The Confessions

Starting today, I am sharing excerpts from a novel that I wrote.

It is actually based on an international prizewinning script that I wrote back in 2016.

It is based on a fictitious sorcery-related attack in Papua New Guinea.

I have included a note and introduction as well before presenting Scene 1.

Note to readers:

1. This is a work of fiction.

2. Instead of listing parts of the book as chapters, the author has decided to use scenes to separate one part from another. In doing that, he tried to keep the novelized form of the story as close as possible to the original script of the play.

Introduction

The Confessions was originally written by me as a radio drama script and entered in the 2016 BBC World Service/British Council International Radio Playwriting Competition.

Among more than 1,000 scripts that were submitted, The Confessions made the shortlisted category, a first for a Papua New Guinean script. Even though it missed out on the first top three prizes, it was named as a regional winner (The Pacific).

Incidentally, it was my first full-length play of any kind.

This publication is a novelized form of the radio drama script.

(February 3, 2021)

Characters

PORO – a young widow, a mother

JOSHUA – Poro’s baby

IMELDA – Poro’s aunt

REBECCA (BEKA) – Imelda’s 10-year-old daughter

LOUIS – Imelda’s 17-year-old son

CATHY – Imelda’s cousin

MARK – Cathy’s 16-year-old son

LEANNE – Cathy’s 9-year-old daughter

LISA – Cathy’s 14-year-old daughter

BOB – the church pastor

KARE – the son of a wealthy man in the village

LUKE – a villager, a friend of Kare’s

GILU – a villager, a friend of Kare’s

MUNU - a villager, a friend of Kare’s

ROBERT - a villager, a friend of Kare’s, an aggressive man

RACHEL – Kare’s second wife

LOKA – Rachel’s baby

MAKO – a village sorcerer

KATA – Robert’s cousin, a cohort of his

MATO – Robert’s cousin, a cohort of his

WOMAN 1 – a villager

WOMAN 2 – a villager

SERGEANT – a police sergeant

OFFICER – a police officer

POPO REKA - the village ward councilor

Prologue

IN the week following 8 February, 2013, and days afterwards, a particular news story caught the attention of the world.

It was reported that a twenty-year-old young mother in Papua New Guinea was burned alive after being accused of killing a six-year-old boy with sorcery. She was dragged from her house, stripped naked and tortured with hot iron rods. Then she was taken to a local rubbish dump, doused in petrol, bound and thrown into a fire of burning tyres. That happened in ‘a village in PNG’.

That in itself was a tragic thing, something that is unusual even in PNG. However, the more tragic thing was she was burned to death in full view of the public. There was a report saying that pictures were taken of her while she was set on fire.

In PNG, sorcery-related killing continues despite the work of the police in preventing such, as in people killing others on the mere suspicion that those were responsible for the deaths of other villagers. It is likely that for every sorcery-related killing that occurs once in every two months, there may be a few others that have occurred in very remote areas of the country where there are no police officers and the presence of the government is non-existent.

Scene 1. The girls race. Morning

THE cousins raced down the track to the river, where the creek beside their village joined with it. They had towels wrapped around their hands. The first one, the more athletic, a nine-year-old bony girl and faster of the pair, called to the second, a ten-year-old.

‘Come one Leanne, hurry up. Why are you dragging on?’

‘Wait for me, Beka!’ the older one said.

‘No, you catch me!’ Rebecca said and continued racing down the gentle slope towards the river. ‘Ah, catch me!’

Leanne tried catching up, running around a tree and the path, moving to the left and then a little to the right before she ran down the last few metres towards the bank of the river. Her cousin was already there, raising both hands to the sky and looking back at her. It was champion’s pose.

‘Ah, you’re still slow!’ Rebecca called, smiling.

‘Yes, I know, champion. By the way you are going, you will win all your races this year?’

‘Possibly sister, possibly,’ the smaller girl said.

‘That is what – the 100m, 200m and 400m events, like last year?’

