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

by Richard Flanagan

  After having been dobbed in by Musha Pug for selling ship’s silk to the Siamese girls of the manfern fronds, Capois Death was given a hundred lashes, strapped to the Cradle for a week, & then sent up the Gordon River to work as a sawyer. One evening, beneath the mottling shadows thrown in the firelight by the myrtles looming over them, he recalled the tragic history of the machine breaker of Glasgow to his fellow sawyers, speaking in such evocative language of the murderous power of steam machines, that it was mistakenly assumed he had some familiarity with mechanickal matters.

  When the huge wooden crates of forged iron pieces marked ‘Locomotive’ arrived at Sarah Island the following month, the accompanying complex assembly instructions defeated even the ingenuity of the best shipwrights. The Commandant’s despair was complete until misinformed by Musha Pug, through his extensive network of spies, that a maroon working on the felling gang up the Gordon had been boasting of how he had once built steam engines.

  Upon being summoned, Capois Death offered the Commandant confident reassurances, & gave the shipwrights erratic instructions based only on an indistinct memory of a street pamphlet he had read about George Stephenson’s new marvel. But it was only after the Commandant told Capois Death that he would have both him & the shipwrights feast on their own balls after having had them sliced off & grilled on a fire made up of faggots of their useless arms, that Capois Death was able to persuade the shipwrights to make sense of what seemed utterly without order, & manufacture out of a confusion of cast-iron a locomotive, with the unique feature of a small mast from which cantilevered cables held up a double smokestack that stuck horizontally out of both sides of the boiler, like a waxed moustache.

  With the steam machine finally assembled, the Commandant took to taking his leave of the island with great ceremony & two Siamese girls every evening, band playing, cannons booming, soldiers parading. After which he would travel two hundred yards in the train from the station to the roundhouse. Here the train would spend the rest of the evening travelling around in circles until the engineer was vomiting & the outward wheels grew so worn from the extra weight thrown by centrifugal force that the train developed a wearying outward tilt. Inside the melancholic Commandant had fallen asleep, head on the lap of one or the other Siamese girls.

  When after another year there was still no sign of any incoming rail traffic, the Commandant had four search parties sent into the interior to discover exactly from which direction the new railway lines must be inevitably advancing. No-one returned. In their absence the Commandant had all those who were in those search parties lost somewhere in Transylvania summarily tried & convicted, having by the application of hot brands to the belly of a returned escapee secured the true story of their disappearance, that they had all boarded an express locomotive bound for Ambleside in the English Lake District at a wayside stop near Frenchman’s Cap—from which, incidentally, Brady & his Army of Light had alighted—with the declared intention of never returning.

  When it was determinedly but respectfully put to the Commandant that a train station on an island in the middle of a wilderness was unlikely to attract any other traffic that might bring in income to offset its enormous cost, the Commandant placidly & unexpectedly agreed. He then revealed that he had for the last several months not been asleep at all in the revolving locomotive cabin, but in deep discussion with a Japanese trader called Magamasa Yamada, a man in whose land there was a great demand for wood & with whom the Commandant had entered into an arrangement to sell the entire Transylvanian wilderness in exchange for more rolling stock which the pirate had come in possession of while on a trading trip to South America. These mechanickal carts would allow the Nation to reap the inevitable boom that would accompany the abolition of the wilderness & subsequent opening up of the cleared land for settlement. No-one was willing to say to His Gold Mask that the endless circling in the railway carriage had tipped the already disturbed equilibrium of his mind into complete lunacy.

  The only one not surprised the following summer when the junks of Japanese sawyers arrived was the Commandant himself. He watched as they unloaded the promised rolling stock. The cabins were riddled with woodworm & rot, but as the Commandant would always sit only in the improvised coal truck that had been designated the Regal Cabin, this seemed to be of no real matter.

  IX

  AS I STARED at the stargazer ascending into the chimney, now so many pieces of charred paper, Capois Death, with his cack-headed leer, began telling me all about his new position, how following his success in redesigning the locomotive, his role was to foster a notion of travel that might encourage use of the national railway station, the national locomotive & accompanying rolling stock.

