Beware of Dogs Read online

  ‘Right. All aboard. Got your stuff?’ Matt was organising us, throwing our bags onto the deck, herding us along the jetty. He offered his arm to help me onto the boat, but I balked. ‘I can’t.’ I could hear the hysteria in my voice. I’m sure they could too. I realise now how much at least four of them must have enjoyed it.

  Dave was the first to jump down into the boat. ‘Come on, Verhoeven. I’ll catch you!’

  But I stood there frozen, just repeating, ‘I can’t.’ Dave tried a new approach. Softly, softly. ‘Alix, this is not like you. It’s quite safe.’ He reached down and pulled something up. ‘See. Lifejackets.’

  But I couldn’t move. I was utterly frozen. All I could see when I looked at that boat were broken timbers and bodies churning in grey water. It was Lana who broke the spell, jumping gracefully onto the deck and saying in that same little-girl voice: ‘I can do it. See. It’s easy.’ And then Matt was behind me, his voice rough, ‘And so can Alix.’ He was guiding me firmly towards the boat, his fingers gripping me like a vice, when suddenly he lifted me up and turned as if to throw me into the water. I experienced a moment of sheer terror looking into black and weed-filled depths. Then, without a word, he turned again and pushed me onto the deck.

  If Dave or Lana saw they made no sign.

  Unlike the others, I did put a lifejacket on, but it didn’t make me feel any better. The whole journey, which took almost an hour, passed in a daze of nausea, one part seasickness, three parts nameless fear, as the others laughed and joked around me. Whether they were laughing at me I didn’t know and didn’t care, but occasional impressions reached me. Of Dave trying to tell the loudest jokes to impress Matt, of Lana fetching and carrying at Matt’s command, and of the louring presence of the Duffy brothers, who now and then looked at me as if somehow I wasn’t what they had expected, although I couldn’t see how it could matter to them.

  Once I vomited over the side, and I could see Lana make a little moue of distaste. ‘Eeeww,’ she said. But Dave was surprisingly nice about it, bringing me tissues and cups of water.

  And then the next shock, when we got there. All along, despite all the signs, I had retained the image that had first arisen when Dave talked about Matt’s holiday house.

  I had pictured an A-line timber cottage, one of a street of similar cottages ranged along the edge of a bay. I had pictured a kiosk, a pier and perhaps a hotel, at the very least a bakery. And people. Lots of people. Families and caravanners, all enjoying their holiday.

  But Matt’s island was nothing like that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Drooping Sheoak (Allocasuarina verticillata)

  An attractive salt-tolerant tree that often grows in thickets. It has curved drooping branchlets of grey-green needles, likes sunny locations and tends to colonise coastal regions. The sheoak’s main claim to fame is that it has separate male and female plants. Male flowers are produced on yellowish to light brown spikes and the female flowers are reddish. The female plants produce the woody cones containing the seeds for germination. An 1889 book suggests that chewing the needles can relieve extreme thirst, so if you’re desperate, it might be worth a try.

  Atkinson’s Guide

  FIELD DIARY – Sunday 15 April

  * * *

  Despite a very broken night, interrupted by terrible nightmares, I woke up slightly less stiff than yesterday, and almost refreshed. I must be acclimatising to this new life. The dawn rush to the toilet was so much easier in the long T-shirt and boots that I think I’ll leave the jeans off unless I’m exploring or rock-climbing. It’s not cold in the cave, so a T-shirt should be quite adequate.

  I was still spooked after yesterday, and had to force myself to walk up and down and exercise my legs and arms for a few turns before scuttling back to the safety of my cave. I hope that Dave will have decided that I’m not hiding in this part of the island, but at the back of my mind is the fear that yesterday was simply a reconnaissance, and that today he might return with the others for a thorough search.

