Drift

by Brian Castro

  On Sundays, on the Hawkesbury, the Bosanquets forced him to church, where he sat in a pew trying not to breathe, and thus without breathing, willed the service and the pastor’s platitudinous droning to end, to suffocate, to explode. Oooh. Ahhh. He thought he could faint to shorten the process. But one thing prevented it. Mrs Bosanquet, for some strange reason, left her knickers in the woodshed. It happened more than once and he didn’t think fit to mention them, giving himself to understand that it was an act of charity. She had seen the holes in his clothes. She had stressed cleanliness. But the knickers… Perhaps she was embarrassed. He wore them under his trousers. He couldn’t faint. What grew light on top… his head faded into balloons… grew heavy beneath. Mrs Bosanquet’s underpants excited him. Her unmentionables next to his skin. He didn’t have to make any effort not to melt into air. Yet his desires confronted emptiness and this thorn kept reality close, for he was unable to explain to himself how an older woman like her could have all the manipulative skills of a passionate lover and yet dole out the dangerous supplement of a never-to-be-consummated flirtation. She treated him like a child. They was alway doin’ that. I said I was grown up an’ all, but it was the goodness what was killing me.

  McGann studied the back of Mrs Bosanquet’s head. A pale neck, hair swept up to fall in ringlets, reddish-gold beneath. She had large, watery-blue eyes and fainted easily when the weather changed. On humid afternoons when McGann would be kneading her likeness from clay along the riverbank, in the late afternoon just before the predictable storm arrived, Mrs Bosanquet would faint on the verandah, her fan fluttering at her breast. The servants would loosen her collar. Sometimes she fainted in church and he would glimpse a lace bodice, but he was never close enough or alone so that he could do the loosening himself. Want to know what love is? It’s somethin’ you feel what the upper classes alone can say. God, my heart broke! Do we love differently?

  Mr Bosanquet puffed and groaned and the pew creaked when he shifted. He smelled of worsted and tobacco and moved slowly, with the peculiar dullness of colonial commerce in his head. He was respected as a man who knew sheep and cattle, dung sprouting with straw stuck between the heel and sole of his boot. McGann could not have imagined a worse existence. As a convict he had seen floggings and hangings and yes, had developed the best motivation for staying alive: resentment. Oh, aye. Excitin’ to see a man hanged. It brought you the rage, see?

  Something of this sort had already taken place on board ship from England. They had run into the first of several storms off the Cape and in the ensuing mêlée, he found himself in the officers’ quarters when, wonder of wonders, discovered a dozen chickens kept there for higher palates. He released them through the porthole and remembered feeling immense satisfaction at their clumsy flight and futile plunges into the mighty ocean. One however, drew altitude in manic indirection, withstood the eager reaches of spray and driving rain and headed fortuitously toward land beyond. He took this as a sign of his own manumission. Then nearing Sydney, he contracted malaria and spent months in solitary, his face swollen, shivering in night-sweats. Given up for dead, he was freed for a time, lying unnoticed in a puddle by the Quay until a fellow inmate dragged him up, forcing him to sip a concoction a Chinaman had recommended: hairless, new-born rats marinated in rum. ‘Twasn’t a matter o’ taste. You swallowed without chewin. He recovered. A magistrate found reason to return him to chains. He was patient, and earned release again.

  But the rustic piety and continuous homily at the Bosanquets had no concern for the diseased reality of life; at least not with this one. That is, if it weren’t for Mrs Bosanquet. Who had taught him to read. Her breath sweet on his neck as she pushed her finger haltingly over the words; ever onward. She taught him Latin. He memorised without effort: amo, amas, amat.

  He breathed in.

  Terra Australis: An open-air prison, he was thinking, as she read to him about Napoleon’s exploits.

  He breathed out. A strand of Mrs Bosanquet’s hair lifted and she half turned. He saw her glorious ear. But he had not the words which she would want to hear.

