Preservation

by Jock Serong

  ‘And Mr Figge? There was nothing good about him.’

  ‘No. But I think his plan was to leave my father alive. A trap, of sorts. His’—the boy swallowed—‘his cries in the dark. If he was dead he would be of no use. And Mr Figge wants people for their use.’

  Charlotte kept her counsel. For just a moment she saw the endless vanishing cliffs of the boy’s pain. What Mr Figge, whoever he was, had done to her husband; what he must have done to Thompson and Kennedy and to the man in Calcutta; even if the ultimate goal was financial gain, he had gone about it in the cruellest way he could devise.

  ‘I hope you are right,’ she said eventually. ‘How will you find him?’

  ‘Those people talk across the bush. Walbanja, Tharawal, even the Cadigal. If one knows, someone else knows, they all know. It is a big place, but I do not think it can hide a dozen Bengalis.’ He smiled a little. They were stepping down now, following a shallow cutting the convicts had made the previous summer.

  ‘Something I don’t understand, Srinivas,’ she said. ‘How could you struggle as you did for safety, then turn your back on it? That distance you walked, no man has even contemplated it before. You survived all these terrors I can barely imagine—you survived Mr Figge. And now you have found refuge. You don’t want it anymore?’

  He stopped again. ‘You have your home here, ma’am. The lieutenant, and you will have your child…’ He gestured faintly towards her body and then let his hands hang awkwardly at his sides as they both blushed.

  They’d reached the timbers of the wharf. The weather was coming in and the breeze that had picked up was slapping a light chop into the hulls of the moored boats.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said absently, ‘Sydney is not an end, nor an answer.’

  He looked down the row of vessels, some forming the focus of movement and activity, others patiently waiting. ‘This one,’ said Srinivas, gesturing to a small sloop roped to the windward side of the wharf. ‘They showed me yesterday.’

  The men working on its decks, occupied in tiny ways, were unaware of the boy. She watched him step through the gunwale and across the deck to the hatch, at home in his surrounds but a guest now rather than a lackey. Either way, she knew, he would adapt to his surroundings by effacing himself.

  She stepped forward to the edge of the wharf and watched as they prepared the vessel for sea. She could feel the gaps between the boards under the thin soles of her shoes. Srinivas reappeared from below, having deposited the few possessions he was carrying. He was staring out over the wide harbour, the blue and the sun, disappearing fast now behind lowering clouds. The interrupting dark sentinel over Pinchgut and its column of birds, framed on the far side by the slopes of Cremorne.

  He turned back to her, found her eyes and waved. She tried desperately to read the small gesture, then simply returned the wave. She left him there and stepped onto the path. She would depart from it halfway home; walk into the bush once more and think of him. The passage of time and the vast silence of the land would soon erase his name so completely that no one else would remember him at all.

  42

  Joshua Grayling let his eyes fall closed in the sun’s narcotic warmth. Alone in a chair that had been brought out from the house and placed on the lawn, he could see down over the cleared ground and the remaining trees to the cove, to the sun glittering on the water, so bright it hurt his eyes.

  In the west, above the rise where Parramatta would be, a storm was gathering, building a wall at its advancing edge: a fortress mounting across the sky. It was dark beneath the ramparts of cloud, and the darkness devoured even the tallest trees in its path. The breeze had dropped to nothing. The cove and the headlands waited.

  Still the blessed sun lit everything in the near distance, as though it didn’t care: as though there would be time later for the rest of it. It lit the water and the headlands, the front edge of the cloud-wall and the gulls that passed before it. It lit his hands where he had placed them on the blanket on his lap.

  The storm was headed directly for the cove, but its progress was imperceptible—it was only by looking away and looking again that Grayling could sense its advance. The Eora were gone: he could not see a human anywhere on the downslope before him.

  A sail hurried its way towards the heads, eager to make open sea before the change. It would be the sloop, carrying the lascar boy to his dreams. The last of the three survivors to leave, and the only one of whom it could be said that his freedom was well earnt. If Figge was out there in the bush, then he was only one among the dozens of escapees, the warriors and crazed visionaries. The land would absorb his malevolence, and ultimately it would do him in. Sooner or later, the land did everyone in.

