Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

by Richard Flanagan

  I have used the image of a relentless river to describe Miss Anne’s letters, but this is imprecise. Certainly her enchanting tales seemed to be written in this fashion, twice, sometimes thrice weekly; but they were delivered & thus received only once or twice a year—and therefore their effect on the Commandant’s mind was not so much the gentle erosion of a stream upon its banks, but more that of a tidal wave, obliterating everything in its path.

  When later I came to paint several of these letters, I found their tone inevitably exuberant, the form overrunning, sentences tumbling over each other, phrases leapfrogging ideas, the writer panting to tell the one she believed to be her younger brother of all the new wonders of the age, made all the more remarkable by some personal association—high tea with George Stephenson’s sister who thought her idea of calling the locomotive ‘The Ebullient Thunderer’ excellent, a risqué evening watching bear baiting at the Five Courts where she was introduced to the poet John Keats, with whom she had compared notes, wrote she, on wayward brothers lost in the New World.

  These letters tormented the Commandant, who had become profoundly afflicted by the pathos of distance. They distorted his perspective of the Old World, diminishing the everyday, the banal, the chicanery & the mediocrity of Europe; exaggerating the marvellous, the sublime, the astounding of that distant world half a year’s voyage away.

  In the Commandant’s mind events in Europe came to seem epochal, & connected in unexpected ways. Thus the steam locomotive & Byron’s Don Juan & Baron Rumford’s splendid scientifick fireplaces—all of which arose from some delightful personal association with Miss Anne—leapt into the Commandant’s imagination simultaneously as one, creating an idea of smokeless Romantic travel & the pleasures of the flesh that he was later to pursue with a certain mad ardour.

  One night, when behind his gold mask his eyes had finally wearied from rereading her wondrous letters & closed in a dully pleasant anticipation of nearing sleep, he realised that all the new technological miracles in Europe had either been invented by Miss Anne or directly come into being from her good works, wise advice or kindly intervention: be these the locomotive, the steam ship, the steam press or the generation of the supernatural force of electricity—all were the creation of Miss Anne!

  And then, after a further time, he had to concede to himself that not only matters technological, but also the very marvel of modern nineteenth-century Europe were clearly a direct consequence of his sister’s imaginings. With the force of profound revelation he realised that his sister was inventing Europe, & his body shuddered in a single, violent clutch.

  The next morning, as he had the old Dane calculate on a large abacus their monthly takings for spermaceti, he found himself beginning to wonder if he might not do the same. As the black & white beads clacked back & forth something else was tallying in his mind, the sum of which was that he might make the penal colony of Sarah Island the product of his imaginative will as surely as Miss Anne had Europe.

  He cried out so loud that the old Dane in shock dropped the abacus, which broke upon the flagged flooring of the Commandant’s cell. As the black & white beads rolled in every direction, the old Dane scrabbling after them, the Commandant shook his head in revelation. He would reinvent Europe on Sarah Island, only this time it would be even more extraordinary than any of his sister’s descriptions.

  And that day the old Dane’s calculations were shown to be only so many black & white balls dribbling away in the dust, the Commandant found his monochrome dreams of a man inspired by the nightly return of moonbirds exploding into a kaleidoscope of colourful desires. Through a sea of convict blood he would later claim to have only ever spilled in furtherance of his people’s destiny, Miss Anne’s letters would henceforth be to him as a crazed lodestone by which he would navigate his strange journey, with us his unwilling passengers.

  V

  AT THAT TIME my life had settled into a routine that was if not pleasant then, compared to most of my fellow felons, at least tolerably comfy. Though I continued to sleep with the other convicts in the Penitentiary, between the morning & evening muster I was largely free to do whatever took my fancy & go where I liked on the island. I received extra food, a rum ration & was allowed to keep a small vegetable garden for my own use next to Castlereagh’s pen. I even had a woman, which in a colony full of men, was no small matter.

  She was the Commandant’s mistress, Twopenny Sal. My assignations with her were accordingly risky & thus furtive affairs hidden from all view, normally undertaken in that one place no-one else ventured, the small piece of bush between Castlereagh’s pen & the steep bank behind it.

