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

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘Slow,’ replied his guard to the Commandant’s subsequent polite query as to the manner of his death on the black ship as it sailed out of Hells Gates into a wild sea to there throw him into the deep, because they had to, there was no choice. The story was so mad, the crime so immense, the culpability of so many others at stake, for they had believed him & backed him & everyone was guilty & it was better a prophet die than his followers be punished. ‘Not only because we have to,’ said the sailor smiling, such a gentle, pretty mouth he had, ‘but because there is a pleasure to be had in it also.’

  In the end it was as the Commandant had long suspected: so that he might make no mistake as to the pattern of cause & effect & understand life is stupidly linear instead of mysteriously circular, on Marshal Musha’s express orders (as the former constable now styled himself) they gelded him & had him pound his own balls to a mince with a hammer, & then failed to rip the first knife up his brisket & had to get a cooper’s saw to finish the job so that they might wrest his heart out & wave it about, crying out in glee—

  ‘You heartless bastard!—& who gave you this?’

  —& none read the name of the Mulatto that was inscribed upon it so bold & clear so that all might see, none saw that the fatty heart was her, & that it was also hers forever & ever, they just laughed & laughed. But there were some in that carnival that day who were silent, not from pity or fear, but from wonder, for he was human & though he was monstrous what had made him so & what was it that separated them from him?

  He wished to tell that finally he knew the answer to the question that had for so long haunted him. The search for power, he concluded in his last remaining moments of clarity, was the saddest expression of all, of an absence of love, worse yet, of the capacity to love. He wished to cry out, I am imprisoned in the solitude of my love! To yell, See, see, that is all there is & I didn’t see it! And indeed, he was not entirely sure that he hadn’t done so, for his torturers first jumped backwards when a low moan came from his mouth, but then cried in glee upon deciding that this was just the final passage of some wind from the lungs being forced by the partial disembowelling that continued on the vinegared quarterdeck for a few more minutes yet.

  VII

  AT THAT SAME moment the Commandant was metamorphosing into a cetacean legend, Pobjoy, red-faced from more than just the growing heat, stood outside the windmill—as the headquarters of the coup d’etat, one of the few buildings still being adequately defended against the fire—beset by terror. He had a few days earlier sold Marshal Musha an authentic Constable—my very last work—for a considerable number of Bengal dollars. While being hung, there had been discovered on the back of the canvas a painting of a silver dory & Marshal Musha quickly guessed the nature & origin of the deception.

  Inside his windmill, emboldened by the ease with which he had taken power without resort to any of the considerable firepower he had murderously assembled in the floor above him, Marshal Musha had spent the last hour angrily shouting at his new minions that he was much too absorbed in affairs of state to talk, while compiling a list of possible new titles for himself.

  The title Marshal Musha had a barracks room familiarity he had first liked, but which now worried him. The Commandant’s folly was to think you could turn a penal colony into a nation, whereas it was clear as day to Musha Pug that it would be far more successful as a company. He had crossed out the words The Supreme, The First Consul, His Bunefience (the spelling of which had taxed him considerably) and was circling The Chairman when Pobjoy was marched in to see him.

  Wishing to impress on all present that time was money Marshal Musha stood up, went over to the wall where the convict-Constable hung, & before the gaoler’s eyes ripped the canvas out of the frame & screwed it up. He threw the balled canvas at Pobjoy’s feet & demanded double the sum he had paid for it by the following morning or Pobjoy would face a fate worse than that which was shortly to befall the wretched painter Gould. And with that, the interview was over.

  After Pobjoy left, Marshal Musha ordered a detachment of guards make haste to the other side of the island & halt the execution of William Buelow Gould. Whatever a forged Constable was worth on Sarah Island, it was worth a great deal more in London. The Commandant’s crime was to dream too much, thought Marshal Musha, Pobjoy’s to dream too little. He, however, was determined to pursue a strictly mercantile line of moderate extortion, that had proven so successful with the likes of Clucas.

