by Brian Castro
Deakin shrugged.
Mournful history, he ruminated. Never learned much of it. All those places had grievous names.
I left him with half the bottle, saying I had to take a nap. I folded the map as he was fumbling for something in his pocket. He produced a pellet of paper and unfurled it with one hand.
You want to hear the latest, what they’re writing about you in London? It’s from The Guardian. He was seeking to detain me.
I shook my head.
He began to read anyway, his voice quavering in false tenor, like an old Ezra Pound recording:
Johnson’s work and life reveal the tragic assumption of the notion of fiction as lies. Painting himself into a corner and failing a one-to-one transfer of truth between writer and reader, he desperately tries to subvert the text.
Subversion, Byron, Deakin said. It’s a dangerous game to play.
I made my escape on that warning. Before the lift doors closed, I saw him making notes with a gold fountain pen.
Ascended.
Stepped off on the fourteenth floor, went down the fire exit and took a walk by the waterfront. Had to move fast. When faced with the unpredictable, do the unexpected.
Couldn’t breathe then. Felt a cold hand pressing down upon my neck.
16
Rage, of course, made him shallow.
Sperm McGann was standing his watch in the dark, thinking of that, transfixed by the silvery waves creasing the sea behind, the brig doing a steady four knots reaching for the Furneaux.
It was an illness, this rage, frothing his mouth and locking his jaw. They said that happened when you got bitten. There had been a dog at the Bosanquets. Mongrel on a chain which lunged at him every time he fed it. Biting the hand…
He was at other times immensely calm. Changeable like the sea. Used to get the longboats out and tug them over the side, gently pull on his mind, ropes of thought. He wanted to know so much. Wanted to find out exactly the mechanism which drove the body. Down below, the last time off New Zealand, he’d operated on a man. The boatsteerer. Yes, the same who was flicked like a gnat off a blackfish fluke. Upside down he was, in mid-air, collarbone through the flesh, all the while Pennington-James scooting fore and aft polishing his eyeglasses, saying Damn, the man’s a goner.
Down below McGann had pushed back the bone, placed a board in front and one behind and drew them together with ropes and turnbuckles. Above the man’s screaming he’d heard the crack and suddenly the air was rushing into his lungs and the poor fellow was grunting and then wheezing and then was breathing as easy as you please. But the next night the boatsteerer brought up black blood and that was when McGann cut him open, reached in with a finger and felt the penetrated lung and pushed back the splinter of bone. The man gasped, frothing with blood and died an hour later.
In there, inside the body, an immensity of thought. Someone else’s work he would like to preserve, but he was hamfisted, cack-handed, his mind like granite and always within that, the fires of rage. He wanted so much to know.
He heard a movement behind.
Mishter McGann, you want for me to take your watch?
It was Cavalho, the Portuguese.
Aye, Porky. In two hours I want all the men up here. No noise.
Cavalho, one of those bull-necked seadogs who gave loyalty in return for their share of violence, pillage, rape and porter. He drank so much there was never anything in his lay after the others deducted what he owed them. McGann gave him a wooden whistle.
Three blows.
Cavalho swung himself onto the quarterdeck. Immensely powerful, he irritated all authority with his inane and provocative smile, which, attended by a disconcerting astigmatism, gave him the look of a benign, though unpredictable gorilla. He was smiling now, on the quarterdeck, picking something out of his ear with McGann’s whistle.
