Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

by Richard Flanagan

  There was if not a certain progress in my art over the next year, then at least a slow alteration, & what began as bricolage ended as a style. At the Repent & Drink I painted a mural of flowers in the Potteries manner to recompense that publican, Augusto Traverso, for the supposed passing of a false note. The flowers entwined with some of the patrons, looking admittedly more like a pastoral tribute to the Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety—so many elegant, reasoned floralled Marats & Robespierres—than an accurate rendering of dishevelled, unreasonable Hobart Town drunks. Still the old lags—bless their rancid souls—were flattered enough to be happy.

  Undoubtedly the high point of my short Hobart Town career was my dramatick canvas for the Iron Duke depicting the depravity of circus life after that good publican’s woman ran off with the Great Valerio, a Sicilian high-rope walker & seller of aphrodisiac powders. I did a terrifying mural of a soft naked woman being dragged into a Hell of flaming acrobats & tumblers by a rather nasty looking bald eagle, beneath which was inscribed the motto: Ex Australis semper aliquid novi (There’s always something new out of Australia).

  ‘The only taproom in Hobart without a Gould on the wall,’ remarked the sly-grog shop owner Mr Capois Death, upon seeing this much celebrated marvel, ‘is the one with Gould in the gutter.’

  He slapped me heartily on the back &, for once being square with me, offered to pay should I do a special job for him. It only took a morning’s painting to knock up the sign on a square Huon pine board. It showed an exasperated white woman (model: Mrs Arthur, wife of the Governor of the island colony, Lieutenant George Arthur) scrubbing as hard as she could a black baby in a wooden tub who smiles back at her, below which sat the logo of the establishment this advertised—the Labour In Vain, such sign celebrating Mr Capois Death’s establishment near the Old Wharf going legal.

  Along with the knowledge that I was, after all, only acting on his instructions, I these days console myself with the thought that Mr Capois Death was, one way or another, always destined for disaster. His reputation was as a flash man, gained from his passion for molly-boys, his stable of fast women & slow horses, & a similarly unreliable taste made alcohol in his notorious Larrikin Soup, a violently strong purl-ale flavoured with wormwood, a poor man’s absinthe. Then, though, destiny seemed as fresh & promising as the summer sea breeze into which the sign was hoisted & hung flapping above a delighted Mr Capois Death.

  It was, if you will allow me the compliment, a grand thing that pub sign, gently rocking back & forth, so light & laughing it brought a smile to the face of one & all who passed beneath it in Barracouta Row. They would have laughed all the more over their pots of purl-ale if they had seen the future it truly signposted, rather than the Larrikin Soup we foolishly thought it advertised. It is hard to believe the power such a painting had, that its effect on me & Capois Death was to prove as decisive as if it were not a sign board but Madame Guillotine herself hovering over our heads. But before it destroyed us the Labour In Vain was going to bring us together.

  We of course saw none of this. Capois Death was himself a man of colour, a maroon from Liverpool, & he found the picture amusing & instructive. He said that I had caught the spirit of the island precisely. I was allowed back into his taproom with a clean slate.

  The following day Mr Capois Death was closed down on Governor Arthur’s direct orders, on the grounds of promoting subversion. Our splendid sign was burnt & Mr Capois Death & myself were sentenced to fourteen days on the treadwheel, he for the inadvertent poisoning of a ship’s surgeon, me for absconding without notice from Palmer the coachbuilder.

  That would have been if not tolerable then at least survivable, if it hadn’t been for the unexpected return of Captain Pinchbeck to Hobart Town. He was now working as a whaling skipper, in the hope, it was said, of one day accidentally harpooning his French rival, but his desire for vengeance was, as I was to discover, even larger than the leviathans he pursued through the southern oceans. In the course of a night’s carousing he had cause to visit several local establishments, including the Iron Duke & the Repent & Drink, from whose paintings he deduced that I was pursuing a vendetta through a series of cleverly coded paintings depicting his cuckolding & slow strangulation by Gallic adulterers. This was my second lesson in colonial art: you discover the true nature of your subject at the same time as you discover your audience, but it is an added disappointment.