  Outside Pobjoy let the crumpled canvas drop from his hands into the ash that now covered everything. In that ash a smouldering ember burnt a red hole into the canvas ball. Pobjoy spat in the palms of his hands. Reflecting that if he had lost a painting he had at least gained a pig, he took hold of the handles of the cart to which Castlereagh was strapped. As he grunted with the effort of lifting, he contemplated his successful theft of Castlereagh from his pen a short half hour earlier in the tumult of fire & mutiny, & never saw the swirl of angry hot wind that picked up the canvas ball at his feet & threw it dancing in the air.

  In my mind I can see the fish, the pig, the Pobjoy: in short, the whole calamity. There he goes now, & oh Lord look at him heading back up the Boulevard of Destiny away from the windmill, bowed & sweating & puffing & going green with all the unaccustomed effort, a wilting asparagus stick of a man pushing the firmly trussed & somewhat awkwardly tied down monster of a pig in a handcart unequal to its load, & both the pig & the Pobjoy entirely unaware that behind them the air gusting around the canvas ball has turned that glowing red hole into a flame.

  Please don’t ask how I know such things, please: where fish are concerned I know everything—or as good as—& besides, it’s rude to interrupt when I am in the middle of telling you how that sorry crumpled dory began to flare up, transforming into a larger fireball, & how that growing fireball then leapt with the wind in all its fiery splendour, dancing up to the windmill’s second floor & through a window into the Chairman’s secret armoury, there to fall into the middle of some several dozen kegs of gunpowder.

  VIII

  I HEARD A massive boom.

  I felt the air & earth pulse as if they were living swaying fancies.

  What seemed a lifetime later, but which can have been no more than a second or two thereafter, came gasps from those who, unlike me, were able to witness the spectacular sight of a static world in sudden & complete majestick motion—here the Commandant’s locomotive leaping heavenwards in roaring fragments; there carriages skyrocketing toward the stars like sticks for a dog; everywhere huge iron wheels flying like flattened cannonballs; plaster busts of Cicero & splinters of the Registry shelves; opened books flapping like dying birds; as well walls—pictures & mirrors still attached—billowing into the sky like sheets of paper tumbling in the wind; bowed bodies already limp impaled variously on pokers, banisters, chair legs & jagged floor joists rising like oddly-skewered autumn leaves toward the savage red sun; thousands of shreds of Miss Anne’s letters singing Europe into being exploding into a thousand atonal notes & Marshal Musha’s final scream atomising into as many particles as his exploding ball bag.

  The sun was growing ever greater in size & redder in colour until it was a monstrous bloody sphere the precise outline of which disappeared into that dark catastrophe of memories; & lost within it forever Brady & his great liberating army, ham hocks, Pliny’s wonder, our hopes, the Commandant’s vision of the Nation, letters of love, mah-jong pieces, the republic of dreams, pork knuckles & pieces of Pobjoy.

  But in my cell how was I to know that others would rebuild the island, rewrite its histories, & condemn us all once more? For all that I could feel when I put my hand out through those bars was the gentlest of heavy black rains falling upon the land, all that I could see was our collective vanities returning to us now as so much ash, & what I could never know was that speckling the smoking sea was an exploded image of the one responsible for this final apocalypse: the charred remains of the silver dory.

  IX

  CAST-IRON COLLARS,
chains & spiked basils, the smell of men’s dying souls & living bodies, along with the true humour of suffering, the wondrous truth of contempt, the glorious freedom of neglect, the inarticulable fear of many fish & my unrequited love for them: these things I have known & will never know again. I was hurt by this world into making my soul transparent for all to see as words & pictures, but I was allowed to do it unbeholden & undazzled by anything other than that same shivering naked soul.

  If my painting of such things had made me famous I would have known otherwise: I would have been courted, flattered, lied to, my preposterous opinions deemed significant, my paltry presence a blessing, my flap-dragon face attractive. The falsehood of honour, the po-faced seriousness of success, the prison of reputation; men wanting to cover my eyes with raining gold & women wishing to lie with me; all solicitous of my company or failing that the smallest token of my esteem, a sketch, a note, a hint of acknowledgment. All would have been mine. All mine & more than that mine & my name more than my work. My work would mean less & less, most particularly to myself. I would wish myself dead.