  On Sundays he was not to work, so he lingered near the house after church and did carvings. Out of selected boxwood, he made figurines so fine he could have whittled a new life for himself, but he showed them to nobody and thought badly of his skill. He considered himself a simpleton and these were simple pastimes. He was told repeatedly that religion and work were the important things and that he was someone who should never aspire beyond his station. So he was more than a little aghast when religion continually brought him to the back pew behind Mrs Bosanquet’s neck, and religion led him to examine her body with impunity and to unclothe her and to touch her. Never, never, never. For the boredom of religion had given him the power of extreme imagination, to the point at which, coupled with his short and dramatic life, he was unable to manage reality without convincing himself of some illusory purpose. It was warped; it was fundamental and exciting… really of no relevance in the mounting of Mrs Bosanquet, in the kissing of her neck while frothing in ecstasy, in the fondling of her breasts, in the insertion of himself with wild transgression… of no relevance at all when everything was imagined and no insight revealed itself, no issue of fact save the pounding insistence in his trousers, the pressure there when he decided, one Sunday afternoon, to call on her with an armful of figurines… his best work… little dancing faeries, winged ballerinas, all etched with fine scales of ringleted hair he had once glimpsed in a painting. Never.

  He tapped at the kitchen window and a maid appeared shooing him away with her hands. He asked for the mistress. She wasn’t in. The maid had seen her take the sulky towards the river, perhaps to meet her husband on the road from town. Mr Bosanquet would stop at the hotel of course, if the river flooded. The hotel had markings on the wall near the steps: the height of flood-water cut into the stone. The marks were very high. Sometimes Mr Bosanquet would not be home for days.

  He walked back by the woodshed and saw the sulky, the horse tethered by the willows and with heart beating irregularly, stole up to a crack in the bark wall and saw Mrs Bosanquet jigging up and down, performing a kind of dance, though she was on her knees and unclothed, and he watched with fascination how one of her breasts was smaller than the other and how she was red in the face and perspiring, her eyes closed, then half-closed, and she moved her head from side to side as one who was taken with the falling sickness, and then rougher arms came up to steady her, holding her hips, and he saw the pastor lying on a horse-rug beneath her, his arms falling back as though he were struggling in water and about to drown. Imagination. Reality. I care not which.

  McGann put his nose to the gap. Ironbark. River loam. Perfume. Semen. This was the pious otherworld. Cicadas intensified their scraping, until their drumming came in regular rhythms of deafening noise which reflected his isolation. He tore at strands of his hair. His jealousy was immense, a sweet, sexual pain held in infinite contradiction. And then the little chirring sounds the pastor was making broke through, Mrs Bosanquet’s gasps punctuating them.

  Cheated of his manhood, he turned, came to a kind of crossing, a muddied corduroy of logs, and he sat and placed his feet in the warm liquid and watched insects swim and dart away. He squashed a few. The black mud changed and reformed in fluid consistency. He looked at the bubbles and suddenly knew, though he had scarcely the words to convey the insight, knew that he would have to weave his own image in the darkness of this world. Fatherless, motherless, to forever perform a corrective to the corrections of authority. Which was tryin’ always to silence those who really needed to speak.

  He picked up an axe. Hesitated. Chaos was his. It would come as suddenly and as naturally as a baby’s first gasp of air. A slap and then the fury, the splintering bone and gushing blood, the cries and gurgles of this furious world. He would see them begging, pleading, on their knees in the same way as they took their pleasure. The crunch of skull beneath. Fleeting life.

  But for now it was enough to have s
een it; to have had the powerful desire to take it away. He shouldered the axe and followed the river. At a bend he cast his figurines into the water and the sprites floated off. He walked until he reached the sea, contemplated there awhile, his finger in his nose… about the peace of islands and the natural order; the domain of love about which he had heard; maidens with flowers in their hair… his fancy peppered with the grapeshot of the Napoleonic enterprise, missions of conquest and skilful dominion, visions to weave his own future outside the oppressive presence of an authorial hand.

  They were building ships at the mouth of the river. He managed to become a swab on one that looked likely to sink on its maiden voyage.

