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

by Richard Flanagan

  I cannot say when I first realised that all that long time on Sarah Island had really been an infinitely slow process of metamorphosis. As I tentatively began seeking to break out of the darkness of Crania Tasmaniae & the letters contained within, how could I have guessed I was soon to be reborn new & different? That the process of painting the fish had been so painful & arduous not because the fish were dying & I was unequal to their form, but because in order that my own form might begin to change I also had to die? How could I have known that all that long time my paintings had been transforming me, that I was with my brush creating not so many pictures, but spinning out of the innumerable threads of my paintings a single cocoon?

  And how was I to know as I tossed that letter to the ground, seeking finally to leave my chrysalis, that my desperate mission of escape was about to begin?

  THE CRESTED WEEDFISH

  In which is recounted a most bold & audacious escape—The sled of thwarted memory—Brady, an avenging angel—Return of Capois Death—Attacked by blacks—A murder—The funeral pyre.

  I

  IN THE BEGINNING was the Word, & the Word was with God, & the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with the old Dane as it was with God, all things were made by him; & without him was not anything made that was made.

  But then the Word was made flesh & dwelt among us as part of our darkness, & it comprehended not our darkness; for its flesh was putrid & slimy green bloated rotted rags floating flotsam-like around my cell. As I tried to keep my head above this slime that nightly rose around me, to avoid the sensation of sinking forever into the primeval Word, it became my life’s most sacred desire to expose that the Word & the World were no longer what they seemed, that they were no longer One.

  It was New Year’s Day, 1831, & I was determined to keep my newly made resolution to leave—but with an ambition far greater than escape: the intention of once & for all destroying the Convict System. The weapon with which I would achieve this end was the large selection of records that I had stolen from the Registry.

  These, along with me, Rolo Palma’s fish-netting gang agreed to ferry across the harbour under the cover of night. In return I gave them an assurance that neither they nor any authorities would ever again see their convict records, six Bengal dollars & a copy of the highly esteemed, if somewhat tatty & partly mutilated 1628 Rotterdam edition of Philemon Holland’s first English translation of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, with all its tales of strange races—the Thybians with two pupils in one eye & the image of a horse in the other; the Monocoli who on their single leg hop with amazing speed & who, to shade themselves on hot days, lie down & raise their leg like a parasol; the Astomi, who having neither mouths nor noses, but only holes for nostrils like a snake, lived on smells.

  The settlement was in an uproar: the inexplicable disappearance of the old Dane, the rumoured imminent arrival of Matt Brady & the Army of Light, the Commandant’s reclusion—all had people rushing back & forth for no clear reason. In such tumultuous disorder, to flee was not so difficult & I shall not bother here with the tedious story of my escape. It would demand of me an explanation of details—the initial night-time meeting with Rolo Palma, the quarter moon allowing enough but not too much light, the tide running our way & the flour & pickled pork, the axe & pot, the boots & sled & the way I bought all this, along with my freedom—& details have never interested me. It was, in any case, not an affair of courage & daring, but—as these matters tend to be—bribery & timing.

  Recalling their last sight of me as madness made paper, the fish-netting gang later spoke of convict registers, letter books, the miscellaneous marble-endpapered records, papers & manuscripts all shaping together out of the grey light of dawn into a single hut-like mound upon a sassafras sled.

  Rolo Palma’s men pulled on their rough-hewn oars & felt the whale boat beneath them slowly come to life with their rhythm, at first little more than a quiver, & then an undeniable glide along the water, black & silent, heading back for Sarah Island.

  As in that chill summer dawn the men sought warmth in their work, I heard their voices whisking with tufts of mist over that still water to where I was attempting to draw the sled into the wilderness, still dark & dewy, a tatterdemalion man bound to his burden by a harness of kangaroo leather.

  ‘He looks all the world,’ I heard Rolo Palma say, ‘like a praying mantis trying to drag a brick.’