  Here, protected by a copse of dense tea-trees & the rising miasma of pig shit, we stored in terra-cotta pitchers our contraband supply of a rough grog we fermented out of stolen currants & sugar, flavoured & coloured green with sassafras leaves in memory of Capois Death’s Larrikin Soup. Though I would claim I was elsewhere painting fish, inevitably I was in the tea-tree fishing for Twopenny Sal’s delights.

  Hidden from the world, here we passed day after day. It was early winter. While over us brutal westerly winds cut across the island, in the tea-tree we had us our snug, warm & protected, close & holy as the night. Here we traded words.

  My favourite: Moinee.

  Her favourite: Cobber.

  Twopenny Sal thrilled to stories of London, was at once terrified & excited by descriptions of crowds larger than the largest mob of kangaroos & buildings so tall & densely arrayed they made their own valleys & gorges & ravines without a tree in sight. She would in turn tell tales of how Van Diemen’s Land was made, by the god Moinee striking the land & creating the rivers, by puffing away & blowing the earth up into mountains.

  ‘And how was Macquarie Harbour made?’ one day asked I. ‘By Moinee?’

  ‘Macquarie Harbour?’ said she. ‘Moinee’s piss pot—cobber.’

  She would smell of pickled herring & I would pass her my pipe & with the pipe clenched firmly in her teeth she would quiver like a fish, then smell of something altogether different & even better & then we were rooting swimming flying mollynogging most marvellous. She had small breasts & a large waist & skinny shanks & was at first voracious in her lovemaking. She would make a great deal of noise, somewhere between a Van Diemonian devil screeching at night & a stampede, which was both pleasing & frightening because it meant we ran the risk of being caught, even with Castlereagh carolling away in the background. No matter how much I implored her to enjoy her passion in muted delight, she ignored me. She had little knowledge of shame & when passion was upon her, which at the beginning, as I have said, was more than frequently, she would have as happily taken me in front of the Surgeon or the Commandant or a chain gang.

  But I would be less than honest if I said all was well with me & my routine which was—though I did not know it—about to end. Looking back, it is true to say that things were even then beginning to fall apart. After a time Twopenny Sal did learn the necessary proprieties, but by then she had lost pretty well all interest in me & was spending time with Musha Pug, a dog who by dobbing had been rewarded with the cosy billet of assisting the storemaster in the Commissariat, & was a far better source of food & grog & tobacco than I had been. And I, who had taken her so for granted, missed her much more than I thought possible.

  My style in my paintings of the fish was mercifully improving, & with it the prospects of my survival. My pictures were becoming pared down, as useful as a good boot, as solid as a well-fitted mizzen mast for the Pudding’s ship of glorious Science.

  In any case—or whatever parallel—the Pudding was well pleased, sometimes to the point of glee, as his daydreams filled with images of the Glorious Return of the Great Natural Historian & Noted Ichthyologist Lempriere to the Capital London, as he mouthed silently his rejoinders to those Ladies of Society who at the Grand Soirees of Science fell at his feet & asked how did he survive Savages & Jungles & the Hungry Hottentots, & he, with the greatest humility, replying:

  �
��Because I believed in Science, Madam, & my own small part in its Sacred Mission.’

  VI

  IN DIFFERENT WAYS does the Devil present & never one easily reducible to illustration. My work was becoming increasingly frustrating & it seemed only appropriate that the evocative & luminous name ‘stargazer’ would suggest to my mind a fish entirely different from that which the fishing gang one morning presented me to paint. I imagined a fish possessed of some ethereal quality, as if it were some meditative virtue incarnated as fish-flesh. Such a fish would, reckoned I, be ideal for the medium of watercolour, which I found difficult in capturing density, but which had a certain ability to render the passage of light.

