Preservation

by Jock Serong

  Each time the doctor visits, I make faint and sorry-eyed. He probably knows it’s an act but I don’t care. He smells of grog and his cures are ridiculous. As soon as he leaves, I’m back to the door to hear you, Mr Clark, weaving your coarse net of a tale for the lieutenant. My goodness, the things you have forgotten.

  Like the testing of the gun. When we sat there on the beach in the sun, slapping at those huge biting flies. You saw him check the flintlock and frown as he looked through the breech, muttering about it being ruined by the saltwater. Wasn’t it you, Mr Clark, who told him the gun was finely made and would survive it?

  Because he took the gun and loaded it then, primed it, snapped it shut. I tell you it is inoperable, he said. And then he took young Devesh by the ear and hauled him up, laughing at the lad’s pain. He moved so quick: pressed the muzzle against the poor boy’s forehead and said I hope you are wrong, Mr Clark, because if you are right then this will be on your conscience. And he pulled the trigger.

  Jai sita ram, there was no more than a fizzle of smoke from the pan—the round failed. The boy had wet down his leg and Mr Figge threw him to the ground, laughing.

  And why have you not spoken of those first days with the natives? We all felt the bush moving around us: not just trees in the wind but thumps and snorts and barks. Small game, mostly, but not always. We saw a fine yellow dog one day, tall as a pariah dog but lighter. Kangaroos—we had heard about them. But until the time I was looking down as one of them took off in fear of us, and I heard the heavy thumps, it was a frightening, mysterious sound.

  So there were sounds that we knew through seeing their makers. But then there were others: brushes and whispers so faint they suggested the land itself was talking to us. We discussed it among ourselves. We were being watched, it seemed; followed, even. You gentlemen did not talk of it, but you must have thought it. All of us knew there were natives on these shores. The signs were clear: the old fireplaces, the faraway smoke.

  On our third day of walking we saw footprints on the beach. Adult footprints, coming out of the bush and passing down to where the sea washed the sand flat. They ended there, then started again nearby and returned to the tree-line. The prints were close together: someone walking slowly. None of us had gone ahead: there was no possibility that the prints were ours. Why, after three days of watching us in secret, might the walker now be so open?

  It was a message. These people who could melt into the shadows with such ease, they must be deliberate about the leaving of footprints.

  Within days we were seeing the cooling remains of fires, a burning tree with a strange object at its foot—an animal trap, we thought, made of fine string and bark. As we moved along that mighty, endless beach, a great crowd of watchers was all the time edging away, allowing us room.

  These thoughts rested uneasy in me during the day. Then, on the fourth night of our walk, I woke for no reason at all from thick sleep, pressed against the bodies of the others—as was our habit to keep warm. There was no movement around me, only snoring. My face was turned upwards and I should have seen the thin trees and the bright moon. But that is not what I saw.

  I saw the shape of a man.

  A man standing above me, looking down at me, his face in shadow so I had no idea whether it showed friendship. It was a head and shoulders, dark against the sky. I could not say how I knew, but it was clear he was not one of us.

  Perhaps the shock made me move. The sleeper next to me jumped awake but already the man was gone without a sound. He was there, then he was not.

  For the next few days I tried to put it behind me. I told my father: in his kindly way he said I was sleeping poorly, as we all were, and that it was most likely some vision from my dreams. I tried to accept this. But it did not ease my heart like other things he said. I think now that he knew the man had been there.

  The second time it was late afternoon and I had gone out in search of food. I had one of the short swords, and no idea what I would do with it.

  I crossed the mouth of a creek, and then another. Clear water, sand and pebbles on the bottom. The creeks never flowed simple and straight to the sea: their path always curled through the land, much like mine now: a sandbank here, holes and reefs there.

  I was wasting time, swinging the weapon at sticks. The bushes turned hollow, led me deeper, away from the camp and the beach. It was a path, I see now, but at the time I did not notice. The branches made an archway ahead of me, a frame for the dim light, and then a man was there.

  I felt no fear. The ground had produced a man before me and it was no surprise. What came over me was a flood of relief that a fellow human lived here. Here, where all was uncertain. Did tigers roam the night? Was the water poisonous to drink? Was the earth infested with things that slid and crawled, and might they bore into my body and burst into hideous eggs and worms? We knew the place only as a sketch on a page, a crooked line between land and sea. The map was silent about what lay within. But this, a man with divine light in his eyes, the sun on his chest: this said to me that human warmth was here, even here.

  He was neither hostile nor welcoming. Only, perhaps, as curious as I.

  I watched him, as the air quivered between us, for a sign to say which way this would turn. A small twitch from his long fingers; darker than mine on their backs, pink like the Englishmen’s beneath. A slow step forward, shinbone leading, and I felt his easy balance on the ground. No sound. Fingers of his right hand feeling the air and only now could I see the spears in his left, and both of us were making decisions.

  His was made: he lowered the spears to the ground, those fingers still reaching my way. Two heavy birds moved overhead without interest in us: black ones with a white fan on their tails, almost crows but not. I dropped the sword. I would have smiled too—I think we both knew what a spectacle I’d make trying to wield that thing—but it occurred to me that to show teeth might not be a mark of friendship. I was thinking faster than the heartbeats of the birds.

