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

by Richard Flanagan

  Maybe if I had been hung upside down as a child I would have ended up different, maybe it would have improved me. But I suffered more than my share of humiliations back then & it didn’t seem to improve me at all, & a lot of what I suffered was a good deal worse than just being trussed up & left to hang by the ankles, let me tell you.

  On the second evening of their stay, after I had brought in the decanter of finest Martinique rum—watered down as per the Surgeon’s instructions—Mrs Gottliebsen placed her hand over mine. She told me how her husband had seen some of my work & regarded me as a sensualist, no doubt because of my imbalanced bodily fluids. She took my hand up to her lips & kissed it, caressed my arm, then asked me if I might take her while Pastor Gottliebsen watched at a discreet distance. She offered 6 oz of the best nigger-twist tobacco. For 6 oz, said I, Pastor Gottliebsen can come as close as he wants, but Mrs Gottliebsen seemed not so keen on this.

  She asked that I blindfold her & bind her wrists with cord to the bedposts. For 6 oz I felt obliged to show her all my best steps, & so we danced the old Dutch still life & we jigged along to the Enlightenment, & she cried out over & over in her blind pleasure, which was all very fine for her but it was hopeless for me, for the Flemish painter just wasn’t loading from the palette.

  Poor Mrs Gottliebsen! She was a bold woman, & her body bolder yet: big alabaster thighs & rolly belly & heavy breasts with particularly large areolae. Face damasked with florid effort, she was yelling now, ‘Ravish me! Ravish me!’ But all I could do was put my nose to her thighs, run my fingers over her nipples, tongue those splendidly generous areolae, & begin to feel ever more desperate for all was to no avail.

  Poor bugger Billy Gould! Once was the time he’d root a pair of drawers on a rat trap. Now where were his imbalanced body fluids when he most needed them? I felt bewildered. She was damning me as a depraved monster. I was lost. She was thrashing around worse than a trumpeter just caught. ‘You beast!’ cried she. In response I bellowed. ‘You awful beast!’ cried she in delight. I brayed. Mrs Gottliebsen began to moan. It was awful. I neighed & snorted & mooed & baaed. I was a menagerie of loud lust. But no matter how many ludicrous noises I made that might keep the fiction of my passion alive a little longer, I was but an echo searching for its lost caller. Neither Mrs Gottliebsen’s wild, earthy cries nor my own inward exhortations or outward displays were going to make any impression upon my flaccid loins. The Gottliebsens had desired a leviathan & I had transformed into a sardine.

  It is difficult, looking back on it, to believe that Billy Gould could be privileged to know so much flesh & still remain unmoved. I would not insult Mrs Gottliebsen who was in so many ways a nice woman & most attractive, apart from her face, but then who looks at the mantelpiece when they are stoking the fire? Except I couldn’t have lit a candle, far less got a fire up & racing. I thought maybe it was the blindfold & then I tried to imagine Mrs Gottliebsen’s eyes but I couldn’t remember them, & then I felt put off by Pastor Gottliebsen behaving unspeakably in the sofa behind me, & I tried to imagine he wasn’t there.

  Then I was angry that they were making me play the priest with his chalky fingers. I tried to imagine every wicked thing in the world & my mind was filled with more imaginings than it is possible to imagine but still I was a child before her. In terror I prayed to Saint Guignole, patron of the impotent, in the hope of imitating his celebrated statue in Brest, famous for its erect member which—in spite of being constantly whittled away by desperate lovers—miraculously continues to maintain the same remarkable length & orientation.

  But the truth was that Twopenny Sal had somehow got into my head & pray as I did, try as I liked, want as I wished, she wouldn’t leave & let me rise to the occasion. Mrs Gottliebsen spread out in front of me larger & whiter than all Europe, & all I had to do was conquer her like Alexander & weep thereafter. But all I could see was the frail sisal ropes of Twopenny Sal’s dark biceps & forearms, the ribs coopering the small firkin of her chest beneath her slight, slightly sagging breasts, the stretchmarked glory of her puckering belly, the lips like moist mussels urging me inwards …

  I didn’t feel loyal to Twopenny Sal—after all she was hardly a vestal virgin—but it was something between us getting between me & the writhing Mrs Gottliebsen, who was now saying any manner of foul things about me being an animal. Would that we be so lucky. It made me feel all angry because it wasn’t rational & I wanted to please myself as well as Mrs Gottliebsen & I knew it just wasn’t going to happen & none of it stood up to Reason—at which thought I thankfully recalled the Great Philosopher.

