I remembered Isinglass of the ancient parapets as if it had been a legend long ago. I thought of the goddess, Ina. I, who had seen sidereal archipelagos, islands where delirious skies opened to the gaze of the seafarer—I longed for home. It must be there, in those ageless nights and days, that the birds of ecstasy are exiled. It must be where the vigour of the ancients lives. But it was too late for me. I had been adrift too long. Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious, each sun bitter. Acrid love swelled in me, a torpor like decay. I wanted my body to burst. I wanted to leak my fluids into the sea.
My last memory: twilight in a land far away where, in the sweet-scented evening air, a small child, full of sadness, releases upon the waters of a pond a boat as delicate as a moth. A child innocent of the palace. The inheritor of the ages. Myself. Forgetting wakes and plumes, flags and flames, the blank eyes of trading ships, I let go my hold upon that weedy log and sank at last beneath the waves.
It was the sea people who found me, they who live out their lives on their boats. They dragged my sea-pale, wrinkled, ulcerated body from the waves and laid me down under palm-woven covers between the narrow thwarts of their vessel. Perhaps they thought I was some half-drowned deity or perhaps a heretofore unknown kind of merman. Upon my lips they spilled pure clean water. Later, flakes of the flesh of some fish were forced between my teeth and thence dissolved imperceptibly upon my tongue. The murmur of syllables in their own mouths sounded like a recursion of the sea’s inimitable language. Slender women, fat children. Men so wizened by the sun, so cured in the salt immensities, they were like mummies of themselves, their tattoos ageing along with their skin, so that each seemed wreathed in the blue story of his life.
Where were they going? Why? What inscrutable design led them always eastward, into the rising sun? How did they know where each green island was, raised as if lashed to the stars above, by the old earth’s turning? They knew every reef, every rocky tooth, every coral atoll in that wide expanse; and here, or here, or here, they pulled from the sea wonders far in excess of the thing I was. Sharks like creatures made of weed and rays that flew from the depths, gigantic birds seeking the air. Swordfish and flying fish, the grunters and the spanglers that haunt the caverns of reefs. These were eviscerated then opened out like fans and left to dry upon the roof I lay beneath. Their butterfly shapes and their yellow–brown leathery shadows shaded my convalescence. I ate their sun-dried flesh and drank the sweet water my hosts gathered from springs or rainwater pools on islets only they knew about. I became strong again.
We came at last to the coast of the land they called K—if that is the way to write the guttural sound they made in their throats when they gestured towards the low blue shore rising ever closer ahead. The sands of K turned out to be a whitish yellow and its distant cliffs a dusty red. They beached their boat in a wide sheltered bay between two low bluffs with, behind a sandbar, long estuarine banks of a river where grey–green trees fingered down into the brown fecund mud. Here illusion and its imago merged so perfectly you could not tell one from the other. As if mirror and reflection should turn out to be the same. As is perhaps the case.
And here, after they had taken from the rills above the beach water into their bamboo pipes, and a turtle from the shallows of the lagoon, whose blood they drank and shared with me, they made signs that I should stay and, when I resisted, pushed me away, gently at first, all the while chattering some explanation or plea in their barbarous sea-tongue. I did not want to stay on that barren shore and nor did I understand why they wanted to leave me there: everything done for me thus far had been an act of kindness, but this felt more like a sacrifice—as if I was indeed to them a god whose presence on this alien shore was somehow preordained.
When I would not desist from my protests, their demeanour changed; they became stern, even violent, and in the end I was taken by both arms and my hands were lashed behind me with ropes and I was bound and left the way turtles are bound and abandoned in the scuppers to be eaten later. The children wept to see me lying helpless on the sand; the women looked despairingly upon me; but none demurred, and what, therefore, could I do? This was not my home, but neither was that fetid boat nor that fishy air in which everything—birth, copulation, death, the attendant swallowings and evacuations—milled around in an immemorial succession.
The men chanted prayers over me and made signs in the air and bowed and saluted, then resumed their boat and sailed away and left me there, trussed up and at the mercy of the ants and other creatures of the sand; but they were not cruel and had also left behind, among a small collection of supplies, a kind of knife, made from a shell, and in time I managed to cut myself free of my bonds and so stand up and look around and see where I had come. Grassy plains, a silvery-green colour, stretched away into the distance, where the red bluffs we had seen from the sea loomed. The land was stark, almost featureless, arid and deserted—or so I thought.
But I was not the first to land upon that conflicted shore. When I gathered my small store of provisions, dried fish mostly, and began to follow the river inland, I had not gone far when I saw on the bank, beneath the shade of a tree, the round black aureole, the cracked stones, the white ash, of a fireplace such as only humans build. I put my hand into the ashes; they were still warm. And so I gathered leaves and small twigs fallen from the trees that stood roundabout and, with careful nurturing, brought the embers of that fire back to life. And this was where I was sitting when the black people came out of the haze of the evening and found me.
