I remember noticing he’d mixed up a big pot of blue poster paint that was standing before the wall with a brush in it, but I didn’t really think much about it. We were both admiring the painting; it was only at that moment that I understood that it was finished and also what a wonderful thing it was. I didn’t even get a chance to photograph it—all my pictures are from earlier days, they’re of the work in progress. Lee was nodding and muttering, the way he does, he was pretty impressed too, I think. And that was when Thursday bent down and picked up the brush in the blue pot.
He started at the bottom, with the sea, pulling a swathe of bright blue horizontally across the picture from right to left, obliterating the yellow sands first, pushing back from left to right to paint out the estuary, then recharging his brush and beginning to wipe out the figures on the plain before the city. It was so quick, so decisive, there didn’t seem to be anything, short of physically restraining him, that we could do. We just watched, gobsmacked. Fascinated.
Because, you see, it wasn’t an act of wanton destruction. He wasn’t really destroying his painting. What he was doing was showing us something that had happened. It was exactly like what he did when I first had the idea of giving him paints, when he drew that mark on the floor in the dust and then rubbed it out. This was the same. He’d made his city and now he was painting it out. Or rather, he wasn’t painting it out, he was showing us how it had been destroyed. Swallowed by blue. Swallowed by the ocean.
It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, said C, and it was also one of the most eloquent. He painted out that painting with a kind of ritualistic flourish that was intensely moving. We just watched. It was extraordinary, really; we did nothing, we just watched. And when he finished, he put the brush back into the pot and went and sat down on the floor in the place he was when I first saw him. The way a man sits down after he has made a speech perhaps. A confession. Or a testament. Or even a plea. I don’t know.
And then, while we were standing there, Lee and I, and Thursday was sitting on the floor, as if it had been scripted by some Kafka of the North, the door crashed open and three men came in. Two guards and some freckled fellow in a safari suit, who was in charge. They’d been sent to arrest Thursday and take him away, and the guards just picked him up off the floor and dragged him out. Lee protested to the man in charge but he ignored him; and then he told me that my permit to visit Berrimah had been withdrawn and that I must make my way immediately off the premises. So I did.
We were about to be evicted ourselves. The waitress had cleared the table of all but the whisky glasses and I could feel her monitoring the level in those glasses, waiting for us to finish and go so she get the table ready for the evening rush. We drank our drinks, C paid with a card, we left. And went for a walk along the cove.
There were fragments of green weed, pink lichen, white shells and the bladders and cerulean tendrils of bluebottles disposed upon the ochre sands as if laid down in a pattern by some sightless hand, some agency with an innate and exquisite sense of form; but it was only the detritus the last tide had left when it withdrew. Small waves broke close in shore and hissed up the beach. C took off her shoes and left human footprints behind her, to be filled up by the salts and iodines of the sea and then expunged. She didn’t say anything for a long time and neither did I.
And then: There’s one other thing I haven’t told you.
Thursday spoke. He said a word. One single word. It was just before he filled his brush with blue and began to paint the progress of the sea rising to obliterate his city. He made a graceful gesture with his right hand, palm upwards, sweeping across the picture. As if giving the place a name before it should return into oblivion. I’m deaf; I didn’t hear it properly, wasn’t sure what he’d said though I knew that he’d spoken. Lee told me afterwards what he’d heard. Or what he thought he’d heard. He came up to my hotel that night and we talked the whole thing through. Thursday had been taken off to solitary; Lee hadn’t been allowed to see him again. The whole matter was subject to an inquiry. All that bureaucratic crap those places go in for. But the word, yes, the word. The word was Isinglass.
Isinglass, I repeated. Beautiful, mysterious word. Doesn’t it have something to do with fish?
She didn’t hear or she didn’t answer, walking head down, examining the abstract patterning of the sand, bending to pick up a shell. Isinglass is indeed a sort of gelatine that is extracted from the swim bladders of fish, traditionally the sturgeon and especially the beluga sturgeon; but latterly the bladders of cod and other fish have been substituted. Cooked up with gum tragacanth in a bain-marie, it is used as a glue to repair parchments, especially parchment upon which pigments have been painted; and also for patching goldbeater’s skin, that outer layer of a calf’s stomach which helps stabilise the precious metal as it is hammered into the very thin sheets called foil.