  From behind him, in the house, he could hear Ewing working at a bowl with a spoon, mixing something. One of his improbable poultices. Grayling couldn’t look around: some connection in his body from his neck down to the wound would not allow it. The sound of stirring ceased and Ewing approached behind him. Puffing, muttering greetings and something about the day and its weather, the concoction in the bowl. His crippling lack of confidence meant every word of it was directed at the ground.

  He arrived before Grayling now in a waft of booze, the bowl clutched like treasure before his round belly. ‘A balm, lieutenant, an emollient. It will aid the healing.’

  The substance in the bowl was thick and murky. A smile threatened to break across Grayling’s face. He hadn’t smiled in so long.

  ‘From what have you made this balm, Doctor Ewing?’

  ‘Kidneys, sir. The kidney of any large mammal is said to have curative properties. If…correctly prepared.’

  ‘And what is the large mammal in this instance, doctor?’

  ‘The badger, lieutenant. Badgers. A male and a female, to ensure unity of the essences.’ He was slurring, and an odd obsequious gesture escaped him, the gist of which was that Grayling would be required to lower his trousers. The doctor held the spoon at the ready.

  ‘I see this is a topical ointment.’

  Ewing was wrapping his glasses onto his nose with his free hand. He nodded vigorously and his jowls wobbled. Grayling looked away to suppress his laughter, looked down towards the wharf on the near side of the cove. There was still activity there, despite the building storm, convicts and merchants packing and stowing, preparing for the rain.

  A tiny white speck separated itself down there, curled away like a dust mote. It wound slowly up the path and became a human figure, a woman in a dress. Grayling squinted against the light: the sun was now at the verge of the giant cloudbank, ferocious in its last instants. The hill was ablaze in light but the cove was plunged in darkness. The woman stopped, turned to the sky and for a moment was no different from the birds at rest, white against the dun-coloured ground.

  ‘Why don’t you go home, Doctor Ewing?’

  Ewing looked at his patient with undisguised horror. ‘Lieutenant Grayling, you are at a very delicate stage of your recovery.’

  ‘I do believe I will be fine. The day is about to turn: you ought to reward yourself with a drink.’ It took so little; such was the compulsion.

  ‘Yes, well…of course. I could come by tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary, Doctor Ewing. You may leave me alone from here on.’

  A shadow of offence touched the doctor’s face before the more powerful impulse took over and he picked up his bag, returned the bowl to the kitchen and hurried off. The last of the sun warmed Grayling’s clothes and the blanket. The aching had a symmetry about it: it came from the centre of him, a place he could draw every sinew towards. It could be held and contained. But to be stilled like this, to be an invalid, was not his nature.

  The giant eruption in the sky extinguished the light, sudden as a snuffed lantern. But not a drop had yet fallen. A thing he hadn’t understood, and it came to him like a flood: how fortunate he was. It was Charlotte on the path—of course it was. Her steps, the sway of her hands and the tilt of her chin. She’d take
n him to the end of his patience, had near enough outwitted him. She saw him now, shipwrecked on the grass, and she looked puzzled, then amused. Something about the light, the preternatural gloom and Charlotte the only bright point in it. He would turn a blind eye to a thousand of her ill-advised walks.

  She’d picked up her skirts, was running now. Grayling saw the flash of light on the moving fabric of her dress and felt a quickening in his body as he waited for the thunder. A smell rose from the earth, a vapour that was of neither the ground nor the sky but deeply both.

  In the time it took for him to breathe in and out the troubled heavens erupted: a flat, percussive wave that rumbled over the town from the south, rippling at its edges, a deep detonation at its centre. Birds rose and scattered in response to the sound. Had it always been so violent, so majestic here, before they came?

  It felt like the thunder had broken over Botany Bay, well to the south: it was from there that the rain now swept in. He wondered what the Eora did when the heavens opened like this. He had seen them under sandstone overhangs at night. Maybe the storm didn’t bother them. Thunderstorms were something they could explain to their children like the stars and the wind. Men in ships were not.

