by Jock Serong
‘There is a time when I recall nothing at all. Perhaps I’m sleeping. When I open my eyes, I can see the world as it is for the smallest creatures. In front of me is an arch in the grass, maybe ten inches high. Bent together, I don’t know how. Maybe they grow like that. Something is moving behind it. Not clear; then it becomes so: there is a bird inside the arch. I’ve been still so long the bird is not worried by me. A heavy, fat bird, its feathers a bright black that is…what do you call that colour ma’am, the jug?’
Charlotte regarded it. The glass jug she had placed on the table: thick and dark, but where it had been chipped on one shoulder it refracted light.
‘Indigo.’
‘Yes. That. And oh! An eye. An eye I’ve not seen on a bird, or on any other animal. A jewel, deepest blue. Like a glass bead, shining on those black feathers. Fixed on me now—’
He turned his head to one side and it became the bird’s head: cocked, considering. Charlotte almost laughed.
‘I don’t move, and it minds its business, pecks at all the dried stuff around it. I can see now that the things did not just fall so: they were put there by the bird, and there it is, tending them with its beak: moving, putting, moving again. And all through the soft mound it’s made, put very delicate round the arch of grasses, are all manner of…feathers, flower petals and berries, flakes of mussel shells—each of them as blue as that eye. Blues that—’ He absently raised a finger in the air. ‘Can you have… when you say “blue”, more than one blue?’
She smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘They would not be other colours, then?’
‘They can all be blue. The sky and the sea.’
‘Yes. So many blues I never knew to be out there in the world. My poor eyes see the strange collection, so neat that at first I think the natives have put it there. But the way the bird tends to its blue things…’
Again, his hands worked at providing the meanings that his speech lacked: they patiently shuffled imaginary blue objects, each in turn, so the spaces between them appeared uniform. There is a man close by who brings a passage to hell with him, Charlotte thought, and here you are—you and the bird…
‘I watch as the bird picks up a thing from its collection and I stare at the thing in its beak. I reach out a hand and the bird drops it, struts off very cross as I pick it up. A tiny pin of bone, ma’am, polished. Snapped off at one end. Some words in English, carved like scrimshaw. On the end that was not broken there’s a little brass chain, and on it the thing that caused the bird to want it: four beads of lapis lazuli: bright blue like the bird’s eye.
‘A lost bobbin. A token of love, ma’am. And the moment I see it I know the fat bird has not flown far.’
A fat bird worried the ground in Charlotte’s mind, drawn to both its collection and the sky, but she couldn’t grasp its significance. ‘I’m not sure I follow, Srinivas.’
‘The bobbin could come from only one place, you see. Very close by.’
Charlotte smiled and he nodded furiously.
‘Sydney.’
‘So there I am lying, bobbin in my hand. So close to harbour; too weak to get up and walk there.
‘The bird returns to its work, and I shuffle myself down low on the edge of the cliff where I can look over the beach. At first nothing is out of place. You do not see what you are not looking for. You see sand, blue water and rock. Just as any other day.
‘And then…Then there is the boat. It has come around the headland from the north, just small but under full sail in a light breeze. Heeling over as if it will pass the back of those two reefs and keep going south. I cannot believe my eyes. I can see men on her decks working and it feels like they have come with their boat from a different world, we have been so long in the bush. I am supposed to know boats, of course, my whole life. But this is like something that has fallen from the skies.
‘I’m waving and jumping and I no longer care that this will reveal me to Mr Clark and Mr Figge. They are far below and halfway across the beach by now, too spent to come back up the hill. I think, too, that they are too low down to see the boat. They do not change their positions: at first, they look dead. Perhaps sleep has taken them too. But Mr Clark starts to crawl along the sand and Mr Figge starts after him, also on his hands and knees. The most pitiful sight.
‘Then the boat changes course and tacks between the two reefs, and a new hope comes to me. It is safe now, I think, to go down there—they cannot kill me in front of other men—and I cannot afford to be missed by being up there on the bluff.