  He parted the branches that half-hid him the same way I might move through a crowd, my thoughts elsewhere than the things in my path. His eyes never left me. And now he stood before me: tall, slender—not ribs and points like us and the Englishmen but taut and firm, bigger than me but lighter on the ground. His nakedness mocked the rags that hung from me.

  And then he was speaking and his voice was no different from mine. Lower perhaps; more like yours, Mr Clark, but these were the voice and the eyes and the body of a fellow man.

  The words of course I did not know. I caught some of them, rolled them about in my mouth, but they told me nothing. I felt them for their tone and decided they were no threat. Now he was sweeping that right hand behind his hip, low down, and tilting his head over his shoulder.

  I followed, guessing that was what he asked of me. Over fallen timber he jumped silently, gripped and moved on while I slipped and fell keeping up. Then we came down into a gully and I heard voices. Once again, the words a mystery but this time voices of men, women and children. Laughter, argument, a baby’s cry—all of it rose with an orange glow through the bush. I smelled wood smoke, saw moving shadows against the leaves high above. I was tired, stumbling, but he led me on. No words; just the pull of his moving body.

  Then the trees without warning let go their grip on me and I had burst upon a crowd.

  For a moment they terrified me. All talk stopped and every eye had me. Their stares were nothing like the gaze of the first man. Mostly they sat, knees by their elbows, except for those few who were a moment ago—before the arrival of the strangest man they had ever seen—fixed upon some task or other.

  My new friend spoke to them. He had authority, it seemed, because they listened closely. And as I watched them talk, about me I suppose, I understood clearly that this was no chance meeting. I had been watched: we had been watched. This time and place had been chosen. It seemed a good thing they hadn’t dragged in one of the Scots.

  The people moved in around me, bending to inspect. Words passed b
etween them, none directed to me. Bengali, I found myself saying. Bengali, and they were trying it too. Bengali, and I almost laughed, for what was a Bengali doing here? The first one in all of time to stand here, and I’d forgotten to use my own name. But they were testing Bengali—they found shapes in the word like the edges of a stone. Then the man who found me, the senior one, said a word in answer.

  Kurnai.

  Another man called the others back away from me, stepped forward and placed a hand upon my head, left it there as he turned to the others. A point had been made. As if he said, See, he is flesh like the rest of you. And, bolder now, they came forward again, their hands upon me everywhere but mostly upon the garments, what was left of them, tugging and testing but stopping short of tearing them. A woman had my left hand, placed it against her own, matching the fingers, and I saw that part of her last finger was missing. A mishap of some kind, I thought.

  A man handled my poor cock, testing it on its hinges and shifting the balls with his other hand. The sores on them burned at the touch.

  Faces came close to mine and gentle fingers took my chin, pulled it down. Eyes searched my mouth like someone buying livestock. I wondered what they thought to find in there—stored food? But they closed the mouth again with a sort of easy laughter, as if a problem had been solved. I watched the laughter, watched the men. Every one of them had a tooth knocked out: the same tooth.

  My thoughts ran loose: this was all so much, but the two things came together: the feeling of my skin and the looking for this missing tooth. They knew I was not one of them, yet they checked for that mark. They knew I was walking their land and yet they felt for proof I was flesh. Firmly now I had it: they did not think me a sailor, for nothing about me told of a connection to a ship. Nor did they think me a lost wanderer from other lands. They thought me a ghost.

  I laughed; they laughed too. I could see, I could understand that when we thought of them as spirits in the forest, all along they thought the same.

  Hands on my shoulders, making me sit. I worried that my long time away might cause the men—Mr Figge, that is—to go on without me. But the natives seemed to know this. There were looks back in the direction I had come from, hands moving to say you are fine. A handful of meat was pressed into my palm, soft and damp. An old man with a beard pointing long to his stomach made hands towards his own mouth that I should eat.

  They waited until I’d consumed the whole piece. They held their discussion, their other business. Smoke lifted from a deserted fire while they watched me. Children clung to their mothers but watched me too. Those mothers rolled string against their hips, or worked at bowls of grain, but their eyes never left me.

  When the meat was finished they seemed to ease: by the fire they were in fine mood, teasing and sharing stories that were made of looks and sweeping hands. The tiny ways of friendship that looked so similar across the world. I saw a woman place a hand on another’s knee as she whispered in her ear and they both burst out laughing. How could they touch and hear and pass secrets, just as we do? Who taught us all the same?

  18

  In her twisting sleep she had screwed to one side of the mattress, head slung over the edge, a lip and an eyelid hanging slack. She had dribbled on the floor below: through the fierce pain of opening her eyes it was the first thing she noticed.

  Joshua had come home at some stage: she didn’t remember it. He was talking, or making sounds anyway, small and distant. He approached and coaxed her head back onto the pillow. The movement woke her more fully: she focused on his eyes. A new agony gripped her and squeezed her face into a grimace. She fought it; levelled her expression.

