From the Wreck

by Jane Rawson

  ‘He was in Robe,’ George said. ‘Nowhere near.’

  ‘Still, the event clearly stuck in his heart,’ Sarah said.

  ‘And for his efforts, he was paid back with poverty, sorrow and death by his own hand. Three cheers for Carpenters Reef.’ George gulped the rest of his claret.

  Eliza rose from her chair, but George, who really had not expected to be yelling tonight, reached out his hand to stop her. He patted his chest, felt his warm human self there, touched the arm of his warm human wife. ‘My beautiful wife,’ he murmured, ‘carrying our first child.’ He took the pieces of his face and shaped them into a smile for her, then turned it upon her sister, her sister’s husband. He reached again for the decanter. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said.

  ‘We should go,’ Sarah said. ‘It is late – it is no wonder you are tired. Eliza, thank you so much for dinner.’

  ‘Yes, yes, certainly,’ William added. ‘Apologies to you, George, Eliza, for keeping you so long from your beds with idle chitchat.’

  ‘No, do not go,’ George said. ‘I am much better now. William –’ he had succeeded in refilling his glass and pushed the decanter in his brother-in-law’s direction – ‘What of the mill?’ George felt his human self solidify, sentences forming clean and functional in his brain. ‘What was the thing you were telling me about? Barking? A new barking … uh …’ but the word escaped him.

  ‘Ah, now there’s a thing!’ William reached for the wine. ‘I was speaking to the foreman – you know Jameson?’

  George nodded though he had no idea.

  ‘Well, Jameson informs me that it simply isn’t the way things are done at Rosewater. According to him, the old ways are the best ways and “aren’t no need to be changing up, Mister Gardiner, on account of some science nonsense”. This is the attitude I am faced with, George.’

  Sarah placed her hand on William’s arm. ‘George, I think it may be time for us to leave you. If William begins properly on this topic, we will be here until dawn. William?’

  ‘My wife is a wise woman. Perhaps you could visit me at the mill some time, George, and I could show you what I mean.’

  ‘Eliza,’ Sarah said, ‘thank you so much for your hospitality. Don’t get up – William and I can find our own way out.’

  Sarah kissed Eliza’s cheek while the men shook hands, and then they were gone. A log tumbled in on itself in the grate.

  ‘Why don’t you go to bed, dear?’ George said. ‘I’ll tidy up here.’

  ‘Will you speak with Swanforth about the position?’ She stayed seated, made no move towards bed.

  They had all been talking about Swanforth, hadn’t they? Something about Portland. About the lifeboat? No, about a daughter. What possible position could Eliza want him to assume with this daughter? He stared blankly at her and wondered if she had lost her mind.

  ‘The position at the Sailors’ Home, George. You remember?’

  He nodded, though he certainly did not.

  ‘Then you will speak with him? With the baby coming –’ she patted her belly – ‘it would be better for all of us if you were not so much at sea.’

  ‘Of course. He’s leaving soon, for Portland.’ George knew that much. ‘I should speak with him tomorrow.’

  Eliza was satisfied. She packed away her cross-stitch, stroked his head and left the room.

  Better for all of us if I was not so much at sea. Well, she might have something there, he thought. Perhaps a decent spell on dry land and the ocean-fed devils that haunted him would shrivel up, blow away. Perhaps he would learn to sleep and walk and think again like a human man.

  George picked up the dishes scattered about the sitting room and dumped them on the kitchen table. He unwrapped the muslin from a cold roast leg of lamb in the pantry and carved a slice of the meat, then opened the kitchen door to the backyard and sat himself down upon the step.

  He dangled the meat in front of him and whispered the cat’s name. He could hear her among the bushes in the neighbour’s yard. There she was, leaping onto the wall. She ran towards him uttering tiny cries, tugged the meat from his hand and settled over it to eat. George ran a hand over the fur of her head and tried to share her joy.

  Where had William been when he was cast out on that reef? Where had Sarah been when he had been alone and dying? No one had come for him.

