Thirteen

“Mr Wu”

In which I am extraordinarily courageous – enjoy my drive in the countryside – and finally, finally, find what I am looking for.

Tempestuously, the mediaeval water carriage rolled and sloshed all night while, in half-consciousness, I imagined that I had been cast adrift on a raft circled by sharks dressed in white linen suits whilst the Commander puffed past me disapprovingly in his immaculate steamer. Later I feared that I would drown in a terrible sea of watery pancake mixture and dolphin blood presided over by Royal Ronnie, as he swigged all the while from a bottle in which he had imprisoned the tearful Susan. In any event, I slept only fitfully and when morning came I was much relieved to be able to paddle my way to the edge of the bed and roll out, crashing onto the cool tiles.

Nick and I thumped and bumped our way back down the hill into town. Parking in front of one of the novelty shops that sold limitless tat to those that had something to spend, we hurried down the road towards the Gas Shop.

Sunlight was doing its best to glance off the concrete, mock-leaf roof of the central market. The twelve stars of the European Union were emblazoned over the front entrance where they shone in a self-congratulatory circle. The open hall was teeming with people and the stalls were ready for their inquisitive hands. Woven baskets full of sweet potatoes and cassava were piled up in dark, dusty pyramids and cherry tomatoes were arranged on a baize of wilted leaves like uniform billiard balls waiting to be sold for a dollar a frame. In one of the furthest corners a shy man with a knife sat on a stool in front of a huge pile of coconuts. Avoiding eye contact as was the custom in the islands, he would lop off the top of one of them, pop in a straw, hand it over to his thirsty customer and accept the money wordlessly before sitting back down again staring firmly at the floor. Children sat on the entrance steps chewing sticks of yellow-green sugarcane as their parents sold the previous night’s catch out of big insulated boxes. Rummaging in the ice, they pulled out weird species, caricatures of normal fish, and threw them into the purchasers’ arms before taking the money in crimped, blue-black hands.

Pushing through the gathering crowds outside ‘Honiara Bookshop’, which advertised itself to be ‘Nambawan bookstore long Solomon Islan’ and which sold an astonishing variety of garbage but, as far as I could see through the double doors, no books, we arrived on the doorstep of the Gas Shop. It was closed but as it was not yet half past nine, we sat on the pavement and waited. After only an hour in the dripping heat the door was unbolted from the inside. We entered in time to see the manager disappearing out through the back. Humming tunelessly, I inspected the stock whilst we waited for his return.

The shop was crammed with rice cookers, lamps, ovens and refrigerators, woks, boilers, kettles and stoves, in fact every gas appliance conceivable except, of course, fires and heaters. I noticed some small individual gas rings. I lifted one of the paper-and-string tags. They were extremely cheap and I was considering buying one for Ellen when the man came back.

“Oh, hello, I’m looking for Mr Wu.” By now asking absurd questions had become second nature.

The man looked at me with some suspicion. “Mr Wu is not here. He does not come here any more. He must stay at the farm.”

“The farm, what farm?”

“The farm down at Red Beach where he keeps the chickens.”

“Chickens, he says he’s got chickens!” I shouted at Nick, who did not look suitably impressed. “Yes, that’s the one I want. Please could you tell me how to get to Red Beach?”

“Down the coast about ten kilometres.”

“Great, thanks, bye.”

I hurried from the shop and Nick followed, the man in the shop looking curiously after us. I turned to him.

“Look Nick, do you think there is any chance…? Perhaps you’re busy? I mean if it’s too far…”

“Well, if you want to risk the roadblocks then I’m up for it.”

“Er, well…”

Some bread, a tin of corned beef and a few bottles of water were packed as provisions, although I am not sure why we bought the corned beef as we both knew it was disgusting – a sort of vibrant pink paste with gristly bits. We set off towards the roadblock at the ominously named Alligator Creek.

Wearing my bushwhacker shorts and boots, my explorer’s hat and pioneering sunglasses, I was feeling quite the part as we drove down the road that straightened out of town. Somewhere deep, very deep inside me and not in any great quantity I was discovering my spirit of adventure.

We rattled across a railway-sleeper bridge high over a mudflat riverbed. Down below, mangroves grew thickly on the banks and a trickle of water slithered its way across the ooze, Alligator Creek and the roadblock. In the event it was deserted and we rolled slowly on down the road.

Up in a pencil cedar to our left a male frigate bird puffed up to an impressive display of courtship. (Although why we were being so honoured, I was unsure.) As he stretched his gloss black wings wide his pink crop swelled, I am sorry to have to say, like a giant pair of testicles. Nick pointed out the rare Sandford’s Eagle circling in a descending spiral directly over the road. To my untrained eye, it looked distinctly like a vulture and was certainly as menacing. Gliding across the sun, it was eclipsed into shadowy silhouette. Bobbing and whirring through the trees, a white-collared woodpecker followed the course of a nimble stream that sped round the roots of aged trees.

