I’m not a good man, he said. I haven’t lived a good life. It’s hard for me to identify the point where I strayed from the path of righteousness—here he gave a small, ironic smile—into wickedness. It happens gradually and then one day you realise your corruption has gone so deep it’s reached your very soul. I had this realisation about the time I invited Charis back into my life, with her crusading zeal and her won’t-take-no-for-an-answer ways. I suppose that’s why I asked her to help me—as if I still had a shot at redemption, as if working with her, helping her help Thursday, might turn things around for me.
So I did all that, which she’s no doubt told you already, helped out while she tried the various forms of therapy, helped set him up with the paints. And so forth and so on. And then, when they put him in solitary and he started to talk, I got him on tape and then, when it turned out that he spoke an Austronesian language not so very far removed from Bahasa, I found a linguist and had the thing transcribed and translated.
All of this was done quite properly, through the correct channels, as it were, by the book as we used to say, but it didn’t exactly make me popular with my superiors and one day I was called in and told I’d committed a breach of security and consequently my contract wasn’t being renewed. The reason being that I’d sent the transcript of Thursday’s tale to Charis. The one you’ve read. So you’re implicated too. They monitor emails, you know. Though it could of course have just been an excuse. Whatever. One day I was on eighty grand a year or thereabouts, the next, nada.
This coincided, roughly speaking, with my divorce, and in the settlement I lost not just my kids, but the house as well. The bitch got the house, as the bitches always do; but I still had to keep on paying maintenance. I still am. Now you’re thinking that would have happened anyway, it has nothing to do with Thursday, and maybe you’re right. The fact remains, though, that my entanglement in his case was the beginning of the end for me. Before I knew it I was out on my arse. I couldn’t stand Canberra after that so I moved up here. With all the other reprobates and degredados and scum of the earth. Living in a one-bedroom flat down at Fannie Bay, no job and no money to speak of. Do you think I was bitter? You bet I was bitter. I wanted to kill somebody.
The natural thing for someone in my position was to go back into private practice, but I couldn’t stomach that either. I mean, after I came up here, I did hang my shingle out, but I’d lost the knack, or perhaps I mean I’d lost my appetite. I had miseries enough of my own, didn’t want to spend my days listening to the miseries of others. I did some work with the charitable agencies, the churches, social services, counselling, but I wasn’t really in any fit state to help anyone else, I needed help myself. Cura te ipsum. So that went on for a year or two then I gave up all my professional activities. I just drifted. I drank. I fucked around. And then … then I was thrown a lifeline, you might say.
By this time the first bottle of wine had gone, and half a second one as well. Our meals had been served and I had eaten mine, but Leroy just picked at his salad for a bit then pushed the plate away. There was a kind of muted roar around us; the restaurant was busy, big people eating big meals, drinkers pouring their wine or beer down their big throats, laughing and shouting to each other, as if at some kind of gargantuan banquet. And all the time those great black shapes rising from the depths then transforming into sleek silver fish which took with a flurry the chips or bits of flesh or whatever scraps from that orgy of consumption people threw down to them. As if fattening them for the time when they too should be devoured.
Manx gulped his wine, lit another cigarette. Do you see where this is going? he asked.
Not really.
Well, you should. Information is the key. How do you think our benighted governments—note the plural—how do you think they ensure our sovereign borders are so expertly secured? So that these sacred rites—he gestured to the crowd of boozers and eaters—may continue unabated? I had, I have, my contacts. I know people who know people who know other people. On occasion, I pass snippets of information on to interested parties. And I’m rewarded for my acumen. My intelligence. Now do you see?
Yeah, I guess. But what’s this got to do with Thursday?
That was not his name.
Do you know his name?
It wasn’t Anabi either.
Why do you speak of him in the past tense?
Why indeed.
His confession, if that is what it was, had left him for the moment mute. He drank his wine and ordered another bottle. Our third. Like many heavy drinkers, he seemed unaffected by the alcohol he drank. Or rather, it made him sombre instead of euphoric, turned him inwards upon himself, where some endless inquisition proceeded. The trial of the self by the self, ending in the inevitable censure, from which there can be no appeal, no absolution. I felt almost sorry for him.
I suppose you’re going to write all this down, he said, slurring slightly, as if in contradiction of the thought I had just had.
Maybe, I said.
There’s no fucking maybe, he said. You’re a writer, aren’t you? You write things down.
I think Thursday’s tale should be told.
‘I think Thursday’s tale should be told.’ Pompous shit.
You wrote it down.
Yes, and it lost me my fucking job.
He sighed then, and as the air went out of him, he diminished, wrinkling up, like a deflating balloon.
Sorry. I was out of line. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s not your fault. Though I would still like to know whose fault it is.
He stared bleakly at me and then down at his half-filled glass of red.
I can’t drink any more of this vile plonk, he said. I should go.
Sure.
But we didn’t. We sat there, two ageing players at the end of some entertainment that had derisively failed.
He was deported, of course. You must have known that. They made a determination on the basis of his dialect, chose a destination and sent him home.
Where?
