by Carmel Bird
As Magnus spread across the rocks the curious collection of objects, he and Minerva at first failed to notice that the air was much, much warmer, and that ominous clouds were rolling towards the island. Black cloudbanks were stealing in from the horizon and a dull glow was beginning to light up the edges of the scene. A hot, hot wind bearing the smell of burning forest. The sun was blotted out and soon thick fragments of leaves, charred, like fossils in ash, began to drop and then to rain upon the sea and the rocks. The afternoon sky became as black as midnight, and terror again gripped their hearts. Terror and bewilderment at the sudden switch in the mood of the universe. Gone were the seabirds, as one hallucination or dream or nightmare followed another. In the silent darkness the three lost people huddled together in a kind of peaceful terror, Magnus speaking now and then to God; Minerva whispering to the saints, taking careful sips from the blue bottle. These prayers, they later said, were heard. God and his angels listened to their prayers, and answered them. They wrapped themselves beneath the linen shroud, with the laudanum, the port wine, the stone jar of honey, the baby—and waited. Man, woman and child, they waited for something else to happen. Magnus was by nature patient, Minerva was not. For her it was a great effort to be still and to do nothing. Indeed, what could she do? The night air was thick with a terrible burning perfume, and with floating particles of ash.
It was the longest darkest night of unknown meaning, but at last day broke, and a pearly blue sky, clean and shining, gave the lie to the dreadful darkness of the night. The rocks and scrubby plants on Puddingstone Island were now covered in dark ash, blanketed in a coverlet of the stark black impressions of ferns and delicate charcoal leaves and startled insects. Some dreadful dark miracle of incinerated tissue had descended upon the island in the night like snow.
Magnus set out to find what had happened, to try to discover, perhaps, where they were, what help might be at hand, to seek a meaning in the ash. He found a little cave, cool and narrow, and a slender stretch of white sand. You could bring a small boat ashore. If you had a small boat. Where are we, God in Heaven, where are we, and what are we going to do? The empty shells of nautilus were scattered on the sand, plump shining spirals gleaming in the light, dusted now with dark, sticky ash.
For two days Magnus, Minerva and Niña sheltered in the cave, a long hollow in the rock, with an overhang that protected them a little from the wind. In some places the red and black and white carbuncles of the pudding stone jutted out from the walls like jewels.
‘Come here, Minerva. Come and see this.’
Minerva carried the baby into the narrow depths of the cave, in a twisted area to the left, past a rock that had been smoothed by the tight passage of many people long ago, where the air was cold and where there was a sweet sad smell of the earth. In the darkness at the back of the cave Magnus had found a rotting sofa lovingly made from rosewood, and covered with deep crimson velvet brocade. The curlicues and sweeps of the design were covered with a light film of dust. Stamped in dark-blue ink lettering on the back were the words: William Smee & Sons, No. 6, Finsbury Pavement, London. It came from the sea, but had long ago dried out, and had been dragged into the cave on its back. Beside and beneath the sofa were collected in piles the bones of small animals and birds, of limpet and abalone shells, and also the more recently scattered bones and feathers of a very large bird, an albatross, the head picked clean and perfectly dry, the bill smooth and shining, curved and huge. A memento—of what? Minerva’s mind flew to the almost identical skull she had seen in Edward’s hands. In the cave there seemed to be no human bones. The ceiling and upper walls were black with the soot of ancient fires. High and dry. Scattered on the floor were the dried and chewed remains of what smelt like turnips.
Minerva could sense all round her the enclosed air of tombs waiting for fresh bodies. She stood, Niña in her arms, and she turned from the albatross, with tears stinging her eyes, to look at the sofa. Astonishment. The sofa was a small replica of a golden couch from the house of her childhood in Lima. It was like an hallucination, a sudden gift that had drifted in dream from a drawing-room in London or Paris, and Minerva imagined she could see, lying upon it, the figure of a beautiful woman in a long silk gown. The woman was dead and cold, lying forever in the depths of the cave, in the sepulchre of Puddingstone Island.
‘It’s safe to lie on,’ Magnus said. ‘You could sleep here, you and the baby, sleep while I keep watch.’
