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

by Richard Flanagan

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  As I ran I glanced over my shoulder & saw the blackfellas beating Capois Death hard with their waddies, & they seemed to be trying to break the bones in each of his limbs. I saw him raise one arm slowly, an odd & insufficient gesture. Perhaps he was farewelling somebody or something. They were beating him around the head, laying into him with all their force. From the dense cover of a band of tea-tree I watched them then leave him to die.

  When with much care I returned the following morning to retrieve the sled, it was to find it untouched, unlike Capois Death’s corpse, already with viscera trailing from his sunken belly in rich sausage & offal forms & the colours of clotting blood from where the devils & tigers had started feeding in the night.

  To the side of his head, milky eyes still fixed firmly upon it, was his broken, emptied spirit bottle. Scattered around its fragments were its stories: half a garnet ring; some pebbles & dull weeds & three small seashells—a periwinkle, a baby mussel, & a broken scallop shell. He was Larrikin Soup robbed of its wormwood. He was bird’s blood with no body to smear over & make fly. He was history.

  With my poor painter’s hands & with rotten sticks that kept snapping I started to dig a grave in the sour gravel that forms a damp desert beneath the button grass. After a time I gave up in exhaustion, having only made the shallowest of depressions. I dragged Capois Death’s body into it, & then left, not-turning fleeing wishing wanting life to be otherwise.

  Time passed.

  I grew delirious.

  Time did not pass. My visions & vision became one. Time circled. I was hauling a sled of lies called history through a wilderness. Time laughed. I was awaiting a death that would never happen in a cell in the Sarah Island penal colony. Time mocked! Hurt! Wounded! Broke! I was writing a book in another time trying to understand why there were no words for what had taken place.

  None.

  Nothing.

  Semi-naked, emaciated, I began the conclusion of my march, the ascent of Frenchman’s Cap. Each day I cut one more strip off my kangaroo-skin jerkin, & chewed it for sustenance. Calculating the vest was good for twenty strips, the slow disappearance of my clothing served as my calendar, as my teeth first grew wobbly & sore in my inflamed gums, & then began falling out.

  It was in the relatively calm lee of some large granite tors halfway along a westerly ridge some long time later that I found huddled around a small fire battling in the rain the most unexpected group of familiar faces. I had eaten the last strip of vest two days before.

  V

  THERE WERE THREE small girls & a young boy with next to nothing on their frail bodies; several ravenous, mangy dogs; & a shoeless woman I recognised as the one the Commandant called the Mulatto, Robinson named Cleopatra & the convicts & I knew as Twopenny Sal, breaking boughs to put on the fire. For some—no, for almost anybody—they would not have been a prepossessing sight, but for me, who had not seen a fellow human for what seemed an eternity, they were beautiful beyond compare.

  Twopenny Sal was clad in an old black cotton skirt, a coarse woollen yellow convict jacket, & red woollen stocking cap. She carried on her back in a sling made of wallaby skin a baby, who I came to understand was the twin of the child whose tiny skull Twopenny Sal, in the fashion of her people when grieving, carried tied to her dress. The child was of a lighter hue than her other children; her eyes blue. She might, I realised, be my child. Or if there was a child that was mine, perhaps Twopenny Sal had killed it. A black man with his back turned to me was putting three potaroos on the fire to cook. At first he did not even bother looking up when I called his name.

  But when Tracker Marks did finally raise his head, it came as a shock to me. No longer the elegant, strong man I had met on Sarah Island several months before, he was now a figure not so much emaciated as shrivelled, his once elegant maroon waistcoat transformed to a greasy black, hanging as heavy around him as iron basils had once upon me, his fine blue striped shirt dull & torn, his dark moleskin trousers hanging in long shreds from his skinny shanks.

  His appearance was grotesque. His face was mutilated, & when he came up close to me, it was clear that at some point his ears & nose had been cut off, & only fleshy, still partly raw lumps, red & angry, remained where these organs had once been. All over his mangled face, like so many cruel carnivorous beetles, I saw the telltale pustules of the pox. Tracker Marks, whom I had always wished to paint as the dandyish crested weedfish, now resembled only the curling, flaccid & stinking stretch of flesh fish became after a few days sitting in Mr Lempriere’s cottage.