Jakarta. After that, who knows. Somewhere in the Moluccas, probably. Maluku, I should say. Tanimbar was I think where we decided he was from. But whether he was actually sent there and whether that was really where he was from, I don’t know. I’m not sure he was from anywhere.
So you think he’s still alive?
Perhaps. It’s possible.
There was a very long pause. He regarded his glass balefully then took it up and drained it. An expression of disgust crossed his face. He lit another cigarette.
You have to understand, the department would never eliminate anyone. But they will on occasion let people die. They don’t care. If you’re not one of us, you’re nobody. He was a man without identity, without papers, stateless. How would anyone ever know? How would you trace him? He’s gone. Back into whatever dark continuum he came from. It really is quite strange. A very strange tale. I can see why you might want to write it down.
Do you mean Thursday’s tale?
I mean the whole thing. He comes out of nowhere, tells his tale, then goes back there afterwards. Like some messenger from the beyond.
What do you make of the story itself?
I don’t make anything of it. I don’t understand it. You’re the story man, what do you make of it?
I don’t know either. It’s interesting that it ends with a stranding. On the shores of K. Wherever that is. It’s circular, he’s washed up on one shore and then tells this long story that ends up with him being washed up upon another shore.
Maybe it’s all the same story. If I’d been his clinician, oneirophrenia would have been my diagnosis. Unfashionable now. But that doesn’t tell you about the matter of his dreams, does it? That’s irreducible. The disease, if it is a disease, is one thing, but the vision is another. There it is, some prodigy of the imagination. You can’t account for it so why would you even try? It’s unfathomable.
The word hung in the air for a long time. Our eyes met briefly, without rancour or defensiveness. M
anx raised his eyebrows, smiled slightly, shook his head and looked away.
We called for the bill, I paid for both of us and we left. Leroy was taking a taxi back to Fannie Bay but I wanted to walk up to the hotel. It wasn’t far. We said goodbye at the rank. I saw him lurch slightly as he opened the car door and then clutch at it for support. He must have been very drunk.
Just one more thing, he said, with one hand gripping the door and the other held out over it, in a kind of wave that was also the offer of a handshake.
One more thing.
I took his hand and he leaned towards me, as if about to tell a secret that was for my ears only.
Write your fucking book, he said. Write the whole fucking thing down. I don’t care, I want you to. You have my permission.
His hand slid out of mine and in the same motion his body slid into the front seat of the cab. I closed the door. He didn’t look back; he was staring straight ahead like some reprobate in his own custody, as the white car pulled from the kerb and made its way, under yellow lights, into the sultry night.
I was too restless to sleep. I had drunk too much; or not enough. I opened a bottle of bourbon from the minibar then powered up my laptop. There was a documentary I wanted to see, downloaded previously from the Bradshaw Foundation. The mystery of those strange mulberry-red and black images. The tassel figures, who have long protuberances like organs hanging from armpit or crotch or elbow or knee; the sash figures, with what look like printed cloths billowing from their waists; clothes pegs, so called after their bodily resemblance to those humble wooden artefacts; the ones who run or dance or throw spears. The elegant ones who stand still. The ones whose faces, some say, are turned towards the rocks they are painted upon, as if in the act of departing this world for the next.
This fifteen-minute film gave a brief history of the European discovery of the figures then focused upon a more recent find: at a shelter where a boat, with high prows and four figures therein, was found in 2004, a later investigator came across, low down, a frieze of twenty-six antlered beasts resembling deer. No deer has yet been found native east of the Wallace Line, but there in the Kimberley are these sambar, if that is what they are, evidence of eastward travel across that fabled line, and/or a memory of what lies beyond it to the west. They might be 70,000 years old, both deer and boat and the anonymous hands that painted them.
Researchers in the 1950s recorded the legend of Kujon, a medium-sized mottled grey-and-brown bird which still lives in the Kimberley. This is the bird, local Aboriginal people say, which pecks with its beak upon a rock until it bleeds then uses the blood as paint; for finer lines, Kujon employs its own tail feather as a brush. That is why some of the panels are painted so high on inaccessible cliff faces: places where only a bird could go. (It is true that some of the figures were painted using feathers.) If a painting is ever damaged, Kujon will repaint it during the night, so in the morning it will look the same as it did before. Sometimes bush spirits, Djimi and Koion, ask Kujon to paint pictures of beings that we mortals are not permitted to see. Gwion Gwion, an alternative name for these figures, is probably a version of Kujon.
I watched the documentary twice, the first time taking notes, the second, just looking at the panoply of figures scrolling by. They seemed like images of beings who exist whether we can see them or not. Like a procession of antique actors in the human drama unfolding constantly in all those places where we dance, make love, give birth, display our finery, hunt, kill, die and are reborn. I do not doubt they are painted in blood, whether it be the blood of Kujon or blood from some other source—perhaps blood from our own hearts, torn open in fealty to the unceasing imperative that we witness our equivocal, fleeting presence in this place that is no place; this Isinglass.
