The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  There were jokes in the officers’ mess about H.E. training Arabanoo for as long as an Oxford undergraduate, and there were the normal insinuations which had prevailed in the matter of H.E.’s friendship with Harry Brewer—stories of how long ago H.E.’s wife had left him, and why she may have done it; the intimations of sodomy.

  Ralph knew the imputations were unjust. It was apparent H.E. took his task of communing somehow, soul to soul, with these strange beings too seriously to take easy gratification with a robust young native, even if that had been his taste, a matter never proven by anyone. Perhaps the business of living inside a petty officer’s uniform in the city of lags would not have confused Arabanoo as much if H.E.’s appetite for keeping him at his side had expressed itself in some obvious carnal manner. Ralph thought you could tell, by the Indian native’s puzzlement, that it had not.

  After a particularly flamboyant exchange between Worthy/Sideway and Brazen/Wisehammer, Arabanoo raised both hands in the air, vibrated them and let loose a congratulatory vibrato wail, his tongue trembling between his lips like a bird’s.

  Given that the native so clearly liked the preparations of the play, H.E. began to visit the playmaking with him every afternoon. Arabanoo was somehow aware these were not the convicts in their normal persons, but in their transformed persons. And given that ritual was not unknown among the Indians themselves, Arabanoo seemed to take some comfort from the rehearsals. It was possible, thought Ralph, that he considered the reading of the lines and the rehearsal of actions to have religious meaning, and Ralph was beginning to wonder himself if it were so.

  Arabanoo was captured on the lag city’s first New Year’s Eve in the middle of the previous summer. Or as H.E. looked on it, he was rescued, taken out of his ab origine timelessness and introduced to breeches and naval jacket and the Gregorian calendar. 1789, which according to the astronomer Lieutenant Dawes promised—through its combination of cabalistic numbers—to be an exceptional year, would be a lake Arabanoo must enter and swim in, just as Ralph and H.E. and Dawes himself did. He would have to interpret this new and unfamiliar framework of days to his brothers and sisters, the ab origine inhabitants.

  H.E. had become convinced that a native must be captured and trained as a mediator, since no one saw the Cadigal people any more, the tribe who shared the south side of the harbour with the new penal society. The smallpox epidemic had not yet manifested itself, but there were other reasons the tribe avoided the town—the stealing of Cadigal nets and weapons by the convicts, and the passing of venereal sores to the Cadigal women. There were incidents which H. E. chose to take as a warning of coming battle.

  A week before Christmas a number of the lags who worked at the brick kilns came running into town, out of breath and mad in the eye, claiming two thousand natives had appeared from the south that morning and stood facing them with painted faces and bodies. Some of these faces which presented themselves at the kilns were entirely an unearthly white, or were striped with white and ochre in the most frightening way. All were armed with spears whose points of bone, stone, and stingray tails were a poignant reminder to any European that his blood was not absolutely supreme.

  The natives had dispersed only when the convicts pointed their spades and shovels at them in the manner of the Marines’ muskets. The entire confrontation had proceeded in awesome silence.

  Davy Collins had already, of course, made up tables of population for the Cadigal, and he was sure they did not have two thousand warriors. Even so, both he and H.E. agreed on the need to find a man to stand in the middle between the Cadigal and the penal society.

  The finest minds in the penal settlement wanted a native seized and groomed: H.E., Davy, Watkin. When it came to finding officers for the enterprise, however, Jemmy Campbell nominated George Johnston and the astronomer Will Dawes. It was believed that reclusive young Dawes was beginning to consider himself a civilian, and that to make him participate in a more or less military expedition would recall his mind to his true position. Dawes, however, who was making the map of these skies and had the authority of that behind him, went to H.E. He pleaded not only that he was too busy at the observatory but that he could not in conscience and honour take part in any punitive or man-trapping excursions into the forests. And because of his frankness, and H.E.’s prejudice in favour of science, he was excused.

  Ralph was chosen in his place.

