Catching the Current

by Jenny Pattrick

  Mikkel came and went, never staying long. Anahuia was his anchor but laudanum his deepest love. The ships he worked on kept close to shore, trading up and down the coast, or inland up the Parramatta River, never across oceans where he would be too long away from his ‘sweet dreams’. Anahuia loved the gentle fellow, who was part-child, part-lover, mostly loyal friend. She learned that lecturing him on his addiction was useless. Worse than useless — it drove him to it. In happy times, when he felt no pressure or anxiety, he would stay away from the laudanum for a while. Then he taught Johan to play the fiddle and threw his little girls in the air, and at night in the big bed upstairs, over the sewing rooms and the consulting salon, he played Anahuia’s body like a virtuoso until her moans of pleasure woke the house. But when Madame Ana was busy — distracted with clients and children, and her growing staff of seamstresses — he would wander out in search of his ‘sweet dreams’ and return days later, dirty and starving. Anahuia always welcomed him back.

  NOKI grew to be a handful. Energetic, large, restless — like his father, Anahuia thought, but not a dreamer like him. He hated school and left at twelve to go to sea. It was a relief to his mother. At the same time Anahuia apprenticed the other twin, Johan, to a carpenter. Johan — Jackie to his few friends — missed his brother; had always been the quiet one, often unhappy. He hated wearing shoes and would leave his fine clothes lying lost on a wall while he wandered, barefoot and dreamy, among the trees and flower-beds of the parks. His master set him to work on the great Garden Palace being built for a grand exhibition — a centenary of something or other.

  At first the apprenticeship seemed to work. Johan came home full of the building they were creating: what a marvel it would be, how grand the carvings and paintings, how gigantic the ballroom. He seemed to enjoy working with tools. Anahuia praised him and stopped worrying.

  When the edifice was completed she went down to the Botanic Gardens, along with the rest of Sydney, to witness all the lords and ladies arriving for the opening gala. The palace towered over the surrounding houses, acres of it, its spires and turrets lit like a Christmas tree and a huge decorated dome floating high above it all. Anahuia, accustomed now to buildings on a grand scale, thought it rather pretentious. For one thing, it blocked the lovely gentle view down to the sea. For another, your feet ached just walking through all those rooms full of exhibits trumpeting Sydney’s achievements. (And scarcely a mention of the dressmaking trade!) But she would not speak these thoughts to her son. Johan pointed out the section where he had worked, shaping the timbers into decorative curls. Anahuia smiled and nodded, pleased that this son who so often railed against Sydney — how dirty it was, how black with smoke, how noisy — was at last settling down.

  But then, two years later, that grand Garden Palace burned to the ground and Johan’s life seemed to collapse. Anahuia woke early in the morning to the clanging of bells. Fire engines were racing down Macquarie Street from all points of the city. She saw the Surry Hills fire-cart, pulled by half-dressed firemen, clattering down the street, and then a steam fire engine belched its way around the corner, rocking and clanging, almost a fire disaster of its own. People poured into the streets in the grey light of dawn and ran to see.

  ‘The Garden Palace is burning down!’ they shouted. Johan ran with them.

  Anahuia stayed in Surry Hills with her screaming daughters. Watching from the upstairs window, they saw fire run along the parapets to flower from the arches of the four high towers. Then they heard a booming crash, far louder than the cannon salute when the royal duke visited from England. They cried aloud in awe to see a great fireball light the sky, followed by shooting flames and black smoke. Crash after crash echoed across the sky.

  Jackie came home later, black with soot and crying. ‘It is all gone,’ he shouted. ‘Every bit of it burned!’ All day he mooned and moaned and stamped about the house, upsetting his sisters and driving Anahuia mad with it all. ‘The plants!’ he cried. ‘Those beautiful plants. Every one shrivelled. Black corpses dead on the black soil.’ Anahuia had admired the garden of thirty thousand plants that Dr Moore, the chief botanist, had planted around the palace. Its destruction was a shame — sadder, she secretly thought, than that of the showy palace.

