Cape Grimm
Page 5
As the carousel turned and turned, and as the world moved round and about me in a slow and distant blur, from the corner of my eye I caught a flash of live soft pink, a quick pink girl, small like a quick brown fox, who ran alone all alone up to the wild white horse, and as it was prancing by, its rider gazing in rapture at the distant world of his domain, the child skipped, jumped, leapt up onto the running-board, and she grasped the straining neck of the shiny white wooden horse. The huge white bow in her hair bobbed as she moved. Her dress was pink cotton, cotton candy, fairy-floss, cloud cotton, and she clung to the neck as the carousel turned and the music blared and tinkled and whined, and she hung there, a girl with no ticket, no right, no place. She was ignored by the prince on his wild white stallion, but she was the focus of many eyes in the crowd. Where was her mother, her father, her granny? She must be a pale pink orphan in white socks and black shoes and her billowy dress with the wide white collar and the faint impressions of small orange birds fliffing and fluffing around the hem. I saw all this with a delicious clarity. I thought I could smell fairy floss, that tickling whiff of kerosene. And I saw that the girl in pink, drawn by magic to the prince on his horse, was the princess, was radiant. And the world seemed to fall back in the face of her daring leap onto the merry-go-round without a ticket, risking her life, risking falling under the spinning platform and being mashed up in the works.
I was actually a weird kid myself, and I used to hear about Cape Grimm, connecting it with the Brothers but confusing the stories with narratives from other books, and imagining that Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and even Goldilocks and the Little Mermaid lived up at Cape Grimm, the home of the Brothers Grimm. And I loved Andersen’s Little Mermaid. I loved her so much. Charles Dickens always said he wanted to marry Red Riding Hood. That sounds a bit too domestic for me and how I felt and what I wanted. I wished so deeply to be with all those amazing girls, to bask in their glow, to stand beside them and defend them from trouble and pain. Well, that’s what I imagined or pretended I wanted. And I would climb a favourite apple tree that grew up into the roof space of an old shed, and I would get under the roof and read those lovely books—the illustrations linger to this day in my memory, the dark and scratchy evil George Cruikshank etchings, the Doré image of the giant murdering the babies as they sleep, the gnarled and dreaming drifts and branches of Arthur Rackham, the weirdly elegant and strangely threatening palaces of Edmund Dulac. I thought I could become an illustrator and take myself and others into new dimensions of reality and unreality, but I couldn’t really draw. The fairground girl in pink was better than anything I had ever seen in a book.
The princess on the carousel radiated light, and I saw her aura mingle with the light that surrounded Caleb Mean. Mingle just a little. But Caleb never even looked at the girl—and as the mechanism and the music began to slow down, ready to stop so that everybody could hop off or buy another ticket, a woman in a white hat and white gloves came yelling out of the crowd. And Cinderella clung on tighter to the neck of the stallion, and Caleb ignored everything, staring aluminium steadfast ahead, his eyes radioactive circles of terrible spinning light. The woman, her white kid handbag falling to the ground, leapt forward and snatched at the child in pink, prising her fingers from the horse’s neck, pulling her away like a plasticine doll (my computer wants me to type ‘Pleistocene’ but that isn’t what I mean) and yanking her onto the grass by the side of the merry-go-round where she turned her over and started slapping her on the back of the legs with the handbag, which she had swiftly retrieved.
‘Stay…away…from…those…people, that…boy,’ the mother thumped out the words. The child did not even cry. She just crumpled up and then stood, forlorn, on the grass, and her mother took her by the hand and led her away. ‘Stayaway from that boy Itell you. If you don’t stay away from him I will thrash you myself, do you hear?’ And the little girl was a ragged shaking bundle of toy rags on the end of her mother’s white glove.
The whole thing lasted for only a few minutes, but it is lit in my memory like a scene on a stage, an isolated moment captured in brilliantly glowing time, a sequence of film, a fragment, yes, of dream. It is possibly sealed off in that way because of what happened next, the punctuation mark of finality and shock. The girl, my princess, and her mother went from the carousel where the dangerous El Niño and his followers, as well as me and my brothers and sisters, were riding, riding, riding horses and swans, over to the open field where a crowd of other folks were gathered. People were sitting on tartan rugs and drinking brightly coloured cordials while watching the acrobatics of a little team of light aircraft. It was a perfect afternoon for the air show. Large and graceful birds gleaming in the heavens, glittering great insects, a small boy’s dream. Zoom zoom zaroom, the planes flashed across the clear free sky, making patterns, now together, now separate. Zoom. And as the last little aircraft—its name was Dumbo—whooshed down low, climbed, somersaulted, pirouetted, everyone looked up and smiled with pleasure. Then Dumbo began to cough, to splutter, to fall, and Dumbo fell, it said in the newspaper the next day, like a stone onto the princess and her mother who both died, as they are fond of saying in the papers, instantly. From over at the carousel I heard an explosion, screams, glimpsed a flare of flame, saw the slow obsidian billow of the plume of smoke that brushed tragedy across the sky.
