by Brian Castro
Byron Johnson was finally having a real holiday. He clung to the rigging, bellowed at the sea, licked the salt-spray from his arms, allowed the tears to mingle. Finally, finally, he could breathe as though he had developed gills. He sang, and felt the notes melt before him. Captain Morris McGann, peering through cloud and seeing what he thought was a crew member thus engaged in idle and lunatic meditation, ordered Johnson aloft to double-reef the topsail and to furl the foresail. Such a thing was of course rarely heard of at sea. The reputation of losing a passenger was far worse than that of losing a ship. It was the end of any re-financing, for one thing. In any case, Johnson scaled the ratlines… and a heavy man was he.
The captain was trying to lie under easy sail, as was the rule in a storm, and the barque, being a hermaphrodite, loosed her fore-and-aft mainsail and swung before the wind, rain lashing at the rigging and the ship dipping before the swell. Up on the foremast the sails had parted and a piece of yard-arm had sprung out of the iron. Johnson was trying desperately to embrace the canvas. Up on the crosstrees the world was pitching not only fore and aft but from port to starboard. It was one of those windy ferris rides he might have experienced in Southhampton. His feeble cries calling for the sheets to be pulled taut went unheard above the fury of wind and water.
An eternity went by.
There was, at this time, a strange light which illuminated the horizon. It darted about at first, a metallic phosphor, a July 4th fuse and then it drew closer, Byron Johnson becoming transfixed. He tried to reach out for it, one hand trapped between tarry cables, tried to touch its luminescence, to match the nitrous fusion of his body with divine sacrifice, yearning to let go of the responsibility for saving them all. He wanted to visit an obsession; a woman hereabouts, calling from the deep, but heard instead a flat Harvard voice, the tailings of his own imagination and the crackling resonances of Orville Pennington-James:
I do hereby forswear, with my dying pen, such callous nihilism as would allow you to perish forever, the ancient mariner was saying. Allow it upon my head… manacle me to what happens next! Kid me with curiosity! There is nothing, believe me, on the other side, those voices but beckonings, toings and froings of everyday life. Reality, ha! Accept its regularities; concede its banalities, but upon death there is nothing but words and words hereafter. You’ve almost said so yourself:
… today what characterises our reality is the probability that chaos is the most likely explanation, while at the same time recognising that even to seek an explanation represents a denial of chaos.
Just one more step and you would have had it. Chaos is not worth the effort of nailing reality to the mast. Float, Byron. I’ve shipped three years before it. Float. I’ll furnish thee from mine own library the volumes for thy crossing.
So there Johnson clings, pinned by a lightning bolt ringing the iron ‘neath the broken yardarm, brain besieged by the Devil, seduced.
He takes a step. He falls.
The halyards uncoil, slough him off like an albatross loosed from a net and his great wings flap once or twice, too long encaged, too far out to sea, they serve him poorly, and so forlorn, he dives deep into the ocean.
There he was in a kind of calenture, overwhelmed by a desire to be enveloped by the sea. The water was much warmer than he thought, so he believed he was abed, during one of those plunges when people say it is your heart stopping or some such thing, when it is simply the hole of forgetting into which we slip, sometimes for eternity, which serves to remind us that we are never an interruption to anything. Hardly a spark in the great continuum.
He held his breath. When he surfaced, he saw the Nora’s running lights sliding away. Then returning. Morris was going through the usual rescue procedure, reconnoitring back and forth over a grid like a dog on a scent. Johnson tried to hold up an arm, but he sank, his arm probably broken when he was ripped from the rigging. Through a lit porthole he saw Julia’s husband looking at him. He was practically at eyeball level, but we do not know what possessed the fellow not to raise the alarm. Perhaps it was the play of light and dark. Johnson could see him rubbing his earring. He looked ecstatic. So dark it was, that when a light is on inside, one can see nothing outside. It all depends on the dark, on it being darker, in order to see. Glancing without examining. That is how we love and how we kill. And then he saw Julia rise, push him aside to retch. Saw her lie down again, legs up, the lantern swaying, her feet like alabaster. Perhaps she was lying down all the time, because now Johnson was above the scene on a giant swell, the ship and its jetsam juggling with the line of sight. Julia opened the porthole when the vessel heeled, kicked something into the sea. Closed it again.
