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

by Richard Flanagan

  And then, losing what little balance remained to him, Mr Lempriere had fallen into the void.

  There he must have seen many things he had avoided seeing for a very long time. He must have heard the sound of slobber approaching at a trot. And then, I suppose, at a certain point, he must have known there would be no avoiding anything now.

  THE SAWTOOTH SHARK

  Christ, Kabbalists, & pig turds—On what befell the love shovel—Hallucinations of History—A bare escape—Classification of the wen—Jorgen Jorgensen—On his becoming the King of Iceland—Reports of Waterloo—Jorgensen’s new mission—Discovery of Voltaire’s head—Framing of Gould—A second Book of Fish.

  I

  RATHER THAN MR Lempriere’s puerile, ultimately fatal belief in the perfectibility of pigs, I chose to remember his intense—if shortlived—passion for fish that was so powerful it took on in his mind an unfortunate religious dimension. He was confirmed in this delusion when, in an old Kabbalist tract lent him by Jorgen Jorgensen, he discovered that the initial letters of the Greek words for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour—ich-th-ys—were the same as the Greek word for fish—ichthys.

  ‘ALL THAT LIVES IS HOLY, GOULD, BUT FISH ARE HOLIEST OF ALL,’ he had once told me, before his cracked passion became my belief, ‘WHICH IS WHY THE FISH WAS USED BY THE EARLY CHRISTIANS AS A SYMBOL OF CHRIST.’

  Lamentably, God remained in His Heaven & the great scientist in a pyramid of pig turd & a cloud of vile methane, & now the fish were with me—but I was no Father or Son or Holy Ghost & I had no idea what to do with the fish, or with Mr Lempriere’s remains, or what they might all end up doing to me.

  I tried to see the fiasco as a blessing—possibly divine intervention on the part of old Ichthys. The Book of Fish would now never be published, annotated & falsely authored by Sir Cosmo Wheeler. It seemed as though the Surgeon’s death had delivered the fish to me, unencumbered by the demands of Science or Mr Lempriere’s social ambitions, which had amounted to much the same thing. The compass of the fish, formerly so limited, seemed suddenly infinite. I should have felt elation, but my immediate dilemma was too pressing to feel anything other than terror. Because it was known I was today visiting Mr Lempriere, because his death would inevitably be discovered, & because a death on a convict island is invariably viewed as murder, I knew that if something was not done with his bones, something would be done with me.

  I am not saying what I then did was the smartest thing I have ever done, or for that matter the wisest. But for a time it did at least solve the problem of his remains. I fetched what was left of my grog supply & threw it into the pen with the homicide Castlereagh, who had awoken from the sleep brought on by his splendid repast. The pig lapped & slurped the rum with a vigour that within a quarter of an hour had transformed into a cathartic backflip. Castlereagh rolled over & fell back asleep, trotters like four empty bottles rising into the air.

  After checking that the pig’s slumber was sufficiently deep by throwing stones & watching them bounce off his stubbly hide without reaction, I eased myself down into the pen & undertook the awful job of sorting through the shit for Mr Lempriere’s remains. In a frenzy his clothes I threw on the fire in the cottage, his belt & shoe buckles I buried nearby, & his bones I tossed into an old water barrel at the back of the cottage. Then I stood back, drew breath, & wondered how—& on a crowded island where—I might hide a barrel of reeking human bones.

  II

  TWOPENNY SAL HAD no more idea than Billy Gould as to what to do with the bones. Her tiny & dark room—little better than a cell with its ceiling so low, its walls so damp, its cot bed so cramped with its wretched straw palliasse & its only other piece of furniture, a broken wicker chair—he filled with his problems. He started with the dilemma of surreptitiously disposing of the past & ended up on the verge of the Enlightenment, when the bedroom door awkwardly creaked open.

  Billy Gould had just time enough to hide his naked body under Twopenny Sal’s cot, when he heard the heavy, unmistakable wheeze followed by a creak as the Commandant sat down in the broken wicker chair, uncomfortable as Billy Gould’s panicked state of mind at that moment. Only then, too late, I realised that part of me was protruding from beneath the blanket.

