The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  Dick-a-Dick had used his share of the team’s prize monies to hire an extravagant costume for the evening, looking more Genghis Khan than Aboriginal cricketer – nothing he need learn about dramatics. As for the remainder, was it more or less to them than mere play-acting?

  Hayman felt wary of Lawrence, seated stolidly by his side. Nanny Lawrence, Good for Nothing, stared fixedly ahead; still in his almighty sulk. Bill Hayman returned his wandered attention to events onstage.

  ‘“To die,”’ rhapsodised Mr Allerton, ‘“to sleep. To sleep: perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub.”’

  Neither of the team’s guardians noticed, at the very end of their row, an emptied seat.

  ‘“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…”’

  CHAPTER XIV

  Whit Sunday, the 31st of May, 1868

  BUGARAGARA

  ‘The world is mind precipitated.’

  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’

  Mityan, Brother Moon, emerges from the Shadow Lands. Between the bars of a blue gate, Dreaming streets give way to Dreaming fields, dim borderlands lit by His pale face.

  After jogging concrete miles beyond a train journey’s many more, King Cole has arrived at the edge of the city, at least as he knows it. From here on, the stone desert should peter out, like the ash at the end of one of Bullocky’s cigarettes. Instead the hard roadway beneath his feet scrolls on, splitting as it spreads ever further out. From each dividing branch more buildings sprout forth. Every blade of grass is flattened, every tree felled. All earthen tracks are paved over. Smoke fills the air, bringing the horizon ever closer.

  Any hope of open country denied, Cole stands at a crossroads, confounded by a barren wilderness that never ends. Into this latest aberration he will not stray. Keeping within known margins, he makes his way along what the walypela markings call ‘New Road’; even before lessons with Lawrence, he could read a little.

  Weak gas lamps, posted either side at regular intervals, taper away into the darkness.

  All is silent, but it broods.

  A new sensation disturbs, something unfamiliar, the shadow of a shadow unseen. All the same he feels it there, enough to acknowledge a lurking presence – the fear that creeps beyond a campfire’s bright circle.

  Cole shudders. He catches a faint whiff of it; the burgeoning guilt a dog must feel, dragged before evidence of its crime. The same as for any yellow dingo, he cannot comprehend the misdeed, beyond that implication of wrong relayed by his remote accuser.

  This slippery notion either escapes him, or else he shakes it off.

  He recalls his parting from Sundown, and, last thing, the secret he shared. ‘Ancestor Spirits have led me here, and I must find my Way.’

  Words a melody on the tongue rattle an urgent tattoo inside his skull.

  Step for step, moving soundlessly, Cole heads south.

  Passing through a succession of inner courtyards, evil-smelling and indiscriminate in character, King Cole gains ground by degrees. Sibilant beings loiter close to each obscure entrance or exit, bodies pressed close to the sticky walls. He keeps to the middle of the pathway as it finds him.

  Looking down at his formerly smart evening-wear, foot-stinkers and jacket again discarded, he sees the shirt is smeared with grease and soot. His trousers are sodden. Cole recalls that earlier night’s incantation, and supposes it to have worked. He is now as they were, those pale and stunted spectres. The splash and reek of the streets have rendered him unremarkable. At one with his surroundings he is beneath notice, and therefore safe.

  One must first seek permission to pass through any hostile country. He should very much like to keep his kidney fat!

  Having skirted the Well of Shadows, Cole means to pick up his previous trail. Before him squats a mean red-brick building, longer than it is broad, and bordered by a thicket of trees. A low, square tower tops the church, as it seems to be, decorated with globe-like ornaments that resemble huge chess pawns.

  He looks on in wonder as the roof falls in. Through the collapsing body rises a monumental spearhead. The black tower springs up straight and true, an enormous nail, only stopping once its sharpened point has sliced through a bank of low cloud. Succeeded, the ornate old structure at its base crumbles away, until not a sign of it remains.

  A single strike of the church bell dies in the air. Not even the promise of dawn colours the night sky.

