by Jock Serong
‘Mm. There are a couple of passages I thought I might check with you.’
‘I can tell you, without you having to read me anything, that Clark is not to be trusted.’ Figge had turned towards Grayling, one eyebrow arched.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Grayling replied. ‘It was merely…a couple of his descriptions. I wondered what you would make of them.’
Figge snorted in derision, and then smiled as though the unpleasant topic had never come up. ‘You have the porcupines here too,’ he said after a while. ‘I saw one daundering round the garden. The dog was most put out.’
Ewing had a pair of circular spectacles perched on the end of his veiny nose and the man’s foot in his hands. Grayling peered over the moving knuckles and saw the doctor was removing the great toenail with a pair of tweezers. He had it lifted and was tugging gently to one side. The nail was blackened, its leading edge chipped and scored. The skin wasn’t giving it up easily, but Figge seemed unconcerned.
‘Are they feeding you well, sir?’ Grayling asked.
‘Splendidly, yes. Where are you up to with our stories?’ Grayling noted the plural. How many stories were there?
‘Mr Clark was kind enough to describe your walk over the very long beach that stretches eastward from where you made landfall.’
‘Ah yes,’ Figge smiled fondly, as though recalling a childhood memory. ‘Goodness me. Monotonous.’
‘I want to read you his account of that walk. Is now a good time?’ Grayling looked down at the toe. Ewing had lifted the nail back so that the new pink skin underneath was exposed. He was teasing the nail in various directions but it refused to yield.
‘Oh, of course.’ Figge still showed no sign of discomfort at the operation on his foot. ‘Please.’
Grayling read the account Clark had given him the previous day. Figge smiled at various points, even laughed once or twice, but did not interrupt. When he had finished, Grayling asked him his opinion of the story.
‘Yes, most comprehensive,’ Figge replied. Not for the first time, Grayling had the sense of a man mimicking refined manners. He decided to take a small risk. ‘You’ve not once asked after Mr Clark’s welfare, sir. Is it not a matter that concerns you?’
‘Haven’t I?’ Figge raised his eyebrows, approximating surprise. ‘How is he, then?’
‘Oh, he’s coming along.’ Grayling picked up his folder, opened it and took up a pencil.
‘What about the lascar boy?’
Grayling watched him as he asked this. The air of a casual thought. ‘I’m told he’s receiving medical care, although there’s little wrong with him as far as I know.’
‘Oh.’
‘As you’re aware, he has nothing to say.’
‘Quite.’
‘Perhaps it would be useful if you took up the story from where Clark left off?’
Figge heaved a long sigh. The doctor exchanged his tweezers for a pair of pliers, muttered one two three and ripped forcefully. The nail came away and he held it up in modest triumph. Figge hadn’t moved. He took it from the doctor, examined it closer to his eyes. It was thick and curled, more like a shaving from a hoof. Figge put the nail between his front teeth and nipped at it. His lower teeth worked at scraping the little shreds of bloodied flesh on its underside.
‘Let me see then, Mr Grayling. I will do my best.’
‘The first thing to note is that the beach did eventually end.
‘We came to a point where Clark and his boy probably wished for its return: what followed was rock-hopping over boulder points and some wasteful wandering in and out of small bays. A great sweep of dunes rose to the inland of us: nothing grew on them, you understand. Not a blade of glass. Nothing. If the great mass of New Holland led with its westward edge into the Indian Ocean, then perhaps it trailed its eastward edge in its lee, this smudge of sand fading into the ocean behind.
‘What can I tell you about? A meal; I remember a meal. Up to then, meat had been hard to come by because the others were so fixed in their thinking: they could kill and ingest only that which they already recognised as edible. For myself, I was far less concerned: if the thing had muscle on it, then it was going to sustain me. They spent pointless hours throwing rocks at crows in the hope they could bring one down, and never did.
