The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  “Oh sweet Christ!” he murmured. He tore off a small slice of paper—there wasn’t much to waste of the stuff—and pushed a pen and ink toward her. “Come here and write me something.”

  She held the pen deftly and with delicacy, and he was surprised. Then, leaning over the desk, dripping on to it and giving off miasmas that stung his eyes, she began to write, dipping the pen twice. There was some blotting, and when she had finished she waved the sodden paper back and forth, helping it to dry. Then she handed it to him. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” she had written. He studied the succession of vowels, wondering how to get rid of her. Without warning she had her arms around him, threatening to crack his ribs with her maniac strength. Once, in another hemisphere, she’d beaten the wife of a coffee merchant so livid and swollen that members of the jury had wept when the victim gave evidence. In Meg Long’s arms, Lieutenant Clark understood how misused the woman must have been, and why Meg had been given a lifetime’s exile—what the convicts called a bellowser—to a distant star.

  He had only just collected himself to struggle with her when he saw a black face appear over her shoulder. A harmonious voice, marked by elements of French and Kentish and something irreducibly African, came from the face.

  “Ma mère, you must let go that gentleman. Yes, chérie, in the name of the Fragrant One. Ease them little arms of yours. This gentleman is foko to me, is brother, so ease your arms, mammie.”

  Mad, shitty Meg Long let go of Lieutenant Clark and began to caress the black man’s face. His name was John Caesar. He came from Madagascar and invoked the Fragrant One, some sort of Madagascan god, endlessly. He was very dangerous—the strongest and hungriest of all the prisoners.

  “I have come here for the play, maître,” he told Ralph, pushing Meg Long deftly to one side. “There was a black servant in every play I see in Maidstone.” He had been someone’s servant in Maidstone once. His great member was said to be renowned among the convict women, but not always welcomed by them, since he turned so easily to blows.

  Lieutenant Clark thought he had better not entertain Black Caesar’s artistic ambitions too much, since he had seen how dangerous it had been to give any space to Meg Long’s. “There are no black men at all in this play,” said Ralph, his head pulsing. Meg Long’s lunatic muscles had squeezed all the blood into his brain. “There are no black servants, Caesar.”

  “There be always beaucoup black servants in every drama I see,” Black Caesar insisted, frowning.

  “Now do not argue with me,” said Ralph. “It is not down to me that there are not black roles in the play; it is down to George Farquhar, who wrote the play eighty years ago, before you were born, and who died of consumption before he was as old as you or me.”

  Now, in the lessening rain, there was a crowd of convict women, noisy but waiting to be invited in, at the flap of the tent. They displayed that delicacy which, apparently, Madagascans lacked. Ralph saw among the faces that of Liz Barber, who had once, aboard the convict transport Friendship, invited Captain Meredith to kiss her arse and called him a thief. Now she wanted, of course, to be first woman of the stage in this penal latitude. In her berserkly enthusiastic face, Ralph could tell what a grief this play, demanded by H.E. and Davy, might be for him.

  “I will take your name,” Lieutenant Clark told the Madagascan, and did so. “If we find we need a black servant, I shall send to the sawpits for you.”

  Oh what an axeman he was, the Madagascan! “By the Fragrant One,” said Black Caesar, almost gently, “you will need a black servant. Tout le monde needs a black servant for their play.”

  “I shall send to the sawpits,” Ralph Clark promised again, trying to keep out of his voice the hope that Caesar would return to his labour.

  The Madagascan went, but Meg Long sat for hours by the tent flap, just inside, listening without comment or movement as forty convicts, men and women, offered their halting readings to Ralph, some with nearly as much desperation as Miss Long had earlier shown, as if they sensed like her that their best chance out of hunger and lovelessness and a bad name was to capture the first primitive stage of this new earth.

  CHAPTER 2

  Isle of Turnips

  April 2nd 1789

  Concerning the play The Recruiting Officer:

  For the Information of His Excellency.