  Huddled on the wreck in those first hours, first days, of course, they had all said, they would be rescued soon. A passing ship, someone on shore: the alarm raised, the lifeboats sent, and then all of them home, warm and fed and dry. We are they and they are we and soon they will be here to welcome us home.

  Those first days passed. Every morning fewer left – drowning, dying of thirst and exposure and despair, taken by sharks – and no one had come. Hour after hour after hour clinging to a submerged wreck in the middle of a freezing winter ocean. No food, no water. Hour after hour after hour after hour after hour after hour after hour. There had been no relief from the overwhelming feeling of terror for even a minute, even a second. And then suddenly, in one of those minutes, knowing that they would never come: that he had been abandoned to face this alone.

  By the time the Portland lifeboat finally appeared, George had long since used up his last reserves of hope, optimism, compassion, and it had been some time since he could remember feeling even fear. He had been worn down to the bare nub of human consciousness. Those people on the lifeboat were no longer he; they were no longer we. The lifeboat appeared like a flimsy prop on a badly lit stage, came and left, came and left, and never saved a single one of them. Between each of its visits another handful would die. None of it mattered.

  This was a new world he inhabited. He could not die, but would suffer on here for all eternity, visited by inhabitants of South Australia who would pull near in their boats to stare and to yell and then, as night fell, would return to their families and their homes and their sweet, rich existences. He would live here, always, in a world rimed in salt, his naked body chilled grey and swollen, his tongue cleaved forever to the roof of his mouth: the monstrous, undead king of Carpenters Reef. He had been abandoned. He was not human anymore; he was no longer a part of God’s creation, but something outside it, undreamed of in God’s all-seeing consciousness. He was a creature of the devil.

  In the night, James Hare had died. He had been in life, in the world before Carpenters Reef, first steward of the ship. Now he was dead. He had somehow managed to pass on, to take the natural step of dying. He was gone now, in heaven, while George would live forever on the wreck of the Admella. It had been common practice, when a survivor sensibly died, to tumble their body off the sloping deck into the waves: for the dead, a burial at sea; for the ever-present sharks, a sacrificial meal. But at Hare’s death it was though an unspoken agreement passed among those still left, an acknowledgment that this, now, was their life, that this wreck was their home and they no longer lived among humans or by human rules. Hare’s body had been propped behind the stump of a mast to stop it rolling away, and the slumped shells of those who were left sat and stared upon it. It had been maybe minutes later, maybe hours, when the first of those whitened, swollen ghosts had dragged themselves across the deck to lie by Hare’s body and to lick from his hair the dew that had accumulated during the night. George recalled sitting, watching, wrapped still in Miss Ledwith’s arms, as one among them sucked the dead man’s eyebrows, taking the moisture that was a ghost’s right.

  Had he torn the first shred of flesh, or was it another of his shipmates? He could not recall. All he remembered was the delicious feeling of wetness filling his parched, cracked mouth as he sucked the moist gobbet.

  Whether or not he had been the first was irrelevant – there he was again, in his mind, prostrate before Hare’s body, the familiar face beside his own, digging his nails into the skin to get purchase upon a lump of flesh.

  Had he lain there for hours? Had it been mere minutes before the humans from the other world once more reappeared, yelling, throwing ropes, demanding
attention from the ghosts who wanted nothing more now but to be left alone? He saw them from his wooden bed, watched them through his crusted eyes as they pulled closer and ever closer, calling once more about rescue, salvation. Soon they would go, like all the others had gone.

  Only this time they did not. He turned his head and saw the captain, McEwan as he once was, clinging to a rope above the waves, making his way hand over hand into one of the noisy, insistent lifeboats. George turned his head once more, looked at the ghosts about him. Three were gone – were they in the water? Surely they were not in one of the boats? Of those who sat still, staring, everyone was perfectly quiet, and no person inclined to move.

  George remained among them, his people. All this would pass. All this would pass. He slumped once more into Miss Ledwith’s arms, felt again the crust of her skin against the flaking mess of his own. This was his home.

