Miss Benson's Beetle Read online

  “Enid,” said Margery. “Is it necessary to travel so fast?”

  “I’m just excited about getting there.” Enid slurped an oyster out of its shell. She didn’t even use a fork. “At least we should be safe now.”

  “Safe from what?”

  Enid failed to answer. She took a mouthful of omelette.

  “And you’re sure?” Margery said. “About what I’m wearing? You don’t think people are staring?”

  “You’re on the other side of the world. Who cares what people think? You can be what you want. Anyway, you look better in Bermuda shorts than you did in that frock. No offense, Marge—”

  “None taken, Enid.”

  “—but you looked like a beached whale in that thing.”

  “I see. Well, thank you.”

  “I caught the way the women laughed at you at the British consul’s party.”

  “They laughed? When did they laugh?”

  “It made me sick. I had to walk away.”

  Margery paused a moment. All of a sudden, the awful picture that the schoolgirls had drawn turned up in her mind—the way things do sometimes, things that you’re sure you’ve left in the past. She remembered hobbling like a hedgehog through corridors, unable to breathe. Then she looked at her arms, easy now inside a man’s shirt. The memory of that day still hurt. And the idea of the British consulate women laughing—that hurt, too. But Enid was not laughing. She was tearing off chunks of bread and feeding Mr. Rawlings under the table. So the pain Margery felt was small, like a bruise that has turned yellow. It was bearable.

  “And just so you know,” said Enid, “you have very good legs. You ought to get them out more often. You’re the one who should have got the trophy.”

  The road from Boulouparis worsened considerably. There was no change in the landscape: the mountains stretched to their right with the sea to their left, though between the road and the sea there was now an extremely vertiginous drop. The road kept climbing, twisty as a corkscrew, mist clinging to the lower slopes of the mountain, and suddenly they were looking down on thin spires of colonial pines, splashes of red poinciana, groves of coconut palms, the decorated roof of a thatched building, while the Pacific waited, blue as an iris flower, to their left.

  They passed several large trucks—presumably there was a mine nearby: men hooted and waved at Enid to pull over—but then the land turned to a bald expanse of scrub where the forest had been cut down and burned to make way for plantations. It came as a shock, after so many trees, and the smell was awful. Enid glanced in her mirror. Her eyes grew wide.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Not at all, Marge.”

  Not true. Margery checked over her shoulder. A police car had emerged behind them. The landscape was still very open and flat. But instead of slowing, like any normal driver, Enid stamped on the accelerator. Margery’s heart dropped toward her bowels.

  “Enid? That is a police car. We have to slow down.”

  Apparently not. Slowing down appeared to be the exact opposite of what Enid had in mind. Her face was set like a clamp. Her hair blew wild. The police car flashed its blue light. Enid went faster. The jeep rattled, bouncing over potholes. The police car followed, bouncing over potholes. Enid took a bend on three wheels. The police car sounded its siren and also took the bend. Enid zoomed faster. So did the police car. A tree appeared. More rocks. Several goats. Enid screeched the tires, only just missing obstacles as she flew past them.

  “Enid! Enid!”

  Margery couldn’t take any more. Enid seemed to have lost her mind. Even though she had never driven a car in her life, Margery grabbed hold of the wheel and yanked it. They went swerving violently toward a precipice. The ocean flashed directly below, dotted with ships and fishing boats. Enid screamed and managed to swing the jeep back to the road just in time. It came to a skidding halt in another cloud of dust. “What the hell?” she shouted. “You almost killed us.” There was no time to say anything else. The dust was clearing. The police car had drawn up. A policeman was getting out. Even the insects fell silent.

  The policeman was as slow as a walking house. It took an age for him to reach the jeep. He knocked on Enid’s window. An unnecessary preliminary since, of course, the jeep had no roof. She wound it down a few inches. Also, unnecessary. Politely he leaned over the window.

  “Bon shoor!” said Enid. She gave a huge smile and revealed a pair of dimples Margery had honestly never seen before.

  The policeman replied in French.

