The Resurrectionist

by James Bradley

  Perhaps another man might have taken more than the name, might even have borrowed or invented a past. But I wished only to be free, to live without past. I might have been born not a mewling babe but full-grown, rising from that fresh and clotting earth to begin again. And if at first it was a lie, then in time it became something less than that, and more. Another life, newfound, another name which I came to know as my own.

  What became of my erstwhile friend I could not say. Perhaps he prospers yet in some London street, ignorant of this shadow life of his I live. Would he know me if he saw me now? Would he understand what I did, what I took? After all, they are such little things, these names of ours, scratches of sound and ink, impermanent. It is so easy, to forget one’s self, to mistake the masks we wear for the truth of us, to become a name which is not our own, to leave a life behind and be reborn.

  THERE IS NO WRIT or proclamation of banishment, but it is done, nonetheless. One by one my pupils are withdrawn from me, my lessons cancelled. Some do it with the glint of pleasure in their faces, others less gladly, as if they performed a duty regrettable but necessary. In the street faces are averted when I pass, gentlemen falling into too loud conversation with their fellows, ladies pursing their lips and turning away, only to whisper once I am past.

  This is not the doing of Winter alone. Others have taken their part willingly, I am sure. There is a peculiar brutality to the way the unspoken law is kept here, a vengefulness, as if to fall among the fallen is a sort of weakness which must be expunged. Sometimes I have thought the coarseness of the manners in these colonies, the hardness of the spirits that they breed, springs not from the lives we lived so long ago but from the denial of those lives, almost as if the silence we conspire to share is itself a sort of violence we do to ourselves.

  Of course my crime is none that all here are not guilty of. I have taken another name, another life, made myself anew. But there is some quality to the way that I have done it, some unspoken transgression that may not be borne. I see it too, I feel the way it denies us all.

  Without pupils I may not earn, which is ill for me. I have money, for now, enough for food, but it will not last. There is other work I might do, commissions for specimens I could fill, but these last weeks I find I cannot bring myself to do what they demand. To take a bird from the wing with gun or snare seems horrible to me, something which I may no longer do, nor wish to see done. Of course a man may earn a life in other ways: there is work for all here, and in time I may come to push a plough or walk the boundaries.

  The last of my students to be taken from me is Joshua. Bourke does it with a gruff declaration that it is time for the boy to learn more of the running of the estate. He does it quickly, seeking no argument, and I give him none, though I see he has made the decision against his own nature. Perhaps it is as Mrs Bourke said, and in the boy he sees his former wife, some possibility he cannot acknowledge, but it is plain the decision is one that has cost him part of the easiness with himself and his family he once enjoyed.

  Nonetheless it is to the Bourkes’ credit that they do not abandon me entirely. Despite the scene with Newsome, despite the story of my dismissal as Miss Winter’s teacher, the truth of which they must half-guess, neither has pressed me for an explanation. And though for others my name is now a source of endless speculation and scandal, the Bourkes have not made me unwelcome in their home.

  Yet it is plain to all three of us that some fundamental trust is broken. Bourke’s friendship was always of the distant kind enjoyed between those of unequal station, and so it seems less altered, but with Mrs Bourke the change is more easily seen. Though she is as kind to me as she ever was, now her kindness has a different quality. She speaks as to someone who was once a friend, but with whom one has suffered a schism, now resolved but never to be repaired; as if she is determined not to pry within me, not to dig too deep.

  And of her who lies at this thing’s heart there is no word, only the news of her brother’s instruction that I not be received in their home. What she knows I cannot guess, what she guesses I cannot bear to think upon.

  THERE ARE THOSE who would tell you that to make the likeness of a bird you must begin with the head, then proceed to the throat, and hence along the breast-line to the legs. The wing must be started at the pinion line, then the outline of the tail last of all, the details filled in only once the lines are made. But in truth there is no rule for it, no system. The line speaks to the page, and back again: drawing forth the image that is borne within the mind. And this image, for all the precision that it has, is as much one of impression and of feeling as of craft, a thing that takes its life from its line, until it brings itself into being, a thing new born, and new made.

  Late afternoon, a knock upon my door. The intrusion of this human sound into the air of the house seeming to jar. I sit, arrested in myself, and then it comes again, less certainly.

  Rising, I cross to the door and open it, clearing my throat so I might speak. Days have passed since last I had human company. Outside the blueing light of the afternoon, the rising branches of the trees. And then I see her standing there.

  At first she does not speak, and nor do I. Her face looks somehow different, as if I have misremembered her. Older perhaps, and thinner too, more ordinary. Perhaps I look the same to her, for she stares as if I am some sort of ghost, a husband or a brother long thought dead and now alive again, but altered from the image carried in the mind for so many years.

  A life might be lost within the time we stand there. When at last we speak the first words are hers, coming nervously, as I have not heard her be before.

  ‘Mr May,’ she says, clasping her hands.