  But even so, the boy’s mood was out of all proportion. The disaster, after all, did not affect his livelihood any more. Johan sobbed that he hated Sydney, always had. Hated its smoking chimneys, the cold, raw stone of its buildings. He railed against all the dark sides of the big city — the rats and squalor of the Rocks area, the stench of the markets, the belching factory chimneys at Darling Harbour. Anahuia washed her son and rocked him. Finally she spoke sternly.

  ‘This is our place,’ she said. ‘I rely on you, now that Noki is at sea. You must learn to find your way here.’

  But Johan Rasmussen would not be comforted.

  NOT long after the fire Anahuia begins to feel again that pull she has always connected with Conrad. It moves inside her like the steady flow of a river. In the past, when the feeling came, she imagined Conrad in trouble and asked more diligently down at the wharves. And sent steadying thoughts into his mind. For several years, now, she has not felt that pull. It meant, she thought, that he was settled and happy somewhere and she was glad. But now it is back again, and strong. She never talks about these feelings — the down-to-earth neighbours and friends would find her strange. To Anahuia, though, premonitions are as natural as food and drink. Her grandmother always knew when her sons needed help, even if they were many miles away. The death of Anahuia’s father was ‘felt’ in the kainga long before the news arrived.

  So when Conrad’s river begins to move again in her, she takes the feeling seriously and resumes her search. She goes back to the wharves, asking for news of a big Scandinavian, who would be sixteen years older than when she knew him, but surely still a man of prodigious strength, still a renowned storyteller. He will think her dead, of course, which makes the search one-sided, but she has a growing sense that they will meet soon. Her feeling is urgent and close. Maybe he is in deep trouble, or maybe nearby.

  Practical Noki makes light of his mother’s premonitions, says he is embarrassed to ask his seafaring friends. Surely their father would now be happily settled in some other part of the world with a large family. ‘Leave well alone,’ he says, but then, seeing the anxiety on his mother’s face, adds, ‘I might ask. As long as they don’t laugh at me.’

  Johan, moody, unsettled, living in his own uncomfortable world, ignores or perhaps simply does not know about his mother’s search.

  Mikkel understands, of course. Dreams — glorious visions and strange landscapes — are increasingly the stuff of his life. It is poor emaciated Mikkel who brings the news that a man answering the description of Conrad has been sighted in Hokitika, New Zealand. A sailor on shore leave, drinking down at the Rocks with Mikkel, said he had seen such a man working on the wharves at Hokitika.

  ‘Hokitika,’ says Anahuia. ‘I have heard of it. In the south. Do you know it, Mikkel?’

  He nods. ‘That man — the one you rescued me from — took me there once.’

  ‘What is it like?’

  ‘On the West Coast of the South Island. Wild. A bad place. Full of storm. Full of men in a fever over gold.’

  ‘Mikkel, all that would be past by now. The gold rushes are over. It will be an ordinary town now.’

  Mikkel shakes his dark head, avoiding her eyes. ‘No, still bad, I think. Don’t ask me.’

  Anahuia smiles. Always this man knows what she is thinking before the words are formed. ‘Mikkel,’ she says gently, ‘listen to me. It would be a great thing for you if you found him. Think of it. Your friend and mine. Think how the boys would cheer! How pleased I would be.’

  Mikkel smiles uneasily. ‘You might forget this man.’

  ‘You know in your heart I could never forget you. Mikkel, I would go if I was free but the work … Will you go? See if it is him and bring him back? I think he needs us.’


  Mikkel wrings his hands, wags his head back and forth. ‘Across the Tasman Sea. It is a long way …’

  Anahuia knows what holds him back but will not give in this time. ‘For goodness sake, you have sailed the world in better days. The Tasman is nothing. It will do you good, Mikkel. You have been living in too many basements. The open ocean, I think, will clear your head.’

  Mikkel smiles sadly. ‘It may not be him.’

  ‘Also it may.’ A new idea comes to her. ‘No, listen, Mikkel, I tell you what. I will send the boys with you. I have been thinking of sending them to see where they were born. After all, they are fifteen now, nearly men. Go to Hokitika, and then, whether you find Conrad or not, take the boys to see that place. It might settle Johan to know where his whenua is buried.’