  “What did he just say?” said Margery.

  “I have no idea. Keep smiling.”

  Momentarily the policeman wiggled his finger in his ear and then examined whatever he had found there. At least he seemed distracted.

  But Margery was not distracted. She felt made of wire. She whispered, “Paperwork.”

  “What about it?”

  “Enid. We don’t have any.”

  “Marge, could you possibly look less terrified, and just smile?”

  The policeman had now finished his ear inspection and was ready to give Enid his full attention. “Bon shoor,” she repeated, incredibly sweet.

  He said something French again.

  Margery fumbled through her handbag. She pulled out her guidebook and flipped to the Reverend Horace Blake’s Useful Phrases. They included “Can you direct me, boy, to the nearest lighthouse?” Also, “Help, help, I am drowning!” and “I am going to the next village to sell my grandmother’s hens!” She abandoned the Reverend Horace Blake and produced her passport. She began to explain in very clear English that Enid was the brown-haired woman in the photograph, but the policeman was not remotely interested. He patted the hood of the jeep as if it were an extension of Enid. He said, “Voiture?”

  Margery slunk down in her seat. “It’s because of my clothes,” she said hopelessly. “He has stopped us because I am dressed like a man.”

  “Marge, this has nothing to do with the way you look. It’s because we have no license plate.”

  “Why do we have no license plate?”

  “Because I took it off. When I stole the jeep.”

  “You stole the jeep?”

  “Marge, please stop shrieking. Yes, the jeep is stolen. You think I’d pay for this?”

  Margery’s heart had lifted from her bowels and was now banging wildly in her throat. Quite a lot appeared to be going on. Not only had she been stopped by the police—when she had no paperwork, no extension to her visa, and was dressed like a man—but she had also just discovered she was traveling in a stolen vehicle. “Cash,” hissed Enid, still smiling sweetly. “Try giving him cash.”

  “Are you suggesting I bribe a member of the French police force?”

  “Yes, Marge. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. You were the one who caused the jeep to stop. I could have shaken him off if it hadn’t been for you.” She went back to smiling at the policeman. She adjusted her top as a form of distraction. It worked. His eyes rooted in her cleavage and flowered there.

  Margery pulled out her purse and found loose change. Her hands were shaking. She held out the coins, in the midpoint between Enid’s bust and the policeman. It felt like offering cake to a vulture.

  “Are you serious?” said Enid. “We are bribing him, not giving him his bus fare home.” She grabbed the purse.

  It took ten notes. He counted each one solemnly and, for some reason, also licked it. Satisfied at last, he beckoned them out while Enid reversed, the way men do sometimes, as if a woman cannot successfully maneuver a vehicle unless someone gesticulates wildly, while at the same time standing in the exact space she needs to get into. But he could gesticulate as much as he liked. They were free.

  “Well, that went smoothly,” said Enid. “Next stop, Poum.”

  * * *

  —

  She was right, of course.
They were safe. But it took several minutes for Margery to regain the power of speech, and even then, her words came in a rush and in the wrong order. She told Enid this was too much: there must be no more stealing, and no more bribery. “I am an amateur beetle collector, Enid. I am out of my depth.” In turn, Enid said she was awfully sorry, she wouldn’t do it again, but at least they would soon be free to start looking for the gold beetle. She gripped the wheel tightly as they took another bend. “You said you’d do anything, remember? You told me you’d risk everything to find what you want.”

  This was true, though it was beginning to occur to Margery that her notion of everything was not Enid’s. When she’d decided to stop playing by the book, she hadn’t meant to lead the life of a criminal.

  “Anyway,” continued Enid, “we can hide the jeep. Once we get north, there will be no need for it. Now, why don’t you start looking for your mountain?”

  Margery kept her eyes fixed on the horizon—the mountains rose like waves as far as she could see, many bladed, but there was still no sign of one shaped as a wisdom tooth, blunt or sharp or otherwise. As the sun sank, the entire range gave one last bright flare of gold and then the sky went the color of a blackberry and night happened so fast it was like someone had switched off the light. The jeep’s headlamps poked through the dark. Above, the dome of the sky was crowded with stars, occasionally fractured with faraway splinters of lightning. Enid slowed. Even in the dark, Margery could sense her excitement, and though she could not see the mountains, she felt their presence all around, sloping and peaking and falling, more ancient than life itself.

