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

by Richard Flanagan

  Five days before I was to hang, small pieces of ash began falling from the sky. When the wind arose, larger leaves of myrtle & fern fronds charred to a crisp rained upon us, perfect in shape & form, but entirely black in colour, harbingers of our fate fluttering onto our hair & noses & shoulders as if rejoinders from another place & another time that we had wrongly understood & hence irretrievably ruptured.

  Three days before I was to hang, so much ash had fallen that in some places it had blown into drifts in which a man’s leg would sink to his thigh, & by the following morning only the stakes of the compound, the top storeys of the taller buildings & the narrow lanes the chain gangs were made keep clear with an incessant labour remained as evidence that there had once been a settlement of any description on this island of mounting ash.

  As the wind blew stronger & stronger from the northeast, as the fire grew larger & came closer, the convicts—whether in condemned cells or chain gangs or cosy billets—began to sense its magnitude & grow aware of its power & believed it must be Brady’s doing, a part of his grand conception that would see us all freed—oh the genius of the man! That he would use the very Nature that had gaoled us to free us & destroy that Nature at the same time! And they waited for when he & McCabe & the rest of the grand gang would burst like those splendid horsemen of the Apocalypse out of that inferno dispensing a fiery judgement with muskets of thunder & flintlocks of righteousness.

  Because they knew judgement was nigh the convicts cared not for the redcoats or the convict screws. One day before I was to hang, I heard the guards outside whispering how Ben Joshua refused to go bottom dog in the sawpit & said so to Musha Pug, ‘Brady will have you too, Musha,’ said he. ‘Brady will truss you up, Musha Pug, & bind your bulbous ball bag & gag your filthy gob & hold it under water till you have pearls for eyes & flathead for friends a full fathom five down.’

  Musha Pug hit him hard but it was a blow for a woman not a man, a backhand not a fist, & Musha Pug then turned his back & walked off on his three legs & everybody saw it was a slap not a punch. Everybody saw Musha Pug walk away & everybody knew why it had been a slap not a punch. Then chain gangs laughed at the convict constables when they ordered them to work, & then the convict constables refused to use force when the officers told them to maintain order. Rather than beat the convicts senseless there & then, the convict constables either disappeared to their sheds & haunts away from the convicts or tried to curry favour with them, offering tobacco & jokes & guesses as to exactly when & how & in what magnificent form & number Brady would arrive.

  The pining gang refused to leave the island & head up river. The shipwrights lay back in the hull of the cutter they were building & the coopers walked away from their half-finished barrels which with their unbound staves looked like flowers half-wilting, half-blossoming, & no amount of threats or pleading would have a felon move, & very soon the island was at a standstill & all—guard & lag alike—were simply waiting.

  Then Musha Pug broke out a rum barrel, then another, & offered it round the convict sawyers & convict shipwrights & convict coopers in the shipyards, saying over & over that cobbers weren’t dobbers. Later the redcoats came down, but only to commandeer a keg to take back to their barracks where they sat quietly & drank sullenly in a search for courage or oblivion. By sunset, the island was three sheets to the wind, the talk all a wild dreaming of a new country to be, & all eyes focused intently & expectantly upon the mountains to the east for any sign amidst the smoke that might signify the imminent arrival of Brady, & even I, sitting in the almost complete darkness of the condemned cell awaiting my execution the following day, could not suppress the faintest surge of hope.

  IV

  NONE OF THE handful who were to survive could afterwards satisfactorily describe the strangeness of that time, so many images of horror around which the fires of Hell rose & fluttered like the Commandant’s moonbird epaulettes.

  Picture it, as I had to picture it on the morning of that eighth day after the fire had first been sighted—only a few hours before my execution—standing naked in my smoking oven of a cell, occasionally putting my mouth close to the door’s dark edge where the slightest of fetid drafts was for me a welcome breeze, a mistral that brought images of horrors elsewhere in its sluggish wake.

