Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

  We stepped back out through the door to the bike. I opened the lid of the wooden crate on the fish lying wrapped in The Argus. I’d chucked them into the bush below the crown of my hut and so they shared the filth of my shame. I hadn’t intended it but the fish were another layer in my showing. Like them, I was not clean.

  ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t give me all four,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I thought, your old man . . . I’m on my own . . .’

  Her tongue clicked in her palate and the sound grew sharp as it bounced between the tin overhead and the close-rendered brick of the co-op wall. ‘Oh, that’s nice. He’ll be more interested in the newspaper than the fish though.’

  I shrugged, nervously. Feeling now like a kind of suitor. Finding out something of what her father would like.

  She inclined her neck, checking the articles on the paper. I remember seeing death notices, and something about a butcher wanting to sell on a puppy he’d found in his back lane. Mainland details.

  ‘I can take ’em back and wrap them in another page,’ I said, dryly.

  ‘Mmm,’ she said, a gentle levity gathering amongst the echoing tails of our words. ‘Not this time. But next use the saleyard results and he’ll be grateful. Might even invite you to tea.’

  Suddenly I was prickly under the collar of my coat. The ghost of shame I’d been, so tenuous as I cycled into town, had now put on some threads of flesh and blood.

  *

  That night, alone on Wait-a-While, I began for the first time to write the pages I would send through Lascelles, though those initial attempts at putting things down were nothing more than rehearsals for my completing the tale I’d begun to tell Leonie. And yes, I was partly unsettled into this writing by romance, as if every phrase I was to utter had now to be scaled and gutted, filleted and floured, perfumed with Minoan herbs and dished up with classical wine and song.

  That’s why those first pages were destroyed.

  Nevertheless I can look back now and see that a fresher spirit was ringing through me, a warmer song, leaving stoics like Epictetus aside. What I now claim fully as the richness and renewability of love gave Vern and his plight some air on the pages of a lined exercise book, as well as laurel crowns and golden status, with myself the courting chronicler. I can smile as I write how Vern was trussed up by my pen, but doubly so, as written by Homer on his wine-dark sea, which was actually hued with blood. By midnight I was so invigorated I went walking on the earth as the jersey cow had seemed to recommend, swooning that owls were hooting just for me, that frogs were croaking their approval, and imagining the island not as Naxos but as a penultimate realm, precursor to the lofty lenticular cloud of the conjugal chamber. The moonlight seduced, just as earlier that morning the day had made me sick, and to be sure I was a laughable remnant of the war, a thirsting man instantly drunk on his first sip of communion.

  Morning came. I got out of bed feeling flattened by my writings and saw the pages on the table as I passed to heat up the water for the washtub. Already they were like leaves of another planet’s tree.

  After washing I sat with my pot of tea and, I am happy to recall, had a good dark laugh. Oh for pity’s sake, the difference between day and night, it is relentless. By lunchtime I was chopping wood round the side of the hut to purge myself of poetry and in the dusk by the little table under the northern window I reached again for my Epictetus, to bolster and provide continuity through to nightfall.

  That next night I didn’t write, or walk, and the charge as we’d opened the wooden lid by the co-op wall began to fade a little, just as the whiting eyes would be dulling if Leonie and Nat Fermoy had not eaten them yet. I sat in shirtsleeves and woollen vest at my main table, smoking Escorts, a bottle of stout at my elbow, my memories pulling me down, on a burning rope from a blue-prowed boat, with not only me but the shade of my brother’s bloated body on the end. With hands on fire I slipped back from Leonie’s seasoned replies and patient observation, back from the complex figure she cut in the streaky air, towards a goat song of foreign myth, where soldiers have their cocks sucked by nymphs as their brothers die.

  But still the image of the two of us by the co-op wall, the leaning bike, the bricky echo of our voices, came on again to right me back to a kind of centre, my elbows on the table, bottle by my side, my hut situated on what felt that night like a hill the surrounding winds had steadied into existence.

  By Tilley light, one on the kero boxes by the sink, one hanging from the unoiled rafter overhead, the stove door open, with the coals of the wood I’d cut earlier in the day to cleanse me of my bullshit. Epictetus had this to say:

  They who have taken up brave theorems immediately wish to vomit them forth, as persons whose stomach is diseased do with the food. First digest the thing, then do not vomit it up thus . . .