‘We were sitting around a fire in front of the dunes, just on dark. The others were eating the eggs of a swan that one of the lascars had managed to scare off its nest in the wetlands behind the dunes. I was roasting a badger, just a dark mass in the coals, its little claws upraised like a flipped ottoman.
‘Where the edge of the dune beside us had broken away there was a gigantic mound of shells. All of them were those striped snail shells: not land snails, but the ones from the rock pools. We were discussing, Clark and Thompson and I, how the mounds had come to be created. Thompson figured some seabird was nesting there and would bring the snails from the sea and feast upon them. Now this was an attractive argument at first, given the sea was only a hundred yards away, but there was ash all through the pile. Did the birds make a fire and sit round it roasting snails? And why was it a pile at all? Birds don’t care.
‘I put to Thompson that this was the remains of natives’ feasts over many generations. He scoffed at me. I suggested there were many tons of shell in the pile, and that either this was a Herculean bird that lifted them all, or he had to be suggesting that there were teams of birds working together. He said that was right: they were co-operating. I could see his anger building and I must say it amused me. I asked him whether he had observed, anywhere on our walk so far, teams of large birds working in concert to carry snails.
‘And that was it from him. He leapt to his feet and a fight broke out, one to which I could contribute very little for all of my laughter. And you know how it is when you’re in that position, lieutenant, and you’re laughing? It made me weak, and it fuelled him all the more. He was trying to hit me and I was giving him the odd one back and I’d split open his eyebrow and all of a sudden, the old lascar man speaks up and he says: The boy has met them.
‘Well, you can imagine that put a stop to the fisticuffs. The old man pulled his boy upright and he stood there all slender and angelic, a most winsome creature. Everyone listened now and the old man said the boy met them in the bush and was taken into their camp. They are called Kurnai, he told us, and they are kindly disposed.
‘It appeared to me that all the lascars knew of this because there was no consternation among them when it was announced. We, on the other hand, were astonished. Why hadn’t we been told? Were these natives going to appear again? Why were we eating crabs and fucking smelly badgers if there were people who could feed us? The exchange quickly rose to anger again.
‘Now I am not a man to take umbrage, but it was a little perplexing that the lascars had kept this to themselves. It surprised me not at all when Kennedy stood up and grabbed the old man by the throat and demanded that he summon the natives immediately. It was precipitous, though: you don’t manhandle the serang unless you’re prepared to deal with insurrection. Even if you’re nowhere near a boat.
‘The old man protested that the matter was beyond his control. They are watching us anyway, he said. And I suppose that tallied with what I had felt all along; the eyes among the trees.
‘So a new scuffle broke out, but this one odder than the first: the lascars were emboldened now they were no longer at sea, and furious to see their serang treated thus. Nonetheless they were physically smaller than us, and after a fusillade of swatting and cuffing it was over. The boy would be sent back out to bring them to us, and some sort of parley would be concluded.
‘The next day the boy went with his father, under instruction to make contact with the natives and encourage them to meet with us. For us, it was a long day of waiting, and it was hard not to query whether they’d seceded out there, never to return. Nothing happened, hour upon hour. Mr Clark grew angry because we had lost a fine day for walking. Then a column of smoke appeared inland, apparently some si
gnal from the natives that our approach was under consideration. The smoke threaded straight into the sky, veering neither left nor right, so still were the conditions; thus reinforcing Clark’s point. While we were playing at diplomacy, we were losing momentum.
‘In the late afternoon, as we variously slept and sat awaiting their return, we heard the sound of movement through the bush towards us. The old man appeared first out of the trees, followed by his son, and then came the natives, all of them men. I sensed, lieutenant, that they had some awareness of, shall I say, stagecraft: they strode forward one by one, naked but adorned in paint on their bodies and faces. Strong men, carrying no weapons and looking entirely at ease. They were graceful, lieutenant. Warriors. It saddens me to say it, but nothing like the broken wretches you see outside.