But Minerva shuddered and shook her head. She longed to lie down, but she feared being separated from Magnus.
‘We must stay together.’
She said this very quietly.
Later on she did lie on the faded crimson brocade, cradling Niña, while Magnus sat on the floor of the cave with his back to the side of the sofa. Niña had to be fed honey and rock water almost constantly. It was night and they were exhausted; no ghosts or fears could overcome the need for rest on the dry and dusty leftover of some other shipwreck, some other long-forgotten story. Niña imagined that the woman in the silken gown was herself, as she drifted into a deep, strangely untroubled and dreamless sleep, a blank, sweet sleep.
Some fresh water lay collected in hollows in the rocks of Puddingstone, but it was covered with a scum of ashy leaves. They pushed the ash aside and drank the water which tasted of salt and fire. They planned to save up the contents of the box for as long as they could, rationing them out. Minerva fed the honey to all three of them on her finger. It had the most astonishing and powerful flavour, smooth, floral, like lightning and sweet dew. The cave began to be a curious little home, filled with some of the contents of the bag, the trunk and the box. How long must they live there, the three of them together? Magnus searched for wild animals but found none. Birds? Fish? He imagined there could be savages, but saw none. Memories of the cannibal stories he had read in the Glasgow Herald sometimes crossed his mind, and then he would think of Glasgow, and his mother and sisters, and the warm dry house with the piano, and he felt that they had become part of a long-lost dream. He thought of Jenny, gone beyond, and experienced long bleak times of depression and despair. Perhaps he would join Jenny sooner than he had thought. But the island and the sea and Minerva and Niña brought him and his thoughts and hopes swiftly back to the desire for life.
Magnus scanned the horizon constantly for a sail but, in the pearly blue-grey mist of Bass Strait, no sail appeared. He found the battered figurehead from a wreck, sheltering in a wide crevice, tangled in seaweed, and he longed again for a light that he might set the wood on fire. It was the figure of a woman, straining forward, her hair blown behind her in the wind, flowers carved in her cloak, one hand on her heart. She was ancient, noseless and weathered, pitted by the salt air of the island, splashed with the droppings of the birds that wheeled above.
Once, as he was standing by the red umbrella, a large black dog leapt out in front of him, raced by, and was gone. Instinctively he started to run after it, but it had disappeared, as if it had never been. Perhaps he was seeing things.
‘I saw a dog. It ran right in front of me,’ he told Minerva. ‘I know it was a dream. We will see visions and dreams now. We must be careful. They could lead us to terrible harm. I have heard of this kind of strange trickery. The dog was so very like a real animal. And a black dog is a bad omen.’
‘These dreams are the image of things real, shapes and shadows,’ Minerva said, and Magnus remained silent, not quite understanding what she could mean. Sometimes it was language that separated them; sometimes it was habits of thought. Never in their lives would they truly come to understand each other. It didn’t seem to matter, on the island, or later during their long life together. An unbreakable link was forged between them the night the sea swallowed them and then threw them up on improbable Puddingstone Island.
Minerva tore strips from the baby’s dress, soaked them in water and gave them to her to suck, squeezing them on her face, letting the water trickle into the half-open mouth. Over and over again she took scoops of water with
her hand, held the water in her own mouth, and spat it slowly onto Niña’s tongue. They put a tin dish and the china cups outside the cave, to catch the rain when it fell.
During the morning of the third day a little rain fell, sweetening the gauzy air, and the dish and cups were moist with a film of clear sweet water. Then close to her heart Minerva held the baby who tossed now with a fever, while Magnus ventured out to look again for help, or water, or food, or something. Again and again he went out, further along the shore, searching for whatever he could find, his eyes red with fatigue and cold and salty wind. Again the dog leapt out and ran in front of him, then away into some space between the rocks. Magnus’s thick red curls whipped across his cheeks, into his mouth. It was a real animal that he saw. He called out to the dog, but it was gone. Sometimes Niña cried steadily; sometimes she fell into a profound and deathly sleep. Minerva was afraid to give her too much of the diluted laudanum, afraid that it could harm her, or even kill her.