  But the stargazer the convict fishermen had given me was a far from easy fish to paint. I don’t know why I found it to be so, though in the darkness of its being, in its fiercesome looks, in its satanic horns on the edges of its terrible bull head, its vertical mouth locked in a perpetual scowl, its slimy skin, the strangeness of its eyes that sat on top of its head rather than on the side—as if it were always looking upwards at the heavens, hence its enchanting, celestial name—in all of this was contained the suggestion of something I found not alien but familiar. Yet I could not say what the nature of that familiarity was, nor why it at first disturbed me so.

  A stargazer is a frightening fish by any stretch of the imagination, but not until the day I first saw one in its own world did I understand its true nature. I had gone to the fishing jetty to marvel at the netting gang’s latest catch—a giant cod, with a large ball inside its belly. Beneath the sloughs of milky skin the ball was still recognisable as Doughy Proctor’s head—the only thing left of him after attempting escape strapped to an old pickled-pork barrel. The chief of the netting gang, a Vlach from the Levant by the name of Rolo Palma, gestured me to come over to where he was standing at the end of the jetty & look into the sea.

  In a way that was as much a defining characteristick of the lands he came from as it was of him, Rolo Palma’s destiny was to be bound up in other countries. Having ended up in England & finding English friendship manifesting itself typically as a lack of conversation, Rolo Palma—in the manner of his hero Swedenborg—instead took up speaking with angels. He had a fertile imagination & a keen interest in the natural world, & every prospect—if his acting on the angels’ orders had not interposed, forcing his compulsory migration to Van Diemen’s Land as a convicted murderer—of inventing a natural history system even madder than that admired by the Surgeon. But he had to make do with speculating on the existence of mythical creatures such as the minotaur & gryphon in the Van Diemonian interior & pointing out to me, perhaps five feet underwater, two devil eyes protruding from the sea floor. The fish to which the eyes belonged lay submerged in the sand—its huge head, its satanic horns, its tapering circus strongman body—still, tensed, hidden, waiting for the moment when a baby flounder drifted by overhead.

  Then, an explosion of sand out of which the stargazer’s great body appeared, as if forming out of the very disorder it had created. That huge mouth opening & closing all at once & all together. A body flexing & leaping, propelling the stargazer up & sharking down the hitherto unsuspecting baby flounder, leaving only the Vlach cheering & sandy water swirling suggesting a life leaving.

  The lines of my first painting were weak & untrue to this capacity to manifest menace. They failed to render the monstrous proportion, the oversized head that dominated the subordinate tapering body, & my colouring was inadequate to reproducing the tension that is implicit in the musculature of all fish, but most particularly that of the stargazer.

  At such times, when the fish remained only a miserable scientifick illustration, there would enter my mind like an uninvited guest the wretched image of Mr Cosmo Wheeler reinventing the World as a Great Steam Engine like those the machine breaker had tried to smash, cogs within crushing cogs, & me & all the fish being pulped to a mass meal in between their grinding teeth of taxa & systemae.

  I worked & reworked my sketches & my paintings until they overflowed with redundant crisscrossed lines & colours, all of which were a net in search of a fish, but still the fish escaped me. Finally I made a painting that was still mediocre, but which I hoped might prove passable for the Surgeon. By then the fish had gone off, & though it was still boiled & eaten as soup, the netting gang were not happy with my request for a second stargazer, which they thought would be similarly spoilt.

  As it transpired they never had to give the fish to me, for my fortunes were about to take one last turn for the better before everything went to Hell, & Hell came to us.

  VII

  THAT A BOOK should never digress is something with which I have never held. Nor does God, who makes whatever He wishes of the 26 letters & His stories work just as well Q-E-D as A-B-C.

  The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers. I believe the King is with me on this one. He is, I have no doubt, all for bends & diversions & sightseeing, which, while ever only the ongoing art of disappointment, still make a journey the memorable thing a journey ought be.

  Warming to my idea, I put it to the King that this question of roads marks the fundamental divide between the ancient Greek & Roman civilisations. You make a straight road like the Romans & you are lucky to get three words: Veni, vidi, vici. You have a crooked goat path like the Greeks all over the Acropolis & what do you get? The entire damn Odyssey & Oedipus Rex, that’s what. The King, something of a Classicist, stares at the ceiling, his mind filling with gryphons & centaurs &, of course, Pliny.