  General Principles of Procedure—

  For the chief male parts, those with less outlandish British accents. West Country people—whom the convicts call Zedlanders, I notice, because of their well-known inability to pronounce S—will serve pretty well for the lower and more comic parts. The play is set in Shrewsbury, but there are not many Salopians among the prisoners, and certainly none with any Thespian ability. For the women, Melinda and Silvia should be capable of polite London accents, but Rose and Lucy can be wilder. Nancy Turner, the Perjurer, would be a perfect Melinda—she is handsome and dark. But perjurers should not be honoured, particularly in parts which have been graced by a line of great actresses, beginning with Mrs. Rogers. I might say it is surprising to find her reading for a play the day after her lover Dukes was hanged, reading without apparent grief. There’s a steeliness to the woman, however, which might be the mask of grief.

  So far I have settled upon only one actor—Henry Kable has the right levity and intelligence to play Captain Plume. His East Anglian voice is very pleasant, and given that he is a convict overseer he will be able to keep order among the others. Your Excellency might remember too he is a characteristic East Anglian Dane, very fair-haired, but his complexion a quite handsome leathery brown. Your Excellency might also remember that he is married to the convict Holmes and that his history is somewhat more interesting than that of the run of felons. He is still a thief—I remember from the Friendship how when he was working the pumps with another lag he managed to cut a way into the forrard stowage and take a quantity of flour. But his present behaviour is such, and his engaging character so marked, that we are not likely to find another quite like him. I shall keep Your Excellency informed concerning the preparations for our play.

  Your obedient servant,

  Ralph Clark,

  Lieutenant, Marines.

  At the noon bell he cleared the auditioning convicts from his tent and Private Ellis brought him his plain lunch of rice pudding and bread. He ate the food without joy, and it sat like a cramp on his belly. The sun appeared, and suddenly the tent was full of those great black flies which infested this littoral. He would have liked to sleep, but he had a duty to his turnips.

  A pug-faced man of about fifty years, wearing a crooked three-cornered hat, stuck his head in at the tent flap. “Holy Christ, Ralph,” he said. “I swear I saw Baker watching me this morning, when I rose at first light to take a piss.”

  Private Baker had been hanged with the other Marines just yesterday, and it was normal for Harry Brewer, the Provost Marshal and owner of the rumpled face, to see the phantoms of the hanged.

  “Did he speak?” asked Ralph, feeling again the oppressiveness both of yesterday’s extreme punishment and of the sickly liquor in his blood.

  “Nothing. I spoke, Ralph, though I am not sure he stayed to hear. I told him I was the one in possession of the earth, I was the only one with an active manhood left to ply. He was not the sharpest man of intelligence and it will take some days for it to come to his attention that his cock has fought its last fight.”

  Ralph wondered how Harry Brewer’s image of the dead’s behaviour fitted with the Christian doctrine of Heaven and Hell, of deliverance or damnation at the second of death. There was something heathen, Portuguese, or even Chinese about Harry’s belief that spirits delayed and lingered and had to be spoken to harshly to make them move on.

  Harry Brewer came fully into the tent now. There was a bottle of port in one hand. “If I come out to your island with you, we could sit in the shade and watch your old lag do the hoeing and recuperate ourselves. I want to get away from this Bedlam here. Every whore calling congratulations
to me because Baker’s hanged. Sometimes I wish I was a man of virtue, like you, Ralph.”

  “You have lost a rival.” Clark smiled, lively now that the prospect of going out to the island had been raised—inspired also to eloquence by having read all morning the playwright George Farquhar’s well-balanced sentences. “And gained only the small annoyance of a ghost.”

  A shudder—the sort of spirituous shudder good bottlemen seem to suffer as they get older—rattled through Harry’s features.

  Harry Brewer protested, “But you know I am unhappy to see any rival vanish that way. The hemp quinsey, as the convicts call hanging, and the shitten breeches. Christ, I swear I hate it.”

  “Well, there are no executions in our little comedy here,” said Ralph, patting his two copies of the play.

  “Deo gratias,” said Harry. He had picked up fragments of Papist Latin in such places as Rio and Narbonne. He and H.E. had once spied on harbour fortifications in France, but enjoyed the occasional High Mass as well.