Up on our left was a sign partly obscured by trees, ‘Red Beach, 5 km’. As we neared it, we could both clearly see that its tin surface was pockmarked with what looked like bullet holes. It could, of course, have been the woodpecker.

Passing a Japanese war memorial that stood at the side of the road, its minimalist carving surrounded by grey gravel, we crossed through some ill-tended rice fields and entered a forest of pometia trees, their shiny trunks ghostly in the shaded light.

“We must be pretty close by now. Keep your eyes peeled.”

Nick slowed down, hunching up to the steering wheel to see better through the windscreen, which had now become a smear of dust, splattered insects and the last couple of squirts of water left in the windscreen washer. A building shone whitely up ahead, an American-style homestead. A broken gate would once have opened onto a carefully laid front garden, now much overgrown. Immediately I felt there was something not quite right and then, of course, I realised what it was. The house had no roof. We pulled up and, getting out rather slowly, approached. As there was clearly not much point in knocking, we tried the front door handle. The door was locked. We followed the dwelling round and as we peered through a shattered window, we could see dark marks scorched up the walls and smell the pungent reek of smoke and damp ash.

“I think this must have been the place, the place where old Ted Birch used to live.”

A Yorkshireman with a ready sense of humour and a rough tongue, Ted Birch had brought his wife Anne out to the islands just after the war. In an old, reputedly pretty unsea-worthy wooden cargo ship The Blue Porpoise they had pottered in and around the islands of the Central Province as traders, delivering supplies to far-flung colonials, colonels and commanders and to the fledgling village stores. Ted and Anne provided the kerosene, cooking oil and soap that the villagers required and rather than return to Honiara unladen they took delivery of sacks of cocoa and copra – the dried kernel of the coconut – bound for the oil processing plants at Yandina. These sat in the hold alongside the wooden ornaments and utensils that they bought from carver communities deep in the bush. Wrapped in calico, the lustrous ebony bowls and mythical rosewood figurines inlaid with shell remained protected from the elements for the duration of the voyage. Once returned to Honiara, they sold them to departing ex-pats who would take them home as presents or mementoes ‘of our time in the Tropics’. No doubt, hidden away behind lace curtains, they still incongruously decorate the hallways and front rooms of carefully kept houses in Croydon and Crawley.

On one such trip to the Reef and Santa Cruz Islands, Anne had contracted malaria. Sick though she was there was no real cause for concern because, just a couple of days’ sail away in Honiara, treatment could be found. But then, just off Tinakula the engine stopped. Although they had plentiful supplies of food and water, it took Ted three days to isolate the problem and repair the engine whilst Anne lay feverish in a cabin above him. By the time they got underway again Anne was dangerously, deliriously ill. As The Blue Porpoise came alongside the wharf in Honiara, Anne died.

Ted, having no desire to carry on cruising without his shipmate of more than thirty years, sold the boat and came ashore, moving to a house in Red Beach. He had eventually retired and, although popular with the islanders and ex-pats alike, he became a virtual recluse. When the trouble started, most of his neighbours fled to the safety of Honiara. He refused.

“Bugger tha’.”

The inevitable happened. He returned one evening from his weekly trip to town to find a gang of young boys delighting in dismantling his house and destroying its contents. They were armed with home-made guns, spears and machetes. Incensed, the Englishman strode into his castle and without a word disarmed a surprised twelve-year-old, grabbing him by the ear. His accomplices deserted their partner in crime and disappeared off into the gloom. Still holding onto the ear, he made radio contact with the police and asked them to come as quickly as they could. When, relatively promptly, they arrived, Ted handed over the youthful prisoner but was irritated when the Sergeant made light of the confiscated weapon.

“These never go off you know,” he chortled as he roughly propped it in the corner of the room. There was promptly an ear-splitting explosion as the handmade cartridge detonated. The bullet nicked the Sergeant’s right buttock and, to add insult to injury, blew a huge hole in Ted’s prized gramophone. Ted packed his remaining possessions into the back of his truck and took off into town. The following night his house was torched.

I sniffed nervously. “Well there doesn’t seem to be anybody here much. Perhaps we ought to make a move.”

“Where to?”

I wasn’t terribly sure.

We climbed back in to the Jeep. I wasn’t feeling quite as gung-ho as I had when we set off out of town. Apart from anything else, driving along in a women’s self-help truck that had pink squiggly writing on the sides rather deflated my macho pretensions. What was more, there was a distinctly eerie atmosphere in this abandoned clearing amongst the trees that intensified as the vulture, and it definitely was a vulture, floated back into view.

Nick started up the engine and we whined backwards out of the driveway. Following the road a little further, I was about to suggest that we turned back when Nick slowed to a stop.

“Look, through there!”

