by Brian Castro
Morris lurched before him, coughing into the back of his hand. Told him when climbing to use two hands on the rails. One for yourself and one for the ship, he said, his right shoulder hunched, a familiar posture to those who’ve had tuberculosis.
It was only much later that night, when Byron Johnson found himself in a pub, his back against a weeping stone wall, that he thought about Morris’s shoulder in the barque’s galley, remembering again the dandruff on his peacoat, the way he coughed, the stubby fingers and the dirty notebook in which Morris McGann had pencilled in his name. That name McGann again.
Byron Johnson grew dizzy from drink.
18
Late 1820's. For over half a year they escaped detection, marauding up and down the islands of the Strait, capturing more women, killing whales, bartering sealskin. This was trade of a kind, and the British kept their eyes averted. Free enterprise, as long as it wasn’t Dutch. But the Nora needed serious repairs and had sprung dangerous leaks.
They took the brig into the Furneaux Islands which were shrouded in mist, waves dashing against great crumbling columns of rock, erratic demons’ teeth strewn half a mile out to snag those wooden butterflies of the sea. They threaded their way through channels and harbours so skilfully until they found a deep-water refuge in the night and there they drilled holes in her bottom and loaded four whaleboats with provisions and watched her go down, turning on her side and groaning like a dying whale, sending up columns of froth, soon to be nothing but swirling water and then in the stillness only the slow slap of oars as they made for shore.
They had cut their ties with the outside world. From now on they would speak no ship, answer no call, seek no help, raise no conventional signal.
Nights there would be fires, seen and transcribed from one island to the next and their presence would be known, but no one would bother them, (except perhaps for French explorers whom they treated with great hospitality). You see them now, hair matted, wearing kangaroo skins, sunburnt, healthy and wild-eyed, their huts in twos and threes along the coastal fringes.
Your ancestors, dear Emma. And with them, the native women, thin, lithe, food-gatherers. In the sheds, even today, they still work by oil-lamps, heads in shower caps all covered in feathers, scalding, brushing and laying the muttonbirds on racks; washing, grading, sprinkling them with salt and packing them into barrels for New Zealand; pouring in brine and watching for the spud to float up when the salt was right. Maybe you’d chosen me to be the potato. Writers, I could tell you were thinking, were praters, maybe prats. But I am answering your call as a gauge to what is right.
They were left alone; silent desperadoes, the Intercostals, their rage directed towards their women. Yet they all survived the bleakness of the islands, not through trade but by means of their industrious concubines, who, like cobwebs placed on a wound, knitted them together. Yet they failed to have any progeny.
Once a week, as near to Sunday as he could make out, for he kept no log, the bellwether of the Furneaux exhorted his tribe. Lightning rimmed the ocean. His face had thinned. The points of his broad shoulders stood out. Salt-spray formed on his brow:
O Straitsmen, let not your isolation envelope your minds in muttonfat. Allow not listlessness to render your genitals flaccid. You have a duty towards progeny. Progeny will be the supply of labour. Progeny will be our salvation, our reward, our harvest, our rib from which we will fashion a new mankind inured to all hardship, a hybrid of the greatest intelligence, native cunning and physical strength, and through it will evolve an equal and just society. Let not this difficulty absorb you unnaturally. I suspect a trivial matter… something we must be eating. I… uh. We… uh.
Spittle dribbled from McGann’s chin and he lost the thread of his rhetoric, though the lightning still danced above his head and he felt a numbing absence, the loss of words when vision broke, as though the hand of God had been proffered and then withdrawn. Innovation, he had already suspected, was also dissipation. He ordered that certain vittels be eliminated from their diet and that they watch their women carefully when foraging. Half listening to him, the men turned, smirked and spat and went back to their huts to sleep.
