The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  ‘“If we repent not,”’ he sighed, ‘“verily, we shall be inexcusable.” “And the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day…when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.”’

  A dull thudding sound forced her to look up. Hands above his head, Lambert rained blows on his exposed crown with frightening violence. Sarah leapt across the gap between them, landing bodily on the side of the bed. All of her papers fell on the floor. She paid them no heed. The blows from his punishing fists she took upon herself. Sarah hugged Lambert to her.

  ‘Howl!’ he cried. ‘“For merchant people cut down…all they that bear silver, cut off…their goods, booty, their houses…desolation”!’

  Her slim body wracked with sobs, she pleaded with Lambert to stop. One might as well have commanded the tides to stop. Determined, he brooked no arguments.

  ‘“This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is none beside me. How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in! Every one that passeth by her shall hiss, and wag his hand.”’

  Forcing herself upright, Sarah took her father’s shoulders between her two hands. Her face looked directly into his – his face, gathering blackness. Furiously she willed him love, so that he might regain his reason.

  ‘Remember,’ she gasped, ‘remember the story of Jonah and the gourd? “Doest thou well to be angry?”’

  He returned only vacant looks. ‘“There is a multitude of slain,”’ he mumbled, ‘“a great number of carcasses…no end to the corpses. They stumble upon their corpses… Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongues shall consume away in the mouth.”’

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘Oh, no…’

  ‘“The Almighty Disposer will stretch out his hand”…“make of Nineveh a desolation, and dry…like a wilderness…”’

  Lambert gasped and fell back.

  ‘“Nineveh is of old…like a pool of water,”’ he croaked, weakly. ‘“Yet, they shall flee away. Stand, stand! they shall cry, but none shall look back”…“nations, cut off…their towers, desolate…streets, waste, that none passeth by…there is no man…there is none inhabitant. She is empty…and void…and waste.”’

  Head deep into the pillow, Lambert’s tongue curled back into his mouth. He was little more than shell.

  The surface of the river is as flat as mirror glass. As above, so below – the reflected city lies silent, in ruin, a cracked dome at the centre. The crown of the Piebald Giant, bleached white, is no more than a shapeless, nameless rock pile, worn by winds and the sands of time.

  Pale light, weak and failing, illuminates the scene. A great many broken buildings lie half-submerged in desert sands. Dense foliage wreathes the rest. Cormorant and gau-urn, the bittern, nest in the cracked rafters. Their voices sing from the windows, the woodwork all exposed. The numberless flocks of summers past, the spawning fish and all the wild beasts return.

  A few paces distant a stranger sits, upright on a broken arch, rubble once part of the bridge now destroyed. He pauses from scratching marks onto a stone tablet to take in the awful beauty, peace, and quiet of his surroundings, sombre-seeming in his thoughts. Brippoki dares not approach for fear he may disturb him.

  Is the fellow dark? Is he white? Brippoki cannot tell. The clothes he wears are like nothing ever seen. It almost seems for one moment he looks at himself – but that is how visions are. Asleep with eyes open, awake with them closed, he might even be a stone carving, an immobile statue.

  The setting sun in one last burst tinges the pale ruins red.

  From beneath the depths of West Monster Abyss and out of broken Shadwell, to the east, shadow creeps. Nurtured by day in the narrow alleyways, under arches, in damp corners of hidden courtyards, the terrors of black night unhitch themselves to come sliding forth. Stretching, lengthening, deepening, they roll across rooftops and slither down stairwells, joining, meeting, growing – spreading. Run together they form pools, above which solid swarms take to the air. The windows, gathering soot, black themselves out. Stone-bark grooves of petrified tree trunks run with a liquorice-sticky juice. The same greasy filth that seeps out of the pipes flows from swollen drains. In the middle of the streets, it meets. Each and every crevice is filled in. Scurrying figures flee in vain, swallowed up whole – disappeared within. Others, crow circling, turn silhouette. The streets and houses drown. Lanes are black, the immense buildings black. The bone factories pump out black smoke.

