by Carmel Bird
Well, they are gone. It is not possible, but it has happened. And all the children, so many dear people, are passed over, they are dead. I know they are in paradise, but in my heart I feel only their loss. One hundred and fifty is the optimum number of members for a community of hunter-gatherers. Caleb knew that when this number was reached, with the birth of baby Nathaniel Thunderstone, the time had truly come for the community to be sent forth by fire. One hundred and forty-seven to burn, three to fly away.
Yes, I dwell in dull amazement on the fact that even we—and Caleb—were meant to go, according to the plan Caleb had made. The idea is repugnant to me now. The plan was that we would all ride over the cliff and fly off, riding the winds, and our bodies would arrive at last in the sea and be lost, merged with the ocean, laced with foam, blessed with the deep waters from which all life once came. Our souls would be in paradise with the blessed souls of our families. Our bodies returned to the deep where the Iris lies, guarding the secret of Niña Mean, the secret, perhaps, of the whole history of the Means of Skye. Niña, Niña, who were you, who are you? There we would be, mingling with the bones of our ancestors, Caleb, Golden and me, and also Caleb’s final words on the tape in his pocket, his message to the universe. Instead of jumping we gave ourselves up to the police—I mean that we just stayed quite still and the police collected us like obedient children and put us into two cars. Something had changed, after the fire, after the helicopters came, something that stopped us from jumping and flying and dropping into the sea. It is difficult for me to remember and describe all this because I was quite entranced, I had moved to a higher level, beyond conscious understanding, into a strangely vacant space, like the sky itself, like hollow sun-sapphire space and the weaving strands of time.
So much love and beauty has been incinerated—in the name of love and goodness and eternal life and light. Perhaps we are the unlucky ones, after all—that must be so, for the others have all fully translated to the light. We remain here on the earth in spiritual darkness, in pain and sorrow and exile. The air did not hold us up, and our mother the sea did not take us in her arms, and now I am so lonely here, so very, very lonely. I live in a sad hope that one day I may be permitted to see Caleb again. Then a great fear comes over me, a fear that they have perhaps executed him after all, have done it secretly, by a special law and dispensation. ‘He died in custody, died in his sleep,’ they would say, ‘leapt to his death from the castle tower.’ I imagine they can do that, can do whatever they wish to do. They would inject him with drugs and just let him fall asleep and fade into oblivion, dissolve into nothing. Then I think—but how could they do that to a being such as Caleb? It would not be possible. Then I realise very sadly that I no longer know what is possible. I remember all over again that I am alone in this vale of tears, in this world of wickedness and woe. I have resolved to try not to think of Caleb, but to exist in the now, for my life is beyond my control, and my very thoughts must concentrate upon the daily task of strange survival.
In the time between then and now, between when my horse did not fly out across the waters of the Strait and now, when I am at last able to write, and almost to feel, almost to think, there stretches a cold and empty arsenic world of trampled threadbare no-time. Everything has stood still, and my breath is held, my eyes are wide, and I am waiting for the next unknown.
I lay in the silence of a grey-white room, and there were bars outside the windows, and I was watching with dull eyes the moving shapes and colours of the sky. The sunlight and the moonlight cast the shadows of the window-bars across the walls of the room, and I watched as clouds drifted, as storms frowned and lightning split the mind of heaven in jagged fitful phosphorescent green. Once, at the beginning of a tempest, yellow and white flowers blew in streams and flurries in the sky outside the window-bars, flowing past my gaze, whirling now and then in a little dervish dance. Was it hot or was it cold outside? The temperature in the room was always the same. I could not smell the earth, I could not sense the rocks that must lie deep at the base, at the bone-creaking foundations of the building. I could not imagine the haunted rivers and whispering, rustling, spectral streams that must run somewhere nearby in the world of the hospital or prison where I was kept. A woman in grey was seated by the door.