  Stairs dripping with filth lead the way down to the river, running shallow towards low tide. At their base, he crouches low over the exposed bank, close to the water’s edge. He dips nimble fingers into the nightmare sludge, repeatedly daubing the upper parts of his face, neck and breast, until caked with a fearsome ritual garb.

  King Cole stands tall in the presence of the Great Serpent, Mindeye.

  Mindeye eats up clay and spits it out again. Masked in the stinking slime that trails in His wake, His lowly follower seeks to honour and placate the great Spirit Ancestor. Cast from the mud, in His image, they are one. His scent is the same.

  Cole holds the vast body of water in awe. He stares a while across the turbid expanse – the sheer breadth of the river, in the dead of night, accentuated by its emptiness.

  On the opposite shore, the darker side, a lightless mass cleaves to the riverbanks. Likewise moulded of tidal muck, it rises from the slick silt – bricks and mortar black with the dust of coal-ships, and soot from the smoke of squat hutments there compacted – an impenetrable wall.

  Marshland this was, and always would be.

  Cole traces the progress, swift progress, of a broken bough bobbing in and out of sight among treacherous currents. The wide mud-tide flows thick and fast. Under what is again a moonless sky the river is a deadly torrent of ink. Surface taut with menace reflects nothing. It is like staring into empty space, a bottomless pit – an immense and unquenchable hunger.

  Darkness calls to darkness.

  East is the direction in which Cole is drawn, and so eastward he goes.

  Massive warehouse walls blinker his vision, affording only glimpses of the Serpent’s course. The path is wrong. He feels certain he should walk with the river on his left side, not the right.

  King Cole retraces his steps, until standing once more at the head of Pelican Stairs. He turns west. Looking back, a wavering form shimmers briefly, and disappears from view – a place he knows well drowned beneath two great waterholes. Taking this as a promising sign, Cole advances. His temples throb with foreboding. Just ahead rears an apoplectic grey tower, penitential and severe.

  He paces nearer the wall’s great curve. Dull, metallic vibration – power bound by the bleak stone circle – causes him to tremble. Cole reaches out a cautious hand, establishing contact. The presence is physical, solid and undeniable. Cracked plaster, peeling paint, meaningless slogans scrawled across the surface; the tower bears outward signs of neglect. The place, so it seems, is abandoned and ignored. He spies a doorway, partly concealed. The gate that bars the way is flimsy. Beneath layers of clogging dust and trailing broken cobweb, hangs a notice.

  Property of East London Railway Company

  KEEP OUT

  With fluid ease Cole squeezes through a broken slat, low to the ground. By the wan light he can make out, immediately to his right, a modest wooden cabin. The window-glass throws back a smeared reflection. He searches his pockets for a stray coin. This he places on the ledge of the phantom tollbooth, amongst delicate spider-spun filaments. Passing inside, he stands and waits for his eyes to adjust.

  His keen night vision gradually discerns differences in density. Within the total blackout of the tower’s interior, he senses volume and scale. High overhead, an immense domed ceiling shuts out the sky. Only a couple of paces in front, a balustrade curves away to either side. Open space yawns below.

  Cole peers over the edge into abysmal gloom. A gaping maw at least 50 feet wide eagerly waits to swallow him up. No telling how deep down into the bowels of the earth the great shaft might sink; there is no cert
ainty it even has a bottom.

  An urge to flee furiously battles the intense compulsion spurring him on. Lure eventually overcomes dread. Cole turns to one side, grips the raw-bone rail and, guts tightened, braces to launch himself into the void.

  He runs, full tilt, hollering at the top of his voice. Hysterical echoes accompany him all the way down, inexorably down.

  Twinned stairwells sweep back and forth, traversing the sunken circumference. The stone pathway splits, only to reconvene, and then once more part company – the cadence of a falling leaf.

  King Cole, swept to the bottom, slows.

  His bare feet slap onto a paved platform, a subterranean road. Colliding with a fixed length of iron track, he stumbles. His flailing hand meets with clammy plaster. The walls run cold, rivulets chill as the sweat that streaks Cole’s forehead. He is down, under the ground, farther than he ever believed he could sensibly go.

  Reaching for his waddy club, tucked into his belt, he withdraws it.

