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

by Richard Flanagan

  The Commandant’s dreams, as ever, transcended our abilities. He wanted the city to be silent. He wanted the people no longer to talk but to communicate through an elaborate system of written messages. These would be rolled up & placed in small wooden cylinders, that would be propelled with compressed air along pipes, shooting the message off to wherever & whomever it was meant.

  Apart from the sheer mechanickal impossibility of such a scheme, it was respectfully pointed out to the Commandant, as he sat alone on the bare flagstone floor of his darkened cell, that it was not likely that people in the future would want to live in a world where they could only communicate through such sterile means, never to see or meet each other.

  ‘Speech was given to man to conceal thought,’ the Commandant said, his own speech now almost entirely reduced to the poverty of such endless aphorisms, & some said his mask was seen to smile in the dim light of his prison cell, his feathered epaulettes to flap as he spoke.

  The Commandant went on to argue that this—at which he held out his arms as if to wrap them around the cell—this was our future, a claim so patently ludicrous, so demonstrably untrue that no-one took any further issue with it or the Commandant for the rest of the day. He was left alone in the dull catarrh of his cell to invent further impracticalities & the pointed maxims that justified such excesses of uselessness.

  VII

  AS THE SHADOW thrown by the Great Mah-Jong Hall slowly diminished as it was dismantled, the Commandant could feel another growing, until it covered not only Sarah Island but all of Van Diemen’s Land, a shadow to which no definite body could be attached but whose corporeal presence was everywhere rumoured.

  The name of the shadow was Matt Brady.

  ‘Mutt Braddy,’ some unknown convict etches into the soft sandstone of the prison wall, ‘—THE LIBERATOR!’ The lustrous legend that is the bushranger Brady, a convict who with fourteen others escaped by stolen whale boat from Sarah Island, & with the Pilot Lucas & an armed guard in hot pursuit sailed it under full sheet round half Van Diemen’s Land to Hobart Town, where they abandoned the boat & quickly established themselves as the most feared, the most admired bushranging gang in the land.

  Like fish in the sea the bushrangers swam through the uncultivated backblocks of the east, peopled by ex-convicts & convict stock-keepers & shepherds & savages who sheltered & fed, hid & kept informed the most powerful, the most admired of the Tasmanian banditti.

  Reports & rumours reached us of how the rest of Van Diemen’s Land was seething; how more & more convicts were escaping to join bushranging gangs growing in both size & ferocity. Some, hopelessly ineffectual, others pointlessly cruel. But the sum of their ventures was that the rule of English law was collapsing.

  Van Diemen’s Land—intended by the authorities to be a transplanted England—is mutating into a bastard world turned upside down, & increasingly the convict & ex-convict population of this topsy-turvy land look to Brady as the leader of that new world.

  The island waits.

  For a final confrontation, a reckoning.

  In the face of Brady’s growing power, the increasingly unsettled, unruly nature of the convict population in consequence, & the unceasing black war, the settlers begin abandoning their farms & retreating into the larger towns.

  Brady, relentless, growing in his power like his nemesis Governor Arthur, also a master of public gesture, pursues them.

  A short, dapper man rides a splendid roan into the centre of Hobart Town & posts a notice offering a reward for Governor Arthur’s head. Sgd Matt Brady, King of the Woods. The short man in splendid dress pulls the roan around, smiles, takes his hat off & sweeps it low to those running to form around him a crowd, jetsam bobbing in an eddy at the side of a rapid.

  And then the rapid is gone.

  Larger rewards are posted. More money for any information on Brady. Freedom to any convict who betrays Brady. And everywhere Governor Arthur’s ever-growing network of informers, & with the information he gathers from them, Arthur’s minions threaten, blackmail & start to build a web from which none can escape. The muddy streets of Hobart run with the blood of Arthur’s Terror. Up to fourteen pairs of legs dance the diddly-back-step a day, up to fourteen pairs of pants putrid with the shit of dying men are buried with their finally stilled owners each evening in nameless graves.

