The Fringe of Leaves

by Patrick White

  So she cried out, and he redoubled what might have been demonstrations of love. Or was it desperation? After they had fallen apart, exhausted, they continued soothing each other with the hands of hardened criminals.

  Again she remembered the teeth, and was driven to kissing his throat, a cheek, a shoulder, one of his nipples, disguising her remorse as tender frenzy.

  Because he no longer responded, she asked, ‘After Mab—was there no one, Jack, you could bring yourself to love?’

  She lay listening for his reply. A wind was ruffling the roof of the hut. There were moments when the thatching failed to protect those inside against a cold interrogation by starlight.

  ‘Nobody at Moreton Bay’, she suggested, ‘you was able to form a relationship with?’

  Nobody could sound as crude and awkward as Ellen Gluyas.

  ‘There was the women’, he said, ‘at the female factory. But who in chains could ever take up with a woman? with the iron eatin’ into ’is legs! An’ the women—they wasn’t chained, but as good as. The poor sluts was never ’ardly let draw breath. They was put to pickin’ oakum, an’ other occupations. They did the laundry for we men, so far as it was done.’

  Her interest was to some degree requited; more when he rolled over and submitted her again to the length and weight of his body.

  He grunted, and said, ‘I’ll tell yer,’ when ready to resume the topic they had dropped, ‘there was one—an Irishwoman—we’d look at each other. I never got to know ’er bloody name, not even after we was in a position to speak to each other. Some fight shy of askin’ or tellin’ names—like there are those who’ll not tell why they was sentenced or ’ow long they’re in for. Oh, some are only too ready to boast—make it sound bigger than it is—like you’ll find inderviduals in real life. An’ some are all for jemmyin’ a cove’s secrets out of ’im. But speakin’ for meself, I respect delicacy if I reckernize it in others.’

  She had never felt more indelicate, but waited, and he continued after moving his hand until it rested in the moist hair between her thighs.

  ‘This woman I see’d often enough. She was one of a party they used to march down early from the female factory to the ’orspital—as we in our gang was trailing’ out to hoe along the point, or hull maize, or break stones for road-makin’. These women were nurses, see? though I’d lay a bet none of ’em was in any way experienced before they come to the Colony. They was that rough. Whores among ’em. But here it’s a case of a pig in a poke. Anyways, this Irish never missed lookin’ in our direction—in mine I was persuaded of course, though the others were shoutin’ at ’er. She’d those eyelashes you see on some of the Irish, so thick they look like they’re gummed together, or loaded with flies.’

  She tried flickering her own lashes in the dark, but could barely persuade herself she still had them; they might have been singed off by the sun, or the rims of her eyelids eroded by privation.

  She asked, ‘Well?’ because his silence was a protracted one.

  ‘That’s the way we pass our lives—a mouthful o’ pumpkin loaf, a quick draw or chew at the crow-minder’s bacca, a try at catchin’ sight of what’s inside the shifts of a gang of Dublin and Cockney molls. In between the ’ard labour. Or ’arder still when they strip us naked and string us up at the triangles—for the good of our moral ’ealth.’

  She flinched.

  ‘I fell down once. I reckon I must of fainted, but I’m still not sure. The surgeon that was standin’ by—this was for our general physical well-bein’—kicked me to see if I wasn’t dead. I oughter been. When they pulled me to me feet I could ’ardly stagger. This was the worstest experience I ever ’ad of a bastin’. I would of said the bones was showin’ through me hide, whether or not. Anyways, the flies got to work on the cuts. I was turned septic. Yairs, I was a brake on the chain-gang, whether at the mill or the stone-bustin’. So this same surgeon—great-’earted, considerin’—ordered me to ’orspital.’

  She was clinging to him in horror and disgust: the smell alone, of putrefying flesh (or rotten teeth). But either from abstraction or from conjuring this Irishwoman, he showed no sign of appreciating her sympathy.

