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

by Richard Flanagan

  But it was not until my eyes alighted upon some lines at the bottom of a page in the front of the book that I experienced something like panic.

  ‘William Buelow Gould,’ read I, ‘had been born with a memory but neither experience nor history to account for it, & had spent forever after seeking to invent what didn’t exist in the curious belief that his imagination might become his experience, & thereby both explain & cure his problem of an inconsolable memory.’

  Resolving to read no more of such fancy, I tore that offending page out & threw it into the flames, but I now felt my breath shortening into abrupt pants & on my back a prickly sweat of fear was rising & in my bowels my guts began dancing a watery jig.

  Twopenny Sal wiped tears off her cheek & indicated that the far side of the pyre needed more fuel. I was infuriated by her total lack of interest in my feelings & was determined to read not another word, to begin there & then to try to erase this moment from my life.

  I would recommence my search for Brady who would tell me that all I was now witnessing was simply the delirium of a man lost & starving in the wild woods of Transylvania. But it was no good—Billy Gould could not escape the growing suspicion that he had become entrapped in a book, a character whose future as much as his past was already written, determined, foretold, as unalterable as it was intolerable. What choice did he have but to destroy that book?

  I tore out yet a dozen more pages with great energy & threw them in the fire, but the upward draught of the flames picked the pages up & swept them straight back into my face. As I pulled a partly burnt page off my nose I could not help but read:

  ‘Lying on the ground beside me, terminating in the smoking stump of a forearm, was a smouldering black hand …’

  With great violence, I screwed the page up & threw it on the fire, only to see revealed on the next page a picture of a freshwater crayfish. It looked as if it had been painted in perfect imitation of my style. Trying desperately to avoid the conclusion that if this book of fish was a history of the settlement, it might also just be its prophecy, I then realised that the book was not near ended, that it contained several more chapters, & with mounting terror I read on the succeeding page of how—‘I realised that the book was not near ended, that it contained several more chapters, & with mounting terror I read on the succeeding page of how—’

  II

  —STRANGELY, TO MYSELF no longer inexplicably, I then let the entire Book of Fish fall into the inferno, & proceeded to join with the black woman in tearing the other books apart & feeding the torn pages to the fire.

  Onto that pyre those descriptions of so many individual pasts, their implicit idea of a single future, & how those hungry flames shrieked with delight! As Pobjoy so long ago told me, definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words—that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated me as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving—that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell.

  I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was: I was the past that had been flogged on the triangle, but I am the flagellator dipping his cat in the sand bucket to give the tails extra bite; I was the past that fell with choked scream through the gallows’ green wood trapdoor, but I am the hangman swinging on the dying man’s legs; I was the past bought & chained & raped by sealers, but I am the sealer making the black woman eat her own thigh & ears.

  Onto the fire I threw those books of betrayals, of fantastickal rumours, of stories a little true & mostly false, all with treacheries great & insignificant at their core hiding from us our shame at how we were made to be both gaoled & gaoler. Neither we nor our children nor their infinite progeny were ever to forget the shame, long after the memory of why had been lost. Onto the fire I threw Crania Tasmaniae—those beautiful lithographs of stolen skulls & they too danced around the charring corpse. Onto the fire & into its hungry heart we heaped them all, all those lies that obscured the mysteries & clues & echoes & questions & answers, in order to escape that prison finally & completely & forever; onto the fire we cast every last register, every loose sheet of paper, on & on, & on & on they burnt.

  At first so much damp paper merely smothered the fire, but soon the flames re-emerged & the fire leapt back into being like a huge ball, as if the System were a dragon that had just been slain, its dying breath apocalyptic, as though a thousand furious spirits were being released. The fire shrieked & cracked & threw geysers of sparks far into the night sky, the bush all around brightly lit by a dancing red glow.