  Meanwhile Brady wins ladies’ hearts by never taking advantage of them, plays their heavy husbands & fathers for the inflated fools they are, renders the women complicit with his smiles, his grace, his flash clothes—the mulberry waistcoat, the fancy brocaded breeches, the emu feather in his hat, the gold chain with diamond-studded cross hanging from his neck. He caresses their wrists with bindings of silk, leaves them with closeted desires they will take to their graves as the most vivid moments of their lives. His total lack of weapons—in a society where every free man wears arms & vies for the honour to shoot Brady down like a dog—only reinforces his aura of invulnerability & destiny.

  As if filling the void that seemed to arise between our dreams & our daily life, the word was rising that Matt Brady had vowed that when the winter blizzards had abated he would force a passage through the uncharted western wilderness of mountain & rainforest that coming summer, bringing his forces westwards, intending to free his former prison, Sarah Island, & recruit the liberated felons into a new army.

  It was so implausible, so impossible, it was hard not to believe. Various elements were added in gossip—that he was seeking to free the island from its wretched subjugation by making common cause with the warring savages of the island & that he even slept with one, Black Mary; that she was to show him the way west over the uncharted mountains; that he was intending to use us as a basis for an army which would proclaim a republic in which everything solid would dissolve into air & no man would remain enslaved.

  The Commandant wrote to the Governor begging for more soldiers to keep order on the island, to prevent a mass outbreak, & to repel Brady when he inevitably attacked.

  For Brady was invading the Commandant’s drugged dreams as surely as he continued to conquer our feverish imaginings; Brady who could take on a dozen redcoats at once; Brady who outwitted the Governor; ethereal Brady of our most sacred desires; lascivious Brady of our most depraved thoughts; strong-armed immortal Brady who struck down the government men, the rich, the dobbers & deadflogs—fearless Brady, great Brady, astonishing Brady, a rummy, canny coot the equal of ten men, Bradyo! & everyone waiting for his triumphant entry, his declaration of the Republic, for we all now knew the day of liberation was approaching.

  Then I wake & before properly waking I am making dreaming praying painting a fish before muster, before fear reason hope thought a small leatherjacket begins appearing on the paper, not bristling with spikes, but lovely after its own truth, fish that lives not on other fish but only seaweed & kelp, with inquisitive eyes, the dandyish bright yellow fins, its gentle soft sandpaper skin glowing purple below its gills. Gentle leatherjacket, beautiful leatherjacket of my dreams of impending release, a touch of such softness after so much horror.

  VIII

  AND WHEN I finished the painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go around as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?

  It began to worry me, you see, this destruction of fish, this attrition of love that we were blindly bringing about, & I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish.

  Life is a mystery, Old Gould used say, quoting yet another Dutch painter, & lov
e the mystery within the mystery.

  But with the fish gone, what joyful leap & splash would signal where these circles now began?

  IX

  WITH ALL THE rising vapours & damp earth the building of the Great Mah-Jong Hall had entailed, the Commandant’s consumption—caught amongst the manfern fronds from the Siamese women—worsened to the extent that no amount of bleeding seemed to do any good.

  Both the Commandant & the Surgeon came to fear that they would fill the entire harbour with his blood without any cure being effected. Nor did the consumption respond to any of the Surgeon’s other invariably successful treatments—not the nightly drinking of chamber-lye, which the Surgeon fermented from his own urine; nor the daily swallowing of album nigrum, the excrement of rats, which at least had the virtue of being the most readily available medicine on the island; unlike the tobacco, which the Surgeon used as a final desperate expedient in the practice of insufflation, which saw him injecting tobacco smoke into the Commandant’s rectum after every voiding of the bowels.

  Then to grant the Commandant the illusion that something was being done for his body—beyond enabling it to fart smoke—the Surgeon came up with a new treatment that was apparently meeting with some success in England. At first the Commandant was unwilling to eat large amounts of butter several times a day, on the foolish grounds that it made him nauseous, but the thinking behind this treatment was scientifick, incomprehensible, & for both these reasons, undeniable.

