by Jock Serong
Grayling felt a surge of panic, rifling through words like ‘reconsider’ and ‘on reflection’, then stumbled on an escape route. ‘The governor has instructed me to ask you for your account without the assistance of other sources. Just to make sure we have it…independently.’ He tried smiling, reached out a hand to pat the man’s shoulder. But Figge burst into movement, twisting up and sideways so that his wreck of a face was close to Grayling’s and a gust of foul air connected them.
‘You listen to me, lieutenant. I didn’t survive two shipwrecks so you could play games with me. You understand? I didn’t walk hundreds of miles through the bush so some preening halfwit could try out a strategy on me.’ He shot out a hand and gripped the front of Grayling’s waistcoat. His eyes bored into Grayling’s. ‘Do not attempt to toy with me. I am not a man you’d toy with.’
‘I’m sorry Mr Figge, I…’ Grayling found himself stammering. ‘That was certainly not my intent.’
‘And don’t compound your idiocy by FUCKING LYING TO ME.’ Spittle gathered in the corner of Figge’s mouth, where the tiniest trace of a mad grin was forming. It was a performance. Grayling knew this, but it was no less frightening for that. ‘Get out,’ Figge spat. ‘I shall consider at my leisure whether I wish to co-operate any further.’
Grayling turned on his heel, but before he had reached the door Figge called out. This time his voice was pleading. ‘Oh forgive me, forgive me,’ said the new voice. ‘I have been through such terrible things. Sometimes I fear I do not know myself anymore.’
The lieutenant turned, his skin crawling. He looked at the fading light outside the window above the bed. He would play this game: see where it led. ‘I must go anyway,’ he said abruptly. ‘I have a commitment.’
‘I beg of you lieutenant, don’t leave me. I am full of terrors.’ Figge’s eyes narrowed as another idea came to him. ‘It’s not duty, is it. This commitment of yours is personal, I think. You’re worried.’
Grayling was suddenly flustered once more. He forced a smile.
‘Tell me what it is.’ Figge’s tone, artfully laced with fellowship, invited him in. How did this man pass through tempers so swiftly? Grayling forced his revulsion down and stepped back towards the bed, even while he wondered why he did so.
‘My wife is unwell. I must watch her closely at present.’
‘The two of you came over with the governor on the Reliance. From England, I mean.’
‘Scotland originally. Who told you that?’
‘Oh, people talk. I am interested in people.’ He made an airy gesture with one hand, the violence quite gone. ‘So four years here, then. You must be close to him.’
‘I had worked alongside His Excellency for some years before this.’
‘The Corps will wear him down eventually, you must know that. What will you and your wife do then?’
‘I don’t think that is your concern, Mr Figge.’
The eyes, under the swelling, looked chastened. ‘No, you’re right, of course. I take it from your manner, lieutenant, that your wife is more than just unwell. What are her symptoms?’
Figge was gesturing at the seat beside the bed. Grayling resisted him. To ask of her symptoms was to invite a conversation about her body, the open stretches of her warm curving skin; the trespass upon that skin by this damned pestilence, whatever it was.
He felt the impertinence, keenly; but he was desperate.
He sighed. ‘She has been getting worse for over a week now. She’s a very—a very healthy woman, Mr Figge, but she has become weak and faint. Her legs will not obey her, they…I mean by that, she cannot stand. She has a rash over her abdomen and…’ No. Charlotte’s health, her body, was not this man’s concern.
‘Go on. There is another thing.’
Damn him.
‘A sore. An abscess, I suppose, on her head. Here.’ He pointed to his own head, behind his ear. ‘Like something bit her. But the swelling increases and it has been eight days.’
Figge was frowning, chewing his wild beard slightly into his mouth. ‘Is she coughing?’
‘No.’
‘Feverish?’
‘No.’
‘Let me think about this, lieutenant. I am not medically trained, you understand, but I have some knowledge of the world.’
Grayling felt a wave of relief that Figge’s reversal of the interrogation had ended. He thanked the man vaguely and turned again to go.
‘I would be pleased to attend on her.’
The words were spoken evenly, neither hopeful nor dismissive, and they lodged like a hooked seed in Grayling. The man was not letting go.