  The huge fire was wild with it all, & then the surrounding bushes spontaneously combusted from its banshee-breath & the night sky began to thrum to its growing banshee-wail. The fire began spreading & the surrounding pencil pines & then the forest beyond was in flames & then as far as I could see, everything was afire & without willing it or thinking it, I found myself joining the black woman in her dance, bathed in the wild red ochre light thrown by the inferno.

  I dragged my withered, ulcerated legs in poor but definite imitation of her jumps & leaps, & together with her & the children I danced so many things that lay so deep within my soul it felt like a purifying fire itself. It was a joy & it was a sadness & it was inexplic able. It was the weaver & my poor mother, it was Audubon & all the birds he shot, Old Gould & Old Gould’s daughter, Voltaire & Mrs Gottliebsen, the Surgeon & the fish, the Commandant & Towtereh, Capois Death & his beloved Tommy, the potaroos & the Tracker. We were dancing something beyond words. My body took on such wild life separate of me that I feared my wretched old bones might break & fragment in that ceaseless, strange furrowing of the earth.

  After a long time, after the flames had departed to the ranges & tiers far beyond & only warm cinders lay about us & the smoke billowed far below along distant ridges in the rising light of dawn, I watched the black woman gather up the ashes of the dead Tracker Marks & mix them with water to form a mud, grey & gritty, that she then smeared all over herself & her children. Thus attired in the night of their grief, they prepared to depart into a morning she seemed determined not to relinquish.

  ‘No you worry, Tracker he go to England,’ she told me. ‘Tracker he numminer piccaninny now.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said I. ‘When you are dead you don’t get reborn as an Englishman.’

  ‘Numminer!’ cried she. ‘Tracker numminer! Gould numminer, but long time before you were Palawa.’ And with an outstretched arm she described a vast arc through the dawning sky above, her pointed finger beginning at me & ending at the other end of her world pointing down at charred earth.

  ‘Long time before,’ said she, ‘you were us.’

  I looked at her & then I couldn’t look at her, & so I looked at the ash-strewn, dance-scuffed ground.

  ‘Gould, you come,’ said she.

  I kicked my toes into the dirt, felt myself shuddering & swallowing.

  Said she: ‘Come back, cobber.’

  III

  BUT I WHOSE obsession had been the past & its chronicles, found myself without either the desire of the energy to follow Twopenny Sal into the future.

  I had watched them walk off—this woman whose name I had never known & her bedraggled children, of whom one may have been mine—into the charred, still smouldering forest. Before long their naked forms were indistinguishable from the burnt stags & saplings that spiked that beautiful blackened country.

  I headed into the east wind, walking in the opposite direction to her & the westward surging fire, a lengthening wall of smoke receding from my back. I made my way up through an alpine country of heaths & small shrubs, still aiming for the peak of Frenchman’s Cap. No longer encumbered by the sled & books, I found myself even in my weak state making much quicker progress.

  Mid-afternoon I came upon a steep creek. It rose a few hundred yards fur
ther on in an alpine tarn, a little lake caught in the cupped palm of a small mountain valley. At that summer level the creek was nothing more than the gentlest of cascades playing around large river rocks on one of which was a creature, glistening greens & apricots, emerging out of a large shell a good yard long.

  For some moments I was unsure what it was, until I recognised it as a freshwater crayfish of the type the convicts sometimes hunted in the rivers. It was shedding its carapace & emerging newer & larger, yet still the same. I looked at the translucent shell the crayfish was abandoning & marvelled at its metamorphosis, at the magical power it had to appear one thing & become another, its ability to leave behind an image of itself that was no longer itself.

  I thought of trying to catch it, for its flesh is very fine eating. But the moment I threw a fist-sized river rock, the crayfish leapt backwards into the water. The rock landed with a futile thud where the crayfish had a moment before crouched, & all that remained were suggestions of what had once been: the shell in which it had lived, a damp shadow on the rock where it had stood, a vortex of bubbling water into which it had disappeared.