  ‘I was deleerious at first. I would not of knowed nobody. The chaplain prayin’—very thoughtful—was about the first thing I saw. One Sunday, as a special treat, the Commandant visits the ’orspital. By now I can take notice—and hate. I can see ’im lookin’ at me, out of the corner of an eye like. ’E’s brought ’is missus, a pretty little piece with pink roses inside of ’er bonnet. You can see she’s off colour, like the patients from their own stench—some of ’em layin’ on the boards in their shit, that the nurses is none too willin’ ter dispose of. “It’s pitiful! What—oh, what can we do for them?” the lady squeaks from be’ind ’er ’ankercher. I felt downright sorry for ’er. Well, you did! She’s whisked away pretty smart though, soon as ever she give tongue.’

  He remained mumbling awhile on the situation.

  ‘This Irishwoman would wipe my arse. She’d a rough hand. But the eyelashes. “When me strength returns,” I tell ’er, “you’ll help me, wontcher? Sooner if you ’ear ’em talk of dischargin’ me.” She made no promise, but I could tell by ’er stance she was dependable. An’ that is ’ow I bolted for the last and most successful time from Moreton Bay.’

  Her throat had grown bitter from thirst. She would have gone outside to quench it, regardless of whether he had finished his story. Were her promises equal in his mind to the Irishwoman’s silence? It tormented her.

  ‘One evenin’ she distracted the guard afore they was due to be changed. It’d been a hollycaust of a day. They was leanin’ sweaty on their muskets, only thinkin’ to be marched off to the barracks to their grub. I climbed the wall with the ’elp of a barrel I’d ’ad me eye on. Even the spikes was of assistance. Though I’ve a scar or two ter show for it.’

  From his tone of voice she thought this must be all, when presently he all but crushed her in what she knew to be gratitude: she was acting as proxy for this Irishwoman of gummed-up lashes; she must not, she did not, feel resentful; she returned his embraces as though she personally deserved them.

  It was the woman herself who might have resented, and hearing this Mrs Roxburgh when the fever was abated, ‘Well, now you are free Jack, and will remain so if I have anything to do with it.’

  He did not answer, perhaps did not hear for the silence which had built up around them.

  It did not prevent her hearing the feet approaching from two directions at once. Converging on her, so it seemed. She was lying stretched on the scrolled couch. The striped cerise silk blazed in a sunlight such as Cheltenham had never seen, the gilding of the scrollwork bronzed and blistered by unnatural heat (the gold leaf was in fact peeling like sunburnt skin). She shaded her eyes and rearranged her neck on the bolster as though expecting an assignation. She had shed, she noticed, the fringe of leaves which was her normal dress, and the hair in her thighs appeared to have been formally curled in the same style as the scrolls of the daybed on which she was waiting, on cushions melting into a dark cerise sea.

  All around, dust was proliferating amongst the stones. To one side, where the gutter would have lain had this been a street, an evaporated creek had left behind wrinkles of curdled mud. A pair of heifers in milk too early for their years meandered past her, snuffing at the dust for the odd blade of grass until goaded into a lurching run by the flies stinging their rumps.

  All this while the feet, she realized, had been approaching.

  It was the contingent of women marching under guard from their quarters to the hospital. Their frocks of a coarse, grey-green cloth fitted them shamefully about the breasts and buttocks; their boots were designed only for plodding.

  She lay smoothing her nakedness, it could only have been waiting for her lover, under her neck the bolster in sweating cerise. Soon after, he did approach with an assurance which her promises must have stimulated.

  But she thought it as well to remind, ‘I am
the one on whom you depend,’ before taking possession of him.

  He affirmed, by word as well as physical ardour, that it had not been any but herself, never Mab, and least of all this Irish moll.

  As she covered him with her breasts and thighs, lapping him in a passion discovered only in a country of thorns, whips, murderers, thieves, shipwreck, and adulteresses, the gilded day-bed refused to yield, nor yet when one of its legs screamed.

  And as the party of women reached them, the gang of male felons, she noticed from round the corners of her kisses, came shambling from the opposite side with an almost sensuous rustle of chains. The women began murmuring. One hostile voice suggested that a poor whore could open her legs as wide as any wealthy harlot. She would listen to no more. And smother her lover rather than allow him to be drawn back into the ritual of chains and licence. But he wrenched his head free just as the fly-ridden Irish lashes paid flickering tribute, not to himself, but to his double in the chain-gang. She was so incensed she started banging against the suddenly petrified bolster the head she had been cosseting.

