Preservation

by Jock Serong

  The teeth closed again harder now and I felt gristle tearing, his jaw moving as it chewed, blood mixed with slobber, matting my hair. The screams in me were crushed as I made them, and his other hand, the one not holding my hair, reached down and I knew where it was going and he dragged down his tattered breeches and mine and now he was climbing further over me. He took my legs, easy as the bones of a finished meal, and he got them apart. I forced them back and he hit me again, this time in the side of the throat so that I choked, then coughed. I felt sure my belly would push out every trace of the food in me but he’d pinned me so hard even my retching was crushed still.

  He was over me now and he’d rammed his knees up the insides of my thighs so I had nowhere left to move and I feared my hips would come apart but then the feeling of that was nothing at all because the world became a rod of bright red pain driven through the centre of me and I could not believe the whole world had room for so much pain. He rammed into me harder and harder, a barbed pike hammered into soft earth. A body has no instinct for this, to be impaled against its will: every muscle a riot of resistance and pain, and the demon above me had summoned such force that no response could have any effect.

  A hand now came up to take hold of my throat, and there it gripped, the fingers gouging into the sides of my windpipe. With each shove he made into me the hand took it also, deep into the cords of my neck, leaving only whistles of breath to squeak through. He grunted fierce and quick now, loud enough to wake those who slept and to shame those who pretended. My cheek slid back and forth along a rough carpet of leaves—the beautiful sawtooth leaves I have never seen the same way again.

  Then he collapsed, his forearms over my shoulders, and he took himself from me leaving a scalding trail of sticky fluid—part of him or some part of me he’d torn free, I had no way of knowing.

  The heavens spun above me uncaring and the pain left in its own time. The horror I sucked deep down into myself; I buried it there. I told myself it was better my father was gone, for he would have died trying to stop it.

  We had our answer now: the bush hid its monsters, but they were not the kind we expected. Thompson and Kennedy would go on fearing and hating the natives despite their own crimes, and despite seeing with their very own eyes the act of this man in their midst.

  Mr Figge went back to the rough bed he’d dug at sunset with the end of a stick. Within minutes he was snoring and I thought to take up the knife that I knew was somewhere beside him and drive it through him. What stopped me—it makes no sense now—was the fear that the others might step in. So I lay there and watched him curled and smiling and I thought about what I would do and when that would happen.

  When the morning came it was calm and still once again. The trees rang with the calls of unseen birds. I took myself down to the beach and its shining dawn water and I eased myself in, and washed the spit and dried blood from my ear. Attended to worse damage below the water. As I stood chest-deep amid the yellows and greens of that new light I looked back at the land and wondered if I could forget. Knew that I could not.

  We walked. We had walked. We would always walk, or so it seemed.

  I was slow, torn worse than I had thought. A trickle of blood worked its way down my leg throughout the morning, like something melted by a fire above it. I could not draw one leg after the other without the burning.

  Thompson was slow, too. Coughing all the time: staggering when the coughing made him dizzy.

  No one spoke anymore. All five of us looking forward and down into a small parcel of space in front of our feet. Your back ahead of me, Mr Figge’s eyes on me from behind. And further back, heard only in their cursing and the cracks of twigs, Mr Thompson and Mr Kennedy.

  At some point you told us to stop. The coastline had been taking us straight east for hours and the land sloped up sharply behind. You said we must be walking out on a long headland; that we might be able to save time by going over the top of it. The same argument with every headland: whether to climb over it or press on to the east.

  This time you walked off, intending to find a view, and Mr Figge smiled as you went. I wondered what would happen if you failed to return.

  Then the bush closed around your back, and I thought of nothing for a while but the sense, the old sense, that we were being watched. It did not seem important.

  By the time you returned in the mid-afternoon the sun was weak. You were pleased: you’d found a pass over the ridge and a vast and beautiful bay beyond it. We had been indeed walking out on a long headland; we would save many dozens of miles by going over the hill.

  And so we turned, and we walked again. Uphill this time, following a narrow gully that made a snake’s progress up the hill, brushing sticks and softer branches away from our faces.

  My thoughts were a bloody list: Mr Figge had one knife. You had the other, the one that was more like a short sword. The second short sword was gone. The pistols were ruined by the seawater. I had no object, no plan for these weapons. Only they circled in my thoughts: knife, sword, drowned guns…

  A stop for water. You crouched by the stream that flowed down the gully and tore a handful of bright stems from a ferny plant. The stems were fine like cress and they broke above the roots so they were clean of soil. You pushed a few into your cracked mouth and began to chew. You seemed pleased with the flavour, and handed another bunch to me. I ate, and the leaves were agreeable so I lay down where I was, on a mat of small ferns, and ate a few more handfuls. The others, as they joined us, did likewise.

  When the four of you set off once more I waited and then I sat in the water and once more washed the injuries Mr Figge had left me. My neck was tight from the choking and it hurt to move my jaw to eat the leaves.

