by Carmel Bird
One day I expect I will move on, will take up my travels where I left off. Maybe go to Florida? I often have a strangely vivid (so vivid, so vivid) dream of a bright green and white backpacker hostel that must be somewhere in dream-Greece. Even as I am dreaming it, I am aware that it has the sharp quality of hallucination. It is there that I find my dream soul mate, my woman with amber-eyes, singing softly to me in the twilight. This brings me to reflect on some of the history of my personal life.
Once I was married to Paloma García, but what began romantically and dramatically in Mexico ended a year later in New Mexico with some bad blood and some hard feelings. All concerned—me and Paloma and the Other Man—were somewhat the worse for wear. At least I was the worse for wear, maybe they weren’t. My mother certainly was—she was already knitting her special sort of lacy white baby dress in joyous expectation of our non-existent offspring. The dress was not knitted in vain, as it has served its purpose many times over, since my sisters regularly produce batches of bouncing young.
Paloma and I met in the unlighted emergency room of a nightmarish hospital in Mexico City during the earthquake of 1985. Looking back now I can see that we were caught up in the romance of having escaped death and of being thrown together by fate under extreme circumstances. She was wearing a thin dress the colour and texture of the pink fairy-floss cloud dress worn by a girl I fell in love with when I was six, my Cinderella girl. I was lost in an enchantment. I tell myself Paloma’s dress had nothing to do with what happened, it was just a nice coincidence. The air around our first embrace was filled with the groans of a man dying on the floor beside us, his blood flowing warm and slippery and pungent beneath our bare feet. There was the stench of shit and decay with a sharp hint of a nauseatingly sweet disinfectant. We ran, both only slightly injured, from the hospital and kept going, finding a bicycle under a pile of dust and rubbish, and riding together out to the suburb where Paloma’s uncle lived. We passed the dead and dying on the way. There was nothing we could do but keep going. Three months later we were married. It’s all a blur now.
When we had been married for a year, and were on a short holiday, staying in Taos where I was doing homage to D.H. Lawrence, she deserted me—oh that bleak, that desolate word—to follow after a tall handsome Spanish Jesuit who was, or so he rather quaintly said, detaching himself from his original vows. Well, they had language and religion more or less in common. It took me a good five years to recover from the heartbreak. Heartbreak—there is another one of those plain and dangerous words. Heartbreak.
It was a radiant morning, the morning Paloma left me. She walked out through a dark red door in Taos, into the arms of Jesus the Jesuit who was carrying a small basket of oranges and a single red rose. How could something so corny cause so much heartache, so much world-shattering pain and anguish? Five years to recover. Five years. It’s ridiculous. However I did recover—all you suicidal rejected lovers take note. The experience, as it happens, did me good. It’s a well-known fact, but one that often needs to be restated, that the broken heart is just one necessary trauma among many in the development of the adult human being, like the pain of getting wisdom teeth, perhaps.
In any case, while those Greek sirens of the dreamland backpacker hostel call to me from the deep of sleep, I labour on alone in the sparkling daily gleaming whitenesses of the facility, listening to the dreams, the thoughts, the fabling warbling narratives of the patients, making judgments and decisions about their mysterious lives.
Meanwhile, much of eastern Australia is turning to dust. Seven million tonnes of topsoil, I heard, blew away in one enormous duststorm. Almost in the same breath you hear dust and El Niño. Here at Black River the words ‘El Niño’ have a different meaning from the newsreader’s one. Our most important life-guest, our star, is Caleb Mean, who has been known all his life as El Niño. Because of Caleb and his title and the significance of El Niño in his family history, I have made a study of warm currents and weather patterns and catastrophes, as well as a study of the Catholic image of the Christ Child. I came to know about the role of El Niño in the Netherlands herring industry, for instance, not because of my Dutch heritage, but because of my study of Caleb—Caleb Mean, El Niño of northwest Van Diemen’s Land.
I have elected to write an account of Caleb, who was nicknamed ‘El Niño’ by his family when he was born in 1959. I say ‘nickname’ but it was really more like giving him a title. I sometimes carelessly conflate ‘Caleb’ with ‘Caliban’ the missing link, because for one thing Caleb Mean is startling in his oddity. I have met some very unusual characters in my time, but Caleb is, for good reason, the strangest and most fascinating to me.