  She reached him, held him, laughed and kissed him. The first large drops smacked into them both.

  Over her shoulder, through her hair, he watched the rain beating down on the roofs of the downhill houses, the pulverised droplets raising a spray. The sound was vast and it overwhelmed everything else: if the Eora were still calling to each other, and the lags and the lorikeets, the dogs and the swine and the fowl, all of it was consumed by the rushing of the rain.

  43

  The chestnut mare slowed to a walk at the new chandlery on the southern side of the quay. Sydney still slept, lit only by an occasional oil lamp yellowing the windows of the larger houses. The waters of warrane were calm, the masts of the waiting vessels standing still. Dawn was still two hours away; the wind and all human activity had died with the moon.

  The rider stepped down and tied off the bridle at a post by the wall. He searched the silent wharf a moment until a low whistle caught his attention. A man in sailor’s clothes, beckoning from the wharf ’s edge.

  ‘Conrad,’ said the rider, approaching him with a hand extended.

  The sailor lifted his face into the light: bearded like the rider but slightly younger. He was the right size. Boils on his neck, but it mattered none.

  ‘Connor, sir. Connor Mailon.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ The man smiled and shook his hand warmly. ‘Can you take me to her?’

  The younger man hesitated. ‘You haven’t told me your name.’

  ‘I am Manfred.’ A curl of amusement under the misshapen nose.

  ‘Very well,’ said the other man, though his face betrayed disquiet. He led them along the wharf for some distance until he came to a small sloop. The man could see the vessel was rigged and fully provisioned, and a small cluster of crewmen slept forward of the mast under rough blankets.

  ‘This is the Eliza?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ whispered Connor Mailon.

  ‘Not much of her. Still sailing at dawn, as planned?’

  ‘Far as I know. Can we address the money please, if you don’t mind?’ He glanced at the sleeping crew. ‘The other half?’

  ‘Of course. Forgive me.’ The man produced a small leather pouch from inside his coat and raised it before the sailor’s eyes, then withdrew it. ‘But there’s a few small things before we do business.’

  The sailor crossed his arms, and a look of wariness came over him. ‘Well?’

  ‘What county?’

  ‘Sligo.’

  ‘Town?’

  ‘Mullaghmore.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘Mary and fuckin’ Joseph.’

  ‘Don’t be impatient with me.’

  The sailor sighed. ‘William and Constance.’

  The man studied the rigging sceptically. ‘How’s she sail?’

  ‘Masthead rigged, genoa jib.’ He pointed. ‘Forestay, backstay and shrouds. Simple.’

  ‘Fuck-all of it. This tub’s supposed to carry survivors and cargo? She’s barely a longboat.’

  The sailor shrugged. ‘Ten tons burthen. She’ll get there.’

  ‘Might not get back.’ The man thought a moment. ‘This is only the escort, right? Where’s the leading lady?’

  ‘Aye, the Francis. Over there.’ The sailor nodded over the water to a schooner waiting on the far side of the cove.

  ‘Ah, that’s more like it.’

  The man stepped down from the wharf onto the deck of the Eliza; it rocked faintly against its hawsers.

  The sailor raised his voice now to an urgent hiss. ‘What’re ye fuckin doing? Get orf.’

  ‘Just looking.’ The man peered about, unconcerned. He took in the slumbering crew, the stores and the furled sails, then leaned back against the pinrail as the sailor climbed down to prevent him wandering further over the deck.

  ‘None o’ these men have met you, you say?’

  ‘No,’ said Connor Mailon. ‘Got the job with the stevedore yesterday.’

  ‘Hmm; aye. Have ye brothers or sisters, Conrad?’ The man had his hands on the pinrail behind his hips, resting idly on the heads of the belaying pins.

  The sailor’s face turned to a scowl in the dark. This man was making no attempt to lower his voice. He seemed to revel in the risk of being challenged.

