Preservation

by Jock Serong

  They stood like the trees on the ridge above us: one, then three, then a dozen, twenty, fifty. Staring down at us with scorn on their faces. Is it possible, Mr Clark, that we were not some kind of gods among these people, but clumsy flesh and no tools? Dying on our feet in a land where these people lived at ease?

  The men on the ridge came down and it felt like we would be tried, that was how my father saw it. They are calling upon us to justify ourselves, he said to me, quiet.

  They had weapons: long, thin spears aimed at some point between the ground and our hearts, which said they could be moved either way. The sun picked out the chips of shell they had glued to the barbs and I imagined them breaking off inside me, lodging like curses. They also held the spear-throwing sticks they called wumeras—clacking and sliding, soft in their ready hands.

  Just a movement now could fill the air with missiles.

  They waited and let us weaken further in our fear. Then they sent their senior men forward, older men with anger in their eyes that sparked and flamed into a burst of yelling and pointing. Fixed upon Kennedy and Thompson. Of course.

  Your calming gestures, Mr Clark, smiling like a man selling a lame mare. I’d not yet seen such an act from you, and nor had Mr Figge, for he burst into unhelpful laughter. The Djirringanji did not know how to take this. They watched you, watched Mr Figge, and began their shouting again.

  My father stepped forward, and for just a moment I felt his age, felt the strain in the movement. But he rose because he was the serang: his authority had survived the wrecks and he carried it in the bush, as much as Mr Thompson or Mr Clark had lost theirs. Perhaps it was this that the Djirringanji sensed, for their mood changed as they watched him. He was a still spot in the moving, whispering crowd: when he sat and looked up, the leaders of the Djirringanji sat too. By slowly drawing on the ground, he was able to show them that we wished to walk north, and that we were all friends. To play out this last point, he got up and embraced me, then Mr Kennedy and Mr Thompson and Mr Figge; finally even you, Mr Clark—wooden as a board.

  The Djirringanji spoke to each other and my father waited with his eyes down. We knew he had calmed them. The most senior man raised a hand and waved his agreement, though he did not offer friendship.

  Such a moment for you, Mr Clark, to make a gift of some lengths of cloth. The old man spoke to those behind him and one came forward with a kangaroo’s tail, stepping past you to present it to my father.

  The bolts of calico lay there at the old man’s feet and he looked at them, then looked at you as if to say, Get this rubbish away from me. He did not move a finger to pick them up.

  26

  ‘Is the packing making a difference?’

  Clark was sitting up in his bed again, a book face-down on his lap. An irritable breeze was harassing the town, whipping leaves and dust through the sash window on the far side of the room. Grayling crossed by the foot of the bed and closed the window as the stray leaves swirled at his feet.

  Clark regarded his bandaged hands, turned them over front and back like misplaced parcels. ‘No, lieutenant, it is not. I fear the holes will not fill.’ He remained in mournful contemplation for a moment. ‘How is your wife coming along?’

  Grayling was surprised by the inquiry. ‘Very well, thank you sir. It is remarkable how quickly her health returned after Mr—after the parasite was removed.’

  Clark looked furtively towards the door. ‘You will say it is not my concern. But you should not let that man anywhere near your wife. I am pleased she is recovered, but…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Never place yourself in his debt.’

  Grayling forced a smile. ‘She is well, Mr Clark, I am grateful for that. Now come—we have much to discuss. Would you care to take some sun today? I feel we should be making the most of it before the season turns.’

  Clark hauled himself from the bed, his expression still wary, and Grayling took him gently by the elbow.

  ‘How are your feet? Are you up to this?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Fine.’ Clark pushed the damaged feet into a pair of slippers and they made their way, arm in arm, through the door of the cabin and out into the light. The front of the house was in the lee of the wind; a pool of still air collected on the verandah.

  ‘So,’ Grayling began. ‘It seems that by the eleventh of April, you’d reached this large loch, and I take it from your account that you had a couple of native men accompanying you.’