  In the dark & in his stupor the Commandant mistook the two buttocks blossoming out from beneath the bed for a dilapidated footstool. With the back of his heel he gave them a few kicks to puff the age-flattened cheeks up into some semblance of comfort, then wriggled his boots back & forth along the line of my crack. It’s far from easy for a man to stay silent & still naked on his knees, with the old love shovel being biffed back & forth. It was an awful thing, a torment not eased by the long monologue that the Commandant then commenced, though not before taking, I later gathered, some drops of laudanum.

  In a growing delirium he spoke of how history, far from being past, was ever present. All those who had over the centuries deliberately or inadvertently discovered Van Diemen’s Land, he now believed all to be here, now, sailing into Twopenny Sal’s bedroom. He saw twelfth-century Arab traders in their triangular-sailed dhows, fourteenth-century Japanese pirates ill & wasted from their long voyage, soon dying of an inexplicable melancholia, their gummy bald corpses so light they floated in the air & had to be tied down with stones in order to keep them in their graves. He saw scurvy ridden fifteenth-century Portuguese adventurers in three caravels seeking gold & converts for Christianity, trying to reconcile their Ptolemaic charts at the bottom of which was a vagueness marked as Terra Incognita—the land unknown—with the certainty of naked black inhabitants so uninterested in trade they threw back at the Portuguese all gifts offered, keeping only red handkerchiefs to tie around their fuzzy heads.

  The Commandant shook his head at the sadness of such innocence. The Portuguese left the bedroom, turning their caravels southwards where, on moving mountains of ice, their leader, Amado the Reckless had heard there lived a race of more commercially inclined people who had no noses but only snake-like slits & lived solely on odours for which they were willing to trade gold.

  I felt a flea bite my crutch & inadvertently wriggled my arse. The Commandant gave a hefty kick to right what he presumably felt to be a toppling foot stool, & resumed talking about those who the Commandant seemed to think were also with us in the by now very crowded bedroom of history.

  Then the Commandant began yelling out at the Dutch—shining a boot on my cods in his excitement—who sailed over the crest of Twopenny Sal’s cot in their stumpy fluyts looking for trade, followed by Javanese in their long & narrow proas blown far down from their fishing grounds in the distant northwest, & a French expedition of naturalists, astronomers, artists, philosophers, encyclopaedists, & savants, led by the gallant Monsieur Peron who, upon landing on a long beach in what he thought was Van Diemen’s Land in Year Six of the Republic but was rather here & now, drew off his glove while bowing to a black woman, at which she screamed, thinking he had peeled off his skin. Her fears could not be allayed until, to her great amusement, he sang the Marseillaise & she was able to take off his trousers in order to ascertain if he were a man like real men.

  And then the Commandant was beset by the most terrible fear:

  ‘What if time never passed?’ shrilled he. It was as though the Arabs, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Javanese & French were always all there discovering Van Diemen’s Land in Twopenny Sal’s bedroom along with Major de Groot, face smiling and talking in spite of the poison, along with all those who died on the Cradle with their minds more maggoty than their backs, once more alive along with a thousand and one others in a long procession now streaming in through Twopenny Sal’s door, ending with Lieutenant Lethborg and his platoon, their water-bloated and raddled bodies marching in like balloons trying to keep martial order. Abruptly the Com mandant swung his legs off my bum, stood up, & without a word more staggered out.

  Later Capois Death told me that he had heard the Commandant’s opiate-induced hallucinations always took this form. Yet many years befo
re, when the Commandant had first taken laudanum the effect was said to have been profound. Now in Twopenny Sal’s squalid room, it had, like all events of spiritual significance when degraded through intimacy & repetition, been reduced to the sadly diminished realm of art, even entertainment.

  Now he would whoop when the Javanese disappeared, hiss the French & laugh at the dying Japanese. But back then history became a nightmare from which the Commandant could not awake. Beneath his gold mask his face erupted in a plague of chancres from the worry of it all. He began to see everywhere unsettling evidence that the Past is as much a Chaos as the Present, that there is no straight line only infinite circles, like rings proceeding ever outward from a stone sinking in the water of Now. He took more & more green laudanum. He doubled, & then doubled again his dosage of mercury to treat his clap, which seemed to be eating both his body & mind away. He feared above all else that he was mad, & that he was now imprisoned in his imaginings.

