The Persimmon Tree by Bryce Courtenay Page A

soaked in iodine and a bandage from the first aid kit. I also treated the cuts on his feet and legs with a solution of iodine, and fortunately they appeared fairly superficial.
    ‘I’m hungry, sir,’ the new, clean, white and very battered-looking version of Kevin cried in a plaintive voice.
    I cooked him a bowl of rice and tinned fish and watched him eat it ravenously.
    ‘I think you should lie down, mate, you look pretty whacked.’ He’d copped a bit of sun, although it could have been worse — the cloud cover had increased as the morning wore on and it was now completely overcast, moreover the greasy oil would have effectively protected his fair skin. I gave him a couple of Aspro. Anna had given me three bottles, the only medicine I had in the medical kit except for Epsom salts and iodine. She’d insisted I take all three bottles even though I protested that I hadn’t had a headache in two years. I recall how she’d laughed, ‘ Mijn papa, he buys always a big box, twenty-four bottles, for the morning his head and ja , also at night.’ It wasn’t hard to see that the little bloke was completely done in. Still in the nuddy, I took him down below where I made him climb into the double bunk in the forward cabin. Despite the noonday heat, in a couple of minutes he was dead to the world.
    I changed into a spare pair of shorts and climbed up the mast to fix the faulty blocks, greasing them and making a few small adjustments. Then I set about the task of washing his clobber as well as my own, his several times in an attempt to get rid of the oil. But each time they dried they remained stiff as a board. Fourth time around, while badly discoloured, I reckoned they could be worn. I rinsed the blood and sand off the headless bloke’s boots and set them out to dry. They’d be miles too big for the little bloke but along with the wallets and scraps of paper would be further evidence of the atrocity if ever we made landfall in Australia. I gathered up all the wallets and paper and dried them on deck, only giving them a cursory examination. They confirmed that their murdered owners were Australians off HMAS Perth . I would read them more carefully at a later time, I decided.
    My final task was to create a waterproof wallet out of a small square cut from the hem of my stormweather oilskin. Into it I put the triangular envelope containing my precious butterfly, then placed the wallet within the infusion jar and screwed the lid back on. If we sank it would float to eventually turn up on some golden beach fringed with coconut palms where a beautiful young woman, very reminiscent of Anna, would find it and treasure it forever. My imagination was working overtime, no doubt triggered earlier by my evocation of the little bloke turning into soup, simmering away in a huge three-legged cannibal pot. It occurred to me that had we been marooned on some remote beach in New Guinea instead of Java, the threat I’d used on Kevin would not have been an idle one, cannibalism being still practised among some of the more remote tribes.
    Around five o’clock, with the clouds now low and dark with moisture and the air almost overbearingly humid, I gathered everything from the deck and stowed it below. The little bloke lay bathed in a lather of sweat and I had some trouble waking him. Eventually I got him to sit up and made him drink. In all he must have consumed half a gallon of water since the morning and had yet to take a piss. I gave him two more Aspro tablets and he collapsed wearily back into the bunk and in moments he was out to it again.
    I removed my shorts to prevent them from getting wet in the threatening tropical storm and returned to the deck, where I rigged a canvas sheet fashioned into a trough to catch drinking water. Moments later the deluge arrived and I sat with my back against the mast, my face raised to the sky, where I let it all come at me, the hard pellets of rain pelting into my face and skin in a vain physical attempt