Gould's Book of Fish

by Richard Flanagan

  Jorgen Jorgensen was, like everything else in the Registry, monochrome & chill. Criss-crossing his grey skin were white lines taking many different forms: a line of white foam creasing that crooked mouth, long wisps of his white hair hanging at odd angles across his lolling head like broken spider webs.

  ‘Doomed,’ continued he, savouring the word, ‘to suffer torment for all eternity.’

  Jorgen Jorgensen didn’t make a good God: for one thing he didn’t have the beard, only that wretched moustache with half last night’s skilly hanging off it in congealed dew drops. For another he smelt of rotting offal, & God who is everything isn’t really, because other wise He would be every bad smell in the world as well as Daffodils, Love, Sunrises etc, etc. But God seemed a role Jorgensen wished to play, for having created the world anew, he now seemed determined to do some pearly gate pronouncements, the first of which was that I had to die.

  Ever since the poorhouse priest told me it was only God’s Love that made him wish to rub my feet so, I have been of the opinion that even if you accept that something is God’s Will it doesn’t mean you have to agree with it. You can, for example, accept that it is God’s Will that it is raining, but that doesn’t mean you continue standing in the rain. And so on. And while I accepted Jorgensen’s argument that my miserable skin really didn’t deserve anything other than the most miserable death, I didn’t agree that I ought die there & then. And so, when he suddenly leapt at me with a strength & agility out of all proportion to his wretched body & age, rusty sword unsheathed & aiming straight at my heart, I jumped out of his way, knocking over my candle on the floor as I did so.

  The candle extinguished, I ran to hide behind a bookcase, but the old Dane knew his maze of books better than a rat its nest. Before I even smelt that odour of decomposing liver, I felt the cold flat of his sword upon my neck.

  ‘Like Dante’s Adamo de Brescia who forged the Florentine florin,’ hissed he, ‘your body will balloon like a mandolin with the dropsical torment, in the dark, stench pit of the circle of Malebolge in Hades!’

  As his language grew more purple, his gummy mouth filled with foamy spittle as if all his adjectives were aerating the froth collecting about his lips. He pressed the flat of his sword harder against my neck & I began to choke. I was shaking so uncontrollably that the bookcase against which I leant also began to tremble. On the uneven floor the rough-made cabinet rocked awkwardly, its balance, I could feel through my body, at best precarious.

  The old Dane shoved up against me, communicating his vision of my future Hell not only with mere words but in the dribbly froth which accompanied them & blew in a spume over my face.

  ‘You will be afflicted by thirst & loathsome diseases,’ sprayed he. ‘You will be but one of an infinite parade of the broken dead, another mutilated shade, condemned to live amidst the sickening stench of putrid flesh, all you falsifiers covered in loathsome scabs & each other’s sloughing flesh.’

  With these words he gave the flat of the sword a good shove. Its corroded edge drew a thin, broken line of blood across my neck. As he pushed the sword harder yet, one of my vomit-slimed feet slipped backwards. Unable to keep balance, I slid with it, my lower back whacking into that unsteady bookcase, its dead weight giving way to the momentary possibility of a pivot. I thought of Twopenny Sal’s circles, of her rump rising, but it would be wrong to credit what I then did with the dignity of the word idea.

  With all the might left me, I shoved my arse as hard as buggery into that wobbling edifice of a bookcase.

  The book-scorpion must have heard something—perhaps a sharp creak of timber or a dull thump of one volume falling back domino fashion onto another—for suddenly he looked upwards. I don’t know if he saw the bookcase staggering but, in such quick succession that it was almost a single movement rather than three, he glanced upwards, took a short step backwards, then tripped on his own feet. Losing his balance, he fell just as the first books began dropping earthwards.

  My last sight was of him uselessly trying to parry with his sword those huge tomes that now were falling upon him heavy as boulders, ubiquitous as rain, dreadful as an avalanche. As those volumes now bore down on Jorgen Jorgensen I heard him shrieking how nothing held, not even books.