  How had it come to pass that she had been taken from him? He could remember none of it but the feeling of being suddenly even colder, even more alone. He looked about himself and discovered that Miss Ledwith was gone. Bridget was gone. He had not realised he had any attachment to life left in him until that moment, when he felt it leave. He released his grip on the railings and rolled into the waves. But the waves, those instruments of the Lord, refused him. He tumbled instead into one of the infernal lifeboats, where the monstrous humans bent over him and declared that death was near. What did they know? Death was not for him. He lived now in another world.

  He had woken in hospital, surrounded by humans, by light, by warmth, by noise. He was dry. He was warm. His skin was washed clean of salty crust. His tongue once more moved inside his mouth. He had been thrust back into humanity. He recalled the taste of Hare, and closed his eyes in horror. Had he really to live once more? How could such a thing be possible?

  Why had the waves not taken him? Why was he here?

  He pulled the cat to him but she struggled, evaded his grasp and disappeared into the night.

  2

  George had not married right away after his rescue, though that had been the plan. Eliza said she’d still be happy to have him, though he was broke and broken, but convention was on his side when he told her it was wrong to marry in such a state.

  Instead, when they told him he wasn’t about to die after all, George began searching for Miss Ledwith. He was not alone. All the papers wanted to find her, the only woman survivor of the terrible wreck. How had she lived through such horror? They speculated wildly on what she must have done, felt; where she could have got to. Perhaps she was a man, one said, in disguise. They sent a writer to Victoria, to the goldfields, and he sent word back that he’d met a young fellow, name of Trainor, who was probably Miss Ledwith, though they couldn’t confirm it for certain. Chap had a certain tilt of the nose and a deathly terror of the ocean. The paper gave it eight hundred words. George would have liked to go see for himself, but with no money Victoria was out of the question.

  She had not been a man in disguise. There was something bent about her, but that wasn’t it.

  George took work, went back to sea, made money. He kept his eyes open in port. If any woman passenger was shy, kept her face from view, he made extra sure to draw her out until he was certain that this woman was not her. As the months piled up, money piled up, George’s arms and back and chest got stronger and his reasons for not marrying his fiancée began to look like what they were. For two months more he avoided Eliza and her family and their questions, telling himself he could have until April to solve this thing, to send her back to wherever it was she’d come from, to rid himself of her, and then he must knuckle down to a proper life. Two months.

  There was an article in The Argus. An interview. She told the details of the famous wreck, apologised that she had needed time alone to recover but now she would return to live with her family in Morphett Vale. It was her. But the letter was as though she was a sensible human woman and that tilted George’s conviction. She was a sea creature. He knew that. She had come into the boat from the ocean and she looked and smelled and felt all over like a human woman, but he was damn sure she was not.

  George read the article in Melbourne and for the two days until they sailed he would not be stilled.

  The ship docked in Port Adelaide. William was there, Eliza’s sister’s husband. He took George’s arm and steered him to the pub and while George sat there fidgeting, thinking only about how he needed to set off, to find Miss Ledwith, sea creature or no, William lectured him on how he had put it off too long. It was time to marry Eliza or break off the engagement.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ William said, as George began explaining his ever-thinning reasons for delay. ‘I’m not Eliza’s messenger. You need to tell her yes or no. Tell her yourself.’

  What was he supposed to say? On the ship, William, on the wreck, I only stayed alive because this woman-not-woman wrapped me in her naked flesh. I don’t know who or what she was. She said her name was Ledwith but I saw her with the horses and I can tell you she was no human woman generally and she was no Miss Ledwith specifically. Siren or whatever she was, she is why I am here now and I tell you I’m not ready yet to live life as though I am a normal living man. I ate human flesh, William, and I lived undead naked in this woman’s arms. In all probability she is my unholy bride and how can I marry your sister-in-law, William, if that is the case? I have to find her and marry her or kill her or at least be convinced she is just a frail human woman and maybe then I can be the kind of casually human man that you are, drinking beer and talking about promises as though anything we do matters at all.

  But he said, ‘I will, William. I have a small item of business to attend to and then I will visit Eliza and we will resolve this matter.’

