Preservation

by Jock Serong

  Eventually we found the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land and followed it south. Swung nor’-east around the foot of it with the topsails in rags, and somehow we made Maria Island on its east side. Hamilton had the other chart, you understand, Mr Furneaux’s. So from there he was telling us it’s a straight line nor’-nor’-east to Sydney.

  The boat was slowly drowning itself, even then. Hamilton had us eighty miles off the coast and headed due north. I was asleep at the time. Middle of the night and we’re hit by another front and it’s on again, same as the other times only this time it’s hitting us on the starboard stern quarter, from the south-east. Warmer wind, different ocean. Short, punching chop. Not the great marching lines of the roaring forties.

  And Hamilton turns us west: makes the decision to run for shelter. The wind’s a south-easter veering to a nor’-easter and as it gets to shrieking we’re staring at a lee shore and gaining speed like we’ll ram clean through the cliffs. Short swells dunt us left and right and the boat’s bucking and swaying like some giant has the old cow by her left rear hock and he’s tipping her on her ear, and thus it went for two hours.

  Then there was a crack like a gunshot and a percussion through our feet and the ship spun on its heel and faced up into the wind. The ones who understood these things went below—they knew what it meant and they came back long-faced and said the bow, where we’d had all the trouble, had now collapsed. There was a sombre meeting: Hamilton and his mate, and Kennedy the carpenter, and Figge.

  Pardon, sir? No, I have no idea what business a tea merchant had in such a discussion.

  In any case, the leak was now beyond us: five feet of water in the hold, sloshing among the cargo. A small part of me thinks Hamilton was worried mainly for the human souls aboard: why else was I not consulted about the cargo at that point? If I was a company man I’d have insisted on more pumping, more repairs, and a stagger to Sydney. But as you may have guessed, I am not a company man.

  It was determined that the pumps would not keep up and we must run her aground. The only decision left was where we could do so safely. By nightfall the water had reached the lower deck hatches and my cargo, along with most everything else, was submerged. It was a wretched night: a vigil on a dying ship. The getting cuffed and thrown by the sea, the acts of spite from within and without. I learned that night that men in extremity are a study in self-interest; the things they will do and say to save their hides. I craved some sign of the dawn, and when it came it was so jaundiced I wished for the dark again.

  As the sun rose out of the east behind us, we’d tilted over so hard that it was no longer possible to stand unaided, and at times it was necessary to clamber up the slope of the deck. Below you could hear the livestock in their terror, immersed to their flanks in seawater and kicking at the hull. We should have ended their suffering, but we could see we might need them for sustenance.

  Hamilton and Thompson were puzzling over the helm, attempting to sail a vessel that was lying on her side. What are the sail orders when the rigging drags in the sea? The lookout was in truth only ten yards aloft because the masts swept so low over the water. He called landfall. A shoal of sand and weed, and beyond it a small rocky islet. There was nothing left but to hope we didn’t sink entirely before we got there. And it was close in the end, but we got in, between a cluster of the rocky islands—a mountainous one to our north and a flatter one to our south before the keel knifed a shoal and we halted.

  Before us, perhaps eighty yards away, an island of boulder and sand. Beside us, a much smaller one, dome-shaped and entirely ringed by granite. No trees, just grasses and windblown scrub under cloud.

  There the ship groaned and gave up. It died there and never moved again. For the first time in ninety-one days, we were utterly still.

  Hamilton announced to those nearby that he believed we’d entered a great firth. He was guessing, of course. We already knew we’d sailed into the gap in Furneaux’s chart, and no one could have the slightest idea what the gap represented. More pressingly, we were still five hundred nautical miles short of Sydney. My mind turned to the obvious consequences of our foundering. The firm in Calcutta had no way of knowing we had failed to arrive at our destination. Sydney had never known we were coming. Deep in the clean white paper west of the known coast, we were far from any passing ship.

  No one could know of our plight. There was no prospect of rescue. We had vanished from the face of the earth.

