busiest has only one or two travellers a day.

  I’ve thrown some dead roots on to the fire. The bike is burning down from crimson to ash grey. The skull is still grinning, maybe happy to have a friend after all these years alone. Though his conversation’s not up to much.

  The painkillers are closing my eyes as I write. I’ll talk with you again in the morning, when I can think clearly about getting out of here.

  Woke at dawn in agony. No strength to pitch tent, so slept under stars. Rolled up trousers to look at my blackened shin. I could see the bend, the foot askew. Popped two more ibuprofen, then slid the metal rods from the pannier lining. The four metal bars that stop the canvas flapping against the rear wheel will stop my foot flapping against my shin. Using my one and only bandage and another torn-up T-shirt, I bound my broken leg into a splint.

  But it didn’t stop the pain. If anything, the pressure made it worse. To take my thoughts from gangrene and thirst, I lay out my expedition and took stock:

  Canvas pannier bag (minus rods)

  Lengths of bungee cord x 3

  Medium ‘day-hike’ size backpack

  T-shirts x 2

  Tracksuit top

  Pairs of socks x 2

  Pairs of underpants x 4

  Pair of swimming shorts

  Diving mask

  Sleeping bag

  Ground mat

  Tent

  Tool kit

  Swiss Army knife

  Flashlight

  Compass

  Pocket torch

  First Aid kit

  Toiletries bag

  Petrol lighter (full)

  Box of matches

  Kerosene stove (three-quarters full)

  Tin cup

  Spoon

  Cooking pots x 2

  Food:

  – Spaghetti 200g

  – Rice 3–400g

  – Vegemite (half jar)

  – Tube of tomato puree

  – Jar of pepper

  – Tin of tuna

  – Onion x 1

  – Instant soups x 9

  – Pack of crackers (crushed to crumbs)

  – Instant coffee

  – Servings of porridge x 4

  – Powdered milk

  – Sachets of sugar x 7

  – Water 4.5 litres (5 days’ worth?)

  Camera

  Canister of film

  Pair of flip-flops

  Outback Australia Lonely Planet

  Cairns postcard (with meeting time and place in your handwriting)

  Address book

  Passport

  $743.50

  And the clothes on my back, a solid silver cross, one watchful skeleton, and of course this pen and paper, you.

  This is what all the preparation was for. I have medicine and shelter, maybe two weeks of food. 4.5 litres of water seems enough, but this depends on how long my desert sojourn will last.

  I think of the stranded glider pilot who survived by drinking his own urine. An amateur flyer, he’d confused north from south over the MacDonnell Ranges and touched down hundreds of kilometres from the airfield. The TV docu-drama cut from survivor in the studio to actor in the desert, wiping his brow and screwing up his face at another swig of life-saving piss. He’d already been marooned for two days, and after gulping down his one Coke, he began urinating back into the can. Less and less each time. Between toilet refreshments he licked drops of condensation from the Perspex cockpit of the glider. When he ran out of piss and condensation he descended into delirium. He chased monitor lizards in the vain hope of catching them and drinking their blood. He dug a hole, waited for a spring to fountain from the earth. He watched a mob of kangaroos bury themselves in the sand to keep cool, and did the same. Scorching dehydration headaches wrecked his brain. He crawled back to the glider and waited to die.

  But we know he survived because he’s in a studio telling the camera how on the fifth morning he woke and stumbled far enough to find tyre tracks. He carved SOS on to the road and collapsed. And because he’s in a studio before a camera, and because an actor is playing his parched self, we’ve already guessed that someone happens to drive past and come to his rescue.

  So I wait for my own farmer in a beaten-up ute. Someone taking a short cut through a dried-up creek bed, too narrow for cars or trucks.

  What are my odds of rescue?

  Strange to be lost, yet know where I am.

  Show Me the Sky

  14 September 1834

  On the suggestion of Rev. Lilywhite, to assist him in the continuing advance of my English, and to make the both perilous and tedious sea voyage to the South Pacific an educational one, I, Nelson Babbage of Whitechapel, London – formerly Naqarase Baba of Lakemba, Fiji – commence this journal.

  Stowaway on the ship Fortune in 1824, a boy without clothes, I had no more idea of what lay beyond the horizon than what I could see. Now I sit in a London chapel, dressed as dapper as pampered gentry, dipping my quill from ink to page and writing in English. Although this is not my language, these are my words, and with my hand guided by my spirit, and, I pray, the good Lord above ever watchful, I will bring my life to these very pages.

  After such an announcement I am unsure of what I am supposed to record. And for whom? My people do not collect such private thoughts. We are not afflicted with the busy and restless spirit of the white man, and find no merit in a mind not shared with our family and brothers. Though after ten long years upon these shores, much of England and her peculiar ways has no doubt marked my soul.

  Ten years in the lands of Europe! Ten years of walking the mighty cities and tumultuous towns, the great speeding streets that swirled with all the vim and vigour of a tropical storm.