A year before that smile was a comfort of sorts when Pennington-James had the brig lying off Macquarie Harbour, close-reefed as the wind whipped up and the clouds scudded across the sky and the sandbanks were coming up close, ridged with fierce spume and suddenly they could see the wrecks rising out of the rocks so they made for the harbour, signalling in the salt haze to the semaphore station on Entrance Island, which stood guard, piteously small, next to the raging slit of Hell’s Gates. Yes, Pennington-James was frightened to go in without a pilot, making whimpering sounds on deck, saying that he ought to perhaps circumnavigate Van Diemen’s Land again, until better weather afforded him the grace to pass safely through. At the moment it was a maelstrom of froth and current, seven and a half feet of aquamarine and then the slapping deep black water, cold and tannin-stained of the penal harbour. McGann drew a whaleboat, picked Cavalho and two others and they sailed in for provisions, gaff-rigged, tide against wind, between Scylla and Charybdis, the huge rumbling seas swallowing them and for one moment they all heard the voice of God, that resonant howling heavy with judgment, an albatross gliding above. Cavalho looked up and smiled and they all thought what innocence he possessed, his wet, benighted face calming Divine fury, the bird suddenly shitting in flight, gobbets of it landing in Cavalho’s wall-eye as the Roaring Forties suddenly spat them into calm water. That had freed them all. Then close-hauled, they saw a man running on the shore and as they drew in close they could see him still running, naked, genitals flailing, pallid flanks trembling, coming up against an invisible wall, raising his arms, running back, finding no escape in the dense scrub and finally squatting, exhausted, in the shallows. McGann jumped over the bow, pulled the boat in.
‘Take me back,’ the escapee rasped, hair matted, face chiselled and scarred, beard clotted with green slime, a nauseating stench from his nether regions. He was grasping a square of fish-bait.
They forced him to sit over the side, shit running down his legs, his little package neatly wrapped in kelp and when they neared Sarah Island, saw a boatload of marines pulling out to intercept them.
The fellow spoke again before they manacled him.
‘I’ve eaten of a man,’ he said. ‘Here, got some of ‘im left.’
He unwrapped a green piece of meat.
Should have taken him aboard, McGann was thinking, swinging in his hammock, when a shrill whistle sounded. Once. Twice. No more. Fucking Cavalho can’t count. He drew a pistol from his seabag, carefully inserted a ball, seated the cap. He swung out of the hammock and went up to the Captain’s cabin. The door was slightly ajar. Pennington-James was snoring. A stale waft of air emerged. A ruffle of bedclothes. A Mohair Harvard quilt.
This is it, Orville, the end of the line.
Mama, is that you?
Draw out thy hands or I’ll blast thee in the bum.
This formality awoke the Captain, his mind still festooned with bedtime sea-stories.
Mercy! he cried.
He was allowed to put on his spectacles.
Mutiny!
Aye, you’ve guessed correctly. A boat is awaitin’ you. Don’t miss it, or you’ll be swimmin'.
And so fiction and reality joined forces and broke into Pennington-James’s life. Now he had real material to write about.
They cast him ashore on a little islet strewn with boulders and rimmed with raging ocean, nothing there but low-lying scrub and gnarled, stunted trees; no fresh water, no wildlife, just sand and teatree amidst which Pennington-James stood forlorn in his longjohns, coughing, rubbing his toes in grey sand and feeling cold. McGann left one barrel of water and some salted pork. Pennington-James requested his logbook and quill, but was refused.
Nay, you’ll be leaving no evidence of us, McGann shouted.
But just as the former captain began to scout the immediate shores of the islet, trying to remember Defoe’s epic, (which gave no advice of any practical nature and thus disproved the mischievous canard the author herded into the annals of real experience), there was a shout from the ship.
McGann drew himself up from the stern of the whaleboat and saw some disturbance in the water. At first he thought they were seals, but
then he saw flailing, skinny arms and bobbing woolly heads swimming for shore. The captured women. The rowers needed no command. They pulled till their shoulders cracked and within a few dozen strokes were level upon the escapees. Cavalho knelt and drove a spike at the nearest and they all stopped swimming, stalled by a slight swell. McGann clouted him with the oar, knocking him over the side, but Cavalho rose and clung to the bow, blood spurting from an ear. Then the men reached over and dragged them on board, limp, exhausted. WORÉ was on her face and when McGann turned her over, found beneath her breast a rusty stain of blood, the flapping wound turning white where the barb had entered and exited, her eyes cloudy. Waves were breaking over the bow, cold, black water frothing white, the evening murk coming upon the islands. Presently a salt mist formed and then the lashing of Bass Strait winds parted the clouds and unleashed a pale, ghostly beam of setting sun which moulded everything into a frieze of blood and boat; then into the benighted extinction of an unambiguous past.