  ‘Aye, different people again. They spoke to us at great length; hand signals and so on. Walbanja, they said.’

  ‘That’s the tribe?’

  ‘I suppose so. They were still saying Guyangal also. You can’t distinguish. They called the lake wallaga. And they took us up a little hill so that we could look over it, because you see in the centre of the thing was this island that was shaped perfectly like a duck. Climbed a damned hill—in our state—to be shown an island shaped like a duck. This is why you can never quite take them seriously. But the island, anyway, they called it ‘umbarra’: that’s ‘island’. Or ‘duck’, I don’t know. But I, yes.’

  ‘You what, Mr Clark?’

  ‘I suddenly felt this terrible keening for home.’ The wind toyed with the strands of Clark’s hair, and the age that the ordeal had added to him suddenly fell away. Grayling realised it was the first time he’d felt truly sorry for him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Umbarra, I suppose. I heard it as “umbrel-la”. And the duck, so absurd, and I just thought of the glens and the lochs back home. There’s precious little here that reminds you of anything familiar.’

  ‘No, I suppose that’s right. These Walbanja people, were they friendly or hostile?’

  ‘Friendly, in their way. They found us a meal of mussels. Didn’t sit well in every man’s belly. We were having trouble keeping food down by then, and mussels can be disagreeable at the best of times. But, hm. Hungry, so we took the chance.’

  ‘The Walbanja weren’t to know that, I imagine.’

  ‘No, but nor can you discount their potential for treachery. The ones who guided us, even camped with us—there were occasions when they greeted others who just appeared, and then you’d find that those ones had spears hidden in the grass. They’d come up very agreeable but they had other options if needed, you understand.’

  ‘Did the guiding assist you? I imagine their intimacy with the coast must have been helpful.’

  Clark appeared momentarily puzzled. ‘The odd thing was, they didn’t go straight up the coast.’

  ‘But they knew where you were trying to go?’

  ‘I assume they did: we gave them every indication. They looked north and they said kuru. This was an interesting aspect, lieutenant. There were very difficult hills to our west throughout those early days of April, and sometimes they crowded all the way in to the coast. These natives, the Walbanja, they didn’t necessarily follow the shoreline. Sometimes they took us deep inland. We followed a river valley at one stage, far into the hills until we were all quite cold. There was discussion among us about whether we were being led into a trap, or if they were simply entertaining themselves at our expense.’

  ‘Why would they bother to do such a thing?’

  ‘As I said, lieutenant, one must reckon with their duplicity. Wadbilliga. Had I written that down?’

  Grayling checked the journal, sun bright on the pages. ‘No, you hadn’t.’

  ‘That was the place they led us through. Bastard country, hard on the feet. Thick growth that tore at us for days.’

  A detachment was being assembled down the hill, a cluster of brightly coloured uniforms and glinting metal. A sergeant shouting orders, children circling as close as they dared to watch the spectacle and pack horses draped with chains for their quarry. Grayling normally knew who was being sent out, and in pursuit of whom. This one he had no idea about. He concluded it was the Corps, pursuing their own ends. He turned again to Clark.

  ‘These others that would visit while you were being
guided: did you find that unnerving?’

  ‘Sometimes, aye. The business with the hiding of spears and the like. Unpredictable. The best we could do was to make ourselves the objects of humour. Funny faces, singing songs… but you can only go so far in making a man like Mr Figge appear harmless. I believe they had their private views about him.’

  Again, his veiled references to Figge. Grayling made a note of it. ‘What about the lascars? What would they have thought of these natives?’

  ‘They appeared to view them favourably, and I believe the lascars felt warmly towards the natives.’ Clark stood abruptly and winced as his feet took his weight. He turned back towards the house. Grayling took this as an indication that the discussion was over.

  ‘Aye,’ Clark finished. ‘Turned out to be mistaken, of course.’

  27

  There’s no finer feeling than strength returning. Food prepared for you; the caress of clean sheets.