  6

  Charlotte Grayling knew the sounds of Joshua’s arrival, habits in his movements he didn’t know he had. She lay still and anticipated him—his voice, the small sounds of his breathing and the way his body carried the light.

  One step on the bare boards of the verandah. One on the doormat he had fashioned from coiled rope. The latch, the swing of the door. Then his face, etched with the day but offering love or good humour. Such a boy he was, every day. She wanted to light the fire for him. To have something, anything, in the pot above the coals. But she was simply unable.

  His eyes did not dart to the cold fireplace, not once. They homed in on her and she felt their love and concern. He sat on the edge of the bed, beside her shoulder. Not a tall man, not a heavy man. A man who stood upright because naval training had imprinted the posture on him, but who was less inclined to certainty than his stance suggested.

  He asked her how she felt as he untied his boots and worked them off his feet. The soft light of evening and a solitary lamp glowed on his shoulders. How much pain was it reasonable to share?

  ‘Oh, I’m fine.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked up. ‘Don’t tell me what I want to hear. Can you walk?’

  An obvious thing to ask someone who was lying in a bed as daylight receded; but he meant the question another way. Her walking had been the single thing that divided them.

  She didn’t understand why she did it, knowing how it disquieted him; other than to say there was no child to rear, no parents to attend to. No occupation to her days, no threat or promise to spur her between his going in the morning and his returning at night. She was trapped in amber for him, here at the end of the world. As much as she loved to give him warmth and comfort, she was never going to be such a wife.

  And so she had begun to walk. Not far at first: mere flirtations, it seemed. Longer ways to come home from the market; excuses to go and see traders further out. But these became furtive excursions into the bush, illicit in some unspoken way: undertaken for that very reason. She walked because she shouldn’t. It was not respectable for an officer’s wife to be seen on the sandstone country, scratched and sweating, hair flying. There were killers out there, the town said. Thieves of womanly virtue. They were as black as death and they moved without sound and they used the stones themselves for razors to lay open the white flesh of innocents. Pemulwuy was out there, and though she knew little of who he was, she knew what he represented. Pemulwuy was the darkness.

  Walking was her act of defiance. Not against Joshua particularly, but against his world that was now hers, and its insistence on fear. She felt he understood that it wasn’t personal, but each time she did it she was testing his allegiances: to authority. To her.

  ‘Not this morning,’ she answered. Her legs had made the motions, but she couldn’t coordinate them. They wouldn’t talk to her.

  ‘Ewing told me he came by.’

  Ewing had indeed come by, muttering and smelling of brandy. His poultice this time had been ginger and beeswax, as ineffective as all the others.

  Grayling frowned. ‘He makes this great show that he knows what’s happening, but I do not think he has any idea at all.’

  ‘Don’t be unkind to him, dear. He has greater responsibilities than some fainting woman in a bed.’

  He reached over and stroked the hair from her face. ‘May I see?’

  She flinched a little as he reached around towards her left ear, the one furthest from where he sat on the edge of the bed, then inclined her head towards him. His touch was light over the swi
rl of her ear, the ringlet that hung just below her lobe that he often said was the most beautiful thing he’d seen. She had removed the combs she would normally wear, wanting her hair to fall and conceal the thing he sought: the large abscess that had formed just inside her hairline. She had found it with a mirror: it was angry and red, fading to a livid pink welt that contrasted against the cool pallor of her neck. The centre of the swelling was cratered, the crater circled by broken skin that had bled slightly. At the touch of his fingertip she grimaced.

  ‘Have you been scratching at it again?’ She could hear the way he schooled his voice to avoid reproach. The same thing Ewing had asked her. She hadn’t come to this by scratching her head. She wriggled slightly away from his inspection. But he took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. Now she could smell his skin and feel the comforting pressure of his forearms, placed lightly on her chest. He was her refuge from this place when it overwhelmed her; but also her gaoler.