19
WORÉ is still here. Three seasons older. The scar in my chest turning purple when it gets cold, standing here in the water washing myself so the seals don’t smell me. WORÉ, who can now speak a little in their language. She who suffers, who believes in McGann because he knows things no one else knows. He who cures illness. He who speaks at night to WORÉ the most tender of things but beats her in the morning and sometimes WORÉ approaches him out of fear as well as loyalty, wanting his praise, but out of fear and loyalty, she urinates instead.
I take the club. I walk along the edge of the water. The wind blows softly towards me. The seals snort and blow and cough. When the water is deeper, I swim quietly and reach the rocks. I climb out. Seals have poor eyesight. They scratch. I lie down on the rocks. I scratch. They sneeze. I sneeze. I let their spirit come into me. My belly is hard. I am with child. McGann can never tell. This is the third time. All he does after he squirts his seed into me is to make wax heads in my likeness. He places them all over our hut and lights the oil in them so that they glow from within. The seals beat their bellies with their flippers. I beat my belly with my fists. Hard. Harder. There is much pain. Suddenly I jump up and hit the nearest seal with my club. It moans softly and coughs up blood. Just one blow on the snout. It dies. I take it by the flippers and drag it back to McGann, who is standing on the beach watching me. When I reach him I can see that he is in a rage.
Just one ? He shouts in my ear. All that time and just one seal?
He snatches the club from my hand, jumps across the rocks holding my arm, dragging me along. I can hear my arm crack. The seals slide into the water, but for a few it is too late. McGann flails at them and in a few minutes there are five or six dying seals.
That’s how you do it, he says.
But I do not understand why he wants so many to be left on the beach to stink, so the others do not return. He grabs me by the hair. Thrusts my head underwater. When I pretend I can hardly breathe, though in reality I can hold my breath for several minutes longer, he pulls me up again.
You just do it. You ask me nothing.
He holds me under again. Lifts me up.
How many pounds of seal oil can ten men produce in a single day?
Three thousand.
How long will a sixth of a pint keep a wick alight?
Twelve hours.
How do you improve the oil?
By bleeding the seal as much as possible before it dies.
Good.
He holds me under again. Another question when I rise.
What is the greatest delicacy?
The tongue.
Salted tongue! You have our tongue WORÉ. Then do as I say and don’t play the fool. Otherwise I’ll cut it out, salt it down, take it back, eat it.
I could tell him how I killed my babies. The first one I drowned over there, by the mangrove. The second I killed by putting a firestick down its throat when it cried, in the way my people used to kill elephant seals. This one I’m killing inside me. I kill them because they will be like me. They will be women which McGann will take and thrust his seed into them. I kill them because I follow this shame which I do not yet know how to resist since I now belong nowhere. Something in me says I would prefer to die. But I am a smell on the beach, warning the others not to return. While McGann has me, there will be no more white men. The ones here grow old quickly. Then they will die too, on this white beach and one day, when there is nothing left of them, the seals will return to inhabit this place in peace.
I can see Cavalho in his hut across the bay. He’s been watching all this through a spyglass which he took from a sea-captain. I stick my tongue out at him and he puts down the glass and resumes what McGann calls their sexual duty. He pants and groans over my sisters. When he is spent and asleep, they will mix into his stew the seal liver they have
been extracting and they will mince the pulp of grass trees into his tea and day by day he will grow more stupid and he will vomit and shit continuously. Too busy watching McGann trying to drown me, he hasn’t seen the ship on the horizon coming towards us.
20
Time shrouds everything; pares down speech; makes life black or white.
Must’ve been that seeping pub wall. Moisture down the vertebrae causing unwanted connections. Some sort of short-circuit in the brain. They told me I was flailing about at the bar; no mere drunkard, not the DT’s either, someone had experience of that. An ex-rugbyman from the St John’s Ambulance, a Knight-Hotelier, thrust a blackjack into my mouth to prevent lockjaw after hitting me about the head first, a few times to elicit ingenuousness.
The next morning I had mostly recovered.