  From the log of the Nora, a brig commanded by Capt. O. Pennington-James:

  McGann deserted his first ship in Cloudy Bay, New Zealand. They all had the feckin desire to do that: frisk with native women and produce a new patriarchy, monarchy, whatever, of ministering maidens… but they usually got eaten or thrown off clifftops or burned ceremonially. But by golly, I give it to this McGann. He must have had the good fortune or manner to ingratiate himself, for he lived for some time with a bevy of Maori women.

  If it can be believed, McGann told us how on a West Coast trek one summer… they did these treks quite regular… they all slid down a glacier in a Kauriwood canoe, attacked periodically by a giant, flightless bird… well, every mariner turned marooner came up with such stories to hide failure. McGann was either a consummate liar or a feckin simpleton, and I think, expected good hazing from all.

  But then there was the time when we encountered war canoes off the Bay of Islands and why, McGann spoke so fluently and convincingly in their tongue (theirs were stuck out to horrify us, fluttering purple athwart their lips) that soon the natives were pressing upon us more fruit and potatoes than we could have possibly stowed. We were in such calm we anchored awhile and the men spent the following week lazing, pulling at the scuttle-butt and sitting round the longboat until they had to be humbugged into mending the rigging.

  Spouter off larboard!

  Pennington-James lays aside his quill and goes on deck with the brass speaking trumpet. Cavalho, the Portuguese third mate, points. Eighty yards off the prow a black whale surfaces, blows, swings playfully sideways to eye them off, dives and circles back. Pennington-James yells to the helmsman to keep the ship on course, driving the whale leeward to shallower water. Pretty soon they see two others, then a pod of five or six, altogether about 400 to 500 barrels, Pennington-James calculates, for this is his specialty, the quickness of mind when it comes to figures, let’s see, at ?13 per ton, he was looking at ?2,000 right there, these the Right whales, he muses, his mind already computing the ?200 he would earn for this trip.

  Lower the boats!

  The men don’t need to be told. McGann’s chocked the steering oar when they swing the boats out, the davits groaning, like riding a horse now, bending his knees as he releases the rope, waiting for the dip of waves to drop the whaleboat in, whipping away the wooden pulley yelling Heads! a split second too late as it swings back towards the ship, hoping to catch a swab a good one on the head, but there are no takers and they are used to this and they duck and are soon pulling steadily towards the rocky shore and the emerald furrow of dangerous water, pulling hard because the tide is giving them no chance for error as they feel the pull of the swell and the black water heaves and suddenly they’re closing on a curious whale and Cavalho’s stuck it, but not too well for the iron draws, Cavalho pulling in, his hands blood-crusted, the whale’s eye turning cloudy in pain, now trying to scythe them with its flukes. They strike again and this time the black fish sounds, the rope whipping and whirring from the tubs, smoking the blocks, and when the beast glides up McGann deftly plunges a lance into its heart and it blows a terrible trumpet of blood and tissue into the boat, everything smeared now, the men in a frenzy, making fast an anchor by drilling through its flukes and he, fixing a rod into its back, runs up a white whiff. Aye, these black fish have no real will to fight, he says as the sun peeps out, lighting up the water. Eeee. Eeee. They say they have a song, chirruping underwater to each other. Poor barnacled flanks which will become bubble and squeak and the scented oil of night providing for our education, weak eyes and the attrition of desire.

  Before too long he sights three others and they gain on them and separate them, harpooning two, but the third escapes with two hundred yards of line in its back, trailing a red wake in the aquamarine.

  By dusk a nauseous wind has risen and when Pennington-James heaves the ship to and lowers sail, he counts twenty-two carcases, some anchored, some running towards the shoal water. He orders McGann to bring two alongside. When the boats are up they begin the cutting in, wasting no time while the weather was calm, standing on stages lowered from davits, wielding bounding knives, swaying and stripping, their backs lit by the try-pot fires roaring beneath the cauldrons, strips of winched blubber sliding sticky with blood back along the deck, innards oozing and sucking at their feet. Black smoke, blackened men, rancid air, a ship afire. The natives on shore watch in fascination, marvelling at this industry of devils.