  I knew better than to be talking when I needed to be listening, but still I felt the need to venture the observation that on an island approximately one square mile in area, there was nowhere to go.

  ‘Precisely,’ said the old publican seeking—I felt—to affect an air of mystery which to my shame I must say succeeded in making me feel intrigued, ‘but there will be.’

  He told me I was to present myself at the train station immediately prior to that night’s departure of the Sarah Island Express. That misty evening, as the boiler was slowly brought to pressure in preparation for departure, as the air became a fiery-coloured scrim of cinders & ash, as I stood barefoot & ankle-deep in the mud below the siding staring upwards, the Commandant, from behind a drawn sooty curtain in the Regal Cabin, explained at length to me his conviction that Commerce—for which, it seemed, he mistook the endless circling velocity of his locomotive—was now entering not only new territory for Trade, but also for Art. He then explained why he felt it entirely necessary to have me strapped to the front of the locomotive so that I might better experience the new aesthetick of movement.

  He drew the curtain back a little, but from where I stood all I could make out was a little of his gold mask & two small eyes reflecting the disturbing glowing yellow of the mask. Though I demurred—politely—the Commandant insisted—gently—and had me immediately seized by Musha Pug. Without further talk, I was firmly bound with several belts & leather thongs to the locomotive’s front railing.

  To the growing roar of the steam engine & the rhythmic clatter of iron wheels on iron rails, I circled endlessly. Within a few minutes I was vomiting, & a few minutes after that I had nothing left to retch save a foul green bile that spread like the vomit before over my clothes. On & on, round & round, & no attempt to lose myself in sleep or daydreaming or focusing on thoughts of food or women helped in any way. My only sensations were a nausea that bordered on a violent assault of the senses, a stench of coal smoke that filled my lungs, a feeling that my entire body was being violated & crippled, a knowledge that I was utterly alone. If this was the future, thought I in one of the few moments of lucidity granted me that long evening, it was not a future that seemed worthy of the name.

  After the locomotive slowly screeched to a halt, I was unstrapped & dragged senseless & sick to an easel set up especially for the purpose with a magnificent view of the roundhouse.

  For some time I struggled merely to stand upright. The world rolled in waves around me; the roundhouse rose & fell like a forest of bull-kelp, Siamese girls floated past, Musha Pug & his henchmen darted hither & thither, a school of alien aquatic creatures. Somewhat unsteadily I picked up a paintbrush, my light body stumbling in the heavy mud, recovered my balance, & set to work, fully intending despite the fug of nausea that overwhelmed me, to paint the Commandant a picture of Revelation & Profound Discovery that remade the world anew as Commerce.

  But then I finished.

  In every way I knew I had failed.

  Billy Gould had always felt if something was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. Worry about doing it too well, he believed, & you may well be crippled by your ambition. In this regard, if in no other, he suspected he may have succeeded.

  For what I had painted was not a warm thing or a happy thing, but a cold thing, a frightfu
l, frightening, frightened thing. They had wanted of me consolation, & this was desolation. The latent violence, the manic vision: I had got none of it. They had wanted Hope & Progress, & to my horror I saw sullenly staring back at me—a stargazer! They had wanted a New God & in my monstrous confusion I had given them a fish!

  It was no good. A fate worse than Captain Pinchbeck’s petite noyade, crueller than Governor Arthur’s Cockchafer awaited, the Tube Gag & the Cradle & the Scavenger’s Daughter all bound up together & me dying the most terrible death in the middle.

  Feeling ever iller, I stepped backwards, gulping, slightly stumbling, terrified of what my failure might augur. As I sought to regain my balance, to my horror the Commandant, who I had not known had been standing behind me all that time watching, stepped forward.

  Unlike the Surgeon, who could fill days examining a single image for flaws, the Commandant spent only a few seconds surveying the picture as I surveyed him for the first time since he had spoken to us on the day of our arrival. From behind, it was clear what the gold mask was intended to obscure: the great size of his head, the disproportionate smallness of the body beneath, that subordination of the body to the spirit.