There is no more to say. I joined their little band of foragers and went with them through the land. I learned their language and told them the stories that it was my profession to tell. And I learned their stories too, which were different from mine, wilder and stranger; and so I remembered that, even though my people call ourselves the first people, there were in fact people older than us, with their own histories, their own stories: these black people, for instance, or the sea people, or the small people who lived by hunting pachyderms in the islands to the west.
They gave me a woman and in her arms I tried to forget all I had been and all I had known, though I never really did. Yet in time we learned to love one another and when we had children, they were of a middling sort, neither as black as she nor as brown as I, but something in between. Each year our little band would visit, as if upon an appointed round, different parts of our territory, taking from each the plants and animals most characteristic of that place; and in the high summer, when it was very hot, we would retreat into the red bluffs, which were in fact mountain ranges, with narrow valleys between, and in these valleys lay pure, deep, pools of wholesome water; and here would gather together many bands like ours and there would be talking and feasting and, in the evening, dancing.
Here too were galleries, the flat red cliffs of precipices or the insides of caves or the slanting walls beneath rocky overhangs; and here people painted using the pigments of the earth itself—red, white, yellow, black—to show themselves as they danced, or hunted, or feasted, or made love, or performed the rituals that were designed to let this appointed round continue unabated and uninterrupted and unchanged, indeed unchanging. And in time I too learned how to paint and to reproduce on the walls of the ancient galleries, not a log of the life I led in that land, but images of the time before, when I lived in the City of Isinglass, the last city, which lies now beneath the waves and exists, if it exists at all, only in memory.
IIII
Darwin
I walked out of the bright percussive light, the cloying heat of late afternoon, into the cool and cavernous interior of Squires Tavern, which was shadowy and dim, lit only by the subaqueous screens of untenanted poker machines and concealed lighting behind the bar along the north wall. There was a Cold Chisel song playing, not loud: Cheap wine and a three day growth … and just one other patron in the room. He was flirting with the barmaid.
If I had titties like yours, he said, I’d be playing with them twenty-four seven.
If I had a cock like yours, she shot back, I’d be playing with it twenty-four seven.
They both laughed.
What’ll you have? she asked. Don’t mind him.
I ordered a beer then sat down on a bar stool to wait for Leroy Manx to arrive.
Years had passed since I last heard from C. Years since I first read Thursday’s strange tale. I wasn’t sure why I was reviving the quest, unless it was because of Operation Sovereign Borders, its manifest absurdities, its hypocrisies and its hidden atrocities. Plus, unusually for me, I had a bit of money—an award that didn’t require anything of me except acceptance. I thought I should use some of it to try to find out what happened to Thursday. It took quite a while to track Leroy down and he was at first reluctant to talk. Even now, sitting at our appointed meeting place, just next door to the Darwin Central Hotel, I wasn’t sure he’d show up. Jimmy Barnes sang: Watching the ocean, watching the shore / Watching the sunrise and thinkin’ / There could never be more / Never be more.
I had just ordered my second beer when a large pale unhealthy-looking bespectacled man, dressed in a white shirt open at the collar, khaki shorts, long socks pulled up to the knees above suede desert boots, walked in and stood blinking at the dimness. He looked ten years older than me, though I knew him to be the same age or younger; looked, in fact, like a cross between a superannuated schoolboy and a colonial field officer in the old dispensation. Then he came closer and I saw the collar of his shirt was frayed and grimy, there were stains on his shorts and a general air of dishevelment, if not decay, to his person. He held out his hand.
You must be Martin, he said. Call me Lee. His grip was limp and his palm sweaty and large. I need a drink.
We retreated to a corner table wedged between the door to the men’s room and a blank wall. Leroy took a long pull on his lager then set the glass down upon the round table.
Sorry I’m late, something came up. What was it you wanted to know? Something about Charis, was it?
He looked across the table in a challenging, indeed belligerent manner. His eyes behind his glasses were a pale blue and seemed to swim among the milky discoloured whites; his face had the purple and grey mottle of a heavy smoker.
It was Charis, wasn’t it? You said.
I rehearsed the circumstances that brought us together. Not for the first time: I’d said it already in the emails, and in our single telephone call.
That’s right, he conceded, and drained his beer. Another?
When he came back he started on about Charis again. How was she, when did I last see her, that sort of thing.
Years, I said. It’s been years.
Again that belligerent look. She was your girlfriend, wasn’t she? Lucky bugger. She was never mine.
I said it was a long time ago. I said that wasn’t why I was here. I said that she was just a conduit. He drank the rest of his second beer. My third sat almost untouched before me. I bought him another. He took a sip, sat back.
Well, it’s none of my business, really, is it? What you get up to. It’s just that I’ve always been a bit obsessed with her, you know? Even after I got married and had my kids, I would still think about her. Like she carried some hope, some seed of hope, not just for me, for all of us. As if there might still be goodness in the world, that’s always how I saw her, she was the goodness in the world and if that failed, we all failed. It’s crazy, I know, but that’s what I thought when I was twenty, twenty-two, whatever, and I still think it. Or rather, I still want to think it. I don’t really think it any more, but I want to. So when she popped up suddenly again, thirty years later, I couldn’t help but wonder. Where my idealism went, I mean.
