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

by Richard Flanagan

  Capois Death fell silent. For a moment it seemed that we were back on the wheel & there was only the sound of our irons as we stepped, clock-clock-clocking, the slow rolling thrum of the wheel, as though there was no escape except in stories. Then the Glasgow machine breaker once more spoke, but his voice was now a wretched rasping croak, & he asked us to kill him.

  At first we dismissed his pleadings, reassuring him that at some point the doctor would arrive & he would be treated.

  But he was gasping repeatedly, as if he was bound to a new wheel & could only reprise its rhythm:

  ‘I am dying!’

  Over & over & over, clock-clock-clocking.

  As though we doubted it.

  XIII

  CAPOIS DEATH PICKED up his palliasse & walked over to where the machine breaker lay. He knelt down & looked away from the man’s eyes. He seemed to be looking at his thick black hair, which he pushed into a side part with gentle sweeps of his hand. He ran the side of his hand down onto the machine breaker’s cheek, holding it there for a moment. Then he stood up, dropped the palliasse over the machine breaker’s head & kneeling, straddled the man’s covered head, stretching the palliasse taut between his knees.

  In this manner he held the machine breaker tight & began to sing in a soft voice the songs he had learnt from his mother. The smothered man’s body bolted & bucked, but his thrashing seemed to all too quickly grow subdued & then halt altogether. Capois Death stayed sitting on the man for a good minute more, then stopped his singing & stood up & dragged his palliasse off.

  No-one moved. All eyes were fixed on the machine breaker for a sign of life. There was none. Capois Death rifled his pockets & finding half a garnet ring, dropped it in his spirit bottle. Then he lay back down on his palliasse, closed his eyes, & on the deck of the convict ship I opened mine & saw around me the low rolling wildlands of Port Davey, & knew that was all now behind me, that the most frightful task before me was only to paint the fish the captain had given me as the subject of the third part of his lover’s triptych.

  The kelpy which he had presented to me to paint was not one that seemed to be cognisant of its fate as an ambassador of romance. Curled in a bucket of seawater, it was still alive &, it seemed, somehow faintly contemptuous of its new role. I took the kelpy out of the bucket for half a minute or so, arranging it on the table in front of me, working quickly, then placing it back in the water so it might breathe & not yet die. This dry table, I realised, was the kelpy’s petite noyade, & I his Captain Pinchbeck. Like me, the kelpy was guilty. Like me, it had no idea why.

  I found it not so hard to paint a reasonably accurate picture, but the kelpy’s eyes followed me as if it knew all our true crimes, just like the machine breaker’s eyes had followed me until the moment of his death, but that was not exactly how I painted the fish—as an accusing, horrified eye in a dying body. No, emboldened by the oddities the captain had so unexpectedly sanctioned with the first two paintings, I must confess I began taking liberties with that fish’s face, so it was both the fish’s knowing eye & the horror of the machine breaker’s eye watching us on the treadwheel; so it was both that & so many other things. It was Capois Death’s stare & buck teeth & his half-horrified, half-fascinated look forever backwards over his shoulder at his own past as the machine breaker bucked beneath him. It was all that blood—of fish eyes & revolting slaves being torn apart & Maurepas’ nailed shoulders haemorrhaging & the blood in the machine breaker’s eyes after we drew the palliasse away—and it was my own fear at this cracked world in which I & they & everything was trapped. It was a funny thing but then it didn’t seem so funny that all these things were bound together for a moment & all existed as a single dying kelpy.

  They were stupid thoughts, & I was glad when the captain took the picture away for his mistress & gave the sailors the kelpy to smoke & eat.

  XIV

  HOW COULD I then—as I was painting my first fish—have known I was setting out on a venture as quixotic as it was infinite? I have read the lives of the artists &, like the lives of the saints, greatness seems imprinted upon them from the beginning. At birth their fingers are recorded making painterly flourishes, merely waiting for a loaded brush & a canvas to fill with the images they seem to have been born with, so many immaculate conceptions.

