I do not reveal this lightly, and I do not present any ameliorating details, but I tried to give it up, to save myself and cast Cook away. Although we both wished to live, we had become at odds, and were causing one another to die. But Cook latched on to me, climbing me, twisting around, as though he might stand upon me and get his head above the water in that way. I was thrust deeper. I felt like I was full of my mother’s embroidery needles, which were coming out through my skin, and they were pulling a bright rainbow of silk threads from me, but every time I tried to snatch a breath of air, the needles were sucked inwards and burrowed into my lungs, and the silk became a great tangle. Perhaps I deserved it. My father had always said that we all get what we deserve, in the end. Somewhere there were unintelligible voices crying, high and shrill, like the screeching of imps, and a terrible booming, all exceedingly muffled. I felt hot, although somewhere in my rational mind I knew I was in fact cold, and with that thought I became cold indeed. Out of my chest came a wordless exclamation against death.
Then, all at once, Cook became tender and soft, and drifted gently to the surface once more, pulling me with him. I could not compel my body to swim upwards; all I could do was cling to Cook and rise into a great black shadow. We bumped against a wooden structure that went on for many miles in all directions. Cook’s face brushed my own, his eyes and mouth now loose and amused, and his fair hair shifting. He was very white in the dark below the whaleboat. My heartbeat throbbed me into a realm of a clear blue medium, where I saw refracting light making a cathedral inside my eyes, and my mother’s silk threads untangling and weaving themselves into a mathematical design, and I heard a high and humming song.
In Xanadu
The hull dragged against me and I was pulled sharply sideways and upwards, where the air whipped at my face—sweet air, most likely, presumably fresh and wholesome, and yet my lungs simply would not breathe, no matter how I willed them. My arms tightened convulsively until I was strangling Cook, but Cook’s face remained calm and happy. Extraordinary, really, to have one’s head above the water, and one’s body below. My ears were as closed as my lungs. There was a cacophony of sound occurring somewhere quite distant and separated from me by many layers of some thick matter resembling blancmange. I distinguished the characterful voice of my Cannibal, not by any particular words he was saying, but by the deep and resonant sound of it, coming from his chest and passing into my own body by means of Vibration.
Boom boom boom!—was my Cannibal’s voice in my bones.
I thought I should prefer to live in the world, for it is a known quantity, and there is no guarantee of Paradise. I had certainly not attended Church as faithfully as I ought—although Hell held little terror for me, after the torment of the voyage from England, and the dreadful inn in which I had stayed my first night in Van Diemen’s Land.
I breathed, and my lungs convulsed, and I coughed and could not breathe again but spewed water in nightmarish quantity. There was coarse stuff rubbing against the side of my face. It was my Cannibal’s hair. His arms were wrapped about me, and we were afloat, and I was holding Cook’s neck, and Cook was bobbing dead with us.
The air ripped at my throat as I breathed and breathed again, and found that I might continue breathing, and that I most likely was not Dead.
‘There now, Fox,’ said my Cannibal William O’Riordan, ‘I have you.’
I thought, with pleased surprise: He has learnt my name.
As I was hauled into the American’s whaleboat, the gunwale pressed into my gut and I spewed again, but not in so great a quantity, and it was not seawater but a sour white mucous. (That is perhaps unnecessary detail.) The American and another person had me under my arms, and they pulled me in, where I lay back across the benches, retching and wheezing. Both O’Riordans were there, sitting up, soaking wet, looking grave but calm. Pendle, too, with his head in his hands and another man’s coat over his shoulders. I closed my eyes and tried to still my body, but I could not—my teeth chattered, my hands shook and I breathed in great gasps like the tearing of Heron’s frockcoat. Water slopped beneath me. Men above me were saying things, as men do, and the boat tilted. More slime sputtered out of my lips. A great wet something was laid next to me. I opened my eyes to look at the sky, and then rolled my head to the side to meet the eyes of the corpse.
‘Mr Fox,’ said Pendle, ‘what is that in your hand?’
I found I could not speak for the chattering of my teeth.
