Preservation

by Jock Serong

  23

  Charlotte Grayling left the house early this time, with nothing in her hands.

  Other times she had taken a basket, a pannikin of water, a heel of bread. But the heart of the matter was to increase the feeling, each swing of her hands a reminder of her vulnerability.

  She hadn’t walked since the time she’d fallen ill. Part of the misery of her sickness was the inability to do this: to be freed of the constraints of the tiny house, the unspoken judgments of the neighbours. They were officers’ wives too—they watched, they saw and they kept count. To hell with them: now her strength was back and her body would resist the urge no longer.

  She waited until her husband had gone, headed to Government House in his small cloud of purpose, then she slipped out in the opposite direction, making her way down the lane with a nod to the Cadigal men sitting close by a fence in the shade of a tree that belonged to no one in particular but to them all along. It was something Joshua never understood about the walking: far from slipping into some bottomless void in the land, she was watched everywhere she went. The men by the fence could describe her every movement in the bush, just as the neighbours could report on her domestic routine.

  It was early enough that the settlers had no interest in a white woman making her way towards the edge of town. Only the convicts were about: mucking out the night filth, saddling horses. The smells that defined the place, the wood smoke and baking and the waste of humans and livestock, had not yet risen with the sun. There would be no heat to escape today, no need for urgency in the early hours.

  She watched her boots. She watched the skirts about her knees. The ground: earth and small grasses, stones passing under. Each yard still familiar, she strode harder. The last cottage, the one that belonged to the broken man with his ticket of leave and cloudy eyes. Russick, who had turned down the offer of land on account of his ulcered legs and was near enough to blind now.

  Open country now, cleared in anticipation of the township’s growth, but abandoned while fear of Pemulwuy’s fighters gripped them all. No one wanted to risk provoking him by pushing the settlement further into the bush. Not yet.

  She knew the path that ran from the end of the street, the one the convicts had cut with their picks. She had no way of knowing whether the Eora had made the path in response to the making of the street—a furtive way in and out of the English world—or whether the path had always been there and the street was its clumsy tracing. From there, the land sloped up, the scrub touched her shoulders and brushed her cheek. The delicate perfume of the wildflowers, slaughter and tar receding. Up more, and she was breathing harder. The path snaked on past a boulder, a tangle of roots. Is this how they felt?

  Voices in the trees. The demented chatter and song of the birds, challenge and seduction shouted over each other like the drunks. And higher than the birds, the sea air breathing over the canopy, making it shudder and murmur. The leaves of the giant eucalypts tapped each other on their hard edges, the touches in their millions collecting into a great sigh, and as the wind slowed from each gust the sigh disintegrated again into the singular, hard touches of the leaves.

  The sweat was beading on her forehead, slipping in her armpits and gathering in the small of her back. She worked harder, pushing with her hands on her knees when the ground rose steeper before her, until there was a clear stretch ahead. She closed her eyes, willed herself to keep them shut, and extended her fingers so the soft ends of the foliage traced over them. She counted eight steps before her trust faltered and she opened her eyes. She could have kept going. She chided herself, walked faster. It was still a path, though nothing behind her spoke of civilisation anymore. The bush had closed around her.

  It felt like this.

  To not know shelter. To search for water, food, comradeship. To be occupied only by the body’s needs must be akin somehow to the absence of want. If the body needed to drink from a stream she could oblige it on her hands and knees. If it needed relief she would hang her hands over the low branch right there and piss. To have had that word and never uttered it, to speak it to the empty bush. The times she had heard it used among the men and had bowed to the necessity to smile it away. She had burst upon a native woman on one such walk, squatting and engaged thus. The woman had barked some admonition at her and laughed loudly. Being seen: it was as harmless to her as having been overheard using the word.

  Fuck. The crowding trees absorbed the sound, so she said it louder. Loud enough this time that it rang in the gully. The bush did not react and the profane thrill sparked again in her. The path was fading and now descended into deeper glades. Water dripped somewhere nearby and the birds were different here; no longer shouting but speaking in brief melodies that echoed between the tall trunks. A great protruding burl glowered over her from the nearest trunk, a face carved in a keystone. She sat, felt the damp soaking through her skirts, and removed her boots and stockings. When she stood again the clammy ground oozed between her toes. Out here, like this. This is how it felt.

  She lifted the skirts a little, hefted them in her hands. Twigs and bark and moving insects among the folds, hems heavy with dirt and moisture. She was lost now. She knew it. There was no clear way of knowing where the ocean lay, where the sun would track towards evening. Down here, under the mysterious shroud of the moving branches, she was lost.

  She was a child again, had wandered into a forbidden room and could feast her eyes on the adult things, might imminently be caught. The wave through her body again, the coursing tide that unfocused her eyes and carried both desire and repletion. She had lost herself. She closed her eyes and let the sweep of it overwhelm her, surrendered to it vaulting down through her hands and over the delicate pads of her fingertips.

  She placed her fingers over her eyes and spun a full circle, then another and another. When she removed her hands she had to steady herself against a tree. Now the bush had closed around her. Now it held her in unspeaking embrace, only sounds and sensations. Now it offered no clue to the way home.