I looked up the old papers and read about it a few years ago. There was a photograph of the woman and the girl—solemn, the same big white bow in her hair. Mrs Roberto Rinaldo and her daughter Francesca. They had been living at Skye, it said, until recently. Poor princess. Her father, it said, was a foreman at the Burnie Paper Mill. As such terrible events will do, her death and the image of Caleb on his white foamy stallion were linked in my childish heart, and they remain forever twinned in my memory, lit with the supernatural light of tragedy and loss. I don’t even know the real story behind the child’s ride on the merry-go-round, and the mother’s hysterical outburst against Caleb and his family. I can guess, but I can never know.
When I think of Caleb’s fatal last sermon on the cliff in 1992 I recall also the other time when I saw him, on the day of the picnic, with a particular and eerie vividness. And I think of that sermon often. The words he spoke in his final speech were first rehearsed and recorded on video, on a tape among hundreds of tapes found at a place on the outskirts of Skye known as the Temple of the Winds. He also recorded their final version when he spoke them in his clifftop performance. It’s a bit like the photographer who takes the picture of his own death. I have made a study of the words, the tone, the emphasis, in order to try to come to some understanding of his mental state. I compare the sermon with the text he shouted to us at the picnic, and as I do, sometimes thick slabs of my mother’s cinnamon apple slice, cold, with great blobs of yellowy cream, come sweetly back to memory.
CHAPTER THREE
Air
‘My mother she butchered me. My father he ate me.’
BROTHERS GRIMM, The Juniper Tree
This is how it was that night on top of the cliff at Cape Grimm. Caleb the Preacher Boy had become the Preacher Man, and had destroyed his people—and the reality of that is still beyond my comprehension. His narrative had come a long way since the recitation of the Psalm at the picnic; it had moved through poetry to millennial madness, drawing into itself all the drama of the delusion that he is at once the isolated leader and the key and central figure of the universe, the King of the Golden Mountain. I still don’t follow what brought this dangerous and tragic man to this point, but my work suggests that many factors and ingredients came together over more than five generations to produce the events of that summer night in 1992. Perhaps in some weird way it was the time and the place for that thing to happen—although that often seems to me to be a very skewed and bleak way to look at the events that make up the movement of human lives.
Caleb sits, high in the darkness, mounted on his horse, on the summit of the lone cliff, facing the sea, facing the forlorn and silken s
ky. The clear, clean, cold night air, the icy waning moon, the stars a scatter of tinsel in the fine pure air. Behind the man on the horse, across the stubble, rocks, lichen, yellow heath, stands the Cape Grimm weather station, like a tall soft-grey bathing box surrounded by cyclone fences. Light will bounce from the diamond framing wire spaces of the mesh, flashing messages of enclosure, of escape, to the sky, to the angels, to the night birds and the night animals. Presiding over everything is a lacy silver radio tower, a giraffe-insect, a wild windmill, a praying mantis gleaming in the dark.
A light is burning—comfort, hearth, home, a light is burning—in the weather station at Cape Grimm; there is one man inside, working the night shift. This place is where the air is collected, evaluated, measured, sent on to be re-measured, compared with other air, stored. And the air, which blows here across the Southern Ocean, touching no land, is frequently found to be as close to pure as any air in the whole wide world. There is nothing, nothing, between here and Africa which is eight thousand miles away. One of the computers in the silent weather station is named Jakob, and the other is Wilhelm, in remembrance of the great collectors and tellers of stories, the Grimm Brothers. Attached to the side of Wilhelm’s monitor are the words of a song on a yellowing piece of paper torn from a story book: My mother she butchered me. My father he ate me. My sister, little Ann Marie, she gathered up the bones of me, and tied them in a silken cloth, to lay, beneath the juniper tree.
On the metal filing cabinet beside computer Jakob there is taped a small print of a painting by Tom Roberts, the original of which hangs in a country art gallery, in Victoria, at Benalla. Brushstrokes of children, two girls in white pinafores over gold-brown dresses, beneath a tea-tree twisting and writhing above the rocks on the edge of the seashore. Nearby a row of tiny houses from whose steep roofs wisps of hearth-home smoke is rising. Lights glimmer through the bushes by the tumbledown fence—comfort, hearth, home. And all across the horizon stretch mist-blue trees, low hills, with a miniature town intact, red roofs, white church, the school where other children are busy at their lessons—Geography, History, Arithmetic, Nature Study for Tasmanians—the butcher slicing meat, the bricklayer laying bricks. Mothers feeding babies, fathers chopping wood, boys playing cricket, dogs running wild along the beach. And the girls on the patch of stubbly grass beneath the tea-tree on the foreshore, wearing their hats and white pinafores and little black boots, are making a daisy chain.