  The nightmares didn’t help either, a strange melange of shark attacks, drowning and, worst of all, waking to find myself trapped in the cave with Dave and Matt. No, not worst of all. Be honest, Alix. Thinking back over the boat trip before going to sleep has served to revive old horrors I thought were fully vanquished. Even now, in the light of day, I can’t get the picture of the ferry out of my head. I will not think about it. I will push it to the back of my mind.

  I force myself back to reporting the facts. Today I have stuck rigidly to my timetable.

  Daybreak: Go outside for exercise and toilet.

  Despite my terror, this part went without incident.

  6.00–8.00 a.m.: Housekeeping.

  Not much of this today but I managed to fill up the time fairly successfully, mainly by making an effort to rearrange and hang my clothes. I spent a good fifteen minutes working out a system of folding the jeans inside a kitchen tidy bag to make quite a good kneepad, so I can manage the kneeling stage of my plan with less discomfort, then took them out of the bag, turned them inside out and hung them over the tree root for a well overdue airing.

  8.00–9.00 a.m.: First meal.

  I have decided to reduce the water ration to keep my supply going as long as possible, so used every possible ritual to stretch the tiny allowance out. I resisted the temptation to gobble my food, and ate the nuts as well as the sultanas one at a time, with a long pause between each morsel. It certainly enhances appreciation of every nuance of taste, but this method doesn’t seem to alleviate hunger nearly as well as gulping by the handful.

  10.00 a.m.–12.00 p.m.: Stand in entrance space.

  This was the worst part. Today, trying to keep from indulging in morbid introspection, I thought I would go mad with boredom. I only just managed to force myself to wait until the dot of twelve before allowing a change of position.

  12.00–1.00 p.m.: Return to sitting position. Snack time.

  Even though I had the full ration of nuts, sultanas and water at eight o’clock, by the time I was scheduled to eat the two remaining karkalla fruits in the middle of the day I was ravenous, and thirsty. It’s clear that I will need to find more wild food. The nuts and sultanas might be sufficient for survival, but without anything to supplement them my energy will flag and I can’t afford that. I’ve also got to find some kind of water source. When I wrote my wish list the main things on it should have been a camp stove that could safely be used in the cave to boil leaves and a machine to desalinate seawater. But I don’t have such a machine and I don’t have a stove, so that’s that. I think boobialla fruits are edible, but I don’t know what they look like, or whether they’re in season. Tonight or tomorrow morning I’m going to have to make a search. Or go down the rock staircase in search of karkalla.

  1.00–3.00 p.m.: Write up diary.

  What more can I say, other than that I have determined to make a thorough search for more food supplies when I go out at sunset. I’m not sure what sources of animal food might be available here. All I can think of are small lizards, which are unfortunately most active in the middle of the day, and perhaps insects, which are at least more likely to be nocturnal, but I haven’t seen anything bigger than tiny ants so far, and I’m not desperate enough yet to try eating them. There were shellfish on the eastern beach, but the coastline here doesn’t look very crustacean-friendly, and anyway it’s too far for me to risk going down the rocks.

  One good thing, though, is that the island appears to be free of mosquitoes. I haven’t seen one, by day or by night.

  Now I think I’ll spend my time standing in the entrance trying some yoga breathing as well as the exercises. Maybe it will help me visualise an alternative food source.

  Sunset: Prepare for sleep. Finish diary.

  Back again in one piece. I have managed to convince myself that evening is likely to be the least risky time for exploration, so I struggled into my jeans and anorak, filled my pockets with plastic bags, hefted my weapons, and set off to ch
eck out the small woodland beyond my original toilet area. Again I had a strong sense that no-one was around. I felt brave enough to go a little beyond the wood to where the ground dropped down into the valley. This valley cuts across the centre of the island and leads to the beach on the east side (where the cabin is). It’s really the only way to access the north-west point that houses my cave, so I took a good long look for any signs of activity. No doubt there were small creatures going about their business, but not a sight or sound of anything large or dangerous.