  I grabbed Voltaire & pressed him into service & Mrs Gottliebsen began to squeal worse than Castlereagh & Pastor Gottliebsen to groan & his eyes were rolling in the back of his head, & I am not sure if he ever really saw what was going on with all his moaning, for the following day when I bad them farewell at the dock I kept on catching them stealing glances at my crutch which they obviously believed to be a valley of hidden giants rather than the desert of desire I knew it to be.

  The 6 oz nigger-twist I calculated would last me four months if carefully rationed. I smoked half in two days, & then sent word to Twopenny Sal that I had some tobacco if she was interested. Her reply came the following day.

  She was.

  II

  ON THE BACK of her black calves Twopenny Sal had showed me two circles that had been cut into her flesh & then scarred to form raised cicatrix, steel blue in colour, strangely soft in feel. One circle she touched & said ‘Sun,’ the other, bisected but not broken by a single line, she touched &, again in English, said ‘Moon.’

  Then she found a Y-shaped stick amongst the Surgeon’s firewood, & after sharpening two of its points with the kitchen knife, had me pull my shirt up & lie on my belly. I felt her pushing the stick into the small of my back & using it in the manner of a compass, cutting a circle on each side of my backbone. The pain as she slowly scribed the stick around made me shiver & I momentarily bucked when she began bisecting the second circle with a line across its middle.

  As she rubbed ashes from Mr Lempriere’s fire into the wound to create the finished cicatrix, she again touched the first circle & said, ‘Palawa,’ her word for her own people; then when rubbing ash into the second circle that she had bisected, said she one word over & over, ‘Numminer,’ like I was some foolish child, said she, laughing, ‘Numminer, numminer.’

  ‘I am no numminer,’ said I after a time, rolling over, knowing numminer was their word both for ghosts & white men, that they believed England was where their spirits went after death to be reborn as English men & women, that the white men were their ancestors returned.

  To prove it, I then had her lie down. I studied the circular fish & the circular canvas in front of me. I studied the various raised scars in the shape of circles on Twopenny Sal’s body. The sun, the moon. Black woman, white man. But for me the most wondrous of her circles was that on which I then began to paint.

  The variety of breasts is infinite & every breast brings forth an image at once ludicrous & beautiful: breasts that barely hint at being, slight mound & all areolae & nipple as if concentrating all their beauty in this coned essence; large breasts that seem to long to be rolled & cupped; dog-like tits & cow-like udders each with their own undeniable erotic charge; breasts to run your tongue over & breasts to hold your cock between; breasts that look away from each other like a rancorous couple that can never be parted but will never speak to each other; blue-veined mother’s breasts with the close smell of sour milk; taut breasts & flaccid breasts; breasts with nipples like revolver barrels & breasts with inverted nipples that have to be sucked till they pop out into your mouth as if standing to attention. But the image that Twopenny Sal’s breasts brought forth that day as she lay on Mr Lempriere’s dusty floor was of a small round fish that darts around reefs like a curious spinning plate, most sumptuously decorated in velvety stripes.

  I pointed the tip of my brush on her tongue, then ran it slowly over her cheek & the red ochre th
ere that she used to rouge herself. With my tongue I moistened her brown breast in preparation & then began working the red ochre over as a foundation, at first with my brush that puckered & caught her flesh, & then with my fingers, tracing them slowly round & round, leaving the lower crescent of her breast as it was.

  To the right of her nipple I got up a bluey hue from some ultramarine pigment. The little white horns I made out of Mr Lempriere’s white lead powder, & for the fish’s distinctive yellow iris I used a little gilt long-ago pilfered from the Great Mah-Jong Hall. I rubbed so gently her charcoal-tipped eyelashes between two fingers, & on a palette I improvised on her belly I worked up that black residue into a small dark paste with spittle. With this I striped the contours of her breast. Finally, over her off-centre nipple, long & dark with wonder, I ran light traces of lines to give it the appearance of the fish’s pert pectoral fin. The result was at once not completely satisfactory & yet entirely vivid. Twopenny Sal eased herself up on her elbows, but I had eyes only for the striped cowfish as it slowly moved.