‘Playing in the Garden 1888’. The sea, the glimpse of patch of sea is blue-pink-lilac duck egg speckled in the thin still light of early afternoon. Grandmothers in dark shawls are making oat cakes and knitting stockings by the fireside. Children playing 1888. It is a piece of music, it is a game, the game of 1888 in Ulverstone Tasmania where, just out of sight, Tom Roberts has set up his easel and is painting in oil on canvas. If he forms a telescope with his curling hand he can catch and frame the piece of world, the time, the place, the tree, the children, the sea, the light, the busy far-off town—the church, the school, the dog on the beach. He can glimpse the daisy chain as it shivers in the air, draping from the hands of the child on whose hat there sits a decorative red poppy, on whose pigtail has been tied a bow of poppy-coloured silk. Pinky orange poppy blooming at the end of the pigtail at the back of her neck, in the soundless snatch of sunlight in the paradise glade on the edge of the well-known world. Playing in the garden. White daisies in a daisy chain, swinging in the air. Step forward, Poppy Girl and drape the living necklace on your sister’s shoulders, decorate the little one with a string of dying marguerites, wild culling from the forlorn and humble garden behind the beehive oast-house cottages where the black kettle sings on the hob and the grey cat sleeps in the heavy kitchen heat. And in the patch of sunlight, thin upon the yellow grass, a clump of primroses, the paint laid on the canvas in such a way that in a certain light the flowers appear to form the head and body of a little dog, a little dog that turns its eyes to whoever is looking at the picture, which looks out at Tom Roberts, looks out also at every viewer, at me, at the empty room in the Benalla Art Gallery when all the visitors have fled, and only the ghosts remain.
Not so far away from Benalla on the map of Australia, in Bendigo, hangs the picture of the first primrose ever brought alive to the colony, and on the filing cabinet, below the print of the children playing in the garden is stuck a faded, feathered postcard of that primrose picture. The yellow flower in the terracotta pot glows with a supernatural light at the centre of the scene which is busy with nostalgic visitors come to the dock to marvel that this fragile tender bloom could travel all the way from home to this far far place, sprightly, unharmed, fresh from its Wardian case of mahogany and glass. The opulent dark hair of one woman shines as she bows her head before the primrose, caressing the leaves with her cheek, her eyes downcast, her silver earring enormously pendant from her aristocratic ear. The head of a dog is raised from below in homage to the flower. In virginal blue, with soft white head-shawl, wide-eyed a young woman with a face for all the world like the face of Queen Victoria, gazes into the heart of the innocent primrose, enraptured, lost in prayer. Such is the life of an English flower celebrated in the colony in 1855. The colours in the picture have faded over the years, and Africa is still eight thousand miles away across the Southern Ocean.
Below these two pictures on the grey filing cabinet someone has taped the top of an old matchbox on which appears the figure of a young girl. In her left hand a basket of primroses yellow and blue, in her right she elegantly holds a tiny posy selected from the flowers in the basket. Her grey shawl and grey bonnet resemble the clothes of an old woman, her hair is tangled on her forehead, and she tilts her head to one side as she smiles shyly up: ‘Primroses, buy one, Sir?’ Her arms are bare. The background is indistinct, misty, lilac, dreamy, but the story in her eyes is sad, and long, and terrible. The primrose is often called ‘the flower of the key to heaven’—a sad irony.
These four forgotten scraps of paper—the song, the children, the primrose, the child with the basket—are more or less the only evidence here of a human response to anything other than the quality of the air, for life at the station is focused, as is right and proper, on the primary and important purpose of observing and measuring aspects of the weather. And the papers dangle there like the tattered and faded wings of a broken moth, gathering dust, subject to foxing, curling, cracking—distant recollections of other worlds, left there by absent hands who laughed and loved and maybe dreamed and understood. Telling somehow some narrative of dreadful vulnerability, who knows why. Was there one storyteller or many, and what roads have they taken now, and did those roads turn, twisting round and round upon themselves to wend their way back here again, back to the weather station at Cape Grimm where it all began with a song: My mother she butchered me. My father he ate me?