  On the way down to the dinghy, Harry murmured, with that terrifying nothing-to-lose candour of his, “What I fear is that she had more ardour for Handy Baker than she does for me.” Ralph felt desire pass through him like nausea.

  The she Harry spoke about was a nineteen-year-old convict who was still known by the name she had been given in childhood by her mob, her canting crew. The name was Duckling. Ralph did not think Duckling was very clever, but she had wonderful breasts and good sharp features. Harry Brewer, thirty years older, was possessed by her and it did not make him happy.

  “When I put my hand on her,” Harry continued with his usual frankness, “her eyes deaden. What would you expect? She has been on sale since she was eight years of age. All I hope is that her eyes deadened when she was with Baker.”

  Private Ellis was already at the dinghy in his shirtsleeves. He grunted in a way Ralph associated with low intelligence as he rowed them forth across the deep anchorages of the cove. Even from a little distance the town looked what it was—a pitiably half-matured conception of some distant and dispassionate idea. On the east side of the stream they saw H. E., “the Captain” as Harry called him, strolling with the native Arabanoo in H.E.’s vegetable garden. H.E. looked comically bandy, but the native—in white knee breeches and naval jacket—dazzled the eye. Harry Brewer gave a little shrug. No more than a lot of other people had he approved of H. E.’s plan of finding one of the savages of the locality and quickly turning him into a gentleman ambassador back to his own people. But Harry could not say so even though others loudly did. There was a sort of balance operating between H.E. and Harry. H.E. did not condemn Harry for sleeping with a convict, and so Harry did not condemn H.E.’s strange enthusiasms.

  “I would like to use Ketch Freeman for the role of Justice Balance,” Ralph confessed as, groaning and sniffling and muttering to himself, Private Ellis pulled wildly on his starboard oar to yank them round the point of the cove. “Do you think it’s proper to use him?”

  “Ketch Freeman came to read lines for you?”

  “Yes. He has the right sense of bitter funniness.”

  “I suppose the poor bastard would have.”

  “If he is known as an actor, people won’t spit in his shadow.”

  Ketch Freeman was the public hangman.

  As they rounded the point and H.E.’s garden, H.E. bending to demonstrate the nature of com to Arabanoo, Ralph was able to perceive in its entirety this outermost penal station in the universe. By its serving officers a number of whimsical names for it had been invented: Lagtown, Felonville, Cant City, Cullborough, Mobsbury. Actually H.E. had named it plainly after the distant person of a London political jobber, Tommy Townshend, Home Secretary in the government of Britain, who had in his care all prisons—even this enormously removed, out-of-doors one. Townshend had been ennobled as Viscount Sydney, and so Sydney was the name H.E. chose.

  Ralph had always thought that to name things was to end their innocence. Naming children, he believed, was so dangerous that no name was put to his son, Ralphie, until the child was actually being christened. In having Tommy Townshend’s name stuck on it, the place had taken on the flavour of British factional politics, and it had lived up to its name by being factional, sectional, violent. Though almost a year’s travel lay between this convict moon and the politics of Westminster, the members of the officers mess formed crazy little parties and cliques with all the bitter energy of a true parliament. They wrote partisan letters for and against H.E. to old school friends who happened to work at the Admiralty or the Home Office—mail no ships ever came to collect.

  The place which had been chosen for this far-off commonwealth and prison, and named Sydney Cove in the spirit of events, faced the sun, which here was always in the north. This reminded you, if you thought about it, that home was always on the other side of the sun—eight moons of navigation away if you were lucky, a year or more if not. The land on either side of the cove was divided down the middle by a fresh-water stream flowing out of a low hinterland among cabbage-tree palms, native cedars, the strange, obdurate eucalyptus trees of a type which (as Ralph was assured by scholars like Davy) occurred nowhere else in all Creation. Ralph had not liked to say, in the face of Davy’s botanical excitement, that the rest of the world had been lucky to miss out on these twisted, eccentric plants. But if, as Dick Johson believed, it was the great flood of Noah which had drowned the unlovely eucalypts elsewhere than here, then elsewhere than here was lucky to have missed them.

