To the Highlands

By Jon Doust

Fremantle Press

Copyright © 2012 Jon Doust
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-921888-77-9
CHAPTER 1

PART ONE

1

The man on me moves.

I lie still.

He moves again. Maybe he’s embarrassed to be murdering a sobbing, bleeding, blubbering man who has no power, no strength, no will, no future. He rolls off me. I squeeze my eyes. Lungs suck great chunks of air. I hear him stand and walk away. I don’t know where to but I hope it’s far, so far I can’t see him when I get up off this floor because then I might stumble down the stairs to the kitchen, take one of the houseboy’s long knives, walk up the stairs to his room, open his door, find him lying on his bed exhausted from the attempted murdering and stick him – stick the knife into his musclebound body more than once, maybe as many times as the murder I heard about on Radio Australia last week when one man stabbed another to death because of a sweet potato deal gone sour.

I turn my head to the floor. The crying spreads. I am emptying, pouring out, everything is leaving me. I know that if I cry long enough and hard enough there will be nothing left but a wet patch of tears mixed with blood, and when he comes out of his room to check on me, or someone climbs the stairs, all they will see is a small pool of what was once me.

2

When I stepped off the plane in the capital, I stepped into a stinking, rotting, decaying, forever composting wet heat, and right into the care of two seasoned bank johnnies who drove me direct to a tropical pub full of cane furniture. They didn’t take me to the bank to meet the manager, the assistant manager, the accountant, or up the hill to meet the district commissioner. They said all that could wait.

First things first, said Tony, who was leaving at the end of the week for Sydney and his old job at head office. For us expatriates, the islands are all about drinking and fucking. One is easy to come by and the other depends on your preferences.

I smiled, sat back in the big cane chair and looked around me. Tony and the other bloke, whose name I didn’t get and I don’t think I ever saw him again, were wearing the standard white shirt, white shorts and long white socks. A great start, straight to the pub, no looking around for cops hunting underage drinkers, or adults who might know how old I was and tell me I was too young to drink. When it was my buy I didn’t even have to walk up to the bar because a solid black man in a skirt walked up to our table and asked if we wanted more drinks. I said yes and he went away to get them.

I might get used to this, I said.

You’ve only got two years, Jack, said Tony, and if you get used to it, by then it’s time to leave. As for me, it’s been fun but I can’t wait to get home and see a bit more white flesh.

Most people in the lounge bar were white. All the waiters were black. As I looked around I noticed I was the only one looking around. Then I saw her, the mixed race woman. Tony looked at me.

Yes, he said, she’s stunning, but not for you, or any of us.

Why not?

Not because of her colour, mate, because she’s taken, by some bloody shipping millionaire.

She was magnificent, all the way down from her face, through her neck, shoulders, arms, breasts, stomach, thighs and legs and in that way she moved, sat and placed one leg so carefully over its equal and opposite. I almost died there and then but couldn’t because she became a dream and I decided I wouldn’t wake up until she, or someone just like her, was lying beside me with a perfect leg draped over one of mine.

The other bloke said, Trouble, Jack, you’re looking at trouble.

How would y