  I gave up, and walked on. Beyond the tarn I passed a grove of pencil pines & entered a clearing in which sat a dozen or more dome-like buildings arranged in a circle. From their large beehive shape & the careful, intricate thatching of the tea-tree & grass, I recognised these as the cottages of the blackfellas, the tarn as the site as one of their villages.

  But there were no blackfellas.

  There was an old firesite at the village’s centre, lichen scabbing the dirty ash, over which were scattered, as if in explanation, mounds of bones & a host of human skulls, long since picked clean by animals & birds & insects. Remnants of black women’s ornaments rotting upon some bones, & of black men’s ornaments on others. Skulls with one, or at most two small holes, I presumed from musket balls. Skulls with the back smashed out where devils had bitten through to get at the brains beneath. Skulls bleached white, & skulls with a gathering of green moss. Big skulls. Little skulls, toothless, translucent as parchment.

  IV

  I WAS LYING on the ground, panting quickly, shaking uncontrollably with fear. The mountain earth was reaching around me with the sweet weight of death. My body heavier & heavier, my head a stone, & within an insistent voice wimbling away, dragging me downwards, urging me sleep—sleep, sleep Billy boy. Through eyes pearling, I dimly noticed a few yards distant an entrance to one of the larger dome huts, a low hole no more than a foot wide & no greater than double that in height.

  I began a crawl away from that firesite of skulls, toward that narrow opening, a cruel, harrowing journey over ground strewn with the feathers of emu, & the broken bones of this stately bird as well as of kangaroos & possums. I hauled myself over intricately woven grass bags, crushing beneath me small plants growing out of their rotted thatch.

  I halted my infinitely slow crawl to rest, & saw the letters of all my childhood prayers bounced back & reformed on the ground as some scattered leaves torn from the Bible, smeared with red ochre. On examining some of these leaves I found them to contain such passages as, ‘I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem’ & ‘Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies’; the sort of rot you might use to get your way with a bedswerver like the publican’s wife. But I found it so peculiarly ill-adapted to me that I could not help blaspheming, & so without applicability to my situation that I blew my nose upon it. Given I had sent God 26 letters on numerous occasions—admittedly long ago—I thought God could have done a little better than this. The last page I looked at lay at the wombat-hole entrance to the hut. It was even more irrelevant. ‘I said of laughter,’ it read: ‘It is mad: & of mirth, what good doeth it?’

  Bugger all. I threw it away. Upon finally crawling inside the hut I was overwhelmed by a fecundity of smells—stinking human & animal odours, smoke & cooked meat, decay & growth, but mostly decay—which made my stomach clutch. I went to puke, but Tracker Mark’s potaroos would not budge from my gut & instead my throat just burnt with bile. I rolled the wasted rack of my body onto its back. For a long time I lay not far from the low entrance, exhausted, crook, trying to empty my mind, my eyes adjusting to the darkness.

  A capacious room, surprisingly comfortable, remarkable warm & dry, slowly appeared around me, large enough to accommodate perhaps twenty people, though presently home only to two potaroos & one tiger cat which had scampered out after I entered.

  I felt as though I were nestling in a giant seaeagle’s nest turned upside down, for the dome’s walls curved around me, covered with the sulphur-dipped feathers of cockatoos, the raven black feathers of evil-eyed currawongs. Here & there animal skins were pegged with sticks on the downy wall. Scattered around me sharp stones of the type the blackfellas use for tools, the back of a looking glass, & what appeared to be a flint-lock that had been pounded into a small, sharp knife-like tool. As with my eyes, so too did my nose begin to adjust, & the strong smells at first so distressing, grew comforting, halfway between meat cooling & coming home.

  I eased myself up into a sitting position. I stared at the dead firesite at the centre of the hut for a long time, lost in despair, for what was I to do now? To have come so far, only to have all my records burnt. To recognise I could go on no further. To no longer care if I lived or died, far less found Brady. My supplies, my strength, my very life seemed spent in a quixotic mission that had come to nothing but utter disillusionment.

