The Smallest Voices

“…Yeah, I’ve heard there are places in New Ireland where children aren’t allowed to go after dark…?”

Mark leans back – curious, polite. He and Suzie are old friends, and she has flags in the corners of her face for him: a smile, a twitch, a purse, an eyebrow, not quite a wink. Suzie has been telling us about island sorcery – the love spells that will set you barefoot, night-wandering, mad – the women who cast their spirits out to wander with stolen forms and strange faces – who wake tired – and people who are willed to death. But: “It won’t work if you don’t believe it…” (don’t worry white kids). She directs an amused glance at me, my body language inverted – I am leaning towards her, eyes wide, frightened – certainly half-believing, at least for this moment in the dim light of the balcony, folded as we are in the blackness of the Bismarck Sea.

“Yes – and when they come back, they cry, cry, and they lose weight…”

They waste away. Their spirits are detached from them, and they must be called back. Pat tells us that in her husband’s place, in Central Province, children can’t be carried in bilums after dusk – they might be snatched from their parents’ backs. Strange things happen after dark, Suzie and Pat agree. And you know something is wrong when a child won’t stop crying.

My return to Alotau is on a little plane again, cramped and sweaty after a marionette sprint across the tarmac. I have two scotch fingers, apple juice in one of those airline plastic cups that remind me of doctors’ samples, and a blocked nose which makes me feel as if my eardrums are bursting. Around me, the smaller passengers seem to be suffering the same misapprehension – there is a chorus of screaming that keeps up throughout the hour-long flight, which gives me ample time to reflect on how silent, for the most part, Papua New Guinean children can be.

Don’t get me wrong, there is boisterous noise – as I write, I can hear the scattered register of small voices, swooping, screeching. Every day at 3pm, kids cluster behind the probation office and pelt rocks at the fruit trees that overhang the fence, by the river – clunk, clunk, on the flat tin roof until Karen affects a gruff bass and bellows “HEY!” from behind our faded curtains. It is part of my job to visit schools, and attempt to demystify this country’s juvenile justice framework while seven-year-old potential felons (and let’s not forget, in PNG the age of criminal responsibility is still seven years old) wriggle and giggle like a hat full of caterpillars. I believe I can say with some authority that there are plenty of happy sounds to be heard from the children of PNG – it’s the sounds of distress that are missing. Children don’t cry.

Even when they are four years old and they have cut their fingers deeply on the small knife that their grandmother was using to pierce coconuts for the white lady and the other strangers at the centre of the family’s orbiting attention. What they do then is they take a grubby piece of fabric and they wrap it round their little injured hand and hover quietly at the edges of conversation until somebody notices, answering in a fuzzy whisper:

“… hurt …”
“… knife …”

At the school, the teachers had a hundred questions – not about juvenile justice, or the responses I have rehearsed with the kids (“Who do we ask for?” “SEEBEESEE!”) – but about child protection, and the new Lukautim Pikinini Act. Could we tell the children about child abuse? What are their rights? They brought us anecdotes – neglect, bruises. Babies having babies and fingers pointing at fathers.

There are so many ways that it hurts to be a child in PNG. They are brutally enumerated in the literature I trawl through in empty hours at work. And now I am shivering again, in the heavy air, in my big bright room full of dappled sunlight. Who knows what dark things it would take to make these tiny stoics cry and cry and cry.