  The convicts could always bolt, but no such release, even one as wretched as perishing in the wilderness, awaited him. Once he had searched out the Mulatto in order to assert his existence, in order to lose the sense of his life, in order to forget the confusion that daily crowded him more & more. It did no good whatsoever. The Mulatto would bend over & throw her skirt onto her back, exposing the splendid rump that so excited him, & merely ask that he be quick, as she had matters to attend to. The Commandant would plough a lonely furrow, curse her, & withdraw feigning a triumph they both knew to be illusory.

  It may be asked as to why & how Twopenny Sal—and by obvious implication, Billy Gould—had avoided the clap with which the Commandant was riddled. But his disease had been with him a very long time & in the nature of that curse it was now his alone; like his thoughts no longer communicable.

  The day many years before, after he first saw the horror of a past that was inescapable, the Commandant interrogated Jorgen Jorgensen at some length, then issued an unequivocal command while making water in the corner of his cell.

  ‘I charge you,’ the Commandant had said, ‘with keeping all the records of the island.’

  The Commandant turned toward the old Dane, flipping his pustulant penis back inside his breeches without shame or care but with the slightest tremor of an intense pain.

  ‘If I cannot control the past now,’ he continued, wiping his wet fingers on a moonbird epaulette, his mask shining so bright the old Dane had to shield his eyes with a cupped hand, ‘I will at least control it in the future.’

  In comparison to such ambitions of temporal tyranny, Billy Gould’s problems were small fry indeed. No doubt, in the future people may wish to view his subsequent actions as an inner rebellion or a fierce declaration of humanity. But the King & I know otherwise: Billy Gould was in more shit than Lempriere’s bones & needed to get out of it as quickly as he could.

  III

  I DRESSED & left Twopenny Sal’s quarters. Her only suggestion seemed not the best, but it did have the virtue of at least being an idea, unlike the one fear of being caught which was all that was rattling around my terrified head, lonely as a piece of meat in convict soup.

  I carried the barrel of bones back down the Boulevard of Destiny, feigning to one & all I met along the way that it was rancid pickled pork being returned by the Surgeon, making my way to the same room in the commissary where were stored the Aboriginal skulls Mr Lempriere had collected.

  In that dim, windowless room lit only by the slippery light of three whale-oil lamps & smelling of the mournful screams of dying cetaceans, Mr Lempriere had with patience & occasional violence trained the convict mute Heslop in the cleaning, cataloguing & correct packaging of the skulls in preparation for shipment to Sir Cosmo Wheeler in England.

  ‘A CALLING,’ he had told the mute convict, ‘GLORIOUS & SACRED—WHAT I HAVE GIVEN YOU—WHAT SAY YOU, EH, HESLOP?’ to which the mute, was, of course, unable to say anything.

  When I presented Heslop with the latest set of bones for cataloguing, he was annoyed. By gesture he made it clear that he thought he had finished with the bones of the dead blacks & would be able to return to the more congenial cataloguing of plants & flowers. He took a look inside the old barrel I had with difficulty carried in on my back—unaccountably redolent of the smell of pig—in which he discovered, in a muddy, muddled pile, yet another fresh human skull streaked with particularly nasty looking peat. He shook his head, & grunted angrily.

  No doubt the mute was peeved with Mr Lempriere for dumping yet more bones upon him. I sympathised. There was a cutter returning to Hobart Town that night, & Mr Lempriere had been insistent that the complete set of Aborigine bones be on it, bound for London.

  So, it had to be done, & to avoid Mr Lempriere’s wrath, Heslop there & then set about the cleaning, preserving & cataloguing of the skull that had been so badly damaged in its exhumation as to appear as though gnawed by a wild animal. He took the brown-streaked pink skull &, temper abating, gestured that he was relieved that unlike the other heads, it didn’t mouth silent rebukes as he set about scraping, boiling & cleaning it. I helped as best I could, carefully registering a description of cranial measurements in the catalogue that was to accompany the skulls.