  Cast into this kingdom as a boy, dizzy with wonder at the feats of construction and engineering, at the mountains of stone and glass, the hissing and clanging machines with fire in their bellies, I believed I were a hapless mortal snagged in the dream of Ndengei, our Great Spirit, and that when He awoke, I would open my eyes on the golden sand and glittering surf of home, believing once more that the world contained no more than our verdant land and the deep blue sea.

  But the great ships had already split the sky. We had chosen not to heed the warnings of our Tongan neighbours. We did not believe that pale gods stepped down from the height of the sun, that they ventured into our kingdoms on canoes pulled by clouds. That the learned and chosen amongst their many, many thousands, had transformed trees to paper and transcribed the voice of God, the creator of all creators.

  But I know now, as my brothers will know soon, the sun that folds in a breaking wave on a Fijian beach, is the same sun that shines on all lands.

  I must sleep now and sleep well. Tomorrow I remove from the Mission Society to the good ship Caroline at Blackwall, the vessel chartered to ferry God to my heathen shores.

  15 September 1834

  Indeed the Caroline is a fine ship, and by the grace of God she will carry us safely to what is the other side of this spinning globe. That my cabin is no longer than my head to my toes does not dismay. It is a palace compared to the damp and stinking billets of the deckhands, who must share their swinging hammocks with each
other – one man sleeps while the other works.

  As this land I have made my own will soon be memory, I today took what may be a final walk around my favourite haunts. From the crowded markets of Holborn and Covent Garden, to the grand old trees of Hampstead Heath, where one can admire the view from on top of Parliament Hill. At this vantage point the size of the city is apparent, a skyline ever closer to the clouds, the green of the counties encroached. But what I saw today I did not pass judgement upon. For better or worse, it is God who sees fit that this metropolis grows. I will miss it.

  16 September 1834

  For the next week I am to assist Rev. Stevens in the loading and stowing of the mission supplies. Expecting to be a labourer of the boxes from carriage to hold, I was most surprised to learn that I was in fact the inventory officer – the men employed to shift and lug our chests, clothes, crucifixes and poultry, noticeably sullied at a man of my skin standing above them with paper and quill.

  Apart from keeping the inventory I have been occupied with the beginnings of an English to Fijian dictionary, a work that will ultimately contain around five to six thousand words. Many dialects have flowered upon our many islands, and I am somewhat diffident about preparing what will be an authoritative text. Though I must confess, to be a teacher of words to the white man is an exaltation I could not have dreamed. I still remember my time on-board the Fortune, jumped up from Lakemba like a wild animal, and afforded little more comfort than the pigs and fowl. Only when the sailors decided I would not eat them in their sleep was I permitted above deck. They joked and toyed with my tongue as though it were a plaything, putting words into my mouth like handfuls of stones. I spoke and they laughed, not knowing the oaths and blasphemes I was uttering. Beyond the curses against God I was taught the lexis of the ship, and then commanded about it by the bark of the captain in single words, gathering a vocabulary no bigger than the names of the sails and masts I had to scale.

  And then the cacophony of London, the screams and shrieks, the intelligible tongues wagging without meaning. Only when the Mission Society confirmed my schooling with Mistress Beaumont did I believe this a language I could tame. A strict and imposing teacher, she peered over her spectacles eager for our errors. I and various other indigenes of the Empire’s reach – Malays, Indians, Hawaiians and Tongans – fast became adept with a tongue we wanted or not. One soon learns to write correctly when the stroke of a cane punishes a spelling mistake, or the bony hands of Miss Beaumont rearrange lips and teeth to fix a mispronounced word.

  To think now, with the scratch of a split quill I have the power to shape the mouth of an Englishman!

  18 September 1834

  This morning the Caroline and her senior officers formally welcomed on-board the Rev. Lilywhite, director of the South Pacific Mission. Despite his senior years and frailty of body, he must surely thank God for his lasting keenness of mind. For the best part of my schooling he was my financial guardian, making regular visits to Miss Beaumont to assure that the sponsorship of the Mission Society was being put to worthwhile use. I trust he learned that I was consistently top of both my English and Theology class.

  Assisting the Rev. Lilywhite will be a Rev. Jefferson from Edinburgh, and for one year previous, of Botany Bay, New Holland, where he presided over a parish of indigenes and men in chains. Youngest of the clergy is the Rev. Stevens of Worcester, a man of jolly countenance and vigour, whom I am most looking forward to working with and learning from. All reverends are joined by their families, though the older children of Rev. Lilywhite will disembark in Portsmouth, where we will also welcome our final pilgrim of the South Pacific, a Rev. Thomas, whom I only know by name. If his character glows with God as that of his brethren, then the Lord has selected a fine charge of men to sally forth with his message.

  22 September 1834

  With his bible wagging in his right hand as he spoke, the Rev. Lilywhite launched the Caroline south on Matthew 28:19–20, so that all on-board can be sure that we voyage into the deep with God on our side: ‘Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded of you.’

  The Rev. Lilywhite followed this with a prayer for calm seas and fair weather, and that ‘the God of Jonah be our God’. The Bishop of London, on-board for the farewell ceremony and officially representing King George, then added his blessings: ‘For those devoted to the work of preaching the Gospel of Christ to the poor and benighted inhabitants of those godless islands, know we pray here in England that the Lord sails with you.’

