This is the story of a stand of trees

Your place is over those mountains. Two days of walking – it is better, you remember, when you are climbing and descending – the thick leaves shelter you, although in the rains, the mud-soft slopes will test you. But the road is hot, rough, unforgiving. It did not reach your village before – two years, maybe – when you last came this way with your grandmother, laden with garden food to sell at the big covered market. Two days. The vehicles did not stop for you, and you reached town late, and slept outside the market on the gravel, close together.

This time, you came by vehicle. Jolting about in the back of the high police wagon. That is probably how your brother got his black eye.

Where you stay in the police station is not a room meant for sleeping, it is full of chairs like a school, and a desk. A man lies behind like a bent stick, he smells of jungle juice and his head has patches of blood. They give you Coke and cream crackers for a meal, which is good, although you would like some more crackers. They talk to you in Pisin and English and you look around for that Constable who brought you in from your place who will understand but he has taken the vehicle back there and you don’t know how long you will be and maybe it is better here at the police station because you haven’t been to town for two years and your brother has never been and you don’t really know where you are.

You tell the police officers you are twenty one.

What happened is that there was a place that belonged to your village but then the coastal people came up from town because maybe some of them had had land in that place but you don’t think it was true because maybe it had been too many years and they were not from there anymore. There were trees there. They chopped them down and built canoes, left them half-carved, adrift in the grass and climbing mustard, among the wounded stumps. The village was angry.

You and your brother have slept rough since your grandmother died. You don’t go to school. Those old ladies let you cut betelnut, and sometimes you can sell in the village, and you have wantok there but you are too old to adopt and nobody has much to share but you get by. You like it better there than town, except for that cut space, which reminds you. In the night, you and your brother took bush knives and hacked the canoes into pieces, like kindling. That is your place.

That man from your village is here, but you mostly ignore him. He told you to make compensation to those coastal people after they caught you and you sat down with the village magistrate. You are proud of your place, and proud of the way that people look at you about the village now. Nobody from your place would make that compensation. The village is proud of you. You have no money, anyway.

That man has told the police that you are seventeen, and your brother is only fifteen. You don’t think they believe him. He has brought more people with him, another, older man who asks you questions quickly in Pisin, like he will maybe punish you or else run out of breath, and a dim dim lady who made your brother embarrassed because she touched him on the shoulder.

That man is telling the dim dim lady in English about the canoes. She nods a lot and makes small noises, but he keeps on telling her, until she starts talking and putting her hands around like she will hit him. The other man, the shouting one, is friends with the dim dim lady and he is nodding and smiling.

When the police come in, the dim dim lady starts to talk to them, slowly, loud and hard, not like she talked to you and your brother, and she stands very close to them. That Sergeant is not happy. You breathe fast in your mouth, will he hit her? Doesn’t she know that police can belt you? They leave.

You eat another cream cracker and sit on the floor, aim a kick at the chairs, but quietly. If you had a bush knife you would slash at the desk, hack through that high window, cut the room the police station the town and all these people with Coca Cola and sea canoes and guns and money and they would all be pieces of firewood and you would cook the best things you can think of in a clay pot over them burning.