by Craig Cliff
Brig Amherst, in search of castaways, March ’68; by order of the Government of Southland
I knew I was in the Southern Ocean, but had no clue where this Southland might be. I still referred to the island I was on as the big island, though with every walk it became a little smaller, a little more comprehensible. What I needed, I decided, was to leave my mark as the men from the Prince of Denmark and the Amherst had done. But I didn’t fancy carving my own epitaph just yet.
What about a sign on the front of this place? Vengeance had suggested.
Doig’s Castle, you mean?
If you must. From what you’ve told me, this depot is a stately home compared with your grotto on the other island.
Aye, that it is. Castaway’s End might be a better name. But I havenae got the wood for a sign.
Then carve it directly onto the door.
Will it even—? I said, and drew a gull’s beak down one of the timbers in a straight line. Perhaps this splinter, I said, holding up the sliver of wood I had dislodged, will bring me good luck.
You are the master of all that you survey.
And you are the lady of Splinterlands.
Unfortunately, the grounds of Splinterlands were not flush with game. On another of my long walks I’d found the skeleton of a cow at the bottom of a cliff on the southern coast. I couldn’t be sure if it had fallen or if it had jumped after walking four miles from the landing point and finding not a blade of decent grass on the island. Once I was rescued, I was asked repeatedly if I’d seen any livestock: cows, bulls, goats, sheep. I wrote that I had only seen this one skeleton and the odd scratch of wool suspended in the tussock that at the time I’d thought was the work of a hardy spider.
On the north-west of the island I’d found a scatter of timber and tin, the remnants of a blown down hut. A sealers’ hut, I surmised, back when the beaches were thick with the creatures. I’d seen a couple swimming just beyond the breakers—their whiskers held above the water, the rest of their light-giving, hut-warming blubber a dark mass below—but they were too wary to come onto the shore. Near the sealers’ hut, in a tangle of shrubs, I’d found a spruce spar, possibly once the mast of a boat. It was too heavy to lug back to Splinterlands so I carved it on the spot. Once finished, I placed it upright on a nearby knob above this same north-western beach. Rather than a beacon for potential rescuers, this totem was like the patterns I was working into the tongue and groove walls of the depot, the rafters, the beams and struts of the bunks—a kind of vandalism, Gabriel was here, a marker of my existence and my quiet acceptance of the fact I might never see another living soul. Vengeance referred to it as my island style: the dense network of arrow-headed bracken leaves, unfurling fiddleheads, bursts of tussock, the ‘m’ silhouette of gulls and hundreds of tiny, distinct human faces poking through the overgrowth, their eyes cast this way and that.
It helps to pass the time, I’d say to Vengeance when she tried to draw me on the subject.
The only woody plant on the island was a kind of shrub with waxy leaves, never more than a few feet high. The gnarled and twisted branches were no thicker than my own scarred wrists. The wood burnt poorly and couldn’t be worked in any civilised way. Fortunately I could keep my makeshift fireplace running on peat and my lamp on penguin blubber. The yellow-brows had disappeared from their colonies for the winter months, during which time I survived on tinned beef and mutton, Hell’s Cabbage, another wee creeper that tasted of celery and the occasional albatross or burrowing petrel.
When the yellow-brows returned in spring I ate them salted, wind-dried, smoked and boiled, but the greasy, fishy-mutton taste was barely altered. For the past six weeks I’d had their eggs as well, though the initial bounty was over. Any egg left on a nest now would be addled. My cache of two hundred eggs would have to last me until next October.
I had a soft spot for the albatross, their combination of grace and awkwardness. Their flesh was slick and shot through with dark veins, but as each day passed the memory of it moved closer and closer to chicken until, as on this day, I pushed aside my thoughts about their hard life and gentle nature and trudged up the plateau to pluck another from its nest.
Well, go on then, Vengeance urged.
There were several species on the island. The smaller ones, the ones with the dramatic eye makeup or sooty mantle, made their nests on, or near, the cliffs, but the largest sort—their bodies big as bull terriers, their white plumage sprinkled with brown sugar—preferred the plateau. They did not go for much in the way of nest making. They might scrape at the sedges and dead leaves with their feet before squatting down, or prune a nearby tussock with their beak once seated, but on the whole they seemed happy to let their mass and time combine to form a comfortable indentation. With no mammals on the island, I could see why these birds had become so cavalier about raising their young, though I had once seen the skuas engaged in a tug of war over an albatross chick. But these foul birds were nothing compared with me.
Most of last season’s chicks had fledged by this time and the adults were busy tapping their beaks and bobbing their heads in their intricate pre-mating ritual, which meant I would have to break up a happy couple. It would not be difficult. When nesting with a chick, they would happily rise to let me snatch the shock of white feathers they were working so hard to rear. They might clap their hollow beaks together—tock tock tock tock tock, like an agitated grandfather clock—or nudge me with the side of their heads, but this was the extent of their defence.
There were dozens of heads visible above the sedges, ferns and tussock and I soon found a solitary bird. As I approached, it stared at me through one eye, then the other. It was madness but I felt as if she were trying to remember whether I was her mate. I was right beside the nest now, kneeling down. Satisfied I was not her mate, she faced forward, stoically. I stroked the top of her head, which was larger than a door knob and soft as velvet.