  By morning the wind has intensified. There is nothing to be done and the ship is beginning to drag its anchor. After a while they hoist the sails and depart, leaving twenty whale carcases buffeting the boulders, pieces of blubber floating in red froth, the natives poking at them, tasting bits, watching the rest roll into inlets and coves, setting up an almighty stink.

  The ship made sail in the firming wind and ploughed northward. In the lazaret three captured women lay, exhausted, turning in pools of vomit, faecal matter and bilge water, wretched from the tossing, bucking and swaying. McGann went down there, the air fouled with sickly blubber and blood. He brought salted pork and a slops bucket and cleaned them, gently rubbing their skin with gin and water, their teeth chattering. There now. They trembled. There now. They ate for the first time, chewing slowly. The one he had designated was his, the one he loved most, the one called WORÉ.MER.NER., smiled at him.

  At noon, Pennington-James called McGann to his cabin.

  I’ve decided to lay over a bit, he said. See what we can pick up. I’m getting the hang of this here whaling.

  Sealing’s the thing Sir. We’re too small for whales.

  Hmmm. But you see, McGann, there’s nothing to sealing. If you think that small you’ll end up scooping scampi. I know the Nora‘s only a brig, but if you get the men down below with the oakum… plug all the beams with tar, we’ll do this aright. Square her up, McGann.

  Pennington-James didn’t tell McGann that he thought whaling was more dramatic, that he needed whaling in order to write his private log. Pennington-James didn’t mention the cart he was putting before the horse, the book before real life, writing before whaling. Pennington-James wanted to compose the definitive whaling novel while nibbling on crayfish and sipping a crisp semillon. He wanted to put down the greatest fish story of them all, just when a youngster by the name of Melville slipped out of Albany Classical School to begin a life at sea.

  I’ll make the decisions about this ship, he continued, avoiding McGann’s eye, taking off his spectacles for that purpose. You’ll see by and by what’s best for us.

  Sperm McGann didn’t see at all. Down below, in his hammock, he plied pieces of old hemp. Then he went down into the lazaret and flicked it at the legs of the women. They thought it was a game and giggled at first, but when it didn’t stop, suffered it noiselessly.

  12

  Gravity drew me down. The gravity of letters.

  I knew from experience what dependency could lead to. Emma’s grief would be great if she met me, just think of it, an oik from Hammersmith, (Hammersmith, Thames-side inner borough; industl., residtl., elec. and car accessories, synthetic rubber), what do I know of psychological dependency? What do I know of the healing process? Better remain silent, rear my ugly head at the right moment and not put pen to paper for the purposes of communication. Better the bearer of delicacy: obs
erve, repine, empathise from a great distance, than to fester a wind-swept isle with hotfooted assuagement from the other side of the colonial Styx. Yet to stem the hurt now, was that not insurance for a happy meeting? A prolepsis, no less, to tell her: Fear not, I’m coming to you, and thus, having arrived, not fear the unknown? And further: Together we will discover what you cannot say. And each time I will grow dizzy and we will draw closer. A déjà vu is better than an imprévu, I say. But then a potential suicide and a repressed schizophrenic can be a volatile mix. Witness her latest missive: some ancestral memory of whaling; natives amidships in the forbearing line; sentences cut into chaotic boroughs of tribal dialects, somewhat like Fulham. A jigsaw. A problematic. I wasn’t Freud. I tried to reason it out. Tell a story with a point to it, and unlike Kafka, try to sell books. Maybe, against my better judgment, (and how that has failed me over the years!), I will send her my most innovative book, printed on loose-leaf and bound in a ring folder, (much to the annoyance of my publisher… you can see him drinking to my demise which he regards as much as his own), so the reader could readjust the plot if fancy overtook him/her; and in the subtle shifting of identity, gender, class, age, whatever was unleaving from the constriction of rings, retire to the real chaos of our imaginations.