  All of this occurs without a single sound.

  A sudden spillage of ink into the sky, black sunrise inspires swift growth of bare black branches, a canopy of waving spider-legs, extended, stretching out across the firmament – thick trunk of solid blackness dragged pulsing behind. A furious thunderhead gathers, shadow casting shadow across the ground. Tornado-twists spiral down, the air streaked with great black tears – Sky World pulling itself back down to earth.

  A last wink of light, and then there is nothing, save blackness and the darkness forever, more dreadful than any night.

  Only the river stays clear, its broad beam his guide. The blacker it gets, the brighter seems the light. A distant star suggests itself, a candle in an open window…

  The coarse laughter of a ferryman, his lantern working below, brings Brippoki around. Dust, filling up his gaping mouth, lodges fast in his throat. Dark clouds are under his feet, and the shadow at his back.

  Guts churning, Brippoki’s chest heaves. He throws up on the spot.

  His brow burns as his throat burns. He takes one last slug of blue gin, then dashes the clay jug across the vomitous rock, resolved to run. Feet stumblesliding through the puke and jagged shards, he staggers towards the remote flare of light.

  CHAPTER LVII

  Saturday the 20th of June, 1868

  THE HAUNT OF MEMORY

  ‘Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,

  And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake:

  For all the Sin the Face of wretched Man

  Is black with – Man’s Forgiveness give – and take!’

  ~ Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

  The Aborigine breezed in, quite soundless, through the open parlour window. He walked directly up to the fireplace and stared intently into the ashes. The fire was unlit; she had been meaning to sweep it out, but never quite got around to it.

  His appearance was the most extraordinary yet; still naked, near enough. Objects increasingly arcane were tied onto strands of his hair: longer feathers, more teeth, and a dangling claw, either crab or lobster. Smeared with gum as before, as far as she could tell he had added horse manure to the mix.

  Sarah shifted in her seat and cleared her throat, politely.

  Brippoki leapt back, nearly going for the window again. He collided with a small occasional table, dislodging its lace doily.

  ‘It’s only me,’ she said.

  The wing of the armchair had perhaps hidden her face. Why she had chosen to sit alone in a darkened room, Sarah couldn’t exactly say.

  ‘I’m…sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  Granted, she didn’t occupy her usual spot; still, she found it hard to believe that he, of all people, could be surprised by her – a turn-up for the books! She almost laughed: and would have, were it not for his pitiable state.

  He was sweaty and breathless. She could smell the drink on him.

  Brippoki keeps his eyes averted. He paces the carpet, warily, making sure to tug at his min-tum so that she sees he is protected. The Guardian has her days. It is not good to look on a woman when she is bleeding.

  He remains on edge, unsure of propriety.

  Thara moves to light the candles. ‘I’ll boil a fresh pot,’ she says. ‘This one has gone cold.’

  As soon as she is gone from the room Brippoki returns to the fireplace. He crouches down, hurriedly reaches in and retrieves the object of his desire – stands, unsteadily. His dilly bag is lodge
d in its place of concealment. Hands cupping the precious trophy, he casts about for another pouch suitable to keep it in.

  Sarah returned bearing the teapot, piping hot. Brippoki was grovelling in the grate again. He ducked back when he saw her, looking a trifle sheepish. Abruptly he let go the poker, as if it were red-hot – confounded by the clang of it striking the hearth. He looked tragi-comical in his guilt. The notion that he might wield it as a weapon barely creased her consciousness.

  He was as dead and grey as a cast in the half-light, bathed in a fresh coating of ash. The skin of his feet appeared dry and scaly. The nails, long like talons, needed clipping. Brippoki, expanding his thin chest, gathered himself to his full height, and did his unsteady best to affect nonchalance – a valiant effort in vain: he was so very obviously liverish, more than a little green about the gills, almost blue, his rapid breathing far shallower than previously.

  Brippoki sat – collapsed rather – as if strings holding him up had been cut, all the cartilage in an instant removed from his bones. Folded in on himself, he clutched and massaged the muscles of his upper arms and occasionally his calves, deficient by comparison. Formerly so bright, so sharp and swift, his distracted attentions easily wandered.

