Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

Surrounded by the stench of rancid fat and sweat, the blanket of wood-smoke, the grunts and cries of animal pleasure, she dared for the first time resurrect her own husband, the image at least of what she remembered: the fastidious hands and glossy whiskers, the eyes too deeply concentrated on an inner self she had never been privileged to meet. Whatever his deficiencies or hers (in retrospect she thought that perhaps she had loved him most for the ailments and the crankiness which called for her sympathy or forbearing) she willed herself to experience that greater reality which dreams can bring; and fell asleep in Mr Roxburgh’s embrace.

She was disconcerted however to find herself subjected, then submitting, to coarser treatment. Ohhh she detested what she was physically incapable of resisting, most of all the hairy wrists and swollen veins. Exhausted by the ensuing struggle she could only lie like the spent fish she was, gills subsiding as emotions expired.

She awoke stiff and cold except where the embers touched her, still surrounded by the sighs, the breathing and dreaming of others, while her own dream faded into ash-colours, and she realized that it was not Austin but Garnet Roxburgh who had possessed her.

His continued immanence and her own disgust forced her to her feet at such speed that she was almost stunned by a blow from one of the saplings supporting the thatch of leaves. She fell upon her knees, and crawled instead on all fours towards the entrance, like any sow shaking off the night and lumbering out of a foetid sty. Without having seen them she knew that her breasts must be swinging lean and russet as she lurched into a pearly light. Dew raining down along her spine and rump cleansed her to some extent of her dream. It was her locked joints which were making her groan in her efforts to stand erect.

But the hour before dawn offered compensations. Her ghost drifted with the wraiths of mist, among the ghosts of trees, and found itself again haunting the shore, a bland, unobstructed verge which presented no sure way of escape to a lost soul, a woman, or a rational being. If one of them accepted to be seduced by its beauty, and a second fainted at the prospect of a footsore journey, the third, a sceptic, feared that this ribbon of sand might not lead to Moreton Bay, but could double back upon itself to create a prison in an island.

Reason might have made Mrs Roxburgh more disconsolate and lost had it not been for the sound of a receding tide. She stood awhile in the shallows, letting the wavelets play round her ankles, rubbing one sandy shin against the other, listening to the clatter of shells and pebbles as the current dragged them back and forth. She found herself smiling for these lesser pleasures which appealed to what Austin Roxburgh deplored as ‘the sensual side of Ellen’s nature’.

The cold broke in upon her at last. She recoiled shivering from the expanse of colourless water, and sky as colourless except for the hint of an apocalypse, to stumble back in what she hoped was the direction from which she had come. She positively panted after the tribe to which she now belonged. What if she never found it, and spent the rest of her days on earth (if not in hell) circling through the scrub till her bones gave up? She longed for even the most resentful company of whatever colour. She might have bartered her body, she thought, to one of the scornful male blacks in return for his protection.

To indulge in such an unlikely fancy could not be regarded in any degree as a betrayal, but while she walked, her already withered fringe of leaves began deriding her shrunken thighs, and daylight struck an ironic glint out of the concealed wedding-ring.

So her lunging and plunging through the forest was as much an attempt to elude her thoughts as to find the camp she had unwisely deserted. She was made quite feverish by her search, in the course of which she came to a hollow where she was halted, indefinitely it seemed, by the horror which paralysed her.

Directly in her path a fire had but lately burnt itself out. Amongst charred branches and the white flock of ash gone cold, lay a man’s body set in a final anguished curve, the roasted skin noticeably crackled down one side from shoulder to thigh. One of the legs had been hacked away from where the thigh is joined to the hip. If the skull, bared to the bone in places by wilful gashes, grimaced at the intruder through singed whisker and a crust of blood, grime, and burning, the mouth atoned for all that is fiendish by its resignation to suffering.

Mrs Roxburgh only gradually realized that she was faced with the first officer’s remains. She was left gasping and sobbing, not so much for decent stolid Ned Courtney, her relationship with whom had never been more than rudimentary, as for the death of her husband and her own insoluble predicament. She might have forgotten her intention of finding her way back to the vindictive but necessary blacks, and lost herself deeper in the forest, if two children had not appeared, full of admonishment and anger which could only have been inspired by their elders. Although she took it for granted that these children had been sent to spy on her and lead her back to captivity, she was ready to surrender herself. They first beat her about the shoulders with switches, which in the circumstances she felt, then of their own free will offered her their moist, childish hands, a gesture she accepted gratefully.

During the journey back the children found a crop of berries, some of which they forced into her mouth. The berries were watery, insipid, but not unpleasant. Shortly after, halfway down a slope, she caught her foot in a vine which had escaped her notice, and tumbled like a sack off a cart. Imitating her fall, the children rolled downhill and landed in the same heap. They all lay laughing awhile. The young children might have been hers. She was so extraordinarily content she wished it could have lasted for ever, the two black little bodies united in the sun with her own blackened skin-and-bones.

Not surprisingly, her wish remained ungranted. The children cleared their faces of smiles, and they marched on.

At the camp they found the men had already departed on the day’s errand, while the women were at work dismantling the huts for setting up, it eventuated, at no great distance from their former site. The women had little but scowls and pouts for the recalcitrant slave, whom they loaded with the heaviest sheets of bark and thickest swatches of leafy thatching. However capricious the present manœuvre she carried her loads willingly enough, grateful for her reinstatement in the community to which she belonged. (Only at evening she discovered the reason for their arbitrary move: fleas are less predatory on virgin ground.)

Later in the day a troupe of females and middle children proceeded by instinct or pre-arrangement to the beach, where fishermen had been casting their nets. A hush had fallen upon the men, some of them immersed up to their heads, others but waist-deep in water, like stanchions to which the nets were attached. The women, if incapable of silence, chattered in subdued monotone like birds at roosting. Less controlled, the children scampered around and about flinging handfuls of wet sand which the sun transformed into arcs of light.

Suddenly even the children were stilled as they noticed a shuddering of the water some distance offshore. This barely visible disturbance of a calm sea, like the very slight agitation of a sheet by innumerable hidden bodies, was moving ever closer to the mouth, then into the belly of the net, the outline of which could be traced from the black blob of one motionless head to the next, and closer inshore, the more exposed human stanchions. When a distinct collision took place underwater. Single fish, mercurial enough to appear as liquid as their element, leaped briefly above the surface. There began a frenzied shouting, and hauling on the net. Women shrieked, children squealed, as all dashed into the mild surf to join in dragging the net to land, when they were not dabbling their hands after an individual catch of slippery and, in most cases, elusive fish.