‘Clark’s journal? I thought that was all secret now. Which part…here? Very well. The natives on this part of the coast appear strong and muscular, with heads rather large in proportion to their bodies. I’m not sure about the heads, but yes, the rest of it.
‘Where? This?…they are daubed with blubber or shark oil, which is their principal article of food. This frequent application of rancid grease to their heads and bodies renders their approach exceedingly offensive. Clark and his sensibilities. It wasn’t something I noticed. It was ostrich oil, anyway.
‘Show me. Ah…Upon the whole, they present the most hideous and disgusting figures that savage life can possibly afford.
‘Really? That’s the only reason you brought the journal here, to ask me that?
‘Maybe the difference is not in them, lieutenant. Maybe it is the difference between Clark and me. One sees what one desires to see. A smell might remind you of home or it might turn your guts. Same smell.
‘Yes. In any event, there was a discussion, seated on the ground. Several of theirs were the spokesmen, and they addressed themselves to the boy and his father. No doubt that was due to their earlier familiarity, but it irritated Clark no end. There was an exchange of gifts: we gave them some of our short bolts of calico and they gave us food. Have you ever eaten carrots when they are still very fine and tender, lieutenant? Eaten them raw, I mean? That is what these tubers were like: paler, still with the dirt on them, but delightfully sweet. They carried them in animal skins, and they ate them with us as though that was important to them. They made a great fuss of our clothes, lifting them, then watching our eyes as though they were concerned they were hurting us. I believe they were unsure whether the clothes were part of our bodies.
‘We were able to show them, by drawing in the earth with a pointed stick, that we were going north. I did not detect any sense that they understood what Sydney was or why it might matter to us, but they certainly grasped the notion that we intended to continue up the coast. To our drawing they added an important feature: they drew a river to the north of us and then a line across it. I took them to mean this river was the end of their territory: either they did not know what lay beyond it or they were not kindly disposed towards those who lived on the other side.
‘We left after an hour or two on the basis that they bid us adieu, but that we would see them again. All very civil. In fact, more than civil—I would say that we were firm friends by the end of it.’
‘Firm friends?’ Grayling compelled himself to stare deeply into those eyes. ‘So why did these people later spear Mr Clark?’
Figge laughed, revealing a graveyard of tumbled brown teeth.
‘You’re assuming they were the same people. And you’re assuming Clark didn’t deserve it.’
‘What are you telling me, Mr Figge?’
‘All in good time, sir. Don’t be rushing us.’
‘I will thank you not to play games with me, sir.’
Figge paused, seemed to reconsider the direction of their conversation. ‘You’re tired, lieutenant. You look wearier than I do, and I’ve had quite a journey. What ails you?’
‘This is not the purpose of our discussion. My…’
‘Your wife. Your wife ails you, because she herself ails.’
‘My wife is unwell, Mr Figge. I have told you that.’ This infernal man. He had found a window left open somewhere and was climbing into his soul.
‘Has she worsened?’
Grayling hesitated. ‘Yes. She is very poorly.’
‘Still no movement in her legs?’
‘The paralysis has grown worse, and she is becoming delirious.’
‘Why are we sitting here talking about the past, lieutenant? I say again, I can help her. You are a civilised man: you’re observing an unnecessary degree of restraint. You only need to relent.’
Grayling felt the dread swimming in him like nausea. There was a line he did not want to cross, the one that demarcated professional duty and personal anguish. But this was a torment more exquisite than that simple conflict. Figge’s battered face, even as he watched Grayling—expectantly now—was a sea of crossing currents: kindness and compassion and empathy, rippling the surface of darker waters through which he could see the half-lit backs of malevolent creatures, large and slowly circling.
20
I’ve waited behind the door, wearing a shine on the boards. I’ve come through your room, excusing myself, in countless false expeditions to the outhouse.
But the lieutenant has not come today, Mr Clark. Perhaps he has gone to Him for the continuation of the tale. Perhaps He is already claiming credit for the meeting with the Kurnai.