  There was a steely tree too which when struck with the axe either took a gap out of the blade or began to bleed a blood-red sap. It was, Ralph thought, a fair symbol not only of the strangeness of this reach of space but of the criminal soul as well.

  This penal town station had the literal appearance of a town because of its peculiar circumstances. There were no walls or compounds—space and distance and time were the walls and the compound. So, like London, Paris, Vienna, and any other settlement marked by the European genius, the town had already developed quarters and suburbs—a fashionable side and a rough side. The stream was the divider. If your eye started on the west arm of the town, for example—the exactly opposite pole to the point where H.E. was presently entertaining a savage in his garden—Lagtown began with the hut of Lieutenant Will Dawes, the astronomer, and his observatory. Dawes lived apparently happily over there, always abstracted. He tried to avoid garrison and court duty, since they interfered with his observations. Because the night sky was so different here and so engrossing, he avoided mess nights with Major Robbie Ross. His coat was already merely a mid pink, as if the militariness was being bleached out of him by the moon.

  Near them was Surgeon Johnny White’s hospital and its garden. Next you could see the bakehouse which stood close to the beach and on the edge of the women’s camp. The women prisoners lived under a high shelf of rock and in a suburb of shacks, the walls being panels of wattle and daub, roofs of thatch cut in a hurry from the grasses which grew along this shore.

  When the women had first landed from the prison transports thirteen months before, they had been given only a sheet of canvas to make tents and awnings. They camped under those escarpments of rocks, down which the afternoon and evening thunderstorms of Sydney’s strange Februarys ran gushing. In the weeks before the six convict transports and their accompanying storeships vanished again, making for India or China to find cargoes, you would see love-struck sailors coming ashore with carpenters’ tools, doing their best to work the hard and contorted timbers which grew here, putting up for those women they had known on the endless voyage little huts and cabins—gifts of love which, like love itself, had small chance of keeping the weather out.

  South of the camp of women lay a men’s cantonment large because of the great number of male prisoners. Then, farther south again, stood the parade ground and the Marine encampment. Officers, the company of Marines and their listless wives lived here, as did Ralph, who had been able to acquire some sawn planks and shingles
for the making of his one-room habitation. In this quarter too could be found the courthouse of the Judge Advocate Davy Collins, constructed by the convict brickmaster, Jimmy Bloodsworth, using red clay he had found a short walk behind the cove. Bloodsworth’s bricks were scarce, were treasures. Between Capetown and Valparaiso, between the South Pole and Batavia, Bloodsworth’s bricks were the only materials of any substance.

  The little stream which divided the city of lags was able to be forded. The water of the spring came down from no snowbound mountains, but from a temperate inland, and it was pleasant to wade across keeping a lookout along the banks for the iguanas of the region, who were large and muscular and full of arrogance.

  Once you were across the stream, you were on the better, or eastern, side of things. Ground had been rationally cleared to make some large vegetable gardens. Those convicts who had trades and a good record lived here. So did many public officials. Henry Kable, the convict overseer who Ralph considered might make a good Captain Plume, had the dignity of living here. Will Bryant, the only lag who knew fishing and spouse of that Dabby Bryant who had eased Ralph’s dreams, had also lived over here until caught stealing part of the catch. You found, too, on the east side of the stream a number of women convicts who occupied the suburb by right of concubinage: the Jewish prisoner Esther, who lived with Lieutenant George Johnston, H. E.’s aide-de-camp, or the London thief Duckling, who lived with Harry Brewer. But they all knew that like Bryant they might be cast back over the stream for any criminal act, and that their official protectors might not be willing to prevent it.

  Two bays around from Sydney Cove and still deeply within the great blue protection of the harbour lay Ralph’s island garden. Once Ralph had worked it on his own, but then convicts began swimming around the shoreline to it to steal carrots or turnips. So the old convict Amstead, a West Country thief of roofing lead, had been put out on the island as a nightwatchman and a day labourer.