The Best Australian Stories 2016

by Charlotte Wood

  Yesterday I visited the Catholic school. I have an arrangement with the school: I go there once a month and am driven into town by the school’s driver. We travel in a primordial jeep. In town, I pick up the supplies shipped in by my research group and send my month’s data home; then we drive back to the school. It’s a suitable arrangement for everyone, worked out in the distant days in which I was apparently capable of dreaming up such things: the school, which seems to exist in a state of immaculate fundlessness, gets some of my grant money, and I don’t have to go to the trouble of maintaining a vehicle. I order in treats for the schoolgirls: lollies and biscuits, novelty erasers, books. These I pass on to the head of the school, Father Anthony, who always wants me to come to his office for a chat; I always refuse him. Every month I anticipate these trips with an obscure dread.

  For the last few months, Father Anthony has been inviting me to address his students on the subject of marine life. I declined at first. It felt false to arrive at the school and pose as an expert when a) I no longer believe in God; and b) to this date my most significant contribution to the science of the squid is the observation that male colossal squid probably do have a penis. I discussed my qualms with Darwin and he rejected them immediately. First of all, I am a scientist, and these priests and nuns and children are not. They don’t know how many papers I haven’t had in Nature. Second, I’m invited to speak on marine, not heavenly life, so my lack of faith shouldn’t interfere. And third, I have a problem that I need help with: namely, freeing Mabel. It was Darwin’s suggestion that the school may be able to provide this help. He has a tactical mind.

  I delivered my talk yesterday, after my usual visit to town in the jeep. The driver of the jeep, Eric, is a sinewy man of tremendous energy. I understand that he does various kinds of physical work for the school: gardening and maintenance as well as driving. When he talks, which is rarely, it’s mostly of the branch of his family who moved to America long ago and is thriving there as if having discovered a taproot from which they were once dramatically severed. Eric speaks of America with an ancient nostalgia, but refuses to go because he was born on this island and his unlucky father lives here. His energy is badly placed behind the wheel of a car. He sits in tense near-sightedness, coiled, attentive, as if he’s offended by the stillness required in order to travel so far so quickly. The roads are covered at all times in blotchy fruits that, when crushed, spill out slippery seeds. Apparently, the animal that would once have eaten them – a large bird with a frighteningly hooked claw – is so near extinction it now trembles with evolutionary neurosis in the quietest corners of the forest, eating less perilous fruits. This is the road we travel – viscous, birdless – into town. Town: one store and five drinking establishments. When the supply ship docks, the entire place seems doubled in size. I like arriving with Eric. He knows everyone, and with him I’m greeted like a brother. Without him I appear to go unnoticed, which I know is not the case.

  Yesterday, everything was quite normal – my crates were stacked on the dock, already clear of ‘Customs’ – except for the presence of five white women, all young and dressed in T-shirts and baseball caps. They sat together on benches by the dock, fanning themselves with the necks of their shirts and glowing with satisfaction at their evident discomfort. The girls rested their heads on each other’s shoulders and took self-portraits with their mobile phones, and no one paid them any attention. They looked to have been sitting there for some time.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked Eric.

  ‘Students,’ he said.

  ‘Students? Where from?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Someone must know!’ I said. ‘What are they doing here?’

  ‘They’re waiting for someone to drive them.’

  ‘To drive them where?’

  ‘Around.’

  After our errands we went to a bar, where we found the young men who clearly accompanied the girls outside. They were discussing this question of a driver with the patrons. Their American voices and emphatic gestures lacked economy in the midmorning heat. Eric expressed no interest in interacting with the visitors, so I lost interest in them too. All kinds of people come through this place, just as I’ve done. They’re none of my business. We drank, we drove the slippery roads, and Eric delivered me back to the school in time for my presentation.

  This is how I prefer to remember all my contacts with civilisation: as briefly as possible.

  Fans revolved idly in the school’s lobby. A row of African violets butted up against each window, brown in the heat, and a small table was stacked with copies of a pamphlet called ‘Good News for Modern Man’. I read it while I waited for Father Anthony, and it reminded me of the church I grew up in: the primary colours and cheerful messages, the merry heaven and blotty, yellow hell. ‘For God so loved the world,’ it told me in a bright, responsible voice. I felt a small nostalgia. I had one of my headaches and all the angles of the world seemed wrong.