  Sarah too, weary with cares, struggled to concentrate. She had left Lambert sleeping, finally quieted, or else would not have left his side at all. Clarity and recognition returned to his looks, he had drifted away with a wan smile tugging at the sides of his mouth.

  She told herself he was past the worst of it – on the mend, like so many times before.

  Brippoki’s head lolled, drowsily. Speech seemed beyond him.

  Earlier, Sarah had taken the latest batch of Admiralty papers from their envelope, intending to read out the details from the muster roll. She realised that would be to little advantage at this juncture.

  Bleary-eyed, her guest waited doggedly on her. She knew what he wanted. Still standing, she took up her notebook; forgetting, in all her distresses, that Brippoki had run out on her previous reading.

  ‘Last we saw,’ she said, ‘our man had been returned to England, all of his various attempts to return to New Zealand frustrated.’

  Sarah started to read from the notes she had most recently transcribed: the sole reason for Brippoki’s visits, for what other reason could there be?

  I again went on board the Namur. From her I was in-leaved at Sheerness. I then came up to Gravesend, where I met a woman in great distress, and glad I was to find her so, for the husband of the said woman once relieved me in my distress, and I thought that one good turn deserved another. I had 22 pounds in my pocket, which I received at Sheerness for serving His Majesty.

  It was late at night when I met Mrs Downey in the street. This is her name. I asked her where was Mr Downey. She told me he was at Northfleet at work. I told her to follow me to the Watermen’s Arms where I lodged that night. I told the master of the house to give Mrs Downey whatever she wanted that night for her and the children. And I went to her house the next morning. I gave her four pound to lay out for her family, after which she robbed me of sixteen pound. But in a few days the money was returned me by the Mayor of Gravesend.

  I then went to lodge at the King’s Head, where I remained till I had spent all my money, and lost my papers which was worse nor all. I then went to work among the lightermen on the River Thames, till I was so afflicted with the rheumatism that I could work no more.

  So he became a Thames waterman, like the ‘water-poet’ John Taylor. The repetitive cycle of Druce’s behaviours appeared the chief cause of his woes, a self-frustrating prophecy.

  Brippoki sat trance-like in his apathy. Features blank and unresponsive, he appeared morose more than impassive, sunken into a profound and personal gloom. He fingered and twirled the thong around his midriff – not proudly, as he once had, but from nerves. On a separate string around his neck he wore what looked to be the beak of a small bird, and this too he touched, almost by way of reflex. That same splendid body capable of monumental stillness was a mess of tics and twitches.

  Their progress only brought on his decline. Sarah was almost loath to carry on. Something ate him up from the inside. She was losing him too.

  I was then to Bartholomew’s Hospital by Mr Voss, a gentleman who was my master at that time. After my recovery I returned to my master, Mr Voss, where I worked for him till I again took sick. I then went into the poorhouse. In a few weeks after which Mr Cooper sent for me in hope to procure me a passage to New Zealand. He sent me to Squire Hagin, Queen Square, Westminster. Mr Cooper told me that Squire Hagin was going to New Zealand and he would take me with him. But when I went to the Squire he told me that Government had cancelled his going to New Zealand. I returned with my heart full of grief.

  Going through Fleet Street on my return home I met a Mr Thompson, who ask me if I had been to New Zealand. I said yes. He told me to call on him the next day, which I did. He then sent me to Mr Flicker and Mr Flicker sent me to Mr Pratt, where I was introduced to the Society. They took me out of the poorhouse and maintained me for a short time, till one day Mr Pratt sent for me and told me that the Society could no longer support me, for Government would have nothing to do with it. I again was turned into the street.

  I then in my heart renounced all mankind. And I went and pawned the prayer book and Bible –

  The oracle spoke. ‘What is “pawned”?’ he asked. Brippoki inflected his accent in precise mimicry of hers.

  Sarah sat down closer to him to explain.

