by Carmel Bird
He left a note behind addressed to me, actually. It was on his blue airmail paper, sealed up in a thin blue envelope. He offered me his cell with all his pictures of MM, saying he knew how much I loved her. He was going, he said, to join Dr Goddard at the Hyatt on Collins, and they were in due course going away together to start a new life. He knew I would be pleased and asked me to look after Dee Dee, and to forward any mail he might receive to him care of the Hyatt.
I sat in my office in the gathering cobwebs of twilight, Caleb’s letter in my hand, and wondered about Sophie. How much had she realised, known about Caleb’s state of mind? Was she unaware of his coldly demented plans? She saw him, I believe, as the case that would take her career to greater heights. She was also crazy about him, was under his spell—of that I am certain.
In the cool mist of a July morning Caleb made his way through the sombre forest, heading for the sea. It was the first time he had been at liberty in nine years. The air was sweet, perfumed with the honey of freedom, the sounds of the forest musical and heavenly. Wearing blue jeans, a white tee-shirt and black trainers, he was a man like any other walking in the woods. He carried a bottle of water, a Cherry Ripe and a parcel of dried fruit, and he wore a watch. His shining eyes, full of electric excitement at his project, swiftly moved to left and right, round, up and down, alert for any sign of danger. But he knew he was invincible, perhaps even invisible. He was fit and he could move between the trees and rocks like a wild animal. He rejoiced in the glorious beating of his own strong red joyful heart.
In a strange way he is high, he is walking on air, intoxicated by success and by the anticipation of the bright and gleaming world opening up before him. He knows when he is getting closer to the sea, to the mystical wide opening of Bass Strait that beckons him. He can smell the water.
No sound of alarm comes from the prison. No hint that he is missed or pursued. He begins to forget that he is an escaped prisoner, and sees himself as the swift and glorious voyager he truly is. God’s anointed, God’s obedient son, God’s holy messenger. God’s favourite. He is the son of his earthly father, but he is also the son of the son of God.
He has listened very carefully when Sophie has spoken of her house, its location and the small blue dinghy tied up on the shore. Through the tea-tree on the edge of the forest, between the tall trees and the sandy scrub, he can glimpse the silvery-grey cedar shingles and the glint of the wall of glass bricks. Thor has designed another perfect landmark, almost like a lighthouse, and now Caleb has it in his sights. Skirting the house he follows the sandy track down to the foreshore, and there, sure enough, knotted to a tree-stump, upside down on the gravelly sand, there in the slow, shimmering morning sunlight is the blue-green dinghy of his dreams, oars crossed on the sand. The little Seagull motor Sophie had spoken of must be up at the house—Caleb looks round and he considers going to look for it, but a fear of being seen decides him. He will row the boat to mainland Australia in the primitive old-fashioned way. On the prow Sophie has painted the name Tom Thumb after two of the boats used by Bass and Flinders. Caleb smiles to himself when he sees that. Flinders is one of his heroes, the man who named Cape Grimm.
For a few minutes Caleb pauses and stares out into the Strait, his arms uplifted as he takes deep joyful breaths of the sweet, sweet air. God will be his guide across this stretch of water, which today is flat and almost still. Looking-glass, millpond, ornamental lake. Blue, green, silver, gold. He knows it is one of the most treacherous straits in the world, he knows that deep down there somewhere lie the remains of the Iris. He knows the Roaring Forties can come roaring in without warning. He hangs his shoes around his neck and wriggles his toes in the cold wet sand. Then he turns the boat over, drags it to the water, collects the oars, pushes out, hops in, sets the oars, and he’s away! Sailor boy.