The Nora disappeared.
Presently Byron Johnson felt something slide beneath his feet. In the strange, purple, celestial light (in this afterburner of the tempest which in future years will be the cause of countless disappearances of vessels… this I quoth in all sincerity and foreboding), he saw a giant jellyfish, a man-o'-war sneaking up his crotch. The thing was wedging itself there, dear God, ready to sting him athwart the tail. He flailed at it and pulled on it, determined to wrestle any sea monster until the storm had o’erblown. Arrrgh! he shrieked. It was Julia’s muslin bloomers. Without much pause for thought, he did what he had been taught at school. (Sailors’ trousers… what d’ye do with sailors’ trousers? his teacher had demanded, slipping out of his bell-bottoms). These were finer. He blew into them and with a deft twist, tied the ends and blew again. Two white sausages gradually appeared. He hitched one final knot and then rested his head in the crotch. Thus he was borne by his own breath through the dark and turbulent sea.
Pennington-James’ voice persisted:
At this juncture I was interrupted by a high official from the Government, who burst into my hospital room in Hobart, requesting that I, Mr Crusoe, was it? be up and dressed and that I was to report immediately to Government House. He was powdered and hairless and sported no wig. I informed him that I had spent almost two years on a desert isle, that my name was Pennington-James and not Crusoe, nor Robinson, for that matter, and that I was seeking rest, whether eternal or not, a thing entirely between me and Him Upstairs, and would he mind getting his uncontrolled derrière out of my room.
I thought, he blubbered, that you were one of us.
He left this ambiguous statement hanging, patted his braid and minced into the sunlight. It was at that point that I threw the piss-bottle. I was my own man. A life at sea had seen to that.
The next day, (there was no warning; these people would interrupt funerals if necessary, disinter corpses, steal heads), two emissaries arrived, made sure I was conscious and then ushered in the Governor himself. His Excellency had thin lips, long sideburns and dandruff and came in humming a hymn. Tall and stooped, he examined me with a monocle which was so thick it appeared that his eye, like God’s, encompassed the whole room. I had a faint suspicion I was at the Gates themselves. Everywhere I looked his eye followed until, it seemed, I was swallowed by it. He proceeded with a series of questions, his voice mechanical and toneless. He wanted to know with how many of the native women had I slept. He wanted to know the state of my health and of theirs. He wanted exact calculations of the length of time of their visits. He wanted to know the kinds of food they brought.
I thought he was a most prurient man. But I was generous, contemptuous as I was of his lack of imagination. I was through with writing. Perhaps he could use the material, no doubt published under a nom de plume.
He pulled out a gold watch, and with the magnifying glass still in his eye, proceeded to time the interval between my coughing fits. He finally clicked the watch shut, turned abruptly on his heel and exclaimed, it seemed in a moment of passion, Tremendous!
29
The Lieutenant-Governor,
Hobart Town.
Primo, December, 1830.
My dear George,
I beg to refer you to Capt. O.J. Pennington-James, late master of the brig Nora (both lying abed, eh what?) fo
r the particulars of the attack the natives made upon the men in Company employ on the 11th December. Capt. Pennington-James was brought from Launceston after his rescue from a lamentable state having been cast away upon an infernal island, and is at present recuperating at Company expense on Northmere.
While the men were collecting cattle along the Great Western Road, they were set upon by natives in a premeditated attack. The blacks made off with several milking beasts. As I mentioned in my last dispatch, some of these natives were captured and dealt with severely. I’m extremely happy to hear that you found that upstart Robinson’s report of thirty killed as "greatly exaggerated". It was nowhere near that number. Penn-James, however, will not testify, even as he lies upon his deathbed, having also drunk, like Odysseus’s comrades, from the milch-cows of the sun-god, and will never return to health.