  And I realised, sipping at my beer, that myth itself can be a bare theorem, though one shaped to the nature of longing for reason in the brain; and I decided to take a leaf out of Leonie’s earthy book and burn the pages of the night before, and with it the idea that Vern and I were players in some second-hand bookish labyrinth.

  I placed the prehistory of these bungalow pages through the open door of the stove that night and felt something suitably beyond description.

  The burning of those pages was the first layer in a type of composting. These words I write now are the new green shoots.

  *

  For three nights I dreamt of Adrasteia. It was how we touched that mattered, not what we said or what we thought. It was enough for me that my days were normal and plain as my hut, the completion of which kept me righted. I chopped wood, built a fence and gate at the gap of the paperbarks onto the road, and looked out to sea. And the sea was plain too. At that distance, in a temperate brace of weather, it was as level as my table. I could have placed my book upon it, my teapot and my ashtray. In a giant’s life. In another world.

  It had been implied that Leonie would visit me again sometime soon, if not by a spoken arrangement then by the nature of what we’d shared, and by what we both knew now remained to be told; but she never showed. And so I entered a pensive and fractious zone where the name of my land seemed nothing but bloody droll. If it was a test, yet another one, sent by her or whoever, maybe even by her father in some traditional courtship ritual, I failed it miserably. Not that I succumbed to visiting her, my instability wouldn’t allow for that, even though I wanted to so badly.

  It seemed that all I had was yet another questionable encounter on my mind. No physical seduction took place, but I was left alone regardless. And now, as the days went slowly by on Wait-a-While and she didn’t show, I copped the full southerly brunt of it.

  In training in the desert we had been taught how to handle the Tommy guns, how to wire in, to advance and fall back in formation, the importance of equipment maintenance, how looking sharp and being neat and clean could save our lives. But we had not been taught how to wait, any more than we’d been taught how to watch our best friend pulsing out gluts of blood before he dies with a terrible absence of emotion. We taught ourselves. How to while away hours without killing each other before we even got to the Germans or Italians, how to count butterflies and play knuckles and two-up and poker as we hung around Iraklio in the spring. Well, at least we had each other; whereas now, in ‘peacetime’, I was still waiting, but this time on my Pat Malone.

  And just yesterday, thinking of those days after she had knocked on my door with that storm-black eye, I had the liberty to compose this thought:

  Trauma finds its companions, just as happiness seeks out joy.

  When I showed it to her this morning she screwed up her face before saying: ‘Is that a reference to you and I?’ As if to say, ‘I thought you were supposed to be setting it straight about Crete, not what’s happened afterwards.’ And I said, ‘But is it true, do you think?’

  I saw then how her mind went straight to companion
planting, how certain plants will thrive beside others until they all run across the ground in a unified field of tiny flowers and leaves and tufts that draw in the spinebill, the honeyeaters, the landrail. And she finally said, ‘Be more specific’, requiring that I rewrite the sentence again, or at least elaborate, implying too that if I was to be true to the phrase I would make something less smooth, something more difficult, something endemic to my life.

  And so, internal life be damned, I must now recount how a tooth flared up in my soul, something as sharp and well designed as one of old Nat Fermoy’s pilot-whale teeth on the wall at Yellow Rock, as if to mock my nebulous pining for his granddaughter, to blight me again. It was my left bottom molar, and bit by throbbing bit it grew like a hard running tide through a common Bass Strait cold, until I winced and whined the days alone amongst the hessian and newsprint walls of Wait-a-While.

  If I could have ripped it out myself with pliers I would have taken up the whaler’s scrimshaw craft with glee on my very own tooth but all I had for it was alcohol – the last of my whiskey, and when that ran out bottles of Brian Robinson’s homebrew stout – and hot compresses I made of wads of rosemary and parsley wrapped in silverbeet, which I thought might help but didn’t. My pain was a geologic strata: at the root my grief and guilt and the official injustice, on top of that my self-imposed exile, above that the want of Leonie, not only her face and company and tone but my need now to help with her problems and to continue my account; and then, on top of it all, the final strata of the external reality you would see if you had the chance to peer into my hut on Wait-a-While during those days: a man in a dirty singlet grimacing and sighing, gripping his furniture with the pain of a toothache.