  I could not help staring. Then Tracker Marks did something that had I journeyed a thousand miles through a hundred wildernesses to find this one place, I would never have anticipated.

  He was extending his arm.

  He was reaching toward me.

  With the back of his fingers, on my cheek & lips, he was touching me.

  VI

  HIS HAND FELL from my face, & I sat down on the earth with them around their fire. As the potaroos’ fur began to singe & hiss, Tracker Marks, through signs & the Van Diemonian patois they called dementung, that bastardised dialect that was part-blackfella, part-whitefelon, told me they had been expecting me for some time, having sighted & tracked the smoke of my fires for several days as I slowly wound my way up the flanks of the mountain.

  Twopenny Sal lit a pipe & after a few puffs offered it to me. It was some sort of native tobacco, strong & greasy & refreshing. I passed it to Tracker Marks, who inhaled once, sneezed & coughed a great deal—a very bad deep cough it sounded—then told me how he had decided to leave Sarah Island to hunt for kangaroo. After some days travel he had come to the river mouth the whites called Pieman Heads. There he had run into a party of redcoats who had been sent to find the Tracker & ask him to help them find the notorious bushranger Matthew Brady.

  At this point Tracker Marks interrupted his story to take the singed potaroos off the fire & deftly gut them with a sharp stone. After returning them to the fire, he coughed some more, then continued with his tale.

  The redcoats offered gold, as well as land near Jericho where the Tracker might establish his own farm. For the next several weeks they criss-crossed Transylvania. The Tracker showed them rocks that were Brady, tarns that were Brady, fish that were Brady, made them swim rapids in deep mountain rivers that were Brady, made them stand in the chill wind that was Brady, & then they showed the Tracker the boot, sliced off his nose & ears, one ear so close that they took part of a cheek, then gave him a good hiding & told him that if they came across him again they would shoot him up for the cocky coon he was, for having led them away from their prey for so long.

  I felt a stirring of excitement at this story. My soul had warmed at such unexpected company & my mind felt oddly lucid from the tobacco. With the force of revelation, I realised that my journey was coming to its fabulous conclusion. Clearly, though Tracker knew where Brady’s camp was, he had skilfully avoided showing the redcoats. Now he would lead me there.

  VII

  THE WORLD GREW grey as great clouds, immense & black, came over & obscured nearly all light, hastening the onset of nightfall. Almost immediately, with a perversity entirely consistent with the Van Diemonian summer, it started to sleet.

  As sloppy snow hissed contempt into the fire, Tracker Marks took the cooked animals off and cut them into pieces, sharing them around. He himself ate nothing, not even when Twopenny Sal cracked open the thigh bones of the cooked potaroos & held them close to his mouth, imploring him to suck the marrow for strength, then, when he refused, rubbing the marrow on his cheeks & forehead as though this might similarly impart strength.

  When after the meal I then asked Tracker Marks where Brady was, replied he that the rocks were Brady, that the tarns were Brady, that the fish were Brady …

 
I might have mourned that not only Tracker Marks’s body, but his mind seemed to be in such decline. But to tell the truth I felt little other than a great weariness consequent on the sudden & unexpected meal of marsupials, slightly sick but also strangely sated. I drew closer to the fire until Twopenny Sal bad me join them in a small cave-like recess in the rocks into which they had all retreated.

  Once under the overhang Tracker Marks had me sleep with them, the fire in front of us, dogs curled at our head & feet, his children cuddled up to me on one side, Twopenny Sal on the other, with Tracker Marks on the far side of her.

  I found the proximity unexpected, &—to be frank—a little inappropriate, but as no-one else seemed to find it the least bit odd, I rolled over on my side & found my nose nestling into the back of the one the Commandant called the Mulatto, Robinson named Cleopatra & the convicts knew as Twopenny Sal, & whose Aboriginal name, I realised with a sudden sense of shame, I had never bothered finding out.

