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

by Richard Flanagan

  I felt only an immense emptying. A great disillusionment. Time … well, what did I care about time now? Perhaps it halted or started or danced or fell asleep or went to the pub for several Larrikin Soups. My nausea abated a little. Hunger—incessant, unavoidable—came back upon me. I shoved the wallaby-hide cover of the book in my mouth & tried to eat the book, as much to be rid of it as to appease my belly.

  But that proved pointless, for the book was as inedible as it was incomprehensible. How can I convey the utter futility of what I had read? It was, I suppose, best described as a kind of personal journal written in what the author claimed to be kangaroo blood, a small earthenware inkwell of which I noticed remained sitting amidst the stones from where I had grabbed the journal.

  It was a rattle bag of things really. There were observations on blackfella ways & habits, which seemed pointless. There were vulgar jokes written out in great & tedious length, emptying their vehicles of what little humour they may have had. There were pieces of what I suppose amounted to a personal philosophy: various commonplaces on the theme of friendship such as ‘Love cannot live without the forgiveness of sins continually’ & similar such tripe. Recipes for bush poultices & medicinal draughts. Observations of animals & birds. The currawong. The quoll. The sea eagle. The tiger. Did he not have a gun? Could he not like Audubon at least have had the decency to shoot one or two & make some bad pictures? No. His style was too artless. ‘The shrike-thrush calling lovely like he has lost an old cobber calls he Jo Witty? Jo Witty?’ He had no ambition. Whenever a thought or observation overwhelmed him, rather than seek to conclude his idea he would instead just write, ‘And on & on, & round & round’, as though idiocy is the need for conclusions.

  I searched in vain through those pages, sometimes stiff & thick, sometimes as thin & light as pressed flowers, for orders for a jacquerie, any mention of a rebellion, plans for a revolution, or even something that might amount to an outline for an orchestrated uprising, a draft declaration of independence for the Republic—anything that might fundamentally threaten the System.

  There was nothing.

  Only page after page of more pathetick affirmations of love between a white man & a black woman, that left me feeling queasy. At one point the typically cryptic aside: ‘To love is not safe.’

  And what did that mean?

  I had no idea.

  The ink was dried up & the dreams were only of Brady’s love for a black woman, of building a white man, black woman home, the whole something other than either in the merge, adorned with moonbird & black swan feathers, with a large vegetable garden where he & she might live knowing that place & each other & their family over the course of a long life, growing old together.

  To love is not safe. Whole circle, black man. Circle bisected, white man. Really it was just like Descartes, or Descartes was really just like them, him thinking in whirlpools & them in circles, & all a similar nonsense. Love. Forgiveness. Love, love, love, thought I—is that all? Is that it?

  Apart from a recipe for roo patties, it was.

  I closed the book.

  Who was this Brady?

  It occurred to me that he may have been Tracker Marks. Or René Descartes. Or that he may have been the black woman whose name I never learnt. I even wondered if he was in the end just an idea, but then his story would properly belong in the realm of literature, & not here in a truthful account that deals only in real fish.

  And what had happened?

  Had he killed the blacks who lived in this & the other beehive huts? Or had he been killed with them? Was he now condemned to some nether world of the type Pliny the Elder had described in the book I had found impaled on the old Dane’s sword, living with the Monocoli & the Astomi & all the other fabled people?

  I rolled onto my back, exhausted beyond measure, all hope finally extinguished.

  VIII

  I READIED MYSELF to die.

  For several hours I merely let my gaze wander the inside of that hut, staring at the texture of the tea-tree thatching, its feather cladding, so rough, so gentle, the whole hut I fancied like gnarled old hands grown into great wings cupping around me, & the dull-dun tobacco colour of it all, acquired, I suppose, from the fire smoke that must have once played in the now dead black coals at the hut’s centre.

  Skins of wallaby & possum & quoll hung on the walls at unusual angles, as if they might momentarily take back their original form as animals & leap down. I looked at the pictures drawn on these skins in fats stained with charcoal & red ochre, of tigers & devils & kangaroos, of hunting parties, of men & women dancing, of the moon in its various guises, which had, I had to admit, a certain mesmerising power.