I confess that he is part of the reason I decided to take the job here at BRPDF. I have wanted to know what made him tick for a long long time. I never will, but I can try. He was treated by his family as if he was the South American version of the Holy Child, the Infant Jesus who sits up on his throne, wearing a pink silk dress and covered in cockle shells. He sometimes used to wear a straw hat with shells on it, a pilgrim’s hat, a replica of the hat on El Niño de Atocha. We are the same age, Caleb and I, and I have known about him all my life—he was famous around here, a strange looking boy with huge teeth, and smooth shining electric-blue eyes with long black curling lashes. He sometimes wore the robes of El Niño, and sometimes he wore a shining silver and white suit, all his costumes were made from cheap taffeta and satin, according to my mother, who would know. He led prayer meetings and rallies, always gleaming with a preternatural radiance. I met him several times when we were children, and there would often be articles about him in the paper, sometimes serious, sometimes teasing and joking. I used to read these greedily, and with a sort of envy for his exotic, powerful and privileged life. I have spent many years trying to make sense of the phenomenon of Caleb by clinical and therapeutic means, like many of my colleagues both here and abroad. The result is a vast file of colourful contradictions and very little real illumination. So instead of a psychiatric report, I am giving a poet’s telling of the story, which I hope goes wider and deeper than any case-study. I am looking for the shape of the shadows of things, of lives, of the ways things happen. Sometimes in half-dreams I enter the terror of being caught by the chill strings of my heart in the shifting shape of a shape-shifting Caleb. He morphs into a photographic negative of a photograph of myself. And once I heard a voice that I identified as his voice calling, echoing from a great distance, and that voice was calling: Nineteenfiftynine and already too late!
Caleb Mean is my great challenge. He is very difficult to understand, let alone explain. Impossible perhaps. I love a challenge!
Sometimes I feel that in writing these stories I give the account not only of the people and the events at Cape Grimm and nearby, but of Cape Grimm country itself, this place where the very winds and the very air are caught and sifted and measured and recorded. For Caleb and his deeds really are fashioned of the air—of the history and the geography, and they are made from the rocks and the trees and the water. And the air, oh, the sweet pure magical air. The air and time. Ticktockticktockticktock. Bewarebewarebeware. Tidesturn, tidesturn, tidesturn. Burnandonedayyouwillburn. Such was the rhyme we used to sing, the counting rhyme, the beat of the human heart. I don’t know where it came from, that song. Am I being too fanciful—about the links between Caleb and this place? I don’t know. It is a strange and eerie place, and I must tell the tale. Caleb’s story reaches back into the history of his family, and like a lot of stories, I suppose, this is as much about me, the author, as it is about him, the subject. I know I’ll be unable to resist breaking into the narrative as the story develops, and I have already begun laying out for readers some of the history of my own family. The two histories, of the Means and the Van Loons, are different, yet both families fetched up here on the rocky northwest coast of Van Diemen’s Land, and that seems to bring them together, or so I think. The Means were here in the mid-nineteenth century, the Van Loons coming a hundred years later
. This begins as a story of migration, of people looking for a home, finding it here on the far northwest of this island. Cape Grimm I see as a pinpoint focus, a convergence of lines of lives leading from all corners of the globe over time. You can do that to any place on the map, but I have chosen to do it with Cape Grimm. Because I am here. Because it is a kind of nowhere. Because it is home.
My practice in much of this writing is, as my colleagues love to tell me, unprofessional. I sometimes consider retiring from my day job in order to plunge head-first into the sea of writing fiction. And I also think of maybe going into private practice where I can be more free, and in a sense more secretive, somehow. I also think of giving up psychiatry altogether and becoming—what—ah, I don’t know. Whatever the morality of this project, now that I have begun I certainly intend to continue. I must go on. For years I have done no other writing but articles for journals, and also the poems that pour out from my unconscious. The present project is another matter, with a different purpose, a new and different pleasure for me. No doubt there is an element of self-delusion lurking here. I am in love with the idea of telling the story, with giving myself the freedom to construct with words as I have never before constructed.