Magnus and Minerva looked into each other’s eyes, unable to utter the idea that Niña might die anyway. Then there was the deep and primitive thought that Niña could be their source of nourishment, a terrible reversal of the rule of nurture whereby Minerva’s body should feed Niña. It was a sad and distorted reflection of the vivid stories about the cannibals from the Glasgow Herald.
Rock, rock, baby, in the evil wind that blows through the Strait. Will Niña in fact feed Minerva and Magnus with her own body? Could it come to that? They do not speak of it. In the remote nowhere of Puddingstone Island in Bass Strait, in February 1851, it could come to that.
Beneath the hot and swollen eyelids of the child were large bright eyes of forget-me-not blue. Minerva, weak and frightened, looked into them with her own inky gaze. Magnus killed a crippled silver gull with a stone hurled from a slingshot fashioned from a strip torn from his jacket. In the shelter of the cave the blood of the bird smelled clean and good. How were they to eat it? They were not yet ready to tear the sparse raw flesh apart with their fingers. The bird lay stiffly on a flat stone, waiting until they were ravenous, bringing ants and flies, smelling stronger and stronger of its own decay. Minerva mixed a little of the blood from the creature’s wound, in the hollow of her hand, with drops of water. This she mixed in her mouth with her own saliva and then dribbled into the mouth of the baby, and then she licked her own fingers clean. She liked the taste. Magnus, learning astonishing new skills, caught a gannet in his hands and he wrung its neck. It too remained uneaten, a store in the larder. A rock in the sea, not far off from Puddingstone Island, was white with gannets.
Tough watery cactus grew in the cracks between the rocks. Minerva and Magnus chewed the silvery leaves, hoping the plant would not poison them. There were huge thistles also, offering no gesture of friendship, nor hope of nourishment. The thistles were like giant brown emblems of Scotland, horrible monster symbols of Magnus’s homeland, spiny reminders of all that he had left behind, would never see again in this world. Magnus found the carcase of a rotting shearwater, a moonbird, on a narrow patch of sand. And with Rosa Hoffmann’s knife he picked a handful of limpets from the rocks.
The waves of the incoming tide sent up a straw mattress, dumping it on the shore, on the one patch of coarse flat sand in the cove on the eastern side. A sudden gesture from the depths. Perhaps the mattress, regurgitated from the belly of the ocean, came from the Iris, perhaps not. It could be of no use to Magnus and Minerva, a bloated, sopping bridal bed beached between lonely rocks on the silent sand. In years to come the seeds from inside the mattress would sow themselves on Puddingstone Island. English grasses and periwinkles and poppies would blow and bloom in the crevices between the ancient speckled rocks, glowing in the sun, battered by the storm, fluttering beneath the spiky goblet heads of the thistles. When she first saw the mattress Minerva had a horrible vision of the sea sending up the body of Edward, flinging it at her feet. She saw his face had been eaten by fish; she saw small creatures swimming in the sockets where his beautiful eyes had been. She banished these images and ideas from her mind. She concentrated on Niña, willing the little girl, the little creature to cling to life.
‘And how were they saved?’ ask the children of Skye, cheeks pink, eyes wide, a picture of health ready to be pecked clean by gulls, sucked dry by underwater monsters that go shifting, gliding, slimy, more mysterious, more silent, more deadly than the deepest most sucking nightmare vision in the mud of the void. These children love to hear the story of their origins over and over again.
After days and nights a boat came, a fishing boat on its way back, almost empty-handed, from the islands. It was pointed at both ends, having once been a whale boat. The era of whaling and sealing in the Strait was over, and the boats had not yet been abandoned. It was returning also in bewilderment and fear, running home from the cloud of ash and crisp black leaves and insects that had filled the air in the Strait on February fifth.