V
Crescent
In the world below the world there was a perfect world. If you went and looked, you would see it waiting in the pellucid waters for your eyes to fall upon. Yes. An architecture of polyps harbouring protozoa, which made of the light of the sun animal food and built their skeletons thereby. Their lovely bones, within and without of which the jewelled fish swam. The octopus’s garden. The triton’s lair and the groper’s dust. It doesn’t matter how it is described: it was the natural, of which we, you and I, and all of the others too, were formerly a part. Now excluded forever. Now, with our plural eyes, which once were singular, we watch it disappear.
The reef was dead, or dying: grey as defunct teeth; here and there, where fishermen had used dynamite to stun their catch, exploded into wreckage, like a ruined palace. They had pulled fish from the water as if picking berries. There was no dynamite any more and no diesel either; the afternoons when the frail boats, like leggy insects, sputtered out into the sunset with their unmuffled motors clacking, had gone. Anyone who fished now did so silently, as in the old days, with just a flickering light suspended above the water, hoping to see some silver shape rising. There were still fish, but they were not many and they were difficult to catch.
At the high-tide mark, above the white sand, was a crust of grey and blue, glowing here and there with highlights of pink or yellow or aqua: plastic thrown up out of the sea over decades, now gone brittle and pale and granular, like bitter-tasting sugar or doomed confetti. With the demise of the petroleum economy, this too accreted no more along the strand. The tough silver-and-green marram grass came back through the crust; the apples of Sodom too, with their poisonous fruit; the pigface and the salt-sorrel; and, behind that, a few ragged palms leaning forward as if in anticipation.
His shack was at the far end of the crescent, tucked into the lea of a sandy point, surrounded by flowering hibiscus, with an ancient tamarind tree, so old and wizened that it seemed to be shrinking back into the ground again, growing nearby. His water came from the thread of a creek arcing around the tamarind’s roots and running out to the sea. It was just a hut made of coconut logs and crowned with a tin roof. Built who knows when by who knows who.
The village people had given it to him when, years ago now, he came unexpectedly among them. They did not dislike him, but they did not understand him either; and so they feared him: his strangeness, his barbarous tongue, his silence. Yet it was their fear that bred tolerance. That, and their own faith’s instruction: Islam began as something strange, and it shall return to being strange, so give succour to strangers.
Offerings of rice and fish and greens were brought daily by young children and left on a flat stone nearby, though no one ever sat down to eat with him. Sometimes a pack of clove cigarettes. Even, on rare occasions, a bottle of white spirit, distilled from fermented rice; because, although alcohol was prohibited, it still existed. Nor were its uses forgotten.
Those nights the people of the village, which stood behind the dunes at the other end of the beach, might hear singing on the wind. If they bothered to come down close onto the shore, they might have seen the intermittent glow and fade of a kretek, imagine they heard the crackle as a piece of clove combusted. He would be sitting out the front of his hut before a fire of driftwood, chanting his incomprehensible songs.
Only the children came. They were not supposed to but they did: pulled like fragments of magnetised iron towards the strange attractor that crazy old man had become. They sat in the sand in front of his hut while he told them stories. In his incomprehensible tongue; which, it turned out, was not so incomprehensible after all.
Just another variant of the Bahasa everybody spoke, only maimed and distorted as if, like the tamarind tree, it was reverting back into the ground of being from which it came. Decaying into sand or into the sound of the sea. Becoming wind again, or water. Becoming earth or fire. His stories too were elemental. He told them as if there were no other truth. He told them as things that were immemorial, that could not be altered, could not be other than they were.
Long ago … he said. Tomorrow. Once upon a time. And then he began to tell.
The words came to them like messengers who recall imperfectly the things they are supp
osed to say. They lodged in their ears as mysteries whose solutions would only become apparent later, when the world turned into night and the stars appeared. They were sound before they were sense, and the children would repeat them to themselves in the silence afterwards, like spells for coming out by day.
Grandmother Bird, he said. Grandmother Fish. Grandfather Stone. Grandfather Fire. The Gate of Grief; the Gate of the Crossing. The Listeners of the Sky. We were not many but we were everyone. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. It only takes one.
One what? a small girl asked, she who most often brought the offerings of rice and fish and greens and left them on the flat stone.
The old man looked at her, his eyes like small black beads glistening within the fantastic tracery of lines upon his face.
Do you know what a Rememberer is? he asked.
She did not.
It only takes one, he said again. Perhaps it will be you.
Why don’t you have a wife? the little girl said. Where are your children?
He pointed out across the water. My wife is there, he said, beneath the waves. Or in the air. My children are here; and he opened his arms to include the half-dozen sitting in the sand before him. They looked at each other and laughed.
He always wore the same clothes. A T-shirt, once blue, now faded, with the word Eternity written in yellow cursive script across the front. A pair of shorts, knee-length, with button-down pockets on the sides, from which the buttons had gone. They had been black, were now a silvery-grey. A cap with the image of a seagull, also blue, stitched into the cotton. His hair thin and lank, tied up behind. His eyes.
A Rememberer, he said, is what I am. One who remembers.
Remembers what? the girl said. Her name was Ina. The queen that in the caves of history dreams.
What I have been telling you, he said. What I say.
Those old stories? she said.
Yes, he said. Those.
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