  ‘What else? What else did he find?’

  ‘Oh, there were things he found and things he didn’t notice. He says my heart is going faster…’ She laughed and fluttered her lashes his way. ‘But he didn’t ask about the rash.’

  His smile faded. ‘Would you show it to me, please?’

  She rolled her eyes as he got up off the bed and drew the blanket back. She lifted her nightdress to her chest, knowing it shocked him. There, in a line across the end of her belly, below her navel where it met the hair, was the speckle of tiny pink dots, concentrated in the centre and spreading towards the points of her hips. She knew it was more livid than it had been that morning. It felt pricklish, raised like the trail left by a brush with a nettle. The rash puzzled them both, and Joshua had been unable to resist a connection to her wandering ways. This is what happens when you go about like a native, he had said. But even if there was some unknown form of stinging undergrowth out there, too much remained unanswered. It didn’t explain the abscess behind her ear. And even allowing for her wanderings, how had she come into contact with such a plant down there?

  ‘Enough, my darling. You’re staring now.’ She lowered her nightdress, returned the covers to their former position and mocked him with a prim look. ‘Now tell me about these men.’ She rolled onto a hip to face him, pulling the blanket further up under her chin. He sat down again beside her, worked down the buttons of his jacket and removed it.

  ‘Well, the first one’s Figge. Tall, grave-looking. His hair and beard are wild—’

  ‘Of course they are, poor man.’

  ‘Mm. And his nose, it’s…smashed. I can’t see Ewing getting it straightened out. I spoke to Ewing about him and he expects he will recover. In full health he’d be an impressive man; built very square. But his eyes. They were…’ He sighed as if he had no words.

  ‘They were what?’

  ‘Ferocious. Bright.’ He raised his hands helplessly. Charlotte knew from the look on his face that he was doubting himself. ‘I suppose they’ve been places no man has ever been before…’

  ‘The natives have.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. Though I tell you, it feels like the natives are all here in town. You should see them around Government House this week.’

  ‘You remind me. Boorigul has returned.’

  ‘Really?’ There was an edge of exasperation in his voice as he stood and peered around the doorway into the skillion. Charlotte couldn’t move to follow his gaze, but she knew the girl was there in the shade, a dusting of light on her body. That aspect to her, the waiting for something. Her watchful eyes.

  She had asked Boorigul to come in earlier in the day, had persuaded her to take the basket of washing and set about it. If Joshua had noticed the clothes hanging from the twine strung along the side of the house, it hadn’t occurred to him that Charlotte was now incapable of churning the garments in the copper and thrashing them over the board. She should feel guiltier; but the aching back and the raw pink hands were more painful and ugly than the rash that had her confined to bed; the one they were so concerned about.

  So Boorigul had done the work, bent indifferently naked over the steaming copper. Watching her, Charlotte wondered if it was how her own body would look to others, stooped over the same work. Short and softly rounded, Boorigul wore a circlet of dried grasses and a necklace of shells. Her body curved and swelled, and she stood without shame. When Charlotte saw her this way, the seams and constrictions of her own clothing were a small sadness. It seemed a practical way to go about it: no damp sleeves to contend with, and the sweat dried in the sun.

  Boorigul’s nakedness panicked her husband, she knew. He’d remarked awkwardly once that she might be cold, then shrunk from the comment as though he had imagined the air on her skin and it had been too much. Eora women crowded the hillside from Government House down to tubowgully, defiantly naked and in need of no one’s shelter. It was impossible to live in the colony without becoming accustomed to it. But for Charlotte’s husband, Boorigul’s casual proximity to the house made the sight of her body altogether more alarming.

  Their neighbours also hosted uninvited guests. They were a topic of idle conversation among the officers: the small boy who’d been brought into town by a detachment, the parents having been killed—she’d seen the despatches—in an act of resistance. The girl of marriageable age who had become a bored wife’s project. The missionaries and their opaque motives.