  Then he turned around, but all I could see were those jaundiced eyes highlighted by the eye sockets of the gold mask, & behind that mask’s smiling slit the suggestion of a cavernous black mouth opening ever wider. The incongruous small squawks issuing out of that dark emptiness pronounced the Commandant as pleased as I was appalled, as if I had done a fine portrait of him as one of Napoleon’s marshals he had once so admired, rather than a painting of a lousy fish.

  Here, I realised, was a man clearly in the prime of his life. I smiled and, with the flourish I also remembered of Audubon, bowed.

  THE LEATHERJACKET

  Which treats of how a Flemish painter came to see Reason—Sublime possibilities of modern travel—The Great Mah-Jong Hall—On the colonising force of fish—Underlining Europe—Goethe’s passion for Miss Anne—Paganini—Cockatoos—Culture, so much guano—The dream of a silent city—A surfeit of love.

  I

  THE NEXT DAY I was summoned to meet the Commandant in his cell. The weather was full Van Diemonian. The wind beat brutal. Loose shingles were torn off roofs & hurtled through the air with great & unintentional ferocity, wounding the unwary & unlucky. The great Huon pine log walls were to be heard cracking & groaning in the ongoing agony of continuing upright, as the wind beat into them & at them again & again. The rain fell & fell. The soldiers’ second mess was buried in a mud slide. Spume & mist rose & ran fifty or a hundred yards at a time, to rest for a moment or a minute before the wind hurtled them on again. And beyond the sea beat into a white fury hammering at the island. Part of the new wharf caved in & then washed away. No boats had been out for three days after a party returning from the Gordon made a dash for it across the harbour & lost all hands. Rushing between Lempriere’s cottage & the Commandant’s quarters in one of the few breaks in the rain, my eyes smarted with the salt mist & the grit & ash thrown around in the air like loose shot.

  Wet & cold I waited for several hours in a dark narrow corridor with the redcoat who had brought me. When in early evening I was finally admitted it was to an unspeakably small, unusually scented room—no wider than a single arm span, at the most just slightly over a man’s height long.

  Rats as large & bold as anywhere else on the island occasionally scuttled in & out of the dull light given off by a guttering candle impaled on a wall hook, their size accentuated by the very smallness of the cell & the weird shadows they threw in the jumping light. It seemed impossible that two people could be together in such a confined space & still not see each other, yet such was the case, for he remained behind a drawn curtain that divided the cell, as if it were some papist confessional.

  The cell was largely unadorned, save for a small glass bust of Voltaire, half-full of some amber fluid that I suspected to be whisky. In form & size, if not material, it looked identical to the bust which Gould’s daughter had once dansey-headed known the blessings of the old Enlightenment. Its uses for a man trying to win back the passion of Twopenny Sal were to me, if no-one else, obvious.

  I did not then know—how could I?—how strong was the Commandant’s desire for smells. I did not know from Twopenny Sal how he once begged her not to wash for a month so that he might savour the full universe of her natural odours. I did not realise he had his favourite cologne shipped from Naples; I was not aware when I felt its slight weight in my hand & slipped it down the front of my government blouse that the Commandant’s most precious perfume of all—a special scent made for him by Napoleon’s very own perfumer, Chardin—came in that small glass bottle shaped as none other than a bust of Voltaire smiling, now down my dacks staring at the sorry sight of a jobless Flemish painter.

  The Commandant told me, his voice muffled by the curtains, that given the wonderful painting of Progress that I had completed the evening before, I was to be given a new task that would—if executed with both diligence & creativity as well as a certain discretion—see my living conditions improve considerably, & perhaps reconsideration of the severity of my original sentence. He understood that I did illustrative work of some technical description or another for the Surgeon, but what he was proposing was only an interruption, not a cessation of such scientifick work, & I would, when I had completed this task, return to my duties for the Surgeon.