  Then the sun was up & they must have realised that the hut, like their whale boat, had come to life & was also moving for I heard them cry in astonishment that it was gone—swallowed in that green immensity that went east for hundreds of miles with only blacks & wild animals & wilder rivers & God-only-knew-what other monstrous races & creatures—& with it an escaping lunatic destined for oblivion.

  II

  IT HAS TO be understood that Billy Gould attributed to the records a power only those immersed in paper too long can appreciate, if even then not fully comprehend. I worried that unless I did something, the lies I now dragged behind me would one day be all that remained of the settlement, & posterity would seek to judge those who had gone before—to judge Capois Death, Mr Lempriere, the Commandant, even poor Castlereagh, to judge them, to judge me—to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant’s monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!

  There was, I knew, only one man who would know what to do.

  Matt Brady was for us all an enigma, but in the darkness of my stinking cell, as the old Danish scribe slowly disintegrated around me, Brady had for me become a beacon. No-one I knew had ever seen him: stories of his physical nature varied greatly in consequence. Yet I was convinced that the moment we met I would recognise Brady. Some said he was tall & swarthy with a Maori-like tattoo down one cheek; others that he was half-Samoan & that this explained his warlike propensity; others yet that he was short, freckled & wore his red hair in two long ponytails. For the Scots he was William Wallace, for the Irish he was Cú Cucalain; for all, a hero.

  But only for me was Brady the one who might avenge History.

  My desires, you will by now have gathered, were manifold; I should have known they were also unrealisable. I intended first to paralyse the settlement by removing its basis of administration, the paper records of its invented history, the necessary fiction by which the reality of the prison-island was maintained. I had then determined I would find Brady & deliver these records to him. For I was labouring under an illusion even more monstrous than my sassafras sled of crudely hewn hopes—the belief that once Brady had both the official, fictitious records & my own true testimony as their corrective corollary, the bushranger would be in a position to organise his vengeance when he came to liberate Sarah Island.

  Brady would bring to a divine justice the rats who dobbed, the convict constables who sold their mates out for a cosy billet, for all were depicted in the old Dane’s records as heroes, as worthy & respected convicts. Brady would free the rest, & a convict without a record would remain a free man, for it was clear to me now that it was these false words which enslaved us. Without them, who was to say which man was free & which man not? Upon being liberated the convicts would be able to travel anywhere & call themselves free, & with no records, no longer living within the prison of paper, none could prove they were not. And after, Brady would circulate a truthful account that exposed the horror of the settlement for what it truly was, which showed the lie of the official record, of all official records, & in so doing inculcate through the length & breadth of Van Diemen’s Land a spirit of revolt.

  So, at last the instrument of glorious purpose, I slowly made my way further into the unknown with my strange burden, always with the vision of Brady my redeemer before me.

  Yet even without my sled of such outrageous ambition, my journey was preposterous. The violent land was uncharted, the whereabouts of Brady within that wildness the size of England unknown. The terrain was densely, at times even impene
trably, forested by primeval trees & ferns. It rose in great wild waves of mountains, it fell in the harshest cataracts, glistening white as granite.

  The journey became a torment beyond imagining. But as I dragged my sled of a thwarted memory through snow, through driving sleet, up yet one more gully or over yet another button grass plain, across several mountain ranges & through as many swollen rivers, never in my most despairing of moments, in my greatest of physical agonies, would I ever, ever countenance the thought that I would not find Brady, because Brady, when I found him, would understand it all. Brady would know what it was that I did not. Brady would tell me how this world might be turned upside down & once again made right, the way it once was, & the way it should be.

  III

  HE CAME INTO the flaring circle of my fire early in the evening. His scabby & sored body withered & miserable, he was as good as naked apart from a grass hat on his head, a dull & scratched earthenware pitcher in his right hand, & a brand ‘S’ big on his arse like two puckering horseshoes raised & entwined.

  I was nestled up under a flaky shale rock shelf & was as astonished by his desperate audacity as I was first mystified by his identity. My hand gripped my axe. But when he made his bold proposal there was no doubting who else with so little would seek to turn such weakness to his advantage.