  Rarely were the visitors of full age. Older men and women, shadows in the grounds, sometimes wailed for their return. The householders shouted them back into the street. Like so much about the place, Charlotte could draw no bright, clear line to tell her which of the children sought refuge in the settlers’ homes and which were held there against their families’ will.

  Boorigul had been coming to them since the previous winter: had appeared in the skillion one day sitting sodden and uncommunicative among the sacks of grain. There were rats out there, and other strange scurrying creatures that weren’t rats but needed the same treatment. Charlotte had invited her inside. The girl refused to move, so she prepared a cot by the fire, laid blankets on it and turned the top one back invitingly. Still she had refused.

  The refusals were not sullen or ungrateful, but were firm. Charlotte had resorted to bringing her food, which she accepted silently: eggs at breakfast time, a hank of mutton or badagarang in the evening. Cups of water, a cloth and a bucket in case she wished to bathe.

  ‘What should we do?’ Joshua was asking her now, as he climbed back onto the bed. Charlotte set great store by the sense they could find in their own conversation. Patiently opening and exploring a problem, venturing ideas, retracting them without pride when their logic failed under discussion. But was the girl a problem? Was there anything to solve? Joshua thought so.

  He reached for structure and logic in everything. It was a difference between them that she found amusing. She was content to see the girl sheltered, fed occasionally, and tending to whatever other life she lived, wherever else, when she was not with them. Joshua worried for her safety: worried she would contract some illness out there in the cold. He said so now, but Charlotte laughed.

  ‘She has lived in the cold, love. For years. And the heat, and the rain and the wind. She was doing it before the town came up. They all did. I believe they think our ways of dealing with the climate are inferior.’

  ‘You haven’t seen enough of the world,’ Joshua said gently. It seemed to her condescending. ‘There’s no way of living that surpasses our way.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, and pulled the blanket under her chest to let him know she had shrugged. ‘Listen.’

  Outside they could hear an exchange of voices. Boorigul’s soft whisper was only just audible; louder and more confident were the voices of older women, speaking rapidly in their language, peppered with fragments Charlotte could recognise as English: lieutenant. Gub’nor. Missus. The conversation sounded warm, reassuring. The old ones had come to check on her, to keep her company.

  They were
both silent while they listened. It had occurred to Grayling that he needed to make them food, and a fire. But he wanted to be near Charlotte.

  ‘Tell me more about Mr Figge,’ she said.

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘His eyes, I think.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Disconcerting: as if he knows your thoughts. Anyway, he wasn’t ready to talk. Said we could start tomorrow.’

  ‘What else? There’s something else.’

  ‘Probably nothing. Just, he became very animated when I told him I would read him Mr Clark’s diary of the journey.’

  ‘Surely you’re not going to?’

  She heard him let go an exasperated sigh. ‘I know. But this is exactly what I’m saying—the offer just tumbled out of me because all I could think of was those eyes boring into me.’

  ‘Why would you give Mr Figge a chance to corroborate what Mr Clark says? That journal, my love, it’s your best comparison against Mr Clark’s memory, and against Mr Figge’s truthfulness. I’d be holding it close. But of course’—she lowered her eyes—‘I’m sure you’ve thought of these things.’

  Joshua had stood and moved to the pot above the fire. He glanced back sceptically at her. It was a game and both of them knew it. But she loved him too well to let an argument unfold. She smiled and he returned to the edge of the bed. Close to her, where she wanted him.

  ‘Lie back and I’ll tell you Clark’s story,’ he said. And, placing a hand on her brow, he began to relate the story, just as it was told to him.

  7

  I watched that space on the floorboards for many long minutes before I dared to move. Measured it with my eyes: seven feet, from the edge of the bed to the door. I could hear your voice in there, Mr Clark. Yours and the other man’s, the naval man’s. Him bumping you along, careful. You, stopping and flowing. Your truths, your half-truths and your silences. And your lies, Mr Clark. Let us be plain, your lies.