Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (15 page)

Mister Bruce is sitting in his kitchen marshalling the
dregs of his Corn Flakes with a Bowie knife when the gun goes off. Suzie finds him there on his knees with his forehead pressed into the chequerboard lino, asking over and over, ‘How many? How many?'

A question that will be asked for years to come. How many people disappeared in what became known as the Final Annual Rabaul Fun Run? There will be wild speculations. Armageddonesque estimates concocted by Matupit bigmen with an eye for compensation. It's true some never come home. But how many take this cataclysmic opportunity to head for the hills and start a new life? How many men see a chance to desert ugly wives amid the smoke and confusion? How many unhappy wives, having stared down the jaws of mortality, run, emboldened, for their secret lovers?

No one can say the missing are pulverised and gone forever without Suzie becoming angry and swearing they're likely-as-not just pacifists who, believing Mister Bruce has declared war on them, paddled to Australia seeking asylum, or took off into the jungle for the duration. And one fine day, when they realise he hasn't commenced hostilities and has, in any case, got beyond fun runs, they will emerge, giggling, sorrowful, shame-faced, wanting to make amends for having made Mister Bruce look bad.

Mister Bruce doesn't hold by Suzie's theory. He takes responsibility for the missing. Sends men to help widows dig gardens. And won't hear a word against Expendable Buloo. ‘Buloo,' he says, ‘had aspirations. Witness his teeth. He was no scholar of cannonry, but
he was well-meaning. Nowhere near as expendable as advertised – I wish I knew what happened to him.'

Mister Bruce scratches his neck nervously at any given estimate of missing persons, saying, ‘Thirty, you reckon? Thirty's bad. Still, even the modern Olympiad had teething problems.'

Again, no word of complaint is heard from any Department, Bureau, Commission, Agency, Office or Authority. To the contrary, there is a freeing-up of funds toward Mister Bruce and the tourism board after FR2. It gets to where the government will grant him funding for any damned excitement he can brew up so long as it isn't a fun run. A five-thousand kina endowment for his Pan-Pacific Shark-Calling Championship. Another ten-thousand for his Festival of Nude Islanders. A four-thousand kina disbursement for his Celebration of the Liberators, with which he tries to lure US veterans back to Rabaul to spray Matupit youths dressed as Jap soldiers with automatic gunfire as they helter-skelter through coconut groves shouting of Hirohito's deathless glory in pidgin Japanese. All of these are essentially bribes to keep him from fetching his bullhorn out of his shed and announcing FR3.

Every day he battles the mountain with new schemes. Every day the mountain erases Rabaul's future and Mister Bruce redraws it again. If the ash won't stop, then neither will he.

The ash is still falling. But one day, perhaps, when every one except pharaohs and fools has given up hope, Tavurvur will sleep. Then vines will snake across the earth, trees will grow, birds will return carrying their sweet song. Traffic will begin again, a joyful opera of hornblast and fistwave will play on the streets. The city will rise and Americans will come to dive among the splendors of the fish, the reefs and wrecks. Amid the bougainvillea and mango and birdsong, with Redskin and Green Bay fans waddling through markets in running shoes as expensive as Toyotas and swooping on newly hewn artifacts, no one will speak about the time of ash and the things that were done back then.

In this new age of safety and ease, when Rabaul is again the Pearl of the Pacific, long-absent friends will descend like aliens from the mountains, smile sheepishly, embrace their families, and stain each other's blouses with happy tears. Buloo himself might sidle from the deep bush and stand before his people waiting to be judged, hoping to be loved.

S
he was a rare jewel and Owen was itching to get his hands on her. Everyone who knew him knew he would have her. But on the day the people of Sydney heard he had paid two hundred pounds for her they could not look each other in the eye. They stared down at the ground and poked at nothings in the dust with their shoes and sighed and mentioned the weather and the bushfires and wool prices, and packed tobacco viciously into their pipes and drew hard on them. Because they knew what would be done to her by Owen. They knew an innocent was to be defiled. They knew it would come to this…

This now. With her shaven and gagged and strapped to a table while Owen, whispering instructions to his
manservant, enters her. And learned gentlemen in dark suits lean down from viewing balconies nodding in fascination, murmuring, ‘Remarkable,' ‘Extraordinary,' ‘Bravo, Owen.' As Owen narrates his own assault in his thin voice…

‘I am now dissecting the neurocranium suture for access to the frontal lobe. You will notice, gentlemen, her struggles will diminish dramatically once I have broached it.' Owen labours with saw and hatchet. ‘The skull … is … inordinately thick. And the frontal lobe is … is, oh yes, most decidedly … as I had thought and predicted, elongated like that of the orang and most dissimilar to that belonging to Archbishop Polding, I would hazard.' He holds up something resembling wet blubber as peals of laughter ring about the oak panelling of the operating theatre.