  ‘Mab!’ he screamed in agony.

  The light was increasing around them, putting on the iron greys she most dreaded in that they made her more aware of her rags of flesh and physical exhaustion. His grey face was turned towards her, supported in the absence of a pillow by the wishbone of an arm.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  It took her by surprise, because she had thought him still asleep.

  ‘You must have been dreaming,’ she replied uneasily.

  ‘I would of said you was the one.’

  ‘Both of us then. Mine was a dream I shall try to forget. Do you also forget yours,’ she advised in what sounded like an echo of Mr Austin Roxburgh at his most cranky and most rational.

  She lay a little longer in hopes of being allowed to doze, but knew that he would rise at any moment and announce that they must prepare themselves for the day’s march.

  Whether today’s or tomorrow’s or yesterday’s it was all one by now, a continuous seamless tapestry, its details recurrent and interchangeable. Giant, wooden birds stalked the earth, or paused to consider the similar movements of the apparitions confronting them, or flumped towards safety if some more than usually grotesque gesture destroyed their sense of security.

  There was an occasion when she fell down, scattering skywards a cloud of ashen parrots. She would have continued lying on the ground and perhaps become her true self: once the flesh melts, and the skeleton inside it is blessed with its final articulate white, amongst the stones, beneath the hard sky, in this country to which it can at last belong.

  But he had got down, and was beating on her skull with his fists. ‘Come on, fuck yez!’ he was shouting. ‘Wotcherthinkwereerefor? Ter die?’

  She could not summon breath enough to answer before he had dragged her up and along. They had returned into the timeless frieze, of burning earth, and ghosts, and ghostlier living figures.

  That evening he made no attempt to build a shelter or hunt for food. It was he who lay as though dead.

  ‘My love? My darling?’ She gathered in her arms this detached object, or rare fruit, his head. ‘Jack?’ For the moment she was their only strength.

  Then they lay apart, as brittle as any other sticks. Had anybody trodden on them, their bones must have snapped, at once and audibly.

  The sun was well launched in the sky by the time they awoke. For once neither of them nagged that they ought to press on. Each could have been grateful. There was little positive movement on either side, except when she stretched out the arm nearest him, and he shoved his fingers between hers, but inert and stiff as the cold toast in a rack.

  They lay thus, in passive communion, and snoozed, and throbbed, and groaned, and tossed (he yelped once) under a sifting of trees, and ants crawling over their all-but-unfeeling flesh.

  The bird-calls must have roused him in the end by playing on submerged memory. The birds themselves rarely became visible, or if they did, were more shadow than creature, their wings a flirt of what might have been leaves instead of feathers. But their voices could not deny their presence, and might even have been celebrating a joy in living.

  About noon, after however many days, he sat up, listening awhile, hands hung between gaunt knees, then took the spear on which they depended, and left the place which she supposed they regarded as their camp, roofless and fireless though it was. She noticed him stagger once before she lost sight of him, and experienced a qualm: what if she lost him altogether? If that were possible of one whose will must be stronger than his body. Just as her own will had been so finely tempered by adversity, adversity itself must capitulate in any physical encounter. Or so she was persuaded.

  She passed the time coaxing a fire, as she remembered seeing the black women, using sticks and fibre; and waited for him. As she sat beside her fire, and he had not come, the tears ran trickling over her sharp knee-caps and down her filthy shanks. In some degree, the tears were solace for his absence, as well as an expression of the tenderness she felt for him: his wasted arms, cratered cheeks—more than any part of him, the broken teeth which had roused her disgust.

  When he reappeared he was carrying what she saw at first as an armful of speckled feathers, until a neck dangling as far as his shins, like the broken spring of a jack-in-the-box, and a pair of claws curled in death, showed her that he had speared one of the giant birds of wooden gait and human demeanour. So a feast was promised.