  I took the skins off the wall & placed them under & over me. I curled into a ball over which kangaroos & wombats & devils & dancers & hunters & the moon roamed in stories I had no way of understanding. In that serene dark of the beehive hut of feathers, covered in incomprehensible tales with Brady’s book of indigestible love at my side, I finally fell asleep.

  Like the crayfish leaping backwards into the water after abandoning its shell, I prepared to abandon the shell of who & what I was, & metamorphose into something else. As with my mind’s eye I saw a shimmering arch of blue flame, smelling of singed fustian, being drawn out of my nostrils by those dancing animals & then sent hurtling out of the hut, I finally felt my soul taking flight.

  Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.

  I dreamt I spat onto the crazed sepia crust of kangaroo blood at the bottom of Brady’s ink pot, making a scarlet ink, the colour of a troubled dawn. Into that wet, dark demon I dipped the nib of an old quill with which I then wrote in Brady’s wallaby-skin journal where Brady’s dreams ended & the clean, empty sheets began:

  Orbis tertius,

  my first words rendering that third circle in Latin.

  And then, finally, breaking apart the spider web of an infinite memory in which I had become enshrouded, I dreamt of the man whom I had been—a convict forger who called himself William Buelow Gould, & who, discovering that implicit in a single seahorse was the universe, that everyone had the capacity to be someone, something, somebody else, that Numminer were Palawa & Palawa Numminer, had painted a few queer pictures of fish, & then died.

  IX

  I HAVE STOLEN songs from God.

  X

  AS I SLEPT on I began to wonder whether if all this were just a dream & I the dreamer, that the many strange forms of my dream might also just be me. Could it be that, though the Commandant reigned over me, I was yet the Commandant? Was it possible that though Mr Lempriere ordered me to paint the fish, I was Mr Lempriere? And that though I painted the fish, I …?

  But it was not possible to continue.

  There were shouts, curses, the heavy sound of tramping, a cry of discovery, the sharp, ammoniac aroma of excited fear, the sudden clicking of flintlocks. I opened my eyes, saw barrels radiating from my head, as if I were a sea urchin & the levelled muskets my spikes. Brandishing the firearms were some lousy bottom-feeding soldiers, great galoots of gurnards with their huffy cheeks—redder than their rotten coats—& poppy eyes. In what felt a single movement I was roughly dragged from my bed of skins & heaved outside. I groaned, spat out the peat that had ploughed into my mouth where I had so rudely landed, & lifted my head.

  To my side were a mangy tiger-skin cap & the dead eyes of one whose terribly bloodied head seemed familiar & the foolish & naked body beyond from which it was severed finally recognisable as that of the banditto, traitor, child-murderer, rapist & sealer, Clucas. I did not then know that having fulfilled his part of a bargain in providing several dozen barrels of gunpowder, Clucas had then been paid out in his own currency of death. But when I looked further up I did know, without seeing his face, the name of his
murderer. For eclipsing the sun now rising beyond was the unmistakable & monstrous udderish outline of the great ball bag of Musha Pug.

  THE SILVER DORY

  On the perplexities of time—Burning of Nova Venezia—Betrayed by an opium-eater—Intimations of immortality—A disembowelling—Mutiny—The silver dory detonates—Sky rains dreams & hopes & railway carriages—Tales of love, paid in death—Reflections on Rembrandt van Rijn & sundry other matters—Fish plot vengeance.

  I

  BILLY GOULD HAD awoken startled. Shaking his head, he ran his hand over his roughly bearded chin, scratching himself in all the awful places awful lice were biting. Feeling a sudden desire to move, if only in order to be momentarily rid of the itch of lice & the insolence of dreams, Billy Gould leapt up & seizing hold of the prison bars high up, hauled himself to the slit window & looked out. Relieved, I saw the miserable magnificence of the Commandant’s Nova Venezia all about, & my heart swelled with gratitude toward Musha Pug for having brought me back.