  The duty made him unhappy. But he needed promotion then—Captain Shea had not yet gone under to his consumptive disease and Ralph was still second lieutenant, anxious for the further seven shillings a week which elevation to a full lieutenancy would bring him. At that time, the last day of 1788, the play had not yet been proposed, and so he could not claim that special judicial, scientific, or other duties had a prior call on his time.

  The expedition to capture a native required two longboats. One of them was commanded by the officer from the Supply, the penal storeship which ran back and forth between the outer settlement of Norfolk Island and Sydney Cove. On its runs, the Supply traversed spaces and seas where it knew it would never see another craft. Its officer, Lieutenant Ball, had found in the midst of the ocean, halfway between the principal convict station of Sydney Cove and the minor one, a pinnacle of rock, a blade of stone high as a pyramid emerging from the ocean. To encounter it and to name it was as sweet as the construction of some great monument—as good as an act of creation. It was no surprise that after such experiences in mid-ocean, Lieutenant Ball would be willing to lead an expedition, given that its purpose was to vivify and transform—perhaps with a new name—one of these beings ab origine.

  The second boat in the excursion was commanded by George Johnston, with Ralph as his second lieutenant. George was a well-made young Scot, popular with his brother officers both because of his joviality and his willingness to conspire. He was no scholar and he drank too much. The rumour was that he was much hectored by his lag mistress, Esther Abrahams, but his temper was too volatile for anyone to mention that to his face.

  It was a hot but not unpleasant day out on the massive reaches of the harbour. As they passed Ralph’s island, old Amstead hoeing away at the potato beds and taking no notice of any other business, Ralph spoke to Johnston, who sat beside him in the bows, armed with a sword and a pistol.

  “Do you think a native will really be changed? Just by bringing him to town.”

  “First,” said George, patting the scabbard of his sword, “we’ll have Christ’s own time finding one. Their childlike trust ain’t childlike trust any more, Ralphy.”

  “The convicts haven’t been changed by being brought all that space. So how can we alter a native by bringing him back across the harbour.”

  “I wouldn’t say the lags hadn’t been changed, Ralph,” Johnston murmured. Perhaps he was thinking of Esther, who gave him his nightly remission.

  “Ralph Clark,” said Ralph, “is still Ralph Clark. Fortunate not in any cleverness but in his marriage to a divine wife. People are the people they are.”

  “You do mean to give me proper help in this exercise, do you, Ralph? You would shoot a black bastard to save Georgie’s life, wouldn’t you?” George buffeted him jokingly on the shoulder.

  “I would even shoot one to save myself.”

  “To save a second lieutenant, Ralph. I wonder would Robbie consider that a proper expenditure of a ball?”

  But after they had laughed, Ralph said, “Each native has those of his family who depend on him for their food.”

  “I’m sure they’ll find someone to take up the slack for the one we catch.”

  They had rounded the harbour’s middle cape and traversed the swell surging in through the headlands which gave to the open sea. Lieutenant Ball called back to them, drawing their attention to the crowds of natives visible on the sheltered beach on the north side, the beach H.E. had called Manly as a gesture of esteem for the Indians on that side of the water. High up on a rock ledge above the sand two men with clubs in their hands were dragging large
iguanas out of their lairs and killing them—not with clubs, but by a deft movement of one hand—which stopped the meat from being bruised. Ralph saw a muscular savage hold up an iguana triumphantly, as if to the applause of people on the beach below, or even of the ghosts in the longboats. For that—said Davy Collins, who had begun his study of the native tongue by trading names of visible things with the Indians, and had then been able to move on to more subtle questions with them—was what the Cadigal and their Gayimai relatives on the north shore thought the convicts, Marines and sailors were. Bow-wan. Or mahn or tu-ru-ga, as Ralph remembered being called by an old native in Botany Bay. Tu-ru-ga. A fallen star.