  I had calculated that I had twenty minutes of good light, so I set about exploring. There was fruit on the boobiallas, but it looked like the last of the season, and was clearly not going to solve my food problems. However, I gathered a bagful of about two dozen berries for the next few days. They were smaller than the karkalla, and I had no idea what they would taste like, but when you are forced into hunter-gathering, you gather what you can.

  What I did find though was something to cushion my sleep. Behind the boobiallas was an overhanging stand of sheoaks, and when I touched their clumps of drooping needles they were as smooth and soft as any English heather. Well, almost. Carefully, so as not to leave obvious destruction in my wake, I pulled off half a dozen branchlets from the base of the bushes and put them in a pile with my bag of fruit. If my mouth got uncomfortably dry with the shortage of water, I’d heard that chewing on sheoak needles could provide a measure of relief, although no actual water. Why, I wasn’t sure, but it was an added comfort to know that I’d have a supply near at hand. I now had about five minutes before I needed to head back, so I pushed through the sheoaks to a rough thicket beyond.

  This turned out to be a little copse of coast banksias in full flower, and I recalled one of the sources of both moisture and food used by local Aboriginal people in the past. When the banksia flowers are covered with morning dew, they can be squeezed to provide a kind of nectar. It might be too dry here for dew to form, but I was excited enough to plan to set my alarm very early one morning and come and find out.

  Suddenly cautious, I took a moment to check the valley again. Still no sign of life. I collected my gatherings and, happily burdened but still careful to scuff out every footprint with a branch, I returned to the cave, where I deposited my treasures and returned outside to peel off my jeans by bracing against the entrance rock. Next, a fast, jeans-free toilet run. Then, cover tree back into place, and just enough time to finish writing my diary and prepare for sleep. The time is 5.57 p.m. on Sunday the 15th of April.

  * * *

  What can I think about that won’t bring back the nightmares?

  With sheoak branches tucked behind my head and back and into the gaps between me and the rock wall, I feel comparatively comfortable. In fact, no worse than in many of the camps I’ve had to endure in the past, particularly in England.

  One of the many things I liked about Australians from the outset was their love of comfort, so that even the most remote camps would have high quality sleeping equipment, good food and, usually, excellent beer. Coming from my father’s abstemious, self-denying household, then England’s wet, cold, masochistic discomfort, how could I fail to be beguiled by the four-wheel-drives and helicopters and seafood dinners?

  I think I chose geology initially because of its perversely romantic image of hardship and lonely isolation. Having disappointed my family by turning my back on their beliefs, I could not have adopted merchant banking or advertising copywriting, or even competitive rock-climbing, with their connotations of decadence and wealth, even fame. But the other contributing factor to my decision was, of course, my love of rocks.

  Many of my happiest memories involve rocks. The one childhood holiday in Madagascar, spent without my father, scrambling with Abel among the fabulous limestone cliffs of Ankarana, was the beginning of a long love affair with cliffs, rocks and caves. My lonely adolescence in England, which I resentfully regarded as exile, was made endurable by rambling the Yorkshire moors. And as a foreign, and alien, undergraduate at the University of Manchester, all of my leisure time was given over to expeditions to the limestone cave systems of the Pennines. The Pennines excursions, however, were done in company. No matter how foreign and alien you may be, at an English university you can always find a club full of people who are even stranger than you are.

  Thinking about that magical family expedition, I wonder now how Moe persuaded my father to let us go on holiday at all. Although done under the most primitive conditions, it would have cost money. We had a tent, stretchers, ropes and boots that must have come from somewhere. And the food. Normally we lived on food the congregation brought us in lieu of paying a stipend. This was not the kind of food you could take to a remote camp, especially as the giver would be back that day or the next to retrieve her pot. My mother preferred to receive cooked food, and until that trip to Ankarana I assumed that Moe didn’t know how to cook.

  The camping trip revealed more than one hidden talent of my mother’s. She used the old curtains from the sleepout, which she had always hated, to make sleeping bags for me and my brother (she herself slept wrapped in her thickest lamba), and she unravelled one of my father’s unneeded pullovers to knit us socks to go with the two pairs of heavy boots she had found at the back of Ulysses’ store.