  My back spasmed, a mass of cruel knots ever more tightly tangled. The joints in my legs felt like river rocks grinding on each other. My head swam in a light fever. Cold, old, alone in a land no white man even knew on maps, far less in their heart, beyond any redemption in a blackfella’s house of feathers. Though it was warm, a coldness, terrible & violent, crept over me. I felt very still, yet I was hurtling around in circles both inside & outside my body. With an unexpected clarity I knew that I was dying, & that, if I did nothing, before very long I would no longer care if I was dying. I found myself battling death &, worse yet, my desire to live.

  I was so frightened.

  I resolved to pray to God.

  I resolved to confess to Him everything.

  I cleared my throat with an awkward cough. I pulled myself into what felt like dignity & knelt. I would just let it all pour out, everything from Castlereagh’s drinking habits to Ackermann’s awful teeth & a hundred & one other things, it really would be a terrific thing to finally say it all & not hold it down any longer.

  ‘God,’ began I & my prayer of confession went like this—

  V

  ‘A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-RS-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z.’

  VI

  IT WAS A wondrous ark that confession & I really did put everything I knew in it so they might live: all the plants & birds & fish & animals I have loved, not to mention the Commandant’s bad breath & Mrs Gottliebsen’s splendid areolae & Twopenny Sal’s dancing & all of it was just 26 letters long.

  But it did no good whatsoever—what prayer ever did? And not being able to kneel on the rock of the church any longer I was swaying falling dreaming embracing the earth.

  VII

  I PROBABLY WOULD have died very soon after if my fall had not been most uncomfortably broken by a small cairn of ochre stained rocks. When I rolled over, groaning with yet one more set of new bruises & aches, it was to notice that protruding from the now half-collapsed cairn was a book.

  At that point there could have been nothing more likely to depress me than the dismal prospect of reading, for reading had become for me the source only of disappointment & disillusionment, of a measure that seemed to turn my entire life upside down, disturb & distress me beyond compare, & make me think everything I had hitherto taken for granted about this world was all cack-handed & wrong.

  I understood how Mrs Gottliebsen would have felt if I hadn’t discovered Voltaire in the nick of time. She would have felt like me with books. Che
ated.

  After all, it was reading all those romances & adventures as a young boy that had been the undoing of Jorgensen, making him think he could remake the world in the image of a book. It was reading Miss Anne’s idiotic missives that had led the Commandant into his follies; & it was reading all those works by Linnaeus & Lamarck that had made the porcupine fish think he had a sacred role in reordering a world that was only ever going to reorder him as the supreme example of a degenerate black skull.

  It was the nonsense of all their reading & then me in the Registry stupidly sticking my own beak into books that I shouldn’t have, that had led me to this sorry pass where I was about to die alone in a nameless forest.

  Thought I: only a fool would touch it.

  My fingers stroked the cover’s dusty invitation. I pulled my hand away, looked up at the ceiling, away from that wretched book sticking out of stones, taunting me like the publican’s wife all those years ago behind the bar with her sultry silent come hithers. I rolled myself onto my side, pushed what remained of the cairn apart with my outstretched hand, & lifted the book out from the dry rubble.

  It wasn’t a large & grand tome like those in which Jorgen Jorgensen had reinvented Sarah Island, but a small & crudely made volume. Its pages appeared to be roughly bound with gut sinew, which I recognised as having been stretched & softened in the blackfella manner of chewing. Its cover—wallaby hide, like the rest of the book—was stained red with ochre like that which, I realised, touching my cheek, still remained on my face from where the black woman had rubbed it on.

  Thought I: only a madman would open it.

  The book fell open in my outstretched hand, & there at the book’s front, written in what thought I a surprisingly childlike hand, was the name—

  Matt Brady.

  Thought I: I can’t bear to read what follows.

  When I had finished reading I breathed deeply for some time. I felt my skin prickle & breathing grow shallow. Then sobs, which I tried to stifle by pushing a fist into my mouth, erupted like odd, acrid bubbles bursting forth from a burning pot. I tried to stop my head shuddering.