Isinglass is or was also a constituent of jelly in confectionery and desserts, part of a solution for the preservation of eggs and a fining to take away the cloudiness in beer or the sediments in wine. But a city? How is it a name for a city? After all, it’s only an old Dutch word, huisenblas, for a sturgeon’s bladder, now sometimes confused with mica, and so corrupted into its present English form.
C didn’t know and didn’t seem to care. Perhaps it was the whisky or perhaps it was the exigencies of the telling of her tale: she had relapsed into a silence I could not penetrate. When I stood in front of her so that she could see my lips move, and suggested we return to the city, she merely shrugged her assent; and we turned and trudged back up the beach, past the turnaround, the restaurant and the pub, to the car; where, holding on to the open passenger side door and facing me across the roof, she said she was sorry, it wasn’t me, it was the events of the last week or so, they had just hit her, she felt unspeakably tired and all she wanted to do now was lie down and go to sleep.
In the car she took her glasses off, laid them in the lap of her yellow skirt, put her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes; and that’s how she stayed as I drove through the little village, past the Church of Our Lady Star of the Sea, whose mission is the saving of those in peril on the deep, up the hill and along the ridge again before plunging down against roaring tides of rush-hour traffic into the violent sunset haemorrhaging in the west.
She woke up as we came out of the tunnel under Kings Cross into William Street. Looked around in that startled way that sleepers do when they return to the sublunary world and wonder where they have come to, where exactly they have been.
Oh, she said, scrambling for her glasses, I was in Portmeirion. Where are we?
Not in Portmeirion, that Italianate prisoner’s village designed and built by her grandfather at Gwynedd on the Snowdonia coast of Wales, but Sydney in autumn with the sun going down.
Shards of low light splintered like glass against the towers. I took the right at the top of the hill by Hyde Park and drove past the aquatic centre, the cathedral, the barracks and the mint, the hospital, the parliament, the libraries in Macquarie Street, the gardens and then went round the block and up to Reception at the Intercontinental. I didn’t know how or even if the evening would proceed, and nor I think did she. We looked at each other in the yellow gloom of that perfunctory drop-off point.
Can you come in for a moment? she said.
If I can find a place to put the car I can, I said.
I watched her walk away through the sliding door seeming, in her golden skirt and green top, somehow slighter than her years; then went to see if I could squeeze in at the back of the rank in Hunter Street, where half a dozen legal parking spots, to the annoyance of taxi drivers, persist.
When I came back to the hotel she was nowhere to be seen. The Treasury Lounge was closed so I joined the idlers idling in another bar, beneath domes and palms, as if among the longueurs of some post-dated novel by Somerset Maugham. I remember in my childhood how my mother used to say, in pauses in conversation with my father and their friends, Yes, Maugham.
I was only dimly aware that this was a famous author’s name. I thought a Maugham might be an exclamation, or a kind of cake layered with cream and jam, perhaps even something you might tuck around your knees when you were cold; though I certainly knew the word evoked a world that was not, however much we might desire it to be, ours.
Instead of a pink gin, then, I ordered a beer and sat down to wait where I could see the lifts: C must have gone to her room, I thought, and I did not see how I could follow her there.
When she stepped out of the lift and came over to where I was she was wearing a light-cream cashmere cardigan unbuttoned over the same yellow skirt and green lace top.
I didn’t know it got so cool here in the evenings, she said, sitting down and pulling her cardie close across her chest. No, I don’t like beer; and anyway, that second whisky nearly finished me off. I think I’ll have a cup of tea.
The Earl Grey came and she drank it, English-style, with lemon. I was still inadvertently in my faux Maugham fantasy and, for the first time, regretted the paucity of words between us. Or rather, the scantiness of my portion of the conversation. I would have liked to riff a while on those absurd connections that we haul, like irretrievable lagan, across the weedy bottoms of our psyches. Our Maughams and Portmeirions, our Ladbroke Groves and Cypress Avenues, our Freud and Fitzroy and Madame Joy.
What about Lee? I said instead. Where’s he at now?