  I laid my brush aside.

  When, leaning down, I with my tongue tip touched the cowfish’s pectoral fin, it quivered as if in anticipation of life.

  I hoped she did not dislike me, but I was under no illusions that she might remember me in any way fondly; that is, if she remembered me at all. I was but one of a procession; I provided extra food, drink, that day some tobacco, beyond that I did not exist for her. When I thought of the way money & dirt & the frenzy of human desire & the bitter aftertaste of life all come together when you buy a woman in whatever way, I felt dizzy like I was peering into an infinite black hole & losing my balance. I thought: it is not dishonest; it is the most honest expression of the whole infinite sadness of us all. I had willingly passed like quicksilver through too many women’s hands, but there was a reckoning. There was no absolution of love; no redemption in the idea that the world had shrunk down to just two people. For in her that day I knew myself to be absolutely nothing.

  I looked up & stared at the intricate arabesques large huntsman spiders formed with the webs they spun, silken shoulders linking the crumbling walls & ceiling of Mr Lempriere’s squalid cottage. When I looked back down I thought I saw in her face an impression of absence; it was perhaps this more than anything else that lent her—at least to me—a certain serene profundity. Her eyes seemed so full of wisdom, but when she spoke it was only to ask for more pisco, & then she danced.

  That autumnal day in Mr Lempriere’s cottage as a chill wind was rising into a gale outside, that one & only day she came back to me, lured I thought by my promises of tobacco & pisco, she stood up naked, with that roaring fire of cracking wet myrtle logs behind her, & danced as though she were evading musket shots: feinting as if to go one way, then twisting & leaping in the other direction. Her dance had nothing of the feminine about it; nothing that we might know by the words woman & womanly. It was by turns violent, shameless, devoid of grace, & seemed to aspire not to beauty but only to tell a story that I had the vanity of thinking might be intended for me. She seemed to be seeking to exist in defiance of weight, of gravity. The striped cowfish leapt & cavorted & flitted through the ocean of her dance.

  After the dance she was sweaty & cold. I did not dare & she did not desire coupling on Mr Lempriere’s mouldy cot so we used the filthy floor instead. I started kissing her back then she rolled over & I began sucking & licking. As we started dancing the old Enlightenment & Voltaire’s smile of reason began building in her a slow wave waiting to break, I saw these things: on one wrist a large silver bangle, on the other a large unlanced boil. A cowfish staring. Lice crawling up her arm & onto a cowfished breast; this sight of one body ceding to others, of the inevitable advance of death & at the same time its transformation into new life, struck me as terrible & wonderful. Nothing was reconciled: everything was beautiful.

  There was a bitter tang in the taste of her, a little salt, a little fruit, a little sour, a little cinnamon, & all of it a very large, strong, sweet thing. As I lay with her on Mr Lempriere’s filthy floor & saw her dark arms & thighs & torso mingling with the dust & the dirt & the dead flies, the blue of her cicatrix, the dark hue of her skin seemed to me all the more brilliant, more beautiful for lying in such filth.

  That day, the more I loved her, the more mysterious she became to me. I began with certainty; that she was black, that she was for me pleasure, & that I could make love to her without consequence. I ended in doubt, both as to who she was &, even more shockingly, as to who I was.

  I rolled the ball of her head in the palm of my hands, held the short curly shanks of her hair in my fingers & pulled her head back with them knotted so, so hard I worried I might be hurting her, yet the harder I held her head, the more her insistent rump seemed to respond in rising & falling pleasure, pushing & demanding more & more of my straining loins, & the more I stared into her face, the more I knew it had nothing to do with her face or my own empty, barren conceits of what beauty was & where I had foolishly supposed it resided; the more I searched her close eyes, the more I knew she was far, far away, drifting ever further from me, demanding of me only that I continue rolling her head & pulling her hair & answering with whatever strength left me the rising, rolling heave of her velvet loins, roiling over me like the most exquisite storm that was about to shipwreck me forever, while beneath us the striped cowfish slowly dissolved into sweaty smudges of lost, dusty colours.