‘Good of you, sir,’ Grayling fumbled. ‘We shall see what unfolds.’ He made it to the door but turned again, despite himself, to look at the figure in the bed. The eyes had never left him.
‘Yes.’ Those eyes were a hot brand on his flesh. ‘You should go to her.’
9
Lovely of you to come, lieutenant. I hope I didn’t frighten you, but the look on your face! I heard Hamilton’s pomposity in your plummy mouth as you retreated. Fear not, I can weave through the obstacles in this little tale, even if you won’t tell me what Clark’s said or written. Whatever it is, it will only be constipated by formality. He saw what I saw and felt the things I felt, but on the page the dreary bastard will suck the life out of them.
The boy doesn’t speak. Clark can’t write. The story in its greatest form lives in me. And here it starts: with the early light and the new day breathing soft upon me. I am seated away from the others, on a boulder in a clearing. More boulders stretch beyond, great towering piles of granite that thrust towards the rumbling sky. Nearer in, they are fringed with great hummocks of grass. The tussocks caused me pain last night, bulging here and there into my resting bones.
But what fills the world is the birds. It is them that make the grunts and yarks and other complaints I hear, sounds that might have issued from a barn full of unfed livestock. Birds of an ordinary size, sooty black, short of tail and clumsy afoot, wandering like drunks over these clumps of grass, peering into holes then honking apologies when they find inside not the mate they seek but some other irritable tenant.
There are other birds about: gulls and skuas overhead, and lumbering fat grey geese along the back of the beach. Someone found a penguin in a crevasse between two boulders. But these sooty ones are by far the most numerous. As my eyes adjust I find there are dozens, hundreds of them, all doing this same thing: waddle and stagger, inquire at the mouth of a hole then blunder onwards.
We have made camp, the lot of us, atop a giant colony of these dundering imbeciles, and as the men set their feet upon the ground they trip and stumble among the burrows. Swearing at each other, swearing at the birds. I should join them. I should be up and about in vigorous pursuit of our salvation.
But I like to observe.
This circular flat with its bird warrens and its hard, spiky grasses is home to forty-nine souls: ten of us Englishmen and Scots, and thirty-nine lascars, many of them huddled around a fire, though it is not cold. They’re burning broken planks because fire makes sense of the world.
The ship lies just across the little beach and a short stretch of water, swamped to her gunwales and still in full sail as though she intends to continue on underwater. In her dying moments she righted herself somehow, and thus her bow faces us squarely. It lends her a nobility she doesn’t deserve, the old heifer.
By sun-up we’ve six or eight of the dimwitted birds on a fire, necks wrung and roughly plucked. Hamilton didn’t get wet last night and he’s there in his fine trousers and his jacket, making speeches. The ship is lost, he declares, like that’s a revelation when she sits there on the bank, awash in the leftover chop from last night and groaning like a beast in labour.
The bird flesh is greasy and it stinks but I’ve had worse. It comes away in strips from the bones, and the muscle differs little from the sinew. The guts are bitter, fishy and dark. The teeth can work through these bones, but the powdery
remains in the molars are the least pleasant part. I do not forget a bird, and I have seen these ones in the north, way north in the Arctic Circle. I cannot fathom how they would be here too, but it is them, I have no doubt. The clumsy shape, more beak than tail. I wonder how the living feel as they watch me devour the dead. I suppose they are too stupid to make the association.
Hamilton, barely brighter than the birds, is still talking. He has a plan of sorts. We are to use the jollyboat to retrieve everything from the ship and bring it to the beach. We are to load a barren rock, maybe a mile long, with the baubles and trinkets of faraway civilisation: plates and shoes and spices and a horse and cow and for the love of Christ Himself a musical organ. What pretty mischief: we are making a tiny England.
There is the other thing: the thing lodged deeper in me than all that trivial finery: the barrel storage of seven thousand gallons of rum. What’s surer than the sunset is that these fools will break it open and gorge themselves to a rolling stupor. And a revelation it will be if that stupor is at all discernible from their intellects when sober. We were headed for a colony where rum is money. The carcass of the Sydney Cove holds a fortune in liquid form, enough that a man could buy his own mountain and never work again, and this mob would guzzle the lot.