  ‘Dr Birch!’ cried Father Anthony, arriving. Father Anthony seems always to be arriving: there is a perpetual commotion about him. I’ve also never met a pinker man in all my life. His face is rose and his ears are salmon. His neck folds into itself like certain kinds of coral. His hands sprout from the ends of his arms, anemone-like and gloved in pink.

  ‘Dr Birch!’ he cried again.

  ‘Call me Bill.’

  ‘Bill, Bill,’ he said with delight, shaking my brown hand with his pink one. His was smooth and cool; mine was damp. Father Anthony has a gift for the comfortable use of names. He dispenses them like small gifts, as if they’ve been prepared lovingly in advance. I’ve seen this delight people, and I can imagine it – this small recognition – feeling large enough to turn a soul back to God. I believe that Father Anthony’s God is an old friend to him, gracious and prudent, with a priest’s sympathy, a compassionate memory, and a steady heart for his flock’s misgivings and undoings and hurts.

  ‘This way, Bill, this way,’ said Father Anthony, ushering me along with his hands. I wonder if, like certain corals, they glow all the pinker in the dark. ‘We’re proud to welcome you. The sisters are very excited, as are our students. This is quite a treat. What a treat. We have so few visitors. The bishop once – what an occasion. This is in my lifetime. Well, my tenure here – a lifetime in itself. Ha, ha! This way, this way.’

  He ushered me into a small, overcrowded hall in which nuns quieted students and drew blinds over windows. They went about their tasks with a sensible bustle I found intimidating.

  Father Anthony introduced me to the students as Dr William Birch, eminent marine biologist. I introduced myself as Bill Birch, malacologist.

  ‘A malacologist,’ I explained, ‘is a scientist who studies molluscs.’

  It occurred to me for the first time that this title of mine is extremely ominous, belonging as it does to the list of distasteful words beginning with ‘mal’: malcontent, maladjusted, malformed, malicious. I wanted to explain that, until my passion for the colossal squid blotted out my love for all other marine organisms I was a conchologist, which sounds much safer. More avuncular; sort of bumbling. Instead I loomed above them, malacologist, and ordered the lights out.

  The students watched my slideshow presentation rapturously in the semi-dark. Their crowded bodies gave out a smell of warmed fruit about to spoil. It seemed to me as if their dark hair was filling up the room and muffling my voice, and when I felt prickles of fever up my legs and sweat behind my knees, I couldn’t be sure of the cause – sickness, or girls?

  A tiger shark swam across the screen in the dark room. The girls all breathed together, softly, ‘Shark.’ An anemone appeared, and they sang together, ‘Anemone.’ ‘Starfish,’ they sighed, and ‘Seahorse’, ‘Eel’. I showed them a beach camouflaged by thousands of newly hatched turtles, and they inhaled collectively (we slow-breeding humans are always astonished by the extravagance with which sea creatures, seasonally awash in salt and sperm, reproduce themselves). I showed a photograph of
myself in the observation station, taken by my departing colleagues. I paused on this photograph for too long because I was struck by the plump health of my former self, with his tan and his professionalism (he stands in the station doorway in prudent boots and his posture is in no way diminished by the tropical mountain rising above him). Then I showed pictures of Mabel in her bay and the students giggled. They know Mabel, although we have taken care not to publicise her. They know I’m the man who watches Mabel in the long afternoons and then watches them with his long binoculars. They laughed at her, friendly, and they laughed at me.

  ‘Thanks to the wonders of technology,’ said Father Antony, ‘you have shown us the goodness of creation.’

  The students can walk for minutes through the goodness of creation to see first-hand, in the blood-temperature sea, the same wonders I had just displayed. Since leaving them I’ve found myself repeating their breathless catalogue: shark, anemone, starfish, seahorse, eel. A children’s book of the sea. And I think of the waste involved, the sea full of death and the dying: all of creation’s necessary hunters fanning out among the reefs and rocks and sunken ships, all of them hungry and if not hungry, dead. What if I’d discussed this in my talk? A Lecture On the Origin of Species? But Father Anthony seems a sensible man. Perhaps the students are taught evolution. I suspect we think similarly, all of us trapped yesterday in that hot room: we’re worried, daily, by the vast number of unredeemed things in the world.