I peered past him into the bush. Through a tangle of trees and vines, I could just make out the oblong of a building. A slender trail, quite overgrown but passable, led towards it. We pulled over onto the verge. Foolishly, I took up the vanguard and, with Nick close behind, I could not allow myself the luxury of second thoughts. Facing us stood a pair of large doors at one end of a warehouse. To the right was a cookhouse but no smoke rose from it. Silence. And however hard I strained my ears, I couldn’t hear any cheeping.

“Call out,” Nick suggested. “We don’t want someone taking potshots at us.”

Very true.

Uncertain what to call under such circumstances, I cleared my throat.

“Hello, any chickens for sale? We are unarmed and come in friendship.” My voice should have been much louder but the sound did not seem to want to come. I tried again.

“Hello, is there anybody there?” This was a better effort. Like Grimble, ‘my legs began to feel more stick-like than they normally were’.

We listened. Then with a slight creak one of the doors opened a crack and I suddenly found myself face to face with Nick. Turned back around, I saw a blinking Chinese face peer out.

“Wha’ you wan’?” he asked, but not aggressively.

“Mr Wu?”

“Yes.”

It was he! It was Mr Wu! I stepped out into the light.

“How you fine me?” Good question.

“Wuni sent me. He said you might have some day-old chicks that I could buy from you.”

“Ah, ma ow fren Wuni. Cumminsigh.” With that he pushed the door wider open and disappeared. Following him in, we found ourselves in a room open to the rafters. It was dark but a few shafts of dusty sunlight, like expensive spotlights, had pierced between the planks that walled the building. In one corner was a pile of copra sacks that seemed to double as a bed, and at the back of the room was a gas ring, gas bottle and a few packets of food. On the dirt floor stood a wooden table piled high with papers and office paraphernalia. Suspended just above it by a long chain that ran from a beam high up in the roof space was a pair of old-fashioned bronze scales, the lead weights divided equally on either side so that it balanced perfectly. It twisted slowly in the still air.

Mr Wu was a man of indeterminate age dressed entirely in navy blue. He wore a cotton jacket that buttoned up to the neck, calf-length trousers and a pair of slippers. His hair, neatly parted, shone and his eyes gleamed in the gloom. When he spoke it was at great speed and with an almost impenetrable accent. For the greater part I had no idea what he was saying.

“No chicken.”

This, on the other hand, was easy enough to understand, although I tried not to believe my ears. I had not risked life and limb to get here only to be told ‘No chicken’. I felt like throttling Mr Wu or bursting into tears or laughter or all three simultaneously. Perhaps sensing some threat to his personal security, he added:

“No chicken this wee. Ness wee. Egg hatch ness wee. This wee useing yoo batter. So ready ness wee.”

“Batter?” Ing you batter? What the hell was he talking about?

“Incubator,” whispered Nick.

“Oh, yes. Incubator, of course, absolutely. Ing you batter, yes, yes, good.” I hardly knew what one was.

“Cumeyeshoyoo.” He ushered us through a door.

Laid out on the floor in a room similar to the first were dozens of square boxes with clear plastic lids. Underneath each lid I could see in grids about a hundred indentations and resting in each one was an egg. Above them all hung strong lamps with aluminium shades. Mr Wu saw me looking curiously.

“Owsae, Jenny Reya.”

“He’s got a generator outside,” hissed Nick.

“I know,” I hissed back. I would have got there in the end. We both smiled at Mr Wu. Back in the front room, he sat at his desk.

“So how many yoo rike?” He fitted a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon glasses to his nose and pulled out a ledger from the pile.

“Two hundred, please.”

“Derively where?”

“Er…Munda.”

“Nine hundred fifty dollar.” He pronounced very distinctly. Almost exactly what Warren had forecast. I handed the money over in the green fifty-dollar Solomon bills that were ominously decorated with sharks and crocodiles. He counted them carefully, turning them occasionally to make sure they were all the same way round, and then with a lick of his thumb he counted them through again with practised ease. He wrote me out a receipt, signing it with a complicated signature in Chinese.

“Allive next Fliday.” In about ten days. “Morne fry.” On the first plane, perfect.

When I explained to him that I wanted to order two hundred every two weeks, he looked most pleased and explained how to pay the money into his account at the bank in Munda. When he had received the money he would despatch the chicks. He wrote an account number on the receipt and handed it to me with both hands.

“Do you sell feed as well?”

‘Honiala’ was his only suggestion. I did not mind. We had achieved enough for one day. Thanking him we made for the door. As we left I noticed a revolver hanging from a nail.

“Do you get much trouble here?”

“No tlubble. Anywa come, bang, bang!” He mimed firing off two rounds most expertly.

I ducked and we jumped back into the car, setting off in the direction of the town. The barrier still pointed heavenward and there was no sign of life at the roadblocks so we drove straight through and, with a last glance, I put bandit country behind me.

At least we had not had to eat our corned beef.