Apparently I’d slept out, on the lawn beside the CSIRO building in Hobart. I can remember periods of consciousness, watching the fishing fleet go out at two in the morning, lights flickering, the bottle of Guinness in my left pocket, the fuzzy grass, smell of the world spinning beneath.
For over a year, Byron Johnson suffered from not being himself. That was the trouble. He thought he was going mad, but other people assured him he was simply drifting a little. Which was far from the truth. This was a huge worry. He thought he had a grip on it and then it slipped like a fish from the hand. Still, a pleasure that another self had regained life. That he worried the truth was escaping him meant he wasn’t mad. Yet. And so he had discovered a solution of sorts. He clung to the belief that metaphysics meant you weren’t mad. Transcendentalism was sanity in a sordid, disappointingly real world. Then he discovered silence. But the trouble with that was when he did speak, something gushed involuntarily with excess.
For a while, at parties, he nodded wisely, he nodded foolishly. He didn’t think it really mattered, until the night the celebrated publisher Elaine Friedman launched her first novel. She flushed him out. You think my novel’s shit, don’t you, she asked. He nodded. It wouldn’t have mattered had she not broken her wineglass over his head and made the morning papers. He knew they had already surpassed him, these first-timers. They were in tune with issues. They moved on… and trampled over him. Oh, yes, Byron S. Johnson, once a legatee of Beckett and Joyce. Now maybe a character in one of their books. Silence meant he had nothing to say; yesterday’s man again. Yet when the Other Self performed, what a toll it took! Each exaggeration a painful tattoo on his back he was condemned to wear forever. Word for word and word by word the public mocked him. And of course he fell in love with Elaine Friedman and had to more than once accommodate her husband, the cantankerous New York publisher D.V. Ravisingh, who really did turn things in his favour. He was back in circulation briefly. He made fruitful collaborations, but his real work suffered. The building of integrity had to do with reserve, retrieval and balance. That was before he married Ainslie Cracklewood. She set him on the path of no return. Moved him into an apartment of his own, and like George Sand, shielded and prodded him by turn and forced him to get on with it. Then to add the tragedy he had always needed, left him.
I smelled the grass and dreamt how once near here, they brought convicts to be hung, and here once they set out on an expedition, a thin black line of death to kill every native they could find; here a place of fish and blood, and here too, the beginning of great adventures: Mawson leaving from yonder Queen’s Pier, to dare the hummocks and treacherous floes; here whalers set sail and spent winters locked in ice long before maps were made, maps in which sometimes a gaping hole appeared. That’s when they needed a third eye to stare down fear… the moment when they stepped outside their own creation.
It had always been harder for introverts to stare down fear. We had an upstart teacher who was reading Freud. He tried to teach us the terms. In Hammersmith, in primary school, we ran naked on sports days by the Thames, escaping Tunnel Ball and dragging dead cats from the sludge, sluicing flotsam in search of buried hulks or lost watches, and sticking our fingers into one another’s navels, shouting innies or outies? Pressing hard until a nervous reflex of pain made the victim squirm. Innies were introverts. They felt pain. They had this hole in the centre of themselves, no evidence of a true parting from their mothers. But they were more than the merely human.
Even before the womb, a desire for inanimateness.
But the third eye of the introverts saw victory beyond death. Those who possessed it fell, always a sacrifice so others would be saved. In every age they go forth, sensitivities bared, the burghers of history… mad, masochistic, dangerously extreme. Our Freudian teacher was dangerously extreme. He massaged the backs of our necks as he walked up and down the aisle of the bus, consumed by Freud. My mother said he could get dismissed for that kind of thing.
Well, down to the sea in ships. The barque Nora looked good in the sunlight and Morris was there, scampering among the rigging with simian arms. A gymnast once, perhaps. He was waving. Damn. Will have to wave back. Didn’t think old salts did that kind of thing. Finally glad he didn’t wave back. Morris was winching something up. Didn’t see the rope. The fitted out boat looked too complicated. Two other men appeared and disappeared. Surly types, cigarettes in mouth, beanies on their heads. Nobody spoke. This was good.
