As they waded ashore, Prabir looked down into the warm, clear water where he’d swum with Madhusree, then across the dazzling white beach where they’d played. He wasn’t just cheating her out of a role in the study of the butterflies, he was depriving her of the chance to demystify the island, to purge it of its horrors the way he was doing for himself.
But he could never have brought her back here. He could never have undone the one good thing.
Grant wanted to collect specimens of the butterfly’s other stages, so they spent the morning doing nothing but searching appropriately succulent leaves for the spiked larvae, and the branches of the same trees for pupae. The original versions would not have been hard to spot: both had been covered in bright-orange patches, warning colours to signal their toxicity. Grant found signs of leaf damage that looked promising, but there were no culprits nearby. If the larvae had switched strategy and opted for camouflage that was as efficient as the adults’, their movements would be far too subtle for the image-processing software to detect.
They stopped and ate lunch in the middle of the forest, in a rare spot where the ground was rocky enough to keep the shrubs at bay. Prabir still didn’t feel safe sitting down until he’d sprayed a cordon of insect repellent on the ground; the ants were never content to stay inside the orchids, waiting for easy prey. He wasn’t sure why they didn’t swarm up the trees and take nestlings; maybe they were lacking some crucial adaptation for the task, or maybe it just wasn’t worth the energy.
Grant said, ‘So your whole family was here for three years, from 2010? Was your sister born on the island?’
He laughed. ‘We weren’t quite that isolated. We went to Ambon on the ferry four times a year. And we flew down to Darwin for the birth.’
‘Still, it must have been a rough place to raise a young child.’ Grant added hastily, ‘I’m not criticising your parents. I’m just impressed that they could cope.’
Prabir shrugged. ‘I suppose I took that for granted. I mean, the people in small villages on the other islands had better access to transport, clinics they could get to, and so on. But we had a satellite link, which made it easy to forget the distance. I even had lessons from a school in Calcutta; they’d set up a net service for kids in remote villages, but I could join in just as easily.’
‘So at least you had some friends your own age through the net.’
‘Yeah.’ Prabir shifted his position on the rock, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘What about you? What were your school days like?’
‘Mine? Very ordinary.’ Grant fell silent for a while, then she took out her camera and began scanning the branches around them.
She said, ‘The butterflies spend a lot of their time quite high in the canopy. Maybe they lay their eggs there.’ She lowered the camera and asked casually, ‘What are you like at climbing trees?’
‘Seriously out of practice.’
‘It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.’
Prabir gave her a stony look. ‘You’re the field biologist, remember? I’m the desk zombie. And I don’t care how ancient you are: you’re twice as fit as I am.’
‘You put that so gallantly.’
Prabir said flatly, ‘I’m not doing it! The deal we made in Ambon—’
Grant nodded effusively. ‘OK, OK! I only asked because I’m not used to judging the strength of the branches of these species. I thought you might be more confident, since you must have climbed them as a kid. I’ll go back to the boat and get a rope—’
‘A rope?You’re not serious?’
‘I had a bad experience in Ecuador,’ she admitted. ‘I broke a lot of bones. So I’m ultra-careful now.’
Prabir’s resentment faded. There was a principle at stake, but he didn’t want to be petty and sadistic. ‘I’ll do it, but you have to pay me. Ten dollars a tree.’
Grant considered this. ‘Make it twenty. I’ll feel better.’
‘With a conscience like that, who needs labour laws?’
Grant selected a nutmeg tree. Prabir took off his boots and rolled up his trouser legs. He hesitated, unsure how to begin. The lowest branch of this tree was just above his head; he must have been able to scale a sheer trunk once, gripping the bark with his arms and legs—he’d even climbed coconut palms—but he felt certain he’d make a fool of himself if he tried that now.
He grabbed the branch and raised himself up, then hooked his feet around it and hung sloth-like for a while before figuring out how to right himself. It was a clumsy start, but once he was standing squarely on the branch, with a firm grip on the next one up, he was elated. The scent of the bark, the feel of it against his soles, was utterly familiar; even the view straight across into the other trees was far closer to anything he remembered than the view from the ground. He glanced down at Grant, not wanting to lose perspective, not wanting to be drawn back too strongly.
She shaded her eyes and looked up at him. ‘Be careful!’
He took a few steps along the branch, feeling it flex, trying to recalibrate his old instincts for his adult weight. He called down, ‘I promise you, I have no intention of breaking my neck for a caterpillar.’
He scoured the clusters of leaves hanging around him for signs of larval feeding, but there was nothing. He climbed higher. Fruit pigeons fled as he approached, a rush of air and a blur of motion. There were foul-smelling beetles on the trunk, but they scurried away from the repellent. There’d been pythons in the trees once, but even the lowest branches wouldn’t have taken the weight of anything remotely like the one he’d met in the mangrove swamp; as long as he didn’t panic and fall to his death, he probably had nothing to fear from its tree-dwelling cousins. Assuming they hadn’t acquired venom.
Twenty metres up, Prabir found something hanging from a slender branch. At first glance he’d mistaken it for a nutmeg fruit, but then a hint of unexpected structure had made him look again. When he was close enough to examine it properly, he found a butterfly, wings folded, suspended from the branch. It had to be a pupa, but it looked more like a tiny sleeping bat than an insect about to emerge from metamorphosis—and it still looked more like a nutmeg fruit than anything else. He touched it warily; it even felt like a nutmeg fruit.
He took out his notepad and recorded some vision, to document the attachment method before he broke the pupa free. The silk girdle around the bulk of the insect was virtually undetectable, the colour matched so well; the short length anchoring it to the branch looked exactly like a stalk. He sent the images down to Grant, and spoke to her through the notepad; it was easier than shouting.
‘What do you make of that? Pretty good camouflage, at the risk of being eaten by mistake.’
‘Maybe they smell bad to the fruit pigeons,’ Grant suggested.
‘Why not just—oh, forget it.’ Whatever anything did, why not do it differently?It was frozen history, not rational design. He broke the pupa free, and dropped it in his backpack. ‘I’ll go up one more level, just to see if there are any larvae.’
‘Are you sure it’ll take your weight?’
The next branch above him was barely chest high now. He wrapped his arms around it and lifted his feet off the one below. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’
He clambered up. He had a firm hold and a secure footing, but he could feel the top of the tree swaying, and the branches around him had thinned enough to make him feel exposed. Looking sideways through the forest at this level, the distant branches appeared uncannily like the struts for some elaborate geodesic folly. Maybe the Stetsoned entrepreneurs who’d followed the expedition down from Ambon could anchor a perspex roof to all this scaffolding, and turn the whole island into an exhibition centre.
He looked down and saw the ruins of the kampung.
A wave of vertigo swept over him, but he kept his grip on the branch beside him. The centre of the kampung had been reclaimed by the forest, but the trees couldn’t quite obscure the roofs of the huts: the matt-grey photovoltaic surface was still visible through a thin layer of creepers. The buildings had all become badly skewed, but none of them appeared to have collapsed completely. The six huts had been arranged in a regular hexagon, and in their current state he couldn’t tell them apart; with the path from the beach erased there were no cues to enable him to orient the view.