  I went with my mother, full of excitement, on several expeditions to the Epicerie at the other end of the village (the name, a reminder of the French-colonial past, proclaimed itself in uneven red letters on a pale-green board hung from the ceiling). Most villages had a store of some kind, many built out of mud like the houses, some just a mat on the ground where goods were displayed anew every morning. Ulysses had been more ambitious and built an edifice of timber offcuts and driftwood, held together by faith and a few nails. The back half was covered with pieces of scrap tin of many colours, and the front with a plastic shower curtain decorated with pink flamingos. Rummaging with Moe in the most remote corners, I felt I was in Aladdin’s cave, surrounded by a wild assortment of hats, toys, umbrellas, buckets – and, oh miracle of miracles, boots – with Ulysses scurrying behind us, pointing to one item, pulling out another, eager to give us a full appreciation of the riches on display.

  With these supplies, plus ropes and stout sticks, and bright lambas wrapped round our heads to keep off the sun, Abel and I felt quite well equipped and professional.

  At the time of the caves trip I was about ten and Abel would have been twelve. Because he was habitually given a lot more freedom than I was, we rarely spent time together at home in the village, so it was exciting to set off exploring with my big brother. Except for a guided tour of one of the larger caves, Moe didn’t come on these expeditions, but would stay back at the campsite to prepare strange meals out of the limited foods we had been able to bring and, as we discovered one day when we came back unexpectedly early, to read novels, the works of the Devil, a forbidden pastime. (Except, of course, when used in the reputable endeavour of improving our English, but these novels, even we could see, were not of that kind. And more wicked still, they were in Dutch.)

  We never told my father. Where she managed to obtain the books I don’t know. Perhaps she smuggled them all the way from Home. In fact none of us said anything, but she must have sensed our complicity, because from then on she relaxed quite amazingly, so that mealtimes became a shared game.

  ‘Alix, what will we have for dinner?’

  ‘Rice?’

  ‘We shall have rice.’

  ‘Abel, what will we have with the rice?

  ‘Manioc?’

  ‘It so happens we have some manioc here. We shall have rice and manioc. Now, is there anything we have that would make it edible?’ This would precipitate a mad search among the increasingly dwindling supplies for food with any flavour at all. We finished the eggs within the first two days, and the dried fish also disappeared, except for a few eagerly sought scraps. For the last two days we were left with a dilemma: either eat rice and manioc au naturel, which formed a kind of gluggy mess with n
o flavour at all, or add to it the contents of a small tin of English mockham, which was vibrant with flavour (and pink dye), but somehow repellent.

  That holiday, including the cooking, still stands in my memory as the best holiday of my life. I wonder if Abel remembers it the same way. I try to recall when I last saw my brother, and realise it must be at least eight years ago. He visited me in Manchester on his way to his seminary in Canada.

  When he turned up at my door I didn’t recognise him at first. He’d been a doughy sort of boy, somehow unformed, with soft fair hair cut in a basin cut with Moe’s sewing scissors. The neat stocky figure who greeted me in the Malagasy way (‘Salama, Alixi’) and handed me a small wrapped parcel was an adult. His face had settled and tightened into maturity and he was no longer soft but solid. Someone you could depend on. Someone you could trust.

  Sadly, Abel had not lost his quiet reserve, and I had lost all ability to trust. It was early days for me at the university. I had not yet met Jonathan and his friends, and although I showed Abel around the place, took him to lunch in the student cafeteria, asked about Moe and Vader, there was a formality to the visit neither of us seemed able to break.

  But when he talked about his studies at the seminary in Canada my usually taciturn brother was on fire. ‘It’s not like all that hell and damnation Vader goes on with.’ He had already acquired a faint Canadian accent and his English had improved out of sight. ‘It’s about helping people live their lives. About day-to-day things – work, children, sickness.’