  ‘His whenua?’

  ‘The afterbirth. As I buried your daughters’ ones here, remember? The boys’ is under a totara tree by the Manawatu River. They know the story.’ She smiles at Mikkel. ‘This is a mission for you. A double mission.’

  His eyes begin to focus then, and a liveliness creeps back to his face. ‘If it is him …’ he says, ‘if it is him, and I bring him back …’

  ‘You will be a hero, my dear,’ says Anahuia.

  8.

  Hearth and Homeland

  HOKITIKA, NEW ZEALAND

  SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

  1884

  1.

  IN MOST OF Con’s stories a storm is a predictable player and the way Con tells it there’s a black storm that day in Hokitika. Con’s mood is just as dark as he tramps down Gibson’s Quay in search of his boat. His head is down against the blinding rain and hail that sweeps in sheets up the long wharf, pinging like gunshot on the iron of the wharf sheds. The woman known as Eva, drunk, sodden inside and out, trails him all the way, shouting and cursing, then trying a few tears — any trick to hold him from going. Rolling waves, driven by the sea-wind, surge up the river, tossing ships against their moorings. A forest of spars and rigging wave back and forth with much creaking and groaning, like spectators jostling for a better view. Con shakes rain out of his eyes, unable, in all this fury, to read the names of the ships. Where, in the name of God, is the Mary Emmanuel?

  Under an awning, in the lee of the weather, a rough group of rock-miners, in from the bush, are celebrating their day off in the usual manner. Con met them earlier, in town — attempted a greeting but quickly gave up. Even then they were surly-drunk, having been tossed out of Pritchard’s Saloon Bar for disorderly behaviour. On the coast, ‘disorderly’ has a fairly lenient interpretation so their behaviour must have been bordering on criminal to earn them the heave-ho. Con gives them a wide margin.

  The barque Mary Emmanuel is tied up at the seaward end of the quay, her master and crew struggling to bring a load of logs aboard.

  ‘Come up quick, man!’ shouts the master to his new crewman. ‘We are fighting a losing battle with this lot.’

  Con turns for a moment to the pleading Eva. ‘I’m off, then. This is the end of it, Eva.’

  She strikes at him, fingernails drawing blood down his cheek. The miners cheer. ‘Traitor!’ she shrieks. ‘Deserter!’ Then softer, ‘Will you be back, at least?’

  ‘I will not!’ shouts Con into the wind, despairing. ‘We are nothing but poison together. And have ruined a child’s life.’

  He turns away then, leaving the wild woman alone on the wharf. Swag on shoulder, sure-footed, he runs up the plank. Stepping aboard is like coming home. He groans. Why, in the name of Thor, has he stayed ashore so long?

  Hauling on slippery ropes, cursing at the tangling tackle, Con and the rest of the crew struggle to swing the wet logs aboard and stow them below in the tossing hold. The heavy grinding work helps to ease his pain. He tries to ignore the woman still shouting on the quay, but notices how one of the miners — a black-bearded thickset ape of a fellow — approaches her to offer a swig, tries to put an arm around her. Eva, in no mood for play, knocks the jar from his hand, shouts some obscenity, and at last marches back towards the town. For a moment the furious fellow goes after her, but when she turns and bares her teeth, even he thinks better of it. Con eases his shoulders for a moment and watches her go. He does not regret seeing the back of her.

  Further away, a thin man is making his way up the quay, staggering and weaving against the rain. He stops at each ship, shouting a question up to whoever might be there, waits for an answer and then tries another. Con sees him shout his query at Eva, sees her shake her head angrily and push him away. On he comes, unsteady but dogged, towards the next ship. Here the vessels are double-banking and the man scrambles across one to check the other. He is nimble across the heaving deck: a sailor. Con is curious but must turn back to his work.

  When next Con looks, the thin man has reached the unruly miners, who are at that moment quarrelling among themselves, shouting drunken insults. One presents a fist in another’s face. They are spoiling for a fight. For a moment the thin man hesitates, but some kind of foolish obstinacy seems to be driving him. He approaches the knot of men. Careful, tentative, he asks his question.