  But Art is a punitive sentence, not a birthright, & there is nothing in my early life that suggests artistick aptitude or even interest, my pastimes & fascinations nearly all being what may—& were—deemed the merely villainous. And though I am, of course, the hero of this, my own tale, if only because I can’t really imagine anyone else wanting to be, my story is no remade myth of Orpheus, but the story of a sewer rat made worse.

  I am William Buelow Gould, sloe-souled, green-eyed, gap-toothed, shaggy-haired & grizzle-gutted, & though my pictures will be even poorer than my looks, my paintings lacking the majesty of a Girtin, the command of a Turner, believe me when I tell you that I will try to show you everything, mad & cracked & bad as it was.

  I’ll make the mark my way, be buggered if I won’t & I know I’ll be damned if I do, for it may not be Lake poetry or Ovid or that damned dwarf Pope but it will be the best I can do & like no other has. Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condem nation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises. They say the storyteller is the man who would let the wick of his life be consumed by the flame of his story. But like good Trim Shandy I shall confine myself to no man’s rule. Next to my paintings I intend to make a bonfire of words, say anything if it illuminates a paltry moment of truth in my poor pictures.

  I am William Buelow Gould & I mean to paint for you as best I can, which is but poorly, which is but a rude man’s art, the sound of water on stone, the fool’s dream of the hard giving way to the soft, & I hope you will come to see reflected in my translucent watercolours not patches of the white cartridge paper beneath, but the very opacity of the souls themselves.

  And is that not enough for a struggling deckhand to have from a wild sea hauled into his boat? Answer me—is it not? Or do you desire evidence of the sublime? Of the Artist in control—indeed at the peak—of his powers?

  You’ll get none of that poppycock from me. For I am out of control here, badly & I hope dangerously so, & when my brush starts to attack Pobjoy’s paper in small stipples—rat-a-ta-tat—rat-a-ta-tat-tat—I am shooting for freedom, nothing less, liberty, & my aim is untrue & my weapons a sorry paintbox I’d be ashamed to hock, a few poor brushes, some pots of poorer paint & a bruised talent for nothing more than reproduction. But my sight is level & I will make the best of it I can.

  What?

  Where, I hear the criticasters ask, is the fineness of approach? The evidence of anything other than a poor provincial mind relentlessly on the make?

  They diminish me with their definitions, but I am William Buelow Gould, not a small or mean man. I am not bound to any idea of who I will be. I am not contained between my toes & my turf but am infinite as sand.

  Come closer, listen: I will tell you why I crawl close to the ground: because I choose to. Because I care not to live above it like they may fancy is the way to live, the place to be, so that they in their eyries & guard towers might look down on the earth & us & judge it all as wanting.

  I care not to paint pretend pictures of long views which blur the particular & insult the living, those landscapes so beloved of the Pobjoys, those landscapes that trash the truth as they reach ever upwards into the sky, as though we only know somewhere or somebody from a distance—that’s the lie of the land while the truth is never far away but up close in the dirt, in the vile details of slime & scale & filth along with the Devil, along with the angels, & all snared within the earth & us, all embodied in a single pulse of a heart—mine, yours, ours—& all my subject as I take aim & make of the fish flesh incarnate.

  The criticasters will say I am this small thing & my pictures that irrelevant thing. They will beat
a bedlam outside & inside my poor head & then I cannot keep time with the drum of my stippling. They will waken me screaming from my necessary dream. They will try to define me like the Surgeon does his sorry species, those cursed Linnaeans of the soul, trying to trap me in some new tribe of their own invention & definition.

  But I am William Buelow Gould, party of one, undefinable, & my fish will free me & I shall flee with them.

  And you?

  —well mark the great Shelley—

  Ye were injured, & that means memory.