The bird is reduced to skeleton and I toss it at some of its former comrades, bumbling about on the sand in pompous clamour. Beyond them are the seals, piled one atop the other all over the boulders, and I count fifty of them just within the curve of this bay. In the dying hours of the Sydney Cove’s voyage I saw perhaps a thousand. Blubber and fur: a bounty more valuable even than the rum, and more lasting. There is a fortune to be made out of what I know: that a ship lies broken here, laden with riches. That an industry could be got underway, clubbing these stupid beasts and skinning them.
The boulders around me are glittering in the morning sun. Untold riches, they sing, for the man who lives to see Sydney.
Hamilton is talking about the longboat, but as I am not one of his crew he cannot address me with any authority. I lie here, indifferent to his fine words, while the others must sit upright and listen attentively.
The longboat. He wants the longboat repaired of the damage it has sustained in the wreck, then modified and reinforced for a long journey. He is forcing himself to devise a practical course, but the despair in his heart is transparent to all. We are placed most exquisitely in the hands of Fate. A boulder island north of Van Diemen’s Land and south of New South Wales. A place where no ship goes. Where no man, possibly not even the Savage, has yet placed a foot in the entire history of God’s creation.
I stand—dust myself off, because Figge would do so—and turn my attention to Hamilton. He wants a well dug. It’s late summer here, no surface water anywhere. They go to it with the only spade from the Sydney Cove, choosing a hollow between two stacks of granite, and eventually strike water at seven feet. Horrible stuff.
I walk away from the men at their labours and head towards the western side of the island through a range of large granite domes. Winding in and out among them, over gravelly sand and feeble topsoil, I come across one of the lascars, the cassub, squatted to shit between two stunted bushes.
I stop to watch him and he protests mildly, but he has his trousers around his ankles and his hands bracing his knees: he can hardly shoo me off. Standing to the east of him, it occurs to me that the smell of the shit is wafting my way. The wind is blowing west.
This is an interesting development. Hamilton, of course, sailed us directly into the gap in the Furneaux chart: the blank paper in the long coastline that stretches from the southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land all the way north-east to Sydney. Furneaux lost his way about there: the pencil left the page for a crucial few hundred miles. Now that we are in Furneaux’s gap, the larger question looms: what exactly is in it?
A short herb grows beside the squatting man. Silver-blue and sprouting vigorously from pure sand. I tear a little of the foliage and bite into it. It tastes of salt, mildly herbaceous. The shitter is watching me dolefully so I push him with a foot. He topples sweetly into his own dung and it makes a thick orange-brown print on his thigh.
I move past him and on to a low range of the giant boulders, eyes drawn to the sea again. Looking west. The onshore wind has streaked the white foam out there and as it pushes at me two thoughts occur almost simultaneously: I am looking westward and seeing water—so where has the coastline gone? And there is swell, not just chop, moving across that water towards me. This is no estuary. There is a long fetch of open sea out there.
This enigma stays with me over several more days as the lascars busy themselves retrieving the Sydney Cove’s cargo. The weather is fine: the longboat is dragged up onto the beach and braced by heavy timbers, sourced among those already breaking free of the ship’s corpse. Kennedy works shirtless in the sun, sawing, nailing, planing: straking her sides and fortifying her guts for a long voyage.
For us, waiting, it’s a diet of rice and bird. Nobody will starve here. At least, not for some time. On occasion we have dined on the enormous grey geese that wander the island. They scare easily, but they only take flight after much awkward lumbering. In between there is a moment of opportunity. The heavy flesh on them roasts well. The Javanese are trying to eat the big conical limpets from the boulders. But they are tough as hell, and no amount of pounding on the rocks or boiling in seawater will soften their fibres. I tried the rubbery flesh—once. The taste is of wharf posts at low tide. Better to bait a hook with the damned limpets than to try eating them.