  Another log swings aboard. Con struggles to control its lethal passage. When next he looks up the thin man is on the ground, writhing and kicking. His cap is knocked off and the poor fellow is trying vainly to protect his dark head from the boots of the miners. One of them heaves the skinny fellow to his feet, spits in his face, and flings him to the ground again. The fellow’s scream slices through the storm.

  ‘Hey there!’ shouts Con, leaning over the side. ‘Get off the poor sot!’

  The ship’s master pulls Con away. ‘It is only some idiot of a black fellow. No great loss to mankind. He has wasted our time already once, asking for someone. Out of his mind.’

  Con doesn’t like the master’s tone. ‘Well then. Who does he ask after?’

  ‘Something foreign. Rasmussen, perhaps. Conrad. Nothing to do with us.’

  But Con leaves the log swinging and the master cursing. He is over the side and into the boil of miners.

  In Con’s telling, the battle is heroic: he bestrides the dazed Mikkel, and, deadly accurate, fells his adversaries one by one as they fly at him from left and right. The truth is darker. The fight, at first a rescue, becomes, for Con, a release. The shattering despair and humiliation of the past few weeks explode out of him in a berserk fury. He picks up a lump of timber as if it were kindling and sweeps it at two of the miners, breaking ribs and smashing them to the ground. Another he hurls against the iron wall of the shed. By the time a fourth is retching on the ground, his face a bloody pulp, the rest have scrambled off, leaving their victim motionless in a puddle.

  Con bends over him. The dark man’s skin has paled to an unhealthy grey; an arm angles sickeningly from a dislocated shoulder; blood oozes from an ear. One eye is swollen shut, the other stares up.

  ‘Conrad,’ he croaks. Tries to smile, then passes out.

  Con picks up the shattered body, light as a bundle of sticks. He holds him gently but even so he can feel bones grate. By now several of the crew are hanging over the side of the Mary Emmanuel, watching the show. Con shouts up into the wind and rain that he is taking the man to a doctor. The master threatens but Con walks away.

  ‘Is it you, little Mikkel?’ he murmurs. ‘After all these years, friend?’

  Con walks down the quay, treading softly. From the other end two men are approaching — lads, more like, same size and height, heads down into the wind. As they are about to pass, one stops and signs to the other, nods towards Con’s burden. The other curses and comes in a fury at Con.

  ‘What have you done to him?’ he shouts. ‘Give him over here or I’ll knock you flat!’ A brave threat, given the mismatch in size.

  ‘Hold your hair on,’ mutters Con. ‘I have rescued your friend. There is no need of further blows.’

  But the two lads are now stock still, staring. Con stares back. What Con sees are two boys, identical and handsome. Pale gold hair and skins the colour of milky t
ea, large open faces and broad shoulders. Unused to seeing his own image, he does not make the connection. The boys, on the other hand, have looked at a living mirror image every day of their lives. They stare now at a larger version.

  ‘It’s him,’ whispers Johan.

  Noki gapes.

  ‘This man needs assistance, lads,’ says Con.

  Johan clears his throat. ‘Are you Conrad Rasmussen?’

  ‘That is one of my names,’ says Con. ‘I have others.’

  Mikkel seems to be unconscious but now his lips move into the smallest of smiles. ‘It’s them,’ he croaks. ‘Your sons.’

  Con hears the words. He looks again and knows it. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he whispers. The boys look at each other, gape back at Con. It seems no one can make the next move.

  Finally Con speaks. ‘How are you named?’

  ‘Enoki and Johan,’ says Johan. ‘Some call me Jackie. We are Rasmussen.’

  ‘Ah, Jesus!’ cries Conrad, looking from one to the other. He all but drops Mikkel.

  ‘Why didn’t you ever come?’ shouts Noki roughly. He is not yet ready to forgive this new father. ‘Our mother waited!’

  ‘I thought you dead. And your mother. I was told you were dead!’ Con howls the words into the wild air. Then stops as if shot. ‘Your mother?’ The words are barely audible.

  The boys nod together. ‘We are all alive,’ says Noki, frowning. ‘No thanks to you.’