  I should have known why I was there, but in truth I didn’t. To be frank, although I have painted all I know, it’s clear that what I know is two parts of bugger-all. All that I don’t know, on the other hand, is truly impressive & the library of Alexandria would be too small to contain the details of all my ignorance. I don’t know, for example, why I am now to hang for two murders I never committed, yet why nobody is guilty of the firesite of skulls. Nor do I know why murdering the Pudding or Jorgensen is deemed a crime, while murdering a people is at best a question & at worst a scientifick imperative. There is much more I don’t know. For example: why people read Bowdler-Sharpe & dismiss fairy tales as nonsense. Why an alphabet can be contained in a world, but a world could never be contained in an alphabet. These things & so many others are all mysteries to me. How boats float. Why we order our lives as ladders while around us the earth circles. How mortar works. Why a man quivers like a fish when a woman walks by. How buildings don’t collapse. Why we can walk but not fly. Why I dreamt I had transformed into a forest but woke to find my gob ploughing the earth until it hit the stump of Musha Pug’s boots.

  Whatever their more clandestine purposes, Pug’s party of traps had officially been on patrol with the aim of gathering information on Brady’s movements, & for a moment had thought in my wasted sleeping form they had finally captured the great man himself. I told them that I had indeed met the one they sought, & pointed in the opposite direction to where Twopenny Sal had set out.

  ‘Did you think Brady could save you?’ laughed Musha Pug, kicking my head.

  ‘Of course,’ said I, because it was what he wanted me to say, but now I knew the truth was otherwise.

  Even if he had all the histories of the world & its suffering open in front of him, Matt Brady, whoever & wherever he was, could not have saved us. Nothing could. Not the Surgeon’s Science. Not the Commandant’s Culture. Not God, who is infinite time. Nor could we save ourselves. There was no solace in the past. There was no solace in the future. There was no solace even in the idea of salvation. There were only Musha Pug’s boots, & after they had landed one more blow on my cheek & were skating over my mouth I kissed them. I kissed them because they were all that I had left to love.

  II

  THE SLIT WINDOW from which I was hanging afforded a view I found both splendid & instructive: on the fish-netting gang’s crude plank jetty below a gibbet was being erected, an incentive to us condemned souls watching from above to concentrate our minds upon repentance before all was finally lost. Below the jetty at low tide some washed-up skulls & bones of Lieutenant Lethborg’s platoon were bleaching and breaking back into the sand. I had been brought to my new cell—a death cell—after my capture, to await my imminent execution eight days hence.

  This new home was not without virtues. It didn’t flood on a daily basis & its ceiling seemed unlikely to collapse. It was one of three slightly larger cells on the other side of the island to the main settlement, & I could have been almost happy with my imminent demise if it hadn’t been for Pobjoy, who at that point took it upon himself to interrupt my splendid solitude.

  I tried to continue hanging like Christ, but I wasn’t really that interested in suffering on my own behalf, far less that of the entire world as the old priest had taught. My poor arms could not hold even such miserable weight as I was any longer, & I fell back into the darkness of my cell while Pobjoy, as ever stooping to new lows, announced that he was seeking the return of the oil-paint set. Until that point I had thought the self-interest of Pobjoy & his need for a continuing supply of convict-Constables might make common cause with my desire to live. Quite the opposite: he calmly told me that my impending execution no longer disturbed him.

  ‘I feel—’ said he, determinedly moving into the cell & grabbing the paint set & my most recent convict-Constable, then corrected himself: ‘I know I am more than capable of picking up where you have left off.’

  For once I looked up into his face. Though tall, he had a round red dial with a wall-eye, which may have explained his similarly bent illusions. He had a jutting lower lip & an angry red-raw jaw where he had shaven badly, like a silver dory’s great ugly mug, &, though I can’t tell you exactly why, I’ve never really taken to dories. They’re trouble.

  I should have guessed from the raffish way he had lately taken to wearing his redcoat partly unbuttoned that Urges Dreadful had come upon him. His desire was grand: ‘I want,’ said he, head jerking backward in a gesture at once haughty & nervous, as if disclosing an illicit passion that might prove his undoing, ‘to become an Artist.’ I told him there were worse ambitions, but at that moment I was unable to think of any.