All right now, Gabriel, Vengeance encouraged.
I stroked the head once more and continued the motion down to the middle of the neck, placed my other hand across the throat and squeezed hard, once to crush the windpipe, then twisted, once, twice, to break the neck and stop the flapping. Two birds about ten yards away stopped their dance and stared at me, then began to clap their beaks together. To this chorus, I stood, lifted the albatross carcass and began my trek back down to the depot.
I knew when I started talking to Vengeance that it was all in my head. But since I had lost my voice, my thoughts were all I had. Then there was the question of Vengeance’s unlikely reappearance in my life. The inkling that she was more than met the eye. That she had a spirit or a spirit dwelt within her. She never let me catch her blinking or scratching her nose, but she seemed to be engaged in mischief. Her expression of stern forbearance and poorly suppressed rage had softened until it was almost a smirk. Guess what I’ve got behind my back? she seemed to be saying. It was no longer a chib she clutched, it was a magician’s top hat or a silvery salmon. And since we communicated without words, like those mentalists who advertised in the boys’ magazines I’d read—Learn the secrets of telepathy! Read your mother’s mind! Your teacher’s!—we were never apart.
Vengeance was ever vigilant about the threat of scurvy. She suggested brewing teas and broths from the leaves of herbs and green coprosma twigs to ward it off. She reminded me how long it had been since my last bite of Hell’s Cabbage and proposed where on the island I might find another patch. She suggested collecting whelks, mussels, limpets, chitons and hermit crabs on fine days. She understood the tides. She knew when it was time to change into another of the identical houndstooth suits and insisted I boil the swamp water before I washed my clothes. But she was strangely silent about the men who had intruded upon our world as I carried the dead albatross back to Splinterlands.
In a year on these islands I had become accustomed to the sound of strong winds and the frantic, shimmering movement they caused, which meant I could now detect something different, something for
eign, further down the slope.
What’s going on, lass? I asked, but got no reply.
Instead of continuing down to the hut I diverted to the right at the end of the albatross pathway to the top of the hillock that sheltered the depot. There I placed the bird under a crown of tussock, got on my belly and crawled to the edge.
Two men were standing in the clearing with their hands on their hips. They wore thick flannel shirts, brown trousers and sturdy-looking boots. Och, those boots, I said. What I wouldnae give for a pair of new boots!
A third man arrived, carrying a heavy hessian sack on his shoulders. Despite the fact I had now made the trek through the tussock to the landing point dozens of times, I still marvelled at the strength of the men who had carried up the provisions. The other men began gesticulating, pointing at the hut. They’d been inside, seen the boxes emptied and flattened, the bench with all my tools laid out—orderly, as my father had taught me—and the mad network of fern fronds and faces I’d carved on every available surface. I felt ashamed, as if my mother had walked in on me with Claire, the prostitute, then felt ashamed again because until then I’d kept this memory cordoned off from Vengeance.
Even if I had a voice, how could I explain to these men what I had done inside the hut?
And then she spoke to me.
Are you coming down, Gabriel? Or are you just going to play hidie up there?
The third man dropped his sack to the ground and followed the others inside the hut. I stood and walked back down the hill, entered the clearing and light-footed my way to the back wall of the depot. I pressed my ear to the wood and listened.
Are you not coming in? Vengeance asked.
Shh.
The men’s voices were low and muffled through the weatherboard, but I soon began to make out words and phrases.
‘—vandals?’
‘She’s been raided all right.’
‘—whalers?’
‘I don’t know who—’
‘—Splinterlands?’
‘How’d she get in here?’
‘They brought her in, didn’t they?’
‘For company?’
I heard a brushing sound and then felt the vibration rattle through my head as one of the men knocked on the other side of the wall.
‘A lot of work has gone into this. Look at it.’ I heard the brushing sound again, imagined the third man running the rough tips of his fingers over the grooves of my scrollwork.
‘They bloody near cleared the place out,’ another man said.
‘But left the tools.’
‘And most of the clothes. I think there’s one suit missing.’
‘Then we’ll hear about it if they ever set foot in town, won’t we?’
‘It could have been a castaway, though, couldn’t it?’
‘—so. We’d have heard if they got picked up. There haven’t been any ships reported missing since we last visited.’
‘I supposed you’re right. Bloody —’
Gabriel? Vengeance said in a sing-song voice. These men would like to talk to you. They have a lot of questions.
I removed my ear from the weatherboard and placed my shoulders square against the wood. I lifted my eyes to the grey blanket of clouds. It would rain soon. I needed to get back to the albatross carcass before the skuas found it. I had to worry about the parakeets, too. Then I realised what I was thinking. I was worried about a single dead albatross when rescue was on the other side of the wall. There’d be hot meals on board the ship—real chicken, perhaps—and cake and oranges and fresh bread and questions, endless questions. The world of man was complicated. The world beyond these islands no more hospitable and just as inscrutable. What would I do back in the world, a mute thirty-two-year-old figurehead carver in a world of jabber and steam?