  By chance Captain Pinchbeck had dinner with the Governor & his still aggrieved wife the evening following our arraignment for the Labour In Vain clapboard. That much I know—what was said through long candles & over the wombat consommé can only be guessed at.

  The following morning I was informed that an order signed by Governor Arthur himself had just arrived, in which it was commanded that myself & Mr Death, whose complicity seemed to lie only in his folly of keeping company with me on the treadwheel, were to be transported to Sarah Island for seven years, he upon several new charges of sedition, me—an escapee who had been at large for twenty years—for having conspired to pervert the course of justice through the use of a false name.

  Various mentions were made of mutinous & rebellious behaviour, desecration of national flag, etc, etc, at the time of the colony’s founding by a person whose name I recognised as one to which I had once answered. But now condemned to Sarah Island, I felt like only answering to myself. When asked if I had anything to say in regard to my sentence, I replied:

  ‘I am William Buelow Gould, & my name is a song that will be sung.’

  On the grounds of insolence my sentence was doubled to fourteen years.

  X

  THE COCKCHAFER WAS a wondrous cruel machine. It left your body feeling as if it were composed of pain rather than flesh. This was not only from the sheer physical fatigue or the rasping effects even a few hours stepping up & down in coarse government slops would have upon one’s groin, leaving it a mass of raw red flesh, but from the monstrous brilliance of its utter pointlessness, knowing at the end of the day that your cruel labour was entirely for no other purpose than to propel that monstrous treadwheel.

  The Cockchafer took the form of a gigantic, stretched waterwheel suspended slightly above floor level, like some grotesque rolling pin clad in wooden slats that formed steps. It stood the height of two men & was a good two dozen yards long, so that up to thirty men could be punished simultaneously.

  We climbed a short stepladder to shoulder height, grasped a fixed handle of sweat & blood-burnished gum wood that ran the length of the treadwheel at elbow height, then stepped onto that rotating waterwheel in which we had to become as water. For the next ten hours we climbed that circle of Hell, never going any higher than the next falling step, trying not to hear the groaning of each other, the thrum of the spindle, the clock-clock-clocking of our chains. In the torturous summer heat we ran rivers of sweat, making the steps slimy & slippery & us maddened with thirst.

  Near the evening of the second day a machine breaker from Glasgow became beset by terrible cramping & was only able to lift his legs with the greatest agony. Despite his pleas, the guards refused to stand him down. Unable to climb, he finally fell & became stuck between the treadwheel & the stepladder. The slats ground past his jammed body, but still that huge wheel, as if answering to laws other than those of this earth, rolled on as we yelled to the guards to allow us to halt. Even after the order was given to step down, it was not immediately possible to stop the great momentum of the wheel, so it further pounded the poor man until coming to rest jammed.

  Some didn’t care, were grateful only for the break his suffering gave us, saying if he was lucky he would perish. Others clawed like mad men for a time, trying to roll the wheel back & pull him out. We talked to the machine breaker & he a little to us. In dark words dribbling with bloody gobs from his mouth he admitted that he wished he was a real Villain. We roared our approval & finally managed to drag his broken body, so inexplicably unmarked, onto the dust of the muster floor in front of the wheel.

 
‘My father was a weaver,’ he continued, ‘& I am sorry to have shamed my father, but weaving is no fit business now, in fact it is no business at all.’ Then he stopped saying anything for a long time, & we wondered, is he thinking or is he dying?

  Then his voice sounded once more, though this time it was much more distant & muffled, as if all the machine-spun cotton in the world was wadding up into his bloody mouth. ‘My father was a weaver,’ he repeated, ‘but it is better for a man in such times to steal silk than weave cotton on the steam …’ But he couldn’t say the word ‘machine’, only rucked a further spew of blood onto the floor.

  Later he began raving how the kelpy was coming to take him. He was screeching, thin & harsh, like an ungreased treadle no longer used. Another Scot from the wheel said the kelpy was a spirit of the waters in the shape of a horse, & that this kelpy drowned those who travelled too far from their home.

  We were ordered back to the wheel & left the weaver where he lay until a doctor could be found. His screeching dimmed to an odd gobby scream, as if he were trying to vomit all those steam spinning machines out of his mouth, & failing.