Owen bends to his work again; his hands holding scalpel and forceps are out of sight inside the great skull of the gorilla for minutes, and when they emerge they hover twitching with triumph and glory above the now dead beast. ‘Gentlemen,' his thin voice is even higher than usual with excitement. ‘You first fellows of this colony, this … Sydney … you shall be thankful I finally caught up with this sinister ape here of all places on the globe.' He gazes up into the viewing balconies to meet his admirers. ‘I have been after the gorilla, as you know. And perhaps, knowing my reputation, you knew I would have it, too. But be happy I caught it here, in your young town. Because it is here in this happy colony I have the great and important duty to
pronounce the gorilla has no hippocampus minor …'

Owen waits for this to resonate with his audience and seeing that it doesn't he goes on. ‘Gentlemen of Sydney, possessing no hippocampus minor the gorilla's brain cannot be related to that of Man and the wicked fantasy “Evolution” is smashed like a dodo egg. The evolutionists, with their rank notion the ape is our cousin, are wrong.' Owen bows his head and these first citizens of Sydney cheer and clap at this happy news. ‘Hear, hear, Owen.' ‘Hear, hear.' ‘Hallelujah.' ‘Praise be to God.' ‘Amen.'

But there is one, a young man, his views on himself marked by ostentatious sideburns and a claret waistcoat, who is not near as impressed by Owen as is the rest of this learned, darkly dressed audience. He has sat becoming more and more agitated as the operation has proceeded, and has for some while been pulling at his waistcoat buttons and pouting scornfully down upon the surgery. On hearing Owen's announcement of the missing hippocampus minor he can stand it no longer. He rises to his feet and shouts with the voice of an English gentleman, ‘I wonder what a chimpanzee might say gazing upon your brain, Owen. If he mistake it for a pig's gonad, Sir, and pronounce, “
Oh … here is a boar's left one
,” then his anatomical knowledge might be judged equal to your own.'

Amid a wild censure (and some stifled laughter) and much apologising to the visiting English professor by his Sydney hosts, this young man is thrown bodily from the operating theatre into the dust of Pitt Street and his
buttocks are footed a dozen times with the pointed Spanish riding boots that are in vogue with the gentry. He is told he is a debauchee for mentioning a pig's privates in public and a fool for doubting Owen. Furthermore told that a fool should keep silent for his own good. And he does. For the next twenty years.

But right now he picks himself up, and rubbing his poor stomach and his dizzy head and his boot-buggered buttocks he staggers down to The Rocks, gazing all about him in wonder as he goes. For after the hovels of New Zealand, Sydney is a grand vision. Her wide streets are a helter skelter of gigs, landaus, and phaetons driven by liveried servants. After South America, unspeakably uncivilised, this place is all fine horseflesh and grand architecture and the young Englishman tells himself that ancient Rome in all her imperial grandeur would not be ashamed of such a colony, and he thinks it high among the wonders of the world and puts its magnificence down to the force of the parent country. Because here scores of years have wrought what many centuries have failed to achieve in South America. He congratulates himself he is an Englishman, and curses the fact Owen is one as well.

A very famous one. Richard Owen is the scientific man of the hour. A tall striking figure with glittering eyes. The Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Owen stands triumphant as England's reigning anatomist, dissecting whatever dies at the London Zoo to an audience worthy of Hamlet. He has graced this far-flung colony to collect
marsupials for his scalpel, and to conduct a series of lectures on The Immutability of Man. What a stroke of good fortune that he ran into a gorilla here. For, though he would have liked to destroy Evolution before a congregation of dukes, earls, lords and professors in Lincoln's Inn Fields, the gorilla is rare and had to be taken when chance presented.

The young gentleman with the sideburns and claret waistcoat stumbles into the King's Head Hotel. The bar is dark, unlit, bare boards both floor and walls. On one wall is posted a bill, black ink on yellow canvas, stating:

 

Wombell's Travelling Menagerie

Presents

Nusuzu … The Beast

A … Gorilla

The Salacious Black-Skinned Ape
Of Africa

A Truly Barbarous Spectacle Sydney Cove Flat, Friday through Monday Entrance 1 penny. (Strictly No Ladies nor Women nor children nor dogs Admitted)

The young Englishman wonders about the stated barbarity of the spectacle. What sort of goading and hostility must they have subjected this poor animal to in order that she become even remotely barbarous? For he recognises the gorilla as female, and knows her as a herbivore and peaceable.