  By the time her husband returned in the evening, Charlotte had drawn a cask of water, removed her clothes and washed them, and had made a passable stew from the odd things the store would give her.

  He came through the door with the cares of the day graven in his face. She wanted immediately to take him and hold him, feel his familiar warmth. But he only grunted as he took a chair and began to remove his boots. When he was done, and with her standing expectantly across the table from him, he sighed and spread both hands on the rough timber surface.

  ‘Dark in here,’ he muttered, and fumbled with the tinder box to light a candle.

  ‘I’ll get the lamp,’ she replied, measuring him silently for some sign of his mood. Now more than ever she must be the woman she had left waiting at the near edge of the forest.

  ‘You washed your dress.’

  She had her back turned, reaching for the lamp as she heard him say it. She looked around and laughed. ‘I do wash our clothes occasionally, Joshua.’

  ‘No.’ He fixed her with a look of specific query in his eyes. ‘You washed the dress you were wearing when I left this morning.’

  ‘I was brushing the fireplace out and I got soot on it.’ She tried the laugh again, faltered and blushed.

  ‘Your boots by the door,’ he continued. ‘They’ve been scrubbed. Why would you scrub your boots if you got soot on your dress?’

  She looked at him helplessly, her mouth slightly open as she waited for inspiration to arrive.

  ‘Scratches on your forearms.’ He was looking down now, speaking quietly. ‘Please don’t lie to me in addition to…whatever it is you do.’

  A tear formed on one eyelid and it infuriated her.

  ‘You’re walking again, aren’t you?’ He glared at her, suddenly a stranger. ‘Did they have to go and get you again? Or did the natives bring you in?’

  ‘I found my way.’

  ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ he demanded. ‘What is it I’m not providing to y
ou? Is it my, my physical affection?’

  His awkwardness tore at her heart. It was not that, of course. He loved her whenever she pleased, and she felt his love as a barrier against the chaos beyond their walls. But no amount of love could guide him to the strangest depths in her. The years were telling her now: they were not coming closer to exploring this terrain. I might not be like you, she had thought back in Leith, but I do love you. The landscape offered occasional temptations to burst free, to run at the thickets or throw herself into a rock pool and shiver the walk home. But in those offerings it drew her away from him, and into itself.

  ‘It is nothing,’ she said eventually. ‘There is nothing I could want for.’ She pulled out a chair opposite him and sat down, reaching across the table to take his hands in hers. ‘I cannot explain to you why I do it because I do not know myself.’

  He exploded from the table, sending the chair tumbling. ‘You do know why! You must—you get up in the morning, you watch me leave and you plan it, damn you. You wait for your chance and you go out there, and you cover your tracks afterwards. You endanger yourself and then you deceive me. Why can’t you just—’

  ‘—make house like the other women?’

  ‘Now you see fit to mock me?’ His rage was building to a fearful height now and it scared her. ‘You nearly killed yourself with your last escapade. I had to bring that…that man into our home because of it. Is that it? You want the faith healer back here again with his…with his hands—?’

  ‘Please do not be this way.’ She was weeping now, reaching again for his hands though he kept them away from her. ‘Please my love. I won’t…I’ll never do it again.’

  He sighed at this. Some of the anger seemed to leave him.

  But she knew in her heart it wasn’t true.

  24

  The whale country. I don’t know if I can call it that.

  The days with my father, numbered by then. The coast running north and folded green hills and trees that hid the light.

  Eighteen miles a day and you were barefoot like us by now, Mr Clark, tripping over scatters of cannonball stones, small and round enough to move underfoot. Birds we never saw on the highest branches, hundreds of feet above, their sound, both whip and whistle, ringing through the bush.

  We came upon a cut in the slope behind the beach where the land opened like a wound and the trees stopped and all was rock and gravel, twenty yards wide. The gentlemen argued over what it was: some said it was made by God; you, Mr Clark, said it was no more than a natural fold in the land. A Javanese man said it was made by the natives and that it was a quarry. He said it quiet, not wanting to upset the gentlemen after the business with the snail shells, but he would not be shaken from his view.

  Nearby I watched a fat badger sipping from a pool of water that had collected in a rock hollow, her broad head reflected in the water’s surface. She stopped drinking, looked up at me, steady and slow. The rippling water around her snout became still, and for an instant the badger and her soft dark eyes were a sign of hidden tenderness in the land.

  Although it was open country, it changed before our eyes. Tiny bushes came only to our shins, then we were crashing through head-high thickets with sheets of papery bark, and cursing and cracking through twigs that clawed at our eyes. Then the land would open up again, and all pain would pass and the heath was covered in pink and red flowers like animal paws, and others like brightly coloured spiders or exploding fireworks.

  The lascars were weak—we all were weak. The gentlemen rained blows on us in their confusion and fear, kicking sometimes, and we simply endured until the attacker—whether Mr Kennedy or Mr Thompson, with his round red face and his pig’s eyes, became tired. But Mr Figge never showed strain: he’d laugh his hard, rattling laugh, so different from his speech, that bore no warmth for anyone else. For a man with a voice like a strung instrument, he had a laugh that tore the nerves.

