Port Vila Blues

Thirty-nine

He edged down the terraced garden slope, dodging fleshy spurs, exposed root cages and stiff vine tendrils. The island’s generator continued to throb through the night, the only calm point in a place of alarmed cries and running feet and jerking torch beams. Once or twice he froze; but there were security guards and paths and lighted areas to get around, so he moved again, showing himself this time.

Shouting, running, waving his arms to confound the searchers and witnesses: ‘The shots came from that room… I saw someone over here… Careful, he’s armed… He ran up the hill…’

The row of cabins at the water’s edge sat on stilts. When he was clear of the confusion above him, Wyatt took shelter under the cabin closest to the ferry mooring, his feet ankle deep in seawater. The ferry wasn’t there. He could see it across the harbour, waiting at the little wharf on the mainland. It wouldn’t be in a hurry to return to the island. The traffic this late at night was all oneway, guests returning from the mainland casinos.

Wyatt considered his options. He didn’t want to swim. His shoes would protect him from the spines of stonefish as he waded into the water but the island was ringed with coral and the guidebooks warned against sea snakes, cone shells and sea urchins. He imagined the coral tearing open his skin, his blood attracting sharks; he imagined the numbing pain as venom shut down his nervous system. These were fears he could only live with in the daylight, when he could see what was coming.

There were plenty of small boats on the island. Half a dozen aluminium dinghies powered by outboard motors were moored to the jetty. A paddleboat and snorkel hire concession operated from a shack at the edge of the only stretch of sand on the island, just beyond the jetty.

Wyatt slipped out of the sheltering cabin and ran half-crouched toward the jetty. Then he stopped, flattening himself on the mossy wetness of the stone shelf that led into the water. Figures were loping along the jetty. Wyatt watched as they peered into each dinghy. A moment later they were gone, leaving two men to continue the search of the hire boats. Finally a security guard growled a few orders, climbed into one of the dinghies and sped away across the black harbour, trailing phosphorescence and a high, small-motor whine.

Wyatt crouched ready to run again but was warned off a second time. Somebody had called the police. Three launches were approaching the island from the mainland, going fast, searchlights poking at the dead water.

Wyatt allowed himself half a minute’s grace, mentally mapping the harbour and the high ground opposite, where the costly white houses sat on green lawns that stretched to private moorings on the water. There was a light burning above De Lisle’s mooring.

Just then a searchlight swept erratically along the shoreline, highlighting cabins and mangroves. Wyatt ducked. People were gathering on the jetty, shouting, encouraging the police launches.

Wyatt’s options were shrinking. The ferry was out of the question; so were the bulbous orange paddleboats the tourists played about in. He couldn’t head inland, into finger-pointing chaos. That left only the rocky shoreline at the uninhabited corner of the island. He slipped under the first cabin again, then down the row away from the jetty. The world beyond the final cabin was dark, treacherous, and that’s where he let himself be swallowed up by the night.

Away from the jetty and garden lights his eyes began to adjust to the gloom. He came upon cliffs first, limestone scored and fissured and sharp enough to tear open his hands and shoes. Then the cliffs dropped away and he was wading knee-deep in water and finally picking a path along a metre-wide band of coarse, corally sand. Mosquitoes swarmed around his head, and in the darkness and the urgency of his slapping hands he didn’t see the object that spilled him onto his face.

He was out for a few seconds, all the breath driven from his body. When he could move again he climbed free of the trap and explored his ribs, hoping he hadn’t cracked them. It hurt to breathe and his head swam dizzily.

He sat on the sand for a while, breathing shallowly, concentrating, reducing the pain to a size he could shape and channel. It wasn’t a mangrove root that had caught his shins, and he hadn’t pitched onto a sharp-edged log-it was something unchanged in centuries that had trapped him and it was also his salvation.

Wyatt got to his feet. The outrigger section had been fashioned from a sturdy branch about two metres long, pointed at both ends and shaped to slice through the water. It was separated from the body of the canoe itself by two bamboo poles about three metres long. The canoeist sat in a hacked-out tree trunk. Even in the darkness Wyatt could see that both the outrigged float and the main body had been daubed in bright paint. The only concession to the twentieth century was the binding: nylon rope instead of vines or raffia fibre.

Wyatt turned the canoe over. The paddle was underneath, fashioned from a machined board that had probably washed up after a storm. He tried to imagine the man or woman who owned the canoe: someone who had nowhere else to store it, someone who fished the dark side of the island, away from the eyes of the Europeans who still ran the little republic.

He hauled the canoe over the sand to the sea’s edge, tugging it by the axe-fashioned bow. It was heavy, and sat low in the water. He waded out until he was waist deep, the water cold and sobering, erasing the clutter from his mind. For the next couple of minutes he eyed the narrow stretch of water between the island and the mainland. The police launches were concentrating their search around the international yachts and the two ferry stops. Wyatt had no need or intention of straying there. Where he wanted to cross, the harbour was black, impenetrable. If he set out now, he wouldn’t be spotted.

He climbed in, began to paddle. His bruised ribs shot pain that made his eyes water, but the little outrigger was like an arrow, skimming him across the calm surface, past the wrecked steamer, between the rusty buoys, toward De Lisle on the other side.