Sometimes there was a bowl of lilies, huge and glowing, like ladies on thin stalks, visible to me in waving rainbow shapes through a thick glass window. Sometimes it was a vase of white roses, sometimes a tall jar of bright green and scarlet leaves shaped like enormous hearts. I could hear the shush shush of hospital machinery, the clink of cruel metal things, the soft voices and the shouts and laughter of the people working in the corridor. There was no real sound, not a dog, not a bird, not a rustle of leaves, not even a clap of thunder that I could detect through my dungeon walls. I was a living corpse, silent, fed through tubes, wondering, wondering—what will happen? I imagined spiders walking, curtsying on long legs, dancing taut and delicate across the white hospital quilt. Then I would remember Golden and I would want to scream, yet my throat was silent and the scream died in my heart. Golden was somewhere. Where was Golden? Golden my dancing baby girl. And I heard voices calling, calling, but I could not understand what they were saying, yet I know they were the voices of my family, all the brothers and sisters now translated into the light, living in my memory, shrunken to fit inside my spinning head, to sail along in my bloodstream forever. They are now among the glorious People of the Light, travellers in Fairyland, workers in Ferryland, creations of the mind of the great Saint Virgil. What were they telling me, those voices of the People of the Light? What are you singing, People of the Light? What have you seen? What do you say? When will I be free? And where is my baby, my Golden, my baby Golden? I wept my silent tears until, in a mysterious twilight hour, my baby was returned to me.
The woman in grey—her name I know is Alice—saw the actions of my weeping, of my sobs, my sighs, my groans, my moaning thrumming silent song of sorrow and despair. My sudden bursts of noiseless laughter, laughter that shakes me all over, but which does not light up my eyes, does not echo in this sorrowful poison-prison-room where life is punctuated by the sudden smell of prison hospital poisoned food. I know all this. I know when my eyes shine and when they are still, misted over with a veil of secrecy, a pall like the pall of death. Very occasionally I would open my mouth in a noiseless scream and I would attempt to sit up, like a woman experiencing some terrible nightmare, drifting in a landscape of ethereal light, weighted down at the ankles with heavy stones. Then the nurses and doctors were called to administer special soothing drugs and other medicines to me. That was a kind of relief from the sadness and the boredom and bewilderment. I can hear Alice breathing. She is like a piece of flotsam in my world, some piece of wreck that has floated in, washed up on the edges of my kingdom, barring the way out, the way in, a giant breathing grey nuisance spiderface sitting next to the door, understanding nothing, imagining she knows everything. She has power over my body, but my mind is free and she makes eternal notes in her eternal notebook. I believe I must be an unsympathetic character in a play or an opera she is writing. Furry-faced grey jailer genius writes prizewinning play hailed as a masterpiece on Broadway opening in London, Milan, the Sydney Opera House.
They took my clothes and gave me a thin white nightgown. They took the guns away from me, naturally, but I still have my blue pendant. And Golden. Sometimes I think that those things are all I really need to keep me anchored in time and space and hope and love. My pendant and my little daughter Golden. And yet, and yet, sometimes I wonder what even they might mean, Golden and the silver pendant. Golden needs me. That idea, that truth, holds me in place. All the teachings and meanings embedded in me from the past, all the wisdom of our ancestors seems to whirl around inside me, and all around outside me, and I am a reed, a cobweb, a speck of nacreous stardust in the storm. Our family history is dominated by storms, and we have weathered the tormented days and nights of many many tempests blowing in from Bass Strai
t. I used to love the storms, and I would stand high in the Temple of the Winds and revel in the drama of the skies. The fire was the final washing away, the purification, the final obliteration, the final blessing.