Well, I said, as far as I know she’s still involved in good works. Mostly conservationist issues I think. But I didn’t come here to talk about her …
Yes, said Leroy, but I did.
He gave a sudden, almost inadvertent, bark of a laugh. That challenging look again, only this time mixed with a vulnerability that was almost affecting. There might have been tears in his eyes.
I’m going out for a smoke, he said. You want one?
In the desolate alley outside, in the sweaty heat, amongst the detritus left by other votaries of the nicotine, we smoked our cigarettes: he with the appetite of the truly addicted, I with the circumspection of a part-timer. The sun was westering. We made two long shadows on the stained concrete. I felt my head begin to spin in that old familiar, half-unpleasant, half-welcome way, the clinch in my guts, the cloud upon my thought. Then the firing of synapses.
I was only halfway through my smoke when he crushed his out beneath the rubber sole of one yellow–brown boot. I threw mine down as well; we went back inside. That cool dark interior.
The place was empty. The other guy had left. The barmaid was wiping down the bar, singing under her breath. The last plane out of Sydney’s almost gone … As if it were still 1978 or whenever it was. 1968. Khe Sanh. Leroy drained his beer and went to the bar for another. I was sitting on mine—two beers is usually my limit; he was into his fourth. He licked the froth from his upper lip.
I don’t work for the department any more, he said, answering a question I had not asked. They cut me loose … oh, two, three years ago now.
What are you doing?
This and that. Not much. Odd jobs. I had some money saved.
I let that hang in the air.
So I can’t really help you. Even if I wanted to. Confidentiality and all that. I had to sign an oath. Not to tell. It’s standard procedure.
Tell what?
Anything.
He laughed again but it was an uncertain laugh, an uneasy laugh, the laugh of a man with a bad conscience.
Look, this is heavy shit, all this border-security stuff, detention centres, boat people, especially here in Darwin. You can get yourself into deep water if you’re not careful. There’s eyes and ears everywhere. Loose lips sink ships, you know.
It was meant to be a joke but it wasn’t funny and he knew it. He passed his hand over his face.
Oh, Christ, he said and then he didn’t say any more.
Look, all I want to know is what happened to Thursday.
That’s all?! That’s all you want to know? Jesus, give me a break. They’ll have my balls …
I thought you said you don’t work for the department any more?
There’s work and there’s work. Besides, are you sure you want
to know?
Yes, of course, that’s why I’m here.
Have you considered the possibility that information like that comes at a price?
What do you mean by that?
He sighed in a weary way and finished his beer. I offered to get him another but he shook his head.
I don’t mean money. I mean, there could be consequences for you too. If I told you. Have you thought of that?
What is this, a spy story?
In essence, yes. That’s exactly what it is.
We eyeballed each other across the table.
Meaning what?
Meaning that there were elements in the department whose assessment was that he was …
A spy? That’s absurd.
Absurdity is the stock in trade of those people. It’s Kafka, mate.
Who was he supposed to be spying for? Indonesia?
An agent of a foreign power, yes. Sent here to cause disruption, panic and fear. To overturn our institutions from within. And so forth.
That’s incredible.
Maybe. But a case was made. I saw the interim report. Those tapes I transcribed, that story he told: deeply subversive, they said. A narrative designed to undermine received versions of our history. A deliberate attempt to intervene in the national discourse. I seem to recall they described him as a sleeper. You know, an agent sent to be activated at a later date.
Yes, I know.
It was preposterous. I shook my head. There was a pause. Then I made one last try.
So what did happen to him?
I can’t tell you that.
We locked eyes again. His milky blue unwavering gaze. Mine attempting a steely resolve. I was the first to look away.
All right. I can’t make you.
No, you can’t.
I drained my glass and set it down opposite his empty one. We sat, like Cezanne’s cardplayers perhaps, sans cards. In the lengthening silence, the barmaid crossed the room and cued up a song on the jukebox. I couldn’t believe it; it was another Cold Chisel tune—they must be on permanent rotation here: Taking her seat at the bar / She don’t talk to anyone / Plane leaving soon for afar / Where she don’t know anyone.
I stood up to go.
Look, said Leroy, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be an arsehole. Why don’t we get something to eat? And I’ll try to explain. Yeah?
The first lines of the chorus followed us out of the bar. Is this the way it’s gonna be forever? / Is this the way it’s gonna be forever? / Is this way it’s gonna be / Forever now …
Even though it was just a short walk away, we took a taxi down to Port Darwin, sat outside on the wharf on white plastic chairs at a white plastic table, and ordered wine and fish and chips. It was a smoking area so Leroy chain-smoked and I helped myself to his cigarettes from time to time. Brightness fell from the air, the sky went pale green then darkened to a Prussian blue, while white arc lights came on, turning the water below a transparent aqua, through which silver fish rose to gulp down morsels thrown to them by diners. The hectic illuminations of the industrial port glowed in the middle distance, where red and yellow machines, with a dull clanking rumble, pursued their inscrutable tasks in the service of the economy. As soon as he got the first glass of wine inside of him, Leroy began to talk.
Isinglass Page 17