  For one who’d been through such layers of difficulty I got myself into quite a state: knowing I should cycle over to Currie, at least for alcoholic relief at the hotel if not to seek out a dentist, but at the same time ensnared by not wanting to miss Leonie if she came.

  A full week went by since the tooth started to play up, I was braising rabbit and also a wallaby I’d caught in a necker-snare near the house, hardly sleeping, drifting back and forth between what these days the hippies would call hallucination and in the Old Testament lamentation. An old black woman came to the door one morning to say that a dentist from Melbourne was on the island for a bird-watching holiday, you could tell him by his large brown field glasses, she said, his monogrammed Gladstone bag, and that he was lingering up near Cape Wickham. If I was quick I could catch him before he left with the next boat out of Grassy. I could cut him off on the Pegarah road. She left with a gaping but girlish laugh, in a mouth without one single tooth. After much effort and traipsing through bright yellow canola fields (there was no canola on the island back then, and never has been since) I eventually found the ornithological dentist drinking rum with Leonie’s Uncle True at Yellow Rock. He made me lie flat on the big log table in the kitchen, and took out the instruments from his bag. Telling me to concentrate on his birding results, the statistics of which were written in copperplate all over the kitchen walls and even on the salt-streaked glass of the big west-facing window, he began to jiggle and snick and tinkle around in my open mouth. As I read his elegant count of black-browed albatross, storm petrels, sea eagles, stints, chats, Cape Barren geese and sooty oystercatchers, I was relieved there was no pain. He was certainly busy with his instruments and it seemed he was a master. Or was it the interest of the bird names and numbers that was sufficiently distracting my mind?

  I came out of this delusion writhing and cursing for it seemed that all the while the dentist had been etching a flock of nimble dotterels onto my tooth. The hallucination ended with him pulling the tooth, and bearing it off to show Uncle True his artwork. Such was the perversity of my distress.

  I lost track of days until finally it occurred to me, in something like a cloudbreak of the mind, that I could die of the infection. Also, that it might have already been months since I’d seen Leonie off at the gate. Such was my disorientation, the sanity of the prospect of infection merged effortlessly with my wonky reckonings of time. Later on I found out that my delirium was one week long and no more.

  I straddled the bike, rugged up against the westerly I’d be riding into. I was weakened, despite my feral thereabout stews, which I’d eventually boiled the life out of to save chewing, and don’t remember much of the ride. But I know I arrived at the hotel because after a couple of whiskeys served up by Jerome Sleeves over the bar I began to gather my senses. The pain relief that the alcohol brought flooded me with a half an hour or so of long-sightedness. I felt my body’s exhaustion but was convinced I was in no danger. I could see the effect the woman had on me, how she had reduced me to this. There was probably bugger-all wrong with my tooth, I reasoned. I took another slug of whiskey and looked around the bar.

  Jerome Sleeves, the publican, was an average-sized man, with the close grown curls of a bird-dog and a mildly stoic disposition where he stood polishing glasses behind the bar. On the bench under a window looking out onto the street, two red-skinned craymen were sitting, beers in palms, having a quiet yarn. One of them dished out a deadpan stare as I glanced across, but then a belated nod. On a table with four chairs in the middle of the bar between where I sat and the window’s bench, another man sat with a glass of portergaff, reading a letter written on blue airmail. He was engrossed but every now and again one of the craymen would ask him for his opinion about something they were discussing. And on the other side of the bar from me sat Lascelles, chewing assiduously on the counter lunch of curried sausages in front of him.

  Perhaps Lascelles had said g’day when I first walked in and I hadn’t noticed. I couldn’t be sure. But now, with his slouch hat resting on the bar-towel beside his plate, having just broken my fever and dulled my pain, I could almost have done with a chat. Even with him. I was so relieved to have ended the week of nightmares alone on Wait-a-While.

  The man reading the airmail at the table eventually finished his letter and looked up towards the bar with a pleasant expression. Our eyes met and we acknowledged each other, again with a nod. Jerome Sleeves took the cue. ‘Another, Keith?’ he asked, or something like that, and the man at the table, folding the letter and slipping it into Harris tweed, said he would.