  ‘If you will share your food,’ said Capois Death, ‘I will share shouldering your burden.’

  I gave him some pickled pork. I watched as he chewed it on one side of his mouth like a dog, the rest of his teeth I guessed having fallen out. I asked why he had escaped—after all his billet was a privileged & far better one than most on the island.

  Still chewing, Capois Death took off his grass hat & removed from the top of his head a wretched & filthy scrap of paper. It had been folded & refolded so often that the creases were now largely tears, & it was four almost separate pieces of paper.

  ‘Dear cap,’ it read:

  you was always my one & only you was everything how sweet how good how I will never forget how I loved your crooked smile your kinky hair how I always loved you

  your darling forever

  Tommy

  I handed the letter back to Capois Death.

  Following Roaring Tom Weaver’s hanging last winter, said he, his own heart broke. At first he was going to kill himself, after a time he instead resolved to escape the following summer. He had fled with a party of six several weeks before; they had split when the last of their food ran out. One mate had drowned fording a river, the other gone back to the lime burners’ camp to give himself up. Capois Death had fought a devil off for the carrion of a wombat a week before; since that time, nothing.

  ‘Yes,’ said he, though in answer to what I don’t know, & he uncorked the pitcher he carried, still full of some piss-stained fluid that was once Larrikin Soup, & a history, said he—his mind I realised now well addled—that had once been his. He extracted a slimy thread of grass & told of how, not long after arriving on Sarah Island, he had witnessed the interrogation of a recaptured convict.

  The convict—a pieman from Birmingham—had spent several weeks on the run with three still missing escapees. For want of food in that harsh world, he was believed to have eaten his colleagues in the course of unsuccessfully trying to find a passage through the wild mountains of the west to the settled east, before finally, a starving wretch, returning to the settlement & giving himself up.

  Declaring he was tired of this life, confessed he to his cannibalism, but he was not believed until taking off & flourishing his moccasins made of human skin. More interested in what the pieman had learnt of the unknown Transylvanian wilderness than in confessions of depravity, Musha Pug pressed him to describe the exact nature of the country through which he had travelled.

  Exasperated, the pieman leant forward, &, asking permission of the Commandant, took a sheet from Jorgen Jorgensen who was making a record of the interrogation. With a violent gesture he crushed the page into an ugly ball.

  ‘Sir,’ calmly said he, ‘Transylvania looks like that,’—& he dropped the crumpled page to his feet.

  For the sake of what little food I had left, Capois Death now joined me journeying through that crumpled labyrinth of cascades & rainforest & ravines & limestone tiers that was unfolding before our eyes into something beyond words.

  We were bound for Frenchman’s Cap, the great massif of Transylvania. Visible for up to a hundred miles in any direction, its distinct broken crescent shape, when viewed so far away by those in bondage at Sarah Island, vividly—& to us convicts, ironically—suggested the Frenchman’s cap of liberty, where I had reason to believe (based both on the constancy of endless rumours & certain secret letters I had found from the Governor addressed to the Commandant) that Brady was camped.

  We were bound for Frenchman’s Cap, but we were not the first. We came upon camp fires with the occasional thigh or forearm bones. We came upon myrtle roots entwined with the manacled skeleton of a nameless escapee.

  We stood still, listening for something, I don’t know what.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ asked Capois Death, scratching at a large, angry looking scab that had formed over the smiling mask brand on his forearm.

  We hobbled on. Our pickled pork ran out. The books grew damp, collected moss, sprouted lichen, acquired insect & small plant life. The scab on Capois Death’s arm grew septic, his movements slow, his mind feverish. Our tea ran out. Somehow we lost the axe, though I think Capois Death may have thrown it away, lest one of us was tempted to use it in the manner of the pieman. Our flour ran out. In a deep river valley we came upon the dead white stag of a blue gum, as wide as a score of men in its girth. Upon its trunk were nailed in a straight line what looked at a distance like pieces of bark. In his fever, Capois Death believed them to be the multiple issue of the machine breaker’s eyes peering into him, determined upon vengeance, & would not come near. But they were nothing of the sort: on examination I found the pieces of bark to be a dozen pairs of shrivelled black ears.