Some scholars say the oldest story to be found in manuscript is the tale of The Shipwrecked Sailor. The date of the manuscript is disputed, but in any case the tale is written on a very ancient Egyptian papyrus scroll, telling of a sailor who ended up on an island where he was saved and befriended by a serpent of bright gold. This place was called the Island of the Soul. That’s the oldest story, and I can imagine that the story I am telling might even be part of it.
If I die in the sea, don’t leave me here alone.
Am I writing against that loneliness? The child in the sea off Christmas Island had only her little human voice, and for the world at large, those words of hers are all that remain, but they are words never to be forgotten. When she spoke them she threw out a line to me, up here at Black River in my Rapunzel’s Tower. I see that in quite visual terms, the little child in the water crying out to her father, the words becoming a line of eerie vermilion type, like the words the angel whispered into the ear of the Virgin Mary. Hail Mary. The child’s words arc out from the waters off Christmas Island to the valleys of Christmas Hills where I take up the story. As I try to unlock the mysterious logic in the story of Caleb Mean, I am, in a sense, for the sake of the little one who cried out in the sea, looking for the key in our lives that turns and twists and unleashes our misfortunes. The destiny that left her there to drown, the impulse that compelled Caleb to set his own people alight. I will not leave her there alone. I will explore destiny, and good, and evil, and time, and tide. I have both a wide canvas and a curiously narrow one.
This is a big project, I know, but I have been worrying at it like a loose tooth for a long time now, and if I don’t get on with it I might go mad myself. I think it could be quite easy to go mad. I live with the madness of others every day, and everybody knows that psychiatrists suffer from some of the ills of their patients. There must still be members of that lost child’s family on earth, so the effect of her drowning on the SIEV-X will reverberate forever somewhere. For one thing, her father lived to report her words, otherwise I would not know them.
But my first task is this one: to trace the twisted history of Caleb Mean, to untangle, to find the shape of things. Instead of going into Caleb’s head, I will go out into his past and out into the world, and that journey will take me far and wide in time and space. I will look at the stars and I will imagine the deep, deep ocean where the Kraken slumbers. There is talk of global warming, with much evidence. I wonder, as the planet heats up, and the Kraken prepares to take over the oceans, and the fevered earth, if the tempers of human beings might not be on the rise. Is everybody getting angrier? Is Caleb’s conflagration just a symptom of a terrible flaming anger that is taking hold of the world? I love action movies. I do. Is the world turning into an action movie? I think perhaps it is. Maybe.
I took down my well-worn copy of the complete works of Hans Christian Andersen to check on the eyes of the dogs in the story of The Tinderbox and I discovered that whereas The Tinderbox is the first story collected, the sixth last—Number 150 of 156—is called The Great Sea Serpent. I read it for the first time, and it turns out that the serpent there is not the Kraken I had imagined it would be, but the telegraph cable ‘that stretches from Europe to America’. It lies ‘perfectly still, as if it were lifeless, but inside it is filled with life, with thoughts, human thoughts. Human thoughts expressed in all the languages of the world, and yet silent, the snake of the knowledge of good and evil.’ Just like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Hans Christian Andersen had his eye and his finger on the future. I had not fully realised that before. He saw in the transatlantic telegraph cable the snake of the knowledge of good and evil worming its slithery way beneath the waters of the world.
Meanwhile, much of eastern Australia, speck by speck, is turning to dust.
CHAPTER TWO
Mask
‘Their vestments of spiders’ webs shall not abide the force of the Lord’s wind.’