Pendle prised my fist open. I do not know why he was so curious, but I could not have told him, even if I had been able to speak, for I had been completely unaware until that moment that I was holding anything at all. In my hand, like a little drop of sunshine, was Susannah’s portrait in its golden case. Pendle wordlessly closed my hand back around this item. ‘We’re movin’, Mr Fox,’ said he. ‘Come centre with me. They must row.’
I do not know how, but I found myself sitting looking about me and more hands took me and helped me slide into the middle of the seats, where the elder O’Riordan and Pendle were, dripping and blue, and where Cook lay, arranged with a bench running beneath his head, and his back, and his buttocks, and his knees, and his feet, that he might not sag into the empty spaces and down into the bilge where water shifted and pooled. It was jolly fortunate Cook was proportioned precisely as he was, and fit along the benches so well, and I tried to say this, but my teeth simply would not cease their chattering.
Someone settled a heavy coat around my shoulders. It went some way to the beginnings of comfort, but what I really wanted was a pair of warm arms encircling me. There was a quiet shuffling and organising of men. I came to see that Jack was seated near me, wet and grey with cold, and quaffing from the rum keg. He clamped the back of my head and pressed the keg to my lips. The rum began a slow fire in my belly, which I quietly vomited down my chest. Jack assisted me to take some more. How we destroy ourselves!
Behold the wreckage of our expedition, and the pointlessness of it.
‘Not pointless,’ said Jack, and I supposed I must have uttered that last thought aloud.
As one, the men began to heave home.
I began to think with some compunction of my mother, and worry that she was not comfortable in the attic of our house, although we had furnished it quite commodiously, and had all agreed that, had she been in her right mind, she would certainly have wished to withdraw thus from Society, and not let her distracted state be generally known. At least, Father had told us that we all agreed on the matter.
I thought of Aunt Jane, my mother’s sister, a woman who had always had the expression upon her face of someone who has just remembered some important thing she has neglected to do. Jane had visited every week—no small feat, as she dwelt most of the year in London—and asked to be allowed to see Mamma. I wondered if she yet persisted, and if Father had yet permitted this, or if he was still of the opinion that Jane would only create in Mamma an agitation, and do her ill. I saw Mamma, in that moment, quite vividly, as I had left her to come away to the colonies. She was a sober woman in a plain grey dress, her dark hair under her cap, sitting by the dormer window with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes looking at something I could not myself see, until they shifted to meet my own. Her apron was creased, which Father had taken as a clear sign of Madness—as she had always been an exceedingly orderly person—but was, I admitted to myself there in the boat, merely a sign of being denied servants beyond the Giantess Betty Sikes, or a flat iron.
She was much changed. Only such a very short time before she had been put away had she been lively, and full of intelligent talk, and ornamented, and coiffed, and dressed in the proper array of costumes for the proper times of the day.
‘Goodbye, Mamma,’ I had said.
‘Goodbye, Gabriel,’ she had said, and looked away again.
There in the rescue-boat, Jack said, ‘They must be drowned.’
‘No,’ said Pendle. ‘Only Cook.’
‘No,’ said Jack. ‘Heron and Byrne. And Woo
lley. Where are they?’
I found it difficult—impossible—to think of three more deaths. The cracking of the hull of our whaleboat was still tormenting my ears. Starboard I could see it, half-sunken, one painted eye sticking up on a jagged piece of wood. It was like—well, I do not know what it was like, for it was entirely outside my experience, and I could not liken it to anything. Unless a cracked walnut, perhaps.
A water cask bobbed upon the waves.
‘What does it signify now Heron is dead?’ asked Jack. ‘Does Mrs Heron own the lease to the station?’ Jack lowered his voice and addressed me directly. ‘It would not be preposterous if Heron had willed it for sentiment’s sake to me, you know, for the sake of my father, who founded it and sold the buildings and the lease to Heron before his death.’
Whose death—Heron’s or Jack’s father’s—I did not know.
‘I heard a man call you Montserrat,’ I said, the rum at last stilling the chattering of my teeth enough to speak coherently.