  When the bishop and his entourage stepped off the gangplank, and the length of wood that joined us to dry land was raised, the Rev. Lilywhite turned and cried, ‘Onward Christian soldiers!’

  Capt. Drinkwater ordered that the anchor be weighed, and as the Caroline slipped her moorings, the Rev. Jefferson and I hoisted the missionary flag – three silver doves on a purple field, bearing olive branches in their beaks – to the tip of the masthead. The wharf was a carnival of well-wishers, and it seemed every parish of London had come to Blackwall to wave us off, many joining the reverends, their wives, the captain and the crew, in singing the hymn ‘Jesus at thy command we launch into the deep’.

  24 September 1834

  Just after dawn the Caroline weighed anchor from Hope Point and made sail for Sheerness. Feeling for the first time a stiff wind, we merrily raced towards the mouth of the Thames and the North Sea, the riverbank rolling by as though it were the deck fixed and dear England sailing.

  26 September 1834

  This afternoon, standing on the prow watching the garden coast of Kent flare and shadow beneath the scattered clouds, I was taken aside by the Rev. Stevens and informed something of our final brethren, Rev. Thomas – due to join us in Portsmouth tomorrow. ‘He is the only one of us without kin,’ Rev. Stevens most earnestly remarked. ‘And despite my knowing that you are a man of most impeccable manner and etiquette, I feel it correct to warn you of enquiring about his family. Well, what was his family.’

  The Rev. Stevens went on, in hushed and discreet tones, to tell me of how Mrs Thomas and their teenage daughter had been tragically robbed and shot by highwaymen earlier this year. On a trip to Exeter, while Rev. Thomas took relief in a dell, bandits assailed the carriage, murdering the coachman and his two passengers. Though the motive was presumed robbery, the killers had fled empty handed, leaving only the corpses of the coachman and the family Thomas.

  Rev. Thomas was of course distraught, and public reaction to the murder of a minister’s family prompted officers from London to assist in the case. To heap further misery upon the tragedy, a Detective Mills of Bow Street vanished whilst staying with the reverend – thought accidentally drowned taking an early morning swim in the Channel.

  The reverend has remained stoic throughout. However, with the murderers still at large and the case unsolved, each passing carriage or mother and daughter a reminder, the mission to Fiji and New Holland seemed a timely diversion from family tragedy, as well as a call from the Almighty.

  Rev. Stevens concluded that, ‘Perhaps his character is not tempered as well as the other missionaries, but know that his soul is devoted, and trust in him and the Lord we have.’

  27 September 1834

  Gathered for our second and final farewell, we depart Portsmouth, and finally England. She will be within view for some time yet, but the feel of her beneath my feet has gone. With the tearful children of the Rev. Lilywhite waving goodbye until they were but specks upon the harbour wall, the leaving of land seemed all the more emotional than the choral fanfare of Blackwall. Several eyes watered on-board, including reverends and hardened sailors. I also had to use my sleeve to quell a tear, as though I were at the wake of a good friend, or even a family member, I would never see again.

  The briefing from Rev. Stevens about Rev. Thomas proved most invaluable, as our introduction was a most awkward misunderstanding. When the Rev. T
homas reached the foot of the gangplank, the porters set down his luggage to be stowed by the crew. My name had been lost in the melee of greetings with the other reverends and their wives, so when the Rev. Thomas turned to see my dark hand held out for shaking, he snapped, ‘Put your hand upon my case, boy! Not my palm.’

  There and then I had not the courage to correct the rev. and properly introduce myself as translator of the mission expedition, and quickly did as I was told, carrying two cases to his room before the Rev. Stevens had us formally acquainted.

  The Rev. Thomas is a large, ruddy-faced and portly man, puffing his chest and gasping for air as though each breath were his last. His ‘apology’ consisted of a lecture on how to introduce oneself in a correct manner, and the confession that my ‘dusky hand’ had been the first ‘neither white, nor olive’ he had ever been offered, taking him somewhat by surprise.

  Tonight I pray that I am wrong about the Rev. Thomas, for he seems the kind of man who would immediately wash after shaking hands with a man of my skin.

  1 October 1834

  With much shame I answered the Rev. Lilywhite with an untruth when asked upon whether I was regularly keeping this journal. The rev., no doubt suspecting my falsehood, replied, ‘It is a daily record, Mr Baba, not the meanderings of our hand given to whim.’

  The excuse was that upon departing the damp isles of Great Britain, again watching the wind unravel in the billowing sails and feeling the deck creak beneath my shoeless feet, I was quite overcome with joy. Once more I could rise and fall with the rhythm of the sea, breathe the same sweet breeze that blows across the waves, and not choke on the chimney smoke or fetid stench of a London street.

  Though the Mission Society has secured my passage, requiring me to do little more than sit and wait for the shores of Lakemba, I am not a man to rest my limbs while others labour. As a boy apprentice on-board the Fortune, I learned the rigging well enough to haul sails with the crew, and now this time with the men of the Caroline.