  “Look at that. Just look, Marge. Did you ever see anywhere so beautiful?”

  * * *

  —

  It was nine before they reached Poum. “Delightful Poum,” wrote the Reverend Horace Blake, “where the native huts stand on stilts and the Kanak people spear tropical fish and dance merrily by the fire.”

  Margery was beginning to wonder if he had actually been to New Caledonia. Poum wasn’t even a town, it was so small. It was just a few ramshackle sheds, some old men, and a lot of goats. Since the café where they were to collect the key for the bungalow was closed, they had to sleep in the jeep, covered with a net and interrupted only by mosquitoes, the sound of the ocean, and the odd murmur of drunken laughter.

  At dawn, they washed in rust-colored water from a tap in the square while a silent group of old men—both Kanak and lonely Europeans—gathered round to watch. Afterward Enid led the way to the only shop, which had a total of two shelves, selling eggs, corn and guavas, yams, coconuts, small sweet pineapples, and green bananas, alongside bags of salt, hardware, batteries, and some old tins with a picture of a fish on them. Margery bought fruit.

  Since the café was still closed, they walked to the water’s edge where the Pacific met the Coral Sea, and the waves were the biggest they’d seen yet, hitting rocks and sending up towers of spume. Ahead, islands of diminishing size poked out of the ocean, like broken-off fragments floating toward the horizon. It really was the end of the world.

  Enid climbed onto a wooden jetty, hopping between the missing slats while the breeze tossed her hair. Britain seemed another life. And it wasn’t just home that was as far away as it could be. Neither of us, Margery thought, is the woman we were when we met.

  Enid must have been thinking something similar because, as she jumped down from the jetty, she laughed.

  Then they turned their backs on the ocean and faced the mountain. It looked so close suddenly, rising to the highest point where nothing grew—there was just red stone—and topped—exactly as the missionary had described it—like a blunt wisdom tooth. Enid reached out as if she could touch it.

  “You’re going to find the beetle,” she said. “And I’m going to have a baby. I know it in my heart.”

  They set off to collect the key for the bungalow.

  Every day, he was closer to New Caledonia. And this time he didn’t hide. He sat at the front of the cargo ship where he could see the horizon, his big hands overlapping his knees. He hardened himself so that each muscle in his body was rigid and strained. He spoke to no one. He sat in silence, waiting.

  Mundic had his Panama hat and sunglasses and wrote in his notebook about the weather, what he ate, and the things he saw, like the fish. Sometimes he watched other people, just so he could collect their names and put them in his Book of Miss Benson. He heard their voices and the splintering of the waves against the ship’s sides, and sometimes he got the oily whiff from the engine room or a rancid smell of half-dry coconuts, but he let it wash over him as if it was all part of the same thing. There was a berth below but the men were Dutch, in the sandalwood trade, so Mundic stayed on deck, and at night he coiled himself under a bench and slept there.

  One of the crew came out every morning to read a letter. He would take it out of his pocket, read it, and wipe his eyes. Then he would fold it carefully and put it back in his jacket.

  Watching him, Mundic remembered the faces of the lads in the camp when a Red Cross parcel got through and they read their letters from home. They’d talk about a sweetheart, or a wife, or their kiddies. Mundic had been glad he had no letters. Everything about Britain had seemed off the point when you spent your nights in a hut, not even with a proper roof on it, rats running over your head and men crowded all round you, like cattle, and dying.

  And sometimes one of the deckhands would sit and play his harmonica and that would get Mundic remembering the camps, too. In his mind, he’d see the blokes who had tried to keep themselves educated. Playing music and reading books, like they were clever. But it didn’t matter how clever you were if a Jap was beating you with a stick.