Yes, milk, dear George. The milk of human kindness. He drank copious amounts of it and all the time grew sicker. This, I beg you to consider, could be the final solution to the native problem, for they do not understand the notion of labour, and we are not about to be ruined for the sake of virtue. The coughing sickness, George, will be far more effective than musket-balls.
I have the honour to be, & c.
Ed. Curr,
Resident Magistrate,
Tasman Wool Co.
Northmere.
30
Sperm McGann is standing up in the stirrups of Thomas John’s old nag, taking great gulps of fresh air at Circular Head, the freshest air in the world. Didn’t want to be like John, lying gangrenous in his hut did he?
Old John went out and provoked the blacks and copped one in the thigh; thin sliver of a spear with nasty back-raked barbs. No matter how much he broke off, some would remain… like the blacks. Wonder if they’d poisoned the tips?
Sperm McGann at an easy canter, still standing up in the saddle, shaken with a violent coughing, blood-flecks on his bristly chin, beating at the air with one hand to stay aloft. What a life, these shepherds. They could have easily grazed their sheep and cattle without trouble, but they needed women didn’t they? The whole place was short of them. Now they only wanted women with dark fuzzy privates and unashamed offerings and they wanted to pay nothing for the privilege. You always have to give back bigger and better presents. So sheep were taken.
Great draughts of air. That’s it. Easy does it. Long breaths bounced out by the cantering. Will. Health was an act of will. Great gulps of air. Rein in the horse. Arrgh! Look at the sea.
Kicks the horse into a gallop again because up there on the hill his eye catches the movement of black bodies painted into lines… they think they’re menacing that way… see what a musket will do.
McGann whoops. Turns the old nag which is rearing like a warhorse, leather all white-laced with froth and sweat, the thump of breath and soil. Spurs it back to what was called ‘the Race Course'.
When he arrives at the huts he notices first that the smoke from the chimneys are curling to the ground. A shift of wind. He’s too exhausted to think too much about it; remembers some vague parable he was forced to learn at the Bosanquets about the smoke from sacrifices… God’s dissatisfaction.
But he forgot that on a shift of wind the natives come, downwind, but the white men wouldn’t smell them anyway, mouths stuffed full of fatty mutton and beer.
McGann can hardly breathe. Dismounts when the outlying dogs bark. Receives the first spear before he can turn around. It’s surprising at first, this quivering rod stuck in the side of his chest. Then a fiery pain and he falls, more from comprehension and shock and sees the blacks scooting through the tea tree, maybe twenty of them, suddenly his collapsed lung bringing massive relief despite the pain, and he can breathe once more, his hand at his side warmed with blood. He shifts into a sitting position, places his other hand around the wound and pulls the shaft, then sucks at his fingers full of blood and soil and crawls inside towards a fire, plunges into its redness and feels it sear the wound and he coughs once and sees his insides spewing out, hears the hollowness in his ear, waves of fainting. Bloody nonsense, he says. All bloody fear. He thinks he’s talking, but hasn’t said a word in reality. Looks around him and sees stinking boots and vomit and piss and blood.
G’day, Sperm. Whatcha do? Fall off yer horse?
Thomas John is lying on the floor, breathing his last, three spears in his back.
III
Amongst Those Left Are You…
– It would be just like your sort to go so far as to invite reader participation in the remaining two volumes of the trilogy!
B.S.Johnson,
See The Old Lady Decently
1
He wrote that a few months before committing suicide, the first in his ‘Matrix Trilogy', which he never completed. He left that to me. The ancient Greeks had a word for it: Tessera. A piece of broken tile which completed a puzzle.
My name is Thomas McGann. And I want to know why he committed suicide.
Even now, when I read his work, it is as though he is holding it open for me. He must have begun the second volume at about the time my stepmother bought an old run-down motel in Queenstown on the west coast of Tasmania. It consisted of cabins, a dozen of them running haphazardly along the highway, old miners’ shacks built on piers, converted into tolerable accommodation. The slagheaps in the background loomed, cast into landmarks on the neon motel sign in a vain attempt to pick up some of the passing tourist trade. Almost nobody stopped.
Nobody of note.