‘I start down the rocky parts between the trees, sideways, like I had seen walabees do. I fall anyway, once or twice; yards only, not the full distance. Maybe it’s seeing the boat, or maybe I have come to the end of everything and death is approaching, but my body is giving up. My eyes, my legs are…I let myself fall, just lie down and slide over the loose rocks at the bottom, pulling with my arms when my legs will not do the work. I can still feel the shells on the rocks: they tear at my skin and I no longer care for the pain. The joy at the sight of the boat, the power gone from inside me, all at once.
‘I fall to the creek mouth and I am bleeding—these are the cuts ma’am, here and here—and the blood’s going out in clouds in the water. I drag myself across on my hands and knees, a hopeless turtle in the sand, sand stuck in my wounds and stinging eyes, sand in my mouth like a helpless infant. I breathe and it tears my throat.
‘Ahead I can see the other two and now I feel I could laugh if only I can remember how: all three of us on our hands and knees, each lost to the world. The boat luffs its sails there off the beach and they drop an anchor and a jollyboat and two sailors row it to shore and call out to us but I cannot hear what they are calling and we are saved, we are saved and they could be the angels or just ordinary men but the difference comes to naught because nothing matters any longer.’
III
36
Grayling generally took pains to avoid the Brickfields. There was a hunger about the place, away down the South Head Road and far from judgment’s eye.
Seeing as the colony provided no formal entertainment, the people gathered there on a Saturday and found their own. The Contests, they called it, or the Fighting.
As they would loiter and stare at a corpse in the street or the stop-swing snap of a hanging, so the people would mill about the gruesome spectacle of two natives going at each other. They lit upon an intersection of language; it came to be understood that the fighting was payback. And it was not always the Eora who sated the lust. Sometimes it was white men—and if no one could find a human grudge to settle there was always cockfighting or dogs to fall back on.
Of the four thousand colonists and as many Eora, a fair majority would throng the dusty flats of the Brickfields for the Fighting. Weapons might be used—the rules of an Eora contest were beyond the control of the audience—and there was no predicting the age or sex of the combatants, or the terms of the dispute. The crowd came for the skill of it, the sweat and the open wounds and the ultimate collapse of the vanquished. It mattered not whether the Eora had organised the fight to take place there on the open ground in order to accommodate onlookers or whether the place had come to be used because the traditional places were now seized: nobody involved in watching the Contests gave any thought to their deeper meaning. The point was simply to have a place to drink openly, something on which to wager—and unthinking release.
A girl had died in the dust there, late in the summer. Entirely innocent, it turned out, of the thing being litigated, but positioned in the family such that she must answer for it. The governor had asked Grayling to be present that day out of concern for the public order. The young woman gasping on the ground, her bright, ghastly wounds under the roar and the smashing of bottles and the pitiless sun: it paralysed Grayling with horror. He could not describe it when Charlotte later asked him what had happened. He had no words, no way of knowing whether the scene represented the workings of another society or a mutation of those workings: changes
wrought by the pox and the land taken and the slavering hordes.
Now he found himself part of that disturbing crowd once again. A leaflet had gone around the town.
The Much-Celebrated Shipwreck Survivor and Businessman Mr William Clark is to be Farewelled, Upon the Occasion of His Departure for Calcutta, at the Brickfields after the Contests.
Senior members of the New South Wales Corps would be in attendance, the flyer promised.
Grayling left his arrival as late as he could. He placed himself on the rise above the contest ground where the crowding trees offered swift escape as the sun softened in the west. It was women and children this far out: the men were concentrated closer in and thoroughly drunk by now. All that remained of the preceding violence was a patch of scuffed ground and a large bloodstain. He had no desire to know whose blood it was: the body from which it had run was now the concern of Dr Ewing, or the sexton.
A group of troopers entered the open ground and deposited a small wooden stage there. More of them came forward with a podium and a weary flag, St George and the saltire, on a small pole.