  There was in all this a symmetry & beauty that did not escape me—the way the Great Scientist in death had become part of his own Immortal System. I felt teary as I wrote on the damp page of the catalogue what was to be both the skull’s identification number & Mr Lempriere’s epitaph, as concise as it was appropriate, reminiscent of the deflated porcupine fish thrown into the fire. As the thirty-sixth skull of the Macquarie Harbour collection, it was according to Mr Lempriere’s own method to be called MH-36. I lifted my quill & threw sand across the page. Beneath the speckling I watched as those four fluid letters dried into reality.

  When that evening the cutter was loaded with the specially constructed crates, each containing several individual compartments, one for each Aboriginal skull carefully padded in aromatic Huon pine shavings, with their destination—

  Sir Cosmo Wheeler,

  Royal Society,

  London

  —marked on each box as Mr Lempriere had instructed, there were oddly no accompanying comments to be found from the noted colonial surgeon - collector entered next to the skull designated MH-36 in the enclosed register of descriptions. It was a rum thing, thought the mute, but he had no desire to have his hide whaled for asking why.

  I slapped Heslop on the back, thanked him for a job well done, but should have known that the disappearance of Mr Lempriere would not so easily be allowed.

  Several days passed. It had been raining without cease for most of that time, & I was working in a room in the Commandant’s palace, painting a new portrait of the Commandant swimming the harbour surrounded by loving multitudes. With the noise of the rain I never heard him, only smelt his odorous presence behind me. When I turned there stood a three-legged dog & a wet, bedraggled figure I knew instantly, lapis lazuli necklace flashing in the late afternoon light.

  ‘Who loves longer?’ hissed Jorgen Jorgensen, ‘a man or a woman?’

  I swallowed.

  The mangy dog stood up on its hind legs & whistled. Jorgen Jorgensen gave it a hearty kick. Applause wasn’t what he sought from his audience, but their complicity in making up the story. Gifted as Elsinore was, her limitations in this regard sometimes irritated him immensely.

  In his outstretched hand he held a perfume bottle in the shape of Voltaire’s head, half full, half empty. It was, I noticed for the first time, the colour of turquoise.

  IV

  TURQUOISE’S VERY NAME is suggestive of the exotic other, the Occident. It is derived, the Surgeon once told me—no doubt inaccurately—from the French pierre turqueise meaning Turkish stone. Equally redolent of mystery as the green ink with which I now write this sentence was the one I would come to forever associate with this colour, the one who now held out before me the treacherous attraction of Voltaire’s head: Jorgen Jorgensen.

  When he sto
od before me that wet afternoon, reading out a charge of murder that I had not committed, I realised the awful truth about Sarah Island: that this was not a colony of men at all, but a colony of fish masquerading as men. When he pronounced with such savagery upon my future, I recognised not Jorgen Jorgensen but saw a sawtooth shark, thrusting & cutting me into pieces with his long mouth.

  If I were to contrive some motivation for what Jorgen Jorgensen did—his jealousy of a supposed influence with the Commandant, say, or his clerk’s desire for obvious cause & effect—this would be merely literature, rather than life, where there is no explanation or motivation for people’s actions. It was, I suppose, simply his nature, as it is that of a sawtooth shark’s.

  I was later to discover—too late—that like the Commandant, Jorgen Jorgensen suffered a sense of slippage. He had read too many books, & at the age of sixteen, inspired by their tales of romance & adventure, had one day in 1798 ventured out from his hometown of Copenhagen only to discover that the world did not correspond to anything he had read.

  Things were rupturing & nothing held. Books were solid, yet time was molten. Books were consistent, yet people were not. Books dealt in cause & effect, yet life was inexplicable disorder. Nothing was as it was in a book, something about which he forever after harboured a dull resentment that finally found expression as vengeance.

  Nothing held on the storm-tossed English collier to which he was indentured & where he shared his lice-ridden hammock with a fellow sailor who in the heat of passion & the rolling darkness of the crowded low space where they slept turned out in his trembling, descending hand to be a woman. Nothing held in the hands of cards he was dealt on the rare occasions ashore, which invariably left him both with no money & a desperate need for money that could be answered only by invention: of stories—lies if you like—that he traded for credit to play the gaming tables again the following evening. He began by using gossip to ingratiate himself, & ended up as a spy telling the agents of various governments whatever fears they needed to know.