  That the Commandant was now malnourished as well as consumptive did not help his humours, which daily grew more vaporous & even less easily divined than before. He was troubled by nightmares in which he was revealed not as a Roman emperor but as a Lakes poet, given to long dreamings at the edges of Grasmere on the Sublime & Majestick, as if his very dreams were capitalised to drive home the idea so strong he felt suffocated by it, because a father of the nation ought be born to the role, not have to fight for it every day.

  He knew for him none of it came easy, not even the cruelty, & it only made him even angrier that in his dog days when a little understanding from others would not have gone amiss, that so many mistakenly thought harshness his second nature, for even his malevolence he had to struggle for & with.

  ‘You understand me, O’Riordan?’ he cried, leaping from his infantryman’s palliasse & seizing a musket from his aide & smashing the butt into the aide’s face, again & again, all the while the lieutenant protesting that his name was not O’Riordan but Lethborg. This only antagonised the Commandant all the more, because he knew all his soldiers to be feckless, cowardly Irish peasants, & it was evident O’Riordan was even worse, being a feckless, cowardly, lying Irish peasant.

  The Commandant took to kicking him in the nuts & head, hissing, ‘Brady-brady-brady’ with an unrestrained vigour that might have been mistaken for glee had it not been obvious that both men were weeping, one blood from his mouth & nose, the other only tears from his masked eyes, because he was the Commandant & a certain dignity became him, because his way was so hard & why was he not composing Tintern Abbey at Rydal Lake?

  Because his anger was so misunderstood, that’s why the Commandant had the lieutenant & the platoon of perfidious papists he commanded arrested, bound & gagged; because the Commandant could stand the sighing of O’Riordan’s wounds no longer, that’s why he had no choice but to have the whole mass of bound & gagged green treachery thrown into the sea to join the fish.

  His symptoms grow daily worse, wrote the Surgeon to Sir Isaiah Newton, a distinguished colleague in Liverpool with whom he had trained, & from whom he now solicited professional advice on what was to be done for his Commandant, for his chest grows noisome & flutters like a prisoned moth. Given the great beyond gobbing distance of the globe that separated them it would be months, perhaps years before a reply came, & meanwhile the prisoned moth grew into a slopping mullet caught in the collapsing creel of the Commandant’s rib cage.

  ‘You understand, Commandant,’ stammered the Surgeon, ‘these things take time.’

  ‘But time!’ roared the Commandant, ‘time! dear Surgeon is what our Nation does not have!’ because now in his mind His Destiny & that of His Nation were one & the same, that’s why the Commandant could not ignore the quietness that beset the island in the wake of the respective failures of the National Railway & the Great Mah-Jong Hall, & a hundred & one other monumental disasters.

  Of a night he was unable to sleep for want of the sound of a nation. All he could hear echoing up & down the lonely market aisles that were supposed to be full of the noise of bartering, of trade, of people, was that hollow sound of the waves ominously slapping the shore.

  Lying awake, terror mounting, he began to wonder whether that one sound was the sea or was it his lungs or was it his destiny calling slap-slap-slap even then, calling him back, was it his own breath rasping brady-brady-brady or was it the convicts with their ceaseless perfidious gossip of how Brady would liberate them, no matter how many old lags he made stand behind the bare stalls & feign commerce, how Brady would avenge them, no matter how many fine new stone buildings he put between him & his night-time visions, no matter how much of Europe he erected between him & the silence, it was the same nightmare of the sea rising & rising & rising, & Brady coming ever closer & closer & the flames of Hell ever hotter …

  THE SERPENT EEL

  Which is not so long as some chapters—Uncontrollable urges—Making of a nation—Gelding of Mr Lempriere—A bowsprit of suffering—Barrels of talking black heads—Rise of Cosmo Wheeler & other misfortunes—Sorry demise of Mr Lempriere—Castlereagh the homicide.

  I

  SO THERE HE is, this Gould, this pathetick forger, this drunkard trying his best to be on the make rather than back in chains on the Triangle & the Cradle. He is, if you will—& as he would most certainly like—trying to rise up the ladder of convict society, & what is happening?