  For many years I have been painting fish, & it is true that latterly I have been unfaithful. I abandoned them & I burnt them, but I never stopped loving them, I was like Voltaire who loved Madame du Chatelet so much that he was then able to run off with a whole host of other women, until finally she had a brief affair that resulted in her falling pregnant. Too late Voltaire realised what he risked losing, & returned to witness his great love dying in childbirth—which is why, after causing such misery, it was only right & proper he ended up an empty-headed perfume bottle used to bring women to pleasure ever after.

  Outside the world glows red. Inside, with brown ink made from the last, most desperate of expedients—a slurry composed of spittle and a projectile normally reserved for the pleasure of Pobjoy—I now set down the final hours of both the settlement & myself in the convict’s true ink, his poor man’s umber that he uses to smear his protest, his rage and hate and fear of this shitty world, with shitty hands in shitty washes over cell walls in the hope he hopes not forlorn—that love will still at this last bid find him if he can but dig deep enough into his own decay.

  Billy Gould, he would rather words & the remaining sheets of Pobjoy’s paper, but it amounts to much the same thing: read his daubings how you will—an excuse for another hiding, as Pobjoy would see it; raging against the night, as a criticaster might have it; testament of belief, if you like; or, as he prefers, a confession of failure.

  For many years I have been painting fish, & I would have to say that what once was an imposition—what started out as an order, became a cosy push then a criminal act—is now my love. At first, I tried, in spite of my artistick shortcomings, to create a record of this place, a history of its people & its stories, & all of it was to be fish. At the beginning it was to be every last one of them, all those faceless people who have no portraits, who only exist beyond their bodies as a sentence of exile, a convict indent record, a list of floggings, a tattooed initial on a fellow felon’s chest or arms, gunpowder blue & hair-forested; a penny love token hanging around a heavy wrinkled neck recalled as a young woman’s firm, sweet flesh; a memory fading quicker than hope.

  I fancied I would paint fish finer than anyone in history; that Rembrandt van Rijn or Rubens or any Renaissance flashman would not hold a candle to Billy Gould, that my fish would be hung in the finest homes, the detail of the scale & gill praised by generations of periwigged professors.

  I would fill a great London gallery with these transmuted images, so that people who came to view my paintings would soon find themselves swimming in a strange ocean they could not recognise, & they would feel a Great Sorrow about who they were & a Great Love for who they were not & it would all be mixed up & all clear at the same time, & they would never be able to explain any of it to anybody.

  Then I came to see such was vanity. Far from caring whether they were hung, I no longer even cared whether my paintings were accurate or right in the way that the Surgeon & his Linnaean books of scientifick description wished paintings of fish to be accurate or right. I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything. But because I could not paint everything, because I could only paint fish & my love & because I could not even do that very well, you may not think it much of a story.

  I grew older. My patron became a pig. I was condemned to death. We set the world aglow. I realised it was not fish I was trying to net, but water, that it was the very sea itself, & in the way nets cannot hold water, nor could I paint the sea.

  Still, I continued making this Book of Fish because I could not laugh it or dance it like Twopenny Sal might have, because I could not swim it & live it like my subjects had, because this most inadequate form of communication—these images & words falling stillborn from my brush & quill—was all I was capable of realising.

  Yet my paintings were—as the Surgeon on the first day instructed me—to be of Life, not Death. I was to understand the manner of their movement of fin & flesh & gills to make the most accurate studies possible, & every time they were about to expire on the table, I was to toss them back in a tub of seawater in order to revive them so that they, like me, might maintain the terse stretch of life a little longer.

  I wanted to tell a story of love as I slowly killed those fish, & it didn’t seem right that I was slowly killing fish in order to tell such a story, & I found myself beginning to talk to the dying fish as their movements grew sluggardly, as their brains slowly ceased working from lack of oxygen.