  ‘It means he gave these things away, his prayer book and his Bible,’ she said, ‘for money.’

  Such a clear suggestion that the author had lost his faith – more so, rejected it – upset Brippoki gravely.

  ‘Him still budgere goodpella,’ he expressed, sincerely. ‘Him still love God, inne.’

  The alternative seemed too terrible to contemplate.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘Yes, I’m sure of it. Only his need for money is greater, at this time.’

  ‘Behold,’ he said, sadly, ‘what manner o’ love, that we be called the sons o’ God.’

  He quoted the First Epistle General of John. Sarah’s mouth hung open. Beloved, now, are we, it went, when he shall appear, we shall be like him. For we shall see him as he is.

  ‘We be called the sons o’ God,’ Brippoki repeated. ‘Dem first words Lawrence teach to us boys, from the Holy Bible.’

  Sarah felt she should very much like to meet this Lawrence.

  The humble and despised Aborigines, unsuspected by the world at large, truly were the favourites of God. She wondered how much of the message Brippoki might have taken to heart, if only as a measure of the strength of his white brethren’s beliefs, as opposed to his own.

  ‘The prayer book,’ she said, ‘the Bible, they are but things. Faith…is something you carry inside of you.’

  She tried her best to sound sincere, to soothe him.

  ‘And every man that has this hope purifies himself, even as he is pure. Purifies himself, and “Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not”.’

  Brippoki was nodding, more sage than savage. ‘We should love one another,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah. She worried how well he might know the remainder of that text.

  ‘He says he has given up on his fellow man, that is all,’ she said.

  It was enough.

  ‘You can understand,’ she went on, ‘how he might. Lose faith. In man. After all he has been through, I mean…turned out onto the street…’

  Best to press on.

  I then in my heart renounced all mankind. And I went and pawned the prayer book and Bible, and then went to Liverpool. From there I went to Dublin, and from Dublin to Cork, where I see a ship laying called the Guildford. She was bound to Port Jackson with convicts. I asked the Captain to take me with him, but the Captain told me he had so many men on board his ship that he could not ship any more. At the same, he gave me a shilling, seeing I was in distress, and the Irish God bless
them all for they used me like a Christian while I was among them.

  ‘You see?’ said Sarah.

  Brippoki slumped, inconsolable. Apprehension, the threat of some sort of ever-present danger, seemed the only thing to rouse him from these frequent bouts of listlessness.

  One eye on him, she read –

  I remained in Cork for some time, till, one day, I met a gentleman who knew me. He relieved me with money, and the next day sent his servant for me who conducted me to his master’s quarters. This gentleman was a Captain in His Majesty’s Horse Guards, the 79th Regiment. At my arrival in Captain Lacock’s quarters he received me with open arms of friendship and brotherly love. He told me to make myself happy for he would support me till he either got me a situation or a ship from that country. In a short time after, at his return home from parade, with a smile of glory and joy on his countenance to serve me, he told me he had spoke to Captain Johnson the commander of the ship Guildford to give me a passage to New South Wales, and that I was to go on board the next day. My heart leapt within me for joy, and my friend fitted me out with everything for the voyage. The next morning I took leave of my friend and went on board. In a few days after, the ship sailed.

  Sarah fell silent. She had reached the end of the fresh material recorded that day, as well as the surplus from her previous session.

  The intervention of yet another gentleman helper who ‘knew’ Druce aroused her suspicions: were such instances of brotherly love the agency of Christian charity, she wondered, or rather evidence of Freemasonry in action? The Guildford. Guild Ford. They too favoured the First Epistle of John.

  Brippoki’s bearing brightened, as if he entertained genuine hopes of a happy ending to the story – that their unlikely hero, after so much frustration and disappointment, might actually achieve his goal and be returned to New Zealand. He had forgotten the bare facts: the manuscript had been written at the Naval Hospital in Greenwich, and its narrator buried there, long since. Or could it be that she herself presumed too much? Only a little way ahead with her transcript, she had not yet made the end of it. The ending was unknown. Should she even dare, to hope against hope?