  Picture smoke-choked birds—the native swifts & grass parrots that had not been caught & painted & the jays that had not been caught & eaten, all the sea eagles & black cockatoos & fantails & blue wrens—dropping dead from the sky into that boiling sea. A tideline of their bodies ringed the island, a boom of birds against which our hopes began to beat ever more futilely for the island was even then starting to smoulder & there was nowhere to go, only dead blackened birds to throw at flames that were even then beginning to appear all over the island.

  Watch the whole island transforming into a single furnace, one flame as infinite as Hell, an eternity of suffering in which nothing existed except to fuel the fire further, & then the fire finding its way into the heart of the settlement.

  Over everything & spreading everywhere there is just fire & wind & smoke, smoke as acrid as sin, thick as dirt, heat blistering your skin, singeing your hair, & vilely tonguing through it all the ubiquitous redness.

  Picture men shaping in & out of smoke as they run from the flame into the flame, all one & the same now the maelstrom had arrived. Pity the soldiers & the convicts who have ceased fighting the gathering firestorm, giving up their unequal struggle & with all the energy they can muster running to the wharf, a pied swarm of redcoated soldiers & yellow slop-coated canaries, a moving motley of terror, seeking protection under the piers, in the water, returning to the sea to escape the infernal heat, & all who are not yet dead wishing themselves so.

  They run over earth scorching; they run past carts, barrels, half-built ships, jetties & even men self-combusting & exploding into fireballs, breath sucked out as flame before they can even scream their final agony; they run away from flame swirling in whirlpools of fire writhing up a hundred yards up into the sky; they curse & hate & run from that flame falling back down from the heavens in a yellow & blue & red storm with one thought inescapable: run!

  V

  BUT IF FOR a moment you dare pause to pant for breath, spare a thought for Billy Gould in his miserable cell. He couldn’t run. Because you may suppose that all those prisoners locked up in solitary cells would have been released in order that they might also escape the conflagration. And in this you would be entirely wrong. Our guard had retreated to beneath the jetty, refusing to open our cell doors without an order from Pobjoy, & Pobjoy—for reasons I intend to explain—had been summoned to the settlement shortly before it turned into a complete inferno & was, though none of us yet knew it, never to return.

  Left to roast in my cell, biting smoke so thick that it had become a rancid grease down my throat, eyes watering so wild that were I painting I would have been able to moisten my brush with my tears, I could only make myself feel better by dwelling upon the fortunes of one in an even more wretched state than me, the only other person on the island who wasn’t running either, not because like me he couldn’t, but because he wouldn’t.

  The Commandant was sitting up on the sofa on which he had for a time laid after he had abandoned the smouldering ruins of his cell & taken refuge in his palace, one of the last buildings still standing on the island. He felt the wet, Huon pine-oil scented towel peel off his mask & he resumed watching with unwearying pleasure the magnificent spectacle of his palace which had now also begun burning. He coughed. A few threads of blood ran in red rills over his black lips & onto his smudged mask.

  Those few left around him offered every form of succour & consolation, telling him false news of successes in holding the fire back & serving cups of cold sassafras tea to cleanse his lips & soothe his consumptive-cough scoured throat, all of which only served to reinforce in him the sense of how utterly distant & ignorant they were of him & his true nature.

  For in truth nothing had given him greate
r happiness since the time he had first met the Mulatto. He felt a great glee as burning roofs began caving in, waterfalls of flame. Then, as everything he had struggled & fought & killed for was gobbled up in front of his eyes by fire, he felt his glee transform into a great tranquillity; as into flame dissolved the unbearable weight of inanimate objects that had become a massive anchor chaining him for so long to a person—the Commandant—he no longer wished to be; to a place—Sarah Island—that he had at first endured only because there was nowhere else in the world in which he might remain safe & free; to a life—his own—which he now recognised as patently absurd.