  As the longboats worked themselves in stern first to kiss the beach, Ralph thought the native act of primal boasting poignant, given the intentions of all those fallen stars drawing near. From the bows of Lieutenant Johnston’s boat, he saw the iguana hunters descending from their rock ledge, old men appearing from the fringe of acacias, women running with strange tentativeness from among the boulders where they had been harvesting shellfish.

  As arranged, Ralph and the Marines stayed by the boats, while Ball and Johnston and the sailors walked up the beach to the crowd. Ralph was as always astonished by the strange deportment of these creatures, the way they looked so frankly and curiously into the visitors’ eyes. There was no doubt these beings who had lived here from before the Flood, who knew nothing of Zion or the Ark of the Covenant or the Redemption of Christ, who had been protected by eight moons from news of the wheel and the plough, were baffled by their new neighbours, were still looking for a definition of them. They seemed to find meaning in the most accidental aspects: they would seek out a sailor, for example, who was missing a tooth, and the old men would put their fingers in the gap—often to the distaste of the sailor who would nonetheless be under orders from his superiors to stand still. It was Davy Collins’s belief that the native Indians were trying to find explanations to the arrival of the lags and Marines in terms of spirit, rebirth, fable, rather than in terms which had to do with the hard-headed plans of the Admiralty or Home Office.

  Ralph noticed that it was specifically the youngest and strongest men who hesitated most among the ferns and acacias at the edge of the beach. It seemed they might think their young strength and virtue was what the visitors had come searching for, and of course—Ralph knew—it was exactly so. The women, however, came close, talked incessantly, flourished their hands in front of their enormous eyes; every woman identically marked by the loss of all but the stub of the little finger of her left hand. What did that mean? Ralph had always wanted to know. Why was it essential to the physics of their world that no woman carry a full left hand?

  Her own face and shoulders glittering with fish oil, one of the women ran her hand down the sweat on Sergeant Scott’s face. The sergeant’s moisture astounded her and she began cawing with delight, raising her hand to show her sisters. Some old men began to sing, and through the press two young ones appeared. They were a little taller than the European average, and sinewy, exactly the types of men who had caused H. E. to affix that name—Manly. For since the Creation they had lived on rock oysters, robust kangaroo, sweet-fleshed iguana, and whiting.

  The two young men who had now advanced did so silently, as if all the mad singing and wailing had evoked them, had somehow elected them. One smiled as he got nearer. The other stayed sombre. Five steps from Lieutenant Ball, the sombre one was intercepted by a round, gleaming, shrewish native woman who began to argue with him. This amused the sailors from the Supply. They were used to the shrewishness of the women’s camp and saw manifested in this woman the antiquity and universality of the hell-hag. The young husband argued with her for a while, using moderate tones, while at an increasing pitch she pointed to a large pouch of grass around the other young man’s neck, and on the strength of it seemed to be accusing her husband of turning up—in the presence of the fallen stars—improperly dressed.

  But he argued her down; he had an authoritative presence. Clearly, in his innocence, he believed he did not need an amulet to face Lieutenants Ball and Johnston.

  Though his muscular friend was animated and laughed a lot, it was this man—the man who had silenced his strident wife—who began playing the word game with Lieutenant Ball. Exchange of words had become the protocol for meetings between the two societies.

  “Nose,” said Lieutenant Ball, while one of the women ran her hand wonderingly down his blue naval jacket. As he said the word, he pointed to the centre of his face.

  “No-gro,” sang the authoritative young native and touched his own nose.

  Lieutenant Johnston, surrounded by women staring fixedly at his red coat, parted his lips and pointed into the black cavity between. “Mouth,” he said.

  “Ca-ga,” sang the young native, and his companion and all the women and children chortled in chorus, while still the old men sang chants of their own devising and aged purpose.

  “Teeth.”

  “Da-ra.”

  “Lips.”

  “Wil-ing.”

  “Ear.”

  “Go-ray.”