  I felt childlike, & with a dim sense that my knowing so little was a vague but real sin, terrible & unspeakable, which had yet been forgiven, I fell asleep. As I slept I felt my muscles & bones slowly warm & then relax, & I felt, for the first time in many, many days, that I was safe.

  VIII

  WHEN I AWOKE it was night, dark save for the fire—which had earlier looked doomed to die in the cold & wet—now roaring & driving, a huge wild red presence three yards high & at least the same in radius filling our cave with a yellow leaping light.

  Tracker Marks, Twopenny Sal, the children & dogs—all were gone. A smoky yet somehow familiar scent came to my nostrils, which reminded me of that particular must I had smelt on my first entry to the Registry.

  On the far side of the blaze I saw Twopenny Sal dancing with the children. She had abandoned her European clothes & apart from a red ochre smeared necklace made of sinew & a strip of roo skin wrapped several times around her waist to which the tiny skull was now attached, she wore nothing other than red ochre smeared on her face & through her pubic hair, the latter looking like rusty iron shavings attracted by the magnet of her pudenda. Her hair had been remade with a thick pomade of red ochre & grease, fashioned into overlapping scales like those of a fish. The children were similarly naked & similarly decorated.

  As I made my way toward them around the fire, I felt something fall upon the side of my shoulder, then drop away. I stopped, turned, & looked down. Lying on the ground beside me, terminating in the smoking stump of a forearm, was a smouldering black hand.

  THE FRESHWATER CRAYFISH

  King Canute—An antipodean auto-da-fé—The leaving of Twopenny Sal—Metamorphosis—Firesite of skulls—Song of Solomon—Beehive hut—The wages of reading—Eating Brady’s journal—Universe of horror, infinity of love—Clucas ahead—His perfidy rewarded.

  I

  WITH A SENSE of impending horror, I stopped, turned & looked up. At first I refused to believe what it was that I was witnessing. That it was a confusion of the eye & brain, that I was mistaking the endlessly liquid form of flames for other things. But the longer I stared, the more I knew it could be no mistake.

  For high in the middle of the fire, sitting bolt upright seven feet above, was a shrivelling, flaming dark log supported by burning branches piled up on all sides. The dark log was a black King Canute enthroned happy-as-you-please while a yellow & blue tide of flame rose ever higher around him. I blinked—once, twice—but there could be no mistake: King Canute was Tracker Marks, now dead, & this was his cremation.

  The black dandy, his hacking cough now forever stilled at the dancing fire’s heart, was charring into something unrecognisable. Red flames were wrapping like slavering hands around a waist, caressing a chest, desiring a chin. There was an arm ending in an elbow spluttering fire. An ear-hole burning with a soft yellow flame like a tallow lamp.

  I heard a yelp & looked down to see one of the wretched dogs attempting to race off with the hand that had dropped from Tracker’s corpse onto me & from there to the ground. A foot fell on the hand, a foot I recognised as thankfully unlit & alive & belonging to Twopenny Sal, who bent down, wrenched the still smoking hand free from the dog’s jaws, gave the dog a kick, & with a casual lob threw the hand back on the fire.

  If the reader should suppose that at this point Billy Gould screamed or screeched they would be greatly mistaken. If they think Billy Gould boldly leapt up, wrested the Tracker’s body from the flames & thereafter gave him a good Christian burial they would be even more mistaken.

  For one thing, it was all I could do to continue standing. For another, I’ve never been one for telling people how they ought live their lives &, given my own experience, it seemed a not unreasonable principle to now extend to death. I had already interfered with two corpses, & one had transformed from a turd into a scientifick system, while the other had become a slimy sage. It had become clear to me that no good, scientifick or spiritual, comes from messing with the dead. And besides, I felt the Tracker looked rather happy up there at the top of his bonfire, like the glowing star of Bethlehem atop a Christmas tree. It wasn’t beautiful, & it wasn’t ugly. It wasn’t right & it wasn’t wrong. It did smell similar to what I hoped Castlereagh would one day smell.