  The drawing room where he had received foreign dignitaries, the ballroom where the great parties & orgies had been held, where he had hidden behind the long green curtains of Japanese silk waiting to grab the Mulatto & take her there & then, the Great Hall of National History with its many full-length portraits I had painted of him as a Noble Sage, National Hero, Ancient Philosopher, Modern Saviour, Roman Emperor, & Napoleonic Liberator upon rearing white stallion, all now crackled & blistered & flared into flame, & as the canvas bowed outward with the intense heat, the figures ballooned as if suddenly animated & finally freed from their exile on those distant walls & able to escape with their maddened vanities & cracking desires into smoke.

  Into those flames he now let fall an eight-month-old letter he had just received from Thomas De Quincey. The writer was grief-stricken: Miss Anne had disappeared & he feared greatly for her safety.

  He had had an opium-inspired dream: ‘At a distance,’ wrote he,

  as a stain upon the horizon were visible the domes and cupolas of a great city—an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone, and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman; and I looked; and it was—Miss Anne! Her looks were tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of expression; and now I gazed upon her with some awe, but suddenly her countenance grew dim, and, turning to the mountains, I perceived vapours rolling between us; in a moment, all had vanished; thick darkness came on; and in the twinkling of an eye, I was far away …

  Try as he might, the Commandant, who understood the curse of wishing to please an audience, felt De Quincey could not write without sounding as if he longed to hear the salon politely applauding his artifice as on & on the London literato drearily drummed, writing that he could not find her, that only rumours remained—that she was dead, worse yet, that she had never even existed but was only a character out of a modern novel of whom the novelist had tired & had made emigrate to the colonies. Had he, her beloved brother, perhaps seen her there?

  But the Commandant’s tears could not hide from his blurring vision what was so obvious: that De Quincey’s hand & Miss Anne’s were identical.

  His sister revealed as fake as her brother, his nation ash, the Commandant threw away his scented towel & inhaled so deeply of that great tumbling acridity of fumes that he found himself retching. The notion of a golden age to come, of a fall only just hidden, of a utopia desecrated, of a Hell that could be obliterated only by a determined amnesia, all this he finally smelt in the smoke of his burning palace as the folly of those who cannot accept life.

  He was gripped by the sensation that he was awakening, not from a dream but its fearful, terrifying inverse, waking from reality to the sense that all life, properly understood, is a savage dream in which one is shuffled about, taken by the tides & winds & the know ledge—constantly in danger of being lost—that one is only ever an awestruck witness to everyday wonder.

  He thought—don’t exasperate me by asking how Billy Gould knew what he thought, for if it isn’t obvious by now that he knew much more than he ever let on, it never will be—he thought several banal things, which I reproduce in no particular order.

  —There is no Europe worth replicating, no wisdom beyond the flames consuming my palace. There is only this life we know in all its wondrous dirt & filth & splendour.

  —The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or sorrow or wonder than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.

  —I have lived a life of meaninglessness for this one moment of meaning & these things which I now know, & the knowing of which will flee my mind & heart as abruptly as they have entered.

  He wondered if even the perfumer Chardin would be capable of filling Voltaire’s head with the aroma of such pungent enlightenment?

  And he thought he knew all these things fully & completely, & he felt it as grace, the consummation of an otherwise entirely pointless life. Then he knew that his thinking was a final useless vanity & that like his palace, his thoughts were disappearing into the smoke, & he was left holding a cup of sassafras tea growing eerily warm.

  When the burning roof of the palace collapsed into charring timber beams cracking & flames shrieking, the smoke-hazed sky above the Commandant’s terrified eyes began darkening with thousands upon thousands of moonbirds returning to their sand-dune burrows. With the force of premonition the Commandant knew he was about to be enveloped by the night.

  Thinking:

  I have been everything, only to discover everything is nothing.

  Guessing:

  The rest is silence.