  Getting up from the table he drained the last of his portergaff, and walking over to the bar set it down for Jerome Sleeves to refill.

  ‘So how’s he gettin’ on?’ Jerome asked him, pouring out the beer from the tap before he topped it up with stout.

  The man who’d read the letter nodded easily, with high, satisfied eyebrows. ‘Her father’s given him a go on the farm. Famous potatoes apparently, they’ve got what used to be the manager’s house, which Teddy says is small but snug. So all’s well.’

  ‘Well, I expect everyone’s settlin’ into things again well and truly now. Gettin’ some normal work done,’ said Jerome Sleeves.

  ‘That’s what it sounds like. I don’t think we’d be expecting him back anytime soon.’

  As Jerome finished pouring the portergaff and the man put his coins on the bar, Lascelles swallowed the last of his lunch as if perfecting a technical assignment. Finally he looked up from his plate.

  ‘Pretty island, Jersey,’ he said, nodding, and wiping his chin. ‘From all accounts. How are you anyway, Keith? Keeping well? You’re certainly looking fit.’

  The bloke called Keith took up his glass but didn’t return to his table. ‘Struggling on, John, you know. Feeling tip-top now though, thanks to the postal service, eh.’

  At his corner of the bar Lascelles almost blushed, but just as quickly regained himself. ‘And you, Wes,’ the postman now called, careful as always to do the right thing. ‘How’s the new digs coming on? You’re looking well.’

  Looking well? I couldn’t but snigger rudely, after what I’d just been through.

  ‘It’s coming along,’ I managed.

  What ensu
ed then was, it has to be said, an enjoyable conversation between the three of us, especially so for me, I s’pose, due to the way the grog had backed off the pain. As the chat went on I could feel a dull throb in the molar, though more just a tidal pulse than what you would call genuine discomfort.

  It seemed Keith, who subsequently introduced himself to me as Keith Brimacombe of Quarantine Bay, and who was a long lairdish but genial type of chap with plenty of hair, had a twin brother Teddy who’d fallen in love with a nurse from Jersey in the Channel Islands during the war and had settled there. Keith and Lascelles chatted amiably, mainly about people I’d never met, but also a little about what Teddy had to say about postwar life on Jersey and how he was getting on as a farmer with only his faraway southern knowledge. There followed a brief discussion about the nature of island life, in part prompted by Teddy’s letter but driven also by Lascelles’ impressions since he and his father had moved over from Victoria. Lascelles remarked that island living seemed to give people their bearings and Jerome suggested that each island was a world unto itself and therefore often riddled with ignorance. Keith Brimacombe recounted how much his Teddy had felt a stranger on Jersey, and how he figured it was because of the unique limits of each island’s life. This got me thinking and, perhaps prompted by the slow thud of my molar, I began to observe myself there in the bar, as if looking down from the ceiling, holding forth on Crete.

  Before I knew what I was doing I’d suggested that islanders are habitually patronising to all outsiders and inveterate liars because of it. What was I thinking, mainlander that I was, having been saved and comforted so many times by the kindness of islanders on Crete? But on I went, between the throb of the tooth and sips of the whiskey, until even the red-skinned craymen at the window bench began to show an interest.

  There is some kernel of truth in even the worst of delusions, the world often revealing itself in such contrarian ways, but this errant rant of mine also set in train a further and even more extended ear-bash on how islander eyes equate their horizon with the end of the world, and thus with death, and therefore prefer to stay at home in order to stay alive. To this Keith Brimacombe countered with the argument of British colonisation of the far and wide, including the ground where we talked, and Britain all the while remaining just a small island in the sea. I said of course that in everything, including military responsibility and moral accountability, the Poms were often the rare exception, and on and on we went. Eventually, to their undivided interest, I recounted the Minoan hoax of old Arthur Evans, how he had gone to such lengths to weave his archaeological myth of ancient pacifism on Crete, and how the Cretans themselves had played along with it in order to enter his employ, knowing full well that they were about as pacifist as the bulldog Churchill himself. Their inscrutability was yet another example of an island culture’s amorality towards outsiders.