  Ahead of him in the gloom, a light flares above two massive, horseshoe-shaped arches, each more than twice his height and wide enough for a single carriage. Burning overhead at some nebulous mid-point, the gaseous star too soon winks out. Twin corridors stretch out before him, into everlasting midnight – a hope-devouring darkness.

  The dismal black lanes bring to mind the holes of shipworms, bored into the soft wood of the Parramatta. He faces perhaps the Great Serpent’s lair, or, worse, His interminable gullet. He perceives ribs, diminishing with distance. They lead to Mindeye’s foul black belly.

  Is that the stench of His guts he can smell? From far off in the distance comes a faint churning sound, the racked workings of waterlogged lungs. The foetid vapour suggests the impossible: the breath of a corpse.

  Beyond fear, King Cole passes the point of no return. Choosing a side at random, he starts into the left-hand tunnel.

  Positioned at fixed intervals, flame-jets of gaslight spark into fitful life. From some way ahead, snatches of a queer, mechanical music waver amidst ghostly echoes: weak, female voices; scuffles and scrapings that come from the frequent little alcoves conjoining the paired passageways. As he approaches, Cole perceives – deep within the darkness – termite forms. From the shadows of their dirt caves they whisper and beckon, pitifully eager, sadly imploring.

  The dead city seethes with such horrors. It has no space that is not filled. Even here, thousands teem, groping blindly. Some seem to tend humble stalls for penny wares. Others have nothing to sell except themselves. Withered scraps and faded charms – shopkeepers, whores, but nowhere any customers.

  Fast travelling between worlds, Cole often witnessed phantoms in some sense or another existing. None he can recall is as pathetic and forgotten as these white-haired, pale-limbed creatures. Dully aglow in the intense gloom, they wear glass marbles for eyes. Be they relics of the past or figments torn from some dread future, he neither knows nor cares. Sensing they are not as solid, as constant as he in the Dreaming, he chooses to ignore them.

  Doggedly, he drives himself forward.

  At a junction where the tunnels widen, a miniature steam-driven organ plays without any audience. Garlanded with artificial flowers, all choked up with dust, it grinds out indeterminate tunes, ceaselessly and carelessly. Cracked and dirty orange-coloured tiling surrounds a complex array of mirrors, lamps, and lenses. Billing itself the ‘Cosmorama’, the elaborate object idles, extinguished.

  King Cole finds it increasingly hard to draw breath.

  The passageways are suddenly choked: with ancient silt; bygone sands; or fathoms’ river-flow. He struggles on through suffocating murk, his arms and legs flailing desperately.

  Globes of liquid light swell and burst before him. Cole runs. Every insubstantial spectacle intended to delay and doom, he ignores, stopping for nothing. A treadmill pace gains the far stairs; he ascends swiftly, bursting through barred doors.

  Flopped like a landed fish, convulsing, vomiting a little, King Cole lies sprawled on the dry paving. He rests a while.

  Above and behind snores a sleeping giant. Hand pressed to his chest, Cole turns to look. The sounds growl out of a bump on the skyline – all that shows of the great nest below.

  His heaving lungs eventually calm, rising and falling in tune.

  Regaining his feet, he surveys new surroundings; another distinct region, cognisable from other days’ and nights’ Dreaming – yet, again, subtly different. As he turns east, the river is now on his left. The great black beast stretches out, skin scabbed by countless dark barges.

  Cole searches for some trace of the road bridge he has just crossed. There is no sign. The city, divided in two, is all alike one piece of dry land. A warrior of the Wudjubalug, he has walked beneath the waves without getting wet! Resolute, he resumes his passage eastward.

  Ahead lies a cold, black swamp.

  Cole picks up the pace. He runs along a strip of dry land, sees a strange stone house on legs. Turn-turn fetch-the-water, a windmill rises to his right.

  He runs on into a maze of smaller streets, dense overgrowth almost impenetrable. Sharp left, hard right, the lie of the land is a complex set of rhythms. Ahead, two lanes converge. Another course joins his own. The only way forward lies straight ahead. At every junction his choices are predetermined. He is being driven, like a sheep to its pen.