  His cup of sassafras tea began boiling in his hand & even before he had dropped it in pain he sensed with horror his gold mask similarly heating & then running like treacle, & too late smelt it scorching his flesh, felt it searing his skin, & he suddenly screamed for he knew the mask was melting into his face, fixing forever his image in that of somebody who was not him but had now become so.

  Alone in his palace knowing now that His Destiny & that of His Nation were one & the same, the screech of the fire the only sound now echoing up & down the lonely ash-defined corridors & was it his lungs or was it the fire or was it his destiny calling slap-slap-slap even now, calling him on, was it his own breath rasping brady-brady-brady or was it the shriek of the fire lurching, leaping, flying ever closer, was it the same nightmare of the sea rising & rising & rising, & brady-brady-brady coming ever closer & closer & the flames of Hell ever hotter …

  VI

  IN THE END lucidity returned. As the Commandant lay haemorrhaging on that bloody quarterdeck of the black ship, it was as he had long feared: he was immortal. He would not transform into a whale as some of his putative murderers later had it, but he would return to the sea whence he had come.

  Earlier, when bound in a filthy calico strait-jacket he was frogmarched by a large detachment of hand-picked soldiers through the dying flames & still glowing beams of what had been his palace, all who saw him through the coiling smoke knew that the writhing blubbering dwarf was not to be confused with the tyrannical visionary who had been our leader for so long.

  It was not possible that this screeching simpleton—with the putrid stains in his pants where he had pissed & shat himself, with the frothy black mercury dribble flying from his whirling head; whose face like a raw beefsteak was hideously wounded from where the soldiers had with pliers pulled out the melted gold of his mask—could be mistaken for our feared & glorious patriarch who had once transformed ships into clouds before our eyes & invited us to take flight with him, who had changed, as he had assuredly told us, a penal colony into a new Venice.

  Long before then & the coup d’etat led by Musha Pug, the signs of decay were already there for the alert to notice. Fungi was breaking up through the paving, ferns sprouting out of walls, blackwood seedlings dangling from spouts; but at first only a few had been prepared to acknowledge that all that vanity of activity, that glorious carnival of commerce, had been an illusion, a theatre of mercantile triumph to hide the despair of the island from its sorry inhabitants.

  Yet in the months preceding his grab for power Musha Pug—pendulous ball bag swaying back & forth—chose to see none of it. He was to be seen h
obbling everywhere, all over the island like some treacherous three-legged monster, whispering words of conspiracy & retribution, making duplicitous promises of the spoils of future power shared, as he set about assembling in the second floor of the windmill a secret armoury of modern American armaments & several dozen barrels of Chinese gunpowder, along with the two hundred & forty redundant mah-jong sets already stored there.

  But all that Musha Pug coveted was already crumbling. In the summer before the fire a destiny that did now seem inescapable once more asserted itself, as the devils & feral pigs took to wandering through the empty warehouses & the possums to nesting in the lofts of the clerks’ & actuaries’ rooms & eating their gold-brocaded purple curtains. As the bollards up & down the vast empty wharf were rusting from having no ropes winding back & forth to polish them, the slime of rotting geranium petals was underfoot everywhere, the scent of pink dissolving into brown, the carnal transforming into the faecal.

  Shit, thought the Commandant when the men he derided as traitorous mutineers had surrounded him & ordered him on pain of death to surrender, It’s all gone to shit. But said he nothing, & instead held up his hands in acknowledgment of the silence of an undeniable solitude that was returning forever.

  They had the Commandant sit down, & at bayonet point sign several confessions, all of which were untrue & none of which came close in their litany of criminal intent to the Commandant’s real achievement, but he understood Authority’s need for order & signed anyway, for the files were God’s joke on memory, the only understanding of today that would remain tomorrow.

  ‘History, the cruellest of goddesses,’ said the Commandant, handing the quill back after condemning himself in the name of several fictions that surprised him only in their banality, ‘rides her chariot over the corpses of the slain.’