  Capois Death began to talk loudly to the weaver, which was strictly forbidden while one was on the wheel but the guards chose to ignore him for it seemed to calm the weaver & stop him screaming. Capois Death told his mother’s tales of her country & of the many fabulous things she had seen & known before the slavers had come & her chiefs had sold her. As we went down & back up on the Cockchafer, I too listened & tried to imagine how it might be possible to fly as Capois Death’s ancestors once had; to levitate then fly far from Van Diemen’s Land’s chains & cockchafers by eating fish eyes & smearing a bird’s blood over my arms & leaping off a certain magic mountain, then diving into the sea & swimming as one with the fish until one was a fish.

  Occasionally, as Capois Death talked, he twisted around to grab a glance of the machine breaker now broken by a machine, to see if he was yet dead, but always his eyes were clear, brighter than fire coals, & those eyes were always following us, as if we should not have allowed such a thing as the Cockchafer & our subjugation by it, as though we were somehow culpable for a greater crime than the tawdry offences listed in our convict records.

  XI

  ON THE FORTNIGHT-LONG journey in a small packet around the uninhabited south coast of Van Diemen’s Land to Macquarie Harbour the seas grew so violent that we were forced to take safe anchorage in the expanse of Port Davey.

  It transpired that the captain’s Cape Town mistress, under the influence of an innumerate Kabbalist to whom she had recourse for divining her future, believed that truth was to be found in threes. As emissaries of his love the captain had thus sent three rings made of gold teeth wrenched with a cruel urgency from several formerly rich convicts’ mouths; then three live emus, which had all died in transit; & in a more exotic mood three white-pointer sharks’ mouths, though this latter gift was more in memory of the pleasures she had given him than a present to please her. The captain had heard nothing for eighteen months; he worried his gifts needed to be more subtle & enigmatic, & for this reason the presence in his boat of a painter with whose work he was, as a patron of Hobart Town hotelries, passing familiar, suggested to him the idea of a painted triptych of weird Van Diemonian creatures.

  I was brought up on deck along with Mr Death, the captain having in former times drunk in his establishments & made use of his women. My first suggestion of three bald eagles he hastily rejected, as he did the idea of three wisteria garlands. He warned me that he wanted nothing provocative in the manner of Mrs Arthur & the black baby, but something that seemed innocent & only of itself yet which could be read in an entirely different manner. Capois Death suggested that the triptych contain an animal, a bird & a fish, & the captain seemed to think this a splendid idea. What truth this added up to, an admonishment or an encouragement, was entirely beyond me, but the subtle messages of my work were, I decided, not for me to decode. ‘You are the fish,’ said Capois Death, whose opinion I had not solicited, ‘not the net.’

  The following afternoon I was summoned to the captain’s presence & presented with a watercolour set & instructions to paint the outcome of his morning’s hunting onshore: an orange-bellied parrot before it was plucked & thrown into the parrot pie the captain was to have for his tea, & a small kangaroo of the type the Van Diemonians call a wallaby, which was also to be cooked into a stew when I had finished with it.

  The pictures did not end up the most truthful. The orange-bellied parrot, a small, rather sweet & colourful bird in the flesh, bulked larger on paper than in life. It was unavoidable: half the poor creature’s head had been blown apart by the captain’s shot & much of its body was matted in dried blood. I drew on experience to fill the hole the captain had made, & the bird took on a regal splendour, its posture one of a brooding aggression, its beak &—well, to be honest—its entire body more bald eagle than Van Diemonian parrot. The kangaroo was worse: this handsome animal on paper evolved a suspicious rodent-face rather than its own gentle physiognomy, to which was coupled a body suffering severe posture problems, the whole absurdity capped off with a long ropy tail more suited to a kite.

  My body was, as you might expect after the horrors visited upon it by Captain Pinchbeck when he had been unhappy with my work, a prickly sweat. I couldn’t swallow, my tongue rolled around my mouth like a lolling smoked cod. I tried to touch up the pictures, then gave up & started all over again, but the results only worsened each time—the kangaroo ever more some deer with the dropsy & an impossible anatomy; the parrot with each redoubled attempt increasingly a warrior of the wind, an aggressive North American spirit in an ill-fitting, garishly coloured jacket.