  Father Anthony took me to his study after my presentation. A white room with a view of jungle trees and, above the window, an ivory Christ on an ebony cross. Sun-faded copies of ‘Good News for Modern Man’ filled a low bookshelf. The sun ages everything so quickly that they may have arrived on last month’s supply ship. Even Darwin looks a little more worn around the edges than when he first arrived a few months ago, glumly agnostic. Only the thirsty trees seem to resist the sun, growing greener by the day, sweating out a greenness that hurts my eyes and forces me to keep them trained on the sea. The mosquitos, also, seem unaffected, but I suppose they hide from the sun in the daytime.

  ‘May I ask you a question?’ said Father Anthony.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Are you a man of faith, Bill?’

  ‘That seems like the kind of thing you’d ask before letting me get up there in front of your girls.’

  ‘Our students are not necessarily young women of faith, Bill. And we would never keep you away from them on the basis of your beliefs.’

  This implied – I was sure of it – that Father Anthony had considered keeping me away from them on some other basis.

  ‘Well, I’m not a man of faith,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not.’

  And because this seemed so definitive – because this was the first time I had said anything like it aloud to a living man – I wanted to qualify it, immediately. I said: ‘I used to believe, you know. God, the maker of heaven and earth, Jesus Christ, conceived by the Holy Spirit. The third day he rose again from the dead. You know, all that. The Church of England.’

  ‘But not any more?’

  ‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘So I suppose that means I’m going to hell.’

  And I regretted this immediately; it was such an amateur thing to say. But my head was bad and I was worried I might have an attack – a vertigo attack – right there in his office.

  ‘God knows your heart better than I do,’ said Father Anthony. ‘I thought you might be a believer, because in your lecture you said the way a squid eats is like a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Ha, ha! I found that very funny. It’s rare these days to come across a good Biblical joke. Can I order you some tea?’

  Father Anthony is a kind and good-natured man, one of those beaming, healthful men who truly believe drinking a hot liquid in insufferable heat will cool you down, and my heart went out to him – broke for him, really – and I loved my fellow men, and wanted to sail home to them immediately. I wanted to have sailed already. And why hadn’t I? Mabel, I suppose, whom only I could save. I was also embarrassed for having said so much. I was talkative in my guilt and sorrow, and would admit to anything.

  ‘No tea, no thanks,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll have some. ‘A “spot of tea”, yes? I’ll ring the bell. Something cool for you, perhaps, Bill?’

  His hand was poised in mid-air, holding a small silver bell. Did I mention we were both sitting, he behind his desk, and me in front of it? It was like being at school again.

  ‘Yes, something cool,’ I said.

  I pressed my hand against my forehead, and when the something cool came, I pressed the glass against my forehead too. Father Anthony looked concerned. He looked on the point of ringing his little bell again.

  ‘When you agreed to give this presentation today,’ said Father Anthony, ‘you asked for something in return. You said there was a scientific matter we could help you with. Is it to do with your squid?’

  ‘With Mabel, yes,’ I said. ‘Strictly speaking, of course, she’s not my squid. She’s not anybody’s – not even God’s. Do you see? I want to free her. That’s what I want your help with.’

  ‘You agree, then, with those young activists in town?’ said Father Anthony. I realised he was referring to the young people I’d seen at the port in their T-shirts and caps; I understood that Mabel was no longer a secret and they were here to protest her captivity. This explained why Eric had been so unforthcoming with me.

  ‘I don’t know who they are or what they believe,’ I said.

  ‘They want the very same thing you do – to release your squid. You could ask for their help.’

  I thought of the boys in the bar and the girls on the beach, of their sincerity, their photogenic martyrdom, and the primary colours of their T-shirts, and I said, ‘Tomorrow, Father Anthony, it has to be tomorrow. Before they find her and turn her into something she isn’t.’