  III

  THE WATERCOLOURS WERE almost all used up. Twopenny Sal was gone. The Surgeon a foul miasma. My laudanum pot empty. Pobjoy only ever taller. Capois Death disappeared—some say escaped, others murdered, on the express orders of the Commandant following the unfortunate razing of the frozen wastes of the Northwest Passage, after it caught fire from the steam engine cinders & burnt down in the middle of the Commandant’s nightly train journey. There was at that time no King with whom I might discuss my increasingly forlorn plight, for what I am about to relate occurred before he came to join me in this cell.

  There was, in short, nothing left for my chronicle to interpret. My work, my life, was achieving a correspondence to which I was not completely blind, for one was ending & the other lagged not far behind.

  I know it was Christmas Eve, for with my death approaching rapidly I was highly conscious of passing time. The day had been uncommon hot, & when the tide began to rise that evening I welcomed the water’s serene enveloping. The water rose & me with it, until I was floating around my pitch-black cell, nose bobbing into the ceiling. For no good reason, I took to poking one of those very large flagstones above my nose, which, supported by heavy beams, formed the ceiling of my cell.

  I had been playing in this absent-minded fashion with the ceiling for an indeterminate time, listening to the slow percussion of the sea lapping at the cell wall outside & drawing an inexplicable comfort from the sound, running the backs of my wave-wrinkled hands along the ceiling’s soft harshness, pushing it & prodding it with no purpose or desire, when the most terrifying thing happened.

  I suddenly found myself being violently thrust deep down into the chill, lamp-black water. Though I fought & thrashed, still I continued sinking. My thoughts were galloping far away, transforming into bubbles racing upwards, so many confused questions that could never be answered. Was Brady’s Army of Light laying siege & demolishing the building in which I was held with cannon fire? Had one of Pobjoy’s clients come under cover of night with the aim of drowning me because he had become an admirer of Titian & my convict-Constables now seemed limp works unworthy of his passion?

  Just as I was wondering how much longer before the pain in my chest, the pounding in my head, the constriction of my throat would transform into death, I felt the large weight that had been driving me down slide off my chest, rasping my flesh as it did so. My body stopped sinking & began to rise.

  Only after I bobbed back up to the surface & had spent several moments spluttering & gulping air like a starving man bread, filling his mouth but unable to sate
his craving, did it begin to dawn on me what had happened. Reaching upwards with an arm, it was to find myself not just at the top of my cell but in a cavity somewhat larger than the one I had so recently left. I gingerly raised my arm a second time & with my hand felt some edges of broken flagstone ceiling above me, upon which it was possible to get some purchase.

  Sand, damp & salty, fell in heavy crumbs wherever I touched, onto my face & into my half-open mouth. And then I realised—the local sandstone, soft at the best of times, was succumbing to the daily exposure to salt water. With my pulling & prodding it was now falling apart, causing a large piece of flagging to drop from the ceiling, pushing me with it to the bottom of my flooded cell.

  Possibilities I had for too long repressed began to resurface. With an excitement animating my body I would not a minute before have felt capable of, I groped around as a blind man, small pieces of sandstone scattering all over my face as I did so. I searched for a small crevice in which I might insert my hand & use as a point of leverage. As if in a fever I pushed & shoved so much that the water-softened skin of my hands began to slough off, & I began to know the sandstone as the undeniable gritty sharpness of a thousand needles.

  I had no plan, no clear thoughts as to what I might do. I didn’t even know what the dim void above me was, whether it was open air or just another cell. I raised my arms into that unknown dark, finally found a hold, & taking firm grip, began to pull.

  IV

  NOT WITHOUT DIFFICULTY, I half-hauled, half-clambered up past dangling broken beams & through the broken flagstone into the brave new world that I could see opening above me. For a man who has always prided himself on his absence of physical strength & who had moreover been confined in a cell only an arm-span wide for several months surviving on slops thrown him by Pobjoy, this was no mean feat.