  The game increased in speed, and Ralph, standing with his Marines by the stern of Johnston’s longboat, small harbour waves sucking at the heels of his boots, had the strong impression the natives were seeking a word of their own which fitted one from the other tongue, and when that word was found, the whole mystery could become clear. With that one coincident word, Ralph was certain the natives believed, the fallen stars, the ghosts, could then unravel their way back to their own place. With this understanding of the native’s energy in seeking a word which fitted, Ralph felt, like a loss of breath, an unbalancing grief at his loss of Betsey Alicia, felt weighing on his head the fabulous distance which lay between him and that small divine woman who now ran incoherently through his sleeping hours.

  And so the game continued for a while.

  “Hand.”

  “Tam-mir-ra.”

  “Arm.”

  “Ta-rang.”

  “Thumb.”

  “Wy-o-man-no,” sang the young man. His voice was liquid and lyrical.

  Lieutenant Johnston pointed to the man’s bitter-mouthed wife. “Woman.”

  All the women laughed now the argument was moving closer to them. Some thrust their hips out and felt their upper thighs, others covered their faces under the impact of such hilarity.

  “Din-al-le-ong.”

  The second young man, the one with the pouch around his neck, jostled his companion. He too seemed now anxious to find the coinciding word and began to look into the eyes of Lieutenants Ball and Johnston with the avidity which had earlier marked the women.

  “Belly.”

  “Bar-ong.”

  “Leg.” Lieutenant Johnston slapped his white breeches. They were kept laundered for him by his little shoplifter.

  “Da-ra.”

  The two Indian men were now standing one-legged, their right legs bent, and the sole of their right feet lodged against their left knees while each patted his upper leg. Lieutenant Ball of the Supply gave his signal. Five sailors grabbed the first young man, the one who had been so wisely warned by his wife. Three had him by the upper body, and there was one to each of his legs. The native with the pouch at his neck opened his mouth to roar at this treachery, but the visitors were all over him, too, and a fist was shoved in his mouth as a sort of gag. The women began to scream and advance and Ralph brought his Marines a little way up the beach to block them. The plump young wife took to beating the shoulders of a sailor with a pointed tuber-digging stick, and a magnificent young man emerged from the fringe of trees behind the beach throwing stones, a doomed loving scream rising from him.

  The first young man, the spouse of the wise plump wife, was thrown into Lieutenant Ball’s boat, which immediately pulled away from shore. Ralph and his Marines held the line while behind them Johnston’s crew tried to load the other native. This one, however, fought valiantly. Dragging one of the sailors with him int
o deeper water, he commenced to drown him. Ralph, stealing one glance over his shoulder, caught sight of the sailor floating limp while the savage swam vigorously away.

  Without particular fear, Ralph now saw spears and firebrands arching toward his line of Marines. All the beach and the entire hillside seemed to Ralph to give off a cloud of missiles. He heard grunts as his men were hit by stones or digging sticks, but he himself was not struck. The spears, even those Ralph hated—pronged with the tailbone of the stingray—seemed to clatter about their ankles, deprived of impetus.

  “Fire!” advised George Johnston from Ralph’s rear, and without waiting for Ralph’s order the Marines let off a thunderous but poorly managed volley which caused no visible harm to the Indians.

  “Ralph,” George called again more urgently. “We’re giving the other one up!”

  Ralph tumbled his frightened Marines back into the longboat, while still in the shallows taking one blow across the shoulders from the digging stick of a woman as he launched himself aboard. The sailors pulled away vigorously, the half-drowned sailor lying gasping in the bottom of the boat. The coxswain of the Supply threw a burning branch, which landed on the thwart beside Ralph, overboard and into the harbour. Ralph could hear the captured native in the other longboat wailing and keening, and then in deeper water saw him tethered with rope to the thwarts and raising manacled hands.

  “This has been damned wrong, George,” called Ralph, his shoulder still stinging, and saw two panting Marines nudge each other.

  “Black bastard tried to drown poor Johnny,” murmured the coxswain.