by Peter Carey
“How clever of him,” said Dennis Hasset sourly.
“Well,” said Miriam, “indeed it is. You cannot just nail a board on to a cast-iron frame.”
“I never thought of it,” said Dennis Hasset. This was play-acting. A weatherboard could be secured, just as glass could, on the wooden mullions.
“Spare me your wit then, Mr Vicar, and if you are so wise in these worldly things, tell me how you would fix a weatherboard to the walls of the church.”
Dennis Hasset smiled at her in a way which, in any other context, would be taken to be friendly.
“With fencing wire,” Miriam said. “Like a stockyard fence. But if you are wise in these country matters, you will know how to do it. But, then again, you will not need to. The Gleniffer Anglicans will be here tomorrow. There has been so much trouble with white ant they are pleased to have a cast-iron frame. But, Mr Hasset, you look disappointed.”
“As you know,” he said, “I had rather hoped I would at last have a church here.”
“Then we must get up a fête, and raise some money,” Miriam said. “But you cannot ask me to worship in my husband’s tomb.”
“Still, I am disappointed.”
“Your Sundays will certainly be very busy.”
“I do not complain about God’s work, but rather that the church was intended for me. But, but,” he held his hand up as if to hold off her fury, “the courts said otherwise.”
“Miss Leplastrier must have been most fond of you.”
“We were friends, yes.”
“As she was obviously fond of my husband.”
Husband? How is he husband?
“She has been in correspondence with me again. I must say I admire her frankness.”
“Oh?”
“You are not aware of our correspondence? She does not keep you informed? And yet I understood from her when we met outside the court in Sydney that you had a detailed correspondence. Indeed, she knew so much about our little town.”
“Come, Miriam, what has she said.” He held out his hand to the letter that Miriam was unfolding.
“It is not gentlemanly to pry into the private correspondence of young ladies. But I will read you little pieces. She writes: ‘I made a bet in order that I keep my beloved safe.’ I take that ill, Dennis, that she call him ‘beloved.’ I think that poor taste. What say you?”
“She was fond of him?”
“She seems fond of almost everyone. But let me read some more: ‘I beg you, please, as one woman to another, to not do this to me. I am astounded to see these words come off the tip of my own pen, but still they come. Let us not have our fears make us greedy.’ Our fears, “said Miriam, “make us greedy. Really, I can’t think what she means. ‘When I walk the streets of Sydney I realize I cannot bear to be an impoverished woman here. Please, Mrs Chadwick, if you have any Christian charity at all, you will allow me to keep some small percentage of my fortune.’ ” Miriam then folded the letter and placed it in her bag.
“So,” she said.
Dennis Hasset’s lips parted and his eyes narrowed a fraction.
“So,” he said, “and what do you reply?”
“I replied sympathetically, of course. How could I not be sympathetic, I who have spent half her life in mourning rags, as I am again. I have an intimate knowledge of the poor woman’s situation. It is I, after all, who was brought to this town through ill-fortune, was shipwrecked, and although a governess have had to suffer the indignity of a life better suited to an Irish servant. I know, better than she knows, what her situation must mean to her.”
“And Your response?”
“I worked as a servant,” Miriam repeated. “I set fires. I milked cows when I should be teaching them their Shakespeare and their Milton.”
“And you would have her do the same.”
“Dennis, you think me hard.”
“Mrs Chadwick,” he said.
“Hopkins,” she corrected.
“Mrs Hopkins,” he said, “let us not be enemies.”
“Mr Hasset, you are in such a rush to be friends you are stamping on my feet. Have 1 not said I will donate my little church to your Gleniffer Anglicans?”
“Indeed you have.”
“Why then, I am dispatching today my cheque to Miss Leplastrier. It is not a fortune, but certainly should be some assistance to her in her present needs.”
It was this cheque which occasioned the short letter from Lucinda to Miriam which was unearthed nearly half a century later amongst Miriam’s darned and fretted-over petticoats. By the time it was found, her letter was as fragile as the body of a long-dead dragon-fly. Its juice was dry. It was history. Lucinda was known for more important things than her passion for a nervous clergyman. She was famous, or famous at least amongst students of the Australian labour movement. One could look at this letter and know that its implicit pain and panic would be but a sharp jab in the long and fruitful journey of her life. One could view it as the last thing before her real life could begin. But in 1865, Lucinda could not be so disengaged and she had written with passionate down-strokes on poor quality paper which was speckled like a plover’s egg, and spotted with dark blue patches where the paper drank over-thirstily of the ink. It was a letter written by a weary woman with red eyes and scalded arms, an employee of Mr Edward Jason’s Druitt Street pickle factory.