  And you are just going to have to begin as I did: by looking long enough into the fish’s eye to see what I must now describe, to commence that long dive down, down into the world of the ocean where the only bars are those of descending light.

  Hush!

  Pobjoy is coming, the sea is rising, my wound is clotting, so just sit back & agree with the Russian convict that it’s all better in a book, that life is better observed than lived. Nod like the lucky bastards you are, like nobby Hobart Town clerks who breakfast on the upper storey of the Colonial Secretary’s office watching early morning public executions, fat arses flapping on padded seats, enjoying in comfort & company with the jolly pissy taste of fried kidneys still sweet in their gob the spectacle directly across Murray Street at the gaol entrance of a good gibbet.

  In that brief moment before the gallows’ trap door opens its own gaping, insatiable mouth, let me continue now—like all good confessions of a condemned man—with the immediate events that have led me to such a sorry pass as this.

  THE PORCUPINE FISH

  Sarah Island—Several forms of torture—The Commandant founds a nation—Mr Lempriere—Sharing the joys of Voltaire—Dancing the Enlightenment—A death & a new name—Bedswerving—Castlereagh the Pig—Dr Bowdler-Sharpe on eggs—How I came to paint my second fish.

  I

  AT THE END of that strangest of voyages, we slowly approached our new prison in the late evening on an early autumn sea so still that we were frequently becalmed. In this age of abominations, in a time when, as we are so often told, everything that is sacred is profaned, nothing is more abominable, more without precedent in the annals of degradation, than this island on which my story was now to unfold. In the entire unknown, unmapped western half of Van Diemen’s Land only savages roamed & no white settlement was to be found, save for this one gaol for the recalcitrant.

  Yet in the pale curd-coloured moonlight in which we first saw it, Sarah Island appeared not as we expected. The captain had granted several convicts—including myself & Capois Death—a special dispensation & allowed us up from the sweating, fetid hold onto the deck. Like a silvered sea monster of fable rearing its terrible head, the island loomed over our boat still far away.

  It was as if a giant octopus had spread itself over the island & eaten up every last vestige of vegetation, every last tree & plant & fern, leaving only its upturned tentacles of log fences, fifty feet or more in height, running up & down the settlement. Soaring above these were the island’s great buildings, so many quicksilver kraken heads: the Commandant’s pink marble palace at the foot of which we would later feel as though we were in some man-made gorge where wild winds played & whose shadow reached over the rest of the settlement; the magnificent stone Commissariat which would have not been out of place in a great port; the Penitentiary in the centre of which was a Cyclopean lintel, emblazoned with the settlement’s odd coat of arms, a smiling mask.

  Then I looked away from the island & down at the sea. I saw something I had never seen before, a very remarkable thing that I wished I might have words to describe but for which I knew there were no words: the stars reflected in the water, shining as bright as in the sky, as though we were journeying through the very southern heavens to arrive at this place of wonder; as though there were a thousand candles burning just beneath the surface of the still dark water, one light for each soul of every dead convict buried on the small isle of the dead to our right. When several of these lights were extinguished by the head & afterwards the body of a dead man as it so very slowly swept around our becalmed bow & floated into view, face down, I wondered if at last the machine breaker was one with his dream of freedom.

  The corpse was later identified as that of an escaped convict who had failed to make it to the mainland in a raft made of a door. Whether the captain meant the convict’s fate or the island he could only escape through death, his comment as he watched the convict’s body being heaved up with gaff hooks still chilled me.

  ‘A full stop,’ said the captain, ‘to the end of Empire.’

  II

  WHEN LATER THAT evening the wind finally rose & we came closer in to berth we were able to see the bold streets running along & across the island’s natural contours, the extensive landfill & unfinished wharves & shoreside streets of looming stone warehouses that would shame Liverpool—collectively a prophecy of a nation that might be summoned into existence simply by the night-time will of its leader, a man we were to rightly come to regard as extraordinary.

  You may well say: How lucky the colonies were to have such a man!