But it is 1836 and ‘gorilla' has suddenly become a household word. There is a flood of interest in the new black-skinned ape. Scandalous stories and macabre tales of ferocity and woman-snatching are travelling the colony.

To glimpse any ape in captivity is a thrill. And the East India Company has seized on the public's fascination and arrived at the Sydney Cove docks with baby chimps and orangs that have been snapped up by zoos. But never a gorilla. No one had ever seen one. Until a year ago. When Wombell's Travelling Menagerie, which paid top prices at dockside, managed to purchase a young female. And named it Nusuzu.

Wombell's menagerie has travelled hundreds of miles over this last year. At its head has marched a smallish brass band of drunkards honking tubas and trumpets scavenged from a Napoleonic battlefield, and behind them three bullocks strung about with bells and hung about with long-haired rugs in order that old, potbellied Wombell (topped with a rug himself) could pass them off as yaks.

Wombell had a close knowledge of suckers, but knew almost nothing of animals. Looking at Nusuzu he supposed her a slavering carnivore and attempted to
feed her any and all of his other attractions that expired en route, and cursed her and poked her through the bars with a pointed stick for cantankerously fasting and pig-headedly wasting away when she was his star attraction. He took her for a finicky diva and sautéed numbats for her. It was only when his Siberian timber wolf died and was tossed into Nusuzu's cage as an irresistible morsel and she began to pick grass seeds from its coat and nibble hungrily at them that Wombell supposed such a devilish-looking beast might possibly be an eater of plants. He began to feed her eucalyptus then, and though she didn't appear to enjoy it, she ate it and gained condition and began to break a pleasant antiseptic, almost medicinal, wind. Until science, in the form of Owen, came calling with its promissory note written out under the guarantee of the London Zoological Gardens.

‘I will take a rum,' the young Englishman tells the barman. ‘And you may take that bill down, Sir. The beast will not be appearing. The show cannot go on. She is dissected. Misrepresented. Her hippocampus minor denied.'

‘Ahh, then,' the barman says. ‘Does Wombell have a lion? Only, I was going to go and see that show. But if his hippo has died and his gorilla is dissected, then, I would need a lion. A bull lion with a ruff. Not a bald-necked bitch lion.'

It is not until the young gentleman in the waistcoat with the side-levers has had eleven rums and is safely drunk enough to be thrown out that he tells the barman, ‘You are gorilla yourself, Sir. And ignorant enough to take offence at the suggestion, I warrant.' The barman is
ignorant enough to take offence at the suggestion and the young Englishman is thrown out. In the dusk he staggers down among the harbour warehouses to the docks where he weaves up the gangway to his ship the HMS
Beagle
, and her smiling sailors turn away out of deference for their naturalist while he ricochets his way through his many boxed and labelled specimens to his hammock and fights his way aboard the treacherous thing, cursing it as an evil-minded beast with no hippocampus minor.

Owen's evening did not go so well. No eleven rums followed by a pendulous slumber for him. The great man is high in triumph, his heart beating loud in his ears, a thrill of achievement coursing through his body. His hands are slick with Nusuzu's cerebral sap and he is holding them aloft taking congratulation. Beneath him the dead gorilla. He has just proven that Man stands alone in nature, in a special sub-class. Glorious, glorious news. For if this gorilla lying dead upon the table were a relation to man then man's dignity is undone, his special place in the firmament dashed, and his status as God's chosen life form disproven. What would follow from this? Depravity. Total immorality as God's law lay in ruin. This might seem too much threat to take from one exiled ape exuding eucalyptus airs, but it is a threat civilised society has felt keenly of late. These last years, evolutionists have made free with much ungodly balderdash.

But now, the gorilla, Owen is ecstatic to announce to the waiting world, has … no … hippocampus … minor …

As the crowd calls his glory and thanks him for saving the Lord and His law and civilisation as it exists, a young bounder in a burgundy vest jumps up and compares Owen's own brain to a porker's left nut. Ye gods! The blood pounds in Owen's temples. Someone bludgeon this young heretic with a wooden cross or a metal table leg.

As the fool is ejected Owen slowly lowers his glistening hands. The pounding in his ears and throbbing in his temples is a curious loud thing. Ohh … Ohh … Owen drops down dead beside the table. The colony's surgical notables rush to his aid and in this emergency they lie him on the table beside Nusuzu, much as married deceased might lie side-by-side in eternity. They work at his heart and they massage his vital points. But it is no use. The Great Owen is gone. He has performed a crucial task for God, and God has called him home for his reward. Indeed. Perhaps.