  I caught up a little further on. You were all struggling to climb a rounded face of granite. It took a while but eventually we all stood on the tall boulder and looked out through the roof of trees. Below us was the coast we had walked: beaches weaving the headlands together, the sea a deep blue made darker, almost purple, by large spreading shadows near the shore. The sun was just about to hide itself behind the crest of the great hill we had been climbing. The gully and its stream had disappeared and there was little more climbing before we would reach the peak and see this great spreading bay you had spoken of, and—

  I wobbled and fell where I was.

  Felt…surprise.

  You stooped to peer at me, then shrugged and walked away. I looked around me in confusion. Picked at the torn edge of my ear until my fingers were sticky with blood.

  One tree on the hill above captured my gaze; I stared at the bark, formed with deep creases that ran straight up. Not a single branch until it was perhaps sixty feet tall, and then the branches spread like wings beyond a hundred feet. The edges of the leaves, the branches, the trunk, the edges of all were blurred by a faint rainbow that mixed the outlines of the tree and the light behind it. I blinked but the colours stayed. It was not my eyes. The tree was making them.

  A tilted head in my vision blocked the trees: someone had bent to check on me and—oh!—it was my father, his kindly face full of worry. He looked in, smiled and then his eyes went dark and became holes in the day and his features drifted off into nothing, like the mist from the hills and I was staring at the bright unending sky that had no sorrow for wrecked mariners and no time for a poor broken boy. I stood, unsteady, and ran as best I could after the others and I found Mr Kennedy on his knees praying and Mr Thompson not much further on, flat on his face crying into the ground.

  Beyond them the rocks and the pillars of the trees beat and swelled like they were painted on a sail that billowed in the wind. I saw you up ahead, Mr Clark, and I felt a wave of relief. But when I caught up with you, you were singing. Some grinding dirge, flat words blurring into each other so none could be heard clear. The sound of it terrified me, and I looked around again for comfort in a world that had gone mad.

  The trees. They were different here. Or perhaps I hadn’t noticed before but now my
senses were whipped and I could see trunks of a beautiful shining clear white, dotted with thousands of small dark divots. It was as if the children of centuries had tossed stones at them and each strike had left an imprint. Closer to the ground the trunks bore round patches of yellows and greys, and even the pale green of the strange hard mosses we had seen on the granite. The blurring colours I had seen a moment before were gone now but the world was fixed somehow in the white spears that carried the holy green canopy across the sky.

  My mind was working against me but I understood the crowding undergrowth was gone from here, as if it had been cleared. It was grass, the going easy upon it, and it was trees, openly arranged. Soft sunlight fell on me, and the wind still carried your rudderless song as I walked onwards, wishing my father would appear from behind one of the great growing columns and this time not as a ghost.

  You stopped.

  You stood before a different tree.

  A darker trunk, a thick coat of bark that cracked into long plates, dark needles on its twigs like a pine, instead of leaves. But none of this was what had stopped you.

  You were staring, Mr Clark, at the trunk of the tree. There, at exactly your eye level, a little over my head, the bark had been cut away in a great sheet, leaving a diamond-shaped scar. The wood beneath had been cut over and over again into patterns of short angled lines like the meat of a fish. The cuts were new: so new that the sliced flesh of the tree bled sap from its wounds. The cuts were intended and they were not made to remove the bark. They were a message to any who passed. I felt their meaning in my body—a cold dread flowing through me, and I knew it as the direst warning.

  You seemed astir, Mr Clark, but in no great panic.

  There’s a saltire, you said to yourself in the oddest voice. In the tree. Andrew’s cross.

  Mr Figge had his fingers on the cuts in the bark, walking them slow over the sticky sap. He held his palm up so it faced you like a sign of its own, and his eyes just then were not of our world. ’Tis a sign of some sort, Clark, he said. We’re being told to go another way.

  And you turned slow round to face him, sir, and looked him over as though you’d never met the man.

  It’s a forest, Mr Figge. Doesn’t belong to anyone. If I want to go there, I’ll go there. If I want to go over there—you were pointing east now—then that’s where I shall go. You stood and started forward again, spoke over your shoulder. These people are wandering over it just the same as us. They’re simply too stupid to realise what could be made of it.

  You left us at odds behind you. Mr Kennedy moved to follow, then Mr Thompson, slower. Mr Figge moved last and I was left alone with my fear. A fat grey bird sat on a lower branch of one of the great white trees and watched me. Then it told me I was a bright and attentive boy and I hissed at it until it flew off.

  When I caught up, the three of you were standing in a shady place on the grass. Before you, a series of trees had been taken down to make a small clearing. It had the air of a temple; walled by trees and filled with quiet power.

  You turned in a slow circle, then sat yourself down, dropped the small calico-wrapped bundle of your possessions, and got out your journal and pencil. Without regard to us, you began writing your business there, stopping now and again to parley with your compass.

  What’re ye doin, ye dottle-heided wandocht? That was Mr Figge, mocking your Scots.