  But when you saw his vast shipyards—I say ‘his’ advisedly—it quickly became apparent that we had passed from one dominion, that of the English, to another, much more remarkable, that of His Bulkiness, the Napoleon of Sarah Island, the Great Doge of the South Seas: the Commandant himself. Even then his shipyards were the busiest in the southern colonies; far, far larger than the colonial authorities knew, because for every brig or sloop built by the convict shipwrights out of the Huon pine felled by shoeless chain gangs of felons up the Gordon River & sent as a form of tribute to the Van Diemonian governor in Hobart Town, a dozen more were built & reserved for the growing trading fleet of the island, through whose agency the Commandant had established links, at first commercial & then political, with Javanese traders & several newly independent South American countries.

  Under the influence of mercury, which he administered to himself daily as a salve for his syphilis, & laudanum, which he drank each evening in imprecisely measured amounts to enable him to sleep, because of all things, this brave man feared only his dreams, opiate-enhanced nightmares that gave him no respite & which always ended in flames from which he rose phoenix-like just before dawn each morning, to recommence building what was already ash.

  You may well wonder: How on earth did he expect this to end?

  But his ambition was as enormous as his appetites, both dietary & carnal, & it was no less than the creation of a nation that would have as its heart the city-state he was already building the foundations for, with him for its Father.

  You may well ask: How was any of this possible?

  But it was only necessary to hear him speak of his dreams, his visions, & the rough-hewn planks beneath your feet would begin to sway & roll, the flaking split-sandstone walls of the room around you would fall away, & the world of that dull, desperate prison would transform in front of your eyes. Before we were in any way aware of the transformation, we would be flying through the southern heavens to a distant land of fable, a tyranny perhaps, but one enchanted by his stories of his hopes & despairs, a world that with his every word & every gesture was becoming more & more real to us.

  After berthing we were made strip, & whilst shivering naked on deck, convict constables stuck their fingers up our arses & grouted around our mouths for tobacco wads or precious stones. We were then allowed to dress & waited for the Commandant to arrive.

  Shortly before dawn he came aboard to address us. His appearance was unusual: it was not that he was short, but that his small body tapered away from his very large head, & in consequence he seemed to have no neck. His black hair, which was dense & wavy, was his best feature, yet its extravagance only highlighted his other physical shortcomings. On any other, such exotic dress as was his—the blue uniform, the gold mask—would have been his most distinctive features. But that early morning it was the way he spoke: directly, simply, occasionally even lapsing into dementung, the p
idgin issue of blackfella language & convict fly talk, & there was something mesmerising about his words, his passion.

  Before we knew it the ship had transformed into a moving cloud, & as the cracked pastels of sunrise began to escape into the early morning sky behind him, he was pointing out the future as we flew over it; the small island that had become a noble trading giant, revered & feared in equal measure around the world, for its wealth, its power, the beauty & majesty of its civic arrangements. We saw how traders & artists & all manner of other courtesans made the long trek from distant provinces in their youth, abandoning their pasts, their accents, disavowing their families, their friends, their lovers, & carrying with them only the flaming desire to identify their own ambition & wild dreams with those of the rising island of the south.

  He imagined—and we with him—himself being painted in a Roman toga, himself the subject of epic odes, himself founding a dynasty that would war in the name of his disputed memory, himself revered as Himself, & he saw no conflict between his despotick & dynastick desires, his official duties as an English officer in charge of an Imperial penal settlement, & the high regard he held for Renaissance city-states such as Florence & Venice, about which he had gained certain misleading conceptions from blue chapbooks on Italy. These he was sent by the woman we came to know as his sister, Miss Anne—a Romantic watercolourist whose minor distinction lay not in her art, but in once having had a short, illicit affair with Thomas De Quincey during the opiumeating writer’s single term entombed within the decrepit, dull cloisters of Worcester College—accompanying her letters from Oxford.