“Dear Mrs Chadwick,” Lucinda wrote. “There is no disputing that you are a thief, but a thief, I think, made so by fear and weakness and as I too understand the terror you have felt in your soul to contemplate a woman’s life alone in New South Wales, then I forgive you.”
Miriam’s cheque, for ten guineas, was enclosed.
Lucinda wrote no return address upon her envelope, but she was certainly no longer at Longnose Point for when, in June of 1865, Wardley-Fish came out to Whitfield’s Farm in search of Odd Bod, he found the little cottage deserted and not so much as a blanket or button to provide a clue as to what passions had brought his friend to inhabit this damp and sorry place. It was a rainy, overcast day with wind driving across Snails Bay from the south. Wardley-Fish stood on the spine of rock. His beard was soaked. His eyes were narrowed against the wind and water. The only brightness on that long peninsula came from Borrodaile’s shiny red surveyor’s stakes which dotted the earth as regularly as pegs upon a cribbage board.
110
Songs about Thistles
After only one hundred and twenty years this church, the one in which my mother sang “Holy, Holy, Holy,” the one of which my father was so jealous, the one my great-grandfather assembled, shining clear, like heaven itself, on the Bellinger River, this church has been carted away. It was not of any use.
Where it stood last Christmas there is now a bare patch of earth, which is joined to the kikuyu grass by two great wheel ruts where the low-loader was temporarily bogged. There are sixteen banks of old cinema chairs which had lately served as pews for the small congregation. But there is no sign here of anything that the church meant to us: Palm Sundays, resurrections, water into wine, loaves and fishes, all those cruel and lofty ideas that Oscar, gaunt, sunburnt, his eyes rimmed with white, brought up the river in 1865.
There are thistles everywhere. They are small and flat now, like prickly sunbathers, but by the end of summer they will be three feet tall, and they will be thickest beside the short fat stumps where the church has stood. No one will slash them because this ground belongs to the church and the church is not here.
There are wheel ruts. There are thistles. By autumn their seeds will be catching in the needles of casuarinas, floating down across the shallow gravel beds of Sweet Water Creek. There are no stories to tell about thistles.
111
A Song for Oscar
When Oscar said goodbye to my great-grandmother he no longer thought that the glass church was a holy thing. He thought it a conceit, a vanity, a product of the deuce’s insinuations into the fancy-factory of his mind. He was like a drunk waking after a spree, sour and sick and
full of remorse and mixed in with all of this was the sin of fornication, his great fright to discover women have hair in “that place,” the throbbing pain of his sunburn, the lesser pain of the infected blister on his heel, his itching, bleeding arse-hole, the rope bums on his wrists and the nauseous fluttering feeling that told him he needed more laudanum.
He walked out along the ringing wooden wharf as though the water were no threat to him. The church rode on its mooring, creaking slightly as its ropes stretched against the zenith of high tide. He limped down the steps, grimacing, and entered through the cedar door which he carefully shut behind him. He walked across splintered glass and the bodies of dragon-flies and wasps. He sat on the straight-backed chair which Kumbaingiri Billy’s father’s sister had carried through the bush to give him as a farewell gift. He reached for his laudanum and, having raised it to his lips, found it empty. He dropped the bottle on the deck, and then bent his head to pray.
He begged God forgive him for the murder of the blacks which he, through his vanity, had brought about.
He begged God forgive him for the death of Mr Stratton.
He begged God forgive him for the murder of Mr Jeffris.
He begged God forgive him for the seduction of Mrs Chadwick.
He begged God forgive him for his complacency, his pride, his wilful ignorance. But even as he prayed he felt himself polluted almost beyond redemption.
He prayed as he had prayed in his Bathurst Street boarding house, digging his nails into the backs of his hands, rocking to and fro on his chair until its legs groaned, but somewhere on the inky side of dusk, as the flying foxes began to detach their pegged and ragged forms from the branches of the Moreton Bay fig trees by the Bellinger, he drifted into sleep.
Thus he never reached the final destination of his prayer which was to ask God to destroy the glass church. In the event, no heavenly intervention was necessary, for the lighters belonged to H. M. McCracken whose house stood on sinking stumps, whose wagons had wheels with broken staves. One of the lighters, the one away from the wharf, shipped water, not so much, but enough to have made H. M. McCracken tell Percy Smith to “keep an eye on ‘er.” It had been taking in just under half an inch of water for every hour and now it was over one hundred hours since anyone had thought to look at it. At ten minutes past eight on Good Friday eve, the old lighter passed the point at which it was buoyant and then, with no fuss—it sank.