A delegation pushed forward, the soldiers swinging freely at the drunks to clear a way. In their midst was a stallion; as they neared, Grayling recognised the rider perched high above the fray. Thin and disdainful, John Donald Macarthur had chosen an immaculate uniform jacket for the occasion, though no one had seen him engaged in soldierly duties for months. Grayling felt a deep surge of the enmity that the governor knew, but unmediated by the governor’s measured character. The man was a tyrant in the making: a grasper made powerful by influential friends.
Their posse rumbled forward, taken off course at times by the weight of the crowd. Macarthur dismounted and handed the reins to a soldier. Elizabeth, normally a fixture at her husband’s appearances, had had the sense to stay away. The horse shied and baulked, its eyes big with fear as it was led off. Standing a head taller on the podium, Macarthur surveyed the crowd. Grayling searched the faces near the stage and found William Clark, partially visible behind the gold-encrusted shoulder of Macarthur’s jacket. His face showed only confusion.
Macarthur lifted his chin high and aimed a glare at the crowd down his long, thin nose. He held it as silence descended, then abruptly smiled at the melee before him: these were his friends now, eager to hear from him. They cheered at the feint, because they didn’t know what else to do. Two dogs broke into a vicious tangle of teeth and fur before they were kicked apart.
‘I hope you have enjoyed your day,’ Macarthur began. ‘Not something I would ordinarily be a part of ’—he smirked—‘but having a commercial interest in intemperance, I wish you well.’
The crowd took a moment to disentangle the language, then cheered again and raised their bottles. He waved, dismissive.
‘Now as a Scotsman, it falls to me to farewell a countryman of mine. I know’—he raised a hand to refute a protest that had not occurred—‘I know your esteemed governor is also a Scot, but it seems he was too busy to come and discharge this responsibility’—widespread booing—‘busy playing his fiddle and painting his birds. His time will come, I assure you.’
Grayling could scarcely believe what he was hearing. The brazenness of it.
‘But for today,’ Macarthur continued, ‘it is my duty to pay tribute to Mr William Clark’—he swept a hand in Clark’s direction and Clark made a gesture at doffing his hat—‘a good man and true, who not only survived the worst ravages of the sea but led seventeen men on a trek that will surely become famous in this colony’s history.’
Fourteen of them dead, Grayling muttered to himself. A small drunkard with a matted beard was stroking the leg of Macarthur’s trousers, apparently entranced by the quality of the fabric. Macarthur slapped him away and droned on.
‘Mr Clark was pursuing business for this colony, gentlemen. Business. He wanted us to have rum, so that we might enjoy some means of commerce—commerce! The good Lord doesn’t want us idle here, but productive, turning this wild place into a model of harmonious society and a great trading port of the Pacific. Aye, that He does.’
Dust; the restless stirring of the crowd.
‘Yet Mr Clark’s treatment upon arriving here has been, sadly, less than civil. His account called into question—disbelieved, even—by those at Government House who might struggle to take a long walk in their garden, let alone survive the manifold horrors of the bush.’
Macarthur looked around himself, out into the crowd, as though searching. The faces of the men formed a collective snarl and some of them looked back to the south-west, towards Government House.
‘A hero, ladies and gentlemen. Cross-examined and hectored by the self-appointed gentry. How dare they.’
Grayling felt a surge of fear. The man had an instinct for this: he had the crowd baying. If Macarthur pointed him out now, he would have to answer to the mob. They knew he was Hunter’s aide: it would be as good as lynching the governor. But Macarthur showed no awareness of Grayling’s presence.
‘I want tae thank Mr Clark on your behalf; for his part in the bold expedition to bring consumer goods and aye, spirituous liquors’—much hooting and laughter at this—‘to our humble colony. For his bravery in surviving the natives and all the other privations of that long journey. And for his good grace in tolerating the excesses of our bureaucracy. We wish him all the best for his return to Calcutta, and we ask that perhaps one day he will consider returning to us, when conditions are more…receptive.’