I have to remember, as if I could forget, that Caleb is—not to mince words—mad. I find, strangely enough, that the mad are on the one hand interesting, but on the other kind of one-dimensional and boring, like a cheap cartoon animation such as the Road Runner. I suppose what I am saying is that they are sort of children with a screw loose—but dangerous and not to be underestimated. Caleb is an escapee from an institution for the criminally insane, to which institution he has been consigned for the rest of his life. He has no compass, although he is sharp enough to be able to navigate roughly by the sun. Rowing? Yes, rowing across Bass Strait from the northwest coast of Van Diemen’s Land to the mainland of Australia. In many, some would say most, ways, he is a child on an adventure, a child having the best time. He is likely to burn up in the daytime, freeze at night, starve, die of thirst, drown. Where does he think he is going? In so far as he is thinking at all, he is fixated on the idea that he will go to Melbourne and find Sophie and together they will take on the world. Something like that occupies his imagination. He can smell crushed raspberries, taste crushed raspberries, warm and bleeding in the sun. And high in his dreamless mind he sees himself as he was when he took out his old bagpipes and played his beloved tunes. In his mind, on the water, he starts to hum.
Speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing
Onward! The sailors cry.
Carry the man who’s born to be king
Over the sea to Skye.
Caleb is El Niño, stuck in his holy babyhood. That fact is what has shaped him, disfigured him, warped him—however you want to say it. He is the Baby Jesus who never grew up, bobbing along in the choppy wavey watery adventure of Bass Strait.
He feels the lovely strength in his arms as the oars dip and rise, dip and rise in the water. He is Peter the Fisherman, he is Matthew Flinders, he is Rat, he is Mole. Messing about in boats. He is the Owl and the Pussycat. He is on his way to the land where that bong tree grows. He is the Steadfast Tin Soldier making his faithful way to his beloved ballerina. Fast. The oars are the oars of a man who has worked out on the rowing machine for the past three years, waiting and planning his journey to freedom. For three hours he travels out, sighting nothing but a very small rocky island where a few storm-petrels are lined up staring into the wind. Every hour he takes a sip of water. He plans to keep the fruit and chocolate for later. His bare feet push against the friendly wooden slats in the floor of the boat. And lying beneath his feet is an old rainbow string bag Sophie has left there.
Snatches of texts he has read float whole onto his lips: ‘Your goats have gone wild, your orchards fallen into decay, your birds flown, and the only sound is the cry of the sparrow-hawk as it circles the valley of rocks. And as for myself, I am as a friendless friend, a father who has lost his children, a traveller who roams the earth where I alone remain.’
A brisk wind picks up on the water, blows him along, out, out towards the horizon. Then before he knows it a steel dark cloud begins to roll in from the west, and the water that has welcomed Tom Thumb like a child’s yacht on an ornamental pond begins to rock and then to churn and the boat is tossed and spinning. And the cloud rolls on and it drops great sheets of rain like drenching black night, and Caleb in his boat of salvation is helpless.
He can not hear in the distance behind him the sudden piercing wail of the facility siren. Weeaaroooh-weeaarooh! As Caleb spins and tips and puts his faith in God.
O Holy Spirit who didst brood
Upon the waters dark and rude
And bid their angry tumult cease
And give for wild confusion, peace.
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.
The storm takes hold of the waters and rolls and roars in over the land, so that the police helicopter can’t take off, and although all stations are on alert, the land search can not begin until the weather clears. It has not yet occurred to them that Caleb might have set off by sea. In fact it never really occurs to them at all. Three days later, when the whole north of the island is in a state of jitters because there is a maniac on the loose in the woods somewhere, Caleb’s black trainers stamped on the inside in red ‘BRPDF’ and kn
otted together, are washed up on the rocks at Penguin. It is likely that Caleb Mean has drowned while attempting to escape. Nobody has yet discovered that Tom Thumb is missing.
‘The boat at last spun round four times and became filled to the brim with water. It began to fall apart, and as he thought of his love a line from a poem came to him: Death comes so swift and cold. The boat fell apart and he would have drowned had not a greedy fish swallowed him. The fish was caught by a fisherman and taken to the market and sold. The kitchen maid found the Steadfast Tin Soldier inside the fish when she opened it up to clean it. So she picked him up and took him in to show him to the family. And there in the dining-room he saw his dancer, his love.’
It was three weeks before the whole world read the headline: GIANT SQUID TAKES HOLOCAUST PREACHER. As you can imagine, TV went berserk.