I am living now, with Golden, in the care of Gilia and Michael—old people, strangers to me, kind people, somewhere in the wilderness, and I am safe. They are the friends of Father Fox who rescued me from Alice. I am now safe from Alice, and from all people who would wish to hurt me. I have been told the only thing left in one piece in Skye was the Temple of the Winds. How I love my memories of that place. High up on the walls, near the ceiling, there is an old mural painted by one of my ancestors, showing the eight winds, four men and four women, imitating the style of Michelangelo. I liked those pictures so much when I was little, and whenever we went out to Four Winds Hill I would lie on my back, the shell and bone patterns of the floor uneven but warm beneath my spine, and I would look up in pleasure at the frieze round the walls. The motto of our family, strangely Welsh, not Scottish, brought with Magnus Mean long long ago, is written in gold ornamental script over and over again underneath the paintings: ‘Heb Dhu—Heb Dhim’ which means ‘If I have God I have Everything’. One small window in the dome, a eye to heaven, is made from thin, thin slices of iris agate, which is a prismatic light gate, cut from a stone found by Magnus when he was looking for gold over at Fingal. My sisters and I would lie on the hillside outside the temple and stare up at the night sky, up through the clear pure air of Cape Grimm and we could feel ourselves falling up, up, up into the stars, so white, so clean, so near, so close to home. And there I would lie with Caleb.
I will never see the temple again, because I can never bear to return to the ruined town. For all I know the place may have been set aside forever as a perpetual crime scene. Is that possible, I wonder. Can they (the police? the local council?) decide that a piece of land is tabu because it is spiritually contaminated? I do wonder about that. But I daydream about the Temple, I imagine and remember the days and nights we spent there. Our ancestor Minerva began the building of the Temple, back in the 1860s, inspired by the Doric temple constructed by Lady Jane Franklin at Lenah Valley down in Hobart. It soothes and comforts me to remember that Minerva built our remote and holy temple—out on Four Winds Hill.
It is a tall compact room with a vaulted ceiling, open on eight sides to the air, the winds blowing freely through from all directions, the columns encrusted with the shells of mussels and scallops. On the external apex of the domed roof is a wooden carving of three knots, the knots that are said to contain the winds—undo the first one and you get a moderate wind, undo the second and you get a gale, undo the third and you get a hurricane. When I described the Temple to Gilia I said there were eight sides because eight is a Fibonacci number.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
I tried to explain what they were, the Fibonacci numbers. It is funny the things I do not know of her world, and the things she does not know of mine. I expect her to know everything I know, and many more things besides, but it does not work like that. My father was very fascinated by the numbers, by what he called Sacred Geometry, and he would often say ‘This sunflower, this shell, look at this, it is following the sequence.’ Many of the designs in the shells at the Temple follow Fibonacci sequences—as do the designs of millions of shells, I imagine, and as do also a great number of plants. There are whole nautilus shells carefully preserved in the ceiling of the Temple of the Winds because they are not only beautiful, but they are perfect specimens of the equiangular spiral. They are really breathtaking and they are arranged on the ceiling in such a way that they make another whole sequence of the spiral. If you lie on the floor and look up you can lose yourself in the design. Nautilus are made from the secretions of the arms of a type of octopus, and are really flotation devices for the octopus young. Sometimes they are dumped in great numbers on Bass Strait beaches, and when we were little we once collected hundreds of perfect specimens from the beach at Woodpecker Point, and we sold them by the side of the road just outside Penguin. When I told my father about that he became very angry, and he said I should have brought them to the Temple of the Winds instead of casting them out into the dark world where they would lie lost and forgotten on the shelves and mantelpieces of beach houses, gathering dust and dead flies. Gilia was surprised when I told her we were allowed to wander about the countryside. We had caravans and we would go off selling our toys and signs and honey and cloth. People thought we were gipsies. Maybe we were. In the caravan I was sometimes very afraid of my father’s sudden temper—he had extremely sensitive hearing, and in that very confined space he hated the sounds of us eating—eating is so unspiritual he would say, and the sounds of it somehow reminded him of death.
‘If you are going to eat apples,’ he would shout, ‘go outside and do it, do not stand around here munching and crunching the things within my hearing, eating your way to the grave with your teeth showing, without grace and within my hearing. Thank you!’