Clark looked up gratefully at Macarthur from his station behind the podium, declining, with a modest wave of his bandaged hands, to make a speech in reply. The crowd raised three cheers to his health and more brandishing of bottles followed. And then a curious spectacle ensued: the men surrounding the podium ushered Clark onto it and induced him to sit. They then produced two long poles, which they slotted into iron rings on the sides of it. On a signal, they raised the podium aloft with Clark on it, supported by six or eight of the largest men. The cheering began again and Clark waved feebly. When the crowd continued to call his name he took off his hat and threw it to them.
The platform was rotated now and pointed downhill towards the shore at Rose Bay. The crowd followed, the men leading and the women bringing the children along behind. The Eora divided themselves: some were happy enough to join the procession, clapping arms around each other and even the convicts. Others walked off, indifferent.
Grayling remained still, feeling the energy of the mob dissipating as it poured downhill. A ship waited at anchor just off the bay, a rowboat on the beach. Bottles, bones and the gnawed remains of fish littered the ground. Gulls massed over the empty ground for scraps: human shit glistened here and there, coiled and smeared underfoot.
Clark was gone: and at his going remained as much of an enigma to Grayling as the day he arrived. Was he a bad man? Or just an ordinary one, taken to extremity? Grayling had no idea, and no measure, either, of his complicity with Figge. Perhaps he was a simple opportunist—it put him in company with just about every resident of the town.
Of one thing he was absolutely sure: Clark was no hero. He had evaded the capricious version of justice on offer here. Now, somewhere out at sea, he would prepare his explanations for others, brandishing the bloodied diary in defence of his curious tale.
37
Grayling made his way to the governor’s residence in the last light of evening, his mind alive with ideas.
The man who had taken Boorigul had a name. It had been made known to him in the same way so much else was passed to him: in reports, filed for the governor. Reports about the settlers’ complaints and fears; about armed soldiers pushing deep into hostile country, successfully and unsuccessfully; about their bodies returning to Sydney in carts, studded with spear-ends snapped off by their desperate comrades. About intelligence gleaned from Eora with a score to settle—or a family to save, with diversionary information, from someone else’s score-settling.
There was enough corroboration between the account
s that a picture was emerging.
Boorigul had been taken by a young warrior who went by the name of Warrander. The man was said to be Cadigal and did not reside within the limits of the township. She was betrothed to him and had left to seek shelter in the town because of his involvement with another woman. Over the same period that Boorigul had been coming and going, Warrander had been implicated in a number of maize fires around Toongabbie and Parramatta, unrelated to her presence in Sydney—but possibly motivated by a loyalty to Pemulwuy. To date he was not known to have killed anyone.
These matters came to Grayling and he recorded them. Names and dates and incidents and reports—the passage of lives themselves—were the victuals that nourished the growing administration. It did not have to be a personal matter that Grayling collected such things. It was one of the subjects that occupied him, nothing more.
Another was Figge. He knew enough of him now, enough to pounce. Pemulwuy, out there in the darkness somewhere, was the fire that threatened them from without. But ultimately he would flicker and die. The greater danger was the malignancies within: Macarthur and the Corps. And this man Figge. Wherever it was that he had come from, Figge had attached himself to the colony through the demise of the Sydney Cove, and now Grayling would be the one to put an end to it. He needed only an order.
His footfalls rang on the flagstones of the entryway and he heard the familiar music from upstairs. The melancholy strains of the governor’s violin, leaking from the study and into the night: the sequence of long, mournful bowing; a faster, skipping passage, another long note.
Grayling’s knock at the door was answered by Mrs Butcher, still crisply attired in cap and apron, despite the late hour. She regarded him evenly, and led him into the hallway.
‘You may wish to take a seat, lieutenant,’ she said, gesturing to the alcove by the stairs and a pew that had the look of convict work. The music curled carefully onwards, resonating in the timbers of the big house. As he sat, placing himself more or less in the centre of the short bench, he saw that the old woman was turning to do the same. He scurried to one end before her backside came to weary rest. She straightened her back and folded her hands on her lap and they listened in silence. There was a gravity about her, a quiet authority. He had no doubt she was a tyrant in the back rooms—the young girls would live in terror of her silences. She would rule by inference, he thought, not by rage.