Thus Pennington-James watched and envisaged the future. Sometimes he heard its cry, a ghostly semaphore of image and metaphor limning the sky. Sometimes an echo of a higher place, totally empty if he strove against it. But flowing, he was there and sometimes concurrently, felt the fear that he had been called. His chest pounded. A bird fluttered in his throat. His forehead ached with the effort of remaking himself. He wrung his hands together, interlaced his fingers, gesticulated at the sky. They on the ship would never see his lunging, this wrestling with invisible weights flaking with the ancient rust of indifference. There he was, cleaning and pressing, lumbering, tottering, conquering himself for the residue of individual conscience. He began rubbing two sticks together. Without pen and paper, he had a duty to survive. After the first cold tremors of the incoming night, he began to dig a hole in the scrub and laid down a glowing mat of leaves, imagining he heard above the pounding sea the snap of sail as the ship drew away forever.
In the Captain’s cabin, McGann gave WORÉ a twist of valerian he kept in a small leather bag. Her spasms stopped. Then he prodded her wound with a finger dipped in whisky. She groaned, but did not cry out. It went down to the first joint of his index finger. Luckily the iron had travelled in between the ribs. No vital organs affected. He kneaded elephant-seal fat into it. The fat oozed after a while, rimmed yellow with blood and plasma. She had no fever. A sailor would be cracking a high temperature, guzzling rum, yelling with self-pity. He recognised superior health. The ship creaked and rolled. He sat through the night with her, bathing her wound, inserting a rubbery kangaroo artery as a drain, sealing and closing the wound tightly in wax. He heard the bells struck and a profound yearning came upon him. Yes, in these islands, coves, harbours, channels and inlets, he will start a tribe which will evolve in his likeness. A grand enterprise lay before him: What Napoleon had achieved through conquest, he would do by progeneration.
McGann. Paterfamilias.
Yes, he breathed into WORÉ's wounded side and mumbled words, secret, arcane and profane, sang and chanted shibboleths of long forgotten antiphons and pronounced the hidden name upon which he would revive the glory of outcasts, strangers, the marginalia who would carry his charter into the future.
The Intercostals, he whispered, astounded by its sacramental sound.
17
Born with the most terrible affliction, an unrelenting sense of impending tragedy, I expected around every corner: motor accidents, fatal encounters, impossible coincidences. It wasn’t a fear of mortality, but of being condemned to witness it helplessly. Indeed, death would be an opportunity for relief. The day before, I pressed 200 kilograms in the Sheraton Health Club and spent the afternoon in the State Library. Dusty volumes wore me down. I choked, sneezed, sprayed like a whale. Others moved away. I read the diary of George Augustus Robinson, Administrator of the Aborigines in the 1830's. Found therein the name McGann. Tore out the page. So this was where Emma obtained her information.
I carried her letters in my ample pockets. Now and then, usually in the drizzle, in a moment overcome by impending tragedy, I read her garbled messages. So tenuous, these cries for help. It could all have been an elaborate joke. Indeed, just to touch her… and then perhaps laughter would ensue between us. Merciful relief, a life of brutish heartiness. But to be challenged by silence!
Sitting on that splintered beam on the dock I had a sense of being utterly, uselessly and uncompromisingly alone. It was only a moment later that I sensed I was being watched. Behind me, in a square of water locked by a swivel bridge, jostling in the incoming tide with an assortment of crayfish boats, shrimp yawls, floating fish marts and sundry working trawlers, was an old flaking barquentine. Standing aft, leaning on the rigging, a bearded man in a peacoat and skipper’s cap was regarding me closely. On the wharf, a placard advertising tours. I nodded. He spoke grudgingly, as though unused to touting for business.
We go anti-clockwise, right around.
I looked at the board. It was expensive.
Do you make any stops?
Depends. For repairs.
I was intrigued.
Can I come aboard?
Be my guest.