  But then I could hear no more for I was far back in a cavern of collapsing books, arse up & head down, concentrating all of what little strength I had in levering the bookcase further up my back. Being close to its base should have meant that the falling books & shelves, having no great distance to fall, would only hurt rather than severely injure me. But then a shelf from higher up was arcing out crazily & swinging wildly toward me.

  I never felt it hit.

  For I was bracing failing falling not knowing if I could any longer live under the great weight of so many words.

  IX

  I HEARD THE noises of morning: muster-call, chickens scuffling, the distant, happy cries of the homicide Castlereagh. Yet everything around me remained in darkness. How long I had been in that darkness I had no idea. My mind felt fogged, & so heavy that for a moment I panicked, thinking my head, severed but still conscious, was lolling in a barrel bound for England.

  When I felt a book splayed over my face, the heavy corners of other books sticking in my ribs & belly, my chest enshrouded in the formidable weight of unopened books I knew my head & I must still be one. I smelt parchment, vellum, sour sweat, the decaying kidney scent of Jorgensen. There was a dull heavy pain in my lower back that I took to be a corner of the bookcase resting on my body. Beyond, names were being yelled & answered. I heard the dull chip & chuck of the chain gangs’ fetters as they set off for work. The curses of the sawyers, the bark of constables.

  But no-one seemed to hear or notice me when I sneezed several times from the insufferable amount of dust in the paper which wrapped around me.

  I took stock of my situation.

  I heard. I smelt. But I saw nothing.

  This immense weight of inanimate matter that seemed to be so important to Jorgensen was for me a smothering blindfold I needed to be freed of. I feared it, the way it would kill me if I did not find a way to escape it. I felt I might at any moment start screaming uncontrollably from the wretched closeness of it all. Worse than any jagged basils, these books followed my every movement, mocking me, seeking to smother me even more effectively as I writhed first this way & then that. Less than easily, I slid & pushed, until I dragged myself backwards out of that darkness.

  I felt sick, light-headed. Above the fallen bookcase that sweet peculiar scent of the oil of fresh blackwood rose from broken & shattered shelves. I managed to stand up.

  And then at the far end of the bookcase I saw a black puddle. I staggered toward it, clambering over the rubble of fallen books & smashed timbers. The puddle was congealing blood, dust-scummed & creased with strands of hair that led down beneath a large book.

  I pulled the book back.

  One eye of the old Dane’s dangled from its bloodied socket, forced out by some blow of a book corner or a shelf edge. His sword had partly skewered a raggedy old volume which, on closer inspection, turned out to be Pliny’s Natural History. I wondered if he were really dead, or just in a state of grace like Saint Christina the Astonishing who, after a fit, appeared dead only to then fly from her coffin to the rafters in the middle of a Requiem mass. But there was nothing of grace about what I could see. I shoved the old Dane’s body & then his head with my foot, kicked it a few times, but it was already stiffening.

  I looked at him a long time.

  I don’t know how long.

  After a great time or a short time, an infinity or a few seconds, I went through his pockets. What began as a dim inventory of rubbish did produce a few useful items—two broken quills, one pen knife, some black bread of the good quality that was baked for the officers & was thus unadulterated with sawdust & mud, spectacles (one lens broken), & a gold ring. Sewn into his coat’s collar I found a dozen Bengal dollars that were later to prove invaluable.

&nb
sp; An intense blue light seemed to pulse within the wrinkled folds of his neck. Old Gould had taught me blue was the feminine colour, the most expensive of pigments with which the great painters of the Renaissance had decorated the Virgin Mary’s mantle, how ultramarine was so called because it had to be imported from the Middle East—from beyond the sea.