  ‘How came you here?’ I ask, looking past her towards the path.

  ‘It is no great distance to walk,’ she says. ‘May I come in?’ and, confused, I step back to let her pass.

  Her eyes move here and there about the room. She stands like this for a space of seconds, her back to me, then turns to me.

  ‘Why …?’ I begin, my question fading out, incomplete.

  ‘I would see the paintings that you promised me,’ she says.

  Not knowing now what I might say, with a lifted hand I gesture to the little room where I keep my desk.

  I am nervous, with her here. We cross towards the papers on the desk, but I push them aside.

  ‘Which ones would you have me see?’ she asks, and so, selecting one, I place it on the table in front of her. For a long time she contemplates it. Then she moves it aside, and I pass the next, and then the next. My throat is tight.

  Finally she sets aside the last of them. She straightens, touches the things I keep upon my shelf. Watching her I sense she approaches something in her mind, something she is unsure of how to broach. Then at last she turns to face me. Her face is tired, but I see in it some decision reached, something she will not now put aside.

  ‘Would you know how he died, my boy?’ she asks.

  ‘There is no need,’ I say, shaking my head.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I would have you know,’ and so I nod, and she pauses, and then starts.

  ‘I did not love his father,’ she says. ‘Not even then. He was not a wicked man, but a foolish one, the sort who does what pleases him and then feels a fine regret for his actions afterwards, all sorrow and self-abasing shame. He began it, I suppose, though I understood well enough what it was he sought of me, and I did not discourage him. I knew he had a wife, but he flattered me, and the rest of it was more like carelessness. I am not sure what I thought I might find in it. Some sort of pleasure, I suppose, some sort of feeling.’

  She looks at me, and I understand that what she tells me she has told no one else.

  ‘There was not much joy in it, not for me, nor even I suspect for him, but that was not the worst of it. The worst of it was that when it was done and all was changed I was still on my own. Sometimes I have wondered, were I to have that time again would I do the same? – if I am honest with myself I know I would, save f
or the hurt that it brought to those who were close to me.

  ‘When it was clear what the result of my indiscretion was, I was sent away to where I would not be visible. A farm near Launceston, kept by friends of my father’s from another time. Good people, and Christian too. I spent a winter there in their company, unvisited, forgotten, or so it seemed. My father wrote to me when he could, but his letters grew more infrequent as the months of my confinement passed. From Edmund there was no word, but that seemed normal to me then, for even when we were young there was little warmth between the two of us.

  ‘The child came at the winter’s end. I pressed him from my body in the dark of the night, watched over by a doctor brought from the town. When they put the little one in my arms I did not know what it was I felt; something fierce, and so like pain I thought I might weep.’ Lifting a hand she wipes it against her face, though there are no tears that I can see. ‘I called him Thomas,’ she says, ‘the name you bear.

  ‘I think my brother thought we might give my boy away, perhaps my father too, bring me back into society, pretend I had merely been away somewhere, until the story was forgotten and I might be married off quietly. But as I held him in my arms those thoughts did not occur to me.

  ‘It was almost a month before my father came to visit me, and when he did I understood the reason his letters had not come more frequently, for he was ill, and had been for many months. But I saw the way he took my child in his arms and cradled him, the way he spoke to him. He was a gentle man, and kind, and I saw the joy he took in the boy. He promised he would come again - but he never did, for that very week he suffered a seizure of the brain, and for the month that he lived on after had neither speech nor movement in his limbs.

  ‘After he was dead my brother brought me back to Hobart so I might live once more with him. I thought at first it might have been an act of kindness, to have the child there, but I soon understood he merely wanted me where he might watch me closest, so I could not cause him any more disgrace than I already had.

  ‘Though Edmund never spoke to Thomas, save when he could do nothing to avoid it, he was not cruel to him. That is not his way. And yet Thomas worshipped him. He was a quiet child, not much given to playing with the other children, which perhaps I liked more than I should. It is a strange thing, to be cast out: with so few who were prepared to see me, I was largely on my own, and he came to mean so much to me. Too much, I suppose some would say.

  ‘Nonetheless it worried me, that he would be too often on his own. But our housekeeper had a brother, a man not long out of Port Arthur, and he brought a pup. It was not handsome to look upon, just a ragged thing, but my boy loved it. He would play with it for hours, chasing it, making it bark. It was so unlike him, this happiness, that I did nothing to keep them apart. Then one morning, I came down to find the two of them in the yard, Thomas running back and forth, so the pup would chase him. Because the men were in the yard that day and I saw he would be troublesome I sent him down past the house to play with the dog there, meaning to follow him immediately. But then I thought to fetch a book, so I might have something to read, and going in I went upstairs for the volume from my bedroom where I had left it the night before. Wordsworth, it was, poetry.