On the beach at Boat Harbour, as they were setting off for their morning swim, Josh and Jenny Astor found to their amazement the sprawling, stranded body of a sea monster. Sixteen metres long, pink with eight tentacles each as thick as a man’s leg, liberally studded with powerful suckers that bloom all along from where they join the body of the beast to the tips. Jet propelled, the giant squid, feeding close to the surface in these times of warming seas, discovered the Tom Thumb with its fit and healthy sailor boy, and with all the elegance of a ballerina of the sea, wrapped the package in a firm embrace and powered off into the stygian deep to enjoy the feast. Let’s call it the Kraken. Forgive me if I sound callous as I tell this story. It is after all about the horrible nightmare death of one of my patients, but there is something so other-worldly about all this that I have quite a bit of difficulty getting the right tone.
When scientists opened up the Kraken, they discovered nothing that could be identified as human residue, for these creatures chew their food thoroughly, and it must pass through their brain before it reaches their digestive system proper. But, lodged in one of the tentacles were a few shards and splinters of wood, faintly painted blue-green, and on one of these could be deciphered the letters ‘UM’. In the eight-day interval between the finding of the shoes and the finding of the Kraken, it was decided that Caleb had possibly drowned. Then they tested the stuff in the belly of the beast, but they could not say that any of it was human. The poet in me—or you could say the cynic—wanted to hear they had found skin on which was drawn the image of a bluebird of happiness, but that was impossible. They didn’t find that. They didn’t find anything. Because of the discovery of the fragment of the boat, it was assumed and officially accepted that Caleb had been taken by the squid. Forgive me now, but I must give in to an urge to quote from Tennyson.
‘There hath he lain for ages, and will lie,
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep:
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise, and on the surface die.’
There’s also a part that talks about the Kraken’s ‘ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep’. I thought that was nice, given Caleb’s own notorious inability to dream. I couldn’t get the tone, could I, but at least I have passed on the essence of the narrative. Caleb’s Kraken weighed two-hundred and sixty kilos, which is not so big when you think of whales, but it is big.
There was a sad funeral at the facility, unremarked in the press except for one small paragraph in a national paper, although someone got some pictures to put up on the website. It was attended by no members of Caleb Mean’s family and conducted by Father Fox. The poor remains—the shoes and the bit of boat—were cremated and later scattered into Bass Strait one eerie grey afternoon off the Bluff at Devonport—again by Father Fox who has become the de facto guardian cleric to the remnants of the Means. So finally Caleb was drowned, eaten, burned and scattered. One day Virginia and Golden and I drove out to the Bluff and said a brief farewell to Caleb. Virginia had brought with her a bunch of Highfield roses and as we stood on the cliff, our faces to the open sea, the grey wind in our eyes, we hurled the heads of the roses into the waves below. They floated for an instant, blushing dots of colour on the riding foam, then sank quite suddenly from view, consumed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Heb Dhu Heb Dhim
‘The hitherto lifeless earth springs into green. Gross flowering plants appear, bright, lush, as high as a horse’s head.’
CARRILLO MEAN, Making Love to the Air
For myself and Virginia and Golden there is a happy ending. Years after I met her beneath the cherry tree in the convent, years after she spoke her first word, my name, years after I left her behind in the wilderness, we found our happy ending. I accepted a two-year appointment to a job in Tallahassee at Florida State University and the State Prison in Starke, and before we left Van Diemen’s Land Virginia and I were married in a simple outdoor ceremony at Christmas Hills, among a stand of she-oaks above a sea of scarlet tulips and dream-coloured poppies. Virginia was wearing pearly pink. Father Fox gave the bride away, and Golden, who had reclaimed her name, and two of my nieces were the flower girls. Virginia resembled an angel in a Botticelli picture, and I can not begin to describe how beautiful she was. I was in a trance of joy, experiencing feelings I have never known before, feelings I have read about in poetry without truly understanding. This was bliss, indescribable bliss for me. I saw that Virginia was so calm, so serene, so pure and lovely, and it was almost as if I had been bewitched. I feel a fool, going on like this, but that is how it was. Something transcendent occurred when Virginia appeared beside Father Fox in the little glade at Christmas Hills.