  When the captain came shortly before dusk to inspect my handiwork, memories of the petite noyade flooded my mind as surely as water had that awful box. I was unable to speak, gulped & felt seawater already filling my throat, & meekly placed the pictures before him on the deck without comment. But unlike Captain Pinchbeck, this captain seemed pleased by the element of the unreal that had accidentally crept in. It suggested, said he, a world at once more fantastick & yet bizarrely more familiar than the one we lived in, & all up he felt it would do him only good with his mistress.

  To complete the triptych he had the following day brought me a fish that the sailors liked to catch with hook & line off the reefs of the harbour, & then smoke & eat. The fish was large-scaled & coloured pretty enough; perhaps it was this latter feature that made the captain think it might appeal to his mistress. I was told that in consequence of its favoured food, the great aquatic forests of bull-kelp that occur in the oceans off Van Diemen’s Land, the fish was known to the convicts as a kelpy.

  XII

  IT LOOKED NOTHING like a horse. It looked like a two-pound pretty fish that might, if you were hungry enough, be worth smoking & eating. But that didn’t make me feel any better. Was a kelpy a kelpy or just a fish? Was a fish just a fish? & then I looked into that damn kelpy’s eyes & though I did not wish it they were taking me back, quicker than Mr Banks scalping a blackfella, to the Cockchafer & us sitting around that evening waiting for the machine breaker to die, wondering whether he would last the night, & trying to work out a way of persuading the cook to give us some lard with which we might grease our raw thighs, when Capois Death began once more to talk.

  He had an authority about him that is impossible to explain & which was entirely at odds with the bald facts of his physical presence. A portrait would show a short black man with a slightly weak chin, & a twist to his right shoulder that gave him a curious nature, at once intimidatory & suspicious, for he always seemed to be glancing behind himself & would corkscrew his whole body around to listen to you as though he were about to hit you.

  Capois Death was originally from San Domingo, his wrinkled prune face as circuitous as his history. Like some other former slaves I had met he carried with him everywhere a spirit bottle. It was a dull, scratched earthen ware pitcher & contained, said he, his own i
nvincible memory of himself as a self-liberated man encased for protection in his once-celebrated Larrikin Soup. He had, when taken to Bermuda from Jamaica to be sold there by his master, succeeded in bribing a soldier with fellatio to forge his certificate of freedom & thereupon fled to England where he found work first in the north Atlantic as a harpooner & later in Liverpool as a footman, a position he lost along with his freedom upon being caught stealing silverware from his employer.

  He had a crooked mouth constantly in motion, & when night came & we were ordered back to our quarters, taking the machine breaker with us as no doctor had yet arrived, he told us, as we lay on our old damp straw palliasses, in a form so epic & so open as to be never-ending, the story of the great slave revolt of San Domingo in which half a million slaves overthrew in turn the local whites, the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, an English expedition of sixty thousand men, & a second French expedition led by Bonaparte’s brother-in-law.

  And he told it just like that, like he was an infantryman firing, loading, & refiring his musket, brickfaced without pause & without emphasis, & the horror & the glory & the wonder of it all were in the accumulation of endless detail, of how as a child he had witnessed the ferocity of the revolt; of Bonaparte’s brother-in-law’s attempt to quell it; of seeing Negroes being publicly fed to dogs & being burnt alive; of their leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black Napoleon, betrayed by the white Napoleon; of L’Ouverture’s cultured black general Maurepas, having to watch his wife & children being drowned before his eyes as the French soldiers nailed a pair of wooden epaulettes into his naked shoulders, taunting him, laughing as they hammered so: A real Bonaparte now! And yet it was also another Frenchman, the sea-captain Mazard, to whom he owed his life, who had refused to drown the one hundred & fifty slaves given him for that express purpose & instead took them to Jamaica. There he sold them to the English planters, something for which the captain was reviled by both white & black for the former wanted the blacks’ death as punishment for their rebellion, & the latter would rather die in any manner than continue to live as slaves, because to die as a free man meant the revolt never ended.