  Preparing for it they did not speak, but communicated by grunts and sniffs; if their hands touched, it was doubtless only accidental. She thought she could detect moral censure directed by the convict at himself for having murdered the human bird, and incidental disapproval of the manner in which she was laying out the corpse. Hunger, she knew, was making her slapdash. While plucking the bird she did more than once tear away strips of bluish skin, the feathers still rooted in them.

  Once she was unable to resist draping such a strip around her neck. ‘Look, Jack! My feather boa!’

  Her own whim made her laugh, then on seeing his mystification she was at once glad that he could not grasp the extent of her frivolity.

  Again, while chewing at the tough, though fortunately glutinous, half-roasted meat, she began asking without thought for the consequences, ‘When you were with the blacks, did you ever taste—?’ but stopped before she had compromised herself.

  ‘Did I ever what?’

  ‘Once,’ she mumbled, ‘they killed a dugong. It tasted of hog.’

  ‘Nothing unusual about dugong.’

  She threw away the bone she had been cleaning. She feared she might be boring him. It was a relief at least to have averted the dangers surrounding her experience of tasting human flesh on a morning the stillness and pearliness of which seemed to set it apart. But with the passing of time she would not have known how to exculpate herself, or convey to the convict the sacramental aspect of what could only appear a repellent and inhuman act. He would not have understood, any more than he had recognized the semblance of a feather boa she had hung frivolously around her neck.

  Strengthened by food, he set to work hacking off branches, and built them a shelter according to routine, and they lay inside it as on every night of their life together. But tonight he neither spoke nor touched, and she wondered, if only in a brief, melancholy flash, whether she could sense disgust, either at her behaviour, or even her unspoken thoughts.

  The morning which followed was so gently perfect, compounded of birdsong, shifting leaves, and speckled light, she hoped he would not in any way attempt to destroy it; in fact she went so far as to pray that the next stage of the journey to which they were committed might be postponed.

  She looked at him to see whether he had intercepted her prayer as sometimes he happened upon her thoughts.

  Far from meddling with her thoughts and prayers, he was looking so remote that she more than likely did not exist in the world to which he had withdrawn. It was a state of affa
irs which her present limpid frame of mind found altogether agreeable. She liked to believe that rest and their feast of emu meat had restored to him what she remembered as authority and strength, and was even persuaded that she saw a nobility transcending the convict’s origins and fall from grace, to contradict Garnet Roxburgh’s opinion of ‘these miscreants, the sweepings of the London streets’. She realized with resentment that in the eyes of her brother-in-law she must stand equally condemned, since unrestricted association with the convict made her his accomplice.

  Oh, but the injustice, Mrs Roxburgh might have pleaded in her own defence, in such brutal circumstances.

  And she had loved this man, even if she also pitied and needed him. She did still love him.

  ‘Love’, the old thing reminded in a more than usually tremulous voice, ‘love’ is selfless, never sensual. Ellen was unable to contribute to a conversation the subject of which was so vast that it could not be understood except by the instincts.

  She raised her arms. It was love, whether selfless or sensual, which had restored the youthful skin to her breasts, the hollow in a smooth, leaf-patterned flank; the tendrils of hair singed off ritually by her black mentors were again stirring in the armpits.

  Her face she was unable to see, unless when she turned it towards him, and it became reflected in his.

  Illusions of beauty and suspended time increased as the day declined. Birds balanced on trapezes slung between trees grew accustomed to the presence of intruders and descended seemingly by ropes of light. Still in mid-air, some of them were catapulted skywards by anxiety, others landed, flitting and flickering, themselves like brown leaves as they foraged over mould and in the crevices of shed bark.

  Growing restless in the later afternoon, she got up and wandered off on her own, without any explicit aim, and burst through the thicket upon a sheet of water strewn with lilies. In this instance the beauty of the flowers conflicted with knowledge acquired during her enslavement by the blacks, but without giving further thought to it, she plunged in, and began diving, groping for the roots as she had seen the native women. However clumsy and inexpert, she was determined to make a contribution by bringing him a meal of lily-roots.