He showed me the ship. Everything was very old, but extremely neat, an obsessive tidiness which went beyond that required by confined spaces. He paced the deck with deliberate and measured steps, avoiding the flat, spiral coils of rope… Flemish Flakes, he called them… counting out where he should stop and pointing to what would be of interest to a landsman and by doing so, I thought, to gain some measure of me. I manifested the disinterest of those to whom all was despair. Uselessness. The profound uselessness of going to sea. Only the smells fascinated me. New paint and ancient decay… wood exuding varnish and the ceaseless effort of bodies, a wrung combination of old sweat and sapless age, of dead work and repeated renovation and of old sea-stink… reminder of the alien element into which I felt I was already sliding. There were three cabins, enough bed space for six to eight people, crew quarters for two, a makeshift lounge and a screwed down bar. An old diesel motor levered into a space that would have made repairs almost impossible. Sail lockers full of greasy canvas. Down below I felt suddenly ill. Someone was trying to test the motor. KRAANG! The smell of crayfish, shell left there, on a plate. Diesel floating in off the salt… the smell of childhood… but no idea took hold in this loneliness of sensation. Strange how every thought goes to that, the striving for idea, in the end to make a book of life, when all the while the perfervid worm crawls slowly and ceaselessly from lithesome flesh, oozing into emptiness. I thought then of my hotel bath for some reason, the claustrophobic steaminess, no call-girl, no company to share the waters, the deliberate tortures of memory. Emma’s letters. The ink running. Once, yes, once again, in my London apartment, trying out the first of my credit… and what better to test such an honorarium than ringing a companion, for a friend, I said, who was mute? She arrived with a card machine and I duly signed before completing the act in total silence and for the first time didn’t experience the guilt of language and its betrayal. Honest sex. No images of another, except perhaps of a cancerous mole on her back, perhaps one or two twittering bats or the cry of a gull before the incoming surf. These anxieties fairly minor considering the teeming bookshelves full of them.
How old is she?
1872.
The skipper wore a black fisherman’s cap, his beard silvery.
Used to do the regular run to Sydney. Built of blue gum, copper fastened, her keel stringers, waterways and strakes made in single pieces… a superior ship, way ahead of her time…
KRAANG!
Fuckin’ be gentle with that drive shaft, will ya?
Fuckin’ broke one already. Fuckin’ cost four hundred last time!
Turning to me, he said: Excuse me. Life on board. The colloquy of the sea. Refinement runs in the family. We’ve got doctors, writers, politicians. I only do this in the tourist season. Chandler. Not my name, my profession. The name’s Morris.
They shook hands.
; Byron.
The skipper stared at the deck.
No club foot, if you don’t mind my remarking. Reminds me of my cousin. They wouldn’t let him into the golf club down at Kingston. All very exclusive, you know. Then they must’ve felt sorry for him… he had this disability, poor bugger… only one arm… and they let him join. Played immaculate golf, but once on the green kicked his ball into the hole. Used to say he had a club foot.
B.S. Johnson smiled and said: You may as well call me disabled. I worked on a trawler once and got in the way.
Yes, the sea was the last place in which he could claim any skill. It had always been the last place where others had gone before, the first to burst into that silent sea. Fouled it up for the rest. He thought Morris was pleased he wasn’t one of those maritime enthusiasts for whom every clew was a matter of record.
We sail in the morning if the others turn up. You interested?
A moment of madness, secured with money, or at least…
Byron Shelley Johnson. Mastercard.
But then the galley in which they were standing swayed. A metallic taste coated his tongue and he felt the sweating planks against his hand, the blue gum and the Huon pine and the jungle of darkness and decay and the sump of black water and bottomless gorges out of which these trunks had arisen, each from a tiny, imaginative grain; he couldn’t abide it, this pinprick of light which brought coincidence close, creation and death, the crack in the wooden door in Hammersmith, the sweltering towel of childhood illness pressed against his cheek, the rancid refrain of chicken broth and the feel of his mother’s cool hand; you’re not imagining it, are you, dear? Several times he had visited that place called death by imagination, each time aboard a ship, and found a weak filament of fear through which he returned. His mother challenged him; she dared him to live and he hated it. Pale were his achievements, pallid his face, puce, the light filtering through the porthole. Evenings before departure, they used to say, made one melancholy. The waning light outlined his failures, described those hours of wrestling with God.