  Later limping down from a high rocky outcrop we came upon a great plain of button grass, sags up to chest high, copper hued with small flowers & fresh growth. We saw an irregular shimmer moving through that plain towards us, that after a time we came to recognise as two blackfellas.

  Neither was frightened off when we played the old trick of picking up sticks & raising them to our shoulders in pretence of muskets. There was no point running, we even hoped they might prove friendly & offer us some of the kangaroo we could see hanging over one man’s shoulder.

  But upon them walking up to us, it was clear they were not going to share anything. One was a tall man, & somewhat scabby. The other was of a shorter, stouter build. We could see they were angry. We never saw the spears they dragged along the ground, clenched between their toes.

  ‘Numminer? Numminer?’ queried they, & I, a stupid white man thinking by numminer they meant white man allied to all the horrors inflicted by white men upon blackfellas, said, ‘No, me no numminer.’ Capois Death, a smart black man thinking by numminer they meant ghost & that he might be able to play the bogy man to such simple souls, straightened his body & with all his will kept from violently shuddering so that they would not know how ill & weak he truly was.

  In as strong a voice as remained to him, said he:

  ‘Yes, me numminer, me bloody big numminer.’

  IV

  CAPOIS DEATH’S LAST sight before his own pitiful death was to be that of his whole sorrowful history being played in reverse. All his vicissitudes on Sarah Island, the machine breaker, the Cockchafer, his successes as a Hobart Town publican, his times in Liverpool, he was seeing running backwards through the spilling of a pitcher of purl-ale.

  He looked up & he saw himself as he swam back up into the slave ship & delivered himself into servitude after a humiliating act with a white man, gazed with ever-growing sadness as he gradually abandoned all his fierce desire for freedom, while Frenchmen laughingly drew nails out of the wooden epaul
ettes that were so peculiarly attached to the black general Maurepas’s shoulders.

  Maurepas gazed up at the jolly Frenchmen in shivering incomprehension, as his wife & children returned from the sea, as dogs vomited forth pieces of human beings that reformed into whole people, as the brutal repression of the slave revolt turned into a brief liberty then finally, once more, an infinite servitude.

  Capois Death felt his unquenchable rage & determination to not remain enslaved diminish like a guttering candle flame & as he lost the strength of manhood & descended into an ever weakening childlike body, he simply came to accept the world of endless labour, ceaseless brutality & pointless violence from both his masters & his fellows as the way all life was here, there & everywhere. Only the taste of a guava stolen from his mouth & grafted back onto a tree redeemed that long time that ended, finally, when the black overseer dragged a weeping black woman forward.

  With great force a white woman insisted on pushing Capois Death, now a baby, on to the screaming woman, whose screams quickly subsided & after holding the still wet & bloody child at her breast for a short time, got off the stool & squatted in a dusty courtyard under a guava tree & allowed Capois Death finally to return to the one time of serenity he had never known & to enter feet first into the immensity of her through the wild, torn, bloody cave of her opening.

  Just at that last moment before darkness encompassed him forever, Capois Death turned & saw himself reflected in the mirror of an emptying purl-ale bottle in which time had halted wheeling backwards & was now rapidly spinning forwards, but he was unmoved by his future, was indifferent to the revelation of his destiny that revealed him & me leaping out of the sled harness & seeking to run away from the blacks, & two spears passing into & through his fevered torso.

  Capois Death turned away, took a deep breath, slowly stood back up & had taken only three slow steps from the bottle that moved backwards & forwards in time, when he felt the first spear like the blow of a sledgehammer; felt himself staggering, then a second blow even more powerful than the first. He spun like a skewered blackbird & fell clumsily to his knees. As he tried to crawl away, he felt their waddies begin to drum his body & he felt language starting to drift