  The more he talked, the redder grew his face & the more his head jutted back & forth. The greater the head rocking & face ruddying, the longer his lips protruded as if overcoming some childhood handicap in talking. And the more his lips stuck out like the silver dory’s infinitely-extendible mouth, the more I wondered whether he was telling me things, or trying to suck something out of me with his great gob, something fundamental that he might need to help nourish all that immense folly of aesthetick aspiration.

  Then, perhaps overcome with nostalgia for happier times, he gave me a good kicking. Afterwards I assured him he had all the attributes necessary for a successful artistick career, though unfortunately my mouth was too swollen to list them for Pobjoy’s benefit: mediocrity; a violent capacity with any potential rivals; the desire not only to succeed but to see your fellow artists fail; gross insincerity; & a capacity for betrayal. Fortune favours folly, I tried to say, but merely succeeded in dribbling some blood & teeth.

  Then Pobjoy was weeping, saying he always had bad luck, he had bad luck being pressed into the army, then worse luck being sent to such a dismal outpost as this, & worst luck of all being made guard idiots like me. I managed to get my lips moving again & began telling him a story to try to console him for his bad luck, but this just seemed to make him angry once more & he told me to shut up.

  ‘I’ll have you drawn & quartered,’ yelled he. ‘I will personally flog your back until there’s nothing left & the cat’s tails are sticking out the other side tickling your tits.’

  He snorted snot from his nose back down his throat & from his great height gobbed on me.

  ‘Are you such a half-wit, Gould?’

  I knew better than to disagree with Authority, so while wiping my face with my hand, I humbly ventured I most certainly was.

  ‘Shut up! Shut up you stupid bastard, or are you so stupid that you can’t see I’m fed up to here with you & all your stupid stories? If you say a word more I’ll kick you again.’

  So I told him about how I once knew a certain Ned Hennessy who came from near Waterford, who was a simpleton & whose friends decided to play a joke on him. They pretended that one of their number had died & had him laid out in the coffin & asked Ned Hennessy to guard him through the night with a pistol in case the spirits from the other side came to steal him away. Then, in the middle of the ni
ght, up bobbed the corpse & said, ‘Hello, Ned,’ & Ned, who was frightened of the dark & had stowed a pistol in his pants, shot his prankster mate—bang!—dead through his forehead.

  ‘Shut up’, said Pobjoy dully.

  ‘Ned Hennessy,’ I concluded, ‘was a right rumun.’

  Pobjoy gave me a good clubbing all over this time, with his fists & his head & even a couple of wallops with the paintbox, but he didn’t even bother with his boots & I knew his heart was no longer in such violence, poor Pobjoy!

  ‘A man such as yourself,’ I began, but my speech was slurring, blood was dribbling out over my words, & it was hard to see much lying on the floor, ‘in the obvious prime of life …’ But I could hear the cell door slamming shut, the bolts sliding, & as I spat the last of my teeth out, I had to admit that it hadn’t been an entirely agreeable meeting, that I had lost my paints & this time it really might all be over.

  III

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, as I once more hung from the cell’s high barred window, gazing out, I avoided looking at the gibbet by focusing on the distant plumes of smoke that daily moved further outward from Frenchman’s Cap & closer to us. The rest of the settlement at first thought little of the growing fire that was consuming the great uncharted forests of myrtle & pine that the Commandant had not sold & the Japanese not carted away.

  No-one would have believed me if I had told them how the fire had started, & who, pray, was I to do the telling? Who was I to say that the conflagration was first fuelled by the poesy of the very System itself?

  At the beginning we all saw the fire only as an extension of our own particular, peculiar vanities. For some convicts the accumulating dust in the air was one further oppressive element of a natural world that existed only as a gaoler, while through his gilded vision the Commandant saw the catastrophe as only another mercantile opportunity, & immediately sent envoys to several Portuguese colonies offering deals on charcoal which with mercury was used to smelt gold in the distant jungles of the New World; & on it went, with each of us remarking upon the fire only as a prolongation of our various worlds, rather than the ending of them as it was to become.