Oh, Lee, she said. He’s a fool. A good-hearted fool but still a fool. Do you know he asked if he could stay the night with me in Darwin? For old time’s sake, he said. I said, What do you mean, Lee, there were no old times, we never slept together, not even once … she went a bit pink at the thought. He’s lonely. He split up with his wife. She took the kids; he hardly ever sees them any more. Lives this strange sort of crepuscular life. It’s all work for him.
That’s what I mean, I said, his work. What effect will this thing with Thursday have?
Not much, she said. It’s only one case among hundreds. He’s highly regarded and anyway, his contract is with the Commonwealth, not Serco, they have to put up with him as long as the government continues to employ him. Lee will be fine. It’s Thursday I’m worried about, but we’ll just have to wait and see. Lee will keep me informed, I’m sure of that, and I’ll pass on whatever comes my way. I don’t know what else we can do.
It was starting to feel like a let-down, a false ending, a dying fall. What had been accomplished, what did we know that we did not know before? What had I contributed and what could I do with the story now? And C, what did it mean for her? Her mission, such as it was, had dissolved into uncertainties, enigmas, chimeras; a few images on a digital camera of an equivocal work in progress, now lost; a single word of dubious provenance.
She said that she would try to photoshop the pictures she had taken of Thursday’s painting and, if they came out, would send them to me. (She never did.) Said that we should keep in touch. That it had been good to catch up after all this time, even if we hadn’t really done that much catching up. Her next yacht trip, she said, was a big one. She and her husband were going up into Alaskan waters, but that wasn’t going to be for a while yet; I would certainly hear from her before they left.
I told her I would make notes on the events so far and send her the results, that the story would be difficult to write in any comprehensive sense because it lacked a focus, narrative drive, a spine. There were too many suppositions and besides, I was only an observer. I lacked first-hand knowledge of the protagonists, didn’t know Lee, hadn’t met Thursday, was remote from the nexus of the tale.
Isinglass, however, interested me. That was something I would like to research. The name recalled other lost cities of legend: Ys, or Ker-ys, the exemplar of Paris, drowned beneath the waves off the Breton coast when the king’s daughter, Dahut, at the behest of a knight in red, stole the key to the city gates from around her sleeping father Gralon’s neck and let the sea come in. Or Hy-Brasil, the phantom island out in the misty Atlantic west of Ireland, which only shows itself once in seven years. Even Isengard, the iron tower, the west guard, in Tolkien’s fable.
What a romantic you are, she murmured.
And you’re not? I said.
No, I’m a retired psychologist, a Sunday painter, a sailor-girl who wants to save the world. She laughed.
My beer was finished; I did not want another. Her tea was drunk. We stood up to say goodbye. Under the uninterested eyes of the concierge we embraced demurely but did not kiss. I turned back once as the sliding door closed behind me and saw her standing there, as real as fact no doubt but also illusory: a slip of a girl in green and gold, a maiden at the gates of a mythical city, a woman at once inside and outside of time.
On the rank in Hunter Street, outside Deutsche Bank, I saw a cabbie I knew and stopped to chat; he was having a bad night, had only taken about seventy dollars for himself, but before I could tell him much of what I had been up to, a supercilious fellow in running gear with his suit jacket folded on a hanger over his arm came out of the building, wanting to go to Longueville. I watched Garth’s cab do a U-turn in the mouth of Phillip Street and his tail-lights retreat hectically off up the hill, then drove away myself through the city alone.
Warren Zevon was singing on the car stereo: Everybody’s restless and they’ve got no place to go / Someone’s always trying to tell them / Something they already know / So their anger and resentment flow … Don’t it make you want to rock and roll? When I reached home, I set myself to find out what I could about the lost city of Isinglass.
If you go to falling rain dot com you will find an alphabetical list of places in the world. Vertiginous, voluminous, barely conceivable. Those that start with the letters I S I N, from Isin in Iran to Isinyi-Naro in Nigeria, fill three whole pages. Ecuador, Germany, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Madagascar, Nicaragua, Norway, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Tanzania, Turkey, Vanuatu, the United States of America, Zaire—all have cities or towns that begin with those four letters. Ising, Isinga, Isingali, Isingheim, Isingiro, Isingisha, Isingo … but no Isinglass. The likely contenders are all in Africa. Azania, Madagascar and Zaire is where the Isingishas, the Isinkas, and the Isinukas are. This rhymed, perhaps, with C’s feeling that in Thursday’s painting the city and the people who lived there were African.