  But the distance I had to travel was far less. I only had to reach down, wrench that lapis lazuli necklace from the chook-flaps of his neck, & that very day grind that bright blue stone with rocks to make the powder for the ultramarine ink with which I now rightly write this tale of cold death. Blue speaks of the morning, of the sky & of the sea. Yet as the fish with their crossweaving of colour had taught me, contained in every colour is its opposite, & blue is also the colour of sorrow & anguish & lewdness. And in front of me that hot summer morning slowly turning that same cursed colour, covered in a growing number of flies, was a corpse which, if I didn’t do something about it, would see me implicated with a second murder.

  Death is such a simple matter, yet as Castlereagh’s turd taught me, it can have unforeseen consequences, all of which I was keen to avoid. I dragged the once-King of Iceland’s body over to the circular desk, kicked aside an empty schnapps bottle, pulled back my makeshift trap door, & pushing the corpse through a puddle of vomited Europe let it fall into my world below.

  It was a stupid thing to do, but having done it, there was no turning back. Now, at low tide I hide the corpse behind the cell door along with the broken timber & debris from the partial collapse of my ceiling. At high tide we simply drift around together.

  In so many ways a corpse is the negative image of the living man; in so many ways I have discovered it is preferable to the man who once inhabited that collapsing stretch of flesh. Where Jorgen Jorgensen tried to make this world conform to his desires, his corpse the King—freed from the subordination of the brand of the Commandant’s mask that fell away along with the rest of his skin—is the very model of Occidental acceptance. While Jorgen Jorgensen wished to tell posterity what he thought, the King is content to ponder the thin soup of my ramblings.

  There is much about the King’s subsequent company which, as I have detailed, has come to help fill my emptiness here & which I have come to admire. Without him & his encouragement, I would, for example, never have made such progress with this book of fish. He never criticised my efforts, belittled my ambitions, attacked the poverty of style. It was an attitude of benign neglect, & I firmly believe my writing has prospered in consequence.

  But at first, with his milky eye & drawn cheeks & beard & nails still growing, Jorgen Jorgensen’s corpse was—I must admit—disturbing. Later, as he bloated with death gas, as his body grew black, then green & slimy, as his flesh began to slough off his now elephantine form in greasy, putrid rags, his stinking balloon corpse would bump into me as we floated around.

  In disgust I would with shuddering hands seek to push him away, only for my hands, as if by magic, to pass through his grossly swollen, rotting flesh until hitting the last firm thing left of the King: his bone—the bone of his arms or legs, the bone of his rib cage or skull. I recalled the King’s final words to me that night in the Registry, about the dropsical sufferings I as a counterfeiter would suffer in my Dantesque inferno, & yet here swimming about me was the bloating corpse of the true counterfeiter, his last kingdom my cell, now his circle of Hell.

  X

  THE NEXT NIGHT I returned to the Registry. The day had passed exceedingly hot & even late in the evening the room was clammy, its air thick & close. Everything was as I had left it: the fallen bookcase, the smashed shelves, the books scattered & splayed in odd positions & raggedy heaps. The Registry—being the domain of the old Dane—had not been visited, no-one daring enter during the day, nor would they, I realised, until his absence was noticed, which might be several days. I picked up the book that had lain across the old Dane’s face—its corner darkly bloodied from where it had gored his eyeball out—to see what, if anything, it might have to say on the matter of unmeditated murder.

  It was a large & elegant folio, only very recently published. Embossed across the front, in gold Gothic lettering, was the title—

  CRANIA TASMANIAE

  Sir Cosmo Wheeler

  I opened the book, & read inside the inscription:

  To Toby Lempriere

  From your Fellow Foot-soldier in Science—

  Cosmo Wheeler K. C. B.

  There were several cuttings of reviews inside the cover taken from learned journals, all effusive, one praising Crania Tasmaniae as Wheeler’s magnum opus, another hailing Wheeler as the British Blumenbach, noting—

  … that while that great Prussian craniometrist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, has established beyond doubt the existence of a European race he terms ‘Caucasian’ separate from the other four human races, his theory of Caucasian superiority to the other races has—until the seminal publication of Crania Tasmaniae—been more bold Teutonic assertion than proven scientifick fact.