Magnus stood high upon the highest rock of the island, beside the scarlet umbrella, scanning the sea, almost blind with the wind and the cold sunshine and the sight of that empty world. Then as if out of nowhere there came a black boat. Three men in a tough black boat, two oarsmen and one at the steer-oar, their backs to the island. Would they see him? He called, but his voice was whipped away by the wind, tossed into nowhere, spun off by the clouds. His bright wet hair was snatched from his brow, whipped about his head. He waved his arms and leapt in the air. The boat rocked up and down on the water, way below him, far off. They must turn round; they must see him. He willed them to look back, look up. Look here! Look here! He cried. Lord God make them look! The three men felt a sudden rush of blood-warm air at their shoulders and the boat turned, and the sailors looked up at the figure high on the rocky island. A mad and tattered scarecrow, seething with fever and crumpled dreams, beside a big red umbrella, he was calling to them. Coo-ee! Hold on! they called. Hold on! The sight of a man marooned on one of these islands was not new to them, they saw such things, such sights, from time to time. And they chipped and chopped through the steely waves, heading for the Puddingstone shore.
Almost half an hour, half an eternal hour, it took for the boat to reach the island. And the sun was high up in the sky. Magnus stood like a laird, half-naked, where the water met the rocks, and he prayed aloud to the Lord with thanks for this deliverance, and the hand that threw the bottle of water to him was solid, the eyes that looked into his, even at a distance, seemed as blue as noonday. He caught the bottle in midair, like an expert catching a ball. Shipwreck, sailor? Shipwreck, he said. Me, me and a woman and a child. Alive? All alive. No more? All gone. A long draught of fresh water and it tasted like life, it tasted like love.
The blue eyes looked into his, a dark query, and two other pairs of silent eyes looked on and listened. Two rugged tanned faces, wrinkled and scarred, and a black. From the rock Magnus was unable to reach the boat in the waters below. We’ll go round there to the cove. And come ashore. Water, he says, please give me water for the woman and the child.
A green glass bottle of pure fresh water was then thrown with a terrible confidence through the dangerous empty air, and now it was in Magnus’s fist. As the sailors made their way by sea, pulling steadily on the oars, to the sandy inlet, Magnus followed on land, leaping the rocks with new vigour, with the energy of hope. He ran past the cave where Miverva and Niña were sheltering, Minerva in terror that the child was failing, quivering with cold and bewilderment and anticipation and a deadly fear of all that might be to come. The lights of hallucination danced and zipped before her eyes. Magnus rushed in at the opening and called to her. Magnus’s face was glowing like the face of a madman as he came towards Minerva, the bottle of water gripped by the neck in his right hand. Water. A boat. We are saved. Take this, drink. Give some to the baby. Then follow me to the beach. The boat, the boat has come, the boat is here, we are saved.
Was this another vision, mirage, hallucination? But there in her hand was the bottle of water. Could there really be a b
oat so soon? Were they truly about to be delivered? Could they trust strangers in a boat? There were two codes on the seas; by one you could be saved, and by the other you could be robbed, raped and eaten by pirates.
Minerva drank the fresh water, she drank slowly and gently and gracefully, and Niña’s eyes fluttered and her lips opened and she allowed drops of water warmed in Minerva’s mouth, to trickle down her throat. Then Minerva, with a presence of mind for which she would become renowned, collected the pistols and ammunition from Rosa Hoffmann’s possessions, along with the laudanum, and followed Magnus down to the water, with Niña bundled like a chrysalis in the blue shawl. Suntanned and grizzled men in heavy black jackets and caps were waiting, dark angels, by the boat. Their shoulders were dusted with ash, the surfaces of the boat decorated with the black imprints of ferns and leaves and insects, now smeared where they had been touched. Fire, they said, there was a big fire in Port Phillip. The whole country is on fire, the whole country is going up in smoke, turning to ash, turning to dust. It is the fire of hell. It is the Inferno. We had it from a whaler coming in from Cape Otway. It is the Last Judgement, the punishment, the fire of hell releasing poisonous smoke and ash over the rim of the horizon.
‘And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.’
Because the catch was small, there was room for the two adults and the baby. There was a thick smell of rancid oil and the tang of salt. Minerva was quiet, shivering, sheltering Niña from the cold wet air; Magnus was ecstatic with the delirium of prayers answered in time of despair, his hair and eyes wild with a strange and burning light.