Paris Savages

Hilda lit her lantern and walked along the deck to the midship hatch but found it locked. She looked to her father, who was still in conversation with the Dutchman, their faces tilted up at the moon, smoke from their pipes clouding the night air.

‘Papa?’ she called as she pulled on the hatch cover again. Someone began to strike it from the other side.

‘No!’ He frowned and turned to the Dutchman, who shook his head, saying he would go to find the bosun. ‘He will have the key.’

‘The captain insisted,’ the bosun explained as he undid the lock and lifted the hatch.

Hilda immediately smelled vomit and rushed to Dorondera, who was slumped on the stairs.

‘Are you alright?’ Hilda asked in Badtjala, embracing her friend and holding Dorondera’s face in her hands. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were shut inside. I promise.’ She reached behind her and tapped her father’s leg. ‘We didn’t know. It won’t happen again.’ She kissed Dorondera’s cheek.

Hilda held her lantern high to illuminate the hold, where none of the lanterns had been left burning, and saw Jurano walking towards her through the darkness like a ghost.

‘Who did this?’ he shouted.

‘It was wrong,’ Hilda told him in Badtjala. ‘A mistake. Where is Bonny?’

‘In his bed,’ Dorondera said. ‘His headache is worse.’

Bonny was asleep. Hilda felt his feverish forehead and leaned closer, sensing his warm breath on her face. She breathed it in, following each slow exhalation and observing the flicker of his eyelids. What was he dreaming of?

‘Hilda,’ her father said, taking the lantern from her outstretched arm. ‘Come away now.’

But she leaned even closer, her head against Bonny’s chest to try to hear his heart beating. Only when Bonny’s breathing suddenly quickened did she pull away. Bonny was awake, staring at her as if she were a stranger.

Hilda remembered the bread she had wrapped in her shawl.

‘Here,’ she said, handing Bonny a piece. He refused it. ‘For you too, Dorondera.’ Hilda proffered the food, which Dorondera held but did not eat as she turned and went to her own small bunk.

‘We could not get out,’ Bonny said, his expression hard.

‘The Kapitän …’ she began. What could she say? There was no excuse. ‘Bonny …’

She could hear the Dutchman angrily recounting to her father what he had witnessed in the Molluccas – kidnapped Aborigines diving for pearls. ‘I’d never seen such sorry people, men with sunburnt lips and bloodshot eyes,’ he said. ‘Many died.’

Bonny looked away. Hilda remembered his smiling eyes following her when she walked about the camp or swam in the shallows of K’gari.

‘Please stay here with him, Papa. Assure him things will be better from now. It has not been a good start. Dorondera and I will go upstairs to our cabin.’

‘Where are you taking me?’ Dorondera asked.

‘To a more comfortable bed. Is that what you want?’ ‘I will look.’

‘Hans, will you …?’ Louis asked.

‘I will accompany them, yes.’

Hilda was immediately conscious of the relative luxury of the saloon: the absence of vats containing whale oil and the nauseating scent they gave off, the presence of the dining table, the cloth-covered bunks, the fireplace. Dorondera smiled when she saw the canary and ran her hand along the tablecloth.

The captain stepped into the dining room from his cabin and made no attempt to hide his shock at seeing Dorondera. He regarded Hans before addressing Hilda.

‘Fräulein … Where is your father?’

Hilda’s heart was racing. She despised the captain for locking her friends downstairs and did not trust what she might say.

‘Dorondera will sleep here with me, if you have no objection. I understand women normally –’

‘I do object –’

‘They objected to being locked below decks,’ Hans stated plainly. ‘You gave that order?’

‘Of course.’

‘My father didn’t know?’ Hilda asked.

‘No. Why should he? I am in command of this ship.’

‘It is inhumane. You should not do it again,’ Hans said, raising his hand in farewell to Hilda and Dorondera and leaving the captain standing by the saloon table.

Hilda pointed Dorondera towards their cabin.

‘Better, isn’t it?’ Hilda asked in Badtjala.