  I told them all about me, about being a bad bastard who forged himself anew as a worse painter, but a painter nevertheless. I wanted to tell a story of love as I slowly killed those fish, & I told them how my paintings were not meant for Science or Art, but for people, to make people laugh, to make people think, to give people company & give them hope & remind them of those they had loved & those who loved them yet, beyond the ocean, beyond death, how it seemed when I was painting important to paint that way.

  But such things weren’t what people wanted in paintings, they wanted their animals dead & their wives dead, they wanted something that helped them to classify & judge & keep the dead animals & dead wives & soon-to-die children in their place inside the prison of the frame, & this business of smuggling hope might make them wonder, might be the axe that smashed the frozen sea within, might make the dead wake & swim free. And that wasn’t a painting worth twopence, but something more criminal than stealing.

  I gulled myself with the hope that this death I imposed on each fish I painted might be a moment of profound release for them, something they might look forward to as I now looked forward to the gallows as a blessed release.

  But the truth was that the fish sensed that I was dying too, that I was with each passing day finding it harder to breathe the air of that fetid settlement, that dense, smoky pall of oppression & degradation & subjugation. My movements too were growing sluggardly, my skin was also burning & my eyes dulling, & we all knew that the fish that had for so long been the object of my rapture were soon to have their revenge.

  THE WEEDY SEADRAGON

  Which treats of Brady’s tragic death—A short battle—A dramatick escape from the gallows—On the company of fish—Lost at sea—The island of forgetting—Thoughts of heresy—The return of Mr Hung—A capture imminent.

  I

  MY TRAGEDY WAS that I became a fish. Brady’s tragedy was that he didn’t. For I am still alive & Brady is dead, I know he is dead, as I too feasted on his headless corpse (his head, unlike his life, clearly had a value to the Governor) when they threw it off Constitution Dock into the Derwent River. There was for me no magick transformation, when hair fell out & skin slowly coarsened & divided into infinite scaling, when limbs seized & twitched & grew translucent & sharp-edged as fins, no dawning sense of wonder when I began to feel the propulsive power & fine control of the long tail sprouting out beyond my arse; no sense of panic as gills erupted behind
my mouth & my need for water became something altogether more torturous & profound than can ever be described by the mere & derisive word thirst.

  I simply had spent too long in their company, staring at them, committing the near criminal folly of thinking there was something individually human about them, when the truth is that there is something irretrievably fishy about us all. One moment I was a convict forger, a Villain masquerading as an Artist, standing on the gibbet on the jetty, & the next moment I knew I had one last remaining piece of energy that I must summon. With an almighty jackknife I twisted out of the noose, glanced a jetty post, & fell from there into the sea.

  But I must be more precise.

  From the catastrophic events that had so quickly seized the island, we condemned inhabitants of the death cells & our twelve-strong guard had remained isolated. The fire had raced up the ridge immediately behind the cells; the mutineers had not sought the confidence or support of soldiers at outposts, & so we were left unburnt & unaware of the momentous events unfolding just over the hill on the other side of the island. But what with rumours variously of an invasion begun just the previous hour by the English Royal Navy, of a coup d’etat, of the Commandant’s murder & miraculous resurrection, & the huge explosion which was, according to the bedraggled & wounded survivors who were just beginning to make their way to our part of the island, the mere beginning of the Commandant’s vengeance, the small guard was nevertheless growing nervous. Their sergeant rallied them by arguing that they must continue as before or the Commandant would surely kill them, & that the first matter before them was to carry out that day’s execution.

  I had been led onto the wharf, I had climbed the gibbet, I had looked wistfully into the smoke-salmoned sky & with my blindfolded eyes I sensed that the sky was not empty but full of dead souls waving me to come join them. I had listened to none of the priest’s prayers, I had waved merry in the direction I had heard the small crowd of felons gather, obliged to watch. I had laughed with them, & I had bathed in their admiration of my white surplice with its long sleeves that fell below my hands, its splendid embroidered fish blessing my breast, its fine decorations of long bull-kelp streamers that the guards had thrown over me with derision—Hey ho, King Neptune!—& long before the others saw them, I knew that I had been condemned in a much more terrible way.