  A narrow causeway crosses over a whiplash twist of creek, where the air reeks worse than swamp gas. Cole is returned beside the Great Serpent.

  A scattering of vessels drifts unmanned on the low-lying waters. Their crisscross cables drip, slathered over with tar, draped with weed.

  From behind high cloud, a lambent screen, reappears Mityan – a good hunting moon. Bone-stark, every detail of the Dreamscape gains in definition. Moonlight ripples the currents, white to black and black to white – the scales of the Great Serpent, writhing.

  Impetus turns Cole inland.

  The streets converge on an open marketplace, above which rises a complex of tall, rectangular buildings. Glowing white in the night, it is a moon palace.

  He approaches closer, along a riverfront terrace. The tranquil galleries, lined with stiff columns, recede into middle distance. They seem to float on a slight ground mist, as if becalmed on cloud.

  A restless crowd emerges from among the sturdy pillars. Steadily they stream, pouring forth from all points of the compass. Croaking voices harsh and grating, they call like crows, occasional laughter dissolving into fits of racking cough. Dressed in uniforms of ragged blue, some wear hats cocked with three corners, others, knitted caps. In all shapes and sizes they come – men, and the remains of men. Limbless, peg-legged, one-eyed or one-armed, some bend so low they resemble lobsters or crabs. They drag themselves through low oceanic mist, strangely undisturbed by their laboured progress.

  Gradually, they disperse, to sit in clumps by the river steps, as useless and cluttering as fallen leaves, or else to roll about their palace grounds.

  Returning along the terrace, past the heady, commingling scents of brewhouse, bakery, and stable block, Cole comes to a fence bordering on to formal gardens. The woods are thick, the trees very big. They shake to warn him away. Something else, pressing close, insists he go in.

  This part of the garden is neglected and overgrown. It is, he sees, a burial ground. Cole’s head throbs. He trips, and falls.

  Is someone there? He feels afraid, a small child again.

  Regaining his feet, Cole drags himself across the rough turf. The grass gives way with a brittle crunch, wasp bodies crushed underfoot. A sudden chill scoops out his lungs. Limbs shivering, he can feel the marrow inside his bones; taste blood, on his tongue. It is the very edge of night and the end is near.

  Cole lurches to a dead halt.

  Breath comes in puffs of white cloud that blow back into his face. Dried clay caking his features and upper torso, the Thames mud begins to crack and disintegrate. Crumbling, it falls away in a shower.

  He stands at the base of an old grave,
unkempt and entangled with weeds. The uneven earth at his feet has been turned long ago. There is no headstone, just a short wooden stake driven into the ground. King Cole falls to his knees, clutching at the soil.

  Raising his left forearm, he takes up a small blade, concealed in his back pocket, and slits open the largest vein.

  His hot blood spatters, smoking, on the turned ground.

  King Cole falls back into the long grass, relishing the embrace of earth, the sensation of sinking back in. His night’s journey is ended. Taken together with his first London Dreaming, it has been a life’s journey, womb to tomb – from birth to death and beyond; a vital link between opposite shores of existence found and forged, without his having the least idea why.

  He opens his eyes. He has left the old grave behind, making the steep climb up a nearby hill. In appreciation of the elm at whose root he relaxes, its unique outline, he follows the coil and twist of branches. The tree stands alone on the hill. Venerable link between earth and sky world, its limbs thrust upwards, reaching outward to gather in the stars.

  Bark fingers weave in and around constellations only semi-familiar. The campfires of his Ancestors, the Nurrunbung-uttias, dot the galaxy. Their smoke threads its milky way. Differing entirely from the night skies of his homeland, the cosmic alignments diverge only slightly from the stranger-skies of his Dreaming.

  A dark red orb rises but brings no dawn.

  Cole wonders if what he has heard is true: that the starlight itself is but a trace of long ago and far away. Looking past the branches overhead, beyond even the light of the planets themselves, he contemplates – with sad longing – the blackness in between the stars.

  The sun was strong, back in the World. When he left, summer was at its height.

  He mourns the loss of his former team-mates, his clan brother most especially. And then, sinking deeper, he remembers his people, and tries desperately hard not to think of their fate.