‘Yes, indeed. I am John Montserrat, son of George Montserrat, of Montserrat Station. But I do hope Heron is not dead,’ he added, and it was simple in its sincerity.
In that moment, we both became cognisant of the third whaleboat, only some short distance to larboard, but back and away where we had to turn to see it. The helmsman of that boat was a Scot whose name I did not know. He was not Mochrie, Tam’s father, who was some other person. This man stood very straight at the sweep oar, presiding over the men with a solemnity suitable to the occasion. And there they were: Heron, Byrne and Woolley, ranked down the middle of the benches between the rowers, other men’s coats on their backs. All three were certainly yet living, although sitting with their faces like the lurid masks of actors depicting unhappy Ghouls. Heron’s gaze was fixed upon some unseen object in the water, and I further contorted my body and the scales fell from my eyes to see the whale floating huge and dead. The harpoon in its side was still and steady, and the line trailed from it and dipped neatly below the surface of the sea. Beside the harpoon someone had pinned the whale with a red flag on a wooden spike, and the Creature drifted in pillows of fog like a black lump of an island claimed for the Nation of Red.
‘What is that flag?’ I asked.
‘The waif,’ said Jack.
‘No one will give me a straight answer in this place,’ I said. ‘No one will say, That Thing has This Name, and it has a particular use, and I shall briefly describe that use to you, and I hope that will fully answer your question.’
There was a pause, and then Jack said, ‘That thing is called the Waif, and its purpose is to mark the Carcase, so we might find it again later.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And what are trypots?’
‘They are like to cauldrons, and their use is for rendering the whale oil.’
‘Thank you. And—what is the matter with Mrs Heron and Balloons?’
‘She makes little Hot-Air Balloons out of paper, and sends them up,’ said Jack. ‘Tam likes to assist her. She teaches him.’ ‘Thank you.’
Despite the numbness of my skin, I could still feel the phantom shapes of Cook’s hands clutching at me.
‘Forgive my abruptness just now,’ I said. ‘I think I am rather upset.’
‘There is nothing to forgive,’ said Jack. ‘I am rather upset, too.’
The light, like the beacon that had guided me in the night, was hanging yet over the station. Below it, the station itself was a little painting in black and white, touched with yellow, as we heaved into view of it. The fog was entirely gone on shore, and on the water it had loosened its great mass, persisting only in plump little billows, here and there. Ahead I could see the white sweep of sand and the waves worrying at the grey rocks. Mrs Heron was standing with young Tam, watching us come in. She held a string attached to her little sun, which was indeed a miniature Hot-Air Balloon. Central to the tableau was the stone house curling smoke from its chimney, windows alight, curtains drawn, with the other buildings dotted about it. The wall of trees lurked behind it all, and the cliff meditated, just as much as any living thing might meditate. I did not know if I had killed Cook, nor how I would be judged.
Ashore, Mrs Heron stooped slowly and gave the string to Tam. The lad stood, gazing above him at the glowing Balloon which, I suppose, served as a kind of North Star, for it did not waver.
I AM NOT CLAIMING WE ARE PRINCES
We had drawn ashore at the station, which must have been as we left it, in substance—and yet it had changed. I cannot define the nature of the change, but it was to do with the mood of the place, or its spirit. No longer was the station a decayed hulk with my person at its centre and a gaggle of hopeless waifs radiating raggedly out like the spokes of a rusted wheel. Probably that had been some breed of Narcissism, or vain hope, thinking myself the centre of things. Now, after I had been humbled by the sea, I saw more truly. Now the men went with purpose, performing various necessities with a grave brevity, while I was catapulted out into some obscure sphere of uselessness. I moved to stand by some men who were preparing a great fire upon the beach, but I got in their way, and so I withdrew to look out at the sea. Susannah had been wearing dark watered silk the last time I had seen her, and I saw that dress now in the waves. Time grew sluggish, once more.
Jack had given me some clothes. He was a shorter man than I, and my ankles were cold, although the rest of me had warmed sufficiently.