  You looked left and right. Me? I am recording our journey, Mr Figge. Others will want to know what transpired.

  The heat rose up in Mr Figge. He stood over you, no mockery now. You’re lying on dangerous ground, little man.

  Again, you looked around yourself. This? I think not. Now if you’ll excuse me—

  I looked to the bush, out wider. The day was darkening now, the shadows less certain. Mr Thompson and Mr Kennedy sniffed the tension like they smelled food. Poking sly fun at you, Mr Clark, even as they laughed at Mr Figge’s anger. What had happened to us all? Why were we so untied? I hated the shadows all of a sudden. I wanted to rush through them and sweep them away to see what secrets lay behind.

  You ignored us; you continued to write.

  The others had sat down now.

  The bush.

  I turned a circle as you had just done, and a gasp got away from me. The others looked and I pointed: the patterns were cut in the trees all round us, facing in at us. Circles, spirals, squares. One was the outline of a huge lizard.

  The air changed and you stopped writing. Another round of dispute seemed about to start. Then the shadows moved.

  I was looking at Mr Kennedy when I saw him open his mouth to shout. I followed his gaze and a man stepped from the trees at the edge of the clearing: tall, thin and naked but for the twine belt around his waist. He had a spear raised, lying in a wumera.

  Pointed straight at you, Mr Clark.

  He had no expression on his face at all. Not the welcome smile we had seen so often nor any other. He was watching you as though the rest of us were not there. And from behind and around the man came more and more, painted in the white streaks we had seen before, but this time also stripes of a red clay. Their eyes were changed by the painting. These were not the Walbanja: all were naked but none the same; some carrying the sacred scars and some unmarked. None talking to the other, nor to us.

  I was not myself. The trees were turning into more and more warriors. Dozens now, slipping forward by inches. More spears than I had ever yet seen, and every lethal point trained on you.

  I dug my fingernails into my thigh to feel the pain and know for certain this was real. Trees becoming men, and yet I felt the fingernails telling me this was no dream. The other three stood now, slow. Hands out, not a twitch.

  More of them, and more. Not a woman, not one. Not a scrap of clothing. Clubs, axes and spears and the quiet like a thin layer of oil coating everything. I wanted to cut it open with a scream. But the minutes were passing without me in them.

  The one who’d come furthest forward, the one who was the first from the tree-line—now he began to speak. Not to us, but to his fellows, without ever taking his eyes off you. Soft words. Their effect was that the spear carriers divided their aim: five or six now covered each of us. Even then, the bulk of the weapons still focused on your beating heart.

  Now see here, you began, but the warriors showed no sign of hearing you, other than to take several steps forward. Your eyes darted about, desperate now: they fell on Kennedy and lit up.

  This is the man you seek. Yes! Him, and the other here…You extended a hand towards Kennedy, then Thompson, who looked back at you with disgust. That hand stayed there, accusing him: the white palm bright against the gloom. If you’ll spare us, you may—

  There was a flash of movement, a blur in the air and you fell, clutching at the hand. Your screams tore open the silence and bodies moved in every direction. Thompson had fallen. There were arms raised, sounds of shouting and timber snapping. Mr Figge I could not see. One of the natives stepped swiftly to you, ripped your good hand away from its grip on the wounded one. He yanked it out at arm’s length; drove his long spear through it and into the earth.

  The spear stood there, quivering, while you twisted and wept in pain. The man who did it stood back tall and watched you. I was watching him, then there was a blow and a terrible pain I did not understand. I remember falling in the soft grass and wishing it was all there was in the world.

  31

  The man appeared in Joshua Grayling’s doorway that afternoon.

  Grayling had been reading at the table. The man did not knock. He did not call out. It happened that the door was open to bring air through the house; his form in the doorway altered the light, so Grayling looked up.

  He was naked, which was nothing remarkable among the Eora. It was clothing, not nudity, that stood out in Sydney. The familiar strings draped over the taut drum of his chest, which was latticed with straight scars.

  He was not an old man. His beard was thick, the skin pulled tight over his cheekbones, but Grayli
ng reckoned him to be no older than twenty. His hair was matted with a reddish mud, and other things caught Grayling’s eye in odd sequence: the sleek roping of his arms, the cracked traces of old paint in his skin, a scar over his right forearm that looked not ceremonial but riven by trauma. His eyes were clear and dark and level. They did not defer to him nor offer any hint of good humour.

  He opened his mouth and uttered just one word: Boorigul.

  Come in, sit down, Grayling ventured, trying to make time in which to sift through his growing dread. The man did not move from where he stood but lifted one hand to chest level and made a sign with it that Grayling did not understand: it was quick and emphatic and with it came the girl’s name again. His intonation hadn’t changed; if he was impatient, it did not show.

  Grayling was alone in the house. Charlotte had persuaded the girl to walk with her to the Rocks to bargain for new clothes. He was not going to tell the man that they’d gone to tallawolladah, to the wattle and daub and twisting alleys growing rudely on a meeting place.