I began the walk back to the top of the hill, to join the albatross beneath the tussock and wait for the men to leave.
I regretted my decision as soon as I returned to the hut, found it stocked with new provisions and smelling of the sweat of other men. It felt strangely empty, deserted.
I was alone.
They had left a note, another hex upon the soul of looters. ‘Reprobate,’ they called me. ‘The miseries of the world’ they wished to heap upon my living soul.
The note was signed, GSS Hinemoa.
Cowardice of the highest order, I heard Vengeance say. It was as if she had been speaking for some time. I crawled into my bunk.
Fair gauperie, she said.
Aye, aye, I said and drew the blanket over my head.
A dowfart, you are.
Aye, I hear you. But what can I do now?
Eat your damned albatross. Maybe start carving the floorboards? I would expect nothing less, Gabriel.
They’ll come back, I said. They’ve been twice now. The day I lost my voice on Lemon Wedge and today.
You’re banking on that, are you?
I said nothing.
And what if they do come and you play hidie again?
We’ll walk that bridge when we come to it.
And so I slid back into my old routines, using those few moments every day that did not revolve around the getting of food, its cooking or consumption, to find new patches of wood inside Splinterlands and inscribe them with my island style.
Despite the grand name, my stately home felt smaller than ever. It seemed to be closing in upon me an inch or two every day. My existence felt hollow, artificial, as if I were a street peddler who demonstrated the sharpness of my knives by cutting through iron bars that were not really iron and lengths of wood that had already been part-sawn. I might be leading a hard life, but the world was not heaping misery upon me; all this was now by my own hand. I had stepped aboard the Agathos. I had failed to disappear in Melbourne. I had played the sort of victim every crew desires. And now I had turned my back on men who could have plucked me from all of this. I chewed these events over as if they were Hell’s Cabbage roots, grinding every last grain of sweet regret out of them.
In time my thoughts turned to Vengeance. If she had not appeared on the quay that day I would never have crossed the gangway, never heard Porter’s words, never left the Clyde. If she could survive the dismasting and end up stashed behind the provisions depot, perhaps she had engineered the arrival of the Agathos that day, calling forth the storm just past the Azores that snapped the foremast and rid the ship of its appointed carpenter. Och, the coincidence of it all. Cannae you get any new tricks!
With that, I stopped talking to Vengeance. She kept her peace as well.
And so I spent the island’s short summer in the kinch of my regrets and bitterness, the time seeming to pass swiftly and not at all.
Along with more tea, sugar and cabin bread, the men from the Hinemoa had added to my meagre library—the two untouched Bibles—with copies of Brett’s New Zealand and South Pacific Pilot, Norie’s Complete Epitome of Practical Navigation and a three-week-old copy of the Otago Daily Times. I thought about the return of these men, all of the things I must explain, the game of charades that would ensue. If I was able to write everything down in advance I could avoid any confusion, but they had not left any ink or writing implements. If Vengeance had been talking to me she would have chided my feeblemindedness: What is a quill, Gabriel? And what is that red ink that so readily stains your hands? When I finally twigged I ripped the flyleaf from the Norie and started writing responses to the questions I would surely be asked.
Can you speak?
What ship were you on?
Were there any other survivors?
Where are you from?
Did you carve the interior of the depot? Why?
How long have you been here?
Did you not see us when we came last? Why did you not make your presence known?
This last question proved difficult to answer in the quarter-inch remaining on the back of this first page. I tore another from the book but after half a page I grew frustrated, crumpled it into a ball and tossed it near the
fireplace. After two more false starts I decided it was the fault of the question.
Why did you not make your presence known?
I looked around the depot, every inch of it changed by my hand since I’d arrived in March. I thought of the male albatross that returned from the ocean to relieve his mate on the nest only to find her missing, the lost generation of yellow-brows from which I made my morning omelettes, the bare patches where once Hell’s Cabbage had grown, the rock falls I had caused and the spongy, iridescent moss that would bear the imprint of my boot till kingdom come.
I was in bed when the men returned to Splinterlands that morning in late January. I had started to lie in later and later, devoting less time to foraging and growing weaker as a result. It took me a moment to realise what was happening when the door opened and the watery daylight entered the hut.
‘We’ve got him, John,’ I heard a man call.
I felt the same rush of shame and discomfort I’d felt back in November, though I hadn’t killed another albatross since then. I wished to go back to sleep and wake up when the men had gone once more.
I heard the door hinges creak and felt the hut grow darker. ‘You see this,’ the first man said, ‘he’s carved the outside of the door now. Look at these. Boots, everywhere.’
A second man laughed. ‘I’d like to meet this man.’
‘He’s in bed.’
The door opened again and a slightly built man with a full but well-trimmed beard entered.
I was sitting up now, my head leant forward slightly to get out from under the top bunk.
‘Hello there,’ the man said.
I nodded.
‘I’m John Bollons, first mate of the Hinemoa. Who are you?’
Two men crept into the hut and stood behind Bollons.
I pointed to my throat and shook my head.
‘Are you unwell?’ Bollons asked.
I shook my head again and stood. I made my way over to the pile of books that sat on the bench, next to my tools.
‘Gently. We won’t hurt you.’