  How could I forget Pliny?

  Once more, the sagacious King had won, showing that to generalise is to be an idiot, for Pliny may have been a Roman, but he made a book more crooked & bent than Capois Death’s face the day he came back to implicate me in yet one more inevitable digression. Oh, how the black publican seemed to resurface in my life at regular intervals with promises of infinite hope, & depart it leaving my world in complete despair. He was Adventure & I was Envy, he was Trouble & I was Excitement, he was talking & I was already not hearing thinking dreaming wishing that somehow escape might now be possible.

  Capois Death was as bright & breezy as if he had just been freed from the Cockchafer, smiling as though Brady himself were his closest cobber, laughing like he was the top swell of Hobart Town, quarter-flash, half-cut, fully primed Capois Death strolling through the Surgeon’s door, crying, ‘Damn fish, Billy boy!’ & before I can say a word he’s thrown my painting of the stargazer into the dull ashes of Lempriere’s fire, & is off brightly yabbering again, saying, ‘We’ve got better work on our hands.’

  Even in his government slops he still cut a dash, or at least to my mind. And, as ever, he had managed to rise back up the Ladder of Sarah Island. He was now, said he, an official of the National Sarah Island Railway Station, Commissary with Special Responsibilities for Travel.

  Under the influence of Miss Anne’s stories of the new steam locomotives that had become the rage in Europe, the Commandant, increasingly frustrated in his desire to be seen as a man of destiny, intoxicated by his sister’s long descriptions of the exhilaration of a New Age coming into being, riding the railway from Manchester to Liverpool, had three years before decreed that a great train station be built.

  It was a huge undertaking, requiring sandstone be quarried & shipped from far up the coast, the purchase & assembly of all the machinery needed for the workshops & smiths & factories associated with a great train station. All this in face of those who quietly expressed the timid doubt that a train station on an island in the middle of a wilderness far off the coast of a nowhere land so blighted it existed only as a gaol was unlikely ever to be either the terminus or point of departure for any traveller. Such arguments were calmly refuted by the implacable conviction of the Commandant that railway lines grew out to train stations as willow roots to a lake, & that therefore before long it would be the busiest train station in the antipodes; that soon Manchurians & Liverpudlians would enviously
& covetously talk of the National Sarah Island Railway Station. In this way, said he—and some even claimed that the gold mask was seen to smile—we will have traded our tyranny of isolation for the liberty of commerce.

  Two hundred yards of line were laid to the roundhouse, around which ran a loop of line, such that locomotives—when they finally steamed out of the rainforest—could be turned around either on a large wooden turntable powered by a spindle pushed by two dozen convicts who had been reconsigned from the caterpillar, or by traversing the loop & then back to the station. When after several months there was still not the slightest sign of willow-like tendrils of lines snaking their way across the adjacent wilderness towards us, no evidence of iron bridges arising between the island & the mainland, the Commandant announced that he had ordered a steam train from an American whaler, using the last of the gold he had gained in selling the Gordon River & the Great Barrier Reef.

  VIII

  Billy Gould had not been without his problems on Sarah Island. But compared to Capois Death he had been lucky. Soon after arriving at Sarah Island Capois Death had met back up with Roaring Tom Weaver who had managed to find an easy billet for his old landlord with the shellfish gathering gang. There Capois Death incurred the malignant enmity of the convict constable Musha Pug, the gang’s supervisor, who had been transported to Sarah Island because of an unsavoury interlude with a sheep. At his trial Pug, committed for bestiality, had wrongly thought himself accused of sodomy. When asked by the judge what he had to say in his defence, he felt obliged to point out that it was not a ram but a ewe with which he had been caught. Forever after his hatred of catamites—with whom he presumed he had been so criminally confused—was for him a guiding passion that fortunately found numerous outlets for expression on Sarah Island.