The clever platform Percy Smith had built dropped on one side. Water rose into the church. There was nothing to stop it.
Oscar awoke as he hit the floor. He slipped down to the low side, furthest from the door.
He scrabbled up the sloping platform towards the door. He slashed his hands on broken glass. The twisting of the platform had jammed the door.
It was not quite dark. Flying foxes filled the sky above the river. The tilting platform became a ramp and the glass church slid beneath the water and while my great-grandfather kicked and pulled at the jammed door, the fractured panes of glass behind his back opened to let in his ancient enemy.
A great bubble of air broke the surface of the Bellinger and the flying foxes came down close upon the river. When they were close enough for his bad eyes to see, he thought they were like angels with bat wings. He saw it as a sign from God. He shook his head, panicking in the face of eternity. He held the doorknob as it came to be the ceiling of his world. The water rose. Through the bursting gloom he saw a vision of his father’s wise and smiling face, peering in at him. He could see, dimly, the outside world, the chair and benches of his father’s study. Shining fragments of aquarium glass fell like snow around him. And when the long-awaited white fingers of water tapped and lapped on Oscar’s lips, he welcomed them in as he always had, with a scream, like a small boy caught in the sheet-folds of a nightmare.
Glossary
brolga—a large silvery-grey crane found in Northern and Eastern Australia, which performs an elaborate courtship dance.
Coberra—a worm, eaten as a delicacy.
jinker—a a light vehicle, designed to carry two people.
kingsman—a large showy handkerchief in fashion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Mohawk—a colloquial term for a late Regency/early Victorian “Hooray Henry.”
the push—colloquial Australian for a gang of vicious hooligans.
shickered—drunk.
swy—a gambling game.
Peter Carey is the author of eleven novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.
www.petercareybooks.com
BOOKS BY PETER CAREY
PARROT AND OLIVER IN AMERICA
HIS ILLEGAL SELF
THEFT
WRONG ABOUT JAPAN
MY LIFE AS A FAKE
30 DAYS IN SYDNEY: A WILDLY DISTORTED ACCOUNT
TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG
JACK MAGGS
THE UNUSUAL LIFE OF TRISTAN SMITH
THE BIG BAZOOHLEY
THE TAX INSPECTOR
OSCAR AND LUCINDA
BLISS
ILLYWHACKER
THE FAT MAN IN HISTORY
ALSO BY PETER CAREY
BLISS
For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear in this darkly funny novel, death is sometimes a necessary prelude to real life. Part The Wizard of Oz, part Dante’s Inferno, and part Australian Book of the Dead, Bliss is a triumph of uninhibited storytelling from a writer of extravagant gifts.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76719-0
HIS ILLEGAL SELF
Seven-year-old Che Selkirk was raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. The son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties, Che has grown up with the hope that one day his parents will come back for him. So when a woman arrives at his front door and whisks him away to the jungles of Queensland, he is confronted with the most important questions of his life: Who is his real mother? Did he know his real father? And if all he suspects is true, what should he do? In this artful tale of a young boy’s journey, His Illegal Self lifts your spirit in the most unexpected way.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27649-0
ILLYWHACKER
In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey’s uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76790-9
JACK MAGGS
The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation. Installing himself within the household of the genteel grocer Percy Buckle, Maggs soon attracts the attention of a cross section of London society. But Maggs is obsessed with a plan of his own. And as these schemes converge, Maggs rises to the center, a dark looming figure, at once frightening, mysterious, and compelling.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76037-5
MY LIFE AS A FAKE
Fiendishly devious and addictively readable, Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian n
amed Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious piece of literature Sarah recognizes a work of real genius. But whose genius? As Sarah tries to secure the manuscript, Chubb draws her into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping, and exile—a story that couldn’t be true unless its teller were mad. My Life as a Fake is Carey at his most audacious and entertaining.
Fiction/978-1-4000-3088-0
OSCAR AND LUCINDA
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms—could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions from the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77750-2
THE TAX INSPECTOR
Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning, and a handbagful of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franchise into an empire—and himself into an angel. Out of the confrontation between the Catchprices and their unwitting nemesis, a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office, Peter Carey, creates an endlessly surprising and fearfully convincing novel.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73598-4
THEFT
Michael “Butcher” Boone is an ex-“really famous” painter, now reduced to living in a remote country house and acting as a caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh. Alone together, they’ve forged a delicate equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives.