The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  ‘Please…’ she said.

  He backed away a little.

  – Then the cold sweat ran down my face. This was my poor immortal soul that had leapt out of her chamber, to ask me what I meant by loading her so heavy with sins. No sooner had she left her chamber with the assaults of my sins than the Satan placed one of his imps in her seat, so at her return to her chamber she could find no place of rest, only the base walls to cling to, as a bat clingeth to a white sheet of a dark night. The powerful grasp she gave my veins at that moment drove all the cold water out from among my blood in torrents.

  – O, my dear brother Gilbethorpe. God’s guardian angel over poor weak souls like mine was passing by, and heard her pitiful cries about her chamber. That night I see myself, He rebuked the evil spirit and gave my poor soul her seat again. This was the first sign, Gilbethorpe.

  – The second was here where I lay in these woods, at about the same hour of the night. I was laid on the broad of my back, perfectly awake, looking up to Heaven. And I see the Heavens part asunder in the centre, the distance of about six feet as I suppose, and the Light of Heaven shone on earth, just like the light from a blazing lamp through the crease of a door. I thought I heard a soft voice say, ‘Despair not. God Himself orders this sign to be shown to you, that you shall live and not die, for you have long life and great sufferings to go through on this earth. And the miracles of thy life shall be recorded through all nations. Among the heathen also shall you be honoured. Yea in your old days the Lord will lift you up, and raise you above all your enemies, so them that hate you shall fear you. Therefore praise the Lord.’

  – At those thoughts the Heavens closed. This, Gilbethorpe, was the second sign that God showed me.

  – The third was in a dream. I fell down a dreadful steep hill, and came with great violence against an iron stanchion. It gave me such a shock that I said in my dream, ‘Surely I am not in a dream now. For if I had been ever so fast asleep, I am sure that I should have waked with the tremendous blow that I have received on my right side. And there is another thing that makes me know I ain’t asleep. It is daylight, and there is a man, the other side of these rails, and I will go and ask him what place this is.’ And as I went round to the old man I looked under the rail, and it looked like a furnace that was at its full heat. I asked the old man what furnace it was. He told me it was Hell. But there was no person in it yet.

  – I waked. And this was the third sign God showed me.

  – Another night in my dream, I went into a house that had windows in the top of it, one of which was open. And two Grand angels were in the house, and three Goddesses. I advanced to a glass case full of inexpressibly rich diamonds. While I stood gazing, the Goddesses came to me, and the centre one, pointing to a gold crown covered with diamonds, told me that that crown of diamonds was for me.

  – And this was the fourth sign God showed me. So you see, my dear brother Gilbethorpe, that it is not to creatures sleeping in their beds full of thoughts of this worldly business that God manifests Himself to, but to poor miserable sinners like me in their pilgrimage.

  – I can tell you of one remark I made, when I was in London with my mother.

  – One day four of us children run about my mother crying for bread and butter. She took us into the front parlour, where the bread was. And to try our patience, she gave us a small slice apiece. But, as all young ’uns do, we pouted our lips, and all throw down our bread.

  – The old woman in a most cordial manner took the bread up which we threw down, and expressed these words: ‘If you ain’t satisfied with a little, you shall have less.’

  – And at that moment a beggar came to the window, to which she gave all the bread and butter before our eyes that was in the house, and locking the door at the same time told us we should not go out that day, and that she meant to have given us all the bread and butter if we had been content with what she give us first.

  – So you see, Gilbethorpe, how it is with greedy persons rich or poor. They are not satisfied with what God please to give them, but they want the whole world to themselves…

  My friend now took leave of me for that day.

  Brippoki stood.

  ‘No, no! That is what is written in the book! He,’ said Sarah carefully, ‘means Gilbethorpe.’ She indicated his seat. ‘You are welcome yet,’ she said. ‘There is only a little more to go.’

  The next day, Gilbethorpe laid me, with my lame side upmost, on the body of an old tree that was exposed to the heat of the sun, best part of the day, and told me to mind the crows didn’t run away with me till he should come at night to remove me. He constantly attended me night and morning, and at the end of six weeks I got the use of my side so as to walk. And in a short time after I again assisted my friend with his daily labour, till one day a man whose name is Joe Wright came to the place where I was at work. He knew I was a stranger. He advanced to me. I rose up with that intent to take his life, but he saw the axe in my hands with which I meant to kill him.

  He then turned about and run home to his house and told his wife that he would go immediately and inform of Gilbethorpe for harbouring me. Gilbethorpe came to me and told me that I had not a moment to stop but be gone from there, and at the same time, appointed a place where he would meet me. I went immediately and set fire to the place where I slept by night, which was formed by the hands of nature. This caused great confusion in the whole settlement. For it was so, before I set light to my place of rest, there was not a breath of wind. But as soon as I had kindled my tent with fire, the wind rose and the fire ran, violently consuming everything that stood before it, so that when my enemy returned the whole place was in a flame.

  Every night at twelve o’clock Gilbethorpe came with provisions to me in the woods, alongside a most beautiful stream of water. I remained in this situation for five months, till the new Governor arrived, whose name was Philip Gidley King. My friend Gilbethorpe went to him and told all my sufferings and that for five long months he knew me to be hard at work. The Governor immediately gave him my free pardon. I cannot express to the reader all my heart felt at that time. It was in the dead hour of the night when my friend came to me with my free pardon in his bosom.

  ‘Good mate, Gilbeythrop!’ enthused Brippoki.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Sarah, ‘a very good man.’

  ‘Liket you!’

  ‘Not quite…but thank you.’

  A good note for them to end on, and a blessing; for that was all there was. She would have to return to the library and transcribe the next part of the manuscript before they could carry on.

  ‘Over?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘for now. More tomorrow, if you’d like. No…’

  The next day was Sunday. The Reading-room was closed on Sundays.

  For once, even with the story done, Brippoki showed no immediate wish to leave. He seemed glad of her company. She would have been gladder of his, if he only wore a single stitch of clothing. One would do.

  His fingers twinkled in the air, a magic trick like she had seen him perform once before. Hey presto, a large golden coin glittered between them. It threw off sparks of candlelight.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ she asked.

  More to the point, from where on his naked person had he retrieved it? Better perhaps not to know.

  Brippoki explained that it was his share of the team’s winnings – which allowed he was still with them, after all. Maybe she had quit Lord’s too early, and he had come straight from a post-match display of exhibitionism – so to speak.

  ‘It you,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It you,’ he said. ‘You help me.’

  He thrust it forward, almost under her nose.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘No, I couldn’t possibly.’

  ‘Me gibbit you,’ he insisted.

  Sarah studied the coin, but did not take it from him: it was a genuine golden guinea! A relic of Regency England, a ‘spade-guinea’, the side presente
d bore a shield shaped like the playing card suit of spades. This was most likely someone’s idea of a tasteless, if extravagant, joke – gold, King of Metals, given in prize monies to a mock dignitary. Sarah wanted no part in it.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Really. I won’t accept it… You don’t owe me anything.’

  Brippoki held the coin out, silently pleading, until she stood and moved away.

  ‘Keep it,’ she said.

  Sarah instantly felt that she understood the reason why it had been impossible to trade fairly with the Aborigines: just as the notion of reciprocity lay at the very heart of their morality, so did they base their economy on generosity, the giving of gifts. He only tried to pay her money because he thought of it as something she might value, when already he had gifted her something far more precious. All she might share in return was her reading from the manuscript, a very poor exchange.

  Sarah forgot herself. All of Brippoki’s expressive body language had wilted. He slumped with melancholia. Was it her refusal of the coin?

  Brippoki went to the window. He wanted out.

  Sarah moved to comply.

  ‘When will I see you?’ she asked. ‘I can’t retrieve the manuscript until Monday, and we’ve exhausted the notes I have. I’m awfully sorry.’

  He could come again tomorrow, but what then should she do with him? It seemed an improper suggestion: and she had anyway promised her Sundays to Lambert.

  Brippoki merely shrugged his shoulders. He would not look at her.

  ‘Mun-dy,’ he said.

  ‘Monday, you’re sure? I’ll have some more to read you by then. But come tomorrow, if you’d like.’

  According to their match schedule, printed in the morning papers, the Australian Eleven were due in Southsea Monday and Tuesday, and again in Stortford later in the week. The tour continued apace.

  ‘You will be able to make it?’ she asked. ‘You have cricket all next week.’

  ‘Bael mo’ cricket,’ he mumbled. ‘Cricket…over.’

  ‘But, the team?’

  ‘En’t my clan brothers,’ he said. ‘En’t my kin.’ With a petulant flourish he threw his loincloth high into the air. Without exactly meaning to, Sarah caught it on its way down…just a tea towel again.

  ‘I’ll pray for you,’ she said.

  ‘Pray,’ he said, ‘tomorrow.’

  And with that, he was gone.

  Sarah felt her forehead: it was hot, and a little wet.

  She had made him unhappy.

  Whatever Brippoki made of Druce’s story, she could not say, but he certainly took the man’s words to heart. The way he sat, coiled like a spring. The way he stood, and oh, the way he moved, so swift, scarcely seeming to move.

  He went naked, as truth goes.

  Sarah looked from the empty fireplace to the seat at the table he had only just vacated, disbelieving almost. An unearthly illusion of character; painted, fancifully wild – she had wanted to see him so very much these last few days. The mess and the soup bowl lent proof where proof was needed.

  The strong wind gripped the entire window-frame and seemed to shake it with both hands. Temperatures outside must have dropped; it was certainly chilly indoors. Wasn’t he cold, like that?

  She folded her arms and rubbed them; well past time she snuffed out the light and went to bed.

  Leaping from the high window, his nimble fingers grip the brickwork and he pulls himself up around the corner, out of sight.

  Brippoki scales the drainpipe, as if it is a thick black creeper running up the side of a tree. He sits on the roof, in contemplation of the distant stars, bittersweet.

  Mityan, hunted moon, is already half eaten up. What little high cloud remains scoots past, driven by the high winds. The streets themselves are howling. Sleeping, to get knowledge – he dares not go into the Dreaming, scared of what might find him there.

  He listens for sounds that he feels more than hears above the rising gale; the interior clicks and shuffles of the house beneath, preparing for sleep. The last of its tiny lights is extinguished.

  Brippoki loses some hours.

  Three days without sleep. Three days of running without pause, without direction, running in circles around the Piebald Giant, eventually slowing, to enter into the wormhole of the Great Serpent – wandering into West Monster Abyss. The rock formations here astound, alien and terrifying in their regularity: high mountains and deep chasms, a valley of brick threaded through with a torrent.

  Grey days, and featureless, spent tripping back and forth across the Serpent’s back.

  Brippoki, coming to, snaps to wary attention. He searches the blackness for signs.

  Wicked impulses, gathered, have become shadow, the shadow becoming substance. From Dreaming, it spills over.

  Time to slither.

  Thinking it no longer safe to stay, he gathers up his waddy, his boomerang and skins from the cranny in the chimney, and goes in search of a new fireside.

  He runs from roof to roof. It is easy. The houses are all connected. When they are not, distances one to the next are always small in one direction or another. He finds, driven into some walls, row on row of large spike nails: one set to hold on to, another for his feet to race across. Hopping one to the next he barely has to slacken his pace.

  Passing into districts less solid to cling on to, he risks being blown off the more crooked rooftops. He slides down towards ground level, sprints along the tops of alleyway walls, the yards behind each tumbledown hollow linked in endless lines. Slathering dingo-dogs lunge at their chains as his heels fly by.

  He avoids turning south, towards the Well of Shadows, or west into unknown parts. Instead he heads east, towards that territory best remembered.

  He is but a dot etched on the horizon, a blur against the cloud-dimmed sky.

  The Guardian has refused him. He has no mate, no one to turn to, nor place to belong.

  ‘Bael Thara,’ moans Brippoki. ‘Bael ba-been.’

  Without warning, he faces an apparition, his opposite. In shock, Brippoki’s vocal cords clench, the blood freezing in his veins.

  A white face, blackened by soot, stares into a black face crusted with clay, ash, and chalk. Cold sweat and hot tears trail contrary streaks across their cheeks.

  Met with a May Day lillywhite, the chimneysweep’s eyes roll, perplexed. His hair is dusted with powder, caked in meal; but he wants for his glitter, his gold leaf-foil and ribbons.

  White-black hands out, Brippoki backs up, and edges around the black-white man.

  The sweep is alarmed to see his nakedness. He bangs together his brushes and tools, crying: ‘Weep weep! Weep weep!’

  Brippoki runs on.

  And he does.

  CHAPTER XL

  Sunday the 14th of June, 1868

  THE DEVIL’S FOOTPRINTS

  ‘And Shaphan the scribe shewed the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest hath delivered me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king.

  And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes…and wept before me.’

  ~ 2 Kings 22:10-11/19

  A slight lifting of the curtain brought light flooding into Sarah’s room. An hour or more yet, and then she would get up, spent from a night of dreams without sleeping.

  In the gloom of darkness, in the still hour of the night, that deeper shade had lingered. Ash and soot, a king couched among charcoal…a black snake crowned with white feathers.

  Sarah rolled over onto her back, properly awake and thoughts busy.

  Belatedly she realised the Biblical Joseph that Druce was named for was most likely not the husband of Mary, mother of God, but Joseph ‘the dreamer’. From the signs God had shown him in his fever, it was clear that he knew to identify himself with his namesake.

  Joseph had dwelt in the land of Canaan, the favourite of his father, Jacob, and hated by his brothers for his self-aggrandising dreams. Sold into slavery, Joseph had been entrusted with the superintendence of his master
’s house. Falsely accused and cast into prison, implicit confidence was again placed in him when the keeper committed the other prisoners to his charge.

  The circumstances echoed Druce’s own life story, if somewhat in reverse – the boy criminal had been given the responsibility of mustering his fellow prisoners while on board the Royal Admiral, subsequently serving an army officer, and then the botanist Caley, as his masters in the new colony.

  Under Pharaoh in Egypt, the faithful servant Joseph had eventually risen to a position of great power owing to his skill at interpreting dreams. All Druce’s talk of dreams, his ‘sleeping to get sense and knowledge’, quite possibly exposed him as a charlatan of the first order. He would often solicit pity via expression of his piety, finding impressionable souls, like the Gilbethorpes, and dazzling them with vivid stories of sin and redemption. That was likely his means of survival, the method by which he had always survived. Perhaps he was not even conscious of doing it, fooling himself with that same brand of biblical signs and wonders he had been raised in; the same as had been burned into her.

  So God performed His works through sinners, more than those meek and mild: she would have to take that on advisement. Sarah did not doubt it. Or did she doubt too far? For so many years locked up inside her own head, she envied the active and simple-minded.

  She should strive to be more like Brippoki.

  Joseph Druce, by his own account, was a character filled with intrigue. His travels had taken him to the opposite ends of the earth. So, too, had those of Brippoki, a fellow equally intriguing. More so, she felt, for being that much less transparent.

  He remained, to her, a closed book.

  What Sarah wanted most of all was for the Aborigine to sit back and tell her his life story. He got his learning by entirely other traditions – and could, no doubt, do wonders by the power of imagination. If only she could see the world through his eyes.

  She suspected a whole host of secrets to which she was not privy.