  ‘Turn her into what?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you know very much about colossal squid, Father Anthony?’

  ‘Only the information you presented in your lecture today,’ he said. ‘Their brains are round with holes in them, like donuts. They have eight arms and two long tentacles.’

  ‘The most important thing I said about colossal squid today, Father Anthony, was that we don’t know anything about them. And even though I’ve been watching Mabel for over a year now, I still know nothing. It’s even possible that Mabel is still immature, that she could get bigger. How can we be sure of the true size of the colossal squid? Who knows what we’ll fish up some day – the gargantuan squid? We might have gone a step too far, calling this one colossal. Soon we’ll run out of superlatives. Wouldn’t it be better just to leave things be? They’ve recorded a mysterious bloop, you know, coming from somewhere underwater, which could only have been made by an animal of unthinkable size. I hope we never find it.’

  Father Anthony waved his hand in the direction of his tree-crowded window as if mysterious bloops were none of his business.

  ‘The squid an infant – interesting,’ he said. ‘But wouldn’t it look different if it were a baby? Forgive me, but you must know that, at least? You scientists?’

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘It’s impossible to tell. Darwin talks about it in the Origin: “there is no metamorphosis; the cephalopodic character is established long before the parts of the embryo are completed”. A squid is always a squid, right from birth – so we talk of mature or immature squid, but never of infants. The squid has no infancy, which means no nostalgia. It has no Romantic period. Squid think Wordsworth is full of horseshit. They have no childhood! None at all! They’re born adult, and the only change they undertake is death. There is no metamorphosis!’

  At the end of this speech I felt as pink as Father Anthony looked. There was a ticking in the room; I thought it came from the ivory Jesus crucified on the wall.

  Father Anthony drew a long breath. ‘Do you like it here on our island?’ he asked.

  ‘Actually I’m thinking
of leaving.’

  ‘Do you crave human company? That’s only natural.’

  ‘I want to be surrounded by people again, but I don’t have much desire to talk to them.’

  ‘But you have so many ideas to share,’ said Father Anthony. ‘If you’ll excuse my asking, do you feel quite well? Not everyone can withstand this climate. I myself, many years ago, spent an entire year prostrate on my bed. The heat, you see, and it led to a sort of spiritual crisis, a lack of faith, you might say, in the sustaining hand of God. I thought I may have dreamed winter. It was only prayer that gave me strength, Bill – the strength of God against the burden of His creation.’

  ‘Prayer!’ I said. ‘Can I ask you a question? Doesn’t faith feel to you like a deep-down knowing, something you’ve discovered rather than made? And what do you do when you’ve lost that knowing? Hope that praying to something you no longer know will get it back for you?’

  ‘Would you like me to pray for you, Bill?’

  ‘I’m not well,’ I said. ‘I have headaches.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Father Anthony, reaching out a hand, and I was able, then, to imagine him laid out on a bed, dreaming winter. ‘Why not leave?’

  ‘Mabel.’

  ‘Mabel is the squid, yes?’

  ‘She belongs in the sea.’

  ‘And what do you propose?’

  I explained that the net with which we’d plugged Mabel’s bay was impossible to move with only two men. I corrected myself – one man. Of course he didn’t know about Darwin. Can a priest see the ghost of Darwin? Unlikely. But if all the students came down to the bay and we worked together, we could unfasten the net and, very swiftly, move it from one side of the bay to the other, so that Mabel, on escaping, wouldn’t tangle herself in it. (Confession: when I imagine this, I have in mind a delirious scene from the Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty, in which the girls of Tahiti, bare-breasted, hold an enormous net in the water, into which the native men drive schools of fish.) Father Anthony seemed concerned about this plan. He asked if there would be any danger. I told him no, there would be no danger – unlike octopi, squid are not dangerous to human beings. All those old etchings of whaleboats embraced by monstrous tentacled creatures are completely false. I said this, but we don’t really know. No one has ever swum with a colossal squid. But just to be on the safe side, it’s my plan to feed Mabel all the fish I have while the girls move the net. I’ll enter the water to distract her if I have to. I’ll get so close I’ll fill her clever eyes.