  The corollary of Blumenbach’s skull from the Caucasus region, which he considers displays in its shape and form the finest features of the human race, and has led him to give the European race the appellation ‘Caucasian’ in its honour, is Sir Cosmo Wheeler’s Negroid skull from Van Diemen’s Land, known only as MH-36, in which the degenerate and …

  In my astonishment I had let the cutting fall out of my sweating fingers to the floor. Beneath where it had lain was a review which declared—

  A propensity to undue and excessive animal passion of the sexual variety, amativeness is most readily apparent by the way this decadent energy over a lifetime voids a space larger than normal on either side of the skull (to the retardation of all other cerebral growth) between the mastoids, immediately betwixt the ear and the base of the occipital bone. Sir Cosmo Wheeler rightly describes MH-36 as possessing ‘the Great Southern Land of amative cavities, a dark lacuna of monumental proportions awaiting further scientifick exploration’.

  Which seemed cruel irony when I pondered the sorry fate of the Surgeon’s penis. The last review I read before throwing the rest away was definite in its opinion that—

  … one only has to look at the hideous depravity, the ovine set, and the generally regressive shape of skull MH-36 to understand why Crania Tasmaniae is one of the great scientifick achievements of our age.

  Wheeler proves beyond doubt the Tasmanian negro is of an entirely separate species, one possibly even more barbarous than the New Hollanders, approaching the mere animal.

  The marks of mental inferiority and racial degeneration are everywhere evident in the corrupted cranial features so splendidly illustrated in the book, and generally lends weight to the growing body of scientifick knowledge that such a wretched, if fascinating, species must have been created separately from European man. Its origins are therefore not in the Garden of Eden, but outside of it, with all the spiritual, moral and utilitarian consequences this therefore brings into modern human affairs.

  I leafed through the book, tearing its uncut pages with my index finger as I went. There were many intricate etchings of the Van Diemonian native skulls, wonderful well done. None though were more finely realised than the several pages devoted specifickally to different, detailed views of that seminal skull, MH-36, in which the skull multiplied endlessly in top-down, bottom-up & side-on images. Such reverential devotion put me in mind of Saint Agapitus, no fewer than five perfectly preserved skulls of whom are venerated through the Italian peninsula.

  Accompanying the book were two letters, both addressed to Mr Lempriere. The first, bearing the intact seal of the Royal Society, informed Mr Lempriere that in recognition of his assiduity & perseverance in his collection of natural history specimens, the society had decided to award him a Commendation.

  The second was a personal letter from Sir Cosmo Wheeler in which the great phrenologist of our age assured his dear friend that he had fought hard within the Society for membership to be given Lempriere. He had told
his colleagues how critically important his disciple’s collection of skulls had been; of how, in particular, the skull marked MH-36 had proved conclusively what Sir Cosmo had long believed. More clearly than any other skull he had ever examined, this particular cranium demonstrated the moral deficiency, the reduced cranial capacity, & the regressive nature of the Tasmanian negro race that would ultimately assure its destruction, irrespective of the arrival of the civilised & advanced European.

  Yet, sadly he had to report that fine work, like fine words, butter no parsnips, & his proposal for Lempriere’s admission had been defeated by the more general will of the Society. Nevertheless, continued Sir Cosmo, a commendation from a body of such prestige was not to be sniffed at, & would, no doubt, serve as a vital stepping stone to his ultimate goal of membership.

  In the meantime had he considered collecting eggs? Bowdler-Sharpe was hopelessly inadequate, & Sir Cosmo was contemplating a comparative study of eggs of the Old & New World, & wondered if Toby might be interested in being part of this great collective endeavour?

  XI

  I FELT MYSELF slowly suffocating, as though pages as large as houses were falling upon me, pressing in upon me as if I were only a flower to be desiccated & preserved through flattening; as though a book as vast as the sky were wrapping around my humbled form, soon to close forever.

  Men’s lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.