I have been thinking back to the whale country, Mr Clark. You should tell that next—when the walking became something more than weeks of sand and eastward march.
The spells of beach then point, beach then point, began to tilt north-east, and finally we reached a right angle in the coast, pressed tight between the sea boulders and the great forbidding forest. The few times we tried to push deep into the trees, we found that they went on and on into the land, so endless and frightening that we stopped trying. Around that time Mr Figge muttered to you, This feels like testing the extent of death itself.
The day before we met this turning of the coast we passed two islands; the first just a rise of boulders a thousand yards off the beach, capped in green and circled as always by the birds. The second was much greater: it rose from the sea after we had crossed another sandy bay, four miles from one sand spit to the other. I was trailing behind my father over those miles, watching the rise and fall of his feet and the sand stuck to the blood on them. His shoulders, narrow and bent by years and miles. A faraway memory of being perched up there, complaining, I suppose, as he carried me through the crowds of Chowringhee. The wonderful smell of him from up there, him and the day. Serious smells, not easily understood. You are an intelligent child, he would tell me as I clung to his hair, a bright and attentive boy. Now he was an old man, the respect of others replacing his failing strength. And I was not yet a man of any kind.
At the end of that bay, the end of my thoughts, we reached the second island, larger but closer to the shore. It was hot: we walked towards the back of the beach, seeking a place to lie in the shade and maybe find water, and it was in one of the dune shadows that we found the canoes.
They were as long as two men, narrow and made from large sheets of bark, tied at both ends with twine that seemed also to be made from bark. There were sticks crossed inside them like bones for support, and they were clean enough of sand that we knew they were in use. They could only have belonged to the Kurnai, and something about them felt familiar. Not that I had seen their canoes before: I hadn’t. No, more that it was the same as the night at their camp, the way those people filled the land, and the land filled them.
Do you remember, Mr Clark, looking out at the island and seeing the houses there? The little domes in twos and threes? I thought then: not only do they have the run of the land, the miles that might stretch between one man and another, but they put homes where they want them for the seasons. To be rich, I had thought until then, was a walled palace. But now I wondered if being rich meant not needing t
he wall.
The going was flat and easy then, only the one creek crossing, a stream the colour of tea that crossed the beach no deeper than our shins. By night we had reached a round point made mostly of dunes. On one side of it we looked south. On the other, we looked east. Mr Clark said we had reached the very corner of the continent: Cape Howe, named after one of their admirals.
As had become our way, we lay down and drew hopeful piles of leaves over ourselves against the night’s chill. In this we were never successful: shivering came as snoring did, like it or not. That night I was curled beside my father, surrounded by the other Bengali men. The Mussulmen rested further out. But past their sleeping bodies, across the ground, I saw his eyes glittering in the dark, fixed on me like those of a watchful beast.
He may call himself Figge, and you may accept it as his name, but that is just some word. It’s a sign on a door to an empty room, and the wind blows through it.
I feared it that night and it came to pass. He was waiting for a chance.
21
Joshua Grayling rushed from the guest quarters to his home on Bridge Street, hours ahead of the schedule that ruled his days and ashamed that he’d spent so much time listening to the strangers and their tales when his responsibility lay at his wife’s bedside. He hurried down the track, over the open slope that three years ago had been cloaked in forest. Head down, thoughts scattered by panic, he was unaware of the gentle late autumn sun and the birds and the shadowing trees. He made no effort at conversation with the men beside him.
He entered alone, leaving the other two on the narrow verandah. His eyes locked on the bed. She was there, moving fitfully, her skin slicked with a greasy pallor. Her murmuring belonged neither to sleep nor consciousness. He shook her, called her name and she lit up with recognition.
‘You’re early, father…Bible. I’m…Papists.’
‘Charlotte!’
She screamed as he shook her again, then slumped in his arms, glass-eyed. A tiny murmur escaped her.