‘Yes.’

‘You can wash your face if you want.’ She pointed at the washstand nailed to the ship’s wall in their cabin.

Dorondera walked to the stand, bowed her head and scooped water into her cupped hands. She dipped her face into the bowl she’d created. When the water had drained from her fingers she ran her hands through her wavy hair. At the end of the dark strands, the tips were a pale yellow-brown. Drips of water ran down her back and onto the white dress.

‘Here.’ Hilda handed her a small towel.

Dorondera dried her face and tugged at the back of the dress, then at the sides.

‘Is it too …?’ Hilda could not remember the Badtjala word for ‘tight’. She cinched her hands around her own waist. ‘Small?’

Dorondera nodded.

Hilda opened her suitcase and looked at the three dresses she had brought for herself. The first was plain blue; the second, dark green and embroidered by her mother with the shapes of red eucalypt blossums; and the third, red, Christel’s own and Hilda’s father’s favourite. In amongst them she had laid the nautilus her father had found. Dorondera smiled when she saw the shell.

‘That is what Europe will be like.’ Hilda pointed to the curved inside of the shell, speaking in a mix of Badtjala and German. ‘Trains pull into giant stations made of glass and steel carrying hundreds of people very quickly, wherever they want to go.’ She shot her finger inside the shell and then extended it out.

Hilda handed her friend the red dress.

‘I can’t take it,’ Dorondera said.

‘Please. You can’t stay in that one and you have nothing else. Take it as an apology. You should never have been shut inside. If I had known …’

Dorondera held the dress against herself. Hilda remembered her father offering the dress to her after Christel died, but seemingly not wanting to let it go. He had tried to be cheerful and made three waltz steps so that the skirts had swayed and, for a moment, it was as if he had brought his wife back to life.

‘Do you think, in these clothes, people will treat me better? Like a lady?’ Dorondera asked.

‘You are already a lady. People will see that, yes.’

Hilda lay dozing beside Dorondera, who had fallen quickly asleep, her hand twitching in Hilda’s. A gentle melody drifted through the deck and, for a moment, Hilda thought she must be dreaming. It sounded like Bonny singing. She opened her eyes and listened again, then, sure there was music, she climbed the saloon companionway. Bonny was indeed singing, his voice low and beautiful, although less energetic than normal. As Hilda’s eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw that Bonny was seated, bare-chested, leaning against the deckhouse. Jurano and Hans were with him.

Hilda watched as several crew left their beds in the deckhouse to stand along the rails and listen.

25 February 1882 (evening)

When a woman marries on K’gari, she is presented to her husband with her hair set in tufts of beeswax and decorated with cockatoo feathers. I am recording that small fact now, before I forget such things …

Tonight, after Bonny had finished singing, Papa came to the cabin to check on Dorondera and me. In the lantern light, he saw Dorondera lying on her bunk in the red dress that was once my mother’s. Papa was rendered momentarily speechless. I watched his chin lift and his nostrils flare as they do when he is overcome. In a flash of memory, I saw a vision of my parents walking arm in arm along the beach nearest the camp, collecting shells. They stopped and held each other and, with the seagulls and waves as their music, began to merrily waltz before resuming their promenade. My mother was wearing the red dress and lifted it at one side to keep it from getting wet. Her feet were bare underneath. As I followed, the dress stood out against the white sand and the blue sky like a figure in a painting. Papa must have had the same thought, for he stopped and arranged himself on a piece of driftwood and, taking his portable watercolour kit from his jacket pocket, began to paint my mother. He asked her to sit on the small rise above the beach and weave a basket in the way she had been taught by Mary, incorporating variously coloured strands of grass so that they might tell a story.

A few weeks after that day, my mother grew ill. I don’t know where that painting is now. I had a mind to ask Papa, as he stood here tonight, looking at Dorondera, but I didn’t have the heart. I whispered to him that the other dress was too small.

He nodded but did not speak. Before he left, he kissed his hand, reached up to my bunk, and placed his fingers on my cheek.