  Having been made paint fish & then having been freed of those little balls of leprous slime & scale, having copped the best billet of them all, painting that ponce of a Commandant in a hundred & one different historical poses, what do we now see—

  A man who is going to use this newly found position of influence with the Commandant to get ahead?

  No.

  Who is to begin to transform from the status of lackey to adviser, insider, confidant, with all its requisite perquisites?

  No, you see nothing of the sort. Granted this Gould wants merely to abuse his position to his own advantage, but he is troubled by Thoughts. Though he desires only an easy cop of it all, the truth is that he feels ever more imprisoned in growing Notions & Fancies.

  What you see—& here I am afraid I just have to come out with it—what you see is an idiot who feels an unbearable desire to once more paint fish.

  And why? Because it is passion?

  No.

  Because he thinks he has a role to play in the furtherance of Science?

  No.

  Of Art?

  Heaven help us, no, no & no! Because, Jesus wept, because of all things, he is starting to feel uncontrollable urges toward fish!

  But before I can get to all that I have to sharpen my sharkbone quill, dip it again in this green laudanum, & make a necessary detour if we are to reach our destination of our man’s growing weakness of mind, this saltwater cell of an inescapable & putrid destiny, & swerve back to one of the Commandant’s nightly binges with Mr Lempriere in the latter’s cottage.

  Mr Lempriere is by now, as you might have expected, more than a little morose that his Grand Scientifick Mission of Transylvanian fish-finding has been temporarily, perhaps permanently, halted by the Commandant’s need to put Art to National rather than simply Scientifick purposes. So permit me to change tack, swoop back down into Sarah Island, over the Commandant’s Moluccan guards, & tumble down Mr Lempriere’s sooty chimney into the smoky living room where the Commandant in his cups is admitting to the outrage of his ambition.

  ‘To make a nation, my God yes, a nation that�
��s what we can & must become,’ he is telling Mr Lempriere, ‘& no, sir, I am not ashamed of it. No, sir, how can I be when I have been anointed by Destiny for this role? A nation & me its founder & it a Nation not some godforsaken dreg of a Prison Island. A nation of which I will be the father, the father whom they will honour & revere & write epic poems & paint atop glorious white stallions rearing against a tempestuous night. You hear me, Lempriere? And none will know that it was work, our hard work, our sweat & sacrifice that raised this island from a prison into a nation.’

  ‘PISS,’ muttered the drunk Surgeon, ‘GOT TO.’ Heaving with some might, he managed to lift his much vaunted sash window open & bowed outward, sighing slowly, ‘G-O-U-T-T-E À G-O-U-T-T-E,’ as he began relieving himself.

  Mr Lempriere dressed in the style of thirty years previous, with knee breeches & large buckles on his shoes which he had once made me polish each evening. They were made of some poor man’s pewter which Mr Lempriere insisted to be silver, despite them being duller than dishwater. He leant up & forward on these shoes to better his trajectory out of the window.

  At the moment of his relief one of the buckles finally gave up its long & unequal struggle with the contortions of Mr Lempriere’s oversize body. The buckle snapped. Mr Lempriere’s foot shot forward. At the same moment, he lost his grip on the window & he lurched first backward, then forward. With a great & abrupt crash the window slammed down onto the sill across which lay like a lost caterpillar Mr Lempriere’s protruding member.

  You might think from all I have said that the Surgeon at this point would have bellowed like a Brahman bull, or screamed in some terrible high pitch, but no, beyond his white lead-powdered face blushing an exquisite shade of coral pink, there was for a moment nothing to indicate the full horror of what had just passed.

  Perhaps in that moment of agony he knew no amount of yelling or screaming was going to alter the undeniable fact of his sex having been awful mangled by the accident. He felt a vertiginous horror, both at the pain & at the apprehension at what it might mean for his future. He felt his legs bowing, falling, failing him, & then at the same moment, everything passed to black.