It rained a lot, and in the winter, a constant sleeting. The motel was constructed of Huon pine. It was waterproof. But there were no trees anywhere to be seen. A mining town like a moonscape. In between stripping beds and shaking out sticky condoms, cleaning up vomit, vacuuming the carpets and flipping eggs ‘easy over’ in the mornings, I began writing the last part of Johnson’s trilogy, sitting at the registration desk in the middle of the night and listening for the change of gears which suggested custom. It was a kind of memorial, I suppose, though it was questionable for whom it was intended. Perhaps I was calling him down, pleading for a guiding hand to show a stutterer on his way; or perhaps even as a guide, his Virgilian shyness and distemper may have matched the complicities of my ancestors. Although… come to think of it… there was a salt-encrusted hand, barnacled with age and tutored in perversity which strove hard in the telling to hold things together. Deadly enemies, truth and fiction. It’s a crisis in every age.
Reception was in a new bungalow built on a slab. The former owners didn’t heed engineering principles. Every time it rained, water rushed down the hills, collected the slag and flooded us with black ink. A pump switched on automatically, sluiced the stuff into a downpipe. I can still hear it; or is that my heart? There it goes. Over it and behind the thin partition, the snores of my stepmother. Times like these my mind invariably drifted between tenses.
Though I’d outlasted B.S.Johnson by two years, (on the mainland, my average life span would be just about up), I had nothing in common with him except perhaps a dead mother. Although I was looking for truth as hard as he did, all I was uncovering were lies about my life. Meanwhile my stepmother kept me enslaved in the motel with illnesses she’d invented while I laboured and she counted money, complaining of cancer. I don’t doubt her anxiety about death. I won’t cry at her funeral either, unless the moment overtakes me. I ladle out porridge from the aluminium saucepan, its handle burning my hand. I can ill afford that. My stepmother pulls her beanie down over her eyes. It’s three degrees in the kitchen. Food stains mark the walls. Between the chopping board and the greasy toaster, there is a hole in the wall made by mice. That’s where she keeps her money. I put my hand in, feel the softness of a rat; push the money-belt down my shirt.
Down the road, at Macquarie Harbour, they endured much more for a lesser crime a hundred and fifty years ago: deathly cold, poor food, disease, torture, the worst excesses of human nature. There was no escaping Sarah Island; neither by sea nor through the impenetrable wi
lderness, and it was easy to be spotted from observation posts which were watched as well by others from their own hiding-places and peepholes, others who didn’t mind the cold and so stood unmoving, sleet melting off their greased hair, watching the fires and the drunkenness and the sweaty clasp of man upon man in the loneliest winters of the cruelest station.
Then there was a girl looking like Lady Diana. She arrived late one night in a dented taxi, smoking a lot of cigarettes and making a dozen phone-calls and all the while I was hoping the secretiveness I admired in her wouldn’t turn out to be something vulgar. So that was all I had to go on. Oh, and a copy of Albert Angelo, signed by B.S.J. himself. It wasn’t available in Australia because H.M.Customs had seized the whole consignment since the text included holes cut in the pages and they wanted to view the offending excisions. The book smelled like someone had smoked a hundred cigarettes in it, the sixties hermetically sealed in print. I wrote to the bookseller in Hammersmith, who wrote back that, yes, I could have one smelling of Guinness if I liked, at ⊥200. I wasn’t the only B.S.J. collector. At least the girl wasn’t going to charge for her story, even if I was too shy to talk to her. Later I plucked up the courage, went to her room with a bottle of milk and showed her my copy, annotated, the margins filled with sequel, the blank pages scored with scribble. I grew dizzy then, and had to sit on the edge of her bed.
In Tasmania, the best minds of my generation were failing the heritage test, for we were half-castes, destined to be hated by all; not of one mind; caught, as they say, between the devil and the deep blue sea; patronised by some and regarded as curiosities by others. Don’t be fooled by my white hair and pink eyes. I’m an albino. Not at all the same as those which have been worshipped here for well on a century: the large, the grey and the muttony. We had our own myths, and depending on the occasion, could turn them and turn them again, possessing a talent for the international stage, whose roving spotlight would soon find its mark.