All the surfaces of the Temple of the Winds are embellished with whole and broken shells from the beaches along the coast, as well as shells brought in sacks and boxes from all parts of the world over many years. The eye may follow the journeys of stripes and waves and striations, spots and glassy blushes. There are the three-dimensional iridescent swirls of emerald and turquoise, mysterious crimson shadings on the paua shells. In pride of place, central to the apex of the dome, is the Rainbow Paua, in acknowledgment of the Iris, the wreck from which our family first sprang. There are brickred spatters that will not fade from the surfaces of the mitre shells, and they form geometric designs on the walls, and form pictures as well. Pictures of flowers, particularly sunflowers, and lotus flowers, of bowls of fruit, exotic birds and mountain scenes decorate the interior of the Temple of the Winds. The colours are soft—white with greys and browns and corals and mysterious purples and blues and greens, all overlaid with a dusty bloom, a salty, moonshine haze. These colours are my favourite colours, and the shells at the Temple of the Winds are some of my dearest favourite memories, are lodged in my mind and forever linked to my people. I close my eyes and bring back the patterns, the colours, the secrets of the sea that are eternally whispering in the shells. And there are fragments of glass, all colours, that twinkle. There are stones, smooth as eggs, and pieces of broken pottery with coloured patterns of roses and garlands and birds and even little scenes of old-fashioned country life and Chinese legends. There are strange insect shapes built into the patterns, flocks of palest flying insects captured in the lines and whorls of the walls. Was it, after all, a dream-temple, nothing but a chimera conjured up in the collective mother-of-pearl imagination of the people of Skye?
This imagination was the obverse of my father’s outbursts of temper, and it sometimes seemed to me that my father suffered from a profound lack of trust in the beliefs of the community. He was unlike other fathers, my uncles and cousins, who all appeared to follow the teachings on the world to come and our part in it, teachings that have grown up in the community since Magnus and Minerva first began to build Skye. If my father had not died the year before the fire, I wonder, I wonder—perhaps the fire would never have come to pass. He was not a charismatic in any way, but he did have a certain ability to persuade other people with what he called his ‘basic common sense’. So why did he stay on and lead his life at Skye? Why did he not pack us all up, me and my mother and my brothers and sisters and move away, away? Just get in the caravan and rumble off into the wide blue yonder, never to return? Ah, the answer to that, I believe, is that it was very very difficult to leave because so much had been indoctrinated from birth, and the world of Skye was the whole world, although I have heard my father yell at my mother:
‘This place is a paper nautilus and we are trapped in its chambers, sailing along to nowhere, peering through the walls at the high waves, waiting, waiting for the winds to tip us over and we go down. Down-down-down into the graveyard of the Iris and all the other rotting wrec
ks at the bottom of Bass Strait.’
‘Hush now, Matthew,’ my mother would say, treating him almost like a child, ‘the Truth will one day be revealed to us, and until that Time of Light, we must persevere in cheerfulness and hope.’
And she would make him some camomile tea and attempt to soothe his brow with kisses and warm drops of lavender oil. They loved each other. Perhaps that is also why he stayed, for she would never never leave, she believed very deeply and simply in everything that was taught, and it also seemed (at least to me) that every nerve, every vein, every hair on all our heads was linked, tied, knotted up into the fabric of the village of Skye—cut us loose and we would bleed to death, would wither and shrivel and fade away into hopeless ranting helplessness.
And mostly, I realise, my father also toed the line and played his part in the communal life. His death was sad and strange, and ironic when you think about it, for one day he was sitting with my mother on the cliff and they were just looking out to the dreamy turquoise of a sea festooned with the slow lace of waving foam—it was a warm day in October—and watching the mollyhawks, the shy albatross, in their dignified courting dance on the rocks far below. My father, concentrating on the beauty of the dance, took a huge bite out of a big green apple and it caught in his throat and before my mother could do anything he had choked to death right there and then, where the high land meets the water down below, where the rocks have snapped off to form the edge of our world.