Two white men would have been at the mission workshop, crouched beside a four-wheel drive. They stood up together, looked at their watches, and squinted into the sky. One was tall like a tree, the other one short with a round gut. They spoke, and got into another vehicle.
Many kids and young people, dark ones, were over near the store and the basketball court. One tall boy leapt into the air, hovered, and tossed a basketball toward the backboard. The orange ball gently arced and descended through the hoop without touching it. The boy rolled over onto his back, laughing. He looked into the sky, and pointed up and to the south-east. All the kids stopped their games, and looked, and they pointed too. Their eardrums, even those that were perforated, or congested, or—in one or two cases—hindered by sprouting watermelon seeds, trembled with the drone of airborne engines.
Next to the lumpy and cracked basketball court was a corrugated iron shack with rubbish and graffiti scattered along the wall. People were sitting on the ground there. A man put his head out the door. ‘Teacher plane,’ he said.
‘Teacher plane teacher plane. Gissa ride, gissa ride.’ The utility, coming up now, pulled over. Bodies poured in, all sizes. The same was happening to other utilities there. Boys standing on the trays, young women sitting holding their babies, people cross-legged on the roof of the cabs. The old people, sitting around the office and out the front of the houses along the road to the airstrip, watched them drive by. The corrugated iron resonated with the rumble of the plane flying overhead, the cars driving past, the shouts, the barking of dogs.
I am flying. I was coming to a landing.
The plane had flown in low, under the rain clouds, navigating by the rivers and coastline. My wife, Liz, still held the small motion sickness bag and could only smile weakly at me. The pilot shouted, but because of the roar of the engines and the earmuffs I wore I couldn’t hear him. He pointed ahead and I saw a small settlement. There were tall, deep-green trees, buildings glinting in the sun, and a blue pool where the river slowed and widened.
‘Ah, that’s it?’
The pilot nodded. We’d been flying for an hour and a half. In the plane with us were Alex and Annette Seddum and their eight-year-old son, Alan. Alex was to be the principal of the school we were flying to.
The boy squeezed his hands between his knees and wriggled. ‘We nearly there?’ and he turned and called to his mother, ‘At last we’re nearly there at this place whatever it’s called.’
Annette smiled at him. Alex patted the boy’s head and turned his own furrowed brow away.
We flew over a large curved pool in the river, and saw the mission with its lawn and buildings and plantation. There were small huts and large trees, and a scratch of a track that dipped through creeks. It scratched past the powerhouse and the school, turned the corner of the basketball court near the mission gates and continued, lined with coconut palms, past corrugated iron huts to a gravel airstrip in the shape of a cross.
Not far from the airstrip the river flows through a gorge before widening to a mangrove-lined mouth and into the sea. The plane flew low and banked to make its approach to the airstrip. I saw the white ribbons of water which poured from the rocks and were shredded and swept downstream. That river is always a torrent at this time.
As we lost altitude the scratch became a dirt road barely wide enough for two vehicles. It went cautiously through the bush between the gorge and the airstrip which we saw before us, through the settlement and then out the other side of it. The bush was littered with old car bodies, tins, plastic, all sorts of rubbish. We landed with a crunch and the gravel spat at us, the engine roared, and we were taxiing over to a crowd of dark bodies waving from the back of four-wheel drive utilities.
We all waved back from inside the plane. It was very hot and humid on the ground. We shouted at one another over the roar of the engines.
‘Quite a reception.’
‘Good eh? Friendly.’
‘Look how many in each car.’
‘Gaw, they’re really black aren’t they?’
Yes, whereas these people in the plane looked even paler than usual. My wife from travel sickness, the others from what? Exhaustion? Apprehension?
The pilot turned off the motor and said to the mostly pale faces around him, ‘What do you reckon? Think you can teach them?’ He opened the doors for us.
Annette pointed to two white men. ‘Look, Alex, there’s two men there.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that must be the project officer. One of them will be anyway.’
It was. His name was Gerrard. The other was Murray, the mechanic and general tradesman for the mission and community.
We all shook hands, a small group circling in the space between the plane being unloaded and the welcoming crowd. Small children shyly zig-zagged toward the long white walksocks among us.
We new teachers sat in the back of the utility with our few boxes and cases. Our clothes stuck to our flesh. We tightly gripped the sides of the tray, worried we’d fall as the ute bounced along the track. A number of other vehicles accompanied us, and we rattled in a great cloud of dust and noise. We came through the corridor of coconut palms and, smiling stiffy, regally waved back at those who watched from the shade of the huts.
Many of the younger children held lengths of nylon fishing line, the other ends of which were tied to cans dragging behind them.
‘Hey, I used to make toys like that when I was a kid. I’d forgotten.’ It was true. I’d forgotten.
The half-naked children turned, their faces splitting into grins, and waved also. Old car bodies rusted in long green grass. Clothing was strung out on low barbed wire fences around some of the shacks. In one yard a circle of people sat under a big tree, hunched over a game of cards.
‘Who dem gardiya?’
‘Teachers.’
‘Look out, ’m fall off not careful.’
‘Wave ’em, look at ’m they wave. Think they pope, or what?
‘Look at that one, blondie one, that short one.’
‘See that hat? That John Wayne maybe, ridin’ Toyota.’
‘Aiee! That red hair girl, mine!’
Screams of laughter.
Fatman Murray turned into the backyard of the teachers’ housing behind the school and the front wheels of the Toyota went through the grass and sank deep into the mud.
‘Shit.’
At a card game someone fanned his cards out on the top of his belly. ‘Coonce!’