  ‘A brother. Tommy. Younger, all right? Ye’ve got enough now, so be done with questionin’ me. Told yeh. None of ’em knows me anyways.’

  The man smiled broadly and clapped the sailor on the back. ‘You’re right,’ he beamed. ‘Come. I’ll buy you a drink and we’ll settle the money.’

  He gestured for the sailor to climb off the gunwale ahead of him and then followed behind, leaving an empty bracket in the pinrail where one of the belaying pins had been.

  The cut stone steps led up a short embankment and through a dark glade that followed the coast between the wharves and the town. The sailor was complaining louder now, arguing that the tavern would never serve them at this hour, that he had no cause to trust some Manfred if that’s yer real name, that for the love of God his name was Connor not Conrad.

  The man followed behind. The whining did not trouble him at all, though he felt tempted to hurry things along as they passed under the secretive canopy of the scrub. He curled his hand around the heavy head of the pin under his coat. An instinct counselled patience.

  As the trees opened into a laneway with the glittering water on one side, they passed a row of timber yards. The first was filled with sheep, strange-looking beasts with heavy rolled coats and curling horns. Now there’s a slow road to a fortune, thought the man. There were perhaps twenty of them pressed tightly together, flank to flank. Silent and quite still, as though they were mere depictions in a painting, not living things. The absence of movement, their flat stupid eyes. The sole thing that made them corporeal was the inescapable stink of shit.

  Next came a sty fenced with lengths of rough-cut timber. As they came level with the fence at shoulder height, the man heard a hog snuffling in response to their passing. It was up now and moving their way, a fine beast of maybe five hundred pounds, trotters squelching under its weight as it approached through the mud. The shit-stink again, sourer, filling the curl of his nose.

  Onward; and now he saw why he’d waited. The faint light of the stars was glowing on the place where the convicts had cut away the embankment above a small beach, revealing the cut face of a great pile of seashells. He knew the place; had considered it at length on his walks. Seashells, ashes and flakes of stone. The hand of man here, the ghosts of families and the deep burial of time. The convicts had arranged bricks to form a kiln—the ashes of the day’s work still smouldered faintly in the great hearth they’d constructed. They were un-making in mere days that great aggregation of years, like sifting out the stars from the sky.

  A whiter patch where the lime
was heaped and the barrels stood in rows, filled and sealed, half-filled, empty. Wooden shovels, flat-bladed. And he saw it all perfectly. Poor Connor still walked ahead in hope of his rum, mumbling about something.

  The man slid the pin from his coat, hefted it once in his hands and brought it down swiftly. Connor Mailon slumped facedown on the path, dead before he came to rest. It took the man some minutes to get all the clothes off him and to arrange them on himself. Although the singular blow had been sufficient, the sight of him naked awoke something else in the man and he gave him another and another until the vault of his skull had yielded and the egg-wobble brains jellied his blood. The man drew the pin several times over the leg of his discarded trousers, wiping the muck from it, then returned it to its place under his—Connor Mailon’s—coat. It would still serve perfectly on the Eliza. Would perhaps whisper this memory to him once or twice.

  He lifted Connor Mailon by his legs and dragged him to the barrel rows, further spillages stringing from his skull as it bumped over the rough ground. He found a barrel that was yet to receive its load and made Connor Mailon its contents, folding him arse-first into the darkness. The body wedged there for a moment, and the man took out the pin and struck the knees once each, hard, so the feet went in against his belly and the knees were inverted and topmost alongside the staring eyes.

  It was a generous cask: there was room still for a dozen shovels of the lime. The dusted sailor looked back at him as he worked, until the powder covered his eyes and soon enough his wrongful knees as well.

  The man searched the site and found a timber bucket. He took it down to the gleaming cove, where he filled it. He stood over the barrel, poured the water in and stepped back. Nothing happened for a moment, then the slaking took its course; bubbling, smoking and sputtering. A horrible stink rose from the tub and the man found himself laughing that he’d rather go back past the pig shit.

  When the reaction had slowed he found himself a lid and tapped it in place with a stone. Then he rolled the barrel on its edge into the row where the completed ones stood.