There are cumbersome dark fish of various kinds among the rocks, including a thin one with sandpaper skin and a sharp horn on top of its head. On the sand, the men fishing have found another creature altogether: a long, slender flat-fish that appears more like a reptile. When brought to the surface it carries the colours of the seafloor in perfect mimicry, complete with the speckles, but these soon fade to a dull brown. A row of sharp spines lies flat against its back, flaring only when it is subjected to the indignity of capture. These ones eat well, comparable to a good English cod. When I see one brought in I make sure to seat myself by the lucky angler and remind him of my position as client.
These are the most fortunate days of our odyssey. I walk and think and take such small advantages as I can. On the beach at the southern end of the island, a round boulder stands topped with a smaller one, looking like some fat old harpy who’s tumbled onto her arse in a stupor. The sky is huge and never quite empty: if it’s not clouds racing past it’s birds of countless sorts. The oily dark ones we’ve been eating are the most plentiful but there are gulls both large and small, and just occasionally a white eagle, its broad wings backswept to a handful of flight feathers extending like fingers that grip the air. I watch it draw its circles above us, the beak with the tip curved for taking out eyes, and I wonder, are we merely meat to it? Meat that unhelpfully moves about but soon enough will lie soft in the grass for the talons to plough?
When the inevitable happens and the thirsty Lothians break into the rum, it is me who goes to Hamilton and points out the other little island just to our south-west where, perhaps, he might want to isolate the intoxicants. Logic would say Clark should be protecting his investment, not me, but I am not concerned who perceives my plans in motion.
After another two days’ work the men have ferried the grog across the water. I later observe them—not the lascars: grog doesn’t seem to light their fancy—gazing sadly out towards the faraway casks, neatly stacked along the foreshore above the tide line. I would feel some sympathy for the dumb oafs who have lost their one means of release. But they cannot apprehend the true value of those casks.
Hamilton has named our island Preservation—for its dubious role in our survival. I was mildly surprised that he avoided eponymy, but perhaps he didn’t want his good name associated with this debacle. During one of our murmured conversations I suggest to him that he call the other little island Figge’s Isle, in sly honour of the poor sod wh
o bequeathed me his trousers. Hamilton replies that islands should be named more practically, and human names should only be chosen from among the deceased. He has me there: as long as I walk and draw breath, Figge remains alive. And with characteristic lack of imagination, he settles upon Rum Island.
Rum and Preservation. What a pair.
10
She hated the days when she couldn’t get out of the place. She hated the monotony, the great weight of time that pressed on the roof and made the windows knock. She hated watching the light and feeling it burgeon, then decay, like life itself. She would have said that she hated to cook and to clean and to wash; to conform to the air of authority that pervaded every home. But right now she would have given anything to throw her body at a task and to puff the stray hair from her face as she raised an unseemly sweat.
Because the bed was worse than anything. The helplessness of it, the waiting. Domestic work she could tolerate. It contributed something to their lives. But this lying around! She was too weak for rage: if not, she would have stormed out and plunged headlong into the forest.
She held her visions of the forested world deep inside, used them to fortify herself against the hours. The powerful smell of the secret, enveloping trees and their straying edges of bark; the long twigs that whipped and draped over the sandstone; caves and ledges and trickles of cold water arranged in complex symmetries that beckoned her to believe all of this was intentional display. That beholding eyes, even hers, were the only thing required to complete the perfection. She had begun to think the bush spoke at a different pitch and that, although she couldn’t hear it, her body mourned its absence when the house enclosed her. Perhaps she was going mad. Perhaps it was the sickness.
In the afternoon she caught herself waiting for him, imagined him there and close to her, closer to her, above and inside her and breathing hard by her cheek and in her ear, taking her hair in his hands and rocking against a sea or the stars or the wind perhaps, some gale over the shores that rushed life into the trees. She imagined the times when it was the two of them and the land outside whispered spirits through their tiny house and sent them raptures she could not explain: then she would drive her fingers into the ropes of his back and gorge upon the good fortune of him, that back of his unmarked and strong and arching in perfect beautiful agony for her. In those moments, when she knew him so completely, she could see past their lives into some other place where they still existed together; yet in slivers of those same instants she did not know him at all, for his eyes would fade from passion to an immeasurable distance. As if oceans separated him from her; oceans they had made together.