When I widened the search I found cognate names: Isanga, also in Tanzania; Isanager in Uttar Pradesh; and many more it would be tedious to list. Did we even know what that single word was? What had Thursday actually said? It might have been something else entirely. I had to look elsewhere. A fragment of a poem I have long admired came to mind: Ishango saw them flighting / in their viral caravels / like sparrows on an arrow / or jupiters in a box / the bootless zé-povinho / in the land of Once-Begun … they being Portuguese mariners sailing the coasts of Africa on one of the epochal voyages that founded the maritime spice trade in the late 1500s; but what is Ishango?
The Ishango bone, named after the place where it was found near the headwaters of the Nile at Lake Edward on the present-day border of Congo and Uganda, is an inscribed length of the fibula of a baboon with a sharp piece of quartz fixed to one end. Unearthed by a Belgian in 1960 and now in Brussels, it was dug up in the detritus of a small village buried by a volcanic explosion maybe 20,000 years ago and looks like it might have been a tool used for engraving or even writing: a Palaeolithic pen.
The markings consist of three columns of asymmetrically grouped notches. Those in the centre column (7, 5, 5, 10, 8, 4, 6, 3) add up to 48 and suggest an understanding of the principles of multiplication and, setting aside the first two, of division by two; in the two flanking columns, all the numbers are odd. The marks in the left-hand one list the prime numbers between 10 and 20 (19, 17, 13, 11) in descending order; while those in the right consist of 10 + 1, 10 − 1, 20 + 1 and 20 − 1 (11, 9, 21, 19); the notches on these columns both add up to 60; and 48 and 60 are each divisible by 12. Some think the Ishango bone was used as a counting too
l as well as a pen: language written on an instrument by which it will be handed on. Others, that it is a lunar calendar and might have been used for tracking the menstrual cycle by way of the phases of the moon, which seems quite likely.
I wish I knew if there was any mathematical import to the marks that Thursday inscribed on the walls of his city, but it is of course no longer possible to find out; so I turned my mind to C’s description of the figures crowding out of the gates onto the plain above the estuary. They had at the time seemed reminiscent of the Bradshaw figures which are found on cave walls and rock shelters in north-west Australia, so called after their European ‘discoverer’, Joseph Bradshaw, who stumbled across them when he was lost in the Kimberley in 1891.
Bradshaw wrote: We saw numerous caves and recesses in the rocks, the walls of which were adorned with native drawings coloured in red, black, brown, yellow, white and a pale blue. Some of the human figures were life size, the bodies and limbs were attenuated and represented as having numerous tassel-shaped adornments appended to their hair, neck, waist, arms and legs; but the most remarkable fact in connection with these drawings is that whenever a profile face is shown the features are of a most pronounced aquiline type, quite different from the native we encountered. Indeed, looking at some of the groups one might think himself viewing the painted walls of an Egyptian temple. These sketches seemed to be a great age.
Aboriginal people call them Gwion Gwion, after the long-beaked bird that is said by some to have made the paintings—by pecking at the rock until its beak bled and then using the blood as pigment and its tail feathers as brushes; but the figures themselves are called Djinarrgi Djinarrgi, messengers. David Mowaljarlai (d. 1997) dissents: Gwion Gwion started up Stone Age. He made those paintings when he was a man. Before he was a bird. He made that gimbu—stone point—and tomahawk. Cracked open that rock, made spear and gimbu. Started up the Law from this time. Made knife. That’s how they get ’im out of that string (vein), that blood, initiation. Use that gimbu to get out that blood. Those Djinarrgi Djinarrgi dancing together, in a row, a circle, ceremony. That’s why ceremony keeps going today, from those images. The Gwion Gwion bird has a long nose. It’s hard to find him because he walks around at night. We know how to find him. I’m Gwion Gwion Man.
Isinglass Page 9