‘Possibly the 800m and long jump too,’ Rebecca said.

‘You’re really thinking of doing that?’ Leanne said, now standing on the riverbank and looking down.

‘Yes, I have thought about that,’ Rebecca said, her hands toying with the towel before wrapping it around her waist.

Leanne looked at her cousin and then noticed something behind her, to the left of where Rebecca was standing. It was as if someone was drifting head-up along the shallower part of the bank beside the bushy canes near a sand bar.

‘Sister, look! What is that?’ she asked Rebecca.

‘What?’ Rebecca said and lowered her hands.

‘There to your right, near those canes!’

Rebecca looked and she saw it. ‘It must be some clothes left by someone!’

‘It looks like a person!’ Leanne said and jogged down the slope towards her cousin and moved towards the thing, walking a bit downstream.

She picked up an old branch on the heap of rubble on the sand bar that Rebecca was standing on. She walked over the pebbles and sand cautiously to the heap.

‘It looks like a person,’ Rebecca said, now moving a bit behind her cousin.

Leanne poked the heap and the heap moved a bit under the water. She stood and watched. Half minute later, the thing bounced back up from the water and a white ghostly face of a person appeared.

‘Ahhhh!’ Rebecca screamed from behind, turned back and ran up the bank of the river. ‘It is a corpse! It is a corpse!’

Leanne also threw down the stick and ran up behind Rebecca, screaming: ‘It is a dead body! It is a body!’

As the two girls retraced their steps back towards Renatufo, the village, running around the trees and up the slope, the partly rotting face of a woman showed among the heap of clothes. There were deep sharp cuts across the face of the woman, cuts that were possibly made with the sharp point of a machete.

Twenty minutes later, the bank was filled with people standing and watching a few men who stood near the corpse of an old woman. A rope was tied to the leg of the corpse and one end of it was wound around a tree on the bank just where the track led down to the water.

Two hours later, a group of policemen and two officers from the forensic unit and two hospital staff turned up at the scene and carefully placed the body into a body bag before placing the heap gently on a stretcher. They also found another body, that of an old man, thirty meters downstream. His left forearm was missing. His face also had deep cuts, possibly made by a big sharp knife.

A sergeant spoke with Renatufo villagers who were beside the river and then walked up with two of his officers to the village and went further upstream to other villages. They were armed with M16s.

An hour later, the three officers returned and the sergeant spoke with the other professionals at the river. At midday, the whole group left with the corpses. Four village men helped carry the two stretchers with the body bags to the highway, taking about an hour to do so. An hour and a half later, the corpses were signed into the mortuary at the general hospital in Goroka.

One year later

‘Be firm with your foot on the ground! Keep it steady! Now strike me!’

The partner struck with his long wooden stick at him. The boy blocked it.

Both of them were dressed in sports shorts and T-shirts. They were sweaty from the morning practice session.

‘That was not hard! Do it again!’ the boy said. ‘And try to put everything into your hit. ‘Think about focusing all your energy into that hit. As yet, I am not feeling much force from you!’

His practicing partner struck again, now with more force.

‘That’s it! Try again!’ the boy said.

The partner tried again.

The strike was forceful enough to get the boy a bit off balance, and he moved back.

‘That’s it! That is better! Whew! That was one hard one!’ the boy said to his pal.

The partner smiled.

‘What if a person is with a machete? Can we defend ourselves with such a weapon?’ the partner asked.

‘Sure. But the goal would be to get the machete off him with a minimum number of hits. Like, in your first three strikes, you must hit him so hard somewhere to get him to lose the knife. You can strike his upper arm or even go for a strong, good knock on the face. You have the advantage with this stick because you have a longer reach. The machete cannot reach far as you can.’

‘That sounds good.’

‘Next time when we meet, I will use a stick which is as long as a machete to attack you and you should try to knock it off me – or give a knock on me to get me to lose the machete and then you can attack me with the stick.’

‘That sounds good!’