  I realised that Twopenny Sal was looking up at me. I could feel the heat of the fire on my face, & I could see the flames painting their cavorting leaves of red light & black shadow over her body, her face, her black eyes wet with tears. From a small kangaroo-skin basket hanging by a belt of sinew from her waist she took a clump of red ochre which she crushed to a powder in the palm of my hand, then mixed to a paste with spittle, saying all the time the words, Ballewinny—ballewinny—ballewinny, & all the time crying & her face twitching & shaking in that leaping light, & she kept looking at me & I only looked down occasionally at her work with the spittle-greased red ochre, too embarrassed to do anything else, even when she brought a red daubed finger up to my cheek & began to smear markings on my face.

  As she rubbed the ochre in she stared at me, as though I were some long lost friend, as if I were her man, her brother, her father, her sons, all the other people who had preceded Tracker Marks, for whom she had rubbed ochre on her face & charcoal onto her body to mourn as one by one they had perished of colds & smallpox & the clap & musket shot, as if we shared something that transcended our bodies & our histories & our futures, & as if by marking me so with red ochre I might somehow also know something about all this.

  But in the twisting light & shadow of the fire with the daubings of death & life on my face & the secret mysteries of which they spoke, I only sensed that I knew none of it.

  The black woman turned away, took a large bough, & beating it hard down against Tracker Marks’s flaming head broke open his skull & exposed his brains in a perfect state to the fire. She then worked her way around the body with the bough, poking & lifting & prodding, seeming determined to ensure that Tracker was all properly burnt to ash.

  After she began singing, & the children joined her, the children singing together, & she singing an octave above them, forming a concord of such exactness, that I, though I understood none of the words, felt greatly moved.

  It was at this moment, when I was trying to rid myself of my frustration at not understanding a word she sang but possessed of the terrifying suspicion I actually understood everything too well, that this woman of many names whom I no longer knew how to address turned back around & began tearing pages out of a book & throwing them on the fire.

  I looked up & realised that Tracker’s head, pointed north, was shrouded by sheets of the convict registers, the letter books, the records of reports & standing orders, all now reduced to the purpose of fuelling a funeral pyre, bursting into flame & then rising & floating off past Tracker’s cheerily charring face, their flapping pages momentarily illuminated by the light of Tracker’s ear before they disappeared into the night as leaves of disintegrating carbon.

  As she came around to the side of the fire closest to me, I saw that while dancing Twopenny
Sal had been all the time feeding the fire with pages she was ripping with a great frenzy from the registers.

  The registers!

  The registers I had dragged for so many days with so great a sacrifice! The registers with which Brady would liberate us! The registers that had killed Jorgen Jorgensen & for which I had risked my life & Capois Death had inadvertently given his life …

  I rushed up & seized from her the book she was tearing up & throwing onto the flames, determined to fight to rescue at least one volume from her manic antipodean auto-da-fé, but to my surprise she offered no resistance to my sudden attack & instead just let go.

  As I tried to pat out the book’s flaring edges I noticed some of the words illuminated by the flames. In the firelight I read some sentences that made no sense whatsoever, about buying chairs as a futile act of atonement for unspecified but very real sins. Then the flame leapt up the page to my hand & the page, already loose, fell into the fire. I looked back up at her, but she was still staring down at the book, where I then read what was now its beginning, a half-torn page, the first legible words of which were:

  ‘ … for I am William Buelow Gould, sloe-souled, green-eyed, gap-toothed, shaggy-haired & grizzle-gutted, & I mean to paint pictures of fish & capture in them one more soul like mine …’

  Suffering the dim sense of a skewed recognition, I flipped through more pages, leafing past pictures of fish & prose I found in several places to be recognisable as my work, & in other parts to be ludicrous nonsense though not without a curious & sometimes disturbing correspondence to reality on Sarah Island.