  William opened his mouth as if to say something more but for once he thought better of it. Instead, he took the paper he had tucked under his arm and passed it across the table to George. ‘That young woman,’ he said, ‘the one from your ship. From the wreck. She’s been writing to the paper.’

  George stopped himself from stammering some kind of excuse, apology. William could not see inside his head, however smart the bloke thought himself. He breathed: once, twice. ‘I saw,’ he said, but then looked down at the paper and realised of course it was not The Argus, but The Register. ‘Writing to The Register?’ he said.

  ‘Says there’s an impostor about, some fraud claiming to be her in the Melbourne papers.’

  ‘Oh.’ George opened The Register, flicked to the letters page. ‘It was with interest,’ this woman wrote, ‘that I read last week’s Argus. That paper’s article purported to be an interview with the only female survivor of the wreck of the Admella, a Miss Bridget Ledwith. Unpleasant as it may be, I must find fault with that esteemed journal, as I myself am the former Miss Ledwith.’ It went on and on until ‘Yours sincerely’. She signed, ‘Mrs Ann Avage, Ballarat, Victoria’.

  Ballarat? Mrs Ann Avage? He was not going to Ballarat to look for some woman who claimed to be married to a man called Avage. That was not going to happen. No succubus marries and changes her name to Avage; it simply doesn’t happen.

  ‘I will go see Eliza,’ George said. ‘Now. Why wait? I will go now.’

  ‘Good man,’ William told him.

  3

  After five hours of labour, Eliza had had enough and sent George to fetch the doctor. It was midafternoon, December, hot, and George felt his boots chafe and rub as he stomped down the streets of Port Adelaide. Dust blew up from the road and the grit of it got between his teeth.

  At the door to the doctor’s house, George rubbed his face with a handkerchief to remove some of the sweat and dirt, then rang the bell. The girl who worked there sat him down in the kitchen and poured him a glass of water, said wait.

  ‘He can’t come now,’ she told George when she returned.

  ‘Now is when we need him.’ George kept most of the growl from the edge of his voice.

  ‘Well, he isn’t here. He’s had to go to Largs for
a lady, but I will send him on once he’s back. Will you write your name and address?’ She presented him with a piece of paper and a chewed pencil.

  ‘Do you know how long he will be?’ George laboured a little over the spelling of the street where they now lived, and instead just wrote Seamens Home.

  ‘I couldn’t say. But I’ll have him to your wife as soon as possible. Would you like me also to send a message to the midwife in case she can come?’

  ‘A midwife will do just as well. Better, even.’ George wrote his name and address again and the girl said she would take the message herself, and that George should hurry home. ‘Someone will be with you soon,’ she told him. ‘Tell your wife not to worry.’

  Eliza did not look well, but George did not say so. While he was gone Sarah had arrived and was attending to her sister. She sent George from the room, told him to rest a while, that Eliza would be fine until the midwife arrived, or the doctor, should he come.

  He would wait out the back. That way he would be handy if Sarah needed him, or to let the midwife in once she arrived. When would she arrive? He asked the cat, who lay stretched and rolling in a patch of sunny dust, rubbing the bugs from her fur. Where is this wretched woman? Or this doctor, where is he? George scratched his fingertips along the cat’s belly and listened to her purr.

  There was wood to be ordered for the stoves of the Sailors’ Home. Butter too. A new latch for the stable door. George picked himself up off the back path and went inside, opened the account book, flicked back through the pages to see what Swanforth had paid last time and began writing out the orders. His ear wandered, listening for sounds from their quarters. Was that Eliza? Or that? He scribbled the numbers down and closed the book. She would live, of course she would. She was strong and young, healthy. No one healthier than Eliza. The whole thing had been going on far too long for his taste. Could the baby not just be born? He chewed at the end of the pen, scratched a picture on the blotting paper, an elephant standing on his hind legs and balancing a ball. Was that her? He leaned from the window to hear better, pulled his head back inside when he saw old Mitchell approaching up the road – that man loved nothing better than a mindless gossip and he would not talk now about his wife’s condition.