He went down to his cabin hoping to meet the other passengers but none had arrived. Chose the upper bunk, pulled back the sheets just in case. Old school habit. Prison the same. You survived the snoring on top, but not the insomniacs. Insomniacs smoked. He went on deck and observed some of the action. Took a few mental notes of how they prepared the sails. Didn’t have to be an expert to see things that began to ring alarm bells, for they were either taking short cuts or counting on the weather to be fine throughout, which was highly unlikely. They made do with one squaresail yard crossed on the fore and a small aft rig and he wasn’t feeling any better when he saw the drums of diesel the two deckhands were hauling aboard. It wasn’t going to be plain sailing, but a kind of motorised subsidy. The Nora must have been inefficient to windward, so he was glad he didn’t choose the cabin over the steerage. He went back down, spread some of his things over the lower bunk and made his way to the engine housing. Motor installed in 1950, the plate once riveted to the side hanging loose. He found a bottle of beer on the shelf, pried it open, sat down near the shaft and studied the starter motor. The hydraulic accumulator charged by a belt-driven pump. No hand lever in case the pressure dropped. Judging by the water in the bilge, there was a fair amount of leakage from the shaft housing. The beer smelled like old socks and tasted warm, so he left most of it, then thought he’d better get rid of it and poured it down an empty oil drum, which, come to think of it, looked like a fuel tank. Nothing seemed quite as shipshape as before. He looked under the cowling. Found a metal box. Took something from it and put it into the pocket of his jacket. He went up on deck and climbed down onto the dock.
Felt better when a luxury limousine pulled up and a couple got out and walked towards the Nora. The man was stocky, wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket. He had long greasy hair, an earring in his left earlobe. Possibly a rock musician. They kept some distance between them. She had upper class written all over her; conservative but expensive dress, supercilious expression, blow-job mouth, tanned and well-shaped legs you wouldn’t often see out of jodhpurs. He’d learned the smell from Ainslie. It took one look at them to tell him the gigolo married her for property. The fellow made his fingers into a pistol.
Hi. You crew or passenger?
He didn’t like the familiarity, so he pointed back in like manner, a Mexican stand-off perhaps, indicating they were all in the same boat, compadre. He nodded. Looked at the wife.
Gotcha, the husband said.
She had just a whisper of contempt on her face. Enough to say: Kiss my arse, buster.
Gladly, but not yet.
It took a little time to realise the disdain was reserved for her husband. Then when she stepped over the threshold into her above-deck cabin, she glanced very quickly
around. His heart pumped. A long time. It had been a long time. He feared the old flaws.
Next couple arrived. Mr and Mrs Average. Made him feel at home. He in checked flannel shirt and lumberjacket, she in trackpants and parka. They had won well at the casino. Raked in at the tables and the cruise was part of the deal - getting off at Launceston for another fling. He could imagine them standing all day at the roulette table in their sandals, faces so innocent no one could tell they’d been winning for three days and when they settle up she could hardly lug the chips out of her bag. They should have gone back to Queensland, set up a gas-grog-and go store on the corner of some dusty highway, but they always wanted more and pretty soon they would slide down the other side when the luck ran out. And it always did. He’d seen his father do that; the Johnsons had never known what to do with an oil spout in their own backyard. Moving house was the traditional response. Here they were in another guise. Mr and Mrs Mitchell-Smith. The hyphen came with the luck.
The Nora got under weigh at noon, making for Port Arthur. They would all spend the night at the penal settlement, in a motel a manacle’s throw from some of the bleakest dormitories in the Antipodes.
21
It is, as usual, WORÉ who first sees the barque and the Union Jack she had been taught to fear. The ship is coming in fast, close-hauled, and she can see a man on the bowsprit taking fathoms.
Three… two and a half.
McGann, who is chasing her, walloping her with an open hand, stops when she suddenly stops shrieking.
Sperm! Ship!
Two… two.