  The sea rocks were streaked with dark reds and greys and even a dull yellow, so they looked to hungry men like lumps of raw fatty meat.

  The natives here stayed wide of us, shy again. It was only ever the men, unarmed but watching. The small trees, thicker here, made a deep shade that tricked the eye. The watchers knew the shade and they used it to appear and disappear. We talked about it, in close. My father felt that the natives understood our northward aim and were waiting at points ahead of us. The paths appeared under our feet, and they led us to the watching men and on past them.

  You were full of talk at night, Mr Clark. About the river mouths we had been crossing, so fine they would one day be the sites of great cities. The hills that fall to them, the plains beyond. The trading houses will be here, you said. The mills there and the administration there. The unclear edges between reeds and shallow pools would be no more, you claimed, when firmly defined by sea-walls.

  Once I was certain you were done with me—feeding you, preparing your writing materials—I would return to my father and listen to him talk softly in the thick silence of the bush. You must attend to Mr Clark at all times, he reminded me one such night. Much of what we value is scattered now. When all breaks down, the only thing you will have to hold onto is your duty. I asked him what he meant by this but he only continued. Do not be one of those base men who panics and resorts to his own interest.

  I said if all else was chaos, I would remain true to him: my father. I am old, he said. You are a bright and attentive boy. There is much before you and this test may be the making of you. You must cleave to duty.

  Within moments I could hear he was asleep. I was disturbed now, and wide awake. Out there in the night our people slept. They were tired, some of them injured, hanging in the unclear space between anger and open mutiny. Nothing was true any longer: they were neither sailors nor employees nor even allies. Only walkers, greater in number but smaller in size. And unarmed: the last shreds of authority had meant that the gentlemen carried the weapons. Perhaps that mattered less than it might have. The guns were ruined as far as we knew, and as for the knives and tomahawks—well, the ground out there was covered with weapons. A rock, a knot of timber: any such would kill if used in stealth.

  The morning after that conversation, there was another beach, cut by a river: this one narrow but deep. Again you pressed your authority and sent the man named Mohan in to test the depth. That teapot tint of the water meant there was no knowing what he would find: he quickly disappeared up to his waist and then was afloat, and it was all he could do to stop himself being carried off through the river mouth and out into the ocean. He came ashore cursing and hard of breath.

  While the gentlemen sat and rested, some more of our men scouted inland, to find that the river stayed deep and became even wider. So again, once again, the making of a raft. There was nothing left by now of our floating sled. The work was slow, felling and chipping logs with the tomahawk, Mr Kennedy pleased as always to have a turn at giving orders.

  As we worked, an old native man came to us, the same scars across his chest, knobbed and stretched with age. It was less of a shock now: some of our party did not even look up from their work. He marched up bold to my father, thinking him our leader. He pointed at the river, his fingers making the water, and said a word several times: Nadgi. Then he indicated higher with his chin, over the water to the forest on the other side. Guyangal.

  He stood tall, swept his arm low across the northern sky as though he wanted to take in everything ahead of us. Yuin, he cried, to no one in particular. Then he came in closer: sharing something small but significant. He dotted his hands over the nearby landscape, smiling. At a hill, at the nearby sea, at the forest itself. Thaua, he said. There was a confidence in him about these things, he spoke the words with strength. But the men gave voice to their confusion with sneers.

  For it was not clear whether he spoke of a place or a person, or even a group of people. You offered the man some pieces of calico, but he wanted nothing to do with trinkets and with a great sigh, he turned his back on us.

  W
hen the raft was made we crossed the river mouth. As soon as we’d done so and taken our belongings onto the sand, another man came forth, this one younger and stronger. I cannot say how, but he was not the same kind of man we had just left on the opposite bank.

  In this man’s smile also, a tooth was gone, but a different one. He wore no paint on his face; I could not say if he had marks on his chest, for he wore a splendid coat of dark grey fur streaked with black. Opossum fur, I saw when he came closer, turned in so the skins faced out and the deep, soft fur was on his body. I longed to feel the way he must have felt in there. Mr Figge had killed an opossum three nights before, wringing its neck as it strayed too close to his food. He cut it open and we ate everything out of it, pulling with our fingers inside the bag of fur. When we were done, we threw the hide into the fire. Stupid.

  The man called towards the trees on the riverbank. One by one, people came from behind them, and for the first time there were women and children. All naked but for small things, like the cords around their waists. They made their way across the sand flats at the river mouth, smiling with their hands out to touch us.

  Perhaps it is as well that nobody has asked me to talk of those days, because I do not know what I would say about the feeling that came over me. I saw in their hands, in their eyes, the chance that I could be anybody to these people: not just Srinivas the lascar, or the servant, or the son of Prasad. Not a Bengali, or even a sailor or a boy. I could be anybody, as they could to me.

  Two of the women came forward with woven bags containing oysters still wet from the rocks. There were no such shells near us; they must have come from further upriver, or from other waters. We fell upon them with great hunger, as the natives smiled. They brought us tea as well, a strong brew that smelled of aniseed and felt bright inside. Warraburra, said one, gesturing at the steaming bowl, for he knew how good it was.