A slender young man I had not seen before came from the slab hut to stand beside me and join me in my idleness. This person was of tidy appearance, grey-eyed and clean-shaven and with neatly cropped auburn hair. He had his hands in his pockets, and we tarried like two visitors to an Exhibition to look together out at the great black body drifting amongst the rumpled silk of the waves.
When I was a child, I was known as the Careless One amongst my family, for once in 1827 I had forgotten to close a gate behind me. In consequence, a bull escaped and was shot by a neighbour for his Menacing Ways, which embroiled my family in a feud with the neighbour’s family. Thereafter, I was not trusted to perform the simplest of tasks alone, and was given cheap dishes from which to eat, lest I somehow sweep them clumsily from the table in the ordinary course of dining. In fact, I was not at all Careless. I was a lad of ten years, and had not shut the gate because I had been stung by a bee upon my eyelid, and could scarcely see, and was rushing inside to show my mother, or anyone who might care.
I felt almost entirely convinced I had made a good effort to save Cook’s life, and had not abandoned him to his death, nor caused it through Carelessness. I made this remark to the young man beside me.
He did not respond, and in that moment a great clatter arose from the whalecraft store. I had no occupation to busy my hands, and no useful destination where I might go. We went together to the whalecraft store, which seemed to grow smaller the closer we drew, as the forest rose up around it.
In the store was a great chest of tools with a scratched brass plate marked montserrat affixed to its lid. Jack was scrabbling within.
‘Do they belong to you?’ I asked Jack.
‘The tools? No—Heron’s.’
‘Did he purchase them from your father? It is only that I see the box is marked with your name.’
Jack did not respond. He was sorting through the tools, and, reaching the bottom of the box, sorted through them once more.
‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.
‘The broadaxe.’
There was a thud against the door. ‘Open, Jack,’ someone said. ‘We are bringing him in.’
I obliged by opening the door.
Woolley and Byrne were bent under a great wet cocoon.
‘The women have stitched him in,’ said Byrne.
‘Why is he still wet?’ I asked.
‘He ain’t,’ said Byrne.
I gazed at the flowering patches of damp scalloping the shroud. ‘Why are you bringing him in here?’ I asked, just to see what contrariness I might receive in response.
&nbs
p; ‘Animals can’t get him in here,’ said Byrne.
‘The tiger-wolf?’
‘Yes, as an example. What are you looking for, Jackie? We want to put him on the chest if you will close it.’
‘The broadaxe,’ said Jack.
‘Why do you need it?’
‘Why do you think?’
‘He doesn’t need a coffin,’ said the clean-shaven young man beside me, and I realised that it was my Cannibal.
‘I did not recognise you—William,’ I told him. I did not wonder at his transformation, for I saw how he had frowned, and squared his shoulders, and reached to doff a hat he did not wear when the men had brought Cook in his shroud. It was Respect.
‘I know.’
‘Did you save me from drowning?’ I asked him.
‘I did,’ he said. ‘But I could not save Cook.’
‘Neither could I,’ I said. Never had a more useless exchange been made. There Cook was, dead and sewn into his shroud, and my Cannibal and I hardly needed to tell one another that we had failed to save him. And yet somehow it seemed it had needed to be said.
Clouds bellied the roof of the stone house. The Herons stood leaning upon one another, Mr Heron about three times his lady wife’s size, but each looking as ill as the other. An old woman lurked behind them in the doorway, a long white rope of hair over her shoulder. She was clothed in black, but wore an unexpectedly gay shawl crossed over her breast, in white and red. I saw—real as you like—the words KANGAROO STEAMER picked out in chimney-smoke above her head. I thought I could just about remember a day when I was not hungry.
Mrs Heron clasped a grey shawl over her hair and around her shoulders, and, all in all, with her little shoulders and her sorrowful face, presented an appropriately tragic figure for the men gathered before them. Well, I was also a tragic figure, with my black eye, and my empty stomach, and my fear that I had perhaps strangled Cook to death in the waves.
A Treacherous Country Page 10