The party afterwards was one of my mother’s biggest efforts ever, with all the women from miles around roped in to cook and lend their tablecloths and their best plates and silverware and crystal. The tables underneath the trees were heaped with flowers and fruits and wine and more food than you can imagine. One of my cousins had come up from Hobart to play the harp, and she was like another angel under the trees. Virginia decided to take my name, to become Mrs Van Loon, and Golden also, my adopted daughter, has taken my name, becoming Golden Van Loon, removing from herself the strange script written by her father into the words ‘Golden Mean’. Perhaps we have been able, to some extent, to exorcise the spirit of Caleb Mean, but only time will tell. There was no shadow of his presence that I could feel at the wedding that day. The only darkness, a deep and abiding sorrow, lay in the fact that all of Virginia’s family was missing. Also, I knew that my father was shocked that I was marrying her, one of the Means, when he had had higher aspirations for me. The phantom of Caleb and the fire, the horrors of the union of Bedrock and Carrillo, the whole mad tribe of unsavoury Mean characters hovered in a cloud around my father that day. He looked very old.
There is a great pleasure in explaining all the normal, ordinary details of the wedding, as they come in the wake of such bizarre and extraordinary events, events that have coloured and fragmented our lives over the past ten years. I plan to write a Christmas email this year, and there I will be able to elaborate on the many small triumphs that have marked our lives over the past twelve months. But for now Cape Grimm and the tulip farm and Black River and Transylvania are all far, far away from me, as if in another world and time. The winds of destiny have brought us here to Florida, to the place where the fate of the world was decided in 2000 by the flutter of the chad in the US presidential elections. The pregnant chad, the dimple chad, the butterfly ballot and the caterpillar ballot—how organic and charming and innocent it all sounds. How sadly it now all resonates with the present stories of the world at large.
So the winds of destiny have brought us to the Gulf of Mexico, just a stretch of water—a large enough stretch of water—from where I met Paloma during that incredible earthquake years ago. It is so long now since I have thought of her, but the close and real presence of the place where we met sometimes reminds me of past happiness and sorrow. In moments of reflection I recall the bike ride from the hospital, through the ruined city, to the small
neat house, untouched by the earth tremors, where her uncle was sitting quietly in the kitchen as if waiting for us, his old hands on the knob of his walking-stick, his bright brown eyes twinkling with pleasure at the sight of us. I recall also the unknown man who died at our feet as we embraced in the hellish darkness of the emergency room. I remember these things like episodes in a distant tale, connected and yet disconnected to myself.
So, the winds have brought Virginia and me to the Gulf of Mexico.
After the wedding at Christmas Hills we travelled out to the ruins of the village of Skye, our principal aim being to visit the Temple of the Winds. Virginia once believed that she would never have the courage to go back, but together we found the strength, together we made our way to the Temple of the Winds. We had to pass through the ruined and abandoned village that was a forlorn whistling skeleton through which morning glory and blackberries and grasses had moved, giving the effect of softening, decorative, even artificial greenery. It was a fairyland of woody, leafy arches and hollows and windows and arcades. Through the leaves of a riotous honeysuckle I read a fading but undamaged sign in blue and white that said: ‘Flying Sheep Café’. Trees sprouted from the rusting skeletons of burnt-out cars. As if spirit people had suddenly fled before a powerful, creeping, verdant force. The most potent thing was the wind itself, the way it twined and softly wailed, raising flurries of pale sand from the ground, a sand that had all but obliterated the patterns on shattered pavement tiles. The breath of desolation was carried on the wind.
The place where the Meeting Hall had been was cleared and flattened, covered with grass knee-high. In the graveyard next to it were rows of uniform white crosses, like on an old battlefield in some far-off country. We walked slowly up and down the rows, and silently read the names—Virginia’s whole family was buried there. We were both weeping softly. Since then we have never spoken of this time in the graveyard, and perhaps we never will. It was beyond words, beyond emotion, beyond understanding. The miracle was that Virginia and Golden had escaped, had lived to take up their lives in joy and hope. As I looked at Virginia while we stood by the graveside of her mother and father and brothers and sisters I was overcome with a great amazement that she should be beside me, that she should be so vital, so filled with a shining energy and beauty, that she should be mine.