The date is February fifth, 1992, when Caleb speaks to the stars of the southern sky above this remote and rugged place, 40°45′S; 144°45′E. His horse is dark, with light scattered markings like pieces of silver faintly gleaming in the darkness. He records his own words on the Sanyo M–5645 in his pocket. Seeking logic, I wonder why he was recording if he truly planned to leap off the cliff into the sea. But you can’t apply any rules of logic to the human mind under stress—it is hard enough to apply those rules at any time. Caleb is not thinking straight right now. It is around eleven o’clock, or, as Caleb states it, it is the eleventh hour, the hour of the marigold.
His words as I record them here will lack the ringing voice, that vital spark, the magical ingredient that drove them, as his words were always driven, like flaming arrows into the hearts of those who heard. His words had the quality of primitive music, they went deep into the blood, the nerves, and they worked as a power all their own, they were vibrant, luminous, necessary for the life of the ears into which they poured. Was it only in the timbre of the voice? Was it also in the electric glints in the speaker’s eyes? Was it located in the erotic energy sensed in the way he moved his body, the way he sto
od on a platform, the way he sat on his horse? What was it that persuaded one hundred and forty-seven people to obey that voice and lay down their lives for him like sheaves of wheat before a mighty wind? His own focused ecstasy as he addressed the sky from the clifftop while the village behind him flamed, a thousand torches in the darkness, while smoke and ash rolled and flurried through the air—that ecstasy could hold the stars in thrall.
‘I am an owl of the desert. The stars and souls are not mute. From the heavens comes the behest to instil in the air the mystery of all things. God is ocean infinite, infinite cloud. There are songs, there are stories in the air. Listen, listen to the mighty script of the universe. Listen to the saints and the wise men, the wise women, listen to the wisdom of the child. Saint Rose of Lima said “God is infinite cloud, ocean infinite.” As I speak to the potent silence of the stars, a shudder is passing over everything that breathes. Joyful souls released from the torment of the earthly journey take glittering flight and swiftly rise with soundless echo into the infinity of space and time. All heaven is watching. Stars, cloak your eyes, for the souls are coming. These souls, these souls in gleaming, rushing flight, these souls on their pathway to the light of light. We are human and yet we came from the sea, from the mist, and we were made from the raw material of the stars. And into our bodies, the great spirit breathed the light of the soul, and we moved and we joined hands, and with holy joy we spoke together to the great universal good. And in our voice was fire. Fire! Fire! Stars and moons and all the suns and planets are on fire with love. On fire with love. And the fuel of that fire is the spirit of the imagination, the images borne of the high human mind. Seek always the Golden Mean, the natural number of all living things that grow and unfold in steps. Seek out in the ocean the nautilus; on the sweet earth, the sun-flower with its spirals of fruitful seeds. Seek out the number and enfold it within the secret imagination of your heart. All movement is in the spark, the ignition, flame, flint of the imagination. And lo! with the imagination comes the end of death, the end of evil, the perpetual cleansing by the divinity of fire. When we are gone, and our hearts are numbered among the brightest of the stars, there will remain the great Milky Way of the chambered imagination, the pure fire of fires. Fire of fires. Star of stars. I am the owl of the desert. And the true gold in the base crucible is Air. Spirits melted into nothing. The secret of the Golden Ratio is Air. Air is the breath of life, and life is the speaking of the Word. Air! Carry the sparks of our brethren to the outmost edges of the breathing universe. Air! Carry these words to the angels; carry them on the spiral winds, the everturning pathway; and carry these souls to the point of calm. For the wind can not blow everywhere forever across the surface of this earth. Somewhere must rest the fixed point that is the true point of salvation. Souls, seek out the fixed point. Imagine yourselves to God. Transform into yourselves. Transmute into air. I am the King of the Golden Mountain. The Word. Take the angel, take the demon, and fashion from the words the sacred Golden Mean. The acrobatic lacewings twist and spiral through space and time. The Air is the story. And the King of the Golden Mountain said: All heads off but mine. For the King must rule the mountain, must rule the seas, and I must commit the souls of the souls to Air. I promise you calm seas, auspicious gales. And behold we have seen the great festival of dreams when the burning brand is seized and the question is asked: “What are dreams?” Woe to him who seeks to answer the question, for dreams are the shadows of the devil’s plans, and he who seeks to dream is evil, and will be exterminated by the fire of the furnace. Souls, seek only the fixed point. Listen to the music of the moment. That music will commit all souls to Air. And I will move on; the woman and the child will move on in trinity. We will make the great leap from the high cliff, into the far and holy Air. Nothing is ever lost, for everything is eternal. The new age of the spirit, the prophet Joachim’s Golden Age, the age when priests and ceremonies will disappear, when the Air and the spirit will be one—this Golden Age is here and now. Now and here. The task is finished, and time will tell. The words I take with me as I complete my journey, my mission, my contract with earth and heaven, those words are “angel and demon”. And with those words I commit our souls. I commit our souls to the wild and scattered freedom of the Air.’