  My relief, that porous day when the Commandant told me of my new mission, was immeasurable. I would—at least for a time—escape my horror of the fish without losing any of my valuable privileges. The Commandant was offering me a path away from the pitiless corrosion of my soul that was beginning to affect me so badly that I was unable to sleep of a night lest I awake in the ocean. I wished to sigh, to smile, to throw an arm over His Bulkiness’s back. But said I nothing &—save continue listening—did nothing, as the Commandant went on to outline his vision for the railway line in the absence of movement.

  He wanted me to paint a series of theatrical drop screens Capois Death had devised depicting different views & sublime scenes that would form an outer walled circle lining the circular railway track at the roundhouse. These would, he believed, anticipate a new trend in travel whereby people would never have to move in order to have their desire for exotic spectacles gratified, occasionally looking outside as they circled around endlessly to see that they were rushing past Tintern Abbey or Windermere or, as a poetic touch, the new rookeries of Salford—just to add that sense of movement from Industrial to Natural, from Modern to Pastoral, that sense of contrast in which Capois Death, who had once read the Lake poets, had told him all true appreciation of Romantic scenery to be so deeply & indelibly rooted.

  These proposed paintings did not sound uncertain slimeballs of trouble like fish. To the contrary; they sounded the fine sort of paintings with which I could quickly find myself happily familiar, splendid vistas in which bald eagles might be sighted, perhaps, thought I wistfully, sporting splendid garlands of wisteria.

  As I took my leave that day from the Commandant’s cell & headed alone down that dreary, whale oil-lit damp stone corridor, Voltaire bumping away at my ball bag, I heard the rain carolling as ever outside & for the first time in such a long time I felt that it did not sound like an infinity of chain links softly drumming on stone. It sounded like hope, serenity, a drizzle of security. It sounded like things were looking up at last for Billy Gould.

  You may wonder what the Commandant’s motives were in all this. Why such paintings? Why me?

  But I didn’t. I never questioned the peculiarities of power, only sought to serve it, be it Captain Pinchbeck or the Commandant or that great goose, Pobjoy. If they were to say, ‘Kiss my arse, Billy Gould,’ I would only ever reply, ‘How many times? And will you be wanting my tongue up there as well?’

  II

  THE BACKDROPS PROVED no great Garrett-drama to paint, all big gestures that tended to run into dreary & dismal washes when it rained, but th
is was turned to our advantage by Capois Death. He invented a schedule that saw the drop screens replaced every week with a fresh set; one of the Swiss alps, the next of the great Russian taiga (which was just the alps with the rain-dissolved mountains presented as sky), the next of the marvellous African veldt (the further distressed taiga) then the sublime Lake district (the veldt with daffodils) & so on, round & round.

  As the Commandant circled endlessly in the Regal Cabin past the aching emptiness of the Oriental plains, the soot-smutting sadness of the satanic mills of Yorkshire, the white invitation of the Arctic Circle, the Japanese sawyers made camp on the edge of the swamp at Liberty Point. Dividing the surrounding forests up into squares, they set to work in a thorough & systematick way which over the next few months turned the surrounding blue & green wild lands into an unruly chequerboard of stubbly bare brown squares where they had felled & cleared the forest, & the verdant, as yet, uncut & uncleared squares. Then the Japanese left for winter, the rains came, & while the Commandant gasped in astonishment as the crowded chaos of the isle of Manhattan ceded to the trackless glory of the recently discovered American Rockies, first the soil, then several mountains washed away, so that when the Japanese sawyers returned the following summer they were confronted with an immense & entirely disorientating boulder desert to the north.

  On & on the Commandant circled, flying past my many paintings of bald eagles in every exotic location known to man, & the more he advanced in his belief in his manifest destiny, the more he declined in the practice of sense. His talk became of impossibilities—of building a temple of odours; of lifting the Penitentiary into the air by the power of levitation, so escape would be impossible except in balloons; of developing mesmerism as an offensive weapon for his army by raising a regiment of spiritualists who would stand in the front row of great battles willing the other side to lose.