JOHN KNOX, Epistle to the Congregation of the Castle of St Andrews
I had already heard a great deal about Caleb Mean and felt I already knew him when I met him for the first time at a picnic. Before this day I had only seen him from a distance. Memories of this picnic take me back into the pleasant wandering realms of my childhood. It was summer holidays in Christmas Hills, the day I encountered Caleb, and our whole family—from the grandparents down to the littlest babies—were out at Duck River for the day, eating and drinking and fishing and swimming. I was about eight in a land of milk and honey. Our feet were bare, flies tickled our skin, and our white blond hair stuck up in tufts, letting the sun straight through to our pink Dutch skulls. The girls, protesting, wore sunbonnets which were one of my mother’s specialities, but the boys were too tough for hats. Some of us were playing one of our favourite games under the helter-skelter shelter of a she-oak that grew above a big rock, away from the family group on the picnic rugs. We were on the dusty ground at the foot of the rock. The game was called ‘Mask’ and the main players were the Victim and the Interrogator. The rest were the Jury. The Victim had to put on a mask and answer questions invented by the Interrogator, the point being that all your answers had to be lies. The Jury kept score. When they decided you had told the truth three times, or had hesitated too long over your answer, you were out. You had one last chance to tell the truth, one last chance while everyone chanted our rhyme: Ticktockticktockticktock. Bewarebewarebeware. Tidesturn, tidesturn, tidesturn. Burnandone day you will burn.
The nature of the questions meant that when you told the lie the others knew the truth anyway. Either way you were exposed, and you looked stupid.
The mask itself was a balaclava, hot as hell, made by Aunt Edda—strictly speaking she was a great-aunt—who lived over at Woodpecker Point, and spoke embarrassingly terrible English. ‘Yu git th’ idee?’ she would wail after every second thing she said. I always squirmed inside when I heard her in public with her grotesque double vowels and the funny buzzing of the ‘zz’. She was always cooking, buns and ‘keks’, always keks with cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg. ‘Littol keks for good children,’ she would say, and I would try to blot out the way she talked, greedy for her cooking. Loving her for her keks, her shellbark layer cake and her shoo-fly pie. Yet I loved her too. ‘The flowerz and the zunshine bring the colourz, children, and the shadowz and the gravez. Yu get th’ idee?’ We did understand her perfectly, but it was hard for people outside the family. She would tap the side of her spectacles with the middle finger of her left hand, as if to ensure somehow that the listeners got the idea. She kept a few sheep from which she got the wool to spin and dye and knit and weave—and we would even be taken on excursions to distant towns for the purpose of scraping lichen from the old gravestones in the cemeteries. She said the lichens gave her the finest dyes, but fo
r us the visits to the graveyards were just another reason for other kids to make fun of us. We were known as Double-Dutch graverobbers, among other things.
The headstones in the cemetery at Stanley were some of the cleanest in the area because we scoured them. They were also dangerous because they were completely undermined by rabbit warrens. We would go to the beach below the graveyard for a picnic, baskets of Dutch gingerbread and ambrosial egg and bacon pie and, before we were permitted to eat a thing, we had to take to the graves with our pocket knives, collecting the lichens in special wicker baskets lined with the broad leaves of the palm trees that grew along the path to Edda’s front door. Edda used to say that the lichens from that particular spot, from that graveyard looking out to sea, were among the finest lichens in the world. I don’t know how she figured that, but you couldn’t argue with her. ‘Zientifick,’ she would say, ‘it iz perfeckly zientifick. You get th’ idee?’ Her other great scientific exercise was fixing her dyes in the urine of sheep or goats. All this happened in a shed under an old plum tree, and I leave people to imagine the fumes and the smell. We would do anything, anything at all, to get out of helping in the fixing shed. Edda refused to use commercial or synthetic dyes, claiming that her methods were God’s own methods, as used by the people in the Old Testament (and the Greek myths). He was a strictly vegetarian god, with something rather Buddhist about him, as far as colouring his fabrics went, for Edda would not use, for example, cochineal, but worked on getting her reds from plant sources. She was known to use tea and coffee and seeds and grasses and wine and fruits and flowers—marigolds, red roses, the dark blue of the iris—never shellfish or blood. And she said squid ink was of no use to her. She had a friend who used to send her bright russet and terracotta lichens—which are smeared like paint and clotted like blood across the rounded tear-stained rocks along the coastline of Flinders Island—and she treasured those, giving cries of a kind of holy joy when she opened the little parcel. I have to emphasise that her work was really beautiful, and I wish I had kept some of it, if only to reassure myself that I am not imagining its quality in the glow of nostalgic memory.