  ‘When I came down the path I could not see him anywhere, but I could hear the dog. There was a little creek in the gully behind the house, its water black with the tannin from the fallen leaves, and so I followed on, seeking for the dog and for him. And then I saw the dog, standing by the creek’s edge, barking and barking. I knew then, without needing to see, the knowledge of it so powerful I thought that I would choke, and yet I cast aside the book, and ran, tripping over the grass towards the edge of the creek. And then I saw him, face down, his body drifting below the surface of the water. He did not float, and for a moment I though he might still be saved, and so I went in after him. The water was not deep but it was cold, and I pulled him out onto the bank, and striking his chest and fumbling by his lips I tried to put the breath back into him. But it was no use, because he was dead, and drowned, and I knew, I knew what had happened, that it could not be undone.’

  When she is done there is silence, a space larger than words. Though she does not look at me I know what my part is, what part I should now play. Yet even as I see what it is she needs of me I know that I cannot, that there are no words to mend this thing. And so at last she looks away, her hand straying onto a painting which lies beside the window sill.

  ‘I would keep this, if I might,’ she says, turning to me. Her eyes are wet.

  I nod, and she steps away. I follow her towards the door. At the last moment she turns back to me.

  ‘Your name,’ she asks, ‘what is your name?’

  I feel myself naked in her gaze.

  ‘Gabriel,’ I say, ‘it is Gabriel.’

  ‘It is a fine name,’ she says. I think that she will weep, but she just stands, holding herself so she does not shake.

  ‘We are none of us without a past,’ she says at last, leaning forward to let her lips brush against my cheek. And then with an abrupt movement she turns away from me.

  I stand there for a long while once she has gone, staring out along the path by which she went. Outside the day is drawing to a close, and overhead the birds are gathering for the night, calling and chattering as they move between the trees, their cries rising on the air. How many times have I heard them thus, the chirruping of the lorikeets, the whirring sound of the honeyeaters, the long echoes of the currawongs. It might be yesterday, or tomorrow, each day the same. How long has it been, I think, how long have I been thus alone? It weighs on me and chokes, something I cannot undo, cannot forget, nor live without.

  Sometimes when I am alone out there, in the bush, or even here in my house, it seems almost possible that I might lose myself; there in that silence where there is no need of words or discourse. I have heard it said that there are men who have lost their minds to it, reason drained away into the dissolving space of sea and sky. And indeed while there are times when this place is full of life, a raucous cavalcade, even then there is a sense of emptiness, as if some ancient silence lingers in the fabric of this place, something alien, and unknowable.

  Do I dream of them at night I wonder, standing here? The answer is no, or not often. Rather I sleep as might the dead, almost without dreams, or none borne back with me from that place. Instead it is in the days that I remember them, when I am alone, amongst the trees and hills. Then they come back to me, summoned as if from some other life. But even then I feel no guilt, only emptiness, as if all feeling were drained from me, and I was made unreal, transparent as the sound of the wind upon the trees.

  Overhead the birds are calling, their cries seeming to fill the air. As I watch they rise, flinging their bodies against the sky, intent upon the moment, spinning and turning like embers or smoke upon the air. I envy them, this life of theirs, the way they live so free of themselves. They are without past, without future, an exaltation of life beating in so many parts, rising up into the infinity of space. Watching them I find I want to weep, and yet I have no tears. And anyway, what would these tears be for? That I cannot fly like them? That I am not free? We are all of us made like this, I see it now, to live and die and live again, our hands and bodies cages which can bind as well as keep. I would rise like them, forget myself, and be released. And then all at once I do begin to weep, and I think I understand what it is to be reborn, what it is to be remade. So many lives, so light.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank all those who assisted in the writing of this novel. For taking the time to read various drafts and offer advice I am grateful to David Malouf, Hilary McPhee and Delia Falconer; similarly I am indebted to the doctors and students who allowed me to observe as they worked and who allowed me to learn first-hand what it is like to spend time with the recently-dead. Though their subjects could not consent I owe them and their families a special debt of gratitude. For support of a different kind I am grateful to the Li
terature Board of the Australia Council for the provision of the Fellowship on which much of this novel was written, a gesture which bought me time and space I could not otherwise have hoped for, and to Fiona Inglis for her support through much of the time it took to write. But most of all I would like to thank my agent at Rogers, Coleridge and White, David Miller; my publisher at Picador Australia, Nikki Christer; and my editor, Judith Lukin-Amundsen. And last, but certainly not least, Mardi McConnochie, without whom it would never have been written.

  Author biography

  James Bradley was born in 1967. He has twice been named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists. He is the author of Paper Nautilus, Wrack and The Deep Field, and lives in Sydney.

  by the same author

  Paper Nautilus

  Wrack

  The Deep Field

  Copyright

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2007

  by Faber and Faber Limited

  3 Queen Square London WC1N 3AU

  This ebook edition first published in 2008

  All rights reserved

  ©James Bradley, 2006

  The right of James Bradley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in

  accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  ISBN 978—0—571—24618—2 (epub)