  I imagine Clark still mopes about, grieving for his failed fortune and nursing those ridiculous paws of his. His lascar boy I have not seen, though I believe they keep him near to Clark. His whereabouts may become a matter of some importance to me. Depending how things turn out.

  I can walk the township now, chop a little wood: thock thock. I talk to the natives, morose crowd that they are. I sit on the verandah in the mornings and take in the sun, listen to the birds. My celebrity precedes me down these rutted streets: a swept hat, a short burst of applause or a blushing curtsey. As far as the barracks are concerned, I am neither in custody nor, I suspect, entirely free to go. But that is the way of the whole place—ask a convict whether they are imprisoned and they will answer, That, sir, is the riddle. They come back voluntarily when they bolt, men who’ve found the ghost of themselves somewhere in the night, in the trees. Begging to have the irons back on.

  Through early April with the coast insisting north, Clark mumbles one day out of his prognostications that we’d be around two hundred miles from Sydney. Covering an average of eight miles a day, perhaps allowing for a slowing as fatigue worsens us, we might be only a month from our destination. He knows and I know that our project has become pressing.

  We’re stopped by a lake: low country, easier going but a vicious-looking range of hills in the background. A couple of the natives are walking with us: three times these men have materialised as we stood at the edge of a river. They have names for each of them that sound like the honks of rutting animals. Nurooma. Morooya. They move us upstream or down, because invariably we’ve selected the wrong point at which to cross. This knowledge they share unguardedly and with evident pride. My imbecile shipmates scoff and grumble each time they are relocated, but they know the worth of it by now.

  Once placed at the appropriate crossing, the natives indicate with the usual choreography that they want us to wait, and then scurry off into the bush, returning with a canoe they’d dry-docked somewhere nearby. These are beautiful craft; perhaps even more elegant than the ones we saw further back. Even with an occupant in them, they draw no more than eight inches of water and stir barely a ripple on the surface. The paddler seats himself—though just as often it is the women paddling them—on a soft sheet of bark with legs tucked under, arse on heels and bony knees employed in steadying the sides. They use wooden paddles that look like cooking spoons, one in each hand. To see them in motion is to watch the progress of a delicate insect.

  We discover the extent of the natives’ skill—and the lack of our own—when we reach the third of the rivers, having covered twelve miles. This time the riverbank bears no sign of our friends. Thompson evidently expects them to be standing there like Thames boatmen. Can’t rely on ’em, he mutters. They’s boats’ll be ’ere somewhere, he mutters. He goes off searching through the undergrowth. Sure enough, ten minutes later he’s procured himself a canoe. Not so fuckin smart then are they, and he slides the thing into the shallows. You can feel the lascars settling in for the show, and probably the natives, somewhere back in the deep forest, because what happens next is not unexpected.

  Thompson gives the craft a shove with his hands on both the gunwales and tries to swing his legs in as the flow of the river gets a hold of it. He lands with half his arse in and the other half out: the canoe continues into the stream and he’s left hanging sideways for a second before the whole thing flips and deposits him in the drink. He’s already a good fifty yards downstream from us and heading for the mouth, which is not that much further on. The canoe is picked up by the current in its swirls and spun towards an eddy that holds some branches and there it sticks fast, upside down.

  Thompson resurfaces spluttering and cursing, hair all down over his face like a fool, and the lot of us bellowing with laughter. At first, he has his feet on sturdy ground and he stands chest-deep calling us arse-cocklings and sons of damned whores, but then the river gets to work on him and he’s much too busy for abuse. He starts tilting backwards, pushing against the current, but it’s a good deal stronger than a half-starved Englishman so he employs his arms in frantic paddling, trying to stay upright.

  Laughter dies in throats and Clark orders the lascars to extend him a branch. He’s only a few yards from the edge, and a good bough would reach him, but something has changed in them. For a moment it’s more transfixing than the drowning fool, the sight of these twelve standing stony-faced.

  Thompson’s pleading now. Clark’s screaming at them: if you won’t get a branch then get in the fucking water and pull him out. Nobody moves. Plainly this is their common design, and it brooks no discussion. So Clark blusters forward, aiming a fist at the nearest brown face. He misses and staggers to stay upright in front of the intended victim, who stares contempt down on him.