  The talking again. ‘—Lord, Charlotte. Has Ewing been? How long have you been—’

  ‘…’s worse.’ She pushed the words out, thick and obscenely soft. ‘Don’t think…supper, ’f you…’

  The pain was worse behind her ear. She lifted an arm with difficulty and felt there with her fingertips. The swelling had grown; it radiated heat. Her fingers did not recognise the scalp as a land they knew.

  ‘What has happened with the numbness?’

  She waved a heavy hand at the sheets across her legs, a point near her hipbone. ‘About here, I—’ She tapped the skin on her upper thigh, shrugged. ‘Rash…’ Touching the inside of her other arm, the curve of her neck.

  She drew a breath, swallowed and concentrated on the words. ‘Gov’nor’s man brought gin from His Exc’ncy.’ The square bottle stood on the table. ‘Worried about you.’

  ‘About me?’ Grayling couldn’t help the edge of sarcasm. ‘Ewing’s given up, hasn’t he?’

  She worked her shoulders into a small shrug.

  ‘Well we can’t do nothing! This is insupportable!’

  ‘Shh. Tried praying. I’m not much…’

  ‘Praying? There’s no God here, Charlotte!’ He clutched at his hair in frustration. ‘He’s watching the other side of the earth where all the bloody people are.’

  ‘Please…please.’ She extended a hand towards him. ‘Sit down. Tell me…the day. Thought about what you told me…’

  He sat beside her, swung his feet onto the bed. She closed her eyes to hold on to the pleasure of his voice but he did not begin.

  ‘Please.’

  She looked again. His jaw was clenched as he waited for his anger to subside.

  He took a breath. ‘I spoke only to Clark today. I had other things to do. He was telling me about the start of their walk.’

  She reached for his hand and ran a thumb over his knuckles, wishing it could be like any other night; that they could cling to small pleasures.

  ‘They…ah, they sailed north from where the Sydney Cove was wrecked and they struck land—that’s the second wreck, I mean—somewhere west of the coastline hereabouts. You see, from Sydney, the coast drops straight southward, and the coast of Van Diemen’s Land is the same. North–south. But at some point, it must veer sharply to the west. It’s quite odd—Clark insists they were walking straight east for the first couple of weeks. No doubt Mr Bass will head out there directly upon his return and try to resolve the whole question. Anyway, Clark was more talkative today, thank God. He was telling me about their decision to walk for help, rather than waiting there.’

  ‘’S right isn’t it? No rescue out there.’ She was pleased to see he was warming to the conversation.

  ‘Yes, but what interests me more is the politics of the decision: Mr Kennedy, the carpenter, was in favour of going back to Preservation Island. Mr Clark and Mr Figge wanted to press on. And who’s here now? Clark and Figge. No Kennedy.’

  ‘You’re saying…?’ Her head rang so hard with pain that she feared only a seizure could end the pressure.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He was focused somewhere else in the room, hadn’t seen her wince. ‘But at the least it’s reasonable to assume there was an alliance between these two, even though Clark is refusing to discuss Figge. It’s like, like they’ve had a falling out. Just a silent lascar between them.’

  ‘A mutiny?’ she mumbled. ‘Some…want to press on, some want to go back?’

  ‘And maybe even a third group who just want to stay there, build a shelter and wait for help.’

  She wanted his voice. She wanted more from him so it wouldn’t be just her and the pain. ‘Who led them? Mr Clark?’

  ‘He says he did. The structures that applied at sea had no currency on land, of course. He says Figge was no help, Kennedy and Thompson weren’t up to it, and the lascars had their own senior man who they listened to.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘The boy’s father. A Hindu man named Prasad.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She bit her lip, pressed her eyes shut.

  ‘Clark was talking today about them just following this long beach for weeks, crossing river mouths from time to time, but no danger of any kind, really. I think we’ve covered about three weeks of the walk, taking us up to late March, and there’s been no deaths, not even any contact with the natives. It seems they’d
worked out how to eat and drink, at least a little.’

  She picked at a loose thread in the blanket. ‘And the boy?’

  ‘I’ve told you—he can’t offer anything. I have to work this out through the accounts of the other two.’

  ‘No. Who cares for him? No parents here, no—’

  ‘He is of an age where he can make his own way in the world. Plenty such as him are already at sea.’

  ‘Does Mr Clark visit him?’

  ‘The lad is in the room adjacent. He probably waits on Mr Clark if he’s well enough.’

  She thought about the story and for a while the words were all there was, and the storm in her body had abated. She spoke again, quietly. Placing the words with great care.

  ‘Here…’ she sighed. ‘One thing to land here among people who love you. Quite another to do it alone.’

  19

  When Grayling reached the guest house the next morning, he found Figge’s long form folded into a wicker chair on the front verandah. His wild hair had been swept back and tied, though he had not clipped his beard and it remained a prophet’s tangle.

  Doctor Ewing sat on a small stool in front of him, with Figge’s outstretched left leg settled on his lap.

  Grayling took up a chair beside him and placed the journal and the letter in the leather folio on the ground between his feet. For a moment they both looked out at the garden in silence. Small, bright blue wrens darted about on the ground, tails flagging as they picked at unseen grit.

  ‘I see you brought the journal,’ Figge said brightly.