  And then Mundic would get so lost in remembering, the old thing would happen again, and he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell if he was on a boat or if he was back at the camp and dreaming about a boat. He couldn’t tell if the men laughing were Japs or the Dutchmen in the sandalwood trade. And he’d have to knock his head and take out his passport and say to himself, “I am a free man. I am a free man,” before the flame blew up inside him and he lashed out.

  Now he sat very still on the boat, waiting for the memories to pass. He didn’t write them down. He wrote only the facts. He put that the sea was blue and he could see a white bird. He would be okay, so long as he stayed in the present.

  In order to find a new beetle, Professor Smith had told her once, you needed three things. The first was knowledge. You needed all the knowledge you could get your hands on. Second, you needed to be where you thought the beetle was. Last, you needed courage.

  Staring at the bungalow, Margery felt every drop of it evaporate.

  “Oh, Enid,” she said.

  “Fuckadoodledoo,” said Enid.

  The clue was in the name: the Last Place wasn’t just the last bungalow on the track. It was the last place in the world anyone would want to live. They had collected the key from the café in Poum—the owner was possibly the biggest man Margery had ever met, and also the hairiest. He had clasped Enid and Margery in his arms as if they were long-lost daughters and roared something in pidgin French that had made no sense to either of them but turned out to be an insistence that they must eat. He’d brought them a giant plate of cooked prawns and lobster, then pointed the way. After that they had followed a dirt track past a shantytown where a gang of small boys raced alongside the jeep, dressed in scraps, waving madly, shouting madly, and holding up a selection of domestic animals—mainly flapping ones—that they appeared to want to sell. After another few miles, the track had petered out completely, and there was nothing but the bungalow. It was surrounded by thick, high elephant grass and kauri trees as tall as towers. The two-pronged mountain loomed just behind.

  Enid cut the engine. No sound other than a million trillion insects.

  This was no bungalow, or at least not the lovely British kind. It was a wooden hut st
anding on stilts six feet off the ground, with broken steps that led to a broken wraparound veranda. The roof was a mishmash of tiles, tarp, and banana leaves, while the door was held in place with a broken padlock; the key in Margery’s handbag was a red herring.

  Enid leaped out of the jeep and went ahead, clinging to the rail with one hand and holding Mr. Rawlings with the other. Margery trudged behind.

  Inside, the bungalow was in better structural condition, though it was piled with rubbish and the smell was foul. From the veranda, they entered a long room with a cupboard-sized room next to it, and behind that they found three smaller rooms that opened off a narrow passage, each with a moldy bed and a window. The running water was mainly what it said: gaps in the roof that let in rain, and some wonky pipes; the bathroom facilities were a lavatory attached to another pipe that went straight to a hole in the garden.

  “I’ve seen worse,” said Enid. “Yes. I’ve seen worse.”

  “When, Enid? When have you seen worse?”

  “During the war, Marge. I saw a lot worse. At least it’s nice and private. At least it’s out of the way.”

  “Out of the way? Even hermits would avoid this. Nothing’s lived here for years.”

  Untrue. Clearly a lot of things had lived there. It was just that none of them were human. Margery tripped over a tin can, and a flood of cockroaches came out. Dead insects were collected everywhere in powdery piles, and paper curled off the walls, half chewed. A thick web filled an entire corner, loaded with flies, like a serial-killer spider’s pantry. There was even the bottom half of a bird.

  “It doesn’t matter, Marge. We’re not living here. We’ll be up the mountain in our tent.”

  “But this is our base camp. It’s where we store our collection. It’s where we come every week to clean up and refresh supplies.”

  In time, Margery would love this place, just as she would love the view as she sat on the veranda with Enid after another week of hard toil. Sunsets like a sky of geraniums. A mosaic of light and shadow on the trees. The sky snowing butterflies. She’d make Enid some eggs and fetch a bucket of water for Enid’s feet, and they’d sit together watching the sky turn purple. Later, as threads of cloud laced the moon, Enid would shout, “Look, Marge! That’s a beetle-shaped one! Make a wish!”