  And all the while Thompson is disappearing. He’s sucked in some water, and the river has him: he’s off his feet and borne fast by it, a good eighty yards from us, his head a lump of pallid meat in boiling water, bobbing and vanishing and lacking only the accompanying turnips. We move along the bank to follow his progress, though it’s clear this won’t involve any kind of help from the lascars.

  Clark’s on his feet, storming around them as they walk downstream on the pebbles of the bank. Get him, he screams at me, noting my relaxed saunter. I shrug. It is diverting, the impotent rage of a man with nothing to command.

  Throughout these dramas, I’m watching Kennedy, and past him to the drowning wretch, when very suddenly the carpenter leaps in fright away from the scrub and towards the water’s edge. For two of the Walbanja have now arrived, and by their focused movement it’s clear they’ve assessed it all: us quickstepping along the bank, the overturned canoe wedged in the timbers and Thompson face-down and stuck now by the shreds of his clothes in the same snag.

  They are young men, not painted, carrying nothing in hand. They run featherlight over the shallows and splash in deeper, not fighting the current but riding it so that one spin takes them this way and another the opposite. In seconds one of them reaches Thompson and rights him; the other does likewise for the canoe. Then begins the tricky operation of manoeuvring him onto the delicate craft, which, with some effort, they achieve.

  Thompson’s a sorry sight on the bank, laid out so he drapes on the stones like wet washing. The natives have him face-down, and they press on his back while they speak their lingo over him. For a time, he fails to respond: then he stirs and starts heaving his guts onto the pebbles, yielding little of course but water and bile. I study his feet: the holes and abscesses soaked white, the long cuts revealing pink slashes of his flesh. His entire body is racked by shivers he cannot control: he shakes as if possessed. The river’s done nine-tenths of my work.

  The natives lean back from Thompson’s slumped form and look to the rest of us, faces unmarked. If they feel any resentment over the theft of their canoe, they give no sign of it. And if they’re confused to see we did not rush to him, that’s disguised too.

  Long moments he lies there, unattended by anyone, and I feel the urge deep within me to take up a
river stone and deliver the last tenth. Crush his skull and splatter his brains on the sunlit rock for the flies to carry off. He’s been a liability all along, and now he’ll be a further impediment while he recovers from his riverpickling.

  The sun must have dried out his innards, for at length he begins to moan. The natives produce a small kangaroo they’d been carrying and had left on the bank during Clark’s rescue. Now a strange ceremony ensues, the younger man shaking the thing with its tongue lolling dead from its furry snout, then grinning and dropping it by the front of the canoe. I can see that the only reason they were late arriving at the riverbank, giving Thompson the opportunity to thieve the canoe and almost bringing about his end, was that they were obtaining the meat for us. Oh, what ungracious swine we are!

  The two of them sit there, regarding us in silence. Deep judgments in the making, I suppose. Have they read what passes between the lascars and us? I wonder if they have any sense of their own endangerment at the hands of our chums in Sydney, whose civic aims blandly require their extermination? More specifically, can they read the plans in my heart, the nefarious intent visible only—and even then only partially—to Clark?

  Thompson raises himself to a lopsided crouch. Seeing he’s up, we indicate to the natives that we wish to be on our way. North draws us inexorably towards itself, no doubt a subject of some curiosity to the Walbanja. Clark stands and studies the compass and his sodden watch: I doubt either remains operable but he clutches them like regalia, fooling only himself with his pomposity. A child could see what is required here: Sydney lies to the north-east: provided we keep the ocean on our right, and provided the sun rises each day more or less in the middle of it, we cannot lose our way.

  The Walbanja men empty the water from the canoe and I watch one of them, the older of the two, making some minor repairs with a ball of tinted gum that comes from his purse. He’s humming to himself as he works on the bark, his back turned to me, trusting no harm could come. From me, of all people.